09 November 2006

When General Michael Hayden became CIA director six months ago, his mission was to calm a troubled agency, get it out of the headlines and restore its professionalism. "Back to work, back to basics," is how he sums up his initial goal.

Hayden is now firmly ensconced at the CIA, and he's putting a military man's imprint on the place. He still wears his blue US Air Force uniform to work. Behind his desk is a painting of a combat plane, flanked by a poster of his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers and the famous photograph of President Franklin Roosevelt meeting with Saudi King Abdul Aziz to plan joint strategy for the Middle East.

Hayden is doing many things right, according to CIA officers and foreigners who work closely with the agency. He is a low-key change agent, communicating well with a work force bruised by years as a political football. He manages the sprawling Langley headquarters with a squadron commander's informality, taking his wife for lunch to the CIA cafeteria, getting a taco salad and finding an empty seat. He delights in events such as "Family Day" and the "Alumni Forum." For a neurotic agency, this "show the love" approach is a happy change.

But there are still too many things wrong at the CIA, which Hayden needs to fix. Officials at other agencies say the quality of CIA analysis varies widely, from top-notch to very ordinary. CIA officers in the field complain about a bureaucratic culture that still punishes risk-takers and rewards those who play it safe. Agency gossip has it that several dozen officers recently bid for a plush station chief's posting in Scandinavia, while only several applicants each volunteered to run the stations in Baghdad, Kabul or Islamabad.

Hayden must also cope with the confusing intelligence reorganization that created the office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he was previously deputy. Under John Negroponte, the DNI structure is still very much a work in progress. Negroponte may move to deputy secretary of state after the election, providing a new opportunity to focus the reorganization. The administration was initially interested in General John Abizaid for the DNI post, but officials say Abizaid will stay on as commander of US Central Command.

Hayden wants to fix what ails the CIA. He installed as his deputy Steve Kappes, a popular former director of operations who was purged by the zealous right-wing aides of Hayden's predecessor, Republican ex-Congressman Porter Goss. Hayden has encouraged Kappes to press ahead with his plan to get more CIA officers out of embassies and into "nontraditional" platforms under deep cover. CIA veterans say they don't yet see much sign of Kappes' promised innovations, but then, if they were successful, they would be invisible.

Hayden is also trying to change the process of analysis, which failed so badly on the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction issue. In place of a CIA analytical culture that rewarded management skill and ticket-punching, Hayden wants analysts to stick with the subjects where they have acquired real expertise. He also wants to break down the tribalism of CIA directorates so the agency finally has a common culture shared by operators and analysts alike. As a start, he has fused their separate "Ops Centers" and created shared units for human resources, information technology and budgeting.

The real challenge for Hayden is to restore the elite luster of an agency too often characterized by mediocrity. To do that, he must resist pressure from a Congress that assumes that more is better. Hayden says he knows he isn't playing a numbers game, but he will have to fight to maintain quality in an agency where 40 percent of the employees have joined in the last five years.

Today's CIA is in many ways too big and bloated - pumping out green officers to huge stations overseas without focused missions. In Baghdad, for example, the CIA station is said to have over 600 people; yet most of them rarely travel outside the Green Zone and some senior Iraqis say it has been months since they met with a CIA officer. Younger officers are said to be frustrated with this cautious approach as they watch American soldiers fighting and dying, and see Iraq slipping away.

"This agency is at war," says Hayden - and, for a change, not with itself. He has undone much of the damage done by the Gosslings - refocusing the afternoon operations meetings that languished under his predecessor and talking with three dozen spy chiefs around the world to rebuild liaison relationships. Hayden wants to create a professional intelligence service, but maybe that's too low a bar. To cope with its current troubles, America needs something that arguably goes against our national grain - a truly great intelligence service that can operate powerfully, invisibly, legally. There's a modest post-election goal.

Syndicated columnist David Ignatius is published regularly by THE DAILY STAR.