Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Presidency Presidents Their CIA Directors 20240713

One cia director, george h. W. Bush, later became president himself. The Smithsonian Associates hosted this program. Good evening, everyone. My name is ruth robbins. Its a pleasure to welcome you here tonight for our program. A couple of quick things first. One is, if you could, please put away your cell phones, turn them off, silence them, any electronic devices, we would appreciate it. If youre wondering why bright lights in here, because youre all going to be on tv. Cspan is taping tonight. Im kidding, youre not going to be on cspan, the speaker will be on cspan. When we get to the q a, they usually want to bring a mic down so they can record it. So if you have a question, just try to wait until they bring the mic to you so we dont have to repeat it. The speaker will repeat the questions so you can hear, but this is so they can hear it or however they work it. Our speaker tonight is david robarge, received a phd at columbia university. After teaching at columbia, working for banker david rockefeller, completing media studies at columbia, he joined the cia in 1989 and later became a political and leadership analyst on the middle east. Dr. Robarge moved to the cia history staff in 1996 and was appointed chief historian of the cia in 2005. Hes published several classified works as well as have appeared in studies in intelligence, Intelligence National history, oxford intelligence and National Security. Hes taught intelligence history unclassified mono graphs on supersonic Reconnaissance Aircraft and intelligence the American Revolution and biography as director of Central Intelligence was declassified. His articles and book reviews on cia leaders, counterintelligence covered action and technical collections have appeared in studies in intelligence, Intelligence National history, oxford intelligence and National Security. Hes taught intelligence history at George Mason University and Georgetown University and written a biography of chief justice john marshall. Please join me in welcoming our speaker tonight and enjoy the program. Good evening. I appreciate everybody turning out tonight. Its good to have such a large audience for what i hope youll find to be a pretty interesting presentation i spent a good deal of time studying directors. I did a biography of the director during the 1960s, during vietnam war, Jfk Assassination and run up to the cuban missile crisis. I got very interested in looking at the different ways in which shaped by political environment and in particular their focus with the president. I should say before i start, what im not going to be covering today, a lot of current stuff. Im not going to be talking about the president and his relations with the agency currently, because thats not history. Ill look at that in a few years. Ill have another talk on the update, which will be very, very interesting. What i would like to concentrate on are the ways in which the president s interact with directors and vice versa. A couple of things to leave you with, fundamental points for the evening. President s, unlike their highlevel choices, cabinet members of certain offices, often which are political payoffs or people who have some lobby behind them and kind of foisted on the president. Thats not the case with the directors. President s pick the type of director they want to establish certain aspects. Domestic politics is a driver behind what the cia can do, what the president can have it do, and the way in which the agency can effectively or ineffectively, depending on the context, carry out its mission. So the choices that president s make about who will run the agency is very important index into how the president s are going to run Foreign Policy. We all know enough about American History since world war ii to realize that different president s have had different Foreign Policy agenda, outlooks on the world, foreign policies and many have been preoccupied with domestic policies, so Foreign Policy has opinion somewhat of an afterthought. In other cases, Foreign Policy has been at the forefront of what the United States is doing in the world, whether its combating communism, finally ending the cold war, whatever, fighting the global war on terror. And these are the times when president s pick particular types of directors to do certain things with the agency that you wont find other president s doing at other times in our history, which is why we have such a mix. Although diversity isnt the first word that will come to your mind when you look up there. Though i do notice we dont have any with beards yet, and im hoping that will change at some point in the future. Yes, theyre all white men. Now we have gina haspell, who i will be talking about in a few years hopefully. The other point i want to leave with you, this really is a diverse bunch of leaders coming from a wide variety of backgrounds. Each of them brought to the agency a particular, if i can use a cliche, skill set, a body of experience, and in some cases inexperience, that they have applied to running the agency in the way that the president s who pick them want them to. Thats a very Cardinal Point i want you to leave here tonight with. Secondly, we dont want to exaggerate the influence that directors have on Foreign Policy and president s they serve. This is fodder for movie, tv series and fictional portrayals. One director, helms, will tell you flatout director of Central Intelligence is one of the weakest political figures in washington, because he is totally dependent, for the most part, on the president for his influence. And the president can use him, lose him, forget him, dump him, misuse him. Thats, again, all the president s call. So thats kind of the theme of our discussion tonight. Before we get started i thought i would have a little bit of fun. While i was waiting to get started i noticed a lot of you gazing up there, trying to figure out who these people are. So i thought we would spend a few minutes playing directors jeopardy jeopardy. I havent done this before, so it may fall flat or spend the rest of the night doing this and i can trash the presentation. Lets start with this, i am the longest serving director of Central Intelligence. You can shout out the name. Alan douglas, right. There he is, there. Conversely, i am the shortest serving director. Pompeo. No. Pompeo was in for the better part of a year as was george bush. Schles iinger. Schlesinger almost. No, in for a year and a half. We have to go way, way back to somebody im sure youve never heard of unless youre a history geek. The first one sidney souers. Who was head of the Central Intelligence group, which was cias predecessor organization. He was a crony of harry trumans. He made it very clear when he took the job that he only wanted to serve a few months, because he wanted to go back and run the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain in missouri from whence he came. Intelligence officer, served as an attache to the french during world war ii. He was an experienced leader but truman wanted a figurehead to get the new cig, Central Intelligence group, up and running. Okay. Lets see. I am the only convicted felon. Helms. Richard helms regrettably. He was caught in what i have to say was a pretty nasty gotcha episode. He was testifying before Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearings before he went out to be ambassador to iran. He was asked by a senator, who knew full well what the answer was but for whatever reason was grandstanding to the public, did we ever try to covertly try to overthrow the government of chile . This was an open hearing. Richard helms should have said i cant answer that in public, we have to go into private session. For reasons he never explained to me personally i helped him with his memoir and writing, he goes ahead and says no three times to direct questions. This was a flatout lie. As youre aware, we did quite a bit to overthrow the government of chile in 1970. So he winds up receiving a twoyear suspended sentence and a relatively small fine of a few thousand dollars, which a group of friends pay on his behalf when they had a celebration at the Congressional Country Club after his sentencing. [ laughter ] okay. I had my security clearance pulled. And one more. Where is he . I cant see him too well. Deutsche. John deutsche. He had laptop trouble and wound up losing his clearance because of the fact that he had classified material on his laptop, that his son was using the laptop to also connect with internet sites that i wont discuss in any detail with this audience. [ laughter ] lets see. I am the only career analyst to become director. Robert gates. Now, brennan was an analyst for most of his life. He also had a hitch as chief of station. Then he left the agency to become president obamas Homeland Security and terrorism adviser and then he came back to run the agency. Lets see, here is an easy one. I am the only director to later become president. Bush. Bush. Okay. Good. That was the 100 question, not the 40,000 question. Lets see, i was Dwight Eisenhowers chief of star during world war ii. Smith. I could also ask a tougher question, i resigned as dci to take a better job. That was also smith. The better job, interestingly, was undersecretary of state, which back in 1952 and 3 when this happened was a much more prestigious position than the director of Central Intelligence. I later became chief of staff of the air force. Check out the military uniforms. We only have two air forcers up there. Ill also add, i am the only dci who became the namesake for an important military post, military installation. Vandenberg air force base. Thats hoyt vandenberg, who took the job as director as a stepping stone to becoming chief of staff of the air force. It was a different world back in the 40s, which is why i say sometimes in our history the director of Central Intelligence was not a very prestigious position. Here is one with four answers. So youll at least get one right. I served in the oss. Dulles. Okay. We have i heard dulles, thats correct. Who else . Helms. Helms, right. Not bush. Did i hear colby out there . Yes. And bill casey. We have four, this is an important point. We have four former directors who use d to serve in one of cias predecessor organizations, so they bring to their experiences as directors that ontheground, inthewar intelligence experience. It was very influential for many of them. Lets see. I am the only former fbi director to be bill webster. Bill webster. I am the only judge webster. Piling on. Okay. I was the classmate of the president who appointed me. Turner. Turner. And president carter. Lets see. I used to be white house chief of staff. Good. I used to be a congressman from california. Leon panetta. Leon panetta, good. Okay. I used to be one of the Senior Executives at the bechtel corporation. Thats a final jeopardy question. John mccone. He was a classmate of Stephen Bechtel at berkeley, where they were both studying engineering. Lets see. I was the only person to be director of cia and director of the nsa. Michael hayden. Michael hayden. Okay. I used to be an officer in our directorate of operations before i changed careers and served in another capacity for a number of years and then became director. Well, yes, you could say that of any of the oss grads, if you will, but i was thinking director of operations, cia position. He was a case officer for about 10 years. Gates. No. Gates was an analyst. Potter goss. He worked in the d. O. As a case officer, had to leave for medical reasons, then became a local politician in florida, and then a congressional representative, ran the House Oversight committee for a while, and then became our director. I am the only person up here who is both director of Central Intelligence and director of the cia. Goss again. He was running the agency when the dni position was set up. The intelligence terrorism and intelligence excuse me, intelligence reform and terrorism prevention act, irtpa, passed in 2004, effective 2005. It abolished the position of dci and for the first time in history created statutorily the position of director of the Central Intelligence agency. Well talk a little bit later about the effect that had in the prominence of the dci, vice dcia and the different authorities that they have. Okay. I think thats a pretty good warmup. You all did really well. Super job. So let me go on and talk about main points of tonights presentation. When the cia was set up, a couple of different models came to mind for the leaders. You had allen dulles, who at the time, had his oss experience. And he thought, based, in part, on that, and his dealings with the British Service during world war ii, that the cia should pretty much always be run by a careerist, somebody who grew up in the agency and was wedded to, devoted to that particular line of work. Now we have only had a few directors who were careerists, that is, people who started at the agency and worked their way all the way up to be director. Bill colby, Richard Helms, gina haskell and bob gates, though not directly, because he did do a couple of tours at the nsc during the reagan administration. Youre fyoure talking direct straight from desk up to the seventh floor, we really have only those three. That is one model. What has come about is the one that Dwight Eisenhower specifies here, which is he is using the word peculiar in a variety of meanings here. Not just strange, not strange and oddball, but peculiar in the sense of requiring special capabilities. And what i think he was getting here is that we will see this as our talk goes on that you have to be able to pick a certain type of person to run the agency at a particular time to fulfill your, the president s Foreign Policy agenda. That is what became the pattern. These individuals were neither elitists from a small cadre of the british model but rather than drawn from all walks of life, as we will see. It became an important element, i think, of their strength and their utility that they had this variety of backgrounds. Taking a quick kind of statistically snapshot of them, we see that their region of birth, for what its worth, is a determination factor and is concentrated in a couple of parts of the country. We now have our first southernborn director, gina haskell, previously nobody from that part of the world. Who is the only overseas born one . Any idea . That was john deutsche. He was born in belgium. As far as education goes, this is a pretty smart lot. A lot of advanced degrees. Four doctorates, people like schlesinger and gates and deutsche had them. We have one interesting outlier. He only went to high school. But hike they used to say, anybody in america can grow up to become president and anybody in america, almost, can grow up to become director of Central Intelligence or dci. Ironically, this is one of our most influential directors ever. If you go back, we are still living with many of his accomplishments and that is Walter Bedell smith. The reason he is so influential he established the director of agency where we had analysts, operations officers, and support officers in separate directories and the science and Technology Directory was structured and that was 1963 until the modernization that occurred under director brennan, although it still exists it the actions occurs in Mission Centers that fuse together mainly components of those different directorates as getting rid of stove pipes, that sort of thing. This is where the diversity really comes into play. If you look at those variety of backgrounds and, of course, some people did more than one thing in their careers. We had 25 directors either dci or dcia so a variety of backgrounds. This is a strength for them because they were able to bring, again, based on what the president s wanted at particular times a specific kind of expertise and background to bear on the president s Foreign Policy agenda. All three branches of government are represented as are three of the five military services. Perhaps one of the keys that distinguishes many of these directors, in fact, almost all of them, 24 out of 25, from other cabinet appointees, many of whom, when you think about it, really dont have much experience in the Cabinet Department area of responsibility that they are running. They werent farmers. They werent involved in the energy industry. They didnt have anything necessarily to do with the military directly and on and on it goes. But with the exception probably of William Rayborn who served for one year in 1965, 1966 and johns picked i am because he had no other alternatives and looking for somebody he was remotely familiar with. The major point he was trying to give Richard Helms, he wanted to be his director, a year of highlevel grooming, so helms is promoted to Deputy Director and in that much more prominent position in a whole year, getting more washington experience and more visibility than rayborn checks out almost by design and helms is elevated to the directorship in 1966. Now what i mean by direct experience here is that an individual was either a practitioner of intelligence, that is, an analyst, a case officer, or they ran an Intelligence Organization like they were head of air force intelligence in the case of vandenberg or they were a senior officer in a military Intelligence Service like general hayden was air force for a while. And so forth. So youre either a practitioner or youve run an Intelligence Organization. Indirect experience means a person who was a consumer or a user of intelligence in a Foreign Policy or National Security position. Not a practitioner, but someone who had all of the clearances needed, used the intelligence to inform decision making, and there we have ten of them had that background. As i said, admiral rayborn was probably the only individual who had no background at all in intelligence. Some would argue that leon panetta didnt other than engaging with it in congress and chief staff of the white house no contact with any intelligence in any depth but that is an arguable proposition. Its a definite job for the middleagers. Tho we have though we have a bit of a range of ages there. Who do you think was the youngest dci ever . [ inaudible ]. No. James schlesinger. He was 41 when he became director in 1973. Who do you think was the oldest . Casey. Casey was in his 70s when he was appointed. The central tendency of the spread is definitely toward that mid50s age range. Its not a job with a lot of security, though. Now we do have, again, a bit of a scatter plot. We are dulles serving over eight years and tenet seven and helms six and like figure skating scattered showers is schlesinger five months and bush 11 months and so forth. Three years is about as long as they last. Its kind of moving in the downward direction lately. But, for the most part and youll see why president s change or dont change directors when they are elected, when they become president s, or why, if they are reelected, they might choose to retain a director rather than picking a new one instead of the usual kind of cabinet shuffle. That is an interesting factor here is the surprising, i think youll see durability, of directors through transitions or through reelection periods. Now when youre talking about the director being placed in the washington political environment, a couple of things need to be kept in mind. One is that as laenallen dullesd a lot of intelligence people dont know much about intelligence. They come to it as overseers or managers of the agency, being the chief executive, overseers in congress, with a lot of misapprehension about what intelligence is, what it can do, what its capable of, how long it takes to set up intelligence networks, to develop covert action programs and why analysis is such a doingedly difficult proposition. They often have a very simplistic idea what intelligence is. Go steal some secrets and tell me what they mean. That is the sort of simplistic view of what intelligence is. And its often misrepresented in the popular culture. Of course, we have all read trashy spy novels and see horrible spy movies. Nonfiction sometimes isnt much better. And journalism, it can be hit or miss when it comes to covering intelligence. Journalists in the National Security beat can sometimes be very good but sometimes they can be quite sensationalist headline chasers. When you put that into the washington environment, you have a tough situation for a director because he is under the spotlight all the time. The cia is the most open secret organization in the world and its held accountable by more organs of accountability than any other Intelligence Service in the world. When you add to that all of these misrepresentations and misconsepceptions a director of Central Intelligence is in a difficult position to explain why they are wrong because secrets have to be kept and cant always be brought out into the public to explain that. Even in camera, in closed environments, our leaders, our political masters often just dont understand what its like to be an intelligence professional. Held hem ms point goes back to something i mentioned earlier that contrary to all of the literature and cia as the puppet master of the world and all of this nonsense, the cia director really, when you think about it, is a politically weak individuals. I think one way to represent this is go back to something that a number of us learned back in our Political Science courses in college. Do you remember hearing about the Iron Triangle . Some textbooks even had a diagram of it. What it means is that in washington politics, a Cabinet Officer, cabinet official, secretary has a Cabinet Department, has a usually sympathetic Congressional Committee and some kind of lobby or trade association that is abdicating for the business of that cabinet. They all kind of work in a mutually reinforcing fashion. That is the Iron Triangle. When you think about cia, cia does not have that. For one thing, cia is not a Cabinet Office. It is an executive Branch Office that reports to the National Security council and through that to the president. But it does not have an executive department that is nearly as powerful in policy terms as a Cabinet Department. Secondly, it does not have a lobby group. We have our retirees association. The afio association of former Intelligence Officers but otherwise kind of events and publicity and a lerp to the tte editor now and then its not like the ama, the nra, the chamber of commerce, planned parenthood. You just name it in washington, they are all power lobby groups and have their targets within the executive branch. And our congressional overseers are often very hostile to us. They are not very sympathetic most of the time. Consequently when we get into political trouble, when scandals ensue, when investigations are run, when people want to make headlines by beating up on intelligence and Foreign Policy, cia is pretty much out there on its own unless the president backs it. Sometimes we can enlist sympathetic members of congress if we have built relations with them. Richard helms was especially good at doing this, but more often than not, we have to hope that the inhabitant of the white house is supportive and will, in effect, go to bat for us in these political controversies and that hasnt always been the case. As you are undoubtedly aware. Now this is a little bit of work that ive done at cia and you can read about it, if you want more details, in an article i wrote in studies and intelligence if you go to cia. Gov and google my last name and directors, it will pop up. What i did when i was working on my macone book is try to put him in the context of all the other different directors and try to figure out why john f. Kennedy picked him and not somebody else. Because he did have some alternatives and especially after the bay of pigs, he had a number of options to exercise as far as our leadership. So why did he pick that particular individual . So i expanded my analysis to look at a variety of important and i think objective facts or data points, if you want. First, this is very important, what did the president want that director to do . When you think about our history going all the way from sauers to pompeo and you associate those directors with the president s they served, youll make the connection. Not every director is supposed to do the same thing with cia because the president doesnt want to use cia for those kinds of purposes. If its not fighting the cold war or going after the communists it might be like staying out of trouble or getting out of the headlines and reforming yourself, whatever. So directors get picked by certain president s at certain times to do certain things. And these are can be readily identified. Then you look at the end of the career. Did they accomplish what the directors or the president s wanted them to . Interestingly, how did they go about it . Were they effective managers . Did they have good people skills . Were their political antenna sensitive to shifts and changes . Did they ride rough shot over the agency or did they try it find ways to work with it, especially if they were brought in from the outside . And then patterns. Can we discern that certain types of directors get picked at certain times based not only on what the president wants them to do, but what the prior directors had done or had failed to accomplish or had gotten the agency in trouble with . The answer to that is yes. And we will see that in a little bit. Here is what ive done with the various directors. Ive created these different categories of different directors and relate each of these to the president s who picked these type of directors and youll see this connection im trying to emphasize tonight. You have ive color coded these for reasons of visual effect later when i do a little some kind of graphics and animation for you. You have these five types and ill spell these out in more detail and give you examples. You can see them up there. Two types of administrators. Intelligence operator. An insider who is supposed to reform the agency. An outsider who is supposed to then a restorer and we will define all of these in turn. The administrators come in two types. Low energy and medium energy. And what the president at the time picked them to do was not a whole lot, because either he didnt want much done or he thought if the agency did too much, it was going to cause trouble so he wants it to stay out of trouble. He just wants kind of steady as you go leadership. Oftentimes, after scandals, the president s want to back off from activist leadership and keep the engine on and dont speed and dont double park. On the low end of the spectrum you have. The following. You have soers truman wanted a friend in politics to run this agency. They wanted vandenberg to slow things down a lit and synchronize the new cia. I could have asked this question too during our jeopardy round. He was the only person to run both cia and its predecessor organization. He was selected in 1947 and in the National Security act passed creating the cia he stays on and becomes the first dci. But he wasnt much of a manager but then at that point, truman didnt want a lot of active leadership at the cia because no Foreign Policy is being run by the secretary of state. After 1947, the secretary of defense which office was created under the National Security act. Then raborn is. I could by johnson to simply fill the position until helms is ready. Now at other times, president s have said they wanted a little more energetic type of leadership, not one that is going to take the agency off on big Foreign Policy crew said, but rather ones to manage it during times that are a little bit in transition. When you think about jim wool y woolsey, clinton comes in and doesnt know what he wants to do with cia because he is a domestic policy president and doesnt have a Foreign Policy agenda so he picks a known quantity from the National Security environment in washington to just kind of come in and say keep the agency running and ill ring the phone when im interested in having something done. Needless to say woolsey didnt have much of a relationship with president clinton. He rarely saw him. As best i know, they met only a couple times in formal meetings. Youve heard the old story about the airplane crashing on the white house lawn and people joked that was jim woolsey trying to get an appointment to see the president hell be the first one to tell you he was pretty much read out of Foreign Policy. The clinton Foreign Policy was one by the National Security advisers, secretary of state, secretary of defense were prominent figures and such. George tenet becomes clintons third director. John deutsche falls in the center but a different type of doctor as we will see. Tenet is interesting individual because the only director who walls in two categories. From 1997 to 2001 george tenet was not much of a presence at cia. He was popular people loved to see him in the cafeteria back slapping and chewing his cigar and all that. But he really wasnt a person with clout at the agency. The agency was still kind of moving along in this post cold war period, finding its moorings and looking for new targets and avenues of interest, but the white house is providing very little guidance in that. Then petraeus comes in appointed by obama after panetta leaves to become secretary of defense and he is only there for a year and we wont get into the reasons why he left. In case youre wondering, yes, he will have an official portrait at cia. We are allinclusive when it comes to our directors. As i said, we even have a portrait of a convicted felon and a person who lost his security clearance on and authorized use of government classified property so we are a forgiving agent when it comes to our portrait at least. Petraeus didnt accomplish a whole lot at the agency. One could almost put him in perhaps the custodian category but he was such an energetic person you cant imagine him being a custodian. Aside from a couple of minor tinkerings he didnt accomplish a whole lot as the agency went. It seems at the time that is what president obama wanted. Obama was largely a domestic policy president during his first term. Now the intelligence operator is an individual who, as the title suggests, uses experience, particularly in clandestine agency to move the agency ahead. These are people who are experienced with intelligence either a current or former Intelligence Officer, and during their tenures, the agency goes off and does a vast amount of s espiona espionage, counterintelligence and all in the aggressive support of the president s active Foreign Policy agenda. Because these directors are tied to the president they often have close ties to the president himself. Not that they are best friends forever, but they do have entree. The president does listen to them and sometimes they are elevated to cabinet rank like bill casey. They get drawn into policy making. For some directors and certainly a lot of observers of the cia, this is not a good thing, because this can let ad to the politicization of intelligence but i will say in the real world, intelligence is always deeply steeped in politics and that is entirely different from politicization which is the corruption of the analytic product to support president s Foreign Policy agendas. In other words, cia, ill tell you what to write so i can say you agree with me when im abdicating a certain Foreign Policy and not what im talking about here. What im talking about is the fact that certain president s want intelligence at the table to do more than inform. If you work for the president and he says what do you think i should do . Youre not just going to say sorry, thats not my job and pack your briefcase up and head back to langley or that will be the last time youre in the oval office. So, instead, you wind up becoming a de facto policy adviser, sitting there with the secretary of state, defense, National Security adviser, whoever else working on those decisions. A combination of long tenure, involvement with policy, often leads to mistakes, scandals, and screwups. Some of these are not the agencys fault. Some of them are. Policy can be good or bad and the intelligence used to support it can only be as good or bad as that policy is good or bad. Covert action is a classic example of this. If you have a fumbling inept nonstrategic Foreign Policy and you ask covert action in at the last minute to bail it out, its going to fail. But in washington, who do you think takes the blame for that is in the finger always points at langley and never at the white house or the pentagon or the state department. And that is usually why these long serving directors go down in flames in a manner of speaking, because they get in trouble, in part, because they are put in trouble, in part, because the agency has overreached or been overstretched. Its a variety of reasons for those disasters that have huge political implications for the agencies standing. You think about allen dulles picked by eisenhower. Eisenhower is on a containment crusade and, in some cases, is even trial to roll back to to communism to once it came. Naturally an intelligence professional like dulles was a perfect fit and also why he will stayed around as long as he did. Now Lyndon Johnson picks Richard Helms, i believe, because he wanted a skilled operator and an individual with a very good political sense to run the agency as the vietnam war was heating up. A good fit there. Ronald reagan has pledged to win the cold war and he goes back and he picks his Campaign Manager bill casey to lead the agency on a worldwide crusade to finally crush communism for good. Again, a Perfect Match and its hard to think of another president other than someone like eisenhower perhaps picking somebody like casey. Then george tenet, after 9 11, he, in effect, becomes a head of a massive Counterterrorism Organization that president bush has mobilized to lead the fight against al qaeda and the taliban. Tenet almost overnight transforms from a tech thnicrat with a major influence in policy. You can see the connection there between the president s agenda and the transformation he made of george tenet. So all of the president s who picked these individuals really had no qualms at all about using the agency aggressively. A very opportunistic kind of appointment that perfectly dovetails with the president s agendas. At other times, in particular, after the agency has gotten into trouble, president s decide, well, we have to pull way back and cool things off and probably clean up the mess. Reorganize, hire different people and fire some people and change the way business is done and reconnect with congress. A whole new kind of agenda for the agency with the president at that time. Now in these cases, the president can choose to go inside or go outside. In a few cases, the president s have deemed the timing right to take the agency into a reform mode but to do it kind of low key, quietly, dont ruffle feathers and keep the waters relatively still. The best way to do this is to pick an Agency Insider to lead those changes. These individuals have experience with the agency, knows the bureaucracy, the culture of the personalities, and are there to get the agency out of trouble and sort of stabilize it in this time of uncertainty. So they go about making their personnel changes, their organizational changes, and their mission changes in a quite deliberate lowkey fashion. Here we have three examples p. M. Richard nixon picking bill colby after a very brief tenure by James Schlesinger that was really quite tumultuous for the agency and somewhat counterproductive. So nixon says during this time when you have watergate scandal and you have dissent growing in the United States against the vietnam war you have a lot of distrust of government and trusted insider like colby is appointed to run the agency during this time of uncertainty. Robert gates becomes george bushs director of cia in 1991 after the webster period, which was kind of lackluster, not much going on and webster had fallen out of favor with the white house, particularly over intelligence during the first gulf war. So bush thought that especially now that the cold war seems to be ending, that we needed new leadership but one of a low key trusted insider variety to start steering the agency into the post cold war environment. He also makes an interesting shift from picking somebody with operational experience to someone with analytic experience and that is bob gaets. And then you have president obama picking john brennan in 2013 after excuse me . Oh, sorry. In 2013 to run the agency while he is trying to navigate some difficult Foreign Policy issues and bringing to the agency the knowledge from the white house sector, because as i mentioned, brennan was the Homeland Security and counterterrorism adviser to the white house. So brennan comes in and after managing the places relatively low key, sets off on the Modernization Initiative which breaks up the directorates. At other times, president s have said i dont really want an insider because i dont quite think they will accomplish all i want. I need a lot of change out at cia. So i want someone who is not a careerist, somebody who is not an insider, who brings to bear these outsider types of experiences to run the agency. This is the most diverse kind of group and it also is the one that has the biggest agenda. The ones who were there really to shake up the agency, to make major changes in personnel and organization and in mission focus. More change occurs under these and needless to say change isnt always popular with people. They can be some of the most successful and some of the most unsuccessful directors, some of the most popular and some of the most unpopular directors. And here they are. Very quickly. Hoyt vandenberg was head of the Central Intelligence group in 46 and 47 brings cig on to the Foreign Policy making map. Under souers wasnt much of a player but wins a emptying collection in analytic capabilities. Smith i mentioned established the directate program. Mccone i could go on all by charged keeping the agency out of Covert Agency action after the bay of pigs and once inside he creates to move the agency very smartly into the cutting edge revolution of technical intelligence. Schlesinger comes in in 1973 with the agenda to finally run the agency the way nixon wanted it. Nixon did not like cia and he chose schlesinger to come in and implement some Intelligence Community reforms that schlesinger had advocated when he was at the office of management and budget a couple of years earlier. Schlesinger came in and fired about a thousand people and cut the budget got rid of offices and created new officials and moved organizations around and he was gone thankfully from a lot of peoples perspective at langley in only five months. Turner who is carters director, comes in and tries to run the agency like a battleship. One of the big mistakes that outsiders have made is to come in and bring a group of friends from the previous life, put them in senior staff positions, and then tell them to go tell the careerists what to do. The careerists will immediately bridle and balk at that and sometimes try to undercut the leadership with rumors and such. It really got bad under turner who never seemed to quite wake up to the fact he was a large degree part of the problem. Now, yes, any agency should take its orders from its boss, but the bosses have to make sure they give the right orders and give them in the right way. For turner, this was the wrong way to do things. He became one of our most unpopular leaders. He fired about 800 people or encouraged them to leave or didnt fill their jobs. And really became head of the agency during a very awkward time. John deutsche picked by clinton to run the agency near more military lines. Deutsche wanted to be secretary of defense but took the dci position as a consolation prize but tries to run a as an adjunct of the Defense Department. He brings in a couple of people he knew from previous jobs, nora slatkin was the executive director and became kind of his hinch woman who really alienated a lot of the Senior Leadership at the agency. Deutsche, himself, seemed largely out of touch with the agencys concerns baecause he really wasnt interested in being there. They lost imagery analysis because deutsche farmed it out to the pentagon so we dont do that any more. Goss brought in people from the hill to help run the agency and got immediate pushback. Some of our Senior Leaders resigned in protest because of the way he was running things. He didnt have a direct mission particularly. I think george bush appointed him u him. Goss left after about a year and a half. Michael hayden in refreshing contrast was popular at the agency because he knew exactly what not to do. He, in effect, got out of the car, the first day on the job alone. And walked up to the seventh floor and said, how can i get your help to do what im assigned to do . Which was to help the agency navigate the increasingly controversial counterterrorism scandal that it was falling into with the black sites and the rbi program and very tough relations with congress. Hayden had been a very adept head of the National Security agency. Very good intelligence professional. I kind of think of him not so much as a military Intelligence Officer but as an intelligence professional who is in the military. I think the perspective he brought to the job and might sound academic but i think if you knew hayden and saw the way he ran the agency, he ran the agency, you could see my distinction there. The last group, the restorer. As the name suggests, these individuals are none of the above. They are not there to just sit there. They are not there to win the cold war and they are not there to clean up the mess. Except in the respect that they are there to, as i say here, reconnect with the wider world. Get the agency back on track with copping, with tngress, wit and with the leadership. Usually when they take the office the agency is down in the dumps so they come in and raise morale and very good at Public Relations or portraying themselves as having a particular type of image, political experience, moderation and all of that. Not charged with reorganizing or reforming. And we have four here. George bush, bill webster, leon panetta, and mike pompeo. Ill talk about pompeo different because evident a bit kimpt in the different in the way he was a restorer. When you think about bush becoming head of our agency right after the start of the scandals in the mid 1970s he there so make the agency seem like its not the oger it was portrayed. Initially as a politician, Agency Professionals did not like this appointment because we did not want the agency turned in effect another Cabinet Office with a political hack or a big donor running it. Bush was able to lay those concerns quickly because he was basically a nice guy. Everybody could get along with him. He was very honest about what his agenda was. And by the end of his 11 months, he had accomplished exactly what president ford wanted him to. Webster gets appointed after the iran contrascandal. You can see why having a former judge and a senior Law Enforcement official after all those illegalities. He brings in a judge webster and the mr. Clean of the agency. Panetta comes in under president obama as the agency is still under fire for the rdi program. Congress is after us. We have had a whole variety of hot High Temperature issues with them. And panetta comes in, of course, as a long time congressional he knew everybody what was firing their guns at us and kind of able to get this them to steer the barrels in the other direction. He had savvy an political experience of being chief of staff and so a very good and timely appointment for restoring the agency to a better luster. Lastly, mike pompeo. Here is where he is kind of a unique restorer. He not trying to restore the agencys reputation with the public but the white house. Its kind of going in the other direction. When he resigned and i could talk about him in this analysis, i was kind of thinking where really would he will fit . I went back and was looking at some of the things he did at the agency and for Foreign Policy and such, and yes, some people said he was kind of an operator because he was very policy oriented and all of that. I didnt quite see that fitting terribly well. He certainly didnt do a lot of reforming and reorganizing and such. But then i got to thinking what about thinking of restoring in a different context . Not with the public in congress, but with the white house. And, yes, that is where the restoration occurred because pompeo was able to maintain that bridge between cia and the president that i dont think another director perhaps would have been able to do and haskell has been able to condition that to a great degree but i wont to about her in any great detail but i think pompeo fits there the best. Now, cycles of leadership, as we look at all of these different leaders ive color coded them and given them little acronyms here for a purpose. I wanted to emphasize that ones we put some order into this scatter plot, youll find that some interesting patterns arraez. Notice every time you have an intelligence operator running the agency and they always leave in some kind of position of controversy, they are always placed by a reformer or a restorer or, in one case, by an administrator custodian. In other words, definitely not an insider after an operator who by definition insider mucks up the place. You dont want another insider necessarily to come in and clean it up. Notice so often right after the intelligence operators you have the outsiders coming in to sort of sweep the place clean. Youll also inside that we have never had two operators in a row. And oftentimes after periods of drift, you have a more activist kind of leader being appointed. Inside a point of time after the custodians you have an inside reformer coming in or intelligence operator. I dont want to make too much about it but i think its an indication, again, of the very situational appointments that president s make. They look at the agency in the context in which it exists, they think about what they want to do and pick a type of director to carry out that specific mission. One important index of the amount of change that directors make at the agency, again, at president haial behest is how m people they get rid of. The hire and fire criteria. The most senior level personnel change occurs with restorers and that is because i think they look at the agency as a little bit tainted and they dont want to have a lot of holdovers. They need new leadership to give the impression that everything is fresh and clean and sanitized for your protection and, in other words, its kind of a good housing keeping keel of approval of getting rid of people in the senior ranks. The two manager reformers of both types also clean house a lot but not as much as the restorers. I think some of that is their recognition that especially on the outsiders part but also the insiders, they can only do so much with getting rid of people before they restabilize the place and create a lot of internal backlash. So they do a little bit less very smartly. Then, of course, the administrators do the least personnel changes because they are not supposed to. The intelligence operators also do very little change. I analogize this to a head of a military who is about to go to war. The last thing you do when youre about to go to war is change your Senior Leadership. That just creates all sorts of instability and uncertainty in the ranks, new relationships have to be built, trust has to be established. You cant do that as youre about to go to war. So the intelligence operators keep the Senior Leadership in place as they march the agency off on its global campaign. When we are talking about variables to success, we have a variety of things we want to keep in mind. How can these directors most successfully succeed that the mission the president s give them . First, they have to have a keen understanding of the legal authorities under which they operate. If you dont grasp the limitations of your power, you have to wind up learning too much on the job. Secondly, of course, the relationship with the president. Is it close . What exactly is it . And what is the president s attitude himself toward intelligence and cia . This will be a crucial factor as we will see, whether president s have experience with Foreign Policy, know much about intelligence, or hostile to it or whatever. And very importantly, how they run their National Security apparatuses. Who is really in charge of intelligence . Is it the person at langley or is it somebody downtown . Another important variable for the dci is the bureaucratic skills. This is now even more important under the director of National Intelligence who is notionally superior to the director of cia. Would it be so from the dnis perspective . That is still very much a work in progress but we will talk a little bit how the dci or directors of Central Intelligence have tried to manage that issue with the president as a factor. Lastly, the very important oversight element. I already eluded to this earlier. The cia being, in effect, a wideopen organization and when it gets in trouble through the oversight process, does the president support it . How does the dci or the dcia try to manage that difficult balancing between consill eightieight ing congress and relying on the president for backstopping . Lets start with the legal authorities. Back in 1947, the National Security act is passed. In addition to creating the airline force as a separate branch of military and the office of secretary of defense, not the Defense Department, that came in 1949, and establishing the National Security council, the National Security act also created the cia. And in that language, you find an interesting dynamic here. If you want to interpret a law, i would suggest that you look at the verbs, the action words, because those are the words that bestow authority and power potentially. If they are strong, precise, empowering words, then you know that youre going to be able to do something. But if they are kind of vague, weasel words that dont really mean much that you cant really get your arms around, then you know youre probably going to be in some kind of trouble somewhere along the line. This is exactly what you have with the National Security act. When the agency is given authority to perform its Core Missions which are to collect secrets and protect secrets, that is espionage and counterintelligence, its pretty clear in the National Security act that we have the power. Perform and protect. Yeah, its legalese and doesnt sound its on steroids or anything but in legal terms this means something and it did mean something in action. Then when you move away to the analysis area, it gets a little vaguer. This is because we have competitors in the analytic area. Whereas, we are not competing with the military and espionage or covert action. A little bit with the fbi and counterintelligence but really our core mission there. But with the intelligence analysis, we do have competitors in the military and the state department, and so you would think if that is supposed to be one of cias primary missions, the language giving us that authority would be more equallily powerful to the others. Instead we are correlate and evaluate and disseminate. What does that mean . It means probably you Better Compare when other people are saying so you dont get into some trouble when your story doesnt match what the state department or the pentagon are saying about the same issue. Then, lastly, this is a crucial point. In relation to the president s dealings with cia, does the director of Central Intelligence really direct something called Central Intelligence . That is rhetorical question. The obvious answer is no. Because the dci never had direct line authority, direct management executive thorauthor over any other organization in the u. S. Intelligence except the cia. Historically, 85 plus percent of the intelligence resources of the u. S. Government have been run by the military and cia, the dci had no authority over any of that. He could not say to the pentagon move this money and these people over here. All he could do is suggest that it might be a nice idea and hope that his argument prevailed in the National Security council deliberations. Usually it didnt. So the dci is really not a dci. The only way that he was going to prevail in interdepartmental disputes was with president ial backing. More often than not, the president sided with the Defense Department when it came to those conflicts over resources and authority, and even, in some cases, analytic issues. I can think of, for example, during the Richard Helms directorship two principle issues in which cia flatout said something entirely different than the pentagon. The president disagreed, side d with the pentagon and ultimately proven wrong on both counts. But it just goes to show you that when the bandage musters its resources in political infighting in washington it is far more formidable than the director of Central Intelligence. In contrast to that situation, you have, under the intelligence reform and terrorism protection act, prevention act of 2004, the agency having two things happen to it. One, it is no longer first among equals necessarily. It is no longer central. But it has much more power in its realm of activity. It is now the only organization, unless the president makes specific exceptions, that is going to engage in espionage and particularly covert action. The Defense Department has a Clandestine Service that does some espionage but its a pretty small enterprise. Cia is, by far and away, the place to go for espionage activity. And the president has clearly said in executive order one two triple three unless i say so, cia is the only outfit that does covert action as legally defined. And we also have, under the as its called, the other duties as assigned. The president can tell us to do pretty much whatever he wants us to do as long as its legal. That would necessarily be to the detriment of the military. In a sense, though cia was demoted with the dni placed above it in the bureaucracy, its power within its Core Mission Areas really was amplified under there. So its a long march from the cig back in 1946 which didnt do a whole lot except produce a daily product for the the president , to cia today, which really is the most Dynamic Force in these areas of operation and its budget has ygrown and its personnel table of employment has grown significantly as well. Now relations with the president s have a variety of variables. Youll see montage here. If you look at the body language and expressions and such kind of say a lot. I have a few points to make on that. One is going back to the National Security act of 47. Other than establishing the National Security council, that act doesnt tell the president to do anything about how to run it. His National Security apparatus is his. He can set it up as he wishes and use it as he cares to. It can be very important, it can be highly structured, it can be free wheeling. It can be anything he wants. And the role of the National Security adviser is a key variable in this because in certain cases, the National Security adviser becomes the barrier between cia and the president. Most significantly with nixon and kissinger and carter and turner. In both of those cases, the president s made very clear that they wanted their National Security advisers to their National Intelligence advisers and to control the flow of intelligence into the white house, to be the principle analyst on the scene, to interpret the daily product that cia produced for the president and to be, in effect, his intelligence policymaker. Stan turner had the same role under jimmy carter. He did a clever thing. He noticed that on the president s daily calendar was a provision for a morning meeting called the morning intelligence briefing. And, of course, turner, the dci said, im doing that. And said we will see about that. What he did was change the entry on the daily calendar from morning intelligence briefing to morning security briefing. And, of course, the National Security adviser would do that. So stan turner is shouldered out of the morning meeting and it becomes Stansfield Turner who brings the president s daily brief to the president and talks with him about it. Going back to the nixon period, you have a clear indication of what nixons relationship with cia is going to be when at the ends of the transition period after we had provided the the president s daily brief to president elect nixon during that november to january period, kissinger is the only one who read them. The copies that went to the president were returned to us in sealed envelopes. And very soon, we found out that nixon was not receiving the president s daily brief as a standalone product, but that Henry Kissinger was having the National Security staff cook it, along with a lot of other information, into a morning briefing memo that his staff would write and he would use that when he met with the president in that morning briefing. Cia is president wants. Some National Security councils have been highly structured. For example, eisenhower ran it like a big military staff. And whereas today we have just become so every day the president should get an intelligence briefing from cia or the dni. And thats the president s choice. Is it going to be our leadership, dni, senior analysts . How is the whole process going to be structured that under eisenhower, intelligence was part only of a weekly National Security council meeting. The president got the daily product, but it was simply not part of the daily discourse at the white house. Its a very different kind of environment back then than in later years when much of the agency is constantly spun up trying to feed that daily product for the benefit of the president. In some of those cases the directors of Central Intelligence might have gotten a little too close to the president s. In some cases, they were estranged. And one way that we tried to make that connection was with this daily product. And as you can see from the montage, its looked different over the years. As we have tried to fashion it in ways in response to generally negative feedback from the white house about what the president s reading preferences are. What does he want it to look like . How much information should it have . Should it be a classified headline service . Or should it be short, almost Like Research papers that analysts have written. Or a combination of the two. How many people should get it . Heres a tradeoff inevitably between utility and sensitivity. If a lot of people are getting the daily product, you think, hey, thats good. Its in front of a lot of policymakers. They are connecting with what cia is doing. But because so many people are getting it, youre not going to put your most Sensitive Information in it because you dont want it to leak. So some president s have said, youre right. I dont want it to leak. I want hardly anybody to see it. So youve had some president s who have had it distributed to as few as six people or ten people. In other cases, as i mentioned, like in the Clinton White house, you had dozens of people receiving it. And the format has changed, as i said, in response to president ial feedback. Some president s, like Lyndon Johnson initially wanted to get it at night. You always think morning briefing . Of course so you can start your day with the best secrets the cia and other Community Offices have collected and the best analysis. Why would you read it before you go to bed . Youd probably toss and turn all night based on whats in it. But thats how the president at the time, johnson, preferred to get it. And you might have seen this one photograph of him sitting there with ladybird and one of the grandkids in her life and hes reading the pdb at the time. Not a very good story for bedtime. You wonder if the infant was cleared for it. He started to want to get it in the morning because hed listen to all the morning newscasts on tv. Remember in the oval office, the three televisions which had the three major channels. Back then you only had three major channels. So hed watch all the morning newscasts and get the pdb and all these morning newspapers and that was the way he started his day. As i say, its varied significantly over time. If you are interested in the daily product, the agency right now has undertaken a big effort to declassify as many of them as we can. We declassified all of trumans. Were working on eisenhowers. We declassified all of kennedys, johnsons, nixons and fords. And were about to start on carters. These are all available out on the cia public website, cia. Gov. I hope you find this a little surprising. We would generally think that when a president is elected or reelected that he would, as he often does with the cabinet, kind of clean house. Start afresh. So what does that pattern hold with the cia . Weve had 12 transitions since truman starting in, of course, 5253. In only six of them have president s picked new directors. And ive color coded these blue and red for democrat and republican to see if some kind of partisan angle could be developed here and im not seeing one. But lets take out one anomaly here, if you will. You might expect that a new president appoints a new director because hes dissatisfied with the old one or has a new Foreign Policy agenda or thinks that the incumbent is politically tied to the outgoing administration. So get rid of them. Well, lets eliminate the one case when that didnt happen when a president offered a director a better job. Remember, i think i asked this question back during the jeopardy round, who was that . Smith . He became under secretary of state. So lets eliminate him as a not fitting the new president new director model. Now were down to fewer than half of the transitions involve a new director. You will notice, however, that increasingly thats happening. More recent president s have done that than older ones. So i think thats why we might think thats always been the case, but its not so. Well, the flip side of that is holdover directors. 6 of 12 transitions, the new president keeps the incumbent director. Now, if you look at this, i dont see any party angle to it. Thats what we call intelligence that disproves a theory and its valuable from that standpoint. But lets take out of here the two, thankfully, anomalous situations. When we had a president ial transition. What would they be . Kennedy and nixon. Because we have an assassination and a resignation. And if we eliminate those two, we have onethird of our transitions as holdovers. Five of them were new directors. Again, no pattern here. So fitting in with my general point, president s deal with this transition issue in a very situational manner. They decide that the time and the place dictate, to a certain extent, whether i keep or i get rid of the incumbent director because that fits my Foreign Policy, and that fits my particular political needs broadly speaking. Here, however, is a decided distinction between a certain set of president s and another set of president s. These are all the republican president s and all of the different types of directors they have picked. Again using our nomenclature and color coating for the evening. Does something strike you about that selection . Its kind of hidden in plain sight, in a way. Every type of director is up there. For republican president s. Contrast that with democratic president s. Very notably, what kind of director is almost entirely absent from democratic president s choices. The intelligence operator. In only one case, johnson and helms, did a democratic president select an intelligence operator. And overwhelmingly, the preference for democratic president s is the manager reformer outsider followed by the administrator. Three of each type. And one restorer and one reformer insider thrown in. Almost as outliers. This demands an explanation. And im going to give you one, but others are possible, and i invite commentary either during the q a or after. But heres what i think is going on here. And i want to i hasten to add that what im about to say is not a statement of partisanship or a statement of evaluation. Im trying to be as objective and historical based as i can. What i think is going on here is experience with Foreign Policy and intelligence as the key variable. Now let that settle for a moment. And heres where im going with this. If you think about all the democratic president s weve had since cia was formed well go back to cig with truman. Most democratic president s have less experience in Foreign Policy and less awareness of intelligence than the other kind of president. Now again, thats not a partisan statement. Its not an evaluative statement. If you think about who those president s were, what their primary focuses were that they were mostly domestically oriented. And they came to their office with relatively not no, but relatively less experience in the Foreign Policy National Security area. And they nearly always appoint, as we just showed, administrators or manager reformers, particularly the outsider types. Whereas, and here we want to keep in mind that the most recent republican president s do not fit this generalization. But president s who were more relatively experienced in intelligence, relatively more experienced than the others were all republicans. Again, think back at our republican president s and the names will jump out at you. And they appoint all types, as we showed. Now what i think is going on here and again, i dont mean this as a partisan or a evaluative statement. I think because of the times in which they take office, the democratic president s with less experience in Foreign Policy and less awareness of intelligence dont really know what to do with cia. To them, its not a potential asset. Its a potential problem. Especially if they take office after an intelligence scandal or flare up. So theyre probably looking at cia as something that needs to be tamped down, reformed, cleaned up or heavily managed or made not to do the bad things that it was doing. The republicans on the other hand, because they are more experienced with intelligence and Foreign Policy kind of take it as it comes. And they look at the situation that theyre in, and they figure, im comfortable with intelligence. I know what cia can do or not do. Ill pick precisely the kind of person i need at this juncture to do what i want. And as a result, because of that Comfort Level being relatively high, theyll take any kind they care to because they trust that cia will wind up doing what they want. And its not something that automatically is a potential problem or a real problem that needs managing and reform. Its something i can use at times. Notice all the republican president s with that one exception picked the operators to advance their Foreign Policy. The key point here i want to make about how a director manages the Community Goes back to what i said earlier with the limits on the directors legal authorities. He doesnt have really any clout legally when it comes to the Intelligence Community. He must rely somewhat on congressional backing, but ultimately it has to be the president who backs him when he gets into these bureaucratic squabbles over resources and analysis and such with the pentagon primarily. Now when the director of Central Intelligence was at least notionally head of the community as indicated by the old emblem there with the other organizations encircling it, you could at least say that the dci was, on paper, the head and that he had some ability in certain circumstances to use powers of persuasion with those other organizations. Particularly through something called the u. S. Intelligence board which is kind of like the ceos of the Intelligence Organizations with the dci as the chairman. John mccone used this adeptly because of his business background. As a chief executive of a global enterprise. This was just very familiar territory to him to turn it into the board of directors of intelligence incorporated. And that was his corporate mindset. He was very effective at trying to get some buyin from the military services with the things he wanted to do. Other directors did not choose to use that, and they again had to fall back on the white house for assistance in these disputes. After the passage of the intelligence reform and terrorism prevention act, you have cia sort of taken out of the center and now having to deal with the dni. Now the dni, i wont talk about in any great detail today, but its had a number of directors. Theyve had varying degrees of success. Jim clapper is far and away the most effective of any of them. And hes probably set the standard for future directors National Intelligence. Dan coats, for various reasons, has never emerged as much of a player. But the place of the director of cia in here is now important because instead of being at the head of the table, hes now just another just another chair at the table. And now trying to manage in that sort of not quite first among equals environment, all these different agencies with their different cultures, different missions, different resources, different authorities, different oversight mechanisms, its a massively difficult bureaucratic challenge. I would not want to have to confront that day in and day out. And the fall back for the director in the situations is relying on support from, first, the dni, if that individual is important to the president and again, thats the president s choice. And ultimately, the inhabitant of 1600 pennsylvania avenue. That becomes particularly important in the oversight process. As i mentioned earlier, cia is the most open secret organization in the world and im not just talking about Congressional Committees like the appropriation committees but the special commissions investigative bodies that congress routinely sets up or authorizes like the 9 11 commission depicted there. And very importantly in our open intellectual environment, the power of the media to sensationalize and create scandals where they dont exist or to publicize them where they ought to be publicized, this becomes a huge political challenge for directors of cia. They can sometimes fall back on sympathetic individuals in congress which was frequently the case in the early years but that changed radically in the 1970s when oversight became very onerous and, ultimately, our protector in these controversies would have to be the president. Very notably, during the confirmation process, we have had increasingly become the target of a lot of political attack. And when you think about these individuals who have been confirmed, the earlier ones were all confirmed by acclimation. Voice votes, no recorded votes. The first controversial confirmation was john mccones in 1962. And this raised a huge kerfuffle about his qualifications, about his supposed hardline ideology that would slant analysis, about some questions of Financial Trust using divesting himself of money and such. Getting 15 negative votes was pretty astounding at the time. Doesnt sound like much, but notice over the years the numbers of negative votes for the most part have risen steadily, and theyve kind of locked on now to about a onethird against. Now a big point here is that the controversy rarely has anything to do with the qualifications of the nominee. I would suggest that aside from michael carns, one of clintons nominees in 1995, none of these individuals would be considered unqualified to run cia. They all had some kind of background whether its direct in intelligence or managing Large Enterprises or political connections, political experience, whatever. I think you could say that all of them in effect deserve to be confirmed. So why do they get so frequently so many negative votes . Its because the confirmations become a forum for political debate over Foreign Policy issues and the role and place of cia in that Foreign Policy. As you can see increasingly, its just become standard. Even lets see. I think i have haspel in there. No, i dont. Even gina haspel, as qualified as most people thought her to be, ran into trouble and got roughly onethird negative votes. She got 34, if i recall correctly, which is slightly over onethird. What this says then is, again, if a president nominates somebody for office, sometimes that doesnt prove to be sufficient backing. That the political winds become just too strong and the nomination has to be pulled for various reasons. Okay. By way of just finishing up here, if you want to learn a little bit more about the directors and their relations with the president s, i didnt have a chance to put together a reading list for you tonight so ill just pitch a few titles at you here. Over the years, the agency has had a fairly Robust Program to document the histories of our various directors. I did the mccone book there. Weve had others done on the early directors and also helms and colby. We finished a study of the casey years but its highly classified and doubt it will ever be declassified, regrettably, because its a fascinating work. But i would recommend these all to you. They are available out on the cia public website, cia. Gov, if you want to read more about them. And weve also put out a couple of other publications. One focuses these are unclassified. One focuses on the directors as heads of the Intelligence Community. Sort of a different take on the story. And then our Public Affairs Office Working in conjunction with the history staff has a nice kind of profiles of leadership publication on all of our directors. So if you want to read a three or fourpage of the various directors terms and get some bio data on them, check out profiles in leadership on the public website. If you want to read what historians have said about the directors, theres a decent shelf of books here. Some of them are varying reliability. I would commend a few of them to you. Let me get myself straight here. Peter gross bio of allen dulles is superb. Bill colby still awaited a good biographer. Bob webers book on casey. But it sullied itself with the ridiculous climax with the death bed conversation with bill casey which simply did not happen as best we can reconstruct. However, thankfully you have a good open source biography of casey knowing that the one we just finished will never see the light of day. And joe persicos is a terrific treatment of it. The directors themselves have written about themselves. And a good index of a good memoir of any sort to me is, what does it do to capture the writer. Its not just a bland rehash of what happened on my watch or an apology for what i did or didnt do. But rather kind of a verbal portrait of the individual. Every director mem area fits the bill there. Bill colby, the objective lawyer has written an extremely solidly grounded candid but lawyerly type of account of his life. Stansfield turner, who never thought he ever did anything wrong from day one to day end makes that very clear in his book secrecy and democracy in which he effectively blames the agency for everything and himself for nothing. Robert gates, a ph. D. In russian studies has written probably less an autobiography and more an i was there throughout cia history and the cold war book. You could read this as a very good history of the cold war with bob gates popping in and off of the scene as the situation merited. Richard helms, i had the privilege of assisting him with the memoir as a research assistant. Hes written probably overall the best memoir. The man who kept the secrets, he was referred to in a biography about him. And he does do the same thing here. Hes written a very discreet, cautious, cagey, savvy, all the descriptors of Richard Helms are epitomized in a look over my shoulder. George tenet at the center of the storm is very much at the center of the book. Its all about george. Hes picked three big episodes in his tenure and its everything that he was involved with him at the center of the maelstrom in some circumstances. Very much a personal book. You can just sort of see his energy, his enthusiasm, his excitement. His georgianess. He really comes alive on these pages. Michael haydens very good playing to the edge recounts both his careers as director of National Security agency and of cia. A very candid, objective, honest, i did things wrong, i didnt do this right, but for the most part, hes trying to say the agency was pretty much on the mark in most of the big issues and really fell into political disfavor for unjustified reasons. Leon panettas memoir is a full bore autobiography covering his time in congress. His time at cia. His time previously as chief of staff. And then a bit as secretary of defense. All of these books went through our publications review board so they do not tell any secrets out of school. They have all been vetted for National Security information. And lastly, id like to just finish up with some measures of success that would be bases for evaluating, i think, an objective fashion how well a director succeeded. Ive already indicated inferentially those that i dont think were very good and those i think were first rate. Id certainly put down as kind of the ulysses grants and Warren Hardings of cia, people like deutch and turner and rayborn to some extent. I think the washingtons, lincolns and trumans and eisenhowers would be people like smith and mccone, to some extent hayden. I think they were all very excellent at doing what the president s appointed them to do. So if you step back and look as a biographer like me would, these are the areas youd focus on. Whether they had a durable impact on any of these and especially with our focus tonight on the president s, how well they cemented or tried to repair that relationship with the president. Some, as i mentioned, were close. Like tenet and casey. Some started out reasonably well like mccone but eventually became estranged over policy issues. In some cases, there was very little relationship as woolsey would tell you and brzezinski to some extent. But if you try to evaluate a directors success on some kind of objective indices, these would be the types of things that you would look for. And if you were to try to tell a new director how to do his business based on what predecessors did or didnt do, i would suggest these kinds of things. If youre going to come in with an agenda, make sure Everybody Knows about it from the outset and you keep them posted. Nobody likes surprises. Least of all intelligence professionals. We like secrets but not surprises. You want to make sure that you are ultimately the man who takes the fall but you also want to make sure that you push out authority to the operational level so people can do their jobs. And then you back them up when they need resources and when they get into a bit of a bind. You dont bring in, especially if youre an outsider, outsiders to run our professional organization. You use the professionals to administer your changes. This was haydens success. This was mccones success. That was deutchs and turners and goss failures. As Richard Helms said, you only work for one president at a time. And that was one of his keys to success was making the transition as smoothly as you could from one incredibly difficult president to work for, johnson, to probably an even harder president to work for, especially if you were at cia, richard nixon. And it is surprising in our history with those holdover directors that some of them didnt make the jump from one to the other. Mccone very notably. He had a decent relationship with john kennedy and then when johnson came in he tried way too hard to sell the agency on somebody who didnt know much about it. And johnson finally just shut him out of the oval office. And it didnt help that mccone was routinely bringing him bad news about vietnam which johnson didnt want to hear. And it was up to Richard Helms to repair the relationship, which he was able to do during the sixday war between the arabs and the israelis in 1967. As i mentioned earlier, a couple of times, it doesnt matter what the law says. Politics often trumps law in reality. Not that politics is illegal, but nonetheless, in the environment of washington, if you get into disputes with other bureaucracies, you better have the white house behind you, regardless of what the National Security act or the irtpa happened to say. A very fine line to avoid this appearance of partisanship and policy advocacy because, as we noted, some president s draw you into it. If they want you as a key adviser, if they are using the agency aggressively in covert action to implement Foreign Policy, you become de facto a policy figure. And if that policy tanks, you might go down with it. Its a question really of who you ultimately work for and the president s operating style. And the director can fall on his sword, but that doesnt accomplish anything because hell probably be replaced by somebody who wont and youre back to square one. Especially after the mid1970s when the entire congressional oversight mechanism changed, you have to include congress right at the start of anything you do as director. You must preemptively brief them if bad news is coming down the road. You have to work with them as a collaborator, not as an adversary, regardless of what the political situation seems to dictate. And in that realm of accountability, its important to not just clam up and hope that the issue at hand, the public criticism will just go away. You must try to deal with it not defensively and not aggressively, but put out as many facts as you can to address what youre being charged with. A good example of this came in 2007 after one of the worst books on cia in cia history was written. Tim winers book legacy of ashes. If you dont read one book about cia in your life, thats the one. Its terrible. And you can see what we think of it by looking at our review on the cia public website. Now im not averse to criticism. You should read some of the things ive written about us. We are our own best critics. We kind of revel in tough love because we think it will make the agency better. But we dont like unfair criticism, and onesided criticism. Thats all you get with tim winers book. When that came out, general hayden said we need to respond to this in some fashion. So he did make a point of addressing some of its flaws in public, and he did authorize the Agency History staff and Public Affairs staff to in effect go public with a rebuttal, which is something we hadnt done before in our history. It didnt get any blowback. Nobody accused us of trying to influence American Opinion in violation of our charter or anything like that. I think it was, in a way, the right way to deal with the public criticism. The other point i would make about this is the way bill colby handled the scandals of the mid1970s. If you contrast Richard Helms approach, which was to say we are a secret service and i think the secrets should stop with me, if you can imagine him running the agency in the mid1970s with a congressional spotlight on him, we could have been blown apart. But bill colby came in like a lawyer and viewed this public indictment almost in a courtroom kind of setting. Here are the charges. And im going to sit here and rebut them or acknowledge them or clarify them. And i will disclose as much as i safely can for National Security reasons. He was reviled by many Agency Professionals for doing so. But i think ultimately, he helped save the agency. And that might be the best way to respond to this kind of criticism, promptly, firmly, openly, not defensively. And we have a little bit of time for questions. I know ive run on a little bit, but let me give it a go. We have a microphone here. So if you can wait until it arrives. Can you hear me . Is it true that the reason nixon didnt like the agency, especially visavis the bureau was that he held the agency so responsible for the fictitious missile gap in the 1960 campaign, plus the agency was populated with ivy leaguers that he didnt like. That was nixons stereotype as the georgetown set. A bunch of liberal democrats, et cetera. And he did think that the agency had passed information to kennedy during the 1960 campaign to his detriment. None of that is true. On that score. Yeah, georgetown said if you look at a handful of the early leaders, yeah, they did fall into that elitist category. But nixon had a number other grunls against the agency. He thought dyi was not running the Community Property and disagreed with our analysis of the soviet union. Other questions . Either one. Maybe i can take two more. The lady in the back and then the gentleman up front. Of all of the characters to decide to write a book about, why did you decide on john mccone . I pick john mccone for my subject because somebody else on the history staff when i arrived had done a draft that was unpublishable. And i thought it definitely deserved he deserved a better treatment. I wont go into why it was unpublishable. But i just kind of revisited the story from scratch, spent 7 plus years of writing it with other things and eventually came out with it in 2005. I do think, though it sounds selfjustifying that mccone was one of the best directors but ill leave that up to you to decide after you read it. And then a question down in front from the man in the blue shirt. Speaking structurally, not necessarily current events, if a president is determined to politicize the agency, are there structural things the agency can do to avoid that . Yeah, what can we do if hypothetically we have a president who really wants to turn the agency into a political tool. You have congress. You can go public to a certain extent. Can you rely on your oversight committees to do that for you. Inevitably in the washington you will have leaking going on so you could enlist the media as an asset rather than an adversary to certain extents. Inside of the agency we have mechanisms like an ombudsman and an Inspector General who is statutorily independent of cia, confirmed by congress senate, rather. So you do have opportunities if you feel aggrieved at it in the broader political sense you have, of course, the resignation possibility. The big public brouhaha over a politicization. And we have had incidents like that. For example when bill clinton for political reasons was going to possibly pardon jonathan pollard, a spy for the israelis, george tenet said if you do that im resigning. And he really meant it. And that caused clinton to back off. Now that is not polit sization but it is using intelligence as a political adjunct to Foreign Policy because it was a of ingrashy ating himself to israel and our director did the noble thing and said flat out no and every director since made that very clear, that pollard was not an issue. They would never agree to the pardon there. I guess youll have to be the last one, sir, because we do need to close down. Go ahead. Two questions, if i may. And im not sure if you could answer this one but im going to ask it any way. Im not sure what the relationship is between the director of National Intelligence, the director of the Central Intelligence and the National Security adviser, what are their roles, what are they supposed to be doing . And my second question is what time of the day is the Daily Briefing done to the president under normal circumstances . Okay, ill answer the second one first because it is easy. Except for those situations i mentioned, the intelligence briefing has almost always occurred sometime in the morning. Some president s have wanted it the very first thing. Like george bush 41 insisted that the first thing on his daily calendar was the briefing. Other president s said ill take it later as my schedule requires. Some people have never gotten around to it during the day even though it is on the calendar, the briefer will go down and cool his or here heels and be sent home. The document will stay but no briefing occurs. Whether that is ideal or not is hypothetical. To me it makes sense but other president s have deemed otherwise. The first question, the dni under the erpa is the legal integrator and coordinator of the 16 agencies in the Intelligence Community. But he does not have mandatory authority to shift personnel and resources wherever he pleases. He can do it in a limited area. But he simply cannot say pentagon, i want 5 billion moved over to cia tomorrow. He doesnt have that authority. If he becomes the president s National Intelligence adviser, the one who goes down every day and does the briefing and sits in on policy discussions, that is, again, up to the president. That is not part of erpa, that is an addon based on the president s preferences. The dcia under erpa runs only cia but if the president wants that person to participate in the morning briefing, give it instead or with the dni and bring along senior experts on intelligence areas, again, that is a president ial preference. George bush 43 orchestrated at the suggestion of his National Security adviser a pretty elaborate briefing mechanism throughout the week in which he would have generalized briefings with walkons, that is experts popping in to talk about a particular issue and then leaving and then another one coming in on another issue. He would have whole mornings devoted to certain issues. Terrorism tuesday or iraq thursday. When that was all he was briefed on. Again, strictly a preference. The role of the National Security adviser, which has been the subject of similar analysis that i did tonight on the dcis varies directly with the president s interests. Some have been administrators of the National Security staff, some have been high policy makes like kissinger, brzezinski and some heavily involved in policy but not big administrators of the council, some have been more of one than more of the other. And they cycle through relatively quickly. They have a shorter shelf life than directors of Central Intelligence and cia have. Again all president ial preference. And i cant leave you with a more important point that practically everything weve talked about tonight is all based on what the president wants. Nothing that weve discussed tonight with few exceptions is mandated under law and it will change with the next Administration Im sure. All right. Thank you very much for listening. 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Next, on the presidency, historians analyze the secret white house tapes of john f. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and richard nixon. We look at how president s conducted daytoday business and hear candid assessments. The university of miller hosted this event. Good afternoon, everyone. Im mark silverstone. Associate professor in president ial studies at the university of virginias miller center. And as chair of the centers president ial recordings program, id like to welcome you to a special panel echoes of the past, featuring my colleag