800,000. eichman went into hungary and in 1944 on a mission to kill the last jews of europe. wallenberg was sent their funded by the americans on behalf of roosevelt and managed to save over 100,000 of those 800,000. so it is an inspiring story about how one person can make a huge difference. >> how did his life and? >> we don't really know. it's a big question, it's a good question. the russians still to this day won't say exactly what happened to him. many people believe he was killed by the russians, shot by the space in 1947 but there is no death certificate. the russians to this day won't reveal all they know about his fate, and the question is still open. the fate of the holocaust greatest hero is yet to be decided. >> why did the russians have it

out for him? >> good question. he was taken into russian custody in january, 1945, as were many people caught up in the soviet advance as they swept into eastern europe. he was one of many diplomats taken into custody, many people in the the russians basically wanted to use him. they said to him look, you work for us as a spy, go back to sweden, work for us and you can live, and the furious wallenberg said no i'm not going to spy for you and they said okay well we can't admit we to keep, we can't admit that you're alive, the best thing is that we kill you and that is exactly what they did. >> alex kershaw is the author of the envoy the epic rescue of the lost jews of europe and world war ii. former national security archive fellow matthew aid talks about the history and purpose of the national security agency,

which since 9/11 provides the president with a daily intelligence briefings. the international spite museum here in washington as the host of this 50 minute talk. >> well, good afternoon, everyone. and welcome to the spy museum. i am peter earnest, the executive director, and i have to tell you i'm very impressed with how many of you have come out and i just don't know if you're not reading the papers or have intense interest in the subject. it has the heat index of 102 to 105 is my understanding. it's going up into the late nineties, the high 90s, let me put it that way. and i just think you ought to be careful. so i'm very proud that you have embraced the heat, it's also hot out there. [laughter] you wave to the heat and you must have put your head out the door, felt the heat and rushed into the air conditioning. a we are delighted to our all of

your. we have a real treat i think and obviously a number of you may know that already. this is a very, very fine work. i have had the chance to talk to others about, and i think that all of you have an appreciation of how much the nsa techniques have figured certainly in the cold war, and you can go back beyond that i know, but certainly in the cold war and today. and i feel that we are going to have a treat of listening to a historian who is well known. he has appeared on the major media as a commentator. he has done quite a bit of writing and it was fascinating to me and talking to him this is a man with a passion for his subject and he certainly brings that to bear in this book and i

am a stand there may be others in the future. one thing i would ask you is i hope he would just touch on what we now understand about this fiber command is going to come under the nsa umbrella. it's not clear whether it is going to come under work the next or what but if you could touch on that i think that would be great. so, "the secret sentry the untold history of the national security agency. i should mention as a last word i don't know if you'll recall, but there was a story in 2006i believe about the u.s. government's efforts to reclassify literally thousands of documents that had been released. the man who discovered that and who got the story was matthew aid. so we will be listening to

someone who has a sort of double appeal both touching on what we are seeing in that regard as well as the nsa. matthew, it is a great treat to have you here. please help me welcome matthew. [applause] let me move that one out of the way. >> well, thank you very much for coming. i would like to share it mr. earnest's congratulations for those of you that have come out in the 90-degree heat in washington at this time of the year as those of you know you have to basically brings a squeegee with you whenever you walk outside, always very gratified when i see people actually and venturing out into the heat. i have -- i'm going to keep this informal. i'm not going to read you a speech or anything. what i do want to tell you is a

few things that are not in the book and for those of you that have read it and for those of you who do not, i should mention that first of all sort of an unknown fact this book could not have been written without perhaps the ongoing assistance of the national security agency itself. every time we read an article in a the newspaper the always described nsa the initial stand for never say anything or no such agency. but it turns out that, you know, the nsa has had for quite some time in three country inns of and dedicated history program. usually for officers still on the agency's payroll are commandeered because the of the ph.d. in history and asked to write multi volume histories of various aspects of the agencies and past activities and one of those individuals, dr. tom

johnson is hiding in the back and his four volume history in her nsa which is declassified at my request formed a very large basis for my book about 30 either nsa histories which nsa was all too willing to be classified, so for an agency that journalists tend to portray as hyper secretive this seems to be contrary to the cia which i have had a knock down drag out fight with since the reclassification scandal 2006 now they won't answer my phone calls anymore. nsa has been the exact opposite. basically everything i have asked for the have given me in putting for my book, my new book on obama and the intelligence community is the giving me material about activities in

afghanistan and iraq and global war on terrorism which is quite remarkable and i think i would be remiss if i didn't zoos them and i did in the forward to my book but tom johnson and bob and a host of other historians literally made my job so much easier. they basically allowed me -- i spent 25 years piecing together little bits and pieces of nsa's history and when the classified their tomes for my book, literally it was like everything opened up. all of the little bits and pieces that i had been accumulating for over two decades suddenly became clear and it was only when the nsa began to classifying this material beginning in the late 1990's that i was able to write this book in a cogent and organized fashion. before that my book was

basically the entire order of nsa. i knew where every officer had been, office names, in other words it would have board all of you to tears. no publisher would have published it, but anyway, the book itself also, thanks to dr. johnson and the other historians i could write a different kind of book than could have been written before. the main question i always wanted to answer is we stand right now 200,000 americans comprising the u.s. intelligence committee total cost $700 billion a year what are we getting for the money for all the manpower and all the efforts what bang for the bucks are we getting it's the hardest question any historian can answer. it's great to write a good salacious book about during do and spies in the ether and how

it's done but we have to ask ourselves is to have it literally tens of dozens of pages of the cia studies the one question no one can answer is is the nsa worth of the money spent since it was created in 1952 it's like trying to prevent negative, it is impossible, and so we wanted to do to write this book is to lay out of those instances, those things i knew both about good and bad where the successes and failures of the agency in terms of the product produced on a stayed away from sources and methods as much as i could for them reason i didn't want to sleep in a bit next to an nsa security officer for the rest of my life and it's as much as i appreciate the

massive technical skill that is required to intercept and process the communications today as opposed to 50 years ago when it was all retial all the time now you have cell phones and fiber-optic cables and blackberrys and about a million different kinds of hand-held devices i can only imagine the nightmare situation that the boys and girls have to face today. literally there are -- it is 40 times more stuff coursing through the ether for them to intercept them there was at the cold war and there aren't enough supercomputers in the world to handle all of that material, so i have great sympathy for them, how they are doing it. i can only guess that. well it's an educated guess but what i wanted to give you, the readers, is a sense of what they

have produced or failed to produce during that period from the end of world war ii in 1945 up until the time my publisher told me to stop writing in 2008 upon the threat of bodily harm, and as a friend of mine correctly pointed out, and it is almost a truism, we know much more about the failures of intelligence agencies than we know about the success, and i have to say that i was trying to be mindful when writing the book to be balanced, to give their readers a sense of all the success as well as the failures, and in reading the reviews that came out after the book was published a year ago i'm always surprised we who write books hold that you, the readers will come back and sort of take it

all and come and reading the reviews i sometimes wondered if the reviewer is actually read the book i wrote because it was either too harsh, too much negative, or the man is in love with the agency, he basically gave a free ride, and somewhere in between i was missing sort of the salient fact, and i admit many of the agency's successes i don't know about or i may know bits and pieces but not enough to go to print with. i should also point out that two-thirds of my manuscript in the up on the cutting room floor. i gave my publisher said okay i want 100,000 words. i gave him 300,000. and so basically what put out a lot of the material on some of the success stories got cut out

simply because they said boring, so and ended up on the floor and for that i apologize. that's my own fault. everything you want to know what electronic intelligence, peripherals, submarines, use of navy ships for collecting electronic signals that all ended up out of the book as well. i am going to have to separate book on that as well. the biggest problem that i face though, and i'm teasing it right now in writing my obama book is how do you talk about the craft of intelligence as an outsider without compromising on the operations? and one of the problems we faced in writing the secret century especially the chapters four 9/11 or post negative lesson is that i ended up knowing -- i was told a lot more than i could put

in print and not expect a federal grand jury in alexandria to hand down an indictment, so like many responsible journalists, there are others, but like the few responsible journalists who do write about intelligence i ended up self editing a lot of the material, the code words for the domestic eavesdropping programs, what does it tell you? if i was to put it in a book yes, "the new york times" and "washington post" would lead to their feet and publish the code words from these programs but it doesn't tell you what these programs did, it doesn't tell how expensive they were, whether they were legal or, so i didn't edit that material. a lot of the other current operations that were then taking place in iraq and afghanistan and pakistan and elsewhere around the world clearly if i

was to publish or propose publishing any of it might publisher would have had a heart attack and i wouldn't be able to sleep at night, so i just want you all to know that there were limits, self-imposed limits in terms of what i could and should irresponsibly write about intelligence operations, and it's a terrible burden any person writing about intelligence -- at least if you are responsible or think you're responsible has to deal with. one of the things i should also mention is had been sleeping away on this book -- i think i mentioned it took me 25 years to write this book and the first hint i had that i could actually write this book was in 1995 when

the nsa and cnca jointly released what is called the papers about the predecessor organizations to what is now nsa braking the code some of what is now or what used to be the kgb and their operations here in the united states, and for reasons that are subtle and sometimes difficult to understand a former deputy director's of the nsa who was a litter of history, and you don't get many people rising to senior ranks, and the intelligence community have an appreciation for history said well, this stuff has outlived its usefulness as a secret, let's declassify it, and i know that there were those in nsa who strenuously resisted the declassification of this material but were overruled because the deputy director of the agency said do it, and just tell me when you're going to

release it so i can have a press conference, and, you know, one of my name -- one of the problems that has sort of real its ugly head in the post-9/11 world that we live, immediately after line 11 we lived in a world of kosmas during the lovely period, during the mid 1990's right up to 9/11 when there were annual conference is the cia releasing documents and in fighting historians to come and listen to former agency officials talk about how they won the war and and 9/11 cantelon and stopped, and stopped completely. no more conferences, no more releases of beavers and suddenly i became persona non-grata along with the others that wrote on this issue, and it's beginning to change again in the next six months the cia has released

several trenches and significant groups of papers on the cold war intelligence issues, and i applaud the cia for doing it and i hope that the nsa will follow suit and to the same, but we live in any democracy and i keep having to remind myself cut no matter how much damage and death and destruction al qaeda may have caused on 9/11 what makes us strong is the fact that we continue on as a people we have probably the free society of the world if you ever lived overseas you know the truth of it and the fact that the intelligence community is back in the business openly talking about the history of intelligence i think is a very good sign. lastly, i should also mention

that i have to make an apology to all of you and i think it's inappropriate one. the book is a couple hundred pages long one-third of which is footnotes and there is a reason for that. i don't know how many of you who are serious readers of intelligence history, you open up a book and have no idea where the information the author is presenting to you as fact came from, and i am not an academic. i only have a bachelor's degree, i'm not a phd but it always drove me crazy when i would pick up a book, and i won't mention the names of any authors because the book shop downstairs has a number of them for sale, but i always believe that you have the right to know where this stuff comes from and it's confidential and i do use in my footnote's the phrase confidential source

more than i am comfortable with, and then i began to regret doing that especially when many of the people who gave me the information set i have no problem with you using my name in your book and i decide if they were still alive fire was not going to use their names, then tom drake was indicted by federal grand jury in baltimore for leaking information to the "baltimore sun," and at that point i realized i was really smart not putting the names of my sources and to the footnotes of my book. the other thing i would like to say is and end on before i turn it over to you is for those of you who may think i was a little too critical of the agency in the book on a tacked on to the paperback version sort of a postscript of what's been going on since president obama moved into the white house of january

last year. i mentioned a few programs which took the breath away of some people at fort meade but didn't reveal as much as i could have about what these programs are up to. i wanted to sort of begin the process of correcting what some people think is a slant towards the critical aspects of my book by paying tribute and mentioning the success currently taking place. you have to be weary when you read a newspaper article, take for example the dana priest series published by "the washington post" recently which sometimes took on a demand gloom rampant intelligence community of control, the road elephant specter reared his ugly head again, first time that's happened since the nixon administration and, you know,

you have to -- no matter what you may think about the article and the information contained or what was not contained, you have to always remember that there's something else behind the statistics, there are hundreds of thousands of men most of them in uniform stuck in some -- with an to kabul and islamabad four times in the last couple of years and i can't even begin to describe the horrible conditions these guys are having and gals or having to go through doing their jobs. it just -- some of the newspaper articles don't do justice to the efforts these men and women are doing today. that doesn't mean they are not making this takes the lead to mistakes and it's up to us to tell you about it because well it is a human endeavor, good, bad and ugly but i just i think

it is incumbent on the intelligence community to adopt more transparency to tell us if they don't like the stories appearing in the new dirk tonnes and "the washington post," if they don't like the tener of the stories within for god sake, correct the story, give us the truth and by god our democracy will survive. even telling us with the domestic jeeves driving program. yes, there will be about a week's worth of screaming and yelling on the fox network's at cnn and msnbc. but i think we can handle it to use a line of a comedy show. i should also, mr. earnest asked me to talk briefly about cyber command. for those of you who don't know,

president obama approved the formation of a military command of u.s. labor command whose head is lieutenant general keith alexander who is also the director of the national security agency so now he has the last county had about four or five different hats that he wore with the u.s. cyber command is a responsibility of defending our nation's telecommunications and computer destruction which we always thought was part of nsa's the original mandate. originally called communications security that became information security. somehow we needed a new command. a new layer of bureaucracy on top of what already exists to handle the cyber threat from abroad. i will tell you what. when these lovely authors coming from nigeria asking them to give me my bank account information,

when they stop i know that cyber command is working but the seibu command may have some affect or not on protecting our nation's, the government communications system. it's never been proven to my satisfaction that there are literally about 15 different organizations engaged in the degrees in cyber defense and it is the hottest contracting. you go to a conference to in washington. there are literally hundreds of defense contractors bidding for the multimillion-dollar contracts. it is hot stuff. the problem is i don't think anybody knows what the threat is or how to deal with it. but there is a town of, there are billions of dollars being thrown at the problem willy-nilly and that's typical

for washington. what we need is one person to quote jr told them to bring them in darkness and bind them under one dictatorial head, but that's something that's sort of goes against the culture here in washington. by the way, if any of you wonder why the list director of national intelligence didn't survive very long, we have now a man who is the phenomenal head of our intelligence community who literally has no power to direct or control the activities of the 16 intelligence agencies that he commands much less his own office, much less military intelligence component which is the second power. nobody realizes there is a second intelligence community on the other side of the potomac. so what i would like to do now

is turn it over to you and yes. >> how did you answer your own question how we getting our money's worth, why or why not, and what are some of the major successes, what are a couple of failures and how could they have turned into success? >> freakin' question. -- very good question. and it is a personal opinion, and you talk to any senior cia officials and he will give you a different answer. they are the ones that have the clearance, but my feeling is that have gotten our money's worth from the agency despite all failures, despite the tonkin gulf in 1964 which will say

intelligence failure which dragged america into the war, but as dr. johnson points out, you know, president lyndon johnson at the time was looking for a reason to go to war so of the tonkin gulf didn't happen then something else would have come along that would have ultimately resulted in us going into the war. it just so happened but the tonkin gulf is in sort of in a egregious example of where intelligence failed. where it failed at nsa and the white house and pentagon level where you had a secretary defense that was in such a hurry to bomb north vietnam the did didn't matter with the intercept said. you tailor them to your already cremate conclusion. the weapons of mass destruction

scandal and iraq is another example where the nsa isn't entirely just had a small part of the intelligence failure. -- >> are you saying that the nsa got it right and it's the political process that got it wrong? >> there have been examples where nsa got it right and analysts at langley got it wrong. for example the 1968 soviet invasion of czechoslovakia. all the evidence from the intelligence and from other sources clearly indicated the soviets were going to intervene militarily and crush the czec government, and for reasons that the cia intelligence analyst at the national until the budget officer level said the russians will rattle their sword but they are not going to do it, and this

was written in stone and they refused to budge the matter how much evidence. the same thing with the tet offensive in 1968. all the evidence from the collection standpoint from nsa and others clearly portend a major offensive in generate, 1960 by the north vietnamese and viet cong, the analysts at langley, the north vietnamese don't have the capacity to conduct a nationwide coordinated offensive. it was just a part of the mind set up the time. there's just literally dozens of examples when the collectors get it right the 1973 arab-israeli war, another good example of where the nsa got it right and the analysts at langley said of the egyptian forces are incapable of taking on the israeli defense forces. there is no chance of war so

everybody was shocked when the egyptian army crossed the suez and then we have dix hills where the nsa has gotten it wrong with those six samples are fewer than the analysts responsible for taking the mass of material collected by nsa and turning it into truth for the policy makers. that is my conclusion. i cannot empirical the demonstrate. it's just that as i -- for 25 years i see more and more examples of analysts for whatever reasons -- there are many examples they got it right and the nsa had no collection on the issue whatsoever. but on the major crisis of the 1950's throughout the cold war in like 60 to 70% of the time nsa was right.

so i mean, that says a lot about how massive and global nsa was at the height of the cold war i think in 1967, 68 nsa had in excess of 90,000 military and civilian personnel and close to 100 listening posts of them the world. it is truly gargantuan effort and virtually every nation in the world was being listened to, united nations, ngos, you name it, everybody was being monitored, and i would be willing to admit that given such a gargantuan effort yahoo would miss a few things but i'm always surprised at how much they actually caught. >> let me give you a hand if i may i just want to emphasize again [inaudible] so everyone can hear the question as well as the [inaudible] [laughter] a traveling microphone here as well. okay. but it does help because

everyone can hear it also those who are taking the meeting. okay. so thank you very much and go on with your questions. i did want to take this occasion if i may speak to delete the [inaudible] i think they can hear me. >> of the recording can't. >> this is the director of our adult programs and i wanted to introduce you to our new historian who just joined the museum, mark stout, so any concerns you have, programs you want to suggest or just random comments, either one of the more as well as myself so let me if i may. >> we have a lady here to this and i have a simple question but i know a tough answer. could you give a concise description of what the nsa does

of racially, or organizationally, how does it work to pull of this information? >> that is a big one. okay. the nsa but simply is basically two primary missions, it has a host of corollary missions, it has basically -- it does two things and two things only, it is the nation's eavesdropper which probably accounts for 60 to 70% of its efforts, and it's responsible for protecting the government's communications and infrastructure whether it be computers, e-mail and what does it. well. okay. i will speak to it in general terms. nsa, and i hearken to the fact that today i assume many of you have children or grandchildren who are enamored of soft loans

and have little registers in their hands at all times cracking up huge bills. nsa -- i will give you a very good and simple. in baghdad in 2007 general david petraeus is sent over to baghdad, iraq's security situation is feeling a rapidly. petraeus says i can fix it for you, mr. president. he goes over to baghdad and the first thing he is confronted with is we knew very little about the organization of the iraqi insurgents and al qaeda in iraq. it turns out that nsa had come up with a couple lovely devices which basically could vacuum clean all of the e-mail, digital pages and cellphone traffic for the greater baghdad area which is roughly a couple million people crammed into a very small

place, and then there was a corollary computer system that basically could run through all the call data and figure out who is an insurgent and who was just mom-and-pop calling for the local store. and what we have to wait for nsa to classify material on the subject, but i talked now with a couple dozen people who basically said through this vacuum cleaner intercept system they parked on a man-made mountain out near the baghdad international airport it looked basically like the compressor -- demers all powered compressor as you see when the guy is sitting there with a jackhammer and it's connected to a little power pack behind him. that's exactly what the interest system looked like.

there was nothing unusual about it just had this capacity to basically sock of everything in the ether within a certain frequency range, which is what sells phones all operate off of cells. this thing is basically connected to the different cells in the blood that area. everything fit into this computer system which said we have an insurgent sell here and here. it could locate them based on their telephone number and where -- it's just like with our police systems your use in the united states. when you pick up the cell phone they can actually track you using it. they know exactly where you are. this is how the system worked in baghdad and then so general petraeus was able to send what they call it door crunchers. basically infantry squads to the

locations, and sure enough just one insurgent sell after another after another went down thanks to basically it is a simple process but it is much more complicated than i am making it sound. that is an example of how the system works. it takes a vast amounts of computer power to do it and nsa is the only agency in the world that has the technology, the money and manpower. russia used to have a much larger -- the soviet union before communism collapsed as much larger intelligent system and then they fell on hard times after the collapse of communism. they are on their way back but still a shadow of their former self. those that answer the question? >> i don't mean to be disrespectful by asking this but nevertheless, what does your book to different from a multi volume version of dr. johnson --

it is it an executive summary of his or what do you bring to the table? i don't mean to be disrespectful. >> no, no, no disrespect taken. it's actually i'm almost tempted to drug tom up here and let him get his side of the story. what i tried to do -- i mean, there is -- thomas multivolume history is wonderful except this still huge chunks of it that remained classified. i tried to fill in some of the blanks. in some cases with success, and others, mont. i tried to add material that wasn't contained in tom's multivolume history because with all due respect to my friend back there, there were many other nsa history is written on spic 52 specific operations and aspects of the agency and i tried to bring them all together

plus bring the results of 25 years of research at the national archives and other document repository is plus the interviews i had done with former cia and nsa officials. so basically, i tried to do basically the same thing he did but from an unclassified source perspective. >> matthew come to me to try to answer the question. i think i would like to put a perspectives and tell you a story about how we met matthew. i was an nsa's history program and writing some multivolume work and one of my jobs was to review what was coming to the agency. almost all of them had something to do with things that used to have been rather than things that are going to happen.

and i started to notice that there was a huge pile coming in from the national security archives and every single one of them had at the bottom matthew kennedy will this was a competent person would be named matthew aid, and so i think it was in 2001i was invited to speak at a conference in toronto on my feet was the korean war and i went and there was matthew aid. i introduced myself and i had no idea you were a real person. i apologize. [laughter] so i read the paper he presented on korea and i had already written one of the chapters in my multi-billion history. also on the same 1i realized his was better than mine and i had access to all the classified documents and the reason it was better is because he stepped

outside the agency and brought perspective and agency employee couldn't, and he had a critical audit that i simply didn't have. i was a true blue nsa patriot and i could not step outside the agency and view it i think from the perspective matthew had and i could say what i think in short that is what his book brings to the evaluation of nsa. >> thank you, tom. >> i enjoyed what i've heard so far. i want to come back and paz had a scenario and ask what your opinion is based on your work. in very simple terms, and this is definitely over simplify in

the situation, the internet is wide open. the deadly anybody with the right skills processing capability can pretty much spy on anybody else and i would describe the web it might be something akin to dodge city on payday. only there is no sure if. and to the extent there is any government presence at all, the classic case is the situation where 130 million credit card members were stolen and there are government agencies that actually knew about it as it was a career and did nothing to warm either the company or the people involved so i guess the point of my question is in fact cyber is a situation the way to describe it we are in -- is the internet is as open as it is, and with all due respect to the

government's to get involved in it, home to be appropriately protect the public with respect to privacy and what would your observation be about that? thank you. >> thank you. you hearkened to the sort of part of the problem which is if the government was to step in and propose that he this cyber command in any iteration that it assumes with moving into the commercial meaning of the civilian internet market to protect us you can imagine what the reaction would be from the aclu of also people like me who are still a part of me that wonders why google for example needs nsa assistance to protect it from hackers and other

internet service providers don't have the benefit of nsa's protection. and coming in the aftermath it's been five years since the new york time revealed the domestic on the front of the papers. there was no pole ever taken but if nsa was to propose to let us move into your computer's, let us protect you from the nigerian and fraud artists and bisons iberia trying to separate your credit card numbers from your wallet and i think a lot of us would be very wearied, and properly so letting a government agency, especially one as large as nsa, as powerful as nsa into our homes. i mean, you can imagine the constitutional lawyers will argue this is the fourth amendment issue, this is invasion of my home, you can't enter here.

so why don't see -- i don't see how nsa can intervene in protecting us as americans, as individuals. its mission commands understand right now, and it is a matter of intense debate in the west wing of the white house, at nsa, at the department of homeland security, nsa's cyber command is only to protect the u.s. government's communications, and those of our allies and our troops fighting overseas. if beyond that, i mean, you can imagine what the public's reaction would be. you saw what their reaction was when it was revealed in "the washington post" that google had approached nsa and asked for help to protect it from chinese actors. the reaction was visceral, it was planted and it was overtly negative. and so i mean, google is that

large and dominating presence on the internet imagine if, you know, it would take a 9/11 type of catastrophe affecting the entire internet before i think most americans would be willing to let the national security agency or such organization regulate and be the sheriff on the internet. right now i don't think nsa wants the job. my impression talking to general alexander and others is it is a fourth amendment might mayor that the agency absolutely does not want or need right now. it has three wars for ticker in the government's communications. that's plenty right now. >> isn't there a conundrum that even if the agency were to protect private communications it would inevitably protect communications of those parties

some of which it wants to eavesdrop on and their needs to be no way out of that but to protect me from nigerian scanners, could protect the inadvertently protect the communications people threatening terrorist action here were against our allies. >> it's a different way at the same problem. absolutely true. i will put the problem in a different light. if the nsa came to me and said we are going to give you mr. aid, a onetime good deal. we will play overwatch. we will be big brother just for your computer. but your computer and telephones, we will make sure you don't get calls from telemarketers at dinnertime at maturity nigerians leave you

alone and we will keep the buggies out of your computer. we will do all of that. all you have to do is give us your passwords. we have to know some very intimate personal information about you. we can't protect you unless we know you, and i mean, it was the question we all asked ourselves after 9/11. i mean, we knew that we were going to have to make some accommodations after the terrorist attacks that there would be some loss of civil liberties that we would have to make sacrifices in order to protect our country, our homeland. we didn't realize how far the government may have gone or the infringements of the constitutional infringements that may or may not have taken place we will never know because all the guilty parties were given retroactive immunity. so, but yeah, we are in the same

boat. does anyone here -- i mean, i am willing to entertain any calls. those anyone here feel that, you know, they are so threatened that their computers are so wide open to attack -- it hasn't happened to me i have to admit, and let's face it, licht -- i have the chinese embassy who have all sorts of interesting structures i have to believe they are listening the russian embassy is not all that far from me. we live in a town which is just we have probably more spies here in washington today than we had at the height of the cold war. they live in my building. i've met some of them. the chinese, god, the are wonderful. that's for my next book. but i don't -- i personally don't feel threatened enough, i don't feel that it is eminent

enough i would be willing to let the nsa or the u.s. government in general and to my home come into my computer to protect me. i'm not sure what rubicon has to be crossed before we would be willing to let that happen, and i am just postulating a position here that i think the vast majority of the 250 plus americans would not be willing to permit that to happen. we don't have the situation that you found in london where every street corner you find three cameras. i don't think we would permit that here in the united states and the same is true when it comes to protecting our communications. >> maffei, thank you very much. >> my pleasure. cemetery stimulating

presentation. [applause] we have been delighted to learn today that there really is a matthew aid to keep up the good work. >> historian matthew aid is a former staff sergeant with the u.s. air force and former national security archive fellow. the international spotlight museum here in washington, d.c. hosted this event. to find out more information, visit spymuseum.org three >> what is the world's most powerful law firm? >> well, the firm here in washington that represents all of the tv anchors come all of the big correspondence for most of the networks, all of the bigger "washington post" all the way up to barack obama, sarah palin, president clinton, the bushs committee of the bases covered. i did a story for the washingtonian magazine called "the firm that runs the world,"

and that evolves into this book that when you cut down to the nub of washington politics and media, they have the lawyers that are sort of the ones that control everything that goes on around him. >> how did they get to grow so big and powerful? >> relatively speaking the are not so big. but they are only about 250 lawyers, where a lot of them are open to the thousands. and in fact that is one of the things of the book that makes them unique is that they don't accept a lateral partners like other firms do. in other words, stealing partners from other firms, they will get themselves as an elite band that grew up together, sort of like a baseball team and all please together in the minors. the sorted thesis of the book is that when edward founded the firm, he is the most powerful and famous lawyer in the united states and after he died in 1988, lawyers robert burnett, brendan sullivan, larry, now the

president of the boston red sox and a couple of other guys, took the firm and moved on to be even more powerful and influential than it was when edward bennett williams was alive. and that's sort of the thesis of the book. it tells how they did it. brendan sullivan, people might remember from the tennessee vince charnel, where the prosecutors ended up getting in more trouble with the end of the case than stevenson. and that isn't an accident. i to brendan sullivan's career that all the way to the beginning and show how in virtually every case he tries, the prosecutors or more at risk than his client. in fact in 35 years he's never lost a case, whereas the prosecutors in the case had gotten into trouble or lost their jobs countless time. >> and he was a lawyer, too, was a two? >> that is where rivers met him is covering the iran contra hearings, and he told me about how brendan sullivan was like the manager in the film bill

durhma. he would interrupt him, taken all the time, have long conferences people felt something important was happening, and brendan sullivan would be sort of calling him down. a lot of really interesting insight into brendan sullivan, who i think most people who follow the law realize he is not only the best trial lawyer in the united states the most interesting as well. >> did the partners in williams and connelly participate in your book research? >> well, i had known them for a long time and developed a relationship with them. so, yes, i mean, they were very cooperative and helpful and hit some element of trust me because i had attended him for 20 years, i just didn't pop out of the bushes and all of a sudden say i am writing a book. i had already established relationships with all of the partners, brendan sullivan and bob barnett particularly. >> the new book masters of the game inside the world's most powerful law firm.

>> this is booktv coverage of the 61st annual national book award in new york city, and now we are joined by mcginn, a finalist in the nonfiction category. her book, every man in this village is a lawyer and education in war. what was your experience in baghdad and afghanistan? >> well, i was in baghdad and afghanistan covering the the stories for the the "los angeles times." i was there in 2001, it was actually my first foreign assignment. i was a young reporter and i sort of got thrown into it, and it was traumatic and exciting and amazing and completely memorable. i went to iraq later on on and off after the ev mission in 2003. just covering the events and watching everything more or less fall apart has been far from my

experience in afghanistan and iraq. >> so this book has been about nine years in the making? >> yeah, that book is drawn from reporting that goes from 2001 to about 2006-2007. yeah, and it took a few years to write and get out into the market, so yeah, it's about a decade of my life. >> where did you come up with the title, quote kuhl every man in this village is a lawyer"? >> it comes from afghanistan. the was a phrase someone said to me before i went to afghanistan, every man in this village is a liar. it derived from an old greek paradox, where the person who says i think it is actually all of the cree tins are lawyers the the person who says a is a creetin so it is and logical possibility that if he is telling the truth he's lying. i use it because it seems the elusive nature of the truth in war and the difficulty of reporting in a war zone.

village in some ways, it's a global village as well. there wasn't really any way who came away with their hands clean from the war. everyone was lobbying to some extent. >> where detector on the cover come from? >> you have to ask my publisher. i actually don't know anything about it. they showed it to me and my father was beautiful to the believe it is afghanistan judging by the building but i don't know. >> if someone reads every man in this village is a liar will we learn about the daily lives of people in afghanistan and iraq? >> is as well as other countries. the book takes place through years of reporting. it's about libya, saudi arabia, it's about israel, it's about jordan, egypt, it kind of -- it really tries to take in the to tell the to tell the of the so-called war on terror. it's not so much focus on the combat zones exclusively. it's also about the