The Bush administration, which emerged from the September 11 2001 attacks vowing to make the United States safe from terrorists, was yesterday warned that it risked provoking a new crisis over intelligence if the president appointed a controversial general to head the CIA. Bush is widely expected to nominate General Michael Hayden as head of the intelligence agency on Monday, three days after the abrupt departure of the agency’s director, Porter Goss.
The choice of a career military officer to lead the CIA was criticised by Republicans and Democrats yesterday for concentrating control of intelligence in the Pentagon.
The nomination of Hayden has deepened doubts about the independence and effectiveness of an organisation still struggling with its failures in the Iraq war and the September 11 attacks. Hayden’s appointment would be controversial, moreover, because as a former director of the National Security Agency he was the architect of a programme to eavesdrop on American telephone calls and e-mails without court oversight.
The latest tumultuous chapter in the recent history of the CIA opened on Friday, when Goss resigned after less than two years in the post. No official reason was given, but his exit was linked to his failure to win the confidence of senior CIA staff and to his bruising bureaucratic power struggles with the National Intelligence Director, John Negroponte, who wanted to hive off the CIA’s analytical branch. The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has also been pressing for the Pentagon to take over some of the CIA’s work in foreign intelligence.
In addition, at least one of Goss’s closest aides is under investigation for possible links to a corruption scandal in which members of Congress were plied with bribes and prostitutes in return for defence contracts. A former California Republican congressman, Duke Cunningham, is serving eight years in jail in the widening scandal.
Amid this atmosphere of crisis, a leading Republican congressman warned on Sunday that he feared the CIA would be compromised by putting the agency under the control of a serving military officer. ”Putting a general in charge — regardless of how good Mike is — is going to send the wrong signal to the agency in Washington, but also to agents in the field around the world,” Peter Hoekstra, the Republican chair of the house intelligence committee, told Fox television.
Republican as well as Democratic members of the Senate intelligence committee, which must approve Bush’s choice of CIA director, have also expressed reservations about expanding the Pentagon’s control over intelligence. ”You can’t have the military control most of the major aspects of intelligence,” Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator from California, a member of the committee, told ABC TV.
Some critics say Hayden lacks the background in human intelligence that is meant to be the CIA’s new focus. The NSA concentrates on signals and satellites intelligence. He also presents a convenient target for critics of the domestic eavesdropping programme.
Although the White House is said to be confident of public support for the wiretaps — which the administration calls the terrorist surveillance programme — a number of senators said they planned to use Hayden’s confirmation hearings to press for fuller disclosure on eavesdropping.
”I believe this nomination will give us an opportunity to try to find out what the programme is,” Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican chairperson of the Senate judiciary committee, told Fox TV.
Hayden has a reputation for toughness and his public defence of the warrantless surveillance programme showed his aggressiveness. Matthew Aid, a historian who is writing a book on the NSA, said: ”He can be an SOB if he wants to be.”
As the battle lines were being drawn on Capitol Hill, there was further speculation in intelligence circles on the circumstances of Goss’s departure. In his brief and stormy tenure at the CIA, he was believed to have clashed regularly with the newly created overlord for intelligence, Negroponte.
However, some analysts said while they were engaged in a struggle over resources, there were also clashes over the CIA’s assessment of Iraq.
”Iraq played a much bigger role than people realise,” said a former CIA counter-terror expert. ”The agency estimates on Baghdad continued to be very pessimistic and continued to alarm the White House.”
Backstory
The low morale and exodus of senior officers during the brief and stormy tenure of Porter Goss as head of the CIA masks a bitter power struggle over control of intelligence between the agency and the Pentagon. The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is making aggressive moves to expand the Pentagon’s role in intelligence-gathering in the US’s so-called war on terror. The Special Operations Command has now assumed the leading role in the activities associated with the ”war on terror”, and clandestine military teams have been deployed around the world to gather intelligence and mount operations. The Pentagon now has the authority to deploy teams without informing resident US ambassadors. – Guardian Unlimited Â