The agency staff is always nervous with change, particularly when the new director comes with a high-profile military background, a history of regularly changing jobs and a hint that this may just be a temporary stopover on the way to something else.
Senior CIA officials, who lived through the unsuccessful, brief tenures of John M. Deutch in the mid-1990s and Porter J. Goss a decade later, talk about both of them arriving with their own entourages and agendas to shake things up.
Leon Panetta, the current director, heeded advice he had gotten and arrived with only one person, Jeremy Bash, a lawyer who had worked as a staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Recalling that, one former senior CIA official said Wednesday, “Petraeus should get out of the car with only one military aide.”
Robert L. Grenier, a retired longtime CIA officer, recalled that Deutch came in 1995 from the Pentagon, where he had been deputy defense secretary, but with the expectation that after a year he would return as defense secretary. “Petraeus,” Grenier said, “would be making a big mistake if he did what John Deutch did, being obvious [by bringing in] uniformed persons everywhere on the seventh floor.”
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