The CIA in the 21st Century

Danny Crichton:

Tim, thanks so much for joining us.

Tim Weiner:

My pleasure.

Danny Crichton:

You've been a lifelong author, you've published multiple books, but I want to start with a book that I read in high school, believe it or not, back in 2000, published a book called Legacy of Ashes. Many of our listeners are young founders in the tech industry who may not even been alive when this was published, but this was a really, really important time in the intelligence community. 9/11 Commission was underway. You had Thomas Keene, Bob Carey co-chairing this committee, trying to investigate what happened in 9/11, why was the intelligence missed?

You had the Iraq War debacle going on from 2003 to 2005, and so you had sort of the first book that came out back in January, 2006 that really opened up the dialogue here and really explored the entire history, all the way from the OSS in 1945 onwards with Wild Bill Donovan, into kind of the histories of the '60s, '70s and a lot of the scandals and crises that kind of befell CIA and the classified and confidential operations they were undertaking. Take us back to that era. Why was that the topic you chose? What was your exploration there? And then we'll project forward to the new book.

Tim Weiner:

Well, Danny, I first set foot in the CIA early in 1988. I was a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the way I got my foot in the door is kind of a good story. The previous summer I was making plans to go to Afghanistan. Then under Soviet occupation, the CIA had a not terribly secret and very large covert action program to ship billions of dollars of weapons to the Afghan guerrillas who were trying to fight the Soviets. The CIA didn't set foot in Afghanistan, Pakistanis trans-shipped the arms. Reporters generally did not go to Afghanistan when it was under Soviet occupation. It was pretty dangerous. There are no hotels and no electricity, so you had to watch what you were doing and how you reported. So not knowing any better, I called up the CIA and said, "Hi, there." They have a public affairs officer on duty.

I said, "Hi there, I'm a reporter. I'm going off to Afghanistan to write about this enormous covert action program you guys have going. And I understand you people sometimes do country briefings for reporters who are off to strange places. How about it?" And the public information officer said, "Absolutely not," and hung up. So off I went to Afghanistan, amazing trip, three months. I hadn't been back at my desk in Washington for more than a day when the phone rang. Guess who? It's my new best friend from the CIA, "How are you, Tim," he said, and I said, "Great." "How was your trip?" I said, "It was awesome." He said, "How do you like to come in for that briefing now?" So off I went to CIA headquarters, which is about seven miles outside of Washington in the woodlands of Langley, Virginia.

And you walk into the old headquarters building there, on your left engraved in big [inaudible 00:02:50] letters is a passage from the Gospel of John and it says, "And you shall know the truth and the truth will make you free." Well, at that point I was hooked and I decided, "God, maybe I could cover the CIA the way I used to cover the cops and the courts when I was a rookie." How old was I? 31 at the time. And so I did, and that's kind of what I've been up to for most of the last 37, 38 years. So I covered CIA for The New York Times as a beat from 1993 to 2000. And in those years, the CIA was in bad shape. Its original mission from 1947 and for the next 45 years thereafter was to push back, spy on and understand the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was gone. What was the mission now? Nobody seemed to know.

The foreign policy of the United States went somewhat adrift at that point. It had lost its North star. People were literally saying, the top intelligence analysts, the top covert operations officers, "What is the mission?" They were looking for some direction from Clinton administration and getting very little of it. Then in August of 1998, Al-Qaeda blew up two US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The bomb in Dar es Salaam didn't do too much damage, the bomb in Nairobi did. 12 US people were killed, including two CIA officers, and 224 Kenyans lost their lives. And with that, the CIA realized that it was facing a new kind of enemy, one that could strike from its base in Afghanistan 3,000 miles away and hit two targets at once, which was not twice as hard, it was 100 times as hard as hitting one target.

Counterterrorism it appeared, would replace anti-communism as the new mission. And the director, George Tenet, tried to get the CIA and the rest of the US intelligence community and the military and the White House mobilized with a proclamation, a secret one that said, "We are at war," and nothing much happened. Poor George, who I knew quite well, was like the Wizard of Oz, punching buttons and pulling levers and there's nothing behind the wall on which they're attached to make things happen. And with the new administration of George W. Bush, the threat reporting intensified. The CIA warned Bush three dozen times that something terrible was about to happen with Al-Qaeda, but they couldn't say when or where.

And then we were hit. And on the 12th of September, 2001, the CIA didn't really know a lot about Al-Qaeda. They knew very little about who was who in the Al-Qaeda zoo. Their command structure was how they moved money and people around. It was a want of intelligence that allowed the attacks to succeed. It was for want of intelligence that the terrible events of the American War on Terror gathered, the secret prisons, the torture and all that went with that.

Danny Crichton:

And when you get into, we have this peace dividend in the '90s, so to your point, anti-communism mission went away. There was this real drive from the Clinton administration matched with Republicans on the House and Senate, Newt Gingrich and the '94 Revolution to say, "Look, we want to take money out of the Pentagon, we want to take it out of the IC, the intelligence community. We want to get this piece dividend. We want to redevelop it and put it in other places." And you have this kind of dot-com bubble that's going on and all this stuff we now think of as the '90s.

And so when you say that obviously this organization was very fractured, it was adrift, it was also getting defunded. There's a massive pullback as people are trying to reconfigure the federal budget. Clinton, I believe, actually gets to positive numbers by '98, '99 for the federal budget as they're sort of cleaning it up. And then there's this huge wave of funding that comes back. You go into the Iraq period in '03, so you have this massive bureaucratic reconfiguration and new surge of resources, but the fundamentals are still off. And I think you cover kind of the history in Legacy of Ashes and then really in The Mission, you get into this challenge of this didn't solve the problem.

Tim Weiner:

Well, the CIA did take about a 20%, 25% budget cut during the '90s. It started at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration. The peace dividends, such as it was, was never really reinvested. And the CIA's budget at the end of the '90s was about $3 billion a year, adjusted for inflation about what it was at the time of the Korean War. After 9/11, Congress as is its want, threw a wheelbarrow full of money at the CIA. The budget instantly doubled at George Bush's request, at Tenant's request, to about $6 billion or $7 billion. And the Counterterrorism Center grew tenfold to about, numbers are not public, but well north of 2,000 people. It became the biggest single component of the operations side of the CIA by far.

And unfortunately, the CIA did not have a very large cadre of people who knew about counterterrorism, who knew about al-Qaeda, and a very small paramilitary division, probably about 100 people strong toward the end of 2001. All of this ballooned enormously without a concomitant increase in leadership experience, knowledge or direction. So you have the unfortunate situation where a guy named Jose Rodriguez who had previously been removed from his post as Chief of the Latin American division for what the CIA Inspector General called a remarkable lack of judgment, Jose gets catapulted into third in command at the Counterterrorism Center.

He said, quite frankly later, "I didn't know anything about counterterrorism or al-Qaeda at the time." He then within the year, becomes the chief of the Counterterrorism Center and Jose is one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the secret prisons and the infliction of torture upon prisoners. Jose then becomes the chief of the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency, the top spy and the most powerful spy in the world. Things did not go well under his watch. The CIA, among other things, was never set up to be a lethal paramilitary force, it was never set up to run secret prisons and it was never set up to conduct interrogations, brutal or otherwise. It didn't have people who knew how to do this and it showed.

Danny Crichton:

I think this gets at sort of this challenge of you have different leaders coming in from the civilian side, different presidents that are appointing different types of directors. You go through these different types of areas of focus. In Legacy of Ashes, you highlight in the '50s and '60s, you have the Vietnam War. A lot of this is about fighting the communists in Southeast Asia. You're trying to analyze it, they analyze it very badly, as did most of the rest of the Western world. But there's a small amount of operational components there and I'm remembering the Dulles brothers and you have Guatemala and a bunch of other categories and missions that are sort of now canonical into this story, but that kind of gets pulled back in the '90s. And then you get into the 2000s, to your point, where all of a sudden it's like, "Well, that's what we want."

We want a totally different agency. This is not going to be... The central Central Intelligence Agency, it was supposed to be the center of 12 plus IC components, centralizing all those, synthesizing all the information. It was an analytical function and that person will brief the President of the United States. Now, it was sort of a quasi-Delta Force, it was a quasi-adding all these other operational elements that was not a clandestine service. It was actually quite overt and it was very out of sync with the mission.

And so I'm curious because I think one of the things you really highlight in The Mission is this tension with wanting to be responsive to civilian leadership, the new priorities, the agendas, the mission, but at the same time, each person coming in has their own proclivities, they have their own lines of ethics, we could call it. They have their own goals and motivations and agencies don't adapt that fast. We have a much faster democratic system than, to your point, you can hire all these sorts of folks and get them in place, trained and operating effectively. And so you call politicization, but how do you think about that balance between being responsive and saying, "Look, that's not our job, that's not our mission?"

Tim Weiner:

It's important to remember that the CIA is an executor of the foreign policy of the United States. It doesn't make policy, with the barest of exceptions. It does what the President tells it to do. And it was President Bush who authorized the secret prisons, who authorized torture. It was President Bush who was hellbent on going to war with Iraq. It was a decision taken going to war with Iraq six days after 9/11 as the man who was the Chief of the Iraq Operations Group before and during the American invasion of Iraq told me, "These guys," meaning the Bush administration, "These guys would've gone to war if Saddam had a rubber band and a paperclip to put your eye out." That said, the Senate Intelligence Committee sent a fax over to CIA headquarters in late summer of 2002, asking for an instant version of a national intelligence estimate on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

A national intelligence estimate is sort of one of the Holy of Holies of the American intelligence community, distillation of all known thought on the subject of existential importance. "What is the order of battle in Vietnam, how big is the enemy? How big is the Soviet nuclear arsenal?" Questions like that. And these things normally take a year to produce and the Senate wanted one yesterday. They wanted it bad and they got it bad. The CIA didn't have any spies in Iraq at the time in 2002, and it hadn't had any since 1998 when Saddam kicked out the UN weapons inspectors, and with them, the CIA who used the UN as cover. It didn't know anything about Saddam's arsenal. It had a few sources, one of them was an Iraqi defector in the custody of German intelligence, named Kodem Kurbal, who purported to be a fountain of information on bio weapons programs Saddam had.

He was a liar, he was a drunk. He made it all up. But the CIA took this as gospel, or at least the component set up to analyze weapons of mass destruction did. And Bush turned to Colin Powell at the end of 2002 and said, "I need you to go to the United Nations and make the case for war. You're the only one here who has any credibility." Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, and for years the most politically popular general since Dwight Eisenhower, Powell goes to the CIA headquarters for a weekend, three days, long days [inaudible 00:13:30] everything the CIA has got and it's all bullshit. And there were people in the room where Powell was the top CIA analyst, who knew it was bullshit. Among them, Mike Morrell, who was the top analyst at the time, later the Acting Director and Deputy Director of CIA. And Morrell is sitting there, going, "How can we say this? We don't know this."

He's thinking this. Does he say it? He does not, which he later recognized was a grievous mistake. So Colin Powell goes to the United Nations. George Bush, the Director of CIA is sitting right over his shoulders, and tells the world about Saddam's arsenal bristling with WMD programs. The tragedy, one of the tragedies, aside from the immense loss of life that blazing the trail to war in Iraq created is that estimated, a national intelligence estimate is what you do when you do not know. And the CIA as an institution and the individuals within it did not have the courage to say, "We don't know what Iran's weapons of mass destruction arsenal is." That said, the intelligence didn't matter to Bush. He was going to do what he wanted with or without it, but the CIA did provide the Casus belli for war.

Danny Crichton:

Obviously, there's a lot of reflections to the modern world that we can make, but I want to focus on one individual component here, because I think actually, with all the risk gaming stuff, we do a lot of in-depth analysis, what we call long horizon work so we're always trying to look around the corner. We're in an industry with venture capital in which we're investing in companies today that hopefully will succeed in the next 10, 15, 20 years. And so we always have to be thinking, "What's 2030 going to look like, what's 2035?"

But then there's also this pressure of saying, "Well, we have a deal in front of us, we need an answer today." How do you balance when you think about if the CIA is the executor of foreign policy on behalf of the President and the president says, "Look, I need an answer today, I realize you don't have one, but I have to make a decision, the decision is now," what would you do? Or it may not in your case, but when you look at the research you've done across your books, what is the proper response for someone? Would it be to resign and say, "Look, I can't sign on to this. I just refuse to put my signature on it?"

Tim Weiner:

Sure.

Danny Crichton:

Is it to couch? There you go, you would resign?

Tim Weiner:

Resignations in principle are exceedingly rare in the American government, once in a blue moon. The problem you're stating is a classic problem and it boils down to the difference between strategy and tactics. Tactics is, "What am I going to do right now? I'm at my desk, I can't see beyond the edge of my desk. What should I do?" And strategy is you're able to look over the horizon. You're able to see clearly what is happening now and what might happen in the near future.

Strategic thinking and strategic analysis is exceedingly rare at the CIA and indeed in our popular culture. We have all been made prisoners of the speed of the internet and we do not see beyond the edges of our desk. Everything is what just happened five minutes ago and what will happen five minutes from now. That is a terrible way to run a company, a newspaper for example, which is what I know about, an intelligence service or a government. The fierce urgency of now does not create strategic thinking in and of itself. You've got to zoom out and see the curve of the earth.

Danny Crichton:

We had Zach Dorfman on the podcast last year, working on a book on non-official deep cover agents, but he has covered China and US for a very long time. And I mean, one of the things that I took away from The Mission is one of the big challenges is when we're talking about strategy, China was obviously a rising threat for the last 20 years, but then there's this rush a couple years ago to build China House, this dubbed. And it has a more official, Office of China Coordination, but China House.

Tim Weiner:

Yeah, the China Mission Center at CIA, it's called.

Danny Crichton:

Right, yes. And for years, there was just no coordination, not just within the CIA, but also across the IC, across also the State Department, Defense Department and saying, "Look, this is a locust that we should be thinking about," putting all the pieces, parts together. We obviously exited Afghanistan, 2021. That still was sort of the center point for a lot of this and one could argue even today, Middle East is still the center point, the fulcrum for a lot of the way that the IC still functions. I'm curious when you think about the strategy component. This is the goal, is to be foresight and to look forward and to analyze and to collect data.

You're getting new streams of information, and I think of it in my own career as in venture capital here, trends are, right now is artificial intelligence and that's the only thing anyone's ever talking about. But we're always trying to, "What's around the horizon? Is it biotech, is it quantum computers, is it fusion?" We have a whole list of these things that we talk about every once in a while. But you're in this tactical mode of like, "We got 50 deals in front of us, they're all in AI."

This is what's going on, but probably somewhere else where the money is, so to speak. How do you think about the bureaucracy here? There was this massive reform 20 years ago. It doesn't seem to have worked and I feel like if I had to summarize your book, it was like, "That didn't work." How do you start to, what really went wrong? What do you think was sort of neutral, what would you keep? And maybe we'll we project towards the future a little bit, but I feel like your whole book summarizes the Intelligence Reorganization Act was a failure.

Tim Weiner:

Well, the Intelligence Reorganization Act 2005 was a reaction to both 9/11 and the disastrous failure of intelligence reporting and analysis from Iraq that paved the path to war. But of course, Congress in its wisdom, stood up on its hind legs and said, "Do something, here's $88 billion," without saying what it was it wanted done. There was no blueprint for the Director of National Intelligence, and what it did was essentially layer another bureaucratic structure on top of the intelligence community without adding a lot of value. That said, you mentioned China and of course, the other great geopolitical threat to the United States is Russia. China, in the decade of roughly 2002 to 2012, and Zach Dorfman has paved the way to understanding through his reporting of what went on.

In that decade up to 2012, the CIA built a network of recruited Chinese agents very painstakingly and very successfully. In short, it had discovered that the corruption of the Chinese political system meant that you had to pay a, quote, "Promotion fee," if you wanted to claw your way up the greasy pole at the Chinese Politburo, in the military at the Ministry of State Security, which is the intelligence behemoth. And so it targeted some up and coming people and got friendly with them probably over drinks and said, "Look, here, we'll pay your promotion fees," which were in the $1 million range, "And all you have to do is sit down with us every now and then, or better yet, communicate with us through this covert communication system we've set up on the internet and everybody wins."

So by 2010 or so, the CIA had a network of probably three dozen really well-placed, recruited Chinese agents reporting on what was happening in China. Right around the time Xi took power, one by one, by one, these people were arrested, jailed, tortured and murdered. The lights went blinking out, it went dark. And this was a driving force for Xi's so-called anti-corruption drive that took place after he took power in 2013. What had happened was that the CIA's covert communication system was shoddy and it could be penetrated with not a great degree of difficulty. The Iranians probably did it first because there was a similar system in Iran. They told the Chinese about it. The Chinese surely told the Russians about it. The agent network was destroyed. After it was destroyed, the Chinese mounted a really huge sophisticated series of operations, which goes on to this day, to project their surveillance state into the United States. Have you ever been to China?

Danny Crichton:

I have not.

Tim Weiner:

Take a guess how many closed-circuit television cameras there are in China, take a guess.

Danny Crichton:

I'm going to guess 10 times the population, so something like 10 billion, something like this.

Tim Weiner:

That's a bit of an overstatement, but-

Danny Crichton:

There we go. Okay, there we go. It's free. Yeah, there we go.

Tim Weiner:

It's upwards of half a billion. All right, the Chinese want to project this surveillance state into the United States. "Data is the new oil," Xi said in 2013. Information is power, as we all know. In 2014, the Chinese hacked into the Federal Office of Personnel Management in Washington. They stole the personnel files of everyone who worked for the United States government or had worked, 22.5 million people, including the security files and security clearance forms of everybody who worked for the intelligence community, including the CIA. This is passport information, this is really personal stuff. They then took this and cross indexed it with biometric data that they had stolen from the world's airport, gave it all to Alibaba to crunch.

And today, ever since then, if you are a CIA officer arriving to take up a post in Beijing or Kuala Lumpur or [inaudible 00:22:52] you are likely as not to be buttonholed by a Chinese intelligence officer who will greet you and say, "Hello, Joe, I know who you are." Espionage in age of ubiquitous technical surveillance is a whole new thing, and the American intelligence community has been desperately trying to stay at the curve or ahead of the curve in AI and particularly in quantum computing. It is therefore a disaster that this week, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, summarily revoked the security clearances of 37 people for having worked or worked in proximity to the analysis that showed that Russia had hacked the 2016 election to help elect Donald Trump, and got rid of them.

Among them was the chief data scientist in the US intelligence community, Vinh Nguyen, who worked at the National Security Agency. This is the top guy in America working on this very problem. He's out of a job. Now, how do you mount a successful espionage operation against the Russians after the Russians hacked the 2016 election in what the former CIA Director, Mike Hayden, called the most successful covert operation since the Trojan Horse?" There was a new chief of the clandestine service, a new top spy at CIA. His name is Thomas Rakusan. Tom Rakusan's roots are Czech, his parents are Czech. He was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the Prague spring peaceful uprising against Soviet imperialism.

His feelings about the Russians are pretty strong, you might say bread in the bone. In the spring of 2017, Rakusan called in all the top officers of the clandestine service, dozens of them, almost all of whom had spent the previous 15 years working 24/7, 365 on counterterrorism. And he said to them, "Look here, the Russians just manipulated our fucking election. How do we make sure this never happens again? I want you," he said to the assembled multitudes, "To take the talents that you have honed in targeting terrorists." And by targeting, I don't mean putting warheads on foreheads, I mean identifying them, figuring out who they are in true name, where do they live, who do they love? Who do they hate? All with an eye toward recruiting them, which the CIA had done successfully with Al Qaeda out of the CIA stations in Islamabad and Kabul in the late '00s.

And that is what blazed a path to Osama bin Laden's door, not torture. "Go after the Russians," he said. "Take the talents that you have in targeting terrorists and turn it on Russian spies, Russian oligarchs, Russian diplomats." Four years later, the CIA penetrated the Kremlin, which had been the sine qua non of American espionage since 1947, to learn the intentions and capabilities of the Russian leadership. And it stole Vladimir Putin's war plants for Ukraine in the fall of 2021, a remarkable achievement. And then equally remarkably, the CIA director, Bill Burns, said, "We need to tell the world about this." And they did. And while it didn't stop the war, it had a remarkable galvanizing, unifying effect on Europe, on the nations of NATO, who to this day, support the survival of Ukraine. The CIA has been in Ukraine since 2014, supporting the survival of Ukraine, and all of this is now hanging by the thinnest kind of thread.

Danny Crichton:

Obviously, you're talking about influence here in the United States and Russian influence, but it's not unique to Russia. There are other countries who try to do things. Russia, there's some very good books on this and I've recommended them on the podcast and newsletter over the years, but this sort of chaos engineering. And Russia doesn't just do it to the US, it does it to people all around the world. As an example, we had [inaudible 00:26:48] a scholar over in the UK who focuses on which she sort of calls the gig economy of intelligence operations. But this idea of if you want to bomb a building, you used to have a knock, you have to go undercover, you had to do all these operations.

You can almost post it to an online labor marketplace. It's incredible, people will do it for a couple hundred bucks and they'll drop off a package right next to the building. They'll put up signs and anti war propaganda and in Paris, famously putting funeral crypts underneath the Eiffel Tower for 150 euros. And so you can extend far farther, and there's a lot of innovation on the Russian side. To go back to the main point here, there's a lot of ways to influence. You can go through social media, you can go through traditional media, you can influence through kind of the elite approach of funding think tanks and kind of just classic elite influencer operations.

We've seen this over the last couple years, I think pretty comprehensively. I know I keep bringing up Legacy of Ashes because that's sort of the connection over to The Mission, but your last book was sort of this history of US and Russian relations, and then your book prior to that was focused on FBI. And so, one of the big challenges when I look at this industry or in this category is you have this subdivision between the FBI is the homeland and this kind of extended mission with counterterrorism overseas, and they have officers and field agencies all around the world, but CIA does not operate domestically.

Tim Weiner:

No.

Danny Crichton:

There's supposed to be a very strict line that it does not operate domestically.

Tim Weiner:

It has no police powers in the United States.

Danny Crichton:

Correct, but now these lines are getting blurred. And they're not necessarily blurred on our side, but others are blurring them for us. They're creating gray zones where it is harder and harder to make a distinction between these two. They oftentimes have to work together. And as you know very, very well, but the CIA is not a law enforcement agency. It does not build evidence to go to a court case, to go to a prosecutor that goes in front of a jury. They don't need to deal with any of that.

And that culture is directly diametrically opposed to everything the FBI has built around, which is process, procedure, chains of custody and evidence, et cetera. How do you start to deal with a threat like, let's say Russia coming to the US influencing an election or influencing whatever the case may be here, with the fact that these agencies, the cultures, the institutions just don't collaborate very well together on exactly these sorts of issues that are critical to the United States and its national security?

Tim Weiner:

Well, let me preface this, Danny, by saying that Russia is, as we speak, conducting a very aggressive hybrid warfare campaign throughout Europe, including but not limited to assassination, sabotage, subversion, cyber attacks and political warfare. If Putin is allowed to keep a single inch of Ukraine, acquired through conquest, he's not going to stop there. That said, the threats that Russia and China pose directly to the United States are very different. As I mentioned, the Chinese following the precepts of Sun Tzu, they want to know us. "Know your enemy, and in 100 battles, you will not be defeated." The Russians just want to screw us. Their intelligence services are skilled in sabotage and subversion. They're not that great at traditional espionage. They're un-subtle.

Danny Crichton:

Yes, one could say.

Tim Weiner:

To meet this, first of all, you have to have a CIA that has expertise in Russia and China. Let me tell you what has happened over the past couple of months at the CIA regarding this. John Ratcliffe, Trump's CIA Director, has fired everybody the CIA hired in 2023 and 2024 because they were Biden hires. Many, perhaps most of these people, had trained up to staff the China Mission Center, newly established by CIA director Bill Burns in 2023. They're walking around with targets on their backs for hostile intelligence services. Ratcliffe then destroyed the career of the outgoing Chief of the Clandestine Service, Tom Sylvester, who was slated to go for a final tour to be Chief of Station London, for no apparent reason. Perhaps because Sylvester talked to me for my book, The Mission.

Ratcliffe is encouraging people at the most senior levels to hit the exit doors and find another line of work so more compliant, younger people who can pass loyalty tests to Donald Trump can be promoted. That's where that stands. At the FBI, Kash Patel is systematically destroying the intelligence and national security divisions at the FBI. He is firing people right and the left, including senior most leaders who worked on Russia, who worked on domestic and foreign threats to our national security. In the best of times, the FBI and the CIA have trouble working together. They can do it, but it's not easy. They're different cultures. The FBI are cops, the CIA are spies. The FBI sees an evildoer, wants to string them up. The CIA wants to string them along to find out what he knows, to see who else is working with him.

They can cooperate on spy catching, but it's hard. The FBI has overseas components, FBI attaches as the CIA has station sheets. The CIA depends mightily on its liaisons with foreign intelligence services, so does the FBI. The CIA doesn't have the people or the global reach to cover the planet. It doesn't have the languages, it doesn't have the country knowledge. And so it relies on more than 60 foreign allied intelligence services, including some in countries you would not think of as American allies, to help it know what's going on.

These are alliances, they've been around for decades. Donald Trump is systemically destroying American alliances and he's put in charge as the intelligence czar of the United States, Tulsi Gabbard, who is a conspiracy theorist, a Putin acolyte, and who doesn't seem to understand the first thing about how an intelligence service works. If you are a foreign country and you are deciding whether to share deep secrets of state with the United States, would you trust Tulsi Gabbard to keep them?

Danny Crichton:

I would not.

Tim Weiner:

This is a problem.

Danny Crichton:

Let me ask you, I mean, we're obviously recording this at the end of August. We just had the White House Summit. We saw a bunch of world leaders right after Trump's summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin last weekend. It'll be a couple of days until this comes out, so we'll be about a week delayed. But when you think about exactly the subject, so alliance building, all these interconnections, I feel like this is one of the pieces that we don't see, which is these sort of lengthy institutional arrangements that come together over decades.

You have been one of the great historians of the intelligence community. You've written the extensive books of the canonical works in this field, covering all the way from '47 all the way to the present day. It really feels that this is, at least from my perspective as an outsider, the single toughest moment that this entire institution has ever faced because the threats have traditionally been outside. They've been congressional, they've been budget. The Church Commission in the '70s was really tough, but was probably ultimately good for the organization. I see no positive from the activities that are taking place today. What happens next?

I'm looking at the board and a lot of what we do is long-horizon thinking. We've seen over at the Pentagon that the key agency around here has been removed. We've seen policy planning and state has been kind of wiped out. Strategies, sort of anything long-range is going away in terms of a Twitter mind effect of, "We're just going to make decisions from our gut and the intelligence can be damned." How does it get recovered? Is this a capability, a set of institutions and arrangements and alliances that just never recover? Is it resilient and it's just sort of, we got to wait three years and it kind of cleanses itself out? What do you sort of project forward?

Tim Weiner:

Danny, the President of the United States is systemically destroying the architecture of American national security that has been created over the past 80 years since World War II to protect and defend this country and to guard against Soviet and Russian imperialism. The danger of putting crackpots and fools in charge of American national security is immense. It increases the risk of a catastrophic intelligence failure and the success of an unforeseen surprise attack on the United States at home and abroad. This danger is doubled by the fact that Donald Trump has said, he said it when he met with Zelenskyy the other day, that if there were an international crisis or war involving the United States, he would cancel the next election.

And that will be the death of our noble experiment with American democracy now coming up on 250 years old. I teach sometimes, and I like to remind my students that no free republic in the history of civilization has lasted longer, than 300 years, and that was the Roman Empire. How can this damage be repaired, you ask? The damage is not simply to the American National Security and intelligence establishment. The rule of law is under attack, freedom of speech is under attack, freedom of the press is under attack. At some point this will end, we hope. The job of rebuilding and repairing is going to be as hard and as long as reconstruction after slavery and the New Deal after the Great Depression. It will take a generation.

Danny Crichton:

Well, talking about canceling the election, on the way out of the White House Summit, Trump escorted, I think it was Zelenskyy and Macron and one or two other European leaders to the gift shop on the way out where MAGA hats were aplenty. But notably, a Trump 2028 hat was, I guess not for sale, but was sort of on the shelf, ready to go. So clearly in the milieu, a huge amount of work to do going forward. I will say in that gift shop is not your book, but for everyone listening, they should definitely read it. Tim Weiner, the author of The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century. Thank you for joining us.

Tim Weiner:

Thank you, Danny.

‍