 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Doug Swanson, visitor services manager for the National Archives Museum and producer for the Noontime Lecture Series. Excuse me. On behalf of David Ferriero Archivist of the United States, I'd like to welcome you all to the William G. McGowan Theater located in the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. And I'd also like to give a special shout out to our good friends from C-SPAN who are also joining us today. Before we hear from Philip Mudd about his new book, Black Sight, the CIA and the Post-911 World, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs taking place in this theater. This Friday, August 16th at noon, William G. Highland Jr. will tell us about a forgotten founding father, George Mason, the founding father who gave us the Bill of Rights. And then on Tuesday, September 10th at noon, Sidney Blumenthal will tell us about his recently released Volume 3 of his biography of Abraham Lincoln, All the Powers of Earth, the Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856 to 1863. To find out more about these programs and our exhibits, please visit our website at www.archives.gov. You'll also find some printed materials out in the theater lobby about upcoming events as well as a sign-up sheet so that you can receive an electronic version of our monthly calendar. Philip Mudd joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1985 as an analyst specializing in South Asia and then the Middle East. After the September 11th attacks, he was the CIA member of the small diplomatic team that helped piece together a new government for Afghanistan. After returning to the CIA, he became deputy director of the Counterterrorist Center and served there until 2005. He was the first deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations National Security Branch and later became the FBI's senior intelligence advisor. Philip Mudd has received numerous CIA awards and accommodations and has commented about terrorism in congressional testimony and been featured in broadcast and print news. He is now the president of Mudd Management, a company specializing in security consulting, analytic training, and public speaking about security issues. He is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute and serves as senior global advisor to Oxford Analytica, a British-based firm specializing in advising multinational companies. He sits on the advisory board for the National Counterterrorism Center and for the director of National Intelligence and he serves on the Aspen Institute's Homeland Security Group. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Philip Mudd to the National Archives. You missed the most important part of that, which is I live part-time in Memphis, Tennessee, the Bluff City. Well, thank you. Stick with Payne's barbecue. I was running there in a place called Midtown Memphis, which is a historic part of Memphis. It must be now three or four years ago wondering whether to write another book. I've written a couple and reflecting on some of what I witnessed at the CIA, particularly during that excruciating time after 9-11 and realizing some of my colleagues, many of whom were friends, had written their stories, but many of the people that I worked with would never speak, would never write, and their stories would never be told if no one talked to them, put their stories together in one simple narrative and explained what happened. So I decided that morning running my five miles in Midtown Memphis, I would do that. This is mostly their story. It's not a history. It's not every document that ever appeared related to what we call the program, the secret to tension and interrogation of all kind of prisoners. It's the story of men and women that I served with and who decided to speak to me because they trusted me. Step back in time with me. This is we're going into a time machine. If you go back to the 1990s, a lot of my colleagues talk about the peace to be ended. The time to paraphrase one of them when we thought we had killed the dragon, the Soviet Union, and only snakes were left. That's a time after the fall of the Soviet Union, the fall of the wall where people thought the intelligence challenges of the future may not reach the magnitude that they reached during the time of the Soviet Union. But the counter terrorism people knew they had a problem. That problem started mostly when bin Laden was in Sudan, accelerated when he moved to Afghanistan. But when I spoke to them, when I spoke to 35 or 40, again, most of whom will never speak, when I spoke to them about those times, about the peace dividend, there's a great sense of frustration in some ways, sadness. That they witnessed the rise of a global network and that the tools they had were so limited when you look back in retrospect, realize that's only 20 years ago. That's less than a full generation. The tools the CIA had were limited. If you think about loss of budget and personnel, I'm not accusing the national security infrastructure of doing anything wrong. All of us thought the same thing, the dragon is gone. But if you think about any organization, whether it's a tech organization or a manufacturing organization, if you lose substantial pieces of money and people, your ability to operate declines. There was also the attitude about terrorism. Think back again, only 20 years. Nobody I spoke with could have imagined a world when somebody said we could conduct lightning raids in Afghanistan day after day after day. The thought that a raid would happen where there was high risk of American soldiers' lives was almost unthinkable before 9-11. Forget about a U.S. invasion, just a raid against an al-Qaeda compound. And we knew, they knew where some of the compounds were. Much less, much less an armed drone that could kill a terrorist overseas. In debate for years, never happened. Meanwhile, there's atrophy, a bit of atrophy at the CIA. For example, training. Training spies declined. The number of spies in CIA training programs declined. And the attitude about terrorism was mixed. Remember, after 1947, the targets that the CIA typically chased were big targets. The Soviets, the Chinese, the Cuban Missile Crisis, big targets. I served. I returned from taking a leave of absence to the CIA in 1992 and was told to go to the counter-terror center because it was seen as a place where you sent people who maybe weren't ready for prime time, which, of course, was a model I fit. That changed over time. Like any organization, even large organizations, people make a difference. In the personalities, the colorful personalities that I read about in the book and that I knew so well were critical in keeping counter-terrorism from declining further in the 90s. George Tenet, the CIA director, was immersed in counter-terrorism and insisted that counter-terrorism gets some level of primacy. He insisted on budget. And he insisted on ensuring that there was leadership there that was well-regarded across the agency. Not common in the 1990s, including the director of the center, a guy named Kofor Black, legendary in my business, who raised the profile of counter-terrorism, increasing the quality of people who were going over there, increasing the respect of counter-terrorism at CIA before 9-11. But make no mistake, the peace dividend for intelligence, the lack of focus on terrorism meant that on that day, on that day, the CIA and the counter-terrorist world was not only not prepared, they could not be prepared. They all talked to me about feeling before, but especially in the searing months and years after 9-11, about feeling like they're on the back foot. On that day, and this is not over-dramatized, everything changed. Years of debate about armed drones done. Years of debate about raids in Afghanistan. Forget about raids. The CIA will be first in with operatives with money, technology, guidance within weeks of 9-11. Forget about raids. The U.S. Army, Big Green, will invade Afghanistan. The transition not only in resources, but in attitude was foundational. The CIA director used to ask us, I sat in on the nightly threat briefings for years. We had about five or six briefers. I was trading back and forth with another one of my colleagues opening the meeting with the threat briefing, a matrix of 10 or 15 or 20 threats, people who would write in threats to a website, foreign security services who would tell us that they uncovered a threat. Intercepted communications where Al Qaeda was talking about coming to the United States. I started those briefings and one of the things that was so evident and that was spoken around some of those tables was a simple concept. We anticipated a second wave, what we call the second wave for years. The second wave was what we anticipated would be another 9-11, but perhaps worse because Al Qaeda had an anthrax program that we did not fully understand. For months, months and longer, we did not understand the research and development. We did not understand whether they had taken strains of anthrax out of Afghanistan. There was concern that the second wave might not be aircraft, that it might be anthrax. And added to that was a fundamental problem. We did not understand the adversary. The human source penetration, that's the bread and butter of a human source, of a human informant organization like CIA, the human source penetration and this is operative speaking to me, this is not me speaking. The people who ran operations against Al Qaeda would tell you that human source penetration was modest. So in the midst of America watching horrific videos of people jumping off buildings and watching pages in the newspapers of faces of the fallen, we were sitting behind the scenes with the director saying, if there is that second wave tomorrow and you say, I wish I had done this, that or the other thing, why don't you do it today? In the midst of all this, there was a drumbeat in the spring of 2002 and I witnessed a lot of this firsthand that was intense and getting louder. And that drumbeat was the hunt for the first major CIA captive, Abu Zubeda. One of the challenges Al Qaeda had was they miscalculated what the U.S. response to 9-11 would be. They did not anticipate A, such a huge response, they thought it might be, they didn't anticipate they would take the towers down, but they thought the response might be more cruise missiles. They also anticipated that if the U.S. military went in, they working with the Taliban would believe the U.S. military just as they had bled the Soviets. They did not have an exit plan. The military operations, intelligence operations, the cooperation with the Afghans the U.S. was working with, an element of Afghanistan, a group called the Northern Alliance, were so successful that Al Qaeda had to flee before they ever developed a plan. And many of them fled east into Pakistan where they started making mistakes. Mistakes that allowed us in a part of the business, in intelligence that we call targeting, that is having individual analysts responsible for an individual terrorist to the tactical level where you know what that terrorist communications patterns are, you know what his family is, you know what the courier network is. We had individual analysts in a growing intelligence profession called targeting analysts who were watching Abu Zubaydah. In the briefings, the growing drum beat was the sense that the circle around him almost by the day was getting tighter. And then in the spring the raid happened. He almost died, suffered wounds from the gunfight that ensued, particularly a grievous wound to his leg. In a side piece of the story that I tell in this book, the CI flew out physicians to ensure he would not die. Another bit of the agility after 9-11 that made the U.S. response so powerful. You could, could you imagine calling a medical center before 9-11 and saying we'd like you to loan us some of your physicians to go treat a terrorist overseas now and we're going to put them on a plane. Unimaginable before 9-11. That began the search for what a detainee could tell the CIA about an organization the CIA did not fully understand. Forget about plots. Those are important. The counterterrorism business, a lot of what I witnessed was not about plots. That's what you saw in the newspapers. Our business was a people business. People, if you stop a plot, if you harden a building, if you harden an aircraft, people who are committed to the murder of innocence will simply go on to create another plot so unless you can take down the architects of an al-Qaeda or an ISIS, you will face plots forever. Ours was a people business. Had to find, fix, and finish a human being typically by staging a raid operation. Abu Zubaydah was the first one who went down. The reason he was significant was I mentioned the lack of understanding of al-Qaeda. If counterterrorism is often a people business, obviously the first questions you might have for a terrorist would be can you tell us about plots? Can you tell us about this second wave? Can you tell us about whether there are further hijackers in the United States? But the stuff behind the scenes, can you tell us what the organization looks like? Can you tell us what the hierarchy looks like? Who are the key players? Who are the trainers? Who are the facilitators? Who's creating the false documents? Who comes up with the propaganda? Who are the couriers? Critically important for intelligence. Who carries messages between al-Qaeda leaders who don't want to communicate by electrons? That basic material, I call it bits of sand that make a beach, that basic material is critical and we did not have a good understanding of that in spring of 2002. Abu Zubaydah talked, but then in the memory of the people I spoke with he shut down. And he told his interviewers, his interrogators, go home, have babies, don't come back because I'm not speaking anymore. So in the intensity of that time when America was saying make sure this doesn't happen again, when a president of the United States said make sure this doesn't happen again, when a congress said how did you fail to catch it the first time, when the anticipation at the CIA was a second wave that might include anthrax, CIA officers in the cauldron of decision making that was the spring and summer of 2002 said well, if Abu Zubaydah we think is shutting down what are our options? We can send him into the U.S. justice system where he will lawyer up and never speak again. We can send him to another foreign country that might have charges against him. The prospect is that that other country will interrogate him themselves. We will not sit in the room and they will shield from us critical intelligence that we need. They also will not have the same priorities that we have. They're going to want to ask questions about their country. We want to ask questions about America. So through a series of conversations among CIA leaders there is a fateful decision that is the subject of this book and that is should we develop our own secret facilities called black sites, clandestine facilities in friendly countries overseas where we will transfer al-Qaeda prisoners in this case an al-Qaeda prisoner and interrogate them using the harsh techniques that have been splashed across every page in newspapers and in America for more than a decade. There's another piece of this process. Everybody knew when I was there that people would ask questions later on and everybody knew that this was not only sensitive but would be controversial. That is the program, the secret black site network. So there are conversations between the inspector general and at the CIA and the lawyers at the Department of Justice who set law and interpret law for America to say what is appropriate in terms of interrogation for a CIA black site, what complies with the U.S. Constitution, and what complies with federal law. And we want it on paper and we ain't moving until it's on paper. Through the summer of 2002, CIA lawyers in the Department of Justice discussed what could be done with Abu Zubaydah. He was already transferred stable and transferred to a black site but the formal authorization from the Department of Justice did not arrive until August of 2002. August of 2002 is when my colleagues marked the beginning of the black site program. Abu Zubaydah went through tough interrogation techniques. People talk about waterboarding. There are more than 100 detainees at CIA facilities, black sites. Three of them were waterboarded. Abu Zubaydah was one of them. One of the challenges of talking to a detainee and one of the challenges of discussing this in a public environment where we don't have the luxury of time that we have in this auditorium is people will look at me every day and say, well, come on. If you put somebody under duress, they're going to lie. So let me explain as we went through that process with Abu Zubaydah, why? And I'm not here to defend the program. I'm here because I thought that the views of the CIA should be explained so Americans on either end of the spectrum, those who want to attack what was done and those who support it and I hear both when I'm on the streets will understand what happened and why. We'll be able to walk the shoes my colleagues walk through and say I understand what they did regardless of whether I like it or not. But on this foundational question of why would you pressure someone to speak with techniques like sleep deprivation because you know they're going to lie. My answer is straightforward. First of all, people not under duress lie too. That's not the full answer, but an al-Qaeda terrorist who's not under duress is going to make up stories all day long. That's not the real point. The real point is an analytic effort I mentioned earlier called targeting. You cannot have a successful high-end interrogation of a high-end al-Qaeda prisoner unless you know so much about that prisoner. Not a mid-level guy, not a low-level guy, but so much because you've been following for so long that you can come up with in concert with other experts, physicians, psychologists, interrogators, that you can come up with a package of questions over weeks where that detainee starts to realize, A, these guys know a lot more than I know, and B, they seem to know when I'm lying. When that prisoner is under duress, when that prisoner has been in a confined box, when that prisoner has been under sleep deprivation is exhausted, when that prisoner starts to realize that he can't lie his way out, you start to get answers. Not truth. Not truth. We were not stupid. Some answers never came, particularly, for example, locational information about Osama bin Laden. But you get what we call compliance. Someone will try to give you bits and pieces of information that they think are less valuable. Yeah, there was a guy we trained a few years ago who was a German at our camp. I think his name was Hans. I'm making up these stories, but that kind of material, those bits and pieces are invaluable gold for an intel guy. If a prisoner is compliant and he gives you what he thinks is throw away information about somebody who trained a German or a Frenchman or a Brit or an American, just one example, who trained three years ago, game on for people in my world. I'm going to bounce that against every bit of data we've had, against every bit of travel data we can acquire, against every other detainee who might know, and all of a sudden, over the course of time, those bits of sand are going to tell us who that person was who trained three years ago. Based on one tiny shred of evidence, shred of information from a compliant detainee who was giving you stuff he thought was irrelevant. The point I'm making is, of course, people lie. And the only way you can get out of that box is developing an interrogation package that is so complete that that detainee feels he needs a lifeline. And that lifeline was the CIA. A lot happened after the initial stages of the Abu Zubayd interrogation. When I spoke with lawyers and managers of Black Sites, managers of the program, they talk about the maturation of the program. The first months and years were tough. Remember, you have an agency that's trained to collect information from spies overseas that is now serving as a prison, conducting interrogations that the CIA had never done. The CIA values agility, but sometimes they step into programs because they believe nobody will ever do it despite the fact that we don't have experience do it, we'll do it. That was part of the genesis, part of the ethos that led to the Black Sites and the interrogation program. But because of conversations with lawyers who were meticulous, and I know some of these people, the Black Sites matured into 03, 04. Policies and procedures tightened, training changed. There were some individuals involved in the program early on who should not have been involved. Typically over time, people who were recruited if they walked in the room and said, I really want to get in this, because I want to go after with vengeance the people that committed the acts of 9-11, those people were weeded out. You would not pass the application process as the program matured, unless you could be assured that you were in there to be professional. I realized there were weaknesses, they were outlined in the book and mistakes early in the program, but as lawyers, training, leadership got involved, particularly after some egregious mistakes the program matured. Other things happened that were surprising. I can tell you, sitting at the threat table in 2002, 2003, 2004, until I shifted to the FBI in 2005, I thought we were losing. That may come as a surprise to you. The U.S. Army had invaded Afghanistan, support by the CIA. I saw a breadth of a network that I did not think we were in front of for years, and a volume of threats and attacks that we could not contain. Nonetheless, the people I spoke with uniformly said business was good. They never anticipated the volume of high-end prisoners that happened because of the accelerating raids around the world. For example, the architect of 9-11, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the highest-end prisoner the CIA ever held, captured in 2003, architect of the Yemen bombing against the USS Cole. Time and time again, raids happened faster and faster as the intelligence picture clarified, and not only did the program in terms of policies and procedures mature, the sites matured, the CIA needed more sites. They started developing their own custom-built sites. The first site was not custom-built. It was a remote location that a foreign government offered the agency. The expertise the agency had in training people to talk to prisoners and determining what techniques were most effective and determining how to build a psychological package around each individual terrorist so that you could go in and maximize the prospect that that terrorist would say, wow, they know more than I ever expected. I'd better speak. Better and better and better. But there was a flip side. And that was the Iraq War, the declining unity America after the remarkable unity of 9-11 leading up to the Iraq War, and increasing questions about whether the CIA program was sustainable, especially, and many of my colleagues would view this with some sense of pride, especially since the second wave never happened. Let me put it this way. The fact that America had the time and space to discuss what should be done in a democratic society resulted partly from the fact that there was not another major attack. Many of my colleagues are persuaded that if there had been more catastrophic attacks, people would have asked far fewer questions about what techniques America used against terrorists. Let me make it simpler. The decline of the program was partly due to the success in keeping America safe. And the debate was a good thing. The word that was used by my colleagues was simple. That word was end game. As early as 2002, 2003, early on, the CIA was starting to say, our job is to extract intelligence from a human being, from a terrorist. We are not jailers. We are not the Bureau of Prisons. And once we extract that intelligence, we are not going to be holding people for 20 years. We don't even necessarily want to hold them for two years or one year. We want to extract intelligence and move them on to people who are professionals in incarcerating individuals. Nobody wanted to answer that question. Nobody. Because as soon as you answer that question, A, you acknowledge that there is a CIA Black Side program and B, you acknowledge publicly what happened in that Black Side program. Leaks contributed to the end game. Questions. Major leaks about locations. At least one location was closed because it was disclosed in a leak. But also more questions in the American public and among members of Congress who had not been briefed on the program, very few were briefed. I was among those who briefed them. We told them what we were doing. We told them in some detail, but very few were briefed. Increasing questions about within the CIA what the end game is and outside the CIA what are they doing, whatever happened to College Shake Mohammed. The White House, in the memory of my colleagues, was not too excited about dealing with these questions. I don't blame them. I understand that once you open the door on the Black Sides, you have to answer every single question about how and why you authorized that. But this led to increasing frustration at the CIA, including frustration at White House meetings where CIA officials time and time again told me, they were saying, we cannot be put in the position of being jailers. You, the American policymakers, asked us to go down this road of detentions. You have to participate in the painful conversation about what happens after. The questions continued and got more intense. Directors transitioned. One director who transitioned, going back to about 2006, was Michael Hayden, a legendary director among CIA officials, former director of the National Security Agency, a man of steeped in experience and intelligence in the military, highly respected for his discipline, for his mind at the CIA. He came into the CIA in 2006, four years after the first detainee and said, we have to put this on more solid ground. Let me read everything. And he was a voracious reader of information about the program so that he could master the detail. Let me read everything and figure out what the right path is. I think in talking to my colleagues, his effort led to a few more interrogations. But by that point, even in 2006, the writing was on the wall. Just five years after 9-11, just four years after the 2002 capture of Abu Zubei, the program, was already declining. The appetite wasn't there. Hayden asked questions about what worked, what didn't. Waterboarding was dropped. The interrogator said, we don't think, despite all the national conversation about this, we don't think this is the most significant technique we have and we don't think we need to use it anymore. Sleep deprivation, for example, again and again comes up as a technique that was successful. People don't like to be tired and they start to lose their will to not speak. So Hayden scaled back the program. There are more and more conversations with the Department of Justice. Sometimes the program was shut down, including by Director Tenet before, because Department of Justice officials were starting to scale back on their original opinions. Every time they scale back, CIA leadership a couple of times rightly said, if you want to change the documentation, we're not moving until you change it. We don't move without paper. And that paper has to explain how what we're doing is in compliance with the Constitution and U.S. federal law. But the writing was on the wall. And then, of course, George Bush made his announcement, famous announcement, and said, we have these prisoners. There were these black sites. And we're transitioning them to Guantanamo. Where some of them, including College Shake Muhammad, still are. That was not the final end of the program, including under General Hayden. There are a couple more prisoners authorized to go through the program. But once the President made that announcement, I think in retrospect you could say that was the beginning of the end, the final chapter. Now, widely reported, some CIA officers went to brief President-elect Obama on what the program was. And shortly after the President came to office, he said that the United States had committed what he called torturing some folks. I think the colleagues I spoke with bristled at that for a simple reason. Every President has the right to change policy. But we had been told, and this is a lesson of covert action from the beginning of time, we had been told by one administration that this is not only the policy of the land, but this is complies with the law of the land. And then told that what you did doesn't comply with the law of the land and doesn't comply with basic values that we all signed up for. That was painful, and the program was done. I did spend time with every one of the individuals I spoke with. Some of them had unique questions because of their jobs. Interrogators, I asked about interrogations. Senior managers I asked about, including I interviewed two, three, four CIA directors, most of whom I knew. About White House deliberations, but I asked some common questions of all of them, which is the final piece of the book. Ethics and reflections. I think when my colleagues look back, they look back in one sense with the knowledge that anybody on September 12th of 2001 would have said there will be a second wave. We weren't prepared for this. And if you argued against a second wave, if you'd said there will not be another catastrophic attack in this country, people would have said, you're crazy. So in terms of reflecting, many of my, and there was a fair amount of unanimity in this. Many of my colleagues look back and say, I was a tiny piece of a puzzle that ensured that maybe another nearly 3,000 people didn't die. They look back on the program itself. I would say not with regret. They feel that that was a piece again, a piece of the puzzle that might have helped keep Americans safe. But they do look back, I think, with a knowledge that an America that once said, do anything to ensure there's not a second event, very quickly, I think surprisingly quickly, said what you did, some Americans, what you did was wrong. That's painful for my colleagues. Many of them would look at the program and say, that will never happen again in my lifetime. Not, not because they regret it or because they're embarrassed about it or because they thought it was ineffective, but because they know, as people who have experience through these searing moments, they know that if a program like that were ordered by another president years down the road, three years, five years, 10 years, people would say, what did you do? Why did you do it? And now you may be even culpable for legal action by the next administration. Some of my friends were investigated for years by the Department of Justice. So in terms of the program itself, I think my friends look back and say, we were a piece of a difficult time in America that will never happen again. And maybe, maybe we helped ensure that another kid gets to grow up with their parents. In terms of the ethics, I think the best capture of this was with one of the more the most thoughtful officers. I don't name people into the book typically because I told them I would not and because I don't want them getting hate mail. One of the most thoughtful officers I ever worked with gave me a snapshot of ethical thinking that I think captured a lot of what I witnessed. And that was, there's technical pieces of ethical thinking. What is the law of the U.S. government? Does the law allow you to do something? That's a Department of Justice piece of paper that says what you're doing complies with the Constitution and federal law. What is the regulation of your agency say? Is there formal guidance that says what you're doing complies with what this agency has written down as formal policy? Then you start getting tough. Those are pretty straightforward. There's a classic question as you step down a list of ethical questions. How clearly can you explain this in a public audience? We used to call this the Washington Post Test. If you're in front of a journalist, I now do CNN for a living, so it's similar to the Washington Post Test, can you capture what you're doing and why in one sentence that your mother would understand? And if you can't, be careful. In the last tests, did I think my friends have to think about regularly? I still think about it. What would your mother say? I don't care what the law says. I don't care what regulations are. I don't care what the Washington Post says. What would your mother say? Using those litmus tests to look back on the program, I think most people still look back and say, I'm not sure I can give you a perfect answer every question, but I am sure of one thing. If you step back in time and drove down the GW Parkway in the spring of 2002 and recollected people jumping off buildings and you thought that maybe you're a tiny sliver of the response that prevented that from happening again, they still sleep at night. Thanks for listening to my story. We'll take questions. Because there's a televised component of this, I'm going to insist, I was told to insist, so don't blame me. I'm going to insist that you go to the microphone so this can be captured on audio for the TV audience. Yes, please, sir. For the talk, I would like to ask you where you started about the dragon being slayed and the snakes that remained. From the perspective of there's always the what if aspect. The what if aspect. The Soviets, Russians, whatever departed Afghanistan, however they had infrastructure there and new aspects that could have been interesting and tapped on, was that possible from any perspective of people that were there that the U.S. could have somehow relied on to get intel prior to 9-11? That's a great question. I don't remember anybody ever raising that, ever. The relationship with the Russian security service, I don't want to get too much into detail, was and I assume still is obviously with Russian intervention in American elections, tenuous even after 9-11. There was a lot of talk about we face common threats, etc. I don't think the Russians were a great partner even after 9-11. So the prospect that they would be extremely helpful at a tactical level, which is really what the CIA needed. I don't remember, it's a great question and I'm going to have to now secretly ask my friends. I don't remember that coming up at all. Man, you started strong. I was, thank you. I never thought about that. If everybody else could do that, that'd be great. Yes, please, go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry. Thanks so much for your fascinating story. As somebody who grew up, I mean, I was in first grade in 2001. It's really something to hear from somebody who was there at the time, fully formed member of the intelligence community, making hard decisions about just the tragedy that occurred on that day. I'm really curious to know if in your view, you think that counter-terrorism is on its way out. I know that these days the discussion is really, I think, rightfully focusing on great power competition and also domestic instances of what could be called terrorism, the proliferation of right-wing extremists in the US. Is this counter-terrorism really on its way out? This is a rare moment. I'll say this. I don't know. I'm going to give you an answer. Typically, I'll give you yes or no. I'm not sure for the simple reason that terrorism, obviously, is declined dramatically. Remember, it was only like 2014 when ISIS was in the news every single day. You look for two characteristics in a terrorist organization that's a threat, breaking through all the noise. I typically look for leadership that's visionary. Don't just take out the local police station or the military. The Americans are the threat. And I look for leadership that has safe haven, the time and space to act. You don't see that today, the safe haven and leadership. Some of the leadership has gone from Syria and Iraq. But the speed with which an organization can constitute leadership and safe haven in a place like the Sahel in Africa, I wouldn't rule out. And I'm a pretty optimistic person. I wouldn't rule out that a group rapidly reemerges to seize America's attention. Another thing I agree with you, by the way, on the shift in focus to the more traditional post-1947, what about Iran? What about North Korea? What about Russia? What about China? The South China Sea? But it's not hard to envision a world where within a year some group emerges in a place where the local government doesn't have the capability or will to take them out. Just two quick things, finally, I would say on that. Some of the tactics in chasing people I could see, I'm not talking about laws. I'm just talking about analytic capability. I could see easily transferred to, for example, white supremacist groups. I'm not suggesting the CIA would do that. They do not do that. I'm not suggesting we should do that. I'm talking about the techniques of how you chase somebody down. So if America starts to say we have a different thread, and maybe the American Intel community, including the FBI, learned a lot about how to look at people and not just big threats. Yeah, I see it changing, but I'm not sure that America has a stomach if there's some terrorist from the Sahel who goes and shoots up something in America that Americans have any stomach to say anything, but now we've got to do this all over again. I'm not sure. Hi, thank you for your talk. I wanted to ask you about the language used around what happened at the black sites. My personal view would be that regardless of the ethics of it, what occurred fits with the dictionary definition of torture, and that using words like enhanced interrogation is more just a euphemism. So I'm wondering what language do you prefer to use, and how do you see this debate around enhanced interrogation versus torture? And by the way, most people don't ask that question politely. I really appreciate that. No, I'm serious. I get attacked a lot in public sessions. I never went to a black site. I'm not denying that I didn't know everything that was going on. I never interrogated a prisoner, but I'm the one speaking and speaking partly as a result of my conversations with colleagues. That is a fair question. I can give you a couple of answers. Just technically speaking, we didn't use the word torture as illegal. So if you say, let's go, you're acknowledging that you should be in a federal prison. The technical way people looked at it, there are a couple of phrases used and legal concepts. One legal concept is knowingly doing something that would result in long-term physical or psychological damage to a human being so that you can say, I'm uncomfortable with waterboarding. I think it meets my sort of human definition of torture. Technically it doesn't meet a legal definition. I'm not excusing it. I'm just giving you an explanation. There was another phrase that was used called shock the conscience. That's a legal phrase, meaning if you pick up someone for stealing gum, you're not going to put them in a black site. If you pick up someone who was participating in the murder of almost 3,000 Americans, that doesn't shock the conscience if you submit them to sleep deprivation. So I would close by saying I think the right conversation to have is not what the law is. And of course, this is from someone who never got close to a law school. It's where you're headed, which is, and where the Congress has been headed, which is, are we, please don't look back. We did this and the Congress said, okay, look forward. Is this where we want America to be? If the answer is no, simply create laws to stop it. But if you're asking your technical question about how we talked about it, that's a quick snapshot of some of the language that was used in some of the philosophy behind the program. Thank you. Thanks for being polite. That's a fair question. Hi. So it's been about 17 years since the beginning of these black sites were established. This year, the Intel Authorization Act dramatically expanded the Identity Protections Act in kind of a broad way. And so, and one of the reasons that the CIA justified it was saying that because of past going issues due to RDI, and so just based on your experience- RDI is the Rendition and Detention, he's talking about the black site program. Yes, thank you. And I'm just wondering from your experience like what those issues could be and why that would come up now in 2019. I've seen commentary, what you're talking about is the Congress saying, you know, trying to protect the identities of secret officers more aggressively. I have not looked at the law. I've read some of it. I can just tell you from a personal perspective, let me put two things together. The anger in this culture is something I have not seen before. That anger is fueled by both sides of a political debate. And the second piece of that is I see character, I see elements of that, sparks of that in, I have a website in, for example, a hate mail that I receive. The level of anger and violence in culture today is high. So if you just do mathematics, 330 million Americans, if you start exposing X number of CI officers, what's your statistical chance that one person who's angry isn't going to show up at somebody's door because you can find people's residences by public records? I don't worry about it because I work in a public world, I'm on CNN, I think about it a lot, people come up a lot, but I can understand just from a, I don't know the law, but just looking at the world as I see it and knowing my colleagues in this culture with a number of people who want to send mail that says, you should die of cancer, that people might say, maybe we should work harder to protect those who took great risks because in culture today, I wouldn't, even in contrast to 10 years ago, I wouldn't guarantee that somebody's not going to knock on the front door. I mean, the stuff, I don't want to complain at most of it's, I don't want to say harmless, but most of it's just somebody who's ticked off in their basement. If my mail is any indication, that bill is worth it because the volume of people who write and the language they use is unprintable every day, every day. People say, and so I mean, my address is public knowledge, I think about that and I can understand why people would want to be protected. Anyway, yes, please. Yeah, you had mentioned the first wave, of course, being 9-11, that we waited for the second wave that never came being anthrax. In the intelligence community, is it thought of that we are now on a wave three or wave four and that we just skipped a wave and that these are different modes of terror or is it that the second wave is just the one that never came? Let me see, man, that's a good question. I'm going to give up soon because I'm tired. We focused on a large group-based threat, Al Qaeda. Nobody talked about homegrowns in 2002 when I was doing threat briefings for Director Tenet. I'm not sure we used the word. Our concept of second wave was another major organization creating another hijacking catastrophe with 20 people. To answer your question, I think what happened and what I would characterize as a third wave was the realization and for me this starts and I'm going to say 06, 0708, that there was a diverse, disparate movement of like-minded individuals who didn't really understand the ideology but thought that their anger was validated. Typically young people who were not connected to the central group except by watching a YouTube video. The third wave was people who are less strategically scary. They're not going to conduct an anthrax attack but harder to track because they're not really part of an organization. I thought the homegrowns in some ways were the third wave and then you start all over again almost repeating the process of going after a large organization and seeing it morph into individual actors with ISIS. Big organization then all of a sudden you start to see people who want to see an ISIS video and say in Colorado or New York I'm in. But we would not have defined the third wave or the second wave in any terms other than this is the next big one from Al Qaeda. Yes, why don't we do one more and then I'll disappear, sign books and disappear and go sell more books. Yes, please. This may somewhat pick up on what you were just talking about but I'm interested in what you learned about the motivations of the people you interrogated and to what degree that might help us in the future anticipate or dispel you know the forming of more and more groups. There's two basic groups of people. The original Al Qaeda guys were very smart. College Sheikh Mohammed the book talks about this would sit in front of a white board at a black side and explain to you the ideology of Al Qaeda. He was very proud of it. They're also very proud of 9-11. They thought this was they were not apologetic. Again, it's one explanation for why it was hard to get them to speak. They're like, I didn't do anything wrong. The motivation was interesting from an American perspective which typically is short-sighted and in some ways selfish what's in it for me. Their motivation would be they would say it won't come in my generation. It will not come in my children's generation but maybe in my grandchildren's generation there will be an acknowledgement that the only way to live is by the rule of the book that nations across the Arab world like they would say Saudi Arabia in Egypt don't rule by the rule of the book because the leaders there are corrupt and that the only way to take out those governments is to get rid of the Americans because the Americans are the backstop to these corrupt regimes. So their philosophy was if you get the Americans out and they thought we were weak, they strike at an economic target in New York, a military target at the Pentagon, a political target at the Congress, a very strategic strike. They said the Americans are so soft in the underbelly they'll get out of support for these regimes and then we can move in more aggressively and take out these regimes in a place like Egypt and Saudi Arabia over 50, 75 years. That was their philosophy. Now, one huge caveat and of course they would say violence is justified because the Americans are simply preventing the rise of people who live by the book. This changed when the homegrown movement started in earnest and again whatever it was the late 2000s, the mid to late 2000s. My experience and this is, I think similar with ISIS is that the further you get away from the nucleus of the organization into homegrowns, a 17-year-old in Colorado, a 20-year-old in California, an 18-year-old in Georgia, the less likely that person is to really understand what the ideology is. They're going to come at this with some curiosity. They might be angry about something that they've witnessed at school and society. The organization, think of this as a cult culture, not as a religious group. The organization validates their anger. They can give you three minutes on what the organization is all about. But in contrast to Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, if you ask them about three questions about ideology, they can't get you there. They're just ticked off. The group says, come into our organization, we'll validate your anger and we'll give you a YouTube video that helps you understand why we exist. So real differences between core organizations that can give you chapter and verse on ideology in homegrowns where the ideology is really razor thin. The final thing I'd say on this has to do with a practitioner's issue. You can't tell Khaled Sheikh Mohammed what he did was wrong. You can't. He'll explain to you otherwise. When you're dealing with law enforcement action or a social services organization dealing with a homegrown who's been indoctrinated over the course of two months, the likelihood you can turn that person is much, much, much higher. Simply because they don't have the depth of ideological indoctrination or understanding. And someone who's an expert might be able to talk to them and say, you know, what were you thinking? And after a while, they can't explain what they were thinking. So the approaches to someone who's a committed years-long terrorist and a homegrown kid who went the wrong way when he was 17 in terms of how you de- indoctrinate significantly different. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed will be proud of 9-11 forever, I suspect. Thank you again. I think I'll be leaving to sign a few books in. Thanks for the questions. Thank you.