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Mic Drop: Former Deputy DNI Sue Gordon: ‘it is conceivable that the world order has already been broken’
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From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click here. Sue Gordon spent her life working in.
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Intelligence, came right out of school and got a job with the CIA that turned out to be a fit. Like peas and carrots.
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She rose through the ranks, held every big intel job you can think of CIA, NRO, ODNI, and in in 2017, she landed a role that sounded more powerful than it probably felt. Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, which.
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Is perhaps the worst title in the world.
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We caught up with her in Nashville at a summit on the future of war at Vanderbilt University. It was mid April, and the headlines were coming fast and furious. Tariffs paused, NSA Director General Tim Hawk fired without explanation, and cisa, the cybersecurity agency tasked with protecting the country's critical infrastructure, was bracing for more layoffs. And that's where we started. There seems to have been a little more churn than usual in the early days of the Trump administration. How do you think our adversaries and we could pick China or Russia. How do you think they're seeing what's going on?
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I think they see opportunity. If I went back to my real intelligence roots, I'd say this is a great time for mischief.
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From Recorded Future News, this is Click Here's Mic Drop A longer listen to one of our favorite interviews of the week. I'm Dena Temple Raston, and today a former career intelligence officer weighs in on chaos, cyber, and what happens when a government seems to forget how its own systems work. Where were you when General Hawk was fired?
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Reliving my time in the previous administration when each morning you wake up and you go, oh my God.
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We'Ll be right back. Support for Click Here comes from CleanMyMac. A cluttered desktop isn't just an eyesore. It wastes mental energy, slows down your Mac hampers focus. Since 2008, CleanMyMac has helped users optimize their devices, and the latest version focuses on comprehensive care, not just cleaning. With CleanMyMac, you'll boost both your Mac's performance and your productivity by easily identifying and removing large, unnecessary files, including cache files. CleanMyMac finds outdated files that can be safely removed, so there's no need to worry about losing important documents or photos. Decluttering isn't just about speed. It's about creating an environment that helps you work smarter, not harder. Your Mac will continue to run clutter free with the Smart Care feature, ensuring your Mac stays in top shape. With just one click, you can effortlessly clean up ram, manage processes, and even check for malware. Deep clean your Mac Scan for potential threats and boost performance, all with one click. Experience CleanMyMac for yourself. Try it free for seven days and use promo code. Click as in Click here to save an additional 20% on your purchase at cleanmymac.com click here is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company has affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. I'm Dina Templewost and this is Click here's mic drop. When Sue Gordon was principal Deputy Director for National Intelligence, she had one job that few people ever briefing the President every day. Give us an idea what that was like.
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What was that like? Every president is different. And since the job of intelligence is simply to present the best view of what is not what we prefer because we have no policy responsibility, it's just, can we communicate the best of what we know in a manner that can be heard? And so every time you have a different president, you have to do that differently. What was interesting about President Trump, I'd probably say three things. Number one, I think he was our first president that was disproportionately economically, not politically, militarily driven. And so his questions fell into areas that we weren't as practiced about talking about as his interests were. Right. So you can ask me about order of battle for foreign nation states and capabilities and alliances, but the questions about leverage, I think that was a hard thing for us. The second difference was he really didn't understand the government at all. Zero.
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What does that mean, how it works.
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Who has what responsibility, how you move it to achieve what you want. And you kind of have to know that. And then the third piece is he had particularly for intelligence, he trusted others more than us. So that was almost for the first time, intelligence community having to say, we're used to being sacrosanct and now we have a guy that'll call up a friend of his and he believes them more on South Africa than us. And so if you put those three things together with the impatience and confidence of a Donald Trump, you can see how we think we're trying to help him get where he wants by sharing what we know. And he's like, I just want to do it. I mean, it was a romp. I mean, I love the intelligence community and I love the kind of purity of our mission which I think he didn't understand. I think he conflated it oft times with the FBI, and he can make whatever policy he wants. But we would like him to know what we know and understand how not to misuse what we don't know. We thought he had the what and we had the how. I think what seems to be done now is he's got the what and he tells them how. Now, listen, if you got a career government employee sitting here, here's what I'll tell you. So slow. Too costly, probably too big. Not responsive enough to a changing world. But you do have to have a vision of what you want to do, and you do have to have an idea of how that system works. Like, would you hire me to be the CEO of ExxonMob?
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I don't know. We'll wait till the end of the interview. You're doing pretty well so far, right?
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I'm not a professional CEO. I might be good enough to be a startup CEO, but I'm not good enough. And so I think that's the problem, is government does have a sense to it, even if it needs to be modernized. And when you don't see that and you just have people who just do things because they can, you run the risk of breaking things that you don't understand.
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Not out of malevolence, just out of.
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Yeah. I don't think you have to be malevolent to cause damage.
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Exactly. You just have to be maybe not understanding something.
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Elon Musk, I think America is awesome. I think what he has built with SpaceX and what we've done in terms of putting things in space at lower cost than Starlink, I think is absolutely awesome. And when that rocket blows up, who the hell cares, Right?
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Right.
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There are going to be a lot of people who care, who have come to count on something that is produced by people who simply create the quiet that things happen in. And when that isn't there, I just worry after that.
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The quiet that things happen in. That's a nice phrase. One of the things, as an intelligence officer I think you do is you kind of see things from maybe an adversary's point of view. How do you think our adversaries. And we could pick China or Russia, they're different, I think, in the way they're seeing what's going on. How do you think they're seeing what's going on?
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I think they see opportunity. I think for the longest time, the United States has had kind of a stranglehold on global actions and global integrity. And putting aside any of the political discussions about tariffs and the need to rebalance trade and all those things. Yay. But the greatest strength America always had was friends, that people would choose to be friends with us. And I think that was clear now. In a digital world, economic forces are more important than political. Military protectionism is more economic. As we've changed our priorities, I think alliances have become more situational. And when we become more stable and economically less dependable, I think you will see people going toward other centers. Said more grossly is conceivable that the world order is not being challenged, but it's already been broken and two sides have chosen a place and the US Is trying to decide where it's going to go. And all the other people that around the world are looking to say, I'm too small to be one of these big players. Who am I going to align with to make sure that I can be as sovereign as I am? And I think so. I think that's created an opportunity.
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When we come back, Sue Gordon on the Doge Cuts signal gate and the surprising decision to fire NSA Director Tim Hawk. We'll be right back. There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's on the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass that's on the Media specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts. In Tuesday's episode, we heard from someone inside the US Digital service who described what it felt like when Doge, a Trump era efficiency initiative, moved in. She said it didn't feel like reform. It felt like a purge. People were being fired, systems were being gutted. And the people making those decisions didn't seem to understand how fragile the government's digital backbone really is. And that is one of the things that keeps Sue Gordon up at night.
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The president is just not the national security decision maker. The work of national security is done by the thousands and thousands of people.
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The people who do the daily work of protecting the country, who don't make policy but need to understand it in order to implement it. If they're left out, or worse, undercut, the system suffers.
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When you don't include them, you don't connect them, or worse, you undermine them. How does the system work? How do we have any conversations with our allies and partners to do things? How do you get the American people to willfully suboptimize their lives so that something good can happen if you're telling them that none of that is working. I just feel it's so destructive.
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And when the system actually breaks, our adversaries are watching what went through your mind from like an IC perspective, an intelligence, professional perspective.
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Okay, so again, this is a really consequential moment where everything that was doesn't work anymore.
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She compares it to an invisible earthquake. Everything looks the same, but none of it works anymore. The problem, she says, is that evolution won't fix it. It needs reinvention. And for the cyber world, that moment of reinvention isn't coming. It's already here. And do you feel this is a consequential moment in the cyber realm in particular?
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Holy smokes. Yes.
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Okay, tell me about that.
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Well, cyber is just. It has changed everything. It has changed the projection of power. Now anyone for a buck 380 can go any distance across any barrier to do anything with volumetric effects. And then we have nation states that have the power of nation states behind them that are mature political military institutions that know what to do with that, with the resources that they have. And so there is just no doubt that it isn't just the economic impact of the ransomware, but is also the insinuation into our institutions that we know exists. I mean, you know, the Russian attack on Ukraine that took out that power grid wasn't about taking out the power grid. It was about showing that they could.
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You mean years ago, before the war?
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Yeah, 2000, seven years ago. In Western societies, because we depend on a default trust. And cyber is fundamentally assaulting trust. Look what they've done with influence as well as attack. So what worries me the most about this is just because no adversary has effected something with systemic outcome doesn't mean that they could if they either needed to demonstrate their power or if they just decided to create advantage. And I just don't think we're talking about it in the way that will help American decision makers, whether that's the population or whether that's a business leader or even the government saying, how are we going to do this?
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How should we be talking about it? That is a major threat.
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First we have to understand what we want to do. I mean, now that we're in a digital world, you can't stop cyber attacks because you need to be able to communicate, but you can build resilience. We could build the capability to achieve what we wanted to do. We need to talk more about risk than compliance, because you can't stop everything. So what risks are we taking when we make the choices we have. Putting so much pressure on companies to defend themselves against nation state attack is just myopic. We still talk about cyber as though it's this capability. What it is is just the new means to achieve the objectives of any interested party said differently, advancing their interests at the expense of ours. And we need to start talking about it in that way because if we understood some fundamentals of what people want to get and achieve, then we would say that now all that is being done digitally now how do we think about that? So everyone who is insecure in their connected device has created a pathway for someone who wants to use it to go to somebody else. And at one point in my career I was on the cyber actor side. Legally, of course. That's what we do on the cyber actor side. And we're lazy. I'm not going to go after the hard thing. That's resources I don't have. I'm going to find the easy way. So what was it? What's the meat packing?
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The world's largest meat supplier is coming back online today. After making significant progress against a ransomware attack, Brazil based JBS was forced to cease cattle slaughtering operations at 13 of its meat processing plants in the United States.
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Who would have ever thought. And the answer is, but it was right at the time that supply chain really mattered. And so it was both an actual effect and a terroristic effect.
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Colonial Pipeline, too.
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Colonial Pipeline, great example. We caused the shortfall because we didn't have enough wisdom there to understand the difference between the business system and the system. So we actually caused the shortage because we didn't. So I just think that there's this need for education, for people to understand that it isn't just a technical thing that is reserved for obvious targets, but it is ubiquity. And so let's talk about each person's risks and interests and then the collective responsibility. So as with almost any topic we're going to talk about, I think we need to have better conversations with the American people.
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So what we're hearing from the Trump administration is they want to lean forward a little bit more on offensive cyber. And this has always been a bit of a third rail for people. It is for lots of good reasons. For lots of good reasons, including that we have an incredible attack surface here, meaning the United States. Do you think the way to go is to lean forward on offensive more than we are? Has that sort of been baked in now, you think?
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What a great question. I think we have to have a vision of what our Interest and what our objectives are. One of the things I'm proudest of about America is that we do actually have a standard. I mean, there are reasons that we haven't done some things that haven't done is that we do worry about coupling effects in the digital domain, much as our military cares about civilian casualties different from others. And so I do think we need to think more about a world where this is the threat surface. Think about what our vision is about what we need to do for both deterrence, for the ability to respond when we munch. But I hope that where we're starting is from that place. Rather than give me a cyber action.
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Let me talk to you a little bit about Signal. When you were in the ic, did you ever use Signal?
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No, Signal was nascent. Did I use whatever instant messaging? Yes. Never for business, for God's sake.
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Right. So what was your reaction when you saw all that?
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I am really loathe to assign bad intent to anybody. I do think new administrations do suffer from not understanding why things are done certain way back to this. What weight of responsibility. This isn't new. We had to take President Obama's BlackBerry. So, you know, the horror just is misplaced. There are a couple things that are worrisome about it. Number one is at some point when it turned to that conversation, somebody needed to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's go to another channel, right? And there were people. One, this is a great role for intelligence because we have no dog in the fight. So Director Gabbard, I would have loved it if that had been her role. But Mike Walsh and Marco Rubio, they're seasoned professionals. They could have. So I guess that's what could have happened. I think it shows they're not using their professional staff or the professional staff has been so denuded because this is where you call, get me a secure thing. I know it's inconvenient, but this is what you have your teams to do. And so whether you don't know that they can do that or whether in some of the churn we have in the ranks, they don't exist. And then I think the piece that for me was the most disturbing was the suggestion that it was inconsequential. And I'm an intel officer, man. That was a target rich environment, right? And it was a target rich environment just in the conversations that they had after about it. But I wouldn't presume that our adversaries and competitors don't have the ability. And just because there was no action on that Operation which yay, I'm so glad it was successful. And yea, doing those things, I don't think that necessarily means that it hasn't been penetrated. The one thing I'd say to the question of why do people have signal? It's because with signal I would tell every leader that that's what you should use to arrange your dinner plans.
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So signal for dinner plans.
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Yeah. So you don't get pattern of life. We don't. Or who your friends are or what routes you take. I mean, so there's a really good reason for signal being used by people who are of interest to our adversaries and competitors, but not for that kind of conversation.
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Tell me if I'm wrong about this, but if say for example you had spyware that was dropped on a personal cell phone, even though signal is encrypted, you would be able to see everything. Right.
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It depends on where it is in the sack that it's located. But you don't know. You just don't know. And all our devices are so complex now, it's hard to even back into all the processes that are running in all sorts of places. So now I will say when Dave Petraeus was the director of the CIA, he was absolutely relentless on the insufficiency of secure communications at the speed he wanted to operate. And I was his director of support and we had tussles over but you must be secure. And he's like, but I must move fast. You know what that interaction cost? We got better technically on the secure communications. And so if what comes out of signal is it just wasn't responsive enough to what had to happen. Now that isn't seemed to be the conversation that was actually going on that wasn't.
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This is nothing to see here is what we're hearing.
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Yeah, but I do think, let's not forget that things move on, that there could be exigencies that mean that our secure infrastructure isn't what we need. Yeah, people in 2025 and beyond, you need to be able to oper operate from where you are at the speed you need to operate. So let's get on with that development securely.
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So if you were whispering to NSC Director Waltz about what the cyber plan would be, what kind of advice would you give him? What should our cyber plan be?
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We have all the capabilities we need probably we are incredibly technically capable. We are largely unprotected because the gap between what we can do and governmentally versus what can be affected locally is huge. To choose an example that isn't super popular right now, but it's what Chris Krebs did with CISA post2016. We realized that our state and local governments that actually do run our elections were woefully underprepared for it, and so we invested in it. So that's one is that we have the capabilities you need to make sure it's connected all the way through it. Take a really hard look at our infrastructure, especially in that light. And I would say I'd probably start with energy, but transportation, communications and health would go. And then the last thing is we don't have the policy to support any action we want to take right now, particularly if we're under attack. And so what I would say to them is think about use cases, address our ability to use it and to deter it and to defend it, and then put all the things in place that you need in order to affect that.
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But sue says there's a gap, a dangerous one, between the technical expertise we have and the policies that enable us to act. The targets aren't just federal. They're state, local, commercial, and the defenses haven't caught up. So she says start there with elections, with hospitals, with the grid, then give people the authority and the rules they need to respond. She says intelligence is still her favorite part of government, not because it's perfect, but because at its best, it's a kind of flashlight in a dark room.
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So I told you, intelligence is my favorite, but I would love it if it reimagined itself as though it were newly designed today rather than in 1947, because this is a very different information world. It's a very different partnership world.
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It's not 1947 anymore. It's not even 2007. The rules have changed, the adversaries have changed, and so has the information itself. Now it's faster, fuzzier, and everywhere.
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So I think they need to double down on all the information that the world has, double down on finding patterns so that you can have more understanding than capability knowledge and find ways to present that information so it helps decisions at the speed you have.
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Intelligence isn't just about knowing what's true, it's about knowing what's coming.
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We are too slow at showing second and third order effects of decisions being made. So I think there's a lot that can be done there. And then lastly, I think we are still applying with volumetric effects. We still think of cyber as a technical thing being applied by technical people. And I think we really need to break out of that and just see that it's a modality and get that to be more in our wheelhouse. But I think intelligence has the potential to be the hero of this moment's story, just as it has so many times in the past.
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But for intelligence to work in 2025, it can't be a Cold War relic. It has to be reimagined. It has to be faster and more collaborative, less about secrets and more about the signals and pattern and second order consequences in order to be the hero of this moment. From Recorded Future News, this has been Click Here's Mic Drop. It was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Gaeda, Zach Hirsch, Lucas Riley and me, Dina Templest. It was edited by Karen Duffin. We'll be back on Tuesday with an all new episode of Click Here. Have a great weekend.
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Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here? Then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month.
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Just go to the Record Media.