CIA chief spices up spy shop's image on reality TV

Dinner diplomacy

 “A little too salty,” the CIA chief finally said, giving thumbs down to the dish prepared by a warring team of cooks from the reality TV show Top Chef.

Panetta also guessed, quickly and correctly, that it was beef Wellington. The episode, dubbed Covert Cuisine, featured traditional dishes disguised as something else. “Poor disguise,” Panetta said. “They would have captured this individual and hung him!”
Laughter among the assembled guests followed. But this comic turn, not normally in the CIA playbook, was only partly for fun. The access and time Panetta gave the show is a classic example of the former legislator’s efforts to charm not just the public, but the White House and Capitol Hill in his first 18 months in office.

Panetta is working to protect the CIA’s budget at a time when Congress is looking around for cuts, and to guard the CIA’s role as the lead agency in the war on terror. Panetta also hopes to boost the morale of a staff that’s been criticised and even prosecuted for its practices, including its handling of terror suspects who have been whisked away to “black sites”, or secret prisons, and sometimes waterboarded.
Panetta has built on predecessor Michael Hayden’s public overtures, which included an appearance on the National Public Radio programme Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me! Combined with negotiating skills honed as chief of staff to president Bill Clinton and 16 years as a California congressman, he’s been a formidable fighter for the agency.

“He’s tough, knows the Hill, and clearly has President Obama’s support,” said Hank Crumpton, a former high-ranking CIA official.

Panetta scored a knockdown in his bureaucratic face-off with the now-deposed director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, over who got to choose America’s chief intelligence representatives overseas. President Barack Obama ruled that the CIA director does.

Keeping CIA at helm

Panetta has also pushed to keep the CIA leading the war against violent Islamic
extremism at a time when the White House grew increasingly comfortable using the US military’s special operating forces in roles that were previously the sole purview of the agency.

“I happen to think that we are the premier operational unit of all our intelligence agencies,” Panetta told his staff, according to a transcript from a CIA town hall meeting last year. He’s manoeuvred hard to protect that role. After a recent interagency squabble over who would continue to provide key tactical intelligence to US forces in Afghanistan, former officials said the CIA prevailed and the military’s contracts to provide similar information were cancelled.

Panetta’s supporters say he’s also won public and political support simply by bragging about what the agency has accomplished.

Panetta has tried to smooth relations with Islamabad, meeting directly with his Pakistani counterparts together with White House national security adviser Jim Jones last May.