Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror
Page 47
By the time I was director of CIA, I had added a fourth Venn oval—one labeled “Politically Sustainable.” Presidents (and their intelligence agencies) get to do some things one-off based on raw executive authority. But no president, even a popular one, gets to do anything forever without bringing in the other political branches and, directly or indirectly, the American people.
Beyond a narrow base of lawfulness and just raw effectiveness, actions need to have political and policy legs, and they have to be created by informed debate. So sustaining an RDI program (chapters 10 and 12) simply required me to be more public about it. It’s hard to build a political consensus if people think you aren’t leveling with them.
• • •
OF COURSE, all of this is premised on the belief that American espionage is worth doing and worth defending. In my class at George Mason, I usually begin each semester by asking the students if espionage and all of its secrecy is compatible with a democracy. They usually say that it is. I’m pretty sure they believe it, too, even allowing that the guy asking (and ultimately grading) them is the former head of CIA and NSA.
I conclude the discussion with a more challenging proposition. “Rather than just being compatible with a democracy, espionage is essential to it. Frightened people don’t make good democrats. No spies. Less security. Less freedom.”
I then tell the class about the Washington premiere of the first episode of AMC’s miniseries TURN, a dramatized version of the espionage exploits of George Washington’s Culper Ring on Long Island during the Revolution. Jeanine and I were invited, and we enjoyed the showing, which was at the National Archives, and I got to participate in a panel following it. On the panel I celebrated the fact that the Culper Ring was being memorialized in popular culture and being memorialized there, at the archives, within twenty-five yards of the Constitution and a copy of the Magna Carta.
I admitted that “the American public has an uneasy relationship with espionage agencies. It’s just back and forth.” Part of that (not surprisingly) is the public’s incomplete knowledge. “You know about Benedict Arnold. You know about Nathan Hale. . . . [But there is] an absolute, iron rule about espionage: You know about the spies who fail. You don’t know about the spies who succeed.”
And that’s why I welcomed the moment (and the TV series), since it gave me the opportunity to note that the nation’s first spymaster was its first president. He even insisted on and got a covert-action budget from Congress. The point was that this was thoroughly American: “Espionage is as old as the republic,” I said. “Baseball, apple pie . . . it goes back to our roots.”
But being necessary and traditional doesn’t make it easy. I end that first session with my GMU students with a reading of Plato’s parable of the cave and its probing questions about appearances and realities and the challenges of discovering truth.
“Can we ever really know the truth?” I ask and then continue by describing a conversation I had three decades earlier with a political officer in Communist Bulgaria. Frustrated by some of his remarks during a lengthy discussion (the subject of which I have long forgotten), I blurted out to him in frustration, “What is truth to you?” and he just as quickly answered, “Truth? Truth is what serves the Party.”
Which sets the stage for talking about the true nature of intelligence, or at least the nature of intelligence in a modern democracy. I liken the intelligence-policy dialogue as a room with two doors, one labeled intelligence, the other reserved for the decision maker. Since the decision maker can range from a tactical commander, to a cabinet secretary, to a president, the “room” can range from a canvas-covered tactical operations center, to an ornate office, to an oval one.
In any case, the dynamics are the same. Even though the two enter through separate doors, the intelligence professional must connect with the decision maker. Ideally, that would be in the center of the room, but even if it is not, the job of intelligence is to impose itself on the thinking of the other, no matter how far one has to walk to capture him.
And that can be hard, since to legitimately enter through the intelligence door, one has to be fact-based and see the world as it is, while the policy maker is rightly vision-based (taking us somewhere) and picturing the world as he/she would like it to be.
The intelligence door demands thinking based on inductive reasoning. Swimming in a sea of particulars, the intelligence officer is working to create the general, be that a judgment, a conclusion, or even just the controlling narrative (Sir, what we thought was an insurgency in Iraq is now clearly a civil war). The policy maker trends powerfully deductive, trying to apply his or her first principles (the ones that swayed the electorate) to a specific circumstance (Give me the prisoner-by-prisoner plan to close Guantánamo, as I promised to do).
The intelligence professional trends pessimistic. Bob Gates once quipped that when a CIA analyst stops to smell the flowers, he always looks around for the hearse. If the policy maker isn’t an optimist, he or she wouldn’t pursue the job. (Remember, they said they would make things better.)
The trick is for the fact-based, inductive, world-as-it-is pessimist to get into the head of the vision-based, deductive, world-as-we-want-it-to-be optimist without betraying his own roots (and his legitimacy for being there in the first place). And to do it knowing that with every sentence, he is making the policy maker’s day worse than it would otherwise have been (Mr. President, looks like we may have a near-complete nuclear reactor in eastern Syria or Mr. President, given what we know, I would NOT characterize ISIS as the JV team).
Intelligence does not set policy, but when done right, it sets the right- and left-hand boundaries for any rational policy discussion. That is its critical contribution.
On balance, American intelligence masters the art and science of this process pretty well. It is the only intelligence community today that is or is required to be global, and how well it performs that task is best reflected in the number of foreign intelligence services that routinely make the pilgrimage to Langley to enlist support and cement cooperation. There have been mistakes and failures, and I have participated in my share of them, but it is also a truism that there is only so much even good intelligence can do in the service of flawed policy.
But now there are bigger questions than just the competency of American spying. Despite the roots going back to Washington, espionage has never sat easy on the American psyche. At NSA I was fond of saying, “The agency requires only two things to be successful. We need to be powerful and we need to be secretive. And we live in a political culture that distrusts only two things.”
Power and secrecy, of course.
We are seeing that play out today in dramatic tones, many of them dark. There are many who, on learning what measures have been taken to deal with new flavors of threat (like terrorism) or new technologies (like a single global integrated cyber grid), have assumed the worst and have been unrelentingly critical of what they have dubbed the “surveillance state.”
Others have unfairly labeled any such concerns as perforce emanating from the permanently paranoid, black-helicopter-fearing, tinfoil-hat-wearing crowd.
I really do try to point out that this is NOT a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, as some seem to assume. This is the normal job of balancing that free people assume when they are serious about both their security and their liberty. We have a history of tacking back and forth on this issue as broader conditions (like the nature and level of threat) dictate.
I am fond of reminding audiences that soon after throwing out George III for his overbearing rule, we became disenchanted with the successor government under the Articles of Confederation, since it was too weak to protect the country or do much of anything that we expect governments to do. The miracle of Philadelphia fixed that with a much stronger centralized authority—strong enough to be feared, actually, so that almost immediately it was constrained by the quick pas
sage of ten amendments to limit its power, the Bill of Rights. We’ve seen this movie before. In fact, we’ve been in it.
Fears of the “surveillance state” and “rogue agencies” are now emanating from the impassioned right as much as the impassioned left. In early 2015 I agreed to appear at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference—the annual rally/convention/revival in Washington. I was to debate Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News’ resident libertarian jurist, on NSA’s 215 program. The judge and I know each other and actually are friends. I expected it to be fun, and it was.
After the judge opened with a predictably harsh diatribe dripping with emotive constitutional references, I stood up and began by saying, “Judge Napolitano is an unrelenting libertarian,” to the cheers of many of the thousands of twenty-something libertarians in the crowd.
As the cheering died down, I continued, “And so am I,” a remark that generated some catcalls, some booing, and at least one shouted, “No, you’re not!”
Undeterred, I then added that I was a libertarian who, for most of his adult life, was charged with fulfilling another part of that foundational document, the part that said, “Provide for the common defense.” And I reminded the young crowd that their favorite part didn’t protect them from all searches, just unreasonable ones. And so it went for thirty more minutes.
As I was walking offstage I didn’t turn as I heard a female voice shout, “You’re a liar, Hayden. You have blood on your hands.” I didn’t turn because I judged her to be unpersuadable. No sense trying. She had her world. The rest of us had ours.
Or I, at least, had mine.
• • •
I HAVE SPENT my adult life working in American intelligence. It has been quite an honor. Generally well resourced. A global mission. No want of issues.
And it was a hell of a ride: from the DMZ in Korea to Masada in Israel; from war-ravaged Sarajevo to hyperelegant Geneva; from Baghdad under siege to Sofia under communism; from ancient Addis Ababa to modern London; from isolated Guantánamo to teeming Bamako.
I got to meet the likes of a criminal Ratko Mladić (Bosnian Serb commander), an imperturbable Li Chan Bok (North Korean negotiator), a tough Alvaro Uribe (president of Colombia), a heroic Abdullah II (king of Jordan), a subtly urbane Mohammed bin Zayed (crown prince of Abu Dhabi), a frenetic Nicolas Sarkozy (president of France), a distasteful Saif al-Islam (son of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi), and a whole lot more.
Mostly, though, what stands out is the mission—defending a republic as worthy as ours is—and the people, those noble individuals who mentored me as a junior officer, those I befriended, those I may have helped along the way, and all those who still toil in the shadows and keep the secrets.
Washington’s spy ring on Long Island was called the Culper Ring after the alias of its chief agent. It was formed after a previous attempt at espionage on Long Island and in New York City had tragically failed with the execution of twenty-one-year-old Nathan Hale. There is a statue of Hale in a quiet, shaded spot on the CIA campus between the Original Headquarters Building and the Bubble, the agency’s auditorium.
Every CIA director gets to design a personal coin that he can give to top performers. The front side is standard, the agency shield, but the back side is up to each director. As a history major, I toyed with the idea of putting an imprint of Hale’s statue there. My deputy, Steve Kappes, immediately objected. “You realize he was killed on his first mission, right? And never got any useful information for Washington?”
As usual, Steve was right. I dropped the idea, but held close the thought that success in this business was not guaranteed and failure brought with it a great price. Hale was executed, after all, and the British held New York for the rest of the war.
My daily routine as CIA director began at 5:30 a.m. with a three-mile run along the Potomac, a quick shower, and a thirty-minute drive to Langley in the back of an armored SUV with my PDB briefer. We went over what would be shown to the president at eight o’clock, and then a whole lot of reporting not yet ready for prime time, plus a stack of operational cables from CIA stations and bases. The whole drill took a little more than an hour on average, half in the car, half after we got to the office. Reading that book every day made it hard to maintain a positive view of human nature. It was clear that there was evil afoot in the world.
Facing that evil, sharing a responsibility to prevent or at least deflect it, I sometimes contemplated what the twenty-first-century equivalent of Hale’s failure might be.
That conjured up some very dark thoughts, some very dark thoughts indeed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of the joys of this project was reestablishing contact with dozens of old friends who freely gave of their time to chat, to reminisce, and to correct both my memory and my prose.
My methodology was pretty straightforward: take advantage of a long domestic or international flight to hammer out (from memory) the summary of a chapter and then identify the people and documents I would need to make sure I got it right, got it complete, and (I would hope) got it interesting.
Over the course of eighteen months I conducted over seventy interviews. I am deeply grateful for all the cooperation, but for fear of leaving someone out and, frankly, to spare my former colleagues the danger of unwarranted editorial abuse or legal harassment by a small fraction of the people they have worked so hard to protect, I have chosen not to mention specific names.
Special thanks, though, to groups like the NSA professionals who set up the Stellarwind program and operated it so professionally and came to my interview with stacks of documents detailing the program’s effectiveness. The same for those involved in the CIA detention program, equally anxious for the chance to tell their side of the story. Not surprisingly, the legal staffs at both agencies were also enthused by the opportunity to set the legal record straight. Everyone I spoke to was willing to be judged on what he or she had actually done and wanted that record out there.
I had wonderful staff support while at CIA, NSA, and ODNI, and I relied heavily on the extensive contemporaneous notes of my executive assistants, chiefs of staff, and others. Kudos to all of them, too, for helping me decipher their handwriting and for the rich verbal detail they willingly provided on nearly forgotten episodes.
Real practitioners of the craft of intelligence rarely get a chance to step outside of themselves and talk about and grade their own work. CIA station chiefs and NSA SIGINT collectors and analysts from both agencies did exactly that during my discussions with them. They were candid about what worked and what didn’t, where they were right and where they were wrong. I have tried to reflect their honesty in the narrative.
Of course, not every officer was willing to talk to me. Two folks, both very prominent in the counterterrorism effort, politely declined. I consider them both good friends, but true to their own code, they just don’t talk to anyone, not even a friendly former director writing a book. Ya gotta respect that.
Requests to interview serving intelligence officials were handled by NSA and CIA headquarters, as were my many requests for documents. Special thanks to all for the responsiveness. Frankly, I was surprised how much of a director’s daily routine is chronicled and archived and retrievable. These were largely the same folks who had to judge what I could and couldn’t say when it came to classification. They were firm when they had to be, but understanding and helpful where they could.
To make sure that I reflected policy debates accurately I also checked in with my executive branch colleagues, cabinet officers, and White House officials. All were generous and candid. My thanks.
I have also drawn on other writing I have done since leaving government, especially my more or less regular columns for CNN, the Washington Times, and World Affairs Journal. Being able to further develop thoughts first mentioned there added much to the current narrative.
That narrative ended up being a solo work, but I need to menti
on Vernon Loeb, former Washington Post reporter and metro desk editor, who first proposed we collaborate on this project. Before we were barely under way, Vernon opted out in favor of an editor’s desk in Houston, but it was his initiative that got me moving.
Finally, I really wanted all of this to be readable, so I tried out chapter drafts on my wife and our adult children. They were generous in sharing their thoughts on my prose, grammar, organization, and logic. They also were very encouraging, sometimes explicitly pointing out the responsibility to leave my story for the grandchildren.
The family’s inputs really helped the storytelling. If anything remains that is wrong, inelegant, redundant, or superfluous, the fault is fully mine.
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
Abbottabad, 204–5, 329n, 338, 340, 341, 373
Abdul Aziz bin Saud, King, 321
Abdullah I of Jordan, 322
Abdullah II of Jordan, 322–24, 431
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, 320–21, 322
Abkhazia, 311, 312
Abramson, Jill, 118
Abu Ghraib, 188–89, 384, 385, 394
Addington, David, 70, 71, 72–73, 81, 85, 87, 366
Afghanistan, 30, 31, 39, 45, 53, 65, 66, 104, 136, 148, 195, 206–10, 223, 242, 292, 293, 295, 305, 329, 334–36, 347–49, 357
Biden in, 208
Durand Line and, 209, 349
Hayden in, 206, 207–10
Kabul, 30, 31, 204, 206, 207–8, 316, 349
Khost, 210, 323, 394
Korean missionaries in, 324