WASHINGTON, May 26 (UPI) -- As expected, U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden won confirmation Friday to be the next director of the CIA.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Hayden by an overwhelming vote of 78 to 15. More than twice as many Democrats in the Senate voted for the confirmation than voted against it.
The vote was another victory for the White House in what has been a rebound on security issues on Capitol Hill over the past two weeks. President George W. Bush's proposals on border security, while widely criticized, have also been welcomed by many experts as a balanced and overdue response to dealing with the issue.
The vote was also a testimony to the credibility that Hayden brings to the post. He was expected to face a difficult time in his confirmation hearings because of USA Today's revelations about greatly expanded secret phone surveillance by the National Security Agency while he ran it. The story ran only a few days before his confirmation hearings started.
But Hayden, a veteran of congressional testimony and questioning, impressed senators of both parties on the Senate Intelligence Committee and that success, along with his stellar record running the NSA and as Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte's chief deputy over the past year, won him easy approval.
Hayden is the first senior officer from the U.S. armed forces to run the CIA in a quarter century. But the selection of an experienced general for the post is not unprecedented. And while Hayden is expected to work very closely with his old boss Negroponte, he is also expected to be a far more effective defender of the CIA against turf encroachments from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his array of well-funded Pentagon intelligence services than previous CIA Director Porter Goss. Some 80 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget goes to intelligence agencies ultimately controlled by Rumsfeld.
Hayden is expected to work hard to try and boost the CIA's human intelligence capabilities around the world, especially in the Middle East and in dealing with Islamist terrorism groups.
Hayden comes to the job with strong credentials. Unlike his predecessor Goss, he is a lifelong career military man with extensive experience of running the nation's largest and arguably most successful intelligence services. The National Security Agency, based in Fort Meade, Md., has a larger annual budget than the CIA's and is recognized to be the most technologically advanced and capable electronic and signals intelligence monitoring organization in the world.
Hayden enjoyed the full confidence of his senior staff at the NSA. Goss butted heads with veteran intelligence professionals at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., from the day he started the job, and drove away many of the best and most experienced of them that he most needed.
Hayden also has a reputation as a go-getter, the kind of military executive who gets things done. Goss recognized -- or said that he recognized -- that the CIA urgently needed to massively increase its number of field officers and sources, or assets around the world, especially in the Middle East. He also said he recognized the need to rapidly recruit far larger numbers of language experts, especially in Arabic, Farsi and other Middle Eastern, South Asian and Central Asian languages. Congress approved the funds and President Bush backed the initiative.
But Goss never got a handle on the arcane bureaucratic security procedures from the Cold War that he inherited and progress has been miniscule in those areas, Langley insiders say.
This reflects the scale of the challenge facing Hayden. The CIA was already mired in big problems when Goss became its director -- and in his less than two years at the helm they only got worse.
In the sweeping reorganization of national intelligence after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and inquiries the CIA director lost his coveted position of nearly 60 years as the man who briefs the president of the United States on intelligence matters. Morale at the agency, already poor after the hammering its senior officers and analysts took over the failures in Iraq, plunged further when that happened.
Negroponte has been pushing for the agency to boost its analysis of open source intelligence. Here too, Goss failed disastrously in his executive capacity. Recruitment of new analysts proceeded far slower than Negroponte wanted and their caliber so far has not been impressive, intelligence sources said. Hayden will face the challenge of rapidly boosting both the volume and caliber of the agency's open source assessments.
Former colleagues say Hayden has the experience, the credentials, the intelligence and the energy and the organizational skills in abundance to do the job. He has already won plaudits for selecting the former CIA Director of Operations, who resigned after clashes with Goss, as his Number Two. But no one doubts the challenge they face is a vast one.
