The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to...

good afternoon I'm David Ferriero the archivist of the United States and it's a pleasure to welcome you here to the National Archives in the William G McGowan theater this afternoon and special welcome to those of you who are joining us on our YouTube channel today we'll hear from David priests for behind the scenes look at the president's daily top-secret intelligence briefings after the program he'll sign copies of his book outside the archives store one floor up but before we heard from David I'd like to tell you about two other programs coming up in the theater next week on Wednesday June 7th at noon historian Charles raptly will tell us about his latest book Herbert Hoover in the White House the ordeal of the presidency and on Thursday June 8th at 7 p.m. we joined with the national capital planning commission in the National Park Service to present a panel discussion on memorials for the future designing a memorial for the 21st century to learn more about these and all of our public programs and exhibits consult our monthly calendar in print or online at archives.gov there are copies in the lobby as well as a sign-up sheet where you can receive it by regular mail or email and you'll also find brochures about other National Archives activities the book of secrets of today's talk is not the key to a secret treasure so a Nicholas Cage refers to the president's Daily Brief the highly classified intelligence summary delivered to the President of the United States every day David Priest himself a daily briefer for the president has interviewed every living president and vice president and others intimately involved with the production and delivery of what CIA officers simply called the book he traces of the history of the Daily Brief to the last days of World War two and focuses on the evolution of the document from Kennedy through the Obama administration's my notes say admirations instead of administrate great huh and it's forward to the president's Book of Secrets George HW Bush a former president and former director of the CIA wrote every experience with my daily book of secrets and with those who produced and briefed it reminded me how the president's Daily Brief stands out as something both uniquely American and yet underappreciated by the very people it helps to ultimately protect please help welcome David priest to our stage good afternoon I want to take you on a journey today a journey of all the modern presidents and their top-secret intelligence reports like the one pictured here with the hands of George W Bush this is a journey of sensibly about the president's Daily Brief the short daily document that's been presented to every president since Lyndon Johnson and in its earlier form to John F Kennedy that gives the president what the intelligence community thinks he needs to know that day about international affairs about national security to reduce the uncertainty inherent in the job ostensibly it's about that for that purpose the research for the book came from many sources one from the National Archives itself both the National Archives facilities here in the Washington area and the presidential libraries administered by the National Archives also had the opportunity to speak with and get input directly from a wide array of the president's Daily Brief customers and producers this includes all the living presidents all the living ex presidents I should say all the living ex vice presidents and most of the national security advisors CIA directors White House chiefs of staff and others but it's about a lot more than just this book that is presented to the president each day I'm going to tell you stories about intelligence successes and failures stories about foreign policy breakthroughs about national security crises and stories about presidential arrogance and presidential excellence it all begins more than 50 years ago with President John F Kennedy John F Kennedy was unlike his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower loved long stately meetings when he addressed foreign policy issues he did it with a series of National Security Council meetings with briefings hours long planned in some cases months in advance John F Kennedy did not play ball that way John F Kennedy wanted to have quick ad-hoc impromptu meetings he couldn't sit still according to his advisors long enough for even a short briefing much less hours long too key advisors recognized this early on one was the National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy he wrote a memo to the president in May 1961 laying this out very bluntly saying we can't get you to sit still this is a problem I haven't been able to catch you for more than a few minutes at a time the last few mornings even though that's what you said you wanted me to do he also had a military assistant Ted Clifton Ted Clifton was the de-facto intelligence support provider within the White House - John F Kennedy he was frustrated because he was the one who every morning had to try to make up for this and he would compile documents from the CIA from the State Department from the Defense Department all the national security bureaucracies he would pull those documents together and put them in a big stack for Kennedy to read and they would hope that during the day Kennedy would just get through those didn't happen the stack was sitting there unread so what Ted Clifton decided to do is call two of his contacts from the Central Intelligence Agency man named Huntington Sheldon and a man named dick layman this is a picture of dick layman here dick layman is known as mr. current intelligence at the CIA because of his role over the next few decades in the stories I'll be telling you dick layman and his boss ting Sheldon came into the White House and they watched Ted Clifton pull out of his briefcase report after report top secret at all heavy classified material but report after report from all of these agencies and he said I can't get through it all much less expect the president to get through it all what I need from you is one daily document that you pull together for us that has everything the president needs to know in it and nothing he doesn't that avoids all of the bureaucratic gobbledygook that these reports are full of that gets rid of all these classification markings the alphabet soup that appears at the top and bottom of a whole lot of heavily classified government documents oh and one other thing I'd like it to be small enough that he can just fold it put it in his breast coat pocket and carry it with him during the day because I know his style he's gonna want to read an item he'll get captivated by it run off to say something and then not get back to the document right away I want him to be able to refer back to it during the day dick layman smiled because he had seen the change in the Eisenhower administration to the kennedy administration and he had been talking about just such a document to his colleagues back at CIA so he was ready to go normally a bureaucracy would have real trouble with coming up with a new document for the President of the United States on short notice they turned it around within less than 24 hours they presented a dry run - Ted Clifton Ted Clifton liked it said let's do it the very next day was a Saturday they produced the first president's intelligence checklist this is a version from later in the administration as you can see it's not a very impressive document just some papers bound at the top but in it is the most secret information that the US government collects on national security issues Clifton presented Asst - John F Kennedy the first time at john f kennedy's least country estate in Middleburg virginia Glenora here's a shot of the swimming pool kennedy was sitting on the diving board between laps when Clifton approached him he handed him the new checklist told him what it was Kennedy flipped through it true to form didn't get through it put it aside went back to swimming laps but he was hooked and sure enough for the rest of his time in office John F Kennedy read the president's intelligence checklist with the acronym pickle why the CIA was known as the pickle factory for many years thereafter - based on it that is he told others in the government what to do based on what they received in the president's intelligence checklist this created a problem because at the beginning the president's intelligence checklist was going only to the president to the National Security Advisor and a few others at the White House it was very confusing for the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense to get a tasking from the president of United States you need to follow up on this they would say what's the background where did this come from it came from the president's intelligence checklist so six months later December 1961 Kennedy proved this going also to the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense there was one person excluded from the checklist however this became a problem two-and-a-half years later when President Kennedy lay dead in Dallas from Lee Harvey Oswald's bullets Vice President Johnson was suddenly President Johnson there was a problem he had never seen the president's intelligence checklist in fact there was no evidence he even knew it existed there had been one person who had tried to make him aware of it earlier in Kennedy's years that was declaiming himself he had recognized that three of the four statutory members of the National Security Council that is the president the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense were receiving this document but the fourth the Vice President of the United States was excluded so he went to a senior National Security Council official pointing out this lapse and said what about Vice President Johnson the answer was firm and final under no circumstances kennedy and johnson did not love each other kennedy staff did not love Johnson and vice versa so it's not much of a surprise but that led to a bit of a problem for John McCone the director of Central Intelligence when the day after Kennedy's assassination he was supposed to be meeting with the new president he got on the calendar with the - of deception though he had his assistant call the very afternoon that Kennedy had been shot he had as his assistant called the White House and say will the new president want his regular intelligence briefing at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning there was no regular intelligence briefing Kennedy did not see his CIA director one-on-one often and certainly not for daily intelligence briefings he read the intelligence checklist with his advisors McKown is betting that Johnson did not know President Kennedy's intelligence patterns well enough to call his bluff and he didn't he said of course I'll take the meeting so they had the meeting 9:00 a.m. the next day it's a little awkward here you are telling the new president United States here's the president's intelligence checklist implying that it's been there all along and he's never seen it before the memo that he wrote afterwards indicate that he he downplayed it he just tried to put it across the table start talking quickly about the things in it Johnson didn't react but I'm not sure he would have he reacted in a different way later as the years went by they found he was not reading the president's intelligence checklist they couldn't get him interested in this document and that makes some sense if you think about it it was clearly Kennedy's document no love lost between the two why would President Johnson want something that was a holdover from the Kennedy years he didn't seem to do much with it so CIA thought hmm how can we change this and the CIA leadership came up with an idea we like this daily intelligence document we like the access to the president the other president seemed to appreciate it how about we reformat it we retitle it and his advisors can tell him it's just for him and so they did they created something called the president's Daily Brief the name was given on December 1st 1964 and has stayed the same ever since up to and including this very morning when President Obama read his very similar inform just a little bit bigger and there was a reason for that John F Kennedy wanted to fold it and put it into his pocket Lyndon Johnson had a different style and the PDB throughout its history has been adapted to the current president's style in this case President Johnson he liked to do a lot of his paper work late at night in fact he stayed up til the wee hours of the morning up in the presidential residence often sitting in bed going through his stack of what was known as the night reading CIA officers learned this and said let's start producing it in the afternoon let's print it in the late afternoon get a courier to take it to the White House put it in his night reading that's when he does the most and they did so President Johnson started reading his PDB in bed at night and sometimes into the wee hours of the morning now how do we know he actually read it well this is a clue photograph that ended up in the newspapers in the late 1960s you see the president see his wife Lady Bird Johnson and you see someone who I'm not sure is cleared to see that level of intelligence information but clearly absorbed by the material in the document things changed after President Johnson for the first time we had a transition that was planned in this case to Richard Nixon Richard Nixon did not he did not love the CIA some words to characterize Nixon's relationship with the CIA disparagement vitriol hatred and those are the nice ones he and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were no novices at foreign policy and they may have felt they didn't need the tutorial that seemed to be provided every day but that was not the purpose the purpose was to give the most current information from all intelligence sources to help the president reduce uncertainty in national security decisions still President Nixon and dr. Kissinger had a different plan for the PDB first they restricted its access to just them second dr. Kissinger wanted to be aware of what was in it before it went to the president and before he got reactions about it from the president so he had it delivered back in the morning again but he wanted to see it the night before his advisors pointed out to him you realize what that's gonna do that's gonna mean there's a 16 to 17 hour lag in the information that's in the president's Daily Brief before the president sees it dr. Kissinger was okay with that it gave him a chance to read the material react to it write a cover memo highlighting certain things or reacting to certain things because he felt he knew the president's needs better being closer to him during the years that Nixon was president we still can't tell whether Nixon read the PDB in depth or much at all some people say he didn't others swear that he did but he's not talking the best we've been able to do is do a little bit of deduction based on what we know about Nixon and his style Nixon was bordering on the paranoid bordering on not trusting anyone he relied on Henry Kissinger to a large degree for national security advice but a whole lot of information that's come out showed he did not really trust Henry Kissinger on everything either he made a lot of nasty comments about him behind his back also so it would seem to make sense that if here there's an independent channel of information coming from the Central Intelligence Agency that was not written by him just had a cover memo on top of it it makes sense that makes me would probably want to be aware of this if nothing else to be a check on his own national security adviser by early 1974 the winds of Watergate were blowing it was becoming increasingly obvious almost everybody in the National Security bureaucracy the President Nixon would not see out his second term but then we had a new vice president Gerald Ford in June of 1974 Gerald Ford pictured here his vice president John Ford made a visit to CIA headquarters he was there to get general intelligence briefings to get a sense of what the intelligence could do during those briefings the director walked him around to various offices some of them showing him gadgets and things one office he took him to was the office of current intelligence which produces things like the president's Daily Brief at CIA this office where dick layman was working happened to have on a table the president's Daily Brief which vice-president Ford had not yet been seeing by the account of the story he walks by sees it on the table says oh what's that there the director says that's the president's Daily Brief that goes to the President and dr. Kissinger every morning oh well I'd sure like to see it okay we can arrange that and the director suggested that he not only get the president's Daily Brief every morning but that Vice President Ford taken in person briefing from a working-level CIA officer an expert who would come in walk through the items in the book talk through the details maybe discuss alternatives bring up information that didn't make it into the final draft to provide extra service to the vice president ford accepted immediately and for the rest of his time as vice president he received Dave Peterson a CIA officer often in his home in Alexandria at the kitchen table talking about the president's Daily Brief sometimes in the back of the limo and the car ride up from Alexandria August 1974 comes along Richard Nixon resigns suddenly Vice President Ford is President Ford he's got a lot of pressure on his schedule a lot of his advisors telling him you need to reduce your meetings one meeting he does not reduce is his daily meeting with the intelligence officers talking about the president's Daily Brief he keeps that on his schedule now of course for Dave Peterson at the CIA the real estate certainly improves he's no longer at the kitchen table in Alexandria he's in the Oval Office that raised one problem for him though on the very first day Gerald Ford in the Oval Office Dave Peterson comes in to give him his first president's Daily Brief briefing as president it went well the material was covered just fine he did his job but as he left the office he had a bit of a problem here's what Dave Peterson said I exited the office through the nearest door only to find myself at a dead end a second door which I later learned led to a smaller private office for the president was locked trapping me in the passageway he couldn't even get out of the White House complex what he had to do is knock on the door to get back in the Oval Office where he found President Ford and Al Haig the only other person in the room laughing hysterically loving that this had happened but Gerald Ford being a genial sort quickly stopped laughing and made Dave Peterson feel better by saying don't worry the first time I walked in this office I did the same thing one other story from Gerald Ford's presidency and probably the only story that involves someone who regularly attended the president's Daily Brief sessions naked on four legs with a tail this was Gerald Ford's prized golden retriever Liberty Liberty was a regular fixture of the Oval Office in the Ford years loved walking around very friendly dog as well so friendly that during the briefings Dave Peterson would often have to reach down and scratch her behind the ears or she would not leave him alone this led to one unfortunate circumstance one day Liberty came in there doing the briefing Dave scratchy Liberty likes the scratching Liberty likes it a little too much Liberty starts wagging her tail enthusiastically rattling and nearly knocking over presidents for President Ford's prized pipe rack Ford lost his temper for one of the few times in these briefings and banished Liberty from the PDB sessions from then on the next president was Jimmy Carter and Jimmy Carter did something that is unprecedented in the modern history of the PDB when he was a candidate for president he requested and got an intelligence briefing even before he was nominated by the Democratic Party usually the candidates get intelligence briefings after the nomination but before the election the same briefing to ensure that it's fair Carter asked for it early he got it early the person who delivered it George HW Bush who was director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time President Ford sent him to go and do it telling him just cover the arrangements for what the briefings will be like after the nomination Bush exceeded his mandate they ended up covering virtually the entire field of intelligence during this briefing Carter was appreciative much later he reflected on this and he said he was deeply honored by the fact that Bush himself came to do this even before the nomination it didn't help of course Bush was seen as a political appointee and Carter replaced him as he came into office but it did start Carter's close relationship with the president's Daily Brief President Carter was a reader and President Carter was a writer he liked documents where he had lots of white space this goes back to the time when he was governor of Georgia he would like to write notes to his aides into himself so the format of the PDB changed during the transition this became clear the CIA changed the president's Daily Brief yet again for the style of the individual in the Oval Office and gave Carter a style with a lot more white space to use his National Security Adviser was a big new Brzezinski pictured here in the Oval Office looking at the PDB with the president the first day the Carter was in the office Dave Peterson showed up from the CIA the president's briefer I'm here to brief the president it was the first day he would brief the president and it was the last because the big new Brzezinski decided to go back to the Kissinger model where he would be the funnel for all intelligence information coming into the president from that day forward he incorporated the president's Daily Brief and discussions of intelligence into his national security briefing that he would have every morning with the president in March the new director of Central Intelligence is confirmed Admiral Stansfield Turner he's getting feedback that President Carter loves the PDB and he thinks we'll wait a minute I'm the president's chief intelligence advisor he loves the PDB he's getting the PDB during a briefing shouldn't I be the one delivering this briefing to him so he goes to dr. Burzynski and makes his case dr. Brzezinski he knows bureaucracy what he does is he walks over to the president's schedule where it says intelligence briefing he crosses out the word intelligence and writes national security from now on the intelligence has just incorporated in the national security briefing he considered the case closed the next president is Ronald Reagan conventional wisdom has it that Ronald Reagan was not much of a reader certainly not of top-secret intelligence reports in this case conventional wisdom is wrong and we know this for a couple of reasons first we have Reagan's Diaries and if you look through the hundreds and hundreds of pages of Reagan's Diaries as I did you'll find lots of interesting things but you also find references to the president's Daily Brief some of them explicit he will even name it sometimes just talking about the intelligence that day that he read and it's clear from context that it's from the president's Daily Brief that's one sign the other sign is hidden deep in the vaults of the Central Intelligence Agency most of the president's Daily Brief copies in history are still classified they're not open to the public I'll talk at the end about how that's changing with the help of the National Archives but Reagan's PD bees aren't open to the public but they are open to CIA historians who hold top-secret clearances can look at them and then if appropriate release information about them after they've seen them one CIA historian went back through the first thousand or so of President Reagan's president's Daily Brief and what did he find he found notations he found little marks on the pages he found brackets around certain information exclamation points underlining clearly in reagan's hand because the same marks he would make on other documents not only that but a few times he found questions about something in the PDB that was different than he had just read on the page before that's right President Reagan was catching mistakes in the nation's top intelligence document Reagan's seemed to read the PDB carefully some other people in his administration did not seem to treat the PDB as carefully in fact one senior official in the Reagan White House was making copies of the president's Daily Brief taking them home to read and storing them in his garage remember this is top-secret intelligence the national security found out National Security Adviser found out about that and corrected that very quickly someone in the administration was very disturbed by this treatment of the president's Daily Brief Vice President George HW Bush as I mentioned previous CIA director he knew the sources and methods that went into collecting this information he knew what exposure of this information could mean to some intelligence sources he told me that he was very disturbed by this and angry by the treatment of the PDB certainly things changed when he became president this is President Bush sitting in one of his daily president's Daily Brief sessions with the CIA briefer Chuck Peters at the top of the room going around the circle Judge William Webster in this case director of the CIA you've got Johnson your new chief of staff Bob gates deputy national security advisor with his back to us and Brent Scowcroft national security advisor for both President Ford and for President Bush 41 President Bush was the first president to get in person CIA peb briefings for the entire term of his presidency jerem Ford had done it to start his presidency but after a year or so he phased it out after he got up to speed on issues George Bush did it for the full four years because he was so comfortable with intelligence he had the Liberty to do things with his briefers and his briefers had Liberty to do things with him that may not have worked with other presidents for example one day in early 1990 there was an election going on in Nicaragua Daniel Ortega was actually opening up the country to an election most observers thought that it was virtually rigged that he would use the instruments of power to ensure he got reelected CIA analysts agreed using analysis of classified and unclassified information they presented that analysis to President Bush President Bush looked at the analysis looked at his briefer looked at the analysis with to his briefer he said I'll bet you an ice cream cone that you're wrong briefer shocked thought about it for a minute what do you do when the president tries to make a bet with you he decides to stand by the analysts says sir I'll take that wager he took the wager and he lost next day he brought an ice cream cone into the Oval Office because the president's instincts were right the opponent won President Bush's successor Bill Clinton seen here with his PDB briefer he had an ebb and flow with his PDB briefings sometimes he would take briefings often he would not because his schedule was difficult to manage he liked to extend meetings and get a conversation going that would often push the rest of his meetings off but this is one that he did have you'll see pictured here his CIA briefer an analyst named John Brennan he's gone on to some other things President Clinton voraciously read the president's Daily Brief he loved it he was also exasperated by it he told me that he was frustrated because it didn't have all the answers that he wanted that's the nature of intelligence it will have some amazing information some things that really do help you make those tough decisions and sometimes on the toughest decisions it's not a magic bullet it doesn't give the answers the best it can do is reduce the range of uncertainty involved in a decision despite the fact that he was frustrated with it he said he got a lot out of it one story he told me was in July 1999 India and Pakistan were yet again fighting along their border perennial II having a conflict sometimes a shooting conflict in this case they were really going at it and it was a little bit different now than in previous decades because now India and Pakistan both had nuclear weapons you have a shooting war between two countries with nuclear weapons what could go wrong the Prime Minister of Pakistan realizing that he'd gotten in a little too far had flown to Washington for the July 4th weekend he was gonna try to convince President Clinton to let him save face to find some way that the United States could get him out of this crisis without him looking too bad President Clinton the morning of his meeting with the prime minister read in the president's Daily Brief an article that he said disturbed him he said it was an article about Pakistan and India's knowledge of each other's intentions particularly regarding nuclear weapons and he could not believe that these two countries were getting more and more into an all-out war without even knowing what the other one was going to do with their nuclear weapons he saw Armageddon he talked to the Prime Minister that day using the PDB article he asked the Prime Minister if he even knew what his own military was doing with nuclear weapons the Prime Minister was shocked it appeared to be the wake-up call he needed and sure enough President Clinton convinced the prime minister to pull back in avert an all-out war involving nuclear weapons but it wasn't always so serious and President Clinton's 50th birthday he opened up his PDB and started reading about all of these crises around the world about how things were going to hell in a handbasket and specifically article after article telling him because of things he had said and done in the previous days and weeks and he flipped through it shocked that this was all happening overnight before he realized they were pulling his leg they had given him a fake president's Daily Brief on his birthday as a special gift the next president george w bush george w bush came into office a fan of intelligence he appreciated the CIA he'd been around his father enough to understand the business and he also wanted a daily pdb briefer with him but he took it up a notch he took it up a notch in two different ways one way he did it instead of just having briefings in Washington when he was in the Capitol he took a CIA PDB briefer with him whenever he traveled you can see that in this picture you might recognize it from 9/11 this is at an elementary school in Sarasota Florida well George W Bush first heard about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center you see some of his officials around him including the director of the White House Situation Room you see a man looking very serious off on the left hand side holding a briefcase that is not the man holding the nuclear codes that you always hear about that is Michael Morell CIA briefer the daily briefer to the president who's with him that day flying around on Air Force One throughout the day in my book there's stories about how that helped the press during the day having that connection to CIA right there with him and the President did seem to value having that personal PDB briefer every day with him wherever he was I mentioned two ways he took it up a notch the other way that George W Bush elevated the intelligence briefing process in his second term you might recall that the war in Iraq was not going particularly well the business of intelligence analysts is not to tell the president what he wants to hear that things are looking great in Iraq but to tell the president what he needs to hear here is what's happening and here's why we assess it's happening and here's where the levers or opportunities are to change that but it was a steady drumbeat of articles about Iraq and it was not a pleasant time there are two ways a president can react to something like this one is you're getting negative news every day you don't want to hear it you shut that off you say I don't want to hear that anymore President Bush went the other direction he turned the volume up he said I don't only want a PDB briefing every day now I want to supplement the PDB briefing with working-level analysts on topics all around the world including Iraq that will come in and talk at length about the nature of the problems and I'll engage them in what he called the Socratic method he would ask question after question to drill out their knowledge to get at their assumptions and perhaps the biases inherent in the analysis he took intelligence briefings to a new level of course this scene also reminds us why the intelligence briefings were so important because of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the 9/11 Commission which was designed to investigate the attacks on America ended up doing something that no other Commission or investigation had ever done before it provided the public a window into the president's Daily Brief there was a scuffle for months between the Commission and the administration about seeing the president's Daily Brief themselves these had always been protected as a confidential channel of communication between the intelligence services and the President of the United States but finally the administration gave in the odd thing was the administration was not just protecting the pdbs that had gone to President George W Bush remember at the time of 9/11 president had only been office for what eight months they were protect projecting protecting many more briefings from Clinton's administration than from their own based on the principle of executive privilege but the Commission ended up looking at the whole range of terrorism-related president's Daily Brief articles and opening up some of them to the public in the 9/11 Commission report the biggest view we've had into the president's Daily Brief itself until very recently last year the Central Intelligence Agency the Office of National Intelligence director and the National Archives together released the old president's intelligence checklists and pdbs from the Kennedy and Johnson administration's those are out there you can actually go online and see what did the intelligence community tell President Kennedy about the Congo in 1964 you can look up those things now and this year the plans are to release the president's Daily Brief from the Nixon and Ford administration's we will start to get glimpses inside the book in a way we've never done before I use the word book because that's the term that intelligence professionals have often used for the PDB and you've seen throughout history the pictures have shown it as a book often flipped at the top sometimes on the side for president george w bush it was in a very nice leather binder three-ring binder because they wanted to slip in last-minute intelligence reports and other information as they were racing out the door to brief him that has now changed president obama continues to receive the president's Daily Brief but he does not get it as ink on paper he gets it as electrons on a screen this is President Obama looking at his president's Daily Brief on his very special very secure iPad how does that change the analysis and assessments in the president's Daily Brief in one way not much at all it's still the intelligence analyst best take on what's going on around the world presents it as concisely and precisely as possible to help the president make tough decisions but it does allow some things that paper alone doesn't some multimedia products videos some scalable graphics where you can move them around and poke down into things so it does change the format but that just follows through on the history of the president's daily from its beginning it's been tailored to the personal needs and preferences of the president I've often said that if a president decides instead of paper or an iPad president decides that he or she wants the president's Daily Brief in the form of interpretive dance there's gonna be a whole lot of intelligence analysts learning to dance these are just some of the stories that I have in my book most of them told by the people involved themselves the president's the vice president's the CIA officers there's a whole lot of history in here that George HW Bush referred to in David's opening comments when he said here's a product that's uniquely American but something that few people know about President Bush told me he wrote the foreword and he agreed to write the foreword you'll see he didn't write it about himself he wrote it to thank the men and women of the intelligence services who collect this information analyze this information all without any expectation of credit just so the president can hopefully make a more informed decision that's what the president's Daily Brief is all about from its beginning under John F Kennedy as the president's intelligence checklist to the iPad PDB that President Obama looked at this morning I look forward to your questions thank you [Applause] please you kind of surprised me that when you said that President Carter got briefing before he was even the nominee right you turn with the peeking the full briefing of top-secret classified information clarifying yeah thank you the the briefings for presidential candidates are different they are not the president's Daily Brief that contains the most sensitive reporting and analysis in the United States government the briefings for candidates are usually overviews of the world situation they include classified information but they do not include the most secret information they do not include knowledge of covert actions underway so there is a difference between the two traditionally presidents have allowed the major party candidates to get these intelligence overview briefings after the nominations Carter just jumped the gun a little bit perhaps it was because he realized as governor of Georgia he was not a foreign policy expert he had not had exposure to intelligence and he was a voracious consumer of information he probably thought it would be good for him not only to get smart on issues but also to know what to avoid on the campaign trail that is one of the purposes of these candidate briefings to make sure the candidates don't inadvertently say something that will box them into a bad foreign policy once they've become president thank you yes you spoke about how some of the vice president's work cut out right of access to the president's briefings my understanding is that mr. Cheney the vice president was very involved with intelligence gathering and in filtering that intelligence for the president would you speak to that since you didn't mention it in the course of your presentation I will and I'll draw a distinction between two things you said Vice President Cheney very involved in intelligence not filtering the intelligence there's a distinction there Cheney had been working on intelligence when he was in the House of Representatives he had been Secretary of Defense for four years under Bush 41 he came into office President Bush asked him to put special attention on intelligence he was going to be in a sense the chief intelligence policymaker in the administration the Vice President Cheney did the same thing the president was doing he had a CIA briefer come to him every working day and he had CIA briefer travel with him to make sure he was up to speed on everything the president was seeing but the Vice President was an amazing reader and loved intelligence so his briefers would add into his book what they called behind the tab because there was a tab there that was just for the vice president and it was additional information that would come in so that he could absorb all of it like the president or vice president cheney asked tough questions of his briefers pushed them on the analysis wanted to make sure that they had thought about all the alternatives from the people that I spoke with it became very clear that Vice President Cheney was very very active with his briefers very very active with the intelligence but when it came to attending the president's intelligence briefings he was not pushing things across he was deferential to the president realizing he was vice and that word before president means a whole lot in terms of filtering the information there were a few stories people told me about the vice president seeing something in his behind the tab section of the PDB that he thought was really interesting really important and he would say to his briefer let's get this to the president and then the decision would be made does this warrant the president's attention or not usually the vice president's pretty good judge of whether it warrants the president's attention so a lot of things would go to the president I never heard a story of the opposite which is something that was designed to go to the president the vice president said we can't show that to the president and then taking it out that's something that I never found thank you thank you sir I want to maybe continue with that point designed to go to the president historically there's a lot of things going on in the world as there are today how do they decide when it should go to the president and you talked about a couple things intelligence being aware of something and then acting on it something that gets on a list that he continues to seeing it used to be on the Daily Brief stays on for a period or comes off at another period how does that work any understanding the whirring is of that thank you I'll give you a wholly unsatisfactory answer two words it depends yeah the main mantra is in the name itself the president's Daily Brief its brief usually it's been in the range of a few pages in history it's gone as low as one page and I found some examples of dozens of pages but certainly not a thick report that covers everything going on in the world president doesn't have time for that so it's got to be brief that means there has to be a filter there has to be the intelligence community deciding what does the president need to know today on this topic that can vary depending on a few things one is how serious is the crisis overseas is it something that is at the presidential level is it being worked out lower in the bureaucracy that's the president's part of the title president's Daily Brief it has to be something that is of interest to the president something the president can affect not something that be useful for a desk officer at the State Department to deal with that day but it is a daily book also in the name and that means like a newspaper you've got to have a story you've got to have something there now it's hard to believe that there isn't something going on in the world every day that the president should know about and that's why the president's Daily Brief has been published every working day for more than 50 years trying to decide what that threshold is right aside what does this president need to know and when is something that comes from a lot of coordination and collaboration some people close to the president give great advice on this the National Security Advisor for one often the Vice President or others involved in the president's decision-making circle can give the intelligence community some advice on that traditionally that's been the CIA in the last 10 years the president's Daily Brief has been controlled by the Director of National Intelligence that was created after 9/11 and the Iraq WMD issue that collaboration hopefully gives insight into what does the president need and what would help the president today similarly a feedback mechanism from the president is helpful he saw the pictures where there were people getting in person briefings when a CIA officer was there with George HW Bush you didn't have to guess what the president reacted to in the book that day he was there he saw it he heard it he could bring that back to CIA headquarters and tell the leadership and the analysts working on the today's piece this is what the president seems most concerned about this is how we can help by providing information on this topic but it all goes back to factors that we can't even know because it's what's in the president's head unless the president is telling his CIA officers and now his odni officers every day this is what I want in tomorrow's book there's gonna be some guesswork involved hi I'm just curious as you were compiling this book and once you've finished it did you have to run it by the intelligence agencies or folks there was anything you know redacted or taken out and then what's the reaction been from briefers and and and and colleagues to to what you've written yes there's a process for anybody who has worked in the intelligence business as I have to get things cleared the publication Review Board is the CIA's version of that and yes this book had to go to the publication Review Board it was a long process the president's Daily Brief has considered the holy of holies it is the sensitive channel of communication to the president that said the research here is all clearly unclassified it's from the documents in the National Archives in the presidential libraries its president's describing how they felt about the product there's no story in here about what President Obama read before the Benghazi attack that is still classified you're not going to find a lot of details about what was in the book every day during most of the recent administrations it's just not there instead this is more like the the biography of a recluse where you get stories from around and you get a picture of what's going on in that life or like a black hole astronomers understand a whole lot about black holes but you literally definitively can't see anything inside a black hole but based on the way things orbit around it and interact with it you learn a whole lot about its influence and that's similar to how this worked in terms of the process itself I found that the review of this was relatively easy that is there was nothing redacted of import they were often minor comments about certain events overseas long ago that were not central to the story but very few of them in fact the main issue was time you don't write a book quickly when you're going through the clearance review process your other question had to do with the reaction to the book can tell you about a few reactions I've heard one is from audiences like this with great questions about the history trying to learn more about how did presidents get their intelligence and how did that affect the nation's national security the other reaction I've had is from people inside the intelligence business or former intelligence officers and they've been very supportive saying this is the story that we wish we would have had when we were doing the job and that is where I came to this book in the first place I was chosen to be one of the intelligence briefers during the George W Bush administration to some of the people that he had selected to also receive the book and I did ask my colleagues so where's where's the guidebook where's the history where the story so I can learn what mistakes have been made so I can avoid those and make ones that are all my own and they looked at me like I had grown a second head said a guidebook history we don't have one of those I wanted to create that history not only for everyone to know what it is that the president gets and how he gets it but also so that people doing the job that I did having to brief senior officials would have a sense of what has gone before please in the ones that you've gone through have you seen anything that deals with intelligence reports of the personal health of foreign leaders that the president would deal with one of the big issues in presidential level intelligence is preparing the president for meetings that the president is having often with world leaders that can be overseas visiting their countries or it can be in Washington so that is a big part of the president's Daily Brief is helping the president see what's on this leaders mind how is this leader doing health-wise what is it that will come up in the meetings if we know that from intelligence sources there are two methods of doing this one is writing an article which was the main format of the PDB for most of its history even now on the iPad it's still text writing an article about this foreign leader what is he or she up to how is he or she feeling what is he or she likely to bring up that that could be the kind of thing that's in a president's Daily Brief article but there's a way of doing this as well and that's using video if you're gonna be talking about the way that a foreign leader speaks about a way that a foreign leader interacts what better way than to actually show it and I found evidence going back to the Nixon administration that they had supplemented the PDB with videos you can imagine for President Ronald Reagan a former actor himself lots of supplements of videos and these are some of the comments in his Diaries what he seemed to appreciate the most worthy videos of foreign leaders and he wrote once this gives me a sense of having met him before that's exactly what this kind of intelligence should be doing thank you did you give us a quick overview of sort of logistics behind preparing this document is there like an editorial meeting is it run like a newspaper how many people are involved at the actual production of the text versus review and how far ahead I mean somebody assigned to meetings coming up in two months to do background you know just some of the basic logistics and then the feedback that folks get after the actual sessions is there a loop involved thank you I'll give you a brief sense of it there's there's a lot of stories in the book from different administrations and the thing that surprised me in researching this was the variety from across these different administrations in just that question how it was prepared in some cases early on remember the picture of dick layman up there who invented the product for John F Kennedy in some cases he would just take the information that other analysts were putting together and he'd draft up a short piece for Kennedy and put it in there maybe an editor or two would look at it it would be almost a direct channel you saw the picture of George HW Bush and his briefer in the Oval Office sitting with him that was one of two people during most of that administration who not only briefed the president but the night before did the final editing on the pieces going to the president because they knew what kinds of things would trip up the president make him stumble or what kinds of things would make him more open to reading the whole article that was there with the information he needed to know in other cases it has been more of the committee it has been more of an editorial decision a people scratching their heads and saying well what do you think he might need to know and they would talk to people who'd interacted with the president they try to get information from the National Security Advisor and others and then they would decide here are the articles to go in here's how we'll review them the numbers of people who work on the PDB are not known well they're known to somebody but they're not known to us they're classified but you can imagine that at some level there's only a few people who actually work on the whole book who put all of it together because having hundreds of people work on one book and it wouldn't make sense on the other hand you can almost see the whole intelligence community being part of the PDB process because any day anyone in the intelligence community can raise her hand and say I see something going on in this country I'm closest to the material I know that this is alarming we need to warn the president before it becomes a crisis and then that can wind its way through the bureaucracy and maybe get on the President's desk at the very next day terms of feedback you also see that that varies in the stories in the book some presidents have given extensive feedback especially the ones that had in-person briefings it's hard not to get feedback from a president when you're sitting and talking to him you're going to get something on the other hand Richard Nixon no feedback during his entire time in office some of his advisers who were not sitting with him as he read it would give advice to the CIA based on what they saw in the president's Daily Brief but it was pretty clear that that was their advice not necessarily the president's the one exception to that is dr. Kissinger who did have insight into Nixon's mind he would give plenty of feedback to the CIA never clear if that was entirely reflecting Nixon or his own insights at some level even that doesn't matter if Kissinger was that central to foreign policy getting the insights targeted to him worked just as well but could you say a little bit more about instantaneous communication including satellite with live images imagery for example and also the coming of the Situation Room in the White House might have interrelated with the EM preps made the daily briefing a little less than totally current relative to other means available sure two points there one on the nature of incorporating instantaneous or near real-time information and then secondly the role of the White House Situation Room in terms of instantaneous information that's not what the president's Daily Brief is all about you heard in the Nixon case 16 to 17 hours but even in the best of administration's it's still going to be a delay in the information because you have to have analysts get the information process it think through what it means write up their interpretation or assessment and get it to the president that can be done in the wee hours of the morning but it's still not going to be up-to-the-minute information there is an institution that does that and you named it the White House Situation Room the White House Situation Room can get information directly from the Defense Department the CIA the State Department the Treasury Department anyone in the US government including satellite information and they can get it onto the desk of the president within seconds so if there's breaking news if there's a crisis the president's Daily Brief might address it but just the timing of a 24-hour cycle means that it might not be relevant if it happens at noon and the president gets the president's Daily Brief first thing in the morning probably during the afternoon and evening the National Security Advisor in the White House Situation Room is going to be giving the president the information he or she needs at that time the next day the president's Daily Brief might incorporate some analysis of it here's what happened in the crisis here's what we think is coming next or here's what happened in the crisis here's the dynamic behind it that will help us anticipate getting ahead of it that kind of thing could happen with the White House Situation Room there is complementary and contradictory issues going on in some cases the White House Situation Room through most administrations has provided a twice-daily product to the president here are the breaking news issues around the world there's gonna be some overlap with the PDB back in the Nixon administration his staffers discovered the overlap was significant and in fact that may have been why Nixon wasn't reading the PDB because he noticed that a lot of you dozens and dozens of people in most administration's the president's Daily Brief has gone to the president the vice president eventually the Secretary of State the Secretary of Defense the National Security Advisor those five almost always then often some others have especially in more recent administrations the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sometimes the deputies of all of those people deputy secretary the deputy national security adviser almost always in recent years and this is now dated information from few years ago but it was it was informed on the Obama administration that it was over 30 recipients we're getting the president's Daily Brief now the real issue is why does that matter well it matters at either extreme if you're the president and you want to get the most sensitive information things that cannot even be mentioned to other senior officials then you limit the PDB to yourself you read it and you don't talk to anybody about it well that doesn't do a lot of good the president United States doesn't actually do much in terms of executing foreign policy sure he might make a phone call to a foreign leader but even then the National Security Advisor the White House Situation Room is sitting in on the call at the other extreme if you make the PDB available to hundreds of people you can't put the most sensitive information in there it's too widely disseminated and what you end up doing is having private briefings with the president taking in the most sensitive information obviating the need for a PDB in the first place the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle now what is that is it four or five people or is it thirty people to me that depends on the personality and the preferences of the president if the president is somebody who likes to have discussions with a dozen advisors before making an important decision then maybe having those dozen advisor advisors all see the PDB makes a whole lot of sense if the president is somebody who gets inputs but coordinates all those inputs internally or perhaps just with the National Security Advisor then it makes sense to limit it because of the different needs of that president thank you I appreciate all your questions we have time for just one or two more yes hi you mentioned the briefs that were released as part of the 9/11 Commission report when you looked at them all did those briefs suggest that more of them could have been done to prevent 9/11 whether were there clues in there or if not does it suggest that the briefs themselves sometimes miss the point and they don't have what everything they need to have yeah thank you there's a whole lot going on in that question one yes the PDP's often do miss the point because that's the nature of intelligence you you don't necessarily know what you don't know some of the things you don't know you find about and now you know more some of the things you think you know a lot about you find out you don't know a lot and then you have to go and find out what is it all of those have uncertainty in them in terms of 9/11 the 9/11 Commission did not publicly release most of the PDB s in fact they only released two PDB articles one from the Clinton administration that talked about the threat of hijacking from al Qaeda that was in 1998 and one that was in August 2001 which was titled bin Laden determined to strike in u.s. a piece that laid out very clearly the intent of Osama bin Laden to strike in the homeland both of those pieces were released in full with only a few very minor redactions those are those blacked out parts where they cover up the words that we can't see very few of those now the 9/11 commissioners did get to see a whole bunch of other pdbs those were the ones that they thought were most relevant to the public understanding of what happened on 9/11 the fact is the specific attacks on 9/11 were not predicted in the president's Daily Brief the intent of bin Laden was known some of the capabilities were known but the attacks themselves it was a very tightly held conspiracy that the intelligence community did not break before it happened that is true all around the world there all kinds of things going on around the world that the intelligence agencies don't know but there's a lot that they do and if it's relevant to the president's needs that's how they get it across to the president thank you all right thank you very much

Channel: US National Archives

Views: 1,104,024

Keywords: US National Archives, NARA

Id: O-H9CvTd2Ko

Length: 62min 46sec (3766 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2016