National Security & Truth: David Priess
June 8th, 2023
“National security has to do with protecting the lives and the overall welfare of the country.”
David Priess is the Director of Intelligence at Bedrock Learning and has served at the CIA as an intelligence officer, a manager, and a daily intelligence briefer during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. We discuss how the issues of waging war and negotiating peace affect our everyday lives.
The intelligence function is about discovering the truth in order to reduce uncertainty for decision-makers on issues of national security. Intelligence cannot predict the future, especially when it comes to human choices. Although some information is necessarily secret for our own security, we should all be engaged on national security issues. That means asking questions of our elected representatives instead of being passive recipients of information, and to vary where we get our news.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: David Priess
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis & Sara Burningham
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David Priess Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
Today's show is about the intersection of civic engagement and national security. We often don't make a direct connection between our everyday lives and foreign policy or the issues of national security and intelligence. The reality is that the decisions that are made in this realm like waging war and negotiating peace, do affect us directly. And paying closer attention helps us in our own decision making about who we want to elect, how we want to engage, and what we want to demand from our government.
Joining us today to parse how we can be better informed and how we can think about national security is Dr. David Priess. He's the director of intelligence at Bedrock Learning, senior fellow at the Hayden Center and was previously the chief operating officer of the Lawfare Institute and the co-host of the Chatter podcast. He has served at the CIA as an intelligence officer, a manager and a daily intelligence briefer during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W Bush. He's the author of two books, The President's Book of Secrets and How to Get Rid of a President. David, thank you so much for joining us.
David Priess: [00:01:35] It is a pleasure to finally join you after listening for so long. Thank you for inviting me on.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:40] So I figure we should start with the basics. When you talk about national security, what do you have in mind? Because sometimes national security gets stretched to what seems like all corners of policy, like public health, guns, and it touches on so many things. But it would be useful to start with to help us focus.
David Priess: [00:02:01] I would have given you a different answer to that when I started studying international relations and national security some decades ago. It used to be that national security was seen as matters of hardcore war and peace. It was issues of military strength, intelligence collection and that kind of thing. Over the decades, though, the definition has expanded. Part of that is due to external events. I
think one example of that is 9/11. A lot of issues that were considered more domestic law enforcement, at least that was the framing people put on it in the government context, and often in the societal context as well. 9/11 proved that those were national security issues and we had to look at them in totality.
In recent years, I think it's been clear that we have to think of national security expansively in other ways. You mentioned public health, and not all public health is core national security, but it's hard to see issues of government authority to institute quarantines during a pandemic as something that is completely separated from national security. And similarly, when it comes to domestic political protests, what right does the federal government have to put down insurrections on one hand versus peaceful protests on the other? You're talking about a lot of the same issues for what you might call national security that traditionally you didn't. So the way I tend to think of it is national security has to do with protecting the lives and the overall welfare of the country. And that can include a whole bunch of things from the immediate, such as is Canada going to invade us today all the way to the next generation talking about climate change as a threat to the long-term security of the country.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:00] Mhm. That's a big range of things and all, like you said, really do touch national security. So what's the story that you love to tell that you hope can help more Americans understand national security?
David Priess: [00:04:15] I probably would go back to 9/11 because I was working in the Counterterrorism Center at the Central Intelligence Agency. And it was a day when I was working in Europe and not at CIA headquarters and all the events of that day in obviously New York and Washington, ultimately in Pennsylvania, my colleagues back in the Counterterrorism Center, they refused to leave CIA headquarters even though the rest of the facility was evacuated because they knew the importance of finding out exactly what happened in real time in order to hopefully prevent the next attack and help arm the policymakers and the American people with information about this crisis. Why that's important in this context is those people who were there at the Counterterrorism Center, they were people like you and me. They were people with families, with, in some cases spouses and parents and siblings. And they were people who decided that they had to stay all night and work, in some cases the next night and the next night. And it was a few days before I got back into US airspace and got to CIA headquarters. And
what I saw was people working as hard as they could, but some of them literally collapsed on their desk because they'd been working nonstop trying to do everything they could. And that human side is often lost when it comes to national security. People think of these big organizations as these monolithic entities, these bureaucracies that are soulless. But whether it's the State Department or the Pentagon or the intelligence community or any of the other agencies and departments that have to do with national security, they're all staffed by people and people at every level have to make decisions every day about what to do. And on 9/11, I saw people deciding they were going to give it their all to try to prevent another attack from coming. And I simply became the relief team. I was the one who said, okay, you can get out of here. Now it's my turn to wear myself out because I've been able to rest up on the way back. That's one story I could tell just about the fact that people are at the center of this. People making choices, people making judgments about what's going on in the world, and then trying to provide our political leaders with the best information they can to make the hard decisions that come with national security.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:47] Yeah, I think you're exactly right. We don't really think about the actual people who do the work and make the decisions. One of the things that we really talk about a lot in the podcast is that this is about people. You know, the people who are affected by the decisions, but also, of course, the people who make the decisions. So you've got me thinking about how this evolving frame for national security has been shaped by the evolving threats we face. Like you said, some of this has been external stuff totally beyond our control. But as we were talking here about 9/11 and the aftermath and what was in our control afterwards, the response and the war in Iraq, because that war was sold as a national security exercise on the basis of weapons of mass destruction. But it's a war that was hugely destabilizing for the region, and I think it really delegitimized American power. And to wit, Putin points to the Iraq record and invades Ukraine. So. So tell us about how you're thinking about that.
David Priess: [00:07:50] Yeah, I certainly wouldn't draw a straight line from Iraq to Ukraine. I would draw a line through all human conflict as destabilizing. There's this idea we have in the United States that people who lived through the last 30 years or so have this image of the first Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and was kicked out by an international coalition led by the United States. There were relatively few US casualties. It was a war fought with hundreds of thousands of troops. But because of
our advanced technology, the investments that had been made in military infrastructure, because of the command, because of the training, it was a war that went really well by historical standards, and the American people almost felt like it was a celebration more than a burden. That is not the way in human history war goes. War is not an easy thing that people watch and are amused by. There is sacrifice involved. There are burdens involved. But then we had another one a few years later that was even more distant, which was the campaign in the Balkans, the campaign against Serbia and some of its abuses. And again, that was largely an air war. That was one where there were relatively few US casualties, even fewer. And Americans, I think, got this sense that, you know, national security comes easy, that if there are core US interests, perceived or real at stake, that it's easy just to call 911-US-military. They go and do it and it doesn't require anything from us. I think that changed a little bit with 9/11, but there was a missed opportunity there. 9/11, the political decision was made, "we're going to go after the terrorists. We're going to try to remove other threats." And the perception was that Saddam Hussein, who had invaded a couple of neighbors already and tried to pursue weapons of mass destruction, was probably doing it again. The idea was we're going to do that, but we're not going to ask Americans to change their daily lives. Famously, the president said, go to the shopping mall. We don't want to shut down the economy. We don't want the terrorists to win by changing our way of life. But that was a choice to make because a different choice could have been, we're going all in. We need all Americans to chip in on this effort, not just the people who have volunteered to serve in the military. And we need to do what it takes to get bin Laden right away instead of taking many years to do it in terms of taking out the terrorist infrastructure quickly in a broad way, instead of dragging it out and finding ourselves where we are even now in Afghanistan. That is a choice. But that's a choice in a democracy that's on us because the leaders we elect. So I don't put the straight line through from Iraq to Ukraine. I think that what we're seeing in Ukraine is more typical of warfare in the long stretch of human history than the experiences Americans have had recently. And the burdens and the horrors that Ukrainians are experiencing are more in line with what war is like than with this sanitized version that we have been blessed enough to have in some of our most recent interventions.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:04] Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think one of the big things about Ukraine, of course, that we're not directly involved. When we think about Iraq and we think about Afghanistan, we really do like to think of ourselves as the bastion of
democracy and the beacon of the free world. And we made big investments to spread democracy around the world, especially in Afghanistan. But that sort of Bush era language sounds kind of Pollyanna-ish today. So how would you characterize the shift? You know, the fact that we're not actually putting boots on the ground in Ukraine and we're not even doing a no-fly zone. And of course, we've withdrawn from Afghanistan. So it feels like a big shift. But is it a big shift or what is it?
David Priess: [00:11:49] It sure feels like it. I got to say, as someone who studied issues of war and peace in graduate school decades ago, the idea of a major war in Europe, it sure seemed like we'd moved past that, that it wasn't going to happen again. And yes, flare ups in the Balkans are a real issues that affect real people. But something like the First World War or the Second World War in terms of massive armies clashing in Europe and tens or hundreds of thousands of people dying in direct conflict, it seemed like those days were past us. So Ukraine was a wake up call for a lot of people. And of course, the signs were there. Russia had been messing around in Ukraine very heavily since 2014 and even before then. But the idea was always that, well, of course they'd never actually invade. You'd never try to take over another country in Europe, even if it still does happen in other places in the world. And I think there's a reckoning going on in the national security community about that. It also is a reckoning that I think the American people should be having. We tend to focus on a lot of issues that are truly very important in our day to day lives. But national security crises have a way of imposing themselves on our everyday lives and things that we wish would go away or not affect us, have a way of affecting us. Whether it's many years ago when suddenly there was an oil crisis and the cost of everything at home went up because of something some other country did, and a lot of people weren't paying attention and were surprised by that.
Whether it's a terrorist group forming a couple of decades ago in the Middle East and then coming at America directly, not just its facilities and citizens overseas, but also US soil, things outside of the United States have a way of affecting inside the United States. And it's no coincidence that virtually every president gets elected with a strong domestic policy agenda. And depending on their ideology, depending on their party, they have different ideas for that domestic political agenda. But I think the symbol of that was on 9/11 itself when George W Bush was at a school in Florida and he was reading a story to a group of children as an event related to his education agenda, which was one of his
major issues coming into office. But that day is not remembered because of his book about a pet goat that he was reading to these kids and his education agenda. It was remembered because the world imposed itself on the United States that day. And virtually every president has some parallel of this, something that they want to get accomplished, but they find their time and their energy sucked into some foreign crisis, often not of their making. That ends up taking the energy of the American people and the American government different than they thought it would. So I think society also needs to come to a reckoning with this and realize that there's a whole lot of bad actors in the world. There's a whole lot of conflict in the world that may be simmering just below the surface. And we do have to be prepared to protect American interests against those conflicts.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:56] Right. Well, this time is no different for President Biden. The war in Ukraine feels at once far away and very present. It's there in our shopping carts in terms of inflation. Right. And inevitably, considering the state of American politics, the war in Ukraine is becoming a matter of partisan contention. But it's hard to figure out whether it's a matter of deep public concern. I don't think that people on an everyday basis really think about it. Tell us, though, in your mind, since you are an expert in this field, what is the importance of the war in Ukraine for the American people?
David Priess: [00:15:31] You know, America is funny in this regard, where things that happen overseas that are major events generally don't matter, until they do. But once they do, they cross a threshold and then the curve accelerates rapidly. So it's not a straight line on a set trajectory. It's usually a very slow crawl. And then for some reason, once it hits that thermocline, it really changes quickly, for example. And there's a bit of mythology around this, but the idea that before the Second World War and the first, to be frank, but the Second World War, America was largely isolationist. We didn't want anything to do with conflicts in Europe and the rest of the world, largely a function of geography, which is we are very, very blessed for a long time to be protected by two large oceans from most of the major powers in the world. And before modern technology, that was about as good a defense as you could get. In many ways, that's simply not true anymore. But that was part of it.
Part of it was ideology. The ideology of the American experience was we could, in a sense, grow across the continent, notwithstanding all the issues that came with people
already being there, which we have not reckoned with, but the national security from outside powers attacking us was never at the forefront until it was. And then once it became an issue, the full might of the American people and their ingenuity and their creativity and their productivity came to bear. And people recognized it after the First World War and after the Second World War, it was unmistakable that the United States was the preeminent power. I'm not sure that isolationist streak has ever gone away. And I think many Americans are perfectly happy not to care about issues like Bosnia or Ukraine or Congo or any of these things until something fully gets their attention. And in some segments of the United States population, Ukraine has the horrors coming out of that country are historic in nature. It's truly repugnant. And that is getting some people's attention. In some cases, it is more great power politics calculations. That's getting into the wider conversation about, wait a minute, if Russia wins in Ukraine, are they actually going to try to do this to other countries that we care about even more? So I think in different ways it is resonating with parts of the American public. But we have to be honest. It's far away. Ukraine is not a country that people are as familiar with as, say, Canada or Mexico or France or the United Kingdom. So there will always be that obstacle. And some of that is leadership. Some of that is the American political leaders talking to the American public and explaining why the world is of interest to the American people. And they really should care about what happens in these places.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:26] Mhm. Yeah. Well put.
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And now let's return to my conversation with Dr. David Priess.
Your specialty has been intelligence. What are the core functions of intelligence?
David Priess: [00:19:26] Intelligence is not the way that we get it through entertainment media. When I grew up, intelligence, I mean, the only thing I was really exposed to was James Bond. And that's certainly not my experience in CIA and not anyone else that I know. That's not what it's really like. Intelligence has one core function, and in order to get to that function, there are other things involved. The core function is to reduce the uncertainty that policymakers have when making hard decisions about national security. It's pretty hard to know what to do if you're the president of the United States and you don't even know if China has nuclear weapons. That makes a difference in how you're going to escalate a crisis. But if you don't know if they have nuclear weapons, that's a big uncertainty. What you want is intelligence that can narrow that uncertainty and say, well, yes, they do and hopefully can tell you, and here's where they are and here's how ready they are to launch. And here are the problems they might have with the technology. Oh, and by the way, here's the Chinese leaders decision making process about how they'll think about using those weapons versus other weapons. And maybe even here's what we know about individual nuclear scientists and operators that we might be able to recruit to get them to either sabotage those weapons or give us information about them to help mitigate the threat.
Intelligence is about reducing uncertainty. Now, to do that, you need two different parts. You need good information. That is good collection. You need to find the data. You need to access that information, most of which other people don't want you to have. And you need to analyze that information because that might not be information that by itself reflects something that that gets to the level of being certain or known. Sometimes you need to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together. So you need the collection and you need the analysis. The idea of intelligence is binding those together in a way that makes the best use of the collected intelligence, whether it's spy reports from human beings, whether it's signals, intercepts, listening in on military communications, for example, between Russian commanders in Ukraine to figure out what they're doing, whether it's satellite imagery, whether it's open source information, things being published in newspapers or posted on social media. The job of the analyst is to take all of that together and put it into what's called finished intelligence, which is an assessment or an analysis that is presented to a policymaker to help them understand a situation. And there are many examples of this that you can look up if you're curious, because even the reports that went to the president of the United States through the 1960s and 1970s have been declassified.
There's one other side of intelligence that gets a lot of attention, back to James Bond, and that is covert action. That's not about collecting information in order to help build that jigsaw puzzle picture for presidents and others to understand what's going on in the world. Covert action is to actually change reality overseas. And there are cases in history that are very well known, like the Bay of Pigs, the attempted invasion of Cuba and many others. That is an intelligence function, but it's also a special forces function. It's also a military function. And each country decides whether that's something that belongs in the intelligence infrastructure or whether that remains within the military command in the United States. We do a little bit of both. We have Special Operations Command that does some of those missions. And then we have the intelligence community that does some of those missions at the direction of the president of the United States. But that's a little bit different than the traditional function of intelligence, which is to help a ruler understand the world better and hopefully to make better decisions.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:27] Yes, both those aspects are important, but primarily, as you said, it's the intelligence gathering, the data gathering and the analysis. And to reduce uncertainty when you make decisions. I think that's really important because even though you're reducing the uncertainty, you don't eliminate the uncertainty. There's always something that you might not know. Or as as life happens, it doesn't turn out the way we think. We can't predict the future.
David Priess: [00:23:51] That's absolutely right. And two things on that. One is it didn't strike me until recent years just how much the intelligence function, which seems like a secret dark thing because it's classified and people don't talk about it as much, but how much it has in common with a couple of other very important industries that we have. And Michael Hayden, former CIA director, pointed this out in one of his books that the intelligence function really is more similar to journalism and to science than to almost anything else, because all of those professions are involved in discovering the truth. Now they have different applications. When they discover the truth or whatever they can find that's close to the truth in the form of intelligence. It's to give political decision makers the benefit of some advantage in national security and protecting the country and hopefully bettering the world. For journalists, it's to make things known to the public in the hope that there will be a greater goal of a more informed citizenry that helps to make better choices for their elections and other decisions. They all have a common
element, which is the search for the truth. It's not about spin. It's not about what you wish. It's about what is. So that's one element of it.
The other element that strikes me about this is that intelligence increasingly is public in a way that it wasn't decades ago. Now, every year you've got open threat testimony from the leaders of the intelligence community to the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill. And for a day they go in and they talk for hours about their assessments of the threats from Russia and China, Iran, North Korea, climate change, cybercrime. And this is public. And yes, they're still giving a lot of classified assessments to decision makers. But we've gotten to the place where there actually is more public knowledge and awareness of intelligence than at any point in human history. And that's remarkable.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:56] Well, I think it's good that we have some more public discourse about it. You just now mentioned about, of course, the intelligence that the president sees, which is classified. So you were a presidential intelligence briefer, and presidents are not necessarily experts in all the things that come up. And there's so much that is potentially important. So to continue your journalism analogy, you're editing the information to make it digestible for the president. So how do you prioritize what you share? And I'm asking that in part because I'm wondering if it could help everyday people process news about national security issues.
David Priess: [00:26:37] The whole idea of getting information to the president is that there are some things the president has to decide. The United States government is a massive bureaucracy and a lot of decisions are made at at every level. But when a decision is really hard and it involves high stakes issues of alliance commitments or committing US forces overseas or major sacrifices the American people will have to make. You're not going to get some GS-12 bureaucrat working in the basement of the Treasury Department making that decision. It's going to get elevated through meetings of managers after managers up to the cabinet and in many cases up to the president of the United States, especially on national security issues. As commander in chief, the president of the United States has landed on his desk very frequently. A lot of really crappy choices, and he has to decide what to do about this and then implement it in the US government and in the country and with allies. So the president is a very special customer of intelligence because the toughest decisions sometimes have the highest uncertainty and that's why they're tough. And so anything the intelligence community
can offer, either in terms of exquisite intelligence that's been collected, that intercept of what Vladimir Putin actually said today on this issue, we need to know or probably more often exquisite analysis where there's only a few tidbits out there and there are a whole bunch of unknowns. But an analyst who really understands the situation can see the picture from only a few data points and put together an assessment that will help the president understand the issue a bit better. So the president is a very special customer. Because of that, the intelligence community for decades has customized its flagship product, the President's daily brief. Every day for a succession of presidents. Every president since Lyndon Johnson has had something called the president's daily brief. And all those presidents are very different individuals. So it has been customized to the personality of the president not to tell him what he wants to hear. That is against the ethics of intelligence. The whole business of intelligence is to tell the president and others what they need to hear, even if it's not good news for their policy preferences. That, to me, is the lesson for all of us.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:01] So if I'm an everyday person, like if I read about national security in the paper, how can I process that perfectly open eyed and not thinking it's all going to work out? Like if I read about Ukraine or whatever else may be happening, how can I actually say this is really bad for us, and then in which case, is there something I can do?
David Priess: [00:29:25] This is tough because necessarily there are issues in national security that we do not have full information about. Now, we shouldn't lie to ourselves and pretend that the US government writ large or even the president has perfect information either. But when it comes to some issues like the details of North Korea's nuclear stockpile, there are going to be some secrets because if those secrets got out, it would be harmful. It's good that we are one step ahead of adversaries in terms of what they think we know about their nuclear arsenals or about their intentions. So it's a hard one because we will always be feeling like we don't know enough and the government is not telling us information. And that is true. Information is classified and is not released to the American public. I haven't seen classified information in a long time and boy, do I have questions. There are lots of things I'm curious about and I feel like I would be a better citizen if I understood some of those things.
I also understand that I don't need to know those things. We know the general parameters of things pretty well through things like congressional oversight. We have a system that's been set up going on for 40 some years now where we have committees overseeing the intelligence community from Capitol Hill, and they don't just hold classified hearings, they hold open hearings talking about intelligence issues. We have a vibrant press which is talking about classified issues involving intelligence and national security all the time, much to the chagrin of some of these government leaders who are trying to keep that information secret for use against adversaries or to assist allies. So there's always going to be a tension there. I think it is reasonable for all of us to ask the questions, to go to our elected representatives and say, I want to know more about this and see if there's a reasonable way of doing so. But we have to do so with two restraints. One, restraint is the idea of recognizing, no, we do not need to know everything. Some things are secret for a reason and that's actually a good thing. If the US government would have released what it thought it knew about the location of Osama bin Laden publicly because of a public right to know about it, then we would not have gotten Osama bin Laden. He would have been tipped off to it and he would have gotten away. The other one is that issue of certainty that I keep coming back to. I think a lot of us feel that if the government were to open up its National Security Archives, that we would know everything. There would be secrets about John F Kennedy and there would be secrets about aliens landing on Earth and we would know the answer to all of these vexing questions that we've had about the world. And the truth is, on most of these issues, there is no smoking gun.
There is no secret piece of intelligence that reveals everything that's being squirreled away. Usually, it's just a lot of uncertainty. And that's humbling because it makes us realize that we invest a whole lot in national security to try to get, in some cases, very small advantages, incremental advantages over adversaries, not necessarily to know everything in the world. And there's one case in particular, Mila, that comes to my mind on this, which is trying to predict the future. It's really, really hard to know what's going on in the world right now. The world is a big place and a lot of countries and a lot of terrorist groups are trying to keep what they're doing secret. It's really hard to know what somebody's going to do in the future when they themselves might not know what they're going to do in the future. You try to tell me if China is going to invade Taiwan in the next six months. Hard for me to predict that, in part because I'm not sure the Chinese leadership has decided. And if they haven't decided, it's a pretty high bar to expect us to
know what they're going to do. So intelligence can help reduce that uncertainty. As I mentioned. But intelligence is not good at predicting the future, especially when it comes to human choices.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:37] Yeah, it's really just giving you sort of the lay of the land as opposed to telling you what the probability of one outcome may be. So I want to go a little bit back here about things being necessarily secret, but secrecy and lack of transparency can be vehicles for malfeasance. So, black sites, waterboarding, things Americans have definitely not voted for or agreed to be done in their name. So how do you think about the balance between secrecy and democratic values?
David Priess: [00:34:08] Yeah. This ultimately does fall back on the American people because we elect a president and vice president. We elect them in part to appoint officials who do oversight of various practices. We elect our representatives to vote on issues of war and peace and to do things like oversight. So you can have an issue like the enhanced interrogation methods. You can have something that's approved by the president. You can have something that his attorney general has said is okay. You can have something that lawyers in various agencies and departments say is okay. You can have something that's briefed to a very small select group of congressional leadership, and they don't object to it. That sounds like that's okay to go ahead, but there's still always an ethical issue involved. And that ethical issue involves, you know, do you elect people with fundamental character and integrity that you think will make the same choices you would make in one of these dilemmas or not? In most cases, you get general insight into it without knowing the particulars. That is, we knew that there was a war on terror going on, and in many cases there still is. But we know that there are things going on, such as US military deployments overseas. We get information about things like drone strikes that are taking place. The Pentagon gives briefings, the State Department gives briefings on the kinds of things that are happening in this. Now. Do I know exactly who's being targeted in Somalia today and whether that person has met the threshold of a severe imminent threat to the United States? I don't have access to that level of information. But in this country, we have a pretty good sense of in general, what the government is doing and why, because we have regular elections and people have to answer those questions if they want to get elected. Where we get into trouble is where the people stop asking those questions because they stop caring about it, because other issues block it out.
So to the extent that nobody bothers in a presidential election to ask the candidates how they feel about this policy or that policy, then it's pretty hard for them during that administration to complain about that president's foreign policy because they didn't even bother to ask the question about it. Part of our system is to weigh in on what everybody does and wait for the next election. But I really want an engaged electorate on national security issues in addition to other issues to make a better choice about who's well suited to run this big national security bureaucracy we have. And that means asking questions not just during a campaign, but also right now. You can send a note to a congressman and ask them to do some oversight, to do some hard questioning of the bureaucracy, as well as of the political decision makers to figure out what's happening. That's probably a better strategy than sitting back later and complaining about something that happened, because then at least you're trying to get the answers and you're trying to figure out what is guiding them to make this decision. We won't always have perfect information, but you'll feel better about it if you do ask the questions and try to discover what is publicly available about these national security issues.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:22] Yeah, Good advice. So given the recent leaks, when you see rapid advances in AI and leak after leak over discord gaming platforms, how can intelligence and national security keep up with the times and the technology?
David Priess: [00:37:40] Yeah, I'm troubled by any intelligence leak or classified leak in general, just because I've worked with that material in the past. And I know that there are no-kidding real secrets there that would do harm if they got out and I mean harm to the American people. There are things being done to keep the American people secure, and classified information gives an advantage to doing that. I also know that we have a very strong culture of overclassifying information, and there's a whole lot of information out there, perhaps millions of documents that are classified at the wrong level. That is, they're over classified or they're classified when they really don't need to be. That is dangerous because it can lead to a in a sense, a mission creep where if something seems like it's sensitive or something could be uncomfortable, then you find a way to make it classified so that the people can't see it. It's all too easy for information to be hidden away in a bureaucracy when it has a highly classified culture to it. Even if the people aren't intending to do it, it can become almost this this subconscious process to just classify everything. Finding out what is legitimately classified and not though, isn't up to a leaker. There is a process for it, and there's even whistleblowing processes
within the intelligence community and it goes. Up the chain through inspectors general and through general councils and things like this to try to determine what's going on. If you have somebody who takes a thumb drive and gets millions of documents and then runs away to China and Russia claiming openness, I'm a little bit worried about the motives there because that's not showing good judgment about releasing documents that you haven't even seen.
One thing we do know from leaks in the past is that there is a tendency for some of the most major leaks, some of the biggest information where secrets have been exposed and put some people at risk that come from the most petty motives. It can be people trying to sell those secrets to make a few more dollars by, in the case of Aldrich Ames, selling it to the Soviets and the Russians. It can be out of ego. It can be somebody trying to feel important because they watch the news and they smugly see that the entire US government is spinning in circles because they can't figure out who's leaked this and what's happening. It can be based on ideology. It can be somebody thinking, I don't think we should be supporting Ukraine. So they leak something that they think will make support for Ukraine look bad. Those are major, major consequences for somebody making what is ultimately a really petty personal decision. And that has nothing to do with exposing any kind of malfeasance or fraud or abuse.
Some of those things truly are sensitive. And to the extent that they expose different methods of intelligence collection, it means that ultimately we do have less information about adversaries in the future because they will learn to shut down that collection that has been exposed.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:50] Mm hmm. Right. So I want to pivot a little bit here. You took a turn in your second book to do something much more focused on political action. How did you come to write a book about how to get rid of a president?
David Priess: [00:41:04] Yes. So my first book, The President's Book of Secrets, was the history of that document. I mentioned the president's daily brief. And for that, I had the privilege of talking to all of the living former presidents and vice presidents and CIA directors to get their stories about how did intelligence work at the highest levels. Through that book and that research, I got to know the modern presidency and modern political history pretty well. How presidents from John F Kennedy forward have
managed national security issues. And I was embarrassed, Mila, when I was out around the country talking about this book. And people would ask questions about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson and what about them on these issues? And I would just stare back at them. I'd heard these names before, but I hadn't researched them. I didn't know their stories. Now, part of that is because intelligence in the modern sense really is a modern story. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson didn't have a CIA and a president's daily brief. But I also was embarrassed that here I am talking about the presidency and I can barely name the previous US presidents, much less tell stories about them.
So for my second book, I decided I was going to dig deeper into American history. But I also wanted to tell a story that I thought we weren't hearing enough. We focus a lot on elections for good reason, And the remarkable thing about America is not that we elect our leaders. The remarkable thing is that leaders actually leave when new leaders are elected, and at the highest level that's actually historically odd across the wide scope of human history. There's a real problem with getting people in power to step down because most people get power and they kind of like it. And here we are 200 plus years into this experiment and we have had every single president step down or somehow leave office when the time comes. There have been a few speed bumps along the way, so I wanted to research all of those and figure out what are the various ways that presidents leave office or are pushed towards the door. Why is it that we have this surviving representative democracy when all of the incentives are for those leaders to retain power by any means necessary? So I did a look at all of the ways that presidents have left. Sometimes it is by violence. We can't avoid the fact that Abraham Lincoln and three other presidents were removed by force. Most often it's by political means. Obviously, elections, and then sometimes people try to impeach and remove a president. We have a 25th Amendment to remove a president for disability if needed. So I explored all of those as a way of really understanding this issue of what makes us unique, because we're so good at getting rid of leaders and moving on to the next one.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:53] Well, it's a perfect segue for my next question. How does the intelligence community think about foreign interference in the most central act of American civic life, our elections?
David Priess: [00:44:07] As I've talked to historians about this, I've realized more than I ever knew that it's not new, that there was foreign interference of one method or another. You know, back at the very start of the republic and in the elections between Adams and Jefferson, for example, with the British and the French trying to manipulate things a bit. But it really didn't take off as much until recently. And I've got to say, this is one of the things that disturbs me the most, because back during the Cold War, the Soviet Union might try to influence American political opinion, but they had to do it by literally planting stories in newspapers, maybe overseas, and hoping those stories would get picked up in the United States or somehow planting them in the United States. In some cases, they just made things up and they did gain some actual currency in the political and social environment. Stories about, you know, US intelligence agencies putting drugs in inner cities of the United States. Russian propaganda stories about things like that actually did resonate with some people, but they didn't fundamentally make us question whether an election was legitimate or not. Now, with the Internet, with the troll farms in Russia where people can get on and they can be spoofing all kinds of what appear to be legitimate party organizations and other civic organizations in the United States. There's no shortage of ways that people can manipulate our choices and make us think that we're making an educated political choice by listening to all these voices that purport to be other Americans. But in fact, it's people trying to widen our divisions and make things worse. The good news is, I think that as a government and I even think that as a society, we've had our wakeup call and we have organizations like CISA, we have organizations that are really devoted to looking at this. And in the last presidential election, they were all over it and they were issuing public statements about the election interference they were seeing or they weren't seeing. They were talking about election security at a granular level, not just the foreign interference level. And I think we understand now that it's an issue. And once you have the awareness, you can put in that discount factor and have that skepticism. When you see something that looks like something that would exacerbate division, is that really a thing or is that something that's being pushed on us? We can go to that next level of thinking and try to figure that out. We're not going to be perfect at it. We're human beings and we have all of the psychological flaws that human beings always have, but we're more aware of those flaws, and we can find ways to weigh that information and see if we're being deceived.
Mila Atmos: [00:46:50] Mhm. So along those lines, what are two things an everyday person should be doing to be properly informed about matters of national security?
David Priess: [00:47:01] First of all, seek out alternative sources. It is so easy for me or anyone to say I like what I'm hearing from MSNBC or I like what I'm hearing from Fox News or from whatever it is and say, because I like what I'm hearing, that's how I'll get my news, not just my opinion. And that's dangerous because even inadvertently, any individual media source can be biased simply because there's only so much they can print or there's so much they can broadcast. And you're inherently not telling other stories that are out there. You can witness this if you flip between channels. We recently cut the cable and switched to YouTube TV, and we're going back and forth to places like BBC now and we're able to see that there are entire stories about what's going on with a cease fire in Yemen and with issues going on in French politics and the situation in Peru that honestly, I haven't seen in even what I thought was pretty good international coverage from some US outlets.
So, the number one is very where you get your information once in a while, preferably every day, deliberately go somewhere you haven't gone before for news. Pick a reputable outlet. Don't just go to some, you know, random blog, but try to find some place where you can get something from a different perspective so that you can hear about stories you might not have heard or get some of the information that doesn't percolate up through the newsroom of the outlet that you normally do.
The second one will be a hearken back to something I mentioned earlier in a different context, which is ask questions. One of the best ways of getting information is not just to be a passive recipient, but to ask the questions. This is something that would have been really hard advice several decades ago because reporters and newsrooms were operating somewhere and unless you knew one personally, you didn't really interact with them. You just literally read the newspaper. Now you've got Twitter and Mastodon and Instagram and Facebook and you've got email, and you can actually interact with the media, whether it's your local media reporting on school board meetings or whether it's international reporters talking about national security. And you can actually ask questions and find out, hey, where did you get that information? Are you going to give more detail on this in a podcast instead of just the short story that you wrote? And you'll find that you can actually get more information than anyone in history could get simply
by trying to prod it out from people. So if you're really curious about these issues, don't stop asking questions.
Mila Atmos: [00:49:44] All good advice. So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
David Priess: [00:49:51] I think what makes me hopeful is that people in general have been so upset by things like foreign interference in the election in 2016. People have been so upset by those prospects that there has been that wakeup call. I think I'm hopeful that national security, if nothing else, people are more aware of the fact that it can affect things like election security. So in that realm, I am hopeful. I will also say that I am hopeful on the issue that is most dear to my heart, which is intelligence. I'm actually hopeful about the future of intelligence and national security in this country because in so many other ways, when we've had aberrant behavior, we had a unique president who treated the presidency like no other person had. And yet the intelligence community held its ground, continued to produce objective intelligence. We don't know the full story yet about how President Trump used or didn't use that intelligence, but the stories that have come out, including an internal CIA study, show that the intelligence community kept doing its job. They kept providing objective intelligence not only to the president, but to all of the other people in the US government who needed it and could take action on national security. And I'm hopeful that those very people that I talked about at the start, the people who put their heads down and do the work when the going gets tough, there are still those people who are working inside the national security enterprise of the United States who are doing their best to try to get information to people who need it to take action, whether it's diplomats trying to free a kidnapped reporter in Russia, because that's really what's happened in Russia, whether it's people trying to help the Defense Department to protect US forces deployed overseas. We got people who are working really hard to do that and not getting politicized like so many other things in life. And that's a good thing.
Mila Atmos: [00:51:48] Right. Right. That is indeed good news and very hopeful. Thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on.
David Priess: [00:51:56] It was my pleasure, too. Thank you.
Mila Atmos: [00:51:58] Dr. David Priess is the director of intelligence at Bedrock Learning, Senior Fellow at the Hayden Center, and was previously the chief operating officer of the Lawfare Institute and the co-host of the Chatter Podcast. Next week on future hindsight, we're joined by Frank Guridy to talk about the power of social movements in the United States. Frank is the executive director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia and the Dr. Kenneth And Kareitha Ford Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies.
Frank Guridy: [00: 52:34] We saw this in 2020, even though I think the verdict on 2020 is still yet to be determined. But there's no question in my mind that what we saw transpire in that summer was a change attitude towards the question of police violence against Black people and people of color in general. You know, we haven't seen effective policies to curb that problem, but we certainly have seen, you know, an awakening around those questions. And of course, the backlash too.
Mila Atmos: [00: 52:57] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
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This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham.
Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00: 53:31] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.