Hayden Primer: Hoekstra’s Slam,
The Movie Critic & The Honor Roll

“Bottom line, I believe he’s the wrong person, the wrong place, at the wrong time. We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time.”

That’s House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) on Michael V. Hayden, the man widely expected to replace outgoing CIA director Porter Goss.

Hoekstra also believes that Hayden would be perceived as “under the sway” of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

That’s despite the fact that Hayden is not very close to Rumsfeld.

(In the summer of 2004, then-NSA chief Hayden was called to the Pentagon for lunch with Rumsfeld, who chewed him out for testifying before Congress that the NSA wouldn’t be harmed if put under the control of Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte. Rumsfeld asserted that Hayden was “out of line” and that his agency should be solely under the Pentagon’s control.)

Back in 1998, Hayden invited actor Will Smith to tour NSA headquarters during the making of the thriller, “Enemy of the State.” But when the movie was released months later and Hayden went to a screening in South Korea, he was shocked that the film, with a great deal of prescience, portrayed the agency using its technology to track and eavesdrop on Americans. The movie’s message prompted Hayden to launch a public relations campaign to reassure Americans about the reality of the agency’s mission.

To get a peek into the workings of Hayden’s brain, check out his speech to the Air Force Association in February:

Then I say, in terms of the sharing of information, no one beats the American intelligence community. No fooling. We’re better than anyone else in the world. And if the President and my dad in Pittsburgh were grading on the curve, we’d be honor roll. [Laughter] But we’re not. We’re grading on an absolute standard; nobody drives any big objects into big buildings. So this is to push it even further.

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