 And it's really my pleasure to welcome Phil Mudd, who's also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, who, as many of you know, had a distinguished career at the CIA. I think he began in 1981. So, 80, wait a minute. 85. 85. Okay. Sorry. Not that old, man. After you were at the University of Virginia with a degree in English and really effective preparation. And Phil had a large range of different jobs at the agency, many of which are recrounded in this excellent book, Take Down, which has just recently been published, to give you a sense of a couple of the most important jobs that Phil had. He was Ambassador Dobbins' CIA sort of, I guess, liaison to the CIA when Dobbins went in to basically stand up the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan and to help with the formation of the first Afghan government. Phil was also the Deputy Director of the Counterterrorist Center at a time when it was engaged in finding people like Abu Faraj al-Libbi, Khaled Jake Muhammad, and other leaders of al-Qaeda. He retired from the agency in 2005 and has done a variety of different things since. He's worked with Palantir a little bit. He's now an unbelievably an investment banker. He spent quite a lot of time in Riyadh working with the Saudi Interior Ministry. And we're really looking forward to his comments today. Thanks. And just to make it clear, I've known Peter for about 147 years. So if you sense some casual back and forth, it's because we're not only colleagues, we're quite good friends. And Peter probably owes me a bottle of wine for this. Okay, so, you know, when I was reflecting on this and writing the book, which I wrote mostly actually in Riyadh, it seemed to me that most of this was at best an accident and maybe at worst a mistake. Because I joined the CIA because I couldn't get a job in 1985. I wanted to be a high school teacher and I had more than 35 rejection letters from high schools up and down the East Coast. I wanted to inspire kids to learn to read. And so I had heard that CIA was hiring so I drove up to the front gate on the George Washington Parkway with a resume. And the security officer looks at me and says, excuse me, this is the Central Intelligence Agency. Well, about three months later, I got a call and they offered me a job. And I stayed, I thought I'd stayed two years, I'd stayed 25, some of which was at the Bureau. That part was the accident. If you think about the variety of things I saw that prepared me, everything from serving initially on counterterrorism in about 1991 because I told my office I was going to move to Paris. And they said, if you're moving to Paris, why don't you go fill a slot that we have to fill on the program to support the Mujahideen who were fighting the Soviets. So 20 years before 9-1-1, I had my first interaction with the Muge. And then I came back from Paris with shoulder length hair and two earrings, believe it or not. And the office looks at me and says, we're going to put you in the outback, which is called the Counterterror Center. And so by accident, again, I started on a career path that I never knew would persist for so long. But to move forward quickly, I also had experiences in those years before 9-1-1. First as a staff assistant on the 7th floor, that is the executive suite of CIA, which I hate. I was the worst staff officer ever. Not a detail-oriented person, which is not a good thing if you're a staff officer. But I got to know not only the workings of the agency, but I got to know a guy named George Tenet. Then I moved back just because I had great mentorship, I jumped a couple rungs of management and immediately became manager of the Iraq program at CIA, which gave me experience not in staff work, but in personalities and managing people. After that, again, these accidents that allow you to have a range of experience for problem solving. I went down to the White House and I only saw how policy worked, but got to meet people like Cheney Staff and the National Security Council staff and Condi Rice. Think of all these experiences and how they play into Washington, D.C. in a post-9-1-1 environment. One thing I tell new officers coming in is, never think this town is too big because it's not. And secondarily, if you want to make an enemy, be careful because there may be 330 million people in this country, but that enemy you make in this small town of Washington, D.C., is somebody you're going to cross paths with years down the road. But going to 9-1-1 and the experiences after that, I remember being evacuated from the executive office building and walking out into the streets of Washington, we thought there was a plane coming for us, so I left my keys and wallet in the executive office building and it was like a movie set. There are just people milling around everywhere. We couldn't get cell phone coverage and I later made it to my house in suburban Virginia and watched the buildings fall and I remember as an intelligence professional saying, I don't know who did this, but I know our lives will change and my life will change and particularly I suspect that intelligence will move out from sort of the periphery of Washington to the core. That was correct, it became an intelligence war. When I moved to the CIA back after the Dobbins effort in Afghanistan in January of 2002, I thought our responsibilities were pretty basic and I'll summarize them quickly, but I want to give you a sense of smell of what it was like. The responsibilities were things like, how do we understand the problem of al-Qaeda? And that has a lot of facets, that's things like money, how do they communicate, what kind of courier system do they have, what's their WMD program, and most importantly, who are the key players we have to take down to mitigate threat. There is a reason that the CIA calls its center the counter-terrorist center and not the counter-terrorism center. The business I was in and the business that continues today is a people business. Let me be blunt, if you take the people out faster than they can replicate themselves, in my experience you win. It's a brutal business. I thought initially in 2002 when we did our first take down, the major take down, that was Abu Zubaydah, we sat down that night and tried to figure out what to tell the president the next morning. Because one of the responsibilities I had in the center with a bunch of other people, some of whom are in this room was, we had to talk to the president six days a week via the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet. So you'd be sitting down at night with a breaking event saying, we better say something interesting, primarily because the president's a pretty serious customer, secondarily because George Tenet has a Mediterranean temper, and if we don't say something interesting, he will chew my ass. So we sat down that night and tried to figure out what to say about the first big take down, again Abu Zubaydah. And I didn't realize that the answer was not about Abu Zubaydah. It was about whether after Zubaydah we could maintain an operational tempo so that the shark's teeth who might come up and replace him couldn't move up fast enough. It was about operational tempo, not about any individual operational leader. We also had other big duties for people who in many cases, including mine, were at least one step in management beyond where they had been before. We're all, to be brutal, quite inexperienced. Putting together an office in the midst of chaos, dealing with the workforce, a few of whom were not dealing with the stress very well. Dealing with the pace of threat that required updates every 12 to 24 hours and how to handle that volume of threat, both within the CIA, how did we manage it, but also in communicating to the White House, the Defense Department, and to the American people. One of the unique aspects of this, I think, was over time, my job was more about outside the building than inside. Because going back to this theme about intelligence being at the heart of this war, dealing with the Congress who was going home every weekend and saying, not only what's the intel picture, but what do I tell my constituents? So I'm the guy from the intel side talking to a senator or congressman saying, here's my counsel on what you tell local TV and Topeka. That's a bit of a mind stretcher. Dealing with the media, which was a big part of the job. What do you do about a leak? And what do you do about how to shape those who explain to the American people what terrorism is all about? Do you tell them a lot? Do you tell them a little? Do you tell them something in between? Do you get out in front of them? Do you stay behind them? Do you react? Do you predict? Dealing with other agencies, in particular the Defense Department. One of the proudest things I remember from CIA was building a relationship with the J2, that's the head of intel for the Defense Department. Where when we're doing a predator strike, I'd call him live and say you're gonna go in the tank, that is the briefing center, with the chairman, and you can't give him bad information. So I don't care whether it's disseminated or not, we're gonna have a partnership that says, when I see something, you're gonna know about it. Because I don't want you embarrassed in front of the chairman, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And that built an incredible relationship over time with, at that time, Ron Burgess, and I would say we're still friends. The last thing I'd say before I transitioned to how to understand the problem we face today and what to do about it tomorrow is, I thought over time that one of the key responsibilities we had was to keep cool. Whether it was our managers or analysts, or whether it was frankly our seven floor, which got overexcited at times. You know, all of us whether you're in the corporate environment or in the government environment or the nonprofit environment. I think over time we don't get paid for time. We get paid for judgment, wisdom, knowledge. And we get paid to keep cool when it gets hot. And so I thought one of the responsibilities we had was to keep cool. You can't make decisions if you allow the heat in the kitchen to make you sweat. And an aspect of that was, I think all of us knew all along, that with the things we're involved in, particularly detainee and drone operations, we all knew they would get public. And we all knew it would go ugly. And the answer was, this is what we do. Let's get over it, do it as best we can, representing not only a law of the land, but representing the ethos of the American people, and to try to do the best we can with a bad hand. So to transition to what this means, I went after that to spend about four years at the bureau where I learned more about things like how to think about the difference between domestic and foreign intelligence. How to think about intelligence when your first question isn't where's the information, how do we get it? Your first question has to be, how is it appropriate to act in the United States? Which is a very different way to think. But over time, I came to conclusions about what threat looks like. And so I want to close by talking about how to understand today's threat and about what I would do about it, or how I would think about it as we look down the road in places like Mali, in places like the Horn of Africa or the Arabian Peninsula. I came to view threat through two basic lenses. The first was people. Who are those people who think about the West as a target? And there are very few. Who among those people has access to trainees or foreign populations that can translate that intent into capability? That is, who if they think about attacking the West can get at you? So the first major category is people. The second is safe haven. Who has the time and space to put together an operation that might look basic to the West, but it is very difficult to execute from Yemen or Saudi Arabia or Algeria? So the combination of people and safe haven. My view is money, WMD, training, all these other characteristics of terrorist organizations to me are subsumed by people and the ability to plot with time and space. If you look at the threats we faced, Indonesia, Southern Philippines, Somalia, Yemen, Sahel, they all have two characteristics. They have space where government can't or won't execute power. And they have key players, whether it's Druk Daal, whether it's the Americans who showed up in Somalia, whether it's, I think, Zarkawi and Iraq. They all have leadership that thinks in strategic terms about the West as a target. So if you look at it from that perspective, what do you do about it now and in the future? This is not a policymaker's perspective. This is a practitioner's perspective. I think you have to ask a simple question. If you take this premise of people being important, as time goes on, as the globe and the United States loses the appetite for kinetic operations, that is, as the globe and the United States 12 years after 9-1-1 increasingly questions the elimination of leadership, the balance is going to be, is the threat sufficient to either use or engage a foreign power to take out leadership, that is, supporting operations in places like the Sahel, or is it sufficient in places like Yemen for us to do the job ourselves? And the balance within that is going to be, if we get there too late, they're going to kill people in New York City. If we get there too early, we're going to alienate people faster than we have to. So when you decide that to represent the American people appropriately, we should try to take leadership off the battlefield, and taking leadership off the battlefield only has two outcomes. You're going to arrest them or you're going to kill them. That's it. As I told Christiane Alhampore, you know, war's hell, get over it. And I'm not a field practitioner, but I sat there, and I still remember at nights, it's not a pretty memory. Thinking about signing in order to send somebody to a black site, or thinking about a live operation where you know you're watching live the killing of people who have a soul and whose kids will never see them again. These implications are profound, and I think people who suggest in the debates about these that those of us who are practitioners don't think about them, that's a mistake. So as I look forward, I think in looking at places like the Sahel and Mali, I would say we have to maintain a policy process that tries to decide when a threat reaches the level where we want to engage a foreign power or conduct operations unilaterally. That threat ought to have a couple of dimensions. A strategic leadership that is thinking about us, and not just about their local problem, and that has access to people who can hurt us, and that has safe haven, time, and space to plot. And finally, over time maintaining the capability to identify, to find, fix, and finish those folks, which is a revolution in intelligence the last 12 years. That is to use data tools and analytic processes where you locate someone in a place like Somalia or a place like Pakistan with a tactical capability to go after them if you need to. I think that's where we are today in places like support operations in Mali. I think that's where we will be tomorrow if we choose to intervene in other places, for example, North Africa. And finally, one of the most interesting implications, I think that targeting mindset, how do you think about leadership that's a threat to the United States? I do not believe that we have thought enough about how that applies to similar targets. Cartels, human traffickers, how do we think about people whose leadership are designed and driven to destroy life in America? And what do we do about it now that we know we have a different intelligence option that we've perfected for 12 years? That's my story, and that's how I see the world, and I suspect you have different perspectives. So please bring it on. We can talk also about English literature if you'd like. My master's specialty was Victorian novels, so I'm sure there's hundreds of people in the room who want to go deep into that. But let's go, whatever you want. So Phil, what would you say then about the Al Nusra Front, which is clearly the most effective al-Qaeda force in the world right now, the most effective force fighting Assad, which is basically acting in a Hezbollah-like manner in the sense that not only is it fighting effectively, it's also providing effective services. So for the first time in the entire history of this kind of movement, we're seeing a Sunni ultra-fundamentalist militia controlling territory and delivering services. What would you do about it? I'll combine both policy and intel, but if our policy guy, my first question, my first perspective would be, and I know this is an ideological issue in this town, would be, look, we're not in the business of policing the world. I mean, I like Hezbollah, but A, they're there, B, they're there deep, so to dislodge them would be, I would say, virtually impossible. C, the hardest thing for us to acknowledge with Hezbollah or Hamas is the voice of the people said we want them. I'm talking about Al Nusra Front in theory. Exactly, so Al Nusra Front, my first point would be, whether it's Al Nusra, whether it's the Brotherhood, whether it's Hezbollah, we're not gonna go clean up every place. So I'm gonna go back to my basics, which are far more tactical, to say, I wanna have enough collection to know whether there's leadership that's thinking about us. If they're not, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna keep collecting, but I wouldn't propose we get in the business of opposing them simply because they're radicals. I mean, we have radicals in this country. Radical is a way of thinking. And parallel with the collection process to understand how they think, I would also be using this huge targeting capability we have to say, if need be, do I have a good enough collection option where for the leadership of this country says, now we have to go after them, that I don't have to spend a year building that up? Okay, well, let's drill down on that a bit more. You had Al Qaeda in Iraq saying, hey, the Al Nusra Front is actually us, which is something that the US government has said since December. They then, Al Nusra said, actually we're not part of Al Qaeda in Iraq, but we do pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda leadership. And so does that, what you just described seems to make a lot of sense, except the goalposts have shifted somewhat just even in the last week. My view would be cautious on this for simple reasons. The first is, once you start picking a fight, you're in for a dime, you're in for a dollar. If you wanna pick that enemy up by starting to take them out, you go from, I think they might be adversaries to guaranteeing they will be adversaries. So I stay to say that is sort of practical. The other thing I'd be saying is, look, we looked at Iraq early on as a huge problem in terms of bleed out, and that's the term we used back in about 2003. That is, we looked at Iraq through a lens of Afghanistan in the 1990s and said all these foreign fighters are gonna go home and since they've absorbed the al-Qaeda ideology, they're gonna go home and kill us. What didn't happen? Partly it didn't happen because a lot of them killed themselves and partly because they pissed off the Iraqis so much that the Iraqis did our work for us. So I'm looking at Al Nusrah Front and I'm watching how they interact with the secularists and what percentage they are of the population. And I'm saying, before I pick a fight, my guess is that the secularists, the sort of Free Syrian Army and others aren't bothering to mess with them because if they wanna go blow up some security guys, fine, but they don't agree with them. My guess is, afterwards what's gonna happen might be similar to what we saw on Iraq. That is, the Syrians, once Assad's gone, say, look, you guys, thanks, but don't do that anymore and that they may do our work for us, I think. But if I were on the inside, I'd be really taking the pulse of how much we know about intentions. I don't wanna be bitten by the dog, but I don't wanna bite the dog too early. What were the lessons of Mali? I mean, here you had a case where the French army were greeted as an army of liberation in a place that they relatively recently controlled. Yes, I think my lesson was quite straightforward. You had leadership and safe haven that was pretty early in the game. So if someone said to me, should Africa command be in the forefront of intervening, I'd say no because I don't think the threat is metastasized to the level that it's a fundamental concern for the United States. That said, if our job, especially post 911 is to be preventive, I don't wanna wait for it to metastasize. So there is a middle ground. We have tremendous capability, including on the targeting front, that is this capability we have to use technology and data to find, fix and finish an individual in the middle of the desert, should we be helping other people carry the load so that we don't get to the point where we have to carry the load ourselves? And that point would be when we find somebody in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles who was trained and sent by somebody in Mali. So I think a support function is good. I think we should be there because we already have an adversary that has some leadership and the safe haven to conduct operations. I don't think the target is metastasized to the point where we should be primary. And finally, even if we don't have a target, as a manager, I would keep in place the targeting specialty at the agency over time in reserve. You can't replicate that quickly enough if you let it die on the vine. So even if we didn't have a target now, I'd say, hey guys, 100, 200, 300 folks, you're gonna become targeting experts because I don't know how you're gonna deploy you in the future, but I don't wanna have to build you from scratch. You probably saw in the post a story by Greg Miller, which an advisory board at the CIA led by people like David Barron and Chuck Hagel said that the targeting kind of aspect of the CIA had sort of so much taken over the agency, but in a sense that it malformed it and they needed to get back into the espionage business at the core of the agency. And the burden of Mark Mozzetti's new book is basically the same. I mean, for instance, and I'll give you a reel, for instance, I think not predicting the Egyptian revolution, I don't think you can criticize the agency for that. Give me a break. But here's where it gets a little more complicated. How about the fact that the Salafists got 25% of the vote in the parliamentary elections? That to me is something the agency should have seen coming or they're being paid to look for that kind of thing. And yeah. Okay, so do you think that's a, I'm forgetting about the Salafist thing for a minute. Yeah. The overall kind of point, has the agency kind of gone away from its core business too much because of being a counter-terrorist agency? I think these are valid questions. I think the answers that I'm seeing are a little too simplistic. Now it's actually a lot too simplistic. Let's separate two things out. One is kinetic action that is firing a missile and there's a debate about whether the Pentagon should take that. Mike, I haven't thought about this a lot, but my view generally, especially as I got into more and more complex management positions, is in complex situations, you've got to simplify. So the CIA doesn't tell, the military does kinetic action. I think what we did, I'm happy, not happy, I think what we did through the 2000s was appropriate, but at some point you say, why don't they do kinetic and we'll do intel? So, but that's a slightly different question than saying should the CIA be involved in this analytic process to identify people? My view there would be they should because increasingly the problems we face, organized crime, human trafficking, narco traffickers, I suspect policy makers gonna say, wow not only can you give us a strategic understanding of this adversary, but you might be able to help the Mexicans understand exactly where that guy is and what his vulnerabilities are. Now the action goes elsewhere. If it's kinetic, maybe it's the military. If it's covert action, maybe it's CIA, but complimenting CIA's strategic analytic capability with this new emerging capability to help a customer when he's got a specific problem, I think is pretty powerful and I would be very reluctant to let that go at CIA. It's not an either or proposition. That's correct, yeah. The kinetic piece I'd probably write it off now, my friends at the agency would shoot me, maybe with a predator, but that's okay. They'd have to find you first. It's not that hard. I'll be... What about, I mean, since you raised the issue, I mean, JSOC taking, it would be JSOC, it wouldn't be Department of Defense, right? That would basically de facto control the program. Yeah, but I mean JSOC is, I'm talking about the, generally military versus intelligence. Right. As a practical matter, it would be JSOC rather than Air Force. Yeah, I would, yes. I would hope so because my, I think the ethos of this has to be, if you go back to operational tempo, you've got to maintain, you've got to be on the edge all the time. Go, go, go. You can't over-bureaucratize this. You were four years at the bureau. I forgot about that. But you know, why did you, what did they hire you to do? How successful do you think your time was, not just personally, but just the overall mission? And to what extent do you think the domestic threat is, you were there at a time when there were, you know, dozens of mini-apolitans going from Minneapolis to Somalia, there was, you know, Faisal Shazad, and I think, well, there was kind of a lot of, 2009 was sort of the peak of this, and it seemed to have subsided. How do you, is it, was 2009 an aberration, or was it a kind of, it's hard to tell? No, I think what we were seeing is the ripple effect that we saw in the UK and Europe in 2003, four, five. We thought maybe it wouldn't come to America, it did. It's just, the ripples were a little further out. And to me, unsurprisingly, it came in the case of Somalia to the community that had the most in common with expatriate communities in Britain. That is a community that was closely connected to its home turf, where US policy was seen as sort of anathema and where kids were first generation. So they felt this kind of viscerally. So I think that ripple effect that it took us, it was 0809, I felt the crescendo, I obviously think it's dying. The problem is people too quickly as a career analyst are over analytic about this. They say, well, because the problem is declining, why don't you withdraw resources? The problem with this country as someone who's testified 476 million times is the Congress will tell you that and then as soon as you miss one guy, you can miss, by the way, 12,000 gang murders in this country. If you miss one guy in the Mall of America, that's a year of testimony and here's how we're gonna viscerate the FBI because you miss that. So the balance between being coldly analytic about the threat, which I think is relatively low and the response, which is relatively high, is conditioned not just by what a manager thinks it should be, but by what the people who are elected by the American people ask of you. Don't make a mistake or it's on your ass. But even inside the politics of all that for a minute, I mean, is there one part of the budget debate I don't hear very much discussion of is we've created this sort of national security industrial complex. I mean, it's not a one out of 10 of the richest counties in the United States was in the DC area or 9-11, now it's seven, 860,000 Americans have top secret clearances, four and a half million have secret clearances. I mean, there's redundancy and there's over redundancy. So how would you, I mean, understanding that politically it's hard to have this discussion because of what you've just outlined, which is, I mean, shouldn't this discussion be had in terms, wherever else, it does seem to be one part of the budget debate where there isn't much discussion. I think that's true and I think over a glass of wine, my friends and I, at least a few of them would say the counter-terrorism problem is over resource now. I think a question I would have that I've never seen addressed though would be, do you want to think about other networked adversaries? And by networked, I mean, when you look at organizations, whether it's IBM or Al-Qaeda, they have characteristics. They have leadership, they communicate, they recruit, they have money, they have a way to spread their ideology. And that's how I looked at Al-Qaeda. I came to view them through about six or seven lenses of how an organization works. And the aggregation of those lenses was my summation on here's how we are against Al-Qaeda with a particular focus on leadership, an operational tempo to eliminate that leadership. But I would be asking the question of the other major threats we look at, in particular, I think gangs and drugs would be at the top of my list, do we want to think about the resources we have that are dedicated to the networked adversary of Al-Qaeda and applying them to other networked adversaries that I think are a huge threat to America but that we don't talk about that much. For example, this is gonna sound bizarre, but what the heck, I'm out of government now. You look at what happened in JSOC and rolling raids in Iraq perfected over time by Stanley McChrystal, General McChrystal, who's an American hero. That was a 24-hour operation center. I mean, I've been there, multiple analysts taking a lot of data and using big data tools like Palantir, Kiliad, putting them into a rolling picture of an adversary. I've thought, now it would be interesting to set up 24-hour courts in Los Angeles and do rolling raids against gangs so that we move so quickly they could not recalibrate. They couldn't figure out how to get in front of us. It's sort of like what you do at a football stadium. You have sort of courts on the fly. I'm not saying, get out of the American justice system. I'm saying, is there a revolutionary way to think about how to apply the lessons we used against foreign fighters in Iraq or al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to new areas? Is it how we look at the border areas and cartel activity there? I think there are ways to think about this and I would think about using some of those resources that might be over-resourced on terrorism and say, I want you to learn the gang target and I want you to take them out. Presumably that would not be the CIA. It would not and should not be. Where were you when Bin Laden was killed? Downtown D.C. Did you get a heads up? No, I woke up. One of the things that happened, you don't realize how this affects you when you're on the inside. You know the gravity of what you're involved in, but boy, and it surprised me. I talked to an agency psychologist a while ago who was doing a survey of those of us who had been involved, in my case, not peripherally but not centrally and detainee stuff. And I gathered that most of us have said, you know, we think about it every day and I think and reflect, you know, what did we do? Was it right? I don't feel bad about it, but you got a thing. That's another human being. So that's a long way of saying, after I left, at night, cell phone goes off. I'm not doing it anymore. So I woke up and hit the cell phone and there's like 470 million messages in there, mostly from journalists. And I started to reflect to me on what I thought. And I confess it was really discouraging. My reflection was, this is a good thing, but it's not a day of joy. This is a human being. He did have children. I don't regret his demise, but we can't reduce this war to eliminating some spot on a map. You never, you should never rejoice in death, ever. And if you do, you should get out of the business. And the second is, the second thought was Al Qaeda is not a group. It is a revolutionary movement. And I fear, remember this a couple of years ago and intervening a couple of years or whatever, a year and a half, two years ago. We've made still a lot of progress. I was still thinking if people think that this is the demise of the movement when actually it's more the demise of the group, they're gonna lose sight of the target. So I go out on the streets of Washington, DC that night and I did CNN that night and walk out of the CNN studios. And there's three drunk college students, one of whom is wrapped in an American flag, saying, we kicked his ass, weren't you just on CNN? And I'm like, this is discouraging. This is not how we deal with war and this is not how the American people talk about the death of another human being. I don't care if he's a terrorist. I suspect that's objectionable to Americans, but that's what I think. You do not celebrate death. When you were at the agency, Ben Laden, you've told me in the past that Ben Laden wasn't really much of a subject of everyday discussion. Why was that? This actually occurred to me fairly early on and that was, I thought our job was to mitigate threat. That is to stop more people from coming into this country and killing Americans or killing our allies. It's sort of a finger in the dike that is operational finger in the dike, stop them while you hope that the ideology dies. So you're going against the group while the revolution itself dies of its own accord, which it did. By the way, I think counter-messaging from the United States is a waste of time. I thought the rest of the world did that just fine enough for us. We didn't have a voice there, so I didn't see us as the end. I saw the end as the revolution. I saw us as sort of, as that's happening, keep your finger in the dike. Now the people who are most responsible for that were people like College Shake Mohammed, Abu Frazier, Olivier, Hamza Rabia. Those are the people who were the architects, not only of 9-1-1, but of the plots that followed. And you could tell by the reporting we were getting who the operational players were. I mean, the guys in Al Qaeda would talk about them. And so it was who the guys who were putting together the plots, who was involved in getting the recruiting and training to execute those plots. And I never saw that as bin Laden's Wahri. They were kind of the ideological leadership. Not that they, as you saw from the raid, didn't have a knowledge of or some hand in operations, but they were kind of the revolutionaries, if you will, of the Al Qaeda global revolution. Meanwhile, the guys executing the stuff was one or two steps below. So when people used to ask us about bin Laden all the time, it's not that we didn't have operations to try to go after him. I would say that's interesting, but if my goal isn't killing bin Laden, my goal is the mitigation of threat while the revolution dies, and that threat is embodied in people like Hamza Rabia and Abu Faraj Al-Libi. Because they are the operational commanders. Correct. They are closer to sending somebody to New York City. How would you, if you were in Aiman Al-Zubah... Is this clear enough? I can get more excited. If... How would you assess Aiman Al-Zubah's job right now and prospects for success? He's chump change. I mean, if you think of... I mean, I think the group is dead in Pakistan. Remember, I want to be very clear about differentiating from between the group and the movement because the movement lives in Mali, it lives... That's the success of Al Qaeda. We got there too late. The revolution had already metastasized. And so, when people ask me, how are you doing against Al Qaeda, I'll say, you know, we're still have a challenge, not a huge one, but a challenge with the revolution. Moving forward, our bigger challenge is going to be when do we intervene and not so that we don't get in too early and we don't get in too late. And meanwhile, Zawahri, you know, 12 years ago, we were spending all this firepower trying to keep him off Al-Jazeir. He couldn't pay to get on Al-Jazeir now. He doesn't run a group that has operational significance if he moves too much, his head is gonna be on a platter one of these days. And even while it's not, he's not running a group that's particularly relevant. This is not to say America doesn't face a terror threat. It's just to say that as he built this revolutionary movement, his group itself started to die. And I think he's marginally relevant today. He's not well respected within Al-Qaeda. He doesn't have a voice internationally. I mean, I still think he needs to come off the battlefield, but he's not somebody I worry about. You mentioned Faraj Al-Libi and Hala Sheikh Mohammed who were both arrested in Pakistan. Yeah. How would you assess your relations with the Pakistani intelligence services and when I say your CIA in general at that time period? I would say pretty good. I think people in this country mirror image too much. I mean, they sit here and say, why don't the Pakistanis do what we want them to do? I'm like, really? Why don't we do what the Pakistanis want us to do? I mean, really? You look at what happened and we don't think about this. When we went in to talk to President Musharraf, we asked him to take the biggest U-turn any foreign policy official has taken around the world in some ways in recent decades. That is, Pakistani strategic policy is predicated on we face the Indians and we have to keep our back door safe. They were a hair's breadth away from having their back door safe because they're proxies. Let me be blunt. The Taliban was a hair's breadth away from taking over Afghanistan. And we went in and said, not only do we want you to make a U-turn in terms of where you are with the Taliban, we want you to sign off on a back door that is Afghanistan that's no longer, we want you to sign off on changing the way you implement strategy vis-a-vis your historic adversary. That's it. That is huge. And Musharraf said partly because I think he's saying the options here not so good. I'm playing poker, I got double deuces. He said, okay. So that said, my view was always a couple, was very simple. I'm an idealist in a realist body or something like that. My view was, look, we can't do it ourselves. So I don't care how good our partner is, we're not gonna go it alone. If you go it alone, the partner spends more time chasing you than they do chase the adversary. Second, the partner has lost a lot of people in this campaign. Their civil war has gone on more than twice as long as ours. That is the civil war in the tribal areas of Pakistan now extending out of the tribal areas. And their leadership has no popular support to sustain this war. That is popular support in terms of the population or in terms of the parliament. All of whom think this is America's war. So my lens was, yeah, they're not perfect. Yeah, they leak. Yeah, we lose targets. But man, they have lost a lot of people. And what's our option? So you'd get Americans, and I think Americans, not only in mirror image, their lifespan of an idea is about three days. Say, the Pakistanis just pissed us off. And my answer would be, okay, next, next question. Well, we have to go screw them to a wall, really. And where are we going? You know, one of the beauties of doing this 25 years is you try to, and believe it or not, in a bureaucratic environment, I'm cool. Not in this environment, because I want to make sure nobody falls asleep here. But you got to sit there, and if I was right earlier, that as you move up the system, it's not how many hours a day you bring to a problem. It's whether you've thought through a problem. You got to sit here and say, well, if we go nail them to a wall, where are we going to be in a year? What's your end game? Do you have a way out if they say no? Well, then deal with it. Get over it. Damn it. Final question, Phil. When you went into Afghanistan with Ambassador Dobbins, before we open it to other questions, you know, what was that like? When did you arrive, and what was the purpose of the trip, and how did it kind of come out? Boy, that was fascinating. Let me spend a minute on this, because among the things I've done in life, and I reflect back as like I'm 90 now, I'm only 51, but I was talking to somebody in a bar the other day, which is where I spent roughly half my time, now that I'm in private government, as an investment banker, Southern Sun Asset Management. If anybody here has disposable assets of greater than $5 million, I want to talk to you afterwards. And by the way, you're buying. But I've only reflected after, things were moving so fast then about some of the experiences. That had to be among all the things I saw, talking to Benazir Bhutto, which I did once, talking to presidents in the Oval Office, talking to Tony Blair. All I remember is calling over to CIA after 9-1-1 saying I want in this game. And at that point, interestingly, as someone to book-ended, who had been in the war against the Soviets 10 years earlier, and watching how much the Soviets got blood, my reaction was, man, this is gonna be tough against the Taliban, but then things started rolling very quickly. And I think I called John McLaughlin actually and said I had heard about the Dobbins team saying I want in. And lo and behold, he calls back and says game on, you're it. I'm like, okay, let's go. I'm not the world's biggest planner, as you might have noticed. Like, what does that mean? So Dobbins put together the team and basically the issue was, Kandahar hadn't fallen yet, but a lot else was falling. And the issue was, we don't have the political back end of this. So let's go talk to everybody, including that we want to talk to the king in Rome, which was another story. The king of Afghanistan, Zaheer Shah. I'm like, this dude, really? Anyway, that's another story. But we want to talk to all the players, the Uzbeks, the Pakistanis, heading toward what turned out to be the bond process. But we first went into Afghanistan in November of, before Thanksgiving, I guess it was, November of 2001. And remember, as a GS9, which is an entry-level analyst, English major going in, Dobbins is looking at me saying, Hank Crumpton, Ambassador Crumpton has written a book saying, you got to get me a plane into Kabul. I'm like, you talking to me? And I realized Dobbins is a tough bird. I realized like, I better deliver. So I just said, I got it. So I called Hank, who was running Afghan operations, said, dude, I need to get the Ambo in, the ambassador. So I was sort of jack-of-all-trades for Dobbins. We flew in to Bagram Airfield because Kabul was either going to fall or had just fallen. We fly in and there's aircraft parts all over the place. There is no tower and there's basically no windows or lights in the facilities. And the idea after we had talked to people on the perimeter, including the Pakistanis, was we got it. How can you go talk about the future of the Afghans without talking to the Afghans? So the first visit was primarily symbolic to say, we're even in a fairly dangerous situation, we're going to talk to you. So we're sitting in a room in Bagram Airfield, which is probably, I don't know, what, 30 miles or whatever, 20 miles north of Kabul. And we walk through the airfield and there's a bunch of Afghan military guys and like high-top basketball shoes saluting us. They're all like five, three. I'm thinking, man, this is really surreal. And we go into a room and in walks, Bahrondine Rubani, then the putative president of Afghanistan, it's starched white robes and sits down with his crew. And I remember one enduring memory and that is 10 years ago I was watching as we bled the Soviets dry because we were shipping in weapons so fast you couldn't keep track of them. And now we might be getting into a situation where we parallel the Soviet experience. I remember saying, where am I going to be in 10 years? Are we still going to be fighting this war? Because that's what happened to the Soviets. And instead, I ended up at the New America Foundation. So the sense of the unknown and the stress was pervasive in the sense that we were going down a road that had no end was pervasive, but I think it turned out okay. Yeah, I mean, the comparisons with the Soviet experience are pretty, I mean, in my view, facile. I mean, leaving aside the obvious thing about the Soviet tactics and the Afghan war, but the Soviet Union also went out of business in 1990. That's the reason the Najibullah government fell. Yeah, but I don't think, remember, we're 60 days after 911. I don't think you can, there are two characteristics that are intertwined that historians better consider. One is the unknown then, right now the unknown in the world of terrorism is about this wide. The unknown then was, it was universal. And the second was when we went down to see George Tenor, the so-called small group meetings every night, five o'clock, the sense of threat, is it gonna happen tomorrow? Is it gonna happen the next day? Is it gonna be Chicago? Is it gonna be New York? Is it gonna be WMD? How many people will die? And driving down the George Washington Parkway when the New York Times started running the faces that have fallen, when you sit in that room every night, that sense of threat is pervasive. And as an intelligence community transitions and a CIA transitions from helping a policy maker understand a problem like Soviet missiles to solving the problem like al-Qaeda, you say my responsibility among tens of thousands of people is to make sure there's no more kids who wake up without a parent. It's unforgettable. Thank you. Well, we'll open it up to questions. If you could wait for the microphone. Can you ask something fun? I mean, this is enough for me. Wait for the microphone. Let's start on the back. Barely this person here with the hand up and behind you. Yep. We can do trout fishing. We can do investment banking. John Mueller from Ohio State and Cato. Would you talk about the last thing you just mentioned? It was perfectly plausible in 9-11 that what this was was a fluke that a bunch of bad guys got really lucky once. Now there's no way to refute that, but there's also no way to deal with it or to confirm it. But if everybody in intelligence was assuming, I disagree with you, but go ahead. Okay, everybody in intelligence was assuming that there'd be many, many more of these attacks immediately suggests bad intelligence in the sense that an obvious hypothesis, which proved to be essentially true, I think, was simply not even kept on the table. What's the obvious hypothesis? That there wouldn't be another 9-11. I couldn't disagree with you more. Look, what happened is complicated for the American people to understand. I fully believe that without the American Security Response, I mean, the American Security Apparatus is an aircraft carrier. I think the analogy holds. It is really hard to turn, but when it puts its guns on, you forget about it. When you watch this from the inside, and I watched 10 years of threat briefings with the CIA director, the director of the FBI, the attorney general of the United States, the American Apparatus, for you as taxpayers, is pretty impressive. I'm not saying it's efficient, but it's pretty impressive. There are three characteristics to the response, and that was go after them where they are. That's Afghanistan, Pakistan, that's military, foreign partners who were terrific from the Pakistanis, the Saudis, and others, to intelligence operations, obviously, like CIA. Second is if you don't go after them where they are, stop them before they get here. That's the incredibly inefficient operations to seal the border. Hardened cockpits, biometric passports, expanded visa application requirements. Third, if you don't stop them where they are, if you can't stop them at the border and get them while they're here. That is the FBI dedicating half its resources and expanding its resources so that every time somebody called in Peoria and said, I think my neighbor's a terrorist, you go after them. Here's why I say that. I believe if we hadn't done that, this group, which was by 9-1-1 entrenched, large, with an apparatus that included recruitment, financing, and a revolutionary ripple effect that was already reaching into places like Indonesia, I have no doubt that many thousands more would have died. I'm not suggesting that any president would have done anything otherwise than what we did. I mean, that was sort of what do you do? We're gonna go get them. All I'm saying is I thought it was a pretty large and entrenched group. I thought the revolution was succeeding and I thought as late as about 03-04. I remember sitting at the threat table in 03, that nightly threat table thinking after Kenya, Saudi Arabia, after Humbali, Indonesia, I thought we were losing. Not because Al Qaeda was winning but because Al Qaedaism was winning. So I don't think our hypothesis was wrong at all. I think the response was so powerful that we decimated the adversary in some ways faster than I thought we would. And meanwhile, the other great advantage, probably the bigger advantage in the operational success we had was Al Qaeda was so stupid, ideologically, that they killed too many innocents and destroyed the revolution. Exactly what Zarkawi did when he told Zohari, thanks for your advice, I'm going after the locals. And the locals turned around and said, go kill the Americans, but not so much when you kill Iraqis and they turned on the foreign fighters, I think. Anyway. Boy, I got a chill out here. Anybody got like a vodka tonic or something? Is that inappropriate? Ian Wilkie, Archer Analytics. Thanks very much for your service. What is that, Archer Analytics? Archer Analytics. Okay. It's limited. Small consultancy. Anyway, getting back to the people and you've been mentioning the importance of people and I think everyone in this room would agree that there was some element of Pakistani support that allowed Osama bin Laden to live near the Pakistani military academy. Let me start with myself. You say, since I spent quite a lot of time looking into this question, there's no evidence for that at all. It's hard to prove negatives. We've recovered thousands of, let me finish because you've raised the issue. We've recovered thousands of documents from bin Laden's compound. None of those documents, which have been translated, show any form of Pakistani complicity for bin Laden living in that compound. And that makes sense. Bin Laden was a very paranoid, secretive and disciplined guy. Why would he let anybody know who didn't need to know? There were people living on the compound who didn't know that bin Laden was living there, adults. So I think the premise of your question, sorry to interrupt, is off. Begging your pardon. Let's just stay with Peter's point. I mean, the locals knew it as Waziristan House. They knew that there were illicit activities and people in that house probably didn't know that bin Laden himself was there but knew that elements of the Taliban were there. But returning quickly to the people that we think are in Pakistan right now, with Zahra Heery, of course, is number one U.S. interested party over there. Would you add as number two and three, perhaps, Adam Gadan and Adnan al-Shukr-Juma or Saif al-Adal, are we less concerned that those two represent, the latter two represent a harm to the United States? Saif al-Adal, I would take seriously. Thank you. In my order would be Zahra Heery, Saif al-Adal, who I would put pretty far up at the top. Shukr-Juma, I think Gadan's a joke and I think there would be a pretty good conversation about what you do if you could geolocate him. I'd say let him go. He's probably a greater benefit to us in the field. He's chump change. And I think Shukr-Juma would be above him in terms of interest. So, yeah, Adal is Saif al-Adal is heavy duty. I mean, he merits U.S. attention. Do we think he's in Iran or in Pakistan? I don't think he's in Pakistan. But I'm just saying, if you're asking me to rank, and by the way, I agree with Peter, whether some people talk about it. I mean, you go to Pakistan. Pakistan is a huge third world country. No, what I said is, dude, what I said is, compared to what we faced 12 years ago, this organization, A, operationally, bears no resemblance to what we faced. B, ideologically, bears no resemblance to what we faced. C, in turn, if you look at the criteria I established for threat, that is, people who are serious and think about us and who have the capability to have trainees overseas. Algeria, Mali, it used to be Somalia, although that's declined Yemen a little bit. Zawahiri doesn't have those capabilities to the extent that other players do. If I have to apportion threat, I'm not saying there's not a threat to America. I'm just saying the revolution is metastasized to other threats if you look at the threat through the lens of leadership and safe haven. These gentlemen here. Yes, sir, my name is Kami Bhatt. I'm the Pakistani Spectator. I'll take my paycheck later, by the way. I really appreciate that you are one of the very rare scholars in Washington who have come. Scholar? Oh, my God. I mean, you wrote a book. I can't write a paper, so you are a scholar. Have you read the book? It's basically illiterate, but go ahead. I rarely see any person in Washington who would show little empathy for poor Pakistanis who have lost almost 50,000 civilian and 7,000 security people. But people consider that as just statistics. No one care about those poor people. And I really appreciate that. My question is that you know that it's very difficult to take care of this problem of Afghanistan and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, because terrorism can't originate from there, that part of the world. And the real problem is I think the bad relationship between India and Pakistan. US has so much collout with India because of this atomic deal between US and India and trade relationship. US is still the largest, one of the largest trade partner of India and Pakistan. So why doesn't American administration use its influence on India to make some kind of peace with Pakistan? So, see, I can give you the example of Grover Norquist. If you ask him, he said, we are being foolish. We spent $4 trillion, and we lost more security people after September 11 than we lost 3,000 on September 11. So according to his logic, it's not very smart choice that we are wasting money on these wars. So I think the best option is we should get to the origin of this problem that is between India and Pakistan and try to make some kind of peace. So Pakistan could reduce its budget, and then India could live peacefully with Pakistan that is considered a troublemaker country. So again, my question is, is there any way we could use our influence to have a peace between India and Pakistan? Thanks. Are you taking that one or is that? I mean, it sounds desirable, right? But I think it's hard to do in practice. Yeah, okay, let me cut to the chase here. When I was looking at South Asia as long as 25 years ago, there's a constant conversation about military balance, and you would look at India and Pakistan because of the history of animosity and the Siachen Glacier and the Atlantic control, et cetera, and look at the military balance between the two. Now in the intervening 25 years, India, partly because of the economic revolution in India, and slowly getting rid of sort of the license raj in India, has become a major global player. Best example, that is the bricks. They're one of the bricks. So you have India going this way. Pakistan is looked at as a place where there's frankly endemic corruption. You look now at questions in Britain where politicians are saying, why are we giving so much aid to a country that doesn't require its richest people to pay taxes? You look at a country where economic and educational performance is abysmal, and what has happened in my personal experiences, no one ever talks about balance anymore. And so as I look at South Asia, I look at India as a strategic partner, not because of their military capability or their rivalry with Pakistan or their nuclear capability, but because they are an economic powerhouse that I suspect will only grow with a workforce that's extremely well-educated. And I look at Pakistan and say, Pakistan has gone, if anything, in the reverse direction, how can we, instead of looking at them as an economic partner because of necessity, how can we help to create policy that will prevent them from slipping further? So you're putting India and Pakistan in a basket, and I'm saying if anything, over the course of decades, to me, they were in a basket 25 years ago, they are no longer in a basket today. In the front here, Akbar. You can see why I'll never have a job in the US government again. It's not gonna work. I don't wanna stand up, but... Oh, come on, man. I'll stand up. I'll give you a bow. My name's Oqad Malik. I'm a assistant professor at National Defense University, Islamabad. Recently arrived... We should do this in Islamabad, although I think I might get... You could do it when you come over there. I would love to go. Yeah. And I'm a size fellow right now, this year. That's Johns Hopkins, for those who don't know. But I didn't know before anyway. Yeah. Interesting that this chap brought this question up. Pakistan has had a strategic redirection as far as military is concerned, especially, over the last couple of years. It's been thinking about a lot of things that are happening in the country, and he's rightly said how much the country suffered, and he's continued to suffer. But it's also recognizing that the internal threat is much greater now, and that's our immediate need of the country that we're faced with endemic corruption, crisis for the energy, a new innumerable number of other things, but also militancy extremism are rampant. And that is partially the result of, as a population sees it, invasion of Afghanistan by a foreign power again. It seems to be happening very often, lately in the last few hundred years. And may well happen again. Who knows? Could be the Russians. I don't know about the Russians, but the Chinese may take it up. How about it? But I find also that I want to take you across, not to India, Pakistan, because that is a very complicated issue, and that can't be discussed in this form that easily. Although I do appreciate you highlighting Pakistan's efforts in this respect and how transient people's perceptions are in one way or another. But I want to look into the future, which is very much in discussion now. We name 2014 as a crossing point, a threshold or a milestone that we have to reach as if it's something that will completely change everything because somebody says it will. We know that that's not going to be the case. We know that it's highly likely that there is going to be a draw round. Maybe the US will stay there in part. But the fact that there's a lot of worry in the area, especially in Pakistan. And we face with internal insurgencies that are growing. There's a population increase that may go up to 250 million within the next 15 years. We can't afford those resources right now, never mind then. And I was talking to Stephen Cohen last week, and he said, I keep on telling everybody Pakistan is what you need to look at. That's more important to recognize how this country affects the rest of the world, and we need to help. But nobody takes notice of that. Where's the question? The question is. Maybe it's a statement as well. I am a professor and I have no lectures lately. Your students are very nostalgic for you though. But I'm thinking where do we go from here? Because when you talk about counterterrorism and people business, I agree with that. But we have to look at the strategic issues as well. Yeah, no, I think there's a couple of things to think about. The first is I find this interesting. For years now, we've looked at the tribal areas, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan as a place A, where key al-Qaida players are, and B, where al-Qaida moves into, I think al-Qaida is a small influence in Afghanistan. But let's say Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida move into Afghanistan and cause problems for ISAF forces. I wonder if 2014, giving the level of problems still in the tribal areas in Peshawar, et cetera, things are going to reverse. That if we don't have Afghan security forces that can project power into the provinces, that Pakistan is going to face more of a problem coming in from Afghanistan. Again, whereas in the past, we had the problem going from Pakistan, that the geography will reverse. And so from that sense, it's a fairly tactical perspective. I think America should be engaged because we're going to have to think about whether we want the capability to take some of those folks out over the long term. Longer term though, you're looking at a country that's nuclear-capable with educational standards that are abysmal and a history of exporting extremism with groups like Lashgiri Taiba around the world. If we have these characteristics that is not al-Qaeda, but Pakistani groups that are infected by al-Qaeda, I'm thinking particularly of people like Lashgiri Taiba. And we see their leaders talking about foreign targets and the Pakistanis don't have the capability to pursue them. I'm going to go back to my basic judgments as a manager and say those two characteristics are a recipe for a problem. How do we deal with that? Is that a response that says, let's work with the Pakistani security services and try to take some leaders off the battlefield? Or is it a more strategic response? How do we improve education in Pakistan? How do we improve things like healthcare? My guess in this country is people, this is a very insulated country, is people are going to say, quite simply, we don't want to pay for that. They will not pay for a strategic solution of the kind you're talking about. Especially in the age, not only in a country that gives a relatively small percentage of its money to foreign aid, but an age where we're cutting back budgets, I don't think people in this town either will or will have the capability to think about problems in a strategic way. To think about if we don't invest where we're going to be in 20 years. Gentleman here and then the gentleman behind him. Hi, my name is Dave Price and I'm a retired English teacher, so I want to apologize for taking- Probably your high school. No, I wasn't sure. So I want to know how would Charles Dickens write this up? Long. Yes, that's correct. Now the serious question would be this. I wonder if you could comment a little bit on talking- there was those moments you say, post-911, pre-911. Of course it was one of those changing moments. What impact has technology had on all of this? In particular, a couple of things that you addressed. Does it make the decision to go after someone easier or harder because it's, you know, there's lives involved in both ways and then that. And what about, or what have you found when you were working? What have you found about fear engendered by that on the other side? Do they say, oh my God, they've got drones or is it just something, the cost of doing business? No, that one's easy. They are petrified. Hands down. I see the public debate about cost benefit is worth having, but if you think they're petrified and not only are they petrified because they don't really know how this works, thankfully, but they're petrified because it's decimated their organization. So personally they're threatened, and ideologically it's just, they can't operate. Your question about expanding options is interesting. I think what's going to happen is first of all the advent of what we call big data that is this volume of digital exhaust that you all leave every day. You're on email, you're on the phone, you're on the internet, Facebook gives us an ability to draw a picture around you that's very tactical. So if I want to go against the human trafficking organization, I may be able to look at your digital exhaust in contrast to 10, 15 years ago. And I can understand you much more quickly and therefore I can do things I could not have done 15 years ago. Primary among those things is telling a policymaker your question about are things going to get more complicated. We now have the capability to find that human trafficker in Indonesia. What do you want to do about it? As a practitioner I would say this is a good thing. My job is simple. It's how to help a customer understand a problem well enough to do something about it. Now that might be macro. What is the Soviet missile threat, whatever they are now, the Russian missile threat look like. And increasingly it might be tactical. Who are the players in this human trafficking network? I think big data helps that enormously but my view would be I've given the policymaker another option. In my world that's a good thing. I've given you more flexibility and in his world he might say this is more complicated but I think that's okay. You have an option between doing nothing and putting big green military on the ground. Our option could be taking somebody out or giving the Indonesians or Mexicans a way to take somebody out. That's your choice. I just want to be sure I give you enough of an array so that you feel you have flexible policy options and I think that's a tremendous change in the past 10, 15 years. By the way would big data be neutral, helpful or unhelpful in trying to predict something like a large political shift like the Salafis winning 25% of the vote in the parliamentary elections in Egypt? I think we're in chapter one of that because the answer is yes. For example, you can look at Twitter and realize there's been a catastrophic event in Peoria before the EMTs get a phone call. Just by doing two things. I won't get into it but it's fascinating. You could look at I think over time at an array of data everything from people moving money out to how people talk about Twitter. That is the extent of talk versus vis-a-vis background noise. So you have a background understanding of how they talk and now something's changing. The volume is increasing and the kinds of words they're using increasingly refer to something related to violence. You could but I think we're at sort of in terms of human health it would be sort of 19th century. We've realized that actually blood circulates which I guess is 18th century. We've realized that we've realized some fundamentals about how to use these tools to understand human behavior but the conversations I'm in are fascinating. I still sit on advisory boards for this stuff are fascinating but it's sort of like Brave New World. And of course there's the civil liberties issues that I think Americans don't understand very well. This gentleman here. This is kind of fun. Thank you by the way. I think I haven't seen any sleepers yet but they're pretty good so thanks. If there are sleepers just put your head by on somebody else. I don't want to know. Hi my name is Oliver Grimmai I'm the U.S. correspondent for Austrian newspaper called Deep Passen. Nothing's quotable here. Of course not. I'm just kidding. But just sort of curiosity, in light of the two lenses you apply to figure out if a threat is worth looking into more closely is particularly somebody like Mika Zenko with our rights to criticize the CIA to have gone after many people who are actually not terrorists who would want to attack the U.S. with drones but who are possibly just insurgents who are trying to fight the Yemeni governments or some local Pakistani governors they disagree with. And by doing so, by taking out people who would well not be nice people in the view that we share in this room but who are not really international terrorists would have sort of supported the brand of this al-Qaeda movement that you've alluded to that is apparently still so vibrant contrary to the group. I don't buy the argument for some pretty basic reasons. The first is anybody who says these operations don't work I have two questions. First show me where the movement is today and I think a lot of that is a result of eliminating leadership. Second is I always get these questions which are kind of fun at a bar but not so fun when you're in the room operationally these questions about don't you think you're making more enemies long term. Well let me tell you something. When someone is in the sites and they're identified as posing a threat that you can quantify if you will a threat to Berlin or London or New York your option isn't do I alienate people or do I not act your option is I can either stop the threat or not. And if you choose not to I want to know what you're going to go tell the families if that plot succeeds. It's not do I alienate people 10 years down the road and furthermore again I'd say those who say you've made more enemies than it's worth I would say well what's the state of the threat today. So I don't know I sort of went on a and so I got half your question what's the other half. I think you answered it. I did. Yeah. Okay. Okay let me. Okay. Okay. Here's what I would say. Here's right. Clearly you know it's interesting to me that if someone gets killed by a mortar that somehow people decide that because the kinetic action comes from the air that it's somehow war becomes clean. And but we don't talk about artillery or mortars in this way. I think people think more of the drones because they're sexy without thinking about them as a tool of war and war is going to lead to the death of innocents. We want to separate war from tragedy. This is not possible. But secondly let me give you an analytic answer. People when you look at the fundamental mission that I described earlier as trying to ensure that we mitigate threat while the ideology kills itself the way to understand a terrorist organization is not to think of a terrorist organization as a hierarchy or a pyramid. That's how Western organizations work. You have the head, the deputy head. This is more a fabric where you have threads. Those threads are not always cooperating with each other even when Al Qaeda was fairly prominent in 2002 or 2003. Their leadership didn't always know what each other was doing but they had a network that was intertwined of money, recruiting, training. And so as you're mitigating threat by taking out operational leaders about 98% of what we did would never appear in American newspaper because it's third-tier threads and the operations we were undertaking were going so fast that the fabric was ripping. And those third-tier threads might have been in a Pakistani village or an Afghan village. They were not operational names like Abu Frajo, Libya, or Hamza Rabiya but given the way I and we understood Al Qaeda as a network with some key players but as this sort of network we were taking out fabric that might look from the outside to be sort of sub-tier players but I thought the operational pace we had against those sub-tier players ripped the fabric. Finance, recruiting, training in ways that are hard to quantify but seem clear to me on the inside. We went from 03 when I'm sitting at the table with George Tenet saying I think we're losing to about, I don't know, 06, 07 when you're saying, man, we are gaining traction fast. These guys, by the time Bin Laden goes out Al Qaeda is already a spent force. Al Qaeda, not Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda. That is the Pakistan guys. Good gentleman here. Man, my work day is done after this. By the way, you made one mistake. I did not retire, I resigned, I quit. So I got no pension for those who want to hire and it's $12,000 an hour and I'm happy to go wherever you want. Not really. Looking forward, at the moment the United States enjoys a monopoly on certain capacities and... Can you identify yourself, sir? Ah, Warren Cotes, International Monetary Fund working in Afghanistan. Drones. We're the only ones who have them. That's not going to be the case forever. No, we're not. But anyway, go ahead. My question is 10, 20 years from now when these capabilities can be used against us how should the CIA and our intelligence capacities build to operate in that world? You never lose sight as an intelligence professional that the intelligence service acts at the behest of those elected by the American people. So if those elected by the American people say we want to shoot the leadership of Mexican cartels my question is, is this legal? Is it ethical? And have we notified the Congress of the United States? So I guess my question would be I should advise, if I were in the business still those who are elected by the American people of what options they have, what capabilities we can develop if we have the capability to build missiles on tiny drones, and I'll give you an example or two in a moment, that can take out a cartel leader my question would simply be the policy side has to tell me what they want. A couple things to nail this one a bit though I think in contrast to the operational capability of drones that the policy debate is behind because of what you say, as people get these what is the international understanding of when it's appropriate to intervene in someone else's country? Clearly there's no international, I suspect there's a legal issue here that people have thought about but clearly on the broader policy level we don't have an international debate about what happens when the Filipinos want to go into Indonesia and go against people who are sending militants back into the archipelago. What happens there? How do we police that? More interestingly, I think the capability domestically is going to be fascinating For example, what if you had a series of drones over Washington D.C. and there are universal violence against women code a 911, and that automatically triggered a mini drone to go to that place, that's not that far off do you want that? I saw that guy who had a, remember about two months ago there's a guy who abducted a kid into a subterranean vault what if you could put a three inch drone with twin nine millimeters on it down his air tube that's not that far, that's essentially a drone that uses nine millimeters instead of a five kilo or a ten kilo warhead I would have done it as soon as he touched that kid he's going to take two in the head I would have done it in heartbeat I'm not blood thirsty but you can't sacrifice that kid if you've got capability to take out somebody we can't get to otherwise I think the ability to use these things for policing, public safety I don't think we have any idea what we're getting into yet if you're a woman walking across a campus do you want to be able to say 9-1-1 and something comes overhead immediately my answer would probably be yes but I'd want to think about it a lot before I said that do you have a question? there's no bad question somebody's got to have a loser usually in a crowd like this somebody says you know do you have a question? sorry there's a lady right there in the back I think this is kind of interesting I hope it's okay with you guys I'm finding this intriguing I thought especially with you in the chair this would be kind of boring but Carrie Buckner with Mission Concepts I'm a little pumped right now hey Carrie hey sir how are you doing so I love coming to these things especially with you as the speaker because I have much respect for you you call a spade a spade in doing so my question is such that do you think America has lost its will to confront the threats now that America faces since 9-11 so do you think in your estimation we would do what we did then now for instance rendition, gitmo no way no and I think most of us who are practitioners would say there ain't no learn in the second kick of the mule I don't regret what we did I'm not proud of it because I don't know if you can be proud of participating in a war but that doesn't mean I regret it or I think we did anything wrong I would just say we tried our best and people look back I think appropriately one of the proudest things I can think of is people have had a chance to debate this because we succeeded if there had been 17 attacks nobody would have asked any questions so I feel I'm an eternal glass half full kind of guy I'm sitting here saying what we did gave people the space to say we don't like what you did stop it in my view is the American people have the capability to elect those who tell us what to do so I'm happy with what we did but I think the American people have spoken they said we don't like this so much and my answer is okay I'm not angry I'm like okay I got the message we won't do it again so if we had an attack on the Sears Tower tomorrow with WMD and somebody said when are you roping black sites I probably would say no because in five years I know it's not out of anger or even to protect the agency I would simply be saying I know I'm supposed to represent in some way the American people and I think I know eventually where the American people are going to go and they're going to say we don't like this we like it this month but we don't like it in five years and that's okay I don't I think the further you move up the tougher the problems get but the simpler the responses have to get I take these two questions together she's Louise is this over yet we have five minutes left I take a nap sir my name is Mohammed I'm a Hubert Humphrey fellow from Pakistan my question is today's New York Times has published a story of a Gantanama Bay prisoner who is on a hunger strike for the last 60 days what do you think what are your comments on the prison policy of USA regarding these prisoners and what do you suggest in the future okay and then this gentleman here wait we just get together get more on what we do alright okay yes please Doug DeGrodi our magazine question on Sahel in Algeria you did mention it what do you think from the standpoint of your experience looking now at this situation where the French made the intervention a quick intervention they have bases in four neighboring countries and so on how does that affect the situation okay okay here's the deal I don't I wasn't participating in a conversation about what we did with Gitmo I mean I don't look back because I know how hard these decisions are and say Gitmo was a mistake I do say at some point this country has simple, simple values if you did something wrong the rule of law wins and if you didn't there's tremendous risk but you're out we let child molesters out murderers out because A they either serve their time or B we can't prove the case these people pose a greater threat to American society than the terrorists does the biggest shock and the most disturbing thing I saw at the FBI was not terrorism it was child pornography infant pornography the extent of it in this country is epidemic people abuse children they abuse infants if we can't prove the case there we let them out and when they do their time so I would sit back at some point and say you know American values we didn't say we will live in the land of the secure we said we will live in the land of the free done deal so put them in a court and if you can't let them go done and again I will never have another job this time so let's get to Sahel I looked as an analyst I thought about it and I ran it through my lens when this first started happening understanding that this is a more immediate problem for the French because of their historic colonial interest than for us the political issue with the French leader who wants to pretend like he's the biggest badass on the planet there's no French meeting here I thought the timing looked about right to me you have an emerging problem if these guys take root it's like a plan it's much harder to get them out so maybe a little early but not too early the thing that I thought was most interesting is terrorist threats are not geographic they're leadership based that is conventional capability can remove them from the city terrorists aren't very good at holding geography I was looking at this saying in terms of looking at things like Africa command and the US support I hope our engagement is at the people level that is the French are looking at how do we clean up the Sahel how do we put troops on the ground amidst all that there are players in the militant movement that are thinking more broadly those are the guys that we have to worry about because they have the ability to take a ground level militant and say you know I know you're worried about taking Tim Buck to let me tell you how to think about the world those are the guys that can exponentially increase threat so I was sitting here saying I hope what we're doing behind the French is not just supporting their ground movements it's looking at the leadership and the potential that any of those leaders as we saw with al-Shabaab and Somalia that any of those leaders start to think strategically about the United States or Western Europe and saying if we're going to move those are the guys we're going to focus on and they're not going to metastasize this threat outside Sahel so overall I thought this is okay and I'm glad I'm not in the business anymore thank you Phil and Phil will sign his book for those who are interested after this thank you