Former CIA museum curator highlights the agency's most important artifacts - transcript

"Intelligence Matters," CBS News' weekly podcast featuring interviews with top national security officials and experts, is launching a new series called, "Intelligence Matters DECLASSIFIED: Spy Stories from the Officers Who Were There."

Former Acting and Deputy CIA Director and CBS News senior national security contributor Michael Morell will be interviewing former intelligence officers about some of the most riveting – and often dangerous – stories of their careers. 

Future episodes will include these insider accounts:

• The 2014 evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in war-torn Benghazi, Libya, and how a young CIA analyst found herself at the center of a mission to protect her colleagues;
• The discovery, surveillance, and ultimate arrest in 2010 of 10 Russian sleeper agents known as "illegals" who operated for over a decade inside the United States; 
• CIA's fight with high-level officials from the Bush administration over the question of whether there were ties between Iraq and al Qaeda;
• The 2009 suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan by an al-Qaeda double agent who killed seven CIA officers in one of the most lethal attacks in CIA history;
• The years-long international manhunt set off by a gunman who killed two agency employees and injured three others outside CIA headquarters in 1993.

Intelligence Matters DECLASSIFIED episodes will be released at least once a month amid regularly scheduled episodes of Intelligence Matters. 

New episodes will be available on iTunes on Wednesdays and updates about future guests will be posted on Twitter and Facebook. Transcripts will be posted on CBSNews.com.

In the premiere episode of "Intelligence Matters DECLASSIFIED: Spy Stories from the Officers Who Were There," host Michael Morell interviews Toni Hiley, the former curator of the CIA's private museum, located at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Hiley takes listeners on a tour of the agency's most important exhibits and artifacts, explaining the historical context and personal stories behind each. Morell and Hiley explore pivotal events and the officers who witnessed them from World War II, the Cold War and the aftermath of 9/11.  

Highlights: 

• THE CIA MUSEUM'S HISTORY: "The program started in 1988. So our job as curators is to preserve the tangible heritage of the Central Intelligence Agency. Our officers make history every day and that those historical operations sometimes generate items of historical significance that can help us remember that operation, that event, and make sure that the lessons learned from it are preserved for current and future generations."
• CIA'S PREDECESSOR ORGANIZATION, THE O.S.S.: "So we trace our foundations to the O.S.S. Thirty percent of CIA in 1947 was O.S.S. and lineal descendants still serve there today. At a time when 70 percent of our workforce has joined since 9/11, I think it's imperative that they understand where they came from and where our origins are. So that's what we learn in the O.S.S. gallery."
• ON FEATURING A SPECIAL AIRCRAFT USED IN THE AFGHAN WAR: "It was the first American air asset into Afghanistan. It enabled CIA's operations for those first three months. And we wanted to collect it, but it still had an operational life in those early days. So we were able to get the clock off of it. And we displayed that for several years. We keep the clock set to 8:46, which is the time it was that the first plane hit the first tower..."

Follow CBS News on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and listen to podcasts at Play.it. 

INTELLIGENCE MATTERS – DECLASSIFIED 

INTELLIGENCE MATTERS DECLASSIFIED: TONI HILEY

MICHAEL MORELL: Toni, welcome to Intelligence Matters, it is great to have you on the show and it is very, very good to talk to you again.

TONI HILEY: It's wonderful to be back with you again, Michael. Thank you so much.

MICHAEL MORELL: So, Toni, chatting with you reminds me of a certain spy plane and how it came to sit on a rather nice platform in the CIA parking lot. Do you remember that?

TONI HILEY:   I remember it very well. This is back in 2007, leading up to the agency's sixtieth. And thanks to the support of the agency leadership, yourself included, we had the opportunity to collect one of just nine remaining A-12 Oxcart high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. The A-12 was the CIA's predecessor to the Air Force -- as our 71-year listeners are probably more familiar with. And it was designed to replace the U-2 over the Soviet Union. So we're coming up this summer on the 64th anniversary of the U-2's first overflight of the Soviet Union, the fourth of July 1956. Harvey Stockman was the pilot and Soviet radar had tracked that first overflight.

So it was only a matter of time before, we feared, that the Soviets might shoot down the U-2 – which they did on the 1st of May 1960. So already in 1956, 57, President Eisenhower knows he has to have another option. And the brilliant minds in our country told him, 'We think if we fly a plane three miles higher than the U-2' – so the U-2 flew at an operational altitude of seventy thousand feet. So it's 1957 and we want to fly three miles higher. And while we're at it almost five times faster, we can beat the radar. And I just think that's an extraordinary national strategic goal. 

So by 1959, the contract for the A-12 Oxcart – what a misnomer that was – was on the drawing board. It was first tested in 1962 and it met its design specifications by 1965. But by then, the Soviet Union was being photographed from space by Corona, the first photo reconnaissance satellite. So the A-12 didn't have a mission until 31 May 1967, when CIA pilot Mel Vojvodich came in hot, hit Mach 3.1 at 82-thousand feet to photograph missile sites throughout Southeast Asia, part of the Vietnam War.

And that intelligence that the A-12 gathered during those 29 operational flights helped save my dad's life. My dad flew 23 combat missions between '66 and '68. As the pilot, it would be 57. And thanks to the A-12's intelligence, he now knew where the missiles were that could shoot him down.

MICHAEL MORELL: Great story. So, Toni, you were the curator at CIA for 20-some years, I believe. How did you come to do that job and what does the job entail?

TONI HILEY: So I was actually the agency's third curator and had the honor to build on the work of two predecessors. The program started in 1988. So our job as curators is to preserve the tangible heritage of the Central Intelligence Agency. Our officers make history every day and that those historical operations sometimes generate items of historical significance that can help us remember that operation, that event, and make sure that the lessons learned from it are preserved for current and future generations.

So we do that work through managing thousands of artifacts, through doing educational exhibits, through providing tours to our official visitors, through publications and through the work that we do every day to preserve our history.

MICHAEL MORELL: So one of the things you did, Toni, that I found inspiring was a presentation you did each month to those agency officers who were just returning from war zones. I'm wondering if you could tell us about that and what the purpose of those presentations were to people who had already been in the agency for some period of time.

TONI HILEY: So we're coming up on 20 years since 9/11 and we have maintained an operational pace, an extraordinary operational pace as an organization, since then. A good chunk of the workforce has served in war zones around the world, and when they come back, they have a two-day training course to help share their lessons learned, and we help with that reentry. 

And I had the honor for several years to provide their final briefing, which was an historical look at their predecessors, agency officers who have gone to war over the past almost 75 years now, even going back to our World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. So by simply telling stories of intelligence officers at war, we gave them, I think, a look at their context in the current operations and war zones they served in and put it into a bigger historical context with stories going back to World War II.

MICHAEL MORELL: So, Toni, I would love to have you give our listeners a digital tour of the various museums and artifacts at the agency, a kind of walk around, taking us through the various exhibits and pointing out some of your favorite artifacts and perhaps some of my favorites. 

I think this will be meaningful to our listeners because the vast majority of them will never get to see these exhibits. And maybe the place to start is with the O.S.S. Museum, which is in the agency's new headquarters building. 

So if you're watching a movie and you're watching a flyover of the agency, it's the greenish glass building in the back of the original headquarters building. So, Toni, tell us about the O.S.S. Museum. What's the flow that a visitor goes through? What do you want people to take away from spending time there?

TONI HILEY: So the O.S.S. Gallery is our legacy exhibit. And what we hope visitors to the gallery will take away is that O.S.S. wouldn't have existed but for two men, Wild Bill Donovan and President Roosevelt. That the Office of Strategic Services was a full source, full-service intelligence agency. Donovan pulled together a think tank of the leading scholars and historians of the day – people like Sherman Kent, William Langer, Walter Langer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – and their contribution to the craft of intelligence was all-source strategic intelligence analysis. That's the work done by today's Directorate of Analysis. 

Donovan had a "Q." His name was Stanley Lovell and he was a Boston chemist Donovan brought on board in 1942 to be the head of research and development. Donovan said to him, 'Stanley, we need every underhanded trick and devilish device to help defeat the enemy. You will invent them. Start today.' Today's Directorate of Science and Technology. 

Donovan had operations officers like Allen Dulles just as chief of station in Bern, Switzerland, sending agents into Hitler's high command, helping broker the surrender of Axis forces in Italy – today's Directorate of operations. 

And of course, Donovan had a world class support operation, administrative and support, to enable all of those functions – today's Directorate of Support. 

He didn't have a Directorate of Intelligence to do the digital side of things, of course, like we're structured today. But that all laid the foundation for the agency that we know today. 

In fact, I think we can say that had Donovan not accomplished all that he did in three-and-a-half short years, that it it's unlikely that Truman could have established the CIA just two years after World War II. And then by 1949, the Soviets having a bomb and the Cold War is on. 

So we trace our foundations to the O.S.S. Thirty percent of CIA in 1947 was O.S.S. and lineal descendants still serve there today. At a time when 70 percent of our workforce has joined since 9/11, I think it's imperative that they understand where they came from and where our origins are. So that's what we learn in the O.S.S. gallery.

MICHAEL MORELL: Toni, let me ask you about one piece in the O.S.S. Museum that I think is incredibly special.

It's a letter from an O.S.S. officer to his young son. Can you tell us about that letter? And if you have it there in front of you, could you even read it to us?

TONI HILEY: So I think the Helms letter that you're referring to is one of our our most important heritage asset treasures. And Helms had joined the O.S.S. in 1943, served in London, and towards the end of the war, he may have been one of the first intelligence officers to get into Hitler's bunker down in Bavaria, where he very well may have picked up this piece of Hitler's letterhead. 

The historical record doesn't tell us exactly where he found this piece of letterhead. But on Victory in Europe Day, he wrote a note on it to his three-year-old son.

And the note says, "Dear Dennis – and I know it by heart. 

"Dear Dennis. The man who might have written on this card three short years ago when you were born once controlled Europe. Today he's dead. His memory despised, his country in ruins. He had a low opinion of mans as an individual, a fear of intellectual honesty. He was a force for evil in the world, his death, his defeat, a boon to mankind. But thousands died that it might be so. The price for ridding society of bad is always high. Love, Daddy."

MICHAEL MORELL: That's remarkable. And when when did we receive that letter, Toni?

TONI HILEY: We received that letter that Monday that we, as a work force, learn in 2011 that bin Laden was dead. And that last sentence just raised the hair on our arms because we know only too well that the price for ridding society of bad is very, very high. A simple look in our Book of Honor at the number of stars since 9/11 tells you that.

MICHAEL MORELL: So, Toni, there's another piece in the museum that that always drew my attention because, as you know, I grew up as an analyst. And that's actually a psychological assessment of Hitler. Can you tell us about that piece?

TONI HILEY: I think this is another amazing piece as well. And I'll refer your listeners to CIA's website, where we have an exhibit catalog on the O.S.S. gallery, so that they can they can almost read does the catalog and and visit the gallery that way. 

So in 1942, General Donovan – actually, he was Colonel Donovan, he didn't receive his first star until '43.

So Donovan commissioned a psychoanalysis of Hitler written by Walter Langer. And this was prescient. Donovan was brilliant. And he believed in using every possible means to understand our our adversaries. And Langer's psychological analysis of Hitler turned out to be very, very prescient, like I said, He predicted in this psychoanalysis the military coup against Hitler in 1944. And he also predicted Hitler's suicide in 1945. So it's an amazing document.

MICHAEL MORELL: Maybe the last piece to talk about in the O.S.S. Museum, which always draws the eyes of visitors, is the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. Tell us about that.

TONI HILEY: So William Fairbairn was a British special operations executive. SOE was the British clandestine paramilitary service that elements of O.S.S. were modeled after. And he was a major Donovan brought on board from SOE to teach hand-to-hand combat up at Catoctin Mountain Park up by Camp David. And Fairbairn believed that every fighting man should have a fighting knife but he wanted his knife to be used against the vulnerable points of the body rather than as a slashing knife like a military knife was. 

So he and his business partner, E. A. Sykes – it's called the Fairbairn-Sykes – developed this knife for SOE. And it transitioned over to O.S.S. as well. Fairbairn wrote a book on hand-to-hand combat that he based on martial arts and just dirty gutter fighting. And if you turn to the chapter on knife fighting, the first thing he tells you to do in a knife fight is bring a gun. 

You really don't want to be in a knife fight. If anybody pulls a knife on you, then you need to run like the dickens. But, so, if you see a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife that has a unique scabbard with a pancake spatula on the end of it, that's specific to O.S.S.. 

So resources were limited during the war. They couldn't give up a whole production unit for the various units that were interested in this knife. So instead, they went to a kitchen utensil company and saw that there was a metal dye in place for the pancake spatula with those slats in it that could easily take a belt width of varying widths woven through it. They stuck that on the scabbard and off to war they went. So it's one of our favorite artifacts as well.

MICHAEL MORELL: OK, Toni, let's leave the O.S.S. Museum and let's walk a couple hundred yards back to the original headquarters building. So the white stone building from the movie flyovers. And this is where you start most of your tours, right, in the agency main lobby.

So take us there. Tell us about what's there and why do you start your tours there?

TONI HILEY: We like to stand on the agency's seal there in the lobby, right in the middle of the compass rose to symbolize that Our guests, as they stand there, are standing at the center of intelligence with intelligence coming in from all points of the globe to the center.

It's also where our commemorative installations are; we have a single star to the 116 O.S.S-ers who died during World War II. CIA's Memorial Wall is there as well. One hundred and thirty-three stars on that wall. When I joined in 1999, there were 77 stars on the wall; 133 now. 

And every agency officer on that very first day swears their oath of office in front of that wall with 133 of our colleagues watching, and General Donovan looking over their shoulders. It's an amazing place to start your career. 

There's another memorial there that you and I worked on together, which is the Fallen Agent Memorial where we honor agents like Popoff and Penkovsky and Tolkachev and Kuklinski, who also made great sacrifices and risked their lives to give us the intelligence that we needed. 

So we leave the the lobby, we go up to the upper lobby, which is our presidents gallery. And our compound is named the George Bush Center for Intelligence after '41, George Herbert Walker Bush, who was director from '76 to '77. And then that leads us to the Afghan gallery where we start the gallery tours.

MICHAEL MORELL: Tell us about the Afghan exhibit.

TONI HILEY: So the preamble to our exhibit on CIA's role in Operation Enduring Freedom, of course, starts with the attacks on our country on 9/11. So from each of the attack sites, we have representative artifacts. From New York, a piece of a U.S. government safe that came out of World Trade Center 7 from Shanksville; a gym bag that belonged to one of the passengers onboard Flight 93. Deora was the youngest passenger on 93 and she was on her way home to visit her family. Her mother donated her gym bag to us; it still has the Flight 93 sticker on it from the crash at Shanksville. 

And then the case that we have dedicated to the Pentagon contains some particularly poignant artifacts. You'll recall that Flight 77 crashed right through the Naval Operations Center. Everybody, almost everybody in that part of the Pentagon was killed, as well as everybody on 77. And moments before the plane hit, a young Army sergeant had stepped out of the ops center to go to the men's room, when all chaos broke loose. When he recovered, he took his shirt off, he soaked it in water and went back in towards the ops center to see which of his colleagues he could help. 

And he found a young naval officer who had been severely injured by the blast, the explosion from the aircraft, it actually rolled in over his shoulder, melted the name tag on his uniform, but didn't touch the ribbons he was wearing that day. And we have the ribbons that he was wearing on display there in that first case. 

He was still alive and the sergeant got him out of the building, eventually up to Walter Reed, where the docs took over. Very long recovery, many, many operations. And his heart stopped twice on operating tables. Docs brought him back. 

Following a long recovery, he served on the 9/11 Commission and then he made a decision to continue to try to make a difference. And he joined the Central Intelligence Agency, and he was a part of the team that helped lead the hunt for bin Laden for nine years, seven months and 20 days.

MICHAEL MORELL: And there's a there's a personal twist here for you with regard to the bin Laden operation and him, correct?

TONI HILEY: Yes. So I had the honor in 2011 to tour the assault team through the museum shortly after the raid. And I usually judge my success with a tour group if I can make them laugh at some of my stories.

You know, this is a very serious story, but there's some there's always some dark humor in an event. And I to work really hard with those guys. They are definitely deadly serious. I told them the very same story I just told you. And then it's very hard to shock these special warriors, these incredible Americans that do what they do for us. 

But I said to them, having told them the story of the officer those ribbons belong to, I said, 'And now I'd like you to meet him. He's with us today.' Kevin was with us that day and he stepped forward to this shocked group of assaulters and shook hands with every single one of them, passed a coin that only survivors of the Pentagon pass. And I stood there and watched their world just come together. It was an amazing, amazing, amazing experience for Kevin as well as for them.

MICHAEL MORELL:  So Toni, while we're on the bin Laden raid, two other pieces that I would love to talk about.

One is the scale model and the other [is a pair of boots].

TONI HILEY: It felt very good several years ago to be able to add two additional artifacts to that Afghan gallery to put a punctuation point on it, if you will. 

And those two artifacts are a 7:1 scale model of the Abbottabad compound that CIA commissioned of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. And their model makers used hundreds of pieces of all-source intelligence to create this 7:1 scale model and make it as accurate as possible. And the original model was used to brief the president, used by the operational planners to plan the mission, used by the assault team to prepare. And then the very same intelligence that made that model as accurate as possible was then used to build a full-scale mockup of the entire compound. And it was on that mockup that the assault team came in to physically practice for the raid. 

The other artifact that we include nearby are a pair of boots that belong to one of the assaulters who was on the helicopter that went down. And when they started training for the operation, those boots were brand new. And they did so much fast-roping to drop from the helicopter down to the X – so much of that practice that the rope actually wore a groove in the arch of one of one of the shoes. So he wore those shoes to training. He wore them on the raid. He told us that when he got home that night after the after the operation was over, he was able to tuck his son into bed. And several months later, he presented the shoes to us for our collection.

MICHAEL MORELL: And then there's all that in the Afghan museum there. There's also a saddle in the Afghan museum. What's that all about?

TONI HILEY: So I was sitting in my chair one February morning, 2002, reading the newspaper, drinking my tea and read that Special Forces was on horseback in Afghanistan. 

And I thought to myself, 'If they're on horseback, so are we." So we went straight into work, and I contacted a friend of mine over in the Counterterrorism Center and I asked him if it would be possible to get a saddle out of Afghanistan so we could tell the story of our second team in. 

So the first team into Afghanistan entered on the 26th of September, 15 days after 9/11. So that's Gary Schroen's team. The second team went in on 16, 17 October, led by J.R. And J.R.'s team was actually on horseback for the first 10 days of their deployment, riding from their headquarters, which they had nicknamed The Alamo, to wherever General Dostum was, as they are serving as pathfinders to the eastern Northern Alliance for the military that came in, the task force dagger that came in two days after we did. 

So they spent 14 to 18 hours a day in those Uzbek saddles. There's no padding, just carpeting, on stallions – because we don't geld in this part of the world – running operations from the back of a horse. So we had to have a a saddle to tell that story. And I found out later how it came to us. 

So the poor communications officer at Mazar-e-Sharif got the tasking. You know, "The curator would like a saddle, go get her one." So he took an Afghan counterpart and Afghan partner down to the bazaar that day, and bargained for the saddle. I think they paid $110 dollars for it and shipped it back to me. I learned later that a month after they had gone down to the bazaar to buy our saddle, that we lost that Afghan partner. So we always remember him when we talk about the saddle.

MICHAEL MORELL: So Toni let's leave the Afghan exhibit and the CIA museum and retrace our steps a couple of hallways, maybe a couple hundred yards to another to another hallway where there's an exhibit called "The Art of Intelligence." Tell us about that.

TONI HILEY: We established an intelligence art collection back in 2004, 2005. The agency's mission is to go where others cannot go and accomplish what others cannot accomplish. And so the art collection allows CIA museum and our visitors to go where we couldn't go historically. 

We might not have an artifact related to that moment in time, and this picture is worth a thousand words. The paintings enable us to capture that history and ensure that it remains accessible to the workforce. So with a generous donation of fifteen donors, we established the core of the collection, which it turns out are mostly aviation-related paintings. But, you know, I don't have a problem with that, thanks to my dad.

Although the workforce has given me some crunchy feedback complaining that there are too many aviation paintings. And I was commiserating with a friend of mine in Ground Department one day and he looked at me and he said, "You know, we don't walk to these places," – so that was good enough for me. But we have done a strategic plan for the collection and we're very busy to fill in those gaps. So we now have – we just finished a painting, by the way, that you'll be seeing here sometime later this year. And we have 24 paintings in the collection now.

MICHAEL MORELL: So my favorite is the painting of Virginia Hall. Can you tell us about that painting? Can you tell us about her?

TONI HILEY: I think it's one of my favorites as well. It's by Jeff Bass. And Virginia Hall was a Baltimore native who joined the State Department in the 1930s and had various postings, suffered a hunting accident while she was in Izmir, Turkey, and lost a left leg. 

She had hoped to join the State Department as a diplomat but wasn't able to – the State Department had a regulation back in those days that they couldn't post officers abroad who had lost a major limb. 

So she resigned and traveled in France, got caught in France when World War II broke out. She stayed and drove an ambulance for a while, actually. And then the British recruited her, Special Operations Executive recruited her to be a radio operator for an agent network in Lille. Eventually, she was betrayed by one of her agents. She had to escape. She made it  over the Pyrenees that November with a wooden leg and eventually made it back to London, where she was picked up by the O.S.S. and inserted back into occupied France on a British torpedo boat two months in advance of D-Day, where she sent 37 intelligence messages back to London, and that's what the painting depicts. 

She would move from a different barn, sometimes in the morning, sometimes late at night, moving constantly so the enemy couldn't triangulate on her position, and sent those messages via a suitcase radio with the help of her French counterpart, Edmund Lebrat, who had rigged a temporary generator with a bicycle to generate power for her radio. 

After D-Day, she linked up with a Jedburgh team and paramilitary operations officers, and together they trained 1,500 free French. At the end of the war, President Roosevelt invited her to the White House to receive the only Distinguished Service Cross. This is one of our nation's highest awards for valor, and the only one presented to a female civilian during the war. 

But she was still operational. She was in Paris at the time. She thought of herself as an intelligence officer first, and she didn't want the publicity of going to the White House. So she politely declined, and instead, Donovan presented the award to her. It's a decoration that we display in the O.S.S. gallery. We have her original. 

She received the award from him at the desk that we also have in the gallery, accompanied by her mother just three days before O.S.S. was dissolved. She went on to serve in the agency, was one of our first six women to join, and one of our first paramilitary officers.

MICHAEL MORELL: So, Toni, we started our discussion with an artifact that was an aircraft, the A-12. And so I think we should finish with another. And that CIA, as you know, just acquired a particular aircraft that was used in the early days of the Afghan war after 9/11. Tell us about that.

TONI HILEY: This is the Russian-built Mi-17, and it was the aircraft that the agency used to fly into Afghanistan 15 days after 9/11 to take the War on Terror to the enemy. The team was led by Gary Schroen, and Gary and his team's mission is a strategic one to work on a very high level to cement that coalition of cooperation with Eastern and Northern Alliance.

Aboard that aircraft are seven agency officers, three air crew, two Afghan partners, two thousand pounds of equipment, extra fuel and three million dollars.

MICHAEL MORELL: I love to throw three million dollars part, by the way.

TONI HILEY: If you've ever flown on an Mi-17, you might describe it as 10,000 parts all trying to come apart at once. Thanks to the Air Department, Special Activities Center, we were able to collect the clock off of 91101. So the aircraft received a tail number two days after landing in theater in the Panjshir Valley. 91101 was the tail number and that identified it as a Northern Alliance aircraft; it had no track transponder on it. So to delineate it as a friendly aircraft, the American flag and U.S.A. were painted on the horizontal stabilizers. 

So that's such an historic object, that aircraft. It was the first American air asset into Afghanistan. It enabled CIA's operations for those first three months. And we wanted to collect it, but it still had an operational life in those early days. So we were able to get the clock off of it. And we displayed that for several years. We keep the clock set to 8:46, which is the time it was that the first plane hit the first tower, and then it took many, many years, and the work of many, many people. And kudos to my successor, Rob Byer, and his team and the partnership all over the agency that enabled us to bring that helicopter to its final display there at headquarters, where it is a bookend installation that speaks to not only the attacks – we have a piece of steel from the World Trade Center – but the agency's response aboard that helicopter 15 days after 9/11.

MICHAEL MORELL: So, Toni, you have been amazing with your time. I just want to ask you one more question, which is just in the 40 minutes or so that you have been with us, it is so easy to tell that you absolutely loved your job. Why did you love it so much? What was it about it?

TONI HILEY: I think it was the opportunity to serve our beloved agency, the Central Intelligence Agency. And to honor the sacrifice of the men and women who every day risked their lives to get our policymakers the most accurate, up-to-date intelligence, to preserve the national security of our nation. Most Americans will never know what we do on a daily basis. And the museum is one place where the stories that we can share with the public can be told. Because the museum is at headquarters, most Americans will never get to see it, but they can visit our website. We push as much as we can out on the website.

The museum operates within under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Intelligence, which is our agency's historical think tank. So, just ensuring the Center for the Study of Intelligence, the Museum, our Lessons Learned program, our history program, oral history and emerging trends, do everything that we can on a daily basis to preserve the knowledge and the lessons learned that we make by making history every day, and ensure that that knowledge is accessible, that it remains accessible to inform, instruct and inspire current and future generations.

MICHAEL MORELL:  Toni, thank you so much for joining us.

TONI HILEY:  Thank you, sir. Great to be here.