Embassy, got over the fence, set fire to vehicles and did a lot of damage. My analysts believe the guys in benghazi, bad guys come absolute bad guys terrorists, saw what happened in cairo and said lets go do the same thing for the sake of our facility. And they did the assault on the state Department Facility and then they followed the state department guys come the state Department Facility to the cia facility conducted an attack immediately in the cias facility and were pulled by my security guys. They came back four hours later with much heavier works. One of the questions you have to ask yourself is people have pointed to these borders as this is evidence of preplanning. This is evidence and the effectiveness of the mortar fire. One of the questions you have to ask yourself is if there was a lot of preplanning why didnt they bring those borders to the first attack against the state Department Facility for the first attack against the cia facility. Why did they wait until almost nine hours later . The answer to that question is because they just went lastminute. People say they brought five mortars and three of them are affected. My question was why did they only bring five . Libya was a country awash in mortars. Why did they only bring five . They had time to fire a lot more than five. The answer, thats all they brought. Thats all they could find in the short period of time. The question here, the issue that you raised in the book is is. Absolutely not. These were caused by the analysts and one of the things that Everybody Needs to know about analysts in the cia is it takes great pride to call and things like they see it. They take great pride in telling policymakers you are wrong about something. They actually like to stick their finger in the policymakers eye. You are wrong wrong wrong about that. There was no political influence on the analysis here. I do know the analysts and some folks have claimed. The analyst did their jobs. Director petraeus and i defended the analysts. We believe that the analyst had to say. Director petraeus admitted the next day the principles meeting he believe, i believe the analysts and like i said most of their judgments have held up including the fact that there was little preplanning. Ive never seen significant evidence of preplanning. We are going to move on to the iraq war. He wrote in your book talking about secretary of state colin powell on a number of occasions in recent years secretary powell has should grant by harming him without intelligence of his u. N. Speech. The cia and the broader Intelligence Committee clearly failed him so someone in the chain of command at the time of the iraq wmd i would like to use this opportunity to publicly apologize. There were two big, at the time of the month leading up to the iraq war there were two big intelligence judgments. One is what was the status of weapons of mass Destruction Program and the second was what was the relationship between iraq and al qaeda . On the first vote was the status of his weapons of mass Destruction Program . The analysts in the entire u. S. Intelligence, in fact the analysts in every Intelligence Service on the planet had looked at the question. They came to the same conclusion this guy had chemical weapons. This guy has a biologic weapon production capability and this guy is reconstituting a Nuclear Weapons program. Thats what the analysts believe. They turned out to be wrong. All of the people looked at this question and turned out to be wrong and we can talk about why if you want to but it turned out to be wrong. The reason i apologize to colin powell is twofold. One is i think colin powell is a remarkable individual. I think he served his country with great distinction in job after job after job. He deserves the stellar reputation. His u. N. Speech and he did not say anything that the cia and the rest of the Intelligence Community did not leave. This tarnished his reputation. Hes the first person to tell you that. Ive heard him say that iraq wmd presentation to the u. N. He carried this with him. Ive also heard him say that nobody from the cia ever apologize. I was number three on the analytic side who did this analysis that we got wrong. And so given all of that i wanted to apologize and i also did want to surprise him. I didnt want him to got the book and see that he was in there so i sent him a chapter at a time. We talked for 45 minutes and he was deeply appreciative. Would you agree that the war was sold on the basis of wmd weapons . I wouldnt say so. I didnt mean it in a negative way. President bush would have to tell you himself and is very important, one of the main jobs of an analyst and one of the things i try to do in the book is put some of the Big Decisions in context. What was the context in which president bush made them . 9 11 had just happened. The largest single attack on america. 3000 people killed. The cia was telling him that Saddam Hussein one of our primary enemies a sworn enemy of the United States had active weapons of mass Destruction Programs including a Nuclear Weapon program and we were telling him that Saddam Hussein supported International Terrorist groups, not al qaeda and we can talk about that if you want Palestinian Terrorist groups. So there says president bush having faces huge attack on the United States understanding job number one at the president is to protect the American People and we are telling him this guy has weapons of mass destruction and support to terrorist groups. Hes sitting there thinking, you know if saddam uses these weapons against us or if saddam gives these weapons to terrorist group and they use these weapons against us that could make 9 11 look small. I think thats what drove president bush to action in iraq and its exactly what led a majority of congress to support him, for exactly the same reason. Absolutely the analysis on iraq having weapons of mass destruction played into it no doubt about it. These are tough calls and nobody gets them all right but does the cia have an observation to do more to find out where rather than based upon circumstantial evidence . Great question. When you read about when you read about the intelligence failure that i was iraq and weapons of mass destruction you will read mostly about the failed analysis. In fact there have been books about it. Academics have written articles. There have been studies and ive read it all. I was involved in this and i have read it all. Part of the failure here was something that never gets talked about. Part of the failure here was not just the analysts at the cia but the people at the cia responsible for collecting the data. The people at the cia who were responsible for recruiting other human beings to spy on the United States. They were not successful in getting a human agent close enough to saddams inner circle to find out what saddam was really doing. But he was really doing was believing the only way he could get out from under sanctions was to get rid of his Weapons Program. He believed the cia would see that. The cia would tell the president about it. The president would get rid of sanctions and he didnt want anybody else to know that he had gotten rid of these programs. They were a deterrent to this main enemy of loan so he wanted it to be a secret that he had got part of the program. And by the way he planned all along to eventually go back to his Weapons Programs after sanctions went away. How do we know this . Because he told us this. After he was captured we have long discussions with him and he told us exactly what he was saying so it turns out he overestimated the capabilities interestingly enough. The part that deals with having access to redeveloping Nuclear Weapons my understanding is it was based around iraq acquired aluminum casement that were often used in that process. But it was also used for other things. Look the aluminum tubes and we can talk about aluminum tubes if you want. I dont know that we need to. Just let me say this. That was one of the factors that led the analyst to the nuclear conclusion. There were a lot of others. The department of energy which concurred to the judgment that saddam was reconstituting his Nuclear Weapons program didnt buy the aluminum tubes or aluminum tubes are gaba thought the rest of the evidence was Strong Enough to make that judgment. To the cia ever do an analysis of what to expect it to go to war in iraq and what the ultimate outcomes would be . We did it in different places. I think we owed president bush before he went to war we owed him what is called the National Intelligence the lead analysis by the Intelligence Community. We owed him here are the implications if you go to war and heres what to expect in iraqi society, iraqi politics at the goto war. Heres whats important and here are the key factors that will determine whether this place become stable or unstable. We didnt pull it together in one place. Is not a pretty picture. Saddam hussein is gone. Aside from that iran has now emerged as a power because iraq was the main Power Holding them back. Isis and al qaeda had a field day and in your book you talk about that. Now they are taking huge portions of terrorists. In the book what i say in the book is i really believe that the decision to invade iraq at the end of the day i dont think was a decision that brought about the instability in iraq. The decisions that brought about the instability in iraq were the d. Bath vacation by the Coalition Provisional authority. After the military operations ended and we were in charge of iraq bremer was in charge of iraq the first few decisions of the Coalition Provisional authority were one to remove from from the government anybody who is a member of the baath party and to basically disband any organizations that had a very close relationship with the baath party. Those two decisions resulted in the collapse of the Iraqi Military the Iraqi Security service and the iraqi Intelligence Service. All of them were members of the baath party and all of a sudden i didnt have jobs anymore. What did they do . A whole bunch of them went to work for al qaeda in iraq because they were mad number one and number two they got paid by those organizations. It was those two decisions that i think were the critical decisions that led to that. When you look back as a former member of the cia were you satisfied with how things work out in iraqs . Of horse not. Its a mess. One of the things you have to think about what would the place look like what with the place look like today if we hadnt done that . You have to do the counterfactual. What would iraq look like today if we had not invaded iraq . Who knows but let me give you a possibility. Sanctions would eventually gone away without a doubt. Theres no way that the United States would hold the sanctions together. They would have gone away. He would have restarted his Weapons Program and he would have had chemical weapons and he would have had a violet to go weapons capability and probably would have developed a Nuclear Weapon. Either you would have had to have dealt with that if you saw it happening where he would have won. And then you fastforward and you say okay what happened in tunisia, what happened in egypt, what happened in libya, what happened in syria in terms of the arab spring could have easily happened in iraq. In other words people rise up and say we want you to go away. You might have a country that has these weapons of mass distraction that have the same instability today that libya has. So you cant look back and say that if we hadnt done this that iraq wouldnt look like that today. He could easily look like it today with a Nuclear Weapon. One of the things you talk about was the politicalization of intelligence by the Administration One democrat and one republican. In fact with regard to the leadup to the iraq war you wrote about Scooter Libby and Vice President cheney. Libbys attempt to intimidate a cia official was the most weight and politicize intelligence i saw it in the business. It would not be the last attempt what impact does politicizing of intelligence have and does it distort what the cia is doing and is the cia able to stand up to the president say no . This is really important. Bramborough said there were two big judgments on iraq prior to the war, weapons of mass distraction and then iraq and al qaeda. On iraq and al qaeda what we said was what the analysts believed was the there were some historic conversations between iraqi and intelligence and al qaeda but as of 2002 there was no current relationship between iraq and al qaeda. There was no iraqi involvement in 9 11. There was not even iraqi foreknowledge of 9 11. Thats what we said. Scooter libby did not like what we said. He believed there was a connection. He thought we were wrong and after he put this paper out the set wages he called up my boss and told her to a java paper and fix fix it because it was wrong. We just put our hands up and said no we are not doing that. I told you earlier we are not partisan and we call it like we see it. Where the umpire, where the referee we call like we see it. We didnt budge. Scooter libby called John Mclaughlin v. Director of the cia to complain about the paper and george tenet and John Mclaughlin said no, stop. And president bush did something really important. My boss who Scooter Libby called and he refused he briefed president bush on Christmas Eve in 2002. Went to camp david ended and did his daily intelligence briefing. At the end of that raising as he was getting up to go president bush said one more thing. Ive heard about this issue regarding iraq and al qaeda. Ive heard about the pressure on you guys. I just want you to know that i have your back and i want it to continue to call it like you see it. Very, very important. But in my experience at 33 years i have never seen an analyst buckle under to anybody to try to get them to say anything that they dont believe. We trained analyst that way. They are proud of it. They really call it like it is. They dont budge to pressure. In fact the pressure strengthens the back end even more. Talk about osama bin laden. Some of his material was just released a few days ago, some of his notes and some the book that he was reading and so forth. He says al qaedas sole opportunity in the arab spring which was something that the west didnt necessarily recognize. With regard to the arab spring there were a couple of things we got right. And there were a couple of things we got wrong. By the way one of the points i want to make here is that the work that the agencies have to do is really hard. The analysts only get the hard problems. They dont get the easy jobs. They only get the hard questions and they get most things right and occasionally they get some things wrong. Its really hard so arab spring. First of all we provided what we called strategic for years we had been telling the president , the National Security team multiple congresses that there were pressures building in the arab world that were unsustainable. There were political pressures, economic pressures, demographic pressures, societal pressures that were built and and we wrote that over of years in depth. We provide strategic warning from the arab spring. What we didnt do one of things we didnt quite right is we didnt provide what we call tactical warnings. Tactical warning as we think this place is going to blow up. We think we have reached the tipping point. Thats very difficult to see coming. We didnt see it. We didnt write it. Shame on us. We could have done a better job with social media to see what the arab spring about what was happening. We could have done a better job at that. Once arab spring happened we got something really important right and we got something important wrong. The thing we got right was as soon as tunisia happened we said this has the potential to be a contagion. This has the potential to be a threat and that was the first real time. Tunisia was the person we said it was going to spread before tunisia began to show. So we got that right, we nailed that the thing we didnt get quite right was the analysts said as soon as the arab spring started that the arab spring was going to undermine al qaeda. Their argument was that it was going to undermine al qaeda because it was going to undercut their narrative that violence was necessary for political situations. They may have been right about that but what they missed were two other really powerful dynamics that turned out to make the arab spring and al qaeda spring which is the title of the book this particular dynamic. The two particular dynamics are number one the arab spring undercut the willingness of some arab countries like extremism inside their border. The best example is egypt under president morrissey were the guys who had fought tears for years in egypt still have their same capabilities. They didnt think they have the political cover anymore to fight terrorists and so they stopped. Al qaeda came back to egypt for the first time. Within a matter of weeks back in egypt. The other dynamic was you had countries who had a willingness to fight extremists inside their border but no longer have the capab