weekend on c-span three. now, on american artifacts, part two of the visit to the cia museum in langley, virginia. cia curator begins in the director's gallery. the director's gallery. normally the director selects the artists will do his portrait after he leaves office. we're are standing here in front of the portrait of george >> we are standing in front of the portrait of george herbert walker bush, who was director of central intelligence at a difficult time in our history, following the pike and church committee hearings in 1955. the agency was under investigation by congress and mauro was low at the time. he is the first member of congress to serve as director, sent over by the president to help repair relationships between cia and congress. the oversight committees come out of this investigation as

well. select committee on intelligence and house permanent select committee on intelligence. he was with us just 10 days shy of the year. he would have liked to stay on. he established a practice which we still use today, which is -teamd a-team, b competitive analysis, or red cell analysis of stop and agency would generate analysis on a given subject and set up another team to attack that theory. so we think osama bin laden is in that compound at abbottabad. if not, what explains it? he started it. still exists today. urgencything that took was cia briefings to the presidential candidates. truman started it. he did not want his successor, resident eisenhower, to be as

uninformed as he felt he was. remember, truman did not even know about the manhattan project. but under his watch it takes a new urgency. we renamed the compound the george bush center for intelligence and have sent an artifact out to the library at college station in texas. it is the original legislation signed by president clinton renaming the compound after george herbert walker bush. >> when you say the compound, what does that mean? rex tillerson 58 acres here at langley, virginia. reconnaissance balloons were launched from here in the civil war. it is kind of a high plateau over washington. there are the remnants of civil war camps. the construction projects have turned up civil war era relics we have in our collection.

the george washington parkway was extended as part of the original construction plan. and we hold objects in our collection related to the cornerstone-laying ceremony. we have the travel that president eisenhower and allen dulles used that day to lay the mud. two years later, the building is ready to occupy. in his remarks of the dedication of the building, allen dulles includes a bible quote. says, ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. be carveds that that into the fabric of our building, because to mr. dulles, truth and freedom are the pillars on which cia work is built. we began occupying the building the same year the berlin wall went up. is that reagan broke ground for in new headquarters building

1984. that building was ready to occupy in 1988. theike to say we are bookends of the cold war in the architecture at cia. we have a number of different galleries here. this is dedicated to the director of science and technology. this is a directorate that truly defines creativity and innovation. during the cold war, different options for collection platforms were explored, including those that the animal kingdom might present. case of our a animal slides. -- animal spies. this is a uav developed in the late 1960's, meant to look like an eagle that could be founded into migration flocks that might

fly over a hard target area to provide oblique imagery or any numbercapture -- of different platforms could potentially have been put on a piece like this. it was in development for about six years. no operational vehicle was ever deployed to the field. learnedy, the lessons informed future uav programs. air cover the connecting with the pigeon line -- let us talk about the pigeons first. pigeons flew microfiche into paris during the franco prussian war. the germans invented a pigeon camera in the early 1900s. pigeon photography was used during world war i. there is no such thing as technology that is too old for espionage.

we frequently revisit technologies. pigeon missions are still classified. we developed a program. we found a challenge as soon as we strapped a camera on our bird, they became operational. that bird no, longer look the same with the camera hanging off its chest. the civilian pigeon would attack the operational birds. plus hawks like a tasty morsel of pigeon now and then. every once in a while, we would have one operation lost to ad hoc. plus pigeons are sensitive to their environment, they don't like change and when it came time to ship them to the area, they got so stressed out they molted. birds without feathers don't fly. these are some of the challenges we had. so from up in the air to below the water surface we're also collecting intelligence. we have a robotic catfish. there are two exemplars of this, one is traveling to the american

people right now. and the one in the cage is probably the prototype. and during vietnam era we developed what are called seismic intruder devices and made them look like ordinary debris that you would find along a jungle trail. if you look closely at ours, one seems to resemble a piece of tiger dung, so as the trucks and troops came down the ho chi minh trail the vibrations could be counted, sent to a listening post and then transmitted for collection. additionally in this case we have a very unique kind of concealment. if you and i need to communicate with one another, case officer to agent, one of the most difficult sensitive dangerous ways for us to do that is face to face. then we both risk being compromised. so we will develop impersonal means of communication, like

codes or covert communications equipment, or dead drops. and we want our dead drops to be innocuus, we don't want them to draw any kind of attention. or we want them to be particularly disgusting so no one will touch them. in this case we might have hit the disgusting part because this is a rat concealment and was used for operations in mass -- in moscow. the only creature that will go anywhere near a moscow rat is a hungry moscow cat. but we thought of that as well. so as you are issued your rat dead drop, you're also given a bottle of tabasco sauce, so you can lace that rat with the tabasco sauce and hopefully the cats won't bother it. take away your dead drop. these are just some of the animals that have been partners in espionage. we're in the intelligence art gallery and we don't always have an artifact or an object to catapult us into that part of our history.

so 10 years ago we started an intelligence art collection, inspired by the painting collections in the military services, and we're standing next to our first painting in the collection which is entitled "earthquake's final flight." this painting captures an operation in 1954, the place is -- the book is called "hell in a small place." the french can't resupply their troops and they reach out to the united states, and the u.s. air force provides c119 flying boxcars, u.s. markings have been painted out with french markings, and c.i.a. provides the pilots through its proprietary airline, civil air transport. 36 cat pilots flew 682 missions during about a two and a half month period. in the spring of 1954. many of those flights flown through murderous antiaircraft fire. this painting captures a flight that took place on the 6th of

may, 1954, flying that day was a legendary cat pilot by the name of james mcgovern. his copilot was wallace buford. the french kicker was seated right behind the pilot when the plane was hit. he ran to the back of the open cargo bay to check the dam to the stablizer, noted that the port engine had been knocked out and was streaming oil. this aircraft does not like to flay on one engine, but they kept it in the air for 45 minutes until it finally crashed inside laos where the wreckage remained unrecovered until 2002. finally a team was allowed to go in there and recover the remains. he was buried at arlington. we received a few pieces of the aircraft, you could imagine after that many years there wasn't much left. these two combat casualties were the first american deaths in the conflict we call the vietnam war.

this is a story of two young men. drew dix is just 23, a young special forces staff sergeant on his way to vietnam in 1967 when his assignment changed and instead he's sent to work under the auspices of the lone c.i.a. paramilitary officer. jim is 27. jim is in charge of c.i. a's role pacification programs, and one of these is called provincial reconnaisance unit. they are forces that the agency has recruited in to help us take down the viet cong infrastructure, and drew is con -- coming in to take command of that unit. along the night of 30-31 january, 1968, drew and jim have been picking up anomalies in viet cong activity, but most of their troops have again home to celebrate the tet holiday.

but drew feels something is up. so drew takes a handful of the p.r.u.'s and a couple of navy seals and goes up along the border to recon itsnoiter. -- recon the border. that same time the provincial capital was invaded. he radioed to drew, you got to get back, we're under attract. drew makes it back in. when he arrives jim says, maggie is missing, a friend of theirs who is an american nurse in the city. so what do these two men do but jump in a jeep and go off to save her. when they get to her house it's occupanted by the viet cong and they get her out. they fought a series of battles in the city with just a handful of of troops. they rescued another 13 civilians, captured one of the highest ranking viet cong captured during the war.

and rescued the acting province chief bus wife and children, which rallied their own troops. at the end the c.i.a. recent natural supervisor said drew deserves nothing less tonight medal of honor, and he took it. a year later staff sergeant drew dix received the first special forces noncommissioned officer medal of honor. now on the back of this medal honor, it says military assistance command vietnam combined studies division. this is the only c.i.a. medal of honor. drew was detailed to us. the program. he received a commission to first lieutenant, retired as a major. then went up to alaska, owned and operated a bush service flying in the alaskan interior. and then became alaska's deputy homeland security. jim finished his career in c.i.a. paramilitary operations, retired in 1998.

two weeks after the attacks on our country, jim was out in the war zone. you don't get to meet men like this every day. jim received the distinguished intelligence cross which is our highest award for valor like our medal of honor. in our entire history, only 34 have been presented. we're in what we call the afghan gallery, this is an exhibit on c.i.a.'s role in operation enduring freedom. a role that was carried out in the days and weeks after the attacks on our country on 9/11. the c.i.a. team entered afghanistan on the 26th of september. 15 days after the attacks. one of the reasons we were able to go in so quickly is that we had a contingency plan on the shelf for doing just this. and on the 14th of september, director tenant briefed president bush on the c.i.a.

contingency and the president, said, i want c.i.a. to be the first team on the ground. the second team into afghanistan entered just weeks later on the 17th of october. this team has a different kind of mission, a tactical mission. their job is to set up an intelligence shield across the top five provinces of afghanistan, and working with native partners to collect intelligence to shape the battlefield. when i interviewed the head of that second team in, he confided to me that as they flew in, they were going over their mission. they knew it was to link up with

a native insurgency, train them and run operations with them. he said we all looked at one another and said it feels like we're working for general donovan. he said the more it changes the more it stays the same. so what's what gave us the idea for this exhibit, is to position photographs and objects 60 years separating each and it's a very powerful lesson. gives us our legacy, and it capitalizes our history. the model makers used hundreds of pieces of all sorts of intelligence to make this model as accurate as possible. a seven to one scale model of the abadabad compound. the original model was used to brief the policy makers, to brief president obama and used by the assault team to plan their raid. two additional copies were made for historical record, and this is our copy. i think we got the best feedback we could have hoped to receive. when every single one of the assault team returned alive, and

when we debriefed them they said they felt like we'd been there before. the first helicopter landed here, the second helicopter was to drop the team onto the villa. then a number of things happened. first of all, we have a stealth helicopter whose flight characteristics have been modified. they are coming in. hot and heavy. they go into a hover over the villa, the rotors are turning, air is directed down into the compound, probably hits these walls. comes back up over the aircraft and it's called setting with power, the more he tries to power out of it the faster down he'll go. american helicopters rotate counterclockwise, which is why we ended up over here. everybody got off alive. the entire raid lasted 39 minutes. the weapon we have displayed in this part of the gallery was recovered from the third floor of the compound, by the assault team during the raid.

we find in to be a very powerful object. it has an immediacy to it. it puts us there on that mission, with the assault team, there on the third floor of the abbottabad compound. but even more than that, this one object represents for us here at c.i.a. the taskings of three presidents to do everything possible to bring down al qaeda. the president's daily briefing is the most exclusive publication in the world. and our job as agency officers is to collect intelligence that matters and get it to the policy makers so they can make informed decisions about our national security. we do this through a number of publications, we're looking at the most exclusive publication right now. this has an interesting history. it goes back to truman's day.

it was truman who asked for a briefing that he could carry with him, it was called the daily summary. he asked for it in 1946. and then he wanted a weekly summary. so we did that, we always taylor the brief for the first customer. the president decides who else will receive the briefing in addition to him. and that changes from administration to administration. president kennedy wasn't happy with the f.a. format, he wanted a check list of the most critical national security intelligence that we had at the time. so we created the president's intelligence check list, or the pickle. picl. president ford was the first to get one on one briefings with the c.i.a. and the president always travels with his cia briefer. traveling with the president on 9/11, there in the classroom, with president bush when he received the phone call that the tower has been hit, on air force

one for the next 13 hours until the president came back to andrews, was the c.i.a. briefer. in 2004 we had the intelligence reform and terrorism prevention act. that piece of legislation is the first sweeping changes to the intelligence community. as a result of that, the position of director national intelligence is created and the p.d.b. staff is now moved up to the dni level. they still contribute over 90% of the briefing, but now other members of the intelligence community also contribute to the briefing. today president obama receives his briefing on a tablet. as you can imagine, our current operations are still highly classified. so those objects that we might collect into the collection would be highly classified as well. so in our world, tangible objects are not considered to be official u.s. government records.

there are therefore they are not part of that 25 or 50-year automatic declassification effort. if we want to try to tell the story of a classified program through classified tangibles, then we have to make sure that there are no agency equities that could be compromised by our telling that story. and there's an internal review process for the equity holder. if it is a piece of covert communications equipment, a camera, the director of science and technology will have to agree that the technology can be put on display. the information that we write about that must be reviewed by the publication's review board. and then released by that particular director's review and release mechanism. so there's a great deal of oversight and it's a good partnership that we have with these various equity holders to make sure that we tell a complete story, an accurate

story in our museums. all official visits to the central intelligence agency begin and end here in the memorial lobby in the only headquarters building. -- original headquarters building. this lobby contains a number of commemorative pieces to our history. not only the o.s.s. memorial, commemorating the loss of 116 o.s.s.ers at the beginning of our country's first nondepartmental intelligence agency, to this memorial which commemorates 107 of c.i.a.'s fallen, dating back to 1950 when we lost our first officer. across these 107, there are representatives from all four

directorates, but a look at the book of honor will show you that not every star has a name next to it. there are still 27 of our colleagues who even in death cannot be publicly acknowledged because those national security equities that they worked are still sensitive. every year we'll review the remaining 27 and if the equities change so we can add the name, we'll do so at the time of our memorial service. this year is the 40th year anniversary of the memorial wall. representatives from every directorate, as i said. there are 10 women on the wall. the youngest is a woman, barbara robins, the first female officer killed in the line of duty and the youngest star at age 21, killed in vietnam in 1965. there is a wide diversity of our officers here on the wall. there are three african-americans, two native americans, two asian americans and one persian american. and

there are nine of our colleagues who have never come home, including our first star, doug mccaron. -- mccarnon. i think it's important to note that every new agency officer starts their career right here in front of the memorial wall. they take the oath of office to serve our country and this agency, standing right here with 107 stars, our fallen colleagues, looking at them, and the father of central intelligence across the way observing their joining this organization. these 107 fallen for us capture the ethos that all of us try to live by on a daily basis. that includes service, excellence, integrity, courage, team work, and stewardship. if you read the stories behind the stars on the wall, you will

find examples of all of those values that all of us try to carry with us as we go through our careers and as we serve our nation. through the work that we do here at the central intelligence agency. >> for more information about the c.i.a. museum, visit their website, cia.gov. you can watch american history tv's american artifacts programs online any time. this is american history tv. all weekend, every weekend. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> when i started covering congress, you had people like senator russell long, wilbur mills, danny rostenkowski, vaper, people- who were giants in their own ways. a couple of those guys got

themselves into problems. peoplerall, these were -- they were all very intelligence. they knew how to craft legislation. he knew how to do a deal. and they all worked with whoever the president was. there was politics, but at the end of the day, there was a way to make decisions for the good of the country. today, you do not see that anywhere. first of all, i think the quality of members of the congress and their intelligence and their work ethic, has diminished. they are great people, and i should not malign -- there are wonderful members on both sides, but i think they are a minority. i think increasingly people are driven by the politics and by their own sort of survival. i think the hardest work they do is raising money. it is not learning the issues. it is not crafting deals.

it is making speeches and positioning themselves to get reelected. myers is leaving washington, d.c. behind. find out why. >> the idea behind 250 and 250 is, instead of trying to tell the history of st. louis as a timeline, we would miss vitally important things. instead of trying to do that and failing, we decided, what if we give snapshots of st. louis history that would give people a glimpse of the diverse things that have happened here? and they could use their imaginations to fill in the rest. we chose 50 people, 50 moments, 50 images, and 50 objects, and tried to choose the most diverse selection we could.

we are standing in the 50 objects section right now. this is what most people would call the real history. this is where the object is right in front of you. brewing is such a huge part of st. louis's history. it is an amazing story, with lots of different breweries. the most famous became anheuser-busch. in the era of anheuser-busch talking about millions of barrels produced each year, they are producing so much fear. this is from an era when things were a little bit simpler. it is fun to show people this object and kind of gauge this risk -- gauge their response. in the days before they had all caps, they put corks in the top of bottles, and somebody had to do it by hand. you can see it has foot petals in the bottom. the operator would push down with his feet to give enough force to go into the bottle. it has three holes for three

different sized bottles. andext week m, the history literary life of st. louis, the gateway to the west, on book tv and american history tv. >> on may 13, 1939, the trans-atlantic liner st. louis departed germany bound for cuba with 938 passengers, almost all of whom were jews fleeing the third reich. they were refused entry into cuba, then later refused entry into the united states. they sailed so close to miami that they could see the city lights. up next, scott miller talks about his book, "refuge denied: the st. louis passengers and the holocaust." mr. miller details the fate of the passengers after they return to europe and he's joined by other scholars and a survivor of the holocaust who was a passenger on the trip, to talk about the refugees and the policies of countries involved. the jewish museum of florida at florida international university hosted this event.

along with the latin american jewry initiative, the cuban research institute, the latin american and caribbean center, and the jewish studies initiative. this is 90 minutes. >> can you hear me? great. first of all, i want to thank the jewish museum of florida for hosting this venue, and for inviting me. i'm here today to talk about an unsolved mystery that hovered over america for over 60 years. that is, whatever became of the passengers who sailed on the 1939 ill fated voyage of the st. louis? late may, early june, 1939, really the unthinkable happened. the ship carrying over 900 jewish refugees fleeing nazi germany, just six months after crys