To be in the cia. I grew up during the 50s and 60s. It never once crossed my mind to eventually join the cia. I wasnt even a fan of the ian fleming books as a kid which most of my generation was. It just never occurred to me. I graduated from law school in 1972 and went to work. I had seen enough of private practice turing summer clerkships and decided i didnt want to do that and probably wouldnt be very good at it so i went into federal Government Service upon the graduation of law school which i did and i joined a Treasury Department as a lawyer which is fine for first job. After couple of years you know how it is when you are in your 20s. For me i was in Washington Young and ambitious wanting to make some sort of mark and i knew i would never make it in treasury. Around that time the that first revelations about the cia were really hitting the media bigtime for a series of exposes by sy hurst and the New York Times followed by, and im looking at the audience and i think most of your old enough to him remember the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s were the cia misdeeds and misadventures during the 50s and 60s first came to light and i remember watching those on tv not knowing anything about the cia, not knowing anyone in the cia but thinking i have no idea that place has lawyers but if they dont they may need some. [laughter] so that was it. That was the sum total of my Career Planning for getting into the cia so i shot a resume out and it took me a while to figure out who to send it to. But long story short i got in and when i say long story short from the time i sent a letter it was a full year before i actually walked into the door because of security processing and all that. Anyway when you come to the cia you are asked to sign then and now, you are asked to sign a full set of forms that in some cases you are basically signing away your Constitutional Rights in many important ways. One of those rights that were restricted was freedom of expression. Every cia employee has to sign on employment or lifetime commitment that he or she shall never publish anything publicly without it having been vetted by ca cias classified information. So that was the hurdle, the threshold hurdle i was facing when i first started to think about the idea of writing a book. Bad as it turned out to not worry me all that much. I knew a couple of things. First of all i had written, by the time i had retired 34 years later and i had done a lot of things at the cia one of which midpoint of my career as i wrote the general regulations for the cia about how you get your books reviewed for publication. [laughter] so i can say that now. So i knew where the lines were in terms of what kinds of information you could talk about i also knew since i was on the other side of the table from a number of the cia memoirs over the years i knew what the Agency Position was going to be on certain things because i had espoused it for many years. So that part honestly didnt bother me. I knew enough to know that i could write, i thought i could write an interesting informative and hopefully entertaining story about my career. The problem of course is that i couldnt let anyone on the outside see what i was writing while i was writing it. Cia rules are such that you have to complete the entire manuscript before cia will look at it. Obviously thats a problem when you are trying sell a book proposal first to an agent and then to a publisher. I was told by a journalist friends before i started down this road in washington who had written books, outside journalists, they told me was going to be hard. First of all its heart in this day and age to get an agent as some of you may know and secondly the Publishing Industry i was told is strapped and there was simply not nearly as many books being published. But you know i was undaunted and frankly i was retiring and i didnt have anything else to do so i thought i would start. Serendipitously i became after 25 years of happily being under the radar at cia by the time 9 11 world around by fate i have become the chief legal officer, so i am the guy who first heard about the proposal for the enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding. I was the guy who submitted those proposals to the department of justice and i was the guy who received, was the addressee for all of what came to be known as the memos from the department of justice that the Obama Administration declassified. So that was me. I became suddenly involuntarily not only a public figure in the post9 11 years as these activities became more controversial and more and more were leaked to the media, i became somewhat notorious. Personally i can be honest. One advantage it gave me of course is no publisher had been interested in me writing a book about my career were it not for that notoriety. I had no illusions about that. But, with the attention did give me and there were a lot of negatives negative attention and criticism but it wasnt all negative and in fact near the end of my time in june 2009 the l. A. Times wrote actually in the scheme of things are relatively favorable profile of me talking about not just my 9 11 years but the 25 years i have been at the agency before then. And as luck would have it an agent from William Morris read the article and so having germinated in my mind that i would rate this book and i would get an agent and William Morris basically called me up and said we would like to at least be explored the idea of you writing a book so that is how i checked the hm box. Easy as that. But they said you have to give us something. So i wrote a book proposal and senate with rules sent to the cia for review. I know was going to be clean. It was basically an outline. So i got that and i had this experience, my main voyage into the murky waters of new york publishing. I remember one frantic day in july and 2011 by agent manhattan visiting publishers and ill be honest with you a lot of publishers were reluctant. First of all you know i had some public profile but i was not a celebrity. I wasnt at officers of it wasnt like my name had any particular heft or show business personality. Second of course is they are buying a pig in a poke. I had to tell them look, i will be able to show you a manuscript until the cia refuses and they are not going to review it until i am done. And they said how long will that be . I had no idea. So honestly a lot of the major publishers were reluctant. Some past and some indicated tepid and lukewarm support but nothing concrete. And then scribner and its ironic that mr. Berg was talking about scribner because scribner came to my rescue and my editor there, a couple of editors who for whatever reason believed in me and believe that the book might be good, might be interesting. As i said my William Morris agent felt the way on what basis i have no idea but fortunately this worked out are made. So one thing about my agent at scribner said, look, what have you written before and of course i said i havent written anything before. They said you need a collaborator and a ghostwriter. I said okay, all right. They found me a ghostwriter so i talked talk to them again. I couldnt show the ghostwriter the things i was writing. [laughter] so finally and i am truncating several months. My agent at scribners after he signed the deal they said look you signed the deal and we gave you the part of in advance. They said look you have to start writing, you have to start doing something. So i wrote a little in my ghostwriter said one out you write a chapter sort of met in oculus chapter that wouldnt have anything classified and it about maybe there early life are when he first entered the cia. So i did that and to his credit he read it and he said this is not bad. He said you know really theres not much i can do to really change it because its in pretty good shape. So i wrote a couple more chapters again trying to keep it as as i could because this guy wasnt clear. First of all i was trying to figure out how its going to get the cia to clear my ghostwriter. After three or four chapters i said im not doing any good here. He was a former editor so it was helpful in the editing process but he said and any told my agent and my publisher, look let this guy right. He said i could write something at least presentable. Every word in this book for better or worse whether you like it or you think it stinks i promise you every word was written by me. I will tell you what i did find and i think this may apply to a lot of firsttime writers. The thing i found just totally intimidating and which really caused more than anything else the block i have about writing because i said i knew in my head i could write an interesting story. But im a lawyer. I have spent my entire career to the extent i did writing in the old days, paper memos and in the later years emails and letters, i always knew who i was writing too to. I knew who the audience was, whether was my boss, whether it was some members of congress or a congressional committee, whether it was my staff. I knew who was going to read what i was writing. It dawned on me far later than it should have that might god im writing something that if everything goes well a lot of strangers are going to read it. And not only that i am writing about me and the realization hit me on that and i froze. I will tell you, i was frozen. I started scrutinizing even my childhood thinking. How much of any of this is going to be of interest to anybody . I decided not much of it would esa that came out but i found that getting over that hurdle very very difficult. After being a three decade decade plus cia guy but i found that part very intimidating. The book, the manuscript was finally delivered to the cia ,com,com ma holding my breath. Again i sort of knew what the rules were at the cia and i wrote it all the while writing in the newspaper which took a year and a half. Mr. Berg was so impressed. He said seven years for this book in 10 years for that book i felt like such a piker sitting back there. I did the whole thing in the year and a half. I wasnt burdened by any research. [laughter] because i wasnt allowed access to any of my files because they were still classified. [laughter] its so liberating in a way but i had to largely relied on memory. I think i have a pretty good memory. I also think im not that unusual among folks in that you know i think you tend to remember significant important and interesting events or conversations you have had in your professional career. I can remember a lot of those going back to to my early years in the cia in the mid70s. So you see in the book that i talk about conversations and places i went to in the 70s and 80s all the way up to the post9 11 period with a degree of certainty and even quotation marks because honestly i do remember a lot of those conversations. So as i say the book is largely by my memories so thats another caveat. I did talk to some former colleagues from various places at various times and they were helpful. And it was kind of reassuring because their recollections squared with mine. Honestly some of the things in the 70s and 80s there is no one still around to talk to about those things. Those were mine but what helped me immensely was that i had a Research Assistant at the Hoover Institution that i had an affiliation with. I asked her to go back and pull all the contemporaneous news reporting about a given event in the cias history that i was part of like the irancontra affair or the aldrich ames spy debacle. I found reading those over and over again buttressed or refreshed my recollection so it was enormously helpful to do that. To the extent ive performed research it was along those lines. I also took the time to read a lot of cia books, books by cia insiders but also cia outside journalists encompassing the previous 20 years which i had never read before. Believe me after you spend 10 or 12 hours inside of that bubble at langley the last thing you want to do is come home and curl up in read more books about the cia. So i never read any of them. I read those and they are helpful. Some are better than others, so that was it. That is how i put my manuscript together. There were a few areas that i will admit to you that i started pushing the envelope. I knew i was coming up to classified line in telling the story and i thought to myself i will see if i can get away with this so i pushed it. Then i would submit the manuscript to the cia and dubiously every time i had done that they knocked it out again. They caught all of them. On the other hand there were certain events i talk about, certain stories and the book is really stories that i thought they would pare it down and they left them marginally unscathed. What i was finally able to get to my publisher the cleared manuscript was actually 95 of what i had originally written so what you are reading if you read this book will be really virtually my unvarnished first original manuscript. When the publisher a wonderful editor at scribner named paul wit latch which is my own son which i found innovating and depressing. They had 12 under other manuscripts that they were looking at and he was scrupulous. Instead of cutting back because i had gone over, i think the book contract called for 100,000 words max and i was at 120,000 i figured when i was done with it between the cia and the editing process it will be under 100,000. The cia didnt take out much and scribner actually asked me to expand in some areas. They didnt take out anything i had written so i expanded. Of course i went to cia with my expansion. Its a unique experience to be a firsttime author when you were formerly with the cia. At the end of all of this, that is how the book emerged and it was a rather rural process which if you are cia guy you get your memoirs published. I wouldnt necessarily recommend it for anyone in the private sector to jump through these hoops but its been a fascinating process to me. I must say 30 plus years at the cia you would think i would be cynical about everything but getting an agent and going through the publishing hoops and all that was just an eyeopening experience for me. One of the reasons i thought about writing the book myself was this is a memoir and if i ever write anything again i want to make sure rightly or wrongly that it would be me and it would be in my voice. I tried to calm us that and i think i did. Those of you who read the book and now you were listening to me speakout hope you find the printed page reflects the way i talk because i tried very hard to do that. The other thing i say as i try to make it accessible. What they mean by accessible is its not a treatise. Its not an academic piece. I wanted a readable story, to have a readable story that the regular people, normal people people who arent lawyers or National Security lawyers could understand, find interesting, have an easy read and not have a doorstopper book and this goes back to the fundamental reason i wrote this book was that it had dawned on me shortly after i retired and i had time for the first time to reflect on my career. I had several turbulent years in my final years and didnt have time to reflect on anything. I step back and i thought my cia career reflected the modern history of cia. I came in on the first wave of reform at the cia. The first time there were congressional intelligence committees, the first time there were executive orders written about what the cia could do in terms of collecting information on americans, the first time laws were to basically mandate how a president would prove that Covert Action Program by means of what is called the president ial finding, written document that the president had to personally sign off on. The idea of course is to do away with the wink and nod days of president ial approval. So all of that coincided with my rifle. As i say i was the first wave of real outside lawyers became to the cia. I was the 18th lawyer hired. By this the time i left in december of 2009 i had 125 lawyers and i think there are about 150 now. So among other things one book to belie the cia has been this rogue elephant that tramples over everything and everyone and has its own agenda. The fact is the most heavily lawyered agency and certainly National Forum policy and lawyers are embedded in every aspect of the cias life. It doesnt mean lawyers have always avoided screwups because you can just google my name and find thats not the case. But the cia, i mean it seems counterintuitive but the cia really does depend on its lawyers. I wanted in the book to get that across. As i say i wanted it to be an accessible read. I was fortunate that i was a participant or an observer at every major conflict in the cia, every flap which there is bound to be one every three or four years like clockwork. And so it did occur to me that my personal history in my personal experience did track with the arc of the cia in its modern era since the 1970s. Honestly no one had written an inside memoir like that and certainly not by a lawyer from the cia. So i thought that might be an interesting and useful contribution. So that is really how this book came to be. The whole process from start to finish and all the backandforth thing was probably two and a half years. Which to me was a very long time but two other authors thats a blink of an eye. I feel a little grubby that i only spent two years on this book. But im happy with it and it accomplished what i wanted it to accomplish. It has gotten extensive attention and spin reviewed by major publications, some good and not so good but all that goes with the territory. Its been fascinating and new and somewhat byzantine to me. I would have never predicted three years ago, four years ago that i would ever be standing here at the savannah book festival in a church. [laughter] talking about spy stuff but that is where the journey has taken me. And as i say, folks like you care enough to come and listen to me you know is a pretty heady experience. I know some of you, many of you and i know some in the audience may not agree with some of the decisions i made or some of the activities ive been involved with. Thats all right, i have gotten criticized for that. I was criticized while i was there and ive been criticizecriticized since the book came out but you know i chose to publish the book and i chose to write the book so it wasnt like i was hiding under a rock for seeking anonymity. I accept the good, the positive reactions with the negative reactions. I have learned from it believe it or not. So, thats about it im thinking in terms of the formal. I am more than happy now to entertain any questions. Mr. Rizzo has agreed to in sir questions and we would ask the come up to the microphone. Form a line right behind