1:56:44 Well, I've covered national security for a decade or more and after 9-11 you could see, you could feel the growth of something around you. You listened to officials and they had complaints and concerns about how much money was being spent. It was all sort of understandable in the beginning and it continued to grow at a great rapid rate. So a couple years ago, Bill, my co-author, Bill Larkin and I, who we've been talking about this for years and years, said, well, how would you go about trying to show this? And we got together and decided that one of the ways we would do it, since it is at the top secret level and we can't get inside of the government, we can't get inside those programs, is to start by just counting them, to find them and then count them and put them on a map.
1:57:33 sort of create an alternative geography of the United States. We did mapping like you would do on a genome project. Once we did that, which took a year and a half to assemble, while we were doing it we were also trying to talk with officials inside the government and figure out what kind of patterns and problems emerged. And that's where The issue of its size became such an issue. It's not just that it grew, it's that it's grown and the growth has overwhelmed some of the progress that has been made in intelligence sharing and other areas. Are you saying that then, I mean this already was a huge apparatus before this, was it not? Are you saying it really is, the dysfunctionality you found is really a result of the 9-11, post 9-11 proliferation?
1:58:21 Well, yes, I don't think it was that sort of large, unwieldy apparatus before 9-11. It was more disconnected than it was afterwards because after all we created the Director of National Intelligence to get all of this under control and to help coordinate all these different agencies. To some extent that has happened. The various directors have managed to get people to share information. in a better way and more effective way, but at the same time this growth was occurring and you had a proliferation of agencies and a number of people working on things and the focus, the direction that was given to those agencies and many sub-organizations that went about doing their own thing was lacking and every time there was a problem the question was not how can we
1:59:07 we do this better, it was let's do more of it. Let's bring in more people, let's bring in more resources. And that, as Secretary Bob Gates and Director of the CIA Leon Panetta told us on the record, is not always the answer to every problem. Now you came up with some eye-popping figures. One jumped out at me, that this whole enterprise produces some 50,000 intelligence reports every year, and you said many of them are routinely ignored. Well, and the reason for that is that many of them deal with exactly the same subject. uh... you doing the easiest thing is what happens a lot of fuel don't push people to do the hardest work that happens in many different ways in the fort hood uh... shooter is a good example of that the armies largest and counterintelligence organization which is supposed to be looking inside the army for for spies or potential jihadist is just twenty five miles of the road from walter reid where major has signed the suspect in that case
2:00:04 began to speak very oddly about Islam and warning the army that they should let people out who were religious. But that organization wasn't in fact looking hard within its own ranks because that's very hard to do. Instead they were doing something that the FBI and Homeland Security was already doing which was to look at other terrorist affiliations within the United States. So all agencies, many agencies had sort of a mission creep and many of them ended up doing the easiest things rather than the most difficult things. Now the office of the director of national intelligence as you know today reacted by saying look we have unsung successes absolutely every day.
2:00:44 Yet you found a general in the Pentagon who was involved in tracking all this who said it's so complex, he said, that we can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe. Is there really a debate within the community about whether this is making us more safe? Well, absolutely. I think that on the surface everybody thinks that we're much more prepared for a simultaneous attack by airliners. That would be very unusual and very surprising if that ever happened again. But given the resources that we've put on this, the question is, are we getting what we think we're getting out of it? And what these officials are saying is they just can't tell because it's gotten so big and not any, nobody or not enough people have the reach and the visibility over the entire thing to be able to judge that. And certainly not the director of national intelligence who is supposed to be doing this.
2:01:39 That's a position that is never given the authority that I think most Americans think that it was given. And it's turned out through a succession of directors not to really be able to do the sort of directing and focusing that people intended it to do. Now, is anyone, is there any serious effort underway to revamp this? Let me turn it around. Do you think that the people you involved at the highest levels of this community were surprised by what they read in your report? Or do they know it and it's just so big and unwieldy that there's no way to get a handle on it. I think it's the latter. I think that people do know this problem. In fact, there's an on-the-record State Department briefing that says, well, we knew this was an issue. Well, they know it's an issue. They know, they can feel it. But I'm pretty certain that they don't have all the parameters of the problem because that was another one of our surprising findings that of the lack of information about other agencies
2:02:36 within the intelligence world. People would ask us, well what did you find over there? We found that more than two dozen agencies are looking at the same issue of, for instance, counter-terror financing, looking at the money flow from terrorist organizations. And they don't even know everyone else that's involved in it. So how can you coordinate if you can't even get everybody, you don't even know everybody to invite to the table. So this lack of information is one of the things that's impeding any kind of change. And you went to see the director of the National Counterterrorism Center and you described him sitting at his desk with all these
2:03:12 you know, I don't know, drives and so on, and all these information flows with internet networks that can't even talk to each other. Right, and this is five years after that office was stood up. Yes, he sits in front of a bank of computer monitors and a stack of hard drives at his feet and he has to go through over one after another during the day because they can't fuse the intelligence together and he said well I can get all my email now on the same computer and that was progress to him. Dana Priest of the Washington Post, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
2:04:04 In the morning