Conversations with Tyler - John O. Brennan on Life in the CIA

Episode Date: December 16, 2020

Want to support the show? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. Growing up in a working-class city in New Jersey, John Brennan's father was an Irish immigrant who always impressed upon his children how grateful they should be to be American citizens. That deeply-instilled patriotism and the sense of right and wrong emphasized by his Catholic upbringing would lead John first to become an intelligence officer and then eventually Director of the CIA. His new memoir, which Tyler found substantive on every page, recounts that career journey. John joined Tyler to discuss what working in intelligence taught him about people's motivations, how his Catholic upbringing prepared him for working in intelligence, the similarities between working at the CIA and entering the priesthood, his ability to synthetize information from disparate sources, his assessment on the possibility of alien life, the efficacy of personality tests and polygraphs, why CIA agents are so punctual, how the CIA plans to remain a competitive recruiter for top talent, the challenges that spouses and family members of intelligence workers face, the impact of modern technology on spycraft, why he doesn't support the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, his favorite parts of Cairo, the pros and cons of the recent Middle Eastern peace deal brokered by Jared Kushner, the reasons he thinks we should leverage American culture more abroad, JFK conspiracy theories, why there seemed to be much less foreign interference in the 2020 election than experts predicted, what John le Carré got right about being a spy, why most spies aren't like James Bond, what he would change about FISA courts, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded November 16th, 2020 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow John on Twitter Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

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And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit Conversations with Tyler.com. Today I am here with John O. Brennan, who is former director of the CIA. John has a new book out called Undaunted, My Fight Against America's Enemies at Home and Abroad. Many public sector memoirs are rather blah. This I found interesting, entertaining, and substantive on every page. John, welcome. Thank you, Tyler. It's good to be with you.

What truths about human nature or human behavior do you think intelligence officials appreciate, but few others do. Well, I guess those who were involved in the conduct of espionage, really understand that individuals will have vulnerabilities, as well as areas of particular interest, that they want to either pursue or protect. And so, again, case officers in the CIA parlance, the ones that go out and actually recruit spies

to conduct espionage against their countries, I think really seek out those areas that could be, in fact, exploited vulnerabilities or otherwise. Or people have, again, certain lifelong ambitions, goals. And for a lot of people who live overseas, it's getting to the United States and bringing their families to the United States. And so I think when you're in CIA and you have a lot of interactions with people overseas, I think you appreciate some of those similarities as well as those, I guess, unique qualities that people bring to the four. Now, your background is from the Blue Collar County, Hudson,

County in northern New Jersey. How do you feel that influences your views on human behavior or temperament? Well, there are a number of things about my upbringing in Hudson County, a son of an immigrant. My father emigrated from Ireland in 1948 when he was 28 years old, and always impressed upon my siblings and myself just how special it was to be an American citizen and never to take for granted the fact that we were by dint of our birth. Because my father used to complain that it was usually the people who were born here that took it for granted, not those who struggle for their, you know, good part of their lives to get here. But growing up in a blue-collar working-class neighborhood really allowed me to appreciate some of

the challenges, difficulties that average Americans face on a daily basis and how a lot of people are just struggling to make sure that their families are fed, that their children are educated, and that they can, again, enjoy what life has to offer here in the United States. So I didn't grow up in a privileged environment by any means. A lot of times that sometimes my father was out of work, and he had to pick up part-time jobs just to make sure that there was money for my mother and father to be able to buy groceries for us to eat. So I felt as though it really gave me a good perspective on what life, quite frankly,

for most Americans is like. How many CIA agents might have once entered the priesthood? Well, CIA agents, first of all, refers to, those foreign citizens who are recruited by CIA case officers to spy against their countries. And so it's referred to as CIA officers, a CIA case officers. The broader notion. So CIA employees, yeah, there are similarities between those who decide to go into the priesthood and those who decide to go into the work of the intelligence community.

And as I said in my book, I was planning to become a priest and the first American pope, but then decided to go in a different path. but I met a number of people throughout my CIA career who had similar types of, at least early, ambitions and goals. And how do you think having been raised Catholic affects your worldview on intelligence gathering and human nature and how people will behave? Well, I was raised in a very religious household, Catholic faith. We would go to church certainly every Sunday, and I would go serve as an altar boy, you know, many days throughout the week. But there was a real emphasis on doing what is right and understanding the distinction. between right and wrong and a premium put on honesty.

And when you go into the intelligence profession, there also is a premium put on honesty. It sounds a bit maybe ironic to some, given that CIA officers sometimes have to adopt false personas when they go overseas to recruit spies. But inside of the CIA family, there is a real need to make sure that people don't astray from the truth because national security really hangs in the balance.

So I just found that my early religious upbringing gave me a good grounding in morality and values and those principles and what I think are the ethics of life that although I have quite frankly lost my Catholic faith over the years and I'm practicing agnostic now, I guess. I never lost though that deeply rooted and instilled sense of right and wrong that was taught to me by my parents. by my teachers and by the clergy. I'm sure you know the Chris Whipple book about CIA directors, and he says about you, and I quote, No one was better than Brennan at sifting through and interpreting raw material from disparate sources. What are your secrets for being good at this? Well, first of all, Chris engages in hyperbole there.

CIA has a lot of people who are just so, so skilled in that. They started out in the operation side of CIA and had a real feel, I think, for clandestinely acquired intelligence, both human intelligence as well as technical intelligence, and then also had a good sense of the different types of other sources of information that come into the agency for the analysts to go through. I served as a State Department political officer in Saudi Arabia early in my career, and so I was quite familiar with Department of State capabilities and cables, also open source information. So I think it was my exposure to a lot of these areas of sources and acquisition that I think allowed me to put into context, the

worth, as well as to allow me to very rigorously scrutinize the reliability, the accuracy, as well as the access of the individuals or the systems that are actually obtaining the intelligence. So let's say we take a concrete issue. The Navy has reported that a lot of its pilots have seen unidentified flying objects. And if you're tackling that as a CIA director or someone who works there. What is it you would sift through and interpret? How would that go? Well, I've seen some of those videos from Navy pilots, and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow raising when you look at them in. You try to ensure that you have as much data as possible in terms of visuals, also different types of maybe technical collection of sensors that you have

at the time. But then you also, I believe it's important to reach out into other environments and find out, well, were there any type of weather phenomena at that time? that might have, in fact, created the appearance of the phenomenon that you're looking at. Were there some things that were happening sort of on the ground or other types of phenomena that, again, could help explain what seems to be quite a mystery as far as what it is there. But I think the important thing for analysts to do is not to go into this type of challenge, either discounting certain types of possibilities or believing in advance that it is likely X, Y, or Z. You really have to approach it with an open mind, but get as much data as possible

and get as much expertise as possible brought to bear. So at the end of all that sifting and interpreting, what do you think is the most likely hypothesis? I don't know. When people talk about it, you know, is their life of their life besides what's in the United States in the world, the globe. You know, life is defined in many different ways. I think it's a bit presumptuous and not arrogant for us to believe that there's no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe. What that might be is, I think, subject to a lot of different views. But I think some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might in fact be some type of phenomenon that is the result

of something that we don't yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might constitute a different form of life. But being an agnostic, you don't think it's something supernatural. Well, supernatural. I'm the eye the beholder. Again, I'm not going to discount those.

That's why I'm an agnostic as opposed to an atheist. I just want to leave my mind open as to what something might be, but who knows what these things might be. Now, as I understand how the CIA works, inside the CIA buildings, you, in essence, have a workplace without smartphones for security reasons.

As a manager, what have you learned about the effective smartphones on our workplace? Well, it's a relatively recent technological development as far as the smartphones and Fitbits and other types of things. I just, even though I grew up in an era when we didn't have all of this technology at our fingertips, I have come to understand

just the power of technology and how it can be used to advance one's but also it could be used by adversaries to exploit to gain access in certain areas to certain types of environments or conversations or whatever that can really defeat physical security obstacles and perimeters. And so I fully understand why certain types of technologies could compromise the secrecy or the needed protection of source and methods in certain environments. Now, you can do things to defeat those types of exploitations. But again, the CIA,

NSA, FBI, and others are always mindful that technology that is used for our purposes can be reverse-engineered for the purposes of others. But my question is much more mundane. When you have all the workers with no smartphones, do they get more done? Or is there no benefit? Well, I think there are certainly benefits to it. CIA officers leave the phones in their car, whatever, so they can go out and, you know, be able to, you know, talk to a family or whatever else. And there are ways to communicate outside. But, yeah, I think that there are a lot of distractions that come with the phones. You know, you go off on, you know, a pursuit of various tangents as you get more and more

curious about certain things. Now, agency officers have access to, you know, computers and, you know, the internet. But even there, we've had to take steps to make sure that people don't, you know, go down wrong paths. How accurate is personality testing for workers? accurate it is one of the tools all these types of tools are useful but none of them should be seen as dispositive in any way that's going to discount all the other sort of factors that are brought into bear but you know when people are hired in the agency or you know in their security reviews as

well as people who want to work for the agency overseas who offer their services you need to go through a series of betting and tests that try to give you a better sense of where the truth might But say I measure is conscientious on one of these tests, does that mean I'm actually likely to be conscientious? I think it's a good question. I think just because someone tests in a certain way doesn't mean that they're going to actually follow through and be that way. It depends, I think, on the rigor and the strength of the test, but I'm not going to stand behind any particular test and say that it is a clear, clear indicator.

I think there are some tests that are better indicators than others. And so, for example, in the agency, we use the polygraph. The polygraph itself, you know, can be accurate or not. But we have found that in the polygraph sessions, a lot of things come out from a person because they are concerned that the polygraph machine will register a falsehood if they tell it. So, again, it is used as a tool. It needs to be a part of a group of things that are going to be used in order to determine whether or not somebody is worthy of employment or telling the truth or not.

In your book, you seem to treat polygraph evidence as very reliable. Our legal system usually treats it as not so reliable. The research literature is somewhat skeptical from randomized control trials. How reliable do you think it is? I don't agree with your characterization that I considered it in my book I portrayed as very reliable. I thought that my Catholic guilt was going to just totally undermine any effort if I hadn't one to try to deceive the polygrapher in the polygraph machine. So I was not going to take that chance because I wanted to be hired by the agency.

And so, again, I think that it can be a very reliable indicator, but people have perfected some techniques to defeat polygraph machines. And it says much dependent on not just the polygraph machine, but the polygrapher. The polygraphers go through extensive training, and a lot of their assessment is done by looking at the individual and how they react and how they shift and how they move and the way they respond to certain questions and they come back to questions later on and whether or not this consistency and the answers that are provided. So again, the polygraph is a process and is designed to try to uncover anything that maybe an employee or a spy is trying to hide.

Are CIA agents more punctual than average? Well, some certainly are, and many of them need to be, because if you're going to have a rendezvous, a clandestine rendezvous, with a spy from overseas, one of your assets or agents, And you have worked for hours to get clean so that you make sure that the local security services are not onto you and surveilling you. And your agent has done the same thing so that when you meet at a designated place, at a designated hour, you can quickly then have either a brush pass or a quick meeting or whatever. And if you're not punctual, you can put that agent's life in danger. And so I think it's instilled in CIA, certainly case officers, that, you know, talk. is of the essence, and you need to be able to follow the clock. Also, I remember when I was CIA

director, and I would go down to the White House for a National Security Council meeting or a principal's committee meeting, Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence and myself, would always be the first ones there because we wanted to, we were always very punctual, but I think sometimes the policymakers, you know, would look at the clock as not as as carefully as we would. If you're hiring for punctuality, and obviously you would expect employees to show an extreme degree of loyalty. Do you worry that you're not hiring for enough what's called disagreeability in the personality literature? People who will contradict their superiors, people who will pick fights. They're a pain to work with. But at the end of the day,

they bring up points that other people are afraid to say or won't even see. Well, when we're not looking to, you know, hire just a bunch of yes people. To me, I don't think punctuality means that you're looking to, you know, instill discipline in an organization. you're trying to ensure that you take advantage of. But that and loyalty, right? It would seem to select against disagreeability. Well, you know, there's loyalty to the Constitution. There's loyalty to the oath of office.

To me, there's not, there shouldn't be loyalty to any individuals, including inside of CIA. So I would like to think that CIA recruiters would be looking for individuals who are intellectually curious, have critical thinking skills, and may have also, you know, I think some degree of contrarianness because you don't want people just to accept as gospel, what it is that they are being told, especially if they're going to be interacting with spies overseas. And so you don't want someone who's going to argue everything just for the sake of argumentation. But I know that certainly when I was at the agency and director of CIA, I wanted people to challenge what I was saying. I wanted to be tested.

I had no monopoly on wisdom or knowledge or insights. And so you want people to be willing to speak up. And I think in my book, I talk about how I was reluctant to do that earlier on, and I learned the importance of doing that as I went through my career. It costs more than ever before to live in or near McLean. Many jobs, including presumably CIA jobs, require greater knowledge of tech, which means there's a higher foregone wage outside of the agency. What's the CIA going to do to meet the next generation of recruiting challenges? I mean, if talent is your real asset, aren't you in a somewhat unfavorable, position looking forward? Sure. If you just look at the financial remuneration that comes with a job,

yeah, we cannot compete with either Wall Street or the, you know, Silicon Valley or whatever. But there are a lot of individuals who want to give back to this great country of ours and also like the idea of working for the CIA. My recruiters would tell me that, you know, with millennials and Gen Xers, you know, they really had a tough time because those younger Americans would bounce around from job to job and that they were going to come to the CIA for two or three years and be able to put CIA and their resume and then be able to go off and make their millions. And I said, well, don't look at us as a problem, look at it as an opportunity that these individuals who could be hired by the, you know, Silicon Valley's and others and big banks are willing to give us two or

three years. And that gives us two or three years to convince them that this is the absolute best place to work because it's such exceptionally talented people here. And there's, you know, technology at your fingertips. And you're really doing something to keep their families and fellow American safe. And our attrition rate is, you know, very, very low. So even if individuals come into the agency with the eye to just staying for a couple, three years, you'd be amazed at how many decide to stay just because the type of work that they're doing is really quite thrilling. If I want to know who will win the Super Bowl, I look at the betting markets. Why doesn't the CIA use prediction markets more?

Even just internal markets. You could do them with chits. You could do it with real money, vouchers in the cafeteria, the winner gets a place in the CIA Museum, whatever you want to do. Well, there's different types of quantitative models that are used to the CIA to see if they could, you know, forecast certain outcomes of certain situations, but they're not going to get involved in the sort of the bedding environment. But I think that what the CIA has always tried to do is to explore any type of new techniques or approaches or practices that are going to provide, again, just one more insight or perspective into, you know, trying to understand this world of ours and how events are going to evolve. You're familiar with Philip Tetlock's super forecasters project? Not quite, no. Philip, he's an academic at the University of Pennsylvania. He trains people and measures their predictive performance over time.

And he's kept a running tally on predictors for decades, actually. And very often his best super forecasters, he calls them, they're housewives. They're people who don't have very high formal status. I was going to ask you, how do you think the CIA does against Tetlock super forecasters? That's a good question. I wouldn't dispute his bottom line at all that, you know, it's, I am really impressed with people who have a good sense of reality in the world and common sense approaches to it. And that frequently wisdom is derived from the ability to absorb information and then

process it and then see relationships and also have almost an intuitive sense of past experiences and and then apply that to future situations. So I think I'm interested now. I'm going to take a look at the forecasting approach, but I would never tell CIA analysts to put their eggs in one type of basket as far as forecasting. People think, you know, what's the prediction of something? And I hate the term, in fact, prediction. It's looking at what are those variables,

what are those factors that they're going to come into play? And if certain things evolve in a certain way, in a certain sequence, that the interaction between these variables are likely to produce certain outcomes that have certain implications, which is what the intelligence officers, analysts do when they talk to policymakers. Because, again, there are so many different variables. And frequently, when you look at events around the world, what the U.S. decides to do on the policy front is frequently quite determinative of what's the future course is going to be. So I think it's having the appreciation of that range of variables that come in and how that ecosystem is evolving. It just,

I think, gives people a good sense, and a lot of times it is rather intuitive. It seems that offense should very often be easier than defense when it comes to terrorism. There are just many disruptive, destructive things you can do. So I know America has taken many, many, many steps since 9-11 to limit terror attacks, but it still seems to me, just as an outside observer, that we should be observing more attacks than in fact we do, that it should be impossible to stop so many of them. At the deepest conceptual reason, what do you think are the defects in the attackers that have led to so few major terror attacks in this country since 9-11?

So you want me to give the enemies the reasons why they're not as successful as they have been? Well, I think sometimes it's because they continue to go back to the tried and true methods. When I look at terrorist acts, especially those that are international, transnational terrorism directed against the United States, al-Qaeda and other types of terrorist organizations continue to go after that, which is going to go boom and bang, trying to secret an improvised explosive device onto an airplane, try to bring down that air carry over the United States, as opposed to really looking at new and ingenious and innovative ways to really cause havoc. But they continue to want to have things blow up.

and the defenses that have been put in place really have guarded against and made it much more difficult for the terrorists to surmount the various obstacles and security checks that are in place, but they continue to focus on that. And I'm glad they do in some respects because that's where we're best prepared to defeat their efforts. I still shudder when I think about all the availability of weapons in the United States, different types of assault weapons, and how much cost. carnage could be created and has been in instances, but rarely has it been as a result of an international terrorist group, a transnational terrorist group. You don't hear about an al-Qaeda

member who picks up an assault weapon and just, you know, most people down at a mall. Occasionally, attempts are made, and sometimes it actually happens, but they still go after that IED that is going to blow up something and create the type of footage that they want. So in your model, is it that they're good bureaucratic. managers, but they're simply bureaucratic and so predictable, sort of like the old IBM, or are they just flat outright bad managers? They couldn't run a candy store. It really varies, just like any organizations. Sometimes individual leaders are quite cunning and quite innovative, and also they're able to use the resources available to them,

and they're able to recruit the right type of people, and they're able to maintain the secrecy that is needed for this, while others are just, you know, want to be terrorists, and they trip over themselves, thankfully. And there are a lot of very, very bad terrorists that are out there that, thankfully, have been caught. And terrorists are caught anywhere along that operational, you know, cycle from their efforts to recruit or gain financing or whatever. Fortunately, the FBI, CIA, NSA have insights into what they're doing. But as they progress, they get further along and they recruit the operatives and then they get the explosives and they start to, you know, surveil and case and even do dry runs, then they're closer to execution of the attack,

but also they run into more of the sensors, if you will, both human and technical, that uncover their activities. As you know, there's a CIA museum inside the CIA. Who or what should be shown greater honor or respect in the CIA museum? Oh, you know, so many CI officers who come into the organization undercover, which means that they cannot acknowledge except to their immediate, family members that they're actually working with the CIA. They know that they're going to live a life in secrecy and that their accomplishments, achievements, will not be known outside of

maybe a small circle within CIA. And the reason why that CIA Museum is in CIA and not somewhere else is that there are some things that still remain classified because they reveal different types of sources and methods that could in fact compromise ongoing activities or future operations. So I really think it should honor those baseless and meaningless women and men of CIA who over the years put themselves at great danger and undertook great sacrifices and their families. And probably if any component of CIA demands, I think, more attention and more appreciation. It's those family members of CIA officers, the spouses, the sons and daughters and parents who keep the home fires burning and allow their CIA officers to go overseas at a moment's notice or to go into a war zone and put their family's

future at risk. Those are really the unsung heroes of CIA, those family members of CIA officers. How do you talk about your work with a spouse or partner without revealing classified information? You do it carefully. Thankfully, during the course of my career, you know, I was, my wife, we were married for 42 years, and early on it was tough. And I talk about in the book that after, you know, less than a year with CIA, my wife and I separated for a year because I got into that CIA environment and then I started to, you know, keep things from her. And she sensed a, you know, growing distance between us. And there was a distance between us. And thankfully, we got back together and we came to an understanding that I would try to explain as much as I could without, you know, going into classified information.

And she was willing to give me that latitude. Whenever I would administer the author of office to a new group of CIA officers every month at CIA headquarters, I tell them to not neglect the home front because, first of all, we want happy employees at CIA. They're better employees. But also, they need to remember their responsibilities and obligations at home to spouses, to children, to siblings, or parents, or whatever. And it is important. But like the bin Laden raid, Kathy, my wife, didn't know about our plans for that raid until after it happened. And after we knew that we got bin Laden, we brought his remains back to Afghanistan, and I gave

her a call and said, Kathy, we just had a great countertared and success and turn on the television because President Obama is going to be speaking to the nation in the world in a few minutes. And I think she sensed what it might be based on the excitement of my voice. But I didn't want to burden her with that type of information that she couldn't reveal to anybody else. So it is tough. It's a balance, but it's one that CIA officers, I think, take very serious. seriously. Which spycraft norms have frayed the most over the last 20 years or maybe just disappeared? Well, because of the advancements in technology, spy business has changed profoundly.

Years ago, CIA would be able to fabricate a passport as well as a visa and go across a border. And as the CIA offices would say with a fistful of 50s, be able to operate rather, you know, well, even in denied areas because you didn't have all of the, the closed circuit televisions. You didn't have the machine readable passport machines at airports, passport readable machines. You didn't have the digital dust that we all leave, whether it be with a credit card or with our iPhone or whatever else. And so operating clandestinely in heavily digitized, you know, sensor-ripe environments is really difficult. And so that traditional spycraft really has had to just be transformed so that you're

able to operate in a very busy digital environment and one where the local services have so many opportunities to pick up on your every move. And so being able to go dark and be able to operate covertly and clandestinely overseas is much more challenging. But thankfully, I think CIA officers have done a tremendous job of operating in that digital noise. The final stage of turning a complex bundle of information into a simple briefing for politicians, say a president, what's the best way to avoid biases when you do that? And what kind of skill do you need to be good at that? Well, CIA officers are expected to be and must remain a political policy neutral when it comes to any type of issue that policymakers may be grappling with. And I also think

it's a very good thing for agency officers to do when they brief somebody, like incoming president-elect Biden about a particular issue is to stay clearly what is it that we know from sources, the reliability, the accuracy of that information, what is it that we don't know as far as gaps in our knowledge are concerned? And what are our capabilities to be able to address those gaps? Because if you don't nest within that broader environment of what is knowable, then I think you can give your listener the wrong impression about the extent and a doubt. depth of your knowledge. And so it's important, I think, again, to put that knowledge, that assessment, that analysis into a context that the policymaker then can appreciate.

This wasn't the CIA, but it came out recently that sources had not been telling the president how many troops we actually have in Syria. Is that ever justified that you have a loyalty to the Constitution? You think the president will make a mistake or is going to remain misinformed. And so you give a briefing that is not the best literally absolute correct Bayesian estimate of the truth. Well, when you say sources, sources again in the lexicon of intelligence world, these are individuals overseas foreigners who give information to U.S. officers. But there never should be a reason or occasion for U.S. government officials to provide misinformation or disinformation to a president.

Absolutely not. It's critically important that a president, and the National Security Council team have as accurate an understanding as possible about it. And I hadn't heard about anybody not reporting what they believe was accurate statistics about what's going on inside of Syria. The sources that provide CIA officers, the information, might be misinformed, might be misleading. But that's part of the business of intelligence. You need to try to weed out the wheat from the chat. Now, as you know, and in your book, you've spoken out against USG use of torture on detainees.

Do you think the torture works in getting people to tell the truth? Well, also, as I say in my book, I don't refer to CIA's detention interrogation program as torture because that program was duly authorized by the President of the United States, and it was deemed lawful by the Department of Justice. And therefore, since it was deemed lawful, it was not torture the time. Now, people can disagree with those Department of Justice memos, and I do. but CIA officers were doing their obligation the best that they could. On the standpoint of efficacy of the use of those techniques up to including waterboarding,

I do not believe, first of all, that they are consistent with American values, and I don't think the CIA should have been asked to do that. First of all, they had no experience in a detention program nor in an interrogation program. And so, again, from just a moral standpoint and ethics and principles standpoint, I don't think that they should have been authorized. Secondly, though, I do not believe that they were the best means to elicit information, reliable information from individuals. Yes, some of the individuals who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques subsequently provided information that was true and accurate and reliable. They also provided a lot of information that was disinformation as a way to mislead CIA officers.

And even when they provided reliable information, there's no way to know whether or not they would have provided that information sooner or later, had they not been subjected to those EITs, enhanced interrogation techniques. So I do not believe one can make the case either from a morality standpoint or from an efficacy standpoint that those types of techniques should be employed. Where in the world do they speak the most beautiful Arabic? You know, I've studied and forgotten Arabic so many times. I used to be pretty good in the 1980s because when I lived in Sogoy, I'd be the first time

for a couple of years. I also studied in Cairo and also had a six-month one-on-one tutorial before I went out to Saudi Arabia the first time. So I was pretty good, but I have long since lost a lot of the capability that I had. There are different types of Arabic when I was in Egypt. I was the first time I learned Arabic and I really enjoyed the Egyptian Arabic. It has a certain dialect and a lot of, you know, globalisms that I became familiar with. But then in Saudi Arabia in the Gulf, it's a pure form of Arabic. if you learn the standard Arabic, then usually can just get by in other countries. But when you start going over to North Africa, where there's just a lot of French that is woven into the Arabic, it becomes much more difficult. And also their dialect is much more difficult to understand.

So I never did well in North Africa. But in the Gulf and in Egypt, as well as in the Levant area, I could get by. What's your favorite site in Cairo? For me, it's the Grand Mosque, but most people would say the pyramids. The citadel also is beautiful. Tahrir Square. When I was going to school at the Mergi Versa in Cairo back in the mid-70s, the AUC campus was in downtown Cairo by Tahrir Square. Tahrir Square was where it was the locus of all the anti-Mubarak activities in terms of the Arab Spring.

There's something really, really beautiful and attractive about the streets and smells and sounds of Cairo and the people of downtown Cairo. So whether it's going to Khan Khalili, which is the gold market, or just roaming around the, Zamalik or Babluk and other areas. I just, I love Cairo, the architecture, again, the people. So I can't put my finger on one place except just saying downtown where, you know, American version of Cairo is located. What do you like best in Arabic music? Well, when I was learning Arabic and I was listening to Arabic music over there,

I mean, it's different certainly than our music, but it's very heartfelt. And then there usually are stories in listening to Un Kapun, who was the famous Egyptian singer, there was such passion that she brought to it that would make men cry. But there's Lebanese music too, which is very, very good and popular. And so I spent my wife and I spent over five years in Saudi Arabia and got a fair amount of time listening to Arabic music, both traditional as well as New Wave Arabic. Now, as you know, President Trump but his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of a Middle Eastern peace deal.

This was mocked mercilessly for a long time, yet it seems he came up with something when other people had not before. Should we view that as a sign of the bankruptcy of our foreign policy elites, that just some guy determined to do something can cut a deal? It's far from complete, but it does seem better than nothing, right? Well, I'm glad that there has been an improvement in relations between some key Arab states, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan on the Arab side and Israel on the other side. I think this was an effort by the Emirates and the Bahraini's in particular,

with the agreement of Saudi Arabia to give Donald Trump a victory before the election as a way to help them out. But it formalized some of the ties, relationships that had already existed for a number of years between the UAE, in particular in Israel. And it brought it up into the, you know, the public view and surface. Now, I do not believe that it is something that has helped the cause of peace in terms of settling the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians got absolutely nothing out of this. Bibi Netanyahu threatened to annex the territories, the West Bank, and then agreed to suspend his planned annexation in exchange for this relationship between some of those Arab states and Israel. Bibi Netanyahu, I think, has been long opposed to a two-state solution. And I just think that

Palestinian people have been deprived of the very basic human rights and dignity that they deserve for so long. And now we have, you know, Arab leaders who are just basically, turning the blind eye to Palestinian problem. And I think that is very unfortunate. And the fact that the United States has moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it has undermined the United States traditional role of playing honest broker between the Arab states and Israel. And so I think, yes, looking at it just in isolation, it's good that the UA, Bahrain, and Sudan have relations with Israel. But at the same time, I don't know whether or not it's now going to be more difficult or harder to address the Palestinian problem,

which is long, long overdue for some type of resolution that, again, does justice to the Palestinian people. How much do you think about the much earlier history of the CIA? So, for instance, it came out some while ago that the CIA supported modern art and abstract expressionism.

This was seen as a counterweight to the more communist tradition of mural paintings. Do you look back and you think, like, gee, that was crazy? We would never do anything like that. Or do you look back and think, well, that made sense for the time, but you know, times change. How do you view the earlier CIA? Well, you pointed out one aspect of the early CIA. There's a lot of other aspects of the early

CIA in terms of toppling regimes and actually shaping developments overseas during the Cold War when I think Washington really felt we were in an existential, you know, challenge and competition with the Soviet Union. I think the United States culture is one of its strongest calling cards around the world. And I do believe that we need to enhance the propagation of our culture, political, social, other. And unfortunately, I don't think we have leveraged it enough. Because even in places like Iran in China and Russia, so many American entertainers and so many aspects of culture really are very much admired and embraced by the populace. And so to the extent that the CIA and the State Department and other organizations can help to extend that

culture worldwide, you know, I think all for the better. I think we should be doing more of that rather than trying to, you know, conduct these different types of covert operations to change, you know, the course of events overseas in ways that usually, you know, do not lead to the outcome that we want. There's a famous Haitian proverb which goes, the constitution is paper, the bayonet is steel. agree or disagree? Well, just from a physical standpoint, I think, you know, if you're talking about the Constitution as the document, yes, it's a paper. But I think the paper embodies what is America, what this great democracy, a republic, is all

about. And I think the Constitution is, you know, the strength of this country, not just because it allows us to continue to grow and prosper as a society as a nation, but also it sends, I think, a clear signal to countries around the world, at least when it's adhered to, that the liberal democratic order and the fact that we are a country and a government anchored in law in the constitution, I think that's a very powerful signal that we've used over the course, certainly in the last 75 years. Unfortunately, you know, the bayonet sometimes has been necessary, certainly World War II and some other times. And the bayonet frequently is used in order to deal with

an urgent crisis, I think the bayonet should be used only when it cannot be, the problem cannot be addressed in other ways. Sometimes the bayonet is opted for too quickly when there are other means to address problems. Why did Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald? That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I've read different books. I'm reading the new JFK book by Frederick Logbul. That was during the earlier Kennedy years. But there are some things that I think are going to remain mysteries. You know, why does somebody, why did Lee Harvey Oswald shoot, you know, John F. Kennedy? We can speculate, and there are things that have been written and said about it. But, you know, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man? But if you just view it in Bayesian terms, it seems to me,

well, that was a long time ago, and there's been no deathbed confession for any conspiracy. So isn't the rational view that it wasn't much of a conspiracy at all, or does that reasoning not carry much weight with you? Well, I think the reasoning is carry some weight, certainly. I don't believe Ruby was part of a conspiracy. I have read and heard and talked about things that what might have led Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot Kennedy that may have involved other antagonists,

but I don't believe Ruby was part, knowingly part of a conspiracy to try to snuff out Lee Harvey so he wouldn't spill the beans. I do think he was just reacting. But that's just my assessment. Now, before this most recent presidential election, the national security experts I know all spoke to me about how worried they were

about foreign interference in our election. Yet we held the election, and as far as we can tell, or as far as I can tell, it seems foreign interference has been absolutely minimal, arguably even zero. So what happened or what changed? Why did all the experts get this wrong? I read hundreds of mainstream media articles

about forthcoming foreign interference. they all cited experts. Where is it? No one's talking about it. Well, I think we, you know, it's still unclear how much the interference was. I think the impact probably was less than a lot of people anticipated. But I think there's no doubt that, you know, Russia and China, Iran, other countries, you know, try to use the social media environment to push out their narratives that they wanted to influence

the minds and the votes of American citizens. But I think this, you know, this past election, the social media environment, as well as just the regular environment, information environment, was just so overloaded with so much misinformation and disinformation. It was hard to maybe distinguish what was coming from broad that was inaccurate and disinformation and what was coming from domestic sources. And I think this is almost going to be a feature in the future. Now, I do think that the U.S. cyber experts in FBI, NSA, CIA, Department of Homeland Security

did a good job of trying to ensure that there was. no technical intrusions that really would be significant. And I think they learned some lessons over the last four years, certainly from the 2016 election. So I think we were better prepared to prevent those types of technical intrusions that we were certainly worried about, but that the influence operations in that digital environment in particular, I think, were still quite evident. I have a few questions about popular culture, movies and TV, books. Jean-Lacaree. What does he get right and get wrong? Well, he's written so many books and he's gotten so many things right, but he also, you know, I think intentionally, you know,

tries to change some facts and realities. He has, I think, a tremendous ability to give individuals a sense of just the meticulousness and the, you know, the detailed steps that need to be taken in order to, you know, carry out espionage operations and how things usually take months, if not years, sometimes for things to, you know, develop and evolve. And in intelligence, patience really is a virtue. And frequently, you want to get things, you know, sooner. But for example, the recruitment of sources can take years. It can be several case officers who are going to cultivate the relationship before someone is formally recruited. And then when those assets start to give really consequential intelligence to their handlers. And he understands that good spies are often introverts, right?

That's one thing I take away from his books. They are and they're not. One of the reasons why I got out of operations because I think I was too much of an introvert. I wouldn't go into a cocktail party and try to talk up people and chat them up and try to cultivate, you know, a relationship. That really requires an extroverted personality. But then, you know, you need to then go back into your cocoon of, you adopt certain personas when you're out, but then when you get it back into the CIA station or headquarters, whatever else, you really need to shield yourself from that type of outside scrutiny or being uncovered. So it takes, a person with almost a schizophrenic approach to life.

Have you ever met a spy and thought he or she is just like James Bond? Or is that completely absurd out of the picture? I've met a lot of CIA officers over the years who have reminded me of a James Bond. Sometimes they're very calm, cool, debonair, slick, and they really seem to fit that bill. But CIA officers, if you want to have a CIA gaze officer go out and be a successful recruiter of spies. You don't want to have someone who's going to stand out in the crowd because then they'll draw the attention of local security or intelligence officials. You want someone who's going to be able to blend in, someone who's not going to be seen as someone to be concerned about. So we

hire all different types of individuals. And even though at one point my Arabic was okay, it's pretty good, I still, if I was to wander in the, you know, among the tribes of Saudi Arabia or in the sukes of Damascus or the streets of Cairo, I still do. look like an American, a westerner. From Hudson County. Yeah. So you really want to be able to have individuals with, you know, diverse backgrounds and experiences so that they can, in fact, blend into the local environments.

Other than being overly dramatized, what does the TV show The Americans get right and wrong about Soviets buying here in the 1980s? People have asked me a lot about the Americans as well as Homeland. I don't, I've never watched them. You know, I live the intelligence business. And then I heard that Homeland in one of the episodes, they blew up CIA headquarters, so I found never to watch it. But, you know, anytime I've seen like a little, you know, snippet or footage of it, a lot of times that they really exaggerate the technical capabilities of the CIA and the health community. But sometimes science fiction gives birth to intelligence initiatives, I think vice versa.

So I think there are, the Americans was based on a real life story with when the Russians had secreted into the United States and, you know, 10 or 11 ill. as they're called to burrow into American society and adopt American personas. And I was at the White House at the time as President Obama's counterterrorism advisor and was intimately involved in that. And it was a really, really interesting and exciting sort of period of time. And my understanding, based on people who have watched the Americans, say it's very good and it gives a good reflection of what the reality was like. I have a few policy questions for you. Given that the risk of America having what you might call an idiosyncratic president seems to be. higher as of late, and perhaps is higher for the future going forward? Do you think that makes a case

for the CIA being less powerful or more powerful as that risk rises? Well, CIA's power derives from its legislative authorities, its statutory authorities. But every bureaucracy has some autonomy, right? Well, they do. And I think some of it takes on, as you, I think, are pointing out, sort of the temperament of the commander-in-chief, the chief executive. But all CIA covert action programs, for example, have to be authorized in writing, in very explicit writing, by a president in the United States. And so the more aggressive a president might be on the foreign front, and the more that he or she would want the CIA to be involved, the CIA will be involved. But I do think that the CIA needs to sort of stick with its traditional mission, which is to

acquire, clandestinely acquired intelligence that matters to U.S. national security, whether it be human sources or technical collection. It needs to carry out the the counterintelligence activities to protect our secrets from foreign interference or intrusion. It needs to engage with foreign liaison services so that we're able to benefit from their capabilities and information gathering. It needs to conduct all source analysis so that we gain the benefit of the insights that we get from liaison, from clandestinely acquired sources and so on. And the more the CIA is pushed into the paramilitary, the more military-like activities, I think the more trouble the CIA will get into.

What changes would you make to congressional oversight of the intelligence community? You know, early on, after the congressional oversight committees came into existence after the church and pike committees in the 70s, when the atrocities that the CI was involved in, quite frankly, were uncovered. And for the first 20 years or so, even longer, the members of the oversight committees, Republican and Democrat, would put their party affiliation outside the door when they conducted those oversight activities. Unfortunately, over the last 15 years or so, I see more and more partisanship going on inside of those committees.

So if there's any way that there can be, you know, going back to a bipartisan approach to intelligence national security oversight, I would strongly recommend it. Because right now the House Intelligence Committee is just fractured. beyond any type of reasonable work that it can do. Unfortunately, I think the Senate has stayed together, but there's still a lot of partisanship, and it needs to rid itself of that. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act set up courts

to oversee decisions about wiretapping, right, and citizen loss of privacy. How would you change that system, if at all? Well, when I was at CIA, I really didn't have to get involved in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA applications, programs. This is something that the FBI was involved in. But you know a lot about it, right?

I mean, how would you improve the system? I think there have been a number of revelations as a result of the investigations that have gone on about the Russian investigation, revealing that there was not the type of rigor and the checking and double-checking of the information that goes into those files of applications. And so without just totally overhauling the system,

I think there can be a way to ensure better accuracy of information that goes into them. And when a FISA application may be approved one day and then 30 days or 60 days later, it'll be re-uped. And I think it's incumbent on the Bureau, the ones that are pushing the FISA to ensure that there is any new information that's been acquired in that time or no needs to be incorporated into that FISA, as well as a review of the existing basis for that FISA needs to be scrutinized. So I just think greater rigor in ensuring that, again, accuracy prevails. throughout the process. Now, a major foreign power hacked into an OPM database and what, I think, 2015, is it harder today to hack again into the OPM or to hack into Facebook? Which is better protected? Well, that's a good question. I mean, I know OPM has done some things, but some U.S.

government systems are legacy systems and trying to transform them and transition to new, updated, and less vulnerable systems takes time, effort, and lots of money. Facebook, it has loads of money, but also I don't know how concerned it is about ensuring that there are no vulnerabilities in the system that can be exploited by actors, either domestic or foreign. So I think this is a challenge for the public, private, and not-for-profit sector in the coming decades. How are you going to ensure that your data is going to be protected while at the same time making sure that it's available so that you can leverage it the way it's designed to be used? As you know, Bob Gates has argued that the Director of National Intelligence position has some problems, it creates a new bureaucracy.

If you were to look at the flowchart of the post-9-11 U.S. intelligence community, it seems to be a highly complex nightmare. Now, if that's just the way things have to work? Should it actually be that way? Do we need to simplify? Are there too many positions? Are there too many chefs in the kitchen? What's your view? Well, the intelligence community of 2020 is the legacy of many, many years, decades of,

of intelligence agencies that have grown up and have evolved and have adapted to the new realities. And so, unfortunately, over time, there has not been as much of an effort to try to better integrate those agencies and authorities and capabilities, as well as to ensure that they are complementary, as opposed to unnecessarily redundant. I disagree with Bob Gates. I do believe that the Office of Director of National Intelligence needs to be looked at afresh after 16 years in existence. And some modifications need to be made. But as CIA Director, the last thing I wanted was to have to be CIA Director and the Director of the Intelligence Community writ large, 17 agencies.

There's more than enough to keep the Director of CIA busy. However, I do think that that orchestration function of the Director of National Intelligence can be refined and modified to try to push the intelligence community. in a direction that sheds some of those unfortunate legacy practices that are a drag on the system and to better integrate capabilities to make the U.S. intelligence community much more effective. Is 17 intelligence agencies too many or too few? Depends on who you ask. I'm asking you.

I think it's too many. There are some of those intelligence agencies that are very specific to organizations. For example, there's the marine intelligence, there's Navy intelligence, you know, there's Army intelligence. and some service their own organizations. And there's, you know, the national agencies such as NSA and CIA and the National Geospatial Agency. And I do think it would be worthwhile to see whether or not some of those individual intelligence

agencies that are embedded, for example, in the State Department, INR, it's called Intelligence and Research, whether or not that intelligence requirement of the State Department can be better serviced by a broader intelligence. community effort. That's why I do think it's worthwhile to take a fresh look at the constellation that exists right now. Very last question. What is it that you know about Donald Trump that the rest of us do not? Well, if there is anything I know about, I'm certainly not going to share it with you and your audience today. I still find it difficult to understand how so many Americans still believe what he says. I mean, his life is just one lie after another, unfortunately, and he's been

masterful as far as capitalizing on this craving the United States to believe in someone who was going to lead them, this country, sort of out of the problems that they see. But no, I think Donald Trump is pretty transparent as far as who he is and the types of things that he is, you know, hold dear. And what he holds dear is, you know, himself first and foremost. So I'm not going to share anything else that I might, you know, know, know, know, or assume. John Brennan, Thank you very much. And again, John's new book is called Undaunted, My Fight Against America's Enemies at Home and Abroad.

Thank you, John. Thank you so much, Tyler. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. Please don't forget to visit Conversationswithtyler.com slash donate to support the show before the year's end.