government efficiency? >> exactly. so i had no sense as to how much that extra layer was and so steve and i pickeded the number 10% and said do 10%. cut by 10% and actually we did it pretty comfortably and then we said 5. i was out of the picture and said there may or may not be more room to address the excess that had grown out of government inefficiency, not contractor inefficiency. we had folks who were leaving the agency, who were resigning, not retiring, what were resigning from the agency and turning back and getting hired by contractors, who were being sold back to us by the contractor because we still had needs that over the skill-set that the government employee had. . employee would

not grant a for an employee who resigned from the agency for a period of 12 months. that's not retired from the agency. if you put enough years in the agency to be eligible for retirement i said, god bless you, you've put your time on, you can move on. but for resignations, the one tool we had was the clearance process and we simply said if you left here, resigned in the last 12 months you're not getting a clearance. i did not want to become the triple-a farm team for a bunch of organizations around the beltway and provide them trained personnel to sell back to us. that too is government efficiency and it doesn't say anything about the contractors. >> right, right, so basically you were losing all these people that were coming back and had to pay for them. >> yeah. >> jack, in the old days this idea of retiring from the c.i.a. and going back and working for them was, i believe, called

double dipping, right? it was kind of frowned upon. it was kind of frowned upon. and now everyone is doing it. >> let me put a marker down before we get too far into it. i did spend 32 years in the c.i.a. and when an autopsy is done you'll find that part of my heart contains the c.i.a. stamp. but there has been a huge historical shift that i don't think is well appreciated. i ran the afghan program in the mid 1980s and i was the director of operation at c.i.a. and i served abroad in five stations. i really do think that i understand the operational world. i don't know what to tell you, for the last 25 years of my career, i left in 1999. if you mentioned the word assassination inside the c.i.a. you were expected to resign. i remember a d.d.o., one of my predecessors saying at a meeting i attended, i wanted to fire all the contractors and now that was

rather a naive statement, as much as i respected him, but it was the sense of the role of contracting inside the operational directory. and now in the 1990s we brought down and i think that many of us felt that the cold war was over and there was a peace dividend and we brought down the agency by 25%, its budget, its personnel. so when you arrived at 9/11 you were gravely understaffed to deal with it and i can understand the push for contracting to fill the gap. there's two points i'm making and i'll answer your question. >> thank you. >> the first point is i do know government contracting works, ok? just so we're clear on where i'm coming from on this and i'm want opposed to it at all, it's just that i'm in a different space.

the other thing that i would tell you is that i was surprised this morning when i read the "washington post," i had not gotten "the new york times," and that the -- and, again, we get into the semantics of this, that the assassination program was outsourced and i just tell you that it's with my experience and i'll leave it to that. now the question of double dipping which is a phrase that i haven't heard in a long time and i think that mike actually addressed this as well, that he was dealing with a situation where some of his best people were going out the door because there was a program set up that allowed them to return the next day and continue working at their full salary and half of their retirement, and, again, during an emergency situation how long you want to extend that is an arguable point, but i will tell you that it's quite different from the 32 years, it was the last 25 that i can tell

you that the concept was alien to the leadership of the agency. both mikes have made the point that there was a technical requirement. when we went into the internet, and i remember when they actually had index cards with names on it, and we were so proud of the best index card system in the u.s. government. i mean, you really need to understand the impact that -- all of you do because you're in the same information business, what that internet meant, you really did need contractors, ok, and you needed the technical area. but we have had in the history of the agency a paramilitary capability that serves using detailees from d.o.d. and that search capability seemed to work well and, again, i don't know all the ins and outs, i have not been in any program with the agency since i left. but it does raise for me issues, both historical and the times we

live in, and i must say that there's parts of it that make me quite uneasy. >> jack, there's a guy named allen stanford who has not gotten as much attention as bernie madoff, a texan now living in the virgin island whose was charged with running a massive ponzi scheme, sort of a junior bernie madoff. i was looking into this case, it's research for a book, and i discovered that allen stanford had hired a private intelligence firm, crowell, to do what they called in the trade self due diligence, ok? they asked them to -- he hired crowell to vet him for potential investors. the court records that i've looked at say that allen stanford paid crowell for this self-due diligence on this

multibillion dollar fund, $15,000 for a full background check. so what kind of background check can you give someone for $15,000? >> again, let me round the question out for you a tiny bit. jules crowell took the magnum p.i. off the street and creating a professionalization of the p.i. investigative world. and formed the first company in -- it's well known in the industry. i've read the "vanity fair" article and i am a reader of"vanity fair," they have great articles in there, and i must say that i don't think that jules and the leadership were happy with the way that this unfolded, i don't know that firsthand -- >> but for $15,000. >> i'm slowly getting to these points. i live in new york so i have jules as a friend -- >> i'm sorry.

>> let me cut to the chase, if you look at a bernie madoff or a figure of that size and stanford, and, again, remember i'm on madison avenue, $50,000 is a going price to take a really serious look at somebody. $15,000 you're probably looking at a very heavily weighted database research which is a very useful and a basic underlining part of any investigative reporting work, but you really have to get out and tweak it. the one thing that i read in the article that i saw and i also looked at those documents, was that they looked at the company but didn't look at the person. >> so they investigated the company and not stanford himself? >> and the report, which is attached, is more about the company and not about stanford, i think that you have to look at the principles because there's a little lawsuit that came from this. >> but, jack, the lawsuit is the point here because one of the

major investors in this firm, they hired crowell to vet allen stanford whom stanford had hired himself so the reason for the lawsuit is the guy is suing because he lost, whatever, $6 billion, how do you protect yourself in a case like this, and should you be hired to do one job, you know, with dual purpose like that? >> i use it as a teaching tool, this particular case -- >> really? >> because this is a problem having the private sector that we didn't have so much in the public sector at times is that they come in and they say i only want to spend $15 now how to and i want all this -- $15,000 and i want all this, and if the budget is low you'll do it and you'll give them a product that is substandard and you have to hold the line and you say, you want me to do this, i have to do all this. >> you could be sued, right?

>> i could be sued on every report that i make and that's why i want to make sure that i'm authorized and funded to provide the information that the client is requesting. the reason that i like the business i'm in this regard is that it's not that much different than the business i was in the c.i.a., give me information, validate that information, stand by that information, and take the consequences. the difference and one of the things that you learn quickly in the private sector as many of you know is that if you're wrong the results are immediate and accountable, you're fired. or sued. >> are there things you can do that the c.i.a. can't? >> there is a world out there and i've talked to my colleagues and having been on the other side of the table i know when their eyes gloss over and i know that mine would have glossed over as well, and i sat with one of your predecessors and they took copious notes and i know that i'd have to rummage through the trash and they thought i was

trying to sell some product to them, which i wasn't. there is a world out there of talent and investigative skills that is huge. people that leave all the foreign services and leave the police and people that are journalists and not in the united states, of course, but that are out there and available to collect information. and i have everything from psychiatrists to record tollers and how you get in and swim in that water is not rocket science, how you utilize it is a different, a different matter. there are things that i can do that i don't think that the agents do because of its official position. what do i mean? in russia and china it would be very hard for the agency to conduct surveillance. or to request certain types of

information. >> from the secret services? >> from the holders of information. >> ok. >> ok? and in the private sector that actually can be done. i was asked once, i thought it was the most challenge -- i'm always intrigued by how quickly a very difficult task seems to be managable. i didn't execute it so i want to be very careful but someone came to me and asked if i could do a surveillance in iran. >> iraq? >> iran. iraq is easy, in that regard, ok? >> in a denied area then? >> a denied area. and it's interesting how you can put these things together, and it's awkward, i'm telling you that it's a different proposition inside and i understand it, but there's a rich world of capabilities thought that i think -- it's not well enough understood, i think that there's a growing awareness to it. look, the agency has immense

capabilities and they say the services are good as anybody else and mike can attest to this, there's no one that gets close in terms of real capabilities, so i'm not saying this, but there's times and places that there's unique capabilities that can be brought to bear through the private sector. >> but there's technology, right and there was a time when, you know, if you wanted to really tap a guy's phone and you really needed the stuff that only the c.i.a. had, you know, these kind of fancy actuators, right and now i can buy stuff on the internet that is probably as good as what the c.i.a. can use in surveillance, is that right? >> one of the trends is that it's much harder in the intelligence community because 95% of the overt information right now is available instantaneously and dealing with the foreign government we were the only game in town. and much of our equipment was made in house and it's

inconceivable that you could keep abreast of technology from in-house capabilities. i remember, i mean, not to date myself unduly as a 32-year-old man, but the communications, i sometimes slip in my emails and write cable, and instead of saying i will do it you say will do. >> it's called twitter. >> so it's coming back. [laughter] so you didn't have the capability to do that. and i was giving a pen by technology and i was so proud of myself coming out of training, i went out and i paid someone almost half a million dollars when that really mattered and i had a product back, and it disappeared.

-- i brought it back, and it disappeared. i had to start all over. this technology -- communications was so hard. short range communications, if you look pitcher equipment today such as cell phones and blackberries and how everything is available and the private sector for you to get it. a lot of people do not understand the law and there are very curious loss involved with privacy. you break it wire if you violate a wiretap in the state of california if you are taping your conversation between a couple t's legal. i mean there's a whole range of issues that are legal and there's a lot of people in this space that legal be damned and that means cell phone records

and bank records and there are people out there breaking the law and because you as a consumer say, look, i'm outsourcing it, i'm not responsible, you sure are responsible. >> you can do it, you can get it. >> and my partners as many of you know is a top end lawyer and we have legal counsel at our left hand, why? because this is a very hairy business that you're in and i know that both mikes are in it and they'll look at it differently than the private sector in terms of liability and legal exposure. so the short answer is, yeah, technology is huge out there and it's being -- there's a trojan horse and i'll stop on this one, i find it fascinating that here you're sitting on your computer and you can go down to the corner, it was $120, and you can buy something for your kids, so you can monitor your kids' computer but for an extra $100 you can get a package to monitor his computer when he's off at

college. now, the problem with that is that it's a nice marketing thing but you're sitting there and saying, wait a minute, why don't i use this not on my kid but use it on someone else. so the capability to monitor your key strokes by people who are prepared or don't care about the law, the capabilities are at our fingertips. and whether it's an audio device that you can put in the lap or somewhere else, there was capability that the c.i.a. didn't have during much of my career and i'm amazed by it and it can be bought in new york or from any major city. >> joe, can i have one point to what jack already made and talking about the c.i.a. being a very competent organization but there's tremendous capability in what he called in the private sector. and let me -- language is important here and sometimes we use words that trap our thinking and drive us to conclusions. let me suggest then a couple other words that we might want to use. you have inside the agency government employees, the agency

routinely makes use of what we call surrogates, ok? these are people who are culturally or linguistically, and access wise and fill in the blanks and i'm not talking about this morning's story, just in general and we use surrogates and they're routinely briefed to congress and much of the activity of the agency is done on our behalf by surrogates. and i would simply suggest to you as you think about what we're talking about here today and outsourcing and so on, keep in mind that surrogates come in a variety of flavors and that an intelligence service like the c.i.a. has the ability to choose among those flavors for different missions. so please keep that in mind. not everything that the agency has done is black and white binary world, contractor, government employee. but i'll end this point by simply saying even when something is done by surrogates on your behalf you are as responsible for it as if it was

being done by a government employee. >> we used to call agents and the world called spies and we never called ourselves spies, we called ourselves spy masters. but there is a trend that is very important, the intelligence community is now looking to try to trans-national issues that require investigative, almost police-type of gritty tactical collections, it's a trend that is changing and we didn't anticipate it, let me put the burden here, as well as we might have. and the private sector world is moving from the investigative world to the high-end intelligence collection and there's these two trends that are running side by side. many of my agents were str strac agents, ok, but they were not in a position to carry out what i call the get into the police records over here in this

barrack. and so there's a change taking place that is worthwhile for professionals to take a careful look at how that's weighted. >> i would like to open up things for questions from you guys. yes. >> i'm wondering if all of you could address this but starting with mr. devine because you migh have a different answer. should there be a bright line between what government employees are able to do versus intelligence analysis or support or do you think that it's fair game for everyone? >> i think that you have to start at the very beginning when you take on a covert action program. you know, you have to have a framework and mike and i have talked over a glass of wine and dinner about this, and that is, you know, what are the criteria for action? whatever your action is, and what are the consequences? and i would start with why isn't it done in-house and when you answer that question, why is it going out? who is it going to? and there's a cycle, and your

point about where the red line is, i do think that there are a series of decisions that have to be made but the one that shouldn't be made is here's something that we'll go do it this way and not think through the full consequences. i would always try to get it done in-house and there's a whole set of reasons which i'm prepared to go into but i don't want to monopolize it. >> [inaudible] >> look, one of the problems when i think of contractors, first, you want to build the skills inside, you know. they call it a trade, it's a trade craft. you know, i learned at the knee of a series of people tt i was proud to work for, my first recruitment was a set-up, the chief knew that -- sent me out there and i spent all lunch trying to wiggle into it, yes, i'll do it, just ask me. so my point is that there was a

trade, how do you -- how do you do it? so you need to make sure that you're not outsourcing capabilities that you need to develop and it's management training and working with foreign governments and you have to weigh ho how much you're putg out and how much is inside. the second thing is if you're going to take lethal action and that the president must sign and it must be improved by congress within 72 hours and both mikes can correct me on that, but if you have a lethal finding it has to be done in a brief amount of time. and then you have to ask yourself, you know, the question, am i going to take this lethal action? if you say i can't do it, i won't ask my son or daughter to do it, and it's not going to feel right in the "washington post" and "the new york times" and it won't pass the giggle test, you don't want to be outsourcing, you want to be involved in it. >> yes?

>> hi, i'm jim shark, the author of this book "spies for hire" which is the only nonfiction book about outsourcing. i have two questions, mostly for general hayden. you are now working for a company that does contract with the intelligence community, i.s.c., as i understand it. i think that it's natural that you would talk positively about contractors but i think that you would have -- i just wonder about your credibility in terms of since you are a contractor now, working for a contractor and making money from this business, you know, should we take your word on contractors with a little grain of salt? and, second, would you -- when you appear on television talking about intelligence issues, would you identify yourself as a contractor rather than just a former director of the c.i.a. or former director of the n.s.a.? that's part one of my question. part two is, the inspector general report came out about a

month ago about the n.s.a. surveillance program, what i found interesting in that report among many things was that they interviewed 200 people involved in the program, including yourself and the former and current officials as well as private sector people, however, none of the private sector people were identified either by name or company. shouldn't we as american citizens know who these high level people are working for our intelligence since companies like boose allen and so on are doing such very high level work for the intelligence agencies? shouldn't we know who these people are and who these companies are in a more clear way? thank you. >> with regard to your first question, i'm not a very creative guy and everything that i said this morning about contractors i said in 2006, 2007 as director of the agency, and i had to make it very clear when we were reducing contractors that it was about us and not about contractors. and the story about contractors

i have told multiple times as director. my affiliation with the chertoff group was made quite public and, in fact, i do identify myself as a member of the chertoff group most times when i am involved in any public discourse. with regard to the i.g. report, i really take no ownership over that, i was one of the 200 people who were interviewed, there were some people who were not interviewed, that's one class of folks and then i wasn't aware of it but i take your word for it, there were another group that were interviewed but not further identified. it might reflect something that the secretary had said earlier that you have people out there in -- who are taking serious personal and financial risk by doing what i would arguably call the patriotic thing. in fact, i was surprised as the director of the n.s.a. and the

c.i.a. how much american business will put themselves at risk for no profit motive in order to assist the american intelligence agencies. and i think that this -- what you may be seeing there is a version of trying to protect them from the kind of legal actions or at least public criticism that seems to be more prominent in recent times. as i've said before, the c.i.a. and n.s.a., and the intelligence community, did not live isolated inside the broader american culture. we rely on us as a society to help us achieve our mission. believe me, there's nothing that farious or dark about that, it's something if the story were better known most americans would be very proud of, but there's elements out there who seem to quote/unquote, want to go after anyone that becomes affiliated with us. and so it may have been that caution that caused what you

described. >> [inaudible] >> there is transparency and it's a good, but not an absolute good. i mean, everybody has secrets and i could ask you about your sources and anyone in the room could say, well, why are you using unnamed sources? and i do believe that there's a reason for that and you do protect your sources and no one is asking for absolute transparency from anyone, there's always a balance to be drawn and we could argue if that's the appropriate balance, but i think that there is a balance all the time. >> can you talk about the difference between the clearance process for contractors versus employees for these tasks and do you think that as the community relies more on these contractors that there could be a counterintelligence risk as they get more into collection issues and other sorts of sensitive areas? >> there is no difference in terms of the clearance.

however, by using contractors you do have certain opportunities, let me -- where you can use a contractor with a lower security clearance, when you get a full up round, either in the agency or n.s.a., for example, you're assuming that you've got a government employ and he'll have access to most of the doors inside the agency and special access programs put aside but by and large. frequently the contractor though, you know that you'll only use this individual for this specific task and it's at this classification level and he'll never go anywhere else in the agency and never get access to anyone else and you'll cabin him off for this activity. so very often one of the things that allows you to more quickly surge with a contractor is that you're only clearing him to a secret level because you know that you'll only use him for that task and when that task is done you'll let him go and so in that sense there's an efficiency with a contractor that wouldn't

exist with a government employee. my most knowledge is as a member of the n.s.a., and the only difference was the contractor always took longer because i put the longer priority to clear the government employees first. >> [inaudible] >> if you want to talk about counterintelligence risk, the number of contractors is probably one of them, but if you want to hit the sweet spot for counter-intelligence risk the fact that we want to bring more people into our intelligence community, i'm going to use the phrase heritage communities, first-generation americans, because there's patriotism and wonderful skills and there's an equally strong trend inside the community that once you're in, remember connecting the dots and remember sharing information and remember not existing in

access information across the board. if i'm the head of the intelligence service, american intelligence services are hiring more first-generation americans and they have access to more information than before. my mouth would be salivating in my eyes would be dilated. i am a supporter of both of those trends that i just identified. if you're going to go down that path, you have to reinvest in counterintelligence, because you have opened up additional formal ability. i think we should have more first generation americans. we should share information more. compared to those things, i think the contacting is a small subset. >> i want to bring you back to that new york times article. director panetta took -- panetta

said this war did certain things. you make a different judgment. can you explain when you think the use of contractors warrants this? program that involved assassination, did not? >> i will use my language precisely here, ok? and as jack pointed out we still hyper ventilate in the association when the word assassination is used. no one is talking about assassinations, ok? >> well, if you don't use the word assassination, if you're using contractors in a program for surveillance and training -- >> is exercising the inherent right of self-defense, how about that? >> but my point is, when do you go to congress, when don't you go to congress, where is the line there? >> this is hard for me to answer, one, because we're talking about it seems a covert action, all right? and number two it's hard for me

to answer because if you look, again, just kind of internally at the "times" story and the story in"the post," the timeline for this is 2004 and ended many years before mr. panetta became director, so, frankly i've learned more about what this is in the last six weeks than i did as director. and that should tell you a lot and if you want to be very dark about it, maybe i wasn't a very conscientious director, and i don't think that's true, but this was not a very prominent thing during my time as director. i do not know enough about the details in "the times" story to suggest to you whether or not it krosdzed thresholds and -- crossed thresholds and mark doesn't know enough either and he talked about training and planning and surveillance and he's not sure what the mix was. so somewhere in that mix i probably would have gone down to talk to congress but i would tell you, jean, if -- the

threshold i probably would have first crossed was a political one, not a legal one. not that it was a significant -- anticipated significant intelligence activity which is the legal requirement, but the fact was that this was maybe a bit of a different flavor than the kinds of things that we had gone on in the past so i probably would have gone down there first off, well, this is different, let's make sure that the committees know about it, rather than some abstract clearly defined legal threshold. i will tell you that when i was director, all right, and the press coverage of this is talked about as one continuous program and i would suggest to you that is probably not true, what you had were three separate efforts under three different directors to deal with an issue that everyone understood was a problem and a capacity that everyone agreed we should have. when i was there if congress was uneasy that i didn't come down and talk to them enough about what was happening on my watch,

i would simply tell them that -- whether or not that's true, i didn't tell the president about it, i didn't tell the vice president about it and i never talked to steve hadley about it, and so what was happening on my watch never reached either the political or the legal threshold in my sense. so, i'm sorry, i'm being evasive only because i don't know the facts, all right? >> you know sometimes -- >> yeah, but i don't know the details about what mark wrote about in this morning's papers and there was probably a threshold in there, whether or not it was crossed, i don't know. but what i'm suggesting to you is that it was probably the political threshold, this is unusual, rather than this legal threshold, significant, anticipated intelligence activity. thank you. >> yeah, kevin whitelaw with npr. i wanted to talk about the difference between the idea of bringing in contractors for

specific skillsets for specific periods of time versus what appears to have happened a lot after 9/11 which was bringing them in for ongoing, long-term operations and running them often in place of government employees or because it was easier to do it or that. i think if i understd correctly from what you're saying that is what you as c.i.a. director tried to work at maybe rationalizing and fixing, sort of to the degree that you -- you know, can you characterize how successful you were at that? and i think that the second part of the question is probably to secretary chertoff but to you as well, is the c.i.a. maybe ahead of other agencies? do a lot of other agencies have catchup to do, what is the variation within the full community? >> yeah, what we did, and i'm going to be very quick about this, kevin so i don't drag you into my whole inbox, i said arbitrarily 10, and 10 plus five, but we had signed attached to it. we did a soup to nuts across-the-board look at all the

things done in the agency and divided them into three baskets, core, core support and support, and you can kind of imagine, you know, in broad terms what each of those might include. when it came to core, the core jobs, the percentage of those jobs being done by government employees was in the mid-to-high 90s. ok? core support though actually had -- and i don't remember the number and i'm not trying to be evasive but i just don't remember, it had a disturbingly high number of contractors in core support. >> what is core support? >> again, it's hard for me, joe, to go into the specifics about it, ok, but if you take core functions as being actual collection, actual analysis and then core support would be functions, maybe collection management as opposed to collection, ok? and then you get support which is like running a small town, ok and all the things. yeah.

kevin, a surprisingly high number of contractors in that middle one and then a surprisingly high number of government employees in the last one. as i have said before our fire department was government employees. ... >> this will seem like self congratulation here, but the model we used was then adapted by the dni and applied more

broadly across the intelligence community. for those of you who are concerned about contractors, and i are retold you might believe -- the cia numbers are actually better than the communities at large. >> general hayden -- >> the dhhs -- i think you will probably lose the higher number of contractors than you normally find. i think that declined over time. one of the challenges is it you can hire contractors relatively quickly. the process of hiring, training employees is relatively slow. that creates a bottleneck through the u.s. government and is an imperfection in the hiring system, as opposed to the contract in system. >> general hayden, two questions. you think a down economy could affect surrogates?

also there was an op-ed in the "times." you talk about consequences. can you talk about what those consequences are? >> jack devine brought up the idea of private companies and how that is tied. do you think a down economy could affect the quality of their work or the need for them? >> i have not thought about it in that sense. there is a positive effect to the down economy though. when i was director, we were getting 130,000 applications a year at the cia. that is higher now. if congress gives us additional strength -- one problem we had was that we had mission and money, but we did not have

ended strength, which is legislated by congress. if congress allows the agency to hire to greater numbers, particularly with the macro economic situation the way it is, a lot of these situations, the proximate need to hire contractors begins to go away. i think that maybe a more powerful effect. with regard to the article in the "times," the basic thrust was looking forward, not backwards. the united states government's interrogation and detention program. that is what that was. i almost said "america's." looking back will teach people never to play to the edge. will teach people i know the

president wants me to do it and the director says it is a good thing and i am capable, but i do not think so. we will teach to mitigate. to a workforce that we need to be vigorous and active. no matter how narrowly defined, this will start pulling threads. you'll have a significant number of agency folks being pulled through this process, in my mind, to no good. the article being released next monday is a 2004 report. i simply make the point that one agency contractor was prosecuted and convicted for his treatment of a detainee, and that career prosecutor is in the district of virginia. career prosecutors in the eastern district of virginia reviewed the report and

concluded no further prosecutions are indicated. after that was done, he returned to the agency and we took disciplinary action. one final point i make is that report has been at the hill since 2004 to the senior members of the committee since 2006. why would this report prompt us to have a special prosecutor or any other kind of activity? i think it is unfair to the people who did what they did out of duty and they did what the nation ask them to do. >> i am national press club member. did you cover the impact of the reduction of staff members used on the community -- in the administrations of president carter and to a lesser extent president clinton and i would

assume there is some relationship with increased contracting as a result? >> there was an explosion after an 9/11 because the work force had been reduced. i became director in 2006. it was prudent to go back and check our homework and figure out where were the inefficiencies. that is what we did in 2007. >> this has happened over and over again in our history. under the contractions, the other thing is the hiring freeze -- however it may be cast. you have the bubbles that are

created in terms of leadership and it creates a spin-off effect 15 or 20 years later. so with carter -- i say carter, but it was really a broad based decision to cut back the budget -- it has an impact 20 years later, in terms of missing generations of officers. >> this is more of flavor thing than a syllogism, right? if i told you more than half the agency's work force has been hired since 9/11, that gives you a sense of the experiential. that might suggest why we have an open mind about hiring retirees as cont follow up on the up and sang, just reading in between the lines, do you think the report will show the for our what

effective in getting the information from detainees in the sense that it was a critical program and could work? >> reduced -- we have the the talk about the success of the program. one section of the report was quoted in the memo. the talks about and no imminent attacks being stopped. that is the end of term rate for the entire program. nothing else is available. if my memory is correct, it is not been retracted. there'll be other paragraphs in there that talk about the significance of program in terms of higher -- how you learn about the basic infrastructure of al qaeda. it has to do with the leadership and the infrastructure of al qaeda.

it does bring more balance to the discussion. the 13 techniques were put up there and people oppose some of them. there must have been more. i said no. i believe it will include a memo from 2007 on which i relied as director. it gives a much narrowed field s well. of techniques available, too. again, that may bring balance into the public discourse. but on balance, i pushed back on this release. >> i am with abc. going back to your comments, you said you were more

concerned with the advance of the last six weeks -- >> no, no. i knew more about the details during my time as director than the last six weeks. >> thank you for clarifying. do you believe the political discourse on the hill the last couple of months, as the program is revealed, has taken a new level and warrants going to where it has gone right now? >> when i first was told that director panetta had gone up there and read, my first response was -- what are you talking about? what programs? then when i found out more details as to what had been briefed, my response was -- why are you briefing this program?

keep in mind. i am focused on the program i knew. everyone talks about this seven and a half year program. i would characterize it as recurring efforts to deal with the problem that is well known in a capacity we needed to have. they were separate efforts. why the urgency? why the excitement? yes, i think the agency has down our report. i can only tell you what i know. several directors went in and talked. i think this is a very balanced product. when it read, read carefully, it will return a certain calm to the discussion that seems to have been absent. >> can i follow up? have you had any discussions

with director panetta regarding this program? >> no. >> exercising the prerogative of the chair, i have my own question for secretary chertoff. what organization is most dependent on contractors? to what extent do used contractors in worksite enforcement? >> i have been out long enough that i complete memory lapse. i would say probably, if i had to guess, it was and the management and detention process. most of the people who are detained as emigration violators wind up in detention. that is for a couple of reasons that we use private contractors. there is a time lag in the process of building a federal facility. it more to the point, the

location and the flow of people who are going to be detained is a very depending on a whole host of circumstances. it would be foolish to invest in building a detention facility in western arizona and then the flow stops there, and we see a greater flow in southeast united states. you're going to have a lot of people you have to have in the eastern u.s.. i would venture to say that is probably an area that in terms of dollars, there's a lot of contract in dollars. i do not know if it is people as much as dollars. in general, you will find contractors in various places in the agency. i believe that has declined over time as the agency has matured, particularly with the emphasis that we have put on to try to get people to to acquisition and career people involved in the acquisition

process. here is where congress tripped over itself. they complain about the fact that in terms of the people who perform the managerial function, that we are using too many contractors. we go, okay. that makes sense. we will hire more people to manage acquisition. then congress cuts the budget for management. wait a second. you want to do more management with people in-house, but then you cut my budget for hiring those people. i think this is an area -- and the administration adds to the budget for a budgetplus up on management, and it got very significantly cut by congress. if you want to do these things, you have to pay for it. once you hire an employee, the fact that the work force

changes does not mean you get to fire that employee he in the federal system. you have the cost of having that person in place for 20 years or more. budget issues tend to not be very glamorous, but it is a very real factor to determine what is contractor compared to what is internal. >> secretary chertoff, hello. i am from "the congressional quarterly." >> i thought that was going to get a question [laughter] ] >> the report takes dhhs for its reliance on contractors. it says that for some reason dhhs has a higher reliance on contractors and is not cutting back on them. can you explain why that is?

can you explain why is in that position? >> i cannot validate that, but i cannot disputed either. one thing is the agency stood up very quickly. organically, as some parts of the agency began, you had some parts that moved. you had a relatively mature function. intelligence analysis was built from scratch. this is very cumbersome, the process of hiring people. as general hayden said, the competition for people with skills when the intelligence community in general was dramatically increasing, all of these things are hard to hire organically. the second thing is a lot of these functions are performed by intelligence functions and are analytic as opposed to operational. although there are operational

elements, it will not necessarily be intelligence and analysis. analysis is a problem in the area were contractor makes a fair amount of sense. there, you are drawing on the skills that are pretty well developed in the civilian sector. some of the sensitivities that occur when you use the contractor operation, they are not really present when you perform analytical work. there are language issues. in that sense, it makes sense to have all larger role for contractors than you would if you had a higher element focused on operational activity. i would spend time, as the agency matures, the balance will move organically to in-

house capability. if you do not want to fund people, you cannot complain when we use contractors. i think general hayden said it earlier. you give us a mission, but you do not find slots, then that mission will be performed by contractors. this is an area where congress could take a big step forward in achieving a balance on this if they were prepared to fund it that function. >> speaking of double dipping, general hayden, you just said that when you heard mr. panetta briefed the hill, the reaction was "why this program?" which makes it sound like there were other programs.

[laughter] >> i get word that there is a covert operation under way to brief the -- my first reaction was what could he possibly be talking about? we were very aggressive in briefing the hill during my time there. i will take that much credit for. also, 2008 was a leap year. we will have the olympics and the presidential election. even if you put aside noble motives on my part -- i actually think there were and are at the agency consistently -- to hide the ball from congress on anything during this timeframe would have been suicidal. our threshold for going out there to brief was incredibly low. really. we went out there with things that we did not have to pass on. "go tell the hill."

>> so there are not other programs you think will be briefed to congress? >> no, no. i went to congress and briefed some stuff, and i was asked if there was anything else. i said that they knew everything i know. >> when you said "why this program --" >> my first reaction was what could this possibly be? when i found out what it was, i thought why was that meeting at this description? again, my field of view was focused on what happened during my tenure. >> all right. i have to wrap this up. i want to apologize to my panelists for bringing them into the line of fire. that was not my initial

intention. you are used to this, i guess. thank you for taking the time and breathing mess, and jack and general hayden and secretary chertoff. thank you to the national press club for putting this together. i'm going to turn it over to our host. >> i would like to thank our panel on behalf of the press club. thank you for taking time to be with us today. as i said, most people are out of town, except for those with us in this room. thank you for attending. as a reminder, this is a joint news makers, book and author committee of them. this will commence afterwards. joe will be available to sign his book just outside the doors.