WASHINGTON, May 8 (UPI) -- Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, President Bush's pick to be the next CIA director, faces an uphill battle to gain confirmation -- but if he wins, he could face a yet tougher fight in his new post.
Hayden comes to the job with strong credentials. Unlike his predecessor Porter 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 technology 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.
The agency has been repeatedly assailed by outside detractors with their own agendas. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has so far won every major bureaucratic battle to prevent the lavishly funded military intelligence agencies under the Pentagon's umbrella from being integrated into the new post-Sept. 11, 2001 national intelligence architecture that Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte is trying to set up.
In the new sweeping reorganization of national intelligence, the CIA director has 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 has 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.
Most of all, Hayden will face the challenge of reviving the agency's human intelligence recruiting capabilities. He will be under pressure to rapidly boost that capability in Iraq. Some progress was being made in that area under Goss, but not enough. And he will have to resist pressures to focus so many resources on Iraq and the war on terror that the agency's human intelligence-gathering assets in other major regions of the world, long regarded as weak by other major Western intelligence services, may continue to decline.
Former colleagues say Hayden has the experience, the credentials, the intelligence and the energy and the organizational skills in abundance to do the job. The real problem is that it might be too much for anyone.
