Hayden And Gates A Pair Of Aces

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Providence Journal-Bulletin
September 21, 2008
By Tom Plate
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- It will be a long time before veteran American CIA officers (not to mention veteran American journalists) manage to forget about The One That Got Away.
That, of course, was the erroneous and/or misleading propaganda buildup prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Substantial intelligence reporting (and some hysterical front-page pack-media journalism) gave immense credibility to the imminent threat of Iraq to the U.S. and to its presumably massive and potent collage of weapons of mass destruction.
But that assessment and the uncritical media reporting was almost entirely wrong.
So the credo that you hear these days, over and over again, from the U.S. intelligence community is: Never again! Never again we will be so wrong in our estimates; never again will intelligence assessments be so subject to the whim and will of top-down political decision-making.
Precisely that clarion call for complete intelligence credibility came impressively from Michael V. Hayden this month. Ordinarily, directors of the CIA are neither seen nor heard. But this CIA director, visiting Los Angeles for a speech under the aegis of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, now outs himself in both dimensions. The retired career Air Force officer wants to be seen as representing a new era in quality U.S. intelligence and heard loud and clear that today s CIA is better than ever.
His aim is to offer pardon the expression change you can believe in. For more than half of the current CIA workforce, Hayden points out, this coming January will be their first presidential transition. Already, Hayden says he has chosen the CIA intelligence officer who is to brief the winner of the November presidential election.
This change in our primary customer is a great opportunity for the CIA, said Hayden, appointed by President Bush more than two years ago.
Both the Democratic as well as Republican nominees promise to be rather tough customers. Both have been rightly critical of the intelligence community s failure. But it is hard to see how further failure doesn t lie ahead. The enormity of all the spook agencies under the vague and undefined umbrella-organization known as the Office of National Intelligence is daunting, in the manner of a 24/7 rush-hour panic.
The problems of intelligence coordination, not to mention de-politicization, could well overwhelm any new White House. What s more, the nature of the threats we face is changing rapidly perhaps more dynamically than any network of intelligence bureaucracies can change in response.
At one point, Hayden was prompted by an audience question whether even more resources were needed. The military man then gave an answer the like of which I have never heard from the head of a bureaucracy in almost all my years as an American journalist. His reply was that the CIA had enough personnel and resources at the moment but has not yet had enough time to maneuver every unit and bureau into smooth functioning order. How refreshing to hear that from someone so deeply embedded in a political and bureaucratic environment that often seems more dedicated to empire building than nation protecting.
Hayden may well be the right man in the right job at the right time. Certainly, almost everyone you ask whether here on the West Coast or back in New York and Washington has a good word to say about him, not to mention good words as well for Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense. The latter, like Hayden, has brought an unprecedented whiff of fresh air to a job that seemed mainly to prize hot air, inflated threat estimates and egoistic and paranoiac self-serving. It may well be that with these two, however, America can be proud of exceptionally fine, dedicated public servants.
Hayden is a bit of a character. My favorite story about him comes from the mid-1980s, still in the midst of the volatile Cold War, when this then-Air Force officer learned Bulgarian (imagine learning Bulgarian!) before taking up his Sofia post. One assignment that he quickly accepted had him traveling by train across the Bulgarian countryside, disguised as a quiet and sleepy working-class native. But he slept little during the trip and was mostly all ears taking in every bit of conversation he could pick up from the loose-lipped Bulgarian solders in the train car!
We cynical American journalists sometimes denigrate public servants as if all were incompetent idiots out of some Gogol novel. Many are anything but. Hayden and Gates are two good ones. The next president may be wise to keep both on. But even if they are retained, the changing global threat structure will probably daunt any CIA or Defense Department counter-effort. Characteristically, large bureaucracies are inherently too slow-moving to recognize novel, morphing threats no matter how wise and honest their bosses.
Tom Plate, an occasional contributor, is a long-time foreign correspondent and editor.
 
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