On Oct. 10, Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz dropped a bombshell: Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, he alleged, had offered to replace Pakistan's military and intelligence leadership and cut ties with militant groups in the wake of Osama bin Laden's killing in Abbottabad.

Ijaz also alleged in his op-ed in the Financial Times that Zardari communicated this offer by sending a top secret memo on May 10 through Ijaz himself, to be hand-delivered to Adm. Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a key official managing the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. The details of the memo and the machinations Ijaz describes paint a picture of a Zardari government scrambling to save itself from an impending military coup following the raid on bin Laden's compound, and asking for U.S. support to prevent that coup before it started.

Mullen, now retired, denied this week having ever dealt with Ijaz in comments given to The Cable through his spokesman at the time, Capt. John Kirby.

"Adm. Mullen does not know Mr. Ijaz and has no recollection of receiving any correspondence from him," Kirby told The Cable. "I cannot say definitively that correspondence did not come from him -- the admiral received many missives as chairman from many people every day, some official, some not. But he does not recall one from this individual. And in any case, he did not take any action with respect to our relationship with Pakistan based on any such correspondence ... preferring to work at the relationship directly through [Pakistani Army Chief of Staff] Gen. [Ashfaq Parvez] Kayani and inside the interagency process."

Mullen's denial represents the first official U.S. comment on the Ijaz memo, which since Oct. 10 has mushroomed into a huge controversy in Pakistan. Several parts of Pakistan's civilian government denied that Ijaz's memorandum ever existed. On Oct. 30, Zardari spokesman Farhatullah Babar called Ijaz's op-ed a "fantasy article" and criticized the FT for running it in the first place.

"Mansoor Ijaz's allegation is nothing more than a desperate bid by an individual, whom recognition and credibility has eluded, to seek media attention through concocted stories," Babar said. "Why would the president of Pakistan choose a private person of questionable credentials to carry a letter to U.S. officials? Since when Mansoor has become a courier of messages of the president of Pakistan?"

On Oct. 31, Ijaz issued a long statement doubling down on his claims and threatened to reveal the "senior Pakistani official" that purportedly sent him on his mission. Ijaz quoted Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, telling Zardari and his staff, "If you stop telling lies about me, I might just stop telling the truth about you."

The Pakistani press has given credence to Ijaz's story because it was published in the Financial Times. "The FT is not likely to publish something which it cannot substantiate if it was so required, so any number of denials and clarifications by our diplomats or the presidency will only be for domestic consumption and would mean nothing," wrote one prominent Pakistani commentator.

This is only the latest time that Ijaz has raised controversy concerning his alleged role as a secret international diplomat. In 1996, he was accused of trying to extort money from the Pakistani government in exchange for delivering votes in the U.S. House of Representatives on a Pakistan-related trade provision.

Ijaz, who runs the firm Crescent Investment Management LLC in New York, has been an interlocutor between U.S. officials and foreign government for years, amid constant accusations of financial conflicts of interest. He reportedly arranged meetings between U.S. officials and former Pakistani Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

He also reportedly gave over $1 million to Democratic politicians in the 1990s and attended Christmas events at former President Bill Clinton's White House. Ijaz has ties to former CIA Director James Woolsey and his investment firm partner is Reagan administration official James Alan Abrahamson.

In the mid-1990s, Ijaz traveled to Sudan several times and claimed to be relaying messages from the Sudanese regime to the Clinton administration regarding intelligence on bin Laden, who was living there at the time. Ijaz has claimed that his work gave the United States a chance to kill the al Qaeda leader but that the Clinton administration dropped the ball. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who served under Clinton, has called Ijaz's allegations "ludicrous and irresponsible."

Then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice, now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has previously acknowledged that Ijaz brought the Clinton administration offers of counterterrorism cooperation from Sudan but said that actual cooperation never materialized.

So why is Ijaz's story so popular in Pakistan, despite his long history of antagonizing the Pakistani government with such claims? According to Mehreen Zahra-Malik, who wrote about the Ijaz scandal on Oct. 29 in Pakistan's The News, it's all part of the culture of secrecy and conspiracy in Pakistani politics that the current civilian and military leadership in Islamabad has only continued to foster.

"When secrecy and conspiracy are part of the very system of government, a vicious cycle develops. Because truth is abhorrent, it must be concealed, and because it is concealed, it becomes ever more abhorrent. Having power then becomes about the very concealment of truth, and covering up the truth becomes the very imperative of power -- and the powerful," she wrote. "The end result: a population raised on a diet of conspiracy."

Attempts to reach Ijaz for comment were unsuccessful.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney argued on Friday morning that the waterboarding of terror suspects did not amount to torture because the same techniques had been used on U.S. soldiers during training.

"The notion that somehow the United States was torturing anybody is not true," Cheney told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute at an event to promote his new book. "Three people were waterboarded and the one who was subjected most often to that was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and it produced phenomenal results for us."

"Another key point that needs to be made was that the techniques that we used were all previously used on Americans," Cheney went on. "All of them were used in training for a lot of our own specialists in the military. So there wasn't any technique that we used on any al Qaeda individual that hadn't been used on our own troops first, just to give you some idea whether or not we were ‘torturing' the people we captured."

Of course, there are some differences between the waterboarding of troops as part of their Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training and the waterboarding of suspected al Qaeda prisoners. For example, the troops in training are not subjected to the practice 183 times, as KSM was. Also, the soldiers presumably know their training will end, and they won't be allowed to actually drown or left to rot in some dark, anonymous prison.

Some in Cheney's party, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), believe that waterboarding is torture. Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism consultant for the U.S. government and a former SERE instructor, has argued repeatedly that waterboarding is torture and called for prohibiting its use on prisoners.

"Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration -- usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten[ed] with its use again and again," he said.

Cheney said the George W. Bush administration had received approval for the "enhanced interrogation program" from all nine congressional leaders who had been briefed on its details: this included the leaders of both intelligence committees, the leaders of both parties, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

When asked if they thought the program should be continued, they all said, "Absolutely," Cheney said. And when asked if the Bush administration should seek additional congressional approval for the program, the nine Congressional leaders unanimously told him, "Absolutely not," according to Cheney's account.

Cheney also said the Bush administration's interrogation policies were partially responsible for recent successes in the fight against al Qaeda, includig the killing of Osama bin Laden.

"I'd make the case we've been successful in part because of the intelligence we have, because of what we've learned from men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, back when he was subjected [to enhanced interrogation]," he said.

In the one-hour discussion at AEI with the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, Cheney also talked about huddling with his wife and daughter at Camp David on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001. Camp David was the "secure, undisclosed location" that the Secret Service rushed Cheney to just after the attacks. Other top administration officials met him there over the follow days.

When asked if he ever broke down and cried in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as had President George W. Bush and other top officials, Cheney said, "Not really," and then grinned sheepishly as the crowd giggled.

"You understand that people will find that peculiar," Hayes noted.

"It wasn't that it wasn't a deeply moving event," Cheney responded. "The training just sort of kicked in, in terms of what we had to do that morning and into the next day."

Despite the White House's claim that the new debt deal would cut $350 billion from defense spending over the next ten years, there are no specifics in the bill on defense cuts  -- and no way to tell what the final cuts will be.

"The deal puts us on track to cut $350 billion from the defense budget over 10 years," the White House said in a fact sheet today. "These reductions will be implemented based on the outcome of a review of our missions, roles, and capabilities that will reflect the President's commitment to protecting our national security."

But if you look at the text of the bill, there is simply no language on how much the defense budget will actually be cut. What the bill does is set spending caps for "security" spending, which the administration defines as defense, homeland security, intelligence, nuclear weapons, diplomacy, and foreign aid. There's no breakdown that defines which of these agencies get what, so there's no way to be sure that all the cuts would come from "defense."

Moreover, the spending caps are split between "security" and "non-security" discretionary spending only for fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2013. After that, the spending caps don't make any distinctions between budget accounts. In the end, the actual fiscal 2012 spending numbers will be set by congressional appropriators in the House and the Senate, hopefully before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

So how does the White House claim that it is cutting $350 billion from defense?

"From the discretionary caps in first tranche of the bill, there is approximately $420 billion in security savings. Of that, $350 billion is from defense (function 050) savings," an administration official told The Cable today.

But former officials and budget experts said that those details are not in the actual bill and are subject to the whim of future Congresses.

"There's actually no way to tell. It's not possible to calculate," Gordon Adams, former OMB national security chief in the Clinton administration, told The Cable today. "The whole deal is designed to be opaque about the things you really want to know, such as how much defense will be cut.... This is classic Washington Kabuki theater."

The defense budget was $529 billion for fiscal 2011 and the entire "security" budget was $688.5 billion. The debt deal caps fiscal 2012 security spending at $684 billion, which means a cut of about $4.5 billion compared to fiscal 2011 levels. That money could come from defense, or it could come from the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, or another department. Nobody knows.

The fiscal 2013 security cap is $686 billion.

The caps will prevent security spending from going up, but the details are still in lawmakers' hands and therefore anything could happen, said Gordon.

"It's more disciplined because now there's a cap. Now they have to duke it out at the [committee] chairmen's level," he said.

And those committee chairmen are already working on it. We're told that defense hawks, including House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA), huddled with House GOP leadership this afternoon to demand answers to exactly how much the deal would impact defense.

"I will support this proposal with deep reservations. Our senior military commanders have been unanimous in their concerns that deeper cuts could break the force. I take their position seriously and the funding levels in this bill won't make their job easier. Still, this is the least bad proposal before us," McKeon said in a late afternoon statement. 

McKeon may have secured some assurances from the House leadership about the specifics of the security cuts, Gordon speculated. A spokesperson for McKeon did not respond to queries by deadline.

What McKeon and other defense hawks are really worried about is the trigger mechanism, which would automatically cut $600 billion from the base defense budgets over 10 years if the new joint committee can't make a deal on $1.2 trillion of additional cuts. After "mechanical adjustments," which are ways to predict the real value of the cuts considering other factors, that $600 billion cut is estimated by the administration to actually be about $534 billion.

While it's unclear whether McKeon got assurances on today's deal, it is clear that his primary concern is about the joint committee and the trigger mechanism, not the security spending caps that he is voting for today.

"What is clear is we have cut what we can from the Department of Defense, and given what's at stake it is essential that the joint committee include strong national security voices. There is no scenario in the second phase of this proposal that does not turn a debt crisis into a national security crisis," he said. "Defense cannot sustain any additional cuts either from the joint committee or the sequestration trigger."

By the way, the White House didn't mention today that it had already promised to cut $400 billion from security spending, although there are no details on that plan either.

Interestingly, if you add the $350 billion in defense cuts announced by the White House as part of today's deal with the $534 billion in defense cuts in the trigger mechanism, it totals $884 billion. That number is suspiciously close to the $886 billion in defense cuts proposed in the plan put forth by theSenate's bipartisan budget group the Gang of Six, which President Barack Obama has already endorsed.

"It just happens to lead you to [Gang of Six leader Sen. Kent] Conrad's number," said Gordon. "I suspect it's not a coincidence."

CIA Director Leon Panetta and ISAF Commander Gen. David Petraeus will get new assignments Thursday, with Panetta being nominated to head the Pentagon and Petraeus replacing him at the CIA. But the CIA and the military have completely different assessments of the NATO-led force's progress in Afghanistan, placing Petraeus in charge of a bureaucracy largely skeptical of his optimistic analysis of the war.

A senior administration official confirmed Wednesday that President Barack Obama will announce the moves Thursday, along with the appointment of CENTCOM Deputy Commander Gen. John Allen to replace Petraeus and former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker to replace Karl Eikenberry as envoy to Kabul. If all the Senate confirmations go smoothly, Panetta will take over for Defense Secretary Robert Gates on July 1 and Petraeus will move to the CIA in early September. CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell would act as temporary head of the CIA over the summer.

Petraeus will resign his military commission when he moves to the CIA. But he is not likely to jettison his opinions about the war in Afghanistan, which are much rosier than the assessments that have been coming out of the intelligence community.

"It is ISAF's assessment that the momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas," Petraeus testified on March 16 before the Senate Armed Services Committee. "The progress achieved has put us on the right azimuth to accomplish the objective agreed upon at last November's Lisbon summit, that of Afghan forces in the lead throughout the country by the end of 2014."

He went on to commend the progress of the Afghan security forces and the Afghan police, praising the success of the troop surge in Afghanistan as providing space for the government led by President Hamid Karzai to increase its responsibilities throughout the country. He also praised the Pakistani military's efforts to root out insurgents in their midst.

That analysis is quite different from the intelligence community's latest National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan and Pakistan from last December, which stated that large areas of Afghanistan were still vulnerable to quick takeover by the Taliban and that Pakistan was still supporting insurgents in both countries.

The leaked NIE caused a rift between the CIA and the Pentagon, with military officials claiming that the intelligence community was not up to date on progress is Afghanistan. With Petraeus now heading to the CIA, he will be charged with evaluating his own rosy assessments of the course of the war.

"The specific guy who was responsible for producing a positive prognosis is now going to a job where he has to judge his own prognosis and grade his own work," said Stephen Biddle, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The institutional culture of the military is generally optimistic and can do. The institutional culture of the intelligence community is generally skeptical and pessimistic."

Petraeus is an unusually open-minded and intelligence-friendly military officer, Biddle said, but he will nevertheless face a culture clash at the CIA's Langley headquarters.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, also expressed some reservations about Petraeus becoming CIA director.

"In Iraq, at CENTCOM and in Afghanistan, Gen. Petraeus has been a consumer of intelligence and has commanded DoD intelligence resources. But that is a different role than leading the top civilian intelligence agency. I look forward to hearing his vision for the CIA and his plans to make sure the CIA is collecting the type of intelligence that policymakers need," she said in a statement e-mailed to The Cable.

It is true, Biddle noted, that Petraeus doesn't have a lot of experience in the intelligence community, but that hasn't previously been a disqualification for the job. "That was also true of lots of past CIA directors," he said.

A more natural promotion for Petraeus might have been to the role of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright is seen as the leading contender for that post due to his closeness to Obama, and despite accusations that he slept with a drunk subordinate - charges on which he was cleared.

Panetta is set to take over the Pentagon this summer, where he will work directly with Petraeus, who will still be serving as ISAF commander. The summer, typically known as Afghanistan's "fighting season," will represent Panetta's first test as secretary of defense.   A senior administration official said that Panetta was initially reluctant to take the job, but finally agreed on April 25.

"Leon loved being the director of the CIA and it showed... It was a difficult decision for him to leave the agency," the official said. "The president asked him, Leon thought about it, consulted with his spouse and family, and on Monday evening, he said yes."

The transition planning at the Pentagon is already underway. Marcel Lettre, formerly the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, shifted earlier this year to a new role in Gates's office, managing the transition process for Gates's departure and his successor's arrival.  Jeremy Bash, Panetta's chief of staff at the CIA and a former colleague of Lettre's on the staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, also could become Panetta's chief of staff at the Pentagon.

Of course, Panetta will immediately be tasked with weighing in on a host of personnel changes at the Pentagon. Will Deputy Secretary Bill Lynn stay on? Nobody knows. Panetta will also have a role in picking the next Joint Chiefs chairman and the next vice chairman if Cartwright, as expected, gets the promotion. A game of musical chairs among senior military officers could also see new jobs for Supreme Allied Commander Europe Adm. James Stavridis, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz, Gen. Ray Odierno, and many others.

Meanwhile, will Petraeus, out of uniform and out of the Defense Department, be able to confine himself to the job of producing objective intelligence analysis and stay away from policymaking?

"General Petraeus has deep experience in the areas of intelligence and as director of the CIA I think he would clearly understand what the role is there," the senior administration official said.

Responding to reports President Barack Obama secretly authorized covert action to support the Libyan rebels, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said that actually arming the Libyan rebels would require his approval and he hasn't given it.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) said in a late Wednesday interview that the Obama administration's top national security officials were deeply split on whether arming the rebels was a good idea. In a classified briefing Wednesday with lawmakers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Rogers said it was clear that there were deep divisions between the cabinet officials regarding the wisdom of arming the rebels.

"I've never seen an uneasiness amongst their national security cabinet members as I have seen on this. It's kind of odd," said Rogers. He declined to say which cabinet members were supporting arming the rebels and which were opposed, but he said it was obvious that they disagreed.

"Everything from body language to the way they are addressing members of Congress, it's very clear that there's lots of tension inside that Cabinet right now. This to me is why it's so important for the president to lead on this," said Rogers. "I think [Obama's] reluctant on this, at best. And there are differences of opinion and you can tell that something just isn't right there."

Rogers wouldn't confirm or deny the report that Obama issued what's known as a "presidential finding" authorizing the intelligence community to begin broadly supporting the Libyan rebels, because such findings are sensitive and classified. But he said that if Obama wanted to arm the rebels, the president would need Rogers' support, which he doesn't yet have.

"Any covert action that happens would have to get the sign off of the intelligence chairmen, by statute. You won't get a sign off from me," Rogers said referring to National Security Act 47. "I still think arming the rebels is a horrible idea. We don't know who they are, we only know who they are against but we don't really who they are for. We don't have a good picture of who's really in charge."

Rogers said that the issues of providing covert support and actually arming the rebels are separate issues.

"There is a public debate about arming the rebels... that somehow got intertwined and it probably shouldn't have."

But Rogers has no objections to putting CIA operatives on the ground to gather information on who the rebels are. National Journal reported late Wednesday that about a dozen CIA officers are now on the ground in Libya doing just that.

"That should be happening anyway, through public means, through intelligence, all of that should be happening," he said. "The agencies are by statute and by law allowed to go overseas to collect information, that means any country."

The intelligence committees do need to be notified about major intelligence operations, either before or immediately after in exigent circumstances, a committee staffer said.

Rogers said he was concerned about al Qaeda's involvement with the Libya opposition.

"The number 3 guy in al Qaeda right now is Libyan. They have put a fair number of fighters into Iraq from Libya. So it is a place where al Qaeda is, [but] that doesn't mean this is an al Qaeda effort."

He also said that the Libyan regime, led by Col. Muammar al Qaddafi, still possesses stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

"The administration missed a big opportunity when they didn't talk about chemical weapons stockpiles. I've seen it personally with these eyeballs. Their biological weapons program, we think we got it all but we're not sure," said Rogers. I worry a lot about who is safeguarding that material. We believe right now it is in the hands of the regime."

"Mustard gas in the hands of bad guy, you don't have to have a large scale event to have that be an incredibly dangerous terrorist weapon. And there are other things that he has as well."

The White House issued a statement late Thursday from Press Secretary Jay Carney that the Obama administration was not arming the rebels as of now.

"No decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya. We're not ruling it out or ruling it in. We're assessing and reviewing options for all types of assistance that we could provide to the Libyan people, and have consulted directly with the opposition and our international partners about these matters," the statement read.

The U.S. intelligence community has been behind events throughout the Arab world for over a month and producing deficient work, the Senate's top leader on intelligence issues complained to the head of the CIA.

"Our intelligence, and I see it all, is way behind the times. It is inadequate. And this is a very serious problem," Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told The Cable in an interview on Tuesday.

Feinstein criticized the U.S. government's intelligence products in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya, saying that the intelligence community has given her "nothing that we didn't read in the newspapers" since January.

"The only one where there was good intelligence was Tunisia," she said, "but really no intelligence on any of the others, whether it was Yemen, or Bahrain, or Egypt... nothing."

Feinstein said she recently raised her unhappiness over the intelligence community's work directly with CIA Director Leon Panetta, who promised to produce better information for lawmakers.

"It's going to be improved. Mr. Panetta is aware of this and is going to take action," she explained.

She attributed the shoddy work product to a lack of human intelligence assets on the ground in the Middle East as well as the intelligence community's failure to maximize the use of open source information, including social networks, which Feinstein said accounts for an increasing amount of raw intelligence.

"I'm not a big computer person but I just went up on one of these sites and all I had to do was look," Feinstein said.

Feinstein said that she has not spoken about the issue with the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Feinstein also joined the growing chorus of senior Democratic senators who oppose any type of military intervention in Libya, including arming rebel groups or imposing a no-fly zone.

"This is a civil war. It is not Qaddafi invading another country. I think [arming the rebels] is an act of war and particularly the no-fly zone is [an act of war]," she said.

The U.S. government shouldn't set a precedent for intervening in Arab civil wars, Feinstein said. She said that such a step could lead to more interventions by the U.S. military, which is already strained by the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The Saudis -- Do you put a no fly zone up there if this happens there? Bahrain -- Do you put a no-fly zone up there? We've got our hands full," she said.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry (D-MA) has repeatedly called on the administration to work with allies to set up a no-fly zone over Libya. But Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) is also against the idea for now.

"There are a lot of questions that need to be answered before that option can be exercised," Levin told The Cable. "Not only what is the mission, what are the risks, but also who are the supporters of it. If there is no support in the Arab and Muslim world or neighboring countries, what it could result in would be a very negative outcome."

Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), an Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee member and former secretary of the Navy, also said on Tuesday that armed intervention in Libya on behalf of the rebels was not wise at this time.

"We all know that military commitments, however small, are easily begun and in this region particularly very difficult to end," said Webb. "I am of the opinion that it's not a good idea to give weapons and military support to people who you don't know."

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence holds its first public hearing today, ushering in what new Republican chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) calls a new era of bipartisan, apolitical, and aggressive oversight by a committee that had lost its way over the past few years.

The first hearing will cover "World Wide Threats" and will feature testimony from a host of top administration intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director Leon Panetta, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, Philip Goldberg.

Rogers sat down for an exclusive interview prior to the hearing with The Cable, during which he promised to reinvigorate the committee's oversight and investigation activities, and use its panel to work with the intelligence community to trim budgets and focus on new threats. He also said that while he seeks harmony with the vast bureaucracy he's charged with overseeing, he has some ideas of his own about how intelligence policy should change

Josh Rogin: What is your overall vision for how the committee should be set up, what it should focus on, and what its attitude should be?

Mike Rogers: One of the main goals is to get the committee back to its original roots. The partisan era of national security should be the rare exception. Over the last few years, the committee has really diminished in the eyes of the intelligence community as the place for national security issues to be discussed, solved, and to conduct proper oversight.... We want to be knowledgeable, we want to be responsive, we need to ask hard questions, and it's ok to conduct thorough oversight. And if we get back to doing that in a bipartisan or non-partisan way, we'll be doing the intelligence community a real service.

JR: Where did the committee go wrong and what were the consequences?

MR: I saw this in the Bush administration. When the political rhetoric exceeded the bounds of the committee it had a negative impact on the committee's ability to do its proper oversight. It became not about true oversight of 17 intelligence agencies...it was the political flavor on national security of the day. When that started, the committee stopped looking as hard as it should have, even at the Bush administration.... It wasn't helpful because it stopped us from asking hard questions.

JR: What are the trends in intelligence threats that you see the committee focusing on?

MR: We have everything from a growing radicalization here at home to a more integrated al Qaeda around the world. Finances have merged, training events have merged, radicalization efforts have merged. Our liaison partners have been damaged through public discourse of things better left unsaid between nations.

WikiLeaks is a great example. We're going to have work hard to regain the trust of our liaison partners overseas.... Cyber is huge. We are going to come up with a policy or law on cybersecurity that will put us in a much better place.... [House Speaker] John Boehner has made that commitment.

JR: How are you going to deal with the intelligence budget and the intelligence authorization process?

MR: The military intelligence budget has not been scrutinized the way it needs to be. I'm going to call it a scrub...in a way that's not been done before. We haven't had an authorization bill in six years. That's not going to happen anymore.... The [fiscal 2011] budget has to get done...that's going to be clean of any policies. When we look at the policies, we're either going to influence the policies by working with the intelligence communities at senior levels, or we will legislate it: it may be a stand-alone bill, it may be part of the defense bill; we'll do it that way.

JR: Are you looking to cut the intelligence budget?

MR: I've told the community that I will be the most ardent protector of mission-essential funds. The last thing we want to do is get to the same place we did in the 1990s where they cut mission-essential funds so they actually couldn't perform at the level they should have been performing at. I'm not going to let that happen. But that doesn't mean we can't find efficiencies and savings in the intelligence budget. We're going to do that in cooperation with the intelligence community.

JR: You've called for the intelligence bureaucracy to be "rattled." What do you want to see happen to that bureaucracy?

MR: I think they have gotten the message. For years this whole town was fighting against [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] from getting bigger. Director Clapper has gone through it and now says ‘I have a plan and help me work through this plan to make the DNI more effective.' At the end of the day I think that will reduce the bureaucracy that we saw in the past.... It's not just about giving him the first crack at this, he laid out a good plan and we're going to be his partner.... It makes the mission more efficient, and when you make it more efficient I think you'll see the bureaucracy get smaller.

JR: Do you plan to use the committee to investigate the policies that led to the WikiLeaks disclosures?

MR: I think we would be irresponsible if we didn't take a look at the policies that we engage in for information sharing. I've found the happy medium [between the need to know and the need to share], it is ‘the need to know with whom to share.'

JR: Do you still plan to try to get rid of the High Value Interrogation Group as established by the Obama administration?

MR: I'm still a skeptic of the High Value Interrogation Group. In the past, we haven't gotten all the information we need. I'm not sure it's the best use of money and investment in people and we'll make that determination in the next couple of months.

JR: Should laws that govern how the government can collect private information, like the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), be expanded to include email and Facebook?

MR: The way we communicate is changing. As long as it is consistent with due process, and I believe CALEA is, we have to do it. We know bad guys are communicating through Facebook and online video games. It's foolish for America not to keep pace with the changing way the world communicates.

JR: Who do you think is really running intelligence policy in the Obama administration? John Brenner? James Clapper? Leon Panetta? Someone else?

MR: We want to better understand that question. We are going to ask questions and we are going to try to come to the conclusion in how it is structured, how decisions are being made -- and at the end of the day does the structure they have created keep us more safe or less safe? If it's more safe, we're going to be with [the administration], if we come to the conclusion that it's not keeping us as safe as another way, we're going to seek some changes.

Following a brief hiccup, all remaining holds or threats of holds on the nomination of James Clapper to be the next director of national intelligence are being cleared up, and the expectation on Capitol Hill is that he will be confirmed by week's end.

Yesterday, John McCain's office said that the Arizona senator had placed a "hold" on the Clapper nomination due to his outstanding request for specific information related to intelligence program acquisitions oversight. Today, the senator's concerns appear to be alleviated.

"This afternoon, Senator McCain received the report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that he first requested nearly one year ago, and as a result he is releasing his hold on General Clapper's nomination," his office said in a statement. "This report confirms Senator McCain's longstanding concerns about the poor oversight and cost overruns in intelligence technology programs."

The Cable caught up with Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, who said that two other senators were holding up the nomination, committee ranking Republican Kit Bond, R-MO, and Tom Coburn, R-OK. The senators wanted ODNI to deliver an overdue threat assessment on the prisoners being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Feinstein said Bond and Coburn's requests were being fulfilled. "These concerns are being satisfied. They are connected to information. Senator Bond should have his and I think Coburn's hold is connected to Bond's," she said.

Bond's office denied he had a "hold" on the Clapper nomination, a nomination Bond supported in a unanimous 15-0 committee vote last week. But that's just a matter of semantics. Most holds are merely threats by individual senators to oppose consenting to a full Senate vote. That has the effect of "holding" the nomination, whether a formal "hold" is filed with the Senate clerk's office or not.

Bond told The Cable Tuesday that he is getting the information he desires.

"Today I talked to General Clapper and I'm pleased the intelligence community is now working to provide the documents and access that I -- and other members -- have been seeking and that they are required by law to share with lawmakers," he said.

Coburn also denied he has a formal "hold" on Clapper but said he was worried about the Guantánamo threat assessment.

"I think it's important that we look at the vast number of people that have been released under the Bush administration and the Obama administration from Guantánamo who are now trying to kill American soldiers," he said. "And I think that information is due and the intelligence committee ought to be getting it. So I am trying to do whatever I can to make good decisions."

Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, D-MI, insisted that he and the Obama administration are still trying to close the prison at Guantánamo and that the threat assessment should help make that happen because it might confirm that the Obama administration has done a better job than Bush in selecting prisoners for release.

"I think it is useful to find out if that's correct, and if so, what the success rate is attributed to, so we can build on that and hopefully make a better identification of who's likely to go back to the battlefield," Levin said. "I don't know what it has to do with Clapper, though."

Levin said he would try to remove, both in conference and on the floor, provisions in the defense authorization bill that prohibit sending a number of detainees to specific countries and thwart the administration's plans to relocate them to a federal prison in Illinois.

The defense authorization bill is being set up to move in September, but might require GOP acquiescence to move forward. Unless those provisions are removed, closing the Guantánamo prison will have to be delayed further, Levin said. "We just can't seem to get it done."

The Senate Intelligence Committee approved the nomination of James Clapper to be the next director of national intelligence by a unanimous 15-0 vote Thursday afternoon.

Committee ranking Republican Kit Bond, R-MO, who was one of the senators who had lingering concerns about Clapper, expressed guarded optimism after yesterday's follow up hearing that Clapper will be the strong type of DNI that Congress is advocating.

"General Clapper has served our nation honorably for 46 years and I admire him, he has assured me that he does not intend to be a hood ornament but judging from recent history my yea vote is really a triumph of hope over experience," Bond said.

No full Senate vote on the nomination has yet been scheduled.

Even before the release of tens of thousands of classified Afghanistan war documents Sunday, a clearly worried Obama administration had embarked on an aggressive campaign to reach out to domestic and international stakeholders in the hopes of mitigating the fallout.

Administration officials, alerted to the pending leak of reams of reports from the warzone by news organizations, launched a two-pronged, preemptive response: They started calling around to leaders of foreign governments who might be affected to warn them of the story and allay any concerns about U.S. government involvement in the leak, and started working Capitol Hill to limit any misinterpretation as congressmen reacted to the disclosures, which include reports accusing Pakistani intelligence operatives of links to anti-coalition attacks.

"Once we became aware of the existence of this story, we proceeded with several country notifications, as is the case when we are aware of major news stories," a senior administration official told The Cable. "These notifications included Afghanistan and Pakistan, at multiple levels, as well as Germany and the U.K. (given that the documents were leaked to the foreign news outlets Der Spiegel and the Guardian)."

"We've also been in touch with members and staff on the Hill over the last couple of days," the senior administration official said.

One particularly important call was between Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. Zardari has at times tangled with his country's top spy agency, the powerful Inter Services Intelligence directorate, and Holbrooke himself said last week while in India that "The links between the ISI and the Taliban are a problem."

Other than Holbrooke, officials involved in the notifications included U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, who happened to be in Pakistan and held a high-level meeting with Pakistani officials Saturday night.

After leaving Pakistan for Afghanistan, Mullen had the difficult task of assuring Afghan tribal leaders that the U.S. government was aware and dealing with the problem of Pakistani links to Afghan insurgents. "I've raised that issue. The Pakistani leadership knows it's a priority," he said Monday at a meeting at a U.S. military base outside Kandahar, according to Agence France Press. "Long-term pressure" on Islamabad, he said, would likely bear fruit.

Although some press reports cited anonymous Pakistani sources speculating that the Obama administration was behind the document dump, Pakistani civilian leaders contacted by the administration over the last couple of days appeared to accept that the U.S. government had no role in the leaks. The message to the Pakistanis was that the information was old, not reliable, and shouldn't derail ongoing and increasing cooperation between the two governments.

"The White House succeeded in calming our people," said one Pakistani source. "I think we've contained the damage on this one, at least on our end."

"Obviously we'll be watching closely to see how various countries and populations respond to the information that's here," said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who added that the State Department believes Pakistan is committed "at the leadership level" to rooting out terrorists. According to Crowley, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was contacted directly. "We also gave a heads-up to India," he said.

Jones was also working the phones Sunday night and hosting meetings for foreign representatives at the White House Monday to make sure there was no ill will resulting from the revelations. Jones's statement released Sunday night praised recent Pakistani cooperation in fighting terrorism and included the line, "These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people."

The administration's relationship with the ISI has apparently not been derailed by the Wikileaks disclosures. ISI chief Lt Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha is expected to visit Washington soon, one of a series of meetings he's been having with U.S. officials.

On the Hill, offices contacted included those of Senate Foreign Relations heads John Kerry, D-MA, and Richard  Lugar, R-IN, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, D-MI, House Foreign Affairs chairman Howard Berman, D-CA, House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton, D-MO, and others.

One source said that Skelton's statement, which heavily criticized the actions by Wikileaks and praised recent Pakistani cooperation using themes similar to Jones's statement, was coordinated with the administration. Skelton could not be reached for comment.

"It is critical that we not use outdated reports to paint a picture of the cooperation of Pakistan in our efforts in Afghanistan," Skelton said. "Since these reports were issued, Pakistan has significantly stepped up its fight against the Taliban, including efforts that led to the capture of the highest-ranking member of the Taliban since the start of the war."

Other leading Democrats were more critical of Pakistan.

"Some of these documents reinforce a longstanding concern of mine about the supporting role of some Pakistani officials in the Afghan insurgency," read Levin's statement. "When Sen. Jack Reed and I visited Pakistan this month, we strongly urged the Pakistanis to take forceful action against militant networks using Pakistan as a base to attack Afghanistan and our troops."

The administration got some rare support Monday from Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-CT, who condemned the leak in a statement. "The disclosure of tens of thousands of classified documents on the Afghanistan war is profoundly irresponsible and harmful to our national security, Lieberman said.

The State Department said it had not decided whether one person, such as Private Bradley Manning, who already stands accused of leaking classified information to Wikileaks, was the source of the documents.

"We're trying to determine if this is related to that ongoing investigation or a new leak," Crowley said.

Last week, the State Department's Diplomatic Security bureau sent out a notice to all 14,574 DC area employees warning them that a new Washington Post website would reveal the locations of firms working on the department's behalf.

But although one White House official called the Post's online database of contractors "troubling," the information graphic that the illustrates where Top Secret firms are located does not give exact street addresses and does not reveal which companies are performing work for which agency. In fact, the text of the first article in the series doesn't mention the State Department at all.

"This isn't really a State Department story," one State Department official told The Cable, pointing out that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has been the lead agency dealing with the story, with the Post also working with the White House and the Defense Department to some degree.

The Post editors said they had addressed concerns about the contractor graphic by not revealing the specific addresses and not identifying which contractors work for which agencies. The paper also allowed administration officials to review the website before it launched. Only one unspecified agency objected to the graphics, but didn't give any specific reason other than it was a national security risk, the editors wrote.

Here's what the website did tell us about the State Department:

There are 146 contracting companies doing Top Secret work for the State Department, 13 large companies, 25 medium-sized, and 108 small companies spread across nine locations. The Department ranks 11th out of 45 agencies in terms of the number of Top Secret contractors it employs. That's the largest number of intelligence contractors outside the defense establishment, after the Homeland Security Department and the FBI.

The types of Top Secret work that State is contracting out include everything from psychological operations and counterdrug operations to intelligence analysis, security, facilities management, and even disaster preparation.

The piece did point to the attempted Christmas Day bombing by Umar Abdulmutallab, who was able to travel to the United States despite some damning information on his visa application that the State Department did not transfer to the National Counterterrorism Center.

But State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Monday that the deficiencies that allowed the entire system to miss Abdulmutallab were already being addressed.

"We haven't waited for any Washington Post expose to do that. There's been a very significant process of reviewing the lessons learned from, you know, the Christmas Day bomber," he said. "And in fact, we have adjusted our operating procedures, our interaction both with the NCTC, the Terrorist Screening Center, and other elements of the intelligence community. So that review and the changes in our procedures has already largely been adopted."

Meanwhile, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted this question and answer sheet and this fact sheet Monday in response to the Post series.

On 10:50 Tuesday night, Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri boarded Qatar Airways flight 52, bound for Doha. When he arrives at 6:30 Wednesday evening Qatar time, he'll board another plane to Tehran, his home.

The details of Amiri's life since the last time he was in Iran, 14 months ago, are sure to remain in dispute for some time. In an interview aired on Iranian state television Wednesday, Amiri accused U.S. and Saudi agents of kidnapping and drugging him while he was on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, eventually taking him to the United States. In another video released last month, however, Amiri claimed he was in the United States voluntarily and studying for a doctorate.

According to one source who spoke extensively with Amiri before he left the United States, his current story is the following: When he was in Medina, Saudi Arabia, in June 2009, a van pulled up as he was leaving his hotel room on the way to the mosque, and men he didn't know forced him into it.

The next sequence of events is hazy, according to Amiri's account. He says he must have been drugged, because the next thing he remembers is being in Washington, D.C., and in the custody of unspecified American intelligence organizations. They allegedly moved him around the country over the next 14 months, and he says that he spent much of his time in Arizona as well as Washington.

Amiri claims that he didn't give U.S. intelligence officers any information, and was caught by surprise when, on Monday night, he was taken out of his secret hiding location and put in a cab. The cab drove straight to the Iranian interests section in Georgetown, which is supervised by the Pakistani Embassy. A U.S. government car trailed the cab, he claims.

Amiri's alleged captors did not torture him physically, he now says, but they did abuse him "emotionally," placing him under great mental strain during his captivity. He did not talk about how or why he was able to produce three YouTube videos and publish them on the Internet.

According to two diplomatic sources close to the issue, the most plausible explanation is that Amiri defected willingly to the United States, but at some point decided he wanted to return to Iran. U.S. intelligence officers may have also decided that holding him was not yielding the benefits commensurate to the costs, and put him out. Under this theory, Amiri is now trying to restore his place in the system of the country he betrayed, while concocting a cover story about being kidnapped.

Amiri has a wife and son who still live in Iran. One source speculated that the Iranians could be threatening his family in order to coerce him to relate his current version of events. That would at least explain why Amiri is taking the huge risk of placing himself back into the hands of the Iranian regime.

Surrounded by Iranian minders during his meetings Tuesday with foreign officials who visited the interests section before going to the airport, Amiri told them he was happy to be going back to Tehran and relieved to be joined again with his Iranian friends. Appearing upbeat but nervous, he answered questions on Tuesday carefully and denied that he was being coerced to tell this latest version of the events surrounding his disappearance.

Our source said he got tripped up on questions that he wasn't prepared for, which some in the room took as a signal he wasn't being honest, and was trying hard to avoid contradicting himself as he told his tale.

Amiri's story conflicts with what little information the State Department has released regarding the case. For example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that Amiri came to the U.S. of his own free will and leaves on his own accord. "He's free to go, he was free to come, these decisions are his alone to make," she said.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said that Amiri got to the Iranian interests section on his own. What seems clear is that the Iranians were ready for him: His travel back to Tehran was already being planned when he arrived.

In the absence of hard facts, rumors regarding Amiri's return to Iran continue to swirl. One source speculated that there may have been a swap deal between Iran and the United States, whereby Amiri would return to the Islamic Republic and then, sometime in the near future, Iranian officials would release the three American hikers they have held since July 2009, or even ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran in 2007.

Until the Obama administration gives a full account of its side of the story, Amiri's tale of the last 14 months of his life will be the only version of events that the public will hear. State Department officials continue to dance around the U.S. government's connection with him, and the circumstances leading to his departure.

"He has been in the United States, you know, for some time," Crowley said at Tuesday's briefing. "The United States government has maintained contact with him. I can't tell you specifically when he made this decision to return, you know, to Iran, but as we indicated today and as the secretary mentioned a bit ago, he's here of his free will and he's -- this is his decision to depart, and we are helping to facilitate that departure."

"We didn't seize him and bring him here, and we're not preventing him from returning to Iran," Crowley said. "That is how we do things here in the United States."

They might not be best friends now, but in the years just after 9/11, George Tenet was extremely tight with Dick Cheney, and together they ran the first years of the "global war on terror."

That's according to Philip Zelikow, former State Department counselor and executive director of the 9/11 Commission, who gave a fascinating talk Friday morning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Question: Who was the combatant commander in the global war on terror? Answer: That combatant commander's name was George Tenet," Zelikow said, adding, "You could make an argument that his secretary of defense was, in fact, Dick Cheney."

The relationship between Tenet and Cheney back in those days was very close, Zelikow remembered.

"Things became more complicated later, so some of that I think has been forgotten," he said.

Zelikow might have been alluding to the Bush White House's abandonment of Tenet, including pinning him with the "slam dunk" phrase on Iraq's WMDs, which drove Tenet to resign in 2004 and write a book slamming the Bush White House.

"You've gone out and made me look stupid, it's the most despicable thing I've ever heard in my life," Tenet said he told Bush chief of staff Andy Card after that, "Men of honor don't do this. You don't throw people overboard."

Or he might have been referring to the revelation during the Scooter Libby trial that Cheney was declassifying and then leaking CIA information to reporters to support the White House's drive to go to war in Iraq.

But before the break up, in the time just after the attacks, Tenet would hold a 5 p.m. briefing every day on the 7th floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, where a host of top officials would inform him of the state of play.

Zelikow also spoke about the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which started up in 2004 and purported to be based on the 9/11 Commission's recommendations.

The NCTC was modeled, in part, on Britain's domestic intelligence service MI5, Zelikow revealed, although nobody wanted to say that at the time.

"NCTC very much is informed by the MI5 precedent, but I did not say so to anyone at the time," Zelikow said. People who didn't like MI5 and saw it as a "menacing, domestic spy agency" might have raised objections to NCTC at the time if the linkage had been clear, he noted.

And for those who did like MI5, they might have been too enthusiastic about it and therefore could have "poisoned the well in their enthusiasm for ‘boy don't we need a good domestic spy agency.'"

People inside the administration were making just that argument at the time, Zelikow said, without identifying them by name (Dick Cheney?). But he defended using MI5 and its unique power and reach as a model for the U.S. counterterrorism infrastructure he helped to create.

"MI5 is not just a domestic spy agency, MI5 is a world-wide spy agency. Its missions are defined functionally, not geographically. It does counterterrorism work world-wide, it bridges the foreign-domestic divide. That gives it a lot of leverage."

The State Department's official cable about underwear-bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wasn't the only report to come out of the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria as part of the Visas Viper process, a State Department official tells The Cable.

As reported earlier today, the alert sent by the embassy to the National Counterterrorism Center and other agencies on Nov. 20 contained only sparse information about the meeting between embassy officials and his father, a prominent Nigerian businessman. That reporting fell short of the regulations for Visas Viper cables, failing to add detailed information about the father's background and credibility.

But the additional qualitative information was included in several reports sent that same day and in succeeding days by the embassy in separate and previously unreported classified communications to the NCTC, from other embassy personnel not from employed by the State Department, the official said.

"The unclassified Visas Viper cable is just the tip of the iceberg in a much more extensive set of reports that came from the post," the official said.

At least one of those additional reports was from the CIA, the official said, and others might have been from the FBI representative on post or other intelligence organizations.

President Obama commented on previous reports that Abdulmutallab's father had several contacts with the CIA that were not disseminated through the intel community. What's new here is that the State Department official is claiming at least some of these were submitted directly to the NCTC "as part of the Visas Vipers process."

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley confirmed the information to The Cable and defended the official Visas Viper report as being only one part of the embassy's effort to pass on the information they had about Abdulmutallab.

"The people in Nigeria said that this was as much of the information they felt comfortable providing in an unclassified cable," said Crowley. "The rest of the information was submitted as part of the VISA Vipers process, but by other means."'

UPDATE: A reader writes in: "There is no FBI representative at Embassy Abuja.  The Legal Attache for Nigeria operates out of the Consulate in Lagos. " So we're left with the CIA and other as yet unnamed agencies as those who submitted the "classified" parts of the Viper cable.