Image credit: Penguin Press
If I had to characterize Gen. Hayden's The Assault on Intelligence: American National
Security in an Age of Lies as a food, or a food component, I'd say it's bran: it's
meant for more mature audiences, and you don't eat it because it's tasty; you eat it because
it's good for you.
Also, too much at once can become hard to chew.
To give you a good sense of the kind of book this is, fully 1/3 of it is end notes and index.
My kindle showed I was 66% complete when I reached the afterword.
As Advertised
Gen. Hayden's book is exactly what it says it is: a study of executive level politics and
associated events, starting late in the 2016 presidential election cycle and moving through to
2018, studying their impact on the US Intelligence Community (IC) — particuarly at its senior levels —
and on national sentiment.
Gen. Hayden meticulously and measuredly recounts and addresses the events, actions and
accusations that impacted the credibility and distinguished careers of IC leadership.
"Rejecting a fact-based intelligence assessment - not because of compelling contrarian data,
but because it was inconsistent with a preexisting worldview or because it was politically
inconvenient— is the stuff of idological authoritarianism, not pragmatic democracy."
But he also offers his views on world events not directly tied to the Trump Administration.
On North Korea, which Gen. Hayden viewed as "the toughest intelligence target on earth," and
"a pathetic, pathological, and truly irritating little gangster state", he writes:
No doubt Pyongyang would use the occasion [of denuclearization talks] to extort more assistance
from the global community, and such an arrangement would be as fragile as it would be distasteful.
There would always be the danger of the North Koreans cheating. . . And, despite charges
that this is an irrational regime, this North Korea would truly be
irrational to give up its current weapons entirely.They have seen what happened to
Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Mummar Gaddafi's Libya when these weapons were not within reach."
And, on the Iran nuclear deal:
The president refused to certify the [Iran nuclear] deal, but not because the Iranians
materially breached the JCPOA.
He simply declared that the agreement was no longer in the
strategic interests of the United States (which Senator Corker's 2015 bill allowed him to do),
dutifully bashed the Iranians, and then, despite the tough rhetoric, declined to do much more,
other than effectively putting the Iranians on notice that the nuclear deal would not inhibit
him in responding to Tehran's aggression elsewhere. In effect, he was telling the Iranians,
"If you want to break the deal, go ahead and break the deal. The deal's not that important
to me." That had the effect of freeing the United States to go after all the other things
the Iranians were doing, but for now, little would change. . . . My sense was that the
president had gotten to make his speech, fulfill a campaign promise, and publicly dissociate
himself from another key element of his predecessor's legacy.
And, on Russian involvement in Syria:
Russia certainly has a terrorist problem, and Moscow was certainly bombing in Syria, but it
had not really been bombing ISIS. Russian strikes were carefully coordinated with
the fire and movement of Assad's forces to expand Syrian government control against the
rebel opposition, including factions armed and supported by the United States. Russia's
goals in Syria were more about regime survival, Russian spheres of influence, and East-West
competition than they were about jihadists.
In general (no pun intended), I found Gen. Hayden's perspective to be similar to FBI Director
Comey's, in that he'd make observations, compare them with the historical norm, offer rationale
as to why the norm is the established norm, then watch the fallout and deal with it as best
he could. It's difficult to take a "not my circus, not my monkeys" approach when you're talking
about the DOJ, the IC, or the executive branch of the federal government — particularly when
men like Hayden and Comey have spent their lives supporting the cause and working tirelessly to
do the right thing. Though Gen. Hayden's book brought more of a world view to the matter, certain
topics regarding the Trump Administration were common between them: President Trump's demand for
fealty ("loyalty" is part of the title of Comey's book), his penchant for "going with his gut,"
his addictions to "divisive use" of social media and to Fox network infotainment programming,
and "his challenged relationship with the truth."
With . . . a president who has imposed an overpowering cult of loyalty on his administration,
the ghost of politicization is always lingering close by for sincere but conflicted senior
officials.
It has also become the habit of President Trump, drained of his moral authority by repeated
untruths, to rely on that of his key subordinates. And in so doing, he adds the erosion of
personal reputation to the damage he is doing to the institutions of government.
In the chapter titled "The Future of Truth," Gen. Hayden referred to the president as "spontaneous,
instinctive, ahistorical, and transactional;" he later offered in summary, "Donald Trump does not
appeal to 'the better angels of our nature.'"
A friend of mine, a security veteran like myself, told me that the [Trump Administration] reminded
him of an upside-down duck. Rather than a visible calm above the surface while paddling like hell
beneath it, the administration is visibly frenetic (often stimulated by the president's tweets),
but there has been less evidence of much going on beneath the surface in terms of developing an
overarching, coherent strategy.
Hayden is not entirely critical of the Trump Administration. He is careful to note there
were some events with respect to the Middle East and which he thought were handled relatively
well because swift military action was taken when needed (you'd think this might appeal to
a Four-Star Air Force General).
Why this book appealed to me
The book appealed to me specifically because Gen. Hayden is an IC professional, and had
front row seats to each of the events he recounts. Gen. Hayden offered a reasoned perspective
and especially shined when recounting the complexity of different "problems" (an IC term referring
to international situations requiring study; "the Syria problem", "the Iran problem," et cetera)
sensitivity to which the new executive hadn't yet acquired.
Perhaps the most enlightening information presented was the work of an analyst named Clint
Watts, who discovered the Russian disinformation operations over social media back in 2014, and
correctly deduced they would attempt a campaign against the United States during the 2016 election
cycle. Watts' analysis of ISIS' use of social media for recruting operations enabled him and
his team to observe connections between a Syrian/Iranian troll network and Russian social media
accounts. Analysis of these links convinced him that Russia was actively operating a disinformation
campaign over modern social media platforms. By 2015, Watts noted the Russians were beginning to
target the US "by grabbing any divisive social issue they could identify", and found that Twitter
and Facebook were ideal platforms for these operations because of our tendencies toward insular
groups with similar views: "With tailored news feeds . . . voters see 'only stories and opinions
suiting their preferences and biases — ripe condition for Russian disinformation campaigns."
Finally, I rather enjoy the double-entendre of the book's title. "The Assault on Intelligence"
can be understood both in the sense that the IC was, and still is, being bullied by the executive
branch of the federal government, and in the sense that some of the president's antics and/or those
of the Trump Administration have been... blatantly dumb ("It appears that [Sec. of State Tillerson]
actually did call the president a 'fucking moron'").
So... there's that.
Would I recommend this book?
Would I recommend this book? Yes and no. It's a lot to fight through. I was attracted to it
because I wanted the view of a career military officer who ran two of the most powerful IC
organizations in the history of the modern world. In exchange for my attention, I've primarily
received useful perspective on "problems" I've been working to understand and third-party
assessments of national events I've seen or read about (complete with fact-checking — recall
the end notes).
As I said at the start, people don't eat bran because it's tasty; they eat it because it's good
for them. In my view, Gen. Hayden's book is good for us to read because it's good for us to
understand the impact the Trump Administration and recent events have had on the IC, and on
the public the IC so tirelessly serves.