The Making of a Career Intelligence Official: A Conversation with Michael P. Dempsey
War on the Rocks
War on the Rocks
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2018
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
Ryan dropped in on Michael P. Dempsey late last week in New York City. He is a career intelligence official who served as the acting director of national intelligence. From 2014-2017, he served as the deputy director of national intelligence and President Barack Obama's primary intelligence briefer. After decades of work in the intelligence community, Dempsey is taking a year out of government at the Council on Foreign Relations. And for the first time in years, he is allowed to speak his mind freely (for the most part) about all sorts of things. Naturally, we had to have him on the War on the Rocks podcast. In this episode, Dempsey starts with the story of his career, from his work as a Latin America analyst all the way up to finalizing the President's Daily Brief and, yes, briefing it to the president of the United States. He also walks us through how to understand negotiations in North Korea as well as the ever-worsening civil war in Syria.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to War on the Rocks, podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. |
| 0:14.0 | My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the editor and chief of Warren the Rocks. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm up here in New York on a beautiful day in the beautiful headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations, sitting with Michael Dempsey. |
| 0:25.0 | Mike is the National Intelligence Fellow here at CFR, and he was also President Obama's intelligence briefer as well as the deputy director of national intelligence and has a long and distinguished career in the intel world that we're going to get into. |
| 0:39.5 | Thanks for joining us Michael. |
| 0:40.5 | Pleasure to be here, Ryan. So let's start with your career. |
| 0:44.0 | I mean, you've risen to the most senior ranks of the intelligence community. |
| 0:48.2 | How did you get started? |
| 0:49.2 | How did you get recruited? |
| 0:51.3 | Did you apply? How did you arrive into the intelligence community? |
| 0:55.0 | So I was in graduate school in the mid 80s and the agency was recruiting on campus and I knew that I had an obligation could I have been a ROTC student. |
| 1:08.0 | So I went into the Army from 1985 to 1989. |
| 1:11.0 | I was in the 101st Airborne Division or Artillery Officer and it occurred to me in the back of my, I kept in the back of my mind that someday I'd like to go back and look at CIA as a career. |
| 1:21.0 | 1989, obviously pivotal period, world history, Cold War ending. |
| 1:25.4 | I looked around, almost all of my cohort of junior officers thought that the future was going |
| 1:32.3 | to end up being a series of deployments to places we really didn't want to go for no real |
| 1:37.0 | compelling |
| 1:38.0 | reason so we thought this is probably a good time to get out of the Army. So I got out and then joined the CIA in 1990. |
| 1:44.8 | And what office did you join in the agency? |
| 1:47.8 | So I've been an analyst my whole career. I started in the office of Africa, Latin America analysis. I started as |
| 1:54.8 | a Latin Americanist. I worked as a Latin Americanist for actually about the first 17 years of my |
| 1:59.2 | career at CIA. I was an analyst, a junior analyst, a junior manager, manager of analysts. |
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