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The Great Gatsby
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Michael Hayden Quotes

Public discussion of how we determine al Qaeda intentions, I just – I can’t see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation.

– Michael Hayden

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas, and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

– Michael Hayden

There’s this movie, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Some have complained that too many ‘secrets’ were dished out by the intelligence and special operations communities to director Kathryn Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Boal and their crew, part of a broader pattern of using intelligence for political effect.

– Michael Hayden

We’re an organization with a clear objective: to protect the American people. We have a number of missions that feed into that, to protect America, and one of those missions we share with the council, which is to help our policymakers make sense of global events.

– Michael Hayden

All enterprises and major players need to pay attention to the needs of the government of the country of which they are a part. At one level, it would be unconscionable for a company like Huawei not to be responsive to Chinese national-security needs.

– Michael Hayden

A significant U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan has been continuous since October 2001, and President Obama’s short-lived ‘surge’ in 2009 was a continuation of his predecessor’s buildup there.

– Michael Hayden

President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community – the people Edward Snowden betrayed.

– Michael Hayden

Before he played CIA Director Saul Berenson on ‘Homeland,’ a much younger Mandy Patinkin gained some fame as Inigo Montoya, a legendary swordsman, in ‘The Princess Bride.’

– Michael Hayden

Apple and Google want to create encryption for which they could not provide you the key. Their business model will not survive if the American government has a special relationship with them that requires them to surrender this kind of information.

– Michael Hayden

There’s a bigger difference between the first and second Bush administrations than there is between Bush and Obama. That’s really true.

– Michael Hayden

At the end of the 30 Years War then, Europe broadly decided to separate the sacred from the secular in its political culture. I know that is an oversimplification, but it is instructive, and it led to a growth in religious tolerance that has characterized the best of Western life since.

– Michael Hayden

Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.

– Michael Hayden

Intelligence collection is not confined to the communications of adversaries or of the guilty. Rather, it’s about gaining information otherwise unavailable that would help keep Americans safe and free.

– Michael Hayden

Americans are very practical folks. Accustomed to hard choices in their own lives, they are willing to give us in intelligence a lot of slack as we make the hard choices our profession demands.

– Michael Hayden

People don’t question American power. What people need to be convinced of is American will.

– Michael Hayden

I’m a career Air Force officer. We have a saying in the Air Force: ‘If you want people to be with you at the crash, you’ve got to put them on the manifest.’ And so I was always of the view to almost leave no stone unturned when you’re up there briefing the Hill.

– Michael Hayden

When the intelligence is making a policymaker too happy, he ought to challenge it, and even if he doesn’t, the intelligence briefer needs to launch a red team against his own conclusions to see if he can hold his ground.

– Michael Hayden

When at the CIA, I was fond of saying that many jihadis join the movement for the same reasons that young Americans join the Crips and the Bloods: youthful alienation, the need to belong to something greater than self, the search for meaningful identity. But it also matters what gang you join.

– Michael Hayden

When asked if I miss being in government, I usually try to lighten the moment by responding that I awake most days, read the paper, and then observe that, ‘It’s yet another great day to be the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.’

– Michael Hayden

I know of no government official who would welcome an army of inspectors general combing through four years of emails on their unclassified accounts. That’s why they use government accounts, where the government remains responsible for security, and they don’t mingle personal correspondence with official.

– Michael Hayden

ThinThread was not the program of record of my predecessor, Ken Minihan, OK. I did not make ThinThread the program of record while I was director. After I left in 2005, Keith Alexander also chose not to make ThinThread the program of record.

– Michael Hayden

I told them that free people always had to decide where to draw the line between their liberty and their security. I noted that the attacks would almost certainly push us as a nation more toward security.

– Michael Hayden

It’s hard to brief in the Oval. You know, you can’t – no visual aids, hard to roll out something in front of somebody.

– Michael Hayden

Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.

– Michael Hayden

The attorney general is the only one who can authorize what’s called an emergency FISA.

– Michael Hayden

When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been – and I’m choosing my words very carefully here – effective in our expansion. We really had – expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren’t. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part.

– Michael Hayden

Right after 9/11, I mean, every agency can give their own gradation, but a nice, popular rule of thumb is everybody doubled down. I ended up in NSA with about twice as much money as I had prior to 9/11.

– Michael Hayden

My experience has been that military assessments on ‘how goes the war’ are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.

– Michael Hayden

The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president’s authority only against al Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes.

– Michael Hayden

The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them.

– Michael Hayden

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