Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror

423 Pages·2016·2.31 MB·English

by  Michael V. Hayden

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Hayden, Michael V. (Michael Vincent), 1945-Title:
Playing to the edge : American intelligence in the age of terror / Michael V. Hayden.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044201 (print) | LCCN 2015049127 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594206566 (hardback) | ISBN
9780698196131 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Intelligence service—United States. | National security—United
States. | United States. Central Intelligence Agency. | United States. National Security Agency. | BISAC:
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Political. | POLITICAL SCIENCE Political Freedom & Security
Intelligence. | HISTORY United States 21st Century.
Classification: LCC JK468.I6 H39 2016 (print) | LCC JK468.I6 (ebook) | DDC
327.1273—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044201
This does not constitute an official release of U.S. Government information. All statements of fact, opinion, or
analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S.
Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government
authentication of information endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed solely for
classification.
Version_1
To my wife, Jeanine, who lived this as fully as I did, but who sacrificed more along the way
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
ONE
THE SYSTEM IS DOWN
FORT MEADE, MD, 1999–2000
TWO
A NATIONAL TREASURE . . . FOR HOW MUCH LONGER?
FORT MEADE, MD, 2001–2005
THREE
GOING TO WAR . . . WITH SOME HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS
FORT MEADE, MD, 2001–2003
FOUR
GOING TO WAR . . . AGAIN AND AGAIN
FORT MEADE, MD, 2002–2005
FIVE
STELLARWIND
FORT MEADE, MD, 2001–2003
SIX
GOING PUBLIC . . . WILLINGLY AND OTHERWISE
FORT MEADE, MD, AND WASHINGTON, DC, 2004–2008
SEVEN
THE PUBLIC’S RIGHT TO KNOW . . . AND BE SAFE
FORT MEADE, MD, AND LANGLEY, VA, 1999–2009
EIGHT
LIFE IN THE CYBER DOMAIN
SAN ANTONIO, TX—FORT MEADE, MD—LANGLEY, VA, 1996–2010
NINE
IS THIS REALLY NECESSARY?
THE ODNI, 2005–2006 AND BEYOND
TEN
“I WANT YOU TO TAKE OVER CIA”
WASHINGTON, DC, MAY–SEPTEMBER 2006
ELEVEN
THREE “EASY” PIECES
BAGHDAD, ISLAMABAD, KABUL, 2006
TWELVE
A UNIQUE VIEW
LANGLEY, VA, 2007–2008
THIRTEEN
GOING HOME
PITTSBURGH, PA, 1945–2014
FOURTEEN
“NO CORE. NO WAR”
AL-KIBAR, SYRIA, 2007–2008
FIFTEEN
ESPIONAGE, BUREAUCRACY, AND FAMILY LIFE
LANGLEY, VA, 2006–2009
SIXTEEN
IRAN: BOMBING OR THE BOMB?
LANGLEY, VA, 2007–2009
SEVENTEEN
A GLOBAL ENTERPRISE
LANGLEY, VA, 2007–2009
EIGHTEEN
“THERE WILL BE NO EXPLAINING OUR INACTION”
WASHINGTON, DC, 2002–2009 AND BEYOND
NINETEEN
TRANSITION
CIA, NOVEMBER 2008–FEBRUARY 2009
TWENTY
“GENERAL, THEY’RE GOING TO RELEASE THE MEMOS”
MCLEAN, VA, 2009–2014
TWENTY-ONE
THE PRIVATE SECTOR
WASHINGTON, DC, 2009–2014
Acknowledgments
Index
FOREWORD: WHY THIS BOOK?
I
had just walked out into the glare of the hot sun of the Australian outback,
made even more harsh by the darkened light and digital screens of the
windowless operations floor I had just departed. I was in Pine Gap, almost in the
middle of nowhere. When you land at the local airport and travel the short
service road to the main highway, you are greeted by a road sign. The closest
town, Alice Springs, is a little more than ten kilometers to the right. Go left and
the next important landmark, the near-mystic and locally sacred Ayers Rock
(Uluru), is 450 kilometers away.
As we shielded our eyes from the sun, I turned to my Australian counterpart
and asked if he ever wanted to explain to his citizens, and especially to his
critics, the quality of the work we had just witnessed inside the facility. Actually,
I said something along the lines of “Wouldn’t you love to be able to show people
exactly what we do?” He quickly responded that he would.
Critics, observers, and just average citizens don’t know as much about
intelligence as they want or should. A goal of this book is to help address that.
Okay. We can’t go to the outback, but we can go behind the scenes. These
pages are my best effort to show to the American people what their intelligence
services actually do on their behalf. No Jack Bauers or Jason Bournes here,
though. Just hardworking and dedicated Americans whose labor deserves
understanding, appreciation, and even occasional criticism. This is a memoir, so
I have to tell the story through my eyes, but I hope those about whom I write see
it as their story as well.
Of course, there are limits. Classification and such. Frankly, there are too
many limits and that hurts the community I served and still love, and the
republic it serves. But I have pushed as hard as prudence and the law (and CIA’s
Publications Review Board) allow.
Even with stops as an ROTC instructor and some stretches in policy, I can
still rightly be described as a career intelligence officer: reading out satellite
imagery as a lieutenant at Strategic Air Command headquarters; supporting B-52
operations in Southeast Asia from Guam; head of intelligence at a tactical fighter
wing in Korea; an overt intelligence collector as air attaché in Communist
Bulgaria; chief of intelligence for US forces in Europe during the Balkan Wars;
commander of the air force’s intelligence arm based in Texas.
I enjoyed nearly every minute of those jobs, but this book is less about them
than about the last ten years of my government service, the decade I spent at the
national level as director of the National Security Agency (DIRNSA), the first
principal deputy director of National Intelligence (PDDNI), and director of the
Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA).*
There were policy and international issues aplenty in those years (1999–
2009), and most of them touched on and were touched by intelligence. Many are
recounted here from the perspective I had from those positions. The narrative
reflects the always important, but sometimes delicate, relationship between
intelligence and the policy makers that it serves. There’s a healthy dose also of
the even more delicate relationship with congressional oversight.
There’s a chapter or three on bureaucracy as well. After all, the budgets of the
agencies I headed are measured in the billions of dollars, their personnel counts
are in the tens of thousands, and their presence is global. Organization, budgets,
and personnel decisions matter, not so much in their own right, but as enablers of
performance and mission success. Getting the overall structure right has been a
pursuit of American intelligence for more than a decade.
Anyone running a large organization will understand how limited the tools of
a CEO or a commander or a director really are. He or she can move (or get
more) money, move boxes on an organizational chart, change out people, and
exhort and inspire. That’s just about the whole toolbox. I’ve always found it
difficult to actually finish reading a book on management or leadership, but I’ve
nonetheless laid out my experiences here.
Then there’s the spooky stuff—espionage, covert action, and the like. There’s
a lot of that even if there’s more to be told that’s not tellable now. A lot of the
spooky stuff is about terrorism, but NSA and CIA have global responsibilities,
so other topics will appear as well.
The telling is largely chronological, starting with events at NSA and
proceeding through the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)
and CIA. Once engaged on a topic, though, I sometimes play it forward and play
it back. The chapter on cyber, for example, comes naturally during my time at
NSA, but to tell the tale properly I have to begin in Texas in the 1990s and play
it forward through my time at CIA and beyond. There’s some of that with
detentions and interrogations too.
Since this is a memoir, its center of gravity is the past, which will perforce
drag in issues like renditions, detentions, interrogations, and the badly
mislabeled “domestic surveillance” program. But in the writing I was struck by
how much my experiences pulled me toward the future, toward things like the
cyber domain and its challenges, a domain of conflict and cooperation whose
importance seems to grow by the hour.
And, perhaps even more important, I was pulled toward the challenge of the
long-term relationship between American espionage and the American people in
an era of shrinking trust in government and expanding global threats.
I could be accused of grading my own work, but I believe that despite our
flaws, we’re actually pretty good at this spy stuff. We need to preserve that
capacity. The world is not getting any safer, and espionage remains our first line
of defense.
The growing difficulty of that challenge helped prompt the title of this work:
Playing to the Edge. The reference is to using all the tools and all the authorities
available, much like how a good athlete takes advantage of the entire playing
field right up to the sideline markers and endlines.
In espionage, that often proves controversial, and I fear we will not be able to
do that in the future without our public’s deeper understanding of what
American intelligence is and does, without our doing (at least metaphorically)
what I suggested to my Australian counterpart that sunny afternoon. So I
committed to tell this story, a story shared by the thousands of folks with whom I
have worked.
At bottom, it was a blessing to be part of such a noble enterprise.