The White House is moving forward with a plan to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo. The New York Times reports Tillerson could be forced out “within the next several weeks.”
Discussions of this plan have been underway for a couple of months.
Pompeo has viewed his post at the CIA as a dream job. Despite coming into the agency as a political type (a three-term Republican congressman from Kansas), he has established a good rapport with the employees in Langley amid tense relations between the intelligence community and President Donald Trump.
Morale among some officials at the CIA has been down in the last several years, in part due to the broad condemnation among politicians of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques (dubbed by opponents as “torture”) and the government’s justification of using them on terrorism suspects. The previous CIA director’s ambiguous defense of EIT did little to encourage demoralized CIA officials.
“Our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives,” said John Brennan, the director, in 2014. “But let me be clear: We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.”
Early on, Pompeo gained the trust of many within the CIA by tapping a career agent, Gina Haspel, as his deputy director. Haspel oversaw the use of EIT on two terrorism suspects; her appointment was widely viewed as a signal Pompeo would defend the CIA’s work. Pompeo’s congenial approach toward managing the CIA has also helped smooth tensions between the agency and President Trump, who has expressed public skepticism of the intelligence community. After years of Brennan prioritizing the analytical side of the Agency, Pompeo has emphasized the reinvigoration of the operations side.
If Cotton succeeds Pompeo, one question is whether the Arkansas senator will be able to maintain the normalization of relations between Trump and the CIA.
