Gen. Hayden Deserves a Chance

I have been a fan of John Negroponte, but I opposed the creation of his job.

I believe the post of director of national intelligence is an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy created in a needless cave-in to the 9/11 Commission, which spent millions of our tax dollars reaching conclusions we already knew.

But you have to play the field the way it is striped. Mr. Negroponte holds the title - and the foreign service résumé to deserve it. He was part of the Reagan administration legacy of chasing Marxism out of Latin America and has spent the years since in ambassador posts from the U.N. to Mexico, the Philippines, Honduras and post-Saddam Iraq.

Make no mistake: Mr. Negroponte is the reason Porter Goss is out at the CIA and the deputy director of national intelligence, Gen. Michael Hayden, is in as the nominee to succeed him. The director of national intelligence is the official who now stands between the CIA chief and the president. Under President Bush, he apparently gets to pick who that CIA chief will be.

Mr. Goss apparently was never popular along the CIA hallways in Langley, Va. Not that popularity is always an indicator of good management, but many career officers did not warm to him, there were reports of infighting, and there was little reason to believe, as he unconvincingly asserted in his Oval Office farewell, that "the agency is back on a very even keel and sailing well."

Questionable nautical metaphors aside, one thing that seemingly never went well was Mr. Goss' relationship with Mr. Negroponte, who reportedly delivered the pink slip to Mr. Goss and handpicked his own deputy to succeed him.

Much is made of Gen. Hayden's role as director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005, a tenure that included the warrantless wiretaps that administration critics love to protest in breathless tones of dread.

But Republican skepticism might stem more from his last year as Mr. Negroponte's deputy. From House Speaker Dennis Hastert to House Intelligence Committee chair Peter Hoekstra, opposition to Gen. Hayden drips with distaste for Mr. Negroponte.

Mr. Hastert called it a "power grab" from Mr. Goss to clear the way for a favored deputy. Mr. Hoekstra blames the new layer of bureaucracy for slowing the improvement of intelligence, and he may succeed at thwarting some budget requests from Mr. Negroponte, who has moved about 400 intelligence jobs from agencies under his direct control.

There's only one question that matters: Is the nation's need for better intelligence well served or not with Mr. Negroponte as director of national intelligence and Gen. Hayden as CIA director?

Mr. Negroponte is not going anywhere, so the battle will revolve around Gen. Hayden's nomination.

There will be the predictable prattling from Democrats hostile to the NSA wiretaps. They will grandstand on that subject to derail the general, deliver a black eye to Mr. Bush and bolster the case for the impeachment frenzy, which would begin the day they regain power in either house of Congress.

But when the subject returns to the issue at hand, there are both Republicans and Democrats apparently willing to balk at putting an active-duty general at the helm of the CIA, even though generals or admirals have led the agency six times.

Other objections may arise from his unbalanced experience - plenty in the world of high-tech intel, very little in covert human operations.

How to sift through all of this? Ultimately, I believe any president deserves deference in picking a CIA chief, barring evidence of a clear disqualifying factor.

Since Gen. Hayden is not exactly the Harriet Miers of intel - and since naming him does not reveal a Dubai Ports World-style judgment lapse - he deserves a shot at making things better at the CIA.

It's a little too glib to say they could not get much worse, but Gen. Hayden would succeed Mr. Goss and, more notably, George Tenet, who oversaw the CIA through 9/11 and the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco. "If confirmed, I will be standing on their shoulders," he said Monday.

Let's hope he can reach a little higher than that.