SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

I stood squinting at the motorcade slinking up the tarmac of Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George's County, Maryland. It was a hot, dusty day. My luggage had already been screened and was on board the jet.

I had met the director of the CIA, John Brennan, before, but I had never had this kind of access. When he emerged from his black SUV and walked up to me to shake my hand, I wasn't nervous, just eager to get the interview underway. Brennan was a barrel-chested, immaculately dressed six-foot-three-inch-tall guy. Although I had been a wide receiver in college and could hold my own, I was only five feet seven, and he towered over me.

Brennan was imposing for reasons beyond his size, though. As I shook his hand, I immediately began to consider the breadth of experience he has had. Here was a man who had been with the CIA for thirty years and who had served under every president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama. I had read that his office was in the West Wing directly below the Oval Office during his role as assistant to President Obama for Homeland Security and counterterrorism. In 2013, he was nominated to be the director of the CIA, the person responsible for protecting the country from everything from nuclear holocaust to terrorist attacks.

I was granted an exclusive twenty-four-hour interview with him to talk about anything at all, which included highlighting the fact that the purpose of his trip to Birmingham (my family's hometown) and to Miles College, a predominantly African American college where my grandmother went to school, was to recruit new CIA agents and encourage diversity within the ranks of the agency.

It was an exciting opportunity. No television crew had been allowed to spend that kind of uncensored time with a CIA director, although Brennan had assumed a more public persona than any of his predecessors.

We boarded the plane, an unmarked jet that just about seated the nine or so people in the cabin. I was surprised that it was so small and unadorned.

I sat at the window, Brennan settled into a seat across from me, and we pulled our seat belts on. Brennan's top press aide sat across from us.

Unlike the commercial flights I usually take, I noticed that the one flight attendant on board did not tell us to fasten our seat belts, nor did she speak over the intercom about what to do in the event of an emergency. Probably not necessary, I thought, given that the plane was carrying the man assigned to deal with every emergency imaginable.

There was so much about the trip that was unprecedented and unique to our time. Brennan was on a mission to recruit more diversity to the ranks of the CIA because he had ordered a study that concluded that the agency was staffed mainly by older Caucasian men, a fact already obvious to anyone who was paying attention, including Brennan.1

Brennan, as director, was not only encouraging more diversity, but he was also repositioning the agency to counter the most pressing cyber threats.² In his view, the two goals weren't mutually exclusive. The CIA needed people from all cultures and ethnicities to form a collective front in defending the United States against all kinds of attacks.

These two factors made the trip personal to me. My family's history was deeply engrained in the civil rights movement, and touching down in Birmingham with a CIA director willing to take a good look at that history and amend it was a great, albeit surreal, privilege.

Brennan's new position also brought him to the cyber realm, where he believed the United States was most vulnerable to attack. I believed that, too. It was the issue I had become nearly obsessed with over the previous few months. Race was still our country's weakness, but now that was just one factor making every American vulnerable. Russian-led cyber-espionage attacks were quietly undermining our free election system. That it had been so easy for the Kremlin to meddle in our democracy was, in my view, the single biggest threat to our freedom—more than terrorism. The Russians had been waging a war against the United States, and the Obama administration had been caught flat-footed. It infuriated me that in the latter stages of the 2016 election the Russian threat had not yet become widespread public knowledge. What the public knew had been coaxed out of intelligence or law enforcement officials by journalists.

The CIA's response to the Russian threat (in conjunction with other intelligence and law enforcement efforts) would consume the remainder of Brennan's career, but he wasn't able to acknowledge that at the time I interviewed him.

I wanted to hear what the CIA knew about Russian interference and how the agency planned to stop it. But these are topics I had to work my way up to, particularly with the director of the CIA.

For much of the flight we discussed the depravity of the radical jihadist group ISIS. Brennan said that the terror group “knows no bounds” and that it had “fewer limitations than al-Qaeda.” He was referring to its use of chemical weapons, which by then had become available on the battlefield. I was intrigued by the fact that whatever topic we discussed always had a component in the cyber realm. For example, we were speaking about how ISIS had suffered some setbacks in recent years.3

Brennan: So, I think it has reached its peak from the standpoint of the numbers that [it] has been able to attract to the organization and its global reach. But that doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that they do not have lethal capability. There's an even greater lethal capability than what we've seen so far because they had invested in this over the past several years. And right now, I think they're trying to reap the harvest of those investments.

Pegues: With operatives they were sending out?

Brennan: Sure. I mean, it's not just sending. It's what they've been able to do across the digital domain and the cyber environments in terms of trying to get people in different countries who never have traveled to Syria or Iraq, who've never touched the organization, to pick up arms to carry out strikes. And that's what they've done. They have preyed on individuals who may be disaffected, may be on the fringes of society. They believe that they have no other purpose in life.

An hour into the interview I asked him how serious the cyber threat from Russia was and if his agency saw signs of Russia's intent to influence and disrupt the election in the United States.

Brennan: Well, I think there have been some reports about that…. But it has happened in other parts of the world, where Russia uses different type[s]…of things. Sometimes it's through cyber, sometimes it's through influence, and sometimes it's through individuals who have been working on behalf of Russia. But it is not something that is strange and unusual for Russia to try to take advantage of the opportunities that are out there….

And there was a threat assessment in February [2016]. And it had a pretty interesting paragraph on Russia's cyber. When you look back at that today it was very impressive…. It didn't say, “Russia will do this.” It said, “Russia has growing capabilities and has done x, y, z in the past.”

I nodded. Some of this was already revealed at a May press conference by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. I pushed Brennan a little.

Pegues: The scope is bigger?

Brennan: The scope. And also, what we've been able to see over the past couple of years as far as disclosures and things that have gone out of there. I think it wasn't a bit unusual that it's not just [the Russians] going in and collecting information; it's collecting it, and then all of a sudden [that information] gets pushed out there by WikiLeaks and others. So it's exposing it. Traditionally foreign adversaries collected [intelligence] for their own use.

That was the first time I had heard it put that way. But it made sense especially when you consider and compare it to the data breach of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that was revealed to the public in 2015.4 OPM houses some of the most sensitive information, including the records of people who have undergone background checks. Both current and former government employees. In the wrong hands, the information can be used to blackmail someone in law enforcement, intelligence, or any type of government service with access to classified information. At least that was what US officials were concerned about when news of the breach leaked out. At the end of the day, more than twenty-one million people were affected, their social security numbers, names, dates and places of birth, and addresses likely in the hands of Chinese intelligence. But unlike Russian intelligence, the Chinese government wasn't leaking what their hackers had swept up.

I tried to process what Brennan had said: essentially the CIA had not known anything specifically about Russia either. I thought about what Linda Power had mentioned, what we'd all been thinking. If the CIA, the FBI, and the White House did in fact miss something this big, how could they have missed it?

Pegues: In the media world, when you miss a story and your competition has it, your boss says, “Why don't you have this?” When something like Russia happened—you know, trying to influence the election—or the OPM data breach, does the president say, “Why didn't you have this? Why didn't we know this was coming?” And do you worry and say, “Oh, gosh. I should have had that. We should've seen that coming”?

Brennan: Well, I am under no illusions that, as good as the CIA is, we're going to be able to have insight into all the future that may take place. Clearly, whenever there is some type of important development around the globe that affects US national interests, I would like to have the CIA know about it in advance. And sometimes we do. Sometimes we don't. Certainly, we feel disappointment if the president is surprised over something….

At the same time, the president [Barack Obama] has a very, very astute and deep understanding of how big and complicated this world is and how, even with our tremendous intelligence capabilities—and there is no country that comes close in terms of our breadth and depth of capability on the intelligence front—that stuff will happen. We're not going to see it all. But he relies on us also in the aftermath of something like that happening [to try] to understand the consequences, the implications, how can we disrupt—maybe—a path that is going to be problematic for us?…

So, it's not just forewarning, although forewarning is great. We do it a lot. We are able to disrupt activities and events and cut them off. But the president also wants to know, “So what are our options now in light of this knowledge, this understanding?” And particularly in the cyber world and the digital world, we know that our systems are so accessible in various ways to individuals who want to do us harm or people who just want to see what they can do and accomplish.

We shifted to talking about all kinds of technological topics from how the government would clear the air space when miniaturized drones have the capability of delivering flowers to our doorsteps, to how to prevent an army of drones flying chemical weapons into the country. He spoke about the incredible things cyber technology has done for us over this generation. The conversation always veered back to defending the nation against all sorts of adversaries.

Brennan: We have to recognize that along with the great convenience of the internet, there is tremendous dependence on it. I can't imagine where we're going to be thirty years from now in the technical arena…. This is the thing that really makes my head hurt. When I was at the White House and I was the president's assistant for counterterrorism and Homeland Security, it was the Homeland Security element of it that really made my head hurt in terms of cyber. How are we going to protect this country? How are we going to be resilient and respond to that type of major cyberattack?

Pegues: You think about that?

Brennan: Yeah. I do. So, you look to the next fifty years and you say, “My goodness gracious. What does science technology hold for us?” Can it begin to cure cancer? But defense always lags behind offense.

It would soon become clear to the world that US defense had lagged behind Russia's offensive cyberattacks on the US election in 2016. But that wasn't the only vulnerability at the time. Russia's multipronged espionage operation included massive cyberattacks and likely traditional spies.

The plane started its descent to Birmingham. My mind was spinning, partially from the altitude but also from the breadth of topics we'd spoken about. Of course, I'd heard people speak about futuristic things before; some of them were plausible while others seemed completely ridiculous. It took on a whole different tone when the director of the CIA was talking about these scenarios as if they were not only plausible but likely.

The campaign trail was surreal enough. When I'd started covering the Russia investigation earnestly, it became clear that collectively we were losing equilibrium. On the plane, talking with Brennan about Russia, that sensation intensified. We were clearly entering a new phase in the world. This knowledge actually made me feel a little bit nauseous.