Good afternoon everyone. On behalf of the archivist of the United States, i like to welcome you all to the theater located in the National Archives building in washington dc. Id also like to give a special shout out to our good friends from cspan2 who are also joining us today. Before we hear from philip about his new book, the cia and the post 911 world, like to be about two upcoming programs taking place in the theater. This friday august 16th, at noon, William G Hyland junior will tell us about a forgotten family father george mason the founding father who gave us the bill of rights. Then on tuesday september 10th at noon, Sidney Blumenthal will tell us about his recently released volume three of his biography of Abraham Lincoln all powers of earth the political life of Abraham Lincoln 1886 to 1863. To find out more about these programs and error exhibits, please visit our website at archives. Gov challenger. Weve also find some printed materials of the lobby about upcoming coming events. Signup sheets and monthly calendar. Analyst specializing in south asia and then to the middle east. After the september 11th attacks, gives the cia member of the small medic team the help piece together and if government for afghanistan. After returning to the cia, he became Deputy Director of a Counterterrorist Center and served there until 2005. He was the first Deputy Director of the federal bureau of Investigations NationalSecurity Branch later became the fbis Senior Intelligence advisor. Philip has received numerous cia awards and accommodations. The comments about terrorism and congressional testimony and featured in broadcast and print news. He is now the president of mud management. A company specializing in security consulting. Annaly trading in public speaking about security issues. Hes a senior fellow at the new America Foundation and the George Washington universitys Homeland Security policy institution and serves as senior Global Advisor to oxford and litigant. A britishbased firm specializing in the advising multinational companies. He sits on the Advisory Board for National Counterterrorism center and for the director of national intelligence, and he serves on the evidence to Homeland Security group. Ladies and gentlemen please welcome philip months National Archives. [applause] you missed the most important part of the. I lived in memphis tennessee the bluff city. Screamac. I was running there in town memphis which is a historic part of memphis. Must be three or four years ago whether to write another book. Reflecting on some of what i witnessed at the cia particulate during the excruciating time after 911 and realizing this among my colleagues former friends had written their stories but many of the people that i worked with would never speak and would never write in their stories would never be told if no one talked to them. They put the story together in one simple narrative and explained what happened. So he decided the morning running my 5 miles in midtown memphis that i would do the. This is mostly their stories. Dishonor history, its not every document the ever appeared related to what we called the program, interrogation of prisoners. Its a story of men and women who i served with and they decide to talk me because they trusted me. Step back in time with me. Go back to the 1990s, a lot of my colleagues talked about the piece. In a time to paraphrase one of them we thought we had killed the dragon the soviet union. Only six were lift. The set a time after all of the soviet union the fall of the wall where people thought the intelligence challenges of the future may not reach the magnitude the they reached during the time of the the soviet union. They knew they had a problem. The problem started mostly when bin laden was in sudan accelerated when he moved to afghanistan. But when i spoke to them, and i spoke to 35 or 40 again, most of them who will never speak. When i spoke to them about the signs about the piece there is a great sense of frustration and in some ways sadness. The they witnessed the rise of a global network. If the tools they had were so limited when you look back in retrospect. That was only 20 years ago. Los than a full generation. The tools the cia were limited. If you think about loss of budget and personnel, im not accusing the National Security infrastructure of doing anything wrong, all of us that the same thing on the dragon is gone. But he think about the organization when it is a Tech Organization or manufacturing organization, if you lose substantial pieces of money and people, your ability to operate declines. There was also the attitude about terrorism. Only 20 years. Nobody spoke with good imagined a world where somebody would say we could conduct lighting raise in afghanistan after day after day. The thought the array would happen where there is a high risk of american soldiers lives, almost unthinkable about 911. Just arrayed against an al qaeda compound and we knew the they knew with some of the compounds were. Much los, and armed drone the could kill a terrace overseas. In debate for years, never happened. Meanwhile theres atrophy at the cia example training. Training spies. The number of spies declined. In the attitude about terrorism was mixed. Remember after 1947, the target the ci templin chased were pig targets. Soviet chinese the cuban missile crisis, pig targets. I served in a return from a leave of absence to the cia a in 1992 until we go to the Counterterrorist Center because it was seen as a place where you set people who maybe werent ready for prime time which of course was a model. The model. The changed. Like any Organization Even large organizations, people make the difference. The people personalities that i knew so well were critical in keeping counterterrorism declining further in the 90s. For tenant, the cia director was immersed in counterterrorism and insisted the counterterrorism get some level of privacy and on budget and he insisted on ensuring the there was leadership there that was real garden across the agency. Not common in the 1990s including the director of the center a guy named cofer black legendary in my business who raise the profile and increasing the quality of people going over there and increasing the respective counterterrorism and pi before 911. Make no mistake the piece for intelligence and the lack of focus on terrorism, meant the on the day on the day, the cia and the counterterrorist world was not only not prepared but they could not be prepared. They all talk to me about feeling before but especially in the searing months after 911 about feeling like they are the backflip. On the day, and this is not over dramatizing. Everything change. Years of debate about armed drones, done. Years of debate about ralph in afghanistan, forget about raids. The cia will be first in with operatives and money technology, guidance within weeks of 911. Forget about ralph, the u. S. Army will invade afghanistan. The transition not only in resources but in attitude with sound to show. The cia directories asked if i sat in on the nightly beef breathing for years. We had about five or six reapers. I was treading back and forth with another run of my colleagues opening the meeting for threat breathing. A matrix of people riding into they uncovered a threat. Intercepted communications where al qaeda was talking about coming to the United States. I started those briefings and one of the things that was so evident and that was spoken around some of those tables was a simple concept. We anticipated a second wave, what we call the second way for years. The second way was we anticipated would be another 911. Perhaps worse because al qaeda had an anthrax program that we didnt not follow fully understand. For months, and longer we did not understand research and development, we did not understand whether they had taken strained and anthrax out of afghanistans. There was concerned the it might not be aircraft but anthrax. An attitude that was a fundamental problem. We did not understand the adversary. The human penetration that the breadandbutter of a human source of a human informant organization like ci the human source penetration and this is operative speaking to me, not me speaking. People are ran operations against al qaeda would tell you the human source penetration was a lot. So the midst of america watching horrific videos of people jumping off the buildings. And watching pages in the newspapers and faces of the fallen. We were sitting behind the scenes with the director saying if there is the second wave tomorrow, can you say i wish i had done this the or the other thing. Why does she do it today. In the midst of all of this, there was a drumbeat in the spring of 2002 and i witnessed a lot of this firsthand. It was intense, and getting louder. The drumbeat was hunt. For the first major ci captive. Beta. One of the challenges al qaeda had was they miscalculated with the us response to 911 would be and they did not anticipate such a huge response, they thought it would be maybe, they didnt dissipate they would take showers down, they got more cruise missiles, if the us military within, they would bleed them. They did not have an exit plan. Military operations intelligence operations and the cooperation with the afghan, the us was working with, an element of afghanistan a group called the Northern Alliance were so successful the al qaeda had to flee before they ever developed the plan. Many of them fled east. Into pakistan where they started making mistakes. Mistakes the allowed us in a part of the business and intelligence that we call targeting is having individual analysts responsible for an individual terrorist the a tactical level the where you know the terrorist Communications Patterns you know what his family is, the Carrier Network is, we had individual analysts in a growing intelligence progression call targeting analysts. They were watching and the breaking the growing drumbeat, was a sense that the circle around him almost by the day, was getting tighter. Then in the spring arena happened animals died. He suffered wounds from the gunfight the ensued particularly grievous lend to is like. It is a piece of the story the until this book the ci he would ensure the he would not die. Another bit of the agility after 911. Make the us response so powerf powerful. Could you imagine calling a Medical Center before 911 and saying wed like you to loan us some of your physicians to go treat the terrace overseas now. And were going to put him on the plane. Commit unimaginable before 911. The began the search for what a detainee could tell the cia about an organization the cia did not fully understand. Forget about plots. Those are important. The counterterrorism business a lot of what i witnessed was not about plots, that was what use on the newspapers. Our business was a people business. People if you stop a plot, if you harden a building, if you harden in aircraft, people are committed to a murder of innocents will civilly going to create another pot. So unless you can take on the architects, but al qaeda organizes you will face plots forever. Its. Who is creating thought . Who comes up with the propaganda . Thats critically important for intelligence carries those who dont want to communicate . That basic material that basic material is critical and we did not have a good understanding of that in 2002. Then in the memory of the people that i spoke with to shut down and told his interrogators go home and have babies and dont come back because im not speaking anymore. So the intensity when they said make sure this doesnt happen again with the president of the United States is make sure this doesnt happen again in Congress Said how do you fail to catch it the first time in the anticipation the cia officers in the cauldron of decisionmaking in the summer of 2002 said what are our options we can send them to the us Justice System where he will lawyer up and never speak again. We can send him to another foreign country that might have charges against him the prospect is that other country will interrogate him themselves and we will not sit in the room and they will shield critical intelligence that we need also they will not have the same priorities that we have. They will want to ask questions about their country and we want to ask and treat questions about america. So through a series of conversations among cia leader leaders, there was a faint full decision of the subject of the book should we develop our own clandestine facilities black sites where we will transfer prisoners and interrogate them using the harsh techniques splashed across every page for more than a decade. Here is another piece everybody knew that if people would ask questions later and everybody knew this was not only sensitive but controversial with a secret black site network so there were conversations between the Inspector General and a cia and the lawyers at the department of justice who set and interpret law for america to say what is appropriate in terms of interrogation for the cia black site that complies with u. S. Constitution and what complies with federal law. We want it on paper and were not moving until its on paper. Through the summer of 2002 they discussed what could be done he was already stabled and transferred to a black site with authorization from the department of justice did not arrive until august 2002 thats when my colleagues were given the black site program. He went through tough interrogation techniques people talk about waterboarding three of those were water boarded and he was one of them. One of the challenges of talking to a detainee and to discuss this in a public environment where we dont have the luxury of time in this auditorium but people look at me every day to say come on. If you put somebody under duress they will lie. So let me explain as we went through that process, wipe not here to defend the program but because i thought the views of the cia should be explained so those americans to attack or support it and i hear both on the streets to understand what happened and why we can walk in the shoes to say i understand what they did regardless whether i like it or not but on the foundational question of why would you pressure someone to speak with techniques like sleep deprivation because you know will live my answer is first of all thats not the full answer but the al qaeda terrorists not under duress will make up stories all day long that is not the real point the real point is the analytic effort that i mentioned called targeting you cannot have a successful highend interrogation of a prisoner unless you know so muc much, not midlevel or low level but so much because you have been following so long that you can come up with in concert with other interrogators to come up with a package of questions over weeks with that detainee starts to realize these guys know a lot more than i know they seem to know what im lying. When that prisoner is under duress and is in a confined box under sleep deprivation is exhausted and starts to realize he cannot lie his way out and starts to get answers. Not truth. We were not stupid some answers never came like Location Information of osama bin laden. But we would get compliance some would give it some pieces that they think are less valuable. Yes there was a guy who was a german so this bits and pieces could be gold for intel. If a prisoner is compliant and gives you what he thinks is throw away information like a german or a frenchman who trained three years ago then game on four people in my world. I will balance that against every bit of data that we have every travel data we can acquire every detainee that i know over time it will tell us who that person was based on one tiny shred of information from a compliant detainee giving you stuff he thought was irrelevant. The point that im making is of course they lie the only way to get out of the box is develop a interrogation package that is so complete that he feels he needs a lifeline and that lifeline was the cia. A lot happened after the initial stages of interrogation and when i spoke with lawyers and managers of black site and the program they talk about the maturation of the program the first months and years remember you have an agency trained to collect information overseas now serving as a prison conducting interrogation the cia values agility but sometimes they step into programs because they believe nobody will ever do it despite the fact we dont have experience we will do it. That was part of the genesis that led to the program but because of conversations with lawyers who are meticulous the black sites matured in 2003 and 2004 policies and procedures tightened and trainings changed some individuals who were involved early should not over time those who were recruited if they walked into the room because i want to go after with a vengeance those who committed acts of 9 11 they were weeded out you would not pass the application process unless you could be assured you are in there to be professional program realize there were weaknesses outlined in the book and mistakes early but leadership got involved after some egregious mistakes than the program matured. Other things happen that were surprising. I can tell you sitting at the threat table in 2002 until i shifted in the fbi i thought we were losing. That may come as a surprise us army had invaded afghanistan supported by the cia i saw brett of network and a volume of threats and attacks that we could not contain. Nonetheless the people that i spoke with said business was good. They never anticipated the volume of highend prisoners that happen because of the raids around the world. For example the architect of 9 11 the highest prisoner the cia ever captured and held or the yemen bombing against the uss cole time and time again with the inte