Former CIA chief suggests a broader view than terrorism

General Michael Hayden, the former head of both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA), has warned that the focus on preventing another 9/11 means that US intelligence agencies are failing to “pay enough attention to the really important.” During a briefing, Hayden argued that he understood the political imperative behind directing resources into counter-terrorism operations, but revealed that it was the issuesthe CIA wasn't watching that concerned him. Among these he cited “states that are ambitious, fragile and nuclear” and in this group included Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. Additionally, he warned of China's continued activities, arguing: “I’m just simply saying that if we do not handle the emergence of the People’s Republic well, it will be catastrophic for the world.”

General Michael Hayden – the former chief of the US’s two most powerful and controversial intelligence agencies – is fearful of his legacy. The only person to head both the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) now wonders if the US’s preoccupation with terrorism he helped shape since 9/11 has caused the country’s intelligence services to take their eye off more serious threats down the road. “The danger is we become so focused on the urgent that we don’t pay enough attention to the really important,” he says.

The urgent, says Hayden, is a terrorist trying to get a bomb on a plane. He understands the political imperative of throwing huge resources into preventing the next 9/11. But he says, carefully, that a terrorist attack “is not an existential threat to the United States”. What keeps him awake at night is what the CIA isn’t paying enough attention to.

“I call it states that are ambitious, fragile and nuclear. I put Iran and North Korea and Pakistan and even the Russians in there. Now if that heads south, that’s much worse,” he says in the corner of a hotel breakfast room in New York amid the clatter of plates. “Now if you run the timeline out to the 10-year point, it’s China. I’m not saying China’s an enemy of the United States of America. I’m just simply saying that if we do not handle the emergence of the People’s Republic well, it will be catastrophic for the world.”

Hayden frankly concedes that all of this became much clearer to him after he was effectively sacked when Barack Obama took office in 2009. Inside the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia, the mentality was summed up by a sign that read: “Today’s date is September 12, 2001.” “Where we find ourselves now is a product of us viewing ourselves as having been in combat for 15 years,” Hayden says. “We need to guard against the consequences of that.”

If the US intelligence services are distracted, then Hayden bears a good part of the responsibility. The air force general served George W Bush through his presidency and was a leading architect of the intelligence priorities prevailing today. That has left him widely regarded on the American left as part of the cohort of warmongers responsible for riding roughshod over the US constitution, the Geneva conventions and international law, led by Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Don Rumsfeld.

Edward Snowden: his revelations exposed the extent of the NSA’s data collection programme. Photograph: Barton Gellman/Getty Images

In the aftermath of 9/11, Hayden turned the NSA from an intelligence backwater that few Americans paid attention to into arguably the most controversial spy agency of the 21st century with the massive data collection programme later exposed by Edward Snowden. After he moved to head the CIA in 2006, Hayden directed the agency’s increasing militarisation, including its own fleet of drones blowing up suspected terrorists and more than a few innocent bystanders.

By his own admission, Hayden helped turn the CIA from an intelligence-gathering agency into something resembling its second world war predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), carrying out assassinations, abductions, secret interrogations and sabotage. But after retiring from the CIA, Hayden began to reflect on what he calls the “obsession” with counterterrorism. Reading back through intelligence briefings to the president, he was struck by how much they dealt with terrorism at the expense of other issues. And when a new CIA director, the since-disgraced General David Petraeus, came to visit ahead of his confirmation hearing before the senate in 2011, Hayden had a warning for him.

“I grabbed Dave Petraeus and said: ‘Dave, you realise the CIA’s never looked more like the OSS than it does right now? That’s good. It’s kept America safe. But, Dave, you’ve got to know we’re not the OSS. We’re the nation’s global espionage service and you need to remind yourself and the institution every day that it’s got this broader mission,” he says.

Hayden, now 70, has a new book out: Playing to the Edge, American Intelligence in the Age of Terror. The “edge” of the title reflects, in part, how closely the agencies he headed sailed to limit of the law. Hayden is not repudiating the past – far from it. He is so convinced of the righteousness of the fight that he compares it to the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery two centuries ago.

Although the CIA had stopped waterboarding alleged terrorists by the time Hayden took over as director, he continues to claim that simulated drowning produced “torrents of information”, even though a US senate report concluded that is a lie. “I’m not alone. Every director, deputy director and chief of operations who was involved agreed,” he says.

General Hayden speaking in 2006 under the watchful eyes of President George Bush. Photograph: Matthew Cavanaugh/EPA

Hayden is not prepared to go so far as to outright deny that waterboarding is, as Obama and the US senate say, torture. “I don’t take a view. It is me copping out, but not a whole lot, because I’m an airman. We waterboarded tens of thousands of American airman as part of training. We didn’t sodomise them. We didn’t pull out their fingernails. But we did waterboard them. You’ve got to admit there’s got to be a distinction between waterboarding and those other things I just mentioned,” he says. The waterboarding of US airmen was part of training to resist torture if captured. Hayden concedes it had neither the intent nor the scale of the 183 sessions on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused 9/11 mastermind now on trial at Guantánamo.

And while CIA waterboarding may have been history by 2006, Hayden continued to oversee abductions and other forms of torture – or, by official euphemism, rendition and enhanced interrogation – at hidden “black sites” in foreign countries, which he defends to this day. The former NSA director is also strident in his insistence that its vast electronic snooping operation to scoop up information about the communications of millions of Americans, so-called metadata, was not only necessary but has been vindicated by Obama’s embrace of it.

That fact gives him particular pleasure. Obama was strongly critical, in his 2008 campaign, of the “disastrous” Iraq war, Guantánamo and the CIA’s torture of prisoners. The CIA was so worried that the new president might prosecute its agents that one of its top lawyers proposed to Hayden that the outgoing President Bush give a blanket amnesty. That didn’t happen, but the intelligence agencies went one better by drawing Obama in with what Hayden calls the “aw shit moment” – a briefing that so alarmed the president with the enormity of the threats the country faced that he embraced the bulk of the NSA and CIA’s anti-terror programmes.

“National security looks different from the Oval office than it does from a hotel room in Iowa,” Hayden says. “It was the reality. So [Obama] gets rid of the black sites. But he keeps rendition. We still do it. He gets briefed on metadata and he keeps it.”

Hayden cannot hide his satisfaction at how this has disappointed those who thought they were getting a peacenik in the White House. “The Europeans are, ‘Thank God we’ve got someone like us.’ And guess what? He’s more like George Bush when it comes to these questions. There’s a bigger difference between the first and second Bush administrations than there is between Bush and Obama. That’s really true,” he says. “He gets the Nobel peace prize and he lectures the Europeans on just war. Where did that come from?”

Hayden is unsparing in his contempt for European officials he regards as “a self-righteous nuisance” on issues such as rendition, torture and drones. Similarly, he regards European handwringing over Snowden’s revelations as hypocritical. “Let me get very specific. You’ve got Brussels and like-minded folks morally clucking at what American espionage does because they’re totally ignorant as to what European espionage does,” he says.

Man of peace: General Hayden in New York, 2016. Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Guardian

Hayden says European governments were well informed about the NSA’s operations after 9/11, in part because the Americans were feeding information they had picked up about “terrorist-related communications” to their countries. He said their response was not to protest but “to take notes”. He also said European intelligence agencies were spying on their own citizens more than most of the politicians realised.

The former NSA director calls Snowden’s exposures “the greatest haemorrhage of legitimate American secrets in our history. We’ve told adversaries a hell of a lot of detail about what it is we do, how we do it and against whom we do it.” He’s none too pleased with the Guardian or the Washington Post for publishing the revelations. “I wish they hadn’t done it. Then again, a state powerful enough to prevent them from doing it might not be a state I’m comfortable with,” he says.

But in his book he also describes Snowden’s revelations as “a gift” that forced a debate about the balance between security and liberty, something he said he has been pressing for since before 9/11 because he knew the controversial programmes would eventually become public. He says that, now the storm has cleared, he’s not displeased at the outcome, with relatively minor new restrictions on the NSA’s work. “To be perfectly candid, we’ve hyperventilated about this for two and a half years now and not much has changed.”

The attacks in France, he says, have brought European politicians closer to the US view. “The more you get Charlie Hebdo, the more you get Friday nights in Paris, the more you see the Europeans bending in our direction. The French have passed laws, the UK prime minister wants laws and the Germans have passed data-retention requirements on their ISPs, none of which would have survived the American political process,” he says. “So, in some ways, despite the clucking I get from European commissioners, the Europeans have become more aggressive than we have when it comes to questions of privacy.”

He is also weary of the perpetual claim that the 2003 invasion of Iraq gave rise to Isis and the crisis in Syria. The former CIA director blames Obama for pulling US troops out of Iraq in 2011, leaving the space for Islamic extremists to take up arms. But then he reaches back four decades. “You want to draw today’s Dante’s circle of hell in the Middle East? It’s not the American invasion of Iraq. It goes back to 1979 and three macro events: the assault on the grand mosque in Saudi Arabia; the Khomeini revolution in Iran; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,” he says.

Most middle-aged Americans could tell you about the last two: the twin forks of Ronald Reagan’s policy through the 1980s were opposing Soviet power and facing down the Ayatollahs. But relatively few have heard of the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by about 500 Islamic fundamentalists demanding the overthrow of the “corrupt” House of Saud. Hundreds died in the two-week siege and battle, which sent shock waves through the Islamic world. Among those taking notice was a young Osama bin Laden. Iran’s newly installed revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, blamed American imperialism and “international Zionism” for the deaths and desecration of Islam’s holiest site. The US embassy in Pakistan was burned to the ground.

Mecca’s Great Mosque under siege in 1979: the event has deep significance, says Hayden. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

“After the attack on the Grand Mosque, the Saudis made a deal with the devil,” Hayden says. “They decided with the Wahhabists, no one is going to be on our religious right. That has left them supporting a violent interpretation – let me say this carefully – of one of the world’s great monotheisms. That has spread a poison throughout the Middle East.

“At a minimum, you’ve got this Wahhabist philosophy, theology that posits a permanent state of animosity between Islam and the rest of the world. And that, frankly, is self-destructive of what I think Saudi Arabia wants to be. And not very useful for American policy, either.”

This is hardly a secret, and the degree to which Saudi policy has sown “the poison” that reaped al-Qaida and Isis is the source of continued debate and disagreement. But little of it is heard within American administrations or among politicians who go out of their way not to offend the Saudis for financial and strategic reasons, in part to do with Iran.

Hayden says in his book that he rarely went to the Middle East without visiting the Saudis, because they were so important. The late King Abdullah usually made time for him. He describes “delightful evenings” with the head of the Saudi national security council and says that the Saudi ambassador to Washington was “always a welcome guest at CIA for tea and conversation”.

Did Hayden tell the king, however tactfully, that Saudi Arabia had, in his view, made a deal with the devil and was spreading a poison that contributed to violence in the Middle East?

“Er, I … I … I never told the king that,” Hayden says.

Why not?

“I guess, I didn’t, er, what’s the Bob Dylan line? I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. It’s a perspective that’s grown on me,” he says.

It seems unfathomable that Hayden was at the top of America’s intelligence services for a decade, yet Saudi Arabia’s part in the rise of Islamist ideology only occurred to him as an afterthought. But he says it was never a subject of discussion, even with the White House.

King Abdullah had his own concerns; Hayden says he warned against the US “losing its aura” in the Middle East. Has it?

“Yes, absolutely we have,” he says. “When I talk to our allied foreign friends, the constant theme is: where the hell are you guys?”

Hayden once again avoids pinning responsibility on the Bush administration and its disastrous handling of Iraq. He blames Obama for pulling US forces out, and for failing to throw more into the fight in Syria. “I do think going to zero on Iraq was the wrong decision,” he says. “I do think what we’re doing now in Syria is under-resourced and over-regulated. America is in more danger today than it was four years ago.”

Playing to the Edge, American Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael V Hayden is published by Penguin Press (US).