Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (14 page)

Russert gave the interview a lot of time. We were delighted with it. He was too. He sent me a personal note just days before his tragic and untimely death thanking me and pointing out that ratings had spiked during the interview. And no one had even come close to spilling any secrets.

I had informed Steve Hadley about the
Meet the Press
invitation. He was fully supportive. I wasn’t quite asking for Steve’s permission, but I wanted to hear if there was any compelling downside. There wasn’t. Leon Panetta’s 2014 book,
Worthy Fights,
suggests that he chafed under the Obama White House’s restrictions on doing similar things. I appreciated and used the running room given me by the Bush White House.

About a year into my tenure at CIA, I spoke to a conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. We were using the occasion to publicly roll out something called the
Family Jewels
. Compiled in 1973 in response to Director Jim Schlesinger’s edict to catalogue the agency’s sins, the
Family Jewels
comprised nearly seven hundred pages of very unflattering commentary on CIA’s past.

Schlesinger didn’t stay on long enough to deal with what was under agency rocks. That fell to William Colby, whose candor and near-preternatural calm in front of the Congress angered the White House he was serving and ultimately cost him his job.

Our point now in 2007 was that we had kept these ugly things secret because they were legitimately secret, not because they were ugly. With the passage of time, they were no longer secret and we were making them public (well, most of them; one was still too sensitive) even though they were all deeply embarrassing.

I told the gathered historians that CIA had a social contract with the American people, and as part of that contract, we had to balance “two crucial obligations: our need to protect information that helps us protect Americans and our need to inform the public—as best we can—about the work we do on their behalf.” Secrecy in a democracy was “not a grant of power, but a grant of trust.”

I argued that this was more than an obligation. It was in our own
self-interest, since it helped the public, Congress, and the executive branch appreciate the courage and integrity of CIA officers. It also helped people understand the limits of our craft.

The speech actually got some pretty wide press coverage. Maybe a little too wide. The next day I was before the House Intelligence Committee in closed session on an unrelated matter when several members brought it up. “What do you mean by social contract with the American people?” The question was actually phrased in a tone that I would not call friendly. It seems that some members didn’t want us talking directly to the American people. Just to them.

We had never thought that steps like this could be viewed as undercutting congressional oversight. That certainly wasn’t our intent. I tried to explain, but sometimes it’s hard to explain the merit of something that you think should be intuitively obvious.

We held our ground there, and outside the committee room as well. Early in my tenure at CIA I had told the PRB (the Publications Review Board, which has to approve any writings by current or former CIA officers) that we needed to draw hard lines to protect what was truly secret, but warned them that if we were drawing them on the margins, we were doing ourselves a disservice. If we were unwilling or unable to tell our story (within limits), how could we condemn the inaccuracies in others’ accounts of us?

Part of our problem was structural. Manuscripts were shopped among various offices of interest by the PRB. Each had the authority to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to various passages or entire documents. It made for inconsistent and opaque decision making and for unproductive and lengthy disputes. The packages were rarely important enough to float to the top of an in-box, and no one would ever be held to account for saying no to a release. There was no risk in that. Saying yes was another matter.

I decided to centralize declassification review at the corporate level. Various offices could be used as subject matter experts, but the final arbiter would be the PRB. I never thought of it this way, but in later years
this was dubbed the “Hayden Doctrine” in some agency channels. I learned that when one of my successors was called to the Hill to explain books like Jose Rodriguez’s
Hard Measures
and Hank Crumpton’s
The Art of Intelligence,
books whose contents had survived PRB winnowing enough to tell richly detailed stories about what the agency really did and why. Working to deflect congressional criticism, my successor apparently fingered me.

That was the only guidance I ever gave the PRB, though. I certainly didn’t want myself or any of the leadership to get involved in the process of approving or disapproving text. My response to former director Tenet’s struggles to get part of his memoir,
At the Center of the Storm,
through the PRB was a heartfelt “Noted.”

The same with Valerie Plame’s book,
Fair Game.
Plame was the CIA officer outed in the press when her husband, retired ambassador Joe Wilson, was sent to Niger by the agency to follow up on allegations that Iraq had pursued the purchase of yellowcake (a uranium source) there. It became a very ugly affair. Wilson accused the administration of lying. The agency filed a crimes report to protest the disclosure of Plame’s status. Scooter Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, was indicted for perjury. Plame resigned from the agency.

And then she wrote a book, which the PRB had to review.

The core issue was what she could or could not say about her life in the agency. There was no precedent to clear the kind of information she wanted to clear, and the PRB stuck to its guns.

I stayed out of it, even when senators and their offices started to call to protest what they called the agency’s politically motivated stonewalling of Ms. Plame’s efforts. Senator Kennedy’s staff took my explanation politely and without comment. Senator Feinstein personally charged that this was all the work of the vice president, even though I said that it was our doing and that I was fairly confident that the vice president didn’t even know that the manuscript existed.

I should add that we weren’t indifferent to what others might say about us or about our people. In June 2008 Scott Shane of the
New York Times
was finishing a piece highlighting a CIA analyst turned interrogator who had great success with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was an interesting story, but the
Times
was insisting on using the true name of the officer. He wasn’t undercover, but we believed that the use of his name would invade his privacy and might jeopardize his safety. Besides, he had refused to be interviewed for the story, so this looked like one of those “we can talk with you or we can talk about you” episodes.

Two days before publication Defense Secretary Bob Gates retired me from the air force after thirty-nine years of service, and I was entertaining the Hayden clan—who had arrived from Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other points—under a large tent in my backyard at Bolling Air Force Base. I broke away from the party to call Bill Keller. DC
über
lawyer Bob Bennett, who had been hired by the officer, was making similar calls.

“Shane’s a good enough writer that he can create this persona without naming names,” I told Keller. “You don’t need to do this.” I guess I didn’t show enough fire. Keller later described my effort as “doing it out of respect for [the officer’s] and his family’s concerns more than a concern the CIA had.”

Probably true, but hardly disqualifying. Later the
Times
’s public editor said that putting the officer’s name out there did not put him into any greater danger than that experienced by the scores of others involved in counterterrorism who had been identified. Let me rephrase that in an unkind way: we do this all the time. What’s one more, one way or another?

Sometimes we pushed back after a story had come out. We certainly weren’t above condemning the inaccuracies in books about us. In 2007 Tim Weiner pushed out
Legacy of Ashes
, his self-described definitive history of the CIA. We thought it so bad that we allowed a CIA historian to review it on the agency Web site, an unprecedented step.

With regard to being definitive history, our reviewer wrote, “[T]he thing about scholarship is that one must use sources honestly, and one doesn’t get a pass on this even if he is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the
New York Times
. Starting with the title that is based on a gross distortion of events, the book is a 600-page op-ed piece masquerading as
serious history; it is the advocacy of a particularly dark point of view under the guise of scholarship. Weiner has allowed his agenda to drive his research and writing, which is, of course, exactly backward. . . . Weiner is not honest about context, he is dismissive of motivations, his expectations for intelligence are almost cartoonish, and his book too often is factually unreliable.” And that’s in the first 225 words of a 6,000-word review.

Even if we were going to be more willing to toss material out there, there were still going to be issues attached to who was catching it. Some writers were hopelessly agenda-driven (Weiner, Jane Mayer, and later Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras come to mind). Others were not so much agenda-driven as simply allowing their writing to follow the general trend in coverage of American espionage, which is to say walking the story to the darkest corner of the room. And there always seems to be a quotable official from an NGO, the ACLU, or even a disgruntled agency former officer eager to show the way.

Then there’s the choice of terms. Routinely labeling activities or documents as “torture” flights or “torture” memos buries the very point of contention in a casually used and conclusive adjective. The same could be said of “domestic surveillance” or “assassinations.” They are useful catchphrases, but they are not always accurate and often oversimplify complex issues. They are also conclusions masquerading as narrative.

I would also argue that some of what claims to be journalism isn’t about keeping the public informed, but rather is about keeping the public titillated—espionage porn, if you will.

When intelligence officials see unarguably classified information in the press—when someone has obviously and without authorization leaked classified material—we are required to file what is called a crimes report. In ten years of working at the highest levels of the intelligence community, I probably directed, participated in, or at least was aware of scores of such reports. In all that time I saw one case make it to a courtroom—the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA officer—and that was about perjury rather than unauthorized disclosure.

Since I left government, prosecutions have become more robust. So robust, in fact, that even I have been uncomfortable about some of them. It’s not that real secrets haven’t been revealed. They have. Sources have been compromised, and journalists, of all people, should understand the need to protect sources and relationships.

But the investigations have been very aggressive, and the acquisition of journalists’ communications records has been broad, invasive, secret, and—one suspects—unnecessary.

A quick survey of former Bush administration colleagues confirmed my belief that a proposal to sweep up AP phone records or a Fox reporter’s e-mails—as done by the current administration—would have had a half-life under them of about thirty seconds.

They would have judged the target (leaks and leakers) to be legitimate, but the collateral damage (squeezing the First Amendment and chilling legitimate press activity) to be prohibitive.

The government may also want to adjust its approach to enforcement. The current tsunami of leak prosecutions is based largely on the Espionage Act, a blunt World War I statute designed to punish aiding the enemy. It’s sometimes a tough fit. The leak case against former NSA employee Thomas Drake (chapter 2) collapsed of its own overreach in 2011. Drake eventually pleaded to one misdemeanor count of exceeding the authorized use of a government computer and was sentenced to community service.

Later, former CIA case officer Jeffrey Sterling was accused of leaking details of CIA covert action against Iran’s nuclear program. I was long out of government when the jury rendered a guilty verdict, but earlier, while I was CIA director, Justice had asked me, “How much classified information are you prepared to reveal at trial to get a conviction of Sterling?”

By then unauthorized leaks had become so routine that I decided to break with tradition (which was to be cautious) and simply told DOJ, “Whatever it takes. Just tell us what you need.” The cumulative effect of previous, cautious, and individually correct decisions to guard against further disclosures at trial had fostered a climate of impunity. There was
no claim to whistle-blower status here either. Failed, clumsy, or even stupid covert actions aren’t a crime. Sterling was eventually convicted of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

As this case was still being contested in 2015, I was interviewed by
60 Minutes
as Jim Risen, the
New York Times
reporter who had written the story, seemed to be facing jail time if he did not expose Sterling as his source. I still had strong feelings about the case. As national security advisor, Condi Rice had convinced the
Times
to scotch the story, but Risen put it in his 2006 book,
State of War
, anyway.

So I wasn’t sympathetic at all to what Risen had done or what he had written. It was irresponsible and caused real harm to the safety of the nation, and I said so. But I also said that redressing this particular harm by compelling Risen to reveal his source might cause even greater damage to American freedoms if it chilled a free press. If I had to choose, I was willing to sacrifice secrets, but not the First Amendment.

That remains sacred, even when it is being abused.

Which leaves me conflicted, and resigned that this legitimate free press–legitimate government secrets thing is a condition we will have to manage, not a problem that we will solve.