Maybe the CIA could use a few amateurs.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
A top intelligence service is vital to national security. So we've been looking for signs that incoming CIA Director Michael Hayden would lead the agency in the right direction. But so far the Air Force General, who won confirmation Friday in an unexpectedly lopsided 78-to-15 Senate vote, has sent more signals that would soothe the souls of Langley's uncounted career bureaucrats than push the cause of reform.
We're reminded of Colin Powell's inaugural promise on taking over the State Department to "put our Foreign Service officers in charge of the work of the department." Is his unhappy result what the general now in charge of the CIA has in mind?
General Hayden's version of this theme could be seen in his widely reported suggestion at his confirmation hearing that his arrival would put an end to "amateur hour" at the agency. Clearly that was meant as something of a rebuke to former Director Porter Goss, who brought in outsiders and tried to shake the place up. We're not well-placed to comment on the skill with which Mr. Goss picked his intra-agency battles, but he had the right idea. "Amateur hour" is a generic phrase, one that could as easily describe much of the CIA's past few decades.
The CIA's Iraq mistakes have been amply documented. But the agency's career analysts also got their judgments of the Soviet Union's condition badly wrong. The Ford Administration had the foresight to bring in outside experts to do a so-called Team B analysis of the Soviet threat in the 1970s, and they got it right.
General Hayden also solicitously told Michigan Democrat Carl Levin he wasn't "comfortable" with work done by former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Contrary to Democratic folklore, Mr. Feith's Office of Special Plans never "politicized" intelligence but functioned as a modern-day Team B, looking at intelligence products and asking questions of briefers. How could the briefers be so sure, for example, that Islamic radicals like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi couldn't have strong links to the "secular" Hussein regime? General Hayden should have been asked to elaborate on why he is uncomfortable that analysts might have to explain how they arrive at certain conclusions.
We understand the General's desire not to undermine morale at the agency he's about to lead. But neither did he have to validate a good deal of the political left's current, if amusingly ironic, defense of the CIA's career spooks: the idea that policy makers should only rarely question the careerists' judgment, and that the careerists' assumptions shouldn't be challenged by new blood from the outside.
When President Bush first nominated General Hayden to be CIA director, some considered it a surrender to an agency that has often performed badly but then tried to undermine the government's policy through leaks and insubordination. We figured General Hayden deserved the benefit of the doubt. But his performance at his hearing makes us think his critics had a point.
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