People forget that I was a Clinton appointee to the NSA job. In 2001 the Bush folks were the new guys on the block and we were settling into that new team. It wasn’t particularly hard, except for one issue. Somebody in the new crew wanted to review and vet all the members of our advisory boards. Although it was never explicitly stated, I suspected that party affiliation was the issue. These boards are pretty carefully picked (I did mine personally) and they’re pretty busy; there isn’t room for honorific or emeritus status. I was looking for balance, expertise, and a willingness to work. Now I feared that the criteria would resemble something reminiscent of the 1950s: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the —— Party?” I decided to ignore the call for names for the new people to vet for as long as we could, and then, post-9/11, this just went away.
I had not met President George W. Bush prior to 9/11. I had met his father when I served on his National Security Council staff, and Vice President Cheney had visited Fort Meade early in the administration, but my first encounter with the president was that September 2001 morning when George Tenet ushered me into the Oval to discuss what more NSA could do. After another meeting or two, Stellarwind was under way. I went back periodically to update the president on the program, but the more detailed briefings to Congress over the next years were always in the vice president’s cramped office just down the hall.
I got to know the president a little better when he came out to Fort Meade to encourage and thank the workforce in June 2002. I was alone to greet him on the post parade ground when Marine One landed, and he invited me into the car with him and Andy Card for the short ride to NSA. The route passed the post’s golf courses, prompting speculation that the president might be able to run on the secure 3.5-mile jogging trail that snaked through them.
Once at NSA headquarters, the president jumped into the role of personally thanking folks and listening to them explain their work. His advance team willingly agreed to a press availability under one of our near-ubiquitous “We Won’t Back Down” banners. After stops that included the Stellarwind shop and the operations center, the president mounted a stage we had constructed in the sun-drenched parking lot to a massive roar from the crowd of over five thousand that had gathered.
The president’s message was simple: I appreciate what you do—an important message in the face of congressional inquiries trying to affix blame for 9/11. He was the first president to come to NSA since his father visited after the first Gulf War; “W” visited again in 2006 a few weeks after the New York Times revealed aspects of the Stellarwind program.
President Bush worked the rope line for twenty minutes after his remarks. He autographed notepapers, dollar bills, and NSA access badges (which we then had to replace). It was a great day, marked by genuine emotion on both sides. They were his kind of people. He was their kind of president.
When I became director of CIA, I more routinely met with the president. He poked at my loyalty to the Steelers and took to calling me Mikey in lighter moments. That had actually been my handle growing up, as there were two other Mikes in the house, my grandfather (Big Mike) and my uncle (Brother Mike).
His informality often took me off guard. I was hanging in the small outer office of the Oval, waiting to go in, when the president bellowed, “Mikey, get in here!” As I entered, he gestured toward the fireplace and said, “You know Tony, don’t you?” I turned to see the prime minister of the United Kingdom extending his hand toward mine.
There is a plotline held by some that the real center of power in the Bush administration was the vice president. A more benign version of the story is that a young, untested president was fortunate to have surrounded himself early on with experienced old hands like the vice president, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and the like.
I really had little insight into the inner workings of the administration until the second term. From that perspective, though, there was never any doubt in my mind who the president was. I never left a meeting with George Bush wondering what it was he wanted me to do. And I rarely had an important meeting with the vice president that did not end with the vice president saying, “We’ll have to take that to the president.” And if there was ever any truth about a new president benefiting from older, wiser hands, it was clear to me that the president had grown beyond all of his advisors by the time I approached his inner circle.
People learn and absorb information in different ways. George Bush was an avid reader, as evidenced by the scorecard kept in the office just outside the Oval with a running count of books and number of pages read by him and Karl Rove. But in terms of intelligence, the president really learned in the conversation. It didn’t take long for any briefing with him to go interactive. Questions. Alternative views. Comparisons with past presentations (“That’s not what you told me six months ago”). He was never rude, not even brusque, but he was challenging, and he had an appetite for details. Near fanatic about being punctual, he allotted a lot of time for intelligence briefings so as not to go long and create a domino effect on the rest of his schedule. And he acted on the intelligence.
I participated in my share of substantive intelligence discussions with the president, but the DNI was his principal intelligence advisor. My special relationship with him was through covert action, which we discussed weekly. It included conversations on the specifics of renditions, detentions, and interrogations. I don’t think that later charges by some Democrats that the president was in the dark about such matters were ever true, but they sure as hell weren’t true on my watch. I also updated him weekly about terrorists that were being taken off the battlefield one way or another, and I told him when things didn’t go well too.
For the last six months of the administration he often began these sessions by reminding me how much more time I had to get bin Laden while he was president. He must have been as angry as I was when his successor attributed the successful raid in Abbottabad to his personal re-prioritization: “And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaeda.” That night, watching President Obama’s speech in our kitchen, I turned to Jeanine to mockingly comment, “Damn. Why didn’t they tell me this UBL guy was important?”
Covert actions are always edgy things. In one, we were controlling a plot that included an al-Qaeda bomb maker who had been brought in to attack an American facility. I was getting briefed daily and had good confidence this was all under control; the president was markedly less sanguine, based on his weekly updates. He leaned on me. Hard. Multiple times. The plan worked, though. A talented bomb maker was taken out of circulation. It all showed a level of presidential trust.
Some covert actions are particularly edgy. One such operation was going to have to thread a very narrow needle in every imaginable dimension: law, politics, ethics, operations, diplomacy. Steve Kappes and I wanted one final gut check with the president, which Steve Hadley arranged. We talked for about an hour. The president was patient. Steve Hadley later told me that the president characterized the session as two good Catholic boys clearing the air with him. When we left, we knew that the president believed that if we thought we should and could do this, we would. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t. He was happy with that. He didn’t speak to us about it again.
We did do it. The morning afterward the president walked into a crowded Sit Room, looked my way, and yelled, “Mike!” He gave me a barely perceptible nod, which I returned, and then he turned to the meeting as if nothing had just transpired.
Much later the president invited Jeanine and me (along with the Hadleys and some friends of the First Family) to Camp David for a weekend. Folks arrived midday Saturday, had lunch with the president and First Lady, and then got a few hours of free time while the president pounded the Catoctin Mountain bike trails. We reconvened for a showing in the theater of The Great Debaters, a 1930s Texas period piece about a sma
ll black college challenging the Harvard debate club.
Dinner followed shortly. All meals were informal and family style, and the president stimulated conversation by asking everyone what they were reading. In truth, all I was reading were intelligence cables, but the last book I had read was Friday Night Lights, a controversial account of a football season at a high school in Odessa, Texas. Odessa is just down the road from Midland, where the First Lady was born and the president was raised. If the president thought I was just sucking up, he didn’t let on as he filled in the background on how the book had divided the town.
More important, as we were walking in for one of the meals on the weekend, the president pulled me aside for a private moment. “Mike, how are you doing?” he asked.
“Fine, Mr. President,” I honestly answered.
“I mean spiritually,” he continued, as I slowly understood the nature of his question.
“Mr. President, I’m really fine,” I once more honestly (and firmly) answered.
“Good. Good.”
It’s hard to go through some of this stuff without building some personal bonds, so we really wanted to be at Andrews to say goodbye. I still hesitated for just an instant, though. I still felt that the CIA job should be and be seen as apolitical, which suggested the Mall or just staying away. But the incoming president’s decision to replace me pretty much lightened that load for me. If anyone had made this political, it wasn’t me.
We arrived at Andrews early and were lucky enough to be in the group that could wait in the DV lounge for the arrival of the helicopter from downtown. I knew that lounge well from countless trips in and out of the capital, but the scene this time was markedly different. The usually quiet, spacious, and well-appointed room was packed with folks in what resembled a somber (but not quite funereal) Bush administration reunion. Current and former officials were everywhere.
Most people were in small groups conversing, with one eye on the TV screens as the events downtown unfolded. With the words “So help me God,” spontaneous, polite applause filled the lounge and we then prepared to walk the short distance to the hangar where the now former president would shortly arrive.
The temperature in the hangar was in the high twenties, but we were at least shielded from the blustery winds as the Bushes and the Cheneys disentangled themselves from the ceremony downtown and made their way to the helicopter for a last ride to Andrews.
The crowd there was pretty evenly divided: one part GIs who had served the president in his travels; one part young White House staffers; and one part senior (including cabinet-level) officials. The first two groups ensured that there would be a lot of hooting and hollering when the party arrived from downtown. They didn’t disappoint.
Vice President Cheney had hurt his back, so he entered in a wheelchair with a blanket over his legs, unfortunately looking like he was auditioning for Lionel Barrymore’s role of Mr. Potter in some as yet unannounced remake of It’s a Wonderful Life. The president bounded onstage, acknowledging the loud applause as he scanned the crowd. He noticed Jeanine and me off to one side, made eye contact with a slight hint of surprise in his face, and gave me that almost imperceptible nod he had given me in the Sit Room a year before.
The ceremony, such as it was, was short. The young folks afterward rushed the rope line around the stage, and I turned to leave but was stopped short by my wife, who said she wanted to go up for one last goodbye. So we waited at the very end of the rope line as President Bush made his farewells. When he got to us, Jeanine was in front of me and got a hug. Then President Bush reached beyond Jeanine, grabbed my shoulder, and pulled me toward him. At which point the forty-third president of the United States gave me a warm embrace, practically kissing my forehead, and then wordlessly began to walk toward the waiting 747 for the trip to Texas. Andrews was the right choice.
As the Bush family went to Texas, I went back to work. I would be President Obama’s CIA director for the next three weeks. We continued to make our adjustments to the new team. The president’s staff demanded brevity in written intelligence products, so much so that one analyst labeled what we were writing for the morning briefing as PDB haiku. I gave an operational update, scaling back the detail I knew President Bush had liked, and I was still told never to brief the president on such minutiae again. Given how much President Obama later got into the details of programs like targeted killings, I suspect the early fretting was more from his staff than it was from him.
But that was going to be somebody else’s problem now. I was leaving and sent one final message to the workforce. It read, in part:
Our Agency has chosen a quotation from the New Testament to underscore its core mission: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
Today, though, the Old Testament offers relevant guidance: “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” It is the season and the time for Jeanine and me to say farewell to you, the wonderful men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency. We have been here for nearly three years and consider ourselves privileged to have been a part of you and your work. . . .
You have . . . carried out your duties with integrity and in a manner that respects American law and reflects America’s values. The Nation could ask no more.
You may catch a glimpse of me later in the week but that will largely be me moving out. That’s physically moving out. We will be with you spiritually and emotionally for as long as you will have us.
With Deepest Respect,
Mike Hayden
18th Director of CIA
There was nothing left to do but go. Midafternoon on a cold February Friday, Steve Kappes accompanied Jeanine and me through the front lobby to a waiting car for the drive to our house.
Once home, I turned my mind to preparing for the May Pittsburgh Marathon, for which I had signed up, one of the better life decisions I had ever made. I was hopeful that running ten, twelve, fifteen miles or more a day would ease any transition. I was right.
TWENTY
“GENERAL, THEY’RE GOING TO RELEASE THE MEMOS”
MCLEAN, VA, 2009–2014
Jim, you’re about to spend at least the next forty-six months without a National Clandestine Service.”
When I was a junior officer, the air force taught me to begin a briefing with an attention step. That was the best one I had ever come up with, and I had just used it on the national security advisor.
Jim Jones was an old friend. We had been neighbors at European Command in Germany in the early 1990s and Jim and I had traveled together to Bosnia to coordinate US support to the UN mission in that country.
I was right to call the national security advisor, even if I was out of government now, but I was also trading on friendship. Jim was gracious, took the call, gave me the time I needed to explain my concern, and thanked me (genuinely) for raising the issue.
The issue was this: President Obama—at the urging of Attorney General Eric Holder and White House Counsel Greg Craig—had decided to stop fighting an ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit and had agreed to release four Justice Department legal opinions that laid out in detail the techniques that had been authorized for CIA’s interrogation of high-value terrorists.
Only days before, agency lawyers had been working with Justice and other departments sorting out which of the many available FOIA exemptions they would use to protect various parts of the documents.
The memos had been a bone of contention for years. They were heavily classified as well as protected by legal privilege, and the Bush administration had only reluctantly shared them with an expanding circle of congressional members and staff.
Now Greg Craig was telling John Rizzo, CIA’s acting general counsel, that Justice would be telling the ACLU and the court that the government would release the DOJ memos with minimal redactions.
Rizzo was no stranger to the issue
. He was the acting general counsel because the Senate Intelligence Committee had denied him the head post after he refused in his confirmation hearing to condemn these same DOJ opinions.
Rizzo related the Craig phone call to Deputy Director Steve Kappes, who was equally stunned. He began his own inquiries downtown while directing Rizzo to alert several former directors. That was pretty much standard practice when formers were going to be implicated in breaking news.
Rizzo called me, still with a tone of disbelief in his voice: “General, they’re going to release the memos.” I couldn’t believe it either. In the very same ACLU FOIA suit, CIA had been in front of the court the year before on an almost identical issue. Based on a declaration I signed, the judge had agreed to allow us to continue to protect—on grounds of national security—the specifics of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that had not been used since 2003, that the agency had not authorized for potential use in years, and that we had publicly acknowledged might now very well be illegal under laws recently enacted by Congress. Despite all that, the court agreed that revealing the details of the technique would tie the hands of a president in a future emergency, since, after all, laws and policies could change.
Releasing the memos would also be inconsistent with an administration commitment not to look backward. During the transition, the new president and his team assured me there would be no retrospectives, no witch hunts, no persecution.
Indeed, when I finally got my “Dear John” phone call from the president-elect, he told me that my departure from CIA would help reinforce that message. A new director would make it easier for the president to stick to his policy and his pledge to move ahead.
After mulling the situation for a few hours, I called Jim Jones from the parking lot of a northern Virginia shopping center after dropping my wife off at her book club. The next day I spoke with White House Counsel Greg Craig and the following day, with Jim’s deputy, Tom Donilon.
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror Page 41
