Transcripts For CSPAN Former National Intelligence Council C

Transcripts For CSPAN Former National Intelligence Council Chair Gregory Treverton 20240713

Was fired. We sort of pretended that it was okay. That it was meant to be celebratory so we kept it that way. Let me start what i think about the future of intelligence for normal times and then and with d with comments about where we are. This is very different times, but i never quite imagined or expected might be. First on my list to kick off, five or six things. First on my list is the challenge of doing strategic analysis. Strategic intelligence by which i mean, intelligence that tries to put pieces together, say how important issues are relating to each other. Often looking forward in time. That was the Traditional Mission of the National Intelligence council when i was vice chair. As scott said i was vice chair 20 years ago. So i am a very slow rise are, 20 years to become chairman. Then we mostly did National Intelligence estimates, more forwardlooking pieces. Hard to put together. We worried were we relevant . It takes a long time to do these things and try to catch a window on the policy side. Its difficult. After the creation of the director of National Intelligence, the National Intelligence council is now the immediate Intelligence Support Group for the main policy committees in washington. The principles committee, thats the cabinet secretaries involved in National Security. More important, their deputies, the deputies committee. I do not think these communities these committees meet much anymore. During during the Obama Administration the deputies met every saturday often many times. The steady stream of questions that came out of those committees was great on the one hand. Because we knew what was going on. We were in the thick of things. It also meant, did we have time to raise our sights a little bit and say, heres a little more strategic view. We were always on the lookout for opportunities to do that. Not all the questions we got from the deputies were purely operational. Wed get interesting ones like if we do x, how will putin respond . We would do that. Thats always a case where i wanted to say you ask this question. We will give you our best answer, but maybe youd also be interested in the answer to a question you did not quite ask. What is the backdrop to these immediate actions he might do . We always tried to do that. Trying to find time to do it, hard. My National Intelligence officers in hot accounts. Russia, middle east, terrorism. They could end mostly did spend their lives preparing for, going to, and following up on white house meetings. One of my colleagues used to say, black suburban problem. They would spend most of their time in black suburbans going back and forth to the white house. My last year, we did 700 pieces of paper or sets a bites on a computer. Of those, 400 were pretty directly questions that came out from the National Security advisor, the deputys committee. Not purely operational but ones we wanted to keep raising our sights. The other thing that struck me in this strategic, tactical realm was terrorism. I understand the political imperative of terrorism. But, in fact, if you look at jihadi terrorism, muslim terrorism in the united states. It is a trivial its a nuisance. That is not the way its treated politically and it is not the way people think of it. They think its a big deal. I understood, we spent a lot of attention to it, but it was pretty deforming to our work in several senses. When we looked at nigeria, there was never much nigeria there. It was only boko haram, the terrorist group. When we looked at boko haram, there was not much boko haram there either. It was mostly can we unravel the networks, identify the bad guys, and take them out. I understood the political imperative, but it was deforming to our work. The second issue for me is about stories. I think of intelligence as about storytelling and story adjusting. If there is no story, then you get a piece of information and it does not go anywhere. It is hard to fit. So the story is critical. Most of the things that get called intelligence failures are examples of the story being a good story until its not. A story being overtaken by events. My favorite example, not favorite since its not a good thing, my most striking example is ebola. Im always struck by the comparisons and similarities between medicine and intelligence. This is one where the medical community had a story about ebola. The story was that people who got it would die before they could spread it. Therefore, it would flare up in Rural Communities and die. That story worked until it got outmoded by better rural to urban communications. Those people who got ebola did not always die before they saw somebody else or went to an urban area. Stories are critical to me. I keep thinking about some of our stories when i was chairman of the nic. Whats the story about the middle east . We were looking for a strategy. But a story wouldve done. I never got a very good one. Never got a satisfactory one. Its a hard and complicated place, but i never got a good story. I noticed even in the Obama Administration, we never really made a strategic choice about whether we cared more about isis or about assad. In the end, we rather let the russians make that decision for us. That seems to be a case where we did not have a story. You might think of north korea too, where weve had a similar story for 20 years and it has not really worked. That is more a policy story than an intelligence story. But it does illustrate the importance of story. Next on my list is really transparency and big data. Transparency. The world is now full of cameras. Information is ubiquitous. My colleagues tell me my car has 12 sensors that emit things that people can listen to if they wanted to. Shortly before i left washington, i was in a meeting with some techies, and they would not have a car made after 2007. Apparently that is the magic date at which cars became full of sensors. They were really worried that someone could hack into their car, lock them in their car and demand ransom. [laughter] dr. Treverton probably dont need to worry about that. But anyway, transparency is here. I did not do operations obviously when i was at the nic. It is an analytic organization. Sometimes i think about the way we do intelligence operations, it reminds me of happily, this group will notice the old road runner cartoons, right . Where the road runner would run off the cliff and wouldnt fall till he looked down. In most of our trade crafts for spying, we are off the cliff, we just havent looked down. The way we have typically typically done espionage out of embassies. That is gone. Biometrics, facial recognition, all of that. That is gone. We might not have realized it yet, but that is gone. One of my colleagues before i left iran was a former station chief in a european country, he was asked by the agency to do a task for them he said yes, ill do it but only under true name. Im not going to do this undercover because then i will never get back into this country for a holiday. Right . When we come to grips with it, it does mean in the future, espionage is going to be almost entirely done through liaison and partners. Maybe will be able to do quick operations for a day or two, but the idea of having people resident in the embassies that are not acknowledged to the locals, i think that is essentially gone. That is one side. The other side is big data. I think that is a great boon for intelligence. It is harder for intelligence because google basically wants treverton is g. Going to be tomorrow so they can target me with ads im interested in. Its sort of a bounded problems. In intelligence, were trying to think about certain futures. Great thank you. It is a harder and less bounded problem. I think were making some headway. Let me give you a few examples. I started an experiment with a Data Scientist in my africa account on the premise that there is not a lot of Intelligence Data about africa. Theres also not a lot of big data about africa, but there is data. It was interesting to see what we could find looking at data with a good Data Scientist. It was pretty impressive. We could, with social media and other things like that, be pretty good at predicting famine and disease. Indeed, we did a lot of work on ebola. Im pretty good at that. My goal for that work was to say, can we give tips to analysts . Can we say maybe you should think of these two things that you havent thought of as related together . Or maybe you should look here. I also inherited a Prediction Market. You may have read about this. Phil tedlock was the author and creator of one of them. Basically, what we would do is have people bet on particular events. Whats the chances that north korea is going to launch another icbm in the next two months . People would bet. I did not much really care about the bets or the results. What i cared about was using this Prediction Market as a kind of red team. If the Prediction Market said the chances of a coup in country x were 50 and the experts said 20 . Then that was a way to have a conversation, start a conversation. I was less interested in the particular results than the differences between what the Prediction Market was saying and what analysts were saying. One of the interesting things about the Prediction Market is, it turns out just like some people are better tha athletes than others, some people are apparently better predictors than others. So phil talks about super predictors. The even better news for me was that you can get better as a predictor with a pretty small amount of training. All of the training, as you might imagine, goes toward helping you keep an open mind just an instant longer. Keeping an open mind just a few seconds longer. Next on my list is breaking the intelligence cycle. Forgive me if this is archania, but intelligence says we collect, we analyze the collection and then we disseminate would vandalized. Agencies always want the report, give me that spy report. It never quite worked that way. But it is a kind of linear process, a sort of industrial process that may be made some sense during the cold war, because then we had one big advisory, the soviet union. Secretive. So we had to sort of ask how do we find out about these things . Seems to be entirely inappropriate in a world where information is ubiquitous. So trying to think about how to replace it. I got excited before i went into the government the last time about something called activitybased intelligence. I will not inflict that on you. It was pretty successful in afghanistan and iraq in using data from very different sources to produce what they call patterns of life that would let us distinguish bad guys, potential terrorists, from ordinary muslims going to the mosque. What i liked about it was the spirit as much as the letter. What it did is it said we are sequence neutral. We may know the answer before we know the question. It would collect lots of data that might be useful later, when you think about life. Im so struck about how true that is of life. How many times in life you realize i never knew i was puzzled by that until i knew the answer. Until i had the answer. The other thing about it that i liked was it was data neutral. T said that it is good if it is good, it is good. If it is not, it is not. It does not matter where it comes from, intelligence tends to prize its own sources. The nice thing about this is it broke down that tendency. The next big challenge for me is thinking how intelligence adds value. New ways of ending value. I give the example of the National Geo Spatial intelligence agency, or nga. Onlyall of their exquisite aquc products are now available on google for free. Their specialized imagery that is interesting but they faced the challenge if people can get our stuff for free, how do we add value . They have been at the forefront of thinking about this problem. My experience i had won a hot moment when i was there vice chairman. We thought our products were National Intelligence estimates, but they were really National Intelligence officers. It was really the people. Not the paper. The paper was our homework and calling card. The real payoff was the people because they could be in meetings, and elevators and have quick conversations. Did not have to be too careful about what was intelligence and what was policy. They could just be helpful. I did a study of the president s daily brief before going back into the government. All of the cia had collected a history of oral histories from policymakers. This thing that is probably the most expensive publication since guttenberg. They liked the briefers better. They could consult other experts. I think more and more of adding value, client service, not a term i like too much. If i was worried that intelligence would go whole hog in that direction i would be worried. Its likely to continue these exquisite products for a very long time. Last on my list of challenges for ordinary times is about competition and colleagues. Intelligence is always worried about being scooped. Competitions. When i was vice chairman in the 1990s, we worried about cnn. Will cnn scoop us . I always thought that was kind of stupid because i thought better to get it right a little later than get it wrong a little sooner. But that was the ethos. Now what strikes me is how much there is out there that could be competition, it is in some sense, but also its a great opportunity to cooperate. Let me give you the 2016 example. 2016 came as a surprise to us what it probably shouldnt have. Later i learned there was a private group looking at jihadi websites, 2014 and they discovered that many of the posters for free syria warrant syrians. There were russians. They were on to the russians in 2014. They said they came to the u. S. Government. Happily they didnt come to me. The government said, were not interested in russians, were interested in jihadi terrorists. It illustrated to me the possibilities of reaching out. In this instance, you do not need to contract with them all you did need to do was listen to them. There was great possibilities and intelligence which is a closed culture. We were prepared to reach out more, had a lot of partners out there. Its also true i think in the cyber realm. Now its complicating point allergens because if a hack occurs then intelligence is by the traditional process, intelligence would attribute or try and attribute that hack and then passed that attribution to policy in secret. The policy people would decide what to do. Now there are all these private companies doing their own attribution, they will make that public whenever they want to, that when the government wants. So in the short run it feels like a complication to many people in intelligence. And the longer run, it seems to be a great opportunity. A great opportunity to cooperate. Work with other people. And in some senses, its even good for sources and methods, something intelligence worries about a lot. Theyll have to be a little more open about intelligence has to be in how they got to their particular attribution. Let me conclude and then look forward to your comments and questions with the times we are in. It seems like, these days we are in a period where truth is subjective, personal, partisan. In some ways, it seems to me like the very concept of truth, that is the idea that spoken statements can be validated or invalidated, is under attack. That is a world i never expected to be in. Its a world very uncomfortable for intelligence as you can imagine. To be a little bit lighter, let me interject one of my favorite. I always wanted when i was in a car going somewhere to have the car pickmeup and the main entrance. I liked it because it is light and airy and because it reminded me, im in the intelligence business now. Ive always found it curious in the walls there is etched the quote from john. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. I always thought that was very curious. Particularly curious in that setting. Really for two reasons. One because there may be divine truth, but an intelligence truth is really sort of good enough for government work. The best we could do. Its not infallible, far from it. The second thing that always struck me about that is intelligence truth, perhaps as opposed to divine truth, is more likely to constrain. Intelligence analysts are wildly fond of telling policy people the 11 11 reasons why their best ideas cannot work. Its more likely to constrain policies and set it free. Anyways i giggled every time i saw that particular line on the wall. How intelligence responds in this period . I guess i hope that this period doesnt last but it will linger. In the short run, i dont see much alternative but for intelligence to sort of doubled down and say you know we are in the business of trying to tell you the truth as best we can write . If you do not want it or want to listen to it, that is ok, but our mission is to try and give you our best judgment on what is true and what is probably not true. I just hope somebody listens. Thank you very much. Www. Cspan. Org [applause] we have to microphones tonight. Ill be working this side of the room and my colleague will work the other side. We look for hands over here, we have a set of students over there and a set of students back over there. We will start here, we will go back and forth, what i will take the liberty of the first question to call on the point you just made. I am not talking about any particular administration because this is in democrat to several. How does the Intelligence Community protect against the politicization of intelligence . With that i will start working walking towards a hand. Guys you have breakfast plans . I could talk a long time about that. Years ago, i used to worry not much about politicization. In those days i would find these great intelligence analysis that were wonderful answers to questions nobody was asking. Right . Mostly we used to call them self looking ice cream cones. Now in the last years, even before recent events, i would much more about politicization. It is always a danger. And in some ways, for me, its less of a danger the more overtly and administration tries to lean on intelligence because that makes it sort of clear and makes the sides clear. The harder parts are when there is a little bit of self politicization. We think about the famous, infamous now, 20

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