By Ethan Sterenfeld, Correspondent
President Donald Trump should not have accused American intelligence agencies of wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 Presidential campaign, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency Michael Hayden said Thursday afternoon in a talk at Princeton University., “That’s awful, and that’s untrue,” Hayden said. The retired four-star Air Force general said that the assorted intelligence agencies do not have political motives in their actions., “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory,” Trump tweeted on March 4. He has since maintained that the Obama administration, and specifically National Security Advisor Susan Rice, monitored the Trump campaign’s communications., Trump has not provided any firm evidence for his claims, the New York Times reported on Wednesday., Although there has been a particularly public conflict between Trump and the CIA at times, it is normal for there to be tensions between an incoming president and intelligence agencies, Hayden said. “I don’t know if you’ve been following along up here in New Jersey, but it hasn’t been smooth.”, It has been harder than usual for Trump and the intelligence agencies to work together because Trump “thinks intuitively” by nature and is not used to consuming the large amounts of information intelligence agencies provide., Hayden also recounted stories from his time in the upper echelons of American government. He was the director of the NSA when the 9/11 attacks happened., He had to address the agency’s tens of thousands of employees two days after the attacks and reassure them that their work mattered, he said. Some employees were scared to come to work., Hours after the attacks, Hayden directed the NSA to expand monitoring of communications between Afghanistan and the United States. He later played a critical role in expanding the surveillance program that former CIA employee Edward Snowden revealed in 2013., In Hayden’s view, Snowden should not be considered a true “whistleblower,” since he did not expose any illegal activity. Everything that the NSA did was authorized by Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama, so the American public should already have known what was happening, Hayden said., There are far more checks on the powers of the NSA to collect data on Americans than the organization’s foreign counterparts have, Hayden said in defense of the agency. In other countries, including Western democracies, legislatures and courts do not have oversight, but they do in America., “We know that as night follows day, we will end up in a Congressional hearing sooner or later,” Hayden said. When he led the CIA and NSA, he would use the maximum powers allotted to him by “the Constitution, American law, and American policy” to keep the country safe, even if he knew some of his actions would be controversial., Complete transparency is not possible from the spy agencies because the full reality would scare some Americans, Hayden said. He advocated for what he calls a policy of “translucence” over full transparency, so that Americans could know generally what was going on without hearing unnecessary specifics., “Frightened people don’t make good Democrats or Republicans,” Hayden said., Hayden teaches a course as George Mason University called “Intelligence and Public Policy” in which he challenges his students to find the correct amount of control and knowledge that the American public should have over the intelligence agencies that are tasked with protecting it., At the beginning of the course, he asks his students a single question, which he wants them to answer over the course of the semester, he said., “Is the secret pursuit of secret truth compatible with American democracy?” Hayden asked. “Is the secret pursuit of any secret truth compatible with any modern democracy?”
