Kappes Is Expected to Boost CIA Morale
Stephen R. Kappes, a legendary CIA clandestine operative, will become as soon as today the No. 2 at the agency in a move that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden hopes will lift morale there. Kappes’s top priority will be to help rebuild the agency’s human intelligence capabilities when the United States needs spies within the jihadist community and elsewhere.
Battered for past failures and downgraded as leader of the intelligence community, the CIA nonetheless has been given new authority as home of the National Clandestine Service, which under Hayden and Kappes will coordinate all overseas human intelligence carried out by U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon and FBI.
Kappes, who speaks Russian and Farsi, is a former Marine whose almost 25 years at the CIA included being station chief in Moscow and Kuwait and running operations against Iran. He returns to an agency whose clandestine service has been shaken by retirements and the resignations of senior-level case officers with years of experience in recruiting agents overseas.
…Kappes understands that problem firsthand, having just left a London-based security company, ArmorGroup International. It hires former intelligence people to operate its approximately $200 million a year in contracts with multinational companies and governments in Iraq and elsewhere. Kappes’s CIA salary, at about $165,000 a year, will be about half of what he received, not counting stock and options, as ArmorGroup’s chief operating officer.
…Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), a ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, is one of Kappes’s most vocal critics. Weldon criticizes what he calls Kappes’s failure to pursue the congressman’s view that a colleague of Manucher Ghorbanifar, one of the instigators of the Iran-contra affair, had important information on Iran’s nuclear program.
washingtonpost.com