Electronic surveillance

Confessions From Bush’s NSA Spy Program

A now famous showdown over a secret U.S. intelligence program that gathered information on Americans’ communications without warrants has been over-dramatized and apparently told largely from the perspective of one man—the current FBI director,James Comey, who at the time urged the attorney general to break with the White House and not reauthorize the controversial operation.

That’s the conclusion of former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, who was the architect of the program known as Stellarwind. In his new memoir, released today, Hayden provides his first detailed account of the creation of the program in the days after the 9/11 attacks, on orders of President George W. Bush, and an internal debate that saw top U.S. law enforcement officials threaten to resign.