the republican national convention is live from cleveland this week. watch every minute on c-span. listen live on the free c-span radio app. it's easy to download from the apple store or google play. watch live or on demand any time at c-span.org on your desktop, phone, or tablet, where you'll find all of our convention coverage and the full convention schedule. follow us on twitter and like us on facebook. to see video of newsworthy moments. the republican national convention all this week on c-span. c-span radio app at c-span.org,

and on monday watch the democratic national convention live from philadelphia. saturday night at 8:00 eastern we'll take a look back at past democratic national conventions starting with the 1960 convention in los angeles with the democratic party selecting john f. kennedy as their nominee. >> the day our concern must be with our future, for the world is changing, the old era is ending, the old ways will not do. >> he went on to become the youngest person elected president. we'll also feature notable female speakers, including u.s. representative barbara jordan, who spoke in new york city and became the first african-american woman to be a keynote speaker. >> our concept of governing is derived from our view of people. it is a concept deeply rooted in

beliefs firmly etched in the national conscience of all of us. >> then the 1984 convention in san francisco with former new york congresswoman geraldine ferraro, and ann richards, who in 1988 was the state treasurer for texas. she spoke at the convention in atlanta that year and later became the 45th governor of texas. also the 1992 convention in new york city with arkansas governor bill clinton accepting his party's nomination. >> in the name of all those who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids, and play by the rules, in the name of the hard working americans who make up our forgotten middle class, i proudly accept your nomination for president of the united states. >> past national conventions next saturday at 8:00 p.m.

eastern on c-span. next, a panel of historians talks about espionage tactics used from the cold war to post-9/11. they discuss techniques and human intelligence-gathering by the cia and russia's foreign intelligence service, as well as the shift in intelligence methods after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. the new york military affairs symposium in new york city hosted this two-hour-long event. >> with that, i'd like to turn things over to ailing but here, bright and lively is the publisher of enigma books and the executive director of nymas, mr. robert miller. [ applause ] >> thank you. thank you very much. i was very sad to hear about the passing of bob manas. i just was shocked by the news,

and i wish we could have this information earlier on our website. so, i'm pleased to welcome all of you to this two-day event on espionage from the cold war to asymmetric warfare. i shall first offer a few words of introduction, followed by a very brief presentation of our panel. since the collapse of the soviet union and the 9/11 attacks on new york, the american public has never been so thoroughly informed of the successes and failures of its espionage services. starting with the crumbling of the berlin wall in november 1989 and the disclosure in the mid-1990s of the now-famous vinona decrypts there was reason to congratulate fbi and cia for a job well done. by 1945, american cryptographers had broken the soviet codes at

arlington hall, the washington, d.c., campus where the secret work took place, and proof of the vast amount of soviet spying that had been long suspected was confirmed. the victory over communism came with the vindication of our intelligence organizations. but then, the new, open russia suddenly closed its after kivs with the ascent of a former kgv officer named vladimir putin to the presidency of that country in 1999, ending a short window of cooperation among historians. just a year and a half later, the greatest shock troubled the new-found satisfaction in our security apparatus with the

september 11, 2001, destruction that took place in this city. the media taught us all about connecting dots and that fbi and cia were actually suddenly dysfunctional, since we had been caught sleeping at the wheel, just like at pearl harbor in 1941. in a rush to fix things, a vast, new bureaucracy was erected with homeland security, and a vast re-engineering took place within the traditional agencies. for obvious reasons, we can't tell how successful those initiatives have been. we can only agree that the absence of major attacks in this country on the scale of 9/11 and the assurances of congressional committee members who offer -- that are offered periodically, are meant to be reassuring. finally, a question we have for

this panel and for the audience that will participate in the debate. it's simply, are we better off now than before? how do the services measure up to the challenges offered by islamic terrorism, a russia that seems to live in a new cold war, the leaking of vast amounts of secret documents by improperly vetted military or government employees. i am referring to wikileaks and perhaps to the panama papers. what do we know -- what we do know is that major destruction can be the work of very few determined individuals who carry out a specific plan. is the united states better off today than it was in the 1990s? now allow me to introduce our distinguished panel. dr. mark kramer is the director of cold war studies at harvard university and a senior fellow of harvard davis center for russian and eurasian studies. he is the author of "imposing, maintaining and tearing open the iron curtain: the cold war and east-central europe 1945-1990," published in 2013.

he is also the editor of a three-volume collection "the fate of the communist regimes 1989-1991," to be published in late 2016. dr. joseph fitsanakis, who received his ph.d from the university of edinburgh and built the security and intelligence studies program at king university, has taught and written extensively on the subject, such as international espionage, intelligence trade craft, wiretapping, cyber espionage, transnational crime and intelligence reform. he's a frequent contributor to the news media, such as bbc, cbs, abc and npr. mark mazzetti has reported extensively from afghanistan, iraq and the horn of africa for "the new york times" on national

security. he holds a masters in history from oxford university and is the author of "the way of the knife," published by penguin in 2013, a best-selling account of the cia's covert action forces. please welcome our panel, and -- [ applause ] and i give the podium to dr. mark kramer. >> thank you very much. i am just waiting for a powerpoint presentation to be put up here. i should add, it wasn't mentioned in the brief biographical sketch, but something i realized afterward, especially germane to tonight's symposium is i am also an editor of a book put out by m.i.t. press called "spies."

and it is a collection of essays about cold war spying. the topic of tonight. i also just was in russia. i was there from mid-april until about 24 hours ago and have worked extensively in the archives there many times, including this most recent trip. as i'll get to in a minute, the political situation in russia's dismal, as everyone knows, because putin has reimposed essentially an authoritarian system. the good news is, though, that it has not affected the archives. and in fact, if anything, bizarrely or paradoxically, the archival access has actually improved over the last couple of years, particularly the last year, and i'll be referring to that a bit in tonight's -- in the comments.

okay, that's all right. i did bring my computer with the presentation, in case this doesn't work. the structure of what i will be presenting is first to go through some of the newly available sources, just to give a sense of what actually is available now. there is so much more that is available as compared to the situation during the cold war. and i just want to highlight that, because it's not only from russia, but also from other former countries and from western countries as well. one of those sources which robert miller mentioned is the venona papers. okay, good.

first, i'll go through some of the newly available sources, then to talk about some of the activities. then -- whoops, i actually wanted to move it here. then i'll talk both about intelligence-gathering activities of different types, and then other activities. tomorrow i'll come to questions of the impact on policy-making and impact on the cold war. i may get into a little of that tonight, but i want to reserve most of it for tomorrow. so, let me go through some of the newly available sources so far. the documents from east european state security archives in some cases are fully open, so you have access to foreign intelligence materials of the warsaw pact, including a lot of soviet documents, copies which were sent there. and in germany, former east

germany, the federal commissioner that oversees the former state security archive, the intelligence files are not completely open. there are a few that aren't -- a few areas that aren't, but by and large, they are fully open. in the czech republic under legislation adopted in 2004, the records of the former state security apparatus, including the foreign intelligence apparatus, are fully accessible. poland is somewhat not as accessible, but a great deal of the foreign intelligence files of the communist regime are accessible. they are under the auspices of the institute of national remembrance, as it's called, ipn. there is a separate archive of the ministry of internal affairs in poland, but the communist era

records by and large now are housed at the ipn, which does have a central archive you can go to and work in. in hungary, it has varied somewhat over the post-communist period. but at the former state security archive, there is a considerable amount that is accessible. bulgaria, you might be surprised by. in 2006, there was a commission set up, and that commission overseas the security records of the communist regime, including foreign intelligence. they have made vast amounts of the collections they have available online. you can go online and download tens of thousands of documents. they also, if you go there and work, you can actually work there even though you have to do -- it's a somewhat cumbersome

process, but you are able to get access to very important materials of the foreign intelligence service in bulgaria. all of these are important records because they worked very closely under the supervision of the soviet kgb's foreign intelligence apparatus. and so, not only are those records valuable in themselves but you can also find there are copies of soviet foreign intelligence documents. in addition to the former soviet union outside russia, for example, in the baltic countries, this would be latvia, lithuania and estonia, there are foreign intelligence records. even though they were soviet republics and were not the central after kiv, there were several copies of foreign intelligence documents from the kgb that you can find there, particularly in lithuania and

estonia, which have separate kgb after kivs. in latvia, it's merged within the central state after kiv and is not and there was more destruction of material there in the final months of the soviet regime than in lithuania and estonia, but you can find very useful materials in all three countries, foreign intelligence records of the soviet regime. then in russia, the foreign intelligence archive, which is in the outskirts of moscow -- it used to be in lubianka, in the main building in central moscow, but in 1974, it was moved out to yseniva, the whole foreign intelligence apparatus. it was still part of the kbg, the main directorate, but it was moved out there, and so was the archive. that archive has been

inaccessible throughout the post-soviet period. i asked one time -- i was at a conference where the head of that archive took part, and i asked him when the archive might be at least partly accessible. he responded [ speaking foreign language ] which means never. so, i think that there is relatively little hope there would be some change to a democratic government in russia of having some access there. however, the good news is that there are a lot of copies of important records that you can find in archives that are at least partly accessible. for example, in the early post-soviet period in 1992 there was a trial of the soviet

communist party. it didn't result in anything. but in connection with that, there was a special commission set up to investigate files of the kgb, among other organs of the soviet regime. and those -- the things they looked at and collected were eventually made available in what is now fund 89 of an archive that's now known as rigani, the russian state archive of recent history. and that is not only accessible in russia, it's also -- it was microfilmed in total. and the microfilms are readily available at many university libraries, also new york public library and others. so, if you're interested in looking at those, you can find the records. many kgb records. they are including important things pertaining to covert operations, among other things, kgb covert operations.

there are also important kgb foreign intelligence documents stored in other parts of rigani, that same archive. that would include now files of various departments of the communist party's central committee. those were off limits for quite a while, but they were opened last august. and so, the irony of the situation in russia is that archival access, fortunately, has not corresponded to the degree of political liberalization in russia, that for reasons that i can get into later on, if anyone's interested. it hasn't been that way. it's operated quite independently of that. there are also other archives where you can find important records from soviet foreign intelligence apparatus.

this would include what is now called rigaspi, the russian state archive of social political history. it's the former central party archive. it covers the stalin period base, lenin and stalin period. so, if you're interested in stalin-era intelligence activities, you can find copies of some doc, including important documents there, very important documents there. also, that archive houses the records of the former common turn, which played an important role in soviet espionage. there is a very good book available about that by john earl haynes and harvey clair, who are two prominent specialists on soviet-era espionage in the united states. and their book is -- their first

book on that topic is based on the common turn files of the american communist party that's housed there. the state archive of the russian federation also has important materials pertaining to soviet foreign intelligence. these were partly as a result of just record-keeping. the files of the soviet state security apparatus were under the auspices of the ministry of internal affairs from the 1950s. that ended in 1960, but you can find those records now housed at garf. in fact, they were specially digitized, and it's pretty easy to go through. garf is one of the most open of the russian archives, but all of the ones i've referred to here are easy to work with now, even though at times in the post-soviet period they haven't been.

then also the archive of the russian foreign ministry, the archive of the foreign policy of the russian federation, as it's known. and that archive, again, contains important materials that the foreign ministry was using from the kgb, as well as the soviet foreign ministry played an important role in its own right in soviet espionage. it had the diplomatic service of the soviet foreign ministry, had a supplementary rationale of being a kind of supplement to the foreign intelligence service. then, other important materials are available in the mitrahine transcripts and summaries. these were transcripts of documents done by vassiliev, the kgb archivist or the foreign intelligence archivist there

from the early '70s until about 1983. these records were transferred. they were initially offered to the united states. the u.s. government, turned them down thinking they weren't serious. fortunately, the british secret intelligence service, mi-6, was more observant and realized the great value of these materials. the materials, unfortunately, sis kept them off limits for 20-odd years. and fortunately, though, they are now fully accessible at churchill college cambridge in cambridge, england. and they were made accessible there in the summer of 2014, after being off limits for about 22 years.

the records, you are allowed to use a digital camera there. so, if, for example, you're interested in looking at the records he transcribed pertaining to espionage in the united states, you can do that. those are in volumes. i did photograph all of those. there are records pertaining to most parts of the world. so, those had been earlier summarized in two important books put out by mitrohing and andrew, the british intelligence historian. and for the most part, they quite accurately reflect the content of the documents. but there are many, many things they weren't able to include in those two volumes, and there's at least one important discrepancy i found when actually going through the materials. the metrohing transcripts cover

the full soviet period but are predominantly about the '70s and early '80s. there is relatively little there about the stalin period. there are a few very interesting things, but much less about the stalin period than i had thought there might be. there is also a good deal less about the '50s and early '60s. as you move into the '60s, it increases, but particularly as in the -- the large majority of it deals with the '70s and early '80s. so you can find very important things there. alexander vassiliev is another former kgb foreign intelligence officer. he was working on a project for the book that came out as "haunted wood," which was co-authored -- he and the late allen weinstein co-authored. it came out i think in 1997 or '98.

that book dealt with soviet espionage in the united states during the stalin era. and that book also was able to deal with only a very small portion of what vassiliev actually transcribed. he was allowed to work in a room where archivists from the foreign intelligence archive brought him materials. and those materials were, again, focused on the united states. vassiliev was not an expert on foreign espionage in the united states. so when he -- which is good, because it meant that he erred on the side of copying a great deal. so, he would transcribe entire documents. and you can find extremely interesting things about soviet foreign espionage in the united states. the materials, again, because of john earl haynes and harvey

clair, who worked with vassiliev -- i myself also worked with him in 2009. and the materials were transferred to the woodrow wilson center archive, which is in conjunction with a project known as the cold war international history project, at the woodrow wilson center in washington, d.c. that project has been invaluable in making materials available from former communist countries, including russia. and the metrochin transcripts were digitized, they were translated, and all of those are available online. so, you can find translations of them, if you want to look at the original transcriptions as well as -- because they were done by hand. and then he typed them out in russian. and then you can look at the translations. all three versions are fully accessible. vassiliev's notebooks are a compliment to an

extraordinarily valuable complement to the venona papers that robert mentioned. and the venona papers were decrypted over quite a long period by what is now known as the national security agency. it became the national security agency in 1952. the national security agency and its various incarnations was decrypting these going back to the late wartime years, but then really had key breakthroughs after the war. even though these are intercepted nkvd documents to various parts of the world, including the united states. and the major decryptions came in the late '40s and into the '50s, and they continued to decrypt them into the '70s, and

eventually the project was halted. they realized that at a certain point they wouldn't be able to decrypt more of them. they were extremely difficult to decrypt, and it was only through the ingenuity -- because this was at a time where computers were relatively primitive. and so, most of this was done through human ingenuity of nsa code-breakers. and the -- it's quite a stunning thing they were able to decrypt any of them, because the soviet decrypts used a particular feature that made it essentially impossible to decrypt them, but there was a flaw introduced into it in the early -- just after the german invasion of the soviet union in 1941. and as a result of that, a lot of them used a particular one-time pad, as it was known, that in fact, it was duplicated. and so, they were able to, upon

detecting that, to break the codes and to be able to read them. so, the vissiliev notebooks overlap with the venona papers, but are an invaluable supplement to them, because they really fill in a lot of gaps for each other, all dealing with soviet intelligence in the united states and the case of vassiliev, and in the case of the venona papers also dealing with soviet foreign intelligence elsewhere. then there are documents from east european spies who were working for the cia or for british intelligence who kaplinski was an intelligence source for the cia from 1972 until november 1981, when he had to flee poland because he had

been discovered there and was on the verge of being arrested. there is extremely a quite startling account of how he got out of poland in a book by benjamin wiser, who's a "new york times" reporter, at least used to be. he also at that time was working for the "washington post." but in his book about kuklinski, which came out in 2004, you can find an account of how he got out. prior to his getting out, though, he was able to transfer it to the cia copies of tens of thousands of documents. a good deal of the materials he smuggled out, though, by no means all, were made available by the cia about seven years ago. and there was a symposium that was held in washington, d.c., in

conjunction with that, and then all of the materials eventually were put online. so, if you go to cia's extremely useful electronic reading room, www.foia.cia.gov, you can find the kuklinski documents, among many others. i'll get to some of the others in a minute. there are also documents that u.s. forces -- particularly israel, and u.s. personnel in africa and latin america were able to acquire at various points. and a lot of these, by no means all, are now also available. the middle east ones in particular, the ones from iraq that were captured by u.s. forces, because these are difficult to work with, even if

you know arabic, they're often difficult to work with. but they have been gradually -- they were in three separate locations as well. and there are a good deal of them that are now being made available in translation. and so, if you're interested in that aspect of intelligence, particularly saddam hussein's foreign intelligence apparatus, you can find a good deal, because again, it had close ties with soviet union. there are also now vast quantities of declassified cia documents. and again, it's hard to overstate what a change the end of the cold war made, that there are just endless collections of cia materials you can find on that website that i mentioned, the electronic reading room. these were kept off limits during the cold war. but again, one of the beneficial aspects of the end of the cold

war is that it did inspire the cia to agree to release large, large chunks of its cold war collections. covert operations are still difficult, and there is still a great deal of effort being made so far, for the most part, unsuccessfully. but to secure a greater release of covert materials pertaining to covert operations. but the intelligence-gathering and the -- i'm sorry, the analysis part of the cia, the analytical division, a great deal of those are now accessible and are often extremely interesting. sometimes wrong about things. if you look -- if you are able to compare it with the soviet records, you can see they got some things wrong, but they also often did an extremely good job and got things pretty accurate

and did a lot of benefit to u.s. policymakers who wanted to understand what was going on. then there are memoirs by former eastern european intelligence officers and by former soviet intelligence officers. the memoirs you have to be wary of, because not only are memoirs just by their gen bound to be self-serving to a degree, but they also, most of these people did not want to disclose too much. and in some cases, they may actually dissemble and to try to mislead people. so, you have to be very cautious when using these, but they still are often extremely important sources about key records including former intelligence officers in the soviet bloc who genuinely wanted to disclose

what had happened and these sorts of things they were involved in and what their countries had been involved in. there were also important memoirs by western intelligence officers, including some former directors, like robert gates, who wrote an interesting memoir that came out in mid-1990s, and there were others who have written other former senior cia personnel, and in some cases, not so senior personnel who have written interesting and useful memoirs. again, with the same caveats that you do have to remember that most of them, they are under legal obligation not to disclose classified information. so, let me then just to finish tonight's presentation just by going through a little bit of what we know with regard to the soviet foreign intelligence apparatus. i'm not going to deal as much

now with the u.s. intelligence apparatus in part because my colleagues, or at least mark mazzetti, will be dealing with that about current day. it hasn't changed drastically in the post cold war period. its focus has. it's no longer on the soviet union, which doesn't exist. and some of the entities of it have been renamed, including several times. i don't even recall what used to be called the operations director of the cia and then became the national clandestine service. i know it was recently renamed, but i don't recall exactly what. so, in the case of the soviet bloc, though, the 11th department of the soviet kgb's first main directorate oversaw the virus warsaw pact. the first main directorate of the kgb was the foreign intelligence apparatus. its jurisdiction shifted over time during the stalin era. at one point, it had been under

the foreign ministry and at another time it had been under what was called the nkvd or the ministry of internal -- the people's commissary of internal affairs. but the first main directorate from the time the kgb was created in 1954 through the end of soviet regime had an 11th department that oversaw the pact foreign intelligence. there were soviet kgb so-called advisers, intelligence officers and intelligence operational groups stationed with east european foreign intelligence services. and their upkeep was funded by the east european governments until 1990.

so, those records -- the records there, again, you can find many of those in the east european archives and the former warsaw pact countries' archives, and shed a great deal of light on the structures and policymaking portion of the foreign intelligence service itself. by far, the bulk of the soviet and east european state security efforts were directed at domestic intelligence. roughly 85% of personnel on most cases. so, internal security was the primary orientation, and it's not surprising, because these were large state security apparatuses. and overseeing modern countries was a difficult thing. the 15% or so of personnel that worked in foreign intelligence, the foreign intelligence service, had special training to

allow them to serve there. and as robert mentioned, one such officer was vladimir putin. the sheer size of the warsaw pact state security organs meant that they had very large, aggressive foreign intelligence branches. and above all, the soviet kgb, but in the case of all of the others that i've discussed here, you can find similar, that they similarly had very active foreign intelligence operations. they took this mission seriously. and then finally, let me mention for tonight's session, the soviet and east european foreign intelligence forces had a good deal of joint efforts during the cold war. there was an increasing centralization of efforts under soviet warsaw pact structures in

the 1970s and 1980s. this corresponded as well to an increasing centralization of warsaw pact structures in the military's sphere, but that was true equally in the foreign intelligence sphere. the foreign intelligence services of the warsaw pact countries were under this 11th department of the 11th directorate of the kgb's 1st main directorate. and those structures were increasingly under soviet control through changes enacted in the warsaw pact's statutes. formal leadership organs were established in all cases in the 1970s, even to an extent earlier, but by the 1970s it was heavily centralized. there were specific cooperation agreements in addition. these were bilateral, for the

most part. there were multilateral agreements, but they were largely bilateral, and they were updated periodically, again, bringing foreign intelligence increasingly under soviet control. so, you can understand what soviet priorities were if you look at the records of the east european foreign intelligence services. there was also, beyond the formal agreements, there was informal cooperation and allocation of assignments. for example, it's now known that the bulgarian state security apparatus, it was called the [ speaking foreign language ] or state security -- had a 12th department that was responsible for assassinations overseas. and a question i'm often asked is whether bulgaria was involved in the attempted assassination on the pope. i won't get into that now.

i'll talk a little bit about that maybe tomorrow. the informal cooperation particularly applied to things like covert operations, but it also in some cases involved intelligence-gathering. there was an allocation of assignments among the warsaw pact countries. cooperation -- the only exception to what i've mentioned here is romania. the cooperation between the soviet and romanian foreign intelligence agencies greatly diminished in the mid-1960s. this was a conscious decision of romania. it wanted to establish autonomy for romania in both the military and foreign intelligence spheres. it never disappeared entirely. for example, romania was involved in covert operations in which it worked closely with the

soviet and other east european agencies. this included the bombing of the radio for europe headquarters in munich, but also romania had close involvement with terrorists, especially in the middle east, in some cases also in western europe. so, the romanian foreign intelligence service continued to play an important role. it's just it was much less under soviet auspices. it worked at times in conjunction with the other bloc intelligence services, but separately. and then, finally, the roles and missions of individual east european intelligence services varied some, depending on what their area of expertise was. for example, the east german state security apparatus had the great benefit of knowing or speaking german as a native language. so that made it quite easy to penetrate west germany.

the west germany, in addition, gave an -- they allowed entree to the nato headquarters. so, in the east german state security apparatus -- i'll discuss this a little tomorrow -- in the east german state security apparatus files, you can find large quantities of classified nato and west german documents. in fact, there are so many of them, you can see -- and you can track when they were supplied. in some cases, almost on the same day they were produced. in many cases, within a few days. so, the east german state security apparatus had direct entry to important classified materials of the west. this meant that -- some cases -- and i'll get to this tomorrow -- you could argue that it may have actually had a stabilizing role

because of what it showed about nato's intentions that nato, for example, was a defensive alliance. so, east germany would probably be the easiest to point to and a speciality, but there were other missions, for example, bulgaria. again, the important state security service in bulgaria had a role in the balkans in overseeing efforts there. there were two balkan countries that were members of nato from 1952 on, greece and turkey. and so, bulgaria was able to -- and bulgaria has a large ethnic turkish community, and so was able to draw on that in part deal with turkey and similarly with greece. so, the polish foreign intelligence services likewise had particularly to try to deal with some polish emegres if they

were able to turn them, or to use polish scholars in the west. i have found, for example, a very interesting report produced -- or interesting in a perverse way. of polish foreign intelligence service from november 1968 about the service that is now called the entity of harvard that is now called the davis center, where i have an office. and that center was then called the russian research center. and they clearly had someone from the polish scholarly community who was supplying information. it's quite an accurate report. unfortunately, because poland at the time was in the throes of an anti-semitic campaign, it talks about how many jews there were in the -- at harvard, and particularly at that center. i translated the report, and you can find it online on the davis

center website. so, with that, i will finish for tonight's session and will look forward to speaking with you tomorrow. [ applause ] >> so, i have the nonpowerpoint interlude for the evening. so, you'll just have to hear me and be captivated just by my voice. and my nephew just arrived, so i'll be keeping an eye on him. if i keep his attention, i figure i'm doing okay. but first of all, thanks for having me here at symposium. it's a terrific honor being on this panel. and being back up in new york, the city i've spent a lot of time in. and it's always great to be back in. and i was feeling a little jealous listening to the previous presentation, mark's

presentation, because the idea of going through all these terrific archives and seeing all of this information that's been either declassified or officially released is something that a journalist who's toiling away in this current era could only dream about. we have to deal with the memories of officers, you have to deal with, mark mentioned memoirs, that i agree are imprecise or self-serving. you have to deal with getting information from people who are always under the threat of going to jail for talking to you. and it makes it very difficult to do this kind of work in this period when people are going to jail. but i do think it's also very important. and when robert talked about some of these mass disclosures of classified documents, i

should say that as a reporter, i am wholly endorsing mass disclosures of classified documents, as long as we at "the new york times" get to look at them first and decide what we should publish. should publish. but it is difficult, and i look forward to -- i don't know if i look forward to this, you know, all the documents coming out from this period 40 years from now, and i could find out everything i got wrong. but i wanted to talk tonight about the -- it's a good segue -- it's the end of the cold war and the beginning of the 9/11 period. and really what i argue are the dramatic changes that have taken place in the intelligence world, less on the structure and more on the focus and what years and years of doing a specific kind of operation -- and i would argue counterterrorist operation

that's been at the center of it, has changed intelligence and has changed spying. so, i thought i would open my talk with an anecdote that gets at the beginning of this period that is i think colorful but also i think sets up where we are going. and it's an anecdote from right after the september 11th attacks. and everyone was -- it was chaos and the cia wasn't quite sure what to do. and the british came to visit. and it was the spirit of the special relationship and also there was a glimpse of what was to come. i'll just read a brief passage from my book that talks about this. it focuses around a man named sir richard dearlove, who was the head of mi-6 at the time of the september 11th attacks. sir richard dearlove saw a glimpse of the future just weeks after the september 11th attacks. the head of the british secret

intelligence service, mi-6, dearlove came to the united states with other top british intelligence officials to show solidarity with the united kingdom's closest ally. he arrived at cia headquarters in langley, virginia, to deliver the message personally that british spies were opening up their books, giving the cia rare access to all of the mi-6 files on members of al qaeda. the british had tutored the americans in the dark art during world war ii but had long approached the spy game differently. in 1943, one member of winston churchill's special operations executive complained that "the american temperament demands quick and spectacular results," while the british policy, generally speaking, is long-term and plotting. he pointed out the dangers of the strategy carried out by the office of strategic services, the cia's precursor, which relied on blowing up weapons disposed, cutting telephone lines and land-mining enemy supply lines. "the americans had more money than brains," he warned, and the oss is "hankering after playing

cowboys and indians could only lead to trouble for the alliance." dearlove had grown up in the classic british spying tradition. he had graduated from queens college at the university of cambridge. a traditional recruiting ground for the british secret services, and has served in foreign postings in africa, europe and washington. like his predecessors, as head of mi-6, he signed all internal memos with his code name, "c," which by tradition was always in green ink. shortly after his plane landed, the plane carrying the call sign "ascot 1," landed in washington, dearlove found himself inside the counterterrorist center at cia headquarters. on a large screen, cia officers were watching video of a white mitsubishi truck driving along a road in afghanistan. dearlove had known that the united states had developed the ability to wage war by remote control, but he had never before watched the predator drone in action. several minutes went by as the mitsubishi was framed by the crosshairs at the center of a video monitor until a missile

blast washed the entire screen white. seconds later, the picture clarified to show the wreckage of a truck twisted and burning. dearlove turned to a group of cia officers, including ross newland, an agency veteran who had months earlier taken the job as part of the group overseeing the predator program. he cracked a wry smile. "it almost isn't sporting, is it?" this was the beginning of a real change in how the cia did intelligence, how the united states looked at the role of the cia. and i think it would be the beginning of what would be a complete reorientation of american intelligence and the intelligence establishment, away from a particular focus on traditional espionage, as it was practiced during the cold war, to a laser-light focus on hunting, capturing, targeting

and often killing. it's a story of the cia at the front lines of what is a secret war, a war that's changed nature of spying and that's had good and bad consequences. it's changed the focus of a cia, which i would argue the cia has had the most profound change since 9/11 of all the intelligence services, because they have been the ones put at the front of this secret war. and it's shaped the perspective of a whole new generation of intelligence officers. the cia now has more than 50% of the agency are people who joined after the september 11th attacks. so, if you think about that, that is the majority of cia officers are relatively young and are people who have known a mission where two successive presidents, one republican and one democrat, have given the cia the first and foremost mission of counterterrorism, in other words, man-hunting.

it's changed the language of intelligence. the idea of what is a target in traditional terms. an intelligence target is someone who would target to turn into an agent for information. targeting becomes something much different in the post-9/11 era. targeting means someone who you are hunting, either to interrogate for information or possibly to kill. that distorts the idea of what an intelligence service should be for. so, what i wanted to do was tonight talk about how we got to this point where we are today and then spend time tomorrow talking about i think where we're going as best we can tell at this point. so, it was four years ago when president obama in the second inaugural address said that a decade of war was coming to an end. what he was talking about was the public wars.

he was talking about the wars in iraq and afghanistan, ones that he was hoping at the time to end. as we've seen, he's -- that hasn't quite worked out as he planned. and then in a speech that may, he said that this war on terrorism must end and that the government has to be more transparent about it. so, this was may of 2013. and basically, he was trying to get to a point where the united states was not in a semi-permanent war that was all done in the shadows, one that was relying on the cia, one that was relying on covert action and secret strikes. but waves seen, it's three years later, and the war continues, and there's little indication as of yet that this new era of transparency is dawning. we're not seeing less really strong action, movement by the government to declassify information or even to classify the cia -- in libya, in syria,

the list goes on. the tides of war that seemed to be receding at one point have come back in. and so i think what we're seeing is that the secret wars that the united states, and in particular, the cia have been waging for the nearly 15 years don't show any signs of ending. and this is going to have an impact on our intelligence service. and i'll get to that i think a little bit more, about where we're going. so, this war, and i talk about it as a shadow war, the war that's outside of the traditional war zones in iraq and afghanistan, it's created a new model for how the united states go to battle. it's had benefits and it's had costs, but there's no question that it's short-circuited the normal mechanisms by which the united states as a mission decides to go to war. it's been carried out, as i said, not in wars that -- war

zones we would traditionally see during the cold war or even in the post-9/11 era, like iraq and afghanistan. it's been waged -- the laboratories for this experiment have been places like yemen and pakistan and libya and east africa. so, what are some of the other characteristics of this war as i get into the details of it? well, here's -- an interesting characteristic, i think, is that it is a war, even at the cia, that has been run in large part led by lawyers. what the united states could and could not do in a war of this nature was largely a blank slate before the september 11th attacks. and the lines were then drawn by lawyers over time over the past 15 years. so, some of the most momentous and, arguably, controversial decisions that have been made in the last 15 years, decisions about detention, interrogation, torture, surveillance, assassination, effectively were made because groups of lawyers got together and said what could

and could not be done, what did and did not violate the law. we still have executive order on the books banning assassination. but as we know, there's been hundreds and hundreds of cia drone strikes killing specific individuals. and so, there's had to be some line drawn what does and does not constitute assassination, just like torture. so even at the cia, for those of you -- i know many of you in the audience have a great deal of background in the intelligence world or how the cia works. what we've seen is the cia has grown not only as analysts and operatives, but in the number of lawyers who have had to make these assessments about what the agency could and could not do.

it blurred the line between the work of soldiers and the work of spies. and the short hand i think you can look at it as over the last 15 years the cia has become more like the pentagon and the pentagon has become more like the cia. and so let me explain that and i think by explaining that i want to talk a little bit about where things were on september 11, 2001, in order to then sort of try to describe the changes. so for the cia, those of you who know it, there's a history that is cyclical to some degree. the early decades of the cia were intensely operational in terms of in europe in, in south america and in africa covert actions, coup attempts, some assassination plots that were revealed in the '70s. this was an intense focus that in the '70s most of these came to light in the church and pike

committees. and this was a real revelation for americans about what the cia had been doing and a really wrenching experience for people who had been in the cia had been not accustomed to much congressional oversight and all of a sudden on television all of the dirty laundry of the first three decades of its existence were -- was being aired and this had an effect, according to both memoirs and documents and a number of people i've spoken to from this period of the generation that came in after the church committee. that those who came in in the late '70s came in during this period when the cia was trying to reorient itself back to being a traditional espionage service. not only the covert actions of the '70s -- of the early '50s and '60s but also the vietnam era, you saw this intense paramilitary focus during vietnam.

those who came in after church were basically taught that the cia should first and foremost be an espionage service not a paramilitary service. and many of those people took that message very seriously throughout their career and what happened was that 20 years later many of those people were then in senior jobs in the cia in the late '90s, early 2000s when a new era dawned for cia and that was -- and specifically a moment in the summer of 2001 when the cia was handed this new weapon called the armed predator. the cia had been watching the rise of al qaeda for a number of years. in afghanistan osama bin laden had carried out a number of attacks up to that point and the question was how should the united states government respond? and the cia had been able to penetrate al qaeda and the taliban to some degree. they were able to find the whereabouts of osama bin laden

but it was never in realtime and once they found him they could never find a way to kill him and there was a question of did they even have the authority to kill him. again, going back to this ban on assassinations that came in in 1976 under president ford, could the cia carry out an assassination to that extent. would it be an assassination? so there was this intense debate in the summer of 2001 when the military, which had developed an armed predator, basically handed the cia this weapon and the question was, should the cia take it up? and george tenant recalls meetings during that summer at the cia where basically it boiled down to we're spies, not assassins. should we take up this new weapon? should we take on this new mission? shouldn't that just be the military's job? and it somewhat seems quaint now but this debate played out right up until the september 11 attacks. in fact, on september 8, 2001,

there was a meeting at the white house about whether the cia should use the armed predator and go to afghanistan with the aim of going to kill osama bin laden. and even years later there is still disagreement about what was decided at that meeting but what we do know is the september 11 attacks happened and within six days president obama gave an authorization to the cia, a secret finding to go around the world to capture or kill al qaeda operatives. a secret order that's still on the books today and it's still basically the foundation of the cia's mission even though those who did the 9/11 attacks are either mostly either dead or in jail. that authorization has been expanded to encompass all sorts of different groups and different people who have carried out different attacks. so that's the foundation for this new transformation by the cia which took up not only the

predator and the role of targeted killing but as we know in the early days, the early years, it was more of a focus on detention, interrogation some would argue torture with methods like waterboarding in secret prisons because there was no -- there was basically very little information about al qaeda and the belief inside the cia and the bush white house was you needed to use these extreme methods in order to get that information. but over time i pointed to around 2004 things begin to change where there's this concern in the cia about the methods they've been employing. there's an inspector general report about some of the methods might have crossed the line into war crimes and there's a real shudder throughout the ranks of the cia that once again the agency might be facing another period like the church commission. they would be the ones who would be facing possible legal jeopardy for the methods they used.

and during that period, 2004 on, you see a shift. you see a shift away from interrogation, away from the use of the secret prisons towards targeted killing as a method of counterterrorism it's something the bush white house embraced wholeheartedly at the end of 2008, the end of the bush administration and as we know president obama has embraced as well. so what we've seen during the obama administration is an acceleration of that process, focusing on paramilitary activities, man hunting in places where the united states is not officially at war but where the cia has this authority so that's one half of the coin how the cia has become more like the military. i'll spend less time on the military side but i think it's important because it's the other half of this dramatic change since 2001. so 2001 happens, 9/11 happens

and the pentagon had been -- military had been structured very much like it had been for decades with a -- with large static armies built to fight wars like the gulf war in the early 1990s. and this really infuriated the defense secretary donald rumsfeld. because what he saw was a military that -- he saw an enemy that was not in wars where the military was authorized to fight. so the question was how could the military, how could he, the secretary of defense, run a war in places where the united states was not at war? the cia had the authority to operate in these places but the military didn't so what he really pushed for in the years he was secretary of defense was to expand the pentagon's authorities to operate

clandestinely, some would say covertly to act more like the cia did with its own authorities. to operate in deniable places, in places where the united states did not have to acknowledge it was operating, he expanded dramatically the role of special operations forces specifically joint special operations command. which is down in ft. bragg, north carolina. it's the delta force, s.e.a.l. team 6. this small niche group built to do hostage rescues, very short operations over 24 hours, basically he built this organization to fight large secret wars in iraq, in afghanistan, across the border into pakistan and this became rumsfeld's tool to create the military more like the intelligence services so there's been a convergence over the last 15 years between the military and the cia and this blurring of the lines and in a little while

i'll get to where does this culminate but first let's get to where does this play out? well, i think that the true laboratory for this convergence is pakistan and i think probably the most interesting, i think the most interesting setting for this experiment over the last 15 years partly because it created this dilemma for the united states government of a country that was officially an ally and yet a country where there were questions about the loyalty of its leaders, the loyalty of its intelligence service, the ability of its government to deal with terrorism threats going not only into afghanistan but to the united states and so it presented this dilemma. so i think that if you want to look at a place where this grand transformation has taken place,

i think pakistan is the most interesting place to look and the arc of the relations between the united states and pakistan follow an interesting although i think somewhat depressing trajectory. there were early on good relations, i would say, for what you could call them good relations between the united states and pakistan and specifically the intelligence services of the united states and pakistan, the cia namely and pakistan's intelligence service, the isi. there was a degree of commonality of what their mission was. there was no love for al qaeda among the pakistani intelligence service and there was a view that while the isi had nurtured the taliban and saw the taliban as a bulwark in afghanistan against india, al qaeda was a problem and a threat and therefore they could work with the united states against al qaeda. so that in the early period, there are a number of senior al

qaeda operatives captured in pakistan. khalid sheikh mohammed, abu zubaydah, others that did show collaboration between pakistani and american intelligence services. but over time suspicion grew about the motive, about each other's motives. the united states began suspecting that the pakistanis were playing a double game, particularly with the taliban. that while they were helping with al qaeda, they were secretly nurturing the taliban because they were unclear whether the united states was going to stay in afghanistan. the pakistanis were unclear whether the united states was going to stay in pakistan -- sorry, in afghanistan and we're not sure whether as the united states got diverted to the iraq war, whether they should be nurtured -- continuing to nurture the taliban because they were looking for the long-term picture of how the taliban fit into their own strategic defense against india.

so the mutual suspicions grew over time. two couple critical points and i think these points accelerate these transformations in the cia that i talked about earlier. the first is the decision in some of july of 2008 by the bush white house to basically conduct drone strikes in pakistan unilaterally. up to that point there had been a decision from 2004 to 2008 to get the pakistanis to sign off on every drone strike or at least notify them of drone strikes that had -- were taking part in the country. there became -- came to be a believe inside the cia and at the white house that the pakistanis were tipping off militants before the strikes and in 2007 there were no successful strikes so there was this belief that perhaps their partner

wasn't such a reliable partner. and so president obama authorized unilateral action and you see this dramatic spike in drone strikes starting in july, 2008, and when president obama comes in in january, 2009, he makes the, i think very fateful decision, to continue the program and in many ways accelerate it from where bush had left it. you're seeing in 2009 and especially in 2002, a dramatic increase in drone strikes based on intelligence gathered by the cia and agents in the pakistani tribal areas. that had positive and arguably very negative results. one is that it did have a dramatic effect on al qaeda and al qaeda operatives in terms of those who were killed or who fled because of the drone strikes. but it also really poisoned relations between the united states and pakistan. to the point that by three years later, was really the cratering

of the relationship. this is one of the big points we want to look at when we look at intelligence operations post 9/11 because there's so much of a focus on what they call kinetic operations, capturing and killing, operations inside countries where you may note acknowledge your role or may not tell your partner service it can have really dilitarius impact on diplomacy and diplomatic relations between the country. many people would think that in 2011, exactly five years -- five years from monday when the osama bin laden raid happened, was the low point but actually, i think in traveling to pakistan and doing a lot of reporting there and as i write about in my book, the real -- i think the lowest point of the relationship came a few months earlier when a cia operative named raymond davis

was captured -- was picked up by policemen in pakistan after he had shot two people he thought were trying to -- trying to rob him as he was driving through the streets of lahore. davis is picked up by the cops. he had -- after he shot the two men he radioed for help. a white van from the lahore consulate in the american consulate in lahore came to rescue him but in doing so killed a third person by accident and drove away and left raymond davis on the street to his own devices. he's picked up and put in jail and the beginning of my book is the interrogation of davis by the pakistani police which you can actually watch on youtube amazingly. it set off this period where president obama had to say publicly he was not a spy he was a diplomat.

the pakistanis knew better and for the pakistanis, this was in their mind proof about cia operations over the years, that the cia had deployed the secret army inside pakistan without telling pakistanis they were up to their minds all sorts of nefarious acts. raymond davis sitting in jail in lahore was the proof of that. the issue ultimately resolves when a deal was struck that the families of the victims were paid off. raymond davis was put on a plane to afghanistan and brought back to the united states but that really soured the relationship ten years after 9/11, more even than what happened three months later when a group of navy s.e.a.l.s went deep into pakistan and killed osama bin

laden. but i think that moment, the bin laden raid, i think kind of illuminates the transformation i've been talking about. here you had ten years after the september 11th attacks and you had a group of soldiers operating under the cia's authority sort of a flick of a pen, the navy s.e.a.l.s were given authority to operate under cia rules, to operate inside pakistan, a country where the united states was not at war. if they -- if the bush administration so choose -- obama administration so chose, they could have never acknowledged the role, never acknowledged the operation. as we know what happened in that operation, it was acknowledged. it became what was considered the cia's greatest moment since the september 11th attacks but does show a blurring of the lines of what happened between the united states military, intelligence services and how

they converged in this country that is officially an american ally. i think that i will stop here and then get tomorrow into where all this is going and whether we're likely to see any change. thanks. [ applause ] >> thank you. i'm glad to be here. thank you to the consulate for inviting me and it's a pleasure to share this podium with two

very distinguished speakers from the panel. i almost actually didn't make it today. i flew in from myrtle beach in south carolina where i teach at the coastal carolina university. the flight was overbooked in typical fashion. i should not mention the name of the company since we're on tv. -- maybe i should for that reason. almost did not make it on the flight. very kind lady stepped in and said, i'll stay here tonight so you can go to your conference. i was very thankful to her. then she turned -- asked me, so what's your conference about? and i said it's about espionage and i think she got scared after that. typical of the subject, when i tell people my academic interest, espionage, i have a discussion to end at that point or dies away. i'm glad to be with this audience that hopefully this discussion will not -- this subject will not kill the discussion, in fact probably fuel it. i hope also for tomorrow's discussion to have some interesting thoughts and

debates. my main area of expertise is espionage, technically speaking, we can call that human, human intelligence, right? essentially a quick definition of this is human intelligence, any information that can be gathered from human sources using human sources. it's basically what the cia was initially founded to do before it changed its mission as mark correctly pointed out. a few very basic aspects of the background of this in the united states. there is a significant human element to the intelligence community, of course, human is one of many disciplines of intelligence collection, it's not the only one. but in the united states, obviously the agency is the

agency that makes most use of human intelligence. it's one of the core missions of this agency but it's not the only one. we have of course a defense intelligence agency that does more or less what the cia does but focuses on military issues as opposed to civilian issues. the department of state also makes use of that technically, they collect information from humans, using humans, although they are not an intelligence agency and have an intelligence component for sure. not to mention the fbi makes use of human intelligence and every branch of the u.s. armed forces has components that facilitate human intelligence. it's a very scattered discipline throughout the u.s. intelligence community. the most esoteric of all, no question about that. that's the reason what i want to

spend a few minutes going into the background of this before i go into more detail. in the united states since 9/11, we had sort of reorganization of the national clandestine service, supposed to be sort of a unit that brings together the human aspects of the u.s. intelligence community and reality mostly run by the cia. the office of the director of national intelligence is supposed to supervise it, a lot of issues and turf wars of who actually is in charge of the national clandestine services, people often refer to the operations as the ncs, a lot of confusion about this. in fact it's supposed to be bigger than just the director of operations, which is a part of the cia that does the human aspect that i specialize on. if you would reduce the --

appreciate that. according to the website of the office of director of national intelligence, the national clandestine service as the national authority for coordination, de-confliction, and evaluation of of clandestine, human intelligence investigation. that's the managed by the director of ncs as delegated by the director of the cia who is an undercover officer. a very quick but important note here about humint, operations officers that deal with human intelligence, they don't kill people, typically, they don't drive flashy cars and if anything being flashy is looked

down on an actual operations officer, they tend to blend in. they don't frequent casinos unlike james bond although there was a story recently about the cia recruiting or trying to recruit chinese officials in casinos in macao. it does happen sometimes, just not very often. and most important of all, i should say by the way, technically they don't spy. they don't themselves spy. they actually recruit others who spy for them. so they are officers not spies. the agents are the ones that do the spying. and most important of all, most of them have diplomatic immunity. right? an important subject to return to this in a minute of what that means in the sort of current era of asymmetric war the u.s. finds itself in.

most operations officers are an evolved human intelligence collection, core collectors or case officers. what they do is they recruit people in foreign countries to spy for the united states government, right? this is a very complex and difficult task that is based on very strong -- developing strong relationships of trust between an operations officer and an agent. these agents then will trust you as an operations officer, as a case officer to such an extent that they will actually go out there and put their lives at risk for a number of reasons, sometimes money or grudges against their own agencies or whatever, but often to a large extent they do it because of you. so psychology plays a very important role in this, far more important than guns, weapons. i would actually call this the ultimate people job. to convince people to do things for you they would not otherwise do. that's the important background to keep in mind as we discuss how this type of line of work has changed in the post 9/11 era

in which we find ourselves today. so the core collectors for the u.s. intelligence community -- core collectors another term for operations officer that collects human intelligence. this is really the conventions that the u.s. intelligence community uses to collect human intelligence. it's a cold war phenomenon, developed during the cold war. america hardly had an intelligence community to speak of before world war ii. and so the conventions and methods and the disciplines and traditions in america of human intelligence developed during the cold war. it is strictly speaking a cold war phenomenon, right? that typically evolves in the cold war in particular, involved probably men, usually from a middle class or upper middle

class or upper class background who joined the cia word of mouth type system, which of course were not used to living in austere environments, they came from quite privileged backgrounds. not as much as the british case but still there was an element of class in that recruitment process. so they were not used to living in very austere environments, right? and they spent as a result much of their career in quite -- i would say for most part, not always, safe locations and doing things that are quite safe. they all had official covers, meaning that they had a position in the u.s. government that gave them diplomatic immunity. meaning that they were often stationed in u.s. embassies or consulates in countries around the world, right? and they pretended to be

diplomats, many of them. in fact they were also diplomats but in fact the real job began usually at night when they did the humint part of their job. of course their life resembled very much those of diplomats. it overlapped in many important areas. diplomats are known for example to attend cocktail parties of various embassies. every country has a national holiday or wholesome type of event to attend and during cold war they would attend those events and stride to recruit other diplomats of other countries.

that strange song and dance with them and they are doing the same to you because they also pretend to be diplomats but they are not and you have to report about this and sort of like hope that something happens out of it and often it does. sometimes it does not. but that's very often a very large part of an operations officer's life during the cold war. these were mostly safe assignments and i would say they are safe even today. if you have immunity and you have a pass that says you're a diplomat and you get caught spying in china, you are basically exceeding the description. they might arrest you or rough you up a couple of days but they can't really do anything to you. chances are they let you go. the case of raymond allen davis you mentioned is typical of that. even in that case he was roughed up for a few days and got to come back home. these were very safe assignments. as assignments go. in addition to that, that's an important part of what i'm trying to say today, right? these mostly men or upper middle class individuals would train to recruit people who looked and act and often thought just like them. right? even if the depths of the cold

war, right, your average russian diplomat you're trying to recruit or polish diplomat dressed like you and spoke something that resembled english and for the most part you could communicate. there was a connection of cultures and also had limitations to how far they were going to go as part of the commitment to principles. they would often not be sort of suicide -- have a suicide mentality, which is not the case today. additionally, most of that work focused mainly on the ussr. it's amazing when you look at the archives, the degree it focused. often that activity in the same parts of africa or asia did resolve around what the soviets were doing there, right? i've written sort of a documentary history of the national security agency and one of the things i found funny and interesting, during sort of the early 1980s, they had four different departments and accounts but they had two like basic units, one was soviet and

the other was ilaoo, which meant all others and that was pretty much it. the amount of output dedicated to the soviet union was incredible. if you look at the map of those days. you're an operations officer and stationed somewhere abroad in a place like istanbul or nairobi or berlin, vienna, the kinds of places or brazil, we associate with the cold war as it were. i'll have you know these are nice places, quite nice, if you're stationed in vienna, you get a nice house and income. even if you're in places like nairobi, you live in the western area and it's leafy and gated. and you get a good income because it's cheap to live there.

it's great. it's a very nice safe type of life for an operations officer. you get to compare that with the types of cities that we associate with today's current affairs, places like benghazi or peshawar. these are the kinds of places we're talking about. the cold war is over and the focus has shifted. these places are not as nice, are they? so essentially what we find ourselves in today is that the main problem we have of course is that i mentioned that human intelligence operations were developed in the cold war on state actors now we're dealing with nonstate actors and the way

you collect human intelligence is totally different than how you go about this with a state actor, right? to begin with, no state actors do not display overt targets of human intelligence collection. they don't have diplomats. they don't have business community or senior officials that you can recruit. you rarely come in contact with them because they mostly operate underground. in addition to that, that forces core collectors to actually focus for a change on targets that are not diplomatic. you can't recruit any more by going to cocktail parties in embassies. you can't recruit people who live in the same neighborhood as you that happen to work for another country. this is over. we do that still but what i'm saying is that the war on terrorism does not revolve around that kind of universe anymore. that is over. in addition, the actual terrain is alien to western operatives. have you been to yemen lately,

place like sanaa, it looks like an alien landscape. i mean that in the sense of extra terrestrial, reminds you of images from "star wars" almost. even the architecture is different from what we're used to here in the west. let alone the way people talk or dress or linguistic issues are massive and cultural barriers, almost insurmountable, even today many years after 9/11. that's a serious problem for human intelligence collection. not to mention of course, the very hazardous operational environment. i mentioned before, if you're caught in even in russia today, let's say or venezuela, something like that, chances are nothing major will happen to you. i tell my students if you want life threatening situations, don't join the cia, join law enforcement, you know?

local law enforcement, far more dangerous than working as a typical case officer, let alone an analyst. in this case if al qaeda were to arrest you, or isis, we're talking about a very serious turn of events for you and your account back in the cia. i have a very important data point in my research which comes from an article written under this title, the counterterrorism myth written by mark gerecht, former intelligence officer for the cia. he wrote this in 2001 in july. and i think that's a very accurate picture of what was happening then at the cia.

this is a quote from his article in the atlantic, the existence of a u.s. counterterrorism program in the middle east south and central asia is a myth he says, it doesn't exist. we don't have such a thing back in 2001. he said, it's virtually impossible for westerners to operate in al qaeda's environments. that's a good question. what are the chances of a white caucasian guy from america surviving in peshawar for more than week or even going unnoticed? that's impossible. not in sanaa or benghazi, doesn't happen. the close -- so that brings me to the point that often these places are terrorist safe havens and these terrorist havens have a very close structure and poses operational difficulties even for noncaucasian muslims which the cia has. what they are saying, back in 2001, not necessarily today,

2001, around the time of the 9/11 attacks is that even a cia officer who is a muslim, who is familiar with the kind of culture finds it very difficult to survive and to be convincing in a place like peshawar or benghazi. case officers because of that have to force themselves to venture outside of the diplomatic circuit. what gerecht is saying, it was not necessarily encouraged because it is dangerous or even rewarded. a great quote that he has in his article from a former division operative for the cia, sorry for the strong language but this is so typically director of operations. the cia probably hasn't got a single qualified arabic speaking

officer of a middle eastern background who can believe a believable muslim sharing his life, for christ's sake, most case officers lived in the suburbs of virginia. we don't do that kind of thing. right? that's a great quote. another quote this time from an active cia case officer, operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen. while we're on the subject i would add operations that include lack of toilet paper as a way of life don't happen either. another thing that he says i'm not sure i so much agree with that but interesting comment, we can discuss it that human is characterized by risk adverse bureaucratic nature which mirrors the growing physical risk of american society. interesting comment even though i'm skeptical about that one.

and i would add to this, this is not gerecht's point, this is my point, it is difficult for the older case officers to venture outside of safe western areas. it's difficult and they tend to fall into predictable patterns of behavior. for example, when meeting agents, which makes them very much the target of foreign counterintelligence. this may have happened in beirut. there was some reports in the news that the cia suffered a virtual wipeout of its agent network in lebanon, beirut in 2001. what happen pd is they would meet them at like the kfc in beirut or starbucks. that's where they felt comfortable going. you feel at home, it's not challenging and dangerous, all hezbollah had to do monitor meeting in those places, that simple. that's the kind of stuff i'm

talking about. how things have changed since 9/11. so what's the way forward? this is the article written in 2001. what's happening now? of course we don't have access to the inside picture where we can speculate and also use some open sources like for instance mark's book that he mentioned earlier, there is no question of course the cia counterterrorism is not a 9/11 creation. it existed for decades before that but we have seen an unprecedented growth of the center. now it's so big and so active that it rivals some of the traditional national clandestine service accounts. that's a direct outcome of that. there's also a renewed growth in the cia's nonofficial cover program, you have probably heard this before.

these are actual officers who go out there and don't have immunity and go out there and don't have a connection to the government of the united states. they do what others do, under immunity without the protection which gives them more flexibility and a bigger pressure to operate within society as opposed to detached from society. that of course is very dangerous. there were about -- hundreds of -- hundreds -- some say over a thousand but norcps have seen a rise over a few dozen from back in the cold war. that's a direct result of this situation. and of course, we are perhaps, perhaps, this is more of a speculation on my part and i'd like to see what others have to say about this. we may be noticing a post global war on terrorism transition from

tactical counterterrorism, the killing and kidnapping and all of that stuff back to strategic operations focusing more on human intelligence. this again is a matter for discussion. i think this is happening although we cannot be certain -- cannot be certain. and this is something part of speculation and connects to what i'll talk about tomorrow, we may be seeing a possible future emphasis on case officers specializing more. in other words, somebody spent like 30 different countries in their career, it may be narrowed down to two or three. they go more in depth and culture becomes more aware and more able to operate in these kinds of environments because that is all they do. that's more of a speculation i think based on my sixth sense and research that this is where things are going toward. but i'll mention more about that tomorrow. until then, thank you for your attention.

[ applause ] >> thank you very much. that was a wonderful presentation, all three of you. we have time for q and a. and please raise your hands and stand up when you take the mic and ask short and pertinent questions. thank you. >> back in 1971 during the -- where west pakistan became bangladesh, there was that whole conflict and the united states backed pakistan, which many people say was the wrong thing to do.

but even though this was 30 years before 9/11, when it was mentioned that at first united states and pakistan had reasonably good relations. even though it's 30 years before, was the united states' role in the bangladesh conflict a good example of that? >> i mean, i could talk a little bit about it. i'm not an expert in that conflict. i recommend a terrific book called "the blood telegram" about that conflict but it gets to the point, the author's name, gary bass, a professor at princeton. you're right, the united states backed pakistan in putting down that insurrection in bangladesh.

all sorts of cables and documents about henry kissinger's role in that. the larger point is that pakistan was seen as a very important cold war ally for the united states where it was seen that india was in the sort of in the soviet sphere and some of my colleagues might be able to speak more intelligently and pakistan certainly and moving forward you have the very important role, the united states and pakistan played in the arming of the mujahadin in the '80s to drive the soviets out of afghanistan. it was an important alliance until the end of the cold war during the -- after the fall of communism, there was a drift in the relationship. there was an estrangement to some degree and the united states got closer to india.

the pakistanis after the soviets left afghanistan, the taliban came about. they as i said earlier, cultivated the taliban as an important ally against india and so what we had on 2001 in 9/11, an old ally that was certainly not -- certainly not the same level of trust as there had been in the cold war but it was still seen as a country that had drifted from the united states' sort of same interest but still quite important. >> if i could quickly add, on the soviet records pertaining to the separation of bangladesh from pakistan in 1971 just became available last august. and again, because they were only so recently available, i haven't gone through all of them. but i did look at some of them and because as mark mentioned india was a close ally of the

soviet union, the soviet intelligence service and soviet foreign ministry were basically quite happy about the outcome in the -- that bangladesh had been able to be separated through india's intervention. and saw this as a new arena in which it would be possible opportunities for intelligence gathering vis a vis pakistan which was looked upon as an important u.s. base for espionage. >> quickly a question for mark, you called this a lawyer's war. do lawyers ever say no? do they ever say, you know, when the services want to torture, when they want to do various things that are on their operational agenda, that the

lawyers say no, you can't do that? if you can talk examples of that. and quick question for joseph, specialization you ended with that now? that is in the sense -- haven't we been doing this and aren't there people working -- iran, iraq, afghanistan, you know, have sort of dedicated their career and their specialization to those sorts of things? you see that that is a way of the future? isn't this what's happening now? i'm kind of hoping that it is. >> so yeah, quickly, yes, they say no. the most famous examples of of course are those of when they have said yes when they were presented a list of things that the agencies wanted to do and

the lawyers basically found ways to justify them, whether it's -- whether it's the interrogation, whether it's surveillance, whether it's the famous or infamous decision to prosecute whether it's the famous or infamous decision to prosecute an war al awlaki. those are the most famous. there are examples of lawyers once decisions were made or in the midst of some of the decisions resisting that pressure, there's a man named alberta mora, who was the -- i believe -- i could be wrong. the general counsel of the navy in the pentagon. who was resisting some of the interrogation methods at guantanamo bay and elsewhere. he famously was a dissenter from some of that movement. there's a lawyer -- justice department bush administration jack goldsmith who wrote a book about how his role in rescinding some of the orders given

specifically on surveillance, for infamous nsa wiretapping. so some of those lawyers are known now. they are sort of famous in some circles but it is i think just telling that some -- it's i think fascinating that some of the most important figures of this period in this clandestine conflict are the lawyers on either side. >> thanks for the information. excellent question. i would say that you're right, there is specialization. let's say in the intelligence community of the united states. a lot more specialization than the analysis aspect. so for instance, you know, there is somebody -- i can assure you that right now there's somebody at the cia who specializes in the history of albanian agriculture. and they're waiting for you to ask them. like they're living their life in a cubicle and their whole

life comes to the point where somebody will ask them. this does happen. however, in the operations department not so much. you look at the biographical sketches of retired operations officers, they say they've run operations in 30 countries. okay? my sense is that this is going to become -- this number's going to be reduced significantly in the years to come. so analysis, yes. operations i think not so much. thank you. >> thank you for everybody on the panel for tonight and look forward to tomorrow. we've got two more. i'll start with "new york times." talk about the extent to which the technology got the policy makers, whether they were republican administrations or democrat administrations off the hook. you can fire a hellfire from a predator but you can also fire it from an f-16 or an air force platform. talk about the extent that the technology made it easier or easy to pursue a policy of targeted killing and perhaps was

a substitution for a more nuanced policy. and then just on the point of the lawyers. there's always been lawyers in the intelligence community. donovan was a lawyer in oss. colby was a lawyer. casey was a lawyer. so that tradition has always been there. but i agree, it's become a much more legalistic process. but for everybody on the panel talk about the impact of the technology on the policy versus the policy on the technology. >> sure. i'll start. it's a terrific question. and right. there's always obviously been lawyers. they've had a role. the point i was making was that basically all of these decisions that were made after 9/11 there was really very much a blank slate that had to be filled in by lawyers on what could or could not be done. it's an excellent point on the technology. right? what is the difference between a predator shooting a hellfire and an f-16. the answer is what the predator did was allowed. the agency or whoever was flying

at it to sit in one spot for a long period of time and watch. and there were -- i don't think i said in my opening talk, there were unarmed predators before there were predators. there were predators that just did surveillance. and the problem that came about is they flew the predator in '99 and 2000 in afghanistan and some cia officers are convinced they saw osama bin laden watching with a predator. it was an unarmed predator. the question was then what to do and if they were going to kill him did they have the authority, was there the technology to do it. they would have to launch a cruise missile from a submarine or something. so what the technology allowed -- and i think you've got a great point. that it drove policy. it allowed them to sit for a long period of time to watch and then when they saw to make a decision and to carry out a kill. so it is -- the technology i think then was very seductive for policy makers to do what

they thought they couldn't do before. >> thank you. curious as to what you find with regards to the cold war with false flag operations. so you have operation north woods. gladio b operations and especially mark cramer maybe you could comment as far as what information has come out with regards to the documents from the soviet union and them doing false flag operations or contemplating it. like operation north woods was never carried out. but it was planned. >> let me if i can just ask for a clarification, by falsifying operations you mean operations that -- oh. okay. false flag. i thought you said falsifying. covert operations were a staple part of soviet foreign intelligence activity.

they had many that were designed for assassinations. they carried out assassinations both in -- within the eastern bloc but also in western countries and in third world countries. there were efforts certainly to deceive and to present something as being western front whereas in fact it was being soviet operated. the records on this are still -- you know, many of them are still sealed, at least in russia, so it's hard to give a sense of the full magnitude of it. but intelligence gathering was the core of the mission of the soviet foreign intelligence service. the covert arm, in what soviet

parlance were called wet operations, [ speaking foreign language ] were important in various eras. but especially the stalin era. but i think it would be misleading to say it was a dominant element of the soviet foreign intelligence service. it was an important part but the bulk of personnel went into intelligence gathering and more straightforward espionage. >> just recently, and i think this was in the "new york times" sunday review like a week or two ago. there was this author and he was doing a biography of james jesus angleton. and he comment bd how ted about cia had essentially pulled -- he was doing a biography of him and wanted to look at something that was supposed to be available.

the cia essentially pulled everything when he went to the archives and they said they have taken everything. i wonder i guess this is for dr. kramer if you can talk about reclassification and essentially intelligence agencies hiding their dark secrets through this. >> well, again, it varies. the -- what was the operations director of cia was specifically exempt from the freedom of information act so you can apply -- foia requests are very common for cia materials, but that part of it is not subject to it. and for understandable reasons. you don't want to disclose agent names inadvertently and potentially endanger people's lives, or at least safety. they are bound to be gaps in that regard.

i would say overall, at least with respect to cold warrior records, the cia has become vastly more overture open than it was. the electronic reading room, for example, would have been incon soef oobl duri inconceivable during the cold war. there are tens of thousands of documents out there and a good search engine that you can use. there is reclassifications of materials. it pertains mostly to nuclear weapons-related materials. and that came about as an act of congress. it was something that i think was unnecessary. it also has been a real burden on declassification. so there are certainly major problems in the declassification process with regard to u.s. documents. but it's in that sphere. the exemption of certain parts of the u.s. intelligence community i don't think will change in the near term.

even about cold war era records. there is a great deal of reluctance to change it both on the part of the intelligence community and on the part of the congress. >> i had a question, and it has to do more with psychology and the american psychological association. about last year there was a big revelation that they were kind of in cahoots with the cia and a bunch of the top heads in the a.p.a. eventually fell but the a.p.a. kind of came about real heavily right after world war ii when you had a lot of these veterans dealing with ptsd. and the a.p.a. i guess had a very strong relation with the military right after that. and then there's a bunch of operations people have probably read and studied about and so forth. but how does the concept of terrorism and that fine line between what is moral and what is ethic -- ethical in terms of not just legal but just what is

huma humane. and there's always this fine line between it but then you have the a.p.a. crossing over and pretty much advising them on how to extract information. what are the lines between it and how to play with someone's mind. and it was very interesting that that came out and several of them fell from their positions. but it almost seemed like a lot of them had been involved in that community for a very, very long time since human intelligence, a lot of it is based on psychology. is there any more about that? because that's kind of a real gray shady area. a lot of people don't have a lot of information about. but i found it was very interesting when that came out last year. >> i think the connection between psychologists and psychiatrists, the u.s. military and the cia is much longer than you make it out to be

in my opinion. if you think the recent stuff with enhanced interrogation is controversial, just look at mk ultra. i mean, speaking of missing documents, by the way. and that's a much more aggressive, invasive program, far less supervised than the current controversy with the a.p.a. i think also a lot of it's to do with fear. i think 9/11 actually caused a tremendous amount of fear on americans and actually also influenced many academics in the academic community who perhaps became a little less careful about the fine line you're talking about than they should have been. >> very quickly, since joseph mentioned about mk ultra, and as he also alluded to that was a very strange operation of the

activity of the cia that was disclosed in the mid 1970s, and in which records were deliberately destroyed to try to cover it up. it turned out there were copies of some of those records that were subsequently obtained and made available. it is quite depressing to read that the cia was engaged in that kind of activity. these were some of the psychological experiments. there were also lsd experiments and others. when those were disclosed, they became extremely controversial. and as far as we know, there has not been a return to that kind of activity. >> just one thing quickly, mathew gannon was a friend of mine. close friend. he was a case officer in the '80s. worked for the counterterrorism agency.

he was probably one of the most fluent people in arabic. he worked in yemen, in lebanon. he was killed in 1989. there are other people -- i don't know russia. i understand the soviet union and eastern europe, they also had experts, but bob baer, bob ames. so i think you're a little incorrect in your statements about generalization of case officers. and i just want to point out that again, matthew died in 1989 and a lot of people were very upset about that. i worked for -- as a low-level person as general hayden when he was at ft. mead. he would say that he was very active in full intelligence and interrogation, in surveillance and in a full intelligence type

of aspects to end al qaeda by a full intelligence. when he left in 19 -- when he left in 2009, obama and panetta changed that and they essentially went toward targeted assassinations, saying that essentially the way to get rid of al qaeda was not through a general intelligence method but was through getting rid of its leadership. would you agree or not agree with that? >> i will start. and then whoever else. i'd agree partly -- i mean, i think that hayden was -- given you said his background was in signals intelligence. he ran the nsa. i think he came to the cia with a view of seeing as you said all aspects of intelligence. he got and by his own admission very, very deep into the

countertomorrow world. and he was even the one who went to the white house in july of 2008 to advocate for this accelerated targeted killing program that the bush administration picked up. and as you said, obama and panetta ran with. i do think by the end of his tenure at the cia, hayden really began something that obama picked up on and panetta picked up on. >> thanks for your question and also trying to say my last name, that was very brave of you. thanks for giving me the chance to clarify. you're absolutely right. it's unfair to characterize everyone in that light. there is a long tradition in the cia of very risky operations conducted by very risky case officers. i mean, we had people in the '80s in beirut for goodness sake. there were people in the congo in the '60s. there were people in -- you know, in very difficult environments and often paying with their lives for that.

my comment is -- and there are also people who did resemble james bond. vasek mirkin and people like that on the soviet desk. so this stuff did happen. i am just saying that -- and if you are going further back in the oss days, there was even more of that. my comment was that during the cold war the majority of people involved in this kind of business were kind of playing it kind of safe. not necessarily because they wanted to but often because they had to. so the culture was more toward that. as opposed to the more risky operation that's you're correct caused many officers their lives very often. so yeah, thanks for your comment and question. >> time for two more questions. >> yes, you spoke about the cia officers changing and pushing the envelope of how they collect intelligence. you spoke about how most of them never lived austere lives, grew

up as white privileged americans. i would like your opinion on if you look at the case of bowe bergdahl, he spent several years as a prisoner learning the culture and living the culture and he would seem to appear as one of the best recruits to become a cia case officer. i was wondering if your opinion is that the cia would push the envelope that far to get their officers that in depth and to get that knowledge. >> yes, it is a great question. basically what you're saying is how do you correct the current deficiency. and i will say that there's been a lot of steps taken toward that direction. i will say that the cia in particular has done great strides to diversify its director of ofrpperations. not just with the aspect you just mentioned but also people who have some kind of foreign background, have lived abroad, speak fluently a foreign

language. it's more difficult to recruit these people because of the difficulty in assessing their background. so say, for instance, if you were born in holland and your mom is dutch or something like that and your dad is american, you grew up in holland, speak fluent dutch, moved to the united states, great background for the cia but they have to investigate your background. they have to go to holland. or if, say, you were born in pakistan. it makes it more difficult. often people who apply for these jobs get tired of waiting and then move on to jobs that are easier to get and pay more as well. another thing, they're less dangerous too. so you have to really want to in order to work in that kind of line of work. and i mean often the cia when they hire people, they would make conditional offers for one condition, two of the people who got the offer they eventually drop out because they are tired of waiting o'they find something else to do. it is a very difficult job. it's more mud than medals, as has correctly been said.

and that's just one example of how hard this situation is and how difficult. thank you for your question. >> i suspect that you all use the unfortunate phrase. rather than saying reorient, you should probably say re-emphasize or change the emphasis. how much does the cia still -- i mean, maybe there's a few old men and women. how much does it still worry about the threat of russia and china which is still major? >> very good question. i think part of the problem with the reorientation of the cia, especially after 2001, but to some extent when the cold war ended in general was a -- as we've all talked about during the cold war the cia was overwhelmingly focused on the ussr and understandably so.