Presidents get to decide how their intelligence is served up to them, and it's the job of intelligence to adjust.

— Michael Hayden

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.

— Michael Hayden

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had paused its nuclear weaponizations work also reported with high confidence that such work had been going on through 2003. How far did they get? That's an important question, but I fear that the Iranians will never answer it, and we will not insist that they do.

— Michael Hayden

The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality.

— Michael Hayden

The first thing I did after getting a Master's degree - and the Air Force was very kind; they let me stay on at school to get a Master's - I went to Denver for the Armed Forces Air Intelligence School, six months. Fundamentally, we had a major effort on in Southeast Asia, and this was training folks to support that effort.

— Michael Hayden

The FISA Amendment Act of 2008 actually allows some of the things we were doing under the president's authority only against al-Qaeda, it allows them for all legitimate foreign intelligence purposes.

— Michael Hayden

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.

— Michael Hayden

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.

— Michael Hayden

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

— Michael Hayden

There's this movie, 'Zero Dark Thirty' about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Some have complained that too many 'secrets' were dished out by the intelligence and special operations communities to director Kathryn Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Goal and their crew, part of a broader pattern of using intelligence for political effect.

— Michael Hayden