“Playing to the Edge offers a full excursion through the contemporary challenges facing American intelligence, including cyber warfare, Russian aggression, and armed conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it also presents an intimate personal portrait—an account of how its author came to be the man he is.
Playing to the Edge suffers from the usual problems of the official memoir. All autobiographies are self-serving, but those of public figures tend to be unapologetically so ... Hayden devotes far more energy to answering critical coverage in the Times and the Washington Post than to analyzing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[Hayden] has written an occasionally engaging book about matters — moral, legal and technological — that are very complex, but he shows little interest in examining them. Throughout he is breezy and unapologetic ... what he doesn’t do in this book is take stock of how other measures stand up in retrospect. A good example is torture. Mr. Hayden took over the C.I.A. after authorization of coercive interrogation tactics were withdrawn, but he remains a defender.
Hayden is at his best not when he is attacking or defending, but when he is simply explaining the challenge of an intelligence professional in the postmodern era ... This is a pessimistic book, but while policymakers tend to be optimists, intelligence agents trend toward the reverse. As former CIA director Robert M. Gates once said, when an intelligence analyst stops to smell the flowers, he quickly looks around for the hearse.
...a surprisingly vivid, albeit acronym-heavy, memoir that probably only a Beltway insider could truly love ... A proud product of blue-collar Pittsburgh, Hayden hints that he would have told far more stories about C.I.A. successes had agency censors let him.
...when it comes to matters that raise questions about the competence, reputation, and potential criminal liability of intelligence officials, 'the world as it was seen from Langley' may not always be the same as 'the world as it is'...truth to Hayden sometimes seems to be whatever serves the interests of his own faction: the permanent bureaucracy of intelligence and military professionals ... while I believe that major aspects of his book are flawed, I also think that other parts are excellent. Hayden spent his career grappling with some of the world’s most complex problems and he has many interesting, if often bleak, things to say about them—especially when his account is less driven by his concern to defend the record of the intelligence agencies.
