This is Democracy – Episode 329: Intelligence: Past and Present

[00:00:19] Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy.

Today, we are joined, , by an old friend, , someone who has, , been on the podcast a few times before and, and really, I think one of the most interesting people writing and speaking about the world of intelligence today, the role of both international and domestic intelligence agencies, and the influence that intelligence has on our world, both in a policy space and in a social and economic space as well.

This is our friend John Sipher. John, thank you for joining us.

[00:00:51] John Sipher: My pleasure. It’s great to talk to you guys always.

[00:00:54] Jeremi Suri: John worked at the CIA’s, , Clandestine Service for twenty-eight years. , He’s now a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and co-founder of a really cool company, Spycraft Entertainment.

If I remember, John, this is… You, you sort of help movies create spy narratives, right?

[00:01:12] John Sipher: Right. We’re trying to, yeah, work with writers to, yeah, build, build stories, films, and TV shows.

[00:01:17] Jeremi Suri: That’s awesome. That sounds like the, the coolest job in the world. Before this cool job, while he was at the intelligence agency, John served in multiple overseas tours.

He was a chief of station and a deputy chief of station in Europe and Asia and in other high-threat environments. And he’s a recipient, one of the few recipients of the CIA’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. So there’s really no one better to talk about these issues. And then of course, we’re joined by Mr.

Zachary Suri as well. How are you today, Zachary?

[00:01:47] Zachary Suri: I’m doing well. Good morning.

[00:01:48] Jeremi Suri: Good to have you with us, as always. So, so John I thought we’d start with, I think, a question that in, in a certain way comes up every time I read a story in the newspaper about intelligence agencies, you know, whether it’s about Iran or Ukraine or whatever.

It does seem to me that it’s a very different world than the world at least I’ve studied as a historian of intelligence in the Cold War, when your career started. H-how do you see the changes or, or, or not maybe in the world of, intelligence activities from when you started to, to where we are today?

[00:02:24] John Sipher: Wow, there’s a lot there. so I mean, intelligence or the intelligence community has a variety of agencies and– but, but you can sort of break it down into two main things. There’s collection of intelligence or secrets or information, and then there’s analysis of those things. And so collection can be spies running spy networks, human spy networks.

It can be NSA listening to phones, breaking into computers. It can be overhead imagery, looking at things from, from satellites above, or, or it can be academics and experts and diplomats collecting information, with people they’re talking to. So in that sense, you know, it’s still a game of collection and analysis, but those things have really been changed and supercharged in many ways by By technology and by the fact that the United States is so big and so powerful that every country for many years has been looking for asymmetric means to, to take us on.

And so we can see this most notably through like Al-Qaeda and 9/11, which 25 years since 9/11. Yeah, they knew they couldn’t take on, you know, the United States or the US Army head on, so we– they looked for weaknesses to take advantage of, and others have learned that tool. And so as a– as someone who, yeah, recruited spies for a living, it’s, it’s a very different space now.

So when I was first going overseas, I could, I could, you know, get a fake passport and a driver’s license, an alias, and I could go into other countries with a fake name, meet people, secretly meet them, see if they’re, they’re, you know, willing to work with us, whether they’re motivated to do so, figure out who has the intelligence that we need that we can’t get it any other way.

And, and, and if, if I wasn’t caught red-handed by the other side, that, that meeting was forever secret and nobody would ever know about it.

[00:04:13] Zachary Suri: Hmm.

[00:04:14] John Sipher: Whereas nowadays, you know, there’s just this ubiquitous surveillance capability. There’s cameras everywhere. There’s data. Our phones are collecting data on us.

Everything is collecting data on us, and there’s, you know, the ability to store it, to use AI to query it, all of these type of things. And so if I meet someone on the street now, I can’t be sure that in the future someone’s not gonna be able to put together data to figure out what happened and who met who at a certain point.

So on the collection side, it’s changed. And on the analytics side too If you were an analyst on, on a name your thing, Russian politics, you know, you, you got a certain amount of information. You probably, if you were an expert, you could, could read most of the key things and most of the intelligence coming in.

Now there’s just so much data-

[00:05:01] Jeremi Suri: Right …

[00:05:01] John Sipher: coming in that it’s impossible for humans to read it all. And so this whole AI revolution of trying to, you know, go through information, figure it out, figure out what’s important and who needs to get it, tho- the- these are challenges the intelligence community’s having to deal with now.

[00:05:16] Jeremi Suri: Right. Zachary?

[00:05:17] Zachary Suri: In some ways it strikes me that the world we’re looking at today is maybe not so different from the world that, you began your career in, you know, in the sense that, you know, some of our biggest adversaries remain who they are and a lot of what we’re dealing with are the kind of, you know, ground wars or that have slowly become, you know, more than that and, and have involved a lot of new technology certainly.

But, you know, seeing a Russian invasion of Ukraine or an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, those aren’t necessarily, that different from the world that you were in. So I’m, I’m curious if you could maybe speak to how you see the, the, the threats or the, the adversaries of the United States, shifting over the last few decades and, and, and, and really whether you think, the world looks so fundamentally different from when, from, from how it did when, when, when you started.

[00:06:09] John Sipher: No, I, I think you make a good point. I don’t know that it’s fundamentally different. I mean, big powers are still competing with each other. They’re competing on the economic front and on the military and diplomatic front. The one thing I think that we saw change, you know, for, since 9/11 is small actors can use technology to make themselves…

You know, look at 9/11. They spent, what, $400,000?

[00:06:29] Zachary Suri: Right.

[00:06:29] John Sipher: To attack the United States, and we spent how many trillions and how many wars and how many things to try to respond to it, which I think was probably, you know, in many ways some of that, a lot of that was a mistake. But our ability to look at smaller actors and, and understand networks is something that’s changed.

But yeah, fundamental big power politics is not, not that, that different But e- but these big powers too are, you know, looking at ways to take each other on in, in new and different ways. and I hope, the one th- the one thing I do hope is the fact that China, this issue that we’re concerned that they might, you know, invade Taiwan, hopefully they’ll look and they’ll realize big Russia took on Ukraine thinking it would be easy, and it wasn’t, and big Israel took on a small slice of Gaza and Hamas, and it wasn’t so easy, and big America took on Iran thinking it would be easy, and it wasn’t easy, is that there’s now asymmetric means for people to push back against the big and the strong.

And so hopefully China realizes that, you know, this notion of going into Taiwan is not something they should consider, take lightly.

[00:07:30] Jeremi Suri: John, just on that point, w- were Ukraine and, and Iran, were those intelligence failures? Did the intelligence agencies overestimate what their own forces were capable of doing or underestimate the resistance in Ukraine and Iran?

[00:07:47] John Sipher: Well, certainly Ukraine was a intelligence failure for the Russians. It was an intelligence fa- failure. In fact, it’s interesting. I think when we look at Iraq and Ukraine It’s very hard and, and you can call it a failure or whatever, to under- to, to determine whether somebody is willing to fight for their country and how much they will do.

Like, I think in Afghanistan there was an assumption that the people we had trained, same in Iraq, that we had trained, when we left they would be able to stand up and fight and take it. And they, and they didn’t. They w- they just didn’t have the motivation or whatever the right reason is. In Ukraine, I think there was a lot of analysts, probably in the intelligence community and outside, who thought, “Oh yeah, yeah, this’ll, this’ll be over quickly and the Russians will swamp them.”

And they didn’t realize that, you know, how serious the Ukrainians were about defending their sovereignty and their, their country. And so yeah, I think we, not just the intelligence community but everybody’s been, been v- very bad at that. So yeah, I mean, you can call them intell- you know, in some fashion intelligence failures.

And also in, part of the intelligence is we don’t really… This might be a weakness in, in like US intelligence. We don’t collect on friends and allies, and we don’t really look at our own. So like, it wasn’t as if the intelligence community was looking at the US military and trying to figure out where its weaknesses were and how strong it was.

That’s not our job. We’re looking at foreigners. And we weren’t collecting heavily on Ukraine, ’cause Ukraine was a democratic, largely, you know, friendly country. So we probably were collecting to some extent on Ukraine, but not enough so that we knew exactly, you know- Right … how they would respond and their ability to respond.

[00:09:16] Jeremi Suri: Right. And what about Iran? I mean, is, is your sense that we underestimated the resilience of, of this horrible regime in Iran?

[00:09:24] John Sipher: No. I think we understood it beautifully and, and deeply. When I say we, I mean, I think, you know, the, the Defense Department, the intelligence community. I think this was a horrible policy failure.

I think this is at the top. You know, the president and others didn’t, frankly weren’t interested in listening to the intelligence. They were in- interested in destroying the administrative state and the intelligence state and all these kind of people. And you know, we’ve known deeply about Iran and Iran’s weaknesses and Iran’s strengths and the things that they might do for years, and he chose to disregard those things.

So I don’t think that- Was an intelligence failure, no

[00:10:00] Jeremi Suri: And, and so what happens in that moment? This is certainly not the first time that we’ve had, um, the intelligence agencies produce, information and evidence that runs against the preferences of powerful policymakers. Yep. You’ve I’m sure encountered that many times in your own career, John.

What happens in that situation? What, what, what do the intelligence agencies do? Just sort of walk us through that, if you would.

[00:10:24] John Sipher: They don’t do much. we used to say inside the intelligence community is you can lead a policymaker to intelligence, but you can’t make them think. And so, you know, as you know as a historian and someone who studies these things, policy and, and policymakers are, are hit all– You know, they have their constituents, they have business interests, they have economic interests, they have all sorts of things coming to them, and they have to sort of weigh them and decide.

And intelligence is just one piece. You know, it’s sort of a value add, trying to, you know, help them understand the issues. But, but, but it’s not descriptive or prescriptive. They, they have to, um- Make a decision and, and, you know, leaders often make what those of us in the intelligence community would think are wrong decisions.

But there’s not much the intelligence community can do other than continue to look at things, continue to provide information, and hopefully enough information so that a policymaker can then adapt and change and, and do things. But I think we’re in a unique situation where we have leadership that, you know, only cares about their own personal interests and/or their own partisan interests and is not really interested in, in what the intelligence community has to say.

And in that case, I, I don’t know what you do. If you’re a serious leadership person, you might wanna quit.

[00:11:36] Intro: Ugh, ugh.

[00:11:37] Jeremi Suri: Do, do you see evidence of in– those in the intelligence agencies shifting their assessments to better serve the interests of leaders? And I don’t mean in a, in a way that is, is sort of horribly sycophantish.

I mean, you know, powerful people put pressure on, on individuals, and they know how to influence people. I think it’s Bob Jervis, the great scholar, who made the argument that policymakers often get the intelligence they want. Do you see evidence of that happening?

[00:12:03] John Sipher: Yeah, Bob Jervis was a, was a professor of mine when I was at Columbia.

Yes, I’d… yeah. I mean, we have a pr- we have a leadership now that’s very much like places where I lived overseas in authoritarian regimes and, name your place, Pakistan, Russia, China, whatever, that, that, you know, they… It’s very clear to the people who work under them what they wanna hear. And, you know, Stalin in the lead-up to World War II didn’t wanna hear what his intelligence community was saying about, about, you know, Nazi attacks and things like that.

and so I do think… You know, I just wrote a piece for The Bulwark, and I’ve written several pieces for The New York Times on the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, and I, I think it’s, it’s, it’s really dangerous that you have someone in the intelligence community whose job is supposed to be giving, you know, serious information to policymakers, essentially telling truth to power, and instead, they’re being radically partisan.

He’s repeatedly used the agency’s authority and prestige to validate Trump’s conspiracy theories that Russia, Russia helping, 2016 was a Democratic hoax or that China stole the election in 2020. And these are dangerous things. And so I think it’s a real dangerous… I, I, I still like to think that the civil servants and public servants sort of lower in the, the food chains are trying to do the best they can, but we have some people at the head of these agencies who are, are partisan

[00:13:25] Zachary Suri: What is your sense of how those changes, in the role of the intelligence agency in the, in the federal government and in the personnel, at the helm have affected what has often been one of the biggest selling points of American intelligence for policymakers, which is that it can be a really important tool of diplomacy with our allies, an important aspect of our cooperation with allies across the world who often rely on our intelligence for basic defense or to counter threats that they might not otherwise be able to control.

Um, I’m curious how you think that kind of work has changed, with, with the new administration.

[00:14:00] John Sipher: That’s a, that’s a great question and, and, and a great point. And it’s not necessarily that the our– the allies rely on our intelligence and therefore it’s important. We rely on theirs. I mean, as a human collector who spent my career overseas, I don’t think that most Americans are– certainly not these political leaders we have in the United States, understand now just how much benefit we get from partners overseas.

And not just these Five Eyes, British, Canada, Australia sort of partners, but everybody. Places you wouldn’t think that we would– might work with are helping us day in and day out. So I would s- I would say, and this is a guess, of the intelligence reports that the CIA Clandestine Service puts out every year, 75%, 80% of those are from foreign partners that we’re working with overseas that are telling us what’s happening in their country.

They have insights into regions of the world that we don’t have quite as much insight, and they’re helping us understand those things better. And so that’s a real danger. I don’t– I-if the, if the leadership in the United States doesn’t understand how important these relationships are with allies, friends, and partners around the world and thinks you can just abuse them, that we’re the big bully power and people should just follow us They’re gonna find two things, that people, the spies that used to work with us because they thought we were something special, aren’t gonna wanna work with us, and the partners who work for us are gonna start to think that we’re not serious and trustworthy partners and stop sharing to the extent they have.

Now, I don’t know if that’s been destroyed fully yet. I mean, we see what’s happening obviously with Canada and some of our European partners, the way the president is treating them. I would suspect that our people on the ground are still trying to work hand in glove to the extent that they can. But if you start ripping that stuff up, it might not be as easy to fix as people think it would.

Mm-hmm.

[00:15:48] Jeremi Suri: And, and just to drill down on that for a second, John, um, because you have such unique experience with this, did you find that, when the United States was able to maintain a, a positive image in other societies, that it made your job easier?

[00:16:05] John Sipher: Oh, yeah, very much so. So my job, obviously, it was a, as a clandestine operative, was to work overseas to, to, to understand the issues the United States needed to, to get, to figure out what foreign people in different institutions had that information, that intelligence, and then try to build relationships of trust with those people to see if they might be motivated to share that with us, to spy, essentially to spy perhaps against their own government or their own bosses to provide those secrets to the United States.

And of course, most people don’t, or most people don’t have that access. But the people who did often did it because they saw their governments as corrupt. They saw the United States as the best bet for them, that, that the United States was a serious player in the world that could provide value to their countries, and that their bosses, you know, were, were corrupt and, and they would, they work for us.

So it’s, you know, American citizens, we don’t have a natural, like, spy gene that makes us particularly good at this. I mean, I lived in Russia. In Russia, this issue of espionage and spying and, and small groups of people working together and hiding things from each other is just almost part of the psyche.

It is not in the United States. But I think we were the best, and probably still the best intelligence collectors in the world, and it’s not because of our personal skill or how much, you know, we, we think we’re good at it. It’s because we’re Americans, and the, and people saw America as something special, and they saw us as playing an important role in the world.

Yes, we made mistakes, but we were leaders, and we were trying to, trying generally to push the right things. And so we succeeded because we were different, and if we’re just gonna be another corrupt country like many of the countries that we work in, that is gonna be much harder for our intelligence collectors in the future.

[00:17:49] Jeremi Suri: And, and by the same token, I think you, you actually referred to this already, the negative view of other societies was often to our advantage, right? That we were seen, even if they didn’t love us, we were seen perhaps as better than the alternative, yes?

[00:18:03] John Sipher: Yes. Very much so.

[00:18:04] Jeremi Suri: Yeah. Yeah. Zachary?

[00:18:07] Zachary Suri: Yeah. I, I’m curious, you know, what you think the future of intelligence in the United States is.

I, I mean, a lot of the things you’re describing are sort of fundamental, impacts on how the United States is viewed around the world, um, that, that, that aren’t just, you know, in the realm of intelligence, but also, um, impact everything from, you know, trade to, you know, international students and, and ed- and education.

I’m curious whether you think a lot of any– a lot of or any of this damage as you describe it can be repaired, whether– or whether these changes are, are sort of somewhat irreversible.

[00:18:42] John Sipher: That’s a great question. and I worry about it. We just talked about allies, and I, you know, I wonder… We’ve spent years and years, almost in every country in the world, there’s been a CIA office there working with the locals year after year after year.

But if you start to damage that trust that’s been built up over the years by our politicians thinking we can bully them and stuff, that might be very hard to fix. And I worry that we might have been gone too far on a lot of these kind of things to reset. I mean, maybe a new leadership comes in in a few years.

I don’t think it just switches back to the old American leadership in the world for a variety of reasons. One danger I see with the intelligence community and the CIA in particular now is, you know, I came in in the post-reform CIA. After the 1970s, there was a s- series of Senate and, and House investigations that looked into the post-World War II creation of, of the CIA and the things we were doing around the world, you, you know, toppling governments and assassinations and things, and made a series of very serious reforms that bought– that brought more sort of legal backing to it.

They gave po- congressional oversight to things, rules about how presidents, if they wanted the CIA to act, had to do so in writing with congressional support, all those kind of things. And so the post-reform CIA was a much more tightly run organization. What this administration now seems to wanna do is move back to that era before the 1970s reforms of, of the intelligence community just being a weapon for the president, right?

So you see them shooting these narcotics, supposed narcotics boats in the Caribbean and all these other kind of things. It’s, it is, you know, that, that look to be war crimes in my view. But, you know, they wanna say, “Hey, use the secrecy of the intelligence community or perhaps of the DOD to do these things just because I want them done.”

you know, and that’s almost, from my experience, that’s the pre-1970s intelligence community that we thought we needed to fix. And so I think there’s a real, a real danger, real danger there for sure.

[00:20:41] Jeremi Suri: they would argue… I, I agree with you, Jon, but just to put the other side on the table, they, they would argue that, um, the reforms of the 1970s, the post-Church Committee reforms and other things that you’re referring to and that we’ve discussed in, in other episodes, that those weakened the CIA, that it wasn’t as tough.

It wasn’t doing the, you know, the difficult work, the working in the shadows, the, the, I don’t know, the James Bond sort of stuff that was needed

[00:21:08] John Sipher: Yeah, that I, I, I understand that view, and I, and I think, you know, there have always been people who sort of want us to be tougher and more aggressive, and that– I think that’s fine.

But if you look back at the issues we’re talking about, they weren’t necessarily to America’s benefit. The tough things, the, the hostile interrogations, the overthrowing of, in Iran and in Central America, and these things have reverberated against us. And arguably, if there was more oversight or they– these were more not just intelligence community and a president running roughshod, if they were more national, partisan…

Not, excuse me, like national policy moves with, with a wider base of support, they might have been wiser and better. And so, I think they may argue that, but I think there’s plenty of data to show that they would be wrong.

[00:21:59] Jeremi Suri: That makes sense. I, I wanna ask you one more question,

[00:22:02] John Sipher: Sure …

[00:22:02] Jeremi Suri: before we go, just to hit it ni- on the, on the head.

Obviously, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence. is– are we gonna replace the agents with robots, um, or, or will there, will there be more John Ciphers in the future?

[00:22:17] John Sipher: Yeah, it’s a really good question. It is harder to do the job that I grew up doing. Like I said, you know, if I met a source and I wasn’t caught red-handed or they weren’t caught, th- then it was forever secret, and that’s harder now.

It’s harder to run around in foreign countries and not, not leave a, a tra- a track of data behind you. I do think more and more, quote-unquote, intelligence or information will come from larger and more effective data collection and using AI and using a lot of these tools. But there’s always gonna be a need for some human intelligence because it’s the, the intentions that matter.

I can break into, I don’t know, the University of Texas computer, and I could figure out all the things people are talking about, what they’re doing, but I still don’t know what the people who make policy in the, in, in the, the university they’re gonna do unless I have someone near them or I have an asset or s- a g- spy in the midst that are telling us what they are thinking and what they’re doing.

So there’s– I think there’s always gonna be a need for human intelligence. But, you know, I worked in the CIA and I wanna say, “Oh, the CIA is, is so important,” but the CIA is just one piece of a much larger collection platform. It provides value add, and when it provides that value, it can be something that is, is unique and important and we can’t get any other way, but it’s not where we get the bulk of our information and our intelligence.

And I think AI is gonna make it, you know, such that The amount of stuff that we need to steal with a human source is, is less, but probably more important when we have success.

[00:23:54] Jeremi Suri: Got it. Got it. Zachary, to, to wrap us up, what, what do you think of this discussion? As, as a young person who, you know, a generation or two ago, and when, you know, when John was sitting in your, in your seat, someone who might have gone into the intelligence agency, someone in- with an interest in international affairs and analytical work, you know, what does this look like to you?

Is this something that’s an attractive area to people your age and your background? I

[00:24:18] Zachary Suri: mean, I think there’s definitely still a lot of interest from people who, you know, as you said, are interested in the world and, and, and in, you know, foreign affairs and, and serious analytical work. So I think there’s always gonna also be a per-perceived glamour to the work, whether true or justified or not.

And on that note, like, I think there are people who are still very interested in doing this kind of work, that are my age. But at the same time, I think it’s probably a much narrower segment of the political spectrum and the, e- the spectrum of academic expertise and, and background and such. And, as I’m sure John would know better than I would, you know, that might have an impact on the quality of, of, of work that they’re doing or the ability of the agency to recruit, you know, the most talent, from everywhere.

[00:25:06] Jeremi Suri: Right. Right. It does strike me that the, the current moment we’re in makes it harder to convince people that this is, um, noble work, even though I think it

[00:25:14] John Sipher: can be. The one thing I would- Yeah … I would say to that is I think there’s sort of a view of the, the public that, that this profession is more sort of conservative or right-wingy I don’t think that, I don’t think that’s true.

And I also think, you know, our leadership now is doing damage to the work we did, not-

[00:25:31] Jeremi Suri: Yeah …

[00:25:32] John Sipher: supporting it. And frankly, the, the, the job as I had it was wonderful. It was about learning foreign language, it was about living in foreign cultures. You had to really have a love for and interest in the place you’re in, the foreign culture, the people, going out to meet people, figuring out what matters to them, what’s important to them, what w- are the highlights and lowlights of their government and people who work for them.

And so it isn’t, you know, a, a rough-and-tumble American w- thinking that they’re bullies and we’re gonna go out with these stupid foreigners and we’re gonna get stuff from them. No, it’s, it’s, it’s actually much more intense in terms of really understanding what makes these foreign cultures work and, and feeling a, a part of it so that you can help those Americans who aren’t in those places understand what’s important in that society and in that culture.

And so I found it a wonderful place, and by no means partisan at all. Like, in fact- Yeah … my whole career, I don’t think any of us ever talked about parties or politics or who was our president or who wasn’t or any of that kind of stuff. And I worry with that this n- latest crew, they want to make it partisan.

They want the intelligence community to be, you know, a Republican weapon or a Democratic weapon, and that’s… It should be… It should not be a weapon at all. It should be a, a tool for, to help keep Americans of all parties safe.

[00:26:49] Jeremi Suri: Yeah. I, I think that’s a perfect place to, to sort of close because I think it’s a key point here, that, that intelligence has, has been a part of policymaking at least as far back as Machiavelli and even further, even going back before the 14th century, and it always will be.

It will look different in a world of AI, but as I think John said so well, there will always be a need for interpretive analysis of information, and it should be something that’s done, um, in, in the way academic is, work is done, right? We’re trying to be as objective as possible so decision-makers can make decisions based on facts, not based on presuppositions and prejudices.

And, John, you’re, you’re a model of that and you’ve also now devoted your second career, I think, to educating the public about this. We’re really fortunate to have you on our show. Thank you, John, for joining us.

[00:27:36] John Sipher: Well, it’s my pleasure, and I, I always enjoy following your work and, and speaking with you, so thanks so much.

[00:27:42] Jeremi Suri: Of course. And Zachary, of course, thank you for your contributions as always, your terrific questions. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode and also joining our Substack, each week for This is Democracy.