The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future by Chris Whipple

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future by Chris Whipple Chriswhipple.net From the New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers, a remarkable, behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to run the world’s most powerful intelligence agency, and how the CIA is often a crucial counterforce against presidents threatening to overstep the powers of their office. Only eleven men and one woman are alive today who have made the life-and-death decisions that come with running the world’s most powerful and influential intelligence service. With unprecedented, deep access to nearly all these individuals plus several of their predecessors, Chris Whipple tells the story of an agency that answers to the United States president alone, but whose activities—spying, espionage, and covert action—take place on every continent. At pivotal moments, the CIA acts as a brake on rogue presidents, starting in the mid-seventies with DCI Richard Helms’s refusal to conceal Richard Nixon’s criminality and continuing to the present as the actions of a CIA whistleblower have ignited impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. Since its inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has been a powerful player on the world stage, operating largely in the shadows to protect American interests. For The Spymasters, Whipple conducted extensive, exclusive interviews with nearly every living CIA director, pulling back the curtain on the world’s elite spy agencies and showing how the CIA partners—or clashes—with counterparts in Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Topics covered in the book include attempts by presidents to use the agency for their own ends; simmering problems in the Middle East and Asia; rogue nuclear threats; and cyberwarfare. A revelatory, behind-the-scenes look, The Spymasters recounts seven decades of CIA activity and elicits predictions about the issues--and threats—that will engage the attention of future operatives and analysts. Including eye-opening interviews with George Tenet, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus, as well as those who’ve just recently departed the agency, this is a timely, essential, and important contribution to current events. About Chris Whipple Chris Whipple is an acclaimed writer, documentary filmmaker, and speaker. He is the author of the upcoming book, 'The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future,' to be published by Scribner on September 15, 2020. Highly anticipated, 'The Spymasters' is the most thorough and illuminating portrait ever of America's CIA directors--based on extensive interviews with the directors themselves--those upon whom the country depends to prevent another Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or deadly pandemic. Epic in scope, spanning seven decades of intelligence gathering, espionage and covert warfare, and intimate in detail, featuring indelible portraits of the directors, this is the definitive story of the men--and, currently, the woman--who keep the secrets. Whipple's previous book, 'The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency,' was a critically acclaimed, New York Times bestseller. The first in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the men who have been the president's closest advisers, 'The Gatekeepers' was named by both Amazon and Apple as one of their "best books of the year." The Huffington Post compared it to "classic works by Richard Neustadt, Theodore White and other White House chroniclers." A frequent guest on MSNBC and CNN, Whipple has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Politico, the Daily Beast, and many other publications. He is the chief executive officer of CCWHIP Productions, and executive producer of the Showtime film, 'The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs.' Whipple was educated at Deerfield Academy and received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in history from Yale College.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

Oh, my God. We have a most excellent guest who's going to blow your mind today. Before we get to that, be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Go to thecvpn.com. If you want to watch the video version, it's the newest technology they have out since 2000, you can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss.

Hit the bell notification. You can watch all the wonderful videos of all the brilliant authors we've had on the show. To see all the books of all the authors we have on the show, you can go to amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. You can also follow me on Goodreads.com under Chris Voss. And the Chris Voss show

just set up a book club over there. We're going to be talking about all the wonderful things we do here on the show, the authors, the interviews, the books, probably giving away some books and all that good stuff. So be sure to subscribe over there. And we are now, with all the places we're syndicated around the world, with Amazon Music. So if you like Amazon Music, you can find the Chris Foss Show on there. We got a chance to check out this book. This thing is amazing by an

amazing author and journalist. And we'll get into it here in a second. The book is called The Spy Masters, How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future. His name is Chris Whipple. He's an acclaimed writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker and speaker. He's a multiple Peabody and Emmy award-winning producer at, you may have heard of this, CBS's 60 Minutes and ABC's Prime Time. He's the chief executive officer of CC Whip Productions. He's a frequent guest on

MSNBC and CNN. You may have heard of those two. And he is writing and has appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The author most recently of The Gatekeepers. He was the executive producer and writer of Showtime's The Spymasters. CIA in the crosshairs.

Welcome to the show, Chris. How are you? I'm good. Good to be with you. I'm excited for this interview because we get to talk about spy stuff. So give our audience an idea of where they can find you on the interwebs and order the book. Yeah, well, one place you can go is to chriswhipple.net, where you'll find all kinds of links to the book, and you can get it at amazon or your local bookstore so um i hope you'll check it out awesome sauce now this this book is about the cia

the spy masters uh i think before we get in the meat of it can you give a lowdown to anybody out there who doesn't know who the cia exactly is probably a good perspective sort of thing yeah you know so one of the things i learned when I interviewed every living CIA director back in 2015, which is when this all began, is that it's hard to overstate the importance of the position. The CIA director is the person we depend on to prevent another 9-11, a Pearl Harbor, or a lethal pandemic. And it's hard to, as I say, these are the guys who are in the room with the president when history-making decisions are made. The stakes could not be higher.

They range from starting wars to preventing Armageddon. John McCone was JFK's CIA director during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And without him, it might have had a very different outcome. He had U-2 photography over Cuba. He had stolen manuals of Soviet missiles from a defector. These are the guys you want to have in the room when those decisions are made, and often, you know, for better or worse. Like the FBI and other agencies, it's a civilian agency. But the CIA is unique. I mean, the CIA director commands an army of intelligence analysts, covert operatives, lethal drones, paramilitary warriors. But at the end of the day, if the CIA director doesn't have the ear of the president, if he or she doesn't have a seat at the table with the president of the United States, the whole enterprise

is for naught, because you've got to be able to have some input into decision-making. Now, that's always been a really tough balancing act, going all the way back to Dick Helms and LBJ and Richard Nixon. You can imagine how tough it is for somebody trying to deal with Donald Trump. Most definitely. So as we, we'll get into that here in a bit. What motivated you to want to write this book? What was the motivation behind that? So it began actually as a documentary I did for Showtime back in 2015 with the great filmmakers Jules and Gideon Naudet, who did 9-11.

Some people may remember that documentary. And Susan Cerenczky, who is now president of CBS News. But I thought the documentary barely scratched the surface of this unbelievable, untold story of 17 men and one woman who have run the world's most powerful intelligence agency going all the way back to the mid-'60s. You know, Dick Helms came in in 1966 with Lyndon Johnson. He was the quintessential old school CIA director. Bob Gates compared him to James Bond. He had some of those qualities. He, you know, dry martini in one hand, cigarette in the other. He could hold his own on a dance floor with Fred Astaire, which he actually did.

Wow. At the White House in 1975 at a state dinner for the Shah of Iran when Jerry Ford was president. He was out on the dance floor with his wife and Fred Astaire was dancing with the Empress. So he's an incredible character, flawed for sure, but ultimately kind of heroic because he faced down Dick Nixon when Nixon tried to get him to join the Watergate cover-up. He also tried to get the FBI involved in it, didn't he? Yeah, he did. But the real moment of truth, the crunch time, came when Nixon ordered his chief of staff,

Haldeman, to get Helms over to the White House. And Helms came, and he wound up in a meeting with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Those names may ring a bell with some people. They were Nixon's henchmen. And Haldeman basically told Helms, and now on certain terms, I want you to, you know, you need to tell the FBI that this Watergate investigation is getting too close to a bunch of your CIA stuff going on down in Mexico, and therefore they need to call it off. Well, Helms was having none of it. Nixon and Haldeman thought that they could blackmail Helms because they thought for sure that there must be stuff in Helms' past, maybe involving the Bay of Pigs.

They weren't really sure, but they thought, surely, you know, we can scare this guy. And, in fact, on the Watergate tapes, you can hear Nixon saying, well, this will blow that whole Bay of Pig things wide open. The truth was they didn't really have anything on Helms. And Helms said, no way, I'm not going down this road. Had he done so, he probably would have wound up in prison and the CIA might have been abolished. But he arguably saved the agency. So you start from Helms. You go all the way from Gina Haspel, who heads the agency. So you start from Helms. You go all the way from Gina Haspel, who heads the agency today.

Was Helms, I was doing some, in my research, watching some of your videos, was Helms around during the JFK-Cuban crisis in the Bay of Pigs then? Yeah, he was, and he was not the CIA director at that point. He was climbing the ranks. He came out of, Helms came out of the OSS during World War II. In fact, a bunch of future directors, including Bill Casey and others, Bill Colby came out of the OSS, which was a legendary outfit.

Those guys used to parachute behind enemy lines and kill nazis uh in norway and france um but anyway uh helms was climbing the ranks and he was he was a very clever bureaucratic infighter and in fact he knew the bay of pigs he could sit he could tell from a mile away that this thing was going to be a total disaster and he managed to keep his fingerprints off of it and stay as far away from it as possible. And, in fact, they took up kind of a betting pool at the office, and people started taking bets about when Helms would show up for a planning meeting for the Bay of Pigs.

Well, guess what? He never showed. That was probably very smart on his part. I remember as a kid. So he survived that fiasco. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, JFK was enraged, furious, threatened to scatter the CIA to the wind, as he put it. He fired his CIA director, and Helms just kept climbing.

There you go. There you go. And Helms must have some pretty good, or some pretty interesting times with Nixon overall, between Watergate and everything else that was going on. Yeah, and before that, he had LBJ to deal with, especially over Vietnam, and that's a great relationship, really fascinating, because Helms really admired LBJ for his domestic policy, for the great society, and he was totally exasperated by Vietnam because LBJ would demand intelligence showing that the bombing of North Vietnam would bring them to the bargaining table,

bring the North Vietnamese to their knees. And Helms kept saying, sorry, Mr. President, actually, it's having the opposite effect. It's strengthening their resolve. Helms was a guy who could tell LBJ stuff like that. And it didn't hurt that right before the Six-Day War, Helms predicted to LBJ, it'll last about a week, seven days. From that moment forward, he had a seat at the table with LBJ. And even when he told him stuff that he didn't want to hear, one more quick story, if I could, about LBJ and Helms. Helms actually commissioned on his own authority a study of the underlying rationale for the Vietnam War. Some listeners

or viewers may be old enough to remember it was called the domino theory, that if South Vietnam fell, all of Southeast Asia would fall. Well, Helms did a study, came back with a memo that said, basically, that's a bunch of BS. That's not necessarily going to happen. He handed it to LBJ in a sealed envelope. His widow, Cynthia Helms, told me all about it, that they deep-sixed this thing because they thought it was so explosive politically that it would destroy the war effort. Now, fast forward many years later, and the phone rings in the Helms house. Cynthia, Helms' wife, picks up the phone. It's Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary, who famously did a mea culpa years later.

Remember in the early 90s, he said it was all a mistake. He just found this memo and read it for the first time. And he started yelling at poor Cynthia Helms and saying, why wasn't I shown this? This could have made a difference. Why didn't I see this? And poor Cynthia's taking an earful from McNamara. Anyway, it's full of stories.

The thing I liked about writing the book is that it's, of course, it's about all the skullduggery and failed coup d'etat and and all kinds of fiascos and and some successes but it's ultimately it's about these people as human beings and I think you get to you get to understand what makes these these CIA directors tick. Did LBJ ever see that commission? Yeah, he saw that memo. It's interesting because Helms claimed,

the only time he ever talked about it, he claimed that LBJ never spoke to him about it. He just got rid of it. Cynthia told me, his wife, his widow told me, oh no, they had plenty of arguments. Boy, did they fight over that. So I found that to be kind of fascinating. And that's the cool thing about your book. You really get into this because the CIA director needs to have the ear of the president and the president needs to listen to the CIA director. Fast forward to Trump, you expose some different things in your book about the coronavirus pandemic. We all kind of know about how Trump, you know, he's a, well, he's a belated narcissist in my opinion. And so, you know, the world revolves around him. He knows

everything and, you know, what does he need anybody else for? And we've all seen the attacks that he's done on the things. So do you want to talk about some of the coronavirus exposure and things? Sure. Detailed? Yeah. So I have a whole chapter on Donald Trump and his two CIA directors. The first was, of course, Mike Pompeo. And the current director is the first woman to run the CIA,

Gina Haspel, who's a fascinating character, and we'll get to her in a second. So in fairness to Trump, he's not the first president who was convinced that the CIA was a so-called deep state full of enemies, liberals who were out to tear him down. That's what Nixon thought of the CIA. And he thought Dick Helms was this martini sipping elitist from Georgetown, who was out to get him. They were both delusional. Nixon was delusional, Trump delusional, only more so. Because at the end of the day, the CIA is really just full of a bunch of people who keep their head down and try to do their jobs and try to ignore whoever is in the Oval Office at any given time, no matter if he's comparing them to Nazi Germany or whatever he's doing, they're pretty good at keeping that out of their heads and

just doing their job. Having said that, you know, this is a whole new ballgame with Trump. To mix my metaphors, it's been a broken marriage from day one when Trump went out to Langley to CIA headquarters in Virginia and stood in front of the so-called Memorial Wall, which is really hallowed ground at CIA. There's a star on that marble wall signifying every CIA officer who gave his or her life in the line of duty. And, of course, Helms, of course, Trump stood there and bragged about the size of his inauguration and barely acknowledged the CIA officers who were signified on the wall behind him. That was not a good start to the relationship. That was not. I remember reading about that.

It's arguably got even worse. But, you know, at first, Trump brought such contempt for the intelligence community to the job that he wasn't even going to sit for CIA briefings in the beginning. He didn't want them. Wow. Didn't trust them. Didn't believe anything. They thought he wouldn't believe anything they told him. He finally relented when Pompeo,

his buddy Mike Pompeo, agreed to come and be there personally for the briefings. Pompeo became a kind of Trump whisperer, but not exactly a teller of hard truths. Um, in fact, he would go out in public and repeat falsehoods because Trump liked them. Uh, things such as Iran's not in compliance with the nuclear agreement when in fact they were and that kind of thing. Uh, Pompeo was a master at telling Trump what he wanted to hear. Um, there were higher hopes for Gina Haspel and we could talk all day, but I, and I won't get into the weeds here, but Haspel is fascinating because she's a mystery woman. She flies below the radar. who cut her teeth as a covert operative in the back alleys of Africa. She then went on to befriend a very unlikely mentor,

a guy named Jose Rodriguez at the CIA, who, of all people, he was the guy who was in charge of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques and the black sites and all that stuff. And he wound up sending Gina Haspel to the infamous black site in Thailand where Abu Zubaydah and other al-Qaeda terrorists were being held and subjected to these techniques. Anyway, I have some great stories about her that have never been reported before about her time there in Thailand. But Rodriguez became a kind of unlikely feminist mentor, right? I mean, get that, get this. Here's a guy who's running the black sites,

and he's this sort of secret feminist mentor. And he's telling Gina, nah, you don't want to be CIA. You don't want to be station chief in Geneva. That's not good enough for you, girl. You got to go for London. And she went for London and the rest is history. She became CIA director, deputy to Pompeo and now CIA director. So just briefly about her, there were high hopes for her because she had a good reputation for being a hard-ass truth teller. But she's really had a mixed bag, a mixed record with Trump. fending the agency's report about the Saudi crown prince MBS and the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. The CIA stood up to Trump on that and said, we have high confidence that MBS ordered that hit. All to her credit. Since then, it's been much more disappointing. For example, you know, soft peddling Russian involvement in the 2016 election and especially in the 2020 election now. And, of course, the pandemic has happened on her watch and Trump threw his briefer under the bus saying that he was told it was no big deal. I find that very hard to believe.

We all do. And Gina Haspel's silence on that speaks volumes. Yeah. You know, speaking of that, there used to be, I think once a year, all the intelligent agency heads would meet and give a televised testimony to congress right and then yeah the key phrase there is used to be yeah it used to be and it's a real problem and and and our in doing my research i was watching one video and you're talking about how she kind of stays below the radar a lot more now i think was it last year that they finally made the decision or maybe it was the year before i I'm starting to, you know, the blood loss in my brain from Trump is running out.

They stopped doing those because they were infuriating Trump. Yeah, that's exactly right. So the last time they did the annual worldwide threat assessment, which is not legally required, but it's a tradition that goes back decades. I asked Bob Gates about it. I said, when was the last time they canceled that? And he said he couldn't ever remember that happening until recently. So here's an interesting tidbit. Buried in the 2019 WWTA, as it's called, which hardly anybody noticed at the time, was an eerie prediction that a coronavirus, something very much like a coronavirus, could come out of China and result in a worldwide pandemic. Nobody paid much attention to it at the time. Fast forward to 2020, January of 2020, sorry, February of 2020, there was supposed to be another worldwide threat assessment, which is, by all accounts, is because Gina Haspel, the CIA

director, the DNI at the time, and others were afraid of saying stuff Trump didn't want to hear. Why is that? Why is that a bad thing? It's a dangerous thing. Because at the end of the day, the CIA director is the honest broker of intelligence, not only to the president, but to Congress and to the American people. It's harder to politicize intelligence in private if you have to testify about it in public. And that's why that's a really troubling thing. And that fear of antagonizing Trump continues. And it's quite scary, too, because, you know, you've heard, well, number one, that sort of presentation was supposed to tell the American people what they're paying for and, you know, educate the American people.

Like, what are we doing here? And so by Trump getting that closed down, he was able to silo information to, you know, whatever he says. And so, you know, we don't have that exposure as the American people. But also, I wonder if, because I heard you talk about several different aspects of this, if Gina Haskell, and they say that a lot of the intelligence community is actually more wary and lying low because they don't want to give information to Trump. Because, I mean, we've seen how open he was with Bob Woodward. Can you imagine when he says the Putin and Xi Jinping and everybody else? I mean, God knows what he carries on about.

Yeah, but I think the problem is really, you know, the fish rots from the head. The problem is really at the top of the agency because I think the people working underneath Gina Haspel at CIA, the analysts and the covert operatives and the others, as I say, they just want to do their job and they just want to present intelligence that is not, you know, kicked around and manipulated and shaped to the president's liking. They just want to present honest evaluations and assessments. And so I think what they need is a director who will stand up for that and who will have their backs. All too often, I think this CIA director has not had their backs. was a case where a former prosecutor went on Fox and compared the CIA whistleblower, you remember him way back when, compared the CIA whistleblower to John Wilkes Booth. Well, if you're, and not a word from Gina Haspel in that whistleblower's defense. You got to have the backs of your troops, the really good ones,

like the Leon Panettas and some others we can talk about. They always had your back. And that's a very important thing as CIA director. You talk about the details of John Brennan's discovery of the plot of the Russian massive interference in the 2016 election, James Clackber's conclusion. Give us some details on that. Yeah, so the introduction of my book, I really opened it with this pretty amazing scene. It's past midnight, and Brennan is alone in his conference room right off his office on the

seventh floor of Langley that overlooks the woods. And he's burning the midnight oil as usual. He was often there at all hours, trying to figure out, trying to put together the intelligence that was coming in, signals intelligence, it was human intelligence, it was what they call open source intelligence, it all added up to one thing. This was early August of 2016. And he suddenly realized that, holy, you know what, the Russians are coming. And they're coming with an unprecedented assault on our presidential election. and they've penetrated the electoral machinery in 39 states. It ultimately turned out to be all 50 states. They didn't actually, in the end, manipulate votes, but they could have. And at that point, he wasn't even aware of the

social media component of it that they became aware of later. But they also had human intelligence that said that Putin was personally behind this and that he had ordered it. He knew this, Brennan knew this was really explosive, and he had to figure out how to break this to, how to inform the right people, Barack Obama, and how many others. You know, he felt it was too sensitive to put in the presidential daily brief, which went to too many people. Anyway, so that's the opening of the book. And then I follow that.

And in later chapters toward the end of the book, I come back to it and tell the whole story of the Russian assault on the US election. But here's a quick sort of spoiler alert about John Brennan, which some people may find interesting, because he's so controversial. And he's obviously become famous for being pretty tough on Donald Trump. And in some people's minds, he's a real partisan. By all accounts, whether you like him or hate him, John Brennan as CIA director was the ultimate honest broker, objective teller of truth. Everybody you talk to, whoever was around him, will tell you that when he walked into the Situation Room, he gave it to Obama absolutely right between the eyes, whether Obama wanted to hear it or not. Wow.

He was a real stickler for that so whatever you may think of his post CIA partisanship if that's what you think it is that's John Brennan I like watching John Brennan and sometimes when he goes real secretive or dark or you know there's like well I can't

talk about that the funny thing about John Brennan is like I would never want to owe him money. He looks like, he looks like an old Testament prophet. He does. He's pissed off all the time, but he's, there are people, including a lot of the women who worked around him who just think he's a teddy bear. They just, they just love him. He probably is in real life. He's just, you know, he's on camera and talking about serious issues.

You know, I think it's hard for so many different people who have to comment on Trump. Like, I hear this all the time. You know, people will be like, you know, the news seems really prejudiced against him. I'm like, well, that's because he's doing stuff like 20 times a day that's either highly illegal and ethical and moral or against the interests of the United States. But one of the things you talk about, and we should probably get Bush in here too as well, is how whenever presidents in 9-11, whenever presidents haven't listened to the CIA, whenever they haven't put the CIA's, you know, the warnings to heart, we as the American people can end up paying for it.

Do you want to talk about George Bush and 9-11? Yeah, it's a great story, and I have chapter and verse in my chapter on 9-11 about that whole walk-up to that terrible day. And in the summer of 2001, and specifically on July 10 of 2001, the head of the Al-Qaeda unit at CIA realized that it was coming. There was going to be a huge attack from al-Qaeda. It was imminent. It was going to cost probably thousands of American lives. He went to his superior, Kofor Black, who went to George Tenet, the CIA director. The three of them went straight to the White House. Tenant picked up the phone and called and he got Condi Rice and he said, Condi, we're coming over now. Get ready. Bush was out of town, George W. But they went over and they sat down with Condi Rice and they laid it on her. And it was pretty scary stuff. And there was no doubt in their minds that it was coming. They couldn't say exactly

where. They obviously couldn't say that it was commercial planes flying into the World Trade Center. They didn't know that, but they knew it was coming. And I had a great interview with Kofor Black, who was head of the Counterterrorism Center. And he said, we came out of that meeting, almost doing high fives, saying to each other, hey, we finally got through to her, you know, we told him what was happening. And I said, yeah, well, what happened? And he said, yeah, exactly. What happened? Nothing happened. Was she the problem or the administration? I think the problem was more than just Condi Rice, but it was the mindset of most of the people in that White House.

And as Kofor put it to me, he said, you know, they were living in a time warp. These were people who thought the terrorists were Euro lefties who stayed up all night drinking champagne and blew up some stuff during the day. You know, that was the 70s and 80s style. They just couldn't believe that there were a bunch of guys with beards and caves in Afghanistan that were about to strike the U.S. So part of it was that mindset.

There's no doubt about it. But, of course, the CIA got blamed, and people told one elected representative told Kofor Black one day, Kofor, how does it feel to be responsible for the biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor? Well, at the end of the day it was the Bush White House that was really asleep.

I mean, he was infamous for not wanting to read his reports, right? Bush. Well, actually that's not true. George W. Bush was actually a really voracious consumer of intelligence. That's the irony here, is that in part because of his old man, Bush 41.

George H.W. Bush was, of course, the only president who was also CIA director. So W. took his intelligenceings seriously. He had them every morning. But he wasn't putting any stock in this bunch of people called al-Qaeda for whatever reason. And reportedly, later that summer in August, he was down at the ranch. And some people may recall there was a famous president's daily brief later declassified. The headline was Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S. And Bush reportedly told his briefer, okay, well, now you've covered your ass. Anyway, they didn't take it as seriously as obviously. You know, you look at the arc of history and what

would have happened if we could have prevented that attack how much different we would be as america i don't know if we would have had worse since but uh so here's here's the other really interesting thing and i hope it's not too much in the weeds here but one of the things that i was told by a number of people in a position to know, really, who really know how the NSC works in the White House, all they had to do, all Condi Rice had to do was call a so-called principles meeting, which means you get the big cheeses around a table, head of CIA, head of FBI. These days, it would also be Homeland Security and others. What happens when you do that is that when you shake the trees, stuff falls out

and people interrogate each other. And they say, oh, yeah, we, you know, those two guys. Well, it turned out there were two hijackers in the U.S. for months before the 9-11 attacks. If they'd called a principals meeting, there's a good chance they would have figured that out. Wow. Did Brennan at the time in August have the CIA's information or the FBI's information with Papadopoulos and all the stuff that they were doing at the FBI with Trump? You know, that's a good question. I don't know to what extent, excuse me, to what extent Brennan knew about Papadopoulos and those guys at that time.

I think he was focused mostly on the social, the Russian assault on the election and the penetration of the election machines and all the rest. But obviously that came into play later. Because I know one of the things with 9-11, I'm hopping back and forth here, but I know one of the things that they found after 9-11 was the agencies weren't talking to each other. And that was one of the fallacies that helped contribute to 9-11 getting by the intelligence agencies? Yeah, that was a huge problem. There was this really kind of a Chinese wall between FBI and CIA,

and there just wasn't enough meaningful communication, and that's how a lot of stuff fell between the cracks. So they attempted to fix that. Congress did post-9-11. That's why in 2005, they created the so-called Director of National Intelligence, this new job. It's now held by John Ratcliffe. When Brennan was CIA director, it was a guy named Jim Clapper. And the DNI is nominally the CIA director's superior. But what he's really there for is to coordinate all the other, there's 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, of which the CIA is one. And the DNI is supposed to coordinate all those other intelligence agencies, NSA, DIA, and all the others, while the CIA director takes care of CIA. Now, Brennan and Clapper will tell you that it's absolutely essential,

but they had a good working relationship. It was a really rocky beginning, and I tell that story too. absolutely essential. But they had a good working relationship. It was a really rocky beginning. And I tell that story, too, about how a DNI made the mistake of taking on Leon Panetta. Wow. The untold story of the CAA's biggest manhunt ever is another thing you take and talk about in your book. This has never been reported. It's an incredible story.

For decades, the CIA and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had one guy at the very top of their list that they wanted to get. They wanted to neutralize him in some way. And his name was Imad Magnea, and he was the operations chief of Hezbollah. And in some ways, people described him to me as absolutely brilliant, diabolical, more dangerous than bin Laden, a guy who had blood on his hands for decades. Among other things, he invented the so-called shaped charge, which was a kind of super IED that would take out Israeli tanks in Lebanon, for example. He was responsible, going way back to when he was a very young man, he was thought to be the mastermind of the worst day in CIA history,

which was the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983. that really began the whole era of truck bombs and that form of terrorism. This was a really bad guy. And on top of it, he was elusive. They literally had one grainy photograph of this guy. He had disguises. He'd never used the same phone twice. They couldn't find him half the time. So I tell the story that has not been told before about how they, at the end of the Clinton administration, they tracked him down in Beirut, and they've discovered that he was visiting his mistress in an apartment in South Beirut. He would go there, he would have sex with her, and then he would beat her. This did not make her very happy, and she wound up cooperating with the CIA. Oh, wow.

And they set a trap for Magnea, and they were ready to bundle them into a vehicle and take them down to the dock and take them out to a ship in the Mediterranean that was standing by, and the whole thing went south at the last minute, and it failed. Now, fast forward 10 years, and I tell the story in the book of how, in detail that's never been reported before, of the joint CIA-Mosad operation that finally tracked him down in Damascus. And they found him and they tracked him and they wound up doing a joint operation where the CIA supplied the remotely triggered bomb. They built it and brought it into Syria.

But the deal was that Mossad and the Israelis had to pull the trigger. And this was partly because of executive orders rules against assassination, which, of course, Trump conveniently ignored in January when he decided to kill General Soleimani, which is another story. Anyway, it's a fascinating story. They tracked him by drone. They watched video of him.

It was an excruciating wait. They had to wait until he was, they put the bomb in the spare tire of his vehicle, but they had to wait for a moment where it would kill him and only him. And they finally got him. And it's a hair raising story. That's amazing. That's amazing. So last question, who do you feel is the best CIA director? I don't know what measure to put that under. I mean, you may have a better, in your analyzation and study, like who maybe was the best or who did you like the best as baby CIA director in your studies? So it's a tough question. There were some good ones and there were some really bad ones.

You might lose some friends here if you... And, you know, there were, you you can't there's no hard and fast rule there's no sort of graduate school for cia directors there's no rule that says insiders are better than outsiders or vice versa there have been real success stories on on both sides um but here's a kind of a spoiler alert um My last book, as you know, was called The Gatekeepers about the White House Chiefs of Staff. And the qualities, some of the attributes that make a great White House Chief of Staff also serve CIA directors really well. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Leon Panetta was the gold standard,

not only as White House Chief of Staff, but as CIA Director. And of course, it didn't hurt that he had Osama bin Laden on his watch. But the thing about Panetta was that he knew his way around. He was comfortable in the corridors of power on Capitol Hill. He knew how to work Capitol Hill. He knew how to work the White House. He had a good relationship with the president. But beyond that, he was 70 years old. He'd been around the block.

He was confident. He was comfortable in his own skin. He had nothing to prove. And he could go over to the White House and he could walk into the Oval Office, close the door and tell Barack Obama what he didn't want to hear. And that's that for both the White House Chief of Staff and the CIA director. That's maybe the most important thing. Now, it didn't matter particularly that Panetta didn't know that much about intelligence. You can learn it and you can delegate that. And if you go in, another mistake that a lot of CIA directors make is they arrive with their own

coterie of sycophants. They bring their friends in and try to take the place over. Well, that never goes down at CIA. I mean, they'll eat you. I mean, Kofor Black said it was like, you know, Scottish tribes greeting the English king. You really don't want to do that, right? So outsiders could get eaten alive, but Panetta was a master at not only doing all the things I just mentioned, but he was gregarious, and he was popular, and he had their backs. I mean, he made it clear toious and he was popular and he had their backs. I mean, he made it clear to everybody that he was on their side.

Others that have been good, so another, an insider who was very successful, Bob Gates, who really knew how the place worked and also supported his troops. And, you know, we could go on all day, but I'd have to cite Panetta as one of the best. Yeah. Was he the one you enjoyed writing about the most, I guess? Well, tough choice because Helms was a lot of fun to write about. Yeah. And, of course, back in those days,

you had Helms and a cast of characters that Le Carre couldn't have dreamt up. You know, James Jesus Angleton, Kim Philby, you know, the Soviet mole. And it's a great – there were great stories from beginning to end. So, yeah, I liked writing about Panetta, but Helms was tough to beat. There you go. There you go. All right, well, anything more you want to plug about the book as we go out? Yeah, let me just tell you one other thing, which is that, so what I hope the book succeeds in doing is capturing the humanity of these directors.

Some of the moments, my favorite moments, are when Dick Helms comes home at night and tells his wife, Cynthia, that he has lash marks on his back, not literally, but figuratively, because Bobby Kennedy's been beating him up all day about killing or getting rid of Fidel Castro. Leon Panetta standing in the cemetery at Arlington for a funeral of a CIA officer when he learns that there's a terrorist in the crosshairs of a drone over Pakistan, and he has to decide whether to pull the trigger. And he, moreover, he's told that they've got the guy and he's a bad guy, but there are innocent civilians in the shot, as he put it. And Panetta, as a devout Catholic, fingering his rosary beads and saying Hail Marys and making the decision in that case to pull the trigger. And innocents were killed. And he said to me, Chris, you know, we got him. And all you can do in a situation like that is ultimately hope that God agrees with you. Wow.

That's a tough call to take and make. Was it the CIA who had Osama bin Laden during Clinton in his crosshairs? They had the car and everything. They were arguing amongst the lawyers, from my understanding, of pulling the trigger? There were times when, arguably, they could have got bin Laden where they had him on video from a drone. There was one famous incident on George Tenet's watch where they saw this tall guy in robes and they could see him

from the drone, but the drone at that in those days wasn't weaponized. They didn't have the missiles. And for a while during the Clinton years, Janet Reno, the attorney general, was the decree from her was you got to capture him. You can't kill him. At the end of the day, at the end of the Clinton administration, there was no doubt that Bill Clinton wanted Osama bin Laden dead. But it took a while to get there. There you go. Well, we're up to the book.

This is going to be a lot of fun. It's a fun read because it's about spies, the spy masters, how the CIA directors shape history and the future by Chris Whipple. Give us your.coms,.nets, where people want to look you up on the interwebs, Chris. Yeah, you can go to my website, chriswhipple.net, and you'll find everything you want to know about the spymasters as well as my previous book, The Gatekeepers, about the White House Chiefs. That's awesome.

So you can order the books. You go to amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash chrisfosh. You can see all the wonderful books in order of the spymasters, how the CIA directors shape history. I've always been intrigued by this. One of my first books I read as a kid was A Thousand Days, and it was talking about the Bay of Pigs and everything that went on with JFK. And just extraordinary read, the fun, the sort of Cold War element,

the spies, and all that sort of good stuff. You can also go to YouTube.com for just Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification, see this video version. Go to Goodreads.com and see our book club over there under Chris Voss. And then also we're on Amazon Music. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on iTunes, and we'll see you guys next time.