John Lisle

One of those excuses at first is, he says, the CIA was drowning in paper.

We had so much paper, we couldn't move.

So there was just an internal...

kind of drive to get rid of this paper so that we could walk around and figure out where stuff was.

He's just completely making this up.

Rao presses him again, why did you destroy this stuff?

Sidney Gottlieb, you know, and he does this to Richard Helms too, they both eventually say again, well,

We wanted, you know, it's part of our job to protect sources and methods.

And so we wanted to make sure that nobody would be able to know what our sources and methods were as part of this project.

So we had to destroy the files.

And Ra was like, these files are secret.

It's not like they're going to be released to the public.

They're the CIA's files.

How could destroying them protect sources and methods any more than just not releasing them to the public?

That's just a non-excuse.

So eventually, Raoul presses Gottlieb more, and he kind of breaks down during this interrogation.

And he says, I was embarrassed by it.

I was embarrassed by what I had done.

Basically...

ruined the lives of all these people, spent $10 million at all these different institutions.