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If you could say something to Edward Snowden knowing that he listens to this particular episode, what would it be?
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You have the right to remain silent.
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This is the Art of Charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today, we re talking with General Michael Hayden, former head of CIA and NSA.
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He s a retired United States Air Force four-star general.
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We re talking today about how intelligence agents and policymakers view the world and the differences in their thinking.
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the warrantless surveillance controversy, aka domestic spying for the layman, ISIS, the Apple iPhone encryption controversy, and the General s thoughts on both Edward Snowden and Donald Trump.
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This isn t your usual AOC fair.
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It s a little bit less psychology and a lot more world affairs.
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But if you re feeling a little adventurous today and you re willing to jump outside the AOC comfort zone, then enjoy this one with General Michael Hayden.
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As you know, The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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If you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox where we discuss body language and nonverbal communication, networking, persuasion, negotiation, and everything else we teach here at The Art of Charm.
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In the US, just text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else in the world, go to theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the right answers, but we definitely have all the right questions.
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With that, here s General Michael Hayden.
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Normally we do shows that discuss cognitive science and psychology and things like that, so first of all, going right to the meat of the topic before we go off on our usual tangents here is, does the intel guy look at cognition, cognitive bias, psychology, and psychological type of topics and content the same way as, let s say, the policy guy?
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Yeah, that s a great question.
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Here s how I describe it.
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I essentially say, look, the intel guy and the policy guy
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I got to come together in the room and that room could be a canvas covered tactical operations center in a desert somewhere or it could be the office let me talk about my last job because we got together was in the office.
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The intel guy comes into the room to a different door than the policy guy the intel guy is fact based.
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Policy guy is vision based.
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The Intel guy is inherently swimming out of detail, trying to create generalized conclusion.
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He s fundamentally inductive.
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Policy guy, he s trying to take his first principles, you know, the ones that got him elected, he s trying to take those first principles and apply them to specific circumstances.
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He s inherently deductive.
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The Intel guy, the world as it is.
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Policymaker, the world as we want it to be.
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And then finally,
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just because of the nature of the work.
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The Intel guy is inherently pessimistic.
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Bob Gates, before he became Secretary of Defense, was actually one of my predecessors at CIA.
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Secretary Gates is fond of saying when a CIA analyst stops to smell the flowers, he or she then looks around for the hearse.
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Inherently pessimistic.
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The policymaker, though, inherently optimistic.
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If he or she didn t think they could make the world better,
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they wouldn t interview for the job and so the challenge for the intel guy since he didn t get elected the other one did the challenge of the intel guy is to get into the head of the policymaker to hunt him or her down wherever they might be in that room but never break his tether to his own doorway in other words the reason he s in the room in the first place he s the fact based inductive world as it is pessimist
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and he s got to get into the head of the policymaker even though he knows that he s probably making that man or woman s day worse than it would otherwise be with every sentence he utters.
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This is funny because it sort of outlines what sounds like a general tension between the two.
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Oh no, there is.
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Look, look, Jordan, you want to drive this one more revolution.
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This really becomes intense.
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When you re going into the policymaker with what we in the intel community called the unpleasant fact.
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The estimate, the analysis, the reality, it cuts across the preferred narrative, the preferred policy, or the preferred politics.
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And the dynamic there is, when you re coming in with a very unwelcome message, you better have mastered your brief.
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Because just by human nature, this is not imputing guilt to anyone, but just by human nature,
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the instinct of the policymaker will be to push back against that, to not believe it, to doubt it, to challenge it, to question it.
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And so the intel person, when he or she knows they re cutting against the grain, they ve really gotta work hard to grab the attention of the policymaker and make the policymaker listen.
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And how do they do that in a way that doesn t get them... Thrown out of the room.
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Yeah.
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Exactly.
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And I know your show talks about some of these things,
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One way is to study how the policymaker learns.
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So I was only President Obama s CIA chief for three weeks.
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I mean, I was just kind of standing in until Leon Panetta was confirmed.
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But in those three weeks, it was clear to me that President Obama learns
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in a method quite different than the way President Bush learned.
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Now President Bush was a great reader.
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He was in a competition with Karl Rove as to how many books they could read.
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But when you were there for the intel briefing, although President Bush would read the stuff, you could tell that he learned in the conversation.
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He learned in the pushback.
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He learned in the exchange.
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Now again, my sample with President Obama is pretty small, but others have kind of confirmed this for me.
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President Obama is more reflective.
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President Obama learns in the reading.
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President Obama learns in the quiet spaces.
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And so you re going in there, I mean, you re not trying to manipulate the President of the United States for heaven s sake, but you ve got to understand how that human being learns new things.
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And frankly, you ve got to adapt to the President s taste and preferences.
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so that you can do what it was I described before, get inside his or her head.
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This makes sense.
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So it s essentially a persuasion sub-skill set where you think, okay, is this person going to be best served by a dynamic presentation of the facts, and let s throw some visuals in there, or let me emphasize these points over and over, or is this something where a detailed report with a lot of citations is gonna do the trick much more effectively, and you have to figure that out quick, because national security kinda depends on it,
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the fate of the free world might depend on whether or not you re up to speed on PowerPoint.
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Yeah, and beyond that, Jordan, would that human being best learn by slowly building from the agreed towards the not yet agreed?
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Or does that person best learn by saying, Mr. President, let me give you a bottom line that I don t think you re going to like?
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You have to make a choice.
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Yeah, and I think hopefully most intelligence agents and most people who have to deliver bad news or difficult news know that it s better to rip off the Band-Aid, right?
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We went into President Bush in late 2007 with a national intelligence estimate that the Iranians had stopped one aspect of their nuclear program.
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To have a nuclear program, Jordan, you gotta have fissile material, you gotta have a delivery system, missiles,
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And then you got to master the science of actually building the weapon.
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That s something small enough and rugged enough to be put on a missile.
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And we had pretty good evidence that they had stopped that aspect of the program, that they were no longer continuing the aggressive research they had on creating a nuclear warhead.
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That s a really unpleasant message.
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And we weren t saying, we weren t saying that the Iranians weren t dangerous or that they ultimately would like to have a bomb.
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We just had the fact that this one part of the program as the president
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It s pretty much stopped.
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And Mr. President, what I m telling you is not based upon the absence of evidence, it s continuing, it s based on the evidence of absence that we know it s not.
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Now, that actually put a torpedo into a Bush administration policy to tighten the sanctions on Iran.
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Frankly, Jordan, a policy I agreed with.
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I didn t think this development made the Iranians any less dangerous, but it was going to be harder for the administration
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to make that argument to the Europeans and others in order to pump up the sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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So we took that message in there, and that was an incredibly unpleasant message, but we stood our ground, and the president and the vice president probed and challenged and finally accepted our view.
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And then here s something that s quite remarkable.
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Since President Bush was basing his Iranian policy on our previous
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National Intelligence Estimate, which said Iran is determined to have a nuclear weapon.
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And we had made that key judgment public.
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He felt as a matter of just policy and honesty, we then had to make the new judgment public as well, that Iran had stopped this one aspect of the program.
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It s kind of a remarkable little morality play as
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as to how this relationship between the intelligence community and the policy community really works.
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It seems like anybody anywhere along the line having a mistaken agenda, or I should say any agenda, not necessarily mistaken agenda, any sort of agenda, personal agenda, political agenda,
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anywhere up the chain could affect the quality or the message that s conveyed all the way to the top and cause ripple effect that s really undesirable, especially if your goal is to deliver kind of a snapshot that s as unbiased as possible in order to let the policy makers make decisions based on that.
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You ve got it exactly right.
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And in my book, I try to weave this dynamic into a whole series of policy decisions that we supported.
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The surge in Iraq, the Al-Khabar nuclear reactor,
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nearly complete nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert, in addition to the Iranian program.
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Policymakers are paid to have agendas.
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That s the difference between the policymaker and the intelligence professional.
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I mean, the policymaker, I mean, the people are elected because remember the vision thing.
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They ve already said, well, I m going to take you this way.
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This is my agenda.
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and now the Intel guy comes in there trying to be agenda free in order to create the right kind of dynamic.
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And again, I cover this in some detail in the book.
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It has to do with the decision leading up to the surge in Iraq, all right?
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If you recall, this is 2006, right after the midterm elections where the Democrats take control of both chambers of Congress.
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Secretary Rumsfeld resigned, Secretary Gates is brought in, and Baghdad looks like one of Dante s circles of hell.
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The violence there is so bad.
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And so we re huddling up twice a day
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What s the plan?
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What are we going to do?
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And one of the proposals, actually, the one we finally landed on, was a dynamic called the surge.
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If you recall, we sent five additional American combat brigades into Baghdad.
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Our intelligence message during that discussion was, look, you put five brigades of non-sectarian, professional combat power in that city, you re gonna drive the violence down.
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And that s a good thing.
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That s not our ultimate goal.
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We re driving the violence down to create space for Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, to actually become the Iraqi prime minister.
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In other words, the prime minister of all of Iraq, rather than for the Dawah party or the Shiite community.
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And we warned in those huddles, that s a low probability shot.
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Nouri al-Maliki will have to govern beyond his life experience
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If he s gonna use this space we re gonna create with American blood and treasure to create a more inclusive government in Iraq.
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Look, the man spent most of his adult life in exile.
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He thinks there s a Ba athist behind every bush trying to kill him because for most of his life, there was a Ba athist behind every bush trying to kill him.
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As I said, a bit of a low probability shot.
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Now, I m being a bit cartoonish in my explanation here.
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I m summarizing three months of hodding, right?
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But at some point, the president made the decision, I understand what you re telling me,
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Intel guys, send the five brigades.
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And then there s the punchline, Jordan.
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About every week for the rest of the Bush administration, President Bush had a personal video teleconference with Nouri al-Maliki trying to coach and mentor this other human being to be what we thought he needed to be in terms of an inclusive prime minister for all of Iraq.
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So I don t feel as if our advice was rejected then,
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I think it was accepted.
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The president understood the dangers, and then he took additional steps to try to mitigate the dangers by this special relationship that he tried to develop with Prime Minister Maliki.
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You ve got this infrastructure overload in the beginning of the book where essentially NSA goes down for a few days because there s so much information coming in because of the collection program.
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Right, it s just the explosion of global telecommunications.
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So we re out there with an architecture, Jordan,
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It s kind of based on a signals intelligence environment.
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There was too little, too hard to get.
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And now the external telecommunications environment wasn t too little, too hard to get.
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It was too much, too hard to handle, too hard to understand.
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You start drinking from the fire hose.
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Right.
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And by the way, the fire hose then overwhelmed our ability to drink and our information technology, our IT systems collapsed.
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Right, and so now, suddenly, the entire world, we can t listen anymore to our enemies.
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And this is something that, you basically start the book with this kind of, it s like if this were a movie, it would be people running down the halls with an alarm going off and red lights flashing, am I right?
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No, that s exactly right.
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That s actually why I started the book with that chapter.
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Keep in mind, I was a Clinton appointee to the National Security Agency.
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it was falling further and further behind.
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It had some budget problems, it had some cultural problems, and so on.
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And then you had this global telecommunications revolution, too.
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And we were on the downslope.
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I was trying to be cautious.
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It s a national treasure, you know, for your Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm.
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But I had been director for about 10 months, and our whole IT system went belly up.
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And you re right, we were out of business for about 72 hours.
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That s really dangerous for America.
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And so at that point, I decided there was no course of action I could set out on.
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And you were right.
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I was new to the NSA.
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I d never been in it before.
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My first day in the agency was my first day as director.
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I decided there was no course of action I could set out on that would be more dangerous to the future of the agency than continuing to sit there and do nothing.
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And so we started to make some dramatic changes.
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and I would love to get into those as well, because now, of course, you have this huge, broad view of intelligence collection before and after September 11th, but as a side note, there s so much in this book, and a lot of it is minute detail.
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I mean, one of the things that struck me, this is, it was amazing, you said, well, we got in the car, and then so-and-so needed another copy of this document, so he said something to Nancy Pelosi, and how can you possibly remember things in such detail?
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It s amazing, you keep a super detailed journal of just everything that s going on?
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No, no, and in fact, we re somewhere between discouraged and disallowed for keeping a journal, you know.
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For the director of CIA to lose his journal would be a really big deal.
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And so we fixed that by not allowing him to have a journal.
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I can remember broadly things that happened, and my rhythm for writing the book was simply to pick a topic.
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Al-Khabar nuclear reactor, that s the one in the eastern Syrian desert.
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Take my iPad when I was taking some long trips,
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and then to the best of my ability, kind of reconstruct what I remember of the story, of the narrative.
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And after two or three long trips across oceans or continents, I d have 3,000 words and big gaps that I knew were gaps.
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And then I would go back to the agencies, NSA, CIA, and so on, and ask to see my files on this topic or from that period.
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I would go in there and do research, and I couldn t take my notes out without the agency clearing them so that they would not be classified.
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And I also would make a request, in addition to my files, I need to talk to him and him and her and her and him and him.
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I talked to more than 70 people in preparing the book.
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And I took notes on that.
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And those notes had to be cleared too.
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But when they were finally cleared and I brought them home and I kludged them with my 2,500 or 3,000 words on the iPad, I m getting close to a pretty mature chapter here.
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That s kind of, I guess that s the 80% solution.
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And the rest of it is just research and recollection.
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and finally you got something ready to show a publisher.
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Yeah, it seems like a complicated process given that you can t write things on an iPad and take it with you on a flight that are classified and you can t take the research out of the place.
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I mean, I imagine it s like law school where you re just sitting there in a dark room with books all over the place, no one s talking to you, and you gotta stay there until you re done.
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Yeah, and like I said, you take the notes, you give them to the agency,
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And then it takes several weeks.
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They ll give you a call and say, come on back, we re done with your notes.
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And you go there and you pick up your notepad and it s got big black marks on it, where writing used to be, because you can t say that, you can t say that.
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But then I would take what survived and do what I said I did with it, combine it.
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Those things would have kind of stimulated my memory as well.
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and I began to get a more and more mature version of each chapter.
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And the book is called Playing to the Edge.
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What does that mean to you?
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Why did you name the book that?
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Yeah, actually, my wife named it.
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The publisher, Penguin, said, okay, book, Hayden, what s the title?
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I go, uh, title, okay.
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So my wife had read the manuscript, and I said, what do you think it should be?
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And she said, Playing to the Edge.
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I added the colon, American Intelligence in the Age of Terror.
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But she recognized that one of the themes that permeates the book
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is that, first of all, I don t get to create the edge.
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The edge is the box that the American political process creates for security services.
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Legally, you mean, in terms of what you re allowed to do?
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It s actually a creation of law and policy, all right?
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Some things are set down in law, other things are set down in policy.
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But we don t do either of those in the intel community.
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That s done by elected officials.
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And that s the box that we re allowed to operate in.
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And the metaphor for the title is that when operational circumstances demand it, I gotta use the whole box.
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I got to play all the way to the edge because if I don t play all
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all the way to the edge.
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If I don t use all the authorities, the law and policy, by the way, Jordan, if I play to the edge, I know I m gonna have an unpleasant congressional hearing, some newspaper s gonna write some unhappy stories, playing to the edge is gonna be controversial.
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But if I decide not to play back from the edge, I ve suddenly decided to protect myself, or more nobly, my agency, from some unpleasant future, but I ve not decided to protect you.
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And that s my responsibility.
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And so the theme of the block is that we did some really aggressive continue to be controversial things.
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I was involved in practically all of them but in a very non apologetic way i describe what we did why we did it why we thought it was a good idea.
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We played to the edge.
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In the early part of the book, you mentioned to a friend, wouldn t you love to be able to tell people what you do?
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Is that why you wrote the book?
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Yes, it frankly is.
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And what you re referring to is, I was in the outback of Australia with an Australian counterpart.
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We were coming off the ops floor of a facility out there that we share called Pine Gap.
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We had just gone through an ops morning, seeing what they did.
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As we walked out, and it s just the glaring sun of the Australian outback, I turned to my friend and said,
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wouldn t you like to show your citizens what those kids are doing in there?
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Intelligence is essential to defend not just American security, but American liberty.
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It rarely has something so essential and so misunderstood or un-understood by the population that it serves.
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And so my purpose, as you suggest, Jordan,
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And the book is to kind of do what I suggested to my Australian friend.
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Hey, come with me.
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I m going to introduce you to some people and show you a bit of what it is they do on your behalf that you re probably not familiar with.
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That was why I wrote it.
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You mentioned liberty versus freedom, and you talk a lot about that in the book, and you mentioned quite brilliantly, in fact, that you say when security concerns arise, we tend to gravitate more towards security than liberty in the balance between liberty and security.
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Do you see or foresee the flagpole moving back towards liberty or security in the future?
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Because right now, if we ve got this tension between liberty and security, freedom and oversight, for example, when we have events like September 11th, we tend to gravitate more towards security.
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Hey, look, we need to be able to see this, we need to be able to hear this.
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Do you see this eroding consistently or moving back and forth?
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It moves back and forth, and that s a sign of a mature democracy.
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Both those things, security, liberty, safety, privacy, those are all virtues.
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Those are all good things.
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We want all those.
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Unfortunately, in the real world, we ve got to balance those.
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Where the appropriate line is to use your model, where you plant the flag on that spectrum, depends on the totality of circumstances in which you find yourself.
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Frankly, fully within my authorities.
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I was more aggressive at three o clock in the afternoon of September 11th than I was at eight o clock in the morning.
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as Director of NSA.
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I was fully within my authority.
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I wasn t covering that side of any legal lines.
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I authorized some things I would not have authorized in the morning, absent the attack.
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They were very appropriate.
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You would have expected me to do it.
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You would not have expected me to do it before the attack.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so this line is something that we continually negotiate.
2
SPEAKER_03
I actually was on CNN yesterday afternoon.
2
SPEAKER_03
Jake Tapper, who was interviewing me, was talking about
2
SPEAKER_03
well, did the FBI guys miss the Orlando thing?
2
SPEAKER_03
What should we do to give the Bureau a better chance of catching these kinds of things?
2
SPEAKER_03
Talked about more authorities and more money and more people.
2
SPEAKER_03
I said, yeah, those are all things we really ought to look at, Jake.
2
SPEAKER_03
But let me tell you one thing, all right?
2
SPEAKER_03
If we do all that, three, four or five months from now, you re going to have somebody else sitting in this chair, and the topic of conversation is,
2
SPEAKER_03
Why do we give the FBI so much power?
2
SPEAKER_03
Isn t that a threat to our liberty and privacy?
2
SPEAKER_03
We swing back and forth between these things, and frankly, no need, no call to complain about it.
2
SPEAKER_03
Certainly not worth your effort, because that s the way a free people, a democracy works.
2
SPEAKER_03
By the way, there s an additional dynamic.
2
SPEAKER_03
You said after 9-11, wow, we moved that flag up.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I said earlier that American espionage defends not just American security, but American liberty.
2
SPEAKER_03
Because, Jordan, if we would have had another 9-11,
2
SPEAKER_03
I ll just let your imagination tell you where that flag was gonna end up.
2
SPEAKER_03
If we failed and America suffered another catastrophic attack, we frankly would have turned on ourselves, our neighbors, our privacy, and our own liberties because we were frightened.
2
SPEAKER_03
I am very fond of saying, and I think I say it in the book, frightened people don t make good Democrats or Republicans, small d, small r, in both cases.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so an intelligence failure that allows Americans to die doesn t just have an impact on American safety,
2
SPEAKER_03
it will eventually eat away at American freedom too.
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You re saying that espionage is critical to democracy because otherwise we end up moving our own flag further towards security.
2
SPEAKER_01
We tend to maybe react emotionally and we jump towards one post much more than we maybe should.
2
SPEAKER_03
Again, frightened people don t often make good decisions.
2
SPEAKER_03
One of the reasons I wanted to continue to play to the edge, I knew that if I failed to play to the edge and something bad happened, that edge was gonna move.
2
SPEAKER_03
It was gonna be far more extensive in terms of what the American people now thought
2
SPEAKER_03
we should be doing to keep them safe.
2
SPEAKER_03
And frankly, you know, I m an intelligence professional, but I m an American too.
2
SPEAKER_03
We all went to the same high schools, if you know what I mean.
2
SPEAKER_03
We all share the same values.
2
SPEAKER_03
I worry about American privacy too.
2
SPEAKER_03
I worry about American liberty.
2
SPEAKER_03
I don t want to put it at risk because we failed to handle security threats.
2
SPEAKER_01
This makes sense.
2
SPEAKER_01
In your book, you work very hard, and understandably so, to dissuade readers thinking freedom versus security thing, this is a sham.
2
SPEAKER_01
But for you, it seems like from the book that the tension between freedom and security is more than some sort of abstraction or abstract ideal.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is basically your entire job.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is why your job is important.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, no, it s exactly right.
2
SPEAKER_03
Look, there s some people out there who will say there are no real trade-offs between our security and our liberty.
2
SPEAKER_03
When somebody says that,
2
SPEAKER_03
my immediate reaction is, well, clearly you ve never been responsible for either security or liberty, because if you had, you know that was just a stupid sentence.
2
SPEAKER_01
It seems like a thankless job.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, we do this all the time.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so we do it in the context of American democracy, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
We do it with oversight, we do it with occasional court involvement, we do it from time to time, actually we do it pretty often, with a great deal of controversy.
2
SPEAKER_03
If Tapper would have said then, Jordan, after I ve said, you know, in four months you re gonna have somebody here complaining about the FBI,
2
SPEAKER_03
If Tapper would have said, well then how would that make you feel?
2
SPEAKER_03
And actually, the answer in my heart of hearts was, makes me feel like an American.
2
SPEAKER_03
We do this all the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you have all this presidential and bureaucratic oversight, which at some level must be a little frustrating, but it seems like you see that as necessary.
2
SPEAKER_03
Oh, it is.
2
SPEAKER_03
Look, I spent a chapter and change in the book by and large complaining about congressional oversight.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s imperfections.
2
SPEAKER_03
But how can you do this otherwise?
2
SPEAKER_03
I actually conclude one of the chapters on congressional oversight by saying if we made a mistake after 9-11,
3
SPEAKER_00
is in not telling more stuff to more members of Congress earlier in the process.
3
SPEAKER_00
The President, fully within the law, okay, the law makes it very clear, he can narrow the number of members of Congress that he tells things to.
3
SPEAKER_00
So the President was acting lawfully.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think just as a matter of policy and politics, you should tell as many people in Congress what you re doing as early as possible.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you don t do that, you allow Congress to take a bunch of cheap shots three, four, five years later,
3
SPEAKER_00
When this becomes public and everyone feels safe again, tell them early, tell them when everyone feels in danger and then tell them if they want to stop it, go ahead, let them make the decision when it was a tough decision, make the decision in prospect rather than.
3
SPEAKER_00
Monday morning quarterback in retrospect.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sure, and thinking about countries where I ve been, places like North Korea where I ve visited and I noticed that they re in a constant state of war and there s always an enemy and whenever we see countries even like Iran or especially North Korea, it s always this outside aggression, the people are scared, they re even scared of tourists who aren t Korean because it s so rare and going back to your earlier point about scared people don t make good decisions, that s
3
SPEAKER_01
a clearly a deliberate choice, and we saw that with the Soviet Union as well, where everything was constant fear, such that they could push and push and push towards security to the point where, even though it would be intolerable under any other circumstances, well, you know, if we don t have this, American spies are gonna nuke everybody or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_00
Actually, Jordan, we re actually seeing that played out now in today s contemporary Russia, where the Putin administration has pretty much total control over the information environment, and they spend an awful lot of time
3
SPEAKER_00
describing NATO and the United States as tremendous dangers to the Russian Federation.
3
SPEAKER_01
Actually, that s a good segue, because since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the war on terror, we ve lost tens of thousands of Soviet analysts to retasking, or even just retirement, I would imagine.
3
SPEAKER_01
And given the recent actions of Russia and Putin, and the rebuilding of their nuclear forces, is this being taken seriously in the Beltway?
3
SPEAKER_01
And what are the plans to rebuild that capability?
3
SPEAKER_00
So, it is being taken seriously.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re serious people, okay?
3
SPEAKER_00
We understand the
3
SPEAKER_00
the issues that people still in government understand the issues but your overall summary is correct, no more than a brick shy of a load when it comes to the technical systems and the human beings that we now need to put back on the Russian target.
3
SPEAKER_00
I tell a tale in the book, in August of 2008, the Russians invaded Georgia.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I got a panicked phone call from Steve Hadley, the National Security Advisor, who d just been called by Misha Saakashvili, the president of Georgia.
3
SPEAKER_01
The Georgia in the caucuses, for those of you who are thinking, holy crap, the Russians are in Georgia.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a country.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Saakashvili was afraid that those Russian tanks were going to come down and get him all the way in Tbilisi, the capital.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so Hadley s question to me was, Mike, where s the Russian army going?
3
SPEAKER_00
I ll get back to you, Steve.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I walked out to my outer office and turned to my assistants and says, get my Georgia people up here right away.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then they started down phone and getting people up there with their maps and so on.
3
SPEAKER_00
And while they re doing that, I turned to my chief of staff and said, we got Georgia people, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because the emphasis, Jordan, may have been so strong on counterterrorism.
3
SPEAKER_00
We did have Georgia people and they were good and they gave me a good lay down.
3
SPEAKER_00
But you know what?
3
SPEAKER_00
We had a hell of a time tracking
3
SPEAKER_00
where the Russian army was.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s something you ought to be able to do against the modern army.
3
SPEAKER_00
We had a difficult time telling Mr. Hadley and the president precisely where the Russians were because the systems we used to have to do that, we didn t have anymore.
3
SPEAKER_00
We had shifted our weight after the fall of the Soviet Union.
3
SPEAKER_00
to other problems, like terrorism.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, meanwhile, our stuff is sitting there rusting, and they re polishing the tanks, getting ready to roll into Tbilisi.
3
SPEAKER_01
I can see you there, one guy s got the hold music, like he s waiting for his bank to come back to him about a credit card issue, and you re going, please tell me there s not some 22-year-old with pimples who s gonna run up here and say, I m the Georgia Department.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, it was far better than that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Good.
3
SPEAKER_00
But again, the weight of effort for the agency had shifted to terrorism at the expense of other
3
SPEAKER_00
important and growing in importance targets.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you ve dealt with a lot of issues here, and of course, during your tenure, you kind of inherited some of the NSA baggage, which resulted in the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy, which is, you know, still a giant mess.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, truth in advertising, I didn t inherit that, I started that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Look, I m glad you said it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I can only get away with so much.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can hang up whenever you want.
3
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned in the book there s a Bulgarian apparatchik who says, the truth is whatever serves the Communist Party.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is earlier in your career.
3
SPEAKER_01
He says that to you.
3
SPEAKER_01
What are you thinking at this point when he says that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because it seems to come back around later on during the controversy.
3
SPEAKER_00
It does.
3
SPEAKER_00
That actually describes a
3
SPEAKER_00
political class that would be very, very difficult for the Intel guys to inject themselves into to give them information that is not consistent with their vision.
3
SPEAKER_00
Look, you know, we ve got our ideologues too, but fundamentally, Americans are pragmatic people.
3
SPEAKER_00
Facts matter.
3
SPEAKER_00
In communism, you had a theory not of government, you had a theory of history.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Marx writes like he knows, in fact, he writes that he does know how history turns out.
3
SPEAKER_00
And his version of history is this unrelenting hostility between the imperialists and the socialist states.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s no amount of evidence that the KGB can bring to the leadership to say, you know, I don t think the Americans are that aggressive against us.
3
SPEAKER_00
Of course they re that aggressive against us, would be the response.
3
SPEAKER_00
Haven t you read Marx?
3
SPEAKER_01
Carl Marx, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
The famous communist.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, not Groucho.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is an example of what I tried to describe before, but in this case, the policy makers are pretty much captured and enslaved by their ideology.
3
SPEAKER_00
In the contemporary world, I would say that the leadership of radical Islam,
3
SPEAKER_00
of radical jihadism is equally captured by their own ideology, which says there is undying enmity between Islam and the West.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we ll get to that in a bit.
3
SPEAKER_01
I definitely want to hear more about that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I do want to ask, though, the truth is whatever serves the Communist Party, to what extent, minus maybe the Communist part, to what extent does that also ring true when we re talking about things like
3
SPEAKER_01
data collection, domestic surveillance, enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, or the critics of these policies, I should say, I would imagine they re ripping that page out of the book and putting it on the wall.
3
SPEAKER_00
One review in the, I think it was the New York Review of Books, hit upon that particular argument.
3
SPEAKER_00
They began with the discussion in Bulgaria.
3
SPEAKER_00
Truth is what serves the party.
3
SPEAKER_00
I said these are controversial, remember?
3
SPEAKER_00
Playing to the edge means you re gonna get some unpleasant newspaper articles written about you, and these will remain controversial.
3
SPEAKER_00
History will rarely conclude, oh, that was clear,
3
SPEAKER_00
we should just stand down on that question.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because even if you get past that point in history, the importance of those questions remain.
3
SPEAKER_00
So let s do the NSA program, the so-called domestic surveillance program.
3
SPEAKER_00
What we were trying to do was to detect the one kind of terrorist communications that should have been most important.
3
SPEAKER_00
Terrorist communications, one end of which were in the United States of America.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now there are only limited tools to do that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so we did do some things that were quite aggressive, quite unprecedented,
3
SPEAKER_00
been quite legal.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m quite comfortable that what we did was and remains lawful.
3
SPEAKER_00
You want kind of an exclamation point on that.
3
SPEAKER_00
You had the senator from Illinois, Mr. Obama, run for president on the platform that he s not George Bush.
3
SPEAKER_00
And when President Obama is president-elect and he gets briefed on these programs that started under President Bush, he doesn t shut them down.
3
SPEAKER_00
He keeps the surveillance programs, which, to my mind, every political bone in his body knew that he would have advantage if he canceled it, but he didn t.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that, to me, is a pretty good indicator that, number one, they were effective, and number two, they were lawful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, the CIA programs, which I did inherit, those were all well underway before I got there.
3
SPEAKER_00
And in fact, if you go through that section of the book,
3
SPEAKER_00
I m kind of there taking that program apart brick by brick, not criticizing my predecessors.
3
SPEAKER_00
They had their issues, I had mine.
3
SPEAKER_00
We knew more about Al Qaeda when I was director than we did when George Tenet was director in 2001 and 2002, so I could afford to change something.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I m not second guessing George.
3
SPEAKER_00
That program remains even more controversial than the domestic surveillance program, the so-called domestic surveillance program.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that program, President Obama did shut down most aspects of it.
3
SPEAKER_00
We used to call it RDI, renditions, detentions, and interrogations.
3
SPEAKER_00
President Obama shut down DNI.
3
SPEAKER_00
He told me on inauguration day, shut down the CIA black sites.
3
SPEAKER_00
That wasn t very hard, they were empty.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t want you guys doing the interrogations anymore.
3
SPEAKER_00
That wasn t very hard either.
3
SPEAKER_00
We didn t have any detainees.
3
SPEAKER_00
But he did keep renditions.
3
SPEAKER_00
The extrajudicial movement of someone from place A to place B. Even President Obama, running on being the anti-George Bush, felt that, nah, I need to keep that one in the quiver.
3
SPEAKER_00
I may want to use that one.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so, look, these are all controversial
4
SPEAKER_01
Good Americans can disagree on all of them.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the point I make throughout the book.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s about good people with opposing points of view, arguing them out within a free society.
4
SPEAKER_01
My take was,
4
SPEAKER_01
I would like to argue them based on facts, and so my book is an attempt to put the facts out there as I know them to be.
4
SPEAKER_00
So what do you think about some of those recent scares about how much information and metadata that NSA is collecting?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because in the book, some of it does seem a little ominous.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a slogan up for some of the targeted killing with the drones and things like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
We track them, you whack them.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I get that for military purposes, but when civilians read that, a lot of us are like, dang, that s,
4
SPEAKER_00
kind of crazy, we don t like the fact that this looks like a video game in its simplicity, of course only in our imagination, as to how easy this is.
4
SPEAKER_00
What do you think about some of those scares?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the image is that this is emotionless killing.
4
SPEAKER_01
It just looks like a video game.
4
SPEAKER_01
I got a joystick and off we go.
4
SPEAKER_01
Actually, Jordan, the opposite is actually very true, quite true.
4
SPEAKER_01
These activities have tremendous impact on the people who are doing them because by the nature of this, you know, you re looking at a compound from an unmanned aerial vehicle, a drone.
4
SPEAKER_01
We require these people to look at that compound for hours, if not days, before you take a shot.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so these people are looking down at that compound.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re seeing this terrorist, and we know he s a terrorist.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re seeing him play with his kids.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re seeing him talking to his wife.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re seeing him having a dinner with his neighbors.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we re waiting for him to get in the car and drive a little bit off the compound so we don t kill his family.
4
SPEAKER_01
And when he gets 100 or 200 meters off the compound, we take the shot.
4
SPEAKER_01
That is tremendous emotional burden that the mission is putting on those people.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because you ve just watched this human being act like a human being.
4
SPEAKER_01
So this is not emotionalist killing.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and you do cover that in the book as well.
4
SPEAKER_00
You talk about the translators and the trackers and some of the drone pilots who are, they re intimately involved in the lives of their targets.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s not like they show up with their coffee and click, you know, the bomb button and then they re, you know, nuking people.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re not shooting people with drones and missiles and then going to grab sushi.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re listening to phone calls, they re watching the movements, like you said, watching them play with the kids.
4
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of them get emotional when they have to confirm the killing of the target and some people refuse, you wrote.
4
SPEAKER_01
We talked about some of our language analysts who were on terrorism targets.
4
SPEAKER_01
We had geolocated the phone.
4
SPEAKER_01
We were intercepting the call live, and we were about to take the shot.
4
SPEAKER_01
You would turn for that last confirmation to say, that s him on the phone, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Of course, the analyst would know based upon voice recognition, and the analyst would also know that if he or she said yes, the next sound he or she would hear would be the explosion.
4
SPEAKER_01
We had some analysts at NSA who did not morally object to the mission, but just could not gather the emotional balance to do that mission themselves.
4
SPEAKER_01
so they requested to opt out.
4
SPEAKER_01
But more broadly, on the question of targeted killing, we track them, you whack them.
4
SPEAKER_01
To give you a sense of the broader picture, Jordan, we believe we re at war.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we ve had two presidents now, very different presidents, the 43rd and the 44th, President Bush, President Obama, both say we are a nation at war, and therefore we are in a global conflict with Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and therefore as a belligerent, we have the right to take our fight to this enemy,
4
SPEAKER_01
when he threatens us.
4
SPEAKER_01
There aren t many other countries around the world who accept that legal theory I just laid out for you.
4
SPEAKER_01
Even our best friends don t think it s legitimate for the United States to act as a belligerent outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, which of course are war zones.
4
SPEAKER_01
But we do, and two very different presidents think we do.
4
SPEAKER_01
And therefore, we have opted, we believe we have the moral and legal authority under international law to actually use targeted killings
4
SPEAKER_01
against individuals in parts of the world where the local government is unwilling and or unable to allow normal law enforcement activities to reduce or eliminate this threat to the United States.
4
SPEAKER_01
I take the point.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s really controversial.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re kind of by ourselves out there.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think maybe Israel agrees with our theory.
4
SPEAKER_01
Frankly, within the last year, the British took their own shot under that theory, and they took it against a British citizen.
4
SPEAKER_01
At least in one instance, they ve kind of lined up in the queue with us.
4
SPEAKER_01
But by and large, this is a uniquely American legal theory.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can probably tell from the tone of my voice, Jordan, I m really comfortable with it.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think it s legal and moral and necessary.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t discount a lot of other good folks don t agree with any of those three adjectives.
4
SPEAKER_00
Sure, I mean, targeted killing has become essentially a core part of the American way of war in recent years, and of course, to do it right, and I put that in air quotes because I don t want 10,000 emails, but to do it right requires the kind of exquisite... Exquisite intelligence, that s right.
4
SPEAKER_01
I am not claiming that we haven t hurt or killed some people we weren t mad at, all right?
4
SPEAKER_01
I think the targeted killing program, I actually say it in the book, is the most precise application of firepower in the history of armed conflict.
4
SPEAKER_01
I really do.
4
SPEAKER_01
But that doesn t mean collateral damage is zero.
4
SPEAKER_01
collateral damage does happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
I talk in the book about the killing of a fellow named Abu Khabab, who was WMD, a weapons of mass destruction expert for Al Qaeda.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we ve been hunting him for a long time.
4
SPEAKER_01
And when we finally had an opportunity to take a shot, he decides to sleep outdoors because
4
SPEAKER_01
In that part of the world, it gets very hot at night.
4
SPEAKER_01
Very often, people sleep outdoors.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he s sleeping outdoors with his grandson not too far away from him.
4
SPEAKER_01
We were gonna take it, but we engineered the shot every way we could to make sure all the energy from the Hellfire Missile went to granddad and not to grandson.
4
SPEAKER_01
All the energy went away from the son.
4
SPEAKER_01
We did our best.
4
SPEAKER_01
We failed.
4
SPEAKER_01
We killed him, but unfortunately, his grandson also died.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ve been candidly in the book, Jordan.
4
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In the real world, things rarely come out black and white.
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Sure, I mean, it s trying to swat a fly with a shotgun.
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It s just not gonna work.
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You wouldn t do that in your house.
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There s a lot of balancing of decisions here, very difficult operational and political decisions that you can t really make if you re not in that position and thinking this is a guy who is brewing something, orchestrating some massive attack.
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If you didn t do it, and then you reported later on, well, we had a chance to shoot him, but he was holding a kid, it would look pretty,
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Ridiculous if that guy had just blown up the Oklahoma City Federal Building with a daycare in the basement.
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Nobody would forgive you for that.
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Jordan, even I know there are second, third, and fourth order effects to doing this.
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And a lot of those effects aren t good.
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Number one, you do get collateral damage, even if you try very, very hard.
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Number two, you do kind of feed the jihadi recruitment video with the heartless crusaders using these weapons from 20,000 feet.
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We ve got a fairly unique legal theory here
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It kind of alienates some of our allies, particularly in Western Europe, who don t agree with our legal theory.
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So we know that when we re buying that first order effect, this bad man is no longer a real problem for us.
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We re also buying the second, third, and fourth order effects too.
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So I conclude that chapter on targeted killings and unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, by saying what we need here is not a switch, but a dial.
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We need to be very prudent with regard to how often we do this and should only do it
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when it s really necessary, because there are other effects that are not positive.
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So one might ask, can a democracy keep that up?
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And can our democracy keep that up?
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Because it seems almost contrary to some of our values to do things like that.
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Well, you know, our democracy has been arguing about it for 15 years.
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And our democracy may change direction next year under a different president.
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We re gonna have to see.
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Jordan, we got no other tools for doing this.
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I don t mean the drones.
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I mean decision making.
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The only way we have to make decisions is to allow our political processes, the people we elect, do what we elected them to do.
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And sometimes they re going to make decisions that in retrospect may not seem as wise as they looked in prospect.
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They may make decisions
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that suddenly go out of favor, not because they suddenly got wrong, but because the control of the House and Senate changed hands.
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That stuff just happens.
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And when I try to work in the book, the description is, the agency, CIA, NSA, they re gonna be there.
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They re gonna be there from Clinton, through Bush, through Obama, through whoever comes up next.
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And they re still gonna have these same responsibilities.
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And so my purpose in writing the book is to try to remind the American people that the human beings inside these big three-letter organizations aren t aliens.
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They re their friends and neighbors.
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They share their values.
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They are just put in circumstances, Jordan, where they have to apply these values in situations most Americans will never see, and in many cases, will never learn of.
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That s one of the themes I try to emphasize in the book.
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You say in the book at the end of the day we re not going to be able to do the kinds of things we need to do to keep America safe unless Americans are more confident in our actions, more comfortable with what we re doing, and we can t buy that with anything other than more openness.
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And that s just the way it s going to be.
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What do you mean by openness?
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Yeah, so what we ve got is a shifting political culture inside the United States.
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I m probably not the first person on your show, Jordan, to mention this, but there s a lot of distrust out there.
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You ve heard that from others, right?
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I have seen that somewhere.
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Yeah, I mean, not many people are willing to cut the government
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when there are elements of doubt, right?
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And the intelligence community is part of that.
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When I was director of NSA, I was fond of saying, look, we only need to be two things to be successful.
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We need to be powerful, and frankly, we need to be secretive.
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And we exist inside a broader political culture that just trusts, frankly, only two things, power and secrecy.
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You ve got this trust factor that we have with the American people.
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And I ve concluded, because the American people are growing increasingly skeptical about a lot of things,
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that the American intelligence community is just going to have to show the American people a little bit more of what it s doing for them.
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The American people aren t gonna give them a blank check based on blind trust.
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Now there are limits to that, Jordan.
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Please don t let any of your listeners kid themselves.
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Making more of this stuff public is gonna shave points off of operational effectiveness.
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But what I m saying to my friends still in the intelligence community is if you don t share more of what it is you re doing, it s not gonna matter because the American people
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aren t gonna give you the permission to do these things in the first place.
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So we re just gonna have to be a bit more open about some of the things we do.
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SPEAKER_00
Speaking of openness and sharing, let s look at a little bit of unauthorized sharing.
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I mean, in the book, you mention Edward Snowden.
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You mark him as kind of a narcissistic defector.
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How did he shave points off?
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How did he damage us, as you put it?
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So, let me give you the very modestly limited positive news first, all right?
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I am willing to concede that the Snowden revelations distorted, but accelerated, a necessary conversation.
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And Jordan, you already made reference to it, the NSA program and metadata and so on, all right?
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So he accelerated a necessary conversation, distorted it as well.
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The other 98% of the stuff that he stole and his accomplices have made public have nothing to do with your privacy or mine.
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They have everything to do with how your government collects legitimate foreign intelligence.
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I point out that this is the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of the republic.
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And Jordan, you are less safe today because of it.
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Rick Leggett is now the deputy director of NSA.
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Rick was obviously a more junior officer when I was there, but a really smart one.
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Rick, about a month or so ago, said that they are approaching 1,000 and counting, 1,000 foreign intelligence targets whom they know with confidence have changed their communications patterns based upon the revelations triggered by the documents that Snowden stole.
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That makes you and me and our friends less safe than we would otherwise be.
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SPEAKER_00
If you could say something to Edward Snowden knowing that he listens to this particular episode, what would it be?
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SPEAKER_01
You have the right to remain silent.
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SPEAKER_00
I wasn t sure if you were gonna answer.
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SPEAKER_00
Has anyone asked you that before?
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You were pretty ready with that one.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I got asked that at Stanford.
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Okay.
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I was like, man, he had that locked and loaded.
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Good for you.
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Look,
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I stand by what I described as self-centered, narcissistic, hopelessly naive, and so on.
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He s done something that s really harmed our country.
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He s surrounding it as an act of civil disobedience.
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If you read American literature on civil disobedience, the keystone document is Henry David Thoreau on civil disobedience, and Thoreau points out that civil disobedience, disobeying a law with which you disagree, civil disobedience takes its moral worth
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by your willingness to suffer the consequences for disobeying the law.
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He s not willing to do that.
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You ve dealt with some of the world s most complex problems at the highest levels.
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Where do you see things going with organizations like ISIS and the domestic slash homegrown threats, both in the USA and Europe?
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Yeah, so let me begin with a little political incorrectness.
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This is about Islam.
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It s not about all of Islam, or for God s sake, it s not about all Muslims.
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There is a civil war going on inside one of the world s great monotheisms.
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And until that civil war shakes out, we are gonna see these bursts of violence that will not be limited to the Islamic world, but will show up in the West, be it Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, or Orlando.
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And I fear Islam is going through what Christendom went through in the 17th century, when Christendom made its peace with what you and I guys call modernity.
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How do you reconcile the transcendental faith
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with science and reason?
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That was a real tough question for Christendom.
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It fought a war in the middle of Europe called the Thirty Years  War in the middle of the 17th century.
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It was at least as bad as what s going on in the Middle East now.
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Estimates are that about a third of the population of Europe died during that war.
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But as we came out of that war and came out of that century, we in the West made our peace between faith and science, between transcendental thinking and modernity.
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We organized ourselves into nation states and we separated the sacred from the secular.
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Islam is having that debate now.
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I should warn you, Islam doesn t necessarily have to come up with the same answer Christendom did.
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Christendom s solution is not a trend line, it s a point.
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And so we ll see what this other great monotheism decides for its future.
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But there is a grand struggle going on
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within the monotheism.
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I was in Wales a couple weekends back and listened to a wonderful British professor at the Hay Festival, a literary festival that s held there every year.
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And he was asked a question after he d given this long, really great lecture on Europe in the 17th century.
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He says, what lessons from Europe in the 17th century might we apply to what s going on in the Middle East?
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And he frankly said pretty much what I just told you.
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He frankly said that Paris and Brussels and Orlando and San Bernardino were spillage
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from what is inherently this conflict within Islam that is probably going to take a generation or two to settle.
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And so this is not something that s going to be solved when we successfully target Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, or if we successfully overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the president sort of dictator of Syria.
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Those are probably good things, but this thing s not going away for a long time.
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SPEAKER_00
Since we have you here and it s timely, I wonder what you think of the whole Apple iPhone encryption issue.
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SPEAKER_00
A lot of people probably realize that the San Bernardino terrorist, the shooter, had an iPhone and the FBI asked Apple to unlock it and they said no because they didn t want to alter the operating system to be less secure.
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SPEAKER_00
What do you think about that?
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SPEAKER_00
It sort of falls right in line with the whole security versus liberty argument.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, actually I side with Apple and I m not the only person like me that sides with Apple.
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SPEAKER_01
Two of my predecessors at NSA, Keith Alexander and Mike McConnell, side with Apple.
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Mike Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security, sides with Apple.
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Dave Petraeus, Apple.
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SPEAKER_01
Richard Clark, used to handle cyber and terrorism for the National Security Council, sides with Apple.
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SPEAKER_01
I ll rephrase your dilemma a little bit, Jordan.
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I don t think this is a constitutional question.
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I actually think the government has the right to demand it.
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I don t think it s a privacy question.
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After all, he s dead and it wasn t his phone.
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I think this is a security question.
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And looking at this question purely through the security lens, I actually side with Apple on the side of good encryption.
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In other words, what I m saying, guys, I think the government has the right to demand they open the phone.
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I just don t think it s a really good idea, because terrorism isn t the only threat against the United States.
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In fact, the last couple of years, Jim Clapper, who s the Director of National Intelligence, has led off his annual worldwide threat briefing by saying the number one threat to the United States is cyber.
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You might want to think two or three times before you, on behalf of a legitimate counter-terrorism need, don t mistake that.
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It d be a really good thing to read that phone.
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On behalf of a legitimate counter-terrorism need, do something that makes encryption, on which all of us depend for cybersecurity, less secure than it would otherwise be.
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And so on security grounds alone, I m with Apple on this one,
5
SPEAKER_00
So do you think you support Apple in sort of the broad sense, but maybe a narrow exception for this particular?
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No, I don t.
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I don t think this phone rises to the level that an exception is needed.
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Jordan, you ask a great question because, you know, all these things are relative.
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I just told you that I wouldn t do it for even these legitimate CT needs because you actually create a far more extensive cyber weakness over here.
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I can think of CT circumstances that actually dominate
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a cybersecurity circumstance on this side, but this isn t one of them.
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I reserve the right to judge specific issues as they come up, but this one was pretty clear to me.
5
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We should not automatically default to the needs of counterterrorism or law enforcement when it comes to weakening encryption in the domain, the cyber domain, in which we are all very much at risk.
5
SPEAKER_00
How do you reconcile then supporting that encryption while the NSA collects tons of data on unencrypted communication?
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because there s a second order effect if you weaken Apple s encryption.
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SPEAKER_01
You re gonna make Americans less safe in the cyber domain to allow other people to steal their stuff.
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SPEAKER_01
NSA targets foreigners for legitimate foreign intelligence purposes, and why wouldn t you
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you want your foreign intelligence service to intercept legitimate foreign intelligence targets.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, if anyone knows why communications need to be encrypted, it s the former head of the NSA, right?
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SPEAKER_01
Well, there you go.
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Now, actually, Jordan, you bring up a subplot here.
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It s really important.
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It really doesn t matter what you or I think about the Apple issue.
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Frankly, it doesn t matter what the Congress does about the Apple issue or what a judge does about the Apple issue.
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The unavoidable arc of technology, Jordan, is in the direction of encryption, really good encryption.
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SPEAKER_01
There s no law or court order or an opinion on a podcast that s going to stop that arc.
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So people like me, who are still in government, are going to have to live with the reality that the content of communications
6
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is gonna be increasingly difficult to recover, and there s nothing you can do to stop that.
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That s where science is going.
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Yeah, it s like trying to stop a waterfall by making legislation that says it can t do that anymore.
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It s just not gonna stop.
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So my counsel is, okay, get over it.
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There s still digital exhaust out there, Jordan, it s probably gonna disturb your civil libertarian listeners, but there s an awful lot of stuff out there that you can collect through electronic surveillance against legitimate foreign targets,
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And never get to the content of the communication.
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You can still create actionable intelligence.
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It s just gonna be less about content and more about all the other stuff that s being thrown out into the cyber domain.
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SPEAKER_00
Sure, I gotta ask you, man, what do you have to say about Trump?
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, you re decidedly somewhat conservative, but you also know how intimately, you intimately know how the US deals with other countries, both in terms of diplomacy, militarily, espionage cooperation.
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SPEAKER_00
What do you think about, what do you think about the Donald?
6
SPEAKER_01
If he were to become president and would govern in any way comparable to the language he has used as a candidate, I would be very concerned.
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SPEAKER_01
about the welfare of the nation and the welfare of the world, and the longer this goes on, his language as a candidate doesn t change, and so I am increasingly concerned.
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SPEAKER_00
Are there people that are in your former position now in the administration who can say, hey, that whole thing about you wanting to do this crazy policy, yeah, we just can t do that, I can t do that, or we won t do that, or?
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I actually said on national TV during my book tour, I was on the Bill Maher show, and Trump said we should target the families of terrorists, and I just simply said,
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Bill, that s just not gonna happen.
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And he said, what do you mean?
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Is there a military coup?
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I said, no, Bill.
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I said, look, that s in violation of American law, it s in violation of international law, it violates the laws of armed conflict.
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SPEAKER_01
If such an order were ever to be issued, when it hit the first man or woman inside of an American military uniform, that individual would simply say what I just said.
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SPEAKER_01
I m sorry, sir, this is just not going to happen.
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Imagine a future in which Mr. Trump is president, and he does insist on that.
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I mean, that s the makings of a constitutional crisis.
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Hence my comment earlier, Jordan.
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I m pretty worried.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, good, that makes many of us, I think.
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SPEAKER_00
You ve seen some of the top technology that s ever existed anywhere, and so I m wondering which companies, maybe in Silicon Valley, the NSA or you, admire most in terms of their technology.
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SPEAKER_00
Have you seen developments where you just think, dang, that is advanced, even if it s just getting a car from the airport?
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SPEAKER_01
No, I m not going to handicap all the things going on in the valley.
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SPEAKER_01
I will give you a macro statement, though, okay?
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So I m an American Air Force officer.
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I was 39 years in the Air Force.
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SPEAKER_01
America s Air Force is, frankly, simply the military expression of American aviation industry.
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SPEAKER_01
By the same token, NSA and other technical intelligence collection activities around the country, they are the intelligence expression of the American computing
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telecommunications and cyber industry.
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SPEAKER_01
Put another way, most of the stuff we re gonna need to keep ourselves safe in a digital world are gonna be developed and invented by the private sector, not the government.
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SPEAKER_01
And so, you asked me about Snowden earlier.
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Snowden s revelations, and particularly the way they were rolled out and written about, has made the relationship between the government and its legitimate activity and the valley and its legitimate activities more difficult.
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SPEAKER_01
We need to rebuild those bridges so that
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American security and take advantage of the kinds of things that American industry creates.
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SPEAKER_00
Instead of understanding a lot of the nuances, the sometimes deadly nuances that intelligence officials deal with on a daily basis, a lot of people, of course, criticize intelligence agencies for not doing enough when they feel in danger, as you write in the book, while then reserving the right to criticize those same agencies for doing too much once they feel safe again.
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SPEAKER_00
You re in quite the predicament, but it s probably a good one to be in from the perspective of a civilian.
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SPEAKER_01
Oh, no, it s fine.
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SPEAKER_01
Remember what I told you on Tapper yesterday?
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If you would have followed on my question on Jake and four months, you re going to have somebody here complaining about the bureau.
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And my fanciful ending, which did not happen, would be, how does it make you feel?
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SPEAKER_01
And the answer was, it makes me feel good to be an American.
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SPEAKER_01
That s what we do.
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SPEAKER_01
If you re going to strap on these kinds of jobs, CIA and NSA, you better button your chin strap, because this is the kind of reality that s going to take place.
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SPEAKER_01
It s how our democracy works.
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And we re better for it.
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We re more secure for it, more free for it.
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SPEAKER_00
This reminds me a little bit of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.
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SPEAKER_00
I can t remember the exact quote, but he s something about, you stand there and question the freedom that I provide and question the manner in which I provide it.
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SPEAKER_00
Obviously, you re not ordering the code red.
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SPEAKER_00
This type of thing should make us stop and think about what we re really willing to give or to tolerate to preserve our illusions of safety in what is an inherently dangerous world.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s exactly right, and that theme kind of permeates the book.
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SPEAKER_01
This is a field of gray.
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SPEAKER_01
There is no white, and rarely is there even any black.
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SPEAKER_01
The decisions that the government has to make, the security agencies have to make, to defend America are always shades of gray, and they ll always be controversial.
6
SPEAKER_01
Somebody s gotta make them, and then live with the consequences.
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SPEAKER_01
Either way, Jordan.
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I used to tell the story that for a lot of my time at CIA, I d get a phone call in the middle of the night, I d have a pretty good idea what it was, before I would pick up the phone,
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SPEAKER_01
I simply quietly say to myself, okay, remember Hayden, whatever you decide on this phone call, you can live with for the rest of your life, which Jordan was not an invitation to be conservative because you realize if you re conservative too often, you may have to live with a catastrophe that you had a chance to prevent.
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SPEAKER_01
And those are the kinds of questions that the people still in government
6
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have to face routinely.
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SPEAKER_00
We ask you as intelligence agencies to do virtually an impossible job, which is to protect us from the future while we go get sushi and then watch the NBA Finals while you sweat it out.
6
SPEAKER_00
What s your decision-making system like?
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, you must have some sort of process that says, all right, this is really important, I can t just wing it based on my gut reaction that morning.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s gotta be some sort of system or rubric that you use personally or that the agencies use.
6
SPEAKER_01
Oh, sure.
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SPEAKER_01
First of all, you re operating, again, within your political and legal guidance, right?
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SPEAKER_01
Your policy and legal guidance.
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SPEAKER_01
So you roughly know where your limits are.
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SPEAKER_01
Within those limits, now you have to make some operational decisions.
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SPEAKER_01
Some are so important or so unique, you kind of toss them downtown for some additional guidance.
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SPEAKER_01
But I got to tell you, if you do that too often, they re going to decide they really don t need you to be the CIA director.
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SPEAKER_01
They can just do it themselves.
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SPEAKER_01
And so you take on an awful lot of things you have to decide within the agency based upon the policy and legal guidance that you have.
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SPEAKER_01
And so when you re faced with a difficult dilemma, my technique was get smart people in the room, ask them what they think and start challenging them, ask them a bunch of questions and make them explain themselves.
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SPEAKER_01
And in those kinds of conversations, I generally got to a comfort level with the course of action that we would follow.
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SPEAKER_01
The last question you would ask is to turn to the lawyer in the room and say, you good with this?
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SPEAKER_01
And of course, you know, that final.
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check with regard to legality, then you would move forward.
6
SPEAKER_00
General, what do you think is the greatest threat to the nation right now?
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SPEAKER_01
If you imagine in the air between us, I ve got a little graph with an X and a Y axis, okay?
6
SPEAKER_01
With the vertical axis being how bad is it, and the horizontal axis being how urgent is it, all right?
6
SPEAKER_01
In the lower left-hand corner of that graph, in other words, it s really urgent, but the danger is not catastrophic, existential.
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SPEAKER_01
I d put terrorism.
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SPEAKER_01
Look, an attack as bad as Orlando is not gonna destroy the American way of life.
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SPEAKER_01
On the other hand, if a TSA agent makes a bad decision tonight at Dulles Airport, something bad could happen by tomorrow morning.
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SPEAKER_01
So it s urgent and it s bad, but there are limits to the badness.
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And then you go out that horizontal axis, that timeline, three, five, seven years, here I start to run into a problem that s actually more serious.
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Here I start to run into states that I call
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ambitious, fragile, and nuclear.
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And here, I ve got North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Russia.
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Again, it s not gonna happen overnight.
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If we don t handle it well, that could be really bad in five years.
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And then way off the line, maybe 10 years out, I ve got the future American relationship with China.
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And we got time.
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Nothing gonna happen in the next week that s gonna make this a crisis, I don t think.
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But this one s really important.
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This one s pass-fail.
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We get this one wrong.
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How does a status quo power, that s us, handle an emerging power, that s China?
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way that creates a new global equilibrium and doesn t lead to global war.
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That s the pass fail challenge.
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If you re in intelligence, you re trying to work all of them.
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And the problem you ve got, Jordan, is that urgent one, because it s urgent is sucking all the air out of the room.
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And you ve got to work really hard to preserve your and your agency s resources to make sure they pay attention to these other issues that aren t quite as urgent, but are frankly more important.
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Why is the Tom Petty song your theme song?
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After the 9-11 attack, I went over to CIA, and CIA had plastered all over the building desks and computers and so on.
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Todd Beamer s last words, or last recorded words on that flight that went into the field in western Pennsylvania, let s roll.
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And for CIA, which has to do a lot of its things forward out of garrison, let s roll fit perfectly.
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So what can we use as a rallying thing?
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We do a lot of our things from garrison because, you know, it s electronic surveillance.
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And my wife and I were watching a benefit late one night, shortly after the attack.
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And Tom Petty was one of the acts and he was singing, We Won t Back Down.
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And my wife just turned to me and said, that s your motto.
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And so it was.
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We plastered that up on all NSA installations around the planet.
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And we got Mr. Petty s permission to use his song at a whole bunch of events.
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And just use that as kind of a rallying, unifying theme for the folks at NSA in the early years of the war.
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General, thank you so much for your time today.
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Okay guys, thank you very much.
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Well, that turned into a really interesting episode.
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I love the fact that he is so open about this and very candid.
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You can tell that they chose the right man for the job when it came to handling these issues in a way that, quite frankly, not everybody could handle.
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I think writing a book about this must have been exhausting.
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If you re interested in that, of course, it is quite the publication.
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I think it s 560 plus pages, and you can find that link in the show notes called Playing to the Edge by General Michael Hayden.
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If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank The General on Twitter.
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Yes, he now has Twitter.
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I would imagine he s a relatively new addition.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well as his book that we had mentioned on the show, and you can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the cheat sheet for this episode, and we link to the show notes directly on your phone.
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I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm.
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It s a great way to engage with us there, ask questions, give feedback, and find some articles, insights, and other things that don t make it to the show.
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Also, we ve got the Art of Charm Challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or in the USA only, text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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It s all about improving your networking and connection skills, and inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show, and I ve got regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every week.
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This will make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed in the US to 33444.
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This episode of the Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogarty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead and tell your friends because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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See you guys next time Thanks for listening to the art of charm get more confidence Relationship skills life hacks and more at the art of charm podcast.com