Spying: Analysis Matters with Michael Morell
In this episode of The Adrenaline Zone, Sandra and Sandy sit down with former Acting/Deputy Director of the CIA and host of the Intelligence Matters podcast, Michael Morell - a man with a wealth of experience on the analytical side of the CIA, advising presidents and other senior leaders during crises and critical national security decisions. Together, our hosts seek to uncover the risks involved in the intelligence business as Michael shares his story of how he entered the field and his experiences working in this high-stakes environment. His experiences as a valued advisor, a review of the CIA's capabilities, and the role of the intelligence community in protecting national security are all discussed here today. Morell also highlights the importance of ethical decision-making in the intelligence business, as well as the risks and challenges facing the community today.
Our esteemed guest goes on to provide a first-hand account of what it's like to be a Presidential Daily Briefing contributor and the immense responsibility that comes with the job. He recounts an anecdote where what he presented to the President resulted in a change in US policy, and he also shares his experience of being with President Bush on the day of the 9/11 attacks, highlighting the surreal and intense nature of the day. As both a witness to and participant in unfolding moments of historical importance, Michael Morell offers listeners here today a rare glimpse into the life of an intelligence analyst. His powerful insights and thought-provoking anecdotes as shared with Sandy and Sandra in this truly spellbinding episode, provide a deeper understanding not only of the intelligence community, but also its crucial role in safeguarding national security.
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Transcript:
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It lies somewhere between the pit of your stomach, your racing heart, and your brain, somehow trying to keep it all together. It's an area we call The Adrenaline Zone.
I'm retired astronaut Dr. Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm retired Navy fighter pilot Admiral Sandy Winnefeld. We're two adrenaline junkies who love spending time with people who are really passionate about pushing their boundaries as far as possible.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: When people think about risk in the intelligence business, what typically comes to mind is cloak and dagger spies, James Bond adventures, and overseas intrigue.
Sandy Winnefeld: Well, as Phil Riley described in an earlier episode of The Adrenaline Zone, there's plenty of that, but there's a different, more subtle, yet equally important element of risk in the intelligence community on the analytical side.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Our guest today is Michael Morell, former acting and deputy director of the CIA and host of the podcast Intelligence Matters.
Sandy Winnefeld: Michael spent his career on the analytical side of the CIA, directly advising presidents and other senior leaders in the midst of crises and critical national security decisions.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Because this show is all about all kinds of risks, we wanted to know more about what happens on that side of the intelligence business, and we're grateful Michael was able to spend some time with us.
Sandy Winnefeld: So stay tuned for a very interesting discussion on the risk behind the scenes in the world of intelligence.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Michael, welcome to The Adrenaline Zone, and thanks for being with us today.
Michael Morell: Sandra. It's great to be with you guys. And, Sandy, good to be with you. And my adrenaline is pumping for this podcast. Yeah.
Sandy Winnefeld: Michael, you're usually on the other side of the microphone with your podcast interviewing interesting guests. Now it's your turn.
Michael Morell: Yeah. Tables turned here.
Sandy Winnefeld: About time. And it is also about time we had you on the show because you've got a great, great story and a very polished way of presenting it.
Michael Morell: It's an honor to be with you guys. Sandy, and this is a terrific podcast. I listen to every episode, and I'm really honored to be on. So thank you.
Sandy Winnefeld: Well, thank you. The honor's ours, but as you can imagine, the first thing we like to do is kind of ask a guest how you got into what you're doing in the first place. So how did you get into the intelligence business, Michael?
Michael Morell: So, like many kids who go off to college, I wanted to major in political science and go to law school and be a lawyer. That's what all my friends were doing. And so I decided to do the same thing. And one of the required courses for a political science degree was a class in economics. And I took that class, and I fell in love with economics. I thought it explained not only how the economy works but how human behavior works as well. And so I switched my major, and I decided pretty early that I wanted to go to grad school, get a Ph.D., and teach—that's what I wanted to do. But I had a professor who did some work for the agency and economics professor, and he said, "I know you really want to do this grad school thing, but I think you should really send the CIA an application. I think they'd be interested in you. They hire a lot of economists because it teaches critical thinking skills, which is what being an analyst is all about." So I did that.
And, Sandy, as you know, I grew up kind of a lower-middle-class kid in Akron, Ohio, and I had never been to Washington, DC, before. And here, the CIA invites me to come down for two days of interviews, and I went with absolutely no intention of accepting a job if offered. So these were two days of, I thought, easy interviews, right? Because to me, it didn't matter because I was going to go to grad school and get a Ph.D. and teach. And in those two days, I was blown away by the mission of the place, which is to provide an objective picture of what's happening in the world and what's likely to happen so that people make better decisions. I was blown away by the capabilities they could tell me about, and what they could actually tell me were pretty limited, and I was blown away by that.
But what I was most blown away by were the people I met. I could feel a strong sense of family. I could feel that they would really care about my career development. And they seemed like decent, nice people. It's not what I expected. And the second day, they said to me, "You know this grad school thing you keep talking about? If you come work here, we'll send you to grad school first at night. And then, if things work out for your career-wise, we'll send you full-time to work on your Ph.D. And we'll pay your salary, and we'll pay your tuition." Which they ultimately did about five years later. But I said yes and never thought about it again. And, boy, did I make the right decision.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That's a good deal, getting your graduate work paid for. And you specialized in analysis, as Sandy's already mentioned, in the science of analysis traces all the way back to the very beginning of the intelligence community. And so, can you tell us a little bit how that started, how analysis got engaged with the field side, and how it kind of works?
Michael Morell: The operations guys don't like it when I say this, but analysis is actually the pointy end of the spear. Because what analysts do is they take all the information that's available to the US government. And they try to make sense of it for the president and the President's senior advisers. They're the ones interacting with the policymakers. It's not the operations guys who are doing that. It's the analysts. And it's not the raw reporting that drives big decisions. It's the analysis.
And I like to think of analysis not as connecting the dots, which is what we heard after 911, failure to connect the dots. I don't like that metaphor because we all think of the connect-the-dot game that we played as kids. The dots are right there in front of you, and it's easy to connect them and it makes the whole thing sound too easy. So the metaphor I like is that of putting a puzzle together, a 1000-piece puzzle, and you only have about 250 of the 1000 pieces, so 750 of them are missing. And then you've got maybe another 5000 pieces that look like they belong to that puzzle but really don't. And your job is to put that puzzle together, those 250 pieces, and tell smart policymakers what you think you're looking at. And what your level of confidence is in what you're looking at. And that's really hard. And you have to do that under time pressure. That, for me, is a much better metaphor of what analysis is all about.
Sandy Winnefeld: So it's obviously a very important skill, as you'd say, the pointy end of the spear. So how does a young analyst learn to do this? What are you trying to inculcate in these people? So they start to get it right from day one, even though they probably have a lot of experiences along the way that polish that skill. How do you teach somebody to be an analyst? What are you telling them?
Michael Morell: You teach them three things. You teach them critical thinking skills. You teach them to be very critical of the information they’re looking at, to ask a lot of questions about the information that they’re looking at. Because a good chunk of the information you’re receiving is wrong, it’s factually incorrect, so be super critical about the “facts” you’re looking at. And then you teach them how to see connections between that data. You teach them how to ask the right question because oftentimes, the best insights come out of asking just the right question, so you teach them that. You teach them techniques to test their own analysis. You teach them to ask, “Here’s what I think is happening here, but is there any other possibility that fits the data as well or better than my idea here?” You teach them to do assumption checks and also to work on techniques.
Probably the most important thing, the most important part of the process, is what I mentioned earlier, is this thing we call confidence levels. Confidence levels were not taken seriously until the CIA’s failure to accurately assess Sadam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The analyst had high confidence in that judgment, and in retrospect, they should not; it should’ve only had low confidence.
And so, post-Iraq WMD, we started taking confidence levels very seriously. Every judgment is accompanied by a confidence level. And why do I have that confidence level? Is my information dated? Do I have just a few sources rather than a lot of sources? What’s the quality of those sources? Is it somebody who heard something from a friend who heard it from a friend? Or is it somebody who was in the room and the prime minister said it? So, all that comes together in assessing a confidence level.
And we’ve gotten into the point now where policymakers understand the confidence levels as well as analysts. And there’s actually a conversation in the certain room, not only about the judgments but about the confidence levels themselves.
Sandy Winnefeld: Which did not happen with the Iraq piece. Some of the heads had high confidence, but it wasn’t even part of the conversation.
Michael Morell: It did not happen at all.
Sandy Winnefeld: So you can hear this, and you just sort of assumed that might be high confidence when, in fact, it might be low.
Michael Morell: Right. And if you think back to Iraq, had we said to the president, “Mr. President, this is what we think. But what you really need to know is that we have low confidence.” And it already would’ve been a completely different outcome.
So just to go back to your original question, Sandy, analysts are taught this on the job, and they’re taught in training classes. There’s kind of a boot camp for analysts that they go to when they first start and then a series of classes after that. But a good chunk of it is learned on the job, interacting with your management and mentors.
Sandy Winnefeld: So one of the things I like to say is that you can think well and not write well, but you can’t write well and not think well? So I would imagine there’s sort of an entry-level piece where you’re testing these young people, realizing they’re not going to be perfectly polished writers. But I would imagine part of the teaching is how to write these things up in a way that a senior leader can digest it at the first statement.
Michael Morell: Absolutely. And your point about there are two causes of not writing well, not thinking well or you are thinking well, but you can’t just get it done on paper. So, those critical thinking skills are really important, and then writing and briefing skills, which I believe if you’re thinking, writing can be taught. And so, you are looking at baseline critical thinking in hiring people. So, absolutely. And the art, Sandy, is to be simple but not being simplistic when you are writing and briefing.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So you talked a little bit about the training program. It seems like one of the pitfalls that might await a brand new fresh analyst is not understanding their inherent bias or questioning their assumptions. What other pitfalls are there, and what kind of risks does an early entry just getting started, the kind of rookie analyst, have to watch out for?
Michael Morell: One of the big pitfalls is coming to a judgment too early. In medical school, folks are taught to hold off on a diagnosis until you do all the testing and get all the information. Because if you come to a judgment too early, when you're looking at the information, you start seeing what you want to see. And so that is a really tough bias, right? Because your mind is taught to come to a judgment, but you really have to hold off and keep an open mind. So that's really important, making sure you understand what assumptions you're making. If you're looking at the decision-making of, say, Vladimir Putin, and you're looking at what a group of his advisors is telling him. And you're using that in a judgment about what decisions he's likely to make. And you're making an assumption about how important they are. So you better be right about that assumption, and you better have tested that assumption. So I think those are two of the biggest.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, how do you know when the time is right? Because engineers are the same way, we want to have 99.99% of the data before we engage in something. So how do you know when you've got that level of maturity or data?
Sandy Winnefeld: When you’ve got enough pieces of the puzzle, right?
Dr. Sandra Magnus: To make a judgment, yeah. How do you know that?
Michael Morell: Yeah. So this is a constant tension. Because the policymaker wants the answer to the question now, and the analysts have an inherent desire to wait to make sure that they've got as much of the information base as they can. And one of the things to understand about analysis is that it's not all there at one period of time. It's coming in over time. And even after you make a judgment, there's still information coming in. So analysts want to wait. Policymakers want the answer now. So the analytic managers have to deal with that tension.
One of the points to make is that I think it's really important that every judgment is considered kind of temporary. It's the judgment at this moment in time, and a piece of information can come in tomorrow that changes the picture. And analysts have to be open to that, too. An analytic judgment is a constantly evolving thing.
Sandy Winnefeld: And the recipients of that information have to be open to it as well.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Well, yeah. That's sometimes, I suspect, difficult.
Sandy Winnefeld: So Michael Morell, grows more senior as a CIA analyst, and as you did, you took on greater responsibilities. And perhaps your first really high-profile job, I may have that wrong, was as the presidential daily briefer to the president.
Michael Morell: Yes. No, you got that right.
Sandy Winnefeld: We'll get into one of the biggest issues there later. But tell us a little bit about the PDB. You're briefing President George Bush. How does that work? What is it? Who puts it together? Who gets it? How is it delivered? Is there judgment involved? I'm really interested in how that very important process works.
Michael Morell: So the PDB are the five, six most important pieces of analysis that the intelligence community produces every day. And there are pieces that are specifically written for the president that a briefer doesn’t have discretion in whether to show the president or not. So there are these pieces that are written specifically for the president. And then, in addition to that, the briefer has to go through all the other analyses produced by the intelligence community and ask, is there anything else here that I want to show that I think is so important that the president needs to see?
And then, the briefer also goes through the raw traffic. So those most important pieces from CIA spies are received, those most important pieces that are collected by the national security in a variety of different ways; interceptive phone calls, interceptive emails. And then, there’s the information collected by our satellites that the National Geo-Spatial Agency pulls out and tells you what you’re looking at. You have access to all of that, and you have to decide what am I going to show the president this morning. And then you’re going to study it because you have to be able to explain it to the president, and you got to be able to answer questions.
So maybe that first hour, from 3:00 to 4:00, 3:00 to 4:30, you’re deciding what you’re going to show. And then, from 4:30 until 7:30, you’re studying it and understanding it. Think of taking a Ph.D. exam, 6 or 7 Ph.D. exams every morning. And then, from 7:30 to 8:00, you get in the car, and you go down to the oval office and spend a half an hour, 45 minutes with the president, explaining those pieces and answering questions.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So I have a quick question on that, because earlier, you said it was really important that the raw data be put into a context and have some analytical chops behind it. But yet, as a PDB responsible party, you're actually kind of, I don't want to say, doing it on the fly, but you're certainly not going through the normal analytical process every day with that.
Michael Morell: Yeah. So you're showing raw pieces of intelligence that don't need a lot of additional contexts.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Okay.
Michael Morell: It might be an intercepted phone call between two leaders talking about the President. Not a lot of additional context needed.
Sandy Winnefeld: Let's make it clear that those are international phone calls, not domestic phone calls.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: International phone calls.
Michael Morell: Absolutely. International phone calls. No, without a doubt, we're laughing here, but absolutely right.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah.
Michael Morell: Taken very seriously. So it's obvious. But you can also pick up the phone and call an analyst and ask them what they think. And one of the things that President Bush wanted is he wanted a sense of who the CIA source was. Most presidents don't ask that question, but he wanted to know. And George Tenet, who was then the director of the CIA, said yes. So there were people in the morning who would tell me the source of this is an aide to the Prime Minister who was in the room when he heard this information. So that gives you a sense of what you can show and can't show as well.
Sandy Winnefeld: I think what's so incredibly extraordinary about this process, Michael, is that obviously, you must show the President stuff is important. But the fact that a PDB briefer is empowered to make those judgments at 5:00 in the morning, that could make some people acutely uncomfortable. It's like, what's Morel, showing him that we haven't told him to show him? And am I going to have to answer for this later on? I think it's extraordinary trust placed in relatively junior people, right?
Michael Morell: You know, it hit me one morning, fairly early on, Sandy, how much responsibility I actually had because I showed the President something. And the next day, in a news interview, he essentially changed US policy. And the next morning, Condi Rice was talking to the President about how he shouldn't have said what he said, and he responded to her by saying, but yesterday morning, Michael told me. And I was like, whoa, this is a big-time job. This is a big-time job here. What I showed him was correct, but boy, did he act on it. And so immediately, the level of responsibility goes way up.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah. This podcast is about risk, and I think that a huge risk is inherent in that job right there. Speaking of President Bush, you were with him on one of our nation's worst days, 9/11. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?
Michael Morell: Sure. It's stuck in my head as if it was yesterday. If I was going to summarize it, Sandra, I'd say that it was a mixture of the intensity of doing my job with the surreal. So an example of the intensity, when we left Sarasota, we were flying around the Gulf of Mexico, not sure where we were going to head on Air Force One, and the President asked to see me. So in his compartment in his office on Air Force One, it was his chief of staff, Andy Card, the President, and me. And the President looked me in the eye, and he said, “Michael, who did this?” And it's kind of a direct question you got from George Bush, kind of a direct question you get from a President. And I told him that I hadn't seen any intelligence yet that would take us to a perpetrator, but I told him that I was supremely confident that when we got to the end of the trail, we would find Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. And I told him I was so confident in that that I would bet my children's future on it.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow.
Michael Morell: I've never told them that, by the way. And then he looked at me, and he said, when will we know? Right? And that's kind of a question that doesn't actually have an answer, so you fall back on what analysts do, which is to provide context. So I told him about three or four times when America had been attacked before by terrorists and how long it took us to find out. And that allowed me to bound it for him. In some cases, it was two days until we found out who did it, and in some cases, it was a year. The Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia took us a year to figure out that it was the Iranians. And so I was able to bound it for him right. By saying, Mr. President, we may know soon, or it may take some time.
Another example of the intensity was on the flight back to Andrews Air Force Base that night. George Tenet sent me a piece of intelligence that a European intelligence service had shared with us. And here's the President, who had just suffered the worst attack on the homeland in the history of the country, and his intelligence briefer is showing him a piece of information. Don't have any understanding of its credibility or where it came from besides the European service that gave it to us. And it said that what happened that morning was the first of two waves of attacks that would happen in the United States.
And then an example of the surreal, there were many moments during the day like this. As we were landing that night at Andrews, the President's military aide who carries the nuclear football, he and I had become friends the previous nine months. And he was looking out the windows on the left side of the aircraft as we were on final approach, and it was dark in the cabin. So I went over, and I looked out, and there was an F16 on the wingtip. And he said, “Michael, that's an F16 DC Air National Guard.” And that plane was so close that you could see the pilot. You could see the pilot's facial features. You could see the pilot looking at us. And in the distance, you could see the still smoldering Pentagon.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow.
Michael Morell: And then the military aide said something to me which to this very day sends shivers up my spine. He said, Michael, “do you know why they're there?” And I had no idea why they were there at that point. Every civilian airliner had been grounded. Only military planes were in the air. He said, “Michael, their job is if someone fires a surface-to-air missile at us on final approach, their job is to put themselves between that missile and the President of the United States.”
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow.
Sandy Winnefeld: Wow. What a story. Amazing.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I can't even imagine what that whole– I mean, surreal seems like a really good word for it. But in general, we talked a little bit about the general pace of the PDB job, and so there's probably some days where there's not much to report. And that one story you told us—you were surprised that something touched the presidential nerve. But maybe other times you might know going in that something is going to touch the presidential nerve. And I imagine there's a little bit of adrenaline and stress that goes with it that you have to kind of manage. And you probably have some good stories there, too, I imagine.
Michael Morell: The job of an intelligence officer, in general–and analysts, in particular—is to tell it like it is. To be the umpire and call the balls and strikes—and be objective—and not have a policy agenda or a political agenda. And sometimes, that means telling people what they don't want to hear. We joke about it and say we're often the skunk at the garden party because some of what you're putting in front of a president is contrary to the policy they want to pursue—or, in some cases, many cases—it's suggestive that their policy isn't working and it can be tough.
I actually found it to be pretty easy with George Bush because I started briefing him before he became president. I started briefing him in early January of 2001, so three weeks before he was sworn in. And I actually had a conversation with him that I just had with you. Some days I'm going to tell you stuff that you don't want to hear, but it's my job to do that. And I gave him some examples. And then, on those days, I would start that day by saying, "Mr. President, this is going to be one of those days where I tell you something you don't want to hear." And he would laugh. And it made it much easier.
One day I showed him an intelligence report that said that the intelligence service of a very important adversary country was telling its leader not what it really thought, but what they thought that leader wanted to hear. And he read that and he laughed and he said, "Michael, we don't have that problem here, do we?"
Sandy Winnefeld: That's cool. Yeah. We used to tell brand new admirals that this is the last time you'll ever hear the truth.
Michael Morell: But maybe an example where it was actually very difficult to do this, and that's when we were talking with President Obama about our confidence level that Osama bin Laden was at the Abbottabad compound. And most of the people in the room felt pretty confident about the judgment, and I didn't. And I spoke up, and I told the President that– And there's all these senior policymakers in the room, many of them who had already made the decision that we should go do this, and my boss, Leon Panetta, being one of them. So I'm sitting right behind him. I'm against the wall in the Sit Room. He's at the table. And I tell the President that the case that Bin Laden was at Abbottabad was circumstantial. There was no direct evidence. And I told the President that the circumstantial case that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was stronger than the circumstantial case that Bin Laden was at Abbottabad. And my good friend, a good friend of Sandy, Mike Vickers, who was in the room, said you could hear a pin drop.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow.
Michael Morell: And that's speaking truth to power in a way that my boss didn't want to hear.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Michael, as you became more senior, you're now the Deputy Director of the CIA, and you found yourself frequently in the White House Situation Room providing analysis to not just the President, but the rest of our nation's most senior civilian and military leaders who are in the midst of either making or making recommendations to the President about critical national security problems. You and I did a lot of time together in those meetings. Can you tell us your view of the role the Intelligence Committee plays in that room and the role it does not play in that room, and the risks that go along with sitting at that table in some of the most tense moments you can imagine?
Michael Morell: I thought I had three roles. One was to put the intelligence analysis on the table and make sure that everybody understood what we were saying, number one. Number two, as the policy conversation then ensued, I thought it was my job to make sure that people stayed within the reality of the analysis that people didn't drift away from the analysis. So I would really only interject once the policy discussion began if I thought people were drifting away from the analysis. And then third, I saw it as my job to listen very closely to the conversation and to be able to go back to CIA and sit down with my collectors and with my analysts and say, "Here's where the policymakers are on this issue. And here's the additional questions that they need answers to, both from the collectors and from the analysts." And so we would try to turn those pieces around in 24, 48 hours so that we could keep up with you guys as you were going through policy formulation.
What my job was not—absolutely not—was to recommend policy. That's a bright red line in our intelligence community. You do analysis. You put the analysis on the table, but you don't recommend policy. Because once you start recommending policy, then people start questioning whether your analysis is objective or not, and you never want that to happen. The other thing I thought it was important to do was to make it very clear what the analysts thought. But then sometimes I would add, "That's what the analysts thought. Here's what I think," which is a little bit different. And then sometimes I would add, "Here's what the analysts think, but here's what my chief of station thinks," which is a little bit different than the analyst. So I thought my job was not only to bring the view of the analyst, which is absolutely, critically important, and that went first, but to also add my own perspective if it was a little different or my chief of station's perspective if that was a little different.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I would just say that what you described is a very elegant balance between it's not just people being suspicious if you make policy recommendations. It's also the consumer of the intelligence, giving de facto credibility to the intelligence briefer at the table. In other words, very rarely there'd be good questions posed to the intelligence briefer. But at the end of the day, what the intelligence briefer assessed as the situation or the likelihood of consequences was, what the policy discussion was based on—we weren't going to argue about that.
Michael Morell: I also thought it’s important, Sandy, that I point out where analysts sometimes make judgments that aren't helpful. So, for example, analysts for years have been saying that Kim Jong-un will never, ever give up his nuclear weapons. And that may be true from making a judgment perspective, but it's not helpful. It's like somebody going to a coach before a big football game and saying, "You can't win." What that person really needs are some ideas on how to win, right? How to play the best game you can. What are the vulnerabilities of the other team? So sometimes, we're telling policymakers things that aren't really helpful. And I would often say when the analysts took a firm stand that some foreign policy objective couldn't be met. I would remind everybody in the room that diplomats do extraordinary things all the time and accomplish things that analysts say aren't possible. I would remind people of that.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: We talked earlier about the fact that the result of analysis efforts can have real-world consequences. And, of course, being the Presidential Daily Briefer, you're at the pointy edge of that spear, and it's very obvious when you're talking in that room. But as you go down kind of in the chain of analysts, how does that knowledge impact the generic analysts’ several layers into the organization? And how do they approach their jobs and the importance of data verification? Do they feel those consequences as strongly, or how do you make sure that they do?
Michael Morell: They absolutely do. Because one of the things that's done is there's pretty much instantaneous feedback. So there's a meeting every morning where all the briefers sit around the table and they say, "Here's how my conversation with the President went. Here's how my conversation with the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs went. Here are the questions they asked. Here's where they seem to have some doubts about our analysis." So there's instantaneous feedback, and people do feel the weight of responsibility. I can tell you that every one of those individuals involved in the Iraq WMD assessment feels the weight of that judgment. I was the number three on the analytics side of the agency at the time. I was in the chain of command for that judgment. And I'm going to have to live with that for the rest of my life. Right. And I think about that a lot.
Sandy Winnefeld: I would imagine that like an action officer in the Pentagon, that when you go back from one of those briefings, and you're able to say to a junior analyst, "This piece of work that you did was really important, and the President appreciated it," that person has to be walking home or riding home on air. Those moments are rare, but they're so motivating.
Michael Morell: As a young analyst, you get a copy of your PDB the next morning. And I always got a huge charge out of just seeing it because, at the bottom, it would say, "For the President only." And I thought, "Wow, I wrote this, and it's for the President only. It's pretty cool."
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, that is cool.
Sandy Winnefeld: Just a quick segue. You had a few overseas postings along the way. I think you were in London for a while. What can you tell us about our nation's relationship with the intelligence agencies and, in particular, the analytical side of other friendly countries?
Michael Morell: Yeah, this is a team sport. The world is an incredibly complicated place. One nation alone can't solve the problems, one military alone can't solve the problems, and one intelligence service alone can't solve the problems. So it's a team sport. Intelligence relationships tend to be bilateral because they're based on trust. There are three levels to them. The first level is exchanging analytic views. So sitting across the table, your analysts and their analysts, talking about what you think and really focusing on those areas of disagreement and trying to figure out why you disagree. Are you looking at different information sets? Do you have different assumptions? So that's kind of the first level.
And then the second level is exchanging raw reporting—you know, us passing to another country what our spies collect and them passing to us what their spies collect. And then the third level is actually conducting joint operations together to actually collect intelligence. And it was my job as Deputy Director to try to take those relationships and wherever they are. When you walk in the room, or somebody walks in the room, to see you is to take it to the next level and keep pushing. Because these relationships are so beneficial to the United States, we could not provide the insights we do to policymakers without these relationships, both analytic and operational.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: The world's changing fast around us. Some things are staying the same, but a lot is changing. And so how do you see the analytical craft changing? With technology and others. And the fact that there's this pervasive information network that's open source everywhere. And then we have things like machine learning and artificial intelligence capability. How is that going to change both the way you do the analysis and maybe your confidence levels and your assessments and confidence levels?
Michael Morell
Michael Morell: So I think two things have to happen. One is intelligence agencies in general, and analysts in particular, have to be more open to open source. There's so much information out there, both that's publicly available that you can get for free, that you can get by doing searches on the Internet, for example. And then there's so much information that is commercially available. In other words, information data that's created by companies just doing what they do every day. And those two sets of information are getting richer and richer and richer.
And some of the things that I've seen available commercially, maybe information that some companies gathered because they have some app—if we collected it the old way, would be stamped top Secret sensitive, and it would only be on paper. It's that good. So there needs to be an openness to that. And there tends to be still a preference for information that's collected by the intelligence community. So there needs to be a more openness to using that data, gathering that data, buying that data. And then there needs to be a greater openness to the use of tools that can sit on top of all of your data and help you identify information that you might not have found on your own—a nugget that you missed that can give you a first cut about how to think about something.
But I think one thing that an analyst will never accept as a black box is some algorithm that tells you there's going to be a coup tomorrow in Moscow. Right. It's great to have an algorithm that tells you that, as long as that algorithm can tell you how they got to that judgment, what information they used, how did they connect it, that always needs to be there. And I'm talking to companies all the time about if you're going to develop these algorithms, they have to be able to see inside them.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, because you can get so dependent on tools that you forget what basic assumptions are buried in there, and they'll lead you astray.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Michael, you've had an extraordinary career of service to our country and a discipline that many people don't understand. So thanks so much for kind of pulling the curtain back on that.
So maybe our listeners have a much better understanding of literally the thousands of Americans, great Americans out there who work their tails off every day to try to take what is collected, whether it's open source or the most sensitive types of collection that our nation has and making sense of them so that senior leaders can make the best-informed decisions. And you've had an extraordinary career doing that. You're also an extraordinary friend. And Sandra and I are both grateful that you would spend some time with us on The Adrenaline Zone. So thanks for being with us.
Michael Morell: You're welcome. It was great to be with you guys.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, thank you. I learned a lot, and it was fascinating.
That was Michael Morell, former Deputy and Acting Director of the CIA and host of the podcast Intelligence Matters.
I'm Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld.
Check us out on social media, including a short video of our interview with Michael on TikTok. Our handle is very simple: @theAdrenalineZone.
