i think that one of the thins you learn in crisis management business is different people can do different things consistent with what they are able to get away with. one of the things that s interesting is, when you are a victim of something, as dr. ford is discussing, you have no power until you re on tv. that s where you have power. that is where she has gotten back into this game. dana: is it harmful for brett kavanaugh to not have been seen since last week? no. it s the right thing. you can t win. one thing you learn in damage control thrrbg are some fights you cannot win. sometimes going away is the best of your bad option. dana: in washington there seems to be a lot of enemies. you wrote a book about the cold war and an unlikely friendship. you ve got a cia legend named jack platt and a kgb guy. they were assigned with terminating each other. they ended up becoming best friends.
it turned deadly because, as this book points out for the first time, jack platt was the man who brought back the file that proved that robert hanson was the mole, the fbi agent who turned mole. the russians ended up blaming his friendship wrongly with vasolenko and it landed him in a russian prison. dana: basically, it s about human intelligence. is there any lessons from the book that you learn that could be applied to today? well, yes. one of the lines we use is jack platt s boss said it is the job of the cia to break the laws of the countries where they operate. that tells you a lot. it s their job. jack platt s job was to help train cia people to defend themselves and to be able to spy abroad. with all the talk we have now a days about cyber intelligence, as jack platt said, edward snowden had to take the thumb drive out of the building. that s still a human act.
so what i find a little troubling is as lehman brothers but informed lehman ateast i raise the question yes it s very cleacredit to default swaps and other derivatives provide a valuableervice and drayed risk and allowing things to happen, t is the benefit of that really gater than the potential catastrophes or cost that come from having the risk spread out in some places of the knows what is going on and you have a more opaque system. covered but we obviously weren t in this last crisis and the result was greater risk because it ended up being just as concentrated as people had feared would be the case and we kw where it was so the fr level was even higher than it would be otheise because everyone knew there was a problem but they didn t know where it was, didn t know wheer you could lend to somebody in goodonscience, talking bank to bank, fear leve were legitimately escalated way beyond what they would have been otherwise. i don t hear anybody askingrelatively few people as