General Michael Hayden, CIA Director (2006-2009) HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDtalk from New York City. I am Stephen Sackur. In the 14

years since Al Qaeda attacked this place on 9/11 the US government has

taken extraordinary measures to ensure that it never happens again.

But at what cost? Fundamental values of liberty and. My guest today is

Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency and

easier is that the did America lose its moral compass? -- CIA. . -- Did

America. Michael Hayden, welcome to HARDtalk.

Almost 15 years on from 9/11 you have been intimately involved with

so-called war on terror. Today, would you acknowledge that war on

terror failed? I would not say failed. I would not admit we are

less safe now than we were five years ago, but we are collectively

more safe in the world since that date. Really? Even though we now see

Islamic State, you aren't just intent on hitting the West act, but

have money and material and men that Al Qaeda could not have dreamt of?

-- West. That is all true. I answer the question as an American in terms

of threats to northern America. It is somewhat true. But in the Middle

East, they are in chaos. It is a terrorist state the size of an

American state in the middle of the Middle East, not in the middle of

nowhere, but straddling these trade routs in a very important region of

the world. And expanding. There are places in Syria and Iraq were there

are thousands of extreme jihadists penetrating Libya and using it as a

new base. Absolutely. I get it. There is danger greater than what we

saw in 2010. I also talk about a real problem the US has in terms of

perception. I will quote you words from a senior lawyer who has worked

with victims of US security policy. He is called Clive Stafford Smith.

He says the day after 9/11 there was widespread response from the US. But

we responded by throwing away our values. Hypocrisy breeds hatred.

Deal except that? -- Do you accept that? I don't. We talk about the

close fight and the deep fight in the military. What do we do when

they have already committed to killing you enjoy family? The deep

fight has to do with the production of those who want to kill our

families in ten years. We have been successful in the close battle. The

immediate threat. We have been far less successful with the deep

fight. I freely admit that the way you fight the close fight actually

can affect the deep fight. We always have that in mind. Let me elaborate.

Targeted killings. I support that. I think it is necessary for the close

battle. Targeted killings, some people call them extrajudicial

assassination. We have had targeted killings. The immediate effect of

those has been positive. They wanted to kill us. We always knew there

were second and third effects, like it feeds the jihadists recruitment.

It does alienate our good friends whose legal theory does not match

ours. The thing with the book, all right, is that this is a perpetual

grey area. I admit we may have gotten it wrong. That is why I point

out... Let us talk specifics and see if you did get it wrong to -- wrong.

Your memoir, ten years in the industry with the CIA. I would point

to your decision to undertake a new level of mass electronic

surveillance in the NSA. And then in the CIA, dealing with the fallout of

rendition, torture, these are big deals. Your memoir is called Playing

to the Edge, going to the legal limits to fight terrorism. I would

say that you did not play to the edge of the line, you CrossFit. I

disagree. -- crossed it. There are lions. -- lines. There are things

you don't do. You don't do them because of ethical and legal

concerns, but also because it hurts you over the long-term. We had to

make these. Tough decisions. Broadly speaking I am comfortable with the

decisions we made ourselves and our allies safe us. Let me tell you a

conversation that never happened. -- safer. I never called an intelligent

chief somewhere in the world and said I have information for you. --

intelligence. They have never said, I need to know how you got it. They

have never told me that. You did not say to these friends, by the way,

friend, I am also spying on you, which you were doing to Angela

Merkel, President Rousseff in Brazil... I will not comment on any

specific operation or activity, but any intelligence service in the

world will go out... If it is fulfilling its responsibilities...

Will go out and try to learn information to try to make their

citizens safer. If we stick right now to this question of electronic

surveillance, which you... You talk big decisions. It was your decision

to have the NSA programme which took the storage and analysis of ordinary

people's telephone communications to a new level. The line you crossed

their was that you were doing this because you needed to know if anyone

in the US was talking to bad guys outside the US. -- there. By the

never inform the American public that this is what you were doing. --

But you never. That is fundamentally contrary to the American

Constitution. It isn't. I understand the changing political culture

within the US and within all western democracies and how we have to

accommodate to the change of culture. -- Western. Let us talk

about what you have described. We got them from telephone providers.

We stored them. We did not analyse them from American telephone

activity. All we did was that when we had what we believed to be a

"dirty" number, almost always a foreign number, we just queried that

with a massive database. Has anyone in that database been in contact

with a terrorist number? Is a number in the Bronx raises its hand and

says we talk every Thursday we ask them, who did you talk to? -- if.

That is it. That is the extent of the metadata programme. They had no

idea you were storing their records. You opened the floodgates to

everything we know thanks to Edward Snowden, prisons, all these

programmes, which allow you and the intelligence services, the spying

community to gather information about ordinary people and their

e-mail, electronic medication, and they had no idea. -- communication.

We did not tell them. You should have. We have had our scandals...

You crossed the line... Let us talk about how this works within our

democracy. Espionage, the province only of the executive, that we

Americans would try an experiment, we would actually expand our

oversight of espionage to the other political branch, the court system,

in certain circumstances. In secret? Yeah. Hear me out. We are still the

only Western democracy that does even that. The compromise was that

espionage, what's needed secrecy for success, would oversee all branches

of the US government. -- which. That is the contract we arrived at... The

point is that it may have been a contract behind closed doors. It

wasn't with the American people. Edward Snowden did the US people a

favour when he exposed this to everyone. You call him a traitor. I

have never said that. I said he was a defector, because of the single

greatest haemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of

the world. One final surveillance point and then we will move on.

Right now there is a debate in the US about encryption. The kind of

complete, full on, and to end encryption that Apple, for example

is using. -- end-to-end. They have not unencrypted the telephone of

someone who had a mass shooting in America. Donald Trump says Apple

should be boycotted until they unencrypt. Is this a massive problem

for intelligence? These days it has become so complicated that you

cannot crack it? Encryption is a difficult problem. We are talking

about a core philosophical issue. The issue that permeates what I try

to write in this book. This is a perpetual grey area, Stephen. It is

not about light and dark. It is about balancing to make things, both

of which are virtuous, freedom, security, liberty, safety. -- two.

In this case it might surprise you that I am with Apple. Encryption is

good. Are just move on to your responsibilities when you were a

director of the CIA. -- Let us. You inherited a profound miss, it was

connected to the fallout from the invasion of Iraq. -- mess. We saw

extraordinary renditions, sending suspected Al Qaeda supervisors to

prisons where they were tortured and the CIA... That is your word. Let us

talk about that. Waterboarding. It is now clear that those in the

United States Congress, those in the intelligence committee in the

Senate, regarded that as brutal and torture and you as having been,

shall we say, economical with the truth in your presentation of it.

Ha! Why don't you come clean and call it torture? It was in the

committee it was the Democrats on that committee. -- wasn't. There was

a report that provided their conclusion. It is not definitive. It

is still a jump. You said water boarding caused

minimum discomfort? I would never say that. It is a very harsh

techniques. Why won't you say the word torture? It is a legal term. If

we use it casually, you may use it casually in your profession, I can't

use it casually in mind. Let's frame this. The CAA held 115 folks -- mine

-- CIA. Of those 115, three were water brought in. The last one was

in 2003 and I became director in 2006. I spent that is, arguing with

the administration. Though this programme had value, we needed to

modify it. One of the modifications was to tell all members of the house

and Senate committees, not just the congressional leadership. I won that

argument within the government. In 2011, is said this to the BBC in an

interview, I believe for the Panorama interview. Referring to the

black sites where some suspect prisoners and up, you said," we did

not send these people that to be mistreated or stop". We didn't! Of

course you did. In the book, I had this conversation with the Vice

President of the United States. We were briefing with the new soon to

be president on all covert actions of the CIA. At this time, that was a

covert action. I briefed the future president on the red missions. The

Vice President interrupted and said, come on, you send those people glad

to be roughed up. I said to the Vice President, that is not correct. We

are under a moral and legal responsibility in terms of how those

people were treated after the rendition had been completed. If I

may say so, your book is all about how you played to the edge but did

not cross it. Your answers suggest you didn't cross the edge because

you simply moved the line to encompass Porter. I don't create the

line. It is created on democracy. What we did was approved by the

department of justice, approved by the President and briefed to the

Congress. Some people may not have liked to wear the wine was drawn,

but honest men have to admit that a democracy have to make a decision

and that was the decision our democracy made. You kind of

attacking the decision-making process of the United States. I am

telling you that a lot of these things continued to cross two

administrations, very different in their orientation is. That point is

absolutely relevant to drone strikes. You called them the most

precise application of firepower in the history of armed conflict. That

is quite a claim. Unfortunately it is not realistic. It is not borne

out by some claims. You don't believe in the research done by

Stanford and New York University is looking on the ground in the tribal

areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan at what actually happens when drone

strikes are ordered? The truth is that won a very detailed study

showed more than 200 people were killed, and only 35 were the

intended targets. That statement doesn't correlate with any reality

with which I am familiar. Did any of those institutions have fully run

streaming video of the target, hours before, during and after the attack?

I do think so. It is a video that is miles up in the sky. It doesn't tell

you who is actually dying or reveal whether men, women and children who

were not terrorist... It does reveal whether or not they were men, women

and children. You have a platform that gives you a god's I eat

continuous view of the target for hours or days. You have

intelligence, you have described it is power, that is used to confirm

the presence of who it is you think is actually there. You also have

penetrations of the Al-Qaeda network which give you information on the

nature of that target. I understand what you are saying. I also

understand that you can repeatedly get it wrong, for example, the

wedding party in Yemen where 14 civilians were blown away driving

away from a wedding. That is something that happened after I left

government. The most precise application of firepower in the

history of armed conflict? Who will believe that in the Middle East

today? It is compared to what? A B-52? This is a relative. I think

the statement stands. We are almost out of time. This specific point

about the big picture of the intelligence strategy of the United

States. An academic who has been critical of the United States and

its Middle Eastern and security policies for many years has said,

the 15 years of war on terror have been as unsuccessful as the United

States' war on drugs. He thinks part of the reason is that some of our

basic premises are wrong. He said our alliance and partnership and

based in Saudi Arabia as a fundamental ally is wrongheaded. Our

view of run Mac has for a long time been unhelpful because we have to

find a way to co-operate, rather than regard them as an enemy --

Iran. Where do you sit on those two countries? There are elements of

Saudi Arabian society and policy that I think are counter to the

interests not only of Saudi Arabia but the US. That is not to say that

the King of Saudi Arabia is not a friend to the United States. The

theology, philosophy, has been allowed to flourish post-1979. It,

take the issue. I do not see the coincidence between American

interests and Iranian interests in the Middle East. I think Iran want

to be a hegemonic power. Henry Kissinger summarises this

wonderfully. He says the Iranian have to decide whether they are a

country or a a culture. When we created the nuclear deal, they were

a country, they have since acted like they were a cause. You have

wanted to play something of a role in the current US presidential

election, being an election adviser for Jeb Bush. Where is America's

foreign policy goal in? The presidential race, a lot of heat and

noise is coming from Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Essentially

coming from people who appear to want to adopt a much more isolated,

protectionist, much less global and open US foreign policy. Oh my

goodness. I am worried. You said, my message to the next president is to

get involved and stay involved. Jeb Bush has just imploded. That kind of

old school Republican... Republican International is. You can call it

that if you want. That is not where the American people or America it

self are today. I do know that that is true, and it is affected by the

amount of personal and political capital that a new president would

put in. President Obama has decided that he wants to spend his personal

and political capital more internally than externally. If you

think about, what do you make of Donald Trump? I have my deep

concerns with some of the things he had said in the campaign. If the

government is consistent with that, I will be very concerned. We have to

end it there. Thank you very much, Michael