Episode 72: Cofer Black on Leadership Lessons Learned and Speaking Truth to Power

Informing your decisions with intelligence analysis and insight brought to you by the team@ooda loop.com all right, I'm Matt DeVoe, the CEO of OODA, and you are watching and listening to the Oodacast. And today I'm incredibly pleased to be joined by Kofer Black. Kofer, while he might dispute the title, is a legend of the intelligence community, having served in the CIA for decades and, and been involved in all sorts of numerous interesting activities. He was also the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism center on the days before and after September 11, and a recipient of multiple, multiple awards, including the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the George H. Bush Medal for Excellence. So, Kofer, welcome to oodacast.

Matt, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here and it's good to see you again.

Yeah, good to see you virtually. So I would love to just get your take on kind of your career progress, you know, tell us about Cofer Black and how you wound up in the CIA in the first place.

Sure. I was, I was always interested in service and I was initially drawn perhaps to make a career in the Air Force and college as an Air Force rotc. And I got a bachelor's degree, master's degree, just started working on a PhD and I remember seeing the chairman of my committee saying, what are you going to do? I said, well, I've had enough of school. I've got to move on. And I had an opportunity to be interviewed by the CIA, which I took. I thought it was rather exotic and a little dangerous. Of course, I was a little apprehensive about it. Anyway, went through the interview process and I was hired. I was very interested in this type of career as a way to contribute to trying to collect information to prevent mass annihilation. If you all remember the Cold War, mutual assured destruction, these were very scary times. I remember the Cold War was serious business between the United States and its competitors, peer state competitors, the Soviet Union, followed by East Germany and the Cubans. And it was pretty, pretty active. My dad was an airline pilot and I would travel with him on school holidays. And he'd leave me off in various places in Africa, from Accra to Roberts Field, Liberia to Johannesburg to Nairobi, and sort of leave me with the station manager. So I spent a lot of time walking out in the jungle, believe it or not. Sounds crazy, but I'd go into villages and meet the chief and they'd let me spe. And I got very comfortable with Africa. So when I completed my training as an espionage officer and they said, what area of the world are you most interested in? I said, Africa. It turned out to be a very, very wise choice. Africa was a place where it was a little bit more removed from the headquarters control, as opposed to some place like Europe and a bit more untethered and therefore a little bit freer to. To practice your craft, put it that way. It was also one of the key areas of confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Seems like every one of my tours there was either war next door or war in the country that I was in. Through proxies, of course, I went through that. I spent, I think 14, 15 years in Africa. And in this process I had some exposure to counterterrorism. My last tour in particular was all counterterrorism, which was serving in Khartoum. Suzanne, in the early mid-90s. Then after that I was sort of on a track doing counterterrorism. And my agency career ended up where I was the director of the Counterterrorism center, which is actually a pretty wide scope job. It covers the production of all finished intelligence on counterterrorism, all operations overseas, all covert action, being a focal point for the intelligence community. So it's one of those jobs. We have eight things to do at any one time. And it was really very satisfying in a lot of ways. Then after that, when my time was up there, I had the opportunity to separate from the agency and go to the State Department, where I got to serve as a coordinator of counterterrorism, which is at the Assistant Secretary of State level with the rank of Ambassador at large. If you're going to be in the Navy, be an admiral. If you're going to be in the State Department, be an ambassador. It's the only way to go. So it was, it was a great experience for me. A lot of traveling, working with our counterparts overseas to build the capacity and the will to fight terrorism, indirectly supporting law enforcement and the intelligence community and their work. And after a couple years of that, that's where my official US government career ended up.

Wound up in the private sector. Now just work as an advisor and board director.

Yeah, I've gone through a couple of companies. One was a great pleasure working with you in total intelligence. And most recently I'd worked for as vice chairman of Blackwater and then went to a smaller but technological company, Blackbird Technologies, which sold a Raytheon. At that point I went out on my own international consulting. And I'm on three corporate boards. I haven't done much traveling for these. We've Been doing conference calls and zoom. So I'm excited about traveling again and going to Europe and the Middle east and going to these ports.

Absolutely. Kind of the way of the world. So it sounds like your dad had almost given you almost in a tailor made experience set for being in the CIA with all of the experience in Africa. What age were you during these timeframes that you're off exploring?

When I was exploring, I would say it was between 9 and 15. And you know, I think back about the freedom that I had. I was usually left under the so called leadership of the, of the airline station chief who was probably spending most of his time chasing after flight attendants. So his keeping track of me was not that close. And so I just went walking around and literally through the bush and going into African villages, meeting them, talking to them. And I do remember in all the countries I went to when I did this, how embracing and how kind Africans were, were at least to me. So I walked away with a very positive impression and a great affinity for Africans and their situation. I still enjoy it very much and regularly try and go back to Africa to visit. Excellent.

So from a counterterrorism perspective, you were directly involved in the intelligence collection that led to the capture of Carlos the Jackal. Can you kind of fill us in on that from your perspective and any lessons that you learned out of that?

Yeah, sure. I mean, the United States, in cooperation with its foreign partners, were interested in the apprehension of Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, who was known as Carlos the Jackal. He'd killed, I think, 83 people or so. You can even if you look behind me, there's a newspaper, clips. I remember when he was actually captured. My wife was in London. She kept three copies. One was the Times, one was the Guardian, the other, you know, Carlos captured and all that. We had reason to believe that he would be in Khartoum, Sudan. And we followed that up with really not much more than that. And because Khartoum was such a controlled environment, it's not like find somebody in New York, finding someone who's not Sudanese. And Khartoum was a bit easier, particularly some who likes the nightlife and drinking and things like that. You know, over time you can, you can have a good shot at locating a guy like this. So eventually we did and then we kept track of him. We had been under the impression that the Department of Justice had, you know, the paperwork to have him arrested for the United States. But when we, when we had eyes on him, it turned out this not to be the case. So the French did. So we provided the key field role, put it that way, for the French, so that they could render him to justice in France. You know, he was a very interesting guy and very dangerous in the sense that he was a sociopath. He had, his history was one of pulling out guns and shooting people throughout his entire career. So, you know, if you make a mistake in your surveillance of him, then you could, you could find yourself in just a terrible situation with gunplay and all that. So our job was to keep track of him yet not be identified. And we did this for a very long time. As a matter of fact, we had him pretty well dialed in. We were so knowledgeable that we could predict. You give us a day of the week and a time, about 94,5% accuracy. We can tell you where he's going to be, but he's going to be with someone alone like that. So anyway, over time we, we were able to facilitate the process where the French were able to come in and grab him and, and render him to justice in France. You know, for us it was just, you know, another day at the office in Khartoum was set. We had no dependence. It was just worker abuse. And we had a very small team we had to draw down because of the security situation. We were concerned about being overrun. And so all we did was work. I mean, literally we'd sleep and work. It was such a target rich environment in those days. Every terrorist group in the planet, certainly Middle Eastern terrorist group, was represented significantly in Khartoum. So it was like banquet. You know, you just had so much opportunity and so you went at it, went at it full tilt. And I think we did, we did a good, a good job, a very good job. A lot of what we know about Salama bin Laden and as an example was a derivative of what we collected in cartoons. We were going full tilt all the time. But Carlos the Jacko, to be perfectly honest, was just one among many. You know, it was a big deal to the French and big deal to Washington. The media loved it. You know, that was just one of the things we were doing. And I would admit to you I was a little surprised after it was reported that he'd been taken by the French and he was under control in France. I remember listening to my shortwave radio where I had automatically plugged into BBC and Radio Moscow and Radio Beijing and all that. Just hit the buttons and I'll never forget this. After years, I just hit the button for BBC and it was Carlos the Jackals when captured and the next one In Russian, Carlos the Jackal, Chinese. Every station in the world was covering it. That's when it really dawned on me. You know, being a worker, be like a rat in a maze, just doing your work. Hey, this is a. This is a big deal for people, and it certainly was. But I would emphasize from a practical counterterrorism standpoint, this was just one among many things. We were doing.

The steady state, but he had the notoriety to make this story much bigger, obviously on the international stage. Excellent. What year did Al Qaeda and bin Laden come onto your radar?

I was aware of him before I was assigned a cartoon. When I arrived in 93, I guess it was. So I was aware that he was there. The national assessment, which was shared by allies, which continued for the whole time as a Khartoum, was that they saw bin Laden as more as a financier of terrorism as opposed to a practitioner, as crazy as that sounds now. But they were convinced that basically his role in terrorism was providing the funding for terrorist groups, such as the funding for Islamic radicals in Somalia or other groups like that. So he did. He was not as high on the list of priorities for the US Government perhaps as he should have been. There was no warrant for his arrest. And so our job was exclusively collection. So we did that, and there was a lot to collect on. Virtually all of his holdings at that time were in Sudan. He had construction companies and training camps and earth moving equipment and stores, and he had a bank account. So, you know, all of these things we were very interested in. So we collected against that and sent that back.

And so at some point did they elevate or at least you got on their radar screen where you started being personally targeted? Can you speak to that a little bit?

Sure. It's been covered in the press. I don't volunteer new secrets. I only speak about old ones that have been exposed. But, yeah, that was in 1995, last year of my tour. We were very familiar with certainly the leadership of Al Qaeda and the major lieutenants. And so we had a pretty comprehensive collection program. And then we noticed, and I believe virtually when they initiated this activity, that we were on it right from the beginning, which was a surveillance activity against me. And they kept adding more people and more capability to what they were doing. They had people that would identify when I would leave my place of work and then which way I would turn at the intersection, and people with handkerchiefs wiping their brow as a signal. And they had people so they would, over time, they'd actually practice various options. And it appeared to Be options of both to assassinate with a weapon, to blow up explosives placed in vehicles at intersections where you'd have to stop, as well as cars with guys in it to pull you over and grab you. So these kind of permutations, they seem to develop in capability and then they refined it over time to the point we thought was very interesting because, you know, we're intelligence officers, we like to collect information. So we're very interested in seeing how they went about this. You know, to make book. It's like the American Navy tracking Russian submarines, right? You want to track them as long as you can to see what they do and how they behave. It's kind of the same thing. But it got to the point where I said, hey, these guys we think are getting close to executing their operation. So we put, we put an end to that. And then that from their standpoint, that activity degraded into high speed chases and cars and stuff. And since our guys were former NASCAR drivers, we win, they lose. And it sort of petered off after that. But they made a good run at it. And we had a very highly trained team. They were very well prepared. We were on the ball. We had no wives and children and dogs. And this is counterterrorism 100% of the time. They might have been more effective. They'd been in a place that wasn't organized like that. But again, I hate to say it, but, but, but when you do this long enough, it's my impression, like being in the combat infantry in war, if you do it long enough, this is your job and you get used to it. Sometimes I think back and say, oh, this will, you know, dicey perhaps, but when you're doing this full time against various groups, it's kind of the cost of doing business. You know, you just want to, of course, you want to make sure nobody gets hurt. You want to be as cautious and careful as you can, but you're still there to collect information and see how they do things. But it was pretty, I don't want to say the word routine, but it was pretty standard of the work that we were doing.

What kind of lessons learned did you derive from the field in the early counterterrorism mission into your leading of the Counterterrorism center at the CIA?

Yeah, well, the first thing I would say is most people talk about counterterrorism. I don't know if it applies today, but in my time and shortly thereafter, over time, there are growing numbers of experts. I always, you know, had an auditorium full of these people said, okay, let's raise your hand, who here is actually meta terrorist? You know, and I would figure not many hands would go up. So a lot of people talk about it, but they haven't had practical experience. My end was more the practical experience than being having encyclopedic knowledge of, you know, bin Laden's mother's middle name, you know, so I became professionally comfortable working against this target. You know, a lot of people, ooh, it's very dangerous. You know, they have guns and they're crazy and whatnot. Well, once you get into it, you know, you figure out the rules of the road and how they behave. And they're human beings too. They follow the same, same traits a lot of people do. You know, human beings will usually take the easiest way to achieve the objective. You know, they can be sloppy, they can make mistakes. And so, I mean, once you understand all this, it becomes far more manageable. So I was comfortable with terrorists. And I think the one thing that I retained as a concept was the less practical experience people have with terrorists, the more they tended to dramatize their capabilities. I remember later in my career when I was the director of counterterrorism, my bosses were always concerned about, you know, Al Qaeda having a nuclear weapon and, you know, detonating it in the United States, you know, because it's really a practical thing. You know, we have to, you know, guard against this. And it was always a concern. But if you look at the probability of what you're likely to face, it's always been the story is, you know, people, including terrorists, go back to what they know how to do best, which is edged weapons, guns, explosives. And in Al Qaeda's case, early on they fixated on the use of aircraft to achieve their objectives. Like the planes operation mutated into how they approached 9, 11. So there is some sort of predictability. And I think as a practitioner, you need to help others consider your viewpoint that perhaps it's the threat that they represent is not as exotic and, you know, use of radiological weapons or nuclear weapons. Not saying this is not possible and should be guarded against, but the probability is you're going to get struck with those means that they're experienced in and more comfortable with.

So it sounds like kind of keeping the focus grounded in reality and experience was able to kind of at least orient your perspective on what should be focusing on at the ctc.

Yeah, I think so. And it was always not a struggle, but always required reminding people, particularly my bosses, of, you know, when you have limited resources, what to put those resources against having the highest probability of the threat and to meet that threat and defeat it.

So leading up to September 11th, I know there's been lots, lots of books and documentaries, et cetera, on the topic, but you kind of were in a position of trying to speak truth to power with regards to the emerging threat from Al Qaeda that would eventually manifest itself in the September 11 attacks. Can you speak to any lessons learned from that process or your experience or even kind of step us through that?

Yeah, I can walk you with it. But I would say the main, the main thing is the concept of speaking truth to power. Whenever I talk to young people, young people in the agency or even the military, this speaking truth to power thing is easy to say, but for some people it's hard to do. But it's absolutely vital no matter what level you're serving at currently. If you're a platoon leader speaking of company commander, it is your professional responsibility to give the, the leaders above you an accurate picture of your area of expertise in the agency. After you go through training, you know, you'd be, say you're responsible for one case, if there's an issue with that case, worthy of seeing the director, very junior officer. You know, you're trotted in front of the director and you're the expert in that. And hopefully you learned then and over time that what you have to say is important regardless of what your rank is. But you have to get that concept across. That's point one. Point two is you have to get, you have to speak truth to power. What I call simple English, which is not, you know, growth is the sign of life. However, good things come in small packages. You can't cover the entire spectrum. You got to decide what the point is professionally. You've got to tell it to them in simple English and clear so they understand it and then it's their job to have to deal with it. But invariably some, some leaders or bosses above you aren't going to like it because it presents them with a problem. This is a factor you'll typically find dealing with the more politically aligned elements, whether it's Congress or the Senate, the National Security Council. They have other agendas, other competing issues, they have other political objectives. And it's vitally important that you tell them exactly what is in your area of expertise and you tell them in a clearly understandable fashion. Otherwise, if you don't do that, then you're at risk of when it's all over and things go bad, you're going to need a full time psychologist to help you through the rest the of of your life you can take satisfaction that you did your job, that you made it as clear as possible. In turn leading up to 911 I could go on and on about this, but 911 Commission did a pretty good job of emphasizing how much paperwork we did. I was using the example of one of my lieutenants, Rich Blee, who I believe you know was the head of the Al Qaeda section. I remember early on in my time in counterterrorism, I went into his office. He had a windowless office, One wall is 15ft long. And he began piling up one copy of every briefing on Al Qaeda and the threat that we gave. If I gave a briefing, they usually write it up. I'd give it and I'd give it back. And so these piles begin to grow and grow and grow. And by the time of before 9 11, I asked him, why are you keeping all this paper? Rich said very, very simply, when the catastrophe happens, there are lots of Americans dead. The investigators are going to want to know, did we brief anybody? I'll be able to say, there you go, how about it? Which is exactly what happened. By the time of 9 11, say a 15 foot wall. One copy of each briefing was piled high, one pile right next to the other from waist high to shoulder high. And I'm six foot three. I mean in fact, when the investigators went in this debriefing, yeah, there it is. They said, man, it's a lot of briefings. Yes it is. So there's a lot of brief paper that went into that. But that doesn't fully cover, nor does the 911 Commission cover all the personal briefings we gave. I mean we briefed people, never briefed the president or the vice President but everybody else in very truth to power way. I did and my lieutenants did and it was a new threat for them. And certainly in the case of the Bush administration, they were concerned about, you know, loose nukes, weapons of mass destruction. And this didn't really fit their agenda. They were going to think about it and they really didn't accept this threat with the severity that at least we gave to it. There was a lot of briefing papers. You know, Osama bin Laden determined to strike in the United States, putting out intelligence there was a terrorist group in the United States, escalatory threat. We expect multiple attacks. Their objective is the destruction of the United States. My favorite one was on July 10, Richard Bleak came in and said, man, the roof's falling in on. What do you got with PowerPoint made some changes, went to see George Tennant. He looked at it, he got it immediately. And we made a non scheduled meeting to see Condi Rice at the White House. We're coming right now. So she was there and some of her people, you know, we, I mean it was, it was among maybe the hardest hitting brief yet briefing I've ever sat through. I mean it was very clear and distinct. You know, it's coming, we're going to be struck. I don't know if she says to me, so Kofer, what do we do? This country's got to go on a war footing now. Slam my hand on the table. Well, unfortunately none of the domestic agencies were mobilized. Just didn't get traction, you know, and so it went like that. And for us the intelligence was, we weren't precious. The intelligence was pointing to we're going to be struck. Which also helped us to develop the capability to have the, the transportation and firepower and communications and allies in Afghanistan. So when this happened we could do our job facilitating the entry of the US military into Afghanistan so that that piece worked out well. Unfortunately for all that to go forward, we had to suffer a tremendous amount of casualties at 9 11.

So I've been fascinated with this concept of gray rhinos ever since I interviewed the author Michelle Walker a couple of months ago. And you know, we understand black swans is kind of the unforeseeable events that could happen. But she talks about the gray rhinos, which are the things where we do have the warning but then we kind of fail to take action. It seems to me that despite the fact that we described 911 as a bit of a black swan, maybe based on the tactics, that it really was a gray rhino. It was something that we had the early warning, you had the kind of the, the Cassandra syndrome of people being briefed and the awareness being driven, but without the associated action or almost action paralysis. Do you think that that's kind of a fair characterization?

I think that's a fair characteristic, certainly in hindsight, but also in real time in the decision makers and the policymakers defense, they would fall back on us. Well, you didn't give us the exact day, you didn't give us the exact target, you didn't give us all the specifics. Well, you know, if I had that information, I wouldn't even be wasting my time coming to talk to you. We'd take care of it. Right. You know who it was, where they were, what they're going to take. What do we need you for? Work with the FBI and they'll take care of it. So the reason that they're being warned is that there are pieces. Despite our best effort, we haven't been able to collect on our estimation, at least mine was sometime In August of 2001, multiple attacks, significant loss of life. Objective, the destruction of the United States. As we got closer to 9 11, our concern was it was increasingly to be in the United States. And I just think that the recipients of this were just not prepared to listen to this. And they didn't take action on it because they didn't want to be in the box of having to deal with something like this when they have other issues. You know, they have competing issues. You know, same time you had a shootout in the South China Sea, people say, what are you spending your time on this counterterrorism thing for? But the my thing has always been and usually do this in other issues. You know, when you have the CIA director and they had to counterterrorism ahead of us, Al Qaeda coming in, I mean, forcefully advancing. We're going to be struck. Lots of Americans are going to die. We need to go into war front. Here's the thing. What traditionally would happen would be that they call for a principals meeting. So you have essentially the war cabinet, Secretary of defense, state and all that. And because bureaucratically that's a good way to handle it, right? You get these people together and they trot in tenant black and bleeding. Listen to these guys, you know, see if you think there's anything to this, then they can make a national determination. You know, are we going to do something? Are we going to do nothing? You know, but at least a decision is made as it was left. There was no meeting like this. There was no decision made. It just kind of happened. So that's. That's unfortunate. It would have been great if we could have collected all the tactical information. But, you know, that's. That's a pretty tall order. It's like saying the FBI, we'd like you to collect all the intelligence so banks aren't robbed. Somebody told me there are like 40 banks a day in the United States that are robbed. There are limitations practically to the detection of events like this consistently where so few people are involved and they're attempting to practice tradecraft to defeat your ability to collect on them. So no, we didn't raise our alert level. The public wasn't warned, and basically and our resources weren't increased. But I will tell you, important part is even to this day, I'm amazed at the difference in the authorities and the resources granted to the counterterrorism center led by me from before 9 11. And after 911 it was before 911 it was, you know, we had less people and less resources than eventually the 911 Commission would have in terms of their staff and their money. So 911 staff and the money allocated for them was more than we had for al Qaeda. After 911 briefing the President it was like not making this up. You need to carry a battle group. I mean it was like, whatever. You guys have a plan, it's been validated, you're going forward, let us know what you need. I mean I remember there was. We had to move an individual through a capital. And I just called. They gave me a number to call. Call this number at the Pentagon, whatever you need, they'll fix you up. Calling them up. I said, good. Just to let you know we're moving this high value guy through this place. You know, normally it'd be like, yeah, fine, thanks for telling me this time. This is kind of symptomatic of the time. I said great. Would you like us to put a squadron of Apache attack helicopters over the convoy? No, it's okay. I think we can manage without it. But it was tremendous amount of resources. You need money, you've got it. You need support from the military, you've got it. Everyone was there to help us because comparatively we've been working on this the longest. We scoped it out, our threat intelligence was accurate. We had plans of what to do. The Afghan war plan, the worldwide attack matrix. So we were on this issue so significantly ahead and validated by the President that temporarily everyone came in and supported us until we could turn this over on the ground to the military and off they went. Excellent.

It sounds like, you know, obviously given the name of the the podcast of the OODA cast and you know, affinity for the OODA loop, it almost sounds like there was an OODA loop stall around September 11th. You know, you had collected the intelligence, you had provided the warning, but then there just wasn't the requisite for a variety of reasons. You know, whether it was that they didn't buy in or there was a high level of friction associated with the actions or was detract resources from others. It just seems like there was a piece of the decision making process. There were not making a decision, not taking an action was an action and other itself.

I agree with you. It's almost like it wasn't really validated except to some degree by some elements of the intelligence community, some elements of the FBI, certainly the counterterrorism center, I would say that's about the universe of it. You get outside that. And there was, you know, I don't want to say ignorance, but not a profound understanding or significant understanding of what you have here. So after 9 11, the people that were engaged, you know, in the land of the blind, one eyed man is king. And that's where it was. You know, just underscore the military. I mean they're great. They have war plans for everything, certainly for pure states and warfare. There wasn't a war plan for Afghanistan because from their perspective they did not want to cross with the issue of posse comitatus. So they purposefully did not plan for the projection of forces into Afghanistan. DoD is great, but in those days, without a plan, there was a little bit of floundering. Now they've got JSOC and all that, they're the envy of the world. But then that was a different story. So at least CTC and the CIA were able to bridge that gap and get them in the game effectively and quickly. And in terms of that context, it worked out well. But it was, as we used to say, before 9 11, we were doing counterterrorism. Before counterterrorism was cool. Now lots of people are involved in this in those days, not so many. Sure.

Yeah. No, I mean, of course, familiar. You know, I was also in that crew that was focused on this issue going back to 1996 and still have the, you know, hanging on a wall you can't see. But I have the gift from our mutual friend, the late Kal Temple of the bin Laden wanted poster in French, you know, that resulted from the embassy and consulate bombing. So it was definitely. There was a community of folks and it just expanded exponentially after September 11th, and rightfully so. You know, given the nature of the catastrophe. I'd like to shift a little bit broader. Given your experience in the CIA and then as the ambassador at large in the State Department, what are some lessons learned just around progressing your career or leadership lessons learned that you would like to convey to folks that are starting or kind of at the midpoint in their career?

Well, I certainly appreciate the opportunity. I would say one thing that helped me tremendously in my ability to assess and put in context situations in which I was the leader, oddly enough, was a function of the readings that I've done my whole life. Even as a boy, I started out reading about military commanders and captains of ships and autobiographies and biographies of nation's leaders and, you know, from Attila the Hun to Sun Tzu to the whole lot of it. So it was really a passion of mine, and it is to this day. And it just sort of expands your appreciation of the various factors involved in leadership. The trick when you have to execute is to kind of draw on the right lessons in the context of your time. So I would say read a lot. You know, whenever you get on a plane, if you don't have a book about leadership or Napoleon or something like that, go to the bookstore, buy one, read it on the plane. That's what I would do. I did my whole career. Then when I became a businessman, I started buying books about business, you know, how to conduct yourself as a board member and all that. So I think reading is vitally important also. In the beginning of your career, when you're put in a leadership position, you should take it very seriously as the first step of what's going to happen in the future. Everyone makes mistakes, and you will as you go along, but you learn, and hopefully you won't make that mistake again. If you make it early enough, you're making it a smaller level than you are later on. I would say, besides the trait of wanting to be a leader, and we should really think about this too, because it has nothing to do about the reserved parking spot in front of the building or the car with the driver, or having your own Air Force G4 to fly to Moscow. It's really nothing about that. If that's what attracts you, go work in the private sector. That's not what it's about, but what it really is about is leading people. Management can be you encouraging people to do things that they don't want to do. But leadership is encouraging people to do things that they never thought they could do, but you knew they could. I think the most consistently over time, I would say the most important trait. You want to think about this too when you're in charge. Like I said to my son when he went to be his first platoon in Afghanistan, these are not your pals, they're not your buddies. These are your troops for whom you're responsible. And the most important trait, I think, that underpins this relationship is empathy. You know, regardless of the aspects of the common work that you share, I think empathy with each individual and groups of people is absolutely crucial. You have to understand where they're coming from, how they see things. And I can give you an example. I would, even later in my career, I would work hard because I come from the operational side. I mean, someone says, hey, hop on a plane, go halfway around and do something that has some risk to it. No problem. That's kind of where I'm coming from. Now, when you deal with people that say, never leave Washington, they're in a cubicle their whole careers and they have a problem, it may seem like not much to you, but if it means a lot to them, that becomes an issue for you, and you have to engage and help them to work through it. So I think empathy is absolutely crucial. You know, this is not the days of Attila the Hun. You know, we're now a society where everyone interacts and everyone needs to be motivated. And I think that's crucially important. The second most important thing, they gave a name to this. I never knew what it was for a time. Long, long time. But they gave a name to it, which is now called servant leadership. When I first started out, I thought organizations were like a triangle with the boss on top and I'm at the bottom, and you kind of move your way up according to selectivity. But if you're a good leader and you have empathy and you want to get results and the like, actually, when I teach people, I felt that the whole triangle was upside down. We'll try with the most junior people are on top, and I was the last guy on the bottom. And my job was to support everyone above me so they could be as effective as possible. So once you realize who's working for who, really, I think that helps you go a long way to being effective. Who's working for who. You have empathy. And the third thing is, I heard say maybe once you've moved up your career a little bit, but according to General Powell, he says it beautifully. He says leadership is lonely. You may be surrounded by a lot of people, but leadership is lonely because you're the one that has to decide, and you're the one that's responsible. And it's important that if there are awards and honors to be passed out, you rightly pass those to your lieutenants and the men and women who did the work. If something goes bad and there's accountability, that's all yours. Once people understand that you're 95% on the way to being a reasonably effective leader, and then you take it from there. But those are the main points. I would say it's easy to say, Matt, as you know, it's easy to say these things, but when it comes to actually practicing them, they can be hard. And that goes with the role of being a leader. Is everyone going to understand all the pressures on you and how hard your job is no, nor should they. That's your burden. And you have to carry on and, and essentially work for them so that they can perform at their highest level.

Like that, it seems even in business and obviously in your career in the intelligence community. I like the idea of the kind of flipping the triangle. If you just think about resource allocation in the triangle, the resources are kind of allocating up to a single point, whereas if you flip that, you might have 100 or thousand or 10,000 points of action that are empowered instead of consolidating everything into one person or one leader. That's another thing that I noticed when you were talking about just in the CIA, the ability to bring in the analyst who actually worked the desk or worked the issue to brief senior leadership. That's also a disruption of that hierarchy by bringing the expertise directly into the room instead of having the expert brief their boss, who brief as their boss and then hope that the message gets a across, you know, in the game of telephone. So I love that, love that messaging. I think that's very valuable.

I would always try to do that in my career. If we have something that's specific and you have to see the director, I'd make it a point to take the action Officer. Regardless how junior they are, you could see them get all nervous and swallow hard and say, this is my job. Get used to it. It's going to happen over and over again. If you screw it up, it's okay, it's my fault, I'm in charge. And get them used to doing that. And every time, the director would play his role in this too and ask them questions. And that was worked out well for everybody and worked out well for the organization. As you help younger employees matriculate up to senior positions so they have the confidence. So when they have to sit down in a small group meeting after There are almost 3,000 dead people with the President of the United States and you tell them what we're going to do. And he says, kofer, can you really do this? This present out of doubt in my mind, these things don't come out of the blue. They're a function of a lifetime of training and experience to be able to do that. Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, we're hopefully emerging out of a global health pandemic. Lots of other kind of security, international security issues in the news. I know you're retired from the agency, but still stay very well informed on what's happening in the world. What are the types of issues that have you concerned or that you think we should be focusing more effort on from a national security perspective today?

Well, there are an awful lot, you know, a lot more about many of these things than I do, like cyber and all that, vitally important and all that. But being sort of a human collector, infantryman type, I think what is most important to me are two things. One is to try and get some type of consensus and unity in this country that we're all Americans, we're all in this together, and try and put our domestic politics aside for the common good as we go forward. I think we could. There's a lot of room for improvement on that and also to work with our allies overseas to get back in harness with them. The last administration's effect on our traditional allies like NATO has been probably catastrophic, is too extreme, but has been very destructive. And we have the rising specter of real peer state threats with Russia and the Chinese. So we need to get our allies, seato Europeans, in a framework where we're all working together and cooperating at the highest standard possible with those two underlayments. The rest, I think, can be managed pretty well. I just saw in the press today that the Senate at least, has passed a bill of trillions of dollars to put into research and technology to counter the Russians and the Chinese. This is all good, but I see this more tactically. I think the underlayment of this has to be putting our own house in order, or all Americans all pulling together in a world that's very diffuse and very dangerous. And the other thing is to get. Get our allies together in the same sheet of music. So we're all cooperating and complementing each other. As a human intelligence guy, you know, if you want to surveil a terrorist in northern Nigeria, you're a lot more efficient and effective having, you know, Nigerians from the Nigerian police do it than you and me. I know you're really good at this, Matt, but rather than you and I going and doing it, we might stand out a bit. So everyone has a role to play, and we need to facilitate this process of building the capacity and the will for us all collectively to operate in what is a very dangerous world. I spend a lot of my time in Eastern Europe on my boards and things. And, you know, when you're in neighboring countries, the Russia, and you see the number of army divisions and brigades they have sitting on the border, and you see what the capability of NATO is that close to the border. If you're a national up there, you should be worried. And their membership in NATO is crucial. It has to be honored by us. So we have a lot to work against and cooperation is the best way to do it.

The US just announced last week that they're going to start viewing some of these cyber criminals through a more of a counterterrorism lens. Do you think that that's a good analogy or frame to use to look at that issue based on your experience?

Yeah, I do. Again, more from the human dynamic behind this sophistication and the carnage that has been wreaked in cyber. You still have human beings behind it. I never thought it was adequate just to. I mean, the FBI had a great success in recovering most of the money from the hack against the colonial pipeline. Right. Got that back. That's great. But that doesn't seem like a very big deterrent to me. So you can go and you can hack, you can get a ransom and then, oh, in this case, the American law enforcement was able to recover the money. That's not enough for me. And I heard the administration say that they're thinking about getting the FBI and the CIA and agencies like that to project into these countries to operate against the individuals that create these problems. I'm all for that. That gives a level of anxiety and paranoia and in some instances pain that goes beyond just recovering their ill got gain. So I think that's a great idea. I don't want to go to Hollywood and draconian. You find out who did it. If you can work with a local government and have them rendered to the United States for trial, I think that's great. Make it public. Let people know you do this to us. Not only are we going to get the money back, but we're going to take as long as it takes to identify who did it. We're going to bring them personally to justice. I think that's a good message. Yeah.

Even if they exist in a regime where we can't bring them to justice, it seems like there's a lot that could be done to disrupt the infrastructure, you know, disrupt the incentives and things of that sort as well.

So. Right. And things happen, you know, so there's no one, you know, it's. It's one planet and it's just because they're in hard to get place, that doesn't mean it's impossible.

It was interesting and I think more details will come out. The ransom, where that was recovered, the funds that were recovered, wasn't the full ransom that was paid. But there was a lot of consternation with regards to, well, how did they get access to it, given the nature of Bitcoin and that you have to have possession of the private key. And it was interesting to note that a day later US and international law enforcement announced an initiative where they had been running basically an encrypted phone service that criminals were using. So I expect that we may see some correlation. But you know, those are the other types of thing activities that I do like seeing where now they start questioning the trust of the communications that they're engaging in and the equipment that they're buying and thought that was a very fascinating and great operation to have run.

I think that's excellent. Everything that around these criminals that you can put into question in their own minds, a good thing.

Last question. And you knew it was coming. Having watched previous OODA casts, what are you reading now or read recently that you would recommend to the folks that are watching?

Well, I tell you I'd recommend a book that I've now read twice. As a matter of fact, I think I read it about five or 10 years ago and I just read it again. It's book called I highly recommend us. It's so great. It's called the Watchman Slept. The Watchman Slept and it's written by an Israeli called Bar Lev. It's fascinating because what it focuses on is the quote, surprise attack of the Yom Kippur war against the Israelis. What you find out very quick, I'll make a long story short, but the essence of it is you have, you have the Israelis making a national assessment that they should have no concern about being attacked by Egypt because the Egyptians know if they attack Israel, they would lose. Because they know they would lose, they won't attack. So that was, you know, written in stock. Yet every year the Egyptians would do an exercise and bring bridges up to the Suez Canal and bring their army up to the canal. And Israelis got used to just being an exercise. But don't worry, they won't attack because they know they'll lose. At the same time, Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had a well placed agent who was the son in law of the head of the country, Anwar Saddam. And they were receiving reporting from him that, yeah, no, they are going to attack. They're going to attack. They're going to attack on this day and this is what it's going to be. And Israelis had about as much information as the Egyptians had about the attack plan. They just didn't believe it. You know, they just owed this. And so they remember. One thing I read was the head of Mossad went to meet this agent in Geneva or someplace. And he was so compelling again that he reported it back and said, hey, you know, they really are going to attack. And the Israeli Defense Force still was adamant and holding on. No, they won't attack because they know they'll lose. And then finally they decide, okay, I guess they are going to attack. The problem is, when the Israelis made the decision, okay, let's mobilize the reserves, it was way too late to effectively get the reserves mobilized and move forward. So the Egyptians got to jump on them. So you have the. On the one hand, you have a bias, a national bias, which makes sense logically. Sure. But practically the Egyptians did attack because they wanted to prove their bona fides as a negotiating partner. They wanted to put their troops, be able to hold the other side of the canal and use that as leverage to force the Israelis to negotiate for the return of the Sinai to Egypt. So it just goes to show you how complex intelligence can be. Somebody's got the right answer somewhere. In this case, it was a national assessment that impeded the natural flow of actionable intelligence that could have put the Israelis in a. A far better situation. If they'd followed the Mossad intelligence, they could have their reserves up and running, if not deter the Egyptian attack. They could have met them in force as they were trying to cross the canal.

It's interesting, it sounds like just a fascinating logic trap there with regards to the expected outcome driving the behavior on the Egyptian side when their expected outcome was actually to. To be in a better negotiating position, not to ultimately win a conflict. So fascinating. Excellent. We'll put a link to that in the show. Notes for certain covert. Thank you so much for joining us. This is a fascinating conversation. Really appreciate you taking the time to chat today.

It's my pleasure. I enjoyed seeing you again and keep up the good work. I read your OODA Loop newsletter and publications and very informative and helps me become somewhat knowledgeable on cyber, which is not one of my strong suits. So thank you. Excellent.

Thanks for listening to this OODA Loop production. For the latest analysis on cybersecurity, technology and global risks, please visit www.ooda loop.com.