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- [00:01]
Podcast Host
The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad free version of the Lawfare Podcast. Become a material supporter of lawfare@patreon.com lawfare that's patreon.com Lawfair also check out Lawfare's other podcast offerings, Rational Security, Chatter, Lawfare, no Bull and the Aftermath.
- [00:32]
Ryan Reynolds
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Chris Whipple
Foreign.
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Caroline Cornett
I'm Caroline Cornett, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare archive for April 26, 2025. Since President Donald Trump nominated John Ratcliffe to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Ratcliffe has reportedly shown a, quote, unprecedented level of interest in support for Trump's agenda, speaking publicly on platforms from Fox News to social media about his efforts to align the CIA with Trump's ambitions. For today's Archive episode, I selected an episode from September 16, 2020, in which David Priest sat down with Chris Whipple to discuss his book the Spy how the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future. They talked about the proper relationship between the CIA director and the president, how directors should handle arguably illegal orders, and how CIA directors through the last several decades have impacted US History and national security.
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Chris Whipple
I'm David Preece and this is The Lawfare Podcast. September 16, 2020. What is the proper relationship between the CIA director and and the president? How should directors handle arguably illegal orders? How important is the director's role as the nation's honest broker of information during times of crisis? To get at these questions, I sat down with Chris Whipple. He is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and the author of two books about the people around the president. First, he wrote the Gatekeepers about White House chiefs of Staff, based upon his documentary of the same name. He was the executive producer and writer of Showtime's the Spy CIA in the Crosshairs, upon which he based his new book, the Spy how the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future. If you want to hear about CIA directors through the last several decades and how they've impacted US History and national security, listen to this episode. It's The Lawfare Podcast. September 16th, the spymasters with Chris Whipple. Chris, you started off years ago in this area with a book called the Gatekeepers that was also built on a documentary of the same name about the White House chiefs of staff. And then suddenly you decide to do another documentary, this one on the the Spy Masters, now leading to your new book about the CIA directors. What took you from one to the next? How did you move from White House chiefs of staff into the somewhat different world of CIA directors and the different challenges that would present?
- [04:48]
Podcast Host
Well, as it turns out, they have a lot in common, which we'll get to soon, David. But a friend of mine at the CIA once said to me that most people write books and then turn them into films. Has anybody ever told you that you're doing this backwards? And it's true. I've been doing it backwards. And that's partly because my day job used to be as a filmmaker. I'm spending more time writing books now. So this began as a documentary for Showtime Back in 2015, with the great filmmakers Jules and Gideon Naude and Susan Zurinsky, who's now president of CBS News. But I really thought that the documentary barely scratched the surface of this unbelievable untold story of 17 men and now one woman who over the last 50 years have run the world's most powerful and influential intelligence agency. And it was a book that was just crying out to be done. So it began as a documentary, and now it's a book, the Spy Masters.
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Chris Whipple
And in doing the documentary first, you had the opportunity to sit down and talk on camera with virtually every living former director, perhaps everyone at the time you did it, including people that traditionally didn't talk to people for books and documentaries like. Like George Tenet. Were you surprised that they all were willing to talk to you and almost universally share details about some very sensitive matters?
- [06:18]
Podcast Host
I did interview every living CIA director at the time and of course John Brennan was CIA director when we did the film. And it was an extraordinary eye opening experience and George Tennant was among the most compelling. George doesn't like me to say this, but when we got him in the chair, he stayed there for about four to five hours. We went straight through. And can you imagine on your watch as CIA director having the walk up to 9 11, the 911 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, the so called enhanced interrogation program with detainees, and then the of course infamous scandal over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Well, all of it on George Tenet's watch. And he's a Shakespearean character in my view. And there were moments when, for example, I would say to him, was there ever a moment after 911 when you blamed yourself? And he squirmed and he fidgeted and he looked at the ceiling and he basically said, well look, I've lost a lot of sleep. We all do in this business. We're all human beings. I'd like to think that the book really humanizes the CIA directors. It's not just a, you know, a dry description of or history of the CIA. But I really like to think that it gets at the humanity of these directors because it's a, it's a rogues gallery of characters that Le Carre couldn't have dreamed up.
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Chris Whipple
And in doing so you do end up telling the story of the CIA. But it's, it's really a series of character portraits. And I'd like to walk through some of those for our listeners here because going through all of them, you end up getting to the core of some very important questions, like what makes a CIA director succeed or fail? What is the proper relationship between a CIA director and a president? What should they do about arguably illegal orders? And ultimately, if CIA and its directors have been a force more for good or more for evil, all of that comes out by looking at some of the tough choices that are put in front of a CIA director time and time again. Let's go back near the beginning. You don't go back in depth at the very beginning of the CIA, but in the, the more modern era, starting in the 1960s and 70s in particular, you start getting much more detail from interviews and other sources. Let's talk a little bit about some of these arguably illegal orders. And Dick Helms was really the one who started facing these in the 1960s and 70s in a way that ultimately became public for some of his successors. So talk a little bit about Helms and everything from orders to go after Castro to providing estimates on Vietnam to Lyndon Johnson to Nixon and Watergate. What were the ethical dilemmas that, that Helms faced and how did he measure up in your book?
- [09:38]
Podcast Host
Well, you know, I started with Dick Helms because he is really the quintessential CIA director, or at that time, of course, they were known as directors of Central Intelligence because they were in charge of all the agencies. Helms is a fascinating, was a fascinating character. He was no angel. He was certainly browbeaten by LBJ and to some extent by Richard Nixon into doing things that he shouldn't have done. I loved his, the description of his wife Cynthia when she said, you know, Chris, they were all asked to do things they shouldn't have done. Helms was pressured by LBJ first in the case of Vietnam. He was a great admirer of LBJ for his domestic Great Society, and he was completely exasperated by Johnson and the Vietnam War. LBJ kept demanding intelligence that would prove that the bombing of North Vietnam was sapping enemy morale. And Helms kept bringing him intelligence that said just the opposite, that it was hardening the resistance of the enemy. This drove LBJ completely mad. He kept coming back to Helms and demanding evidence that the, that the war was being won. Instead, on his own authority. At one point, Helms decided to commission a study of the underlying premise of the war, the so called domino theory, which posited that if South Vietnam fell to the Communists, that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes. Helms commissioned the study. It came back as a 40 something page memo. And the conclusion was that the domino theory was fundamentally flawed. Helms sealed this study in an envelope, took it to LBJ and handed it to him. It was subsequently deep sixed, as Cynthia put it, his widow, by one of LBJ's aides because they realized just how radioactive, how politically consequential something like that would be if it became public.
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Chris Whipple
Right.
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Podcast Host
Well, years later, and this is a story that I don't think has been reported before, but years later, the phone rang in the Helms household. Cynthia picked it up and it was Robert McNamara, the former defense Secretary, who of course in the early 90s published a MEA culpa admitting that the war was wrong. And he had just come across this memo, it had been declassified. He read it and he started shouting at Cynthia, poor Cynthia, who had nothing to do with this. And he's screaming at her over the phone saying, why wasn't I shown this? This could have made a difference. Well, who knows? But again, it's one of these great untold stories that people like Cynthia Helms were able to share with me.
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Chris Whipple
What else about Helms stood out for you? In writing the book?
- [12:51]
Podcast Host
I mentioned before that Helms was no angel. And it's true that he was not able to resist LBJ all the time. And at one point LBJ demanded that the CIA produce intelligence showing that there was foreign communist control over the anti Vietnam War movement in the U.S. well, helms should have known better. He should have realized this was a violation of not only of the law, but of CIA of the CIA's charter not to get involved in domestic surveillance. But he nevertheless started a program called Mhkos, and that was an illegal surveillance program that followed domestic protesters and of course failed to produce any of the intelligence that LBJ was demanding. But it was an example of how Helms occasionally would cross the line, as Cynthia put it, and do something that he shouldn't have been doing when it came to the most important issue of Helms tenure. Watergate. In the end, Helms face down Richard Nixon. He refused to participate in the Watergate cover up, thereby upholding the rule of law and arguably saving the CIA. Helms felt that if he'd gone along with it, that it might have meant not only him going to jail, but jeopardizing the agency. And he stood up to Nixon and face down Haldeman and said he wouldn't do it. This was famously the request to block the FBI's investigation. And so I think that Helms really saved the agency and I think he set an example for every CIA director who followed.
- [14:44]
Chris Whipple
We will come back to this theme as we talk about other directors and how his actions fit in. Now after Helms, of course, Bill Colby becomes director and he inherits something which had begun under Helms, but especially under Jim Schlessinger not long before. The so called family jewels. Talk a little bit about what the CIA family jewels were and what it was that Colby did with them that opened up a whole new era of oversight of intelligence.
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Podcast Host
Bill Colby is an absolutely fascinating, compelling character. He was a soldier in the oss, parachuting behind enemy lines in Norway and killing Nazis during World War II. He then became a liberal union lawyer actually before he joined the CIA. And in my mind he was almost a kind of Michael Corleone of the CIA. He was sort of a reluctant director. His views were liberal. He was not Very much like Helms. But he was faced with this excruciating dilemma. He and his predecessor, James Schlesinger, had sent out a memo at the height of all the scandals that were besieging the agency at the time. The memo asked everyone at the CIA to volunteer any activities the CIA had undertaken that might be outside its charter or against the law. And the result was that the floodgates opened and all kinds of stuff came pouring in. The result was something called the family jewels. It was a 693 page memo in the end of all kinds of things ranging from attempted assassination plots to other skullduggery. And Colby at one point is faced with the decision of whether to make this public, whether to cooperate with Congress. He has it locked in a safe. And he ultimately decides that for the CIA to recover from this long period of scandal, that the only route was transparency. And he touched off a virtual civil war within the agency between the old guard, represented by people like Dick Helms and Jim Angleton, and the new guard, Colby and others who felt that honesty, or at least transparency, was required in order to move to a new era.
- [17:28]
Chris Whipple
And that really highlights the contrast that that era began, right, because before then, CIA directors would talk to members of Congress. After all, they had to get appropriations. But there wasn't. The oversight mechanisms that we have now. The intel committees in the Senate and in the House came about as an ultimate result of the family jewels and the hearings on Capitol Hill about them. So you could have directors like Dulles or Dick Helms who had a choice to make. They had a choice. When asked by Congress of something the CIA was doing, they faced the tension. Do I answer the question truthfully and tell people in Congress who arguably don't have the clearances or don't have the need to know about something that is highly sensitive, or do I lie to Congress to protect the secrets that I am sworn to protect? Helm certainly came down on one side of that. He was the man who kept the secrets and ended up in some legal trouble because he did mislead Congress, whereas Colby opened up and led to that new era. How much of a hinge point was that, really? And how did all the directors you talked to, all of whom came after this point, how did they think about that relationship with Congress?
- [18:53]
Podcast Host
Well, you know, it's fascinating because Helms famously wound up being put on trial in the case of his testimony over the CIA's attempt to overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile. Helms famously said that the CIA had not attempted to overthrow Allende which was not true. Helms wore it as a badge of honor. He felt that the congressman who asked him the question already knew the answer, and. But more importantly, did not need to know. And he was defiant, and he became something of a hero in the process. And so it was a real rift between the old guard and the new. And I think that every director who followed would certainly would probably look back now and say that transparency really was necessary. It was time to move on, and that congressional oversight has become absolutely critical to preserve the integrity and the credibility of the intelligence community. So I think that while it was bitter and it was a real battle at the time, that looking back, I don't think anybody would choose a different course.
- [20:18]
Chris Whipple
Yeah, there's one person who you didn't get a chance to talk to who might have said he would take a different course, because in some ways he did. And that's, of course, Bill Casey, the legendary director for much of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
- [20:32]
Podcast Host
Okay, yes. Okay, well, you've got me there. Definitely Casey would be the exception to that rule, for sure.
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Chris Whipple
Yeah, he had a somewhat different relationship in terms of feeling the need to talk to Congress. But some of that might have been his background, his formative years in the OSS without congressional oversight to speak of, and feeling that he ultimately had the backing of the President to fulfill what he saw as the President's mission. But I think it proves the larger point, which is all of the other directors, certainly post Casey, have had a healthy respect for congressional oversight, even. Even if they didn't always like it.
- [21:14]
Podcast Host
I think that's true. And I think that Cayce, of course, is the wonderful exception to that rule. And I say wonderful just because he's such a colorful and interesting character to read about. And I spent a lot of time with Bob Woodward talking about Cayce. Woodward, of course, wrote the classic biography of Cayce called Vale. And Casey was one of these characters who is just almost too colorful to be true. His nickname was Mumbles. His speech was unintelligible to almost everyone, including Ronald Reagan. When Howard Baker found this out, he famously said, that's the most frightening thing I've ever heard. Casey waged covert wars against the Soviets all over the globe under Reagan. He had real contempt for Congress. Bob Gates told me he was in contempt of Congress virtually every day. He thought that they were gnats biting his ankles and that they were just a nuisance to be ignored. Well, as a result, Casey blundered into the so called Iran Contra affair, in which proceeds from illegal arms sales to Iran, were diverted to the contras fighting in Central America and nearly brought down the Reagan presidency. But he was also a fascinating, brilliant guy who just consumed. He was a vacuum for intelligence and he was a fascinating character.
- [23:01]
Chris Whipple
Yeah. And while he was director, we had something unprecedented in national history, which is a Vice President who had been CIA director previously. That's, of course, George H.W. bush, who really was the first director to reap the benefits or the perils, you pick, of the new era of congressional oversight. In his first, I think six or seven months, Bush testified to Congress some two dozen plus times and made many public appearances, more than his predecessors did, especially in such a short period. But of course, he was then later vice president and then President himself. From the interviews you did with so many people around President Bush and from having the chance to see him back when you made the documentary, what sense did you get of how, having been CIA director, informed his ability to use intelligence as president? And how do you think his presidency stacks up in terms of relationship with his two CIA directors and the President?
- [24:03]
Podcast Host
Well, it's a long question and I'll try not to give you a very long answer, but as you know, I interviewed Bush himself a couple of times before he died. And I'll never forget emailing his then chief of staff, Gene Becker, and saying, I'd love to interview the President. And she said, oh, of course that won't be possible. I'm terribly sorry. Then she came back a day later and said not only would he agree to do the interview, he insists on doing the interview. This was when he was gravely ill. And so that was a great experience. But Bush came in as CIA director, he was the right person at the right time to kind of lift the cloud of scandal that had been hanging over it for so long. He was sure it would be the end of his political career, and he was wrong about that. When he became president, his experience as CIA director really profoundly affected the way he conducted the presidency. Bush insisted on being briefed personally every morning, bright and early by a CIA briefer and often having the CIA director himself present for those briefings. And so Bush took that very seriously and took intelligence seriously. And I think that he also had, of course, the quintessential national security advisor in Brent Scowcroft. And so that was a very smooth functioning national security apparatus in Bush 41's White House. But a lot of it really had to do with his own experience and respect for the intelligence community.
- [25:50]
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- [27:23]
Chris Whipple
And that certainly helped with the two big foreign policy challenges of the presidency the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent liberation of Kuwait by coalition forces, and of course the peaceful end to the Cold War. But that certainly set up a real challenge for his successors as President and his successors as CIA director. Talk about the post Cold War shift and how directors like Jim Woolsey and John Deutch faced the issues of the 1990s when intelligence was no longer seen as such a top priority for the president.
- [28:02]
Podcast Host
Well, in the immediate post Soviet era I think that Bob Yates of course was CIA director and was presented with the challenge of trying to figure out where all of the loose nukes might be as the Soviet Union came apart. Gates of course was the quintessential CIA director who rose from the ranks as a young analyst. So on Gates watch, I think that the intelligence community was playing obviously a vital role in the trying to keep track of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that immediate post war period which was of course fraught and dangerous. And Bush 41 did a marvelous job of along with Gates and Scowcroft and Baker of getting through that period. After the Cold War, of course, Bill Clinton came into office, and at that point, I think that the CIA had really lost its way. I mean, it was no longer defined by one overarching arch enemy in the Soviet Union. It was now, as Jim Woolsey famously put, was a jungle full of snakes that the intelligence community was dealing with. But there were budget cuts and there was a perception that the CIA was much less, much less necessary and valuable in the post Cold War era. And Jim Woolsey became a kind of classic case of a CIA director who had really kind of lost his way. His big problem was that Bill Clinton and Woolsey just didn't get along. He literally had one meeting with Bill Clinton, one private meeting during his entire tenure, to the point where at one point a small plane in a freak accident had crashed on the South Lawn of the White House. And Woolsey told everybody he could find that that was Woolsey trying to get an appointment with the President. So it was a real low point, I think, for the CIA and its place in the national security world. Woolsey was followed by John Deutch, who is a fascinating character, absolutely brilliant. Michael Morell told me that he was the most brilliant person he'd ever met. With Barack Obama a close second. He had foreseen the era of drone warfare. He was a professor at mit, a brilliant guy. But Deutsch brought a hefty dose of condescension to his management style, and he made it pretty obvious to a lot of people at Langley that he thought their counterparts in the Defense Department were more capable and smarter. This did not endear him to the workforce by any means. And ultimately, Deutsch met his demise when he promised Bill Clinton that he would get rid of Saddam Hussein. And what followed was a real disaster in the form of two attempts to overthrow Saddam that went sideways and resulted in all kinds of chaos. So Deutsch finally resigned, and in the end, he really. It was an ignominious ending because he. It was discovered that all kinds of classified information was on his computer at his home. Right. And anyway, this became. This became a kind of a sad ending for a brilliant guy.
- [31:53]
Chris Whipple
And you already hit the main points of his successor, George Tenet, I think, still the second longest serving CIA director. But there's one I'd like to drill down on just a little bit more, which is the issue of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because something that really comes out from your interviews of the directors and some of the future directors who had lower ranking but still senior Roles at this time was that the CIA did not decide this alone. This was something that the White House wanted. And you tell the story how the CIA director, of course, had a decision to make about how to move forward with interrogating terrorists who had been captured. But in going through the various techniques to be used, the President vetted the list, the Department of Justice vetted the list, the Attorney General vetted the list. The techniques were briefed to the senior leadership of Congress, and no one along the way said no to all of the techniques. A few of them were taken off in that process, but there was nobody saying, this is so clearly wrong that you can't possibly do it during a time of high threat. That all came later. How did you feel hearing all of these different perspectives, especially knowing that some of the characters such as John Brennan, Michael Morell, John McLaughlin, even Gina Haspel, would end up serving in senior agency positions themselves?
- [33:23]
Podcast Host
Well, the whole issue of the so called enhanced interrogation techniques is, is a really complex and much more nuanced controversy, I think, than, than it's ordinarily portrayed in the press. And I got that impression really from talking to so many of the directors on whose watch it occurred. And if you talk to Tenet, as I have for hours at a time, and you talk to his deputy, John McLaughlin, and even to some of the more recent people who have led the CIA, John Brennan, Michael Morrell, it's not nearly as black and white as you might expect. I mean, for example, there's the whole issue of whether or not any actionable intelligence was produced through the methods. If you talk to Michael Morell, he will tell you in no uncertain terms that enhanced interrogation techniques, so called, disrupted plots and saved lives. And he gives several examples and is quick to add that it's a totally legitimate question as to whether the United States of America, which is supposed to stand for a certain code of conduct and a certain kind of morality, whether the United States should be engaged in such techniques. But he would argue that they have and they did produce actionable intelligence. Now, of course, the Senate majority report, the voluminous report that was produced well after the fact, argues otherwise. And yet none of the directors on whose watch these techniques took place was interviewed for that report. So it's a, you know, it's a legitimate issue. Obviously, it's a road we will probably go, never go down again with Michael Hayden, who said that if anyone wants to do waterboarding again, he'd better bring his own bucket because the agency's not going to do that again. And I think that's definitely true. But it is interesting to talk to the directors who felt that they had no choice. I mean, Tenet certainly makes as compelling a case as you as you can for the notion that they were expecting a second wave of attacks immediately after 911 and they felt that they had to take extraordinary measures. Now, obviously you can argue that they were beyond the pale and unjustified, but it's an interesting argument.
- [36:11]
Chris Whipple
Yeah, and it was interesting to see. I think it was John McLaughlin who said this in your book, that of course we, we have the reality, the timeline that we're in, where there was not a second wave of attacks. Of course there were major attacks in places like London and Madrid and elsewhere, but we did not have a second wave of attacks in the United States along the lines of 911 or as the intelligence was suggesting at the time, that would be much larger than 911 involving nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. But I think it was John who pointed out, look at the counterfactual. The President has given you the authority to use these methods to get information, and the senior leadership of Congress has not objected. And the lawyers all tell you that it is legal, which they did at the time. And let's say you chose a CIA director simply not to do that. And then there was a second wave of attacks and that information was accessible. That's a very different scenario in which the ethics look different of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Americans dead, when something that had been deemed legal and appropriate by different branches of government was simply left on the table by a CIA director who thought it wasn't worth going there.
- [37:27]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it's worth remembering that as long ago as the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church used to call the CIA a rogue elephant. Well, the CIA has never really been a rogue elephant. Everything it has done, for better or worse, has been at the instruction of the President of the United States. And certainly in the case of the use of the so called enhanced interrogation techniques, Tenet is very persuasive when he says that the President approved the methods, the legal counsel approved them, the Department of Justice approved them, Congress was briefed. So you can't say that this was a rogue CIA operation.
- [38:10]
Chris Whipple
What is interesting, looking at so many of the directors that you profile here, is that the ones almost universally regarded as the most respected and even the most effective in many ways are not necessarily the ones who had the most intelligence experience coming in. Of course, George H.W. bush, you could put into that category. George Tenet had done some oversight of intelligence from Congress, but was not an intelligence professional himself. But then we get to Leon Panetta, who came into office as the CIA director for Barack Obama, and other than very briefly serving in army intelligence as a much younger man, had done very little with intelligence other than as a consumer when he was chief of staff at the White House for Bill Clinton. But you paint a portrait of a very effective CIA director, somebody who even in clashes with the President's senior staff, still came out ahead because of the strong relationship with the President and his ability to understand the environment he was in. Talk a little bit about that. What were the clashes that Leon Panetta got into and how did he get through them?
- [39:25]
Podcast Host
Well, it's no coincidence that Leon Panetta was successful both as White House Chief of staff under Bill Clinton and then as CIA director under Barack Obama. I think a lot of the same qualities and a lot of the same attributes are necessary. Leon Panetta was a 50 year old who was comfortable in his own skin. He was grounded. And as White House Chief of Staff, he could walk into the Oval Office, close the door and tell the President what he did not want to hear. That's a critical thing when you're White House Chief of staff. I would argue that it's the same sort of quality required in a top CIA director. You have to be the honest broker of intelligence, just as the White House chief is the honest broker of information in the White House. You have to be able to tell the President hard truths. It also helps if you are comfortable in the corridors of power as Leon Panetta was, and if you can find your way around the White House. So I think that Panetta was a master at all of that. And one of the great stories I tell in the book is that the clash that he got into with the then Director of National Intelligence, Denny Blair. But Blair made the mistake one day of sending out an instruction to all the CIA stations saying that he, Denny Blair, the dni, would henceforth be appointing the CIA station chiefs. Well, Leon Panetta got wind of this, and about a half hour later or so, he decided to send out another instruction to all the CIA stations which read essentially disregard the previous message. Well, Panetta knew, because he was politically savvy, he knew he would have the backing of Obama and Vice President Biden, who wound up being the referee, by the way, in this case, between Blair and Panetta. And from that moment forward, Panetta demonstrated not only his skill as an infighter, a bureaucratic infighter, but also that he had the backs of the CIA. Everybody felt as One person put it to me, as one former high ranking intelligence official said, from that day forward, Leon Panetta was a God at Langley because he had everybody's backs.
- [42:01]
Chris Whipple
After Leon Panetta was, of course, David Petraeus. And I'll focus just on one issue with him in mind, which is a extraordinary case that happened of a US Citizen, Anwar Al Awlaki, who was engaged in terrorism against the United States and the clash that that created for the President and for the CIA director of what do you do when you get a chance to eliminate the threat by removing Awlaki from the battlefield without normal judicial due process? Petraeus, I understand, didn't talk to you directly about the order to kill Awlaki and how he processed that. But there's an extraordinary part of your book where you have, I think, five or six former directors all weighing in on the ethical dilemma presented, and they come out in very different places on this. Talk about the range of opinions from the CIA directors themselves on the issue of when a US Citizen is engaged in terrorism against the United States and what is reasonable for the CIA to do.
- [43:15]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it's a fascinating dilemma. And one of the things I think the book drives home is the extent to which CIA directors found that they were making life and death decisions every day. This was something that was shocking to Leon Panetta, for example. And there's a story that I tell about how he is confronted with a decision about making a lethal drone strike, knowing full well that there were innocent civilians in the shot, as he put it, and how he decided ultimately to take that shot because of the importance of the target. These are the kinds of things they have to grapple with on an almost daily basis. And Petraeus faced that decision with Anmar of Laki. And it was fascinating to me because all of the directors weighed in, or many of them weighed in on this on various sides of the issue of when it is appropriate to target an American citizen, albeit a citizen who was waging jihad against the US From Sudan. Anwar Awlaki was a sworn enemy of the US and was certainly a threat. Panetta and Petraeus lost no sleep over that decision. The fact that he was an American citizen for Panetta, for example, made no difference. He said, in his view, a terrorist is a terrorist regardless of his citizenship. But it stirred up a really compelling debate among the various directors because William Webster, for example, and Bob Gates were on the other side of this issue. And Gates talked to me about it extensively, and he argued that, look, there are a lot of people who sign off on a decision like that within the national security apparatus. But they're all beholden to the president and that he, Gates, would feel more comfortable if there was some sort of outside panel that would pass judgment on that kind of a decision. You know, a lethal strike on an American citizen, which I think was the first time since the Civil War that an American had been executed without a judge and jury. So it stirred up a fascinating debate. And William Webster, of course, was also troubled by this. And Webster, in my mind, he's sort of the conscience of the CIA. He was known as the judge. He famously called someone at CIA. He was formerly the FBI director, of course, and a man of the law. And he called a friend of the CIA before he took the job and said, can I, as a man of the law, run an agency like the CIA? And this person said, yes, you can do it.
- [46:07]
Chris Whipple
And he did, and by most accounts, did it quite well compared to some of his predecessors.
- [46:13]
Podcast Host
Exactly.
- [46:14]
Chris Whipple
Let's turn to kind of finally go through the directors to two recent examples that you highlight here. One is the fact that it's almost unprecedented for CIA directors who have served previously to speak out against a current president and weigh upon his decisions. Jim Schlesinger did that to some degree when he turned against Gerald Ford and campaigned with Jimmy Carter and ended up serving in Jimmy Carter's administration. But with former directors like Mike Hayden and John Brennan in particular speaking out regularly against President Trump and his decision making, that's raised for many people the issues of what is the role not of current CIA directors to stay out of politics? Everyone agrees that they should. But for former CIA directors, do they have a role, responsibility to stay quiet, or do they have a responsibility to actually speak when there are issues that affect their area of knowledge that would be helpful to the American people? How did you feel about that? After speaking with both of them at length for this book and hearing from the other CIA directors about how they interacted with the political sphere, there's no.
- [47:33]
Podcast Host
Doubt about it that the tradition is for former CIA directors to stay out of politics, to remain above the fray, not to pick sides. And so I think there was a real, almost a consensus among the former directors that I spoke with that John Brennan had crossed the line. A lot of them were really uncomfortable with the way in which he attacked Donald Trump and maybe particularly when he used the word treason in connection with Trump's infamous appearance with Vladimir Putin and Helsinki.
- [48:13]
Chris Whipple
And that said Chris, if I recall, it was not long after that when President Trump was talking about removing John Brennan's security clearances because he didn't like what he said, that virtually every former director and deputy director signed a letter standing up for John Brennan.
- [48:30]
Podcast Host
That's right. But interestingly, even among the directors who signed that letter protesting the removal of Brennan's security clearance, there were several who were still very uncomfortable with Brennan's criticism of Trump, even when they were not personally supporters of Trump and objected to a lot of things that Trump is doing. I think they were still uncomfortable, many of them, with this very public posture that Brennan has taken. Brennan, to me, is fascinating because by all accounts, as CIA director, he was the quintessential honest broker of intelligence who never put his thumb on the scale, who was scrupulous about not advocating policy. And of course, he'd been knee deep in policy in his previous job in the White House. But he kind of like Dick Helms, was an honest broker who would give his opinion about the intelligence and then step out of the room when decisions on policy were made. And so it's kind of fascinating to see somebody who was so respected for being so even handed and nonpartisan would be infuriated by Trump. And I think it just, it says something about the nature of this president and his contempt for the intelligence community and his contempt for the truth. And as David Axelrod once said, Brennan is kind of an Irish cop, and it just gets his Irish up and he can't help it.
- [50:11]
Chris Whipple
So what tension, Chris, does that then put on Gina Haspel, the current CIA director, because she's been put in a position of a president who does not take intelligence the way any other president has, who has a different relationship with the truth than any other president has, and yet she has stayed in the job. Most of her predecessors praise her and have high respect for her, especially when she came into the job. But some of them have questioned some of her choices, such as not publicly defending the whistleblower who was a CIA employee or standing up and applauding during the applause lines of a State of the Union address. How do you think Gina Haspel is stacking up against her predecessors, given the unusual circumstances in which she finds herself?
- [51:02]
Podcast Host
Well, in the best of times, being a CIA director is a high wire act worthy of the Wallendas. You have to be able to tell the president hard truths while also not jeopardizing your access to him. You know, every CIA director from Helms to Haspel has learned the hard way that, you know, unless you have the ear of the president, you're really wasting your time. That's the whole point. Of the enterprise is to inform the president, to make history changing decisions. So it's extremely difficult. But with Trump, it is virtually mission impossible. I did a piece for the Washington Post recently in which I said the president is unbreakable. He doesn't read, he's incurious. He thinks he knows everything worth knowing. And he brings a resentment, a contempt for the intelligence community into the job. He just doesn't believe anything they tell him. So that makes it extremely difficult for Haspel. Having said all that, I think there were high hopes for Gina Haspel, that given her reputation for integrity, for being a straight shooter and an honest broker, that she would have a chance of getting through to Donald Trump and refusing to politicize intelligence. But I think it's been very difficult. Haspel started out well, I thought, as director in the beginning. For example, after the horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi, she defended the CIA's assessment with high confidence that MBS had been involved despite all of Trump's equivocations. But increasingly, as time went on, she was AWOL at critical times when Congress needed to be briefed on the Russian interference in the election, for example, on her watch, the intelligence community has issued an assessment that not just the Russians, but also the Chinese and the Iranians are interfering in the US Election, which is really conflating a much more serious threat from the Russians. And of course, the most serious thing on her watch has been the pandemic. We now know that Donald Trump was warned about the coronavirus in January repeatedly in the President's Daily Brief, or pdb, and that he ignored those warnings. And, you know, as Richard Helms once said, it's not enough to ring the bell. You have to make sure the President hears it. And I think this has been a real problem on Gina Haspel's watch. When Donald Trump blamed his CIA briefer, Beth Sanner, for downplaying the severity of the coronavirus, the silence from Gina Haspel was deafening. He had thrown the CIA briefer under the bus, and she failed to come to her defense. So while there were high hopes for Gina Haspel in the beginning to be a real honest broker of intelligence and not to be pressured by Trump, I think that those hopes are fading.
- [54:30]
Chris Whipple
It certainly is a interesting way to end the book, and we'll end our conversation there. Chris, thanks so much for your survey of CIA directors and their relationships with the presidents and for joining us for this conversation.
- [54:44]
Podcast Host
David, my pleasure. I really enjoyed it.
- [54:50]
Chris Whipple
The Lawfair podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution if you enjoy the content of this and other episodes, please do rate the podcast. Share it with your friends on social media. Let people know what the Lawfair podcast brings to you. This episode is edited and produced by Jen Patya Howell. Ian Enright is our audio engineer and Sophia Yan performed our music. As always, thanks for listening. Listening.
- [55:38]
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