Michael Scheuer

Well, there's no doubt that the Israelis and probably the British had better information than the people working against Osama bin Laden and the agency, much better information.

We needed the collection of signals intelligence out of Afghanistan.

And since there was no central telephone company or communications companies, it was very limited.

You had to be lucky to find the signal.

Well, we found a couple of signals and we shared the information with NSA and they collected information and wouldn't share it with us in the raw form.

NSA reports are generally summaries of what people say over the phone.

You don't really know always who's talking to who.

The first thing we did when we got the first copies of translated material, we sent them to NSA and said, can you please provide the other half of this?

to us and they said thank you very much but under the 1947 act that created NSA we don't have to share that with anyone and we're not going to but somehow the Israelis and the Saudis always were able to find out something was there that they wanted and so when we refused they'd call the White House the White House had called the DCI and the DCI would say give it to them

It's certainly an absurdity

for what the American people pay for signals intelligence to be collected, translated, and supplied to the intelligence community, to have the British, the Saudis, the Israelis getting information from our national security agency that we and the agency were not privileged enough to get.

last always they don't like the united states except for the most part our money and yet uh our national security agency is producing information for them but not shareable with its own people go figure

There were groups of Israelis traveling around the country as artists, sketching things.

Happened to be one time around Cape Canaveral, I remember.

And other places where there were certainly things to paint and sketch, but also noticeably near military installations or some other kind of installation in the government.

So I think that's an open question yet.

In fact,

And the whole time I worked in counterterrorism from 92 till 2004, I never saw one piece of information from the Israelis that was really worth anything.

Well, my name is Mike Scheuer.

I worked at the CIA for 22 years.