Senate Panel Confirms Hayden as Next CIA Chief

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted Tuesday to approve Gen. Michael V. Hayden as director of the CIA, endorsing a veteran intelligence officer who has pledged to push the troubled agency to take more risks and work more closely with other U.S. spy services.

Hayden now faces a confirmation vote before the full Senate, perhaps as soon as this week. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the intelligence panel, called Hayden “a proven leader and an extremely qualified intelligence professional.”

The committee also passed an intelligence spending bill that would require the Bush administration to report to Congress on the treatment of detainees at clandestine CIA prisons overseas. Republican opposition derailed similar proposals on the Senate floor last year.

The panel’s 12-3 vote to confirm Hayden was lopsided, but the dissent reflected lingering concern over his role in a domestic wiretapping program that has been a source of controversy for the Bush administration.

Just last year, Hayden received a unanimous endorsement from the committee -- as well as the Senate -- to become the deputy director for national intelligence, No. 2 to the nation’s top spy official, John D. Negroponte.

But Hayden’s standing among some lawmakers has eroded in recent months amid disclosures of domestic spy operations mounted by the National Security Agency, which Hayden led from 1999 to 2005.

During his confirmation hearing last week, Hayden acknowledged that he was a leading architect of a surveillance program launched shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in which the NSA intercepted international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without obtaining court approval.

Some lawmakers have called the program illegal and complained that it was kept secret from all but a handful of members of Congress for four years before it was exposed in news reports last year.

More recently, Hayden has had to fend off questions about whether the NSA also assembled phone records on tens of millions of Americans in an effort to identify suspicious calling patterns.

The three votes against Hayden were cast by Democratic Sens. Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Evan Bayh of Indiana and Ron Wyden of Oregon. All three had expressed concerns about Hayden’s role in the NSA domestic surveillance operations during the confirmation hearing.

Even some of those who voted for Hayden expressed misgivings.

“My confidence in Gen. Hayden should not be interpreted as confidence in this administration,” said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), who cited concern “that this administration sometimes pays lip service to the law of the land, as we have seen with recent revelations about the warrantless surveillance program.”

Despite the controversy surrounding the NSA operations, Hayden, 61, is expected to be confirmed by the Senate. Roberts said he planned to push to have the vote before lawmakers depart for a weeklong Memorial Day recess.

Hayden would replace outgoing CIA Director Porter J. Goss, who resigned under pressure this month amid criticism of his leadership style and after clashes with Negroponte over the CIA’s diminished role in the U.S. intelligence community.

Goss’ last day at the agency is Friday.

Hayden stands to inherit an agency that has seen a surge in funding and hiring in the nearly five years since the Sept. 11 attacks. But at the same time, the CIA lost significant clout because of sweeping intelligence changes enacted last year.

The CIA director was stripped of authority over other intelligence agencies, for example, and is no longer in charge of delivering the president’s daily intelligence briefing each morning.

But Hayden has agreed to take the job with an eye toward reinvigorating the CIA’s spying directorate. If confirmed, Hayden is expected to name as his deputy Stephen Kappes, the former head of the CIA’s clandestine service who quit in late 2004 after clashes with Goss and his leadership team.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, alluded in a statement Tuesday to criticisms of Goss’ staff. Rockefeller said he was confident that Hayden would “bring in qualified professionals and take the necessary steps to get the CIA back on track.”

Rockefeller said he also was convinced that Hayden, a career Air Force officer, would defend the CIA in “inevitable bureaucratic turf battles” with the Pentagon, which has significantly expanded its espionage capabilities.

In addition to the CIA’s spying woes, Hayden has outlined plans to address shortcomings in the agency’s analytic branch.

In particular, he has said he would expand the use of “red teams,” groups of analysts charged with challenging their colleagues’ conclusions on such issues as weapons proliferation and Iran’s nuclear activities. The plan is part of an effort to root out problems that plagued the CIA’s prewar assessments of Iraq.

The spending bill passed by the committee calls for a modest increase in the nation’s spy budget. Actual numbers are classified, but spending on all 16 intelligence agencies is thought to exceed $40 billion a year.