Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror

by Michael V. Hayden

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  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

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  ONE

  THE SYSTEM IS DOWN

  FORT MEADE, MD, 1999–2000

  TWO

  A NATIONAL TREASURE . . . FOR HOW MUCH LONGER?

  FORT MEADE, MD, 2001–2005

  THREE

  GOING TO WAR . . . WITH SOME HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS

  FORT MEADE, MD, 2001–2003

  FOUR

  GOING TO WAR . . . AGAIN AND AGAIN

  FORT MEADE, MD, 2002–2005

  FIVE

  STELLARWIND

  FORT MEADE, MD, 2001–2003

  SIX

  GOING PUBLIC . . . WILLINGLY AND OTHERWISE

  FORT MEADE, MD, AND WASHINGTON, DC, 2004–2008

  SEVEN

  THE PUBLIC’S RIGHT TO KNOW . . . AND BE SAFE

  FORT MEADE, MD, AND LANGLEY, VA, 1999–2009

  EIGHT

  LIFE IN THE CYBER DOMAIN

  SAN ANTONIO, TX—FORT MEADE, MD—LANGLEY, VA, 1996–2010

  NINE

  IS THIS REALLY NECESSARY?

  THE ODNI, 2005–2006 AND BEYOND

  TEN

  “I WANT YOU TO TAKE OVER CIA”

  WASHINGTON, DC, MAY–SEPTEMBER 2006

  ELEVEN

  THREE “EASY” PIECES

  BAGHDAD, ISLAMABAD, KABUL, 2006

  TWELVE

  A UNIQUE VIEW

  LANGLEY, VA, 2007–2008

  THIRTEEN

  GOING HOME

  PITTSBURGH, PA, 1945–2014

  FOURTEEN

  “NO CORE. NO WAR”

  AL-KIBAR, SYRIA, 2007–2008

  FIFTEEN

  ESPIONAGE, BUREAUCRACY, AND FAMILY LIFE

  LANGLEY, VA, 2006–2009

  SIXTEEN

  IRAN: BOMBING OR THE BOMB?

  LANGLEY, VA, 2007–2009

  SEVENTEEN

  A GLOBAL ENTERPRISE

  LANGLEY, VA, 2007–2009

  EIGHTEEN

  “THERE WILL BE NO EXPLAINING OUR INACTION”

  WASHINGTON, DC, 2002–2009 AND BEYOND

  NINETEEN

  TRANSITION

  CIA, NOVEMBER 2008–FEBRUARY 2009

  TWENTY

  “GENERAL, THEY’RE GOING TO RELEASE THE MEMOS”

  MCLEAN, VA, 2009–2014

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE PRIVATE SECTOR

  WASHINGTON, DC, 2009–2014

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  FOREWORD: WHY THIS BOOK?

  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.

  ONE

  THE SYSTEM IS DOWN

  FORT MEADE, MD, 1999–2000

  The 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 breakin
g 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.”