Jim Pavitt was the Central Intelligence Agency’s Deputy Director for Operations during the early post-September 11 period. John Kiriakou, who in his role as executive assistant to the DDO worked directly under Pavitt during the Iraq War and the early counterterrorism campaign, describes him as “a legendary officer and a really great guy.”[1]
Dismissing talk of invading Iran
After a pre-invasion Principals Committee briefing at which the CENTCOM commander suggested U.S. forces could reach Tehran, Kiriakou returned to the office and told Pavitt what he had heard. Pavitt dismissed the idea outright: “They’re not going to invade Iran — these people don’t understand anything about the region.”[2]
’Pick any job in the world’
At the end of Kiriakou’s year as executive assistant to Bob Grenier, he asked Pavitt for a domestic transfer. Pavitt told him, “pick any job in the world that you want. I’ll give it to you,” then offered him three specific postings — two chief-of-station positions in the Middle East and a deputy chief-of-station slot — warning that the domestic assignment Kiriakou actually wanted was “really not career enhancing.”[3] Kiriakou recalls running into Pavitt, then nearly 70, at a Starbucks at 6 a.m. wearing the previous day’s suit after “visiting a friend” — evidence, in Kiriakou’s telling, that the DDO’s sense of humor and personal habits never changed with rank.[3]
Hostility toward Brennan
Pavitt’s personal antipathy toward John Brennan — distinct from and in Kiriakou’s account stronger than Kiriakou’s own dislike of Brennan — was a fixture of agency culture during this period:
Jim Pavitt, the Deputy Director for Operations, legendary officer and a really great guy. He hated Brennan more than I did. And he used to mock Brennan because Brennan at the time was telling everybody, ‘I want to head my own agency. I want to head my own agency.’[1]
The eventual institutional resolution — placing Brennan in charge of the Transnational Terrorism Information Center (TTIC, later the National Counterterrorism Center) — was, per Kiriakou, a sidelining: “They sort of shunted him off there and it was a nothing analytic organization, not even in the headquarters building. It was out one of the outlying buildings.”[4]
Blocking the breakaway
Kiriakou worked for Pavitt when Pavitt was deputy director for operations, and describes him in 2002 as the obstacle in John Brennan’s way. Brennan, a former deputy executive director, “was in a feud with Jim Pavitt… and Brennan wanted to be more important than he was.” The Transnational Terrorism Information Center was created and Brennan installed as its first head, but he wanted more than that: to take the new body out of the CIA altogether “so he could be the first head of this new intelligence agency.” Kiriakou is explicit that no institutional case was made for it — “not because it would have streamlined the information, not because the analysis would have been any better” — and that Pavitt simply stopped it.[5][6]