that held alan gross. this maximum prison outside of havana. he had long been identified publicly as a political prisoner in cuba. well it was part of a three-member cia operation. and in the mid 90s something went wrong with the cia mission and one of the members was came under the attention of cuban counter intelligence. they tried to do an emergency ex filtration of all three members and for reasons i do not know, he was unable to get out of the country and was arrested. reporter: as part of the trade for gross and trujillo, three of the five were returned last night. they can only disclose pieces of the u.s. spy and he gave critical information and paid for it with two decades of
it s believed he s taken by the iranian. this was a horribly bungled cia operation. does this complicate the picture of where we are with negotiations with iran? i don t think there s any chance that the iranian haven t known who this guy is for a fairly long time. so they came to the table on these negotiations. knowing who he was and possibly knowing where he is. and we are going to take a little while to figure out the true story. but no, i think the bottom line is it didn t complicate our negotiations. here s what it does reaffirm, that our surveillance and espionage programs are covert operations around the globe have become out of control. we are now fighting wars in a covert manner that we used to do overtly. we clearly have surveillance programs we can t defend any longer and we have to have an open conversation in this country about the scope of covert operations and the inability of congress to oversee it and the fact that all these
dedescribes adformer members of the military can independently explain the timeline of events, as well as the cia s response and the impact of not sending military assets. eli lake has written extensively on benghazi. we have never heard from the perspective of the actual operators who went on the ground. the other thing is these guys are working in benghazi, and they can begin to tell the story of what the u.s. intelligence community was doing there. and whether the cia operation was the target of the attack or somehow provoked the attack which killed ambassador chris stevens, sean smith, and ty woods and glen doherty. this recent letter to frank wolf obtained by fox news meticulously lays out the state department s weapons program in benghazi but emphasizes it does not speak for all u.s. government entities. we respectfully refer you to the
infamous talking points that led then u.s. ambassador susan rice to spread a false narrative that the attack on the u.s. council of benghazi that has a protest that spount of control. at no point was i ever told to object to anything i was asking on-line. instincts asking for a higher level review and i did not make any edits as i said. listen to this because rand paul also asked whether there was a cia operation. there are many of us who believe that it had to do with the head of the cia and then perhaps people were unhappy about arms being taken from one group to another and sent to another that may have insighted the rioting and may have insighted the terrorist attacks. i would be delighted to talk to you about the relationship between the state department and the cia in a separate setting if that s helpful. nuland did say hillary
needs to act in national interest. what has changed now and what is different and what are we going to do. those are the things you cannot do just through staff. i think a cabinet officer, the vice president or the president needs to make it more clear to the american people as they start to focus their mind on syria. you have been in the white house when these decisions are being made and how you re rolling them out for the public. does he give a speech? what happens next? i would say a speech would probably work well for him. might rise to the level of the oval office, depending what kind of help they want to provide. they said on background it is not going to be a cia operation, it will be a dod operation. then hear from the secretary of defense, where is chuck hagel, would love to hear from him. there s been testify on the hill, foreign policy community has been talking about syria a long time. the american people rightly said they re skeptical of it. it is going to take the pr