 On behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Archives and Records Administration and the University of Texas is my great privilege to welcome you to the President's daily brief delivering intelligence to the first customer. 50 years ago, President Johnson in an address to American business leaders said, a long axiom in my political thinking has been that a man's judgment is no better than his information on any given subject. Since its creation, the President's daily brief has served to provide our commanders in chief with the intelligence that informs vital decisions relating to our foreign and national security policy. In short, these classified documents offer presidents the tools they need to render their best judgment. First known as the President's Intelligence Checklist or the Pickle, when it was introduced in June 1961, the document became known as the President's daily brief or PDB in December of 1964. It represents the distillation of intelligence material deemed worthy of a President's attention, providing not just news, but importantly, context and analysis. Today's program, which includes our nation's top intelligence officials, will shed light on the intelligence apparatus and how it is used to ensure that the first and most important customer, the President of the United States, is armed with the information he needs on matters of state. It comes as the CIA releases PDBs from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations from June 1961 through January 1969, making, marking the first time the CIA has, through its historical review board, declassified PDBs and made them available to the public. As of today, in fact as of about five minutes ago, they will be posted on the CIA's website. It is now my great privilege to welcome to the stage the head of the National Archives and Records Administration, the Archivist of the United States, the Honorable David Ferriero. Thank you, Mark. And let me add my welcomes to one of my favorite presidential libraries, the LBJ. When we opened our doors in 1935, the National Archives mission was to collect, protect, and encourage the use of the records of the United States government, most importantly, to make the records available so that the American public can hold its government accountable for its actions and to learn from the past. We're the final destination of the most important records of the United States government, that two to three percent of records deemed by departments and agencies to be important enough for permanent preservation. The National Archives is responsible for the records of 275 executive branch agencies and departments, the White House and the Supreme Court, and we provide courtesy storage for the records of Congress. Our records start with the oath of allegiance signed by George Washington and his troops at Valley Forge in 1775 and go all the way up to the tweets that are being created as I am speaking in the White House. It's a collection of about 12 billion pieces of paper, 42 million photographs, miles and miles of film and video, and five billion electronic records. Thirteen of the 46 facilities that make up the National Archives are presidential libraries. When President Franklin Roosevelt created the National Archives in 1934, he also created the presidential library system. The libraries start with the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa and go to the George W. Bush Library in Dallas, Texas. They contain more than 780 million pages of textual material, 625,000 museum objects and electronic records. We started collecting electronic records during the Reagan administration, between Reagan and Bush 41, about 2.5 million email messages, 20 million in the Clinton White House, 210 million in Bush 43, and we just recently passed the 1 billion mark for the Obama White House. On his first day in office, President Barack Obama issued an open government directive which declared that my administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. This idea of open government is embedded in the mission of the National Archives. Our work is built on the belief that citizens have the right to see, examine, and learn from those records. Five years ago, President Obama signed an executive order entitled classified national security information intended to overhaul the way documents created by the federal government are assigned classification codes, secret, top secret. The executive order also created the National Declassification Center within the National Archives with a mandate to review for declassification some 400 million pages of classified records going back to World War I, and to do that by the end of 2013. We successfully met that goal in the declassification process, emphasizing a risk management strategy and expanding data capture efforts. And I'm proud to report that the six oldest documents were released. They are classified by the CIA. They are on his last day, just about his last day in office, Leon Panetta held a press conference announcing the release of these six documents, all formulas for secret ink. Most recently, the National Declassification Center coordinated a multi-agency activity across government to answer a White House request for declassified records responsive to the Brazilian National Truth Commission, the desire for records relating to human rights abuses during 1964. Vice President Joe Biden provided the first of several CD collections to the Brazilian government last summer, and the National Declassification Center is concluding this review in 2015 with a web release that also describes the impacts on Americans abroad. The motto of the National Declassification Center is releasing all we can, protecting what we must. In that spirit, let me tell you that the work of the National Declassification Center goes on so that we avoid those backlogs that they were originally saddled with. Finally, I'd like to say that the release of the President's Intelligent Checklist and the Presidential Daily Briefings will add meaningful context to other National Archives documents in how the President's used intelligence briefings to do their job, and we're thrilled that the CIA is releasing these documents from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And we look forward to more Presidential Daily Briefings from the Nixon and Ford Libraries after the CIA completes its review. And a special shout out from the Archivist of the United States to my colleague Joe Lampert for making this work a priority. Thank you. Thank you, David. It is now my pleasure to welcome the gentleman who David just shouted out, the man who is largely responsible for the release of these PDBs, and consequently this conference today, the CIA's Director of Information Management Services, Joe Lampert. Thank you, Mark, and thank you, David. On behalf of all my colleagues back at Langley, I want to welcome you to the CIA's latest declassification release event on the PDBs. At CIA, we are very proud that this is our 24th major release event in the last seven years. The first occurred in 2008 at Georgetown University, and it focused on the tenure of Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence. Since that time, we've held events at Presidential Libraries and major universities all over the country, highlighting the release of significantly, historically significant documents such as Air America, where at the University of Texas at Dallas, we put Air America helicopter pilots in touch for the very first time with the Air Force pilots that they had rescued. And we contributed thousands of documents on Air America to the archive at UT. We've held events on the 92 to 95 Bosnian War with President Clinton as the keynote speaker at his library in Little Rock. We've held an event on the Camp David Accords with President Jimmy Carter as the keynote at his library in Atlanta. Back in Washington, we held an event on the Declaration of Polish Martial Law, which focused on the life of Colonel Ruzar Koklinski from the Polish General Staff, who is one of CIA's most important Cold War assets. We held our very first thematic event at Smith College, and that one was entitled, Typist to Trailblazer, and it focused on the involving role of women in the CIA workforce. In addition to these major events, we've held a number of smaller ones, like the one we held in the Wilson Center in D.C., highlighting the CIA's involvement in the publication of the Russian language version of Boris Pasternak's Dr. Chevago. Today's event marks the second time that we've actually had the pleasure to work with Mark up to Grove and the LBJ Library here in Austin. In 2010, we released documents on the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and for me, that was one of the most memorable events, not necessarily for what we released, but for the day after the phone call I received from my 20-year-old college student in California. The event had made the media, as they typically do, and it was picked up by an outlet in California in Los Angeles, and my son called me and said, Dad, I hear the CIA's talking about an invasion. Do I need to be worried? I said, son, did you read the article? He said, no. I said, do you have it? He said, yeah, I have it right here. I said, kid, you take a minute and go a little bit further south. In typical 20-year-old fashion, I waited about 15, 20 seconds, heard a big sigh, followed by, oh, come on, Dad, 1968, really? Public releases of historically significant documents like this don't just happen. They require a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes collaboration and work. We gratefully acknowledge the appreciation and support of both LBJ and the library here and the University of Texas for making this wonderful venue available to showcase this document release. In addition to the CIA, there were 13 other intelligence community and government agencies that were involved in one way or another with the review of these documents. I want to offer a very special thanks to the National Security Agency for their efforts. Finally, I'd like to thank CIA's information management professionals back in Washington who've been diligently reviewing these PDBs for the past two years to enable their release today to the American people. Their work is often unsung and the lesson that they've taught me over the past five years is that deciding when a secret is no longer a secret can sometimes be a very difficult task. Now I have the pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker for today. We are very pleased that we have the director of the CIA, John Brennan, with us today. John joined the CIA in 1980 and has been our director since March of 2013. He's uniquely qualified to give the keynote address as he's been on both sides of the PDB process as both a PDB briefer himself and as a recipient when he was assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. Please join me in welcoming my boss, John Brennan. Thank you very much Joe and thank you for your outstanding work that's brought us to today's event and good afternoon everyone. Having spent some wonderful years as a student at UT and still a very very proud longhorn it is my very great pleasure to be back in Austin. I want to thank Mark Uptegrove and his excellent staff for hosting today's event. When President Johnson dedicated this library he said it is all here the story of our time with the bark off. You can't get much further below the bark than top secret intelligence reports. So I think President Johnson would approve of today's proceedings. I also want to thank my good friend and one of our nation's greatest patriots Admiral William McRaven, Chancellor of the University of Texas System for speaking later this afternoon on the importance of intelligence. It is highly appropriate for Bill to help celebrate the history of the President's daily brief the PDB because for a number of years the operations he commanded helped fill the book with some of the very best intelligence. I also want to offer my gratitude to two outstanding agency leaders former CIA director Portugas and former deputy director of central intelligence Bobby Iman for lending their insights and expertise to the panel discussion coming up next. And finally I want to thank my very good friend and colleague General James Clapper the director of national intelligence and an icon of the intelligence profession who knows more about this business than I would argue anyone else. President Johnson made a point of keeping most of his speeches to a 400 word limit and I may be dangerous to the close to hitting that already but I plan to hold on to this podium for a while so I can offer a few words on today's release and the enduring challenge of preserving our national security. On his first full day in office President Obama called on the heads of executive departments and agencies to build an unprecedented level of openness in our government. He made it known that giving the American people a clear picture of the work done on their behalf consistent with common sense and the legitimate requirements of national security would be a touchstone of his administration. In light of this new approach and pursuant to an executive order outlining new classification and declassification guidelines CIA information management officers worked with their counterparts at the national security council and the office of the director of national intelligence to start the review and declassification of PDBs that were more than 40 years old. And today for the first time ever the central intelligence agency is releasing en masse declassified copies of the PDBs and its predecessor publications. Some 2,500 documents from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. This is just the beginning. Some 2,000 additional declassified PDB documents from the Nixon and Ford administrations will be released next year and the process will continue. The PDB is among the most highly classified and sensitive documents in all of our government. It represents the intelligence community's daily dialogue with the president in addressing the challenges and seizing the opportunities related to our national security and for students of history the declassified briefs will lend insight into why a president chooses one path over another when it comes to statecraft. The release of these documents affirms that the world's greatest democracy does not keep secrets merely for secrecy's sake. Whenever we can shed light on the work of our government without harming national security and let me repeat that caveat without harming national security we will do so. The story of the PDB begins more than 50 years ago at President Kennedy's weekend retreat near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. It was June 17th 1961 and an aide had just arrived from Washington carrying a top secret document. The president sat down to read it next to the swimming pool perched on the edge of the diving board. The document was seven pages long and printed on short square blocks of paper with spiral bonding along the top. Inside were two maps a few notes and 14 intelligence briefs most no more than two sentences in length on topics ranging from Laos to Cuba to Khrushchev. After reading the document the president sent word that he was pleased with the contents. An aide contacted the offices at CIA who had written it and said so far so good. This was the very first issue of what would become the PDB. The publication quickly became a must read for President Kennedy and it set in motion a routine for delivering intelligence to the Oval Office that has been at the heart of CIA's mission ever since. The idea behind the PDB was developed quickly in a matter of days to meet a very specific need. Since taking office President Kennedy had been frustrated with the way intelligence was being delivered to him. The reports he was receiving were long dense and abstract and they would come in haphazardly throughout the day making it hard for him and his staff to keep up. The result was that much of what he was being given each day went unread and the president was making policy decisions without the benefit of the intelligence our government had collected for him. A few months into the president's term after he was caught off guard by several developments on the intelligence front his brother Robert Kennedy lit into the president's staff. CIA soon got a call from the White House demanding that the agency find a better way to keep the president informed. In consultation with the president's advisors a team of agency officers decided to produce a daily digest delivered each morning to the White House that would summarize in a few pages all the intelligence that deserve the president's attention. They called it the pickle short for the president's intelligence checklist the forerunner of the PDB. The idea was so successful that it has endured in various forms under 10 presidents and today it is such a vital part of how the White House operates that one can hardly imagine the modern presidency without it. Throughout its history the PDB has helped the president confront the gravest subjects a commander-in-chief can face issues like terrorism and famine and war but as you will see in the documents we are releasing today the PDB's history includes more than coverage of crisis and conflict. In today's collection you will find offbeat items like Russian reaction to a performance by the New York City Ballet and commentary on a decision by the New York Yankees to fire Yogi Berra an awful decision. You will encounter a host of lively characters such as a political leader in Latin America described as a high-living fifth of scotch a day man. You will also find occasional doses of humor a fair number of off-color remarks and an entire issue comprising little more than a poem. Today the PDB is the most abundantly staffed most deeply sourced daily information service in the world. It provides the president with a wealth of insight and analysis on virtually every issue on his foreign policy agenda but when the idea of the PDB was first conceived the plans were not nearly so ambitious. The document was envisioned as more as more of a straightforward news bulletin summarizing the latest developments rather than a font of in-depth analysis. It was very little in the way of rigorous forecasting in the early years. Whole disciplines that are integral to the intelligence business such as covert action were largely left out. Director John McCown who was appointed by President Kennedy thought that some subjects were simply too sensitive to be included in the document so he would relay them to the president in person a practice that has continued to this day. Nevertheless today's PDB in many respects is unrecognizable from what it was in the Kennedy and Johnson years. One of the clearest differences is writing style. Back then the articles were full of colorful language and personal asides that would never make it past a PDB editor today. Consider this report from 1967 about the harassment of diplomats in China. It said, a mob kept one ambassador in his car for 10 hours causing him to ruin both his clothing and the upholstery or this assessment of a fact-finding team that was sent to Yemen in 1967. The team left yesterday with more haste than dignity after six gunfire-ridden days spent mostly locked in hotel rooms and presumably under the beds. It gets more colorful but I think you have the idea. Having been a PDB brief of myself in the 1990s I can assure you that the commentary in the Oval Office is at times quite sporty and eyebrow-raising when the PDB is discussed. Beyond the writing style the PDB has evolved in countless ways since those early years. It has grown in length and sophistication adding features like graphics and imagery. It is more comprehensive now and the analysis is far more rigorous and perhaps most importantly it has gone from a document written by just a handful of people at CIA to one produced by officers representing an array of organizations, specialties and disciplines in the intelligence community. Many of the changes have been driven by technology and by the possibilities afforded by our expanding capabilities and a more integrated intelligence community. But above all the publication has changed in response to the preferences and habits of each president. President Kennedy wanted the checklist as it was known then to be short and to the point. It should be small enough when AIDS said to fit into a breast pocket so that the president could carry it around with him and read it at his convenience. Kennedy also insisted that it be written in plain conversational English, stripped of the jargon and official ease that characterized most intelligence writing at the time. No gobbledygook, the White House said. Over time the checklist began to reflect Kennedy's pet peeves and language and usage. One word that rankled him was boondocks. He founded two colloquial and told the writers of the checklist that it was not an acceptable word. But Kennedy was not an overly fastidious editor and his writers clearly relished the freedom they were given, sprinkling the prose with words like effervescent, ticklish and cuckoo. Classification markings were another pet peeve. Kennedy's AIDS did not want them cluttering up the text. Regardless of the content, each document was to carry a single marking, top secret, stamped at the bottom of the page. This was true even if the information was based on diplomatic reporting or unclassified news accounts. So while you will see a lot of what can rightfully be described as overclassification in today's release, the reason was to streamline the production processes back then and to make the document easier on the eye. Ah, the good old days. In both content and style, the checklist also testified to President Kennedy's breath of expertise. Since Kennedy was so well versed on intelligence issues, each item in his checklist was spare and direct without much background or explanatory information. The authors focused only on what the president did not already know, meaning that a lot of important intelligence was left out of the document. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, photographs and other pieces of intelligence that were passed to the president through separate channels were often omitted from the checklist. As one editor said, why summarize what the president already knows? After only a few months of producing the checklist, the authors had gotten so much feedback from Kennedy that they were able to anticipate his intelligence needs and draft a document to meet them. They understood the kind of writing he liked, the issues that mattered to him, and how he wanted them explained. A bond of trust had formed between them and the president that would last throughout his time in office. One senior officer later said the relationship was going so well that it seemed like heaven on earth. But one of the eternal challenges of the PDB is what works for one president rarely works for the next one. You almost have to start from scratch each time. That is certainly what happened when President Johnson took office. During the Kennedy administration, the checklist was not disseminated very widely. At first it only went to the president and to the director of central intelligence and later to the secretaries of state and defense. But one of Kennedy's aides told the agency that under no circumstances should the checklist be given to Johnson. So when Johnson took office, agency editors had no idea how familiar he was with the subjects they had been writing about in a checklist. It was clear that he needed more background information in the articles than Kennedy did. But how much more? The editors wanted to give the appropriate context, but they worried that if they went too far they would appear condescending and might alienate the new president. Their first effort delivered the day after President Kennedy's assassination included five rather lengthy items and several notes. It did not seem to hit the mark, though it was hard to tell. When the president was briefed on it in the morning, he did not say much in response. He seemed mostly relieved that nothing in the document required his immediate attention, understandable and light of the trauma and mourning that our nation was experiencing. As the months went by, it became clear that Johnson was not reading the checklist. Part of the problem was that early on at least, he preferred to get his intelligence informally, in meetings and through conversation, instead of from written products. Johnson may also have harbored a built-in bias against the checklist since it had been deliberately withheld from him when he was vice president. But the main problem was the format. The checklist had been created for President Kennedy. And in many respects, it was still his product designed to match his preferences and work habits rather than those of Johnson. So the editors of the checklist decided to change course. They gave the document a new name, the president's daily brief. They repackaged it, adding longer articles that supplied greater detail as well as thoughts on future trends. And they delivered it in the afternoon, not the morning, since Johnson liked to do his reading at the end of the day, often in his pajamas while lying in bed. After several test runs, the first official PDB was published on December 1, 1964. Senior aide Jack Valenti returned it with a handwritten note the very same day. The president likes this very much. As with Kennedy, Johnson's PDB did not include material that he had already received through other briefings, or that he was getting from other intelligence products. It is worth emphasizing here that the PDB was never intended to be the only source of intelligence for a president, and it never has been. Throughout the PDB's existence, presidents have also gotten intelligence from the military and other departments of government, through briefings, meetings, and informal conversations, and from longer forms of analysis such as that found in national intelligence estimates. But to say that presidents get their intelligence from a variety of sources in no way minimizes the importance of the PDB. There is no denying the utility of the product to Kennedy and after several changes to Johnson as well. And as the documents we are releasing today made clear, the PDB provided them with critical insights as they charted our nation's course amid the challenges of a turbulent decade. Looking down from History's summit at the challenges and crisis of the past, it is human nature to see them as less complicated and dangerous than those we face today. The threats have either subsided or disappeared. The standoffs have long been resolved. And hindsight has showed us all the answers, or at least most of them, to the questions that were so vexing back in the day. So the past does seem a lot simpler than today's world until, that is, you jump in at just about any point in the narrative contained in these documents and start reading and putting yourself in the shoes of the men for whom they were written. I took a couple of hours on a recent evening to do just that. And doing so quickly restores one sense of perspective. These pages remind us, for example, that while President Kennedy was deciding how to stop Moscow from establishing a nuclear arsenal in Cuba, the rest of the world was not standing still for him. India and China were engaged in a fierce border war. The Vietnam conflict, especially the presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos, was a persistent concern. Civil wars were raging in Yemen and the Congo, countries that tragically have had more than their share of fighting over the years. Warsaw Pact countries launched unannounced military exercises in Eastern Europe, and the East Germans resumed work on extending the wall along their border with West Germany. The fact is, America has faced an unending series of national security challenges ever since we emerged from the end of the Second World War and emerged as the world's preeminent global power. Having assumed the duties and obligations that go along with leading the free world, our country's most pressing foreign policy need in the post-war era was not only to counter the relentless Soviet military and clandestine threat, but to obtain timely, accurate and insightful information on our adversary's actions and intentions. And so it took the United States 171 years before it finally did what every other great power had done, establish a comprehensive intelligence service for both peacetime and war. I joined that service, the Central Intelligence Agency in 1980. I believed in this mission back then, and I believe in it even more strongly today. We have had great fortune over the past 68 years to play an important role in keeping this nation strong and its people safe from the constantly evolving array of overseas threats. And though we are exceptionally proud of the work we do, we have not been a perfect organization. We have made mistakes, more than a few, and we have tried mightily to learn from them and move forward as a smarter, more capable organization. And ever since the agency is founding during the Truman administration, its single most important mission has been to give each president and his senior advisors the clearest possible picture of the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. CIA endeavors to be a trusted, authoritative source of information and understanding and answering any president's most crucial questions, particularly in times of heightened risk and danger. The Cuban Missile Crisis is an iconic example of the agency marshaling its technical, operational, and analytic strengths to help the Commander-in-Chief resolve a delicate standoff peacefully and successfully amid the highest stakes imaginable. In the pages of the president's intelligence checklist and in far greater detail and briefings and other products and venues, CIA offered precise, up-to-the-minute information tailored to presidential requirements, highlighting its essential role in supporting every president of the modern era. But it doesn't take a nuclear confrontation to demonstrate the utility of the agency's support to the presidents. Throughout the documents released today, you will find reports to reflect a truly global scope. All the overseas issues that demand some amount of the president's time and attention presented with bottom line assessments, significant detail, and helpful context for breaking events with which the busy reader might not be familiar. During the Johnson administration, for instance, the PDB was well-received at the White House during the outbreak of the Civil War in the Dominican Republic in April of 1965. It was a very complex situation in a country that wasn't often in the headlines, and LBJ's Press Secretary, Bill Moyers, observed that President Johnson read the PDB avidly throughout the crisis. Objectivity, too, is critical to presidential support. CIA was charted as an independent agency unique in government, free of departmental bias and serving as a dependable source of available information, good news and bad news. It's an essential role, albeit a challenging one. For just as collecting intelligence often requires physical courage, reporting it requires intellectual courage, the proverbial ability to speak truth to power. And that quality shows in the agency's coverage of the conflict that overshadowed all others during that era, Vietnam. It is certainly true that CIA missed some important calls, most notably before the Ted Offensive in January 1968, when CIA headquarters failed to pass along the warning from CIA's station in Saigon that an unprecedented enemy offensive was at hand. But the fact remains that CIA estimates of the enemy's order of battle and staying power were consistently more ominous and as events would prove more accurate than those produced elsewhere. Senior White House staffers occasionally expressed concern over the PDB's perceived negativism on Vietnam. Bromley Smith, the NSC's executive secretary during the Johnson administration, told an agency officer at the time that you're going to break the president's heart. He thinks things are much better today, but that's no reason for not writing it as you see it. In covering the world in 2015, we at CIA are still writing it as we see it. Our contributions to the PDB, which today is published under the auspices of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at CIA headquarters, benefit from the enormous range of talents, skills, and disciplines that CIA brings to bear in fulfilling our global mission. Drawing on the intelligence and ground truth by the agency's worldwide network of stations and bases, as well as the expertise and insight of our all-source analysts at headquarters and overseas, we put together products in the PDB and elsewhere that enable the president and his senior advisors to see an issue in its entirety with the risks, challenges, and opportunities clearly delineated. And like our predecessors who adapted to the needs of the day by developing the pickle and the PDB, we too are taking steps to optimize our relevance and our effectiveness in our own time. When the PDB is sent to the Oval Office today, for example, it arrives on a tablet computer and iPad instead of paper. Indeed, the transformational effect of information technology is the single most decisive factor in setting today's world apart from that of the 1960s. Along with the end of the Cold War, both the cyber realm and social media have made the planet smaller and dramatically more interconnected. And those developments in turn have had a profound impact on the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency and our IC partners. To begin with, cyber technology has created an entirely new domain for human interaction. And though it presents boundless opportunities for advancing our national interests, it also enables individuals and small groups, not only nation states, to inflict great harm on our national security. When it comes to intelligence operations, digital fingerprints might enable us to track down a terrorist. But the digital world also makes it harder to maintain cover for our current generation of clandestine officers, who, for example, almost certainly have used social media sites before they even began their agency careers. Moreover, the erosion of boundaries between domestic and foreign communications has raised complicated legal and ethical questions for our profession. In President Kennedy and Johnson's Day, the enormous signals collection effort against the Soviets and their client states, whose communication networks were largely segregated from those of the free world, carried little or no legal ambiguity. But the terrorists we face today routinely use the same channels everyone else does. And the public debate rightly continues over how to strike the appropriate balance between the need for security and the importance of privacy. When I asked a group of our senior officers last fall to ponder CIA's future and come back with a strategic plan for modernizing the agency, they agreed that, among other things, we had to do a much better job of embracing and leveraging the digital revolution. Consequently, under our current modernization program launched last March, we are adding a fifth directorate to the agency as part of the biggest change to CIA structure in five decades, the directorate of digital innovation. When this new directorate is up and running on October 1st, it will be the center of the agency's effort to inject digital solutions into every aspect of our work. It will be responsible for accelerating the integration of our digital and cyber capabilities across all of our mission areas. Human intelligence collection, all-source analysis, open-source intelligence, and covert action. And though the documents we are releasing today show us that the world is hardly unique in its complexity and danger, it nonetheless harbors a wider variety of threats than the world of the 1960s. These contemporary challenges often overlap, change rapidly, and require a multidisciplinary approach. And as the intelligence community as a whole has learned in the years since 9-11 attacks, integrating disciplines and capabilities is a very powerful way to magnify and optimize our effectiveness. So on October 1st, 10 new CIA mission centers will cover every issue we face. Six focused on regions, like Africa and the Near East, and four focused on functional issues such as terrorism and weapons proliferation. Each center will pull together all the tremendous talents and skills previously stove-piped into separate groups, promoting collaboration among agency specialists in operations, collection, analysis, technical capabilities, and support. These are times of tremendous opportunity for CIA. Our plan will bring the same kind of teamwork to CIA headquarters that one finds in our stations and bases around the globe, where it has helped us succeed against the toughest of targets. These changes build squarely on our strengths, enabling the agency to do an even better job of operating in the multidisciplinary and ever more technical environments that come with our mission today, and that will be even more prevalent in the years ahead. Before I conclude, I want to thank you all for coming out today to mark this occasion. The documents released today touch on history, the presidency, the intelligence field, and democracy itself. Subjects that were of great interest to me when I was a graduate student here at the University of Texas and are even greater interest to me today. If any of this kindles your interest in joining the agency, Chancellor McRaven can tell you some pretty good stories of what it's like to work with us. And I hope to see you among the new officers that I swear in every couple of weeks or so. My own path to CIA started here at UT, where I was interviewed for an agency job when my wife thought I was getting far too comfortable as a graduate student and I was. And it has been my deep privilege since then, not only to serve as a CIA officer, but to serve presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike, who devote so much of themselves to the extraordinarily hard and consequential work of leading our republic. Each of us, who has ever had a hand in producing a PDB or a pickle, feels deeply honored to have played a role, however small, in helping the president make the decisions on which our national security rests. Every book is written, edited and delivered not only as a review of intelligence, but as an expression of respect. And none better captures this spirit than the President's Intelligence Checklist of November 22, 1963, the day we lost President Kennedy. Its pages are largely blank, except for the following words. 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. Last night we received from the White House a letter from President Barack Obama addressed to the dedicated professionals of the United States intelligence community. And it says, our national security depends on protecting the intelligence that saves lives and our democracy depends on transparency for our citizens to make informed judgments and to hold our government accountable. That is why I have pledged the American people that the United States government will be as open as possible even as we safeguard the intelligence sources and methods that must remain secret. In keeping with this commitment, I want to thank the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency and the entire intelligence community for working so diligently to declassify and release an unprecedented number of the world's most sensitive intelligence products. The President's daily brief from 1961 to 1969. I also want to thank the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and the University of Texas for supporting this historic release of PDB articles. As your Commander-in-Chief, each morning I rely on the expertise of the intelligence community to understand the threats, challenges, and opportunities we face around the world. I depend on your insights and analysis as I make decisions critical to the security of our nation. Put simply, I could not do my job without you. The United States has the most professional and capable intelligence community in the world and we are going to keep it that way. While most Americans will never know the full extent of your success, I hope these declassified documents offer our fellow citizens and people around the world a window into your extraordinary service and indispensable contributions to global security and peace. As you gather in Austin to celebrate the culmination of your hard work and success, please accept my deepest appreciation and best wishes for Obama. Thank you. It has been a real pleasure and an honor and privilege to be here as Director of CIA and to be part of this release. Thank you.