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By David Morgan

WASHINGTON, April 13 (Reuters) - CIA Director Michael Hayden is claiming success at stopping media leaks of the kind that plagued the spy agency under his predecessor, including revelations of secret prisons for terrorism suspects.

An in-house policy of open communication between Hayden's office and the agency's workforce has effectively reduced employee frustrations blamed for prompting unauthorized disclosures in the past, the four-star Air Force general said in a C-SPAN interview to be aired on Sunday.

"In my confirmation hearing, I talked about getting the CIA out of the press as source or subject. And I did that," Hayden said in an interview transcript released on Friday.

"The preceding 12 months, it was almost daily that the agency was in the paper and very often being criticized unfairly," he said.

Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency, took over the CIA in May 2006 after former CIA Director Porter Goss resigned. Goss had a difficult tenure of less than two years that had followed intelligence lapses over Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Congressionally mandated intelligence reforms that created the new job of intelligence czar also were blamed for eroding the CIA's status among espionage agencies and undermining employee morale.

One of the most controversial media leaks occurred in November 2005, when the Washington Post reported that the CIA was operating a secret overseas prison system for terrorism suspects including senior al Qaeda members captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

President George W. Bush was forced by a Supreme Court ruling to transfer detainees from the prison system to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September and to seek new congressional authorization for CIA interrogations.

Goss, whose closed-door management style proved unpopular with senior agency operatives, told the Senate early in 2006 that he had launched an internal investigation to root out leakers.

But Hayden said in the 57-minute interview scheduled to air on C-SPAN's "Q&A" program that he owed his success to an internal e-mail system that allows CIA employees to air grievances directly to him.

"I get lots of e-mails every day. And we answer them," added Hayden, who became CIA director after serving as principal deputy to former intelligence chief John Negroponte. Negroponte is now deputy secretary of state.

"We've found that people have a comfort level that their views are heard inside the agency. There's less of a tendency for legitimate, or perhaps not so legitimate, reasons to go outside the agency. And that seems to have worked," he said.

Asked about the status of Goss' leak investigation, CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency's policy is not to comment on internal security reviews "that may or may not be taking place."

But he stressed that Hayden believes leaks of classified information have done damage to intelligence sources and methods "and caused harm to our nation's security."

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