You're Hello and welcome to Spycast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in

Washington DC. I'm Mark Stout historian of the museum. I'm a PhD author and historian who served for 13 years as an analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Every month, the museum brings you interesting talks with authors,

scholars, and practitioners who has something to do with the world of

intelligence and espionage.

We're joined today by one of the country's leading intelligence historians.

That's Matthew Aide. He's the author in 2010 of the secret century, The Untold History of the National Security Agency,

really a remarkable work.

And now in January 2012 he has out his latest work, Intel Wars, the secret history of the fight against terror

Matthew Aid welcome to the International Spy Museum thank you well Matthew as

probably many of our listeners will know you not they'll not only be familiar with your book about NSA but know that you know more broadly

NSA and really studying the history of Cold War signals intelligence has been sort of your thing so this book is a bit of a bit of a new

direction for you how did you come to write about you know Intel Wars and the war on

terrorism because I had started taking trips over to South Asia to Afghanistan and Pakistan

and Pakistan starting in 2008 as part of my work. Yes, I'm best known for writing voluminous tracks on signals intelligence, but you know, it's, we live in a real world and if you want to write about intelligence in the context of, you know, what is it doing today?

I mean, then you have to, you know, you're obviously very few declassified documents and

people here in Washington are very reluctant to speak unless you know you're a member of the

Washington Post.

So what I thought about doing was rather than write another book

about from the perspective of the conference table in the White House situation room,

which has already been written, was actually to try and transport readers to the battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere, and tell the story

from the point of view of the intelligence operator and analyst rather than another political book about

...