Poitras flew again to New York for what she imagined would be her meeting with a senior intelligence bureaucrat.
As her character begs for answers from government officials, including a cold-hearted intelligence bureaucrat played by Meryl Streep, Witherspoon transforms into a desperate, emotional wreck.
Today, because of that decision, Mr. Drake, 53, a veteran intelligence bureaucrat who collected early computers, faces years in prison on 10 felony charges involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice.
The story moves around a lot — from Yemen to Canada, from Chicago to Marseille — and involves a lot of interesting minor characters, from Samir's former girlfriend (Archie Panjabi) to the intelligence bureaucrat (Jeff Daniels) who knows his deepest secrets.
When he was staff secretary, responsible for the flow of paper to the Oval Office, Mr. Podesta was particularly annoyed by intelligence bureaucrats who dressed up routine memorandums with "top secret" designations to get the president's attention.
Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States.
The resulting CIA-FBI controversy was of the sort intelligence bureaucrats describe as leaving blood on the floor.
While leaks of this kind are embarrassing to the White House, intelligence agency bureaucrats and the two committee chairmen, they have helped alert the public to possible defects in N.S.A. monitoring operations and have increased public pressure for an independent investigation of possible intelligence failures.
The interviewees alone are proof of the clout that tech firms enjoy: business magnates, high-ranking bureaucrats, intelligence chiefs and leaders and former leaders of Malaysia, Mongolia, Rwanda, Mexico and Tunisia.Governments that are in denial about impending change will find themselves battling to control their citizens.
Decision-makers choke on such 'information.' For example, the bureaucrats in intelligence, in order to get more and more funding, need to feed the fears of the decision-makers, and so they exaggerate the threat of an 'Orange Revolution' " — a political rebellion of the kind that transformed Ukraine, nearly three years ago — "coming to Russia, even though no such threat exists".
"It is not an autocracy, it is an oligarchy," he said, explaining that in addition to the president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, there are multiple power centers, like the military, the intelligence services and the elite bureaucrats.
