 Good afternoon. I'd like to welcome everyone to the Harriet A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation Policy Maker and Residence Lecture. I'm Rebecca Blank, the Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and I'm delighted to see all of you here today. This lecture is part of the Towsley Foundation Policy Maker and Residence Program. The Towsley Foundation has made a generous gift to the Ford School that enable us to bring distinguished people to campus for extended periods to interact with students and with faculty. In supporting this program, the Foundation recognized that visitors would provide an important enrichment of our curriculum and encourage learning and dialogue among students, faculty, and members of the larger community interested in public policy issues. The opportunity adds immensely to the education that our students receive. It helps us fulfill our mission of interacting with the world of policy and practice beyond just the classroom. With us today from the Towsley Foundation, our Rani and John Riecker, Del Dunbar, Judy Dow Rommelhart, and her husband Don, and I'm going to ask them to just identify themselves like all good students that are sitting in the back row. Thank you for this gift. We are grateful to this Foundation and to these people for their continued support of this program. I also want to recognize the U.M. Office of Vice President for Research, which is co-sponsoring the event with us today, and Fawaz Ulebi, the Vice President for Research, is sitting right over there, and I also want to thank them for their help with this lecture. Thank you, Fawaz. In a minute, University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman will introduce today's speaker, Charles Vest. But first I want to take a second to thank Chuck for coming back to the University of Michigan and to the Ford School as the Towsley visitor. His presence at the Ford School is very highly valued. As part of the Towsley program, Chuck is not just giving this lecture. He's also teaching a mini-course on the effects of Dine 11 on science policy, and I understand that there was standing room only in the classroom today. It's clearly a popular course. Chuck's presence here reflects our own work to establish a new graduate certificate curriculum in science, technology, and public policy at the Ford School. Working closely with other U.M. schools and colleges, our science policy program will provide a context in which students from engineering and the sciences will be able to more closely understand the ways in which their fields interact with public policy. And conversely, the curriculum is intended to give graduate students in the social sciences and in the policy school the opportunity to have a stronger grasp of the relevance of science and technology to their work. And if there are students in the audience who are interested in this program, I urge you to find me afterwards. Mary Sue Coleman, as well as former U.M. President Jim Duderstadt, have both been incredibly supportive of both the Towsley Policy Maker and Residence Program, as well as this new science policy certificate that is being opened. And I am honored to introduce the University of Michigan's President, Mary Sue Coleman, who will come to the podium to introduce Chuck Best. Mary Sue. Welcome. It is my great honor to introduce Dr. Charles M. Best to deliver this year's lecture at the Towsley, as the Towsley Foundation's Policy Maker and Residence at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. I was telling Chuck just a few minutes ago that I just came back today from the AAU Presidents' Meeting. This is the American Association of Universities, the Topper Search Universities, this group. And not having him there, he was there for so long, and it leaves a big void, because he was such a calm and wonderful person in that group that it just didn't feel quite the same. So we miss you, Chuck. I wanted you to know that. Dr. Best comes to us, having served nearly 14 years as president in a very distinguished 14 years as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is probably the biggest bully pulpit in our country for science research. His credentials include serving on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and chairing the U.S. Department of Energy Task Force on the Future of Science programs. He's also chaired the Committee on the Redesign of the International Space Station and the Association of American Universities. Before all of these remarkable achievements, however, Chuck Best had an extraordinary career here at the University of Michigan. He served as Provost as the Dean of the College of Engineering and as Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and he is an alumnus having earned his master's and doctoral degrees here. We are tremendously proud that the rest of the country has benefited from the leadership skills he developed here at Michigan. In 2004, Dr. Best was appointed by President Bush to serve on the Rob Soberman Commission on Intelligence and Weapons of Mass Destruction. That body explored whether the United States has the proper intelligence capabilities to deal with the threat of weapons of mass destruction. I know his talk today will be fascinating and relevant. It is with great pleasure that I introduce the 2005 Towsley Foundation Policymaker and Residents, and welcome back to Michigan. Dr. Charles Best. Chuck. Thank you very much, Mary Sue, and thank you Becky. And really I want to congratulate Becky Blank for her leadership and Mary Sue and so many others for their support. I think establishing the Ford School of Public Policy so solidly on the national scene, beginning to move it into science and technology policy is really a very important thing for this university to do. Becky and I are just delighted to be back in Ann Arbor and to see so many close friends, including many of you here in the audience today. I hope I won't embarrass you too badly, but I do want to begin by very much thanking the Towsley family and foundation for making this possible. But I do have to tell you that I'm a fraud. I'm the public policymaker and residence. I've never made public policy in my life. I've told other people what their policies ought to be, but they rarely listen to me. But nonetheless, I thank you for this opportunity. If it weren't for the seriousness of the topic today, I would point out that what I'm about to give you is a little bit of what I did on my summer vacation kind of presentation because I suddenly found myself thrust into the heart of a world I knew very little about and to some extent perhaps didn't know much about. But it was one of these rare calls to public service that comes to us from time to time. And I was very grateful for the opportunity and hope that I did add a little bit of value to the commission's work. And if in fact there was some value, I think I will be able to tell you what it was. What I would like to do today because this is a very complex topic is sort of begin at the end, going to talk a little bit about how the commission was formed, how we did our work, what we did with our report, how it was rolled out, what the response has been. And then I will return to the actual work of the commission, which as you will see had two components, looking back, looking back at our intelligence activities in particular in Iraq and Libya and other things, looking at them sort of as case studies, finding what worked well, what went wrong, what are the lessons from this. And while that's the exciting part and the part that gets in the newspapers and so forth and so on, the really hard work of the commission and what we spent most of our time on was looking forward, how do you take those lessons and give some guidance to the intelligence community on what they need to be and how they need to operate in the 21st century. Well, as such things began, this began for me with a phone call in my office one day from Andy Card, the president's chief of staff who basically sort of said, have I got a deal for you? And I told him that I would really appreciate a week or so to think about this. I was still in office. I was still very busy. And I wasn't sure I could devote the appropriate effort to it. And he said that's fine. Take the week. Here's my cell phone number. Well, I figure when the president's chief of staff gives you his cell phone number, this is a pretty serious deal. So I walked down the hall, paced up and down a little bit and in 15 minutes called him back with realization that this is something I had to do. Now, let me begin with a preamble. Here are some lessons and things I personally concluded from my work on this commission. First of all, an immense appreciation for the covert work that US intelligence community has done on behalf of all of us to counter terrorism. One of the things that made this work very painful is to produce a highly critical report about a very dedicated group who have actually done some extraordinary things to keep this nation safe. I want to say that up front. Secondly, despite working for over a year with every level of security clearance imaginable and having some engagement, as you will see with the terrorist issues as well as as the more classical WMD issues, nothing changed my personal view and my commitment to the importance of maintaining the openness of US campuses to foreign students, foreign scholars, foreign faculty members. That openness is still key to our future and I learned nothing in this world that caused me to change that attitude. I walked away with the same greatest fear I went in. The worst thing we can possibly imagine is a nuclear device in the hands of a terrorist. I came back with heightened concern about bioterrorism. We won't be able to talk a lot about that today, but I worry more about it than I did before this commission. I came out with a sense of futility and the stupidity of this culture that has grown up over the last decade or two of purposeful leaking of classified information by people within the intelligence community, by people within the Congress and so forth and so on for very narrow purposes. It's done enormous damage. The highest profile example many of you may be aware of a couple of years ago and two years ago when a member of the US Congress walked out on public television and made the statement that he had learned that we are listening into Osama bin Laden's cell phone. Guess who never used a cell phone after that? This causes enormous damage. Also, I came away with a clear belief that as fixated as we are and properly are on terrorism, we should not forget about state actors at his countries as well. And finally, and if there was any value I and my colleague Rick Levin had to add to this, it was that there are amazing parallels between universities together at this day and age as we are trying to do more and more interdisciplinary work and the issues facing the intelligence community. It maps one to one. And I happen to be talking a little bit after a report came out to Bob Gates, who was the longtime head of the CIA, now the president of Texas A&M University. And I made that statement to him. And he said, you know, I say that in every speech I get I give to alumni and they all laugh at me. They think it's a joke. But the fact is it is the same business for him. Now let's get down to our business today. This commission was established as an independent commission by executive order of the president. It had to do with two things, looking back and looking forward. Learning back, we were to examine the intelligence capabilities and challenges regarding weapons of mass destruction, related means of delivery and quoting other related threats of the 21st century, a rather wide mandate. We were to look particularly at Iraq to compare everything we could find out about pre-war intelligence, what we knew, what we thought we knew, how we gathered that information, and then compare that one to one with the findings of the Iraq survey group. This is the group that David Kay led into Iraq after the invasion to try to find the weapons of mass destruction. And you know what he found, which is basically nothing. So when I refer to the ISG, that's what that is. We also were to look at Libya and at Afghanistan and compare intelligence again there with what we know now. But most important is not just to look back, point fingers of blame and so forth. The real issue is we were to derive specific recommendations regarding the authorization, organization, equipping training and resources for the intelligence community. A couple of quotes directly from the executive order, which are of enormous importance. Again, the commission shall have full and complete access to information relevant to its mission. Unlike things like the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's look at Iraq, there was no bickering about what was available or not available to us. It specifically said heads of departments and agencies shall promptly furnish. And I will tell you in over a year of work, we were never denied any information or access to anybody that we request. The commission, the co chairs were Larry Silverman, who is a federal judge and has been former deputy attorney general. He's been the acting attorney general. He was the US ambassador to the U.S. very distinguished career, well known Republican and Chuck Robb former Democratic Senator and Governor of Virginia, who by the way is believed to be the only person in the Senate who ever served on every committee that has any level of oversight of the intelligence community. We call ourselves the the Noah's Ark Commission, because we sort of had two of everything. We had two judges, Larry Silverman and Pat Wald, one of the truly extraordinary members of this group. Pat is a federal appeals judge, now retired. He's also a judge in the International Tribunal in the Hague and is a very well known person in sort of the human rights community in the United States. We had two senators, former one and Chuck Robb and an active one in John McCain, who I must say with great admiration, John's attendance at our meetings was equal to that of anybody he really rolled up his sleeves worked very hard on this. Two university presidents, Rick Levin of Yale and myself, two former people who had formerly been in high positions in the intelligence community. Harry Rowan, who's now a professor at Stanford, who's been assistant secretary of defense, but perhaps more importantly, chaired the National Intelligence Committee for a while, and Bill Studman, a retired admiral who was the deputy director of the number two person in the CIA during a large part of the Clinton administration. And when we began, the wonderful Lloyd Cutler, a long time counselor to many democratic presidents and so forth, was a member of the health issues intervened and Lloyd had to step out. And so very early on Walt Slocum, who had been an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration joined and Lloyd Cutler remained of council. And in fact, right up to the very end was reading our reports and giving us feedback. The staff quite remarkably led by Scott Redd, retired admiral, who had at the time we got him probably the only job that could be worse than leading the work of this commission. And that is he was Bremmer's chief operating officer in Baghdad. So he said, Yeah, I'll come. Stuart Baker was our general counsel, the key person in the final drafting of the report. By the way, today, Scott is the head of the New Counterterrorism Center. And Stuart has moved to very high position in the for a while in the Department of Homeland Security. Mike Munson and Gordon Naylor brought all the corporate memory to us, one from long career, distinguished career in the CIA, one long distinguished career in defense intelligence. We had about 90 staff members, 30 roughly of whom were borrowed from various agencies in the community assigned to us full time. Then we hired another 30 full time people from outside, most of whom had been in the intelligence community at one point or another, and another 30 consultants that we used from time to time for specific issues. How did we work? Well, throughout our existence, we met either once or twice a month as a full commission for two day sessions. And during those we interviewed various people at all levels of the government and the community. We discussed things among ourselves, we framed the document, we worked actively toward the end on the drafting, I'll talk about how that was done. And in between, we had many ad hoc meetings, field trips and so called lightboard sessions, there was something every day of the week, if you wanted to attend, or in some cases, if you as a commissioner wanted to pull a group together, which I did once on the issue of bioterrorism. The commission as a whole framed the structure of the report, we did that about halfway through. We made and decided right up front that no major decision would be made, no draft of anything would leave the commission without being approved by the entire group. This stands great contrast to the way many other national commissions have operated. And finally, we had outstanding attendance and huge amount of work put in by everybody. But of course, the staff ultimately does the bulk of the day to day work. We organized them as we framed the issues into a set of working groups. And each of those working groups, we made sure that we blended people with background from different agencies, so that nobody would be bringing a one sided perspective to the table. They then over the months produced a series of white papers, which would be presented in sort of PowerPoint format to the commission. We'd argue about the basic points and just change this, keep that, do that. And then slowly but surely through the year plus of our work, that began to emerge as what ultimately became chapters in our report. The staff also in these groups with the active participation, usually of one or both of the co chairs interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, policy makers, but more importantly, people down in the intelligence agencies themselves. They reviewed thousands of pages of documents almost entirely classified stuff. And they were just wonderful. Our report was based therefore on refined version of these white papers. Every iteration was discussed and approved by the full commission. And in the end, and I really want to emphasize this because it's quite unusual, we only wrote one report. We did not write a classified report that went to the White House, an unclassified report that went to the public. We wrote one report. Here it is. We redlined it with those things that we thought should be classified. This person's name, the name of that country, a dollar amount, a few things like that. And then at the end, we insisted that that was the way the report was. And I will tell you that with the exception of two chapters, which I will come back to this report that is publicly available differs by something less than 1% from the report that went to the president and other decision makers. So the report is organized literally in half, looking back, looking forward. It's about 600 pages. We had 38 specific findings. There was one or two classified findings, 38 unclassified. And we made 74 recommendations. And that's why we're not going to go over all the details today. There are only minor differences, as I said, between the classified and unclassified printings, just a few specific things. But two chapters we simply did not include in the unclassified version. One has to do with Iran and North Korea. The other has to do with covert actions. And you can understand that we just concluded there's no way that we can produce a meaningful public version of these two chapters. But other than that, what you see here is pretty much what the president had. Now, we had a cover letter to the president. I want to give you a couple of sentences for sentences from it. One, right at the beginning, we conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in all of its pre war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. What the intelligence professionals told you about Saddam Hussein's programs was what they believed they were simply wrong. Now, when we had the press conference, the first question for for Judge Silverman and Senator Rob, first question from the press was, we've read a lot of federal commission reports before, we've never seen one that uses language like this. Why is it written this way? And I'm proud to this day, Larry Silverman looked out and said, Well, you have to understand, we had two university, two university presidents on the commission, and he insisted that we use accurate and direct language. And we did. Now, the letter had four key recommendations. They don't sound all that dramatic. But what's behind them is one, give the new director of national intelligence powers and presidential backing to match his responsibilities. There's a significance to this because the position of the DNI, the director of national intelligence was recommended by the 9 11 Commission, but there was nothing fleshed out. And when it went into legislation, it emerged in basically a form of a guy with a whole lot of responsibilities, and basically no power. So his power today, hopefully eventually legislated a little better, comes from the president. And we're very clear that he had to back that bring the FBI all the way into the intelligence community, we'll get a little bit into this as we go through demand more of the intelligence community. That's a lesson every business in America has learned customer has to demand things of you, you have to deliver. And finally rethink the president's daily brief. This is a point I will come back to. There are some real flaws in the way intelligence products are communicated to the president. A little more language from the report itself. And this was the sentence. All of you who served on committees know you got one or two sentences, you each spend hours going over and over. This is one, I won some battles with it by the way to while the intelligence services of many other nations also thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which is true. In the end, it was the United States that put its credibility on the line, making this one of the most public and most damaging intelligence failures in recent American history. We also set another point. And this is key. The intelligence community did not make or change any analytical judgments in response to political pressure, reach a particular conclusion. With the pervasive conventional wisdom that Saddam retained WMD affected the analytical process. I had to summarize what we learned about Iraq. This is it. A lot of people didn't want to hear it. This is what we believe. And I can tell you that in particular Chuck Robb made it his personal mission throughout this whole thing to track down every rumor about political pressure on people in the community and go interview them and find out this is what we believe. Now how is all this rolled out? It began with about an hour, hour and a half briefing and discussion with the president and several of his key staff from the White House and a couple of cabinet officers. This was dominated by Q&A with the president, who I have to tell you knew these things inside out, asked all the hard questions. It was really a very good dialogue and impressive to everybody who participated. Immediately after that, the president held a cabinet meeting with most of the cabinet, those who run related parts of the government. And then there was a press conference. Now this is what you call a tough news day. And I don't mean to be too humorous about this. But Terry Shiveau died about two hours before our press conference. And we had the Pope and Rome and all these kinds of things. We're trying to make a point about intelligence. Nonetheless, it was a very lively, ran about two hours with all the Q&A back and forth with the press, all handled by the by the co chairs. We then moved to a day of hearings, right after this, first with the briefings, I should say not hearings, both classified one of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, which I missed part of for an important reason, but was there for the end of it. And one with the House Intelligence Committee. And I really have to tell you when I went into this job, wondering whether I should even be doing this, one of my colleagues said, you're going to learn a lot about democracy. And while I learned a lot of things on this commission that are very troubling and disconcerting, two hours of discussion with the House Intelligence Committee, Republicans, Democrats all over the spectrum behind closed doors. These were such dedicated people, they knew all the right questions to ask all the right things to do. And it really was left one with a good feeling. And then as the executive order had stipulated one month after we turned in a report, the commission stood down and exist no more. So what was the initial response? At the time of the meeting with the White House folks in the cabinet meeting, the president announced that there would be a 60 day period for analysis at cabinet staff level of the report. They would then turn to the issue of whether things that they wanted to implement that would require legislation. And then they would publicly announce what they were going to do. To my utter astonishment, and I really have to say utter astonishment of the 74 recommendations we made, the administration formally accepted 71. One that they turned down is classified, but it was not one, frankly, I felt terribly strongly about. And the other two were things that they felt needed to be left up to the judgment of the brand new National Intelligence Director, and he needed some time to think them through. Some actions have already been publicly visible. Something that we recommended the formation of a National Security Service within the FBI that has been started. And something near and dear to my heart was a much enhanced open source unit at the CIA. That is people that don't deal with secrets. They read newspapers and listen to radios. And you'll see why I believe that's important. But look, there have been a lot of commissions that have suggested a lot of things that ultimately didn't really get done. So time will tell. The press reaction was very interesting. New York Times, which gave us two columns on the front page and two entire pages on the inside, had a front page headline, Bush panel finds big flaws remain in us by efforts, and began with a sentence in a scorching assessment of chronic dysfunction inside American intelligence agencies, etc. Then you opened and looked at the editorial page. Lead editorial was titled a profile in timidity. So on the front page, we were scorching scorching assessors on the editorial page, we were timid. And it went on to say nothing there about the central issue, how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports. This was typical. We got very positive journalistic coverage, very positive response inside the government and by both friends and critics of the community. And editorials were almost uniform. In their complaint, that we should not have done the job we were asked to do, which is assess our intelligence capabilities and how to make them better. But we should have moved off of that and decided what we believed was right or wrong about how the administration used that information. We did not do that. I do not believe that we should have done it. I'm sure that around the table, we had nine different views of this, but we did the job we were asked to do to the best of our ability. So let's turn to the core here, intelligence and weapons of mass destruction. First of all, intelligence is a unbelievably difficult business. And there again, it gives one sort of ulcers being so critical in hindsight. This is tough work you cannot imagine. Because after all, you are trying to find out what other people simply don't want you to know. certainty in intelligence is so rare, it virtually never occurs. You also have to understand that. And I will come back at the very end of this certainty issue in terms of how we communicate about intelligence products. As I said earlier, this work is done on our behalf by very highly dedicated community. I never ran across anybody or anything I learned that led me to think anything other than it is totally dominated by people who work very hard, patriotic, doing what they believe should be done. And of course, as an engineer, I have to observe they have some absolutely astounding technology, most of which orbits around the earth. Now I've used this phrase over and over intelligence community, we all know the CIA Central Intelligence Agency that has existed since 1947. It is the only independent intelligence agency. There are in fact 15 separate intelligence agencies in the United States government, Department of State, Justice, Homeland Security, Energy and Treasury, and the Coast Guard all have an intelligence unit. The Defense Department of Defense, the Secretary's level has the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency CIA and DIA are the two big ones. But there's the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and then Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, each have their own intelligence service. And part of the issue is making these things work together, and quite frankly, respecting some of the things that are culturally different about each one. Here again, very much like the university. Intelligence has three basic components. Collection, analysis, dissemination. How do you get information? How do you think about and understand that information? And then how do you present the conclusions you draw by that analysis to policymakers and the government? There are four basic types of collection. Human collection, that's the fancy word for spies, by and large. Signals, signals intelligence means listening to radio, telephone signals and so forth and so on. Imagery, taking incredible photographs and images and other parts of the spectrum, infrared, x-ray and so forth, from radar, excuse me, and so forth, from satellites that circle around the earth. And then something called measurements and signature intelligence, which are things like sampling chemicals, understanding what's in the river, looking at the soil, all kinds of things like this with some technical or scientific analysis can yield important information. That's actually the daddy of them all because that's how we came to understand in right after World War Two, that the Soviets in fact had an atomic bomb. We did that by sampling things in the air and understanding them. This part of intelligence gets short shrift. And I'll come back to that. Now, if you want to be one of the inside gang, of course, you call this human, SIGINT, IMMENT and MASSINT. Analysis means what it says, dissemination means what it says. Now what about weapons of mass destruction? These are called CBNR, chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological. I have used bold letters for nuclear and biological because that's what I'm going to concentrate on today. And these differ from each other. Nuclear, for example, starts with the fact you have to material. If you don't have the uranium and the ability to enrich it or you don't have plutonium, you can't build an atomic weapon. That's simple. Instead of follow the money, it's follow the material. It's very technologically sophisticated. You can read lots of things about how easily build an atomic bomb in your basement. It's not very easy. It can be done by people other than major nations, but it isn't easy. It's very sophisticated. Biological weaponry that we're just trying to understand in its modern incarnation is moderately sophisticated technology. There's thousands of people around the world who would know how to do these things. That's certainly the terrorist scale. And the scary part is what is called a dual use technology. If your country X, and you want to manufacture biological weapons, you can set up some perfectly legitimate facilities, a pharmaceutical company here, a brewery there. And by careful design and planning, in a matter of time, few days, you can pull that together and make it manufacture a biological weapon. And that's part of what makes this area so difficult to deal with chemical, fairly very elementary technology, again, dual use to be rapidly integrated, that is pulled together. And radiological weapons, as you know, are those that are just conventional explosives, to which you attach some materials that are radiological, so that when they're dispersed by the explosion, you get radioactivity, radioactive materials spread around. The people in the defense establishment consider this much more a psychological and economic weapon than they do WND, because in general, large numbers of people aren't going to die. But some are going to get ill, and everybody's going to get very scared. Some alphabet soup before we get rolling full speed, you'll hear me say NIE several times national intelligence estimate. And that is when the community literally comes together around the table, and writes and approves a report on a topic. So it is a product of the community, not of an individual agent. And you'll hear a lot about the October 2002 NIE on weapons in Iraq. Winpack weapons intelligence, nuclear proliferation arms control is a part of the CIA that deals with exactly what the name says. The Jake we're not going to talk too much about here joint atomic energy intelligence committee will rise once. Human, as I said, human intelligence spies people on the ground. And of course, as you all know, now the PDB, the president's daily brief, which is exactly that brief document sort of looks like the National Enquirer with little headlines and articles and so forth. It goes daily to the president. Just a little bit of jargon, covert and clandestine. These are used kind of interchangeably in papers and most literature, but technically, covert is something much deeper than simple undercover work, which is clandestine. Generally, covert activities are things that are illegal, and that will be denied by the government if they are discovered or rumored. And almost always they require a signed presidential finding before they can be implemented. There are not a lot of such things going on, but they do exist. Denial and deception means exactly what it says, the ability of a country or a group to deceive you about what they are really doing. And let me tell you, despite the critical talk I'm going to the critical things I will say about our performance in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was the all time master of denial and deception. He fooled us repeatedly. And we all assumed he was pulling us again. Open source, as I said, is material that's not stamped classified that you get from literature, from radio broadcasts, from TV, so forth and so on. It's out there in the open. We don't do nearly enough of this. And as one member of our commission with long years of experience said, you know, the problem is in the community, real men don't do open source. And we paid a very strong price for that in the case of Iraq. So on to the case studies, the objective, find the facts. More importantly, learn the lessons. Let's start with Iraq. Now, the story of Iraq has mostly been out there in the newspapers with maybe one or two exceptions. I won't say a lot of things that you haven't heard before. I will try to put them together coherently. It's a complicated story to follow because you sort of have to understand the chronology. And the chronology is hard to keep in your head as you organize things across different cuts. But let's start in 1991. If you walk away with one background fact, it should be this. In 1991, after the Gulf War, the intelligence community found itself completely surprised by the extent of deployed chemical and biological weapons, and by the extent of nuclear program in Iraq. They got beaten up. We've all forgotten about this. They got beaten up one side and down the other, because they were completely surprised by all this stuff that Saddam Hussein had. Guess what? They never forgot that never got out of their mind. It became a base of their assumption. Second very important date, 1995. Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Camille, who was in charge of the sort of industrial part of the defense establishment in Iraq, defected. Defected to the West, and told us that he, in fact, had been ordered to destroy their biological weapons stocks in 1991. You probably remember the rest of the story. He ultimately decided to go back to Iraq and was promptly murdered. But what he told us was very important. 1998, the UN inspectors left. UNSCOM, International Inspection Process came to an end. When it came to an end, also what came to an end was almost any information that we were getting out of Iraq. In 2002, in October, the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate on Weapons and Mass Destruction in Iraq, was produced not for the administration, but for the United States Congress. The Congress said, we're going to be asked to go to a war in Iraq. It's being justified largely on the threat to this nation because of WMD. We want to know what you know. So that was that NIE was produced in a matter of a few weeks, which is very unusual. It's usually a months and months process. But I'm not going to use that as an excuse, because in fact they've been working very deeply on this for a long time. One of the things you'll hear from me is that there had been sort of a river intelligence information flowing across the President's desk for years through two administrations talking about the WMD project. The NIE, nonetheless, was produced for the Congress. We saw a statistic of how many people in the Congress said that they actually read it. I wouldn't want to tell you the number, you'd be ashamed. And then 2003, after we invaded, David Kaye and the Iraq Survey Group returned to this country or Kaye returned to this country and said flat out, we found no significant biological or chemical weaponry or any significant nuclear program in Iraq. Let's look at Iraq's nuclear program and their biological program. What were we observing? First of all, in 1994, and what I want you to watch here is the kind of accelerating language, and then we'll come back to what that was based on. 94, the Jakes made an internal report that said Iraq still seems to be pursuing its nuclear program. In 98, there was an intelligence community assessment that said human intelligence is limited, but Iraq seems to be continuing a low level theoretical research. We have an incomplete picture. In 99, we have no specific evidence of reconstitution of the nuclear program. But they noted the opportunity because now the inspectors are gone. So Hussein can get back more easily to what he was doing before. In 2001, the community obtained some intercepted aluminum tubes that had been shipped to Iraq. This, as I will explain, and as you will probably remember, is an absolutely critical moment. Why aluminum tubes? Well, if you're going to enrich uranium to make it a weapons grade material, you have to go through a very complicated process that among other things involves forming a gas, spinning that gas inside very high speed centrifuge rotors, literally hundreds or thousands of these rotors in order to enrich the uranium. So you need some high strength tubes. Iraq has had procured a large number of tubes made of an aluminum alloy that they fill back and tell you all about 7075 T6 of a carefully specified particular diameter wall thickness and very tight dimensional tolerance. Now each of the agencies or several of the agencies began to assess the CIA said these are most likely used for gas centrifuges. That is part of a nuclear program. But they did identify some other possible applications. Here's what we're talking about. This is an image from Secretary Powell's UN speech. So we're talking about these tools. The Department of Energy, who by the way are the people you would expect to know the most about this said quote, these tubes are not well suited for centrifuge application. They could be used but these are not well suited for centrifuge application. We think they're more likely used for NASA 81 millimeter multiple rocket launchers, a conventional weapon. So you go to the conventional weapons experts in the community, which is the Army National Ground Intelligence Center. And their experts, our experts on conventional weapons systems assist the tubes to be quote, poor choices for rockets, although they could not totally rule out the possibility. Remember that not totally rule out the possibility. So then finally, what did the important critical documents say the October 2002 and IE concluded Iraq has quote, reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. And if left unchecked, we'd probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade. They said we have compelling evidence. But they stated that this was a conclusion that they drew with moderate confidence. That's by the way, not real low on the scale, moderate confidence. Now the State Department's Intelligence Bureau dissented from this judgment. Out of the 15, they were the only one that wrote a dissent. We disagree. We don't believe this nuclear program has been reconstituted. Both INR, the State Department and DOE, however, descended from the specific judgment on the aluminum tubes. And again, in my view, people who should know the most about this, they went on to cite additional evidence. Of course, there was procurement of quite a few dual use items, magnets, high speed balancing machines, machine tools, things that could be used for a nuclear program, but not necessarily. They said that they had one intelligent one human intelligence report that rock had reassembled some of the scientists and engineers who are known to have been in the program earlier. And through our satellites, we saw some activities that seemed a little higher than before the inspectors left at suspect sites. They noted that Iraq was vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellow cake from Africa. You all know that sentence. You know that Judy Miller just got out of 85 days in prison over how some things that follow this. But I do want to tell you it's very interesting. By the way, you can get on the web and read the unclassified version of this IE anytime you want. Very interesting. This was not a big deal in the report. I won't say that flat out was one sentence back on page 38 of the chapter or something like that. It was not a major part of their judgment. So that's what had been thought that's what had been concluded. So what did the ISG find when they went into Iraq? They found concluded that Iraq had not tried to reconstitute capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991. And that work on uranium enrichment, including gas centrifuges, the things that might use aluminum tools, the tubes had effectively ended in 1991. Now we now know a lot more. And I just put this in context. Let me tell you a few other things. First of all, this material 7075 T six aluminum is used by 14 different countries in rockets, including with exact same dimensions, Iraq. Remember that reference to the to the missile from the from the DOE. Second, the documents about uranium acquisition from Niger clearly forged. One of the great mysteries I walked away with is the UK and the British still stand by their statement that this was a serious attempt to we don't understand why they're saying that. Getting a little bit into depth here, the CIA had very ineptly handled their physical testing of these tubes. They'd had a contractor to do it. The contractors equipment didn't work properly. Never quite done right. And that was actually should have been much handled much better than was the other streams of intelligence that is other than aluminum tubes about the program were very thin. They're either flawed or limited value. But most important of all, and that's why I put this in red. Most analysts and agencies simply viewed the evidence, even technical evidence through the lens of prior assumptions used to happen. He's a bad man. He's an expert at denial and deception. We really can't conclude that he isn't actively working on these things. Now, if you want to actually wade through part of a 600 page report, there is a part of it that reads like a James Bond novel and believe me, it's the only part. And that's the story and they brought out line of this is probably known to you of what we thought we knew about rocks BW biological weapons program. Go back to the Gulf War era. As I said earlier, pre Gulf War assessments substantially underestimated the quantities of biological weapons that rock had. We didn't think they had much. Actually, they had weaponized anthrax, that's rhenium toxin, phloxatoxin weaponized as you know, means, for example, the anthrax pores have to be ground down to very fine particles treated in very special ways so they don't stick to each other. So you can spray them and disperse them easily. They had 30,000 plus liters of active BW agents. They had 157 bombs and 25 missiles armed with biological weapons agents dispersed all around the country. This was finally declared in 1995, following a really tough confrontation by unscum. Now, when you read our press, used to think these UN guys were pushovers, they were pretty tough actors over there and they finally got to a lot of the truth. This is what we're talking about. These are some of the BW loaded bombs that Iraq had at the time of the Gulf War. These are the sites that were actively involved in constructing prior to 91. In the late 90s, let's watch the language again. The assessments with Iraq could have biological weapons. That is before the Gulf War. In 99 CIA judged that Iraq could quickly restart its BW program. Later in 99, there was an NIE about biological weaponry worldwide. Among other things, it said Iraq is revitalizing its BW program, probably working to develop and produce agents. And then in 2000, I'm sorry, 2000 was the community wide assessment, they said, listen to this language, credible reporting from a single source suggests production of biological weapons that we cannot confirm whether Iraq has produced biological weapons. Then we forward a couple years to the 2002 October NIE. Here were their conclusions. All key aspects of Iraq's offensive BW program are active. And most elements are larger and more advanced than before the Gulf War. And they gave this high confidence. They also said, and these are words that many people are terribly sorry about today, Iraq has now established large scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capabilities based on mobile BW facilities. In Secretary Powell's speech to the UN at the eve of the war, we know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological laboratories. This is a graphic that he used sort of schematic drawings of what these things are. So what did the ISG find? They found BW stocks and facilities and 91 Saddam Hussein had instructed Hussein Camille to unilaterally destroy their stocks of biological weapons. Rock appears to have destroyed its undeclared stock of BW. I'll come back to why this says undeclared in a moment. But they said they retained a physical plan to come for possible future resuscitation of the BW program. 1995, UNSCOM confronted them with some evidence about this facility and so forth. And they supervised its destruction. Also, the ISG found that no evidence that Iraq possessed or was developing mobile BW production exists. The trailers cannot be part of any BW program. Now some explanations. Looking back, after Desert Storm, Iraq declared to the UN part of its ballistic missiles and chemical weapons program, it did not at that time declare its BW or nuclear programs. UN inspectors were very thorough and intrusive. And Saddam decided to prevent discovery of his pre 1991 programs. And that was the point at which he told Hussein Camille to destroy large numbers of the undeclared weapons and materials in July of 1991. So when you get asked the question what happened to this stuff, either it didn't exist or most of it was destroyed in July of 1991 by the Iraqis. In fairness, it is crystal clear that very few people in Iraq knew about this. One of the things we had missed quite frankly is how badly that society had regenerated that Saddam Hussein and his two sons were kind of sitting in a corner running everything. And there was very little knowledge, even among their commanders about what they didn't didn't have. In fact, as you've undoubtedly read the newspaper, most of their commanders at the time of the war, all thought the other guy had them. They thought they had a lot of weapons of mass destruction. So where did all this intelligence about biologically weapons come from? It came from human intelligence sources. We had three of them. One codenamed curveball. One codenamed the asylum or I will call the asylum seeker, somebody who came to the West. And one called the INC source somebody that was handed to us by the Iraq National Congress, the Chalabi organization. Those latter two each gave us one report. The asylum seeker one report in 2001, long after the war, 2003, he recanted that. And the INC source gave us one report. And again, a little too late, but in I'm sorry, in May 2002, was judged to be a fabricator. Curveball gave us 100 reports. So what is this curveball business? Clearly, he was virtually the only source of intelligence about the supposed BW program. He was a defector. He left Iraq, he went to another country, not to the United States. I'll stick by the rules since it was classified. I won't tell you what the country is, but it's been in every paper in the world. And he was seeking political asylum. He was a chemical engineer. And much of what he said was technically detailed, and absolutely was plausible. However, he was being run by this other country's intelligence service. He was never interviewed by a US intelligence agent. Now, this was not because we didn't want to. It's because the the Foreign Service service of this other country would not make him available to the DoD. And it was the DoD's human intelligence people who were in charge of this. The October 2002 NIE, therefore, did not appropriately communicate that the BW conclusions were based almost solely on one source. DoD Human did not, given the fact they didn't interview the guy, did not appropriately vet this character curveball. Now, the CIA Directorate of Operations, down a little bit in the depths of the organization, began to worry about credibility of curveball as early as 2000. And in May of 2000, someone I can only refer to here as a DoD detail, that is a DoD employee on loan to the CIA met curveball. It's very important to understand that this person who met him very briefly was not an intelligence agent. But he was a person who by profession, you would trust or should trust to be able to judge sort of nature and character of this person. And two of the many things he reported back from this five minutes or so he spent in curveball's presence were one that he spoke English well. Well, that was kind of interesting because one of the reasons our colleagues in this other service had given us for not wanting us to talk to him was that he doesn't speak English. Much more importantly, this person reported back, the guy had a horrible hangover. I would judge that he's probably an alcoholic, and he has a very unstable personality. In 2001, the Foreign Service and we'll come back to why they were talking to us reported curveballs out of control. Half the time they didn't know where he was displaying bizarre behavior. Now in the fall of 2002, now we're coming right up the run up the NIE or getting close to the speech to the UN and so forth, a representative of this Foreign Service told a division chief in the CIA, he said to her, you don't want to see this guy because he's crazy. Now she had gone because she was one of the people worrying about this, although her job was not a weapons job. She was part of the division that was in charge of liaison with this foreign country, and she had gone to make yet another appeal to get access to it. On the very eve of Secretary Powell's UN speech, and I mean in the 123 day period up to it, a major argument broke out about curveballs reliability between this CIA division chief and BW expert in Winpack, the person who's supposed to be in charge of these kinds of things. And while in a sort of bureaucratic sense, Winpack won the argument, the division chief saw to it that some communication of concern about curveball credibility started moving up the chain of the CIA. The doubts about curveball never made it to Colin Powell. And there are big arguments about why this did not make it all the way up. We have a little bit of a he said he said she said kind of situation. This was the one tough thing that the Commission did. We really went after a couple of these people in the way that the prosecutor would do threaten them with various things. At the end of the day, we concluded that two people pretty high up in the CIA have slightly different memories of exactly what happened. And we think they actually have slightly different memories that no one is lying about this. But unfortunately, what the reason is, information never made it to where it should have gone, even though it was the 11th hour at that point. So in summary about curveball, poor trade path, especially for asset validation, basics, lack of interagency cooperation, I didn't get into this very much. But DIA and the CIA when talking, they're talking past each other, they weren't sharing information properly, they were scornful of each other, was inattentions to warning signs, inconsistent assumptions, they must have these weapons. So this is Iraqi denial and deception, and lack of proper communication to policymakers. So in summary on Iraq, poor standards trade craft, what I call eyes wide shot, that is, seeing everything through your assumptions, lack of objectivity and skepticism data, women tubes, poor listening, not paying attention to the guy who actually knew something because he wasn't part of the anointed spy game, poor collaboration and sharing little political or social understanding. If we had longer, I would really emphasize that just didn't pay enough attention to what broadly was going on in Iraq. Having said all this, we do not believe there was poeticization of the process. In terms of intelligence reporting, you've heard about the NIE, October NIE in 2002. But as I said earlier, they've been a flow of intelligence and sort of scary headlines in the PDBs and so forth, accelerating verbs and adjectives for several years. And finally, we're very critical of the nature of the communication PDBs period. Very quickly, Libya. This is largely a success story. Let's begin in December 2003. Libya announced an unprecedented disarmament, holding work and destroying stockpiles of chemical weapons, and I'm sorry, and also chemical and nuclear materials and infrastructure. Nuclear program. This was a US UK initiative. We had rather accurately assessed their nuclear equipment. We knew what they had. We underestimated, I'm sorry, we overestimated somewhat the progress they've made. Amazingly, our intelligence had succeeded in penetrating this horrible AQCOM network. That was really the key to this. And they identified and seized a ship carrying centrifuge technology to Libya. No guesswork about tubes this time knows exactly what was going there. And Libya's nuclear materials, equipment and documents today are in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, because of this good work. Chemical weapons. We correctly judged that they had chemical weapons agents and CW aerial bombs. We overestimated how many they had BW. We assessed that Libya maintained a desire for an offensive BW program and some are indeed. This still remains somewhat unconfirmed. It's not a firm conclusion, but the community thinks that it understands the missile program. We seem to been generally accurate. There's still some details that we don't know. But on the whole, they did a good job. Why? First of all, community and the way they went about this operation is very innovative. They were very innovative. And using George Tenet's phrase, they displayed operational daring. This was the community at its best. Maybe seamless is a little too strong a word, but there was at least extremely good communication and cooperation across the intelligence organizations. And how I wish I could talk about this. There was some really clever use of very fundamental technology to draw key conclusion about the nuclear program. That and the penetration of the AQCON network were the two things that gave us what we really needed to know. And if you track through the details as our staff did, the analysts in fact revised and reassessed their judgments against their own assumptions going in in response to new data. Now that I've spent almost all of my time talking about the looking backward, let me spend a few minutes to talk about what we really spent most of our commission time on, which is recommendations going forward and some broad observations. First of all, universities, corporations and the intelligence community. As I told you, there are a huge number of analogies, very direct between the intelligence community and the university and how they operate. There are a bunch of agencies think of them as departments with very driven, dedicated, smart people, each have their own culture, proud of what they do. They think they know how to do it. And all of a sudden they have to do interdisciplinary work together. That's what they're going through. Unlike every corporation in the United States, they have not gone through the revolution of internal use of information technology and modern management theory to cause themselves to work efficiently and effectively to get to the endpoint they are seeking. Data sharing and integration you've heard all about from 9 11 Commission. Going into this they'll all tell you the same thing. We can't share our information because if we share our database, say human intelligence, we've got that coded so we know what the source is. And it's technologically impossible to to effectively share this with others without disclosing our source. We're not going to do that. Well, technically, that's just wrong. We do know how to do this. We're starting to do it. And we've had some very bad starts in trying to do this. The FBI spent 25 or $30 million on the system to accomplish this and then threw it out the door because it didn't work. But there are plenty of people out there in the real world of business who know how to do this. And we got to get serious. Analysts and collectors. Here again, it's culture. It's just like a university. I won't say what the analysis what the analogy is. But the fact is collectors, you want to be a collector, you want to be James Bond, you want to be a spy. That's what counts. Give me something stamp secret, send me overseas. Analysts who the real people we depend on intellectuals who study all this think about it, try to put it together and figure it all out. In several of the agencies, and especially the FBI are distinctly second or third level players. It is just wrong. And not only that, the analysts and collectors need to work together. Because it will sound familiar to all of you who know the history of corporate America and what we went through back in the 80s and early 90s. The collectors basically I'm only slightly exaggerating. They go out and collect whatever they can and they throw it over the proverbial transom and say analysts make some sense out of this. You need a feedback loop. You need the analysts to be advising the collectors what would really be important and so forth. Something anybody in any organization understands current Trump's strategic. A lot of the mistakes we make are because the day to day demands for immediate answers to specific questions, shove aside the time to think and plan and look out in the future and think strategically. We had at least a partial fix for that we have suggested. And finally, and I have to tell you if I had to make just one recommendation, it's this, got to hire 21st century workforce for the Intelligence Agency. Being only slightly facetious, slightly, you can't go into the 21st century with a whole community that's made up of blonde haired blue eyed Yale PhDs and expect to drop them into a place like Afghanistan or elsewhere and have them blend in with crowd. We've got to hire a diverse workforce for very pragmatic reasons. And one of the biggest things that has to get fixed, please don't ask me in detail how to fix it, is the security system itself that basically cuts off from the community. All these wonderful patriotic, second and third generation immigrants from different parts of the world who are very loyal US citizens who can speak languages and understand cultures and so forth. They're almost excluded. Now I have to say the community is beginning to work on ways around this. But if they don't succeed, we can't expect to have any better human intelligence in the future. So new balances have to be struck both organizationally and budgetarily. We, by the way, made no budget recommendations. We did not feel we had the time or expertise to go to that level. But Mr. Negroponte and his colleagues have to look at four balances. What's the right balance of resources between collection and analysis? We have to have more spies on the ground. We have to have better and more deeply involved analysts, human intelligence versus technology. Probably, I don't know, I'm going to guess 85% or more of the budget in the intelligence community goes into what I call big technology, the birds flying around in the sky and so forth. Whereas, if you remember what I alluded to in terms of Libya, small technology, this stuff that's called mass amp is really important to get short shrift, we need more of it, and perhaps less of the big technology, the experts have to decide. And finally, my big passion in all this, we have to have much more expanded open source work. I support this for two reasons. One, there's a whole lot to learn out there about context and culture and what's really going on that we can much more effectively learn just from open sources. And secondly, this is the way to get information technology and modern form into the work of the community. They hire these great young men and women to sit down as analysts. And the first thing they do is they look around and say, Hey, how do I get on the web? And where are my tools? They're not there. They're like industry 20 years ago, all because of the construct that they put together, very bureaucratic fashion for protecting information, it's protecting it so well, we can't get out there and learn the things we need to do. And that's easier to do it's not entirely devoid of security problems, but it's easier to do at the open source intelligence. And that's the second reason I think this is very important. The broad nature of our recommendations, and I know this sounds a little bit fuzzy, they're actually very specific, but three things are kind of described. One is the intelligence community is a community name. It has to be brought together to build a real community that works acts and thinks together. But how you do that, from what I learned is very important. Because right after 9 11, there was a push and in fact, we almost had legislation, thank goodness we didn't. That said, Well, the way you solve that is obvious, you just create one big mass of agency. It's just like Mary Sue gets up tomorrow and announces folks, I've given up on all these department schools and colleges, we're just going to have a university, we're all going to be in the same organization. There is real value in the fact that the culture of the State Department is to think about these issues in one way and CIA, another, the third, and I have to really force myself, maybe I'll say in the FBI as well. But there is value in those multiple cultures, just like there is value in having a biology department, the physics department that have great depth in their discipline, but increasingly have to work and talk to each other. And finally, simply getting serious. One of the real reasons for having a lot of trepidation that the commissioners had nine of us going into all this is that just about every two years since 1947, there has been a federal commission or committee or study on how to fix the intelligence community. And while we were waiting for security clearances and secure facilities and all that to get started, we were given the unclassified summaries of all of these reports since 1947. And I have to tell you, three quarters of what they all say is the same, including ours, we've got some new things, including ours. And somehow they get read, they get shelved. We are hopeful that because of the seriousness of what happened to this nation over rock, what happened in 911, the appointment of the new NDI and the National Intelligence Director and so forth, we are hopeful that this time around, when the President says, we accept all the four of these recommendations, that he means that it actually happens. Just to close a few samples of a recommendation. We suggested the creation of a position of mission manager. And there's actually some positive reaction to this in the community, which would be an individual out of one of the agencies who would pull together over a strategic issue, China, North Korea, whatever it happens to be, or worldwide bioterrorism, and would manage that process, bringing together in a sort of virtual organization for a lengthy but finite period of time, both analysts and collectors and other experts, and get them to think about the strategy. What do we really need to know? How are we going to get at it and manage that process actively for an appropriate period of time, and then disband, as opposed to building a new bureaucracy that has a new China, this or North Korea, that third, most of us and I in particular very much believe that this mass and measurement signatures, intelligence needs to be funded much better, much strengthened. The community is not holding on to remarkable young men and women from science and technology they're hiring, they're getting great talent coming in, they get frustrated, nobody does anything that we suggest, money's not there to do the work, we need to correct that. Certainly in the infamous turf war between CIA and the FBI, there's kind of clash of cultures between what is an intelligence agency and what is a law enforcement agency, because especially in issues around intelligence within the United States itself, as well as foreign intelligence, they need to be cooperating in new and different ways. The President's daily brief and communications, I'm not going to spend a lot of time with this, but I will tell you, if the CEO of any company in the United States got information in the way that the President gets information on these critically important issues, he'd kick his managers out the door. And we have a lot of reasons, you know, why we should do this, including maybe doing away with the PDB itself. Because what happens? As I say, this is almost a newspaper format. And what is the goal of every particular every young person in the intelligence community? Get his or her article into the PDB and get the headline on there that will catch attention. And it does not serve us well. There is no quantitative way or even attempted a quantitative way of clearly displaying the basis of the intelligence and the extent to which the community is confident in it. And this comes from our interview with Secretary Powell and many others. It's just kind of common sense. Intelligence reports to policymakers should go back to fundamentals. They should always indicate these four things, what we know and how we know it, what we do not know, what we think, and why we think. If that discipline of simply reporting these important issues in this manner was adhered to, we would go a long way, as you can tell by looking back at the Iraq experience. In closing my experience on this commission was I believe an opportunity to serve the nation and hopefully the world as well. Believe me, it was an education. It was at once deeply disturbing, but also to some extent reassuring. And I hope against hope that it was somewhat effective. So in closing, if the White House ever calls you, don't answer the phone. Unless you're prepared to work hard, want to learn new things, don't mind losing a lot of sleep, and believe that service can be effective at least some of the time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Dean Blank has asked if I would entertain one or two quick questions. We're awful close to five, but any questions or comments would be welcome. Very soon. Have some views on the first and not so many well thought out views on the second. First of all, Mary Sue, you know me, I believe if we're not in dialogue with people, we can't expect the results that we want. I think it's actually very important that we maintain good working relationship, especially with the FBI. We basically had one for a long time. There was a long period in which I was involved in University administration in which the FBI never came on to a campus to talk to anybody without quietly coming around first and sitting down with the Dean or the president saying, here's what we're here to do. Now I'm sure there were some instances where in fact there was a FISA court order that has to be signed by judge and all that and this could not be open knowledge. But since the US Patriot Act, we've gotten away from that a little bit. I'd like to get back to it. And we found at MIT that it's been very important to try to maintain open relationships and we've been reasonably satisfied with what's happened. But I think broadly there's been a drift away and I would absolutely concur with Bob that that's a good idea. I also would like to add to that a thing that probably would startle a lot of students and so forth for me to say, but one of the reasons the nature of the cooperation between the CIA and the FBI is important. And one of the reasons that we wanted this National Intelligence Service started in the FBI with some oversight by the National Intelligence Director is that the FBI is acutely aware of and obeying all the complex rules about what you can and can't do. They know about protection of people's civil liberties. And if you compare them with most other agencies, they got a pretty good track record of care and concern, because after all, they are an arm of the Justice Department. And so I think it's, it's a great idea when when the FBI began interviewing students from the Middle East immediately after 9-11, you know, my views on this, we were able to tell all of our students what the ground rules were for the FBI agents in those interviews. And let me tell you how we got them, we got them out of the Detroit Free Press online. So we shouldn't have had to go to the Detroit Free Press online. The FBI says that here they are. So I'm all for that. The other issue is maybe a little more complex than I understand. I do think it is a healthy thing for the FBI and other agencies to draw on the expertise in our faculties. And I especially think we need to continue to draw on faculty expertise in terms of social science and cultural geographic understanding and so forth. There are some landmines out there that you have to be very careful about. But on the whole, I believe universities are here to serve society. And as long as we're not crossing inappropriate legal or moral boundaries, I would hope that our expertise is made available. We've had some experiences, I'm sure you've had some experiences. We had the FBI asked to interview a faculty member who had taught a laboratory in a course in which a person they were for legitimate reasons looking for with regard to terrorism. Somebody had been at the University years ago. They went to interview that person about the course and whether what was being taught could be used to make weapons and so forth. And we actually sat down and negotiated with them. And the faculty member agreed to talk to him, but we had ground rules, one of which was not asking the faculty member to make a judgment whether what she had learned could be used to make a weapon. And, you know, when we put these things down, common sense fashion, they agreed to them and went along with them. Yes. I'm a summer in Roger and I actually had interned with CBR and issues at DIA this summer. And just to let you know, I'm a first generation immigrant. So I think they're probably succeeding pretty well and getting some new people in the intelligence community. But my question is having worked there, I saw in the ground level, like the problems that in terms of the hierarchy, you know, I mean, it's really hard to place the blame. And the media really tries to place the blame at some level of the hierarchy within the intelligence community. And do you think that it's the like it's the actual low level analysts that are failing? Or do you think it's something like the middle level people are basically psychopaths to the executive branch? And, you know, basically, there's yes, men that agree to anything that would that the executive branch would want them to say. And do you think having the DNI will either improve this? Or do you think it'll just become another bureaucratic hurdle? And then the second quick question is, are you going to be offering your mini course in the winter term? Not that I know of the second. Let me try this. And you could probably give a better answer yourself. I think many of the concerns that we uncover actually permeate the organization is top to bottom. And please remember that the 60 of the 90 staff people we had, with people who themselves worked or had worked at all kinds of levels in the agencies. So we had some real truth tests. And believe me, they weren't reticent to tell us when they thought we were off base. So most of our understanding and analysis of this is coming from people who actually had experienced top to bottom community. And Scott read very carefully put the staff together to have that character. I do not believe on this issue. We had any kind of dominance of yes, men at the top. There are a couple of things I'm very deeply concerned about. But I wouldn't have signed a report and a letter to the president that said, we believe the community told you what they believed if I wasn't convinced of that. There are other issues on which I think a similar commission might come to some other conclusions. I think there's some other issues the communities had where there's been some semi overt pressure and they may have responded to that. But this business, you know, what you're describing is true of every large organization. And part of what the community has got to do is, frankly, learn at what some of our better, more effective and efficient businesses have learned about how to deal with this because you could have said the same thing about IBM, this company and that company. And while they're not perfect, they've learned a lot about how to get get beyond this. And I hope someday they will. Thank you very much for an absolutely wonderful and very interesting lecture. Thank you all for coming. Thanks to Towsley Foundation for a short reception. Thank you again.