Panetta Did Stint in Military Intelligence
Jan 5, 2009, by | Read more: News
Obama's pick for CIA chief served in unit based at Fort Ord during Vietnam
The chattering classes can't stop commenting on Leon Panetta's lack of intelligence experience. Could have fooled San Jose attorney Bill Gates, who sat at a desk facing President-elect Obama’s choice for CIA chief for two years in the 1960s at Fort Ord. Gates and Panetta worked together in a military intelligence unit in 1965 and 1966, before Panetta launched a career in politics by joining the staff of U.S. Senate Minority Whip Thomas Kuchel, a moderate California Republican whose head was handed to him when he refused to kowtow to the party’s nascent right wing.
Gates doesn’t elaborate on what he and Panetta did at the windswept, now-decommissioned Army base, other than to say it was “top secret” and involved infantry troop numbers in Vietnam.
“We were a training base—we had to put out X number of soldiers every cycle, so it was important that we knew what was going on,” he says. “It had to do with keeping the commanding general posted regarding how the war was building up and, interpreting from that, how many more men and draftees they would need to put through training.”
Gates speculates that Panetta joined the military intelligence unit not because of a fascination with all things spooky but because it spelled a briefer commission than a stint as a military lawyer would have for the newly minted Santa Clara University Law School grad.
As for whether the gig at Fort Ord was any kind of preparation for running a byzantine agency dogged by scandal and allegations of torture, Gates says nah. But he has utter faith in his old pal nevertheless.
“Leon Panetta was picked for that job because of the same reason lots of people were picked for their jobs by the president-elect, and that’s that he’s a very, very smart man. He’s brilliant. He’s a genius. He can run large agencies and he showed that by running the office of the President of the United States.” - Traci Hukill
