Hoekstra Sets His Sights on CIA Chief
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WASHINGTON — When the CIA director, Michael Hayden, testifies today before the House intelligence panel, he will face particular scrutiny from the committee’s top-ranking Republican.
In an interview yesterday, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan, said Mr. Hayden’s memo to CIA employees last week, claiming that oversight committees were informed of the agency’s plans to destroy the interrogation videos, was inaccurate. Stopping just short of calling Mr. Hayden a liar, Mr. Hoekstra, who headed the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2005 and 2006, said, “He says Congress was adequately and fully informed. We were never informed. He contends that briefings in 2002 and 2003 are more than sufficient for activities that took place in 2005 when you had new leadership of the community. That makes no sense.”
Following a 90-minute closed-door hearing yesterday in the Senate, Mr. Hayden told reporters that he laid out narrative for why the tapes were destroyed. But because both the recording and the destruction took place before he became director of the CIA, he could not provide all the answers to the questions from the Senators. The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Rockefeller, a Democrat of West Virginia, said yesterday questions remained unanswered. Mr. Hoekstra also told The New York Sun that he told Mr. Hayden personally that the briefing his committee received on this month’s Iran National Intelligence Estimate was “embarrassing.”
That assessment asserts that Iran’s enrichment of uranium in Natanz, Iran, is distinct from a nuclear weapons program that it halted in the fall of 2003. Mr. Hoekstra yesterday said he did not know what the distinction meant, and the basis for that conclusion was “non-existent.”
“You would expect a very crisp presentation of sources and methods, that would lead you to reach these types of radically different conclusions from what they were saying as recently as three or four months ago,” Mr. Hoekstra said. “From my perspective the basis was non-existent.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has tried to counter mounting criticisms in Washington and among allied intelligence services that its recent Iran estimate was too optimistic. On Saturday, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, Donald Kerr, issued a “response to those questioning the analytic integrity” of the 16 spy agencies that contributed to the Iran estimate. He said, “The task of the Intelligence Community is to produce objective, ground truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate.”
Mr. Hoekstra said that he expects the House intelligence panel will be getting further briefings in the hopes he said of determining how this latest estimate was reached. “I expect the committee to do a thorough review of the development and process under which this new NIE was developed,” he said.
But Mr. Hoekstra also said he did not favor forming an outside committee to review the intelligence estimate, as some Republican lawmakers have requested. “I am very leery of having another independent commission. This whole tape thing is another black eye for the community,” Mr. Hoekstra said, “This puts the intelligence community back under the microscope in the public eye. In many ways this makes the community less effective and more gun shy just when we need them the most.”
Mr. Hoekstra has been a tough critic of Mr. Hayden’s since Mr. Hayden was the principal deputy director of national intelligence in 2005. Mr. Hoekstra at the time pressed the intelligence community to re-open the inquiry into Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, noting that even the final report of the Iraq Survey Group concluded that key sites were modified and stripped clean before inspectors could get to them.
Mr. Hayden and Mr. Hoekstra have also clashed on questions of declassification. Mr. Hoekstra sponsored an amendment yesterday to force the executive branch to make public what it knows about Israel’s bombing of an alleged nuclear facility in Syria in September. “It is so compelling and necessary to get people briefed in on what happened in Syria, that would give you insights into a lot of this,” Mr. Hoekstra said. That said, Mr. Hoekstra’s frustration with the spy chief now comes at a terrible time for Mr. Hayden, who testified yesterday before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about his agency’s decision to destroy videotapes of interrogation of at least two Al Qaeda suspects.
In the interrogations, the agency’s interrogator submitted one suspect, known as Abu Zubaydeh, to a simulated drowning known as water boarding. The technique is considered torture by the American military. Since news of the destruction of the videotapes has gone public, the American Civil Liberties Union has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the destruction of the tapes, requested as evidence in pending lawsuits.
ABC News on Monday interviewed a retired CIA officer, John Kiriakou, who said the water boarding of Abu Zubaydeh yielded actionable intelligence. He also said he saw no reason why the tapes were destroyed.
Mr. Hoekstra yesterday said he was reserving judgment on the matter until he read a report on the incident from the CIA’s inspector general and other classified reviews. Nonetheless, he and the House intelligence committee chairman, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat of Texas, announced a committee investigation into the destruction of the tapes.