Is a big fan of richard nixon, he was young student, we are arranged this is for our cspan viewers. The power of the atlantic as opposed to the Washington Post, we got ed snowden to declare he was trained in all sorts of spy craft and helped the white house make revealed the station chief to make tonight extra special. We have a real treat tonight, spies and spy class with a practitioner and someone who has been deeply involved in watching the story of a National Security in all of its forms and tool kids. David ignatius has been longterm nationalsecurity columnist for the Washington Post. He is the interviewer of my Favorite Book called u. S. And the world the making of conversations of the future of foreign policy. I was a producer, he was brilliant. En Valerie Plame was the counterIntelligence Officer, counter proliferation cia operative despite what a desk officer, we want to get into that. And became one of the most known how did see i agents in the history of the institution. Both of them have written novels. Valerie plame has written blowback, the last time i sought blowback which was the cias term which refers to i havent read this book yet but it is reaction to actions that are taken. Johnson wrote blow back the costs and consequences of the american empire which after 9 11 was omaha artist to get book off the shelf because it anticipated 9 11 to some degree. This is blowback, a fictional novel. We have the director the director by David Ignatius, bestselling author of blood money, body of lies, Russell Crowe and others, all of davids of his being made into movies and i hope yours will be as well. When i read this i was on a cruise in the caribbean. I am hoping to get into Valerie Plames in the same way and i fantasized about being the director. Have your agent call someone in hollywood. To begin with, when you wrote this where you envisioning yourself as the director . Is this the frustrated journalists who had become so entranced with this bureaucracies that was so responsible for managing the worlds great secret, americas great secrets and pursuing National Interest of the United States. I felt when i was reading grahams voice, i was hearing your voice. It goes without saying that any character in any novel is some way a projection of the author. That is what is fun about be a novelist. Your voice in the woman character, in making scenes, places, experiences you never had. I told steve who i had in mind for this character and it was so preposterous, he couldnt possibly be. But speak about the character, i hope the has existence of anybody he is montalban become cia director after running the Communications Company so i and in managing a business person who defied the National Security bureaucracy in that job by refusing nationalsecurity letter which is the way in which the fbi tried to compel people so he comes to the cia as the most unlikely figure as a director, the idea of reforming the place, turning it upside down. In his first week, a young, swift hacker in a dirty tshirt and the tattoo on his neck that says cut here in russian walks into the cia u. S. Consulate in hamburg and claims that the agency is communications and codes have been hacked and hands the base chief a list of names of all the people who are in germany and switzerland. That is the first thing that our new director, a champion of civil liberties, has to deal with. The possibility that these weapons that we see have been turned on the cia itself. That is the character stevens nominated himself. David bradley who runs the Communications Company cant do it, we have to turn the seat. The struggle in the book as i read it was a struggle in part between your fathers cia and the next generation cia. One of zeros and 1s digits, very different security running against the bureaucracy of managing in tent in the world of spying. I am wondering, i read your acknowledgements and in it you talk about being in germany and set up with young hackers. You are totally cool guy and i know you hang out in georgetown and stuff like that you are also known as someone who understands the cold war, state crafted it used to be. How did David Ignatius become cool enough to understand what was going on with packers and the new terrain, the new surf of National Security. Hetrick question. There is an answer to this question. This book is about an institution in transition. I began with the idea that every scene of the traditional spy novel, penetration, deception, manipulation, was going to go into additional space. Today you didnt want to recruit the chief of a service, you wanted to recruit the systems administrator. We open up every secret, all kinds of opportunities for covert action. That was the idea at the beginning. It is a picture of an agency that i think having a sense believe it or not since the mid 1970s is haunted. The cia is haunted by ghosts. I met James Angleton when i was a young journalist. One of the ghosts who haunts the place. Valerie plame has lived this and i should let her speak to what she experienced and what she thinks the modern Creative Intelligence agency can emerge but that is very much Valerie Plame, your heroine, youre covered cia official is Vanessa Pearson. Any connection . I want to get into this. Both of you have said that when you cant write about the truth because what you know is classified and secret, telling the story through fiction enables you to go further. Is the Vanessa Pearson store your story that has gone further yen you have been able to tell before . I am delighted to be here with you. Thank you so much. Of course you take these stories, incredible characters and along the way, operations and i would never want to reveal sources and methods and of course the cia publication review board that i am responsible to as well. I think even if i read cookbooks it needs to go to them. A line out of blowback is editor and right now and i feel confident. It was a very different experience than i went through with fair game but that is another story. Feel free to go into it. The whole genesis of this was i became distressed with how female characters, cia officers are portrayed in popular culture, they are always cardboard characters. I wanted to write one that was much more rich and complex and had something to do with reality rather than just a declaration. What inspired me, i had worked in the cia, working on a network that was brought down in december of 2003, we caught mop libyans red handed to add more widgets to their program and that was part of the network. I was working with the people who after years of patient operations, really creative operational work, brought that down but that characters fascinating. He is a moral, he doesnt care who he sells Nuclear Knowledge and widgets as well. So this character has morphed into someone we call in the book. Which is hindi for ghosts. It will open the dirty bomb, but dont worry, National Treasures you shouldnt give away everything. Talk about gender and spice for a moment. We know in the Osama Bin Laden story that there was a young woman, obsessive compulsive, driven, dont know her name, happy to know she was extremely frustrated, felt discriminated against, underappreciate it and undervalued and at war with the culture of almost misogynist men inside the cia. Is any of that truth . The director was that last submitted to you . Still running the halls for sure. Kathryn bigelow, the director of zero dark faherty said publicly as she was preparing this film in doing the research she found herself surprised at the of a woman was at the forefront. Women are persevering and the woman, a composite figure, did she win for it . She was nominated. In any case, showing women place a more Important Role in operation that gives us credit for. In 2011, in afghanistan in 2009. One of the Operations Officer that i happen to know, killed by a suicide bomber and pushed for the narrative, girls can do operations too. And Vanessa Pearson is engaged, challenged by the job inside and outside between the agency, how do you have a normal life . How do you have a romantic life . How diu channel that drive, and how do you allow you to be successful and accepted. If one of your panels can ask the question, i was researching my second novel years ago which has a woman as a principal character, i interviewed a number of cia women in operations including she told me something i want to ask you if it was ever true and she said women in operations have to be careful, and attractive woman who wants to have a conversation with a target, someone who is developmental at a Cocktail Party or wherever you encounters this person, often have a natural reaction, this attractive woman is coming on to me and he will read this through a lens of traditional gender politics. She said it was a tricky challenge to be engaging and personable but not too much. It is very accurate. My way around it for how i worked, i founder leon if i was developing someone that a lunge was much safer than a dinner. Determined end time, nothing happens after lunch. To turn someone gender issues, sometimes you are the only person who was listening to that target. For whatever, bowl spectrum of human emotions, they are feeling somehow not paid attention to, no one listens to them. Their underappreciated, you are the first one hanging on their every word and that is intoxicating, Pamela Harriman if you look at pictures of her, she is not this stunning bombshell but she had the most important men of the 20th century at her back and call. And some are going really . [laughter] what is so important about your books, novels and a lot of nonfiction policy commentary is that you are humanizing and creating stories about an incredible morass of the intelligence world. Data priest has written extensively about our intelligence Industrial Complex being so sprawling, so large that it is not conceivable or realistic that we have no idea how large this is. David, without giving away the end of this book or other books which i wont do, part of the sub theme of your book is the enemy is us and in your book blood money, a young scholar who became an expert in mathematics and associative intelligence, got in that network that our own inability comes in and bite us back and that is telling that i wonder if i am getting that right. When you talk to a cia director and you talked previously was general David Petraeus do they have a sense that the enemy is us . Great question. The great answer is no. If theres one common theme for my nine novels is that bureaucracy and secrecy can produce a real mess. The organizational desire we produce and grow, in this secret world, look at the nsa and all the crazy things it got into. I fought for years the cia, operations would be better if smaller. The desire to be all things to all customers to know as much about compromise in peru and fiberoptic developments, so you get this huge organization stealing secrets that matter that saved our lives, that the cia secrets that dont make a difference. Do you really need to listen to Angela Merkels phone calls . That is just the beginning of the list. And so the simple answer to your question is yes, that is something that bothered me as a journalist and i have written about and often. Theres a way as a novelist you can play it out, this idea is that hidden in these 3 arcus these bureaucracies are fortunes that will bring down the people, my first novel, wonderful reallife hero robert ames ends and ends with his death, aspects of the operation that he wasnt aware of that just came back. A lot of people die in your novel. How do people do in yours . I just want to add to that. The book topsecret america which laid out chapter and verse the unbelievable growth and reaction to 9 11 that traumatized the country and the immediate aftermath of 9 11 had, how it has grown and grown. I agree completely that it is one of the after the 9 11 commission, one of the recommendations was the director of national intelligence, this overarching entity, but 16 or 17 different age gathering agencies and the old point, the cias Central Intelligence agent, with its inception and you are absolutely right. The growth of it, when you see top intelligence officials on tv defending nsa i have no doubt theyre good and genuine and loyal americans that think theyre doing what they need to do to keep us safe. They never quite to my way of thinking never quite in keeping is sitting conflict with our Constitutional Values . Is that the country we want to be . We never quite get there, just keeping you save, dont ask any more questions. Your book reads a little like 24, a gripping page turner of bringing down the Nuclear Proliferation network that matters your own life, a lot of the tension is the controls back home, bureaucrats who dont understand, may be white house operatives and others can you talk a little bit about that tension between doing saving lives, stopping horrible things from happening that you can never acknowledge versus those people that have different calculations of risk and reward. The predecessor picking up the pieces and yet there it is always the dynamic that i am sure you saw, you tease that out in your book between headquarters, we know what we are doing and those in the field that are on the ground need to make judgment calls, why they paid a salary to make this judgment calls on the spot. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. That tension is always fair, how do you proceed . A few quick questions. I will go to the audience soon but theres tension between the books. There is a human side, and theyre working in the field and david may not notice this but my interpretation of them seems to be in the way he is telling the story, the automation of spying, the atlantic, to laugh about the jobs we all have are going to be taken over by robots and automated had taken over by computers, i am interested in the technological advances dimension of intelligence and the sort of tension, and when we talk about the chief of operations we are still putting it in very human terms that somehow this man or woman from the cia really matters as opposed to the big computer. I recently had dmitri mad that have tweeted out one of the big missiles on the may day parade in moscow and i said facetiously that barack obama should tweet out a big nsa computer picture and i am wondering. Are you really writing about a post human cia, the human stories dont matter as much in the future . No questioning, allows a collection of information that has never been possible before which means it is especially important for congress and the courts to figure out how to oversee that properly. That said, watch through my career reinforces the importance of the human dimension, not its unimportance. There isnt any substitute for good judgment my first novel has been described in a wonderful Nonfiction Book went to plug called a good spy. Robert amos recruited the chief of intelligence, top Intelligence Officer of hours and adversary and operated way over the line, shared more with his agents then headquarters could possibly have allowed. Headquarters said we dont control this agent of yours and that makes it dangerous. We are giving information so lets bust him and they tried to bribe him. Theres a wonderful scene where they take him to a hotel in rome and offer 300 a month. She says no, storms out, he is furious. How do you think you can bribe me . Iman depending . Ames was smart enough to say to let this be what is, what did diplomat would have with his sources. Headquarters was initially furious and thought this was totally inappropriate and finally that is an example of his human judgment, the fabric of the human relationship between him and his force, the thing that is most precious in intelligence is knowing about intentions, but getting inside the world and foreign leaders and what they do or dont do, theres no way you can get that is in having human sources who listen to the conversation . I completely agree. I am biased, i was in human intelligence but all those billion dollars satellites might tell you as the most recent example the tanks are on the border of ukraine but hopefully maybe within the inner circle of Vladimir Putin to tell you is this just a bluff . Are they really going to go over . Will lead humans will tell you that. That is the justification why you dont need somebody in Angela Merkels circle. I am just joking. Ed snowden we need to make some news here, ed snowden is going to say on nbc nightly news, this is ed snowden, i was trained as a spy in the traditional sense and lived and worked under cover overseas pretending to work in a job that i am not even a signed a name that was not mine, sounds like Valerie Plame. He doesnt have a novel out yet but i was interested if you have any quick reactions to ed snowden describing himself as someone who was more than essentially a clerk in a computer and technical experts that came across a lot of disturbing information but our Intelligence Services were training him and what thoughts you have about ed snowden, we were speaking in the greenroom that ed snowden caused you a bit of a problem with this book because it looked like you were following the news being in front of it. Let me start off. I would love to know Valerie Plames thought. I saw the excerpts from brian williamss interview that is on tonight and i was fascinated that he wanted to est