Michael Hayden

Quick facts

Born: March 17, 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Education: B.A. history (1967) and M.A. modern American history, Duquesne University; commissioned via Duquesne Air Force ROTC Career: Career U.S. Air Force intelligence officer (entered active duty 1969); rose to four-star general — the highest-ranking military intelligence officer in U.S. history Health note: Suffered a severe stroke in November 2018, resulting in aphasia; has been largely withdrawn from public commentary since (Washington Post, Nov. 23, 2018)

Key positions

Biography

Michael Hayden is the only person to have served as both Director of the NSA and Director of the CIA. He grew up in an Irish-American steelworker family in Pittsburgh, attended Duquesne University for both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and was commissioned through Duquesne’s Air Force ROTC. He spent four decades as an Air Force intelligence officer — briefer, analyst, command intelligence chief, and air attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria (1984-1986) — before President Clinton nominated him to lead the NSA in 1999.

Hayden’s defining act was authorizing and building the President’s Surveillance Program, classified STELLAR WIND, in the weeks after September 11, 2001. By his own account in his memoir Playing to the Edge, after CIA Director George Tenet asked whether the NSA could do “anything more,” Hayden proposed a warrantless domestic collection program that bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court entirely; Bush signed the executive authorization in the first week of October 2001. The program collected international call content involving U.S. persons, bulk telephony metadata from major carriers, and bulk internet metadata without individualized warrants. The legal authorization memos were authored by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo. In March 2004, after OLC head Jack Goldsmith and Deputy Attorney General James Comey concluded portions were legally unsupportable, Hayden was directly involved in the White House meetings surrounding the hospital-room confrontation in which Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller blocked aides from extracting a reauthorization signature from an incapacitated Attorney General Ashcroft. Hayden continued to run the program throughout (Comey Senate testimony, reported in the Washington Post, May 15, 2007).

As CIA Director (confirmed by the Senate 78-15), Hayden inherited and defended the Agency’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program — the black-site network and the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2014 study (the Feinstein Report) found that CIA directors including Hayden “provided inaccurate and misleading information to members of the U.S. Congress, the White House and the Director of National Intelligence about the program’s effectiveness and the number of prisoners the CIA held.” Hayden disputed the report’s findings and rejected the characterization of the techniques as torture.

He left government on February 12, 2009, and in April 2009 joined the Chertoff Group — the security advisory firm co-founded by Michael Chertoff, Bush’s DHS Secretary — as a principal, the same calendar quarter he departed (Washington Technology, April 2009). He held that role through 2022, became a CNN national security analyst, and founded the Hayden Center at George Mason University’s Schar School. He went on to be among the surveillance programs’ most persistent public defenders, arguing in Playing to the Edge (2016) that they were legal and effective and that the agencies’ only failure was in public communication. In September 2016, in a documented break, he signed a national-security letter warning that Trump was a risk, indicted the administration’s relationship with the intelligence community in The Assault on Intelligence (2018), and endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 — criticizing the political deployment of the apparatus while continuing to defend the architecture he had built.

Sources

• Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (Penguin Press, Feb. 23, 2016).
• Michael V. Hayden, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies (Penguin Press, May 22, 2018).
• Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Feinstein Report), Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program — Executive Summary (Dec. 9, 2014). https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf
• “Chertoff security firm hires Hayden, three others,” Washington Technology (April 2009). https://www.washingtontechnology.com/2009/04/chertoff-security-firm-hires-hayden-three-others/323853/
• “Gonzales Hospital Episode Detailed — Comey Senate Testimony,” The Washington Post (May 15, 2007). https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051500864.html
• “Former CIA director Michael Hayden hospitalized after suffering a stroke,” The Washington Post (Nov. 23, 2018). https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/23/former-cia-director-michael-hayden-hospitalized-after-suffering-stroke/