The Jordan Harbinger Show - 87: General Michael Hayden | National Security in an Age of Lies

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

General Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) is a retired United States Air Force general, former Director of the CIA and NSA, and author of The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies. What We Discuss with General Michael Hayden: Why the current administration revoking security clearance of dissenting intelligence leadership is a big deal -- and why General Hayden believes it sets a precedent that threatens national security. The phenomenon of the unpleasant fact knows no political allegiance. Why it's imperative that we know how to tell uncomfortable truths in any field -- whether we're intelligence agents, business owners, or team members. How intelligence agents and operators at the highest levels of power in government create and maintain relationships and handle sensitive conflicts. An inside look at the game of espionage and why it's a crucial force for those of us who live in a democracy. And much more... 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! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. Today we're talking with General Michael Hayden. He was the director of the CIA and the head of the NSA National Security Agency as well. This has got quite a few secrets in his closet, I would imagine, Jason. This guy knows a lot of stuff. He knows where the bodies are buried. Definitely. Probably some literal truth to that as well. This shows a bit off the beaten path for us here on the Jordan Harbinger show. Today we'll discuss why it's imperative that intelligence agents, and if you run a business, your subordinates and team members, to be able to tell uncomfortable truths and how we can make this process smoother. We'll also uncover how intelligence agents and operators at the highest levels of government and in politics create and maintain relationships and handle sensitive conflicts. And we'll get an inside look at the game of espionage and why it's a crucial force for those of us that live in a democracy.

I find this geopolitical stuff quite interesting. I think you will as well. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of all the key takeaways that I discuss here with General Hayden. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. All right, here's General Hayden. So welcome back to the show.

Thanks for coming on today. I know you're a busy man. This is great. Thank you. And this show never really touches politics per se, but when I was doing the research for the show, I thought, okay, we'll talk about the assault on intelligence, and we'll talk about the book, you know, having read the book. But then, of course, everything yesterday was just upside down.

What is going on with your security clearance? And what's going on with the security clearance thing? What's happening right now? I know of nothing actually going on with my security clearance. We had the event about three weeks ago in which it was suggested from the White House press room. But I was in a small group of about a half a dozen folks who were being watched, looked at. And then he had the announcement yesterday with regard to John Brennan's clearance being lifted. But neither I, and to the best of my knowledge, anyone else on that list has had anyone in government speak with them.

So what we have is the loan event of John having his security clearance lifted by the president, by order of the president. And Jordan, I mean, president has absolute authority over security clearances. But then again, there are processes that normally surround the granting or removing of clearances.

And certainly, neither of that, the granting or the removal, has ever in my life experience been done without cause. And yet yesterday, you had the, spectacle of John's clearance being removed because, and I'm paraphrasing here now, he created some unhinged tweets, which, of course, if that were the requirement to keep the security

clearance, we'd have a lot of folks who would need to be reinvestigated. Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably accurate. And it really, it came in pretty good timing. I mean, the assault on intelligence is the title of the book that you've just written American National Security in an age of lies. And a large part of the book is dedicated to, look, this is how the government is kind of not necessarily being supported in their intelligence, gathering efforts and why this is dangerous. And I talked about this with a friend of mine about the security clearance debacle here with John Brennan. And people were like, oh, yeah, that's weird. I don't know.

I don't get it. And I thought, well, there's a reason that this is dangerous. but I think you're probably the perfect person to explain why sort of willy-nilly granting or revoking security clearances of CIA directors and other high-level government officials is generally not a good idea. So we can put this Jordan in three baskets, okay? Let's just start with the one we just touched on, which is an essential sense of unfairness to John Brennan, all right?

So let me explore that just for a second. There are a lot of former intelligence officials who maintain their clearances. And in all cases, they do it because the government thinks it's a good idea. They either want to call on them or they're in new jobs where the security clearance is required and so on. So now that John has been removed, John is no longer eligible for jobs for which he would be otherwise wonderfully qualified. So there's a certain sense of unfairness here. All right, that's basket one. Basket two are the kind of remaining survivors in the list.

You saw that Sarah Sanders yesterday mentioned, what, another eight or nine names? Mine included, but, you know, this is not particularly referential to me. But in essence, that announcement said, we're putting you people on notice. we're watching you. You better be careful what you say. Otherwise, you could end up like Brennan. That is an assault on free speech. That is an attempt to coerce.

That is an attempt to use raw presidential power to degrade a necessary national debate. Frankly, I don't think it's going to work. I'm going to say, right? think what I want to say right and think, and I don't think I will be influenced nor any of these other folks by this kind of threat hanging over their head. But just the attempt for that has got to be off-putting for most Americans. So that's basket two. Basket three is the biggest and maybe the most important. If you realize that the president yesterday just messaged the entire American intelligence community, if you persist in saying things I don't like or with which I do not

agree, I can punish you and I probably will, which is an horrible message for him because the intelligence community needs the freedom to go in there with some confidence to tell them things they believe to be true whether he wants to hear them or not. And I think he's made that more difficult to do or simply made it a far more courageous act on the part of the Intel guys than they should have to mount. So that's what the deal is. That's what I would have told your friend, Jordan. Yeah, that makes sense to me, General, because I think whenever we have to go to our boss,

regardless of whether we're making auto parts or international policy, we don't necessarily want to go in and say, so here's the problem. all that work we all did or all that money we all spent or all of that analysis we all did turned out to be wrong and here's this other thing that's going to kind of be embarrassing to everyone but it's the truth you don't want people to go shoot if i say that it could ruin my whole career but it will save a bunch of money trouble lives whatever but i really i've been working 20 years in this career i really can't lose it you want them to go this is what i have to do i have to tell the truth right now and people will be accepting of that because this is my job right now you'll be a lot of

your list that's saying oh come on now that's your job you just have to go in there and say it and of course that's right right but why would a president want to make that harder to do why would a president want to make that less likely to happen jordan we have a this happens enough in in my old world that we actually developed a phrase for it. It was called the phenomenon of the unpleasant fact. And so you're going in there to a policymaker and you feel as if you have to tell him something that cuts against his politics, his preference, his policy, his personality, I don't know. But you know it's not going to be a happy meeting. But you go in there and you do it. But Jordan, when you're going to go in there, there is a hesitancy, and I'm not being judgmental here, there is a hesitancy because you know you better get your act together.

You better be able to defend yourself because you're going to really hit some headwinds in there. And so what happens sometimes is that you don't go in there early enough to convince the first customer that he's wrong about something. and you don't go in there in time for him to begin to make adjustments and you've made the problem even worse. And so this is not confined to President Trump. Remember President Obama and ISIS being the JV team? Remember that? Yeah.

So who's the guy that goes in there and says, hey, boss, I've been thinking. Let me give you another way of looking at this problem. Right. And so I suspect, number one, the president should have been pushing back. But number two, they probably didn't pound the desk early enough to say, boss, you got to listen to me. President Trump has made that even more difficult by what he did yesterday. You know, I get it. Intelligence officers should be courageous and always do the right thing.

But, you know, demanding that absolute courage be a core element of their job description means from time to time, some folks aren't just going to meet that standard. Yeah, it's a little depressing when it comes down to it because we want to be ahead of all of this Russia stuff. We want to be ahead of the terrorism stuff here. We want to be ahead of the cyber security issues that we have. We don't want people to be dissuaded from talking about this or researching it. And it has even further reaching effects, I think, because whenever we dissuade people from doing something, the ripple effect really goes deeper. And there's, look, I don't have a concrete example of this, but an analogy I might draw here is going to be something along the lines of, well, do I want to research cybersecurity?

Because if every time somebody brings up cybersecurity, nobody wants to hear it and nothing gets done. And then the person who rings the alarm bell the loudest gets fired. Maybe I'll just go into a different field. Maybe I'll research something, you know, maybe I'll research bilateral relationships with Australia. It's not controversial. Nobody there ever gets canned, you know. It's easier. Well, you know, I had a question I used to ask.

And I'm sorry to be self-referential, but it's kind of the reverse of pushing bad news away from you. And so, you know, our folks would come in. We'd have an ad hoc staff meeting. They'd bring up an issue. They'd show me what the problem was. And one of the questions, Jordan, that I would routinely ask was, did I do that? Is that my fault? And, you know, sometimes it was, well, yeah.

And I go, all right, tell me more. Or even when it's no, I can say, well, fine, but we still have to fix it. But you get the tone that I'm trying to describe here. Yeah. Jordan, it's it's it. You're not pushing the bad news away. You're willing to hear it. You're not going to kill the messenger.

Yeah, that's, that sort of reminds me of, man, no one's going to get this, this reference. but Steve Urkel, Jason, you remember that show where he's like, oh, did I do that when he runs the car through the garage door, or he does some mistake? Oh, yeah. I totally remember that, yep. Yeah. But I think the problem that we have right now,

or I don't know if this is the entire problem, of course, but in this is sort of like post-truth world, intelligence agencies, you find yourselves, well, I guess your former agencies, in the bunker with journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement, and science also, everything's evidence-based, right? So you share this broader duty with these other truth tellers, hopefully truth-tellers, to preserve our ability as a society and as a country to make important decisions based on the best judgment of reality as

we can see it. Right. And look, and we all freely admit, you know, we can all get that wrong. but at least the departure point for our decision making is the pursuit of objective reality rather than some a priori narrative of how the world ought to work. And so this brings us almost full circle to how we began our conversation. What's going on here? And from the point of view of John Brennan and Jim Clapper and others, and look, John uses language that I have chosen not to use, all right? He has made this more personal than I think is effective.

But fundamentally, Hayden, Clapper, Brennan, McLaughlin, Morel, Bash, I mean, I could go on, Phil Mudd, with, you know, former intel folks who are now giving general public commentary. Their view, their purpose isn't to bash the president or bash the administration. Their purpose is to answer the question. And so, you know, when I'm asked something on air, I just try to give an objective answer. I'll give you one, Jordan, that for most people will sound like I'm opposing the president. General, do you think Kim Jong-un is going to give up his nuclear weapons? Oh, my God, no, he would be crazy to give up his weapons. And then I would go on to describe why that is actually the consensus.

of anybody who does this for a living. Now, that comes across as perhaps attacking the president or at least attacking his policy, when in reality all we're trying to say is that's not going to happen, but it comes out negative. And there's unfortunately as a president who does not like voices speaking against his preferred narrative. That's why you get fake news.

enemy of the people, and I'm taking these security clearances away. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, General Michael Hayden. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash advertisers. And if you'd be so kind, please drop us a nice rating and review in iTunes or your podcast player of choice.

It really helps us out and helps build the show family. If you want some tips on how to do that, head on over to Jordan Harbinger.com, slash subscribe. Now back to the show with General Michael Hayden. What do you think we should do about that? I mean, it's sort of saying, well, we need to convince the administration to change their mind. What do you do if you're a CIA or NSA officer or if we're at home and we have to tell our boss at the auto parts store that an inconvenient truth? How do we handle this? How do we prepare ourselves for that? Just tactically? Yeah, so I frankly, you've got to be true to yourself.

No, you know, you're not required to be suicidal or stupid, all right? And believe me, when you're going in there to the president, and I've done this with an unhappy story, all right? You don't want to be in his face or presenting it in a way that makes it politically embarrassing for him. So, Jordan, it's more art than it is science. I mean, it's science with regard to you've got to. have accurate observations, but how do you get those accurate observations inside the head of a human being who is thinking otherwise before you started? And there, as I said, the art form sometimes requires you to say, Mr. President, I get that point. I've got a lot of folks

who agree with Mr. President, but just for a minute or sir, let me give you another way of looking at that problem. You see what I mean? It's our, Mr. President, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I get that. But, you know, I think we, we, this week, we may be underselling the impact of, fill in the blank, Jordan, you know, of X, Y, or Z. You want to, you know, go to where he is and try to carefully walk him to another place. And, and again, that requires a certain interest, curiosity, and openness on the part of the person you're trying to communicate to.

And I'm afraid, certainly in his public persona, President Trump isn't a constant model of openness and willingness to accept alternative views. Do you think if we're stuck in a corporation where we find our superiors, well, we find our superiors being closed-minded? Do you think it's best to try to move away from that position? I'm trying to give something practical here for the listening audience because I think a lot of us find ourselves stuck talking with, say, a superior or boss who just isn't going to change. And what are we doing that position?

Is it better to move away from working with those types of people, wherever possible? Well, you know, Jordan, I can give you the answer that's always right. It depends. But it depends on yourself and on what it is you're doing. Okay. So if they don't mean to downgrade anyone's professional life, if what you're doing, if what you're doing, from your point of view is a job and you work in order to live rather than the other way around, you might be willing to accept frustration. You've done the best you can. You'll take your paycheck.

If, on the other hand, what it is you do is to defend the nation, wow, isn't that a hard question? And I write about this in the book. I actually, the most difficult part of the book to write, The one that I impose the most rewrites on myself was the part that talked about the really good people who the president brought in early in the administration, Rex Torson, Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and others. And point out how hard it must be for these very talented, very experienced, very objective people to work inside this White House. And would there come a point when they would have to make the judgment that they were no longer a guardrail on bad behavior, but had become enablers or legitimizers of that very same bad behavior just by staying on. And at that point, the choice might be, I got to go, because I can no longer lend my, authenticity to something I believe to be inauthentic. Well, that certainly makes sense.

And also it has to be an extremely tough decision. That's for sure, especially in the moment. And it reminds me of a conversation we had also on this show with Timothy Snyder, who's a historian. Oh, yes. I actually quote him in my book. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, actually you do.

That's probably what reminded me to put this in my show notes here. And I think one of the things that he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, was essentially to abandon facts, you're abandoning freedom. And you can't criticize power because there's no, if nothing is true, you have no basis of comparison, right? Exactly right. And actually, actually, I use another quote. I use that passage from his book. And that passage ends up with post-truth is pre-fascism. And that's scary.

That's really scary, especially when we're talking about some of the issues that are facing. the nation lately. And you recently actually had, of course, come under fire for tweeting a picture of, I want to say, it was Burkinaw, and he said, this is kind of where we're heading. No, actually what I said was other governments have separated children from their mothers. Oh, that's true, yeah. Okay. And what I was describing, I walked that real sighting in that iconic picture several times, in reality. And that's where families were separated upon arrival. And I just wanted to draw the point home. I wasn't saying what was happening on the southern border at the time compared to the Holocaust,

but that there were echoes there in terms of what it seemed like our indifference to separating families. And I got, you know, I got to go on the air because you're right, Jordan. A lot of people thought I'd overshot the mark. And I said, hey, look, I'm not saying that we're Birkenau in 1944. But you know, it's beginning to feel a lot like Berlin in 1933 with post-truthism, tribalism, the isolation and condemnation of minorities, the emphasis of blaming everything on the quote-unquote, the other, those sorts of things. And so I was genuinely serious and genuinely, as I think you and I are still now worried

about the course of events and in a later tweet, Jordan. By the way, overwhelmingly, the tweets that followed it were supportive, but the ones that weren't supportive were really not supportive, all right? Very attacking. And I said something later that day is, okay, I get your concern. When should I send up the flare? Should I wait for the white? House press office to become the minister of ministry of propaganda. Should I, should I wait for

somebody to march through a mid-sized American town yelling blood and soil and Jews will not replace us? Should I wait? Obviously, you get the point. Yeah. I'm saying here, Jordan, all those things that already happened. So why shouldn't I send up a flare? The reason that some people, I think, attack you of, well, of course, they disagree with you. But I think others do it because they don't really want to believe what people are saying it's easier if some creepy guy on youtube who runs around with the shirt off and sells you know vitamins is saying that this has happened because we can easily discount it but when it comes from people who are extremely well informed and who have had storied careers of being well informed over a period of several decades at the highest levels

of government it gets more scary because then we can't go eh that general hayden guy is just one of those cooks, you know, he's a, he's a social media guy just trying to get his book sales. It's harder to make that argument when somebody spent years at the helm of the CIA and the NSA and in the military and in other areas of diplomacy. It's harder to just discount that as kookiness. Yeah, and hence, back to where we began, Jordan, you know, the Hayden's, Clappers, Brennan's, Comys, etc. of the world. I mean, these aren't the chicken little characters in a storybook. I mean, each of us are capable of getting stuff wrong, but we are somber, serious folk.

And I think that's why we're going through the current drama, because I think the president, his administration, some of his supporters, are made uncomfortable that folks who, frankly, don't traditionally say a whole lot of anything, frankly, are usually pretty serious about what it is they say and not instinctively extremist in their language, are talking a lot, and they seem really concerned. And that may be what's energizing a lot of what we're seeing now. Yeah, I think that that's a good point. It is a little scary when people who are normally men and women of few words are like, okay, fine. I'm going to sit down and give an hour-long lecture at the Commonwealth Club and have it televised or something because this is, or testify in front of the Senate, because this is important enough where I'm going to kind of throw myself onto the firing line and then get possibly fired. And in many cases, like James Comey actually get fired for doing it. Yeah, I mean, look, this wasn't in any of our career plans. Yeah, generally getting canned or losing your security clearance is kind of a hit to the old resume.

Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned earlier fractionalization or tribalism, I think, is the word that you used. And in the assaults on intelligence, you mentioned the concept of bubbling and social media. Can you explain that? Because I think that's happening to all of us in a way where we maybe don't even notice. Yeah, so we spent 25 minutes here, Jordan, pretty much talking about you, me, and the president, right? But in the book, I spent a lot of time in the book talking about us.

I mean, the big us, the 330 million us. And I talk about our having moved as a society, and others have too, not everybody, but we're not alone. we've moved into what has been called a post-truth world in which decision-making is based less on fact and evidence and data and more on feeling, preference, emotion, tribe, loyalty, grievance. All right. And so data just hasn't been as important in terms of our making decisions on a variety of things. So that's one reality. The second reality, and probably closely related, is that most of us now get our data, but that word in quotes, via social media. We are all subjected to a tsunami of information from a tsunami of uncurated information.

And I'm certainly a lot older than you are, but I think even your generation wasn't trained to absorb data that. way. Most of us, certainly I'll speak for myself. I was trained to absorb data 30 minutes at a time on the evening news and 45 minutes at a time reading the morning newspaper. Digestable doses already curated for my review. And now we're just overwhelmed with information with all of it seemingly equally appropriate, equally legitimate. And what happens, and I did some, on an awful lot of time researching this for the purposes of the book, because it's really important, is that the algorithms that drive social media actually drive us away from common ground and into our self preferences. Let me explain what I mean. So you go online and whatever it is

you're using, Facebook or whatever, knows as much about you as you do yourself. And the business model for those enterprises is to keep you online. It's to keep you on the site. I mean, they make money by the number of clicks. And so they're going to show you some things that are going to keep you there, things that you like. And the longer you're there, the more it provides things that reinforces your original instincts. In other words, Jordan, they don't drive you to the public square for a discussion.

They drive you into the darker corners of your own self-identified, self-defiance. get a little bit. And so because we get our information that way, we find ourselves hardening in our positions rather than rather than in this common dialogue. I was listening to a woman whose name is Tufxhi, who's Turkish by birth and North Carolinian by choice. He's an expert on all this. And she compared it to a Dorito. I mean, a Dorito is frankly a delivery mechanism for salt and fat. And when you consume salt and fat, what do you crave? Right. More salt and fat. And that's what the algorithm in most social media platforms, that's what it does to us. It gives us more of the salt and fat that we tasted in the first place, except you don't have any

calorie counter warning label about the salt content. And you're driven into this bubble into this into this community whose members think and write the way you do. And so we're driven away from dialogue and more in the direction of almost religious like beliefs. Right. So we're in the Dorito bubble where all of the food is Doritos and even the ones that are vegetable flavored are still just Doritos. Yeah.

And so that is that is a. real no fooling problem. And there was a fellow named Roger McNamee, who was an early investor in Facebook and a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. And just before I went final

on the book, he began writing some really harsh articles about the unanticipated ill effects of the algorithm that Facebook uses. And here, Jordan, he wasn't suggesting, you know, we need to better police the trolls

and we better keep Russian political advertisements off the net. No, he was saying the basic issue is the basic issue. It's how it works. It's the basic algorithm. It's the business model. And that was actually quite stunning. And I was glad to be able to include it in the book. Yeah, that's a little scary because that sort of maybe does a head fake to the idea that there's no real solution to this.

Yeah. And look, to end this segment where I began. The president recognized this as a candidate and exploited it, but he didn't create it. All right. And so if we're going to get better at this, if we're going to be more data-based in our decision-making, it's going to be something that we're all going to have to contribute to. Look, Donald Trump is effect from what it is we just described. He's not cause. That's very interesting.

And again, unfortunately, says that, hey, look, this isn't a problem that expires. when administrations changed. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, General Michael Hayden. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash advertisers.

We also have an Alexa skill so you can get inspirational and educational clips from the show in your daily briefing. Go to jordanharbinger.com slash Alexa or search for Jordan Harbinger in the Now for the conclusion of our show with General Michael Hayden. And I think a lot of people don't realize why the fractionalization is a problem, but you'd written in the assaults on intelligence that the more polarized a society, the more vulnerable it actually is. Can you flesh that out a little? Because I think most people don't realize the gravity of that particular fact. So if you picture what I just described, Jordan, as a three-layer cake with the biggest layer being the society we just described, all right, this post-truth world. The second layer being the administration. I mean, it does matter.

The president as a candidate recognized and exploited this. And frankly, by many of the things he does and almost everything that he says, he makes that first layer worse than what otherwise is. B. And then there's a third layer. And this is the first time now, we've been doing this over 30 minutes. This is the first time I'm mentioning the Russians. All right? There's a third layer of the cake. It's the smallest. All right. If you want me to put a number on it, it's 15% of our problem. The other 85% is us. But you now have the Russians there who see what it is we are doing to ourselves and frankly opening ourselves up to manipulation by them because they want to divide and distract us because they view us to be a permanent global competitor with them. And although,

you know, I give some credit to the Russian effort in terms of, you know, the professional talent that was required, we really make it easy for them because of our own internal divisions. It sounds like when you were working in Bulgaria, and I think I read this in your last book, when you were working in Bulgaria, there was an apparatchiks, so some communist party official who said something along the lines of, well, the truth is whatever serves the Communist Party. We were arguing, and I got frustrated. I said, oh, for God's sake, Colonel, what does truth mean to you? He says, truth, truth is what serves the party.

When people say things like that, do you just look at them sideways and think how, How is it possible that you actually believe what you're saying? So if you think about this, and again, I treat this in the book as well. This is a, you know, I hope people enjoy reading the book because I enjoyed writing it and researching it. I got out of my bubble. I mean, it's obviously about intelligence, but it brings in so many other things. And so, so George, what you just described is the manner of thought in the West since the age of enlightenment. In the Enlightenment, Western man embrace this evidence-based path to decision-making at the expense of other ways of doing it.

And that's a common heritage for all of us in the West, but it is a peculiarly strong heritage for us in the United States. Because the founders of our nation were all scholars of the Enlightenment. You know, we hold these truths to be self-evident. And so the essence of our country is based on enlightenment values. Now, as I just said, I mean, the French were children of the Enlightenment, too. Germans were children of the Enlightenment, too. So we share that. But France and Germany didn't shape their identity as a nation based upon the values of the Enlightenment.

I mean, let me put it to you this way, Jordan. Germany and France were nations long before the Enlightenment came on. We became the idea of the Enlightenment and our foundation documents before we were even a true nation. And so if we are backing away as a society from Enlightenment values, that affects the French. It affects the Germans. But it directly assaults who we are or who it is we thought we were. And so when you have a bunch of gooms marching through Charlottesville saying blood and soil, blood and soil, there are some countries on earth that identify themselves through blood and soil.

Germany is one. And they're good countries. But it's not how we have identified ourselves, Jordan. we have identified ourselves as a creedal people, people who are formed by their belief in certain values. You can live in Germany for four generations, and if you aren't German by blood, you're still not German. You come to America after a couple of years, if you understand the documents, prove you understand the documents, pledge allegiance to the documents, you're an American. and I fear that this post-truth world, this tribalism, this blood and soil, this American identity is something other than our ideals, that's an assault on the basic foundations of who we are, and that's why people like me get along. Yeah, that's, I mean, that is kind of a little scary when you think about it, right?

because it seems like our foundation being based on those enlightenment values of truth and things like that, the value of truth, when we look at things like Russian information warfare, which uses so-called domestic alt-right and conspiracy sites and things like that on the left and the right, are we more, are we less prepared to deal with this because we sort of have this underlying assumption that, hey, look, at least there's going to be a basis in truth to some of this, even if there's spin and the Russians are like, are you kidding? We're just going to print up craziness and a certain percentage of you are going to believe it because that's what we've been doing with our own people for a thousand years. Yeah. So, and so, you know, I mean,

the right answer is a little this, little of that. But to a degree I've not seen in my lifetime, other times in my life, we seem to base our beliefs on our tribal identities more than on raw data. I mean, picture, if you will, Jordan, a really controversial. you'll call it an NFL game on Sunday. I can pretty much predict for you what everyone thinks is the right call based upon the color of the jersey they're wearing, okay? And unfortunately, that dynamic now is far more a part of our political dialogue than it should be and maybe that it has never been. I'll give you one example. As part of the research for the book, since I spent most of my life talking about,

talking with people talk like me, I went to my native Pittsburgh and had my brother get a bunch of supporters of the president in the back of a sports bar where I paid for all the beer and pizza and walked in about 40, 45 folks and said, hey, hi, hi, good to see you. What are you guys thinking? And, boy, they told me. And at one point, I actually said, oh, come on, folks, how many of you actually believe Barack Obama wiretap Trump Tower. And Jordan, a surprising number of hands went right up in the air. I go, really? I said, I used to run NSA. I actually know kind of how this works. Not only would the NSA not do it, I don't think they could make the plumbing even work that way to do it. And then I paused and said, why do you believe it to be true? And one person in the front row kind of put arms out,

shrugged shoulders and said, Obama, to which an awful lot of people in the room nodded their agreement. That's post-truth decision-making. That's decision-making based upon tribal identity rather than data. The answer was Obama and then shrug? QED, thus it has been demonstrated. Yeah. Oh, that's so sad somehow. I mean, not somehow. That is just sad. That's ridiculous. I mean, I don't consider myself particularly partisan in any given direction. And I stay, like I said, I stay away from politics most of the time on the show. But I at least do a concern. I like to think a lot of people at least want to put out an effort to find out whether something is complete baloney or not.

And that just, that's maddening and scary at the same time. I know that a large part of your job was when you were head of CIA or NSA was just simply. convincing politicians that you need to get certain things done. Right. But how do you balance the rights of us as citizens, you know, privacy and telling us the truth and things like that with your responsibility to protect us by getting all of our and everyone else's information so you can make informed decisions and form courses of action?

Because that's got to be a pretty tough call, speaking of tough decisions that you can't base on emotion. No one can guarantee you perfect liberty or perfect security. In the real world, people have to make difficult decisions and difficult tradeoffs. And so I guess the first answer I give you, Jordan, is that is that line, okay, between, say, privacy and safety or liberty and security, it's a bit of a movable feast. And I'm not saying it's arbitrary. I'm saying where that line should be depends on the totality of circumstances in which you find yourself. So quite legitimately, the line was one place on September 10th, 2001, and was in another place on September 12th,

because we found ourselves in circumstances we hadn't anticipated. It didn't mean we were a despotic people under a despotic government. It didn't mean anyone had a secret plan in their right-hand desk drawer that they could finally spring on the American people. It meant that a prudent citizenship had decided they needed to make different kinds of trade-offs because they valued both their life and their liberty, their safety, and their privacy. And so what happens, Jordan, is where that line is is always in a gray area. And so no matter where the line is, there are going to be people arguing about it. You make the best decisions you can. Let me fast forward, okay?

We're actually pretty good at this. And there haven't been any really major terrorist attacks, certainly from outside the United States. The last successful terrorist attack was about a year ago. recall Halloween, West Side Drive, bike path, rental truck, eight people killed in southern Manhattan. And when I talk about that to audiences, I say, you know what comes to mind to me, and I think a lot of other folks like me when we see that, is the concept of limits. And I go on to develop, you know, we're actually pretty good at security. and you've put a lot of money into this and given your security agency certain authorities. And so, you know, that might actually give you a sense of the range of what the bad people are able to do to us now.

They want to do 9-11 again, you know, that big, moving, big, slow-moving, complex, multi-actor plot that creates mass casualties against an iconic target. But frankly, what if they are able to do might be the lone wolf, self-motivated, running a truck and killing eight people, which is a tragedy, but not a catastrophe. And then I paused, Jordan, and say the concept of limits may come in in another way as well. I'm blunt, folks. I'm a security guy. I got a lot of controversial programs in my resume. But frankly, I don't know what I would ask your approval to do any more than we're doing right now. That would give me a belief that I would actually have a better chance of stopping that kind of attack than I do now.

In other words, I say, we're kind of in a stasis here, a new equilibrium. that's not as bad as they can hurt us right now, but there isn't much more I could do to make that less likely. And Jordan, that kind of describes this issue. I can't drive either of these to zero. And I decide where it is I want to be based upon the totality of where we are. And I'm telling you, as the surveillance guy, I'm not asking you for any more authorities because I can't turn those authorities into more safety for you. That's interesting. So rather, it's like espionage then is essential to democracy in that way, because of course frightened people don't make good Democrats. We've seen that in other countries. Exactly right. So to give you a sense, after 9-11, we really did kind of push the throttle forward. And we did a lot of things that remain controversial to this day. But Jordan, one of our motivators, one of our motivators in doing that was the absolute firm belief.

that if a second 9-11 happened, there would be no stopping the American people in their demands for security, whatever the price. In other words, if a second major attack happened, it would be deeply harmful, not just to our safety, but to our freedoms as well. Yeah, that I think that sort of goes along with some of the statements that people were making around September 11th that at the time I was kind of too young to understand. Like, oh, the terrorists win if we take away our freedoms. And I was 21. So I was thinking like, I don't care, you know, I don't need, I don't do anything wrong. I had nothing to hide. You know, I had that kind of argument in the back of my head.

So I fully understand that. And as citizens, I think a lot of us, we just, look, speaking frankly for myself, I've, greatly prefer to criticize intelligence agencies for not doing enough when I feel scared while reserving the right to criticize those same agencies for doing too much when I feel safe again. Yeah. And look, that comes with a job, all right? We know that. And that's why you want to be able to stand up and explain to the people who are coming at you

from the left and explain to the people who are coming at you from the right, all right? that I can't make either of you groups totally happy. I've just, we have decided, you know, through the processes of government, Congress, the president, of course, this is what we're going to be. And then you've got to, you've got to man up and say, and I own it. So to be clear, Jordan, so your listeners understand,

you know, I'm the electronic surveillance, renditions, detentions, interrogations, and target a killing guy, all right? And you can probably tell from my tone, I'm at peace with everything that we did and I'm quite prepared to discuss it calmly with anyone who thinks they don't agree with one or another or all of those things. I can make my case. This is not an argument between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. This is a discussion, as I said before, within a free people as to how they want to achieve two things, both of which they would like to have in full measure.

freedom and security, but which in the real world, they have to balance. Yeah, the sticky truth, right, is that we ask intelligence agencies and defense agencies to do basically an impossible job, aka, you know, other, basically protect us from the future. And then we go get sushi and watch the NBA finals and we're like, well, you sweat it out how to do that. Just, you know, don't do anything that I might get mad about later on. Right. We are, as you probably know, very good friends with the other English. speaking democracies. It's called the Five Eyes community, ourselves, the British, Canadian, the Aussies, the New Zealanders. We meet every year the FBI, NSA, CIA equivalence. This relationship is

very close. And we had a delay in the meeting after 9-11. We were busy and security concerns. But finally, in late spring of 2002, we were meeting on the South Island and New Zealand. So we had again, those five countries, those three agencies in each of the countries represent. Not everybody has all three, so there are actually 13 agencies in the room. And Eliza Manningham Buller, who was the deputy at the time that later went on to become the head of Britain's MI5, their kind of FBI. Eliza summarized it really well. She said, you know, gentlemen, and she could say gentlemen, because she was the only woman in the room. You know, gentlemen, we're all been accustomed to serving our nations by dealing with those who are guilty.

Now we're being asked to deal with the not yet guilty. And that was really a very good summary of the tasking that implicitly had been given to us by our populations. Yeah, I think that those relationships are interesting as well for purposes of the show here. We teach a lot about networking and relationship development, and you do have these multinational relationships with counterparts across the world. How are, yes, we have the Five Eyes organization, but how do you maintain those relationships? It seems like there has to be more than just an annual meeting with, you know, a meal at the end to maintain trust and accountability in intelligence agencies like that, because this is serious stuff that requires the highest level of trust and discretion. Yeah. So in terms of the five-eyes community, particularly in terms of signals intelligence, Jordan, so that's NSA, the British equivalent is GCHQ, the Australian equivalent is ASD. If you're picturing the signals intelligence organizations of those five countries, I think Jordan, it is not an exaggeration to say it's not that they cooperate.

It's that they are integrated operations. Okay. So it's not like. each of them does their own work, and then at the end of the day, they toss stuff through the transom. In many instances, that which it is they discover and create is the product of a joint effort from the very beginning. And so, particularly in terms of signals intelligence, these five countries, frankly, are indivisible. I would tell you the story that it is really, really, really difficult for NSA to be doing something about which GCHQ does not become aware, simple because we coexist in the same work spaces doing common things. What do you do them when you fundamentally disagree with somebody across the pond?

It has to happen at some point. It seems like whenever you're dealing with someone who's foreign or anyone for that matter, you're dealing with serious topics like politics and defense. How do you deal with a disagreement at that point? that level. I mean, you can't really, there's obviously, I would hope, not so much politicking involved, and you can't exactly run it by a bunch of other people for opinions either. How does that stuff get handled? So number one, those five countries I listed probably have the greatest convergence in their foreign and security policies of any five countries you could

name, all right? And so if you're going to get really, really integrated, these are the five guys you want to do it with because at the political and strategic level, the really fundamental disagreements are rare. But you ask a fair question, and we've got partners beyond the Five Eyes Alliance. And there, you might be surprised how steady the intelligence relationships are even when the political waters are really, really choppy. And so with regard to the war in Iraq, under President George W. Bush, at the political level, there are many of our partners who've really very much opposed the war. That the level of intelligence cooperation hardly caused a ripple. And the reason that is, is not that anyone was disloyal. The reason there was hardly a ripple is that

the intel guys know that you're all going to be there, even when the political leaders are gone, and you're going to be dependent on these relationships remaining healthy. Right. So it's, it's unfortunately, though I think isn't that one of the reasons that guys like Vladimir Putin think, well, the CIA is really in control of the country because that's how it works over there, the KGB or FSB, they're the ones who are going to be around. Medvedev or whatever president is transient, but the people who are really pulling the strings were always the security agencies. How are things then different? Yeah, they are different because we don't have the, we don't have the KGB chief running the country. I mean, right. There's that, yeah. So look, and this is important. When President Trump and people around him, his supporters or his surrogates, make accusations about the deep state, they are describing the world as Vladimir Putin believes it to be. They are describing America in terms that Vladimir Putin wants to use, that America is controlled by security services and its espionage agencies.

which is not true. But when the president talks that way, he reinforces, he validates, he gives legitimacy to this view of Vladimir Putin. So it's not just incorrect. It's actually pretty destructive. Yeah, I can see why that would actually play right into the hands of Russians and propagandists in that particular argument and that particular element. I mean, that's, that's unfortunate, the unfortunate truth is that it just drops right into, right into their narrative.

Exactly right. And so, you know, that's, again, back you talked to it or isn't it odd. You got the intel guys out here talking. Well, it's, it is unusual, but this is, this is another reason because they recognize that they, they aren't a deep state, that they are not bureaucracies or bureaucracies. Okay. So, so, Jordan, you know, I try to make NSA a different kind of. place than I found it, and I discovered it was a big ship with a small rudder. I get that bureaucracies are hard to change.

That doesn't make them the deep stakes up. So we'll wrap with the last two here, which is, is there anything we can do as civilians and citizens to help defend important institutions and try to get things back on track, or do we leave this up to the people in charge? So, no, you've got a roll to play, and it is part of that first layer of the cake, Jordan. you know, the part we're all participants in. And so I would make an appeal, no matter how much we disagree, not to demonize the opposition, not to attack the legitimacy, the authenticity,

the seriousness, the sincerity of those with whom we disagree. And frankly, the events of the last 48 hours were the president's attacking the legitimacy of folks. rather than arguing the point that the folks might be making is an example of appealing to the darker rather than the better angels of our nature. So I don't need to demonize one another as we have these very, very serious discussions. And that's something all of us can contribute to, and particularly you, will communicate to such a wide group of people. Well, thank you. I appreciate that as well, and I appreciate your time. I just want to ask as well, what do you think is the greatest threat to our people?

nation right now. Because, of course, people are yelling about China. People are yelling about Russia. Where do you fall in that particular analysis? I will tell you the thing that most scares me right now is the United States of America. We are the most destabilizing force in the world. Now, look, I'm not saying that, you know, we're mounting legions to cross borders and conquer territory. And nothing of that. that we are a very powerful nation, in fact, the world's most powerful nation. Everything we do matters. And Jordan, for 75 years, we have been operating internationally based upon some core beliefs.

Democracy was a good thing. Alliances are a national advantage. Trade, the freer, the better. immigration on balance is a net plus for the United States. And everything I just described for you, Jordan, is now being debated. And so what you've got is the most powerful country on earth, confused about its own self-identity and its own future course of action. That's got to make the rest of the world very nervous.

General Hayden, thank you so much for your time today. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you. Always a pleasure. All right, Jason, a little bit of a different flavor for us, but I thought that was interesting. I mean, he is always got something to say. Yeah, I like him as a person. I did not really much care for some of his policies when he was in office, but I respect him now now that we've had a chance to talk to him a couple times now. And he's just, he's really got his pulse on things because I think you're going to have that after you've run the six. CIA and the NSA, you know? Yeah, I can imagine what it's like being in the news and under fire all the time and having so much responsibility for the country, for making the right decision.

It just seems, I don't know. I don't know if I want that on my shoulders, but I guess that's why I'm not a general either. Right, right. You're a general pain in my butt. That's right. That's good enough. That's right, Lieutenant. Great big thank you to General Hayden.

The book is The Assault on Intelligence, American National Security, in an age of lies, an interesting read, more political than, of course, we got here on the show. Tell me your number one takeaway here from General Hayden. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. I'm doing a lot more on Instagram these days, some instructional videos and stuff like that. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard today from General Hayden, go check out the worksheets. Go grab those.

They are also free, of course, and they're in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo, show notes by Robert Fogarty. The worksheets are by Caleb Bacon. Booking Back Office and Last Minute Miracles by Jen Harbinger, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which hopefully is in every episode.

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