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the CIA made an explosive admission that the agency has lost dozens of informants to foreign enemies. My colleague Julian barred on why the failures happened and how the CIA got sloppy at its own game, its brighter October, it you can you tell me about this secret CIA message here last. Week? The CIA sent word. with wide message to all of its stations and bases around the globe. So every point

there is a CIA officer stationed. They got a copy of this relatively short, but pretty explosive cable, and the message was that there is a real problem with sea. I informants being arrested, killed or compromised, and what was unusual is this is usually

the kind of information that you know the most closely held secret so sounds like the sea ice version of sending up a flare saying we are acknowledging that we are losing our people. Is that a fair way to characterizing that's a great way to characterize it? This was something where the CIA was trying to get the attention of its officers, its case officers who run informants, who develop sources who collect the intelligence, the? U S relies on it, wanted their attention, it wanted them to focus on it and they wanted it not to just be the sort of standard reminder, but get people's attention by being very specific about the scope,

the problem. So what is the scope of that problem? Well, we're talking about dozens of informants over several years that have been lost to the United States and losing people can be an informant is arrested. And no longer can talk to the United States, because the source is now in a prison overseas also can mean that the source is executed, as many countries will promptly kill somebody suspected of being a spy for the United States, and then there is a third more complicated category, and these people are still talking to the United States, but the? U S can't trust that they haven't been turned, and so.

The informed is useless. Do we know what the proportion of people who are in any of those categories have more of them than the rest? It have more of them died or have more of them been turned, so we're not putting out specific numbers for security reasons? Ok, but we can tell you the biggest worry, is those double agents, the people who are in the suspected to be turned category two June, when you saw the cable, what was your reaction My reaction was that this problem was bigger than we understood that there were real problems with the CIA is spy craft. Maybe there is something systemically wrong and if that's the case, it's a really big deal. I mean the United States relies on the CIA

and relies on its human resources to collect the economy, formation that we use to avoid a war or avoid conflicts or small Out international relations to be now make the United States safer in theory and so my reaction was. This is a big deal if the? U S is losing its edge? That matters and the more we learned about this cable that seem to be the kind of warning it was delivering. For some reason, the United States has. gotten less good at recruiting spies around the world in how to dive deterioration, occur well.

Think of it in two broad categories of what's going on here in the first is how the world has changed and what were well, first and foremost with technology. There is a dramatic change in all kinds of technology: communications, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, some broad cattle, or is that make it really really difficult to be a spy in the modern world? But what does that look like? How has technology impacted the abilities for spies to operate? Well, let's think back to classic spy movies or classic spy novels. You know the Red Sparrow novels. They talk about american spies in Moscow. Going to meet a source

big hours trying to elude the KGB or efforts be tail, and just doing all these elaborate moves to lose the tale to go black in the parliaments of the CIA, get just a few minutes to be alone with the source and do a brush pass or do a dead drop or get a little bit more time and actually have a conversation.

I'm getting? Jason Bourne Imaging yeah, exactly Jason Bourne, but double seven blows were set up, but that classics by tail. The problem is you can't do any of that Jason Bourne has three passports: five passports, double oh, seven opens a drawer takes out a new passport. Well, guess what you go into a foreign country, they're gonna, scantier retina, like you, can't change your retina. The whole three passports thing doesn't work anymore and you know walkin around Beijing trying to lose the tale. There's cameras everywhere there connected to the world's most powerful facial recognition and a high software. That is a dinner fine people, and so this technological

change means its way way harder to be a spy these days with that constant surveillance in this big brother world that we now live in is that the main way in which the landscape has changed around the? U S and the CIA that's important way its change, but you know the other ways. changed is we have the development of some really really good counter intelligence services in the world from places that weren't always thought of as having the best spies services. Right, I mean classically. You know that

hey GB and the successor organisms ass. We are therefore be were the great spies and the great spy hunters, but it's not just Russia anymore hat- is really good. At this. A wrong has some of the best counter intelligence operations there are. They have destroyed the american networking. Side. That country Pakistan turns out is really really good at finding american informants and time and Again, they have broken down our networks. Penetrator, our networks turned our sources and those turn sources feed us bad information, and that leads to. intelligence he. So we can not just assume that the traditional power are the only ones who know how to do this, and we really.

need to understand that other countries are getting better at this and may be better than we are well if they are getting better. Does not put more pressure on the United States to also match that to also be at the top of its gay yeah? Absolutely it does, but the reality of the situation is The CIA, has gotten floppy, we'll be right back. Colombia is the most welcoming country you could ever visit your welcome with the warmest of smiles you wake up to the smell of the coffee that bids the world good morning here. You'll be green, by the charming, Caribbean, the majestic Andy's them

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You might even walk away some new opinions of your out. You can listen in Europe, sides of the argument every Wednesday were ever yearly. thanks to this bad guest. Ok through it said that the CIA got sloppy. What do you mean? Well, that kind of leads us to the second big category of what went wrong. We let ard spy craft Slip and you have to remember the wider context here, you know what has the CIA doing. Over the last twenty years they ve been fighting terrorism. That's what the focus of the United States was after nine eleven counter terrorism became. The most important issue: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the war in Syria, the threat of Al Qaeda, the threat of islamic state- and you know it turns out-

that it's actually a different thing to try to collect information against another country, another country that operates its own counter intelligence service. That is watching for her speech eyes is got a group of people trying to catch spies and has kind of huge resources to try to counter the CIA. How is it that collecting information against another country is different are harder than again some of these terrorism organisations that the? U S has been focusing on groups like ISIS yeah. I mean ISIS probably is looking for malls: they're, probably try to figure out what of their people are loyal to them, but

they don't have the same means to monitor people right. That is not something that Al Qaeda or the islamic state in most cases, have the ability to do I mean if you are a nation state, you can listen to phone calls in your country. You can listen to phone calls and other countries, you can follow cell phones, and so you know, protecting informants developing informants inside potentially

cereal country requires more care. It requires extra layers of protection. It requires teaching your informants to be spies right, yeah. It's! I think, you're saying that the muscles that the CIA developed during the Cold war era, that they became synonymous with that spy craft and counter intelligence that they may have lost some of that when they started focusing so much on counter terrorism. Is that the main way the CIA sort of let its Biograph slip or is there another? That's one way that

the other way is kind of a a subset of that of mission over security? What's that mean well, it's kind of like quantity over quality? Maybe that's the way to think about it. You know if your CIA case officer those are the people who go overseas and recruit new informants. You don't former officials tell us the way you get promote is you bring a new sources and you would have a successful tour if you'd developed ten new sources? You know three in the Ministry of Defence to you know in the central Bank and three other well connected business people. But what experts have told us is you know quantity is great, but if a couple those people get caught, then your whole network can get taken down and you have two. Instead of focusing on the numbers you have to

the extra time to do the vetting to make sure the people you are recruiting really are on the side of the United States, really are working to help the CIA develop. It's him formation and not double agents, not people working for the adversarial country. There is a classic example that former officials will say that is the sort of worst case scenario in two thousand and nine the sea.

Okay was recruiting a jordanian doctor to infiltrate Al Qaeda to collect information and bring it back to the United States. They arranged for that doctor to go to the secret base that the CIA operated in Afghanistan Camp Chapman in Khost Afghanistan. They were so eager to meet the source to hear what he had to say and not offend the source to keep on their good side that the security checks, the Pat downs, were. Lacks the person got into the base to meet with the CIA agents. Al Qaeda had turn that person. The person was now working for Al Qaeda. He had become a suicide bomber set off the bomb. Seven agency officers

were killed. While it was one of the most devastating days and CIA History- and you know former officials say a classic example of mission over security. The risks of a turned informant can be catastrophic in way You can't really imagine, and that is why it is so important to take the painful steps

and to always keep security at the forefront of your mind. Wow. This is the exact type, a tragedy that they cable points to the real risk that comes with this type of spy craft. That's exactly right, and despite those risks, the human asset is still really important to the CIA. The kind of intelligence you get from another person is really important and it is information that you can always get from a stolen document or intercepted phone call. Is there an example when this type of intelligence outweighed the human race? There's one really important example, and that is the twenty sixteen election and

russian interference and one of the key findings that the sea I made was that Vladimir Putin favoured Donald Trump. This was, as you will recall, of a controversial finding, not all Republicans agreed with that. They felt that Russia was just trying to cause chaos, but it too. without that the reason, the sea I knew about that in part was a human source. They had somebody who was in some meetings with Putin and Flattery Putin, doesn't use cell phones He doesn't like a lot of documents, get created with his thinking on them. It's really hard to understand his intentions, his thinking and the way to do that

To get sources close to on people who have been in meetings with him have heard him talk with advisers, and this asset was real important to the CIA. Making that judgment now. That asset was also an example of someone who was lost. In this case, though, the CIA extracted that operative from Russia and brought him to Northern Virginia to make sure he didn't get caught to mix. or he didn't get turned so I can see other shows the value of that human intelligence. But if this year has already been so sloppy and we ve lost a number of spies to these countries as a result, what happens if the CIA is not successful and re shifting is focus to protecting these human asset? I mean nothing interesting question right, because what what

open if all the human sources dried up or went away. What, if we were just dependent on the information we can get from spy satellites in intercepted phone calls, we wouldn't be completely blind, but I think what the sea I would tell you is If we don't get, this right will lose some nuance and in intelligence, new it, is really important, and when we get the nuance wrong, we make bad policy decisions. So I think if we had Bell burns on here with us, the director of the CIA, he tell you, you know we're gonna, make sure we get this right and we continue to develop

networks, and we will find a way to do it. Discussing might see my left ear. But is it clear, though, when the? U S has more spies out there that if bill burns were here and said, we're gonna do better on this front, that is causation or that the world will then be safer. How do we know that the security vision that the CIA is pitching here is actually a good one? That's a pretty deep question I mean yeah. But it's an important question I mean. Certainly there are people who would believe that you know the world would be better off if we weren't all trying to steal each other's secrets. The other hand in this world that we find ourselves in today with increasingly adversarial relations with China, Russia and a host of other countries,

giving up on intelligence collection seems to be a kind. Unilateral disarmament, we know The Chinese are doing whatever they can to scoop up. Are technology secrets to learn what they can about what we are doing and we stop trying to learn what they're doing it would give them. An advantage and the balance of power,

or in the world could shift and it might shift away from democratic countries to more authoritarian once as imperfect as our democracy may be. The CIA director would tell us that, no matter how you feel about this stuff, it is the world tat we live in. So with his eye there player deeply yeah, that's a very concise way of putting it to an thank you. I appreciate tat. They could be with you

We'll be right back. If there, a friends and family members you haven't, talked tune, while don't worry, it's never too late to reconnect to help eight He is offering deals on the latest smartphones. It's not complicated. Everyone there's something new, so eighteen to use giving new and existing customers their best deals on

We smartphone even the latest ones. Restrictions and exceptions may apply visit. Eighty tee thou come for details, here's what else you should know that on Thursday, Visor Ass federal regulators to authorize emergency use of its corona virus vaccine for children ages, five through eleven, a move that could help protect,

in twenty eight million kids in the United States, the FDA should be making a ruling sometime in November and on Wednesday, a federal judge in Texas halted. The enforcement of a recently passed state law that bans nearly all abortions in the state. The law is one of several anti abortion laws passed in recent years. The Texas law is one of the most stride it allowing for some retroactive penalties to be placed on the doctor or clinic that provides an abortion. Even while the statue is being legally debated. Today's episode was produced by Jessica Charm, Lindsey, Garrison, Sidney, Harper Aircraft Key and Syria shortly it was added it. I M J Davis Land and Patricia Williams and engineered by Chris Word, original music by Dan POW, Elisa, but

Marion Lozada? Our theme is: it is by Jim from birth and been lansford of wandering different. That's it that's it for the daily thanks for joining us, I'm instead Herndon Michael Varvara, we'll be back on Monday. Should I do to get a rigour. This episode of the daily is supported by now. What's next, a podcast from in Stanley that helps make sense of life during and after the pandemic, to chart. What's chow changed and where we might be headed hosts.

Clayton talks with everyone from restaurant owners to therapists, Tasker knots, even third graters, about the opportunity. We have now to rethink some age old assumptions and create a better world search for now. What's next, wherever you listen to pot, casts