Top 70 Michael Hayden Quotes

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

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

When at the CIA, I was fond of saying that many jihadis join the movement for the same reasons that young Americans join the Crips and the Bloods: youthful alienation, the need to belong to something greater than self, the search for meaningful identity. But it also matters what gang you join.

There’s still a lot of things you can legitimately do to make America safe through electronic surveillance.

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

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

To be perfectly candid, we’re better at stealing other people’s secrets than anyone else in the world. But we self-limit. We steal secrets to keep our citizens free and safe.

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

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

President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community – the people Edward Snowden betrayed.

Chairman Chaffetz was an enthusiastic supporter of the ‘USA Freedom Act,’ designed to rein in the allegedly renegade NSA and its wanton depredations of American privacy.

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

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

In my heart of hearts, I don’t think it’s a good position to say that Guantanamo is not an acceptable answer for anyone we might capture now or in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the intelligence is making a policymaker too happy, he ought to challenge it, and even if he doesn’t, the intelligence briefer needs to launch a red team against his own conclusions to see if he can hold his ground.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great weight should be given to the judgment of professionals on what information, if disclosed, would harm national security.

I blame the Russians for a lot, but pinning the creation of ISIS on them is a murky, tenuous, triple-carom bank shot at best.

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

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

In the great battle of Antietam, still the bloodiest day in American history, Union forces were led by Gen. George McClellan, an incredibly cautious man.

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

The intelligence community is governed by the same legal and ethical standards as the rest of American government and society, but an operational imperative is here, too. An intelligence community charged with global responsibilities cannot be successful without diversity of thought, culture and language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MEMRI counts the federal government as a customer for its analysis, and the MEMRI logo is often visible on the B-roll video of major news networks. Other private firms create their own information rather than tracking that of others.

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

The question is how much of your privacy and your convenience and your commerce do you want your nation’s security apparatus to squeeze in order to keep you safe? And it is a choice that we have to make.