What About Negroponte?

19 February 2005 |permalink | email article

Bush’s not entirely uncontroversial choice of John Dimitri Negroponte to be the nation’s first director of intelligence catches the media by surprise. It also revives haunting past human rights questions about the the London-born son of a Greek-American shipping magnate. The politically astute Negroponte has spent more than 40 years serving every president since John F. Kennedy. But he has never served in the intelligence community. The opposite is true of Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, nominated as the first deputy DNI. Now director of the super secret National Security Agency, Hayden would have been a less polarizing first choice for the non-Cabinet post. But he is not our political viceroy in Baghdad.

Dana Priest and Robin Wright in The Washington Post write: “Negroponte’s mission is to tame and unify a sprawling 15-agency intelligence bureaucracy, something that no administration has been able to do since the U.S. intelligence laws were written in 1947.” He will have Bush’s ear and have control over every intel budget. Can he control Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld whose department consumes 80% of the intelligence budget? How will CIA Director Porter Goss adjust to ceding the responsibility to the DNI for producing the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) each morning, a 30 minute review of raw operational intelligence and highly classified analytic articles?

The conventional Washington wisdom is the diplomatically urbane Negroponte will easily win overwhelming Senate confirmation. Even Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, a leading critic of his appointment as American ambassador to the United Nations in 2001, has fewer reservations this time. But you can expect a full vetting of the spy overseer fueled by huge media coverage.

Past stormy confirmation hearings keyed in on Negroponte’s murky covert links to the CIA’s Central Task Force from 1981 to 1984 in operations against the Nicaraguan government while he was ambassador to Honduras. As The New York Times’s David Sanger reported, Negroponte was immersed in providing financial and military aid to Honduras, a huge station base for C.I.A. operatives helping the Contras fight Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

The moral accusation against Negroponte then and now is that he and the CIA station chief turned a blind eye to torture and other systemic abuses by the Honduran government during the Nicaraguan Contra War, shading the facts for ideological or political reasons to assist the Reagan White House agenda in Latin America. At a time when human rights allegations and torture related to the war in Iraq (Abu Ghraib for example) have been the subject of recent Senate confirmation hearings on Bush appointees, the order of attack against Negroponte is predictable.

Arguments against his U.N. confirmation will be reprised. They include the allegations both that he deliberately falsified State Department human rights reports during his time in Honduras and that U.S. missionaries and many people of faith were murdered by the CIA-trained Honduran Battalion 3-16. Negroponte has spent the past two decades vigorously defending himself from such charges.

On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report, “Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980s.” The report was partly declassified on October 22, 1998, in response to persistent demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. Parts of this document can be read on the National Security Archives website.  Only senators and their staffs with security clearance can access the full report. Will they this time?

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