The Jordan Harbinger Show - 576: General Michael Hayden | American Intelligence in the Age of Terror

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

General Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) is a retired United States Air Force general, former Director of the NSA and CIA, and author of Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror. [Note: This is a previously broadcast episode from the vault that we felt deserved a fresh listen!] What We Discuss with General Michael Hayden: How does an intelligence agent view cognition, cognitive bias, and psychology differently from a policymaker? What is The Unpleasant Fact an intelligence agent brings to the briefing table? General Hayden gives us a rare glimpse of working for two very different presidents and conveys the importance of adapting to their particular learning styles. Find out what it’s like to present new intelligence to an administration that forces it to change policy. (Awkward!) Get General Hayden’s take on the Orlando shootings and the difficulty of balancing security with liberty. And much more… Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/576 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. The Stone and Revelations distorted but accelerated a necessary conversation. And Jordan, you already made reference to it, the NSA program and metadata and so on, all right? The other 98% of the stuff that he stole have nothing to do with your privacy or mind. They have everything to do with how your government collects legitimate foreign intelligence. I point out that this is the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American.

American secrets in the history of the Republic. And Jordan, you are less safe today because of it. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional Emmy-nominated comedian, National Security Advisor, and Extreme Athlete. And each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, we have episode

starter packs. These are collections of your favorite episodes, organized by popular topics. Helps new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started, and I always, always appreciate it when you do that. Sharing the show keeps the lights on around here. Today, one from the vault. We're talking with General Michael Hayden, former head of CIA and NSA. Imagine being the head of the CIA and the NSA. The dude must know some stuff. Furthermore, he's a retired U.S. Air Force four-star general, so the dude knows where the bodies are buried for sure. We're talking today about how intelligence agents and policymakers view the world and the differences in their thinking

the warrantless surveillance controversy, aka domestic spying for the layman. We discuss ISIS, the Apple iPhone encryption controversy, and the general's thoughts on both Edward Snowden and our national security and surveillance apparatus. It's a little bit less psychology today, a lot more world affairs. I dig these episodes from time to time, even though, as you know, we strive to remain apolitical here on the show. And if you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network.

And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests you hear on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's General Michael Hayden. Normally, we do shows that discuss cognitive science and psychology and things like that. So, first of all, going right to the meat of the topic before we go off on our usual

tangents here is, does the Intel guy look at cognition, cognitive bias, psychology, and psychological type of topics and content the same way as, let's say, the policy guy? Yeah, that's a great question. Here's how I describe it. I essentially say, look, the Intel guy and the policy guy. have got to come together in the room. And that room could be a canvas covered tactical operation center in a desert somewhere, or it could be the Oval Office. So let me talk about my last job, because where we got together was in the Oval Office. The Intel guy comes into the room to a different

door than the policy guy. The intel guy is fact-based. The policy guy is vision-based. The Intel guy is inherently swimming out of detail trying to create generalized conclusion. He's fundamentally inductive. The policy guy, he's trying to take his first principles, you know, the ones that got him elected. He's trying to take those first principles and apply them to specific circumstances. He's inherently deductive. The Intel guy, the world as it is, policymaker, the world as we want it to be. And then finally, just because of the nature of the work, the Intel guy is inherently pessimistic. Bob Gates, before he became Secretary of Defense, was actually one of my predecessors at CIA. Secretary Gates is fond of saying when a CIA analyst stops to smell the flowers, he or she then looks around for the hearse, inherently pessimistic.

The policymaker, though, inherently optimistic. If he or she didn't think they could make the world better, they wouldn't interview for the job. And so the challenge for the Intel guy, since he didn't get elected, the other one did, the challenge for the intel guy is to get into the head of the policymaker to hunt him or her down, wherever they might be in that room, but never break his tether to his own doorway. In other words, the reason he's in the room in the first place, he's the fact-based, inductive, what as it is, pessimist. And he's got to get into the head of the policymaker, even though he knows that he's probably making that men or woman's day worse than it would otherwise be with every sentence he utters.

This is funny because it sort of outlines what sounds like a general tension between the two. Oh, no, there is. Look, Jordan, you want to drive this one more revolution. This really becomes intense when you're going into the policymaker with what we in the intel community call the unpleasant fact, the estimate, the analysis, the reality that cuts across the preferred narrative, the preferred policy, or the preferred politics. And the dynamic there is, when you're coming in with a very unwelcome message, you better have mastered your brief because just by human nature, this is not imputing guilt to anyone, but just by human nature, the instinct of the

policymaker will be to push back against that, to doubt it, to challenge it, to question it. And so the intel person, when he or she knows, they're cutting against the grain, they've really got to work hard to grab the attention to the policymaker and make the policymaker listen. And how do they do that in a way that doesn't get them thrown out of the room? Yeah. Exactly. And I know your show talks about some of these things.

One way is to study how the policymaker learns. So I was only President Obama's CIA for three weeks. I mean, I was just kind of standing in until Leon Panetta was confirmed. But in those three weeks, it was clear to me that President Obama learns in a method quite different than the way President Bush learned. Now, President Bush was a great reader. He was in a competition with Karl Rove as to how many books they could read. When you were there for the Intel briefing, although President Bush would read the stuff, you could tell that he learned in the conversation. He learned in the pushback. He learned in the Now, again, my sample with President Obama is pretty small, but others have kind of confirmed this for me. President Obama is more reflective. President Obama learns in the reading. President Obama learns in the quiet spaces. And so you're going in there. I mean, you're not trying to manipulate the President of the United States for having to say, but you've got to understand how that human being learns new things. And frankly, you've got to adapt to the president's taste and preferences so that you can do what it was I described before, get inside his or her head.

This makes sense. So it's essentially a persuasion sub-skill set where you think, okay, is this person going to be best served by a dynamic presentation of the facts and let's throw some visuals in there or let me emphasize these points over and over? Or is this something where a detailed report with a lot of citations is going to do the trick much more effectively? And you have to figure that out quick because national security kind of depends on. it, the fate of the free world might depend on whether or not you're up to speed on PowerPoint. Yeah, and beyond that, Jordan, would that human being best learn by slowly building from the agreed towards the not yet agreed? Or does that person best learn by saying, Mr. President,

let me give you a bottom line that I don't think you're going to like. You have to make a choice. Yeah, and I think hopefully most intelligence agents and most people who have to deliver bad news or difficult news know that it's better to rip off the Band-Aid, right? We went into President Bush in late 2007 with a national intelligence estimate that the Iranians had stopped one aspect of their nuclear program. To have a nuclear program, Jordan, you've got to have fissile material, you've got to have a delivery system, missiles, and then you've got to master the science of actually building the weapon. That's something small enough and rugged enough to be put on a missile. And we had pretty good evidence that they had stopped that aspect of the program. that they were no longer continuing the aggressive research they had on creating a nuclear warhead.

That's a really unpleasant message. And we weren't saying that the Iranians weren't dangerous or that they ultimately would like to have a bomb. We just had the fact that this one part of the program, Mr. President, it's pretty much stopped. And Mr. President, what I'm telling you is not based upon the absence of evidence. It's continuing. It's based on the evidence of absence that we know it's not. Now, that actually put a torpedo into a Bush administration policy to tighten the sanctions on Iran. Frankly, Jordan, a policy I agreed with. I didn't think this development made the Iranians any less dangerous,

but it was going to be harder for the administration to make that argument to the Europeans and others in order to pump up the sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran. So we took that message in there, and that was an incredibly unpleasant message, but we stood our ground. and the president and the vice president probed and challenged and finally accepted our view. And then here's something that's quite remarkable. Since President Bush was basing his Iranian policy on our previous national intelligence estimate, which said Iran is determined to have a nuclear weapon, and we had made that key judgment public. He felt as a matter of just policy and honesty, we then had to make the new judgment public as well, that Iran had stopped this one aspect of the program. It's kind of a remarkable

little morality play as to how this relationship between the intelligence community and the policy community really works. It seems like anybody anywhere along the line having a mistaken agenda or, oh, I should say any agenda, not necessarily a mistaken agenda, any sort of agenda, personal agenda, political agenda, anywhere up the chain could affect the quality or the message that's conveyed all the way to the top and cause ripple effect that's really undesirable, especially if your goal is to deliver kind of a snapshot that's as unbiased as possible in order to let the policy makers make decisions based on that. You've got it exactly right. And in my book, I try to weave this dynamic into a whole series of policy decisions that we supported, the surge in Iraq, the El-Kabar

nuclear reactor, which was a nearly complete nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert, in addition to the Iranian program. Policymakers are paid to have agendas. That's the difference between the policymaker and the intelligence professional. I mean, the policymaker, it means that people are elected because remember the vision thing. They've already said, well, I want to take you this way. This is my agenda. And now the Intel guy comes in there trying to be agenda free in order to create the right kind of dynamic. And again, I cover this in some detail in the book. It has to do with the decision leading up to the surge in Iraq. All right? If you recall, this is 2006, right after the midterm, elections where the Democrats take control of both chambers of Congress. Secretary Rumsfeld resigned.

Secretary Gates is brought in, and Baghdad looks like one of Dante's circles of hell. The violence here is so bad. And so we're huddling up twice a day. What's the plan? What are we going to do? And one of the proposals, actually, the one we finally landed on, was the dynamic called the surge. If you recall, we sent five additional American combat brigades into Baghdad. Our intelligence message during that discussion was, look, you put five brigades of non-sectarian professional combat power in that city, you're going to drive the violence down. And that's a good thing. But you know, that's not our ultimate goal. We're driving the violence down to create space for Norley Al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, to actually become the Iraqi prime minister. In other words,

the prime minister of all of Iraq rather than for the Dalwa Party or the Shiite community. And we warned in those huddles, that's a low probability shot. Noriel Maliki will have to govern beyond his life experience. If he's going to use this space, we're going to create with American blood and treasure, to create a more inclusive government in Iraq. Look, the man spent most of his adult life in exile. He thinks there's a bathist behind every bush trying to kill him, because for most of his life, there was a bathist behind every Bush trying to kill him.

I said, a bit of a low probability shot. Now, I'm being a bit cartoonish in my explanation here. I'm summarizing three months of Hutting, right? That at some point, the president made the decision, I understand what you're telling me, Intel guys, send the five brigades. And then there's the punchline, Jordan. About every week for the rest of the Bush administration, President Bush at a personal video teleconference with Noriel Maliki trying to coach and mentor this other human being to be what we thought he needed to be in terms of an inclusive prime minister for all of Iraq.

So I don't feel as if our advice was rejected them. I think it was accepted. The president understood the dangers. And then he took additional steps to try to mitigate the dangers by this special relationship that he tried to develop. with Prime Minister Maliki. You've got this infrastructure overload in the beginning of the book where essentially NSA goes down

for a few days because there's so much information coming in because of the collection program. Right, this is the explosion of global telecommunications. So we're out there with an architecture, Jordan, and it's kind of based on a signals intelligence environment.

There was too little, too hard to get. And now the external telecommunications environment wasn't too little, too hard to get. It was too hard to handle, too hard to understand. You start drinking from the fire hose. Right. And by the way, the fire hose then overwhelmed our ability to drink and our information technology. Our IT systems collapsed. Right. And so now, suddenly the entire world, we can't listen anymore to our enemies. And this is something that you basically start the book with this kind of, it's like if this were a movie, it would be people running down the halls with an alarm going off and red lights flashed.

Am I right? That's exactly right. That's actually why I started the book with that chapter. Keep in mind, I was a Clinton appointee to the National Security Agency. It was falling further and further behind. It had some budget problems. It had some cultural problems and so on. And then you had this global telecommunications revolution, too.

We were on the downslope. I was trying to be cautious. It's a national treasure, you know, for a Hippocratic oath. First do no harm. But I had been director for about 10 months, and our whole IT system went belly up. And you're right, we're out of business for about 72 hours. That's really dangerous for America. And so at that point, I decided there was no course of action I could set out on.

And you were right. I was new to the NSA. I'd never been in it before. My first day in the agency was my first day as director. I decided there was no course of action I could set out on that would be more dangerous to the future of the agency than continuing to sit there and do nothing. And so we started to make some dramatic changes. I would love to get into those as well, because now, of course, you have this huge broad view of

intelligence collection before and after September 11th. But as a side note, there's so much in this book, and a lot of it is minute detail. I mean, one of the things that struck me, this was amazing. You said, well, we got in the car and then so-and-so needed another copy of this document. So he said something to Nancy Pelosi, and how can you possibly remember things in such detail? It's amazing. You keep a super-detailed journal of just everything that's going on? No, no. And in fact, we're somewhere between discouraged and disallowed for keeping a journal.

You know, for the director of CIA to lose his journal, would be a really big deal until we fix that by not allowing them to have a journal. I can remember broadly things that happened. And in my rhythm for writing the book was simply to pick a topic, El Kabar Nuclear Reactor, that's one in the eastern Syrian desert. Take my iPad when I was taking some long trips and then to the best of my ability, kind of reconstruct what I remember of the story. of the narrative. And after two or three long trips across oceans or continents, I'd have 3,000 words and big gaps that I knew were gaps. And then I would go back to the agencies, NSA, CIA, and so on, and asked to see my files on this topic or from that period. I would go in there and do research, and I couldn't take my notes out without the agency clearing them so that they would not be classified. And I also would make a request. And in addition to

my files, I need to talk to him and him and her and her and her and him. I talked to more than 70 people in preparing the book. And I took notes on that. And those notes had to be cleared too. But when they were finally cleared and I brought them home and I clouged them with my 2,500 or 3,000 words on the iPad, I'm getting close to a pretty mature chapter here. That's kind of, my guess, that's the 80% solution. And the rest of it is just research and recollection. And then finally, you got something ready to show a publisher. Yeah, it seems like a complicated process given that you can't write things on an iPad and take it with you on a flight that are classified and you can't take the research out of the place. I imagine it's like law school where you're just sitting there in a dark room with books all over the place.

No one's talking to you and you got to stay there until you're done. Yeah, and like I said, you take the notes. You give them to the agency and then it takes several weeks. They'll give you a call and say, come on back, we're done with your notes. And you go there and you pick up your notepad and it's got big black marks. on it where writing used to be because you can't say that and you can't say that. But then I would take what survived and do what I said I did, but they combine it. Those things would have kind of stimulated my memory as well.

And I began to get a more and more mature version of each chapter. And the book is called Playing to the Edge. What does that mean to you? Why did you name the book that? Yeah, actually my wife named it. The publisher said, okay, and what's the title? I go, oh, the title. Okay.

So my wife had read the manuscript. And I said, what do you think it should be? And she said, playing to the edge. I added the colon, American intelligence in the Age of Terror. But she recognized that one of the themes that permeates the book is that, first of all, I don't get to create the edge. The edge is the box that the American political process creates for security services. Legally, you mean, in terms of what you're allowed to do.

It's actually a creation of law and policy, all right? Some things are set down in law. Other things are set down in policy. But we don't do either of those in the intel community. That's done by elected officials, and that's the box that we're allowed to operate in. And the metaphor for the title is that when operational circumstances demand, I've got to use the whole box. I've got to play all the way to the edge. Because if I don't play all the way to the edge, if I don't use all the authorities of the law and policy, by the way, Jordan, if I play to the edge, I know I'm going to have an unpleasant congressional hearing. Some newspaper is going to write some unhappy stories.

playing to the edge is going to be controversial. But if I decide not to play back from the edge, I've suddenly decided to protect myself or more nobly my agency from some unpleasant future, but I'm not decided to protect you. And that's my responsibility. And so the theme of the book is that we did some really aggressive, continue to be controversial things.

I was involved in practically all of them, but in a very non-apologetic way, I described what we did, why we did it, and why we thought it was a good idea. We played to the edge. In the early part of the book, you mentioned to a friend, wouldn't you love to be able to tell people what you do?

Is that why you wrote the book? Yes, it frankly is. And what you're referring to is, I was in the outback of Australia with an Australian kind of part. We were coming off the ops floor of a facility out there that we share called Pine Gap.

We had just gone through an ops morning seeing what they did. And as he walked out and it's just the glaring sun of the Australian Outback, I turned to my friend and said, wouldn't you like to show your citizens what those kids are doing in there? Intelligence is essential to defend not just American security, but American liberty. It rarely has something so essential and so misunderstood or ununderstood by the population that it serves. And so my purpose, as you suggest, Jordan, in the book, is to kind of do what I suggested to my Australian friend. Hey, come with me.

I'm going to introduce you to some people and show you a bit of what it is they do on your behalf that you're probably not familiar with. That was why I wrote it. You mentioned liberty versus freedom, and you talk a lot about that in the book. And you can mention quite brilliantly, in fact, that you say when security concerns arise, we tend to gravitate more towards security. than liberty in the balance between liberty and security, do you see or foresee the flagpole moving back towards liberty or security in the future? Because right now, if we've got this tension between liberty and security, right,

freedom and oversight, for example, when we have events like September 11th, we tend to gravitate more towards security, hey, look, we need to be able to see this, we need to be able to hear this. Do you see this eroding consistently or moving back and forth? It moves back and forth, and that's the sign of a mature democracy.

both those things, security, liberty, safety, privacy. Those are all virtues. Those are all good things. We want all those. Unfortunately, in the real world, we've got to balance those. Where the appropriate line is to use your model, where you plant the flag on that spectrum, depends on the totality of circumstances

in which you find yourself. Frankly, fully within my authorities, I was more aggressive at 3 o'clock in the afternoon of September 11th than I was at 8 o'clock in the morning as director of NSA. I was fully within my authority. I wasn't covering that sign of any legal lines. I authorized some things I would not have authorized in the morning absent the attack. They were very appropriate. You would have expected me to do it.

You would not have expected me to do it before the attack. And so this line is something that we continually negotiate. Actually, I actually was on CNN yesterday afternoon. Jake Tapper, who was interviewing me, was talking about, well, did the FBI guys miss the Orlando thing? What should we do to give the Bureau a better chance of catching these kinds of things? talked about more authorities and more money and more people. I said, yeah, those are all things we really got to look at, Jake. But let me tell you one thing, all right? If we do all that, three, four, or five months from now, you're going to have somebody else sitting in this chair. And the topic of conversation is, why do we give the FBI so much power? Isn't that a threat to our liberty and privacy? We swing back and forth between these things. And frankly, no need, no call

it's a complaint about it. Certainly not worth your effort because that's a way of free people with democracy works. By the way, there's an additional dynamic. You said after 9-11, wow, we moved that flag up. And I said earlier that American espionage defends not just American security, but American liberty. Because, Jordan, if we would have had another 9-11, well, I'll just let your imagination tell you where that flag was going to end up. If we failed and America suffered another catastrophic attack, we frankly would have turned on ourselves, our neighbors, our privacy, and our own liberties, because we were frightened. I'm very fond of saying, and I think I say it in the book,

frightened people who don't make good Democrats or Republicans, small D, small R in both cases. And so an intelligence failure that allows Americans to die doesn't just have an impact on American safety. It will eventually eat away an American freedom too. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, General Michael Hayden, We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. I really appreciate it.

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Now, back to General Michael Hayden. You're saying that espionage is critical to democracy because otherwise we end up moving our own flag further towards security. We tend to maybe react emotionally and we jump towards one post much more than we maybe should. Again, frightened people don't often make good decisions. One of the reasons I wanted to continue to play

to the edge, I knew that if I failed to play to the edge and something bad happened, that edge was going to move. It was going to be far more extensive in terms of what the American people now thought we should be doing to keep them safe. And frankly, I'm an intelligence professional, but I'm an American too. We all went to the same high schools, if you know what I mean. We all share the same values. I worry about American privacy, too. I worry about American liberty. I don't want to put it at risk because we failed to handle security threats. This makes sense. In your book, you work very hard and understandably so to dissuade readers thinking freedom versus security thing. This is a sham. But for you, it seems like from the book that the tension between freedom and security is more than some sort of abstraction or abstract ideal. This is basically your entire job. This is why your job is important. Yeah, no, it's exactly right. There's some people out there who will say there are no real tradeoffs between our security and our liberty. When somebody says that, my immediate reaction is, well, clearly you've never been responsible for either security or liberty, because if you had, you know that was just a stupid sentence. It seems like a thankless job. Yeah, we do this all the time. And so we do it in the context of American democracy, right? We do it with oversight. We do it with

occasional court involvement. We do it from time to time, actually, we do it pretty often, with a great deal of controversy. If Tapper would have said then, Jordan, after I said, you know, in four months, you're going to have somebody here complaining about the FBI. If Tapper would have said, well, then how would that make you feel? And actually, the answer in my heart of hearts was makes me feel like an American. We do this all the time. I mean, you have all this presidential and bureaucratic oversight, which at some level must be a little frustrating, but it seems like you see that as necessary. Oh, it is. Look, I spent a chapter and change in the book, by and large, complaining about congressional oversight. It's imperfections. But how can you do this

otherwise? I actually conclude one of the chapters on congressional oversight by saying, If we made a mistake after 9-11, it was in not telling more stuff to more members of Congress earlier in the process. The president, fully within the law, okay, the law makes it very clear he can narrow the number of members of Congress that he tells things to. So the president was acting lawfully. I think just as a matter of policy and politics, you should tell as many people in Congress what you're doing as early as possible.

If you don't do that, you allow Congress to take a bunch of cheap shots, three, four or five years later when this becomes public and everyone feels safe again, tell them early, tell them when everyone feels in danger, and then tell them if they want to stop it, go ahead. Let them make the decision when it was a tough decision. Make the decision in prospect rather than Monday morning quarterback in retrospect. Sure. And thinking about countries where I've been, places like North Korea, where I've visited and I noticed that they're in a constant state of war and there's always an enemy. And whenever we see countries, even like Iran or especially North Korea, it's always this

outside aggression that people are scared. They're even scared of tourists who aren't Korean because it's so rare. And going back to your earlier point about scared people don't make good decisions, that's clearly a deliberate choice. We saw that with the Soviet Union as well, where everything was constant fear such that they could push and push and push towards security to the point where even though it would be intolerable under any other circumstances, well, you know, if we don't have this American spies are going to nuke everybody or whatever.

Actually, Jordan, we're actually seeing that played out now in today's contemporary Russia, where the Putin administration has pretty much total control over the information environment. And they spend an awful lot of time describing NATO and the United States as tremendous dangers to the Russian Federation. Actually, that's a good segue, because since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the war on terror, we've lost tens of thousands of Soviet analysts to retasking or even just retirement, I would imagine. And given the recent actions of Russia and Putin and the rebuilding of their nuclear forces, is this being taken seriously in the Beltway? And what are the plans to rebuild that capability?

So it is being taken seriously. We're serious people. Okay, we understand the issues. People still in government understand the issues. But your overall summary is correct. We're more than a brick shy of a load when it comes to the technical systems. the human beings that we now need to put back on the Russian target. I tell a tale in the book, in August of 2008, the Russians invaded Georgia. And I got a panicked phone call from Steve Hadley, the National Security Affairs, who had just been called by Misha Sakashvili, the president of Georgia. The Georgia and the caucuses, for those of you who are thinking, holy crap, the Russians are in Georgia. Yeah, it's a country. And Saakashvili was afraid that those Russian tanks were going to come down and get him.

all the way in Tbilisi, the Capitol. And so, Hadley's questioning me was, Mike, where's the Russian army going? I'll get back to you, Steve. So I walked out to my outer office and turned to my assistants and says, get my Georgia people up here right away. And then they started down the phone

and getting people up there with their maps and so on. And while they're doing that, I turned to my chief of staff and said, we've got Georgia people, right? Because the emphasis, Jordan, may have been so strong on counterterrorism. We did have Georgia. And they were good, and they gave me a good laydown. But you know what? We had a hell of a time

tracking where the Russian army was, and that's something you ought to be able to do against the modern army. We had a difficult time telling Mr. Hadley and the president precisely where the Russians were, because the systems we used to have to do that, we didn't have anymore. We had shifted our weight after the fall of the Soviet Union to other problems like terrorism. Right. Meanwhile, our stuff is sitting there rusting and they're polishing the tanks, and ready to roll into Tbilisi. I can see you there. One guy's got the hold music,

like he's waiting for his bank to come back to him about a credit card issue, and you're going, please tell me there's not some 22-year-old with pimples who's going to run up here and say, I'm the Georgia Department. Yeah, well, it was far better than that. Good.

But again, the weight of effort for the agency had shifted to terrorism at the expense of other important and growing in importance targets. I mean, you've dealt with a lot of issues here. And of course, during your tenure, you kind of inherited some of the NSA baggage, which resulted in the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy, which is, you know, still a giant mess. Yeah, truth in advertising. I didn't inherit that. I started that. Look, I'm glad you said it. I can only

get away with so much. You can hang up whenever you want. You mentioned in the book, there's a Bulgarian apparatchik who says, the truth is whatever serves the Communist Party. This is earlier in your career. He says that to you. What are you thinking at this point when he, says that, because it seems to come back around later on during the controversy. It does. That actually describes a political class that would be very, very difficult for the intel guys to inject themselves into, to give them information that is not consistent with their vision. Look, you know, we've got our ideologues, too, but fundamentally, Americans are pragmatic people. Facts matter. In communism, you had a theory, not of government, you had a theory

of history. And Marx writes, like he knows, in fact, he writes that he does know how history turns out. And his version of history is this unrelenting hostility between the imperialists and the socialist states. So there's no amount of evidence that the KGB can bring to the leadership to say, you know, I don't think the Americans are that aggressive against us. Of course they're that aggressive against us would be the response. Haven't you read Marx? Karl Marx, right, the famous communist. Yeah, not Groucho. This is an example of what I tried to describe before, but in this case, the policymakers are pretty much captured and enslaved by their ideology. In the contemporary world, I would say that the leadership of radical Islam, of radical jihadism, is equally captured by their own ideology,

which says there is undying enmity between Islam and the West. And we'll get to that in a bit. I definitely want to hear more about that. I do want to ask, though, the truth is whatever serves the Communist Party. To what extent, minus maybe the communist part, to what extent does that also ring true when we're talking about things like data collection, domestic surveillance, enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, or the critics of these policies, I should say, I would imagine they're ripping that page out of the book and putting it on the wall. One review in the, I think it was a New York review of books, hit upon that particular argument. They began with the discussion in Bulgaria. Truth is what serves the party.

I said these are controversial, remember? Playing to the edge means you're going to get some unpleasant newspaper articles written about you, and these will remain controversial. History will rarely conclude, oh, that was clear. We should just stand down on that question, because even if you get past that point in history, the importance of those questions remain. So let's do the NSA program, the so-called domestic surveillance program.

What we were trying to do was to detect the one kind of terrorist communications that should have been most important. terrorist communications, one end of which were in the United States of America. Now, there are only limited tools to do that. And so we did do some things that were quite aggressive, quite unprecedented, but quite legal. I'm quite comfortable that what we did was and remains awful. You want kind of an exclamation point on that.

You had the senator from Illinois, Mr. Obama, run for president on the platform that he's not George Bush. and when President Obama is president-elect, and he gets briefed on these programs that started under President Bush, he doesn't shut them down. He keeps the surveillance programs, which, from my mind, you know, every political bone in his body knew that he would have advantage if he canceled it,

but he didn't. And that to me is pretty good indicator that, number one, they were effective, and number two, they were lawful. Now, the CIA programs, which I did inherit, those were all well underway before I got there. And in fact, if you go through that section of the book, I'm kind of there taking that program apart, brick by brick, not criticizing my predecessors. They had their issues. I had mine.

We knew more about al-Qaeda when I was director than we did when George Tenet was director in 2001 and 2002. So I could afford to change some things, but I'm not second-guessing George. That program remains even more controversial than the domestic surveillance program, the so-called domestic surveillance program. And that program, President Obama did shut down most aspects of it. We used to call it RDI, renditions, detentions, and interrogations. President Obama shut down DNI. He told me on inauguration day, shut down the CIA Black Sites. It wasn't very hard. They were empty. And I don't want you guys doing the interrogations anymore. That wasn't very hard either. We didn't have any detainees. But he did keep renditions, the extrajudicial movement of someone.

one from place A to place B. Even President Obama running on being the anti-George Bush felt that, no, I need to keep that one in the quiver. I may want to use that one. And so, look, these are all controversial and good Americans can disagree on all of them. That's the point I make throughout the book. It's about good people with opposing points of view arguing them out within a free society. My take was, I would like to argue them based on facts. And so my book is an attempt to put the facts out there as I know them to be. So what do you think about some of those recent scares about how much information and metadata

that NSA is collecting? Because in the book, some of it does seem a little ominous. There's a slogan up for some of the targeted killing with the drones and things like that. We track them, you whack them. And I get that for military purposes. But when civilians read that, a lot of us are like, dang, that's kind of crazy.

We don't like the fact that this looks like a video game in its simplicity, of course, only. in our imagination as to how easy this is. What do you think about some of those scares? Yeah, the image is this is emotionalist killing. It just looks like a video game. I got a joystick and off we go. Actually, Jordan, the opposite is actually very true, quite true.

These activities have tremendous impact on the people who are doing them because by the nature of this, you know, you're looking at a compound from an unbanned aerial vehicle, a drone. We require these people to look at that compound for hours, if not days, before you take a shot. And so these people are looking down at that compound. They're seeing this terrorist, and we know he's a terrorist. We're seeing him play with his kids. We're seeing him talking to his wife.

We're seeing him having a dinner with his neighbors. And we're waiting for him to get in the car and drive a little bit off the compound so we don't kill his family. And when he gets 100 or 200 meters off the compound, we take the shot. That is tremendous emotional burden that the mission is putting on those people. because you've just watched this human being act like a human being. So this is not emotionalist killing.

Yeah, and you do cover that in the book as well. You talk about the translators and the trackers and some of the drone pilots who are, they're intimately involved in the lives of their targets. It's not like they show up with their coffee and click, you know, the bomb button and then they're, you know, nukeing people. They're not shooting people with drones and missiles

and then going to grab sushi. They're listening to phone calls. They're watching the movements, like you said, watching them play with the kids. and a lot of them get emotional when they have to confirm the killing of the target, and some people refuse, you wrote. We talked about some of our language analysts who were on terrorist and targets. We had geolocated the phone.

We were intercepting the call live, and we were about to take the shot. You would turn for that last confirmation to say, that's him on the phone, right? Of course, the analyst would know based upon voice recognition, and the analyst would also know that if he or she said yes, the next sound he or she would hear would be the explosion. We had some analysts at NSA who did not morally object to the mission that just could not gather the emotional balance to do that mission themselves,

so they requested to opt out. But more broadly on the question of targeted killing, we track them, you whack them. To give you a sense of the broader picture, Jordan, we believe we're at war. When we've had two presidents style, very different presidents, the 43rd and the 44th, President Bush, President Obama, both say we are a nation at war, and therefore we are in a global conflict with al-Qaeda and its affiliates,

and therefore as a belligerent, we have the right to take our fight to this enemy when he threatens us. There are many other countries around the world who accept that legal theory I just played out for you. Even our best friends don't think it's legitimate for the United States to act as a belligerent outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, which of course are war zones. But we do, and two very different presidents think we do. And therefore, we have opted. We believe we have the moral and legal authority under international law to actually use targeted killings against individuals in parts of the world where the local government is unwilling and or unable to allow normal law enforcement activities to reduce or eliminate this threat to the United States. I take the point. It's really controversial. We're kind of by ourselves out there. I think maybe

Israel agrees with our theory. Frankly, within the last year, the British took their own shot under that theory, and they took it against a British citizen. At least in one instance, they've kind of lined up in the queue with us. But by and large, this is a uniquely American legal theory. You can probably tell from the tone of my voice, Jordan, I'm really comfortable with it. I think it's legal and moral and necessary. I don't discount. A lot of other good folks don't agree with any of those three adjectives. Sure. I mean, targeted killing has become essentially a core part of the American way of war in recent years. And of course, to do it right, and I put that in air quotes because I don't want 10,000 emails, but to do it right, requires the kind of exquisite.

Exquisite intelligence, that's right. I am not claiming that we haven't heard or killed some people who aren't mad at, all right. I think the targeted killing program, I actually say it in the book, is the most precise application of firepower in the history of armed conflict. I really do, but that doesn't mean collateral damage is zero. Collateral damage does happen. I talk in the book. about the killing of a fellow named Abu Kabab, who was a WMD, a weapons of mass destruction expert for al-Qaeda. And we've been hunting him for a long time. And when we finally had an opportunity to take a shot,

he decides to sleep outdoors, because in that part of the world it gets very hot at night, very often people sleep outdoors. And he's sleeping outdoors with his grandson, not too far away from him. But we're going to take it. We engineered the shot every way we could to make sure all the energy from the hellfire missile went to granddad and not to grandson. All the energy went away from the sun.

We did our best. We failed. We killed him, but unfortunately his grandson also died. I bid it candidly in the book, Jordan. In the real world, things rarely come out black and white. Sure. I mean, it's trying to swat a fly with a shotgun. It's just not going to work.

You wouldn't do that. In your house, there's a lot of balancing of decisions here, very difficult operational and political decisions that you can't really make if you're not in that position and thinking this is a guy who is brewing something, orchestrating some massive attack. If you didn't do it and then you reported later on, well, we had a chance to shoot him, but he was holding a kid. It would look pretty ridiculous if that guy had just blown up the Oklahoma City Federal Building with a daycare in the basement. Nobody would forgive you for that. Jordan, even I know, there are a second, third, and fourth order effects to doing this.

And a lot of those effects aren't good. Number one, you do get collateral damage, even if you try very, very hard. Number two, you do kind of feed the jihadi recruitment video with the heartless crusaders using these weapons from 20,000 feet. We've got a fairly unique legal theory here. It kind of alienate some of our allies, particularly in Western Europe. We don't agree with our legal theory. So we know that when we're buying that first order effect, this bad man is no longer a real problem for us.

We're also buying the second, third, and fourth order effects, too. So I conclude that chapter on targeted killings and unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, by saying what we need here is not a switch, but a dial. We need to be very prudent with regard to how often we do this and should only do it when it's really necessary because there are other effects that are not positive. So one might ask, can a democracy keep that up? And can our democracy keep that up?

Because it seems almost contrary to some of our values to do things like that. Well, you know, our democracy has been arguing about it for 15 years. You know, and our democracy may change direction next year under a different president. We're going to have to see. Jordan, we've got no other tools for doing this. I don't mean the drones. I mean decision-making. The only way we have to make decisions is to allow our political processes, the people we elect,

do what we elected them to do. And sometimes they're going to make decisions that in retrospect may not seem as wise as they looked in prospect. They may make decisions that suddenly go out of favor, not because they suddenly got wrong, but because the control of the House and Senate changed hands. That stuff just happens. And what I try to work in the book, the description is the agency, CIA, NSA, they're going to be there. They're going to be there from Clinton through Bush, through Obama, through whoever comes up next. and they're still going to have these same responsibilities.

And so my purpose in writing the book is to try to remind the American people that the human beings inside these big three-letter organizations aren't aliens. They're their friends and neighbors. They share their values. They are just put in circumstances, Jordan, where they have to apply these values in situations most Americans will never see, and in many cases, we'll never learn of. That's one of the themes I try to emphasize in the book.

You say in the book, at the end of the day, we're not going to be able to do the kinds of things we need to do to keep America safe unless Americans are more confident in our actions, more comfortable with what we're doing, and we can't buy that with anything other than more openness. And that's just the way it's going to be. What do you mean by openness? Yeah, so what we've got is a shifting political culture

inside the United States. I'm probably not the first person on your show, Jordan to mention this, but there's a lot of distrust out there. You've heard that from others, right? I have seen that somewhere. Yeah. I mean, not many people are willing to cut the government a break when their elements is down, right? And the intelligence community is part of that. When I was director of NSA, I was fond of saying, look, we only need to be two things to be successful. We need to be powerful, and frankly, we need to be secretive. And we exist inside a broader political culture that distrust, frankly, only two things. Power and secrecy. You've got this

trust factor that we have with the American people. And I've concluded because the American people are growing increasingly skeptical about a lot of things, that the American intelligence community is just going to have to show the American people a little bit more of what it's doing for them. The American people aren't going to give them a blank check based on blind trust. Now, there are limits to that, Jordan. Please don't let any of your listeners kid themselves. Making more of this stuff public is going to shave points off of operational effectiveness. But what I'm saying to my friends still in the intelligence community is, if you don't share more of what it is you're doing, it's not going to matter because the American people aren't going to give you the

permission to do these things in the first place. So we're just going to have to be a bit more open about some of the things we do. Speaking of openness and sharing, let's look at a little bit of unauthorized sharing. I mean, in the book you mentioned Edward Snowden, Markham as kind of a narcissistic defector, how did he shave points off? How did he damage us, as you put it? So let me give be the very modestly limited positive news first. All right. I am willing to concede the Stodan revelations distorted but accelerated a necessary conversation. And Jordan, you already made reference to it, the NSA program and metadata and so on. All right. So he accelerated a necessary conversation, distorted it as well. The other 98% of the stuff that he stole and his accomplices have

made public have nothing to do with your privacy or mind. They have everything to do with how your government collects legitimate foreign intelligence. I point out that this is the greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of the republic. And Jordan, you are less safe today because of it. Rick Leggett is now the deputy director of NSA. Rick was obviously a more junior officer when I was there, but a really smart one. Rick, about a month or so ago, said that they are approaching a thousand and counting a thousand, thousand foreign intelligence targets whom they know with confidence have changed their communications patterns based upon the revelations triggered by the documents that Snowden stole.

That makes you and me and our friends less safe than we would otherwise be. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, General Michael Hayden. We'll be right back. And now for the rest of my conversation with General Hayden. If you could say something to Edward Snowden knowing that he listens, to this particular episode, what would it be? Yeah, the right to remain silent. I wasn't sure if you were going to answer.

Has anyone ever been asked you that before? You were pretty ready with that one. Yeah, I got to ask that at Stanford. Okay. I was like, man, he had that locked and loaded. Good for you. Look, I stand by what I described in this, you know, self-centered, narcissistic,

hopelessly naive, and so on. He's done something that's really harmed our country. He's surrounding it as an act of civil disobedience. If you read American literature on civil disobedience, the Keystone document is Henry David Thoreau on civil disobedience. And Thoreau points out that civil disobedience, disobeying a law with which you disagree, civil disobedience takes its moral worth by your willingness to suffer the consequences for disobeying the law. He's not willing to do that. You've dealt with some of the world's most complex problems at the highest levels. Where do you see things going with organizations like ISIS and the domestic slash homes?

homegrown threats, both in the USA and Europe? Yeah, so let me begin with a little political incorrectness. This is about Islam. It's not about all of Islam, or for God's sake, it's not about all Muslims. There is a civil war going on inside one of the world's great monotheisms. And until that civil war shakes out, we are going to see these bursts of violence that will not be limited to the Islamic world, but will show up in the West, be it Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, or Orlando.

And I fear Islam is going through what Christendom went through in the 17th century. When Christendom made its peace with what you and I guys call modernity, how do you reconcile the transcendental, transcendental faith with science and reason? That was a real tough question for Christendom. It fought a war in the middle of Europe called the 30 years war in the middle of the 17th century. It was at least as bad as what's going on in the Middle East now. estimates are that about a third of the population of Europe died during that war, that as we came out of that war and came out of that century,

we in the West made our peace between faith and science, between transcendental thinking and modernity. We organized ourselves in the nation states, and we separated the sacred from the secular. Islam is having that debate now. I should warn you, Islam doesn't necessarily have to come up with the same answer Christendom did. Christmendon's solution is not a trendline. It's a point. And so we'll see what this other great monotheism decides for its future, but there is a grand struggle going on within the monotheism.

I was in Wales a couple of weekends back and listened to a wonderful British professor at the Hay Festival, literary festival that's held there every year. And he was asked a question after he'd given this long, really great lecture on Europe in the 17th century. He says, lessons from Europe in the 17th century, what might we apply to what's going on in the Middle East? And he frankly said pretty much what I just told you. He frankly said that Paris and Brussels and Orlando and San Bernardino were spillage from what is inherently this conflict within Islam that is probably going to take a generation or two to settle. And so this is not something that's going to be solved when we successfully target Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic

state, or if we successfully overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the president sort of dictator of Syria. Those are probably good things, but this thing's not going away for a long time. Since we have you here and it's timely, I wonder what you think of the whole Apple iPhone encryption issue. A lot of people probably realize that the San Bernardino terrorist, the shooter, had an iPhone and the FBI asked Apple to unlock it and they said no, because they didn't want to alter the operating system to be less secure. What do you think about that? it sort of falls right in line with the whole security versus liberty argument. Yeah, actually I side with Apple. I'm not the only person like me that sides with Apple.

Two of my predecessors at NSA, Keith Alexander and Mike McConnell side with Apple. Mike Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security, sides with Apple, Dave Petraeus, Apple. Richard Clark used to handle cyber and terrorism for the National Security Council, sides with Apple. I'll rephrase your dilemma a little bit, Jordan. I don't think this is a constitutional question. I actually think the government has the right to demand it. I don't think it's a privacy question. After all, he's dead and it wasn't his phone. I think this is a security question. And looking at this question purely through the security lens, I actually side with Apple on the side of good encryption. In other words, what I'm saying, guys, I think the government has the right to demand they open the phone. I just don't think it's a really good idea because terrorism isn't the only threat against the United States. In fact, the last couple of years, Jim Clapper, who's the director of national intelligence, is lit off his annual worldwide threat briefing, I'm saying the number one threat to the United States is cyber.

You know, you might want to think two or three times before you, on behalf of a legitimate counterterrorism need, don't mistake that. It'd be a really good thing to read that phone. On behalf of a legitimate counterterrorism need, do something that makes encryption on which all of us depend for cybersecurity, less secure than it would otherwise be. And so on security grounds alone, I'm with Apple on this one. So do you think you support Apple in sort of the broad sense, but maybe a narrow exception for this particular? No, I don't. I don't think this phone rises to the level that an exception is needed. Jordan, you ask a great question because, you know, all these things are relative. I just told you that I wouldn't do it for even these legitimate CT needs because you actually

create a far more extensive cyber weakness over here. I can think of CT circumstances that actually dominate a cybersecurity circumstance on this side, but this isn't one of them. I reserve the right to judge specific issues as they come up, but this one was pretty clear to me. We should not automatically default to the needs of counterterrorism or law enforcement when it comes to weakening encryption in the domain, the cyber domain in which we are all very much at risk. How do you reconcile then supporting that encryption while the NSA collects tons of data on unencrypted communities? Yeah, because there's a second order effect if you weaken Apple's encryption, you're going to make Americans less safe in the cyber domain to allow other people to steal their stuff.

NSA targets foreigners for legitimate foreign intelligence purposes. And why wouldn't you want your foreign intelligence service to intercept legitimate foreign intelligence targets? Yeah, I mean, if anyone knows why communications need to be encrypted, it's the former head of the NSA, right? Well, there you go. Actually, Jordan, you bring up a subplot here. It's really important. It really doesn't matter what you or I think about the Apple issue. Frankly, it doesn't matter what the Congress does about the Apple issue or what a judge does about the Apple issue. The unavoidable arc of technology,

Jordan, is in the direction of encryption, really good encryption. There's no law or court order or an opinion on a podcast that's going to stop that arc. So people, People like me, who are still in government, are going to have to live with the reality that the content of communications is going to be increasingly difficult to recover. And there's nothing you can do to stop that. That's where science is going. Yeah, it's like trying to stop a waterfall by making legislation. Right. That says it can't do that anymore. It's just not going to stop. So my counsel is, okay, get over it.

There's still a digital exhaust out there. Jordan is probably going to disturb your civil libertarian listeners, but there's an awful lot of stuff out there that you can collect through electronic surveillance against legitimate foreign targets and never get to the content of the communication. You can still create actionable intelligence. It's just going to be less about content and more about all the other stuff. stuff that's being thrown out into the cyber domain.

Sure. I got to ask you, man, what do you have to say about Trump? I mean, you're decidedly somewhat conservative, but you also know, intimately know how the U.S. deals with other countries, both in terms of diplomacy militarily, espionage cooperation. What do you think about the Donald? If he were to become president and would govern in any way comparable to the language he is used as a candidate, I would be very concerned about the welfare of the nation and the welfare of the world. And the longer this goes on, his language as a candidate doesn't change.

And so I am increasingly concerned. Are there people that are in your former position now in the administration who can say, hey, that whole thing about you wanting to do this crazy policy? Yeah, we just can't do that. I can't do that. Or we won't do that? I actually said on national TV during my book tour, I was on the Bill Maher show. And Trump said, we should target the families of terrorists. And I just simply said, Bill, that's just not going to happen. And he said, what do you mean? military coup? I said, no, Bill. I said, look, that's in violation of American law. It's in violation of international law. It violates the laws of armed conflict. If such an order were ever to be issued,

when it hit the first man or woman inside of an American military uniform, that individual would simply say what I just said. I'm sorry, sir, this is just not going to happen. Imagine a future in which Mr. Trump is president, and he does insist on that. I mean, that has the makings of a constitutional crisis. Hence my comment earlier, Jordan, I'm pretty worried. Yeah, good. That makes many of us, I think. You've seen some of the top technology that's ever existed anywhere. And so I'm wondering which companies maybe in Silicon Valley, the NSA or you admire most in terms of their technology. Have you seen developments where you just think, dang, that is advanced, even if it's just getting a car from the airport? No, I'm not going to handicap all the things going on in the valley. I will give you

macro statement though, okay? So I'm an American Air Force officer. I'm 39 years in the Air Force. America's Air Force is, frankly, simply the military expression of American aviation industry. By the same token, NSA and other technical intelligence collection activities around the country, they are the intelligence expression of the American computing, telecommunications, and cyber industry. Put another way, most of the stuff we're going to need to keep ourselves, safe in a digital world are going to be developed and invented by the private sector, not the government. And so you asked me about Snowden earlier. Snowden's revelations, and particularly the way they were rolled out and written about, has made the relationship between the government

and its legitimate activity and the valley in its legitimate activities more difficult. We need to rebuild those bridges so that American security can take advantage of the kinds of things that American industry creates. Instead of understanding a lot of the nuances, the sometimes deadly nuances that intelligence officials deal with on a daily basis, a lot of people, of course, criticize intelligence agencies for not doing enough

when they feel in danger, as you write in the book, while then reserving the right to criticize those same agencies for doing too much once they feel safe again. You're in quite the predicament, but it's probably a good one to be in from the perspective of a civilian. Oh, no, it's fine.

Remember what I told you on Tapper yesterday, If you would have followed on my question, you know, and Jake and Forman, you're going to have somebody or complaining about the Bureau, and my fanciful ending, which did not happen, would be how doesn't make you feel? And the answer was, it makes me feel good to be an American. That's what we do. If you're going to strap on these kinds of jobs, CIA and NSA, you better button your chin strap because this is the kind of reality that's going to take place. It's how our democracy works, and we're better for it. We're more secure for it, more free for it. This reminds me a little bit of Jack Nicholson and a few good men. I can't remember the exact quote, but he's something about,

stand there and question the freedom that I provide and question the manner in which I provide it. Obviously, you're not ordering the code red. This type of thing should make us stop and think about what we're really willing to give or to tolerate to preserve our illusions of safety in what is an inherently dangerous world. That's exactly right.

And that theme kind of permeates the book. This is a field of gray. There is no white and rarely is there even any black. The decisions that the government has to make, the security agencies have to make to defend America are always shades of gray, and there will always be controversial. Somebody's got to make them, and then live with the consequences. Either way, Jordan, I used to tell the story that for a lot of my time at CIA, I'd get a phone call in the middle of the night, I'd have a pretty good idea of what it was, before I would pick up

the phone, I simply quietly say to myself, okay, remember, Hayden, whatever you decide on this phone call you can live with for the rest of your life, which Jordan was not. not an invitation to be conservative, because you realize if you're conservative too often, you may have to live with a catastrophe that you had a chance to prevent. And those are the kinds of questions that people still in government have to face routinely.

We ask you as intelligence agencies to do virtually an impossible job, which is to protect us from the future while we go get sushi and then watch the NBA finals while you sweat it out. What's your decision-making system like? I mean, you must have some sort of process that says, all right, this is really important. I can't just wing it based on my gut

reaction that morning. There's got to be some sort of system or rubric that you use personally or that the agencies use. Oh, sure. First of all, you're operating, again, within your political and legal guidance, right? Your policy and legal guidance. So you roughly know where your limits are. Within those limits, now you have to make some operational decisions. Some are so important or so unique. You kind of toss them downtown for some additional guidance, but I got to tell you, when you do that too often, they're going to decide they really don't need you to be the CIA. director, they can just do it themselves. And so you take on an awful lot of things you have to decide within the agency based upon the policy and legal guidance that you have. And so when you're

faced with a difficult dilemma, my technique was get smart people in their room, ask them what they think and start challenging them, ask them a bunch of questions and make them explain themselves. And in those kinds of conversations, I generally got to a comfort level with a course of action that we would follow. The last question you would ask is to turn to the lawyer in the room and say, you good with this? Of course, that final check with regard to legality, then you would move forward. General, what do you think is the greatest threat to the nation right now? Is you imagine in the air between us, I've got a little graph with an X and a Y axis, okay? With the vertical axis being how bad is it, and the horizontal axis being how urgent is it, all right?

In the lower left-hand corner of that graph, in other words, it's really urgent, but the danger is not catastrophic, existential. I'd put terrorism. Look, an attack as bad as Orlando is not going to destroy the American way of life. On the other hand, if a TSA agent makes a bad decision tonight at Dallas Airport, something bad could happen by tomorrow morning. So it's urgent and it's bad, but there are limits to the badness. And then you go out that horizontal axis, that timeline, three, five, seven years. Here I start to run into a problem that's actually more serious. Here I start to run into states that I call ambitious, fragile and nuclear. And here, I've got North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Russia. Again, it's not going to happen overnight. If we don't handle it well, that could be really bad in five years. And then way out the line, maybe 10 years out, I've got the future American relationship with China. Now, we got

time. Nothing going to happen the next week. He's going to make this a crisis, I don't think. This one's really important. This one's pass-fail. get this one wrong, how does a status quo power, that's us, handle an emerging power, that's China, in a way that creates a new global equilibrium and doesn't lead to global war? That's the past fail challenge. If you're in intelligence, you're trying to work all of them, and the problem you've got, Jordan, is that urgent one? Because it's urgent, is sucking all the air out of the room. And you've got to work really hard to preserve your and your agency's resources to make sure they pay attention to these other issues that aren't quite as urgent, but are frankly more important.

Why is the Tom Paddy song your theme song? After the 9-11 attack, I went over to CIA, and CIA had plastered all over the building, desks and computers and so on. Todd Beamer's last words or last recorded words on that flight that went into the field in western Pennsylvania, let's roll. And for CIA, which has to do a lot of its things forward out of Garrison, let's roll fit perfectly. So what can we use as a rallying thing? We do a lot of our things from Garrison because, you know, electronic surveillance. And my wife and I were watching a benefit late one night shortly after the attack. And Tom Petty was one of the acts. And he was singing, we won't back down. And my wife just turned to me and said, that's your motto.

And so it was. We plastered that up on all NSA installations around the planet. And we got Mr. Petty's permission to use his song at a whole bunch of events and just use that as kind of a rallying, unifying theme for the folks at NSA in the early years of the war. General, thank you so much for your time today. Okay, guys, thank you very much. I've got some thoughts on this one, as usual. But before I get into that, here's a preview with the two.

26th National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster, on the greatest threats to the United States. Here's a preview. War is this continuous interaction of opposites, right? You and maybe multiple enemies and adversaries inside of a complex environment. You have to understand strategic empathy to try to view these complex competitions from the perspective of the other. Do you think our divisions domestically right now are one of the greatest threats to our national security? Absolutely.

George, they are. And our adversaries are doing everything they can to exploit them. I mean, Russia's masterful at this. When we were attacked on 9-11, you know, Al-Qaeda didn't target Democrats or Republicans, right? They targeted Americans. I think it's time to really

demand real reforms, you know, and if teachers unions are an obstacle, we've got to tell them, hey, you can't strike reform anymore. And we need to demand it. The fact that we're driven apart from each other based on these divisions in our society, what social media is doing to us by driving as part with these algorithms to show you just more and more extreme information based on your

our elections. The fact that, you know, if you're of one political persuasion, you watch one TV network and somebody of a different political persuasion watches a different one. You're creating two different realities. We're doing this to ourselves, George. We've got to stop. You know, we've got to stop it. So let's think about, let's work together to make our republic better every day. And there are some who don't want to do that. They think that, hey, you can't even empathize. You're not even allowed to empathize. It's a real tragedy. For more, including General H.R. McMaster's thoughts on immigration and climate change, check out episode 410 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Well, that turned into a really interesting

episode. I do love bringing these back from the vault, even though some of the political stuff or the news stuff might be a little bit outdated. I love the fact that he's so open about this and very candid. Not everyone could handle that type of pressure doing that job and the scrutiny that comes from the media afterwards. I think writing a book about this must have just been exhausting. If you're interested in that, of course, it is quite the publication. I think it's like 550 plus pages. You can find the link to the book in the show notes. It's called Playing to the Edge. And if you buy books from the guests, please do use our website links if you buy those books. It helps support the show. Worksheets for the episodes are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes. And some of our interviews,

not this one, unfortunately, because it is from the vault, are on our YouTube channel, Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. Our Clips channel is Jordan Harbinger.com slash clips. Little outtakes, cuts, highlights, things you don't see elsewhere on the show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or you can hit me on LinkedIn. And I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use. That's our six-minute networking course.

That course is free. No weird catch. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into the spy game or surveillance or national security, share this episode with him. I hope you find something great in every episode of this show.

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