a long way from Pittsburgh

In the days after Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked and crashed four commercial jetliners on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop, without warrants, on American citizens and foreign nationals within the United States. His action represented the biggest shift in U.S. intelligence gathering in American history. But the true architect of that secret program, code-named Stellarwind, was a former Air Force intelligence officer who’d been picked to run the NSA two years earlier: General Michael Vincent Hayden. What a long way from Pittsburgh, where Hayden was born in 1945. His youth was western Pennsylvania through and through: Dad was a welder, and the family lived for Sundays, when they would attend mass and Steelers games. In college at Duquesne University, Hayden even worked at the Steelers’ summer training camp to help pay his tuition. He studied history, joined ROTC and started active duty in the Air Force in 1969.

A registered Independent with no political background, Hayden came up through the ranks of Air Force intelligence, and in 1999 President Bill Clinton selected him to run that secretive organization nicknamed No Such Agency. When Hayden arrived, he found the NSA struggling to keep up with the technological tide. Two years later, 9/11 jolted him into unprecedented action, and he implemented rapid, transformational measures. Hayden’s Stellarwind program circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and even went beyond the authority of the Patriot Act passed by Congress.

After The New York Times exposed the operation in 2005, Hayden still moved forward—but another, more damaging exposure lay ahead. Bush made him principal deputy director of National Intelligence and then promoted him to director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2006. Hayden’s new position as top spy coincided with another CIA hire: Edward Snowden. The then 23-year-old computer tech later went to work for two NSA contractors, and in 2013 Snowden released confidential information on the spy program established by Hayden. The resulting firestorm implicated both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Today, General Michael Vincent Hayden is recovering from a stroke which came out of nowhere.  It happened on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2018.

CNN National Security Analyst Michael Hayden, a retired four-star US Air Force general, formerly headed the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. His daughter-in-law, Jessica Powley Hayden, helped him to focus his thoughts and put them on paper. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own; view more opinion at CNN.