The embattled National Security Agency is about to get new leaders to deal with the ongoing fallout from whistleblower Edward Snowden’s surveillance disclosures.



Vice-admiral Michael Rogers, the commander of the US navy’s tenth fleet and its Fleet Cyber Command, will take over from NSA Director Keith Alexander, who reluctantly became a global figure in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

Richard Ledgett, the head of the agency’s investigation into Snowden – who publicly floated the prospect of an amnesty for the former contractor – will become the NSA’s new deputy director and top civilian leader.

The appointments, both long anticipated, were announced by the Pentagon on Thursday.

Rogers is a longtime cryptologist in the Navy, whose informal turn it was to nominate a director for the NSA. Alexander is an Army general; and his predecessor, Michael Hayden, hailed from the Air Force.

Rogers has a resume studded with experience in cryptography and electronic eavesdropping that are central to the NSA’s charter. Tenth Fleet, inert since World War II, was reactivated as the Navy’s cybersecurity command and based at Fort Meade, the base of operations for the military’s infant Cyber Command – which Rogers will also head, pending Senate approval – and the NSA. Rogers also served for two years on the military’s Joint Staff as intelligence director, a prestigious Pentagon post.

But his low-profile commissions have not provided him with a platform to articulate his views on the propriety and appropriate scope of the bulk surveillance of a large swath of world communications, the subject of Snowden’s disclosures that have been published in the Guardian, the Washington Post and other news outlets worldwide.

Nor will the Senate have a chance to scrutinize them, at least formally. The NSA directorship is not a position confirmed by the Senate. Rogers’ appointment to head US Cyber Command, which is co-located with the NSA and largely reliant on its personnel and expertise to protect US military networks, will require Senate approval, making Rogers’ forthcoming Senate Armed Services Committee hearing a proxy venue to learn his views on surveillance.

Rogers did not have much in the way of competition for the NSA job. There were whispers in Washington that the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, was also a candidate for the job, but even those who advocated for Flynn, a veteran of the powerful Joint Special Operations Command, did not expect him to get the NSA job.

In a statement Thursday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he recommended Rogers for the post to President Barack Obama, citing Rogers’ “extraordinary and unique qualifications.”

“I am also confident that Admiral Rogers has the wisdom to help balance the demands of security, privacy, and liberty in our digital age,” Hagel said.

Alexander bequeaths an agency that continues what many intelligence watchers consider the biggest shock in its history: the disclosure of documents detailing its secret collection of the records of every phone call made in the United States; vast swaths of email and Internet communications of foreigners; communications in transit across the global communications infrastructure; and the undermining of cryptographic standards.

At a hearing of intelligence leaders on Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that the NSA has taken large blow to its morale.

Observers note that one of the new leadership’s major functions will be to repair the NSA’s trust with the American public and skeptical members of Congress, who have drafted legislation to end the NSA’s ability to collect US phone records in bulk.

“Rogers has never had to make the public case that the country's intelligence apparatus is not abusing its legal authorities,” wrote Shane Harris in a recent Foreign Policy profile.

Like prior NSA directors, Rogers is likely to be a frequent fixture on Capitol Hill, both for classified briefings and in the coming congressional fight over the future scope of the NSA’s authorities. An early test is likely to be the transition of the phone metadata caches out of NSA, which is backed by Obama and opposed by telephone companies who fear an expanded data storage mandate. During Wednesday’s hearing, two committee chairs, Jay Rockefeller of the commerce committee and Dianne Feinstein of the intelligence committee, indicated their opposition to the plan.