i said alan arkin. he's great. he said great. i love him. sign him. great actor. signed arkin.neets before we're getting ready to shoot i get an emergency phone call. arkin is in the hospital. gallbladder or something. had something removed. in the hospital. and i don't know who should -- who should do the part. so i said, i got one great idea. i think it'll work. i said who? i said, carl rhyner. again, carl rhyner and alan arkin. they were great, close friends. i called rhyner. it was 11:00 at night. went over to his house. beverly hills. went in. he had guests in the house, mel brooks was there, a couple other people. he said -- he said, what is it, jerry? what's so important? i said i need to talk to you right away. i got a script i want you to read. he said well when does it start? i said, two days. he said who fell out? i said alan arkin. he's in the hospital. he's sick. he said, come on, jerry. i said, read it. it's george clooney, brad pitt, matt damon, don cheadle, julia roberts. read it. you're going to like it. >> say we get into the cage and through the security door

. >> that is pulitzer prize- winning "washington post" reporter dana priest, who with william arkin wrote a blockbuster series of stories about intelligence gathering, billions and billions of dollars dollars spent on intelligence gathering. according to them, the system is so big and bloated that lines of responsibility are hopelessly blurred. there is information about the underwear bomber -- tackled by a passenger on the airplane. >> the first part was the one i found most interesting, the growth of these agencies. some of the redundancy is in some ways good. it is a way of cross checking. but it has apparently reached a point where it is out of hand. remember, though, intelligence gathering is just that, polling information from a lot of different sources. the big challenges the analysis side, sifting through that stuff. >> one of the fatal errors is that the new superstructure of the director of national intelligence, who was supposed to be this new institution that would control everything and rationalize it, was given no power of the purse. he basically has no control over the 17 o

she and national security reporter william arkin worked for two years on the project. you to embark on this study? and were you surprised at what you found? >> well, i've covered national security for a decade or more. and after 9/11, you could see, you could feel the growth of something around you. you listened to officials and they had complaints and concerns about how much money was being spent. it was all sort of understandable in the beginning. and it continued to grow at a great, rapid rate. and so a couple of years ago bill, my co-author, bill arkin and i, who we have been talking about this for years and years. said how would you go about trying to show this. and we got together and decided that one of the ways we would do it, since it is at the top secret level and we can't get inside of the government, we can't get inside those programs, is to start by just counting them. count them and put them on a map, sort of create an alternative geography of the united states. we did mapping like you do almost on a genome project. and once we did that, which took, you k

and its co-author bill arkin joins us now. thanks for joining us this morning. what i was struck by reading your piece in "the washington post" is how vast this apparatus has become. more than 850,000 people working across more than 1,200 government agencies, 1,900 private companies in 10,000 locations. you know, that's a lot for people at home to absorb. for everyone trying to get a handling on this, what is the single most important thing they need to know about this "top secret america"? >> well, george, thank you for having me on. i think that the reality for americans is that we've done exactly what america does best, but now ten years after 9/11, we have to ask ourselves whether or not this gigantic system that we've created for counterterrorism provides us both value in terms of money and also makes us safer. and one of the things we've learned in this two-year investigation is that the evidence shows that no one really is in a position of confidence to say that we are safer today than we were ten years ago. >> well, you say that, yet i spoke with an admi

the caller brought up the issue of bill arkin. "politico" or about him as well. -- wrote about him as well. "is one of the first times the -- it is the first time that one of the paper's bloggers has had a byline on a big front-page story." guest: he is not a blogger. he has been a military analyst 4304 decades but i will put out there, because someone else will. he does not have a typical journalist background. he has done research for groups like greenpeace and human rights watch. what a lot of them are bringing up is that it goes deeper than that. he was an analyst for the u.s. air force for years and years. he has been one of the contractors we are talking about. he dropped out when he decided to do this. theectured and taught at advanced or college for the air force. -- advanced war college for the air force. what he is great at, and the reason why we brought him on board, is that he is a phenomenal researcher. he has this database and it took him more than two years. he had been collecting this for more than that time t. he

the caller brought up the issue of bill arkin. "politico" or about him as well. -- wrote about him as well. "is one of the first times the -- it is the first time that one of the paper's bloggers has had a byline on a big front-page story." guest: he is not a blogger. he has been a military analyst 4304 decades but i will put out there, because someone else will. he does not have a typical journalist background. he has done research for groups like greenpeace and human rights watch. what a lot of them are bringing up is that it goes deeper than that. he was an analyst for the u.s. air force for years and years. he has been one of the contractors we are talking about. he dropped out when he decided to do this. theectured and taught at advanced or college for the air force. -- advanced war college for the air force. what he is great at, and the reason whye brought him on board, is that he is a phenomenal researcher. he has this database and it took him more than two years. he had been collecting this for more than that time t he and