Wouldve liked to tell you about two upcoming programs taking place in the theater. This friday augus august 16 at , william g. Hyland junior will tell us about a forgotten founding father, george mason, the founding father who gave us the bill of rights and then on tuesday september 10 at noon, said a blumenthal will tell us about this recently released a young three of his biography of Abraham Lincoln, all powers of earth, the political life of Abraham Lincoln 1856 to 1863. To find out more about these programs and our exhibits, please visit our website at archives. Gov calendar and youll also find some printed materials held in the lobby about Upcoming Events as well as the signup sheet so you can receive an electronic version of the monthly calendar. Phillip joins the Central Intelligence agency in 1985 as an analyst specializing in south asia and then the middle east. As the september 11 attacks he was the cia member of the small Diplomatic Team that helped piece together a new government for afghanistan. After returning to the cia, he became Deputy Director of the Counterterrorist Center and served there until 2005. He was the first Deputy Director of the federal bureau of Investigations NationalSecurity Branch and later became the fbis Senior Intelligence adviser. Philip has received numerous cia rewards and accommodations and thihas commented about terrorism and congressional testimony and has been featured in broadcast and print news. Hes now the president of mud Management Company specializing in security consulting, analytic training and public speaking about security issues. He is a senior fellow at the new America Foundation and the George Washington universitys Homeland Security policy institute and serves as the senior Global Advisor to oxford analytic a britishbased firm specializing in advising and multinational companies. He sits on the Advisory Board for the National Counterterrorism center and for the director of national and serves on the aspen institutes Homeland Security group. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome phillip mud philip mudde national archives. [applause] you missed the most important part of that which is that i lived fulltime in boston. Thank you. Stick with paynes bbq. I was running there a place called the town memphis which is a historical part of memphis it must be three or four years ago, wondering whether to write another book. Ive written a couple, and reflecting on some of what i witnessed at the cia particularly during the excruciating time after 9 11 and realizing some of my colleagues any of whom are friends had written their stories with many of the people that i worked with would never speak or write into their stories would ever be told if no one talked them. Could their stories together in one simple narrative explain what happened. So i decided that morning running my 5 miles in midtown i would do that. This is mostly their story. Its not a history. Its not every document that ever appeared related to what he called program secret detention and interrogation of our prisoners. Its the story of men and women that i served with and who decided to speak with me because they trusted me. Step back in time with me. We are going into the time machine if you go back to the 1990s, a lot of my colleagues talk about the peace, the time to paraphrase one of them when we thought we had told the dragon, the soviet union and only snakes were left. That is a time after the fall of the soviet union the fall of the wall where people thought the intelligence challenges would reach the magnitude theincreasey reached during the time of the soviet union. But they knew they had a problem. The problem started mostly when bin laden was in sudan and accelerated when he moved to afghanistan. When i spoke to them and i spoke to 35 or 40 spoke about the peace dividend and there was the sense of frustration and in some ways its a that they witnessed the rise of a Global Network and the tools they had were Still Limited when you look back in retrospect. Its only 20 years ago, less than a full generation. The tools the cia had were limited to think about the loss of budget and personnel i am not accusing the infrastructure of doing anything wrong. The ability to upgrade the clients. There was also the attitude about terrorism. I think that you can only 20 years. Nobody that i spoke with could have imagined a world where we could conduct lightning raids in afghanistan day after day after day. The thought that it woul they we been rather cite risks of American Voters voice was almost unthinkable before 9 11. Forget about the u. S. Invasion, just against an al qaeda compound and we knew they knew were some of the compounds were. Much less an armed drone that could kill a terrorist overseas. In that debate for years that never happened. Meanwhile others atrophy for training spies and the attitude about terrorism was the. Remember after 1947 the targets they typically chased were big targets for the soviets, chinesethechinese, the cuban mie crisis, big targets. I returned from taking a leave of absence and was told to go to the Counterterrorist Center because it was seen as a place you send people who maybe were not ready for primetime. That changed over time and like organizations people change into the personalities i read about in the book and that i knew so well were critical in keeping counterterrorism from declining further in the 90s. George tenet as cia director was immersed in counterterrorism and in the state indicates a level of primacy and he insisted on budget and ensuring there was leadership that was well regarded across the agency not prominent in the 1990s including the director of the center, legendary in my business who raced to the business increasing the quality of the people going over there and respect of counterterrorism before 9 11 but make no mistake the peace dividend for intelligence and the lack of focus meant that on that day the cia and counterterrorist world was not only not prepared but they couldnt be prepared. They all talked to me about feeling in the months and years after 9 11 about feeling like they are on the back foot. On that day into this isnt overdramatized, everything changed. Years of debate about raids in afghanistan, forget about that, the cia will be first in with operatives with money, technology, guidance within weeks of 9 11. The u. S. Army will invade afghanistan. The transition not only in resources but attitude was foundational. The cia director used to ask us and i sat in on the nightly briefings for years we have about five or six i was trading back and forth with another of my colleagues opening the meetings with a major ax of ten or 15 or 20 threads people who would write threats to a website, Foreign Security services who would tell us that they had covered it with intercepted communications where al qaeda was talking about coming to the United States. I started the briefings and one of the things that was so evident in this book and was a simple concept we anticipated what he called the second wave. The second wave is what we anticipated would be another 9 11 but perhaps worse because all qaeda had an anthrax program that we did not fully understand. For months we didnt understand the research and development, we didnt understand whether they have taken strains of anthrax out of afghanistan. There was concern the second might not be aircraft but it might be anthrax. The answer to that was a fundamental problem. We did not understand the adversary. The human source penetration is the bread and butter of the human in form an organization like the the humans worse penetration and this is operatives speak to me this isnt me speaking to people thae that ran operations against al qaeda will tell you the human source penetration was modest sort in the midst of watching videos of people jumping off buildings and watching pages in newspapers of the faces of the fallen, we were sitting behind the scenes with the director saying if there is a second wave tomorrow and you say i wish i had done this, that or the other thing, why dont you do it tod today. In the midst of all of this in the spring of 2002 i witnessed a lot of this first hand it was intense and getting louder and a drumbeat was behind fo the first major cia captive. One of the challenges all qaeda have as they miscalculated in the u. S. Response to 9 11. They didnt anticipate such a huge response. They thought it might be they didnt anticipate they would take the towers down but they thought they might be more crude missiles and the anticipated every military when its working with a baton and if they would believe the military just as they have let th had left the sy didnt have an exit plan. The military intelligence operations, cooperation with the afghans by u. S. Was working with an element of afghanistan and the group called the Northern Alliance were so successful that al qaeda had to flee before they ever developed a plan and many of them fled east into packets are they started making mistakes. Mistakes is holding them responsible for an individual terrorists to the tactical level where you know what the Communications Patterns are and the family. We had individual analysts i ana growing proportion called targeting analysts who were watching. In the briefings the growing drumbeat was the sense that the circle around him almost by the day was getting tighter and then in the spring the raid happened and he almost died, suffered wounds from the gunfight ensued and in a slate piece. Unimaginable before 9 11. That began the search for what a detainee could tell about an organization that they didnt fully understand. Forget about plots. Those are important. The counterterrorism business, a lot of what i would ask this but useful in the newspapers. Our business was the people business. People who are committed to the murder of innocents will go on to create another so unless you can take down the architects of them al qaeda or ic isis doublefaced plots forever. Ours is a people business to find, fix and finish a human being typically by staging the raid operation. He was the first one who went down. The reason he was significant as i mentioned a lack of understanding is counterterrorism is often a people business obviously the first questions you might have would be can you tell us about plots were about the second wa wave. Critically important for intelligence, who carries messages between the leaders that basic material is critical and we didnt have a good understanding of that in the spring of 2002. He talked but then in the memory of the people i spoke with, he shut down. And he told his interviewers and interrogators go home, have babies, dont come back because i am not speaking anymore so in the intensity of the time when america said make sure this doesnt happen again when a president of the United States zednik sure this doesnt happen again and the Congress Says how did you fail to catch it the first time in the anticipation might include anthrax, cia officers and that is should making in the spring and summer of 2002 said if he is shutting down we can send him to the u. S. Justice system where he will get a lawyer and never speak again. We can send him to another themr foreign country that might have charges against him. The prospect is the other country will interrogate him themselves and we will not sit in the room and a well shielded from us critical intelligence that we need. They also will not have the same priority as the half. They wont want to ask questions about their country and we want to ask questions about america. So through a series of conversations among the cia leaders, there is a fateful decision that is the subject of the boo book advocates should we develop our own secret facilities called blacklights clandestine facilities in the countrys overseas where we will transfer al qaeda prisoners in this case an al qaeda prisoner and interrogator using the harsh techniques that have been splashed across every page in the newspapers and in america for more than a decade. There is another piece of the process. Everybody knew, and i was there, people would ask questions later on. Everybody knew this wasnt only sensitive but that it would be controversial, tha but as the program, the secret black site network so there were conversations between the Inspector General and the lawyers at the department of justice to set up and interpret the wall from america to say what is appropriate in terms of interrogation for a cia black site, with complies with the constitution and what complies with federal law and we want it on paper and we are not moving until it is on paper. Through the summer of 2002, the department of justice discuss what could be done. He was already transferred, stable and transferred to a black site, but the former authorization from the department of justice did not arrive until august of 2002. August of 2002 is when my colleagues were in the beginning of the program. He went through tough interrogation techniques. People talk about waterboarding. There were more than 100 detainees at the facilitys. Three of them were water boarded and he was one of them. One of the challenges of talking to a detainee and one of the challenges of discussing this in a public environment where we dont have the luxury of time that we have in the auditorium is people will look at me everyday and say come on. If you put somebody under, they are going to lie. So, let me explain as we went through that process wide, and im not here to defend the program, im here because i thought that the view of the cia should be explained so that americans are not at either end of the spectrum those who want to attack with wisdom and those who support it and i hear both when im on the streets we understand what happened and why. We will be able to walk the shoes and say i understand what they did, regardless of whether i like it or not. But so much because you have been following for so long that you can come up in concert with other experts and psychologist and interrogators to come up with a package of questions over weeks where then they start to realize they know more than they seem to know when im lying. When that prisoner is under duress and has been under her sleep deprivation and starts to realize he cannot lie his way out not truth we are not stupid. Some answers never came like locational information of osama bin laden. Someone tries to give you the bits and pieces they think are less valuable yes german in our camp and that kind of material the bits and pieces are invaluable gold for intel. Of the prisoner is compliant and gives information over somebody they trained with just one example game on for people in my world. With every bit of data that they have with every travel data and now all of a sudden over the course of time to tell us who that person was. With one tiny shred of evidence shred of information from the compliant detainee that you thought was irrelevant the point im making is of course people lie. The only way you can get out of the box is to develop the interrogation package that is so complete that detainee feels he needs a lifeline. That lifeline was the cia. A lot happened after that interrogation speaking with a bat like Site Management the first month and years were tough if you have an agency that is trained to collect information for spies overseas now serving as a prison conducting interrogations the caa values agility but sometimes they believe nobody will ever do it because they dont have experience and we will do it. Thats part of the dose that led to the black site Interrogation Program but because of conversations with lawyers who were meticulous. The black sites matured. Policies and procedures tightened, training change. Some individuals involved early should not have been. Over time that were recruited and said i want to get into this because i want to go after with a vengeance those people were weeded out. You would not pass the application process as the program richard unless you could assure you were there to be professional. There were weaknesses outlined in the book and mistakes but has leadership got involved after some egregious mistakes the program matured. Other things happen that were surprising. And then shifting to the fbi at 2005 at that we were losing the us army had invaded afghanistan and i saw a breath of a network that i did not think we were in front of four years that they could not contain the people that i spoke with said business is good they never anticipated the high and prisoners that happen because of the accelerated raids around the world. For example the architect of 9 11 the highest prisoner ever held captive and then projected the yemen bombing time and time again faster and faster as the intelligence picture clarified. The sites mature they needed more sites and to develop their own custombuilt sites the first was not custombuilt it was a remote location. The expertise they had to talk to prisoners to determine what techniques are most effective and to determine how to build a psychological package so you can maximize the prospect to say they know more than i ever expected i better speak. Better and better and better. But there was the flipside and that was the iraq war to the remarkable unity of 9 11 leading up to the iraq war and increasing questions whether the cia program was sustainable especially in many colleagues would view this like the second wave never happened. The fact america have the time and space to discuss what should be done in a Democratic Society resulted from the fact there was not another major attack. Many colleagues are persuaded if there was the catastrophic attack people wouldve asked far fewer questions about the techniques. Let me make it simple the decline of the program was partly due to the success of keeping america safe the word that was used for my colleagues is simple as earl