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- [00:00]
Tim Weiner
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Thomas Small
It is supposed to know the world by gathering intelligence and to share it with the President to help him formulate his foreign policy. But again and again, the CIA does something else. It fights secret wars, bends the law and serves presidents whose ambitions it cannot control. Tim Weiner has spent 40 years inside that story. A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of Legacy of Ashes, he now returns with the Mission, a history of the CIA since the end of the Cold War. An era defined by 9, 11, torture, drone warfare and the long shadow of lost wars. Weiner describes the agency's post Cold War collapse, the fear and excess of the war on terror, and poses the deeper questions at the heart of it all. How do you run a secret intelligence organization in an open democratic society? Especially when it serves a President who has no use for the truth. I'm Thomas Small, this is my conflicted conversation with Tim Weiner. Hello Tim. It's very nice to meet you, sir. Thank you for coming on the show.
- [01:45]
Tim Weiner
My pleasure.
- [01:45]
Thomas Small
Tim. You are the author of the mission the CIA in the 21st century, which is described as the sequel to your Pulitzer Prize winning book, Legacy of Ashes. The the History of the CIA. You've reported for the New York Times, previously for the Philadelphia Inquirer. How did you get into this line of reporting? What drew you to intelligence reporting and to the CIA?
- [02:13]
Tim Weiner
So let's turn back the clock to 1987. I'm 30 years old and I'm very interested in the secret operations of the Reagan Administration. The administration is in the process of getting caught selling lethal military weapons to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, overcharging them, skimming the profits and backhanding them the money to the Contra guerrillas in Central America. In defiance of a congressional ban on support for the Contras and in defiance of Reagan's own edict against paying ransom to terrorists, Iranian backed Hezbollah was holding Americans captive somewhere in Lebanon. At the time. All of this was very interesting to me. And in 1987, the biggest CIA operation of the time was not a secret. It was sending billions of dollars of weapons to the Afghan guerrillas who were fighting the Soviet occupation of their country. A decision had been taken in the Congress. Again, none of this is secret. This is not a covert operation. Because the cantankerous American press has exposed elements of it. The United States in its wisdom, is preparing to send the Stinger anti aircraft missiles to the Afghan Mujahideen. This would mark upon delivery the first time that American weapons were being used to kill Soviets in the long history of the Cold War. And I said to My editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. This is very interesting. How about I go to Afghanistan and run with the mujahideen and see a stinger fired in anger? And he said, I agree, that sounds very interesting. So as I was preparing to go, and I went via Pakistan into Afghanistan. As I was preparing to go, I called up the CIA, which has, yes, a public information officer and his name was Pete Earnest. And I said, hello, Mr. Ernest, you don't know me, but I'm about to go off to Afghanistan to write about this ginormous covert operation you all are running there. And I understand you people sometimes do country briefings for reporters who are off to strange places. How about it? He paused and he said, absolutely not, and hung up on me. So off I went to Afghanistan and I got what I was looking for and had unpleasant encounters with the Soviet air force and military, but got out alive and came back. And I hadn't been back in Washington for more than a day when my phone rang. Guess who? Well, it's my new best friend from the CIA, Pete Earnest. Tim, he says, how are you? And I said, splendid. How was your trip? It was amazing, I said. And then he said, how would you like to come in for that briefing now? And I said, I'd be delighted. So off I drove to the CIA with its headquarters about seven miles outside of Washington in a leafy glade of the Virginia woodlands. And I walk in the front door, headquarters, and on the left hand wall in this very elegant lobby of onyx and marble, graven in large letters onto the left hand wall is the Gospel of John, John 8:32, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
- [06:23]
Thomas Small
Wow, that's amazing.
- [06:24]
Tim Weiner
And at this point I'm hooked. And I resolved that I would cover the CIA as I had covered the cops and the courts when I was a cub reporter. And here we are nearly 40 years later.
- [06:40]
Thomas Small
Well, Tim, as I said, you've written two histories of the CIA and your latest one, the Mission, brings the story up to the present. I think it's important at the outset to state that your books are very objective, very balanced, judicious. You clearly have an admiration for the best of what CIA agents can do and do do. And you clearly understand that the CIA is a vital part of the United States foreign policy apparatus, etc. So it's by no means straightforwardly critical or negative account at all. And yet a lot of people will have a negative view in general of the CIA and see that it is always working behind the scenes in some kind of nefarious way. How do you respond to that kind of framing of the CIA? What is the CIA supposed to do? How does that differ from what it does do?
- [07:47]
Tim Weiner
Well, I would point out that it's not all stories of tragedy and farce. There are stories of heroic and brilliant operations in both books. It took me a little while in the beginning, back in the 80s, to understand that the CIA is an instrument of American foreign policy. It is an executor of American foreign policy. With rare exceptions, it does not dream up the operations that it conducts. It does what the President tells it to do. And if American foreign policy, which is the rudder on the ship of the CIA and the wind in its sails is unwise, then the operations of the CIA are not predestined to succeed. The history of the CIA is replete with tactical successes and strategic failures. The point is very important. Fifty years ago, the United States Senate, in the wake of Watergate and the revelation that CIA veterans and FBI veterans had been instrumental in the Watergate break in, and that as the New York Times had reported at the end of 1974, Presidents Johnson and Nixon had ordered the CIA to spy on Americans in violation of its charter. The Senate set out to investigate the Cold War history of CIA. And at the beginning, the chairman of the Committee, Frank Church, said, it seems that the CIA has been a rogue elephant trampling people and nations. At the end of the hearings, he sang a different tune. It was clear, although not entirely clear, that when the CIA trampled people and nations, it wasn't the elephant that had gone rogue. It was the mahout, the elephant driver. And the mahout was the President of the United States. It's his outfit. It does what he tells it to do.
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Thomas Small
Now that's really interesting, Tim, because I have this idea, and, you know, possibly it's completely incorrect and you'll correct me, but I have this idea that though, yes, the CIA, CIA does what the President tells it to do, it is the CIA that tells the President what he should tell them to do. I mean, they advise the President to do something, and so he says, yes, do it. So isn't there a kind of feedback loop there?
- [10:39]
Tim Weiner
Yes and no. The CIA has two elemental components. One is for the collection of intelligence through espionage and skullduggery and the analysis of intelligence, both secret and open source. Okay, you got your analysts and you got your operators. Their collective work in briefing the President is supposed to inform foreign policy. But the President orders the CIA to conduct major covert actions I mean, it's not as if a bunch of CIA officers were sitting around in Miami in 1960 on their second or third martinis and one of them says, hey, I've got a great idea. Let's go kill Fidel Castro. No, it was Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy that wanted that done. The CIA was created in 1947 to inform the President with intelligence gathered through espionage. Very quickly, that mission changed as the Cold War heated up. The mission had been to know the world. The mission became to change the world.
- [12:01]
Thomas Small
And after Watergate and the church hearings and the briefings that the Senate received, were the CIA's wings clipped? For a time, at least. I mean, did it then return to its original mission?
- [12:18]
Tim Weiner
Well, keep in mind what was going on at the time. The United States lost the war in Vietnam, Saigon fell, the President had resigned in disgrace. Okay? There were a lot of wings being clipped on the American eagle at the time. The fundamental change that came out of those hearings was that when the President ordered the CIA to conduct a major covert action, he had to sign a piece of paper. No more of this plausible deniability, because obviously that wasn't working. He had to sign a piece of paper called a finding. So called because it says, I find that the following operation is vital to the national security of the United States. And that finding had to be reported to Congress six years later, five years later, President Reagan was shipping weapons to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard without a finding, countermanding a law that he himself had signed and reaffirmed. So for there to be civilian control of American covert action, the Congress has to carry its oversight responsibilities. And I point out to you that oversight is a two faced word. It means to oversee and it also means to overlook. Oh, that was an oversight.
- [13:45]
Thomas Small
I've never noticed that. That's extremely interesting.
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Tim Weiner
Yeah. And it is the latter manifestation that you find throughout the history of the Congressional intelligence committees. They're not doing their job.
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Thomas Small
And why is that? Why don't they do their job?
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Tim Weiner
Because the Republican Congress is completely dysfunct. The Republican Congress in the second Trump administration has abdicated any powers it has under the Constitution to provide checks and balances on presidential power.
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Thomas Small
So you're speaking specifically about the current Congress, but presumably the problem of the Congress not exercising its oversight responsibilities is older than that. I mean, are Democratic controlled Congresses better at reining in the CIA?
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Tim Weiner
Broadly speaking, Republican Presidents have disdained the idea that any checks and balances as provided by the Constitution need to be respected. Going back to before the end of the Cold War. Republican presidents believe in a theory of the unitary executive, which means that the President is almighty above Congress and the courts. Well, that's not the way the framers of the American Constitution had seen it. The question of the CIA has always been, and it is particularly pointed now, how do you run a secret intelligence service in an open, democratic society? The framers of the Constitution, our founding fathers, knew that there would always be a tension between security and liberty and that people would give up their liberty if their security was threatened, when they should not, they should jealously guard their liberties. Just the other day, President Trump said, apropos a controversy over the surveillance of American citizens by the FBI and I think by the CIA, he said, I would gladly give up my liberty for security. I personally, the President of the United States, would give up my liberty for security. Well, if that's true, we are at a perilous moment in our 250 year history as a free republic. To return to the theme of the mission, my book, the war on terror, so called initiated after the 911 attacks nearly 25 years ago, God help us, that's incredible. Really illustrated this tug of war between security and liberty because the President of the United States was spying on Americans using the intelligence agencies of the US and the FBI director at the time, Bob Mueller, who just died, Robert S. Mueller iii, went to the President, said, you cannot do this, this is unconstitutional and if you persist, I will resign. That brought the balance back into proper order. Every president uses and abuses the CIA in his own ways. And what we saw under Bush and amplified under President Obama is using the CIA as a lethal weapon. Through the inauguration of drone warfare, the CIA opened that particular Pandora's box, drone warfare, more than 20 years ago, and it has transformed warfare and not in a good way. The President of the United States, George W. Bush, authorized the CIA to construct secret prisons and torture, torture prisoners within them using medieval forms of interrogation like the water board and the bastinado. Yeah. The President thought, well, as long as I keep this secret, it's going to be okay. Well, the men and women of the CIA were ordered to do this, and I've interviewed a number of them, including the man who actually constructed the secret prisons, who had that job of being the general manager of the construction project. They knew this would not stay secret. They knew they would be be caught. They knew there would be hell to pay for it and that they, the CIA, would pay the price and not the President. The chief of counterterrorism at the CIA, Cofer Black, said to one of his counterparts. Just a week or 2 After 911 he said, you know, the Soviets executed their generals and we're going to get it in the neck too for this, for what we are about to undertake. And it's true, I mean I think that probably 40% of Americans were just fine with torture, but more than 40% were not.
- [18:39]
Thomas Small
Yeah, that story, the story of CIA torture of prisoners and suspects in the war on terror is extremely important. We'll get to it a bit later. But before we talk about the post 911 world, I'd like to talk about the pre 911 world. The history that your book tells starts immediately after the end of the Cold War and when, let's say George Tenet became the director of the CIA in July 1997. So this is four years before 911 and six years after the end of the Soviet Union right in the middle of that time that people perhaps rather nostalgically consider to be like the high water mark of post Cold War American history before 9 11. And the George W. Bush administration derailed things from that point of view. But back when George Tenet became CIA director in July 1997, how would you characterize the agency at that time? So like, where was the CIA at before the war on terror was launched?
- [19:51]
Tim Weiner
George Shannon himself described the CIA in the closing years of the 20th century as half broken, nearly bankrupt and bereft of a mission. Everybody knew what the mission was during the Cold War. It was to screw the Soviets. Mission accomplished. What's the mission now? Nobody knew. There was a great exodus of experience and expertise at CIA after the Cold War. Recruitment, the hiring and training of new spies fell to almost zero. Who would want to sign up for the secret world when you could sign up for this brave new world of information at this startup called Google? And George Tenet, the director at the time, described the CIA as a burning platform. Think of an oil rig out in the North Sea and it's a dark and stormy night and the rig is on fire. So that was the status quo when Al Qaeda attacked two American embassies in East Africa and Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998. I flew out to Nairobi. After that I saw what had been done. Well, maybe the mission was now counterterrorism. Maybe the mission was now like let's go hunt and kill Osama bin Laden. That got wrapped around the axle very quickly because political assassination is forbidden under American law. And the President of the United States, Bill Clinton and George Tenet actually collaborated to sign a lethal finding for the assassination of Osama bin Laden by proxies. Okay, by Afghan proxies. And both of them have had a severe case of collective amnesia over whether they had indeed authorized the assassination. These plans to go into Afghanistan and capture or kill bin Laden were quickly, of course, overtaken by events on September 11, 2001. And then everybody knew what the mission was without fail. The consequence, of course, was that counterterrorism swamped everything for the next 15 years. It swamped espionage, it swamped analysis. And this swamping goes a long way to explaining how it was that the CIA, in its wisdom, informed the President of the United States and the world that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal bristling with weapons of mass destruction programs.
- [22:29]
Thomas Small
Before we talk about the 911 era and the war on terror and the Iraq war, I want to stick a little bit with the pre 911 era. You know already, Tim, it's incredible how many of the same sort of story motifs pop up again and again in the book involving South America, often mixed in with drugs, involving the Middle east, often Iran. It comes back again and again, like the two poles in a way of CIA covert activity. So one thing I learned from your book, I didn't know anything about it was the Peru missionary plane shoot down in April 2001. So this is. There was a kind of CIA program involving coordination with the Peruvian Air Force to identify and shoot down aircraft suspected of drug trafficking. So already we're in the world of like last year when in September, the CIA, and the Trump administration in general began airstrikes against boats in the Caribbean. So tell us about this Peru missionary plane shoot down and how it relates to the problems that the CIA was experiencing at that time.
- [23:40]
Tim Weiner
So we have to go back to the 1990s. Crack cocaine is very much a crisis in the United States, and President Clinton signs a finding authorizing the CIA's Latin American Division to work with Peru's intelligence chief, Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos, who was crooked as the day is long.
- [24:06]
Thomas Small
God has a sense of humor. Tim, are you serious? That's his name?
- [24:10]
Tim Weiner
Yes, that's his name. You can't make this stuff up. Montesinos was a murderer, a torturer, a double dealer. Anyway. Any port in a storm, right? So the CIA paid Montesinos a million dollars a year for this collaborative project, which was to identify and shoot down drug planes over the Amazon jungle in Peru. Spot of bother with this. It is illegal to shoot down civilian planes under US and international law. So the CIA's lawyers are really quite adept at telling the Agency what it can do as opposed to what it cannot do. And through negotiations with the White House and the Justice Department and State Department, the President of the United States then signed an order saying, okay, you can shoot down unarmed civilian drug planes if you positively identify the plane by tail number, positively know there's drugs on board, warn the plane, establish radio contact, use international signs like waggling your wings and lowering your landing gear to indicate you get down on the ground right now. And if they ignore all this, blow them up. Well, the CIA did shoot down 15 drug planes over, over a four year period. In no case did the CIA follow these rules that had been crafted by the United States government and signed by the president. And the 15th time, they shot down a plane that was carrying an American missionary family, husband, wife, two little kids. The COVID up was extraordinary. The attempted cover up. It's very hard to keep a secret in the United States, particularly when you have a curious and inquisitive press corps. But the horror of this, of course, is that this mission ended up killing
- [26:20]
Thomas Small
Americans and civilians who weren't involved in the drug trade at all. But to return to what you were telling us about before when you said that the CIA simply does what the President tells it to do. So in this case, the President told the CIA to shoot down civilian planes suspected of smuggling drugs into the United States. And then how would the President himself have reached that conclusion, that directive? So he would be informed by whom, advised to do it?
- [26:52]
Tim Weiner
When everything is national security, everything is permitted. Okay, so crack cocaine is a national security problem. The destruction of the old east wing of the White House and the construction of this grandiose ballroom is a national security issue. National security in American governance is used as a sword and a shield. And the shield covers up a multitude of sins.
- [27:23]
Thomas Small
So 911 happens. The national security agenda is ratcheted up in a big way. If everything was national security before, it certainly was after.
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Tim Weiner
Correct.
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Thomas Small
And you mention that after 911 the CIA underwent a transformation because it was finally given a proper mission, it could sink its teeth into counterterrorism globally.
- [27:44]
Tim Weiner
Yes, and its budget doubled overnight.
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Thomas Small
And its budget doubled overnight. Tell us about Jose Rodriguez Jr. This is a career CIA officer. He joined in 1976, joined the directorate of Operations, and eventually served as the Director of the National Clandestine Service, effectively heading up CIA covert operations worldwide during the most critical years of the War on Terror.
- [28:13]
Tim Weiner
Jose was the guy who ran the operations directive, the top spy. Okay? Before that, he had been the chief of counterterrorism, overseeing this entire program. Of torture. Before that he had been chief of the Latin American division during the drug shoot down program. He oversaw those shoot downs. And he had been removed from that position as chief of the Latin American division over a separate matter in which he showed, quoting the CIA Inspector General here, a remarkable lack of judgment. So he's sitting in the penalty box at CIA headquarters when 911 happens and is suddenly catapulted into third in command of the counterterrorism center. By his own admission, he knew nothing about counterterrorism. That wasn't his metier. And he fails upward until he becomes the chief of the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency, the so called spy master.
- [29:18]
Thomas Small
And in that position he was, I guess, a strong advocate for, let's let us call them, aggressive interrogation methods.
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Tim Weiner
Let's call it what it is, let's call it torture. And yes, he is to this day an advocate of torture as a means of interrogation.
- [29:39]
Thomas Small
To this day.
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Tim Weiner
To this day.
- [29:41]
Thomas Small
Now, I mean, is there any justification, let's put the morality aside, which is black and white. Obviously torture is immoral, but is there any effectiveness, provable, empirical effectiveness to torture that he would draw on to justify his record in this regard?
- [30:05]
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- [30:39]
Tim Weiner
I mean, I will quote him. We only waterboarded three guys. Come on, give me a break. I will give you the CIA's argument for torture as a means of interrogation. There was a great fear in the United States, in part stoked by the CIA's own scattershot reporting that there would be a second 911 and a third 911 and a fourth 9 11, a cascade of waves of dreadful, lethal attacks on the United States. As this fear was growing in 2002, the United States and the Pakistanis, sometimes allies of the United States, had taken hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of prisoners on the battlefield of Afghanistan or fleeing the battlefield of Afghanistan into Pakistan. Who were these guys and were there knowledgeable Al Qaeda operatives among them? Well, hundreds were shipped to Guantanamo and then hundreds were being held in Afghanistan and some dozen were being held in Pakistan. And two of These people were believed to have some knowledge of the command structure, the capabilities and the intentions of Al Qaeda. Presupposing that these prisoners had foreknowledge of cataclysmic attacks being planned against the United States. They were tortured for information, and retroactively, the President of the United States authorized this. Now, put yourself in there in the shoes of the CIA officers who are doing this. Some of them are very gung ho about it. And others literally wept upon witnessing torture at the first black site, so called in Thailand and could not believe that they were part and party to this. And there was, and there always will be an ambivalence at the CIA about this record. The justification. Screw the justification. You cannot justify this, okay? Even under the ticking time bomb theory that, you know, had these prisoners had foreknowledge of catastrophic plots. The search for a way to effectively interrogate a prisoner goes all the way back to the early 1950s in the Korean War. There was a fear that American prisoners of war in the Korean War were being brainwashed by the communists. And there was another problem of Soviets who had defected to the United States. But the CIA was unsure whether they were true defectors or false defectors sent to mystify, mislead, surprise and deceive the United States. How to interrogate those people? The search for a truth serum became a program known today as MK Ultra. It was a search for a truth serum that involved, for example, conducting experiments like taking US Prisoners in a federal prisoner and without their knowledge, dosing them with LSD for 77 days in a row. All in the search for a pill, a drug, a silver bullet that would loosen the tongue of a prisoner and compel the prisoner to tell the truth. Well, after 20 years, this program was finally abandoned and most of the records destroyed for fear that they would be revealed in the Watergate upheaval in the 1970s and come to find out after two decades of this, that there is only one drug that will loosen the tongue of a prisoner. And that drug is alcohol. I could have told you that. But wait, there's more. So during the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war downed pilots were tortured by the North Vietnamese.
- [34:57]
Thomas Small
This is the sort of torture that Senator John McCain was subjected to, for example.
- [35:01]
Tim Weiner
Exactly. They weren't being tortured because they had intelligence about when the next bombing run was going to hit Hanoi or Haiphong. They were tortured for the purposes of creating propaganda to make false statements against the United States, to lie. The United States Air Force and Navy constructed a program for pilots of how to resist torture during capture. And pilots who entered this program were waterboarded, were locked in a tiny box, were buried alive. It was torture. Okay, so now the CIA is looking for who knows how to do this sort of thing. And they go to veterans of this program who had overseen this training program that had taken its techniques from the North Vietnamese of torturing prisons to get them to lie. Are you following me?
- [36:05]
Thomas Small
Yeah. Yeah. So it's in fact, these torture techniques are to make people lie?
- [36:09]
Tim Weiner
Yes. And these were the techniques that were then used for Al Qaeda prisoners in the 21st century.
- [36:17]
Thomas Small
There's so many things to say, Tim. I mean, on the one hand, talking about MK Ultra and all that sort of thing, it puts you back in a time of science fiction and Marvel comics. At least that's what it seems like to people like me. I mean, recently that TV show Stranger Things came to an end, which I watched, and MK Ultra is a program that sort of underlies the whole plot. So it's like you're going back to Cold War paranoia.
- [36:40]
Tim Weiner
Well, see, this is the problem here. You have a problem that I have confronted for decades. Now, most people know what they think they know about the CIA from movies and TV and spy novels, myths. Generally speaking, verisimilitude is not a thing that Hollywood covets. So it's my job to find out what actually happened, which I believe is stranger and more interesting than fiction. You know, I do my work in my books when I'm writing about the CIA entirely on the record, Every quote in my books about the CIA is on the record, is attributed. There are no blind quotes. There are no anonymous sources. There's no hiding behind the skirts of anonymity for these people, which is my way of showing the reader what actually happened and of asking the reader to trust my version of events.
- [37:48]
Thomas Small
Yeah, and that's what makes your books, I mean, especially this new one, the Mission, really very good reading. I mean, you really feel like what is, you know, usually portrayed in romantic, or even if it's negative, if it's portrayed as sinister, it's still rather kind of melodramatic. You reveal what it's really like. You know, it's going back to what you said about the CIA hoping that through waterboarding and other techniques they could get these captured men, fighters in the Afghanistan campaign, some of them probably members, you know, definitely members of Al Qaeda. But nonetheless, you know, the fact that they thought that by waterboarding them or whatever, that they would reveal plans for these big, top secret terrorist attacks, it's Just ridiculous. I mean, my co host on Conflicted is Amon Dean, who was in Al Qaeda and then joined MI6 and was a double agent inside Al Qaeda. And he said that the numbers of people who knew anything about any of these attacks, certainly 9, 11, like were very, very few. Al Qaeda wasn't stupid. They didn't tell people about these attacks. They told as few people as, as they could. So you sort of think from the very beginning, the very idea is risible, that by finding some Joe Schmo off, you know, the Afghan street, that you can get him to tell you about some big attack.
- [39:03]
Tim Weiner
Well, you know, they did capture high level people, a handful of them like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But here's the thing. Let's take Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, waterboarded 184 times, absolutely the mastermind, absolutely the mastermind of 911 and other heinous attacks and reduced by torture to, you know, a shadow of his former self. I am sure that under torture he imparted some things that were true. All right, let's take the CIA's best case scenario of this. So here we have captured the mastermind of 9 11, responsible directly for the deaths of 3,000Americans. And through torture we have broken him. Great. Good work everybody. Now let's ship him off to a military tribunal in Guantanamo in Cuba and convict him of these crimes.
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Thomas Small
Ha.
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Tim Weiner
Really? There are people who've been sitting in Guantanamo for close to 25 years now who are responsible for the murder of Americans. They cannot be convicted because their confessions were extracted through torture.
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Thomas Small
It's so incompetent. Tim, it's so what happened?
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Tim Weiner
It's not incompetent. See, that's letting them off the hook. You have to go back. I shipped off to Afghanistan for the New York Times in November of 2001. It's a country I'd been to half a dozen times. Before that I was in Washington D.C. and it is very hard to convey, but I try to do this in the mission and I hope I've succeeded to convey the fear, the secrecy and the ignorance, this toxic cocktail that the Bush administration was drinking every day and administering to the American people. The first, the fear of the unknown, the fear, the certainty that there would be a follow on attack at any given moment. The CIA's own reporting fed this fear and the overwhelming number of reports, and I'm talking about dozens every day reported directly to the White House of imminent threats. 90 plus percent of them were entirely false. Feeding this fear. People who are that afraid and who are that ignorant of the enemy. I mean, on September 12, 2001, I'm quoting Bob Gates, the former CIA director and secretary of Defense. The United States hardly knew anything about Al Qaeda, so it was for the want of knowing that the torture took place. Now, seven years after 9 11, Barack Obama is elected President of the United States. And he has pledged to close the secret prisons, which he did, to close Guantanamo, which he did not. And once in office, arrives at the conclusion that it is better to incinerate these people than to incarcerate them.
- [42:16]
Thomas Small
Tell us about Michael D', Andrea, if that's how you pronounce his name.
- [42:20]
Tim Weiner
D'.
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Thomas Small
Andrea DeAndrea Michael D', Andrea, known as the Dark Prince. So this is a long time CIA operation officer in the clandestine service. Interestingly, he converted to Islam at some point, which is very interesting.
- [42:36]
Tim Weiner
Yeah. Mike was station chief in, I believe, Dar Es Salaam at the time of the embassy bombings by Al Qaeda. And his conversion was the consequence of his marriage to a woman from Mauritius. And he was known fondly, I must say somewhat fondly, as Ayatollah Mike at the CIA. And he was for a dozen years in charge of killing suspected terrorists with drone attacks. You know, worked 100 and something hours a week, slept in his office chain smoking, vegetarian, and he's on his prayer rug in the office five, five times a day. By far the most lethal operations officer in the, in the history of the
- [43:28]
Thomas Small
CIA in terms of kills.
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Tim Weiner
Yeah. Responsible for killing, you know, somewhere well over 2,000 people, probably more like 3,000. And roughly numbers disputed, but the most conservative numbers would be roughly a tenth of these people, that is two to three hundred people were civilians. And killing civilians does not endear you to the general population.
- [43:57]
Thomas Small
Not usually.
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Tim Weiner
And it's one of the several reasons that the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. I don't think the United States as a nation or as a government has fully absorbed the tragedy of the war in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is a country kind of near to my heart. First traveled there in 1987 under the Soviet occupation, and lastly six trips later under the American occupation. 20 years in Afghanistan. The United States, to what end?
- [44:33]
Thomas Small
Well, we've talked about it a lot on this show, Tim. It's hard to say. It's a. You know, if you're. And I'm 47 years old, you know, I was 22 when 911 happened. And so my entire adult life was kind of overshadowed by America being in Afghanistan and Iraq and killing terrorists in Yemen and other places. And yet, you know, 25 years later, you sort of wake up and you feel like you've been in a twilight zone because you, you do ask yourself, you know what happened. One thing that happened is because of the drone program, assassination as a tool of policy was somewhat normalized by the American government. And as you started, you know, you said before, it used to be understood that assassination was illegal. We see assassinations all, all the time now. What about Iraq? So if you say that the CIA does what the President tells it to do, what did the President of the United States in the run up to the Iraq war and his national security team and his State Department or whoever was advising him, what did George W. Bush tell the CIA to do in the run up to Iraq?
- [45:41]
Tim Weiner
Well, the shoe's on the other foot there because it was clear if you were a high ranking member of the Bush administration's national security team, and particular if you worked for the Secretary of defense, Don Rumsfeld, it was clear within two weeks after Bush's inauguration in January 2001 that he wanted to, in the parlance of the time, do Iraq. And, you know, I was at Tora Bora, but in Afghanistan in December 2001, at the foot of the mountain with a bunch of other reporters, knowing that Bin Laden was holed up in the caves in that the mountains, fully expecting, you know, that in a matter of days the Americans and their Afghan allies would be carrying his head on a pike, having flushed him from his mountain redoubt. That didn't happen. And one reason it didn't happen, perhaps the main reason it didn't happen, was that at that very moment the Secretary of Defense was ordering the combatant commander, General Tommy Franks, to prepare to go to war in Iraq. It's just, even today, it boggles the mind. And once the United States Senate in its wisdom, got its mind around that the Following Summer in 2002, that Bush was dead set on going to war in Iraq, it asked the CIA, hey, what is your best estimate of the Iraqi military arsenal? Do they have nuclear weapons programs? Do they have biological weapons programs? Do they have chemical weapons programs? Do they have ballistic missile programs? The CIA doesn't have any spies in Iraq at this time. And yet it duly reports to the Senate and the White House and the United nations and the American people that Saddam Hussein has an arsenal bristling with weapons of mass destruction programs. And that was the justification for going to war. The post hoc justification, the original justification, of course, was that Saddam had tried to kill Bush the elder on a trip to Kuwait in 1993. And Bush the younger said, oh, you tried to kill my daddy, I'm going to kill you.
- [48:08]
Thomas Small
So the CIA spread this false information which they had no way of knowing was even true or false.
- [48:15]
Tim Weiner
It had been ordered by the Senate report to us on the threat that Saddam poses. And having no reliable information, through a toxic cocktail of politics and guesswork, they arrived at this estimate and Colin Powell went to the CIA, having been ordered by Bush to deliver this threat reporting to the United nations and spent a very long, long weekend trying to scrub this reporting and to rid it of ill founded single sourced statements. And he did his damnedest, but he failed. And so we all remember this scene. Colin Powell is at the United Nations. George Tenet, the CI director is sitting right over his shoulder and reporting on this bristling arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. None of it was true, but the American people believed it, although not for long. The American press believed it to its collective shame. Not all of them, but most. And off we went to our, our expedition in Iraq.
- [49:27]
Thomas Small
But do we know now precisely how it is that the CIA made the decision to present that particular cocktail of, of data, trumped up data available to the U. S. Congress?
- [49:42]
Tim Weiner
Yes, and it's a long story. It is reported meticulously in my book the mission. And I have to sum it up for you because a full explanation would take a lot of time. The CIA had very little intelligence. The CIA felt pressure at the highest levels to confirm the preconceptions of the president and the secretary of defense and the vice president. And so to quote the head of British intelligence at the time, the facts were being fitted around the policy. That is a mortal sin. That is the opposite of what the CIA was created to do. And to, you know, really the enduring shame of the American press collectively, with important exceptions, did not question this reporting, was not fully skeptical, was, you know, taken in by the collective fear that gripped the nation. More is the pity.
- [50:46]
Thomas Small
I wonder if you'll talk about timber sycamore a bit because I think, you know, we've, we've run through a lot of ways in which the CIA have been used in the post cold war era that you chart in your book. You know, they're shooting down airplanes that are smuggling drugs, they're assassinating people with drones, they're waterboarding people, trying to extract information about them with timber sycamore. This is where the CIA got involved in the Syrian civil war, basically arming, training and funding Syrian rebel groups fighting the Assad regime. So this is a sort of a different string to the CIA's bow, if you like. Would you tell us a little bit about that operation which lasted from 2012 to 2017.
- [51:31]
Tim Weiner
The CIA thought it could back, and I have to put the words in quotes, the moderates in Syria against Bashar Al Assad and help bring about a moderate Syrian government. Very dangerous operation. The Russians are backing Assad. You're, you know, running a risk of getting into a shooting war with the Russians and nobody wants that. I will confess it, that so much of this program remains secret and so few people were willing to talk to me about it on the record, people who I know participated in it, that I have a very faint picture. The United States thought it could back moderate armed groups, quote, unquote, and it backed the wrong horse and Trump pulled out and was willing to let the Russians take over American bases in Syria as part of his general program of appeasing Vladimir Putin in his first administration. Well, as fate would have it, you know, a former Al Qaeda affiliated guerrilla is now the leader of Syria. He's a vast improvement on Bashar Al
- [52:41]
Thomas Small
Assad, and he was in fact long working with American intelligence officers. I mean, as is now becoming clear, maybe from around the same time that Timber Sycamore was wound down.
- [52:54]
Tim Weiner
Yeah, Timber Sycamore was a thing of the past when he arose. And of course he's working with CIA now because they're going to help him stay in power to the best of their abilities. I do want to talk about some signal successes of the CIA that are reported in the mission. And at the same time, this is going on in the run up to the war in Iraq, which commenced in 2003. The CIA has been working for seven years, from the late 90s into the early aughts, to destroy a person, destroy the work of a person who was deemed as dangerous or more dangerous than Osama Bin Laden at the time. And that was Abdul Khalil Khan, A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist who had for 25 years gathered the materials needed to make a nuclear weapon for Pakistan. That bomb was tested in 1998. A. Q Khan is hailed as the father of the Islamic bomb. And at that moment, having been an importer of nuclear weapons technologies for 25 years, he secretly becomes an exporter of nuclear weapons technology and sells for a very high price the makings of a nuclear weapons laboratory to the worst countries on earth, to the North Koreans, to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, to the Iranians and so on. So a small group of CIA officers I interviewed the three Leading officers who undertook this program set up a sting and set up corporate entities that posed as nuclear weapons smuggling operations. And long story short, captured A Q Han's operation by the spring of 2001, as the leader of this operation personally briefed the President of the United States that the CIA could become a nuclear state, could make its own nuclear weapon, which, you know, in retrospect, would not have been a good idea. So at the same time, literally at the same time that the United States is going to war in Iraq to destroy a completely fictional threat of weapons of mass destruction, the CIA, through daring espionage operations, is neutralizing an actual existential threat of weapons of mass destruction through espionage, success, through war, catastrophe. This intelligence, when it succeeds and it does, can prevent a war, can save lives. Okay. During the Biden administration In August of 2024, in the summer of 2024, the CIA prevented an attack by ISIS K, which is an Afghan, Pakistan based ISIS offshoot. This gang was going to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. And had they succeeded, thousands of people would have died. Well, you know, in a moment, the CIA saved more lives than it had taken in recent years. My point is that espionage, espionage as opposed to covert action, they are two different things. When espionage succeeds, it can save lives. It can prevent a war. When intelligence succeeds, lives are saved. When intelligence fails, people die.
- [57:03]
Thomas Small
What do you think, Tim, is the best way for the CIA not to be used as an agency of covert operations, covert actions, assassinations, and instead be an agency as it was meant to be, an intelligence gathering and espionage agency that saves lives.
- [57:26]
Tim Weiner
Let's define our terms. Espionage is the mission to know the world. Espionage is illegal everywhere. Okay? Because the CIA officer is trying to convince a foreign national to become an agent of the CIA to commit treason against his country, his tribe, his leaders. He is entering into a criminal conspiracy with the foreign recruit to commit treason. It's a dirty and a difficult and dangerous business, and yet it is founded on trust. Because these two people have to trust each other. When the CIA is reduced, as it is in the present day, to functioning primarily as a second echelon, lethal wing of the military to support lethal military operations as it is happening in the Caribbean, as is happening in Iran, as is happening in points unknown, certainly in Somalia, probably in Nigeria. It's not performing what it's meant to do. If you want to kill people, send in the Marines. Don't send in your spies. That's not what they're there for.
- [58:50]
Thomas Small
Well, that raises a question, Tim. Why is the CIA being used in this way, when the United States federal government has at its disposal all sorts of deadly operations teams that they could draw on. The marines, the Navy SEALs, the Green Berets, whatever, there's so many they could call on.
- [59:08]
Tim Weiner
Because when the CIA does it, it's deniable in principle. And when the military does it, it's not deniable in principle. That is the underlying assumption.
- [59:22]
Thomas Small
Goodness gracious. So I return to the question. What's the best means of preventing the CIA being used in this malicious and nefarious and frankly, incompetent way and allowing it to focus on what it does best and what it. What, you know, what a government does need doing, which is the gathering of information.
- [59:41]
Tim Weiner
Well, we could start by electing presidents who are decent human beings.
- [59:44]
Thomas Small
Well, that's a really big problem, frankly, given.
- [59:48]
Tim Weiner
You're not kidding. This goes back to the question I first tried to pose in Legacy of Ashes, which was published in 2007. And I pose it again in the mission. How do you run a secret intelligence service in an open, democratic society? This is not a problem that the British have. This is an American problem. It's very hard for a British audience to understand that there is no Official Secrets act in the United States. The press has a broad right and indeed a duty to report about the secrets operations of the CIA. That's what I did for a long time as a reporter for the New York Times. There are no D notices. The government cannot impose a prior restraint on the press. We're in an extreme crisis today in the United States because the President of the. Well, we're in an extreme crisis for several reasons. But. But when it comes to foreign policy, the President does not listen to intelligence briefings. It doesn't matter what the CIA says. He's interested in the CIA when it can provide lethal support to the military as he conducts American foreign policy as if he were the emperor of the world. So. So if the CIA reports as it did, Venezuela is not a military threat to the United States. Venezuela does not import fentanyl to the United States. It largely exports, transships cocaine to Europe. Well, the President orders the CIA to support the military in blowing, I believe the count is over 170 people out of the water in the Caribbean. That's murder. Blowing civilians out of boats, unarmed civilians, is an act of murder under American law, international law, and the laws of God and man. When the CIA says to the President, well, you know, we can help you assassinate the Supreme Leader of Iran, but that's not going to change the regime. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards will probably take over from the mullahs, which is not a good thing. He's not listening. The capture of Nicolas Maduro, tactical success in service of what strategy? The assassination of the Supreme Leader in Iran, tactical success aided and abetted by the CIA, to what strategy? I want to point out that the United States went to war in 2003 by convincing the American people that Iraq posed a imminent, lethal, existential military threat to the United States. And today, Trump has taken the United States to war in Iran by warning that they posed an imminent, lethal, existential threat to the United States. Both claims were false. The difference was that the intelligence the CIA provides today completely contradicts what the President was telling the American people. But he doesn't care. He doesn't do intelligence. When he uses the word, he puts it in scare quotes, you know, waggling his first and second fingers to indicate that he doesn't believe that such a thing exists. He has said that the only guardrail for him is his own morality. That's what he said. And he is, as every thinking person knows, a profoundly immoral man. A secret intelligence service in the hands of. Of an unlawful president is a very dangerous thing.
- [64:08]
Thomas Small
Well, Tim Weiner, it's an excellent book. It tells the whole story, or as best as a story like this can be told. It seems to be. There's so many episodes as you're leafing through the book. You see names like Chelsea Manning. You see, like, the suicide bomb attack of 2009 in Afghanistan at Base Chapman, which killed all of those agents, and which sort of provides a scene in Zero Dark Thirty, you know, event after event after event. I mean, if you're my age and you've lived through this whole period, you realize, my goodness, the CIA has been involved in a lot of things, but there's. You know, it kind of leaves me always feeling, what are we gonna do about it? In a way, is this just what late American empire is like? Kind of messy and legally murky and, you know, as you say, democracy is broken down.
- [65:00]
Tim Weiner
This is what early American empire was like. This is what empires are like. One of the reasons that I have been fascinated with the task of trying to report reliably about what the CIA actually does and to understand how it works, is that when you're writing intelligence history, American intelligence history, you're also writing diplomatic history, you're also writing military history, you're also writing presidential history. Because when the President orders the CIA to change the world, it is the pointed end of the spear of American foreign policy. And there are probably a dozen reporters left in the United States who do their best to cover the CIA on a daily basis. But covert operations, espionage operations take years to come to fruition. And our understanding of what CIA is up to and what presidents are using and abusing the CIA to do to accomplish their goals takes years to understand. And, and I've been doing this for half my life. And I want readers to appreciate that the CIA is an essential part of American government, that it is not what it looks like in the movies or on television, and that understanding it is a key to understanding how in the 21st century, America has used and abused and wasted the superpower that it had at the beginning of the 21st century. We are a failing democracy. We are a failing democracy today as we approach our 250th birthday. And we should not take our eyes off the ball. We should not avert our gaze.
- [67:16]
Thomas Small
Well, Tim Weiner, you have reported from Afghanistan, from Pakistan, from Sudan, from Cuba, from the Philippines and many other places. You've been following the CIA for basically four decades. And in the Mission the CIA in the 21st century, you offer a very valuable narrative about the last 25 years or so of the CIA's story. So thank you very much for coming on Conflicted. I must say, I feel very depressed, but I guess that's what living in late democracy or late imperial republic is, is all about. Thanks very much for coming on the show.
- [67:56]
Tim Weiner
All right, sir, thanks. Appreciate you.
- [67:59]
Thomas Small
That was Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner. His new book, the The CIA in the 21st Century is available at all good Booksellers. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q and A with my co host, Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message heard Production Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
- [68:49]
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