The former NSA director general Michael Hayden said the Charlie Hebdo attack was “kind of inevitable” on Tuesday, and compared Islamist extremism to Ebola.

“The fact of the matter is there’s a plague and people are going to get Ebola,” he said.

Speaking at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based thinktank, Hayden said: “I don’t know that this was a question or flaw of intelligence sharing, in fact I know that the individuals have shown up on American radars as well as French radars.”

“Most folks like me view the Charlie Hebdo type attacks as kind of inevitable,” he continued, before paradoxically suggesting that no terrorist attacks need happen.



“When one does the forensics, every one of those inevitable attacks was preventable,” Hayden said. “It’s a little bit like Ebola, you know? If somebody’s got the disease you can go back an deconstruct how she got it. ‘If only she had kind of closed the sleeve, or not taken her cover off in a certain way she wouldn’t have contracted it.’”

“We can always look in the rearview mirror and say ‘If only this.’ But this stuff’s inevitable,” he said.

“This was far more a question of French resources than it was how exquisite was French intelligence,” he said.

Hayden also had blunt words for any Germans still angry at the allegations that the NSA tapped Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. Not all American friends are equal, was the message delivered by Hayden and David Gioe, a former CIA officer and professor at West Point. While the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand enjoy a tight-knit relationship, nations such as Germany will remain outside that circle indefinitely, Hayden said.

A no-spying agreement with Germany is “never going to happen”, Hayden said. “Five means five … It’s an arrangement amongst five nations to create a deeper degree of trust and transparency and revealing weaknesses,” he said.

“You can make as many trips to Washington as you want, we don’t have the keys to make five six,” he added.

Hayden said the intelligence leak by Edward Snowden and attendant revelations of NSA spying had damaged the US relationship with Germany, but only the US had failed to prevent leaks. “Shame on us not for what we may or may not have done, but shame on us for our inability to keep what we may or may not have done a secret,” he said.

“We pushed a very good friend into a very bad position by our failure to have operational security,” Hayden said. The former director also said that he had told German colleagues in 2013 to understand why the US would spy for instance on former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, “who is not Merkel, and who opposed American policy in Iraq, and who seemed to have a strange and mutually productive relationship with Vladimir Putin.”

“I was reserving the right of the United States to conduct espionage for the security of the United States at the discretion of the United States,” Hayden said.

Hayden also said that the espionage among friends is simply the accepted state of affairs. He even suggested that German security services may have somehow brought a wiretap upon their chancellor by failing to better protect her phone, relaying an anecdote of having to “borrow” Barack Obama’s BlackBerry briefly after he was elected president.

“We’re telling the soon-to-be most powerful man in the most powerful nation on earth is that if he used his BlackBerry in this nation’s capital, multiple foreign intelligence services will be listening to his phone calls and reading his emails.

“And we didn’t rend our garments, we didn’t cry in outrage, we just knew that that’s how things are, that’s how adults play in the world of espionage.”



The panel also remarked on everything from iPhone encryption (“a damn big ask”, in Hayden’s words) to the problems of trusting sources within other intelligence services: “It’s not that often that very well-adjusted, healthy, happy people are willing to betray the organization to which they’ve nominally sworn allegiance.”

Although Hayden said he would “probably” not dismiss potential cooperation with any source outright – no matter how disreputable – he repeated a common Obama administration rejection of possible coordination with Iran in the war against jihadist extremists in Syria and Iraq.

“To take Tikrit back with a Shia army conquering a Sunni community is not consistent” with US interests, Hayden said.

But other than a rejection of Iran, the panelists were loth to discuss countries with which the US does not have a good intelligence sharing, only glancing on problematic relationships such as those with Pakistan and Yemen’s security services and Egypt’s military in passing. They agreed that “existential threats” and common concerns, such as Isis or Chechen terrorism, could bring services together, but expressed skepticism that limited cooperation would lead to stronger ties or better operations long-term.