Perhaps it’s appropriate in a world of wheels within wheels, secrets within lies, and deeper shadows in the shadows. But the sources I tapped in Washington and elsewhere about Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden’s appointment as CIA director didn’t offer a whole lot of clarity.
For an ordinary citizen, even one with an ability to plug into specialized knowledge, trying to understand the mysterious ways of our own government has become an exercise akin to the Kremlinology practiced by any number of academics and intelligence analysts during the height of the Cold War. The Kremlin then was generally inaccessible to Westerners, so these specialists tried to divine by indirect signs, such as public statements, the positioning of mucky-mucks at May Day parades, changed biographies in official journals, reading between the lines of Pravda, an occasional espionage product for some, and other techniques, just what those mysterious Soviet leaders were really up to. Some of the educated guesses were better than others, but all amounted to guesses.
We’re in almost the same position with respect to the U.S. government now. You can be pretty sure that the official version is at least not the whole truth and may well be an outright lie. But trying to determine what’s really happening in the puzzle palaces of our government is often remarkably similar to what the Kremlinologists of yore, operating from the other side of the world on scraps of information whose true significance they were hardly in a position to understand completely, were forced to do.
It seems fairly clear to most people that Porter Goss, the former spook and former congresscritter who has been in charge of the CIA for the last year and a half, was at least pushed a bit on his way out the door, though one acquaintance of his told me he has been frustrated and ready to leave for some time. He had expected to be the director of national intelligence, the position that went to longtime diplomatic troubleshooter John Negroponte. Now Negroponte gets the daily face time with the president and Goss didn’t. He and Negroponte were reportedly at loggerheads over a number of issues, including personalities that didn’t exactly mesh. He made plenty of money in Florida real estate between leaving (?) the CIA and running for Congress, so he didn’t need the job to keep body and soul together.
Goss, who came in like gangbusters, including bringing congressional staffers with an inflated sense of their own competence into the CIA in top positions, alienated a lot of people at the CIA. Neocons and conservatives tended to view these conflicts as evidence that Goss was their kind of reformer, rooting out the “traitors” to the administration who had been so impolite as to question the WMD and other raw intelligence “stove piped” to Cheney’s staff to justify an invasion of Iraq. I wonder. I suspect that’s too simplistic an analysis.
Whether it is or not, the appointment of Michael Hayden, who has been an assistant to Negroponte at the ever expanding DNI shop, puts a Negroponte acolyte at CIA and firms Negroponte’s control over at least the civilian side of the intelligence “community,” right? Not so fast, says another informant. Negroponte and Hayden weren’t exactly bosom buddies, and Negroponte was hardly unhappy to have Hayden out of his shop and out from under his nose. Does that portend future conflict between the new CIA director (assuming he’s confirmed, which is hardly a done deal) and Negroponte once the dust begins to clear? Maybe, maybe not.
What seems to be clear is that Hayden has managed to ingratiate himself with the Bush White House. Whether that stems from his years at the National Security Agency, where he carried out both of the Bush secret surveillance programs that have been exposed to public view in the last several months, or to skillful schmoozing since he left the NSA, or a combination thereof is difficult to tell. But considering the Bush White House acumen in personnel matters, if the White House thinks it has a golden boy, chances are he isn’t.
Whether Michael Hayden can bring the Central Intelligence Agency out of its doldrums is a question whose answer we may not have until long after he has left his post as CIA director – assuming he is confirmed. Beyond the tea-leaf-reading about bureaucratic imperatives and personal chemistry, his appointment has raised questions that are worth discussion as the United States struggles to cope with the dangers posed by stateless terrorists motivated more by religious and ideological convictions than by nationalist loyalties and concerns.
As former director of the Defense Department’s National Security Agency, the country’s electronic eyes and ears overseas, or “signals intelligence,” Gen. Hayden has intelligence experience. However, retired Gen. William E. Odom, who also headed the NSA, for three years during the Reagan administration, told me Gen. Hayden seems to “have no clue about human intelligence. Signals intelligence and human intelligence are like swimming and flying an airplane.”
What Gen. Hayden has shown from the beginning of his career, however, is a flair for administrative work, and heading a large – probably too large – organization requires administrative skills that Porter Goss seems to have lacked.
While it would be good public relations for Gen. Hayden to retire from the military before confirmation hearings to head civilian intelligence, his military background may be less an issue than some believe. Gen. Hayden crossed swords with Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld when he headed the NSA. So if he’s not John Negroponte’s errand boy, he just might be better equipped than other possible candidates to resist undue military influence on the CIA. Or maybe not.
Making the CIA more effective, however, will require much more than administrative skills, being respected as a briefer, and being independent. In the age of terrorism perpetrated by jihadist fanatics who may benefit from being associated with a government but don’t have to be, the threats to this country are more dispersed and difficult to identify than in the Cold War days when the chief threat was the Soviet Union, its satellites, and those it could influence.
Gathering accurate information about such dispersed threats is in many ways more of a challenge than spying on nation-states. The U.S. has made mistakes in dealing with jihadism in part because it has had little firsthand intelligence of the kind that only human beings operating in delicate and sometimes dangerous environments can gather. Even with a firm commitment to building such capacity – and there is little evidence even of recognition of the need – it would take years to develop it.
The restoration of U.S. diplomatic relations with Libya, while it will no doubt raise questions and unpleasant memories, is welcome, signaling a desire for normalization on both sides. If it also represents a shift toward realism over rhetoric in U.S. foreign policy it will be even more welcome.
One should not downplay the behavior of Libya’s dictator, Col. Muammar el-Gadhafi. After seizing power in 1969 in a country with significant oil reserves, he renounced agreements and berated the United States, leading to the withdrawal of the U.S. ambassador in 1972. For a while, Gadhafi envisioned himself as an international revolutionary leader, sponsoring coups, invasions, assassination attempts, and terrorist acts across the world.
The U.S. cut off relations in 1979. Libyans were responsible for a bombing in a German disco in 1986, which killed several Americans, leading to a U.S. bombing mission on Tripoli and Benghazi. Libyan agents bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, most of them Americans. Meanwhile, the Libyan people have suffered the abductions and tortures that so often accompany a police state.
In 2003, however, Gadhafi announced that Libya would end its nuclear weapons program and allow U.S. and British inspectors in to check, and Libya has not been an active sponsor of terrorism for some time, which the U.S. State Department acknowledged earlier this month.
The administration has attributed this turnabout to the U.S. invasion of Iraq getting Gadhafi’s attention. There may be some truth to this, but Libya had been seeking to get back in America’s good graces (or at least off the embargo list) since the early 1990s, and talks had been ongoing, sometimes through British or other back channels, since the middle 1990s. Gadhafi apparently decided that being seen as a “rogue” state was increasingly undesirable in a globalizing world and having a nuclear weapon would bring more headaches than real power.
It took a long time for the United States to take this seriously and stipulate the price – $8 million for the family of each Lockerbie victim and other concessions – for normalization. This week the decision was simply formalized.
In a way, this decision puts the lie to U.S. talk about promoting and rewarding democracy and freedom in other countries. Gadhafi is still a thoroughly nasty dictator who plans to pass power to his son.
However, most rulers in most countries, whether democratically chosen or not, have a broad nasty streak. The important question is whether other countries pose a genuine threat to the United States. Gadhafi did – though not as much as he or we pretended – and now he doesn’t.
American leaders have an adolescent tendency to demonize foreign leaders who displease us at a given moment. A more mature approach would see diplomatic recognition as simply that – recognition – rather than using it to reward or punish other countries. That would allow closer monitoring of regimes that might eventually pose a real threat, and more effective means of influencing behavior than simply threatening to take our recognition and go home.
It would be nice to imagine that resuming diplomatic relations with Libya portends an era of seeing and dealing with the world based on realistic assessments of threats rather than moral posturing. Considering this administration’s – and to be fair, this institutional government’s – capacity for inconsistency and incoherence, however, I rather doubt that it does.
