History > 2006 > USA > CIA / NI / NSA / NGA (II)

First Source of C.I.A. Leak Admits Role,

Lawyer Says

August 30, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, has acknowledged that he was the person whose conversation with a columnist in 2003 prompted a long, politically laden criminal investigation in what became known as the C.I.A. leak case, a lawyer involved in the case said on Tuesday.

Mr. Armitage did not return calls for comment. But the lawyer and other associates of Mr. Armitage have said he has confirmed that he was the initial and primary source for the columnist, Robert D. Novak, whose column of July 14, 2003, identified Valerie Wilson as a Central Intelligence Agency officer.

The identification of Mr. Armitage as the original leaker to Mr. Novak ends what has been a tantalizing mystery. In recent months, however, Mr. Armitage’s role had become clear to many, and it was recently reported by Newsweek magazine and The Washington Post.

In the accounts by the lawyer and associates, Mr. Armitage disclosed casually to Mr. Novak that Ms. Wilson worked for the C.I.A. at the end of an interview in his State Department office. Mr. Armitage knew that, the accounts continue, because he had seen a written memorandum by Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman.

Mr. Grossman had taken up the task of finding out about Ms. Wilson after an inquiry from I. Lewis Libby Jr., chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby’s inquiry was prompted by an Op-Ed article on May 6, 2003, in The New York Times by Nicholas D. Kristof and an article on June 12, 2003, in The Washington Post by Walter Pincus.

The two articles reported on a trip by a former ambassador to Africa sponsored by the C.I.A. to check reports that Iraq was seeking enriched uranium to help with its nuclear arms program.

Neither article identified the ambassador, but it was known inside the government that he was Joseph C. Wilson IV, Ms. Wilson’s husband. White House officials wanted to know how much of a role she had in selecting him for the assignment.

Ms. Wilson was a covert employee, and after Mr. Novak printed her identity, the agency requested an investigation to see whether her name had been leaked illegally.

Some administration critics said her name had been made public in a campaign to punish Mr. Wilson, who had written in a commentary in The Times that his investigation in Africa him to believe that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence to justify an attack on Iraq.

The complaints after Mr. Novak’s column led to the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity.

The special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, did not bring charges in connection with laws that prohibit the willful disclosure of the identity of an C.I.A. officer. But Mr. Fitzgerald did indict Mr. Libby on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, saying Mr. Libby had testified untruthfully to a grand jury and federal agents when he said he learned about Ms. Wilson’s role at the agency from reporters rather than from several officials, including Mr. Cheney.

According to an account in a coming book, “Hubris, the Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War’’ by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, excerpts of which appeared in Newsweek this week, Mr. Armitage told a few State Department colleagues that he might have been the leaker whose identity was being sought.

The book says Mr. Armitage realized that when Mr. Novak published a second column in October 2003 that said his source had been an official who was “not a political gunslinger.’’

The Justice Department was quickly informed, and Mr. Armitage disclosed his talks with Mr. Novak in subsequent interviews with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, even before Mr. Fitzgerald’s appointment.

The book quotes Carl W. Ford Jr., then head of the intelligence and research bureau at the State Department, as saying that Mr. Armitage had told him, “I may be the guy who caused this whole thing,’’ and that he regretted having told the columnist more than he should have.

Mr. Grossman’s memorandum did not mention that Ms. Wilson had undercover status.

Apart from Mr. Ford, as quoted in the book, the lawyer and colleagues of Mr. Armitage who discussed the case have spoken insisting on anonymity, apparently because Mr. Armitage was still not comfortable with the public acknowledgment of his role.

He was also the source for another journalist about Ms. Wilson, a reporter who did not write about her. The lawyers and associates said Mr. Armitage also told Bob Woodward, assistant managing editor of The Washington Post and a well-known author, of her identity in June 2003.

Mr. Woodward was a late player in the legal drama when he disclosed last November that he had the received the information and testified to a grand jury about it after learning that his source had disclosed the conversation to prosecutors.

    First Source of C.I.A. Leak Admits Role, Lawyer Says, NYT, 30.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/washington/30armitage.html

Judge Rejects Customer Suit Over Records From AT&T

July 26, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

A federal judge in Chicago dismissed a class-action lawsuit yesterday against AT&T that claimed it had illegally given information about its customers to the National Security Agency. The judge, Matthew F. Kennelly, based his ruling on the state secrets privilege, which can bar suits that would disclose information harmful to national security.

The ruling is at first blush at odds with a decision last week by a federal judge in San Francisco. That judge, Vaughn R. Walker, allowed a similar suit against AT&T to proceed notwithstanding the state secrets privilege.

But the two decisions can be reconciled, Judge Kennelly wrote. The Chicago case concerns records of phone calls, including when they were placed, how long they lasted and the phone numbers involved. The San Francisco case, by contrast, mainly concerns an N.S.A. program aimed not at a vast sweep of customers’ records but at the contents of a more limited number of communications.

Because the Bush administration has confirmed the existence of such targeted wiretapping, the San Francisco suit could proceed without running afoul of the state secrets privilege, Judge Walker ruled last week. ‘‘The government has opened the door for judicial inquiry,” he wrote, “by publicly confirming and denying material information about its monitoring of communications content.”

In his decision yesterday, Judge Kennelly said there had been no comparable confirmation by the government or AT&T of “the existence or nonexistence of AT&T’s claimed record turnover.” He refused to rely on news accounts of the program as proof of its existence and noted that “no executive branch official has officially confirmed or denied the existence of any program to obtain large quantities of customer telephone records.”

The case was brought by the journalist Studs Terkel, five other individual plaintiffs and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. They argued that the program violated a federal law that forbids the disclosure of some customer records to the government, and they sought a court order to stop it.

Among the papers the government submitted to Judge Kennelly to urge the dismissal of the case on state secrets grounds was a declaration from John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. “Even confirming that a certain intelligence activity or relationship does not exist, either in general or with respect to specific targets or channels,” Mr. Negroponte said, “would cause harm to the national security because alerting our adversaries to channels or individuals that are not under surveillance could likewise help them avoid detection.”

Judge Kennelly noted his “great antipathy” for dismissing the suit. “Nothing in this opinion,” he wrote, “prevents the plaintiffs from using the legislative process, not to mention their right of free speech, to seek further inquiry by the executive and legislative branches into the allegations in their complaint.”

More than 30 lawsuits over government surveillance programs are pending in the nation. Only one, in Detroit, has moved beyond questions of procedure and privilege to consider the legality of the wiretapping program. A decision in that case is expected soon.

    Judge Rejects Customer Suit Over Records From AT&T, NYT, 26.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/us/26nsa.html

C.I.A. Worker Says Message on Torture Got Her Fired

July 22, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, July 21 — A contract employee working for the Central Intelligence Agency said she had been fired recently for posting a message on a classified computer server that said an interrogation technique used by the agency against some terror suspects amounted to torture.

The employee, Christine Axsmith, kept the “Covert Communications” blog on a top-secret computer network used by American intelligence agencies. Ms. Axsmith was fired on Monday after C.I.A. officials objected to a message that criticized the interrogation technique called “waterboarding,” a particularly harsh practice that the C.I.A. is known to have used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who is widely regarded as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The episode has opened a window into the new world of classified blogging: an experimental effort being carried out in top-secret computer forums where information and ideas are shared across the intelligence community. Intelligence officials said that since last year, more than 1,000 blogs had been set up on classified intelligence servers.

Ms. Axsmith, a computer security expert with a law degree, posted the message this month, shortly after the Bush administration decided to grant some protections of the Geneva Conventions to suspected terrorists in American custody. She said that her message began, “Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong.”

Ms. Axsmith’s firing was earlier reported on several blogs including Wonkette.com on Thursday, and in Friday’s Washington Post.

“I wanted an in-house discussion,” Ms. Axsmith said in an interview on Thursday in her home in Washington. “Something where I would be educating people on the background of the Geneva Conventions.”

Instead, Ms. Axsmith was fired by her employer, B.A.E. Systems, which has an information technology contract with the C.I.A.

Ms. Axsmith said C.I.A. officials had confronted her and told her that the agency’s senior leadership was angry about the blog, which was housed on Intelink, the classified server maintained by the American intelligence community to aid communication among its employees.

Besides losing her job, Ms. Axsmith also lost her top-secret security clearance, which she had held since 1993 and used for previous work for the State Department and National Counterterrorism Center.

She said she feared that her career in the intelligence world was over. “It was like I was wiped out,” she said.

A spokesman for B.A.E. Systems, Bob Hastings, said privacy issues prohibited him from commenting on Ms. Axsmith’s firing. But Mr. Hastings said that company policy prohibited employees from using computers for non-official purposes.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said that the blogs were intended to “encourage collaboration” on business issues but that postings “should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the Web site.”

The C.I.A. denies that it uses torture to extract information from prisoners, although a 2004 report by the agency’s inspector general concluded that some of its interrogation practices appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

In waterboarding, the interrogation technique that Ms. Axsmith criticized, a prisoner is strapped to a board and then made to feel as if he is drowning.

In March 2005, Porter J. Goss, who was then the C.I.A. director, described waterboarding as a “professional interrogation technique”; American military pilots and commandos are known to have been subjected to it during highly classified training regimes designed to prepare them to live in captivity.

The use of the practice, along with the agency’s detention of approximately three dozen “high value detainees” in secret jails, has made some C.I.A. employees uneasy and has prompted a debate within the intelligence community.

Ms. Axsmith said she believed that the “vast majority” of people working for the C.I.A. were opposed to torture.

And, she said that she believed that the classified blogs could be a critical tool to allow C.I.A. employees — who are often prohibited from discussing their work even with other agency officials — to vent frustrations.

“The blogs are a safety valve for people to discuss controversial topics,” she said. “It reduces the chances that people may leak to the press.”

In April, the C.I.A. fired Mary O. McCarthy, a longtime employee, for having unauthorized contacts with the news media.

Though stripped of her security clearance, Ms. Axsmith still maintains her public, unclassified blog: econo-girl.blogspot.com. On that Web site on Friday, there were several messages supporting her, including postings from anonymous intelligence officials who said that they would miss her “Covert Communications” blog.

Ms. Axsmith acknowledges that the posting that got her fired was deliberately provocative, and she said that if she had another chance she might have toned down the language.

“I guess I’m just too much of a big mouth for that organization,” she said.

    C.I.A. Worker Says Message on Torture Got Her Fired, NYT, 22.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/washington/22intel.html

Judge Declines to Dismiss Privacy Suit Against AT&T

July 21, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, July 20 — A federal judge on Thursday rejected a motion by the Bush administration to dismiss a lawsuit against AT&T over its cooperation with a government surveillance program, ruling that state secrets would not be at risk if the suit proceeded.

The case was filed in February by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, and alleged that AT&T was collaborating with the National Security Agency in a surveillance program tracking the domestic and foreign communications of millions of Americans.

In rejecting the motion brought by the Justice Department, Vaughn R. Walker, chief judge of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, ruled that the government had already disclosed in broad terms whose communications it monitored, and that it was generally interested in calls between the United States and other countries.

“The government has opened the door for judicial inquiry by publicly confirming and denying material information about its monitoring of communications content,” Judge Walker wrote.

“Because of the public disclosures by the government and AT&T,’’ he added, “the court cannot conclude that merely maintaining this action creates a ‘reasonable danger’ of harming national security.”

The judge also rejected a separate motion to dismiss by AT&T, which had argued that its relationship with the government made it immune from prosecution.

Judge Walker noted that his ruling should not be interpreted as an indication that his review of classified material presented by the government confirmed the accusations in the suit.

The government’s surveillance of telephone and Internet activity as part of its effort to track terrorists was disclosed in an article in The New York Times last December. In filing its lawsuit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation cited the testimony of a former AT&T technician who disclosed technical documents about the installation of monitoring equipment at an AT&T Internet switching center in San Francisco.

“This cases arises against the backdrop of the accountability of the government as it pursues its surveillance program,” said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group based in Washington. “This is a significant victory for the principle of government accountability.”

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the lawsuit was one of about 35 filed in different states in response to disclosures about the surveillance program, which the Bush administration has acknowledged. Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, has introduced legislation to consolidate those cases before a special court that had previously been established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to deal with such issues.

Separately, at the request of AT&T, Verizon and the government, a federal court in Chicago has begun to consider whether the cases should be consolidated or heard before separate federal courts.

An AT&T spokesman, Walt Sharp, said the company was evaluating its options in light of the judge’s ruling. Mr. Sharp emphasized that the company was committed to protecting the privacy rights of its customers.

A Justice Department spokesman did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

In a separate lawsuit filed before a federal court in Detroit, the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the National Security Agency over the surveillance program.

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said they assumed the government would appeal the ruling, and said the next phase of the case would deal with whether the judge would permit the discovery phase of the trial to continue during the appeal process.

“Everyone expects the government to appeal, and that could take some time,” said Robert D. Fram, a partner at Heller Ehrman, the San Francisco firm representing the foundation in the case.

    Judge Declines to Dismiss Privacy Suit Against AT&T, NYT, 21.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/21/washington/21data.html

Experts Differ About Surveillance and Privacy

July 20, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, July 19 — Legal experts squared off before Congress on Wednesday about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program, offering radically different views on whether changes in the law are needed to allow eavesdropping on terror suspects without violating Americans’ privacy.

Judge Richard A. Posner, an author on intelligence, told the House Intelligence Committee that the requirement for court warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was “obsolete.”

To get a warrant from the secret court that oversees such eavesdropping, said Judge Posner, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the government must already know who the terrorists are. “The challenge for intelligence is not to track down known terrorists,” he said. “It’s to find out who the terrorists are.”

Michael S. Greco, president of the American Bar Association, sharply disagreed, saying the FISA statute and its requirements for warrants remained a crucial protection for civil liberties. The courts and Congress must have a role in governing intelligence wiretaps, he said.

“The awesome power to penetrate Americans’ most private communications is too great a power to be held solely by the executive branch of government,” Mr. Greco said.

Mr. Greco, along with other witnesses, urged Congress not to act until the Bush administration provided more information on its electronic surveillance programs and how they might be hampered by existing laws. The Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, said administration officials would be asked to clarify such problems at a later hearing.

Wednesday’s hearing was the latest sign that Congress was reasserting its role in overseeing sensitive counterterrorist surveillance programs, despite President Bush’s argument that he has the inherent constitutional authority to order eavesdropping without court approval.

Several bills related to the security agency are pending in the House and Senate. One, proposed by Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, would ask the FISA court to rule on the constitutionality of the eavesdropping program. That idea has the support of the White House, but has been criticized as a surrender to the administration, and its fate is uncertain.

Under the program, the agency intercepts international telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans and others in the United States who are believed to have links to Al Qaeda. But the agency does not first get warrants from the FISA court, as the law ordinarily requires for eavesdropping inside the country.

Administration officials have suggested that the warrant requirement is too cumbersome to allow the rapid pursuit of possible terrorists. But some lawmakers who have been briefed on the secret program say there is no reason the program cannot operate in compliance with the FISA statute.

Even the administration’s critics acknowledge that procedures to get warrants may need to be updated. James X. Dempsey, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group, called it “ridiculous in the age of BlackBerrys’’ to be applying for warrants on paper.

The discussion on Wednesday underscored the uncertainty, even among experts, about the security agency’s practices at a time when the Internet is reshaping communications. Representative Heather Wilson, Republican of New Mexico, asked whether the agency needed a warrant to intercept an Internet phone call from Sudan to Afghanistan if the call passed through the United States.

“I’m not sure that’s a resolved issue,” replied Kim Taipale, executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy. Committee Democrats took note of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s revelation on Tuesday that the president personally blocked an internal Justice Department investigation of the lawyers who approved the eavesdropping program.

Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, a Maryland Democrat whose district includes the security agency’s headquarters, said the president’s action suggested why the courts and Congress needed to oversee eavesdropping.

One goal of any legislation, Mr. Ruppersberger said, should be to clarify the rules so that agency officers “will have no insecurities about what’s legal and what’s illegal.”

    Experts Differ About Surveillance and Privacy, NYT, 20.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/washington/20intel.html

White House Agrees to Eavesdropping Review, Specter Says

July 13, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:29 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House has conditionally agreed to a court review of its controversial eavesdropping program, Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter said Thursday.

Specter said President Bush has agreed to sign legislation that would authorize the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's most high-profile monitoring operations.

''You have here a recognition by the president that he does not have a blank check,'' the Pennsylvania Republican told his committee

Since shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA has been eavesdropping on the international calls and e-mails of people inside the United States when terrorism is suspected. Breaking with historic norms, the president authorized the actions without a court warrant.

The disclosure of the program in December sparked outrage among Democrats and civil liberties advocates who said Bush overstepped his authority as president.

Specter said the legislation, which has not yet been made public, was the result of ''tortuous'' negotiations with the White House since June.

''If the bill is not changed, the president will submit the Terrorist Surveillance Program to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,'' Specter said. ''That is the president's commitment.''

It wasn't immediately clear how strong or enduring the judicial oversight would be.

An administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the bill's language gives the president the option of submitting the program to the intelligence court, rather than making the review a requirement.

The official said that Bush will submit to the court review as long the bill is not changed, adding that the legislation preserves the right of future presidents to skip the court review.

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee's senior Democrat, said Bush could submit the program to the court right now, if he wished. He called the potential legislation ''an interesting bargain.''

''He's saying, if you do every single thing I tell you to do, I'll do what I should have done anyway,'' Leahy said.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the administration still does not believe changes in law are necessary, but added that it remains willing to work with Congress.

''The key point in the bill is that it recognizes the president's constitutional authority,'' she said. ''It modernizes (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) to meet the threat we face from an enemy who kills with abandon.''

Specter told the committee that the bill, among other things, would:

-- Require the attorney general to give the intelligence court information on the program's constitutionality, the government's efforts to protect Americans' identities and the basis used to determine that the intercepted communications involve terrorism.

--Expand the time for emergency warrants secured under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from three to seven days.

--Create a new offense if government officials misuse information.

--At the NSA's request, clarify that international calls that merely pass through terminals in the United States are not subject to the judicial process established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The administration official, who asked not to be identified because discussions are still ongoing, said the bill also would give the attorney general power to consolidate the 100 lawsuits filed against the surveillance operations into one case before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Specter did not explain to his committee that detail, which is likely to raise the ire of civil liberties groups.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in an interview that Specter's agreement with the White House raises the ''thorny question'' about whether the content of conversations should be subject to individual courts warrants.

''I really need to see the bill,'' said Feinstein, one of a select group of lawmakers who has been fully briefed on the monitoring operations.

    White House Agrees to Eavesdropping Review, Specter Says, NYT, 13.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Eavesdropping.html?hp&ex=1152849600&en=2441c18a3f8da880&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Lawyers Weighing Suits for Terrorism Detainees

July 13, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, July 12 — Human rights organizations that have succeeded in changing the legal landscape for detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say they are now pursuing the possibility of bringing lawsuits on behalf of some of the terrorism suspects held in secret C.I.A. jails throughout the world.

The lawyers say they believe that what was once was a remote possibility — challenging the detentions in the secret C.I.A. prison system in federal court — has been greatly enhanced by last week’s Supreme Court ruling and the administration’s response. The court appeared to say that the minimum rights of due process of the Geneva Conventions apply to all detainees, and on Tuesday the administration, shifting course, announced that was now official policy.

Michael Ratner, the director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said Wednesday that his group was actively “investigating the possibility of bringing a case on behalf of a secret detainee through a family member.”

Mr. Ratner, whose New York-based group coordinated hundreds of legal challenges by Guantánamo Bay detainees, said lawyers at his organization “have already had preliminary contacts with relatives of people in the secret detention facilities.”

He declined to discuss the identity of the detainee or relative who might be used in a test case.

A lawyer not affiliated with Mr. Ratner’s group said that a woman claiming to be the wife of a detainee held by the Central Intelligence Agency had recently met in Pakistan with an American lawyer who is already representing a Guantánamo detainee. The lawyer who talked about the meeting, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not directly involved in the case, said the discussions were very preliminary, involving the issue of whether American courts could be used to confirm her husband’s location and aid him somehow.

The possibility of using the Supreme Court opinion to reach to the secret detention facilities comes as the White House and Congress are engaged in discussions over possible changes in the law that could lessen the ruling’s impact. The court ruled 5 to 3 that the system of military commissions set up to try Guantánamo detainees violated both domestic law and a part of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article Three, which prescribes minimal rights for all detainees.

The administration initially tried to keep secret the system run by the C.I.A., which is believed to hold about 30 prisoners, including senior leaders of Al Qaeda like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubayda.

But the administration has since been obliged in court proceedings and elsewhere to acknowledge, by name, as many as 11 of those prisoners.

Because the prisoners, sometimes called high-value detainees, are named in court proceedings and in the official government report on the Sept. 11 attacks, lawyers have been given an opportunity to identify relatives who could speak for them. This would open the way to file a lawsuit alleging unlawful detention under the name of a relative who could claim to be the detainee’s “next friend,” a legal term that allows someone to assert rights on behalf of someone else who is unable to file a lawsuit.

Deborah Pearlstein, a lawyer with Human Rights First and a visiting scholar at Princeton University, said in an interview, “Human rights advocates for some time have been talking about how to resolve the legal status of the C.I.A.-held detainees who have been effectively ‘disappeared.’ ” She said the discussions had been given significant momentum with the Supreme Court ruling and the administration’s policy shift.

A different human rights lawyer, who also asked not to be identified because he was not directly involved in the issue, said that the problems in bringing such a lawsuit would be considerable. First of all, this lawyer said, the detainees are generally senior Qaeda operatives who may have been tied closely with planning the Sept. 11 attacks, making them exceedingly unsavory clients. In addition, relatives and friends of such people may, in the end, balk at engaging in the American legal system.

C.I.A. officials say they have ended harsh interrogation practices used on secret detainees. Yet the Bush administration’s decision to grant Common Article Three rights to C.I.A detainees means that the agency must now assess its interrogation practices against international standards of what constitutes “humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Moreover, the new rules mean that C.I.A. officials could be charged with federal crimes under the War Crimes Act for any future cases of detainee abuse.

Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel for the C.I.A., said he believed that agency officers and interrogators would no longer risk engaging in any arguably abusive behavior toward the special detainees because they could no longer be certain of their authority.

“They want clean and unambiguous rules,” Mr. Smith said.

The Bush administration has never spoken of plans to hold trials for these terror suspects, and Common Article Three does not mandate that these prisoners be ultimately brought to trial.

According to Mr. Smith, the administration’s policy statement does not change the basic situation for the detainees held by the C.I.A. Even if they are no longer mistreated, he said, they are still being held indefinitely.

“One of the most difficult questions to address is, Under what authority do we continue to hold them and why?” Mr. Smith said. “And nothing has changed on that front.’’

    Lawyers Weighing Suits for Terrorism Detainees, NYT, 13.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/washington/13policy.html

Agent who led Bin Laden hunt criticises CIA

· Closure of unit 'wasted 10 years' experience'
· Al-Qaida reasserting its influence, says ex-chief

Saturday July 8, 2006
Guardian
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

The man who led America's hunt for Osama bin Laden has said the CIA was wrong to disband the only unit devoted entirely to the terrorist leader's pursuit - just at a time when al-Qaida is reasserting its influence over global jihad.

Shutting down the Bin Laden unit squandered 10 years of expertise in the war on terror, said Michael Scheuer, who founded the unit in 1995 and arguably knows more about Bin Laden than any other western intelligence official. He believes the unit was dismantled because of bureaucratic jealousies within the CIA, and that the closure delivers a further setback to a pursuit that has been squeezed for resources for the past two years.

"What it robs you of is a critical mass of officers who have been working on this together for a decade," he told the Guardian. "We had a breed of specialists rare in an intelligence community that prides itself on generalists. It provided a base from which to build a cadre of people specialising in attacking Sunni extremist operations, who sacrificed promotions and other emoluments in their employment in the clandestine service, where specialists were looked on as nerds."

A 22-year CIA veteran, Mr Scheuer became aware of Bin Laden in the 1980s when the Saudi-born militant was on the fringes of the US-backed mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In 1995, when western intelligence agencies knew little about Bin Laden, Mr Scheuer was charged with setting up a unit that would track what support he was giving to Islamist groups, and determine whether he was a threat. Mr Scheuer left the agency in 2004 after writing a scathing book about its counter-terrorism efforts, called Imperial Hubris. He is now a consultant on terrorism.

CIA officials disclosed this week that the Alec unit - named after Mr Scheuer's now teenage son - had been disbanded, and its agents reassigned. The agency described the shakeup as a necessary adaptation to the changing nature of the US war on terror. "The reorganisation just reflects the understanding that the Islamic jihadist movement continues to diversify," a US intelligence official said.

Mr Scheuer said he disagreed with the argument it was making that Bin Laden was isolated, the organisation was broken and that he was now just a symbol. "How do you explain the fact that he is able to dominate international media whenever he wants to?"

Yesterday, the FBI said it had foiled a plot to blow up the railway tunnels which run beneath the Hudson river into Manhattan, and send a torrent of water gushing towards Wall Street. The leader of the cell, Assem Hammoud, 31, amember of al-Qaida, and two other plotters were arrested in Beirut. None of the conspirators had ever entered the US.

In video footage released on the internet on Thursday and yesterday, Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, claimed to have directly masterminded last year's London bombings. He said two of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, had received explosives training at al-Qaida camps, and the organisation had helped to choose the targets. In recent weeks authorities have made arrests of alleged al-Qaida activists in Manchester, London, Toronto and Miami.

"Bin Laden has always said the main activity of al-Qaida is the instigation ... of Muslims to jihad," Mr Scheuer said.

"All of the people who have been picked up have said they were inspired by Bin Laden, that they trained in their own countries and used information picked up on the internet.

"So the fire that Bin Laden was trying to set is what we are beginning to see around the world and, unfortunately, nowhere more than in the west."

He said the dismantling of the unit reflected a myopia in an intelligence community uncomfortable with the independence of the CIA agents who championed Bin Laden's pursuit.

"From the very beginning, Alec was an anomaly in that it was not subordinated to any area division, and it was given the authority to communicate with overseas stations - with or without the permission of area divisions. That caused a great deal of heartburn among very senior leaders at the agency," he said.

The infighting went on for years. In 1998, a few months before car bombs blew up US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, Mr Scheuer was told to be ready to disband - only to see the unit saved by the then agency director, George Tenet.

But it was only a temporary reprieve. The staff was reduced from 25 to eight. More recently, the unit became a repository for inexperienced officers, who were rotated in for 60- or 90-day stints.

During the past two years the hunt for Bin Laden came second to fighting the insurgency in Iraq. With the worsening security situation in Afghanistan, more intelligence resources are being diverted towards propping up the government of Hamid Karzai in Kabul than to tracking down leads on Bin Laden.

The Bush administration continues to claim success in the fight against al-Qaida, noting that it has killed off two-thirds of its known leadership at the time of the September 11 2001 terror attacks.

But as Mr Scheuer notes, al-Qaida seems to have no difficulty in replacing its senior leaders. A decade after he first began keeping tabs on Bin Laden, he continues to be surprised by al-Qaida's resilience.

"I don't think anyone could have expected to see the success of such an organisation," he said. For observers familiar with the disunity of the Palestinians and other Arab causes, al-Qaida was a departure from the known.

"One of the things that really slowed down the western response to Sunni extremists, but al-Qaida specifically, is that when intelligence agents looked at a group made up of Yemenis, Egyptians, Saudis, Algerians and converts, the natural response was to say, 'That is not going to last 10 minutes. They can't get along together.' It took a long time for people to realise we were seeing an animal of a very unique nature. We haven't even begun to understand where our enemy is coming from."

    Agent who led Bin Laden hunt criticises CIA, G, 8.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,,1815727,00.html

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden

July 4, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."

The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, and a growing concern about Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals.

"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus."

The decision to close the unit was first reported Monday by National Public Radio.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was.

Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken.

"This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda," he said. "These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals."

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military's counterterrorism units, like the Army's Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.

An intelligence official who was granted anonymity to discuss classified information said the closing of the bin Laden unit reflected a greater grasp of the organization. "Our understanding of Al Qaeda has greatly evolved from where it was in the late 1990's," the official said, but added, "There are still people who wake up every day with the job of trying to find bin Laden."

Established in 1996, when Mr. bin Laden's calls for global jihad were a source of increasing concern for officials in Washington, Alec Station operated in a similar fashion to that of other agency stations around the globe.

The two dozen staff members who worked at the station, which was named after Mr. Scheuer's son and was housed in leased offices near agency headquarters in northern Virginia, issued regular cables to the agency about Mr. bin Laden's growing abilities and his desire to strike American targets throughout the world.

In his book "Ghost Wars," which chronicles the agency's efforts to hunt Mr. bin Laden in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Steve Coll wrote that some inside the agency likened Alec Station to a cult that became obsessed with Al Qaeda.

"The bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their C.I.A. colleagues uncomfortable," Mr. Coll wrote. Members of Alec Station "called themselves 'the Manson Family' because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising Al Qaeda threat."

Intelligence officials said Alec Station was disbanded after Robert Grenier, who until February was in charge of the Counterterrorist Center, decided the agency needed to reorganize to better address constant changes in terrorist organizations.

    C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden, NYT, 4.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/washington/04intel.html?hp&ex=1152072000&en=5ced05aa2a8d9b76&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge

June 8, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, June 7 — A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has drawn sharp criticism from American government officials who say the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.

The criticism was expressed privately by United States government officials with direct knowledge of the debate. And the comments flared even before the apparent victory this week by Islamist militias in the country dealt a sharp setback to American policy in the region and broke the warlords' hold on the capital, Mogadishu.

The officials said the C.I.A. effort, run from the agency's station in Nairobi, Kenya, had channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to secular warlords inside Somalia with the aim, among other things, of capturing or killing a handful of suspected members of Al Qaeda believed to be hiding there.

Officials say the decision to use warlords as proxies was born in part from fears of committing large numbers of American personnel to counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, a country that the United States hastily left in 1994 after attempts to capture the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his aides ended in disaster and the death of 18 American troops.

The American effort of the last year has occasionally included trips to Somalia by Nairobi-based C.I.A. case officers, who landed on warlord-controlled airstrips in Mogadishu with large amounts of money for distribution to Somali militias, according to American officials involved in Africa policy making and to outside experts.

Among those who have criticized the C.I.A. operation as short-sighted have been senior Foreign Service officers at the United States Embassy in Nairobi. Earlier this year, Leslie Rowe, the embassy's second-ranking official, signed off on a cable back to State Department headquarters that detailed grave concerns throughout the region about American efforts in Somalia, according to several people with knowledge of the report.

Around that time, the State Department's political officer for Somalia, Michael Zorick, who had been based in Nairobi, was reassigned to Chad after he sent a cable to Washington criticizing Washington's policy of paying Somali warlords.

One American government official who traveled to Nairobi this year said officials from various government agencies working in Somalia had expressed concern that American activities in the country were not being carried out in the context of a broader policy.

"They were fully aware that they were doing so without any strategic framework," the official said. "And they realized that there might be negative implications to what they are doing."

The details of the American effort in Somalia are classified, and American officials from several different agencies agreed to discuss them only after being assured of anonymity. The officials included supporters of the C.I.A.-led effort as well as critics. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the American Embassy in Kenya.

Asked about the complaints made by embassy officials in Kenya, Thomas Casey, a State Department spokesman, said: "We're not going to discuss any internal policy discussions. The secretary certainly encourages individuals in the policy making process to express their views and opinions."

Several news organizations have reported on the American payments to the Somali warlords. Reuters and Newsweek were the first to report about Mr. Zorick's cable and reassignment to Chad. The extent and location of the C.I.A.'s efforts, and the extent of the internal dissent about these activities, have not been previously disclosed.

Some Africa experts contend that the United States has lost its focus on how to deal with the larger threat of terrorism in East Africa by putting a premium on its effort to capture or kill a small number of high-level suspects.

Indeed, some of the experts point to the American effort to finance the warlords as one of the factors that led to the resurgence of Islamic militias in the country. They argue that American support for secular warlords, who joined together under the banner of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, may have helped to unnerve the Islamic militias and prompted them to launch pre-emptive strikes. The Islamic militias have been routing the warlords, and on Monday they claimed to have taken control of most of the Somali capital.

"This has blown up in our face, frankly," said John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit research organization with extensive field experience in Somalia.

"We've strengthened the hand of the people whose presence we were worried most about," said Mr. Prendergast, who worked on Africa policy at the National Security Council and State Department during the Clinton administration.

The American activities in Somalia have been approved by top officials in Washington and were reaffirmed during a National Security Council meeting about Somalia in March, according to people familiar with the meeting. During the March meeting, at a time of fierce fighting in and around Mogadishu, a decision was made to make counterterrorism the top policy priority for Somalia.

Porter J. Goss, who recently resigned as C.I.A. director, traveled to Kenya this year and met with case officers in the Nairobi station, according to one intelligence official. It is not clear whether the payments to Somali warlords were discussed during Mr. Goss's trip.

The American ambassador in Kenya, William M. Bellamy, has disputed assertions that Washington is to blame for the surge in violence in Somalia. And some government officials this week defended the American counterterrorism efforts in the country.

"You've got to find and nullify enemy leadership," one senior Bush administration official said. "We are going to support any viable political actor that we think will help us with counterterrorism."

In May, the United Nations Security Council issued a report detailing the competing efforts of several nations, including Ethiopia and Eritrea, to provide Somali militias and the transitional Somali government with money and arms — activities the report said violated the international arms embargo on Somalia.

"Arms, military matériel and financial support continue to flow like a river to these various actors," the report said.

The United Nations report also cited what it called clandestine support for a so-called antiterrorist coalition, in what appeared to be a reference to the American policy. Somalia's interim president, Abdullahi Yusuf, first criticized American support for Mogadishu's warlords in early May during a trip to Sweden.

"We really oppose American aid that goes outside the government," he said, arguing that the best way to hunt members of Al Qaeda in Somalia was to strengthen the country's government.

Senior American officials indicated this week that the United States might now be willing to hold discussions with the Islamic militias, known as the Islamic Courts Union. President Bush said Tuesday that the first priority for the United States was to keep Somalia from becoming a safe haven for terrorists.

The American payments to the warlords have been intended at least in part to help gain the capture of a number of suspected Qaeda operatives who are believed responsible for a number of deadly attacks throughout East Africa.

Since the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, American officials have been tracking a Qaeda cell whose members are believed to move freely between Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and parts of the Middle East.

Shortly after an attack on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and the failed attempt to shoot down a plane bound for Israel that took off from the Mombasa airport, both in November 2002, the United States began informally reaching out to the Somali clans in the hopes that local forces might provide intelligence about suspected members of Al Qaeda in Somalia.

This approach has brought occasional successes. According to an International Crisis Group report, militiamen loyal to warlord Mohammed Deere, a powerful figure in Mogadishu, caught a suspected Qaeda operative, Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, in April 2003 and turned him over to American officials.

According to Mr. Prendergast, who has met frequently with Somali clan leaders, the C.I.A. over the past year has increased its payments to the militias in the hopes of putting pressure on Al Qaeda.

The operation, while blessed by officials in Washington, did not seem to be closely coordinated among various American national security agencies, he said.

"I've talked to people inside the Defense Department and State Department who said that this was not a comprehensive policy," he said. "It was being conducted in a vacuum, and they were largely shut out."

Marc Lacey contributed reporting from Nairobi for this article, and Helene Cooper from Washington.

    Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge, NYT, 8.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/world/africa/08intel.html?hp&ex=1149825600&en=c5583cc709fe22fd&ei=5094&partner=homepage

C.I.A. Knew Where Eichmann Was Hiding, Documents Show

June 7, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, June 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust administrator Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to C.I.A. documents released Tuesday that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informants after World War II.

The C.I.A. was told by West German intelligence that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name Clemens — a slight variation on his actual alias, Ricardo Klement — but did not share the information with Israel, which had been hunting for him for years, according to Timothy Naftali, a historian who examined the documents. Two years later, Israeli agents abducted Eichmann in Argentina and flew him to Israel, where he was tried and executed in 1962.

The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the C.I.A. to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hitler's regime later used as American agents. The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet K.G.B., according to historians and members of the government panel that has worked to open the long-secret files.

Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman from New York and member of the panel, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, said the documents showed that the C.I.A "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "force us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.

The United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The records also show that American intelligence officials protected many former Nazis for their perceived value in combating the Soviet threat.

But Ms. Holtzman, speaking at a news briefing at the National Archives on Tuesday, said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail. "Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Ms. Holtzman said. She and other group members suggested that the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today.

As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann put into effect the policy of extermination of European Jewry, promoting the use of gas chambers and having a hand in the murder of millions of Jews. Captured by the United States Army at the end of the war, he gave a false name and went unrecognized, hiding in Germany and Italy before fleeing to Argentina in 1950.

Israeli agents hunting for Eichmann came to suspect that he was in Argentina but did not know his alias. They temporarily abandoned their search around the time, in March 1958, that West German intelligence told the C.I.A. that Eichmann had been living in Argentina as Clemens, said Mr. Naftali, of the University of Virginia.

The West German government was wary of exposing Eichmann because officials feared what he might reveal about such figures as Hans Globke, a former Nazi government official then serving as a top national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Mr. Naftali said.

In 1960, also at the request of West Germany, the C.I.A. persuaded Life magazine, which had purchased Eichmann's memoir from his family, to delete a reference to Mr. Globke before publication, the documents show.

Ironically, in view of the information the C.I.A. received in 1958, documents previously released by the C.I.A. showed that it was surprised in May 1960 when the Israelis captured Eichmann. Cables from the time show that Allen Dulles, the C.I.A. director, demanded that officers find out more about the capture.

Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, the Interagency Working Group has worked to declassify more than eight million pages of documents.

Norman J. W. Goda, an Ohio University historian who reviewed the C.I.A. material, said it showed in greater detail than previously known how the K.G.B. aggressively recruited former Nazi intelligence officers after the war. In particular, he said, the documents fill in the story of the "catastrophic" Soviet penetration of the Gehlen Organization, the postwar West German intelligence service sponsored by the United States Army and then the C.I.A.

Mr. Goda described the case of Heinz Felfe, a former SS officer who was bitter over the Allied firebombing of his native city, Dresden, and secretly worked for the K.G.B. Mr. Felfe rose in the Gehlen Organization to oversee counterintelligence, a Soviet agent placed in charge of combating Soviet espionage.

The C.I.A. shared much sensitive information with Mr. Felfe, Mr. Goda found. A newly released 1963 C.I.A. damage assessment, written after Mr. Felfe was arrested as a Soviet agent in 1961, found that he had exposed "over 100 C.I.A. staffers" and caused many eavesdropping operations to end with "complete failure or a worthless product."

The documents also provide new information about the case of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former SS officer who was the subject of a much-publicized deportation case in 1979 when he was living as an American citizen in Paterson, N.J. He was charged with having falsified his immigration application to conceal his SS service, which ordinarily would have barred his entry. But the charge was dropped when a C.I.A. document turned up showing that he had disclosed his SS membership.

The newly declassified records show that he was employed by the C.I.A. from 1952 to 1959 despite "clear evidence of a war crimes record," said another historian at the briefing, Richard Breitman of American University.

Because it valued Mr. Soobzokov for his language skills and ties to fellow ethnic Circassians living in the Soviet Union, the C.I.A. deliberately hid details of his Nazi record from the Immigration and Naturalization Service after he moved to the United States in 1955, Mr. Breitman said.

But Mr. Soobzokov ultimately did not escape his past. He died in 1985 after a pipe bomb exploded outside his house. The case has never been solved.

    C.I.A. Knew Where Eichmann Was Hiding, Documents Show, NYT, 7.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/americas/07nazi.html

Bush Hails Role of C.I.A. as New Chief Takes Oath

June 1, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, May 31 — President Bush delivered a pep talk to employees of the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday, assuring them that the beleaguered agency played a critical role in the nation's security and remained "vital" to the work of the White House.

Addressing the employees after Gen. Michael V. Hayden was sworn in as C.I.A. director, Mr. Bush praised the agency's work, which he called "essential to understanding the plans and intentions of dangerous regimes and terrorist organizations around the world."

"I cannot do my job without the Central Intelligence Agency," Mr. Bush said, addressing employees inside the main lobby of the agency's headquarters at Langley, Va.

The event was the second swearing-in for General Hayden in two days. The general officially became director at a private ceremony on Tuesday, and Wednesday's public event seemed largely intended to lift morale inside an agency that has lost its place as the cornerstone of the American intelligence community.

In contrast to the private White House ceremony 20 months ago, when Porter J. Goss was sworn in as director, the speeches on Wednesday were also an effort to portray calm after several rocky years at the C.I.A.

Standing alongside General Hayden and John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, Mr. Bush praised both men and predicted a more streamlined intelligence community.

Earlier this month, Mr. Goss resigned as C.I.A director after fierce turf battles with Mr. Negroponte over the agency's role in intelligence collection and analysis.

Mr. Bush praised Mr. Goss on Wednesday, saying the former director "leaves behind a C.I.A. that's stronger than the one he found."

General Hayden, who addressed C.I.A. employees on Tuesday and received a standing ovation, refrained from a lengthy public address on Wednesday.

He thanked the president and his family and said, "Let's just go to work."

General Hayden wore his blue Air Force uniform at the ceremony, and has indicated that he has no immediate plans either to retire from the military or to begin dressing in civilian clothes as head of the C.I.A.

At his confirmation hearings, he said that his military career had shaped his worldview, and that deciding to wear civilian clothes would change little.

"The fact that I have to decide what tie to put on in the morning doesn't change who I am," he said.

But the general said that if he believed that being in the military was hindering his ability to bond with the C.I.A. work force, he would consider retiring his military commission.

The choice of a military officer to lead the civilian spy agency initially drew criticism from several lawmakers, who suggested that the C.I.A. might surrender its independence as the Pentagon was expanding its intelligence gathering operations.

But after the confirmation hearings, several senators said he had convinced them that he would act independently of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld while in charge at the C.I.A.

Yet the issue remains sensitive on Capitol Hill. Last Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved language in the 2007 authorization bill that future C.I.A. directors be civilians and that General Hayden was "not subject to the supervision or control of the secretary of defense" so long as he ran the C.I.A. as an active duty officer.

    Bush Hails Role of C.I.A. as New Chief Takes Oath, NYT, 1.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/washington/01intel.html