Michael Hayden Comes Out of the Shadows (original) (raw)

Spymasters are supposed to be good at keeping their mouths shut, so it’s striking how many heads of the Central Intelligence Agency have published memoirs. Just in the years since September 11th, three former directors—George Tenet, Leon Panetta, and now Michael V. Hayden—have felt compelled to tell tales. (A fourth, David Petraeus, coöperated with his biographer so fully that he provided her with classified information.) They are no doubt driven by the same motives that lead other public figures to write autobiographies—money, narcissism, score-settling, concern for their place in history. Spooks in general have had a lot to answer for in the past decade and a half: the 9/11 attacks themselves, Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, torture, warrantless eavesdropping, the bulk collection of Americans’ data, and targeted killings. On the inside, they hold their breath for years; once outside, they won’t shut up. Within the limits set by the C.I.A.’s Publications Review Board, silence is an easy code to break.

Hayden was an Air Force officer who retired as a four-star general. He spent just about his whole career as an intelligence officer—providing intelligence to B-52 pilots in Vietnam, serving as chief of intelligence for U.S. forces in Europe during the Bosnian war, and then running the Air Intelligence Agency. In 1999, Hayden was appointed to lead the National Security Agency. He had the right résumé—all N.S.A. directors are senior military officers—as well as the luck of timing and circumstance that so often determines who gets the coveted jobs in government. But the director of the C.I.A.—a position Hayden held from 2006 to the start of the Obama Administration, after a brief stopover as deputy director of national intelligence—is rarely a career intelligence officer. And before Hayden nobody had ever led both the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. Hayden had clearly impressed the politicians, made few powerful enemies among his colleagues, and avoided scandal. In short, he was an excellent bureaucrat, and he spent his entire professional life guarding the country’s secrets, among them some of the deepest and darkest.

“Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror” (Penguin Press) suffers from the usual problems of the official memoir. All autobiographies are self-serving, but those of public figures tend to be unapologetically so. Hayden includes liberal excerpts from a graduation speech he delivered at his alma mater, Duquesne University, and reports on the standing ovation that greeted him. “Playing to the Edge” is also badly written, with no trace of a ghostwriter or editor. Hayden is a devout Steelers fan, and his style is jock-bureaucratic—tough talk clotted with insider terminology. At one point, he writes, “I have spent my adult life working in American intelligence. It has been quite an honor. Generally well resourced. A global mission. No want of issues. And it was a hell of a ride.” At another: “The head of operations wanted to try the Thin Thread approach, retain US metadata that we were collecting in our foreign intelligence activities, encrypt it, limit access to it through a kind of ‘two key’ protocol, and then (when indicated) chain through the metadata to other contacts.”

This matter of language is important. Professional jargon—on Wall Street, in humanities departments, in government offices—can be a fence raised to keep out the uninitiated and permit those within it to persist in the belief that what they do is too hard, too complex, to be questioned. Jargon acts not only to euphemize but to license, setting insiders against outsiders and giving the flimsiest notions a scientific aura. Repeat the phrase “chain through the metadata” enough times and it sounds like a law of nature rather than a contentious policy. In the case of the intelligence world, where a high degree of insularity is essential, the cloak of language renders spooks and their civilian critics mutually alien. The tendency on each side is to deny that the other has any real right to exist.

Hayden was running the N.S.A. when, following September 11th, President Bush told the agency to intercept the content of certain calls between American and foreign telephones without a court order, and to store all the metadata on calls made to, from, and within the United States. Hayden asked an agency lawyer for an overnight legal opinion and got an answer (“a more-than-plausible theory about its lawfulness”) that a more skeptical mind could have shredded. But Hayden also knew exactly what his superiors at the White House wanted. He had the tools and was eager to use them. You don’t rise to the top of the intelligence community by asking whether “can” and “should” are always the same.

This proved the case with torture, too. Hayden wasn’t yet at the C.I.A. when the agency, with the backing of the Bush White House and the Justice Department, tried waterboarding and other physical efforts to break Al Qaeda suspects in secret overseas prisons. By the time Hayden took over, many, though not all, of the practices had ended. Contemplating an order to subject a detainee named Muhammad Rahim al-Afghani to sleep deprivation and a liquid diet, Hayden writes, “I remember staring down at the page, pen in hand, hesitating to take that step.” Needless to say, he signed. Afghani’s interrogators got nothing useful from their prisoner; Hayden suggests that this was because the harshest techniques had by then been taken off the table.

Hayden insists that vital information about Al Qaeda came from these techniques. He’s contradicted by a thick Senate Intelligence Committee report, numerous journalistic investigations, and the accounts of certain intelligence officers. When it comes to detainee deaths, innocent men wrongfully held in brutal conditions, and other abuses, Hayden barely glances over his shoulder: “There were occasional mistakes.” On the usefulness of the N.S.A.’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, which some insiders have dismissed as producing little valuable information, Hayden is similarly confident: “We were able to brief real connections between overseas terrorists and people in the United States. . . . It is clear that Stellarwind”—the code name for the information collected under the program—“covered a quadrant where we had no other tools. What could be wrong with that?” The public may never be able to assess where the truth lies.

In his last days in government, at the start of the Obama Administration, Hayden fought bitterly against the release of the Bush Justice Department’s torture memos, insisting that the revelations constituted a betrayal and would damage C.I.A. officers’ morale beyond repair. In 2014, when the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report, which singled out Hayden for misleading the committee in many instances, he lashed out even more furiously. The report is a damning document on the brutality of the C.I.A.’s practices, the shoddiness of its management, and the mendacity of its leaders. Hayden’s case against the report comes down to the fact that it was written by the committee’s “Democrat” members and staff. Hayden seems more ambivalent about eavesdropping than about torture. He admits that Stellarwind “did indeed raise important questions about the right balance between security and liberty, and Snowden’s disclosures no doubt accelerated and intensified that discussion.” And last week he sided with Apple in its privacy dispute with the F.B.I. But techniques like waterboarding and rectal hydration raise no questions for Hayden.

He has a number of glowing things to say about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, none about Barack Obama. Bush is a good listener, avid for details, ready to hear hard truths from his intel people and make policy accordingly. Obama, on the other hand, is indecisive, hypocritical, and—on issues like torture and negotiating with Iran—wrong. Hayden devotes far more energy to answering critical coverage in the Times and the Washington Post than to analyzing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In general, he doesn’t care for investigative journalists or congressional Democrats. First-rate intelligence reporters like the Times’ James Risen, the Post’s Dana Priest, and this magazine’s Jane Mayer aren’t just a pain in the ass, in his view—they have low motives and unfair agendas. He can’t fathom why the legitimate role of the press might be to ferret out secrets that officials like him are sworn to guard, or why the C.I.A.’s destruction of its own interrogation tapes looked like a coverup of a crime. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senator Ron Wyden aren’t good-faith critics of the agency—they’re partisan hypocrites. At one point, Hayden quotes a line from Bob Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie”: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” Hayden adds, “Especially with yourself. All the time.” In other words, if the intelligence agencies are going to push the limits of law, policy, and technology, with minimal oversight—if they’re going to use the sidelines, in the football metaphor of the book’s title—they need to hold themselves accountable. But Hayden’s unwillingness to give an inch to any challenge shows why Congress, the press, and the public are the only ones who can keep the agencies honest.

What’s strange is that Hayden knows this. He knows that the intelligence world is isolated from the public, and that, like so many other institutions, it has lost Americans’ trust. He seems to understand that keeping the senior Republicans and Democrats on the intelligence committees informed while imposing a gag order on them is no longer enough to win citizens’ confidence. He goes so far as to call this realization “Snowden’s ‘gift,’ ” referring to him as the “visible effect” of a “broad cultural shift that is redefining legitimate secrecy, necessary transparency, and what constitutes the consent of the governed.”

This is ultimately why Hayden has come out of the shadows to write this still heavily shadowed book. He wants more openness, not out of any principled belief in government transparency but because it’s essential if his profession is going to survive. “If we are going to conduct espionage in the future,” he writes, “we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves.” And, he adds, “we also need to explain to those with whom we intend to be more open that with that will come some increased risk. It can be no other way.” He isn’t wrong to say so, or to point out the bad faith of the agencies’ detractors who want to have it both ways. After quoting passages from a congressional report critical of the N.S.A.’s failure to do more to prevent 9/11, he adds, “I mention them here only to point out that what then followed, NSA’s Stellarwind program, was a logical response to an agreed issue and not the product of demented cryptologic minds, as some would later suggest.” You don’t have to be an admirer of warrantless wiretapping to acknowledge that it might have originated in an understandable panic about the intelligence failures that permitted the attacks to happen. “Far easier to criticize intelligence agencies for not doing enough when [political élites] feel in danger,” Hayden writes, “while reserving the right to criticize those agencies for doing too much when they feel safe.” The truth in this observation isn’t weakened by the fact that Hayden repeats it elsewhere at least twice, nearly word for word.

Hayden isn’t the mindless drone or sinister spy boss that his harshest detractors might believe. He’s a very imperfect bearer of a legitimate insight: that, if the American people and the intelligence world need each other, they can’t afford to speak mutually unintelligible languages. Imperfect because he failed his own standard of openness, first while in government—he battled any serious oversight of the intelligence agencies’ most controversial programs—and then again in this cheerful, overconfident account of his years there. George Tenet, in his more readable memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” spends a lot of time on his mistakes, especially on Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction. Hayden, by contrast, looks back and says, “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.”

Hayden thinks that the answer to the intelligence community’s isolation and disarray is for leaders like him to come forth and explain their work—which is what he’s been doing since his retirement, in speeches and articles and debates (including one with Glenn Greenwald), and, now, in this memoir. He wants transparency, sort of (another official called it “translucence”), but on his own terms. That won’t be enough, and perhaps nothing will be enough. In a sense, the more the spies say, the less the public will trust them, because it’s secrecy that gives them the mystique of knowledge. The relationship is a little like that between teen-agers and their parents. We expect the intelligence people to keep us safe, we resent them for their intrusions and their failures, and we need to believe that they know better than we do in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. ♦