MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Gone are the days when a fake passport and a cover story are all a spy needs to get by. So what's an ambitious intelligence officer to do in this era of cameras everywhere, of retina scanners, of AI? Well, Tim Weiner takes on the question of how the CIA is trying to reimagine the art of espionage in his new book. It's titled "The Mission: The CIA In The 21st Century." Tim Weiner, hey there.
TIM WEINER: Hello, Mary Louise.
KELLY: How much harder is it these days for a spy to spy?
WEINER: It's a challenge unlike any in the history of espionage, which goes back to when Sun Tzu wrote "The Art Of War" 26 centuries ago.
KELLY: Yeah.
WEINER: And Sun Tzu said, know your enemy. Well, the problem is your enemy knows you. An example of the challenges facing the CIA - 12 years ago, Chinese spies and hackers broke into the Federal Office of Personnel Management and stole passport files, fingerprint files, security clearance forms of 22 million people who work for the federal government, including people who work for the CIA. They crunch this data with retinal scans that they stole from international airports. And if you are a CIA officer arriving undercover in Dar es Salaam or Beijing or any other of a number of foreign capitals, you are likely as not to be confronted by a Chinese officer saying, hey, Joe. I know who you are.
KELLY: We know exactly who you are. Yeah. I mean, I suppose the flip side is that the U.S. can do the same thing. It's harder for America's rivals and adversaries, harder for a Chinese spy to land in, say, New York or Minneapolis and not be immediately spotted and tracked.
WEINER: Yeah, the problem there is that the Chinese Ministry of State Security is about 20 times bigger than the CIA. And the Chinese have ambitions to project their surveillance state into the United States. I mean, the difference between the Russian and the Chinese services is that the Chinese want to know us, and the Russians just want to screw us.
KELLY: Is it mutual?
WEINER: Well, screw thy enemy is definitely part of the equation here (laughter). Ever since the CIA was founded in 1947, it has tried to oppose, blunt, undermine, subvert Russian imperialism in the world. That took kind of a back seat after the end of the Cold War. CIA directors and their immediate underlings told the CIA's officers to be nice to the Russians, to, like, work with them on fields of mutual interest, like counterterrorism. And one senior CIA officer told me that this was like a guy who goes out and buys a baboon, and the baboon rips his face off, and then he goes out and buys another baboon. The Russians were not interested in cooperation. They shook your hand with one hand and picked your pocket with the next.
KELLY: So let me bring us to this moment. We are in 2025, and the CIA again serves a commander-in-chief, a president, who has openly questioned the agency's leaders and their work. When you ask current CIA officers about that, what do you hear?
WEINER: The gut-wrenching, nauseating feeling that the president of the United States has gone over to the other side and joined the axis of authoritarianism. It's hard for an outsider to understand the feeling that went through the high levels of the CIA when Trump ordered the United States to vote with Russia, North Korea and Iran at the United Nations against a resolution condemning the Russian occupation of Ukraine.
KELLY: Did CIA staffers raise that specifically with you, that incident?
WEINER: Oh, yeah.
KELLY: What were they saying?
WEINER: You know, there's an ideological purge that Trump has ordered at CIA. And the current director, John Ratcliffe, who is a MAGA acolyte, has told top officers and analysts with 20 or 30 years' experience to head for the exits, find a new line of work. He dismissed two years' worth of new hires, everybody the CIA had hired in 2023 and '24. And ideology is the enemy of intelligence.
KELLY: I want to separate out how much of what you just said is your view - based on reporting but your view - and how much is what you are hearing from people who are working at the agency now.
WEINER: I have to say that people are trying to keep their heads down lest they get chopped off, which is not a good posture for the world's most famous intelligence service.
KELLY: A question on your sources - I covered the intelligence beat for years. I used plenty of anonymous sources to do so. And that was to allow people to speak more freely and to protect people who were risking their jobs to talk to me. You used no anonymous sources. Are there stories you wish you could tell in this book and you couldn't get your source to go on the record?
WEINER: I wish I knew more about how the CIA tried to rebuild its network of recruited foreign agents in China after dozens of them were rolled up, arrested, tortured, imprisoned and killed back about 14 years ago. And I wish I knew more about what is going on right now. It is a very dangerous thing to have an intelligence service in the hands of an autocrat. And I wish I knew if there is, in fact, resistance at the CIA to Trump's foreign policies. The CIA is an instrument of American foreign policy. With the rarest exceptions, it does what the president tells it to do. And Trump has stated, you know, openly from his inauguration, his desire to seize Greenland, to take possession of the Panama Canal. The CIA does not have a history of saying no to presidents. I'd like to know if there's a resistance inside Langley.
KELLY: You and me both. To end by looping back to where we began and the questions of how technology has made it so much more challenging than it ever was to try to spy, to try to collect human intelligence on your adversary - you've now written a couple of histories of the CIA, this one covering the first 25 years of this 21st century - do you think there'll be a CIA around in anything resembling recognizable form 25 years from now?
WEINER: That depends how we get through the next 3 1/2 years. The president of the United States is implacably hostile to the idea of intelligence. He thinks the CIA is the capital of the deep state, which it is decidedly not. There is a reason, Mary Louise, that they call spying the world's second oldest profession. It's been around since Joshua took Jericho. Spying is somehow inbred in our bones. We want to know secrets. We want to know what the other person thinks. And I cannot imagine America as a superpower without an intelligence service to warn of dangers over the horizon.
KELLY: Tim Weiner - his new book is "The Mission: The CIA In The 21st Century." Thank you.
WEINER: Thank you, Mary Louise.
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