This is Democracy – Episode 227: Intelligence

[00:00:00] Intro: This is Democracy, a podcast about the people of

[00:00:09] Intro: the United States, a podcast about citizenship,

[00:00:13] Intro: about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in

[00:00:22] Intro: what happens next.

[00:00:28] Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. Today we have a special treat. Uh, we’re going to talk about intelligence and the ways in which US intelligence agencies, uh, collect information on China and Russia in particular, and the ways in which we should think about the role of intelligence in policymaking in the United States. This is a topic that’s often discussed in the news media.

[00:00:49] Jeremi: But a topic for which we’re given very little background and often, um, issues are misconstrued and politicized before they’re explained. So we’re fortunate today to have with us, uh, an old friend who was on our podcast I think a couple of years ago. He’s back with us today. Uh, this is John Sipher. John retired in 2014 after a 28 year career in the central intelligence agency’s national clandestine service.

[00:01:15] Jeremi: At the time of his retirement, he was a member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, the leadership team that guides the activities of the agency globally. John served in multiple tours, uh, overseas for the Central Intelligence Agency. He was chief of station and Deputy Chief of Station in numerous locations in Europe and Asia and various high threat environments.

[00:01:35] Jeremi: Uh, and he lived to tell the tale John also served, and this is really interesting to me as lead instructor in the CIA’s, uh, clandestine training school. And he was a regular member of various discussions and training activities beyond. He now spends quite a lot of time talking to students and commenting on, uh, intelligence matters.

[00:01:56] Jeremi: Uh, so, uh, we should call you Professor

[00:01:58] John: John now. Oh, geez. My dad was professor. I, I still haven’t got my PhD. .

[00:02:02] Jeremi: Well, you have the PhD of experience. John , uh, welcome to our podcast. My

[00:02:07] John: pleasure. Thanks. Great to see you again.

[00:02:09] Jeremi: Before we talk to John Sipher, we have of course, uh, Mr. Zachary series, scene setting poem.

[00:02:14] Jeremi: What’s the title of your poem today?

[00:02:16] Zachary: Conceiving the Spies Lament.

[00:02:18] Jeremi: Oh wow. Wow. Uh, let’s conceive of that lament. Go ahead.

[00:02:23] Zachary: It must be so boring with your crystal ball seeing each bomb, knowing where it will fall, but not being able to do a thing. And most of the time the thing is to stay quiet and find explanations for the inexplicable, the pinnings of men in smoke-filled rooms far in the distance or else centuries before you were there to say.

[00:02:44] Zachary: No, this is not the end of the world. No, this is not the end of the world. And I am sure if you moved your satellite just to the left, you would see that they are still eating at diners and forgetting to vote and holding up mirrors to the sun to see if the earth will alight. And I am sure when you alight in a field with a parachute, you are amazed, most of all, that nobody cares.

[00:03:08] Zachary: Nobody cares that it is known to man. What the innards look like when the man is gone and all that is left is flesh, or that the moral universe has been found to be alive and fleshy and bending over backwards to show each of us the door at the wrong time. No, this is not the end of the world. The world flows on towards us like a river long after we have forgotten what cold truth the water is.

[00:03:36] Jeremi: What’s your poem about Zachary?

[00:03:37] Zachary: My poem is, is sort of, it, it, it’s trying to, to understand what it’s like to be on the other side, cuz I think we as, as ordinary citizens, we think that our world is determined by these forces that we can’t see these sort of mysterious forces. Espionage and spycraft, et cetera.

[00:03:54] Zachary: Um, but I’m trying to, in this poem, question what it’s like to be in that liminal space, uh, where you are one of those people and, and maybe to question or, or to try and explain how little or, or, or how small, um, one can seem in that position, uh, of, of, of trying to control some, so many of these forces that even for, for you, In that space and that unique space are also out of control.

[00:04:19] Zachary: Mm. And, and hard to, to define.

[00:04:21] John: Mm-hmm. It has been a, it’s been a real danger, especially in the last, I dunno, five, six years is because, The world that intelligence officers work in is a secret world. It is very easy for people to put their prejudices and their beliefs and a lot, and their conspiracies into that space because it, you know, intelligence professionals tend not to respond and provide information and, and so we’ve seen it.

[00:04:44] John: So it has been a handy tool to attack our public servants and our institutions and stuff from poli from political sides in the last few years. And, and I worry a little bit as someone who was in that space, first of all, , we are ordinary pe, ordinary people. The information we deal with is not always, you know, unbelievable and crazy, and there’s not this, these things going on.

[00:05:05] John: We’re just trying to deal with the world with, with a little bit. With a, a few extra sources of information than the average citizen. Um, and then provide the best, not even advice, the best information intelligence we can to policy makers so they can make, make policy. So it, you know, so much is heaped on the intelligence community because it’s secret and I, I worry that at a certain point we, we lose the citizenry cuz they think there’s more there or there’s less there than there really is.

[00:05:32] John: And. I think when General Hayden was the director of cia, you know, he made it clear that people like me and others when we retire, we have an obligation to try to do what we can to explain the intelligence community to the public. Because, you know, we, we operate in the public’s name and they do have a right to understand the basic.

[00:05:48] John: They don’t have a right to understand the secrets and sources and methods we necessarily used, but they do have a right to underst. The process and how it works. What’s

[00:05:57] Jeremi: the most important thing that citizens should know that you find they don’t know about what people in your line of work do?

[00:06:06] John: That’s a hard question.

[00:06:07] John: Um, you know it, again, there’s the conspiracies and then there’s the sort of Hollywood part of it too, and James Bond, . And I think, you know, in a certain sense, A large bureaucracy. And it’s also, um, intelligence is really a value add to the, to public policy making, right? And so, uh, you know, Western Intelligence Services, what they’re, they’re involved in doing is collecting intelligence and per, via a number of means, via human sources, spies, if you will, satellites, uh, diplomats.

[00:06:42] John: Militarys overseas experts like yourself that travel around all put, you know, open source information, and now increasingly big data and open source, and trying to put that together with a professional analytic cadre to provide policy makers with the best information they can to make policy. But as you know, policy is made on.

[00:07:00] John: So many things. It’s made on sort of personal quirks or political, you know, partisan views or, you know, and intelligence is one piece of that. So the intelligence community is, is providing that information as best they can, and it’s often incomplete, but it’s sort of the best they can do. And then that along with everything else is put together to make policy.

[00:07:18] John: So policymaking is a sort of a difficult and complex process. And the intelligence part of that is sort of the, the value add to try to provide a little bit of extra information. Policymakers.

[00:07:30] Jeremi: Most recently, uh, we, we’ve had a series of controversies around intelligence. Uh, one of the more interesting ones to me is the ones surrounding the war in Ukraine, right?

[00:07:40] Jeremi: It, for the first time that I can remember, our intelligence agencies now under the direction of Bill, bill Burns, um, not only collected evidence of, uh, Planned invasion of Ukraine, which of course did occur, uh, but then shared a lot of that information and, and first of all, I is that un as unusual as it seemed.

[00:07:59] Jeremi: And what are your, what’s your assessment of how well the intelligence agencies did?

[00:08:04] John: Well, again, the intelligence community works on behalf of the executive, on behalf of behalf of the president. In fact, it’s funny, when people talk about intelligence, oftentimes they say, you know, the cia, this, the CIA interrogation program, the c.

[00:08:16] John: Frankly, you know, no one says the Department of Defense Invasion of Iraq. Right. We’re, we are part of the executive branch. Everything that the INT intelligence committee has done is done on behalf of the president and the executive branch. You know, working with, with, uh, congressional Oversight. Um, it, it was unusual, but I also don’t think it’s a, it’s a surprise nowadays.

[00:08:34] John: There is such a. Ability now to use, like I mentioned, big data and these other other means of getting open source intelligence and understanding things in a better way so that perhaps, perhaps the intelligence community Bill Burns at CIA or or NSA or somewhere else collected a, a bit of secret information from a source, from a spy, from satellite something.

[00:08:55] John: And they, they had this information and they knew the White House said, Hey, we would love to be able to use this to try to bring together a coalition to try to. Putin from taking advantage. Now what they can do is nowadays, if you have a piece of information, you know, to be true or believed to be true, you can use other means to go out, find this through open source intelligence so that you’re not jeopardizing a source necessarily.

[00:09:18] John: You can say, okay, we’ve, we now know where to look. And by, by knowing where to look, we were able to put together information so we could then use this publicly. So I think you’ll probably. More of that, but, um, I think again, it’s on behalf of the administration said, Hey, we are trying to stop this war. We need to use that intelligence.

[00:09:38] John: Help us find a way to do it. Right. Right. And

[00:09:40] Jeremi: of course, I mean, this is a case where it appears the intelligence was accurate and predictive of mm-hmm. of what happened. What about the Ukrainian side? Did, did our intelligence agencies under. , the resistance of the Ukrainians. It

[00:09:52] John: do, it does seem that, I think everybody, uh, certainly Putin and the Russians who have been spying in Ukraine for years and years and believe they know it better than anyone else, underestimated.

[00:10:02] John: I do think the West in general underestimated the, the ability to fight. And it’s not just Ukraine. Look at, look at, uh, Afghanistan. I think, you know, we spent years there training, providing money, information to Afghanistan, thinking they could hold themselves in. In, in how, you know, is there intelligence that understands a people’s willingness to fight?

[00:10:23] John: It’s, it’s, it’s one thing to know they have the capability, they’ve been trained, you know, the things they say. Another is when push comes to shove, will they fight? And I suspect that, you know, a lot of us got that wrong.

[00:10:35] Zachary: you, you’ve referenced, uh, the Western intelligence agencies. I guess my question for you is, what role does the CIA but but intelligence collection in general, play in in those alliances?

[00:10:46] Zachary: It seems to me that, uh, that espionage or, or intelligence gathering plays a big role in the sort of day-to-day cooperation between allies, particularly within nato, which is of course very relevant in the case of.

[00:10:58] John: I’m really glad you brought that up because I think that’s one thing when you mentioned Jeremy, that what does the public not probably understand about intelligence?

[00:11:06] John: So at least I work for the Cland Decscent service. That’s the human, that’s the, the running of human spies, and it’s just one small piece of a larger community. You know, again, satellites and diplomats and everything that, that goes together to make, to make that. Um, but one of the things that, that. We do the, probably the most important thing we do is that cooperation with people around the world.

[00:11:27] John: And so from the clandestine service, I’m just making up this number. Say we, we put out, you know, 500,000 pieces of intelligence a year from, from the clandestine service, the SAI side of the agency, 75%, 80% of that comes from. Liaison partners we work with. So when I worked overseas, if I was in Pakistan, Indonesia, Moscow, we actually would meet with our local, the local service people there who understand that their challenge is what they’re doing and will work with the CIA on areas of that are of interest and that are compatible.

[00:12:00] John: So even in places like Russia, you know, where we really don’t like each other. Our security people will go over to talk to their security people on issues like terrorism and things where, you know, if we have, in fact, it’s, it’s by law. If we have information that, uh, on a threat to a foreign leader or a for a foreigner, we have to share that.

[00:12:18] John: So there’s times in the past with Saddam Hussein in Iraq where we would show up at his office and say, There’s this effort, there’s this plan to, to kill you here. And he’d be like, what are you bringing this to me for? You guys want to kill me? We’re like, well, that may be true, but we have this information.

[00:12:32] John: We don’t want those guys to kill you, . And so, um, aside from the joking part, incredible amount of working with, and there’s a lot of governments around the world that want to work closely with. American intelligence without ha making that public necessarily. So there’s countries that are, you know, on the periphery of China that don’t want to antagonize the Chinese, but they have information they wanna share with the Americans because we have interest together.

[00:12:56] John: So a good portion of the information that we collect from the clandestine service is through those liaison and friendly contexts.

[00:13:03] Jeremi: is the intelligence collection in China and about China, is that fundamentally different from what we do in other places?

[00:13:11] John: I think China and Russia and places like that are different from, and again, I’m talking about the clandestine service that, that the human spy side of this, that’s the, that’s the kind of work that, that I did.

[00:13:22] John: Um, countries that began. , um, what’s the best way? It’s, you know, sort of from revolutionary roots. So the, the, the, the Russian leaders of the Bolze Revolution, Stalin, Lennon, Trotsky, these people were career revolutionaries. They operated underground as terrorists trying to destroy the Zaist regime. And the same with Miles China.

[00:13:44] John: The people who became the leaders of those countries were professional, underground. Revolutionaries. So when they took over, the first thing they did is create really robust intelligence security services almost. And they almost openly said, you know, we are, you know, we’re as a terrorist organization, it their goal in those kind of countries that grew from those revolutionary roots, their security services.

[00:14:07] John: And the way they look at, uh, national security is regime security. So their national security is all about protecting the leadership and keeping them in power. And so the domestic side of what they do is as important to them as anything. And you can imagine, if you look at Russia or China today, they put incredible resources to making sure that leadership stays in power.

[00:14:26] John: They’re afr. In other words, they’re afraid of their own people. They don’t have systems like ours. As ugly as our system can be. They create, um, that sort of sense of legitimacy so that they need to stay in power by, you know, destroying opposition, you know, keeping people away, killing off threats to the regime inside, as well as fighting off foreign foes.

[00:14:48] John: And so, Places like China and Russia invest an incredible amount in stopping anybody that they think is, is a threat to the regime, both domestically and overseas. And so in a place like Moscow and Russia, they put incredible resources. If you’re a American diplomat in Moscow or in China for that vision, they are going to spend as much money and time as they, they need to stop you.

[00:15:11] John: They’re gonna. Audio and video in your house, they’re gonna contract you as they call it, right? Well, they’ll try to, they’ll try to compromise you. They’ll, they will interview everybody you talk to. They will try to put people up against you to give you false information or to control what you’re up to. I mean, I lived in Moscow and, and it’s not hyperbole to say that I had.

[00:15:30] John: Audio and video surveillance inside my house and every room to include the bathroom the entire time I was there and every time I walked outta their house, whether it be two in the morning, five in the morning, or the next day, I had surveillance. People who follow me everywhere I go. Dogs that came behind in places where they, where I turned a corner and they didn’t see me do that interview.

[00:15:48] John: Everybody I talked to, it’s all about trying to protect the regime and so they put incredible resources to do. Which for someone who’s trying to collect intelligence, that makes it much more difficult, much harder to do. Whereas if we’re trying to find a spy in, you know, in Tunisia or something to help us understand what’s happening, um, You probably could meet someone, you could go to have coffee with them.

[00:16:13] John: You could develop a relationship, see what, what motivates mo motivates them, what do they know about their government? They might be willing to share with an American diplomat or intelligence officer. That doesn’t happen in a place like Moscow in, in, in China. So the way that we collect information is much more difficult there and, and, and harder to collect.

[00:16:31] John: And it’s, that’s what they want.

[00:16:34] Jeremi: So how do we do it then? Because it sounds like most of the things. would make sense to me are, are going to be, uh, for forbidden. They’re gonna be hard to do in that situation. Right, right.

[00:16:44] John: So we have the regular sort of efforts to collect via technical means, whether it be satellites, all those type of things.

[00:16:50] John: You know, visitors of those countries. Oftentimes they don’t have, we don’t have the same sort of ability to get in and know people like we do in more open countries and that type of thing. So, you know, just for what the clandestine service does is oftentimes we have to recruit people. in other places. So when you see a place like the CIAs involved in countries around the world, you think, you know, like back before the, when the Shaw was in Iran, people were like, oh, you know, the CIA failed Cause they didn’t know what the Iranians were up to.

[00:17:17] John: Well the CIA station there was not involved actually in collecting on Iran. It was considered not of importance to the White House at the time, but the officer there are trying to recruit Russians and Chinese and others. And so a CI officer in. Paris is looking to find Russians, Chinese, Iranians, people who might be North Koreans, might be a potential, uh, security threat.

[00:17:40] John: The United States develop relationships with them there so that they understand what makes ’em tick, what kind of access they have, what information they might have that benefits the United States that we can’t get any other way and prepare them when they go back to those places and then find a way to.

[00:17:57] John: trick the local services so that we can meet them occasionally in person or find a technical means where they can get information out. But so it just makes it much more difficult. So, um, our knowledge of those places is, is is harder to come by. And if you look at American foreign policy, sort of disasters over the years are often in places where we haven’t had lots of Americans or American diplomats or embassies or cuz you just have to have that knowledge of sort.

[00:18:22] John: The culture and the place. Mm-hmm. so that when you get pieces of information, they can fit into a larger puzzle. But if we don’t, like in North Korea, if we don’t have people there, right. You know, somebody may come out and give us a piece of information and we may overemphasize it or something. We saw this at the Iraq war.

[00:18:37] John: Right, right. You know, For example. Right, right.

[00:18:39] Jeremi: For assessing someone like Xi Jinping, I know the agency is often called on to be part of a national intelligence estimate and various other documents that are prepared for policy makers offering sometimes psychological analyses. Yeah. Uh, what are some of the best sources you’ve found that you can talk about with us for those sorts of, uh, products?

[00:18:57] John: Well, frankly, the. American policy makers have to work with their intelligence counterparts. You know, so back in the day when Henry Kissinger would be meeting the Chinese or whatever, in talking to those people and sharing drinks and, and relationships is after those meetings, would have to sit down with the intelligence community and explain, okay, here’s what, here’s what’s happening.

[00:19:16] John: Here’s what he said. Here’s what others are saying. So that we can sort of mesh that and put that together. And then we have. All kinds of things from psychologists watching the videos to see, you know, if we think they’re healthy and, and so, you know, if you’re looking from a afar and you don’t have regular access to those kind of people, you do everything you can, but it’s, you know, you again, it’s not gonna be the same where you have sort of regular access to people in countries that are of less, less invested in protecting themselves and keeping out foreigners from understanding what’s going.

[00:19:48] Zachary: you mentioned, uh, earlier the role of presidential oversight in, in the work that you do and the work that your colleagues, uh, do. Um, I guess my question is, and I think this is something that’s definitely been in the news of late, what is the role that, that Congress can play in that, uh, that, that. , the, the legislature, which in this case is, uh, at least partially opposed to the president.

[00:20:09] Zachary: What, what role do they play in the work that you do? The sort of politics

[00:20:12] John: of it? Yeah, so, so the CI and, and the INT intelligence committee is part of the executive branch. So they respond to presidential directives, right. And take action based on, on them. And really, it wasn’t until sort of the seventies when the reform of the intelligence community came along that.

[00:20:26] John: Formalized congressional oversight. Mm-hmm. . So prior to that, there was a few key people in the Senate and Congress that would, would be informed of the things, the intelligence community up to. And when you look at the sort of foibles and problems of intelligence over there, they’re often from those early years, After World War II when we had such fear of the Russians and invasion of the West, that we thought we had to play ugly like the Russians did, the Soviets did at the time, and the CIA got involved in all kinds of things that presidents wanted them to, but there wasn’t really a congressional oversight piece to that in the seventies, the reform of the intelligence community created a number of things.

[00:21:04] John: They said, if the president wants the intelligence community to take action, what they call covert action as opposed to collecting intelligence, what I’ve been talking. Earlier is collecting information, collecting intelligence for analysts to look at. Our intelligence committee also has the ability to take action, and you’ve seen over the years maybe fighting Al-Qaeda.

[00:21:23] John: Um, you know, back in the old days, you know, overthrowing governments and that type of stuff. In the seventies, they reformed it so that. , a president wanted the intelligence community to take that kind of action. There had to be formal written fi, it’s called a finding from the President that has provided the intelligence community saying specifically, you’re being ordered, being asked to do A, B, and C.

[00:21:46] John: That is then shared with the oversight C community so that they are aware of what the executive is asking, and then they are involved. In investigating, asking questions, making sure that the intelligence committee is keeping tho the, the intelligence, um, oversight committees, Hep C, which is the House Committee, permanent Select Committee Intelligence, and sissy, the Senate Committee on Intelligence informed and sort.

[00:22:10] John: If you’re in a, if you’re a senior officer in the intelligence community, you’re gonna spend a lot of time briefing Congress when you’re doing it, it’s a pain in the neck. You’re, seems like it’s taking away from what you’re trying to do and you’re keep busy. But it’s a key part of the process and I think you can, you can look at how our intelligence community operated, you know, sort of pre.

[00:22:29] John: In 1970s and the reforms and post, and I think it’s, it’s a very different, a different way of doing it. But it, but again, if Presidents ask the intelligence community to take action, the intelligence community may explain like, Hey, that may not work, or we don’t have the ability or the access to do the things that you’re hoping we can do.

[00:22:46] John: Presidents we’ve seen in the past will often try to use the intelligence community because it’s easier than, than getting public support for what they want to do. Sure, sure. You know, that type of thing. And, and I can imagine like, And I just know some people were involved in a thing when we, when, when Syria came up, you know, there was a lot of, Hey, we want the agency or the intelligent community to play, to do, play this role in Syria and do A, B, and C.

[00:23:10] John: And before that finding is put out, we go back and say, well, sir, of these are the things that we realistically can do. These are the things that you know, actually. You may false falsely assume that we have this capability, or here’s the potential real downsides of the things that you’re asking for. That sort of back and forth happens, and then this formal finding takes place, which is then shared with Congress.

[00:23:34] John: So Congress plays a real key role in that process, and it’s difficult, you know, when. Congress is so divided and publicly wants to attack the adminis. You know, the opposite party wants to attack the administration. Um, but a lot of that fighting goes on in the public, you know, for their own partisan political reasons.

[00:23:55] John: And, you know, the intelligence committee still has to move forward with the things that the administration asks for. ,

[00:24:00] Jeremi: how does the intelligence community navigate, uh, working with political oversight, whether it’s a president or members of Congress? Uh, I understand that sometime in the next, uh, few days, the intelligence agencies will, will give a briefing to, I guess, the gang of eight, eight members of Congress who are often briefed in on what happened.

[00:24:20] Jeremi: With the balloon satellite or the balloon that the Chinese sent over the United States to try to collect information. Chinese claim it was a weather device. It’s pretty clear it wasn’t a weather device. Um, it seems like actually a pretty primitive intelligence device, but we’ll find out. Um, but how do, how do members of the agency, those in the roles you, you occupied, how do they navigate that?

[00:24:42] Jeremi: Often you must, you must be concerned that the information you are revealing can be misused by the political actors, but yet you work for them, right? Mm-hmm. , so, so how do you manage that?

[00:24:51] John: I you manage it by telling them what they need to know and answering their questions. I think, you know, there in the past there was this sort of view that the things we were doing is too important and certain members of Congress don’t need to know this.

[00:25:02] John: Um, As far as I know people who deal with Congress now and from my time, you try to answer their questions honestly. And there is, there always is that fear that it could be leaked or could be used in a, you know, against us. But, you know, that happens surprisingly less than you might think when you see the political heat and the attacks against the administration.

[00:25:22] John: Oftentimes those people often have more information, uh, you know, than, than you’d think and, and. You know, there is sometimes leaking, there are sometimes downsides to sharing information with those con congressional committees, but in general, it works. It’s been tougher in recent years because the House Committee has gotten almost dysfunctional, really partisan.

[00:25:43] John: Whereas the Senate side has continued to be pretty work. The Republicans and Democrats tend to work together and take their responsibility more seriously, but the intelligence Committee keeps them informed. And I’ve also seen, you’ll be surprised, Jeremy, that sometimes, you know, The people that we brief are incredibly supportive or they understand and then they go out and go to the cameras and say, just the absolute opposite.

[00:26:07] John: Um, I’m

[00:26:07] Jeremi: shocked. Yeah, shocked. Shocked by that. I, I want to close on, uh, the kind of question we close with every week, sort of looking forward, John. Um, as, as we think about the many challenges in the world today, and we haven’t talked about many then, we didn’t talk about the Middle East and we haven’t talked about climate change and, uh, some of the non-traditional challenges as well.

[00:26:27] Jeremi: What do we need as a democracy to strengthen our intelligence agencies, but at the same time, to protect the kinds of democratic accountability? What would you like to see us do if you could have a wishlist Wow. In the next few years?

[00:26:39] John: Well, I think that’s a good question. Um, there’s a few things that, that I, I’m a little bit troubled by.

[00:26:45] John: Like after nine 11, there was an incredible amount of funding and money put into the intelligence community to fight terrorism. And, and I worry that that massive amount of funding. has never been sort of, now that we are, we have had real success against Al-Qaeda and ISIS in a lot of these terrorist groups.

[00:27:04] John: We should look back and say, do we still need that amount of money, that amount of funding. So much of it seems tied to the, the, uh, Pentagon budget, which continues to go up and up and up, and so the intelligence community budget goes up and up and so I think the intelligence community needs to, to take.

[00:27:19] John: Some time and really look at what is it we think we need going forward. You know, it, it’s very easy to say, okay, we don’t need to do as much stuff as we were doing on the terrorism front. We need to focus on bigger state actors like China and Russia and, and you know, move back to sort of traditional, you know, understanding when a war might come and preparing for those kind of things.

[00:27:39] John: But what does that take, especially in this age of sort of ubiquitous surveillance? It used to be I could have a fake passport and travel somewhere. Wander around for a little bit to make sure I wasn’t under surveillance and maybe meet somebody. Nowadays there’s cameras right everywhere. There’s right all of these sort of things that make that harder.

[00:27:56] John: There’s just massive data collect from our phones, all these kind of things. Provi, you know, having that ability to use sort of. Cover to, to protect your operations. Um, the, the amount of collection that could be used against someone trying to meet us by, cuz it’s our obligation as someone, again, I’m talking about the clandestine service.

[00:28:14] John: If I have a source who’s providing me the keys of what’s happening in the Kremlin, it’s. The CIA and the US government and my responsibility to keep that person alive. To keep them safe. Right, right. It’s, you know, I can’t say, Hey, this information’s really important, but, uh, you are not important. And, and then Ron, well we can’t run a serious intelligence service like that.

[00:28:32] John: So I do think it’s really time for the intelligence C to really sit back and look forward and try to say, are we, are we set up the way we need to be for the threats that we think we are gonna be facing in, in years going forward? And I think that’s gonna include a lot. But like this open source. Mm-hmm.

[00:28:49] John: you can, some people talk about the open source revolution. I think it’s, it’s true. There’s an incredible amount of information out there with high capacity, um, computer, um, generation to sort of make connections and collect information and use that information that we haven’t had in the past. And how do we, how do you marry that with the secret part of the stuff?

[00:29:08] John: Mm-hmm. , because, you know, secrets are only about protecting sources. Um, but. intelligence doesn’t need to necessarily be secret. It needs to be information that a policymaker needs to make their, to make better policy.

[00:29:20] Jeremi: Right, right. So, so Zachary, listening to all of this and learning as, as we all are from John’s wisdom and experience, um, what, what do you think going forward?

[00:29:30] Jeremi: I mean, I think there’s a tendency, especially. Uh, among those of us who look at the intelligence agencies from the outside in to either adopt the sort of glorified view of the intelligence agents as superheroes or the opposite right, as villains. Uh, and we can all come up with some examples where you can sort of slice in what looks like one of the two, but of course the reality is somewhere in between.

[00:29:52] Jeremi: What are your thought thoughts on that? How do you perceive this?

[00:29:55] Zachary: Well, I think that the conversation we just have is it, We just had is, is very informative because I think that, that we often forget exactly where we started this conversation, which is, uh, that the intelligence communities are there to help make policy, and that oftentimes the failures of American foreign policy as, as, as much as we would like to blame them on, on intelligence services or on the failures.

[00:30:18] Zachary: Of, of, of individuals in the government are, are a failure of our policy, uh, failure of of, of policy, creativity, and oftentimes a failure of our politics. And so I think I, and I hope that this conversation will encourage our listeners to get more involved in those important policy discussions because I think that this shows how much of an impact they can really have and how important and central that policymaking effort is even to.

[00:30:43] Zachary: Covert activities and intelligence gathering that we may never hear the details

[00:30:47] Jeremi: of. Right. Right. I think that’s very well said. I think it, I could back some point , and I think it echoes what John has said. It echoes your poem. I mean, what I’m hearing you say, John, more than anything else, is that we have to be humble.

[00:30:57] Jeremi: We have to recognize that, you know, as as many, as many capabilities as we have, we’re still very limited in how we assess foreign leaders and the opportunities we have in some of the most difficult places to operate. And that means our policy makers have to sometimes reduce their ambitions. , yeah. But it also means we, we can’t, um, expect to get instant, uh, results.

[00:31:18] Jeremi: In many cases, we need to

[00:31:19] John: elect serious people because it’s the, they’re the people who are telling the intelligence committee what they need to do. Yes, we need to be humble. The world is incredibly complex. The us you know, we have this view that, you know, If something is bad that you, us should take an action and fix that.

[00:31:34] John: But there’s just so many moving pieces out there in these, especially in foreign cultures, that we only understand, you know, partially, you know, we have to be more humble about sort of the actions we take and understand what is it really in our interest or not. And this point that you make about, yeah, our job is to provide information to policymakers.

[00:31:52] John: One, one thing is, I say that is a contrast to places like China and Russia, because yes, they also. Engage in espionage. They try to collect information, they try to use it, but they also have this much larger remit, again, about keeping the leadership in power, which might mean using subversion and sabotage and disinformation and all these kind of psychological, um, you know, even assassination and all these kind of things aga against to keep their leadership in power.

[00:32:18] John: So, um, , there is a fundamental difference between security services sort of in the West and security services and places like that, and sort of battling them as something we’ve been seeing in our public space Sure.

[00:32:29] Jeremi: For the last few years. Sure. And nothing in what you say, John? Excuses our own abuses. It’s simply to say that we have a different mission for our intelligence services, uh, than others.

[00:32:39] Jeremi: One of the things I, I really respect about Drew John is we’ve been very open, uh, when necessary. In the criticism of your own agency of, of, for, for misdeeds in Iraq, uh, and elsewhere, something we talked about when you were on the podcast a few years ago. I, I hope our listeners will, will take this as an entry point to thinking more and reading more about the reality of intelligence, uh, and getting beyond the myths.

[00:33:02] Jeremi: uh, our democracy really depends, as John said so well on having an informed citizenry and informed leaders. Thank you so much for joining us this weekend. My

[00:33:10] John: pleasure. It’s always great seeing you too,

[00:33:11] Jeremi: and thank you for your poem as always, Zachary. Thank you most of all, to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of this is Democracy.

[00:33:26] Outro: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts I t S Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode

[00:33:39] Outro: every week. You can find

[00:33:41] Outro: this is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

[00:33:46] Outro: See you next time.