Today’s Must Read

That’s one way to placate the National Clandestine Service. CIA Director Michael Hayden is going after the agency’s independent watchdog, Inspector General John Helgerson. Hayden wonders if Helgerson — who is not appointed by the CIA director — hasn’t gone too far in investigating how the agency conducts detentions and interrogations.

Helgerson has for years been perceived as overly aggressive in reviewing CIA techniques in the war on terrorism. In 2004, he produced an internal report that seemed to say that Department of Justice-approved interrogation techniques employed by the CIA amounted to torture. That report was part of a series of internal administration moves contributing to uncertainty among interrogators and senior officials about what was legally permissible. Some in the NCS — the agency’s undercover operatives — have purchased legal insurance to guard against the possibility that they will one day face criminal charges for putting administration-approved practices into place. In short, many in the CIA think Helgerson is out to get them.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the investigation has grown out of an effort by Hayden months ago to explore a “friction” that had emerged between Helgerson’s office and that of the CIA general counsel, which also has lent its legal imprimatur to CIA interrogations and detentions, after the general counsel’s office believed Helgerson was improperly second-guessing its advice. But the investigation, headed by Hayden confidante Robert L. Deitz, is now a full-fledged exploration of how Helgerson conducts his work. It comes as Helgerson is “nearing completion” on several reports into interrogations, renditions, and detentions, reports The New York Times.

In investigating Helgerson, Hayden is probably taking steps to assuage what by all accounts is an NCS plagued with legal confusion. Both the LAT and the NYT describe the investigation as “unusual” if not “unprecedented.” Hayden’s spokesman told both papers that the director is simply out to “help this office, like any office at the agency, do its vital work even better.”

Not everyone is so credulous. Frederick P. Hitz, a CIA IG in the 90s, blasted the inquiry in the NYT:

Mr. Hitz said any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would “not be proper.”

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Mr. Hitz, who now teaches at the University of Virginia. “Under the statute, the inspector general has the right to investigate the director. How can you do that and have the director turn around and investigate the I.G.?”

The LAT reports that whatever the outcome of the probe, the IG’s office will feel the consequences for a long time:

But officials expressed concern that the probe would also involve reviewing the inspector general’s files. Such a step could have a dramatic chilling effect, officials said, making agency employees reluctant to cooperate with future investigations for fear that their involvement and the information they provide would be exposed.

Helgerson has been under fire for years. A recently-declassified report blasting the CIA’s pre-9/11 performance has been vociferously criticized by Hayden and his two predecessors, Porter Goss and George Tenet. Goss made Helgerson undergo a polygraph last year after Goss fired one of Helgerson’s subordinates, Mary McCarthy, for allegedly leaking classified information about the agency’s so-called “black sites” — off-the-books detention facilities in Europe — to The Washington Post. That leak fueled the perception that Helgerson was out to stop certain CIA policies — a perception surely bolstered by his most recent reviews into interrogations, detentions and renditions.

But Helgerson is a presidential appointee, not a Hayden subordinate. According to the NYT, Hayden would have to go to White House appointees if he wants Helgerson gone.

Under federal procedures, agency heads who are unhappy with the conduct of their inspectors general have at least two places to file complaints. One is the Integrity Committee of the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which oversees all the inspectors general. The aggrieved agency head can also go directly to the White House.

If serious accusations against an inspector general are sustained by evidence, the president can dismiss him.

And we all know President Bush is scrupulous about both evidence and oversight. Especially over crucial intelligence-related policies in the war on terrorism.