In response to a FOIA request, the National Security Agency
has released a listing of all its closed Inspector General (IG) investigations.
The listing is detail sparse, providing only a few details such as the case number, the date closed, a generic
description of the subject matter such as “Time, Attendance, and Pay,"
"Reprisal," and Miscellaneous." The list said to be all
inclusive as stated in the FOIA request. This is a complete listing of closed
IG complaints from 1995 to the summer of 2012. The list is organized by
case number. The dating is a little disjointed, with the cases from 1995 to
1999 starting on page 20.
In a recently declassified and partially released NSA oral
history conducted in the first year as his reign as DIRNSA, VADM stated that he
believed the NSA’s staff, while the “best in the Government,” were “spoiled and
pampered.”As is the brief, 13-page
interview were McConnell’s doubts as to whether he was “yet qualified to be
director,” even though he had a prior tour of duty in the NSA, his plans for transforming
the NSA in light of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and some amusing
historical tidbits.
The oral history isn’t very good which is not surprising
that it can at the beginning of McConnell’s term when the prominent events of
his reign had yet to begin or were just starting such as Operation Restore Hope
in Somalia, the Bosnian War, and the flaring up of the conflict with Iraq.The real value of this interview is the
historical tidbits sprinkled within such as Dick Cheney was fishing and out of
contact when the Soviet hardliners staged their coup in 1991 and that McConnell
had been given the job of briefing Cheney as to what was going on in the Soviet
Union during the coup.
Another worthwhile bit of information is the
revelation that the NSA or at least McConnell had a fear of Congress because “you
have to be careful about talking to Congress. You go down there and just give
it away, and some member in the Congress at a TS level could stand up on the
floor and is not subject to prosecution. He can say anything he wants to say …
classified or unclassified. So you have to be careful.”
Or at least it did when Michael Hayden was DIRNSA in the Clinton Administration, as show by his July 1999 memo to the NSA staff regarding the issue congressional notification. When employed by the Bush administration, there were a few lapses in his zeal for Congressional notification, most notably the 2005 destruction of CIA interrogation videos. His dislike of Congressional oversight didn't stop there. In 2006, Russ Feingold laid out Hayden's failures in this regard in a press release announcing Feingold's opposition to Hayden becoming confirmed as Director of the CIA:
General Hayden's conduct and testimony also raise serious questions about his
willingness to respect congressional oversight. He was complicit in the
Administration's failure to inform the full congressional intelligence
committees about the warrantless surveillance program, even though this
notification is required by law. In his testimony, he repeatedly failed to
explain or criticize the Administration's failure to inform the full committees
about the program. And he declined to commit to notifying the full committees
about all intelligence activities, as is required by law.
Ultimately, Michael Hayden is a man, as James Bamford described him, "who "spent his life tacking whichever way the political winds happened to be blowing".(1)
James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 111
