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Speaker 1: Special Operations, Cobert Ops, Aspionage, The Team House with Your Hopes,
Speaker 1: Jack Murphy and David bark. Hey, everyone, welcome to episode
Speaker 1: two hundred and ninety seven of The Team House. I'm
Speaker 1: Jack Murphy and we're here tonight with Eric O'Neil, the
Speaker 1: author of Gray Day. He served as an FBI investigative specialist,
Speaker 1: did a number of counter terrorism investigations, including the one
Speaker 1: that led up to the arrest of Robert Hanson, who
Speaker 1: some say is maybe the most damaging spy in American history.
Speaker 1: Excited to get into all that with him. I want
Speaker 1: to tell people real quick before we jump into it.
Speaker 1: There's a link down in our description to our Patreon
Speaker 1: if you want to subscribe to the channel and support
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Speaker 1: to all of these episodes ad free when you sign up.
Speaker 1: So we really appreciate all of you guys who do that.
Speaker 1: And also just want to plug real quick my book
Speaker 1: I have coming out in December, December ninth. We defy
Speaker 1: the lost chapters of Special Forces History as chapters on
Speaker 1: Blue Light Green Light Dead, a debt k the guys
Speaker 1: who are undercover in Berlin during the Cold War, the
Speaker 1: liaison team that exists in Korea to this day. This
Speaker 1: was a lot of fun to work on and I'm
Speaker 1: really excited to finally get it out there this December.
Speaker 1: There's a pre order page up on Amazon right now.
Speaker 1: I appreciate if you guys check it out. So, Eric,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: It's good to be here, Jack.
Speaker 1: So you know, the first question I usually ask people
Speaker 1: is about their origin story. If you can tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about like what your upbringing was like
Speaker 1: and how that sort of eventually took you towards governmental service.
Speaker 3: Sure, no worries. I was sort of born into the government.
Speaker 3: I was born into the Navy. I was the last
Speaker 3: kid born in the Naval Hospital and Charles Navy Base
Speaker 3: in Charleston, South Carolina. My father was a submariner, you know,
Speaker 3: he sort of followed his father's footsteps. His father was
Speaker 3: in surface warfare, so it was a tin Can soldier.
Speaker 3: So I guess he went under a little different And
Speaker 3: you know, my my plan growing up was to join
Speaker 3: the Navy, just like my father and his father and two.
Speaker 2: Uncles and assorted other family members. You know.
Speaker 3: My father left the navy when I was rather young.
Speaker 3: We moved around a bit and he ended up going
Speaker 3: to law school. So I was raised in the DC
Speaker 3: area from about age four and had that basic suburban
Speaker 3: d C. Upbringing.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: My father's Irish, my mother is Italian, so I had
Speaker 3: the Catholic from both sides, you know, so that was
Speaker 3: a big part of the upbringing. Went to high school
Speaker 3: at Gonzaga in Washington, d C. You know, it was
Speaker 3: an Eagle, and finally ended up going to college. Now,
Speaker 3: my plan was to was to go study aerospace engineering,
Speaker 3: for a year and then applied to the Naval Academy.
Speaker 3: I didn't get in right away, and went to Auburn University,
Speaker 3: studied airspace and decided after a year it wasn't gonna
Speaker 3: stick with airspace.
Speaker 2: And I also wasn't gonna go to the Navy, which
Speaker 2: was the.
Speaker 3: Most complicated and difficult conversation never held with my parents.
Speaker 3: My father was great about it. He was like, look,
Speaker 3: you got to find your own path through life. But
Speaker 3: I think I always regretted that decision a little bit
Speaker 3: and wanted to definitely serve my country in some way,
Speaker 3: shape or form. So when I graduated from Auburn, I
Speaker 3: started applying, and I applied to the FBI, the DA,
Speaker 3: the c i A, the NSA, you know, secret service.
Speaker 3: And in those days, I mean we're talking the you know,
Speaker 3: the the early nineties.
Speaker 2: You are ninety five.
Speaker 3: You you sent a postcard and they sent you a packet,
Speaker 3: and you used to have theseus these things called typewriters.
Speaker 3: I'm not even that old, and back then you had
Speaker 3: to type this whole thing, and it was it was
Speaker 3: onerous and absolutely terrible, but I did it. I diligently
Speaker 3: sat there, typed up all those things, and I immediately
Speaker 3: heard back from the Secret Service, the FBI, and the DA.
Speaker 3: I had a friend who was in the Secret Service
Speaker 3: to talked me out of it, and it was between
Speaker 3: the FBI and the DA, and the DA gave me
Speaker 3: a spot at quant I'm there, sorry. BI gave me
Speaker 3: a spot at Quantico that both DA and FBI train
Speaker 3: at the Quantico Quantico Marine Base in Virginia one day
Speaker 3: before the dea recruiter called me to give me his spot.
Speaker 3: So that one day, you know, between the FBI and
Speaker 3: the DA completely changed the whole outcome of my life
Speaker 3: because if it had been in the DA, I probably
Speaker 3: would have been deployed. I would have gone to South
Speaker 3: America something like that. I wouldn't have met my wife,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't be married with three amazing kids. I'd have
Speaker 3: a completely different life than I have now.
Speaker 1: It's it's super funny to you know, I've interviewed a
Speaker 1: lot of folks like you or in this sort of
Speaker 1: career field, and I mean talking to people who had
Speaker 1: these amazing careers like at CIA, like so, why do
Speaker 1: you join the CIA. Well, they were the first one
Speaker 1: that got back to me when I submitted to all
Speaker 1: these agencies. It's like, wow, Okay, that's how you hide
Speaker 1: up your mind. Okay, but it all worked out.
Speaker 3: It worked out great. And look, you know, for me,
Speaker 3: I wanted to do something outside the norm. I didn't
Speaker 3: want to just you know, go be a consultant, because
Speaker 3: that's what everybody was doing in ninety five when I graduated.
Speaker 3: They were going to big cities and they were being
Speaker 3: a consultant to do something I'm not even sure what
Speaker 3: consultants do. And now I'm a bit of a consultant,
Speaker 3: but very targeted way. Uh, and I and I wanted
Speaker 3: to do something that made a difference that you know
Speaker 3: they I mean, you served when at the end of
Speaker 3: the day you have that feeling like I made a
Speaker 3: difference in the world. And and that's that's I think
Speaker 3: everybody should should, at some point in their life do that.
Speaker 3: And that could be you know, working for a charity.
Speaker 3: I ended up doing that for years as well. But
Speaker 3: but going to the FBI gave me skills that I've
Speaker 3: used for the entire rest.
Speaker 2: Of my life. I continued to use them.
Speaker 3: It's a unique way of looking at the world. Working
Speaker 3: in counterintelligence. That just opened your mind to make connections
Speaker 3: that you wouldn't make if you didn't have that sort
Speaker 3: of training. And I'm pretty damn good under pressure. So
Speaker 3: I took a lot from the FBI.
Speaker 1: You had an unconventional career at the FBI. You were
Speaker 1: not a special agent. Did you know that when you applied?
Speaker 1: Did you know that when you got recruited, that you
Speaker 1: were not going to be a special agent, that there
Speaker 1: was actually this other thing that you were going to
Speaker 1: get sucked into.
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, Jack, when I applied to the FBI was twenty two,
Speaker 3: twenty one, twenty two, and that was back then you
Speaker 3: had to be twenty.
Speaker 2: Five to be a special agent.
Speaker 3: But they came back to me and said, we really
Speaker 3: love your application. I guess I spelled things right when
Speaker 3: I typed it. And they do these KSAs nowledge schools
Speaker 3: and aptitude and I scored really high on those. And
Speaker 3: so they said, you know, we can't offer you a
Speaker 3: spot in special agents class, but would you consider this
Speaker 3: top secret group. Now it's not top secret any longer
Speaker 3: because I wrote about it in Grade A and the
Speaker 3: FBI gave me permission to talk about the.
Speaker 2: Special Surveillance Group.
Speaker 3: The classification is Investigative Specialists, and the the aka is ghosts.
Speaker 3: And what we did is we worked fully undercover. See
Speaker 3: idea in the FBI was that special agents weren't doing
Speaker 3: so great at following people because those age and agents
Speaker 3: class you learned so many things. And back back when
Speaker 3: special agents were starting to try to follow Russians around
Speaker 3: during the Cold War, it was, you know, a bunch
Speaker 3: of buzz cut guys who all looked the same in
Speaker 3: suits trying to follow an intelligence officer down the street
Speaker 3: and it just didn't work out. So what the FBI
Speaker 3: decided to do is We're going to grab a group
Speaker 3: of individuals who looked like the kind of people that
Speaker 3: you would see on the street, that can blend in
Speaker 3: and are specially trained in how to investigate and follow
Speaker 3: a target without being seen or if they're seen. Like
Speaker 3: I had a whole disguise kit and I could set up,
Speaker 3: you know, half a mile away from you and watch
Speaker 3: what you were doing. Or I could be right next
Speaker 3: to you and you would never even notice me. So
Speaker 3: it was it was a very particular kind of training
Speaker 3: and very specialized, and like I said, it opened your
Speaker 3: eyes to a whole new world that is around you.
Speaker 3: You know, people can't people can't screw you over when
Speaker 3: you know exactly what they're trying to do before they do.
Speaker 1: So talk to me a little bit more about how
Speaker 1: you I mean, did you go to Quantico? Does the
Speaker 1: training even take place there? And tell us what what
Speaker 1: that training consisted of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the so back when I got into the FBI,
Speaker 3: I also had a training uh slot at Quantico, and
Speaker 3: it's a it's a lot of very specialized practical training
Speaker 3: and educational training. So you know, we we saw the
Speaker 3: DA DA guys out the window while we're you know,
Speaker 3: in classroom learning counterintelligence.
Speaker 2: And in order to learn counter intelligence, you.
Speaker 3: Have to learn the trade craft of every other adversary,
Speaker 3: which is great if you're going to be pursuing targets
Speaker 3: because I could switch tradecraft based on all the different
Speaker 3: instructors that we had, and we had instructors from all
Speaker 3: over the place. H you know, a lot of defectors,
Speaker 3: for example, teaching us their trade craft. And then you
Speaker 3: see the DA guys running down to the rifle range
Speaker 3: and shooting and running back and thinking that could have
Speaker 3: been me. So it was very you know, it's sort
Speaker 3: of like it was one or the other way that
Speaker 3: I was like, that could have been my life and
Speaker 3: now this is my life. And then there were a
Speaker 3: lot of practical exercises, and you know, you you'd live, eat,
Speaker 3: and sleep there, and you don't do much sleep because
Speaker 3: they're constantly waking you up and you're running out to
Speaker 3: the cars and you're following your rabbit and learning.
Speaker 2: Those practical exercises. But look, it's it's a class it's
Speaker 2: a classroom.
Speaker 3: It's a educational environment, and you can't you can only
Speaker 3: do so many practical exercises, but it doesn't teach you
Speaker 3: how to follow a target effectively. And I really cut
Speaker 3: my teeth once I get assigned to a squad in
Speaker 3: DC following Russians around, who are the best of the
Speaker 3: best throughout d C. And if you can follow a
Speaker 3: Russian and not be seen, you can follow pretty much anybody.
Speaker 3: Because those intelligence officers have incredibly in depth training in
Speaker 3: counter surveillance. We'd follow it. You know, I also work
Speaker 3: counter terrorism. We follow terrorists around and stop them before
Speaker 3: they did whatever they wanted to do. And they were easy,
Speaker 3: you can only you could almost sleep walk through that
Speaker 3: because they didn't have anywhere near the training of a
Speaker 3: of a true espionage adversary. The difference of course is
Speaker 3: you know, the worst thing that's going to happen if
Speaker 3: a spy catches you is they might you know, give
Speaker 3: you the finger or you know, go home and then
Speaker 3: you get rasped by your entire team. You don't get
Speaker 3: to work on that person for a while. Terrorists they
Speaker 3: might blow you up or shoot you. So you had
Speaker 3: to you had to be still be careful in the latter.
Speaker 1: And following these Russians around was these were I would
Speaker 1: assume like people who work out of the embassy, but
Speaker 1: are suspected to be like gru guys or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in the old ways that espionage used to be
Speaker 3: conducted where they would actually come over to a country
Speaker 3: and and have some sort of diplomatic covers. They'd be diplomats,
Speaker 3: you know. In the case of the Russians, you have
Speaker 3: the JU which are the military intelligence unit, and you
Speaker 3: had the SVR, which was you know, the KGB. When
Speaker 3: Russia collapse, the Soviet Union collaps split into the FSB,
Speaker 3: which is where they're state police in KGB or SVR,
Speaker 3: which is the you know, like the younger brother of
Speaker 3: the KGB who do the foreign intel, and they would
Speaker 3: come over here under some sort of cover like the
Speaker 3: third Atta Shade Agriculture and the embassy you know on
Speaker 3: Tunlow Road in Washington.
Speaker 2: D C.
Speaker 3: And their real job is to go in meet with sources,
Speaker 3: or service dead drops or set signals or recruit. You know,
Speaker 3: there was a whole line in the SVR and their
Speaker 3: entire job was to recruit Americans to spy for them,
Speaker 3: you know, using the Big three ideology.
Speaker 2: You think more like me, so help me?
Speaker 3: Or the best two blackmail I'm going to give you
Speaker 3: a lot of money and you're gonna help me, or bribery.
Speaker 3: I've learned something about you that you don't want your wife,
Speaker 3: or your mom or your grandma to know. And if
Speaker 3: you don't help me, they're all going to know that.
Speaker 3: Nowadays it's all cyber attacks. The game has changed. There's
Speaker 3: a complete change to the old days when I started
Speaker 3: doing this, to the to the cyber spies that I'm
Speaker 3: working against right now.
Speaker 1: I'd like to drill down a little bit more to
Speaker 1: what the job was of this squad. I mean, you
Speaker 1: mentioned this counterintelligence surveillance. I mean, is the intent to
Speaker 1: catch these guys conducting operational acts so they can be arrested,
Speaker 1: or is it to follow them and see who their
Speaker 1: sources are, what is it that you're trying to accomplish
Speaker 1: out there.
Speaker 3: All of the above, and it was different every day.
Speaker 3: I can't get into too many of the particulars. I
Speaker 3: got to be really careful to stay on sort of
Speaker 3: the script that I submitted to the FBI in grade
Speaker 3: day and they greenlit. Because much of what the ghosts
Speaker 3: do remains top secret. It's very classified. And also the
Speaker 3: ways and means in a particular way you do it.
Speaker 3: But the training is the ability essentially to investigate, to
Speaker 3: put all the pieces together, all the data points, and
Speaker 3: come up with actionable intelligence and then follow someone watch them.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: There are many different ways to do that until you
Speaker 3: catch them in the act. And that was always the goal,
Speaker 3: to catch them in the act, because otherwise you don't
Speaker 3: really have a case. You can't catch an intelligence officer
Speaker 3: as diplomatic community in the act. Well, then you can't
Speaker 3: use that to embarrass the other country and PGM, which
Speaker 3: means persona nogarada, they're not allowed to come back to
Speaker 3: the US, so their careers basically over. We were always
Speaker 3: looking for legals. Now that would have been the holy
Speaker 3: grail those are and I'm not talking about legals who
Speaker 3: are a crossing our border.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: Foreign intelligence officers or assets who are working for foreign
Speaker 3: intelligence who come over here without any diplomatic cover and
Speaker 3: without telling anybody that you're working on behalf of a
Speaker 3: foreign government. So that's a person who comes over to
Speaker 3: the US somehow that is actually a spy, but isn't
Speaker 3: using any diplomatic covers. They're truly hidden. And if you
Speaker 3: remember about ten years ago, there was a case called
Speaker 3: Operation Ghost Stories. It was the eleven illegals who are
Speaker 3: identified ten were arrested. Anna Chapman was the was sort
Speaker 3: of the star of that ring, just because she was
Speaker 3: the beautiful one who sort of slept her way into
Speaker 3: the halls of power. And and they were living just
Speaker 3: like Americans. Some even had children who had no clue
Speaker 3: that their parents were spies.
Speaker 1: And correct me if I'm wrong. But as far as
Speaker 1: this portion of your career that we're talking about, it
Speaker 1: sounds like you were following around foreign nationals, but at
Speaker 1: some point the FBI asked you to start looking at
Speaker 1: American citizens who you know, were suspected spies. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's got to be like a whole different can of worms,
Speaker 1: like looking at suspected foreign spies versus an internal investigation.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, I certainly worked other Americans as we went along.
Speaker 3: I mean, the the spies were the ones that we
Speaker 3: were after. The first case that I worked as a
Speaker 3: as a ghost was Earl Pitts, who was a Cold
Speaker 3: War spy that and I detail him in my book
Speaker 3: Grade Day. Earl Pitts had spied during the Cold War
Speaker 3: and so the union then gone completely inactive and continued
Speaker 3: to work for the FBI and the behavioral science unit
Speaker 3: at Quantico.
Speaker 2: So he was a profiler.
Speaker 3: And Pitts was given up by a former KGB source
Speaker 3: who wanted a better life, sold his identity as a
Speaker 3: former spy for a bunch of secrets of some great
Speaker 3: analysts learned all about him, and a team was put
Speaker 3: on him to investigate him, and he was what's called
Speaker 3: false flag. So when you learn when you have an
Speaker 3: American that's inactive and they've spied in the past, it's
Speaker 3: a lot harder to pin them down and build a
Speaker 3: legal case for something that happened, you know, like ten
Speaker 3: twenty years ago.
Speaker 2: So what the FBI did was they sent a.
Speaker 3: Russian speaking special agent who was trained to go undercover
Speaker 3: and pretend he was a Russian intelligence all.
Speaker 1: Comrade, we need you for one approached them and said.
Speaker 3: You know, we need your head, you know, and uh
Speaker 3: and you know, would you spy for us? And activated
Speaker 3: him and he thought he was spying for Russia and
Speaker 3: he was actually spying for the FBI. And everything was
Speaker 3: handing over. And the FBI does this all the time.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: You know, a corporation, for example, might might realize that
Speaker 3: they you know, they're working for the US government and
Speaker 3: they have a uh an employee who starts stealing secrets
Speaker 3: and they reported to the FBI because they think of
Speaker 3: maybe he's trying to give it to a.
Speaker 2: Foreign palor power.
Speaker 3: Well, the FBI will pretend they're that foreign power and
Speaker 3: roll the guy up once he's given a bunch of
Speaker 3: secrets over and they hand them money, and now you've
Speaker 3: got a case.
Speaker 2: So it got all pits.
Speaker 3: And there were others that I can't talk about that
Speaker 3: we investigated, both both counterintelligence spies and terrorists. And then finally,
Speaker 3: at the what ended up being the end of my
Speaker 3: career at the FBI, I was asked to go undercover
Speaker 3: to catch a very particular style.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, tell us about that. And I sense that
Speaker 1: this was also sort of a shift in roles for
Speaker 1: you because you'd never been an agent. You'd always been
Speaker 1: sort of on the outside and the periphery, but now
Speaker 1: you're going inside the bureaucracy. I mean, tell us about
Speaker 1: how you got recruited for that particular job and why you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I might have been in Washington Field office
Speaker 3: and headquarters five times in five years. I worked in
Speaker 3: off sites, you know, behind seven eleven's, you know, wherever
Speaker 3: my target was. I remember one morning setting up on
Speaker 3: a target, you know, of interest. And this is before
Speaker 3: I met my wife, and it was difficult to date.
Speaker 3: So I was really lucky I met my wife. And
Speaker 3: here's why I would. I know, I'd set up this
Speaker 3: date with the girl that more. I thought, I'm working
Speaker 3: this morning, I'll be done by the early afternoon.
Speaker 2: This'd be great.
Speaker 3: And then I ended up having a caller from from
Speaker 3: a phone hours later. You know, I'm not gonna make
Speaker 3: it tonight. I'm in I'm in Miami. Dude got his car,
Speaker 3: drove south and we just kept driving. You move or
Speaker 3: your target moves. You eat when they eat, you sleep
Speaker 3: when they eat, they sleep, and uh, and she's like,
Speaker 3: what are you doing in Miami? And I was just like,
Speaker 3: I didn't have an answer. I didn't want to lie,
Speaker 3: so I can't.
Speaker 2: Tell you that. You know. That was the end of that.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it's like that. So this case, it was
Speaker 3: incredibly unique, not only for me but for the entire FI.
Speaker 3: There was never a case that'd been run like this.
Speaker 3: But Hanson was unique because for decades the FBI had
Speaker 3: been after this mole that everybody knew, and I'm talking
Speaker 3: the entire intelligence community that we had this massive mole
Speaker 3: somewhere within the intelligence community.
Speaker 2: Didn't know if it was the.
Speaker 3: NSA, FBI, CIA, where this person was, or if he
Speaker 3: was a he or she, but knew that some of
Speaker 3: them most egregious secrets that have ever been handed to
Speaker 3: a foreign power were being handed over. And uh, and
Speaker 3: this the rush reading our lunch. They knew our operations
Speaker 3: before we even got them off the ground. So there
Speaker 3: was this manhunt for this spy that was only known
Speaker 3: as gray Suit. And when you don't know the identity
Speaker 3: of your target, there's a computer at the FBI that
Speaker 3: just spits out two random words and that becomes the
Speaker 3: code name, and it was Gray Suit. So everyone over
Speaker 3: all these years that the FBI had investigated was given
Speaker 3: a derivative name, so it's always gray something. Hanson was
Speaker 3: Gray Day, and there had been other Gray so and
Speaker 3: so is that you know, we'd worked on and off.
Speaker 3: They learned about Hanson at the very end of his career,
Speaker 3: and he was about to retire in April, and they
Speaker 3: learned of him in December twenty two thousand because there
Speaker 3: was a joint FBI CIA task force that recruited a
Speaker 3: former KGB intelligence officer that had long ago and when
Speaker 3: the KGB was demanded when the Soviet Union collapsed, he
Speaker 3: was out of a job and he decided to go
Speaker 3: become a sky in a business and then we want
Speaker 3: to retire. He decided to retire somewhere nice and warm,
Speaker 3: and he sold a little file of secrets to that
Speaker 3: joint task force. He said, I think this is the
Speaker 3: spy you've been after for your whole career, right and
Speaker 3: for a lot of money, like millions of dollars, And this.
Speaker 2: Is the kicker.
Speaker 3: The guy's so brilliant. I have a sixteen year old
Speaker 3: and so we completely understand. Guaranteed school of his choice
Speaker 3: for his two college age kids.
Speaker 2: Full ride.
Speaker 3: I mean that's gold that's worth more than the millions.
Speaker 3: And he's gone.
Speaker 2: He's in witness protection.
Speaker 3: The FBI opens this slim file of information and it's
Speaker 3: a cassette tape, you know, going way back, a bunch
Speaker 3: of letters and a trash bag. It's like the worst
Speaker 3: game of clue ever trying to figure out who done it.
Speaker 3: And the FBI is pretty good at this. So they
Speaker 3: run prints on the trash bag and you know, the
Speaker 3: FBI can do that, the KGB and the SBR can't.
Speaker 3: And it comes back like a partial match. They read
Speaker 3: the letters, which were all written by a spy only
Speaker 3: identified himself as Ramon Garcia, which was turned out to
Speaker 3: be Robert Hanson's code name, and they listened to the.
Speaker 2: Cassette tepe and it was the one big.
Speaker 3: Mistake Hanson ever made. He called the consul at once
Speaker 3: to say, where's my money. He'd left the secrets under
Speaker 3: a bridge, and he'd gone over to where he was
Speaker 3: supposed to go pick up his fifty grand and it
Speaker 3: wasn't there, and he called Daskuare and he had looked
Speaker 3: at the wrong side of a platform out in a
Speaker 3: park Amphitheater.
Speaker 1: Because the interesting thing about Hanson, right is that he
Speaker 1: had he kept his identity concealed from his handlers in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union and then Russia.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, Jack, You're completely right. One thing that I
Speaker 3: attributed his longevity to as a spy, and he was
Speaker 3: one of the most effective spies in history, was the
Speaker 3: fact that he called the shots. He made sure that
Speaker 3: the Soviets and then the Russians were not in charge.
Speaker 3: He told them when, where, and how he would make
Speaker 3: his drops, and he never let them know his identity.
Speaker 3: And that's what kept him safe, because you know, once
Speaker 3: your identity is known to an intelligence service, it just
Speaker 3: takes you know, somebody to go rogue and then suddenly
Speaker 3: the FBI knows who you are. So that protected him
Speaker 3: for a long time. But look, they ran the print,
Speaker 3: they listened to his voice, they read the letters, did
Speaker 3: some pattern recognition, and they had some really good, circumstantial
Speaker 3: evidence that Gray Suit.
Speaker 2: Was Robert Hanson.
Speaker 3: So they give him the code named gray Day, and
Speaker 3: they got this huge problem. He has stolen information from
Speaker 3: the FBI for decades because he penetrated computer systems of
Speaker 3: the FBI that were just never built to defend from
Speaker 3: a trusted insider within. It was just institutional bias in
Speaker 3: the FBI. We can't be the bad guys. It's those
Speaker 3: CIA guys in the NSA guys, right, which is just
Speaker 3: short sighted, but that was sort of the thinking, you know,
Speaker 3: in institutions for years until Hanson, and so they're never
Speaker 3: really looking within, and they weren't auditing what people were
Speaker 3: doing on computers, and he was just stealing stuff from
Speaker 3: computer systems and dropping it in disketts under a footbridge
Speaker 3: in Banna, Virginia. And so they had to give him
Speaker 3: a job that was going to entice him to come
Speaker 3: back stay in the FBI through his retirement. They usually
Speaker 3: these cases take two years, you know, one to two
Speaker 3: years to wrap up, and they gave him a computer job.
Speaker 3: They built a brand new division in the FBI. They
Speaker 3: called it the Information Insurance Section. They gave it a
Speaker 3: really nice office in the ninth floor, room nine nine
Speaker 3: three to zero, and FBI Headquarters. They promoted him to
Speaker 3: executive service and they essentially put Robert Hanson in charge
Speaker 3: of building cybersecurity for the FBI, which you know, that's
Speaker 3: like the biggest brass balls ever because they took one
Speaker 3: of the biggest spies they suspected spies at that point,
Speaker 3: who had stolen from computer systems for his whole career,
Speaker 3: and put him in charge of building cybersecurity for the FAS.
Speaker 3: They're giving him access to things because they wanted him
Speaker 3: to spot. They wanted him to spy so we can
Speaker 3: catch them right handed. And then they looked around the
Speaker 3: FBI for a you know, crack special agent trained to
Speaker 3: go undercover, face to face and have this elicitation conversation
Speaker 3: right where Jack, You and I are talking and you
Speaker 3: think we're just shooting this stuff, but I.
Speaker 2: Don't know if I in curse on this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure I got at it.
Speaker 2: Yeah we're shooting the shit, But I have this agenda.
Speaker 3: I'm pulling information out of you. I'm gaining your trust,
Speaker 3: I'm learning all about you. I'm getting you to tell
Speaker 3: me things that you don't want to tell me. But
Speaker 3: I'm just great at this. And they couldn't find a
Speaker 3: single agent trained to do that, who knew how to
Speaker 3: turn on a computer, who could sell the role which
Speaker 3: was building cybersecurity. So hey, look, the FBI is good
Speaker 3: at this. They went deeper, They went into the realm
Speaker 3: of the ghosts and I had written a program that
Speaker 3: did target analysis. It was mostly because I was in
Speaker 3: law school while I was working for the FBI. So
Speaker 3: I was trying to go at nights and I needed
Speaker 3: something to get me off those horrible night shifts.
Speaker 2: So I said, look on the you know, I need
Speaker 2: to go to law school at nights.
Speaker 3: So when my school does knights, can I, you know,
Speaker 3: work on this program during the day and then get
Speaker 3: to class. And the target analysis program worked. We were
Speaker 3: finding targets by looking at what they did over time.
Speaker 3: I won't go into all the details, but it got
Speaker 3: me some notoriety in the FBI as somebody who knows
Speaker 3: how to turn on a computer and use it. So
Speaker 3: they said, this guy kind of knows how to hunt
Speaker 3: a spy. And look, he knows how to turn a
Speaker 3: computer and at least talk the talk. So they essentially
Speaker 3: built the office, threw Hanson in there, threw me in there,
Speaker 3: locked that big skiff vault door with a Navy seal
Speaker 3: code lock you know, on it, and checked the thing
Speaker 3: up and hoped I came out all right, and I did.
Speaker 1: Now, are are they giving you a badge and a gun?
Speaker 1: That part of your undercover identity is that you're an
Speaker 1: actual special agent.
Speaker 2: Now, no, I didn't.
Speaker 3: I went undercover as myself, and that was the most disconcerting.
Speaker 2: Part about this whole thing. Yeah, typically you go undercover
Speaker 2: with a legend.
Speaker 3: So I would have a different name, i'd have different documents,
Speaker 3: I'd be something totally differ I didn't want a spy
Speaker 3: who's dropping information to the Russians to know who I was.
Speaker 3: But I couldn't do that because I'm investigating face to
Speaker 3: face a fellow FBI employee, you know, a decorated supervisory
Speaker 3: special agent who is going to be my boss. And
Speaker 3: think about it, we're walking down the hall in the
Speaker 3: FBI HQ together.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I didn't know a lot of people in the FBI
Speaker 3: because they kept us separate because we would investigate the
Speaker 3: rogue agents. I was really known only by a code name.
Speaker 2: Uh you know it was if you read my book.
Speaker 3: You have to read my book, and my code name
Speaker 3: was wherewol If I tell why, you don't pick your
Speaker 3: code name, it's not because I'm Harry. There's a story
Speaker 3: behind it. But I tell the story in the book.
Speaker 3: But that's who That's how I was known in the FBI.
Speaker 3: You know, I asked O'Neil to some but but I
Speaker 3: didn't know people. So all all that had to happen
Speaker 3: is he and I are walking down the hall and
Speaker 3: somebody says, hey, Eric, and I've got this other name,
Speaker 3: and Hanson knows it's gone.
Speaker 2: Also, the FBI, I was so.
Speaker 3: Worried about his ability to penetrate the computer systems that
Speaker 3: they didn't know if he could identify who I was
Speaker 3: in a computer system that was going to tell him
Speaker 3: something different.
Speaker 2: So I didn't go under cover as myself.
Speaker 1: If I recall correctly, Hanson had a background in FBI
Speaker 1: counter intelligence too, right, he was a spy hunter.
Speaker 3: In fact, yeah, not only did he have a background
Speaker 3: encounter intel, he was an counter intel trainer.
Speaker 2: He was a counter intel auditor.
Speaker 3: He would go to all the legal attache offices around
Speaker 3: the world and audit them to make sure they were
Speaker 3: doing their job right. And at one point, at one
Speaker 3: point the squad looking for Gray Suit, remember Gray Suit
Speaker 3: was the spy that it turned out Hanson was asked
Speaker 3: their top Soviet analyst to help them identify the spy.
Speaker 3: So they went to Hanson and asked him to catch himself.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just crazy. He must have just loved
Speaker 3: that and loved it and loved it, and he sent
Speaker 3: the FBI on this insane wild goose chase. He gave
Speaker 3: him like one hundred names of who it could be,
Speaker 3: and FBI agents were just spilling out around the country
Speaker 3: looking at people who had nothing to do with it
Speaker 3: at all. And he just must have been laughing the
Speaker 3: entire time. So going undercover to try to catch this
Speaker 3: guy was difficult because he was better trained at this
Speaker 3: than I was. You know, the thing that I had
Speaker 3: going for me is he just didn't see me coming. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he didn't see His pride, Yeah, his pride would not
Speaker 3: allow him to believe that, you know, twenty six, twenty
Speaker 3: seven year old kid was who wasn't even a special agent,
Speaker 3: was going undercover to catch him.
Speaker 2: He was suspicious, but he just couldn't make himself believe it.
Speaker 1: Tell us about your first meeting with Robert Hanson, and
Speaker 1: tell us about him a little bit about who he was,
Speaker 1: because I mean, beyond his FBI professional life. I mean,
Speaker 1: I imagine, as you came to learn over time, he's
Speaker 1: kind of an interesting guy, not necessarily in a good way.
Speaker 3: Yes, so he was. He had been in the FBI
Speaker 3: at that point, almost twenty five years, he is about
Speaker 3: to retire with his twenty five year pension gold watch
Speaker 3: and disappear and go take.
Speaker 2: A job somewhere else.
Speaker 3: Probably during that time he'd had a number of roles
Speaker 3: and went through some of them. He was also one
Speaker 3: of the most damaging spies in US history and certainly
Speaker 3: FBI's history. He gave up some of the most egregious
Speaker 3: information that's ever been given to a foreign power. If
Speaker 3: you think about the height of his espionage was during
Speaker 3: the Cold War between the years of eighty four and
Speaker 3: eighty five.
Speaker 2: Right in the middle of those two years, we.
Speaker 3: Lost every single asset in the Soviet Union, all of
Speaker 3: our spies, and he shares all of those deaths and
Speaker 3: imprisonments with Ultra Games, a CIA spy, so you know,
Speaker 3: unbeknownst to each other, they were both giving up similar information,
Speaker 3: which is golden intelligence for a foreign intel service. He
Speaker 3: also gave up secrets related to our nuclear weapons program
Speaker 3: and warfare program. So it turns out that it's really
Speaker 3: good there wasn't nuclear war because the Soviet knew exactly
Speaker 3: where we were going to fire and who we're going
Speaker 3: to fire at. What would we do if they fired first.
Speaker 3: They knew our game plan. He gave up our continue
Speaker 3: he gave government plan, he gave up under our cover operations.
Speaker 3: He gave up undercover operatives you know, like me and
Speaker 3: thankfully not me, whose entire careers were lost, and much
Speaker 3: much more was He was a bad guy and he
Speaker 3: did it all for you know, just a few million dollars,
Speaker 3: not that that many. He was very careful in what
Speaker 3: he took. He never took more than could get them caught.
Speaker 3: But he gave up billions for just a few million dollars,
Speaker 3: which is, you know, smart if you're a spy, but
Speaker 3: a little crazy. He didn't have to give up all
Speaker 3: of that. I truly think he wanted to be the best.
Speaker 3: Now on the other side the conundrum, that's Hansen, he
Speaker 3: who betrayed you know, his oath, his country, his family,
Speaker 3: his job, everything. He was an known as an upstanding
Speaker 3: family man. He had seven children sort of grandchildren by
Speaker 3: the time I was investigating them. He lived in the
Speaker 3: suburbs of Vienna, Virginia, had a wife that you know,
Speaker 3: he wasn't exactly faithful.
Speaker 2: To, but she thought he was. And he was a.
Speaker 3: A opus day Catholic, a very strict Catholic who went
Speaker 3: to church every single day. I know, because he would
Speaker 3: make me go with him. Now that's where me being
Speaker 3: a Catholic comes in. You know, I got to pay
Speaker 3: I was foreshadowing me a little in the beginning.
Speaker 1: Jack.
Speaker 2: I had to pay that off.
Speaker 3: But clearly the FBI looked at me and thought, Okay,
Speaker 3: we've got some more connections. They're both Catholic, that's something
Speaker 3: they can talk about. They're both computer nerds. They can
Speaker 3: talk about that too. Hanson's oldest son, one of his
Speaker 3: sons oldest or second oldest, was at law school at
Speaker 3: Notre Dame. I was at law school at GW. You know,
Speaker 3: there's more connections. The more connections you have, the better
Speaker 3: openings you have for conversation and dialogue and to gain trust.
Speaker 3: And my first job was gain is trust because without trust,
Speaker 3: you can't get someone to tell you anything. So he
Speaker 3: was an interesting guy. He was also rude as hell.
Speaker 3: He was a really tough. He was like the worst boss.
Speaker 3: I've had all sorts of bad bosses throughout my career,
Speaker 3: you know, until finally, you know, I just started my
Speaker 3: own companies and I had enough of having any bosses
Speaker 3: of my own boss, uh and nobody has come close
Speaker 3: to him.
Speaker 2: So when I was in a law firm, I.
Speaker 3: Was able to work with every asshole partner because no
Speaker 3: one was going to be worse than working with Hansen.
Speaker 3: He could belittle you, he'd yell at you. And it
Speaker 3: wasn't for a long time until I gained his trust
Speaker 3: that he started easing up on me. So it was
Speaker 3: it was grueling. It was mentally just draining to work
Speaker 3: with this guy.
Speaker 1: How did how did you do that and build up
Speaker 1: that trust from that rocky start to the point where
Speaker 1: you're able to start to scratch beneath the surface on
Speaker 1: this guy.
Speaker 2: It took a long time.
Speaker 3: And you know, I see the first time that we started,
Speaker 3: you know, we got into we got into a situation
Speaker 3: where he really wanted to be a mentor to somebody,
Speaker 3: and I could see it right, but he was so reserved.
Speaker 3: And finally I gained his trust when we went to
Speaker 3: church together the first time, and I got to tell you,
Speaker 3: I was thinking, like every nun in my entire Catholic
Speaker 3: career when we had to say that our father and
Speaker 3: you know, like go through the order of the Mass,
Speaker 3: and you know he's watching me like a hawk, and
Speaker 3: I was like, no, I got this, Like I've been
Speaker 3: messing all sorts of stuff up, but this I've got,
Speaker 3: Like I know how to say.
Speaker 2: That our father. Dude, you don't have to stare at me.
Speaker 3: And as we walked out of church, I mean, the
Speaker 3: conversation shifted suddenly. He was being very open. He's talking
Speaker 3: about his family. He's talking and asking about my wife,
Speaker 3: like when are we going to have children, and how
Speaker 3: important it is to have children. And when I said,
Speaker 3: you know we I'm broke. I got an FBI salary.
Speaker 3: I live in a crappy apartment in Eastern Market. You
Speaker 3: know it's like Section eight type housing. You know that
Speaker 3: it's like one room is subdivided into three and they
Speaker 3: shouldn't have We can't afford a kid right now. And
Speaker 3: he started saying things like God will help you find
Speaker 3: a way. I was like, well, God, better start. He's like, no,
Speaker 3: there's a way. We can talk about that later. And
Speaker 3: as we started having go ahead.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, what was he alluding to right there?
Speaker 3: Well, as we started having conversations, the squad started talking
Speaker 3: to me because I was getting debriefed every night, but
Speaker 3: the agent's running this case and they and they told
Speaker 3: me he's recruiting you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, he's recruiting you.
Speaker 3: He's recruiting you, and we want you to make it happen.
Speaker 3: I'd never left the FBI if he had got that far.
Speaker 1: Wow, And I guess I want to ask a little
Speaker 1: bit about like his motivation because I mean he was
Speaker 1: getting paid off in cash and diamonds as I understand.
Speaker 1: So there's money, but was there something else going on here?
Speaker 1: I'm really I think this is like one of those
Speaker 1: really interesting things where you guys are both in the FBI,
Speaker 1: you're both Catholic, have this religious connection. Like what was
Speaker 1: it about him that made him a deviant? Essentially?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, he he he. He had this personality, narcissistic personality.
Speaker 3: It was a true narcissist. And look, I've looked at
Speaker 3: a lot of trust insiders and you know, with government
Speaker 3: but also later in my career business, and they have
Speaker 3: that they have this overinflated sense of self worth and
Speaker 3: they look at themselves and where they are in their
Speaker 3: career and they just feel like they should be doing better,
Speaker 3: and they you know, they're all sorts of narcissists. You know,
Speaker 3: I run a company that does competitive intelligence. And one
Speaker 3: thing that we find is we'll take a resume of someone,
Speaker 3: a CV of somebody that a client is looking to
Speaker 3: hire and put in charge of, like a new CEO
Speaker 3: of a branch or something, and we found that the
Speaker 3: more accomplished the person is, the more likely they are
Speaker 3: to lie on their CV. And I think what it
Speaker 3: is is they're like, I have a doctorate, but I
Speaker 3: should have like two, so they just add one, you know.
Speaker 3: And there's that I'm not saying it's full blown narcissism,
Speaker 3: but there's that sense of entitledment, self worth that some
Speaker 3: people have, some very successful people have. You lose that
Speaker 3: humility along the way. Hanson was just a narcissist. He
Speaker 3: believed that he was the best at everything and everyone
Speaker 3: should listen to everything he said and if they didn't,
Speaker 3: they were idiots.
Speaker 2: And those are his words, not mine. So he had that.
Speaker 3: And the FBI is hard. The FBI is a bureaucracy.
Speaker 3: You either learn to swim with the tide. If you
Speaker 3: fight against it, it will drown you. It doesn't care
Speaker 3: about you. It'll let you go, it'll chew you up,
Speaker 3: it'll spit you out. I mean, people are in the
Speaker 3: FBI because they want to make a difference, because they
Speaker 3: want to change the world, because they want to make
Speaker 3: people safe. They're not, you know, at least career people
Speaker 3: might be a little different. But the people who were
Speaker 3: in the trenches like me, that's why you're there. Otherwise,
Speaker 3: go somewhere else and make a ton more money. But
Speaker 3: Hansom fought against it, and he swam against the tide.
Speaker 3: He was angry about not being you know, promoted where
Speaker 3: he felt like he should be or treated the way
Speaker 3: he did. And he was a disgruntled employee. He's a
Speaker 3: disgruntled employee who also needed money. He joined the FBI
Speaker 3: because he had this idea of being a law enforcement
Speaker 3: officer and being James Bond, and he demanded that he'd
Speaker 3: be sent to a top counter intelligence squad. And he
Speaker 3: wanted New York City, which unless you've got a lot
Speaker 3: of money, don't be an FBI in New York City.
Speaker 3: You know, you don't live in the city. You do
Speaker 3: a lot of commuting. And he was having all these
Speaker 3: kids and he couldn't afford it. So he's mad at
Speaker 3: the FBI because they didn't make him a field up
Speaker 3: like I was. They made him an analyst, which is
Speaker 3: really the bread and bread and butter of intelligence. I mean,
Speaker 3: analysts do everything people like me in the field, you know,
Speaker 3: running around, we can't do anything unless we have actionable intelligence,
Speaker 3: and the analysts give us that.
Speaker 2: He was mad.
Speaker 3: And the way I like to put it is he
Speaker 3: joined the FBI to be James Bond and the FBI
Speaker 3: made him a librarian and.
Speaker 2: He was mad about that.
Speaker 1: That'll do it.
Speaker 2: So he's mad.
Speaker 3: He needs money. That's this triggering event. And he's got
Speaker 3: this personality that tells me, you know what I can
Speaker 3: I can show the FBI, and so he spies his
Speaker 3: first act of vespionage.
Speaker 2: You got two people killed.
Speaker 3: He gave up two of our top assets in the
Speaker 3: Soviet Union, and with a letter, one letter, one piece
Speaker 3: of paper, short, little piece of paper, he got two
Speaker 3: people murdered, and uh that.
Speaker 2: He was going to use to protect himself and he
Speaker 2: became a spy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there's a level of psychopathy there also that
Speaker 1: you know you're putting that letter under the bridge, you
Speaker 1: know it's going to get two people whacked. I mean
Speaker 1: it's on you in a very profound way.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: I mean he has blood in his hands and when
Speaker 3: he was arrested. Finally, you know, he does get caught
Speaker 3: in the end, I survive. Yeah, he he had one
Speaker 3: one of the accounts against him was the bloody hands
Speaker 3: that he had. His actions had led to deaths, and
Speaker 3: he knew that they would lead to those deaths.
Speaker 1: So walk us through this process. Now, now you're in
Speaker 1: this this rhythm where he's trying to recruit you. He's
Speaker 1: trying to groom you to be the next Soviet or
Speaker 1: Russian spy. I should say, how did that process take
Speaker 1: place for you? And I mean, how did you feel
Speaker 1: about that? As you're at least he thinks he's recruiting
Speaker 1: you to do something, you know, to commit acts of treason.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, for a long time, I felt that
Speaker 3: I was just doing an amazing job that you know,
Speaker 3: I'd fooled him to such an extent that you know,
Speaker 3: he felt that he was going to leave the FBI,
Speaker 3: but he could leave some of his legacy behind.
Speaker 2: That I was going to be like the Robin to
Speaker 2: his batman, Right.
Speaker 3: That's what I thought, which which you know, maybe that's
Speaker 3: a little bit of my own self inflated ego, but uh,
Speaker 3: you know, a very a very an agent that I
Speaker 3: respect a lot of We were chatting not too long ago,
Speaker 3: and she told me, you know, that's not what he
Speaker 3: was doing, Eric, And I was like.
Speaker 2: Well, what is he doing?
Speaker 3: He she said, he was going to leave, but he
Speaker 3: was going to he was going to leave you there
Speaker 3: to spy for him. He was just going to run
Speaker 3: you and then when he was done with you, he'd
Speaker 3: just use you up and you know, get you arrested
Speaker 3: and walk away. And I was thinking, yeah, that's probably
Speaker 3: what he was doing, you know, in the end, just
Speaker 3: try to fool me. But I think we would have
Speaker 3: got that point. We never really got there because I
Speaker 3: found the information that led to his arrest. You know,
Speaker 3: I like to say it, you know, and maybe if
Speaker 3: I it cannot be humble for once. You know, it
Speaker 3: took the FBI twenty two years to learn about Hansen,
Speaker 3: and it took me three months to find the information
Speaker 3: that got him. And you know, that's something that I
Speaker 3: own and I'm proud of. It was his pocket planner,
Speaker 3: it was his palm pilot.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you got to go back in time. You got
Speaker 3: to be in the two thousands. The palm pilot was
Speaker 3: the new flashy thing. It was a It was a
Speaker 3: PDA Personal Data Assistant and it was this big thick
Speaker 3: thing that flipped open and it had a screen.
Speaker 2: But to get information into the screen, you had to
Speaker 2: stab it with a plastic stick. That was the height
Speaker 2: of technology.
Speaker 1: Old school left it. The youth are learning something from
Speaker 1: this podcast tonight. So tell us about this PDA he
Speaker 1: had and how he used it.
Speaker 3: Well, he loved the thing. He talked about it all
Speaker 3: the time. He kept it in his left back pocket
Speaker 3: and he was never apart from it. The only time
Speaker 3: that he didn't have it in that back pocket is
Speaker 3: when it was in his hand as you're using it,
Speaker 3: or he was sitting at his desk because he can't
Speaker 3: sit on the thing it was too thick, and so
Speaker 3: he would put it in his bag and like clockwork,
Speaker 3: like a machine, as he sat down, he would put
Speaker 3: it in the bag right next to his desk, and
Speaker 3: as he stood up, he would reach down and grab
Speaker 3: it and put it in his back pocket like it
Speaker 3: was a routine. And we all have routines. Go home,
Speaker 3: don't put your keys on the hook or in the basket.
Speaker 3: And I guarantee you the next time you need to
Speaker 3: drive your car anywhere, they're gone, right. So we have
Speaker 3: routines to protect things, to make sure that we know
Speaker 3: where things are, and everyone uses routines to protect information.
Speaker 3: This was Hanson's and when I asked him about it,
Speaker 3: he said that this is the only way that you
Speaker 3: can organize your life. If you were smart, if you
Speaker 3: were something more than to do nothing, no good, useless clerk,
Speaker 3: you would have one of these things. This is how
Speaker 3: we talked to me, even when he's being nice. And
Speaker 3: so I went and I got too. I went to
Speaker 3: the Office of Science and Technology, we technically worked for.
Speaker 3: I requisitioned two of these suckers. And you know, he
Speaker 3: had a Palm three. I got two pomp fives.
Speaker 2: They were like.
Speaker 3: Thinner, they were faster. You could send an email on them.
Speaker 3: You could play games like mind Sweeper and that kind
Speaker 3: of stuff. And I gave him one and I thought,
Speaker 3: I'll deem myself to the boss. And he pushed it
Speaker 3: back across the desk and pulled out his and he said,
Speaker 3: I've written the encryption on this myself, and these idiots
Speaker 3: of the FBI couldn't crack it on their best day. Now,
Speaker 3: that is a huge clue. It's like we say, clue, right.
Speaker 3: I used to have a I used to have a
Speaker 3: team leader, and early on and when you're out on
Speaker 3: the street and your radios all fail and you're looking
Speaker 3: around trying to figure out where your target just went.
Speaker 3: I'd see the team leader and he put his hands
Speaker 3: like that, which was like a clue and you know,
Speaker 3: like the dude just walk by you. You know, it's
Speaker 3: like our weird sign language.
Speaker 2: But so that's my clue. Hat.
Speaker 3: But Hanson, you know, that was the big clue that
Speaker 3: we needed to get this thing away from them and
Speaker 3: and and find out what was on it because maybe
Speaker 3: it would give us something that would lead to his arrest.
Speaker 1: So how did you engineer concoct a situation wherein you
Speaker 1: were going to be able to do that.
Speaker 3: Well, we had the social engineer, Hanson. We had to
Speaker 3: hack them because the guy was.
Speaker 2: Never apart from the thing.
Speaker 3: And maybe the movie version of me, you know in
Speaker 3: the movie Breach, Ryan Phillby playing me could like bump
Speaker 3: them and pick his pocket and you know, get it
Speaker 3: away long enough. But the problem is the second he
Speaker 3: reaches for it or sits down, it's game over.
Speaker 2: And I'm not a magician. I don't pick pockets. I
Speaker 2: can pick a lock, not a pocket.
Speaker 3: So we needed to to use a pretext, is what
Speaker 3: we call it.
Speaker 2: And here's here's what it came up with.
Speaker 3: There was an an a Dick and assistant director they're
Speaker 3: actually in the FBI called a Dix get that, and
Speaker 3: uh and and the section chief, who was the only
Speaker 3: other person I knew in FBI headquarters who knew what
Speaker 3: I was doing. He was like down the hall, this
Speaker 3: awesome guy named Richard Garcia still friends today, and you know,
Speaker 3: he was my escape plan if everything went wrong, I
Speaker 3: was going to have to try to get out of
Speaker 3: the vault and get down the hall to his office,
Speaker 3: and he was he was just ready to shoot everybody. So, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, we had Richard and and the assistant director
Speaker 3: come and unannounced startle Hanson and uh and invite him
Speaker 3: to come down to the sub basement to go shoot
Speaker 3: with the two of them, And we basically used everything
Speaker 3: that I learned about Hanson in the Psyche profile, which
Speaker 3: was he doesn't like to be challenged, he doesn't like
Speaker 3: to be interrupted, he dislikes everybody above him in the
Speaker 3: chain of command, especially of these two people, And so
Speaker 3: I picked them.
Speaker 2: Of course, but he really, really, really likes to shoot.
Speaker 2: The guy was gun nut. He had all sorts of firearms.
Speaker 2: He loved it, you know.
Speaker 3: He was always telling me like, I'm gonna take you
Speaker 3: down and we're gonna go shoot.
Speaker 2: And I'm like, well, why don't we go do it?
Speaker 3: I think I could have probably outshot him, but I
Speaker 3: don't know. He was He was apparently pretty amazing, and
Speaker 3: and he he can't say no. He tries, he tries
Speaker 3: to beg off, I'm busy, you don't have time, and
Speaker 3: the ADAK looks at him and says that wasn't a request.
Speaker 3: So now he's mad. He's off his game. He makes
Speaker 3: his mistake. He gets up and grabs zero protection eye protection,
Speaker 3: he holsters his firearms. No one actually walks around the
Speaker 3: FBI healed, unless you're like the greenest of green, you know,
Speaker 3: new agents.
Speaker 2: You know, you get it.
Speaker 3: You get to your office, you're locked in your deck,
Speaker 3: like who's going to attack the FBI headquarters. So he
Speaker 3: ulsers that thing and he follows them out, and I'm
Speaker 3: super excited because for the first time, for the first time,
Speaker 3: he's forgotten that damn Pott and Pilot, and I know it's.
Speaker 1: Just sitting in his back, and so you snatched that
Speaker 1: thing up and you have to like drag it down
Speaker 1: the hall to Garcia's office or somewhere else to try
Speaker 1: to rip it.
Speaker 3: Well, it took me a while to get this right.
Speaker 3: This wasn't the first time we tried, but this is
Speaker 3: the time that worked. And so I'm really excited it's there.
Speaker 3: So I go over to the bag, I check, and
Speaker 3: I wait. You know, I was a little bit smarter
Speaker 3: about this, you know, as we went in, as we
Speaker 3: were along in the case, I was learning. I was
Speaker 3: actually learning from Hansom. So I had an asset that
Speaker 3: was down in the shooting range. We're in the ninth floor,
Speaker 3: nine nine thirty, and they're all the way in the
Speaker 3: basement in the parking level, which is where the range is.
Speaker 3: And so he sends me a page on my Skytel
Speaker 3: Alpha numeric page er. It's technically a text, but it
Speaker 3: says in pocket shooting. So once I knew they was
Speaker 3: all the way down there in pocket, they had eyes
Speaker 3: on them, I felt safe going through his bag and
Speaker 3: I found the pomp pilot, but I also found a
Speaker 3: data card and a and all this stuff has data.
Speaker 3: I'll grab it all I ran down three flights of
Speaker 3: steps to where there was this tech room that had
Speaker 3: just tech team that had just been sitting around waiting
Speaker 3: for me to get this right hand off all the devices.
Speaker 3: They start, they hook it up to their systems and
Speaker 3: start copying it. And the one guy says, look at
Speaker 3: it's all encrypted.
Speaker 2: I was like, what are you going to do?
Speaker 3: He's like, we're just going to copy it. We'll crack
Speaker 3: it later. And I was like, great, go for it.
Speaker 3: And you can probably tell, like i'm talking to you,
Speaker 3: you're you're like chilling out in the seat. I stand
Speaker 3: when I talk and I move around and I've I've
Speaker 3: always got this energy. So they threw me out of
Speaker 3: the room, so like this guy's distracting it. So now
Speaker 3: I'm standing in the hall like a recaltran child or
Speaker 3: something like, waiting for them to give me back the stuff.
Speaker 3: And as I'm standing out there just like oh hi,
Speaker 3: as people walk down the hall, nobody knew.
Speaker 2: What was going on in that room.
Speaker 3: It was like one of those rooms with a top
Speaker 3: secret leave it, you know, stay away, and I get
Speaker 3: another page and it says out of pocket, coming to you, so,
Speaker 3: you know, gently knocking the door I'm.
Speaker 2: Like, hey, guys, I'm gonna need that stuff.
Speaker 3: You know, he's on his way back there, like we're
Speaker 3: almost done. You don't understand. He's armed and he's angry,
Speaker 3: and if I'm not there before him, he's gonna shoot me.
Speaker 3: And so it's not like James, you know, James Bond
Speaker 3: or Jack Bauer, Jack Ryan, you know.
Speaker 2: I start with E, not J.
Speaker 3: And I get the stuff and I run up three
Speaker 3: flights of stairs and I get into the office before him,
Speaker 3: and we had a main area where my office was,
Speaker 3: and then he had his own office, which was through
Speaker 3: another door. I slammed the big door to the main
Speaker 3: to the main area, which is what saved me. I
Speaker 3: go into his office and I'm feeling just cool the cucumber.
Speaker 3: I'm sauntering in there. I'm like, I win, we got it,
Speaker 3: and kneel down in front of his bag, and I
Speaker 3: realized there are four pockets and there are three devices,
Speaker 3: and I, for the love of God, I can't remember
Speaker 3: which pocket had pulled these things out of no idea,
Speaker 3: It's go completely blank. And so I'm I kneeled down
Speaker 3: in front of his bag and I'm just trying to remember,
Speaker 3: like does the pomp pablic go here, and the Bobby
Speaker 3: is here, and this is the most meticulous dude in
Speaker 3: the world, like a leaf is out of place in
Speaker 3: his plant.
Speaker 2: And he knows right.
Speaker 3: So in this moment of stress, I'm like trying to
Speaker 3: cast my mind back, like self hypnotize.
Speaker 2: I don't know. And I hear him coming through the
Speaker 2: main door.
Speaker 1: So what do you do?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: I just zipped up all four pockets, you know, like
Speaker 3: you circle see on the scantron when you don't know
Speaker 3: the answer, random my desk and put the best poker
Speaker 3: face I've ever had in my life and ever will
Speaker 3: like right here.
Speaker 2: And he comes through the main area.
Speaker 3: He glares at me, and then he goes into his
Speaker 3: office and I hear, of course zip.
Speaker 1: And he busts out the PDF and starts to type
Speaker 1: in a way.
Speaker 2: He opens his bag, and.
Speaker 3: Then he comes out a few moments later, and he
Speaker 3: right up to my desk and he leans over and
Speaker 3: he looks at me and he says.
Speaker 2: Were you in my office?
Speaker 3: And I said, yeah, you've got a plan for everything,
Speaker 3: every eventuality when you're in this business, and I had,
Speaker 3: and I said, yeah, I was in your office. I
Speaker 3: walked in there I put a memo in the inbox,
Speaker 3: didn't you see it? And in my mind, in the
Speaker 3: back of my mind, I'm saying this, and I'm sweating
Speaker 3: all down the back, but I'm like, I'm totally composed
Speaker 3: up here somehow, I don't know how. And I'm thinking,
Speaker 3: like my mind's going like I tripped over your bag
Speaker 3: and it all fell open and I put stuff back,
Speaker 3: like I'm just trying to come up with some stupid excuse.
Speaker 3: There's no excuse, like he's got me dead to write
Speaker 3: if I got it wrong. And he looks at me
Speaker 3: and he holds that stare and he finally says, I
Speaker 3: don't want you in my office again, and he leaves
Speaker 3: for the day. And we had another week or so
Speaker 3: after that, where you know, things were okay, but he
Speaker 3: was really tense and really stressed out. But about a
Speaker 3: week later, he walks out onto a briak Enna, Virginia,
Speaker 3: and he pulls the package out of his pocket, out
Speaker 3: of his sport coats about that big. It's wrapped in
Speaker 3: trash bags like he always has so it's protected from
Speaker 3: the elements, and he slides it under the bridge at
Speaker 3: Boxtone Park in Vienna, Virginia.
Speaker 2: You can go there. The bridge is still there.
Speaker 3: It's that first bridge when you gets to the parking
Speaker 3: area and he gets back up on the bridge, he
Speaker 3: knocks the dr off.
Speaker 2: His shoes and he smiles to himself because he's just loaded.
Speaker 3: His final drop to the Russians, all the information that
Speaker 3: he's stolen the entire time he and I were working together.
Speaker 1: And from the amount of detail you just used to
Speaker 1: describe that, I have to assume you guys had him
Speaker 1: under surveillance.
Speaker 2: But we were there before him. You know, you're exactly right.
Speaker 2: We were there.
Speaker 3: And as he's leaving the park and he walks back
Speaker 3: to his car, his old silver Ford tourist, two vans
Speaker 3: screeched to a halt, Swat jumps out. They point their
Speaker 3: guns at him. He's arrested, put in handcuffs and he
Speaker 3: says the guns are not necessary, and then he looks
Speaker 3: at them and he says, what took you so long?
Speaker 3: And he's arrested for esp not He ends up pleading guilty.
Speaker 3: We not only knew where he was going to be,
Speaker 3: but the exact time he was going to be there.
Speaker 3: Because the pomp pilot is really just a big digital
Speaker 3: calendar that so you catch a.
Speaker 1: Spy, so you knew from the okay, yeah, So to
Speaker 1: rewind a little bit, how long did it take the
Speaker 1: FBI to crack his super spiffy home brewed encryption.
Speaker 3: Not very long, a few days. And I mean it
Speaker 3: was it was strong encryption. It just FBI has very
Speaker 3: big computers. The thing about encryption is that you know,
Speaker 3: unless it's unless it's some serious military great encryption.
Speaker 2: I mean he wrote this himself.
Speaker 3: The bigger the computer, the faster you're going to crack it.
Speaker 3: And Lee FBI also has, you know, things like the
Speaker 3: NSA and you know, I was a part of the
Speaker 3: team that cracked it.
Speaker 2: But they were able to crack it, and we.
Speaker 3: Learned by reading through all his old letters and other
Speaker 3: information that I had found earlier, in the case his
Speaker 3: special code for how he translated dates so he would
Speaker 3: transpose them. He didn't just put the date in his calendar.
Speaker 3: There was Matthew had to do to the date to
Speaker 3: get the actual date and time. We also knew that
Speaker 3: from an earlier search that I had done, and so
Speaker 3: they were able to know exactly not only where he'd
Speaker 3: people when, And that's gold because we caught him red
Speaker 3: handed loading a drop of secrets he'd stolen into a
Speaker 3: known drop site. And so that's what that's about, as
Speaker 3: red handed as you can get. And then we tried
Speaker 3: to keep it quiet and catch the intelligence officer who
Speaker 3: would come out and service it, but he never did.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's pretty wild. So he had all the
Speaker 1: like dead drops that he would service, all those locations,
Speaker 1: and the times and whatever whatever time delay they were using,
Speaker 1: that was all in the PDF that was in the PA.
Speaker 3: I mean, you have to put it somewhere because these
Speaker 3: things are planned out one two years at a time,
Speaker 3: and unless you want to make a call like he
Speaker 3: did that one time and risk your life essentially by
Speaker 3: breaking protocol, you know, you have to have it somewhere.
Speaker 3: And so you know, there's different ways to do it.
Speaker 3: There's one time pads, you know, there's all sorts of
Speaker 3: things modern no, modern spies probably used a lot of
Speaker 3: different kinds of technology. But this was his way of
Speaker 3: doing it, and that's why he never wanted to be
Speaker 3: separated from that device.
Speaker 1: So from this point we had talked a little bit earlier.
Speaker 1: You were not required to testify in court because of
Speaker 1: all this hard evidence they had on him at that point.
Speaker 1: I mean, were you off the case at this point?
Speaker 1: I mean, were you do you have a visibility on
Speaker 1: the prosecution and how that was going.
Speaker 3: No, at this point, I wasn't actively part of the case.
Speaker 3: It was it was all part of the It was
Speaker 3: the Department of.
Speaker 2: Justice's case at that point.
Speaker 3: And so the indictment was written by the FBI, by
Speaker 3: the API case officer and then case agent, and then
Speaker 3: the Department of Justice took it off. Handsome lawyered up
Speaker 3: and then he decided to plead guilty. And because he
Speaker 3: decided to plead guilty, I didn't have to testify. I
Speaker 3: would have, and I was I was nervous about that.
Speaker 3: I'd have to face him and yeah, and watch him
Speaker 3: glare at me as I talked about all of the
Speaker 3: evidence that I collected. But but he saved me that
Speaker 3: by and and saved the FBI along for a protracted
Speaker 3: case by pleading guilty, essentially for the first time in
Speaker 3: his life doing the right thing.
Speaker 1: What did they sentence him to.
Speaker 3: He was sentenced to life in prison, so without any
Speaker 3: opportunity for parole. I don't even think he could have
Speaker 3: been pardoned. And he had consecutive life turns, you know,
Speaker 3: and part of the deal was that he would have
Speaker 3: to submit to constant interrogation.
Speaker 2: You know. It was like they didn't have an end date.
Speaker 3: So the FBI, the NSA, and two commissions that were
Speaker 3: put together were given access to Hanson so that they
Speaker 3: could ask everything that he'd done so that it could.
Speaker 1: Be fixed, like a damage assessment.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, but the damage was incredible. He blew with
Speaker 3: He blew holes, so many holes, and counterintelligence US counterintelligence.
Speaker 2: It was basically Swiss cheese. You know, our.
Speaker 3: Adversaries knew everything we were doing before we did it,
Speaker 3: and everything else he did. But also the ways in
Speaker 3: the manner that he was able to penetrate the FBI
Speaker 3: so deeply in other agencies and how he did that,
Speaker 3: because that had to all be corrected. So in great
Speaker 3: AI call Hanson the modern architect of the FBI, because
Speaker 3: essentially he is certainly the architect of the FBI's security.
Speaker 3: I don't think it would be very difficult for a
Speaker 3: trust insider to do what Hanson did. He's kind of
Speaker 3: one of a kind because the FBI, by learning from him,
Speaker 3: built its internal security to the standard that is now
Speaker 3: used now and used very effectively.
Speaker 1: Before we move on to the next thing. Any final
Speaker 1: takeaways about the Robert Hanson case that you like to
Speaker 1: get across to the American public or even to these
Speaker 1: bureaucracies FBI, CIA, about the nature of these infiltrations.
Speaker 3: Certainly, I mean, there were always be spies, even even
Speaker 3: in an era where ninety nine percent of espionages is
Speaker 3: conducted through computer systems. I mean, why leave Moscow or
Speaker 3: Beijing or Tehran or peng Yang when you can just
Speaker 3: attack a government official through a computer system, but you're
Speaker 3: attacking the person, you're fooling them. I mean, it's all
Speaker 3: the same deceptive, deceptive techniques in a modern environment. Even
Speaker 3: though that's the easiest way to spy. There will always
Speaker 3: be spies, and so you know, part of looking for
Speaker 3: trusted insiders is understanding how to spot these things. You know,
Speaker 3: government works very hard to train on that. But look,
Speaker 3: espionage is the oldest profession sometimes they say the second
Speaker 3: oldest profession on Earth, and it'll continue to be around
Speaker 3: as long as there are humans.
Speaker 1: So you after finishing this case, you only had you
Speaker 1: spent three more months at the FBI and then went
Speaker 1: to law school. What motivated that change that life change
Speaker 1: to leave the bureau and go to school.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I've been in school for about two years at
Speaker 3: this point, a little over two years while I was
Speaker 3: in the FBI. So I was you know, I was
Speaker 3: desperately trying to make classes and keep my grades up,
Speaker 3: and you know, chasing spies and terrorists all over the place.
Speaker 3: And it's one of the reasons I picked George Washington University.
Speaker 2: Most of the professors as a night student.
Speaker 3: Most of the professors are practitioners, you know, their attorneys,
Speaker 3: they're judges. They understand in a way that you know,
Speaker 3: the tenure day student professors don't when you can't make
Speaker 3: it to class or you show up and you're half dead,
Speaker 3: because everybody's working a job. And so, you know, five
Speaker 3: years of working under cover straight without ever coming out
Speaker 3: of cover, I decided that that was enough.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: A big part of it was the Hands In case
Speaker 3: burned me out a little.
Speaker 2: And I was married, you know.
Speaker 3: The day that my my SSA, my supervisors special Agent
Speaker 3: Gi McClellan showed up at my house unannounced Sunday and
Speaker 3: asked me to work undercover, you know, to investigate Robert Hanson.
Speaker 3: I was married three years. We hadn't I mean, sorry,
Speaker 3: three months. We hadn't even had a honeymoon yet. And
Speaker 3: you know, my wife was German and had come over
Speaker 3: to the US to be with me, and we were
Speaker 3: trying to build a life together. And you know, for
Speaker 3: the entire time I was on the Hanson case, there
Speaker 3: was no life. I was always gone and I couldn't
Speaker 3: tell her what I was doing. I had lied to
Speaker 3: her the entire time, and so I really wanted to
Speaker 3: correct that that relationship. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: I wanted to see what I could do as an attorney.
Speaker 2: And see what I do with a legal shingle.
Speaker 3: And so I hung that out there and went to
Speaker 3: work for what became one of the biggest firms on Earth,
Speaker 3: and did national security law and government contracts, all and
Speaker 3: all sorts of stuff that still had ties to the government,
Speaker 3: but I wasn't in the government anymore.
Speaker 1: Any any notable cases or clients that you can talk
Speaker 1: about during that time.
Speaker 2: Well you know what I did.
Speaker 3: I can't talk about them because they were you know,
Speaker 3: they're still kind of confidential.
Speaker 2: But I worked.
Speaker 3: I ended up working well, you know, surprise surprise, on
Speaker 3: a number of internal investigations. So I built a pretty
Speaker 3: good practice on doing internal investigations of companies who you know,
Speaker 3: had issues or some corruption or problems. And generally it
Speaker 3: was being on behalf of the border directors. So the
Speaker 3: border directors would you know, find out, you know, they'd
Speaker 3: get a letter from the Department of Justice or you know,
Speaker 3: a government contracting agency saying that we think that there's
Speaker 3: you know, financial fraud or contracting fraud, and they would
Speaker 3: hire attorneys to not go under cover, but come in
Speaker 3: and find out where everything got wrong. And you know,
Speaker 3: working with Hanson made me pretty good at spotting a liar,
Speaker 3: you know, all that time in the FBI, and I
Speaker 3: became very good at it in my practice, and that
Speaker 3: was kind of part of the primate genitor of deciding
Speaker 3: to leave then that career as an attorney and start
Speaker 3: a company that does competitive and intelligence and a lot
Speaker 3: of that same work.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about your company and what you
Speaker 1: guys do now the Georgetown Group, but I got to
Speaker 1: ask about, you know, the book Grade Day and then
Speaker 1: the movie Breach that was based on art of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, how did all of that come about?
Speaker 3: Well, the movie actually came before the book, right, So
Speaker 3: I was taking I was journaling during the Hanson case.
Speaker 3: Now I had to turn over all my notes. I
Speaker 3: had to write along every single night. So basically I
Speaker 3: would go to law school. I wanted the special Agent Kate,
Speaker 3: who was basically in charge of making sure I didn't
Speaker 3: screw up, would drive me to law school from FBI
Speaker 3: headquarters and we'd debrief on the way, and then a
Speaker 3: lot of nights, she'd hang out for you know, two
Speaker 3: three hours and pick me up again and drive me
Speaker 3: right back to headquarters and we do a search of
Speaker 3: the office because I had to be there for chain
Speaker 3: of custody. And then I would go home and I
Speaker 3: get like five minutes my wife or she goes to sleep,
Speaker 3: but I wait for her to sleep, and then sneak
Speaker 3: out of bed and go sit down and pull out
Speaker 3: this Hitten laptop and type up my essentially surveillance log
Speaker 3: for the day, which would go right to the director
Speaker 3: of the FBI. And so I wasn't sleeping at all.
Speaker 3: I maybe got three four hours of sleep a night, and.
Speaker 2: It was pretty damn difficult.
Speaker 3: And so you know, I had to find my way
Speaker 3: through that, and you know, going to law school and
Speaker 3: doing all that was part of the big reason that,
Speaker 3: you know, I chose to leave the FBI. Now, the
Speaker 3: movie came before the book, and so when I finished,
Speaker 3: I had all this information. I had to turn over
Speaker 3: the journal, the logs, but I kept my journals, like
Speaker 3: what it was like to work with Hanson, then some
Speaker 3: of the interactions, and I wanted to write a book,
Speaker 3: but by the time I got permission from the FBI
Speaker 3: to write a book, there were already six in publication.
Speaker 3: Just every reporter who grabbed the indictment just wrote something
Speaker 3: real fast and like record time, and I didn't want
Speaker 3: to work with another writer, and so I just decided
Speaker 3: to table it. And then a few years later. I mean,
Speaker 3: I left the FBI in two thousand and one, just
Speaker 3: before nine to eleven or else I never would have left.
Speaker 3: If nine to eleven had happened and I was still
Speaker 3: in the FBI, there's no way I would have left.
Speaker 3: But I left before that, and I was kind of
Speaker 3: like waiting by the phone. Are they going to bring
Speaker 3: me back in here? I kind of thought they would.
Speaker 3: And my brother was a screenwriter and an actor, and
Speaker 3: he just said, I've just you know, over some drinks
Speaker 3: in my place. It was just telling them about this case.
Speaker 3: After I could finally talk a little bit about it,
Speaker 3: and he said this would make the perfect movie. I said, yeah, right, whatever,
Speaker 3: and he's like, can I just talk to a couple
Speaker 3: of producers back in LA where he lived. And I
Speaker 3: said sure, And suddenly the producers were interested. And I
Speaker 3: didn't think it anything would come out of it other
Speaker 3: than I'd get some free flights out there to hang
Speaker 3: out with my brother. So I let them go down
Speaker 3: the road. And suddenly it was getting bid on by
Speaker 3: all these studios and Universal one, and we made the
Speaker 3: movie with them, so that movie came out first and
Speaker 3: absolutely changed my life. I went from being a you know,
Speaker 3: undercover ghost who was an attorney, who was you know,
Speaker 3: making waves, you know, as an investigator attorney, but but
Speaker 3: you know, never did an interview anywhere, to suddenly doing
Speaker 3: interviews and podcast well there weren't podcasts back then, but
Speaker 3: news and media and all sorts of things. And and
Speaker 3: then I turned that into a career as a professional speaker.
Speaker 3: And as I'm speaking through through these years and all
Speaker 3: these stages everywhere, and my first agent came to me and.
Speaker 2: She said, do you have a book?
Speaker 3: I said no, and she said, I find it very
Speaker 3: insulting to literary agents everywhere that there's a movie about
Speaker 3: your story, but you've never written it in a book.
Speaker 3: And I said, well, I told her the story of
Speaker 3: like all the books that were out there, and he's like, well,
Speaker 3: you've definitely got a story to tell. If you just
Speaker 3: wrote up your keynote like you just delivered it, we'd
Speaker 3: have a proposal. And I ended up working with her
Speaker 3: Becky Swear and Avitas in New York and and we
Speaker 3: we came up with this proposal for Grade Ay, and
Speaker 3: I wrote the thing in record time because I've been
Speaker 3: writing it in my head right for years and years.
Speaker 3: And every stage that I ever spoke on, what.
Speaker 1: Were some of the significant differences between the movie and
Speaker 1: the book, And what did you think of the movie
Speaker 1: when you saw it?
Speaker 3: I really enjoyed the I mean I have I still
Speaker 3: have chills when I see that you know, that initial
Speaker 3: Universal screen with the you know, the earth and the
Speaker 3: sun going over it. I mean every time I hear
Speaker 3: that jingle, I like, I have that same moment. The
Speaker 3: first time I watched the movie, was sitting in a
Speaker 3: screening room and Universal Studios lot, right next to Chris
Speaker 3: Cooper and Billy Ray who was the director.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, and.
Speaker 3: Billy brought us both out, but didn't tell either of
Speaker 3: us that we were going to watch it together for
Speaker 3: the first time. So the whole time, like every Hanson
Speaker 3: and Ryan Phillippi plays me, Chris Cooper plays Hanson. You know,
Speaker 3: every Hanson scene, he's leaning over and looking at me,
Speaker 3: you know, and I'm looking right back at him to
Speaker 3: see what he thinks. And I love the movie, and
Speaker 3: you know, I still do. It's it's taught. Scenes from
Speaker 3: that movie are taught in virtually every intelligence school in
Speaker 3: the world. Wow, you know, they teach it at FBI Academy.
Speaker 3: I've gone and lectured to the agents at the FBI
Speaker 3: Academy a number of times, which is which is really cool.
Speaker 3: And the movie for what it is as well. Now
Speaker 3: it's a Hollywood movie. So the way I distinguished them
Speaker 3: is Breaches a movie about me. My book Grade Day
Speaker 3: is my story. So Hollywood takes licenses. It says, you know,
Speaker 3: based on a true story, right, and they add things.
Speaker 3: You know, the core of it is very real. If
Speaker 3: you read Grade Day and you watch the movie. Anytime
Speaker 3: Hanson and I are alone in that room.
Speaker 2: You'll see all the elements because I helped.
Speaker 3: It's uh, it's it's very true to life. So how
Speaker 3: we caught them that investigation, it's all very well preserved.
Speaker 3: But it's not a documentary. So Hanson never shoots me
Speaker 3: in the woods. That didn't happen in real life. That's
Speaker 3: probably the scene that is far this departure from reality.
Speaker 3: He never shows up at my apartment with his wife,
Speaker 3: Like the four of us couldn't fit in our apartment
Speaker 3: and have dinner together. And there wasn't that that that
Speaker 3: level of connection between you know, our wives and our
Speaker 3: families that we weren't that in our massed We were
Speaker 3: getting there, but we hadn't got there quite yet. But
Speaker 3: the core of it, the investigation is is very true
Speaker 3: to life.
Speaker 1: So you could do the movie in the book and
Speaker 1: then talk to us about the Georgetown group and kind
Speaker 1: of what you're working on now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when I left, when I left DLA Piper Uh,
Speaker 3: the law firm I was working at, I decided that
Speaker 3: I wanted to insert myself in the middle. There something
Speaker 3: that that attorneys were missing when they worked on mergers
Speaker 3: and acquisitions. You know, the attorneys look at their thing,
Speaker 3: the accounts, look at their thing. But there's this asymmetrical
Speaker 3: information that they were missing. So unless you hired an investigator,
Speaker 3: you weren't going to find it. And what I wanted
Speaker 3: to do was sort of the deep dive corporate investigative
Speaker 3: work that you know, we're not pis.
Speaker 2: We don't we hire.
Speaker 3: Them sometimes, but we wanted to go deep into into
Speaker 3: the documents and information and you know, some stuff that
Speaker 3: we know as as a group of investigators and former
Speaker 3: investigators and different agencies and work how to find that information.
Speaker 3: So what we do is competitive intelligence. We find information
Speaker 3: that gives an advantage to our clients, whether it's in
Speaker 3: a deal or a transaction, whether they're they're going to
Speaker 3: hire someone, or they think they have they have problems
Speaker 3: with a group or a business angle, or they're being
Speaker 3: attacked by a rival company and they need they need
Speaker 3: some help to learn about that rival company and maybe
Speaker 3: go on the counter offensive that too, until the other
Speaker 3: company decides, okay, we're all gonna stop and pool it
Speaker 3: because this is embarrassing for everyone. So competitive intelligence give
Speaker 3: me an incredible advantage, and you know, we just saw
Speaker 3: a need for it and it's been great. Obviously, we
Speaker 3: work with a lot of attorneys and a lot of
Speaker 3: litigators because I know intrinsically how to do that work.
Speaker 1: But you have some crossover with the field of cyber
Speaker 1: espionage as well or cybersecurity.
Speaker 2: Yes, I do.
Speaker 3: So when Breach came out, I started going out in
Speaker 3: the public speaking circuit, which is my passion, which is what.
Speaker 2: I love to do. I love I love speaking.
Speaker 3: I like I speaking with you, Jack and being on
Speaker 3: podcasts and talking with crowds. But it was it was
Speaker 3: about the Hanson story and that's not evergreen. I mean
Speaker 3: I do, I do that keynote all the time, but
Speaker 3: you know, close to the movie. And then when the
Speaker 3: book came out, I did a lot of it, but
Speaker 3: I needed something more And as I as I continued
Speaker 3: in my career and I started working as a national
Speaker 3: security strategist for cyber companies, I returned to my root
Speaker 3: and computers and what I was actually doing at the
Speaker 3: FBI and the thought leadership all came from the conversations
Speaker 3: I had with Hanson, who was actually a brilliant cybersecurity strategist.
Speaker 3: You know, if he had worked for the Angels instead
Speaker 3: of the Devils, then maybe he could have built a stronger,
Speaker 3: more secure FBI instead, he was the most damaging spy,
Speaker 3: and he did it sort of an asymmetrical way, in
Speaker 3: a different way. So I took what I learned from
Speaker 3: Hanson and all this information that I learned in counterintelligence,
Speaker 3: and I decided that I was going to deploy counterintelligence
Speaker 3: to cybersecurity. And it's been wildly successful, working with different
Speaker 3: cybersecurity companies, being a thought leader in cybersecurity, and the
Speaker 3: majority of my keynotes right now are talking about cybersecurity
Speaker 3: to crowds in a way that is entertaining, Unlike many
Speaker 3: other cybersecurity speakers who either speak from fear or they're
Speaker 3: just boring in PowerPoint, I don't even use PowerPoint when I.
Speaker 2: Get on stage, try and do that.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna explain how to protect yourself from cyber attacks.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to use power point. I'm just going
Speaker 3: to tell you really cool stories that you'll remember the
Speaker 3: next time someone tries to attack you. And my next
Speaker 3: book is all about that. So yeah, but at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, I've learned all this stuff from
Speaker 3: Robert Hanson.
Speaker 1: Do we have any questions for Eric? Yes, Uh, tell
Speaker 1: people while while we wait. Just tell people where they
Speaker 1: can find you. If they're interested in having you for
Speaker 1: a public speaking engagement where they can find your book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you want to learn all about me, about
Speaker 3: my book, about you know, the work I'm doing the
Speaker 3: Georgetown Group, or a new company that I just founded
Speaker 3: with three very close friends called Nexusure, which is doing
Speaker 3: cybersecurity advisory work. You can go to www dot Eric
Speaker 3: O'Neill e R I C O N E I l
Speaker 3: l dot net, and you know, you can find me
Speaker 3: on LinkedIn. I'm really good at responding to people on LinkedIn.
Speaker 3: If you're too shot to ask a question here and
Speaker 3: you want to, you know, message me there. I'm certainly
Speaker 3: happy with them with doing that with you.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll have some links down the description for those
Speaker 1: of you who are interested in finding Eric right on. Okay,
Speaker 1: we have a question from k X, Thank you.
Speaker 4: I agree with FBI agent Jame host the that Marina
Speaker 4: Oswald is obviously a KGB wife, a swallow quote unquote
Speaker 4: still living her cover today in Dallas. Does the guests
Speaker 4: does the guests have an opinion on that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry but that I don't. I don't really
Speaker 3: have an opinion. That's that's a little bit beyond you know,
Speaker 3: what I what I knew when I was in the FBI,
Speaker 3: and I rarely haven't looked into that case. You know,
Speaker 3: the swallows, they existed. They that's not a made up thing.
Speaker 3: In really in red sparrow, and they were very successful.
Speaker 3: And I guess the way I want to answer this
Speaker 3: is that it still happens today. Intelligence services do deployed
Speaker 3: men and women, you know, women mostly because it just
Speaker 3: turns out that guys are much more successful susceptible to this,
Speaker 3: but but men as well too to entice the opposite sex.
Speaker 3: And so what we say in the training is if
Speaker 3: you are in a foreign country and you're sitting at
Speaker 3: a bar and the most attractive person in the room
Speaker 3: comes over to you and sits down next to you
Speaker 3: and wants to have a drink with you and then
Speaker 3: go up to your room with you, it's probably a
Speaker 3: spy because that's too good to be true, and it
Speaker 3: happens a lot, especially when you go to adversarial countries
Speaker 3: that don't have our our best interest at heart.
Speaker 2: So could it be true? Sure? Do I know?
Speaker 1: I don't. We had somebody on here as a counter
Speaker 1: I think army counter intelligence guy. You said, you've got
Speaker 1: to know your number. You know, if you're a four
Speaker 1: and she's a nine, you've got to ask yourself what's
Speaker 1: going on here?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the way I say it is, look, you know,
Speaker 3: some Nigerian princeton just doesn't want to really send you
Speaker 3: a fortune.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: The cryptocurrency scheme that your new friend over a text
Speaker 3: is trying to get you investing in is not true.
Speaker 3: Like that incredibly beautiful a woman who just sat next
Speaker 3: to you at the bar and is giving you all
Speaker 3: her attention, you know, and ignoring the whole rest of
Speaker 3: the room. You're maybe not that attractive. So you just
Speaker 3: really have to look at things with the green install
Speaker 3: And what I what I like to say is think
Speaker 3: like a spy hunter. Look for the con look for
Speaker 3: the problem, see it, and don't don't get wrapped up
Speaker 3: and feeling that that it's it's true, if it's too
Speaker 3: good to be true.
Speaker 4: We have another one from Andrew. Does Eric have any
Speaker 4: funny stories that he could share about spies and would
Speaker 4: be spies?
Speaker 3: Oh, certainly there was a There was a spy called
Speaker 3: David Allen Justice, So Justice. I talked about him in
Speaker 3: Gray Day was working for a.
Speaker 2: He was working here.
Speaker 3: This is a really funny story. He's he's working for
Speaker 3: a contractor on the West Coast that's doing military satellite
Speaker 3: research and he's working on this program and he decides
Speaker 3: that he wants to spy. Now he's watched the show
Speaker 3: of the Americans. We know all this from the debrief.
Speaker 3: By the way, he doesn't get away with it. He's
Speaker 3: watched the show the Americans, and he loves it, and
Speaker 3: he decides, I want to be a spy like that.
Speaker 3: I'm going to spy for Russia.
Speaker 2: So this dude.
Speaker 3: Goes out and he orders these correspondence type courses like
Speaker 3: fight fast, Evade, detection, you know, understand espionage. And he
Speaker 3: takes three courses and he thinks, now I know everything
Speaker 3: about how to be a spy. And he's got these problems.
Speaker 3: His wife is very sick. He can't pay all her
Speaker 3: medical bills, and he's just lost his car because it
Speaker 3: broke down. He can't pay to repair it. So he
Speaker 3: needs money fast. And he's spending way too much money
Speaker 3: on his girlfriend, who's never met. He knows her completely
Speaker 3: on text. Her name is Shay. It wasn't really a
Speaker 3: woman anyway, And he's sending all sorts of things to
Speaker 3: her through Amazon, and he's sending her cash, so every
Speaker 3: time he makes a little bit of cash, he sends
Speaker 3: it to her. And he's not paying his wife's medical bills.
Speaker 3: So he's not only kind of a do fis, he's
Speaker 3: an asshole. And then he decides to spy to make
Speaker 3: money to pay for all this. So he goes into
Speaker 3: his employer and he accesses his computer he's not supposed
Speaker 3: to access. He badges in, inserts a thumb drive and
Speaker 3: downloads this schematics to this classified this classified satellite system.
Speaker 3: And then he calls the Russian consulate in San Francisco
Speaker 3: and he tells him he wants to be a spy,
Speaker 3: and they think he's a crazy person to hang up
Speaker 3: on him. But at the same time, his employer has
Speaker 3: called the FBI saying, we just identified one of our
Speaker 3: employees who shouldn't be accessing things, accessing something, And so
Speaker 3: the FBI gets involved and calls him up and says,
Speaker 3: in a Russian voice, we would like we heard you're
Speaker 3: looking to give us information. We love for you to
Speaker 3: spy for us, and he goes, who is this, Well,
Speaker 3: this is the Russians. He says, how do you know
Speaker 3: that I was trying to spy for you, and they said, well,
Speaker 3: you tried to call us, and we're the Russians. He goes,
Speaker 3: good enough for me, So he starts spying, and over
Speaker 3: I think something like six meats, they get him to
Speaker 3: continue to steal more and more information, and each time
Speaker 3: he shows up and hands over a thumb drive and
Speaker 3: they give him like a few thousand dollars and he
Speaker 3: keeps doing it until like the final meat where they
Speaker 3: put the handcuffs on him. And the other funny thing
Speaker 3: is his first meet. He says, I want to spy
Speaker 3: for you. I love the movie the TV show The Americans,
Speaker 3: and that's what made me think of this. And I
Speaker 3: need a spy code name.
Speaker 2: Now. This guy's last name is Justice.
Speaker 3: That's pretty good. But they say, well, well, what code
Speaker 3: name would you like? And he says, I want to
Speaker 3: be known as the spy named Brian. And every money
Speaker 3: and all the money he made from them he sent
Speaker 3: right to is not real. Girlfriend didn't use any of
Speaker 3: it fix his.
Speaker 2: Car or help his wife. Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have like a rogue gallery of weirdo spies
Speaker 3: and he really tops the list.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's up there, all right.
Speaker 4: We have one last one, How would have Robert Hansen
Speaker 4: using a BlackBerry instead of a Palm pilot impacted the investigation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, the interesting about a BlackBerry is you can
Speaker 3: send emails on it, and so today stealing information is
Speaker 3: in a way a lot easier.
Speaker 2: He didn't.
Speaker 3: You know. Now you don't have to stay save stuff
Speaker 3: on floppy disks, you don't have to you know, save
Speaker 3: it on thung drives, which is where Hanson was going.
Speaker 3: You can extract terabytes of information and upload it to
Speaker 3: dark web servers that publish it to everyone in the world.
Speaker 3: You can steal terabytes of information and dump it on WikiLeaks,
Speaker 3: and then it becomes weaponized.
Speaker 2: So it's it's it's.
Speaker 3: Very dangerous when a spy has access to databases. And
Speaker 3: that's why cybersecurity becomes so important. And if you have
Speaker 3: that BlackBerry, you know, and there word blackberries at the time,
Speaker 3: you know, there were the phones weren't exactly where they
Speaker 3: are now.
Speaker 2: Obviously he may have.
Speaker 3: Been able to get it out faster, but if you
Speaker 3: look back at the time when he was fying, intelligence
Speaker 3: officers were still trying to get stuff through holes in
Speaker 3: the ground, you know, behind the white rock under the
Speaker 3: footbridge in the hollow tree, so he would have still
Speaker 3: had to get that information in some physical form over
Speaker 3: to the intelligence officers. It's just changed now because most
Speaker 3: of it is done digitally. There's a way to get
Speaker 3: you know, this is a really cool way to get information.
Speaker 3: You know, spies have used photo sharing websites and they
Speaker 3: use a technology where they embed their intelligence into a photo.
Speaker 3: So there's no way to know that it's filled with
Speaker 3: secrets other than that, you know that.
Speaker 1: I like like a modern a modern version of micro dots.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and they just they just upload the the image
Speaker 3: to a photoshare website and their intelligence officers sitting in
Speaker 3: Russia or China wherever, downloads the image and you know,
Speaker 3: someone else might have gone through and looked at the image.
Speaker 3: But unless you have the decryption code and you know
Speaker 3: that it's intelligence, it's useless to you other than it's
Speaker 3: a really big photo.
Speaker 1: Before we get going, I mean, Eric, I really appreciate
Speaker 1: you taking the time and telling us your story. It's
Speaker 1: pretty incredible. Anything that I failed to ask or anything
Speaker 1: that I didn't bring up that you want to make
Speaker 1: sure we cover before we get going tonight.
Speaker 3: Well, Jack, you've been a great interviewer and that given
Speaker 3: a lot of fun. You know, one thing I want
Speaker 3: to leave with people with is maybe the first thing
Speaker 3: that Hanson told me. And in this first conversation I
Speaker 3: had with Hanson day one, where I'm I'm in there
Speaker 3: and I'm nervous and I'm trying to figure out how
Speaker 3: I'm going to endear myself to him, he looks at
Speaker 3: me and he says he wants to tell me about
Speaker 3: something called Hanson's law.
Speaker 2: Right, this is this is like the very beginning of
Speaker 2: my book.
Speaker 3: And I said, well, what's that and he says, it's
Speaker 3: this simple. The spy is in the worst possible place. Now,
Speaker 3: I kept this composure, like I was thinking to myself,
Speaker 3: what's he trying to do here? Like does he know
Speaker 3: that I'm trying to investigate him? Is he suspicious? And
Speaker 3: I just looked at him. I said, well, what does
Speaker 3: that mean? I remember learning about that in Quantico. And
Speaker 3: he says, this, Hanson's law is that the spy is
Speaker 3: in the worst possible place. They're that person who has
Speaker 3: access to the information that's going to do the most damage,
Speaker 3: and the knowledge and the wherewithal to get it in
Speaker 3: the hands of those who are going to pay him
Speaker 3: the most for it, and that Eric is what we're
Speaker 3: here in counterintelligence to protect against and prevent. Hanson was
Speaker 3: the spy in the worst possible place, but that elegant
Speaker 3: law really was the foundation of everything that you do
Speaker 3: in counterintelligence, because you're going to find the spy in
Speaker 3: the worst possible place. And today, the worst possible place
Speaker 3: for all of us as individuals is where our most
Speaker 3: important data is, and that's what the spies are coming after.
Speaker 3: And that's the base for my next book, which comes
Speaker 3: out early next year, called The Invisible Threat. So I
Speaker 3: get that plug in there.
Speaker 1: Jack Awesome and people can find Gray Day and then
Speaker 1: Visible Threat. Is that up for pre order or anything
Speaker 1: on Amazon Ya.
Speaker 3: Not up for pre order yet. I finished my draft.
Speaker 3: You know, writing a nonfiction book is a difficult task.
Speaker 3: You've done it, and it's with my editor at HarperCollins.
Speaker 3: Great Day is with Crown. Great Day is available wherever
Speaker 3: books are sold. If you get to my website, you
Speaker 3: can buy it right from there. An Invisible Threat I'm
Speaker 3: hoping for first quarter twenty twenty five, but that's the
Speaker 3: publisher's decision.
Speaker 1: And for our viewers out there, we'll be back on
Speaker 1: Friday with Damon Brown. He is a former Special Forces
Speaker 1: combat diver. Excited to talk to him. Eric, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining us tonight. Really appreciate having you
Speaker 1: on here and getting to hear your story.
Speaker 3: Thanks Jag, it was cool to be on the Team
Speaker 3: House podcast. I love the podcast and thank you everything
Speaker 3: you guys are doing, so keep up the good work.
Speaker 1: Alright, guys, we will see you on Friday. Have a
Speaker 1: nice night out there.