WASHINGTON - Monday's nomination by US
President George W Bush of air force General
Michael Hayden to take over the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the hapless Porter
Goss has predictably intensified speculation over
what is really going on behind the scenes.
Most analysts see the shifts as the latest
battle between the director of national
intelligence (DNI), John Negroponte, and Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld in the war over control of
the multiple functions of the United States'
sprawling, US$40-billion-a-year intelligence
community.
But opinion appears deeply
divided over which bureaucratic titan
will
emerge as this round's winner, although few doubt
that the unceremonious dismissal of a CIA director
who served less than 20 months on the job -
particularly by a president who has proved dogged
in retaining loyal servants despite strong
evidence of their incompetence - is filled with
portent.
Goss, the former head of the
House of Representatives Intelligence Committee,
was sent to the CIA ostensibly to implement a
reform program designed to resuscitate its covert
action and human-intelligence-gathering
capabilities after the debacle in Iraq.
But he is likely to be remembered chiefly
for his "Gosslings", Republican political
operatives he brought with him from the House,
whose main purpose was to purge senior officers
whose loyalty to their tradecraft appeared greater
than to the policy priorities of the Bush
administration, particularly in the Middle East.
By the time of his abrupt resignation last
week, some 16 top officers, including one director
and two deputy directors, with a combined 300
years of intelligence experience, had fled,
leaving "the agency in free fall", according to
Goss's former Democratic colleague on the
Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman.
Both
Negroponte, who last year displaced the CIA
director as the president's chief intelligence
adviser, and Bush's own Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board concluded earlier this year that
Goss and his henchmen had to go, although the
precipitating factor appears to have been
implication in a remarkably unsavory congressional
bribery scandal of the CIA's No 3, Kyle "Dusty"
Foggo, who had been hand-picked by Goss himself.
With Goss out, attention naturally shifted
to Hayden, Negroponte's top deputy and the former
head of the Pentagon's National Security Agency
(NSA), who was formally nominated by Bush to the
post on Monday.
As Bush himself noted,
Hayden has served almost his entire career in
intelligence, although most of it has been more
focused on the kinds of signals intelligence -
satellite spying, eavesdropping and other forms of
electronic surveillance - that is the special
province of the NSA than human intelligence or
covert operations.
"He knows the
intelligence community from the ground up," Bush
said on Monday.
Admired even by his
congressional critics as an excellent and
generally candid briefer, Hayden's institutional
and political loyalties, however, remain unclear -
a fact that has fueled speculation as to the
policy and bureaucratic implications of his
nomination.
Perceived as a
straight-talking technocrat and effective manager
who had largely succeeded in moving the NSA from
Cold War thinking to the new challenges of the
"global war on terror", Hayden was unanimously
confirmed by the Senate last year as Negroponte's
deputy.
But his apolitical image has been
tarnished - for civil libertarians among
Republicans and Democrats alike - by his
unexpectedly aggressive public defense over the
past several months of the NSA's domestic-spying
program after September 11, 2001, and his refusal
to answer key details about it.
Indeed,
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter
warned on Sunday that he will use Hayden's
confirmation hearings to try to pry out
information about the government's
domestic-surveillance effort that the
administration has so far refused to share with
Congress.
Some critics - already concerned
about Hayden's understanding of constitutional
protections against warrantless searches and
seizures - also point to reports that he has
become a favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney,
the administration's strongest advocate of a
virtually all-powerful wartime executive.
"We have to confront the chilling prospect
that the incoming head of the CIA believes it's
permissible to conduct warrantless surveillance on
the American public," Marc Rotenberg, director of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told
the New York Times.
A second concern -
also shared by Democrats and Republicans alike, it
appears - involves Hayden's status as a serving
military officer taking control of the CIA, the
only major intelligence agency, aside from the
DNI's office, that was still headed by a civilian.
"Putting a military person into this role
is just a bad idea," said House Intelligence
Committee chairman Peter Hoekstra, a conservative
Republican, who told a television interviewer on
Sunday that Hayden was "the wrong man at the wrong
place at the wrong time". Some Democrats who have
criticized what has been called the
"over-militarization" of foreign policy have
echoed that view.
Nonetheless, the picture
may be a good deal more complicated than that,
particularly in the context of the broader
struggle between the Pentagon and the civilian
agencies, especially the DNI, over control of
intelligence.
Hayden is not known for
getting along particularly well with Rumsfeld,
who, along with his intelligence chief, Stephen
Cambone, has been aggressive about giving the
military, especially special-operations forces,
unprecedented authority for carrying out covert
operations with minimal CIA involvement. To the
great frustration of his civilian bosses, for
example, the general testified before Congress in
2004 in favor of transferring control of several
intelligence agencies from the Pentagon to the
DNI.
As a "former CIA station chief" noted
to the Washington Post, "How will Hayden deal with
the land-grabbing from the Pentagon? That's going
to be the real fight."
Indeed, the fact
that Negroponte actively sought Goss's ouster and
is now sending Hayden to the CIA as part of a
larger turf war against Rumsfeld and Cambone -
particularly with respect to covert operations -
is seen as threatening to the policy agenda of
neo-conservatives and other hawks who regard the
CIA, along with Negroponte's alma mater, the State
Department, as hopelessly "liberal" and thus
disloyal to Bush.
"If Negroponte forced
Goss out and is allowed to pick Goss's successor
... then Goss's departure will prove to have been
a weakening moment in an administration
increasingly susceptible to moments of weakness,"
the neo-conservative Weekly Standard warned this
weekend.
The right-wing National Review
also smelled a rat, worrying that Goss's ouster
marked a "coup by the [CIA's] insurgents" to stop
the purge against traitorous agency officials that
have allegedly been undermining the
administration.
For John Prados, a
prominent author on national-security
intelligence, it is far too early to predict the
outcome, particularly given the gains and momentum
built up by the Pentagon largely at the CIA's
expense in budgetary and operational areas during
Goss's tenure.
"It's always been Rumsfeld
versus Negroponte, and Negroponte has not so far
demonstrated much ability to rein in Rumsfeld at
all," he said. "This could be a victory for
Negroponte in the sense that a new director that
can breathe life into a fading CIA would re-create
an element of resistance against the Pentagon's
aggrandizement. That could improve his situation
vis-a-vis Rumsfeld."
At the same time, he
said, the latest developments could hasten the
CIA's cannibalization by accelerating the
migration of its analytical resources to the DNI
and its increasingly nominal control over
operations to the Pentagon.
"We may be
seeing the tipping point toward the end of the CIA
and the increased danger of the fragmentation of
the American intelligence community," he said.
