Daley’s record to be spotty at best. As CIA station chief in Yemen, he had been blind to the ever-crescendoing support for Usama Bin Laden. His reporting on what happened in Sana’a was superficial and simplistic, ignoring shifting tribal alliances and their significance. Although he spoke Arabic, he allowed the Yemenis to control his access to anything but the most inconsequential intelligence. When the USS Cole attack occurred on his watch, Langley discovered, much to its embarrassment, that he had been deaf, dumb, and blind to the depth of the al-Qaeda threat within the country. Later, as CIA’s assistant director for intelligence, he had made a series of misstatements that had caused embarrassment both at the White House and in the intelligence community.
Bottom line: after several media outlets produced exposés on his missteps, the White House was told by several high-ranking Democrats that Daley was unconfirmable for any position that required Senate approval.
And so Dwayne Daley was offered the counterterrorism advisor job in the current administration, with the rank of deputy national security advisor and assistant to the president. Not because he was good, or bright, or even competent. But because of simple chemistry. For some inexplicable reason, the president was comfortable with Dwayne Daley. From the campaign on, he’d golfed with him, played one-on-one basketball with him. Worse, Daley managed to shut out the director of national intelligence and the CIA director after he somehow convinced the president that he, not they, should conduct POTUS’s daily intelligence briefs.
It was a chronic Washington conundrum. In many White Houses, this one included, competency all too often took a backseat to affability and chemistry. Otherwise, how else could disasters like Bush 43 staffers Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales and the current administration’s Dwayne Daley be explained?
The president shook hands all around, wished everyone a happy New Year, and then dropped into an armchair in the Oval Office’s seating area, his back to the desk where he normally conducted business. The others spread out on the two facing sofas.
SECDEF spoke first. “Mr. President, I asked Vince to come with me today because there have been some developments on the Pakistani front.”
The president nodded. “Positive ones, I hope.”
“I would characterize them as promising,” the secretary answered. Richard Hansen was a naturally restrained individual. He had spent most of his professional career as a CIA analyst, rising to become deputy director of intelligence, and finally director of central intelligence in the long wake of the Iran Contra affair of the late 1980s. But he found his true calling in the mid-1990s as the president of the University of Missouri. SECDEF Hansen may have been the consummate Washington insider, but he was an academic at heart: thorough, precise, and judicious. His scholarly persona, however, also contributed to what many thought a tendency toward too much caution. Indeed, at CIA Rich Hansen had always been notoriously risk-averse when it came to operations.
He’d brought that quality back to Washington as secretary of defense, along with a professorial wit and a deep intellect. In this administration, made up largely of youngsters, ideologues, and political neophytes, he, along with D/CIA Vince Mercaldi and Secretary of State Katherine Semerad, were the troika of adults who supplied the president with sage advice, prudent political counsel, and sufficient necessary institutional memory to give presidential decisions context and gravitas.
Rich Hansen wasn’t imposing. He wore nondescript suits, white shirts, and boring ties. But he had one of the sharpest minds of his generation, and he wasn’t shy, despite his restrained appearance, at speaking truth to power.
“We are having great success with the Pakistani high-value target program we’ve been running in partnership with CIA,”
Bottom line: after several media outlets produced exposés on his missteps, the White House was told by several high-ranking Democrats that Daley was unconfirmable for any position that required Senate approval.
And so Dwayne Daley was offered the counterterrorism advisor job in the current administration, with the rank of deputy national security advisor and assistant to the president. Not because he was good, or bright, or even competent. But because of simple chemistry. For some inexplicable reason, the president was comfortable with Dwayne Daley. From the campaign on, he’d golfed with him, played one-on-one basketball with him. Worse, Daley managed to shut out the director of national intelligence and the CIA director after he somehow convinced the president that he, not they, should conduct POTUS’s daily intelligence briefs.
It was a chronic Washington conundrum. In many White Houses, this one included, competency all too often took a backseat to affability and chemistry. Otherwise, how else could disasters like Bush 43 staffers Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales and the current administration’s Dwayne Daley be explained?
The president shook hands all around, wished everyone a happy New Year, and then dropped into an armchair in the Oval Office’s seating area, his back to the desk where he normally conducted business. The others spread out on the two facing sofas.
SECDEF spoke first. “Mr. President, I asked Vince to come with me today because there have been some developments on the Pakistani front.”
The president nodded. “Positive ones, I hope.”
“I would characterize them as promising,” the secretary answered. Richard Hansen was a naturally restrained individual. He had spent most of his professional career as a CIA analyst, rising to become deputy director of intelligence, and finally director of central intelligence in the long wake of the Iran Contra affair of the late 1980s. But he found his true calling in the mid-1990s as the president of the University of Missouri. SECDEF Hansen may have been the consummate Washington insider, but he was an academic at heart: thorough, precise, and judicious. His scholarly persona, however, also contributed to what many thought a tendency toward too much caution. Indeed, at CIA Rich Hansen had always been notoriously risk-averse when it came to operations.
He’d brought that quality back to Washington as secretary of defense, along with a professorial wit and a deep intellect. In this administration, made up largely of youngsters, ideologues, and political neophytes, he, along with D/CIA Vince Mercaldi and Secretary of State Katherine Semerad, were the troika of adults who supplied the president with sage advice, prudent political counsel, and sufficient necessary institutional memory to give presidential decisions context and gravitas.
Rich Hansen wasn’t imposing. He wore nondescript suits, white shirts, and boring ties. But he had one of the sharpest minds of his generation, and he wasn’t shy, despite his restrained appearance, at speaking truth to power.
“We are having great success with the Pakistani high-value target program we’ve been running in partnership with CIA,”
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