It’s not like Trump’s ‘whispering this to Theresa May,’ laments a former CIA chief

The former head of the CIA and NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden, is concerned about the disclosures coming out of the Oval Office. This week, President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergei Kislyak. This has led Hayden — a man steeped in keeping secrets — and many others in the intelligence community, to voice their apprehension about possible repercussions from the revelation: They're concerned that it could result in an erosion of trust and information sharing with US allies. 

"It appears as if the president, probably out of ignorance or disinterest went ahead and told Lavrov and Kislyak something that was not ours to share," Hayden told The World. "It's not like he's whispering this to Theresa May. That clearly put the bureaucracy on its back foot."

Then he added, it's time for President Trump to start doing his homework. 

The World sat down with Hayden.

The World: What do you make of the news of the last 24 hours, specifically President Trump's defense of giving highly classified information to Russians?

Gen. Michael Hayden: Look, [it's] totally within his authority as president. Our Constitution gives an awful lot of space to the commander in chief. He is the ultimate declassification authority. What I'm more concerned about, is not about the powers of the president. It's about the person and the performance of this president. [Was it] Legal? Yes. Good idea? Maybe not. 

It looks as if this wasn't a well-thought-out, staffed option that the president exercised, but a spur-of-the-moment thing, acting as he often does, spontaneously and with not much regard to the normal processes and protocols that have governed the office of the president. So, that's worrisome. 

TW: What are the possible repercussions of this disclosure for the US and its allies? 

MH: Well, first of all, you've got a sources and methods concern. And I know, look, H.R. McMaster is a wonderful officer, and he's pointed out that there was no specific discussion of sources and methods. But when I was in government, I talked to an awful lot of folks in your profession who would have stories, and they would have 'the fact of' and say the fact of doesn't put your sources and methods at risk, and I'd say, "Yes it does" because the fact of very often leads to the 'fact how' or it points in the direction of how we collected this information. So, even though sources and methods weren't discussed, that doesn't mean that they weren't put at risk. 

The other concern is simply if the newspaper accounts are correct, this wasn't our stuff. We don't have the authority to share with a third party something given to us by one of our other friends. That is an ironclad concept called the Third Party Rule, and we just don't violate it. 

TW: What's bound to be the repercussions of that, given what you said, disclosing information from a source that you're not supposed to? 

MH: If you do this often enough, the second party isn't going to be giving you the stuff in the future because you cannot promise them that you will control it consistent to … how they would have wanted it controlled. That leads to an erosion of trust and ultimately to an erosion of the kind of information that good partners make available to us. And so, it's just a bad example. Now, the exact repercussions of this — I don't know the details, I don't know the country and so, it's hard to tell.      

TW: If you were at the White House, and you had some leverage over how things would go, what would you do at this point?  

MH: I would work really, really hard to make the president pay attention. The president acts instinctively, he's got kind of this a priori knowledge he believes of how the world works. And yet you've got this vast government out there that's designed only to make him wiser, only to make him more successful. We're talking about, for want of a better word, telling him to do his homework. To sit down with him, to walk him through the things that could likely come up, what the bureaucracy recommends he make his major talking points … What you have is someone very inexperienced with governing, and yet seems to have no sense of humility in the face of his own inexperience. 

TW: There are strategic ways a president might very carefully select intelligence to share with a partner like Russia that you don't consider a true ally. What would you do in that case? 

MH: I would certainly get a range of views, get people who have equities in this, who are stakeholders, get into a conversation, let the National Security Council staff weigh the merits and present me, present the president with a variety of options. And you're right, we do this a lot, and in this case, since it was a terrorist threat, there is lurking just offstage this compelling requirement of a duty to warn, in terms of dangers, to maybe Russian citizens, as well. 

So, I get all that. But if the newspaper accounts are true, this wasn't thought through. It was spontaneous and had, frankly, more to do with bragging about American intelligence prowess than it did with any careful consideration of what we have a duty to tell the Russians about. 

TW: What are you most concerned about at this point? 

MH: Number one: to get the professionals — and here, I'm talking about people who are good friends of mine, H.R. McMaster the national security adviser, his deputy and others — get them out of the arena in terms of defending the president. Get them back into the background so that they can serve the president in the tasks for which those positions were designed, which is getting good advice to the president — not defending him publicly, that task belongs to somebody else, in the West Wing. 

TW: What else? 

MH: Back to the books, so to speak, in terms of working really hard to get into the mind of the president. I want to be very candid. All presidents are different, the intelligence guys, the national security council folks, they have to adapt to the way the president learns. President George W. Bush learned in the conversation. He read, but we would go in there, and you could tell that the real learning was going on in the give-and-take of a real lively conversation. President Obama, far more reflective. I think he learned in the quiet moment, he liked to read. People now in government, Mike Pompeo at CIA, Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, H.R. McMaster at NSC, they've got to determine how this president learns. 

TW: In your career, have you ever seen something like this happen? 

MH: I've searched my memory, and so far, I've not come up with anything like this at all, where you seem to have had a spontaneous, unrehearsed, unprepared decision in the midst of a dialogue with an international adversary. It's not like he's whispering this to Theresa May.

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.