 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, 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 5 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 seek 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 and 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 gentlemen 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 Lambert. 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 92-95 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 Kiklinski 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 Typus 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 is 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 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 Uptigrove 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, Porter Goss, 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 dangerously 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 17, 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 binding 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 officers 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 it 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 deserved 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 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 COVID action, were largely left out. Director John McCone, 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 in language and usage. One word that rankled him was boondocks. He found it too 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 aides 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 breadth 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 admitted, 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 the 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's 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 that 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 1, 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 1, 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. Good afternoon. We're very pleased to have such a terrific turnout for this unprecedented historical event providing to the American public for the first time such a huge number of the presidential eyes-only products. Director Brennan gave an excellent overview and before we discuss the various perspectives of the practitioners and academic here, I'd like to do a little bit of a backdrop to provide you with the sense of how we got to the pickle in the PDB. My name is David Robarch. I am the Chief Historian of the CIA and I've been currently working on an internal history of all of the presidential products and I found it very interesting over the years to track how they have changed, how they have evolved, how they responded to various policy makers concerns and presidents concerns and such and we need to take ourselves back to a period that's very different from the present. So much of what the agency does day to day is really focused around providing that daily product for the president. Much of the agency constantly spends 24-7, 365 practically dealing with feeding that president's eyes-only product, the PDB. And we need to understand that back at the founding of the modern U.S. intelligence community in 1946-47, it was a very different environment. The whole process was very almost laid back. There was a sort of a almost lax daisical element to it in which briefings may or may not appear, the document may or may not get read. There simply was not the anxiety and the pace and the drive that went on. It goes on daily today. Let's take our minds back to roughly the end of 1945, early 1946. President Harry Truman has just abolished the first national level strategically oriented all-service intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, and he finds himself a bit confused about what he is receiving through the intelligence process, if that's the right word. He complains about a lot of random uncoordinated departmental perspectives that don't provide him with an overall insight into what's going on in the world. He wrote in his memoirs that the needed intelligence information was not coordinated in any one place. Reports came across my desk on the same subject at different times from various departments, and these reports often conflicted, very much deja vu, if you will. So one of the first things he charged the CIA's immediate predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group, with doing was creating a document that correlated, evaluated, and disseminated information from all departments of the US intelligence community, provided it to him in a concise fashion, one that he could receive every day and sort of get a classified news bulletin. So the first director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Sidney Sowers, leads the way in creating this new document, which was referred to as the Daily Summary. Almost all of them have been totally, if not almost completely declassified and available out at the Truman Library. It's a very interesting document because it looks absolutely nothing like any of the documents that you will see in the release today of the Pickle and the PDB. It was a two-page, mimeographed document, those of us old enough to remember mimeographed documents and tests and things in grade school. It really did look like that, printed on a roller after somebody typed it in on a stencil. Very, very crude by modern standards, had no visuals, no pictorials. Very, very short, it had only six items at the time. It was organized in a kind of a geographic fashion. But what's interesting is to kind of look at these early documents and see what people really thought were important at the time. For example, in the very first Daily Summary, the most important item in the estimation of Central Intelligence group analysts was a piece concerning alleged secret agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union that agents of some Russians in Switzerland were offering up for sale in Paris. Sounds pretty kind of down in the weeds operational information, but we thought that was important for the president to know. By the end of 1946, the Daily Summary writers are starting to include little tidbits of analysis and insight, but it really is not intended to be an analytic document. It is a classified news bulletin. It never runs for much more than four pages. By February 1948, about two dozen individuals and offices inside the U.S. government are receiving it. It is not nearly as closely held as the early pickle was. There was no briefing. And the delivery and communication process involving the summary was almost haphazard. It was prepared every day, but it might or might not be read by the president. It was always given to the senior military aide or some prominent White House associate. Sometimes it was used in the morning briefing. Sometimes it was not. But one key was that no one from CIG or from the CIA after it took on the responsibility was present. Truman, like the publication, gave it good positive feedback. And when CIA is created in September of 1947, it inherits this responsibility from CIG. Now, even though the feedback from the White House was generally positive, other people were questioning the utility of the daily summary. The, for example, important early evaluation of the new CIA by the Dulles Jackson Correa committee that came out in 1949 made some significant comments about the daily summary that really resonate throughout the history of the president's proprietary publication. This commission says that it was a fragmentary publication and might even be misleading to its consumers because it is based on limited information from certain departments. It lacks historical perspective. It does not follow stories through to their end. The writers don't know everything about the policy involved or even the details of the countries they're looking at. And as a result, the agency decides to change course and come up with a different product that addresses some of these concerns. Much of this is done under the supervision of the new DCI, Walter Bedell Smith, who comes in in late 1950. One of the things he does is carry out one of the big reorganizations of the agency where he consolidates the different analytic elements into one office, renames them, and uses the new Office of Current Intelligence to create a different product called the Current Intelligence Bulletin. And that premieres at the end of February 1951. It looks pretty much like the daily summary in content, short items, same regional categorization, but technology moves ahead at this time and you now have offset printing being used instead of mimeography. And yes, even three years later, the OCI gets a studio camera and can start including graphics in the document. Truman is very, very pleased with this. He writes to Director Smith, I have been reading the Intelligence Bulletin and am highly impressed with it. You have really hit the jackpot with this one. Now the document may have been improved, but the briefing process was not. There is still no daily briefing. Truman's senior military aid continues the practice of meeting with him in the morning, giving him an intelligence update, sometimes using the document, sometimes not. After the Korean War begins, the president meets with the NSC every Thursday morning and gets intelligence updates. This, through the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, was really the principal vehicle for communicating intelligence to the president was the weekly National Security Council meeting. And this is the situation that pertains when the new president takes office in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower. Now, being a military man by career, he organizes his national security apparatus quite differently, and this is one of the constant variables in the history of the president's document, is how the president chooses to run his national security process, whether the agency or the DNI is prominent in it, or whether the national security advisor is pretty much running the show. Eisenhower makes it clear right at the start that he's suspicious of any product that comes directly from a department, and by that he included CIA, even though it ostensibly is an interagency national level organization. He does not read the CIB, makes it clear he does not want morning briefings, and he is not going to use the CIB as his principal entrepo into intelligence. Instead, he is also getting most of his intel from the NSC weekly meeting from his director of central intelligence, Alan Dulles. The CIB does not figure prominently in those presentations, and this process continues throughout his presidency. In the sixth year of the current intelligence bulletin's publication in 1957, various observers note some prominent shortcomings in it that, as I say, kind of work their way through the history of the president's product. Articles are based only on material that comes in every day, so important stories might not even be written about if they don't have that current peg that an analyst can use to hang the story on. The flip side of that is, once the peg is gone, there's no continuity from day to day to follow up with a story, so developing situations after the big news may not do attention. And not enough top officials are reading the current intelligence bulletin because they have their own sources of intelligence through their department channels or through conversations or discussions. They also complain that topics important to them are not covered in the document, and the articles are either too detailed and complex or they're too superficial or they don't contain warning or or or. So the agency responds again retroactively, reactively, and creates a document called the Central Intelligence Bulletin, which premieres in January of 1958. It has a new name. It has a slick new cover. It has enhanced graphics, and it sort of looks like a classified magazine. It sometimes runs to 10 to 20 pages. But effectively, even though it has a dissemination of upwards 100 individuals and offices, it simply is not a significant element in the daily intelligence process. And this is one of the reasons why President Kennedy, as Director Brennan mentioned in his remarks, is dissatisfied when he takes office. He simply does not like the CEIB as we call it, the Central Intelligence Bulletin. And because of his disillusionment with the agency after the Bay of Pigs operation, agency leaders decide that they need to reconnect with the president. And as has always been the case in our history, one of the key ways to do that is by tailoring the daily product to the president's needs and preferences. And I will leave it at that because the director did such a fine job in presenting the history of the pickle and the PDB. And we'll move on to our discussion with our very, very distinguished and illustrious panel of practitioners and experts here. We'll lead off with former director of CIA, Porter Goss. He has the unique situation of being the only individual to be both DCI, Director of Central Intelligence and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, because he was there when the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was passed, abolishing the DCI position and creating the DCIA position. Prior to that, Director Goss had many years in the House of Representatives when, for several of those, he was chairman of the House Oversight Committee. So he sees the intelligence process from two sides of the consumer end, one side of the producer end, and has some interesting thoughts about the prominence that the president's daily product has during his experience. Director Goss, please. Thank you, David, very much. First of all, I'd like to say thank you all for the extraordinary hospitality you've given us away from Florida out here in Texas. I've enjoyed it very much. It's my first time in the library and I hope to come back and take advantage of all it has to offer besides events like this. I want to start out by echoing a little bit what Director Brennan said about the amazing capabilities we have in intelligence in a very dangerous world. It is truly amazing how far ahead we are in the things we can do and find out. And partially that's because we've got such extraordinary men and women in our intelligence service doing extraordinary work. All of this comes together for the consumer in chief. That would be the president of the United States. And the point of delivery for all of this information actually is the PDB. There are still, of course, other ways the president gets information. But this is the vehicle that we look at as a way to get the stuff he needs to know to him or the things he needs to think about to him. So it's an extraordinary document and it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to get stuff to him. Think about this. You're talking the most important man of the world. You want to give him what he needs, not what he doesn't need, so you don't want to give him a lot of fluff. And you need to know therefore what he needs to know. That means you need to know something about what he's about and what his policies are and what his daily schedule might be. But not only do you need to know the man, you need to know the things in the world that are going on so that you can connect those two in a meaningful way to it. That's an extraordinary editorial challenge, analytical challenge, and writing challenge, drafting challenge, for the people involved. And I congratulate them very much. Thank you. I seem to be tilted to the left. Repeating that verbatim. I think the most important thing that I can offer to this panel is how much times have changed from the days of the history that David and Director Brennan have referred to. It's extraordinary. Presidents, of course, are different. But the evolution of how information flows, how much information is out there and how much is known, is really extraordinary if you just think back in the last 10 years of social media and the other all the ways we are subjected to information flow in our daily lives. Weeding through that giant haystack for the nuggets has therefore gotten a lot harder. On the subject of transparency, we need to have the citizens of the United States of America comfortable with how we run our intelligence community and understanding the value of it. And that does require a lot of transparency. Unfortunately, when you speak now to an audience that you think might be your national security team, you've got to remember your setting very well. Because with the flow of information, often the audience of your, the audience you're addressing is the whole world. And it is very hard sometimes to remember which audience you are addressing. And if you notice our politicians these days are having more and more trouble trying to figure out what they want to say for that group and not have it spill over to the other group that's also listening who wants to hear something else. This process is very important to understand because you don't want to get the president of the United States subject to it or in it. You want to give him what he needs, the right stuff at the right time that's urgent and not waste his time either. I would suggest right now that the question of secrecy of the PDB is a very important subject because of the audience problem. I think there's a lot in the PDB that could be shared with the American public, but I would not want to share it with people overseas who have a different view of the United States and a different plan for the United States of America and its well-being and the global stage. So I think that the need for secrecy, it needs to be fully understood, but when there is no secrecy required then transparency is the order of the day in order to continue to keep the confidence and build the confidence of the people of our country that our leadership is doing the right the best they can in a difficult situation with the information that's available. And keeping that trust and confidence up there is a major effort. When I took over as the DCI in 2004, times of course were extraordinarily different than they had been in the 60s. We still had many challenges, they were of a different sort. I sorted my day, my responsibilities into five categories. The first and most important was fighting the war. In 2004 you understood we weren't quite sure whether we were going to get hit again and who the bad guys were and who the South Kaida group was anyway and what were their capabilities. So that was job one every day making sure that we did not have another terrible tragedy on our doorstep. Job two of course was being the DCI which fortunately now has evolved to a new architectural form and we have with us today, we're honored to have Director Clapper of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, our Chief Intelligence Officer in the community, who has taken over the coordination, integration, management of the community at large which is 16 or 17 agencies or more maybe that are doing different things in different ways but are the team that bring all this extraordinary stuff together. That in those days we did not have the DNI so the DCI had that job. We didn't have the money because the Defense Department had the money so I was accountable for a bunch of stuff I couldn't control. It wasn't a good condition and fortunately General Clapper has come to the rescue and we now have the DNI and the third job I had was the Director of CIA which was managing CIA at a time of great transition from what we called conventional activities overseas to very unconventional dangerous asymmetric warfare of a time we hadn't experienced before and didn't quite know how to handle. Those are three big jobs for any individual. The fourth job came along was well our system doesn't seem to be working properly. Congressional reports are saying we need to make some change so we're going to have new architecture. So my fourth job was saying Porter you've got to help build that new architecture of how we are going to create the DNI and remove the DCI out of this game. So I basically was putting myself out of work and finding somebody else to do a job that I was very happy to get rid of and I thanked John Negroponte the first DNI for accepting all of that fun work. And the last job I had was the one that almost killed me that most time consuming the hardest the one I took most seriously kept me up at night every night literally and figuratively and that was preparing the PDB. I can tell you I felt that when I first started reading the PDB as a new director of DCI I was disappointed. I thought that there were things in there that were not relevant to the president's needs. I felt that there were things in there that were stated in a way that outlined a worst case scenario rather than emphasizing a most likely case scenario. There are a lot of things that I wasn't impressed by and I also was getting some feedback from the White House that they felt there could be some improvements too but they weren't exactly clear about what those might be. I am very happy to say that in those days the PDB basically was delivered by professional briefers so that it was not just the director of CIA in the room with the president and the vice president it was also the national security advisor myself and a professional briefer and I am forever grateful to the cadre of extraordinary men and women who did that job. My job was to make sure the substance of the book was there and to answer the questions and say yes or no sir Mr. President yes we'll get that for you tomorrow but the people who had the facts and presented them so well in language that the president of the United States understood because they had spent enough time with him to know what his needs and wants would be and the kinds of questions he would ask that is just an extraordinarily valuable commodity to have and for all of those men and women and they are truly remarkable and have a wealth of information they did a fabulous job and I take my hat off to them that did not mean that my day every day started at seven o'clock the previous day I would at that point get the PDB for the following day I would sit in my office on the seventh floor of the agency and I would go through it I would quite often have questions usually about why is this in here or why isn't there something in here on this and I would call various people in the appropriate department to come up and explain it to me about nine o'clock I generally would get home think a little bit more about it make some questions and some thoughts go to bed get some sleep get up oh dark hundred and be presented with the updates at 5 36 30 whatever time we were going down to the White House that day and I would have to digest all of that then I would go down to my office in the White House complex and my briefer would come in brief me on all the changes that had come in overnight and then the president's briefer would come in and tell me the things he was going to say to the president and then we would all march over to the Oval Office and talk to the president and it took me about two weeks to understand that about half of what we were telling the president he had already found out because he got up earlier and got on the phone and talked to people overseas and we were talking to people to the east of us who had been up for five or six or seven or eight hours earlier and he had been having regular conversation with him we accommodated those kinds of things as best we could as we went along and learned and it is that kind of process that makes us so rich and so valuable and I would say that we got a lot of great questions and a lot of feedback from the president and that changed from day to day some days I was never quite sure what it was he was going to want and he kept me off balance very very well and that kept me doing my job even better I have never had a harder job in my life than trying to figure out what was worth the president of the United States time that we had and I must say there were several cabinet officers and a couple of other White House staffers who wondered what we were doing to why we were taking so much of his valuable time but that was the president's decision he loved the PDB he couldn't get enough of it he couldn't get enough of the information he always asked for more he was an ideal customer and I hope that is something that all presidents at the agency will always do its job so well that all presidents will feel that way about the PDB now to finish on a personal note I look with great interest on these revelations that are coming out because I was a very junior person on the very front lines in the missile crisis down in the conflict area and in the Dominican Republic during these days and I always wondered what those guys in Washington were thinking and so now this is my chance to find out thank you very much next we'll hear from Admiral Bobby Inman well known to many of you as a professor at the lbj school of public affairs most importantly for our event today we have his extensive background as an intelligence officer at the most senior ranks director of the national security agency a major contributor to these products that you'll receive today and deputy director central intelligence under one of the most interesting characters to ever be DCI William Casey Admiral Inman please you're getting it it is sound is going out good as career intelligence officer you realize very quickly how perishable your sources are how easily they're compromised and when you lose them you have a void so from the beginning you want to get the information you that you collected in the hands of those who can use it but same time you want to protect how you know it in the process what was unique about the pvb was that it not only said of what we knew but it often also told how we knew it in the process when I heard that the pvb was going to be declassified and released my first alarm was what are you going to do about all those details of how we knew and then I heard there was a lot of redaction and I rest I relaxed so my comments here really are for the journalists and the historians why the redactions you can often tell what you know without how harming your sources and methods but even the slightest inference of how you got that information can lead to catastrophic loss often hard maybe even impossible to replace when I was director of national security agency looking at what could be declassified for my great holdings I made the decision to release all of the purple materials to breaking the japanese codes during World War two huge value to historians changed a lot of their understanding of how the war was conducted critical decisions that were made I was also pressed by the FBI to release the vanona materials this was the decryption of KGP communications for a very long time frame and I declined to declassify even though the FBI wanted to document why the Rosenbergs had been arrested and tried certainty from the intercepts of their involvement and their guilt why didn't I release it KGB was still using that same system all those years later they'd get a new source they weren't sure it wasn't a plant they couldn't trust it so they would use vanona until they were confident that the source was reliant the new case officer was reliable and then they would go to a much higher level system so the key often is and this is the point I want to make why the redactions how you collected 40 years ago may still be pertinent for other targets you want to go after it may not be the same countries you have to but what you have to protect is the ability you can access the critical information for this country's security and that takes precedent over telling a good story about how you happen to know something so I'm looking forward to seeing the redacted PDBs and I'm also happy that we won't in this process wonderfully valuable for historians to to look at this period of history I'm particularly pleased in this location that you'll get a chance to see president johnson wasn't just concerned with the vietnam war all the things he had on his plate every day with the outside world and this will give a greater understanding hopefully to those who make judgments about his presidency that his involvement on the international scene was vastly broader than just vietnam but in accomplishing that we're still going to protect sources and methods thank you well next here from john helgerson a former deputy director for intelligence at cia which meant administratively he was and subsequently in many ways he was responsible for preparing the the PDB he has a long and distinguished career in u.s. intelligence which you can read about in your excerpt insert about the the speaker's profiles uh most importantly to what we're discussing today is his preparation of an unclassified book that talks about how the agency briefed presidential candidates and presidents elect over the years since eisenhower this book has been reissued in a second edition and it is now available as the as i understand it the u.s. government's first audio book you can buy from the general government printing office both the disc set and you can download an ebook for i'm told only ten dollars so rush right out after this event uh and please do so and you'll find some fascinating insights from uh mr helgerson's research john thank you david like the other panelists i'm delighted to be here at the lbj library and to join in this discussion since david has raised the subject i would point out that in addition to paying the government printer thirty five dollars for this book you can get it online for two dollars and i'll leave it to you to decide which you prefer i am participating today for the reason david mentioned that is uh i happened to write the book on our briefings in the intelligence community of presidential candidates and presidents elect and it seemed appropriate particularly today with debates tonight and so on that we take a few minutes to focus on that aspect of the issue the intelligence community in reaching out to brief presidential candidates and presidents elect had really two fundamental goals broadly speaking one of course was to ensure that those individuals of both parties were as adequately briefed as was feasible in the middle of presidential campaigns and all the chaos that goes with that the second goal was not a selfish one but sounds a bit like that and it was to establish a relationship between the intelligence community and the next president whoever it might be now on the one hand there was the fun of getting to know the president which was the title of my book but on a more serious note and aspect it was to ensure that we did understand the person we would be supporting how we could best support them but more important to be sure they understood and their staff understood that the kinds of information they could reasonably expect to get from the intelligence community and who they should contact to get that information so there would be no break from the past to the future now let me take just a minute to jump back as others have to the history of this this all began through the good sense of president Harry Truman who came to the presidency obviously when Franklin Roosevelt died and Truman was startled to find although he had been vice president and served many other capacities in government at how much he did not know about critical national security issues including for example the Manhattan Project after Truman had been in office a couple of weeks secretary of war Henry Stimson came to his office and briefed him on the Manhattan Project the atomic bomb Truman in his memoirs used this as one example of why he wanted to be sure that whoever succeeded him should be as well briefed as possible so Truman right after the political conventions in 1952 reached out to Adlai Stevenson the Democrat and Dwight Eisenhower the Republican and invited them to come to the White House so that they could be briefed by the DCI whom David mentioned Bedell Smith and the rump group of the cabinet who dealt with national security affairs to get the candidates up to speed well to make a long story short this sort of instructive series of events here Stevenson accepted and went ahead with this plan Eisenhower however did not Eisenhower later wrote that he thought it would be inappropriate for him to be briefed on information otherwise unavailable to the American public and he told Harry Truman this in a handwritten note seeking to explain his declination well you probably know a little about Harry Truman and he was powerfully irritated offended at this reply from Eisenhower so you will find in a different presidential library a handwritten letter from Truman to Eisenhower which I'll take the liberty to quote just a moment Truman said partisan politics should stop at the boundaries of the US is that not an antiquated thought then referring to Eisenhower's staff Truman went on to write I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us he's writing now to Dwight Eisenhower just one world war two he goes on to say you have made a bad mistake and I'm hoping it won't injure this great republic there has never been one like it and I want to see it continue regardless of the man who holds the most important position in the history of the world may God guide you and give you light well oh I know from the records that Eisenhower and his staff deliberated a little and then took the high road declining to respond in kind to Truman but what Eisenhower did and this was instructive to those of us in the intelligence community ever since Eisenhower wrote a note to Beatle Smith the DCI I'll keep in mind that indeed Eisenhower had just won world war two in Europe but his chief of staff had been bedel smith who still wore the uniform as the director of central intelligence so here's Eisenhower in the few days after writing to Smith and he said to Smith to the political mind it looked like the outgoing administration was canvassing all its resources in order to support Stevenson's election Eisenhower went on unbelievably to say to describe the importance of doing what is right and he the challenges and wrote of the challenges he and Smith had faced in Europe well this was a crushing thing for Smith to receive but the lesson for us in the intelligence business and for historians is that one must be extraordinarily careful that intelligence briefings provided to presidential candidates presidents elect and certainly to presidents must not be politicized nor should they have the give the impression of being politicized well I don't mean to paint too dreary a picture here because Eisenhower who of course won the election was also a very wise man and he did say to Smith he would be happy to accept briefings from mid-level substantive experts from the CIA which he did on a regular basis but he did not want it done at the political level powerful lesson which we have mostly remembered over the years now if I may let me talk just a little bit about the 1960 and 1963 transitions because they were each little different and each tells us so teaches us a lesson about how to handle candidates and presidents elect in 1960 Kennedy of course was running against Nixon who was the vice president and thus received his own intelligence but Kennedy was to be briefed well surprisingly when Kennedy became officially the candidate the DCI Alan Dulles decided that he personally would do all the briefings of Kennedy well senior officers and CIA were very concerned at this and it was little surprising that Eisenhower who had been president for eight years thinking back to his exchange with Smith and Truman Eisenhower sat still for this despite some reservations in the White House and so Alan Dulles did the briefings of Kennedy while he was a candidate and while he was president elect and frankly although they worked reasonably well together there was never a warm bond primarily I believe because they were men of different generations and temperaments and personalities and while Alan Dulles knew most everything important he did not have the expertise that impressed would impress Kennedy or his staff there was one briefing however that was an exception and that is that Alan Dulles took Richard Bissell the director of operations to Palm Beach where they sat on the patio of the Kennedy home and briefed John Kennedy this was just after the election on the array of covert actions that CIA had underway the most important of which was planning for what became ultimately the Bay of Pigs operation but at that stage was an array of political and propaganda activities not the military conception Kennedy according to Bissell and Dulles listened attentively the briefing on the Cuban subject alone went on for almost an hour Kennedy asked a number of sensible questions but studiously avoided tipping his hand as to what he thought of the plans underway the issue for the community of course is one must reflect carefully on when and in what way you brief a president elect on covert actions or sensitive NSA operations or sensitive military operations we have pretty much mastered that over the years but in its formative stages it was worked out here with Kennedy the other thing a little more timely it's a lesson from that 1960 transition it was the presidential debates 1960 were the first televised debates and as we all know Kennedy benefited immensely and Nixon was harmed by his performance interestingly from the point of view of the intelligence community though those debates both candidates mentioned the director of central intelligence Alan Dulles and comments he had made as if he was the expert public purposes on the Soviet strength of the Soviet economy and the so-called bomber and missile gaps and all of these things redounded to Nixon's disadvantage as the debate unfolded and frankly Nixon held a grudge against the intelligence community he thought largely or partly responsible for his loss of the election well what I would recommend you take away from this is watch carefully particularly when the debates not tonight but later occur between the candidates republican and democrat the rule of thumb is that if intelligence is mentioned there's trouble I mentioned 1960 but just very briefly let me mention that as recently as 2004 there was the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq where both candidates were critical of intelligence 2008 the issue is rendition detention interrogation CIA's practice practices with terrorist suspects both candidates attacked the agency or in 2012 more recently Benghazi was the issue it never goes away we're still hearing about Benghazi so the point is whatever may be your opinion on these issues if they come up in the debate it's going to be an enduring issue and it's going to be trouble for the intelligence community now concerning 1963 the transition to president Johnson others have commented on this so I won't won't say much except to say the profound lesson for the intelligence community was you've got to be good to the vice president others have mentioned that we did not we the community did not give the pickle to present to vice president Johnson well the reason is that the kennedy administration prohibited it but this was a lesson that was learned in an overnight by john mccown who was then director we've had some discussion already today of the day after they returned from texas to washington but john mccown took the initiative to have his executive assistant telephone johnson's secretary and say tomorrow morning the dci will be at the vice president's office to provide the usual intelligence briefing as is regularly done well in truth there was nothing usual or regular about this as you all now know but mccown did get in and was able quickly to recover in terms of providing briefings to johnson now interestingly the first lesson was take the vice president seriously the second lesson however mccown did not really digest from our earlier experience because johnson appreciated the briefings but he also taken with mccown's forceful direct style began engaging mccown and seeking his advice on what should be our policy in vietnam or who should be appointed ambassador or to other key positions well needless to say while this was flattering to mccown he should not have followed down that track and within some months the relationship soured for a variety of reasons primarily vietnam and mccown of course ended up resigning as dci i oversimplified this a little bit but the lesson of course is take the vice president seriously don't get involved in policy issues or personnel issues now i mentioned we had two goals as an intelligence community to inform and to establish a relationship you will by now be relieved to know i won't lead you through all the other transitions in the intervening years suffices to say however that there was a major break between the first four presidents post truman that is truman through nixon and the seven who followed for the first four when they were presidential candidates and presidents elect they did not receive a daily publication at all and they did not receive daily briefings they did begin to read the daily pub once they were president the following seven presidents though from jerry ford to the president in somewhat different ways all read the daily pdb while they were president elect they continued to read it while they were president and in they all had a briefer every day while president elect and most continued all continued with a briefing usually from the intelligence community not infrequently from the national security advisor the point is the process has matured over the years and the last transition or two have been frankly great successes in no small part owing to the initiative of general clapper and his staff the secret recently has proved to be have not only a director involved to give gravitas to the whole thing but bring along people at a subordinate level who really know what they're talking about in detail and that is more useful and more impressive to admit new administration now i'd end with a couple other thoughts one of them is that all 11 presidents elected since truman have accepted and taken seriously the intelligence briefings they've been offered you might be interested to know however there were a handful of candidates who declined the briefings none of them obviously got elected so in the coming months if you hear one or the other the candidates declines the briefing you know who to bet on come election day now the final point i would make is that in addition to dealing with presidents presidential candidates presidents elect is very important to establish a relationship and support the senior staff the least successful briefing operation we had was with president nixon when he was elected owing to the history i've mentioned but the most successful operation so to speak we've had with senior support staff was with henry kissinger who became national security advisor during the transition period when nixon did not even he returned unopened the envelopes with the pdb kissinger read them kissinger tasked the intelligence community we provided him everything from substantive support to secretarial support and in his memoirs i'll end with this kissinger wrote of richard helms who was the dci now keep in mind this is a guy henry kissinger who does not dispense praise lightly shall we say in his memoirs he says it is to the director this is in the white house year's book it is to the director that the national security assistant first turns to learn the facts in a crisis and for analysis of events and since decisions turn on the perception of the consequences of actions the intelligence assessment can almost amount to a policy recommendation but concerning helms personally he said disciplined meticulously fair and discreet helms performed his duties with a total objectivity essential to an effective intelligence service i never knew him to misuse his intelligence or his power he never forgot that his integrity guaranteed his effectiveness that his best weapon with presidents was a reputation for reliability the intelligence input was an important element of every policy deliberation by and large the president i mean the policy the practice has worked the presidents have appreciated it and we need to remember to support also the cabinet level and national security advisors who are also key to the process thank you very much our next commentator is peter clement who currently is deputy assistant director of one of the new mission centers that director brennan mentioned in his remarks before then he had many many years as an analyst and senior intelligence manager focusing principally on the soviet union and uh later russia and apropos to mr helgerson's remark about supporting the vice president and senior staff uh mr clement was a pdb briefer for vice president cheney and national security advisor rice uh and currently uh or excuse me was chief of the cia's presidential transition team uh in 2008 peter thank you david first let me say it's a it's a pleasure to be here this is my second time and this is an incredibly impressive library the staff here are terrific and uh i've had a lot of fun just touring the exhibits for the second time they upgraded them and it's a terrific facility here second i'm i'm also honored because i'm actually sitting with a friend of her people for whom i've worked pretty directly for a good part of my career including currently uh john brennan and part of the joy of being with the agency for 30 plus years is working with this caliber of true of intellect insight and and also just a lot of fun to work with so i want to thank everybody for having me on the panel as well um i want to talk specifically about my time as a pdb briefer um i feel particularly strongly about the pdb because pretty much most of my long time tenure here at the agency the pdb has been central to my life either as a contributor as a writer as an analyst as a first and second line editor reviewer not the most popular job at the agency uh as a senior reviewer when i was sitting in this the di suite as the final reviewer before i went out the door also a fairly unpopular job although i got to me a lot of tremendously smart and terrific analysts to work with on on review and then finally as the actual delivery person as the briefer i actually got to deliver the book to the senior policy makers so i spent one year as a pdb briefer for the first six months i briefed vice president cheney for the second six months i briefed national security advisor connelly sir rice her deputy steven hadley and another deputy national security advisor for a counterterrorism uh fran townsant so briefly like to divide my comments into two parts first what i would call the prep part what my life was like getting ready for the briefing and then secondly sort of the key elements of the job as the briefer in the room with the with the policy maker my wife was not thrilled when i mentioned i was taking on this job as a pdb briefer when i told her well i'll be going to bed at six o'clock tonight dear because i got to get to work by 12 30 so i would spend from 12 30 a.m. until 6 30 a.m. getting ready to be the briefer that day so you might ask yourself uh why do you need six hours to prepare i mean it's a pretty small book there's four or five pieces what's the problem here and the short answer is as uh david know that i'm really a russian hand from the past and suddenly i found myself having to brief about nuclear programs nuclear proliferation weird goings on in north korea take your pick of the world and suddenly i had to brief on this so part of my prep was familiarize familiarize yourself closely with the piece what's the main analytic line what's the basis as adam ellenman noted where did we get this information and how good is it because i'd need to be able to answer those kinds of questions from the recipient and then figure out if there were any other odds and ends i needed to to prepare for and vice president cheney's case his book was a little bigger than just the pdb book a lot of the policymaker recipients will say well yeah i got all these articles but i want to see some interesting other things have you done any interesting memos that relate to issues i'm interested in uh is there really potentially any good traffic and here we're talking about the finished intel products from different agencies but we call them raw traffic so maybe some interesting intercepts some interesting imagery that might pertain to an item in the book so you're spending a little bit of your time figure out what's going to be in the the package that you deliver down to the policymaker uh the second thing i discovered very quickly was how much i didn't know which is very sobering you think you're relatively well informed until you start reading all these pieces so um i quickly realized like in about a day or two peter you know this whole russia thing it's great that you know a lot about russia but that's not going to get you too far so i adopted the mentality you know my my job here is to basically i'm going to be a mile wide and an inch deep i'm going to be able to get through five or ten or fifteen minutes on a particular issue but i'm never going to be that deep deep expert um it's important to recognize your limitations there are some answers that you're not going to have and the right answer always is sir i'll get back to you we have people who will have the answers uh but at this point it may not be me so the other thing that goes on in the six hours um you interact with a lot of people we might still be finishing a particular piece if there's a less minute change you want to get updated the analysts who actually wrote the pieces will come up pretty early in the morning before you leave to get in the car at six thirty or seven to update you if there's some new tidbit that you need for the piece or if you ask for a pre-brief and sometimes if i were doing a piece on say the nuclear fuel cycle and how many centrifuges are spinning in certain countries and there was some technical issue that i really didn't know much about i'd say i want to have some people from that office come up here and sort of update me on how i can talk about this or explain it in case i get any questions so there's a lot of support that goes on and getting the briefers ready in the morning the other thing the analysts would do is uh and this is not what was going on in the early days of the pickle in the pdb but as analysts the the job of preparing a pdb item became much more um intense and demanding over the years because we develop all these background notes so the briefer in addition to having the piece would have several pages of so-called background notes where the analysts would write well here are the kinds of questions you might anticipate you're going to get and here are the answers very very helpful if you're the person going down there i'm looking at porter goss when he talked about those expert professional briefers going down there porter as you know some of us were perhaps more expert than others so all of this prep actually really helped um a couple of observations on the actual delivery piece so about six thirty i'd hop in the car uh fortunately we had drivers i didn't have to worry about the driving part and i'd do a last minute cramming in the back seat is we'd get down to the vice president's residence or in a condolisa rice's office down on the west wing and uh as i'd go in um i'd kind of walk through the pieces in the book and that's job number one there's multiple roles you play as the actual briefer that morning the first is you're conveying the bottom line of the piece some particular issue or aspect that you may want to sensitize a reader to about either the sensitivity of the sources is this something new or perhaps more importantly is there a shift in the analytic line of the analysts when we're briefing this particular piece we want to make sure that we clarify any ambiguities or uncertainties that the reader might have all the uh the recipients everybody has a different style something like to read through the piece and then ask questions someone read and look up and say what about this sentence what's that about um others like you to actually walk through the piece and do a really quick summary bottom line and then an interesting data point of two uh the other part two other big parts in the briefer role is um you actually are a very important liaison person between the intel community and the policymaker having that time alone in the office gives you a unique opportunity to judge a how well the piece worked did they have a lot of questions where there are things maybe we should have done differently in the way we presented the piece to make it more clear so when you go back to headquarters you can provide really good context and feedback about why things worked it didn't work or um in some cases why you're generating a lot more questions so the other role that you play here is to that you're the actual vehicle to bring back a fair number of questions and taskings sometimes that would not make you so popular you get back to the building and make a few phone calls and say oh um dr rice would like this memo by tomorrow morning there's a big question she had about this piece or uh vice president cheney so you would frequently be the uh the conveyor belt as it were for bringing back feedback uh the other thing that you would do when you would come back after the briefing uh you frequently would get the analyst together uh to talk about the feedback directly convey any taskings and then alert them you know he had some other questions that aren't directly related to the piece but it's something where i think about writing so we use this opportunity to provide some insights into some of the issues or concerns that the reader might have that have nothing directly related to a particular piece but they give you a nice heads up to anticipate there's some issues that are on their mind why don't we plan ahead let's think of another piece we might do about x y and z um and for all the people i briefed for dr rice sir uh deputy hadley or vice president cheney frequently they would say gee i'm really interested uh i can't do it today but i'd love to get kind of a deeper look at what's going on in whatever russia china and we would go back and arrange for a deep what we would call a deep dive and let's organize a briefing and uh vice president cheney would do this not infrequently he'd want a briefing on a saturday uh for maybe a couple of hours and we bring out a team of analysts and really do what i would call a serious review of all the issues related to a particular uh country or an issue um so in that sense we were really trying to be a full service liaison rep both delivering the book providing some context to the reader but also bringing back the feedback and conveying to the authors or to the director uh there would be days where there would be particular feedback that was either sensitive or uh not good news where you'd want to be sure to alert your boss john helverson or perhaps uh porter goss and say boss this piece dirt a lot of interest that you may want to be aware of so the next time you're in the building down there uh you're not blindsided so i'm going to stop there if you have any other questions we'd be happy to take them on and they have questions and answers our final commentator today is professor william invadin who as you know from the bio is a professor here the executive director of the climate center and has very extensive background commenting on foreign affairs foreign policy issues and also brings a policy perspective to after service at the state department policy planning staff and the national security council professor in bed okay all right thank you david um and as uh david indicated i want to offer my brief comments today from two different vantage points first as a historian as a scholar of the of the cold war i'll offer some reflections on the significance of these particular documents for the scholarly enterprise and as a scholarly resource then second as a former staff member on the nsc at the white house i'll offer some brief reflections on the policy makers perspective on the pdb so first uh we're in my historian's hat so the basic craft of the historian is to reconstruct and interpret the past based on the documentary record stored in archives such as the lbj presidential library here where we're sitting today and these archives help us address questions like how the world looked to policy makers and leaders as events unfolded what policy options were they considering and rejecting what policy options did they uh embrace and why and so archives are unique in that they give us a snapshot of what was known at the time as opposed to say uh written memoirs or later oral history interviews which can be very helpful but they're also invariably subject to the uh imperfections of personal memory and sometimes the distortions of personal vanity um in other words we all want to be remembered well and sometimes we remember ourselves a little better than the vax may warrant so um so uh so while the cold war archival record contains a rich repository of policy memos to and from leaders um correspondence and transcripts of discussions we now have a lot of archives from other countries as particularly the end of the cold war is uh eastern european archives opened up missing thus far for historians has been any visibility into the relationship we've been hearing about here today between the president united states and his intelligence community um and so in short we historians have access to what policy advisors recommended to the president what decisions were made what was said in public and presidential speeches but until now we haven't had access to what the president really knew at the time so that's why these new pdbs help answer in a foreign policy context uh a variant of senator Howard Baker's very famous question from watergate what did the president know and when did he know it um and then these pdbs also help illumin a related question what did the president want to know uh and and reading these is almost like getting a a mirror image of the president's mind mind at the time um as has been discussed here an aspect of the pdb that is perhaps not fully appreciated yet as it's not just developed from a blank slate by the intelligence intelligence community based on what the cia wants to tell the president but it's a very interactive process um it's driven largely by by customer customer demand so the president tells the intelligence community what he's interested in and in what format he's interested in and the the ic response um and so these pdbs don't just provide a record of what the intelligence community was telling the president about the world at the time provides a record almost like a a mirror image diary of the president's daily concerns and preoccupations what world leaders interested in him what types of issues worried him what countries and regions were on his mind uh and well uh i've had the privilege uh several days ago of getting some advanced access to these pdbs but you know in full disclosure uh they total what 2,500 documents over 8,000 pages i have not read them all uh not really but i i did read a number of them and a couple of my graduate students and staff read a lot more uh so special shout out to olivia sones and anna waterfield if you're here thank you i'm gonna base these comments in part in your good work um a few highlights and takeaways from what we've seen already and what all historians and journalists in here and interested public should look for first the staggering breadth of issues that a president daily confronts and the multitude of considerations he must juggle and i know this has been echoed by a number of the other panelists here but this is a really important cautionary note for historians who may want to only focus on reconstructing the decision-making process on a single issue so example one that director brennan mentioned earlier today historians who are writing on the johnson administration's troop escalation in vietnam in the 1964 and 65 window will of course find much value in these documents seeing what the cia was telling the president at the time about conditions in vietnam but i also hope that historians uh focusing on vietnam will take notice that while wrestling with the vietnam decision lbj was simultaneously receiving warnings and alarming assessments about the dominican republic congo turbulence in the middle east soviet and chinese communist adventurism throughout the developing world political instability among american uh allies in europe and asia student unrest around the globe uh so these are a bracing reminder that no issue is confronted or or decision is made in in isolation but they're all part of the the boiling cauldron of challenges that a president faces every day and then there are those pdbs from some really pivotal moments in in history again director brennan referenced the the kennedy assassination and then lbj transition earlier as did some of the other panelists here but uh it's really chilling to read the the pickle at the time from november 22nd 1963 because remember it's prepared a course before the assassination and contained a series of items on the sylvia union china cambodia cuba indonesia and they're a really unique glimpse into what might have been on president kennedy's mind that that fateful day in dallas and then uh right after that something i think very unique in the annals of pdbs director brennan mentioned a poem once the horrific news from dallas broke um the the pickle staff added an amendment and i'll just read it here in honor of president kennedy for whom the president's intelligence checklist was first written on june 17 1961 for this day the checklist staff can find no words more fitting than a verse quoted by the president to a group of newspaper men the day he learned of the presence of soviet missiles in cuba bullfight critics ranked and rose crowd the enormous plaza full but only one is there who knows and he's the man who fights the bull and then again as it has been alluded the next day's pickle of november 23rd the the you know new president lbj's first encounter with the really unfathomable challenges of the office offered a bracing overview of the world he encountered reports of escalating vietnam attack vietcong attacks in south vietnam communist insurgency in venezuela recurring soviet pressures on west berlin after we thought that had been settled a couple years earlier political instability in iraq and syria labor party gains in great britain one of our main allies takes only the briefest stretch of our historical imaginations to appreciate that this was the new reality that faced lbj and the realization that these are not just academic interests but these are things he faces as the being responsible for leadership of the free world so there's a much rich material in here for historians let me shift now and just offer a couple concluding thoughts uh or in my head as a erstwhile a recovering policymaker if you will uh and this was this uh the president's interaction with the pdb often shaped the policy agenda for those of us working for him on the nsc staff as you've picked up the pdb is such a privileged and close hold document that really only a small handful of white house staff at the very senior levels have access to it for the rest of us the directors and senior directors and dn and some dns says um uh our our exposure to the pdb would be episodic and prompted by the president's reactions to a particular topic um i suppose i can say now so one rather delicate one that came up for us when i was there in 2005 as president bush uh got into a fairly stern disagreement with his briefer over a uh a matter a question of the historical record in in iran particularly relating to the iranian posture in the hostage crisis of 1979 and i wasn't in the oval at the time uh but from national surprise there had been got the report that the president really disagreed with the briefer the briefer held her ground there's a bit of an impasse and so the question was kicked over to my office the strategy office uh you need to resolve this well bureaucratic politics 101 is it's not a happy place to be stuck between the president and the cia and that's where we found ourselves um fortunately one of my uh more courageous colleagues in the office peter fever took the lead on this while i ducked under the desk uh anyway um and peter is uh you know very uh honorable and empirically minded political scientist he did the research and it turns out president bush was right um so i don't know if director goss you remember that one but anyway so okay so and the next day we got we got uh raises so all worked out right so anyway um uh other times the president might be intrigued by an item in the pdb and then ask us his policy staff to develop a follow-up initiative on on the issue uh so uh and this sometimes turned into really a full intelligence and policy feedback loop so one time a pdb item on a let's just say a large country in east asia uh interested the president and he asked me to then develop a major strategic initiative on that country policy initiative so several months later after we'd completed the policy initiative and we're ready to roll it out we then fed it back to cia who then adapted that into a special feature that was a follow-up deep dive deep dive pdb in other words we made a lot more work for the intelligence community so um and you've already heard the uh the uh consternation from that so to fully appreciate the significance of the pdb one really has to consider it from a full spectrum of perspectives of course the intelligence community leadership as we have here today but also the scholarly community the media and i know we've got several leading journalists here and the policymaker and the warfighter as we'll soon hear from admiral mccraven in closing i want to say this i uh i personally want to thank and commend president obama and director brendan for their principled leadership and taking what really is an unprecedented step of declassifying and releasing these documents i think it's a great hallmark of what it means to live in a free society and this prompts a final thought for all the criticism that the uh u.s intelligence community has faced in recent years in comparison with every other major intelligence service around the world the american intelligence community remains the most transparent intelligence community in the world and for that i'm grateful thank you we have about uh 15 minutes left in our symposium here to take some questions from the audience before we do i would uh enjoin anyone who's proposing to advance to the microphone to please keep your question in the form of a question keep it within one or two sentences please avoid any long-winded prefatory statements or tea ups and thirdly please stick to the content of the symposium the remarks made here the details of the in the publication that you received when you arrived and please stay away from current events or or the controversies that were in no position to discuss in this forum i will start on this side and then move over here if anyone is in line otherwise i'll stick with this side okay sir well i'm afraid i must withdraw in response to your last restriction since my question had to do with the intelligence in regard to the emergence and the capabilities of iso in which there seem to be a contradiction between the director's public testimony as to the agency's briefing of the president honor and the president's own statements uh in march of 2014 which belittled a threat and referred to heissel as a junior varsity uh uh you're exactly right you'll need to withdraw because this it's not part of not part of this symposium today i apologize for that and i will take my seat thank you thank y'all for being here today very important day can you hear me yes go ahead robert maro of austin texas um director brennan gave us a very interesting nugget a few minutes ago it was the kennedy's administration's directive to the cia saying under no circumstances should the pdb or the pickle be given to johnson under no circumstances a few years ago roger stone wrote a book called the man who killed kennedy the case against lbj you gentlemen out there are historians scholars men with decades in u.s intelligence do any of you believe that linden johnson or the cia murdered john kennedy let me be very direct it's total fiction it has no element of accuracy of fact at all and who do you think killed john kennedy adriel inman who do you think killed john kennedy well we know with certainty that oswald killed uh we're going to be left for history to understand what rolled cuba and castro may or may not have been involved in that process uh whether efforts to assassinate castro had caused him in turn to inspire it that's pure speculation there is no fact to support that speculation but there is great certainty that the uh the stonebook has zero credibility or five okay well you speak to your next question please that's a question for the panel and i'd like to have sir one question respond to that please one question one question sir one question for poor guys who killed john kennedy please withdraw and allow someone else to ask a question thank you no i answer would have been i think bill o'reilly had the last word on that if you read his book you talked about the uh the pressures on the people uh protecting your sources and the and the uh pressures on the analysts briefly what is the effect of wiki leaks and snowden in terms of uh how this is done and then second if i can what is the correlation between what the president receives daily and what i'm going to see in the uh washington post in new york times that day let me do quickly the first part and defer to my colleagues for the second the snowden revelations are the single most damaging series of leaks for us intelligence collection capability and our relationships with an ally that has occurred since world war two he is a traitor not a hero in the process wiki leaks was not as damaging to intelligence collection as it was to our relationships with other countries because most of that damage the state department i would not want to be caught not sharing had dumped virtually all their secret level uh tables into a defense intelligence network that's what manning was able to access and release and the damage here is that it revealed who was talking to us in cobble what were the individuals who were talking to the u.s. representatives same for other countries so while it may not have compromised in the same sense what we were reading or listening to but the damage of people being willing to talk to us if they're going to show up somewhere in wiki leaks and the rest of it and embarrass them they're on on country terribly damaging to getting the information we need to be informed on the outside world david if i may answer the second question which i think is a perceptive one it might be good that i answer it because it's been fully 20 years since i was the deputy director for intelligence and responsible for the production of the pdb but at that time now talking history because this question had arisen i had a pretty careful study done and for some period that frankly forgotten how long we discovered that something like 60 percent of the pdb items the essential substance of the item was not replicated in any way in the press i mean we talked about the same countries and general issues but the substance of the information reported was not to be found in the new york times or the washington post i can't speak to how that ratio may have changed from earlier periods or still later periods but i found it's striking at the time it's a unique publication peter could i add one footnote to john's comment the other thing that's important to recognize the pdb is not actually like the newspaper there are items in the pdb there are not about things that happened yesterday there are pretty often pieces about either long-term trends ongoing trends things that are not in the headlines today or tomorrow but are nonetheless significant significant enough that we want to alert the policy makers this is something that's going to be coming up on your radar at some point in time here's a little heads up so it's really not just a current intelligence newspaper i'd like to add to that the times may have changed but there's no question that the media content of the day and the influential media outlets in our country was also a sidebar and the information we had didn't necessarily brief it as part of the pdb but we're very clearly aware of it because quite often we got questions because something would appear that would tickle an interest and the question would come and we'd take it home research it and come back the next day or whatever it might be with relevant information if there was any to say there was a correlation would be too strong a word but to say that interest was peaked sometimes by what the major news organizations were putting out and quite often followed sort of in lockstep what what editorial board was saying in another there's no question that was of interest to the policy makers if there was a factual aspect of that that might gotten to our territory but we obviously didn't get into the political aspects of it next question please yes there's a uh november 2014 article in the new york times about how the obama administration in a year earlier had asked for a report from the cia about the historical record of the united states supporting through arm support insurrectionary groups and the report came out that it was complete failure all the cia's operations in that regards were failures and the obama administration went ahead and proceeded to go ahead and arm the syrian rebels in full defiance of cia's expert advice now a couple things follow from this the first is is this report is classified and how can anybody in the cia talk about the importance of open government when a report like this based on the open historical record is classified and kept from the american people another thing is that there are other issues involving pass support that presumably should have gone to the white house and has anybody at the cia ever bothered to task of the failure of the capitation strategy and the war on drugs and it's in applicability in our current drone wars and so let me let me cut in and address that promptly because then i want to get into at least well i'd like to get into no let me answer it because i helped contribute to that report i was the lead historian on the matter and the press accounts of it were grossly distorted uh i'm not sure who is talking to who half heartedly about what but the the press accounts based on that particular report are very very inaccurate it presents a much more mixed and nuanced picture of the record of success and failure in those regards however as i said earlier we're talking about current events let's somebody please ask a question about let's get to dick helms please sir would you please sit sit down and get sick helms said that he could have reported that there was that sir sir policy one sir you are behaving in an uncivil manner please retreat to your seat sir do you have a question about the pickle or the pdb as it relates to pdbs yes please just curious to know in the history of pdbs if there hasn't been a case when uh an item was not included in the pdb but uh later turned out to be a major stamp food maybe the same day and they wish it would have been included in the pdb uh in other words were with somebody ever found themselves in very hot water with potas as a result of something of something not being included i should have been okay how about the uh the practitioners here fortunately there's more communication with the president of the united states between the agency and the white house than just the pdb uh that would be the main vehicle for dealing the necessary business nation's business to the president united states that you've decided policy maker but uh that's not the only way and if something comes up you can pick up the phone or if you miss something or discover that the president's agenda has changed and he suddenly has a visitor from out of town that needs he needs to know something about those are kinds of things of course the agency has uh the whole community has many capabilities to respond to thank you and a hatch off and very sincere thanks for all those the intelligence community keeps our nation safe thank you ma'am we have we have time for your question please very very concise well i hope you'll be happy to know this really is about pdbs in history um i was curious given that a lot of credit for the quote downfall of the soviet union was attributed to an arms race that essentially bankrupted them you know that's that's the way it's been reported lately i'm curious um if and or how that would have been addressed in a pdb that it was particularly non-military well it was military spending but it had more to do with economic issues behind the behind the scenes than it was a militaristic um battlefield so to speak right it's sort of an addressing long-term trans vice daily reporting right now peter why don't you feel that one these are exactly the kind of questions you don't look forward to but um as you're probably aware that there's considerable debate among academics about what was the main driver in the collapse of the soviet union these are probably my own personal views i'd say there's a variety of factors gorbachev was significantly a huge driver because he tackled issues no one else was prepared to take on because he knew how bad things were one of those factors clearly was military spending um another was the war in vietnam the war in afghanistan um and then domestic internal trends uh with a lot of uh ethnic tensions in different parts of the former soviet union a number of things he had to wrestle with not to mention extreme resistance within the communist party the soviet union to his major reforms so he had a lot on his plate but peter i think it's fair that you weren't getting questions from the consumers about the state of the soviet economy and it was ultimately the state of the economy couldn't keep up in my several years and working this process i never had a policymaker ask me about the state of the soviet economy except one occasion casper weinberger wanted to know how to measure the ruble against the dollar because he wanted to use some displays in his armed services committee testimony but that's why if you get answers to the questions you're asking and when there was little interest on the state of the soviet economy there wasn't a lot of focus on it so there was indeed some surprise that it proved to be so weak so fragile that it ultimately led to the collapse all right thank you very much we're uh through our appointed time at three fifteen so we will break for now and um come back at three thirty i believe there's a a break outside for for all of you and then um admiral mccraven will we'll have his remarks william mccraven graduated from the university of texas with a degree in journalism in 1977 he then went on to serve 37 years in the u.s. navy where he became a navy seal and ultimately advanced to the rank of four star admiral in his last post admiral mccraven was the commander of us operations command leading a force of 69 thousand men and women he advised presidents secretaries of state secretaries of defense and other top u.s. officials in the areas of u.s. foreign policy and defense in addition to many other operations under his leadership admiral mccraven headed up the special ops raid in 2001 that led to the killing of osama bin laden briefing president obama in real time as the operation was being executed the same year he was named runner up for time magazines distinguished person of the year admiral mccraven retired from the navy in 2014 and became the chancellor of the university of texas system earlier this year ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming chancellor william mccraven well thank you very much mark and let me thank you in the lbj library for hosting this magnificent event and let me also thank again director jim clapper and director john brennan two very close friends who have worked with me side by side for many years now uh you know we are really blessed to have these two gentlemen in the positions they are in i can't think of any two guys that have done more to protect this nation over the years uh than jim clapper and john brennan gentlemen thank you very much for joining us today and i also want to recognize again former director portagas so great to have you here and you've added a lot to the last two days and i would be remiss if i didn't call out my very good friend and mentor admiral bobby inman who has been so gracious as he has walked me through the mine fields that sometimes can be politics at the university of texas and and has graciously worked with me as i have established my tenure here at the university of texas admiral inman thank you again very much well i'm going to approach this a little bit differently here you've been looking at the first customer and now we're going to take intelligence and really kind of move it down to a tactical level and then frankly i hope to be able to walk you from the tactical maybe back up to the the first customer so i've been asked to talk about why is intelligence necessary and i want to start off with a little bit of a thought experiment so in the world of special operations one of the things we have to tackle often are hostage rescues so put yourself in a situation where you have a hostage situation and you have perfect intelligence on what is going on in the single room so you have a single room there is a hostage he is on the right side of the room he is in a chair he is bound you know exactly where he is there is the hostage taker the hostage taker is on the other side of the room you know exactly what weapon systems he has you know exactly the dimensions of the room you know the thickness of the walls you have some understanding of the intent of the hostage taker and you have some understanding of how the hostage himself or herself might react You know how the door swings open. You have for all intent and purposes, perfect intelligence. And the purpose of that intelligence, of course, is to mitigate the risk to a manageable level. On the outside of that door, of course, you have special operations, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines that are prepared to go in to rescue this hostage. And not only do you have perfect intelligence at a point in time, but you have it throughout those points in time. So it is real-time intelligence and it is constant intelligence. And of course, what that does for you is it really does reduce that risk to a manageable level. Now, always in the process of going through the door, you blow the door open, the first man through the door could stumble and that creates problems and the next man through now has to adjust as you have a moving hostage taker. All those sorts of things are in play. But having said that, with perfect intelligence, the chances of success on that particular operation are very high. So when we look at intelligence from a military standpoint, and I'll talk a little bit later about how I think policy makers use this intelligence, from the military standpoint, we love to quote Carl von Klauswitz, who talked about the fact that the defense is stronger than the offense. That the defense just has to preserve and protect. Well, the offense has to impose its will upon the enemy. The defense only has to preserve and protect and the offense has to impose its will on the enemy. Well, if you're going to impose your will on the enemy, the better the intelligence, the more likely you are to be successful against the stronger form, i.e. the defense. But of course, intelligence is never perfect. And I'm going to walk you through some of the significant uses of intelligence we have. So we'll start with imagery, image intelligence or image as we refer to it. Many years ago in 2005, we were tracking a very, very high value al-Qaeda target in Iraq. But in 2005, the special forces there, we had only one predator. The predators were relatively new on the battlefield, certainly in terms of the military. And we had a very qualified special operations force, but we had one aircraft. And we had been tracking this individual through human intelligence and we knew that he was going to have a rendezvous or we suspected he was going to have a rendezvous at a certain place out in Al-Ramadi in the western part of Iraq. So we had our human intelligence surrounding where we thought the link-up was going to be of this bad guy and we had, again, a single predator overhead. So as the link-up was occurring, we were not able to verify that the individual in question was there. But as the link-up occurred, we thought we had identified the appropriate vehicle that the bad guy was in and the vehicle started to move. And that was fine because we had a single predator overhead and we were watching as this vehicle moved. And then a second vehicle joined the convoy. And now we had two vehicles, which was fine because they were moving in unisons together. And at some point in time, they came to a crossroad. And the Lieutenant Colonel who was working for me turned and looked at me and said, you got to call it. Are we going left or are we going right? So we took the vehicle on the right and we allowed the vehicle on the left to move out in another direction. And so we followed the vehicle on the right for quite some time. And again, the predator flies at a fairly high altitude. And again, this was 2005. The quality of the sensors weren't all that great. But all of a sudden the vehicle stopped near a palm grove. And we had a good beat on the vehicle. It was the only vehicle around the palm grove. And right at that moment in time as we were watching this vehicle, the optical ball that is underneath the predator recycled. And what happens is it goes from a picture that appears to be a couple hundred meters away to a picture that is now several thousand feet away. And it recycled up and it shocked us all. Now, we could still see the vehicle but instead of the vehicle being this large on our screen it was now about this big. But we watched it very closely. And about 15 seconds later the ball reactivated, came back down and we thought, okay, good, everything's fine. We continued to follow the vehicle. And then finally my patients ran out and I asked the assault force to interdict the vehicle to capture who was ever inside. And so we interdicted the vehicle. No shots were fired. We stopped the vehicle and there was just a driver inside. Not the guy we were looking for. But as it turned out there was a AK-47, an assault weapon in the back, and a laptop. And so we quickly scarfed that up and we got it back to our headquarters. And as we began to do the forensics we went back and looked and we thought something is amiss here. And of course as we did the forensics we found right at that point in time when that optical ball recycled and went from a close-in view to a distance view the individual in the back of the vehicle had gotten up and run into the palm grove and we missed him. And it took us another year to capture, to kill this individual. And in that year's time dozens of Americans and hundreds or thousands of Iraqis were killed and it really showed us both the power of imagery intelligence and also the limitations. The other technical intelligence we use is signals intelligence and I won't go into a great deal of detail but suffice to say we have the ability to understand what is happening between two individuals on various communications. But at one point in time in a country far far away not Iraq or Afghanistan we were pursuing a target and we had interpreted listening to the two individuals on their devices that we thought again that they were going to link up with a very high-value target in this particular country. And so we stood ready to conduct a strike and as the operation evolved and we were continuing to pull in technical intelligence we took the opportunity and took the strike and while it was a bad guy it was not the bad guy we were looking for. And later on I was asked a question about the quality of the intelligence and how I viewed the risk and how that risk was in fact presented to the decision makers up the chain of command. And it is something as a user of intelligence and a conveyor of the quality of the intelligence and the need for action that I never forgot. Suffice to say and I'll talk a little bit more about it is you have to be certain that the quality of the intelligence you get is in fact reducing the risk. We have other types of intelligence where we have large sensor devices and we use this quite a bit in Iraq and Afghanistan to hopefully locate buried explosives homemade explosives. And what you would find is we would position these sensors on large aircraft and they could at times determine whether or not a particular route, a road had been dug up and a homemade explosive had been put in that road. Again the technology was good but it was hardly perfect and many times we would send assault folks in or explosive ordnance disposal folks in based on the intelligence we had to see if we could defuse the weapon and of course it turned out that it had been just some young boy digging in a road that had no bearing on the threat that we perceived it to be. And then of course there was always human intelligence and that is probably the hardest of the intelligence but frankly the most important and the most vital in terms of understanding the context. And of course human intelligence gives you a sense of the intent of the individual and nothing I think is harder to determine than the intent of a particular individual no matter whether you know them well or do not. You just never know what their next move will be. So what we have tried to do really since 9-11 as I have watched it closely is how do we go about improving the quality of intelligence? So in the eminent realm, in the area where we use imagery the quality of the image of course has increased dramatically. In the early days as I said in some cases the ISR that we had, the optical ball was what we would consider kind of standard definition. And so the quality of the image you got was sometimes a little grainy. Not that you couldn't see people very clearly but it didn't also operate well at night and so there were a lot of problems with it. As time has gone on and technology has gotten better and better the quality of that image has gotten to the point where it is as clear as I'm looking at you in some cases. And that's very, very important because again as I said from the beginning the purpose of the intelligence is to buy down the risk. And if you don't understand the factors that are involved in creating that risk if you're looking at a picture that isn't as clear as you think it is then that risk is greater and you're not going to be able to provide the options that you want to the decision makers. You also need more angles. So I talked about the fact that we had one predator. So if one predator is good more predators are better. And the fact of the matter is again a single angle on a target in particularly as we were looking at Afghanistan many times we would be looking at a compound in Afghanistan and the angle of the view was obstructed by the compound itself. And so consequently you went in without perfect intelligence sometimes without even good intelligence but at least it was better because you had some angle. But of course pulling one predator and multiple predators together and working them with fire support that you get from the AC 130 is one of our gunships with the with the aircraft in the sky. All that requires a very delicate and sophisticated dance and that's very difficult to do but it's important to make sure that under the imagery aspect of this you have multiple angles. The longer dwell again fortunately over time what we found with some of our imagery platforms is they were limited in timeframe. Before we had the predators we actually had a helicopter with a small optical ball on it. Well the helicopter was limited by the fuel and therefore every once in a while in the middle of an operation you would have to land the helicopter. It was the only helicopter with the only optical ball we had and we realized you just couldn't do business that away. So we invested a lot not only we special operations but we the United States government invested a lot in making sure we had multiple platforms in order to do the job. And then we talked about the timeframe when you look at the PDB's and what they provide the president in terms of strategic intelligence and operational intelligence on the battlefield and Frank Denious asked the question yesterday to director Brennan and the panel and I about the quality of intelligence and what can you get down to the soldier today and what you can get to the soldier today is unprecedented. The soldier in the foxhole if you will can have a terrific view of the battlefield a visual view of the battlefield. But if that view is time late and I associate it with I have a box at the stadium to watch the football games and the interesting thing is we have a number of TVs up in the box but the TVs are about five seconds late. We know what that means when you're watching football and you hear everybody cheer and you're looking up going I wonder what they're cheering about and then five seconds later you begin to find out what they were cheering about. Well in the in the world of intelligence when that intelligence has to be so timely because it is being relayed to the operator the soldier on the ground five seconds can be a lifetime and five seconds can mean the difference between life or death. So as you look at the imagery you have to work on ensuring that the quality of the image is good that the multiple angles are out there that you can increase the dwell time and that the timing between the actual capture of the image and the return is as small as you can make it on the signals on the technical intelligence this is really about ensuring that we are able to collect on a variety of different platforms and I won't go into a lot of detail there but the other aspect of this is making sure that the analyst you have and the interpreters that you have are good in a lot of cases as we are chasing bad guys around the world some of the dialects that we are trying to translate are not common and therefore there may be one or two people in the Department of Defense that speak this particular dialect and they may not speak it as well as you would hope they would speak it so in the middle of a very complex operation as you are trying to interpret the nature and the intent of the bad guys through technical intelligence the nature of that translator is absolutely critical I learned this the hard way as well when I was giving a speech to the graduating West Point Academy folks in Afghanistan and I got up and gave what I thought was a rousing, fabulous speech to the graduating class and I got a very kind of polite applause at the end and I thought, boy, I must have missed the mark the Chief of Staff of the Afghan Army came up to me afterwards and he said your translator is terrible he misrepresented everything you said and so if you take that to an intelligence standpoint and you realize if you do not have the right translator and if that translation is somehow skewed then again your understanding of the intent therefore your understanding of the risk is entirely different and the analysts and of course we have a lot of analysts that look at these sort of things and it is the same problem set you not only have to have translations but you have to have analysts that understand in context what is going on on the human side we really do look at the training and we have and the CIA are without a doubt the world's finest when it comes to intelligence analysis and we have great folks across the intelligence community at the Defense Intelligence Agency the NASA Geospatial Agency all the parts of the IC some fabulous Intel analysts but clearly what separates us us the US intelligence community I think from any other organization in the world is the quality of the training that these analysts go through in order to be analysts and what you find again it's like any other aspect of life you have the rookie analysts and you have the experienced analysts the reason you have the quality of PDB briefer you have is because that individual has spent a lot of time being an analyst is able to convey the analytical information in context and that's very important to anybody that's receiving intelligence and then again understanding the behavior of the individual so a lot of times we're chasing people that we know very little about somebody in one of the organizations with the intelligence community knows something about them and that person becomes a subject matter expert on a particular individual and sometimes there's only one person or maybe one or two people and you really do rely a lot on them to provide you the analysis of that particular individual in that target set so as you look at the various types of intelligence what we learned very quickly in the war in Iraq is really where we started this is that you have to be able to fuse the intelligence you have to do what we call using all source intelligence and we've always known that the intelligence agencies have always understood that but sometimes on the battlefield you tended to take whatever you got an image a technical intelligence a human intelligence and that became a little bit of your only source intelligence what you have to be able to do is fuse them all together it is the fused intelligence that now reduces your risk again so I go back to my scenario of the room if all you have in that room is a camera that is observing the hostage and the hostage taker then you don't understand the dialogue that's going on between the two if you have the dialogue but you don't have a photo or you don't have a constant video stream then again you have an incomplete picture so what is critical is to be able to take these various types of intelligence and fuse them together and this is again a very important aspect of what we did in Iraq not only did we fuse them but then we recognize it from the military standpoint we also were not the sole source of intelligence when it came to the various types of intelligence so we would bring in CIA DIA National Geospatial Agency FBI Iraqi Intelligence and we would we created these fusion cells also the conventional forces were part of these fusion cells and we realized that if you wanted to be able to pass information and use information you needed to understand what was going on the ground sometimes the soldiers who were closest to the problem set could give you a better insight into what was going on in the ground then the analyst that was back in Baghdad or potentially Langley or Fort Bragg so you pulled all the subject matter experts together in a single place and you would look at a target set and you would fuse the intelligence and you would use this inter-agency process to have the best intelligence you could and therefore again reduce the risk on a particular mission we used a lot of what we call Metcalfe's law and Bob Metcalfe created this law some time ago that talks about telecommunications networks and in it when you look at a telecommunications network what he said was if you add a new node to a telecommunications network so if you have A and B and then you add C what you get is an exponential increase in the power of that communications now C and B have got to be able to talk equally as strong as A and B but this concept of Metcalfe's law frankly applies to kind of human networks as well so every time you add a node you exponentially increase the power of your knowledge and I think the power of the intelligence that is out there so as we created these joint inter-agency task force these gyatus we called them and we had analysts from all the Intel communities we had analysts and operators from the military and from all the other constituents that were out there fighting the battle the State Department etc. you had a much better look at the picture on the ground and this was vitally important and again with each node you added you had a better understanding of the picture so we took this concept of fusion and we started off small with fusion cells we created these locally grown joint inter-agency task force in Iraq and then Afghanistan we began to partner the Iraq and Afghanistan node when we found out the enemy network did not see any boundaries between Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan and other places and then we created this global gyatum where we could look at the problem set globally and each iteration along the way we became better and better so now let's talk about the intelligence and its role to the policy makers and I will use a little bit again another football analogy if I can you know when you look at two opposing teams on the football field and if you said again I'm going to have perfect intelligence on my opponent and I'm going to be able to steal their signals I'm going to know exactly what I need to know about each player which one's hurt which one stayed up the night before how fast are they you know everything about their scheme maneuver their defense their offense you know how they're going to play on the football field and you say I got it I have perfect intelligence on that football team the problem is if that football team happens to be the Dallas Cowboys and you're a high school football team I don't care how good your intelligence is it's not going to help you so this is the point for policy makers it's not just about the intelligence it's about using the intelligence to understand what your options are and how to apply those options against the problem set I had a chance to talk to the the Texas football team a couple of weeks ago and I was talking to them about the Notre Dame game the Notre Dame game of 2007 and in the Notre Dame game this is Notre Dame in the Naval Academy so the Naval Academy had not beaten the University of Notre Dame in 43 years it was a given that Notre Dame was going to beat the Naval Academy and they had I think half a dozen four and five star recruits on the Notre Dame team and I asked the players on the Longhorns I said I want y'all to raise your hand somebody out here raise your hand on those of you that wanted to go to the Naval Academy and play football of course nobody raised their hand and I said exactly right so you had the case of the Dallas Cowboys against the high school team well the game goes into its first overtime conclusion of the regular time frame goes into its first overtime goes into its second overtime goes into its third overtime and the Navy beats Notre Dame 47 to 43 and my point to them and it is a point that should not be lost here is Navy studied Notre Dame Navy understood what Notre Dame's strengths were and Navy understood where their weaknesses were and they developed a plan they reduced the risk to a manageable level to defeat Notre Dame and that's really when you look at it that's the value of intelligence to policymakers so we'll talk about the Ben Laden raid the CIA did a magnificent job along with the NSA and NGA and others in providing us the operators the intelligence for the Ben Laden raid and it was as good as we could have gotten it but the fact of the matter is we didn't know what the inside of the compound look like because we're just not able to quite to do that we weren't exactly sure whether in fact it was Ben Laden and we thought it was about a 50-50 chance at best there was a lot of things we didn't know about the compound where Ben Laden was but when we presented it to the president it was well Mr. President we're the Dallas Cowboys and they're the high school football team we will be successful in this we have the intelligence we need but our team is better than their team and that is the nature of what policymakers have got to grapple with what are their options what are their options what the president did for me and the Ben Laden raid was he said I don't only want you to be the Dallas Cowboys I want you to be the Dallas Cowboys that won the Super Bowl I want you to make sure that there are no that you have reduced that risk to absolutely the smallest possible level you've got great intelligence but now come up with every plan B, C, D and E so that we are buying down all the contingencies we did that through good intelligence we took the intelligence we had and we continued to mitigate the risk so now let's take that scenario of mono a mono a single football team against a single football team the Cowboys against a high school team my seals against what we thought the threat was the Ben Laden compound and now let's look at Dash or ISIS as people call it think of the complexity of a situation like we have in Syria and Iraq this is not the single room in the thought experiment this is a room with another room and another room and another room and another room and another room and another room these are problems on top of problems on top of problems so when you have multiple factors involved you have ISIS you have the Syrian army under Assad you have the moderate Syrians you have our allies in the Turks and the Jordanians and the Saudis and the Emirates and the Iraqis you have the Iranians and the Russians so you can see the dilemma that occurs when now all of a sudden what was a nice clean picture gets multiplied a hundred fold so therein lies the problem for decision makers but I would offer that you begin to slice the problem into definable areas and you tackle the best options you can so what are we going to do against ISIS what are my options how do I build the better team against ISIS how do I build the better team to help build the Syrian military up how do I deal with the Iranians how do I deal with the Iraqis how do I encourage the Iraqis to be more forceful in each one of these cases you build an intelligence portfolio that provides the president the national security advisor options for dealing with these problems the great thing about the options in an area like that unlike the bin Laden raid for me where it was the military against the military target you have the advantage of having the diplomatic option so diplomacy can work economic sanctions can work the military obviously is an option law enforcement is an option so the president has to have the intelligence he has to look at all his options and then in every case he's got to work to buy down that option so he has the best course to go forward and so I will end just with again a couple of final thoughts here as you look at intelligence and as I said what intelligence brings not only to the battlefield but I think to the to the policymakers is the intelligence is there to reduce the risk to reduce the risk to a manageable level so then you can apply your options against the risk that you know and sometimes the risk you don't know the intelligence is there also because it's not always just about offense and my business it's almost always about offense it is the nature of special operations to be on the offensive to go against a defended position but that's not always the case the president and the national security team also is looking for opportunities to be able to play defense against the threat that might come from overseas we have to work continuously to improve the nature of our intelligence and when you look at the director of national intelligence and the director of the CIA and the other the other directors and leaders the Intel community that's what they do every day because the game changes every day the enemy is a thinking enemy the enemy is a reactive enemy and every step of the way you're trying to get ahead of their reaction because every time you come up with a solution I guarantee you it won't be long before the enemy comes up with something that counters that and now you're off on another another tangent in order to tackle that aspect of the intelligence so you are constantly battling this this loop if you will of the enemy being able to adapt and then again as I said the whole purpose I see it from my standpoint as a military commander and I think from the from the standpoint of policymakers is that that intelligence helps them with the options that they've got to be able to put on the table to do what is best for the United States of America I thank you very much and Mark wherever you are would you like me to take any questions and and I can't tell you who killed Kennedy I don't don't know that I need a few questions Mark said I can take one or two questions so yes sir fantastic for Chancellor McRaven or McRaven or both it's Bill to my friends and and I'm happy to be called Bill or Chancellor my time as an admiral is behind me and I'm thrilled to be the Chancellor of the University of Texas System okay Chancellor McRaven have a question for you about a media report that came out four years ago regarding a Freedom of Information Act request for the Osama bin Laden death photos right did you yes or no did you destroy the bin Laden photos in request to a FOA request by judicial watch so they could not get them yeah thanks we've answered that question and that's for the record already so you can go back and check the record on that thanks Sasha Parsons here third year student at UT I had a question for you you spoke a lot about or we've heard a lot today about how policymakers are consumers of intelligence and you spoke in about the very strong relationships between the military and the intelligence community I was wondering if you can go a little bit deeper about what kind of training military officials get about how to be good consumers for intelligence and what kind of questions to ask so they get the information they need that's a great question and I'll tell you we have learned so much as tragic as 9-11 was and it was incredibly tragic we have learned a lot I think as a nation on how to deal with pulling the interagency together how military officers can be better consumers of intelligence one of the things that really helps if you go back to the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986-87 timeframe it told the military that you really need to become joint officers as a naval officer I was required to spend time with the Army and the Air Force in order to be jointized and when 9-11 happened we realized in the military and the rest of the interagency did as well that if you want to learn and understand how intelligence is built how other people think about problem sets then you have to have this interagency flavor to you so what has become kind of standard at least within the military certainly within special operations is that we cross-pollinate all the time with our interagency partners so a young Army captain who in years prior to 9-11 would have gone through the standard schools at Fort Wachuka or someplace else and they would learn how to do Army intelligence now what they get an opportunity to do as a young captain, Army captain is they will spend time at the CIA or they will spend time at the National Geospatial Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency and they get a whole different look at one how the intelligence is developed, how it is produced and the questions to ask because they're around these great folks who do this for a living but by the time that captain becomes a Lieutenant Colonel and a battalion commander in a combat zone they are very well schooled and very well educated in the process and understand the questions to ask because they've been had an opportunity to live with the people to do this for a living Thank you Thank you Alright, one more question Okay, seeing none, thank you very much, appreciate it It is now my great pleasure to introduce our next speaker our nation's highest ranking intelligence officer Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper In his role as DNI, Director Clapper leads the United States Intelligence Community and serves as the Principal Intelligence Advisor to the President General Clapper retired from a distinguished career in the U.S. Armed Forces in 1995 as the Lieutenant General in the U.S. Air Force and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency After working the private sector for six years General Clapper returned to government service in 2001 as the first civilian director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency known today as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency He then went on to serve as the Undersecretary of Defense on Intelligence for becoming DNI in 2010 Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper Thank you, Mark, for that kind introduction and thanks for being such a great host And for whomever decided I should follow Chancellor McRaven I'll offer a much more sarcastic thanks It seems to happen every time I come here In all seriousness, Bill McRaven is a great American a skilled warrior and someone I consider a personal hero He's a national icon And yes, now I follow the advice and counsel without question that Bill McRaven has offered And I know you're all familiar with his iconic advice The first thing is to make your bed I know you've heard that And so I did have to It was a very early get up for me this morning because I flew here this morning So I was going to endeavor to make my bed Just like Bill advises Except I got a gruggy but assertive voice from my wife Not this morning But I tried But he's right about that There is wisdom here If you can't do the little things right you never get the big things right And following Bill at the lectern is a big thing Bill did an excellent job of capturing the essence of the challenge for intelligence To eliminate, which we rarely can do or at least reduce uncertainty for a decision maker Whether that decision maker is in the Oval Office or to stretch the metaphor, an Oval Foxhole So Bill, thank you once again for your long and distinguished service and friendship Also I want to pay tribute to a mentor of mine Admiral Bobby Inman Just as he's mentored Admiral McRaven He's mentored me for a lot of years Admiral Inman officiated at my promotion ceremony for Colonel in 1980 35 years ago And I've never forgotten that He's been a great mentor to me ever since In fact, I'm very, very pleased and honored to be just a small part of this very significant milestone It's a significant milestone obviously for the Central Intelligence Agency But it is also one for the entire intelligence community This afternoon, John Brennan I thought did an excellent job of taking a long historical look at the President's daily brief along in terms of the year span I could not be prouder I could not ask for a better partner colleague friend and as we call each other Foxhole Buddy than John Brennan And I'm so proud of the relationship that we have had during not only going back to John's tenure in the White House and now in his great service as Director of CIA And he spoke very eloquently I thought about the significance of the PDB as did our panel members from the Kennedy and Johnson years By the way, the CIA modernization effort that John talked about Integrating the disciplines and capabilities across the agency reflects changes that we've been making as an intelligence community And they will make the agency faster and more responsive to world events John's superb leadership in bringing these changes about has been tremendous I could talk for hours about how these improvements at the CIA will make the entire IC better But I recognize I'm the last keynote speaker and I'm standing between you and the reception so I won't So today we've of course focused on a single, vital daily intelligence product PDB's as you've heard are at the apex of the intelligence production food chain I don't think any other nation on the planet would look back open and expose intelligence work with the significance of what we're declassifying One of my major takeaways from the controversies of the past few years has been that yes, we have to protect our secrets our sources and methods, our tradecraft but we have to be more transparent about the things that we can talk about because although for most of my 52 or so years in the intelligence business we haven't talked publicly about our work at least very much Now I think the American public expects us to talk about how we're using the power of US intelligence responsibly That's a lesson I personally believe we didn't learn quickly enough and that we, by the way, certainly includes me and so more and more we're discussing our work to help correct misunderstandings and to try to help people grasp what we do to show that we're worthy of America's trust and to prove that we make worthwhile contributions to the security of Americans and our friends and allies around the world It's why over the past two years the community has declassified thousands of pages of documents about our work and importantly about the oversight of our work that's conducted by all three branches of our government By publishing these declassified documents on our Tumblr site, I see on the record and pushing them out on Facebook and Twitter they reach millions of people in the US and around the world That includes as well our adversaries who have also learned a lot from our transparency and Admiral M. and I think spoke very compellingly about this dilemma but we believe transparency is worth the cost Releasing historical documents like we're doing today is another way we can talk about what we do while protecting the tradecraft behind today's intelligence work and I believe the PDBs we're releasing today are from a particularly interesting time in our nation's history I received my commission in the Air Force when Kennedy was president In fact in August of 1962 I met President Kennedy at the ROTC summer camp I was attending at Otis Air Force Base, Massachusetts and as luck would have it I was in the front row of the rope line and the President Kennedy came by and spoke briefly to each cadet most of whom, when he asked were planning to be pilots and he got to me and he asked me what I planned to do in the Air Force and I said I wanted to be an intelligence officer and he simply said that's good we need good intelligence officers never forgot that obviously so I also served a course in Air Force Intelligence through the Johnson's President Johnson's time in office and served two tours in Southeast Asia the first one in Vietnam and 1965 and 66 all to say this event has personal significance for me I think there is a certain relevance and symmetry to John opening today's event and my briefly closing it and I'm here of course because ten years ago under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act the management of the PD process moved from the CIA the Central Intelligence Agency to the office of the Director of National Intelligence and so as a result of that in the past decade the PDB truly has become an IC product as John mentioned but we've tried to build on the PDB process try to build on the foundation of CIA's tradition of excellence and I think I can say and I'm proud to say it that I believe the intelligence community writ large is living up to that CIA legacy CIA continues to be the mainstay of producing PDB articles but the rest of the IC makes major contributions as well all 16 components of the community every intelligence agency and element has contributed material that has made it to the president it is truly a community effort it's been an honor this afternoon to be at this library to talk about the work of our top analysts President Johnson himself once said quote a president's hardest task is not to do what is right but to know what is right having worked closely with and for our current president I can absolutely vouch for President Johnson's words knowing what is right deciding what is right is is the president's hardest task and the IC can't decide for him what is right we wouldn't want to but when it comes to national security it is our job to give him the intelligence he needs to help make those hard decisions I can also vouch that our current president is a faithful and voracious consumer of intelligence and he's been right there with us through the difficulties of the past few years I believe he has a profound understanding of the intelligence community the intelligence process where his intelligence comes from and importantly the men and women who do all that so today as we celebrate the release and publication of the documents that inform presidents Kennedy and Johnson each the most powerful man in the world in his turn I want to assure the American public that today's intelligence and today's PDBs live up to the CIA's tradition of excellence exemplified by the briefings you can now read here in President Johnson's library and at today's PDBs tap the excellence and the diversity of thought of the entire intelligence community so again it was a great honor for me to be here and play a small part in this really significant milestone not only in the history of the CIA but the intelligence community thanks very much thank you very much General Clapper to conclude our conference I'm going to bring up my friend Joe Lambert once again Joe I want to thank you and the CIA for not only releasing these documents which are really a treasure trove to history but for helping to organize today's conference so thank you so much as Mark said this concludes the event today the documents that were referenced throughout the day are live right now on the CIA's website so you can gain access to them right now would you join me in thanking all of our senior intelligence community speakers today in the front row both current and former I think they did a terrific job giving you insights into the PDB and the process and as I thank you we have a small token of our appreciation we'd like to give three organizations so if I could ask for those right now so the first one is for Mark up to Grove in the LBJ Library for your help it is a nice piece of crystal that has the CIA seal and today's event on it Mark thank you we have one for the University of Texas so Adam McRaven if you could come up for this please and we have one for the Association of Former Intelligence Officers so Jim Hughes if you're in the audience thank you folks safe travels home