CIA Morale on Hayden's Menu

Nominee Wants to Bolster Clandestine Collection Role

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, if confirmed as the new CIA director, would work to rebuild morale at the agency in part by emphasizing its central role in managing the collection of human intelligence overseas, including by agencies other than his own, according to active and retired senior intelligence officials.

Hayden would arrive at a CIA headquarters still shaken by the stormy 18-month tenure of Porter J. Goss. President Bush two weeks ago ousted Goss, whose directorship was marked by an exodus of some of the agency's top experienced talent, an incoming wave of younger case officers and analysts, and growing White House dissatisfaction with the leadership provided by the former Florida congressman and his top staffers.

Adding to unease is uncertainty over how the CIA will evolve as part of the newly reorganized intelligence community. Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte has been placed over the CIA and 15 other agencies that make up the intelligence community, while Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been expanding the Pentagon's intelligence operations into areas once the domain of the CIA. Questions about the future role of the CIA in that environment were never settled under Goss, officials say.

Hayden has told colleagues that he expects to act as the intelligence community's manager for human collection, coordinating and overseeing clandestine efforts abroad of the CIA, Defense Department and other government agencies. That would be similar to a role he played for intelligence collected by electronic intercepts when he ran the National Security Agency. In that role, and more recently as Negroponte's deputy, he has clashed with some senior defense officials.

Hayden has also said he would emphasize the CIA's importance as home to the largest number of "all-source" analysts within the U.S. intelligence community. He plans to remind them, an associate said, that the "CIA's primary customer remains the president" and they are still the "major," if not the only, contributor to the PDB, the President's Daily Brief, the highly classified intelligence report provided to Bush each morning.

Hayden's first proposed move -- to appoint as his top deputy former CIA deputy director for operations Stephen R. Kappes, who quit after Goss's arrival -- has been enthusiastically greeted within the agency and particularly by the clandestine service.

A powerful bureaucratic card in Hayden's hand is one that he and Negroponte dealt last October, when they established the National Clandestine Service (NCS), based at the agency, to coordinate overseas human espionage by the CIA, Pentagon and FBI, and named the CIA director to manage it. Hayden and Kappes are expected to play active roles in coordinating human intelligence collection.

"It is no accident NCS is at the agency because, warts and all, the gold standard for training, tradecraft, source validation and description is in the Directorate of Operations at the CIA," said a veteran senior intelligence official with responsibilities in the clandestine collection area. "No matter how big you build clandestine operations at the CIA, it would never be big enough, and you need diversity like DOD [Defense Department] and FBI humint folded into it," the senior official added.

Under agreements by the DNI with the agencies, the NCS will "de-conflict" human collection operations, meaning they will work out among the agencies which clandestine officers will recruit which agents in foreign countries, to avoid having them trip over each other.

For example, defense clandestine operators must advise the CIA chief of station in a foreign country and the U.S. ambassador of any activities they intend to carry out in that country. "If either or both disagree," the senior official said, whether it is a military intelligence or national intelligence issue, "they have to come back to Washington and work it out at senior agency levels." The official said there had been fewer than five such conflicts over the past year.

The analytic side of the agency presents a different problem.

The cold fact, said a senior intelligence official who has recently worked closely with Hayden, is that CIA analysis "is no longer ' primus inter pares ,' " first among equals, as it had been. It is one of 16 intelligence agencies, and it cannot be assumed, as in the past, that "how CIA judges an issue will become the result," the official said.

"CIA still has the largest number of analysts, but they are the youngest with almost 50 percent having less than five years of experience," the senior intelligence official said. "It is not very prudent to rely on that workforce. We have to go to the best people wherever [in the intelligence community] they may be," the official added.

One open wound on the analytic side has been the drawing from the CIA of analysts to help staff the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which operates under the DNI.

"Migrating people . . . turned out to be more painful than it needed to be," an intelligence official said.

When the NCTC was set up by the White House, it was given no new positions, this official said, "and it had to beg for detailees." But concerns among some at the CIA about the NCTC have eased since one of former CIA director George J. Tenet's executive assistants was named NCTC head of analysis.