WASHINGTON — President Bush's apparent choice to run the CIA ran into surprising opposition Sunday as congressional leaders expressed concern about his military background, with one top Republican describing him as "the wrong person, [in] the wrong place, at the wrong time."
The White House is believed to be poised to announce as early as today the nomination of Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden to be CIA director. Hayden would succeed Porter J. Goss, who resigned under pressure on Friday.
It was unclear how Sunday's burst of concern might affect the timing or substance of that announcement, or whether it reflected concerns that had been previously aired with the administration behind closed doors.
But several influential members of Congress, including Republicans on the House and Senate intelligence committees, said they were concerned about a high-ranking military officer running the CIA while the agency is engaged in a rancorous turf war with its intelligence counterparts at the Pentagon.
Hayden, currently the top deputy to national intelligence director John D. Negroponte, would not be the first career military officer to head the CIA. The most recent was Navy Adm. Stansfield Turner, named to the post by President Carter.
But critics contend that naming the general to head the CIA would be a further demoralizing blow for the agency, which has been trying to recover from intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11 attacks and the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"Putting a general in charge is going to send the wrong signal through the agency here in Washington, but also to our agents in the field around the world," Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on "Fox News Sunday."
"I've got a lot of respect for Mike Hayden.... He's got a distinguished career," Hoekstra said. But despite that admiration, he continued, "bottom line, I do believe he's the wrong person, [in] the wrong place, at the wrong time. We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time."
The Pentagon has sought to aggressively expand its intelligence capabilities and operations under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, both in the United States and abroad, and it controls about 80% of the estimated $40-billion annual intelligence budget.
