The briefer watched me as I read the material while offering additional color. These people had been up all night. They would meet in the early morning hours with the analysts who drafted the PDB articles to get additional context so they’d be ready for queries from people like me. I always felt compelled to ask questions, even when I didn’t have any, because they worked so hard to be prepared. In addition to the PDB articles, they’d include a packet of intelligence reports—a tiny sample of the enormous volume of information collected by the U.S. government—that were relevant to topics that
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