Michael Hayden Quotes
When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out.
Hayden, Michael V. Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror. Penguin Press, 2016.
Agree resigned from the CIA in protest to its political position.
When Bob Casey was the CIA Director, he the declassification of all the operational files of the WWII Office of Strategic Service. The huge collection is referred to as Record Book 2.6
We tend to be hard on our intelligence agencies for a combination or reasons. Because much of their activity is secret and many of their successes are not known to the public. If they have a great success, the politicians generally take the credit. But if the intelligence agency makes a big error that causes a failure of some kind, a the politicians often violate the secrecy and blame the intelligence agencies. The Iraq Invasion of the George W, Bush administration was a good example. The President had received intelligence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. He invaded to prevent their being used. It turned ouit that there were no nuclear weapons at all, and the President and leaders of hs cabinet had misled, the people, the Congress, the UN and world opinion and started a war on false pretenses. The administration then went public about the intelligence failure. There was a great deal of intelligence that indicated that there were no Iraq nuclear program but these never reached the President, the military or the public. In addition, the intelligence agencies have missed some really major events, like the fall of the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communist victory in the Chinese Civil war. But intelligence is not an exact science; mistakes are inevitable, The politicians using the intelligence tend to think that intelligence estimates are more certaini than estimates can be. However the CIA in particular has had periods of rogue and illegal activities just which cause many citizens ro distrust them. They have illegally investigated Americans, actually conducted experiments with chemical weapons in American cities without any permission or authority, violated American law in the way they treat prisoners,and destroyed evidence, broken the law by conducting activities that Congress and the President had explicitly forbid. The FBI has also broken the law and spied on Americans who were critical of the government, and slandered the reputations of some Americans by “leaking” information that oftn was not even true. So the current intelligence have to bear the burden of their predecessors, but because of the secrecy, cannot take advantage of all the wonderful accomplishments and great sacrifices of many members of the intelligence agencies.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had released an unclassified Summary of the Committee Report on the CIA using torture and perverse treatment of suspect terrorists in the aftermath of the 9-11 attack on New York. Most Republicans argued vehemently that the Report should be classified and kept secret as the CIA behavior was so egregious, unpalatable, and morally reprehensible that there would be negative consequences including perhaps demonstrations and attacks against Americans in foreign countries. Moreover, Terrorist organizations would use the heinous CIA behavior as a recruiting tool for anti-American terrorists. McCain, who had himself been the victim of North Vietnamese torture cited the moral and ethical reasons to prohibit torture but also explained what has been proven over and over again that torture victims will tell the torturer any nonsense that they think the torturer might believe just to get obtain relief from the agony of the torture.
Expressing concern over President Obama extending some of the American citizen entitled privacy rights to foreigners. He was concerned that this might inhibit our spying efforts.
Intelligence agents tend to prefer covert activities to the less dramatic, non-exciting, activity of gathering and analyzing intelligence. Most national intelligence services tend to enlarge their portfolio to include covert activities regardless of what the national leaders intended. Because of the secrecy, they can often get away with this.
Michael Vincent Hayden is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Hayden currently co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center's Electric Grid Cyber Security Initiative. In 2017, Hayden became a national security analyst for CNN.
