Former NSA Director Michael Hayden Writes A Memoir

Image: Penguin Books

New York Times: Review: In ‘Playing to the Edge,’ Michael V. Hayden, Bush-Era Spymaster, Defends His Record

According to Michael V. Hayden, President George W. Bush personally intervened in 2005 to try to stop The New York Times from publishing an explosive scoop.

In one of his book’s most memorable moments, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman; the executive editor, Bill Keller; and the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., met with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office to hear his objections to The Times’s running a story about Stellarwind, a top-secret National Security Agency surveillance program. For several years, the program had been sweeping up telecommunications data for the National Security Agency without obtaining a warrant.

Mr. Sulzberger, the fourth-generational head of this publication and a man with a notoriously awkward sense of humor, joked to Mr. Bush that they both now worked in their father’s old office. “No ice was broken,” Mr. Hayden writes. The president argued that exposing Stellarwind, which was meant to intercept the communications of suspected foreign plotters, would invite another 9/11-style attack. If that happened, Mr. Bush told the Timesmen, they ought to be prepared to shoulder some of the blame.

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Update: Confessions From Bush’s NSA Spy Program (Shane Harris, Daily Beast)

WNU Editor: He is still peeved off at Edward Snowden .... Edward Snowden is a 'naïve, narcissistic and insufferably self-important defector', claims former NSA boss (IBTimes)