Policing the Past: The CIA and the Landscape of Secrecy - Richard Aldrich

hello good evening it's wonderful to have a full house again tonight thank you very much for coming my name is Karina Oba I'm a historian of modern Europe and I'm organizing this lecture series I would very much like to thank the head of the Board of Trustees charts emoni and of course our director Robert dygraf who is here with some his wife Pia tonight and who has helped to set this all up and I'm very indebted to him on the last occasion we heard Neil Ferguson talk about international crises and tonight Richard Aldridge is going to tackle the CIA Professor Aldridge took his PhD at Cambridge he is professor of international security studies at Varick University and is currently running a big project 11 project called landscapes of secrecy he has written many many books one is called GCHQ and for those who are not British GCHQ is the equivalent of the American NSA he also wrote a book and that's his most recent book on British Prime Minister's and their work was the intelligence service so I think it can't get more topical than that and please welcome professor Aldridge good evening and thank you for the very kind introduction and thank you to the thank you to those who invited me director trustees member of the Institute members of the Institute ladies and gentlemen this lecture series is supposed to be about the impact of the past upon the present and and I've chosen for my subject this evening the CIA and the landscape of secrecy because there are few organizations in the world that are more conscious of the impact of the past upon their presence and indeed on the future of that agency the CIA is one of the first organizations to understand this very thoroughly and to try and take some control of its history and to try and shape those narratives in ways that I'll try and explain this evening I've been working on this subject for quite some time and about five years ago I received an invitation from the central intelligence agency to go and talk about this project inside their headquarters in Langley Virginia on the outskirts of Washington the CIA headquarters is not difficult to find it has a large sign outside saying something like top-secret intelligence headquarters not many intelligence agencies have that and it's a to some extent a symptom of the CIA's relative openness I'd also been there before some way was quite relaxed I was confident I could find it but I'm not a very good navigator I miss the front entrance I went down some kind of mysterious side road and there were lots of signs saying prohibited turned back do not come down here but because I got my invitation letter on the passenger seat I felt confident on I kept from leaving on through the danger signs until I appeared a barrier in the middle of this leafy forest and out of the forest emerged predictably men in black men with guns lots of guns who wanted to know what I was doing here and I explained that I was giving a lecture inside the headquarters they started to make phone calls because they were making phone calls I thought it would be a good idea to get my mobile phone out and ring my friends and explain that I was temporarily delayed and as I started to press the buttons the men in black with guns started to get a bit agitated and there was some shouting and anyway it was fine and eventually it was all sorted out I made my way inside the building and and gave a lecture to her a very well informed and appreciative audience the most interesting thing that I discovered inside the CIA headquarters was the CIA Museum really excellent museum served by an excellent museum staff and working in parallel with a large CIA history staff what is this museum for it's not a museum that ordinary mortals can visit because it's inside that compound it's secret it's a secret music it has two functions firstly it's there to do internal communications it's there for the CIA's own staff as the motto explains it's there to inform instruct and inspire it's also there for external communications in other words this building is continually visited from other people from inside the bureaucracy inside Washington be from the State Department people from the White House and it's there to project the history of the CIA a particular narrative and you can see how important this is because next door to the CIA Museum is the CIA gift shop not joking a really good gift shot and I am the proud possessor of a pair of CIA pajamas with the logo joking aside actually what this shows us is the CIA takes history very seriously he understands the impact of the past upon the present should historians be interested in the CIA I'm a historian of intelligence so of course I'm I'm interested in the history of the CIA and there are specialist historians who do this stuff pretty much non-stop that they're rather sad people there they're little bit like train spotters they like their detail and they write what some people have described as regimental histories they write narrative institutional histories of the CIA Mossad KGB but I'm not talking about those sorts of historians should mainstream historians working on the big questions of American foreign policy US domestic politics in the 20th century should those historians take an interest in the CIA I want to argue that they should because I think the the idea of the CIA has become symptomatic of much more than the agency the idea of the CIA has become symbolic of some of the biggest questions in American foreign policy questions of isolationism versus intervention ISM questions of whether there should be a secretive presidential foreign policy or a more open foreign policy made by Congress made by American public opinion so you know things like iran-contra for example most importantly the conflicts between now all security imperatives during the war on terror versus American core values issues like secret prisons issues like rendition issues like torture in fact if you hear an an American intellectual in fact any intellectual talk about American foreign policy you count the seconds down until they mention the CIA you count the mint the seconds down until they mention things like Iran in 1953 Guatemala in 1954 Chile in 1973 the CIA is symbolic of something much bigger this is understood by intellectuals it's also understood by politicians one of the first politicians to really get this was Ronald Reagan Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail in 1980 used the CIA to signify toughness to send out the message of make America great again Reagan on the hustings said vote for me and I will unleash the CIA and he wasn't talking about CIA analysts with carefully sharpened pencils over the last 10 years I've been fortunate to be a member of a team my own secret team who've been researching the CIA we've been looking not at the CIA as an organization we've not been writing another regimental history what we've been looking at is how the American public came to know about and understand the history of one it's one of its most secret organizations so instead of writing another narrative history of the CIA what we really wanted to do was an archaeology of the idea of the CIA in the public mind the other thing we were trying to do was actually escape the CIA's history police the CIA is a very open organization the CIA has released millions of pages of documents but somehow those documents are never quite the ones you want and you're conscious that while they've released millions of documents there are many many more millions of documents which they haven't yet released and what we were determined to do was to try and find some documents about the CIA that are kind of escaped accidentally where did we go to find those accidental documents we went to the archives of film studios in Arizona and California we looked in the archives of lawyers who had represented renegade memoir writers people who former officers of the CIA who turned against the CIA and had tried to publish illegal memoirs and had fought battles in the courts and we went to look at the private papers of journalists people like Ben Bradley editor of The Washington Post who was always suspected by the owner of The Washington Post Katharine Graham of being a little bit too close to the CIA so we this was an effort really to to redefine the laboratory when you're looking at the CIA the CIA is an object but almost uniquely across the whole realm of the humanities it's an object that you're studying which at the same time controls the data and we wanted to kind of escape that escape that problem so anyway what did our what did our research project discover one of the remarkable things that we discovered was that the first people to write a history of the CIA with a KGB there was a battle between the KGB and the Stasi to write the first history of the CIA the KGB effort is on the is on the left here cloak and Dola on the right the starties effort checkbook and pistol wonderful you can see the vibe that's coming through here the the winning book the book that came first was written by an Australian communist with the help of the KGB it's called cloak and dollar war it was published in 1953 only six years after the creation of the CIA and although it's although it's slanted although it's selective it's actually a very good book it tells you an awful lot about the CIA's operations in its first five or six years its institutions its secret operations into the Ukraine and Poland it's psychological warfare operations how did the CIA and and organizations like the British mi6 respond to the first wave of CIA history they fired a back they wrote books about the KGB and the Stasi sometimes their own books sometimes books that were essentially sponsored memoirs of defectors and so although these secret services were individually trying to protect their own secrets collectively they were spilling thousands of the secrets into the public domain in this in this extraordinary fashion even in the 1950s and the 1960s a historian and journalist called Frances stoner Saunders wrote a famous book a few years ago about the cultural cold war in that book she showed how the CIA saw the cold war not just as a military and political competition but a competition between different ways of life and as part of that competition the CIA had funded all sorts of cultural activities they'd funded writers they'd funded musicians they'd even funded they'd funding orchestras and ballet troupes this was a cultural battle this was a battle of the books a battle of the book festivals what we discovered was the cutting edge of this battle of the books was the Secret Service's writing the history of other Secret Service's in the course of the cultural Cold War but the battle of the books was not just a battle of the books between East and West it was also a battle of the Beltway a battle within Washington in 1961 the CIA's covert action program suffered significant exposure because of the Bay of Pigs the failed attempt to overthrow Castro one of the reasons reportedly that this operation failed was about a week before the operation took place a water on the New York Times called Todd Schultz there was the New York Times star Latin America correspondent wrote an article about the forthcoming operation in the New York Times reportedly Kennedy was not very pleased the editor of the New York Times said we'll try and make it a bit smaller and Castro probably won't read it I think Castro probably did read it but in any case the operation was badly penetrated what's more interesting is that Kennedy was sensitive about the failure of this operation Kennedy was sensitive about his public reputation how this would be received and so the white hut the White House staff people like Arthur Schlesinger got together with journalists including tad Schultz to write books about the Bay of Pigs and the purpose of those books was to shift the blame for the Bay of Pigs away from the White House towards the CIA and towards Kennedy's CIA director Allen Dulles who is the chap there on the left so there was a blame-shifting operation so poor old Allen Dulles has been fired as the CIA director in the wake of the Bay of Pigs his own president is encouraging books that point the finger of blame at him and at the same time the KGB produce another of these wretched books a very bad biography of Allen Dulles how does Allen Dulles respond he doesn't take this lying down in fact he spends the next Allen Dulles dies in 1966 he spends the next four or five years almost constantly as a publicity machine he appears on TV he writes articles in the newspapers and extraordinarily for a recently retired intelligence chief he writes memoirs and books he writes to a memoir and something which is very close to a memoir and one of the most important messages in all this is that no CIA covert operation takes place without the approval of the White House see the finger of blame being pointed back in the opposite direction what Alan does was probably unaware of was that he was opening an entire new frontier in the Battle of the books about the CIA because if the director of the CIA can write memoirs so can everybody else and between 1966 and 76 an era really characterized by the collapse of the Cold War consensus this is the era of Watergate this is the era of Vietnam this is the era of the oil shock quite a number of CIA officers who had become disenchanted wrote renegade memoirs wrote memoirs that were not approved or by the CIA and the CIA devoted considerable resources to trying to police those memoirs extended court cases extended attempts to police the past that was the short term strategy the long term strategy was the CIA started to assist other CIA directors in writing more memoirs even people like dick Helms one of the more famous Cold War directors who said repeatedly I will never write a memoir eventually wrote a memoir with the assistance of the CIA history staff and this is simply accelerated if we think about the last three presidencies the presidency of Clinton of Bush and also of Obama the majority of CIA directors from that period have written memoirs the longest-serving director of that period George Tenet has written a particularly famous memoir and these are critically important in shaping the way in which the public understand the CIA George Tenet memoir got to number two in the bestseller charts it was picked slightly to his shrine growl it was picked to the number one post by the seventh and final volume of the Harry Potter series and actually that shows you how widely these things are read and how important they are in terms of shaping the public understanding of CIA history Harry Potter points us in the direction of perhaps the most important battleground of CIA history CIA history as depicted in film CIA history as depicted by Hollywood in 1991 a film director called Oliver Stone made a film about the JFK assassination called JFK this was a fascinating film it was a mixture of fact fiction and also conspiracy theory and it implicated both the CIA and the FBI in the assassination of JFK and it reverberated strongly on the American public consciousness in fact there are a few better examples of the way in which the past has reverted powerfully on the present for the CIA because the following year Congress responding to public concern passed something called the JFK assassination record an assassination record act which required all federal agencies that still had records relating to the assassination to release this was a historic moment for the agency because it's the first time in almost 50 years the CIA had lost control of its history it had lost control of its records up until this point although the CIA had released records those were records that it had itself Declassified and decided to release now another organization was in control of that release and the agency had little or no veto thousands and thousands of records were released but the CIA did not want released and indeed that powerful process is still ongoing and more records of being released even as I speak the CIA learnt its lesson as that record release accelerated in the early 1990s they thought what can we do the CIA responded by appointing a liaison officer to Hollywood as you can imagine there was some competition within the agency to fill this particular role the brief is really interesting the brief was really to support filmmakers in producing more accurate films more realistic films about the CIA and if we think about subsequent films that feature the CIA the Good Shepherd for example which focused on the early Cold War revisited some of the territory of people like James Jesus angle turned a lot of the debate about that film within the agency in critical reviews amongst the public was the extent to which that was a realistic representation to what extent was this film an analog of reality it was real concern to do a sort of genuine reconstruction I don't think there are many post modernist on the CIA history stuff and that process has continued films continued to receive significant historical support including this film 0.30 released in 2012 thousands of pages of hitherto very recently highly classified documents released for this film this was controversial the film was held back a bit because of the American presidential elections it was released in 2012 it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture in 2013 he did not win the Best Picture Oscar it lost to another film called Argo which was also about the CIA and it also had significant support in its making so as you can see the the landscape of secrecy and uncy cracy the the historical narrative of the CIA has been extremely contested and has continual reverberation continual reverberation of the past upon the present what is the role of the academic historian in this controversial landscape I want to talk about the role of one particular historian one particular he's I'm a distinguished historian called Richard immerman who is a professor at Temple University in 1980 Richard was a graduate student writing a doctoral dissertation about American policy towards Guatemala he was focusing on the CIA sponsored coup in Guatemala in 1954 unlike a lot of doctoral students moving towards the end of their dissertation he was beginning to worry about prospects for future employment and he thought it would be a good idea to write an article showcasing his findings which he did and he sent it off to one of America's most prominent prominent academic journals a few months later he got a letter back from the editor conveying the views of the referees that this was an excellent article and eminently worthy of publication the editor reported that the editorial board also thought very highly of the article but they weren't going to publish it because to publish this article would be in the words of the editor too dangerous I'm glad to say another journal very eminent published the article richard immerman went from strength to strength and a quarter of a century later in 2007 he's sitting in his office at Temple University and the phone rings the people ringing him up are a relatively new organization called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was established in 2005 in response to perceived intelligence failures around 9/11 and particularly the acrimony following the intelligence failures around Iraq and weapons of mass destruction in 2003 the phone call was to ask if Richard immerman would take leave of absence from his post and come to Washington and become the assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards the methodology cop the analytical standards cop for the entire intelligence agency for all the intelligence agencies and I think it's really fascinating that a moment of existential crisis for the intelligence community about analysis about estimates they turn to a diplomatic historian to restore confidence in their analytical standards what are the future challenges for intelligence historians moving into this difficult and contested terrain we're not all going to be offered a job in the DNI historians journalists intelligence analysts are to some extent interested in the same questions about the contemporary history of the 20th century even the contemporary history of the early 21st century and the intelligence agencies of the United States have together gathered extraordinary material which will answer some of the most important questions about that period of history between them the CIA the DIA the National Security Agency the FBI certainly have a transcript of every word ever spoken on the telephone by yasser arafat they probably have a transcript of pretty much every word spoken by Colonel Gaddafi they have quite a lot of the words spoken by the French president Jacques Chirac we know this because they were reported to george w bush in real time because Sherratt was often saying very rude things about President Bush and President George W Bush enjoyed these very much and of course we have the phone calls of Angela Merkel the Chancellor of Germany only one of her phones apparently this is good news and also very bad news because the volume of this qualitatively this material is incredible quantitatively it's frightening nobody is going to attack this material with the traditional historical techniques of a notebook and a pencil in fact the National Security Agency America's largest intelligence agency in the 1970s was producing 30 tons of paper a day now as it's difficult to imagine what 30 tons of paper looked like but I've worked out that it would take me beyond retirement would take me the rest of my working life to read 30 tons of paper analyze that stuff and turn it into books and journal articles if I did that I could write the history of one day in the life of the National Security Agency actually confronts us with this stuff confronts us with great opportunities but also great challenges we need to learn new techniques as some people are already learning new techniques this is Dana priest an investigative journalist on the Washington Post she won a Pulitzer Prize for investigating the story of secret prisons in Europe in November 2005 and her most recent book top secret America examines the growth of secret security institutions in the United States the data for that book came from scraping the internet and the data was so vast that she used analytical programs borrowed from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to examine that material Donna also learns from spy fiction when she meets her sources she rolls her phones she borrows her friends cars she meets people in underground car parks I think historians are also going to have to learn some of these detective techniques in fact some of them already are because many of these documents that we want are missing they're hidden and in some cases even the fact that they're hidden is also hidden a few years ago America's of America's most important intelligence historians Mathew aid made a visit to the National Archives the US National Archives are just north of Washington DC alongside the University of Maryland a matthew aid is a forensic investigator he's the ultimate historical detective matthew aid first visited the US National Archives when he was twelve years old he understands documents he was going back to the National Archives to look at some records which he'd looked at five years before because he's that kind of methodical exhaustive and he couldn't see them he couldn't see them he was told they were classified so he asks for some more records that he saw five years ago and he couldn't see those either and he asked why he couldn't see them and why they were classified and he was told that reason was classified and what actually what he'd uncovered was a significant program of secretly reclassifying records that had been opened to historians over previous decades not only did he discover this program he generated public pressure and brought brought that program to an end similarly in the United Kingdom a historian called David Anderson who works on Imperial history was looking at records on Britain's colonial dominance of Kenya was looking at American records here British records and also records in Africa and again he realized there was something missing okay there were documents that were classified but there were other documents that weren't even recorded as classified a large volume of documents just seemed to be missing what David Anderson finally uncovered through ruthless detective work was that the British Foreign Office had developed a secret base north of London called hands Lake Park a kind of gulag archipelago for secret documents that were so secret that the British government didn't even want to admit that they were secret and after a series of court cases these documents were finally released what we're learning here is the detective work the procession the methodological expertise of people like Richard immerman people like Matthew aid people like David Anderson is really really important and what I want to say by way of conclusion it really is that in the last 20 historians have that accuracy that sense of detective work has not really been prioritized and privileged historians have tended instead to prioritize theoretical sophistication Derrida Foucault the CIA actually wrote a very interesting paper on Foucault but nevertheless I would actually argue that the value of intelligence history and intelligence historians lies somewhere else in a world of declining trusted institutions declining trusts in banks politicians even the media I would argue faith in historians and particularly those positivist values of accuracy and reporting and objectivity has never been more important those values that expertise is opening up a whole new role for historians because traditionally we've tended to think of oversight and accountability as something done by other people the oversight the accountability of the intelligence community historically has been done by lawyers inspectors general and also by Committees of politicians on Capitol Hill over the last decade or so that that business of accountability and oversight has been expanding we're starting to see a sort of ambient accountability because of those people doing oversight have been joined by people like Dan a priest investigative journalists campaigning lawyers particularly whistleblowers and leakers like Edward Snowden and and even ordinary citizens gathering the serial numbers of aircraft at the end of airfields in places like Romania and Switzerland and all exchanging information over the Internet and I would argue that a late a big to that team is intelligence historians intelligence historians are increasingly part of the oversight and accountability body for our intelligence communities and they're very skillful ones at that understandably perhaps the agency has been fascinated by the impact of the past upon their own present Anna's keepers of Secrets it's also understandable that they've sought to place their history for precisely these reasons we need as historians to hone our over our own forensic skills and improve our analytical techniques and be alert to historical deceptions because they are out there if the CIA are the policemen of the past perhaps historians should remember that they are the detectives of the past also the detectors of the present and perhaps the detectors of the future thank you thank you so much for fulfilling the brief of the lectures so brilliantly and and telling the public what kind of problems we are facing in the archives and I'm sure you have lots of questions now so can you please wait until the microphone it's close to you and then just get up and tell me you name yeah recently independent lens put out a documentary on the shadow world of the military and the problem seems to be corruption you seem to differ with that Robert McNamara came to Princeton and said the intelligence on the what was it the in Vietnam was focused on the Tonkin Bay the independent lens said that the war in Iraq Afghanistan Libya and somewhere else were all started on false pretences to the purpose of economic continuation to the defense contractors and I have information in here that 80% of CIA agents are embedded in about 17 top defense contractors also 64% of all revenues tax revenues to the government go to the military so this is about money also Jack Kennedy was going to well my question is about the robbery and just what your reply the the overall Jack Kennedy supposedly because the Bay of Pigs incident was going to reorganize the CIA so my question is that the problem with the CIA is seems to be that it's been privatized and the corruption of the military-industrial complex which was worn by President Eisenhower you you correctly refer to President Eisenhower and they've been concerns about the military-industrial complex for for over half a century I don't think privatization necessarily don't think you have to have private cell privatization necessarily to have corruption but the problem that the CIA now spends more than half its budget on outsourcing intelligence means that those problems become worse and it's not necessarily just corruption it's just that the an institutional and economic momentum builds up behind those contracts it's in a lot of people's vested interest that those security contracts continue that that money continues to flow and in those circumstances it's difficult to question the sort of threat estimates that justify that expenditure so in a word I yes I agree but I'd also qualify that because if we look at some of those moments in which intelligence reporting led to war Iraq in 2003 for example yes there was political pressure to frame those intelligence reports in a particular way but actually the majority of intelligence analysts not only in the United States but also in Britain in Israel in Denmark remarkably in France and Germany countries that did not want to join the war also believed that Iraq had WMD in fact the only pretty much the only country that got it right was Canada we don't think of Canada as one of the world's top spying organizations George W Bush said to the Canadian Prime Minister Korea let me send my intelligence analysts to Canada and let me brief you and Creta has said no I've got my own intelligence analysts say me the raw data and my analysts will have a look and they concluded that there was no evidence of WMD so so actually yes I think there's corruption in places there's political pressure there's biased but there was also genuine intelligence failure thank you the the the CIA beginning in 47 and up until relatively recently had sort of a the picture that in people's minds was as you said people with sharp pencils and officers that were in various places in the world who got agents to pass them information and so on in the past 20 years or so a much darker picture of the CIA side of the CIA has emerged which involves torture and rendering of people and so on my question is sort of two parts which is first was it always the case but we just didn't know this this darker side or is this really since sort of 9/11 or the last couple of decades and if so how does the CIA feel about this new if it's a new role in terms of intelligence gathering or new method of intelligence gathering the CIA has always done this and right from the outset in fact the George Kennan the close associations with Princeton was one of the people who drew up the initial interaction in 1948 between covert action and the CIA rather a messy initial melding of CIA analysts and and covert operatives but the dark side has always been there it was difficult to control those covert operations during the period of George Kennan because George Kennan could never make the argument to the CIA human resources office for more staff because the things he was trying to get staff for was so secret you couldn't tell the human resources off at what you anyway there's always been there this is clearly clearly during the Cold War covert action was high-profile but was a small proportion of what the CIA was spending its money on that has changed particularly since the particularly since 9/11 when Leon Panetta arrived as the director of the CIA for Obama he thought he thought he was taking over an analytical agency he thought he was taking over a bunch of people who read lots of languages and had sharp pencils and as he said I discovered almost immediately when I was briefed by Michael Hayden its predecessor I was taking over in combat a combatant command in the war against terror and one of my first meetings was with the chief of Massa and what the chief of Mossad wanted to do was talk about how they were going to kill more people how do CIA personnel feel about this the CIA is a really fascinating place I i I've genuinely enjoyed all my interactions many interactions with CIA personnel it's such a varied place there are pools of extraordinary expertise extraordinary intelligence there are pools of people with slightly lower intelligence there is also every political that's right across the political spectrum now some of the more famous a covert action operatives Chiefs during the Cold War were virtually communists themselves well federalist socialists they've had people on the so there's every possible political persuasion and the debates within the agency itself have been as animated even more animating perhaps than the debates on the outside in the American wider political constituency that's two women okay I was in Turkey a few years ago and was quite amazed at the progressive people there who really seemed to extrapolate from the Hollywood image of this guy with a six-pack who's omnipotent and you know can do cartwheels from skyscraper to skyscraper in their admiration not admiration their fear of the CIA as this wonderfully omnipotent organization that could do anything anywhere and I was wondering if you think that that is concomitant with the culture war which is to win hearts and minds throughout the world or if it's antithetical to it or if both images are are coordinated and and work together there's no doubt that for both the British Secret Service mi6 and for the CIA these films helped recruit in fact senior mi6 officers in Britain will say without even breaking a smile that their biggest asset is still James Bond because everybody has seen one of these films everybody believes that James Bond is invincible and it's remarkable how often volunteer agents who are genuinely risking their lives and their lives of their families to work for Western intelligence agencies will will mention James Bond Jason Bourne Jack Bauer so in that sense these things have a fictive representation of the past has an operational relevance to the present but that material some of it real some of it fictional some of it Hollywood some of it novels some of it newspaper also has had a damaging effect on places like the Middle East South Asia for exile because those cultures which were always because of their own past slightly prone to conspiracy theory have become even more prone to conspiracy theory really for the last 50 years whenever there was a a major crisis in India maybe even a flood or a famine it would be hours before somebody in a newspaper would blame the CIA or the KGB and and you know one of the best books about the Iraq war a book called fiasco recounts how another book also also also life in the Emerald City these books recount how replete iraq wars as a society with conspiracy theory conspiracy around the CIA almost everybody in iraq would tell you that the CIA was working with Mossad to steal all the hospital equipment in Iraq and ship it back to Israel that's why there was no obviously why there was no hospital couldn't in in in Iraq and and and they people on the street would tell you that the CIA were deliberately shipping suicide bombers into Baghdad to make the Iraqis look stupid I mean these things circulated as as fact inside so I would argue that the covert action delivers short-term benefits but in the long term there's all kinds of fallout there's all kinds of almost political pollution and how to evaluate the course of that I think a very difficult [Music] you're coming about Reagan's have involved in this campaign to unleash the CIA raises the question whether either of the two major exercises and attempting to get control of it first in the 70s with the Church Committee in the Senate and Jimmy Carter's presidency and then some 3040 years later with the reorganization of the intelligence agencies after 9/11 and the Iraq invasion whether either of those episodes have had any significant change on the culture on the sense of legal constraints or in the sense of competition with other agencies because the creation of the director for National Intelligence theoretically was creating another oversight mechanism that one has the sense the agency has done it's best to emasculate but what had been the the long-term changes that these two big exercises in institutional revamping have had in the long term I think it's a great question I actually think there are three there are three moments that you can point to in terms of that attempt to establish stronger oversight as you rightly say in in the 1970s in the wake of Watergate Vietnam there were inquiries led by Senator Church as many as eight committees at one point set up to oversee the intelligence agencies at the same time as part of that general reflection on Watergate Congress set up something called inspectors general these were experienced lawyers with a actually a roving mission that were set off inside American government agencies to find problems and in the 1970s Congress thought this would be going too far to set these lawyers loose inside the CIA the National Security Agency but after iran-contra in 1986 Congress thought again in 1989 entirely confident of my time but around 1989 Congress says actually now you're gonna have inspectors general the first inspector general inside the CIA was a Princeton lawyer call Fred hit and he was remarkably effective because he was a CIA operator he'd been a chief of station I think perhaps in Paris but he was also an experienced lawyer and very tough and in the space of seven years at the CIA he unleashed 400 investigations and depending on your point of view that's either a very good thing or a very bad thing and in the in the universe of accountability and it's very complex universe kind of ambient accountability we often forget about Inspector General's and inspector generals are really unique and fascinating part of CIA culture because during the period immediately after 9/11 when we have renditions when we have secret prisons when we have torture almost from the moment that suspects and captives are undergoing this process people from the inspector general's office are on their case so you can imagine if you're an interrogator you're interrogating people by day by night there's a blizzard of paperwork to complete from the inspector general's office I mean lots of countries around the world torture people but very few people have 400 lawyers looking over your shoulder as you're actually doing this an inquiry followed inquiry by 2008 they actually had to designate an entire building to accommodate all the lawyers and all the inquiries going on in to torture and render four million documents four million documents so there's accountability there exactly what it's very strange it's very strange and it's part of this internal war going on inside the CIA there are people of every political persuasion all sorts of different competences it's it's very democratic it's very fascinating so if you say that the issues of trust and accountability are falling in the hands of historians to what degree do you think you and other historians are being secretly monitored by National Intelligence that's a perfectly good question we know that the intelligence agencies have taken a very close interest in whistleblowers and leakers in journalists and also in history with we also in in historians I showed you a picture of a journalist called Danna priest who revealed secret prisons in November 2005 secret prisons that were maintained in Europe this revelation caused major transatlantic controversy because European states that were hosting these secret prisons all flying people to these secret prisons which was pretty much every European state did not like being outed in public and there was an exchange between the Europeans and the Americans and it went something like this European said this not this secret prison stuff is pretty nasty the Americans said well you help with this stuff we're giving you the intelligence to protect your own citizens so you're a bunch of hypocrites for criticizes and criticizing us in public for something you've helped us with in private and the Europeans replied yes but you didn't say it was going to be secret on a Tuesday and on the front page of The Washington Post on a Thursday you told us this was a secret operation and it's not and the outcome of those discussions between the Europeans and the Americans was firstly a serious retrenchment on the part of the George W Bush administration it's it's in 2006 that the terrorism policies changed not when a bomber arrives and part of that commitment was also to monitor not so much with journalists but also thus their sources and to get tough on their sources and the outcome of those conversations the outcome of pressure from Europe was that President Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers and leakers than all American presidents before his administration in that climate yes they are also monitoring historians I referred to a historian called Matthew aid who visited this building when he was 12 he has written the best history of the National Security Agency when he was typing that history on his computer he discovered that the American government had every word of that manuscript before it was even delivered to the publisher and this was of interest to me because at almost the same time I was writing a history about a year afterwards I was writing a history of the similar British intelligence agency I typed that book on a laptop that had been deliberately modified so it didn't connect to the Internet and I'm told that our signals intelligence agency GCHQ our most important and powerful intelligence agency was unaware that I was writing my book again depending on your point of view that's only they're a very good thing or a very bad thing I know this is more recent news but it just popped up mine on my newsfeed today probably because my phone knew I was coming to this lecture but I know from 2008 to 2011 the CIA lost an ornament inordinate amount of assets human assets due to technological failures of the way that basically they communicated with each other so I know this is I don't even know if you could call it history at this point because it's still so so recent but you can you say anything about that and the losses of human life and I and Iran and China in particular and how that is reverberating into the intelligence community today and then you know was it a a result of you know the CIA being you know from 2000 to 2008 less you know pencil and more paramilitary muscle yes the the CIA and other agencies have lost for nominal quantities of Secrets over the last five years the Snowden leaks are the most famous but there have been other leaks of that kind penetrations of security programs looking at the background of people who are now serving as officers and agents most alarmingly the loss of hacking tools not very long ago the whole world suffered an attack by ransomware a virus called wanna cry which attack computers right across the world that attack was traced back to North Korea but actually North Korea was able to do that because what they'd done was they'd reassemble some parts which had been stolen from hacking programs in the West so all these the problem of keeping secrets is the number one for all intelligence agencies around the world there's a search everywhere for what we might call hyper secrecy and the place they are going to find that hyper secrecy is the past they are abandoning technology they are abandoning anything which has an electronic signature the secret ink is really in to make secret ink you need a number of things one of them is pigeon poo pigeon poo is is the hot thing inside intelligence agencies now and if you want to produce a document that is very secret what a lot of intelligence agencies now have is a room full of typewriters typewriters don't give off an electronic signature and at the end of the room there's a little wood burner there's a little furnace because when you've typed the message on your typewriter you take the ribbon and you burn the river and if you burn the ribbon then the only thing only way you can get that document is to see the document so this is this is going on all around the world and it's changing the way people operate it's yet to be seen if secret services can recover the thing which they treasure most which is secrecy something they associate with the historical past [Applause]

Channel: Institute for Advanced Study

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Id: ewfyMs_xmYs

Length: 66min 52sec (4012 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 05 2018