Thinker, Briefer, Soldier, Spy

By NANCY GIBBS

A welder's job is to put things together--hard, metal things that have to be melted and manipulated in order to be fused into something useful, like a pipeline, or a bridge. So maybe it was from his father, a welder in Pittsburgh, Pa., that General Michael Hayden long ago acquired the tools that made him one of the pre-eminent intelligence players in Washington. His great talent is the briefing, when he sits down in secret sessions with leaders in Congress who don't always know much about intelligence analysis, and he shows how the pieces fit together, explains how things work, lays the pipe, builds the bridge.

"He speaks in lucid, well-constructed sentences," observes former Senator Bob Graham, who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee until 2003. "And then he pauses as if to give the listener a chance to assimilate what he has just said." It is clear when Hayden goes to Capitol Hill that he has studied his audience carefully. "He's a great PowerPoint briefer, and he speaks at their level," says a congressional intelligence staffer who has seen the general in action with lawmakers. "He has that wonderful quality of being quite likable and unpretentious. And he would work those members assiduously." In fact, he was credited with so effectively defending the National Security Agency's no-warrant wiretapping program after it was exposed in December that he helped turn a simmering scandal into a political win for the Administration--to a degree that President George W. Bush might have hoped for another assist when he nominated Hayden to replace Porter Goss as CIA director. "In personal appearance, [Hayden] kind of invites you to underestimate him," says a former national-security official who knows him. "Do not underestimate this guy."

Hayden is the rare officer who managed to earn four stars in the course of a career in military intelligence. A blue-collar kid who drove a taxi to help pay his way through college before joining the Air Force, his first job in 1970 was as an analyst and briefer at the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska. He worked in intelligence in Germany during the Balkans war and in South Korea, and at the National Security Council with Condoleezza Rice during the first Bush Administration. As NSA director, he sometimes dropped in on CIA station chiefs in embassies overseas but without the usual retinue of aides. He was "very low key," says a former senior CIA officer.

Hayden spent two years in the 1980s hunting military secrets of the cold war as a defense attache in the U.S. embassy in Bulgaria, where, according to the Times of London, he was known to dress as a workman and ride buses listening to off-duty soldiers talking (he speaks Bulgarian). That was about the extent of his undercover work; he was always more in the business of data analysis than field operations. He has considerable public relations savvy. When he took over the NSA in 1999, it was still a very secretive place--the nerve center of U.S. espionage--and what little was said about it wasn't good. He helped elevate the agency through careful cultivation of patrons on the Hill as well as selected reporters and writers. He even let in the occasional TV crew. He also shifted the agency's mission from monitoring spies from the former Soviet bloc to tracking terrorists. Two days after 9/11, he told his stricken staff, "Right now, a quarter of a billion Americans wish they had your job, to go after the enemy." When John Negroponte was named the first director of national intelligence (DNI) in 2005, Hayden was a natural choice to become his principal deputy.

Some lawmakers, like Goss's friends House Speaker Dennis Hastert and fellow Republican Peter Hoekstra, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, say they worry about putting a military man in charge of the CIA when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been expanding an empire that already absorbs about 80% of the U.S. intelligence budget. In that view, the CIA needs to remain an independent counterweight to the Pentagon, another set of eyes, ears and instincts, not become a subsidiary of it. But Hayden has hardly been acting like a covert Rumsfeld agent. In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in August 2004, he strongly supported the plan to create the DNI role, over Rumsfeld's objections, and he even proposed--to no avail--that the NSA be moved out of the Pentagon and into the DNI portfolio.

Rumsfeld, who was not pleased, called Hayden into his office to chew him out. Hayden argued that his sworn duty as a general was to give his honest opinion when asked. So among CIA insiders, his appointment to head the largest civilian intelligence agency hardly represents a Rumsfeld coup. During private meetings on the Hill in advance of confirmation hearings scheduled to begin this week, Hayden said he would consider retiring from the uniformed military as part of assuming the CIA job. It may be that, in spirit at least, he already has.

A well-placed intelligence official said that as deputy DNI, Hayden has been fully engaged. More orders seem to be issued, more memos signed and pushed out the door when Negroponte is on the road and Hayden is running the show, the source observed. That energy, along with his alliances throughout the intelligence community and his standing on the Hill, could help Hayden rebuild morale at an agency that has suffered from public failures and private infighting. Many officers in Langley, Va., were ecstatic over the news that the unpopular Goss was leaving and that Hayden hopes to make Stephen Kappes--a respected veteran of covert operations who quit on Goss-- his deputy.

A maniacal football fan, Hayden sneaked off to see the Super Bowl in February and keeps a Steelers helmet signed by every player on the team as a centerpiece on the conference table in his office. (Owner Dan Rooney happened to be his coach at St. Peter's school on Pittsburgh's north side.) Hayden loves the team, he says, because "it's focused. There is not a lot of glamour. There is not a lot of glitz. There is a reason we don't have cheerleaders: we just go there to watch the football game. It's just focused on the sport itself. It's just going to work." And when he's talking about fixing U.S. intelligence, he is every inch the coach himself. Of his recruits to the new intelligence office, he says all are "if not a first-round draft pick, certainly early draft picks in terms of the quality of the folks." Figuring out how to make U.S. intelligence operatives work--and work together--is like what an NFL coach has to do to get everyone "to emphasize the scoreboard rather than individual performance."

Among the reasons lawmakers may have trouble blocking Hayden is that he had briefed members of the Intelligence Committee on at least some of the NSA's data-mining programs. Asked privately about the extent of those briefings, Hayden told one Senator, "They got the full monty." On the other hand, some of his defenses may come back to haunt him. He repeatedly insisted that "this isn't a drift net over Lackawanna or Fremont or Dearborn," naming three communities with heavily Muslim populations. But last week it became clear that the net was a whole lot bigger and had drifted a lot further than earlier accounts had revealed.

With reporting by Reported by Timothy J. Burger, Douglas Waller/ Washington