WASHINGTON — CIA officials were proposing to activate a plan to train anti-terrorist assassination teams overseas when agency managers brought the secret program to the attention of CIA Director Leon Panetta last month, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The plan to kill top al-Qaida leaders, which had been on the agency’s backburner for much of the past eight years, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of proposals to initiate what one intelligence official called a “somewhat more operational phase.” Shortly after learning of the plan, CIA Director Leon Panetta terminated the program and then went to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers, who had been kept in the dark since 2001.
The Obama administration’s top intelligence official, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, Wednesday defended Panetta’s decision to cancel the program, which he said had raised serious questions among intelligence officials about its “effectiveness, maturity and the level of control.”
But Blair broke with some Democrats in Congress by asserting that the CIA did not violate the law when it failed to inform lawmakers about the secret program until last month. Blair said agency officials may not have been required to notify Congress about the program, though he believes they should have done so.
“It was a judgment call,” Blair said. “We believe in erring on the side of working with the Hill as a partner.”
Democratic lawmakers have accused the CIA of deliberately misleading Congress by failing to disclose the program’s existence until the briefing by Panetta on June 24. House Democrats, citing an account given by Panetta, say then-Vice President Dick Cheney personally ordered the CIA not to tell Congress about the initiative, which involved a series of intermittent plans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaida leaders using small teams of assassins.
Congressional Democrats this week formally requested documents about the program, and some have called for an investigation into whether the CIA improperly withheld information from oversight committees. Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., a member of the Senate intelligence committee, was among several prominent Democrats who have accused the CIA of violating the law.
He said he had “deep concerns about the program” and had conveyed them to President Obama in a classified letter.
Republicans say the allegations of CIA wrongdoing are false and harmful, and some accused Democrats of raising the issue to deflect attention from recent controversies surrounding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was heavily criticized after accusing the agency of lying to Congress about its use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.
“We have lost valuable opportunities to improve oversight of the intelligence community because they got caught playing silly games,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich.
The plan to deploy small teams of assassins grew out of the CIA’s early efforts to battle al-Qaida after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
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