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

by Michael V. Hayden

  In 2006 there were only twenty thousand American troops in Afghanistan. It was still the good war. Iraq was the real problem.

  When I got back to Washington, I asked my chief of staff, “Whatever happened to those two Iraq analysts?” We had left them behind in Iraq when Jose and I flew on to Islamabad. He called them and reported back to me that they were surprised I still wanted their serial flier. So they finished it, graphically describing the circumstances on the ground. I said, “Good paper—I’ll brief the president personally.”

  The CIA was no longer responsible for providing the PDB, or President’s Daily Brief. That responsibility now fell to Negroponte even though the briefers he would accompany into the Oval Office came from the agency. The president devoted a lot of time to these sessions, and he was incredibly interactive with the briefers, and very knowledgeable. I remember during one briefing on Pakistan, he just yelled to the outer office, “Get me Musharraf!”

  There were other days when we could hear the rotor blades from Marine One out on the White House lawn. The president was heading out, and everybody else on his staff was running to the helicopter, but the president wasn’t budging until his briefing was over. President Obama stopped the practice of getting a personal briefing every day, but Bush was fanatical about it—he wanted a daily briefing, in person, six days out of seven.

  I wasn’t doing the PDB, but President Bush still insisted on a weekly update on covert actions and sensitive collection, so I got thirty minutes every Thursday morning immediately after the thirty-minute PDB.

  I took advantage of that window to brief President Bush on my trip to Iraq. I didn’t dwell on labels, but I did give him a really candid description based on the paper and my personal observations. “Mr. President, we can’t even get out of the Green Zone to meet sources without a massive armed escort,” I said. The situation there was very ugly, and I could tell I was triggering an emotional reaction from the president of the United States. He knew me, he had picked me to be his CIA director, he trusted me. And I’m telling him: your signature foreign policy thrust is going really, really badly. The hand we were playing wasn’t winning.

  This was probably not the first time the president had heard something like this directly, but it was the first time he heard it from me. He was quiet. There was no pushback. I don’t remember a lot of the usual give-and-take. This was a very dark picture.

  Back at the agency I had the Iraq analysts come to the office for a back brief. “So, is our conscience clear?” I asked. Then, motivated by a belief that all this was better discussed in the Oval than in the press, I added, “We delivered a hard message to the president this morning. Help me protect my ability to deliver hard messages.”

  I got to reprise this stark picture about two months later in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House. The occasion was a meeting of the Iraq Study Group, a hard look at the war commissioned by Congress and led by two prominent Americans, former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton. Other luminaries in the room were former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, former deputy secretary of state Larry Eagleburger, former secretary of defense Bill Perry, former senators Chuck Robb and Alan Simpson, former attorney general Ed Meese, former congressman and former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, and civil rights leader and Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan.

  Bob Gates had been in the group until the week before. Nominated to be secretary of defense, he had withdrawn. I later learned that my dark picture broadly coincided with the one he had already developed.

  I called Baghdad to check my notes with the station chief before I headed downtown. We were in agreement. Security was degrading in Baghdad, and there were no obvious inflection points in our future to reverse the trend. It was not yet a time for despair, but we had our work cut out for us.

  I didn’t pull any punches with the study group. “Our leaving Iraq would make the situation worse. Our staying in Iraq may not make it better” if we continued our current approach without modification.

  We had created tactical successes, but without strategic effect. We had sponsored a government that was democratically elected and ethnically and religiously balanced, but could not function. “The levers of power [in Baghdad] are not connected to anything.” This all seemed irreversible, at least in the short term.

  I expressed amazement at what I had observed in August, that the Iraqis seemed willing to accept incredibly high levels of violence. Drawing on my Balkans experience, I suggested that the parties might have to fight themselves to exhaustion before our efforts at reconciliation could bear fruit. Right now everyone was huddling in their own ethnic or sectarian corner for protection, so our efforts at strengthening Iraqi security forces—often more sectarian than national—weren’t an unalloyed good.

  I used the Pittsburgh Marathon as a metaphor, telling the panel that at mile twenty-two in that race a runner got to a one-mile downhill stretch, and after that, the three miles remaining were no more than you would do before church on any given Sunday. “I can’t see a twenty-two-mile marker that tells me that at some point this is going to get easier,” I said.

  Less than a week before this session, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had offered the president his resignation. It was clear that this was the signal for a major strategy review.

  That review consumed most of my and Steve Kappes’s time for the rest of the year and that of a large chunk of our workforce too. We met morning and afternoon most days under Steve Hadley’s leadership in a large conference room in the Old Executive Office Building. The battle rhythm at Langley comprised a morning huddle with our analysts followed by me or Steve going downtown, a debrief to the same group after the session, and then a repeat of the pattern in the afternoon with Steve and me swapping roles.

  These OEOB meetings were very candid sessions, and multiple options were explored. The role of intelligence was to set the left- and right-hand boundaries of logical discussion. We emphasized that many if not most of the security forces in Iraq were predatory in their behavior toward the population and that strengthening them without reform could actually make the situation worse.

  As we debated what later became “the surge,” we agreed that inserting five brigades of professional, nonsectarian combat power in and around Baghdad would push the violence down. Although that was a good effect, it wasn’t a strategic one. We wanted to push the violence down to create time and space for the Maliki government to be what it claimed to be: a national, unity government. To that point it was 0 for 3 in those characteristics. It was neither national, nor unified, nor, for that matter, a real government.

  And Maliki, we emphasized, was a low-probability shot at changing this situation. Given his character and personal history, he would have to “govern beyond his life experience” for this to have a chance to succeed.

  Congress had its own interest in our assessments. Six powerful senators (all Democrats) had written the DNI in July and again in September asking for a new Iraq National Intelligence Estimate, including an assessment of whether the country was in or descending into a civil war. They also requested that the NIE’s key judgments be made unclassified, confirming that great political use would be made of whatever we said.

  DNI Negroponte consented, and community teams went to work. Not surprisingly, the civil war question consumed a lot of energy. There was little dispute over the facts on the ground, just the accuracy of the label and, frankly, its utility, since this was going to get real political real fast. (It did. The administration used the NIE to support “the surge,” Senate Democrats to oppose it.)

  State Department intelligence pushed against the civil war description, claiming that the situation wasn’t clear enough to make that judgment. Defense, on behalf of CENTCOM, also pushed back, pointing out that DOD did not have an accepted definition of civil war.

  I recalled that when I was in Iraq, the view f
rom MNF-I (Multi-National Forces–Iraq) was that this was a lot more like the Congo than Beirut. People weren’t fighting over control of the government, which didn’t control much of anything. Smaller and smaller groups were competing for power in smaller and smaller environments, and a lot of the violence seemed more about rage than purpose.

  But my guys were adamant. Civil war had to be in. I said so and said that I would be “uncomfortable” were it to be removed. Beyond my view, my analysts mounted a flank attack to support me. My Iraq office chief e-mailed the DNI’s top analyst that even if the language was removed, his folks would have to testify differently if asked by Congress. And we all knew that Congress would ask.

  In the end the NIE asserted that “the term civil war accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements.”

  But it was worse than that, we added. We also had extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, an insurgency, al-Qaeda terrorism, and widespread criminality.

  We were pessimistic about the future: “Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation in the time frame of this estimate [twelve to eighteen months].”

  We feared it could get worse. We identified events that could “shift Iraq’s trajectory from gradual decline to rapid deterioration with grave humanitarian, political, and security consequences.”

  Finally, we added, we were the stopper in the bottle. “Coalition capabilities, including force levels, resources, and operations remain an essential stabilizing element in Iraq.”

  The NIE was published in early February 2007, after the “surge” decision had been announced, but Steve Hadley was quick to point out that intelligence had led policy and that the IC had been a full participant in the policy deliberations.

  We had.

  Our other message was heard as well, the one about Maliki. The president sent the five brigades, but he also scheduled routine personal videoconferences with the prime minister to urge, coach, and mentor him in a positive direction. It wasn’t uncommon for the president near the end of NSC sessions to chase the rest of us out of the Situation Room as the appointed time for his private meeting drew near. President, prime minister, translators. No one else.

  The president also conferred almost constantly with two incredibly talented and tireless ambassadors in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad and Ryan Crocker. He invested his personal and political capital in securing a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, with the Iraqis that allowed us to keep troops there at least until 2011.

  We made progress, perhaps more than I had expected, but the personal intervention of the American president ended in January 2009. And when the SOFA was not renegotiated and extended and the last American troops left at the end of 2011, Maliki reverted to type. Sadly, we had been right all along.

  TWELVE

  A UNIQUE VIEW

  LANGLEY, VA, 2007–2008

  President Bush’s East Room September 2006 speech didn’t settle much. In fact, it drew sharp battle lines.

  That meant that the policy and politics of renditions, detentions, and interrogations were going to suck a lot of air out of a lot of rooms at Langley for quite a while.

  I ended up spending a lot of time talking about, explaining, and defending the agency’s record and trying to craft a way ahead.

  Some of that was self-justification, not for me personally, but for the agency generally. Even though much of this had happened before I came on board, I felt duty bound to defend good people who had acted in good faith. In the world as it was seen from Langley, folks there believed they had done the right things morally, legally, and operationally.

  And then there was the historical record. No one with any knowledge of this program doubted that it had provided unique, actionable intelligence. And I was convinced that some version of it had to go forward.

  That made it a little lonely at times, since CIA was serving a government with a definition of this conflict that far outstripped any other. Within that government the agency was serving an executive with a bolder view on how to conduct the conflict than many in the legislature, and within the executive branch Langley was operating on the outer edges of executive prerogative more than any other arm of government.

  This was going to be doubly hard, since the centerline of public discourse had also shifted. For several years after 9/11, CIA had to defend itself against criticism that it had been too cautious; from about 2006 onward, the more common accusation was that the agency was being too aggressive.

  I drew attention to that dynamic. I told audiences that in our headquarters, in a counterterrorism office, there was a sign that had been up for years, but one that never blended into the woodwork. It simply read “Today’s date is September 12, 2001.” I usually added that, when I got into the car and left CIA’s guarded campus, it was not long before it began to feel like September 10. My point was not that I believed that another attack was imminent. It was just that for the rest of the country the impact of 9/11 had begun to fade. That was actually a measure of our success, but it was not an attitude that the agency could afford to share.

  There was already concern that as the political pendulum began to swing back, it would sweep up agency officers in its path. In a step that a theologian might call sacramental, since its intent was to be both sign and substance, I decided that the agency would subsidize professional liability insurance for any officer who wanted it. The move didn’t bust our budget, since it wasn’t all that expensive, but it did enlist private providers who would pay legal fees and damage claims if officers were hauled into court because of what they may have done performing their duties.

  The substance part was clear: officers should not have to consider risking their children’s college savings before deciding to follow a lawful order. With regard to the sign, we hoped that this would show that real people with real families were involved here—not Jack Bauer clones. Unfortunately, the move was barely noticed outside the fence line.

  Everyone noticed our making more of CIA’s past activities public. That was part of the broader effort to regularize (and, where appropriate, limit) the emergency measures that had been put in place after 9/11. Steve Hadley had said as much in the backgrounder he and I gave right before the president’s September 6, 2006, speech announcing the transfer of CIA’s detainees to Guantánamo. “The president wants to put this questioning program and other tools in the war on terror on a sustainable long-term footing with congressional support and public understanding.” If we didn’t, we and the president knew that these tools would likely not be available to his successors.

  As part of this, I made an unprecedented appearance for a CIA director before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. We billed it as a major speech on the fight against al-Qaeda and scheduled it a few days before the sixth anniversary of 9/11. We got a packed house of several hundred well-connected, sometimes skeptical, but always serious, foreign policy devotees.

  I explained my presence: “There are things that should be said. And sometimes our citizens should hear them from the person who’s running their Central Intelligence Agency.” I then characterized our circumstance as being in a state of war. “It’s a word we use commonly without ambiguity in the halls of the Pentagon and at Langley.” The enemy remained determined, and I gave him high marks for regenerating in the tribal region of Pakistan and planning mass casualty attacks in the homeland. We were less certain about the last remaining element that al-Qaeda needed: “planting operatives in this country.”

  I candidly and unapologetically talked about renditions, detentions, and interrogations and attempted to give a sense of scale to our actions: fewer than a hundred high-value detainees and another group of about half that number subject to rendition. “These programs are targeted and they are selective. They w
ere designed only for the most dangerous terrorists and those believed to have the most valuable information, such as knowledge of planned attacks.”

  I conceded that this raised important issues. I quoted Germany’s interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, who had recently cast the situation in these stark terms: “The fact is that the old categories no longer apply. The fight against international terrorism cannot be mastered by the classic methods of the police. We have to clarify whether our constitutional state is sufficient for confronting the new threats.”

  We were also concerned with what we called “the deep battle: blunting the jihadists’ appeal to disenchanted young Muslim men and, increasingly, young Muslim women as well. The deep fight requires discrediting and eliminating the jihadist ideology that motivates this hatred and violence. It requires winning what is essentially a war of ideas.”

  I conceded that “some of the actions required by the close fight can make fighting the deep fight even more complicated.” There were always second- and third-order effects to any action, even lawful and necessary ones. “But it’s actually very rare in life that doing nothing is a legitimate or a morally acceptable course of action. Responsibility demands action, and dealing with the immediate threat must naturally be a top priority.”

  It was a serious discussion and continued to be so even in the sharp Q&A that followed (once we got past some tired accusations of CIA guilt for overthrowing the Mossadegh regime in 1950s Iran). It was a trip worth making. And we quickly posted the transcript on our Web site.

  I had made a similar speech at the German embassy in Washington in the spring of 2007 to the ambassadors to the United States from all the states of the European Union. The Germans were in the chair of the EU at the time, and Ambassador Scharioth was in the habit of gathering his Euro-colleagues for lunch and perhaps a guest speaker. I guess he thought I’d be interesting.