Q&A: General Michael V. Hayden
Intelligence Officer
Putting New Resources to Work Effectively
General Michael V. Hayden
Director
Central Intelligence Agency
Air Force General Michael V. Hayden is director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Appointed by President George W. Bush, Hayden is responsible for overseeing all activities of the CIA.
Hayden entered active duty in 1969 after earning a bachelor’s degree in history in 1967 and a master’s degree in modern American history in 1969, both from Duquesne University. He is a distinguished graduate of the university’s ROTC program. Hayden has served as commander of the Air Intelligence Agency and as director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center. He has also served in senior staff positions at the Pentagon, Headquarters U.S. European Command, National Security Council and the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria.
In addition, Hayden has served as deputy chief of staff, U.N. Command and U.S. Forces Korea. From 1999 to 2005, Hayden was director, National Security Agency, and chief, Central Security Service. Prior to his current assignment, he was the first person to hold the position of principal deputy director of national intelligence.
Hayden was interviewed on April 15, 2007, on the C-SPAN network’s “Q&A” program. Following are edited excerpts from the interview, as conducted by show host Brian Lamb.
Q: Michael Hayden, director of central intelligence, why would you agree to sit down with us and talk about intelligence?
A: Clearly, a lot of what we do is secret. I mean, we’re a secret intelligence organization. But we live in a free and open society. And we have to have a contract with the American people. In my talks out at the agency, I call it our social contract with the American people. We have to create our identity to the best of our ability—even though we’re a secret organization—to create our identity for the American people so that they feel comfortable with us. They can’t know—most don’t want to know—all the things we do to protect them. But they have to feel comfortable that we’re doing it in a way that they’d find consistent with their values. And so, an opportunity like this to come and talk a little bit, to discuss the people at the agency, to talk about the mission of the agency—that’s a great opportunity for us.
Q: I’ve asked a number of generalists what would they want to ask the head of the CIA. One of them said, why don’t they talk to each other, share information, get rid of the politics, just do their job?
A: Sharing information is a lesson that we learned and learned bitterly after the attacks on September 11. Now, to be fair, the American intelligence community is the best intel community in the world when it comes to sharing information, what I call left-and-right. When you compare us with other organizations around the planet, we’re world class at doing this. Unfortunately, though, life doesn’t mark you on the curve. Life marks you on an absolute scale. And even though I frankly believe we’re better at this—this sharing left-and-right—than any other intelligence grouping on planet Earth.
It wasn’t, and still probably isn’t, good enough to provide the maximum level of protection to the nation. So, it’s something we work on every day. And people say it’s cultural; people say it’s bureaucratic. Frankly, that’s probably true. But there is at its core an existential question here, too. We deal with secret information, secretly acquired. The more you make that information available, the more you expose its sources. And once you’ve done that, if you’ve expanded it too much, if the information gets into the wrong hands, those sources dry up. And now you find you’ve got less information to share. So, although this remains a very difficult problem, we’ve got things that we can correct. This is kind of the state of nature for us. There will always be this tension between protecting the sources of information and sharing that information to the widest possible audience.
You brought up another point, though, which was to get the politics out of this. I’m not exactly sure what your questioner meant by that, but I’ll share one thought with you. When we do our job well—and now I’m talking about our analytical job— we’re at that nexus, the nexus of the world as it is and the world as we would like it to be. And when you’re in that place—and if you’re not in that place, you’re less relevant, you’re less valuable to a policymaker—when you’re in that place, you’re under a fair amount of pressure.
You want your objectivity to remain sacrosanct, and you have to defend that. But you also have to be relevant to the policymaker. You can’t be so pure in your abstract reasoning with regard to your analysis that you’re saying things that are not of value to the guy who understands the duty of your argument, but, frankly, still has to make a decision in the morning. And so, there are stresses, again, inherent in the job. You have to put yourself in that nexus where policy is created. That creates stresses.
Q: Were you there during the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) controversy?
A: I was, for want of a better phrase, present at the creation. Shortly after the attacks in 2001, the agency was asked, could it do more? Could it do more to defend the nation? And the answer I had to give was, within the authorities that the agency currently had—this is late September 2001—within those authorities, I thought that the agency, that NSA was doing just about all it could do to defend the nation.
If you look at signals intelligence, the sweet spot is the overlap of about three things. One is what’s technologically possible. The second is what’s operationally relevant: Is it useful? And the third is what’s lawful, what’s legally permitted. That’s the space—technological relevance—technologically possible, operationally relevant and lawful—that’s the space that NSA plays in.
We had maxed out that space. And as the public record now is very clear, into early October, the president expanded the lawfulness space, using both his inherent Article Two of the Constitution authorities and the provisions of the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress. And so, NSA at that point was able to expand some of its activities, given this special authorization from the president, to defend the nation.
Q: What would you do if you thought you were breaking the law?
A: We can’t break the law. You just can’t go to that place. In the current job at the CIA, this past summer—after the Detainee Treatment Act had been passed in December 2005 after the Hamdan decision, and so on—I actually said fairly publicly to our work force that, as director, I have to be certain that that which I’m asking a CIA officer to do is consistent with the Constitution, the laws and the international treaty obligations of the United States. And that’s why you saw that bit of a scrum here in the fall, as we tried to get language in the Military Commissions Act that clarified some aspects of the Geneva Convention for the agency. Because without that clarification, I couldn’t tell our officers that sentence: “That which I’m about to ask you to do is consistent with the Constitution, laws and international treaty obligations of this country.” If I can’t say that, I can’t ask an officer to do it.
Q: What’s the biggest roadblock you might have outside of CIA to get the job done?
A: One is helping the public, helping government officials, either in the executive branch or in the legislative branch, to understand the limits of our craft, to help them understand the limits of intelligence. I was in front of a small group last week, and one of the fellows—talking about our analysis, our ability to analyze and give ground truth to a decision maker, be it a military commander or a policymaker. And the question he asked was, “On a scale of one to 10, where are we now as a community?”
And I said to him—you know, probably being a little too irreverent, but not being inaccurate—the first thing you’ve got to understand is, eight and nine aren’t on our scale. If it’s up at eight or nine, it’s generally not the business of intelligence. I mean, intelligence works in a range of things that are inherently ambiguous. And even when we’re at the top of our game, it’s very, very rare that we can give certitude to a policymaker. And so, one of the things that I would try to do—I am trying to do—is to inform both the public at large and others within the government that, as good as we might be, certainty with regards to our judgments is never going to be achieved.
Q: If you could have anything you want, how many more people would you want and how much more money would you want to spend?
A: I could go through our budget and pick out little niches there, where just a few more dollars—and in our terms, you know, $10 million here or $20 million there—can really make a difference. But by and large, the community as a whole, CIA in particular, has benefited from the resources that the American people—acting through the Congress and the president—have given us since 9/11.
Right now, my biggest challenge is absorbing the growth we’ve had inside the agency and putting these new resources to work in an efficient and effective way. Sure, it has something to do with the money, but it really has to do with people. I have to talk around it a little bit, because the numbers are classified. But let me give you a sense. One-seventh of the Central Intelligence Agency has been hired in the last 12 months. One-fifth of our analysts have been hired in the last 12 months. Fifty percent of the agency has been hired since 9/11. I mean, that’s tremendous growth. It’s a tremendous opportunity.
Q: What’s the age of those people?
A: Actually, the average age of the agency is coming down somewhat, because of this influx of new people. But you have to understand, new to CIA doesn’t always mean young. We are very happy with a number of folks we’re getting after military service or after a stint in the military, or after they’ve actually done some other things in life. In terms of that indicator, of these cohorts who are coming into us now, this is the richest gathering of life experience that we’ve had in entering cohorts in the history of the agency. So we’re not just getting the 22- or 23-year-old graduates from universities. We’re also getting people who have been around a bit.
Q: Are you getting more HUMINT?
A: Yes, we are. HUMINT is human intelligence, as opposed to SIGINT, signals intelligence, or IMINT, imagery intelligence. It just describes the source from which you draw the information that you then put into this common mix to create the backdrop for your analysis. CIA is charged with analysis. We have the largest analytic workforce—intelligence analytic workforce—in the federal government. And it’s not attached to any Cabinet department. And so, this is the agency that provides the broad, strategic, not tied to one particular department’s analytic framework. But we’re also charged with gathering intelligence. And our expertise, our lane in the road is to gather intelligence from human beings. It’s to go out there and—as some of my predecessors used to say, and I think it’s quite accurate—steal secrets. Steal things that those who would do us harm, those who would act against American interests, would want us not to know.
Q: Knowing what you know, should the public be at all worried that their conversations are being listened to?
A: No. No. I really mean that.
Q: How do we know?
A: Isn’t that the most difficult thing? In the heart of hearts, if I could go out there—the metaphor I use is my dad. If I could just go to my dad in his easy chair and explain this to him—whatever ‘this’ is, some or other aspect of what American intelligence is doing—I’m convinced he’d say, “OK. I can agree to that. That’s good.” The problem we have is, I can’t brief what CIA is doing, or I could not brief what NSA was doing.
You mentioned earlier the president’s terrorist surveillance program. I can’t brief that to a quarter-billion Americans and still keep it effective. Because, if we made it that public, our adversaries would also, naturally, know so much about it, that the program would lose its operational effectiveness. Remember those three criteria that I described earlier. And so, we can’t do that. We’ve got a different formula. It was created about 30 years ago in the Church-Pike era. And that’s the two oversight committees, the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee.
And out of that, out of that episode came this intelligence committee structure in which, once again, in the same way you can’t tell a quarterbillion Americans what you’re doing, it’s also tough to tell 535 senators and representatives what you’re doing. But the Congress has organized itself into two select committees, one in the House and one in the Senate. And that’s my linkage, any one of us in the intelligence community, that’s our linkage to the American people, that we have to display what it is we’re doing to them. They become the surrogates for the quarterbillion Americans out there.
Q: How do they know?
A: We have to tell them.
Q: But we went through this great crisis over the FISA court, where you weren’t going to the court.
A: Right. Well, there’s a good history— there’s a powerful history, and it’s part of the public record—as to how many times members of Congress were briefed on the NSA program prior to the New York Times story. I was the one who gave all the briefings. I was very comfortable that when I prepped for any one of those briefings, I had one goal in mind, and I articulated it to these wonderful experts out there at NSA.
I said, there’s one thing for sure. I don’t want any of these people ever in the future, when ultimately this becomes public—because we know that it will—I don’t want anyone to say, ”Well, I got a briefing, but I had no idea.” I said no, no. This briefing is going to be whole, complete and—it’s the phrase I used at the time—everyone’s got to understand this is bigger than a breadbox, in terms of what it is we’re doing. That’s number one, that’s required. That’s legitimate. As, again, I can’t tell a quarter-billion Americans, but I have to be able to tell the committees, or, in this case, the leadership of the committees, because of the sensitivity of the activity. And you have to tell them fully.
In my current job, I’m called on to talk to the oversight committees about CIA activities. And you get phrases like detentions, interrogations, renditions and so on. And we have worked very hard to make sure the committees are as informed as possible about every aspect of those programs.
Q: Is stovepiping still going on?
A: Sure. Stovepiping describes an agency—I’m going to give you the non-pejorative, non-condemnatory description of stovepiping—an agency so focused on its mission, that’s it’s drilled down on the difficulties of accomplishing its own task, that it doesn’t pull its head out of the scope and look around to see what’s happening to the left of them and to the right of them. Of course it still happens. It’s human nature. These tasks that the intelligence community is required to do are incredibly complicated.
I’ll use an older example from a previous life of mine at NSA. To take a conversation for which you are not the intended recipient, to intercept it, process it just like the communications pass that you were sitting on processes it, to turn the beeps and squeaks into something intelligible to the human ear, to take something spoken in a foreign language and turn it into a useful intelligence product, that requires a lot of focus. That requires an awful lot of specialization. And the more you become specialized at that task, human nature being what it is, the less inclined you are to kind of look over here to see what the other guys are doing. That’s the challenge.
So, when you say stovepiping, I’ve given up stovepipes. I don’t use that word anymore. I use ‘silos.’ And when I’m in a really good mood, I use the word I just used a minute ago— specializations. Modern man has had this problem. As we have turned units of work into discrete parts, so that we can perform it with great precision and skill and speed, you had the challenge of organizing the parts, so that the overall effect is what you want. That’s the life of the American intelligence community. That’s the challenge we have. So, when you say stovepipes or silos or specialization, you’re describing a condition. You shouldn’t impute guilt to it.
Q: When do people know you’re mad or irritated? When do they see you being tough?
A: As you say, I was at NSA for six years. And I probably got really, viscerally angry half a dozen times in six years.
Q: About what kind of things?
A: One was when we were trying to change one or another process. And the fellow whom I entrusted to do it came in and kind of gave me an explanation that I thought really didn’t rely on anything much beyond goodwill. And that’s not the answer I wanted. And I kind of responded to that. I find chewing the rug is not an incredibly effective leadership technique.
Q: What is effective?
A: Being relentless. Meaning what you say. And when you say it, you mean it, and you follow up on it. And if it doesn’t show up, you ask where it is.
And you kind of give people an incentive, positive or negative, as to why you really meant what you said. Do you know how big and complicated CIA is? If you try to draw even high-order significance decisions all up to the seventh floor suite, you’ll bring the agency to a stop.
I think the real trick for leadership of an organization like CIA is to empower people, to put yourself in a position where you’re removing impediments to their behavior. Now, you’ve got to intervene. You’re the one who would talk to the president. You’re the one who goes to the NSC meetings. You’ve kind of got the side picture of broad policy. You probably have the widest field of view of anyone in the agency. So, you can’t put it on autopilot and, you know, go to teatime every day. But there’s an awful lot that gets done there, that you just need to give it its head and good things will happen.
Q: [Question concerning the intelligence community’s handling of information in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom.]
A: It’s back to that nexus of the world as it is and the world as you would like it to be. This is hard. I mean, we’re really talking about intelligence at the highest levels of the U.S. government setting the broad direction for the nation. In my confirmation testimony, I got a question along these lines. And I said, I’ve got 16 years of Catholic education. I know the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning. I also know they’re both legitimate. One can reason from facts up to principles, and one can reason down from principles to specifics. They are both legitimate forms of reasoning.
I’m an intelligence officer. My center of gravity has got to be over here on induction, that you work from facts and you allow the facts to present themselves. And from the facts you gather broad trends, broad judgments and other kinds of generalities. But I also know there’s this other form of reasoning, that people come into the room with their reasoning based upon first principles. You just can’t shut that down. You just can’t throw that away. Your facts—your fact-derived conclusions, your induction—has to stand its own ground.
I have a very specific point, and it’s been a sore point, and I’ve had it touched during my confirmation and it’s recently been in the press, concerning [former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas] Feith and his work with regard to the al Qaeda- Iraq connection. I have been asked by people what I think about that, and I just kind of shrug my shoulders. It was an alternative view. It was wrong. We didn’t agree with it. It was an alternative view, though. Should I be rending my garments that an undersecretary of defense decided to challenge the conclusions of the intelligence community, that an undersecretary of defense decided to take his own fresh look at the evidence and come up with his own conclusions? I don’t think so.
If I’m right, I should go out and say why I’m right, and I should say what evidence supports why I say that, and move on. So, I think there may be less here than meets the eye in some of these controversies. ♦
