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C h a p T e r 8 one More transfer: intelliGenCe at the departMent of hoMeland seCurity when The staff of President Obama arrived at the white house in 2009, they were looking for career professionals to take senior positions. not long after the inauguration, I received a call about taking one of those positions, head of intelligence at the Department of homeland Security. This was a rare opportunity for an analyst who started in an entrylevel position: to take a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed job. In washington, this is an honor, especially for someone with no political connections . There were clear downsides, as there always are. For one, DhS was legendary among my friends in washington for being an unwieldy, massive enterprise that might never fully gel as an organization. Further, the intelligence component of the organization, known widely as I&a (Intelligence and analysis), was rife with problems. There were minor issues, but they were inconsequential from my perspective . First, I’d relied on the Metro for years, and I no longer had a car. The Bureau was a six-stop, no-transfer commute for me, with the Metro line only 150 yards from my doorstep across the river from washington in alexandria, Virginia. DhS would take an hour or more by public transit. Second, because I was transitioning from a civil service job to a presidential appointment, I’d be on a different pay scale. Bizarre as it sounds, this would 192 CHAPTER 8 mean a pay cut. More responsibility, less pay: only in washington do you get these kinds of choices. Before we even started the formal nomination process, I had conversations with both DhS secretary Janet napolitano and her deputy Jane holl lute. Both were gracious, as we talked through the challenges of the organization and what might be done to improve. napolitano was at ease, laughing on a Friday evening as we spoke about washington and intelligence. lute was equally engaging, particularly after we quickly determined that both were committed flyfishing addicts. The nomination process, even for a position as relatively modest as an undersecretary, is byzantine, seemingly endless, and painful. we started with searches of public information about me, such as media mentions. Far more time-intensive, and labor-intensive, was the work on financial records. Because so many nominees are caught up in embarrassing revelations about problems such as unpaid taxes and undocumented nannies, the screening process results in scrutiny of every financial angle that could go wrong. and before the white house is prepared to tell Congress to proceed with scheduling a hearing for the nominee to be considered, that scrutiny has to be completed. after 20-plus years of government service, on a government salary , I didn’t have any particularly exciting financial secrets to reveal, but the process nonetheless took a few months. Preparing for Senate confirmation hearings also was a lengthy process. The most time-consuming element was working through the many documents and briefings provided by the staff of DhS’s congressional affairs element and the managers in the Intelligence and analysis component I was slated to manage. reviewing mountains of relevant documents and listening to the managers of every element of the DhS intelligence organization present their mission, programs, and personnel took weeks. There were related briefs as well, including meeting with civil liberties advocates who were concerned that DhS might conduct analysis that violated americans’ rights or collect information on innocent people. The most challenging were the aptly named “murder boards,” the groups of people who meet to pepper any nominee with the kinds of hard questions that might be posed during a Congressional confirmation hearing. These questions can start from difficult policy issues—in the case of DhS intelli- ONE MORE TRANSFER 193 gence, for example, there were persistent questions among many civil liberties advocates, and others, about efforts to compile “Suspicious activity reports,” documents about suspicious behavior around infrastructure sites, possible surveillance of nuclear facilities, and other such bits of data that might later provide critical pieces in a mosaic of intelligence. But questions also covered personal issues, from questionable financial documentation (I didn’t have any) to professional history (I had a lot, including some knowledge of and experience with the third rail of intelligence issues in the early twenty-first century, that of detainees and CIa interrogations). The latter issue, my professional background at CIa, raised questions early on, and those questions only grew over time. Central to the rising volume of...

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