Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (21 page)

In his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, director-designate Panetta was asked how he viewed his relationship with the DNI. Tough question, actually, since the intelligence reform act says that the DCIA “reports” to the DNI but carefully avoids words like “authority,” “direction,” and “control.” Concluding his responses to a series of questions, Panetta summarized, much to the satisfaction of the committee, “The DNI is my boss.”

It must not have seemed that way to Blair a year later when Panetta told his station chiefs to ignore a directive they had received only days earlier from the DNI on the still touchy subject of DNI representatives. Like McConnell, Blair wanted the right to choose someone other than the CIA station chief for some of these positions. Except Blair just announced the right by fiat and without much warning.

The ensuing very public spat between the nation’s two most senior intelligence officials (neither of whom were career intelligence officers) had to be solved by the White House. The issue I said should never go there because CIA would lose did indeed go there, and I was wrong. This administration sided with the DCIA. The DNI lost and lost publicly.

If White House backing for Blair seemed weak on this issue, it all but disappeared in the aftermath of the attempted bombing of a Northwest airliner on Christmas Day 2009. There was the usual finger-pointing, and some genuine shortcomings were uncovered.

The striking issue was not that there was faultfinding, but rather who was doing it. It was not being done by the DNI, the putative head of the intelligence community, but by John Brennan, a retired CIA officer, who was the president’s homeland security advisor. The DNI and affected agency heads were informed of Brennan’s findings only shortly before the president was going to go public with them, and the announcement was delayed as they furiously (apparently in all meanings of that word) pushed back against some of the conclusions. Brennan
became the public intelligence face of the administration in the days and weeks that followed.

Although he, too, commissioned a thorough review of the intelligence leading up to the Detroit incident, the DNI was little to be seen.

It seemed only a matter of time before Blair would be asked to step down. It was an open secret that the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board had already been poking at the status of the DNI. Chuck Hagel was chairman and asked me to come chat. When asked what to do, I recommended that they have the White House photographer take a picture and widely circulate it: Denny Blair and the president, the only two visible in the frame, huddled closely, poring over a map or document; the president and his intelligence advisor sharing secrets and sharing views. It was only that image—backed, of course, by a corresponding reality—that could give Blair what he needed to truly function.

It never happened.

Blair’s release was particularly graceless, with little advance notice before the press was alerted and little more than boilerplate gratitude for the work he had done.

The DNI rep issue really contributed to this. Having failed to spare Blair that particular problem and finish this issue with Mike McConnell, the best I could do was to remind my CIA friends who were quite upbeat after winning this battle about the last scene in the film version of Herman Wouk’s
The Caine Mutiny
. That’s the scene where a drunken José Ferrer (who was the crew’s defense counsel during the court-martial) reminds the celebrating ship’s officers that their job was not to defeat the captain, but to help him succeed.

Jim Clapper was nominated to join the line of talented men—Negroponte, McConnell, Blair—who had been tapped to be DNI. But as the administration moved to swap out DNIs in the spring of 2010, they were also swapping out definitions of the job. In his remarks nominating Clapper, President Obama noted that Clapper, as chief of Pentagon intelligence, had “successfully overseen the military and civilian intelligence personnel and budgets that make up the bulk of our sixteen-agency
intelligence community.” That’s those big intelligence agencies in DOD; the clear implication was that he would
not
be doing that in his next job.

The next day’s
Washington Post
carried a feature story clearly sourced to White House officials describing the president’s “invaluable go-to person” on many intelligence questions. Except they weren’t writing about the new DNI nominee; they were writing about John Brennan. Although officials denied that Brennan was a de facto DNI, there is no denying that Brennan used his vast knowledge of the intelligence community to direct or question specific offices and shops without always informing the agency head, let alone the DNI.

The 9/11 Commission had actually toyed with the idea of the DNI being housed in the White House. Ultimately, that was rejected. But Brennan was trusted and hardworking enough that he came dangerously close to that status even while serving in an unconfirmed position, beyond congressional oversight, and commingling in the West Wing with colleagues responsible for policy and political decisions.

Finally, on the same Sunday as the
Post
article, Defense Secretary Gates (who had pushed for Clapper) gave reporters a thoughtful and seemingly well-prepared analysis of what the DNI job really was. He punctuated his remarks with multiple references to “temperament,” “positive chemistry,” “getting along,” and bringing people along by “accommodating their interests” and getting them to “voluntarily work together.” He suggested that the position of DNI was closer to that of a “powerful congressional committee chair than it is to a CEO.”

As a career CIA officer and former DCI, Gates knew his subject. He had been offered the DNI job by President Bush, but turned it down because he thought that the position lacked adequate power. He had written an op-ed during the debate over the 2004 law expressing support for an empowered intelligence chief. Now his call for Clapper to lead what amounted to a coalition of the willing suggested that he had concluded that this was the best that could be hoped for.

There is no doubt that the law and the DNI have created some good stuff. The DNI’s National Counterterrorism Center, for example, is an
unqualified success.
*
Foreign and domestic data, intelligence and law enforcement information, and multi-agency inputs are fused together there every day. That could never have taken place under the old DCI structure. America’s political culture could never have accepted such a robust commingling of domestic law-enforcement information with raw foreign intelligence in a structure directly under a community leader who was also the head of the nation’s foreign espionage service.

Mike McConnell also used the DNI position to effect change that would otherwise have been impossible. He bore the brunt of savage personal attacks from some members, doggedly persevered, and almost single-handedly got Congress to amend the FISA Act in 2008, something that neither Keith Alexander nor I could have done as directors of NSA. He also sold President Bush on the immediacy of the cyber threat and convinced him to launch the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a program rebranded but fundamentally endorsed under President Obama.

With some strong CIA support and participation, McConnell also launched powerful initiatives on information sharing and joint duty that will bring great benefits over the long term.

Jim Clapper focused on fusing the community’s multiple IT systems into a whole. He also set up mission managers to coordinate collection, analysis, and counterintelligence by target or topic rather than collection discipline or organization. There is now consolidated budget guidance for the national and military intelligence programs.

These steps rarely make the papers, but over time they create the better integration that the law intended.

This kind of long-term, consensus-driven change may be the best that can be hoped for. And that may be good enough and the most anyone should realistically expect. For one thing, there really are no permanent
solutions to the original dilemma that animated all of this: balancing autonomy of action with unity of effort.

Certainly, no one in the business of intelligence really wants Congress to lift the hood and start pulling out carburetor wires again for another major overhaul. In retrospect, most of us involved with this suspect that we may have dodged a bullet with the 2004 statute. It could have been a lot worse.

This structure can work. It will just depend on people and relationships rather than on formal structures or statute.

First is the president. In this structure no one else can have the DNI’s back. Rumsfeld was right. Like the DCI, there is practically nothing the DNI cannot do
if
the president wants it. Things are better when the president takes a personal interest in the health of the community and not just its products. President Bush personally presided over Negroponte’s and my swearing-in ceremony. Steve Hadley pulled the DNI in weekly to talk about intelligence community matters and I got to join every other week.

Next is the character of the DNI. He, by definition, must be incredibly and peculiarly talented, since he will govern via the skills of a community organizer more than those of a combat commander. He will also need a close relationship with the president, either before being named or quickly developed on the job.

Then the DNI also has to be tight with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He owes the DCIA a fair amount of running room; in return, he deserves a lot of transparency into the agency’s operations. That requires a lot of
personal
trust, well beyond what the institutions will ever be willing to give one another.

Good people overcome imperfect structures. That’s usually not the formula for success recommended by management treatises, but in the real world of complex and important enterprises, it is sometimes the best we can do.

M
ike, the president is going to want to talk to you tomorrow.”

John Negroponte, my boss, the director of National Intelligence, was calling from New York. “He’s going to want to make some changes at CIA.” It was early May 2006.

Ambassador Negroponte had already told me that he thought I would make a good CIA director. The moment, it seemed, had arrived, a lot sooner that either of us had expected. The CIA, deeply engaged in multiple wars, was suffering from a kind of battered child syndrome.

And in a few days, the agency’s number three official, Kyle Dustin “Dusty” Foggo, would be implicated in a bribery scandal, his office cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape.

Powerful people in America were accusing CIA of felonies that went far beyond Foggo’s corrupt contracting. The
Washington Post
had already alleged the existence of agency secret prisons, and the media was reporting extensively on waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques agency officers had used against detainees at those sites.

And CIA’s misjudgments about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had become part of its history.

Morale was bad and the agency was starting to bleed real talent. Later, I was told by people who were there, and really starkly by people who were no longer there, that this was about the existence and future of the institution.

Some of them even thanked me for saving CIA. I doubt that it would have come flying apart, but the immediate crisis reflected a variety of anxieties, not least of which was the office I had found myself working for, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. CIA had lost much of its primacy in the American intelligence community.

I could have been viewed as part of the problem, since I had been Negroponte’s principal deputy, but fortunately, I was a fairly known quantity at Langley, a four-star air force general and a career intelligence officer. During my six years at NSA, I was out at Langley three or four times a month. We did things at NSA they were happy with. I knew the people, and many of them knew me. But the poison in the cup was that I was coming from the ODNI, at the time an institution less in vogue at Langley than Russia’s FSB or old KGB.

It didn’t take a genius to figure any of this out. When I’d taken over NSA in 1999, it needed to be shaken up. Now that I would be leading CIA, I knew it needed to be settled down. After Negroponte’s call, I let my chief of staff, Larry Pfeiffer, know what was in the works and stepped into my outer office at Bolling Air Force Base, overlooking the Potomac River. It was staffed by two women, Mary Jane Scheidt and Mary Elfman, who had been exiled from CIA by Goss’s immediate staff, unfortunately known by all at Langley as the Gosslings.

“Find Steve Kappes,” I said. Mary Jane and Mary looked at me, they looked at each other, they looked back at me, they looked at each other, and a little smile broke out on both their faces. Kappes had been the highly regarded director of operations until he quit a year earlier after running afoul of the Gosslings for refusing to fire a subordinate. We found him within minutes on the platform at Waterloo station in London, where he was working in financial services. He answered his cell phone.

“Steve, this is Mike Hayden.”

“Mike, how are you?”

“I’m OK.”

“How can I help you?”

“Have you ever thought of being deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency?”

“No.”

“Well, would you?”

“Mike, that would depend an awful lot on who the director was.”

“Steve, I’m not at liberty to get into this, but I am the one making this call.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Two hours later, he called back. He had talked to his wife, Kathleen.

“If you’re the director, I’ll be the deputy,” he said.

I was really intent, as my name surfaced as the new director, that it be part of a team, Hayden-Kappes. Otherwise, my appointment would be seen as a hostile takeover on behalf of the DNI, the military, or something, putting both me and the CIA at risk. The president agreed. He knew Steve from his negotiations with the Libyans, talking them back from their WMD program. So that’s the way the administration rolled it out: Hayden-Kappes. That was important.

The next morning, I went to see President Bush in the Oval Office. He knew me well enough. We had seen each other in the Oval and in the Situation Room on and off over the past year, and our relationship had earlier been cemented by my work at NSA on Stellarwind in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

But that was seeing me as head of a SIGINT agency. CIA was different. It did HUMINT. And covert action. Somewhere between the president’s confidence in me and his lack of other alternatives, he had decided to offer me the job. He said he wanted me to take over CIA and straighten things out at Langley. I was reticent, well aware of the enormity of the challenge. “Actually, Mr. President, I’m really happy where I am,” I said.

“Mike, I want you to take over CIA,” he simply repeated.

That was all the convincing I was going to get. He was out of options,
and, I think, saddened by the state of affairs at Langley. He personally liked and depended on the agency. Word from the alumni association was that his father, a former DCI, had also been hearing things and weighing in. The president had asked Goss, himself a former case officer, to give up his seat and his chairmanship of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to run CIA.

Porter, one of my first friends in Washington when I became director of NSA, dutifully accepted, but some of the aides he brought over with him from the House kept him isolated from the workforce, a remarkable feat given Porter’s dedication, personal warmth, and good intentions. And then to have his executive director caught up in a bribery scandal left President Bush little choice but to make a change. There seemed to be a political inevitability to his decision.

When I finally got to Langley, Porter—ever the gentleman—had left a note in the center drawer of an otherwise empty desk. “Good luck,” it said. (I got only one other note during this period, from the Australian ambassador, who had formerly headed up ASIO, Australia’s internal intelligence service. “It’s not as bad as it looks” was his cheery summary.)

I was the selection—and reasonably confident that I would be confirmed. But with a weakened Republican president and the Democrats expected to win both houses of Congress in November, the president could have nominated St. Francis of Assisi and had problems.

I made the usual rounds of the Senate in the competent hands of Michael Allen from the White House legislative office. I had never really had to do this before. Confirmation for the PDDNI position (and my fourth star) was more like a victory parade, since everyone wanted to be associated with the new IC architecture that had been declared by Congress. In that round, Senator Biden broke off from a small group he was addressing in order to come over and shake my hand and wish me well as I was merely passing by outside a Senate office building.

Now I could not move in any of the Senate office buildings without suffering a paparazzi assault. This was going to be tougher, and each private session had its own character. Senator Levin, who would be my
smartest and toughest questioner, warned me that he would ask me about the infamous Bybee memo on CIA interrogations and then offered me some genuinely helpful pointers on how I should answer him.

I was warned that several senators I would see were part of the black-helicopter crowd (i.e., they trended toward a conspiratorial view of the world). They weren’t really that bad, but they did have tough questions, one of them issuing challenges in a remarkable rapid-fire format.

I met Senator Patrick Leahy in a social setting at the residence of the Australian ambassador. I had once been one of his constituents, having lived in Vermont four years as an ROTC instructor. He was actually a graduate of the college where I taught, and he had sent his children to the same Catholic elementary school where we had sent ours. We had a passing, respectful relationship. Leahy grabbed a private moment at the reception, and simply warned me not to lose my humanity. He was obviously sincere, but it wasn’t a very comforting thought.

One senior Democrat said some very kind things about me in a well-covered photo op outside his office. As we were walking away, he asked where my next stop might be. I told him I was en route to Senator Wyden’s office. “Speak slowly,” he advised me. Good advice.

Wyden entertained me with his feet ostentatiously on the coffee table between us, not so subtly messaging that he was relaxed, but that I shouldn’t be, as he made it clear that he was going to make this a tough hearing.

There indeed were issues. First, there was the optic of my being announced within a breath of Porter’s sudden departure, thus eliminating even the illusion that the Hill had been consulted on the choice. Even Republicans felt compelled to push back.

Some objected to a military officer becoming CIA director, arguing that I would be a creature of the Pentagon. Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was the most adamant: “I do believe he’s the wrong person, [at] the wrong place, at the wrong time. We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time.” Of course, he was on the House side, so he wouldn’t get to vote on my appointment.
Besides, anyone who knew me and my relationship with Don Rumsfeld, which was respectful but hardly warm, knew that I wasn’t a creature of the Pentagon.

It may have been a phony issue, but it was one I had to deal with. The president even raised it with me prior to my confirmation hearing. “Mike, you may have to retire from the air force,” he said. “We’re getting some pushback on that.” As it played out, I didn’t have to.

The more problematic issue was my role in the Terrorist Surveillance Program. I had done this, so it was personal—it was about
me
. I was going to sink or swim on what people thought of me, knowing full well I had done that.

At a minimum the Senate would leverage my nomination to pry more information about the program out of the administration. It worked. While Michael Allen and I sat in SSCI chairman Pat Roberts’s office, the vice president called to tell Roberts that the president had decided that the full committee should be briefed on Stellarwind. Roberts drafted a press release while Allen informed the House intelligence chairman of the news.

My closed confirmation hearing with the SSCI was pretty much about Stellarwind.

After confirmation, I closed out the Stellarwind account (for me, at least) by also appearing before the HPSCI.

During my public confirmation hearing in the Senate, critics—led by Wyden, the Oregon Democrat—repeated the charge that I had never been fully forthcoming about the program. I had provided more than a dozen classified briefings to lawmakers since the program had begun, and none had ever objected or suggested a change to me. “What’s to say that if you’re confirmed to head the CIA, we won’t go through exactly this kind of drill with you over there?” Wyden asked at one point.

Wyden also made a run at me about NSA’s Trailblazer program (chapter 2). He quoted from my testimony the year before, saying that I had claimed that NSA had “overachieved” in the program. I remembered my use of the word. In describing our disappointment with Trailblazer, I said
that our concept was going to the private sector for solutions. We had “overachieved” in that regard, since the private sector did not seem to be much better than we were when breaking new ground. I had actually been criticizing our approach, but the senator would have none of the clarification.

This was getting to be pointless bantering. I impatiently closed the briefing book in front of me, signaling that from my end, at least, this conversation was over. “Well, Senator,” I concluded, “you’re just going to have to make a judgment on my character.”

I was up in Boston for the wedding of the son of one of my security officers at NSA when I got word that I had been confirmed by the Senate. Everyone who voted against me was a Democrat: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Evan Bayh, and just about anyone else who might be thinking of a run for president.

After the rehearsal for the wedding, the priest recognized me on my way out of the church and put a small crucifix in my hand, which I still have, and offered me his prayers. After I climbed into my SUV with my security detail, I got a phone call from Senator Bayh.

“General, you know how I voted?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” I said.

“Well, you’re going to be a great director. And I am going to give you my full support. You are a wonderful choice.”

Senator Bayh and I have stayed close, but I’ve never spoken to him about the phone call again. I just find it heartening that he thought enough to call me up and say, pay no attention to the final tally. In the end, I was confirmed by a vote of 79–15. I’ve still got the tally sheet in a frame in my office.

I was sworn in as CIA director on May 30, 2006, in the West Wing by the vice president. (The president later presided at Langley for a more formal ceremony.)

Immediately afterward, I drove up the George Washington Parkway for my first meeting with the workforce in “the Bubble,” the CIA auditorium, which was packed. I tried to be reassuring. “Number one, nobody
sent me up here to blow anything up,” I said. “You people are the best in the world at what you do, so here’s the thing. Blow into the paper bag, get your CO2 levels back to normal, and go back to work. This stuff is over. You do what you do. I got the stuff beyond the fence line. That’s
my
job. We’re also going to be out of the news . . . as source or subject!”

Then I took questions. Near the end, a young employee in the back raised his hand. “What do we call you?” he asked. I hadn’t thought of that one, standing there as I was in my dress blues with four stars on
each
shoulder. But I also knew that CIA functioned as a very egalitarian organization.

“Whatever makes you feel comfortable,” I finally said. As it turns out, it was the most important forty-five seconds of the whole speech. More than a year later I learned that this one sentence was a pass-fail one for the workforce in sizing up the new guy.