You're listening to the CyberWire Network powered by N2K.

Hello and welcome to SpyCast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

I'm Peter Ernest, the Executive Director of the Museum. I served for some 36 years in the

Central Intelligence Agency largely as what is called an operations officer or a case officer.

Every month will be bringing you interesting talks with visitors,

with authors, with others who have something to do with the world of intelligence

and espionage. Intelligence and Espionage. My guest today is Dr Amy Zegard. She's an

associate professor at UCLA School of Public Affairs. She served in the

Clinton administration and later worked on the Bush campaign.

So she's been on both sides of the aisle and in the Clinton administration she served on the National

Security Council.

So she's had an overview of the intelligence world and she has seized that as a topic.

She wrote a very informative book called Spying Blind, the CIA, the FBI, and the origins of 9-11.

Amy, your thesis in that book as much as anything was that while the FBI and CIA are staffed

with dedicated and in many cases and experienced, in some cases not experienced in others people, you feel that there

are organizational flaws, flaws in the system that are impeding the work of those two agencies.

Our concern, of course, I think in

intelligence is we don't have time to have such flaws. In other words, such things

need to be corrected if we're going to keep up with this cyber world and these increasingly

knowledgeable and able terrorists who are coming at us. So I wonder if you could you could touch on that and perhaps illustrate

what you're getting at when you talk about these organizational flaws.

Sure. Well what I say in the book is that they're wonderfully talented people in the intelligence community and what I do is I look at the

...