Read Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror Online
Authors: Michael V. Hayden
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2016 by Michael V. Hayden
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Hayden, Michael V. (Michael Vincent), 1945-
Title: Playing to the edge : American intelligence in the age of terror / Michael V. Hayden.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044201 (print) | LCCN 2015049127 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594206566 (hardback) | ISBN 9780698196131 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Intelligence service—United States. | National security—United States. | United States. Central Intelligence Agency. | United States. National Security Agency. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Political. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Intelligence. | HISTORY / United States / 21st Century.
Classification: LCC JK468.I6 H39 2016 (print) | LCC JK468.I6 (ebook) | DDC
327.1273—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044201
This does not constitute an official release of U.S. Government information. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed solely for classification.
Version_1
To my wife, Jeanine, who lived this as fully as I did, but who sacrificed more along the way
A NATIONAL TREASURE . . . FOR HOW MUCH LONGER?
GOING TO WAR . . . WITH SOME HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS
GOING TO WAR . . . AGAIN AND AGAIN
GOING PUBLIC . . . WILLINGLY AND OTHERWISE
FORT MEADE, MD, AND WASHINGTON, DC, 2004–2008
THE PUBLIC’S RIGHT TO KNOW . . . AND BE SAFE
FORT MEADE, MD, AND LANGLEY, VA, 1999–2009
SAN ANTONIO, TX—FORT MEADE, MD—LANGLEY, VA, 1996–2010
THE ODNI, 2005–2006 AND BEYOND
WASHINGTON, DC, MAY–SEPTEMBER 2006
BAGHDAD, ISLAMABAD, KABUL, 2006
ESPIONAGE, BUREAUCRACY, AND FAMILY LIFE
“THERE WILL BE NO EXPLAINING OUR INACTION”
WASHINGTON, DC, 2002–2009 AND BEYOND
CIA, NOVEMBER 2008–FEBRUARY 2009
I
had just walked out into the glare of the hot sun of the Australian outback, made even more harsh by the darkened light and digital screens of the windowless operations floor I had just departed. I was in Pine Gap, almost in the middle of nowhere. When you land at the local airport and travel the short service road to the main highway, you are greeted by a road sign. The closest town, Alice Springs, is a little more than ten kilometers to the right. Go left and the next important landmark, the near-mystic and locally sacred Ayers Rock (Uluru), is 450 kilometers away.
As we shielded our eyes from the sun, I turned to my Australian counterpart and asked if he ever wanted to explain to his citizens, and especially to his critics, the quality of the work we had just witnessed inside the facility. Actually, I said something along the lines of “Wouldn’t you love to be able to show people exactly what we do?” He quickly responded that he would.
Critics, observers, and just average citizens don’t know as much about intelligence as they want or should. A goal of this book is to help address that.
Okay. We can’t go to the outback, but we can go behind the scenes. These pages are my best effort to show to the American people what their intelligence services actually do on their behalf. No Jack Bauers or Jason Bournes here, though. Just hardworking and dedicated Americans whose labor deserves understanding, appreciation, and even occasional criticism. This is a memoir, so I have to tell the story through my eyes, but I hope those about whom I write see it as their story as well.
Of course, there are limits. Classification and such. Frankly, there are too many limits and that hurts the community I served and still love, and the republic it serves. But I have pushed as hard as prudence and the law (and CIA’s Publications Review Board) allow.
Even with stops as an ROTC instructor and some stretches in policy, I can still rightly be described as a career intelligence officer: reading out satellite imagery as a lieutenant at Strategic Air Command headquarters; supporting B-52 operations in Southeast Asia from Guam; head of intelligence at a tactical fighter wing in Korea; an overt intelligence collector as air attaché in Communist Bulgaria; chief of intelligence for US forces in Europe during the Balkan Wars; commander of the air force’s intelligence arm based in Texas.
I enjoyed nearly every minute of those jobs, but this book is less about them than about the last ten years of my government service, the decade I spent at the national level as director of the National Security Agency (DIRNSA), the first principal deputy director of National Intelligence (PDDNI), and director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA).
*
There were policy and international issues aplenty in those years (1999–2009), and most of them touched on and were touched by intelligence. Many are recounted here from the perspective I had from those positions. The narrative reflects the always important, but sometimes delicate, relationship between intelligence and the policy makers that it serves.
There’s a healthy dose also of the even more delicate relationship with congressional oversight.
There’s a chapter or three on bureaucracy as well. After all, the budgets of the agencies I headed are measured in the billions of dollars, their personnel counts are in the tens of thousands, and their presence is global. Organization, budgets, and personnel decisions matter, not so much in their own right, but as enablers of performance and mission success. Getting the overall structure right has been a pursuit of American intelligence for more than a decade.
Anyone running a large organization will understand how limited the tools of a CEO or a commander or a director really are. He or she can move (or get more) money, move boxes on an organizational chart, change out people, and exhort and inspire. That’s just about the whole toolbox. I’ve always found it difficult to actually finish reading a book on management or leadership, but I’ve nonetheless laid out my experiences here.
Then there’s the spooky stuff—espionage, covert action, and the like. There’s a lot of that even if there’s more to be told that’s not tellable now. A lot of the spooky stuff is about terrorism, but NSA and CIA have global responsibilities, so other topics will appear as well.
The telling is largely chronological, starting with events at NSA and proceeding through the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) and CIA. Once engaged on a topic, though, I sometimes play it forward and play it back. The chapter on cyber, for example, comes naturally during my time at NSA, but to tell the tale properly I have to begin in Texas in the 1990s and play it forward through my time at CIA and beyond. There’s some of that with detentions and interrogations too.
Since this is a memoir, its center of gravity is the past, which will perforce drag in issues like renditions, detentions, interrogations, and the badly mislabeled “domestic surveillance” program. But in the writing I was struck by how much my experiences pulled me toward the future, toward things like the cyber domain and its challenges, a domain of conflict and cooperation whose importance seems to grow by the hour.
And, perhaps even more important, I was pulled toward the challenge of the long-term relationship between American espionage and the American people in an era of shrinking trust in government and expanding global threats.
I could be accused of grading my own work, but I believe that despite our flaws, we’re actually pretty good at this spy stuff. We need to preserve that capacity. The world is not getting any safer, and espionage remains our first line of defense.
The growing difficulty of that challenge helped prompt the title of this work:
Playing to the Edge.
The reference is to using all the tools and all the authorities available, much like how a good athlete takes advantage of the entire playing field right up to the sideline markers and endlines.
In espionage, that often proves controversial, and I fear we will not be able to do that in the future without our public’s deeper understanding of what American intelligence is and does, without our doing (at least metaphorically) what I suggested to my Australian counterpart that sunny afternoon. So I committed to tell this story, a story shared by the thousands of folks with whom I have worked.
At bottom, it was a blessing to be part of such a noble enterprise.
THE SYSTEM IS DOWN
FORT MEADE, MD, 1999–2000
T
he call came after dinner on a cold Monday night, as I was watching the TV news at home. There was a computer problem at work. A software failure had knocked out the network of the National Security Agency.
“Give me a sense,” I asked the duty officer over the secure line. “What are we talking about?”
“It’s the
whole
system.”
A result of overloading. One of my technicians later described us as victims of a “data storm.” The sheer volume of collection had overwhelmed the capacity of our networks as they had been configured. It wasn’t unlike a nor’easter overwhelming what seemed to be sturdy docks, breakwaters, and seawalls on the nearby Chesapeake Bay.
Not
entirely
our fault. NSA had experienced years of declining budgets, a shrinking workforce, an aging infrastructure, and little new hiring. Running hard just to keep up, we had let the network become so tangled that no one really seemed to know how it worked. There was no real wiring diagram anyone could consult. Picture Darren McGavin’s character plugging in the tree in
A Christmas Story.
That was us.
It was January 24, 2000. I was a three-star air force general and I was just finishing my tenth month as DIRNSA, the director of the National Security Agency, America’s largest and most powerful spy agency. I was still relatively new, but I didn’t need the duty officer to explain the magnitude of the problem.
Signals intelligence, or SIGINT, is a continuous process, a kind of espionage production line where communications are collected, processed, analyzed, and reported twenty-four hours a day. At that moment satellites and earthbound collection points around the world were still intercepting communications, their vast take—telephone calls, faxes, radio signals—still pouring into memory buffers. But once in hand, the data froze. We couldn’t move it. Nobody could access it. Nobody could analyze it. It wouldn’t take long for intelligence consumers to notice something was wrong. They could tell it when their morning take showed up light or didn’t show up at all. For all intents and purposes, NSA was brain-dead.
I nervously called George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, on a secure line and broke the news to him. There was nothing either of us could do but get out of the way and let the technicians try to figure out what was wrong. As keepers of the nation’s secrets, we now had another one to keep—a secret Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden or any other enemy could have used to great advantage.
The next morning, the only consolation I had was the snow: a record blizzard had blasted the Washington area and shut down the federal government, giving our gathering army of computer engineers and techies some time—without the workforce around—to bring the agency out of its coma. But despair deepened as two full days passed without progress. The full complement of mathematicians and linguists and analysts reported back for duty Thursday morning, only to find a handwritten message taped to all of the doors and badge readers. With amazing understatement, we announced: “Our network is experiencing intermittent difficulties. Consult your supervisor before you log on.”
The crash had now become a genuine security crisis. By noon, at a hastily called town meeting, I walked onto the stage of the agency’s Friedman
Auditorium (named after a married couple, William and Elizebeth, both pioneers of American cryptology) and told thousands of employees—in person and on closed-circuit television—what had happened. “We are the keeper of the nation’s secrets,” I said at the end of my grim presentation. “If word of this gets out, we significantly increase the likelihood that Americans get hurt. Those who intend our nation and our citizens harm will be emboldened. So this is not the back half of a sentence tonight over washing the dishes that begins, ‘Honey, you won’t believe what happened to me at work today.’ This is secret. It doesn’t leave the building.”
The computer crash was the perfect metaphor for an agency desperately in need of change. Antiquated computers were a problem. But the reality was actually worse.
NSA was in desperate need of reinvention. Heir to America’s World War II code-breaking heroics, NSA was created in secret by Harry Truman in 1952. Many consider signals intelligence even more valuable than human intelligence or satellite imagery, because the quantity and quality of the potential take is so much greater.
But it’s also fragile. Spies are often hard to ferret out, but an adversary can neuter even a carefully crafted SIGINT system by just hanging up the phone. Intercepting communications and breaking codes requires absolute secrecy, so NSA took secrecy to extremes. Most Americans had never even heard of the agency for decades after it was established.
And then many of them heard about it in the worst way. In 1975, a Senate committee headed by Senator Frank Church revealed that NSA had exceeded the foreign intelligence mission envisioned by Truman and had been spying domestically on the likes of Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and Benjamin Spock.
The revelations led to laws and regulations that strictly limited what NSA could do, especially when it came to what the agency calls “US persons”; as a practical matter that meant anyone in the United States and US citizens anywhere. The agency lived by those rules, so much so that it came under criticism in later years for being too cautious.
The agency’s success throughout the Cold War had rested on massive
budgets, superior technology, and the luxury of having a single main adversary—the Soviet Union—that enjoyed neither of those first two advantages. Now all those pillars were crumbling. Still one of the largest employers in the state of Maryland, NSA had lost 30 percent of its budget and an equivalent slice of its workforce during the 1990s. And instead of one backward, oligarchic, technologically inferior, slow-moving adversary, the agency found itself trying to deploy against elusive terrorist groups, drug cartels, and rogue states, all using cell phones, the Internet, and modern communications technology. And that was in addition to the full slate of traditional targets like Russia and China and North Korea.
More and more communications were being encoded with powerful new commercial encryption that was proving virtually impossible to break. Then there was the exploding volume of global communications as more and more messages were moving through hard-to-tap fiber-optic cables. And broadband fiber-optic cables were being laid around the world at the rate of hundreds of miles an hour. The modern data stream was threatening to drown NSA in a roiling sea of 1s and 0s.
In this new world, it was private industry and commercial investment that fueled technological advances and NSA had been isolated from the dynamism of the market by its own cult of secrecy. In 1999, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence declared that NSA was “in serious trouble,” desperately short of capital and leadership. In my first meeting as DIRNSA with Porter Goss, the chairman of that committee, he told me, “General, you have to hit home runs in your first at bats.”
At the same time, civil libertarians, privacy activists, and encryption entrepreneurs—not to mention the European Parliament and thousands, perhaps millions, of ordinary Europeans—questioned the continuing need for such an agency, describing NSA as an “extreme threat to the privacy of people all over the world,” in the words of an American Civil Liberties Union Web site.
In 1997, two years before I became director, the European Parliament had commissioned a report on something called Echelon. That report
had concluded that NSA and its Anglo-Saxon partners were capable of intercepting every fax, phone call, and e-mail in Europe and were stealing European companies’ secrets and passing them on to their competitors.
Beyond industrial espionage, the Europeans also worried about individual privacy, because the US laws and regulations that keep NSA from spying on Americans provide no similar protections for foreigners. By 1999, this controversy had attracted the attention of civil libertarians in the United States, who were concerned about NSA spying once again on Americans.
The irony was powerful: NSA was an agency that was simultaneously being accused of omnipotence and incompetence. It was going deaf
and
it was reading all of your e-mails.
The computer crash in January only confirmed the worst fears about the agency’s antiquated technology and its leaden bureaucracy. After my town hall meeting, I called all of the agency’s top technicians and engineers together and told them just how serious the meltdown had become. The President’s Daily Brief was getting pretty thin.
In reality, about a third of SIGINT production was continuing. That was the fraction produced by allies or by American collection stations that could do their own processing. But two-thirds was still sitting out there, fallow, in our buffers.
Tenet was still giving us plenty of room to fashion a solution, but pressure was building “downtown.” The NSAers understood. As veterans who loved the agency, they understood perhaps even better than I.
Things began to break Thursday night. It happened to be my thirty-second wedding anniversary. That night, with the system showing some signs of life, I took my wife, Jeanine, to an inn west of Frederick called Stone Manor for dinner. On the drive home, Bob Stevens, the deputy director for technology, called to say that he needed to talk to me “secure.” I called him back on a secure line as soon as I got home.
The system had been dysfunctional for more than seventy-two hours. It was back up to about 25 percent capacity, Stevens said, but he didn’t think the techies were on the right path.
Multiple nodes were involved, each of them supporting different customers. We were trying to bring the network up node by node, prioritizing the most important ones. Parts of the network were recovering, but this was through extraordinary means that we could not sustain. We were not driving to a workable or stable solution. Everything was still fragile. We were accelerating down a dead-end street.
Bob wanted permission to take the entire system down and start all over again. He said that he needed to rationalize each of the nodes and to make them compatible with one another, not work them as one-offs.
I gave my OK, and with the system completely shut down, he began installing a massive hardware and software upgrade. By Friday morning, the system was coming back to life.
George Tenet came out to visit Friday night along with his deputy, General John Gordon, to personally thank the engineers who now looked like their eyeballs were about to fall out from fatigue. George was good at this. He personally and genuinely thanked them. There was mutual appreciation all around. America was back in the SIGINT business.
I owed George a lot too. I’ve always characterized my immediate superiors as transmitters, amplifiers, or buffers when it came to bureaucratic pressure coming at them. George was a buffer. He had also had his air assets fly through the blizzard earlier in the week to bring in some badly needed parts. We had trouble driving to the airport, but his guys flew through the storm. I met them later, worthy heirs of Air America, CIA’s swashbuckling Vietnam-era air force.
The next day, Saturday, America’s global SIGINT enterprise worked through the backlog. No coverage had been lost; all of it had been buffered at the point of collection. (Imagine the computer storage space that would have been required at our collection points if we really were vacuuming up everything out there, as some were alleging. The inherent contradiction went unnoticed.)
There was still two feet of snow on the ground, so I decided to unwind by cross-country skiing with my wife on Fort Meade’s thirty-six-hole golf course. Near dusk, as we were gliding near one of the post’s roads, an
NSA patrol car began to stalk us and then pulled ahead of us and stopped. An officer climbed out of the driver’s seat, looked at me, and said, “Mr. Director? I need to take you to the ops center.”
I hadn’t had a patrol car stalk me since I was about thirteen years old. I threw my skis into the trunk and left Jeanine to slush home on her own.
ABC News’ John McWethy had the story of our blackout. Secrecy had a short shelf life. He was going to go with the story that night and he wanted to talk with us.
With Tenet’s reluctant permission, I confirmed that we had been down for about seventy-two hours, but were now up and running.
McWethy was skeptical: “That all sounds good, but how do I know that it’s true?”
“Would I have taken your call if it wasn’t, if we weren’t back up?”
“Good point.”
I watched the story that night on the evening news.
The blackout episode helped me better understand what was ahead of me. I had been cautious. NSA was a national treasure and my first task had been to do no harm. Now it was clear to me that no course of action I could set out on would be as dangerous to the agency as standing still.
Had I known what awaited me—and America—a year and a half down the road, I might have been even bolder.
But the broader lesson stuck. Caution isn’t always a virtue. Not if you’re serious about doing your duty.
