The sources say that Brennan has begun to recruit a team he hopes to bring with him to the agency, and that he has been vetted. Brennan did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment. Along with former CIA official Jami Miscik, he is helping to organize Obama's intelligence agency transition and policy review.
Also being vetted for a key intelligence job is Maj. Gen. Robert Harding (Ret)., formerly director of operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency and a former head of the army's intelligence operations.
Brennan, who was once slated to be deputy to current DNI Mike McConnell, is a lifelong Republican who converted to Obama last year, after his friend Tony Lake asked Brennan to serve on an intelligence advisory panel. A career CIA officer, Brennan favors a holistic and systematic approach to intelligence gathering, and earned the respect of Democrats as the founding director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, now the National Counterrorism Center. On terrorism, as he told National Journal's Shane Harris, United States foreign policy should be more proactive.
I am a strong proponent of trying to focus more of our efforts on the upstream phenomenon of terrorism. I make the analogy to pollution. We learned that pollutants kill us when they get into the water we drink or the fish we eat or the air we breathe. But I think we also learned that we have to go upstream to identify and eliminate those sources of pollution. Terrorism is a tactic, and we have to be more focused upstream. Since 9/11, understandably we've focused downstream, on those terrorists who might be in our midst or trying to kill us, the operators. I think there needs to be much more attention paid to those upstream factors and conditions that spawn terrorists.But, as George Tenet's chief of staff and deputy executive dierctor, Brennan was undoubtedly read into some of the Bush Administration's more controversial intelligence programs, although there is no evidence that he made decisions. In interviews since leaving the government, Brennan has expressed support for the government's rendition policy, calling it effective, "enhanced" interrogation techniques and immunity for telecommunications companies involved in government spying efforts.
Obama takes an opposite position on all three subjects. His widely reported choice of former deputy attorney Eric Holder as attorney general may help mollify critics of the Brennan pick, as Holder and White House counsel Gregory Craig, along with Obama's national security adviser and director of national intelligence, will set policy, not Brennan.
ABC News reported tonight that Marine Gen. James Jones (Ret.) is the leading candidate to be Barack Obama's national security adviser, and Adm. Dennis Blair (Ret.), the top candidate to be director of national intelligence.
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