Wrong!
Glenn Greenwald reports that the Shrubbery is thinking of appointing General Michael V. Hayden, Negroponte’s deputy, to be the next Director of Central Intelligence.
[It just occurred to me that this is another “Harriet Meirs” appointment – the next name the Shrubbery heard when told of the vacancy.]
Billmon’s article, Rumsfeld Über Alles, talks about the conflict between Rumsfeld and Negroponte over control of the intelligence system.
Hayden is an active duty, serving officer of the military. He may be taking orders from Negroponte at the moment, but Rumsfeld controls his rank and his pension.
The CIA and the DoD do not have a close and friendly working relationship. The CIA is not going to appreciate a serving officer as its head, and Hayden can’t act independently while he is in uniform.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. [Matthew 6:24 KJV]
6 comments
Well they have the skewers ready for his confirmation hearing! OUCH – gonna be an interesting wrangle to pin him down on SOOooo many matters of importance.
The man was DirNSA when they started the domestic spying program, so they really don’t want him having to testify before a Senate committee, if they have any sense.
Naw. It’s just that Negroponte won’t feel like he’s one of the Big Dogs until one of *his* cronies gets an appointment.
I would really be interested is a list of Negroponte’s successes before I appointed him to to pick up lunch. The Central American death squad & Iran Contra didn’t work out. He wasn’t at the UN or Iraq very long.
Is it too much to expect that we will occasionally appoint a “winner” to an important post?
Don’t forget the HUMINT-SIGINT rivalry. The CIA is composed mostly of HUMINTers, while Gen Hayden’s background is in the SIGINT community. I wonder how that will affect morale at the Agency. It won’t help because the purges will continue.
There are totally different rules for reliability between the two communities and totally different ground rules for collection.
I was totally disappointed with the apparent lack of information at the beginning of Afghanistan in what would have been an ideal environment for some of the things we did covering Eastern Bloc training exercises.
They wouldn’t have generated much, which would have made anything significant and we didn’t seem to have the equipment and support deployed. It looked like a purely HUMINT show and we didn’t have the necessary net in place.
I don’t know if we even have the resources available anymore to do a decent job.
The purges are the big problem. It takes years to develop sources and seconds to lose them. The Plame outing made the job more difficult than ever, as sources would have been rolled up in the target area.