Senate confirmation of Panetta opens door to CIA X-Files

The U.S. Senate on Thursday night confirmed Leon Panetta as the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on a voice vote. A day earlier, on Wednesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved him without dissent. The new Committee Chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who initially expressed reservations about Panetta as the chief of the largest U.S. spy agency, said: "He has the integrity, the drive and the judgment to ensure that the CIA fulfills its mission of producing information critical to our national security without sacrificing our national values."

Panetta achieved prominence as President Clinton’s Chief of Staff (1994-1997). He is a veteran political insider and his supporters hope he can rebuild morale in the CIA which was badly tarnished by faulty intelligence assessments that led to the Iraq war. Significantly, Panetta is close to John Podesta who served as Panetta’s deputy during the Clinton Administration. Podesta eventually succeeded Panetta as Clinton’s Chief of Staff from 1998-2001. Podesta served as co-chair of Obama’s transition team, and the selection of Panetta reflected Podesta’s influence.

Podesta has been an outspoken advocate of increased declassification of government documents. Both Panetta and Podesta were in key positions to support President Clinton’s Executive Order 12958 passed on April 17 1995. EO 12958 made it easier to declassify national security information that had been unnecessarily classified for decades. Podesta's influence was more recently seen in Obama's January 21 Presidential Memoranda on Open Government and Transparency, and Freedom of Information Act.

During the Clinton administration, Podesta was open about his interest in possible X-Files hidden in different government agencies as depicted in the hit television series. In fact, a video of a Clinton administration X-Files party is soon to be released under the Freedom of Information Act according to a Canadian UFO researcher. The X-Files was a term that could be traced to the FBI’s historic efforts to get to the bottom of the UFO phenomenon. These files were often categorized under "Flying Discs: Security Matter-X".This led to Podesta's support for declassification of many national security files, especially those concerning UFOs. On October 22, 2002, Podesta made a statement at the National Press Club concerning the legality of UFO information that has not been released to the public on national security grounds. He said: "I think it's time to open the books on questions that have remained in the dark on the question of government investigations of UFOs.”

Interest in finding about UFOs in the Clinton administration wasn’t just limited to Podesta. Webster Hubbell was a personal friend of President Clinton who had appointed him as associate attorney general of the Justice Department. In his autobiography, Hubbell wrote: "Clinton had said, 'If I put you over at Justice I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?'... Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn't satisfied with the answers I was getting."

Bill Clinton’s interest in finding the truth of UFOs very likely influenced his choice of the last Intelligence Community outsider, who like Panetta, was asked to head the CIA. Former CIA Director James Woolsey was very interested in finding out about any UFO information secretly kept at the CIA. In fact, Woolsey was given an informal ‘briefing’ by Dr Stephen Greer in 1993 who told him what civilian researchers had discovered about UFOs. Woolsey then ordered the CIA to prepare a report on all its information about UFOs. Woolsey was part of a hushed up effort by the Clinton administration to find the truth about UFOs. His failure to force the CIA to give the Clinton administration access to its X-Files, is possibly why Woolsey eventually became estranged from President Clinton and rarely got to meet him.


The initial nominations of Panetta as CIA Director and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State first signalled that the Obama administration was also interested in the declassification of X-Files from different government agencies. John Podesta was a key figure in the selection of Panetta and Clinton by Obama, and appears to be playing a similar role to what he played in the Clinton administration in encouraging the declassification of X-Files. The subsequent confirmation of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State meant that a key Clinton era figure involved in an earlier effort to release government X-Files would once again be in a position to seek declassification of UFO information. Panetta's February 12 Senate confirmation now adds a powerful new element in what increasingly appears to be a coordinated effort by former Clinton era figures to steer the Obama administration towards locating and declassifying UFO files. Panetta is now in a position to finally finish what the Clintons had first attempted and pressure the CIA to release its deepest held secrets – X-Files concerning UFOs and extraterestrial life.