Director of Central Intelligence General Mike Hayden is taking a beating in the press and in Congress for ordering an investigation of the CIA's Inspector General. But, within the Agency, the move will probably trigger more cheers than jeers, says R.J. Hillhouse** in her third post for DANGER ROOM.*
Mike Hayden's first year and a half at the Agency has been, well, rather colorless -- until now. Given some of the damage done by some previous directors like Porter Goss or John Deutsch, colorless is not a particularly bad thing. Sure, some true leadership would be nice, given the CIA's precarious near-complete dependency upon industrial contractors, high turnover rate and inexperienced staff (half has less than five years experience). But, hey, he's a political appointee and sometimes not doing damage is the best we can hope for. As one senior member of the Intelligence Community recently summarized leadership by DCI Hayden and Director of National Intelligence Admiral Mike McConnell, "The Mikes are watching the clock tick down until the next administration."
But Hayden keeps trying to improve morale, particularly in the National Clandestine Service (the former Directorate of Operations, the DO, the directorate responsible for clandestine and covert actions and the gathering of human intelligence). He's tried chipper morning emails, like he used to do at NSA -- but they were generally snickered at. His stories of pulling down the pants of Soviet officers while at the military mission in Potsdam didn't exactly impress the battle-hardened officers. But DCI Hayden does keeps trying to be liked by the cool kids in the NCS and maybe, just maybe, this time he's succeeded. In what may be his most (internally) popular move yet, Gen. Hayden has ordered an investigation of the CIA's Inspector General. Now this looks like a hell of a conflict of interest to the rest of the world, but it's something that will elicit cheers at Headquarters. Former number three at the CIA, Buzzy Krongard, sums up how the IG is viewed internally:
(As a "it's-a-small-world" side note, Buzzy has been connected to Blackwater USA and the award of its first Agency contract.)
The Inspector General's office has several open investigations of the so-called "black sites," facilities in foreign countries where a handful of the highest value terror suspects are held incommunicado and interrogated. According to the New York Times:
This has been an ongoing point of contention within the Agency.
Another former number three at the Agency has also locked horns with
Inspector General John Helgerson over the same issue. But this received no attention outside of Agency circles. That number three was
Dusty Foggo, of the Duke Cunningham scandal fame. As Executive Director of the
CIA, Dusty Foggo insisted that the IG shut down investigations when they had run out of people to interview and documents to review.
It's the practice of the IG to keep investigations on the black sites and renditions open "to see what develops." An open IG
investigation has the net effect of stopping the promotion of the subjects under investigation until the investigation has closed. This this tactic by the IG effectively halted the promotions of those under investigation until... in effect, forever. Many believe that the IG
under Helgerson was taking an approach to investigations concerning renditions and black sites that had the effect of causing the NCS’s best and brightest to avoid service in the center responsible for black sites and renditions so as not to put their careers on hold.
When Foggo was appointed Executive Director of the CIA in 2004, I'm told there were some twenty open IG investigations into the black sites and rendition program. Foggo never went as far as initiating an internal investigation of the IG's office and IG Helgerson held his ground. Ironically, Helgerson's office would later be investigating
Foggo.
In another (internally) popular and history-making move, DCI Hayden has issued an edict that all CIA employees are entitled to take three hours out of their 40 hour work week to do physical fitness training if they want to. Of course, this probably end up soon translating into six hours:
three for actual PT and three for suiting up before and showering afterwards. Hayden will go into the history books, not only as the first CIA Director to investigate the CIA's watchdog, but, perhaps more significantly, as the fist DCI to to figure out how to get people off of the target and doing something totally unrelated to their jobs during wartime.
So DCI Hayden might become Mr. Popularity after all. Now if he would only do something about allowing those analysts from the
Directorate of Intelligence (DI) to hold the posts of Chiefs of Station
(COS), he might really win over the NCS.
And to help get CIA employees to take advantage of the new non-mission focused opportunity, a friend who is no stranger to dark, dangerous alleys overseas came up with a few "Jody calls" for the blue badgers to chant in cadence as they run around Headquarters while their green badger corporate buddies are inside, racking up those billable hours:
-- **R.J. Hillhouse, cross-posted at The Spy Who Billed Me
