The steady state sentinels produced by the steady
state, the 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 our
democracy and protect our nation's security.
Join our expert hosts as they interview field
-tested guests whose unique experiences shed
light on the crises and challenges facing our
nation. Welcome to the steady state sentinel.
This is a weekly podcast to the steady state,
which is a nonprofit advocacy organization whose
members are former senior national security officials
drawn from across the intelligence, diplomatic,
homeland security and defense communities. And
this week we have the pleasure of interviewing
our general director, our executive director,
Steve Cash. Steve has had a very distinguished
career. in the intelligence community, in the
Senate, and lately at Homeland Security. I first
met Steve, in fact, when he and I were both serving
at CIA. And he was an operations officer there
for several years. And I really enjoyed working
with him. The next time our paths crossed was
at a biosecurity experts group, which Steve really
honchoed along with Larry Kerr and some others.
So Steve, welcome to this initial broadcast of
the steady state Sentinel. Well, Jim, it's great
to be here. I'm proud to be a part of the steady
state. I remember meeting you. I actually remember
the meeting back then. I won't explain in any
detail what happened, but I was blown away by
a certain amount of creativity that you had around
a conference table there. But it's good to be
here and good to see you as always, Jim. Well,
we are really honored to have you on as our executive
director. And I'd like you to just tell us about
how the steady state was founded back in 2016.
What motivated you to do this, what its role
is today and how the membership of our over 360
former national security professionals contributes
to. The foundation, the securing of our national
security and our democracy. Please go into this,
Steve, and tell us about this. Sure. The origin
story. We weren't even called the steady state
back then. We got together in November, roughly
November of 2016, after the election. Donald
Trump had just been elected. And we had some
concerns. Who's the we in that sentence? By that
point, most of the people I had worked with had
left the agency, either retired or moved on to
the private sector, but we had kept in touch.
And in fact, many of us had worked together.
on issues related to terrorism and the Balkans
in the late Clinton administration. And the group
that sort of had kept in touch were agency people
and State Department people. We've worked together.
We've gotten along. We liked each other a lot.
And we were all concerned. And so we sort of
started making phone calls and talking to each
other. What should we do? Now, I'm sure we'll
talk about this, Jim. But certainly at the agency,
there's a real hesitancy to get involved in domestic
politics at all. As I think has been already
said in early versions of this podcast, we didn't
talk about it. If you'd asked me what party Jim
Lawler was, I would have said, I have no idea.
And they would never mention it. It was just
not talked about. So we were very hesitant. But
we were really concerned. This new guy, this
new president, what seemed inexperienced and
almost hostile to the idea of expertise in the
world of national security and international
affairs. After all, he was going to be commander
in chief. And that serious stuff, we felt we
needed to do something. What could we do that
we were comfortable with? And it was, OK, let's
We're a bunch of people who've worked in this
world for most of our professional careers. We
know a lot of things. And so we said, let's just
offer. And so we wrote a letter to the designee
for national security advisor, General Flynn.
He was fired two weeks later. We hadn't had a
response yet. So we wrote to McMaster, General
McMaster, who took his place. He never responded.
And... Soon after we started hearing, even back
then, rumors of retaliation and blacklists. And
people got worried. And it was pretty clear that
this administration didn't want our help. And
we sort of went to sleep. We were never a formal
organization. I don't even think we had a name
back then. And, you know, we had a mailing list.
We grew to around 70 people. And that was it.
And we didn't do anything until the Ukraine scandal
broke. That struck home for a lot of our people.
Most of us had worked the old corridor represented
by the so -called Iron Curtain, so running up
from the Balkans all the way up to the Baltics,
or had worked Russia. We knew the area. A lot
of us had worked on Ukraine issues. really stimulated,
motivated us was what was coming out in the press
and what appeared to have happened. It wasn't
a policy difference. It wasn't even incompetence.
It was a president extorting a foreign leader
for personal gain. And that for us crossed a
red line, a red line that we thought was pretty
far in the distance. And suddenly we were right
there. This wasn't just a threat. that policy
was going to be poorly conceived or policy that
some didn't like. And my goodness, with our group,
getting a policy that we all agreed on would
have been impossible. But this wasn't that. This
was an existential threat. And we said, we hate
getting involved in domestic politics. It's not
a great idea. It's against our culture. And we'll
talk a little bit, Jim, I hope. about why we
particularly know how dangerous it is for our
profession to get involved in American domestic
politics. But something was different here. We
had to do something. And we sort of held our
noses and said, OK, we're in. And we wrote and
we spoke. And you can imagine the CIA people
like, oh, my God, fucking reporters. We wrote
public essays. We spoke on panels. This was during
COVID, so we never actually saw any human beings.
And we eventually endorsed candidates, including
Joe Biden, who became president. And that took
us up to the election then. And I mentioned,
and I think we should go into it more deeply,
the idea that national security people, particularly
intelligence people, just shouldn't be playing
around in domestic politics. I'm sort of proud
of what we did, which is we did nothing. We said,
OK, we're done. We continued. Our steering committee
kept meeting and talking about their grandkids
and golf and also talked about maybe we should
be doing educational material or something like
that. But we stepped away. Existential threat
gone. We were gone. And then the existential
threat returned. Donald Trump came back with
more explicit campaign promises. that represented
everything that had brought us to the table in
the first place. And so we reformed. By that
time, actually during even the 2020 election,
we had called ourselves the steady state in response
to these accusations of the deep state. There's
no deep state, there's a steady state. And we
are part of that steady state. And that steady
state, it's not just national security people,
it's all across the government. America tech
in terms of government the people who do the
work of governing and helping and defending This
country and it runs from the national security
community to the Smithsonian Institution to the
national parks to CDC you name it so we were
the steady state and We got back involved We
did a little bit in terms of the 2024 election,
not as much as we had done. I'm not sure what
we could have done. But after Donald Trump took
over the presidency and we had the transition,
we got back involved. And against all of this
was a background that told us we were on the
right track, and that was January 6th. We'd seen
what happened. That was sort of what we were
predicting could happen. But the idea... that
we would have what, in our minds, looked a lot
like the... Our members have seen a lot of capitals
overrun by mobs. We've seen that one before.
Looked a lot like other countries where the mob
takes over. And we saw it happening. If anything,
it told us we were right, but we thought we were
okay on January 7th when we had a president.
Biden on the way to being inaugurated when he
was inaugurated on the 20th three weeks later
We were wrong. The existential threat is back
and that that's how we got to where we are so
if I can ask Steve when when President Trump
was re -elected in 2024 and took office earlier
this year What exactly were some of the red lines
that he crossed that you and other members of
the steady state, and I'm a member, I joined
several years ago, although I've been inactive
until now when I was asked to host this podcast
and I thought, I've got to do something. My older
daughter, Elizabeth, who lives in New York, she
said, daddy, please do this. And so I thought,
OK, I've got to do this. I'm not going to just
stand by and watch the erosion of our constitution
and our democracy. But were there any seminal
moments where you thought we've got to be more
active? No, we're not the deep state. We're the
steady state. We're not corroding democracy.
We're protecting our republic and our constitution.
Tell me, tell me in your mind what accelerated
the more activities, the greater activities of
the steady state? Well, in the first go round,
it was the Ukraine scandal. Since this election,
the 2024 election, which you're referring to,
the red line sort of had already been crossed
in many ways because he ran on a platform of
saying there was going to be retaliation against
his enemies. And he didn't waste much time after
Inauguration Day in making clear what the point
was. The very next day, he pardoned all the January
6th people. You couldn't get a more clear red
line crossing than that one. It's all right that
you attacked the Capitol Police. It's all right
that you were trying to kill the vice president
of the United States. It was all right that you
broke into the people's house. It was all right
that you were a violent mob. You committed crimes.
You don't need much more of a red line than that.
Having said that, the successive days, up till
today have won over and over again. I don't know
if the metaphor of crossing a red line works
anymore, because you can really only cross a
red line once, right? It's more of a red carpet.
It's a red carpet. That's a much better way to
say it, because we're seeing over and over again
the telltale signs, the indicators of growing
autocracy. He's doing the things that we've seen
dictators and want -to -be dictators do over
and over and over again. It's pretty simple wanting
to become a dictator. There's some boxes you
need to check, there's some things you need to
do, and he's doing all of them. And up until
today, So I know that the steady state tries
to apply some U .S. intelligence community analytic
tradecraft to assess these domestic democratic
conditions in the United States and their erosion.
How did you ensure that this analysis remains
nonpartisan? It's interesting. Let me back away
from that just a second to tell you how it came
to be that we decided to do this. We've been
talking about existential threat and you just
heard me talking about it. think you're going
to hear a lot of people on this podcast talking
about it. Now, first, I'm not an analyst, but
we have a lot of analysts in our group. And at
some point over the summer, we sort of realized
that, wait a second, we're former professional
intelligence officers. And if you sit around
talking about existential threats and you do
work for the CIA or DIA or INR at State Department,
somebody is going to say, you know, we're paying
you to put this down on paper and stopped us
talking about existential threats, described
them with precision, with rigor, and used the
analytic tradecraft that we have taught you to
do in the intelligence community. So we did exactly
that. And the way we tried to ensure that bias
wouldn't creep in, that partisanship wouldn't
creep in, that politicization wouldn't keep in,
is we did what we had learned. We knew what the
traps were. It's been written about a lot, and
there's been some failures of the intelligence
community in terms of bias and groupthink, and
even politicization. And we said, well, how do
we avoid that? So here's how we did it. One,
we got professional analysts. Nobody got to write
our analytic piece that we wrote over the summer
and into October assessing this, which is now
up on our website, www .thesteadystate .org.
Nobody got to write it. unless they were a professional
analyst. My job as executive director was actually
to commission it, to put together what are called
the KIQs, the key intelligence questions. That's
a technique from the intelligence community.
You figure out the people you're writing this
for, what do they want to know? Why are you writing
it for them? What is the key intelligence questions
that they want an analyst to answer? I helped
formulate that because I was the stand -in for
the consumer. By the way, the consumer, unlike
in the intelligence community where it's the
president and the secretaries of the various
departments combatant commanders and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff in Congress. The only one of
them that was sort of left that was a consumer
was at least part of the Congress. But the big
consumer for us is if you're listening to this
podcast, we wrote that for you. You're the consumer.
And so we figured out what are those key intelligence
questions. And then my job from then on was to
keep my mouth shut. I'm not telling any of these
people what to conclude. I'm just going to bother
them every week and ask them if they're done
yet, which was my main job was to be a real pain
in terms of getting it done. They were told everything
you learned in tradecraft, analytic tradecraft.
sticks and bricks, as we say, the recruitment
techniques. I'm talking about the analytic tradecraft.
You apply that here. So work in a group. Watch
out for bias. Don't come up with conclusions
that cannot be backed up with specific evidence.
It's all the rigor that is brought to the table
at CIA and DIA and FBI and places like that.
I think it worked. This document that our group
put together, identifying core trends, driving
authoritarian dynamics. Of all these trends,
what do you feel is the most important warning
or aspect that the public should pay attention
to? What is in your opinion, Steve? I know you've
got a deep background in law and in intelligence.
You've served not only at CIA, but Homeland Security.
You served the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
What do you think would be the key warning or
aspect that the public should pay attention to?
I mean, we talk about red lines, maybe a red
flashing light, a siren going on. A red flashing
light. I almost hate to choose among the sort
of categories because that's how we look. We
had a number of categories, but I'll tell you
one that is near and dear to us and which we
know the most about and is the real red, red,
waving red banner and flag, which is the the
taking of the security services, and Mark, did
I use that word security services? The security
services and turning them from a defensive set
of organizations to essentially a guard of the
leadership. to defend the leader. What do I mean
by that? Many, many countries have national security
communities, just like the ones we come from.
And it usually involves the military, the intelligence
services, and the national law enforcement services.
When CIA people talk about the ones like us who
are working overseas, we use a different phrase,
the national security community or anything like
that. We usually call them the security services.
And we are very well aware of how dangerous they
can be. And they're also the first thing that
the want -to -be dictator reaches to in the toolkit.
So if you could imagine the old grainy footage
of Mussolini on a balcony looking out over the
crowd, you look at any of them, whether it's
Argentina or in Serbia, wherever, you see those
films, you'll always see. or almost always see
two sort of shadowy figures standing two steps
back, two steps to the left and right. Well,
one of them's the head of the army and one of
them's the head of the intelligence services.
They're the bad guys usually. And so the red
flag for us, and it's also emotionally hard for
us, because we love the places we worked and
we're proud of the places we worked, that they
are being turned into instruments of putting
Donald Trump in power. and keeping him in power.
Not only that, but there has been a mass purge
in several of these organizations in the FBI,
in the CIA, in DIA, in NSA, of patriotic, hard
-working intelligence officers, very talented
intelligence officers. and either because they're
suspected of being disloyal to the White House
or have had the temerity of maybe speaking out
and refusing to do things that the White House
wanted. What are your feelings about this? To
me, it makes my stomach ill. It certainly hurts
me in the stomach, too. The brain part of me
is also saying, hey, look at other dictators
that we have watched overseas. What is the first
thing they do? purge the army, purge the intelligence
circumstances, purge their equivalent of the
FBI. You got to do that or you're not going to
make it to the kind of power you want. So it's
both painful to see and terrifying to see. And
it's not done in a vacuum. I mentioned there
are other areas where the flags are waving because
you got to fight on a couple of fronts if you're
a dictator who want to be dictator. So you got
your security services in hand, you're purging,
you're pushing, you're pressuring. Now you have
to turn to the judiciary and the legal system
because you don't want them to stop you. You
can't have an independent judiciary. So you start
attacking judges. Usually starts out relatively
benign. Benign is not the right word. You call
them names. You say you're not going to follow
their orders. You call them traitorous or left
-wing lunatic judges. You go after the lawyers.
I always joke, Shakespeare wrote, first, let's
kill all the lawyers. Well, that's not about
not liking lawyers. The two guys in that scene
talking to each other are minions of a dictator
you want to be. They are saying, if we are going
to be the tyrant or the helpers of tyrants that
we want to be, first thing you got to do is kill
all the lawyers because they'll stop the tyranny.
It's actually very positive about the legal profession.
So that's a place you're going to look. Another
place that's a red flag, and I'll leave it at
that, is academia and the media, the two places
that help us talk and think and speak and argue
and do all the messiness of democracy, which
includes trying to persuade each other of things
and sometimes yelling at each other. And we've
seen that over and over again. So the red carpet.
I love that phrase. Jim, I'm going to use it
over and over. the red carpet is unrolling and
he, you know, President Trump is staggering down
that red carpet with great speed, sometimes with
not a lot of precision, but he's going down that
red carpet and that's what it entails. Well,
you hit the nail on the head when you said that
one thing that really stands in front of authoritarianism
is not only the lawyers, but also the press,
the media. I'm a strict adherent to the First
Amendment. In fact, I'm not sure if the First
Amendment has any limits in my opinion, because
my limits may not be your limits, or your limits
are not my limit. And I do believe that we need
a vigorous free press, a vigorous First Amendment,
and that it will be only the journalists and
the free press that keeps us truly free. I completely
agree. I completely agree on that. So since this
assessment was released, have you seen any other
events, and I'm sure they're legion, that have
been unfolded that are, you know, concerning
us in terms of accelerating this democratic decline?
Any other little examples that you, that the
things that you wake up and you say, I can't
believe this is happening? Well, I mean, the
last three weeks have been... Perfect. There
have been so many, but the most dramatic and
the most terrifying is what we're seeing in terms
of the president's exercising what he sees as
his commander -in -chief authorities, ignoring
a well -established law that requires congressional
involvement in deciding to attack another country.
Speaking about Venezuela here, that was then
sort of accelerated by a program of killing civilians
who are perceived to be committing crimes. There's
a word for that. We use that when we're looking
at overseas entities. It's called extrajudicial
killings. In layman's terms, it's called murders.
You can't do that. It's against international
law, it's against our law, and it is an action
of a dictator becoming a dictator. Not only because
he's doing what he wants unilaterally as if he's
an emperor, not a president, but it is a signal
to all of this. Remember, one of the first things
he said when he ran for president is, I could
shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue
and nobody would stop me. Well, he's shooting
people and he's putting it on video for us to
see. We're the audience there. I know that the
president of Venezuela is also the audience,
but we are the audience there. And it's the same
kind of thing when we're seeing the unending
videos of ICE beating up people on the streets,
picking up the wrong people, handcuffing children.
It's not just because of the brutality of it,
or whether it's some anger or racism against
people from other places. It's a message. It's
a message to all of us. Now, the last week and
a half, where we saw the vicious response to
members of Congress, all of whom who come out
of the national security world, not really criticizing,
but essentially reciting black letter basic American
law governing the military. You don't follow
unlawful orders. It's not a tradition. It's a
fundamental way that we look at things in the
United States military. By the way, people who
think we're disrespecting the military by repeating
that particular thing, that's dead wrong. It's
what our military is probably most proud of.
We're not the Russian army. We're not the German
army. We are the American army. We follow laws.
This comes out of the experience of World War
II and the Nuremberg trials. Today, we saw basically
the press secretary in the White House. Casually,
it said, yeah, we killed those guys floating
in the water. That's a homicide, and it's horrible.
It reminded me of something the Russians would
do or something that the SS in World War II would
do, execute people who have surrendered. It made
me sick when I heard about this. Before our time
is up, if you could advise listeners on one actionable
step to bolster our democratic resilience, what
would that one step be, Steve? The first step,
and I'll give you a couple of other ones, but
the first step, and we have a cute hashtag on
this too, and it's why we exist, is get smart.
You remember the old television show. If there's
ever a time that the American people have to
take the civics classes that were canceled in
our high schools 20 years ago, it's now. You
need to learn what's happening. You need to read
critically. You need to do all the things that
a dictator doesn't want you to do, which is learn,
speak, persuade, take positions. And then two
other things you're going to have to do, and
all of us are going to have to do. One. Organize
and vote. Just going to have to happen. We're
a democracy still. This is how we can save the
democracy. Our life vote is our vote. So vote,
vote, vote. And the other is not only organize
yourselves, but reach across. Before the Trump
era, we had plenty of policy issues that deeply,
deeply divided many Americans. And we yelled
and screamed at each other. We voted for different
people to carry them out. And that's great. That's
what's supposed to happen in democracy. Whether
you think A or B on Israel and Palestine or abortion
or climate change, that's great. But what's in
danger is your ability to actually argue about
those policies. I just spoke at a college that
had been roiled by these demonstrations on Palestine
and Israel. And I knew that in the audience were
people on both sides of that. And I said at the
way we're going, you are not going to be able
to help argue, decide anything about our policy
in the Middle East. It's going to be decided
in the sit room with Donald Trump and a few of
his kids and maybe a few billionaires, he knows.
And you'll have nothing to do with it. So you
need to defend that. And those are the two. Those
are the three steps I gave. Get smart, organized
and across the aisle. Yeah, those are those are
excellent recommendations. So if we had one overarching
message from the steady state to all Americans
who are listening to this, what would it be to
help safeguard our democracy? You've already
said vote, and I think that's a key vote. Keep
an open mind. What else? What else would you
recommend, Steve? I think you have to get your
your brain around something that's so hard to
think about and it's so unpleasant and horrible,
which is. Our nation is in existential danger
that we have never faced, certainly since the
Civil War. It's horrible to think about that.
It's horrible to think that we're all in danger,
that we are at risk. You're going to have to
have conversations around the family table that
you never thought you were going to have. Should
you speak out? I'm thinking of writing a letter
to the editor. Should I? Could that put my kids
in danger? That's what lots of people all around
the world have faced and many of them have risen
to the occasion and been brave and courageous
in all different ways and in all different degrees.
We really haven't had to do that across the nation,
and we have to now. That's the message, is an
existential threat, and now we need America to
meet it. Well, I was shocked when I read about
the fact that the six congressmen and senators
who spoke out saying that military and intelligence
officers do not have to follow illegal orders
and people criticized them for saying that, when
in fact it's part of the Uniform Code of Military
Justice. And obviously if somebody gave me an
order that I thought was unconstitutional or
illegal, I wouldn't follow it. But just saying
that intelligence officers and military officers
should follow the law, no, they don't have to
follow orders if it's illegal. That was shocking.
That was shocking to me. Absolutely. And it's
important both to understand that, but also to
recognize what that means. Because if the military
and the intelligence services can follow illegal
orders, that is the communication method. That's
the toolbox of the dictator, is giving illegal
orders. That's how it's done. And so, yeah, it
was heartsick. I was heartsick to hear that.
But I am optimistic. I always tell people like
all of this bleakness, it's what keeps me up
at night. But the optimism gets me up in the
morning and back to work at steady state because
Americans have risen to the occasion before and
we can do it again. Well, Steve, thank you so
much for being on our. This is our really our
initial program of the steady state sentinel.
And it was a tremendously. Wonderful to have
you here and to outline the the reasons why the
steady state exists. And as Steve said, WWW dot
the steady state dot org. And we will be coming
back in another week with another episode. I'm
Jim Lawler, the steady state sentinel still standing
watch. Thank you for listening to the steady
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