outsider charlottesville and my daughter christina went to university. so i think there's room for meaningful conversations there. i do not believe ever mob should be tearing down statues or tearing down anything else. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website booktv.org and click on the in-depth tab you the top of the page. >> my name is karen greenberg thank you so much for joining us here at the center national security at fordham law. we're delighted to bring you this afternoons conversation. with me today is chris whipple, award-winning author, journalist and documentary maker. his new book is "the spymasters" and you see it? "the spymasters: how the cia did the future" and we're going to talk a lot about this book today the for someone to say ockham, chris. thank you for joining us. >> leisure to be here. thanks so much for having me.

>> this is a wonderful read. when i started it i was sort of like this is going be too much information. i will be able to take it in. it's fantastic. it's based on an addition to your own knowledge and research it's based on over 70 interviews and you've interviewed among those the leading director of the -- living directors of the caa except for the current one. it's really not -- going to say it, it's not so much about the cia directors as about the cia directors and the relationship to the white house and the president. would you agree with that? >> thanks for the kind words about the book, because one of the things i really tried to do, maybe above all, was to humanize these directors. i was lucky because it is a cast of characters never could've dreamt up, from dick helms act in the '60s was the quintessential cia director bob

gates described to me as a james bond type character. cigarette in one hand, dry martini in the other who could walk into the oval office and tell lbj that the domino theory was flawed, and then going forward through bill colby who to me was kind of the corleone of the cia, then you've got bill casey and you've got an amazing cast of characters all the way up to gina haspel, the first woman to run the cia but you're right that the book focuses a lot on the relationship between the president and the cia director. it's been almost impossible balancing act for cia director because he or she on the one nsc, presidents hard truths while also keeping the presidency here. that's a really tough challenge even in the best of times, and

in the current times it's practically mission impossible. >> yeah, and i don't use all the comey film over the weekend -- >> not yet. >> but it's one of the things that becomes clear, how hard that particular relationship is just generally and am a charter it was under trump. just going down that line a little bit, so who has the worst relationship? i read the books i kind of think i know what you're going to say. and then who had the best relationship? [talking over each other] -- that's what i thought. >> willsey, really fascinating character to me, brilliant guy. he was as we all know on a spectrum, an ideological spectrum is well over to the right, but he loves to joke

about the fact that he was president of yale students for eugene mccarthy back in 68. he is known because he thought it was winnable and we're weret doing enough. anyway, he becomes cia director, but bill clinton and woolsey were like oil and water as one source put it to me. clinton just did not like him after the first briefing which went on and on evidently at some length. woolsey left. bill clinton learned come turn to one of his advisors and said, i never want to see that man again. he almost never did. woolsey had literally one meeting with the president and at one point there was a freak accident on the south lawn of the white house, a small plane crashed and killed the pilot. afterwards, woolsey said to the press, that was me try to get an

appointment with bill clinton. >> oh, my god. >> it was not a very productive relationship, and woolsey met his demise over the james dando, that case, the most serious mold since kim philby probably in american intelligence history. intelligence history. happened on his watch. it ended, essentially ended his tenure. >> and what about the best relationship? >> that would be a number of contenders for that probably. i would say that bob gates and george h.w. bush had a very good relationship. leon panetta and barack obama had a very good relationship. john brennan and obama

certainly. a spoiler alert. for those who know that i wrote another book called the gatekeepers about the white house chiefs of staff, some of the attributes that make a great white house chief of staff also serves cia directors well. it's no coincidence, in my view, that leon panetta was the gold standard at both. there were certainly other great white house chiefs and other great cia directors, but panetta was right up there with the best, and both jobs, and that's partly because has a lot to do with the fact that panetta when he became cia director for obama he was 70. you been around the block. he served in congress. he was comfortable. you knew the white house and he could walk into the oval office, close the door and tell barack obama what he didn't want to

hear. and that is essential in both jobs. >> one of the great stories i felt in the chapter is about the time the director of national intelligence made the mistake, blur, lucinda director of national intelligence made the mistake of trying to take on leon panetta in a bureaucratic struggle over who would appoint the cia station chief. well, i guess you could on paper make the argument that the director of national intelligence outranked leon and, therefore, denny blair ought to make that appointment. but in the real world blair should have known that that was

turf that was jealously guarded at langley. panetta knew that, and blair sent out a directive without informing panetta to all the station saying that he, denny blair, would be avoiding the new station chiefs. well, panetta waited about a half hour and set out another message to all the stations saying, disregard the previous message. well, this was not a fair fight. this went to the white house, but leon knew exactly who had his back on this one. not only barack obama, but vice president joe biden who wound up being the referee on this one. and as he walked into the office to adjudicate this with biden, leon turned to him and said, joe, is our teatime still 930 thymic to mark? and biden biden said yes.

and blair knew he was a dead man walking. >> yeah, you know, this book is not just about the white house, the president, the cia directors but it's also a chronicle of american foreign policy. and not just things women from behind the scenes but just the r events that have taken place in american foreign policy over 45 decades. a number of those things obviously have been on our mind lately, 9/11 being perhaps the most obvious one, but the killing of bin laden. but there was one incident that a think a lot of readers in our audience will not know that much about, and that is that of the mod -- i wanted you what to tell a story because i don't have others listen to but i felt like, i'm so embarrassed i don't know the story. now i'm so grateful that i know

this story. sotelo. >> don't be embarrassed because a lot of people don't know it. in fact, the first half of the story until in the book about has never been reported before. it's an absolutely unbelievable story that it lasts for three or four decades. he was far to wait the most wanted terrorist in the middle east by both the cia and mossad going all the way back to the worst day in cia history which was the bombing of the beirut embassy. in beirut which killed so many cia officers. and other americans. at the time. subsequently, it was determined that -- is a probably -- it was the dawn of of course that whole

area of truck bomb terrorism. hellishly the beginning. it was really pivotal time from that date forward yet more american and israeli bottoms have been anyone. he was operational genius of hezbollah, the operational chief. they called in the scarlet pimpernel of terrorism because he is so elusive. they literally had one grainy photograph of him, , the cia and they could never keep up with him. he would wear disguises. he developed come pioneered the use of the so-called shaped charge, a kind of sophisticated ied that really essentially told the israelis out of lebanon, and it was that effective and lethal and it would cut through a tank and he killed a famous israeli general triggering the israeli withdrawal. in short, he was a most wanted guy come and the other two most

wanted guys were general soleimani of syria and in a reign in general named soleimani whose name may ring a bell. since you skilled in january of this year. in any event, cia tried and tried to track down mughniyah and i tell the story of an operation on bill clinton's watch at the end of his presidency on george tenet's watch, as cia director, which they tracked him down to beirut. they discovered he was visiting his mistresses flat, and he would visit her and he would beat her as it turned out, the cia enlisted her, , setting up d grabbing and cut them down to the dock and onto a vote and all to a battleship offshore. it all went south. the operation failed at another

decade went by before cia finally tracked him down in damascus. so i tell that story in hair-raising detail how come in a joint cia/mossad operation they finally got mughniyah, tapped him as he driving around damascus in his luxurious suv. they decided that they couldn't plant the bomb in a phone. he discarded phones too often, but he always had his suv. and they wound up, cia, building obama. they had a technical marvel because they had to replace all back door of the suv without mughniyah or his bodyguards noticing and had to match the paint color exactly, even the age of the paint job. they did all this and mossad

ended up pulling the trigger. and at one point, at one moment while they were surveilling mughniyah and waiting for the moment to strike, they looked and looked again and realize that the guy, someone leaning on his car talking with mughniyah was, guess who, general soleimani. and they thought my god, it's a twofer. we can take them both out. well, they said -- permission was denied. mughniyah was he on legitimate target. they went and soleimani went off, and they finally did get mughniyah. it's just an unbelievable story. and also the whole negotiation because assassination quote-unquote has always been a fraud proposition at the cia --

fraught here it's been prohibited by executive orders including 12333 for decades. in this case it went through contortions so that the israelis would pull the trigger rather than the americans. bush signed off on the deal as long as nobody ever talked about it, and nobody does talk about it to this day, except in part to me for this chapter that i wrote in the book yeah, you have a whole page where you excerpt from your interviews where you ask a number of cia directors what happened, and there's no comment, no comment, no comment which i guess comes with the territory but is not a bad story to eventually get to know. >> can i just say, john brennan who finally got frustrated with me asking him repeatedly for comment what happened to mughniyah, he finally looked at

me and he said, he died quickly, period. that was his comment. >> that's more than you got from any of the others. >> many of the other directors. >> yeah. one thing i wanted to ask that you don't at least don't really talk about and i love your thoughts on is the use of military generals to be head at the cia. and whether you know, how we should think about that and others have thought about that come thinking of general petraeus, general hayden, and is kind of like, cousin is a way which these are distinct authorizations, for using force, covert activity. what did you learn about that particular, you know, that mixing a kind of expertise? >> it's a mixed bag. the two of course directors who

get into it are my kayden and david petraeus, each of them really capable and really interesting characters. hayden tells a story about how he first when he arrived, he would run the nsa, national security agency prior. he was still a general, not quite retired when he arrived at the cia. he went to the so-called bubble, the auditorium cia, to make his first address to the troops as it were. as he was speaking when he came to the end of his remarks he took questions and somebody's hand shot up and they said, what would you like us to call you? and hayden who was famously eloquent and the live and articulate -- glib -- was

thrown, he did not answer, and finally he said whatever makes you comfortable. don't call me general. whatever, call me whatever you want to call me. he said in retrospect it was most important thing he said that day. there is what some at cia call, something called 4-star general disease. what it means is that military people sometimes arrived at the cia and certainly directors have arrived on occasion with a very well-developed sense of entitlement, used to having the key staff, a staff of 50 people too, as david petraeus did when he was in afghanistan, to cater to his every whim. this was a little bit of a problem for the trace when he arrived. it was just a culture shock.

they are just different cultures, and when you have been a commanding general like the tray us, you are accustomed to a different way of life, a way of operating and have people at your beck and call. i think he adjusts to the cia culture but in the beginning it was rocky for him. he had only just really adjusted to the cia culture when of course he met his untimely demise by sharing classified information with his mistress, paula. and in the book, i i mean, i ad him point-blank about that, and it's fascinating i would have to say. >> use an excerpt from her which i felt was also interesting and i can be a teaser for reading that section of the book. what about when directors are asked or told by presidents to break the law?

what did you learn about that process and how that plays out looking at all these different directors and the relationships with presidents? >> to me that might be the most fascinating scene in the book, and it's because it's a continuous theme that from the beginning all the up to our current cia director gina haspel. i had the privilege of getting to know the winner of richard helms, the previously mentioned quintessential cia, old-school cia director. cynthia died last summer but i spent a lot of time with her the summer before. she was 95 and she was full of terrific untold stories about her husband and she said, you know, chris, they were all asked to do things they shouldn't have done. and i said, like what?

and we got into it and we talked about the fact that helms, he was a flawed character. he was brilliant and he was smooth and i loved the stories about him holding his own on the dance floor with fred astaire at the 1975 date dinner for the shah of iran. helms was dancing with cynthia, and fred astaire was dancing. quite the character but flawed. his relationship with lbj is fascinating because he admired lbj for his domestic achievements and the great society. he was exasperated by the vietnam war. he wanted lbj to succeed, , and lbj leaned on him very hard, as only lbj could do, and told him

in no uncertain terms that he wanted intelligence showing that domestic protesters against the vietnam war were being controlled by foreign communist powers. helms protested, says that's not in the lb chief -- lbj said -- helms should've known better, but he bent the law. he set up an operation called operation image chaos. it was illegal domestic surveillance of protesters who had every right to protest. and at the end of the day he came up with absolutely no evidence of any foreign communist control. so helms was flawed, but at the end of the day, helms stood up to nixon at the most important time, when the crunch came during the watergate scandal and

h.r. haldeman, nixon's chief of staff, called him into the house and told in famously to shut down the fbi investigation into watergate. helms was having none of it, and he stood up for the rule of law and he arguably saved the cia. so helms was the earliest example of a cia director who had to deal with that kind of pressure, but so many have had to. time and again presidents will ask them to do stuff they shouldn't be doing, including -- i love the way bob gates put it. gates said usually you've got a really difficult problem, the state department says that the military handle it. the military says let the diplomats handle it, and they all say let's let the cia do it.

cia is -- one former director told me you could never get rid of the cia, never abolish it because then congress would have no one to blame. the fact of the matter, over the last five or six decades, is that when the cia gets in trouble, it is usually because presidents have asked them to do stuff they shouldn't be doing. >> did they get in trouble? >> do they get in trouble? >> you said when the cia, i mean, to the actually get held accountable or get in trouble? >> yeah, certainly have been blamed time and again. the other classic lament out of langley which a love which in this town thoroughly policy successes and policy failures. certain cia was blamed for 9/11. it was called the failure of imagination. it was called all kinds of things but basically the cia

was, the deputy said people, to me, congressman would come up to me and say hey, how does a field of the worst intelligence failure since pearl harbor? the truth is, and i have a detailed chapter on this, in july of 2001, george tenet, black, and rich, head of the al-qaeda unit with over to the bush white house, he slammed assist on the table said we've got to go on a war footing now. they met with condi rice. essentially they blew the whistle, and nobody heard it. this was the case, this was, in my view, less of an intelligence failure and more of a policy failure, a white house failure to heed their warnings.

fast-forward to 2020 and we are now suffering catastrophic consequences of a president who ignored warnings in his president's daily brief throughout the month of january, and 200,000 americans are dead. >> one of the things you talk about, which will different and i want to your thoughts on it, is the abandonment of norms, procedural norms under this president, particularly in terms of the principal committee meetings, et cetera. can you talk about that? it's a thread you talk about the route. it just doesn't come out of the blue when we talk about the trump presidency. >> this isn't the white house that, not only has declared war on process and on norms, this is

essentially a white house declaring war on government from day one. i will never forget denis mcdonough, the outgoing white house chief of staff for obama telling the that when the clock struck noon on january 20th, sitting in his office waiting for reince priebus, the chief of staff and the staff to arrive,, and nobody showed up. he waited an hour or more, finally just turned off the lights and left. to me that's a metaphor for this presidency, but it's not the first time that process and norms have been abandoned. one case in point is 9/11, and that's go back to that because one of the things i learned in the book, i did a documentary in 2015 for showtime by the way called "the spymasters" in which we told the story of the july 10 meeting, july 10, 2,001,001.

in the book i was able to go deeper and talked to a number of really persuasive sources in the white house and cia who said essentially that all you have to do in july of 2001 was call a a principals meeting. and, of course, principals meeting being a heads up cia, fbi, vice president or national security adviser, and all of those departments head and get them around the table and you shake the tree. when you shake the tree with all the people at the table, stuff falls. a number of people told me that they think that had condi rice called a principals meeting that they would have discovered that two of the al-qaeda hijackers were on u.s. soil and had been for months. this was as we all know, failure to communicate between cia and fbi but that's the kind of stuff

that gets you, that gets found out when you go through that kind of process. this is not the first presidency. trump's is not the first presidency to fail to follow some of those norms. and in this case, in the case of the bush white house, frankly, he was living in a kind of time were. they just couldn't believe that a a bunch of guys with beards in caves in afghanistan were going to blow the world trade center. as black put it to me memorably, he said, they thought terrorist were a bunch of euro lefties, stay up all night, and champagne and blow up stuff during the day. that was the '70s mentality. >> but the were people as you pointed out and richard famously tried to get that message to the national security council and the president. i think it's one of the things

we haven't quite absorbed as a country it and we need to reflect on as you say so well, the war on government. another thread that goes through the book, and this is, you know, less abstract, is iran. .. >> we certainly had a very close relationship with the wrong guy in iran, the that of iran -- the shah of iran, as he turned out to be. and that's one of my favorite

chapters in the book, because, again, turner, it happened on his watch as cia director, but it was arguably the greatest intelligence failure of the 20th century. bay of pigs was certainly are a huge fiasco, but in terms of intelligence failures, quote-unquote, failure to see that the shah of iran was as weak as he was in late 1979 and on the verge of collapse was just a fiasco. and one of the reasons, quite frankly, we have almost willfully blinded ourselves, and part of that was because henry kissinger had cut a deal with the shah in which he basically said if you'll give us access to your listening posts on the

soviet union, we will look the other way, we will not pay any attention to your political opponents, and we'll -- we simply relied on the shah's secret police for all of our intelligence. so i get into all of this in the book. and that whole relationship between stan turner and berzin key and jimmy carter and all of that, to me, is really fascinating -- brzezinski. but one of of the caveats about all of this, i suppose, one of the great sources i spoke to was stu eizenstat, just a brilliant guy. he's still very active and a really persuasive voice on foreign affairs and wrote a book on carter recently that was

terrific. eizenstat was saying that, you know, our intelligence was just terrible during this whole period and that we often just completely misunderstand other societies. and this was a classic example. and, certainly, vietnam before iran was a classic example of us just not understanding the societiment -- society. but at the end of the day, you also have to wonder if we had known that the shah was on the verge of collapse, what would policymakers have done with that knowledge? you know, what exactly could we have done to have changed that pivotal moment in history, you know? would there have been any way to have arrived at some modus vivendi with the ayatollah? i'm not sure the odds are all that great that we would have been smart enough to figure out what to do.

and i'm a great george packer fan, by the way. i loved his book "our man" on richard holbrooke. who was my first boss, by the way. about, just about the human, just about how badly we have misunderstood so many of these conflicts from vietnam to iran, to bosnia, to our current situation. so we are, obviously, human beings who are terribly flawed, and diplomats are as well. >> so are you suggesting there's not much of a learning curve? >> well, i think that, i think the cia probably much more capable today than it was in 1979. and there was certainly a lot of, no offense to anybody who went to this school as i did, but it was considered all white

male in yale for decades, and diversity was certainly a huge problem at the cia. and i think it helped to blind the cia in many ways. i mean, i think that we've been historically for many, many decades falled to understand these other -- failed to understand these other cultures. and lack of diversity is certainly a part of that. and that's vastly improved now. and i think the ci a's improved in many other ways too. >> interesting. i just want to tell everyone if you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat or the q&a. i will work them in. i have another question that kind of speaks to the evolution of the cia which is more structural, and that is the dni. the odni, the office of the director of national intelligence, creation of

post-9/11 reorganization of government to enhance the intelligence and national security priorities of -- and abilities of the country. it meant that the rest of the cia was not the head of the intelligence community the way it was sort of understood to function before. what do you make of that, and what do other cia directors make of that? >> well, funny story about that because when my -- i was fortunate, very lucky when my book was launched, i had a zoom party, and john brennan and jim clapper attended by zoom. and i was asked this question about the dni and what i thought of it, and i proceeded to say that, you know, after 9/11 congress essentially felt that it had to meddle in the intelligence community and do something. and so they created this office called the director of national

intelligence, and essentially it muddled lines of authority and confused everyone. at which point jim clapper's screen started pulsating, and he -- [laughter] he started waving his hand, and he jumped in and defended the restructuring of the intelligence community. and, of course, the dni office that he occupied. and then brennan came in and jumped on me too and said he could never have run the cia. it was a 24/7 job, without having someone like jim clapper to talk care of, coordinate all the -- take care of, coordinate all of the other intelligence services. and i finally conceded that they have a point. it really -- i do think that relationship worked with jim clapper as dni and john brennan as cia director because they figured out how to make it work. and clapper was the perfect guy

in that job, in my opinion, as dni. he didn't want to step the on brennan's toes, the cia's director's. -- cia director's. he wanted to help by coordinating the other agencies and leaving brennan to do his job as he saw fit. and it worked. they got along. it was very rocky in the beginning, and i gave an example of leon panetta and denny blair earlier where, in the beginning quite frankly, when the dni showed up as langley, he was greeted as -- [inaudible] at the gates. this was, nobody at cia wanted to be meddled with by the dni. but it's a system of restructuring that is working much more successfully now, i think, than it used to. the problem, of course, now, currently, is that we have a director of national intelligence, in my opinion --

john ratcliffe -- who is a partisan hack who, frankly, has really been serving the president's partisan purposes rather than being an honest broker of intelligence. so that is a serious problem. >> we have a lot of questions, but i -- one is about torture. and you talk about enhanced interrogation techniques, as you phrased it, in your book, and you talk about it a lot. and i guess my question is how now do you see the cia's reflection on that period of time and what happened? and do you think there's a general sense that, no, it was illegal and we shouldn't have gone this and maybe we won't do it again? what's your thought? >> well, i, first of all, when i refer to those techniques, i'm simply using what the cia's term

was. it's not the term i would use. and mark me zedty ghei me a hard time in a review for supposedly referring to it that way. what's fascinating to me is that, first of all, michael haden said to me in a quote that later became famous but he first said it to me for a documentary that if a president wants to waterboard anybody ever again, he'd better bring his own bucket because this agency isn't going down that road again. and i think he's right. for one thing, it's illegal. in my view, it should be illegal. in my view, it's um moral. immoral. it's not something that the united states of america should be doing. if you talk to david petraeus who has some experience with,

who was in charge of more detainees probably than anyone on the face of the earth as head of centcom, he'll tell you that the way you get information is by having interrogators bombed with their subjects and you don't get it, you don't get effective intelligence through torture. having said that, i felt that it would be, it was important to get inside the heads of the directors on whose watch that took place. and if you talk to george tenet, he will, he will give you an impassioned argument that he believed that these techniques were the only way to prevent what he thought was a second wave of attacks that were

imminent after 9/11. that second wave of attacks never occurred. he would argue that some of the techniques did produce intelligence that disrupted plots and saved lives. and mike morrell, to give you -- to cite another acting director -- not exactly an arch-conservative, the odds on favorite to become hillary clinton's cia director, mike morrell will until you that there is no question in his mind that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques provided actionable intelligence that resulted in the ap are remention of terrorists -- apprehension of terrorists. and he gives specific examples. morrell's not arguing, therefore, that we should be doing it anymore, but he's simply saying that it's not as

simple as it's been por drawed. and the -- portrayed. and the last thing i'll say about it is that the senate majority report, which was so damning and in many ways very thorough e and convincing about the inefficacy, if you will, of those techniques, they never interviewed any of the directors on whose watch it happened. george tenet, michael haden, porter goss, none of them were interviewed. so if you want to get a sense of what those directors were thinking inside their heads, you can find it in my chapter, the spymasters. >> right. in addition to being illegal, we should probably -- [laughter] mention that part. a number of people have asked about our relationship with other powers, and i think that, like, starting right now with trump and our relationship with

the five is, the rest of the world is one question. and another question that can be bundled with that is what about, have you talked with any directors about, you know, activities that are with non-al i lied powers. that's a way of paraphrasing this. and just sort of how do you, how does the cia see its position in the world vis-a-vis with its take over time to deal with foreign powers, and then the question of what about our relationship with other, our coordination of intelligence sources, services, etc., in the current context. >> you know, it's, it's a tough question. it's a good question, it's a very hard question to answer particularly with a, because we have a c ia director currently who flies under the radar, gives no interviews, is a, is really

very much, you know, she's, she was trained as a covert operative. it seems to be in her dna, and she doesn't talk a lot about what they're doing. i wish that she and mike pompeo had given me interviews for the book. it, because i believe that the cia director has to be the honest broker of intelligence not only to the president, but to the american people and that cia directors should give interviews. you know, the really great ones weren't afraud of -- afraid of tough questions, the richard helms, the panettas and the bob gates. so that's my little speech about their unwillingness to give interviews. having said that, it's that hard to know very much about how much the trump era has affected the cia's relationships with the five is.

gina haspel has a very close relationship with british intelligence. she was a two-time station chief in london, and so -- and i have a great story in the book about how she, when she was rising through the ranks, haspel formed a friendship with the unlikeliest mentor imaginable, and that was jose rodriguez, the architect of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. he became her sort of feminist mentor. he was the one who would say to her when she was thinking about becoming station chief in geneva, he would say to her, listen, girl, that's not good enough for you. you've got to go to london. that's where it's happening, if you want to advance your career. and she did. so a little digression there, but i do think british

intelligence and the cia have a pretty good relationship. hard to know with the others and hard to know what the effect of the trump presidency has been. but we all remember the time that donald trump met the oval office with russian officials including lavrov, and he blurted out details about a very sensitive israeli operation in the middle east. there is real concern among allies and other countries that this president can't be trusted with intelligence. that's simply a fact. as i wrote in "the washington post", there are other big problems which is that this president is, essentially, unreadable. he doesn't read, he's incurious,

he thinks he knows everything worth knowing, and he thinks he can share stuff with the vladimir putins of the world. that's a problem. there are -- i will tell you that bob woodward reports that dan coats was concerned that this president, that russia might have something on this president. i can simply tell you that coats is hardly alone among very hue hue -- high ranking intelligence officials who believe the psalm thing. and especially after -- the same thing. and especially after hell sip key, i had one person who used to run russian operations for the cia tell me after that press conference in helsinki, he could think of no other rational possibility except that the russians have some sort of financial relationship with

trump. so none of that is a good thing when it comes to the cia's relations with other intelligence services. >> we have a ton of questions, but two of them i just want to give to you together that aren't necessarily related, but you'll relate them. [laughter] which is, they have to do with now. and one of them is china. which is not a huge part of what you've written about. do you -- how do you see china in terms of the extra burden it puts on the cua for right now -- cia for right now? how robust do you think the cia is to handle that. and the second thing is, and this you could write a whole book about, which is the doj's increasing, you know, role in all of this as it has gotten closer to the intelligence community after 9/11, but now it's unusual -- its unusual position inside this administration. and so i'm sure you can give some thought to those, and

because our read -- our listeners are asking, i'm asking you. >> so on china just briefly, i think that there's no doubt about it that china's a huge challenge for the cia, and china's been unusually successful in the rolling up of cia assets in recent years. and that's been kind of an untold story. there's been some new york times reporting on that, but china is coming on strong as a competitor as everyone knows, and i think that it's a huge challenge for the cia going forward. maybe the biggest challenge. as for the doj's role, i think that this is a case where i think gina gina haspel has to be really, really careful.

the way in which donald trump has succeeded in politicizing the top levels of the intelligence community would make richard nixon blush. he has really compromised intelligence and politicized it and left many top jobs simply unfilled or empty. and he's installed a partisan sycophant in john ratcliffe as the trekker of national excellence -- director of national intelligence. that makes gina haspel's job as the honest broker of intelligence not only to the president, but to congress expect american people that much more difficult and so much more important and critical at this time. and the fact that we have a doj investigation led by john durham

seems specious at best, that seems aimed at trying to prosecute intelligence officers for doing their jobs is something that gina haspel has to be very, very careful about. she really needs to have the backs of her employees. and her record really mixed on that. i have have -- i is have to say when donald trump threw his intelligence briefer under the bus saying that the first he'd heard of the virus was on january 23 and that his briefer said it was, quote, no big deal, we all know now her name. she earthly -- evidently, by the way, is on her withdraw out, and it's not clear who's going to replace her, gina haspel's silence was deafening when trump

threw her under the bus, in my view. i think the cia's responsibility, as i say, to the public. and this was a case where there were so many things wrong with that statement. everything is a bug deal, and if it is also briefed to the president verbally, it's an even bigger deal. so again, i think this is a, you know, this is a perilous time right now for the intelligence community, and an awful lot is riding on gina haspel as the honest broker. >> so when you look ahead to the future -- [laughter] the november, the short future like november and then afterwards, what are the top three recommendations to give the cia better tools or less tools or more restraints or more

clarity or more of a vows at the table, any of -- a voice at the table, any of those things? are there anything you would recommend, or you'd just say -- >> well, it has to start at the top. it has to start in november because this is not the first time we've had a president who was convinced that the ci e a was a deep state -- cia was a deep state full of liberal enemies hell bent on bringing him down. richard nixon thought that about the cia back in the helms era, and he thought dick helms was this martini-sipping elitist who was out to get him. nixon was wrong, trump is wrong. trump is, takes it to another level. he's delusional. he believes that the intelligence community -- he's compared us to nazi germany. he brings a level of contempt for the intelligence community into the presidency that makes it impossible to brief him,

makes it impossible for him to have the right information when history-making decisions are made. so the overwhelming priority has to be in november finding a way to get someone into the oval office who respects intelligence and who respects the truth. because at the end of the day, that's what the cia does. >> so that brings up sort of, i think, a last substantive question which is the last election versus this election, you know? and the question of what did we know then and what do we know now. do you think we've learned enough lessons about interference from the point of view of the intelligence community in 2016 that this election really can be protected one way or another? >> we're certainly, we're certainly more aware of the nature of the soviet threat, and

is so that's obviously an advantage going into this. having said that, there are always surprises. and in august of 2016, and my book actually opens on this scene, john brennan is up burning the midnight oil on the seventh floor of cia headquarters looking out at the canopy of trees of langley and trying to figure out what's coming. and he realizes that a soviet -- russian, sorry, attack on the u.s. election is coming. but at that moment in august of 2016, he didn't know about the whole social media component of it. what he knew at that point was that they had hacked into 39 states' electoral machine ily, and it later turned out to be 50. so there are those, uncolluding mike morrell -- including mike morrell who said that's really,

2016 was a strategic intelligence failure on the cia's part in the sense that they didn't see that extra component of the russian attack. so we don't know what the russians may try that's different this time around. we can guess and, obviously, they're looking closely. but it's a problem when the president of the united states denies the reality and pretends that it's not happening. it's hard to mobilize a very effective effort to stop a russian attack. so that would be my answer. it's hard to know -- they know, they have a better idea, but it's hard to know exactly how it'll play out. >> so our last question is always the same question which is what brings you hope? other types -- what brings you hope, yes, and maybe that what

brings you hope is the topic of your next book, but what brings you hope? [laughter] >> i do have another book in the works which i can't really talk about but would love to come back and talk about some day. >> okay. >> this is going to sound a little bit corny, maybe. i have a whole chapter on george w. bush's director of the cia, and there was no greater defender. he loved that job, as i think everyone knows. but i would think, you know, one of the things that strikes me having gotten to know a lot of people out there is that at the end of the day, almost everybody if they're human beings, they have political opinions, there are vast differences between the analysts who tend to be geeky

individuals who are studying, doing their work on paper and the covert operatives who are out breaking laws in countries all over the world, but the vast majority of them really are very good at keeping their heads down and trying to do their jobs and produce honest intelligence. and they don't pay e a lot of -- pay a lot of attention to whoever is in the oval office at any given moment or any of the bluster that's coming their way. and that may sound polly anaish and a little bit corner, but you do talk some hope away from that when you do see how dedicated most of them are. >> so institutional integrity doesn't have to rely on the person on top. >> well, it helps. and, you know, there's no question about it it's critical

that people at the cia believe that the cia director has their backs. the great ones always did, the leon panettas, the bob gates, others of that kind. >> well, chris whipple, thank you for a wonderful conversation. i know the audience has liked it. you can buy this book, there's a button that you can push for the link you got today, so you're going to like it. i can tell you that right now. chris, thank you so much. i'm sure we'll talk again soon. >> it was such a pleasure, thank you. thank you for having me. >> yep. ..