YouSaid · the spoken record

David Ignatius

lines on the record: 63
first: 2024-05-16
most recent: 2024-05-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Let me mention two aspects that I focus on in the book. The book opens with Volkoff in Moscow, concluding that there is this Russia-China kill switch that can effectively turn off GPS when the geolocation systems on which we depend. So he thinks, I have to show this with the United States. It's too dangerous.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Secrets of intelligence agencies. So you can get synthetic aperture radar commercially. You can get thermal imaging commercial. You can get SIGINT voices sometimes commercially. You can buy this stuff. You can dial it down. I've sat with Ukrainian commanders and looked at their command screen. A particular area of Ukraine, and they say we've got four satellites covering this over the next 24 hours. We need eight. And then they buy it. They purchase it off the market. Russians look at this and they have nothing like this.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll tell you how I dialed in on it. I've made four trips to Ukraine since the war started, and each time I go, I often go with people who were in high-tech businesses, help the Ukrainians, it became more and more obvious to me that this is the first space war, that Ukraine simply could not operate against this Russian invasion without the Starlink satellites that are now in orbit in low Earth orbit that provide broadband connectivity to Ukrainian commanders at the front. They couldn't connect without this technology. So that was the first part of it. Intelligence analysis and targeting the Ukrainians were using commercial satellites, MAXAR, planet labs, Capella. There were dozens of companies now that have commercial satellites that offer things that only, they used to be the most exquisite.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gotten interested in threats to GPS in my journalism. I knew they were real. And then I just began to think, well, what if somebody got serious about disabling this? And then I began thinking about the Chinese and the Chinese now are the principal adversary for the United States in space. How did they begin? Back when they had nothing, what would they have been doing? And that's, again, that's part of how the book starts.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So sometimes I do make them columns in the Washington Post. There's a dimension that is, I don't know enough to write it as fact, but I know enough to make it plausible fiction. So this book opens with a Russian who thinks that he has discovered a Russian Chinese technique for what he calls the kill switch, for turning off GPS satellites, which would All your listeners understand would have a crippling effect. You couldn't use your cell phone, you couldn't travel. Commerce wouldn't work. And so he feels he has to share this.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stuff that real, so through my fiction, now written 12 novels. Things that I find interesting in my journalism and want to unpack and tell in a rich way that they really happen, I put into my fiction, and this book is the latest. I got fascinated with satellite warfare.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people began talking to me because I've been working for two years knocking on doors. So I ended up having all this stuff that journalists just don't hear. And I knew the only thing I could do, I'd already written a story on the front page of the paper was to try to write a novel. So I tried to teach myself, got rejected by everybody, but it ended up getting published in 1987. And because it told this amazing, true story, it became almost like a text, dozens of CI officers have said to me, well, when I went to training at the farm, which is where they do their training, they gave me a copy of your book, Agents of Innocence. They said, well, this is what Operations is about. So it was a weird beginning to my using stuff that you”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Israelis assassinated him. And I learned about this as I was heading for Beirut, somebody who'd worked in a Carter White House said to me, you know, the Israelis just killed our men in the PLO. I said, what? My God. And so I spent two years working on that story. The case officer ran that case, came to the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983. I was in the embassy about a half hour before biggest car bomb of that era exploded at the embassy, killing everybody in the CIA station, including this man. So everybody in the agency knew about this amazing operation was dead.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was covering the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal, which is where I began my reporting career. And I ran across the best story I ever had to this day. The CI had recruited the chief of intelligence for the PLO, which was then the leading terrorist group as an American asset and had run him for 10 years.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have the ambition, over ambition to try to be the editor of the paper, and I certainly tried. And I say you're lucky in life the things that you don't get because I have loved being a columnist. I've loved the freedom to write novels and write my journalism. Had I become editor of the post... We all dreamed in that generation of being men Bradley. I couldn't have been Ben Bradley for starters. And I wouldn't have had the life that I've had. And I just know I wouldn't be happy today.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were the young person. Yeah, you could this internet thing, you sort of You got it better than anybody around. So you help put that company on the map, on their pathway to fantastic success, the merger with time, you were covering them. You were just all over it. So, yeah.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business industry really starting up AOL out near Dulles Airport and you were covering it. We need somebody good to cover it, and you just kind of ate it up, and it became your beat. Yeah, I did.”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The great Few that we'd had in years among members of the half family, and you just killed it. You knocked out of the park. And then we had...”
2024-05-16 · On with Kara Swisher · War in Gaza, Ukraine & Space, plus Biden vs. Trump with David Ignatius · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT