Michael V. Hayden, "The Assault on Intelligence"

towards the end of his new book retired General Michael Hayden notes the the plethora of former intelligence officials popping up on TV new shows these days often expressing concern about the direction the Trump administration is is taking the country there is for instance Jim clapper the former Director of National Intelligence John Brennan former CIA director John McLaughlin former deputy CIA director and one-time acting director and Michael Morell another ex Acting Director a general Hayden was self of course also makes frequent appearances now he and some of the other retired officials had been commenting on the networks even before Donald Trump's political ascendancy but their assessments have gotten more critical and alarmist under Trump and this as as Mike notes in his book has created an impression that their acting as the public voice of some sort of deep state intelligence community opposed to Trump Mike is not the opposition he says nor is he the resistance but he is very worried about the undermining of our democratic institutions particularly the intelligence community in which he served for many years a career intelligence officer in the Air Force Mike rose to direct the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and then headed the CIA from 2006 to 2009 since leaving government service he's been a principal at the Chernoff group which is a security consulting firm and a teacher at George Mason University a couple of years ago while the field of Republican presidential candidates was still sorting itself out ahead of the 2016 election Mike released his first book playing to the edge that work which became a New York Times bestseller addressed national arguments over such controversial issues as surveillance drones interrogation and other controversial programs in which he had played a role his new book the assault on intelligence ranges beyond such specific policy matters to sound a general alarm about how Trump's actions and rhetoric are eroding a basic pillar of our democratic society namely the truth looking back at the 2016 campaign and the first months of the Trump administration micro counts how emotions and personal beliefs have repeatedly done more than facts an objective reality to shape decisions and influence public opinion such a departure from evidence based thinking is profoundly unsettling for the intelligence community whose mission is to get at the truth the same can be said about journalism the courts law enforcement and science all of which as Mike observes our feet are feeling the ground under them eroded in the current post truth world and Russia to sense is an opportunity in this age of lies the phrase used in the subtitle of Mike's book and has been exploiting and exacerbating it and yet the president has done little to mobilize against this Russian threat Mike's impassioned and informed argument in favor of factual approaches an expert opinion underscores how much we stand to lose by diminishing our intelligence and other institutions just as we confront new challenges not only from Russia but North Korea China and others ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming General Michael Hayden thank you good evening and thank you all for coming out on a night or traffic was not a blessing coming here at all so I think that the the I would call the order of March here is I get to talk for 25 or 30 minutes no more and then we all get to ask questions and offer commentary and I very much look forward to that all right and so I'll try to be very very efficient trying to summarize what I wrote but more especially why and maybe some of the texture that's already been suggested so i actually start the book with a reminiscence of walking through wartime sarajevo i was the head of American intelligence in Europe during the balkans war balkan wars and would go to sarajevo a lot and it was clear that this is a beautiful city vibrant multicultural I mean he saw Austrian air at government buildings and onion domes and steeples and minarets and then if you walked along the Milioti River you looked up in the hills and you saw Serbian artillery and then you saw the results of the the work of the Serbian artillery and the streets below you realized wow I was walking through Sarajevo ten years after it hosted the Winter Olympics right and so it's quite a startling contrast and and what struck me when I talked to Sara havens or walked among them while they're under siege was was not how much different they were from us but how much they weren't and and I think that's maybe a curse of being an intelligence officer you kind of go to dark places and see things and I think a lot of us come come away with the belief that the thin veneer of civilization is thin and fragile and needs to be nurtured it's it's god-given only in one sense and that God wants us to have that kind of life but it is not naturally occurring I make a reference to Hobbes but mean nasty poor brutish and short if you don't tend to these institutions and then I quickly pivot to to you know not claiming we're on the brink of Civil War here in the United States or we'll break down but that I am concerned and a concern already suggested come comes around that the essential essential importance the the centrality itself of truth and I hope you enjoy reading the book because I really enjoyed researching it I there's intelligence in here in terms of espionage stuff but I got out of my own zone and talked to philosophers and historians and other folks I would not normally have talked to in my in my professional character my professional persona and what I learned is that we in the West since the 17th century have broadly been governed by the values of the Enlightenment which evidence based a search for truth humility in the face of complexity hypothesis experimentation feedback a process in which data reality objective things matter and it was clear to me we are moving into already suggested but what the oxford dictionary word of the year called a post truth world and that was the 2016 word of the year post truth decision-making based on fact and data and more on feeling preference emotion tribe loyalty grievance and it was clear to me we were going in that direction I don't I don't have this in the book but you know when you got that six or seven minutes on a on an evening talk show or something and they say could you summarize the book well the model I've been using is kind of a three layer cake alright so bear with me I'll go back to each layer here in a minute so broad drift post truth culture post truth approach and the three layers the first layer right is not the President or the administration first layer is us and how it is we seem to accept or not accept arguments second layer is the administration right so I think I think the president actually quite brilliantly recognize this post truth drift throughout large portions of the population exploited it during the campaign and then makes it worse as president by some of the things he does but but a lot of the things he says remember the first time that the the president announced he came down the elevator I remember his description of Mexican immigrants all right he campaign throughout in the direction of what became a Muslim ban about eight days into the administration I mean that was based on an almost apocalyptic description of the danger posed by refugees and then a a belief that the current vetting system was dystopian neither of which are true it's quite interesting I just kind of add this as a footnote they go into more detail in the book after the first ill executive order came out five former directors or acting directors of CIA two former deputy directors a Director of National Intelligence and a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center all joined in amicus brief in the courts to push back against the executive order we we had lots of concerns and get into the fine print if you like but the fundamental concern was was decision making based on something other than data it was the rhetoric of the campaign becoming the departure point for the direction of the nation's security policy one more example about the second layer of the cake Obama wiretap Trump Tower remember that now you've had the director of the National Security Agency the director of the FBI the Attorney General I'll say publicly it ain't so but it remains so in the it's the right word mythology of the administration and frankly in the belief system of a big chunk of Americans there was a remarkable scene and this is this actually captures a lot of what I'm trying to communicate in terms of what we are concerned about there's a remarkable scene it was last summer maybe trending towards fall the president was on the CBS Sunday Morning Show and John Dickerson was was interviewing I mean they're going through all the things you'd expect John to ask the president and at the end he gets to the Trump Tower thing and he says you said Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower what evidence do you have what evidence do you have and and the president clearly doesn't want to go there and actually gets up and and physically walks from where the interview is taking place and plants himself behind the resolute desk and in the Oval and picked up some papers and you know pretend to start reading the papers and and Dickerson won't let him go he's stalking him and says no mr. president what evidence do you have what evidence do you have and the president responds a lot of people agree with me a lot of people were saying people were saying and that is the evidence stack from which an awful lot of decisions are made if I can make it popular to speed it up to the 21st century if I can make it trending I can treat it as fact and I can I can base action on that I I tell a story in the book about going back to my hometown in Pittsburgh and and talking to people who don't agree with me all right I paid for the iron city and all the pizza there about 40 people in the room grew up with most of them and I got to the Trump Tower thing all right and it was clear to me that for many of the that all but for many of the folks in the room it really didn't matter whether it happened it was still true did you see them okay so I I've kind of covered the first two layers of the cake boo broadly us second an administration that that exploits in worsens and then I got to put on the top you heard about this I think the Russians who are coming in recognizing the first and second layers and annex and exploiting exploited them is it's best they can I'll touch on each of these in a in a little more detail in a few minutes let me go back to layer one okay what what explains that what explains why it is we can't seem to have conversations that bend to the middle we have conversations that that seemed to go go to the extremes a lot of it probably has to do with technology not a lot of it hat now I must admit that's where I went to Pittsburgh a lot of it has to do with our governance and and what the effects of globalization are and I'm I'm here in front of you saying I have lived the last 50 years my adult life with the winds of globalization at my back and I've been blessed by the effects of it and a lot of people I talked to back in my hometown though the wind was was in their face right so I get the the basil issues in the fundament that people ask to people in Pittsburgh which this president Trump mean to you and the answer was I mean somebody's paying attention to me so we've got that reality but that it's not sufficient to explain the acceptance of a view of objective truth that really is hard to explain and here I attributed that to technology getting ahead of us you saw a Mark Zuckerberg up there a couple of weeks ago and he said kind of having a hard time they explained himself my gentle description of of what he was trying to explain was here's an example of of technology and ambition getting ahead of law policy and societal norms so as I said this is I haven't even got to any Intel stuff yet all right this is all more broad and and to give you a sense as to how fundamental these issues are I was invited to Sweden in December okay now let me repeat that the former director of America's Central Intelligence Agency was invited to Sweden by the Nobel Committee to give a talk on the meaning of truth then that's weird and and and I went there I had I gave about a 12 minute Ted kind of talk and was on a couple panels but I was I was there to learn because really wonderful scholars and there was one woman there her name is to fetch she she's Turkish by birth North Carolinian by choice alright and she she is really an expert on on social media and and and this is important let me I mean let me tell this story out it's in the book and greater detail than you'll get tonight but I'm still trying to explain the first layer here okay she says going to social media Facebook YouTube and so on is a lot like eating Doritos can't be can't eat just one because when you eat a Dorito the salt and fat in the first Dorito crate creates a craving for more salt and more fat and she points out and she's right the algorithms that govern our journey through social media mere the Doritos theory in other words you go on you go on to Facebook or YouTube or any other social media platform first of all they know who you are better than you know who you are and their business model is to keep you is to keep you on the site it's you know the profit is determined by the clicks so they want you to stay so they give you more salt and fat until you go on there they know a certain preference the algorithm presents a certain part of the internet that they know will resonate with you and the longer you stay the algorithm takes you more and more in the direction of your resonance in in other words we have this invention that should be democratizing and leveling and and and and communica munity creating and based on the algorithm what happens after you enter it is that you actually go into the darker and darker corners of your own self created ghetto and now you have folks and a lot around for the book and for others other talks that there are people in the country who have a completely different narrative than most of the people in this room do with regard to the FBI or Bob mower or the Department of Justice or the American intelligence community or the deep state and and so on and it's it's because we get most of our news now through social media let me give you let me give an example of how the three layers of my cake work together I was actually in Huntsville Alabama last night and I was giving a talk down there at University of Alabama in Huntsville Redstone Arsenal great great evening but I reminded that group that last September the president gave a talk at Huntsville all right it was a stem-winder kind of red meat feed the base kind of speech and if you go through it all I mean it's got all the all the memes from the campaign but he added a new one this is late September this is the one we added that take a need this is this is the NFL we call that and he's out there and he used some words we won't use here tonight about the players who take a knee and and into the crowd I'm an Alabama football God for a perfect audience all right there they're going crazy before President Trump got back to the East Coast that night Russian botnets in the internet research agency in st. Petersburg three leading hashtags were NFL taken me and suggesting that definite articles are the most difficult things to translate between languages take funny was the let's see the third and the Russians were playing both ends they were there so I already got this social media space I already got the Dorito effect right and now I've got the Russians manipulating our social media space you have to see on botnets I mean thousands if not tens of thousands computers each one of whom you think is a human being with a with a point of view so they can create trending very very very very quickly and and that three leading hashtags take an ad take the knee and NFL a day or two later after the weekend two of the top four leading hashtags were Pittsburgh Steelers and Alejandro Villanueva remember blind side left tackle Steelers Army Ranger out there and and as I said the Russians are playing it tastes great less filling they don't care all right it's they're doing a patriotic meme and they're doing a free-speech me all they want to do is divide almost immediately American out right media picked up what the President had said and and and the memes were nearly identical with the Russians I'm not implying there passing information I'm just saying they picked it up and and pretty quickly Infowars gateway pundit Alex Jones took this thing deeply darkly racial obviously based on the demographics of of the NFL but but also because Alejandro the left tackle plays for who Mike Tomlin african-american coach and so you've got this being built up now and the outright media I'm still down here in layer one and then and then it bleeds over into Network News at nine o'clock on a weekday night with Sean Hannity and it bleeds from Hannity do you the other non news portions of Fox News and then guess who sees it when it gets played on the curvy couch at Fox & Friends in the morning and then tweets his approval okay now that is not collusion what I call it in the book is convergence each actor has done something for their own purposes the president feeds the base the Russians to mess with our heads all right they're conspiratorial Fox for ratings but it drives us into a far more divisive society than we would we would otherwise be by the way I counted there are 1,750 American athletes who suit up every Sunday and Monday for the NFL the Sunday before the Huntsville speech six didn't stand at attention this is a brick shy of a national crisis because of the atmospherics of our of our politics we make ourselves vulnerable to self manipulation and manipulation by an outside actor so I already mentioned that I I am I I say that they the high friction points of the Trump administration not surprisingly but you kinda have to step back and look at it the high friction points of the Trump administration have been with intelligence law enforcement justice science scholarship and journalism and what do they have in common they're all fact-based they're evident they're imperfect they get things wrong some may be corrupt but the essence of those disciplines is evidence-based a Dressel of of the of the of the world all right and actually it's kind of cute I did you know I did intelligence they did it and they're there and they're there are all the fact-based institutions now two years ago when I was here my fact-based institution was over here because these other ones were yelling at us because of the way we acquire data as you already mentioned detentions and Tara Gaye shion's surveillance I haven't had an argument about that for two years the other fact-based institutions are hugging us like we're long-lost relatives because they now recognize intelligence in its genuine Western democracy forum is fact-based and they see the need for intelligence to be part of this holding the ground based on fact based view of objective reality um so I've talked a lot about a little bit about the Russians I've talked about the layer of the cake that's us a few words on the layer of the cake that's the president and the administration I do not have to document how distant the president often is from objective reality all right you you you you all get that but there's some folks in the room who actually are good friends and I've got some professional ties to that I've talked to and we've had presidents who lie before right wait you didn't tell guys not a handle that we've we've had presidents who have argued with us before about no that's you know I don't agree with your objective view I think this is the objective view okay we're not I have that too this isn't that back to the back to the original theme this is a president for whom objective reality is not the departure point and that sounds harsh and judgmental but I just merely mean it to be descriptive and again not you know trying to expand my own knowledge so I'm fair to everybody involved I came across a term called metacognition okay and I it's in the book in the better description I'll give you now but frankly metacognition is the ability to think about your thinking okay it's the ability to get outside yourself and observe yourself so that you know if you're a director of a play you can say that scene is not working or if you're a musician you can say well missed that note okay people who lack metacognition right don't observe themselves and so when they get into an area that's over their head or about which they do not know very much they keep on talking okay I read that after hour doing research and I harken back to two events one during the campaign remember that the the candidate was making a lot about well we're gonna kill Terry we're not just gonna kill terrorists we're gonna kill their families remember that so I'm on Bill Maher pushing the first book all right and and it's two years ago and Martha says hey we're gonna kill terrorists no no we're not gonna do that and I just kind of stood up for them for the laws of armed conflict and so on the next week there is a presidential debate and Bret Baier references my comment on Bill Maher says Mike Aidan used to kind of run CIA says we're not killing terrorists families that they will refuse to do that and and now President then candidate Trump says although no they won't refuse me and then he went into a kind of a leadership theme as to people people follow him and then he explained why we need to kill terrorists families because you know the 9/11 families were here in the United States and they flew out an airplane several days before the attack took place and they went out over where wherever they were from and they watched the attacks taking place with their husbands doing the attack from overseas that is pure well it's not correct okay I mean it's just totally made up more recently more more more recently the president went to Davos recall back in February and former CNN correspondent a Brit thank you there's Morgan is doing a long-form interview with the president and they they get to they get to global warming okay and then the president goes into this kind of long uninterrupted discourse about they used to call it global warming they don't call it global warming now because they have to call it climate change because they're parts of the earth are getting warmer but they're other parts of the earth are getting colder and then they said the polar ice caps going to go away and right now the polar ice caps are the biggest save ever been okay well okay that's not true either okay that actually it's exactly the opposite you know in in the in the history of measuring the ice caps here's metacognition decision-making based upon something of an objective view of reality but I I wound up with that story to ask you that was the president he travel was inside a very large ecosystem did anyone in that ecosystem after that interview say mr. president a private word which now brings me you know I'll stop in two or three minutes and get to your questions which now brings me to the to the role of truth tellers inside inside the administration how is it that the intelligence community which is designed and with all of our flaws all right which is designed to create and as accurate a view of reality as we can so that American policy and what I what I'm fond is saying is it's it's very rare it was I can think of one instance where I went in there was so much evidence that I was kind of like tossing a syllogism at the president you know or kind of whereas whereas whereas whereas in that prison well okay Mike therefore very often almost in all instances all we do on a very good day is to create the left and the right hand boundaries of of logical policy discussion that is our task and you know we kind of get to say you know if you're over here you're probably dividing by zero and you're not gonna get a good get a good answer and if you're over here you're assuming water is gonna run uphill and that's not gonna work either we create we create that boundary and now the challenge is the challenges for intelligence for a president who reasons differently all right his instinctive intuitive has an almost preternatural confidence in his own upright norine narrative as of how the world works how did the fact-based guys then get into the head of the president and that's that's kind of the last 50% of the book how did how does that take place let me end because I do want to leave a lot of time for questions let me end with a part of the book that I that I tribute to John McLaughlin okay John is a former acting DCI good friend teaches down at Johns Hopkins John John characterizes the relationship with the president with the intelligence community in in four phases all right he said phase one was really raw ignorance I mean the candidate know they made candidate never been in government he knew nothing about the plumbing how things work I mean one of the tells is that there it was really clear he thought CIA was the whole game when in reality my CI is important all right but there are a bunch of other institutions out there and so we went from ignorance okay to to a zone of what John calls antagonism alright and that oh that had to do with the third layer of the cake that had to do with the with our telling him the story that the Russians had intervened in the American electoral process and that was actually a great tragedy for us we always have to adjust to a new president we always have to you know adapt how we approach him based upon how he or she learns right and there's always a speed bump unfortunately the first time we have we had a meaningful dialogue with president-elect Trump it was on the Russian issue where we were just putting out facts as we knew it to be but where he saw an issue that other people not the intelligence community but other people were using to D legitimize his election as president but that is a perfect storm and frankly from the intelligence point of view kind of a national tragedy so you want from ignorance to antagonism zone 3 where we are now phase 3 we're kind of in a zone of what John calls inevitability okay yeah I can't do the job without talking to these guys and even if we have trouble setting the left and right hand boundaries I mean there's a rhythm to decision-making in which the intelligence folks need to be in there I mean even if they don't set the strategic policy you need the tactical information to even make a bad decision work right and so we've got this zone of inevitability so zone one ignorant zone two antagonism zone three and Evatt ability and then john says we will get to zone four when bob mower reports out and then we will see where we go it is an issue I raised in the book I'm happy to entertain in the QA that the president when he gets pushback from the institutions of his own government the fact-based institutions does not argue the facts he attacks the institutions and and so you've got the attack on the FBI you've got the attack on the Attorney General you've got the attack on the Department of just not so much lately but you've had attacks on the intelligence community alright D legitimizing institutions that are the fact-based institutions that provide the the fundamental infrastructure of a country that has been founded on and governs itself reflecting the values of the Enlightenment that we need to make decisions based upon objective truth and so that the the call for the book kind of Creed occur at the end is that obviously you have to protect your own personal integrity but for God's sake you've got to protect the institution's because we're gonna need them again and I do think the badly mix my metaphors I do think we're gonna hit a lot of whitewater when when the model Commission the Muller investigation reports out and so my guidance to my old tribe is stand fast below to the president try to help him succeed but protect the institutions and with that I've used up my allotted time and I'll stop and happily take well I should say that you're assuming that the reason he rejects all the Russia stuff is because some people use it to deal JIT amongst his victory it's also possible that he took an enormous amount of money from Putin and that's why he doesn't want the investigation to proceed because we'll find it but my question is where are the Republicans Devin Yuna's all the Republicans in the Senate I mean today I heard on my way over Trump called immigrants animals they're terrible animals where are the Republicans this isn't you know we have the Democrats over here they're liberal radicals we have the Republicans over here they're far-right everybody it's all of us it isn't okay so that that reflects the lower layer of the cake all right this only happens if we create the conditions where this kind of leadership can succeed but let me let me develop the fun and actually spend some time on this in the book I'm hard to get all sitting in in 26 minutes so the normal constitutional checks on a President may if you read the document you should come from the other branches of government and most fundamentally comes from Congress right until I mean that's supposed to be competing all right there they're supposed to be tension I mean I testified his director of CIA I knew I was existing on the outer edges of executive prerogative and so when I went up there it mattered that I was serving a Republican president and the Democrats had the majority okay but that wasn't that that wasn't the big fault line the big fault line was article one article two I was representing the power of the executive in its extreme and it didn't matter whether you're Republican or Democrat Congress pushed back and that was the stress point that is not happening all right right the what the most remarkable thing is happening that the pushback against the president right now is coming from the departments and agencies of the executive branch it's coming from the FBI is coming from justice it's coming from other interests Solutions and remarkable of remarkable events the president is trying to enlist members of his party in the legislature to rein in the agencies and departments of his own executive branch I have never seen that before and that's kind of a good summary as the to the kind of pathological dynamic we have underway that the normal breaks on the president aren't and that the breaks on the present are coming from the deep state which I choose to define his career professionals governed by the rule of law okay here we are thank you thank you yes hi thanks for a great talk I I'd like to pick up if you're ask you to pick up where you left off and in talking about your sort of your admonition to the intelligence community your advice yes present facts but in the end protect the institutions so given the current intelligence community including the professional staff as well as its leadership what what do you think the that community is capable of doing and protecting you know to what extent to what lengths would they in your belief go to to protect institution say in the event of firing robert muller or in the event that his report is extremely damaging and dangerous to the president so so so far i mean a lot of the sounds you hear from downtown are the institution's holding their ground all right i mean you've had the director of NSA i mentioned this earlier director of NSA director the FBI the Attorney General said no we didn't wiretap Trump Tower period I mean in open session they're answering that question today the director of the FBI said no that Russian thing that's not a witch-hunt all right and so that's that's that's good they need to they need to hold their ground again back to dynamics I talked about how this is twisting the normal constitutional or at least processes with Congress not being not being the break the other thing that's a bit twisted is that you've got the normal engines of government that are designed to help the president succeed all right and and they don't always seem attached to the decision-making process that that's that the president enjoys and so I think that's i think i think that's the history of HR McMaster who who was trying to to connect the the normal processes of making better informed reality based fact founded decisions to the decisions made by the president and he never was able to make those gears make those gears mesh so I'm not even addressing questions of lawfulness all right I mean that's that's a separate issue and you you heard Gina Haspel in our testimony says no we'll follow the law and I'm not worried about that but about it but I am so what I say in the book is that those things over here CIA and NSA and so on we always accommodate to the president all right presidents are different each each human being as president learns in a different way President Bush learned in the discussion president obama learned in a quiet moment he was a reader rather than a conversationalist for for the Intel folks President Trump has his own style all right so we accommodate to that we reflect the president's priorities all right so we accommodate to that but what I say in the book and this is real answer to your question what I what I say in the book is but you cannot accommodate so much to one president that you undercut the very legitimacy of the institution in the eyes of the institution in the eyes of the people are really important in the eyes of the next president who therefore might not believe you are what it is you pretend to be an objective fact-based intelligence organization so that's where I make the plea to hold hold pull the ground right so to be fair dan coates is director of national intelligence right dan coates is said that the Iranians are not cheating on the deal there are no material breaches that Iran is further away from a weapon with this deal than they are without it and that we know more about the Iranian program with the deal then we wouldn't know without the deal he said that publicly and then remember didn't didn't connect but but he said it and he held his ground yeah thank you that's a wonderful presentation it seems to me though there's a layer you're leaving out you're not talking about the corporation's about the interests behind a lot of this policy regardless of whether or not we have a president that's off his rocker but that and that affects your agency or your agencies including military and so forth we're always in them and us situation continuously throughout our history and that benefits arms industry and intelligence industries and other aspects so that if we can't see that layer in addition to the three that you represented we're never free because look at the tax policy look who won on that issue look who wins with the arms sales to Saudi Arabia to Israel and so forth so where's that leg so I get it until my book I mean that's a residual problem all right that is not new with this president all right and we you know President Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex so so is it it's kind of a long-term condition so to be very honest I have not I've not addressed it but but again returning to fact-based decision making can't hurt in in what you what you're discussing today no the Eisenhower played into that - well no I get it I'd like to build on this gentleman's question obviously there was a breakdown during the Bush administration for the Iraq war I'd like you to discuss the commonalities of the bush right intelligence committed community and now I'm sure a great great and fair question and I do address it in the book because it's kind of hard to say you're not basing decisions based on fact and I'm a signatory to the Iranian National Intelligence Estimate sorry the Iraqi National Intelligence Estimate on weapons of mass destruction they kind of got I need to tell you about this one too all right and I mentioned that in the book that was an argument over what constituted objective reality all right and and and and the facts of the case are the following we in the intelligence community believe what we wrote it was politically convenient for the president it was politically useful for the president it was very useful in making a case for war but we actually believed it all right so it wasn't made up it was our view of objective reality we were just wrong there was another case that was being pushed by some in the administration and that was that there was an operational relationship between the Iraqis and al-qaeda okay we believe that to be absolutely untrue and we dug in and we opposed it and and and so it's again it's I've admitted earlier we can all get it wrong but getting it wrong pursuing objective reality it is one thing being comfortable with making decisions on something other than objective reality is another and that's that's the case I think as I said we know how to handle presidents who lie we know how to handle presidents who disagree with us but this is different I'll give you one example one to use and it was a friend of mine in the room we we talked about this at great length remember the Boy Scout speech out in Virginia for the Jamboree you know a little little over the top for 12 year olds okay and the president comes back president comes back and you know there's a everyone's upset and he said no way the leadership of the Boy Scouts called me he said was a greatest speech they'd ever gotten okay no that is not true the question is does he know that does does the mind make a distinction between what happened and what was useful to have happened and that's that's that's the difference I'm trying to so you're saying that the the quality of the intelligence community is equal from the Bush administration or you know well we went to school okay only Iraq and ie and so just add the footnote and so the estimate on the Russians right you know the Russians did this for these purposes was given with high confidence and I would tell you after the Iraq and ie I mean we're real careful before we slap high confidence on any judgment so that made me comfortable but they had a good evidentiary stack to back it up yes hi general Hayden thanks very much for your time over the past decades there's been a sort of a pendulum swinging between human intelligence and signals intelligence I was curious having served at the helm of NSA and CIA whether you think that pendulum where that is now and whether that will still hold for the future so I don't I don't address this in this book I touched it in the and the old one a couple years back and fundamentally or not what I will tell you is because everybody in this room has been so careless with what it is they put in their cell phones okay not you but globally all right we have decided for convenience that even the enemies of the United States love being online all right and and just think of your own practices all right I mean how much more do you do with that instrument in your coat pocket that used to be done in person or the data used to be kept in a drawer or something like that and so we've gone through a period of 10 or 15 years and kind of began when I was at NSA that's ninety nine to two but now where if we figured if we could do this half well this would be the Golden Age of electronic surveillance and then I'm talking about against foreign foreign intelligence targets all right but everyone's getting smarter now we're talking about end-to-end encryption we're those communications which were carelessly put out there and made available to espionage services are now getting more secure and and so I think the broad trend is we're gonna have to cut attend to our knitting in some of the other disciplines like human intelligence and in other sources so it just it shifts my sense is the shift is in the direction of human because signals intelligence might be a little less available thank you almost being equal I think I think we'd all prefer presidents who are fact-based and able to admit when they're wrong and and and consider sort of you know arguments that go against their their train of thought but let me serve through another historical example up there and then see see what you have to say so across the Kennedy and Johnson administration's you know they assembled a cabinet that people called the best in the brightest and Robert McNamara probably considered himself to be like the Mark Zuckerberg part-time he was nothing but evidence based fact-based data-driven and yet over the course of six years you could say we ended up in a far worse blunder than say Iraq how would you how do you square that was sort of where we are right now so when I was a mid-range officer probably lieutenant colonel I read HR McMasters book on this all right dereliction of duty which is a description of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during during this during this very period and and and fundamentally HR condemns the chief for not pressing their case all right for agreeing with the politically look in real life okay when you go in there with a case that cuts across the president's preferred fill-in-the-blank policy narrative preconceived belief you gotta you gotta buckle in and and you've got a you've got to push back hard all right I had a minor version of that with President Bush as we were describing what the war in Iraq was it went from dead-enders okay to an insurgency to a civil war to something worse than a civil war and as we made each analytical leap we had to sit down with the president who was not being made happy that the signal foreign policy action of his administration was doing this but we dug in and said it so it wasn't so in that case an HR makes it very very clear it was the truth-tellers not doing their duty not insisting hi thank you for being here tonight general thanks so I understand you're speaking about this dynamic of post truth administration accountable to a post truth base in America but I was wondering if you could at all speak to how much we're seeing that dynamic in other countries and I don't just mean our close allies in the UK with brexit but I've heard similar descriptions in Russia with this whole you know nothing's true and everything is possible so I I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the Russian Information bubble and I've already given it short shrift here tonight there's a lot in the book about what the Russians did and what we should do about it but the Russians began with themselves all right and they bubbled their own people and then they extended that bubble to Europe and towards us to to give this kind of informational shield over the seizure of the Crimea and the occupation of the dawn boss and then I go a great length in the book to talk about something called Jade helm 15 okay I'm getting some nods here yeah this is a vanilla exercise by American special forces in Texas and several other southern states that Russian BOTS and the outright media turned into an Obama administration roundup of political opponents up to and including abandoned Walmart's being used as concentration camps and boxcars transiting Texas with leg irons attached attached to the floor it got so much traction that the government of Texas called out the State Guard which is a volunteer force okay to watch the feds exercise to calm the population down and so you've got the Russians playing this game a lot now they put it on us and I think with some success with regard to our last election they've tried it on Norway has no effect okay because Norway doesn't have that first layer of the cake that that that we have there are other countries more susceptible and I do think Russian activity as an effect Poland in in Great Britain I mean they they did tighten up the pressure with regard to brexit and so on and so I I don't talk a lot about the rest of the world but there are other examples of what you and I would call modern democracies drifting in the direction of personalism autocracy I won't say authoritarianism but but certainly in the direction of autocracy certainly populism all right and so it is a more generalized trend yeah as you said you mentioned that in Russia for example this was started domestically yeah but do you think that there as here the intelligence community is sort of also caught in that bubble no um no I'm very careful I've member said intelligence law enforcement journalism and so on I'm very careful to say in the Western liberal tradition mmm alright and so there there are intelligent services oh and not all of them a Russian who begin with their own op priori mythologically based view of the world you know I used to work with a lot of them okay and I tell the story in the first book I'm across the table from a thoroughgoing professional until somebody somebody who's a foreign partner until somebody hits a button and all of a sudden he starts talking not based on data but on his Nations creation mythology all right at which point you don't nod because he might take transmission received as in I agree with your transmission okay you kind of lock your eyes one of the passages in the first book that I very happy with though it's going back my wife Janine is here and going back to the c-17 to fly from capital X capital y I get go in the back of the jet pour myself a glass of wine and then think what was it that I said that had that usually very professional officer on the other side of the table going oh you know here comes American mythology at what point did he have that that response but again when I talk about looping in intelligence with journalism and science and scholarship talking the Western liberal tradition thank you very much hey sir is a director of the CIA what he would do if he became knowledgeable of a disaster catastrophe genocide a holocaust and he went into detail how he discussed this with his directors and he finally couldn't answer the question later Rwanda came about and the director failed to make known what was going on did he do the right thing by holding back you know I don't I don't know that my life experience comports with the with the preamble with the with the preamble of the question s Jim Woolsey right a bigger part that's Jim Woolsey right no who who was it after I'd rather that's okay fine well I was the j2 in Europe during the Rwandan genocide and and we certainly knew about it because we deployed we deployed late all right we deployed after the original genocide but we did deploy so it wasn't that we didn't know that's right okay but you just these directors that time didn't to speak I want to thank you for the honest courageous and insightful analysis that you've provided I'd like to ask you have you ever thought of running for elective office never next question thank you again okay thank you sir yeah thank you generally I'll try to be we got three or four I'll try to be really efficient oh yeah okay so you talked about your friends in Pittsburgh and they're sort of ambivalence I think it's kind of more that they're on the team maybe and they they've sided with Trump and they'll believe what he says and Trump perhaps generally Trump will say what favors him in the moment and supports his side yep and a lot of things he says rhymes with some of their core beliefs so I'm sorry to interrupt but the example I you know I know based on fact okay broad macro that's the word statistics immigration is a national advantage for the United States but when I'm talking to a guy in the back room of a bar in Pittsburgh his micro experience may be totally contrary and so when you have a president who appeals to that mic will experience the president's statement may not be factually correct rhymes with a fear or belief that someone has exactly so and James Comey in his book talked about during the election the Obama administration talked about inoculation they tossed around this idea of trying to tell people this was going on I think to some extent we that has happened now we all know that it's happened but do you see a path forward now in terms of what we can do to inoculate the population in any way or encourage a certain so very very brief I talked about this in the book one of the one of the elements I fear is our getting numb our accepting some things as norm when they aren't norm all right and so I really do try to point out in the book you don't know don't say that's okay all right it's it's it's not it's different it's popular air quotes here all right at the moment but it's it's not normal in the literal derivation of the word and and so that that's what I would hold I would or no that's not I will not allow that behavior to be normalized for the conduct of office government public and so on in general just keep speaking yeah yeah thank you good evening sir thank you for your you're talking for this book the assault on intelligence makes me wonder about the question of counterintelligence sir do to treat that subject from say I do not in the book and it is intelligence informing policy not kind of one of the subplots is how does intelligence defend itself against foreign adversaries so I don't in this book I did in the previous book and talk about it there thank you good evening sir quick question are we are we you as our relationships with our allies because the intelligence community relies on its allies to conduct effective operations are we is that being a rep really irreparably damaged or in eroded by the current administration and is that something that may be difficult to recover from in the immediate future which will significantly impact our ability to catch you counterintelligence so so your specific question hasn't been interrupted we harmed and my answer is I don't think so alright so we got a lot of partners we got people out there want to be friends with CIA far more than they want to be friends of America all right I mean no I mean it's we're a big powerful organization and even at the political level when you you got all sorts of you know disagreement they still come visit you at Langley and they still welcome you in their in their national capital so I've mentioned my wives here we will direct her of 31 months we went to 50 countries alright and that's and a lot more came King Langley and so they do that because we're actually pretty good at this and although we get some things we would not otherwise get the rate of exchange in the other direction is always far greater which is big okay but I am concerned I am concerned over the long term so you saw the episode the last 10 days you had the Chancellor of Germany you had the President of France he had the Foreign Minister of Great Britain all come here and say you know we've been thinking why don't we wait a little bit and we went ahead and ripped up the Iranian deal and so fear I have is that in appearance and maybe even in reality America first might push us in the direction of America alone and so if I were still director referring back to your question I would probably get a little group over the side here and I'm just saying don't we're not publishing anything but I want you to go over here and just huddle up and come back and come back in a month or two and tell me how we would do this if we didn't have as many friends what is it what I I would have to change internal to us if we couldn't guarantee the number of depth of liaison relationships we have so I would I'd begin to think about that a bit yes thank you good evening general Hayden thank you for your time my question relates to something you mentioned towards the end of your presentation respecting upholding the institution's remaining steadfast if people like rod Rosenstein Bob Muller are doing their job respecting the institution's upholding them how can we Rilla Judah Mize those very institutions they serve that I think we could agree a sizable population of Americans you know let's believe are currently a farce not now believe their suspect yes exactly you know I know I travel a lot not just on the book but you know have a lot of conversations and there's a good chunk you know I'll make up a number of about a third who fundamental believe that the problem here is that the institution's I'm saying we need to protect they're saying the problem is they're corrupt and frankly are trying to overturn the results of the democratic process and so I was on Bill Maher but ten days ago and one of my panels I didn't do this but one of the I was there with a libertarian a progressive all right CIA libertarian progressive it was great but the but the progressive in responding to no I'm sorry the libertarian and responding to a question said don't impeach don't try okay you know indict or impeach no matter where the evidence leads and I'm not prejudging okay I'm not prejudging where the evidence goes he says the only way you can affect change that the American people wouldn't that a chunk of the American people will not believe is a coup is take it is to have an election and make whatever change we have the product of an election rather than an extraordinary extraordinary activity so that's where our national dialogue is now not and I think that's that's correct and again I may be very careful I mean I'm not prejudging anything that director mowers going to come up with but but but I do think what I fear is what he comes up with is gonna be a national Rorschach test and a third of America is gonna go you see I told you and the other third is gonna see yeah I told you yeah and then this third in the middle is gonna be going back and forth and that does not get the cloud away it's now over us and darkening our dialogue thank you for your time thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 29,276

Rating: 4.4835887 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Hayden, Michael V. Hayden, CIA, C.I.A., NSA, National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, The Assault on Intelligence, Donald Trump, President Trump, Trump, fake news, Russian interference, Russian meddling, Vladimir Putin, Russia, Iraq War, George W. Bush, national security, Politics and Prose, Washington DC, facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Playing to the Edge, American politics, alternative facts, post-truth, post-truth era, Russian bots, Russian trolls

Id: KJP26YxuRiU

Length: 63min 33sec (3813 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2018