 Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the New America Foundation. My name is Mateo Faiena, and I'm a fellow here in the International Security Program. Intelligence sharing, the topic we'll discuss today, is a topic whose importance is widely acknowledged, especially in the fight against terrorism, but that rarely gets discussed publicly. Now, in order to have a meaningful and insightful discussion on this topic, I had to combine academic expertise with professional expertise, both at the highest levels. So let me start with the academic side. Let me introduce you to Professor James Walsh. Professor Walsh is a professor of political science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of the award-winning book, The International Politics of Intelligence Sharing, and he has published widely on the effect of some drone strikes, use of torture, and even European integration. Professor Walsh's book, in my opinion, is the best social scientific work on the subject of intelligence sharing. Next to Professor Walsh, we have Professor David Geo. Professor Geo combines both professional expertise and academic expertise. He is the assistant professor of history at West Point and a history fellow for the Army Cyber Institute. He began his career as in the FBI in the National Security Division, then moved on to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, first as an analyst and then as an operations officer. He then decided that chasing spies and hunting terrorists was not cool enough for him, so he decided to go back to school and obtain a PhD from Cambridge University in intelligence history. And by the way, Cambridge is, to this day, the best place where to study intelligence history. I think they're trying to make up for all the damage they cost to Western intelligence over the ages. He wrote his dissertation on the special intelligence relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. from World War II to the mid-1960s. And last, but certainly not least, our keynote speaker, General Hayden. I won't go over his entire CVP because that would take up all the time we have, but I'll just give you some highlights. A career Air Force intelligence officer who rose through the ranks all the way to becoming a four-star general, which is something very remarkable and very unusual for an intelligence officer. He was commander of the Air Force Intelligence Agency in 1996-1997. He then became director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005. Then principal deputy director of National Intelligence. And finally, director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009. Now, if that's not enough for you, he was also quarterback in his high school football team. And I'm sure you always had very good intelligence in the opposing team's playbook. Now, after spending his career in government service, he joined the Chertov group and he has become a frequent commentator on national TV and on the Washington Times. And I must say, he's not someone who shies away from controversy. Now, without further delay, I will pass the floor to Professor Walsh. Each one of our speakers will speak for approximately 15 minutes. Then I will ask one or two questions. And then we will open up two questions from the audience. So, Professor Walsh, the floor is yours. Great. Thank you very much, Matteo. So, as Matteo mentioned, I'm a social scientist, so I think about intelligence sharing as a problem of international cooperation. How can countries with divergent interests come together to realize mutual or joint gains by sharing intelligence? And so I'd like to do a spend a couple of minutes talking about why intelligence sharing is a particularly difficult cooperation problem to solve, basically because both sides have good and legitimate incentives to keep their intelligence collection practices secret. Talk about some ways that countries can overcome these barriers to successful collaboration. And then I'll try to apply this to some historical cases and contemporary cases. So if we think about sort of the global distribution of intelligence capabilities, the U.S. is really unmatched in a number of areas, right? In terms of what I might call technical collection, in terms of global sourcing, and in terms of global analysis, right? No other country has the intelligence capacity and budget and expertise of the United States. But at the same time, it seems like the United States, this is an area where the United States can benefit a lot from collaboration with other countries, right? In particular, it can benefit from more localized knowledge and intelligence, human intelligence sources from countries around the world. And it seems like that would be particularly important for the United States because it has a global set of interests. Now, the problem with intelligence, the sort of intellectual problem with intelligence sharing as a form of cooperation is that it's difficult to observe if your partner is living up to the terms of an agreement. And this is, I think, this is true for lots of areas of international collaboration, but it seems to me it would be particularly severe for sharing of intelligence, or really for sharing of secret intelligence, right? And the reason it's difficult is because the intelligence is supposed to be secret. The country with which you might be sharing intelligence has good reasons to keep its sources and methods and conclusions secret from maybe even other branches of its own government, right, much less foreign governments. So how do you sort of penetrate that barrier of secrecy as an outside partner as a second country to determine if another country is living up to their promises to share? Now, so far I thought about this from the perspective of the United States, but I think actually partners of the United States have to have somewhat similar concerns about the United States. One thing I want to talk about a little bit later on is how things like WikiLeaks and the Snowden revelations have maybe altered other states' perceptions of the value and credibility of sharing intelligence with the United States. So the puzzle here is how can countries cooperate to capture these joint gains that they can accrue from sharing intelligence, while also minimizing the problem of cheating by their partners. By cheating, I mean not living up to the implicit or explicit terms of an agreement to share intelligence. When detecting that cheating is so difficult to do. So in international politics, there's sort of two ways to think about resolving a problem like this. One is to select your partners carefully, right, to select partners in whom you have a lot of trust, right? You trust not to cheat on a sharing agreement. So this is a good solution and as I'll suggest a little bit later on, it's one that's often pursued. The difficulty is, there are really two difficulties. One is that that may sharply diminish the range of countries that you can collaborate with, right? And it seems to me that it's often the countries that are somewhat less trustworthy have the most valuable or useful intelligence, right? So you could be, by following this rule strictly, you could be cutting off a lot of potentially useful collaboration. The other difficulty that flows from that is that it also would require a country like the United States to further expand its own capabilities to gather and collect intelligence, right? So we'd have to be able to do more of this on its own. Another solution is what we might call trust but verify, right? So this is the sort of domain of traditional international efforts to collaborate where you try to mitigate mistrust and concerns about cheating through things like third-party monitoring or the ability to punish another country's reputation if they cheat on an agreement to share intelligence. If you think about like an arms control agreement, arms control agreements typically often have many of these provisions, right? For some sort of independent or third-party monitoring and the implicit threat to a country's reputation if they engage in cheating that's detected. Now these mechanisms are difficult to pursue in the area of intelligence sharing. Intelligence sharing arrangements are often secret so it's difficult to threaten another country's reputation when they cheat because you don't want to make the larger sort of agreement at least the details of it public. And it can also be difficult to monitor compliance by an outsider, right? And certainly not something that would be easily trusted to a third party. So in my book I suggest that there's another way that countries can address these dilemmas and I think it's one that has not been clearly identified to this point and one that's actually pursued quite often. In fact it maybe even seems like the sort of normal state of affairs but when you look at it in the context of other types of agreements to cooperate and to share information I think it's quite distinctive. And the idea is basically to create a sort of hierarchical relationship between the countries that are sharing intelligence. You have a lead state or a dominant state that sort of sets the terms of the arrangement, compensates the subordinate with material rewards like its own intelligence or diplomatic support and a subordinate that gives up some of its autonomy by allowing the direct, the dominant state to engage in more sort of direct monitoring of its compliance with the agreement. So some specific ways that this could be carried out would be like for example seconding personnel, right? From one country's military or intelligence agencies to another country's and clearly this has the objective of building the partner state's capacity to collect and analyze intelligence and that's really important and that's an important part of the joint gains that they hope to capture. But at the same time it would probably give the dominant state some inside information or at least insight into what's going on in the partner country. Another mechanism might be financial assistance. So if the dominant country helps finance the subordinate country's intelligence service that's a benefit that presumably could be withheld in the future if there was not good compliance. And then a third mechanism might be training the intelligence personnel and the subordinate country. And again this has sort of direct benefit as well if you can increase their capacity to do their jobs but it seemed to me it would also have some indirect capacity to address sort of the trust and cheating issue that I've talked about. You can socialize intelligence personnel in other countries to sort of the American way of collecting and analyzing intelligence and maybe gain more insight into what's going on locally through them. So let me talk about a couple of historical examples. I think an interesting comparison here is between in the Cold War between US intelligence sharing with Great Britain and with the country that became West Germany. Both of these countries had intelligence that was of great value to the United States but they really differed on the level of trust. The UK was of course very closely trusted. The US had at that point a very long history of sharing intelligence with or a deep history maybe is a better way to put that. West Germany though had was less trustworthy, right? There wasn't clear the direction of the occupied territories and how they would evolve into what sort of country they would evolve into and there was a lot of potential for penetration by the Soviet Union and East Germany. So in this case the US took very different approaches towards managing their relations with these two countries. In the case of the UK it was more of sort of a traditional arms length arrangement where the two partners met on more or less equal terms and trusted each other's intelligence and maybe more so than any other case in recent history. But in the case of Germany the US took a very different approach. It really helped establish and literally directly managed the developing West German intelligence service provided it with most of its finance at least in its early years and really set its key objectives for a number of years into the 1950s. And so if you look at the declassified documents, CIA documents from the period it's very clear that the people at the CIA were concerned about cheating by their West German collaborator and took these steps with the deliberate intention of minimizing the risk from that. So let me talk about a couple of contemporary cases. Of course I have no real inside information here but as an academic I will try to apply my framework to every situation that I can find. If you think about say the current campaign against ISIS here a really useful partner for the United States is Iraq because it can help with providing human intelligence and other intelligence useful for say targeting airstrikes. But at the same time there must be, I imagine there are concerns about the reliability of the Iraqi partner. And so maybe this helps explain some of the arrangements that have been worked out where US military personnel have been sent in small numbers to Iraq, not of course to engage in military operations but to help coordinate and oversee the process. One other thing I want to point out is that the partner country of the United States has to have similar concerns about the United States. In other words the partner country, so far I've thought about this is from an American perspective, how does the United States manage its relationships with potentially less than trustworthy partners. But if other countries might worry that the United States could be less than trustworthy as well. And I think that the, for example, the WikiLeaks and Snowden revelations have the potential anyways to undermine other countries trust in the United States ability. Not that these were deliberate attempts by the United States of course to undermine that trust but I may have had that as sort of a spillover effect. One thing to think about too is is that in structuring these relationships how can the United States, what steps can the United States take to reassure its partners of its reliability. And I think that this is another important angle. If we think about the case for example of West Germany, another thing that the United States did was it did not completely control the West German intelligence service and over time gave it more autonomy and more space. And there were a lot of practical reasons for that but one reason was that it did allow, it did make the United States basically vulnerable to Germany if they decided to stop or limit their cooperation. And so, and that was a really important move I think historically by the United States because it showed that the United States had at least a moderate amount of trust in its partner and was willing to try to move in a direction of a more cooperative relationship which seems to have happened. So I wonder too in closing I wonder how that insight might be applied to the sort of problem of insider threats that the United States and of course other countries face but in particular thinking about its implications for intelligent sharing partners of the United States. If there's a way that the US could reassure its partners about that it's taking concrete steps to minimize or reduce this problem that would seem to be very valuable. The trick there though is that how can it take, how can the United States take those concrete steps to reassure its partners while not at the same time also revealing important counterintelligence measures that it's taking to prevent this from happening in the future. So let me stop there. Thank you Professor. Professor Gio. Thanks very much to Matteo and to the New America Foundation for having me and for organizing what I think is a panel on a very important topic. Before I start let me just emphasize that these are my own views and do not necessarily reflect any United States government position or endorsement. I thought I'd start by offering a few personal anecdotes which I think illustrate why studying liaison relationships in particular is fascinating and also how I personally became interested in studying intelligence liaison as an academic discipline in its own right. It always struck me as strange that during my previous career as a CIA officer that I might have a liaison meeting with my British counterparts for example and tell them information that I might not be able to tell other CIA officers in my station. You know, the folks who are trustworthy, discreet, held very high security clearances and who shared my mission, my employer. We all worked for General Hayden. Likewise, during my time as a Naval Reserve Intelligence Officer I participated in some combined exercises with the Australian Navy and the intelligence spaces in any building are always well-policed and secure. Checking badges of folks wanting to come in or leave is a routine security precaution and I guess just stepping back for a second I found it bizarre that a 21-year-old Australian Abel Seaman could walk in and out as he pleased but I would have to actually politely stop or turn away or turn on the red visitor light if a senior American officer would come by who didn't necessarily have the same clearances and, you know, that senior officer shared my uniform. My citizenship outranked me by orders of magnitude and yet, unlike the Australian Abel Seaman could just come and go or he wasn't permitted to enter. And thus my interest was piqued to start to answer questions about how this bizarre turn of events came to be. You know, if you're a Martian looking down on Earth and you're looking at intelligence sharing that might be a bizarre thing you might want to check out. So, you know, why do we do this and how did it develop? And so for me as a historian that's how I come to approach this. As Mateo mentioned, my area of expertise is the intelligence liaison in the Anglophone world and so I'd like to talk about the development of different types of intelligence liaison, human and signant in particular with special emphasis on the US-UK relationship. But before I get into that, I wanted to make a few comments about intelligence liaison generally being precise with what we're actually talking about in terms and concepts will be helpful during the Q&A period. I think that although intelligence sharing and cooperation sometimes referred to as intelligence diplomacy routinely takes place, to me that's not the most interesting phenomenon. Two relatively hostile states can still cooperate to some degree when faced with a common interest or a shared threat. Likewise, intelligence sharing in itself isn't necessarily that remarkable all the time. The recent Al Jazeera leaks illustrate sometimes how prosaic intelligence liaison can be. So to me the real litmus test of the strength of the relationship gets more into the sharing of sourcing information and or running those sources jointly. And along those same lines I'm more interested in considering why and how some states develop agreements so-called no-spy agreements where they actually sort of unilaterally say I'm going to do this, and also that they respect the so-called no-poaching rule which basically states that if one service is one friendly service is closer to recruitment of a foreign intelligence target that the other service will actually back off and let the recruitment attempt proceed. Intelligence and security services I think by their nature are insular and there's lots of obstacles to cooperation, political considerations, risk calculations, competing foreign policy objectives, competing commercial interests and of course just the inherent competition in the international system. I like the words of war theorist Carl von Klauswitz if you're a West Point professor you can't actually go through a lecture without mentioning Klauswitz or they revoke your job. But Klauswitz said, quote, one country may support another's cause but will never take it so seriously as it takes its own. And to me that's really been the case. That said, when intelligence services do overcome these obstacles they can actually cooperate to achieve synergistic outcomes. And once what I would call force multiplication is achieved, success breeds success and the relationship can then deepen and expand in scope. It's something to build on. In the words of intelligence historian Jeffrey Jones, the liaison process, quote, cements alliances and good friends share secrets and the sharing of secrets makes for good friends. However it's critical to remember that intelligence liaison relationships are dynamic and they change in response to inputs say Edward Snowden or WikiLeaks or other global developments ISIS, Putin, whatever. So I think it's helpful to think of liaison relationships as somewhere on a spectrum at any given time and state payers can move up it and they can move down it and they're certainly not all created equal. To describe or characterize liaison relationships themselves I like the term granularity which refers to the specificity of the intelligence or its source or collection method and it's also important to consider how broad or encompassing intelligence liaison relationships are. For instance, are they ad hoc or issue specific, we're going to cooperate on this and then to our corners or do we have a formalized and a global and ongoing relationship. The latter types are what Bradford Westerfield has called full fledged relationships and I think that term fits. For the purposes of comparison just so you have some basis other types of intelligence liaison can include parallel operations hey this is what we're doing we'll keep each other informed allocated operations where we're dividing up the work and then of course working together and that's my particular focus. So again, how do the partners move up and down the spectrum of relationships and how might they increase or decrease the granularity in their relationship. I think in order to move beyond sort of rather bland memo passing that characterizes many intelligence relationships I found the common interests and shared threats or perceptions of those threats are necessary but not sufficient for what I would categorize as full fledged or most granular. To reach those levels I found that other ingredients, again the US-UK relationship is my primary example shared values, common language shared world views, history, culture and even trade craft philosophy which I thought we could get into. Additionally the role of the individual often derided nowadays as a sort of human theories of history. I think the individuals actually matter. Often pointed to in this area is the friendship and productive working relationship between World War II Chief of the Office of Strategic Services William Wild Bill Donovan and his British, actually his Canadian counterpart based in New York William Stevenson or Little Bill in the words of former director general of MI5's for Stephen Lender quote, software issues such as personalities, shared experiences friends in adversity, etc may not actually carry political or public weight but matter in institutional relationships particularly when those have an operational element. These joint activities generate friendships trust with sensitive material mutual respect and confidence as well as understanding about constraints and difficulties, they matter end quote. And I think that's really important intelligence liaison isn't done by faceless bureaucracies, it's done by people. Notably trust shared goals common trade craft and a litany of other commonalities became both reasons to cooperate a basis for cooperation as well as a product or a byproduct of that cooperation so trust in particular joint operations when they go well becomes self-reinforcing of course everything is not roses all the time and sometimes differences can be significant and what I look for in cases like that is how quickly a rift can be healed and if the damage can be localized. The Anglo-American example of the Suez crisis in 1956 reveals that even sharp disagreements can be quickly overcome if there's a firm foundation and I think those who focus on the internecine squabbles between the Americans and the British intelligence communities that may often make headlines are focused on the wrong aspect of the relationship having a discussion or even a heated argument about which service should recruit which person of interest is a conversation that other intelligence agencies just simply aren't having with one another in the first place instead they would abide by the law of the intelligence jungle you kill what you eat or I think rephrase for our applicability you get the secrets that you steal I think it's also important to be careful to define what we're talking about in terms of multilateral sharing or bilateral sharing I think that's really important bilateral sharing is usually the most comfortable and productive environment for intelligence sharing I think much less gets done in multilateral forums with the again notable exception of the Five Eyes communities and I think one axiom that I found to be true in almost all cases that I know of happy to hear of others is that as the number of countries involved in the sharing goes up the sensitivity of that shared information goes down I think it's also important to distinguish between types of collection we're talking about human we're talking about SIGINT human intelligence signals intelligence imagery intelligence and they all have different sharing mechanisms and sharing relationships so I'd like to say just a few words about human and SIGINT the default setting for human is unilateral operations and even the closest partners would prefer to go unilateral if they can why well they're relatively inexpensive they're not overly resource intensive in terms of agent handling officers and the fewer parties involved means a lower possibility of intelligence compromise I think we've already heard that hinted at nevertheless there's lots of reasons to cooperate in human and that takes different shapes services can declare a human operation as I said hey we're doing this or they can actually run jointly and I think one of my favorite examples of true cooperation is the joint CIA MI6 operation running Soviet military intelligence Colonel Oleg Pankovsky who provided critical intelligence in the run up to the Cuban missile crisis so yeah and also of course it just comes down to money sometimes on the other hand the default setting for SIGINT operations is in fact cooperation as I also wear a hat as the history fellow for the army cyber institute at West Point as Mateo mentioned I'd be remiss if I didn't take at least a minute to discuss the five eyes relationship as it pertains to the development of SIGINT cooperation and cyber cooperation unlike human SIGINT is monstrously expensive labor intensive and geography may matter rather more if you just consider for a second the amount of technical expertise needed to establish and maintain SIGINT collection systems the number of analysts needed to translate the material the the linguists to translate the analysts to pour over it and on and on these were formalized during World War II through Anglo-American agreements in 1943 and then because they worked they were reformalized or codified again in 1946 actually these are just declassified in 2010 and so you know I think these these documents or these agreements established a foundation for SIGINT cooperation based on the effective wartime model that remains significant even today what I found in my own research into the SIGINT community is that over the course of the Cold War the Anglophone SIGINT organizations became intertwined as hedgerows making disentangling one from another particularly difficult in contrast there's no human bureaucratic intermingling let me just close on a few words about the special relationship itself in reality there is no special relationship what we refer to rather monolithically actually has many many facets and I think we need to separate out the special intelligence relationship from the broader special political relationship the intelligence relationship is an expansive patchwork of treaties formal and informal agreements overlapping foreign policy and defense goals and personal relationships that we term in shorthand the special relationship this relationship was also interpreted differently and actually just was different in different times and in different geographic locations as well and of course it was not necessarily equally special to the same people at the same time in the same place in the main though I think it was very durable and there's good reasons for this CIA veteran Ben Fischer observed quote the US intelligence communities liaison relationship with the British is its oldest most important and closest both operationally and sentimentally end quote in contrast to Fischer others focus less on the operational nexus and more on the the sentiment often mocked as rather sacrum so here's historian Alex Danchev quote Anglo-America is a kind of failed state the special relationship is not what it was not what its fervent believers would want it to be the party is over but the guests linger reluctant to tolerate spellbound by the storied past there's another way to look at it certainly the special relationship can be problematic the term and many intelligence officers that I spoke to are quick to point out that it's diplomats and political leaders that use the term intelligence officers actually really don't use that term but I still think that the product of it is profound namely never before in the history of international relations have two sovereign states opted to work closely so often and on such a wide range of defense intelligence and security matters and I'll close on two reasons for why I think this is the case first as a consequence of the second world war American and British intelligence services chose to partner with each other to a degree unique in history and I think one of the reasons for that was the simple desperation of the British situation in 1940 and the second reason why I think the wartime relationship was so productive is that it continued in the face of the Soviet threat so without something to push you together and some glue to keep you stuck together I don't think it's going to work in the same way you're not going to be able to reach that that higher bit of the spectrum you know things weren't in all honeymoon since 1941 but overall I think the relationship was important and that's for many reasons including leaders as well sure there's bickering sure there's policy disagreements and of course you have to pay attention to the relationship it'll go away as L.E.B. Zell observed the opposite of love is not hate but indifference finally history has shown that in turbulent times such as 9-11 or 7-7 these often served to refocus re-energize and re-engage the special relationship as a case in point the 1990s widely considered a low ebb for the special relationship but on September 12, 2001 the day after the most devastating attack in American history a single airplane entered U.S. airspace and aboard it were the chiefs of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ so let me close by quoting the great Dean Atchison to a British American group in 1952 but I think it still holds true today quote I shall not bother you by doing what is done so often by talking about all that we have in common language, history, all of that we know all that what I wish to do is stress the one thing we have in common the one desperately important thing and that is that we have a common fate so thanks very much for your attention I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have Thank you Professor Gio General Hayden, floor is yours Thanks Mateo and I think my comments are going to echo some of the fine comments already made by my colleagues here but perhaps with the one revolution of more operational spin because I come at this as a practitioner far more than I am an academic so let me begin Steve Capas who was my deputy at CIA and I we visited more than 50 countries in the 30 months that we were together at CIA headquarters that's a big number in a short time we visited some of those countries more than once and more than and more than that number of countries visited CIA headquarters at Langley in other words these liaison relationships are a big deal they're a big deal even for a big intelligence organization like CIA or NSA the Koreans had some missionaries Presbyterian missionaries and of all places Afghanistan a serious error in judgment I would suggest and they were captured by the telemen were being held for ransom the president of Korea gave the task of getting them back to the head of NIS the Korean equivalent of the CIA and the head of NIS immediately got an airplane and flew to the capital not Kabul this capital he came to CIA and he sat down in my office and asked for assistance these relationships mean a lot to both sides and as already suggested by Professor Walsh here's kind of a macro deal CIA is global resource rich technologically sophisticated our partners are almost always quite small in fact I was fond of saying that in many cases I had more lawyers than they had people in their organizations they're small but they're focused and they're linguistically and culturally agile far more linguistically and culturally agile than big CIA was and so what you got was this symbiotic relationship in which we could take their very specific information and put it into a broader global context and hence give it more meaning to them than it would otherwise have and of course the reverse the reverse was true for us my standard speech to outgoing Chiefs of Station was to pay a lot of attention to the liaison relationship that we would take a call from our counterpart Steve and I any time of the day or night and I would also add I said this to the outgoing class of Chiefs of Station look, there are two things I want you to remember here when you're meeting with liaison number one you're the only superpower in the room and number two don't act like it they already know the first that's why they're so generous in their meetings with you they're kind of taking notes on the second on whether or not you act in that way these relationships already suggested are fairly immune and they're not totally immune but they're fairly immune from the broader political relationship or at least when the broader political relationship hits transient turbulent waters a classic point that we always suggest is even in the run up to the Iraq war when the political relationship between our President and the German Chancellor was so prickly on the issue of Iraq the intelligence sharing relationship between American intelligence and BND the German service continued to be rich even with regard to questions with regard to questions about Iraq as they actually enabled American planning for that war the thing you need to keep in mind and already suggested to think by Professor Gio is that the interest the values and the policies of the United States are never underscored never coincident with the interest values and policies of a liaison service we're not using slides here so if you would just look up here why for a moment use hand puppets if these are our values and policies and laws and interests and this is liaison it's never that even when you're meeting in London or Canberra it's never that and when you go to some other places oh just pick Islamabad out of the air I guess it's kind of that and your job is well in terms of values and law you can't ignore this and they can't ignore that this is where you're working it's in that common space of common interests and common activities liaison you can probably get the point already that it was important and interesting we spent a lot of time on it and it was very revealing in some unusual ways you could be sitting across the table from a liaison partner and having the most serious fact based which is kind of what intelligence does serious fact based discussion you could possibly have and then all of a sudden it happened and the idea is that your partner suddenly went into his nation or his culture's creation mythology and went down what I would call a cul-de-sac describing an event with which you could not possibly agree let me give you one example and it's a very serious one but it's an old one it's easier for me to share when I was a brigadier and I was head of intelligence for US forces in Europe I would go to Serbia and I would meet with Bronco Kyrgyz who was the J2 of the Yugoslavian military the Rump Yugoslavian military this was during the war in Bosnia Bronco and I were actually pretty comfortable with one another he took me off guard in our first meeting he got out from behind his desk and said Michael I feel a great sense of kinship with you and he gave me the Slavic hug and kiss and the bread and salt to share why do you feel kinship with me? number one we were both born in the same year okay you checked my bio and my grandfather was a steel worker in Pittsburgh okay Bronco we're together and we had serious conversations even though our governments run different sides of that war one day more or less drinking lunch at the Yugoslavian Army Club when he talked about the impact of casualties in the Bosnian War and he particularly stressed the impact of casualties on Serbian families who are now one or two child families and I'm there and I'm with them and then suddenly with a wave of his hand that these Muslim families they have so many children it matters far less back to the creation mythology of the other guy at which point you can't even lie to yourself that head nod that we culturally have to say communication acknowledged you've kind of got to go lock forward without showing any signs of agreement so I was in that thinking about that for the longest time when halfway through my tour I was boarding the C-17 for an overnight hop to another liaison service and sitting back in the comfort pallet there maybe getting a glass of wine it suddenly occurred to me what part of my conversation with the liaison partner did that very reasonable man across the table for me suddenly say oh here we go Haynes is a pretty good professional but I'm going to have to stand three or four minutes now of American creation mythology whether it was the efficacy or almost sanctity of elections you know what I mean so I just want to I just want to stress to you that there's an art to this science in liaison relationships by the way you really need to be careful when you actually do this for a living that when you're not here but here you have to be deeply respectful even though you want great cooperation you have to be deeply respectful of what it is your own law and ethics allow you to do a very concrete case in point as director of CIA I couldn't aid, abet advise or even suggest to a liaison counterpart that he go and do something that I was not legally authorized to do I recall one conversation in Tel Aviv with Gaby Ashkenazi who was the chief of the IDF and we were there simply sharing ideas as to what can be done to stop the Iranian program and of course the core of the Iranian program isn't how much highly enriched or low enriched or medium enriched uranium they might have but the core of the Iranian program is the knowledge that they're building up in terms of how to go do this and of course knowledge is carried around inside human beings so if you really want to slow the Iranian program down I couldn't even raise that as an abstract possibility by the way don't think this is a one way street in September 2009 American Navy SEALS a fellow named Salah Nabhan in Somalia Salah was the chief of operations for al-Qaeda al-Shabaab in Somalia there was no attempt to capture this was a kill operation there is not an intelligence service in Europe particularly not an intelligence service in western Europe who could have given the United States information to enable that raid and stay on the right side of their nation's loss so this relationship as important as they are can get very very complicated already suggested some nations are closer than others I think it was Kissinger who actually said there are no friendly intelligence services just intelligence services of friendly nations and so it should not come as a shock to any of you that there are countries in the world who are both partners and targets when it comes to foreign intelligence intelligence officers know that frankly I think politicians know that too sometimes foreign publics have never digested that reality and so when you get the story out there already suggested the impact of the Snowden leaks when you get the story out there that NSA may or may not have been listening to the Chancellor's to the Chancellor's cell phone when I was in Munich for the security conference about 15 months ago Snowden was the news of the day and I'm doing a late night presentation I mean it was late night, it was after dinner it was in the bar it was official I'm in a room full of Germans everyone drinking pills and eating palm frits and I'm on a panel about Snowden and it came up immediately while you're listening to the Chancellor well I'd either confirm or deny what we may or may not have been doing but it did point out that when Barack Obama the senator from Illinois was elected president of the United States he had pretty much run his campaign from his black bear and we approached the president elect after the election and before the inauguration saying you just you can't be doing that and he responded along the lack he said this on CNBC it sounded a bit like a second amendment bumper sticker because he said they're going to have to pry my blackberry from my fingers in order to get it so realizing he did carry Ohio we said I guess he's going to keep his blackberry we said could we borrow it for a day or two just to maybe tighten it up and what I related to the German audience was that what's the backstory on that dialogue the backstory of that dialogue is we're telling the soon to be most powerful man and the most powerful nation on earth that if he used his blackberry in his nation's capital multiple foreign intelligence services would be listening to his phone calls and reading his emails and we didn't render garments we didn't cry outrage we just knew that's the way things are you know that's how adults play in the world of espionage already suggested a couple other points I want to make Professor Geo it's easier to share technical intelligence than it is to share human intelligence and he laid out some very concrete reasons why why that is so I grew up at NSA as my first national job I was the director there for six years and there are intense cooperative relationships you already suggested to create signals intelligence it's almost required this isn't throwing product through the transom at the end of the process right this is way upstream in which the cooperation takes place and so I became accustomed to that level of cooperation then I became director of CIA deputy steve kappas thought with whom I went to all these capitals talked to my director deputy director steve kappas said steve you know I'm really accustomed I'm really accustomed to key allies being able to come and go inside the headquarters building and steve I'll never forget that steve looked me in the eye and said mike I love you like a brother but that's just not going to happen here again the difference between human intelligence and signals intelligence and how it's created also suggested it's easy for me to pivot off some of the key points already made that sometimes you cooperate more with a foreign partner than you may be able to do with others inside your own government I recall one case in point when I was director of NSA and Jim Clapper now the DNI was the director of NGA national geospatial intelligence agency and I'll never forget Jim Jim and I used to have these common meetings of our key leadership about every month or two and he turned to me and said Mike NSA just needs to share more with NGA we would like for you to treat us like the British was his comment when you really get to an intimate intelligence sharing relationship and I think I've suggested and the scholars up here have already outlined that there are layers of cooperation the easiest layer is to share product you throw your end product through the transom they throw their end product through the transom you read it you say thank you you move on the next layer of cooperation the deeper layer is you actually share not product but you share production you cooperate in the creation of intelligence and then finally there are small number of nations around the world and it is a very small nation around the world where you do not share what you know or you do not share in creating that which is known the relationship is so intimate that you share what you do not know that you reveal your gaps to that partner that's a very intimate relationship it's a small group but I hope you've taken the meaning from my comment that the group with whom you have any kind of relationship is actually quite large occasionally difficult to manage but it's worth the effort it's worth the doing thank you thank you general I'll ask the first question on the issue of intelligence sharing and accountability this is for all of you put yourself in the shoes of someone on a congressional oversight committee and you see that intelligence sharing is becoming an increasing share of what intelligence agencies do and yet you have a hard time understanding what it is that they're really doing what suggestions would you give to this member of congress on how to have more access to information and how to make sure that this intelligence sharing is done properly it's hard and I'll be brief because these folks I know have comments number one the instinctive critique by some on the oversight committees is that liaison relationships are a reflection of you're not doing your job or you're not being able to do your job it's a reflection of outsourcing rather than I think what the three of us have reflected here is a deeply enriching process and well worth the effort so there is that that barrier amongst some even veteran members of the of the community the other problem is that the American system of oversight is far more invasive than the systems of oversight of our partners even our partner western democracies so it is not an uncommon thing for a member of the oversight committee to show up in country X and want to go to joint facility Z because he's gone to the identical kind of facility here in the united states and be told by the chief of station you can't do that what do you mean I can't do that I'm a member of the oversight committee I went to facility Y back in America that is very similar to that why can't I go to facility Z and the answer is because their parliamentarians have never been allowed to go to facility Z and that becomes that becomes a difficult management challenge for us in giving oversight enough confidence in what it is we're doing even though we don't have all the tools available to us the visit to show them what we're doing you want to add something to that just one quick thing is that you know it seems like that's a particularly difficult oversight challenge because unlike other international agreements like treaties where the legislature has some say over either implementing them or the ratification that's not the case here as well for the most part I would say that you just have to be substantive as well you know when I was going through analytical training we actually practiced the so called elevator brief where there's a busy official and you have 30 seconds and you're pretending to get in the elevator and say sir you're going up to the 7th floor I have 30 seconds to tell you everything you need to know and I think in Congress I don't think that's the right idea because you simply can't understand this in 30 seconds these problems these processes it's extremely complicated and so I really think that you know what wherever it is that you're going busy Congress person take the time to educate yourself to listen to your community and to learn what's going on and so I think for my money the elevator brief should be abolished if you have 30 seconds I'll come back another time I wanted to ask you another question on the notion of hierarchy Professor Walsh in your book you mentioned that the relationship between the US and Egypt for instance is one example of a hierarchical relationship that leads me to ask how effective is hierarchy really controlling what other intelligence agencies are doing it would be hard to say that Egyptian intelligence has been following America's advice certainly for the past four years well my book was published five years ago right well it does highlight one of the issues with these sort of closer relationships is that it does make like in this case for example the United States to the extent that they're dependent on another service for valuable intelligence if that country behaves in a way that the United States doesn't like then that puts the US in a difficult position and since that's a harder problem the more closely the services are entangled I would imagine I have one question for General Hayden then we'll open it up to questions from the audience can you tell us what your thought process looked like when you had to decide whether or not to share intelligence and what to share with another country number one it depends on the other country but then it also depends on the totality of circumstances available I mean there are narrowly defined circumstances in which a partner perhaps not one with whom you are routinely intimate one with whom you have serious trust issues that this issue is so important that the payoff matches the risk and you have to go with the risk this is after I left government so I'm telling you only what I read in books and only ready what I read in newspapers but we lost seven offices at cost because of great reliance on the Jordanian services vetting of the source Olawi on which the whole operation was based was that a mistake I really don't think it was a mistake it ended badly but I offer you the view that an agency is not willing to take the risk that leads to cost is an agency that never gets to a bot-a-bot and so you've got to make those very difficult decisions okay well we'll open it up to questions from the audience please identify yourself either what your real name or what your undercover name wait for the microphone and make sure they're questions and they're brief okay so we'll start over there oh okay well that's fine then go ahead go ahead go ahead the one with the microphone it will come to you sorry for the confusion Mark Stout Johns Hopkins University I think this question is probably for Professor Geo and General Hayden are there in the US system and should there be in the US system occasions on which liaison relationships that might in principle be fruitful and useful are not pursued or are cut off just purely on sort of moral grounds these people are too thuggish and you could view that as being a question about torture I suppose that is a specific instance of it but I'd view it as sort of a broader question of just too thuggish and nasty to be dealt with even if they could be useful to us sorry I almost want to say no but I'm not because I mean we don't have relations with every country around the world and there are the variety of reasons one they're not worth the effort and another could be simply the character of the regime that said remember and you get here with tip of fingernail to tip of fingernail there is something in there that keeps Americans safer and freer which is not a legitimate it's not legitimizing all this hanging out over here but one has to be careful in that is that does that transient short term tactical operational gain compromise your principles out here and all those things for which there is not overlap I guess what I'm trying to say is there's probably no one that I would dismiss with the comment under no circumstances would we go to meet with that guy I forgot to say Steve my deputy he went to meet with Musa Kousa the head of the Libyan service and actually was he was kind of the beach head for getting Gaddafi to give up his WMD program I'm pretty sure Musa Kousa had something to do with Panem 003 for me I think the question also becomes is the juice worth the squeeze what possibly could we get that we don't have a relationship but all of a sudden somebody comes forward and says hey I want to share this or I want to share that I would just be really I'd just take a rather jaundiced view of why a person would want to come come forward a lot of relationships it is more art than science and intelligence is often shared to influence as much as it is to inform anyone and so I would just be very cautious and really try to figure out why we're all of a sudden now having a cup of tea could you give us an idea as an analyst how would you deal with the issue of possible deception coming from intelligence that's coming from a foreign partner I think largely you have to look at the body of work or the body of the relationship and what it's produced to a certain point you can't look at it in isolation where have we been with this or that service what have they provided in the past does the information triangulate from other sources be it SIGINT you try to vet that information as best as you can but if it were single source information I would just put a giant red caveat on it but I think the nature of your question was not just a data point but a relationship that may be proved so I'll give you a concrete example during the worst of times in Iraq the foreign fighter pipeline through Syria was bad enough we talked to Asif Shakhat who was Bashar's brother-in-law he was killed in a suicide bombing at his headquarters once the current unpleasantness got underway I mean thoroughly disreputable service thoroughly disreputable man foreign fighters were killing Americans and how did that work out not well why because of the moral turpitude of the Syrian regime no because it was ineffective we didn't get really good information my name is Tara McHelvey I'm from DBC and the presentations are really interesting and I like hearing about the creation myth the way you're describing and also whether or not the person you're talking to sees the creation myth that Americans have and the question I have for you is you talked about tradecraft the shared tradecraft between Brits and Americans I work with Brits so they're very similar to us but also different I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit about the relationship in terms of tradecraft say for example Jihadi John which is a tradecraft used by Americans and Brits and then also quickly you talk about the way the US agencies share with the Brits though they don't share with other Americans just to explain more because I don't understand why that is so let me just start by saying I've been out of the government in the intelligence capacity since 2011 so I really can't say anything profound on Jihadi John but getting back to your bigger question of how why the philosophy matters I think it's I don't know I'm an ice hockey player so reduce my IQ accordingly and for me if you're on a team with North Americans people from the US and people from Canada you have the playing style that's just going to work well together without a lot of practice in advance if all of a sudden you put a fin or a check or someone else someone from Switzerland maybe on your team you're going to have to adjust to their playing style they're going to have to adjust to yours and you're not going to be ready for the big game for a little while that's not to say that it can't happen let me give you one concrete example of tradecraft and this has already been pre-cleared by CIA in my dissertation which is what I was frantically hoping for so there was a lot of friction between the two sides and the Americans we're American we have our checklist step one, step two, step three and one of those steps in the so-called asset validation process is to bust out the polygraph and my own opinion I think it's probably I guess I shouldn't say that the Brits don't like it the Americans use it for almost everything it's it comes out of the closet real quick and the Brits just don't think they think it's witchcraft they don't think it's really effective and so even in 1960 61 and 62 Oleg why is Oleg Pankovsky giving us all this information is he a dangle who is this guy should we listen to him the Americans said ah-ha we have a technical solution for that we've got this box and it reads your mind and the Brits were horrified absolutely horrified because it was going to hurt they thought it was going to hurt the relationship with this guy so he's coming forward he's going to get a bullet in the back of the head which he actually does do if he's exposed he's taking these great risks and the Americans still want to strap him up to the box so how it ultimately resolves is there are two Americans and two Brits on the team they couldn't agree and so it actually went up to the director of central intelligence Richard Helms because the Americans weren't backing off and the Brits weren't backing off and finally there was a phone call between the DCI and the head of MI6 Sir Dick White and they agreed to not not break out the polygraph so when there are tradecraft differences sometimes it does need to be resolved at very senior level so even though they work well together 99 times out of 100 sometimes there is friction and it does need to get worked out yeah NGA, NSA, DCHQ it's not that NSA was denying information to NGA it's that NGA wasn't at Bletchley Park and NGA had not had decades long benefit of integration of every aspect there were no trails beaten down in the forest between NSA and NGA their way the trails have been beaten down over decades in the common five eyes intelligence relationship lots of hands we're going to go in the back to gender alternation actually wasn't there someone in front of me though well I'll my undercover name I guess is James Bond so thank you all for the form actually it's related to Kaiser Soze thank you for the form today general sir your reputation precedes you have a number of buddies bookers and producers in the city and you're one of the go to guys when it comes to foreign policy and surveillance so thank you I'll put my questions to you take a survey of director Comey's comments regarding the iPhone security protocols in that device and also your views on the reorganization and restructuring of the agency under director Brennan thanks the iPhone was encryption unbreakable by Apple and Google right yeah may surprise you I probably have more of an open mind on the topic than the FBI director suggested he has I think he's pretty binary about it and it can't go I'm willing to listen to arguments that's a that's a damn big ask of American industry given the global situation after post Snowden and so on and so put me down as undecided okay but but I suggest that to you because instinctively you probably expected me to be over here and I'm quite willing to look at the broader broader scope arguments what John has suggested to do at the agency and we have John had a conference call for people like me before the day before he told the workforce every stitch of John's diagnosis of the issues facing CIA were absolutely familiar ground to me right that on a good day CIA is a collective known it's hardly ever a singular now and on bad days it's a plural in terms of cohesion because of the different directorates and the strong cultures that they have that CIA people now have to check their digital persona at the fence line on route 123 because they can't bring it in I'm not saying they should be able to text from there but the way they live their lives outside the fence line digitally is very different from how they're permitted to do it inside the fence line so I can see he wants to embrace the digital age in terms of tradecraft and so creating centers in terms of focus every director in the last four has created a center counter-proliferation counter-terrorism so you can see why he wants to do it the challenge John will have now is to do that kind of really significant change at an agency that's probably working at about a 115% capacity because of the demands of the current operational environment right here at the front I'm Elaine Cireo executive director of fate squared thank you gentlemen for this presentation today on intelligent sharing can mutually my question is can mutually share and analyze open source intelligence foster a more expansive use an aggressive use of intelligence sharing amongst the intelligence communities thank you any takers what role does open source intelligence play in integrating or fostering intelligence sharing at the classified level hesitating so I'm jumping okay very briefly the first cultural shift that has to take place is within the secret security services who give pride of place to information that has to be stolen as opposed to information that's generally available so the first cultural shift is to recognize that an awful lot actually infinitely more the information you need to inform judgment is readily available if you just know where to look rather than having to be stolen so it's the internal shift that takes place first once that is underway then I think it's a natural thing since you now have eased the burdens on what kind of sources and methods you might reveal by revealing information that you might have richer intelligence sharing amongst nations but the first move is internal I think there's no game really to be played can we say that, can we not say that let me go back to my boss well here it is it's twitter, it's the BBC it's you name it and therefore you keep your momentum versus saying well maybe we'll go have an emergency clearance session tomorrow thank you Jeff Stein from Newsweek General Hayden just for clarification on the Balawe operation and what happened at coast which was a dreadful affair everyone agrees did you mean to say that the CIA did no vetting independent vetting of Balawe did you mean to say that? again I'm basing this totally on Joby Warwick's book and your columns and other things that have been written he certainly was worked from his origin as a Jordanian service source and so I'm just suggesting that there's an act of faith there before going forward I don't know enough details to say what was or wasn't done in terms of what was done with regard to vetting on our side I don't know can you speak a little bit to the difficulty of vetting sources in the Middle East and ISIS sure very hard it is very hard all human beings are complex individuals you can occasionally get a happy person who's willing to spy but it's not the norm and so when you go to someone and frankly I mean Jeff you know this you're sub mourning someone to betray an organization to which they normally owe loyalty that's a complex character you're dealing with by definition and particularly in a part of the world where loyalties run in directions that perhaps don't fit our patterns you and I as westerners and Americans it's probably family, nation you know and other parts of the world it's tribe, religion family, nation maybe and so it just makes it more difficult for someone from our culture to thoroughly vet folks from other culture again with the basic premise that it's not often that very well adjusted healthy happy people volunteer to betray the organization of which they're a part thank you so much general and gentlemen for doing that I'm working for french television the french CNN italy part of canal plus general could you analyze for us the attacks on Charlie Hebdo your reaction and the rise of radical Islam in Europe especially in France that's an easy question for you I've been here guys in terms of what we're doing in terms of talking about intelligence intelligence sharing and again I'm out of government six years now plus I'm just reflecting what I've seen the french services are very good in the language of Langley we had a lot of time for DGSE and I know and become friends with several directors there and so I don't know that this was a question of flaw in intelligence sharing in fact I know that the individuals have shown up on American radars as well as french radars about as much as I can say this was far more a question of french resources than it was how exquisite was french intelligence everybody's got to draw the line you only have so many resources to really focus in on so many potential targets and unfortunately these guys were drawn below the line even though they were known let me say this commonly known to western intelligence no no I think most folks like me view the Charlie Hebdo kinds of attacks as inevitable let me add an additional thought since you're from french media and when one does the forensics every one of those inevitable attacks was preventable it's a little bit like Ebola you know somebody's got the disease you can go back and deconstruct how they got it and if only she had kind of closed the sleeve or not taking her cover off in a certain way she wouldn't have contracted it but the fact of the matter is there's a plague and people are going to get Ebola and that's my view of the Charlie Hebdo kind of attack yeah you can always look in the rear view mirror and say if only this but this stuff's inevitable Professor Walsh you want to jump in you've written about intelligence sharing at the European level do you think well this didn't seem to be a problem of intelligence sharing at the European level but what kind of solutions do you think couldn't be found for the European Union or even with a NATO for increasing intelligence sharing well what's interesting about the European Union is that it has extremely close levels of cooperation in some domains like a single currency and trade policy but intelligence sharing seems to be an area that has kind of lag behind that and there could be a lot of reasons for that one could be that not all the EU states even have foreign intelligence services so there's sort of a question of who's going to be doing most of the heavy lifting there and who's going to be benefiting the most I think there's also issues of how much, how interested they are in cooperating with each other, how much benefit they can get from each other and so it's I think it's proven kind of tricky for them to figure out a sort of structure that is as I was going to say as effective as the single currency but that's really not the way to think about the single currency as maybe coordinated as something like that Yes right there in the middle Yes Please Hi I'm Archer from graduate student at Georgetown in the school foreign service My question goes back to the comments made about the foreign public's reacting very differently than intelligence services when it comes to sort of run-of-the-mill things like tapping may or may not have been tapping Chancellor Merkel's phone does that discrepancy influence in any way the intelligence-sharing relationship and specifically did that case influence the German-American intelligence-sharing relationship Thanks Please I brought up drinking in Munich while we were doing this It did because in democracy these public opinion matters and public opinion does affect policy In my darker moments I will describe some of the things that happened as necessary theater but theater On the other hand one thing I did learn at Munich was that although I may have thought the German response to this was overreacting it was entirely genuine and back to this and how much I learned quickly that Germans seemed to view privacy we all view privacy as a right but Germans seemed to view privacy through the same lens that we Americans view freedom of speech and freedom of religion and therefore it's got a different position on their taxonomy than it does on ours and so it had a greater impact on German public opinion than maybe we felt warranted or we even anticipated but knowing the value structure there one now certainly understands that I actually did a long article I was interviewed for a long article under Spiegel and the title of the article was Shame on Us but if you read the article it's shame on us not for what we may or may not have done it's shame on us for our ability to keep what we may or may not have done a secret and that we pushed a very good friend into a very bad position by our failure to have operational security and so that's it's it's complicated yes right there in the middle with the dark suit yeah I'm going to go to an international spy museum I'd like to ask it a broader historical question about intelligence sharing about liaison and maybe the answer is all of the above but I wonder if the relationships are formed more at the director level at the strategic level or is it more the tactical operational level is it Stevenson and Donovan or is it the guys in the field who are building a relationship thanks Vince I asked that question during my research interviews I interviewed a lot of former mostly CIA and MI6 officers but also across both intelligence communities and I can say at least for the Anglo-American relationship that trust and common understanding did percolate up and it percolated back down as well the leadership sort of sets the tone then at the working level I've served as a liaison officer and in my mind if you sort of feel that the leadership is going to back you or understand why you push this forward or you did what you did if they say yeah that's within the broad construct of the kind of relationship that we want yes by all means go ahead but alternatively if the relationship is already prickly then I think a working level officer is going to say man can I get in trouble for this and even if you wouldn't get in trouble for it it's always in the back of your mind if here's the line you're going to stay well back from it I think that's right it can and does work both ways my going away gift from the head of MI6 was an almost authentic looking copy of the cable sent by the British station chief here to MI6 headquarters in London on the occasion of Bill Donovan's first visit to Great Britain incredibly candid short but very candid cable although Catholic and our Republican comma he has the ear of the president and he's worth your time so it can go both ways yes very far back on the left hi Jeff Morley arms control today United States and Iran have a common enemy in Isis General Hayden I'm wondering do you think the United States should share intelligence with Iran and you talked about assessing payoff and risk how would you assess payoff and risk in this particular example there's always a there's always a duty to warn therefore when lives are at risk you have both a legal and ethical responsibility in the American system to try to prevent the loss of life particularly innocent life putting that aside boxing that off I think my answer to your question is no because I don't think we have common objectives here the current offensive against Tikrit is I think a very good example we'd love the Iraqi government to take Tikrit back particularly to taking Mosul back but to take Tikrit back with a Shia army conquering a Sunni community is not consistent with American interests in Iraq and so I would not yes right up front here sorry I'm making you walk back and forth hi my name's Hugh Macklerath I'm a retired intelligence officer and so my question is based on something I read in the Washington Post I'm sorry we can't get away from the article's phone what I saw in the post was that yeah there was the issue you know if you want to know what I think just ask me but then the article hinted that what the Germans sought was something more like a five eyes relationship and I take from that that they wanted a no spy rule is there anything that any of you can say usefully on that well there's three of you I read the same article as he did so um that's never going to happen okay well one oh five means five and I don't think it can't ever be six but what I'm saying is that's arrangement it's an arrangement amongst five nations who have agreed to a deeper degree of trust and transparency and revealing weaknesses the things you don't know and so it's you know all the trips to Washington you want we don't hold the keys to making five six so that's one secondly in this late night there was a genuine session of the security conference and in the nightclub after dinner I made the point that okay Germans are angry and ask what justification would we have had if we were listening to Chancellor Merkel and my response then was how about Schroeder okay it was not Merkel and who opposed American policy in Iraq and seemed to have a strange and mutually productive relationship with Vladimir Putin and what about that billion euro zone alone that was guaranteed shortly before he left government for Gasprom and Nord Stream and then what board did he get on after he left government okay so I asked my German friends so what do you think intelligent statecraft or something different and so I guess I was reserving the right of the United States to conduct espionage for the security of the United States at the discretion of the United States balanced of course I mean this is not done in a vacuum I was waved off of targets for what I would call broader policy reasons when I was director of NSA that happens all the time but that's a national decision not part of some international arrangement yes all of that but also I think that you can't short circuit historical processes where is the common threat where is the common development how did they intertwine how was the process reified and brought into being through shared experience and through the most dire shared experiences just because you kind of want to make something so or even if you wanted to make it so at the policy level that's why I used the hedgerow analogy they're so intertwined that it's almost impossible to disentangle it I don't think 5 is 5 because you can't add or subtract without an honest to goodness shared threat and it continued glue from that so for instance view Russia in the same way that America does and certainly not as an existential threat we haven't really seen no kidding existential threats since World War II and the Cold War and so now to add something for policy or political considerations I think it's asking too much and it asks more than the history can support the integration is very quite something to behold and it's built up over decades again began at Bletchley but it went on absent a few special niches we never knew anything about what British intelligence may or may not have been doing in Northern Ireland that was absolutely off limits by the same token when the Stella Wynn program that's the NSA surveillance program in the United States was made public David Pepper who was the head of GCHU came to visit me and he walked in and paid me the greatest compliment he could ever play another intelligence officer Michael we had no idea okay absent that though absent those real significant carve outs it would be almost impossible for NSA GCHU to undertake activities not visible to other to the other partners there's also something of a paradox when a country comes to you and asks you please don't spy on us we won't spy on you implicitly that means that they're not getting much information on you to begin with so it's really hard to get these no spy agreements going in the first place another question in the back I see a hand up there I'm Howard Wiarda from CSIS back to the intel reform that was announced the other day could you please clarify something for me because it was very confusing in the news account maybe purposely so one paragraph announced that the regional centers were going to be abolished and the next paragraph announced that they were going to be strengthened which is it do we know could you shed some light on the area or the regional centers and their fate my understanding is John's going to create 10 centers four by topic terrorism proliferation global issues one will come one will come to mind and then six by geographic areas and that he will task organize within each of those centers the DO, DI DS and T people responsible for each of those each of those areas if anything is disestablished my understanding is it would be the middle east bureau inside the DO and the equivalent bureau inside the DI and and so the DO and DI which will continue to exist the case officers and the analyst and the support although they will continue to exist they will be making this part up now but I think it's a good reflection of what John's trying to do they will be the CIA equivalent of the military departments inside DOD they are responsible for train organize equip and providing forces but the forces will be fought by the combatant commanders which in the CIA new system will be the center center directors the issue John will have is he's leaving enough throw weight in the old DO, DI, DS and DS and T to continue to create the kind of talent that the centers will continue to rely on in order to task organize to do their mission so you've got this critical balance DOD is taking care of by having an Army, Navy and Air Force who do nothing but create combat power and then combatant commanders who do nothing except use it John's now governing an organization that's responsible for both and he's shifting the emphasis from the creation of espionage power to the use of espionage power package sounded okay that makes sense to me well we have time for a couple more what happened to the Korean missionaries what happened to the Korean missionaries in Afghanistan they actually got home we didn't have insight into it but I think the Koreans paid for it but I don't know that for fact I really don't not me trying to be oblique one of the most telling moments I had was when the head of NIS was in there I said I need your help you guys know this country I don't I'm going to go to Kabul next can I get your help I said you bet Mr. Minister I'm going to give you a CIA case officer to go with you who knows Afghanistan great here he is and then he said in hunger does he speak Korean and the officer to my right responded to him that's what it means to be a global intelligence service yes right here last question please following up on your acknowledgement from I guess it was GCHQ commending you on that one project so then what would you say to Kaspersky's labs revealing or discovering the equation group for what they team that I would say Kaspersky labs has done what Kaspersky labs was organized to do and what I would expect Kaspersky lab to do that's different from someone on the inside betraying secrets they've sworn to protect any last thoughts from our panelists nope thanks thank you very much