In GOP, Doubts On Likely CIA Pick

In a 1999 New Yorker magazine article, two years before the attacks that led to the establishment of the domestic spying program, Hayden was asked whether the agency could target Americans.

"I'm a kid from Pittsburgh with two sons and a daughter who are closet libertarians," he said. "I am not interested in doing anything that threatens the American people, and threatens the future of this agency. I can't emphasize enough to you how careful we are."

Hayden left the NSA last year to become the first deputy director for national intelligence, a coordination position established as part of a massive intelligence restructuring in response to failures before Sept. 11.

But the changes have weakened the CIA while empowering the defense secretary, and critics of Hayden's nomination cited that as one reason a military officer should not be put in charge at Langley.

Hayden, a four-star Air Force general who is not considered close to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, could retire to alleviate concerns about his Pentagon ties. Roberts said that might help his nomination. Hoekstra disagreed.

"It makes absolutely no difference to me whether he is a general or a retired general," he said in an interview yesterday. "Either way, it sends the exact wrong signal to CIA officers in the field at a critical time."

Thirteen of the 19 CIA directors had military service before their appointment, and the tradition had been to balance a military director with a civilian deputy or vice versa.

Hoekstra will not preside over the hearings, but he is an influential Republican voice on intelligence matters and works closely with the CIA in conducting oversight. With the president's popularity at all-time lows, Hoekstra criticized the decision to dismiss Goss, less than two weeks after Goss fired a CIA employee accused of leaking classified information. "It undermined Porter's efforts to stop leaks," Hoekstra said.

The CIA has been in turmoil for much of Bush's presidency, after the failures to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the flawed prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. Those events were followed by 18 months of CIA management under Goss, who was forced aside last week amid an exodus of top officers at the agency and plummeting morale during a time of war.

Vice President Cheney, who is close both to Goss and to Hayden, said the next director will need to focus on the agency's core mission of sending out spies to collect information on targets such as al-Qaeda.

"We're faced with trying to find ways to figure out what a small group of terrorists are going to do. They're difficult to penetrate, difficult to track by national technical means," Cheney said in an interview with NBC News.

Hayden's intelligence expertise is not in the clandestine service, but in the technical world of communication intercepts and the use of satellite imagery to detect threats.

Staff writer Peter Baker contributed to this report.