Marie Harf and Bill Harlow on CIA Public Relations
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2019
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Central Intelligence Agency, by its very nature, is a secretive organization, yet it has a robust public affairs and media relations operation. How does the agency resolve this tension? How do its employees, from the director of the CIA to the officers needed to assist in this effort, deal with the difficult questions of how open to be? To find out, David Priess sat down with Bill Harlow and Marie Harf, two former CIA officers who were in the middle of it all.
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Transcript
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| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | As a spokesperson, your credibility is pretty much... |
| 0:37.0 | I mean, your credibility and your access, right? |
| 0:39.0 | If they know that you have access to the director or the people who have the information |
| 0:43.0 | and they believe that you're not going to lie to them, that's the whole wall game, right? |
| 0:47.0 | I think one of the challenging things over the past few years, |
| 0:50.0 | particularly just watching how this has played out, |
| 0:53.0 | reporters in the national security or foreign policy space |
| 0:56.0 | are tending to trust anonymous sources more and more, |
| 1:00.0 | and trust spokespeople less and less. |
| 1:02.0 | And I think that's really dangerous, because in general, |
| 1:06.0 | at least the spokespeople I worked with, I can't speak for the current administration, |
| 1:09.0 | but we were the ones who... |
| 1:12.0 | I did not want to report it or print something inaccurate. |
| 1:15.0 | I would not let them if I could help it. |
| 1:17.0 | Even if it would have helped the agency, right? |
| 1:20.0 | So I think that if you can establish that level of credibility, |
... |
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