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The President's Daily Brief (PDB) serves as a conduit for vital intelligence, distilling complex information into concise, actionable insights for the US president.
The PDB may not share the heart-pounding intensity of Katherine Heigl in State of Affairs, but it’s hard to imagine a more urgent brief. The president is updated daily on SIGINT, analysis, covert ops, and reports from sources and allies.
The brief includes CIA, NSA, FBI, and Defense Department input among other agencies. Today, we’re reading you in on 10 PDB secrets.
1. Top-down leaks
Some PDB leaks come straight from the top. President Joe Biden knocked Russian leader Vladimir Putin during a 2021 speech to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for Putin’s alleged Russian intervention in the 2022 midterm elections, noting his PDB contained the details. “In today’s PDB you all prepared for me, look what Russia is doing already about the 2022 elections and misinformation. It’s a pure violation of our sovereignty,” Biden said.
In President G.H. Bush's book A World Transformed, he describes Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 and his 7:30 am PDB with CIA briefer Hank Applebaum. Bush, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and then-Secretary of State Jim Baker discussed their next steps. "Jim had been warned of the ominous signs in the Gulf and had already spoken with [Eduard] Shevardnadze about the danger of an invasion,” Bush writes. “With the news of the invasion, Jim had urged the Soviets to join an arms embargo of Iraq, and Shevardnadze departed for Moscow to consult with Gorbachev."
In an effort to contain leaks, President G. W. Bush cautiously shared his PDBs with the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, an independent body created by Congress to investigate 9/11 - although the decision came after much debate and compromise. In the end, three commission members and the staff director were allowed to see the original PDBs from the Bush and Clinton years and write a summary for their peers.
2. The PDB legal tussle
After much sturm und drang, the CIA released thousands of PDBs in 2015 after a court battle including sanitized versions of briefings for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson (and later Nixon and Ford) on intelligence gathered during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Vietnam. About 5,000 briefs were released in all. We’ll never really know with certainty what the presidents were told because intelligence is excised from the unclassified versions. In one article, for example, the subject was 'Canada', and the rest was just a blank page.
3. Formats
There’s no ‘right’ way to deliver the PDB. During the administration of Richard Nixon, who had a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the CIA, a courier brought the PDB to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's office, which then delivered it to the Oval Office for Nixon to read at his convenience throughout the day. President President Obama read his PDB digitally on a tablet, often alone. Trump preferred bullet points.
4. What’s the content?
John Negroponte, former director of National Intelligence said his typical brief included six or seven articles, usually one paragraph to one page long, plus two longer 'deep dive' pieces delivered during a 30-45 minute meeting. In one of President G.W. Bush’s PDBs, for example, the president and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discussed Abu Zubaydah, the first suspected terrorist taken into the CIA detention program.
Back in 2001, more than 60 percent of the President’s Daily Brief material was sourced from signals intelligence (SIGINT), a figure that has likely increased. A leaked PDB document indicated that PRISM - run by the NSA - was a source of 1,477 items in the 2012 calendar year.
5. 9/11 and the PDB
Between January 20 and September 10, 2001, there were more than 40 PDB intelligence articles related to Osama bin Ladin, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. The Commission called for the declassification of a PDB from August 6, 2001, entitled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US, which was released with redactions.
Former National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice told a press briefing that the August 6, 2001 PDB included information about bin Ladin’s methods of operation from a historical perspective dating back to 1997, including that he might choose to hijack an airliner and hold passengers hostage in exchange for the release of one of their operatives. She said the report contained a generalized warning and no intel that al-Qaeda was discussing a particular planned attack against a specific target.
