Q: When a former CIA officer goes “public” does the information need to be cleared for its possible sensitivity to national security first?

A: Everything a former CIA officer writes has to be cleared by a panel called the Publications Review Board (PRB).  And I mean everything has to be cleared, from a letter to the editor of House Beautiful magazine to a memoir about a CIA career.  But clearance is not a science and the process can take years, or 18 months, in my case.  An author frequently finds himself in a fight with PRB over language, and there is an appeals process which most authors take advantage of.  In the end, the author and PRB usually can come to an agreement, but with both sides somewhat unhappy.

Q: You have been at times at the center of the debate regarding the effectiveness waterboarding.  Where do you stand on the issue now?

A: I believe now, as I believed in December 2007 when I went public, that waterboarding was morally wrong.  I said then and I maintain now that Abu Zubaydah provided actionable intelligence after being waterboarded.  I was wrong when I said he had been waterboarded once.  That was what I was told.  We know now that he had been waterboarded 83 times.  But there are two separate issues here.  Did waterboarding work (on Abu Zubaydah it did in a limited way, but it did not work on other prisoners, who simply told the interrogators what they wanted to hear), and was it morally right?

Q: It has been suggested your position on waterboarding was part of a deception campaign.  Are you lying to us now?

A: If I said no, would you believe me?  Seriously, I’ve seen a couple of conspiratorial, fringe blogs make that accusation.  It’s ridiculous.  I called it as I saw it.  It made a lot of people angry and started an important national debate.  I stand by my position.

Q: Stephen Colbert has suggested the need to waterboard you to get the “real” truth.  Would this work or have you been trained to resist torture?

A: I feel like I already have been waterboarded!  Repeatedly.  I was never trained to resist torture.  I wish I had had training in press relations, however.

Want to learn more? Read Kiriakou’s book The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror

Listen Here: Ask a Spy, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Assassination

We go to our own resident SPY and Executive Director, Peter Earnest, to get an operative’s point of view on the breaking news over the spycraft and disguise tactics used in the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. SPY’s Adult Education Director, Amanda Ohlke, talks with Peter as he draws on his more than 35 years of experience in the CIA.

Resources:

Time Magazine’s Top 10 Assassination List

Test your SPY skills in our immersive mission, Operation SPY

Mr. Harris will be at SPY next Thursday to answer questions and discuss his book The Watchers- The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.

Q: Who are the Watchers?

A: The Watchers are five men who’ve played extraordinary roles in building, and in some cases tearing down, computer systems that can ingest and analyze huge amounts of electronic information about terrorist threats. Their quest is to “connect the dots” about future threats to the United States. Most of these men have worked behind the secretive veil of the intelligence community at some point in their career, but they all share a common thread: Their most important work became the subject of intense public scrutiny, which is rare in the spy world. Chief among the Watchers is retired Admiral John Poindexter, the narrative protagonist of the book. The story begins with him as deputy national security adviser to Ronald Regan in 1983. After a terrorist attack on Marines in Beirut, Poindexter set out to build a system that could detect the signals of impending crises in the databases of government intelligence. He continued that quest after the 9/11 attacks with a controversial program called Total Information Awareness. The other Watchers are Michael Hayden, the one-time director of the National Security Agency; Mike McConnell, ex-director of national intelligence; a software designer named Jeff Jonas, who worked briefly with Poindexter and then became one of his most prominent skeptics; and a former Army major named Erik Kleinsmith, who was the lead analyst on a secret data-mining program code named Able Danger, which may have detected the presence of Al Qaeda operatives in the United States months before September 11, 2001.

Q: Whose watching the Watchers?

A: We have a new generation of Watchers today, and I’m sad to say that they’re mostly watching themselves. The system of oversight we’ve set up in the United States, which is supposed to provide some check on executive surveillance authority, gives tremendous deference to the intelligence agencies to collect information on just about anyone they choose. While there are significant checks to guard against unwarranted monitoring of American citizens’ phone calls or email exchanges, they’re not sufficient for our current data-driven world, in which there are few meaningful impediments–technological or legal–to acquiring information about people. One way or another, the government can get this data. And often, it’s the seemingly innocuous information that is the most revealing. For example, you can learn more about a person’s day-to-day activities and his personal connections by examining his phone logs than by actually listening in on his phone conversations. The former class of data is, legally and technically, easier to get than the latter. The government knows this.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be so concerned about the government’s massive collection capabilities. We live in an era of accessible information, after all. And for the most part, people like that, because it helps us communicate, move about, and shop more easily. Our laws are mostly focused on collecting data, rather than what government agencies actually do with it behind closed doors. And that’s where we need to pay more attention. We should set up new rules for how the Watchers use information about us. And we should employ technology to keep tabs on them. We should, in fact, start watching the Watchers with the very same tools they use to watch us.

Q: Is Admiral John Poindexter the new Dr. Strangelove- or: Should we learn to stop worrying and love Big Brother?

A: It’s tempting to think of him that way. And when I first met him, I was expecting an evil genius character straight out of Cold War fiction. But I quickly realized that he is far more rational, thoughtful, and decent than his most ardent critics have portrayed him. I don’t propose that we stop worrying about Big Brother–but neither does John Poindexter. In fact, when he conceived of his Total Information Awareness system after 9/11, privacy-protecting technologies were at its core. He imagined a system in which all identifying features of the data–names, locations, etc.–would be encrypted, so that an analyst using a TIA program would not know the identities of the people underlying all the information on his screen. If the analyst could form some basis of reasonable suspicion or probable cause that a person in the data was engaged in terrorist plot, then the government would have to get a judge’s approval to “unlock” the encryption and see who was really behind that anonymous information. It was a radical proposal, and it would have built a tangible measure of privacy protection into government surveillance. Sadly, when the Congress pulled the public funding on Poindexter’s programs, and shifted them into the classified intelligence budget, they did not continue the research on privacy. That was a mistake.

Q: Who came up with the idea for the all seeing eye pyramid in Information Awareness Office (IAO) logo?  Clever design or Masonic plot?

A: Not a clever design, definitely not a plot. Robert Popp, Poindexter’s deputy, came up with it. He’d been going back and forth with an artist, whose designs had left Popp uninspired. As Popp told me, his secretary came into his office to deliver a sandwich from a nearby deli. She put the sandwich and Popp’s change down on his desk. Popp looked over and saw a $1 bill, with the Great Seal on the back–a pyramid topped by a large eye. He had a kind of eureka moment. The eye would stand for the letter I in Information Awareness Office. The pyramid was in the shape of an A.  So, he had the first two letters of the acronym. For the O, Popp thought, what better symbol than a globe? Global vision, global security, global awareness. So, “IAO” became an eye atop a pyramid casting its gaze over the world. Popp ran the idea by Poindexter–he liked it. To this day, Poindexter doesn’t see why people reacted so strongly to the image, why they found it so menacing and ominous. I’ve explained the reasons to him several times. He doesn’t agree.

Q: What should be learn from the case of the  Umar Abdulmutallab, the Chirstmas Day Bomber, about the progress of the Watchers?

A: I’m afraid this case tells us the Watchers are losing ground on their fundamental goal. The government has become very good at collecting the dots about terrorism, but not at connecting them. The Watchers always believed they had to do both. But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it became easier to amass huge databases of information than to build sophisticated tools for making sense of that data. This latter challenge has always been harder, and our intelligence agencies are still struggling with it.

Q.  What’s the story on this retired State Department officer and his wife who were arrested for spying in June, Walter and Gwendolyn Myers?  According the New York Times 19 June 2009 http://bit.ly/VdlpA, the FBI warned the State Department about a suspected mole there in 2006.  And yet the Myers weren’t arrested until three years later.  It seems there’s always a long delay before the FBI makes an arrest in so many of these spy cases.

Reply:  First, we don’t know the basis for the FBI’s suspicion if indeed it did warn State about a suspected mole.  It might have been a leak from the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS), information from a Cuban defector, or even information derived from intercepts of the CuIS transmissions to the Myers.  And we certainly don’t know if the FBI had identified the Myers in 2006.  Even if the bureau had reason to suspect the Myers, it has to develop solid evidence to back up its suspicion to enable the Justice Department to bring a case to trial.

Q.  Don’t you agree that the CuIS didn’t place much value on the Myers as agents since they used such low tech methods to communicate with them, short wave radio transmissions and exchanging shopping carts in the Safeway with their CuIS handlers?

Reply:  I wouldn’t disparage their use of low tech communications; it worked for almost 20 years.  The CuIS has routinely used similar low tech methods for communicating with some of its most valued agents in the United States including Anna Montes, the senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.  Motivated by her strong feelings for Cuba, she spied for the CuIS for some time before she was arrested in 2001.  She also received direction from the CuIS by shortwave radio.  Many intelligence services including our own still use low tech means for covert communication when it is considered appropriate.   Intelligence services work hard to match the right communications method to a particular agent.

Q.  Was passing information from 200 reports to Cuban Intelligence the only damage they did?

Reply:  Remember that was in just 2007-08.  Having an agent in the State Department’s Intelligence office, INR, would be solid gold to the CuIS.   The public has a pretty shaky grip on what real spies do – and how much damage they can do.  Pop culture in books, TV, and especially Hollywood perpetuate the James Bond myth:  spying is all squealing tires and shots in the night.  No wonder we are shocked – shocked! – when we read about yet another spy in the government.  Walter Myers had the access to provide their CuIS handlers with information about sensitive and classified U.S. foreign policy issues; information and gossip about colleagues: their political leanings and personal weaknesses: and a whole range of information gleaned from his being an insider.  The CuIS regards intelligence about the U.S. as a commodity worth selling and bartering with other intelligence services.  Walter Myers was in an ideal position to deliver valuable product.

SpyGuy’s Q & A

Q. You were an Intelligence operative for over 30 years; don’t you think Obama is throwing in the towel on the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT)?  In March this year, the Pentagon even stopped using the words, “the GWOT” but instead began referring to an “Overseas Contingency Operation (OCO).”   We hear the same from DHS Secretary Napolitano, State Secretary Clinton, and other Administration mouthpieces. 

Reply:  Words make a difference.  Look at the wrangling over our goal in Afghanistan.  Are we trying to “win” or “succeed?”  They’re not the same.  Using one instead of the other is critical to rallying the government and the country around a common goal.  Too, the “GWOT” raised Osama’s band of murderous fanatics to world stature instead of labeling them more precisely as a small gang of extremists operating on the fringe of one of the world’s great religions.  

Q.  Will ratcheting down our goals then enable Obama to change course away from the previous vigorous campaign against al-Qaeda?

 Reply:  It sure doesn’t sound like it. His advisor on terrorism John Brennan spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on 6 August, saying that the President wants to focus on the real adversaries, al-Qaeda and its allies, and not just on “terror” which is simply a term describing a tactic, not an adversary. 

Q.  Okay, but do you really think this Administration is going to go after Al Qaeda as vigorously as Bush did?   Obama seems to be just running around talking to everyone with no action.

Reply:  Brennan was emphatic:  “Obama will not tolerate Afghanistan or any other country being a base for terrorists determined to kill Americans.”  Al Qaeda, Brennan said, is the most serious threat we face as a nation and Obama has….a clear policy – “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its allies.”  He said Obama has approved operations against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups and encouraged his counterterrorism forces to be more aggressive, more proactive and more innovative….to seek out new ways and new opportunities to take down the terrorists.   Now, that’s more than just running around.  Those words would leave no doubt in my mind as an Intelligence professional about the President’s mandate. 

Q.  Why are you people in Intelligence so hung up on wordsmithing and definitions?  Can’t you just go out and do your jobs?

Reply:  Because knowing what the Chief Executive wants is our job.  We’ve learned the hard way that Intelligence gathering and covert action are nearly worthless unless they’re in response to policymakers’ needs and in sync with the country’s foreign policy.