today i am here with john o brennan who is former director of the cia john has a new book out called undaunted my fight against america's enemies at home and abroad many public sector memoirs are rather blah this i found interesting entertaining and substantive on every page john welcome thank you tyler it's good to be with you what truths about human nature or human behavior do you think intelligence officials appreciate but few others do
well i guess those who are involved in the conduct of espionage really understand that individuals will have vulnerabilities as well as areas of particular interest that they want to either pursue or protect and so again case officers in the cia parlance the ones that go out and actually recruit spies to conduct espionage against their countries i think really seek out those areas that could be in fact exploited vulnerabilities or otherwise
or people have again certain lifelong ambitions goals uh and for a lot of people who live overseas it's getting to the united states and bringing their families to the united states and so i think when you're in cia and you have a lot of interactions
with people overseas i think you appreciate some of those similarities as well as those i guess unique qualities that that people bring to uh before now your background is from the blue collar county hudson county
in northern new jersey how do you feel that influences your views on human behavior or temperament well there are a number of things about my upbringing in hudson county uh the son of an immigrant my father emigrated from ireland in 1948 when he was 28 years old and always impressed upon my siblings and myself just how special it was to be an american citizen and not never to take advan or take for granted the fact that we were by dint of
our birth because my father used to complain that it was usually the people who were born here that took it for granted not those who you know struggle for their you know good part of their lives to get here but growing up in a blue class a blue-collar working-class neighborhood really allowed me to appreciate some of the the challenges difficulties that average americans face on a daily basis and how a lot of people are just
struggling to make sure that their their families are fed their children are educated and that they can again enjoy what life has to offer here in the united states so i didn't grow up in a in a privileged environment by any means a lot of times
that sometimes my father was out of work and he had to pick up part-time jobs just to make sure that there was money for my my mother and father to be able to buy groceries for us to eat so i just i felt as though
um it really gave me a good perspective on what life for quite frankly for most americans is like how many cia agents might have once entered the priesthood well cia agents first of all refers to those foreign citizens who are recruited by cia case officers to spy against their countries um and so it's it's referred to as cia officers oca case officers a broader notion so cia employees yeah there is there are similarities
between those who decide to go into the the priesthood and those who decide to go into the work of the intelligence community um and uh as i said in my book i was planning to become a priest and the first american pope but then decided to go in
a different path but i met a number of people throughout my cia career who had similar types of at least early ambitions and goals and how do you think having been raised catholic affects your world view on intelligence
gathering and human nature and how people will behave well i was raised in a very religious household catholic faith we would go to church certainly every sunday and i would go serve as an altar boy you know many days during throughout the week but there was a real emphasis on doing what is right and understanding the distinction between right and wrong and a premium put on on honesty and when you go into the intelligence profession
there also is a premium put on honesty which sounds a bit maybe ironic to some given that ci officers sometimes have to adopt false personas when they go overseas to recruit spies but inside of the cia family there is a real need to make sure that
people don't astray uh from the the truth because uh national security really you know hangs in the balance so i just found that my early religious upbringing gave me a good grounding in morality and values and those
those principles and what i think are the you know the ethics of life that although i have quite frankly lost my my catholic faith over the years and i'm practicing agnostic now i guess i just i never lost though that that deeply rooted and instilled sense of right and wrong that was taught to me by my parents by my teachers and by the clergy i'm sure you know the chris whipple book about cia directors and he says about you and i quote no one
was better than brennan at sifting through and interpreting raw material from disparate sources what are your secrets for being good at this well first of all chris engages in hyperbole there cia has a lot of people who are just so so skilled in that i i i i started out in the operation side of cia and had a real feel i think for clandestinely acquired intelligence both human intelligence as well as technical intelligence and then also
had a good sense of the different types of other sources of information that come into the agency for the analysts to to go through i served as a state department political officer in saudi arabia early in my career and so i was quite familiar with department of state capabilities and cables also open source information so i think it was my exposure to a lot of these areas of sources and acquisition that i think allowed me to put into
context the the worth as well as to allow me to very rigorously scrutinize the reliability the accuracy as well as the access of the individuals or the systems that are actually obtaining the intelligence so let's say we take a concrete issue the navy has reported that a lot of its pilots have seen unidentified flying objects and if you're tackling that as a cia director or someone who works there what is it you would sift through and
interpret how would that go well i've seen some of those videos from navy pilots and i must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising when you look at them and you try to ensure that you have as much data as possible
in terms of you know visuals also different types of maybe technical collection of sensors that you have at the time but then you also i believe it's important to reach out into other environments and find out well were there any type of
weather phenomena at that time that might have in fact created the uh the appearance of the phenomenon that you're looking at were there some things that were happening sort of on the ground or other types of phenomena that again could help explain what seems to be you know quite a mystery as far as what it is there but i i think it important thing for analysts to do is not to go into this type of challenge either discounting certain types of
possibilities or believing in advance that it is likely x y or z you really have to approach it with an open mind but get as much data as possible and get as much expertise as possible brought to bear so at the end of all
that sifting and interpreting what do you think is the most likely hypothesis i i don't know you know when people talk about you know is their their life of their life besides what's in the states uh in the in the world the globe um
you know life is is defined in many different ways and i think it's a bit presumptuous not arrogant for us to believe that there's no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe what that might you know be is i think
you know subject to you know a lot of different views but um i think some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might in fact be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that um
we don't yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a a different form of life but being an agnostic you don't think it's something supernatural well supernatural um i had a beholder um i um again i'm not going to discount things um that's why i'm an agnostic as opposed to an atheist i i just want to leave my my mind open as to what something might might be but who knows what these things might be
now as i understand how the cia works inside the cia buildings you in essence have a workplace without smartphones for security reasons as a manager what have you learned about the effective smartphones on our workplace well it's a relatively recent uh technological development as far as smartphones and you know fitbits and other types of things that i just even though i grew up in an era when we didn't have all of this
technology at our fingertips i have come to understand just the power of technology and how it can be used to advance uh one's objectives but also could be used by adversaries to exploit to gain access in certain areas to certain types of environments or conversations or whatever that can really defeat physical security obstacles and perimeters and so i fully understand why certain types of technologies could compromise the secrecy
or the the needed protection of sources and methods in certain environments now you can do things to defeat those types of exploitations but again the cia nsa fbi and others are always mindful that technology that is used uh for um our purposes can be uh reverse engineered for uh for the purpose of others but my question's much more mundane when you have all the workers with no smartphones do they get more done or is there no benefit well i think
there are certainly benefits to it um and uh you know that ci officers leave the phones in their car whatever so they can go out and you know be able to you know talk to a family or whatever else and they they there are ways to
communicate outside but yeah i think that um there are a lot of distractions that come with the phones you know you go off on you know a pursuit of various tangents as you get more and more curious about certain things now agency
officers have access to you know computers and you know the internet and but even there we've had to take steps to make sure that people don't get you know go down wrong paths how accurate is personality testing for workers
accurate it is one of the tools um you know all these types of tools are are useful but none of them should be seen as dispositive in any way that's going to you know discount all the other sort of factors that are brought into bear
uh but uh you know when people are hired in the agency or you know in their security reviews as well as people who want to work for the agency overseas uh who offer their services you need to go through a series of uh vetting and
tests that uh try to give you a better sense of where the the truth might lie but say i measure is conscientious on one of these tests does that mean i'm actually likely to be conscientious i think it's a good question i think uh
just because someone tests in a certain way doesn't mean that they're going to actually follow through and be that way it depends i think on the on the rigor and the strength of the test but i'm not going to stand behind any particular test and say that it is a clear clear indicator i think there are some tests that are better indicators than others and so for example in the agency we use the polygraph the polygraph itself you know can be
accurate or not but i we have found that in the polygraph sessions a lot of things come out from a person because they are concerned that the polygraph machine will register uh falsehood if they tell it so again it is used as a tool it needs
to be a part of a of a group of things that are going to be used in order to determine whether or not somebody is worthy of employment or or telling the truth or not in your book you seem to treat polygraph evidence as
very reliable our legal system usually treats it as not so reliable the research literature is somewhat skeptical from randomized controlled trials how reliable do you think it is i i don't agree with your characterization that i considered it or in my book i portrayed as very reliable i i thought that my catholic guilt was going to just totally undermine any effort if i hadn't won to try to deceive the uh the polygrapher
in the polygraph machine so i was not going to take that chance because i wanted to be hired by the agency and so again i i think that um there it can be a very reliable indicator but people have perfected some techniques to defeat
polygraph machines and it says much dependent on not just the polygraph machine but the polygrapher the calligraphers go through extensive training and a lot of their assessment is is done by looking at the individual and how
they react and how they shift and how they move and the way they respond to certain questions and they come back to questions later on and whether or not this consistency and the answers that are provided so again the polygraph it's a it's a process it and is designed to try to uncover anything that maybe an employee or a spy is trying to hide are cia agents more punctual than average well some certainly are and they many of
them need to be because if you're going to have a rendezvous a clandestine rendezvous with a spy from overseas one of your assets or agents and you have worked for hours to get clean so that you make sure that the local security services are not on to you and surveilling you and your agent has done the same thing so that when you meet at the designated place at a designated hour you can quickly then have either a brush pass or a quick
meeting or whatever and if you're not punctual you can put that agent's life in danger and so i think it's instilled in cia certainly case officers that you know time is of the essence and you need to be able to
follow the clock also i remember when i was cia director um and i would go down to the white house for an security council meeting or principals committee meeting jim clapper the director of national intelligence myself would always be the
first ones there because we wanted to we were always very punctual but i think sometimes the policymakers you know would look at the clock as not as uh as carefully as we would if you're hiring for punctuality and obviously you would expect employees to show an extreme degree of loyalty do you worry that you're not hiring for enough what's called disagreeability in the personality literature people who will contradict their superiors people
who will pick fights they're a pain to work with but at the end of the day they bring up points that other people are afraid to say or won't even see well when we're not looking to you know hire just a bunch of yes people uh to me i don't think punctuality means that you're looking to you know instill discipline and organization you're trying to ensure that you take advantage of you know but that and loyalty right it would seem to select against
disagreeability well you know there's there's loyalty to the constitution there's loyalty to the oath of office um to me there's not there shouldn't be loyalty to any individuals including inside of cia so you know i would like to think that cia recruiters would be looking for individuals who are intellectually curious have critical thinking skills and may have also you know i think some degree of contrarian-ness because
you don't want people just to accept as gospel what it is that they are being told especially if they're going to be interacting with spies overseas and so you know you don't want someone who's going to argue at
everything just for the sake of argumentation but i i know that certainly when i was at the agency and director cia i wanted people to challenge what i was saying i i wanted to be tested i had no monopoly on wisdom or or knowledge or insights
uh and so you want people to be willing to speak up and i think in my book i talk about how i was reluctant to do that earlier on and i learned the importance of doing that as i went through my career it costs more than ever before to live in or near mclean many jobs including presumably cia jobs require greater knowledge of tech which means there's a higher foregone wage outside of the agency what's the cia going to do to meet the next
generation of recruiting challenges i mean if talent is your real asset aren't you in a somewhat unfavorable position looking forward sure if you just look at the financial remuneration that comes with a job yeah we cannot compete with either wall
street or the you know silicon valley or whatever um but there are a lot of individuals who want to give back to this great country of ours and also like the idea of working for the cia you know my recruiters would
tell me that you know with millennials and gen xers you know they really had a tough time because those younger americans would bounce around from job to job and that they were going to come to the cia for two or three years and be able to put cia on their resume and then be able to go off and make their millions and i said well don't look at us as a problem look at as an opportunity that these individuals who could be hired by the you know
silicon valleys and others and big banks are willing to give us two or three years and that gives us two or three years to convince them that this is the absolute best place to work because there's such exceptionally talented people here and there's you know technology at your fingertips and you're really doing something to keep their families and fellow americans safe and our attrition rate is very very low so even if individuals come into the
agency with the eye to just staying for a couple three years you'd be amazed at how many decide to stay just because the type of work that they're doing is really quite thrilling if i want to know who will win the super bowl i look at the betting markets why doesn't the cia use prediction markets more even just internal markets you could do them with jits you could do it with real money vouchers in the cafeteria the winner
gets a place in the cia museum whatever you want to do well there's different types of quantitative models that are used the cia to see if they could you know forecast certain outcomes of certain situations but uh we're not going to get involved in
the sort of the betting environment but i think that what the cia has always tried to do is to explore any type of of new techniques or approaches or practices that are going to provide again just one more insight or
perspective into you know trying to understand uh this world of ours and how events are going to evolve you're familiar with philip detlock's super forecasters project not familiar not quite philip he's an academic at the university of pennsylvania he trains people and measures their predictive performance over time and he's kept a running tally on predictors for decades actually and very often his best super forecasters he calls them
their housewives they're people who don't have very high formal status uh i was going to ask you how do you think the cia does against deadlock super forecasters that's a good question i wouldn't dispute his his bottom line at all that you know it's i am really impressed with people who have a good sense of reality in the world and common sense approaches to it and that frequently wisdom is derived from the ability to absorb information and
then process it and then see relationships and also have almost an intuitive sense of past experiences and then apply that to future situations uh so i i think i'm interested now i'm going to take a look at you know the forecasting sort of you know approach but um i i i would never tell cia analysts or um to put their eggs in one type of basket as far as you know forecasting and and what we don't we people think you know what's the
prediction of something and i hate the term in fact prediction uh it's looking at what are those variables what are those factors that are going to come into play and if certain things evolve in a certain way in a certain sequence that the
interaction between these variables are likely to produce certain outcomes that have certain implications which is what the intelligence officers analysts are do when they talk to policy makers because again there are so many
different variables and frequently when you look at you know events around the world what the us decides to do on the policy front is frequently quite determinative of what the future course is going to be so i think it's having the appreciation of of that range of variables that come in and how that ecosystem is evolving it just i think gives people a good sense and a lot of times it is rather intuitive it seems that offense should very often
be easier than defense when it comes to terrorism there are just many disruptive destructive things you can do so i know america has taken many many many steps since 9 11 to limit terror attacks but it still seems to me just as an outside observer that we should be observing more attacks than in fact we do that it should be impossible to stop so many of them at the deepest conceptual reason what do you think are the defects in the
attackers that have led to so few major terror attacks in this country since 9 11. so you want me to give the enemies the reasons why they're not as successful as they have been well um i think sometimes it's because they continue to go back to the tried and true methods when i look at terrorist acts especially those that are international transnational terrorism directed against the united states al-qaeda and other types of
terrorist organizations continue to go after that which is going to go you know boom and bang trying to secret and improvised explosive device onto an airplane uh try to bring down that air carry over the united states as a as opposed to really looking at new and ingenious and innovative ways to really cause havoc but they continue to want to have things blow up and the defenses that have been put in place really have guarded against and and made
it much more difficult for the terrorists to surmount the various obstacles and security checks that are in place uh so but they they continue to focus on that uh and i'm glad they they do in some respects because that's where we're best prepared to you know defeat their their efforts um but they're i still shudder when i think about all the availability of weapons in the united states uh different types of you know assault weapons
and how much carnage could be created and has been in in instances but it rarely has it been as a result of a uh international terrorist group transgender terrorist group you don't hear about an al-qaeda member who picks up a you know an
assault weapon and you know just you know most people down at a mall occasionally attempts are made and sometimes it actually happens but they they still go after that ied that is going to blow up something and create the type of
footage that they they want so in your model is it that they're good bureaucratic managers but they're simply bureaucratic and so predictable sort of like the old ibm or are they just flat out right bad managers they couldn't run a candy store it really varies just like you know any organization so sometimes individual leaders are quite cunning and quite uh innovative and also they're able to use the resources available to them and
they're able to recruit the right type of people and they're able to maintain the secrecy that is needed for this while others are just you know want to be terrorists and they you know trip over themselves thankfully and
there are a lot of very very um bad terrorists that are out there that thankfully have been caught and terrorists are caught anywhere along that operational you know cycle from their efforts to recruit or gain financing or whatever
fortunately the fbi cia nsa have insights into what they're doing but as they progress they get further along and they recruit the operatives and then they get the explosives and they start to you know surveil and case and even do dry runs then they're closer to execution but of the attack but also they run into more of the sensors if you will both human and technical that uncover their activities as you know there's a cia museum
inside the cia who or what should be shown greater honor or respect in the cia museum oh well you know so many ci officers who come into the organization under cover which means that they cannot acknowledge
except to their immediate family members that they're actually working with the cia they know that they're going to live a life in secrecy and that their accomplishments achievements uh will not be known outside of maybe a small circle within cia
and the reason why that cia museum is in cia and not somewhere else is that there are some things that still remain classified because they reveal different types of sources and methods that could in fact compromise ongoing activities or future operations so i really think it should honor those faceless and frequently nameless women and men of cia who over the years put themselves at great danger and undertook great sacrifices in their families
and probably if any any component of cia demands i think more um attention and more appreciation it's it's those family members of ci officers the the spouses the the sons and daughters and parents who keep the home fires burning
and allow their ci officers to go overseas at a moment's notice or to go into a war zone and and put you know their their family's future at risk those are the really the unsung heroes of cia those those family members are cia
officers how do you talk about your work with a spouse or partner without revealing classified information you do it carefully thankfully um during the course of my career you know i was my wife i've been married for 42 years
and early on it was it was tough when and i talk about in the book that after you know less than a year with cia my wife and i separated for a year because i got into that cia environment and then i started to you know keep things from
her and and she sensed a you know growing distance between us and there was a distance between us and thankfully we got back together and we came to an understanding that um i would try to explain as much as i could without you know going into classified information and um she was willing to give me that that latitude and so i whenever i would administer the oath of office to a new group of cia officers every month at ci headquarters
i tell them to not neglect the home front because first of all we want happy employees at cia they're better employees but also they need to remember their responsibilities and obligations at home to spouses to children to siblings or parents or whatever um and it is important but like the bin laden raid kathy my wife didn't know about our plans for that raid until after it happened and after we knew that we got bin laden we brought
his remains back to afghanistan i gave her a call and said kathy we man who just had a great counterterrorism success and turn on the television because president obama is going to be speaking to the nation in the world in a few minutes
and i think she sensed that what it might be based on the excitement of my voice but i didn't want to burden her with that type of information that she couldn't reveal to anybody else so it is it is tough it's a balance but
it's one that ci officers i think take very seriously which spycraft norms have frayed the most over the last 20 years or maybe just disappeared well because of the advancements in technology the spy business has changed profoundly years ago cio be able to fabricate a passport as well as a visa and go across a border and as they see our offices would say with a fistful of 50s be able to operate rather you know well even in denied
areas because you didn't have all of the you know closed circuit televisions you didn't have the machine readable passport machines at airports passport readable machines you didn't have the digital dust that we all leave you know whether it be with a credit card or with our iphone or whatever else and so operating clandestinely in heavily digitized you know sensor life environments is really difficult and so that traditional spycraft
really has had to just be transformed so that you're able to operate in a very busy digital environment and one where the local services have so many opportunities to pick up on your every move and so you know being able to go dark
and be able to operate covertly and clandestinely overseas is much more challenging but thankfully i think ci officers have done a tremendous job of operating in that digital noise the final stage of turning a complex bundle
of information into a simple briefing for politicians say a president what's the best way to avoid biases when you do that and what kind of skill do you need to be good at that well ci officers are expected to be and must remain a political policy neutral when it comes to any type of issue that policymakers may be grappling with and i also think it's a very good thing for agency offices to do when they you know brief somebody like you know
incoming president-elect biden about a particular issue is to state clearly what is it that we know um from sources um the reliability the accuracy of that information what is it that we don't know as far as gaps in our knowledge are concerned and what are our capabilities to be able to address those gaps um because if you if you don't nest within that broader sort of environment of what is knowable um then i think you can give your um listener
a the wrong impression about the extent and depth of your knowledge and so it's important i think again to put that knowledge that assessment that analysis into a context that the policymaker then can appreciate this wasn't the cia but it came out recently that sources had not been telling the president how many troops we actually have in syria is that ever justified that you have a loyalty to the constitution you think the president will make a
mistake or is going to remain misinformed and so you give a briefing that is not the best literally absolute correct bayesian estimate of the truth when you say sources sources again in the in the lexicon of intelligence world these are individuals overseas foreigners who give information to u.s officers but there never should be a reason occasion for u.s government officials to provide misinformation or disinformation to a
president absolutely not it's critically important that a president and the national security council team have as accurate and understanding as possible about it and i hadn't heard about any anybody not reporting what they believe was accurate statistics about you know what's going on inside of syria the sources that provide cia officers the information might be misinformed might be misleading but you know that's part of the of the
business of intelligence you need to try to weed out the you know the wheat from the chaff now as you know and in your book you've spoken out against usg use of torture on detainees do you think the torture works
in getting people to tell the truth well also as i say in my book i don't refer to cia's detention interrogation program as torture because that program was duly authorized by the president united states and it was deemed lawful by the department of
justice and therefore since it was deemed lawful it could not it was not torture the time now people can disagree with those department justice memos um and i i do but cia offices were doing their obligation the best that they could from the standpoint of efficacy of the use of those techniques up to and including waterboarding i do not believe first of all that they are consistent with american values and i don't think the cia should have
been asked to do that first of all they had no experience in a detention program nor in an interrogation program and so again from just a moral standpoint an ethics and principles standpoint i don't think that they should have been authorized secondly though um i do not believe that they were the the best means to elicit information reliable information from individuals yes some of the individuals who were subjected to enhanced interrogation
techniques subsequently provided information that was true and accurate and reliable they also provided a lot of information that was disinformation as a way to mislead ci officers and even when they provided reliable information there's no way to know whether or not they would have provided information sooner or later had they not been subjected to those eit's enhanced interrogation techniques so i i do not believe one can make the
case either from a morality standpoint or from an efficacy standpoint that those types of techniques should be employed where in the world do they speak the most beautiful arabic you know i've studied and forgotten arabic so many times i used to be pretty good in the 1980s because i when i lived in saudi arabia the first time for a couple years i also studied in cairo and then also had a six-month one-on-one tutorial before i went out to saudi
arabia the first time so i was pretty good but i have long since you know lost a lot of the capability that i had there are different types of arabic when i was in egypt it was the first time i learned arabic and i really enjoyed the the egyptian uh arabic uh it has a certain dialect and a lot of you know colloquialisms that i became familiar with but then in saudi arabia in the gulf it's a it's a pure form of arabic um
and but if you if you learn the standard arabic um then you usually can you know just get by in other countries but when you start going over to north africa where there's just a lot of you know french that is woven into the
arabic it becomes much more difficult and also their dialect is much more difficult to understand so i never did well in north africa but in the gulf and in egypt as well as in the levant area i could get by what's your favorite site in
cairo oh for me it's the grand mosque but most people would say the pyramids well the citadel also is beautiful um tahrir square when i was going to school at the america university in cairo back in the mid 70s the auc campus was downtown cairo by tahrir square and tahrir square was where it was the locus of all the anti-mubarak activities in terms of the arab spring there's something really really beautiful and attractive about the the
streets and smells and sounds of cairo and the people of downtown cairo so whether it's you know going to khan khalil which is the gold market or just roaming around the zamalik or babluk and other areas i just i love cairo the architecture again the people but uh you know so i can't put my finger on one place except just saying downtown where you know american invest in cairo was uh was located what do you like best in arabic music
um well when i when i was learning arabic and i was listening to arabic music over there i mean it's different certainly than our music but it's very heartfelt and then there usually are stories and listening to um who was the you know
famous egyptian singer uh there was such passion uh that she brought to it um that would make you know men cry and it it but there's you know lebanese music too which is you know very very good and popular and so i spent
my wife and i spent over five years in saudi arabia and got a fair amount of uh time listening to uh arabic music both traditional um as well as new wave arabic now as you know president trump but his son-in-law jared kushner in charge of a middle eastern peace deal this was mocked mercilessly for a long time yet it seems he came up with something when other people had not before should we view that as a sign of the bankruptcy
of our foreign policy elites that just some guy determined to do something can cut a deal it's far from complete but it does seem better than nothing right well i'm glad that there has been an improvement in relations between some key arab
states the united united arab emirates bahrain and sudan on the arab side and israel on the other side i think this was an effort by the emiratis and the bahrainis in particular with the agreement of saudi arabia to
give donald trump a victory before his uh before the election as a way to help him out but um it formalized uh some of the ties relationships that had already existed for a number of years between the uae in particular in israel um and it brought it up into the you know the public view and surface now i i do not believe that it is um something that has helped the cause of of peace in terms of uh settling the palestinian problem
um the palestinians got absolutely nothing out of this um bibi netanyahu threatened to annex the the territories the west bank and then agreed to suspend his planned annexation in exchange for this um the relationship
between the some of those arab states and israel bibim netanyahu i think has been long opposed to a two-state solution and i just think that the palestinian people have been deprived of the very basic human rights and dignity that they
deserve for so long and now we have you know arab leaders who were just basically you know turning the blind eye to palestinian uh problem and uh i think that is very unfortunate and the fact that the united states has
moved the embassy from tel aviv to jerusalem it has undermined the united states traditional role of playing honest broker between the arab states and israel and so i think yes looking at it just in isolation it's good that the uae bahrain and sudan
have relations with israel but at the same time i don't know whether or not it's now going to be more difficult or harder to address the palestinian problem which is long long overdue for some type of resolution that again does justice to the palestinian people how much do you think about the much earlier history of the cia so for instance it came out some while ago that the cia supported modern art and abstract expressionism this was seen as a
counterweight to the more communist tradition of mural paintings do you look back and you think like gee that was crazy we would never do anything like that or do you look back and think well that that made sense for the time but you
know times change how do you view the earlier cia well you pointed out one aspect of the llca there's a lot of other aspects of the early cia in terms of top lane regimes and actually shaping developments overseas during the cold
war when i think washington really felt we were in an existential you know challenge in competition with the soviet union um i think the united states culture is one of its strongest uh calling cards around the world and i i do believe that we need to enhance the propagation of our culture political social other and unfortunately i don't think we have leveraged it enough because even in places like iran and china and russia uh
so many you know american entertainers and uh so many aspects of culture really are very much admired and embraced by the populace and so to the extent that the the cia and the state department and other organizations can help to um you know extend that culture worldwide you know i think all for the better i think we should be doing more of that rather than trying to you know conduct these different types of covert operations to uh
to change you know the course of events overseas in ways that usually you know do not you know lead to the outcome that we want there's a famous haitian proverb proverb which goes the constitution is paper the bayonet is steel agree or disagree well just from a physical standpoint i think you know if you're talking about the constitution as the document yes it's paper but i think it's uh the paper embodies what what is america what this great
democracy republic is all about and um i think the constitution is you know the strength of this of this country not just because it allows us to continue to grow and prosper as a as a society as a nation but also it sends i think a clear signal
to countries around the world at least when it's adhered to that um you know the liberal democratic order and the fact that uh we are a a country and a government anchored in law and the constitution i i think that's a
very powerful signal that we've used over the course certainly the last 75 years um unfortunately you know the bayonet sometimes uh has been necessary certainly world war ii and some other times uh and the bayonet frequently is is used in order to deal with an urgent uh crisis or one that uh i think the bayonet should be used only when it cannot be a problem cannot be addressed in other ways sometimes the bayonet is is opted for
too quickly when there are other means to to address problems why did jack ruby kill lee harvey oswalt that's a good question [Music] well i i don't know i mean i've read different summary i'm reading a new jfk book by frederick lovegoal or logball that was during the earlier kennedy years but uh there are some things that i think are going to remain mysteries you know why does somebody why did lee harvey oswald shoot you know john f kennedy
you know we can speculate and there are things that have been written and said about it but you know who knows what evil looks in the hearts of men but if you just view it in bayesian terms it seems to me well that was a long time ago and
there's been no death bed confession for any conspiracy so isn't the rational view that it wasn't much of a conspiracy at all or does that reasoning not carry much weight with you um well i think the reasoning is is
carries some weight certainly um i i don't believe ruby was part of a conspiracy um i have i have read and heard and talked about things that what might have led lee harvey oswalt to shoot kennedy that may have involved other antagonists um but uh i don't believe ruby was part unknowingly part of a conspiracy to try to snuff out lee harvey so he wouldn't spill the beans i i do think he was just reacting but that's just my assessment
now before this most recent presidential election the national security experts i know uh all spoke to me about how worried they were about foreign interference in our election uh yet we held the election and as far as we can tell or as far as i can tell it seems foreign interference has been absolutely minimal arguably even zero so what happened or what changed why did all the experts get this wrong i read hundreds of mainstream media articles
about forthcoming foreign interference they all cited experts where is it no one's talking about it well i think we you know it's still unclear how much the interference was i think the impact probably was less than a lot of people anticipated but i think there's no doubt that you know russia and china iran other countries you know tried to use the social media environment to push out their narratives that they wanted to
influence the minds and the votes of american citizens and but i think this you know this best election the the social media environment as well as just the regular environment information environment was just so overloaded with so much
misinformation disinformation it was hard to maybe distinguish what was coming from broad that was uh inaccurate and uh disinformation and what was coming from domestic sources and i think this is almost going to be a
feature uh in the future now i do think that the u.s cyber experts um in fbi nsa cia department homeland security did a good job of trying to ensure that there was no technical intrusions that really would be
significant and i think they learned some lessons you know the last four years certainly from the 2016 election so i think we were better prepared to prevent those types of technical intrusions that we were certainly more worried about but that
the influence operations in that digital environment in particular i think were still quite you know evident i have a few questions about popular culture movies and tv books jean-luc herrera what does he get right and get wrong well he's written so many books and he's gotten so many things right but he also you know i think intentionally you know tries to um change some some facts and realities he has i think a tremendous ability to give
individuals a sense of just the meticulousness and the you know the the detailed um steps that need to be taken in order to you know carry out espionage operations and how things usually take you know months if not years sometimes for things to
you know develop and evolve and in intelligence patience really is a virtue and frequently you want to get things you know sooner um but for example the recruitment of sources you know can take years it could be
several case officers who are going to cultivate the relationship before someone is you know formally recruited and then when they those assets start to give really consequential intelligence to to their handlers and he understands that good spies are often introverts right that's one thing i take away from his books well they are and they're not um one of the reasons why i got out of operations because i think i was too much of an
introvert i wouldn't go into a cocktail party and try to you know talk up people and chat them up and try to cultivate you know a relationship um that's that really requires an extroverted personality but then you know you need to then go back into your cocoon of you know the you you adopt certain personas when you're out but then when you get it back into the cia station or in headquarters whatever else you really need to shield yourself from
that type of you know outside you know scrutiny or you know being uncovered so it's it takes a person with almost a schizophrenic uh approach to life have you ever met a spy and thought he or she is just like james bond or is
that completely absurd out of the picture i've met a lot of ci officers over the years who um have reminded me of a james bond sometimes they're very calm cool debonairs slick and they really seem to fit that that bill but cia officers
you don't want to if you want to have a cia case office go out and be a successful recruiter of spies you don't want to have someone who's going to stand out in the crowd because then they'll draw the attention of local security or intelligence officials you want someone who's going to be able to blend in someone who is not going to be seen as as you know someone to be concerned about so we hire all different types of individuals
and even though at one point my arabic was okay it was pretty good um i still if i was to wander in the you know among the tribes of saudi arabia or in the soups of damascus or in you know in the streets of cairo i still look like a an american a westerner from hudson county so you you really want to be able to have individuals with you know diverse backgrounds and experiences and so that they can in fact blend into the local environments
other than being overly dramatized what does the tv show the americans get right and wrong about soviets buying here in the 1980s people have asked me a lot about the americans as well as homeland i don't i've never watched them
you know i live the intelligence business and then i heard that homeland and one of the episodes they blow up cia headquarters so i've never deployed uh but you know you know anytime i've seen like a little you know snippet or
footage of it um a lot of times that they really exaggerate the technical capabilities of the cia in intel's community but sometimes science fiction gives birth to uh intelligence initiatives uh and and i think vice versa
so um i think there the americans was based on a real life um story with when the russians had secreted into the united states you know 10 or 11 illegals as they're called to burrow into american society and adopt american personas
and i was at the white house at the time as president obama's counterterrorism advisor and was intimately involved in that and it was a really really interesting and exciting sort of period of time and my understanding based on
people who have watched the americans say it's very good and it gives a good reflection of what the reality was like i have a few policy questions for you given that the risk of america having what you might call an idiosyncratic
president seems to be higher as of late and perhaps is higher for the future going forward do you think that makes a case for the cia being less powerful or more powerful as that risk rises well cia's power derives from its legislative authorities the statutory authorities but every bureaucracy has some autonomy right well they they do and i think some of it takes on as you i think are pointing out so the temperament of the
commander-in-chief the chief executive but all ci covert action programs for example have to be authorized in writing in very explicit writing by a present united states and so the more aggressive the president
might be on the foreign front and the more that he or she would want the cia to be involved the cia will be involved but um i i do think that the cia needs to sort of stick with its traditional mission which is to acquire clandestinely acquired
intelligence of uh that matters to us national security whether it be human sources or technical collection it needs to carry out the counter intelligence activities to protect our secrets from foreign interference or intrusion it needs to engage with foreign liaison services so that we're able to benefit from their capabilities and information gathering and needs to conduct all source analysis so that we gain the benefit of the insights that
we get from liaison from clandestinely acquired sources and so on and the more the cia is pushed into the the paramilitary the more military-like activities i think the more trouble i see i will get into what changes would you make to congressional oversight of the intelligence community you know and early on after the the congressional oversight committees came into existence after the the church and pike committees in the
in the 70s when a lot of the atrocities of the the ci was involved in quite frankly uh were um uncovered um and for the first 20 years or so even longer um the members of the oversight committees republican and democrat would put their
party affiliation outside the door when they conducted those oversight activities unfortunately over the last 15 years or so i see more and more partisanship going on inside of those committees so if there's any way
that there can be you know going back to a bipartisan approach to intelligence national security oversight i would strongly recommend it because right now the house intelligence committee is just fractured beyond any type of reasonable
you know work that it can do unfortunately i think the senate has stayed together but there's still a lot of partisanship and it needs to rid itself of that the foreign intelligence surveillance act set up courts to oversee decisions
about wiretapping right and citizen loss of privacy how would you change that system if at all well when i was at cia i really didn't have to get involved in the foreign intelligence surveillance at fisa applications programs this is something that the fbi uh was involved in and uh because you know a lot about it right i mean how would you improve the system well yeah i think that there have been a number of revelations as a result of the
investigations that have gone on about the russian investigation revealing that there was not the type of of rigor and the checking and double checking of the information that goes into those vice applications
and so without just totally overhauling the system i think there can be a way to ensure better accuracy of information that goes into them and when advised application may be approved one day and then 30 days or 68 days later it'll be re-upped
and i think it's incumbent on the bureau the ones that are pushing the fisa to ensure that there is you know no new any new information that's been acquired in that time or known needs to be incorporated into that fisa as well as a review of the existing basis for that fisa needs to be scrutinized so i just think greater rigor in ensuring that again accuracy prevails throughout the process now a major foreign power hacked into an opm
database in what i think 2015 is it harder today to hack again into the opm or to hack into facebook which is better protected that's a good question i mean i i know opm has done some things but some us government systems are legacy systems and trying to transform them and transition to new updated and less vulnerable systems takes time effort and lots of money um facebook uh you know it has um loads of money but also uh i don't know
how concerned it is about ensuring that there is there are no vulnerabilities in the system that can be exploited by actors either domestic or foreign so i think this is a challenge for the public private and not-for-profit sector you know in the coming decades how are you going to ensure that your data is going to be protected while the same time making sure that it's available so that you can leverage it the way it's designed to be
used as you know bob gates has argued that the director of national intelligence position has some problems it creates a new bureaucracy if you were to look at the flow chart of the post-9 11 u.s intelligence community it seems to be a highly complex nightmare now is that just the way things have to work should it actually be that way do we need to simplify are there too many positions are there too many chefs in the kitchen what's your view
well the intelligence community of 2020 is you know the legacy of many many years decades of intelligence agencies that have grown up and have evolved and have adapted to the new realities and so unfortunately over time there has not been as much of
an effort to try to better integrate those agencies and authorities and capabilities as well as to ensure that they are complementary as opposed to unnecessarily redundant i disagree with bob gates i i do believe
that the office of director of national intelligence needs to be looked at afresh after 16 years in existence and some modifications need to be made but as cia director the last thing i wanted was to have to be ci director and the director of the intelligence community at large 17 agencies it was more than enough to keep the director cia busy however i do think that that orchestration function of the director of national intelligence
can be refined and modified to try to push the intelligence community in a direction that shed some of those unfortunate legacy practices that are a drag on the system and to better integrate capabilities to make the us tell us community much more effective the 17 intelligence agencies too many or too few it depends on who you ask i'm asking you well i i think it's too many uh there are some of those intelligence agencies that are
very specific to organizations for example you have there's the marine intelligence there's navy intelligence you know there's army intelligence and some service their own organizations um and there's you know the national
agencies such as nsa and cia and the national geospatial agency um and and i do think it would be worthwhile to see whether or not some of those individual intelligence agencies that are embedded for example in the state department inr
is called intelligence and research whether or not that intelligence requirement of the state department can be better serviced by a broader intelligence community effort that's why i do think it's worthwhile to
take a fresh look at you know the constellation that exists right now very last question what is it that you know about donald trump that the rest of us do not well if there is anything i know about i'm certainly not going to share it with
you and your audience today no i think i still find it difficult to understand how so many americans still believe what he says i mean he his his life is is just one lie after another unfortunately and he has he's been masterful as far as capitalizing on this craving the united states to to believe in in someone who's going to to lead you know them this country sort of out of the problems that they they see uh but now i
think you know donald trump is is pretty transparent as far as who he is and the types of things that he is you know hold dear and what he holds dear is you know himself first and foremost so uh now i'm not
going to share anything else that i i might know or assume john brennan thank you very much and again john's new book is called undaunted my fight against america's enemies at home and abroad thank you john thank you so much tyler appreciate it