clearances. when we amass all this we want to -- we thought of it as our genome project. it was the dna of what we call top-secret in america so we decided to deal everything. we got addresses for every agency and put them on a map of the united states and the map like an old-fashioned developing photo a vat of chemicals started appearing as a different kind of united states. different kind of geography that we began to think about as an alternative geography of the united states where the capital was not washington d.c. but a place 50 miles north of washington d.c. in fort meade where the national security agency, we -- the electronic eavesdroppers that do surveillance around the world is

located. is one of the largest intelligence agencies that morton doubled after 9/11 and when it did start to grow the sub agencies that it worked with started to grow as well and to moving to the area and the contractors that work for the government also started to grow and be close to the agency. so you got a clustering effect that was very dense and that was the densest part of top-secret america, this geography we had put on a map. but the whole eastern seaboard namely around the washington area and another places like colorado--the closest one to you -- outside of denver, what will become vice think the largest federal secret, top-secret

agency's center in the country outside the east coast is outside of denver. this is what we call top-secret america. besides the numbers which were pretty large and many of those, a third of it was created after 9/11. we could talk about what was created after 9/11 also. we wanted to look inside and say it is big and expensive. what are some of the problems? people i had known for many years in the military and the intelligence world were talking to me about these problems even before i started doing this work. that is one of the main reasons we decided to undertake it. people who consider themselves loyal patriotic americans who wanted to keep the nation safe from another terrorist attack were very worried when they saw around them in the secret world.

there was too much growth. people were tripping over each other. they were doing the same jobs. the idea of sharing more information was one of the things that came out of 9/11. while they had gotten better at that, the whole apparatus had gotten so much bigger that was nearly impossible to share everything or even partially with other agencies so many agencies grew and spun off and did their own thing. so that became very difficult as well. that is what we call top-secret america. >> one of the things that is striking in the book is over and over a picture is painted of this clandestine, very expensive

it even murderous operations being carried out not in the recognizable seat of government but in suburbia. there will be a pizza hut or office bar or strip mall or executive in. the point is made over and over. what is there that is particularly creepy about these operations taking place in these anonymous suburban environments? >> it is an odd sensation to realize a place i have been for 25 years and fought i knew the area pretty well but the fact is i drive every day pass office buildings are was just thinking of as regular old office buildings. i will never think of him that way again because we can

pinpoint some secret offices around the washington area in in plain sight. after 9/11 when we were all panicked that there might be another attack that government began to write blank checks. was $40 billion, the first cut of the check which went from congress to the executive agencies at the request of the administration but the acquiescence or actually the aggressive pushing of members of congress who were also worried as we all work that we didn't know who our cargo was or beheaded good fix where they were or how strong they were so let's spend as much money as need be to figure out this problem. after the first forty billion dollars came another $40 billion and overwhelmed system quickly and money was spent on anything and anyone who had an idea that

might be called counterterrorism accept neither the white house nor congress wanted to grote government so they said but don't spend it to hire more federal employees because people won't like that so go higher contractors. and the fog was to give them their say, that this would be cheaper because you wouldn't have federal employee benefits. you could fire contractors easily. hasn't turned out that way at all. there are not many contractors who have been fired. what happened was these companies went in and tried to do not only the job they were given but all the jobs they sought could be done so they started proposing new jobs themselves. and they're not paying the same salaries as federal employees the two or three times as much

so that they could pocket some of the money in overhead so that these grew to be very expensive proposition to hire contractors. the other byproduct of that was people in the federal government who were working very long hours and getting hammered upon for failing to stop 9/11, senior most intelligence officials and military officials would leave government most of them without retiring anyway. and then go to work for these contractors and come back to the very seats they were sitting in before only now they're making three times as much. ..

and he really had no intention of making a lot of money off of this tragedy, but it would get u woul ripped of by their colleaguesri saying are you crazy?r you can make three times as much as you ever made in theuyouan government and who succumb to that and started being gove contractorsrn themselves. startg contractors themselves. so they set the spiral effect of spending, which to this day is huge. and every agency dare 16 intelligence agencies, by the way. every single one is dependent on outside contract is not to get their jobs done. and not just a regular job. contractors are just administrators, paper pushers, personnel people are i.t. people. they are part what the

government does. and my favorite symbol of that is the picture in the book of the stone carver carbine a star and a white marble wall. and that wall was located in the headquarters of the cia and the stars represent people who have died in the land of duty. and there are 22 stars that have been carved since 9/11 for those at the cia who have died in the line of duty. end of the 22, eight are contractors, meaning eight people were involved in covert action, which is the most sensitive thing that our government does. so that's just to say contractors are an integral part of everything we do now is a government, including the most sensitive things. >> one of the things i wasn't aware of was this whole scale movement of the public service, ex-military, ex-generals into the top-secret miracle world.

it's not just ex-generals. michael chertoff and tom ridge, the former heads of homeland security, now they have companies, which are deeply involved in these government take dvds. can you tell us more about that? >> in washington it's known as the revolving door. it's been there since i can remember, many, many decades before that. if you pray that your government service into a lobbying position, consulting job, that sort of thing. the military has done it forever. the intelligence world not so much. usually people -- before 9/11, intelligent leaders would go and become teachers or, you know, maybe they'd work on wall street advising companies or something like that. but these days, the money is too

good. and i had a colleague, julie tate to did a research on what i would call the 9/11 clap as the cia, the top managers that were on station, on post on 9/11. in 90 of them have gone into a moneymaking end of the post 9/11 world. michael chertoff was with the justice department. and then he became the number two at homeland security. and after being there for only two years, he took not only his chief of staff, but many people in the top ranks of what was then and still is now a fairytale and come and experience, not very good department, he took them and went into private practice, consulting with companies who wanted to invest. and guess what?

same technologies and products that are being bought in the same secret world. so insider-trading we are all familiar with. to me this is another kind of insider trading because you cannot get into the circle of people unless you have a security clearance. and once you have that clearance and you have to trust the people inside, you know, you're in for life unless he really screw something up. and you and i cannot cna. it's not like building the next generation of military fighter plane, where we can actually hear that debate and decide how many we really need. all of this is classified. and so you've got contractors with friends and say the government who are now letting the contracts to their friends outside the government. one of my sources called it a self ice cream cone. [laughter] i think that's a pretty good description of it.

>> one of the things that you mentioned is the plethora of information that's being generated every day by this apparatus and how difficult it is. it's one thing for reporters to keep track of it, but other people this is their job, it's difficult if not impossible even for them. and you mentioned being that the general who is going down in all of these reports on his computer and his inbox is overflowing, who sounds angry. >> he was more than angry. he wasn't shy about telling me that. so one of the chapters begins with one of my adventures into the pentagon one night with the help of some sources who wanted a -- you knew what i was doing. i'd been talking to them for quite a bit about what i was doing, how is trying to show this to people who didn't know this world. we arranged to go into a room where he had a computer where

they have special information on it. he just wanted me to see the volume of intelligence reports that he was supposed to read every day. and it just went on and on and on. and he was so frustrated because one of the unregulated, unmanaged parts of top-secret america is the use of analysts. everyone has hired as many analysts as their budget can hold. and that usually means thousands of analysts. analysts are the key to finding out, you know, what is happening. all those infamous that make no sense unless you put them in front of a good analyst who can say what they mean. but put them in front of a bad analyst for an inexperienced analyst mhs mean -- they mean nothing special. and so many of these reports are written, saying the exact same thing. no unique information.

but unique patters on the top of that, meaning that he felt obligated that he would need to resolve these and of course he couldn't. when we went to find out how many -- how can we describe this in more depth, i was told that every year the analytic community of people in this world produces 50,000 intelligence reports a year, everywhere from one page notices to very sick national intelligence estimates. and there's no way in the world that anybody can hope to read all of that. not only that, but if you remember the christmas day bomber, the guy who had the explosives in his underwear, one of the reasons that follow the clues that were floating around the world literally were not put together is not because there were good analyst to put them

together. it is because the world that is managing this has become so large that as the world testified, we've aren't sure who had the ultimate responsibility to run these clues to ground. so even though they created a new agency called the national counterterrorism center, which is housed in a building which is 500 square feet, a new building to despise wal-mart stacked on top of each other, they still did not have the ultimate authority or they didn't think they did to run all of these disparate clues to ground and therefore nobody did it. so that's a specific case where size defeats the purpose. and this is not just in my words and from my sources, but it's ahead of this world, director of national intelligence who told the government that when he was called to testify and explain how in the world this man with explosives was allowed to get on

that airplane. >> i'm curious can you describe in the book walking down hallways, walking into buildings with ultra- top-secret security. the people you're with had their retina scan. how did she get that access? did you have their retina scan? >> not willingly. well, we didn't get inside many buildings, you know, obviously because they are well did. but it was even a trick to find out where they were, find out how many there were. so i became obsessed with actual buildings. at one point -- they are enormous edifice is mayor bill tuesday. it's the other thing i thought was important about finding locations and describing the size of these things because they represent that we as a country or construct and to last

for a long time. for instance -- we said we've got to come out the big ones we can find. and we found 33 skyscrapers. if you put them altogether square footage wise, which you can do because the contractors who built them are very proud of of what they bill coming to usually a square footage out there on the website. if you put them all together, that is worth more than three pentagons, just a big building. there is one agency in itself that is enormous. the department of homeland security, which is an agency that was entirely new after 9/11 that still gets very low marks for its contribution to keeping us safe, but is building in a part of washington that not many people and government goes to is building a complex for its headquarters that will be larger than the pentagon when it's

filled -- when it's finished. the house of the 80,000 people. right now, more than half of those are contract others. so this thing that we try to describe is here to stay. so it's been 10 years since 9/11. we spent a lot of money. you could argue that all of this money has kept us safer. we haven't had another 9/11. and that would be the primary argument for continuing things as they are. are we safer because of this? >> well, i definitely think we're much safer than we were on 9/11. but i don't think it's because of this gigantic thing that we created. i think it is because of a handful of organizations and element makeup was just a minute, that have grown and figured out how to find

terrorist organizations and to capture or kill them with various methods and it becomes quite good at doing that. just to name a couple, you look at who found and killed in london. the cia analysts have on bin laden's trail over there for 10 years. they were the most expert at al qaeda and bin laden, and his associates. they had a very focused mission. they had all the resources they needed. they were not the thousands of analysts who want to get into counterterrorism somehow and who were doing reports that were not unique in not hopeful. domestically, the fbi's counterterrorism agents. if you like about the plots and potential paths undone and discovered since 9/11, they did not come through the homeland

security see something come to say something campaign, were you supposed to report people who look like they're doing something's position is. they did not come from a dragnet approach to this. they came from a group of people who have again are very highly trained, very experienced in terrorism. that is then have foiled a brief read about all of these recently, potential plots. overseas i would say that the joint special operations command, highly secretive troupe called the joint special operations command -- i had to devote an entire chapter to them. they have been more effective than the cia in capturing and killing more targeted terrorists do not only a chemist and in iraq, but also in countries where we are not at in yemen and

somalia and somewhat in ethiopia. so there are groups and may have been so successful that there are only a few hundred of al qaeda left on the planet, most of whom are hiding in pakistan. the other groups that have come up since 9/11, for instance, the al qaeda of the arabian peninsula, those groups are under intense scrutiny by these, again can a relatively small, highly focused units that i'm talking about. that is not the vast majority of this thing that we've created. and so we are doing a book that we really need to step back, 10 years after 9/11 after bin laden is dead. how lucky is now dead as well. al qaeda doesn't have much of a leader. it's a few hundred people and the new organizations are much

more known to our people that al qaeda was on 9/11. and you say, you know, what are we building to defeat the rest of this? and what works and what doesn't work? and until that happens, i think no politician is going to feel safe standing not been saying, we should train hair. because as you can listen to the rhetoric in washington, if you do that, you're only going to get beat up by it don't matter what party you're a member of. >> add one more question before we open the floor to questions. that is a mention in your book that the american people have agreed to this trade-off because they keep supporting political pete will and officials and to let that officials who support these programs. what do you think the trade-off

has been? >> first of all, i think the american people have supported it because we are given a lot of information to go on. the description of the thread has never been very detailed. and now it should be. now is the time that we need to know what's left. we need to know more about the threat actually is. and i think the trade-off is obvious in terms of dollars, but it's also obvious and where the government focuses its attention. there is not only a certain amount of money they can go somewhere, but there's also a certain amount of brainpower. and so much of the government's brainpower has been focused on this thing called counterterrorism. and i had a conversation just a day with someone in the intel community who said the military southern command based in miami

has the biggest hezbollah analytic team in the whole entire government. and that is because they have a tiny little thing in the place of latin america, where there is some financial fundraising for hezbollah. but that said. but they can get at because they are the military and because that is a four-star command. in other ways, they can get it because they ask and they have the credibility and not because there's an actual threat that merits that much attention. so i think that we need to ask more -- ask for more information about how safe we are. i mean, it is a success story. but they're unwilling at the moment to share with you. it is all classified under which means that if they did, somehow they believed the national security of the united states would be harmed.

>> thank you. [applause] >> i did a bit of intelligence work when i was in the navy. how is the intelligence work with the cold war soviet union to the antiterrorism effort? to keep talking about how big this operation is. how do they -- the >> they don't. >> the big difference between man and the cold war is that the cold war -- i hate to say this because you don't think of it that way, but it's relatively easy. you're talking about state that there is. presidents, intelligence chiefs, we knew where to send our

electronic surveillance. we could infiltrate them with the environmental lobby is here then we could -- then you could infiltrate a small tribal-based group of al qaeda. so it's very decentralized compared to -- it's very decentralized and without a state era state sponsors obviously. but the terrorist networks, with some exceptions, are not driven and managed by states. so decentralization has made -- it's made it all the harder. and that is also required that the intelligence be many more places than it was before. and so our electronic capability to be everywhere in the world and to listen in on so many different things has really improved dramatically since 9/11. and that's why ford me that they

are near the national security agency has become so big. this becomes a big unfortunately that there's no way in the world that all of what is brought in everyday, vacuumed up around the heavens will let her be analyzed. and again, no one will say that's enough because you never know brisk free to say this is enough. >> you talked a lot about the bill since 9/11. do you believe that much of what had been surrounded the events of 9/11 have not been revealed to the american people? >> i do not. i think they have been revealed to the american people. i know there are people who believe in what i would call a conspiracy theory of 9/11, i've looked at that years ago. some of my colleagues have spent a lot of time looking at that. and i am sure -- no, i do not

believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy. >> among all of these top-secret contracting countries, all these companies working as contractors at all the secret agencies with untold lands that are being spent, do we know if they are paying taxes on their province in the u.s. or the sudden this money offshore? >> that's a great question. [applause] well, i hate to say this, but i don't know. so i'm going to change the questions lately because i don't know the answer to that. what i can say about the contract jerseys that the vast majority, 80% of the contracting work in this realm is done by defense contract jerseys means

you probably would recognize, like lockheed martin, general dynamics, owing, saic, the really big defense contractors who saw in 9/11 -- quickly saw how the world was going to change from one where steel and hardware we conquer the enemy to where information was what you need it and how you move information around the world quickly would really win the day. and so all of those companies refashion themselves quickly to become -- to serve that purpose. and they did it so fast and so affect really that they were far ahead of the government. and so they could get into this realm. the drone strikes, for instance, do you blog with so much about, that have killed a lucky, that have killed hundreds of terrorists or suspected terrorists around the world, including in countries where

nowhere with, those drones could not fly without contractors. they are dealt, maintained, operated. the information they did is transmitted back all in the hands of contract years. a mob as contractors -- most of them sit in the united states or to please to military calls the sanctuary, which just means it's not the frontlines of the battlefield. the only thing that contractors don't do yet is push the button on the joystick that launches the missiles. but i predict that they will someday because air force pilots really would rather be flying planes been pushing joysticks. >> thank you. [inaudible] -- complications to what the

word that it creates. >> thank you for the question. that's an interesting question. when i talk about the success of al qaeda, i'm trying not to be judgmental about how it was done. because there is a lot of controversy surrounding the drones were surrounding raids that ended the killing of al qaeda members. actually, since guantánamo has become the send team of an albatross, a political albatross, neither obama or the end of the bush administration wanted to put anybody else in guantánamo. so the result is that if it they killed people rather than captured and because they didn't have a place to put them. so that is sort of an unintended, unsponsored byproduct of not having an actual system that's politically palatable to people. the drone strikes have been highly affect did, but not completely effective. war is war and a lot of people

who shouldn't be killed or innocents get killed by accident and the trends have been responsible for those as well. and i have a code in the books and general stanley mcchrystal, who was the general in charge of the special forces troops that i write about and who was also the general in charge of afghanistan until he resigned over some remarks he made to the "rolling stone" magazine. he is the person -- he's the brains behind creating the military force that was able to kill more al qaeda and more terrorists around the world certainly than the cia, more than any other units. and even he says that the strikes can be counterproductive and have been good because every time you killed the wrong person, every time you destroy a home or village, you created blowback for yourself to live on

for generations. it is not antiseptic and the strikes. another hand i estimate they have really diminished the ranks of al qaeda. now the law of war just quickly, you know, there are some who argue that we're extending the battlefield back to the united states because these drones are operated from the united states. and you know, and allowed for it might be a legitimate target if you you're going after anatomy to strike the place where the enemy is launching missiles from. so i'm just putting that out there is an idea to bat around. i think the drones will not -- you know, the tooth paste inside of the tube. we had about 20 drones before 9/11. now there are 6000.

there's all sorts of different sorts. every military service wants to get on this. for good reason i don't want to put people in harm's way. so deserted ingenuity and where technology has always been applied to drones as well. they are now as big as a butterfly and a dragonfly. they have drones that are sulfate, that cannot be detected by radar. they're a drones have landed mexican-american border that are unarmed for the moment. and the most runs our surveillance. there are so many drones flown over the united states for training purposes that the northern command which is a military command created after 9/11 was to make sure that they are phase was safer aircraft in

the midst of all the strong. they're only going to grow. but also you can go to trade shows around the world where private companies are selling drugs to nice places like iran and uae will make different types of drones that it uses. about allies and and enemies have jobs and thinking about how they were using and like that. >> could you talk a little bit about wikileaks? and in your opinion, do you think this next generation of analysts is going to have access to turpitude to speak out to investigative reporters, you know, something really bad is that you need.

what is your opinion of investigative reporting and the subject going forward is going to become prayer and rarer. >> a couple questions there. let me start with wikileaks. if you divorce wikileaks, i can more easily talk about it. he is very anti-american and so, let's put that aside for a minute. .. >> we don't know yet, one of the, i would say, the the biggest criticism about wikileaks was they were not careful in the beginning to black out the names of people who were in these documents, who

are units. and that is what caused -- one of the things that caused the u.s. government heart burn, was they were afraid their sources would be killed or kidnapped or have to go into hiding. while that certainly might have happened, we don't know about that yet. to me, wikileaks speaks to something more broad and definitely something we will see going on in the future which is -- and we write about it in the conclusion of the book. it's a parahell universe. on the -- parahell universe. the obama administration is classifying more information. they don't want you to know what is going on in counterterrorism or in counterintelligence. the record of classification is just, it breaks its own record every year. at the same time, technology that doesn't have anything to do with the government, social media, use of technology, is streaming along at its ownchno

course, and it's creating a flood of leaks sometimes of classified information.e i'll just give you one example.v i visited a company that, called --ive [inaudible] for the conclusion of the book. f the book is and traverse a has clients, big corporations, big law firms, big medical companies who believe for some reason their proprietary information is out there on the web, maybe someone brought some work home and it got out there. so they are hired to go look for it and retrieve it and as they do that they have stumbled upon reams and reams of classified information, including one example of the blueprints for marine one, the helicopter that the president flies in. they always tell the government will what they called the dolphins in the tuna net. it's out there because kids, your sons and daughters, have downloaded filesharing software,

which means software where they can share music with their friends. when you download that, it's like opening the front door of your house. anyone can come into your computer if you are hooked up on a network and go into any file on your computer and take it and there are people with nothing better to do apparently, who spend their entire day looking around computers for sensitive information and the types of classified information out there is astonishing. and the government knows this, and they also know that they cannot plug those leaks. it is a generational thing. the people in charge of agencies are of a generation where yeah they can learn how to use the new technology, but they don't feel it in their bones like younger people do. and this has resulted -- and that is really why wikileaks wikileaks happened. the state department wasn't

looking -- it wasn't doing a simple thing. it was in seeing who could come onto its server and pull out stuff. a don't give you lots of excuses for why was doing it but i think it was because they didn't understand how it works. sewed the march of technology is undermining the governments efforts to keep secrets. you might say, well this balances out but not really, because the government is still acting that it can keep secrets it is really undermining his own efforts to keep it safe because it done than -- doesn't understand so much is leaking out including into the hands of people who shouldn't have it. >> i came in on the tail end of your conversations have you covered this in the beginning, please let me know. >> where were you? >> you don't really want to know. it's a secret. [laughter] [applause] you make a very compelling case for government waste and

ineptitude, and can you imagine, i realized the government bureaucracy is self-perpetuating but could you imagine today when there could be a national conversation on this issue going around to people? you are not sensing a critical mass of people in the intelligence community for example who may be against the way the policy is working but can you imagine the day when this could become a mainstream political issue where we actually look at the policy and say is there a more effective and efficient means to a competent safety of our nation? >> well, i'm monogamous. yes, i can. that is one reason i wrote the book. you just turn your back and let it keep going like this? i think the budget crisis is going to be one of those moments where potentially we are going to have that conversation. i think the conversation though does have to start with the detail of the threat, because when the threat is laid out

there, i think the only time when people can have a sense of what is right, what is the right way to respond to it or how big is it and how should we respond to it and is it going to be safe to cut back in certain areas? but i also think in conversation like that will inevitably point back to ourselves and to say, are we going to hold the governments to zero tolerance? are they going to be responsible for every nut ball who has some explosives? timothy j. types, people who throughout our history have done crazy things, terrible things. are we going to hold them responsible for every single individual? we don't know that -- don't do that for drugs. we have passed laws for all sorts of things but for some reason on terrorism, you know we aren't as sophisticated yet. and i think you know, including

the media. we make a big deal out of everything, and i think an honest conversation has to include our own understanding of what the government can do and can't do. so i would say writing this book was the first -- to try to get that out there in the budget crisis would push that along as well. thank you. >> if you have more questions or you want to continue the conversation with dana, she is going to be in the tent signing books. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twieter.com/--