[Yahoo] The CIA’s Iran chief, described by his colleagues as “legendary,” is being forced to retire as the center he oversees is folded back into the agency’s larger Middle East division, according to former CIA officials.
The official, Mike D’Andrea
| ...more formally Michael D'Andrea, but appropriately not until now found in the Rantburg archives under either ... |
— nicknamed the “Dark Lord” or “Prince of Darkness” and known by the undercover name "Roger"— had been granted waivers that allowed him to continue working at the CIA past the mandatory retirement age, according to former agency officials. But the agency declined his most recent retirement exception, according to these officials. D’Andrea’s retirement was first reported by the New York Times.
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“They decided not to extend him again,” said a former senior CIA official. “It was basically, ‘Look, you’re not going to go any higher, we need new thinking, we need new people,’ and so they eased him out. He didn’t volunteer.”
A small cadre of other senior CIA officials who had been receiving retirement waivers were also told their tenure would no longer be extended, said another former senior agency official.
"Mike has had a long and distinguished career serving his country," a CIA spokesperson told Yahoo News. "We are grateful for his decades of leadership on some of the most difficult issues we face at CIA."
D’Andrea has run the agency’s Iran operations since 2017. It was the final assignment in a career that former colleagues consider among the most consequential in the agency’s recent history.
CIA officials often credit D’Andrea, who led the agency’s counterterrorism efforts from 2006 to 2015, with revolutionizing the CIA’s terrorist-hunting efforts, and particularly the armed drone program that would, under his watch, eviscerate al-Qaida leadership.
The CIA was conducting legal drone strikes soon after 9/11, targeting members of al-Qaida in Afghanistan. But it was under D’Andrea’s leadership that the drone program really took center stage.
The CIA would conduct over 500 strikes using armed drones during the Obama administration, killing thousands of militants and hundreds of civilians. Critics questioned the legality of the program and decried the civilian deaths, though CIA officials say the agency was careful to avoid taking innocent lives.
Even so, D’Andrea was “probably the most lethal leader in the U.S. government for his tenure,” said a former senior CIA official. “He was the grim reaper for the enemy.” The agency’s counterterrorism program under D’Andrea was “bone-crushing and relentless,” recalled this former official.
“If he was a combatant commander, he would have been sitting in the galley for the State of the Union, he would have had all the accolades, and then some, that David Petraeus ever had,” said another former senior CIA official. “He ran that war.”
Certainly wasn't the Pentagon or US Army.
D’Andrea’s biography and quirks became part of his legend: the soft-spoken, professorial figure notorious for keeping all the lights dimmed in his office; the chain smoker who would spend hours exercising on the elliptical, drinking Mountain Dew; and the middle-aged convert to Islam
| ...supposedly because he took a Muslim wife... |
who ran a lethal campaign targeting Muslim religious extremists.
With D’Andrea at the helm, the CIA’s counterterrorism center functioned like a continuous, rolling decapitation operation for al-Qaida leadership, according to former officials.
“There came a point where the life expectancy of the al-Qaida chief of operations was about a month,” said the former senior official. “Every time they’d name a new guy, bam, he was gone.”
Al-Qaida operators became so scared of the CIA’s drone program that their fear began to affect the organization’s morale, said the former official. The CIA even once picked up signals intelligence between two senior al-Qaida officials in which one declined a promotion — ostensibly because he was worried about the added risks, according to this official. “The guy was saying, ‘I don’t want the job; I’m happy where I am,’” recalled the former official.
Under D’Andrea’s watch, the CIA scored an epochal victory when it pinpointed Osama bin Laden to the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad; in 2011, Navy SEALs raided the compound and killed bin Laden.
D’Andrea’s focus on al-Qaida was singular — to the exclusion of other counterterrorism threats, which sometimes irritated others in government.
“The military came to us and said, 'We need help on the Haqqani network ... the Haqqani network is killing soldiers,'” recalled a former senior CIA official. “And D’Andrea’s response, undiplomatically, was, 'Well, that’s your problem. Our problem is al-Qaida. That’s what we’re getting paid for: to go after al-Qaida.'”
The Trump administration, looking to get tough on Iran, provided new opportunities. In 2017, D’Andrea was picked to lead the CIA’s Iran Mission Center, which was spun up under the leadership of then-Director Mike Pompeo. D’Andrea oversaw a program focused on running aggressive covert operations against Tehran, say former officials.
| And then Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated. Possibly this is connected. |
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