David Kapler

Well, no one ends up in charge of intelligence.

No, sorry, teasing you a little bit.

So the position was created in 2016 as a decision of the Warsaw Summit, largely because leaders agreed that they needed military and civilian intelligence integration, and then they added a further complication of combining intelligence and security into one division.

And it is a very interesting idea for NATO because it's the only joint division, the joint military and civilian and joint intelligence and security.

In the first go, I was preceded by a German diplomat, Arndt von Loringhoven, and then I was selected in the summer of 2019 to come in.

And really with the thought that Arndt had been one of the two vice presidents of BND.

Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, right.

But was also a career diplomat prior to that, sat in the seat as the vice president that usually the ministry of foreign affairs fills.

And I think appropriate actually for that period of time, because the challenge really was, how do you bring this thing together?

How do you negotiate?

In fact, with 20, what they had 27 allies, I think, or 26 allies at that time.

do you get that done?

And how do you get these services to work in concert?"

I had had the majority of my career in intelligence, and so a bit different in background and an approach.

And the thought at that time was, you need to make sure then that we actually transition this thing to a full operational

So your background was as an analyst, because we like analysts on this show.

Well, who doesn't?

As I said, the analyst is the apex predator of the intelligence community, no matter where you are.

Well, you heard Daniel Markich try to say that.