Unredacted LIVE! - Postscript on Analytic Transformation

Live Carahsoft FINAL: We want to thank the sponsor for this episode, Kerasoft, the trusted IT solutions provider. Kerasoft supports federal, state, local government, education, healthcare, and private sector industries. As the master aggregator for their vendors, resellers, and integrator partners, they deliver solutions for cybersecurity, FinOps, Multi-Cloud, DevSecOps, Artificial Intelligence, Human Capital, Legal and Courtroom Technology, Customer experience and engagement, and more. Let's sit down. Come on now. Let's settle down. This wild and crazy crowd. Whenever they're ready. Hey, hey, hey. That's not okay. That's okay. Thank you for everyone being here. This is our first live recording of the unredacted podcast. Thank you. A little enthusiasm. That would be nice. so I know it's a bit of a trip out here to rest in, so really appreciate everybody coming out here. it I This is a fun time, I guarantee you. And if you've never been on one side of the microphone, I can tell you that it's it's fun. Being on the opposite side is also fun because you get to ask all the questions. so we got a lot of good folks coming up. Come on here, Chris. And a lot of fun things to talk about. Everyone's settling in. Good, good. All right, we'll play a quick game. Who came the furthest away? Sean Waltman's here. Sean lives in New Jersey. Anyone beat New Jersey? Nebraska always. You're like obligated to be here. Nebraska. Okay. Nobody else? Let's stay a little local East Coast here. Anyone else besides Jersey? Maryland? Okay. Got a couple Marylanders, alright. Luckily, not in a car crash before they came. Right. Terrible. Alright, so Welcome. so today we've got Brian Drake, host number one. Lindy Kaiser. Also host number one. We're we're one and the same. All right. And we have great panel today, so we'll do some quick introductions. Chris Rasmussen here to my immediate right, to his I'm sorry, my left, and then to his left is Sean Denahy, and to his left is Robert Cardillo. very quick bio bios here. Both Robert and Chris worked at NGA. Sean, who's speaking for the first time publicly, came from the CIA. And all four of us were involved in a time in the intelligence community immediately after nine eleven to find ways to transform the community and in enhance collaboration. So we worked on what was popularly known as Web2. which were things like wikis and logs and things today that seem very pedestrian like chat forums and now we're into the the bold new age of AI. So we're trying to span the gap of over twenty five years to talk about what has changed since then and now. That's why we're here. So I get the first question. And it's for Robert. So Robert y all three of these folks by the way, if you've listened to the podcast are mentioned prominently in absentia. And Robert has mentioned several times because you were in a leadership role throughout this entire period. But we'll start with this. Where were you on nine eleven? I was in one, thanks for having me. And it's good to be with this esteemed panel, especially since one that hasn't spoken before. This is quite exciting. I was in Bethesda, Maryland, at the then headquarters of an agency called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the predecessor to National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. I was the newish director of something called the Office of Corporate Relations, which meant I had public affairs and congressional affairs. I was in a conference room interviewing candidates for a position, an open position in our Congressional Affairs office. And on the first plane hitting my assistant, you know, knocked on the door and said there's, you know, been a tragedy up in New York City and I and I I didn't yell, but I said, you know, I'm in an interview and, you know, this person you've just interrupted and now this we've got to restart our train of thought. I mean, I was a little perturbed. I mean, how can you b be bothering me with this accident in New York? And of course, whatever it was forty seven minutes, you know, fifty seven minutes later, you know, there was no knock. It was just the open door and, you know, the whole world changed at that moment. just, you know, briefly, what was that morning like? Look, we were Anticipating our new director, Jim Clapper, was change of command ceremony was set for that Friday. Okay, this is Tuesday. So we were in heavy transition. As a matter of fact, General Clapper was out in Saint Louis visiting our site out there, so you know, none of us knew really what was the extent of what was going on, right? Two planes, you know, but we were hearing reports of a third and a fourth, and so How do you protect the force? How do you protect the mission? How do you locate leadership at this time? and so there was just a whole lot of uncertainty. And then because of my job, I immediately began either communicating with the Hill or from the Hill with respect to what did we know? Not much, right? And how could we help? And I will say the one thing we were able to help on that day is because the Capitol was evacuated, as many buildings were. we ended up being a refuge because we had an office building down in the Navy Yard at the time, Building two thirteen. And so we invited the Hipsey members and their staff to relocate to Building two hundred thirteen and essentially b use that as their emergency relocation facility. What was the conversation like amongst leadership at that juncture? Like yes, a lot of ambiguity. We didn't know what was going on, we were had ideas if we were responsible. Eventually that became very clear that it was Osama bin Laden. But what were the conversations like with leadership around what are we going to change? How do we need to change? What was what was that experience? At least for me, there was a certain period of time and I'm going to say it was at least a few days, if not a couple of weeks, it was very short term thinking. Because the assumption or concern was this was just Act one, act two, act three, there's more coming. Where are current vulnerabilities? If you were in an adversarial position, you know, what would you be planning next? So I want to say it was a very tactical mindset for a few days, maybe even a couple of weeks. So I don't I don't recall and of course one never really settles in after such a traumatic experience, but i it was it was very near term, you know. you know Are there liquefied natural gas facilities and how far are they away from DC and how would that weather disperse, you know, such I mean it was that kind of what do we do if? And so y you know, a lot of like I said, protect the forest, protect and then not protect the mission, extend the mission. It was that kind of mindset. And I would say the the longer term question came weeks, if not a month or two later. So when does it become more strategic about affecting change, transformative change in the community? End of the month. and again, I don't know what your role was on that day. You what you can tell us where you can or can't tell us shortly, but but because of my responsibility to communicate to and from the Hill, there was a lot of conversation about How would the community reposture itself to deal with the reality that we hadn't considered, you know, one month ago? And so you know, tiger teams were set up, joint task force were set up between and across agencies. by the way, General Clapper became the director, I think, on Friday morning in his office. We had no ceremony, of course. it was just a handshake and a turnover. And if anybody knows General Clapper, you can imagine whatever cycle we by the way, General King was no wallflower himself. I mean a very, very energetic leader, but General Clapper had his you know immediate, you know, kind of cycle of you know, identify vulnerabilities, assess opportunities, don't ask permission, you know, move forward with positive intent. get the permission later. And so it it was it was a very dynamic time, albeit one that we weren't quite sure exactly how we were going to work our way through it. But I do think it planted seeds and I know we'll talk about them later about what what what I think what the community was able to to both learn and apply as it went forward. That's awesome. So Sean, if those don't know, Sean started something as a a project called Arachopedia, which was the early predecessor for what became known as Intellipedia. And so for you, Sean, I think we'd like to learn a little bit about how did you how you're now just out. You got to see everything from when you were first in the Air Force all the way through your agency experience, through the Intellipedia experience, and then the senior ranks of the agency. How are we doing? Are we as open as collaborative as we were before, or do you see backsliding occurring? Sure. so what I'd like to start with is obviously we had the tragedy of nine nine eleven. I think one of the things that that I think listeners would be benefit from is that not only did we have that tragedy, that you know, failure of intelligence, but a couple of years later you know, we failed to find WMD in Iraq. And that that was something that I was heavily involved with I was a military analyst studying Iraq both when I was in the Air Force at the Pentagon and then when I was at CIA as well. and that was, you know, I those two events so closely together really were kind of really kind of hit the community in the solar plexus, really. Just kind of it you know, it all of a sudden it required change. and I actually We'd like to read a little bit from the WMD report. you can find it online, but the this is from page five, so probably everyone's read this. the intelligence community is also fragmented, loosely managed, poorly coordinated. The fifteen okay, how many are there now? intelligence organizations are a community and name only and rarely act in u unity of purpose. Perhaps above all, the community is too slow to change the way it does business. Reluctant to new new use new human and technical collection methods. It's behind the curve in applying cutting cutting edge technology. and so and then later on page six, we are not the first to say this. Indeed, commission after commission has identified some of the same fundamental failings we see in the intelligence community, usually to little effect. The intelligence community is a closed world and many insiders admitted to us that it has an almost perfect record. of resisting external recommend recommendations. So after this podcast, they're going to listen at all. They're going to adopt every everyone but that's where we were. So and that's where the community was. And I would argue that's where the kind of that community still exists in that type in that format. What we were able to achieve through analytic transfer transformation is we were given the Leeway, and I think Robert talked about this and and General Clappers kind of go forth, you know, make make changes, go seek, you know, prevention afterwards. we were able to, in reaction to both of these events, we were able to kind of challenge the status quo and and think big and not necessarily, you know, very you know, i typically when you try and start something new, you try and start it really small and grow it from there. But it These efforts that we were trying to do with analyz transformation were were very big and they were community wide and that was something different for the community, definitely. we made some steady progress. and then and I think this is some context that, you know, hasn't come through the in the the podcast series that I've listened to is, you know, there were other things that happened. There was Chelsea Manning, there was Edward Snowden, You know, f folks that b betrayed their country by releasing information, betraying their oath, betraying their secrecy secrecy agreement. and those we were able to manage through those, but the folks that were protecting the status quo, the folks that were, you know, didn't want to adopt these tools would point those and say, see, that's why we we we shouldn't be doing that. And you know, both Chris and I As well as many others. We there was Chris used to coin the term patriotic death claim, that we we were gonna have blood on our hands. Mike Wertheimer mentioned it in you know how that affected him personally during the podcast series. and it affected all of us. I mean, we were trying to affect change, but we were being called out as, you know, that we were we were risking the entire enterprise just by deploying some technology on a network. and so so I think what we've seen over the time, you know, I am very proud that, you know, Intellipedia still exists. Many of the programs of the analytic transformation movement still exist, whether they exist in name or they're just kind of the underpinning or the plumbing of the community. They still they're still out there and still powering a lot of the po plumbing of the community. But I'm I'm fearful that we are seeing some you're retracting in so there isn't an ability to kind of think big anymore in the community. It's well I'm gonna think within my own organization. It might not even be within your own agency. It'd be a a subpart of your agency. and that's that's a you know a little depressing because it's we need people to think big. What do you think, Chris? We're making progress? Well To the the the period from t two thousand five to say two thousand nine, at the peak of of the the the systems that were deployed, mostly on the the inteling fabric that represented a much flatter kind of transparent view. If you were around prior to that, you had access to email, your working groups were assigned to you by your supervisor, it was not a very collaborative place. It is a night and day difference as far as those systems and what it introduced from a coordination perspective. discovering other analysts, other collectors, other technologists. The search efficiency went way, way up as far as the number of links pointing at things. So I think from a coordination perspective it was i incredibly, incredibly successful. And it was just it was an honor to be a part of. Something that it was it was fundamentally transformative. And those calls were disgusting. I mean they were you I I left on my answer machine, just for installing a wiki that runs on an air gap network. so it it seems pedestrian now, but it was a pretty radical thing at the time. my issue was n I always wanted it to do more than build up a knowledge base and connect people. I always wanted to move up the stack from coordination, cooperation to co creation in the official voice. And this here, I think that if you look at this and there's different versions of this. graphic about coordination, cooperation, collaboration. I think that w i these systems in were incredibly successful at the coordination level. At there was pockets at the cooperation level and again some pockets at the co-creative level. but there were certain experiments that were done during the time and I think looking back if I had a time machine we should have done them a lot more. So there was an idea is why can't a version control system on the open source software side that basically powers half of the economy. when you interact with navigation software take money out of an ATM machine is done in this version control controlled way and is incredibly serious and it runs large portions of the economy, but we can't figure it out on social science content. That was always interesting to me, of how to co create together. and there was these certain experiments that were done, national intelligence estimates were a perfect opportunity to do in the wiki. That didn't work out. We should have tried again, not just one. There was another experiment where our official voice content was written in Intellipedia and storefronted in the CIA wire to give it more cachet that this is real. That was done one time. That should have been done a hundred times to increase the sample size. So I I I that's where I wanted it to go. But two things can be true. It's not an either or. It absolutely changed the co the coordination layer forever and it's never gonna be the same again in in a in a positive way. But it never really moved up the co creative stack like I like I like it to see. I wanted to hear that that good things were happening. But so again, Lindy Kaiser, I feel like Brian didn't toot his own horn enough in the introduction, so I'm going to do it a little bit for him. It's been a delight to like listen to this series and learn from this. I wasn't a part of this group on nine eleven. I entered into government afterwards though and benefited from it. And the irony is I was glad that you mentioned your public affairs background. I'm always glad when anybody in the intelligence community admit admits that they are affiliated with public affairs because that was where I worked in government. post nine eleven and this effort was actually something we touched upon and learned from this idea of how information can be disseminated, not high side information, but the notion of collaboration is clearly something the public affairs community is kind of interested in. and our outreach into non traditional markets, which was like blogging, the mill blog community, hell that'll take everybody back a little bit. was was influenced by this, this notion that we can do things in a non-traditional format, which was again pre-9 eleven very much, you know, unconventional. so lessons learned are are big here and I want to get into those, not just because I'm a history buff to try to make up for my complete lack of technology skills, but to you know, you described as a hard pivot earlier. I think it's somewhat of a soft pivot. I see the adoption of AI and quantum now. in a similar fashion to like what you all were trying to do after nine eleven, I see the government trying to innovate and push in that way. So Robert, I want to ask you, do you think there are lessons learned from how you kind of moved government forward post nine eleven? We don't have that nine eleven catalyst here, but we'd certainly have a lot of leaders pointing at us and saying, use AI, you know, quantum is our biggest threat here. Is there is Can you look can we learn something about what you accomplished then as we accomplish that problem set today? I'll add to the try to lift up here. I mean I hope so, and I'll try to make the case that I think it is so. But before I do, I just want to reflect on my my colleagues' responses because, Sean, especially as you were speaking to, I was reminded of quite frankly, the the the sense of not just loss, right, for the tragedy, but but failure. And even though at the moment, right, I wasn't in a key analytic or warning position and whatnot. But but as a member of the Intel community, I felt that that we had let our country down, we let our citizens down, because they're right, amongst our you know top reasons for being is to stop things like what happened happened. And so I do think that mattered and I think it matters, albeit anything like that will, you know, atrophy over time, but but I I think it's healthy to remind her, we did collectively fail, and thousands of people paid f you know their lives for that failure. and so that motivated I think everything, certainly me going forward and and making the kinds of improvements. Now we are going to leap way, way ahead, a couple of decades really to AI and and quantum. And those of you who know me well, you're gonna go, this should be interesting, because y you think you're not technical. proud liberal arts major, you know, that you know r really likes the big hand and the little map kind of explanation of things. But the reason and and and I'll talk to more specifically, but in general, the reason I think AI and quantum represent such Opportunities and challenges is a way I'll contrast it with a different technology that I grew up with. And that's the ability to observe the Earth from space. You know, I came in in the first Reagan administration and you know predominantly if you if if you had the wherewithal to put a satellite into orbit and to put a camera or a sensor on that satellite and turn it around and detect things of interest on this planet. You were one of two governments in those days, right? Either the Soviet Union or the US. And yes, Landsat existed, and I'm not dismissing that, so please don't think I forgot about it, by the way. I'm a huge fan of that sensing capability. But broadly speaking, it was owned and operated by the US government. It was held at the top secret clearance. And so The way it worked is if you had a top secret clearance and you had a top secret question, you could send that question through a top secret system and I could look at some top secret imagery and write a top secret report and I could send it back to you. And so it was a lovely closed loop, now I'm being a bit facetious, or answering important questions about an adversary that threatened our existence, the Soviet Union. And so I'm I'm not belittling but There's a certain way that the government and the intelligence community thinks about technology when frankly it owns it. And it did own it. And it didn't have to ask how to use it, right? It it used it the way it wanted to use it because they were the owner of the i that closed network. And again, I was a proud member of it and contributor and I think I think the country was broadly well served by that. Now let's move forward, right? You know, in you know, in my current life post government, you know, I'm related with commercial companies that do earth observation. And obviously that is not owned by the government but licensed. And the audience might be aware that the the the US government is currently restricting some access to that earth observation around the Iran conflict. And and and by the way that's a bit of a controversial topic and I'm happy to go into more, but I know you did ask about AI and quantum. I'm going to get there. I like the journey we're on. But I guess I guess my point on AI and quantum is first, government doesn't own it. And I know we're having this meta conversation as a society, right? About is that a good thing or a bad thing? Should the government do anything else with respect to regulation or control or guards and all that? And obviously that's a very high level conversation happening right now. but this is these both of these technologies are driven by industry. Now I'm not dismissing the the the the wonder the the the talent and genius that it's places like DARPA and AFRL and NRL. Of course there are or or shoot our national labs, right? I mean we have world class experts in our government on both technologies, but they're not driving them. And so I do think that now has an effect about how the government uses both, because it isn't something the government, my view, can control the way they did, you know, let's say in during the space race. So there's a little bit this is happening to us rather than we're implementing these technologies. And I'll separate the two. On the AI side, and I I think Chris can speak more to the to the applications that he's aware of Chris was in government that's a week ago I think, right? Or so? So you're much more current than I am. but my my guess is, having been out a few years, is is the government struggling to apply the the science and the technology, mainly because and this is the bias that that we all existed in, is that there's a value proposition and it tends to go with classification. You know, if you have something something that says top secret code word on it, it is inimically more valuable than something that just says top secret on it. And way more valuable than something that says secret. I I feel bad for the confidential kids out there, you know. They don't exist. We have a confidential clearance, somebody lied to you. I'm just telling you. And then and then you get to unclass, you know, and then you go, you know, it's in the wild and you know, it's not verified and you know, it's dangerous and it's risky and all that. And, you know, Chris and I locked arms on this a lot when we were serving together to try to quite frankly flipped the equation. And sounding like we broadly haven't flipped it, the way Chris is relating his recent experience. But here's where I think it should be used. I I think both both technologies, even though AI is way further along on the on the maturity level than quantum, and AI obviously changes week and and and monthly, is to is to do what I thought You know, one of NGA's unofficial missions was to create coherence from chaos. Meaning it's a noisy world, right? our consumers, whether they're decision makers, warfighters or both, are confronted with streams and torrents of information and data and it's disparately formatted or not formatted at all and they're overwhelmed. And so how do you put in you know context around it and provide, you know a way to cohere it in a way that can help them make decisions. I certainly think AI can do that. I it does do that. Again, I'll leave it to Chris to relate how well we're doing on that. And then quantum, while it's not as far down the maturity road, I think has that in front of us because it, you know, and and by the way, you know, even though I have an association with a company called Ion Q, publicly traded, they pers they're pursuing a particular modality called Ion Trap. quantum computing. Th the proposal isn't we're gonna wake up one day and go, okay, you know, swivel your chair over here and turn on your your quantum computer because your classical computer isn't useful anymore. This is going to be a hybrid approach. And when quantum becomes relevant, and cryptographically relevant is really the important part, and we can talk more about that. it will it will coexist with these stores of data that is j just hard to get through today. So a very long winded way to get back to your your question, which is I see AI now and Quantum Next as being a way as filtering in in a very user friendly, decision driven optic to help improve those decisions when they have to be made. And that can be through decluttering, that that can be through coherence, that can be through, you know, particular insight that wasn't available through the classical approach. Well I'll finish with the with that that challenge. Almost all of that is controlled but not classified. And so it's I still am concerned about how the our government, especially our intelligence community, can avail itself of that world with the current mindset that Or the mindset that existed when I left and sounds like might still be around. Yeah. You see if you said C UI I was gonna cry, but you didn't. So but now everybody else can cry on his path. So he t I my favorite thing, you asked the next question of the next panelist. So I'm gonna let him ask the question. How are we doing on that? He asked you, so now you have to answer. So as far as the no one has really cracked the nut on this at all. And so I think that from the generative AI perspective that ChatGTB democratized to everyone. Machine learning had been around prior to that, but it really gave a much more democratized face to it. That's not really the the real power of it. And everyone is trying to st is trying to hook their data into these systems. So the real power is the external handshakes brought to these systems. And everyone is still in the very, very early phases of that. agentic AI or model context protocol sitting in front of APIs to a ask natural language questions and get incredibly analytic responses. So rather than tons of visualizations and dashboards and widgets and things, those still exist. You have natural language, you can ask incredibly sophisticated questions, and then these systems, and if they are on the unclassified side, Can can be can connect it to a hundred public domain sources. It could be connected to fifty subscription private curated sources to augment the system. And when I have seen that connected, it is unbelievably powerful. It is fundamentally changing what is traditionally the OSINT collector's job, to be more analytic, stop being so fact of reporting. A lot of our OSINT collectors on the open source side. generate incredible like fact of reports. Those are important, but you can start connecting these systems and automate large portions of the collection process and to start answering, asking analytic questions and getting returns based upon these systems. Then the question is how much human in the loop is there? And I don't think it's a a question of a human validating prompt replies. It's much more structural than that. Is the human machine pairing of setting up the agents, understanding the cognition and the engagement between all of these agents interacting with each other. It's much, much more than validating a reply. So I think some of the debate about trusting AI, in many cases, those those don't even come from work. People pass around stories of of high school students and things like that. In a work context, these horror stories just aren't landing. So I I think that we're in pretty successful in the early phases of this. My big concern is how to interact with the unclassified side. with an obsession of working on two air gaps removed as the default on the classified side. I I I I'm struggling with how are we going to connect exabytes of data elegantly when the number of sensors, original content, and surveyors exist and dwarf the classified side on the unclassified side. So I think that's the big next thing to get. But as far as the fundamentals of how the IC is doing on the agentic front, it's going pretty well. Hey. Steve Hages sign worked after all. I told him I didn't think it was working because most of my friends I think they only know how to use co pilot and he's like, That's not true. It's pretty good. It's just public affairs officers that I'm talking to maybe. They need So Sean, my next question to you, we kind of talked about this too. Like the whole push here with the analytic transformation movement was to eliminate a lot of the stove pipes that you had. obviously a lot of the concern that we have is a lot of those stove pipes have been built back up, which as you mentioned There's history between that, right? We don't have nine eleven, we have Manning, we have Snowden, we have all these milestones in between. but, you know, f from the standpoint of where we're at, like do we can can we get to that collaborative effort again? Is maybe AI movement is there capacity there that could get us in a more collaborative IC environment or is this technology just gonna help us build our silos even higher? So I'll I'll t I'll touch a little bit on kind of where I you know my journey on this. So I, you know, was part of the Intellopedia Lab. That's where I met Brian and and then also met Chr Chris back in the day. and we were a s we basically set up a sabbatical program to kind of train analysts to kind of learn about these tools. And it was a whole range of tools. Intellipedia was just one of them. But it just became the Intellipedia Lab for lack of a better term. And and so I did that for several years. I actually was During that time I was still assigned to the office of a rock analysis because they're like, Yeah, do that in addition to everything else you're supposed to be doing. And and so I did that for a while and then after about three or four years of not doing anything related to Iraq, they said, Sean, you need to find somewhere else in the organization to go, and so they moved me into the IT part of the analytic side of CIA. And and I worked on a number of various IT programs there. including kind of actually resuscitating a tagging platform that Chris initially introduced to the community. so at the c and it was funny because when we went to that there wa we had a platform, it was internal to CIA, there might have been three or four people using it. And and you know the program manager came to me and my my colleague Don Burke and said, How c how can we resuscitate this? And we're like, okay, we will help you. and we'll we'll bring you know the the you know the users to to you. You have to make these modifications 'cause it was kind of an eyesore. but and you have to get the JWix. and that that's part of the deal. We're not gonna work with you unless you get the JWix because it was an internal system and we wanted it available to the community. And they're like, well we don't have a JWix, you know, server, so they had to they had to go work on that issue. They eventually got got around to it. So I worked on a number of IT issues for a while. Then And then I was voluntoled, as many people in the community get voluntold to go do you know, things to excel at, and I was voluntold to go up to the CIA operations center where I w was kind of like pushed back into the world of you'll laugh. Yeah, when I arrived and sh showed up, they're like, Here's your four Lotus Notes databases that you're gonna use. and I said, I'm not using Lotus Notes. We're gonna we're gonna shift and we're gonna move this. and so we did move that that desk that I was on off of off of Lotus Notes into a a web platform, thankfully. and then I started to kinda notice things on the floor that could be much done much better if we could get you know, and start working collaboratively. So luckily I was fortunate enough to be selected to be the director of the op center a year later. and then so you would think, okay, this guy helped start start Intellipedia. It took about two years to get there, because what do we have to do? Well we have stakeholders that were kind of we're not quite quite quite sure if we want to, you know, go that well. I had leadership that was very skeptical. And that leadership would say, well go try it over on this internal system first or try it over on this platform that's supposed to be the new, you know, not new hot hotness or whatever. and we kept on so we'd have to do that and kind of almost fail miserably and kind of say, see, this is why it would fail and this is why I would be better on Intellipedia. and so we were able to get that implemented about twenty nineteen, which was just in time for the pandemic. and so and then we were validated because that became the you know place where everyone went for information on COVID. and it really kind of almost had a second renaissance for Intellipedia because we would create just like on Wikipedia, we would create topical pages on any type of conflict, anything that was impacting the the US you know national security space. and that still exists. So I mean I want to kind of give a little bit of a good news story that you know we kinda ended a little bit earlier kind of on a dour note, but we are still doing that and we le led the community on doing that. It's interesting because we we we reach out to the community and get the the gets to the co creation model. We reach out to other IC partners, other operation centers across the community and say, hey, you can contribute, you can and then they'd be like, well nope, nope, that's your page and we're like No, this is this is the whole intent. and and so they'll they'll add some of their products at the bottom of the page or whatever, which is i is fine. but it it so and w I think what the thing that I take away from it right before I left about six months ago, is that in Intellipedia you can go and and visit kind of what's just like you can do on Wikipedia with the recent changes that have happened. And Wikipedia it's just just constantly changing, obviously. on Intellipedia, it's changing, but it w one of the things that we did at the very beginning of Intellipedia is when you first hit Intellipedia, it would create a user page for you. And so you would just say and it would kind of give you a notification, hey, we've created your user page for you, here it is. here's what you can use Intellipedia for, here's some tutorials, whatnot. what the benefit for us now that I look back on that is that is captured in a log. And so You when I I before I left the community, I was like, you know, people are is Intellipedia still vibrant, is it still valid? and I would say, well, every time I go to the log and look, Monday through Friday, there's two hundred new accounts every day, Monday through Friday. and so that is that just demonstrates kind of the worth of these tools. the need the thirst for knowledge when you come into the intelligence community, this is foreign entity and be able to kind of gravitate to towards that and be able to find information, whether it be you know the the most recent information about the Iran conflict or the Russia Ukraine conflict or now there's the historical piece of what what happened during COVID and they that's all valid. So that took us and I want to go back, that took us two years to get there, you know, because we had to kind of learn. And that and we were the ones that helped create it. So I'm gonna give a little bit of grace to Other people in the community that have, you know, other leaders in the community. But having gone through that experience, it's not too late for because the wiki is so resilient and I've seen this happen, where you know if leadership wanted that we have in the community products, static products that are called profiles, it'd be cyber profiles, terrorist profiles. We write it. We write a terrorist profile. Typically the day before we're going to take the terrorist off of the off the battlefield. But the analyst gets the check mark for writing that you know terrorist profile and pushing out the door. that should be all the anything that ends in profile should just be done collaboratively in Intellipedia. And it's that would be a simple thing to move. You're not talking about because when you talk about like an NIE or something like that, ooh, then and then everyone kind of gets the the their guffed all up. There's there's things that we can start small and build up from and we can still do that. That's a great example too. All right, so in the theme of bringing us to to a positive place and we're coming up on time, so I want to make sure we have some time for this b this bookend. So the reason we we brought everyone here together tonight and because we we brought these folks here is because this is the capstone to a story. We we were talking about nine eleven and we would be remiss if we hadn't we don't touch on what it meant to deliver justice to Osama bin Laden. So my question is for Robert, and everyone's going to understand this very quickly. Where were you when someone somewhere said we think we know where Osama bin Laden is? I was actually in the Oval Office. And the reason I was in the Oval Office is Jim Clapper, who had recently become the fourth director of national intelligence. This is in August of two thousand and ten. I was at DIA as the deputy director for a very hot minute and he became the new director, asked me to come out and ended up being his deputy for Intel integration. So this is early September now two thousand and ten. And I was attending a principal's committee meeting for him, meaning I was in his seat down in the Situation Room, which became another home for th those four years given the number of meetings that we we needed to support. And don't remember what the topic of that meeting was. Doesn't matter. And I'm putting my binder together and throwing it in the lock bag, getting ready to drive back out to Liberty Crossing. And Leon Panetta was there as the director of CIA and he just taps me on the shoulder and he says, you know, hey, come upstairs. We gotta brief the old man. And I go, hmm, I think I know who you're talking about, but you're a little older than he is, Leon. He's the old man. But he meant it he meant it in an honorific way. Right. Right? The boss. Yeah. And by the way, full credit to Leon Panetta, did not need to invite me. I mean, I knew who he was, obviously he knew I was Jim's deputy. By the way, Stephanie O'Sullivan was not in position yet, so I was the acting principal deputy. But again, to Leon's credit, he said the D and I needs to be pulled into this. And by the way, that was not an obvious statement in 2010. Right? I'm sure you've talked before about the standup of ODNI and the pros and cons, but suffice to say the reason Jim Clapper was the new DNI is because of a bad relationship, partially, between his predecessor, Admiral Blair. and Leon Panetta. So he invites me upstairs. And I just follow him upstairs. Now I had been the PDB briefer for a month or a week or something, so I kinda knew my way around. But I'd never been there at night. So one of the things, you know, it's 'cause it's like six PM. No, it's it's May, so no, it's September, so you know, a month before this. But I first noticed, boy, this room really is pretty at night, you know? I mean in the morning it's kinda glary and it's got a lot of brought lights, but it just had that nice, subtle sunset glow. And I don't know what I'm doing in the meeting, right? So I I walk in and I decide I shouldn't sit, right? I'd just been invited. And I think there were four CIA officers in the room. Leon was there, Michael might have been there too, the de p Morel. and then of course President Obama, I don't remember if Vice President Biden was there for that meeting, but his staff. So thank John Brennan, thank, you know, Dennis McDonough. matter of fact, his national security advisor then was still General Jones. General Jones was still in the early part of his tenure as national security advisor. So I go behind the couch, I'm standing, and I'm clearly listening to a briefing that's an update. I got that part, right? 'Cause they're going, you know, as we told you a week ago, Mr. President, whatnot. And they roll out on the coffee table there a commercial image, because it was full color, which by the way we didn't have on the I guess I just said that. Okay, so there you go. We can edit everything, Robert. No, it's fine. It's fine. I don't think people will anyway, they roll out a commercial image of a bottle bod, which I'd never heard of before. I wasn't a Pakistan analyst. I didn't r you know, I mean knew the general area. And I'm listening to this brief and I said, my God, they're updating him on an assessed location of Osama bin Laden. And he must have asked a few questions. They had some answers to him, and so they gave him some update. Somebody gave an update to the collection plan. Remember, this is September 2010, so early, because we've got nine months to go before the decision was made to the raid. So Obviously it was a transformative moment for me 'cause, you know, I'd never been I I don't get me wrong, I had been been involved in different jobs on the hunt for bin Laden. I used to be the head of Source at NJ Charlie Allen had, you know, meetings at five in the morning every day of the week to set a collection plan to find bin Laden. So I I'd been on the team, but I'd never obviously seen something as promising as that. So it was a it was obviously a very exciting moment. So here's the big reveal. What's going on in this picture? that is the first of may twenty and eleven. you know, I'm the guy in the blue shirt craning there at the end, Jim Clapper sitting right behind Leon Panetta and Secretary Clinton, of course, and you see the president and vice president, Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen, and he had to be on with Admiral McCraven, who was in Jalalabad, which is where the task force departed from and returned to. And so There's a there's another famous photo that of President Obama with Secretary Clinton with her hand over her mouth in the very small room, which which was happening during the raid. This is probably five or six hours later. And I think what was happening here is the the f the force had recovered, right? They had a body. that they believed to be bin Laden, but they weren't sure. Right? 'Cause we the the the plan ahead of time was we would take a DNA sample, it would be run through the process, but it was, as I recall, twenty-four to forty-eight hours. It wasn't gonna be it's not I don't know what it happens on TV or I don't know what happens in real life, but that's so the president's waiting for confirmation but n but believing he's not gonna get it that night. And I don't know that it to be the case, but at some point they handed out handheld photos of the body w that was believed to be bin Laden. And Mr. Panetta gave a briefing for the analysts who had assessed given the eyebrows, given the ear lobe, given you know, these facial features, we have a ninety five percent certainty that's Osama bin Laden. And the president said, Well, I'm still not gonna go tell the American people if there's a five percent chance I'm wrong. Because we're not gonna say this and then say, just really looked a lot like But The room and again I can't recall exactly how it happened, but the room clearly figured out that because foreign leaders had been spoken with to include Pakistan, Admiral Mullen had those responsibilities, the president had made some calls to let people know ahead of time, and included the Gang of Eight, which is the eight senior most positions on the Hill, and the And the the decision was I'm gonna go tonight because I don't think the story's gonna hold. I think this will leak very quickly. And again, no disparaging to the hill, right? But it it may well come from the hill. So the president decided to own it. And you know, he had gotten some more cumulative information to go with, you know, he's got to say I'm gonna make the announcement that night. And I I would guess this is around eight or nine PM. when he left the room, I think he said, I'll be you know, at East Wing podium at ten. It didn't happen till like eleven five or something like that. But this was the the preparation for you know him getting ready to make those remarks. So bring us in here. How did you feel after everyone's back safe, likely got bin Laden? How did you feel personally about the the I mean, look, I you know, I was proud of what the community was able to do. it it it it was an amazing you know, analytic and tradecraft application and all credit goes to the officers. Predominantly human, predominantly SIGIN. I'm also proud of the what the role my home agency played. to corroborate and to confirm some of the leads that had been gotten, but but let's face it too, and it's been written in many books, it's been put on docum you know documentaries. it wasn't, you know we can confirm, you know, that location has, you know, Osama bin Laden in it. and so to the well You we skipped over the, you know, the raid famously had an unplanned activity, which was a very hard landing, some might call it a crash, right, of of the attack force. I mean literally the you know, the the SEAL helicopter that was to fast rope into his basically his patio of the third floor, that was the plan. The helicopter lost lift. That lift landed on a wall, tail cracked. You know, people ask me what was happening in the moment of the famous photo and I go, I gotta believe that because just from Secretary Clinton's face of, you know, my goodness, what's happening here? And even though I was very young during Desert One myself, but was around for Blackhawk Down, we you know, in my mind, it's gonna be our third national helicopter tragedy, right? You know, we 'cause we didn't know when the helicopter went down did we lose SEALS. I mean it's crashed. There's a lot of explosives in that helicopter. and remember too, when the helicopter crashed, it's still an assessment that bin Laden's there. So worst case, no, it's an arms dealer, a drug dealer, very rich guy that looks like, you know, et cetera, et cetera, and we've got casualties and we've got a Pakistani reaction to a downed helicopter. I mean, you could just that was going through my mind and so when you ask me what's going on here, one is relief, and it isn't just relief obviously that w justice was finally able to be delivered to Osama bin Laden, frankly relief from the that low point in the afternoon of, my goodness, and we're now experiencing this this national tragedy. So yeah, a great deal of of satisfaction obviously from that. And you know, again, kudos and I mentioned sec you know he became Secretary Panetta after this job. You know, his willing to be collaborative, willingness to be collaborative, you know, taught me a ton. I mean, he took a risk, didn't have to. I would argue that went into what then was a you know, was a a new but very positive relationship between the CIA and ODNI. Now that's not true of the whole agency. I won't say we we would win any popularity polls over at Langley. But Jim Clapper And Leon Panetta made it work and they made it because they were personal, professional, and private. And and and again I think the community was well served by that, this being just one example. Absolutely. So this brings us full circle to this question. So I doubt Liam Panetta ever edited Intellipedia or had a blog. but that cultural ethos you're tapping into, did that contribute at all to the success? That the the work that we did through analytic transformation, do you feel like it had an impression on the people in this room trying to make this mission work? mean look, you know, I've got, you know, a personal view and a professional view. I mean I I and by the way, a a hope for view. I wanna say yes, I wanna say of course, you know, But I'm not I'm not quite sure. I guess i I wouldn't read too much into the into the the pure success that this picture represents at the end of a an incredible ins intelligence operation. It was but but I guess I will say, even though I was I was not on the analytic team and so I don't want to you know, claim any credit for that, I was, you know I I would consider I was more of an oversight, it was more of a red team guy for the process so that I could ask a million questions after each analytic assessment so that we could make sure we were uncovering every other alternative that it's not bin Laden before we dis make the recommendation to the president. But but I will say having you know having watched that team, they were amazingly innovative because And and one would hope this was happening. Truly no stone unturned, and I mean that in a literal sense, no stone unturned in trying to get more and more intel. I too agree with you. I I'm sure Secretary Panetta never turned on it might not have turned on a computer. He was he but he drove that, you know, personally, and obviously President Obama did too, but but he really owned it and and had those, you know check-ins and just asked the kinds of questions that had his team not been A collaborative, B open to other methodologies, you know, C avail to non traditional sources of of of information, then I don't think we would have been successful. So even though well I'm not sure it it in itself contributed, I think the fact of then redounded well back to the community. I mean I'm not dismissing the trials and tribulations Chris and Sean properly reflected upon. But look I do think it I do think it was just as the community had that kind of collective sense of failure, because we did, I think this gave the community a shot in the arm. We can do big things, we can we can we can respond to the nation's call. And to me I I I hope that then then lifted parts of the community in ways that you know, reflected in some of the advances we've heard about here here tonight. Sean, did you want to say something? Yeah. I I can touch a little bit on it and actually kinda links into the OPA angle for Lindy there. So obviously the planning for this and you mentioned it from the from the get go was very tightly controlled. If you watch any you watched a Netflix documentary pr and that came from the President himself, said this can't leak. and so there it was highly, highly compartmentalized. So you know, that that doesn't didn't lend itself to many of the tools that that we were espousing at the time. However, when the rubber meets the road, we actually have to go in. there was another picture of a war room at CIA. and so and my colleague who I worked with on a rock when I was helping set up Intellipedia, and I think she may have even been through our sabbatical program. she needed she was the in our Office of Public Affairs at the time and she needed a way to communicate to JSOC. and the only means means for her to be able to communicate was via Intelink instant messaging, which is capability that she learned about in the sabbatical program. I'm sure whatever they were discussing in that chat room was probably not cleared for the that that chat room, but it was the only means to communicate. And so therefore, so yeah, so it did play at least a l a little part in the in the raid and it was the support our Office of Public Affairs colleagues. So there is there is that threat to it. There's a little something there. Yeah. Anyway. thank you. Thank you for for sitting here and spending time with us. You know. Your three voices weren't able to capture on the series for various reasons. and that was a bit of a regret for me. but so I'm glad that we're able to pull your voices in, especially 'cause you're mentioned by name. of course it's the ghost of a very young Sean Denahee speaking at the Chicago conference. But yeah, yeah. Anyway, any closing thoughts for us, Lindy? No, I mean I've just appreciated, you know, everything that that you've chatted about in this. I think again, this is a significant milestone in our community. I feel like Sometimes we don't stop and reflect as much as we should. So taking the time to be able to do that through this series, through these conversations, it has huge value. I mean, I think this is critically important work. We can't we can't slide it. we can't s you know, say that often enough 'cause I think it's easy to be discouraged in this community right now. And again, I don't like this there was a significant accomplishment here. Even if, you know, everything in government is is a few steps forward and back, right? But the This was a milestone moment and and worth reflecting on, because I think that's what propels us forward. So thank you for all your time recording all those interviews and getting it out and for for this conversation here. And for attending. No one drank wine ahead of time. I would have sounded so much Brian would have been so much more brilliant had you consumed more alcohol ahead of time. De definitely funnier. Yes. But there are drinks happening. But now here's our chance. So thank you very much.