WHEN Mike Battles launched his long-shot bid for a seat in Congress from Rhode Island last summer, he was told to scrub his resume. The experts recommended he downplay his service as an Army Ranger and hide his years in the clandestine service. “At that point, it wasn’t hip to have been a Ranger or in the CIA,” he says. “And everyone told me they thought the Democrats would use that stuff to paint me as a right-wing nut.” No doubt incumbent Patrick Kennedy will still try to paint him as a right-wing nut, but nowadays the bad-boy congressman won’t be able to do it by suggesting that a passion for national security is somehow unhealthy. Battles is one of four former CIA men running for Congress this year. All four are Republicans. Rep. Porter Goss, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, postponed his expected retirement to stay on, and first-term Rep. Rob Simmons is running for reelection in Connecticut. Two challengers, Mike Battles in Rhode Island and Herb Meyer in Washington, must first win contested primaries before they can try to unseat Democratic incumbents. While most politicians these days are spouting self-serving platitudes (“I care deeply about this nation”) or worthless banalities (“We can never let this happen again”), this quartet talks seriously about intelligence gathering, interagency communication, enemy infiltration, and the importance of oversight. If the unfamiliar and potentially crucial question of the 2002 election cycle is how to deal politically with the war on terrorism, then these races are ground zero. “We’re at war and we have a fragile economy,” says Herb Meyer, who’s running in a three-way GOP primary in Washington state. “You can’t have 14 number-one priorities in that context. People just don’t believe that. Sewers and everything? That’s fine. But if we don’t deal with these two issues–war and the economy–nothing else matters.” Meyer served as a special assistant to CIA director William Casey in the Reagan administration. Working on the 7th floor at Langley, Meyer helped develop the theory that the Soviet economy was crumbling from within. He had come to Casey’s attention when Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner gave the CIA boss a copy of Meyer’s book on economics, “The War Against Progress.” Meyer had never even considered a bid for public office. “Guys like me don’t do that,” he says. But then a group of Republicans in San Juan County asked him to challenge Rep. Rick Larsen, a first-term incumbent who won in 2000 with just 50 percent of the vote. With September 11 still fresh in his mind, he agreed. “The only reason I’m running is because we’re at war and we have a fragile economy. People are worried about their jobs and they’re worried about their lives.” So when Meyer talks to voters, he focuses almost exclusively on those two issues. Sure, he says, other issues matter. But voters in Washington’s second district recognize that providing security and safeguarding the economy are government’s first two responsibilities. Meyer believes current members of Congress aren’t asking the right questions about the intelligence failures of September 11. This failure, this oversight on oversight, is caused by ignorance. Few politicians, he complains, have more than a passing knowledge of intelligence issues. “I know how that place [the CIA] works. I have clearances that some members of Congress don’t know exist.” Just to face Larsen, Meyer will first have to beat two Republicans in a late-September primary. His strategy for all of his opponents is the same: stick to the war and the economy. Across the country, Mike Battles is pursuing pretty much the same strategy, though he faces the added challenge of dealing with Patrick Kennedy’s habit of passing out pork to seemingly anyone who asks. So Battles is careful to address local issues, too. “I spend a lot of time talking about education and small business,” says Battles, whose parents were both teachers. “But the populace is really focused on terrorism and homeland security.” Naturally, then, the Battles campaign is highlighting the very things he was told to purge from his resume last summer–West Point graduate, Army Ranger, CIA analyst, intelligence expert. Even after he left the CIA, the boyish-looking Battles sat on the board of a company that provides high-tech intelligence for businesses. By contrast, the highlight of Kennedy’s homeland security experience came on March 26, 2000, when he assaulted an airport baggage screener at Los Angeles International Airport. That confrontation, which Kennedy recently paid an undisclosed amount to settle, was captured on videotape and would make a highly entertaining campaign ad. Battles, who last week won the Rhode Island GOP endorsement for his party’s primary, is getting a hand from another former CIA operative, Rep. Rob Simmons. Simmons pulled the upset of the 2000 election cycle when he beat veteran Democrat Sam Gejdenson. Battles has hired two of Simmons’s top advisers and otherwise seems to be copying from his playbook. Simmons himself helps out, too, not least by pitching in on the retail politics. In late March, the Connecticut lawmaker braved a spring New England snowstorm to speak at a Battles fund-raiser, where he called his new protege “uniquely qualified” to serve in a time of war. Simmons believes Battles’s national security experience will be a major asset in his first run for public office. That’s a different story from Simmons’s own career. “I ran for state rep five times and my CIA background came up repeatedly,” he says. “And not in a positive way.” More recently, when polls showed Simmons was closing the gap on Gejdenson, two of the Democrat’s staffers even suggested Simmons was a “war criminal” for some of his CIA activities. (Gejdenson said he knew nothing of the effort to smear his opponent and quickly fired those responsible.) Simmons ended up winning by a narrow margin, and that fact had Democrats targeting him as particularly vulnerable. But strong fund-raising and a high post-9/11 profile appear to have enhanced his chances for reelection. It’s unlikely that Simmons, Meyer, and Battles will all be in Congress next January. But even if they were, there’s no guarantee that they would be in a position to immediately affect the intelligence debate, not formally anyway. Although lawmakers have regularly sought out Simmons’s thoughts on making U.S. intelligence more effective, he was passed over for a seat on the Intelligence Committee that Porter Goss chairs. Still, with the massive intelligence reform effort underway, Congress could use more advice from those who know the problems and the institutions from the inside. Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
