If praise from a former U.S. president, and a Foreword by another is any evidence, local author David Priess has hit the target with his first book. Published on March 1, the title explains Priess’ connections to White House residents—“The President’s Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America’s Presidents from Kennedy to Obama.”
The heart of the book is devoted to the history of the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB in acronym-speak. Since 1964, the CIA has delivered the document to the president every day but Sunday. Only a few others designated by the president see this extraordinarily sensitive summary. Priess, a Vienna resident, now makes the details of its production and customers available to the public.
George H. W. Bush wrote the book’s Foreword, and in a letter to Priess spoke fondly of the PDB. “When I was president, one of my favorite times of the day was when I would sit down with a briefer and read through the PDB.” As a former director of the CIA, Bush was the most ardent consumer of intelligence among modern presidents. Eight years after leaving the White House, Bush wanted to make sure his son respected the PDB’s value to the presidency. He offered direct advice on the document through Andy Card, George W. Bush’s prospective chief of staff. “Make sure he reads the PDB every day.”
The younger President Bush heeded that suggestion and became the second most avid and interactive reader of the highly classified document. In a note to Priess two weeks ago, he wrote, “Congratulations on its publication. Laura and I send our best wishes.” He added a handwritten postscript, “Good read, David! Keep writing.”
Armed with a doctorate in international relations from Duke University, Priess joined the CIA in early 1998 and became a Mideast and counterterrorism analyst. He soon began contributing articles to the PDB in addition to his other work. Early in the Bush administration, Priess became the daily PDB briefer for Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller. He left the agency in 2004, and is currently director of Analytic Services for Analytic Advantage, Inc. in Reston. He and his family are long-time Vienna residents.
For the book, Priess interviewed every living former president and vice president, eleven national security advisers, almost every CIA director and director of national intelligence, and dozens of CIA and White House staffers. He introduces the reader to the PDB’s successes in forecasting major international events—the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the 1991 coup attempt against the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, for example. Priess also digs into examples of the PDB’s predictive failures—the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the infamous article five weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US.”
“I wanted to write a ‘no-kidding’ history about a daily institution in every recent president’s life,” Priess said in a recent interview. “For fifty years, the PDB has been a rare constant in a city defined by change, especially every four or eight years.”