Former CIA Director John Brennan was a man of many talents. He was a brilliant linguist, a brilliant strategist, and a brilliant human being. But he was also a bad guy. John Brennan is the man responsible for one of the most infamous torture programs in the history of the CIA.
00:01:20.980So he's having a heck of a time finding a job.
00:01:26.540Finally, he goes to the PDB staff, the president's daily brief.
00:01:30.980And it just so happens that they have an opening for a briefer for the lowest ranking person on the National Security Council who's entitled to a PDB briefing.
00:01:40.700That is, the director of intelligence programs that just happened to be, at the time, George Tenet.
00:01:49.460So Brennan and Tenet immediately hit it off.
00:01:53.700They are both alpha dogs, you know, cigar smoking, hard drinking, pockmarked faced, you know, guys.
00:02:31.900The office was reorganized and so John got squeezed out, but George made him station chief in Riyadh.
00:02:41.180Now, this is a guy who has not had five seconds of operational experience in his life, who's now the station chief in one of the most important countries in the world for the CIA.
00:02:52.480It was John Brennan who oversaw the granting of the visas to the 9-11 hijackers, for God's sake.
00:03:00.500So John comes back and becomes the executive director of the CIA, the number three ranking official in the CIA when George becomes the director.
00:03:13.540So it's George, John McLaughlin, John Brennan.
00:03:19.280Well, I'm the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations at the time.
00:03:24.300So John is in my briefings every single day.
00:03:28.340And John was just torture, torture, torture.
00:03:48.180So George made him the head of what was called the TTIK, the Transnational Terrorist Information Center.
00:03:54.020That became the NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center.
00:03:57.960And John wanted to be the head of his own agency because he was telling everybody who would listen at the time that he wanted to be secretary of defense.
00:04:12.180So he goes to the TTIK, and it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
00:04:20.200And so he retires a year before George W. Bush finishes his second term.
00:04:25.740Well, then, and this is the role of serendipity, there was a huge wave of retirements in 2008.
00:04:40.240And about half the people at the senior level who retired went to the McCain campaign, and the other half went to the Clinton campaign.
00:04:48.080John was the only one who went to Obama.
00:05:01.940He was one of the godfathers of the torture program.
00:05:05.180Obama says, okay, I'm going to make him deputy director of the National Security Council, deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism.
00:05:38.200There was a group, even on the analytics side, there was a group of guys who were, you know, these hard-drinking, most of them were single, but hard-drinking, you know, tough spy wannabes.