Transcript
MR. STEPHEN HESS: Good morning. Welcome. I'm Steve Hess, the co-host of this program from Brookings and with Marvin Kalb, the Executive Director of the Washington Office of Shorenstein Center at Harvard.
This is the fifth program in our weekly series on how the press is dealing with, interacting, responding to the present crisis. We started with a panel of Peter Arnett and other war correspondents telling us lessons of past wars. We went on to the other side of the podium and had the response of government spokesmen with a group of presidential press secretaries. Then on to the question of public opinion using the latest figures from Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center on the public response to the press in the current crisis. Last week we took our show on the road and went to the Foreign Press Center where we had a panel of foreign correspondents—the Al Jazeera correspondent, the Milliyet correspondent and others talking about the situation from their perspective in Washington.
Today I think we have the most unique angle to look at this crisis because what we've done is gather a group of former highest level national security policy advisors, and I should say at this point we are one short, unfortunately, on our panel. Yesterday former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger called and he was ill. We're very sorry not to have him and we wish him a very speedy recovery.
But this is an opportunity to ask people who made decisions on national security questions, how they factored in the press, how it entered into their thinking. In fact, in some cases how it may have changed the event itself in the case of what's known as the CNN effect. And of course we won't let them go today without an opportunity to ask them a little about what they think about the press coverage and the interaction of government with the press in the present crisis.
Let me introduce them in the order in which they entered government, and you're going to see a pattern. These are people who I think of as action intellectuals. Dick Neustadt would call them the inner and outers. People who go into government and then come out and often work in universities, think tanks, or law firms with a special international flavor.
Jim Schlesinger who entered the Nixon Administration with the national security portfolio at what had then been called the Bureau of the Budget in 1969, went on to be the Chairman of what was then called the Atomic Energy Commission. After you leave a job they change the name of the agency, is that...
MR. JAMES SCHLESINGER: Sometimes they get rid of the agency. (Laughter)
MR. HESS: For a short time was the Director of the CIA. And then served as Secretary of Defense in the Nixon and Ford Administration.
Note we have representatives, people who have served in every presidency since Richard Nixon.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick was a member of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet and was the U.S. representative to the United Nations and a member of his national security council. She was, before she entered government and is again, a professor at Georgetown and also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I should say, by the way, that Jim Schlesinger has a comparable connection with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. You see the flow in and out of places like this.
And then Jim Woolsey who is a partner in the law firm of Shea & Gardner here in Washington specializing, of course, in international questions. He was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the beginning of Bill Clinton's Administration. Earlier on he had been in the Pentagon as Under Secretary of the Navy, and negotiator of the Armed Forces in Europe and START questions as well.
You'll note too a flow, when these folks are not in government they tend to be on high government commissions like the Rumsfeld Commission. So they represent a certain class or group that really is very important not only in government, but as they leave government in trying to shape the policies that they believe in. Jeanne, there used to be a saying, the New York Times had an ad, "I got my job through the New York Times." Jeanne Kirkpatrick might say I got my job through Commentary Magazine, a very important article that she wrote that caught the attention of Ronald Reagan. But you see their names constantly in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the OpEd pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, on the editorial page, or the Wall Street Journal.
So it's this flow that we're going to follow. How they perceive the press in government, how they use the press when they're out of government. I think we'll turn the first question then over to my co-host, Marvin.
MR. MARVIN KALB: Jim, let me start with you. Jim Woolsey, start with you.
As you look back over your government service now, what was the single, biggest, largest, most compelling national security issue that you faced in office and how did you think the press handled that issue, and how did you handle the press?
MR. R. JAMES WOOLSEY: While I was in government certainly in a position of authority, I've been in government five different times since 1968, but it would have been in the CIA job. Of course I think the most attention the press paid to anything during my two years as DCI was the Ames case.
I suppose I was a bit naive about this because although the CIA had rather dropped the ball on pursuing a source after 1985 of a number of lost Soviet agents, and part of the problem was lack of cooperation with the FBI, it did in late 1991 appoint a remarkable man, Paul Redman, to be the head of the counter-intelligence office and Paul, with his two colleagues Gene Verdefey and Sandy Grimes, essentially solved the Ames case and they did it with very thorough cooperation with the FBI for two years. We knew who Ames was by relatively early in '93, worked closely with the FBI, and at the time of his arrest in February '94, I was all set up, I thought, to hold a joint press conference with Louis Freeh, and we were going to announce this common success in catching this traitor. It didn't go that way.
The FBI decided at the last minute they wanted to do a press conference alone. The press went off on the story of how God-awful the CIA must be to have had somebody like this as a spy inside it. I made a number of decisions about restructuring counter-intelligence and security at the CIA which were barely reported. And by late summer of '94, after I'd spent a week going over in great detail with a panel of disinterested intelligence officers, the personal records of all the people who had had anything to do with Ames' career in the CIA and determined that there were 11 people, four of whom had made serious errors of judgment, but all four of whom were already retired since most of these errors occurred back in the mid '80s and we were already in 1994. Seven people had made some modest mistakes of one kind or another, a few of whom were still in the agency. I wrote letters to each one and the four that were retired, I wrote very strong letters. But that's all you can do. You can't take away somebody's retirement unless he's committed a crime.
The press story was Woolsey fails to fire anybody as a result of the Ames case. And no matter how many times I said look, there were four people who deserved to be fired but they're already retired and I'm not going to fire somebody just to fire somebody, it never got reported, essentially.
MR. KALB: When the FBI had its press conference, did you have yours?
MR. WOOLSEY: I had one, but by that time the issue basically for the press was solely how could you be head of such a rotten institution that would have a spy in it.
One very distinguished Senator who has since left the Senate but is a friend of mine, a very able Senator, I won't name him, called me over the phone and shouted "Just fire the first three people through the door." (Laughter) I said, "Damnit, what if the first three people are the three people who caught Ames?" He said— So everybody, the blood was up. Everybody wanted somebody fired. I still think I made the right decisions in the case.
Clearly I suppose I could have managed the spin better, but I'm comfortable with the decisions that I made and that the agency made back then.
If I could drop a footnote here. Things work both ways with the press. In government, particularly as head of the CIA, I felt that the press, particularly on the Ames case, was not treating the carefulness with which we handled the case, the contribution the CIA made to catching Ames and a number of issues fairly.
After I got out I undertook a pro bono representation a few years ago of eight Iraqis who had been incarcerated by the INS for allegedly being threats to the security of the country. It was a secret evidence case. I really signed onto an existing fine team of litigators in order to help just with the classified evidence aspect. We eventually got all of them free. We won one case on remand after some of the evidence was declassified, and we negotiated releases for the others and they're all free and living in the United States today.
I got a great deal more credit for that than I deserved. I was really a rather minor player in that operation. What was interesting to the press was that former CIA Director who has security clearances is standing up for somebody's civil liberties. From the press' point of view, that was a man bites dog story. As if once you've been DCI you must always be in favor of secrecy under all circumstances. Now I'm a Scoop Jackson Democrat. I've never had a problem with supporting both civil liberties and a strong national security, and I think most Americans support both civil liberties and due process and a strong national security. But to the press' point of view, it was really a man bites dog story. I got a lot of undeserved credit. They kind of portrayed me as Ramsey Clark, but what the heck. (Laughter) Some you win, some you lose.
MR. KALB: Jeanne Kirkpatrick. The major problem, how did you handle it, how do you think the press handled it?
MS. JEANNE KIRKPATRICK: I've been thinking about this. I was in government from January '81 through July '85. That's the first Reagan Administration, plus a few months. The Cold War was the greatest problem. There's not much doubt about it. Our relationship with the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's relationship with us was our greatest problem. And it was a chronic problem. It was the underlying problem on top of which all manner of small incidents developed.
And certainly it affected our dealings with the press. For one thing it was a serious, it was a really serious problem in international security, and both parties in the Congress and most people in the press, most Americans I think probably, took the Cold War very seriously. They understood that it was a serious problem because the Soviet Union was a very militarily strong power. And that meant a lot of things. It meant there was a lot of classified material which was relevant to a good many issues that the press was dealing with. It also meant... I really don't say this in the Cold War spirit, but it meant that the Soviet Union was engaging in a good deal of disinformation.
Disinformation creates a very special kind of problem, but the Soviet practice with regard to disinformation was frequently an issue on UN issues, which is where I was much of the time.
For example, if you take the shooting down of the Korean airliner, KAL-007, in which some 260 people or so were killed, maybe 300. It was tragic. Perhaps you remember it.
The Soviets denied that they had had any role in this whatsoever, they denied that they knew the plane was in the air. There were all manner of extremes. The United States had a tape which it was my obligation to play at the United Nations in the Security Council, which was interesting, and the tape was of the Soviet pilot, the pilot of the Soviet plane which shot down the Korean airliner, talking to his commanding officer in the Soviet Union, and the commanding officer in the Soviet Union telling him that he should shoot it down. It was very simple. And the pilot telling the commanding officer, the General, that he had shot it down.
The most extraordinary kinds of disinformation were developed even around this fairly straightforward episode because there were people, there were Soviet bureaus who claimed that the whole thing was an American fiction. Not only had we made up the story, but we had made up their role in it and we made up the tape and the tape was a conspiracy. There was an Englishman, a professor, and there was an American in California who actually claimed not only that the tape was doctored, but that I had played it in a way that further distorted it. This was a family joke, because I am the least technically skilled person... I could barely turn off and on a tape recorder. They had an elaborate scheme suggesting that I had doctored this tape and doctored the manner in which it was released. It would have required far more skill than I had then or ever will have with tape recorders or any other such devices.
Eventually, the Soviet general who was involved spoke publicly about his role in Moscow, and put his role on the public record. There's probably still somebody some place that claims it was an American fix, but there were a number of such things that, just total disinformation.
It was once asserted, for example, when I was in the government at the UN that I had, I personally had written a 40-page paper on the dismantling of India deliberately timed to be released at the time that the non-aligned congress was meeting in Delhi. This was pedaled around a number of Indian newspapers. We knew it was coming. It was just pure disinformation.
Eventually the people who wrote the paper, by the way I've never written anything on India in my life. I'm not proud of that, but it's a fact. But the person, the Soviet who wrote this paper which was released under my name, eventually talked about it again on the record in Moscow. This kind of disinformation was probably a larger issue at the UN than it was most other places I suspect, because there were more people who engaged in this.
There was one occasion in which a story was released suggesting we were trying to involve NATO in Central America and that there were maneuvers off the coast in Honduras which were just designed to involve NATO and Central America. The fact was, of course, that the Reagan Administration didn't want NATO in Central America. But never mind. (Laughter) A bad precedent.
I don't think that kind of disinformation was probably much, I hope it's not, a continuing issue in press/government relations.
MR. KALB: Jim—
MR. WOOLSEY: Just a quick interjection. There's a story that's believed by I believe a number of people in the Middle East still, maybe won't be after they release this new bin Laden tape, that the Mossad did September 11th. There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people in the Middle East as a result of very biased press coverage in carrying this idiocy, believe that sort of nonsense.
MR. KALB: There may be a distinction between sloppy biased coverage in the press and a deliberate government program to disinform the world.
Jim Schlesinger, your views on this subject
MR. SCHLESINGER: There could be a deliberate campaign in the press without government assistance, I would like to remind you.
Jeanne's comment about the KAL-007 reminds one that a few years earlier than that flight a Korean airliner had drifted over the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Soviet Union and it had not been shot down. And everybody in the Soviet air defense associated with that was taken out and executed. Now that is a powerful incentive for the Soviet air defense people to make sure that that was not repeated. I think that was the driving motivation both with regard to the shoot-down and the subsequent coverup.
When I became Secretary of Defense it was after the Paris Accords. U.S. forces were withdrawn from South Vietnam. And by that time the press was totally hostile to our engagement in Southeast Asia. Now it's a rule of thumb, never argue with anybody who buys ink by the barrel, and that is the press. But that was an uphill fight.
After 1968 and the Tet Offensive the press had turned totally against our involvement in Southeast Asia and the improvements that came after that with regard to the security of South Vietnam was simply ignored. The Tet Offensive had basically destroyed the Viet Cong and after General Abrams took over the North Vietnamese were neutralized. The Christmas bombings had chilled Hanoi just as the successful bombings in Kosovo and Afghanistan had shown the might of American power. Yet by that time there was a conviction in the press that probably we were on the wrong side and when the North Vietnamese started their offensive in late '74 and early '75 there was very little that anybody could do to persuade the press that the United States should intervene.
We had made commitments at the time of the Paris Accords to bring air power in the event of such an invasion, but during the latter phases of the Watergate affair the Congress had imposed upon the President an appropriations bill that no military forces of the United States could be used in, off-shore, or over former French Indochina. As a result, all we could do was to watch the collapse in Southeast Asia. It was frustrating.
MR. KALB: But Jim, just to be clear at least in my mind, you're not ascribing the total collapse of the American position in Vietnam to the press.
MR. SCHLESINGER: No.
MR. KALB: Or are you?
MR. SCHLESINGER: It was a major contributor, but there were lots of major contributors. There was the defects of our initial strategic doctrine with regard—
MR. KALB: I just wanted to take care of that.
MR. SCHLESINGER: There was the evolution of the congressional attitude. There was the weariness of the American people generally beyond what they were watching on television. All of these things came together and as a result there was little we could do in '75 when the North Vietnamese unleashed ultimately 18 divisions to invade South Vietnam.
MR. HESS: Marvin, can we let the panel escape after what Jeanne has said about the idea of a doctored tape in the Korean shoot-down when we have a situation about ready to break today, tomorrow or so forth, with another tape? Of course the bin Laden tape. And the government's response in how it should release it and how it will deal with that?
MR. SCHLESINGER: I would say that Osama bin Laden is proud of the actions that he has sponsored, whereas the Soviet Union was not proud and wanted to hide them. So we are going to have much less difficult with this.
They showed my whole picture, says Osama, and I'm proud of it.
MR. KALB: So the idea then is that you would have no problem with the government releasing this tape and you have no suspicions about the origins or authenticity?
MR. SCHLESINGER: I have no suspicions about them. There may be a problem with regard to protection of sources and methods that Jim Woolsey might know more about than I do, but I would have no problem about that. The release of the tape will not deflect the true believers.
As Jim indicated, there are those who believe that the Mossad was behind the collapse of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon. However preposterous that may seem to us, it is something that appeals to many people in the Middle East, and I don't think that the tape will do anything to change their minds.
MR. WOOLSEY: I agree with Jim. I doubt seriously if there's a sources and methods problem with this tape. If the tape had been stolen by some spy then one should guard its existence very carefully, but the fact of approximately when it was done, what it says has been already released so it strikes me that although there could be some aspect of this certainly that I'm not aware of that would mean it ought not to be released, it strikes me as more likely than not that it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do to release it.
There ought to be relatively simple ways, if this is a videotape, to authenticate it to any reasonable person's satisfaction and to the sorts of people who believe the conspiracy theories and believe that Mossad attacked the World Trade Center and so forth, you're not going to convince them anyway. They'll think the tape is doctored, but forgot about them. They're hopeless.
MR. KALB: Jeanne, do you share that view that the tape should be released?
MS. KIRKPATRICK: Yes.
MR. HESS: The Jims on the panel at least were not happy in the reactions from the press or their dealings with the press. But did you ever call the editors, the publishers? Did you file complaints? Did you have any satisfaction? What was the interaction with the journalists who you felt abused by?
MR. WOOLSEY:: Yes, I would make occasional phone calls, two or three probably of that sort in the course of the two years I was there, but it never did any good. In the press' behalf, let me say that on a couple of occasions we had the classic situation in which we knew a story was going to run because of the questions the reporter had been asking, and we knew that if it ran completely it would betray a source and method. In one case it would have betrayed a very important source who would almost certainly have been killed. I called on the senior executive of a media organization, I won't name him, but it's a media organization that's well known for its investigative and excellent journalism, and they understood, I disclosed everything privately one-on-one about the case, the source, the circumstance. The executive said thanks, we understand, we can run it without that paragraph in the story.
And it seems to me that's the way you have to operate as a DCI and that's the way a senior executive of a media organization ought to respond. It ought to be voluntary. There ought not to be any kind of national secrets act, unless the government imposed legally a prior restraint, but in that case and one other I got good cooperation from the press on what I would call matters of life and death.
MR. KALB: And did any of you, a question for any of you, did any of you ever go to the press, present evidence, say please, in the interest of national security don't run this, and the press said nuts to you, we're going to run it anyway?
MR. SCHLESINGER: Indeed. Indeed. In fact I am the most recent person and perhaps the last person to get out an order of prior restraint against the press. I think that that earns me a hanging in effigy by many defenders of First Amendment rights.
This was when Progressive magazine decided to print the details of how to build a hydrogen bomb, and to have diagrams. Under the Atomic Energy Act, which of course is constitutional until decided otherwise, the Secretary of Energy as successor to the AEC has the responsibility of seeing to it that such designs remain secret.
So I got the Attorney General to take to the courts a request for prior restraint.
Now I'm not sure that that will win the plaudits of at least the co-chairmen of this group but let me say I was ultimately defeated. The reason I was ultimately defeated was that the Progressive magazine sent these prints up to Canada where my prior restraint order did not operate. It was subsequently published in Canada.
Now the interesting part of that is it reflects the fact that you cannot confine news to a single nation. On the international scene things will develop that under national law should not be released.
A prominent example of that of course was the American press talking about the divorcee that was going to marry King Edward VIII. The British press under the secrecy laws of Britain never mentioned the fact that all this scandal was going on and it resulted in a major shipment of American newspapers to London to be spread around.
MR. KALB: What would you prefer? An American press or a British press? A tabloid British press tradition.
MR. SCHLESINGER: The responsible British press. (Laughter)
MR. HESS: We have three panelists, members of former Presidents' cabinets who are not exactly hapless giants as they present perhaps themselves in relation to the press. Surely you were... The morning paper talks about one of your successors, Donald Rumsfeld, as being brilliant at calculated leaks. Surely you had opportunities from your position to influence positively the press coverage in the way you wanted, the leaks plant, flattery, whatever it might be.
MR. SCHLESINGER: That would have been wrong. (Laughter)
MR. HESS: Oh, you served in that Administration, I see. (Laughter)
MS. KIRKPATRICK: We had a very good press bureau at the United Nations mission, U.S. Mission to the United Nations, when I was there. We had a top flight seasoned journalist who had been for quite a period the head of the Washington Post bureau in Saigon as a matter of fact, one Joel Blocher, who managed by and large, handled, oversaw a lot of our relations with the press. Of course there was another difference. At the UN we were dealing with the world press. I don't mean every country who is a member of the United Nations doesn't have a journalist in New York, but many many countries, more than simply the major powers, have significant journalist corps in New York. We really dealt as much with the foreign press as with the American press.
I was personally rarely involved in trying to influence in any way the press, because that was somebody else's job, not mine. I was so busy at the UN.
I think our most dramatic relationship with the press and our biggest unpleasant relationship came at the time of our landing in Grenada. That was one of the absolute low points in the Reagan Administration, through eight years of the Reagan Administration's relations with the press, and it was, it posed an interesting problem. I think, it's one time I thought absolute suppression of news and intention was appropriate because what we knew would have endangered the lives of hundreds and hundreds of people had we released it, and there were, you remember 670 or so American medical students in Grenada at that time. There were also 400 or 500 other Americans in Grenada at that time.
We knew several things about the men who had conducted the coup in Grenada. I'm sure nobody in the room has as vivid a memory of the Grenada events as I do but let me just say a couple of things. The man who governed Grenada was a Marxist Leninist. He was, and had been, he'd been governing Grenada for a number of years, four or five years. We knew that. We had perfectly civil relations with him. This was Maurice Bishop of course. He was shot and four members of his cabinet were shot dead by generals Austin and Coard, who were conducting this coup. At the same time they announced a dawn to dusk, 24-hour-a-day shoot-on-sight curfew. Because they had just shot the whole Bishop cabinet we knew they were prepared to shoot. They arrested the American students. They took them and divided them in two groups, one up high on a hill, one down in the valley, and kept them lying face down in buildings in which they had located them, and they were under heavily armed guard at all times.
President Reagan was absolutely convinced that our success in rescuing those Americans and others, the Governor General of NATO was in continuous radio contact saying don't wait any longer, this is a desperate situation, and many other people were as well. Ronald Reagan was so concerned about saving those lives, particularly of the students, that he went to the most extreme?Larry Eagleburger could address this too. I'm sorry he's not here to do it. The whole Administration, the whole Cabinet went to real extremes to make certain there were no leaks. He did not even inform Margaret Thatcher, his very good friend, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and his closest associate probably.
MR. KALB: Did you find the need in this process of trying to hold on to information the need to lie if a reporter came to you with information?
MS. KIRKPATRICK: I think that— I don't think I personally lied. The plan, it all developed very rapidly. I certainly avoided the press. I personally carefully avoided the press. I didn't talk to anyone who had ever even had a relationship with the press in their lives. (Laughter) But it was only a matter of about 48 hours. And it was over.
Mrs. Thatcher was quite unhappy with Ronald Reagan, quite unhappy, which was a most unusual situation. He tried to explain to her that it was of course not her whom he had any question of whatsoever, but he did have some concern about the leaks in the British bureaucracy as he had concern about leaks in the American bureaucracy. He simply didn't. There was no leak and the students were all rescued and everybody lived happily ever after.
MR. SCHLESINGER: You were invading a member of the Commonwealth—
MS. KIRKPATRICK: That's right. That was her point.
MR. SCHLESINGER: And the Queen was rather distressed by that as well.
Let me point out how difficult it is in this democracy to carry out the kind of covert and deception operations that were standard, let us say, in World War II. When the airlifts started in 1973, the airlift to Israel, I had been told by the White House to get in the Israeli military attache and that he would make a commitment to me to unload those planes which would land in the darkness, under cover of darkness, and have them out before dawn so that the American hand in resupply could be hidden. Well, fate worked against us to say the least. There were cross-winds in the Azores; the aircraft from the depots in the West began to pile up at Dover Air Force Base. So even though the first planes got in under cover of darkness and were unloaded, because of the delays caused by the cross-winds, out of the skies come C-5As which were the largest plane anyone had ever seen in Israel, and half of the population of Tel Aviv goes out to the airport to cheer. (Laughter)
Now those were circumstances in which a covert and deception operation were not entirely successful.
MR. KALB: Mother Nature conspires. Jim Woolsey with the CIA and Jim Schlesinger with the CIA. You don't normally have press briefings. So when you want to get information out on those rare occasions—
MR. SCHLESINGER: We didn't even let television cameras in in those days.
MR. WOOLSEY: It's changed since then.
MR. KALB: How did you do that? Were you engaged in selective leaks? Would that be the general way in which information was out? Testimony that you would give up on the Hill? How did it happen?
MR. WOOLSEY: By '93, '94 we were doing a certain amount of public testimony to give an assessment, sort of a state of the world and where things are in proliferation and the like, and I testified publicly a number of times in the two years that I was there. So most of any clarification which is really what you're involved in, would be done by the CIA press office, usually on background. If there was some added factor that could be released that would augment something that had been said publicly we'd do that.
But the CIA at least in my tenure, and this was true most of the time although not always, I don't know about during Jim's time, is not a policy player in the sense of the DCI offering policy advice. That has occasionally happened, I'm sure it happened with Bill Casey who was a friend of the President. It has happened from time to time but certainly not during my tenure. I had a hard enough time getting in to see the President with intelligence, much less policy advice. (Laughter)
But we're not really a policy player so there's no incentive for anybody even if they were willing, and most people of course out there, everybody has had polygraphs, everybody every five years is asked whether or not they have released classified information without authorization and so forth. It's really a fairly disciplined operation. So you don't have people have the incentive as they do in say the State Department or sometimes Defense or other agencies to help win the policy argument for their boss by releasing or leaking some information.
MR. KALB: Does the Director ever have a news conference?
MR. WOOLSEY: Occasionally. I had one on Ames. I had one on the procedural reforms that I had proposed to change a lot of the aspects of the way security and counter-intelligence were handled. I probably had three or four press conferences in the two years I was there. I did meet with the press for interviews occasionally. In the midst of all of this mess about Ames and then later a very distorted version, propagated principally by the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, Senator DiConcini, of a non-scandal involving a national reconnaissance office building out here near Dulles Airport, materially had been fully disclosed to the Congress which the House Committee acknowledged, but Senator DiConcini wanted to make a big deal out of this so we had a very angry hearing.
In the midst of all this for some reason, and I'm not sure why, David Broder called me from the Washington Post and wanted an interview. I said sure. He came out and interviewed about a bunch of things and ran a story the next day and there wasn't anything really remarkable on it. It was on page A3 or something of the Post. I called David and I said David, listen, all I want to say is thanks. This is the first time in months I've been able to say this. Thanks for just writing a straight story. He laughed and said I appreciate it, thanks, Jim.
MR. KALB: But that's a very sad commentary. Do you all believe that the press generally does not write straight stories?
MR. WOOLSEY: My experience is this. In the aftermath of the Cold War during a time in which a lot of people believed the CIA only existed for the Cold War and indeed had done a lot of things wrong in the Cold War by helping support dictators in some circumstances, and covert actions and the like, and when even as respected an individual as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is calling for the abolition of the CIA, from the point of view of I would say a generally liberal press in the United States, the CIA was basically the enemy. Government secrecy was the enemy. And the CIA was not an institution, with rare exception, was not an institution that I think was treated fairly or in a balanced way by the press in the two years that I was in the job—'93 to '94. Some of this may have been my fault in not being good at handling the press, some of it was the circumstances of the time such as the Ames affair, some of it was intentional distortion such as I think the DiConcini hearings on the NRO building. But I would say that although we did the best we could, my general impression was that with rare and important exceptions like David Broder, most of the press that was covering us, including for the national dailies and the like, was not objective about either the CIA's importance or what it did.
MR. KALB: Jim, was that your judgment as well?
MR. SCHLESINGER: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It all depended on the circumstances and if the story were friendly it was regarded as a good story, and if it were unfriendly it was not regarded as a good story. (Laughter)
MR. KALB: But it could still be accurate.
MR. SCHLESINGER: Let me make two points about this.
First, when Dick Helms became Director of Central Intelligence, about a year or so past, and he saw John Stennis who was Chairman of the Oversight Committee, Stennis said to him, "Mr. Director, you are doing a great job. I don't believe I've seen your name in the press in the course of the last six months." That was the notion in those days at least behind the CIA.
MR. KALB: What changed it?
MR. SCHLESINGER: What changed it I think was Watergate. The allegations, at least, about the CIA, the attempt in some quarters to make CIA the culprit behind the Watergate affair because some ex-CIA people had been caught in the Watergate. They were being run by the plumber's unit in the Executive Office rather than by the CIA, but that led to an attempt to put the blame on the agency and it was some extended period before it could escape from that.
From that point on I think the press felt that it had the obligation as well as the right to look very hard at the agency and at all of our intelligence agencies.
MR. HESS: Let me do something that I haven't done in the four previous sessions we've had Marvin, I'm going to direct a question to you. Our panel didn't quite understand calculated leaks, it's something they never had dealt with apparently. (Laughter) You were, after all, the chief diplomatic correspondent to CBS and NBC. Can you add any— Was there no Secretary of State who perhaps leaked a little something to you, flattered you more than you should have been flattered, manipulated you in any way that you felt manipulated? Surely these folks have some tools to use against the poor souls like you.
MR. SCHLESINGER: I'm interested in his answer. But on the question of leaks which Marvin brought up earlier, let me emphasize that at the agency and elsewhere a reporter would ask for an interview. If that interview were granted that was an interview. For all the other reporters, that was a leak. (Laughter) What is regarded by some of the press as legitimate interviews will be characterized by the press as leaks. I think that Marvin may have been the beneficiary of some of those.
MR. KALB: Oh, I don't think, without any doubt.
But I've always felt that the word leak is one of the most mis-used verbs in Washington jargon. A leak is a calculated effort by the government to transmit information to a certain reporter going way out of channels to do so with an understanding between the government and the reporter that we're both playing this game, we both understand it, and let's move on and nobody talks. That to me has always been a leak.
The idea of a good reporter reading the press diligently, going to all of the briefings, reading the speeches, watching the nuances change. I remember Dean Rusk once telling me, and I've never forgotten this, he once said to me you know 95 percent of what I do. What you don't know is the timing, one source, somebody passing on a little bit of information, that sort of thing. But you know the overall policy and I think a good reporter does. And people who say it was leaked I think quite often are mis-using the term and misunderstanding the process of the transmission of information.
MR. WOOLSEY: One thing that's done a good deal in government which I wouldn't really classify as a leak although if the government agency is run right it's done as an intentional decision by the head of the agency, is that one may tell one's press office, look, don't give any fresh information, but it's in the country's and the public's interest for things that are dead wrong not to be out there and if a reporter comes up with a story and tries to check facts with you, don't give them any fresh facts, but you can under these circumstances since I'm saying so right now, you can off the record confirm or deny that a particular path of inquiry or a particular direction of something is accurate or inaccurate.
That lets the reporter have two sources for something when they need two sources, it doesn't put the agency on the record, and keeps a press story that otherwise might have some accuracy in it but some wildly crazy thing that they've been lied to by somebody that is not anybody's interest for it to run, lets the government agency essentially say that's a completely wild tangent. The rest of the story I'm not going to say anything about but I won't argue with you about it. That sort of thing happens in Washington all the time.
MR. KALB: Very, very frequently.
There was a great State Department spokesman named Bob McCloskey many years ago, and you'd go to him with a tale, something that you've heard and you wanted to check it. McCloskey would often say, hmm, if I began to talk about that I would get a little bit pregnant, so I don't think I want to be a little bit pregnant so I'm not going to talk to you. Or, which is a way of saying you're onto something buddy, but I can't deal with it. Or he would provide a bit of information and say that the rest of what you're telling me I'd be careful about. That kind of help—genuine, serious help—is valued by a good reporter I think tremendously.
I want to jump in the time that we have left to your judgment about what's going on today with respect to not just how the war is being managed but the way the war is being covered. Are the American people getting enough information? Your view of how the Secretary of Defense is doing? Is he wasting his time or is this a good spending of his time?
MS. KIRKPATRICK: I think he's doing very well. I think he's doing well with the war but he's also doing well with the press.
MR. KALB: Yes, he is.
MS. KIRKPATRICK: In fact very well, and he's having daily briefings, isn't he?
MR. KALB: Yes, he is.
MS. KIRKPATRICK: And he's a man seasoned in Washington. He's not only had experience but he's had time to think about his experience. And it seems to me that he's being reported in friendly and what I'm prepared to take as an accurate fashion, and I think that's appropriate.
I feel that the war is being well reported and well covered. I've been pleased, personally, by the amount of background information that's been provided by the New York Times and the Washington Post and so forth on the war. But I think Rumsfeld is really doing a great job in his relations with the press.
MR. KALB: Jim Schlesinger. Running a war from the Department of Defense. You've got so many other things to do. Why spend that much time with the press?
MR. SCHLESINGER: Because the press not only can turn hostile, the press is engaged in a game of criticism.
Now I go back before Jeanne has spoken, the successes that have occurred since the collapse of Mazar-e-Sharif and the subsequent collapse of the Taliban. Remember way back when, two months ago, the press was filled with stories about this war is being badly managed, why is it so slow. Here are the same people saying why are the B-52 strikes being delayed? Give war a chance. That was the slogan in the press.
Now the thing to recognize, it seems to me, is that nobody, even the press, will argue with success. What we have seen is success. But before then the press stories were along the lines of why everybody in the world hates the United States, even our allies.
I remember a story in the Los Angeles Times that said yes, we are dropping humanitarian food packages for feeding starving Afghans, but one of those packages destroyed a house in Kabul, or damaged a house in Kabul. So you had, prior to the collapse of Mazar-e-Sharif and the collapse of the Taliban, stories that were very questioning.
Since that time you've had the same developments of praising success. If the war turns badly I think that the press will turn again.
If you go back to Vietnam, people forget that in 1965 the press was cheering our entry into Vietnam. There was the vote on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, total congressional support, and General Westmoreland was brought back from Saigon to address a joint session of Congress with a standing ovation for the general. When you are successful or you expect to be successful you have the public and the press with you. When there is question about success, the critics become dominant.
MR. KALB: Jim Woolsey, what is your view of press coverage today?
MR. WOOLSEY: I think this whole issue is enlightened very much by a wonderful piece that was carried two years ago by the magazine, The National Interest, called "The Jacksonian Tradition" by Walter Russell Meade. Meade now has a book out called Special Providence. Owen Harry in The National Interest in an essay at the very end of this new issue about the war quotes Meade very positively.
His theory is this. He says essentially there have been four schools of foreign policy pretty much for all of American history and they interact. Sometimes the schools ally with one another, sometimes people are in more than one school, but they're relatively distinguishable. There's Jeffersonianism which is make the United States an ideal democracy and don't interfere with anybody. There's Hamiltonianism which is promote business and anything you need to promote business. It used to be high tariffs, now it's low tariffs, but freedom of the seas also kind of goes with that. There's Wilsonianism which has been a lot longer than Wilson which is devotion to international law, international organizations, intervening abroad on behalf of human rights, etc.
But the fourth school is the one that Meade talks about in this article and is something that only you see from time to time in the United States. It's Jacksonianism named for Andrew Jackson, although Scoop works too, and this is essentially, he characterizes Jackson as he was slow to anger. He didn't take offense easily. But whether as a duelist, and we still had duels in early 19th Century America; as an Indian fighter; as a victor in the Battle of New Orleans; as President—when he felt he or the country had been crossed in some fundamental way he was totally and absolutely ruthless in his destruction of his enemies. Absolutely ruthless.
Meade applies this to American history and says essentially the last time we've really seen an America like this—he wrote before September 11th—was through World War II. Nobody was interested in anything but total victory and utterly destroying enemies.
The Cold War was much more complicated. We won it through containment. The Soviet Union we could deal with on some things. We had to be very forceful with them on others, but it was a different kind of thing and we've all been schooled for the last 40 years up until the beginning of the '90s in the Cold War.
We are now back again, since September 11th, in a Jacksonian era. The reason you can't find flags in stores out there because they sell out so fast is because this intense spirit of patriotism in the country is absolutely committed to total victory.
I'll tell you, out there in Tulsa, Oklahoma where I'm from, I'm kind of known now for supporting hostilities against Iraq. I'm pretty sure I'm thought of as a moderate. I mean you have close to 300 million people out there filled with cold fury, and there is no anti-war movement to speak of.
The Nation magazine. Read Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, not to speak of The New Republic and the conservative magazines. The Nation is pretty well solidly, at least in his writings, in support of the war. There may be a dozen folks at Berkeley and a half a dozen in Cambridge or something who are part of an anti-war movement, but that's about it.
I exaggerate, but not too much. I think that the point here is that the press has been surprised by this. The foreign press has been completely surprised, and the domestic American press maybe kind of understands it, but it's the reason you see, frankly, Fox's ratings going up and the other networks, most of which have a more liberal reputation than Fox's, relatively speaking going down. It's starting to affect the news business. It's starting to affect whether or not other networks say, by the way when you show collateral damage in a village in Afghanistan, let's have some scenery at the beginning of the show of the World Trade Center again going up so people get a sense that it was not just the Americans who are killing Afghans, it's also people who killed Americans. I think the press is coming onto this and beginning to understand it.
But the people of the United States were way ahead of both the government and the press and are still ahead of both I think in terms of their absolute determination to destroy the enemy of the country.
MR. SCHLESINGER: Let me say that Andrew Jackson was not slow to anger. (Laughter)
Marvin, you should go back to Cambridge and visit Harvard. The students in the Harvard Yard are now flying the American flag, much to the surprise of the faculty that was there and grew up in the '68 to '72 period.
MR. KALB: The last I noticed, Harvard is still part of the United States.
MR. WOOLSEY: I speak here as the founder and president of Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy for President. I don't think that this has always been the spirit in the United States, but it sure is now.
MR. KALB: Let me ask this question to any member of the panel. Is that necessarily a good thing?
When this country was set up it was deliberately set up so that the press would have an independent position, would be able to be outside of the government looking in and saying you guys are right, you guys may be wrong, why don't you look at this more than you're looking at that? At this particular time is, for a country like the United States, the sole surviving super power, is it healthy, is it right that there is not a significant force out there to raise legitimate questions about the direction of policy, the strength of the patriotism? Nobody's arguing that it's not there, we all recognize it. But shouldn't the press be a bit more of a questioning organization? That's what it gets paid to do.
MR. SCHLESINGER: Rely on the press. It is there and it is questioning. If you look at the question of military tribunals, read the editorial page of the New York Times. This is a violation of the Constitution, of American tradition, and the like. Nobody is going to, perhaps regrettably, nobody is going to quiet the press. They will be there, they will criticize.
MR. KALB: Glad to hear that.
MR. WOOLSEY: Telling the press they ought to be sure to be questioning enough is sort of like telling high school students that they ought to be interested in sex. No matter what you do, they're going to be. (Laughter)
MR. HESS: Shall we go to our audience? Oh, boy, look at the hands going up already.
Q: Director Woolsey, you were talking about the relationship between the press—Sorry, Peyman Pejman, Middle East Insight.
Isn't the reason or one of the reasons there is sort of a hostile relationship between the press and the CIA that perhaps the relationship has been one-sided? Doesn't that invite the press to be hostile? And also you were talking about polygraphs. We haven't heard of anyone being fired, so are all these leaks coming from DCI? Because no one seems to be getting fired because of the leaks from CIA.
MR. WOOLSEY: I don't know that there are a substantial number of leaks from the CIA on anything. I think that's simply incorrect. Sometimes a DCI will conduct an interview as I did with Broder and described, or it will be a policy reason to do what I described to Marvin of telling the press on background that it's worthwhile investigating that area but this area is a dead end, that sort of thing. I don't think there are many leaks at all from the CIA. There probably are a few, but unauthorized discussion with the press I think is very, very rare out at Langley and indeed in the whole intelligence community, and indeed particularly among the career officers in the military and the rest. I just completely disagree with your assumption.
MR. SCHLESINGER: Can I add something here? It's not always accepted by the American people. We want to have a secret intelligence agency. And a secret intelligence agency cannot be open to disclosures of any type that the press demands.
MR. WOOLSEY: The oldest espionage case in written history I know of is in the second chapter of the Book of Joshua in which Joshua sent two case officers into Jericho, recruited Rahab the harlot, she hid them while they conducted their operations, she had an egress plan, let them down in a basket outside the wall, had a cover story for them, she said they were there to visit her in her professional capacity, and they'd gone out into the desert. It was a wonderful operation.
Joshua didn't tell the two case officers to call a press conference in Jericho after they'd been hiding on Rahab's roof. (Laughter) Espionage is about secrecy. Let's get real.
If you're going to run espionage you do it secretly and you protect your sources and methods. It's nuts to suggest it can be done in the open.
Q: Mr. Adu-Asare. I'm a reporter for Africa Newscast.
My question is about technology and diplomacy. In the early 1970s within the communications circuit there was a view that the medium was the message. That was before the cable news network.
In the particular context of the conduct of war since the introduction of cable television, could you comment on whether that has had an impact on diplomacy? In other words, does the President of the United States before the beginning of say the Kosovo War, how was communication done between Washington and Milosevic or between President Bush and Saddam Hussein?
MR. KALB: And in way of adding to that, really, a subject that Steve alluded to earlier, the "CNN effect". That there is an effect that the new technology of the media has literally upon the conduct of policy, the making of policy.
MR. SCHLESINGER: I don't think there's any question about that. It was, I believe, the images on television and the discussion of the "highway of death" during the Gulf War in 1991 that led the Administration to decide we've got to terminate this thing or allow this to be terminated. The impact of television images as opposed to the written word has just been immense.
MR. WOOLSEY: Absolutely. George Will once in a column said that if television had existed at the time of Antietam, which was the single bloodiest day in American military history, the second day of Antietam, we would be two countries today. And there I think is something to that.
The effect, we lose the two helicopters in Mogadishu and we leave. The Marine barracks are blown up in '82 in Lebanon and we leave. I think that in the Administration I served in the lack of willingness to see casualties coming back in body bags on the evening news fundamentally influenced policy decisions. It's why we sat off at a distance and shot cruise missiles into empty buildings in the middle of the night in order to retaliate for, in a sense, for Saddam's effort to kill former President Bush in the spring of 1993.
I'm not sure why President Clinton thought that going after Iraqi night watchmen and maids in the empty intelligence service building in the middle of the night was going to be an effective deterrent, but it showed something blowing up on television so you looked like you were doing something anyway, and it didn't risk any body bags.
So I think that one of the most gratifying things about the way this war is being done is that there was never any question from the beginning that although we were going to be careful and we've only lost one American to hostile fire. We've lost several from friendly fire and accidents. But while we're going to be very careful, from the very beginning we were putting enough forces on the ground to be able to target the smart weapons and to do the job. The overriding concern was not is there going to be a body bag coming back that will be shown on cable news. I think that's a very healthy development in this current—
MS. KIRKPATRICK: I think the CNN effect is also felt in foreign policy decisions. Such, for example, as the American involvement in Bosnia. There was a long period when the government, our government, George Bush, the first George Bush, was resisting American involvement in Bosnia at the time that our allies were becoming involved in Bosnia. I think one of the very most important factors was the large presence on our television of the outrageous bombing and beating and starving and burning of Bosnian civilians, helpless civilians. I think it changed our policy.
Q: I'm Elaine Sarao, I'm the Executive Director of Foreign Aid Through Education, FATE, and a congressional fellow.
My question has to do with U.S. agencies that were responsible for a long period of time with communications and presenting the U.S. message abroad. The U.S. Information Agency, which was essentially dissolved or absorbed into State Department two years ago, was responsible for the U.S. message and presentation of our position information to foreign markets. And with the end of the Cold War I believe there was a lot of thinking that there was no longer a need for that, and that hastened its demise or absorption into State Department, with the vision that CNN can do it.
What would you say to the fact that maybe we're reaping the negative aspect of letting someone else "do our advertising for us". I don't think Procter & Gamble would let General Foods do its message.
MR. SCHLESINGER: I think that's right on the mark. The most significant aspect of developments not only since September 11th but prior to it was the poor American image in the Middle East for a variety of reasons, and we have failed dismally either to worry about it or to have effective public diplomacy. Now that in the Middle East is going to go far beyond getting the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense on Al Jazeera. It's going to require getting people from the Middle East to speak favorably about America's response to the actions taken on September the 11th, which have not been notably forthcoming.
But we are limited in public diplomacy because we are dealing with an entirely different culture and mindset.
MR. WOOLSEY: There are two aspects to this. One is presenting a message of the United States in an attractive and interesting and available way, that's Voice of America, etc. The other is doing the job that a free local media would do if it existed in places where freedom doesn't exist. That, of course, and one of my favorite questions of audiences, is what was the CIA covert action that was said by both Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel to have been the single most important thing the United States did during the Cold War? The answer is, of course, Radio Free Europe because for the first two-thirds of its existence, RFE and Radio Liberty were CIA covert actions. And the reason they were so successful is that they were not propaganda. What they were was setting up Eastern Europeans and Russians to run a radio station in Munich or wherever to broadcast into the East in the way they would be free to do so if that country were free. So they would report critically on things, Little Rock and race riots in the United States or whatever. They reported objectively and it's one of the reasons they had such a wide following.
So one of the things we need to do in working on this is if we have to have two sets of institutions, have two sets. But one thing for a country like Iraq or Iran or Syria or North Korea, what we need to be able to do is create a sort of a shadow free institution that is what their media would be like if it were free. Not just something to present the American view.
Q: Ardita Dunellori with Voice of America.
As you were talking about Radio Free Europe, there have been several editorials. One was in Washington Times, very strong, on Voice of America and pretty much the question was what is VOA doing with its psychological warfare to help us win this war. There should be no more trying to so-called terrorists or anybody shouldn't get taxpayer money to be on American air waves. We should just be spreading our propaganda. Pretty much this was what was said. What's your opinion on that?
My opinion would be if we go on with this policy, and I want you to kind of help me if I'm right or wrong here, we will lose our audience, because we have an audience out there who counts on us for being objective. We are VOA. We express government viewpoints, but we are objective at the same time. If we are just propaganda wouldn't it be beating the mission pretty much?
MR. SCHLESINGER: You answered your question. That is—
MS. DUNELLORI: Not necessarily. I don't think so because it's completely a different point of view. It says taxpayer money should not go to give air time to—
MR. SCHLESINGER: You've got to learn to take yes for an answer. (Laughter) I think Jim Woolsey before gave a clue to an answer as well when he said whether you set up something that tells the truth.
MR. KALB: If these mechanisms are to be effective they have to have credibility and if you use this thing strictly for propagandistic reasons it's going to lose credibility except to the already convinced.
MR. HESS: The last question.
Q: My name is M.R. Tabatabai. I'm President of the Iran Freedom Foundation.
A foreign movie is slated to be shown throughout the United States beginning with the [unintelligible] the day after tomorrow, Friday, December the 14th. The male star of the movie is an American citizen, a murderer fugitive, a 21 year old warrant for his arrest. He has assassinated Founder, President of the Iran Freedom Foundation on July 22, 1980 in Bethesda, Maryland, which marks the beginning of Khomeini's [terrorism on an international level], fled to Iran under protection of the Islamic Republic. Now that he is coming back, well paid—
MR. KALB: Sir, I know that—
MR. TABATABAI: —this is a related matter. What I am saying is this man is coming back to the United States as a glorified movie star.
MR. KALB: But what is the question?
MR. TABATABAI: The question is, what would be psychological, political, even social impact of it on the people of the U.S. and people of the United States seeing a terrorist assassin is in a movie telling them how to behave and be a good human being? And most importantly, what would be its impact on the position, present position of the United States particularly in Israel vis-a-vis the terrorism.
MR. KALB: Thank you, sir.
MR. WOOLSEY: I'm totally unfamiliar with this. It's all news to me. It sounds fascinating, but—
MR. TABATABAI: On the internet.
MR. WOOLSEY: —I'm willing to learn.
I surf the net from time to time but I don't read everything on the net and I hadn't picked up this yet.
MR. HESS: One last question.
Q: My name is Mike Edington with Wellspring Advisors.
Mr. Woolsey, I'm going to take you back a couple of questions. If you consider the images of body bags and other casualties that are associated with American actions to be, for example, somebody pushing against the chest of government, are you saying that acceptance specific instances such as the attacks on September 11th or other sort of strictly defined times, that government doesn't have the strength or the moral commitment to push back hard enough against those images to make its argument with the people for continuing on a certain process?
MR. WOOLSEY: It makes it harder, and I think it has contributed to a reputation which the United States has in the Middle East, or at least had up until a few weeks ago, for being feckless quitters.
The fact that we stopped in '91 before destroying Saddam Hussein; the fact that we left Lebanon in the '80s; all of the things that I mentioned—Mogadishu and the like—gave I think the Osama bin Laden and Saddam Husseins of the world the idea, the same idea that the Japanese had before Pearl Harbor. That this is a rich, soft country that will run from a fight. And I think there's nobody more surprised than the people who perpetrated this outrage of September 11th to find themselves three months from a standing start hiding in caves with daisy cutters being dropped on them.
But part of the reason they were under such a false impression was because a series of American governments, and I'm afraid this is a very bipartisan thing—both Republicans and Democrats have done it—have gotten involved in something that they didn't have the stomach to stay with even though in advance they must have known that we were going to take casualties.
What we need to be able to do, I think, is to pick the circumstances and ways in which we use force, and I think President Bush has done this superbly. You don't just go hang out in a bad neighborhood with a bunch of Marines in a barracks in the middle of Lebanon. Something's going to happen. If you go in, you go for a victory and you do it quickly and decisively and effectively. Smart weapons make that easier. It's one of the things going from 10 percent to 90 percent smart weapons in the bombing from the Gulf War to Afghanistan has made a huge difference in the effectiveness of air power. There are a number of things we can do. But what we I think have to do is consider the use of American force and American troops for things like Grenada, for things like what's happened in Afghanistan, and not to go just be present some place with a confused mission as we were, for example, in Mogadishu in '92, '93. We've got to find something that needs to be destroyed, take it on with the full power of the United States and destroy it, and then leave the world to the peacekeepers and the people in the blue helmets and the food aid and the rest and we can supply some of the money for that. I think that's the model that we've worked ourselves around to. That President Bush has now for whatever he does in the Mid East, but it has been very, very painful getting there.
I'm not trying to blame the media for showing images of body bags, but a series of American Presidents have made some bad decisions by first getting involved in things and then pulling out, and that makes us look weak.
MR. HESS: That concludes our program, only to say that it's really quite wonderful and we at Brookings are quite grateful, along with Harvard, to be able to have an opportunity to come together, to listen to three people who have held the highest national security decisionmaking sorts of jobs in the United States, to ask questions of them, to hear their problems—they had more problems, didn't they, than we thought they had. (Laughter) They were wonderful, we're most grateful to them.
Next week, same time, same station. Wednesday the 19th, 9:30 to 11:00 we will be doing a program on how the press is covering the threat of bioterrorism. We will have two reporters who cover this beat and we will have a policy scientist suggesting what might be and should be covered, and we'll have a spokesman from the government who has been dealing with this regularly.
So come join us again next week. Our deepest thanks to the Jims and Jeanne.