Pod Save the World - Hunting terrorists

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Tommy talks with the outgoing National Counterterrorism Center chief Nick Rasmussen. Nick worked in senior counterterrorism roles for Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump, and they discussed how weird the transition from Obama to Trump was, how you hunt terrorists, how you fight ISIS propaganda, Trump's North Korea summit and more. 

I am thrilled to be in studio today with Nick Resniewson. He was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2014 to 2017. Prior to that, he was the deputy director at NCTC, which is what we're going to call it from now on, because that's a long name. He worked in the NSC with me. He is now the senior director of the Counterterrorism Program at the McCain Institute at Arizona State University and a contributor to a whole bunch of news outlets. Most importantly, my friend, my former colleague, Nick, it's great to see you. It's great to be here, Tommy. we were talking outside just how much when you leave the environment we were in, you miss

people more than you miss anything else. And that comes home when I see you. It is such a weird thing because I talked to you like every day for four years, but we talked about issues that were probably classified about terrorism. It's like it's a context in a point in time in your life that is sort of almost impossible to recreate, I guess, unless you go back into government. That's true. And when I stepped down at the end of 2017, I knew I was going to, you know,

suffer a little bit from withdrawal. And it's turning out that way. Not so much from issues or the chance to have a voice on policy decisions, but it really is that sense of fellowship with people that you are working alongside. And I had built a team for myself at NCTC that I was really proud of and I care about. And so when you walk away from that, you know, it feels, you feel it. You feel it. You definitely feel it. So listeners to this show have heard me talk about how the deep state attacks are just nonsense.

and how the people I worked with were nonpartisan, they were career professionals. You are the archetype of the NSC goon that helps me finally explain what I'm talking about. So let me credential you for a moment. And we say goon at the NSC with great fondness. You just left 27 years of government service. You have served continuously in counterterrorism jobs

since September 11, 2001. You worked in counterterrorism roles for George Bush, then Barack Obama, and then you stayed on to support President Trump in your role as head of NCT. for a year? A year, that's right. How weird has your last year been?

It was different. You know, but I was prepared to leave at the time of the transition because you need to be prepared to leave. I was a presidential appointee. President Obama did me that great honor. But I was also a career civil servant, somebody who, as you said, I had worked for presidents of both parties. And so when the representatives of the Trump administration said, are you interested in

potentially staying? I said yes, because in part, I was worried about the chaos of transition. There's always chaos at transition time. And it would just provide a little bit of organizational stability at NCTC, my organization, if we could go without a leadership change, at least at the outset. And on the counterterrorism and terrorism set of issues, I thought I could contribute to some kind of stability and continuity when lots of other positions would be turning over.

Right, right. At the White House, at the Defense Department, the State Department, CIA, lots of other places. So I was willing to stay, but I also made clear that this was not a long-term thing. I told the representatives of the Trump administration that it would probably be about a year. And that year was different. There's no question that the decision-making styles, the, you know, everything. Right. Well, so that's an interesting thing. Because like, if you're a lower mid-level analyst at NCTC, you are probably doing a lot of the same stuff. You're tracking ISIS, you're, you're monitoring the nuclear program of fill-on-the-blank country. But your job was different.

I mean, you were at the White House constantly. You're briefing the National Security Council before major meetings. I mean, did it take a while to get used to the new faces, the new styles and rhythms? It certainly did. And one of the things that helped, and it sounds kind of odd to say this, but their tempo of meetings with the new Trump administration was much slower, a lower tempo. That's probably a good thing. Than it had been at the end of the Obama administration. The end of the Obama administration, a week could include, for me, five, six, seven meetings at the NSC.

And I don't say that with pure unadulterated. They were not fun. They sucked. And in a new environment, there could sometimes be two or three weeks when I wouldn't get to the White House at all in this new environment. And that never would have happened, you know, during the Obama or Bush administrations. So, but I also took great comfort as I looked around the table at those meetings, even if they were fewer, because there were some people around that table that I knew I could trust and rely on and feel good about working with. Secretary Mattis, when he had worked at CENTCOM, I admired him. General Mattis was a

great leader and somebody who's a very serious thinker about security issues. General Dunford, who carried over, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who carried over from President Obama to President Trump. There's nobody in the military service that I admire more than General Dunford. Jim Comey. I was a... Everybody's favorite. I was and everybody's favorite. I remain a big fan, an admirer of Jim Comey, and certainly on my set of issues, the terrorism set of issues, it gave me great comfort to know that Jim Comey was sitting across the table and that FBI was still doing the right things on counterterrorism. That's sort of an interesting thing about the FBI job, right?

This is a decade-long, usually, job, so there is that great continuity. This wasn't your first transition, though, right? I mean, weren't you sitting in the White House as the minute hour clicked over and Obama took charge? I was. And actually, this was, it was somewhat planned out that way. Juan Zarate, who I worked for in the last few years of the Bush administration. Deputy National Security Advisor for countering terrorism, combating terrorism, and someone that is a dear friend of mine.

He asked me to come back to the White House as a senior director at the NSC for the last year and a half of the Bush administration when he was still serving. And that was because he knew that there would be transition at the end of Bush, whether it was a Republican or Democrat. And he wanted somebody there of my background who could, at least for a period of time, tied things over on counterterrorism into the new administration. So that was part of the pitch Juan made to me to come back to the NSC. And that's exactly the way it played out.

So, you know, in the run-up to inauguration day, we did a lot of preparing because there were some particularly scary intelligence. This real deal scary threats around that inauguration. You always have, it was an individual tied to El-Shabaab. And it was always hard to get your hands or your arms around, whether this was a real deal or something that was slipping away in terms of how serious it was. But as you know, if it's even a tiny chance that it's real, then the government's going to go all out and make sure we're doing all the right stuff.

But what I thought that episode showed was just how hand in glove that transition was from President Bush to President Obama. All of a sudden, John Brennan's sitting in on meetings that were Bush administration terrorism meetings? Exactly. John Brennan had already been designated by President Obama to have that lead terrorism, counterterrorism role at the White House. And so it was important that he be read in so that he be able to hit the ground running on inauguration day. All of a sudden these responsibilities would transition to him and he couldn't hit the ground cold. He had to be aware of and a part of

decision making even before inauguration day. And I thought it was really, really handled it extremely appropriately. You know, John Brennan would sit in those meetings, participating when asked but not looking to necessarily guide or drive discussion because it wasn't his job to do that yet. And so he was doing, he was playing that careful role of preparing himself to assume, as I said, those pretty awesome responsibilities. And then on inauguration day, sitting there in the situation room, literally watching the events at the Capitol on big screen TV, I'm sitting there with Mark Lippert, John Brennan, Ken Weinstein, the outgo,

going Bush administration, assistant to the president for counterterrorism, and just sitting there having just a really pleasant morning watching the President of the United States be inaugurated, but at the same time worried that something might go wrong, confident that we had done everything that we could to make sure that nothing would go wrong, but still nervous that, you know, until you get across the goal line, you know, nobody wanted anything to ruin that remarkable day. That is for damn sure. One last Trump administration question before I want to do some wonkier stuff. So when Obama was president, he would hold regular NSC meetings to yearly check-ins,

just to prioritize projects and direct the team because a lot of what the NSC does is inertia-based, right? You send them off and they work on accounts. There's also meetings where the president ultimately signs off on intelligence collection priorities, like al-Qaeda, Iran's nuclear program, North Korea. Was there that kind of presidential guidance and leadership in the Trump White House, or was this handled more by the HR McMasters of the world? I think one of the president's advisors early on said to a bunch of us at a deputies committee meeting.

This advisor said, this president doesn't think of decision making the way you do. He doesn't think that all of these decisions have to come through a deputies committee and a principals committee process and a formal meeting of the NSC. This advisor said he comes from a business environment and he's used to gathering around him the people he trusts, most and feels he can rely on with respect to a particular issue, get them in a room together with him and make a decision. And so you guys, it was kind of a bit of a lecturing tone this person used, but this person was saying, hey, don't expect things to work the way you deep staters have been used to

working in the last couple of decades. And I'll leave it to others to provide a value judgment on that. I think on certain policy issues, there was very much a bottom-up policy formation exercise. I think last summer you saw a lot of the reporting on the Afghanistan policy decision when the president was faced the decision about whether to sustain our true presence in Afghanistan. And there were deputies meetings and principals meetings and culminating with the meeting with the president and the National Security Council, very formalized process. And yet, if I'm just going by what I read in the newspaper in the preparations for the North Korea summit, there was none of that. He was working

with Secretary Pompeo, the handful of Korea experts that he felt he needed. And his style didn't require that they sit in a room in the sit room and have, you know, a formally postured agenda at a principal committee meeting or a national security council meeting. Winging it through nuclear negotiations, we will someday find out if that was a good. I was going to say, I'm prepared to suspend judgment until we find out if it works. Me too. I want it to work. We should all want it to work. Yeah, we should all want it to work. Okay, NCTC. What does NCTC do? Like, can you take us through a day in your life as the director and how the products you create get dispersed throughout the government and used by policymakers or

run up to the president? So NCTC was one of those organizations created in the aftermath of 9-11 when we took that really hard, introspective look at ourselves to figure out where we had failed. We, the big we, the United States government had failed in the effort to prevent a catastrophic homeland attack, and there needed to be a way to do business better. So that period of reform, growing out of the 9-11 commission led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and then as a part of that, the National Counterterrorism Center. With the mission of being the one place in government where every bit of available information on terrorism would be made available.

NCTC would have access to every bit of intelligence, every bit of other information available related to terrorism, so that we could... It sounds like a blast. We could put in front of the policymaker the most comprehensive and clear picture of the threat we faced. That's a great theory. I would say we're still working at it

because getting, you know, defining what's relevant to terrorism can sometimes be a little bit controversial in the social media world that we live in now. There's a lot of information that is in the unclassified world. Think of how many bad guys now are operating on Twitter or other platforms. And so it's not just sexy intel cables that we're reading at NCTC. We're actually having to follow what the bad guys are doing on publicly available information, publicly available sites.

So the average day at NCTC for me would start at 7.30 with an overnight briefing from my team from the NCTC operations center, which would kind of collate for me, kind of around the world and counterterrorism from the last 24, 12 to 24 hours to kind of kickstart my day. I would have my entire senior leadership team with me for that, and then I would skinny down to a smaller group after that for the PDB, the presidential daily briefing, which I had access to. And after that, it was a mix of meat, you know, again, this is where the tempo changed from Obama to Trump. In the Obama administration, easily two to three days out of that week would have been focused on White House meetings. Yeah, he's lived at the White House. Syria meetings and Iran meetings

and Iraq meetings and on and on and on, Afghanistan meetings. Actually, the kind of change in tempo during the Trump administration, at least for me personally, liberated me in some respects. You could set priorities more easily, hey, I want to go forge a new partnership for NCTC with that group or that, you know, that partner. I did more travel. this year or that year 2017 because I felt like I wasn't missing, I wasn't giving up my seat at the table at the White House for a decision meeting and I might as well get out on the road and as I said, you know, cement a partnership with a foreign partner or create a new relationship for NCTC domestically here in the United States. And domestically, that's worth digging into a little

bit. You think about terrorism and you tend to think about it being all overseas focused. But a lot of what NCTC does, we produce intelligence that feeds the whole customer set. all the way up from the president on down, the cabinet members, but then also all of the workforces of all of these departments in government that work on counterterrorism. But it's also important to remember that NCTC has a responsibility to provide intelligence support to state and local governments around the country. No real value if it's sitting in a vault in D.C. Exactly. And particularly the way ISIS operates now, you could just as easily find yourself. I saw something this morning.

There was a woman was indicted in Waukashaw, Wisconsin for connection to ISIS. this morning. How much do you suppose the sheriff in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, knows about ISIS? Well, it's our job to at least make consumable for him information that can tell him what he might face, he or she might face in his environment. And so we increasingly tried to find ways to write intelligence at the unclassified level. You know, they don't have to know all the spooky spy secrets about how information was collected. But if a, Icy A racist guy in Nice, France, takes a bus and drives down a street and kills a bunch of people, that technique might be used here in the United States.

And so we owe it to local law enforcement here to tell them about that and to tell them how to prepare to defend themselves. So that was one of the things I felt really good about after several years at NCTC is that we'd really grown in our ability to be full service. Right. Push out those alerts. I want to ask you a bunch of ISIS questions. It's been a bit, but I want to talk to you first about a not-so-normal day in the life,

which was that weekend of the bin Laden operation. Favreau and Love It just love telling the story of the 2011 White House Correspondents Center when they helped write jokes for Obama. They convinced Donald Trump to run for president. Ha, ha, ha, great work, assholes. But the best part of that story is the day before the speech, they're sitting outside the Oval Office, all pissed off that they can't get in to see Obama. And you were the reason why.

You were either in with Obama or waiting to see him outside the Oval, too, but for very different reasons. What were you doing there? Do you remember seeing those idiots? I do. Idiots is your word, not mine. Fair, fair. So, but you're allowed. So, of course, you know, obviously we were working pretty intensively in the period

running up to the Bin Laden raid. And even in one scenario, the raid might have taken place that day. That's well documented in the reporting since then. But now that we knew it was spilling into the next day, the president obviously had to prepare for the correspondence dinner. But we, the White House staff, and the NSC staff were all in that day preparing a whole bunch of things that needed to be done to make sure we were ready for game time. And one of the things on our checklist that the president had wanted to do is he wanted to reach out to Admiral McRaven,

Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, who was the on-the-ground commander in Afghanistan, supervising the raid into Pakistan. He wanted to reach out to McRaven to simply wish him well, ask if there was anything he needed that he didn't have, so that the president could cut through anything. If there was anything that it was on the table that McRaven felt he needed, I think the president wanted to know. And so it's not like the president needed me to staff him for that call. I mean, you've been around the president, Tommy. I mean, you write talking points. Wish Admiral McCraven well.

Yeah. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys. Got this one. But I'll tell you, I give Tom Donnellan some credit for this because he did me a great honor by saying, Nick, go staff the president for this phone call. Because that allowed me to be a witness to a little bit of history. It was a very, not a long phone call, but it was a chance for President Obama in a very heartfelt way.

to wish McRaven Godspeed, hope that the men he was leading would not only succeed, but make it back safely. And then he did ask him that question, what do you need? McCraven said he had everything he needed to succeed at the mission.

So it wasn't a long conversation. We didn't have to throw those idiots out for very long, but it took a while to get the call synced up. And so, and I'm sure those guys thought that what they were doing was the most important thing in the world at that moment.

It was, obviously. Do you ever feel guilty that that joke wasn't quite perfected? But it was, you know, that weekend was an extraordinary weekend in a lot of ways, but that was just one of the more private moments that I got a chance to be a witness to that I will never forget. I bet. When you were leading the counterterrorism team on the NSC, I would see you or John Brennan

or the amazing people on your staff walking in and out of the situation room of the Oval Office. And I would always try to read your face and read your expression, see if I could figure out something bad was going to happen, something good was going to happen. It never worked. You guys are good poker players. because you could have been, you know, talking about getting bin Laden or some very sensitive, scary intelligence about a threat. You personally had to be-

Let me ask you this, Tommy. When did you find out that something was up? When did you get brought in the back circle? The day of the bin Laden operation? I got a call from Ben Rhodes early afternoon and said, you should get in here right away. So I went in and I walked. So kind of noon on that Sunday.

Yeah, sort of noonish on that Sunday. And I walked up to Tom Donald's office and sort of said, where's everybody? And they said, you should probably go check the situation room. Then I walked into a room in the sit-room. and one of my CIA colleagues threw down a photo that was the photo of the headshot of bin Laden. And then I got very quickly read into the whole thing. So I just sort of sat in there.

So the operation had gone down, but there was this whole conversation of, are we going to talk about this tonight? Should he give remarks tonight and disclose this? And obviously there are a whole set of very delicate, sensitive, diplomatic conversations that had to occur with the Pakistanis and everybody else. But we just parked a helicopter in a backyard. in Abbottabad. Like there wasn't a lot. It wasn't a lot to deny here. It wasn't a lot of deny. It was already showing up in the Twitter

universe. You know, you had individuals in Abadabad tweeting away about it. But at the same time, we were trying to maximize the decision space for the Pakistanis to not freak out and create a diplomatic row over this. So, I'm not sure we succeeded all that well there. Remember how there was actually talk of even having the president wait until the next morning, which is crazy, which was crazy. Ben and I were just ripping our hair out. It's one of the times where there's very, very senior people who are going to call the shots and be listened to and whatnot. But, I mean, you know, it was good to have folks in the room where the rubber met the road and the reporter calls were starting to come in because it started to leak.

I think we thought this was a really closely guarded secret. But once the operation went down, I think a lot of special operators were telling their buddies, like something really good just happened. And it filtered through there. I believe the Rock was tweeting about it at one point that night. Enough about the Rock, although we do love him here at Pate, America. So, you know, I see you guys around, you know, like, Like, occasionally I would get read into things you were working on because preparations to respond

to a very scary stream of intelligence required talking to the press or we got a really big deal, bad guy and ultimately it was going to come out. You know, that was on occasion for me. But you had to take this information home with you every day and couldn't talk about it. You had a tiny circle of people that you were able to work with. You couldn't work from home because everything you did was classified. so you couldn't even leave your windowless office. How did you deal with that job, that stress for so many years, given the stakes involved?

You know, I guess the way I dealt with it was by focusing on the extraordinarily positive aspects of it. You know, I'm here I am sitting at the center of decision making on one of the most important issues, you know, facing the United States. And I get the privilege of helping shape our response to that. And even more than that, I get a chance to work with some really cool people, people that I really genuinely admire. And I could say that across all of the teams I worked with in the Bush White House and certainly in the Obama White House. I felt that way. I felt like I am working with truly extraordinary people, people of the highest caliber. And so that, you know, you know there are stresses and strains working in the White House.

And, you know, I punched a wall or two along the way. And, you know, I think I at one point had a fist fight with the elevator wall. in one of the elevators of the Eisenhower executive office building, and my fist lost. But I've heard other people say this. When you walk out the door every night, whether it's at 6 p.m., 7 p.m. or 10 or 11 p.m. And you hear the gate clang behind you, you remember where you worked and you remember where you were walking from. And that sure managed to make it much more tolerable. I actually thought when I made the transition from the White House to NCTC that, oh, am I going to lose that sense of mission because I'm not at the center of things anymore?

And actually, it didn't happen at all. A new sense of mission took over. Now I get the chance to lead an organization of people who are a critical component of the work we're doing on counterterrorism. And I get to lead them with my vision and my ideals and in my sense of priorities. And so that was a different, you know, I'm sure John Brennan went through the same thing at CIA. You know, stepping away from the White House, you step away from being the seat of power. But at the same time, leading the CIA was probably the opportunity of a lifetime for John Brennan. And suddenly you have actual staff to help you do the job, which is the White House.

You certainly did not. So you guys did amazing work disrupting terrorist plots. If a bunch of Al-Qaeda guys in Yemen were trying to ship a package bomb to Chicago or slip a bomb through TSA to take down a plane, the intelligence community found incredible ways to intercept those plans. or get a tip from a liaison partner to disrupt the plot. The thing I think we all failed at in government was dissuading people from joining ISIS or Al-Qaeda in the first place or understanding even the motivations. What have you learned over the past several decades about why individuals join terrorist groups?

And how do we use that knowledge to keep people from not signing up? Boy, I mean, I guess that in an overarching way, I've learned to bring a lot more humility to this now than at the point when I started right after 9-11. I remember being part of strategy writing exercises in the Bush administration and then in the Obama administration where we would boldly declare

we will defeat, destroy, degrade. Yeah, all these really... All the words that... And of course, any administration is thinking about this in either a two, four, six, or eight-year timeline. So the idea that we were going to... You used Yemen as an example. The idea that we were going to fix Yemen

and make it not a hotbed for potential extremism, And we were going to do that just with the tools that the United States has over the time horizon that President Obama had. It's pretty naive when you think about it. So I guess where I come out is, it doesn't make me a fatalist. It doesn't make me think, oh, God, we're screwed forever on this. But it makes me think, you know, maybe the answer is just to be more resilient. The answer is to, you know, play serious offense, and we still play serious offense.

The good news from my perspective is when a bad guy shows up in intelligence, as wanting to do harm to the United States, and that intelligence can be traced and tracked, it starts a process that almost inevitably leads to that person's demise, and often pretty quickly. So the offense piece of this, we're always going to be really good at. The defense piece of this we're much better at, certainly in the period since 9-11, you know, keeping the wrong actors outside the United States, making sure that, you know, that you can't smuggle a bomb aboard an airliner. We're always at risk of, you know, that one mistake.

But even, I would say, offense and defense were better. But where we are struggling is winning this war of ideas and somehow turning around the narrative that it's okay to pursue this agenda if you're, you know, an al-Qaeda guy or an ISIS guy. And I don't know how we win that war. I fully confess I haven't cracked that code. I don't necessarily want to put it on ourselves to figure that we should go solve the problems of Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen.

Yeah. Because I'm not sure that's within our grasp. I know I described a bunch of verbs you listed as adjectives earlier, and my readers are going to let me know. What I was hinting at is there was a whole series of times in politics where I feel like the way we deal with counterterrorism problems is to describe in the greatest detail possible how we're going to beat them or to be as critical and nasty to Iran or whomever as possible.

And it's just so futile and frustrating. But your point about resiliency is so important. Like, we are going to take some punches as a country and do we as a body politic freak out? Does the media freak out? Because I do think we can either play into the terrorist's hands or not, right? I think that's right. And, you know, another Obama insight that I kind of took away from the last year or two when I was at NCTC, we were then, by that point, of course, dealing with the homegrown extremist problem much more. You know, the ISIS motivated individual here in the United States.

who isn't coming here from somewhere overseas, you know, deployed as an operative, probably grew up here and may not have even, may not have even come up on the radar screen for FBI or local law enforcement. I thought the president had it pretty good optic on this. He, I wouldn't say he would have been forgiving of his intelligence community and law enforcement establishment if something happens when those individuals carry out an attack. But he knew just how hard a challenge it was for FBI. to get ahead of that. How do you pick out that one in a million person who may have had an extreme thought but may not have ever exposed that extreme thought to somebody else? So I wouldn't

say he was forgiving about that, but he understood just how challenging it was. Conversely, when we would talk about plots that emanated overseas that were much more of the traditional al-Qaeda trying to do something complex, complicated, moving parts, maybe aviation-related, He wasn't going to be as forgiving about that because he knew we had the intelligence capabilities and the military and law enforcement capabilities to go out and do good things on stuff like that. So if we missed something in that world, I don't think we would have gotten much of a pass from him. One of those new world problems that you talk about is online propaganda. In 2010, Al-Qaeda put out this slick, glossy propaganda magazine called Inspire.

And at the time, I remember some people kind of scoffed at it. Others, I think, found it worrisome. And then fast forward a few years, the Boston bombers used a pressure cooker bomb that had been featured in Inspire to kill three people and terrorize Boston. And today, the ability to disseminate those terrorist best practices and inspirational messages and propaganda are supercharged by Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, like telegram chat rooms, all these things. How the hell do we keep up with them and those tools? And what role do the social media companies play in this? It's funny you say about Inspire Magazine. It almost seems quaint to think back to that period and think that was our problem set at that point,

because obviously now it's a much harder problem set. And I would say the technology and social media companies bear some responsibility to be partners with government in the solution to this. You'll notice that that's a lot of vague words I just used because I can't give you necessarily a prescriptive, you know, Facebook, do these three things. Twitter do these five things. But if you can invest them in the problem so that their best minds are thinking about creative ways to identify offensive and dangerous content, identify where that content leads to upstream so that we can identify who the individuals are behind that content, and then find some way to have that information brought to the attention of law enforcement, that to me ought to be a reasonable expectation.

I understand why their terms of service make that sometimes a challenge for them. It's easy if it's somewhat, you know, if I'm an Al-Zawahari, the surviving leader of al-Qaeda, if he posts something on social media and they can follow him upstream and find out his location, I'm pretty sure they would tell us where that person is. But it's a lot harder if it's an individual who we don't know is actually engaged in terrorist activity, may just be an extremist who is posting threatening material. So there's a lot of gray area in this. The good news is I think many of these companies have understood that this is,

that this responsibility falls in their lap. And they will bear the reputational cost. And that's a business proposition if they don't act on that, that responsibility. Yeah. Right before you left NCTC, you said something really fucking obvious, which is that we are in a more dangerous situation because of our population of violent extremists having no problem getting access to lethal weapons. The Washington Post called that very clear mundane statement, quote, rare candor by a senior U.S.

intelligence official on an issue that is politically charged. Thanks, Greg Miller. Does that drive you crazy? You're a guy that is you're trained to deal in cold hard facts and probability and statistics, but our politics is structured in such a way to dissuade experts from stating obvious things. So that comment came in, I did a roundtable briefing with a bunch of reporters on the record, because obviously it was on the record since I managed to make it on the front page, or in the pages of the Washington Post.

In my last couple of weeks as NCTC director, and I simply observed at one point that one of my colleagues from another country that has a lot more violent extremists, potential terrorists in their country than ours, that colleague in the intelligence communities of that form country said to me, know, if we had your, our population of potential bad guys and your gun policies, he said, we'd be fucked. And I couldn't argue with him because, of course, it does, I mean, I thought of it as a simple, that's what led me to say what I said to Greg Miller of the Washington Post, which was,

look, just the fact that this potential pool of extremists here in the United States has much more ready access to firearms than they would in almost any other country in the world, that adds to our risk level. That, to me, is not a debatable proposition. But, you know, I take your point. I didn't think of it as anything extraordinary. And I, you know, the journalist for the Washington Post, I thought didn't overplay it or over-hype it. Because I think he's a- No criticism. He's one of the very best. It's a political idiocy that drives me crazy. It, you know, I found myself on that same interview, it almost led to me having a moment, because one of the cable news networks that I will not identify left that session with me.

within a matter of a few minutes had tweeted out that I had criticized the president's comments on Muslims. And I hadn't. It was one of those situations where I was asked a question when the president says certain things about Muslim countries, does that make your work more difficult? And I answered honestly, anything that contributes to an environment where trust is lacking and we can't work together. Yeah, that makes life more difficult. But I didn't say, you know, the president's wrong or the president's stupid or the president shouldn't say this. I just simply observed anything that gets said that makes the environment more difficult makes FBI's job harder, CIA's job harder, my job harder. And within an hour, there's a banner running on CNN saying

that I had criticized President Trump. And like, that's not fair to me. It's not fair to President Trump. It's not fair to the people at NCTC who I was privileged to lead. But it's the environment we're living in right now. So it's an interesting broader point here, which is you, you know, our intelligence services, DIA, FBI, but they do incredible work, but a lot of the work they do is building relationships with liaison partners. When you're working with the Saudi intel services or the Jordanians or, you know, whomever, do you hear back from people when there is pretty nasty sort of anti-Muslim sentiment going on in the U.S. political system, or is it a professional relationship that it indoors these things? I think you said it exactly right. I've never really felt that there's

and spillover into that part of our relationships. It's self-defeating for us to ramp up and ramp down the kind of cooperation we do with partners or that they do with us. Here's a good example. Remember the Manchester Arena attack? Ariana Grande and all that. Within a few hours after that attack, the name of the perpetrator had leaked in the American press. Right. And you remember the Brits went apeshit as they had every right to. They were in the middle of some very sensitive roll-up operations that would have allowed them that they thought would to really understand if there was a network and, you know, how this individual operated, all that. And you had some pretty harsh British statements issued that talked about cutting off intelligence

to the United States on something like that. Within a couple hours of that, and that was a very emotional response and totally understandable, within a couple hours, I had gotten two phone calls, one from each of the main services representatives in Washington of the UK government, making sure that I know that I knew that nothing of the sort was going to happen. From their perspective, the level of close cooperation between the UK intelligence services and NCTC, and by extension of NCTC, CIA and FBI and everybody else, that wasn't going to change as ticked off as they were and as legitimately pissed off as they were. I should know that that wasn't going to change things. And I felt good

about that. I think it tells the story. The other people that had been kicked around a lot are the so-called deep state, the FBI, the CIA, Trump likes to slam them a lot. Have you noticed any sense of whether these sustained attacks have hurt morale or hurt our ability to bring in the best and the brightest people into these jobs? It's a good question. It's something that worries me a lot, and I don't think we'll know for some period of time, but I could already tell a little bit that even just anecdotally, if I have a conversation through my alumni networks, my grad school and my college, when I hear that some individual is telling me, I'm not sure I want to go into government right now. It drives me crazy. Because especially at the entry level, that may be your only shot.

You may not have, you know, if you want to revisit that decision in five or ten years, how do you join the entry, you know, the foreign service as easily? You might, but it's just, it's harder. Or certainly, NCTC, we were doing some hiring of entry level personnel. And the good news was I was still seeing absolutely top shelf resumes, the very best and brightest, with the very best educations and background. But I worry a little bit about the signal we're sending about public service to people right now. If they either think that it's dishonorable, you know, they sit outside Washington and say, hey, you know, there is a deep state and it's full of corrupt, dishonest people, that's destructive. But almost as bad as if they just say,

It's just too messy right now. I don't want to be a part of it. I'll opt out and I'll go work for a bank or a tech company or bypass the whole chance to be in public service. And that, to me, drives me crazy. Yeah, me too. I actually, a couple times when I've talked to people about this, young people in their early 20s, and they start telling me how, I'm not sure I want to work for this. I actually get aggressively prescriptive and saying, cut that shit out. Go do it.

Because the idea that, you know, the entry-level position, that you may be seeking at NCTC or somewhere, the idea that that is somehow directly connected to the views of the president or maybe in my role it is, but certainly not for that. My advice to those young people was get into government if you can, develop some talent and expertise, get good at something, and then worry about the political environment a few years down the road when you're senior enough that it may touch on you a little bit. So interesting thing about you is you didn't come up through the ranks of the CIA or the Department of Defense.

which is the area where I think a lot of people would think counterterrorism happens. You are a State Department. And you worked on some really interesting accounts at the State Department. You were from 94 to 96. You worked for the U.S. ambassador at large who handled the implementation of an agreement between the U.S. North Korea to freeze their nuclear program. So all the things. Yeah, look how well that turned out.

Yeah, well. So all the things we're trying to do now you were working on then. What do you make of the recent summit with Kim Jong-un? And from your experience trying to implement an agreement where the North Koreans ultimately cheated, like what lessons do you learn from that time that you think we should be applying right now? So, first of all, we should all hope that this effort succeeds, regardless of where you fall in the political spectrum. If success is possible here and success is defined by me as verifiable, sustainable denuclearization of the North Korean nuclear program, then we should all be hoping for that.

Right. And it shouldn't even be a close call. We shouldn't say, oh, you know, I hope he doesn't get the credit for this. It's crazy. And I actually was pretty, in my own mind, comfortable with the idea of jumping right into the summit piece of this, because I sometimes found it troubling in the past when people criticized other presidents for being willing to talk to an adversary like Obama and Iran. And so to me, I'm not sure how much actual benefit you provide to another country, a rogue nation, as it were, by simply agreeing to talk to them. And you actually only get anywhere by negotiating with your adversaries. We aren't trying to denuclearize the UK, which would be a much easier negotiation to have. So I was pretty willing to cut the president a break on that. And now we have to see what happens. And it's clear that all of the responsibility shifts to Secretary Pompeo and the team of U.S. experts that will then dig into the problem of how to confidently structure an agreement that allows us to know, have insight, have the insight that we need to know

that the North Koreans are taking the steps that they commit to, and that we can verify it over time. You mentioned I worked on this problem in the 90s. I did. I had one trip to North Korea, and it was around the idea of us having caught the North Koreans cheating on something.

What were they doing? We were providing, as part of the 1994 agreement, we were providing them heavy fuel oil. Right. They were choosing, as part of the agreement, they had agreed not to generate electrical power through these nuclear plants they had, the light water reactors that they had. And to compensate them for that, we were providing them fuel oil so they could run their power plants.

Well, we had gotten some indications that they were skimming, that some of the fuel oil was not necessarily going for pure heating. It might be used for something else, something more nefarious purposes. And as a military matter, it wasn't a particularly profound thing, but it sure was politically explosive because it could have showed that we were being gamed by the North Koreans, that we were, you know, once again, you know, being taken to the cleaners by better negotiators and that they were lying and cheating. So I was in North Korea as part of an effort to, you know, install some equipment that would kind of allow us to know with more certainty if they were cheating with this

heavy fuel oil. Small, small episode in history, but to my mind just kind of, we're going to need a lot of access. We and the international community is going to need a lot of access to a lot of North Korean territory in order to be able to satisfy ourselves that when they say it's over here, that it's not over there. And so, you know, the good news is I think Secretary Pompeo's experience at CIA probably gave him some immersion in this issue that he might not have otherwise had. He certainly, as director of the CIA, would have had every opportunity over his year as director to dig really, really deeply into the intelligence, to understand the problem. And so as the Secretary of State, tell me later if it succeeds or not, but I feel like it's better than the

path we were on. Yeah. You also worked on the Middle East peace account for a guy named Dennis Ross. We all worked with later at the White House on the NSC, which felt more intractable. In some ways, the Middle East peace process part or part of my professional life was in some ways more frustrating because you really came to develop not only respect and admiration, but fondness. for people on both sides or all sides, and to see them not able to make the hard decisions

or maneuver their politics in a way that allowed them to get to successful solutions or agreements was heartbreaking. And so, you know, I've been out of that game for 20-some years, and yet you look back in some of the same issues are at play, many of the same actors are still at play. All we've succeeded in doing is creating another generation of,

people in Israel and the Palestinian territories who view this conflict as permanent. And that can't be a good thing. Certainly not on the Palestinian side, because the sense of hopelessness it creates on the Palestinian side, you know, that can only bubble over into, you know, violence and what we've seen in Gaza. It's just, it's frustrating because I really did, as I said, come to admire and really like the people that we were working with in that period of history. And yet we just didn't get it done. an opportunity was presented. It didn't get done. And successive presidents have now tried and failed. Yeah, massive missed opportunities. Nick, thank you so much for coming in and talk with me.

Thank you for 27 years of working really hard to keep us safe and solve big problems. We need more people like you. So hopefully young people listening, go into government. Going to government. It's interesting. The pay isn't great. The pay sucks. But you get to work with really great people and you'll make a contribution that you'll be proud of. The pay sucks. The hours are shit, but it's pretty cool. And you may even qualify as a deep state member.

Yeah, you get a card. So I got to give a shout out to one of my former executive assistants, Allison Ali McMorrow, who gave me as a farewell gift from NCTC, a Yeti mug engraved that said Deep State alumni. So that way I know, I can always remind myself that I am still in the deep state even though I'm outside government. That's beautiful. Give me a picture of that. We'll get it on Fox News. Okay.

All right, Nick. Thanks again.