Pod Save the World - Hunting Osama bin Laden

Episode Date: October 25, 2017

Tommy sits down with Michael Morell, the former acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. They discuss his experience as President Bush’s briefer on 9/11, hunting Osama bin Laden, the state of ISIS, North Korea and the impending release of the JFK assassination files. It was sick.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. Thank you guys for tuning in. As always, if you like the show, please rate us in the iTunes store. It means a lot. It helps people discover the show. Also follow Pod Save the World on Facebook. There's lots of extra bonus content that might be of interest to you. My guest today is Michael Morel.

Michael was the deputy director at the CIA and the acting director at the CIA. I could not begin to count the number of meetings I was in with him during my time with the Obama administration. He was the guy who would kick off whatever scary thing we were talking about with an intelligence assessment. He always had three points, and you will hear those three points today in some of his answers. He talked about the bin Laden operation, what that was like for him, first learning about that intelligence, running it to ground, briefing it to the White House and the president, and ultimately what the day of was like when they actually took out bin Laden. He talks about terrorism more broadly in the state of ISIS and what the threat level is. He talks about North Korea and how he views the threat from their nuclear weapons program.

And he even talks about the impending release of the Kennedy assassination files. He claims that he's never sought out those files during his time at CIA to look at them. I wonder. I'm dubious. Just kidding, Michael, I believe you. So check it out. He's a brilliant guy. He knows been privy to more secrets than maybe anyone else in the United States government

and is really great at offering context about what's happening in the world right now. Joining me today on Pod Save the World is Michael Morel. He's the former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He spent more than three decades at the CIA as an analyst. He is also the author of the book, The Great War of Our Time, the CIA's Fight Against Terrorism from Al Qaeda to ISIS, and most importantly, the host of a new podcast called Intelligence Matters. Michael, thank you so much for joining me on Pod Save the World. Tommy, it is great to be with you.

I was just telling you offline. Anyone who likes this podcast will love Intelligence Matters because you have all the big name people like Panetta and Dennis McDonough and all those folks. But then you also have folks who are fresh out of the DNI or the CIA who are the people that I never actually met in person. And I figured they were working under pseudonyms because they did the really, really cool stuff. So everyone should check out Intelligence Matters. It's a great show. Thanks, Tommy. And now they're speaking on shows like mine under pseudonym.

It's just a different pseudonym. Exactly. I wanted to start this interview the way you started your day for many, many years with the PDB. My understanding is that during your time at CIA, you both oversaw the PDB briefing process and you yourself were a PDB briefer. Can you talk us through that process, like how it all works, how it's changed over time with different presidents and new technologies that have become available? Sure. And I had three different roles during my career. One was I was the guy responsible for putting it together during part of the Clinton administration. And then I was the actual briefer for President Bush for a year, January 2001 to January 2002. And then I oversaw the whole thing. So I had three different incarnations with it. You know, it is the book. It's the best intelligence that the

intelligence community has to offer. It's typically five, six, seven pieces, one page to page and a half of the best analysis on all of the key topics, you know, whether that be Iran or North Korea or China or Russia. And it's provided six days a week. And we've been doing it ever since President Kennedy first asked for a daily product, you know, a long, long time ago. different presidents have consumed it in very different ways. The two bushes, for example, both wanted it briefed to them. They wanted the briefer in the room when they either heard it orally or when they read the piece and then they could ask questions.

There's been other presidents like President Clinton who just received it and read it and didn't have any interaction with a briefer. And then President Obama, for example, as you know, right, read it early in the morning. and then got together with the seniors from his intelligence community, kind of mid-morning to ask any questions about it and get any updates. So different presidents have consumed it in different ways, but it's always been valued. And as time has gone on,

and as there's been more and more issues that are intelligence issues, and by that I mean you can't understand the issue without first-rate intelligence, it's become more and more valuable. So I saw, for example, in both the Bush administration and the Obama administration, a real hunger for intelligence. So when you were putting it together, were you guys in the office at like three in the morning throwing this thing into a book? Like, how did that work? Yeah. So there's a meeting that the agency at the beginning of every day, sort of nine o'clock,

where you get feedback from the briefers on the book that was provided that morning to the senior national security customers. And you think about what you're going to do the next day. and people make proposals. The analysts make proposals. So there's a bottom up part to this, but there's also a top down, right? So if you're the director or acting director or deputy director of CIA, you get to ask for pieces. It comes together both ways. And then the analysts spend the rest of the day writing it and getting it reviewed, right? And the review is important because it's not just the product of one analyst. It is the product of the central intelligence agency. So the review process is pretty significant. And then it all comes together at this thing called the PDB staff. which edits it and makes them sound similar, same kind of language. And that's one role I played. And that goes till 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night. And then when you're a briefer, you come in in the middle of the night to look at all that material, to go through it, make sure you understand it, ask any questions you have

about it, and to think about how you're going to present it to the person you're briefing. So when I briefed President Bush, before 9-11, I got to work at 4.9-11. in the morning to prepare for a briefing at 8. And after 9-11, I got to work at 1230 in the morning to prepare for a briefing at 8 just because there was so much more material. My God. Yeah, like you alluded to, I mean, you were President Bush's PDB briefer on 9-11. I was hoping you could describe that day to us and tell us what the experience was like. And relatedly, I mean, I was not in government on 9-11. I was a citizen. I was in college, actually, but I was there during the Benghazi attacks. and the lesson I learned that day the hard way was that there is no wiggle room to speak publicly about intelligence unless you're 100% accurate and you have 100% confidence in your assessments.

But for you as the briefer, when the president of the United States says, hey, I need information on X, Y or Z, why did this happen? How did this happen? You don't really have that luxury. So what do you do on a day like 9-11 when everyone is scrambling to find information? Information is hard to come by. Communication is difficult. The world is scared shitless of what just happened. everyone's looking to you to say, you know, explain this to me. Yeah. So I remember, Tommy, I remember that day as if it were yesterday, right? It's that crystal clear in my mind.

And for me, it was, it was a mixture of the intensity of doing my job with the surreal. So an example of the intensity of doing my job was, remember, we landed, Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to get rid of all the non-national security people on the plane and bring on food and water because we didn't know how long we'd be flying around. And then we flew from Barksdale to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha where the president was going to do a secure video teleconference with his national security team. So on that flight from Barksdale to Offit, the president asked to see me. And so in his office on Air Force One, it was Andy Card, the White House Chief of Staff, the president, and me. And the president looks at me and he says, Michael, who did this? And as you know, that's the kind of question, it's kind of direct question you get from a president, right?

And, of course, I didn't know, right, who did this. And so I said, Mr. President, I have not seen any intelligence that would take us to a perpetrator. So what you're going to get here is my best guess. And he said, I understand the caveat, and I get on with it. You know, something that's, again, the kind of thing a president says, right? And I said, look, Mr. President, there are two nation states, Iran and Iraq. who have the capability to do this, but neither one has anything to gain and both have a tremendous amount to lose by doing this. So I don't think it was either one of those. I think

when the trail ends, we are going to find al-Qaeda and we're going to find Osama bin Laden. I told him I would bet my children's future on that. I've never told my kids that, so I hope they don't listen to this podcast. And then Tommy, he looks at me and he says, says, when will we know? Right, which is, again, the kind of question you get from a president. And again, there's no answer to that, right? So the best thing to do is to find some context. So what I did is I said, Mr. President, in the East Africa bombing of our embassies, we knew in two days that it was al-Qaeda. In the case of the coal bombing in Yemen, it took a couple months for us to figure out it was al-Qaeda. In the case of the Kobar Tower's attack in Saudi Arabia, it took us almost a year to figure out

the Iranians were behind it. So we may know soon, and then again, it may take us some time. So that's how I answered that question. So that's kind of an example of the intensity of doing the job. Later on that flight, the agency sent me some intelligence that was provided to us by a foreign intelligence service. And what that intelligence said was, this was the first wave, that there was another wave coming. You know, there'd be a second wave of attacks. And, you know, when I gave that to the president in the conference room on Air Force One, you know, here's a guy who just suffered the largest attack ever on the United States of America. And here his briefer was telling him that it was, you know, the first of two. And there'd be another one.

So you can imagine what that was like. Yeah. You know, an example, Tommy of the Surreal was on final approach to Andrews. The lights in the plane were turned down. the president's military aid, you know, the guy who carries the nuclear football was looking out the left side of the aircraft. He waved, he saw me looking at him, and he waved me over, and I looked out the window, and there was a fighter jet on the wingtip of Air Force One. He told me it was from the D.C. Air National Guard. He told me that there was another one on the other wingtip.

The plane was so close that you could look into the cockpit. You could see the pilot's facial features. And then he told me, do you know why they're there? And I said, no. And he said, they're there because if somebody fires a surface-to-air missile at us on final approach, it is their job to put themselves between that missile and Air Force One. My God. And then as you looked beyond the fighters yet, you could see the still-burning Pentagon.

So, you know, that's an example of the surreal. Yeah, I bet. Well, let's fast forward a decade to another day that I imagine is also. seared into your memory. Your deputy director at the CIA, you're working for a different president now, Barack Obama. Intelligence emerges that your analysts think might indicate that Osama bin Laden is living in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Can I ask you to sort of unpack this for us a little bit? Like, what did you guys find initially? How did your team bring that information to you? How big is the circle of people briefed on this information? And how are you feeling as you're

learning that a decade later we might find the person that led to the misery you lived through with President Bush on 9-11. So the raid was in May, right? So in the previous August, Director Panetta and I, Leon Panetta and I, had a three times a week meeting with our counterterrorism center. And they would occasionally at the end of that meeting, which was a lot of people in the director's conference room, almost too many people. At the end of that meeting, sometimes the director of,

of the counterterrorism center would say, could I see you guys in your office? He called it going small. And there was a day in August where he said to us, can I see you guys? And we said, of course. So it was the director of CTC. It was his senior analyst. It was his senior operations guy. And it was the director and I. And Jeremy Bash, who is the director's chief of staff. and in this meeting they tell us about this guy who they've been trying to find since 2002. His name is Abu Ahmed. They've been looking at him since 2002 because a detainee told us about him and then a number of other detainees corroborated it. And the basic message was he was close to bin Laden prior to 9-11.

he was close to KSM, the mastermind of 9-11, after 9-11. He's the kind of guy who might be a courier for bin Laden. And one detainee even told us he's the kind of guy who might be living with bin Laden. So we had been on this guy's trail since 2002. And at that time, we only knew his Arabic nickname, his non-gigur. And so we had to figure out through intelligence methods what his true name was, what his nationality was, what his phone number was. And then once we had all that, we could track him.

And we tracked him to Peshawar, Pakistan, where we then followed him, you know, using standard surveillance techniques. We followed him back to Abadabad. And they were telling us all this in this meeting. And the director and I had never heard of this guy, right? This was a first time we'd ever heard of him. These were one of many leads that we were following to try to find bin Laden. And then they described this compound that they followed him to.

Large, very large compound, 12 to 18 foot walls, top with barbed wire. The interior of the compound is broken up by walls, so it's very difficult to get from one part of the compound to another. There's only one way in. There's a gate. It's got two big doors. The main house doesn't have many windows. there's a balcony on the third floor, but the balcony has a privacy wall. And I remember Director Panetta saying, you know, who would put a privacy wall in a balcony?

Isn't the whole point to look out? And Tommy, nobody said anything at that meeting about Bin Laden being there, but, you know, the hair stood up on the back of my neck in that meeting. And it wasn't long after that, maybe a few weeks after that, they came back to us with more information on the compound. So they knew it was purchased by a couple of guys. They had the names of those guys. Didn't match the name of our guy. It had been paid for in cash.

It had no phone service. It had no internet. They didn't put the trash out. So we were learning. They burned their trash. They didn't put it out for collection. The kids who were inside the compound didn't go to school. And this was in a part of Pakistan that's pretty elite.

And the rest of the kids in the neighborhood actually went to school every day. So there was a lot of. kind of weird things about this compound. So in September, we came to the White House and we briefed Jim Jones, who was then the National Security Advisor and Tom Donald and the Deputy National Security Advisor. And, you know, they understood the importance of this, you know, in a nanosecond, and they said we're going to brief the president. So it was late September when the president first heard about this. And he very commonly, as you know, he does, you know, gave us two instructions. Instruction number one is do not tell anybody else about this.

Nobody else in the government. Nobody at DOD, nobody at state. Don't tell anybody else about this. This is now the biggest secret, you know, in the history of our government. The second thing he said is, you know, he looked Leon in the eye and he said, find out what's going on inside that compound. So those were the two instructions he gave us. What we then learned over the next few months was just a couple things. The first thing we learned was that we already knew there were two families.

We knew there was these two brothers who were living there with their families, but we learned that there was a third family living there. And we learned that none of the neighbors knew there was a third family living there. And we knew that that third family never left the compound. And we knew that one of the brothers was always there. They never left together. They never were away from the compound at the same time. time. So that was very interesting, right? And then the other thing we learned was that was that there was this guy, we called him the pacer, who would take daily walks in the compound. And, you know,

he kind of looked like our guy. You know, he kind of looked tall and thin, but it was really hard to get a read on him. I remember we asked the experts in detecting the height of somebody from, you know, certain kind of photography to estimate his height. And they came back and said between five and seven feet. I remember, director Panetta saying, well, that's, that's really helpful, guys. That's really helpful. But there was this guy, right, who went out and paced every day. And then the third thing we learned was that Abu Akimah was still working for Al Qaeda. And I can't tell you how we know that, or how we learned that. But, you know, one of the things we were concerned about was that he had left Al Qaeda a long time ago, right? And he was now hooked up with some, some organized crime

guys, some drug trafficker. And that's what was going on inside this compound, right? But we learned that he was still working for al-Qaeda. So that was a huge piece of the puzzle. So by late in the year, we came to the president with a formal judgment that we think that Abu Ahmed, and I think this was the exact language, we think Abu Ahmed is harboring bin Laden at Abadabad. And that kicked off a very large number of discussions in the sit-room about the intelligence, the quality of the intelligence, the analysis, what else could it be, the analyst confidence level

in all of this, and then what to do about it. And the president asked us initially to put together some options for going in there and getting him and seeing if he's there and then getting them. And then we broadened that out. The president broadened that out to include the Department of Defense. So it was late in the year that we brought Bill McCraven and his seals and the special forces guys into the conversation. And, you know, we put together a handful of options. And the president picked the most risky one, which was putting U.S. forces on the ground deep inside Pakistan. But it was the one that gave us the best chance of, A, knowing if he was there, be making sure that we took care of the problem,

C, finding out if there was any intelligence on site and getting it, right? It would have been very easy on the president's part to have said, let's just obliterate it, right, with 30 or 40 bombs from a couple of B2s. But he didn't do that, right? He did the right thing, I thought, and made a pretty tough decision to put our guys at risk to go in there and do the job. And America knows the rest of the story. Yeah. It will never cease to amaze me the number of little things your analysts were able to piece together to have this picture of a clearly a high value individual living in this compound. It is astounding. So as you guys worked through this intelligence and you met with the president, you famously told him that the circumstantial case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was better than the circumstantial case that bin Laden was in Abadabad.

I feel like the story of your career is having to deliver very unsatisfying fact-based answers to very powerful people. Why did you believe that? How did Obama react? What was the case like relative to the Iraq case? Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the lessons of Iraq, probably the key lesson of Iraq, is it's important for analysts to not only have a judgment, but then to have a view as to whether they have low, medium, or high confidence in that judgment. It was the lesson of Iraq because if I put on the table in front of smart people,

all the intelligence we had on Iraq in the fall of 2002, people would come to the exact same conclusion the analysts did. What we didn't do a very good job of is telling President Bush that, that, you know, when you look at it closely, we only really have low confidence in this because most of the data is five years old or more. It's a circumstantial case. There's no direct evidence. And one of the things that's really driving us here is the history of the fact that Saddam

had had chemical weapons and actually used them and had a nuclear weapons program in the early 90s that the Israelis took off the face of the planet. And so that key lesson learned of having a confidence level, you know, was infused in the intelligence community. It became part, as you know, of the conversation between intelligence officers and policymakers. So it was part of our conversation about bin Laden at Abadabat. And for some reason, and I don't remember why, but for some reason, Tommy, it went from low, medium, or high confidence to probabilities. And the young analyst who was the lead on this said she was 95% certain.

In the movie Zero Dark 30, she says she's 100% certain, but in real life it was 95. her very senior boss, the lead analyst in the counterterrorism center, said he was only 80% certain. And I said I was only 60% certain. And I remember there was this moment in the sit room where Panetta was sitting at the table and the president was chairing, an NSC meeting. And Panetta's at the table and I'm sitting behind him against the wall. And the president says to Leon, you know, help me understand why there's such a wide discrepancy in these probabilities. So Leon turns around and says, Michael, can you answer that question? So I say to the president, Mr. President, let me start by assuring you that everybody is operating with the same set of information, right?

There's not some people here who've got information and other people don't have, right? So same information set, really important to know. I said, secondly, I think what's going on here is that people are washing this data with regard to bin Laden. Netaboddibad through the filter of their own personal experience. So the analysts here who post-9-11 have known nothing but success after success after success are putting it through that filter and are really confident about what they're looking at. Me, I went through a rock WMD. I went through believing that Saddam Hussein had these weapons only to be proven wrong.

and that's why I'm only at 60%. And that's what I famously said to the president, Mr. President, one of the things you need to know here is that I believe that the case for Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction is stronger than the case for bin Laden being at Abadabad. And you could hear a pin drop. And my sense, Tommy, is that the president deeply appreciated me saying that. Not everybody in the room felt the same way,

because I think there were some people in the room who just wanted to go, go, go, go, go. and, you know, I was putting, I was putting caution on the table here. You know, I think the president, in fact, I've heard him say this, that at the end of the day, he was 50-50. I mean, this was a circumstantial case. There wasn't any direct evidence. We didn't have much more than I just outlined for your listeners. And so the president at the end of the day was a coin flip, but he thought it was, you know, important enough to go in there and see. Right.

My last question about this, and I could talk about this all day is, can you tell us a little bit about the day itself? Like, I feel like we kind of gloss over the fact that one of the helicopter crash landed in bin Laden's yard. You know, a small challenge there that was overcome by the incredible work of the special operators who conducted the mission. Like, what did you do that day? How did you guys feel as the day progressed? Like, can you take us through, you know, what your morning and afternoon was like?

Sure. Sure. You'll remember that the president decided that this would be a covert action. And he decided it would be a covert action because if we went in there and he wasn't there, if we could get out without being detected by the past. Pakistanis, we wouldn't say anything to anybody about it, right? And we would hope it didn't leak. So because the president decided it was a covert action, the chain of command for the operation went from the president of the United States to the director of CIA, Leon Panetta,

to Bill McRaven, who was the commander of J-Soc. So that was a chain of command. Bob Gates, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, you know, was not in the chain. So Leon and I were at CIA in our conference room that we had turned into an operation center. And we were in contact with Bill, who was in Afghanistan, and we were in contact with you all at the White House. And Leon and I went through the whole operation there until the helicopters were back in Afghanistan and landed in safe. And then we came to the White House. But you'll remember during the debate, Tommy, that Bob Gates kept on raising, the attempted rescue of the Iranian hostages. And he kept on saying to us, I sat around this table

when President Carter decided to do that and something always goes wrong, right? Guaranteed something is going to go wrong here, we have to think about that. And when that helicopter crash, right, it got, it lost its wind and it fell pretty hard. When that helicopter crashed, the first thing that popped into my mind was, oh God, Bob Gates was right. But luckily, Bill McCraven had, had, you know, thought of this and had a mitigation. He had backup helicopters that he could bring in, and so the mission could continue. Nobody was hurt. We did have to leave a pretty important helicopter behind, but we did our best job destroying it. But that was my thought. One of the things I'll always remember about that day is that when we finally were confident enough for the president to go

public. It was 9, 10 o'clock at night. I forget the time about this. The first phone call he made was to President Bush. And, you know, I think that speaks volumes, right, of President Obama and speaks volumes about the relationship between former presidents and current and former presidents. Yeah, I agree. If you want to hear more about this day, I suggest you download and subscribe to Intelligence Matters and listen to, among other interviews, the conversation you had with Secretary Panetta, or CIA chief at the time, Panetta, because you guys get into even more detail. But I want to shift a little more to the state of terrorism generally. So bin Laden is dead.

Al-Qaeda's forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been degraded significantly. But it seems like ISIS has taken their place, at least in the public consciousness. On the battlefield, ISIS gained a ton of territory quickly in Iraq and Syria. They seem to have lost most of it back, including their capital. capital and Raqa, thanks to the great work by the U.S. military and the Iraqi military. But so much of their strength is derived from the stickiness of their ideology and this ongoing ability to recruit new adherents, even if we're kicking their butts on the actual battlefield and the caliphate is getting taken away.

How do you assess the threat? And do you think that anyone, it doesn't have to be a U.S. agency, it could be a partner country, is doing a good job at combating the ideology and combating the propaganda that's allowing them to maintain their strength? So that's a great question. You know, we used to talk about the difference between the near war and the far war. And by the near war, what we meant was how do we deal with those guys who have already been radicalized and who are trying to kill us, right? And the far war is how do you prevent the creation of terrorists in the first place? And my sense is that post 9-11, we as a government did a fantastic job in the near war. We did a fantastic job

making sure that we protected the homeland. No outside attacks on the homeland since 9-11. There's been a handful of lone wolf attacks internally, but no outside attacks. That's remarkable because these guys were really trying to do it. There was a number of plots that were disrupted and stopped. Great job. Great job doing that. But as fast, Tommy, as fast as we were taking these guys off the battlefield, new guys were coming on the battlefield. And part of the explanation for why we haven't got our arms around that far war is because you're dealing, right? You're dealing with the guys who are coming at you right then, and that's the priority. You know, so a metaphor is, you know, a couple of gang members are trying to break into

your house, and your only instinct at that point is protect your family, right? The last thing you're thinking about or what are the socioeconomic conditions that create gangs in the first place and what can we do about it, right? So part of it is the focus of your priority. And the second part is that it's not something, this is not something, dealing with a far war and getting our arms around that is not something the United States of America can do on its own. In fact, we can do very little of it because it has to do with poor governance in the Middle East. It has to do with this struggle that's going on within Islam between extremists and moderates. It has to do with the struggle between the Sunni Arab states and the Iranians, which is feeding the sectarianism

between Sunni and Shias. So there's not a lot that we can do. We really need our partners, right, in the region. We need Muslim leaders. We need Muslim clerics. We need Muslim teachers. We need Muslim parents to get their arms around this. Muslim leaders to get their arms around governance, right? And this Iran struggle in the region with its neighbors, right, to be resolved in some way, very, very difficult things to deal with. So what I say to people, Tommy, is that I'm afraid that my children's generation and my grandchildren's generation is still going to be fighting this fight. In addition to that, I think a lot of people are surprised by how far flung this fight

feels these days. For example, a lot of folks, including a lot of members of Congress, were surprised to learn recently that we have a thousand troops in Niger fighting terrorist forces there. How significant do you think the threat is from groups like AQIM or Boko Haram or Al-Shabaab in Africa? Is this a new front or something that we've been working on for a long time that just hasn't made headlines because there wasn't a tragedy like we saw recently? Yeah, we've been at this for a long time. So even before ISIS, al-Qaeda spread. And it spread to three primary places.

It's spread to Yemen. So al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It spread to Somalia, al-Shabaab. And it spread to North Africa. It was then called al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. And those were pretty early places where it spread to. And so we have been working with those governments for a long time, on the intelligence front and on the military front, you know, to help them keep a damper on

these groups. Right now, with the exception in Africa, it's different in Yemen, but in Africa, they really just pose a regional threat, but the point of the United States providing the support is to make sure they don't become a threat to Europe and then after that a threat to the homeland. So we've been doing this a long time. The Obama administration did it. The Trump administration is doing it. And unfortunately, when you've got guys on the ground in the midst of terrorists, you know, there's going to be a chance that they come in contact with each other. Right. Right. The New Yorker recently published a piece that cited a report from the Sufong Group and the Global Strategy Network that said nearly 5,600 ISIS jihadis from 33 countries have returned

home since ISIS lost some of its territory and some of its power. How worried are you about these foreign fighters returning home? Are these folks, you know, know, tucking their tails between their legs and heading home, or are we going to start to worry about that ideology spreading back home and this becoming a homegrown threat? So about 40,000 guys came from about 100 countries to Iraq and Syria to fight for ISIS. So it's a huge number. Larger than went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, larger than went to Iraq to fight the United States and the coalition. So a huge number. People were deep deeply concerned for some period of time about the return of these guys and what would happen.

What our intelligence community has said in testimony to Congress is that they're still worried about it, but they're less worried about it today than they were maybe a year ago. And the reason is because most of these guys are dying on the battlefield. And unfortunately, that's what happens to them. The same thing happened with a lot of Somalia Americans who went to Somalia to fight for El Shabab. They ended up just being killed there and never coming home. So I think there's less concern today about it than there was, but you still got to worry about it, particularly Europeans who are coming back to Western Europe, who live in countries that enjoy the visa waiver program with the United States

and people who can get on a plane and come to the United States right without a visa and without the requisite due diligence and interviews and all that kind of stuff that goes with getting a visa. So, you know, still a concern. Got it. Again, I will stop sounding like such a fanboy, but you had a great conversation with Nick Resnucson, who's the head of the NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center on Intelligence Matters, that folks want to hear more. A question that I think a lot of people raise is everyone has worked in counterterrorism would agree that drones are an important tool for collecting intelligence, in some cases, you know, killing terrorists, taking them off the battlefield. But there is this huge debate over the number of civilian casualties they lead to, and whether they can create as many terrorists as they neutralize. because of those civilian casualties and the way it helps terrorist groups recruit. I was hoping you could provide us some context because I've talked to very senior counterterrorism and military officials who will tell you after a drone strike, that drone can linger on a target

for days. They can figure out exactly how many individuals were killed or hurt. They've told me that the payload on the missiles can be so precise that they can, you know, take out one part of the home and leave other folks in another part unscathed. But then you read other groups in public reporting from the region that will often cite statistics that are double, triple, even greater, the number of civilian casualties as a result of a drone strike. How should we understand this discussion? Like, what should people know about drones as a tool that's used as part of a counterterrorism effort? So I'd say first that this is the most precise tool in the arsenal of the United States of America.

drones are more precise than any other weapon that you could bring to bear to stop those terrorists. So, you know, you could use a drone. You could use a bomb from a fighter aircraft. You could use a bomb from a bomber. You could put guys on the ground with special forces on the ground. And in each of those cases, the civilian casualties are likely to be greater than with a drone. So that's the first point, right? Precise weapon, more precise than anything else we have. have. And if you're not going to use drones, what are you going to use? And they're likely to be worse, right, in terms of civilian casualties. Second, the discrepancy, the discrepancy you talked about is largely due to three factors. The first is that the terrorists themselves don't like these things. In fact, one of the things we learned from the intelligence we got at the bin Laden

compound was that they were incredibly focused on them. They were obsessed with them and trying to figure out how they worked and how to stop them because they were so damaging to the organization. So one of the things that Al Qaeda did was put out propaganda with regard to civilian casualties. They made it up because they knew that it had an effect back in the United States. So one source of the gap was Al Qaeda itself putting out propaganda. The second source is some of the countries, were not happy with the United States doing this, and they themselves would put out propaganda because they knew the effect it would have back in the United States.

And then the third reason is well-meaning reporters talking to well-meaning parents of people who were killed. And when they go talk to those parents, those parents say, well, my son wasn't a terrorist, right? And the reporter walks away with, check, that was a civilian. So you put all that together. That explains a discrepancy to me. I think this is a very important tool.

I think it's going to be something that we have to do for a long, long time. President Obama felt very strongly that it was going to be something that we had to do for a long time, and therefore we need to be as transparent about it as possible. We need to explain why we were doing it. We needed to explain our successes. We needed to explain our failures to get the approval of the American people for us to be doing this, and at least the acquiescence internationally for doing this. And, you know, I couldn't agree more with that.

that, you know, the more you can talk about this, the more those numbers, right, that some people put out will be seen as false. Yeah. So, I mean, I think the one thing that always complicated this discussion for me is that there's two different types of strikes. One is like a high value target. If we know where Osama bin Laden is, we can find them, we can take it out. Another is what's called a signature strike, which is if the U.S. military sees a bunch of bad

guys in trucks with guns heading towards a position where the U.S. or the Afghan soldiers are located, they can take out that group of individuals. individuals. I guess how do we know with confidence that those individuals in that truck are, you know, soldiers on a battlefield versus a mix of civilians and soldiers? Or is that just the type of risk that comes with any warfare? So the rules of engagement in the Obama administration, I have no idea what they are today, but the rules of engagement in the Obama administration were, you know, you had to have, even though you might not know the identity, right, you had to have absolute certainty that they were a member of a terrorist group that the United States was allowed

to target. And without that, you could not take a strike. And that's really important, right? You had to know they were bad guys. And in particular, when you know that they're Al-Qaeda or you know that they're, you know, the Hakani network, and they're loading up in a truck and they're in Afghanistan and they're driving towards U.S. forces, right? You have a pretty good idea of what they're going to do. And so you're allowed, right, you're allowed to engage them. Just as you would be allowed to engage them if you were on the ground and could stop them on the ground, you know, no difference there. So I think that the whole signature strike thing is an issue that the media plays with too much, right?

Because what's required to take one of those is pretty significant. A slightly lighter, maybe topic. We learned this week that President Trump will not stop the Kennedy assassination files from finally becoming public. What do you think about these documents finally being released? Do you think we classify these kinds of documents for too long? You know, it's funny. I've been asked this question a lot in last few days. I don't know what's in them, right? Really? So, no, I really don't. Is that because you never wanted to find out? I was too busy answering answering questions from Tom and Dennis to go dig down and read the Kennedy files, right? I have sympathy for you there. So I, so I, so I

really don't know what they said, but if I were in my old job and people showed up at my door and said, we want to talk to you about our concerns about releasing these files, what I would have said to them was, okay, I'll listen, but this better be good, right? This better be really good. I can't think of a reason why we would not release these things. And not releasing them or redacting them in any way, right, just creates more conspiracy theories. So, you know, let's get this over with, right? And I can't believe there's an intelligence equity at stake here. Yeah. We're already assaulting truth and facts enough in this, in 2017. Absolutely. Back to scary shit. You wrote in the Washington Post that you believe that North Korea may have the capability today to successfully conduct a nuclear attack on the U.S.

And therefore, that sort of takes a preemptive military strike off the table in some senses because they would respond in kind if we were to take what we thought was a preemptive strike. That means essentially that we shouldn't focus on preventing North Korea from getting a nuclear weapon, but instead focus on deterring them from using the weapons. What do you think that means in practice? How does that insight change what should be our approach? Yeah, by the way, General Dunford, who's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in testimony last week or the week before, said we have to assume that he has the capability today. So General Dunford joined me.

And I did it because for exactly Tommy, the reason you said is I didn't want anybody to think that we could take military action against North Korea without at least the risk of the North Koreans putting a U.S. city at risk of nuclear attack. I thought it was so important to be able to say that. So I think there's actually three options here for the president. One is the military option, which is absolutely horrible. You can't guarantee the president that you can achieve his objective of destroying the nuclear weapons and destroying the missiles, and you almost certainly will start a second Korean war that in a worst-case scenario could bring the Chinese in on the side of North Korea, and then we're at war with China, and the worst-worst case

could result in a nuclear attack on the United States. So the military option is absolutely horrible. Nobody in their right mind would go anywhere near that, right? So that leaves the other two options. The second option is the option you mentioned, which is, look, we're going to have to accept this, and we are going to have to deter and contain. We're going to have to build up our missile defenses, which we're already doing. We're going to do it

in South Korea, in Guam, in Japan, in Alaska, and Hawaii and California. And we're going to have to make it absolutely clear to Kim Jong-un that if he ever uses one of these weapons or sells one of these weapons to somebody, that we will destroy him in his

regime. He's got to believe that. So that's option two. Option three, which doesn't get talked about very much, and Graham Allison from Harvard and I just wrote a piece this week that says, you know, there might be, no guarantees here, but there might be a U.S.-China approach to this that could lead to denuclearization of the peninsula, but it would take us dealing with China as an equal. It would take us negotiating with China for what do you want the peninsula to look like when we're done here? And what are we willing to trade away to make sure that Kim Jong-un doesn't have a weapon, right? And what would we be willing to give China if they could achieve denuclearization? So there's a third way that I hope somebody is talking about in the administration.

But if you can't do the third way, then there is no doubt in my mind, Tabi, that that containment and deterrence is the best approach. Right. My final question for you, and thank you so much for giving us so much of your time. We see so much scary stuff on the news that I think it's hard to rank or contextualize all these threats, all these news reports that are out there. And I think that's a problem for a number of reasons. We don't want to be naive about threats that we may face as a country. But we also don't want to live in a climate of fear where we're freaking out all the time about everything, where people are canceling trips to the West Coast because they're worried about North Korea. it's just irrational. You know a hell of a lot more than any of us ever will about the threats that are out there and the things we should worry about. What worries you most and what do you think is overblown? Yeah, so great question. So, you know, when I was deputy director and acting director and I would speak publicly, you know, at a university or a think tank or something, I would always get the question, what keeps you up at night? And at that time, as a serving intelligence officer, I felt I had to answer it with an intelligence answer. which was a terrorist with nuclear weapons.

That scares the hell out of me. It still does. You know, we know that Al-Qaeda tried to get its hands on nuclear weapons, and we know that ISIS talked about getting their hands on nuclear weapons, and there is absolutely no doubt that if a terrorist group did, there would be nothing to deter them. They would use it. You can deter a nation state.

You can't deter a terrorist group. But that's not the thing that worries me the most. The thing that worries me the most is the politics in my own country, right? is the failure of our politics to have our political leadership come together, make compromises that advance our economy and our society. At the end of the day, the most important determinant of a country's national security is the health of its economy and the health of its society. And the thing that scares me the most long term is the state of politics here. And as you know, better than anybody, it's gotten worse. It hasn't gotten better. And it doesn't. It doesn't

look like there's any end in sight at the moment to it. And that scares the hell out of me. The other thing I'd say is that when you think about what are the real existential threats to the United States of America, right? And those are the ones that the president really has to make sure that he's figured out and has an approach to and is doing something about. There are really only three. The first is a nuclear exchange with Russia. That could destroy the United States. The second is a naturally occurring or man-made biological agent that kills 60, 70 percent of the population. We don't spend enough time. We don't spend enough time on that. And then the third, and some people may laugh at this, but it's absolutely true. The third is climate change. It's an

existential threat to the United States of America. And if you don't believe me, if somebody doesn't believe me, look at Puerto Rico, right? This is an existential threat to us. And obviously we're not paying enough attention to that. So I think we tend in general, you know, you won't find this surprising at all. We tend to focus on the immediate, right, not the longer term. Michael, for 45 minutes, I felt like we were back in the situation room getting a very terrifying opening to a longer discussion about some hellacious topic. Thank you for doing the show. Everyone subscribe to Intelligence Matters. It is a fantastic podcast with brilliant people that you may not have heard of, but who have been working these issues for longer than some of us have been a lot.

live. So thank you again. Tommy, it's been great to be with you. Thanks for the invitation. All right, man. See you soon. Bye. All right. Take care. Bye. That's it for Pod Save the World. Thanks again for tuning in. Follow me on Twitter at at TVTor 08 and check us out on Facebook at the Pod Save the World Facebook page. Thanks, guys.