Q&A: Gen. Michael Hayden
This agency isn't used to answering to anybody, beyond people on this campus–and now it does. That's an adjustment.
When the community management staff at the DCI tried many of these same reforms, they found that some of the toughest resistance came from their home turf, from within the CIA. The CIA has become notorious for being a reluctant player. Is that still the case?
I hope not. I mean, remember I said, we've got all this connective tissue, and so unless we are competent and collaborative, this new structure doesn't work. And so I think it's really important for the agency to be the very best team player. There are natural inhibitions to our system. … I've got a pretty decent public track record at information sharing and I've done some things at NSA. But in order to establish my bona fides to this audience, I can't say, "This is what I did at NSA; this is what we're going to do here." I've got to preface it with, look, I know this is a different discipline. When I get too squirrelly at NSA with the sharing of information, by and large, the worst thing that will happen is we lose a frequency. If I get too squirrelly with CIA about how we share information, we could lose more than a frequency.
That said, we are too cautious in the way we share information, and we're going to move the line. … There are certain things here that make this agency legitimately more concerned about some things. But I think we can, again, play a lot better team ball, and we will. The human sources are the ones that require the greatest protection.
The DNI's office talked to us about how the Pentagon's classified SIPRnet system has been opened up to close U.S. allies and how unprecedented that move was. Was the CIA dragged kicking and screaming?
The agency was reluctant, again, because of the nature of this information and, frankly, because they–like everyone else–never believed SIPRnet would be shared beyond the U.S. or the community. So it did not impose a great deal of discipline on itself as to how it posted information, how it labeled information, and so on. And so now, all of a sudden, you're going to allow allies to have access to "the system," you know, kind of the sins of the past come home to roost …
So you have to go back into the data and scrub them for information that is too sensitive?
Well, those are the decisions you have to make, OK? How pure do you need it to be with allies who are very close to you? Now we're in a judgment call, and you can see that this agency is probably a little more concerned about that purity given the nature of its information. Sooner or later, though, you have to admit the world is not a perfect world and you're going to move forward and you tell [DNI Chief Information Officer] Dale [Meyerrose] to go ahead and throw the switch. And that's what we did.
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