Theater located in the National Archives building in washington dc and also a special shout out to our friends at cspan who are joining us today. Before we hear from philip about his book would like to tell you about two upcoming programs taking place. August 16th at noon to tell us about a forgotten founding father george mason who gave us the bill of rights and on tuesday september 10th at noon blumenthal will talk about his recently released volume of his biography of Abraham Lincoln 1856 through 1863. To find out more please visit our website. Also printed materials in the lobby about Upcoming Events as well as signup sheets you can receive the electronic version. Philip joined the cia in 1985 specializing in south asia and then the middle east after the september 11 attacks and see a member of a small Diplomatic Team hoping to piece together a government in afghanistan. Meant to become Deputy Director of the Counterterrorism Center serving through 2005. He was the first Deputy Director of the fbi National Security branch and later the fbi Senior Intelligence advisor. Receiving numerous cia awards and commendations in his comments about terrorism in congressional testimony has been featured and broadcast now the president of med management specializing in analytic training and speaking about Security Issues and the senior fellow at the new America Foundation at George WashingtonUniversity Homeland Security policy institute serving as dean of Global Advisor to a firm specializing multinational companies. He is on the Advisory Board for the national Counterterrorism Center and director of National Intelligence and serves in the Homeland Security group please welcome philip to the National Archives. [applause] you missed the most important part of live parttime in memphis. [applause] thank you. I was running there that was a historic part of memphis wondering whether to write another book and reflecting on what i witnessed at the cia during that excruciating time after 9 11 and realize some of my colleagues and friends had written their stories but many of the people i worked with would never speak or write and their stories would never be told of nobody talk to them or put their stories to gather in one simple narrative to explain what happened. So i decided that morning i would do that for go this is mostly their stories. Its not a history. Its not every document that ever appeared what we call the program. Its a story of men and women that i served with who decided to speak to me. So to step back in time with me we are going into a time machine back in the 19 nineties. A lot of my colleagues talked about a time when we thought we had killed the dragon of the soviet union and all these snakes were left this was after the fall of the soviet union were people thought those intelligences of the future could not reach the magnitude of the soviet union but counterterrorism knew they had a problem. That started mostly when bin laden was in sudan and then accelerated in afghanistan but when i spoke to them about those times of the peace dividend there is times frustration that they witness the rise of a Global Network and the tools they had are so limited its only 20 years ago less than a full generation. That they think of loss and budget and personnel are not included on accusing the National Security structure but whether Technical Organization are manufacturing if you have substantial pieces of money and people moved you will have declines there were also the attitude about terrorism thinking back only 20 years nobody would imagine a world where somebody said we could have raids in afghanistan day after day after day. The thought that a raid would happen with high risk of american soldiers lives was almost on thinkable before 9 11. Forget about a us invasion but just a raid on a compound and we knew they knew where some of the compounds were. Much less an armed drone that could kill a terrorist overseas. In a debate for years, never happened meanwhile there is a bit of atrophy the number of spies declined in the attitude about terrorism was mixed remember after 1947 the targets the cia typically chased were big targets soviet, chinese, cuban missile crisis. I returned from taking a leave of absence in 1982 was told to go to the Counterterrorist Center because it was seen as a place you sent people who are not ready for prime time. [laughter] that changed overtime like any organization the personalities that i write about in the book were critical to keep counterterrorism from declining further george tenet was immersed in counterterrorism to insist it gives a level of privacy and insisted there was leadership there that was well regarded across the agency. To rate that profile to increase the quality of people but make no mistake the peace dividend for intelligence a lack of focus on terrorism meant that on that day the counterterrorism world was only not prepared they could not be prepared but in those months and years after 9 11 it is not over dramatized. Years of debate the cia has to be first in with the money and then will invade afghanistan that attitude is foundational. And that on the nightly press briefings for years five or six prefers i was trading back and forth with the people who Foreign Security services who tell us they uncovered a threat and to suffer communications coming to the United States and one of the things that is so evident it was a simple concept we anticipated a second wave four years. What we anticipated would be another 9 11 but perhaps worse because al qaeda had the anthrax program we did not fully understand. For months and months we did not understand if they had taken strains of anthrax out there was concern next time its not aircraft but anthrax per credit to that we did not understand the adversary the bread and butter of the human source of the organization like cia this is not me speaking with those that ran operations that it was modest. So in the midst of america to watch the pages and watch the faces of the following we were behind the scenes with the director to say if there is that second wave tomorrow and you say i wish i had done this then do it today. Intelligence operations, cooperation with the afghans the u. S. Was working with an element of afghanistan, a group called the Northern Alliance was so successful that al qaeda had to flee before they developed a plan and many of them fled east. Its mistakes that allow us in a part of the business in the intelligence that we call targeting that is having individual analysts responsible for the individual tactical level where you know what the terrorist communication patterns are, where his family is, what the network is. We have individual analysts. The drumbeat was the sense that the circle around him almost by the day was getting tighter. And then in the spring the raid happened. He almost died and suffered wounds from the gunfight particularly to his leg and a slight piece of the story by telling the buck ensured he would not die. Another bit of the agility after 9 11 that made the u. S. Response so powerful could you imagine calling a Medical Center saying we would like you to loan us some of the physicians to treat overseas now and we are going to put him on a plane, unimaginable before 9 11. That began the search for what a detainee could tell about an organization they didnt fully understand. Forget about the plot. Those are important. The counterterrorism business a lot of what i witnessed thats what you saw in the newspapers how to find, fix and finish typically by staging a raid operation. The first one who went down the reason he was significant as i mentioned with the lack of understanding. If counterterrorism is often a people business, obviously the first questions you might have would be can you tell us about plots and the second wave, can you tell us whether they are in the United States. But the stuff behind the scenes, can you tell us what the organization looks like and what the hierarchy looks like, who were the facilitators. Who carries messages between those who dont want to communicate between electrons. Thats basic material, the basic material is critical and we didnt have a good understanding of that in the spring of 2002. He talked with him in the memory of the people i spoke with, he shut down and he told his interviewers, his interrogators go home, have babies, dont come back because im 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 says it sure this doesnt happen again and how did you fail to catch it when the anticipation was a second wave that might include anthrax, cia officers into the decisionmaking in the spring and summer of 2002 said well, if we think hes shutting down, what are the options, we can send them to the 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 the other country will interrogate him and we will not sit in the room and a well shielded from most critical intelligence that we need. They also will not have the same priority is that we have. They are going to want us to ask questions about their country and we want to ask questions about america. We will transfer al qaeda prisoners and interrogate them using the harsh technique that has been splashed across every page and newspapers in america for more than a decade. Theres another piece of the process people would ask questions later on and everybody knew that this was not only sensitive, but it would be controversial. That is the program. So, there are conversations between the inspector general, the cia and the war years at the department of justice has hit the wall to say what is appropriate in terms of interrogation for the cia fight, what complies with the u. S. Constitution and what complies with federal law. We want it on paper and we are not moving until it is on paper. Through the summer of 2002, the lawyers and department of justice discussed what could be done. He was already transferred, stable and transferred, but the formal authorization from the department of justice to not arrive until august of 2002. August of 2002 was when my colleagues marked the beginning of the program. He went through tough interrogation techniques. People talk about waterboarding. Theres more than 100 detainees at the facilitys. Three of them were water boarded. 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 as people to loo do look at me y and say come on. If you put somebody under duress, they are going to lie. So let me explain as we went through the process wide, and im not going to defend the program, i am here because i thought tha their views should e explained so americans on either end of the spectrum who want to attack what was done and those who support it and i hear both on the streets we will understand what happened and why. Why would you pressure someone to speak because you know they are going to lie and my answer is straightforward. That isnt the full answer, but an al qaeda terrorist is going to make up stories all day long. That isnt the point. The real point is the analytic effort i mentioned earlier call targeting. You cannot have a successful interrogation of the prisoner unless you know so much about the prisoner, not a midlevel or lowerlevel so much because you have been following for so long that you can come up with in concert with other experts, physicians, psychologists, interrogators you can come up with a package of questions over weeks when the detainee starts to realize these guys know a lot more than i know. When he starts to realize he cant lie his way outcome you start to get answers. Some answers never came, for example vocational information about osama bin laden. But you get what we call compliance. Someone will try to give you bits and pieces of information that they think are less valuable. Those bits and pieces are in valuable gold for the intel. If a prisoner is compliant and gives you what he thinks is throwaway information about somebody that trained a german, french and, im just one example of a trained three years ago, game on for people in my world. Im going to balance that against every bit of data that we have had against all the charitable data travel data and over the course of time it will tell us who that person was trained based on one tiny shred of evidence, shred of information from a compelling and detainee who was giving you stuff he thought was irrelevant. The point im making is of course people why and the only way you can get outofthebox is developing an interrogation package that is so complete a te detainee feels he needs a lifeline and that lifeline was the cia. A lot happened after the initial stages of the abu zubaydah interrogation. When i spoke with lawyers and managers of the program, we talk about the maturation of the program. The first week the first month and years were tough. You have an agency that is now serving a prison conducting interrogations that the cia had never done. They value agility but sometimes they step into programs because they believe nobody will ever do it despite the fact we dont have experience. There are some who may not have been involved particularly over time particularly after some mistakes the program matured. Other things happened that were surprising. I can tell you sitting at the threat table in 2003, 2004 until i shifted to the fbi i thought we were losing. That may come as a surprise to you but the u. S. Army had invaded afghanistan supported by the cia. There was a network i didnt think we were in front o of her years in a volume of threats and attacks we could not contain. Nonetheless, the people i spoke with uniformly said business was good. The architect of 9 11, the highest and prison are they ever held captured in 2003. Architect of the bombing against the u. S. S. Cole. Time and time again they have been faster and faster as the intelligence picture clarified and not only did they matured at the sites matured, the cia needed more sites and they started developing their own custombuilt sites. The expertise and training people to talk to prisoners and determine what techniques were most effective in determining how to build the psychological package around each individual so that you could go in and maximize the prospect so they would say they know more than i ever expected. I better speak. Better and better. But there was a flipside and that was the iraq war, the declining unity after the remarkable unity of 9 11 leading up to the iraq war and increasing questions about whether the cia program was sustainable. Especially as many of my colleagues would view this with some sense of privacy especially since the second wave never happened. Let me put it this way the fact that america had the time and space to discuss what should be done in a Democratic Society resulted partly from the fact there wasnt another major attack. Many of my colleagues are persuaded the decline of the program is partly due to the success of a we are not the bureau of prisons and once we extract that intelligence we are not going to be Holding People for 20 years we dont even necessarily want it for two years to the endgame questions very few were briefed and i was among those briefed them. We told them what we were doing and we told them in some detail but very few were briefed. Increasing questions within the cia with the endgame is and outside of it what are they doing and whatever happened. The white house and the memory of my colleagues was not too excited about dealing with the questions. I dont blame them. I understand once you open the door you have to answer every single question about how and why you authorize that but it led to increasing frustration at the cia including frustration at white house meetings where the officials time and time again told me they were saying we cannot you, the american policymakers asked us to go down this road of detentions. You have to participate in the conversation about what happens after. About a legendary director among the cia officials before and director of the National Security agency, a man with intelligence and the military, highly respected for his discipline, for his mind com, he came into the cia in 2006 after the first detainee and said we have to put this on solid ground if we Read Everything and he was a voracious reader of information about the programs that he could master the details. Let me Read Everything and figure out what the right path is. I think in talking to my colleagues, his effort led to the interrogations but by that point even in 2006, the writing was on the wall. Five years after 9 11, just four years after the 2002 capture of abu zubaydah the program is already declining. The appetite wasnt there. Waterboarding was dropped and the interrogators said we dont think despite the conversation about this, we dont think this is the most specific technique and we dont need to use it anymore, sleep deprivation for example comes up as a technique that was successful. People dont like to be tired and they start to lose their will to not speak, so he scaled back the program. There were more and more conversations with the department of justice. Sometimes the program was shut down because the department of justice officials were starting to scale back on the original opinions. Every time they scale back the leadership a couple of times said if you want to change the documentation we are not moving until you change it. We dont move without paper and it has to explain how would we are doing is in complianc