Incoherent Trump

Former CIA chief Hayden: Clinton better prepared than ‘incoherent’ Trump

Donald Trump is a national security threat, George W. Bush’s spymaster tells Glenn Thrush in an exclusive interview for POLITICO’s ‘Off Message’ podcast.

By Glenn Thrush

Earlier this month, former CIA Director Michael Hayden found himself on the not-so-hot seat at FOX & Friends with noted national security expert Brian Kilmeade, who asked him this: Which one of the remaining GOP candidates would he trust most on national security?

Easy. Hayden (who describes Donald Trump’s fist-in-face foreign policy pronouncements as “incoherent”) answered, “John Kasich,” whose mainstream Republican views most closely resembled his own, and those of his chosen candidate, the bygone Jeb Bush.

But Hayden – spectacled spy eyes dancing behind a blank-page technocrat’s mien – knew he’d dodged a more interesting question: It doesn’t look like Kasich is going to win – so who is your second choice?

“Number two… in the narrowly defined national security lane — I’m not talking about all the stuff to the right and all the stuff to the left, number two right now, best prepared from Day One: Secretary Clinton,” he told me, in roundabout fashion, during a 45-minute sit-down for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast last Friday.

Hayden is by no means a Clinton supporter (though, interestingly, he wouldn’t explicitly rule out voting for her up the line). And his praise for her is tempered by disapproval of her handling of her homebrew email server (he doesn’t buy her argument that she was following in Colin Powell’s footsteps) and Benghazi (he thinks her actions before and after the attacks — but not during them — were indefensible).

Moreover, the retired four-star Air Force general remains fiercely loyal to a national spy-and-surveillance apparatus he tamed over four decades as an affable, but steely insider. True, in his new book, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, he calls for greater transparency and an end to what he sees as reflexive over-classification. But he’s not exactly Frank Church. Hayden is a loyal Republican, a skeptic when it comes to the Obama administration’s softer-touch terror policy, a defender of enhanced interrogations (in principle) – and a caustic critic of James Risen, Jane Mayer, Glenn Greenwald and anybody else who spills secrets without explicit government say-so.

Yet like an increasing number of conservative national security experts, Hayden is coming to grips with the possibility that Clinton just might be a safer bet than Trump who is on pace to represent the party of Bush, Ike and Reagan.

“Who is a larger threat,” to national stability on security matters, I asked him: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?

“Donald Trump,” Hayden answered without hesitation.

“I view his current statements as erratic… I just don’t know what it is he’s going to do,” he explained.

As for Clinton, she’s impressed him the few times they’ve interacted in person.

“I had to two or three weeks’ overlap with her as I served for President Obama until Leon Panetta was confirmed [as CIA director],” Hayden said. “I did brief her on CIA covert actions, which is required, since she was the incoming Secretary of State. She was a quick study.”

Then Hayden – who alienated congressional Democrats during his three-year CIA tenure by advocating a continuation of the enhanced interrogation program, albeit a limited one – plunged forward, a little sheepishly: “By the way, a lot of my friends will point to Benghazi and a whole bunch of other things, but this is an experienced diplomat, an experienced woman, who seems to have taken these questions seriously.”

As I was talking to the 71-year-old Pittsburgh native, Trump was sitting down for an epic 100-minute chat with two New York Times reporters that seemed to underscore Hayden’s impression of Trump as a low-information, high-testosterone gunslinger.

TTear up agreements with Saudi Arabia, he told Maggie Haberman and David Sanger, if they don’t start paying their way. The same holds true, he added for deadbeats Japan and South Korea – they might want to think about building their own nukes – and why not pull U.S. troops off the tinderbox North Korean border if Seoul doesn’t cut Uncle Sam a big check? Trump touted his own “unpredictability” – you know, just like Nixon – and said “I wouldn’t want them to know what my real thinking is,” referring to the brain chess he planned to play against the Russians, Chinese, terrorists or whoever else who was dismissive of America’s uncontested puissance.

“Mr. Trump,” the authors concluded drily, “explained his thoughts in concrete and easily digestible terms, but they appeared to reflect little consideration for potential consequences.”

Trump’s national security patter is the precisely kind of vague, bombastic talk that really spooks a spook. “It’s not so much wrong or overly certain. It’s incoherent,” said Hayden, whose criticism played a part in Trump walking back his call for U.S. forces to “go after” the families of terrorists.

He deplores Trump’s call to temporarily ban Muslims from the country – and thinks it has already aided extremist recruitment efforts (“it has made the United States less safe than it would otherwise be”). He hated the bit about ordering up hits on terrorist families and, in general, thinks the developer-turned-pol doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. But Hayden – who admits his own culpability in providing some of the spurious “storytelling” on weapons of mass destruction that led to the invasion of Iraq – is most offended by what he sees as Trump’s indifference to fact.

Take Trump’s insistence on telling “the story about the families fleeing two days before 9/11,” Hayden says. “There is no data that supports any thread of that story. Most of the 9/11 hijackers weren’t married, none of them had families inside the United States, and there’s no evidence that any family members moved before, during, or after 9/11. It was completely made-up… [That] doesn’t seem to matter to some fraction of our electorate.”

But here Hayden makes a significant pivot: Trump, he believes, is a histrionic symptom of otherwise sensible conservative frustration with President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to make the war on terror a top priority.

And he endorses Trump’s oft-repeated call for the return of “tougher” terrorist interrogations and a wider reliance on targeted killings, though he doesn’t explicitly embrace waterboarding or “worse,” as Trump has – nor call for “bombing the shit out of ISIS,” as Trump does.

“Trump is saying we need to be tougher,” Hayden adds. “Yeah, that’s actually a fair argument. I do think we need to be tougher. I do think our tolerance for collateral damage is far too low.”

Hayden has been grappling with these issues as long as anybody, since he was barely old enough to drink. His first significant Air Force post came in 1967, as a 22-year-old officer in Colorado, tasked with sending first-generation drones on intelligence-gathering missions over North Vietnam (“No live-streaming video. It flew a pre-programmed path, we hope, took pictures along that path. We developed the wet film,” he recalls). From there, it was on to Guam, where he was tasked with synthesizing the intelligence needed to send flights of B-52s over Vietnam to flatten three-by-one-mile “boxes” in the jungle, a point-and-pray spray of 500-lb. bombs that were woefully imprecise.

He doesn’t engage deeply when I ask him to tell me what it’s like to know your work resulted in the deaths of real people. He’s more eager to address the macro – how massive technological improvements since the 1960s have made bombing exponentially more precise and made Americans less willing to tolerate the killing of civilians, even for a quantifiable military goal. “We had a higher demand for exquisite intelligence, the American tolerance, overall, for collateral damage went down, as well,” he says.

Of course, most of Hayden’s late career was spent far from the battlefield, at the center of the two major policy debates likely to dominate national security discussion for the foreseeable future – the enhanced interrogation of terror suspects and the widening scope of surveillance, electronic and otherwise.

A few hours before we spoke, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) blasted Hayden’s claim, in the book, that some enhanced interrogation techniques – especially sleep deprivation – helped shake loose valuable intelligence from terrorists. He’s battled Feinstein and her staff for years, and after engaging on the topic for a couple of minutes, he stopped in mid-sentence, glared and declared: “Frankly, I tire of this issue.”

Another thing that frustrates Hayden: The intelligence community is fighting the Feinsteins and Greenwalds of the world constrained by the anachronistic shackles of self-imposed secrecy. In the book he argues against over-classification, and not only for the usual public-interest reasons: He thinks the intelligence agencies, which have been battered publicly since 9/11, have to step out of the shadows for their own self-preservation.

Somewhat surprisingly, Hayden thinks the government needs to release greater details of its targeted killing programs, to win the public relations war and demystify a process he thinks is vital for national security.

“We very often vacate the field of argument on that by not putting sufficient data out there” that would counter a “journalistic record” focused on the deaths of innocent civilians rather than successes, he says. “There’s an instance where I actually think the government would be more well-served by being more transparent.”

For a man who has spent his life keeping secrets, Hayden has grown strikingly resigned to the idea that “crowdsourcing” has made that enterprise increasingly difficult and, often enough, pointless. He faced that very challenge in the writing of his book: The CIA censors didn’t ask him to remove any significant details, but he voluntary struck several sections dealing with previously undisclosed covert actions. He’s not enthusiastic about the redactions and doesn’t expect them to stay secret for long.

“Everything becomes public sooner or later,” he said with a shrug.