Marc: So Mike, there's a dispute now between Apple and the FBI. You know James Comey. You
know the folks on all sides...
Hayden: I actually know Tim Cook too.
Marc: There you go. And so, it seems to be a dispute in some way between the national
security establishment and the tech establishment, but Bill Gates has sort of said that Apple
should be more cooperative and you, one of the great national security leaders of our
country have backed Apple. What's happening here?
Hayden: I'm defending Apple. Look Marc, there's probably a constitutional question here. And
I'm not a constitutional lawyer. There's clearly a privacy security-balancing thing here, and
I'll let wise people think about that. I just look at this in the security line and frankly,
given the variety of threats that America faces, one needs be careful that in dealing
with this threat over here, we don't make it more difficult to deal with that threat
over here. And so I think we need to be careful about what the government's asking Apple to
do, because if you believe Apple, and frankly a whole bunch of other technologists, even
done well. You know, dual key, key under lock, court order and so on, even done well, you
have actually opened up greater possibilities for degrading what would otherwise be almost
unbreakable end-to-end encryption.
And Jim Clapper, in the last, what two or three years in his worldwide threat briefing,
Director of National Intelligence, has said the number one threat facing America is the
cyber threat. And so I would ask the government, frankly being a security guy, I think the
government has the right to demand this. I just don't know that it's a wise thing for
the government to demand it. Now if you want me to make...I've kind of teed up the issue
as to why we need to be careful. If you want me to make a judgment, my judgment is that
we're probably better served by not punching any holes into a strong encryption system,
even well-guarded holes.
Marc: Okay so. But this is a challenge that we have in the high tech world. So for example,
if I have a home, I can lock the door to my house. I can put the most high-tech security
system into my home, but when the government comes with a lawful warrant and says that,
"You have to let us in," I have to let you in. I have to disable the system and all the
rest. Basically, what it sounds like is the tech companies are building a technology that
will blow up my home if you try and come in.
Hayden: Yeah, but actually in this case you're asking the tech companies to build a key that
opens 320 million houses.
Marc: Interesting. So...
Hayden: And that's really the deal. When this all began, Marc, I said, "I know this is bad."
I'm not sure if this leads to that. But the longer I've thought about it, I'm trending
that yeah, this does lead to that. And the metaphor you raised is actually the right
one. This key isn't just to my house. This key opens everybody's house.
Marc: So does the national security establishment, we know how important getting content has
been for national security. Is content going to be out of our reach from now on?
Hayden: Content will be more out of our reach no matter what we do in this case. This is
just an inevitable advance in technology. By the way, you play this out two and three
moves down the board, we could have a really bad outcome. What if you compel U.S. companies
to do this, and we drive the highest end encryption on the planet offshore. If you look, Apple's
actually been cooperative in all the other things with regard to the phone. All of what
I call the digital exhaust that these folks have been putting out, that was evadable to
Apple and they shared it with the government. It was evadable to them because they used
an Apple product.
They were in the Apple system. Now if we make Apple do this, offshore companies don't, we
will drive the international market to the offshore companies and we will now, not only
not get content. We won't get digital exhaust either. And my point is, there's a lot of
digital exhaust out there. Mike McConnell, one of my predecessors at NSA actually lived
through this movie. It was called Clipper Chip. And Mike wanted to bake in the back
door, actually into the silicon, and the Clinton administration would have none of it. And
Mike then tells the tale, thus began the greatest 15 years in the history of electronic surveillance.
Because everyone going to digital devices created this ocean of data, much of it meta
as opposed to content. But with metadata, you can do an awful lot. So, sorry. To specifically
answer your question, under any circumstances, we're going to get less content. It doesn't
mean we're going to get less intelligence.
Marc: Interesting. So we have to fight the war on terror on the fumes.
Hayden: Well, yeah on the stuff surrounding the data. And if you go into this domain...digital
exhaust is the best phrase I can think of. You can't avoid it. If that engine is pumping,
there's exhaust. You might not get what's inside, but you're able to learn an awful
lot by what's you're running.
Marc: Like an infrared picture. You can see the outline. You can see the heat element
but you can't tell who it is necessarily.
Hayden: Yeah, and you can learn a lot.
Marc: Yeah. Interesting. So is there a wall right now between the FBI and the NSA? Could
the FBI give this terrorist's phone to the NSA to have?
Hayden: Well, first of all I'm not in government. I don't know what's been done. I know of no
legal impediment that would prevent the bureau to ask the agency to do this on its behalf,
using the bureau's authorities rather than the agency's authorities. I know of no impediment
to that kind of cooperation.
Marc: And does the agency have...I've always heard, we hear about literally unbreakable
encryption. Is that a phrase that's accepted by the NSA?
Hayden: Well all encryption is breakable. It's just a matter of time. And unfortunately,
some of it's so good that time is measured in decades, not minutes. All right. And so,
I would not be surprised if the bureau has asked the agency, and the agency says, "We
can't deal with that." Apple's a big, powerful, technologically advanced enterprise. They're
good.
Marc: Interesting. So let's shift topics. Let's talk about the terrorist threat. You
spent a large chunk of your career keeping the American people safe from this threat,
and you were there in the intelligence community, as you mentioned in your new book, on September
11, 2001. So before September 11, 2001, we faced primarily a danger from one terrorist
network, which had safe haven in one country. Today, we face danger from multiple terrorist
networks. You have Al Qaeda, ISIS, and then all the Al Qaeda affiliates. AKYM, the Islamic
Maghreb, Al Shabob, multiple networks with safe haven in more than a half dozen countries.
Are we in a greater threat environment today than we were before 9/11?
Hayden: I don't say that. And here's how I draw the graph and the ether between us Marc,
is if this is where we were on September 10, and unfortunately we weren't quite aware we
were there, all right, the actions of two administrations has pushed that threat level
down. It was getting better and better and better, till about 2001, and then that line
nosed up again and is starting to increase. I do not think it has yet gotten back to the
level of September 10. But we unarguably less safe than we were one, two, three, or four
years ago.
Marc: But the threat has also metastasized. So it's like you were dealing with a cancer
in a specific location and trying to stop it from coming back. Now we have metastasized
cancers all over the place that are causing it.
Hayden: I would agree and to extend the analogy, just one more revolution and you know all
analogies break down eventually...
Marc: Of course.
Hayden: ...that one more revolution is that was a life-threatening cancer right next to
a vital organ. Now it's metastasized, as you've said. But individually, even collectively,
it is not yet quite as life threatening as that September 10 one was.
Marc: And we have though, a unique situation in the history of Islamic radicalism, short
as it is, modern Islamic radicalism, which is that you have free market competition between
two competing entities. It's like you have Apple and Microsoft competing...
Hayden: No. Actually what you've got is Apple and Xerox. You've got that mature, somewhat
bureaucratic, fairly slow moving Al Qaeda, and now you got this damn startup over here
that's acting like a Silicon Valley startup.
Marc: That's a really interesting analogy. But you have this competition going on and
so there with the coin of the realm, they're fighting for the hearts and minds of the Jihadi
faithful, they're fighting for the money from the Jihadi fundraiser around the world at
that. So how do you win that competition for who signs up with you, who gives you money,
you attack us right?
Hayden: No. And Marc, your question also reveals another great truth. You know, we argue with
ourselves about if we do x or y or z, we're just feeding the narrative. Guantanamo, it's
a recruitment poster. Targeted killings, you're filling in the b roll for the recruitment
video and so on. You want to pump up terrorist recruiting? You want people flocking to the
black banners? You have one big deal successful terrorist attack against the United States.
All right. So that truth you just pointed out applies not just to the competition between
groups. They want to score, but it also applies to the logic of why we need to do some of
the things we do. And the argument that some of the things we do helps recruitment, may
or may not be true. But if you really want to help recruitment, fail.
Marc: So aren't we in this terrible, vicious cycle where the intelligence committee before
9/11 was criticized for not doing enough to stop 9/11. So they turn around and they start
the CIA interrogation program. We have the NSA's activities. We do all these things and
at the time, in the wake of 9/11 they were incredibly popular among those who know them.
And then, they're so successful, that they prevent another attack, people start feeling
complacent again and they start criticizing the NSA and so now, we have to scale back
some of these programs and then, what's going to happen? We're going to get hit again and
the cycle starts again?
Hayden: You're right. There's a natural, predictable rhythm we all knew this. When we're doing
Plane to the Edge, as the title of my book suggests, when we're doing that, '01, '02,
'03, '04, we knew the pendulum would come swinging back. The existential whine that
we have in the intelligence community is that politically, it's not most Americans, but
political elites feel free to criticize us for not doing enough when they feel in danger.
And then immediately criticize us for doing too much once we have made them feel safe
again.
Marc: So you have just recently forced Donald Trump to do something he never does, which
is back track. So he announced that he's no longer for going beyond waterboarding.
Hayden: He's taking the war crimes plank out of the platform. Yeah.
Marc: We both know you know the people who ran the program. No one could have tortured
anybody in the United States government, but we did use some techniques that were necessary
in order to get people to talk. There's an element. I think every Republican candidate
has said that they would bring back some form of interrogation.
Hayden: Right.
Marc: Are we in danger now because we're no longer capturing and interrogating terrorists.
Hayden: Yeah, and frankly the primal problem is the ones you just suggested. It's not so
much what we do after we capture them. It's, we don't capture. All right, we don't. I've
got more fingers up in the air here Marc, then we've actually captured people outside
of internationally recognized theaters of conflict that we have not put into an Article
3 court. And by the way, putting someone into an Article 3 court is a very high bar. And
frankly, having that as your criteria, the only standard under which you will capture
and detain someone is illogical.
You've got this president, like his predecessors saying we're at war with Al Qaeda. Based on
the fact that we're at war, he feels he has the right to kill people, including American
citizens. And yet, powerful illogic is, I can't capture and hold them unless I've got
a criminal charge against them. I can't capture and hold them under the laws of armed conflict.
And it just boggles the mind as to why you demand A but somehow reject B. Now once we've
got them in our custody, there are a variety of techniques you can use, all of them lawful.
I would simply hope that any administration is, what's the right word, comfortable, confident,
enough to go ahead and as the circumstances dictate, use all the tools available to get
information that would save lives.
Marc: Now don't we have a problem though, because the Republican Congress just citified
Obama's executive order requiring the Army field manual...
Hayden: They did, and you know, one of the reasons Marc, that I kept the CIA program,
recall in December of '06, and what are we going to do. To tell the story, I could have
walked away from it. I just said well, that was then. This is now. We're not doing it
anymore. I did say that was then. This is now, but we need to continue to do at least
some of this. Because I wanted to keep the options open for the president. One of the
reasons, one of the arguments I had in my mind Marc, for the reasons I had to keep some
of this, was what you just said.
That the Department of Defense was hunkering down, with the rewrite of the Army field manual,
which was far more conservative in terms of interrogation techniques than the manual that
it replaced. It was totally unclassified. It didn't have a classified annex, like the
manual it replaced. Look, I understand why America's Army did that. They were trying
to recover some lost prestige after the genuine abuses of Abu Ghraib but it is an incredibly
conservative manual. And I make the argument, I made it then and I'll make it now Marc.
No one could claim that that manual exhausts the inventory of lawful interrogation techniques.
And so I would not have recommended to codify in law, something that prior to that, the
president still had the option to change.
Marc: Absolutely. Let's talk quickly about Afghanistan. So the Obama Administration recently
announced with great fanfare that they had destroyed a major Al Qaeda training camp in
Afghanistan, which sounds like good news. Except for one problem. There were no major
Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan when they came into office. So we see Al Qaeda
making a comeback in the land where they planned and launched 9/11. ISIS is moving in. There
was a story in the Washington post recently that ISIS is coming in and they're treating
people so brutally, that people actually long for the rule of the Taliban. And the Taliban
is making a comeback. And this is all as a result of the U.S. withdrawal or draw down.
Is Afghanistan going to become the next Iraq?
Hayden: You know, the administration, I think, saw a little bit of the handwriting on the
wall. Certainly their game plan for both places was based upon electoral promises and the
electoral calendar in North America. Not on any South West or Central Asian ground realities.
All right. And so we had this drive to zero in Iraq, and I don't think any canting human
being now, could think that the right number of residual number of American forces in Iraq
was zero, given what's happened there. Administration's gone to school a bit on it, but it still had
this internal conflict, Marc. Where you've got this electoral promise push to get as
close to zero as possible but now the reality is such on the ground that I think even the
administration recognizes zero's not the right number. That said, the earlier withdrawals
were not conditions-based. They were calendar-based. And we're now living with the consequences
of that decision process.
Marc: You know we talk about cycles but it seems like Afghanistan, we're now in the third
repeat of the cycle. We had the Reagan administration help the Mujahadeen drive the Soviets out.
As soon as the Soviets were gone, he said one and done. This is not our problem anymore.
And they let it happen. The let Afghanistan fall apart and the result was 9/11 and Al
Qaeda coming in in 9/11, and now we're repeating history again. We're drawing down, and we're
going to let them come back in.
Hayden: Yeah I think so. The counter argument is the forever war argument. Can we do this
forever. You know, it depends on what you mean by this. All right. You've bought things
with blood and treasure. You really don't want to easily give them up. Husain Haqqani,
the former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, actually a good friend of America
and actually a very knowledgeable guy. He had great phrase at Aspen a year or two ago,
Marc. He said, "You know, you Americans don't lose wars. You just lose interest."
Marc: That's a good phrase. So closing question? So during the 1988 presidential campaign,
no one asked George H. W. Bush about Iraq, and on his watch the Persian Gulf War happened.
During the 2000 campaign, nobody asked George W. Bush about Al Qaeda, and of course 9/11
happened and all that resulted. We're now in the middle of a presidential campaign.
What is the one intelligence or nationals security challenge that we face that nobody's
talking about or thinking about right now?
Hayden: Wow. Here's how I slice and dice it, all right? The thing that you've got to worry
about overnight is terrorism in cyber crime. The thing you've got to worry about three
to five years out is a group of countries, Marc, identify as ambitious, fragile, and
nuclear. North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and even Russia, and then even way out here on
the end. We've still got time, but the one that's a really big deal is how do you accommodate
in a peaceful way, the rise of China. That's kind of my menu. I guess that I would tell
a candidate, don't get over focused on the near term.
Look at those mid and long-term issues and begin to shape your policies to deal with
those. If you're looking for something that's going to go bump in the night, the combination
of likelihood and oh, that's really bad, all right, where those lines cross. The Chinese
have identified the South China Sea as a core interest, and they're acting that way. We
Americans, as part of our DNA believe free navigation is a core interest. This is core
interest v core interest. This one could go bump and be bad.
Marc: Well thank you Mike for your time today. Appreciate it.
Hayden: Okay Thank you.