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. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot. – Michael Hayden
This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
We live inside a democracy, and you know, public will matters in a democracy. I just hope it’s informed public will, and frankly, when the decisions are made, you understand the costs. – Michael Hayden
When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
National security looks different from the Oval Office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa. – Michael Hayden
Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
Our nation counts on us to have the expertise and the insight to flag the risks and the opportunities that lie ahead, and to keep our eye on all the critical international concerns that face our nation right now. – Michael Hayden
As director of CIA, I was responsible for everything done in the agency’s name, and it didn’t matter whether that was done by an agency employee, a government contractor, a liaison service on our behalf, or a source on our behalf. – Michael Hayden
If we are going to conduct espionage in the future, we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn’t stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary. – Michael Hayden
‘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. – Michael Hayden
When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
As much as we might look for opportunities to keep Iraq together, we need to be prepared for the reality that it’s not going to stay together. – Michael Hayden
My personal view is that Iran, left to its own devices, will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage, so the needle isn’t quite in the red for the international community. And, frankly, that will be as destabilizing as their actually having a weapon. – Michael Hayden
Responsibility demands action, and dealing with the immediate threat must naturally be a top priority. – Michael Hayden
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. – Michael Hayden
Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril. – Michael Hayden
