America’s former CIA chief Michael Hayden:
‘If we don’t handle China well, it will be catastrophic’
[The Guardian, 09mar2016]
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General
Michael Hayden oversaw the NSA’s bulk surveillance programme and helped turn
the CIA into a militarised force carrying out drone attacks.
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Why does
he now think the obsession with counter-terrorism obscures more serious
threats?
Wednesday 9 March 2016 17.42 GMTLast
modified on Wednesday 9 March 201622.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/09/america-cia-nsa-chief-general-michael-hayden-china-catastrophic-for-world
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Man of peace: General Hayden in New York, 2016.
Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Guardian
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Edward Snowden: his revelations exposed the extent
of the NSA’s data collection programme. Photograph: Barton Gellman/Getty
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General Michael Hayden being sworn in as director of the CIA in May
2006, a position he held until 2009. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
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General Hayden speaking in 2006 under the watchful eyes of President
George Bush. Photograph: Matthew Cavanaugh/EPA
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1.
General MICHAEL HAYDEN – the
former chief of the US’s two most powerful and controversial intelligence
agencies – is fearful of his legacy. The only person to head both the CIA and the
National Security Agency (NSA) now wonders if the US’s preoccupation with
terrorism he helped shape since 9/11 has caused the country’s intelligence
services to take their eye off more serious threats down the road. “The danger
is we become so focused on the urgent that we don’t pay enough attention to the
really important,” he says.
2.
The urgent, says Hayden,
is a terrorist trying to get a bomb on a plane. He understands the political
imperative of throwing huge resources into preventing the next 9/11. But he
says, carefully, that a terrorist attack “is not an existential threat to the
United States”. What keeps him awake at night is what the CIA isn’tpaying
enough attention to.
3.
“I call it states that
are ambitious, fragile and nuclear. I put Iran and North Korea and Pakistan and
even the Russians in there. Now if that heads south, that’s much worse,” he
says in the corner of a hotel breakfast room in New York amid the clatter of
plates. “Now if you run the timeline out to the 10-year point, it’s China. I’m
not saying China’s an enemy of the United States of America. I’m just simply
saying that if we do not handle the emergence of the People’s Republic well, it
will be catastrophic for the world.”
4.
Hayden frankly concedes
that all of this became much clearer to him after he was effectively sacked
when Barack Obama took office in 2009. Inside the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia,
the mentality was summed up by a sign that read: “Today’s date is September 12,
2001.” “Where we find ourselves now is a product of us viewing ourselves as
having been in combat for 15 years,” Hayden says. “We need to guard against the
consequences of that.”
5.
If the US intelligence
services are distracted, then Hayden bears a good part of the responsibility.
The air force general served George W Bush through his presidency and was a leading
architect of the intelligence priorities prevailing today. That has left him
widely regarded on the American left as part of the cohort of warmongers
responsible for riding roughshod over the US constitution, the Geneva
conventions and international law, led by Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney and
defence secretary Don Rumsfeld.
6.
In the aftermath of 9/11,
Hayden turned the NSA from an intelligence backwater that few Americans paid
attention to into arguably the most controversial spy agency of the 21st
century with the massive data collection
programme later exposed by Edward Snowden. After he moved to head the CIA in 2006, Hayden directed the agency’s
increasing militarisation, including its own fleet of drones blowing up
suspected terrorists and more than a few innocent bystanders.
7.
By his own admission,
Hayden helped turn the CIA from an intelligence-gathering agency into something
resembling its second world war predecessor, the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), carrying out
assassinations, abductions, secret interrogations and sabotage. But after
retiring from the CIA, Hayden began to reflect on what he calls the “obsession”
with counterterrorism. Reading back through intelligence briefings to the
president, he was struck by how much they dealt with terrorism at the expense
of other issues. And when a new CIA director, the since-disgracedGeneral David Petraeus, came to visit ahead of his
confirmation hearing before the senate in 2011, Hayden had a warning for him.
8.
“I grabbed Dave Petraeus
and said: ‘Dave, you realise the CIA’s never looked more like the OSS than it
does right now? That’s good. It’s kept America safe. But, Dave, you’ve got to
know we’re not the OSS. We’re the nation’s global espionage service and you
need to remind yourself and the institution every day that it’s got this
broader mission,” he says.
9.
Hayden, now 70, has a new
book out: Playing to the
Edge, American Intelligence in the Age of Terror. The “edge” of the title reflects, in part, how
closely the agencies he headed sailed to limit of the law. Hayden is not
repudiating the past – far from it. He is so convinced of the righteousness of
the fight that he compares it to the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery two
centuries ago.
10.
Although the CIA had
stopped waterboarding alleged terrorists by the time Hayden took over as
director, he continues to claim that simulated drowning produced “torrents of
information”, even though a US senate report concluded that is a lie. “I’m not
alone. Every director, deputy director and chief of operations who was involved
agreed,” he says.
11.
Hayden is not prepared to
go so far as to outright deny that waterboarding is, as Obama and the US senate
say, torture. “I don’t take a view. It is me copping out, but not a whole lot,
because I’m an airman. We waterboarded tens of thousands of American airman as
part of training. We didn’t sodomise them. We didn’t pull out their
fingernails. But we did waterboard them. You’ve got to admit there’s got to be
a distinction between waterboarding and those other things I just mentioned,”
he says. The waterboarding of US airmen was part of training to resist torture
if captured. Hayden concedes it had neither the intent nor the scale of the 183 sessions on
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused 9/11
mastermind now on trial at Guantánamo.
12.
And while CIA
waterboarding may have been history by 2006, Hayden continued to oversee
abductions and other forms of torture – or, by official euphemism, rendition
and enhanced interrogation – at hidden “black sites” in foreign countries,
which he defends to this day. The former NSA director is also strident in his
insistence that its vast electronic snooping operation to scoop up information
about the communications of millions of Americans, so-called metadata, was not only necessary but has been vindicated by
Obama’s embrace of it.
13.
That fact gives him
particular pleasure. Obama was strongly critical, in his 2008 campaign, of the
“disastrous” Iraq war, Guantánamo and the CIA’s torture of prisoners. The CIA
was so worried that the new president might prosecute its agents that one of
its top lawyers proposed to Hayden that the outgoing President Bush give a
blanket amnesty. That didn’t happen, but the intelligence agencies went one
better by drawing Obama in with what Hayden calls the “aw shit moment” – a
briefing that so alarmed the president with the enormity of the threats the
country faced that he embraced the bulk of the NSA and CIA’s anti-terror programmes.
14.
“National security looks
different from the Oval office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa,” Hayden
says. “It was the reality. So [Obama] gets rid of the black sites. But he keeps
rendition. We still do it. He gets briefed on metadata and he keeps it.”
15.
Hayden cannot hide his
satisfaction at how this has disappointed those who thought they were getting a
peacenik in the White House. “The Europeans are, ‘Thank God we’ve got someone
like us.’ And guess what? He’s more like George Bush when it comes to these
questions. There’s a bigger difference between the first and second Bush
administrations than there is between Bush and Obama. That’s really true,” he
says. “He gets the Nobel peace prize and he lectures the Europeans on just war.
Where did that come from?”
16.
Hayden is unsparing in
his contempt for European officials he regards as “a self-righteous nuisance”
on issues such as rendition, torture and drones. Similarly, he regards European
handwringing over Snowden’s revelations as hypocritical. “Let me get very
specific. You’ve got Brussels and like-minded folks morally clucking at what
American espionage does because they’re totally ignorant as to what European
espionage does,” he says.
17.
Hayden says European
governments were well informed about the NSA’s operations after 9/11, in part
because the Americans were feeding information they had picked up about
“terrorist-related communications” to their countries. He said their response
was not to protest but “to take notes”. He also said European intelligence
agencies were spying on their own citizens more than most of the politicians
realised.
18.
The former NSA director
calls Snowden’s exposures “the greatest haemorrhage of legitimate American
secrets in our history. We’ve told adversaries a hell of a lot of detail about
what it is we do, how we do it and against whom we do it.” He’s none too pleased
with the Guardian or the Washington Post for publishing the revelations. “I
wish they hadn’t done it. Then again, a state powerful enough to prevent them
from doing it might not be a state I’m comfortable with,” he says.
19.
But in his book he also
describes Snowden’s revelations as “a gift” that forced a debate about the
balance between security and liberty, something he said he has been pressing
for since before 9/11 because he knew the controversial programmes would
eventually become public. He says that, now the storm has cleared, he’s not
displeased at the outcome, with relatively minor new restrictions on the NSA’s
work. “To be perfectly candid, we’ve hyperventilated about this for two and a
half years now and not much has changed.”
Former NSA director:
Charlie Hebdo attack was 'kind of inevitable'
20.
The attacks in France, he
says, have brought European politicians closer to the US view. “The
more you get Charlie Hebdo, the more you get Friday nights in Paris, the more
you see the Europeans bending in our direction. The French have passed laws,
the UK prime minister wants laws and the Germans have passed data-retention
requirements on their ISPs, none of which would have survived the American
political process,” he says. “So, in some ways, despite the clucking I get
from European commissioners, the Europeans have become more aggressive than we
have when it comes to questions of privacy.”
21.
He is also weary of the
perpetual claim that the 2003 invasion of Iraq gave rise to ISIS and the crisis in Syria. The
former CIA director blames Obama for pulling US troops out of Iraq in 2011,
leaving the space for Islamic extremists to take up arms. But then he reaches
back four decades. “You want to draw today’s Dante’s circle of hell in the
Middle East? It’s not the American invasion of Iraq. It goes back to 1979 and
three macro events: the assault on the grand mosque in Saudi Arabia; the
Khomeini revolution in Iran; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,” he says.
22.
Most middle-aged
Americans could tell you about the last two: the twin forks of Ronald Reagan’s
policy through the 1980s were opposing Soviet power and facing down the
Ayatollahs. But relatively few have heard of the seizure of the Grand
Mosque in Mecca by
about 500 Islamic fundamentalists demanding the overthrow of the “corrupt”
House of Saud. Hundreds died in the two-week siege and battle, which sent shock
waves through the Islamic world. Among those taking notice was a young Osama
bin Laden. Iran’s newly installed revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini,
blamed American imperialism and “international Zionism” for the deaths and
desecration of Islam’s holiest site. The US embassy in Pakistan was burned to
the ground.
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Mecca’s Great Mosque under siege in 1979: the event
has deep significance, says Hayden. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
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23. “After the attack on the Grand Mosque, the Saudis made
a deal with the devil,” Hayden says. “They decided with the Wahhabists, no one
is going to be on our religious right. That has left them supporting a violent
interpretation – let me say this carefully – of one of the world’s great
monotheisms. That
has spread a poison throughout the Middle East.
24. “At a minimum, you’ve got this Wahhabist philosophy,
theology that posits a permanent state of animosity between Islam and the rest
of the world. And that, frankly, is self-destructive of what I think Saudi
Arabia wants to be. And
not very useful for American policy, either.”
25.
This is hardly a secret,
and the degree to which Saudi policy has sown “the poison” that reaped al-Qaida
and Isis isthe source of
continued debate and disagreement. But little of it is heard within American administrations or among
politicians who go out of their way not to offend the Saudis for financial and
strategic reasons, in part to do with Iran.
26.
Hayden says in his book
that he rarely went to the Middle East without visiting the Saudis, because
they were so important. The late King Abdullah usually made time for him. He
describes “delightful evenings” with the head of the Saudi national security
council and says that the Saudi ambassador to Washington was “always a welcome
guest at CIA for tea and conversation”.
27.
Did Hayden tell the king,
however tactfully, that Saudi Arabia had, in his view, made a deal with the
devil and was spreading a poison that contributed to violence in the Middle
East?
28.
“Er, I … I … I never told
the king that,” Hayden says.
29. Why not?
30.
“I guess, I didn’t, er,
what’s the Bob Dylan line? I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
It’s a perspective that’s grown on me,” he says.
31.
It seems unfathomable
that Hayden was at the top of America’s intelligence services for a decade, yet
Saudi Arabia’s part in the rise of Islamist ideology only occurred to him as an
afterthought. But he says it was never a subject of discussion, even with the
White House.
32.
King Abdullah had his own
concerns; Hayden says he warned against the US “losing its aura” in the Middle
East. Has it?
33.
“Yes, absolutely we
have,” he says. “When I talk to our allied foreign friends, the constant theme
is: where the hell are you guys?”
34.
Hayden once again avoids
pinning responsibility on the Bush administration and its disastrous handling
of Iraq. He blames Obama for pulling US forces out, and for failing to throw
more into the fight in Syria. “I do think going to zero on Iraq was the wrong
decision,” he says. “I do think what we’re doing now in Syria is
under-resourced and over-regulated. America is in more danger today than it was
four years ago.”
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