Not surprisingly, the man who President Trump is appointing as the next Deputy Director of the CIA managed to maintain a low public profile during his 30-year Agency career. Some would call that perfect tradecraft, but now that Vaughn F. Bishop has been named as the next Deputy Director, people are eager to learn a little more about him. Of particular interest, is how his deep analytic experience will combine with Director Gina Haspel’s operational expertise, to forge a path forward for Agency leadership.
If you heard the collective sigh of relief out of McLean on news of Bishop’s appointment recently, it was in large part because he’s an insider, not a political appointee, as some had expected and others had feared. Rumors were beginning to circulate inside the building in the weeks since Gina Haspel’s May 17 Senate confirmation, because a deputy director candidate was nowhere to be seen. A former CIA Official told The Cipher Brief’s Dead Drop in June that there was hallway buzz that the delay in naming a deputy was due to a tug of war with The White House over whether to appoint someone with political ties to the current Administration, or to appoint someone who might serve as a more experienced deputy to Haspel. (UPDATE: A well-placed source tells The Cipher Brief that those rumors aren’t true and that Bishop was Haspel’s pick ‘all along’.)
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