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" Politicization - the shading of analysis to fit prevailing policy or politics - is the harshest criticism one can make of an intelligence organization. It strikes beyond questions of competence to the fundamental ethic of the enterprise, which is, or should be, truth telling. "

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" Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril. "

Michael Hayden

Wisdom

Security

Events

" My experience has been that military assessments on 'how goes the war' are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies. "

Michael Hayden

Military

Been

" There is no part of the executive branch that more exists on the outer edge of executive prerogative than the American intelligence community - the intelligence community, CIA, covert action. My literal responsibility as director of CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval, to inform. "

" I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.' "

" The intelligence community is governed by the same legal and ethical standards as the rest of American government and society, but an operational imperative is here, too. An intelligence community charged with global responsibilities cannot be successful without diversity of thought, culture and language. "

" The use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work. "

Michael Hayden

Use

Work

" There is no worse place for an intelligence service like CIA to be than on Page 1, above the fold in your daily newspaper. "

" Apple and Google want to create encryption for which they could not provide you the key. Their business model will not survive if the American government has a special relationship with them that requires them to surrender this kind of information. "

" President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed. "

" Chairman Chaffetz was an enthusiastic supporter of the 'USA Freedom Act,' designed to rein in the allegedly renegade NSA and its wanton depredations of American privacy. "

" An intelligence analyst may attribute an attack to al Qaeda, whereas a policy maker could opt for the more general 'extremist.' "

Michael Hayden

May

Attack

" I've often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be. "

" As much as we might look for opportunities to keep Iraq together, we need to be prepared for the reality that it's not going to stay together. "

" If Snowden really claims that his actions amounted to genuine civil disobedience, he should go to some English language bookstore in Moscow and get a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience'. "

" I was an intelligence officer for what was then 8th Air Force, B-52 Air Force. "

" Dissenting analysts passionate about their positions are not unusual in the American intelligence community. Their presence - or even the rejection - of their favored positions is not prima face evidence of politicization. "

" Intelligence collection is not confined to the communications of adversaries or of the guilty. Rather, it's about gaining information otherwise unavailable that would help keep Americans safe and free. "

" Public discussion of how we determine al Qaeda intentions, I just - I can't see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation. "

" I think the Sino-American relationship is the most important geo-strategic question facing us. "

" The question is how much of your privacy and your convenience and your commerce do you want your nation's security apparatus to squeeze in order to keep you safe? And it is a choice that we have to make. "

" Americans are very practical folks. Accustomed to hard choices in their own lives, they are willing to give us in intelligence a lot of slack as we make the hard choices our profession demands. "

" It's good to remind intelligence producers and consumers alike about the need to 'warn of emerging conditions, trends, threats and opportunities' and the potential for discontinuities. "

" All enterprises and major players need to pay attention to the needs of the government of the country of which they are a part. At one level, it would be unconscionable for a company like Huawei not to be responsive to Chinese national-security needs. "

" Great weight should be given to the judgment of professionals on what information, if disclosed, would harm national security. "

" Despite a campaign that was based on a very powerful promise of transparency, President Obama, and again in my view quite correctly, has used the state secrets argument in a variety of courts, as much as President Bush. "

" There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption. "

Michael Hayden

Encryption

Downside

" 'Islamist terrorism.' The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world's population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims. "

" I told them that free people always had to decide where to draw the line between their liberty and their security. I noted that the attacks would almost certainly push us as a nation more toward security. "

" The CIA held about a hundred detainees from 2002 to 2008; about a third of them underwent interrogations that have been variously described as enhanced, tough or torture. The toughest technique was water boarding, used on three detainees, the last in early 2003. "

" When asked if I miss being in government, I usually try to lighten the moment by responding that I awake most days, read the paper, and then observe that, 'It's yet another great day to be the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.' "