Bernard Hudson: New Orleans Attack, Cybertruck Explosion, CIA Corruption, & Tulsi Gabbard
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So you served in the CIA for how long? 28 years. 28 years. You joined when? 1989, January. 1989. And what did you do, roughly speaking, for CIA? So I was a case officer. Yes. Which means my job was, I was focused on, you know, foreign governments and foreign posts where you're trained up.

given language skills, given set of skills to manage what we call tradecraft, how to operate clandestinely and safely overseas. And then you're assigned undercover to an embassy. And that sort of becomes your career with stints back in what we call headquarters in Virginia. ♪

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What countries did you serve in? So I served throughout the entire Middle East. I was in Iraq, I was in Africa, I was in the Levant, I was in Pakistan. Where in the Levant? Jordan. Interesting. What was Pakistan like? So Peshawar, Pakistan... You were in Peshawar? Yeah, but before 9/11 was the most alien place that I've ever gone. I wasn't there permanently. I was just, I would go in for business.

But that was an alien place. You think? I was there two weeks after 9-11. I've never seen anything like that. Yeah, it's even alien. Even Pakistanis who live in Islamabad or Raul Pindi or Karachi, when they go into Peshawar will remark,

This is a different country. This is really Afghanistan. It just happens to be inside Pakistan's borders. It's a cool town, don't you think? It is very, if you like that sort of man who would be king vibe. The Flashman Hotel is there. If you like the Flashman Hotel, if you like that sort of British late colonial chic. Totally. It's the place to go. The last flag bearer from the retreat from Kabul. The last guy who survived. Yeah, rode in to the...

Interesting. Okay. So you served an interesting post doing the kind of work that people associate with the CIA, not reading foreign telegram posts back at headquarters. No, I was thankfully spared that. I was able to actually serve, again, sort of undercover, working, trying to recruit what we call human sources and foreign intelligence to go back to our government. How did it change the agency over the 28 years?

So there were three CIAs that I served in. So there was the Cold War CIA that I joined in 1989. Now, I joined like only nine months before the wall came down. But the ethos of that place up until, say, 91, was always focused on Russia and the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, Russia.

And then it went and I won't call it an identity crisis, but certainly a change in its character as the United States sort of moved into the peace dividend era, say sort of '91 when the Soviet Union is no more and NATO starts expanding westward. In that period, you know, you had a lot of basically a struggle to figure out what does the agency really want to focus on? And it never really came to a clear answer until Tuesday morning, 11 September.

And then it became the third agency that I served in. Where were you? So that morning, I was at home. I was in an apartment getting ready to go to an assignment overseas during my final preparations. I saw that the news had said a plane had just struck a building in New York City. I thought, you know, that was pretty weird. Clear day, you know, a little suspicious. Jump in my car to go to CIA headquarters, and

On the radio, I hear that they had just hit the second tower. And I get into the parking lot and there's a lot of things going on. A woman tells me, I didn't know this person, but they said, you know, in the way things had happened on that Tuesday, people would talk to you who didn't normally talk to each other. Hey, somebody just blew up the State Department. Now, that was obviously a garble of the plane hitting the Pentagon. So I went into the building,

Went to the Near East Section, which was my home division. Your home office was called the division in those days. And at that point, there was a report that there was a missing fourth plane headed to Washington. And the director of CIA probably smartly decided to evacuate the building because he didn't know where the target for the fourth plane was going to be.

But when you're young and aggressive, I decided I wanted to ignore that order. And so sort of enlisted a friend of mine who was, you know, as we were being told by the, they were called security protective officers, who basically the guard force and the security force inside the agency were telling everybody to leave.

It was the first time I'd ever directly disobeyed an order in CIA and instead got a friend of mine to go with me over to what was called the Counterterrorism Center, where a friend of mine who I'd worked for before was the director and said, "Listen, this is why I joined the CIA. I joined it to be ready to do something for my country when that time came." And you never really know when that time is.

And that for me and for everybody else who was in the CIA in those years, that became the dominant mission. You know, prevent another 9/11. Yes. Figure out what the real threat is, find, fix that threat, and then, you know, do something to make sure it doesn't ever happen again.

So where did you go from there? So you're on your way somewhere. Did you change destinations? No, I still went to the Middle East, to the Gulf region. Perfect. And served there for a number of years supporting operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. What you learned in the early days of the global war on terrorism is that it really was a global effort. You know, the United States in those days, and it's kind of hard to understand now,

had an enormous moral hand when it came to trying to get other countries to enlist with us to work against the counterterrorism threat. And a lot of that, I think, was basically because a lot of countries woke up and realized that accommodating terrorists or turning a blind eye to them was injurious to their own fate and were eager to partner with the United States in those days. In those days, do you think that's changed? Yeah.

Well, certainly. I mean, so, you know, you have the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which unfortunately, you know, the intelligence that led to the decision to go in there was deeply flawed. And that had an enormous hit on the American intelligence community's credibility and U.S. foreign policy credibility. Was there soul searching within the CIA after that? I think there was. I mean, I think what's unclear is

And what probably has to happen when something that egregiously wrong goes, occurs. There's got to be a public facing piece of this. I think that was absent in the post-2003 environment. I personally believe that this was the greatest crisis.

intelligence failure of the American intel community in my, certainly in my time in government. Well, sure, and a million people died and it reset. It changed so much that I don't understand why they couldn't find somebody to say, we're going to punish this person, a guilty person, one would hope. So what tends to happen in a modern bureaucracy, at least in the American version of it, is

Those type of mistakes are considered, I'm not saying this is proper, but this is sort of how they approach it. It's a systemic problem. And so we're going to take all these steps to change the things that we think led to this. It is not including firing the leaders of that system, I notice. That is true in the 2003 example. You know, what you don't have is what you might have in, say, a private sector company where you get something really, really wrong. It's hard to compare. Right.

you know, the magnitude of the 2003 mistake on Intel with anything a private sector company would do. But you got bureaucratic reform out of it, but what you didn't get, and it's fair to say this, is you didn't get, say, 20 identified people who were told, you know, you have to leave now. Yeah, because, I mean, you made the point by implication earlier that one of the reasons countries participated in the global war on terror with the United States, helped the United States,

was because they had the example of countries that refused to participate or who worked against our interests, and they got overthrown. So there's something sort of instructive about punishing someone because it teaches everybody else not to do that thing, right? Well, I think in the case of counterterrorism and the cooperation we got after 2001, I think the reason these countries cooperated is their own fear of

that radical Islamic terrorism was a threat to them as well. What I think disturbed them after 2003 wasn't that anybody lamented the Saddam Hussein regime going away. It's here's the United States, the global remaining superpower, getting something so tragically wrong where along the way, many of the countries that are allies of the United States were cautioning, are you really sure that you've got this story right?

I think what happened, what you start to see the glimmers of in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion is sort of that deference to American foreign policy begins to be questioned. Yes. And I think in the, you know, immediate years after 2003, you know, Russia and China are still not peer rivals of the United States at that point. But, you know, the repercussions, the ripples that came out of the Iraq invasion, you know,

in regards to Americans' alliance system and how countries view it, I think underwent another change, certainly by 2015-16, with the rise of China's economy and the return of sort of a more confrontational Russian policy in Syria. Within CIA, was there anyone who said, you know, wait a second, we should figure out exactly how this series of intel assessments got to the president and policymakers?

And like, how did we do this? And anyone who participated in it should be fired? Or did anyone say that? So certainly many people said all of the points you made up to firing people. There were some people who said that, you know, there needs to be accountability, personal accountability to named individuals. The decision essentially was that

we would hold the system accountable and they introduced a number of reforms. One of them was to create a director of national intelligence, which didn't exist before 9/11. I mean, 9/11 is actually when they created it, but it was empowered by what happened in 2003. So, you know, if you were looking for, you know, a single event where somebody could say, you know, these people are personally held accountable, that did not happen after the Iraq invasion.

And it's not just the WMD intel that remained unpunished. It's like everything since then, every disaster since then has been without an author, I notice. Again, the way America –

Yeah. So, I mean, again, the way it tends to work in an American bureaucracy is you get sort of collective punishment, if you will, or collective change. It's like systemic racism. Everyone's against it, but no one can quite describe what it is. Yes. Or, you know, you don't point out a particular individual. Right. Exactly. So, the DNI is one of the...

one of the bureaucratic bolt-ons, one of the responses to the obvious Intel failure in the run-up to the war in Iraq. What is... To the war in 2001, actually. So it was the... No, it was 9-11. I'm sorry. Right. It was 9-11. It was 9-11. I beg your pardon. What exactly is it?

It's a good question. So, you know, it's changed over time. So essentially the DNI, Director of National Intelligence role, is to make sure that there's a single accountable person to the president who is responsible for all of the production and all of the assessments that come out of the intel community. So there are 18 agencies, including the Director of National Intelligence as an office, not a person, inside the U.S. intel community.

Before there was a DNI, the director of CIA had two hats. Hat one, director of the CIA. Hat two, director of something called Director of Central Intelligence, which is essentially the process by which the president and the senior leadership get something called the President's Daily Brief, which is called the PDB. It's a classified newspaper that speaks to issues of interest overseas to the American government. Right.

So the DNI was created, it was given the authority to manage that classified newspaper, if you want to call that. That was one of its duties. Duty two was you as the DNI are responsible for looking at how do we do collection across the board, agency by agency, which agency is collecting what type of information? Is there duplication? Is that duplication necessary?

It also has, you know, sort of a mundane but important role in determining budgets and managing not necessarily the execution of, not so much execution of budgets, but pulling a budget together for the IC and being accountable to talking to Congress about it. As it is lived, you know, there are issues that some people have and questions people have raised over the years about why does the DNI need to be as large as it does? It doesn't collect data.

unique information. Unique information is collected by the 17 other agencies that are out there. But it collates it. It collates it. The one thing that some folks have talked about, a role that the DNI could do, but it hasn't to date, is a more aggressive assessment of how each of the agencies really contribute to the overall IC mission, essentially grading the homework. Can you list the 17 other members of the intelligence community?

For points, I guess I could probably do it. So, nine of them are within the Department of Defense. Nine? Nine of them. So, Army Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence, Navy Intelligence. Air Force? Air Force Intelligence. Don't forget the Air Force. You have the National Security Agency, which is part of DOD. The National Geospatial Agency, which is an agency that looks at exploiting imagery and making sense of pictures. If you think of the Cuba Missile Crisis...

And the analysts who are looking at crates and boxes to determine, is that just a crate or is that a crate carrying a Russian missile? That's the modern version of where those people went. It's a very little known agency, but it actually has a really important mission. The National Reconnaissance Office, which manages America's satellite system,

Then you have seven agencies that are part of other government cabinets level agencies. So for example, Treasury's Intel section, the Department of Energy's got an Intel section. The State Department has something called the Intelligence and Research INR. You've got the Coast Guard and you have Department of Homeland Security.

Why would the Department of Energy have its own intel component? So, unique to the American intel community, the Department of Energy has got a bunch of authorities dealing with nuclear weapons and the design of nuclear weapons, both, you know, in the United States and what we need to know about potential adversary or partner countries that have nuclear weapons.

And so they have a very small, it's a very small office inside the Department of Energy. But it's a fair question. People will say, you know, why don't we just have one agency that takes care of all of this for so many different organizations? And I think over the years, certainly within DoD, for the nine agencies they've got, they feel these are technical enough and they need them focused particularly on that particular service. Like the Air Force has a particular set of things that they need

to carry out their mission that are not necessarily the types of information the CIA might collect. Some of the things CIA might collect would be of use to the Air Force, but there's a lot of things that CIA wouldn't collect that the Air Force, for example, might need, and that they prefer to have their own unit. It's mostly analytical to assess foreign air developments. If you're still using Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile, obviously our condolences, but you're going to want to hear this.

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So the director of national intelligence sits in some way, but not literally atop all of these other agencies. So they sit atop it. You know, it gets a little complicated when people think, you know, is there a org chart that says the director of national intelligence can give an order?

that one of these other agencies have to follow, or could it cut their budget if the Director of National Intelligence wanted? That becomes more of a political issue, and some of that has to do with how money is allocated by Congress. So we talked about how nine of these agencies are actually within the Defense Department. Well, that means their ultimate boss is the Secretary of Defense. And the Secretary of Defense has an enormous say

in how those agencies are operated. So really, you know, the DNI's authorities are looking at how these agencies really contribute to the overall American collection and exploitation of information effort. President Trump has nominated former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence. She's facing enormous resistance in Washington, most of it not public. You came out publicly in support of her.

Why did she do that? So I've noticed her career from early on when she was a congressman. And myself and others, you know, CIA officers and other people in the government, I think we're sort of interested in here's somebody who has served her country. She was still, in fact, I believe she was a congressman and serving as an Army reservist, who actually raises some thoughtful questions about, you know, the purposes of American foreign policy.

And, you know, during her run for president with the Democratic Party, you know, her comments in some of the debates I found to be extraordinarily unusual for an American politician. You know, in particular, when she challenged, you know, the frontrunner Hillary Clinton on, you know, the effects of some of her foreign policy decisions, I think in particular on Libya. So I thought, you know, Tulsi Gabbard was a solid choice.

to be the DNI. And I was, I've been a bit surprised by some of the vitriolic response to her nomination, because when you look at on paper, you know, her background, it's consistent with other people who've had senior jobs in the US Intel community. Mike Pompeo, John Ratcliffe, in some ways, Avril Haines, who's now the current director of national intelligence. You know, some of her background is not at all dissimilar to some of them,

I don't think Tulsi Gabbard ever ran a pornographic bookstore, while Avril Haines did, I think, in Baltimore. I'm not aware of her background on that. But just for the record, I don't think that Tulsi Gabbard ran a pornographic bookstore. I wouldn't think so. It would seem to be inconsistent. What was also sort of interesting to me was, you know, she took a lot of heat for...

being skeptical on things that I'm not so sure it wasn't right to be skeptical on. Such as? So, in particular, you know, I've, I am sympathetic to when she was a congressman and went to Syria and, you know, was essentially trying to do a fact-finding mission to figure out, you know, what is U.S. policy interest in Syria? And, you know, was also trying to get to the bottom of, I think, in her mind, and I can't speak for her, but, you know, it's my outside assessment of

You know, the question about whether or not the Assad regime used chemical weapons on its own people. Now, the Assad regime was brutal. Both the father and the son ran one of the most diabolically brutal regimes that they've ever had in the Middle East. However, you know, what she was trying to look at was, had they escalated the use of chemical weapons? You know, when you think about all the people who were participating in what we call the global war on terrorism or the Iraq veterans,

I wouldn't blame any of them for being skeptical about what the U.S. intelligence community might have said about another Arab state having a weapon of mass destruction. On the basis of no disclosed proof at all. Well, you know...

I pushed the State Department if this is true. Like, what do I know? I'm not there. But where's the evidence? And a lot of the goodwill and trust had been extinguished by what happened in 2003. So, you know, again, in my view of Tulsi Gabbard and other veterans of the Iraq war and occupation, which was an opposed occupation, it got fairly bloody at times. So if you're there in that country serving...

And at some point you ponder, you know, how did we exactly get here? And somebody tells you, well, it's, you know, the American intel community, you know, assessed that there was WMD here. They got it wrong. Flash forward now, you're a congressman. Someone is, you know, laying out yet another case that there might have been chemical weapons use. Maybe you're concerned that is this a prelude to not only just tagging and assigning culpability to an evil regime, but some sort of

opening move in a much more aggressive U.S. involvement in that country. So I, on that, you know, just as someone who myself was in Iraq and very familiar with other people who've served there, I don't blame any of them for wanting to ask two, three, four questions about

the existence of WMD in an Arab state in the first, you know, say decade after, after an incident like 2003. Even bigger picture, I never understood, like, when did Congress pass the law requiring me to hate Assad? There are lots of brutal regimes in the Middle East, some of which we support. I would argue as brutal as Assad's regime, just my view, but whatever. But there are other countries and, but why was I required? I'm agnostic about Assad. I support him to the extent he protected Christians. Right.

That's my personal view. But when did it become like some requirement that all good people hate Assad? Where did that come from? I was just confused by it. Well, I mean, you get sort of, you know, sometimes shifting standards on what constitutes a threat. Yes. I do believe that probably by the end of his administration, even the Obama people had come to conclude that –

Syria was probably not a direct actionable threat to the United States. Now, it's fair to say that during the occupation of Iraq, that the Syrian government knowingly allowed plenty of people to cross that border who were going to, you know, attack U.S. troops in that country. But, you know, there are ways to deal with that.

And I think, again, when you look at U.S. policy towards Syria, it's always been fairly hostile. You know, it's never outside of a very short period of time in the first Gulf War when Bashar Assad, the father, or Hafez Assad, the father, had gone along with the Americans to push back Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. We've always had a bad relationship with that regime. So... Any reason? No.

It was particularly brutal. It was also, you know, as a legacy of the Cold War, very close to the Soviets. They, and it's easy to forget now, but the Syrian regime under the Assad family hosted a number of terrorist organizations, right?

that did attack American interests in Europe and other places. They hosted terrorist groups. They helped destabilize Lebanon, which was an important small ally of the United States at the time in the '70s and '80s.

You know, that gets us back to sort of the third world movement and Soviet surrogates. The non-aligned countries. Non-aligned countries. And then you add on to that just sort of a uniquely strange cult of personality where, for example, in Iraq, you know, the name Assad also means, you know, it's a lion in Arabic. People wouldn't want to use the word for lion in Arabic, right?

because that would require them to say the president's name, the name of the president's family. The fear that the average person had in Syria was astounding. I remember going there on a trip at one point and just it was saturated with secret police everywhere. I would call it the not so secret police because you'd be walking around Damascus and you could see clearly these guys there.

And really, their focus was domestic repression. You know, it was really not looking for foreigners. So, it's not to say that you're absolutely right. There are many terrible regimes in the world. The Assads, you know, were at least noteworthy within the Arab context. Interesting. So, she dared to go talk to Assad, went to Syria, Tulsi Gabbard. But, you know, that was seven or eight years ago.

And she never endorsed Assad or anything like that. She's got pretty conventional views on most issues, I would say, foreign policy issues. She's not like anti-Israel or she's, you know, she's within the mainstream on most things. But the resistance to her is very, very intense. Where do you think that comes from? I think some of it seems to come from a sense that she is not deferential to the foreign policy consensus. Right.

And within Washington, you know, there is a sense that there, I mean, there clearly is a foreign policy consensus, you know, and that's true of almost any government. You know, any government that has a foreign policy and that has security services, you know, there tends to be sort of a worldview that's coalesced, that generally coalesces and is held by the majority of the people who work there. I think she's a bit of a disruptor when it comes to that and is willing to challenge things.

I would agree with you that I don't really understand sort of the vitriol of some of this. I don't think it really is warranted. Calling her a traitor to her country? Well, this gets to the sort of absurd lengths that people have sometimes fallen to about trying to go after their domestic opponents. I mean, here we have somebody who was and is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, which means she has security clearance, probably top-secret clearance.

And, you know, making statements as serving government officials or recently, you know, retired government officials that this person is probably a Russian agent. You know, I find it curious that the same group of folks who might say that, you know, the McCarthy era was...

Well, they've embraced it completely. It's, you know, the McCarthy era is not a how-to manual. It was a cautionary tale. I mean, they got us into war with Russia from my perspective on the basis of this hysteria. It's beyond belief. So here's my concern. Trump gets elected on the explicit promise to end pointless wars, defend the United States when necessary, but we're not, no more wars of choice. They haven't helped the foreign policy consensus. Moreover,

isn't working, obviously. It's not helping the United States in any measurable way. And people are very sick of it. And he said that in 2016, got elected. He said it again in 2024 and got elected. And yet the overwhelming majority of the nominees so far are well within the foreign policy consensus. They're neocons. And she's not. And so don't you think Trump voters deserve a

And appointee once in a while? I guess that'd be my view. But that's like too much for DC. This is my read. You can't have anybody who disagrees with Mike Pompeo. Like, not allowed. That seems pretty dysfunctional to me. Well, I don't get consulted on these sorts of issues. No, but as an observer. So, you know, part of, I think part of what you're seeing here is, you know, that sort of independent thinking thing.

And really questioning in some ways what we got for our efforts of the last 25 years, you know, certainly since 2003. You know, to essentially assess that you've developed inside the United States something I liked or something I've heard people call militarism without victory, where you have this sort of

consistent push to the most aggressive options on the table. But you're not Sparta, you keep losing. And we certainly, you know, we don't gain much even from some of the ones that we've won on. That's right. And so I think, I'm not sure that a lot of the professional national security establishment

has, as a group, really come to that conclusion yet. I think individually, you know, when you talk to folks who, you know, had careers, whether in the military, the security services, State Department, they'll privately admit that, you know, if you name Libya, Iraq, the, certainly the occupation of Afghanistan post the death of Osama bin Laden, that it's really hard to say that we really got very much as a country out of that. But there certainly, you know, is, you know,

the relevancy that you get as the United States by being able to sort of impose your will on situations. And it's important if you're going to be a superpower to be able to impose your will if you have to do so. What has changed, I think, over the last 20 years is the threshold to want to impose that will seems to have gotten down to a fairly hair-trigger.

And so things that I would think, you know, we would have stayed out of when we had a standoff with the Soviet Union or at least thought twice about, people are now a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction that, you know, let's move this two steps up the escalation ladder. Not always warranted. Well, and reckless because the consequences of misjudging are...

And you can only control one side, of course, yours. Well, you know, back to your, you know, it gets to your question on, you know, why Tulsi Gabbard. I like skepticism in senior intelligence officers. In my experience, you know, being overly credulous or being willing to sort of believe the most extreme version of an event, even if it later turns out to be true, certainly at the senior levels, you know,

It's well worth it to have some people in the loop who are prepared to ask some very hard questions and to suffer the consequences from asking those hard questions. If you really want to be an effective director of national intelligence, you probably have to go into work every day with the expectation that this might be my last day. I might be forced to say something or do something that will be unpopular, unwelcome, unpopular.

But I think it's necessary for the system to have a couple of folks around who are prepared to take that risk. And from what I saw of her career, and I don't know her personally, she seems like somebody who, despite being on the fast track in the Democratic Party, she was the vice chair of the DNC, a presidential candidate, was willing to put her personal ethics and personal views, you know,

on the table and say, you know, for this, I'm prepared to suffer. And that's a good thing to have for the American Intel enterprise, in my opinion. It seems vital. So then the question arises, like, where's the oversight of these incredibly powerful agencies, which have, by definition, the power to spy on people and kill them and do?

Someone from outside should be making certain that what they're doing is within the bounds of the Constitution and just decency. And I don't see anybody. I see the House and Senate Intel committees as completely controlled by the IC. I mean, I've seen it. What's the view from within CIA on that?

There's any, like, anybody in the House and Senate, particularly the Senate, who will say you can't do that, will pull your budget if you do that? So, I think there have been instances where, you know, you've had that sort of oversight. Now, some of it, you know, goes back historically. So, your church committee, so, which is the, you know, long time. 50 years. That's a long time ago. That's sort of the high watermark of, you know, oversight having a significant effect on the ICs.

You know, since then, and, you know, in my experience was mostly, you know, post 9-11 in dealing with Congress, that there was fairly robust interest in what the agency does. To be fair, there was a lot of support, you know, for the IC in the, you know,

in Congress, historically, generally is. The CIA would say that that's because they try to be consistent with what they think Congress will accept and what the administration wants. It's always worth remembering that the IC, in the end, works for the executive branch and the president. Obviously, their budgets and some of their authorities are controlled by the laws that Congress puts on them. Your question is a really good one on

is in a low trust society or a society where trust is now at a premium, you know, how does the IC manage the suspicions of an increasingly larger number of people in the American population? I'll just say as the son of a federal employee who spent most of his life in D.C., I always wanted to trust the government and in fact did. And it was, you know, learning that what government was doing with my money and my name, I was so outraged by it. I have no more trust.

And so I think that, I mean, that's just my perspective. I'm sure everyone has a different perspective, but I applied to CIA and didn't get in. But that's a measure of how much I believed in the system. And so from my perspective, it's low trust because they violated our trust.

And I think, you know, however we got here, I think one of the things that I would like to see the IC and those who manage it accept is that we really are here. That this is, you know, a situation where it's a highly partisan atmosphere in the United States. Not everybody is going to flexibly trust the security services. And if they really want to be able to perform their mission appropriately and effectively,

They've got to be in a place where the people trust them. But on whose behalf are they performing it? I mean, they have no authority at all other than that conferred to them by the president of the United States. That's it. Period. Because his authority comes from voters. It's our system. And he confers that to the executive branch agencies of which CIA is one.

And so if he doesn't want them to do something, they have no moral or constitutional right to do it, period. I don't see another read of the Constitution. As a legal measure, you know, if a president, you know, as long as it's lawful. Well, exactly. Yeah, gives an order to the, you know, to the IC, especially the CIA, which directly works for the president. It doesn't even work. You know, we talked about the nine other intel agencies. They work for the Secretary of Defense, by extension, the president, of course.

Yes, they have to obey lawful orders that are given to them. But they're not allowed to freelance. Like, by whose authority are they doing that? How can, and not just CIA, I don't mean to pick on one, the most famous of all the federal agencies, but I mean, there are many others, maybe all of them, doing things the president ran against that he did not authorize, which, in other words, they have no legal or moral right to do, but they do it, and no one's ever punished. Like, on whose authority do they think they're acting?

Again, I think, you know, come 20 January, you know, we're going to, once the executive, and one presumes that there'll be a number of executive orders that will come out of the White House, you know, that the president will be able to lawfully provide. At that point, you know, if people in the IC or the IC leadership is not responsive, you know, there's plenty of mechanisms for a president and a White House and national security advisor to determine, you know, if they're,

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I'm hardly an expert on CIA. I am an expert on elected officials in D.C. and they're all afraid of getting killed or blackmailed. They think that the intelligences will kill them. They actually think that. I don't know if you're aware of that. I'm aware of that. So they think that. Why do you think they think that? You know, that wasn't my experience, you know, working with, you know, oversight when I work with them, you know.

I've sadly just never heard anybody say that to me. I had a member of an intel committee, elected official, tell me that he was on the oversight committee overseeing the IC, that they were spying on him, that they were reading his texts and listening to his calls and there was nothing he could do about it. And I said, why don't you hold a press conference? I mean, that's like so outrageous. It's illegal. You can't do that.

you saw the chairman of the senate intel committee violated some agreement the ca thought that she had with them and they spied on her they they spied on senate staff they got caught and no one right so and actually the senate didn't do anything about it they didn't say you know we're going to expose your black budget or you know defund parts of you we're going to fire you no one did anything

So what does that tell you? If the agency can spy on sitting senators who are supposed to be in charge of them, or their budget anyway, what does that tell you about how afraid people are? So let me take this in reverse order. Yes. So I think you're talking about the Feinstein statement. That's exactly right. So my understanding of how that happened is that they accused the agency of being able to look at the computers. Correct. In the Senate.

that were in the CIA building that the Senate staff had access to, and that there were government computers with CIA information on it, and that all of those computers come with a warning, both written on the cover of the computer and when you boot it up, that this is a government system and it's fully auditable. So it's my understanding that the computers in question are

you know, that, you know, Senator Feinstein said were improperly accessed by the agency, were in fact, you know, CIA computers that were made available to them, but with the clear warnings that anything on this computer that you do, not some other computer that you would be on, not your personal handheld device, those computers are accessible by CIA security, just like every other computer that

that the CIA buys and makes available for its own employees, so that there's an audit function on all of that. Now, I had never heard...

you know, that the allegations ever extended to other computer systems that people in the Senate were using that were not provided by the CIA. Now, again, I'll caution that I, you know, I'm not, I wasn't directly involved in that. I'm pretty sure that Senator Feinstein said and alleged that CIA was spying on her staff in order to push back against her expected pushback against them. In other words, to control her.

I was aware she said that. Again, you know, my understanding is the only, you know, audits that were going on of any computers were ones that were clearly marked as this is a computer owned by the government subject to audit. So, I can't speak to, you know, what I can't speak to is never in my career did anybody ever approach me and say anything about audits.

Spying on members of Congress? Never. No one ever asked me to do it. No one I know ever told me that they were involved in it. And it's a fairly small place. Right. I'm not saying that... So if a member of a congressional intel oversight committee says, I believe CIA or NSA is spying on my personal communications in an effort to control me, do you think that's a crazy thing to say?

I think it's troubling if any member of Congress believes that. Not only believed it, I think the person believed it, told me in a restaurant. But I said, that's like completely outrageous. And actually, you can't have a democracy under those circumstances. So you should hold a press conference and say, I can't do that. So really, to me, it's unprovable whether or not they were spying on his phone. Maybe he's a nutcase. He's a pretty famous person, but could be a nutcase. But what I was struck by was the fear, like, I can't do that.

And that's, I would say, what you've just told me. That would be, if I was still in government, that's the thing that would trouble me. Yeah. Is that if our relationship with our oversight has reached this sort of a level where they would entertain that type of a... Where CIA is more powerful than the people overseeing CIA. That's not good. I mean, again, in all my interactions when I would go down and testify or provide, you know, background briefings to Congress, it was always with the understanding, you know, that the CIA has an office, you know, that...

deals with collaboration and oversight. It was always like, you've got to make sure everything you say is accurate. If you say something that's not accurate, you've got to come back and explain that you got it wrong, that you submitted something that was, you know, in error. It was always deferential in my level and with what I experienced. But if I had become aware that, you know, a senior senator had said something like that or a congressman at any level,

Yeah, I'd say we definitely have a problem. You know, we need to reestablish trust. However it has to happen. And if somebody had ever told me that we're spying on, you know, congressmen, I wouldn't have followed an order like that. And most of my friends that I know who were there wouldn't have followed an order like that.

I just, I never believed any of this stuff. And then the closer I got to it, the more I thought there's something really wrong here. And that the, almost with that exception, the members of Congress who are the most vocal cheerleaders for the IC are the ones with the most to hide in their personal lives. I've definitely noticed that theme. Definitely. And I feel like there's probably a connection. Does that make sense? Again, I...

I never saw, heard, or even got a whiff of anything like that. Washington does play by some pretty hard rules within the political world. But again, if I'd ever been in a meeting where somebody had said, hey, we're going to dish some dirt on some congressman, it would have been utterly shocking and appalling. Yes. And...

I think, again, most of the employees I know would refuse to carry out an order like that. We would actually think this is some sort of bizarre joke. I just can't see how you would easily be able to do that without other people knowing. It's a very gossipy place, the CIA. It's just – it's so striking to me that –

Members of Congress who represent districts where, just for example, you know, the overwhelming majority in Republican districts, the overwhelming majority of their voters don't want to send another $20 billion to Ukraine, just to give one among many examples. And then they show up, they go into the skiff, they get the briefings, and they're in favor of doing something that their own constituents hate. And so there's a control mechanism in place there, obviously, whether it's

you know, as sinister as, you know, whether it's sinister or not, I don't know. But what is that? Well, I do think, you know, just like any mature bureaucracy, you know, the intel community, any federal agency can make a very good case for why they think something needs to be done. And I mean, a case on its merits, you know, so, you know, Kissinger used to have an old joke that he would get three types of briefings, you know, one is, or three types of options, total nuclear war,

abject surrender, and then something in the middle. That's still a fairly common play across the U.S. government. So it is entirely possible that busy congressmen and senators who have an awful lot of things that they've got to be focused on, they come in to deal with an agency that they have oversight on. Generally speaking, that agency has an information advantage,

over them on, you know, details and can lay out a very good case for what it is they want to do. I'm not saying it's necessarily a wise case, but they can lay out a compelling case. And there is a sense, I did notice in my career, of a deference to, well, these are the experts, you know, they're careerists who've been doing this for all their life, you know, pushing back on that could make, you know, it's a bit of a lonely place to be. So,

I think, you know, in some ways, you know, Senate and House staffs, they don't have a lot of them. You know, they have a lot people think they do. But when you think about all the things that they've got to evaluate, especially when they deal with, you know, complex issues, war and peace, national security issues.

There's an awful lot of deference that does apply to the agencies. When Senator Chuck Schumer, the head Democrat in the Senate, says to Rachel Maddow, man, Trump made a huge mistake messing around with the IC, they'll screw you six ways to Sunday. Yeah, that's a hard one to square. That's a, you know, I remember when that statement was made. And again, you know, wasn't in the part of the CIA that I had any access to, but I

That's the kind of statement that doesn't contribute in any positive way. But does it reflect reality? It certainly didn't reflect a reality that I was a part of. You know, I retired in 2017. Clearly, it's become fairly toxic, you know, in Washington. And, you know, it's not unfair to say that some of that toxicity does, you know, reach into, you know, the government, you know, the federal agencies.

But when people make statements like that, you know, whether it's bravado or, you know, they think it's true, it fuels that mistrust. So one of the things that the Intel community could do to restore trust is declassify things that have no legitimate reason to be secret, like trust.

any files pertaining to the Kennedy assassination from 62 years ago. And yet they are ferocious, the CIA in particular, ferocious opponent. In fact, because I bumped up against it myself, ferocious opponents of declassifying that information. Why do you think that is? So there is a sort of a reflexive

circling of wagons when it comes to secrecy in the IC. I think in the case of the Kennedy assassination and probably things certainly dating back maybe even less than that, there's an overwhelming public benefit to sharing that data.

But in that specific case, it was so long ago, so many books have been written about it. It's a cliche. It's almost a parody at this point. The Kennedy assassination, it's like, if you can't give an inch on that. And by the way, as of two weeks ago, I happen to know, they were still fighting it like ferociously. No, you cannot appoint that person. That person might disclose those files. What? What is that? So-

What I'll say next, I'll say as a person who spent most of my adult life, you know, in the Intel community, I would be very curious as to how somebody would try to justify that. I mean, the only thing that I could think of is that, you know, government files would include theories of a crime or an event that later get to be disproven. So, in the early days of, you know, some kind of an event, you know, you're going to have agencies and parts of your agency generate things. I understand.

But I think American democracy can handle that. Well, it demands it. Who's the president of the United States? Well, I mean, the president has absolute declassification authorities. I'm aware. So people can dislike it. But if the president says, you will declassify everything related to subject X, his declassification authority is as broad and absolute as his pardon power.

Why would Pompeo fight so hard to keep those files secret? I don't, I really don't know. It's a, if the president had said that they wanted something declassified, I don't understand why they would say that, you know, they would push back on it. Do you think CIA had a role in the president's murder in 1963? I personally don't. You know, if I had to guess, you know, could I see a situation where dots didn't get connected? No.

that should have been connected. You know, things dropped off the table. Somebody looked at a piece of information and said, well, that's not really all that important. That said, you know, I have friends of mine who are retired, you know, CIA officers who at least entertain the idea that the agency of 1962, 1963, you know, it's possible. I don't personally see that, but this could all be cleared up if they just put out whatever they have.

Yeah, I mean, it seems very unlikely to me after all these years there could be anything in those files, which are, of course, physical files. Yes, they're all paper. Yeah, of course. You know, really, they're still there sitting in a manila folder, like telling us who the assassin was working for or whatever, telling us the truth. I have a lot of trouble believing they'd still be there if they were ever there.

The only reason that I'm focused on it is because I know for a fact that there are CIA employees. I know this for a fact, dead certain fact. I just was hearing about it, are trying to prevent certain people from getting jobs on the basis of their belief that those people will push for declassification. I think it's crazy. Again, for the people I knew when I was in the agency and the people I know who are still there, yeah.

If I were still in, I would reflect, my reflexive position would be, okay, there's really no reason that something that long ago can't be declassified in toto. What about the 9-11 files? So we're moving on, you know, we're getting close to 25 years later. All the governments in that region are different from what the Saudi government's completely different.

um i don't understand and there are all these theories about what actually happened and it's clear that we don't know the full story whether the full story is sinister or not you know i hope not you know but i don't know you would do a lot to heal american society by putting doubts to rest and if these really are like dangerous conspiracy theories then prove it like why wouldn't they release all those files

Well, I'll go on the record as saying, you know, I believe 9-11 was perpetrated by who we said it was. Yes. And some of those people are still down in Guantanamo Bay waiting for justice. Others are dead. I'm very confident the IC had nothing to do. There was no deep state actors or, you know, putting demolitions in the towers in New York. There really was a plane that hit the Pentagon. I think you could make a good case.

That there's no reason not to declassify most of this stuff. What I would expect, you know, might be troublesome. It's possible that, you know, some of the early documents are wrong, you know, materially wrong. When you're reporting on contemporaneous events, some of your reports will be wrong.

I think people can understand that, okay, this is something that came out, you know, a week after 9-11. It's incorrect. It was proven. It was a theory of the crime that was disproven. I personally believe if it would advance, you know, building more trust with the government and the IC, which I think is absolutely critical to having, you know, effective national security defense, I personally don't think that there's any reason you can't classify most of those things, if not all of them.

I agree with you on all counts. It is critical to national security and defense to have trust between the population and the government and employees to protect it, right? So trust is not just like this thing you wish you had. It's this thing you need in order for the system to continue. So yeah, and if people believe that there wasn't a plane that flew into the Pentagon or that the CIA or Mossad or somebody else other than the 19 hijackers did this, prove them wrong. Like wouldn't that, it would just be good for everybody, would it not? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I remember years ago, actually, you know, some people in Al-Qaeda discussing this, you know, weirdly that, you know, they were upset that people were trying to take their credit from them for, you know, doing what they did on 9-11. Because, you know, for them, it was an important part of their, you know, their credibility with their own folks that they were able to pull this off. So I...

I see no reason that they probably can't. It was five years ago this month that people started to drop dead in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Five years since the beginning of COVID. Tens of millions dead. Societies reordered completely. Economies destroyed. And yet, for some reason, we still don't know answers to the most basic questions. Where did this virus come from?

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and pieced together the story, which is shocking. We are proud to host that documentary here on TCN from December 20th to January 19th. You will see the exclusively here on TCN. Again, it's called Thank You, Dr. Fauci, and it's worth it. Then why the effort, and CIA has, I think it's been, well, it has been documented, participated in this effort to discredit people who ask questions or who have alternate theories? Why not prove them wrong rather than

resort to character assassination, conspiracy theorist, et cetera. So again, you know, when I was in the agency and what me and my colleagues did, we were focused on collecting foreign, actionable foreign intelligence abroad. You know, if somebody on the internet had something to say, you know, that was completely at odds with what we knew to be the truth, you just sort of baked that in to how you did what you did. Yeah.

It's a political question. It's really a White House decision. You know, if the White House had decided, you know what, it's in our national interests to put everything out on the table that we have. You're making a fair point, a true point. And a president can make that happen. Just like a president can pardon anybody, a president can bulk declassify data if they want to. And there's literally nothing the federal workforce or the agencies could do to push back on that.

I'm praying for that to happen because I think it's necessary for healing, sincerely. Too much is classified. Too much is secret. It's unfair on its face, but it's also corrosive of trust, I think. That's my view. Tell us about security clearances. Security clearances, let me just say for context, as someone who lived in D.C., are held by a lot of people who are not federal employees, a lot of contractors, a lot of retired people.

have security clearances and they use those to make money in the private sector or from government working as contractors. And it seems like people leave government service and just continue on with their security clearance, which from my perspective as a U.S. citizen who's paid his taxes for 55 years seems a little unfair. Like why should John Brennan, who's not a federal employee, get to see top secret information, but I can't? Like what? He's not a federal employee. I don't really understand that system.

So, you know, I'll caution this by I'm not an expert on how they do what we call contractor clearances. But, you know, in the years after 9-11, the federal workforce didn't grow as much as the work grew. And so what happened was there was an increasing reliance on private companies to do and to augment the federal intelligence community. Right.

Those companies would have to hire people who would need to get security clearances. And those security clearances have to be the equivalent of the ones that a federal employee had to do the same work. So in many cases, what you had were federal employees who reached the point of retirement, but let's say they're still relatively young, 50, 52, and they go to work for these contracting companies that have contracts back in the government.

And in that case, they need to maintain their clearance and can lawfully retain their clearance because they're working on a government contract through an approved vendor. Now, you probably have a much smaller number of instances where people who don't fit into that category might still be authorized to have access to a security clearance and occasional briefings.

from the government. And what happens, that's again, a very narrow number of folks, usually cabinet secretaries, people who have careers where they're still engaged with, say, foreign policy in the private sector.

And the government deems that it's advantageous to keep these people updated on certain developments. Usually, they don't get access to the same information that an in-service federal employee might get. But they might be given a briefing on, you know, developments in a certain part of the world because they travel there a lot, you know.

They can still be an effective voice for American policy if they're informed. But that's a very tiny... So Tony Blinken, for example, is now the Secretary of State. He will be until January 20th, God willing. And his views are completely at odds with those of the incoming president, completely at odds. And he's working hard to undermine the incoming Trump administration in Ukraine, pushing to get Ukraine and NATO or some insane thing like that.

He plans to retain his security clearance. He's hired a lawyer to argue the case if it comes to that. I happen to know. Why, on what grounds could Tony Blinken, even if he thought he did a good job as Secretary of State, which I want to say, once again, I don't. But like, why does he have a right to a security clearance when he leaves federal service as an appointee? Well, nobody has a right to it. Right. And again, you know, the DOD...

and whatever the home agency is where your clearance is quote being held, have an absolute right to grant, revoke, or not issue a clearance. And certainly a president, if the president decided this person does not need access to classified information, it would be unusual for a president to sort of name somebody like that. But as far as I understand, it's well within his authority to say this person doesn't need a security clearance.

And the person would have to be able to articulate, even if a president wasn't involved in making a decision like that, the person petitioning to get a clearance or to keep it would have to have a reason that's actionable and to the benefit of the government to do so. You know, I'm not aware of the specifics of, you know, a former cabinet-level officer trying to keep a clearance. I would imagine if the new administration said that they didn't approve it or concur—

That it's essentially an unreviewable decision. Probably, being Washington, you could probably find an attorney who would take your case on. But, you know, presumably, even if you had a clearance, they don't have to actually give you any access to anything. Just because you have a clearance, it isn't a badge that allows you to get into a physical place and access data. Somebody still has to proactively access.

check that you have a clearance and then brief you. Right. But the reason I think that it's significant is because it sets up legal penalties for the transfer of classified information to you if you don't possess a clearance. So in other words, if you're Tony Blinken and you leave January 20th, you want to continue to undermine the administration, which he does, you can remain in contact with your former employees at state or throughout the U.S. government, your allies, and receive classified information and no one's breaking the law. But if you don't have a clearance, you're

you know, then you could get John Kirikou for it. So... And again, an administration has broad authorities about who can have a clearance. And just because a former official wants one, they don't have a right to keep it. What do you make of these apparent terror attacks in New Orleans? Well, the attack in New Orleans and then the exploding cyber truck in Las Vegas.

So, you know, it's early. And one of the things I learned, you know, in my time dealing with terrorist actions and in an intel world is, you know, you want to be careful about what you think you believe. You still get the story. What we know so far about New Orleans is it looks like other types of attacks we've seen over the years, sort of somebody becomes self-radicalized.

And then carries out, you know, an extreme act with little preparation time ahead of the actual attack. So often in these type of cases, you know, somebody may have been thinking about doing some violent action. Something happens in their life, they see, think, or believe something, and they simply are triggered. Yeah.

The initial information that I was reading earlier today was that the attack or whatever happened, the explosion in front of Trump Hotel, is not related to or they haven't detected any connections with what happened in New Orleans. Now, I think if I was still in government and two events happened on the same day or within 24 hours of each other,

that has sometimes been the hallmark of an organized terror attack. And as a working theory, it's worthwhile to at least look into it. However, what little we know, and we don't know much about the attacker in Las Vegas, he doesn't seem to be the same political persuasion. Again, we don't know a lot yet of the attacker in New Orleans. Now, you have two possibilities here. One, they're connected, which means that it was an organized effort.

and somebody missed it. Initial indications are that's probably not the case. The other option is that you've got two independent attacks, if this is really an attack, if it's really political in Las Vegas. What that would tend to tell you, and especially when you add in the attack or the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, which was clearly in many ways an act of political terrorism,

Is something changing in the political atmosphere, which is already toxic, that is triggering a certain set of our population to say, you know what, whatever my personal beliefs are, they are so pushed to the edge that at this point I feel I've got to execute or make some kind of a statement, a violent statement that I've been sitting on for quite some period of time. So,

I think it's too early to tell, you know, are we looking at my, you know, is this sort of the new normal where as politics becomes more toxic in America that people decide, you know, to take, you know, take violent action on their own? We do know that violent acts tend to open the door to other violent acts. You know, people who are inclined to do these type of things when they see a violent political act will often, you know, see that as like, well, you know, that person can do it, I can do it.

uh we just simply don't know so there's no indication that you've seen it's i mean because everything you said suggests you you think this is just domestic entirely there's no foreign actor i don't i mean inspired so the guy in new orleans apparently you know was consuming isis type propaganda and you know according to the you know what's in the papers or the you know the news media

had produced a couple of videos en route to the attack site making pro-ISIS statements. So in that case, yes, he's inspired by ISIS, a foreign terrorist group, but it doesn't sound like, you know, he was getting any direction or had any help, which is

its own troubling type of terrorism when they do this on their own and they don't require a conspiracy. It's very hard to catch them. Of course. I mean, there have been an early report, you know, the vehicle involved that come across from Mexico. Yeah. You know, that seems to maybe not be true, but it does bring up an interesting point, which is, and part of the reason I think that had a lot of currency, it's very hard to have an effective counterterrorism policy

if you don't have border control. Because terrorism is about people. It's people who carry it out. You know, in the last four years, we've had something like 9 million people show up at our borders unannounced and have been allowed to come in and stay. 9 million people, if you aggregate it out on a monthly basis, is one U.S. Marine Corps worth of people every single month for four years. It's impossible to vet or to know anything meaningful

about a Marine Corps' worth of people coming into this country every month for four years. As a former intelligence official myself, somebody responsible for counterterrorism operations and intel, if somebody had told me, "Well, we need you to guarantee that you've got a screening process where we could look at who these people are so we know who we're letting in," that's impossible. You don't even know what these people's real names are. You don't know anything about their backgrounds.

It's an enormous black hole of information that there's no easy solution. If you're not going to have order controls that are effective, it's very hard to have an effective CT policy. Counterterrorism policy. Counterterrorism. So, you know, you left in 2017, I think you said. I did. But, you know, your friends who stayed who were in counterterrorism, I mean, they must have looked on with horror at this.

I think there have been, you know, I've never heard anybody tell me that if you don't have control of your borders, that you can have good counterterrorism policy. In fact, I remember when I was in service, you know, like many of us, I had a chance to actually talk to people who'd been terrorists, you know, honest to goodness, you know, gun carrying terrorists. And you ask them sort of, okay, of all the things that governments do that make it hard for you to do what you do as a bad guy,

What are some of those things? The top two were, the number one was getting across borders where they ask a lot of questions. They said that's an extremely tough thing to get around. You know, it's the single easiest thing a government can do to isolate itself from at least a big element of terrorism, which is transnational terrorism. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a counterterrorism official, but that was obvious to me. How could...

Biden administration officials who abetted this not know that. I can't think of any credible counterterrorism official I know who, if asked the question, can you guarantee that you're able to validate up to 200,000 people a month who are coming through our border? That's not possible. It's simply impossible to know even what their real names are. Wow.

So, I think the implication is that you would not be surprised if we see acts of terrorism in this country accelerate. No. I mean, without effective border controls and in a world where America has legitimate enemies. It does. People may say, well, we shouldn't have made that person or that country an enemy, but we live with the reality that we have. It's a needless and avoidable risk.

that we've taken that we could easily do something to prevent and tighten that up very quickly. No, it's an act of hostility toward the United States, I would say, to allow that. What are the things that we've done that have engendered hostility? So, there's two ways that you can engender hostility. One, carrying out something that's important to you that in the course of events, you have to impose your will on a foreign country or a foreign organization.

because it's in your legitimate interests. - And people don't like it, yeah. - And they don't like it. And that's an awful lot of this. In other cases, some of the long occupations that the United States has, some of its foreign policy decisions, which may or may not be controversial with the American people, which maybe there's no consensus on, will tend to generate ill will with a certain percentage of the world's population.

So when you were in all these countries, and I love how you refer to the region, not the country, but quite a few countries, it sounds like, over 28 years, carrying out tasks that you were asked to carry out. Were you struck when you came home about how little your fellow Americans knew about how we were projecting power abroad? So, you know, the thing about narrative is that the people who tend to buy the narrative the most are your own people.

And so, it's easy as an American not to really understand how you are perceived in another country. And, you know, part of what I liked about being in the CIA was that it gave you an opportunity to be able to go out and find out what are these countries and

interest groups really think about us. Yes, exactly. And, you know, often, you know, people didn't want to hear what you had to say because, you know, you want to believe that, okay, this policy that we're pursuing is either at least, if not popular with country X, is at least accepted by its leadership. And in many cases, that's simply not true. Now, many times these countries were either powerless to do anything about it. You know, it was...

something they disliked, but it wasn't going to have a negative impact, meaningful impact on their relationship with the United States. But generally speaking, I would say that Americans don't have a great understanding of how the rest of the world works. I mean, we're a huge country. You know, you don't have to engage with foreigners a lot. You don't have to, I mean, you can travel, but it's touristic. If you don't speak the language, there's a lot of things you don't pick up.

Part of what and why having a security service or an intel service is critical, and frankly, also a foreign service, a State Department that's good at its job, is you need people who know what the reality on the ground is in these countries, so that despite whatever the popular narrative is, that at least the American leadership is informed. Here's what these guys really think about Subject X. And if we pursue Subject X further, it's likely to have results,

that we can't stop or we're going to have to stop at an elevated cost to ourselves and our own interests. But you would bring that information back and you would get supervisors who just weren't, not that interested in hearing it. So I would say generally within the CIA, you know, you got a fair hearing about what it is you collected. Now, whether or not the policymakers...

who consume the information the CIA produces, whether or not they believe it, or they believe it's significant, or they believe it's outweighed or not outweighed by other information they have access to, that was really up to them. I'd say something that has changed in the last 20 years that makes this much harder is the rise of instantaneous information through the internet, you know, the handheld device, you know, that everybody's got.

In the past, the security services, I think even globally, the IC in the United States, if they didn't have a monopoly on foreign information, they certainly had a large, hard-to-challenge degree of access that nobody else did.

What often I think happens now, and we've seen glimpses of this, you know, even come out in the media, is you have senior leaders of countries, senior leaders in the U.S., who, yes, they will consume that president's daily brief that's produced every morning. But they've also got contacts around the world who send them an email or send them a video. That's right. And I remember several bizarre instances in the early days of the Ukraine war where

where people were commenting on videos purportedly coming out of Ukraine that were actually clips from video games. Yes. And, you know, in some cases, these were, you know, senior people or senior former people who just didn't realize that, you know, this wasn't what it purported to be. And now that you've got... Well, they're lying. I mean, I don't understand. So, Russia has 100 million more people than Ukraine and much deeper industrial capacity. Right.

And nationalism, which actually matters in war. And so, like, there was never a chance, I think, any objective person would say that Ukraine was going to, like, crush Russia. I just don't think it was going to happen, and it hasn't happened. But you saw all these intel-adjacent people or members of Congress who've been briefed, you know, repeatedly by the IC say, you know, tell you that with a straight face. And so, like, where's the breakdown here?

in information there. Members of Congress are getting honest briefings. They're going to have a clearer sense of the reality than they seem to have. Like, what is that? So, you know, I think, I mean, Ukraine's instructive on a couple of levels. You know, one, if you think the 2003 invasion of Iraq was mishandled by the American intel community, and it was, the information on that

Think about being the intelligence guys who told Putin that it would be a walkover to get into Ukraine, because all indications are he was told we'll be in Kiev in a week and we will be able to, within a few months, be able to reimpose some type of a government in this country that's more to our liking.

And clearly, you know, the Ukrainians who have their own nationalism, and it's been, I think, deepened by, you know, the violence of this war. I mean, they've really pushed back, and it's bizarrely, Vladimir Putin has helped create more of a Ukrainian national identity than almost any other Ukrainian politician's ever done. People can unite against a common foe. You know, as to the long-term consequences. Can I say? Sure. But it's not, I think what you said is fair.

But it's only one of the intel failures. If you're the Biden administration and you send your vice president over to Europe to encourage in public Zelensky to join NATO, what happened to Bill Burns, who wrote the famous memo, who now runs CIA, said, if you do this, Russia will go to war. I mean, it's existential for them. You can't put NATO on their borders.

Where is the intel briefer who puts that in the PDB? If you do this, you should know there's a non-zero risk of nuclear war. Where was that guy? And we certainly just don't know because currently I assume the current administration is not interested in providing what they call a track B analysis, an alternate analysis. How about casualty numbers? I can't find a member of Congress, most of whom probably don't want to know.

But just give a straight answer. How many Ukrainians have died? Oh, we don't know that. Really? You get these briefs all the time in your little skiffs going through your little bullshit kabuki and you can't tell me how many Ukrainians have died? You sent them to your desk with this money and you can't tell me how many died? No, no one's ever mentioned that. Like, what is that?

yeah i mean it's clearly a knowable fact yeah well yeah and you know whether or not you know they were briefed on it you know they chose not to talk about it or where they've never been briefed on it i i personally don't know i mean i i think based on public comments from the incoming administration i think they've got a very different plan about how to try to bring this

terrible, horrible conflict to some sort of a resolution? I sure hope so. I, you know, I hope so. But I just think as you're prosecuting the war and paying for the war and your weapons and your advisors are making the war possible, whatever you think about the morality of the war or its cause or whatever, but you're definitely driving the war

one side of it. Don't you have an obligation to know how many of these people are dying? Like, I just don't understand that. I mean, I can only say that were I advising somebody who was on the oversight, I would say that you have a very broad writ to be able to ask anything that you want to ask. And I would think that nobody in the IC, if asked, would say anything to them other than, okay, here's what we know. Now, maybe they don't know, or maybe they haven't gone out and collected it.

But in the case of casualties in Ukraine, I'd be surprised if a congressman really wanted to know that, that they couldn't get that answer or force the system to give it to them. And if the system didn't, then that's a problem. That's a problem. I just would think that would be like one of those baseline numbers, like one of those Wikipedia numbers. It's just like these are like facts that you should know, like what are the casualty numbers? And by the way –

Everyone has an incentive to lie about them always in every conflict, and both sides are lying about them. I get that. But my impression was the intel agencies are supposed to be like purveyors of reliable information. Again, I would imagine that they must have a pretty darn good idea. Do you know what those numbers are? I've heard various ones. I have too. So, you know, I've heard on the very low side, I've heard something like 50,000 Ukrainian dead. I don't believe that one. I think it's probably more like...

120 to 150 dead. I think Russian, maybe half again that, if not double. I think one of the things that you see when you go to Ukraine is an astounding number of people with traumatic amputations and grievous injuries. And all these are indicators of just how bad this conflict really is and how it's ground up so many young lives. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I agree with that. Is the President's Daily Brief written in a way to influence the president one way or the other? It's not supposed to be. And it's supposed to be the job of whoever is the director of national intelligence to, you know, to the degree, you know, humanly possible to not put a heavy editorial slant on it. You know, whether they achieve that in everything.

You know, it's a human enterprise. I'm sure there are instances when it doesn't. But maybe that's why they don't want Tulsi Gabbard in there. I think there seem to be a lot of reasons why they, you know, they're uncomfortable with somebody who doesn't accept the foreign policy consensus. And, you know, since I wrote that article endorsing her, you know, I've had people I know, people I like, you know, say that, you know, why, you know, why her? And, you know,

I've had a lot more actually also reach out and say, we agree with you. You know, somebody who's going to be skeptical and challenge the assumptions that we, you know, we far or were too easily willing to continue to traffic in. You know, it's, we can afford to have a couple of skeptics around. How many moments during your 28-year career did you have moral qualms with what you were asked to do? I did not have a moral qualm with anything that I was asked to do.

You know, some of the things you get asked to do are hard. Oh, yeah. You know, probably, you know, I'd say in a war situation, and I'll expand this beyond myself, you could find yourself in situations where, you know, you might be supporting one side or another in a conflict, and it becomes the policy of your country that it's no longer going to support either side, or it's going to withdraw support.

That can be a very bad thing to experience where you've got to deliver a message that says, I know we were supporting you before and we've been doing that for some time. Priorities have changed and we're not going to support you. Now, that's completely within the lawful authority of the director of the CIA, the National Security Council, and the president. It doesn't make it easy to do that, right?

But did I have, you know, you know, was ever asked to do anything where I said, you know, that's completely outrageous or immoral? No, but, you know, maybe they save those questions for somebody else. But, you know, in my case, you know, I took a pretty aggressive view towards what America's role in the world should be. You know, like a lot of other folks, you know, who went to war zones, you know, now we don't equate what we do to what combat soldiers do.

But, you know, you've got to make decisions sometimes that affect life and death. I think the first casualty in the war in Afghanistan was a CIA officer. It was. Mike Spann. Mike Spann, who was killed, you know, early on. So, yes. Did you know him? I did not. I did not. I knew, you know, other members of his team. And I remember the night when he was killed in Kalajangi Prison, you know, when a prisoner riot happened. Yeah, it's a job that has elevated risk, especially if you are overseas, you're in conflict zones, etc.

You know, sometimes, you know, it's hostile action. Sometimes it's bad luck. You know, you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know, something falls out of the sky and it gets too close to you and you're, you know, you're injured or killed. But it was a great career, you know, for a young person who's interested in the world, who, you know, sort of wants to challenge themselves and is willing to make a sacrifice. You know, if you can keep your ethics while you're doing it, you know, there's nothing else like it in the world, in my experience. I believe that. A lot of divorce happens.

I've known a lot of case officers who are almost all divorced. Those type of careers, sort of like some of the careers— Is that a fair thing to— It's—and, you know, it's heavily skewed towards, you know, case officers and people who have multiple assignments overseas. Yeah, yeah. I'm not talking about the analysts at home. Yeah. I'd say, you know, similar to, you know, the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, which are, you know, Delta Force, Navy SEALs,

Yeah, you have enormous stresses on families. To do this type of job and to really love it and to want to do it, you've really got to be willing to sacrifice. And that's something that they don't, they will tell you this when you first join. You know, what's the old joke? What do young people really know about certain things? You know, and as you matriculate through your career, you realize that, okay, you're going to need to give this up and this thing might be important to you personally. Right.

You're maybe you're not going to go to that assignment that you wanted to go to because they're redirecting you to some other crisis that, you know, you were never interested in having anything to do with. But you you join to serve at the leisure of your directors and your bosses. And I in my case, I never turned down an assignment, you know, even though, you know, I remember I tallied it up once of all the places I ever went. I never actually asked to go to any of them.

I was just told, like, we know you put down you wanted to go to some nice place in Europe. Somebody will just tell you, well— Back to Sudan. Back to wherever you're going again. What's the worst post you had? So, you know, Sudan and Africa was pretty dicey and a pretty interesting place in the early 90s. You know, there's no cell phones. It's, you know—

It was a hotbed of bad guy terrorism back in those days. Osama bin Laden was literally driving around Khartoum in a Toyota Hilux pickup truck. The government of Sudan was highly radicalized and had literally an open door policy towards almost every bad guy organization on planet Earth, which led to some very peculiar situations where they would

I remember at one point they had a meeting at the Khartoum Hilton Hotel, which is near the Nile River. And it was literally a conference for every jihadist group on planet Earth. So the jihadis prefer Hilton? Is that what you're saying? You know, it seems, you know, they had good discounts. They got the point. They had, you know, and if you're going to have non-alcoholic drinks, you know, super sugary, they had some pretty nice offerings. Yeah.

But, you know, it was a different world on terrorism prior to 9-11. I mean, the Sudanese government in those days, quite literally, and this is not an exaggeration, advertised a conference. I think it was in December of 1993. Come to Khartoum. We're going to be hosting everybody at the Khartoum Hilton. Bring, if you want to bring Hamas, bring Hezbollah, bring Islamic Jihad, bring the IRGC, bring...

far flung terrorists, other groups that, you know, almost no one else has ever heard of. And these people showed up for two days, you know, to talk about, you know, sort of the unfair American hegemony that, you know, they felt had been imposed upon the world. Did you go to the conference?

I did. So... What was... It was... What'd you put on your name badge? I should have put like Swiss delegation or something, but I actually, I remember I was sitting next to... Again, the government at the time in Sudan was proud of this. They thought it was important. It was their way to establish a role for themselves. And...

I was a young guy, I was like 26 years old, and I wound up in this conference hall where the opening chant is, the army of the prophet is against the Jew. So that goes on for a couple of minutes to get the crowd going. And again, I'm there not to advocate for what these people do. I'm there to try to figure out who they are and what they're up to. And if they want to invite me to their conference,

extremist event because they're proud. Why would they invite a lot of CIA officers? I don't think, we didn't put that on our name card, but it was, they were okay with foreign embassies that were accredited to their country showing up. And so I remember I was seated- You went as a U.S. embassy employee. I was the only U.S. embassy person dumb enough to go to this thing. And the guy sitting beside me was the Swiss charge. And-

Very nice guy. Chargé d'affaires. Chargé d'affaires. Number two guy in the Swiss embassy. And Switzerland, because of the Red Cross, had a fairly big presence there. And when this number starts with the opening chant, he and I had been sort of small talking, and he just said, I'll never forget this. I'm sorry, my dear boy. I hope you will understand. I'm going to go away from you now. I was like, that's all right, you know.

And that was because, you know, it was like, you know, death to America was always the second chant. Yeah. After that.

Again, the peculiar thing about it was, despite all that hostility, you'd actually get Sudanese, who are congenitally very friendly people, even their kind of extremist government, they'd come up and ask you afterwards, like, you know, during a break, are you having an okay time? Are you getting, you know, a cool drink? You know, it's a little hot, even though it's December. I'm like, I'm good. So...

It was a very different world on terrorism. These groups could operate fairly openly, and there just wasn't a Western response like there was after 9-11. And I know I've had friends of mine tell me, like, that can't possibly be a true story. I'm like, you can look it up on the internet. I mean, not what I just said, but that they actually had a conference like this. They had even Sunni and Shia groups at the same time.

At the same thing, same event. Ecumenical terrorist group. It was the most ecumenical group of bad guys you'd ever meet. So what's the story with the drones over the United States? In December, there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unconfirmed but citizen reports of drones over New York, New Jersey, Mid-Atlantic, Pennsylvania, at night with lights. Yep. So why would drones be flying with lights at night? So I think this is a... I think...

From what I've looked into and what I've talked to people who I think know something about this, that there's no foreign threat here. This isn't any kind of hostile action. But it absolutely points out some longer, some immediate problems that the United States has. Can we begin with what it was? So what it appears to be is, you know, people were saying that I'm seeing what I believe to be a drone in the sky in the evening hours. Now, what?

What it appears to have been going on is there was some fair amount of misidentification of, you know, manned aircraft or other things that people would report, hey, I think this is a drone. In other cases, you know, the Federal Aviation Administration, which controls the U.S. airspace, had in the last year, I believe, changed the rules that said you could now operate a drone at night under certain conditions if you put lights on it.

So, it appears that at least some of what people were seeing were people who were lawfully accessing the airspace with their private drone, most of the time are probably hobbyist drones, that people are kind of seeing things up in the sky that they wouldn't have seen before. What was really peculiar about this was the sort of fumbled response from the national... Wait, so you're saying it was nothing?

I believe, and I have no evidence that this was an Iranian mothership, that there were some kind of government, sensitive government operation or testing. I mean, the government has plenty of other places to test drones. And if you're going to test out military drones doing sensitive missions, you're not going to bother to put lights on them. Well, of course. And in Ukraine, where they've been using literally a million drones a year.

Nobody puts lights on their drones, so if you're a hostile actor, you don't do that. Of course not. But what this has pointed out is there's really not a unified plan in the United States. Well, right. And the more paranoid among us, like me, might say that not all unified plans are great. But can we just go back to just the cause? Sure, of course. So you think...

Every, you know, the scores, hundreds of videos of lighted drones or things, lights in the sky at low altitude hovering, those were all hobbyist drones with lights on them. I mean, some of them could be, you know, there are in the commercial drone world, there are drones that are, you know, that people use for commercial purposes, most of photography, you know.

I would say that I have become suspicious over the last couple of years in believing things that I see on videos. Oh, for sure. Just because so many of them are, you know, you don't know the Provence of them. I'm in the news business. I can promise you suspicion is warranted. However, there's so many of them that I'm just interested. I mean, I don't know what they were, but...

that these were hobbyist drones or misidentification of other types of aircraft. Planes. Planes, you know. Helicopters. You know, something else that's authorized to be there that's flying. But boy, the government could have really made this much easier on everybody if they just said, we're going to take three simple, easy steps to resolve this. You know, one will explain who's actually responsible for the airspace because there really isn't a

or an easy to understand plan on that too. They could put up a few government drones of their own to go look and try to see who's up there. Third, they have plenty of detection gear that you could use in a civilian area to determine if there's actually a drone up there because drones have to have a radio connection between the operator and the person flying it. It's understandable and well-known what those frequencies are.

That type of equipment is available to the government. They could have within a few days. It's available to the civilian. And it's available to civilians. And, you know, the government could have easily gotten, you know, made people, could have calmed the situation down. But they didn't. And it went on for over a month. And the Internet was just crowded with these videos. Yep. Hysteria was rising. And not only did the government not make, at all levels, the state of New Jersey, state of New York,

And then of course the Biden administration made no effort to calm people down at all and said contradictory, weird things, some of which were clearly untrue, but it was unclear what was true. I mean, it just seemed like if you wanted to calm people down, it's the opposite of what you would have done. I got the sense that they just didn't take people's concerns seriously. Again, but I work in the drone industry. Yes. And so, you know, from everybody I've talked to who I think is, you know, credible and thoughtful on this...

None of them believed that this was some sort of nefarious thing. That it was a government operation. That it was like, you know, that they were looking... What was one of the stories I heard? That they were looking for, you know, lost nuclear materials in Jersey. You know, as a friend of mine said, how could you tell, you know, with everything else in Jersey, you know... Fair question. But that's not really how you would look for lost nuclear material anyway. And I think what happens in the absence of the government providing some kind of an answer...

The void has to be filled by something. I'm willing to – I mean, I don't know the answer, as I've said, but I'm certainly willing to believe everything that you have said. What I am hung up on is the government response because at best it betrays – at worst it betrays some sort of sinister plan to make people more paranoid, which is not inconceivable. But at best, it suggests that it just don't care at all what the public thinks about anything.

And that's a very bad attitude that should be punishable by jail time. In my opinion, that's anti-democratic. Like, you don't care? I'll put it this way. You know, I and other folks I know in that industry are all of a single mind that they could, you could easily know what this was and you can make, you know, definitive statements about it with a little bit of investigation. I think the, I think they just didn't take the concern seriously enough.

And when they did try to look into how to do this, they realized that they have a mishmash of authorities. So just as a very simple one, people don't realize that there's no legal authority to knock a drone out of the sky.

outside of a very few narrow use cases that only the government has and not all the government only but i understand like as a bird hunter i mean i would if i would immediately shoot a drone down over my house i wouldn't even think about it why did nobody do that what a nation of and maybe it was because you know this maybe that's why that we had the story in new jersey and not texas uh that's right no that's a fair point i you know i i

I remember when I understood that there really is no authority to knock a drone out of the sky. And in fact, if someone was to shotgun somebody's drone out of the sky, the FAA on paper could actually charge you with literally interfering with an aircraft in flight, which is a rule that was designed to keep manned aircraft and crewed aircraft safe.

But that law still covers, you know, anything that flies. And so, you know, you are at some legal jeopardy, you know, if the government chose to prosecute a person for, you know, taking your AR-15 and, you know, knocking a drone out. That'd be a very good shot. That would be a very good shot. Maybe they have the lights on. It makes it a little bit... Yeah, but with a tightly choked 28 gauge, you could definitely bring it down. Yeah.

So I was not surprised when some idiot member of Congress claimed it was from the Iranian mothership because they want a war with Iran because they're paid to want a war with Iran. This is my view. And they blame everything on Iran, which clearly doesn't want a war with the United States, but whatever. But it does raise the question, could a hostile nation park a ship offshore and attack us with drones? Yes, they could. There's currently very little defense in the United States against a deliberate use of drones.

against any major target. And that's, you know, so we, you know, take a look at the situation in Ukraine where they've now literally, I think last year, Ukraine used 1.4 million drones.

That's the population, that's almost the population I think of like San Antonio, Texas. One drone per person. But they used small attack drones, 1.4 million of them. That's not including the Russians. When you say attack drones, what are those drones capable of doing? What do they do? So those drones would be about as big as, you know, two big boilers that you might have in your house. Could carry, you know, two, maybe two, three pounds of explosives per person.

fly anywhere from 8 to 15, 20 kilometers, 11 to 15 miles, something like that, and be delivered precisely within inches of what you're trying to hit. So if you were to look at some of these Ukraine war videos where people are literally driving drones through the hatch of a tank from miles away, that's absolutely happening right now.

In addition to that, you know, people have developed drones that can fly a thousand kilometers and hit a target within inches. Ukrainians have actually taken out very expensive, hard-to-replace Russian strategic bombers that were on an airfield that would be very hard to hit in flight. But they decided, you know what, we're not going to wait for that airplane to go into flight. We're going to hit it on the ground where it's extremely vulnerable.

That could easily happen in the United States. There is no comprehensive protection against small drones. The U.S. Air Defense was created around the concept that we're trying to stop either scud missile type threats or manned aircraft. Yes.

I'll give you a good, you know, fairly tight scenario. So the Patriot missile, which is, you know, America's preeminent, you know, air defense system that's deployed all over the world, it's got something like 36 missiles in it. It costs quite a bit of money to have one of those systems. You can quite literally overwhelm all of that, all of its defensive systems with 30 or 40 cheap drones. It would cost you less than $100,000.

And the operators of that defensive system would have to expend all of their missiles because they'd see this threat coming and they'd shoot at least one rocket per target. And then they're down to zero. That's sort of kind of what you've been seeing on the Red Sea recently. Yes. Between the U.S. Navy and the Houthi militant movement, where the U.S. is spending millions of dollars per missile strike to take out a $10,000 drone. Right.

You know, the math is unsustainable. And so the U.S., like most countries in the West, are very vulnerable to this issue right now. I mean, when air power is no longer tied to airfields and it doesn't need a pilot, you know, you've democratized air power in a way that's very discomforting to Americans.

I mean, I assume there are drones with like big payload capacities now. There are. So, you know, when you think about, you know, sort of the drones of the global war on terrorism, the Predators, the Reapers. Yeah, yeah. These are proper aircraft. You know, they're large, but they're also very easily seen on radar and they're expensive. They can cost, you know, tens of millions of dollars to some of them. You know, some of the big surveillance drones are $100 million worth of electronics and equipment.

But we've reached a world where, I mean, again, back to the Ukrainians, you know, they've been able to knock out, you know, five, you know, $2 million, $3 million tanks with $1,000 drones because of the precision and the lack of defense that, you know, often the Russians have. And then you add into, you know, robotic, what we call military robotics, drones at sea.

Where, you know, it's increasingly possible, and the Ukrainians have done this as well, to use a $250,000 drone boat to sink a 50 or 60 or $100 million ship. Ukrainians have physically been able to do that on the Black Sea. You know, for a country like the United States, which really relies on a blue water navy, right?

You know, we are very likely to face opponents who will be able to put up hundreds, if not thousands of drones at a time that would easily overwhelm, you know, the defense systems we've got. So if you ever go online and look at, I would call something called Chinese drone shows. This is where, you know, they'll have a Chinese company at some event in China or around the world where they sort of rent out this capability and

where they've got a dragon flying in the air. And maybe it's 4,000 drones or 5,000 drones that they've got up in the air that they are controlling all at one time in some of these bigger shows. Four or 5,000 flying devices. I've seen them. What if they put a pound of explosive on each one of them and then fire them over a city or fired them at, you know, a sensitive military facility? That's well within reality, and it's only going to get more acute in the coming years.

And right now, you know, the United States is still, despite some efforts, you know, that I'll give them some credit for on the Biden administration to try to look at this, we're woefully behind. Ukraine has got a far more sophisticated drone program than the U.S. does right now. And so does Russia. I mean, that just seems like criminal negligence. You know, I think a lot of it was, you know, the global war on terrorism favored very large aircraft, right?

And so small drones were not really a thing for the U.S. military? They were first used in warfare, I think, during that Iraq and Afghanistan. Is that not right? So at, you know, at scale, small drones, no. So, I mean, they just were not, you know, they weren't battlefield significant for quite a period of time. But I'll, you know, a quick fact, you know, I looked this up, up until about two years ago, I think 18 months ago,

No U.S. servicemen, no army, nobody in the army had been killed by an enemy airstrike since Korea. When that drone strike took place on the Jordanian-Syrian border against U.S. military base that I think killed four or six U.S. servicemen, it's the first time U.S. servicemen, army folks, had been killed by hostile air action in decades.

70 years. 70 years. So, I mean, the U.S., which has long relied on the fact that we completely dominate the airspace, any future Marine or Army operation will have to factor in that there are cheap, large numbers of surveillance and strike aircraft that the enemy have access to that are

really change the calculus on how much risk we're taking? Are micro drones likely to play a role, tiny swarms of, large swarms of tiny drones likely to play a role in future warfare?

Absolutely. I mean, I would define tiny as probably, you know, something that can carry about a pound of explosives. You know, there's really two things you do with the drone. One, you use it for surveillance. Yes. So you know where the enemy is. Two, you use it as a weapon. And absolutely, there's no technical reason that in the next five or seven years that an average military unit might carry 10 or 15 small drones on it.

that don't cost an awful lot of money, but can go up and search out enemy vehicles, locations, fortifications, and strike them. I would also suggest that probably on a civilian level, and this is my speculation, within 10 to 15 years, your first engagement with law enforcement or the traffic stop will be with a drone. That, you know, instead of being pulled over by a cop who gets out and comes up and talks to you, that I suspect that

That it will be every cop car, every police car will actually have a small drone in it that they will be able to sort of send forward once they've got you at a stop. They'll have a camera in there, the ability to talk to you through it, and that will be your encounter with law enforcement. And you already see that in some ways with, you know, cops using small drones to go into tactical situations and take a look around before sending an officer in.

Yeah. I want to just give them nuclear weapons, you know, I mean, right. So people are not thinking through the effect. I mean, when DOD started transferring hardware to police departments, I'm as pro cop as anybody, but you could sort of see the end of civil liberties right there. Yeah. I mean, on this one, you know, I mean, I think you're talking about the, I think it was at the end of maybe the Bush administration where there was a lot of former mill kit. Oh, of course. That was made available. Yeah. I mean,

Yeah, I mean, in this case, you know, I was just thinking a civilian version of a police drone. I mean, your civil liberties question, though, is appropriate because what drones will allow someone to do is at extremely low cost. Yes. To put complete blanket surveillance over any city they want to. Well, sure. This is why they don't care. So, to answer your question or my question or both of our questions, like, why didn't they care that people were afraid of...

you know in the run-up to christmas in a sacred time like people are anxious about these lights in the sky and no one in the government feels like i need to calm people down and you know explain this yeah because they they're looking at a future where there's complete control of the population through technology that's exactly they don't have to care and on this you know when people talk about you know civil liberties concerned this is an actual one that i think

Technologically, we're already there. They could do it if they wanted to. Any country could. You could put a grid of drones over a major city and do two things. You could cover almost every square foot that's available from line of sight, and you could record and keep and store all that data for all time. There is no practical reason, technical barrier, to put a drone up over...

let's say, you know, downtown Chicago, and keep a drone on station there day in and day out for years and constantly build a body of video data on that neighborhood that could be stored for all time and would be available to the government or whoever has access to it. That's something that probably really does need to be addressed at some point. Sure. I mean, it may sooner rather than later happen.

There may come a point where we sort of... I mean, I hate crime, and I think criminals should be punished. But we may sort of look back wistfully at a time when people were able to commit crimes because it's not possible anymore. Only the government can commit crimes. Sorry to get dark on you. No, it's all right. Yeah, I mean, you can build a time machine in the sky with these systems. And you can store the data because it's super cheap to store data now. We're getting cheaper all the time. Well, you know, imagine, for example...

You have a confirmation hearing 25 years from now. And for 15 of those 20 years, we've been able to keep drones up over a city. And we've got 15 years of data, you know, of people who were just going about their daily lives, who later go on to, you know, go into politics. Who has access to that data? This is why I quit drinking. That's why I never started. Smart. Yeah.

Is anybody, I mean, you're obviously on the drone side of it. Do you work in the drone industry? But is anybody on the regulatory side thinking about how to balance this technology and its amazing possibilities with people's right to be human and have civil liberties? Not, you know, there's a few sort of lonely voices out there that are trying to get some attention on this issue. But there and there are some, you know,

some legal mind starting to think about it. But, you know, when you think about privacy and, you know, privacy in public places, which is what kind of we're talking about with drone data, the regulation is not there yet. You know, personally, I would see that, you know, at minimum, you would want some type of a warrant. So even if you had drones up over, you know, an area, let's say a high crime area, at some point, you know, as you store that data and people want to reaccess it who are in government,

They should get some type of a court order to allow them to go into that sort of data. FISA court. Let me laugh bitterly. Maybe we can have a different court than FISA court. Yeah, maybe a different court. And presumably, I mean, you know, taking video from the sky is not the only thing they could do. I mean, they could do thermal imaging. I'm sure there's all kinds of audio recording they could do.

I mean, you can collect cell phone information, obviously from the sky, but you can do that from the ground as well. I mean, frankly, if you're a government, say in any country, if you want to, you can access your own telephone networks, your own country's telephone systems. The big privacy change on drones is simply being able to see privacy or pattern of life information online.

and people going about their daily lives in all aspects when they're out of doors. And you can tell when they go home, you can tell when they go to work, you can tell where they are, you can tell as they move around the city. And again, you can store all that data. So when they tell us, when the Biden administration tells us they know nothing about the guy who shot Trump at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July, I'm just going to be skeptical right there. When that happened-

What I couldn't understand, and I still don't understand. You're so diplomatic. You should be in the CIA. What I couldn't understand is, with all the drone tech available, why doesn't the Secret Service, for all of its protectees, put a small number of drones over all these events?

You know, you can put it up hours earlier, you know, just to pick up pattern of life and determine, you know, are there things that are going on right now that would... Guys on roofs with rifles and stuff. You would think, yes. I mean, that's... Man with range finder at magnetometer. That, you know, that I have to say was among one of the more disturbing stories that I've ever watched unfold, you know, even as a private citizen. What was that?

Systemic incompetence. The guy is 22 or whatever, and he has no social media profile? I mean, I know less about his backstory, but... But we know nothing about him, his motive, nothing? Yeah, I'd say... If you were covering this, you're a case officer in another... Country. Yeah, country, but not Sudan, okay? But like...

Some other place. Yeah, a more developed country with technology and a functioning government. And they told you that story. Head of state or the aspiring, the challenger to the head of state just gets shot. Yep. And we killed the perp. But we don't know anything about him. We don't know why he did it. There's no story whatsoever that would explain this. There are no relevant facts about the guy. What would your assessment be? You go back to your superiors, you'd say what?

They'd probably ask me to try harder if I came up with that answer. But that would raise suspicions about the authorities telling you that, correct? It would make you think that, like, you know, there's really—this really can't be your best effort. Yeah, there's something going on. Like what? I mean, you know, like a lot of things that happen, you know, things get memory-holed or, you know, forgotten about. Again, you know, I'm not a protective services guy, but just the—

You know, it was one of those stories that every piece of new information you get just makes it worse and worse. You know, just...

About the failures, intentional or not, I'm not sure it matters, of federal protective services to protect Trump. But I'm talking about the guy, the perpetrator, the man with the rifle who shot in the head. Yeah. And the fact that we know, I mean, you spent your entire life gathering information on people. That was your job, right? Gather information. You would think you could get more, you think you could know quite a bit about a person.

Especially a young person. You can, right? Yeah. I mean, I haven't looked into his background. No, no, not him specifically, but... Yes, there's anybody born since 2000, you know, certainly has, you know, with the rarest of exceptions, you know, they've got some sort of footprint online. You know, they've got a search history. They've got, you know, telephone usage. It's very hard to not leave what they call digital dust behind.

in your wake about who you are and where you've been and what you've done. I would think in a case where, you know, a significant crime happens, then it would be in the interest of the government to collect and make that known, you know, to somebody. And in a case where they don't think there's an ongoing threat, then I would think that there is, you know, the bias should be to talk about what they know. That's what should happen. What does it make you think that they haven't done that? What's the conclusion?

I don't have a great conclusion on that one. I mean, is that one of the weirdest things you've seen in a while? I would say that if I came back to my bosses and I was overseas, they would literally tell me, try harder. You can clearly get more information than this. Well, I hope somebody... I hope somebody tries harder. I appreciate you taking all this time. A pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

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