Words&Dirt

There was a time when I thought Michael V. Hayden and his ilk were scum, but, as Hayden himself acknowledges: “You can only dehumanize an enemy from a distance” (238). Once I let Hayden into my head, he gave my liberal, civilian ass a serious reality check. Despite its nonlinear format and a bevy of technical jargon that I struggled to properly parse, Playing to the Edge challenged me to consider new perspectives about how and why Americans need––and should even celebrate––our practitioners of espionage.

This book’s title is a carefully chosen sports metaphor; it functions at multiple levels throughout Hayden’s memoir of heading up both the NSA and CIA during the late 1990s and early 2000s. “The reference,” Hayden explains, “is to using all the tools and all the authorities available, much like how a good athlete takes advantage of the entire playing field right up to the sideline markers and endlines” (xiv). In Hayden’s view, it is the job of intelligence services to take every inch allowed by the law in order to keep Americans safe.

Whether or not Americans agree with Hayden’s viewpoint is less important than our ability to learn from his experience. That’s why Playing to the Edge is a valuable text, even if it is also confounding, sad, and occasionally infuriating. Hayden prompts us to look deeply at our ambivalent relationship with national security, and suggests how we might shed some light on it while still preserving the elements of secrecy on which all intelligence is founded. This is a monumental task––one that nobody could expect Hayden to accomplish alone. But his experiences have given him a singular view of the security landscape, and from this vantage point he makes a worthy contribution to our national dialogue.

From the start, Hayden works very hard to dissuade readers who think the “freedom vs. security” trade-off is a sham. For Hayden and his colleagues, the tension between freedom and security is much more than an abstraction; it is the protean global wound from which their job derives its meaning. Hayden repeatedly points out that maintaining freedom and security concurrently is a grueling and thankless charge. Instead of understanding the deadly nuances that intelligence officials deal with every day, people prefer to “criticize intelligence agencies for not doing enough when they feel in danger, while reserving the right to criticize those agencies for doing too much when they feel safe again” (34-5). I happen to think our spies should be forced to live with this pickle (as they do), but Hayden is right to point out that, even on the best days, it’s a damned difficult position to be in.

Hayden thinks the Americans who take up this burden on behalf of the rest of us are under-appreciated; after reading this book, I’m inclined to agree. Hayden goes to great lengths to demonstrate how hard people at the NSA and CIA work to ensure that their actions are safe and lawful––even when they fail. Though part of me balked at the suggestion, it was more of a relief than anything else to learn that “CIA is composed of ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans placed in extraordinary circumstances and expected to do extraordinary things” (272-3).

Even when our intelligence personnel fail or disgrace us, what do we accomplish by vilifying them? Hayden provides a disquieting but wise answer: “They get to say, and say publicly, ‘See. This wasn’t about us. It was never about us. We’re not like that. Those people, those people over there. The ones who lied. It’s about them’” (400). If we, the public, continually exculpate ourselves from the moral transgressions of those we send to guard the walls of our republic, for how long will we deserve that protection? This question should not be used to silence all criticism of intelligence agencies, nor should it lead us to believe everything we’re told about how they operate. But it should make us stop and think about what we are really willing to give (or to tolerate) to preserve our illusions of safety in an inherently dangerous world.

If Hayden is an expert at needling the conflict between freedom and security, he is equally adept at framing the role of intelligence in the modern world. Even though there are plenty of sections in this book that merely catalog “one damned thing after another,” Playing to the Edge is also peppered with telling insights about what intelligence is and how it operates. The most delightful aspect of these moments is that they sometimes apply not only to intelligence in the narrow context of national security, but also in the broad context of what it means to act intelligently in general (something that is notoriously difficult to define).

My favorite of these characterizations is also the most vexing. Hayden contrasts intelligence with traditional justice:

[Traditional justice] is a process of assigning guilt and meting out punishment after an evil has been done, with time not a factor, and with the appropriate standard of proof being beyond a reasonable doubt.

None of that applies to intelligence, where the evil is pending, time is always critical, and where the objective is to enable action even in the face of continued doubt. (280)

The sticky truth is that we ask our intelligence agencies to do an impossible job, which is to protect us from the future. No reasonable person would deny that bad things can be prevented with proper foresight and preparation, but neither would that same person deny that the future is always uncertain until it becomes the present. So we toss our intelligence people into the middle of that paradox and let them sweat it out. Then we go get a cheeseburger and think about who’s going to win March Madness.

Lest you should think I’ve downed Hayden’s Kool-Aid without a fight, I’ve got a few serious bones to pick with him. The first is that, throughout the book, he is far too defensive about the claims of his critics. Hayden is happy to lionize those who “play to the edge” in the name of security, but doesn’t extend the same magnanimity to those who take up the arduous task of scrutinizing whether or not the receiver was actually in-bounds when the catch was made. Too often, Hayden comes off as a football coach who prefers it when the opposing team and referees just don’t show up for the big game. He seems to find the idea that there are multiple interpretations of the law distasteful, especially when those interpretations might render some of his or his colleagues’ actions unlawful.

Hayden haughtily dismisses the work of journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras as “hopelessly agenda-driven” (124). This is a myopic and unfair characterization of people many Americans see as heroes––myself included.  Hayden’s appraisal of Edward Snowden is even worse; he calls Snowden an “incredibly naive, hopelessly narcissistic, and insufferably self-important defector” (421). Even if those labels rightly apply to Snowden, they are certainly not the only ones that do. Hayden credits Snowden for shedding light on the need to improve the “relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves,” but gives him no recognition for bravely standing up for his core beliefs, for doing something he knew would make him a global target, or for sacrificing his personal achievement of the American Dream in order to promote his vision of a better America (422). By assuming a view so devoid of nuance, Hayden belies many of his other insights about the importance of grey areas when assessing security situations; he also risks looking like precisely the villain that indignant liberals accuse him of being.

This problem is compounded by sections in Playing to the Edge that read like something straight out of Heller or Orwell. Take this example:

Enhanced interrogation techniques had been used on about a third of the hundred or so HVDs [High-Value Detainees] that had been held. The techniques were not used to elicit information, but rather to move a detainee from defiance to cooperation by imposing on him a state of helplessness. When he got to the latter state (the duration varied, but on average a week or so), interrogations resembled debriefings or conversations. (223, emphasis his)

This is the insidious logic of a teenage psychopath caught abusing a dog: “I wasn’t hitting him to make him do what I wanted! I was just trying to show him what would happen if he didn’t!”

Similarly disturbing are Hayden’s calculations about how to weaken Iran:

What kind of internal tensions would distract Iranians from the nuclear program, cause them to divert resources from it, or convince them it wasn’t worth the candle or at least make their behavior more costly?

Iran has fault lines; it is far from a homogenous society…Would it be possible to exploit or deepen the unhappiness that these groups already had with the government?…What kind of messaging could mobilize these groups and energize these disputes? What kind of actions could inspire or appear to reflect heightened dissidence? (303-4).

Reading passages like this made me feel like a more appropriate title for the book might have been Playing with Lives. I find it sickening that some of our best and brightest spend their time trying to weaken foreign nations in such a fashion––even in the name of preventing nuclear proliferation. Nebulous phrases like “divert resources” and “deepen the unhappiness” and “energize these disputes” obfuscate the larger goal here, which is to sacrifice the stability of a nation––to compromise thousands upon thousands of innocent lives––because we are terrified of what might happen if they acquire one nuclear bomb. Perhaps this is evidence that I’m simply not grokking what’s really at stake, but I’ve never accepted the logic that America should go to such lengths to ensure nonproliferation. If Iran gets one bomb, we still have thousands––the deterrent against initiating a nuclear strike still seems perfectly robust. And in an era when cyber attacks and biological warfare can be just as damaging as nukes (if not moreso), why is nonproliferation still an acceptable justification for undermining a foreign nation?

There is a systemic trend here: By asking individuals to serve in our intelligence agencies, we foist on them a kind of selective empathy. We train them to be highly perspicacious and flexible when detecting threats, mimicking the thought processes of enemies, and designing security solutions, while also dulling their sensitivity to the plight of perceived enemies. We require their perspective-taking habits to conform to the standards of treaties, laws, and global conflicts, while simultaneously resisting many of the intuitive mechanisms of mutual understanding that pervade social life. I believe this is a necessary but tragic predicament that enables our intelligence apparatus to function properly; but it doesn’t come without a personal cost to those on the ground.

The influence of the “us-versus-them” mentality is powerful, as demonstrated by Hayden’s reflections on a conversation with Branco Krga, a Serbian intelligence officer:

At one point Branco leaned into me over lunch and lamented the deaths of so many young men. He talked especially about Serb grief, with one- and two-child families now the norm, and then it happened. “But these Muslim families,” he continued with a wave of his hand, “they are so large, what does it matter to them?”

There is little point in arguing. Just don’t agree or even seem to agree. Sit there, expressionless, not allowing yourself the almost instinctive head nod signaling “transmission acknowledged,” hoping that the episode passes quickly and you can get back to useful dialogue.

It took a while, but one night as I was preparing for an overnight hop to another destination on a foreign trip, the thought struck me. What of my side of these dialogues did our partners dismiss as American mythology? When I talked about self-determination? Cultural pluralism? The curative effect of elections? And when were my partners patiently waiting while I finished before we got back to “serious” talk? (317)

Rather than blaming Branco for his harshness and praising Hayden for his trenchant revelation, my first impulse is to lament the need for such discussions and interactions between people and nations. I picture Hayden sitting there, blank-faced, not showing an inkling of the disgust he must have felt. And seeing that in my mind’s eye, I conclude that something in the world is profoundly broken. But, to my surprise, I also conclude that something in the world is pressing on, despite setbacks and sins, despite cruelty and callousness, despite disease and death.

Where does this leave me? Well, I agree with Hayden when he asserts that “Rather than just being compatible with a democracy, espionage is essential to it. Frightened people don’t make good democrats. No spies. Less security. Less freedom” (427). I also think he is right to conclude that intelligence agencies need better and more frequent communication with the American public:

The American intelligence community owes the public it serves enough data so that people can make out the broad shapes and broad movements of what intelligence is doing, but they do not need specific operational details. The former should suffice to build trust, while the latter would be destructive of espionage’s inherent purposes. (424)

This balance is currently skewed far too much in favor of secrecy, and it’s good to see Hayden pushing for transparency where appropriate. Only time can reveal if the sacrifices we make for freedom and security are worth it, in the end. But right now, caught in the dizzy unfolding of events, there is some comfort in knowing that good people of all sorts are pushing for their respective ends. Though some of his views and actions repulse me, I’m glad Hayden served my country, and fortunate for the chance to encounter this book.

Rating: 9/10