The others, too, but they're not as stealthy about it.
The CEO and the CIA
How Carly Fiorina managed and advised the ‘poobahs’ at Langley.
by JIM GERAGHTY
National Review, May 5, 2015
One week after 9/11, Michael Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency, the electronic surveillance arm of the U.S. government, had a long list of problems. High on the list was the fact that the NSA needed a ton of new high-tech equipment, particularly servers, right away, to handle a vastly expanded, critically important workload.
Hayden called up the CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina. “HP made precisely the equipment we needed, and we needed in bulk,” says Robert Deitz, who was general counsel at the NSA from 1998 to 2006. Deitz recalls that a tractor-trailer full of HP servers and other equipment was on the Washington, D.C. Beltway, en route to retailers, at the very moment Hayden called. Fiorina instructed her team to postpone the retailer delivery and have the driver stop. An NSA police car met up with the tractor-trailer and the truck proceeded, with an armed escort, to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.
It was an early moment in the close professional relationship between Hayden and Fiorina. Five years later, President George W. Bush named Hayden director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Upon assuming control at Langley, Hayden decided that he wanted to create an ‘External Advisory Board.’ He once again turned to Fiorina, and she went on to chair that board.
The most obvious knock on Fiorina’s newly announced presidential bid is that she has never been elected to any government office. But during the Bush presidency, Fiorina walked the corridors of the CIA and other high offices of government, assembling recommendations for national-security policy and developing a close working relationship with some of the most powerful officials in the administration. She’s already begun to cite these years in an attempt to counter those critics who say she lacks the experience needed to be commander-in-chief.
When Hayden moved to the CIA, Deitz became his senior counselor. He served as the CIA’s main liaison to the advisory board, although he says Hayden and Fiorina had regular private lunch meetings.
“The board had a lot of egos — these were people from academia, retired three- and four-star generals, big poobahs from private industry,” Deitz remembers. “It was a challenging board to run. She would generally sit quietly, ask questions, but you never got a sense she was dominating or big-footing — but by the end of the meeting, she had gotten exactly what she wanted. . . . Polite, but you couldn’t push her around.”
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417938/ceo-and-cia-jim-geraghty
Thoroughly modern warmonger.
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