The full transcript of The N&O interview with Gen. Michael V. Hayden.


Q: The very nature of the work that will be the topic of your speech depends on details that can’t be disclosed. How far can you go, and what should the audience expect?

A: I’ll begin with a fairly deep backdrop of what the agency looked like before 9/11, what changes were made after 9/11, the kinds of broad things we did to establish knowledge of al Qaeda. I won’t dwell on it, but you know part of that is the programs that President Bush authorized, rendition, detentions and so on. I’ll talk a bit about covert action, and how that’s authorized, what are the rules, how it’s governed. It’s not lawless, but it’s different from other things and frankly is one of the things that make the agency very unique.

Then I’ll begin to get a bit specific about the hunt for bin Laden,what I know about it. It won’t be in painful detail, in part because some of it happened after I left. But I will talk about the broad trajectory, how the agency got to where it was. And the dynamic of how you give the president enough confidence to take an operationally,physically and politically risky step like that without flooding the zone so much that you tip off your prey and lose the one opportunity you may have had to get him.

Then I’ll probably come off of all that with an assessment as to where al Qaeda is now globally, and what the impact of bin Laden’s death was, and maybe what’s on the next stage or in the next chapter.

I’m comfortable enough I’ve talked about things like this, and I’ve found I can actually say a lot without saying anything I shouldn’t.That’s different from getting cute with the audience or inferring things, but there are some things you can say. For example, there is a good case to be made that CIA has never looked more like its direct ancestor, the OSS, than it does right now. It’s not just an intelligence gathering operation. There are certain things I can’t confirm or deny, because our government hasn’t. But there are some things I can talk about.


Q: What do the details of the bin Laden raid tell us about what spying has become, about what’s new and also what hasn’t changed?

A: It’s good that you asked about spying, because my center of gravity and what the talk will be about is about the intelligence story, and not the operational story, what the SEALs did. I talk about the hunt and where we were and, more candidly, where we weren’t, in ’04, ‘05, and ‘06, and the UBL cell coming to talk to me in ‘07 and why they thought working the couriers would be the most profitable way to go in to pinpoint where bin Laden was. I talk about building the trail from that pebble by pebble. And I can’t go into detail, one, because I can’t, and in part because there is only one layer I know, but all the forms of intelligence contributed to this. It had human intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence. And an analytic shop that was obsessed with doing this.

Here is a case that was tremendously successful because there were no seams between the collection and the analytic task, and that is something that in terms of how we do our work, that’s gotten significantly better in the last 10 years.

Also, going after this kind of target like this requires near-exquisite human intelligence so that you can build a foundation, the database, so you can create and test hypotheses. And human intelligence is an on-again, off-again thing for Americans. We’re far more comfortable with technical intelligence. So, after 9/11 we had to re-create human intelligence capability. So it was frankly several years before we had the kind of penetration of al-Qaeda that has allowed us to do the kinds of things we’d done, not just killing bin Laden, but capturing or killing the majority of their leadership.


Q: For most of the past decade you were in lead roles for the top U.S. intelligence agencies – a decade in which they were keenly focused on bin Laden and al Qaeda. What did you feel when you heard that he had finally been killed?

A: Overwhelming satisfaction. Probably not quite the celebratory mood you saw outside the White House that night. Probably because those who have been doing this knew that this was important but not a climactic moment, but that people who are doing this would have to go to work tomorrow and they would pretty much be doing the same thing they were the day before. But there was great, great satisfaction.


Q: Did the rather suburban nature of his compound in Abbottabad surprise you?

A: Yeah, a little bit. We had always gone under the belief – and it was an assessment, not based on any direct evidence – that he would be where Pakistani sovereignty was weakest, and that translated to a fairly remote area of the federally administered tribal areas. So when it’s Abbottabad, yeah, I’ll tell you very candidly, a bit surprising. But when I look back on it, not illogical, not irrational.

But everyone’s asking questions, how could he possibly not be there without knowledge of someone in the Pakistani government. Because of that, our assessment was he would be in an area where the Pakistani government was weak.


Q: What’s the likelihood that members of the Pakistan government knew where bin Laden was?

A: I can give you something reasonably definitive, with the words chosen carefully. If someone wants to convince me that the senior levels of the Pakistani government knew where he was, the absolute burden of proof is on them. Because I can’t think of a logical reason for senior levels of the Pakistani government to know this and not share it with us. I can think of logical reasons, I think they’re very bad ones, from a Pakistani perspective, why they would protect, say, Haqqani and his network. He’s their guy, he does certain things for them , and they have a relationship. Why they would protect a foreigner, an Arab, I don’t understand. So I do not immediately conclude that senior levels of the Pakistani government knew about this. Now, you’ve heard me say “senior levels” three times, so I’m making a distinction here.”


Q: Between bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora in December 2001 and the discovery of this compound, did the U.S. have any solid information about his location?

A: No. I can only speak with authority through 15 February, 2009, but the trail was cold. When people would ask, how are you doing on bin Laden, “Well, that’s a tough problem.” “OK, when’s the last time you really knew where he was?” My answer was Tora Bora.


Q: As CIA director, you held what has been called “The most important job in the U.S. government when it comes to fighting the global war on terrorism.” Can that fight ever end?

A: You now, I’m sorry, but the answer is yes and no. You get to a certain success level, that you’ve pushed their capabilities down below a certain threshold. We aren’t quite there yet, but we’ve had great success. What they’re capable of doing now is well below what they were capable of doing 10 years ago, and that’s really good news and cause for celebration, but we’re not yet down.


Q: Is it a war?

A: Defining it as a war, and giving ourselves the legal authorities and physical capabilities that defining it as a war gives us, are still needed. I’ll be up in New York on the evening of Sept. 7 debating that very proposition with Peter Bergen. He believes that we should declare the war on terrorism over. My view is, no, we still need the authorities, ethically and legally, that treating it as a war give us, and we will awhile longer. I feel very strongly we’re still at war. At some point, we will decide we no longer need to define it as a war. But we aren’t there yet.


Q: What are some of the important capabilities that this gives us?

A: Well, where al Qaeda is in its arc of history, the kind of threat it poses to us. OK, I’ll give you an example: We just had an agent of the U.S. government kill an unarmed man in cold blood who had not offered any active resistance, and was under indictment in the U.S. court system, and pretty much all thought it was a great idea, right?

The legal authority to do that only comes from the concept that you’re at war. If you’re not at war, then its minimal, not the maximum force that’s authorized and there would have been a legal and ethical responsibility to (make him) surrender.

Another example, the Navy SEALs killed the operations chief for Al-Shabaab in September 2009 in Somalia. Now, Somalia is not Afghanistan, it’s not Iraq. It’s not in a recognized theater of conflict. Unless you accept the U.S. definition that we are in a global conflict with al Qaeda, there is no legal or ethical underpinning for doing that. Those kinds of things need to continue.


Q: North Carolina, of course is the home of certain military units, like Delta Force, that are known for working with the CIA.

A: That’s one of the sub-plots I’ll mention. I’m probably making an outline in the ether here between me and North Carolina, but one of the things I will talk about is that the bin Laden raid was really well done, really stretched the capability, but it wasn’t unique. We have being doing this in conjunction with JSOC for years. And one raid I can talk about as part of this is the raid that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. How cooperative was that? A day or two after the raid I got a handwritten note from Stan McChrystal saying “Thank you and your people.”


Q: Right after 9/11, many said we were too reliant on technology and had far too few human sources of intelligence in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Where are we at with that balance now?

A: I was tasked with increasing the number of case officers by 50 percent. And I did, we got to the end of the journey on my watch. But we have kind of jumped over that, and now the grand dispute isn’t between the disciplines: human intelligence, imagery and signals and so on, though they’re still jostling for programs and dollars and so on. The real issue facing us now is how much of all our energy, collectively, all of the disciplines, we’ve put into the counterterrorism target at the expense of everything else. And that’s really become the current issue not just the balance between the disciplines, but where do you focus any or all of them.


Q: What else would we be spending that energy on?

A: Well, you’ve got a (nuclear) proliferation issue, and to be fair, Iran was the second-most discussed topic in the Oval Office while I was DCIA . But you’ve got all these other things that are growing that we need to be aware of. The accusation was that the Arab Awakening caught us by surprise. Part of that is false expectations of what intelligence can do for you. But a big part of that was, well, it caught us by surprise.

There’s the question of East Asia, and the rise of China, and how exquisite our intelligence is or is not about China and Chinese decision-making. And what are the other long-term trends in other parts of the world, and do we have enough people working on them?

And keep in mind that debate isn’t a reflection of a mistake. It’s a reflection of adapting to your environment. No one was raising this point in 2003. But now that we’re in 2011 and things have changed, what of the things we’re doing within the terrorism bubble should we shift our weight on, and what should we shift from the terrorism bubble to some other things.

Remember, I said earlier that the CIA has never looked more like the OSS. It’s fighting the war. It’s doing its share. The euphemism I’m allowed to use, I guess, is taking terrorists off the battlefield one way or the other. But we also have to remember, and I had to keep telling myself this, as important as this is, and as successful as the agency was in that, we also are the nation’s global intelligence service, and we need to keep that in mind.


Q: But no matter how well the intelligence agencies eventually get that balance, they can’t predict every major change that will pop up. The world is too complicated, and some of the things they miss will be big. It’s like predicting the stock market, lots of outside variables.

A: I wasn’t director very long, and I used to go talk to the president every Thursday morning about the agency following his morning intel brief. So I went in there one day with John Negroponte, and the analytic guys at the CIA had actually put together a briefing on how well they had done over the last year or so on PDB – President’s Daily Brief items with regard to how often we were right with regard to predicting events …and they compared our record to similar records in the outside world, including the one you just named, the stock market. Multiple outcomes, right? Frankly, we did about as well as the people on the outside did.

So I got all done with the brief and I felt real good about it, and we’re walking out of the brief and John said to me, “Mike, you got it all wrong.” I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “We’re not there to predict the future for the president, we’re there to help the president understand issues.”

I found that a pretty telling comment, that our real value added was no whether we could predict whether this or that was going to happen within a certain period of time. But our expertise creates the left-and right-hand boundaries of legitimate and rational discussion. Predictability is a very narrow metric with which to measure ourselves.


Q: Pakistan is an ally, but its main intelligence agency, the ISI, is widely believed to have ties to insurgent groups like the Haqqani network, which you referred to, and to other militants. Given that, what was it like having to work with the ISI?

A: I’m going to limited in my commentary here, but when you’re working with any foreign partner, you’re looking for the common space. And there is no foreign partner where your space is totally coincident with their space. There are always differences. Even the closest, English-speaking partners you can think of, you’re not the same.

I usually illustrate this with my hands. I start with one hand on top of the other, where the fingers are coincident, and then I begin to spread them and eventually only my thumbnails overlap, and I’ll make the point that even under those circumstances, intelligence services are forced to work with each other and you build on that common space. With Pakistan, the common space got progressively smaller over the years.

And that’s based on the fact that Pakistani views of their interests,currently, are not nearly what American views of our interests are in this part of the world.

I had a lot of calls from your colleagues after that contractor, Ray Davis, was arrested in Pakistan, and they said, well, this intel thing is really putting stress on the American-Pakistani relationships, and I said, “What are you talking about, it’s the other way around.” The lack of commonality, this decrease in overlap between world views and interests at the macro level between the two governments, that’s shrinking the space in which the two intelligence services can work, and that’s the ultimate dynamic.


Q: Well, I also look at his arrest, and one of the things I thought was, OK, here’s yet another contractor with ties to Blackwater who has managed to get into trouble and increased the diplomatic friction between two governments.

A: Well, as far as I’m concerned, they’re wonderful. We used Blackwater, and they did everything we asked them to do.


Q: What does the CIA do with its shell companies after their cover is blown?

A: It’s hard for me to give any answer for that without specifics, and that’s impossible to do.


Q: I ask, obviously, because there is a company here in North Carolina that is widely reported to be a successor to the agency’s Vietnam-era air service, Air America, and has been reported as such for years now, but it’s still here. When Air America’s cover was blown, the agency eventually shut it down.

A: I have no views on that subject.


Q: According to many news reports, the Pakistani government arrested a Pakistani doctor who helped with the United States with the bin Laden operation. I wouldn’t ask you to specially address that doctor’s situation, but just broadly, can the CIA do anything for local nationals it recruits like that when their cover is blown? Clearly his life is at risk.

A: Not talking about that case, just speaking generally, one of the things the agency takes very seriously, when someone enters into a relationship with us, we pick up a very strong burden to protect the individual and their family. I used to talk at case officer gradations. Every time we graduated case officers I would go to the facility where we do the training and speak at graduation. One of the things I point out was the moral responsibility you embrace when someone enters into a relationship with you. The phrase I used was something like, ‘You may be the only face of America they ever see, and you are responsible for their welfare.’

Now, I know nothing of the facts of the case, but I recall one press report saying that the doctor was told you need to leave, and the doctor refusing. That has the ring of truth about it.


Q: You were at the helm of the NSA when it developed programs for warrantless monitoring of domestic communications, monitoring that has been criticized as illegal. The details of that have been hashed out pretty thoroughly….

A: Actually there is no accurate description of what we were doing in the public domain.


Q: OK, well, obviously it would help an informed discussion to have the details. But I wanted to kind of step aside of the debate over whether it’s legal or illegal, and just ask you morally, how should an open society like ours best balance its need to protect itself from the likes of al Qaeda while also protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of its citizens?

A: My wife and I were at Aspen about two weeks ago and on stage you had Al Gonzales, John Yoo, Anthony Romero from the ACLU, and a professor … from Georgetown. And it was a lively 90 minutes. Yoo, a very smart guy, led with the thesis that we have fought this war with very little impingement on American privacy or freedoms, particularly compared with what occurred during previous wars. And I think John’s right. When you look at the degree of verbal gymnastics over some of the provisions of the Patriot Act, it’s really quite stunning. The arguments were way out there at the margins, they were not fundamental invasions of privacy or liberty.

I was very comfortable. I was comfortable with what we were doing in terms of U.S. privacy because I knew how careful we were being, but I was also comfortable with the legal underpinning because of the president’s Article 2 authorities when it comes to waging war.


Q: In your view, how much of the intelligence that it took to find bin Laden was gained through so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding?

A: It’s impossible to quantify, but I’m going to talk about it anyway.When I became director in 2006, I essentially went to school on the whole detention and interrogation program. I had to make decisions, so I spent the summer of 2006 studying this. Even in 2006, with the fight under way for five years, the agency’s estimate was that 50 percent of our knowledge of al Qaeda had come from information from detainees.Now, not every detainee had interrogation techniques used against them.

When they came in 2007 and told me they were going to chase couriers, one important route, one important kind of clump of information, that caused us to go down this path had come from the interrogation of three detainees … all three of whom had had enhanced interrogation techniques used against them.


Q: For many Americans, what they know about spying comes from novels. Do you read spy fiction?

A: Well, I’ve read, and I assign in my class at George Mason, David Ignatius’ “Agents of Innocence” and I tell my students that up until a couple of years ago, the CIA web site used to describe that book like this way: “This is a novel, but it’s not fiction.” So the agency feels like that one really captured how this is done.


Q: But not classics like John le Carré, which really get at the moral ambiguity of working for intelligence agencies?

A: I read le Carré, but it was a long time ago. And “Agents of Innocence” has a pretty good helping of moral ambiguity in it, and that’s why I used it with the class. And in the graduation speech I was talking about earlier, in that I mention how in these times of great moral ambiguity you need a very powerful moral compass.


Q: What is the future of drones? They are playing huge roles over Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, and there was apparently one over the bin Laden compound during the raid providing a real-time video feed to commanders and the White House. But I’m not asking just about their future for spying. You were an Air Force general, you know the debates between those who feel strongly that it’s important to keep building piloted aircraft and training pilots, and those who think the most of the future is drones.

A: OK, first, let me make it clear that I’m not confirming or denying any programs. We’re just talking about drones. Yes there’s social stress in my service, but they have been core to the mission now. And there is an awful lot of creative thought about how to use – actually the Air Force word for these is “remotely piloted vehicles.” They are still piloted, just remotely. And actually I think the numbers are that last year for the first time the Air Force created more RPV operators than actual pilots.


Q: Do you think that ratio will keep moving in the same direction?

A: Yes, but – and here’s the thing. Drones are magnificent. For the kind of war we’re fighting now, they give us absolute persistence. It is an unblinking view. Speaking hypothetically, now, if you’re looking down on a target, you don’t have to make your decision about whether to do something in a split second. You can drone that target for hours if not days in order to decide whether you meet all the requirements of the rules of engagement and simple morality to take action against it.

That is wonderful. On the other hand, we’re using RPVs now in an absolutely permissive air environment. They are ideally suited for the current war, against an enemy that is incredibly difficult to find but frankly is pretty easy to kill once you find him.


Q: Just a point of clarification, when you say they’re operating in a permissive environment, you mean the enemy has almost no capability to shoot them down.

A: That is correct. And so you need to keep in mind, as good as they are and they are ideally suited as they are for this circumstance, there will be other circumstances, with other mixes, where they are going to be not nearly as well suited.


Q: A big goal for you going into the NSA in 1999 was to lift the technology into the 21st century. I’m assuming the NSA and other government intelligence agencies have the same problems as the rest of us in keeping up with the pace of change in communications technology.

A: The purpose of the NSA is to be a party to communications of which it’s not the intended recipient, and that’s hard. And yes, if your target goes from 2G to 3G and you have a magnificent 2G infrastructure, guess what? You’re deaf. And so given the pace of change in global telecommunications, you really had issues if you were working along government planning, programming and budgeting cycles.

That was the challenge. You had an agency that had grown up kind of isolated. It had high walls around it, speaking figuratively, because it had big secrets to keep in, and that’s a virtue. And for most of its life, that was fine, because it was ahead of most of the culture in the things it cared about. But that changed in the ‘90s. Now, the technology outside the walls was better and changing more rapidly than the technology inside the walls.

And the height of those walls, which used to have a downside that was manageable, and that’s upside used to be a virtue, had a real opportunity cost associated with it. Therefore my macro decision was, we’ve got to lower the walls to the broader society and specifically from the broader global – and particularly American – computer and telecommunications industry.


Q: Can the NSA stay on top of those challenges? I mean, bandwidth and the different kinds of channels available for moving information seem to grow exponentially every time you blink.

A: It is hard, but look on the bright side. Never in human history has so much of what it NSA cares about been pushed out there into the electro-magnetic spectrum. Think where we were 50 years ago. Communications were limited. Now, just about everything is out there in ones and zeroes. So, although the challenge is really hard, the payoff is really great if you master the technology.


Q: But the enemy always has a vote, and can change their methods. For example, here you have killed two major figures by tracking people to their location, bin Laden’s courier and Zarqawi’s spiritual advisor. And surely the people who the U.S. is hunting will note that and adjust. The same must apply to spying on communications.

A: That’s why signals intelligence is so fragile. It takes an awful lot to hide something from imagery intelligence when you’re doing something. But to hide it from signals intelligence, you just have to hang up the phone. And that’s why folks at the NSA get so excited when people in your profession write about what they are or aren’t doing.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/08/21/v-print/1427530/read-the-full-transcript-of-the.html

Edited by babyfinland (Aug. 27, 2011 17:24:44)