Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Inber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage,

intelligence, and covert operations across the globe. The conflict has been escalating between two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan.

It started in April, after India blamed Pakistan for supporting militants who carried out a massacre

in Kashmir. President Trump offered to help diffuse the tensions. Their hostility has

been documented in the president's daily brief, a highly classified rundown of threats facing

the United States. That's what former CIA officer David Preece, author of The President's Book

of Secrets, told us as we discuss the crown jewel of U.S. intelligence.

So good to have you with us, David.

Sure, thanks. Great to be here.

Now, you were an intelligence officer and you were also a daily intelligence

briefer at the CIA under the Clinton and the Bush senior administrations.

Can you tell us a little bit more about why the U.S. decided to have a president's daily brief?

And how long has it been around?

Yeah, it's funny that it wasn't a decision that was made early in the United States.

We had most U.S. presidents getting

no kind of intelligence analysis whatsoever. That's more of a function of where the United

States was geopolitically, that the United States was not in a position where it absolutely

needed to have a commander-in-chief having global intelligence analysis analysis really started to develop a little bit

with the first world war and then with the second world war it amped up more. But even then,

it was much more of just providing the president with raw reporting, not the analysis that comes

from expertise. That really developed after World War II. And it was only in the 1960s

...