the storm coming and one of his workers comes up and is referencing you can see it, he says oh my gosh, it's coming and bill paxton, that moment stopped and said it is already here. i think it is becoming real because it is tangible. you are running for it, you are breathing it. you are swimming in it. you could be drowning in it. i think it is here. i know that sounds dramatic but it is dramatic. i am often struck with rachel carson. i quote this in the book superman's not coming, she talks about how man has the fateful power to alter nature and that is about all the will not be won by us. instead of trying to alter that, we look to ourselves, and

master and alter our responses, our solutions and our actions. >> watch the rest of this program visit our website booktv.org. search for aaron brockovich and the title of her book superman's not coming using the box at the top of the page. >> my name is karen greenberg, thank you for joining us at the center of national security, we are delighted to bring you this afternoon's conversation, joining me is award-winning author, journalist, documentary maker his new book is the spy ministers, can you see? how the cia director's shape history in the future. we are going to talk a lot about this book today. welcome, thank you for joining us. >> thank you so much for having me. >> this is a wonderful read. when i started i was like oh no, this is going to be too much information. i won't be able to take it in. it is fantastic.

in addition to your own knowledge and research it is based on 70 interviews and you interviewed among those the directors of the cia, living directors of the cia accept the current one and it is i will say it is not so much about the cia director's as the cia director's and their relationship to the president. would you agree with that? >> thanks for the kind words about the book. one thing i tried to do is humanize these directors. i was lucky because of the cast of characters that couldn't have been tripped up from dick helms in the 60s who was the quintessential cia director, bob gates described him as a james bondian character, figuring one hand, dry martini

in the other, he could walk into the oval office until lbj that the domino theory was flawed. going forward through bill colby, vito corleone of the cia and then you've got bill casey and an amazing cast of characters all the way to gina haskell, the first woman to run the g cia. the book focuses a lot on that relationship between the president and the cia director. is almost impossible balancing act for a cia director because he or she on the one hand has to tell the president hard truths and also keep the president's here. and and it is practically mission impossible.

>> host: don't know if you saw the comey film over the weekend but it becomes clear how hard that particular relationship is generally and how much harder it was under trump. going down that line a little bit, who had the worst relationship? i read the book so i think i know what you are going to say and who had the best relationship? >> guest: jim woolsey would have to be the worst relationship. ..

to become cia director but no 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 turned 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 trying to get an appointment with bill clinton. >> oh, my god. >> so was not a very productive relationship and woolsey met his demise over the james scandal,

that case was the most serious mole probably an american intelligence history. intelligence history happened on his watch, and it essentially ended his tenure. >> and what about the best relationship? >> there 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. here's 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 serve 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 as cheese and of the great cia directors but panetta was right up there with the best in both jobs. that's partly because that had a lot to do with the fact that a netted when you begin director for obama he was 70. yet been around the block. he served in congress. he was comfortable in the corridors of power. he 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's essential in both jobs. >> you portrayed him as being not just an honest broker but like a brilliant strategist. >> he was, he was.

one of the great infighting stories that i felt in the leon panetta chapter is about the time that poor denny blair who was then 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 chiefs. 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. blair sent out a directive without informing panetta, to

all the station saying that he, denny blair, would be appointing the new station chiefs. well, panetta waited about a half hour and sent out another message to all the stations saying, disregard the previous message. well, this went, 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 they walked into the office to adjudicate this with the biden, leon turned to him and said, joe, is our key times till 9:30 to marquis biden said yes, and blair knew he was a dead man walking. >> this is not just about the white house, presidents come cia directors but it's also a

chronicle of american foreign policy. and not just things a looming behind the scenes which is the major events that take place in american foreign policy over the 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 i think a lot of readers and our audience won't know that much about, and that is that of -- i just wonder if you tell that story because i don't know others listening you but i felt like i am so embarrassed i don't know the story. now i am so grateful that it know the story. tell us. >> don't be embarrassed because a lot of people don't know it and, in fact, the first half of the story that i tell in the book about him has never been reported before.

it's an absolutely unbelievable story that it would for three or four decades. this man was far and away the most wanted terrorist in the middle east by both the cia and mossad going all the way back to the worst day of cia history was the bombing of the beirut, of the embassy in beirut which killed so many cia officers and other americans at the time. well, subsequently it was determined that this was probably the dawn of the era of truck bomb terrorism. that was really the beginning. it was a really pivotal time. from that day forward this minute more american and israeli blood on his have been anyone

picky was the operational genius of hezbollah, the operational chief. they called him the scarlet pimpernel of terrorism because he is so elusive. they had one grainy photograph of him, , the cia, they could never keep up with him. he would wear disguises. he developed pioneered the use of the so-called shake charge, a kind of sophisticated ied that really essentially drove the israelis out of lebanon. it was that effective and lethal and it would cut through a tank coming to kill famous israeli general triggering the israeli withdrawal. in short, he was the most wanted guy and the other two most wanted guys were a general sue lehmann of syria and then the rain in general named soleimani whose name may ring a bell since he was killed in january of this

year. in any event, cia tried and tried to track down the man and i tell the story of an operation on bill clinton's watch at the end of his presidency on george tenets watch as cia director in which a tracked him down to beirut. they discovered he was visiting his mistresses flat and he would visit her and he would eat her as it turned out. the cia enlisted her to set him up and grabbed him and bundled him down to the dock and onto a boat at all to a battleship offshore. it all went south. the operation failed at another decade went by before cfa 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 him, tracked him as he was driving around damascus in his luxurious suv. they decided they couldn't plant that the bomb on the phone. he discarded phones too often but he always had his suv and they wound up come cia building a bomb. ahead was a technical marvel because they had to replace the hold back door of the suv without the bodyguards noticing and had to match the paint color exactly, even the age of the paint job. they did all this and sod wound 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 what back for permission. permission was denied. mughniyah was only legitimate target. they waited and soleimani went off and they finally did get mughniyah. it's just an unbelievable story, and the whole -- and also the whole delicate negotiation because assassination quote-unquote has always been a front proposition at the cia. it's been prohibited by executive orders and certainly 12333. for decades in this case they 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. >> you have a whole page where you excerpt from your interviews where he you ask a number of cia directors what happened and just no comment, no comment, no, it i guess comes with the territory but it's not story eventually get to know. >> can i just add that for domes very own john brenham who finally -- fordham -- john brennan, i asked what happened picky final look at me and said, he died quickly. period. that was his comment. >> that's more than you got from any of the others so interestin

interesting. one thing i wanted to ask, you don't at least really talk about, i would love your thoughts on, is the use of military generals to be head of 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, just kind of like, because there is way which the united states authorization for using force, covert activity. what you to learn about that particular, that mixing of kind of expertise? >> it's a mixed bag. the two directors i get into with our hayden and betray us. each of them really capable -- p trias. really interesting characters.

hayden tells a story about how first when he arrives he would run the nsa, national security agency prior to he was still a general, not quite retired when he arrived at the cia and he went to the bubble come the so-called bubble, the auditorium at cia on his first company to make his first address to the troops, as it were. as he was speaking when he came to the individual marks he took questions and somebody's hand shot up and they said, what would you like us to call you? and hayden who is famously eloquent and glib and articulate was prone for a minute picky did not answer and finally just said whatever makes you comfortable. don't call me general. call me whatever you want to call me. he said in retrospect it was the

most important thing he said. that day. there is what some at cia called, something called 4-star general disease. and what it means is that military people sometime arrive at the cia and certainly directors have arrived on occasion with a very well-developed sense of entitlement, used to having 50, a staff of 50 people to come as david petraeus did when he was in afghanistan, to cater to his every whim. this was a little bit of a problem for petraeus when he arrived. it was just a culture shock. they are just different cultures, and when you have been a commanding general like the tragus, you are accustomed -- like the tragus come you're

accustomed to give a way of life and operating and having people at your beck and call. he got over that i think it, he adjust to the caa culture but in the beginning it was rocky for him. he had only just really adjusted to the cia culture when the course he met his untimely demise by sharing classified information with his mistress. and in the book, i mean, i ask him point-blank about that and it's fascinating. >> use an excerpt from her which i felt was also very interesting. that 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 the process and how that plays out looking at all these different directors and the relationships with president? >> to me that might be the most

fascinating scene in the book, because it's continuous theme from the beginning all the way up to our current cia director gina haspel. i had the privilege of getting to know the widow of richard helms, who previously mentioned quintessential cia old-school cia director. cynthia died last summer but i spent a lot of time with her right 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 was, he was a flawed character. he was brilliant and he was smooth and he was, you know, i

love 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 with a woman from iran. like a 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. but 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, said that's not in the cia charter and lbj that i am well aware of that. i wanted. he wanted intelligence. well, helms should have known better but he bent the law. i mean come he set up an operation called operation mh chaos. it was illegal domestic surveillance of protesters who it every right to protest 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 white house chief of staff, called him into the white house and told him famously to shut down the fbi investigation into watergate. helms was having none of it,

auntie 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 of them have had to hear 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 let the military handle it. the military says that the diplomats handle it. they all say let's let the cia do it. cia is one former director told me that you could never get rid of the cia, never abolish it because presidents would have no one to blame.

so the fact of the matter over the last five or six decades, when the cia gets in trouble, it's usually because presidents have asked them to do stuff they shouldn't be doing. >> did they get in trouble? >> do they get in trouble? >> now, you said when the cia, did actually get held accountable or get in trouble? >> yeah, certainly been blamed time and again. the other classic lament out at langley which a love, at this town early policy successes and intelligence failures certainly cia was blamed for 9/11, was called the failure of imagination. it was called all kinds of things but basically the cia was, george tends deputy said, people would come up to become congressmen would come up to me and say how does a it feel that the worst intelligence failure since pearl harbor?

the truth is, and i have a really detailed chapter on this, in july of 2001 george tenet, black and the head of the al-qaeda unit went over to the bush white house, covert slammed his fist on the table and said we got to go on a war footing now. met with condi rice. essentially they blew the whistle and nobody heard it. this was a case, this is in my view less of intelligence failure and more of a policy failure, i white house failure to heed their warnings. fast-forward to 2020 and we are now suffering the 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. >> wonderful thing to talk abou about, i would like 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 you talk a little bit about that? it's a threat you talk about throughout, it just doesn't come out of the blue and you talk about the trump presidency and the cia. >> this is a white house that not only has declared war on process and norms. this is a white house that essentially declared war on governing from day one. i'll never forget denis mcdonough, , the outgoing white house chief of staff for obama

come telling me that when the clock struck noon on january 20, you said in his office waiting for reince priebus the chief of staff and his staff to arrive, and nobody showed up. he waited an hour or more and 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 in norms have been abandoned. and one case in point is 9/11, let's go back to that for for a second because one of the things that i learned in the book, i did a documentary in 2015 for showtime by the way called the spy masters in which we told the story of the july 10 meeting come july 10, 2001. in. 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 had to do in july of 2001 was call a principal's meeting. and, of course, principal's meeting being a headset cia, fbi, vice president or national security adviser and all of those department heads, and you get them around a table and you shake the tree. when you shake the tree with all those people at the table, stuff falls fast. a number of people told me that they think that had condi rice called a principal's 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, , a failure to communicate between cia and fbi, that's the kind of stuff that gets found out when you go through that kind of process. so 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, they were living in a kind of time warp. they just couldn't believe that a bunch of guys with beards in caves in afghanistan were going to blow up the world trade center. as black put it to me memorably, he said they thought terrorist were a bunch of euro lefties can stay up all night and champagne and blow stuff up during the day. that was the '70s mentality. >> but there were people as you pointed out, tried to get that message to the national security council and the president. i think it's one of the things we have quite ignored as the country yet and we need to reflect on, as you say so welcome the war on government. another threat that goes through the book, and this is less

abstract, is iran. every director time and time again has to deal with iran almost always in a crisis situation or more than one crisis situation, right? the iran-contra, now soleimani, and others. i don't know exactly ask a question but it what you know, like where do you think and to what peter you get think we had the best understanding of . of time -- and relationship with iran? >> we certainly had a very close relationship with the wrong guy in iran, the shah of iran, as he turned out to be. thus one of my favorite chapters in the book because again, stansfield 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 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 the late 1979 and on the verge of collapse was just a fiasco. one of the reasons quite frankly we had 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 will 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

simply relied on its secret police for all of our intelligence. i get into all of this in the book, and that whole relationship between stan turner and. >> sewage brzezinski and jimmy carter and all that to me is really fascinating. one of the caveats about all of this i suppose is one of the great sources spoke to his stu eizenstat come just a brilliant guy. some of you may know him. he's still very active and really persuasive voice on foreign affairs and wrote a book on carter recently that was terrific. eisenstadt was saying that our intelligence was just terrible during this whole period. and that we often just completely misunderstand other

societies. this was the classic example and certainly vietnam before i ran was a classic example of us just not understanding the 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, where there have been any way to have arrived at some way with the ayatollah? i'm not sure the odds were all that great that we would have been smart enough to figure out what to do. i make great george packer fan by the way. i love this book our man on richard holbrooke who was my first boss by the way. about come 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. we are obviously human beings, are terribly flawed, and diplomats are as well. >> so i just just just think this that much of a learning curve -- are you suggesting there's not much of a learning curve? >> i think the cia is probably much more capable today than it was in 1979. there were certainly a lot of, no offense to anybody who went to the school as i did, but it was considered all white male and yale for decades, and there was diversity was certainly a huge problem at the cia. and i think it helps to blind

the cia many ways. i think we have been historically for many, many decades failed to understand these other cultures and lack of diversity certainly is a part of that. that's vastly improved now. i think the cia has improved in many other ways, too. >> interesting. i just want to tell everyone if you have any questions feel free to put them in the chat, in the q&a whichever you like and i will work them, i worked a few in the conversation already but 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, office of the director of national intelligence, creation of post-9/11, reorganization of governments to enhance the intelligence and national security priorities and abilities of the country.

that meant that the director of the cia was not the head of the intelligence community the way sort of it was understood to function before. what do you make of it and what do other cia directors make of that? >> funny story about that because i was fortunate, very lucky when my book was launched. i had a zoom party and john brennan in jim clapper attended by zoom. 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 modeled lines of authority and confused everyone -- modeled -- at which point jim clapper

screen started pulsating and he started waving his hand and he jumped in and defended the restructuring of intelligence community and, of course, the dni office that he occupied. in 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 take care of, coordinate all the other intelligence services. and i finally conceded that they have a point. it really, i do think that relationship worked with jim clapper at dni and john brennern as cia director because they figured out how to make it work. clapper was the perfect guy in that job in my opinion as dni. he didn't want to step on the cia directors toes. 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 they gave an example of leon panetta and denny blair earlier where in the beginning quite frankly when the dni showed up at langley it was like he was greeted as a visigoth at the gate. nobody at cia wanted to be meddle with by the dni. but it's a system, a 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 direct 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. that is a serious problem. >> we have a lot of questions, one is about torture. we could talk about the interrogation techniques as referred to in your book? you talk about it a lot and i guess the question is, how now do you see the cia reflection on that. of time and what happened? do you think there's a general sense of know, it was illegal and we shouldn't have gone there and maybe we won't do it again? what's your thoughts? >> first of all, when i refer to those techniques as enhanced interrogation techniques and simply using with the cia term was. it's not the term i would use. martin said he gave me a hard time in review for supposedly

referring to it that way. what's fascinating to me is that, first of all, michael hayden said to me in a quote the later became famous when he first said to me for a documentary, that if a president wants to waterboard anybody ever again, a better bring his own bucket because this agency isn't going down that road again. i think he's right. from one think it's illegal. in my view it should be illegal. in my view it's immoral. it's not something that united states of america should be doing. if you talk to two david petraeus -- if you talked to david petraeus who was in charge of more detainees probably than anyone on the face of the earth as head of centcom, he will 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 talked to george tenet, 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 in minute after 9/11. that second wave of attacks never occurred -- were imminent.

he would argue that some of the techniques did produce intelligence that disrupted plots and saved lives. and mike morell, to give you another acting director, not exactly an archconservative. the odds on favorite to become hillary clinton's cia director. mike morell will tell you that there is no question in his mind that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques provided actionable intelligence that resulted in the apprehension of terrorists, and he gives specific examples. he is not arguing, therefore, that we should be doing it anymore. but you simply saying that not as simple ideas been portrayed. the last thing i would you say about it is that the senate majority report which was so damning and in many ways very

thorough and convincing about the in efficacy if you will of those techniques, they never interviewed in of the directors on whose watch it happened. that is george tenet, michael hayden, 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 of "the spymasters." >> in addition to being illegal, we should all mention that, , a number of people asked about our relationship with other powers. and i think like starting right now with trump and our relationship with the five eyes or the rest of the world is one of the questions. another question that can be bundled with that is, what about come have you talk to these

directors about activities that are with non-allies, powers? test by this with paraphrasing this. how does the cia the its position in the world vis-à-vis what risk is been wanting to take over time to deal with foreign powers? and then the question of what about our relationship with other, coordination of intelligence, sources, services, et cetera come in the current context? >> it's a tough question, a good question, a very hard question to answer, particularly with, because we have a cia director currently who flies under the radar, gives no interviews, is really very much, you know, she was trained as a covert operative ticket seems to be in her dna and she doesn't talk a

lot about what they are doing. i wish that she and mike pompeo had given interviews for the book. 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. the really great ones were not afraid of tough questions, richard helms and leon panetta and bob gates. so that's my speech about their unwillingness to give interviews. having said that, it's hard to know very much about how much the trumpcare has affected the cia's relationship with the five eyes -- trump era. gina haspel is a very close relationship with traditional intelligence. she was a two time station chief in london, and so come and i

have a great story in the book about how she come when she was rising through the ranks, haskell formed a friendship with the unlikeliest mentor imaginable, and that was josé rodriguez, the architect of the black site and enhanced come so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. he became her sort of feminist mentor. he was one who would say to her when she was thinking about becoming station chief in geneva, he would say to her, listen, thorough, that's not good enough for you. you have got to go to london. that's where it's happening if you want to advance your career. and she did. so that's a little depression do to think reddish intelligence and 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.

what we all remember the time that donald trump met in 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 is simply a fact. as a wrote in the "washington post" there are other big problems which is that this president is essentially not breathable. he doesn't read. he doesn't read the president's daily brief. he thinks he knows everything worth knowing. and he thinks he can share stuff with vladimir putin and others of the world. that's a problem.

there are others, 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 i can simply tell you that cos is hardly alone among very high-ranking intelligence officials who believe the same thing, and especially after helsinki. i had one person who used to run russian operations for the cia tell me that after that press conference in helsinki, he could think of no other rational possibility, except that the russians have some sort of compromise or financial relationship with trump. so none of that is a good thing when it comes to the cia's relations with other intelligence services.

>> there's a ton of questions but two of them i just want to give you together that are not necessarily related but you will relate them, which is they have to do with now. one of them is china, which is not a huge part of what you've written about. how do you see china in terms of the extra burden it puts on the cia for right now? how robust do you think the cia is in order to handle that? the second thing is, this you could write a whole book about, which is the doj's increasing role in all of this as it's got closer to the intelligence community after 9/11 but now it's unusual position inside this administration? and so unsure you have given some thoughts to those and because our listeners are asking, i'm asking you. >> on china, just briefly, i think there's no doubt about

that china is a huge challenge for the cia. and china has been unusually successful in rolling up cia assets in recent years, and that's been kind of an old told story. there's been some "new york times" reporting on that. china is coming on strong as a competitor. as everyone knows. i think that it's a huge challenge for the cia going forward. maybe the biggest challenge. as for the doj, for all -- i think this is a case where i think 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 been compromised intelligence and politicized it, and left many top jobs simply unfilled or empty. and he is installed a partisan sycophant in john ratcliffe as director of national intelligence. that makes gino's job as the honest broker of intelligence not only to the president but to congress and the american people, that much more difficult and so much more important and critical at this time. and the fact we have doj investigation led by john durham that 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 is really mixed on that. i have to say when donald trump through his intelligence briefer under the bus saying that, the first year of the virus was on january 23 and is briefer said it was quote no big deal, we all know now her name is beth saturn. she evidently by the way is on her way out and is not at all clear who's going to replace her. gina hassles silence was deafening when trump to her under the bus, in my view. i think the cia director responsible as a say to the public and this was a case where there was only things wrong with that statement here everything

in the pdb by definition is a big deal, and if it is also briefed to the president verbally, it's an even bigger deal. so again i think this is, this is a perilous time right now for the intelligence community, and awful lot is writing on gina haspel as the honest broker. >> so when you look ahead to the future the november, the short future like november and then afterwards, if stomach and you and said what of the top three recommendations to give the cia better tools are less tools are more restraint or more clarity or more of a voice at the table coming of those things, are there anything would recommend or would you say let's just --

>> it has to start in november because this is not the first time we had a president who was convinced that the cia was a deep state full of liberal enemies hell-bent on bring him down. richard nixon thought that about the cia back in the helms era. and you thought that counts was this martini sipping elitist who is out to get him. nixon was wrong. trump is wrong. trump takes it to another level. he is delusional. he believes that the intelligence community compares us to nazi germany. he brings a level of content 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 find a way to get someone into the oval office who respects intelligence and he respects the truth because at the end of the day that's what the cia does. >> so that brings up i think the last substantive question which is the last election versus this election. the question of what it we know then and what do we know now. do you think we learned enough lessons about the interference from the point of view of the intelligence community? in 2016 this election really can be protected one way or another. >> we are certainly more aware of the nature of the soviet threat, and so that's obviously and advantage going into this year having said that, there are

always surprises, and in august of 2016, and my book actually opens on the scene, john brennan is burning the midnight oil on the seventh floor cia headquarters looking out at a canopy of trees of langley and trying to figure out what's coming. and he realizes about a soviet, russian story attack on 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 was they hacked into 39 states electoral machinery and a later turned out to be 50. there are those including mike morrell who said that's really come 2016 was a strategic intelligence failure of the cia's part in the sense they didn't see that extra component. of the russian attack. so we don't know what the russians may try it's different

this time around. we can guess, and obviously they are 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, i mean, they have a better idea that it's hard to know exactly how it will play out. >> so our last question is always the same question, which is what brings you hope? what brings you hope or, maybe what brings you hope is a topic of your next book what brings you hope? >> i can't really talk about but would love to and talk about

some day. this is going to sound a little bit corny maybe, at the risk of i have a whole chapter on george h.w. bush as cia director and there was no greater defender of the cia. he loved that job as a think everybody knows. 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 knows they are human beings. they have political opinions here there are vast differences between the analysts who tend to be some deprived, geeky, intellectuals who are stuck doing their work on the paper and there are covert operatives of breaking laws in countries all over the world. but the vast majority of them

really are very good at keeping her head down and trying to do their jobs and produce honest intelligence, and they don't 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. that may sound pollyannaish and a little bit corny, but you do take some hope away from that when you just see how dedicated most of them are. >> so institutional integrity doesn't have to rely on the person on top? >> will, it helps. you know, there's a question about it that critical that people at the cia believe that the cia director has their backs. the great lines always did. leon panetta, bob gates, others

of that time. >> well, chris whipple, thank you for wonderful conversation. i know the audience has liked it. you can buy this book on invitation. there's a button you can push for link you got today. you are going to like it, i can tell you that right at the chris, thank thank you so much. i'm sure we'll talk again soon. >> such a pleasure. hankie. thanks for having me. >> you are watching c-span2, your unfiltered view of government. c-span2 was created by america's cable-television companies and today we're brought to you by these television companies to provide c-span2 the viewers as a public service. >> coming up tonight at 8 p.m. on c-span the federalist society hears from attorneys on the bible and trump campaigns on the future of election law. on c-span2 this and is back at noon eastern.

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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good morning, everyone and happy new year's eve. i want to as always thank dr.