Why Obama Picked Panetta To Run the CIA

He's clean, he knows where the line items are buried, and the director isn't the chief spook anymore.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009, at 6:54 PM ET

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The puzzler of the hour: Why is Barack Obama picking Leon Panetta, a former congressman and White House official with no intelligence experience, to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency?

Nothing definitive can be said here—the Obama transition team is a tight-lipped shop (the leak probably came from elsewhere)—but some inferences can be drawn.

First, Panetta was almost certainly not among the president-elect's initial list of prospects. As was widely reported, John Brennan, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, seemed pegged for the job—he'd been candidate Obama's intelligence adviser for nearly a year—until he was linked a bit too closely to President George W. Bush's enhanced-interrogation program and so "withdrew" from the running.