Results tagged “Michael Hayden” from SpyTalk

CIA Chief on Transition Danger: 'No Chatter' from Qaeda Right Now

By Jeff Stein | November 13, 2008 6:17 PM | | Comments (5)

Considerable anxiety has been expressed about the possibility of al Qaeda taking advantage of the handoff of security agencies from the Bush administration to the incoming Obama team.

But according to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, all's very quiet on the Western front.

For the moment.

Hayden, who headed the eavesdropping National Security Agency before taking the CIA job, said Thursday there had been "no increased chatter" about plots picked up by U.S. intelligence, according to my CQ colleague Tim Starks, who covered Hayden's appearance at The Atlantic Council of the United States, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. 

"We do not see any real or artificial spike" in that chatter as a result of the election, Hayden said in answer to a question after his speech. 

On the other hand, Hayden said, "We don't know what we don't know." 

Hayden also said he'd stay on in the Obama administration if asked, Starks reported.

"If asked to stay, I think both of us would seriously consider it," Hayden said of himself and Mike McConnell, the National Intelligence Director. 

But Hayden also said both understand they "serve at the pleasure of the president" and that it was important there be a "personal relationship" between the president and his intelligence chiefs.

During the campaign, Obama repeatedly argued that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, because the main front against terrorism is in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On Thursday, Hayden sounded like he was getting with the program.

"Today, the flow of money, weapons, and foreign fighters into Iraq is greatly diminished, and Al Qaeda senior leaders no longer point to it as the central battlefield," Hayden said in his formal remarks.

As for al Qaeda, the terrorist organization has suffered "serious setbacks" but is adapting, Hayden said,  and  its safe haven in Pakistan's tribal areas "remains the most clear and present danger to the United States today."

Tags: al Qaeda, Atlantic Council, CIA, Michael Hayden, Mike McConnell, NSA, ODNI

Who Will Run CIA?

By Jeff Stein | November 6, 2008 3:48 PM | | Comments (1)

With snow already falling in Afghanistan, Barack Obama's not likely to wait long to pick America's next top spy.

For my two cents, it's as hard to imagine the president-elect keeping Mike Hayden at the CIA as it is him picking Anthony Lake for the job, no matter how much we're hearing about Obama naming Republicans like Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar to top national security posts.

Notwithstanding Hayden's restoration of calm professionalism at the agency after years of turmoil, he was a loyal soldier in the Bush administration's secret warrantless wiretapping program, as director of the NSA before moving to the CIA. 

That will never sit well with most Democrats, at least some of whom will think of Hayden, fairly or not, as a potential fifth columnist. 

Obama will want somebody he knows and trusts running herd on the agency's spies 
and analysts.

Tags: Barrack Obama, Chuck Hagel; Richard Lugar; Nancy Peosi, CIA, John Brennan; Anthony Lake; PFIAB, Michael Hayden, Silvestre Reyes, Tim Roemer

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Accidental Spy Is Obama's Top CIA Briefer

By Jeff Stein | November 5, 2008 3:31 PM | | Comments (0)

"When Michael Morell was growing up in Cuyahoga Falls -- hanging out at the city pool, playing baseball, watching the Browns and Indians -- he had no clue he would wind up at the highest level of the world's biggest spy agency," the Akron Beacon Journal reported last August.

But today, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell tapped Ohio native Morell, the CIA's third-ranking official, to brief President-elect Barack Obama on the U.S. intelligence community's view of global developments and its secret operations.

Morrel joined the agency in 1980, almost as an accident, he told the Akron paper upon his appointment as CIA associate deputy director.

"I had every intention of going to grad school and getting a Ph.D. in economics and teaching," he said. "But a friend of mine suggested, 'Why don't you send a resume to the CIA?'"

"Even on the day he walked into the CIA for his job interview," the paper said, "he had no intention of actually working there. He was a just college kid at the University of Akron cashing in on a free trip to Washington, D.C."

That was 1980.

Morrel ended up on the analysis side of the business, spending most of his career with the Directorate of Intelligence. He was chief of the agency's Asia, Pacific and Latin American division.

He also headed the unit that prepares the President's Daily Brief (PDB). In that role, he briefed President George W. Bush.

He has also been the acting associate deputy director of intelligence for strategic programs and was deputy director for intelligence at the National Counter-Terrorism Center.

DNI McConnell led a team of senior intelligence officials to brief Obama Wednesday morning.

But the CIA sounds like it's not going to take a back seat in forming the president-elect's views.

"We have already prepared a great deal of information about CIA for the Obama team," CIA Director Michael Hayden said in a letter to agency employees.

"The goal today is to review what has been done and to ensure that every part of the Agency is well-placed to contribute in the weeks ahead."

Tags: CIA, Cuyahoga Falls, Michael Hayden, Michael Morell, Mike McConnell, presidential transition

Julia Childs' Spy File

By Jeff Stein | August 14, 2008 4:17 AM | | Comments (0)

The National Archives has opened the books on the OSS, America's World War Two spying and sabotage agency. 

On Thursday the Archives released 750,000 pages of records, including the intimate personnel files of future super-chef Julia Childs, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, screen star Sterling Hayden and Boston Red Sox catcher Moe Berg. 

Child's file shows that in her OSS application, she included a note expressing regret she left an earlier department store job hastily because she did not get along with her boss, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.

Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt; and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police, according to The Associated Press.

The OSS -- formally, the Office of Strategic Services -- recruited so many blue bloods and Ivy Leaguers that lesser Washington mortals cracked that its initials stood for "Oh, So Social."  But in its short, six-year life span it spent a fraction of today's spy budgets with far better results, many critics say.

It's hard to imagine the CIA recruiting such worthies today -- without inciting congressional investigations and demands for Michael Hayden's scalp. 

Tags: Arthur Goldberg, Congress, espionage CIA, Julia Childs, Michael Hayden, Moe Berg, OSS, oversight, spies, spying, Sterling Hayden, World War Two

Intelligence Overhaul: CIA Has Only Self to Blame

By Jeff Stein | July 31, 2008 3:13 PM | | Comments (1)

The CIA has only itself to blame for further erosion of its authority in the intelligence overhaul order signed by President Bush today.

The seeds of the realignment, which gives the Directorate of National Intelligence greater authority in managing the relationship of U.S. intelligence agencies with foreign services,among other things, can be found in the CIA's own Inspector General's report in 2007, which recommended agency officials be held accountable for the intelligence lapses that opened to door to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Gen. Michael Hayden, CIA Director, had fiercely resisted release of any parts of the report, and no CIA official was fired or rebuked for the agency's failures related to 9/11, specifically the failure of "50-60" CIA offers to inform the FBI that two al Qaeda operatives had entered the U.S. with apparent plans to carry our a major terrorist action. 

The unclassified portions of the CIA Inspector General's report can be read here.

There seemed to be a confusion, meanwhile, on the breadth of the changes ordered today by the president.  

The New York Times' Scott Shane quoted a top former CIA official who called the changes "underwhelming."

"I don't see a lot of change here," said Mark Lowenthal, a former CIA assistant director. He described the revised order as an "organizational update" that seemed "underwhelming" after months of speculation inside the government about how the powers of various agencies might shift.

But The Times itself did not post Shane's story, opting for wire service copy. It instead appeared only on in the Web site of the Times-owned, Paris-based International Herald Tribune.  


The Washington Post's Joby Warrick, meanwhile  first described the executive order as "major," but the word was deleted in a subsequent online edition. 

The ACLU called the changes "significant."

"The most chilling aspect of this executive order is that the Director of National Intelligence can task any agency of the government to spy on you," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. 

The next time you're asked to give information to a government agency or official, you not only won't know where that information might go, you may not even know who's really asking the question in the first place. What effect these changes ultimately will have is unclear because the Department of Justice has previously issued a secret legal opinion saying the President does not have to follow executive orders. This kind of concentrated power, exercised in secret, is a lit fuse with our Constitution likely in danger of being burned.

UPDATE: DNI chief Mike McConnell called the order, "truly a historic day for our Community and the nation."

This Executive Order is the next, necessary step in intelligence reform and upholds the key themes of intelligence reform, namely: that the sum of our parts will produce better intelligence than each intelligence element individually; that we need a dedicated official - the DNI - with the responsibility and authority to lead and integrate this Community; and that the decentralized structure of the Community should remain intact, with most IC elements remaining embedded in cabinet departments.

Tags: CIA, Director of National Intelligence, espionage, Michael Hayden, Michael McConnell