YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Wiener

lines on the record: 38
first: 2025-08-30
most recent: 2025-08-30
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

“In Alaska, that mail in voting is bad. So I don't want any more mail in voting. Can you imagine what Donald Trump would do in a crisis if the United States were hit again at home or abroad? I think he would declare martial law. He's halfway there now, sending troops into American cities. I think he would cancel the next election and truly rule as a despot. The chaos in the American intelligence community In some increases the likelihood of a catastrophic attack on the United States and the catastrophic consequences for American democracy should that attack succeed.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is happening at a time when Trump seems all too willing to cram peace settlement on Russian terms down Ukraine's throat. If Putin is allowed to keep one inch, Ukraine. He will not stop there. He is not stopping there now. He is waging a campaign of sabotage and subversion all over Europe. He is heading west. The United States will be ill equipped to confront a national security crisis should it happen. Apostocracy, if I may use that term, running American intelligence increases the possibility Of a catastrophic intelligence failure and the likelihood that the next attack on the United States at home or abroad will succeed. Trump is already talking about how he really doesn't want to have another election. In this country. He said, Well, I don't want any more mail-in voting because. Putin told me”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because these were Biden hires. And he has abolished the CI's longstanding decades-old policy for diversity in hiring among its operations officers and its analysts. The CIA wants to hire African American, Asian American, Latino American officers on the very good precept that sending an all-white cadre to spy in Beijing or Sudan is not a good idea. Diversity, also that you should have people in both directorates, operations and analysis, who know the language and the culture of the countries they're covering. Diversity was a superpower for the CI. It's how they don't get caught overseas. All of this Taking a wrecking ball. The institutions of American intelligence and the architecture of national security created After World War II to protect the United States and its allies from attack. specifically from Russian imperialism.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Directorate of National Intelligence, that is the titular intelligence czar overseeing all U.S. intelligence agencies, you have the conspiracy theorist and fabulous Tulsi Gabbard, a Putin apologist, and at CIA you have John Ratcliffe, who has proven time and time again that he will twist and distort intelligence reporting to please the president. He will never tell Trump something that Trump doesn't want to hear. Ratcliffe at CIA has destroyed the careers of senior officers. He is imposing loyalty tests on people seeking to be promoted. Who did you vote for in the last election? Who really won in 2020? What did you think of the January 6th insurrection? Keelhalled, everyone the CI had hired in 2023 and 2020.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The FBI, you have another MAGA acolyte, Cash Patel, former podcaster, right-wing podcaster, who is systematically dismantling the FBI's national security intelligence divisions, because these are the people that did the work to uncover the Russian attack on the 2016 election, and to hunt down and prosecute the hundreds and hundreds of people who attacked our democracy at the insurrection of the capital in January 6th, 2021. He is dismantling the FBI's intelligence and national security divisions. Full stop.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are in a very difficult moment today. The President of the United States has appointed a quartet of crackpots and fools to run America's national security at the Pentagon you have Pete Hegsep, former Fox TV host, who is a rank amate A Christian nationalist to boot who is firing the top brass at the Pentagon if they won't swear feal teach Trump.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To convince the American people that it never happened. He, like Putin, does what all autocrats do. They try to convince the citizenry that there is no truth and there are no facts. And they might as well just give up and do what the dear leader says.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's impossible to scramble, unscramble the egg and precisely count how many boats the Russian political warfare operation actually swayed But by a Pervasive, insidious, and at times ingenious series of propaganda operations and influence operations to denigrate Hillary Clinton and to elevate Donald Trump, it made a difference. A decisive difference not knowable, but a difference. One former CI director, Mike Hayden, Bush's last CI director, called it the most successful covert operation since the Trojan horse. And that is how the US intelligence community viewed it with horror and more than a little grudging admiration for the success of the operation. Trump has spent the last nine years trying to plunge all of this down the memory hole.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And while it didn't stop the war, it did have an immediate electrifying, galvanizing effect on the nations of Europe. Have up until this day stood steadfast with Ukraine, even as the President of the United States for the past seven months has betrayed them. CIA, let it be known been in on the ground in Ukraine since twenty fourteen When the Russians stole Crimea and the eastern Donbass, working to rebuild the Ukrainian intelligence services and provide them with support so that they can defend the country against Russian aggression. The CI has been essential to the survival of Ukraine over the past decade. And now we have come. A terrible moment”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had worked with GI officers for 30 years as a diplomat. And Burns and remains America's greatest expert at intelligence diplomacy. That is combining the missions of CIA, the state, to get desired foreign policy results. And Byrne said to the president and to the Secretary of State, look here, we have this nifty secret we've stolen. We need to tell the world about it. Past CI directors would have been, let us say, reluctant. To share this information with the world. And the American people. Burns thought it was a great idea. So did Biden. And so America told the world. Putin was about to invade Ukraine. And the world, particularly NATO, said, really? Aren't you the people that told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? And CIA and the White House said, yes, really.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“with an eye toward recruiting them to become spies for the United States. Tom Rakusen says, Take those talents and train it on the Russians. I want you to recruit Russian spies, Russian diplomats, Russian oligarchs. And I want you to achieve what had been the CIA's highest goal since 1947. I want you to penetrate the Kremlin. Figure out what Putin's intentions and capabilities are. And lo and behold, four years later The CI stole Vladimir Putin's war plans for Ukraine. Including the plan to set up false flag attacks as pretext for war. And the CIA director at the time under Biden, Bill Burns, widely acknowledged as the greatest American diplomat of his generation before he became CIA director, a man who had worked as a diplomat, as ambassador to Russia, as ambassador to Jordan, as the head of the Middle East division at state.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tamra Kushan is checked, his roots are check. His parents are Czech. And he was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring and its uprising against Soviet domination in 1968. His feelings about the Russians are bred in the So, in the aftermath of the Russian hack, of the election, Tomra Kusin calls in all his top people. And he says, Look here. The Russians just manipulated our freaking elections. How are we going to make sure this never happens again? He told them, I want you to take the skills you have honed for the past fifteen years in targeting terrorists, and by targeting I don't mean putting warheads on foreheads, I mean... Learning who they are, what their true names are, who they are at home, whom they love, who they hate”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100 battles you will not be defeated. So the Chinese want to know us. The Russians just want to screw us. Their intelligence services are pretty good at sabotage and subversion and not that great at espionage most of the time. So when the Russians monkey wrenched the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump and it was established beyond a shadow of a doubt that their intelligence services had carried out a remarkably successful act of political warfare. In the spring of 2017 in the aftermath of this the CIA had a new chief of the clandestine service, new top spy. And his name is Tomas Rakusan.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the Chinese, in addition to this, have stolen all the health records from the major health insurance company in the United States. They have penetrated all the major telecoms of the United States. Their goal is to extend the surveillance state they have created in China into the United States so that they have a god's eye view of who we are in the event of a crisis or God help us war so that they have information dominance. They are following Sun Tzu's precept, know your enemy.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And their passport and fingerprint information was in the hands of the Chinese. The Chinese intelligence services then having stoned biometric data from the world's international airports, you know, what your eyeball looks like, gave it all to Alibaba. Alibaba crunched it in 90 days. And the result is for the last 10 years, If you are a CIA officer newly arrived in Beijing or Kuala Lumpur or Oagadugu, you're collecting your bags at the carousel. Likely is not a Chinese intelligence officer is going to come up and buttonhole you and say, I know who you are, Joe. Espionage in an age of ubiquitous technical surveillance is a hard thing.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For 15 or 16 years after 9 11 The United States was focused on counterterrorism to the detriment of espionage and counterintelligence, that is spy catching, and Russia and China were focused on us. The United States. This began to become painfully apparent during the Second Obama administration. The Chinese intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security, penetrated the federal Office of Personnel Management, where the personnel records of everyone who works for the government, including everyone who works for the intelligence community and all their security clearance files are stored. And the Chinese stole all of it. And for the intelligence community, including the CI, this meant that their...”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of this was the capture of a 100 ton shipment of nuclear weapons technology from AQCon's operation in Malaysia that was headed for Tripoli to Gaddafi for his use. The ship was intercepted in the high seas in the Mediterranean. Gaddafi caught red-headed, was persuaded by American and British intelligence senior officers to come clean, lest what fate befall befell Saddam would befall him. And again, an existential threat. AQCon was judged as dangerous a person as Osama bin Laden, eliminated through espionage, not war. Or to quote Churchill out of context, jaw, jaw is better than wah, wah.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the CIA did in Excalibur was to set up phony nuclear weapons technologies importing and exporting companies, dummy companies that looked like perfect places for AQCon to do business. And within three years, by 2001, the CIA could have built its own nuclear weapon and become its own nuclear state. The people who ran this, Jim Lawler, a Texan whose nickname is incongruous, mad dog, Paula Doyle, who looks like a Catholic secondary school teacher, and Robert Gorleck, who was a deep cover spy for many years, looks like a university professor, they drew AQCON's operation into their own dummy corporation and then rolled it up.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he will shell to any despotic regime on earth. The North Koreans, the Libyans, the Syrians, you name it. Three people at CIA led an operation, which they internally called Excalibur. Hunt down a Kucon and neutralize the threat. What they did was a sting operation that was modeled on the first successful international operation of the Cheka, the Soviet intelligence service after World War I in the early days of the Soviet Union. In order to neutralize counter-revolutionary Russians who were in exile in Europe and plotting against the Bolsheviks, they set up the Soviets did, fake resistance organizations lured the counter-revolutionaries into them, and captured and executed them.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was a beautiful operation that showed that you could eliminate an existential threat of weapons of mass destruction through espionage rather than going to war to eliminate non-existent threats of weapons of mass destruction. Espionage better than war in which tens of thousands of innocent civilians are killed. Yes, AQCON, a Pakistani metallurgist who only recently died, had spent 25 years from the early 70s to the late 90s accumulating the tools that you need to build a nuclear weapon. He worked all over Europe. Imported these tools into Pakistan, the Pakistanis explode their first nuclear device in 1998 after the Indians test their nuclear device for a second time. And thus we have the Islamic bomb. Undetected at the time, in 1998, Khan reverses the lever instead of an importer of nuclear weapons technology. He becomes an exporter.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And says, You bettam has weapons of mass destruction. The CIA told me so. None of it None of it, again, for lack of intelligence, for want of intelligence. And that is a permanent stain on the reputation of the CI that lasted. 20 years, and let's talk about now how that stench eventually evanesced.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who claim to know everything that there was to know about Iraq's biological warfare programs? The CIA had never met this person. It had no contact with Kurval. And Kurveval's intelligence was never really vetted. An operations officer, wonderful woman, confronted the Iraqi weapons analyst who was handling the And said, do you know who this guy is? Nope. How do you know what he's saying is true? Well, it matches what we found on the internet. How do you know that's not where he got it? It wasn't who he was was more important than what he was saying. None of this was ever vetted. And so Colin Powell, God rest his soul, the Secretary of State, the most respected general in the United States since Eisenhower, maybe more so, goes to the United Nations with George Tennett sitting right over his shoulder, you may remember the picture.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it took bits and shards of four or five-year-old intelligence and then went around the world saying, hmm, what else do we know? And in one rather poignant case, found that the German intelligence service, the BND, had an Iraqi defector whose codename, God Help Me, was curveball. I guess in cricket, that would be a googly, right?”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Six months to 12 months. Yes. So the Senate asked the CI to produce a national intelligence estimate on Iraqi WMD in three weeks. It's urgent. We want it now and we want it bad. You want it bad? You're going to get it bad. Unfortunately, and here we return to our great theme for want of intelligence, dot, dot, dot See, I didn't have any fresh intelligence on Iraqi WMD. It last had boots on the ground in Iraq in 1998, nearly five years before the war. And then Saddam kicked the UN Weapons Inspectors out of Iraq. And with them, the CIA officers who had used the UN operation as cover. The CIA didn't have any spies in Saddam's world. Not a single one.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying, look here, we would like to have a national intelligence estimate on Saddam's WMD capabilities. A national intelligence estimate is like the Bible, okay, a chapter and verse of the Bible. It is supposed to be all known thought on matters of existential importance to the United States in the Cold War. How many nuclear missiles does the Soviet Union really have? Or what is the order of battle and the strength of the enemy in Vietnam?”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These people were ideologues, Carl. An ideology is the enemy of intelligence. If you are an ideologue, your mind is made up and you don't need to be confused with facts. President and the vice president, Bush and Cheney had their minds made up that they were going to war and they wanted CIA to provide reporting that would justify it. No question about that. Then about, let's see, six, seven months before the actual invasion of Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee, which in theory oversees the CIA. Sent a fax to CI headquarters on a summer Saturday afternoon.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is really important to understand that the CIA is an instrument of American foreign policy. It is an executor of American foreign policy. While intelligence reporting can inform policy Intelligence reporting should never ever be fitted around the policy so that it conforms with what the president wants to hear. That is a mortal sin in the intelligence world. Here's what happened that allowed the CIA to tell the president and the world that Saddam had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction programs. It has to be said And here I'm quoting the head of the Iraq operations group in the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He told me these guys, meaning Bush and Company, would have gone to war if Saddam had a rubber band and a paperclip to put your eye out. minds had already been made up”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Abadabad Pakistan after he had gone dark for a decade, was not blazed through torture or through brutal interrogations. It was made possible because the CIA stations in Islamabad and in Kabul, Pakistan, Afghanistan respectively, recruited Al-Qaeda members and turned them into spies for the United States. Espionage, in other words, not brutal interrogations. And that was quite a signal success. It wasn't really until 2017, though, Carl, after the Russian intelligence services had hacked the American Democratic system and the American election to help elect Donald Trump.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He will deny to his dying day that torture took place within those walls. And Jose Rodriguez himself would say, you know, come on. We only had 114 prisoners in there and we only waterboarded three of them. Give me a break, quote unquote. Well, I'm sorry. A break will not be given on that one. It has to be said that the path to bin Laden's”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Confessed later that he didn't know a damn thing about terrorism or about Al Qaeda when he got into that job. It was Jose Rodriguez who had previously been removed from his post as chief of the Latin American Division of the clandestine service for a, let's put it politely, a terrible lack of judgment. It speaks volumes that this is the man who was a driving force to convince the president of the United States to authorize the CI to set up secret prisons and conduct torture within them. The CIA was not set up to run secret prisons or conduct interrogations. It didn't know what it was doing. They were flying by the seat of their pants. Through the secret prison system. Let us not forget that the president of the United States Authorized this. It was on his say so that secret prisons and torture were established.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It speaks volumes. that the man who later became the head of the clandestine service, the top spy. Was catapulted immediately after 9 11 into being the chief of operations of the counterterrorism center at CIA, and then the head of the counterterrorism center of the CIA. And his fellow Jose Rodriguez.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out a statement to the entire U.S. intelligence community and the CIA. We're at war, it said. We're at war with Al-Qaeda. But he found he was a little bit like the wizard of Oz behind the screen, pulling levers and pushing buttons. And there's nothing behind the screen. Tens of thousands of years of experience and expertise had walked out the door at CIA after the end of the Cold War. And it was not capable of gathering intelligence on Al-Qaeda that was definitive, but it did know in the months before the 9-11 attacks, it knew with a terrible clarity that something awful was about to happen, something catastrophic was about to happen. And it told George Bush, the president, 36 times in late 2000 throughout 2001, that something terrible was going to happen. But it could not specify the time or place. And that was a tragedy.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When he resigned, the goal posts was still five years away. He described the CIA in the late 1990s as a burning platform. Imagine an oil rig in the North Sea that's on fire. The ship was in danger of sinking. He described the CIA in the late 1990s as half bankrupt and half broken. When Al-Qaeda hit two American embassies, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998, and it became clear that counterterrorism would have to supplant anti-communism as the mission for CIA.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The head in the sea would be a little bit like making me the head of the Ford Motor Company in that he was over his head. He tried his goddamnest. When he first came in as director in 1997 in July of that year, he told the Senate at his confirmation hearings that the CIA needed a five-year-long rebuilding program to get its key directorates, that is the clandestine service, which conducts espionage and covert operations, and the analytical directorate, which takes the CI's reporting and other all-source reporting and tries to figure out what's going on in the world, a five-year plan for rebuilding. Seven years in”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I got to know George Tennant when I was covering intelligence for the New York Times in the 1990s, and he was the senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, which is, for your listeners, a White House-based group of experts on various countries and subject matters. He ran the intelligence programs. And the NSC both advises the president is supposed to provide direction to CIA through a series of misadventures, the CIA went through five different directors in six years between 1991 and 1997, and George was the sixth. George is a Very nice men, very hell fellow well met, a back slapper in a city of backstabbers. He was beloved at the CIA in the four years before 9-11, and mostly in the three years thereafter. However, making George Tennet, who had always been a staff guy,”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone wants to talk, Carl. Everybody wants to talk about themselves. It's human nature. And the older the spies and the analysts get and the further they are removed from the tensions of the day, they begin to reflect and they are more willing to talk in detail. I only publish on the record. I don't do anonymous quotes or blind sourcing on the theory that if people are on the record, they are more likely to tell you the truth. That's the opposite of Washington journalism. And, you know, I have to say I haven't been a Washington journalist since the late 20th century.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back then, not out of the milk of human kindness, but because they were bored and they wanted someone to talk to. It's a big country. It's a long drive. Often as not, they were inarticulate, so you had to ask them questions because they really wanted to talk and they wanted to talk about the most fascinating thing in the world, which was, of course, themselves. So little by little, even though I didn't know what I was doing at the time, I was a teenager, I learned how to do an interview.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you hang around long enough, I suppose people begin to trust you. Second, covering the CIA is a lot like covering a foreign country. You have to learn the customs of the tribe. You have to learn the language and the Argo. You have to learn to think like People you're talking to, and you do that by listening. There's a deeper principle, I suppose. When I was a teenager way back in the 20th century, I used to hitchhike from coast to coast across the United States. And people pick you up.”
2025-08-30 · Intelligence Squared · What will become of the CIA under President Trump? With Tim Wiener · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT