Hayden will replace Porter Goss, who took over 20 months ago amid congressional hearings on “intelligence failures” of the CIA and other spy agencies leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

The CIA’s standing among government spy agencies continued to decline under Goss. The Defense Department has complained in the past about the inability of the CIA to provide adequate numbers of “terrorist” targets in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon, which controls 80 percent of the funding for all government spying activities, has expanded its spy operations into areas that were previously the domain of the CIA.

Critics of Hayden’s nomination have expressed concern about public perception in the choice of a military officer to head an ostensibly civilian agency. Hayden would in fact be the fifth active duty officer to head the CIA.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Peter Hoekstra, a Republican, called the nomination, “the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Sen. John Kerry said he has “serious reservations” about the nomination because of Hayden’s participation in the domestic surveillance program at NSA. Sen. Joseph Biden, like Kerry a Democrat, added that the nomination gives the impression that the CIA is being consumed by the Defense Department.

Others disagree. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, also a Democrat, spoke for the nomination. “Rumsfeld wanted to control the NSA, to his credit Hayden stood up,” she said, referring to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s opposition to a proposal by Hayden to move the NSA from the Defense Department to the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Rumsfeld prevailed.

News accounts of Hayden’s nomination have centered on speculation that it will aid the Defense Department’s efforts to expand its control over all government spying. In response to such questions, Rumsfeld was more pointed than usual at a May 9 Pentagon briefing. “The quality of the debate on this subject is pedestrian and unimpressive,” he said. “It should be a bit embarrassing for people to see what’s going on.”

The Pentagon not only controls the lion’s share of funds for spying, but, unlike the CIA and FBI, its operations are exempt from interference by the new Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.

Rumsfeld took advantage of questions at the Pentagon briefing to talk about the need to transform military intelligence, alongside the radical changes underway in the strategy, order of battle, and global deployment of the U.S. armed forces aimed at fighting a “long war” against Washington’s adversaries with lighter and more lethal and mobile units.

“If you talk to our combatant commanders, I think probably the thing they mention the most is the fact that they wish they had more intelligence, that they wish they had more timely intelligence, that they wish they were able to access information in this new 21st century that’s more appropriate to the 21st century,” Rumsfeld said.

The defense secretary implied that U.S. spy operations today remain stuck in the Cold War mode, when they were focused on the large armies, air forces, and ballistic missiles of the Soviet bloc. “It’s quite another thing when you’re dealing—moving away from that kind of a world where you’re worried about nation states with big military entities, into an asymmetric world with irregular warfare, with non-nation states, with people functioning in countries that we’re not at war with,” he said.

“The wall between intelligence and operations has already been lowered and the dream is eventually to do away with it altogether,” wrote William Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, in the May 9 Washington Post. Unlike CIA analysts, the soldiers involved in spying “are not collectors collecting for collection sake,” Arkin said. “They are directly supporting the commander.”  
 
 
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