CIA appoints "James" to run Baghdad station

Ken Silverstein at Harpers.org, the website of Harper's Magazine, has an interesting profile of the person referred to as "James" who the CIA has supposedly named to head its Baghdad station. Silverstein implies he knows who James really is but cannot reveal this information for legal reasons. So long as he stops short of naming him, Silverstein feels comfortable revealing a great deal about this James person - and about the Agency itself.

Particularly interesting about Silverstein's account were the reasons his sources in the intelligence community believe that James is a poor candidate for this position.

These sources - most identified as government officials - object to James not because he supposedly "triggered" the jihad in Algeria in the 1990s, as Silverstein suggests, or because he was head of Alec Station, the CIA unit focused on bin Laden that failed to predict 9/11. Neither did James disqualify himself, according to Silverstein's sources, when as head of the Kabul station, he let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, or because he again failed to find him in Pakistan when he then went to run the station in Islamabad, after bin Laden supposedly left Afghanistan.

No, the real problem with James, Silverstein's sources suggest, is that he was a key advocate of the CIA's interrogation policies, specifically those designed to quickly extract information from high-value intelligence sources (namely al Qaeda leaders) before their fellow travelers realized they had been nabbed. “These guys believed that the memos written by [Albert] Gonzalez and lawyers at the CTC gave them the legal authority to do what they wanted,” Silverstein's source, identified as "a former official," reportedly told him. “But in my view that was just stuff we were writing to ourselves."

In other words, James's greatest failing, according to his critics in the intelligence community, is that he is no bureaucrat, that is, he is not someone who is content with generating memos, well, for the sake of generating memos. Not surprisingly they also say he is a "terrible manager" because he "creates a lot of tension" in the workplace. Perhaps because he expected his subordinates to produce results?

What these sources really seem to be revealing here is, if this is the mentality that he has had to work with, maybe James isn't to blame after all for not being able to find bin Laden in all these years and different places.