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

by Michael V. Hayden

  We were also now in the last months of the Bush administration. No fair launching a major initiative whose effects only your successor would have to live with. The PC thanked us and moved on.

  There was, of course, always a third option. If you can’t change the regime’s mind, why not change the regime? Our best assessment was that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, believed that this was really our purpose all along. Our ranting about the nuclear program, he believed, was just a smoke screen to enlist international support for the first stages of our true intention, getting rid of him.

  We would have loved a different regime. After all, we weren’t so much opposed to Iran having a nuclear program as we were opposed to this Iran having one. We visualized two clocks, one marking the nuclear program’s progress, the other ticking down the life of Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution. We were obviously trying to slow down the nuclear clock. In a theoretical sense it would have made sense to accelerate the regime survival timepiece.

  Except that we weren’t, at least not much beyond publicly calling the regime to account for its many failings. Regime change is tough, and the presence of any American hand might have strengthened the mullahs rather than weakened them.

  And there was always the possibility that the regime would indeed change, but in the wrong direction. As bad as Iran was, it could always get worse. After all, their tightly controlled elections were more open than most in the region.

  The Obama administration faced this issue starkly in the summer of 2009 as the Green Movement filled the streets of Tehran with three million protesters after it was announced that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the presidential election. Signs, written in English for the international TV cameras, pleaded for external assistance as the Basiji busted heads and demonstrators were gunned down. The Iranian government already believed that we were fomenting the unrest, but the opposition knew better. They begged for help. To no avail. No actions were forthcoming, and even American verbal condemnations were tepid and late. If ever there was a moment for regime change, this was it. But that moment, such as it was, is past.

  By the way, in his inaugural address President Obama had already distanced himself from President Bush’s freedom agenda—the belief that only democracy offered the hope for long-term stability: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Translation: We won’t threaten your internal system if we can make our external relations right.

  Now, in the summer of 2009, the administration was not going to allow a chancy bet on the Iranian street to threaten its approach to Tehran on the nuclear question.

  In the three weeks I served as President Obama’s CIA chief while awaiting Leon Panetta’s confirmation, we discussed Iran twice in the Situation Room. At the first session the new team laid out its proposed opening to Tehran. I offered no views on the merits (not in my job description), but I did opine that such an offer would create stresses in the regime. “Might make their brains explode,” I said, since much of what was left of the diminishing legitimacy of the government rested on its heroic opposition to the Great Satan. “Could be instructive to watch,” I added.

  At the second meeting, attended by the president, he began by turning to me and asking how much enriched uranium the Iranians now had.

  “Mr. President, I actually know that but let me offer you a different frame of reference. In one sense, it almost doesn’t matter. There isn’t an electron or a neutron at Natanz that’s ever going to end up in a nuclear weapon. They’ll spin that uranium at some secret military facility beyond the eyes of the IAEA.”

  We already knew about the secret facility under the granite mountain at Fordow near Qom, but had not yet made that public. That wouldn’t happen until White House aides briefed the New York Times’s David Sanger in a Pittsburgh hotel room in September.

  “What they’re building at Natanz, Mr. President, is knowledge. They’re building technology. They’re building confidence. They’re mastering this process and once they have, they can turn it on whenever or wherever they want to.”

  That was why someone was killing their scientists. And later that was why someone was destroying their centrifuges with a cyber weapon. And that’s why any nuclear program in the hands of this regime that allows centrifuges to continue to spin constitutes a standing danger.

  The current deal negotiated between Secretary Kerry and Iranian foreign minister Zarif allows such a program. It preserves Iranian facilities, Iranian centrifuges, and Iranian nuclear research.

  Even if the deal is honored, it legitimizes Iran as an industrial-strength nuclear power and as a permanent nuclear weapons threshold state. The near-impenetrable facility at Fordow, big enough for a weapons program but too small for creating fissile material for a civilian energy effort, remains even if uranium is not being enriched there. The agreement after eight years removes restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program, which, absent weapons of mass destruction, has little utility.

  There will also not be an accounting of Tehran’s past nuclear activities, including its warhead weaponization program. Turns out that “access” to suspect facilities does not mean invasive physical entry into them by inspectors, and there is no chance that there will be a thorough debriefing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Robert Oppenheimer of the Iranian weapons program.

  The White House has talked about the most intrusive inspection regime in history. That is probably a bit of hyperbole, but there may indeed be a tough regime for Iran’s known facilities. Frankly, though, the IAEA smothering locations we know about isn’t all that comforting. The inspectors need to be able to go anywhere at any time, since American intelligence has always assessed that weapons-grade enrichment would take place at some covert location. If inspectors cannot quickly go to military or Revolutionary Guard facilities, there will be a gaping hole in the inspection regime. The agreement gives the Iranians at least twenty-four days to “rope-a-dope” any requests.

  The agreement’s impact on future counterproliferation efforts will also be profound, as a struggling, isolated regional power has challenged the world and clearly won. After all, the starting point for all of this was a series of UN Security Council resolutions that directed Tehran to suspend all enrichment activities, and President Obama himself declared earlier that the facilities at Fordow and Arak were not legitimately part of a peaceful nuclear program.

  The final deal goes out of its way to point out that none of its concessions to Iran should be considered precedent-setting for other states party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That should tell you something.

  And even with an accord in hand and honored, Iran remains the duplicitous, autocratic, terrorist-backing, Hezbollah-supporting, Hamas-funding, region-destabilizing, hegemony-seeking theocracy it has been. (No wonder Khamenei always thought we were all about regime change.) A nuclear agreement will end the regime’s isolation, and the return of frozen funds and the ability to sell oil will underwrite a host of troubling activities.

  So Iran may have little incentive to cheat on an agreement.* Many of us in the intelligence community, myself included, were always skeptical that Tehran would build or at least actually test a nuclear device. Unlike the North Koreans, who had to cook off a bomb to achieve the desired political effect, the Iranians get most of what they want with few of the downsides by parking themselves with an acknowledged nuclear capability always within striking distance of a weapon—precisely where they will get in ten to fifteen years by adhering to the agreement.

  Chalk all of this up as observation, though, rather than condemnation. I don’t think the Bush administration would have bought this deal, but it wasn’t like we had created a lot of better choices, either.

  SEVENTEEN

  A GLOBAL ENTERPRISE

  LANGLEY, VA
, 2007–2009

  In early August 2008, Steve Hadley’s concerned voice was very clear on the secure Red Switch from the White House. Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, had just been on the phone with him and Saakashvili was excited, even desperate. Russian armor was clearing the crossroads town of Tskhinvali in northern Georgia, and he had every reason to fear that the tanks wouldn’t stop until they got to him in Tbilisi, his capital.

  Saakashvili had had a hand in generating the crisis. He had allowed his troops to rocket and move into South Ossetia, a breakaway part of his republic that was under the protection of Russian “peacekeepers.” And he had done it when a division-plus of the Russian army was just finishing up a summer exercise near there. Now those and other units were bearing down on him.

  We knew Saakashvili well, and we owed him a lot. As a student, he had done postgraduate work at Columbia and George Washington in a State Department program, and as president he was an unflinching friend of NATO and the West. He had dispatched a brigade of Georgian infantry to Iraq and was trying to pull his country toward a market economy and democracy. But now he was in danger, and Hadley wanted to know what he could tell Saakashvili about Russian capabilities and intentions.

  After promising Steve I’d get back to him quickly, I walked into the outer office and barked at my executive assistants, “Get our Georgia people up here right now!”

  As they were making their calls, I turned to Larry Pfeiffer, my chief of staff, and only half-jokingly asked, “We got Georgia people, right?”

  Turns out we did, and they were good. Within the hour I had gotten a detailed lay-down and was back on the phone with the West Wing. Saakashvili wasn’t out of the woods, but we thought a Russian push to his capital was unlikely.

  Rather than continue south, the Russians hooked west and hived off another breakaway region, Abkhazia, along the Black Sea. Collecting on Russian movement was tough, though. National technical means, spy satellites and such, were less optimized to work against this army than they had once been.

  I remember thinking at the time that we had to get better at this before the Russian army showed up, plowing through the rich black earth of Ukraine (which it did six years later).

  In 2008 we ended up relying a lot on direct observation rather than technical collection. We deployed a squad of case officers into Georgia; we put them into soft vehicles and essentially directed them to drive northwest until they saw Russian armor and then take a GPS reading and phone it in.

  Policy-wise, the United States also came up short. A few navy ships entered the Black Sea to show presence and make whatever observations they could. DOD conducted an emergency airlift of the Georgian brigade (minus its heavy equipment) back home from Iraq. Some American humanitarian supplies also arrived by military aircraft. We toyed with the prospect of reconnaissance flights near or over Georgia, but ultimately rejected that as too dangerous.

  After a few days of fighting, the French brokered a cease-fire calling for a pullback of Russian forces to their pre-conflict lines. A few Russian units moved, but trumped-up arrangements with newly independent South Ossetia and Abkhazia allowed Russian troops to remain there indefinitely. No European governments formally accepted the dismemberment of Georgia, but they also weren’t in the mood for military or even strong economic measures to contest the remapping. Economies were teetering with the US financial meltdown, and Russia was their source of energy.

  American thoughts circled around the concept of inclusion-exclusion. Throwing off the autarkic Soviet model, Russia had fought hard to enter the post–World War II global structure that had been nurtured by the United States: groups like the G8 and the G20 and institutions like the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund. But these were supposed to be councils of like-minded nations, and Russia’s redrawing of European borders hardly fit that description.

  If Russia wanted to be treated like a normal country, it had to act like a normal country, or so our thinking went. But we were very late in the administration, and even the mild sanctions imposed by the United States were withdrawn in May 2010 as part of the Obama administration’s famous “reset.” Russia was eventually suspended from the G8 in 2014 after the invasion of Ukraine, but we let them out of the penalty box far too quickly for Georgia.

  From the agency’s perspective, Georgia was a mixed bag. We had helped Steve Hadley keep Saakashvili from suffering a meltdown. But we had not given Hadley or anyone else any warning of the conflict, even though it was our friends, the Georgians, who had precipitated it.

  The young folks who originally scrambled to my office with their charts and maps certainly were magnificent, and they stood up to the president’s direct questions a few days later when he came to Langley for deeper background. But there weren’t many Russia House veterans around to divine Moscow’s intentions as opposed to just tracking the battle. Counterterrorism and the war on al-Qaeda were gobbling up a lot of agency focus, resources, and talent.

  We didn’t get much sympathy. We were still expected to be global and to do more than “just” fight al-Qaeda. Our government clearly expected that, as did our intelligence partners, or “liaison,” as we call them. Actually, our being global was the basis of any relationship we had with them.

  These partnerships are an exchange of capabilities. CIA is large, powerful, tech savvy, blessed with resources and the ability to take locally derived data and give it greater meaning by fitting it into a global context. The liaison partner is local, focused, agile, and culturally and linguistically smart. We trade off each other for mutual benefit, even when there isn’t much agreement at the policy level between governments.

  In fact, these partnerships are remarkably durable, operating below the surface, even when political relations are stormy. That’s because they enable mutually valuable exchanges between professionals who face common problems, between intelligence establishments that will still be in business and will still be expected to perform when policies and political leaders change.

  These liaison relationships are also based on a large helping of personal trust. That’s why you invite the head of service to your home for dinner, or spend an extra afternoon in his capital so that he can personally show you the sights. That’s why you follow your mom’s advice and eat every (exotic) thing on your plate—and like it. And that’s why you clear your calendar to meet with liaison despite other demands.

  Such friendships were a real bonus, but what we were really doing was building a precious level of confidence—the kind built on shared experience and personal contacts, not on formal memos or minutes.

  A case in point involved a CIA station chief accompanying a cabinet officer to a meeting with a major Middle East partner. At the end of the session, it was agreed that some important data would be exchanged, and the cabinet official said he would have his staff draw up some memos on the arrangement. The head of the foreign service leaned forward, smiled at the official while gently putting his hand on the forearm of the CIA escort, and objected, “Friends do not need memos.”

  Lots of services want to be a friend of the Central Intelligence Agency (and its director) and they go out of their way to show it. Shortly after my arrival at Langley, Bulgaria’s intelligence chief told our office there that he had taken my file out of the archives and was keeping it in his personal safe. I doubt that there was very much embarrassing (or interesting) in the dossier, but Durzhavna Sigurnost (DS)—the former Communist regime’s state security apparatus—was nothing if not thorough, so I imagine the file was pretty thick.

  I had been the air attaché in Communist Bulgaria in the mid-1980s. Attachés are “overt collectors,” so hostile intelligence services know to zero in on them. We were so certain that our apartment was bugged that my wife and I had those little toy erasable pads with a plastic stylus—the kind where you pull up on the top plastic sheet to obliterate what you have just written—i
n every room. Sensitive or just private conversations were conducted via a series of notes passed between us and then immediately erased.

  I had been detained twice by the Bulgarians during my time there, each time prompted by my getting too close to their military activities trying to identify an aircraft or observe an exercise. No rough stuff, just stern formalities, although one of my colleagues doing similar work was shot and killed in East Germany while I was in Bulgaria.

  That wasn’t the result of a nefarious plot, just a nervous Soviet conscript—a Central Asian, I was later told—put into a situation that he was ill-prepared to handle.

  We worked hard to avoid that circumstance. Like on one daylong car ride to observe some nondescript installations in central Bulgaria with my French counterpart. We picked up close DS surveillance almost immediately, and their vehicle stayed locked to our bumper. It was a routine collection trip, but there was a party congress under way, so I guess they weren’t taking any chances. Since we were just driving by barracks on public roads, there was little they needed to do beyond just following us.

  So my French companion and I were a bit surprised and concerned when, while we were stopped at a railroad crossing, the chase car ominously pulled out and came alongside us. I looked to my left to see one of our stalkers pantomime using an imaginary fork to bring imaginary food to his mouth from an imaginary plate. He was right. We had been going for more than six hours without a break. It was time for lunch.