CIA Soldiers On Amid Al Qaeda Tape-Shred Scandal
By James Gordon Meek
CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden was on the congressional hotseat this week answering for agency operatives who shredded Al Qaeda interrogation videos. The tapes, which depicted Abu Zubaydah and others being waterboarded and questioned, were made from 2002-2003 and destroyed in 2005, a year before Hayden took over at Langley. As one frustrated U.S. official told the Mouth of the Potomac Blog, “He just gets to clean this up.”
But you don’t get to be a four-star Air Force general without political chops, particularly if - like Hayden - you don’t have pilot’s wings on your blue uniform. Proof of Hayden’s steely temperament under hostile political fire was on display after the flap erupted, when the grinning spy chief joked to an associate that U.S. government dignitaries had been phoning to thank him for taking the disputed Iran National Intelligence Estimate off newspapers’ front pages.
After first telling his troops last week that Congress knew about the tapes and plans to destroy them, he had to perform an about-face Wednesday when Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) chewed him out in a closed hearing for not telling the House Intelligence Committee that the tapes were tossed. Hayden emerged from the three-hour grilling Wednesday and admitted, “We could have done an awful lot better at keeping the committee alerted and informed.”
Yet Hayden’s defense of the CIA and his bullet-proof demeanor evidently have won him the admiration of rank and file spooks, who lined up by the hundreds Tuesday morning - a few hours before a Senate hearing on the tapes scandal - to express their support at a Langley holiday party, according to one of my sources, who was there. Hayden shook “more than 1,000 hands, getting hugs and posing for pictures with CIA employees. Lots of employees wished him the best and said they were pulling for him.”
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