our good friends from c-span are joining us today. before we talk to philip mudd about "black site: the cia in the post 9/11 world," i would like to tell you about what is taking place in the theater. on august 16th at noon, william holland junior will tell us about a forgotten founding father, george mason who gave us the bill of rights.

on tuesday, september 10th, sidney blumenthal will tell us about his recently released volume, his biography of abraham lincoln, all the powers of earth, 1856-1863. to find out more about these programs and our exhibits please visit our website, www.archives.com/calendar and you will find some pretty theater in the lobby, and sign up sheet so you can receive an electronic version of our monthly calendar. he joined as an analyst specializing in south asia and the middle east. after the september 11th attacks he was a ci a member of a small diplomatic team that helped piece together a new government for afghanistan. after returning to the cia he became deputy director of the

counterterrorism center and served until 2005. he was the first deputy director of the federal bureau of investigation's national security branch and later became the fbi senior intelligence advisor. philip mudd has comment about terrorism and congressional testimony and been featured in broadcast and print news. he is the president of philip mudd management which specializes in security scanning, analytic training and public speaking about security issues. he is a senior fellow at the new america foundation and the george washington university homeland security policy institute and served as senior global advisor to oxford analytic a which specializes in advising multinational companies. he sits on the advisory board for the national counterterrorism center and for the director of national intelligence and service on the homeland security group.

please welcome philip mudd to the national archives. [applause] >> you missed the most important part, i live part-time in memphis, tennessee. >> thank you. i was running in a place called midtown memphis, a historic part of memphis wondering whether to write another book. i've written a couple. reflecting on some of what i witnessed during that excruciating time after 9/11 and realize some of my colleagues had written their stories, many of the people i worked with would never speak, would never write and their stories would never be told if no one talked to them, put their stories into one narrative and explain what

happened so i decided running my 5 miles in midtown memphis i would do that. this is mostly their story. it's not a history. is not every document that ever appeared related to the program, it is the story of men and women i served with and he decided to speak to me because they trusted me. step back in time with me. we are going into a time machine, back to the 1990s. a lot of my colleagues talk about the time, to paraphrase one of them, when we thought we had killed the dragon. and only snakes were left. a time after the fall of the soviet union, the following the wall, people talking the intelligence challenges of the future did not reach the magnitude be reached at the time of the soviet union but counterterrorism people knew

they had a problem, that problem started mostly when osama bin laden was in sudan, accelerated when he moved to afghanistan. when i spoke to 35 or 40 most of whom will never speak, when i spoke to about those times, there's a great sense of frustration and in some ways sadness they witnessed the rise of a global network and the tools they had were so limited when you look back in retrospect and realize that was only 20 years ago, less than a full generation, the tools the cia had were limited. if you think about loss of budget and personnel, i'm not accusing the national security infrastructure of doing anything wrong, all of us thought the same thing, the dragon is gone but if you think about any organization, a tech organization or manufacturing organization, if you lose substantial pieces of money and people your ability to operate declines.

there was also the attitude about terrorism, only 20 years, nobody i spoke with could have imagined the world when somebody said we could conduct lightning raids in afghanistan day after day after day. the thought that a raid would happen with high risk of american soldiers lives was almost unthinkable. forget about a us invasion, just a raid against an al qaeda compound and we knew they knew where some of the compounds were. much less, much less an armed drone that could kill a terrorist overseas. in debate for years, never happened. meanwhile there is at trophy at the cia, training spies declines, the number of spies in cia training programs declined, and the attitude about terrorism was mixed.

after 1947 the targets the cia typically chased were big targets, soviets, chinese, the cuban missile crisis, big targets. i returned from taking a leave of absence in 1992 and was told to go to the counterterrorism center because it was seen as a place where you sent people who maybe weren't ready for prime time which was a model life it. that changed over time, like any organization, even large organizations people make a difference in the personalities i read about in the book and i knew so well were critical in keeping counterterrorism from declining further in the 90s. george tenet, cia director was immersed in counterterrorism and insisted but counterterrorism get some level of primacy, he insist on budget and insisted on ensuring there

is leadership there that was well regarded across the agency. not common in the 1990s including the director of the center, who raise the profile of counterterrorism, increasing the quality of people who were going over there, increasing the respective counterterrorism at the cia before 9/11 but make no mistake, the peace dividend for intelligence, lack of focus on terrorism men's on that day, on that day, the cia and the counterterrorist world was not only not prepared, they could not be prepared. they all talked to me about feeling before but especially in the searing months and years after 9/11, that they were on the back foot. on that day, this is not over dramatized, everything changed. years of debate about armed drones, done. years of debate about raids in afghanistan, forget about raids, the cia will be first in

with operatives, with money, technology, guidance and weeks of 9/11. forget about raids, the u.s. army will invade afghanistan. transition not only in resources but attitude was foundational. the cia director used to ask, i sat in on lightly threat briefings for years, we had 5 or 6 briefers training back and forth with another of my colleagues, opening with a threat briefing, a matrix of 10 or 20 threats, people who would write in threats, foreign security services tell us about a threat. intercepted communications where al qaeda talked about coming to the united states. i started those briefings and one of the things that was so evident that was spoken around those tables was a special concept. we anticipated a second wave,

what we called the second wave for years. the second wave was what we anticipated would be another 9/11 but perhaps worse because they had an anthrax program we did not fully understand. for months and longer we did not understand the research and development, we did not understand if they had taken strains of anthrax out of afghanistan. there was concern the second wave might not be aircraft, would be anthrax. added to that is a fundamental problem. we did not understand the adversary. the human source penetration that is the bread and butter of an organization like the cia, the human source penetration, this is not me speaking, the people who ran operations against outside will tell you the human source penetration was modest so in the midst of america watching horrific videos of people jumping off buildings and watching pages in the newspaper of faces of the fallen we were sitting

behind-the-scenes with the director saying if there is that second wave tomorrow and you say i wish i had done this, that or the other thing, why don't you do it today? in the midst of all this, there was a drumbeat in the spring of 2002 and i witnessed a lot of this firsthand, that was intense and getting louder, that drumbeat was the end for the first major cia captive, one of the challenges our qaeda head was they miscalculated the us response to 9/11. they did not anticipate such a huge response. they didn't anticipate they would take the towers down but they thought it would be more cruise missiles. they anticipated if the us military went in, they, working

with a telegram, would bleed the student -- the military as they did the soviets, they did not avonex plan. the military operation, intelligence operation in cooperation with the afghans the us was working with, and element of afghanistan and a group called the northern alliance were so successful that al qaeda had to flee before they ever developed a plan and many of them fled east into pakistan where they started making mistakes, mistakes that allowed us in a part of the business intelligence we call targeting, individual analysts responsible for an individual terrorist to the tactical level where you know what the terrorist indications patterns are, what his family is, the career network, individual analysts and the growing intelligence progression, targeting analysts who were watching and the growing drumbeat was the sense that the circle around him almost by the day was getting

tighter and then in the spring the raid happened, he almost died, suffered wounds from the gunfight that ensued particularly a grievous wound to his leg. a side piece of the story, the cia flew out physicians to ensure he would not die. another bit of the agility after 9/11 that made the us response so powerful. could you imagine calling a medical center before 9/11 and saying we want you to loan us your physicians to go treat a terrorist overseas now and we are going to put him on a plane? unimaginable before 9/11. that began the search for what a detainee could tell the cia about an organization the cia did not fully understand. forget about plots.

those are important. the counterterrorism business. a lot of what i witnessed was not about plots. that is what you saw on the newspapers. our business was people business. people, if you stop a plot, hard in the building, harden an aircraft, people who are committed to the murder of innocents will go on to create another plot. unless you can take down the architects of an al qaeda or isis you will face plots forever. hours was a people business, how to find, fix and finish by staging a rate operation. erinyes zubaydah was the first to went down. the reason he was significant, i mentioned lack of understanding of al qaeda. of counterterrorism is often a people business obviously the first questions you might have for terrorist would be can you tell us about plots, the second wave, whether there are further hijackings in the united states but the stuff behind-the-scenes, can you tell

us what the organization look like, can you tell us what the hierarchy looks like, who are the key players, who are the trainers, who are the facilitators, he was creating the false documents, who comes up with the propaganda. who are the careers, critically important for intelligence, who carries messages between al qaeda leaders who don't want to communicate by electrons? that basic material, bits of sand that make the beach, is critical, and we did not have a good understanding of that in spring of 2002. zubaydah talked but the memory of the people i spoke with, he shut down and he told his interrogators go home, have babies, don't come back because i am not speaking anymore. in the intensity of that time

when america was saying make sure this doesn't happen again, when the president of the united states and make sure this doesn't happen again, congress said how did you fail to catch it the first time, when the anticipation at the cia the second wave that might include anthrax, cia officers in a of decision-making in spring of summer of 2002 said if zubaydah is shutting down what are our options? we can send him to the us justice system where he will lawyer up and never speak again, we can send him to another foreign country that might have charges against him. the prospect is that of the country will interrogate him themselves, we will not sit in the room and they will shield from us critical intelligence that we need. they also will not have the same priorities we have. they will want to ask questions about their country. we want to ask questions about america. so, through a series of conversations among cia leaders there was a fateful decision that is the subject of this book, and that is should we

develop our own secret facilities, clandestine facilities in friendly countries overseas where we will transfer al qaeda prisoners come in this case an al qaeda prisoner and interrogate him using the harsh techniques that have been splashed across the page in newspapers and in america for decades? there is another piece of this process. everybody knew and i was there, that people would ask questions later on and everybody knew this was not only sensitive but would be controversial. that is the secret black side network. there are conversations between the inspector general of the cia and lawyers at the department of justice set and interpret law for america to say what is appropriate in terms of interrogation for a cia black site that complies with the u.s. constitution and

was complies with federal law and we wanted on paper and we are not moving until it is on paper. through the summer of 2002, cia lawyers and department of justice discussed what could be done with zubaydah. he was transferred to a black site, formal authorization -- authorization from the department of justice did not arrive until august 2002, that is what my colleagues marked the beginning of the black site program. zubaydah went through 7 delegations techniques. people talk waterboarding, there were more than 100 detainees at cia facility black sites, 3 of them were waterboarding.

zubaydah was one of them. what challenges of talking to a detainee, one of the challenges of discussing this in a public environment where we don't have the luxury of time that we have in this auditorium is people look at me every day and say come on. you put somebody under duress they are going to buy. let me explain as we went through that process with zubaydah, i'm not here to defend the program. i'm here because i thought the views of the cia should be explain so those who want to attack what was done and those who support it, i hear both on the streets, will understand what happened and why, will be up to walk the issues my colleagues walks through and understand what they did regardless of whether i like it or not but on this foundational question of why you would purchase someone to speak with techniques like sleep deprivation, because you know they are going to lie my answer is straightforward. people not under duress lie too. that's not the full answer but al qaeda terrorist not under duress is going to make up stories all day long.

that is not the real point. the real point is an analytic effort i mentioned earlier called targeting, you cannot have a successful high end interrogation of high end al qaeda prisoner unless you know so much about that prisoner, not a mid-level car, not a low-level guy but so much because you have been following for so long that you can come up with in concert with other experts and physicians, psychologists, interrogators, a package of questions where the detainee starts to realize these guys know a lot more than i know and they seem to know when i am lying. when that prisoner is under duress, when that prisoner has been in a confined box and under sleep deprivation, when that prisoner starts to realize

he can't lie his way out you start to get answers. not truth, not truth, we were not stupid. some answers never came particularly locational information about osama bin laden, but you get what we call compliance with someone will try to give you bits and pieces of information they think are less valuable, there was a guy who trained a few years ago, who was a german at our camp. i think his name was hans. i'm making of the stories, but that kind of material, bits and pieces, are invaluable gold for intel guy. of the prisoner's complaint and gives you what he thinks is throwaway information about somebody who trained, a german or freshman or a british or american three years ago, game on for people in my world. i'm going to balance that against every bit of data we have, every bit of travel data we can acquire, every other detainee and all of a sudden those bits of sand will tell us who that person was based on

one shred of evidence, shred of information from a compliant detainee giving you stuff he thought was irrelevant. the point i am making is of course people lie, the only way you can get out of that box is to develop an interrogation package that is so complete the detainee feels he needs a lifeline and that lifeline was the cia. a lot happened after the initial stages of the zubaydah interrogation. when i spoke with lawyers and managers, they talk about the maturation of the program, the first months and years were tough. you have an agency trained to collect information from spies overseas that is now serving as a prison conducting interrogations the cia had never done. the cia values agility but

sometimes they step into programs because they believe nobody will ever do it despite the fact that we don't have experience doing it, we will do it. that was part of the genesis that led to the black side of the interrogation program but because of conversations with lawyers who were meticulous and i know some of these people, they matured on 304, policies and procedures tightens, training changed, there were some individuals involved in the program early on who should not have been involved. typically overtime people who were recruited if they walked in the room and said i want to get in this because i want to go after with vengeance the people who committed the acts of 9/11, those people were weeded out, you would not pass the application process as the program matured unless you could be assured you were in there to be professional. i realize there are weaknesses outlined in the book and mistakes early in the program but as lawyers training, leadership got involved particularly after egregious mistakes the program matured. other things happened that were surprising.

i could tell you sitting at the threat table in 2002-2003-2004 until i shifted to the fbi in 2005 i thought we were losing. that may come as a surprise. the u.s. army had invaded afghanistan, i saw the breadth of the network i did not think we were in front of for years and a volume of threats and attacks we could not contain. nonetheless, the people i spoke with uniformly said business was good. they never anticipated the volume of high end prisoners that happen because of the accelerating raids around the world. for example the architect of 9/11, khalid shaikh mohammed, architect of the human bombing against the uss cole, raids

happen faster and faster as the intelligence picture clarified and not only did the program in terms of policies and procedures mature, the site matured, the cia needed more sites, start developing their own custom-built sites, the first site was not custom-built. it was a remote location at a foreign government office in the agency. the expertise the agency head in training people to talk to prisoners in determining what techniques were most effective, determining how to build the psychological package around each individual terrorist so you could go in and maximize the prospect of that terrorist would say they know more than i ever expected, i better speak. better and better and better. but there was a flipside. that was the iraq war, the declining unity after the remarkable unity of 9/11 leading to the iraq war.

and increase questions about whether the cia program was sustainable, especially, many of my colleagues would view this with some sense of pride, especially since the second wave never happened, let me put it this way, the fact that america had the time and space to discuss what should be done, and democratic society resulted partly from the fact that there was not a major attack. many of my colleagues are persuaded that if there had been more catastrophic attacks people would have asked far fewer questions about what techniques america used against terrorists. let me make it simpler. the decline of the program was partly due to the success in keeping america safe. the debate was a good thing. the word used by my colleagues was simple. that word was end game. as early as 2002-2003 early on the cia was starting to see our

job is to extract intelligence from a human being, from a terrorist. we are not jailers, we are not the bureau of prisons and once we extract intelligence we are not going to be holding people for 20 years, we don't necessarily even want to hold them for 2 years or one year. we want to extract intelligence and move on to people who are professionals incarcerating individuals. nobody wanted to answer that question, nobody. is soon as you answer that question you acknowledge there is a cia black side program and you acknowledge publicly what happened in that black side program. leaks contributed to the end game. questions, major leaks about locations. at least one location was closed because it was disclosed in a leak. more questions members of congress had not been briefed on the program, very few were brief. i was among those briefed, we told them what we were doing,

we told them in some detail, but very few were briefed. increasing questions within the cia what the end game is and outside the cia what are they doing, what happened to khalid sheikh mohammed. the white house, the memory of my colleagues was not too excited about these questions. i don't blame them. i understand once you open the door you have to answer every question how and why you authorize that but this led to increasing frustration including at white house meetings were cia officials time and again told me they were saying we cannot be put in the position of being jailers. you, the american policymakers asked us to go down this road of detentions, you have to participate in a painful conversation what happens after. the questions continued and got

more intense. directors transitions, one director transitions going back to 2006, michael hayden, a legendary director among cia officials, former director of the national security agency, steeped in experience, intelligence in the military, highly respected for his discipline and his mind, he came into the cia after the detainee and said we have to put this on more solid grounds. let me read everything and he was a voracious reader of information about the programs to master the detail. let me read everything and figure out the right past. in talking to my colleagues i think his efforts led to a few more interrogations but by that point even in 2006 the writing was on the wall, just 5 years after 9/11, just four years after the 2002 capture of zubaydah, the program is already declining. the appetite wasn't there.

hayden asked questions about what worked, what didn't, waterboarding was dropped, the interrogators, we don't think despite the national conversation about this, that this is the most significant technique we have and we don't think we need to use it anymore, sleep deprivation again and again comes up as a type that was successful. people don't like to be tired and they start to lose their will and not speak. hayden scale back the program. there are more conversations with the department of justice, sometimes the program was shutdown including by director tenet because the department of justice officials were starting to scale back on their original opinions. every time they feel that, cia leadership said if you want to change the documentation we are not moving until you change it. we don't move without paper and that paper has to explain how this is in compliance with the constitution and federal law,

but the writing was on the wall and george bush made his famous announcement and said we have these prisoners, there were these black sites and we are transitioning them to guantánamo. were some of them still are. that was not the final end of the program. including under general aden, a couple more prisoners authorized to go to the program but once the president made that announcement i think in retrospect you could say that was the beginning of the end, the final chapter. some cia officers went to brief president-elect obama on what the program wasn't shortly after, the president came to office he said the united states had committed what he called torture. i think the colleagues i spoke

with bristol that that. every president has the right to change policy but we had been told and this is a list of covert action from the beginning of time, we had been told by one administration this is not only the policy of the land but complies with the law of the land and then to be told what you did doesn't comply with the law of the land and doesn't comply with basic values we all signed up for, that was painful. i did spend time with every one of the individuals i spoke with was some had unique questions because of their jobs, interrogators, i asked about interrogations, senior managers including several cia directors about white house deliberations

but i asked questions of all of them. ethics and questions. when my colleagues looked back they looked back in one sense with the knowledge that anybody on september 12, 2001, would have said there will be a second wave, we were not prepared for this and if you argued against the second wave, if you said there will not be another catastrophic attack people would have said you are crazy. so in terms of reflecting, there was a fair amount of unanimity in this. many of my colleagues, would say i was a tiny piece of the puzzle to ensure another 3000 people didn't die. they look back on the program itself i would say not with regret, they feel it was a piece of the puzzle might help keep americans safe but they do look back i think with a

knowledge that an america that once said do anything to ensure there is not a second event very quickly, surprisingly quickly said what you did was wrong. that is painful to my colleagues. many of them would look at the program and say that will never happen again in my lifetime, not as they regretted that -- what they thought it was ineffective but because they know as people of experience through the searing moments that if a program like that were ordered by another president years down the road, people would say what did you do, why did you do it and now you may be called for legal action by the next administration. some of my friends were investigated for years by the department of justice. so in terms of the program

itself i think my friends look back and say we were a piece of a difficult time in america that will never happen again and maybe, maybe we helped ensure that the kid gets grope with their parents. in terms of the ethics, the best capture of this was with one of the most thoughtful officers, i don't name people in the book typically because i told them i would not and i don't want them getting hate mail. one of the most thoughtful officers i ever worked with gave me a snapshot of ethical thinking that captured a lot of what i witnessed and that, there was a technical piece, what is the law of the us government, does the law allow you to do something. that is the department of justice piece of paper that says what you're doing complies with the constitution and federal law. formal guidance says what you are doing complies with with this agency has written down as formal policies.

then you start getting tough. those are pretty straightforward. there is a classic question as you stepped on a list of ethical questions, how clearly can you explain this to a public audience. we used to call this the washington post test. if you are in front of a journalist, i now do cnn for a living. can you capture what you are doing and why in one sentence your mother would understand it if you can't, be careful. the last test that i think my friends have to think about regularly, i still think about it. what would your mother say? i don't care what the losses are what regulations are, what would your mother say? using those litmus tests to look back on the program i think those people still look back and say i am not sure i

can give you a perfect answer to every question. but i am sure of one thing. if you step back in time, and drive down the gw parkway in the spring of 2002 and reconnect people jumping off buildings and you thought maybe your tiny sliver of the response the prevent that from happening again, they still sleep at night. thanks for listening to my story. [applause] >> we will take questions. because there is a televised component of this, go to the microphone so this can be captured on audio for the tv audience. >> i would like to ask where

you started about the dragon being slain and snakes remain. from the perspective of the what if aspect, the what if aspect, the soviets, russians, whatever, departed afghanistan, they had infrastructure and new aspects that could have been interesting and tax on. was that possible from the perspective of people that were there that the us could have somehow relied on to get intel prior to 9/11? >> that is a great question. i don't remember anybody ever raising that ever. the relationship with the russian security service, don't 20 too much into detail, was, i assume still is with russian intervention in american elections tenuous even after 9/11. there was a lot of talk about we face common threats etc..

i don't think the russians were a great partner even after 9/11, the prospect that they would be extremely helpful on a tactical level which is what the cia needed, i don't remember -- a great question and i will have to ask my friends. i don't remember that coming up at all. we started strong, thank you. i never thought about that. everybody else to do that, that would be great. >> thanks so much for your fascinating story. is somebody who grew up, i was in first grade in 2001, it is really something to hear from somebody who was there, a fully formed member of the intelligence community making hard decisions, without the tragedy of that day. i'm really curious to know if in your view you think counterterrorism is on its way

out? i know these days the discussion is really, rightfully, focusing on great power competition and domestic instances of what could be called terrorism, right-wing extremists and is this sort of counterterrorism, is counterterrorism on its way out? >> this is a rare moment i will say this, i don't know. i will give you an answer, i am not sure for the simple reason terrorism obviously has declined dramatically. in 2014 isis was in the news every day. you look at two characteristics of a terrorist organization, i typically look for leadership and visionaries, don't just take out the local police station, military, americans, i look for leadership that has time and space to act. you don't see that today, the safe haven of leadership, some of the leadership is gone from syria and iraq but the way to

constitute leadership, i out, i'm a pretty optimistic person. i wouldn't rule out a group rapidly reemerges. i agree with you, by the way on the shift in focus to the more traditional post-1947, what about iran, what north korea, russia, china, not hard to envision a world where with any years include be merges in a place where the local government doesn't have the capability or will to take them out. two's quick things i would say on that. the tactics in chasing people i could see. not talking about laws that analytical capability, could easily transfer to white supremacist groups. i'm not suggesting the cia would do that, i'm talking about the techniques of how you chase somebody down. of america starts to say we have a different threat, the

american intel community including the fbi learned about how to look at people and not just big threats so i see it changing but i'm not sure america has a stomach if there's a terrorist who goes into shoot up something in america that americans have any stomach to say anything but now we've got to do this all over again. not sure. >> thank you for your talk. i wanted to ask about the language used around what happened. my personal view would be regardless of the ethics of it, what occurred with the dictionary definition of torture and using words like enhanced interrogation is more just a euphemism so i'm wondering what language do you prefer to use and how do you see this debate around enhanced interrogation?

>> most people don't ask that question politely. i appreciate -- i'm serious which i get attacked a lot of public sessions. i never went to a black site, i never interrogated a prisoner but i'm the one speaking and speaking partly as a result of my conversations with colleagues. that is a fair question. i can give you a couple of answers, technically speaking we didn't use the word torture. torture is illegal. if you say -- you acknowledging you should be in a federal prison. the technical way people looked at it, there are couple phrases used, legal concepts. one legal concept is knowingly doing something that will result in long-term physical or psychological damage to human beings so that you can say i am uncomfortable with waterboarding, it beats my human definition of torture, technically it doesn't meet a legal definition. i'm not excusing it, just giving you an explanation. there was another phrase used

called shock the conscience. illegal phrase meaning if you pick up someone for stealing gum you are not going to put him in a black site. if you pick someone who was participating in the murder of 3000 americans, that doesn't shock the conscience if you submit them to sleep deprivation. i will close by saying i think the right conversation to have is not what the law is. this is from someone who never got close to law school. it is where you are headed which is an were congress which is been headed, please don't look back, we did this in congress and look forward. is this where we want america to be. if the answer is no, create laws to stop it. if you are asking the technical question how we talked about it, a quick snapshot of the language we used in the program, thank you. that is a fair question. >> it has been 17 years in the beginning of these black sites.

the intel authorization act expanded the protection act kind of in a broad way and one of the reasons the cia justified it was issues regarding rdi. >> he's talking about the black site program. >> thank you. just wondering from your experience what the issue could be and why it would come up now in 2019. >> i have seen commentary talking about congress trying to protect the identities of secret officers more aggressively. i can tell you from a personal perspective let me put two things together. the anger in this culture is something i have not seen before. that anger is fueled by both sides of the political debate and the second piece of that, i

see elements of that, i have a website in the hate mail i received, the level of anger and violence in culture today is high. if you just do mathematics, 330 million americans, if you expose x number of cia officers, what is your statistical chance the one person who is angry isn't going to show up at somebody at the door because you can find people's residence by public record. i don't worry about that because i work in a public world and i'm on cnn. i think about it a lot. people come up a lot. i can understand -- i don't know the law but looking at the world as i see it and my colleagues in this culture with the number of people who want to send mail that says you should die of cancer, people might say we should work harder

to protect those who took great risks because in culture today, even in contrast to 10 years ago i wouldn't guarantee someone would knock on the front door. i don't want to complain, i don't want to say harmless but most of it is just somebody ticked off in their basement, if my mail is any indication that bill is worth it. the volume of people who write in the language they use is unprintable every day, every day. people say -- i think about that and understand -- anyway, yes please. >> you had mentioned the first wave, we waited for the second wave that never came, being anthrax. in the intelligence community is it thought of that we are on wave 3 or waive 4 and skipped that wave and these are different modes of terror or the second wave is just the one

that never came? >> let me see. that is a good question. i'm going to give up soon because i'm tired. we focused on a large group based threat, al qaeda. nobody talked homegrowns in 2002 when i was at threat briefings. i am not sure we used the word. our concept of second wave was another major organization creating another hijacking catastrophe with 20 people. to answer your question i think what happened, what i would characterize as a third wave was the realization, for me to start in 2006-2007-2008, that there was a diverse, disparate movement of like-minded individuals who didn't understand the ideology, but

thought there anger was validated. typically young people who were not connected except by watching the youtube video, the third wave was people who are less strategically scary, not going to conduct an anthrax attack but harder to track because they are not part of an organization. i thought the homegrowns were the third wave and you start all over again almost repeating the process of going after an organization and seeing it morph into individual actors with isis was a big organization and suddenly you see people who want to see in isis video in colorado or new york, we would not have defined the third wave or the second wave in any terms other than this is the next big one from al qaeda. what do one more and then

disappear, sign books and disappear and sell more books. >> this may somewhat pick up on what you were just talking about, but i am interested in what you learned about the motivations of the people you interrogated and to what degree that might help us in the future anticipate or dispel the forming of more and more groups? >> two basic groups of people. the original al qaeda guys were very smart. khalid sheikh mohammed, the book talks about this, would sit in front of the whiteboard and explain the ideology of al qaeda. they are proud of 9/11. they were not apologetic. one explanation for why it was hard to get them to speak, i didn't do anything wrong. the motivation was interesting from an american perspective which typically is shortsighted

and in some ways selfless, their motivation would be they would say it won't come in my generation or my children's generation but maybe my grandchildren's generation there will be an acknowledgment that the only way to live is by the rule of the book, the nations across the arab world, like saudi arabia and egypt, don't go by the rule of the book because the leaders are corrupt and the only way to take out those governments is to get rid of the americans because the americans are the backstop to these corrupt regimes with their philosophy was if you get the americans out, they felt we were week. they strike as an economic target in new york, military cut, the pentagon, very strategic strike, they said the americans are so soft in the underbelly they will get out of support for these regimes and we can move in more aggressively and take out these

regimes in places like egypt and saudi arabia over 50, 75 years. that was their philosophy. one huge caveat. they would say violence is justified because the americans are simply preventing the rise of people who live by the book. this changed when the homegrown movement started in earnest whenever it was, the late 2000s. my experience, this is similar with isis, the further you get away from the nucleus of the organization into homegrown, 17-year-old in colorado, 20-year-old in california, 18-year-old in georgia, the less likely that person is to really understand what the ideology is. they are coming to come at this with curiosity, they might be angry about something they witnessed at school. think of this as a culture, not a religious group, the organization validates their anger. they can give you 3 minutes on

what the organization is all about in contrast to collegiate mohammed. if you ask him three questions about ideology they can't get you there. they are just ticked off, the groups is come into our organizational we will validate your anger and give you a youtube video that helps you understand why we exist, real differences between core organizations that can give you chapter and verse on ideology and homegrowns where the ideology is razor thin with the final thing i would say has to do with practitioner's issue. you can't tell collegiate, what he did was wrong. you can't. he will explain to you otherwise. when you're dealing with law enforcement action or a social services organization dealing with the homegrown who has been indoctrinated over the course of two month, the likelihood you could turn that person is much much much higher. simply because they don't have the depth of ideological indoctrination or understanding and someone who's an expert might talk to them and say what were you thinking and after a while they can to clean what

they were thinking. the approaches to someone who is a committee years on terrorist and homegrown kid went the wrong way when he was 17 in terms of how you the indoctrinated, significantly. collegiate claman will be proud of 9/11 forever. thank you again. i think i will be leaving to sign a few books and thanks for the questions. [applause] >> books are available in a few moments. >> tonight on booktv, at 11:00 pm eastern, supreme court associate justice neil gorsuch discusses his book, a republic if you can keep it. >> when hero the constitution, those are just promises. he didn't think we needed a bill of rights if we got the constitution and the structure and separation of powers right. he knew men are not angels and the key to your liberty is

keeping power separated. >> on sunday at 9:00 eastern on afterwords in his latest book, sentinel inc. how labs in china manufacture the drug. is interviewed by the democratic on this woman and mclean custer, cochair of the bipartisan opioid task force. >> in the old days if you are a scientist at a university, you publish your paper and it went into some university library. in the internet age, all of these papers were published online. >> publicly available. >> exactly. these rogue chemists began looking for these files, specifically for these papers, to go through them and appropriate the chemical formulas to learn to make these

new drugs. >> a 10:00 eastern oregon democratic senator jeff merkley provides firsthand account of conditions for migrant families at the us southern border in his book america is better than this. >> advocate said hundreds of boys separated from parents would be in a warehouse in a walmart so i went to find out about it and they decided they didn't want me to see what was going on and instead called the police and the video went viral and all of america was hearing about cages and secret warehousing of migrant children. >> reporter: watch booktv every weekend on c-span2. >> booktv recently went to capitol hill to find out what books are in the reading lists of members of congress. >> darren soto, what are you reading? >> i am reading for whom the bell