An Afternoon With John Brennan

When John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Unit, visited the JFK Jr. Forum last year, it was a special privilege to have someone of that stature make time out of his busy schedule. “I just feel so invigorated,” he began, talking about his job on a daily basis and working with some of the brightest Americans, who deeply care about this country. “We have to be on top of our game every day.”

Every day when he wakes up, he gets a call from the President to solve some of the most pressing issues in the world. He tells the President what they know and what they don’t know. The CIA is the institution that asks the tough questions, he assured the audience.

He said that next to making sure that the CIA is effective at what it does, his role is understanding the impact that technology will have on the country. “Because of technological change, our operating environment is now very different, and we need to be able to adapt,” he said.

Brennan acknowledged that when the Agency makes mistakes, it really tries to learn from those mistakes. Indeed he acknowledged that the Agency will keep making mistakes in the future. “Will we make mistakes sometimes? Probably,” he admitted. “But the Agency has a lot to be proud of, and I’m proud every day to be leading it.”

When he was asked what had prepared him well in his career during Q&A, he told of his experience as a studying abroad at the American University in Cairo. He advised students to study history, as he complained that people too often forget about things.

When I asked him about a strategic decision the US will have to make over the next ten years that will be remembered 100 years from now, he said that the US needs to decide how to regulate the cyber economy, as technology is going to affect everything in the future. When I asked him if he could a share a strategic principle, he said that honesty is the key value that served him well. He also mentioned that you have to understand your role in relation to others. He also recommended Hermann Hesse, the German-born Swiss poet, to put on your reading list and advised to spend as much time with family as possible.