John O. Brennan: commitment

Transcript context

…I’m sure you know the Chris Whipple book about CIA directors. He says about you, and I quote, “No one was better than Brennan at sifting through and interpreting raw material from disparate sources.” What are your secrets for being good at this? First of all, Chris engages in hyperbole there. CIA has a lot of people who are just so, so skilled in that. I started out in the operation side of CIA and had a real feel, I think, for clandestinely acquired intelligence, human intelligence as well as technical intelligence. Then also had a good sense of the different types of other sources of information that come into the agencies for the analyst to go through. I served as a State Department political officer in Saudi Arabia early in my career, so I was quite familiar with Department of State capabilities and cables, also open-source information. I think it was my exposure to a lot of these areas of sources and acquisition that allowed me to put into context the worth, as well as allow me to very rigorously scrutinize the reliability, the accuracy, as well as the access of the individuals or the systems that are actually obtaining the intelligence. Let’s say we take a concrete issue. The Navy has reported that a lot of its pilots have seen unidentified flying objects. If you’re tackling that, as a CIA director or someone who works there, what is it you would sift through and interpret? How would that go?…

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