 Good evening. My name is Larry Temple and as chairman of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, it's my privilege to welcome everybody here tonight, really on behalf of Mark Updegrove, who can't be here tonight. This program tonight will be the last of the Friends programs for the summer, but I can tell you a very exciting array of programs have been planned and are in the process of being planned for the fall and including there will be a program that we will have with Elizabeth Crook in September and there'll be one with Michael Morton and those of you that have been here in Austin watching the episode with regard to Mr. Morton and what he went through in Round Rock and other places I think are in for a treat. We're all in for a treat. We're in for a treat tonight too. Not only with the speaker we have, who is certainly the preeminent person on international security, I think in the country, and you knew that or you wouldn't be here, but the second part of the treat is going to be the person that introduces Bob Inman and that person is Robert Chesney. Everybody knows him as Bobby Chesney. He is a man of many hats and even more talents, one of the great rising stars on this campus. Bobby is a professor of law at the law school and teaches national security at the law school. In addition, he is associate dean for academic affairs at the law school and then where I know him best and see him more frequently is as director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law and that is a center that in a short period of time has achieved a great repute in the country and beyond and a lot of people around the country and around the world are looking at this campus for where we are on national security, international security and the laws attendant to it. So we are very, very fortunate to have Bobby Chesney as a rising young star and he is already one of the imminent experts in the country. So I am pleased to have the opportunity to introduce to you tonight Bobby Chesney. Well, thank you very much Larry both for the kind introduction and for all that you have done and that you continue to do for the university and especially for the Strauss Center. I'm quite grateful. The town of Ronesboro. It's a little north of Tyler. It's a pretty small place but as the example of LBJ himself illustrates some pretty big things can come from some pretty small places. Back in the 1940s there was a young man there in Ronesboro, a really smart young man. When he graduated from high school at the age of 15 it was clear to everybody in town he was going places. First up was here in Austin and the University of Texas. That smart young man from Ronesboro made pretty quick work of his undergrad degree here and not long after graduating at the ripe old age of 19 he headed off to see the world and service country as an ensign in the US Navy. Over the years his service ranged widely and as time went by his responsibilities increased and his distinction increased. 20 years in in the early 1970s he was made the Director of Naval Intelligence. This position would be a career pinnacle for most officers but for that smart young man from Ronesboro it was just the beginning. His success in that position turned heads and not just in the Navy it was clear outside the Navy indeed clear outside the armed forces there was a substantial talent on their hands. Soon he was made Vice Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency which is a body that serves the armed forces as a whole and this was in the mid-70s a time that was very difficult for the nation not just because of disco music but more generally because of media leaks and congressional investigations that had turned a piercing eye towards the activities of the intelligence community. Many difficult questions were being asked and the national security establishment was shaken it's it's something we can all relate to today it was very familiar and it was happening back then. Amidst this turmoil the president turned to that smart young man from Ronesboro asking him to become the Director of the National Security Agency and there to guide the NSA back to a place of stability and trust while still preserving its very important capabilities. Later another president asked him to do much the same thing by becoming the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. By the time he retired from the Navy after more than three decades of service he had the four stars of an admiral on his collar and on his shoulder boards but though he'd retired from military life he was far from finished as we all know. That smart young man from Ronesboro soon became the chairman and CEO of a legendary entity the MCC the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation and as chairman and CEO he made the monumental decision to bring MCC to Austin in the face of competition from dozens and dozens of more well-established communities he brought it here and it forever changed the economic destiny of our city and of our state. Later he served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas and of course he's been indispensable right here at UT his alma mater serving not just as a tenured professor at the LBJ school and not just once but twice serving as the interim dean of the school. So if you ever needed evidence that what starts at UT really can change the world I submit to you you're going to see it tonight. Ladies and gentlemen it's my honor and privilege to introduce that smart young man from Ronesboro Admiral Bob Inman. Thank you all very much. We're going to go through some pretty rough terrain tonight at a pretty fast pace. Those of you who heard me do this before know that I normally start with overarching threats, challenges, opportunities, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, cyber security, narcotics, pandemic epidemics, changing nature of economic trade. I'm going to pass by all those tonight simply because there's so many other things that I think are important to talk about. And in that process though when we come to Q&A and I will try to leave 20, 25 minutes for that you're fair game to go into the topics. But I am going to start very briefly with North America because we're at a very critical point and where we head with our economy with our prosperity and it all relates to energy. Canada has made processing the oil sands into heavy oil economically viable. They're eager to market it. If the pipeline isn't built to bring it to the U.S. it will go to the Pacific Northwest and go to China. Very eager to acquire it. And they may end up doing both just to have a backstop since we've delayed so far the development. An even greater surprise has been the change in Mexico where a bright young president before he took office reached agreements with the other two parties for major structural changes including changing the Constitution to permit foreign investment in the oil industry. Huge oil reserves but declining production for the last 15 years. They need new technology. And then we have the revolution here with shale and suddenly 10 years ago we would be talking about shortage. Now we're talking about the real possibility that within this decade North America can be fully energy independent but beyond that in a position to substantially export there will be arguments against it. Chemical companies like the cheap feedstock prices available now. Others are afraid that if we export that will somehow drive up gasoline prices further. We're still going to have the energy that lets us have cheaper cost for manufacturing than virtually any other place in the world which means manufacturing coming back to North America is a real likelihood if we simply follow through in the process. So some big decisions but it so completely changes our relationships with the Venezuela or with the Gulf and I'm going to spend a lot of time on the Gulf Persian Gulf area later tonight. I will take only a quick glimpse south of us that's at Brazil. Ms. Rousseff presided for two and a half years over a booming economy. She's got to go to the electorate later this fall and no odd speculation if Brazil wins the World Cup she will be reelected and if they don't because the economy has slowed to less than 1% she may have a tough battle on her hands. I'm going to spend most of my time much further from our shores and starting where so much of our focus has been the last 10 years and that's in Afghanistan. Presidents announced that we will leave a small contingent of troops to help train the Afghan military forces and that those will all be gone by the end of 2016. But the bulk of the offensive capability will be gone by the end of this year. Taliban has known that for a long time. They're going to do their usual summer surge in the near weeks and so we'll get a test of how good the Afghan forces are. Can they stand up? Will they stand up and fight? But what's hovering over all of that is yet another fiasco over an election. Four years ago, Abdullah Abdullah who'd been the foreign minister probably won the election and it was stolen. Karzai got a second term. It produced a very tough period in U.S. Afghan relationships and they've been turbulent ever since. Abdullah got 45% of the first vote and in the runoff 10 days ago suddenly it looked like that the vote was going to go to Ashraf Ghani who's a capable guy but unfortunately he's very committed to the Karzai clan and to me it has the flavor of their most concern. Can they continue to access the corruption that's made them extraordinarily wealthy in these eight years? So events are changing every day. The head of the electoral commission resigned yesterday that may open the prospect for a new look at how the votes were carried out. There are a large number of votes in the second time from areas that didn't vote at all, the first one. What could you hope for as the best outcome? That the two would sit down and make a deal to provide stability going forward but right now there's not a hint that that will occur. The two major other players there in South Asia are Pakistan and India. Pakistan, we'll call it a basket case but the turmoil in its governance and its structure inside is severe. It is a Muslim country but it too is divided between Sunni and Shia with the Shia being over in the area nearest Iran. So you've got that stress going, you've got the Pakistan Taliban still going and I'd simply remind you Pakistan, Taliban and Al Qaeda particularly Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula and Yemen are the ongoing organizations trying to conduct attacks inside the United States. Sharif now in his third term, third time as the Prime Minister, helped create Lashkar-e-Taiba, his first office under the counterpart CIA, creating training terrorists to go into Kashmir. He was thrown out by the military when he came back second. He went to Saudi Arabia for exile that's where his support, financial support comes from. When he came back second time they reactivated Lashkar-e-Taiba and the attacks became more broadly throughout India. It was that effort that ultimately led to the raids we saw in Mumbai. He was not in office when they occurred but they're his stepchildren. So now these are the third time I'm waiting to see. Relations between Pakistan and India are comparatively calm, better than we've seen a long time but more support for terrorist activity back into India could turn that around. So the thing to watch is what Sharif does and where the military goes. The former head of the military and then president after Lasku Mashaaf is on trial for treason. The army's been trying to work getting him out of the country for medical reasons and just this past week the Supreme Court overturned that. So we're moving back toward a clash between the military and the political leadership. Next door, Mr. Modi, head of the BJP, Hindu nationalist party won a sweeping election. 281 seeds, absolute majority, doesn't need a coalition. Now we're going to see if he can govern. He's made all kinds of promises of how he's going to shift and spur the economic growth. Because he was head of the state where there were riots back in 2003 that led to about 10,000 Muslims being killed, the U.S. refused to grant him a visa to come to the U.S. And in the middle of this past campaign when it suddenly became clear he was the likely winner, the U.S. Ambassador went to meet him and to tell him he could have a visa to visit the U.S. again. Given the sweeping outcome of his victory, let's hope he doesn't bear grievance. Because overall, even though they have their difficulties, relationships between India and the U.S. are probably the best they've been in my adult life process. Shifting to the heart of East Asia, when we brought MCC to Austin, MCC was created to compete with Japanese. Japan's coming, Japan's coming. They're going to take over all of the business leadership in so many areas. A vibrant 20 years of impressive growth. And then the real estate bubble burst and they went into 15 years of successive recessions and deflation. And with that, substantial political instability. Eighteen months ago, Mr. Abbey led the LDP back to victory in the House and the following summer, the upper house as well. He is a nationalist at heart, but he is, at this point, committed to the U.S.-Japanese alliance. And he's been trying to work problems in Okinawa where the bases have been a problem for a long time. He sat out to try to end deflation to burst the economy with three arrows. The first one was monetary printing lots of currency, reasonably successful. The second arrow was fiscal policy. And what that meant was a large amount of money flowing into infrastructure. The third arrow was supposed to be reforms of the industry, how it performed, how it was governed, how it was taxed. He finally announced the third arrow last week. Depending on the source, it's been described either as a thud or instead of a third arrow, a thousand needles. But it's a blueprint. So we'll be watching the next several weeks, a couple of months, to see he wants to lower the corporate tax rate from 39% down to 35%. He's got a lot of other measures. But interestingly, he's the first leader to tackle the issue of an aging population. They've constrained any immigration. It's a very homogenous society, but a graying one. And he's talked in this last week about the need to bring more women into the workforce and to permit foreign workers to come. Whether he can sell that and support it will be interesting to watch. But it will be critical for whether Japan, once again, is the vibrant economic. Remember, it's still the third largest economy in the world. South Korea continues to charge along. They're running about fifth or sixth in status. But they face the reality that north of them is one of the most unstable countries in the world. The so-called young, dear young leader who came to power when he was 28. That's about four years ago. He has proven that he's very skillful at eliminating anybody who might be a rival. The general view that I heard when the West was that he was in office, but the real force was his aunt and her husband, who was the closest contact with China. Well, six months or so ago, suddenly the uncle was arrested and executed. And 65 of his closest friends were also executed. And the aunt is now an asylum for her health. So it gives you a sense that there is not stability in this leadership that would give you confidence for a would-be new nuclear power along the way. But obviously the greatest interest in that part of the world is China. Now, the second largest economy. Very optimistic that they were going to overtake the U.S. and be the largest economy between 2020, 2030. Sort of pick your date. A new leader who's been in office a little over a year. He knows he's got 10 years, so he can take a long view. He has accrued, she has accrued more power than any leaders since Deng Xiaoping in 78. But his efforts to try to get the economy moving, they know they need to create a consumer economy to parallel the export economy, that they can't sustain the growth rate simply on exports. And prices are going up for them. Foreign manufacturers are suddenly finding that labor has become more demanding in the process. So labor which had gone there, manufacturing shifted to Vietnam, or some of it back to Mexico in the process. Xi Jinping recognized that the single greatest threat to the party's absolute control of the country was corruption. And so he set out major policy item to go after corruption. This phrase is the tigers as well as the flies. When Nancy and I made our first trip out there in 05, very bright, smart guides everywhere we went, but they would talk about the corruption and they catch the little guys but not never the big ones. That's changing under Xi Jinping. But it's also unsettling because it turns out that so many of the elite families whose fathers, whose grandfathers were those who helped bring Mao to power and helped govern and who were then sent down by Mao and were restored to power by Deng Xiaoping, many of those families have become fabulously wealthy. Xi Jinping's family had not but his sister and brother-in-law had acquired a great deal of wealth. Now I would remind that their shared father was one of Deng Xiaoping's favorites who went down to Bill Shenzhen after the revolution started. So it may well be that she acquired her wealth through the ties from the father and not simply on the edges of Xi Jinping's successes, but in case they are selling a lot of their assets they've acquired. So clearly there is an effort to try to make that immediate family as criticism-free as possible. Thing to watch, they're slowly tightening the news around Zhou Yunkang who was in the previous administration the head of state security, one of the most powerful jobs in China. Before that he'd been the energies are and a great many of his colleagues are billionaires at this stage of the game and they're slowly moving and it appears almost certain that they will in fact finally move on Zhou himself. This will be the first time ever that somebody who was on the standing committee was brought to account for corruption. So things are changing in China but the issue is what about the instability? But come back to the challenge that Xi Jinping has. Their goal was to move 270 million people in the next 10 years into new cities and for me that's a daunting task that I'm skeptical that anybody could pull off. But the bottom line is here they recognize they've got to keep the middle class expanding if they're going to be able to retain single party control of the country. Xi Jinping unlike Gorbachev has no interest in altering the party or the party's control over China. But he does want to give a new surge to the economy and in turn that leads to questions what will be the relationships with the U.S. and with Japan and with the other neighbors East China Sea, South China Sea, who gets to exploit the energy under those. Lot of interesting challenges. But of course the one that we've been closer to in watching these challenges is Russia. Putin made a trip a few weeks ago out to China in the wake of sanctions being declared and issues about perhaps alternate natural gas sources for Western Europe. He needed to continue to earn the income from those to sustain his tight control on Russia. So he made a deal with China. They've talked about this deal for 10 years. Building a pipeline from Siberia into China. The Chinese offered to pay for it. But Putin going back to his seizing power and taking over the U.S. and the rest of it, all energy transmission systems as well that should belong to the state. So the issue was could they get enough money out of China for long-term contracts with natural gas to pay to service any debt they took on. Chinese got a great bargain in the price because Putin felt the political need to have an alternative contract done. So China got the better part of that deal. Obviously the Ukraine has been at the center of our focus now for weeks. Yesterday Mr. Putin announced that he was going to ask the Duma to withdraw the permission to use Soviet forces in the Ukraine. Didn't need it. He doesn't need it because special forces are doing it. He doesn't need to send overt forces in. The so-called nationalists in the east are some of them are active serving Soviet commandos who are leading the various efforts. The wild card here is the newly elected president of Ukraine. He's a billionaire, chocolate business, and over half his business is in Russia. So he knows how to do business with Russia. He's already had some conversations with Mr. Putin. His phone call is supposed to take place today or tomorrow with Ms. Merkel and President Holand and the president of Ukraine and Mr. Putin to see if they can move things along about making a declared ceasefire work. Russia will not give back the Crimea. Crimea is now part of Russia and it will stay part of Russia. But I'm persuaded at this point he said Putin's got another 10 years to serve. Bob Gates recently noted China can look out 10 years, Russia can look out 10 years, for the U.S. long term is next thirsty in the process. And so it does make it difficult in finding policies that work together. In looking at the reality of things, I think Putin's taken a long view. He'll keep Ukraine from moving too far to the West. They can have a trade deal with the EU, but they will stay within Russia's orbit. Within Europe itself, it's another one of these places where secretly recorded phone calls are causing a lot of trouble. Those published in Poland two weeks ago indicated that some of the senior leadership did not trust the U.S. to really fulfill Article 5 of the NATO treaty if they were attacked. They've since announced that that really didn't represent their views, but it may lead to an election in Poland. And Poland's one of the strong places in Europe. They came through the 2008 meltdown better than most other countries. There was a big fight going on over who's going to chair the European Union Commission. Jean-Claude Juncker, who is long-term Prime Minister Luxembourg, and a dedicated political integrationist is the lead candidate. Mr. Cameron in the UK has elected to make it a blood issue, publicly going to fight it all the way down, and he's probably going to lose. He thought he had Mrs. Merkel on his side. She went home and found that within the coalition government there were very strong commitments the other direction. So she called Mr. Cameron and said, sorry, I can't support you. Italy may join him, two or three others, but the odds are that Juncker will be elected. His goal is further political integration. At the same time, if you watch the elections for the European Parliament, the ones that got the most votes were the ones who were nationalists, who said less political union. So that does not bode for a comfortable, easy European Union, but I'm particularly focused on Great Britain. Through my whole adult life and whatever crisis we've had, they've always been with us on our side. In October, there was a vote in Scotland for independence. And if that does pass, then what happens to the United Kingdom, as we've known it, is Scotland part of the European Union or not? And Cameron has already promised that after the next general election, if he wins, he's going to have a referendum of whether Britain should withdraw from the European Union. So what was the model for a large trade union and prosperity across a large continent is now in substantial question. And I can't avoid it, so I'll now go down to the Middle East. Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, looks as though they may pull off an election with an inclusive government, not a Muslim dominated government. Libya is a basket case. There's an election today for a new National Congress, 200 seats. Promise that if it's, they're elected, they'll be seated in Benghazi, not Tripoli. The militias probably aren't going to pay any more attention to them than ones elected a year ago. So there is no reasonable prospect of stability or political unity in Libya in the near future. Former general has elected to try to go about bringing about that unity militarily. We've denounced them as have many of the others. So I guess the answer is we prefer instability to a dictatorship. And next door in Egypt. Mubarak fell in 2011 because the large crowds came to the streets protesting the economy. And the U.S. pulled a plug, military overthrown, and they raced for elections. And the only group organized, having eliminated Mubarak's party, the only group organized was the Muslim Brotherhood. And I'm not sure who sold the case that the Muslim Brotherhood was somebody we could rely on. Everything about them says they want to create an Islamist state. And the idea of having an inclusive government runs against their basic charter in the process. Morsy was elected. He had almost three years. The crowds came back in the streets because the economy wasn't any better. What brought him out in the first place. So the army moved and has been repressing. Marshal El Sisi is now President El Sisi. Still very broadly popular inside Egypt. Strongly supported by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, who've already poured 16 billion in and who are now trying to advise how to get the industry going. But the reality is the government subsidies are simply unsustainable. 20% of the Egyptian budget is on energy subsidies. Those have to come down if Egypt is going to be economically viable. And that's going to be politically very divisive. But Egypt still is potentially the strongest player and the strongest stable ally in that part of the world. Israel, Palestine, efforts by Secretary Kerry over a year and a half to try to broker new negotiations toward a peace agreement have fallen apart. Mr. Netanyahu has made a particular case of the fact that with Egyptian help, there had finally been a truce between Fatah and Hamas to try to put together a unity government on the Palestinian side. We've now got the case of the three kidnapped teenagers in the West Bank. Massive effort to try to find them. Believed that Hamas was behind their kidnapping. They were successful. You may remember several years ago, they captured one soldier through across the border and got a very large number of Palestinians out of jail in that process. They're clearly aimed on that same path again. So the prospect of a settlement between Palestinians and Israelis is not on the near-term horizon. Civil war in Syria is now over three years long. It has evolved into primarily a Sunni-Shia war with different groups funded, but the success of Assad in surviving is directly from the Iranians. The Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards trained the Syrians on how to crack down and they brought their wards that Shia Hezbollah, militia from Lebanon to turn the fight and they were successful. But now what's happened is that a number of the fundamentalists who were funded largely by gutter and by wealthy Saudi merchants have now shifted the fight to the eastern part of Syria. They now have effective control over most of eastern Syria and the oil fields and they're the ones who now, under the fabric of an Islamist state of Iraq and the Levant or Syria, depending on which newspaper you read for which title they use. They're not a large number of fighters but they have a lot of money and when they rolled in to Mosul they took over the banks and picked up about 85 million out of the local branch of the Iraqi National Bank in the process. They are very effective users of kidnapping, extortion to add to it, but what they smartly did was to go buy off tribal chiefs to either join them or to stand aside while they made their fast sweep. Why is Iraq so vulnerable here? In 2009, an election, a lawee who had been the first prime minister after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein got the most votes and we sat out trying to build a coalition and the head of the CUD's force on the ground out Madoverdes and he got Maliki another term. As you've now had four years, they had a recent election and again it's indecisive, but he has been through these four years not only president but minister of defense and minister of the interior and he sat out to remove from the leadership, both of the police and of the military, anyone that he did not believe was loyal to him. But the problem goes deeper in Saddam Hussein's days. The bulk of the officer corps were Sunni and the bulk of the enlisted were Shia. What's changed, the bulk of the enlisted are still Shia but now a significant part of the officer corps are Shia but without having demonstrated the ability to lead. So you look at what can you do in this crisis? Where can you make any kind of a difference? We have sent 300 military and special forces to be advisors, not clear for whom or why. CUD's force is also there. General Soleimani is in Baghdad. So he's marshaling it from the Iranian side. For me, the spectacle that we might do airstrikes to support forces being governed and run by the Iranians is a little hard for me to contemplate why that makes sense. But more importantly, we could not reach agreement in 11 for a residual U.S. force to try to help produce a professional military. We wanted the status forces agreement. They offered a diplomatic note. We declined. The 300 people have gone in on a diplomatic note that we would not accept in 2011. So Inman's view is that we are very close to seeing the lines drawn at the end of World War I establishing countries to be erased. A smaller Syria, an Islamist state covering a good deal of eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq. Kurds seeing what was going on quickly grabbed nearby the city of Kirkuk where they had some decent claims. So the Kurds control the northern oil. The Shias still have the southern oil fields. And if they can hold on to the part in Syria, the Sunnis have the oil fields. Each of them can see where they could be economically viable. So what's the attraction to come together in a coalition government? Where is the leadership that not produce it? And then hovering over all of this is Turkey. Turkey houses a very large number of Syrian refugees. So does Jordan. So does Lebanon. Fair number in western Iraq. In excess of six million refugees. In those refugee camps are probably the future leaders or whatever remains of Syria. But the key player here is Turkey. Turkey, up to literally this last year, any idea of an independent Kurdistan was anathema to them because of a large number of Kurds in Turkey as well as in Iran and in Syria. When the announcement was made that the Kurds were taking over Kirkuk, the Turks did not object. A lot of trade going back and forth. It's a pretty viable part of the economy. Now hovering the middle of all of that, Mr. Erdogan has run out his time as prime minister. He doesn't want to give up power. So he's decided he ought to run for presidency and take much of the power with him in the Putin model in the process. So how Turkey responds to all of this is governed in large measure for what are Erdogan's prospect for his long-term future. On that cheerless note, let me finally stop. I still saved about 15 minutes. I mean, I throw the floor open for questions. There are microphones on either side. And if I've stirred any interest in asking questions, would you please? I see one person moving. Thank you. See a second one. Good. Yes, sir. You're there first. Thank you. Good evening. I'd actually like to pull you a little closer to home and a little bit more into your personal history. Can you give us some insight on the proper relationship between the intelligence community and the press? Obviously the intelligence community never enjoys sunshine upon them, but we've historically seen intelligence go off the rails. Are you far enough removed from your time in the intelligence community to give us some perspective on that relationship and what it offers? In 1977, I'd been the director of NSA for only a couple of months. And an article was published in the Wall Street Journal telling things we knew, but didn't reveal how. New York Times ran the next day and identified NSA as the source. And we lost diplomatic, the country changed its codes that day. Attorney General went to President Carter and said you need to do something about this. So the decision was made to send the general counsel of DOD, the assistant secretary for public affairs, and Vice Admiral Inman to see the publisher of the New York Times. And the layout for him, the damage they had done, and the Wall Street Journal had not done. So Mr. Salzburger, when I finished, said, well, Admiral, if this is about censorship, we're going to fight it every step of the way. And my response was we wouldn't be here if it was censorship. We're here to tell you the damage you did to sources and methods that the journal didn't do, but yet got out to the public the essence of the story. A fascinating hour followed a discussion between the publisher and the editors. And they finally said, well, if we had somebody we could talk to at 7.30 at night and say would it be damaging if we'd said the following, we'd be willing to try it. We took it back, went up to the president, he, the secretary of defense, Attorney General urged him to do it and suggested Admiral Turner, the director of central intelligence, classmate of President Carter. And Carter said no, didn't want to do that. But since Inman's done this one, let's have him do it. Pretty quickly, it expanded to Washington Post, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, and pretty soon the weeklies as well. I took an awful lot of calls and in almost every case, simply by changing wording, taking out how we knew. Ben Bradley told me one day, most of the articles in the post were from Bob Woodward. And he said, you know, Admiral, we believe this isn't national interest. But one of these days, Bob Woodward's going to write a book. And I'm not going to get to review it. The book was The Vale. And if you read it, you'd think Woodward and I were talking every other day. In the preface, he says, where I was not a party to the conversation, I have reconstructed it as I likely believe it occurred. When the administration's changed, dialogue between Secretary Brown and Secretary Weinberger, they decided to continue. President Reagan agreed. And I kept that through the 18 months that I was at Langley. When I left, Mr. Casey wanted to take it over because he wanted to kill it. It has never been rebuilt. It is essentially based on trust. In asking some journalists last year up in Dallas, someone who used to work the national scene, why there was so much animosity, I said, because there's nobody they trust. There is no ongoing dialogue. I'd have to tell you from my side look, having that dialogue with New York Times is a lot tougher now than it was when the senior Seltzberger was the publisher. It still works with some of the other papers. I had an encounter with Keller when he was the editor-in-chief on PBS at which he has posed the view that it was the intent of the founding fathers that the media would decide what should or should not be published about government activities. And I told him then I found it troubling, and I still do. Thank you. Yes. With all that's occurring in the Middle East, and it seems to be rather grave right now, can the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan do much to dampen down some of this? Are they so politically and financially and economically vulnerable that they are on the precipice of something? The real issue is whether King Abdullah can survive. He made the wise choice, happy choice of marrying a beautiful Palestinian queen, and that helps a lot in dealing with the pretty large Shia population in Jordan. His primary support still from the better ones, they still love him, devoted. But the problem now with more than three million Syrian refugees, they are simply overwhelmed. And now the borders between Jordan and Iraq are controlled by ISIL forces. So he's vulnerable. He's probably the most loyal trustworthy friend we have in that part of the world. But he is so dependent on all the others. And I should have talked about Saudi Arabia and my rundown. Forgive me for loading on your question to say support from the Saudis, financial support are pretty critical for King Abdullah of Jordan surviving. Karen Elliott House, who is a distinguished alum of UT, was managing editor of the Daily Texan, long time head of foreign reporting for Wall Street Journal, did a book about 18 months ago on Saudi Arabia in which she was pretty gloomy about the prospects. She's got an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, which is worth reading. She's been back out there. And she says they're making headway and dealing with the problems of disaffection inside. So it's a more optimistic look about where Saudi Arabia is. But part of the problem is right now, Saudi Arabia doesn't trust us. They blame us for pulling the plug too quickly on Mubarak and Egypt. And they believe the greatest threat to them is Iran. And in this whole Shia-Sunni conflict, if we don't take their side solidly, they think we're wrong. In one's view, is there a no winning position for us in trying to intrude ourselves in the Shia-Sunni fight? We have to carefully look where our own interests are. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Yes, I was wondering what you think the impact of the Grand Renaissance dam in Ethiopia will be on East Africa and Egypt? Well, it's causing a lot of worry about what impact is it going to be on the water as it flows on down into the Nile and for Egypt. And of course, as one dam, its impact on that as well. Near term, it will be a significant plus for the Ethiopian economy. Hopefully, they will also see that the Kenyans can benefit from it. I didn't talk about Africa at all simply for time. There, I know I had been very gloomy about the prospects for Africa very broadly. You have the al-Shahab al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia continuing to do strikes in the Kenya, which keeps things unstable in the process. You go a little further south, things in Tanzania are more solid, but you go to one more step down, the Mozambique, and the natural gas discoveries there are enormous, 100 trillion tons natural gas to be exploited. Political situation reasonably calm between the two groups who fought for a long time. They're going through an election in the near term, but you could see a much more prosperous East Africa benefiting again, much of it off of energy and of water, which remains a precious factor. I grew up here in Texas. I remember well the last five years of the depression, and I remember the impact in small towns and rural areas when the rural electrification administration came in, and suddenly you had electric power. You had lights by which you could study, as opposed to kerosene. I'm old enough to remember that timeframe, but just think about what electric power from much of Africa, whether it comes from RTG's nuclear supply or otherwise. If you think about how could you change the overall prospects for much of the civilizations, plural in Africa. It's having power, the ability to have light, the ability to have education, the ability to move food, and I look at the dam and the hydroelectric prospect out of it in that light as ultimately a plus, not a negative. Five minutes to go, there is time for one more question, or maybe I've exhausted you at this point. I think I covered everything that I had in my mind mentally that I wanted to talk about. And is that another question coming no margin is going to run things from the back. I've got one here. Okay, please. Yes, sir. Can you share with us how you gather and more importantly, how you filter the information you have shared with us and you continually used to educate yourself? When I left government in 1982, I was curious, my clearances were still held because they never let former directors of NSA or CIA completely retire to call back when they've got some large problem they want to talk about, but I made the decision I would not read any classified intelligence reporting. I didn't want to have to stop and say, where did I know that? So I said, how well informed can I stay? Every day I read New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, every day they're published, local paper, I scan the monthlies. I've been privileged to serve on a number of large multinational corporate boards while I travel. So I've got a lot of friends in other countries. I see a story, I'm skeptical, I'll call friend and say, you know, is that valid? What do you think about that? I began it as a hobby and then I found over time that sharing that continues, I had value in my teaching and hopefully to crowds like this as well. Thank you very much for your time.