Watch the video below.
00:00 – Jim Lawler
Hello, you’re listening to the Steady State Sentinel from the Steady State. I’m Jim Lawler, a former senior CIA operations officer, and I’ve worked some of the most sensitive counterproliferation and espionage cases in the agency’s history.
Today I have the great privilege of being joined by Larry Pfeiffer – the former Senior Director of the White House Situation Room, former Chief of Staff to CIA Director Michael Hayden, and currently the director of the Michael Hayden Center for Intelligence Policy and International Security at George Mason University. Larry brings a rare combination of operational experience and institutional perspective to the critical questions facing our intelligence community and our democracy today.
Larry, welcome to the show. I know we’re going to have a good time discussing some very sensitive national security topics.
00:49 – Larry Pfeiffer
Well, thank you for having me.
00:58 – Jim Lawler
You’ve served across NSA, the Office of Director of National Intelligence, CIA, and the White House for about 32 years. What does it mean for the intelligence community to remain apolitical? And have you seen that norm tested in ways the public didn’t see?
01:14 – Larry Pfeiffer
It’s vitally important that when the men and women of the intelligence community come to work, they hang up any political predilections on a hook somewhere. They come into the office just looking at facts, looking at science, distilling all this data, and presenting it to policymakers in as unvarnished a manner as possible. That way the policymaker – who naturally comes to the game with preferences – gets the ground truth that will help inform them.
General Hayden used to talk about how the job of the intelligence officer was to create the box within which reality exists, and you explain that box to a policymaker. He then has to decide: Am I going to accept what you’ve explained as reality? Am I going to make a decision based on what’s inside that box? Or am I going to take additional risk and make a decision outside the box? We can’t stop them from making decisions outside the box – that’s their job. Our job is just to give them that unvarnished truth.
Yes, today I am very worried about the intelligence community and actions that have been taken against officers, managers, and senior managers over the last year and a half that are likely putting a chilling effect on those who would otherwise be doing their duty.
02:42 – Jim Lawler
Absolutely. You just underlined something I consider very important: we have to have professionals who will speak truth to power, even at personal cost. Did you ever personally face moments in your career where telling the truth created a real professional risk for you? How did you handle that?
03:06 – Larry Pfeiffer
Fascinating question. Serving as chief of staff to General Hayden when he was director, there was a lot of very edgy activity going on in the war against terrorism. I was side by side with General Hayden as he was going to the Hill and briefing them on controversial programs – like the renditions, detentions, and interrogation program that CIA had. There was a wide swath of opinion on the Hill about whether we should or shouldn’t be doing it and how legal or illegal it actually was.
Depending upon how politics swayed, I could have been at risk for my job if they decided what we were doing was illegal. But we stood behind the facts, we stood behind the law as it had been interpreted for us, and we went forward.
There were some edgy aspects of those actual programs. I can’t go into a lot of detail given the sensitive nature, but there were times when there were debates within the Directorate of Operations about whether they should or shouldn’t take actions with some detainees. There were instances where I weighed in on one side or the other to help make the decision go one way or the other. Those were definitely decisions I thought long and hard about – and still to this day think long and hard about – as to whether they were the right thing to do. But definitely some risky things were going on.
04:39 – Jim Lawler
As chief of staff to General Hayden, one of your jobs should have been to be his consigliere, his advisor. He was looking for unvarnished opinion, and he trusted you.
04:51 – Larry Pfeiffer
Absolutely. There was one time – again, I can’t talk about exactly what it was – but an operation was being contemplated, and the execution order was to be given for this very sensitive operation. I went into General Hayden’s office late on a Friday, walked in, closed the door – just him and me – and I said, “If we go forward with this, there are things that critics are going to accuse us of having done that will be very serious and very consequential. I personally want to make sure that you personally believe you have the backing of the president of the United States on this decision.”
He then met with his deputy – a good colleague of yours, Steve Kappes – and they talked it over and decided they needed to have one more conversation with the president. The president was at Camp David. They reached out and said we have to talk. He invited them up to Camp David. They had a conversation. The president said he had his back – said if anything went wrong, or if everything went right, he would stand behind us.
Ultimately the general decided to give the go order on this operation, which turned out to be highly successful and has remained largely secret, remarkably. But it was pretty damn edgy.
06:17 – Jim Lawler
But you just put your finger on it: you had the backing of the president. He had your back. I don’t get the feeling that in the current administration, if things went sideways, you would have the president’s back. Maybe his backside, but not supporting you.
06:33 – Larry Pfeiffer
Well, he’s proven in more than one instance that loyalty is a one‑way street with him.
06:41 – Jim Lawler
Speaking of which, we’ve all heard about ideological purges and loyalty tests at the CIA and the FBI. From your personal experience, what happens to the quality of intelligence when analysts or operations officers believe that their assessments will be judged politically rather than on merit?
07:03 – Larry Pfeiffer
What people need to remember is that the men and women of CIA are just that – men and women, human beings with foibles and fallibilities. My worry is that some will pull punches. They’ll take an extra day or two to craft their analysis so that it’s more politically palatable. That day or two they take could be decision time you’re taking away from policymakers – that’s not good.
One of the great things about CIA that I loved was that the best people went to the hardest problems because they felt they had the talents and skills and wanted to do their patriotic duty. It would not surprise me if some people are deciding maybe it’s not time to do that. Maybe it’s time to go work on a target set that’s not as politically sensitive or not as much in the spotlight. Maybe it’s time to go get that graduate degree. Maybe it’s time to take a sabbatical. So we could be depriving our nation of great talent on some very hard problems.
People near retirement are saying, “Let’s get out of here.” People who have just joined and have the luxury of making a career change without significant consequence – some of them are leaving. Folks in the middle – ten, fifteen years in, kids going to school, braces to pay for – those people can’t just walk away. Some of them will make decisions for self‑preservation. At the end of the day, that just means less quality intelligence going forward to policymakers.
And lastly, I can tell you for a fact: there are young people – incredibly talented people we would love to have come work in the intelligence community – who right now are saying to me at George Mason University, “Mr. Pfeiffer, maybe it’s not time to go into the intelligence community. Maybe I should go do something else for a few years and wait to see what happens.” It’s very hard to not agree with them.
09:29 – Jim Lawler
I mentor a lot of young people interested in careers in the intelligence community. What I usually say is: there’s a lot of chaos in the government at the moment, but this too shall pass, and it really won’t affect you at the entry level, at the junior levels. It’s more the mid‑levels and upper levels that it affects.
09:48 – Larry Pfeiffer
I would agree. I’ve told some younger people: look, hopefully the mid‑level and senior‑level managers are doing their job to keep the chaos off your back and let you focus on the mission. So go in, learn the tradecraft, learn the skills. Hopefully in two, three, four years, this too shall pass.
10:07 – Jim Lawler
We try on this podcast to focus on the personal costs of professional integrity – how pressures repeated across institutions can weaken the systems responsible for protecting our national security. You ran the Situation Room. What does institutional degradation actually look like from the inside, and how quickly can that happen?
10:31 – Larry Pfeiffer
The Situation Room, remarkably, is comprised mostly of individuals on detail from other agencies, departments, and the military services. When I was there, I had the luxury of having people apply to come work in the Sit Room who were the best of the best. It’s probably the only job I ever had where every single person working for me was an ace. It allowed me as a manager to focus on other things rather than making sure people were getting their jobs done.
I worry today that there are very likely people who are not pursuing that detail. The last thing you want to do is go to the White House and find yourself toe‑to‑toe with someone in this administration who might not like the way you answer a question and call your agency and say, “Fire this person.” So I worry they may not be getting the best and brightest to come work at the White House. Some agencies may even be unable to get people to come. That can eat away at the professionalism, integrity, and quality of support the president is getting.
I used to tell young analysts and operators coming to work for me in the Sit Room: you’ve probably been told in many jobs that you can’t make mistakes, you have to work perfectly. I’m going to say the same thing, but here in the White House, that’s actually for real. When you make a mistake, the distance between you and the president is the shortest it’s ever going to be in your career. If you make a mistake, that president may make a decision on bad or untimely information. So you need to be as perfect in your work as possible. You’re human, so you will make a mistake – that’s why the job of the team is to constantly look left and right at your comrade, and if you see someone starting to slip, jump in and help.
But yeah, I do worry about what’s going on in the current Situation Room.
12:48 – Jim Lawler
If a senior duty officer came to you today and told you they were being pressured to shape or suppress intelligence to align with the administration’s preferences, what would you tell that officer?
13:04 – Larry Pfeiffer
I would tell them to stand with their values and their principles. But what I would immediately do is go and speak with whomever had given that guidance – or their supervisor – to make sure that gets corrected, even if it risked my own job. That’s just who I am. Now it’s easy to say that sitting here on the outside.
My greater fear, actually, is that they’re just not using the Situation Room. They’re not relying on the men and women there and the information they could provide. This administration has so far shown they’re not necessarily big fans of intelligence. So it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re just not utilizing the Situation Room to its full capacity and benefit.
13:58 – Jim Lawler
When you were senior director, I’m sure you spent a lot of time on continuity of government – ensuring the president has Situation Room‑like capability even on the worst of days. Are you confident those systems and norms are being protected right now?
14:20 – Larry Pfeiffer
Between the White House Situation Room, the White House Military Office, the Secret Service, and some elements of Homeland Security, the U.S. government has developed an incredibly robust and highly redundant system of capabilities to serve the president wherever he or she may be at any given time. I would be stunned if that robust set of capabilities had deteriorated to the point where they weren’t being served.
That said, the destruction of the East Wing of the White House – which sat on top of the President’s Emergency Operations Center, the PEOC – clearly caused some deterioration. They’re now talking about needing to rebuild the PEOC as part of the reason for the money they need for this grand ballroom they’re building. I’m fairly confident that the good men and women of those organizations, when told the East Wing was going to be demolished, would have leaned on some of the redundancies to still fulfill their mission. But anything taken away with the destruction of the East Wing will need to be rebuilt somewhere. I worry the politics of the ballroom are actually affecting what should be being done to rebuild that capability.
15:58 – Jim Lawler
The Situation Room is in essence a physical embodiment of institutional knowledge and process. What happens when the people who carry that knowledge are pushed out or sidelined? Suddenly people are beating a path to the exit. What happens to our national security?
16:19 – Larry Pfeiffer
When you have senior people with years and years of experience and skills running to the exits, that’s a knowledge gap – a knowledge dearth – that can never be replaced. Even if you tried to hire them back in two or three years, the gap that will have developed won’t be good.
The same goes for younger people. When younger people leave, they don’t necessarily have a deep body of knowledge yet. But what they bring is enthusiasm and a level of intelligence. I always joked that I could never be hired in the intelligence community today, given how remarkably smart the young men and women we’ve brought in over the last ten or fifteen years have been. So you’re depriving yourself of great talent, skill, and physical ability to do that kind of work.
We’re working in a Situation Room crisis center – it’s shift work, round the clock. You and I would be dead in a week if we tried to do crazy rotating shift work at this point in our lives. But when you’re twenty‑five, thirty years old – those are the people we need doing that job. So if people are heading to the exits at those two ends of the spectrum, it will affect those organizations’ ability to fulfill their mission.
17:53 – Jim Lawler
Up until about the 2016 election, I never knew – nor did I care – what the political affiliation or beliefs of any of my CIA colleagues were. It never even occurred to me. Was that your experience?
18:10 – Larry Pfeiffer
Yes, absolutely. I could not tell you the politics of almost anybody I ever worked with. Now in retirement, in some cases I’m stunned when I find out some of the politics of people I sat next to. But despite what their politics ultimately were, I never saw anyone in the business making a decision or doing their work based on their personal political viewpoints.
The only time politics would sometimes be discussed was when I was operating at that very senior most level – where directors and deputy directors are engaging on a daily, hourly basis with an administration. There were times where we would sit there and cross our fingers and hope maybe this guy got elected over that person. But that was inside‑baseball chit‑chat. Never did we actively attempt to push one candidate over the other. There was no CIA plot to undermine the Obama election or the Bush election or – I presume after my time – the Trump election.
19:26 – Jim Lawler
I remember leading some very high‑stakes counterproliferation operations, and I had bipartisan support – Democrats, Republicans, independents. They were very concerned about our national security. I’m not sure I see that anymore. The fact that our national security should be the foremost thing we’re concerned about – that troubles me a lot.
19:48 – Larry Pfeiffer
I saw the beginnings of some of this during the Bush administration when I was with General Hayden. You would go into closed‑door skiffs with senators and congressmen and offer briefings, have conversations where you left the room feeling fairly supported. But then an hour or two later, one of those people would be out in front of a microphone bashing what we were doing. It was like a Jekyll‑and‑Hyde experience.
When Leon Panetta came in and succeeded General Hayden, I served him as chief of staff for about a month. I went up with him on one of his first visits to the Hill after he was sworn in, and I asked him – this was 2009 – “Sir, you served on the Hill, you served in the White House during the Clinton administration. Were things as politically corrosive and divisive as they are today?” Leon Panetta said, “My God, no, Larry. This is the worst political environment I’ve ever experienced in my long career.”
I asked what caused it. He put a lot of the blame on the 24/7 news cycle – the fact that senators and congressmen didn’t have the luxury they used to have to go behind closed doors, have dinner together, have conversations in shared apartments, where they could make the hard compromises required in a democracy. There was just no breathing room when cameras and microphones are in your face constantly.
The second critique was the extremes the parties had gone to. The primary system we currently have rewards the most excessive, most extreme viewpoints. That constantly creates this whiplash condition we’ve had over the last ten or fifteen years – go Republican, go Democrat, go Republican – it seems to be spinning out of control.
22:12 – Jim Lawler
I’m going to get on a fun topic. You’ve gotten a lot of credit as the technical advisor on the Netflix film The House of Dynamite. What drew you to that project, and what did you hope audiences would take away about the real Situation Room?
22:28 – Larry Pfeiffer
The last thing I ever thought in my entire life is that I’d be a technical advisor on a Hollywood film working for one of the most acclaimed directors in the world, Kathryn Bigelow. I literally got a cold call email asking if I would take a phone call from a Hollywood producer. I had been recommended by someone I worked with in the White House – General Doug Lute, who had served as a senior military advisor on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and then as ambassador to NATO. He had served as an advisor on some of her earlier films, including Zero Dark Thirty, and she was asking him questions about the Situation Room because it figures prominently in the film. He said, “I don’t really know how it worked minute by minute, but I know someone who can help you.”
So I take the call. We have a great conversation. The producer said Kathryn is committed to presenting things in as realistic a way as possible. Having worked in the Situation Room, I felt it was one of the gems of national security that most people don’t know anything about. Here was an opportunity to show the professionalism and sacrifice that men and women make by going to work at the White House Situation Room. So I dove in.
I met with Kathryn Bigelow. I then suggested I might be able to get them into the Situation Room for a tour. We had a colleague from Langley who was the senior director at the time – this was during the Biden administration. He ran it up the flagpole, they agreed. We went in, gave them a tour, were in there for over two hours, which blew my mind – I probably would have given them half an hour when I was senior director.
At the end of that, out on the sidewalk on 17th Street, Kathryn looked at me and said, “This has been great, Larry. You’ve been such a big help. We’d love to have you work with us while we’re filming.” I said, “Wow, that’d be an honor. You guys are going to pay my transportation and a hotel, right?” The producer looked at me and said, “Larry, we’re going to pay you. Money.” I thought, “Wow, extra bonus.”
So I got to spend parts of August and September 2024 up in Jersey City in a gigantic warehouse facility – the studios. They had recreated the Situation Room with a precision that blew my mind, considering they weren’t allowed to take photographs. The production design guy apparently has one of those memories where he can memorize everything he sees. It felt so real that one point during filming my phone started to vibrate in my pocket, and for a split second I had a momentary panic – “Crap, I’ve got a phone in the Situation Room!” I laughed at myself for even thinking that.
What did I want to accomplish? I wanted to show what it can be like. I wanted the American people to feel what it’s like to work in a place like the White House Situation Room. If you watch that movie, you will walk out knowing what it would probably feel like on a pretty bad day. Hopefully we accomplished that.
26:35 – Jim Lawler
How do you think the current Situation Room would react to an unknown adversary launching an intercontinental ballistic missile at an American city? That sends chills up my back.
26:51 – Larry Pfeiffer
I think they would respond with the precision and dedication to mission as portrayed in the movie. I did have a couple of former duty officers say it got a little melodramatic in a couple instances. I said, “Number one, it’s a Hollywood movie – I did my best. Number two, in your time at the Situation Room, did you ever have to experience something as dire as a nuclear missile heading towards a U.S. city? No, you did not. That’s kind of an unknown – how individuals might react. Some may react with more emotion than others, and that’s what we tried to portray.”
I mentioned to the actress portraying the senior duty officer that you may find yourself getting caught up in the emotion of the moment. The emotions you portray are the emotions your team will then evoke. Your job is to try to keep those emotions in check – even if it means you have to step out, go to another room, collect your thoughts, and come back. She thought that was great. During one scene, she did that – unscripted. When the director said “cut,” Kathryn went up to her and said, “What did you do? I didn’t tell you to do that – where’d that come from?” She said, “Larry said it would be a really good idea.” Kathryn turned to me and said, “That was great. I love it. Let’s keep it in, do a few more takes.” Those were moments of pride for me.
28:46 – Jim Lawler
Let’s turn to your current leadership at the Hayden Center at George Mason. What are you trying to instill in the next generation about the relationship between expertise, ethics, and service?
29:03 – Larry Pfeiffer
General Hayden had been teaching graduate‑level courses at the school for several years. The school approached him and said, “Can we create a center with your name on it?” In typical humility, he said, “I don’t know if I want my name on it.” They said, “We want your name because it’ll be a draw.” So the school saw it as an external‑facing way to draw interest, but we also saw it as a way to enhance the experience for students.
It’s a rare opportunity for a student to sit in a room and listen to current and former leaders and experts of the U.S. intelligence community talk about issues of the day – how they dealt with challenges, how they approached their career, what might be valuable for a student to study and bring to the table when they apply to come work in the intelligence community. That’s what we’ve tried to create through panel discussions and one‑on‑one interviews. It’s resonated very well.
At the same time, General Hayden sees this as a vehicle to inform the broader public about what intelligence is and isn’t – how it supports policymakers, how it sometimes fails, what we do to self‑correct, what oversight we welcome. We’ve been doing it for almost nine years now – it’ll be nine years this fall. We believe we’ve been pretty successful.
Our audience has grown. We started thinking Washington area – student body, professionals in D.C., think tanks, Congress, military officers. Then the pandemic came, we started doing events virtually, and we built a worldwide audience. We’re not only informing the “Washington mafia,” but also the broader American public and an international audience. The dean of the school, Mark Rozell, often likes to mention at the opening of a Hayden Center event that we have individuals from six continents watching – and jokes that we’ve got to find a scientist in Antarctica one of these days so we can say seven.
We hope we’re contributing to a more rational look at what intelligence is and how it supports the country – and fighting against the media’s tendency to go to the darkest corner of a room, do short sound bites, or rely on people who come to the conversation with a grudge or a chip on their shoulder.
32:05 – Jim Lawler
If you could put one thing on the desk of every senior official in today’s government – something you learned in the Situation Room – what would that be?
32:22 – Larry Pfeiffer
My goodness. In this day and age, I would put a copy of the United States Constitution on their desk. I would tell them to read it, abide by it, honor it, and remember that that is what you swore an oath to – not to an individual, not to a political party, not to the soil we stand on. I used to have a Constitution on my desk. Did I read it every day? No. But I had it there as a reminder throughout my career: this is what I’m doing, this is what I’m supporting. Regardless of my time in the Situation Room or as an intelligence officer, I believe that is probably the most valuable thing somebody could have.
33:05 – Jim Lawler
It’s funny you say that – I also used to carry a little copy of the Constitution in my backpack every day when I went to work. I thought, if they ever confront me about something, I’ve got this sacred thing right here.
33:19 – Larry Pfeiffer
It sounds corny, a little wacky, but I had the same thing – a pocket‑size on my desk, one in my travel bag. I would take it wherever I went. Occasionally I would crack it open to remind myself of some of the provisions. Yeah, reddish‑brown cover, little gold‑leaf title on the front.
33:39 – Jim Lawler
When you and I came into the government, we swore an oath not to an administration but to the United States, to the Constitution, to defend our country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’ve always thought that was a sacred commitment.
34:02 – Larry Pfeiffer
Yep. I never thought in my life as a foreign intelligence officer that I would ever be worrying about enemies domestic. But today I worry about enemies domestic maybe more than I worry about enemies foreign – or equally as much.
34:17 – Jim Lawler
I’m going to draw this to a close. Any last‑minute remarks for our audience?
34:29 – Larry Pfeiffer
Just keep the faith, keep the fight, don’t give up. I think there are more of us than there are of them. There are more people who believe in the values and principles of our government as it was stood up 250 years ago. So participate. Find a way to participate.
A lot of people tell me, “I’m overwhelmed. There’s so much happening. I don’t know where to start.” That’s absolutely understandable. So pick your passion. If your passion is the intelligence community, do whatever you can to make sure it’s being supported and that people understand what it’s about. If your passion is immigration, focus on immigration. Pick a passion or two if you have the bandwidth, and go with that. If we all approach this overwhelming problem that way, we can at a minimum have a lot of fingers in the dike – and at a maximum create a mass that pushes back against some of the horrible things that are happening.
35:35 – Jim Lawler
I agree one hundred percent with you. Larry, it has been a privilege and a pleasure having you on the Steady State Sentinel today, sharing your thoughts and your vast experience. For our audience, if you liked today’s conversation, please subscribe to the Steady State Sentinel and leave us a five‑star review. Join us next week.
For the Steady State Sentinel, I’m Jim Lawler – still standing watch.
The Steady State Sentinel is produced by The Steady State, a community of former national security professionals who spent their careers safeguarding the United States at home and abroad. Today, we continue that mission by staying true to our oaths to defend the Constitution, uphold democracy, and protect national security. Each episode features expert hosts in conversation with accomplished guests whose experience sheds light on the crises and challenges facing the nation.