to the head of the army intelligence and security committee which ran all of that. his name happened to be keith alexander at the time. and that got nowhere so then she climbed up the ladder on the congressional side and got all the way to the senate intelligence committee chairman leahy and again nothing happens so she finally talked to me. i really asked her to go full face and full name and let me use that because otherwise they would just say i'll go you are just making it up. she did and it was a very brave act on her part but she felt very strongly that the government was doing this is in this is the problem the whistleblowers they spray they don't have any real protection. we were a will to do a few things behind the scenes that got her protection within two hours of the time i came out with mike look and was on abc

news. senator rockefeller and the chairman of the senate intelligence committee at the time agreed to hold a hearing, not hold a hearing but agree to an investigation and they immediately asked her if she would testify. she said she would which made her witness before a committee. they couldn't prosecute her without obstructing investigation of congress. i have never had a source get arrested or prosecuted and i want to keep it that way. >> jim lee told c-span 8:15 and we have so many questions out here. >> i don't want to keep people here if they don't want to be here so if you want to leave. i am happy to keep asking them. >> thank you so much, jim. >> thank you very much. i really appreciate it.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> by the way i think they are selling books out there and they have asked me to notify you that my books are for sale. it's a capitalist society here. [inaudible conversations]

now "after words" features john rizzo and "company man" thirty years of controversy and crisis in the cia. he is interviewed by "washington post" intelligence reporter dana priest. this is an hour.

>> host: john it's good to be here with you. >> guest: nice to be here with you dana. >> host: a very interesting but you have written so i want to start in the beginning. that's probably the easiest way to go. can you tell me why you decided to join the cia? >> guest: it was 1975. i have been out of law school for about three years. i had a good job and entry level job in the treasury department as a lawyer in the customs service which is part of treasury at that point and as i say it's a good job but i found the atmosphere the bureaucracy of treasury stultifying. in retrospect i was young and ambitious and i was just restless. at the same time the church committee hearings were being

televised -- you know first of all congressional hearings that exposed cia activities and misadventures and follies from the 50s and 60's. it was chaired by senator franken or tramon to know and big chunks of the were being televised. i believe on c-span if i'm not mistaken. i was watching this and i knew nothing about the cia. in those days the cia had no visibility at all but it just occurred to me as i'm watching all these tales of cia adventures that cia did -- and i had no idea if they did or not that i occurred to me that they might meet someone so i applied as a shot in the dark. >> host: or they may need some

new ones because there was some wrongdoing. >> that as a phenomenon. i found this pattern repeated throughout my career. when the cia would get themselves into some kind of pickler flap the cry would go out that the cia needs more lawyers so hearst wave of new lawyers. >> host: so, believe it or not people still are confused about why the cia is different than any other agency of the u.s. government. so just if you could summarize why do we need the cia and hoomes control is thecia under? >> guest: of course the cia is a secret intelligence organization that has been in existence since 1947. as i say it's very presence was shrouded in mystery for its first 20 or 25 years.

so then of course it acquires this mystique over the years, james bond novels and all that. but it is i mean in essence it is unique among federal departments in that one it operates almost totally in the sacred and two it is really an instrument of the president and that is, has always been the case. the president is always the master. i mention the book that presidents and i served under seven in my time, it each and directed to do things in secret. they don't have to worry about the normal congressional appropriations process and you know it's a convenient and attractive and sometimes overly sadat if tool in the presidents

foreign-policy arsenal so it always has been and i think it will continue to be. there were times in the years after certain scandals or debacles that the cry goes out that the cia is going to be abolished. it'll never happen because any person regardless of party or political persuasion is going to want to hit the cia. >> host: they can do things that other agencies are not allowed to. you can break the laws of countries overseas in order to do what it needs to do. >> guest: yeah. the cia ,-com,-com ma in the cia we can't break u.s. laws but espionage is violative of international law and of course all nations have an intelligence service. we are keenly aware of that so everybody sort of does it and it's presently understood so the

cia can do things that a normal federal agency couldn't do. the key thing is not to get caught or to screw something up. hosts go what i surprising about your book was your role and how much responsibility you were given and how many times people just really depended on you to do something to make the decision that they couldn't make or that they didn't want to make going back to the cold war actually and uri bazinga and you tell a story about him. if you could put the story in context and described your visit with him and what your mission was and how that went. >> guest: i will try chunk hate this. uri yatsenko was a defect did kgb apparatchik really and he

defected to the station in moscow in february of 1964 which of course was only four months after the kennedy assassination, three months and during the cold war the cia detectives from the kgb were considered gold. the cia has long had a program to try to track them. it's a huge sometimes vexing was huge at the cia and dice has been. there was this guy yatsenko who literally walked in. and like a lot of detectives he had read each. he was a heavy drinker, possibly an embezzler of kgb funds so he was no st.. but he came and he not only fell into their laps, he allowed

among other things had access to the kgb file of lee harvey oswald and of course you know at the time that was huge. and basically what he said was that the kgb never had any connection with oswald while he was in russia. >> host: which was not exactly what they were hoping to hear. >> guest: yeah, yeah. keep in mind this was 1964. i was in high school then. i think there was some obviously different schools of thought because some of the cia took him at his word and others particularly a legendary cia character named angleton who is head of intelligence at the time was convinced that yatsenko was a devilish ploy by the soviet union that he was dispatched to

the agency into the u.s. to basically draw attention away from what angling 10 was convinced was the kgb connection. angleton who is all-powerful of the time decided not only that yatsenko was to be disbelieved but it had to be broken. yatsenko was transported to the states basically in prison, secret prison so to speak. for three years was kept in a small room and endured endless interrogations, deprivations. and while some of this story turns out fell apart he never varied about his claims about oswald. finally in 197 after three years of this cia leadership decided

enough is enough and basic lee let yatsenko go and when i say let him go let them go to be in the custody of cia to resettle and try to put together and a semblance of a normal life. so fast-forward from 67 to 1978 which is where i found him. i have been in the agency less than two years and i'm still trying to figure out what's going on. i was dispatched by my bosses to go see yatsenko who will course had an entirely new name and identity and had a new wife. defectors not only shed their countries but shed their families in the old country and come here to get married. defective divorce is a whole other story. anyway so i was dispatched to

actually go down and see him in this sleepy little southern town i say in the book at something out of mayberry. he had not a huge mansion but a nice angulo near the water. he likes to fish and i was sent down on a mission and he was filing some estate papers with the local probate judge and he was using his new identity so there was a lot of stuff in the papers about his biography were simply false. i was about to quietly go into the judge's chambers and give the judge some sense of who this guy really was in why he couldn't use his true name. that was the kind of job you would give the kid lawyer at the cia. >> host: and they said whatever you do don't talk to him about his detention. >> guest: those were the instructions that reverberated in my head while i was down there.

agencies were worried that you might sue them or something so okay i got that. my orders were to fly into this little southern airport, get to my motel on the edge of town, spend the night quietly go and see the judge and do a courtesy call with yatsenko on the way out. as soon as i got to the airport and got off a cup -- commuter plane standing on the tarmac with none other than yuri yatsenko who was a physically imposing guy. i described in the in the book. he had a mug like ernest borgnine and he had this to russian withdraw -- russian drawl. and he was hoping. he is there which was a surprise to me and he is not only there but he says the hotel can wait. you're going to come to, i wish

i could to voice imitations but it was more like a command. you are coming my house for dinner. i said what am i going to do so i get in this big buick gas eating car that he drives 100 miles an hour to get to his house and no sooner do i get there then he breaks out his homemade that of vodka and i proceed to get as drunk as i have ever been before. >> host: i have to read this one part. you say more than three decades later i can still taste the stuff buried in those days i enjoyed an occasionaoccasiona l vodka martini but this was like nothing i had consumed before or since. after one shot my hands were tingling. after two might hands were numb and after the third i couldn't feel my face. meanwhile yet singled to belting them down and started talking even more adamantly. he then really wants to talk to you about the thing you are not supposed to talk to him about. his detention periods.

>> guest: he starts off on this so at this point i have already violated my orders. first of all this guy drives me to his house starts pouring this vodka and then starts with no warning starts going on about his detention. none of which i was supposed to have known but i was trapped and i was getting increasingly inebriated and not by choice either way. he kept pouring them and he kept belting them so i'd figured i would have to go with it. it was fascinating especially given what happened to me 25 years later. he started talking about what it was like to be in prison incommunicado to be subject to brutal deprivations. all of which his bottom line was

he understood. he said you know by now that the cia thinks i'm going to sue them. i'm not going to sue them because i understood we were professionals and this is what you do to someone like me who comes over. so he said just tell him i'm not going to sue him and i don't have any hard feelings against anybody including angleton. but his kicker was he said you go back and tell them that i will never forget what they did. so that was the year he yatsenko story. >> host: which introduced you to the whole spy world and the characters that were different than the other agencies who had worked for. let me ask you about iran-contra because that was another incident. this was the scandal that became a scandal in which ollie north

was running his own shop helping his own cia folks and exchanging arms from iran. selling them to the contras in central america. you have a particularly important role all of a sudden in hearings that were taking place on capitol hill which the legislature is trying to figure out what happened here and how did this happen. >> guest: this was 1987 so we are now the, it's been 10 years since yatsenko. so yeah i was put in charge of dealing with the iran-contra committee which as you or call at the was this huge washington scandal, televised hearings, gavel-to-gavel and i was the guy the agency had to be the focal

point with the iran-contra to deal with in terms of documents provided to them and to deal with them in terms of questions that they had her witnesses from cia. they wanted to have testified. it basically consumed all of 1987 for me. >> host: and at one point you are sitting in your office next to the telephone while the hearing is on and as members want to ask a question they need to figure out whether they are going to divulge by mistake classified information so their aides are running behind the scenes picking up the phone and calling you right there is a solving televised. you had to make very quick decisions. >> guest: yeah. the entire chapter was called reality tv because that's what it was. i decided at the outset that rather than behind --

be behind this means i could be more productive in more important at cis pork headquarters and close the door and watch the live or see things as they transpired. it was at that post that i would look at the television and this is what happened. the hearings one on for 40 days. i could literally look at the television and see a member about to ask a question turned to his agent and slip them a piece of paper or something and the paper goes scurrying off the screen and i knew instinctively what was going to happen in 30 seconds. i put my hand on my phone because they need the aid was going to call me. we are on live tv. my guy wants to be able to talk about this cia and wants to use the real name of the a cia officer. >> host: you had to keep classified information just on the spur of the moment. >> guest: literally over the phone and a lot of these

questions i was being asked were not only beyond my expertise but way beyond my pay grade. there was no time to talk to anyone about it. i was literally on this high-wire and as i say it happened, it seemed to happen constantly. >> host: talk for a minute about the prt 250. >> guest: the prt 250 sounds exotic doesn't it? in 1987 it was a fairly sophisticated telephone communication. >> host: secure communication. >> guest: between the cia headquarters command center in the ci stations around the world >> host: it would be something we could all understand why you'd want to keep it secure and probably secret in order to keep it secure. >> guest: yeah it was certainly secret. a number of people obviously

used it so it was fairly well-known inside the cia but it never acknowledged it existed outside of the cia not even at the white house. as a matter fact this tempest arose because the witness at the time before the committee was john poindexter the national security adviser so the iran-contra broke. it was clear he didn't know that this machine existed. so what happened, we told the committees about it and actually had given transcripts of relative conversations and the conversations were between wayne casey and john poindexter and 1986 as the iran-contra was unraveling. casey's was at an overseas station and calling poindexter at the white house.

the testimony pointed to -- confronted either arthur weinman the chief investigator before the committee. weinman was basically reading the transcript and poindexter was taken aback trade he said i have no idea where that comes from and i had no idea i was being recorded and of course this set off a tempest at the hearing and in the media at the time because it was thought that william casey who had a reputation of being widely and devious somehow may be constructed the smithsonian tape system that no one knew about. so i mean it was huge. >> host: you are being asked to tell the staffer who was okay that the member could continue asking questions and this is what you write because i think this kind of oils down sort of a lot of things you are asked to do at the time.

you said holding the phone, i would just take a breath close my eyes and make a judgment call. heads i would agree to the disclosure of some sensitive secret, tails and i risk having the agency accused of obstructing a congressional investigation in the public's right to know. for the first time in my career i was alone on a high-wire without a net. that seems to be a pattern. >> guest: yeah. i mention it in the book because to me that was when i was really tempting fate. long story short the committee and the committee staff implored me to declassify it so they could publicly explain that no this was what the system was four. the committee was fine with it. >> host: in the republic did not fall apart once you did it. >> guest: it did not, it did not. i said go ahead and reality tv three minutes later there is

lyman writing a text for approval on television. this is late in the afternoon. i will never forget it. the hearings ended charlie thereafter and i get a phonecall by the cia director who at the time was bob gates. he was acting director so i'm trudging down the hall from my office thinking this is it. the system had been in place. i had just told the world about it and it turns out gates asked me another question that had nothing to do with this. so offhandedly as i was leaving i said anything happen at the hearings tonight? i hesitated and quietly said nothing much except i declassify the prt 250 and he shrugs so i dodged a bullet there.

>> host: that sort of secrecy and what happens when things are revealed is a theme i have heard you talk about before. in your book you say one thing that you learned his secrets don't stay secret very long. i guess that's a good segue into talking about 9/11 and the things that happened after 9/11 that were all supposed to be secret and some of them i'm sure still are but a whole bunch of them are not. i wanted to talk to you about 9/11 and if you could tell me briefly, you were in the building, you couldn't get away from the building. there was a crowd of people trying to flee so what you did was you started thinking like a lawyer. what are we going to need after that and took your legal pad and started writing what? >> guest: yeah. this was literally the morning of 9/11 and our two after

certainly right after the pentagon after the world towers were hit and issue say they have a building wide evacuation. cia and -- cia headquarters at langley and people are streaming out. i looked out my window on the second floor with a view of the sky by the way with big windows and i said you know i can get out of here. i figured the hell with it and i close my door and started to try to think basically let my imagination run wild on that unimaginable day. anything we had been doing in counterterrorism up to that point was obsolete and -- obsolete in woefully inadequate. i start sketching out the kinds of things that if the president directed us to do we could do and that includes capturing and

detaining high-level terrorists, lethal operations against terrorists at home mass of financial activities to get at. the al qaeda money machine, things that we have sometimes thought about at cia hears before but were so, it was so risky and so aggressive that no person we knew would never have authorized it. this time i knew that we were going to be asked to do things we had never done before. >> it turns out you were very much on the mark. the cia was the lead agency way before the defense department going into afghanistan and trying to pick up individual high-value targets they were called and it is certain point they captured one of the biggest abu zubaydah who is the logistics head of al qaeda and help plan 9/11 and within a couple of weeks i believe, maybe two weeks the interrogators mainly from fbi don't feel like

they are getting anywhere and they are asking for permission to do a whole host of things that we have come to know as enhanced interrogation. >> actually at the time also in that interim between 9/11 and late march when zubaydah was captured we constructed our first what came to be known as the black side because we knew hopefully we would grab high-level al qaeda's guys and we needed a place to put them so we constructed this secret prisons overseas. >> host: that was where? >> guest: that is one of the few remaining secrets of the interrogation program so i can't anyway, so the first, he was

first interrogated first of all he was shot up badly when he was captured so they flew to john hopkins to patch him up. but he wasn't talking. the interrogation came up at that point and i didn't precisely know that at the time but there were cia interrogators and if the i interrogators. i learned later that the fbi interrogators thought they were making our grists was zubaydah and our guys were convinced that he was basically being pretty brazen about it. he knew what we wanted to hear but he wasn't going to tell us. it was our people and not the f. t. i bet some new departure was needed. >> host: that is when they come to you and they say this is what we have been you say tell me exactly what it is you want

to do and don't spare me any details because you are going to have to make the decision at that point whether it's legal and so they describe attention grasp walling facial hold insult slap cramped confining which is it big box that you can stand in or a small box for fewer hours that you can't stand in, stress positions, while standing meant to strain your muscles, sleep deprivation and probably the most controversial waterboarding what i found interesting here is your description of how you felt after they explain this to you which in the book you say you largely were left speechless. so the techniques they describe sounded like something out of the three stooges slapstick routine and other sounded and terrified xing -- terrifying things that you would

never thought about her were unthinkable before that and certainly potentially transgress the federal anti-torture statutes and then there is a scene in which you go outside the agency walking on the ground smoking a cigar trying to take this all in knowing that you are going to be responsible for making that decision not only whether it's legal but if you were to decide otherwise that you would be the person whose shoulders this would rest. so what were you wearing at the time? >> guest: well it's very hard. i probably didn't succeed entirely in trying to describe what it was like back then and what it felt like back then being basically got smacked with all these new proposed techniques.

i had no idea what waterboarding was before i was briefed by your counterterrorism team. but you know this was just a few months after 9/11 and time was that the essence. it was thought around the country and certainly washington that it wasn't a matter of if they would attack the homeland but as a matter of when. there wasn't time for deliberation. in my career i have never had to deal with the u.s. anti-torture statute so i had no idea what the legal line was. another one i wasn't able to describe in the book that was never implemented but if anything more terrifying them want her boarding, i had to process all this. i could have right then and there, this program germinated

out of the cia. it didn't come from the white house. it was inside the building. it hadn't left the building. i was chief officer and i had been there a long time and i knew i had some credibility. and influence. i know i could've right then and there stopped and stopped it before it started and said these aggressive techniques, forget it they are just real risky. i had been with the agency long enough at that point to know i didn't want to get the agency in trouble and i knew sooner or later i would get the agency in trouble. i could have stopped it.

>> guest: i remember them saying, you know, this water boarding, "water boarding," the word with the history you described, doing it, and i mean, that was one of the reasons why, you know, i decided that i was not going to make this time call. it was just too close, i mean, given the precedence, i was certainly not going to approve water boarding, and that's what led us to go immediately to the department of justice to get a definitive legal review of the

entire program and water boardingen and the way people proposed to it. >> host: went to the office of legal com, which is the white house legal team, and they end up approving it in memos to you and d oorks d and others. looking back now. one other question, if you thought that there was a history in which this was considered torture, i can see how you would be worried that your people, even if the white house is okay, that your people might be vulnerable at some point when, again, you know, the pend line up swings and people rethink.

was that a calllation in your mind? >> guest: you know, the agency, during my time, i mean, there was press dealt for very important, significant new legal questions for us to go to the justice department, the final, binding legal arbiter. we've done that before. this, of course, the interrogation program, but i thought and certainly the precedence was such i wanted something definitive and detailed. especially if they were going to approve the techniques. to give the agency, my belief was maximum legal protection, especially mindful, not of the people, you know, at my level on the 7th floor executive, but the

13th and 14th who carry out the programs in these prisons in the middle of nowhere, and so i thought that would be, i mean, experience taught me that the opinions are binding, and they are good as gold, and that would basically, you know, make our people secure. >> host: we talk about water boarding, but it's sleep derivation, and in the book, you said that is one of the methods that some of your interrogators broke one of the detainee, and you also say that that's what powell, who was the secretary of state at the time was most concerned about, and that rumsfeld walked out of the room because he didn't want to hear about it. those must also have rung alarm bells to you, in a way. >> yeah, sure, you are referring to national security counsel principle meetings that were

held regularly, actually, during the course of the interrogation program. it was not just cia doing this on its own or this was all of the policymakers briefed regularly on what the techniques were, how they were implemented, and i would go to meetings as a back bench, with, you know, the director at the table, and i would observe reactions, and, you know, it was fascinating. >> host: did it make you nervous? >> guest: it was forboding, and water boarding was laid out in how we were doing it, and i don't remember debate or concern or hand wringing or objections to water boarding, but i was struck by powell's body

language, and giving off every vibe of not wanting to be in the room, but when he did speak up, i was struck by the fact, and, of course, distinguished military background, he'd know this. he viewed sleep derivation as the most brutal of all techniques, which i, you know, thought was fascinating. as you say, he would try to avoid the meetings, and the ones he could not avoid, these principles meetings, he tried to but he couldn't delegate it, but he didn't want to know about any of this. i don't think he had moral objections to it, but he just didn't want to be touched with it, especially after. >> host: leaving you in the middle of it, although you ask higher authorities for approval, you still are there representing the agency.

you're out for four years, hearing the debates whether it's constitutes torture, and understanding what your role as a lawyer to represent your clients to protect them, i just definitely get the impression by the way you talk about it that you actually, and this is my question, you know, in the intervening years that you consider this torture, that it is not something less, especially in combination, and i'm wondering, you know, there are a lot of -- if your people were protected, which they are. i mean, nobody's going to go back and say the people said this was okay to use these techniques, we're going to go and cause them trouble now, but is there a reason you think it's necessary to speak in the most

honest way about these now and do you think that these techniques did amount to torture? >> guest: no, i didn't, i don't. again maybe because i'm a lawyer, torture is define in the u.s. statute. i mean, you know, they were brutal. they were harsh. some of them were scary. i don't think they crossed the line into torture. i didn't -- some were close, but i didn't think that back then, and i certainly, once i got the opinions from the department of justice, and there were a number of over the years addressing the program, that that techniques did not cross the line into legal torture, an i still don't believe that, but, you know, what i tried to do in the book was certainly not be a cheerleader for this program

because, you know, it did get a lot of attention from the agency in the kind of trouble i anticipated at the beginning, so -- and i was not alone in this. you know, none of the people involved in the program, and they have gone on for six years, and, i mean, ever, ever were enthusiastic boosters of it. if we thought that the program was not working, it was not yielding results, you know, as critics have charged, we wouldn't have done it. i mean, we wouldn't have continued it. i certainly wouldn't have continuing it because it was growing politically toxic by the month, and so i, you know, i don't think it was torture, and i also think it yielded benefits. listening todd feedback from the analysts at cia, i was convince

because they were convinced it was providing worthwhile, hugely important intelligence. >> so there is a body of work that suggests that many people throughout the world believed this amounted to torture, and that it has damaged our standing in the world in some important way, and these just are not, you know, what human rights liberals, but people like thomas pickerring who was involved in a study on this, and who said we need to address the world on this. do you see any value to that? you know, even though you might not think it's torture or break the law, but it was something that so many other people do believe is, and maybe in the end, it's a question of judgment? should we somehow address this chapter in our history in the right way?

>> guest: oh, yeah, absolutely, all those, not just pickerring, but, you know, there were a lot of imminent scholars, politicians, expermits around the world certainly, but here in the u.s. who believed that, that, you know, that consider it being a moral stain. so, no, i don't -- i mean, surely i don't reject that contention, and, yeah, let's have it all aired out. >> host: so one of the ways that could happen is if the senate intelligence committee, which has a very large, that luminous report on this that's all classified, do you think that should be released in order to air this out in its entirety?

>> guest: yeah, no, i do. obviously, i have no idea what's in it. >> host: you probably know pretty much, though, because you were -- you know what went on. >> guest: yeah, but i mean, from what i read in the media, about what it contains, i gather it's largely going to conclude that the program was worthless, largely worthless, and that information derived from it, the stuff that was valuable could have been awired without resorting to -- that's apparently the story line, and as you say, it is 60,000 pages, footnote, and a couple thing about it, though. first of all, the -- $6 million spent on it, over four years, and they never interviewed

anyone at cia about the program. i don't know about other cia, but i was out. i i would have been happy to be in a group for it. i don't see how one could do a really comprehensive review based on reviewing the written record. secondly, you know, it's not a bipartisan report. it's done strictly by the democratic members, so i think you have to take that into account. >> you see the republicans, if they declassified at all. >> guest: i'm told the cia has drafted a rather lengthy, strong rebuttal to many of the premises conclusions, so to answer the question, sure, i think, you know, $6 million, you know, american taxpayers footed the bill for this, and, yeah, let's have them really sit, you know, make the appropriate redacss, and at the same time release the cia rebuttal so people can read

the whole thing, who are so inclined, but yeah, i think if it's not released, telling you, it's going to get leakedded. let's release it. >> one of the reasons i can see it not released is someone in the government who has the power to say so could say, well, it will damage our relationships overseas because the secret prisons, for one thing, relied on relationships with other countries who housed prisons and promises it should remain secret; however, as you know, the european com, the counsel of europe, other governments overseas investigate this, and there's several countries whose names are repeated about the fact they had these or probably did have these. you have been inside and watched these revelations on other countries come out, and isn't it

true that over time relationships repair themselves quickly because those countries have a national interest in working with us? >> guest: yeah, yeah, no, i think, you know, i think that's right. i think we see it now in the context of the snow den leaks and revelations that the foreign governments are up in arms, and my experience was that that whatever tensions, whatever breaks in relations, they get repaired overtime, and intelligence services need each other, and keep in mind, some of the protests, again, in my experience, the cia program was leaked, foreign government, foreign leaders getting high judges, that behind the scenes the intelligence services reach out to cia basically saying, look, you know, we have to say these things publicly, you know,

this is a huge political issue, but, you know, we'll keep working together. don't -- don't take this too hard, and, you know, it's just something we have to do. >> host: why is that? why do they do that? >> guest: well, i mean, i think they know they have to work with cia, the u.s. intelligence community, and for one thing, we are a source of many, many of the intelligence that the countries have about in terrorism arena, threats to their country. they don't want to shut off the cia information. it's not because they love cia, but they need us. it's inevitable. i think, you know, i think a culture of spies by the organizations, not saying it's cynical, but realistic. this, too, will pass. >> host: you know where the prisons are and look at those

relationships, were any permanently ruptured? >> guest: not that i'm aware of. >> host: on the contrary? >> guest: yeah, no, it's uncomfortable, it's embarrassing, but i don't think any damage was permanent. >> host: no. so can you talk for a minute -- it's not in the book, but you referred to it, and, again, you're in the perfect spot to reflect on it for all the reasons you stated, but the snowden documents and what's that revealedded. there's people that are saying he should get a deal for telling the government what he released, and first talk about, you know, what's your feeling about the revelations? were you surprised to learn what the nsa was doing? to the extent they were doing it? >> guest: the relations cover such a wide swath of activity. some of what have come out

publicly, no, i was not surprised about it. i knew what nsa was doing at the time. this is on the electronics surveillance. >> host: meta data collecting? >> guest: yeah, and so that was not a surprise. it was in the a surprise with the electronic surveillance activity they were doing overseas of foreign, foreign governments, and none of that was a surprise. what was a surprise to me was the massive amount of data and information snowden had access to. some of the revelations, every few days, the latest revelation and think to myself, i never knew that was going on. i didn't -- what i am saying is this 29-year-old, contrary to sending out remote outpost in hawaii gets the stuff that i, the legal officer, cia, i couldn't have gotten to that when i was there.

>> host: do you think it's created a worthwhile debate, as we wrap up here? >> guest: i think the debate is good on the data, and u.s. surveillance, and i think that's valuable and fruitful. i fish it came about a different way, and i don't think that would have happened without the snowden disclosure, but he disclosed so much else nothing to do with america or american constitution. i think that is huge di damage willing and rep henceble. >> host: because the technology can want adapt quickly enough to learn how to do things differently, or what is so damaging about it? i mean, you have just said that these -- many of the countries are going to continue working with us. >> guest: inevitably, but there's a chli