General Michael Hayden is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and the only man to have ever run both the NSA and the CIA. He is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy founded by the former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoft, and a professor at the George Mason University School of Public Policy and Government and International Affairs. He s also the author of Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, which is well worth reading. In this interview, General Hayden talks about his background in the Air Force and CIA, the ethics of spying and the trade-off between privacy and security, Edward Snowden and the consequences of his leaks, and his opinion on the Russian hacking of the U.S. election. He also talks about the differences between the CIA and the NSA, and why they are so different from each other, and what makes them so different. He also explains why he thinks the CIA is better than the NSA. And why he doesn t think the CIA should be more like a spy agency. The Making Sense Podcast is made possible by the support of our listeners. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, we don t need to pay for ads. So if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. Please consider becoming one of our supporters. You ll get access to our premium memberships, which includes ad-free versions of the Making Sense podcast and access to all our premium features, including the premium features and special bonus features. Subscribe to our most listened to this week's Making Sense. and much more! Subscribe and subscribe to the podcast on Audible, wherever you get the most premium episodes of the show. Enjoy! Subscribe, subscribe to our newest episode of Making Sense and subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform, wherever else you re listening to podcasts are listening to the making sense podcast? You get 10% off your favorite podcatcher, and get 20% off the entire podcast, plus a discount on future episodes, plus an additional 5% off of the next week's next week sakes, free shipping, shipping and shipping plans, and free shipping throughout the coming in the coming months, plus other perks, plus more personalized offers, plus all kinds of goodies, including a free shipping policies and goodies, coming soon, coming up in the next month!
00:05:11.700Look, I mean, look, these are all bureaucracies, and that's good news and bad.
00:05:15.920I mean, bureaucracies are how humans organize themselves in order to be most efficient with a specific task.
00:05:23.280But, you know, the way I've always put it is that it takes one kind of culture to intercept communications for which you are not the intended recipient, that's NSA, and another kind of culture to suborn people to give you information that, frankly, the organization to which they belong doesn't want you to have.
00:05:43.340Those are different things, and so they build up a bit of different kinds of cultures.
00:05:50.980The magic is to preserve enough of those cultures so that they can actually do what they're supposed to do in the first place.
00:05:56.900But they also cooperate and synchronize and harmonize their activities.
00:06:03.240And is there efficient sharing of information at this point?
00:06:09.000And look, my irreverent way of answering that, if God were giving us a grade and God were marking on a curve comparing us to other countries, we'd get an A.
00:06:21.620But neither God nor the American people should mark us on the curve.
00:06:28.980And so the sharing of information, again, created in these different kinds of organizations,
00:06:34.580the sharing of information is something that you always want to improve on.
00:06:39.100So described that way, the CIA and the NSA have different liabilities.
00:06:44.360I think at one point you say this in the book that the CIA has often been faulted for, in its use of human intelligence, for collaborating with bad people.
00:07:37.520But, as you suggest, in the modern world, it's hard to intercept the communications of people who, frankly, I think you want us to listen to, without bumping in to the communications of Americans.
00:07:50.480And there's always great distrust that NSA intentionally or inadvertently listens to people it shouldn't be listening to.
00:08:00.960Perhaps you should define this term signals intelligence or SIGINT.
00:08:20.820That's the NSA folks, the electrons and photons of modern communication.
00:08:25.780And then U-MINT, human intelligence, which is the work of CIA.
00:08:30.640The politics of spying are pretty interesting because there are many things we do which everyone knows or assumes that we do.
00:08:40.420And so they're essentially open secrets.
00:08:42.080But when a secret is made explicit, people seem to react very badly to this information.
00:08:47.480So I'm thinking in particular of our surveillance or claimed surveillance of Angela Merkel's cell phone that was revealed by, I believe, by Edward Snowden, or at least alleged by Edward Snowden.
00:08:59.560And, you know, this created an international incident.
00:09:02.020But isn't it the case that all major governments both are allies and not assume that this sort of spying goes on all the time?
00:09:13.380And in their quieter moments, they understand.
00:09:16.120They're not enthusiastic about it, but they do accept that that kind of stuff is an accepted international practice.
00:09:23.580So I was in Germany visiting at a conference during the height of the kerfuffle we had after Snowden's allegations.
00:09:32.780And I told a story to the Germans, which was simply, you know, after Senator Obama was elected, he had run his campaign through his black bear.
00:09:43.700And, of course, we saw that and said, Mr. President-elect, don't know that you should be doing that now.
00:10:16.860The backstory is we were telling the soon-to-be most powerful man in the most powerful nation on Earth
00:10:22.880that if he used his BlackBerry in his national capital, his emails, text messages, and phone calls would be intercepted by a big number of foreign intelligence services.
00:10:34.160And we didn't rend our garments or feign outrage.
00:10:37.360We just understood that's the way things are.