PLAYING TO THE EDGE
American Intelligence in the Age of Terror
Michael V Hayden
Penguin Press
448 pages; $30
According to Michael V Hayden, President George W Bush personally intervened in 2005 to try to stop The New York Times from publishing an explosive scoop.
In one of his book's most memorable moments, the paper's Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman; the executive editor, Bill Keller; and the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr, met with Mr Bush in the Oval Office to hear his objections to The Times's running a story about Stellarwind, a top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programme. For several years, the programme had been sweeping up data without obtaining a warrant.
The president argued that exposing Stellarwind would invite another 9/11-style attack.
The story ran. No attack came. The sky did not fall. And herein lies my primary objection to this book. During the Bush years, Mr Hayden ran the NSA, served briefly as deputy director of National Intelligence, and then directed the CIA, but his assessment of the more controversial programmes he administered seems to ignore what happened after he left office in 2009.
We actually have more perspective now, and it turns out that pulling some of these programmes back from the edge has not resulted in more terror attacks in the US on the scale of September 11. On the other hand, the excesses have done profound and lasting damage.
Mr Hayden seems oblivious to this. He has written an occasionally engaging book about matters - moral, legal and technological - that are very complex, but he shows little interest in examining them. Throughout he is breezy and unapologetic. Branded as an arch-villain of the Bush era, Mr Hayden is determined here to show he was not just a successful military officer, but a good man, religious, a loving husband, someone who believes in the rule of law and constitutional limits, and a regular guy.
If the Bush administration overstepped privacy laws and basic decency, it did so only after careful in-house legal consideration and congressional oversight. White House legal memos and congressional briefings will hardly calm angry critics, but, in fairness, security officials felt a responsibility to protect the nation after September 11.
But we survey the same ground today better informed. Al Qaeda, as it was 20 years ago, no longer exists, thanks in part to Mr Hayden's efforts. Osama bin Laden is dead. We still face isolated, random acts of mass murder, but of a kind committed more by the lone killer than by organised terrorists.
Here and there Mr Hayden does a good job of making his case. He is particularly strong on NSA data collection. The word "warrantless," for instance. Collecting telecom data without a court warrant does not mean such collection is entirely "unwarranted," as in, unjustifiable.
Spectacular revelations about surveillance practices, like those leaked by Chelsea Manning and Edward J Snowden, spurred fears of a creeping Orwellian state, even though the vast stores of material outed seemed mostly to show ordinary government officials working hard, and even intelligently, at their jobs. Mr Hayden argues convincingly that he and others in the Bush administration had no interest in listening to your phone calls, unless you were chatting regularly with a known terrorist overseas.
But what he doesn't do in this book is take stock of how other measures stand up in retrospect. A good example is torture. Mr Hayden took over the CIA after authorisation of coercive interrogation tactics were withdrawn, but he remains a defender. He sees coercion simply as a useful intelligence-gathering tool, and I tend to agree, which doesn't mean it should be American policy.
This is not just a moral concern. The photos taken at Abu Ghraib, for instance, were arguably the single worst setback to the American military effort there. The fallout was bad enough for Mr Bush himself to abandon his support.
Mr Hayden reserves polite but withering scorn for President Barack Obama over many things, for hypocrisy (adopting many of the practices he criticised while campaigning); for the Iran deal (though he concedes that the president did not have "a lot of better choices"); but mostly for the decision to release the Bush administration "torture memos," the legal justifications for authorising coercive interrogation. Mr Hayden sees this as a shocking betrayal of the loyal officers inside the CIA who carried out orders. hE engages here in awkward hyperbole, quoting a veteran CIA officer as saying the release of those memos "hit the agency like a car bomb in the driveway."
Again, the sky has not fallen. To my knowledge, no CIA employee has been prosecuted or reprimanded.
Yet, Mr Hayden feels Mr Obama had not fully thought the thing through. He says he told the former Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, "any future president who would want to resurrect the techniques had better practice up because he would have to administer them himself."
In other words, no agency officer in the future would dare.
Which seems to me precisely what Mr Obama had in mind.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
Mark Bowden is the author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
