 Good afternoon. We're very pleased to have such a terrific turnout for this unprecedented historical event, providing to the American public for the first time such a huge number of the presidential eyes only products. Director Brennan gave an excellent overview. And before we discuss the various perspectives of the practitioners and academic here, I'd like to do a little bit of a backdrop to provide you with the sense of how we got to the pickle in the PDB. My name is David Robarch. I'm the chief historian of the CIA. And I've been currently working on an internal history of all of the presidential products. And I found it very interesting over the years to track how they have changed, how they have evolved, how they responded to various policy makers' concerns and presidents' concerns and such. And we need to take ourselves back to a period that's very different from the present. So much of what the agency does day to day is really focused around providing that daily product for the president. Much of the agency constantly spends 24-7, 365 practically, dealing with feeding that president's eyes only product, the PDB. And we need to understand that back at the founding of the modern US intelligence community in 1946-47, it was a very different environment. The whole process was very almost laid back. There was a sort of almost laxadaisical element to it in which briefings may or may not appear. The document may or may not get read. There simply was not the anxiety and the pace and the drive that went on. It goes on daily today. Let's take our minds back to roughly the end of 1945, early 1946. President Harry Truman has just abolished the first national level strategically oriented all-service intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services. And he finds himself a bit confused about what he is receiving through the intelligence process, if that's the right word. He complains about a lot of random, uncoordinated departmental perspectives that don't provide him with an overall insight into what's going on in the world. He wrote in his memoirs that the needed intelligence information was not coordinated in any one place. Reports came across my desk on the same subject at different times from various departments, and these reports often conflicted. Very much deja vu, if you will. So one of the first things he charged the CIA's immediate predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group, with doing, was creating a document that correlated, evaluated, and disseminated information from all departments of the US intelligence community, provided it to him in a concise fashion, one that he could receive every day and sort of get a classified news bulletin. So the first director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Sidney Sowers, leads the way in creating this new document, which was referred to as the Daily Summary. Almost all of them have been totally, if not almost, completely declassified and are available out at the Truman Library. It's a very interesting document, because it looks absolutely nothing like any of the documents that you will see in the release today of the Pickle and the PDB. It was a two-page, mimeographed document. Those of us old enough to remember mimeographed documents and tests and things in grade school, it really did look like that, printed on a roller after somebody typed it in on a stencil. Very, very crude by modern standards. Had no visuals, no pictorials. Very, very short. It had only six items at the time. It was organized in a kind of a geographic fashion. But what's interesting is to kind of look at these early documents and see what people really thought were important at the time. For example, in the very first Daily Summary, the most important item in the estimation of Central Intelligence Group analysts was a piece concerning alleged secret agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union that agents of some Russians in Switzerland were offering up for sale in Paris. Sounds pretty kind of down in the weeds operational information, but we thought that was important for the president to know. By the end of 1946, the Daily Summary writers are starting to include little tidbits of analysis and insight, but it really is not intended to be an analytic document. It is a classified news bulletin. It never runs for much more than four pages. By February 1948, about two dozen individuals and offices inside the US government are receiving it. It is not nearly as closely held as the early pickle was. There was no briefing. And the delivery and communication process involving the summary was almost haphazard. It was prepared every day, but it might or might not be read by the president. It was always given to the senior military aide or some prominent White House associate. Sometimes it was used in the morning briefing. Sometimes it was not. But one key was that no one from CIG or from the CIA after it took on the responsibility was present. Truman, like the publication, gave it good positive feedback. And when CIA is created in September of 1947, it inherits this responsibility from CIG. Now, even though the feedback from the White House was generally positive, other people were questioning the utility of the daily summary. The, for example, important early evaluation of the new CIA by the Dulles-Jackson-Carréa committee that came out in 1949 made some significant comments about the daily summary that really resonate throughout the history of the president's proprietary publication. This commission says that it was a fragmentary publication and might even be misleading to its consumers because it is based on limited information from certain departments. It lacks historical perspective. It does not follow stories through to their end. The writers don't know everything about the policy involved or even the details of the countries they're looking at. And as a result, the agency decides to change course and come up with a different product that addresses some of these concerns. Much of this is done under the supervision of the new DCI, Walter Bedell Smith, who comes in in late 1950. One of the things he does is carry out one of the big reorganizations of the agency where he consolidates the different analytic elements into one office, renames them, and uses the new Office of Current Intelligence to create a different product called the Current Intelligence Bulletin. And that premiers at the end of February 1951. It looks pretty much like the daily summary in content, short items, same regional categorization, but technology moves ahead at this time and you now have offset printing being used instead of mimeography. And yes, even three years later, the OCI gets a studio camera and can start including graphics in the document. Truman is very, very pleased with this. He writes to Director Smith, I've been reading the Intelligence Bulletin and I'm highly impressed with it. You have really hit the jackpot with this one. Now the document may have been improved, but the briefing process was not. There is still no daily briefing. Truman's senior military aide continues the practice of meeting with him in the morning, giving him an intelligence update, sometimes using the document, sometimes not. After the Korean War begins, the president meets with the NSC every Thursday morning and gets intelligence updates. This, through the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, was really the principal vehicle for communicating intelligence to the president was the weekly National Security Council meeting. And this is the situation that pertains when the new president takes office in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower. Now being a military man by career, he organizes his national security apparatus quite differently, and this is one of the constant variables in the history of the president's document is how the president chooses to run his national security process. Whether the agency or the DNI is prominent in it or whether the national security advisor is pretty much running the show. Eisenhower makes it clear right at the start that he's suspicious of any product that comes directly from a department. And by that he included CIA, even though it ostensibly is an interagency national level organization. He does not read the CIB, makes it clear he does not want morning briefings, and he is not gonna use the CIB as his principal entrepot into intelligence. Instead, he is also getting most of his intel from the NSC weekly meeting from his director of central intelligence, Alan Dulles. The CIB does not figure prominently in those presentations, and this process continues throughout his presidency. In the sixth year of the current intelligence bulletin's publication in 1957, various observers note some prominent shortcomings in it that, as I say, kind of work their way through the history of the president's product. Articles are based only on material that comes in every day, so important stories might not even be written about if they don't have that current peg that an analyst can use to hang the story on. The flip side of that is once the peg is gone, there's no continuity from day to day to follow up with a story, so developing situations after the big news may not do attention. And not enough top officials are reading the current intelligence bulletin because they have their own sources of intelligence through their department channels or through conversations or discussions. They also complain that topics important to them are not covered in the document, and the articles are either too detailed and complex or they're too superficial or they don't contain warning or, or, or. So the agency responds again retroactively, reactively, and creates a document called the Central Intelligence Bulletin, which premieres in January of 1958. It has a new name, it has a slick new cover, it has enhanced graphics, and it sort of looks like a classified magazine. It sometimes runs to 10 to 20 pages, but effectively, even though it has a dissemination of upwards 100 individuals and offices, it simply is not a significant element in the daily intelligence process. And this is one of the reasons why President Kennedy, as Director Brennan mentioned in his remarks, is dissatisfied when he takes office. He simply does not like the CEIB, as we call it, the Central Intelligence Bulletin. And because of his disillusionment with the agency after the Bay of Pigs operation, agency leaders decide that they need to reconnect with the president, and as has always been the case in our history, one of the key ways to do that is by tailoring the daily product to the president's needs and preferences. And I will leave it at that because the director does such a fine job in presenting the history of the pickle and the PDB. And we'll move on to our discussion with our very, very distinguished and illustrious panel of practitioners and experts here. We'll lead off with a former director of CIA, Porter Goss. He has the unique situation of being the only individual to be both DCI, Director of Central Intelligence and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, because he was there when the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was passed, abolishing the DCI position and creating the DCIA position. Prior to that, Director Goss had many years in the House of Representatives, when for several of those, he was chairman of the House Oversight Committee. So he sees the intelligence process from two sides of the consumer and one side of the producer end and has some interesting thoughts about the prominence that the president's daily product has during his experience. Director Goss, please. Thank you, David, very much. First of all, I'd like to say thank you all for the extraordinary hospitality you've given this boy from Florida out here in Texas. Enjoyed it very much. It's my first time in the library and I hope to come back and take advantage of all it has to offer besides events like this. I want to start out by echoing a little bit what Director Brennan said about the amazing capabilities we have in intelligence in a very dangerous world. It is truly amazing how far ahead we are in the things we can do and find out. And partially that's because we've got such extraordinary men and women in our intelligence service doing extraordinary work. All of this comes together for the consumer in chief. That would be the president of the United States. And the point of delivery for all of this information actually is the PDB. There are still, of course, other ways the president gets information. But this is the vehicle that we look at as the way to get the stuff he needs to know to him or the things he needs to think about to him. So it's an extraordinary document and it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to get stuff to him. Think about this. You're talking the most important man of the world. You want to give him what he needs, not what he doesn't need, so you don't want to give him a lot of fluff. And you need to know, therefore, what he needs to know. That means you need to know something about what he's about and what his policies are and what his daily schedule might be. But not only do you need to know the man, you need to know the things in the world that are going on so that you can connect those two in a meaningful way to it. That's an extraordinary editorial challenge, analytical challenge, and writing challenge, drafting challenge for the people involved and I congratulate them very much. Thank you. I seem to be tilted to the left. Repeating that verbatim. I think the most important thing that I can offer to this panel is how much times have changed from the days of the history that David and Director Brennan have referred to. It's extraordinary. Presidents, of course, are different, but the evolution of how information flows, how much information is out there and how much is known, really extraordinary if you just think back in the last 10 years of social media and the other all the ways we are subjected to information flow in our daily lives. Weeding through that giant haystack for the nuggets has therefore gotten a lot harder. On the subject of transparency, we need to have the citizens of the United States of America comfortable with how we run our intelligence community and understanding the value of it and that does require a lot of transparency. Unfortunately, when you speak now to an audience that you think might be your national security team, you've got to remember your setting very well because with the flow of information, often the audience of your, the audience you're addressing is the whole world and it is very hard sometimes to remember which audience you are addressing and if you notice our politicians these days are having more and more trouble trying to figure out what they want to say for that group and not have it spill over to the other group that's also listening who wants to hear something else. This process is very important to understand because you don't want to get the President of the United States subject to it or in it. You want to give him what he needs, the right stuff at the right time that's urgent and not waste his time either. I would suggest right now that the question of secrecy of the PDB is a very important subject because of the audience problem. I think there's a lot in the PDB that could be shared with the American public but I would not want to share it with people overseas who have a different view of the United States and a different plan for the United States of America and its well-being and the global stage. So I think that the need for secrecy it needs to be fully understood but when there is no secrecy required then transparency is the order of the day in order to continue to keep the confidence and build the confidence of the people of our country that our leadership is doing the right, the best they can in a difficult situation with the information that's available and keeping that trust and confidence up there is a major effort. When I took over as the DCI in 2004, times of course were extraordinarily different than they had been in the 60s. We still had many challenges, they were of a different sort. I sorted my day, my responsibilities into five categories. The first and most important was fighting the war. In 2004 you understood we weren't quite sure whether we were gonna get hit again and who the bad guys were and who the South Kite group was anyway and what were their capabilities. So that was job one every day making sure that we did not have another terrible tragedy on our doorstep. Job two of course was being the DCI which fortunately now has evolved to a new architectural form and we have with us today, we're honored to have Director Clapper of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, our Chief Intelligence Officer in the community who has taken over the coordination, integration, management of the community at large which is 16 or 17 agencies or more maybe that are doing different things in different ways but are the team that bring all this extraordinary stuff together. That in those days we did not have the DNI so the DCI had that job. We didn't have the money because the Defense Department had the money so I was accountable for a bunch of stuff I couldn't control. It wasn't a good condition and fortunately General Clapper has come to the rescue and we now have the DNI and the third job I had was the Director of CIA which was managing CIA at a time of great transition from what we called conventional activities overseas to very unconventional, dangerous asymmetric warfare of a time we hadn't experienced before and didn't quite know how to handle. Those are three big jobs for any individual. The fourth job came along was well our system doesn't seem to be working properly congressional reports are saying we need to make some change so we're gonna have new architecture. So my fourth job was saying Porter you've got to help build that new architecture of how we are going to create the DNI and remove the DCI out of this game. So I basically was putting myself out of work and finding somebody else to do a job that I was very happy to get rid of and I thanked John Negroponte the first DNI for accepting all of that fun work. And the last job I had was the one that almost killed me the most time consuming the hardest the one I took most seriously kept me up at night every night literally and figuratively and that was preparing the PDB. I can tell you I felt that when I first started reading the PDB as a new director of DCI I was disappointed. I thought that there were things in there that were not relevant to the president's needs. I felt that there were things in there that were stated in a way that outlined a worst case scenario rather than emphasizing a most likely case scenario. There were a lot of things that I wasn't impressed by. And I also was getting some feedback from the White House that they felt there could be some improvements too but there weren't exactly clear about what those might be. I am very happy to say that in those days the PDB basically was delivered by professional briefers so that it was not just the director of CIA in the room with the president and the vice president it was also the national security advisor myself and a professional briefer. And I am forever grateful to the cadre of extraordinary men and women who did that job. My job was to make sure the substance of the book was there and they answered the questions and say yes sir, no sir, Mr. President, yes we'll get that for you tomorrow. But the people who had the facts and presented them so well in language that the president of the United States understood because they had spent enough time with him to know what his needs and wants would be and the kinds of questions he would ask that is just an extraordinarily valuable commodity to have. And for all of those men and women and they are truly remarkable and have a wealth of information they did a fabulous job. And I take my hat off to them. That did not mean that my day every day started at seven o'clock the previous day. I would at that point get the PDB for the following day. I would sit in my office on the seventh floor of the agency and I would go through it. I would quite often have questions usually about why is this in here or why isn't there something in here on this? And I would call various people in the appropriate department to come up and explain it to me. About nine o'clock I generally would get home, think a little bit more about it and make some questions and some thoughts. Go to bed, get some sleep, get up, oh dark hundred and be presented with the updates at 5 36 30, whatever time we were going down to the White House that day. And I would have to digest all of that. Then I would go down to my office in the White House complex and my briefer would come in, brief me on all the changes that had come in overnight. And then the president's briefer would come in and tell me the things he was gonna say to the president and then we would all march over to the Oval Office and talk to the president. And it took me about two weeks to understand that about half of what we were telling the president, he had already found out because he got up earlier and got on the phone and talked to people overseas and we were talking to people to the east of us who had been up for five or six or seven or eight hours earlier and he had been having regular conversation with them. We accommodated those kinds of things as best we could as we went along and learned. And it is that kind of process that makes us so rich and so valuable. And I would say that we got a lot of great questions and a lot of feedback from the president and that changed from day to day. Some days I was never quite sure what it was he was gonna want and he kept me off balance very, very well. And that kept me doing my job even better. I have never had a harder job in my life than trying to figure out what was worth the president of the United States time that we had. And I must say there were several cabinet officers and a couple of other White House staffers who wondered what we were doing to why we were taking so much of his valuable time. But that was the president's decision. He loved the PDB, he couldn't get enough of it, the information he always asked for more. He was an ideal customer. And I hope that is something that all presidents at the agency will always do its job so well that all presidents will feel that way about the PDB. Now to finish on a personal note, I look with great interest on these revelations that are coming out because I was a very junior person on the very front lines in the missile crisis down in the conflict area and in the Dominican Republic during these days. And I always wondered what those guys in Washington were thinking. And so now this is my chance to find out. Thank you very much. All right, next we'll hear from Admiral Bobby Inman, well known to many of you as a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Most pertently for our event today we have his extensive background as an intelligence officer at the most senior ranks, director of the National Security Agency, a major contributor to these products that you'll receive today, and deputy director of Central Intelligence under one of the most interesting characters to ever be DCI, William Casey. Admiral Inman, please. As a career, you're getting it? It is, sound is going out. Good, as a career intelligence officer, you realize very quickly how perishable your sources are, how easily they're compromised, and when you lose them, you have a void. So from the beginning, you want to get the information that you collected in the hands of those who can use it, but at the same time you want to protect how you know it in the process. What was unique about the PDV was that it not only said what we knew, but it often also told how we knew it in the process. When I heard that the PDV was going to be declassified and released, my first alarm was, what are you going to do about all those details of how we knew? And then I heard there was a lot of redaction and I relaxed. So my comments here really are for the journalists and the historians, why the redactions? You can often tell what you know without how harming your sources and methods, but even the slightest inference of how you got that information can lead to catastrophic loss, often hard, maybe even impossible to replace. When I was director of national security agency, looking at what could be declassified from my great holdings, I made the decision to release all of the purple materials to breaking the Japanese codes during World War II. Huge value to historians. Changed a lot of their understanding of how the war was conducted, critical decisions that were made. I was also pressed by the FBI to release the Venona materials. This was the decryption of KGB communications for a very long time frame. And I declined to declassify, even though the FBI wanted to document why the Rosenbergs had been arrested and tried. Certainty from the intercepts of their involvement and their guilt. Why didn't I release it? KGB was still using that same system all those years later. They'd get a new source, they weren't sure it wasn't a plant, they couldn't trust it, so they would use Venona until they were confident that the source was reliable, the new case officer was reliable, and then they would go to a much high level system. So the key often is, and this is the point I want to make, why the redactions, how you collected 40 years ago may still be pertinent for other targets you want to go after. It may not be the same countries you have to, but what you have to protect is the ability you can access the critical information for this country's security, and that takes precedent over telling a good story about how you happen to know something. So I'm looking forward to seeing the redacted PDBs. In the process. And I'm also happy that we won't in this process wonderfully valuable for historians to look at this period in history. I'm particularly pleased in this location that you'll get a chance to see, President Johnson wasn't just concerned with the Vietnam War. All the things he had on his plate every day with the outside world, and this will give a greater understanding, hopefully, to those who make judgments about his presidency, that his involvement on the international scene was vastly broader than just Vietnam. But in accomplishing that, we're still gonna protect sources and methods. Thank you. Well next here from John Helgerson, a former deputy director for intelligence at CIA, which meant administratively, he was, and subsequently in many ways, he was responsible for preparing the PDB. He has a long and distinguished career in US intelligence, which you can read about in your insert about the speaker's profiles. Most importantly to what we're discussing today is his preparation of an unclassified book that talks about how the agency briefed presidential candidates and presidents elect over the years since Eisenhower. This book has been reissued in a second edition, and it is now available, as I understand it, the US government's first audio book. You can buy from the general government printing office both the disc set, and you can download an e-book for, I'm told, only $10. So rush right out after this event and please do so. And you'll find some fascinating insights from Mr. Helgerson's research. John. Thank you, David. Like the other panelists, I'm delighted to be here at the LBJ Library and to join in this discussion. Since David has raised the subject, I would point out that in addition to paying the government printer $35 for this book, you can get it online for $2, and I'll leave it to you to decide which you prefer. I am participating today for the reason David mentioned. That is, I happen to write the book on our briefings in the intelligence community of presidential candidates and presidents-elect. And it seemed appropriate, particularly today, with debates tonight and so on, that we take a few minutes to focus on that aspect of the issue. The intelligence community in reaching out to brief presidential candidates and presidents-elect had really two fundamental goals, broadly speaking. One, of course, was to ensure that those individuals of both parties were as adequately briefed as was feasible in the middle of presidential campaigns and all the chaos that goes with that. The second goal was not a selfish one, but it sounds a bit like that, and it was to establish a relationship between the intelligence community and the next president, whoever it might be. Now, on the one hand, there was the fun of getting to know the president, which was the title of my book, but on a more serious note and aspect, it was to ensure that we did understand the person we would be supporting, how we could best support them, but more important to be sure they understood and their staff understood that the kinds of information they could reasonably expect to get from the intelligence community and who they should contact to get that information so there would be no break from the past to the future. Now, let me take just a minute to jump back, as others have, to the history of this. This all began through the good sense of President Harry Truman, who came to the presidency, obviously, when Franklin Roosevelt died, and Truman was startled to find, although he had been vice president and served many other capacities in government, at how much he did not know about critical national security issues, including, for example, the Manhattan Project. After Truman had been in office a couple of weeks, Secretary of War Henry Stimson came to his office and briefed him on the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb. Truman, in his memoirs, used this as one example of why he wanted to be sure that whoever succeeded him should be as well-briefed as possible. So Truman, right after the political conventions in 1952, reached out to Adlai Stevenson, the Democrat, and Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican, and invited them to come to the White House so that they could be briefed by the DCI, whom David mentioned, Bedell Smith, and the rump group of the cabinet who dealt with national security affairs to get the candidates up to speed. Well, to make a long story short, this sort of instructive series of events here, Stevenson accepted and went ahead with this plan. Eisenhower, however, did not. Eisenhower later wrote that he thought it would be inappropriate for him to be briefed on information otherwise unavailable to the American public. And he told Harry Truman this in a handwritten note, seeking to explain his declination. Well, you probably know a little about Harry Truman and he was powerfully irritated, offended at this reply from Eisenhower. So you will find in a different presidential library a handwritten letter from Truman to Eisenhower, which I'll take the liberty to quote just a moment. Truman said, partisan politics should stop at the boundaries of the US. Is that not an antiquated thought? Then referring to Eisenhower's staff, Truman went on to write, I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us. He's writing now to Dwight Eisenhower, just one World War II. He goes on to say, you have made a bad mistake and I'm hoping it won't injure this great republic. There has never been one like it and I want to see it continue regardless of the man who holds the most important position in the history of the world. May God guide you and give you light. Well, I know from the records that Eisenhower and his staff deliberated a little and then took the high road, declining to respond in kind to Truman. But what Eisenhower did, and this was instructive to those of us in the intelligence community ever since, Eisenhower wrote a note to Beatle Smith, the DCI. I'll keep in mind that indeed, Eisenhower had just won World War II in Europe, but his chief of staff had been Beatle Smith, who still wore the uniform as the director of central intelligence. So here's Eisenhower in the few days after writing to Smith. And he said to Smith, to the political mind, it looked like the outgoing administration was canvassing all its resources in order to support Stevenson's election. Eisenhower went on unbelievably to say, to describe the importance of doing what is right. And he wrote of the challenges he and Smith had faced in Europe. Well, this was a crushing thing for Smith to receive. But the lesson for us in the intelligence business and for historians is that one must be extraordinarily careful that intelligence briefings provided to presidential candidates, presidents elect and certainly to presidents must not be politicized, nor should they give the impression of being politicized. Well, I don't mean to dreary a picture here because Eisenhower, who of course won the election, was also a very wise man. And he did say to Smith, he would be happy to accept briefings from mid-level substantive experts from the CIA, which he did on a regular basis, but he did not want it done at the political level. Powerful lesson, which we have mostly remembered over the years. Now, if I may, let me talk just a little bit about the 1960 and 1963 transitions because they were each little different and each tells us, teaches us a lesson about how to handle candidates and presidents elect. In 1960, Kennedy, of course, was running against Nixon, who was the vice president and thus received his own intelligence, but Kennedy was to be briefed. Well, surprisingly, when Kennedy became officially the candidate, the DCI, Alan Dulles, decided that he personally would do all of the briefings of Kennedy. Well, senior officers in CIA were very concerned at this and it was a little surprising that Eisenhower, who had been president for eight years, thinking back to his exchange with Smith and Truman, Eisenhower sat still for this, despite some reservations in the White House. And so Alan Dulles did the briefings of Kennedy while he was a candidate and while he was president-elect. And frankly, although they worked reasonably well together, there was never a warm bond. Primarily, I believe, because they were men of different generations and temperaments and personalities and while Alan Dulles knew most everything important, he did not have the expertise that would impress Kennedy or his staff. There was one briefing, however, that was an exception and that is that Alan Dulles took Richard Bissell, the director of operations to Palm Beach where they sat on the patio of the Kennedy home and briefed John Kennedy. This was just after the election on the array of covert actions that CIA had underway, the most important of which was planning for what became ultimately the Bay of Pigs operation, but at that stage was an array of political and propaganda activities, not the military conception. Kennedy, according to Bissell and Dulles, listened attentively, the briefing on the Cuban subject alone went on for almost an hour. Kennedy asked a number of sensible questions, but studiously avoided tipping his hand as to what he thought of the plans underway. The issue for the community, of course, is one must reflect carefully on when and in what way you brief a president-elect on covert actions or sensitive NSA operations or sensitive military operations. We have pretty much mastered that over the years, but in its formative stages, it was worked out here with Kennedy. The other thing, a little more timely, it's a lesson from that 1960 transition was the presidential debates. 1960 were the first televised debates, and as we all know, Kennedy benefited immensely and Nixon was harmed by his performance. Interestingly, from the point of view of the intelligence community, though, those debates, both candidates, mentioned the director of central intelligence, Alan Dulles, and comments he had made as if he was the expert public purposes on the strength of the Soviet economy and the so-called bomber and missile gaps, and all of these things redounded to Nixon's disadvantage as the debate unfolded, and frankly, Nixon held a grudge against the intelligence community he thought largely or partly responsible for his loss of the election. Well, what I would recommend you take away from this is watch carefully, particularly when the debates, not tonight, but later occur between the candidates, Republican and Democrat. The rule of thumb is that if intelligence is mentioned, there's trouble. I mentioned 1960, but just very briefly, let me mention that as recently as 2004, there was the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq where both candidates were critical of intelligence. 2008, the issue is rendition, detention, interrogation, CIA's practices with terrorist suspects, both candidates attacked the agency, or in 2012, more recently, Benghazi was the issue. It never goes away. We're still hearing about Benghazi. So the point is, whatever may be your opinion on these issues, if they come up in the debate, it's gonna be an enduring issue and it's gonna be trouble for the intelligence community. Now, concerning 1963, the transition to President Johnson, others have commented on this, so I won't say much, except to say the profound lesson for the intelligence community was you've got to be good to the vice president. Others have mentioned that we did not, we the community did not give the pickle to Vice President Johnson. Well, the reason is that the Kennedy administration prohibited it, but this was a lesson that was learned in an overnight by John McCone, who was then director. We've had some discussion already today of the day after they returned from Texas to Washington, but John McCone took the initiative to have his executive assistant telephone Johnson's secretary and say, tomorrow morning, the DCI will be at the vice president's office to provide the usual intelligence briefing as is regularly done. Well, in truth, there was nothing usual or regular about this, as you all now know, but McCone did get in and was able quickly to recover in terms of providing briefings to Johnson. Now, interestingly, the first lesson was take the vice president seriously. The second lesson, however, McCone did not really digest from our earlier experience because Johnson appreciated the briefings, but he also taken with McCone's forceful, direct style, began engaging McCone and seeking his advice on what should be our policy in Vietnam or who should be appointed ambassador or to other key positions. Well, needless to say, while this was flattering to McCone, he should not have followed down that track. And within some months, the relationship soured for a variety of reasons, primarily Vietnam and McCone, of course, ended up resigning as DCI. I oversimplify this a little bit, but the lesson, of course, is take the vice president seriously, don't get involved in policy issues or personnel issues. Now, I mentioned we had two goals as an intelligence community to inform and to establish a relationship. You will by now be relieved to know I won't lead you through all the other transitions in the intervening years. Suffice is to say, however, that there was a major break between the first four presidents post Truman, that is Truman through Nixon and the seven who followed. For the first four, when they were presidential candidates and presidents elect, they did not receive a daily publication at all and they did not receive daily briefings. They did begin to read the Daily Pub once they were president. The following seven presidents though, from Jerry Ford to the president, in somewhat different ways, all read the Daily PDB while they were president-elect, they continued to read it while they were president and they all had a brief every day while president-elect and most continued, all continued with a briefing, usually from the intelligence community, not infrequently from the national security advisor. The point is, the process has matured over the years and the last transition or two have been frankly, great successes in no small part owing to the initiative of General Clapper and his staff. The secret recently has proved to be, have not only a director involved to give gravitas to the whole thing, but bring along people at a subordinate level who really know what they're talking about in detail and that is more useful and more impressive to new administration. Now, I'd end with a couple other thoughts. One of them is that all 11 presidents elected since Truman have accepted and taken seriously the intelligence briefings they've been offered. You might be interested to know, however, there were a handful of candidates who declined the briefings. None of them obviously got elected. So in the coming months, if you hear one or the other of the candidates declines the briefing, you know who to bet on, come election day. Now, the final point I would make is that in addition to dealing with presidents, presidential candidates, presidents elect, is very important to establish a relationship and support the senior staff. The least successful briefing operation we had was with President Nixon when he was elected, owing to the history I've mentioned. But the most successful operation, so to speak, we've had with senior support staff, was with Henry Kissinger, who became national security advisor. During the transition period when Nixon did not even, he returned unopened, the envelopes with the PDB, Kissinger read them, Kissinger tasked the intelligence community, we provided him everything from substantive support to secretarial support. And in his memoirs, I'll end with this, Kissinger wrote of Richard Helms, who was the DCI. Now, keep in mind, this is a guy, Henry Kissinger, who does not dispense praise lightly, shall we say, in his memoirs. He says it is to the director, this is in the White House year's book, it is to the director that the national security assistant first turns to learn the facts in a crisis and for analysis of events. And since decisions turn on the perception of the consequences of actions, the intelligence assessment can almost amount to a policy recommendation. But concerning Helms personally, he said, disciplined, meticulously fair and discreet, Helms performed his duties with a total objectivity essential to an effective intelligence service. I never knew him to misuse his intelligence or his power. He never forgot that his integrity guaranteed his effectiveness, that his best weapon with presidents was a reputation for reliability. The intelligence input was an important element of every policy deliberation. By and large, the president, I mean the policy, the practice has worked, the presidents have appreciated it, and we need to remember to support also the cabinet level and national security advisors who are also key to the process. Thank you very much. Our next commentator is Peter Clement, who currently is deputy assistant director of one of the new mission centers that director Brennan mentioned in his remarks. Before then, he had many, many years as an analyst and senior intelligence manager focusing principally on the Soviet Union and later Russia. And apropos to Mr. Helgerson's remark about supporting the vice president and the senior staff, Mr. Clement was a PDB briefer for vice president Cheney and national security advisor, Rice, and currently, or excuse me, was chief of the CIA's presidential transition team in 2008. Peter? Thank you, David. First I'm saying it's a pleasure to be here. This is my second time, and this has been an incredibly impressive library. The staff here are terrific, and I've had a lot of fun just touring the exhibits for the second time. They upgraded them and it's a terrific facility here. Second, I'm also honored because I'm actually sitting with a friend of our people for whom I've worked pretty directly for a good part of my career, including currently John Brennan. And part of the joy of being with the agency for 30 plus years is working with this caliber of true intellect, insight, and also just a lot of fun to work with. So I wanna thank everybody for having me on the panel as well. I wanna talk specifically about my time as a PDB briefer. I feel particularly strongly about the PDB because pretty much most of my long time tenure here at the agency, the PDB has been central to my life, either as a contributor or as a writer, as an analyst, as a first and second line editor, as a reviewer, not the most popular job at the agency. As a senior reviewer, when I was sitting in the DI suite as the final reviewer before I went out the door, also a fairly unpopular job, although I got to be a lot of tremendously smart and terrific analysts to work with on review. And then finally, as the actual delivery person, as the briefer, I actually got to deliver the book to the senior policy makers. So I spent one year as a PDB briefer. For the first six months, I briefed vice president Cheney. For the second six months, I briefed national security advisor, Connalisa Rice, her deputy, Stephen Hadley, and another deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism, Fran Townsend. So briefly, I'd like to divide my comments into two parts. First, what I would call the prep part, what my life was like getting ready for the briefing. And then secondly, sort of the key elements of the job as the briefer in the room with the policy maker. My wife was not thrilled when I mentioned I was taking on this job as a PDB briefer. When I told her, well, I'll be going to bed at six o'clock tonight, dear, because I got to get to work by 12.30. So I would spend from 12.30 a.m. until 6.30 a.m., getting ready to be the briefer that day. So you might ask yourself, why do you need six hours to prepare? I mean, it's a pretty small book. There's four or five pieces. What's the problem here? And the short answer is, as David noted, I'm really a Russian hand from the past. And suddenly I found myself having to brief about nuclear programs, nuclear proliferation, weird goings on in North Korea. Take your pick of the world, then suddenly I had to brief on this. So part of my prep was, familiarize yourself closely with the piece. What's the main analytic line? What's the basis? As Admiral Inman noted, where did we get this information and how good is it because I'd need to be able to answer those kinds of questions from the recipient. And then figure out if there were any other odds and ends I needed to prepare for. And Vice President Cheney's case, his book was a little bigger than just the PDB book. A lot of the policymaker recipients will say, well, yeah, I got all these articles, but I wanna see some interesting other things. Have you done any interesting memos that relate to issues I'm interested in? Is there really potentially any good traffic? And here we're talking about the finished intel products from different agencies, but we call them raw traffic. So maybe some interesting intercepts, some interesting imagery that might pertain to an item in the book. So you're spending a little bit of your time figuring out what's gonna be in the package that you deliver down to the policymaker. The second thing I discovered very quickly was how much I didn't know, which is very sobering. You think you're relatively well informed until you start reading all these pieces. So I quickly realized like in about a day or two, Peter, you know, this whole Russia thing, it's great that you know a lot about Russia, but that's not gonna get you too far. So I adopted the mentality, you know, my job here is to basically, I'm gonna be a mile wide and an inch deep. I'm gonna be able to get through five or 10 or 15 minutes on a particular issue, but I'm never gonna be that deep, deep expert. It's important to recognize your limitations. There are some answers that you're not gonna have and the right answer always is, sir, I'll get back to you. We have people who will have the answers, but at this point, it may not be me. So the other thing that goes on in the six hours, you interact with a lot of people. We might still be finishing a particular piece if there's a less minute change, you wanna get updated. The analysts who actually wrote the pieces will come up pretty early in the morning before you leave to get in the car at six, 30 or seven to update you if there's some new tidbit that you need for the piece, or if you ask for a pre-brief. And sometimes if I were doing a piece on, say, the nuclear fuel cycle and how many centrifuges are spinning in certain countries, and there was some technical issue that I really didn't know much about, I'd say I wanna have some people from that office come up here and sort of update me on how I can talk about this or explain it in case I get any questions. So there's a lot of support that goes on in getting the briefers ready in the morning. The other thing the analysts would do is, and this is not what was going on in the early days of the pickle in the PDB, but as analysts, the job of preparing a PDB item became much more intense and demanding over the years because we develop all these background notes. So the briefer, in addition to having the piece, would have several pages of so-called background notes where the analysts would write. Well, here are the kinds of questions you might anticipate you're gonna get and here are the answers. Very, very helpful if you're the person going down there. I'm looking at Porter Goss, when he talked about those expert professional briefers going down there, Porter, as you know, some of us were perhaps more expert than others. So all of this prep actually really helped. A couple of observations on the actual delivery piece. So about 6.30, I'd hop in the car. Fortunately, we had drivers. I didn't have to worry about the driving part. And I'd do a last minute cramming in the back seat as we'd get down to the vice president's residence or in Condoleezza Rice's office down on the West Wing. And as I'd go in, I'd kinda walk through the pieces in the book and that's job number one. There's multiple roles you play as the actual briefer that morning. The first is you're conveying the bottom line of the piece some particular issue or aspect that you may wanna sensitize a reader to about either the sensitivity of the sources. Is this something new? Or perhaps more importantly, is there a shift in the analytic line of the analysts when we're briefing this particular piece? We wanna make sure that we clarify any ambiguities or uncertainties that the reader might have. All the recipients, everybody has a different style. Some like to read through the piece and then ask questions. Some will read and look up and say, what about this sentence, what's that about? Others like you to actually walk through the piece and do a really quick summary bottom line and then an interesting data point or two. The other part, two other big parts in the briefer role is you actually are a very important liaison person between the intel community and the policymaker. Having that time alone in the office gives you a unique opportunity to judge A, how well the piece worked. Did they have a lot of questions? Were there things maybe we should have done differently in the way we presented the piece to make it more clear. So when you go back to headquarters, you can provide really good context and feedback about why things worked or didn't work. Or in some cases, why you're generating a lot more questions. So the other role that you play here is that you're the actual vehicle to bring back a fair number of questions and taskings. Sometimes that would not make you so popular. You get back to the building and make a few phone calls and say, oh, Dr. Rice would like this memo by tomorrow morning. This is a big question she had about this piece or Vice President Cheney. So you would frequently be the conveyor belt, as it were, for bringing back feedback. The other thing that you would do when you would come back after the briefing, you frequently would get the analysts together to talk about the feedback directly, convey any taskings and then alert them. He had some other questions that aren't directly related to the piece, but it's something we might think about writing. So we use this opportunity to provide some insights into some of the issues or concerns that the reader might have that have nothing directly related to a particular piece, but they give you a nice heads up to anticipate there's some issues that are on their mind. Why don't we plan ahead? Let's think of another piece we might do about X, Y, and Z. For all the people I briefed, for Dr. Rice or Deputy Hadley or Vice President Cheney, frequently they would say, gee, I'm really interested, I can't do it today, but I'd love to get kind of a deeper look at what's going on in whatever, Russia, China. And we would go back and arrange for what we would call a deep dive and let's organize a briefing. And Vice President Cheney would do this, not infrequently, he'd want a briefing on a Saturday for maybe a couple of hours and we'd bring out a team of analysts and really do what I would call a serious review of all the issues related to a particular country or an issue. So in that sense, we were really trying to be a full service liaison rep, both delivering the book, providing some context to the reader, but also bringing back the feedback and conveying to the authors or to the director. There would be days where there would be particular feedback that was either sensitive or not good news where you'd want to be sure to alert your boss, John Helverson, or perhaps Porter Goss and say, boss, this piece stirred a lot of interest that you may want to be aware of. So the next time you're in the building down there, you're not blindsided. So I'm going to stop there. If you have any other questions, we'd be happy to take them on and they have questions and answers. Our final commentator today is Professor William Inbudin, who as you know from the bio, is a professor here, the executive director of the Climate Center and has very extensive background commenting on foreign affairs, foreign policy issues, and also brings a policy perspective too after service at the State Department Policy Planning Staff and the National Security Council, Professor Inbudin. Okay. All right, thank you, David. And as David indicated, I want to offer my brief comments today from two different vantage points. First, as a historian, as a scholar of the Cold War, I'll offer some reflections on the significance of these particular documents for the scholarly enterprise and as a scholarly resource. And then second, as a former staff member on the NSC at the White House, I'll offer some brief reflections on the policymaker's perspective on the PDB. So first, we're in my historian's hat. So the basic craft of the historian is to reconstruct and interpret the past based on the documentary record stored in archives such as the LBJ Presidential Library here where we're sitting today. And these archives help us address questions like how the world looked to policy makers and leaders as events unfolded. What policy options were they considering and rejecting? What policy options did they embrace and why? And so archives are unique in that they give us a snapshot of what was known at the time as opposed to, say, written memoirs or later oral history interviews, which can be very helpful, but they're also invariably subject to the imperfections of personal memory and sometimes the distortions of personal vanity. In other words, we all wanna be remembered well and sometimes we remember ourselves a little better than the facts we weren't. So while the Cold War archival record contains a rich repository of policy memos to and from leaders, correspondence and transcripts of discussions, we now have a lot of archives from other countries as particularly at the end of the Cold War as Eastern European archives opened up, missing thus far for historians has been any visibility into the relationship we've been hearing about here today between the president of the United States and his intelligence community. And so in short, we historians have access to what policy advisors recommended to the president, what decisions were made, what was said in public and presidential speeches, but until now we haven't had access to what the president really knew at the time. So that's why these new PDBs help answer in a foreign policy context, a variant of Senator Howard Baker's very famous question from Watergate, what did the president know and when did he know it? And then these PDBs also help illumine a related question, what did the president want to know? And reading these is almost like getting a mirror image of the president's mind at the time. As has been discussed here, an aspect of the PDB that is perhaps not fully appreciated yet is it's not just developed from a blank slate by the intelligence community based on what the CIA wants to tell the president, but it's a very interactive process. It's driven largely by customer demand. So the president tells the intelligence community what he's interested in and in what format he's interested in and the IC response. And so these PDBs don't just provide a record of what the intelligence community was telling the president about the world at the time, provides a record almost like a mirror image diary of the president's daily concerns and preoccupations. What world leaders interested in him? What types of issues worried him? What countries and regions were on his mind? And well, I've had the privilege several days ago of getting some advanced access to these PDBs, but in full disclosure, they total what, 2,500 documents, over 8,000 pages, I have not read them all. But I did read a number of them and a couple of my graduate students and staff read a lot more. So special shout out to Olivia Sones and Anna Waterfield if you're here. Thank you, I'm gonna base these comments in part in your good work. A few highlights and takeaways from what we've seen already and what all historians and journalists in here and interested in public should look for. First, the staggering breadth of issues that a president daily confronts and the multitude of considerations he must juggle. And I know this has been echoed by a number of the other panelists here. But this is a really important cautionary note for historians who may wanna only focus on reconstructing the decision-making process on a single issue. So example one that Director Brennan mentioned earlier today, historians who are writing on the Johnson administration's troop escalation in Vietnam in the 1964 and 65 window will of course find much value in these documents seeing what the CIA was telling the president at the time about conditions in Vietnam. But I also hope that historians focusing on Vietnam will take notice that while wrestling with the Vietnam decision, LBJ was simultaneously receiving warnings and alarming assessments about the Dominican Republic, Congo, turbulence in the Middle East, Soviet and Chinese communist adventurism throughout the developing world, political instability among American allies in Europe and Asia, student unrest around the globe. So these are a bracing reminder that no issue is confronted or decision is made in isolation. But they're all part of the boiling cauldron of challenges that a president faces every day. And then there are those PDBs from some really pivotal moments in history. Again, Director Brennan referenced the Kennedy assassination and then LBJ transition earlier as did some of the other panelists here. But it's really chilling to read the pickle at the time from November 22nd, 1963. Because remember, it's prepared a course before the assassination and it contained a series of items on the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, Indonesia. And there are really unique glimpse into what might have been on President Kennedy's mind that fateful day in Dallas. And then right after that, something I think very unique in the annals of PDBs, Director Brennan mentioned a poem. Once the horrific news from Dallas broke, the pickle staff added an amendment and I'll just read it here. In honor of President Kennedy for whom the president's intelligence checklist was first written on June 17, 1961. For this day, the checklist staff can find no words more fitting than a verse quoted by the president to a group of newspaper men the day he learned of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Bullfight critics ranked in rows, crowd the enormous plaza full, but only one is there who knows. And he's the man who fights the bull. And then again, as it has been alluded, the next day's pickle of November 23rd, the new president LBJ's first encounter with the really unfathomable challenges of the office offered a bracing overview of the world he encountered, reports of escalating Vietnam attacks in South Vietnam. Communist insurgency in Venezuela, recurring Soviet pressures on West Berlin after we thought that had been settled a couple years earlier. Political instability in Iraq and Syria, Labor Party gains in Great Britain, one of our main allies. Takes only the briefest stretch of our historical imaginations to appreciate that this was the new reality that faced LBJ and the realization that these are not just academic interests, but these are the things he faces being responsible for leadership of the free world. So there's much rich material in here for historians. Let me shift now and just offer a couple concluding thoughts or in my head as a erstwhile, a recovering policymaker, if you will. And this was this, the president's interaction with the PDB often shaped the policy agenda for those of us working for him on the NSC staff. As you've picked up, the PDB is such a privileged and close-hold document that really only a small handful of White House staff at the very senior levels have access to it. For the rest of us, the directors and senior directors and some DNSAs, our exposure to the PDB would be episodic and prompted by the president's reactions to a particular topic. I suppose I can say now, so one rather delicate one that came up for us when I was there in 2005 is President Bush got into a fairly stern disagreement with his briefer over a matter, a question of the historical record in Iran, particularly relating to the Iranian posture in the hostage crisis of 1979. And I wasn't in the oval at the time, but from National Securities there had been the report that the president really disagreed with the briefer, the briefer held her ground. There's a bit of an impasse. And so the question was kicked over to my office, the strategy office, you need to resolve this. Well, bureaucratic politics 101 is it's not a happy place to be stuck between the president and the CIA. And that's where we found ourselves. Fortunately, one of my more courageous colleagues in the office, Peter Fever, took the lead on this while I ducked under the desk. Anyway, and Peter is a very honorable and empirically minded political scientist. He did the research and it turns out President Bush was right. So I don't know if Director Goss, you remember that one, but anyway. So, okay. So. And the next day we got raises. So all worked out. All right, so anyway. Other times the president might be intrigued by an item in the PDB and then ask us his policy staff to develop a follow-up initiative on the issue. So, and this sometimes turned into really a full intelligence and policy feedback loop. So one time a PDB item on a, let's just say a large country in East Asia, interested the president and he asked me to then develop a major strategic initiative on that country, policy initiative. So several months later after we'd completed the policy initiative and we're ready to roll it out, we then fed it back to CIA, who then adapted that into a special feature that was a follow-up deep dive PDB. In other words, we made a lot more work for the intelligence community. So, and you've already heard the consternation from that. So to fully appreciate the significance of the PDB, one really has to consider it from a full spectrum of perspectives. Of course, the intelligence community leadership as we have here today, but also the scholarly community, the media, and I know we've got several leading journalists here, and the policymaker and the warfighter, as we'll soon hear from Admiral McRaven. In closing, I wanna say this. I personally wanna thank and commend President Obama and Director Brennan for their principled leadership in taking what really is an unprecedented step of declassifying and releasing these documents. I think it's a great hallmark of what it means to live in a free society. This prompts a final thought. For all the criticism that the US intelligence community has faced in recent years, in comparison with every other major intelligence service around the world, the American intelligence community remains the most transparent intelligence community in the world. And for that, I'm grateful. Thank you. We have about 15 minutes left in our symposium here to take some questions from the audience. Before we do, I would enjoin anyone who's proposing to advance to the microphone to please keep your question in the form of a question. Keep it within one or two sentences. Please avoid any long-winded prefatory statements or tea-ups. And thirdly, please stick to the content of the symposium, the remarks made here, the details in the publication that you received when you arrived, and please stay away from current events or other controversies that were in no position to discuss in this forum. I will start on this side and then move over here if anyone is in line. Otherwise, I'll stick with this side, okay? Sir. Well, I'm afraid I must withdraw in response to your last restriction. Since my question had to do with the intelligence in regard to the emergence and the capabilities of ISO in which there seemed to be a contradiction between the director's public testimony as to the agency's briefing of the president honor and the president's own statements in March of 2014 which belittled the threat and referred to ISO as a junior varsity of China. You're exactly right. You'll need to withdraw because it's not part of the symposium today. I apologize for that and I will take my seat. Thank you. Thank y'all for being here today. Very important day. Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. Robert Morrow of Austin, Texas. Director Brennan gave us a very interesting nugget a few minutes ago. It was the Kennedy's administration's directive to the CIA saying under no circumstances should the PDB or the pickle be given to Johnson under no circumstances. A few years ago, Roger Stone wrote a book called The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ. You gentlemen out there are historians, scholars, men with decades in US intelligence. Do any of you believe that Lyndon Johnson or the CIA murdered John Kennedy? Let me be very direct. It's total fiction. It has no element of accuracy or fact at all. And who do you think killed John Kennedy? Who? All right. Admiral Inman, who do you think killed John Kennedy? Well, we know with certainty that Oswald killed him. We're gonna be left for history to understand what role Cuba and Castro may or may not have been involved in that process. Whether efforts to assassinate Castro had caused him in turn to inspire it. That's pure speculation. There is no fact to support that speculation, but there is great certainty that the Stonebook has zero credibility or fact. Okay, will you speak for yourself? Next question, please. No, that's a question for the panel, and I'd like to have some. Sir, please, one question. I'd like to have a question of that, please. One question. That's one question for... Sir. One question for Corey Goss. Who killed John Kennedy? Please withdraw and allow someone else to ask a question. Thank you. No, my answer would have been, I think Bill O'Reilly had the last word on that if you read his book. You talked about the pressures on the people, predicting your sources and the pressures on the analysts. Briefly, what is the effect of WikiLeaks in Snowden in terms of how this is done? And then, second, if I can, what is the correlation between what the president receives daily and what I'm gonna see in the Washington Post or New York Times that day? Let me do quickly the first part and defer to my colleagues for the second. The Snowden revelations are the single most damaging series of leaks for U.S. intelligence collection capability. And our relationship with an ally that has occurred since World War II. He is a traitor, not a hero in the process. WikiLeaks was not as damaging to intelligence collection as it was to our relationship with other countries because most of that damage, the State Department, I would not want to be called not sharing, had dumped virtually all their secret level cables into a defense intelligence network. That's what Manning was able to access and release. And the damage here is that it revealed who was talking to us in Kabul. What were the individuals who were talking to the U.S. representatives? Same for other countries. So while it may not have compromised in the same sense, what we were reading or listening to, but the damage of people being willing to talk to us, if they're gonna show up somewhere in WikiLeaks and the rest of it and embarrass them in their own country, terribly damaging to getting the information we need to be informed on the outside world. David, if I may answer the second question, which I think is a perceptive one, it might be good that I answer it because it's been fully 20 years since I was the deputy director for intelligence responsible for the production of the PDB. But at that time, now talking history, because this question had arisen, I had a pretty careful study done and for some period, frankly forgotten how long, we discovered that something like 60% of the PDB items, the essential substance of the item was not replicated in any way in the press. I mean, we talked about the same countries and general issues, but the substance of the information reported was not to be found in the New York Times or the Washington Post. I can't speak to how that ratio may have changed from earlier periods or still later periods, but I found it striking at the time. It's a unique publication. Peter? Can I add one footnote to John's comment? The other thing that's important to recognize, the PDB is not actually like the newspaper. There are items in the PDB that are not about things that happened yesterday. There are pretty often pieces about either long-term trends, ongoing trends, things that are not in the headlines today or tomorrow, but are nonetheless significant enough that we want to alert the policymakers, this is something that's going to be coming up on your radar at some point in time. Here's a little heads up. So it's really not just a current intelligence newspaper. I'd like to add to that that times may have changed, but there's no question that the media content of the day and the influential media outlets in our country was also a sidebar in the information we had. Didn't necessarily brief it as a part of the PDB, but we were very clearly aware of it because quite often we got questions because something would appear that would tickle an interest and the question would come and we'd take it home, research it and come back the next day or whatever it might be with relevant information if there was any. To say there was a correlation would be too strong a word, but to say that interest was peaked sometimes by what the major news organizations were putting out and quite often followed sort of in lockstep what editorial board was saying in another, there's no question that was of interest to the policymakers. If there was a factual aspect of that, that might gotten to our territory, but we obviously didn't get into the political aspects of it. Thank you. Next question, please. There's a November 2014 article in the New York Times about how the Obama administration in a year earlier had asked for a report from the CIA about the historical record of the United States supporting through armed support, insurrection-narrated groups. And the report came out that it was complete failure. All the CIA's operations in that regard were failures. And the Obama administration went ahead and proceeded to go ahead and arm the Syrian rebels in full defiance of the CIA's expert advice. Now a couple of things follow from this. The first is, is this report is classified and how can anybody in the CIA talk about the importance of open government when a report like this based on the open historical record is classified and kept from the American people. Another thing is that there are other issues involving past support that presumably should have gone to the White House. And has anybody at the CIA ever bothered to task of the failure of decapitation strategy and the war on drugs? And it's in applicability in our current drone wars? And- Let me cut in and address that promptly because then I wanna get into at least a- Well, I'd like to get in to bring it back into- Let me answer it because I helped contribute to that report. I was the lead historian on the matter and the press accounts of it were grossly distorted. I'm not sure who was talking to who half heartedly about what, but the press accounts based on that particular report are very, very inaccurate. It presents a much more mixed and nuanced picture of the record of success and failure in those regards. However, as I said earlier, we're talking about current events. Let's- Somebody please ask a question about- Well, let's get to Dick Helms. Please, sir. No, would you please sit down and get- Dick Helms said that he could have reported that there were- Please sit down. Sir. Sir. Policy one bit. Sir, you are behaving in a civil manner. Please retreat to your seat. Sir, do you have a question about the pickle or the PDB? As it relates to PDBs- Yes, please. Finally. Just curious to know in the history of PDBs, there hasn't been a case when an item was not included in the PDB, but later turned out to be a major stamp food, maybe the same day, and they wish it would have been included in the PDB. In other words, was somebody ever found themselves in very hot water with POTUS as a result of something- Of something not being included, that should have been. Okay. How about the practitioners here? Do you have the gas? Fortunately, there's more communication with the President of the United States between the agency and the White House than just the PDB. That would be the main vehicle for dealing the necessary business, nation's business to the President of the United States as the Chief Decider Policymaker, but that's not the only way. And if something comes up, you can pick up the phone or if you miss something or discover that the President's agenda has changed and he suddenly has a visitor from out of town that he needs to know something about. Those are the kinds of things, of course, the agency has, the whole community has many capabilities to respond to. Thank you. And a hatch-off and very sincere thanks for all those in the intelligence community that keeps our nation safe. Thank you. Ma'am, we have time for your question. Please, very, very concise. Well, I hope you'll be happy to know this really is about PDBs in history. I was curious, given that a lot of credit for the, quote, downfall of the Soviet Union was attributed to an arms race that essentially bankrupted them. You know, that's the way it's been reported lately. I'm curious if and or how that would have been addressed in a PDB that it was particularly non-mil... Well, it was military spending, but it had more to do with economic issues behind the scenes than it was a militaristic battlefield, so to speak. It's sort of an addressing long-term trans-vice daily reporting, right? Peter, why don't you field that one? These are exactly the kind of questions you don't look forward to. But as you're probably aware, there's considerable debate among academics about what was the main driver in the collapse of the Soviet Union. These are probably my own personal views. I'd say there's a variety of factors. Gorbachev was significantly a huge driver because he tackled issues no one else was prepared to take on because he knew how bad things were. One of those factors clearly was military spending. Another was the war in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan. And then domestic internal trends was a lot of ethnic tensions in different parts of the former Soviet Union. A number of things he had to wrestle with, not to mention extreme resistance within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to his major reforms. So he had a lot on his plate. But Peter, I think it's fair that you weren't getting questions from the consumers about the state of the Soviet economy. And it was ultimately the state of the economy couldn't keep up. In my several years in working this process, I never had a policy maker ask me about the state of the Soviet economy, except one occasion, Casper Weinberger wanted to know how to measure the ruble against the dollar because he wanted to use some displays in his armed services committee testimony. But that's why you get answers to the questions you're asking. And when there was little interest on the state of the Soviet economy, there wasn't a lot of focus on it. So there was indeed some surprise that it seemed to be so weak, so fragile that it ultimately led to the collapse. All right, thank you very much. We're through our appointed time at 3.15. So we will break for now and come back at 3.30. I believe there's a break outside for all of you. And then Admiral McCraven will have his remarks. Thank you very much. Thank you.