American Intelligence and the 'High Noon' Scenario

[Commentary] It is bad politics and bad policy for good friends to put their partners in politically impossible situations, and recent reports of aggressive American espionage have done just that. It matters little that the reports may or may not be true or that foreign leaders may or may not have already suspected these activities. The issue now is that seemingly plausible accounts are in the public domain, and people are angry. But American intelligence works to meet the needs and follows the lead of American policy makers. There is actually a formal framework for national intelligence priorities agreed upon regularly at the National Security Council level. When policy makers validate a need to better understand, say, the level of corruption in a particular state or the intentions of a friendly but balky ally, what is it they think they are asking the intelligence community to do And when they read a responsive, incisive report, where do they think it came from? There's a real danger here. The American signals-intelligence community is being battered at home from extreme left and extreme right, and it's being battered from abroad for just being extremely good.

[Gen Hayden was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009.]