The left-wing hit job on Brennan showed that liberals may have a taste for covert action after all, the spooks chuckle.

“Almost anyone working at the agency since [Sept. 11] is tainted,” says retired CIA veteran Milt Bearden, a former Pakistan station chief, expressing the facts of life.
“If he wants experience, get an old-timer who left before that. Or go with a completely new face, maybe someone like a [Richard] Holbrooke, though I doubt he’d take it.”

Or get it. The veteran diplomat’s vice-chairmanship of a hedge fund is said to be problematic.
Can anybody who could do the job, get the job?

“Beats me,” said a well-wired former senior intelligence official. “Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were [dirty] and the transition folks didn’t have the will to explain that they were wrong.”
A former national security official and friend of Brennan, who asked not to be identified, is disgusted by what happened.

“Ninety-nine percent of” what the CIA has been doing since Sept. 11 “is not related to torture, but now everybody is tarred with this brush,” he said.

“The dirty little secret, “ he added, “is that very little has been going on since [Sept. 11] that hasn’t gone on for the last 30 years.”

By that standard, almost anybody who’s worked in operations — like the much-touted former CIA station chief Jack Devine, or the current heads of the agency’s clandestine services, Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick — has a skeleton in the closet.

“They are going to have to go outside of that circle,” says a recently retired CIA division chief.

Send Dollar Bill to the CIA

“There are a couple of great officers who hands are not ‘dirty’ and could manage the agency well,” contends another recently retired senior official.
Melvin Gamble comes to mind, he said. The just-retired chief of the Africa Division and deputy chief of the European Division knows where the bodies are buried and has decades of operational experience that would be respected in Langley’s hallways.

Executive experience is crucial to success there, say most intelligence insiders. And that makes the current occupant of the CIA chiefs, Gen. Michael V. Hayden , the best-qualified candidate of all, said one agency official.

“Almost all directors have had knowledge of intelligence — either as a producer or as a consumer — but the ability to manage a large complex organization is also necessary,” he said.

“That’s why Hayden is really ideal, to my mind. He’s managed a large complex organization, and it happened to be an intelligence agency” — NSA — “before coming here.”
But he added, “Of course, everyone here realizes he’s history, for political reasons.”

You want somebody clean?

CIA insiders are generally loath to consider anyone from Capitol Hill. The brief, chaotic tenure of Porter Goss comes quickly to mind.

But one name I heard floated Friday gave pause to the spy world consensus: Dollar Bill.

Dollar Bill Bradley.

The former New Jersey Democratic senator (1979-97), presidential candidate and NBA star — so named for the $500,000 contract the Princeton grad and Rhodes scholar landed with the New York Knicks — impressed many a CIA official when he served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).

“I distinctly remember briefing Bradley on counterintelligence and other intelligence matters and being blown away by how serious, informed, and supportive he was,” James Olsen, a former head of CIA counterintelligence now teaching at Texas A&M, said by e-mail.

“I don’t know if he’d even be available or interested, but Bill Bradley was one of the best SSCI members I worked with. He knows this stuff and has the clout, political savvy, and integrity to get the job done.”

Send Dollar Bill to the CIA

Mention of Bradley’s name drew mostly slow nods of approval in my soundings Friday.

Not that Bradley, who’s spent most of the years since he retired writing books and hosting a radio show, is a natural to be top spook. After all, he’s never run anything more complicated than a fast break.

But neither, you might say, has the next president of the United States — unless you count his improbable winning campaign. The brainy athletes might well make a good team.

Mr. Obama: Go for the open man.