Hi, welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and I'm here today with A16Z policy team partner Matt Spence in Washington, D.C., to talk with Michael Morel, former deputy director and two-time acting director of the CIA about all things spies. We're here to talk about the art of spycraft. And first of all, is that even an okay word to use? Is that the right word?

The word we use at CIA is tradecraft. What does that mean? What does intelligence gathering actually mean? So there's three different missions at the Central Intelligence Agency. One mission is to

collect information from our adversaries. So think of it as stealing secrets. We recruit other human

beings to be spies. We use technology to acquire that information as well. The second mission

is then making sense of those secrets. That's what we call all-source analysis and telling the president, here's how

we think about this issue. A lot of people think we're predicting the future. That's not what we do.

Oh, interesting. We're much more focused on describing the current situation. Why are we here?

And what are the factors that are going to determine which way it goes. That's what I spent my

career doing analysis. And then the third mission is covert action, which is somewhere between

diplomacy and military action. Like we provided significant support to the solidarity movement in Poland,

all the way to paramilitary activities like providing arms to the freedom fighters in Afghanistan

when they were when they were fighting the Soviet Union. That's covert action. It's kept secret.

It can only be done at the direction of the president of the United States, actually a written

document that he has to sign that says, here, I want you to do this. And here's the policy objective

I'm after. Increasingly, as you think about that third bucket, intelligence is used in ways that

sometimes blurs a line between what traditionally military used to do.

That's a lot by technology.

And sometimes a covert operation becomes not covert, you know, and involves the military.

Some of that, especially the stealing secrets and the covert action sounds like some of the

best spy movies.

How is it different from what the public thinks of spying as, you know, when you're looking at Mission Impossible or what are the most common misconceptions?

What do this public get right?

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