 I'm Mike Wasilenko, I'm the Interim Dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, and on behalf of Will Freeman, who is the President of Public Agenda and myself, thank you for joining us this morning to hear from Ambassador Donald Gregg. As always, our sincere thanks go to the Ford Foundation for providing us with a home for our policy breakfast, and to Bernard and Louise Palitz for their financial support. Now to introduce Robert Siegel, who has been our partner in this enterprise from its inception. Robert is a senior host of national public radios, All Things Considered, and an award-winning journalist with NPR for more than three decades. He started his professional radio career right here in New York City in 1971 with WRVR Radio, following graduation from Columbia University and Stuyvesant High School. Robert has reported from all over the world on every issue imaginable, and no one does it better than he does. Now let me turn to you, Robert, to introduce and interview our distinguished guest, Ambassador Donald Gregg. Thank you, Mike. It's good to see all of you once again. Within the next few weeks, President Obama will be making a decision about how many troops to draw down from the current presence in Afghanistan, how long that drawdown should take, how many troops we should leave for the next several months or the next year. The question that he will be addressing will be answered by many others before he gets to answer it, by generals, by intelligence officials, by politicians, by columnists, and a whole lot of other people. That nexus of decision-making between generals and civilian policymakers is one that our guest this morning, Donald Gregg, is especially interested in, that he's been thinking about and writing about for some time, and few people are more qualified to talk about that subject. Donald Gregg was U.S. Ambassador to Korea during the administration of President George H. W. Bush. When Mr. Bush was Vice President, he was his National Security Advisor. He went on, of course, to become Chairman of the Board of the Korea Society, and all of this was after a career of more than 30 years at the Central Intelligence Agency. Ambassador Gregg enlisted in the military at a high school and then went to Williams College and was recruited by the CIA right after that. He's our guest this morning, and we're delighted to have you. Thanks for being here. Thank you. The decision about how many troops are required, what the point of their presence is in Afghanistan, it's going to be a big story soon. You feel you've seen this movie before? I once or twice. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. I'm very happy to see some old friends, Bobby Inman from Texas and Rick Smith from Newsweek and all kinds of friends from the Korea Society, and so thank you all for coming. I want to tell you a wonderful story that I just heard, which has nothing to do with the subject, but I thought I was going to have to think on my feet. I didn't know we'd be sitting down, but anyway, this is about thinking on your feet. I heard it at my 60th reunion at Williams, from which I just returned, and one of my classmates helped start the SEALs. He'd been in UDT work during the Korean War and stayed on and was really deeply involved in establishing the SEALs. And so following that, he was looking for something exciting to do, so he took on the chairmanship of outward bound. And as part of the training for that, he was taken on a trip down the Colorado River in a rubber boat with a very interesting group of people, one of whom was a very tall Japanese American named, I think, Ishiguro, who was a very highly trained engineer at Marietta. And it was very hot, and so they pulled ashore on the shore of the Colorado, and Ishiguro-san felt very hot, so he walked upstream around a corner and took off all his clothes except for a big sombrero and waited into the water. And so he was standing in water about knee-deep when a huge boat full of rubber raft full of tourists came from upstream. And so they looked at him, and he looked at them, and then he said, is the war over yet? And on the boat was the chairman of FedEx. And FedEx, chairman, yelled at him. He said, I don't know who you are or what you're doing, but I'm going to hire you. So I think that's a wonderful story about being able to think on your feet. Not altogether enlightening about Afghanistan or the decision-making process, but President Obama's about to hear from some generals, one in particular about what he should do. What's the track record of our senior officers in giving advice to presidents about what has to be done? Well, I'd like to start answering that question. I'd like to go back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In thinking over the years since I graduated, I think the two presidents that have been most arresting to me in terms of who they were and what they were trying to do were JFK and Obama. JFK, the first Catholic, the youngest, Pete Nixon by 120,000 votes, got off to a terrible start with the Bay of Pigs, which he'd inherited from Eisenhower, then went off and had a premature meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, which did not go at all well. And then came the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it was kept secret for the first seven of the 14 days, but it was known at CIA. And the mood at CIA was very, very doer because we felt that the agency would certainly be targeted by any of the Soviet missiles that might have gotten through. And the forward planning was pretty rudimentary. I was running the Vietnam desk at that point, and I was taken out to a cave in Virginia where there were a bunch of musty old files, and they said, well, if you survive, why come out here and dig these out and start over. And the general instruction to people was if you survive, try to reassemble at the Charlestown racetrack in West Virginia. Literally, that was it. So we were very concerned about what decision JFK was going to make, and he had two streams of advice coming at him, one from the civilian side, which was to negotiate, and the other from Curtis LeMay, Dr. Strangelove, Maxwell Taylor, which was bomb them. And so he had time to reflect on those two options. And there were various ways of communicating with the Soviets, and during the crisis he received two letters from Khrushchev, one talking about the number of deaths that would be involved if a nuclear war took place. We estimated we would lose 80 million people from the missiles we thought would get through. And a second much tougher letter. And so the time came where he really had to make a decision as to what we were going to do to try to stop the ongoing shipment of missiles. And so there was one last rundown, and at this last rundown, a lieutenant general named Sweeney, who was in charge of the strategic air command, said, Mr. President, I cannot guarantee you that I can hit every missile that the Soviet Union has on Cuba. And in fact, I would think that probably some would be able to be launched and gotten through. And that swayed Kennedy's decision. He decided to react to the milder letter from Khrushchev, and that was the key to solving the the issue. Twenty years later, Maxwell Taylor, in an article in The Washington Post, was reflecting on a grim October, and he admitted that they had no recollection. Those who were saying bomb them had really no recollection of the fact that they were standing on the edge of the apocalypse. And he had no excuse to offer for that. But he and LeMay took a consistently hard line on that. I encountered that thinking myself in a war game in the spring of 1964, where we were debating the efficacy of bombing North Vietnam. And LeMay again was very hard over, urging that we undertake bombing. And his scenario was that the North Vietnamese would want to retaliate by trying to bomb Saigon, that they didn't have the air force to do it, so they would turn to China and get from China the same kind of aid that the Soviet Union had given the North Koreans, i.e. Chinese aircraft. And that, he said, would give him the excuse to go into China and bomb their nascent nuclear capacities. So that was his scenario. And fortunately, the American general in the war game, Buzz Wheeler, who was in charge of the Chinese North Vietnamese, he did not retaliate to the bombing. And at the final wrap-up of the war game, LeMay just burst out at Wheeler and said, Buzz, you know, god damn well, if I bomb your capital, you're going to bomb mine. And Wheeler said, Kurt, I know that's what you want me to do, and that is the last thing in the world I would do. And then LeMay said, well, we could bomb those people back into the Stone Age in 12 hours. I'm sure he said it a number of times, but I heard it that once. And there was a long pause, and then McGeorge Bundy said, maybe the problem is they're too close to the Stone Age as it is. So I think that that one piece of advice from General Sweeney, which was we can't accomplish the mission that you want us to, was terribly important and very, very rare. I spent four years in the Vietnam War. I knew Harkins, Westmoreland, and Abrams. It was always, yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. And it was a war we never should have fought. Abrams gave me a lunch just before I left Vietnam in June of 72. And there had been a siege at a place called An Loc, and all of the ground forces had gone, but there still was access to air units and a wonderfully profane general named Hollingsworth was mixing strategic and tactical airstrikes to keep off six North Vietnamese divisions. And so I asked Abrams at this lunch. I said, well, how do you keep going? And he said, well, I've been here six years and I'm still learning. And I said, well, I put it politely. What have you learned lately? And he said, well, I've just finished reading a book by Bernard Foll about the Battle of Dien Bien Phu called Hell in a Very Small Place. And he said that had a sentence in it that I think I understand now. I said, what was that? And he said, well, the French lost because they failed to politically organize the terrain. So my thought was if it took you six years to finally figure that out, no wonder we were in deep trouble. I had a chance to meet General Petraeus a couple of years ago and had a dinner in his honor. And I stood in line to shake hands with him and saw how adroit he is at handling society matrons and ancient veterans with ribbons. Oh, you fought at the Battle of Chigamaga. Oh, yes, the big red one was journalist too, by the way. That's a good journalist. And so I went up to him and I said, General, I was looking for you in Vietnam, but I couldn't find you. And he said, Jesus Christ, I was just in high school. And I said, well, you know what I mean. I was looking for somebody who really understood what we were trying to do. And I thanked him for promoting some of the generals who had been in Vietnam who did know what we were doing. There's one who's written a book called A Derelection of Duty, whom he has promoted. And they were with him when he redid the counterinsurgency manual. So I think that he has a better understanding of what we are up against in Afghanistan. But the question is, what kind of advice is he going to give President Obama? I think the tough decisions are, the preliminary decisions will be made this year. The really tough decisions will be made next year, which will be just 50 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the Council on Foreign Relations has done a study on Afghanistan, what we should do, and their idea is maybe having a smaller footprint. I was at a dinner given for Chuck Hagel last night, and I asked him what sort of advice he thought Patreus would give Obama. And he said he thinks he will call for the smallest possible incremental downturn this year, maybe 5,000. So the real decisions I think will come next year. And I think it's very, very interesting that Patreus is going to go to head CIA. And I think he's a very good choice for that, because we have a controversial but very effective smaller footprint which we can leave behind if we decided to remove boots from the ground, and that is the drones and the missiles. And he will have a very clear sense of the efficacy of those weapons, and I think he at the head of CIA will be a very formidable director. One difference between the advice that General Sweeney gave that you said, and the situation that General Patreus is in today is that the question to Sweeney was what do we do? Should we begin a course of action? Should we become involved in a conflict? The question becomes much more complicated when you're in the midst of the conflict, and it's very rare to ever hear a general say, I think we should consider folding our tents and walk away from the fight and risk whatever the world thinks about our leaving short of victory. Do you ever get that judgment from a military officer? I don't think so. I think there might have been a short retreat in Florida when we were defeated by Osceola and the Seminoles, but we went back. But no, that's not what we train generals to do. We don't train them to do that. I mean, we train them to take that hill. And so that's why the Sweeney story is so interesting to me. And I am hoping that Patreus is sophisticated enough. Perhaps he'll be freer to speak at CIA than he might have if you were still wearing four stars. Because from what I know and read of Afghanistan, I've never been there. I have been to Pakistan. What we're dealing with there is extraordinarily important, extraordinarily complex. The tribal structure in Afghanistan is such that you can make gains in one province, and then you pull back, and the gains are quickly dispelled. In your experience, when there is a discussion within an administration, what do we do next? What kind of force should we use? Is it open to the extent that there is not a chain of command of opinion? That is, if you're serving under the general who holds a particular view, is that part of your mission to advance that point of view? Or do more junior officers who can have access to the discussion, do they feel free to voice judgments that are different from their superiors? I think the better the commander, the freer the advice he will receive from his subordinates. I remember there was an African American general, Hamlet, Brigadier General in Vietnam, just when I was leaving, and we used to talk about leadership and speaking truth to power. He said in the military there are two schools of thought, the butt kickers and the example setters. You have to be able to do both, but I have found that the butt kickers don't get nearly as good advice as the example setters, because the example setters, just by the way they operate, open the door to creative thinking, whereas the butt kickers sort of stifle that. I think that would be very much the case in the military. The Bob Woodward's thesis of what happened in the last big Afghan policy review was that the military rigged the game, that they didn't present the full broad range of options that Obama wanted to see, and ultimately he was choosing between A and A plus 1 in terms of what choice he might have. Do you get the impression that President Obama has gained whatever control presidents gain over the military, or is he more the following the lead of the officers? We'll find out, and we'll find out about this time next year, when I think the real decisions are made. The military is always bound to prepare for the worst possible eventuality, and that is usually defined by conventional thinking, but that has caused them often to miss what really happens. I was thinking of Pearl Harbor. I was thinking of 9-11. These were things that nobody had anticipated. Why not? Because they were thinking of the worst possible eventuality in conventional terms, and often with the world as it is, the next crisis comes in unconventional terms, which there's really no prior thinking available to apply. By the same token, we often, there's a demonization factor. When we're dealing with a leader that we neither like nor understand, we tend to demonize that person. I sometimes give a talk called, what do Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong-il have in common, and what they have in common is that we demonize all of them. Saddam Hussein in particular was a case in point where he was awful. I was at a wonderful conference at Ditchley in the UK in 2005, and the Brits had called it to say, how did we both miss the call on Iraq? MI6 was there, and Jamie Mishik was there, former DDI director, wonderful woman. What happened was there was immense pressure from number 10 and from the White House, particularly Cheney, saying, of course they have them. And so one Brits said, well, we all knew that he had nuclear weapons. We all knew he was embedded with al-Qaeda. We just couldn't prove it. But once we got in, we'll find it. Well, they knew it because they had demonized him to the extent that he was capable of anything. I'm glad you've raised the demonization because it gets us to the field on which you are exceptionally expert, which is Korea. There is perhaps no more demonized regime in the world than North Korea. And because it's so inaccessible, relatively few people have firsthand experience of it or its leaders. Just this week, there's another story out from a nonproliferation conference in South Korea that if there's another North Korean test, there'll be more sanctions sought this time with Russian and Chinese support. I want to get your sense of how responsive to carrots and sticks the North Koreans are, whether you find them to be rational interlocutors or people with an agenda so peculiar that our actions will have no particular effect on their actions. I do not feel that they are, I think they are susceptible to what we do. I haven't been to North Korea for, the last time I went was in conjunction with the Philharmonic concert, I think in the 80s, 2005. In my first trip to North Korea, Kim Gaye Gwon, the man whom I saw whenever I went, asked me three questions which I always remember. One, why is George W. Bush so different from his father? And my answer was, well, we're a big country and Father Bush was raised in New England and the son George was raised in Texas and those are different parts of the world. Then the second question was the key and he said, how do you function as a country when you elect people as president who have nothing in common with their predecessors? And I said, well, that's the way democracy works. You have what we might euphemistically call continuity of leadership, so you don't have to deal with that, but we do. We don't like the way a president behaves. We vote him out and somebody comes in who does things differently and he said, all right, I understand that, but that makes it very difficult for somebody trying to have a, build a relationship with you. And so when people say, you know, we bought that horse before and they're unreliable and so forth, I would say in retali in response, here are three instances where we very quickly contradicted ourselves and what we were doing. When I was ambassador, the first thing I tried to do was get our tactical nuclear weapons out of South Korea because we were trying to keep the North Koreans from going nuclear and I knew very well that if we, once we put pressure on them, they would immediately say, well, you've got nuclear weapons in South Korea, so why should we not have nuclear weapons in North Korea? So I said, we need to get them out ahead of necessity. And fortunately, we had very enlightened commanders there, Lou Menetry and Bob Rascasi, and we had a very good and very underrated South Korean president, Noh Tae-woo, with a very sophisticated national security advisor. And within a year of my arrival, I was able to send a cable back saying with full support of General Rascasi and full support of the Blue House, I recommend that you remove our nuclear weapons from South Korea. And President Bush used that as a fulcrum to remove our tactical nuclear weapons from all around the world. Well, doing that opened up dialogue with North Korea, and in the process of that, we canceled a large training exercise called Team Spirit, which was put on every year, which the North Koreans hated because it was a reenactment of our rushing to the defense of South Korea in 1950. And so we canceled it for the year, 1992, and a lot of talks took place. There were eight Prime Ministerial visits and so forth. And then out of the blue, it was announced by the Pentagon in September of 1992 that Team Spirit would be reinstated. And who was Secretary of Defense? Dick Cheney. And I had not been consulted by that. I would have opposed it. And it undid everything that had been done. And the next year, the North Koreans pulled out of the NPT and it set the stage for a major crisis, which was sort of 1994. So just very quickly, that's number one. Number two was when Newt Gingrich became Speaker and the Republicans captured both houses. They didn't like the agreed framework, which we had set up with the North Koreans, which they shut down their nuclear reactor and returned for heavy oil. The Republicans didn't like that, so they dragged their feet on the oil and finally destroyed that. And then the third was when George W. Bush made the part of the Axis of Evil 14 months after the North Koreans had invited Bill Clinton to go. So we have never stuck it for the long term with consistency in our dialogue with the North. They would, from their perspective, we've been a very fickle partner in all of these arrangements. Only the oil seems to be the only material issue here. The others are matters of dignity and defense, the symbolic of defense. Yes, which is very important. For example, I last, about almost two years ago, I wrote a letter to Vice President Biden suggesting that Kim Jong-un be invited to the United States for an orientation tour. He had just surfaced as a possible leader. Yeah, I of 26 went to school in Switzerland, spoke some English. Michael Jordan, fan, sounded like a fairly regular guy. I thought it might be a nice gesture to invite him just to have him get to know what we are like and to give us a chance to know what he was like. But for political reasons that I was told, oh no, we can't do that, the Republicans would tear our heads off, which they probably would have. So the, I mean, while we're all going to be focused on Afghanistan and Iraq and the Arab Spring and the European currency crisis, Korea, a year from now, I mean, do you see any way out of this, Dewey? Are we headed for a military showdown at some point with the North Koreans? I think this is a very dangerous year. 2012 is a very big year for them. It's the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung. They want to declare that they have become a prosperous country. Lee Myung-bak leaves office, a new Korean president will be elected. President Obama is up for re-election. So a lot of things are going to happen next year, which have a big effect. China's influence has grown very strong in North Korea. The Chinese certainly do not want, they're more worried about instability, either an implosion or an explosion on the Korean peninsula. That worries them much more than a few nuclear weapons, which they feel the North Koreans will never use. So my feeling is the only way to deal effectively with North Korea is to have sustained dialogue with them. And I hope that when there is a new president in South Korea, that will become more possible. In a moment we'll take questions from our audience. This is just one question. I've been curious to hear what you would make of these things as we've all been focused on the uprisings in Arab countries. It's raised the question for how important democracy or democratization, or at least the opposition of autocrats, is in the making of U.S. policy and deciding what positions we take. I'm curious, you not only have dealt with North Koreans who come from a decidedly undemocratic society, but you were during a period when South Korea was going through great pains of democratization. We had fought and died alongside the South Koreans well before that time. How important is it? What value do you assign to political reforms and democracy in allied countries? I think we've had a particularly good dialogue with South Korea. The Korea Economic Institute did a very interesting thing two or three years ago. It contacted every living Korean ambassador to the United States and every living ambassador to Korea and had us all write accounts of our ambassadorship and what we were dealing with. It's a very, very interesting pattern because the relationship clearly had ups and downs, but there was a continuous relationship and continuous dialogue. It had some downsides and it had some upsides, but the result is just the magnificent achievements of South Korea. President Obama recognizes, as no other president has, that South Korea is our most reliable ally in North East Asia. I think of them as approaching for us the role that Britain has played for us in Europe. It's not there yet, but we've had trouble with Europe or with the U.K., think of the Suez Crisis in 1956. We don't always agree with them. We won't always agree with North Korea, but South Korea, but their performance and their growth has been tremendous. As a result, I think it's a very dynamic democracy. I spent 10 years in Japan and we transformed Japan in a way, but I think the perpetuation of the emperor in place has really confused their own attitude toward the past because the man in whose name every atrocity was committed was kept in power by MacArthur, and so the intellectuals have not had the clear shot at a new era that the intellectuals in Germany have had, but I think it's a different pattern in every country. Libya, for example, I think it was very tempting for us to do what we did. I talked to the British officer who had been knighted for his work with Qaddafi, getting him to give up his nuclear weapons, and he said it was one of the weirdest assignments he had ever had. It's a common report from Libya assignments. There's a case where the military advice certainly was not our army, not our air force. Find some other air force to go use for this operation. Yeah, I think the ability to speak truth to power within a society is terribly important, and where we see in China, Lee Kuan Yew was a terrific person to talk to about China, and he said the Singapore Lee Kuan Yew, and he said the Chinese couldn't care less what the outside world thinks of them. What they're concerned about is maintenance of internal stability, and I think that's absolutely true. He, on his part, when asked why do people keep coming to you for advice, and he said, well, I'm 88 years old, I've had a lot of experience, and I haven't forgotten my mistakes. That's a key thing. He hasn't buried them. He's learned from them, and I think that's really a key ingredient in what you're talking about, because the intellectuals can say to a desk spot, hey, you've made lots of mistakes, and he said, oh, gee, you're right, I've got to change. Well, that very rarely happens. Yes, unlikely. Well, perhaps we'll return to that. Let's take some questions from the audience, starting with Bob Inman. We have to have a microphone find you. This comes under the category of be careful what you ask for. 60 years of watching the military side. One notable characteristic when there is a new president elected, there is a great rush to go please the president, to come to his attention, to be responsive to what he wants. In the campaign, Iraq is a war of choice, Afghanistan is the war of necessity, and that came time and again. So the climate on 20 January 2009 was how do you in fact, what is a war of necessity? What means you got to win? So you get this great rush of advice to try to be responsive. It may not have been what candidate had in mind when he characterized it as a war of necessity, but I would argue repeatedly occurs, that I observe much more what does the president want, not clearly understanding it, how do you offer up? Woodward got it only half right. What do you think about that, Ambassador Gray? Well, I think that is correct. I think that the best generals, I have a great respect for the outgoing chief of the JCS, Admiral Muller, and I think he's been, I hope, I see you nodding and I think you would agree. And he's the last active general to have served in Vietnam. And he realizes the costs to the military of being constantly engaged as it has been for over 10 years. And so there's some texture to his advice because he realizes there's only so much you can ask our people to do. I think the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed types are saying, well, how can I catch the president's eye? But I think the best officers are the ones who have in mind the costs and the abrasions and just what is involved in terms of sacrifice that we've asked our military to do for so long. And that's why the decisions that Obama has next year on an AFPAC are just so incredibly difficult. I mean, the big news this morning is that the Pakistanis have arrested five Pakistani citizens for helping CIA locate Osama bin Laden. And they're regarded as traitors to Pakistan. And so there's a torch we really missed, Dick Holbrook, on that, in my view, because he was one for dialogue. I don't think he was fully used by Obama and I knew him and liked him, and so you knew him. And we really missed that kind of man. Let's take a question up front. Mary, wait for the microphone to read you. Hi. You said earlier what we're doing in Afghanistan is very important. And I wanted to hear more about, given everything else that we're trying to do in the world today and our own domestic problems, could you speak a little bit more about what that importance is relative to other issues and other military opportunities? It's a very good question. And in answering it, I'm deeply sympathetic to military people who are asked questions like that. It's what we've already tried and almost succeeded but failed to do in Afghanistan up to now. There's a book coming out by a guy named Dov Zakheim, which I think will be very interesting to read. And he is very concerned that at the, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and our first influx into Afghanistan, we had the Taliban on the run. We had Osama cornered in Torah Bora. And instead of completing that, we got distracted and so many people were pulled away into Iraq. So we have made a huge investment there in terms of blood and lives and effort. And for us to not leave something behind would be something, I think would be sort of a tin can we would tie to our own tail. So how can we leave respectively? I don't think we can win it. I think it would cause involvement there for a generation and I don't think we're able to do that today. So I think it's important to kind of strike a balance and to deeply learn from it. And I think Petraeus and the people with him who have redone our approach to counterinsurgency and counter terrorism know that more clearly than previous generations of leaders. That's not a good answer, but that's the best I can do. You say we have survived. Yes, we have. And I think we did. I think Petraeus and some of the other people, McMaster, who wrote the book Daryl Ekshin of Duty, there were, I think a great deal has been learned about that. I think we are, it's interesting to me that we're not absolutely wedded to counterinsurgency. I think there's a healthy ability to say, hey, look, there's only so much we can do there. We really have to focus on counterterrorism. And the thing I referred to earlier when I said Petraeus going to CIA with a formidable weapon, I'm talking about our missiles and our robots, which are, you know, the drones. And that is a weapon that is a very effective weapon. It is a very controversial weapon, but it in terms of cost effectiveness, it's very high. You're saying it's an effective counterterrorism. Counterterrorism. Absolutely not. It's detrimental in that way. It's in this side of the room for a second. Hi, Don. Thank you for your always illuminating observations. Colin Powell is a great American and it made me very embarrassed and sad to see him lying to the United Nations eight years ago. And after that, I developed this kind of naive knee-jerk response whenever I heard the words weapons of mass destruction. I just assumed it was more propaganda and I paid no attention. But what happened yesterday in Pakistan with the arrest of the informants makes me wonder how safe are the nuclear weapons in Pakistan? Is it possible for al-Qaida or other non-state actors, the groups that were responsible for the Mumbai attack and others to have access or to compromise those weapons in Pakistan? And what is the U.S. doing about it now? What should the U.S. be doing about it? Is our military relationship with the Pakistan army as good as our relationship with the Egypt army, for example? I thought you might want to comment on that. Well, I don't feel even qualified to comment. You have raised imponderables, which I am not in a position to answer at all definitively and which I think the very best people who work on it day and night are working on it. I understand that at a recent meeting in terms of cooperation with Pakistan, somebody knowledgeable would say, from one to ten, where would you rate our cooperation from the Pakistanis? From one to ten, he would say three. And I had great hopes for General Kayani. Have you ever met him, Bobby? I also had great hopes. Had. This is the Pakistani Chief of Staff. Admiral Mullen also, I think, has had great hopes for him. He's spoken of his close relationship with General Kayani. That's right. And so if we don't have really rock-solid relations with the Pakistani army, the questions you raise become even more concerning. And as I say, I wish Holbrook were still around, and I'm glad we've got a very good ambassador there, but it's a terribly difficult and dangerous problem. Let me ask you a question drawn upon your CIA days here, which is you run an operation in a friendly country without the knowledge of the local intelligence service or government, and several citizens of that country help you do it. Aren't they in trouble? I mean, aren't they, would their home government commend them for doing this? Or isn't it obvious that a Pakistani who's assisting the CIA without his own country's knowledge is going to pay consequences? Well, that's why you hear from the agents of the mantra Sources and Methods, because a case officer in CIA has it as his number one duty to protect the identity of his source, because the people who tell you these things are laying their lives on the line. And the agency goes to extreme lengths to protect their sources. And I think it's tragic that these sources in Pakistan have been discerned, and it's a testament to the difficulty of the relationship we have with the whole Pakistan apparatus. Let's take another question. Why don't you give the microphone? Here's a hand over here. There is an example of a general folding his tent. In 1961, there was a full-scale rebellion going on in Algeria. The army was trying to crush it. The French were divided as to whether to continue their presence there. When De Gaulle came into power, he overnight pulled the French army out of Algeria. He just did it by announcing they were no longer going to stay there. Now, that's what I was hoping Obama was going to do when he came into office. And still, here we are three years later, and you're saying it's now going to be another year before anything significant happens. Is there any possibility of reversing this thing and having Obama do something along the lines that De Gaulle did, and just end this? Well, we will find out. I mean, Obama has doubled the number of troops we have from what it was when he came into the presidency. And that was because he heard uniformly from Bob Gates, whom I know and respect very, but it's necessary to do it. And I think the surge in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan paid off short-term. But I do not see any evidence to know that that's permanent. And you hear the mantra from our military, it's fragile and reversible what we've achieved there. And I don't know how long we're going to be saying that, but I think it's going to take something such as you described to really cut that. It's what Congress finally did in Vietnam. They cut the purse strings, but that was a bilateral effort. And I don't see much of anything going on bilaterally in Congress. But that's why I say next year is going to be, I think, the defining year for the kind of President Obama is. He's young, he's inexperienced, he's highly political, he's the first black man, he's got the toughest agenda of any American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Racism is alive and well in this country. He has a very tough job to do. And I think his presidency will be defined by the decisions that he makes in the next 12 months. Yes, sir. It's good to see you again, Ambassador Greg. Your voice is greatly missed. Just a footnote on Algeria. I was living in North Africa at the time. De Gaulle, while he kept the troops on the ground before withdrawing them, was engaged in many years of negotiation with the FLN. Now, we don't know how far negotiations with the Taliban have gone. I have no idea. That seems to be a kind of a will of the wisp, and it seems to be a very local thing, that when there are gains made in a district, it's sometimes possible to have the local leaders sit down with the Taliban, and they say, well, this is the way we'll do it this week, but that may not be the way we do it next week, particularly if an American has closed the fire support base, so forth. And it was interesting, the parallels in Vietnam. I'm writing a book on some of the things I remember, and I had my monthly reports from Bien Hoa declassified, so I was able to read on a month-by-month basis what I was saying about the war when I was there. And many of the things are extremely similar to what we now hear coming out of Afghanistan. The government is not pushing through on the things we wanted them to do. There is tremendous corruption. There is a reluctance to attack the hard military targets. I was there for the stand down of the First Division. My last year, there were really only a few helicopter pilots and some A-37. They were still giving them a target, and they would fight like hell, but much more so than the Vietnamese. And so we almost lost Vietnam in 1972 at the Siege of An Loc, and it finally came to an end three years later. And I wasn't surprised. I think Admiral Inman, one comment, and then let's... I promise a question this time, not a speech. Worst case, North Korea, and the implosion. What happens? Well, there will be thousands of people moving into China, which is what the Chinese fear most. There would be great questions about what to do at the DMZ, which is very heavily mined. There would be tragic cases of people trying to cross the DMZ and getting blown up by mines. I think there would be... I don't think there would be much formal unit fighting. I think there would be just tremendous chaos. And who would emerge? I have no idea. I don't think anybody has any idea. I call North Korea the longest running failure in the history of American espionage, and I can say that because I was part of that failure for 30 years. And we still don't know what they think. We listen to them, we look down at them, but we don't know what's going on in their minds. My take from my five meetings there, and the long talks I have, is that their number one objective is a solid dialogue with us so that we will remove from them the threat of a nuclear or military attack upon them. And that if they get that, other things will become possible. But that is going to take a longer span of consistent dialogue with them than we have been able to muster ever since I've been dealing with them. Before we leave North Korea, I just want to have you address one other point that you've spoken about or written about, which is a year ago, March, there was an event that soured whatever progress there seemed to be on the Korean Peninsula, the sinking of the South Korean naval vessel. A team of Western experts, including American experts, were brought in and they investigated and the South Koreans concluded on the basis of that that it had been a North Korean torpedo from a midget submarine. And there is an alternative thesis that it was a mine and it was not nearly such an aggressive act. And you're you're you're you're open to that interpretation. Yes, I am. I have written about it. The Russians sent a team and their thesis was they found remnants of a fish net wrapped around one of the propeller axes. They felt that what might well have happened was that a fish net that they got tangled up with dislodged a there are a lot of old mines lying around there and that might have dislodged one that caused the explosion. They began to ask questions along that line, got no answers, and so they went home. I asked a well-placed Russian source, are you going to make this report public? And he said, no. I said, why not? And he said, because it would be very damaging to both Lee Myung-bak and President Obama. Since then, my I'm still very skeptical on it. And there are others who feel as I do. The problem is that the Cheonan incident is a roadblock to establishing any kind of dialogue between North and South Korea, because the South Koreans are saying we're not going to talk to you unless you're you apologize for thinking the Cheonan. The North Koreans said we did not sink the Cheonan. We're not going to apologize for something we didn't do. So there you are. And so my call would be let's have another look at it because there are some issues that have been raised. A mollusk found on the smoking gun of part of the North Korean submarine found near the sunken ship that had a mollusk in it, which would indicate that it had been under water for some time. And the mollusk is found more frequently on the east coast than the west coast. And so there are these things that are there to be investigated. So I hope at some time the North Koreans might be invited and say here we're going to take another look at it. And they've been wanting that, but that's been turned down. And I'm extremely unpopular with the South Korean for saying extremely. And I think probably with some friends of the Pentagon also. A friend, Rick Smith. Again and again, you mentioned the importance of speaking truth within complex forward-leaning highly disciplined systems. And this is a personal question, but I think it bears on that. You enlisted before you and the military before you went to college. You joined the Central Intelligence Agency not here to fore noted as a bastion of wild free thinking and liberal thought. You moved on to the Bush administration. And yet through those years, you managed to retain the ability to say things within those systems that were unpopular from time to time. How do we encourage in the military in other institutions like that the kind of openness and willingness to speak truth to power in a way that would be very helpful in difficult national security situations? Well, it's a wonderful question. The absolute moment of truth for me on that issue came when I was Chief of Station in Seoul. And it was after the kidnapping of Kim Dae-jung. And when it became known that the Korean CIA had been the kidnappers, some riots broke out on college campuses to protest this. And Korean CIA, which is a very draconian organization at that point, arrested an American educated professor, accused him of having stirred up the riots and either tortured him to death or tortured him to the point where he jumped out a window to cause the torture to end. And so I reported this to CIA. And then I said, I want to protest this. And as I said, I just cannot see us having to do just carry on with this organization that does this kind of thing. And I got an ice cold message from my boss, who's now dead, saying, stop trying to save the Koreans from themselves. That's not your job. So I disobeyed orders. And I went to the Chief of Protective Service for the President, sort of like the Secret Service. I said, I have no authority to say this. It's just my own kiboon, my own feeling about it, that you know what happened to Professor Choi. And I'm very uncomfortable dealing with an organization that is more interested in crushing any kind of thinking, creative thinking in South Korea. And as much we're interested in that than working against our common enemy, North Korea. That's all I said. And a week later, Lee Hu-rock, who was the president of the head of KCIA, was fired. He was the second most powerful man in South Korea. And his replacement was a man named Shin Chik-soo, who had been former Justice Minister. And he said, Mr. Greg, I'm going to be as much against those who break the law on behalf of this government as I will be against those who break the law against it. And that is probably the single most significant thing I ever did with CIA. And it was as a result of disobeying orders. And I have told that repeatedly to groups of CIA officers that I speak to. And I say, if it comes to the point where you either have to break a rule or disobey orders or quit, do it. Because if you don't, you're going to undermine your own feeling about yourself. And you're going to undermine what you hope the organization that you worked for stood for. So I just, that was the moment. And I, whenever I meet with CIA people or anybody else, I get on college campuses whenever I can. And I say, if you're in an organization that does things that you know are not the way you feel they ought to be, speak out or quit. And I believe that very strongly. So thank you. That's a very nice softball I don't normally get those questions. Well, thank you very much. Ambassador Greg, thanks for your answer to that question and to all of our questions. And it's a great talking with you this morning. Thank you all very much. Just one second. Well, yes, we're done. Thank you everybody. I'm Will Friedman with Public Agenda. And we just wanted to thank you for your attendance today and through the entire Maxwell's series for this year. We're working on next year's schedule. And as we get towards the fall, we'll be back in touch with you. Thanks for our colleagues from the Maxwell School. We'll see you all soon. One more hand for our speakers. Thank you. I enjoyed that. Thank you.