Are We Dumb about Intelligence? Amy Zegart on the Capabilities of American Intel Gathering

Uncommon Knowledge

Hoover Institution

Politics, History, News:politics, Science, News

4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amy Zegart is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of political science at Stanford University, and the author of a new book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence. In this frank conversation, Zegart grades American intelligence-gathering operations, recent and historical, and compares them to their counterparts in China and Russia. Professor Zegart also discusses Silicon Valley’s crucial role in these operations and how they often conflict with the politics of the people running tech companies. Finally, Zegart discusses the crucial ability of the intelligence community to recruit the next generation of spies and analysts, some of whom may be her own students.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A college senior has one job offer from Google and another from the CIA, which job should
0:08.2	she take?
0:10.2	We'll come to that, but first an examination of the entire vast American intelligence apparatus,
0:17.4	Amy Ziegart, on Uncommon Knowledge Now.
0:30.6	Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.
0:32.0	I'm Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science
0:36.6	at Stanford.
0:37.6	Amy Ziegart served on the National Security Council for President Bill Clinton and advised
0:42.7	the 2000 presidential campaign of then-governor, later president, George W. Bush.
0:49.2	Amy Ziegart's new book, Spies, Lies and Algorithms, the history and future of American intelligence.
0:57.8	Amy, welcome.
0:58.8	Peter, thanks so much for having me.
1:01.8	First question, let me set it up with two quotations.
1:07.1	Quotation number one, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, writing about the withdrawal
1:11.0	from Afghanistan, which he calls an intelligence failure.
1:16.0	Quote, not only did the Central Intelligence Agency and other US intelligence agencies
1:20.5	wildly underestimate the speed of the Taliban advance, they appeared to have been blind
1:26.2	to the political dealings of the Taliban and the military prepositioning the Taliban
1:31.8	had achieved.
1:32.8	Close quote.
1:33.8	Here's quotation two, Julian Barnes and David Sanger in the New York Times.
1:39.2	The United States intelligence agencies unearthed Russia's war plans.
	...

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