Q&A: Gen. Michael Hayden
We wanted to talk about the National Counterterrorism Center. Can you help us understand where boundaries are being drawn? Who is in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden?
Here's my view. No. 1, CIA is the nation's strategic analytical function for everything. Except counterterrorism, because the law says so. The law says … that will be done by the National Counterterrorism Center, so by law and by logic, this is OK. This makes good sense. No. 1, the NCTC is just a more natural environment for jumping the gap between foreign and domestic, between law enforcement and intelligence information. And so if you ever want to tighten that seam tighter, you'd have more cultural impediments in doing it in a center that was in and of CIA. Better to do that in a new location, without any historical baggage to worry about. So, in that foreign/domestic, law enforcement/intel, that's a real plus.
Second, your language actually betrayed one of the challenges we had here. "The hunt." An awful lot of our work is focused on supporting our operations. If you read that [April] speech I gave in San Antonio, which I thought would make news but didn't until the National Intelligence Estimate was leaked, I actually made this point. What I said was, "We can't take all of America's analytic expertise and hard-wire it to any kill or capture operation." That this war against terrorism is more than just killing and capturing people we're really mad at. That it fundamentally is a war of ideas. And if it is a war of ideas, then we have to look at both sides of an equation, OK? The creation of people who want to kill us and the killing and capturing of people who want to kill us. I actually think that the NCTC may offer us better opportunities to support all the elements of national power because an awful lot of our activity here, quite legitimately and quite naturally, was focused in on supporting our operations.
You know, I have to be careful here. I don't want to kill a good thing, and believe me, the [CIA's Counterterrorism Center] here is a really good thing. I don't want to injure it, I don't want to shave points off of it, I want it to continue, but we also have this other challenge. As good as the CTC is, in terms of its action, we need to use other things too. So, I was willing to take the risk of shifting some of the weight of our analytic force from here to NCTC. So, we've agreed to do that. And I've talked to the tranche that went over after I first arrived. Talked to them personally, telling them why they were doing this, trying to give them this backup so they wouldn't be forgotten.
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