this is part of our 2018 special fiction addition of in-depth . >> host: david ignatius, what's the premise of "the quantum spy". >> guest: the us is locked in a new manhattan project race

to build a piece of technology that is world changing, that is the quantum computer and our principal rival in that race is china. i told you as far as simply the facts, the "the quantum spy" is a novel that imagines characters who involve intelligencebattles , and other secrets about this world changingtechnology . principally it's the story of my hero orest chang. an officer who is asked to penetrate the chinese intelligence service and in the process learned things about himself, things about the cia, they do not how the world works that shake him to his foundation and we also see in this novel how the chinese intelligence services , not so familiar to readers

as five fiction. we all feel we've been in moscow center with carla and the russian spy world is familiar to us. the chinese not so much while the pleasure for me takes us into the world, the ministry of state security, a very secretive chinese intelligence agency that is the principal antagonist of this book or the cia. >> host: how much of it is true? >> guest: i always say in the preface to my books that they exist in an imagined world, you can sometimes tell people if you take any book i write and think it's a recipe for how to make a cake, you're going to end up with a mud pie because you got all sorts of things thrown in. that said, i should try to do research for every one of my novels but "the quantum spy" is my 10th novel.

i researched it for many months. i went to the computer laboratories for quantum computers and in one case where one has been built. i traveled to every place mentioned in the book and looked at it and thought about it, i studied the chinese intelligence service in all sorts of different ways though myanswer would be that it's a novel , the story is imaginary, the characters don't exist in real life but it is drawn from real life. it's as real as i could make it be and still feel it's a work of fiction. >> one of the conflicts is about science and whether to be open and fair and you write that science has no flags. >> guest: it shouldn't have flags. the problem in this area i was writing about where you have these superpowerful technologies, the reason quantum technology is important is if you want a quantum computer it could shred every system of encryption ever devised.

it would render all your adversaries most secret messages, documents, information, your own. so it has that real purpose in the world. >> host: when it comes to quantum computing, is it? >> guest: quantum computing is coming out as fast. in my book i describe a technology that is kind of quantum computing. it's actually quantum annealing and i won't bore you with the details of the difference but it's not quite quantum computing but it assembles qubits. the standard computer as units that are either zero or one , on or off and the quantum computer is made up of what are called qubits. zero and one at the same time. they have this ambiguous

state and that means that as you assemble these qubits, as you entangle them to use the phrase that technologists use, you begin to build a computer that goes in every direction simultaneously. it's vastly more powerful than any supercomputer ever built. a problem that would take thousands of years even for the most powerful supercomputers could be done in a fewseconds with a quantum computer because of the power of these qubits . so whoever get that's technology is going to have an instrument that is goingto be potentially world changing. it also could change our world and a lot of other ways . discovering new materials, material science and even if it involves lots of computation, lots of simulation, these computers will be able to do it in an entirely different matter and

that's why it's so but why somebody's so excited about this. people began to say maybe it's 10 years out, the most recent estimate i've heard are that it's five years out. and as i mentioned, there is a firm based in vancouver that has built a quantum on the alert that has assembled 2000 cubits to do a powerful calculation in some areas so you talk to people who do technology, they get excited about this but nobody can give you a precise prediction of when it's coming. you asked earlier about the classification. a lot of this computer research is open. obviously our it companies, the company that changed the world, google, microsoft have proprietary limits on that there technology. they just move it out as quickly as you could but something that has so many

military applications like computing , that's been going on for 20 years, an effort to take some of the most sensitive technology involved in both quantum computers and do some of that research with classification. the first way i found out a book about this was the disclosure of the nsa's black ledger it was called and there was a big chunk of funding for quantum computing. my first thought was wow, there's something here and that was back in 2014. so there is a battle going on between scientists who want the most open world possible where we share information, ideas, where are labs and graduate students from china, russia, where wherever they come from. and others who say this is just too valuable to our country . they wouldn't have brought

germans into los altos during the manhattan project, it was too dangerous. that's one of theissues . >> host: that's one of the themes in "the quantum spy" about harris chang is that his americanism isn't western . >> guest: harris chang, our hero grew up in flagstaff arizona. at one point i believe red white and blue, served in the army in iraq and was recruited into the cia. it feels entirely american. he went to west point, it never occurred to him that his ethnic background would be subject to investigation and he finds in the course of the book thatboth for the chinese who tried to manipulate him using his ancestry and for some americans , in the intelligence community, it ends up being central to his experience, deeply upsetting

for him and that's really the arc of his story is coming to realize that people see him in a way he doesn't see himself and by the end of the book, i'll let readers describe becomes "the quantum spy". >> host: has that been through in the intelligence community since before these or whenever, that somebody's nationality or their heritage can affect how they are viewed? >> guest: i think our intelligence community has always been anchored to use the richnessof our national fabric . the people who speak languages, who have cultural skills or the soviet files have russia and the ukraine, east european backgrounds. often middle east people who

speak arabic have a native fluency to their family for their experiences would go into that part of the agency of operation so it's always been a cross. the danger is when people feel they are being seen in stereo typical ways as arab american and this set of things but not that. i think this is more of a problem with gender. women, although they were given responsible roles, they were encouraged to go out and recruit spies in the cia. they felt limited, that's another theme that weaves through this novel. a woman who felt she was in a sense robbed at of an

experience she might have as an intelligence officer and ends up having a deep rage about that. >> host: with a novel like this, do you start with the conclusion and work backwards? >> you really start i think with the idea, the theme that you want to play with. i've always been interested in quantum theory and then looking for something to do, i love to go out and report and find information so i got interested in quantum computing and i saw the chinese were our principal rivals and that interested me. it wasn't until i could see the character, until i could see harris chang at a hotel room. i started writing this book after a trip to tampa, coming back on the plane and suddenly i understood where the ball would start rolling

in a hotel room in singapore so for the writer, it's the process of taking the themes, making those themes alive and the charactersunderstanding, the places those characters are going . and then to be honest, the essential thing in writing this book and every book is rewriting. the first draft in which you have done your first kind of rough sketch and then you need to go in ruthlessly and see what works and what doesn't, the passes that are wide, the characters that are fully developed and the ones that don't work. you need people who will be honest with you and say david, you've got to go back and do it again. and principally the person for me, my recent books that's been my wife eve who is the hardest person in the

world to see your husband slaving away so proud he's got the first draft of and he she takes me like a puppy and i would say i've been slaving and she would think carefully and say i just don't think it's there yet. i don't think the characters are believable so you go back and rewrite it and hopefully you get another honest evaluation. we, even the best writers are capable of rewriting the first draft if it's not real and we need people who will tell us the things we may love in our book to do it again. so i've learned over time the value of people who will say thatto me directly .

>> host: harris chang, tom bendel, denise ford, mike flanagan, some of the characters in "the quantum spy". what are those names projecting? >> those names are projecting a diverse agency, the cia is one in terms of every variable. all the women who work at the agency, i think one thing that really has changed about the cia is it's not an ivy league playground. they thought basically yale was the feeder school for the cia. it's more diverse in that way. people from every educational background, looking for the unconventional interests and backgrounds. i think there is a blue-collar side of the cia and the white-collar side. i think the head of support in my book, an important part of the cia is not often

recognized at the safehouses and on the airplanes and they send out shooters to guard the case officers, they don't do all the glamorous stuff you got to get done if you're going to conduct an intelligence operation. there the blue-collar workers and they carry themselves that way. they've got a chip on their shoulder, interested in people and one of the works i've done is try to explore those people. >>. >> host: with those characters, they think ahead unlimited safehouses, unlimited money, unlimited resources. is that based on real life? >> i think the cia doesn't suffer for resources. comes sometimes from ideas. it suffers from us as a country in operating truly clandestinely so that people, americans are graded.

there is a natural straightforwardness to the american character, i think. the cia is when american power was strongest, had the wind at its back. everybody around the world wanted to be america's friend . an enormously powerful economy as the engine of global prosperity. i once joked that in beirut it was hard to find a person who either wasn't a cia contact or didn't want to be seen as one because that was the crown of the realm. today, we are much more reluctant to be seen as friends and it can get you killed today rather than a public fortune.where we had the wind at ourback , going

into a pretty strong head wind, it's harder to find people who want to take those risks. when the us does find them they are not always as good as they should be out protecting them . or sharing with the us government so i think that i've been writing with my tent novel, the first one was published 30 years ago. over that time that i've seen the agency i think has lost its way a little bit. it really struggles most of all with the way the world has changed. we aren't superpowerful for a while and everybody wanted to be our friend . today, we are not superpowerful, we have stronger rivals and everybody doesn't want to be our friend . >> host: what i've noticed in your books is there's never necessarily a clear-cut good guy, bad guy in it. >> guest: i think spy novels

always are painted in shades of gray and moral ambiguities . that's what intelligence work is all about. our basic ambience of the spy novel. in mybooks , the operators who in a sense are most ruthless and effective, john vandal who is the chief of operations in my new book, the quantum spy just in terms of being a rough character at the end of the book, asked the state department to do it. morally complicated and right people, operators like john bendel, i hope the reader will see as competent professionals. there are questions that you ask about corners, questions

about harris chang, the hero of this book asks more and more deeply about this colleague. just the wonders if they are ruthless to the point of shattering the reason that he got into the cia in the first place. >> your first book, 1987 it came out, agents of innocence. takes place in beirut and about that book you wrote, it was obvious the only way i could share this fact was through fiction, what were you referring to? >> guest: i had written for the wall street journal a story that was published in february 1983. more than two years, and that front-page story said that the cia, the united states had recruited the chief of

intelligence of yossi or arafat and plo, at that time the leading terrorist adversary as a cia asset. you was enormously helpful to save thousands of american lives and was fascinated in 1979 by israel. which recruited him with good reason. as a terrorist. it had taken israel he lives so we're not talking about the gray zone of intelligence, just this space that we had. a few months after i published that article on the front page, the caa officer would run this operation and had been corroborated, a direct director of the subject of a superb nonfiction book published two years ago called the good spy came to beirut, came to visit this guysstation .

it happened that i had a meeting with the military at cachet and they let the embassy just after 1:00. on that day in april 1983. the biggest car bomb that anybody ever seen was loaded at the door of the embassy and i was in my hotel when i heard this earth shattering roar. and saw the embassy just shatter. i described it as the fleshof the building just being ripped away . robert ames, this hero within the cia was leaving and had been killed along with every member of the cia station in beirut that they. they were all at lunch and happened to be where they

dropped the bomb off and in the aftermath of that tragedy, the arabs who had been working with the us on the long lion case remembered this. our chief of intelligence had been in constant contact with the cia. people who'd been involved in that and knew about it needed to talk about it, needed to believe the loss of this man robert ames and because i've been working on the story for two years, i was the only american alive, a journalist in beirut who felt they could talk to people who kept coming to me and telling me things that a journalist just doesn't here, shouldn't here. and i began to accumulate this richness of information about a story whose basic outlines i'd already written on the front page but i thought, what on earth are

you going to do with this? and the answer to me then was you're going to write a novel. i had no idea. i was a journalist at that time. >> for 80 years, so i sat down, wrote a first draft and the second draft, send it off to the publisher who turned down by everyone. finally, the publisher is still my publisher, ww norton said okay, we will publish age of innocence. on the condition that you give us a nonfiction book. they didn't really want a novel that much either the nonfiction book that they thought ignatius a journalist should write, they were willing to buy the novel so that's how ages of innocence published in 1987 was although i didn't say it at the time potentially a true story from page 1 to the end. and the people who were most involved, the plo in the cia

and intelligence agency, all over the middle east knew immediately when the book came out that it was all real. so the book began to get a sort of cachet with readers who knew and then it began to be particularly read. a piece that people would say give it out to recruits and explain this is what the business is about. i've had over the last 30 years a dozen cia officers in various places walk up to me and say i can't tell you who i am but i want to say if you want to tell my mom and dad what i did, i say read your book. it's got the basics of what an intelligence officer does. both through the story of one of the great cases that i ever read. brilliantly executed but by a

real professional in the most ambiguous terrain morally. >> the plo and i really was in it. that got me started and i just never stops. i taught myself how to write a novel. all those rejection slips that i got, i began to learn the craft of writing fiction and it's played off of my journalism ever since, over 30 years the things that interest me and i learned about have such so much more than i'd like to say as a spy novelist, to really unpack the ideas, the places, the issues. i say at the end of this book

i started 30 years ago when age of innocence was published. but i had to choose whether to be a journalist and i'm glad that i didn't. and i mean that, i'm glad i didn't. >> can we draw any straight lines from your washington post national security column to your novel? >>. >> you can certainly draw a straight line in terms of the subject matter. >> my column, i've written a lot about iran in my column. in iran in 2006, 2018. after the 2006 visit, i was fascinated by the uranian room that's becoming an issue of intent . and i thought this is the perfect setting for a novelist and i wrote a novel called the increments which kept in real life. but an imaginary iranian nuclear scientist and every one of the cia calls a virtual walking.

on its website, the cia says if you have something to tell us, just do it and they get a lot of people coming in from defense and a lot of people coming in from iran that's how that novel began. it ends up describing the assault on the iranian supply chain. that is eerily like what we've learned to call, that's one where just making some lucky guesses i ended up being trained, it was more factional than i realized at the time. that's an example where readers read my columns when i was there. what they didn't know is i was taking every piece of kind of pocket litter i can find, every map, every guidebook. every restaurant i knew and strolling them all away and

bring you back home. and but fictional. the iran that would be in that time. >>. >> host: david ignatius, has anyone ever felt outed by a character in one of your books. >> people, somebody joked to me the other day, a former intelligence officer had said on the real harry pappas. he was this character in the book i just described. and i didn't fear anger. i heard him talking about it as if it was a bit of a bragging rights. my first novel, age of innocence were about things that were so sensitive that when it was published, i just didn't know what the consequences would be. i've never done this before.

i knew how raw it was, i just made a decision to write it as i can and i didn't know what people thought but initially there was shock. over the years i sometimes write that about the cia, that might be difficult to tell but i had written, made people's hair stand on end. but i never had anybody, i tried to be careful about not taking any characters per se an outing that person keeping their identities far secret and they are at riskevery day . >> you've got a former cia director who blurred your book at the bank of fear which came out in 1995, how did you get that? >> over the years these books have been read by a lot of cia officers.

my new book has blurbs from three former directors. i've been shameless in asking people, no matter who they are, tv journalists , you name it for blurbs, readers know , all these quotes on the back page from books that you buy, us writers work so hard to get and it can be embarrassing on the tour, to not to us electronically. would you read my book, just say something nice about it. i made a rule years ago because i suffered some difficulty when i started at pretty much anybody who asked me to write a blurb for a book, if they say there's a reason to read it, i'll say yes just hoping that if somebody else started who said i had when i was a young

writer, these little blurbs including former cia directors. >> host: good afternoon and welcome to book tv on c-span2 and this is the kickoff edition of our special fiction edition year of in depth. david ignatius is our guest this first month and all year long, we will be having fiction writers on the in-depth program to talk about their books. for david ignatius, the numbers are two 02748 200. 748-8201, if you live in the mountain and pacific time zone you might want to participate this afternoon, you can also participate via social media. that includes facebook, twitter, instagram and email. just remember at book tv is our handle and our email address is book tv at c-span.org.

david ignatius is awashington post columnist on national security issues and the author of these 10 books . agents of innocence came out in 19 87, the bank of fear in 1995, a firing offense in 1997, the sun king came out in 1999 and then perhaps you saw the movie body of lies is a book that came out in 2007. the increment in 2009, blood money, 2011. "the director" in 2014 and "the quantum spy" just came out in the last couple of months. davidignatius, your books have moved from beirut to iran, iraq, washington . how do you keep up with all the threats the us sees and now we are in china? >> i wanted to write about china very deliberately in

terms of national security, in terms of the world and also opportunity and trends. china needs to be at the top of people's list. china has announced the first set of its president xi jinping that it plans to dominate the heights of technology by 2030 . and through 2050 and they been very specific and they task their intelligence service to go out and gather information to be brought and deal in secret that will help reinforce that position. they're building new weapons systems . but the challenge is far less military power. so china has set a course that people worry is going to bring it to us to a collision, a military conflict and not something that's inevitable but i do think that the times for

readers to get inside chinese ambitions in terms of being a world power, to get into our intelligence service. that was again part of the book but you're quite right, we do try to look at the things that make sense and see the next big threat. my last book was about how the russians were manipulating the libertarian underground, the world of wikileaks. when that book was written, we are now in the midst of a huge molar investigation but if you go back and read the director you will find some useful guidance to where we are now. i hope that people will stay still say about the bonds fly as we get more focused in china, they will see in this book the characters, the settings that help you understand what's coming at us.

that will want a lot of whati write in my books is about opening the world i'm reporting as a columnist . giving out these nuggets in a much bigger way that you can think about the issues. >> host: the cloak and dagger aspects of these books, are they true? does this stuff happen? >> guest: from my first novel it was the process of recruitment. the way in which i get someone willing to share secrets with the united states. >> how i play on that person and the needs of the vulnerabilities. and draw that person into a secret relationship. obviously, one reason this interests me and also one reason i think i'm able to write about it is convincingly is that it's so

much like being a journalist. what i do as a journalist every day is go out and talk to people. they may not want, if they want to talk to the washington post columnist but over time gain their trust and maybe they begin to tell me things i think are important for my readers. think about how to protect them so that they don't suffer for having to share that information. >> so that part of the intelligence which has nothing to do with the shoot them up, james bond aston martin crazy technology, it's a simple part of identifying the target and thinking how you make an approach to that target. having an initial contact and slowly reeling back in. >> that potential source, that interest me. that process is essential, i

guess the other thing that's in every one of my books is in some ways the suggestion the united states doesn't know enough about the parts of the world where we get so deeply involved to take the risks that we do.the theme of agencies, that's is my first novel in some ways that's all the way through this book. just don't know enough to take risks, that our country has gotten in a series of wars from the time i've been a journalist, one after another in the middle east. by thinking, i wish they knew what the characters in my novels know about how often we are flying blind. >>. >> host: and in fact you write i believe this is from the quantum spot but you're writing about an agent who is so game for anything, a sentiment not readily heard.

>> guest: the cia has gotten more risk adverse over the decades that i writing about it, this idea of the cia as a rogue elephant doing whatever it wants. but i think that ended with the investigations in the 1970s, it certainly ended with the investigations that followed the torture, the cia likes to call it harsh interrogation but that followed 9/11. i think the cia now knows that they can be legally vulnerable. >> they often take out legal insurance to protect themselves against the possibility that they need counsel and inevitably, that makes people careful about operations. >> this is a kin to a culture that you never want to be

that person says mister president, that's not such a good idea, you say yes sir. >> and so that's the culture. there is now a, let's talk to the lawyers before we sign off on the operation. lawyers are a big part of tia operations now. >> that's an interesting issue for the currentdirector . mike pompeo said several times he'd like to see the agency be more aggressive, take more risks, get secrets from north korea or china or russia that we need to know what when you take more risks, thedanger of getting caught increases . the term of art at the cia increases and the lawyers are always going to be there to say it's not a good idea and the congressional committees which now play such an important role overseeing intelligence also , they may go along in the beginning but then the agency and its officers often see.

>> the importance to the intelligence community of the church hearings of the 1970s and of 9/11. >> guest: the church hearings really set the basic limit that they, you didn't have intelligence committees doing regular oversight for those hearings. they exposed the secrets the cia had sought the hardest to protect. the crown jewels, they were known as area they kept looking and the public was shocked by some of what they discovered. i look back and to be honest, it's amazing how little of the really nasty stuff the cia did back then was discovered. the occasional assassination

plots, but you can list them all on one hand. mostly they were unsuccessful. they come up with crazy ideas but generally they were carried out. today we live in a world where also our special operations command routinely engage in targeted killing of our adversaries. before, that simply wasn't done. in a world in which it's at least considered practically every day of the week so the established rules, the established oversight set a new framework and we now live in that and that's better for our concern . >> 9/11 for a time from an intelligence collecting agencies to essentially a covert action agency. the cia, they had a plan for what to do after the twin

towers. and george tenet, if you read the histories was very clear, president bush was ready to go and that they were, they wereon the ground in afghanistan within a week . and they took down the taliban in afghanistan with a brilliant influx of americans working with their assets and with projects and others in afghanistan. they left osama bin laden's slip away, the second secretary of defense pleaded with his colleagues to authorize greater use of force to prevent bin laden from getting into the mountains. in all matters was counting on, but he was right about that. >> but secretary rumsfeld wouldn't sign off. but the 911.

made our terrorism center of the cia's mission. made increasingly use of drones. of high tech spray of taking people out. the instrument of choice was, they began running a drone program . soon these resources were targeted. executing and after 9/11, the cia was told by the president of the white house, the nation is a threat. there is the use of biological weapons, chemical weapons. the whole population could be at risk. you need to know,you need to find out what they're going to do as the cia crossed the line . in retrospect we all feel it was the big lines across. in terms of how it was interrogated, i will go through all the details but it does shock the conscience to see what our intelligence officers did in those

interrogation rooms.and i think there is nobody at the cia would like to get back into that business, nobody. and it led to such public criticism. the cia in the end depended on the public. when we see our soldiers in the ballgame, we love our military. they also take similar risks but they don't get applause. quite the opposite. they don't like that and they like to have a base of support so that's one reason they would be so wary about that being asked. go into the interrogation business, you can't make that. that's an agency that would like to go back to its basic mission of collecting

intelligence to less of the secret war, counterterrorism and all the related missions that years after 9/11 has the potential for the country in terms of the cia act that in terms of the agency or morale, its mission, that was not a good mission. >>. >> host: 10 years ago body of lies came out and a netbook you write quote, this was the real card america had in the intelligence team. without its money, certainly not its human intelligence but it's ability to overhear almost every conversation or any conversation in the world. >> guest: the fusion of our surveillance resources, the essays, the big years in the sky, our ability to get into the fiber-optic communicationscables , every internet message and phone

call. that is a weapon no other country had and obviously it's very powerful. if you look at all the way back to 9/11, in the fight against isys, americans don't tend to take much notice but the islamic state rose or swept across iraq and syria in 2014. three years later, it has almost no territory. tens of thousands of people and that has been not much written about the best been a war in our special operations and powered by this claim that anytime you have any digital pin , there's somebody who's threatened an american, threatened, electronically is visible,

it's likely that person soon will be targeted. this is been a much more ruthless and effective thing than people realize. and i think much more journalism needs to be done about how this is conducted, whatthe human costs were . there has not been enough reporting on this. >> host: julian assange, edward snowden, how are they viewed in theintelligence community ? >> guest: i compare the cia director working in a hostile community, i think edward snowden who was under the protection of the russians is seen as someone who has turned over some of the most sensitive secrets in the way that they can be used by the russians.

or china, whether that was intentional . i think there's a pretty hard-nosed view among intelligence professionals about certainly when there's been a suggestion that there might be some sort of plea bargain for edwardsnowden , my sense is people in the intelligence community have loudly said that they want to be sure this is not an easy negotiation. that they explain precisely what he did and the simple answer is there's not a lot of sympathy for him. >> host: or the hospital. >> in every one of my novels, it's a big question. and every one of my novels there's a characternamed tom. my first novel frank kaufman , there's a station chief who was foiled against the hero

in the book. he was modeled after the real-life robert innes. >> and hoffman was just an outrageous foulmouthed cranky funny guy. not a person we meet in real life and i just found the character so engaging that i can't adding him or a member of his family, son, his cousin in every book. there's somebody. >> a lot of spy novelists have the same protagonist in every book. harry bosch and michael connelly novels, i just never wanted to do that. i like to start fresh with each book with a new set of characters.or issues that

interest me, i hate when anyone does that but i did decide that i keep this continuity through hoffman in this book. although she isn'timmediately obvious , again, i hope people when i look at my work over the years will see maybe in these hoffman characters cdr of the cia's experience and changes the ways it's seen. i'd love people to someday be able to look at this body of work and say infection, here's fairly realistic fiction, a chronicle of the life and times of our intelligence agency. what changed and what worked and what didn't. again, every book, waste one basic theme is we don't know

what we're doing. >> host: the other way to interpret the hoffman legacy through your books is the cia is a little hidebound, maybe a little colloquial. >> guest: the hoffman's are always acting at themargins. they are loudmouths, showoffs . they are schemers, they are often the people who say this cia bureaucracy is ridiculous and we are going to do things through the back door because the front door is not going to work so yes, they are iconoclasts. >> host: speaking of the bureaucracy, that's another theme in your book is the difficulty or the politics of negotiating the intelligence community bureaucracy. >> i think that's absolutely right. the bureaucracy gets thicker or more viscous in each book.

so once upon a time, the first novel, frank hoffman, the station chief just ordered something and it would happen. >> across the line, you didn't care. that was through interestingly about the real-life operations in which that novel is based.>> across a lot of lines making people say the right things. >> as the legal controls, the congressional oversight increased, so has the bureaucracy. >> you thought about the bureaucratic reorganization which may be worked even more confusingly than it was before. >> i'm not sure it's put entirely to bed. so the people spend an awful lot of time going to meetings and a lot of time writing memos, i've been in on that

one. in that sense, it's sort of the opposite of what you think of in a james bond novel where he's a super cool guy in a tuxedo who goes out and shoot people. james bond would spend an awful lot of time writing memos from his file to the real world. >> what is cooperation level between michigan five, michigan six, the cia, the cia. >> cooperation with foreign intelligence services, liaison partners as the cia likes to call them is and has been since the beginning excellent. it's really the cia's biggest asset is its really only powerful global source of information with all these

technical sources. its selection and analysis, is able to shift with his partner that they couldn't get anywhere else. every day, there's some foreign intelligence service that comes to visit from langley. but especially thecia to tell information . and that tends to people you wouldn't think, russians, there's a lot more intelligence sharing about issues that people what to say publicly. so i think that's a big asset, the fact that the us has a lot of friends around the world and they still impact the agency.they share information. in terms of internal sharing, our domestic agents, there still is an awful lot of silos out there that we have 17 different intelligence agencies. these still are analysts who

are doing the analysis today. they emerge and if this is a company and they had 17 different sets of accounting, going over this potentially the same paperwork, you'd say that's not's. i don't want to spend five minutes in this. there's been an effort to remove this but everybody insists, my information, my sources, nobody can knowabout this . it's all controlled by the originators, the buzzword that goes and even now, after more than a decade of talking about breaking down the stovepipes, they are still there. >> host: dan coats job. >> guest: dan coats job is to oversee this sprawling and one problem is that it'stoo big .

the cia is too big. this is a situation where les would be more. a smaller, more genuinely clandestine intelligence service that gets the targets that really matter. i just think that it's sprawl and i'm not even including the consultants multiplied by the tens of thousands. it's vast and it feeds and information system that nobody can digest. we generate far more information than anybody could analyze. maybe computers will be able to do the analysis for us and i hope so but over time, that's one other observation that i make. it's just too darn big. we spent plenty of money,

sometimes we are just gish jen, you wrote in 2009 that quote john updike chose me as his successor. i i never got to ask him why. >> guest: i know. >> host: successor to what? >> guest: what happened was it was a magazine