This is Democracy – Episode 78: The Role of Intelligence Agencies in American Democracy

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Dr. Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today we’re going to discuss the evolution and role of intelligence agencies, especially foreign intelligence agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency in American Democracy, especially in the 20th century. How have these agencies evolved, what vital role have they played for our society, and how can we think about the relationship, and sometimes the tensions, between having secret intelligence agencies and being an open democracy? We have with us one of the foremost practitioners and experts on the topic, and we’re very lucky that he’s willing to share his time with us. His name his John Sipher. He retired in 2014 after a 28-year career in the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Clandestine Service. I’m sure we could have a seven-hour podcast on his stories. At the time of his retirement, he was a member of the CIA Senior Intelligence Service, the leadership team that guides CIA activities all across the globe. That’s quite a job. He served multiple overseas tours as chief of station and deputy chief of station in many countries in Europe, Asia, and various other high-threat environments. John Sipher also served as the lead instructor, this is really interesting, in the CIA’s Clandestine Training School, and he was a regular lecturer at the CIA’s Leadership Development Program. He’s a recipient, and this is quite an achievement, he’s a recipient of the distinguished Career Intelligence Medal that very few people actually receive. John, thank you for being with us.

John Sipher: My pleasure. This is fun.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: So before we turn to our discussion with John, we have of course, Zachary’s scene-setting poem. What’s the title of your poem today, Zachary?

Zachary: Supposed To Forget.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Supposed To Forget. Let’s hear it.

Zachary: My mind is frozen with the picture of some le Carre spy novel hero climbing over the Berlin Wall. It takes me, still stuck in time, around him like a 360 degree focus, and in his face is arrogance, is violence, is stubbornness. And zooming out we can all see the absurdity of it, the blank concrete, the guard towers, the long lines of barbed wire, like chopping a city in half for no reason. And it seems to me sometimes that we are obsessed with secrecy, with spy novel CIA operatives behind the iron curtain because we just don’t want to see the broken pieces that sit in our hands, the botched assassinations, the rampant racism of the secret filing cabinets, Martin Luther King Junior’s affairs. And when did we forget all the failed missions, all the Bay of Pigs, anti-Sandinista assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem? When did we choose to ignore the servers with all of our emails, with all of our midnight night pizza delivery receipts? When did we forget privacy in favor of rogue individualism? And I know that’s not fair. I know that there are those who sit behind a computer monitors and have nothing to do with it, analysts who try and get to the bottom of Belgian politics. I know I should be grateful for the OSS who saved all our butts in World War II. I Know I should feel that communism was always the greater evil, that no one should care if Jones randomly assassinates terrorists in the middle of deserts 7,000 miles away. I know I’m supposed to lose perspective, define the naive moral blindness refreshing. I know I’m supposed to forget the violence, supposed to embrace the Men in Black. I know I’m supposed to find it all so charming. But sometimes I think we all can’t help but wonder, can’t help but doubt that it is in our interests to send violence in secrecy to the alleyways of the world like a disease.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: What is your poem about, Zachary?

Zachary: My poem is really about the contradictions between having an agency, like many of the intelligence agencies in the United States government, and how that contradicts with democracy, and in many ways our democratic interests overseas. But how at the same time they’re still important institutions.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. Sometimes necessary.

Zachary: Right. Yeah.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: John, this is a good place to turn to you. How did you get involved in this field of work?

John Sipher: Well, I guess like everybody that gets involved in a variety of things. I grew up in Upstate New York. My father was a history professor and my mother was a librarian. I was always interested in history. I’d never traveled overseas until my junior year in college. I went to London for a year and really enjoyed the notion of being overseas. So I wanted to do something that had a political impact that mattered to our country and these type of things. I ended up going to get my graduate degree at Columbia University in New York, and applied to a number of places in the government. Back then we used to have a thing called the Presidential Management Intern, and we could work in different places. I worked for a summer at the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau and started to learn a little bit about the community. The CIA was the much bigger organization that in-took younger people, whereas the INR at State Department tended to be career professional.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. Foreign Service Officers.

John Sipher: Right. It wasn’t an intelligence collection agency, it was an analytical arm. So I applied to the agency, among other places, and got in, and I got in to be in the analytic cadre. As you know, CIA several big tribes, but two main tribes. One is the collection side of the house, this is the overseas, the espionage. The people live overseas and collect intelligence, human intelligence, and then a large analytic cadre, which is almost like a university with the professors. So there’s experts on every conceivable thing, Chinese politics, Iranian missile systems, Russian tanks. They receive intelligence from all of the agencies. So there’s CIA spies that are collecting intelligence. There’s the NSA that is listening in on things. There’s diplomats overseas, there’s academic, they’re meant to be experts and take it all in to provide analysis to our policymakers. So I came in initially to be on the analytic side, and in many ways because I didn’t know much, and even in the process of applying, they wouldn’t tell me as much as I really wanted to about the clandestine side. But when you come in, there’s a CIA one-on-one where you go through a process with everybody together.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: This is on the farm, as they call it, right?

John Sipher: Well, no, that’s later. There is a process of almost a year or two before we would go to the farm to learn things, and in that process, I learned much more about it. The people that I was befriending were the people who were in the clandestine side of the house, and I didn’t think that I wanted a career where I was traveling overseas as much. But as I learned more, I actually was able to switch over, and part of the process when you come into the intelligence agency is that long security process, but also psychological testing, and so they have a feel for which place they think you’d be better. So I was able to switch over to the Clandestine Service pretty early. So I never actually worked in the analytical side of the house.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Interesting.

John Sipher: Then as that processed, eventually after what we used to call in terms to work on different desks to get a breadth of experience, you then go to the farm to learn the nuts and bolts of surveillance detection and recruiting spies, and all those things that you’re talking about, and then you go and you take languages and prepare to go to different overseas assignments, usually for 2-4 years of time overseas. So I really enjoyed it. It’s almost like a mini master’s degree every few years. So you’re getting ready, you’re going to go to Japan. So you learn Japanese language for a year or more, and you learn the issues, and what’s important, and the culture, and then you go to live there for two or four years, and meet people and do the issues. Then you’re going to go to India, and so then you got to come back and do the whole process again.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: You get to learn a whole new language. It sounds fascinating.

John Sipher: It was fun.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: I think there’s a reason why are we as non intelligence experts are drawn to these stories. As you see it, what is the role for a clandestine service in a democracy? Before World War II, we didn’t have much of one. Henry Stimson famously said that gentlemen don’t read other gentleman’s mails. Henry Stimson was Secretary of War and Secretary of State in the 1930s. So what is the role as you see it for a clandestine service in a democracy?

John Sipher: Well, interestingly, everybody was reading our mail at the time.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Of course. We just weren’t reading other people’s mail.

John Sipher: Then shortly thereafter in wartime, we determined that it was necessary to read the Japanese and Nazi mail in the process. Yeah, it’s interesting you talk about the balance there, and there’s a couple different pieces to this. There’s the one piece where because the work is often secret, it then can be imbued with either negative or positive things. So when people talk about CIA, they’re often too positive thinking it’s this wonderful thing that we’re doing, all these crazy things that we’re not doing, or too negative that we’re these vicious people that lead to a blood and murder and stuff like that. For the most part, we’re bureaucrats doing a job that our policymakers and presidents and congressional oversight are asking for us to do.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: You’re not James Bond.

John Sipher: No, definitely not James Bond. We like to think we’re James Bond sometimes, but it doesn’t work out that way. So yeah, it’s really harder to democracy, because there’s that constant balance between security and order and then freedom on the other side. So this balance is constantly being reassessed for every generation. What is the right way to go? When we feel safe, oftentimes we think that things that our clandestine service and other things are doing for us or maybe a little going too far, and when we’re scared, sometimes we pull back and we want them to do more than we expect them to do. For those of us whose job it is day-to-day, we need to have that understanding, where are those guidelines, where are those guard rails of what we can do and should be expected to do? Because we want to be effective. We want to collect information that policymakers need and frankly, we have to steal, we’re what we call the collectors of last resort. So if academics, and businessmen, and diplomats and all these other ways can collect information for the United States government, you don’t need people like us to steal it. But if it’s something the US government believes it’s need for its security and nobody else can get it, they put us to try to find it and steal it. Frankly, even in that case, it’s an inefficient business. It may be effective when we’re successful, but most people don’t want to spy. Most people don’t want to commit treason against their country. So it’s an interesting business. When it works, it could be really beneficial to security, but it doesn’t always work. We’re always going back and forth about how far should we go because we want to use all of our authorities, because we take seriously the defense of the United States, and getting information to policymakers. We don’t want to go too far because it’s important that the US population, that their citizenship has some relationship with these intelligence agencies and support what they do.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. As we were talking about before we started recording, from your point of view, when you’re doing this very difficult work, it’s to your benefit if the American public understands part of it. Because that way they can offer you the kind of support that you need, right?

John Sipher: I think that’s right. When things go wrong we’re blasted for it, and then it can be very difficult because sometimes we’re put in positions where our policymakers, our presidents, our administrations are asking for things that they haven’t gauged where the population is in. So it’s interesting something that thing you mentioned in your poem talks about some of the things in our history, you can see that we haven’t always gotten that balance right. So many of the things from the early years about, when the CIA was first started in 1947. In those early years, Eisenhower’s administration and others, I think they tended to overuse this new weapon, if you will. This is where all these, overthrowing countries and stuff happened. So I find, for example, I’m Twittering some people, they’re attacking me for things, I’m like, the things you’re coming after me for were before I was born. So it is a constant balance and it’s never going to be perfect, but it’s necessary that people in that business take those things seriously, take the ethical and moral dilemmas quite seriously, and try to understand what the public and the administrations want of them.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Zachary.

Zachary: Well, you were talking about government overthrows and things like that, how do we fit covert military operations that often are within the intelligence agencies into the idea of intelligence collecting agency?

John Sipher: Yes, so this is very interesting. So primarily our job is to collect intelligence. So we’re trying to collect intelligence to fit into that analytical business that provides support to policymakers. We also, from the beginning, we’re given the authority to do what we call covert action, which is essentially taking action on behalf of the US government, and that’s from those early days, sort of the overthrower of countries or attempts to do so. So those are very different things. To get involved in what they call covert action, you need what’s called a Presidential Finding. So the CIA doesn’t just choose to do these things, in fact many times not that it wants to do these things. Because oftentimes and sort of, little bit digress here, is when administrations have a very difficult time figuring out what is the right policy or they have a very difficult time, a foreign policy challenge, they will try to use the secrecy of the CIA to take action rather than do the hard work of creating a policy and working it through and getting support from the American people and from allies and others. That often puts the intelligence agencies in a difficult place. So in recent years, that debate back and forth, when an administration wants say, I’m just making this up, the CIA to do something in Syria to support rebels in Syria, that discussion will go back and forth essentially saying, well, what is the policy? We can take action but if the action is not in behalf of a very clear policy, it’s very hard to grade our work. It’s very hard to decide what we’re doing and how it’s going. So those are two distinct and different things, and different intelligence services around the world have different versions of those. But we’ve had that covert action activity since the beginning.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Just to be clear, right, especially in recent decades, there are very, very strict legal restrictions on the covert actions you can take. You do need for most cases to have authority going to the White House, you have to have those-

John Sipher: For all cases, yeah.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: So anything that you’re doing in the covert white realm, when you’re planting bugs in Iranian software or things like that, you’re doing that with presidential approval and presidential oversight, is that correct?

John Sipher: That’s right. Especially since 1972 and the post-Watergate period, there was concern that Congress and others that the CIA was becoming rogue and was pushing the stories of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro in Cuba and in Iran, overthrowing the Shah, putting the Shah back in, remember all these kind of issues. Many of them which seemed to be successes at the time for various administrations obviously had follow-on effects or unintended consequences. By 1972, Congress really looked at this issue and deal forward, put in a number of guidelines in terms of no assassinations, stronger Congressional oversight, where Congress would have to be informed of all of these activities. Presidential would have to give written findings to take any of these covert actions we talk about. So in our world, at least in my almost 30 years of time, we were very focused on the legalities and the ethics of what we’re doing and needed support from the administrations. I mean, by no means are our intelligence services either partisan or doing things on their own and so that’s one of the things I worry about with this administration is they tend to think that the FBI and the Justice department and the intelligence agencies are personal play things of the President United States.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: So it’s good to emphasize this point. In your experience, the intelligence agencies are filled with nonpartisan individuals, can you just elaborate on that a little bit?

John Sipher: It’s really funny. For me, I spent again almost 30 years and I we’re in a very close friendships, we’re actually a very small cadre. There’s more FBI Special Agent in New York City than there are CIA clandestine officers around the world and so we tend to know each other and train together and back and forth and are very close and in some of these places in Moscow and Pakistan, in places where you are with people in very dicey situations, you get to know them very well. So I have a lot of very close friends that have no idea what their political leanings are and it wasn’t until I retired and got onto either Twitter or Facebook that I realized that my friends, oh my God, he’s left-winger, right-winger whatever it is.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: They were retired then too, they were not even on Twitter when they [inaudible] .

John Sipher: No. Absolutely not when you are inside and so it has really pushed us in the beginning. It has to be a politicization of intelligence is one of the worst crimes you could do and therefore, never in my time in any meeting, on any operation in any country was there discussion of what a political party wanted or what are the specific somebody related to politics. When its national security, you do support the President United States from whatever party they happened to be, but by no means are we trying to push any [inaudible]

Dr. Jeremi Suri: It’s hard being in the military in that sense.

John Sipher: Hundred percent.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: You are following the orders that come from your superiors, as long as they are legal orders. So that brings us then to the question of torture, which we have to talk about and seems right. If the actions of the CIA and others are supposed to be within the legal framework, how did we get into the use of torture in Iraq and elsewhere?

John Sipher: Less so in Iraq. Well, it goes back to the thing we talked about that balance before. So when Americans feel safe, like now we can look at those things and they look quite aggressive in things we don’t want. But after 911, with the fear that there was more to come, that there was more bombers and terrorism was out there and we were unprepared for it, American essentially felt much less safe and there was more of a push for intelligence agency military to do more and so it’s interesting to me as an insider, this is inside baseball that many of the same politicians who later said, this was torture and this is unacceptable, were once at the time as we were trying to figure out where are the limits, what do we need to do, were pushing us to do more. I can remember senior senators and others saying when they saw the program like, this is it? This is all you’re doing? You need to be doing more. I can remember the President United States saying things like, “Why are you stopping that person’s suffering? You should be pushing forward more.”

Dr. Jeremi Suri: The President of the United States saying that?

John Sipher: Yes. We forget how feelings and emotions play into these things at times and that’s understandable and that’s part of that back and forth and finding where the balance is and I think we’ve now determined, and I think that’s perfectly he’s saying that some of the things that we did when we were scared and we believe that we needed to do are unacceptable and that’s good. If there’s laws that make it clear where those lines are, that’s better for an operative and all those kind of things.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Sure.

John Sipher: I want to make clear, I wasn’t involved in that program. I know many good people who believed that they were doing what needed to be done to protect the United States and that the program was looked over by lawyers at Justice Department, the administration, and therefore believe that they were doing important works and so I think probably those same people would say now, hey, you put us in a position where the American people and the politicians weren’t clear about what you wanted and weren’t willing to support it when the times got tough and therefore they would have preferred clearer guidance.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: How do we prevent that though? I mean, that’s I think a very truthful and fair explanation of how this situation arose. But how do we prevent these emotions from leading to actions that in many ways are against our interests?

John Sipher: Yes. I don’t want to be in the defend torture thing here and it would be a much longer discussion, but it was really an interesting thing. What happened, there’s some practical things that lead us in this direction. So 9/11 happened, we were looking for Al-Qaeda, we’re trying to figure out where these people were. What is the next level? There was information out there that there was more to come and we started to find and capture some of these Al-Qaeda leaders overseas. Let me give you an example. We caught a senior Al-Qaeda person in Pakistan, the Pakistanis would say, “That’s great, we don’t want him staying here, don’t leave them here.” So you can imagine someone who’s involved and has done what seems to be a successful thing, we’ve caught this person who’s trying to attack the United States and writing a message back home. We’re going to send this person back home to be dealt with and immediately comes back. Congress has changed and written a quick law that none of these people can come to United States and we’re like, okay. We’re an intelligence organization, we don’t do interrogations, this is not our business. Department of Defense you guys have interrogators as part of your job, you need to take these people. Then Rumsfeld, who’s a very savvy political like, “No DoD won’t take any of these people, we won’t do this stuff.” So all of a sudden, you are holding a prisoner who wants to kill Americans in a place where the country where they’re saying, you got to get rid of them and that you can’t send them back to the United States and Department of Defense won’t do this stuff, so did you let him go? Do you let one of these people? So it became almost like a series of practical things that ended up us becoming jailers and becoming interrogators and I went through trainings here, we didn’t learn how to do any of those things. But the CIA is also the Covert Action operation Arms when President tells you will do this, we ended up doing it and in retrospect, in pressure and in things, it was not a well-run and well done program. I think it probably pert the CIA far more than it helped the CIA. You have to know that some of these things, you’re catching someone like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who was the brains behind 9/11, who sought of Danny Pearls’ head with a blunt knife on video, when you catch these kind of people and you believe this is the person who has answers to questions about what is next, the fact that he was pressured and waterboarded and stuff, there’s a lot of people and probably the majority American still would support some of the things that were done. I think if you polled Americans they probably support those things and so I think waterboarding, I agree now, and I think most of us agree this is too far and it’s torture. But the CIA they did waterboard three people, and these people were heinous individuals that if I showed you the video of them sawing people’s heads off, you might in that moment also tend to agree that putting water in their face is not the worst thing, but yeah, just the tension, the hardness, yes. It it ended up hurting us. I’m glad it’s very clear that there’s laws that it can’t be done. It wasn’t as clear in the days after 9/11.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well, and I think it’s so valuable, John, that you’re here to talk about this with our audience and especially with a large number of young listeners because we as a society, I think need to talk about this in an informed way rather than just taking positions and yelling at one another to understand how difficult these issues are. What you’re describing the difficulties of being in an occupation mode, when you’re in another society and you confront all these difficult questions and we have to do better in the future, but we will only do better by confronting the reality of the situation.

John Sipher: Dealing with it, and not making it black and white or cartoonish. Society has to discuss these things. Our representatives have to be clear about what it means because you’re going to expect soldiers and others to take action based on what the society says is the right way to go. There is some distinctions between, you mentioned, between intelligence agencies and military and some of these things get conflated. Abu Ghraib and all those things that we saw had nothing to do with this programs and so hopefully our society has looked at these things and processed them, but I think it needs to be an ongoing issue.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: So we have a number of student questions here. Excellent student questions. One from Marissa Xiang is actually about this very issue and the legacies of history. How did we come to this moment? Do the experiences of the CIA in Latin America, you referred already to operations vis-a-vis Fidel Castro, how do those influence how we’ve come to this moment? Let’s hear Marissa’s question if we could.

Marissa: Hi, my name is Marissa and I’m a freshman advertising major. So to my knowledge, the CIA played a vital role throughout the 20th century in American Foreign Affairs in events such as Latin America in the Cold War. How did these previous events that are precedents for current policies and actions in the CIA or do they have any effect at all on how government intelligence operates today?

John Sipher: I think all institutions, intelligence agencies certainly, have to learn from the past. Their background is part of what develops culture. I worked a lot as I grew more senior in my work, working with the FBI on counterintelligence questions and trying to catch spies that are working for the Russians or the Chinese or others. It’s really interesting when you work with another agency or institution who’s working in a similar space so military, intelligence, FBI investigators, they’re all working in the same space, but their cultures are very different because they grow up through a different lane. In many ways that the FBI are cops and in many ways CIA are robbers. Our job is to steal information from overseas. Every place we work, the work we do is illegal in that country but everything we do inside has to be followed, strict laws, ethics, follow the law. I can’t operate in a fast and loose way inside my own bureaucracy, like we can to try to steal overseas. Each institution builds up a culture over time of what it’s trying to do. CIA people have to be used to dealing in ambiguous gray zones. They have to be very clear about what’s ethical and moral. They have to really be interested and love living overseas, living in the cultures, working with foreigners. Much of the work we do is with foreign intelligence agencies. A lot of people don’t understand that quite the bulk of the intelligence we collect is actually with partners overseas and sometimes with countries that we don’t even like that well. We work together on things that work together. The FBI has developed a culture around investigations and security. It’s a black and white, what is right or wrong. So yes, I think CIA has learned a lot over the years from things we did. As a CIA operative or practitioner some of those things that you talked about in those early years in Latin America I always find it frustrating to try to defend them because I wouldn’t defend them inside either. So we want clear policy, we want to be doing what we think the American public wants us to do. We don’t want to be considered like out-of-control rogue elements. Some of those things I think we have learned. I think some of the things that the US government got into was a mistake and hopefully we should learn from them so that when we do these things in the future, we don’t have to pay the price for them.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: It seems to me that transfer is over to the next set of questions regarding privacy, you talk about collaborating with the FBI. Clearly, a lot of what you do and what you do very well, as you said, is collect material, often collect material that people don’t want you to collect. Our next question is from Alan Pinochet Paul and he asks about these issues of privacy and how you think about that, especially in our current world. Can we hear that question?

Alan: Hi, my name is Alan Pinochet Paul and I’m a senior Computer Engineering student. My question is, in a world with so much of our data being collected for various uses, how do you find the balance between privacy and security in the interest of national security?

John Sipher: Wow, it’s a big question. I don’t think that is something that the US government and certainly the US society has come to terms with. I see even corporations and others are collecting so much data on people that even the US government can’t or won’t collect and so we’re in a really difficult position with that. For someone like me who’s a clandestine operative overseas, my job is to collect as much data from a foreign target, if you will, not from friends and allies and that type of thing. But Iranian, Russian, Chinese, North Korean that the US government has decided that they need to collect against. I don’t see a limit at least in terms of what we can steal from them, but it only needs to be things that again, we can’t get in any other way and we determine that we need. In terms of using data from Americans or from companies, there are very, very strict limits in the US government. For example, the FBI has legal authority to collect information on Americans if it’s predicated by a specific investigation. We in CIA can’t collect American data, in fact, if we’re collecting on something overseas and there’s information related to Americans it has to be expunged or not allowed to look at that. So CIA is not really the institution that’s going to have to grapple with US data and how that’s going to be used, but I do believe in a bigger context as the US government, we really have to figure this out.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: How do you think about counterterrorism? For instance, if you have someone who’s come to the United States who you think is a suspect, it seems it’s hard in tracking someone who you should be tracking not to run up against data from Americans, right?

John Sipher: Right. That’s why agencies and institutions need to work together. NSA and CIA, who are foreign collectors, need to be very clear about when someone might be coming to the US so that the FBI and domestic agencies can deal with that part of it. It’s really an important role that we take very seriously. It’s not something that’s joked or we’re just going to do this if we need to do it, we really don’t and probably we lose some element of security because of that. But as a country, we’ve decided that that’s very important. These agencies, if used inappropriately, can be quite powerful and quite dangerous to democracy. Therefore, those things post 1972 in particular, that make it very clear about what we can do and can’t do are things that we take very seriously.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: That makes sense. I think the question needs to be asked also, John, in your experience, are there rogue elements in the CIA? You see the salacious stories all the time?

John Sipher: In any large group of people there are fools, idiots and those need to be dealt with. I’m overdoing this here. We say we’re given incredible authorities to do really important work and if you abuse that authority, you should be destroyed. If our authorities are pulled back because people are abusing them, that’s going to hurt our ability to do things in the future. Those rogue actors who take action that they shouldn’t take need to be dealt with harshly and severely and quickly. So are there rogue actors? Are there people who misbehave and do things wrong? Yes. Hopefully we catch them and stop them. Are rogue elements like offices? No, not that I’m aware of. As I’ve moved up through the ranks to become more senior, you deal with these problems, you get this person has done this activity.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Sure.

John Sipher: What’s hard now as I was just chatting with some friends here. In fact like Steve Slick, we were roommates together Slick and Sipher at the farm. We’re talking about some of these things that we’re seeing that the administration, the president is taking action on things that, if I used a government phone to make a personal call, I could get fired.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Of course.

John Sipher: If I took a government car to stop home on the way somewhere, I could get fired.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Of course.

John Sipher: These really strict guidelines that we see an administration doing things with the Justice Department or for personal benefit or financial benefit that would never, in any means be, accepted inside these bureaucracies, and so it’s really an odd place for us to be.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: One of the really impressive things in your career is how much time you’ve spent being trained and also training others, and the sign of an organization that doesn’t allow rogue elements is an organization that is constantly training itself to identify and understand its ethical and legal limitations. Certainly, the CIA invests a lot in that. You were an instructor yourself, in fact.

John Sipher: I was an instructor at the farm training, and that training tends to be very exercise driven, preparing people to be overseas. We also do training as people move through the ranks, be more senior in terms of those issues of leadership and what are the ethical boundaries. It’s an ongoing process, it’s something that can never really stop.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Continuous improvement.

John Sipher: Right. In the military and other places they do that too. You may call it hot washes or after-action reports or trying to look at these things. I think most of our institutions are pretty professional and take this thing seriously. But again, that’s why the law enforcement exists. There’s people that in any organization, in the banking world that steal money, and there’s people in the insurance layer there.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Human nature is human nature.

John Sipher: I think intelligence agencies slightly do better than many of these places because the input process. People are taking polygraphs, and security backgrounds, and question their friends. Hopefully, these ethical issues and potential criminal issues are cut long before someone ends up and see inside CIA.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: That makes a lot of sense. Our final question which we always like to close on, John, is really looking forward, really taking this vast reservoir of experience and knowledge you’ve shared with us and really thinking about where we go forward as citizens. What do you think, especially young citizens coming of age in our democracy today, what do they need to know and what do you hope they are discussing when they think about intelligence and the future of our democracy?

John Sipher: I hope they understand that all democracies have intelligence agencies. Every country that takes democracy seriously has also decided that they need to keep themselves secure, and intelligence organization is part of that process. I think they need to understand that it’s an ongoing effort for people in those agencies to understand where the limits are, what is important, and what they need to do. I worry a little bit now that in our heightened tribal partisan atmosphere, there are people in this administration who believe that these agencies should almost be for their personal benefit. Like we talked about before, politicization or being used for partisan means, and I really worry about that. My first tour overseas before I went to Russia was in Finland, and if you remember in the Cold War there was a term called Finlandization.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes, of course.

John Sipher: It was a smaller country living next to a massive country. The Soviet Union and Finland almost had to figure out what were the boundaries of what they could say and not say about their big neighbor. Over time, they self-censored so they understood how far they could go because they didn’t want to antagonize or upset their larger neighbor. You get to a point where you don’t even understand or realize that your self-centering yourself. I worry little bit now as you see the president of United States attack these institutions, attack any of the institutions that could hold him accountable, and even individuals inside the institution. Lower like that these organizations that we want to be robust and efficient and effective are going to start self-censoring themselves and understand what they can do or maybe we shouldn’t collect on Russia stuff because maybe it’ll upset the president. If we get to a point where these institutions are over worrying about what fits with a particular populous leader or not, it’s going to hurt us all. I worry that we want the institution to be robust, we want them to be strong, we want them to do the job to keep us safe, we want to understand that they’re doing things professionally on a bipartisan, nonpartisan basis. I don’t want them to become scared of upsetting individuals or certain parties.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. So we need to support professionalization and police the boundaries between politics and the technical work really and analytical work that these organizations are doing.

John Sipher: I do a lot of talking about Russia and Putin and active measures and disinformation these things we’ve seen, these political warfare we’ve seen from the Russians. Part of that is assassinations. You’ve seen them in Europe assassinate their enemy, liquidate enemy.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Sure in England and elsewhere.

John Sipher: One of the reasons they do this is to send a message back home. They kill someone with polonium or with nerve agent instead of just hitting him on the back of the head with a hammer because they’re sending a message to people in their institutions, “Here’s where the line is, here’s what’s going to happen to you if you cross the line.” In some ways, in a less insidious, but the actions of the president now, he’s attacking people personally, is sending the message into these institutions, “This is what I won’t allow. Here’s a message, back off.” Both of those things are dangerous. You’re abusing power to try to make these institutions turn to your needs as opposed for the country as a whole.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: It’s such an important point. I think the historical lesson is obvious. If you want people to speak truth to power, don’t just valorize the dissidents but protect the professionals, and limit the wielding of political power against people who are just trying to do their job, whether that’s an ambassador to Ukraine.

John Sipher: A whistleblower.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right, a whistleblower. The reason we protect whistleblowers is just, as you said, so people can speak truth to power, and we have to set limits on ourselves when we have power.

John Sipher: Right, correct.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Zachary, do you think that this discussion for young people like yourself, do you think this helps to elucidate some of these issues or what do you think?

Zachary: I think just the fact that we’re having these conversations and we’re talking about these issues, I think boost really well for our democracy. I think if we’re aware of these issues, and if young people are educated on how complex these issues are, I think we have a bright future. But I think the problem is if we fall into either thinking that all of these institutions are bad and defined by their past failures, or thinking that they’re perfect, we’re going to have a very dangerous room.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. We need to actually understand that complex space and each generation has to rethink. Where are the lines? What do we want our intelligence agencies to do? What is inappropriate in a democracy, and what do we need for the security of our democracy and it’s an ongoing discussion. John, thank you so much for your wisdom, your honesty, and your input, and Zachary, thank you for your insights. As always, thank you for joining us for this week of This is Democracy.

MALE 2: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

MALE 3: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.

FEMALE 2: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy.