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(00:00:04): Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies.

(00:00:12): Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This episode is presented by Matt Fulton and produced by Chris Carr.

Matt (00:00:37): Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Secrets and Spies. My guest today is Tim Weiner, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Book Award-winning author of Legacy of Ashes. His new book, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century picks up where that story left off -- tracing how the agency evolved in the wake of 9/11, through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of Russia and China, and the chaos of the Trump years. It's based on exclusive, on-the-record, interviews with six CIA directors and dozens of officers who served undercover for decades -- many of them speaking publicly for the first time. We talk about the agency's failures, its quiet successes, and the moral cost of operating in the shadows. And we look at what it means to defend democracy when that democracy is under threat -- from abroad and at home.

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Matt (00:01:52): Tim, thanks for being here. It's great to finally have you on Secrets and Spies.

Tim (00:01:57): A pleasure.

Matt (00:01:58): Lots to talk about today. Book is great. I wanted to first start by pulling the lens back a bit -- so you've now written two histories of CIA. So, back in 2007, when Legacy of Ashes was published, the Cold War was over, CIA was still reeling from failures around 9/11 and Iraq and much of its record in the War on Terror was only just becoming visible. Now with The Mission, you followed the agency into the first quarter of the 21st century -- from black sites to drone warfare, the resurgence of great power politics, and the rise of Trumpism. Looking back across both books, how have your views of CIA evolved? Has anything about the institution surprised you or even changed your mind?

Tim (00:02:46): Well, with The Mission, I had the great good fortune to interview more than a hundred CI officers, analysts, and executives on the record. And I got insights that I'd never fully appreciated before about the nature of recruiting foreign agents, about the struggle to support Ukraine going back to 2014, about how to run a beautiful operation -- and I'm thinking of the nine-year effort to take down the notorious and dangerous A.Q. Khan, who was running a global Walmart for the manufacturer of nuclear weapons and selling to anyone and everyone who could pay him -- but also into the moral dimension of running a secret intelligence service in an open democratic society. Or at least until recently, we were an open democratic society, now I'm not so sure. The epigraph for the book comes from a guy who was the CIA's director of training for many years in the Cold War, Hugh Cunningham, and he told thousands of officers in training at the Farm, down in the wilds of Southern Virginia, "We must have the greatest immorality and we must have the greatest morality." And exploring that dilemma runs through the whole book.

Matt (00:04:57): Well, my next question is about that beautiful operation, so thank you for teeing that up so nicely. So, Legacy of Ashes was critiqued by some in the intelligence world who said it focused too heavily on the agency's failures. But in this book, as you said, you spotlight Operation Excalibur as a genuine triumph, which as you said, is that almost decade-long effort to dismantle the A.Q. Khan network and brought about an end to Libya's WMD program without firing a shot. What does this operation tell us about what CIA is capable of when it relies on deep intelligence gathering, operational patience, and trusted partnerships rather than just one-off military strikes. Especially now, after the strikes on Iran, is there a lesson here?

Tim (00:05:44): So this operation showed that CIA could take down a global threat of weapons of mass destruction without firing a shot. It began when an FBI agent of great repute, Dave Major, came to lecture at the CIA about an operation called the Trust, which was the first great exploit of the Cheka, the Soviet intelligence service in the years immediately following the Russian Revolution. The Cheka set up what it called the Trust, which was a network of false front organizations in Europe that lured Russian counter-revolutionaries into the fold. And once they were in the fold, they were captured, tortured, executed. The key to it was setting up a sting, basically, through a false front. And Jim Lawler, who was then leading the team of counter-proliferation operations at CIA thought to himself, well geez, if the Bolsheviks can do this, why can't we? So working with two stellar spies -- one, Paula Doyle, who later became the assistant director for technology in the Clandestine Service, and Robert Gorelick, who had been a NOC, a non-official cover officer, in a number of disguises and names around the world for a decade before coming in to join the team, set up a global network of false fronts that essentially absorbed key elements of the A.Q. Khan network.

(00:08:03): In the spring of 2001, George W. Bush came to CIA and Lawler briefed him on this operation and said, "Mr. President, the CIA at this point could become its own nuclear state." Rather bracing comment. What they did was to capture the operation and the culmination was the interception of a huge shipment of nuclear weapons technology headed to Libya on the high seas of the Mediterranean. The operation required strategic thinking, it required rat-like cunning, and it required patience. "Spying is waiting," as John le Carré once wrote, and here was -- if anybody had thought to recognize it as such -- an operation that culminated in the early stages of the American occupation of Iraq in the fall of 2003. And again, you could take down the threat of weapons of mass destruction without declaring war, sacrificing lives, and spilling American blood and treasure.

Matt (00:09:34): Great context there as a sort of a case study as the left-of-launch alternative that often works more in the long run, I think.

(00:09:41): So, the Iraq War is perhaps CIA's greatest modern failure -- flawed WMD assessments, politicized analysis, led to a deep crisis of credibility. But you cover how the agency, under General Mike Hayden, helped the Bush administration confront the reality of the war's failures and lay the groundwork for the surge. How do you reconcile, or how would you reconcile, those two chapters in CIA's story -- being complicit in the rush to war, then instrumental in helping salvage it? And do you think the agency learned anything lasting from that debacle?

Tim (00:10:19): One hopes so. When General Mike Hayden took over CIA in 2006, the agency was in dire straits. It had just suffered through the 19-month tenure of Porter Goss, a conservative Republican congressman who had been chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when George Bush selected him to take over from his star-crossed predecessor, George Tenet. Goss -- he's still alive, so there may be a further reckoning on this -- will probably go down as the worst CIA director in the agency's now almost 80 years. He was absent, even though he was present. He kept congressman's hours; he left Thursday and came back Monday. And he essentially turned over the daily operations of the CIA to his number three, who was a felon named Dusty Foggo, who served as the executive director. Foggo went to prison for corruption. He had a kickback scheme with his best friend on basically quarter-mastering the CIA's secret prisons and global operations. And Goss's tenure ended with the FBI's raiding of the seventh floor at CIA and putting yellow tape across the executive director's suite that said, "Crime scene, do not cross."

(00:12:16): So Hayden took over, and I'm paraphrasing him, but he said that there was a black cloud over CIA and he had to let some sunlight in, sunlight being an effective disinfectant. And what he did was threefold: He convinced Bush that he had to own up to secret prisons and he had to own up to torture. And he said, "These aren't the CIA's prisons, they're America's prisons." It wasn't the CIA that unilaterally decided we are going to torture our captives. It had the president's imprimatur, the president's authorization. Bush took months and months and months before he acknowledged the existence of the secret prisons, which had been exposed by, of course, courageous journalists like Dana Priest of The Washington Post. He would not own up to torture, he would not say the word. "We don't torture," was his edict and therefore we didn't. But letting in a little sunlight in on them, on the secret prisons, effectively doomed them. Once they were acknowledged, the American people -- particularly Senator John McCain, who himself had been tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for the better part of six years -- we would have no more of it, and the next president who wanted to waterboard people had better bring his own bucket was the outcome of that. Second, Hayden, not single-handedly, but it was a lonely struggle, basically convinced Bush of the wisdom of the surge. He had allies in this -- the former secretary of defense and CIA director, Bob Gates; the future CIA director, Leon Panetta. And the surge worked until it didn't in Iraq, but it bought time and it, in the short term, prevented a catastrophic collapse of the Iraqi government and tamped down some of the violence that Iraqi soldiers, spies, and civilians had inflicted on their own people and on American soldiers. Hayden righted the ship and deserves a lot of credit for it.

Matt (00:15:36): How would you rank Goss against a director like -- this director is maybe a bit outside the scope of this book -- but, say, like John Deutch? Who's, by my recollection, not remembered too fondly.

Tim (00:15:48): Well, I will leave that judgment to Mike Morell -- who was by turns the acting director, the deputy director, and the head of intelligence analysis -- who served at CIA for 33 years and he said Goss's 19-month stint was the worst 19 months of his time at CIA. Which is really saying something.

Matt (00:16:20): Yeah, yeah. I'll take Mike Morell's word for it.

Tim (00:16:23): What was bad about it was not simply that he turned over daily operations of the CIA to a criminal, but that he executed, at President Bush's direction, an ideological purge of the top ranks of the CIA and forced out the chief of the Clandestine Service, Steve Kappes, forced out a number of top operations officers and analysts, all in the name of trying to align the CIA with the president's agenda. Rather than having the CIA help the president form his agenda, the CIA had to fall in line, okay?

(00:17:11): We are seeing the same thing today, Matt, as John Ratcliffe inflicts an ideological purge, forces out senior officers, keelhauls new hires, and twists intelligence to please the president. It is a disastrous way to run the CIA. Ideology, Matt, is the enemy of intelligence. If you are an ideologue, your mind is made up. You don't need intelligence. You don't need facts. You already know everything. And we have seen, shockingly -- and I'm not easy to shock after nearly 40 years of reading and writing and thinking and reporting about CIA -- the fact that you have the president of the United States and the secretary of state saying, forget about the intelligence. Ignore the intelligence, specifically on the bomb damage assessment of the attack on the Iranian nuclear site at Fordo. But in general, this is a president who doesn't read the President's Daily Brief, which is the daily compendium of what's going on in the world -- which is better than CNN, as good as the BBC, but also contains hard-won secrets. And this is a recipe for disaster, Matt, okay? You got the instruments of American national security in the hands of crackpots and fools. You've got a white Christian nationalist running the Pentagon -- which is, under the president's new budget, basically a trillion-dollar-a-year operation -- who has shown that he couldn't handle a dinner party for eight at this point. You've got a conspiracy theorist and Putin acolyte, Tulsi Gabbard, running the directorate of National Intelligence. You've got Kash Patel at the FBI dismantling the directorates in charge of national security and counterintelligence, and you've got John Ratcliffe at CIA with a proven track record of distorting intelligence, twisting it to please the president. And you've got a world that over the past couple of years, going back to the last two years of the Biden administration, that is increasingly dangerous, in which the pillars of American foreign policy and have been crumbling -- a president who is destroying alliances that have been formed since the end of World War II and embracing authoritarian governments. It is not an exaggeration to say, Trump's only been in office less than six months now, that the president of the United States has gone over to the other side and joined the authoritarian axis, which is I think we can both only imagine a gut-wrenching, head-spinning, nauseating experience for professional intelligence officers who have been fighting Russian imperialism their whole lives.

Matt (00:21:36): Yeah. Let's take a break and we'll be right back.

(00:21:53): I want to circle back to the Trump of it all a bit later, so there'll be more room for that. Before we get that though, I want to touch on a few more of the black spots on the agency's record leading up to that. So Jose Rodriguez is one of the more consequential figures in this story. I've always had a bit of an anthropological interest in him -- his affect, I guess you could say. His fingerprints are on some of the worst excesses of the War on Terror. Even in hindsight, he's remained unapologetic about what was done at that time in why. How do you assess Rodriguez as a character and a leader at CIA?

Tim (00:22:34): Jose Rodriguez had a lot of fans inside the Clandestine Service. He was fiercely protective of his officers. He was fiercely against "espio-crats" and bureaucrats at the CIA, and he showed loyalty up and loyalty down. On the other side of the ledger, Jose Rodriguez was a man who was promoted far beyond his capabilities. He had been dismissed as chief of the Latin American Division of the Clandestine Service for egregious bad judgment. And he was kind of hanging around headquarters looking for his next forward assignment on 9/11 and Cofer Black, then the head of counterterrorism and his classmate from the Farm back in the day said, yeah, we'll find something for you to do. And lo and behold, Jose becomes, first, chief operations officer of the Counterterrorism Center and then the chief. And by his own admission, he didn't know jack shit about al-Qaeda at the time. In fairness on 9/11, very few people--

Matt (00:24:20): A lot of people didn't.

Tim (00:24:20): knew jack shit about al-Qaeda. And he becomes the counterterrorism chief and he is the greatest advocate for secret prisons and for torture. The CIA wasn't set up to run secret prisons. The CIA wasn't set up to interrogate prisoners using medieval torture techniques. CIA is a spy service, although counterterrorism swamped everything for the better part of 15 years after 9/11. And then, under Porter Goss, who has dismissed a very capable chief of the Clandestine Service in Steve Kappes, Jose becomes the chief of the Clandestine Service at a time when he was facing criminal investigation from the Justice Department over the secret prisons and over torture. No one can fault him for his dedication to the mission, but he can be faulted for terrible judgment and decisions, taken in a "damn the torpedoes" fashion, that left permanent scars on the reputation of the CIA.

Matt (00:25:58): Yeah. Someone maybe for whom the mission always justifies the means given the consequences of failure -- that kind of archetype.

Tim (00:26:05): Right. And that will take us into the morality of all this. The ends don't always justify the means, but sometimes they're the only things that can.

Matt (00:26:18): Yeah. After the bin Laden raid and the War on Terror starts to wind down -- so we're talking like 2011 - 2012 here -- CIA had almost come to resemble JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, more than a traditional civilian intelligence service. Thousands of officers had spent a decade focused on counterterrorism -- that sort of legacy that Rodriguez represents that we just talked about -- and the agency's classic tradecraft had atrophied. At the same time, Russia and China were mounting more and more aggressive intelligence offensives against the US and its partners. What were the growing pains CIA faced in trying to pivot back to great power competition in a fundamentally changed world? And how well do you think it adapted?

Tim (00:27:03): This didn't really happen in a serious way, and by this I mean the resurrection of espionage as the most important mission of the CIA, until the immediate aftermath of the Russian intelligence attack on our democracy -- Putin's covert operation to monkey wrench the 2016 election, denigrate Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump; was ajudged by no less than General Hayden as the most successful covert operation in memory, possibly going back to the Trojan horse.

(00:27:53): In early 2017, in the aftermath of the unassailable assessment that Russia was behind the sabotaging of the election, there was a new chief of the Clandestine Service, whose name was Tomas Rakusan, a name that until the publication of this book, probably unknown to all but a handful of Americans, excepting CIA officers of course. So Tom Rakusan, his roots are Czech, and he was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to crush the popular resistance to Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia. And his hatred of the Russians was bred in the bone. So Rakusan called in a number of his top operations officers, including the future chief of the Clandestine Service, Tom Sylvester -- of whom, more later -- and said to these guys, in so many words, "The Russians manipulated our fucking election. How are we going to make sure this never happens again?" And he told them to take their 15 years of expertise in targeting terrorists -- and by targeting, I mean not putting them in the crosshairs of a Reaper drone, but identifying them, finding out everything about them. Who do they love? Who do they hate? What makes them tick? With the goal of recruiting them. To take that expertise and turn it on Russians -- Russian spies, Russian diplomats, foreign ministry bureaucrats, oligarchs. With the goal of achieving what had been, since 1947, the highest goal of the Central Intelligence Agency: penetrating the Kremlin.

(00:30:09): Those officers wrote a manifesto called "Call to Arms." Rakusan got the Congressional intelligence committees to get him a very large chunk of money. He doubled the size of the CIA's Russia House within two years. He pulled in top talent from all over the agency. Not just operations officers, but analysts and techies. And the end result of this, Matt, four years later, was the theft of Putin's war plans for Ukraine. Knowing the intentions and the capabilities of your main enemies is why you have a CIA, and recruiting foreign agents who can give you that intelligence is the "sine qua non" for a CIA officer. Bill Burns -- the extraordinary director of CIA under Biden, generally regarded as the greatest diplomat of his generation, former deputy secretary of state -- convinced Biden that CIA needed to tell the world about this as a warning because this was a Pearl Harbor moment. And lo and behold, they declassified the intelligence and they told the world about it. And the world, by which I generally mean NATO nations, said -- cocked a collective eyebrow and said, "Really? Aren't you the people who told us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction?" Well, the intelligence was absolutely on target. The world was forewarned, and while the intelligence didn't prevent the invasion, it did have an electric and unifying effect on the NATO nations. And it needs to be said that without the CIA's steadfast support for Ukraine, going back to 2014, after the Russian seized the Crimean Peninsula and eastern Donbas, the Russians would've been in Kyiv a long time ago. And you can go back to 1947 and you can find a few triumphs of espionage and analysis that can match this. That brought espionage back to its proper place of prominence, and when Tom Sylvester became the chief of the Clandestine Service back in May of 2023, he carried this mission as far as he could take it. As far as he could take it was until the second inauguration of Donald Trump.

Matt (00:33:11): One of the aspects of this -- one chapter of this story, this period of CIA's history that I was really interested to hear more about when I went into the book was that partnership between CIA and Ukrainian intelligence, starting to rebuild Ukraine's intelligence services after the seizure of Crimea in 2014 and as the US intelligence community got more serious about the Russians after 2016 and moving forward. What did that partnership look like in practice, and what does it say about what CIA can accomplish when it's working quietly, over the long term, with the right allies?

Tim (00:33:49): Much is yet to be discovered about what went on on the ground.

Matt (00:33:56): Yeah.

Tim (00:33:56): But starting in 2014, after the Russians seized Crimea, a succession of CIA station chiefs and operations officers helped the Ukrainians purge their civilian and military intelligence services of Russian moles, helped rebuild it into a lean, mean and very adept intelligence service that was particularly adept at recruiting Russians. As one senior Ukrainian spy reflected, "If an American recruits a Russian, I mean, that is high treason. If a Ukrainian recruits a Russian, it's just a couple of friends having a beer or three."

Matt (00:34:55): Yeah, little shot of vodka or five, maybe.

Tim (00:34:59): Yeah. And many of the insights into Russian military intelligence services come through the Ukrainians, as well as the Poles, the Germans, the Estonians, the Dutch, and a number of countries that you would not count off the top of your head as American allies. The extent to which CIA contributed to lethal Ukrainian operations inside Russia is an unknown. One strongly suspects there was intelligence input in the, for example, the recent Spiderweb operations that destroyed Russian materiel over a spread of many time zones. There were, and this is secondhand information, some lethal operations that the CIA wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole and got scrubbed. One outcome of this, Matt -- when the CIA introduced drone warfare at the beginning of the assault on al-Qaeda and its allies, I don't think people fully envisioned how drones were going to change the nature of modern warfare. The Ukrainians are now the world's leading expert in drone warfare.

Matt (00:36:56): Taking that into the stratosphere.

Tim (00:36:58): And one suspects there was considerable American technological and operational input into this evolution --for good or ill, probably both.

Matt (00:37:12): Yeah. Let's take a break and we'll be right back.

(00:37:29): Coming back around to the Trump in the room. So Gina Haspel played a crucial role in guiding CIA through Trump's first term, including the lead up to January 6th and Biden's inauguration. You cover her a lot in the book -- her exploits, we'll say. How do you assess her leadership during that time? What did she get right, and did she fall short anywhere?

Tim (00:37:56): Someday, perhaps Gina Haspel will give an interview, or perhaps a classified oral history that will, after you and I are dead, be declassified. The only thing that Americans knew about Gina Haspel at the time she became director of the Central Intelligence Agency was that she had been present and had overseen torture at the black site in Thailand where two of the CIA's first high-profile prisoners were grievously waterboarded. Haspel was a very tough operations officer who cut her teeth in Russian operations in places far flung as the Horn of Africa, Azerbaijan, and Turkey -- and with the publication of The Mission, I think she will be recognized and get some credit for protecting the CIA against continuous assault from Donald Trump in his first term, and when things went badly south in 2020, in the months before the insurrection at the Capitol on 6th January 2021. And Haspel, at considerable personal risk to her job, acted as a heat shield against Trump's calumnies and attacks on American intelligence. She foresaw that we were headed for a right-wing coup after the election, and Trump tried to keelhaul her in December 2020 and put Kash Patel -- the MAGA acolyte who now runs the FBI, God help us all -- in charge of the CIA. And Haspel went to the White House, where she had not been for a considerable amount of time -- one, because her intelligence was not heeded, and, two, because it was then, unless we forget, a COVID vector of considerable proportions, Trump himself having infected a number of people in his inner circle and his own family -- and with the awareness that she was going to be fired that day in mid-December of 2020. And we don't have her direct testimony on this, but by all accounts, she basically had told Trump that if he fired her or forced her out, she was carrying a live grenade and she was going to pull the pin, and in a suicide pact with everybody of any importance at the CIA and the intelligence community, there would be a mass resignation in protest. And Trump, being a coward, backed down -- like all bullies when confronted with an equal and opposite force. And we have it on the testimony of no less a figure than her successor, Bill Burns, that she did a lot to protect and defend the agency from Trump during his first term, and maybe with the publication of The Mission, she'll get some credit for that.

Matt (00:42:32): Yeah, I was really glad to see that in the book, her getting her recognition of what she probably spared us in those couple of weeks there. I think a lot of democrats -- small-D democrats -- were wrong about Gina Haspel when she was first nominated.

Tim (00:42:51): Well, again, the only thing you know about somebody is that she conscienced and countenanced torture. You're liable to form a poor opinion of them, and she only won her nomination back then in 2018 after conceding that maybe it was a bad idea.

Matt (00:43:15): Right? Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I think there's still a lot more to -- hopefully, one day, you'll get that exclusive.

Tim (00:43:24): I'm not holding my breath.

Matt (00:43:25): Maybe, maybe. We'll see.

Tim (00:43:29): Stranger things have happened.

Matt (00:43:30): Yes, yes they have. In the last decade, they certainly have. So, as we start to wrap up here, and I wanted to give you plenty of space to answer this question because it's kind of a broad one. So at the end of the book, you quote John le Carré, who called a nation's intelligence officers "the infantry of our ideology" -- caught between presidential orders and the moral cost of carrying them out. You also quote James Olson, the Cold War-era Russia House and counterintelligence chief -- who said, "I spent my entire CIA career lying, cheating, stealing, manipulating, deceiving." Do you think CIA today can still reconcile that kind of moral ambiguity with the defense of democracy -- or are we nearing a point where that contradiction breaks down?

Tim (00:44:22): Ever since the end of World War II, Matt, and the creation of the CIA in 1947, the CIA for all its flaws and all America's flaws, was able to recruit foreign agents from the world's autocracies and dictatorships because America stood for freedom and democracy. Brave people from bad countries put their faith in CIA, and whether they were motivated by patriotism, by money, by revenge, or simply a desire to get the hell out of Moscow or Tehran, they came over to our side. I'm afraid that we've come to a point where the lights are going out in the shining city on the hill. We have become a failing democracy. We are entering an age of autocracy in America. An intelligence service in the hands of an autocrat can be a dangerous thing. Presidents in the past -- and I'm thinking particularly of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon -- ordered the CIA to spy on Americans. Presidents in the past have ordered the CIA to overthrow democratically elected leaders in foreign countries. And who's to say what Trump will do with the CIA?

(00:46:27): On the one hand, he disdains it and vilifies it as the capital of the deep state. On the other hand, he must understand on some level that the CIA represents great power -- and secret power. The danger, of course, is that you now have people like Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth and John Ratcliffe who are, by turns, amateurs and toadies in charge of the instruments of American national security. And I think the greater danger is that not that Trump decides to mount a coup in Panama to seize the canal, but that the architecture of American national security is crumbling. Ratcliffe has forced out any number of experienced intelligence officers and analysts in the name of making the CIA an echo chamber for Trump's prejudices and preconceptions. He, at the behest of Elon Musk, keelhauled two years' worth of new hires, people hired in 2023 and 2024. The greater danger is that the CIA and the rest of the American intelligence community, in the hands of these unworthy people, fails to detect a surprise attack against the United States at home or abroad. I think we are in as great a peril as we were in the months and years before 9/11. American support for Israel's slaughter of civilians in Gaza has not endeared it to the Arab world or the nations of Islam. And Matt, I shudder to think what would happen if we were hit again.

Matt (00:49:09): Right now, given our current climate, you're saying?

Tim (00:49:12): What would stop Trump from declaring martial law or suspending elections? Congress? The Supreme Court? I doubt it. And if he orders CIA officers to do something illegal or immoral, they can throw down their stars and resign in protest, quietly. But there is nothing to prevent the invincible ignorance of this man from creating the conditions where we can be hit again. And I don't want to be a doomsayer. I'm not predicting an attack. I know from experience that he who lives by the crystal ball will wind up eating broken glass.

Matt (00:50:18): That's a good saying.

Tim (00:50:20): But you look at the leadership of the American intelligence and national security community at this point, and it looks dangerous to me.

Matt (00:50:42): Yeah. Do you think -- you mentioned that incompetence, the sort of amateur hour nature of the whole crew that's been brought in at the top, right? And in a way that's dangerous because, as you said, yeah, it opens us to attack and there's all kinds of nightmares that potentially then follow that scenario. But is there also perhaps a double edge to that sword? I mean, one thing that I remember from a year ago around this time where the very sort of assured promises that, you know, "Trump 2.0, you put us back in office, it's going to be totally different this time. We're going to be real competent. We got rid of all the losers and wackadoos who don't know what they're doing." That to me, I think, that promise did not bear out to be true. They are still just as incompetent and tripping over each other and backstabbing each other, and they're still the same mess that they always were. They're more confident about it, but Kash Patel is still doing the job part-time from Vegas. Tulsi Gabbard can't get out of her own way making YouTube shorts and is on the outs with the president because he just sort of finds her weird. Is there something there, how -- shall we say, cracked and loose that layer of sand is at the top that sort of insulates the professionals, the talented folks, to the extent that they're still there, below that sort of do their job and hold the line? Am I perhaps being a bit naive in holding to that hope?

Tim (00:52:17): I wish I had a greater visibility into the number or percentage of people at CIA who are keeping their heads down and doing the jobs that they were intended to do. But one thing that it took me a long time to learn when I was starting out on this beat way back in the 20th century was that the CIA is an executor of the foreign policy of the United States. It does not make foreign policy except in the rarest of instances. It's the president's outfit, and with the rarest exceptions, it does what the president tells it to do. I'm unaware of a senior CIA officer resigning in protest, resigning in principle over the years, but that may be my lack of visibility rather than their lack of political courage or self-sacrifice. I do know that if you put ideological purity tests and loyalty tests onto senior CIA officers and analysts, you are shooting yourself in the head. If you want an intelligence service that only tells you what you want to hear, which Trump clearly does, to the extent that he listens to intelligence at all--

Matt (00:54:09): He wants his intelligence services to stay on his narrative, to reinforce what he's saying -- like, "I said this. Now your job is to go make it true." He's wrong in that belief, but that's what he wants. That's what he expects.

Tim (00:54:23): He is impervious to intelligence, Matt, that contradicts his worldview, and that's the most dangerous thing of all. Richard Helms, the Cold War director of CIA under Johnson and Nixon once said that, "It's not enough for us to ring the bell, you have to make sure the other guy hears it." And if you have a president who is blind and deaf to intelligence threats, you're looking at some serious pain down the road.

Matt (00:55:06): Yeah. Anything else that you would like to cover today that we haven't yet?

Tim (00:55:13): I want to say that -- okay, this is my seventh book, and when Legacy of Ashes came out fifteen Julys ago--

Matt (00:55:28): I read it in high school.

Tim (00:55:29): I'm sorry, my bad -- when Legacy of Ashes came out eighteen Julys ago, it was heralded by some as the "feel-bad book of the summer" because it discussed some of the failings of American foreign policy and of intelligence during and immediately after the Cold War. The Mission, I hope, will be regarded both as an account of some triumphs of American intelligence, absolutely, and some dangers that come from having terrible leadership and terrible foreign policies that distort what the CIA is capable of doing. Any reporter worth his or her salt should understand that there is a small but significant affinity between reporters and spies. We are both interested in the way things work, what makes people tick. We're interested in digging out secrets. And we can parachute into a place, as I have done, like Khartoum or Jalalabad and say, "Take me to your leader," and chances are you will be taken to the leader. And I met some extraordinary people reporting this book. Tom Sylvester, who departed on Memorial Day as the chief of the Clandestine Service, is an extraordinary guy, and The Mission recounts some extraordinary things that he has done over the past 25 years. Jim Lawler, Paula Doyle and Robert Goerlick, who led the A.Q. Khan take-down operation -- you will never meet three smarter people in your entire life. And they gave me hours upon days of their time to help me understand this complex and brilliant operation. There is a tendency among the American people to believe the myths about the CIA that they get from movies and TV and books -- that it is either an all-powerful threat to American freedom or that it is a bunch of nincompoops who couldn't find their own ass with both hands and a roadmap. That's nonsense, okay? It's a fascinating organization to me, and I hope that readers will pick up The Mission with an open mind and look at the good and the bad and the ugly over the past 25 years.

Matt (00:59:08): I think it does that beautifully. It's a frank, honest assessment of the last 25 to 30 years of the Central Intelligence Agency's history. It covers failures, yes -- but also successes. There's praise, there's criticism. For all the ground that we've covered today, there's so many more interesting stories and anecdotes and characters in there. For folks watching, here is what it looks like on the shelf. So that's The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, and that's available wherever you get your books on July 15th.

Tim (00:59:44): I urge people to go to Bookshop dot org or to their local independent bookstore and pre-order a copy. Books these days -- it's hard out there for a book, Matt.

Matt (01:00:03): It is, it is.

Tim (01:00:06): And books live or die on pre-orders these days, believe it or not. If you are in New York, we're going to launch next Monday the 14th at Powerhouse Books in Dumbo. If you're in DC, we're going to launch at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue. These events hosted, respectively, by Steve Engelberg, the head of ProPublica, and by the legendary Washington Post reporter, Dana Priest.

Matt (01:00:37): Nice.

Tim (01:00:39): And I'm very pleased to be with you today, and I can't thank you enough for reading the book.

Matt (01:00:50): Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, no, it was great to have you and to speak to you about it. I read Legacy of Ashes way back in my senior year of high school, so seeing the sequel now all these years later and getting to talk to you about it on this little platform that I got, that was pretty cool.

Tim (01:01:06): Alright,

Matt (01:01:07): So we'll have links to all that in the show notes and definitely, yeah, if you're in DC or New York, go see Tim in person and say hi and get a copy signed. Tim, thank you so much for joining me. It was great speaking with you.

Tim (01:01:21): My pleasure, Matt. Thanks.

Announcer (01:01:55): Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.