Top 75 Michael Hayden Quotes

We live inside a democracy, and you know, public will matters in a democracy. I just hope it’s informed public will, and frankly, when the decisions are made, you understand the costs.

CIA relies on a partner’s focus, linguistic agility, and cultural depth; in return, the partner benefits from CIA’s resources, technology, and global view.

Public discussion of how we determine al Qaeda intentions, I just – I can’t see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation.

Right after 9/11, I mean, every agency can give their own gradation, but a nice, popular rule of thumb is everybody doubled down. I ended up in the NSA with about twice as much money as I had prior to 9/11.

The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them.

There’s a bigger difference between the first and second Bush administrations than there is between Bush and Obama. That’s really true.

Politicization – the shading of analysis to fit prevailing policy or politics – is the harshest criticism one can make of an intelligence organization. It strikes beyond questions of competence to the fundamental ethic of the enterprise, which is, or should be, truth telling.

After the attacks on September 11th, we all learned lessons.

Dissenting analysts passionate about their positions are not unusual in the American intelligence community. Their presence – or even the rejection – of their favored positions is not prima face evidence of politicization.

My life experience confirms that the U.S. government frequently overclassifies data. But that’s a stronger argument for not dumping large volumes of government traffic on an unclassified personal server than it is a justification for retroactively challenging classification decisions.

It was a long, difficult summer of 2004. That was a leap year, so several things happened – the Olympics and presidential election. And right in the middle of the election campaign – and I don’t think this was an accident – the 9/11 Commission delivers its report.

Before he played CIA Director Saul Berenson on ‘Homeland,’ a much younger Mandy Patinkin gained some fame as Inigo Montoya, a legendary swordsman, in ‘The Princess Bride.’

I don’t know if the European Union contributes a great deal to espionage. At the union level, they talk about commerce and privacy. But to keep citizens safe, that remains a responsibility back in national capitals.

Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence are staples. The four countries of highest interest – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – are constants.

I think the Sino-American relationship is the most important geo-strategic question facing us.

What Edward Snowden did amounted to the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of my nation.

The CIA held about a hundred detainees from 2002 to 2008; about a third of them underwent interrogations that have been variously described as enhanced, tough or torture. The toughest technique was water boarding, used on three detainees, the last in early 2003.

I have spent my adult life working in American intelligence. It has been quite an honor. Generally well resourced. A global mission. No want of issues. And it was a hell of a ride.

My experience has been that military assessments on ‘how goes the war’ are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.

Americans are very practical folks. Accustomed to hard choices in their own lives, they are willing to give us in intelligence a lot of slack as we make the hard choices our profession demands.

I must admit, my old tribe is not unanimous on the view I’ve taken, but there are other folks like me, other former directors of the NSA who have said building in backdoors universally in Apple or other devices actually is bad for America. I think we can all agree it’s bad for American privacy.

My time in war zones have been fleeting and infrequent. I’ve been to Iraq. I’ve been to Afghanistan. I’ve been to other places where I’ve collected hazardous duty pay.

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had paused its nuclear weaponization work also reported with high confidence that such work had been going on through 2003. How far did they get? That’s an important question, but I fear that the Iranians will never answer it, and we will not insist that they do.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas, and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

When I was in government, what we would used to mystically call ‘the kinetic option’ was way down on our list. In my personal thinking – in my personal thinking, I need to emphasize that – I have begun to consider that that may not be the worst of all possible outcomes.

The use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.

‘End strength’ – the total number of government employees you can have at the end of the year. That’s a separate exercise and requires independent energy, independent effort with the Congress to get the ceiling of your government employees raised.

Apple and Google want to create encryption for which they could not provide you the key. Their business model will not survive if the American government has a special relationship with them that requires them to surrender this kind of information.

One might oppose the CIA program, but Abu Ghraib it ain’t.

If we don’t get our relationship with the emerging People’s Republic of China right, that is something that could lead to global catastrophe.

This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.

An intelligence analyst may attribute an attack to al Qaeda, whereas a policy maker could opt for the more general ‘extremist.’

I’m a career Air Force officer. We have a saying in the Air Force: ‘If you want people to be with you at the crash, you’ve got to put them on the manifest.’ And so I was always of the view to almost leave no stone unturned when you’re up there briefing the Hill.

American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel in danger, and as soon as we’ve made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we’re doing too much.

In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn’t stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary.

At the end of the 30 Years War then, Europe broadly decided to separate the sacred from the secular in its political culture. I know that is an oversimplification, but it is instructive, and it led to a growth in religious tolerance that has characterized the best of Western life since.

Access to the security clearance database would disgorge even more detailed personal information, including the foreign contacts of American officials.

Most of the 9/11 hijackers weren’t married, none of them had families inside the United States, and there’s no evidence that any family members moved before, during, or after 9/11.

Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973.

Thoreau points out clearly that civil disobedience gets its moral authority by the willingness to suffer the penalties from disobeying a law, even if you think that law is unjust.

Despite a campaign that was based on a very powerful promise of transparency, President Obama, and again in my view quite correctly, has used the state secrets argument in a variety of courts, as much as President Bush.

Presidents get to decide how their intelligence is served up to them, and it’s the job of intelligence to adjust.

The Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. What constitutes reasonableness depends upon threat.

Our nation counts on us to have the expertise and the insight to flag the risks and the opportunities that lie ahead, and to keep our eye on all the critical international concerns that face our nation right now.

Renditions before and since 9/11 share some basic features. They have been conducted lawfully, responsibly and with a clear and single purpose: Get terrorists off the street and gain intelligence on those still at large. Our detention and interrogation programs flow from the same inescapable logic.

Once you’re in a network, you can do a whole bunch of things to that network. It’s just that NSA doesn’t have the authority to do that.

I used to have a little saying I used when people said, ‘What are your priorities?’ I’d give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I’d say ‘CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.’

I’m not hugging the Guantanamo location, but our right to hold people under the laws of war as enemy combatants, I think, is unarguable, and we need to stand up for that.

If Snowden really claims that his actions amounted to genuine civil disobedience, he should go to some English language bookstore in Moscow and get a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’.

NSA is a very conservative culture legally. Our lawyers at NSA were notorious for their conservatism up through the morning of September 11th, 2001. The single most consistent criticism of the NSA legal office by our congressional oversight committee was that our legal office was too conservative.

I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but Iraq and Syria are gone, and they aren’t coming back, at least not as centralized states.

I was an intelligence officer for what was then 8th Air Force, B-52 Air Force.

Al Qaida changes; Al Qaida adapts. We have to adapt as well. We rely on resources to do that. Reducing resources beyond a certain point will make us less able to adapt as our enemy adapts.

Responsibility demands action, and dealing with the immediate threat must naturally be a top priority.

George Tenet was actually a very strong centralizing force. If you met George by personality, George met with the president six days out of seven: nontrivial attribute inside the federal government. And George was head of the CIA.

All enterprises and major players need to pay attention to the needs of the government of the country of which they are a part. At one level, it would be unconscionable for a company like Huawei not to be responsive to Chinese national-security needs.

My personal view is that Iran, left to its own devices, will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage, so the needle isn’t quite in the red for the international community. And, frankly, that will be as destabilizing as their actually having a weapon.

Anger can be a useful emotion; it’s built into our genetic code to help with self preservation. But it can also be destructive, even when it is justified.

The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results.

I enjoyed writing in school. I don’t know that I was all that good at it in school. I worked at it later. I feel comfortable writing now. I enjoy writing now. I suspect, like most college students, I viewed writing then to be more tedious.

It’s hard to brief in the Oval. You know, you can’t – no visual aids, hard to roll out something in front of somebody.

Xi agreed to the American definition of legitimate espionage. In other words, you don’t use the power of the state to steal secrets for profit.

There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption.

For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot.

National security looks different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa.

ThinThread was not the program of record of my predecessor, Ken Minihan, OK. I did not make ThinThread the program of record while I was director. After I left in 2005, Keith Alexander also chose not to make ThinThread the program of record.

When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.

I’ve often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be.

My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress – not to seek their approval; to inform.

‘Islamist terrorism.’ The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world’s population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims.

Intelligence is often viewed as a profession that steals secrets and then knits those secrets together for policymakers in order to inform their judgments.

If we are going to conduct espionage in the future, we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves.

Intelligence collection is not confined to the communications of adversaries or of the guilty. Rather, it’s about gaining information otherwise unavailable that would help keep Americans safe and free.

There is no worse place for an intelligence service like CIA to be than on Page 1, above the fold in your daily newspaper.

I told them that free people always had to decide where to draw the line between their liberty and their security. I noted that the attacks would almost certainly push us as a nation more toward security.