General Michael Hayden, the president's nominee to head the CIA, is
in for a grilling this week. But the expected flaying doesn't have
anything to do with the CIA. Instead, the Senate is eager to use
his confirmation hearings to investigate the National Security
Agency's controversial warrantless wiretapping program and its
creation of a database for tens of millions of domestic phone
calls--both programs that Hayden approved when he headed the
secretive spy outfit. Already, several Republicans have suggested
that Hayden isn't the right man to lead a CIA in crisis.But, if Hayden's Capitol overseers are wary, his troops-to-be are
ecstatic. Over his 19-month tenure, Hayden's much-loathed
predecessor, Porter Goss, turned the agency from a wilderness of
mirrors into a vale of tears, firing longtime operatives for
insufficient political fealty to President Bush and unapproved
chats with reporters. The reaction to Goss's departure--and
presumably that of his lackeys, whom longtime CIA officials
derisively termed "the Gosslings"--has been nothing less than
gleeful. "Thank God," says Buzzy Krongard, the CIA's former
number-three man, who quit in 2004 over Goss's political
strong-arming. "He set the agency way, way back. His legacy is
certainly not one he should be proud of. Porter was very ill-served
by his staff."
By contrast, Hayden's nomination--and the selection as his deputy of
Steve Kappes, a beloved case officer whom Goss forced out--has
signaled that the CIA is set for a long-overdue revival. After all,
Hayden currently serves as the right-hand man to John Negroponte,
the first-ever director of national intelligence. Putting Hayden in
charge of Langley, the thinking goes, is a vote of confidence in
the CIA from the new intelligence czar--and an overdue olive branch
from a White House that has used the agency as a scapegoat for its
foreign misadventures. "I am very strongly a fan of both Mike Hayden
and Steve Kappes," gushes John Brennan, a longtime CIA official
who, until last year, headed the National Counterterrorism Center.
"I've been critical of some of the administration's actions in the
intelligence arena previously, but this shows much better thought
and planning."
In backing Hayden, Negroponte's primary goal is to revitalize the
agency's much-derided human intelligence, or "humint,"
capability--the classic spycraft of infiltrating shadowy terrorist
cells, stealing secrets, and recruiting spies. According to
Negroponte, "the CIA must remain the intelligence community's
premier human intelligence agency." That's a good thing, but CIA
veterans might want to hold their applause. Negroponte's enthusiasm
for espionage is not matched by his enthusiasm for the CIA's other
mission: analyzing the meaning of the information it collects.
Indeed, Negroponte has spent his 13 months as director filching
analysts from the CIA for his own office. Worse, he's changed the
agency's focus to short-term analysis at the expense of peering over
the horizon to forecast future threats. Of course, after Iraq,
there has been little dispute that the agency's crystal ball needs
a vigorous polishing, but Negroponte has been doing more harm than
good. And Hayden's nomination shows that he has no intention of
stopping.
Since September 11, a procession of high-profile commissions
impaneled to scrutinize the CIA emphasized that the agency needs to
improve its spying capabilities. But, while no one disagrees that
better human intelligence is essential to, say, averting the next
train bombing, such information rarely illuminates the broader
context of the threats the U.S. faces--where the next jihadist
sanctuary will emerge, for example. That's a job for analysis:
taking the available data and explaining its implications. At its
best, CIA analysis reveals truths concealed in plain sight, as with
a famous piece of ignored analysis from August 6, 2001, titled,
"Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S." Of course, CIA analysis
has hardly been at its best recently, as when it concluded that
Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological
weapons. But, rather than strengthening the agency's weakened
analytic limb, Negroponte seems intent on amputating it. An
"emerging scenario," according to Steven Aftergood, an intelligence
expert at the Federation of American Scientists, is "the
dismemberment of the CIA and its reduction to the humint
function."
Over the last several months, Negroponte has steadily exerted more
and more control over analysis. Among his first acts as director of
national intelligence was to make himself, and not Goss,
responsible for Bush's daily intelligence briefing, which is now
compiled by Negroponte's personal analyst, Thomas Fingar, a State
Department veteran. Then, Negroponte took the National Intelligence
Council (NIC), the intelligence community's long-range think tank,
out of Langley and incorporated it into his own office. Perhaps
most significantly, he has been appropriating CIA analysts for his
own use. According to Time, about 90 analysts have slowly migrated
from the CIA to Negroponte's office, and even more have gone into
the new community-wide centers for high-priority subjects like
terrorism and weapons proliferation.
This shift is motivated in part by simple institutional interest.
Negroponte is responsible for briefing the president, but he
started his job with few analysts reporting directly to him.
Negroponte, after all, may be the head of the intelligence
community, but he doesn't actually run any of its 16 agencies. (By
contrast, the old director of central intelligence, or DCI, was also
head of the CIA.) Mark Lowenthal, a senior CIA analyst until last
year, explains the resulting dynamic this way: "[Former Deputy DCI]
John McLaughlin put it best when he said, `Do you know why the DCI
relies so heavily on the CIA? It's the only agency that says, "Yes,
sir" when he asks them to do something. Everybody else says, "I'll
get back to you."' So, now, Negroponte is in that situation."
The appropriation of analysts may seem like mundane bureaucratic
reshuffling. But Negroponte isn't just moving analysts from one
office to another. He's also changing how they work. Analysis, say
veterans, is becoming the study of the day's events rather than of
the broader trend--the trees instead of the forest. "Their time
horizons are very short," says Greg Treverton, a former NIC
vice-chairman now at the Rand Corporation. "[Y]ou ask them, `What
about these longer-term questions, like how Al Qaeda is morphing?'
They say, `That's a great question. I wish we could do something on
it, but we just don't have time. '" The CIA, apparently with
Negroponte's approval, even eliminated the agency's premier center
for long-range forecasting, the Strategic Assessments Group. While
CIA spokesman Tom Crispell says there has been "no analytic
capability lost," Robert Hutchings, the NIC chairman from 2003 to
2005, calls it "a retrograde step," noting that the group "did some
of the most imaginative and strategic thinking in all of
government."
Perhaps the biggest change has come to the NIC itself. Before coming
under Negroponte's wing, the NIC was responsible for comprehensive
analysis that drew on data from across the intelligence community,
either in the form of the (supposedly) authoritative National
Intelligence Estimates or reports like 2004's "Mapping the Global
Future," which dealt with high-altitude questions like the effect
of increasing religiosity on the territorial and political
ambitions of Muslim states. Now, the NIC is becoming Negroponte's
analytical shop, lending its focus to what the director needs to
know in preparation for his next Bush briefing or National Security
Council meeting. "This has become almost a total preoccupation for
the NIC," says Hutchings. "What this will mean under any
configuration is that the NIC is no longer as able to do long-range
analysis."
And, for Hutchings, the correlation between short-term analysis and
the recent U.S. strategic blunders is unmistakable. "This
administration has really undermined strategic analysis and
strategic policy-making," he says. "You look at the course of our
involvement in Iraq. It has just been adlibbing from almost the
time main combat stopped." Nor is that happening by accident, he
continues: "The administration has allowed strategic analytic
capacity to erode because it doesn't want strategic analysis. It
wants isolated facts and narrow analysis that it can draw upon to
support its preferred policies."
There's not a soul in Washington who would disagree with the
proposition that the U.S. needs better spying. (Treverton quips,
"That and the tooth fairy get you a quarter.") But analysts are
often seen as subordinate partners in the intelligence world--or,
in the Bush era, disloyal ones. And, as laudatory as Hayden and
Kappes's focus on humint may be, it also risks exacerbating the
intelligence community's analytical decline. Says Lowenthal, "You
can argue about whether or not they get it right all the time,
which is a stupid argument- -they don't, nobody does. But [CIA
analysis] is the main analytical strength of the intelligence
community. So you can't eviscerate it." For that reason, he's
skeptical that Hayden or Kappes will actually further diminish the
role of the agency's analysts. But not everyone is as convinced.
"If there's a vision," says Treverton, "it seems like the vision
for the CIA at play now is like the conception of the [CIA's]
Counterterrorist Center: primarily dominated by operators," with
analysts helping simply to pick their targets. And, by all
accounts, Hayden has been Negroponte's key partner in that vision.
"Negroponte apparently has confidence in him," says longtime
defense wonk John Pike, "and must regard him as an effective
manager who can be trusted to do the right thing without being
watched all the time."
The irony--and possibly the tragedy--is that all these moves were
ostensibly designed to improve analysis. After both the Senate
Intelligence Committee and the RobbSilberman Commission blasted the
CIA for "groupthink" that led to a disastrously wrong picture of
Iraq's WMD capabilities, Negroponte said his shake-up of the CIA
would make the country less vulnerable to a deadly surprise. And,
clearly, the agency needed to do something differently to avoid
further catastrophic errors. But grinding analysis to the smallest
bore makes it more, not less, likely to miss the next threat.
Hayden's hearing will be dominated by the controversy over his
warrantless surveillance at the NSA. His vision of analysis at
Langley will surely be an afterthought at most. As happy as
analysts have been to see Goss go, they may end up finding what
comes after him is worse. Maybe they should have seen that coming,
too.
By spencer ackerman
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