May 26 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate voted 78-15 today to confirm Michael Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hayden, who is deputy director for national intelligence, will take over an agency that has been plagued with low morale and the departure of senior managers.

Hayden, 61, received bipartisan support from lawmakers who said they're confident he'll provide unvarnished assessments of intelligence to President George W. Bush.

``His actions have demonstrated on a number of occasions the independence and strength of character'' needed in a CIA director, said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who's on the Intelligence Committee, which approved Hayden's nomination by a 12-3 margin on May 23.

Some Democrats criticized Hayden's role in creating and defending a controversial warrantless surveillance program that Bush authorized when Hayden was the National Security Agency's director between 1999 and 2005.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, one of three Democrats on the Intelligence committee to vote against Hayden when the panel approved his nomination 12-3 on May 23, last night criticized the effort Hayden has ``spent on the bully pulpit defending the president's wiretapping program.''

Bush ordered the NSA to monitor conversations between U.S. residents and suspected terrorists overseas after the Sept. 11 attacks and, according to recent disclosures, to assemble as well a data base of billions of domestic phone-call records.

Specter Votes No

Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania was the only Republican to vote against Hayden. Specter, who's introduced legislation that would require some judicial review of the surveillance, said, ``I feel constrained to vote no as a protest.''

Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, will be the CIA's third director in two years. He succeeds Porter Goss, 67, whose 19-month tenure was marked by turmoil and the departures of senior managers.

Goss began the process of rebuilding the CIA's spy network, which was slashed following the Cold War. Yet his efforts to overhaul the agency met resistance and John McLaughlin, a career officer who was deputy director and temporarily led the agency, left soon after Goss arrived in September 2004.

Congress reduced the CIA's power following its failure to detect and stop the Sept. 11 attacks and its assertion, which turned out to be wrong, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

A year ago, lawmakers established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which assumed the CIA's historic role of managing the other 15 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence network.

Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte has said the CIA will be the premier agency for obtaining intelligence from people and will be an important for analysis on the information.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeff Bliss in Washington at jbliss@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 26, 2006 11:40 EDT