WASHINGTON, January 10 (Sputnik) — US President Barack Obama's selection of the Treasury Department's head of terrorism and financial intelligence, David Cohen, to the number two post at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) signals a new shift by the agency to use financial tools to counter terrorism, former US intelligence advisors have pointed out.
"I think it really speaks to the new world and the new tools we're trying to use against rogue nations and terrorist entities," Allen elaborated.
The former advisor also said that he found President Obama's decision to appoint a Treasury official to be Deputy Director of the CIA as a sign of "acceptance" by the intelligence community of "the new financial tools and the financial wars that we have underway against proliferators and terrorists".
Meanwhile Gary Schmitt, who worked as a top staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee and as a US presidential intelligence advisor in the 1980s, described Cohen's appointment as a refreshingly new approach.
According to Schmitt, who also took part in the Friday FPR conference call, inviting a financial expert to the CIA "reflects the fact that we actually have brought to the table something really quite new in terms of the tools of statecraft".
Under former US President George W. Bush, a new position in the Treasury Department was created to target terrorism and the illicit use of the international financial system. Since that time, there has been an institutional effort to "to get at proliferation and terrorist financing" in "novel and new ways", namely through international financial tools, Schmitt explained.
As Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Cohen led efforts to identify and disrupt lines of financial support to terrorist organization, people involved in proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, narcotics traffickers, and other illicit actors, according to a Friday CIA press release, which added that Cohen is scheduled to take the position at the CIA in February.
