Leon E.Panetta, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency, faces pressure to probe Bush-era abuses./CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

NEWS ANALYSIS

By MARK MAZZETTI


WASHINGTON - As every previous director could attest, succeeding at the helm at the Central Intelligence Agency requires an uneasy balance: being firm enough to impose a White House agenda without inciting a revolt, while winning allegiance at the agency without being co-opted by its bureaucracy.

For Leon E.Panetta, Presidentelect Barack Obama’s choice for the job, the task is going to be even more difficult because of the intense pressure on Mr.Obama from members of Congress and outside groups to hold agency officials accountable for counterterrorism policies in which the C.I.A. played a leading role.

Aides to Mr.Obama say they have no intention of directing Mr.Panetta to oust C.I.A. officials who played a role in the agency’s secret interrogation and detention program. Instead, they say, the new administration will focus on reversing the rules that authorized the C.I.A. to carry out aggressive interrogations as well as closing the detention center in Guantanamo Bay.

Indeed, in deciding to retain Stephen R.Kappes as the agency’s second-ranking official, Mr.Obama will keep in place an official who had direct oversight of the agency’s network of secret prisons when he held in succession the top two jobs in the C.I.A.’s clandestine service from 2002 to 2004.

Still, the selection of Mr.Panetta has put some of the C.I.A.’s employees on the defensive, in part because Mr.Panetta is hardly alone among senior officials being installed by Mr.Obama to have said that the agency’s interrogation program amounted to torture.

The last time a Democratic president came to power as an outspoken critic of the C.I.A., it was Jimmy Carter. In selecting Admiral Stansfield M.Turner to lead the agency, he chose some someone who shared his dismal view of America’s spy service.

Admiral Turner ultimately left the C.I.A. having made little progress on his goal of weaning the agency off its attachment to foreign adventures, and he admitted in later years that he had been outmaneuvered by a bureaucracy that often treats outsiders like a hostile virus.

Mr.Panetta, 70, is a former White House chief of staff with limited direct experience in the intelligence world.

On the day he walks into his seventh-floor office, if confirmed by the Senate, Mr.Panetta will be managing employees who are under federal investigation for participating in the destruction of videotapes recording the interrogations of two prisoners suspected of being members of Al Qaeda. The prosecutor in the case, John H.Durham, recently told a federal judge that he would need until the end of February to interview witnesses as he considers whether to bring criminal charges in the case.

Beyond that inquiry, Mr.Panetta is facing the prospect that Democratic lawmakers might establish an independent commission tasked with looking into the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies, including the roles played by C.I.A. employees.

The number of employees who would be targets of such a commission is relatively small, and many within the agency were never comfortable with C.I.A. officers acting as jailers.

Still, some experts said any public factfinding inquiry could be perceived within the intelligence agency as a witch hunt.

“If Panetta starts trying to feed people to that commission, his tenure at C.I.A. will be over,”said Mark M.Lowenthal, a former senior agency official and an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

“If it happens, C.I.A. people are not going to start plotting against the president, but they are going to withdraw from taking risks, and then the C.I.A. becomes useless to the president,”Mr.Lowenthal said.