U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has chosen former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Yonhap News reported Tuesday.
Dennis Blair, a retired admiral and former chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, has also been picked as national intelligence director to compensate for Panetta's inexperience in the intelligence community, CNN and other reports said.
The selection of the 70-year-old Panetta, who served in the Clinton administration, is seen as an attempt by Obama to overhaul the CIA, which has been under fire for its failure to provide warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and for falsely asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which led to the U.S. invasion in 2003, Yonhap said.
U.S. President George W. Bush recently said that he regretted the false information on Iraq's WMD, although he defended the invasion as being justified to oust Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.
The U.S. has spent more than $600 billion in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, home of the Al Queda terrorist network, straining an economy that is struggling with trade and budget deficits and bailout funds for ailing U.S. financial institutions.
More than 4,200 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the Iraq war, which has pulled down Bush's approval rating to one of the lowest among presidents ever before the economic woes caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.
Panetta currently serves as the director of the Panetta Institute at California State University in Monterey.
The former nine-term congressman served as a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in 2006 to look into the unpopular war in Iraq and make recommendations to Bush.
Obama arrived in Washington late Sunday without fanfare amid deepening economic woes, international uproar over Israel's invasion in the Gaza Strip and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's withdrawal from nomination as commerce secretary due to an inquiry over a state business contract granted to a political advocate. He takes office on Jan. 20.