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Don't Hang the RefThe CIA's inspector general must be free to do his job.

By Patrick Radden KeefePosted Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2007, at 5:36 PM ET

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Fred Kaplan wondered if the CIA could recover from its intelligence mistakes surrounding the Iraq invasion. Rebecca Lemov reviewed the history of CIA interrogation techniques. Daniel Franklin argued that the CIA and the FBI shouldn't share intelligence. Daniel Engber explained how to keep all the different 9/11 intelligence commissions straight.

There are established procedures for a CIA director to question his IG without threatening the independence of the office. Hayden could go directly to the White House, or to the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which oversees federal watchdogs, and which is run, as Spencer Ackerman points out, by a prep-school crony of the president who would have no trouble icing Helgerson. But by opting to keep the investigation internal, Hayden is undermining not just Helgerson but the structural integrity of the inspector general's office. IGs rely, in their own investigations, on the trust and respect of agency employees. How will this vote of no confidence affect the office's stature?

More pernicious is the possibility that Hayden's investigators will access the IG's files. Employees who alert the inspector general about abuses rely on confidentiality; it allows them to cry foul without jeopardizing their jobs (giving them an important, last-ditch alternative to leaking to the press). If Hayden looks in the files, that promise of confidentiality will no longer be on offer, and the result could have a devastating chilling effect on future internal investigations. But then, it's hard to escape the conclusion that this kind of chilling effect is precisely what Hayden intends. Fred Hitz, the agency's IG from 1990 to 1998, called the investigation "a terrible idea," and told the Los Angeles Times that it looks like Hayden is trying "to call off the dogs."

To get a sense of what can happen when the dogs are called off, we need look no further than Hayden's recent career. Before he left the National Security Agency, where he was director, Hayden originally authorized the infamous warrantless wiretapping program. Hayden's general counsel knew about the program and approved it. And who was his general counsel at the time? Robert Deitz, who followed him to CIA, and whom he just chose to spearhead the investigation of Helgerson. If the NSA's inspector general had a problem with secretly violating federal law, no one ever heard about it, because the office reported only to Hayden and not to Congress. (Helgerson reports to the CIA director and Congress, a two-master system designed to shield him from undue pressure.)

From Watergate to wiretapping, it seems axiomatic that, left to their own devices, spies will overreach. Stifled by secrecy and fearful of being tarred "soft" on national security, Congress has largely abdicated its role in effectively policing American espionage. Now Hayden is seeking to cow his own IG at a time when the agency—and the country—needs that oversight most. I don't trust Mike Hayden, or his subordinates in the field, to be the final arbiter on what our spies can do. That's why Michael Scheuer's division of labor makes sense: We can ask intelligence officers to play by the rules, but it's folly to let them write the rules, as well.