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Michael V. Hayden
When Michael V. Hayden
became director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in late
May 2006, he took on what Michael Vickers, a Pentagon consultant and
former CIA official, described to reporters for the Washington
Post (May 7, 2006, on-line) as "the most important job in the
U.S. government when it comes to fighting the global war on
terrorism." He also assumed responsibility for restoring the
reputation of an agency whose place in the U.S. intelligence
community had become uncertain, in part due to the creation in 2005
of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which was
charged with overseeing all national intelligence activity. Hayden
brought a wealth of experience to his new post. A former
intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force, in which he attained the
rank of general, Hayden served as the director of the National
Security Agency (NSA) from 1999 to 2005 and as the CIA's deputy
director in 2005 and 2006. In those positions he earned a reputation
as a low-key but strong and thoughtful leader. The retired vice
admiral Thomas Wilson, a former head of the Defense Intelligence
Agency and a longtime friend of Hayden's, said to Greg Miller for
the Los Angeles Times (May 7, 2006) that with Hayden at the
helm of the CIA, "I would expect to see a real strong effort to
bring the agency more fully engaged with the rest of the
intelligence community. Always, one of the issues with the CIA was
its unwillingness to share information and sources. I would think
[Hayden] would try to further the progress that has been made [in
sharing information]." Hayden is "exceedingly smart, he's very
hardworking, he has great integrity, and he knows the intelligence
business," Brent Scowcroft, a former government official and air
force general, said to Scott Shane for the New York Times
(May 18, 2006). "That's a combination that's really needed right now
at C.I.A."
Michael Vincent Hayden was born on March 17, 1945 in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, into a large extended Irish-Catholic family, and
raised on Pittsburgh's working-class North Side. His father, Harry
Hayden, was a welder for a company that produced electrical
transformers; his mother, Sadie, was a homemaker. Hayden has one
brother, Harry III, and one sister, Debbie. As a boy Hayden was an
exceptional student; his father has recalled returning home from
work after midnight, or leaving the house before dawn, and finding
Hayden alone in his room, studying. Hayden also played quarterback
for the football team at St. Peter's parochial school. Dan Rooney,
the son of Art Rooney, who founded the Pittsburgh Steelers
professional football team in 1933, was Hayden's football coach.
(Dan Rooney is currently the owner and chairman of the Steelers.)
"He wasn't the biggest or the strongest kid on the team, but he was
the smartest," Rooney recalled to Scott Shane. "He exuded
confidence, and the other kids gathered confidence from him."
Hayden's family and the Rooneys were well acquainted as parishioners
at the same local church, and as a teenager Hayden took a job as a
ballboy for the Steelers.
After graduating near the top of his
class at North Catholic High School, Hayden enrolled at Duquesne
University, a private Catholic institution in Pittsburgh. (While in
college he worked as an intern in the Steelers' offices.) He earned
a B.A. degree in history in 1967, the year he joined Duquesne's Air
Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program; he later
graduated with distinction from the ROTC. In 1969 Hayden received a
master's degree in modern American history from Duquesne; he wrote
his master's thesis on the effects of the Marshall Plan on
post-World War II Europe. During that period he supported himself
and his wife, Jeanine Carrier, whom he had married shortly after
completing his undergraduate studies, by driving a cab, teaching,
coaching football at St. Peter's, and also moonlighting as a bellhop
at the private Duquesne Club.
Also in 1969 Hayden went on active duty
with the air force. He was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant
on June 7, 1970 and to captain on December 7, 1971. Meanwhile, from
January 1970 until January 1972, he was stationed at the
headquarters of the Strategic Air Command at the Offutt Air Force
Base, in Nebraska, where he was an analyst and briefer. From 1972 to
May 1975, he was assigned to Anderson Air Force Base, in Guam, where
he was the chief of the Current Intelligence Division. In the summer
of 1975, Hayden completed coursework at the air force's Academic
Instructor School, located on the Maxwell Air Force Base, in
Montgomery, Alabama. He would go on to complete assignments at
Squadron Officer School at the Maxwell Air Force Base, in 1976; at
Air Command and Staff College, also in Montgomery, in 1978; at
Defense Intelligence School at Anacostia Naval Annex, in Washington,
D.C., in 1980; at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk,
Virginia, in 1983; and at Air War College at the Maxwell Air Force
Base, also in 1983. After completing instructor school, Hayden
served until 1979 as an academic instructor and commandant of cadets
at the St. Michael's College ROTC program, in Winooski, Vermont. He
was promoted to the rank of major on June 1, 1980.
That same month Hayden was assigned the
post of chief of intelligence in the 51st Tactical Fighter Wing, at
Osan Air Force Base, in South Korea. There, he earned a reputation
among the officers assigned to his command as an affable leader,
more of "a mentor than a commanding officer," as Vernon Loeb
reported for the Washington Post (July 29, 2001). Gene Tighe,
an intelligence officer under Hayden's command, said to Loeb,
"[Hayden] wanted us to see the temples, the rice paddies, go
shopping in Hong Kong. He took a vested interest in making you feel
important." After spending more than a year, from January 1983 until
July 1984, at Air Attache Training School, in Washington, D.C.,
where he learned to speak Bulgarian, Hayden moved to the U.S.
Embassy in Sofia, in the Republic of Bulgaria. In one of his many
assignments there, according to the Washington Post (May 7,
2006, on-line), Hayden traveled by train across the countryside
disguised as a working-class native in order to eavesdrop on the
conversations of Bulgarian soldiers. He was promoted to the rank of
lieutenant colonel on February 1, 1985.
When he returned to the U.S., in July
1986, Hayden was without assignment until recruited by Charles Link,
then a colonel, for a position at the air force's headquarters, at
the Pentagon, in Washington, D.C. For the next three years, Hayden
served as a politico-military affairs officer in the strategy
division of the air force. His deft handling of his responsibilities
there won him the approval of General Charles Boyd, then the air
force's director of plans, who observed in Hayden an "ability to
think conceptually and put his thoughts down on paper," as Vernon
Loeb phrased it. Boyd said to Loeb, "[Hayden's] got the soul of a
historian. . . . He thinks things are explainable on the basis of
how things have been. It's a scholarly bent, combined with an
exceptional sensitivity to human behavior." Boyd later recommended
Hayden for a position on the National Security Council, under Brent
Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush's national security adviser.
Hayden worked for two years as the director for defense policy and
arms control on the National Security Council (alongside the current
U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice); part of his
responsibility in that position was to write the national security
adviser's annual strategic policy document. He was promoted to
colonel in 1990. From July 1991 to May 1993, Hayden was the chief of
staff for the secretary of the air force at the Pentagon. He was
again promoted, this time to the rank of brigadier general, on
September 1, 1993.
In May of that year Hayden had moved to
Stuttgart, Germany, to the headquarters of the U.S. European
Command, as the head of intelligence directorate. That period
coincided with conflict in the former Yugoslavia and saw the Bosnian
Serbs' violent campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against Bosnian
Muslims, with the support of neighboring Serbia. On June 2, 1995
Hayden learned that an American F-16 fighter aircraft, piloted by
air-force captain Scott O'Grady, had been shot down over Bosnia, as
the craft was patrolling a no-fly zone. O'Grady ejected from the
craft, evaded capture, and was later rescued by a Marine unit. The
incident had a profound effect on Hayden's view of the role of
military intelligence. Hayden had previously recommended that the
U.S. take seriously the warnings by Rathko Mladic, a general in the
Serbian army, that NATO aircraft must avoid Serb airspace. O'Grady's
being shot down demonstrated for Hayden that the traditional role of
the intelligence community-to provide support for the
military-needed to be rethought, that intelligence "was becoming so
essential to make use of and counter sophisticated weaponry that it
had become as much of a weapon in its own right as any bomb or
missile," in Loeb's words. "It was a kind of redefinition of self,
as a professional," Hayden said to Loeb about the O'Grady episode.
"It's not about intelligence successes or failures; it's just
successes or failures."
Hayden was next appointed as the special
assistant to the commander at the Air Intelligence Agency, at Kelly
Air Force Base, in Texas. In January 1996 he assumed the duties of
commander of the agency and, simultaneously, became the director of
the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center. In the former
position, as the head of the air force's so-called "cyberwar
department," he was responsible for planning the air force's strikes
against enemies' computer systems. He was promoted to the rank of
major general on October 1, 1996. His next assignment took him to
the Yongsan Army Garrison, in South Korea, as deputy chief of staff
of U.N. Command and U.S. Forces Korea, from September 1997 until
March 1999. According to Loeb, the move signaled that Hayden "had
crossed the divide between the bookish world of intelligence into
the front-line world of operations."
In 1999 the U.S. House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence reported that the National Security Agency
was in need of a new leader and desperately short on capital. George
Tenet, then the director of the CIA, offered the job to Hayden, who
became the NSA director in March of that year. Created by President
Harry Truman in 1952, the NSA specializes in signals intelligence
(or SIGINT), encoding secret U.S. communications and decoding those
of other nations; for decades prior to the Internet age, the NSA was
the undisputed leader in such activities worldwide. With the end of
the Cold War, the shift in focus from monitoring the activities of
the Soviet Union to combating such enemies as terrorist groups, and
sweeping changes in technology, the NSA found itself struggling to
maintain its dominance. In addition, following revelations in the
mid-1970s that the NSA had engaged in domestic spying-on individuals
ranging from the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. to the
singer Joan Baez-many called the agency a threat to the privacy of
American citizens and questioned its very purpose.
As NSA director Hayden was credited with
fostering the pooling of information between the NSA and the CIA,
and he took steps to counter the agency's reputation for being
hermetic. He invited journalists and others on tours of the agency's
facilities and reportedly brought reporters to his home. Hayden was
praised in government circles for bringing the NSA up to date in
terms of its surveillance technology. Not all of the reports about
Hayden's performance were positive, however. He invested $1.2
billion in a program called Trailblazer, which was meant to
streamline the NSA's capacity for sorting through the millions of
messages it intercepts each day; the program was reported to be
largely ineffective. Also, NSA officers cited frequent malfunctions
and system crashes in the agency's computers. "Hayden had a lot of
great ideas," Matthew M. Aid, a former NSA analyst, said to Scott
Shane. "But when he left N.S.A. . . . none of his modernization
programs had been completed, and the agency's fiscal management was
still broken." Damaging to the reputation of the intelligence
community as a whole was the failure to prevent the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks.
As the director of the NSA, Hayden was
perhaps best known for presiding over a controversial
domestic-wiretapping program. A front-page New York Times
article, among other reports, publicized the program in early
December 2005, revealing that the NSA, beginning in the months after
the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, had been-without
warrants-wiretapping the international communications of people in
the U.S. who were suspected of having ties to terrorism. Republican
and Democratic lawmakers called in early 2006 for a congressional
inquiry into the NSA's practice of domestic wiretapping. On January
23, 2006, addressing the National Press Club, Hayden defended the
NSA's use of the controversial program, saying, as quoted by the Web
site globalsecurity.org: "The 9/11 commission [which investigated
intelligence failures prior to the 2001 attacks] criticized our
ability to link things happening in the United States with things
that were happening elsewhere. In that light, there are no
communications more important to the safety of this country than
those affiliated with [the terrorist network] al Qaeda with one end
in the United States. The president's authorization allows us to
track this kind of call more comprehensively and more efficiently. .
. . The intrusion into privacy is . . . limited: only international
calls and only those we have a reasonable basis to believe involve
al Qaeda or one of its affiliates." He added, "The purpose of all
this is not to collect reams of intelligence, but to detect and
prevent attacks. The intelligence community has neither the time,
the resources nor the legal authority to read communications that
aren't likely to protect us, and NSA has no interest in doing so. .
. . The program has . . . been reviewed by the Department of Justice
for compliance with the president's authorization. Oversight also
includes an aggressive training program to ensure that all
activities are consistent with the letter and the intent of the
authorization and with the preservation of civil liberties."
Meanwhile, on December 17, 2004
President George W. Bush had signed into law the Intelligence Reform
and Terrorism Prevention Act, which the U.S. Senate had approved by
a vote of 89-2. Many of the provisions of the legislation had been
recommended by the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist
Attacks Upon the United States (often called the 9/11 commission),
which released a report on July 22, 2004 that identified the major
intelligence failures leading up to the events of September 11,
2001. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act called
for the overhaul of the U.S. intelligence community, including the
establishment of an Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
which would oversee all intelligence operations. In May 2005 Hayden
was nominated by President Bush to be second in command to John D.
Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence. Hayden's new
duties included overseeing the budgets of the various intelligence
organizations.
On May 5, 2006 Porter Goss resigned his post as director of the CIA.
Goss's appointment, in September 2004, had been disquieting to many
in Washington, as he had shown fierce partisanship with regard to
important national issues during his tenure as a Republican
congressman from Florida. Under Goss the CIA had come to focus on
rigorous intelligence analysis rather than hands-on intelligence
gathering. Morale among its employees had sunk to all-time lows,
according to several reports. The establishment of the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence had put Goss at loggerheads with
Negroponte; the two disagreed about the direction of the CIA. On May
8, 2006 President Bush nominated Hayden to succeed Goss as CIA
director. In light of his role in the controversial
domestic-wiretapping program, the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) objected to his nomination. As quoted by BBC News (May
8, 2006, on-line), Anthony Romero, the executive director of the
ACLU, said, "Hayden's approval of warrantless surveillance on
Americans raises serious questions about whether the CIA would be
further unleashed on the American public." Others wondered if
putting Hayden atop the civilian CIA would concentrate too much
power in the hands of the military.
In his testimony
before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on May 18, 2006,
Hayden elaborated on the NSA domestic-wiretapping program, noting
that the program had proved helpful in tracking those suspected of
links to Al Qaeda; he did not comment specifically, however, on any
of the program's accomplishments. He also shed light on the origin
of the domestic-wiretapping program, explaining that he had proposed
the program in the days after September 11, 2001, following his
meeting with then-CIA director George Tenet. Hayden disputed the
notion that President Bush, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, or
other administration officials had put pressure on the NSA to ramp
up spying on Americans. When pressed by senators to assess the
constitutionality of the program, Hayden argued that in a time of
war Article II of the Constitution expands the president's authority
to conduct domestic surveillance. He also stated that the NSA's
lawyers had assured him of the program's legality and that no
lawmaker had called for significant changes to the program during
the several classified briefings NSA had given before the program
was made public. Hayden said that if confirmed as CIA director, he
would work to "reaffirm CIA's proud culture of risk-taking and
excellence" and ensure that the agency is "field-centric, not
headquarters centric," while also maintaining its strong record on
intelligence analysis. He also stressed the importance of the CIA's
"fitting in seamlessly with an integrated American intelligence
community." As quoted by reporters for the Washington Post
(May 19, 2006), Hayden said: "It's time to move past what seems to
me to be an endless picking apart of the archaeology of every past
intelligence success or failure. CIA officers . . . deserve
recognition of their efforts, and they also deserve not to have
every action analyzed, second-guessed and criticized on the front
pages of the morning paper." He added, "While the bulk of the
agency's work must, in order to be effective, remain secret,
fighting this long war on the terrorists who seek to do us harm
requires that the American people and you, their elected
representatives, know that the CIA is protecting them effectively
and in a way consistent with the core values of our nation." On May
23, 2006 the Senate Intelligence Committee voted 12-3 to send
Hayden's nomination to the full Senate, which confirmed the
nomination on May 26 by a vote of 78-15. He was sworn in as the CIA
director on May 30. In mid-June 2006 Hayden announced the hiring of
Stephen R. Kappes, who had left the CIA in November 2004, as the
agency's deputy director. Hayden and others hoped that Kappes would
help boost morale at the CIA and help "stem the outflow of trained
clandestine officers," as Walter Pincus wrote for the Washington
Post (June 19, 2006, on-line).
Hayden's wife, the former Jeanine
Carrier, is active in the National Military Family Association. The
couple have three adult children--Margaret, Michael, and Liam--and
live in Fort Meade, Maryland. Hayden has been described as
unassuming and cerebral. "He's not the flashy, fiery kind of guy,"
Charles Link said to Scott Shane for the New York Times
(February 18, 2005). "His strength is the power of his intellect and
his ability to articulate ideas." Hayden is known to be an avid fan
of the Pittsburgh Steelers and often attends the team's home games.
He also enjoys cross-country skiing and reading and attending
Shakespeare plays. Hayden attained the rank of lieutenant general on
May 1, 1999 and, on April 21, 2005, the rank of general. His
military decorations include the Defense Distinguished Service
Medal; the Defense Superior Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster; the
Legion of Merit; the Bronze Star Medal; the Meritorious Service
Medal with Two Oak Leaf Clusters; the Air Force Commendation Medal;
and the Air Force Achievement Medal.
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