‘Just Because It’s Legal Doesn't Make It Right’: The Ultimate Government Insider Contemplates Life Outside

In August 1987, in Bethlehem, a 17-year-old New Yorker confronted a local leader with a question.

“You have been here when the Israelis and when the Palestinians ruled this area. From your point of view, which one was better?” the young woman, who had traveled to Israel for vacation with her father, asked the Armenian mukhtar who headed the town government.

“Definitely the Palestinians,” he answered.

Her follow-up was fast and blunt: “Why?”

“The Israelis … have no idea how to do things in our community,” the mukhtar replied. “If they’re looking for a kid who’s been accused of an offense, they’ll break into homes and arrest him. This caused a lot of resentment, when all they needed to do was ask the mukhtar.”

That teenager was Avril Haines who, more than 35 years later, has become the leader of the U.S. intelligence community and one of President Joe Biden’s closest advisers on issues from domestic surveillance to the year-old war inside Gaza. What Haines, whose mother was Jewish, understood — even at 17 — was that life for the Palestinians in places like Gaza and the West Bank was unsustainable, according to her father’s published memoir, A Curious Life. Haines and her father left Israel with a sense that, while the situation on the ground was a result of a complex history of religious and military feuds, the expansion of Israeli settlements and border blockades into Palestinian-occupied areas was deeply unfair and harmful to civilians.

That conversation was one of many about civilians in conflict zones that she’d had growing up. They helped shaped Haines’ career path. She went to law school to get a degree she thought could place her at the epicenter of an institution — the U.S. government — that was best positioned to do the most good on issues that mattered to her.

But it hasn’t been as easy as that.

Over the years, Haines has become the ultimate government insider — with a lawyer’s rigor and the touch of a diplomat — but little known to those outside of government. What has made her invaluable to bosses from both parties in a variety of branches of government — the State Department, Barack Obama’s White House, the CIA and now as the Director of National Intelligence — has been her ability to subordinate her personal views to the professional demands of the institutions she has served. She could always justify this to herself: She says she believes in the ultimate value of a clean deliberative process, untainted by personal agendas, to solve the most difficult problems on behalf of the most people.

But now, some 20 years into her career, Haines, 55, is beginning to question whether Washington is a place where she can effect the greatest good.

In multiple interviews I conducted with her over the past eight months — an unusually frank series of conversations for a senior intelligence official — Haines asked whether the strict compartmentalization of her professional obligations and her personal ethics in government work is accomplishing the good she once thought it could.

“I am glad I went to law school,” she told me, but “the law can only take you so far.”

Haines first confronted this during her work on a policy for the use of drone strikes during the Obama administration, which she ultimately defended, but which critics saw as a morally and ethically compromised policy that was a stain on the administration.

The war in Gaza has proven especially challenging for Haines to reconcile her personal values with the demands of the nation’s foreign policy in the Biden administration, according to people familiar with her thinking.

Haines told me she has remained impartial as she has sifted and synthesized the streams of intelligence that flow through her office. Each time she has been asked about her policy views — not just on Gaza but also on other national security issues — she has refused to answer. It is not her job to craft policy in the first place, she says, and commenting would compromise her ability to do her job. Indeed, there’s only one public hint of how she might feel about the current war in Gaza: a letter she signed in 2020 advocating for the inclusion of Palestinian rights — in addition to Israeli rights — in the Democratic Party platform.

But as the war enters its second year and threatens to spin into a wider regional conflict, people who know her and to whom I granted anonymity so they would speak candidly have told me that Haines is personally rattled by the rising death toll and continued suffering of Palestinian civilians trapped inside the war zone. The situation has confronted her with a dilemma similar to ones she’s faced in the past: Even if what is happening on the ground is legal, is it right? And if it isn’t, can she do anything to correct it from inside the government?

Haines herself never made an explicit critique of her administration. She also never spoke about her political or policy beliefs. Doing so, she said, would impact her credibility as an intelligence official. But it wasn’t hard to detect in her carefully crafted answers a longing for life on the outside of government — with more freedom to do and say what she thinks is right.

“Government often is so detached from the individuals affected by the decisions we make,” Haines told me in one of our interviews. “You have to work hard to incorporate them into your thinking and the decision-making process and surface the question: Are you actually improving society?”

Haines is widely considered to be a candidate for even higher office in a second Democratic administration, potentially to take the job of national security adviser. Kamala Harris will likely lean on Biden’s top national security officials for guidance and would ask some of them to stay on, and Haines would be an obvious choice for a new administration seeking to maintain continuity during a tumultuous moment on the world stage.

But would she take the job now if a President Harris offered it?

Haines hasn’t made up her mind, but in my conversations with her and her current and former colleagues, it’s clear she is reckoning with the inherent limits of what government can do — and what life on the outside could look like.

“I’m cynical enough to realize that it is very easy to think you are making something better — perhaps particularly in government work,” Haines said in one of our interviews, “and it turns out, you are not improving the situation; you might even have made it worse.”

Even as a young girl of 11, it was apparent to Haines that her mother, Adrian, a multi-pack-a-day smoker, was dying. Haines made it her mission to keep her mother alive. She and her father, Thomas, turned the family’s apartment on New York’s Upper West Side into a makeshift hospice. Haines cleaned her mother’s oxygen tank. At night, when the only thing that could be heard were fire engines blaring down the West Side Highway, Haines, who lived in a studio apartment her parents owned directly above them, would listen through the floor to her mother’s labored breathing. If there was an emergency, a trap staircase her father built would let Avril descend directly to her mother’s bedside.

Haines had learned from her parents that she wasn’t just responsible for herself and her own actions, she was also responsible for those around her. “We taught her that you didn’t just clean up your own mess, but that of everyone else, too,” her father wrote in his memoir. From an early age, she was trained to sense when someone needed emotional support without asking. “What nice thing have you done for someone today?” her father would often ask her.

When her mother died almost seven years later, Haines felt as though she’d failed. “Avril felt she was responsible for her mother’s death. Nothing anyone said could convince her otherwise,” Thomas Haines wrote.

“I was very lost after my mom died,” Haines said in one of our interviews. “My whole life revolved around her and keeping her alive.”

She needed time to decide how to move forward. Instead of going straight to college after high school, she decided to take a year off and travel. One of her first stops was Israel and the West Bank where she met the Armenian mukhtar, a Christian, and spent time with several Jewish families to try and understand better a conflict that had for decades torn the region apart.

And even though she studied physics at the University of Chicago, she found herself drawn to foreign affairs. “The first time I visited Avril in Chicago, she was with a group of guys and gals in an apartment, and on the back of the bathroom door was a map of all the recently decolonized countries in Africa,” her father Thomas wrote in his 2019 memoir. “I suspected physics was not her career.”

In some ways, her bio speaks to her independent streak — in college, she became a mechanic and got her pilot’s license, and after school started a bookstore and cafe she and her husband (who had been her flight instructor) converted from a Baltimore bar seized in a drug raid. But her parents’ admonition to work on behalf of others also infused her work on community projects in Baltimore, setting the stage for her ultimate career path in government.

In 1998, she enrolled in Georgetown’s law school, where she studied international law. She started just as the International Criminal Court in the Hague was ramping up its trials of people involved in the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides. Prosecuting the people responsible for those crimes was something that appealed to Haines.

“What I observed [doing community work] was that the lawyers who participated in such efforts tended to be the ones who understood how government worked and which levers to push,” she told me. “This realization, in combination with the fact that I was born in the 1960s, and I had seen how critical the law was to the Civil Rights Movement, made me want to go to law school.”

Her most important early career move came in 2003 when she moved to Washington to work in the State Department’s office of legal affairs, first in the treaty affairs office and then in the office of political military affairs. She worked on the Guantanamo portfolio, studying cases of detainees. It was in that legal office in Foggy Bottom where she first realized she had an affinity for the unsung virtues of collaborative government work. She then went on to work as a staffer in the Senate before returning to the State Department to work on treaty affairs.

Success, she believed, was almost guaranteed if one combined the requisite number of work hours with the right amount of input from every stakeholder and just enough ego-less self-effacement. “A lot of what drives me is this feeling of just solving problems,” she told me.

Haines, whose signature look is an all-black ensemble with her glasses pushed on her head, is known for her soft-spokenness. Her former bosses and colleagues say she is neither loud nor bombastic. She’s flexible when she needs to be and aggressive only when necessary. “Only those who know her well know when Avril is pushing back and disagreeing with you. She does it so politely. She’ll talk in circles and then repeat her point but just in a different way,” one senior U.S. intel official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the nation’s top intelligence official, told me. “Then she smiles and looks at you and says, ‘What do you think?’”

The result of Haines’ we-first approach pushed her further and further up the ladder.

“When I first met Avril, she was the deputy director of the treaty office. There was literally so much paper in the legal adviser’s office in cardboard boxes that it was a fire hazard. And we put Avril in charge of improving all of that,” said John Bellinger, who was the head of the State Department’s Office of Legal Counsel when she first joined the government.

As a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where then-Sen. Joe Biden was chair, “she got more treaties approved by the Senate, I believe, than at any point in American history,” Bellinger said. “More than 90 treaties approved by the Senate in two years, simply because Avril put her shoulder to the wheel and got these hearings done.”

In 2010, President Obama tapped her to work as one of the White House’s top national security lawyers and then appointed her deputy national security adviser. She and Obama had worked together when Obama served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Her arrival in the White House coincided with the escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Often, she’d take staffers, such as Ben Rhodes, Obama’s adviser and speechwriter, out for coffee to pick their brains. “You can fall into the trap when you’re in these jobs … you’re kind of in this closed feedback loop of information. But periodically she would really want to think deeper about something we’re doing,” Rhodes said. “She knew I was the younger, I think more left-wing guy in the national security space in the Obama years and so it was like, ‘Can we go to coffee and talk about the ethics of drones for an hour’ — or whatever the thing was.”

It wasn’t idle curiosity. The drones program would ultimately become an issue that marked the first test of her ability to square her personal ethics with the demands of her job.

Haines’ time in the Obama White House reminded her of those days in the Upper West Side apartment. She slept just four or five hours a night — a habit she’d picked up caring for her mother. She worked late because she wanted to feel needed — and impactful — as she had when she was a child. But she also believed in her boss. She liked the deliberative way Obama approached complex policy matters. And he read more than just the pile of briefing papers on his desk each morning; devouring news clippings and magazines to test his way of thinking.

Up to that point she had relished solving the puzzles presented by a jumbled bureaucracy. Now, as a lawyer in the White House, she had entered a new and far murkier realm. The Obama administration’s growing reliance on drones had become enormously controversial. By the end of Obama’s first term, the U.S. had, by some estimates, conducted about 540 drone strikes, killing nearly 800 people. More than 320 of those were civilians, some of them Americans. The administration argued the program allowed the military to kill terrorists without putting U.S. troops in the direct line of fire. Haines was among those, inside and outside the administration, who urged more restrictions to prevent civilian casualties. But others wanted more flexibility to call for strikes against designated terrorists.

Haines dealt with decisions around drone strikes regularly, including when and how to kill terrorists. In 2011, the administration had a very specific concern about a particularly problematic target. Anwar al-Awlaki was a cleric living in Yemen and a member of an al-Qaida affiliate that had attempted a bombing of a U.S. airliner in 2009. Awlaki was a designated terrorist. But he was also a U.S. citizen, who under the constitution, many argued, had the right to due process. And killing Awlaki, officials knew, would potentially also mean killing other civilians in the process.

A clear conflict was emerging between her personal belief in the defense of innocent civilians and her professional duties to support the administration’s larger anti-terrorism objectives.

Haines, along with her colleagues, thought the administration should empanel a group of experts — retired judges — to look at the constitutional questions raised by the case and to provide recommendations. Haines wanted the process to be thorough enough that the ultimate decision, whatever it was, could be justified. Obama ultimately decided not to empanel that group, instead relying on the rigorous legal analysis conducted by his national security lawyers. He launched the attack in Yemen in 2011, killing Awlaki and several others. Later, Awlaki’s 16-year-old son was killed in a separate strike, enraging civil rights groups who claimed the U.S. was engaging in unlawful extrajudicial killings. Though she backed the president’s decision to target Awlaki, Haines pushed for minimal collateral damage. “When providing legal advice about a particular action, I do think it is important to do just that — and not to weigh in on whether it makes sense or is good policy,” Haines said in one of our talks. “But I have often noted that just because something is legal doesn’t make it right, or a good idea.”

Obama subsequently acknowledged the need to formalize the administration’s drone strike process and policy, and he asked Haines to help lead an interagency group to review the program. The group’s new guidance, which insiders say was constructed separately from the conversations around Awlaki, severely curtailed the extent to which the administration could choose to carry out strikes. It said the president needed to personally approve the killing of a U.S. citizen targeted outside combat zones. It also said government should only use drone strikes when it isn’t “feasible” to capture someone alive. And, the guidelines said, the administration would need “near certainty” that someone who is targeted “is in fact the lawful target” and that civilians would not be killed. When it was completed in 2013, Obama made a speech outlining the new strategy and his efforts to rein in his own drone program.

The policy guidance was hailed by some in Washington as a big step forward toward transparency — that it helped lift the veil on a program that had killed civilians with basically zero oversight. But not everyone saw it that way. Some viewed the policy guidance as giving credence to the very program it was meant to keep in check.

“The human rights community said [the guidelines] were too lax and the conservative community said we’re too strict, which probably means that she got it about right,” Bellinger said.

What wasn’t included in either the Department of Justice memo outlining the legal justification for the killing of Awlaki or the broader drone policy guidance document: the conversations Haines grappled with in her own head about how to square her responsibility as Obama’s lawyer with wanting to uphold her own ethics. Our conversations represented one of the first times she spoke in detail about this conflict.

Haines was well aware that collateral damage was often the cost of drone strikes — even if the U.S. tried its best to avoid such a situation. Even if the process of putting together the operation had been rigorous. Still, in those times when the compartmentalization skills she’d come to master didn’t hold up, civilian deaths were always difficult to confront. “I think it is crucial to consistently consider the human and ethical consequences of your work,” Haines said. “There is no question that doing so takes its toll.”

Today, when she talks about the use of drones, she is careful not to criticize the program she sought to legally justify. Collateral damage is impossible to prevent completely, she says. But she is open about the costs of her justification.

Her work in the White House, specifically on the drone issue, impressed then assistant to the president for Homeland Security John Brennan so much that when Obama appointed him director of the CIA in 2013, he asked Haines to become his deputy. “I consider myself Mr. Inside, I wanted someone outside the CIA to challenge conventional wisdom and raise questions like, ‘Why are you doing it that way?’”

Haines took the job, turning down a dream job as chief legal counsel for John Kerry at the State Department, but she quickly discovered the ethical ambiguities only piled up as she climbed the ladder. Her time as deputy director of the CIA coincided with the publication of details about the agency’s torture program. She was responsible for overseeing the redaction of the Senate’s report on torture in 2015 which detailed the extent to which the U.S. had used tactics such as waterboarding during interrogations. Only 525 pages of the more than 6,700-page report were made public — a fact civil rights advocates viewed as irresponsible and unethical. In our conversations, Haines wouldn’t speak about her role in keeping that report secret. But she has publicly noted a need to declassify specific kinds of intelligence and told Congress in her confirmation hearing for Director of National Intelligence that she does not believe in torture. 

“No one was held accountable for that and Haines apparently thinks that is an OK resolution to the matter,” Daniel Jones, the Senate report’s lead author, told The Guardian in 2021. “Many people have nothing but great things to say about her, but that is a massive blind spot, which is kind of unforgivable.”

Haines had been out of government for nearly three years, living quietly in New York and working at Columbia University, when in the summer of 2020 she got a call from Joe Biden’s team.

The then-Democratic nominee was setting up his White House transition team and needed someone to lead the national security cohort. Haines topped his list. When Biden won, she was considered one of the main contenders for national security adviser. Though many say she wanted it, Haines did not ultimately get the gig. Jake Sullivan did. Biden tapped her instead as the first woman to serve as Director of National Intelligence.

It was still a plum job that would put her in a position to correct what she and other top national security officials saw as massive mistakes made by the Trump administration that had politicized the intelligence community, threatening democracy and good governance, and severely diminished America’s foreign policy reputation. Years of fighting with Trump had built up deep resentment inside the intelligence community; trust with the executive branch needed repairing, she thought.

Haines promised in her confirmation hearing to “speak truth to power,” rather than be a rubber stamp for presidential whims. “I accept this nomination knowing that you would never want me to do otherwise,” she said, addressing Biden directly, “even when what I have to say may be inconvenient or difficult, and I assure you, there will be those times.”

This time, unlike in the Obama administration, she would be in a principal position that would afford her the ability to impact decision-making at the highest level. Although she is an intelligence official — one who stays out of the policy process — Biden has asked her to take on tasks that have veered slightly outside that lane. Just as CIA Director William Burns has helped negotiate hostage deals and a potential cease-fire in Gaza, Haines, too, has traveled to try and manage international crises.

In November 2023, in secret meetings at a hotel in Kigali in Rwanda, and in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haines pulled off what many in Washington deemed nearly impossible: She helped prevent a catastrophic war between Congo and Rwanda. The two countries had grown increasingly frustrated with American interventionism and were tired of lectures from Western diplomats. They got the opposite from Haines. She didn’t back one side or the other. Instead, she offered a concrete way forward. She helped provide intelligence that would hold both sides accountable during an armistice. A cease-fire went into place directly following her visit.

In late 2021, Haines played a key role in a plan to share declassified intelligence with Americans and U.S. allies as Russia was planning false flag operations in advance of its invasion of Ukraine. The initiative was heralded inside the administration and across the world as a success — and one of the reasons why Russia’s invasion in early 2022 was blunted.

But as an intelligence official Haines has not been able to directly affect critical policy decisions on Gaza, an issue that preoccupies her on a personal level.

Haines wouldn’t tell me what she thinks about what’s happening on the ground. She has said that as long as she has this job she will not allow personal views to seep into her briefings for fear that it would compromise the trustworthiness of the intelligence she provides. Some foreign policy officials and politicos in Washington did see a politically tinged policy statement inside DNI’s 2023 annual threats assessment, which commented — very briefly — on the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It said his “viability as a leader … may be in jeopardy” as a result of the ongoing war in Gaza. It was one line — and one that insiders say was based on a variety of intelligence streams — but it was seen in Jerusalem as a slight to Netanyahu and it complicated conversations between the U.S. and Israel.

The sole public hint of Haines’ personal views came before she entered office. She signed a letter, along with other foreign policy professionals, asking the Democratic National Committee in 2020 to change its platform to include clear statements about Palestinian rights. The letter said previous platforms have “been nearly silent on the rights of Palestinians, on Israeli actions that undermine those rights and the prospects for a two-state solution, and on the need for security for both peoples.”

But in my conversations with Haines, it was clear the conversation she had with the mukhtar in Bethlehem still echoes for her today — and she’s reminded by the daily headlines of the toll the war in Gaza has had on the Palestinians living in Gaza. The intelligence she reviews daily has revealed the impact of Israeli shelling inside the Gaza enclave: Women and children are dying and aid organizations struggle to get food and much-needed medical supplies to those who need them.

The problem is that despite her exceptional responsibilities she does not feel like she’s in a position to do anything about it. Her job requires only that she pass on information to policymakers to help them make decisions about how to handle the situation on the ground. She can’t personally ask the Israelis to strike more precisely or, conversely, to ask Hamas representatives to direct their commanders to stop embedding in civilian homes, or to free the hostages.

If Harris wins in November, President-elect Harris will likely uphold Biden’s policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza — the U.S. will help Israel defend itself while also putting pressure in Jerusalem to limit civilian casualties. But the widening conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon has demonstrated the limits of Washington’s influence on Israeli decision-making.

Harris might very well ask Haines to stay on. The decision to leave will not be an easy one for Haines. She’s been given incredible power, but she has also realized that she isn’t able to have the impact she wants while still inside the restrictions of government life. And so she wonders whether there is a way — or a better place — to better marry her professional and personal ethics.

“If I could contribute to a more ethical society, then I would be doing something to improve our discourse, decision-making and ultimately enhancing the quality of our lives,” Haines said. “I very much hope I can make such a contribution in the next phase of my professional life.

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