Hayden's Challenges if Confirmed

By Douglas Farah

If Gen. Michael V. Hayden is confirmed as CIA director, he will inherit an organization with several overwhelming problems: morale is near rock-bottom; almost an entire generation of senior agents and managers have walked out the door; the large recruiting classes are bringing in smart people but hardly any with real-world experience or institutional knowledge; and bureaucratic infighting has left the agency in a much weaker institutional position than it was when Porter Goss took over.

While recruiting classes are large and the quality of recruits high, it is almost impossible to overstate the feeling foreign intelligence officials, retired officers and others have when they deal with the agency that the agency is operating with little adult supervision. There is no doubt reform was desperately needed after the end of the Cold War, as state threats merged with the threat of non-state actors sliding through the seams of globalization.

But those who left were not just the dinasours who couldn't change. There were also people who know how to successfully run clandestine operations, who think about exploiting the slight cracks among the different groups that emerge as enemies, those who know how to run covert information and disinformation campaigns. All of this must be done in a radically different world than the world that existed before the early 1990s, but the skills themselves are still vital. And the talent charts in the agency of those who have them is slim indeed.

Publicly floating the idea of bringing back Stephen R. Kappes as Hayden's deputy is a direct slap at the Goss legacy. Kappes resigned less than two months after Goss took over as CIA director in late 2004.
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