The Senate Intelligence Committee endorsed the confirmation of General Michael Hayden to be the next Director of Central Intelligence by a 12-3 vote. Evan Bayh, Ron Wyden, and Russ Feingold dissented. A lot of people are extremely upset by this vote; thereisnospoon even called it treason. I have a different view. Part of my reasoning is purely pragmatic. Porter Goss’s last day on the job is Friday. It would be problematic for the position of Director to remain unfilled for any significant amount of time, and the sooner someone can come in and rid the place of the Gosslings, the better. Still, filling the position is not so urgent that we should entrust the job to an unqualified or otherwise bad candidate. The nomination of Hayden has brought forth several concerns.
Some are discomforted that Hayden is a member of the military. This concern is misplaced, in my opinion. Several former Directors have been military men, and the Deputy Directors are usually military men. The CIA is a paramilitary organization (among other things) and there is no reason to preclude military people from running the organization. It is well known that there has been tremendous friction during the Bush era between the Pentagon and the CIA and State Department over intelligence. But Hayden (working at the NSA) was as opposed to the Pentagon’s intelligence work as anyone else. He also butted heads with Rumsfeld (when he was Deputy DNI). Here’s how he put it in the confirmation hearings.
LEVIN: But there’s been press reports that you had some disagreements with Secretary Rumsfeld and Undersecretary Cambone with respect to the reform legislation that we were looking at relating to DNI and other intelligence-related matters.
Can you tell us whether or not that is accurate; there were disagreements between you and the defense secretary? Because some people say you’re just going to be the instrument of the defense secretary. And if those reports are right, this would be an example where you disagree with the defense secretary, who — after all, you wear a uniform and he is the secretary of defense. Are those reports accurate?
HAYDEN: Sir, let me recharacterize them.
The secretary and I did discuss this. I think it’s what diplomats would call that frank and wide-ranging exchange of views…
Hayden goes on to give a diplomatic answer, but the point for me is that he is not afraid to stick up to and oppose Rumsfeld. He is not Rumsfeld’s man. And if the CIA has a Director that opposes the methodology of Rumsfeld’s minions and will vigorously engage in a ‘frank and wide-ranging exchange of views’ with them, then the CIA will not be demoralized to have a military man as Director.
When it comes to the mismangement of intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq War, Hayden is clear that the fault lies not at the CIA but in the Pentagon and (although he never says it directly) with the policy makers that kept demanding reporting on alleged ties between al-qaeda and Iraq. We can see this in a remarkable exchange between Senator Carl Levin and Hayden during the hearings.
LEVIN: An independent review for the CIA, conducted by a panel led by Richard Kerr, former deputy director of the CIA, said the following — and this relates to the intelligence prior to the Iraq war — “Requests for reporting and analysis of Iraq’s links to Al Qaida were steady and heavy in the period leading up to the war, creating significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection.”
Do you agree with Mr. Kerr?
HAYDEN: Sir, I — as director of NSA, we did have a series of inquiries about this potential connection between Al Qaida and the Iraqi government. Yes, sir.
LEVIN: Now, prior to the war, the undersecretary of defense for policy, Mr. Feith, established an intelligence analysis cell within his policy office at the Defense Department.
LEVIN: While the intelligence community was consistently dubious about links between Iraq and Al Qaida, Mr. Feith produced an alternative analysis, asserting that there was a strong connection.
Were you comfortable with Mr. Feith’s office’s approach to intelligence analysis?
HAYDEN: No, sir, I wasn’t. I wasn’t aware of a lot of the activity going on, you know, when it was contemporaneous with running up to the war. No, sir, I wasn’t comfortable.
LEVIN: In our meeting in our office, you indicated — well, what were you uncomfortable about? Let me…
HAYDEN: Well, there were a couple of things. And thank you for the opportunity to elaborate, because these aren’t simple issues.
As I tried to say in my statement, there are a lot of things that animate and inform a policy-maker’s judgment, and intelligence is one of them, and, you know, world view, and there are a whole bunch of other things that are very legitimate.
The role of intelligence, I try to say it here by metaphor because it’s the best way I can describe it, is you’ve got to draw the left- and the right-hand boundaries. The tether to your analysis can’t be so long, so stretched that it gets out of those left- and right-hand boundaries.
Now, with regard to this particular case, it is possible, Senator, if you want to drill down on an issue and just get laser beam focused, and exhaust every possible — every possible ounce of evidence, you can build up a pretty strong body of data, right? But you have to know what you’re doing, all right?
I got three great kids, but if you tell me go out and find all the bad things they’ve done, Hayden, I can build you a pretty good dossier, and you’d think they were pretty bad people, because that was I was looking for and that’s what I’d build up.
That would be very wrong. That would be inaccurate. That would be misleading.
It’s one thing to drill down, and it’s legitimate to drill down. And that was a real big and real important question. But at the end of the day, when you draw your analysis, you have to recognize that you’ve really laser beam focused on one particular data set. And you have to put that factor into the equation before you start drawing macro judgments.
LEVIN: You in my office discussed, I think, a very interesting approach, which is the difference between starting with a conclusion and trying to prove it and instead starting with digging into all the facts and seeing where they take you.
Would you just describe for us that difference and why you feel, I think, that that related to the difference between what intelligence should be and what some people were doing, including that Feith office.
HAYDEN: Yes, sir. And I actually think I prefaced that with both of these are legitimate forms of reasoning, that you’ve got deductive — and the product of, you know, 18 years of Catholic education, I know a lot about deductive reasoning here.
HAYDEN: There’s an approach to the world in which you begin with, first, principles and then you work your way down the specifics.
And then there’s an inductive approach to the world in which you start out there with all the data and work yourself up to general principles. They are both legitimate. But the only one I’m allowed to do is induction.
LEVIN: Allowed to do as an intelligence…
HAYDEN: As an intelligence officer is induction.
And so, now, what happens when induction meets deduction, Senator? Well, that’s my left- and right-hand boundaries metaphor.
LEVIN: Now, I believe that you actually placed a disclaimer on NSA reporting relative to any links between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein. And it was apparently following the repeated inquiries from the Feith office. Would you just tell us what that disclaimer was?
HAYDEN: Yes, sir.
SIGINT neither confirms nor denies — and let me stop at that point in the sentence so we can stay safely on the side of unclassified.
SIGINT neither confirms nor denies, and then we finished the sentence based upon the question that was asked. And then we provided the data, sir.
From that exchange it is clear that Hayden understands how to do intelligence work and that he was as fed up with the Office of Special Plans as anyone.
Having said all this, there still remains the problem of Hayden’s willingness to implement illegal warrantless wiretapping of American citizens during his time at the NSA. I would have opposed his confirmation on those grounds, just as Russ Feingold did. But, that battle is really a battle between the administration and Congress. Hayden’s confirmation hearings were really not the proper forum for hashing those constitutional issues out. Rather than hold Hayden hostage until the administration comes clean, Congress should use the appropriations process, or some other avenue to demand accountability. As things stand now, we simply don’t have enough facts to hold up Hayden’s confirmation and the consequence would be to leave the CIA adrift.
We may discover that Hayden deserves to be in jail rather than heading up a major government agency. But, we don’t have the luxury (or the votes) to stop him.
So, while I am not happy with his selection, I do not think he will demoralize the CIA because of his connections to the rival Pentagon, I do not think he will be beholden to Rumsfeld, I do think he understands how to do intelligence work, and I am confident that he will stick up for his views and his employees in interagency debates.
The real destruction Hayden will do has nothing to do with his personal idiosyncracies. The real damage is coming from Negroponte, who seems intent on stripping the CIA of its responsibilities for analysis and cherry-picking all the talent out of Langley for his operation. Ultimately, there is nothing any DCI can do to restore morale over the fact that the DNI is now the man with the responsibility for briefing the President. But, on the operations end of the agency, Hayden should be seen as an ally, not as some proxy for Rumsfeld.