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  Hayden believed that the US government would have been better off if it had been even more open with the news media and the public before Snowden made his disclosures.

  “When I was at NSA,” Hayden recalled, “I used to draw three Venn ovals—one labeled ‘feasible,’ one labeled ‘effective,’ the third labeled ‘legal’—and where those three [overlapped], that was the space that espionage and NSA in particular worked in. By the time I got to the CIA [in 2006], I realized there was a fourth Venn oval I was missing: politically sustainable. For something to be done over a long period of time required political sustainability…. And frankly, you don’t get political sustainability without—fill in the blank here—public acceptance, public support, public tolerance. You need that.

  “My first summer at the CIA,” Hayden added, “we convinced the president to go public with the detentions and interrogations program. We pushed a lot of information out the door on the grounds that this [program] was not sustainable over the long term without some measure of political support, political support would not be forthcoming without public support, and public support wouldn’t be forthcoming without giving more information to the American public.”

  Political adversaries spoke of Hayden with a mixture of respect and loathing. “I’m pretty sure Michael Hayden is a vampire,” Ben Wizner, director of the Speech, Privacy and Technology project at the American Civil Liberties Union and another one of Snowden’s US-based attorneys, said with a nervous chuckle. A devoted Catholic throughout his life, Hayden made a point in our interview of mentioning his weekly attendance at Mass. When Congress was considering his nomination to head the CIA, he testified that as a youth he benefited from eighteen years of Catholic education. Ray McGovern, a retired twenty-seven-year veteran of the CIA and also a committed Catholic, found Hayden’s professions of faith hard to square with the general’s defense of torture. “I only had seventeen years of Catholic education,” McGovern told me, “so I guess I missed the course on ‘Ethical High-End Interrogation Techniques.’”

  Hayden took a lifelong military man’s view of whistle-blowing. Orders were orders, not options. As long as they were lawful orders—and government lawyers had found both warrantless surveillance and “high-end interrogation” to be lawful, Hayden argued—no underling had the right to ignore or circumvent them. Anyone who did, he told me, should face justice that was “swift and certain.”

  When asked what role whistle-blowers should play as the nation struggled with the tension between liberty and security, Hayden made no mention of any possible benefits of whistle-blowing. His only expressed concern was to prevent future instances of “unauthorized disclosure” of privileged information. It was a mistake, he said, to pursue punishment through the courts, a process that was “slow moving, with doubtful results and has available to it only very powerful statutes.” It was better to handle such matters administratively, he added: “Stripping a person of a clearance, if that’s done quickly and effectively, would have a powerful deterrent effect, rather than a small number of showcase trials based on legislation almost a century old.” [Hayden was referring here to the Espionage Act of 1917, which was used to prosecute Drake, among others.]

  Thus Hayden distanced himself from the government’s campaign of judicial harassment and prosecution of Drake. “I had nothing to do with [the prosecution of Drake],” Hayden told me. If it were up to him, Hayden added, “I would have ripped his clearance away, kissed him on both cheeks and sent him on his way. No reason to destroy a man.”

  Or was there?

  Could the NSA Have Prevented the 9/11 Attacks?

  Drake’s most explosive allegation—one not fully ventilated until now—directly implicates Hayden in what would rank among the worst blunders in the history of spycraft: under Hayden’s leadership, Drake told me, the NSA was “culpable for 9/11. The NSA had information that could have stopped the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and it failed to act on it.”

  Months before the attacks, according to Drake, the NSA came into possession of a phone number in San Diego that was being used by two of the hijackers who subsequently crashed planes into the World Trade Center. The agency did not act on this information, however, and likely was not even aware it possessed it. Adding insult to injury, said Drake, Hayden—egged on by Bush and Cheney after the attacks to “do more” to protect the homeland—then used the catastrophe of 9/11 to justify an illegal expansion of NSA’s surveillance efforts to include not just foreign but also US communications. The new authority was needed, Hayden argued, if the nation was to thwart future terrorist threats.

  “Hayden has been the main espouser of the Big Lie that we could have stopped 9/11 if we’d have had the mass surveillance that he put in place after the attacks,” Drake told me in July 2015. “That is a lie, and Hayden knows it’s a lie.”

  Hayden dismissed Drake’s accusation as conspiratorial nonsense, asking me, “If that were true, why wouldn’t the presidential commission [that was impaneled to investigate US intelligence failures regarding 9/11] have found that out about us? And by the way, why wouldn’t we admit it? We came ‘Full Monty’ on [having overlooked] those two interceptions [of al-Qaeda chatter] on September 10th, the ones about ‘The match begins tomorrow’ and ‘Tomorrow is Zero Hour.’”

  Drake is hardly the first person to accuse the US intelligence apparatus of dropping the ball in advance of September 11. Nor is the NSA the only alleged culprit; the FBI and the CIA have also been the object of withering critiques.

  One of the most publicized came from another whistle-blower: Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent later named one of Time’s Persons of the Year in 2002. Rowley was working in the Minneapolis office of the FBI when she began developing information on Zacarias Moussaoui, a Saudi immigrant who worked for Osama bin Laden and later became known as “the 20th hijacker.”

  Moussaoui attracted the local FBI’s notice partly because of his interest in learning how to pilot a 747 at a flying school in Minnesota. Six months before 9/11, Rowley and her colleagues in Minneapolis repeatedly requested a warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings, but FBI headquarters in Washington denied the requests. In frustration, Rowley and her colleagues finally passed their information to the CIA’s counterterrorism unit—only to be chastised by FBI headquarters for breaching protocol. Moussaoui was duly arrested in August 2001, weeks before the 9/11 attacks; when interrogated, he said that anyone who killed civilians who had harmed Muslims would be a “martyr.”

  Somehow, this information never sparked the FBI to take further steps that might have uncovered the other nineteen hijackers’ plans. Indeed, FBI director Robert Mueller insisted for months after 9/11 that the FBI had possessed no such information on Moussaoui—until Rowley sent a corrective letter to him and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

  By then, Congress, the media and the American people had been seeking answers for months: what had gone wrong at the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and other US government agencies to allow Osama bin Laden’s operatives to avoid detection before September 11? At the NSA, Drake was tasked with preparing the agency’s response to Congress, a mission that required an in-depth investigation of NSA’s practices prior to 9/11.

  As Drake interviewed NSA colleagues and scoured databases and records, he came across information that horrified him. It appeared that, mere weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the NSA had secretly revised its scope of operations. The NSA had long been authorized to act solely against foreign entities; eavesdropping on domestic communications was strictly forbidden. Drake had no qualms about lawful surveillance of potential terrorists—far from it. But his investigations persuaded him that the NSA was now turning its vast surveillance powers inward as well as outward, collecting information on communications within the United States. And it was doing so without obtaining legally required court orders in advance.

  Drake’s objections were practical as well as legal. He was not a lawyer, but such domestic surveillance seemed to violate the statutes prohibiting NSA operati
ons within the United States, and doubly so when it was conducted without a warrant; the Fourth Amendment prohibited the government from searching a person’s house, papers, or personal effects without a warrant based on probable cause of wrongdoing. Drake also believed that collecting the huge amounts of additional information the expanded surveillance generated could actually hinder effectiveness: it created so many additional haystacks that NSA analysts would find it harder to recognize the truly important needles they contained.

  An additional shocking discovery convinced Drake that too many haystacks of data had been a problem even before the 9/11 attacks. It was well known that bin Laden had ordered the attacks from his cave in Afghanistan, but the operational logistics were largely coordinated from an al-Qaeda “safe house” in the Arabian Peninsula state of Yemen. By early 2001, this safe house was well known to the NSA and the CIA; after all, bin Laden’s forces had already carried out a series of other attacks on US targets, including bombing the USS Cole warship in 1998 and a failed attempt to destroy the Twin Towers in 1993.

  The NSA had already put in place so-called cast-iron coverage on the al-Qaeda safe house, James Bamford reported in Foreign Policy in August 2015—the first exposé of this aspect of NSA’s alleged pre-9/11 failure. Bamford, a former NSA officer, was widely regarded, on the basis of his four previous books and countless articles, as the world’s leading outside expert on the NSA. His article explained that “cast-iron” meant that the NSA intercepted every phone, email, and other form of communication that went in or out of the safe house. Among those communications were at least seven phone calls from an apartment in San Diego where two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, resided for months before the attack.

  What Drake discovered, he told Bamford, was that the NSA had intercepted those seven phone calls from San Diego, stored the phone number in its records months before 9/11, but inexplicably taken no further action. Drake found a record of the intercepted calls buried in an NSA database. Since both the NSA and CIA recognized the supreme importance of the al-Qaeda safe house, why would seven phone calls to that safe house from the same number in San Diego not trigger further action on NSA’s part? Surely a judge would have issued a warrant so the FBI could surveil the San Diego apartment. Such surveillance likely would have uncovered the plans of the two hijackers and perhaps those of their fellow conspirators as well.

  “With 9/11, [Hayden] presided over possibly the single greatest failure of the NSA ever,” Drake told me. “He was in charge. He was the captain of the ship. It was on his watch that NSA failed in providing the common defense of the country.”

  Hayden emphatically rejected these accusations. His voice rising to a shout, he denounced Bamford as someone who wrote “often about the NSA—often, not well,” adding that his accusation about the NSA’s surveillance of the Yemeni safe house “wouldn’t violate the laws of the United States, it would violate the laws of physics!”

  “They’re Just Buffaloing Everyone”

  Later in our interview, Hayden seemed to regret losing his cool, telling me, “Despite, you know, my raising my voice more than once, my instincts are not to bear these people any ill will.” But Hayden did not back off his insistence that the scenario in Bamford’s article was literally a physical impossibility. “Nothing in the physics of the intercept or the contents of the call, even in retrospect,” he told me, “would allow us to determine that one end of the call was in San Diego, or anywhere in the United States.”

  Hayden also genially disparaged statements to the contrary by Michael Scheuer, the former head of the bin Laden desk at the CIA. Bamford had quoted Scheuer complaining that the CIA had asked NSA some 250 times for information it was collecting from surveillance of the Yemeni safe house but never got so much as a reply. “Mike Scheurer is a wonderful guy, I sometimes see him at Mass on Saturdays, Mike and I chat,” Hayden told me. But, he added, “Mike doesn’t know the physics.”

  Hayden then explained “the physics” to me, saying of his former agency, “We never collect the uplink. We always collect the downlink. That’s why when you do Satcom [satellite communications] intercepts, you need antennas all around the globe in the footprint of all the possible downlinks; thereby if you can collect both downlinks, to either end of the conversation, you actually then can have computers that connect those two ends of the conversation and give you the totality of the back and forth: he said, she said.” But, Hayden repeated, “We don’t collect the uplinks.”

  Who’s telling the truth here, one might wonder, and what exactly are uplinks and downlinks?

  The latter question is straightforward enough. In the case of calls between San Diego and Yemen, the “uplink” would refer to calls made from San Diego to Yemen—because the call traveled “up” from San Diego to a satellite—and the “downlink” would refer to calls received in Yemen, because those calls traveled “down” from the same satellite. Hayden seems to have been telling me that the NSA, in accordance with the legal prohibition against eavesdropping inside the United States, did not intercept calls originating in the United States—“uplinks.” And since it only intercepted downlinks, the NSA couldn’t possibly know where those calls to Yemen originated.

  As I explored this argument after our interview, I discovered that Hayden had made the same point numerous times before, including in his testimony to the Armed Services Committee in 2006, when the US Senate was considering his nomination to become CIA director. And a number of high-ranking officials had been persuaded by it, apparently including President Barack Obama. In 2014, when Obama explained his decision to back continuation of NSA’s domestic surveillance (though with limited reforms), he said, “One of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, made a phone call from San Diego to a known al-Qaeda safehouse in Yemen. The NSA saw that call but it could not see the call was coming from an individual already in the United States.”

  But when I checked Hayden’s assertions with technical experts, only one of them gave it any credence, and that required giving every possible benefit of the doubt to Hayden’s veracity. “The NSA doesn’t lie, per se, as much as we might think,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group devoted to “defending your rights in the digital world” whose board of directors includes both Snowden and Ellsberg. “Rather, they use words creatively in a Humpty Dumpty sort of way, without explaining how their words don’t mean what we think [they do].”

  When I asked Bamford to comment, he described as “very odd” Hayden’s claim that Bamford wrote “often but not well” about the NSA. He noted that his books and articles had led to invitations for him to “testify under oath as an expert witness on intelligence issues before committees of the Senate and House of Representatives as well as the European Parliament in Brussels…. I’ve also been a guest lecturer at the Central Intelligence Agency’s Senior Intelligence Fellows Program, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Joint Military Intelligence College … and Hayden even invited me to give a talk at the National Security Agency’s own National Cryptologic School.

  “Thus far I’ve written about NSA missing the calls to San Diego in a bestselling book, an article in Foreign Policy, and a documentary for PBS, and not a single person [I interviewed] has agreed with Hayden,” Bamford continued. “On technical information, I really trust the people with the PhDs in physics and the senior level career cryptologists that I interviewed over Hayden…. He is certainly not a technical expert. And of course he has a very good ulterior motive for his claims: he learned about 9/11 from a $300 office television set tuned to CNN instead of the multi-billion dollar spy agency he was running.

  “Hayden not only blew 9/11, he also got it wrong on Iraq,” Bamford added. “As I point out in my book A Pretext for War, Hayden told the White House that his agency had concluded that Saddam did have [weapons of mass destruction]. That makes him two for two in terms of [intelligence] blunders, the two most serious blunders in modern American histo
ry.”

  Bamford was not a technical expert, but most of the technical experts I consulted held, or previously held, the clearances necessary to understand the NSA surveillance system’s internal operations. But no classified knowledge was required to understand how Hayden was misstating the case, I was told, only an understanding of how normal telephone calls work.

  Foremost among these experts was William Binney, who spent thirty-six years at the NSA breaking codes and designing surveillance operations before retiring in 2002. A mathematical wizard, Binney has been hailed as one of the most brilliant cryptographers ever to work at the agency. He resigned in 2002 largely because he too was aghast to discover that the NSA had turned its all-hearing ear inwards, directing surveillance operations inside the United States.

  Like Drake, Binney tried to blow the whistle on these practices and paid a price. Also like Drake, Binney played an unwitting role in Snowden’s leak of documents proving the point. (When Greenwald, the first journalist Snowden approached, did not respond to repeated queries, Snowden came across The Program, a short film by Laura Poitras featuring Binney; the latter described how his NSA bosses had taken surveillance programs he had designed for use against foreign targets and turned them against the American people. “I’m sorry for that,” Binney said in the documentary. “I didn’t intend that.” The film led Snowden to contact Poitras, who invited Greenwald to join her on the story.)