Q&A: Gen. Michael Hayden
U.S. News's Kevin Whitelaw and David E. Kaplan interviewed CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden in his seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters. Before arriving at the CIA in May 2006, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence. Now a four-star general and the U.S. military's highest-ranking intelligence officer, Hayden was also the longest-serving director of the National Security Agency, which is responsible for intercepting electronic communications.
Extended excerpts:
You started at the DNI's office and have now come over here to the CIA. What surprises have you found here? What was different about being here?
Not a whole lot of surprises, really. What I told the workforce the first day here was [that] we don't need to do so much fretting about being the Central Intelligence Agency. I said, this agency's got so much connective tissue to the other parts of the intelligence community that if we're competent, and if we're collaborative, both of which are totally within our control, there is no question that we'll be "central." I said if we're in a meeting, we're going to govern the thought process of that meeting, not because we're representing the [director of central intelligence] but because we're the smartest guy in the room on the subject being discussed.
That was one aspect that I could see from where I had been, that a lot of the instinctive concern that this agency had had about the DNI–they didn't need to be worrying about some of those things. That was actually one of the earliest messages.
Did that get through?
I think it did. You know, the next line out of my mouth on that morning was, "Let's just go back to work. Let's just do our job and not worry about this because it's not worth worrying about."
The other aspect, and this is not a paid political advertisement, having the DNI is actually liberating for the guy in this office. I can't imagine. … My workday starts here; they pick me up at 6:45; I'm reading the [President's Daily Brief], all right? I've read through the PDB book, which is more than just what the president gets, but all the other cables I should be looking at, and I'm done before [DNI] John Negroponte goes into the Oval Office. So, I am now the director of an agency, in mind as well as body, by 8 o'clock, whereas George [Tenet] when he was doing this or Porter [Goss], couldn't turn his attention to the smooth functioning of this agency until much later in the day. … So, it really is, I've used the word, liberating.
The director of the CIA used to have a second title, director of central intelligence, to reflect his role of coordinating the intelligence community. Now, the DNI does that second job. Does having the DNI give you some cover to run the CIA?
I wouldn't use the word cover … but when I was the director of [the National Security Agency] and I would sit there and George would sit here and we'd talk about issues, and George would have views … I mean, I love George like a brother, but I was never sure on this or that issue, whether I was talking to the DCI or the [director of the CIA]. The DNI doesn't have that issue. … There's less reason for people, for whatever reason, to question whether or not that's the community view, because he only represents the community. There are those downtown who say it's an extra layer of bureaucracy and it gets in the way. I wouldn't state that that strongly. It can be a challenge sometimes to respond to questions or to do things in a way that the DNI would want you to do them as opposed to way the agency would have done them, if left to its own devices, but it's not overly burdensome. …
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.
When you throw that switch … we're jumping into the deep end of the pool. That is transformational. That sets in motion a whole series of secondary and tertiary events now. That, frankly, is what the DNI's all about. It's a staff with enough expertise and enough size that it's not dependent on the constituent parts for information. It says we're putting these guys on this network, and here's the date we're throwing the switch, and you can do what you have to do between now and then–rather than the reverse, which is let's all get in a room and negotiate a point in time when we will all be ready.
The question of security seems like the elephant in the room when you're talking about everything from dealing with local law enforcement to dealing with foreign liaison partnerships.
Yeah, how long it takes to clear a contractor, how much one agency respects the security clearance process of another agency. And CIA, historically, is conservative about this for reasons that are legitimate, but the line has moved, the line is moving, and the line will continue to move in terms of how we access things. I did bring in one guy from another agency and the first noise from the clearance system was, "Well, we're going to have run a background investigation on him and do all the things we do for new employees." He's coming from NSA! And to their credit, the security folks here said: "We now have two bodies of policy. One body that's internal to the agency–that says this is what it takes to get on the computer system. The other is a broader community policy that talks about respecting agency clearances crosswise, left to right, in the agency. And without prompting, the security guy says, we go with B.
Was he making an exception because you're the director?
I don't think so. I think it is an indication of a sea change.
We're still trying to figure out the relationship between the CIA and the Department of Defense, especially when it comes to HUMINT [human intelligence], and where that line is and how easy it is to draw that.
I am the national HUMINT manager. I'm the national HUMINT manager because the ambassador wants me to do it, and I'm the national HUMINT manager because if you look at the body of documents that govern our community, it points you strongly in that direction, and the language that's used for that is that I coordinate, deconflict, and evaluate. And I intend to do that for HUMINT by whomever it is conducted in whatever form.
Has that process begun already?
Absolutely.
Can you help us understand then how the National Clandestine Service concept at the CIA is different from before? Some critics say that you've just changed the name.
No. My line is "wherever it is, by whomever it is done, in whatever form." If you were collecting information from human beings for foreign intelligence purposes, you just slipped into the box that I believe the national HUMINT manager governs, to coordinate, deconflict, and evaluate. That's a little bit different; that's not operational control. OK. Coordinate, deconflict, and evaluate. The score on that one is that it's not going badly. The DOD is actually being quite good about that. We're going to write common procedures. We're going to have common standards for source evaluation. We're going to have common standards for classifying information; we're going to have common standards for how we share that information. We're going to have common formats so that your machine and my machine can take the same report and present it in the same way.
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.