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Tim Weiner, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century" (Mariner Books, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Welcome to New Books in National Security as part of the New Books Network. My name is Luca Trenta. I'm an associate professor in international relations at Swansea University. I'm very honored to have as guest today Tim Viner. Tim Viner has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his reporting and writing on American intelligence and national security at the New York Times. He covered the CIA in Washington and in Wars, Conflict and crisis in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, and many other nations. He is the author of multiple books, including histories of the CIA. An earlier book, Legacy of Ashes, covered the history of the agency from its founding to the early 2000s. His new book, which is the object of our episode Today, the the CIA in the 21st century, was ranked number three on the new York Times Bestseller list upon its publication. Tim Viner lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Kate Doyle, an expert on human rights. Tim Viner, thanks so much for being with us and for being willing to discuss your book with us.
- [02:19]
C
This is my pleasure.
- [02:20]
B
Thank you, Tim. I have to say it's very much an honor to talk to you. I was a young undergraduate student when the book Legacy of Ashes came out. It was only the second nonfiction book I bought in English, and it's probably one of the books that made me really, really interested in the history of the CIA. My first question, I guess, has to do with what was different this time around. What has been different in researching and writing this book compared to writing Legacy of Ashes?
- [02:54]
C
So Legacy of Ashes, which was published 18 years ago, was based primarily on the declassified documents of the CIA. CIA was founded in 1947. Like all good government bureaucracies, it creates documents. And the trick of it was I started covering CIA full time for the New York Times in 1993. The previous year, the CIA director, Bob Gates, later Secretary of Defense under Bush and Obama, announced that the CIA was going to declassify key elements of its Cold war history, including 11 major covert actions. Gates said, well, CIA openness, I guess that's an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp. But the Cold War is over. We have a story to tell. I hereby order these documents declassified. Well, as you can imagine, there was a great deal of kicking and screaming at CIA, and it took more than a decade for the pig to go through the python, if you will. But by 2003, 2004, I was able to amass a circumstantial collection of declassified CIA documents, some 300,000 pages. And using that as the framework for the book, and then conducting interviews on an actuarial basis, because there were still a number of people in their 80s and 90s who had worked for CIA in the late 1940s and the 1950s, I was able to pour some meat on the bones other documents. And that's how Legacy of Asterisk got rich to go. The mission covers the 21st century CIA. We start in the late 1990s. Actually, there aren't any declassified document. The entire framework of declassification under law in the United States has pretty much broken down. So this is an interview driven book as opposed to a document driven book. All the interviews are on the record. There are no anonymous quotes or blind sources. And I was very fortunate to have an extraordinary number of people speak to me, not simply CIA directors, but for example, the man who was the chief of the Clandestine Service, the top spy, Tom Sylvester, held that post from the spring of 2023 to the screen of 25. And we'll talk more about Tom in a minute. And so in a way, it's a more vivid and immediate book, or at least I hope it is.
- [05:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think you mentioned just now that the book starts in the late 1990s. I think it also starts just before 9 11. And I think basically ever since, there has been a constant fight between commentators, former CIA officials, former administration officials, as a sort of like, who is to blame for 9, 11? Some have blamed the Clinton administration and its sort of uncertain counterterrorism. Others have blamed the Bush administration for ignoring the threat of terrorism itself. Others have blamed the agency, others, a mix of all of these. What is your view on this issue?
- [06:37]
C
The success of Al Qaeda's attack was a failure of the government of the United States, not just the CIA. It was a failure of the White House to listen to CIA's warnings. It was a failure of the CIA to be able to determine the time and place of the attack. It was a failure of the FBI to track Al Qaeda conspirators in the United States. It was a failure of the aviation authority, the immigration authority, of Congress of the press. But there were specific failures at the CIA that enabled the success of it. If you go back to the end of the Cold War and the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had vanished and we were at the end of history. Remember that. And the leaders of the CIA, the top spies, the top analysts who remained after the end of the Cold War, were acting aloud. I did interviews with them for the New York Times. They literally said, what is the mission now? What is our mission now that Soviet communism is dead? Well, in August 1998, Al Qaeda set off the powerful bombs at two American embassies in Africa. One in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and one in Nairobi, Kenya. The one in Kenya killed 224 Kenyans and 12Americans, including two CIA people. It was becoming clear what the mission was going to be. Now it would have to be counterterrorism. A couple of weeks after the August 1998 attacks in East Africa, the CIA director, George Tenet, convened a meeting of all U.S. intelligence leaders. And at the end of this conference they put out a report which was of course highly classified, but later became available. And the report said that unless the United States got its act together and the CIA got its act together in counterterrorism and against Al Qaeda, that the United States would suffer, and I quote, a catastrophic systemic intelligence intelligence failure. And the date of that report, Luca was September 11, 1998. Three years later came that catastrophic intelligence failure. But as I say, it's intelligent. People talk about intelligence failures a little too freely. Often it's not what we call intelligence failures are in fact policy failures. The CIA is an instrument, an executor of American foreign policy. It does what the President tells it to do. And if President George W. Bush had listened to the CIA, which he didn't. The United States had the whole of government effort could have mounted defense and offense against Al Qaeda. It did not.
- [09:55]
B
Yeah, and I mean, of course in immediate aftermath of 9 11, the Bush administration launched what became known as the war on terror. And I think the book does a very good job in providing a lot of detail on the war on terror. And there are some very interesting highlights. For example, the issue of torture, but also an immediate, probably unnecessary and narrow focus on Iraq, the sort of destruction of early options for peace in Afghanistan. My question really is what do you think were the key milestones of the war on terror under Bush, which theory talked me about?
- [10:40]
C
At a meeting at Camp Jaden, Maryland, the presidential retreat, a decision was taken. Orleans hit Saddam Hussein to go after. This decision was formalized in an order from President Bush to General Tommy Frank in December 2001, just as and I was there, the United States was trying to hunt down Osama bin Laden into the mountains of Afghanistan at Tora Bora. One of the interviewees for the book is a man named Luke Ruweida who was an author of a quite successful covert action plan to infiltrate Saddam military and intelligence. Luiz told me these guys, meaning the Bush administration would have gone after Iraq, would have invaded, attacked Iraq, if Saddam had a rubber band and a paper clip to put your eyes. And of course the CIA came up with a dreadfully flawed estimate, assumed that Rob had weapons of medical destruction. But in the end for Bush, it didn't matter what the intelligence said. He was hell bent on going to war. In another interview in the book, Bob Gates, as I mentioned, the former CI Director and future Secretary of Defense. Then on 12 September 2001, the CIA knew jack shit about Al Qaeda, knew nothing really about Al Qaeda, about its order of battle, about who was true, how they moved people and money around. And it was for want of intelligence, a desperate search for intelligence that the secret prisons were built and torture inflicted on captured prisoners. Want of intelligence. Yeah.
- [12:41]
B
And I mean, I guess you mentioned two key elements here. One is the intelligence and policy failure of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and also the development of the secret prison system, which of course also included extraordinary rendition, the prison system at Guantanamo and so on. These clearly impose certain reputational costs on the Bush administration as a whole, but also on the CIA. To what extent and how did the CIA recover from these reputational costs?
- [13:24]
C
The CIA would not set up erect secret prisons or inflict torture or be a lethal paramilitary force. CIA was set up to conduct espionage to gather Intelligence by spying. That is its true mission. And for 15 years after the Al Qaeda attack, counterterrorism swamped everything at the CIA. That began to change in 2017 after the CIA came to unfortunately belated conclusion that Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence services, in a covert operation that was the most successful of its kind since the Trojan horse, conducted a political warfare on the United States. And Monkey wrenched the 2016 presidential election to help elect Donald Trump by using social media, greatly aided by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks to denigrate Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. In the spring of 2017, there was a new chief of the Clintons clandestine service, the new top five at the CIA. And his name is Tomas Rakusin. Tom Rakusin. His roots are Czech, his parents were Czech, and he was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring and resistance against Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia. So feelings about the Russians were bred in the bone like and late spring, early summer of 2017, Tom Racousin calls in all his top people, all the top spots at the CIA, all the top operations officers, and he says, look here. And by the way, these people have been doing counterterrorism 24 hours a day for 15 years, most of them, and he says to them, look here, I want you to take the talents that you have honed in targeting terrorists. And parenthetically, by targeting, that doesn't. He didn't mean putting warheads on foreheads. He means identifying who are they, who are they when they're at home, who are their friends, who are their enemies, what is the pattern of their lives. And Rakusin said, I want you to target Russians. I want you to recruit Russian spies, Russian oligarchs, Russian diplomats. I want you to penetrate the Kremlin, which was the highest aspiration of the CIA from 1947 until the end of the Cold War. And it took four years, but they did it. And they stole Vladimir Putin's war plan for the invasion of Ukraine. That was in 2021. And then their director, Bill Byrne, who was, you know, widely thought of as the greatest diplomat of his generation. He had been Deputy Secretary of State reporting, Ambassador to Moscow. Bern told, you have to tell the world about this. The President agreed. And so here was this incredible secret which was now being broadcast to the world. And the world said, oh, really? Aren't you the people that told us that I had weapons of mass destruction? But of course, the CIA was right. And while that didn't stop the Russian invasion, Ukraine, it did have a galvanizing and electrifying effect on the notions of NATO and their support. And until Donald Trump was reinaugurated this past January, American support for the survival of Ukraine has been crucial, fundamental. So that, in a nutshell, is the story of the revival of espionage at the CIA up until the re inauguration of Donald Trump.
- [17:42]
B
Yeah, I wanted to go back slightly earlier and say a few words about the CIA under Obama because you mentioned in your previous reply that the CIA was not made to establish a prison system, the CIA was not particularly made to kill people and so on. But under Obama, of course, targeted killings conducted certainly by the Pentagon, but primarily by the CIA, become really one of the key missions of the CIA and one of the key elements of US Counterterrorism. How does that happen? How did the CIA become so focused on targeted killings as opposed to other aspects that as you say, would come back Only later, towards 2015, 2016?
- [18:38]
C
Again, the CIA is an executor of American foreign policy. It does with the rarest acceptance what the President tells it to do. And President Bush began the practice of drone strikes on terrorist targets, which inevitably killed hundreds and hundreds of civilians. And then Obama stepped it up. And why did he step up the drone attack? Because he vowed to shut down the secret prisons and he made the decision that it was better to incinerate than incarcerate suspected terrorists. By the late summer of 2014 and continuing through 2015, the drone strikes were severely crucial. And the then Deputy Director of CIA, Abrielle Haynes, she was later, she had been a key White House advisor to Obama, persuaded him that the drone strikes were creating more enemies than they were killing.
- [20:00]
B
Yeah, yeah. You mentioned also in your previous answer that of course towards the end of the Obama administration we have the emergence of Russian interference, but we also have more generally, I think a re emergence of great power confrontation with both China and Russia. Before going to a discussion of Russian interference, how did the CIA adapt to this sort of renew or revamped mission of confronting great powers after so many years of non state actors and counterterrorism?
- [20:40]
C
You will recall that after the Russians stormed into Ukraine and seized the Crimean Peninsula and eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region, that Obama, in a speech in the Hague, derided Russian as a second rate power, a regional power, not a global power. And this was erroneous, of course, because by 2014 the Russians were not only aggressively seizing large swaths of Ukraine, but they were mounting up political warfare operations against the United States. And in particular the attack on the 2016 election, but also throughout Europe. And today, as we speak, the Russians are engaged in a concerted campaign of sabotage, subversion, assassination, and political warfare throughout Europe. And it really wasn't until CIA mounted its espionage campaign against the Kremlin in 2017, it really got going in 2018, that the CIA was positioned into a great power conflict architecture with the Chinese. That's a different story. And fundamentally, the difference between the Russian and Chinese intelligence services in their reckoning of the United States is that the Chinese want to know us, the Russians just want to screw us. The Chinese, following the precepts of Cheng Tzu in the Art of War, know your enemy, and in a hundred battles you will not be defeated, have mounted an extraordinary campaign of cyber espionage against the United States. And here's how that got started. In the decade between roughly 2002 and 2012, the CIA, remarkably, had built up a pretty big network, maybe three dozen people of recruited Chinese agents who were well positioned in the Chinese Politburo and in the Chinese power structure, including the Ministry of State Security, that's the primary Chinese intelligence service. They had recruited these people by identifying a kind of a key flaw in China's armor, which was corruption. In order to get promoted in the Chinese power structure, people had to pay what were called promotion fees, that is bribes. And the CIA, in its recruitment of Chinese agents, offered to pay these bribes on behalf of their recruited agents proved an effective technique. Cash has always been the CIA's best secret weapon. This network was destroyed in roughly 2011, 2012. The Chinese figured out what was happening because of a flaw in the CIA's covert communication systems, the way it talked with its recruited agents. They rolled them all up, arrested them, interrogated them, tortured them, and killed them. This was about the time that Xi took power in China. The Chinese response to this was the beginning of an extraordinary penetration of the American body politics. It really began when the Chinese broke into the federal Office of Personnel Management, that's, if you will, the government's human resources department. And they stole the personnel files of everybody who worked for the American government and in particular, everybody who worked for the US Intelligence community, with particular attention to the security clearance files of people who worked at the CIA. And those files include personal information, passport information, fingerprint files, unate. They then took this stolen data, combined it with a biometric data that they had stolen from the world's international airports, gave it to the Chinese tech giant Alibaba to crunch, and developed their own personnel files on CIA officers. If you were after that, if you were a CIA officer newly arriving to take up a post in Beijing or Kuala Lumpur or Oagadougou. Likely as not, you would be met at the luggage carousel of the airport by a Chinese intelligence officer who would say, hi there, I know who you are. The Chinese penetration of the American body politic has gone on to include the theft of everybody's health insurance files, complete penetration of the major US Telecom networks, and breaches of the unclassified computer systems of the White House. So, as I said, the Chinese want to know it. The Russians just want to screw us. And Russia's political warfare against the United States has received a great boost from what I can only call the cultivation of the President of the United States, Donald Trump. For a decade, the past decade, American spies, diplomats, journalists, citizens have wondered, what is the nature of Donald Trump's strange romance with Vladimir Putin? Is he a Russian agent? Did he take a suitcase full of Kremlin gold under a bridge in Vienna in 1997? Does he like Putin because he wants to be like Putin? That is an autocrat. Well, we know the answer now, and we've known it with certainty over the past few months. Trump is not Russia's agent. He is Russia's ally.
- [27:19]
B
I mean, this is a good segue into my next question. We mentioned the interference in the 2016 elections, and you mentioned the role of WikiLeaks. It was also very interesting in the book to discuss the degree to which that issue, which was a national security issue, became hostage to partisanship and Republicans refusing to expose the role of Russia and so on. So to what extent do you think the success of the 2016 interference was down to Russia, and to what extent was it down to the US Domestic political situation, partisanship and so on? Could the Obama administration have done anything more?
- [28:06]
C
Well, of course they could. But the realization of what the Russians were up to in 2016 came too late. The understanding of what they were doing came too late until right before the election itself, the Obama administration and the CIA were watching what was happening, looking at it like a cow watching a train go by. They saw it, but they didn't understand what it was. And, you know, a key to success of the Russian attack on American democracy have been the perceptive analysis by the Russians of the wounds in the body politic and then rubbing salt into those wounds to help divide us, to. To create arguments. And of course, the cult of MAGA that surrounds and supports Donald Trump depends on credulous Republican senators and congressmen amplifying Russian talking points and Russian foreign policy pronouncements. Today, we have a situation where Donald Trump has put in charge of the great institutions of American national security. People like John Ratcliffe at the CIA. As a MAGA Congressman, John Ratcliffe was all over Fox the News deriving the, quote, russia hoax. And of course, Donald Trump said the Russia hoax is the fact that the Russians helped elect him in 2016, which is an undisputed fact you have at the Directorate of National Intelligence today. That is the bureaucracy that oversees all US Intelligence agencies. Tophi Gabbard, also a former member of Congress and long a Putin apologist and a conspiracy theorist and fabulist of the highest order. These two have been put in those high places by Donald Trump to destroy the CIA and American intelligence defenses against cyber attacks and foreign espionage. Why does Trump want to do this? Because he hates and fears the CIA, whose spies and analysts gathered and processed the evidence on the Russian attack, exceeds the CIA. Trump does, as the capital of the so called deep state, that shadowy conspiracy of soldiers and spies and diplomats out to subvert him. And what these two people have done in the past eight months, luca, is truly extraordinary and unlike anything we have ever seen in American history. And if you like, I will get into specifically what John Radcliffe has done as CIA director.
- [31:39]
B
We'll definitely come to that. I also wanted to ask you a question because you mentioned earlier, William Burns, who was CNA director under Biden and who, of course has penned a very strong essay in the Atlantic lamenting the approach of the Trump administration. But it seems that in the book, to a certain extent, under Biden, the CIA worked quite well. At least that was my impression in reading the book. If you think this is accurate, why do you think it worked well? What made it work well? Was it the people in charge?
- [32:19]
C
Yes, it was. And the success of the CIA in those years is almost entirely owing to its leadership from Earl Burns. As I mentioned, Burns was an extraordinary American diplomat. He was not, you know, an intelligence officer, but from early on in his career and again he served as Ambassador to Jordan and ambassador to Moscow. He worked very closely with CIA station chiefs and CIA officers abroad. CIA station chiefs and US ambassadors have been working together since 1947. They drink out of the same water. Trouble. For American foreign policy to succeed, it has to be coherent and it needs to be linked to American intelligence. And Burns had been practicing what. What he called intelligence diplomacy for, you know, three decades as a flight air and service officer at the U.S. state Department. So what Burns did was to harmonize, as best he could, statecraft and spycraft. And when that works when all the horses are pulling in the same direction, you can accomplish things.
- [33:48]
B
We go fairly soon to a discussion of the present prospects of the intelligence community. But I also wanted to ask you another two questions before we get there. One is related to the title of the book, the Mission. And you mentioned at the start of our conversation the fact that after the Cold War, the CIA felt a bit without a mission. But it is also my impression from reading the book that you seem to suggest, and again, I might be wrong here, that the agency performs at its best when sort of its various missions are somewhat in a balance. So that when it's not only focused on imprisonment is not only focused on targeted killings, but when it does various things at the same time and does them relatively well, is that an accurate picture, or am I somewhat imposing my own message on the book?
- [34:49]
C
No, no, I think you've done it basically right. But let's remember that the core mission of the CIA from its creation in 1947 is espionage. And the core of espionage is recruiting foreigners to become spies for the United States. The CIA officer, in recruiting a Russian or an Iranian or North Korean, it is asking that person to commit treason to betray his country, or in the case of terrorist organizations, to betray their cause. And of course, money is always an incentive, and the CIA has plenty of that. But in years gone by, luca, the motive of the recruited agents could be any one of a number of things. It could be revenge. It could be simply the money. It could be a desire to get out of the authoritarian state in which they're living and come to the United States. And it could also be a desire to change the world around them. In the Cold War, the CIA had a big advantage over the Russian intelligence services, for example, because it could represent the United States as versteining city on the Hill. We could claim, we, the United States, could claim with a straight thing to be a representative of democracy and freedom. And the terrible fact is that the lights on the crowning city on the hill are going out because the President of the United States has joined the authoritarian axis. He's gone over to the other side. And just imagine, for example, that you were a CIA officer and there are hundreds and hundreds of people that fit this description who has been working since 2014 full time to support the Ukrainians and to push back against Russian imperialism. And you wake up on the morning of the 24th of February this year and you see that the President of the United States has ordered at the UN that the United States vote with Russia and North Korea and Iran against a UN resolution condemning the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine. And the extraordinary. The extraordinary that you see in this boat is that the President of the United States has joined the authoritarian axis. A head spinning, gut wrenching, terrible revelation.
- [37:52]
B
I mean, I think this expands beyond the CIA, of course, with what is going on currently in the United States, and perhaps if we're staying with the intelligence community. We haven't mentioned, of course, because we're talking about the CIA, but also Cash Patel at the FBI, I feel, is making a similar amount of damage. Before we conclude on this, perhaps I wanted to ask you a more general question. Throughout the book, of course, you cover all the CIA directors from the late 1990s to the present. And this includes some very interesting characters. George Tenet, whom I desperately try to interview from my own book, but I never got a response. Porter Gosse, General Michael Hayden, Petraeus, Gina Haspel. I'm very interested in your views about how we understand the role of a CIA director. So how do we judge a CIA director? What should we look at in their performance? Is it their successes and failures in conducting operations? Is it their ability to deliver for the agency to respond to the President? Does sort of morality get into it in any way, or is it something else?
- [39:14]
C
Well, you can think of the CIA director as the lead violin in an orchestra of 18 musicians. There are 18 different US intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping and so on. And they have to be playing off the same sheet of music, the same score. And the score is the foreign policy of the United States as set by the President, who is the conductor of this orchestra. And if the foreign policy is coherent, that is, if the street music is written in a harmonious way and the State Department is in harmony with the CIA, you can get things done. This, of course, is not the case. You have Katsapani and you have the conductor, the President of the United States, if you will, taking the instruments out of tune and ordering the players to match their instruments. And this creates an extraordinarily dangerous situation. The the CIA is being run by John Radcliffe, the former MAGA congressman. What Ratcliffe has done in the past eight months is truly extraordinary. If you want to be promoted at CIA, you have to pass an ideological security test, a loyalty test. You are asked, who did you vote for in the last election? What did you think of the January 6th insurrection of the Capitol? Who really won the 2020 election, and so forth. We mentioned the outset. Tom Sylvester, an extraordinary CIA officer and The Chief of the Clandestine Service, the top spy from May 2023 until roughly May 2025. It is traditional as been from the start for the Chief of the Clandestine Service before he or she retires to take up the post of Chief of Station in London. And Silvector's bags were packed. Radcliffe canceled that assignment and so Beckter resigned because Silvester could not pass the ideological purity test. This is one of the most decorated officers in the history of the CIA. Radcliffe then fired every one of the hundreds and hundreds of newly minted spies the CIA had trained up in 2023 and 2024, because these were Biden hires, just sent them packing. And many of these people, the majority, I think, were trained to go work on China. Ratcliffe then canceled the CIA's long standing policy of diversity in hire. Why is diversity important at the CIA? I'm a very good precept that sending an all white cadre to go spy in China or Somalia or Pakistan is terrible trade crime. The CIA officer abroad needs to understand the of the people and needs to speak the language and understand the culture and the customs of the country. Diversity was the CIA is superpower. It's how they don't get caught. This is a short list of the destructive things that Radcliffe has done at CIA. Over at the FBI, you have Cat Patel, MAGA podcaster, who is literally dismantling the National Security and Intelligence Directorates of the CIA, of the FBI, at the Director of National Intelligence, the intelligence arena. We've mentioned her. Tulsi Gabbard. She is yanking security clearances from people right and left. She is dismantling the cyber defenses that the nation set up after the Russian attack on our election a decade ago. And over the Pentagon, you have the former Fox News weekend anchor Pete Hedshuth, who knows as much about the military as a pig knows about Sunday. And he is mounting lethal attacks in the Caribbean on Trump's order against boats that are not military targets. And literally in the White House the other day, Hegseth said in the Oval Office, we're all about lethality, not legality. These people don't know what they're doing, Luca. They are crackpots. They are fools. And the danger, of course, is that their amateurishness and their blind fealty to Trump creates a danger for the United States. And that danger is a systemic, catastrophic intelligence failure and an inability to see an attack being mounted over the horizon. We're in a very dangerous place today.
- [44:29]
B
Yeah, because that would probably give even more of a reason to exploit and crack down on domestic dissent and all of this sort of things. The last question, I guess, if I can, taking advantage of the fact that you've covered intelligence for so many years, the picture at the moment seems exceptionally bleak. And I think the CIA is in a very precarious position of becoming a sort of praetorian guard to a precedent. Is there anything you are seeing that makes you even a tiny, tiny bit optimistic about the situation or not?
- [45:12]
C
The only way to stop the systemic destruction, not only of the architecture of the United States created after World War II to protect this country against, among other things, Russian imperialism and the continuing and concomitant assault on civil liberties and freedom of speech and freedom of the press in this country will come in November 2026, which is that the American people will have to vote the Republicans out of power in Congress. That will put the brakes on. Right now, the Democratic Party of the United States does not have a leader, does not have coherent domestic policies, and does not have a plan of attack against what is happening in this country. They'll have to help protect and defend it by mobilizing people and getting them to the polls next year. Well, you have to. Do I have any hope? We live in hope. Luca and I live in hope. And one of the reasons that I live in hope has a lot to do with my mother. My mother was born in Third, the Jewish enclave of Nuremberg in 1924, incidentally, 11 months after Henry Kissinger was born in the very same place. And when I was a reporter at the New York Times, I could always get Kissinger on the phone. I would ask the secretary to remind him that his father taught my uncle in the gynasium. And Kissinger would get on the line and say, yeah, Mr. Biden, what do you want now? And so, of course, my mother and her family had to flee Germany, which they did at Kristallnacht. They went to Paris, and then, of course, Paris fell. And my mother and her mother, then aged 16 and 48, were trapped in Vichy, Paris. And gradually, slowly, they were able to make their way first to Marseille and then to Casablanca. And in March 1942, they were in Casablanca. This is the exact same time down to the week that the movie Casablanca was being filmed at a backlot in Hollywood. Everybody knows Casablanca. So my mother and I were watching Casablanca on black and white television when I was about nine years old. And the famous scene where the Nazis get up in Rick's Cafe and start singing the horsel Shrift, and then everyone else gets up and sings La Martez. My mother burst into tears and I asked her why she was crying. When the movie was over, she told me she and her mother got the second to last boat that ever crossed the Atlantic with German Jewish refugees in March 1942. And when my mother then 17, when the boat was out in the open ocean, she looked up at the night sky and she said, thank you for saving my life and I promise to live a life of purpose, help other people. They were two years in a refugee camp in Havana. They eventually were paroled in the United States. And then my mother heard about this program for young women like herself. And long story short, she was graduated from the Class of 1945 at Smith College, one of the premier women's colleges in the United States. And she went on to become a very good history professor and author of many books. And her writing and her story and her survival inspires me to this day and allows me to live in hope. Wow.
- [49:03]
B
Thank you so much for such a fantastic and a remarkable story. I mean, that should be the subject of a book in itself, I feel. Thanks again. Tim Weiner. Thank you so much for being on the podcast once again. The book is called the mission the CIA in the 21st Century is published by Mariner Books. Pick it up, read it and hopefully will inspire other people, like he did with me with Legacy of Ashes, to start studying the intelligence community and the CIA. Thanks again for your time.
- [49:39]
C
Thanks Luca. Sam.