Changing of the Guard at Langley

Tomorrow, President Bush will likely announce that General Michael V. Hayden will replace Porter Goss as head of the C.I.A. This has been controversial, particularly amongst Republicans, who fear that the nomination will effectively subordinate the C.I.A. to the Pentagon. Certainly suggesting that an active-duty military officer should head a civilian agency raises a few eyebrows, particularly at a time when the Secretary of Defense has come under fire.

On Friday, I pointed out that somebody blew the call before the war about the WMD's, resulting in our being in Iraq and in a quasi-permanent state of quasi-war. This is not the sort of call that gets blown by a single person. Assuming good faith on the part of our leaders, this blown call was the result of incompetence in, at minimum, the intelligence sphere. When there is incompetence, the appropriate thing for executive leaders to do is attempt to remedy the incompetence -- by changing personnel if need be. Now, Porter Goss is no longer head of the C.I.A. because of a political struggle with John Negroponte, but the fact of the matter is that the bulk of our intelligence comes from the C.I.A. and we know something went wrong there. Those in the know are better-positioned than the public to understand what and why that was.

The C.I.A. has been run, in the past, by military officers; its first four directors were all active-duty general officers. These officers were, like General Hayden is now, officers who have substantial intelligence backgrounds as well as the personal confidence of the President. The situation today isn't much different from that, as far as I can see. So there is precedent for an appointment of this nature.

It appears, furthermore, that General Hayden's political loyalty runs to John Negroponte, not Donald Rumsfeld. Since Negroponte is the National Intelligence Director, the "spy czar," if you will, that does not strike me as a bad thing. Future Presidents will name new CIA directors and new National Intelligence Directors, and they will do so for their own political reasons -- just as the current President is.

So politically, I think Hayden is well within the realm of acceptable choices to lead the C.I.A. Politically, it is an acceptable choice; I see nothing wrong with consolidating the power of the National Intelligence Director over intelligence-gathering operations and I am not terribly concerned that an active-duty military officer at the helm of the C.I.A. will somehow make that agency subordinate to the defense department or otherwise alter its civilian character. These concerns by Congressional Republicans are all inconsequential, and to that extent, I will suggest that the President gets to pick who he wants to run agencies because he's the President and that is that.

Now, with that said, General Hayden has at best a poor understanding of the Fourth Amendment, and appears to have been a strong proponent of the warrantless wiretapping program of which I have been such a critic. This is the issue worthy of Congressional inquiry. It is not the only issue with which Congress should be concerned, to be sure. There are administrative matters, there is the question of how data analysis can be improved and what assets are needed, comparing "human intelligence" to the clean data we get from satellites and wiretaps, and a myriad of other intelligence and administrative issues.

But I do think it is important for Congress to challenge General Hayden on what role he sees for the C.I.A. in detecting terrorist activity that may be occuring in whole or in part within the borders of the U.S.A., and if so, what the role of the judicial branch of government may or may not be. At minimum, I would expect Congress to demand that General Hayden indicate that he intends to use the FISA process to provide for minimal judicial review of intelligence-gathering activities that may affect U.S. citizens or take place within the borders of the country. I've said it before, and I still mean it: it's just not too much to ask.