Xi agreed to the American definition of legitimate espionage. In other words, you don't use the power of the state to steal secrets for profit.
If we are going to conduct espionage in the future, we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves.
I don't know if the European Union contributes a great deal to espionage. At the union level, they talk about commerce and privacy. But to keep citizens safe, that remains a responsibility back in national capitals.
In the great battle of Antietam, still the bloodiest day in American history, Union forces were led by Gen. George McClellan, an incredibly cautious man.
When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part.
When asked if I miss being in government, I usually try to lighten the moment by responding that I awake most days, read the paper, and then observe that, 'It's yet another great day to be the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.'
My time in war zones have been fleeting and infrequent. I've been to Iraq. I've been to Afghanistan. I've been to other places where I've collected hazardous duty pay.
The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had paused its nuclear weaponization 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.
Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.
American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel in danger, and as soon as we've made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we're doing too much.
President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.
Dissenting analysts passionate about their positions are not unusual in the American intelligence community. Their presence - or even the rejection - of their favored positions is not prima face evidence of politicization.
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.
When I was in government, what we would used to mystically call 'the kinetic option' was way down on our list. In my personal thinking - in my personal thinking, I need to emphasize that - I have begun to consider that that may not be the worst of all possible outcomes.
I know of no government official who would welcome an army of inspectors general combing through four years of emails on their unclassified accounts. That's why they use government accounts, where the government remains responsible for security, and they don't mingle personal correspondence with official.
I blame the Russians for a lot, but pinning the creation of ISIS on them is a murky, tenuous, triple-carom bank shot at best.
Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril.
Our inaction created the opportunity for the Russians to reenter the Middle East in a powerful way for the first time since 1973.
For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 'truthers' who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot.
ThinThread was not the program of record of my predecessor, Ken Minihan, OK. I did not make ThinThread the program of record while I was director. After I left in 2005, Keith Alexander also chose not to make ThinThread the program of record.
