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" When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent. "

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" We live inside a democracy, and you know, public will matters in a democracy. I just hope it's informed public will, and frankly, when the decisions are made, you understand the costs. "

Michael Hayden

Democracy

Decisions

Know

" I don't want to be overly dramatic, but Iraq and Syria are gone, and they aren't coming back, at least not as centralized states. "

" The attorney general is the only one who can authorize what's called an emergency FISA. "

" Renditions before and since 9/11 share some basic features. They have been conducted lawfully, responsibly and with a clear and single purpose: Get terrorists off the street and gain intelligence on those still at large. Our detention and interrogation programs flow from the same inescapable logic. "

" There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption. "

Michael Hayden

Encryption

Downside

" If we are going to conduct espionage in the future, we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves. "

" George Tenet was actually a very strong centralizing force. If you met George by personality, George met with the president six days out of seven: nontrivial attribute inside the federal government. And George was head of the CIA. "

" Before he played CIA Director Saul Berenson on 'Homeland,' a much younger Mandy Patinkin gained some fame as Inigo Montoya, a legendary swordsman, in 'The Princess Bride.' "

" 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. "

" The point I wanted to make was, as we have moved forward on the war on terrorism, FISA has been increasingly effective in terms of results. "

" 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. "

" I'm a career Air Force officer. We have a saying in the Air Force: 'If you want people to be with you at the crash, you've got to put them on the manifest.' And so I was always of the view to almost leave no stone unturned when you're up there briefing the Hill. "

" Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. "

" When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the toughest: In a political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life, could American intelligence continue to survive and succeed? That jury is still out. "

" NSA is a very conservative culture legally. Our lawyers at NSA were notorious for their conservatism up through the morning of September 11th, 2001. The single most consistent criticism of the NSA legal office by our congressional oversight committee was that our legal office was too conservative. "

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

" The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them. "

Michael Hayden

Control

Country

" President Obama came to office with a strong belief that America had overreached, that we had become too involved. It matched the national mood, and indeed, there was some evidence that it was true. "

" 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. "

" One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes. "

" Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973. "

" I blame the Russians for a lot, but pinning the creation of ISIS on them is a murky, tenuous, triple-carom bank shot at best. "

" Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens. "

Michael Hayden

Citizens

Nothing

" We're an organization with a clear objective: to protect the American people. We have a number of missions that feed into that, to protect America, and one of those missions we share with the council, which is to help our policymakers make sense of global events. "

" I must admit, my old tribe is not unanimous on the view I've taken, but there are other folks like me, other former directors of the NSA who have said building in backdoors universally in Apple or other devices actually is bad for America. I think we can all agree it's bad for American privacy. "

Michael Hayden

American

Apple

" 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. "

" My personal view is that Iran, left to its own devices, will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage, so the needle isn't quite in the red for the international community. And, frankly, that will be as destabilizing as their actually having a weapon. "

" 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. "

" There's a bigger difference between the first and second Bush administrations than there is between Bush and Obama. That's really true. "

" For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 'truthers' who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot. "