HUMan INTelligence in the Digital Age: Global Agenda 2012

good evening everyone and welcome back to global agenda at the University of Delaware I'm Ralph Begleiter director of the Center for political communication I'm always glad to note that global agenda is supported by the University of Delaware's Institute for Global Studies the Department of Political Science and International Relations and the department of communication we live in a digital world just look around you at the people sitting at the next table at the restaurant texting their friends instead of talking with the ones right at their own table or try to do your tax's without a computer and as we heard from national former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden just last week spies and sneaky guys are all using digital weapons both in offense and defense despite all that the popularity of Gianluca ray is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy demonstrates that we still like an old-fashioned spy story and it's still true that the world of espionage relies very heavily on people to do the most sensitive and skilled work in intelligence whether it's peering through a magnifier at satellite images of bin Laden's hideaway in Pakistan last year or meeting secretly with some of his henchmen in Egypt Yemen or Afghanistan human intelligence the kind of espionage produced by people who betray their governments in Syria or Iran or China or Russia is still among the most valuable information reaching the president of the United States every morning in the president's Daily Brief our guest tonight is robert grenier he has spent three decades working for the CIA in the national clandestine service much of that time he worked specifically in human intelligence undercover overseas which means others didn't know what he was up to among Bob Grenier assignments the CIA's Counterterrorism Center where he focused to the 9/11 attacks on preventing another big one as the CIA's station chief in Pakistan Grenier directed operations against the Taliban before and after the 9/11 attacks he was the CIA's representative to the White House during the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq in 2003 earlier in his career he was chief of the CIA's basic spy training ground known as the farm there he authored the clandestine services code of ethics Bob Grenier earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy at Dartmouth and was a graduate student at the University of Virginia please welcome Robert Greene yay to the University of Delaware once again thank you l appreciate your very kind introduction and it's a great privilege for me to be able to speak to you here at the University of Delaware but there are a couple of hurdles that I had to overcome before I could actually sign on to come and speak to you all and one of them frankly where's the title spies lies and sneaky guys it has a certain alliteration it works but I still didn't feel terribly comfortable with it something about it that suggests that the people who were engaged in this profession or somewhat morally challenged might be too sensitive here but you know as I thought about it more it seems to me that quite frankly that's entirely understandable in fact what we do in the espionage world is highly questionable morally certainly for those who are not very well introduced I mean think about it the things that spies are supposed to do the things that they do on a day-in day-out basis or all the things that your parents tell you you're never supposed to do you're lying you're cheating you're stealing mostly documents sometimes other things you're misrepresenting yourself you're misrepresenting your intentions you're misleading other human beings gruffness mentioned I was actually the author of the code of ethics for the clandestine service now some of you may think that's an oxymoron some was not a very vigorously oh well just give me a willful suspension of disbelief here for a moment when I tell you that in fact people in the clandestine service do take their moral obligations very very seriously there are in fact codes by which we measure our conduct but which we guide our conduct ourselves now colleagues but at the base of it all it really comes down to an aspect of Just War Theory I mean after all soldiers who are serving their country they do things that under normal circumstances people should never do they kill people they break things and yet under certain circumstances we say that this is not only morally permissible but but in some cases actually morally required to defend their country against those who would want only kill their fellow citizens well it's the same in a very different context for people who engaged in espionage you know a quote that I read many years ago and that stuck with me ever since and is affected my thinking ever since came in some testimony that was given by a former Secretary of State Dean Rusk and in response to a question from a senator he said senator other nations have interests the United States has responsibilities whether we like it or not our country is the indispensable nation whether we like it or not we have assumed on our shoulders tremendous responsibilities around the world and given those responsibilities there are certain things that we must be willing to do certain capabilities that American policymakers American leaders must have if we are to fulfill those responsibilities so to the question and it's not a rhetorical one the question should we be doing this in a digital age or any other age unsurprisingly I'm going to tell you yes as I say it's not just a rhetorical question and there's some people who like to engage on this perhaps in the Q&A I'd be very happy to do that I've thought about this a lot I'd love to talk about it but maybe more fundamentally and more I propose what it is that we're here to speak about tonight the question is can we do this in the digital age and it's not a frivolous question the world has changed tremendously I was telling some of the students a little bit earlier today what it was like when I was operating under non official cover I was operating as a business person unconnected with the US government back in the mid-1980s and I was traveling around the world meeting with intelligence assets various points during 27 years I had a lot of different covers I'm not revealing any national secrets when I say that there were times when I was opposing as a diplomat other times as a civilian member of the Department of the army I had other covers as well but in those years when I was operating ostensibly as a business person traveling internationally I say think back on it now it was unbelievable what we were able to get away with I had a pocket full of alias documents another pocket full of cash I could go pretty much anywhere I wanted and do pretty much anything I wanted to do but there was a day mid 1980s and I went to check into a hotel a large popular hotel in Geneva I presented my passport at the desk and the clerk turned around took something off of a printer and he placed it on the desk in front of me let's just say that I was mr. Smith that day and this little form letter said welcome back mr. Smith we're very glad to have you doesn't particularly surprise thing about that is they're not in today's context I had been there before I'd been there a little over a year before now it's not new that hotels then or since time immemorial maybe would have records and so if the inspector of police in Geneva were to have come to that hotel and said he's I wish to see a record concerning a Monsieur Schmidt I need to know if he has stayed in your hotel on the 25th of January in 1988 your cooperation would be appreciated we've seen this movie right and and so the nervous clerk sweating bullets he rushes back and he pulls out the paper records and yes I yes it is a mr. Schmidt he was with us on the 25th of January he was in 112 19 but when I made the reservation to go and stay in that hotel I didn't think that they were going to be going over 30-some years of paper records to find out if I'd ever stayed there before we forget what life was like and it wasn't that long ago believe me but now when I saw this form letter that said welcome back mr. Smith oh my god it was like the future in a flash had opened up before my eyes and I didn't like what I was seeing think about it if this man in this hotel can do that because all this information is suddenly available to him well what if they did that at border crossings what if they did it at multiple border crossings simultaneously what if somebody in the immigration department of a particular country that I was travelling through could see the pattern of travel that I had made over a course of years and then correlate it with other things that were happening at the same time and I wasn't even thinking about machine-readable passports or biometrics but like a bolt of lightning suddenly I could see the future and it did not look good this was going to be a very bad thing for espionage I remember also during that time when I was traveling internationally particularly if I was traveling through an international gateway where they had fairly serious immigration controls I would show up at the airport early and I would go to a newsstand I would purchase a newspaper and I'd go and I'd find a quiet spot and I'd sit and I'd open up the newspaper and act as though are we reading it but what I was really doing was going over my story in my head I literally sit there and say okay Who am I who do I represent what company am i with what business am i doing Who am I gonna meet where did I go to college what I major in what year did I graduate what's my what's my mother-in-law's maiden name all those things that I should know automatically if I am who I say I am but at that time certainly during the course of an interview and unless they were so suspicious of me they were gonna arrest me for several days so they could launch a full investigation they weren't going to be able to check on any of this if I was glib if I had the answers if I acted perfectly normal I was going to get through ninety nine times out of a hundred even in the unlikely event that they pulled me into a secondary interrogation think about the situation now some little guy sitting in the back room in a matter of minutes would be able to come back out and say wait a minute you know Bowdoin College 1976 there was no Smith think how many other holes he could have poked in my story even when I was telling as much of the truth of the truth as I possibly could think about the fact that I didn't have any credit history and that name-o this is very interesting mr. Smith you have a credit card according to this credit card you've never engaged in a in a single non cash transaction before six months ago how old are you you couldn't do it and what it means is that by and large by and large there are always exceptions but by and large nowadays anymore you have to be who you say you are what's the hottest spy to do this is terrible and it makes life much much more difficult that is espionage in the digital age but that means therefore is that the paradigm has had to change and this has been underway for a long time now and it's a it's a progression that was still very much underway when I left six years ago and I have no doubt although they don't tell me anything anymore I have no doubt that it's still under way now and it's a difficult thing if you have to be who you say you are you can't do the sorts of things that I did with impunity back in the mid-1980s that means if we want somebody to be able to pose as a nuclear scientist she better be a nuclear scientist you know back in the good old days of the Cold War when we were primarily focused on the Russians and the Chinese Communist powers these were closed societies the very few people who were actually able to come out of these societies and the few people who were able to come out of those societies disproportionately were were diplomats and others assigned to embassies abroad and so people like me typically were posing as diplomats that was pretty easy spent my career was the state department officer you go to cocktail parties and you try to bump into these people and you try to develop a personal relationship that you hoped would turn into an intelligence relationship but when you're dealing with terrorism nuclear proliferation pull efficient of missiles narcotics you have to be able to go places you have to be able to be things that are very very difficult to establish and to maintain particularly particularly if you have to be who you say you are think of the effort that would be required to do that think on at the same time of all the things that we want a staff Operations Officer mind you let's get the nomenclature right here we don't talk about CIA agents agents are individuals usually foreign nationals but access to information access to information of interest to the US government and the other ones who provide that information they are the sources we call them agents officers people like what I used to be we call officers or in the clandestine services case officers well think of all the things that we want case officers to be we want them to be able to write like we MF Buckley we wanted to be able to brief presidents we want them to be able to do analysis we want them to know multiple languages we want them to mature in their craft we ultimately want them to become managers ultimately maybe senior managers well if early in their careers we are taking them as nuclear scientists and we're saying you have to maintain your capability as a nuclear scientist you have to be able to do all the things that nuclear scientists do how you develop all of these other these are the capabilities and if you put millions of dollars in years of effort into establishing that kind of a cover well you're going to be very very careful about the way that you use it back when I was mr. Smith if I suddenly came under suspicion mr. Smith suddenly was no more gone problem solved and I'm back two weeks later is mr. Jones in a different place not so easy if you have to be who you say you are so in a context where in the clandestine service it has been an article of faith for many many years that the problem the solution to virtually any problem is a well-trained case officer if that's what it takes to maintain a case officer to get that individual where that individual needs to be maybe a case officer per se isn't your first choice solution talked about agents and case officers well what if you combine the two what if instead you take an individual let's say somebody who is a cleric a Muslim cleric Muslim cleric from Mogadishu Somalia you're not going to find a garden-variety case officer who's able to operate in that kind of an environment and get close to the people that you want to get close to but if you find that person that genuine person and you recruit that person to represent you not as a case officer but it's sort of a hybrid there's nothing new about this we used to call them staff agents maybe they still did and there are any number of different permutations on that scenario but as I say it's nothing new espionage the second oldest profession in the world there is nothing new Under the Sun in espionage but the paradigms making what used to be exceptional and making it routine that's the real challenge and that's why espionage in the digital age is so difficult you have to be where you say you are and it means that we have to develop not just as a service but essentially as a country because there are whole lots of other people who get votes on this Congress in particular we have to change that paradigm so we've talked about the challenges even raised the question as to whether it's possible to do espionage in the digital age and in fact it is don't worry it's more difficult but it can be done it is being done it will continue to be done oh and by the way there's some good news here too because at the same time that we are faced with all these challenges in the digital world there also some tremendous advantages that arise as well it's talking about fact that traditionally in the clandestine service the answer to every problem is a well-trained case officer and well maybe that's not exactly true maybe we don't need to have a huge number of additional case officers maybe what we need to have is a more modest number of officers who are properly supported having proper covers requires a tremendous amount of administrative backroom ward it's not glamorous it's not the stuff of spy movies but it's the stuff that makes espionage possible a well operating case officer has to have targeting you know again back in the 80s when I was a young pup yeah what we were doing we were doing targeting but it was just awful it was really Clement junior officer operating in North Africa remember this is the days of the Cold War so we were very concerned about leftist organizations that could be used as fronts by the communists so as a young man in North Africa it was my job to get close to radical leftist student leaders who knew anything about radical leftist student leaders in North Africa well yeah there was probably some French academic who done a fair amount of work and if he if you could find some dusty old monograph that he'd written it was might be in a secondhand bookstore in Paris maybe that would help you but if it even existed so what I felt was that the best way to find out about you know student radical leaders was to spend time with students students in North Africa in the 1980s I guess much like students now they didn't have a whole lot of money and so they'd hitchhike everywhere so what I do is I would go and I would pick up hitchhikers so I'd pick up some young man and I would try in the space of about three blocks to find out if they knew anything about what was happening in the in the student movement and if he didn't I would make an excuse give him a pack of cigarettes kick him out of the car and go someplace else and if he didn't know something his may have one time out of ten then I'd make some excuse to followup with it I give another pack of cigarettes you'd be very glad to come and see me again in a cafe the following week and we'd go on from there so a for effort but this was really primitive and it was it was difficult and it was not at all efficient if you're doing it now think of the amount of active information that you'd have available to you that dusty monograph it'd be online you'd have all this information from Facebook and from Twitter you'd be able to figure out in pretty short order without ever setting foot on the street who it was that you really needed to go after who had the information that you were looking for and then you could begin to think productively about how we get close to that individual that's the difference the targeting is made in the context of espionage in the digital age talking about the difficulty of operating as a case officer the difficulties involved in in identifying and recruiting agents well okay we have an agent we have that wonderful thing an agent in place now well we recruited this individual to provide information so we have to communicate with him in the old days that could be a very difficult thing under the circumstances if you're talking about Moscow in the 1950s oh my goodness you could never meet face to face with somebody like that chances are that person was putting information maybe a microfilm in a hollow rock and putting an end to a bridge as he walked through and you would have to plan literally for months how it was it you were going to go and retrieve that rock with a Russian of security finding you on the street more sophisticated times you'd be giving people spy gear giving them radios for giving them little later on satellite communications but these were things that you would find in the local version of radio shack these were this this was spy gear anybody who was caught with it was in deep deep trouble they could get caught for all the wrong reasons having nothing to do with the local security service they could just have a problem with somebody in their families I'm stumbling over something it's happened but what if what if you can communicate securely in a way that will not identify the sender and the true recipient and it looks like the kind of communication that everybody else is doing wouldn't that be terrific well guess what in a fundamental sense we're all becoming spies we're all communicating out there in the ether we're all concerned many of us if we're not we ought to be about what the wider world can see what can people know about us in the context of our communications and our relationships that we don't really want them to know things that we really would like to protect we all have something to hide don't we and in a business context well people are encrypting information all the time people who are involved in international business nowadays they have international intellectual property that they have to protect they have business secrets that they legitimately have to protect and so this creates a profile out there into which other people who are sending information securely secretly for espionage purposes can mimic maybe not as easy as that it's not easy at all because again you still have to protect where the information is coming from and where ultimately it's going to but there are tremendous possibilities that we have in the context of the digital age that we never had before you think about electronic media digital media so it was coming up on the train today it was rummaging around in my briefcase and I found this I don't even know what's on it maybe I should be more careful little thing like this suppose to gigabytes of information that is just unbelievable now mind you when I was a tender young officer I literally had people bringing documents to me that they would secret in their shirts right and then one guy pertaining and he because he couldn't bring a briefcase he worked in a very very sensitive secure facility you had to come up in and out with your hands clean that was it you weren't something to search but it was expected was a protocol you didn't bring things in and out so he would put documents under his shirt and he would walk rather stiffly out the door until you come and see me well this same individual given one of these things I carry the number of documents that you could carry in a Deuce and a half truck it's absolutely unbelievable it's a huge problem in a counterintelligence context now I don't want to say anything against private Manning he's innocent until proven guilty but he's the individual who it would appear may have provided thousands of diplomatic cables and military communications to WikiLeaks how'd he do it you know WikiLeaks they're known for being able to hack into computer systems they didn't hack into any computer system this guy if in fact he did is alleged put it on a thing like this and just carried it on out and handed it over to these folks one of the things that I advised people who in private industry who are trying to protect their secrets and as their protections as their as their methods of protecting themselves and their systems from cyberattacks become more sophisticated what I teach China really remind them is that the real danger is the danger within the danger from your people what the wrong a motivated person can do if they have administrative access to your system the flipside of that are the opportunities that belong to the people who are on offense people that I used to be associated with so there are tremendous opportunities that are associated with life in the digital age as well as the tremendous challenges that we just talked about so I think we've covered spies and lies at least quarter inch deep half a mile wide but sneaky guys now you may think that that's just sort of a logical extension of what we've just been talking about well I don't know and I never asked Ralph to define this for me but sneaky guys to me those are the dirty trick guys what we call in the intelligence world covert action you see traditionally the way intelligence and policy works it's a linear progression in collecting information you sort it and you analyze it and you disseminate the information to policymakers then hopefully if your information is good and they're wise enough to heat it they come up with good policies it's a linear process but anymore so many of the questions that face our country we already know what the policy is we're concerned about terrorism we know what our policy is we're against nuclear proliferation proliferation of missile technology narcotics we know what our policy is so it's not enough just to report on what's happening in those contexts it is the duty and the responsibility of intelligence writ Wyden particularly the clandestine service to do something about it we're all afraid of the next major terrorist attack well if we put a report on the President's desk that says yep major terrorist attack on this block New York City tomorrow homerun they're really good we informed the president in advance this is what's gonna happen no no that is not a good job if we report to the president that Iran is going to have a nuclear bomb two weeks from today last screw goes in is that a success maybe not so what I would suggest is that the sneaky guys the real sneaky guys the people who do a corporate action in fact as we move forward are going to become more and not less important that's going to be part of espionage in the digital age as well spies lies sneaky guys I think we've covered the waterfront to a certain extent now we'd welcome your questions okay Bob come on over we can take some questions let me ask one that comes out of your remarks which is are we seeing the blending of the signals intelligence world that we all heard about last week from general Hayden and the human intelligence world that you've just been talking about in the sense that as as I think you were suggesting human intelligence really can't operate any more outside the electronic or the digital world they're just things you no longer can do without intersecting with the electronics that can be picked up by somebody else we're going to see the blending of those two forms or is is human intelligence still something that's always going to be separate well I think human intelligence is it's a separate discipline and separate people do it and they do it in with a separate set of methodologies but in terms of the way that it's employed absolutely it's blended with signals intelligence as very broadly defined so and when you see all of this come together and that's one of the the marvels in the way that the intelligence community has evolved just in the last 10 years or so is that now we can combine in real-time not only information that comes from human agents with information that we're getting in real time from from intercepts but we're also able to use information that we get in real time from intercepts to guide personnel on the ground and just a few years ago that was absolutely unimaginable getting a sneaky guys are being guided by the signals intelligence in ways that previously was not possible absolutely and I would just simply had to do with the way that we are able to communicate globally and again I want to get you know too far into the into the tradecraft and the capabilities here but but one of the things that we discovered we were able to do this number of years ago is see you don't always have the the linguist that you want who is awake and in the right part of the world at the time when you need him or her and with improvements in internal communications in the intelligence community now we've got a system where you can have a drone in a certain part of the world which is picking up signals intelligence say say RF radio and is immediately in real-time sharing that with an analyst who is a half a world away who is interpreted who is interpreting that in real-time and then sending the text back so the people on the ground have it within ten minutes and just getting it on a live feed that's simply a matter of coordination of communications and with the system that we have right now we can do it we'll come back to that in a minute but as I mentioned we we're webcast on Second Life and we have a couple of questions from there one of them from the Pacific Northwest and who was asking about and I thought of this as you were saying it you were saying you could go to a hotel hotel clerk and it would be impossible for you today to be someone that you're not are you telling us that the CIA is incapable of creating a database of credit-card transactions that go back more than six months on the credit card that you use at the hotel clerk you couldn't create an identity electronically today that that would make that kind of operation succeed in fact in fact I think you could it would be very difficult it'd be very time consuming the chances for making a telltale error would be considerable and one of the things that people submit I don't say that we can't do it and that God knows we may be doing it as we speak as I say they don't talk to me anymore and they should but one of the things that folks often failed to appreciate understandably is that you know we're not doing intelligence for the United States is a one-off this is a global system we have dozens in fact hundreds of intelligence operations that are underway in different parts of globe simultaneously and you have to have a system that's capable of doing that we don't have the luxury of doing intelligence on a reach basis now in certain circumstances if the priority is high enough yeah you'll pull it all the stops and you'll you'll use tremendous resources just to do one operation but the paradigm for us is global operations and to do what you're describing on a wholesale basis as opposed to a retail retail basis I think is probably beyond the capabilities of anybody with a reasonable level of resources so was your message in effect that the kind of spying you used to do where you adopted a different persona a different identity a different business from one month to the next is no longer possible I'm saying that it is no longer sustainable in the way that it was is it possible are they still doing it now it might very well be and again it all depends on what the objective is it's a matter of getting across a border doing a discrete thing getting out again growing very rapidly so that if events take their normal course you'll be long gone by the time anybody figures out that hey wait a minute of something dodgy about this individual that's fine and that probably happens all the time but if you're talking about a sustained relationship either with somebody whom you are developing as a potential intelligence source of somebody who is is a current intelligence or somebody say who's going to be going back and forth across the border multiple times and just to pick up on something you mentioned very early in your remarks but you just kind of glossed over it you said not to talk about or not to mention biometrics and other similar kinds of technologies do though are those things widely enough in use in the world today for someone like you to be conscious of them when you walk up to a hotel desk and think they might actually use biometrics on you to see if you really are the person you claim to be the short answer is yes to what it says being used in hotels sure but there are many countries including some that are not normally considered to be all that sophisticated particularly the Middle East who have access to a lot of money and who are installing these systems and they're very very sophisticated so yeah it's more bad news for the espionage in the digital age covert action in the digital age okay let's take some of your questions we'll take questions from students and non-students let's go with a question from a non student first tonight yes way back there he played through that reason why but okay the question is have you ever studied or can you talk to us about what are the motivations for someone to lie and cheat against their own government and I'm gonna make sure that the question includes both lie and cheat against the US government as well as lie in cheat against some other government if are those motivations different and how do you play to those when you direct a covert operation I think that the reasons why people will did answer your question directly have we ever studied this yes absolutely and there are a lot of psychologists psychiatrists who work for CIA and for other elements of the intelligence community who look at this a lot but but honestly the range of motivations for people to engage in espionage whether it's against you know foreign governments or our own is as broad as human psychology and I know from personal experience that there are any number of reasons why people do it and and there are times when they do it for the best reasons there are times when individuals provide information to the United States because they feel that their governments policies are by wrong that they they're they're doing things supporting terrorism for instance but they ought not to be doing it that the only way of putting a stop to this is by providing information to a country that can actually do something about it so you might not have the justification to provide this information to Costa Rica but you may very well have the justification to provide this information to the United States and it's frankly it's one of the comparative advantages I think that CIA has over other intelligence services but mind you obviously there there are many many instances where people's motivations are a good deal less noble it is it is routine that normally their their motivations are a combination of things that are we would see as being positive at least in a narrow context and things that that are clearly venal and negative and one of the things that you try to do when you're dealing with an individual and you're trying to persuade that to betray his or her organization government what-have-you is to help them to construct the high-minded rationale for doing what it is that they really want to do perhaps for legal reasons does that help at all and the questioner asks how you play to those and in fact the US government and other governments do that all the time I mean when you're trying to turn an agent or an officer of another country to assist the United States you're precisely playing to those character flaws or that psychology aren't you oh absolutely and often it works on multiple levels so you know I may be speaking to an individual whom I've gotten to know very well over time and have developed a relationship of trust with and I may end up saying to this individual you know it's not fair the way you've been treated is simply not fair I've heard all the stories and you know I'm just here to tell you that this is simply not fair these people have never recognized you for who and what you are they don't recognize the contribution that you make the country would benefit a great deal if only they would listen to you and maybe the best way of doing that is to provide the information to allow someone else to take the action that you yourself are unable to take and by the way their failure to recognize your contribution has kept you unfairly from being promoted it's kept you from educating your children on the way they ought to be educated I know how devoted you are to your children I know how much their education means to you let me help you would you characterize that as sneaky guys how many do it a question from a student is there a question from a student yes sir okay question is questioner says spying is probably not as romantic as James Bond although I don't know you might dispute that a little bit but have you ever been in a situation where you've been in combat with another agent or found yourself in conflict with a someone who's doing exactly the same work you're doing for another country Chucky's but James Bond reminds me of a quote from Winston Churchill which is that there was nothing in life so exhilarating as being shot at without effect and and James Bond has been shot at a lot without effect no you're right Espie knows it's not quite like like James Bond and no I I think I've ever been shot that was the time I might have somebody money taking a potshot my convoy and in Iraq but I'm not sure that that really that really qualifies once had a rocket fired right over Mike my office when I was in Islamabad so I guess that was could have been a close call the person who fired the rocket fired out of the back window of a vehicle and just hadn't quite predicted that the degree of deflection from the FM from the the recoil on the rocket fortunately but but now I don't think that this particular team if you talking about me personally now I'm I'm not one of the shooting scoot guys but but obviously in the war zone we've we've had a lot of intelligence efforts we've had a lot of intelligence officers who along with their military colleagues have definitely found themselves under fire in Afghanistan and in particular and you had a lot of armored vehicles shut out we've lost a number of people but probably not we probably am very fortunate that our losses have been as light as they have under circumstances setting aside for the moment the question of whether you were ever shot at or whether there was a violent exchange surely there must have been times in your career when you're crossing a border when you're going through a checkpoint when you're being searched during or questioned when you're trying to get into Afghanistan as somebody other than who you are when you've had that nagging thought in the back of your head that says oh something's going wrong here I forgot to dye my hair or I forgot to do whatever it was you forgot to do was there something like my moustache is sagging it happened no I guess some with getting it that the whole of danger thing and maybe this is a 30 degree deflection from from your question Ralph there's certainly a lots of those of us who serve in in dodgy countries with with with dodgy security obviously have to take tremendous precautions when I was the chief of station in Islamabad after 9/11 it occurred to me that there may be some people who take a dim view of me and what I was doing and so yeah we were taking extraordinary precautions to try to make sure that that we would make it easy for people at least to target me and my colleagues I was telling that the students a little bit before now and this may come as a surprise probably for my money the most dangerous place I ever served at least the time that I was serving there was in Athens in the mid-1980s people were being killed left right and centre they were terrorists or it was actually a good thing for me I was there were lots of people who who the Greek government ought not to have allowed to travel into the country who they were allowing into the country many of them were people I want to meet so this this works both ways so this is not altogether a bad thing but you had Palestinians killing Palestinians Israelis killing Palestinians you had the November 17 terrorist group which is a indigenous domestic week terrorist group that was targeting Americans British in particular very shortly after I left Athens the via the naval access show u.s. naval attache was was killed in an ambush by November 17 so yeah during that period nobody I never allowed anybody to know where I lived I was doing a surveillance detection roof every I would never allow anybody to follow me where I was going I wouldn't allow the same car to make to terms with me I know just before I went into my house so those are the kinds of impressions that we were taking those days because people were literally being hunted in the streets question from a non-student yes sir is your question to give us some some guidance on the number of women involved so maybe let's broaden the question to what's the role of prostitute prostitution in espionage but maybe also you can talk a little bit about from your knowledge of the clandestine service is it true that most of the employees there are men or is there a broader distribution or what yeah well and frankly what you're describing was was a standard ploy of the the Soviets for years you know honeypot is this is just business of a standard procedure that they would often try to employ was doing to entrap people in sexually compromising situations thinking that that would then coerce them they could use that as if it means of course was it to get people to do to cooperate lots of stories surrounding that and not just involving intelligence people but on the bundle the broader question well what I can tell you is that in CIA again the paradigm has changed tremendously went when I was a junior officer when I went through training we had very few female candidate officers in my class it was a very small proportion years later when I was the chief of crannie was fully fully fifty percent between the two and so yeah that that is something that is a good thing given you know we're who we are as a people wanting to take to take maximum advantage of the talent that we have our country on the other hand in many parts of the world it's still a man's world and it is an added burden on women and I think female case officers in order to be successful in some respects have to be I think that much better than their male colleagues in many instances because they are often dealing with men in a setting where their attentions can easily be misconstrued and so it takes a certain strength of character and a presence to maintain a professional relationship to me and to make sure that you go down the path that you want and not down the path that perhaps this individual thinks you've been intending all along that that's an ad it serve as a reality and it's something that women have to deal with in fact that the women who entered CIA do that extremely well and what we found is that women have been every bit as successful if not more so than men since we've opened up the aperture and we've recruited much larger numbers of women who have much higher proportion of women into clandestine service you mentioned the Soviets when you were talking about the prostitution aspect of espionage one of our questioners on Second Life was asking whether you think that the Soviets the Russians today are still planting sleeper agents around the world including in the United States and does the u.s. engage in that kind of activity planting officers elsewhere for a very very long period of time I think it's fair to say that the and again we get into cultural differences the Soviets back in the day were much more inclined to ask people their officers to make what we would regard as a tremendous sacrifice of their careers to take somebody who is otherwise very capable and who might in a different line have had a very successful career and ask them to go be a sleeper agent to go sit in Duluth or something against the day when there might be a nuclear exchange so they could do some discrete thing whatever that was knowing that if more ever came that basically your career was a waste they were willing to do that I'm sure there's a lot that I don't know about things that operations that were run by the CIA back in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s but I can tell you that culturally we would be far less inclined to do that to ask somebody to basically take a ninety nine percent chance of simply throwing their careers away against the day that they might be able to do some discrete thing under under unlikely circumstances from a student yes okay questions about bin Laden's assassination and whether you see it as a in the category of covert operations sneaky guys as a one-off operation or whether this is a change of schema and that we're going to see much more of this kind of activity on the part of covert agents in the future yeah with regard to the first part of your question is this an intelligence operation properly so-called there was this a military operation frankly it's a combination of the two it's a hybrid and that's true not only in the sense that it was the intelligence community and maybe disproportionately the CIA they had to put together the intelligence package that enable this operation to happen obviously the actual operation that the shooters on the ground were military and normally you would prefer it that way because they're they're professional soldiers that that's what they do however it was pretty clear from what was said at the time if you if you could read between the lines and understand what was being said that those JSOC operators Special Operations Command personnel were actually operating during the time that they were in Pakistan under CIA authority it was it was mentioned several times so this is actually Leon Panetta's operation and it's because in fact those those military personnel when they were engaged in that operation in within a country with whom we were not engaged in combat were actually were essentially chopped over that they were essentially CIA personnel for that brief period of time because the CIA has those authorities in the military does not and that really gets to the different authorities under we want to get down to the weeds between title 50 and title 10 but but US military forces are only authorized to operate in combat zones Pakistan not an official combat zone we're not at war with Pakistan we've got to the broader question about is is this sort of a template for the future the only the only instances where we are going to be inclined to do this are are in areas that that we might refer to as uncovering space you know if we know that there is a terrorist in Belgium but we're not going to send in either CIA or the military to do something about it we're going to tell the Belgian authorities and that's probably going to be true of a number of countries who may not have very good relations with us but who don't particularly like terrorists operating on their territory particularly if they're going to commit acts within their borders so it's really only in countries that that really are not under the control of any organized or responsible political authority places like large parts of Yemen Somalia areas along the pakistan-afghanistan border those are the only places where we're likely to see that in frankly I don't expect to see a great deal of it not not operations like that particularly that good question and your answer leads me to ask about the situation that's very much in the news today Pakistan in the United States are at odds and have been for quite a few months now over whether the kinds of operations that you were just talking about should be being conducted in Pakistan by the United States and you didn't mention it in your answer here you were talking about on the ground operation to get Osama bin Laden but the Pakistanis also complain about other kinds of military or our CIA operations such as the flight of drones over Pakistan unmanned aircraft the question for you is you know or have we blurred the lines with the increasing use of intelligence to conduct what were previously military operations have we blurred the lines of the legalities that you were mentioning and what implications does that have for diplomatic relations and political relations between countries like Pakistan in the United States you know I frequently get asked about drones and I wish that I could answer those questions in French and the reason for that is not because I'm hoping that people will not understand French it's because when you're speaking in French when you're using the subjunctive mood it's much more obvious so let me preface that question by saying that I see news reports which indicate that there are individuals who disappear mysteriously a puff of smoke in places like North Waziristan and Pakistan and it is supposed by some that these may be the result of missile strikes from drones which the u.s. of course never acknowledges and if they are right then I would say the following so so just keep that in mind okay anything I say that that's it's only after preamble yeah that the question with Pakistan is an extremely extremely complicated one and there are times when the Pakistanis are just as happy thank you very much to see people disappear in a puff of smoke and there are a lot of militants in the tribal areas and some of them are primarily of concern to them because they're making war against Pakistan some of them they don't think are particularly their problem because they're operating across the line in Afghanistan and they've got enough enemies thank you very much and they just assume not not deal with all that at the same time if these if these drone strikes are taking place in in - too frequently and in areas that are politically sensitive and if there are a significant number of of collateral casualties as a result that makes huge political problems for the Pakistanis and obviously they would so they would think long in service they would like to have control over all this and obviously they don't and the reason for it is because these are areas of Pakistan that they simply cannot control and we have we have concerns about terrorists based in those areas or operating internationally we have concerns about force protection for our own forces in Afghanistan who were under daily attack from people who are operating across the border in Pakistan and we simply cannot sit on our hands and allow these things to take place so is it is it blurring lines to an extent it is that the fact that we allegedly have these these quasi military operations that are they're being undertaken by by intelligence but again the reason for it is the one that I decided before in the context of the bin Laden raid and that really has to do with legal authorities which which entities in the US government have the legal authorities to take this action which we deem to be necessary you know as someone who was in charge of the counterterrorism operation in the United States do you draw a distinction between the incident you mentioned in your remarks earlier where a drone would be or earlier in the qat where you said a drone would be sending back a signal from someplace for translation perhaps in the United States and then the translation would get sent back to where it's needed is there a distinction between that kind of drone operation and the kind of drone operation in which it isn't a signal that's being sent but it's a missile that's being sent oh absolutely and if in the former case when when we have a drone that's flying for a reconnaissance mission either to collect signals from the ground pick up cell phones radios whatever and possibly take overhead photography as well that's that's an intelligence-gathering operation and it requires no unusual authorities from the US government for us to do that that that is within the purview of the CIA anytime the CIA is asked to essentially do anything to affect conditions on the ground whether it's influencing an election or or trying to strike and a quasi-military role against terrorists in a particular location that requires very very separate authorities under under a what is called a presidential finding it can only be done with the specific authorization blanket authorization that case-by-case authorization but blanket authorization from the president yeah that was what I was getting at I'm gonna resist the temptation because we know there's a lot of other questions but I got to resist the temptation to ask you about whether you would have applied the same French subject subjunctive preface to the photographs taken of a US drone in Iran when they presented it on the ground in Iran I won't ask you about that a question from a non-student now we're up to a non-student let's see I want to get places I haven't gone before yes ma'am the greater to metaphorically speaking okay questions basically about information overload in in the digital age can you and and the US intelligence agencies handle the flood of information some of which useful some of which isn't question are made reference to the underwear bomber whose father had reported something and it just didn't get didn't get caught yeah the problem that you cite is is a very real one it's a serious one and it's sort of axiomatic now in the intelligence community that often the problem is not not enough information it's too much information and trying to make sense of that information which sometimes gathered literally in terabytes you know which they measure in terms of the amount of documentation that could be held in a football stadium I mean it's huge huge almost unimaginably huge amounts of data and and trying to sift through that and make sense of it and get out the nuggets that may actually have some significance and I might mention parenthetically that that's not just an intelligence problem that it's also in some respects you have committed sort of a political problem because one of the pressures that the people who are trying to make sense of that those huge amounts of data are operating under is the fact that god forbid there is some critical nugget of information that's in there and that they miss it and I think that's kind of what you're getting at because then they're going to be blamed after the fact that's kind of what you're getting at in the case of the underwear bomber in that case though I don't believe based on what I heard at the time and and from some some briefings that I've been privy to that that this was a case of you know data that was sort of lost in that big stream out there which had had we only received it and recognized it in time that we might have been able to do something about this this was this is really a case of frankly human judgment if somebody had to make a judgment as whether or not it was critically important that this this individuals father had these concerns I'm a father I've got lots of concerns you know some of them are well-founded some of them not and so it should should you know extraordinary attention had been paid to this to this young man well in retrospect we can say yes but you know what I can tell you is that in the this terrorist threat databases there are literally hundreds of thousands of names and in any given time analysts have to make decisions as to which of those particularly individuals at a given point in time we are going to devote particular scrutiny to where we're going to put them on the priority list and I think that's that was a case where you know there was a what we now know was a human mistake it would would reasonable individuals necessarily have made a different choice given what people knew at the time that may a bit of be a bit of a toss-up but nobody would want to admit that and maybe I'm being too forgiving of the intelligence community but but I'm not really sure what the answer to that question Bob here's a question from two different web viewers one in Orlando one in upper New York State same question essentially one of the keys of the digital age is the idea of crowdsourcing or citizen it's called citizen journalism sometimes in this case they're referring to it as citizen intelligence do you see that trend that possibility of crowd-sourced information coming from perhaps other countries as being something that's useful to the US or perhaps challenging to US intelligence well I would place that category of information in in the broad category of open source information and there is there's been an explosion in clandestinely acquired information there's been a much larger explosion in open source and that is becoming proportionately a much more important slice of the overall intelligence picture and one of the challenges for the intelligence community is to appropriately leverage information which we don't have to collect secretly clandestinely and things that we can get openly we ought to get openly when we had to devote our scarce resources you know to go after those things in the clandestine role that can only be be acquired that way so I my answer is yes I think that this is potentially a very significant stream of information will become more significant over time both as it comes to the intelligence community directly and as it comes mediated through newspapers and others who make use of this sort of popularly generated information but and I don't think that the intelligence community should see this in any way as being competition it's a it's a blessing actually if we have the the the analytic means to actually employ it usefully and let's just devote those resources that we can devote to clandestine collection in those areas where we absolutely need it question from a student next from a student where are we yes all the way in the back speaking of sneaky guided digital ad I'm sure you're familiar with the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iranian heavy element energy bilities and also with your experience in the Middle East what's your opinion of interaction between the CIA and mossad the Israeli Secret Service the question was what's repeat the very last sentence just in your experience what's your experience of interaction between yourself so the cool the questioner prefaced by referring to the Stuxnet virus which actually we talked about last week that was something that damaged the Iranian nuclear development program but the question actually that was asked was what is the relationship between US intelligence and the Israeli intelligence service the Mossad with regard to Stuxnet it's really not a whole lot I think that I can I can add to that perhaps it is what they what they say it is who was behind it yeah I certainly don't know in that in the broad context of us relations between CIA and the Mossad obviously there are such relations both side is I think it's very capable and the areas that it focuses on I think it's a it's a very capable espionage service I have dealt sometimes about their analytic capabilities but but I think they're very good espionage service they're they're tough guys they're very focused guys I fought with them on many occasions but with regard to you know whether I think maybe you didn't ask the question that I think maybe what might this Stuxnet have been a product of cooperation between the CIA and and the both side all I can say is the truth which is I don't know okay question from a non-student yes sir okay question is asking preface thing the US has always been a step ahead in terms of technology and intelligence do you think that's still the case and I'll broaden it to ask whether what depending on your answer what effect does that have on the need for clandestine services if the technology gap is narrowing does that what does that do for the need for clandestine services it's a it's a very very broad question and if you talked about the relative technical sophistication and whether we have a critical advantage over others that very much depends on the context within which you're you're speaking and so there there's the whole broad realm of the commercial world which encompasses most of technology and others more competent they would have to would have to address where we stand I think it relative to do other nations but but clearly I mean that these the technical expertise is something which recognizes no borders and their tremendous pockets of technical expertise that are that are in foreign countries that comes here ours goes there so but but insofar as technology is employed in military and intelligence operations as a practical matter clearly we have we have a fairly significant advantage particularly over the people who our current and most likely adversaries that that's a gap that I think is going to narrow over time I think that's that's just inevitable and so much of what we do in the government realm necessarily leverages capability it's not developed at DARPA or strictly within the government but which is actually being developed in the wider commercial wood and then adapted for intelligence and military uses so for all those reasons we're going to see that that that gap narrow the what what helps to keep the u.s. in a relatively preponderate position in military intelligence somebody because the amount of resources that we are devoting to it which of course is was head and shoulders above everybody else with regard to this question you posed Ralph which i think is an extremely important one and that is you know given the sophistication of technology now and the technologies that are being put to intelligence collection intelligence analysis what does that really do to the relative position of espionage and I guess what I would say is that espionage remains tremendously important because there at the end of the day it's people who make decisions at the end of the day whatever technical protections you put in place is probably a person some place who can help you to defeat it you know you you may have tremendous protections in place that will keep anybody from successfully launching an internet-based strike against against your computers and your information systems and yet there's that one individual inside the organization who is in the right place who can compromise the whole thing that's an intelligence target so I don't see espionage becoming any less important over time I just think the context in which it takes place and the targets against which it is directed will change and evolve I gotta ask you a lighter note question for a second the more I listen to you talk the more disappointed I become as I come to realize that I don't think you ever had a pen that you could push a button and it would turn into a laser-guided missile and I'll bet you never drove a car that that had a smoke screen in the back of it and you know and and I'll bet you never met any of those girls and gold figure either I mean this is a tremendous disappointment to me yeah you know tell me I'm wrong yeah I I wish I could tell you that you but somehow they never got an answer and they kept getting lost and as for the girls well I don't want to go there alright we're up to a question from a student question from a student no yes good question for the students in the audience how do you get how it was a transition you made from undergraduate and graduate world to the CIA yeah I was I was telling students earlier today that I wish I had an inspiring story for them about how I'd always had this desire to go off and serve my country in the until in the intelligence service and finally I had the chance where you were recruited in the shadows oh yeah exactly I was recruited you know Dartmouth College and you know one of the deans you know came up to me one day and said man no it's nothing like that I stumbled into it is what it was I was looking for a job somewhere in the foreign affairs realm because I was studying it in graduate school and I didn't have any any particular preferences I thought you know that maybe I'd go into the Diplomatic Service I said wandered in and applied to be an analyst at the CIA and the next thing I knew I was a completely different branch of the CIA and life took his course the next thing I knew it was 27 years later I sort of wandered into it so as I say I wasn't smart enough to really plan my future but I was smart enough to recognize a good opportunity when I stumbled over would you do it again if you had to do it oh absolutely absolutely honest I twenty seven years I spent in CIA I really never had a bad day I had a lot of bad things happen to me but but but this is a seduction in the work there it's only word that I can I can use to describe it it's just something that just just grips you about it and I couldn't believe people were paying me to do this I really couldn't that said you know when it was time for me to leave I felt it was it was time for me to leave I've done all the things that that I really wanted to do didn't have any regrets wasn't hoping that I'd be called back someday and I'm glad that I've had the opportunity to do a lot of the other things that you know I you just don't have the opportunity to do in that kind of a restricted life life from the CIA is very restricted in certain respects as you can as you can well imagine but one thing I did want to mention I wanted to mention to the students and having failed to do that I'd like to mention it now and that's some guidance for young people who want to get into CIA wanted a life in intelligence and once again this is you know life in the digital age if they want to apply they have to apply online and you know so God knows how many applications go in and they just you know go into the system and frankly it's like dropping something into a black hole in many respects and so it's really really important to network it really is that it makes a huge difference if there is somebody not to go and necessarily advocate on your behalf but just to make sure that you get considered after your your application goes into this huge electronic mall and I have students who come to me all the time and asking for guidance and I try to give them as much time as I can and they've been many instances where I've sent their names and their resumes forward not to say that I knew these people that I could necessarily vote for them but seems it like a good person take a look I full assurances that at least somebody is going to take a good look at that application and make a determination as to whether they should go to to the next step so I would strongly encourage people to do that question from a non-student yes ma'am okay question is asking about Iran to what extent would you imagine the US intelligence service playing a role in trying to do something about Iran's development of a nuclear weapon yeah I would agree that Iran is very difficult challenging environment within which to operate in a large part because it's not a very welcoming place certainly for official Americans no official American presence there and we saw it happen for instance to a couple of hikers simple hikers you know who were three of them who were wandering along the border there and in court Astana and ended up being guests of the the Iranian state for for many months so so yes it's a very difficult place to operate in as far as the role the US intelligence may be playing and trying to keep the Iranians from acquiring a nuclear weapon I have no idea and I couldn't say anything if I did did you ever have a moment in your career as the author of the ethics documents for the trainees back at the farm was there ever a moment in your life in your career when you sat down and you really had it was blurry who the black hats were and who the white hats were in in that fundamental sense no absolutely not God knows I have disagreed with aspects of US foreign policy on many occasions and over many years so it's not as though I think that my country is infallible by by any stretch but I do believe that you know we are well-intentioned and that the u.s. by and large is a force for good in the world and that this is a responsibility that we've taken on our shoulders so that even if we made nothing but mistakes in the past even if the CIA was a thoroughly corrupt organization I would say that it needs to be reinvented and we need to start all over again because this is the responsibility that we have as a country so no I never that fundamental sense of if I thought that maybe we've wandered off the path if there are things that I've been engaged in I've questioned absolutely but in that fundamental sense yeah well you know you know the sort of this was that the spy who came in from the cold you know was is this this conversation between the the British spy and them and the Russian and they're really not sure who are the good guys you know at the end of the day I've never had any qualms about that whatsoever okay question from a student sir question from a student yes ma'am okay question is about drones does the use of drones by the United States give other nations an excuse in effect to use military action against others does it say if the US does it they can do it I'm not aware it's not a particularly instance of that that would come to mind I would say though that the use of drones is to borrow that the same word that it can be a little bit seductive you know I think there's been a lot of controversy for instance about this the strike against Anwar Awlaki who was an American citizen radical Muslim cleric who left the United States went to Yemen and was first preaching propaganda encouraging people to to engage in violence against the United States and against Americans and then apparently took on an operational rule in the context of the underwear bomber as a matter of fact and ultimately was struck apparently by a missile from a drone in Yemen and this is a fairly extraordinary circumstance in virtue of the fact that he was an American citizen and and should that have made a difference I think the fact that these when these operations take place via drones I think they are there somehow seen is more antiseptic and people don't have as many moral qualms about them I think if it were somebody with a pistol on the ground shooting this individual I think morally it might be an equivalent act and yet we would look at it very differently I think many of us so yeah I worry a little bit that you know this drone war which sort of enables us to operate you know literally literally at 30,000 feet above the ground where no one can touch us and where we can sit act with impunity may cause us not to reflect in as much as perhaps we ought to at the end of the day I don't I don't have any moral qualms about what may have happened with mr. Awlaki but but I do see a certain moral hazard there with regard to drone something that we have to be conscious of without asking you to comment on whether the US has or uses drones are there other countries that have or uses or use drones in the same the same way that we've been talking about here tonight is there any competition essentially of them yeah yeah you know I I often think about there was this old song of these to sing in music houses in London back during the Victorian days and thank you were that old huh no you'd be surprised people often are and it went for in the free in the end we have got the maxim gun and they have not so victory in England when they were fighting colonial wars they knew at the end of the day that they they had preponderance military technology that his native peoples could never resist and that at the end of the day whatever you know tactical reverses they might suffer that they were going to they were always going to win out because they had the maxim gun and sometimes I feel like we're in that position now we have capabilities that really no one else can respond to you know at least in the places where there were they're being employed you know you're terrorists really can't respond very effectively in kind with with with drones whatever whatever purpose they're being put to so yeah I think that that's a clear qualitative advantage that we have the only other people that I know I mean lots of other countries number of other countries obviously they have the technology to do it if they chose to the Israelis use use drones quite effectively and primarily in the territories but they're the only ones that I'm aware of offhand who make active the use of drones in an active intelligence collection and and paramilitary okay before we say thanks to Bob Grenier let me tell you about our next program if I may two weeks from tonight two weeks on Wednesday April 4th we'll meet a man whose job it is to question to challenge what the CIA is doing Eric Anderson is a career intelligence officer who serves on what the CIA calls its red cell so to be sure you don't miss word about programs like these if you'd like to get on the list put your name and your email address clearly on one of those bright orange sheets out the lobby on their way out this evening now please let's thank our speaker tonight Robert J you

Channel: University of Delaware

Views: 16,537

Rating: 4.8526316 out of 5

Keywords: HUMan, INTelligence, digital, age, Global, Agenda, University, of, Delaware, UD, UDel, CIA, Robert, Grenier, espionage

Id: bfIxarRLMDo

Length: 88min 59sec (5339 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2012