Community & Government, Business
Part 2: Missions, Myths & Movies
Lesson time 29:12 min
Get insider access to three former CIA intelligence officers as they reveal never-before-told stories and the lessons they learned about leadership, perfecting your pitch and the path to a career at the CIA.
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Topics include: Three Primary Missions The Technologist CIA Pitch Lesson The Covert Operator Lessons from Khost The Analyst Lessons From North Korea CIA Movie Myths "How to Pick a Movie — the CIA Way" The Art of Disguise
With Former CIA Officers
Learn declassified techniques on how to assess risk, strengthen relationships, and get ahead in life and business. Skills so good, they’ve been kept secret, until now. The Central Intelligence Agency has not approved, endorsed, or authorized this production or the use of the CIA seal, name, or initials.
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BRIAN CARBAUGH: Don't believe everything you see in the movies. There's a lot more to the story. We know because we lived it. If you want to learn more about intelligence and espionage, you've come to the right place. There are three primary missions that CIA has. The first is to take all the information that's available to the US government and make sense of it for the president. That's what an analyst does. The second thing the CIA does is to collect clandestine intelligence. DAWN MEYERRIECKS: When it comes to clandestine intelligence gathering, technologists, analysts, and operators intersect and interact with each other. Case officers in operations, which was part of the organization that Brian ran, are responsible for recruiting and handling spies. Their information fed into the analytic product, which Michael led. The role of the Science & Technology organization at the Agency, which I ran, is to do all of that cool stuff that case officers and assets use for communications, for disguise, for manufactured documents or anything that you needed in order to get into and out of a place that you weren't supposed to be without being spotted. We also collected technical intelligence for the analysts and got them insights they couldn't get in any other way that they combine with open-source information that is accessible to anyone as well as other sources of intelligence. The third part of the CIA's mission is the CIA can be called upon by the president to carry out specific types of covert action around the world. The president decides that for policy reasons, he wants the CIA to undertake a set of activities that have a policy outcome. So that's separate from the first two missions, which are understanding the world. That third mission, covert action, is actually trying to change the world. I had a former boss who called me his technical teddy bear, which I took in the best possible sense, because what he meant by that was I'm able to make complex technology accessible to smart people who don't necessarily have technical acumen and don't need to have technical acumen for their jobs, but do need to be able to make decisions about whether to make investments or not in very complex technical systems. I double majored in electrical engineering and business. And my graduate master's degree is in computer science. I became an engineer because I wanted to build things that changed people's lives. I wanted to make people's lives better with technology. That's my button. That's the thing. After I finished my undergrad, I moved to Southern California to work for TRW. It was an aerospace company. Ended up going to Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a part of NASA. And then I got recruited to build command and control for the entire army. And because we actually delivered systems that worked, came to the attention of a navy admiral and ended up at the Defense Information Systems Agency. We built command and control that was used in Desert Storm I and II and change...
About the Instructor
WARNING. What you’re about to read is not for civilians’ eyes. Until now. MasterClass has attained access to three of the CIA’s top former officers, who have been given authorization to share their real-life experiences and the valuable lessons they learned about leadership, critical thinking, and risk management. There’s a reason the CIA keeps its techniques a secret. You’re about to find out why.
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Brian Carbaugh, Michael Morell, and Dawn Meyerriecks
Learn declassified techniques on how to assess risk, strengthen relationships, and get ahead in life and business. Skills so good, they’ve been kept secret, until now. The Central Intelligence Agency has not approved, endorsed, or authorized this production or the use of the CIA seal, name, or initials.
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