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When Michael Hayden was a young air force officer in the 1980s, the military stationed him as an intelligence attach\u00e9 in Bulgaria. There, the man who would rise to the top of the American intelligence community in the post\u2013September 11 era lived under constant surveillance: he and his wife, believing their apartment to be bugged, kept toy erasable pads scattered around it so they could converse in writing. Against that tense cold war backdrop, Hayden was once talking with a political officer in the Bulgarian government and became frustrated, blurting out, \u201cWhat is truth to you?\u201d The Communist Party apparatchik supposedly answered, \u201cTruth? Truth is what serves the Party.\u201d<\/p>\n In his memoir Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terrorism<\/i>, Hayden uses this anecdote to set the stage for a discussion of how intelligence officials are supposed to function in a modern democracy. Their crucial task, he writes, is to be \u201cfact-based and see the world as it is,\u201d supplying complete and accurate information to policymakers who make difficult decisions. His veneration of this ideal accords with his contempt for certain journalists he sees as \u201chopelessly agenda-driven\u201d and with his self-image as a truth-teller. He observes that an entity that lives outside the law, as the Central Intelligence Agency does when it carries out covert operations abroad, must be \u201chonest<\/i>,\u201d adding: \u201cEspecially with yourself. All the time.\u201d<\/p>\n When intelligence officials live up to this standard for candor, the information they supply may be inconvenient for the various agendas of decision-makers. When President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney ran the country, Hayden\u2019s CIA, <\/abbr>he writes, told the White House that the insurgency in Iraq was spiraling into a sectarian civil war, and later that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program. The latter assessment, which did not serve the purposes of hawks who wanted to escalate the confrontation with Iran, led many on the political right to conclude that the CIA<\/abbr> was taking \u201crevenge\u201d on the Bush White House for \u201cbeing forced to take the heat\u201d for inaccurate intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs before the war. Hayden writes that such talk \u201cmade for a nice, tight story, but it just wasn\u2019t true. The facts took us to our conclusions, not retribution or predisposition.\u201d During the transition after Senator Barack Obama won the presidency, Hayden and other intelligence officials \u201cwould work to get access to him and then create as many of what we crudely called \u2018aw, shit\u2019 moments as possible.\u201d This meant telling the president-elect<\/p>\n about the world as they saw it, not through the lens of campaign rhetoric, tracking polls, or the world as you wanted it to be. The \u201caw, shit\u201d count simply reflected how many times they had been successful, as in \u201cAw shit, wish we hadn\u2019t said that during that campaign stop in Buffalo.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hayden suggests that President Obama\u2019s early decision to keep using \u201cextraordinary rendition\u201d transfers of detainees to other countries\u2019 intelligence services, a counterterrorism practice that Bush critics had come to see as deliberately outsourcing torture\u2014unfairly, he maintains\u2014was a result of such briefings.<\/p>\n