President’s Daily Brief

U.S. President Truman

How does the US president gets his intelligence information in order to determine his policy and make the right decisions? In the wake of the Pearl Harbor disaster, president Truman (image) decided that all intelligence should be collected and centralized by one organisation and that the president would get a daily briefing. This was the beginning of the President’s Daily Brief or PDB.

In the August SpyCast, John Headley explains how the CIA keeps the president posted, and how the different administrations in the past had their own way to do this. John Headley, a former CIA officer, was editor for the PDB for many years and in this interview he reveals some nice anecdotes on how the former presidents preferred their PDB.

You can download the 25 minutes interview on SpyCast (25Mb)