Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the episode four hundred and eleven of
Speaker 1: The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest
Speaker 1: Alma Katsu. She served as a analyst at NSA and CIA.
Speaker 1: I'm also delving into the technical side as well, some
Speaker 1: of the technological development work that they do. And she
Speaker 1: is the author of ten books, including some spy novels,
Speaker 1: the bigger one being Black Vault, which is being made
Speaker 1: into a television show, and an upcoming novel about Havana syndrome.
Speaker 1: So a thank you for joining us on the show tonight.
Speaker 1: Your name has been circulating around for a while. I
Speaker 1: think I've had you on our list for a while. Actually,
Speaker 1: I'm glad this is finally happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me here. I'm really looking forward
Speaker 2: to this. I know it's kind of confusing because I'm
Speaker 2: not really known for my spies stories, but then when
Speaker 2: people find out my background, they're like really surprised. That's
Speaker 2: not all I write.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think it's always enjoyable
Speaker 1: when somebody kind of brings their personal experience into the novel,
Speaker 1: whatever kind of novel. You know, if you were a
Speaker 1: police officer or a CIA officer or whatever the case
Speaker 1: may be, and kind of lend that sort of like
Speaker 1: that insider baseball is what I think, kind of like,
Speaker 1: at least for me, kind of makes the book what
Speaker 1: it is.
Speaker 2: It was really interesting. I never thought that I would
Speaker 2: actually write a spy novel. I tried early on when
Speaker 2: I was you know, my very first book was It
Speaker 2: came out in twenty eleven, and it took me ten
Speaker 2: years to write that book. And while I was writing it,
Speaker 2: I would jump in and try to write, you know,
Speaker 2: like a spy thriller, and I was terrible at it.
Speaker 2: So I just figured I'd never write one. And then
Speaker 2: after the first three books came out and I was
Speaker 2: retiring from NSSA actually it was twenty seventeen, and my
Speaker 2: editor at Putnam and I'd done a couple books with her,
Speaker 2: and she said, you know, I know you've always wanted
Speaker 2: to write a spy novel. Why don't you get to try?
Speaker 2: Because she knew I wanted to write one about the
Speaker 2: female experience in the spy business and a CIA. So
Speaker 2: you know, I was really lucky. I was kind of
Speaker 2: gifted that experience and I knew what I was going
Speaker 2: to write about because when I was there, there was
Speaker 2: a really horrible thing that happened that if I told you,
Speaker 2: you would recognize it because it was in the news
Speaker 2: for years, but it was never publicly associated with CIA.
Speaker 2: And I always knew i'd write a story and incorporate
Speaker 2: a version of what happened there in it, so I
Speaker 2: got the chance to do it. But you know, it
Speaker 2: was really an eye opener. I don't know what your
Speaker 2: experience has been, but you know, you go into this thinking,
Speaker 2: just like you said, I'm going to tell I'm going
Speaker 2: to be a truth teller. I'm going to give the
Speaker 2: inside baseball, you know, and it feels like it's going
Speaker 2: to be cathartic for you. And then once you get
Speaker 2: into it, you realize that that's not necessarily what the
Speaker 2: public wants. You know, they're kind of conditioned more for
Speaker 2: you know, Jason Bohn and Jack Reacher and you know,
Speaker 2: James Bond, and that's not what the job is really like.
Speaker 2: And so as a writer, you're sort of torn between
Speaker 2: these two things. You you want to be true to
Speaker 2: your to the profession and the wonderful people that you
Speaker 2: work with, who you want to honor, you know, and
Speaker 2: not make them into characters or you know that sort
Speaker 2: of thing. But you're also an entertainer and you have
Speaker 2: this obligation to try to entertain your readers. So it's
Speaker 2: that's made it not what I thought it would be in.
Speaker 1: My mind, you know, when when I'm writing like mostly
Speaker 1: like special ops stuff, I kind of picture that this
Speaker 1: guy is having like such a singular career, like every
Speaker 1: amazing thing that could possibly happen is happening to this
Speaker 1: one person. It's like, no one has a career like that,
Speaker 1: like just to be clear, like nobody has a like
Speaker 1: something out of a video game. So yeah, it becomes
Speaker 1: like this you know, combination of of all these other
Speaker 1: experiences packed into like one protagonist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, in your in your business though
Speaker 2: at least is full of action in real life for
Speaker 2: most even case officers, right, it's not like they're running
Speaker 2: down the streets waving again for people, and you know,
Speaker 2: which is unfortunately kind of the expectation of a lot
Speaker 2: of the public, especially if they don't really read spy novels.
Speaker 2: If really they're they're understanding of the profession is based
Speaker 2: on movies and TV shows, you know, which is a
Speaker 2: visual medium. There's certainly a lot of great spy novels
Speaker 2: that are more realistic. You know, I'm thinking jehan Lecery
Speaker 2: and you know, Charles Cummings and those kind of guys.
Speaker 2: But but you know, it's really hard, you know, even
Speaker 2: Mheron for instance. You know, I got to be on
Speaker 2: a panel with Mchern and I asked him, I said,
Speaker 2: how did you know that there actually are offices like
Speaker 2: the slow Horses? And he looked at me and he said,
Speaker 2: I didn't, but there are. And I accidentally got to
Speaker 2: the boss of one of them once. When I was
Speaker 2: at NSA. One of my last jobs was I was
Speaker 2: made the director of one of the research labs. And
Speaker 2: I only got the job because the person who had
Speaker 2: been the director for six years was horrible and had
Speaker 2: run it into the ground. And what they had done
Speaker 2: was they put all these deadwood, all the people they
Speaker 2: didn't want to deal with in the S and T
Speaker 2: back in NSA. They sent them down to my lab
Speaker 2: twenty miles away so they wouldn't have to deal with them.
Speaker 2: So I just felt like Jackson Lamb. I just had
Speaker 2: this team of you know, useless, argumentative, you know people. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: I could not get the work out of them that
Speaker 2: Jackson Lamb gets out of his people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, no disrespect at all to anybody, any
Speaker 1: of the case officers out there, but like, and it's
Speaker 1: not just like an aberration, but I think it's like
Speaker 1: almost intentional. A lot of these guys look like insurance
Speaker 1: claims adjusters. They don't look they don't look like uh,
Speaker 1: you know, James Bond. And they shouldn't, right, because they
Speaker 1: got to blend in in different places, you know, they
Speaker 1: shouldn't look like a CrossFit athlete, right, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, that's what what's his name? Colby said? Right, the
Speaker 2: little gray man, the man that can just blend into
Speaker 2: the background. And that's the most successful case officers. But
Speaker 2: I'll tell you a funny thing. On the analytics side,
Speaker 2: you do get some very attractive people.
Speaker 1: There was Yeah, we noticed, Alma, thank you not.
Speaker 2: Some of the people I worked with were like, one
Speaker 2: of them looked just like Gwyneth Paltrow. I am not kidding.
Speaker 2: And we were thinking this particular office chief kind of
Speaker 2: went out of his way to hire really leggy, attractive blondes.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, well, well that's well, we'll get into that
Speaker 1: when we start talking about the female experience of the
Speaker 1: Cia and some of the dubious characters that you cross
Speaker 1: paths with. But well, let's uh, before we get too
Speaker 1: deep into the into the I want to kind of
Speaker 1: start at the beginning with you and ask a little
Speaker 1: bit about kind of your upbringing and how that took
Speaker 1: you towards governmental service. You know, what was your first
Speaker 1: stop at the NSSA or did you have something in
Speaker 1: between there? And you just walk us through it.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 2: Well, when I started out, when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: I wanted to be a writer. I mean, I think,
Speaker 2: like with most writers, I was a little introvert, you know,
Speaker 2: was more comfortable with a book than with people, and
Speaker 2: pretty much spent all my time in the library, so
Speaker 2: much so that the librarians gave me a job as
Speaker 2: a page when I was fifteen, so kind, you know,
Speaker 2: And so I thought I would be a writer. And
Speaker 2: I actually started out as a reporter while I was
Speaker 2: still in high school and while I was in college.
Speaker 2: And you know, back then, this was pre internet years.
Speaker 2: Most people didn't know any you know, like a novelist.
Speaker 2: I had no idea how you would become a novelist.
Speaker 2: The only thing I could see was newspaper work where
Speaker 2: people were really making a living and writing. So I
Speaker 2: sort of figured i'd go in the newspaper work. But then,
Speaker 2: you know, the job market crashed. This was in the
Speaker 2: late seventies early eighties, and my dad, who'd been in
Speaker 2: the military, you know, he was really after me to
Speaker 2: get a government job, that security, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: And so just just on a whim, I applied to NSA.
Speaker 2: My sister, who was a wild child, she went to
Speaker 2: Woodstock and she hitch hyped across the country during the
Speaker 2: Summer of Love. Right. She told me all these crazy
Speaker 2: stories she'd heard about the place that it was. You know,
Speaker 2: it just made us sound insane, and so I thought, well,
Speaker 2: you know, even the application process was an experience, you know,
Speaker 2: go down to the corner, knock three times kind of thing. Right,
Speaker 2: So I applied, and I never thought I would get
Speaker 2: a job with them, and I never thought I would go,
Speaker 2: but they offered me a job, and at the time,
Speaker 2: my job where I was working, which had only been
Speaker 2: for about a year, I was working at a college,
Speaker 2: was looking pretty shaky. So I went ahead and took
Speaker 2: the job. And when I went I told them, look,
Speaker 2: I have no interest in national security. You know, this
Speaker 2: is not my thing. I'm just coming here for the experience.
Speaker 2: I'll stay a few years and I'm going to leave.
Speaker 2: That's what I told them, and they were like, sure, sure,
Speaker 2: come on down, you know, reel me in. And I stayed.
Speaker 2: You know, I had a thirty five year career and
Speaker 2: then some so I stayed because, as you know, it's
Speaker 2: such a singular profession and you get opportunities. I got
Speaker 2: opportunities that if I had stayed in Boston and followed
Speaker 2: what I thought was my you know, path, I never
Speaker 2: would have gotten. And when we talk about the career
Speaker 2: a little bit more, you'll see so, you know, while
Speaker 2: it wasn't perfect, and there were a lot of things that,
Speaker 2: you know, were disappointments. Everyone has disappointments in their career,
Speaker 2: you know. I have to say it made me into
Speaker 2: a person, you know, I never never dreamed I would be.
Speaker 2: And that includes the science and technology part because when
Speaker 2: I was a little kid growing up. Even though I
Speaker 2: grew up in a town that was home to one
Speaker 2: of the first computer companies, so all of us were
Speaker 2: exposed to computers way before most people were, they still
Speaker 2: kind of treated girls like, you don't know math, and
Speaker 2: you're not going to be good at science. So I
Speaker 2: thought I wasn't good at math and science, And it
Speaker 2: wasn't until I got to NSA and they know how
Speaker 2: to train you from what you need to know, I
Speaker 2: found out that I was actually good at it. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, it really opened up a lot of doors
Speaker 2: for me.
Speaker 1: What was the position they hired you for?
Speaker 2: So I got hired into what was then their intern program,
Speaker 2: which was a little bit like the PMI program, but
Speaker 2: I was hired as what they called a reporter, which
Speaker 2: is a kind of analyst at NSA. I think it's
Speaker 2: changed now, But when I started, and this was decades ago,
Speaker 2: reporting and I mean, as I should say, was sort
Speaker 2: of a hybrid. It was you were working with linguists,
Speaker 2: but a lot of times the linguists were not so
Speaker 2: good at stepping away from the content of what they
Speaker 2: were translating and really understanding the so out of it.
Speaker 2: So a lot of times a reporter, someone who was
Speaker 2: better at writing, would then step in and kind of
Speaker 2: take it to the final you know, take it to
Speaker 2: a finished product. That changed for me, of course when
Speaker 2: I went to CIA. They have a very different view
Speaker 2: on what an analyst is and when an analyst would
Speaker 2: be able to produce. So but that's how I started out.
Speaker 2: I started out as a reporter, did that for about
Speaker 2: I can't remember how long, fifteen years or so, made
Speaker 2: it all the way up to a sigate national intelligence
Speaker 2: officer in my field, so very fulfilling job. That got
Speaker 2: to look kind of my and IO. So when you're
Speaker 2: a national intelligence officer, generally that's associated with CIA, the NICK,
Speaker 2: the National Intelligence Council, but other intelligence agencies often have
Speaker 2: their equivalent to sort of lead in that particular area,
Speaker 2: and for me it was multilateral affairs. I ended up
Speaker 2: becoming a specialist in like Phase four operations and operations
Speaker 2: other than combat. In the nineties, there was a lot
Speaker 2: of that going on, especially genocides and atrocities. That's kind
Speaker 2: of what I'm famous for. Not the thing you want
Speaker 2: to be famous for, but because my NIO, who was
Speaker 2: wonderful David Gordon, brilliant man, but he came from outside
Speaker 2: the intelligence community, so he didn't really understand how intelligence
Speaker 2: supported his work. So I ended up working very closely
Speaker 2: with him, and yeah, it was an amazing time. But
Speaker 2: it all ended when nine to eleven happened, and I
Speaker 2: ended up going down to do two policy years to
Speaker 2: try to support the Bush administration in their objectives.
Speaker 1: Well, let's take a second to talk about those first
Speaker 1: fifteen years at NSA. I think the people that listen
Speaker 1: to this podcast generally understand what NSA does that they're
Speaker 1: sort of the big ears listening to the interceptions and
Speaker 1: everything else. But it sounds like you got there probably
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties and worked there into the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: What was it like at that time? I mean technology
Speaker 1: was kind of analog transitioning to digital. What was it
Speaker 1: like working at NSA at that time frame and what
Speaker 1: were the kind of technological constraints you know?
Speaker 2: So it is interesting. I came to NSA like a
Speaker 2: lot of my peers, you know, we came from all
Speaker 2: over the country. I had come from a very sort
Speaker 2: of protected, unworldly family, right, so getting there just trying
Speaker 2: to sort of get my feet on the ground was
Speaker 2: about all I could wrap my head around and trying
Speaker 2: to learn the job because it was so different from
Speaker 2: anything i'd been exposed to. As you can imagine, because
Speaker 2: you're not only having to say, learn a target, you're
Speaker 2: also having to absorb the culture. When you work in intelligence,
Speaker 2: you have to learn a lot of stuff like how
Speaker 2: to handle classification. There's just all these components that are
Speaker 2: more than what your average job is asking of you.
Speaker 2: The technology was incredibly analog. We did not even have computers.
Speaker 2: There was one computer, a Delta Data at the end
Speaker 2: of the aisle, and you kind of sorted through your
Speaker 2: papers and looked at things and trying to draw your
Speaker 2: little confute conclusions, and then you would run down to
Speaker 2: the computer, you know, to try to access the data.
Speaker 2: It was just insane when I look back on it.
Speaker 2: A lot of analysts did their work on index cards,
Speaker 2: kept notes on everything. Right, if you try to tell
Speaker 2: the kids about it today, they won't be right. But
Speaker 2: I was there. I was starting to get in the
Speaker 2: upper echelons by the time the transition what they called
Speaker 2: the transition at NSA, and that was the transition, the
Speaker 2: world's transition from analog to digital, and that was huge.
Speaker 2: That was so eye opening and it really made an
Speaker 2: impression on me for the rest of my career. So
Speaker 2: later when I went into technology forecasting, I drew a
Speaker 2: lot on that experience, what the agency went through to
Speaker 2: you know, you hear the expression you're building the plane
Speaker 2: as you're flying it. They were building the plane as
Speaker 2: because we knew if we did not change in five years,
Speaker 2: we were going to go blind. We would not be
Speaker 2: the communications we're going to move on. How you process them,
Speaker 2: how you make sense of them, everything is completely different
Speaker 2: from analog, and so it was a huge investment. They
Speaker 2: had to stop working on certain targets that were bringing
Speaker 2: that were our bread butter that you know, we're answering
Speaker 2: policy makers needs today. But the management had to make
Speaker 2: this very difficult and very brave decision to do that
Speaker 2: and put up with a lot of flack. I mean,
Speaker 2: you can imagine people were so upset, right this is
Speaker 2: the it's rights bullism. This is their job. What are
Speaker 2: they going to do if they can't make that transition,
Speaker 2: if they can't understand how to deal with this new technology,
Speaker 2: especially as analysts. It was frightening. And we'll talk about
Speaker 2: that more because we were going through that right now.
Speaker 2: The intelligence community continues to go through a second digital
Speaker 2: age right now.
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Speaker 1: Bye.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so that was very interesting. I mentioned to
Speaker 2: you before the show, and I guess I need to
Speaker 2: shove this in there somewhere. Early on in my analytic career,
Speaker 2: I got to be on the team that was the
Speaker 2: first hackers at NSA.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: That was well crazy because the technology then is not
Speaker 2: the technology now. So we were chasing entities around the
Speaker 2: Internet in a method that does not exist now. And
Speaker 2: the funniest thing, well, the weirdest thing is I'm still
Speaker 2: friends with one of the you know, I was one
Speaker 2: of the analysts. So we supported the programmers trying to
Speaker 2: find it was entirely a research endeavor, right, it was
Speaker 2: not operational We were the team that had to prove
Speaker 2: that you could do this. We had to figure out
Speaker 2: how to do the back end processing, all that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. So we had programmers who were just I
Speaker 2: mean excellent hackers, right. They were the best of the best, really,
Speaker 2: these kids. And then they had a team of reporters
Speaker 2: like me, analysts who supported them and we'd shift through
Speaker 2: a lot of data and look for patterns and say, okay,
Speaker 2: I think there's something here, let's reverse engineer or whatever.
Speaker 2: So you know, got to sit in the room with
Speaker 2: them while they were doing the very first intrusions and
Speaker 2: things like that. It was it was something, I mean,
Speaker 2: made a big impression on me, so much so that
Speaker 2: years later, for now, I was asked to write what
Speaker 2: we call design fiction for CIA. It's fiction. It's like
Speaker 2: science fiction, right, but it shows up for particular outcomeing
Speaker 2: or objective and in it I had to do something
Speaker 2: that was very much akin to hacking. But I haven't
Speaker 2: done it in twenty years, so I'm like, I'll just
Speaker 2: write what I think might be going on. And I
Speaker 2: got a friend of mine who had been one of
Speaker 2: the programmers, and he stayed in the career field. He
Speaker 2: stayed in computer security information operations his whole career, and
Speaker 2: I asked him to read it before I handed it
Speaker 2: in to see IA, and he said, yep, that's pretty
Speaker 2: much what we're still doing. He made a couple suggestions,
Speaker 2: so that was pretty eye opening.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, so this is again the kids may
Speaker 1: not understand what we're talking about, but this was the
Speaker 1: days of dial up modems. The Internet was in a
Speaker 1: nascent sort of form, to say the least. It wasn't
Speaker 1: exactly what people see on the Internet today. What was
Speaker 1: kind of I understand this was sort of a proof
Speaker 1: of concept at the time, but sort of what was
Speaker 1: going on in NSA's had at this time, like because
Speaker 1: mostly it was just like universities really that were on
Speaker 1: the internet. Was it sort of like trying to project forward,
Speaker 1: like governmental institutions are going to be on this platform eventually,
Speaker 1: so we need to be there.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I was just a little peon on
Speaker 2: the team they you know, I didn't hear what was
Speaker 2: happening at the higher levels, the direction that was being
Speaker 2: given to our management. And it was a very small
Speaker 2: office and this was quite a few years before the transformation,
Speaker 2: so I think at that point there were probably knowing
Speaker 2: what I know now for technology forecasting. There was probably
Speaker 2: a lot of naysayers who were like, this is never
Speaker 2: going to change, You're wasting our time, blah blah blah.
Speaker 2: What you were saying is so true. It was so
Speaker 2: unlike the Internet today. For instance, back then you got
Speaker 2: what was known as a DNI, a dial number indicator.
Speaker 2: It was like a telephone number that you used on
Speaker 2: the internet, so you had to know the person's telephone number.
Speaker 2: There was no you know it was. It was just
Speaker 2: so completely different. Yeah, and you could I can understand
Speaker 2: why it didn't take off.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, so at the time, the NSA was kind
Speaker 1: of like, we don't really know what to do with this, I.
Speaker 2: Would say, because when I started out, I was an
Speaker 2: intern for three years and then I was pulled into
Speaker 2: an office that ended up being the beginning of something
Speaker 2: that ended up being really big for an essay, and
Speaker 2: it was their interface really with the commercial sector in
Speaker 2: technologies of interest, and so I was exposed. I was
Speaker 2: actually on standards committees for I'm actually one of the
Speaker 2: drafters of an old American national standard for encryption for
Speaker 2: key encryption. I'm sure it's been superseded many times by now,
Speaker 2: But so I was exposed to that world, and then
Speaker 2: I had the opportunity to go work on this in
Speaker 2: this hacking cell, just because I'd already had that sort
Speaker 2: of technical exposure. So I'm sure there were people who
Speaker 2: were skeptical of it. That's just the nature of emerging
Speaker 2: technologies and it's a little.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, anything new, there's always going to be some skepticism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's always a town of naysayers. I'd say, like
Speaker 2: eighty twenty eighty percent are people who just think things
Speaker 2: are going to continue the way they are. And you know,
Speaker 2: so you know, I really kind of made my name
Speaker 2: in this area with social media. I was at CIA
Speaker 2: at the time, and the center they have that is
Speaker 2: the lead on open source was supposed to be taking
Speaker 2: the lead and developing an approach to social media. But
Speaker 2: the question at the time, I mean this was two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven. You know, none of the platforms are
Speaker 2: anywhere near what they are today, and you know, people
Speaker 2: were just saying, this is for kids, this is not
Speaker 2: gonna this is not a serious thing, and this is
Speaker 2: and they needed somebody who had a technical background because
Speaker 2: they were kind of looking at and then what I
Speaker 2: call the hunt and Peck method. You know, they were
Speaker 2: just looking, but they had no plan, like how you
Speaker 2: systematically figure out what's out there? And then there are
Speaker 2: a lot of associated intelligence questions with that, like how
Speaker 2: do we know this person is who they say they are?
Speaker 2: You know, how do we know when information is authentic?
Speaker 2: Just all of these sort of validation issues that as
Speaker 2: an analyst you have to be able to answer. So
Speaker 2: they hired me to be the first senior analysts for
Speaker 2: social media and I spent three years in that program
Speaker 2: and I approached it like I would as an NIO, right.
Speaker 2: I reached out to like the best researchers in the country,
Speaker 2: you know, working with them to try to develop methodologies.
Speaker 2: I took nssa's approach, where you have systematic sort of
Speaker 2: a systematic look at the environment, the communications environment. NSA
Speaker 2: does it through frequencies. We had to figure out a
Speaker 2: way to replicate that in an environment without frequencies, which
Speaker 2: we made some headway towards. So anyway, a fair amount
Speaker 2: of people ended up knowing me for that work, and
Speaker 2: when I went to RAND, it was based on that work.
Speaker 2: But ooh, I kind of lost the track.
Speaker 1: What was the Yeah, you jumped right onto the social
Speaker 1: media thing. But I mean, we can dwell on that
Speaker 1: for a minute. So two thousand and seven. Facebook came
Speaker 1: around two thousand and four, I believe, and my Space
Speaker 1: was around back in those days. Also, yeah, a.
Speaker 2: Few years before Facebook took up Twitter. I can't remember
Speaker 2: the exact year. Two thousand and six was Miracle on
Speaker 2: the Hudson, which was you know, when Sully landed the plane,
Speaker 2: you know, outside of New York, and it was the
Speaker 2: first time that we had seen the news break on
Speaker 2: Twitter faster than we were seeing it break in the
Speaker 2: news media, you know. So and.
Speaker 1: How did you already see how did you already seen
Speaker 1: that phenomena take place once already in your career with
Speaker 1: the advent of satellite live news from CNN and so
Speaker 1: on starting to come online.
Speaker 2: Well, so that I wasn't in a technical position during
Speaker 2: that time. I was working you know, operations other than combat,
Speaker 2: and so I was running a lot of war rooms,
Speaker 2: and we were having to deal with that because you'd
Speaker 2: have your policy makers, you know, listening to CNN, and
Speaker 2: you're trying to do your keep on top of the
Speaker 2: intelligence and at the same time you've got to constantly
Speaker 2: bounce it against this never ending stream of open source
Speaker 2: information to try to, you know, not cross wires. If
Speaker 2: you have something that is contradicting what the media says,
Speaker 2: you've got to deal with that. So I had to
Speaker 2: deal with it more on that in that regard, rather
Speaker 2: than trying to figure out its role was. When I
Speaker 2: took over as the senior analyst, it really was the
Speaker 2: question that was posed to me is is there intelligence
Speaker 2: value in social media? So that's what we had to answer,
Speaker 2: and to do that, we had to have a good
Speaker 2: sense of what was out there, who's talking, you know,
Speaker 2: what are the conversations. I could go on for hours
Speaker 2: about how this is done. But it's what folks who
Speaker 2: aren't exposed to but don't understand, is it's all that
Speaker 2: measurement is done with highly sophisticated physics models. It's highly technical.
Speaker 2: It's not just oh I looked at Twitter today and
Speaker 2: I saw these things, or these are the top ten
Speaker 2: trending topics on whatever. You know, when you're answering the president,
Speaker 2: you know, you have a very high bar. You really
Speaker 2: need to know what you're talking about, and in order
Speaker 2: to do that, you have to run all these complex
Speaker 2: analytics so that you understand, you can validate what you're
Speaker 2: seeing out there on social media, which is pretty much
Speaker 2: an invisible platform to most people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean, well, nowadays our policy makers are
Speaker 1: definitely taking cues off of Twitter on a daily basis,
Speaker 1: for better or worse. But what was the question I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask? Oh, I'm surprised that the intelligence community
Speaker 1: didn't jump on social media sooner for targeting, that all
Speaker 1: of these people, just the very nature that somebody is
Speaker 1: uploading their profile onto a social media platform must be
Speaker 1: a bonanza for targeters.
Speaker 2: I think targeting was probably one of the first fields
Speaker 2: that actually did take advantage of social media the early years,
Speaker 2: though for me at least, it was just so much
Speaker 2: pushback against you know, the rank and file. And I'll
Speaker 2: just talk about this one organization, for instance, that was
Speaker 2: supposed to have the lead, and that was the Open
Speaker 2: Source Center. I don't think it's called the Open Source
Speaker 2: Center anymore. It might be called the Open Source Enterprise.
Speaker 2: But you know, there were just like it at CIA
Speaker 2: in the DA. You know, you have all these offices
Speaker 2: that have a regional focus or they have a topical focus,
Speaker 2: right the Office of Transnational Issues or counter Terrorism or
Speaker 2: the Office of Russia, the Office of South America and
Speaker 2: those people at the Open Source Center. It was really
Speaker 2: run like a wire service. They were responsible for understanding
Speaker 2: what the foreign media was talking about in their area, right,
Speaker 2: so it was very language based. There was a lot
Speaker 2: of translation of you know, traditional media. And what they
Speaker 2: didn't appreciate at the time is that this was all
Speaker 2: going to be challenged and eventually done away with. That
Speaker 2: the digital revolution was going to come and it was
Speaker 2: going to make all those sources that were so important
Speaker 2: to them less meaningful in some cases meaningless. And so
Speaker 2: they fought us tooth and nail for the three every
Speaker 2: day in three years. And I was there. It was
Speaker 2: just a battle, and the management did not want to
Speaker 2: side with us because you know, what happens is was
Speaker 2: the same thing as as with n Essay during the transition.
Speaker 2: As a manager, you have responsibility to look forward and
Speaker 2: to put your agency in the best position to deal
Speaker 2: with what's coming over the horizon. But knowing what's coming
Speaker 2: over the rising is very hard. And at the same time,
Speaker 2: you still got to deliver the mail every day, and
Speaker 2: the stuff that's coming in on your legacy syss is
Speaker 2: your bread and butter, and you don't want to upset
Speaker 2: the people who are making your bread and buttering it
Speaker 2: by telling them I'm going to take twenty or twenty
Speaker 2: five percent of your resources and turn it towards this
Speaker 2: news source which may or may not, you know, come
Speaker 2: to fruition. And so they at NSAY they made the
Speaker 2: tough decision to take that twenty percent of the workforce
Speaker 2: and give it over to the transition so we could
Speaker 2: figure out how to do the processing and we could
Speaker 2: see where we were going, and we made a successful transition.
Speaker 2: At the Open Source Center. They did not do that,
Speaker 2: and I kind of got off the social media wagon.
Speaker 2: I mean, I was working as a consultant for companies
Speaker 2: for a while on this, but I stopped a while ago.
Speaker 2: When I did, I estimated that the intelligence community was
Speaker 2: almost ten years behind what the commercial sector can do
Speaker 2: in evaluating social medium. That was the upshot of that,
Speaker 2: you know, I understand and the attitude of my peers
Speaker 2: not wanting to give up what they were doing, but
Speaker 2: it came at a great cost.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's another tangent, but I think a
Speaker 1: lot of intelligence professionals have had sort of this criticism
Speaker 1: that there are these open source investigators that are able
Speaker 1: to put things together and connect things that even the
Speaker 1: intelligence community hasn't been able to do, or at least
Speaker 1: not able to do very well. But then there's also
Speaker 1: some thought now that because of AI, that the golden
Speaker 1: era of open source intelligence is basically over, that that
Speaker 1: the information environment's becoming so polluted with artificial intelligence content
Speaker 1: and so on, that even those types of that type
Speaker 1: of intelligence isn't going to be as fruitful as maybe
Speaker 1: it used to be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't imagine it would be. We are sitting
Speaker 2: seeing the inditientification of the Internet. As Cory Doctoro says,
Speaker 2: he's absolutely true. AI is already messing shit up and
Speaker 2: plowing it back into the you know, like the septic
Speaker 2: field that is our Internet. Yeah, I don't know what's
Speaker 2: going to happen in the future. I did a lot
Speaker 2: of work recently before I finally gave up consulting work
Speaker 2: on generative AI and artificial intelligence. So, but I jumped
Speaker 2: off it about a year and a half ago, so
Speaker 2: I'm not up to speed on the on what's happening
Speaker 2: now in the last year and a half is orders
Speaker 2: of magnitude and sophistication. Yeah, I don't know what's going
Speaker 2: to happen.
Speaker 1: Okay, So we've been jumping around a little bit, which
Speaker 1: is totally fine. I just don't want to blow over
Speaker 1: a few things. One of them was your work on
Speaker 1: Phase four operations, and it sounds like you were kind
Speaker 1: of knee deep maybe in like the West Africa stuff,
Speaker 1: the Balkans and things like that back in those days. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: could you explain to the listeners what Phase four operations
Speaker 1: are sort of what your role was there.
Speaker 2: So the nineties, which we sometimes called the Golden Age
Speaker 2: of genocide, there were many many civil conflicts, internal conflicts
Speaker 2: in countries, a lot of them in Africa, but not
Speaker 2: solely in Africa, and at that time it was less,
Speaker 2: you know, American boots on the ground than multinational forces.
Speaker 2: So the US was being called to, you know, put
Speaker 2: forces on the ground. Sometimes it was NATO, sometimes it
Speaker 2: would be combination of things. And so whenever that happens,
Speaker 2: the intelligence community has to support those. You know, NSA
Speaker 2: is a defense department institution. You are supporting the warfighter
Speaker 2: in addition to supporting policymakers. So we would have to
Speaker 2: spin up these war rooms to try to help support
Speaker 2: these things. Also, just sort of the approach that intelligence
Speaker 2: community agencies have, which I sort of mentioned a little bit,
Speaker 2: It tends to be sort of split up between the offices,
Speaker 2: get divided up geographically, so you know regions you'll have,
Speaker 2: so you'll have the right resources to support whatever you're
Speaker 2: doing in that particular area, language, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And at that time, there weren't a lot of people
Speaker 2: that were used to dealing with these kinds of operations.
Speaker 2: It wasn't strictly combat. There would be other components to
Speaker 2: what usually had humanitarian component. That's why they were called
Speaker 2: operations other than combat. It wasn't just war fighting. And
Speaker 2: so it became useful to have people like me to
Speaker 2: go from one to the next because we carried this
Speaker 2: knowledge of what you could expect, how the multinational forces
Speaker 2: were going to work, how they were going to interact
Speaker 2: with international organizations, what was going to be called upon
Speaker 2: in the event of humanitarian relief. That ended up being
Speaker 2: a huge part of my job was following a humanitarian
Speaker 2: in operations, and that's what I did for Rumsfeld's office.
Speaker 2: When I ended up going down to OSD after nine
Speaker 2: to eleven so yeah, it was sort of a hybrid thing,
Speaker 2: and it was always, always, always, always a war room
Speaker 2: component whenever there were US forces there. When something happened,
Speaker 2: often you had to be twenty four hours with a
Speaker 2: small staff. So yeah, there was a lot of watchstanding
Speaker 2: for instance. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Two
Speaker 2: and a half years on the Balkans, I had Somalia,
Speaker 2: Sierra Leone, They're all fading in the midst of time.
Speaker 2: I think it started with Rwanda, d Rock, Yeah, East Liberia,
Speaker 2: how can I forget Liberia?
Speaker 1: Did you do North Iraq? Also with the Kurds.
Speaker 2: Not so much prior to the Iraq War? I do
Speaker 2: you think there was something.
Speaker 1: Else they had? There's the military did a big humanitarian
Speaker 1: operation to head off a famine in the Kurdish areas
Speaker 1: of Iraq after the Gulf War, I believe, so maybe
Speaker 1: like ninety four, ninety three or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was doing Africa. Then we did have a
Speaker 2: team that looked at Iraq, but they were focused on WMD.
Speaker 1: So you had a pretty broad experience doing that in
Speaker 1: these different theaters. I'd be interested to ask you what
Speaker 1: kind of grade would you give the United States? Did
Speaker 1: we do better in some areas than others. What made
Speaker 1: the difference between success and failure? I mean, just from
Speaker 1: your unique perspective, I'm really interested, like what kind of
Speaker 1: like lessons learned you may have pulled out of that experience.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I mean just from my my little
Speaker 2: corner of it is the intelligence community, and it was
Speaker 2: sort of the same experience as when I was finding
Speaker 2: I would later find in the technical area, and that
Speaker 2: is you know, when you're doing something that is not
Speaker 2: the standard, it's it's rough because you're not going to
Speaker 2: get the resources you need. So for instance, and I
Speaker 2: laugh at myself today, but I remember when I was
Speaker 2: going through this in the nineties and we were watching
Speaker 2: Russia implode and they were complaining because you know, there
Speaker 2: was a lot of call to draw down the incredible
Speaker 2: amount of resources we threw. You know, Russia was target
Speaker 2: number one. And then with the Cold War seemingly dissolving,
Speaker 2: you know, did we really need six hundred Russian linguists now?
Speaker 2: You know? Could I have a few of them to work?
Speaker 2: You know, I'll give you an example. When I worked
Speaker 2: on the Balkans, for instance, the team I had, which
Speaker 2: was the Multilateral team, we had maybe twenty people, and
Speaker 2: that's to do round the clock operations, whereas the Balkans
Speaker 2: office itself had one hundred and fifty people, and they
Speaker 2: NATO had blown up their communications, so they weren't even
Speaker 2: as busy right as we were. And yet I could
Speaker 2: not convince them to hive off a handful of people
Speaker 2: and give them to us. So, you know, it was
Speaker 2: hard to keep the wheels on the train and to
Speaker 2: meet the high demand from customers when you were not
Speaker 2: being given the resources, which from my perspective, you know,
Speaker 2: I thought that was bad management. Then after I became
Speaker 2: a manager, I realized how hard it is to make
Speaker 2: people do something against their will. You know, if they
Speaker 2: studied Russia and got their advanced degree in it, they're
Speaker 2: really not going to want you to tell them to
Speaker 2: just go over there for a year and do this
Speaker 2: other job.
Speaker 1: And what year was it that you made the jump
Speaker 1: from NSA to CIA.
Speaker 2: Well it was two thousand and three. After nine to eleven,
Speaker 2: I went downtown for two years, so and I was
Speaker 2: still an nsay or at that time, but I was
Speaker 2: sent to State Department and I worked on policy there
Speaker 2: in the multinational arena. Because of my background in multi nationalism,
Speaker 2: and it was to work on the team that helped
Speaker 2: prevent the people that we thought were responsible from fleeing
Speaker 2: to other countries, mostly North Africa. So we worked on
Speaker 2: the National Security Council trying to get them, you know,
Speaker 2: member states to support us in preventing this. It was
Speaker 2: the what did we call it, I forget, you know,
Speaker 2: the Flea States. So I did that for a year,
Speaker 2: and then I ended up going to the what used
Speaker 2: to be called the Office of Humanitarian Assistance until Bush's
Speaker 2: people decided we didn't do that, and then it became
Speaker 2: the Office of Reconstruction and something else I forget now.
Speaker 2: So I worked on the Iraq war planning for a year.
Speaker 2: That was the most eye opening.
Speaker 1: Experience tell us about that.
Speaker 2: So I was one of the few people in there
Speaker 2: who actually had ever worked Phase four combat operations, and
Speaker 2: I was brought in to help advise on what would
Speaker 2: happen in Phase four, which is what happens after combat
Speaker 2: as your troops are moving through a country and you're
Speaker 2: trying to secure the back area and make sure that
Speaker 2: the humanitarian stuff is in place and all that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. Work with the civil affairs officers, and it
Speaker 2: became quickly apparent that they had no interest in that
Speaker 2: that really.
Speaker 1: I'm not telling nation building was a bad word at
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 2: Very much so, but also just their whole concept going
Speaker 2: into that war was wrong, was wrong. I was at
Speaker 2: the Iraq Rock Drill, which is where you get together
Speaker 2: before operations, and everybody goes around the room so we
Speaker 2: are all on the same page. And it became very
Speaker 2: apparent listening to all the different components that were there,
Speaker 2: that no one was on the same page. Some of
Speaker 2: the offices were told we were there for WMD, and
Speaker 2: other offices were being told we were there for other purposes.
Speaker 2: And I remember General what is his name, the first
Speaker 2: guy we sent in. General I want to see I'm sorry, no,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry for humanitarian assistance. He was a retired general.
Speaker 2: I can picture space. And he realized at that moment
Speaker 2: he was screwed that he was being sent in there
Speaker 2: and he was going to take the blame. And I
Speaker 2: told him, I said, you're going to be twisted in
Speaker 2: the wind. And you know, he was sent back within
Speaker 2: six months because as soon as he got there, he
Speaker 2: realized that this was a setup. So yeah, and so
Speaker 2: at a certain point, you know, I was telling people.
Speaker 2: I was telling their generals, this is not how it's
Speaker 2: going to work. You're not going to go in and
Speaker 2: they're going to welcome you as saviors and everything's going
Speaker 2: to be great. I didn't see them ripping copper out
Speaker 2: of the walls by day three, but you know, that
Speaker 2: was what happened, destroying buildings and all this stuff. I mean,
Speaker 2: I knew from everything I had seen we were going
Speaker 2: to have a humanitarian crisis on our hands, and they
Speaker 2: butter put things in place, which of course they did not.
Speaker 1: Why so I think there was such a disinterest in
Speaker 1: planning for this when you know, for starters, it's a
Speaker 1: part of military doctrine, the demobilization or transition process. But
Speaker 1: also there's this sort of like real politic just bureaucratic incentive.
Speaker 1: If you're the Bush administration, you don't want to preside
Speaker 1: over a failed war, and if you don't have some
Speaker 1: sort of like legitimate reconstruction plan, you know, then you're
Speaker 1: condemning our forces to just like kind of camp out
Speaker 1: there forever. I guess, which is sort of what happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I'm I wish I knew the answer.
Speaker 2: I just know what I felt from the meetings I
Speaker 2: was in and talking to various officials, you know, I
Speaker 2: was at the as D level, not the you know,
Speaker 2: under secretary level, So God only knows what went on
Speaker 2: in those meetings, But partly there was just a feel,
Speaker 2: a feel I think that we had the most powerful
Speaker 2: war machine on earth. There was no way we were
Speaker 2: going to fail. Sure, we were going to be able
Speaker 2: to take the country pretty easily, and I don't know
Speaker 2: why they didn't think that that it was going to
Speaker 2: be as hard as it was afterwards. But also going
Speaker 2: into it, you know, there was a big fight between
Speaker 2: the agencies. There were departments like State Department that did
Speaker 2: not agree with what Bush wanted to well Bush, what
Speaker 2: Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to do. And they actually started
Speaker 2: their planning process first, and they held conferences and they
Speaker 2: brought in as many Iraq experts as they could, and
Speaker 2: the Defense Department really wanted to get a hold on
Speaker 2: their strategy, but State Department wouldn't give it to them.
Speaker 2: And I was one person who really knew the guy
Speaker 2: at State Department who was running that really well, and
Speaker 2: so I was kind of caught in the middle for
Speaker 2: a little while, and we tried to hold our own conferences.
Speaker 2: But when the experts told the defense officials the same thing,
Speaker 2: this is a horrible mistake and you're not looking at
Speaker 2: this correctly. They basically just told us to pound sand
Speaker 2: I mean, I was called a trader to my face, right,
Speaker 2: twenty yes, after twenty years working in intelligence, being an
Speaker 2: athal time like that.
Speaker 1: You like lacked sufficient patriotism to support the war, that kind.
Speaker 2: Of thing, right, right, So we tried our best to
Speaker 2: advise and they didn't want to listen to us. We
Speaker 2: tried our best to try to manage the case us afterwards,
Speaker 2: but it just could not be held. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: you know, it's a crime, really, what they did.
Speaker 1: It's the saddest thing for me is that we have
Speaker 1: learned basically or we have learned absolutely nothing from the experience.
Speaker 1: If you look at what we're doing in Iran right now,
Speaker 1: there's no plan. There's no plan for this. You know.
Speaker 1: The plan is, hey, we're going to drop some bombs
Speaker 1: and if that doesn't work, we're going to drop some
Speaker 1: more bombs. And no one's thought beyond that.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely ludicrous. But the only way, of course that
Speaker 2: this administration can get away with this is that they
Speaker 2: have people with absolutely zero experience leading these departments, and
Speaker 2: it's such a disservice to the professional people who have
Speaker 2: run this government and the people in the military, and
Speaker 2: you know, the government workforce who work so hard to
Speaker 2: develop this expertise so we understand how to do these things.
Speaker 2: It's like it all over again, but worse, like having
Speaker 2: clown tell you, you know, to shut up and sit
Speaker 2: in the corner, and you're absolutely right. There's no plan.
Speaker 2: I have been through war planning for something like this.
Speaker 2: There's nothing even remotely like it. So the American people,
Speaker 2: I don't understand. I just don't understand what they want.
Speaker 1: Well, well, the American people have this weird thing. And
Speaker 1: you know, they've been conditioned also for twenty five years
Speaker 1: at least now maybe more, that airstrikes in special ops
Speaker 1: is not war in their mind. I don't know why
Speaker 1: that is. They think that, like if we're blowing the
Speaker 1: shit out of like a girls' school in a foreign country,
Speaker 1: in their mind, that's not war. I don't get it,
Speaker 1: but they've been conditioned to believe that that's true.
Speaker 2: That's true. And yeah, I don't understand either. Is it
Speaker 2: the movies? Is it because they see it on a
Speaker 2: movie and they think, well, that's different. It's not real
Speaker 2: to them.
Speaker 1: I know, I think that's I think that's a big
Speaker 1: part of it. And I think also there is a
Speaker 1: such thing is you know, the Fortress America and just
Speaker 1: the distance we have from it, that politics doesn't have
Speaker 1: the immediacy for us that it has for people who
Speaker 1: live in contentious parts of the world where you know,
Speaker 1: the politics go hey wire in your country's being invaded.
Speaker 1: You know, we don't really have that sort of experience here.
Speaker 2: That's true. But you know, even in the nineties, you know,
Speaker 2: where I was closer to this, there were other things
Speaker 2: that the American people cared about and that registered with them, right, so,
Speaker 2: and yet none of that seems to have the same
Speaker 2: impact anymore on Americans where what is important to us?
Speaker 2: And you know, I actually blame technology for a lot
Speaker 2: of this. I do feel that, you know, especially social media.
Speaker 2: Social media is how people around the world communicate now, right,
Speaker 2: used to be telephones and letters, not anymore. It's all
Speaker 2: the social media, and it's different, right, It's asynchronous, and
Speaker 2: it's also all propaganda. That was a big part of
Speaker 2: my work. My first teams. We're the ones who started
Speaker 2: looking at how do you measure disinformation? How can you,
Speaker 2: you know, authenticate information, how can you authenticate users? What
Speaker 2: the hell's going on out there? And we are just
Speaker 2: totally in an age of propaganda now. You really can't
Speaker 2: believe anything you hear from people. And you know, when
Speaker 2: I say that to people, especially kids, they're like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: we know, and yet they don't.
Speaker 1: Right, right, but they go along believing it anyway, right, right,
Speaker 1: what's the answer.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I've been yelling for years that really
Speaker 2: what we need in this country is strong regulation of technology,
Speaker 2: especially social media, and we need it for AI too.
Speaker 2: It's from what I saw working with these companies when
Speaker 2: we first started doing the disinformation work, and I had
Speaker 2: ended up retiring and was working with one of these
Speaker 2: companies helping them in their outreach, especially to government. So
Speaker 2: we did a lot of cases, studies and that sort
Speaker 2: of thing, and at that time Congress got it, but
Speaker 2: unfortunately Trump was on the horizon and they knew he
Speaker 2: did not want any policies looking into He did not want,
Speaker 2: you know, regulation of the technology interesting and didn't believe
Speaker 2: said he didn't believe it that disinformation. So you know
Speaker 2: that kind of closed the door. Then there was a
Speaker 2: time when Congress kind of looked at whether or not
Speaker 2: we should do this. So a lot of the people
Speaker 2: I knew and I still worked with on the outside researchers,
Speaker 2: they were working on projects for the big platforms. They
Speaker 2: worked with Google, they worked with Facebook, they worked with Twitter,
Speaker 2: and you know, and then they told me and we
Speaker 2: would just what we needed was like a quasi governmental organization.
Speaker 2: Because the platforms won't talk to each other, they see
Speaker 2: each other as competitors, and you can't shut down disinformation
Speaker 2: platform by platform because the actors jump around, they move,
Speaker 2: they're very fluid. There has to be coordination and the
Speaker 2: only way that we could see that working was through
Speaker 2: a quasi government governmental organization. We actually came close to
Speaker 2: having some Congress support that, but it passed because you know,
Speaker 2: went away because of Trump and we're in this mess
Speaker 2: word today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does seem that our government has been so
Speaker 1: captured by these companies at this point that they're they're
Speaker 1: the possibility of regulation just seems so far away. It's
Speaker 1: almost inconceivable, even though I think everyone knows exactly what
Speaker 1: you said, that kind of we desperately need some type
Speaker 1: of regulation that also protects people's you know, right to
Speaker 1: express themselves and so on.
Speaker 2: But it can be done, but it would shut down
Speaker 2: this open season onling right. But obviously there are some,
Speaker 2: especially politicians, who have a vested interest that this, yeah,
Speaker 2: remain well.
Speaker 1: And also the companies themselves bounce around to They're very
Speaker 1: nimble in how they're able to court the government. You know,
Speaker 1: whether it's some Democrats or Republicans. They'll go and tell
Speaker 1: them what they want to hear it, and you know,
Speaker 1: walk away with goodies from the government. It seems that
Speaker 1: it's not a big deal for them.
Speaker 2: It's not. I mean in early on though, I will
Speaker 2: say that they were it wasn't even handed. They were
Speaker 2: courting conservatives because the conservatives were so critical of the
Speaker 2: social platforms. Right around the time I retired and I
Speaker 2: was looking for my next job, I was looking at
Speaker 2: what was available at places like Google or whatever in
Speaker 2: the policy areas, and they were looking for policy people
Speaker 2: government to be liaisms with the government. But they only
Speaker 2: wanted them for right wing organizations. They weren't doing anything
Speaker 2: for the left leaning organizations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean definitely there's this sort of like
Speaker 1: bouncing back and forth, and you know, I think we
Speaker 1: can all remember like the rhetoric about big tech and
Speaker 1: they wanted to get big tech under control. And then
Speaker 1: you know, after the election, Zuckerberg and Elon or they're
Speaker 1: at the inauguration. It's like all that just went away apparently.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, that is that's a big tragedy
Speaker 2: really for this country. And maybe it'll swing back. I
Speaker 2: mean there was the finding against Meta recently that they
Speaker 2: did contribute.
Speaker 1: To mental health addictas behaviors, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Which they certainly did. You know, it's it's just insane
Speaker 2: that you can see these behaviors out there. You know
Speaker 2: they're doing it, they're lying about doing it. You know,
Speaker 2: it's gaslighting, to use a popular word. I guess maybe
Speaker 2: that'll make a difference.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's really depressing,
Speaker 1: you know how our government has sort of abdicated its
Speaker 1: responsible ability to protect the public, even like the FBI
Speaker 1: saying recently that you should use Signal or another encrypted
Speaker 1: app to protect your communications because we can't and won't
Speaker 1: protect them. How does that work? I don't know.
Speaker 2: Hopefully the people a Signal are overjoyed. Of course, they
Speaker 2: started because they didn't trust the government, So yeah, that's
Speaker 2: kind of interesting. Well, you know, we did put ourselves
Speaker 2: in this fix. One of the technologies that we have
Speaker 2: that I've watched my whole career is computer security, and
Speaker 2: the companies know, everybody knows we need more computer security
Speaker 2: baked into our products, but companies have said, we're not
Speaker 2: going to put it in there unless consumers want it,
Speaker 2: and consumers don't want it enough to make it, you know,
Speaker 2: worth the investment for them. We do this to ourselves.
Speaker 1: So to get us back on the time mine a
Speaker 1: bit after the Iraq War planning, what was sort of
Speaker 1: the next step in your career.
Speaker 2: Well, I was at the Pentagon when who was it Hayden.
Speaker 2: Now I love Hayden, General Hayden. He was the chief
Speaker 2: of NSA for the transformation, and like I said, he
Speaker 2: did a tremendous job. But I was there when he
Speaker 2: came to talk to the workforce about the Patriot Act
Speaker 2: because of course it had a big impact for NSA, right,
Speaker 2: and it really ran against the policies that singand analysts
Speaker 2: are trained to go by. And I was it just
Speaker 2: shocked me how much he was in Rumsfeldt's pocket. And
Speaker 2: you know, that there was no pushback on this. So
Speaker 2: I was complaining to David Gordon, my friend who was
Speaker 2: the NIO and at the time he was a office
Speaker 2: manager at CIA, and I said, I really don't want
Speaker 2: to go back to the Defense Department, and he said,
Speaker 2: come work for me. So I went to CIA. At
Speaker 2: that point they hired me and I went and I
Speaker 2: was the senior humanitarian analyst for five years. Cool so
Speaker 2: I had to become an all source analyst, had to
Speaker 2: learn how to do that. It was a really eye
Speaker 2: opening experience because I was coming in as a mid careerist.
Speaker 2: As you know, probably most agencies, government agencies like you
Speaker 2: to come in as a young person, and so you
Speaker 2: come up through the ranks and you really are just
Speaker 2: you know, immersed in the culture and all those things
Speaker 2: that I talked about, you know, like learning, classification and all.
Speaker 2: You learn their ways and it just seeps into your pores, right.
Speaker 2: So everyone has the same experiences, and so it's hard
Speaker 2: when you come in mid career. It's very hard bringing
Speaker 2: in people from industry, you know, from outside the government.
Speaker 2: You bring them in for their expertise in a particular domain,
Speaker 2: but they didn't come up through the ranks and so
Speaker 2: they don't have the same experiences and the same understanding
Speaker 2: and all that. It was very hard, and David brought
Speaker 2: several folks in from other agencies as mid careers, and
Speaker 2: it was hard for all of us. Yeah, so at
Speaker 2: the end of five years, he ended up becoming assistant
Speaker 2: secretary for Condoleeza Rice. He left left me high and dry,
Speaker 2: and then I had to fight off the wolves because
Speaker 2: you know, I was an outsider. But after five years,
Speaker 2: that's when I got the gig. Basically, I did a
Speaker 2: year of recruiting and during that time Open Source Center
Speaker 2: came to me and said, we need someone who has
Speaker 2: a technical background to work on social media.
Speaker 1: So and what was this horrible story that got turned
Speaker 1: into a novel.
Speaker 2: It happened in when I was in the Office of
Speaker 2: Transnational Issues. The new office director, who had been my
Speaker 2: friend David's deputy, did a really stupid, stupid thing and
Speaker 2: he he basically dabbled in operations without telling the Directorate
Speaker 2: of Operations he was doing this. And it was a disaster,
Speaker 2: I mean like a really bad disaster, and they frog
Speaker 2: marched all the analysts into the bubble and said, you're
Speaker 2: never going to do this again, and they put down
Speaker 2: all these new coordination rules, you know, so no one
Speaker 2: would ever make this horrible mistake again. And yeah, that's
Speaker 2: the most I can tell you about it, sorry, because
Speaker 2: if I say anything more, you'll know what the incident was.
Speaker 1: Uh well, how did how did that get fictionalized in
Speaker 1: the book?
Speaker 2: Well, so somebody died during this operation that this guy authorized,
Speaker 2: and in a denied territory, and so I just how
Speaker 2: to put this? I thought it was interesting that a
Speaker 2: manager could well he didn't survive, he got thrown out,
Speaker 2: but he should have gone to jail. Somebody died. But
Speaker 2: you know that's not what happens in the intelligence, especially CIA, right,
Speaker 2: their mandate is to do these impossible things, you know,
Speaker 2: for a policy objective. Basically, you know, he wanted the
Speaker 2: right outcome. He just went about it the wrong way
Speaker 2: and so his punishment was to be banished from the kingdom.
Speaker 2: But I just thought that was so weird. And I'll
Speaker 2: tell you in publishing, when I talked to my editors
Speaker 2: and agents and I told them the story as much
Speaker 2: as I could, they were flabbergasted that all he got
Speaker 2: was fired, that he didn't go to jail. I think
Speaker 2: it kind of showed that the public doesn't really understand
Speaker 2: what intelligence does, what you know, the rules that apply
Speaker 2: to it, and that sort of thing. I can't I
Speaker 2: really can't tell you more, even though it's been quite
Speaker 2: a while.
Speaker 1: The uh was I mean, that's like one of those
Speaker 1: kind of like hard lines, right that analysts aren't supposed
Speaker 1: to be running operations.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely absolutely. But this guy you knew dealing with them,
Speaker 2: that he thought too much of himself, and he was
Speaker 2: always he prided himself on thinking outside the box, and
Speaker 2: you had to be prepared to tell him, no, I
Speaker 2: won't do that, Amy, you'll do that. You have to
Speaker 2: find another person to do that for you. And a
Speaker 2: couple of people didn't tell him that.
Speaker 1: It reminds me, as you're telling me this story, it
Speaker 1: reminds me about you know, what's been said about Oliver
Speaker 1: Worth in the nineteen eighties, that he was going to
Speaker 1: these embassies and saying, hey, I'm a direct representative from
Speaker 1: the White House. I have this letter from President Reagan
Speaker 1: saying this to the station chiefs, you're going to do,
Speaker 1: you know, parallel unilateral operations for me, and all the
Speaker 1: station chiefs reported back to the CIA even though they
Speaker 1: Oliver North said, you cannot to tell anyone. All of
Speaker 1: them reported back. I believe the one that didn't was
Speaker 1: the station chief in Honduras, and he was the one
Speaker 1: that cut canned.
Speaker 2: Yeah. See, they were smart. They were smart. Now, the
Speaker 2: Havana syndrome story has something in it. That was another
Speaker 2: thing that happened in my career. Happened when I was
Speaker 2: at NSA, and it has to do with an official
Speaker 2: on the policy side getting caught making a secret deal
Speaker 2: with the enemy. So that was fun. I got to
Speaker 2: go back, and I mean it wasn't fun at the time.
Speaker 2: We felt very bad for this person. This person his
Speaker 2: heart was actually in the right place. He was trying
Speaker 2: to do the right thing. It's just that he believed
Speaker 2: the adversary when the adversary puffed up his ego and
Speaker 2: told him, you know, you're the only one and you're
Speaker 2: going to be our man.
Speaker 1: Piece is going to break out if you work.
Speaker 2: With us, right, uh, yeah, something like that. And he
Speaker 2: couldn't see that he was he was doing a treason
Speaker 2: this thing, right, But we caught him on intercept and
Speaker 2: we had to tell his secretary and that was not
Speaker 2: a pleasant thing. Yeah, But I It was another one
Speaker 2: of those instances that I thought, if I ever write
Speaker 2: a story, I'm going to stick this in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so while we're talking about that, this
Speaker 1: is the uh the well. First off, tell us what's
Speaker 1: the title of the novel about the analysts that was
Speaker 1: you know that you fictionalized the the analysts dabbling in operations.
Speaker 1: What was the name of that book.
Speaker 2: That was my first spy novel. It is called Red Widow.
Speaker 2: Came out five years ago, I think, and there was
Speaker 2: a second book in the series, Read London, came out
Speaker 2: three years ago, and unfortunately those are the only two
Speaker 2: books in the series. We will not be getting any
Speaker 2: more read books. I'm very proud of the books. They
Speaker 2: did well critically, Like Red Widow was the New York
Speaker 2: Times book editors picked it as an editor's choice, and
Speaker 2: it was nominated by International Thriller Writers for Best Novel
Speaker 2: of the Year, and it got optioned a couple times,
Speaker 2: but it ended up not being picked up. And then
Speaker 2: I did a couple like novella length pieces for Amazon
Speaker 2: Original Stories. So one is Black Vault, and that is
Speaker 2: actually a UFO story because you probably maybe had the
Speaker 2: same idea when the sixteen minutes piece came out about
Speaker 2: the Navy, you know, and everybody was talking about it,
Speaker 2: and I was like, Oh, here's going to be a
Speaker 2: congressional directive, which means every agency is going to be
Speaker 2: told to do a report or you know what your
Speaker 2: experience is, and I know exactly how the CIA one's
Speaker 2: going to go. So I wrote a story about that,
Speaker 2: and it's basically this case officer fifteen years ago. He
Speaker 2: has what seems to be like a close encounter with
Speaker 2: the UFO, and like an idiot, he insists on writing
Speaker 2: a cable about it, and he's told by his deepestation,
Speaker 2: don't do that. You're going to destroy your career. You're
Speaker 2: gonna make us look like idiots. They're going to think
Speaker 2: we're smoking something out here. But it falls through the
Speaker 2: cracks and it gets released and it ruins his career.
Speaker 2: Fast forward fifteen years the sixty minutes piece comes out,
Speaker 2: the congressional directive comes through, So what a CIA do?
Speaker 2: It sets up a task force to write report, and
Speaker 2: he is assigned to the task force. He is six
Speaker 2: months away from retirement. He thinks somebody is yanking his
Speaker 2: chain and trying to get him to quit by putting
Speaker 2: him on this task force. And you know what these
Speaker 2: task forces are, it's dead wood. That's where you send
Speaker 2: the people who are not doing a liquor work anyway.
Speaker 2: You just don't want to look at them for a year.
Speaker 2: So it just gets filled up with all these useless,
Speaker 2: you know, slow horses characters. And he goes down there
Speaker 2: and he's just furious, and he ends up mouthing off
Speaker 2: to somebody, somebody who's high up who used to be
Speaker 2: a friend of his, and he says, you can't put
Speaker 2: people who know that the last thing you can do
Speaker 2: with CIA is fail. They're not going to write a
Speaker 2: truthful report. You've got to put young people on it
Speaker 2: who don't know to be afraid to fail yet. And
Speaker 2: so the guy does and they end up finding out
Speaker 2: what actually happened fifteen years ago, and they uncover this
Speaker 2: massive there was a massive mole problem. Minute blows the
Speaker 2: doors open that maybe there are aliens out there. So
Speaker 2: that's the story that it got picked up by for
Speaker 2: TV by AMC, and the producers of Breaking Bad and
Speaker 2: the producers of The Walking Dead are my producers on it.
Speaker 2: And right now we're looking for a star to attach
Speaker 2: to it. It has been. It was such a fun
Speaker 2: story to write, and the reaction from Hollywood has been
Speaker 2: very gratifying. I really like the story, so fingers crossed,
Speaker 2: we'll see something before too long.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I'm glad to hear that that. You know,
Speaker 1: it got the attention after the two Spine novels. It
Speaker 1: sounded like they really resonated with people, but for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: didn't get you know, maybe the traction that you'd hoped for.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, my experience with Hollywood has been interesting,
Speaker 2: Hollywood versus the books. Sorry, I'm looking at myself here,
Speaker 2: my hair looks terrible. Readers seem to like books that
Speaker 2: follow sort of a predictive, a familiar pattern, right, whereas
Speaker 2: Hollywood likes stories that are grounded, very truthful. So there's
Speaker 2: some of that, but it takes you beyond them. So Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: the read books because they're women protagonists and even the
Speaker 2: antagonist is usually a woman, it really is written from
Speaker 2: that point of view. But the readership of spine novels
Speaker 2: tends to be a male. It's one of the few
Speaker 2: categories in in fiction that is more male readers.
Speaker 1: Science is the only other one.
Speaker 2: Maybe, Yeah, And you know, they find that men tend
Speaker 2: to not want to read a story from a woman's
Speaker 2: point of view. So the main character, you know, like
Speaker 2: putting themselves in the head of a woman and seeing
Speaker 2: how she sees the world, and they tend not to
Speaker 2: want to read books by women too, So that that
Speaker 2: has been sort of a double whammy for the Red Books.
Speaker 2: But oddly enough, Hollywood loved the idea. Unfortunately, the movies
Speaker 2: from a woman's perspective tend to do as well either.
Speaker 2: So that's the lesson I took away from all that.
Speaker 1: So I'm surprised for one. I mean, I would rather
Speaker 1: watch a movie with Charlie's then than Gerard Butler or
Speaker 1: somebody just my opinion. Take it for what it's worth.
Speaker 2: I agree. I love The Atomic Blonde.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so the Havannah book, you have a working
Speaker 1: title for that.
Speaker 2: The Invisible Enemy.
Speaker 1: And so I've done a lot of like journalistic work
Speaker 1: on Havana syndrome, and I've had folks tell me, and
Speaker 1: this has been reported publicly now too, that it's suspected
Speaker 1: that the first Havana syndrome victim was actually an NSA
Speaker 1: employee in the nineteen nineties. I was wondering if you
Speaker 1: ever crossed paths with any of that back in those days.
Speaker 2: So here's a crazy story and it'll lead to the
Speaker 2: book I swear In two thousand, I was a National
Speaker 2: Colligence officer. At the time. I was supposed to go
Speaker 2: a participate in a war game for a friend of mine.
Speaker 2: I woke up and I had complete vertigo, spin, spin, spin,
Speaker 2: and the worst head pain of my life. I thought
Speaker 2: my skull was splitting open. This went on for nine months. Now.
Speaker 2: It didn't come out of the blue. There had been
Speaker 2: I'd had a couple of years of continuous problems with
Speaker 2: my head and pressures and ear and all that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff, But of course NSA didn't want to talk
Speaker 2: to me about it. If you had been in the
Speaker 2: building at the time, you would have thought there's got
Speaker 2: to be environmental issues here because the building was not
Speaker 2: kept up well. But the main thing was the roof.
Speaker 2: And this was I was always in the main headquarters building.
Speaker 2: The roof was completely covered with microwave antennas. The walls
Speaker 2: were riddled with cabling where transmissions are going around you
Speaker 2: and underfoot. You were just and occasionally you would get
Speaker 2: somebody else complaining of the same issues that their heads
Speaker 2: felt funny and whatever, but they would do nothing for you.
Speaker 2: So long story is short. I thought I was going
Speaker 2: to have to retire. We didn't know what it was.
Speaker 2: It took nine months to get to Hopkins. They have
Speaker 2: a special program, and they gave me a diagnosis and
Speaker 2: I stayed under their care for six years. To this day.
Speaker 2: I still take daily medicine to try to suppress a migraine.
Speaker 2: That's how it is, right.
Speaker 1: What was the diagnosis that Hopkins gave you for that?
Speaker 2: So twenty five years ago the I diagnosed this is
Speaker 2: this rare form of migraine called vestibular migraine where its
Speaker 2: actu vestibular system. So it was twenty twenty one. I
Speaker 2: think that I ran into Oh I should explain a
Speaker 2: few things. One is they got it under control enough
Speaker 2: so that by the time nine to eleven came around.
Speaker 2: I could just go from the frying pan into the fire.
Speaker 2: You know, I was in the office of the Secretary
Speaker 2: of Defense for the Iraq War.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: If pressure was going to make my head erupt, that
Speaker 2: would have been it. I was literally working like sixteen
Speaker 2: hours days in commuting three so it didn't come back.
Speaker 2: I went back to NSA in twenty fourteen, and it
Speaker 2: wasn't until that day I thought, Ooh, I haven't had
Speaker 2: those problems since I left that building. I wonder if
Speaker 2: I'm going to have those problems if I have to
Speaker 2: go back to that building. Luckily I did not have
Speaker 2: to go back to that building. I ended up being
Speaker 2: in the out buildings. But also they cleaned up their act.
Speaker 2: There's not an army of microwave antenna's on the roof anymore,
Speaker 2: so didn't have any problems. Twenty twenty one, I think
Speaker 2: I was at a speaker at a conference when a
Speaker 2: Valerie Plames conferences, and she had Mark Polyoff I scrap name, Polly,
Speaker 2: thank you. He talked about his experiences with Havannah syndrome,
Speaker 2: and you could have knocked me over with a feather.
Speaker 2: It was exactly the same what he went through, the feelings,
Speaker 2: the headaches, that just crazy. When he finished, I sat
Speaker 2: down with him and I said, look, I'm not saying
Speaker 2: I had what you had. I'm not saying you had
Speaker 2: what I have, but this is weird, and he agreed
Speaker 2: it was weird. That's actually how the book that I
Speaker 2: worked on, The Invisible Enemy, came about because when Cia
Speaker 2: came out a little while after that with there they said,
Speaker 2: we don't believe it's a directed energy weapon. He contacted
Speaker 2: me and he said, you know, he was doing a
Speaker 2: lot of interviews at the time and telling them his
Speaker 2: experience and how he felt betrayed and that the agency,
Speaker 2: you know, was doing a disservice to his fellow officers
Speaker 2: who'd also been struck. And he said, we need to
Speaker 2: write a story about it. And he said, a story
Speaker 2: is not going to get what you want. You know,
Speaker 2: it's not going to do it any better than your nonfiction.
Speaker 2: He said, I don't care. I want a story. So
Speaker 2: that's why I ended up writing the story. At the time,
Speaker 2: I was doing a lot with Amazon, and I thought
Speaker 2: for sure they would publish it, and so I wrote
Speaker 2: it to a novella length and long story short. It
Speaker 2: took a year and a half to actually get them
Speaker 2: to give me a contract on it, and they wanted
Speaker 2: it a novel length by then, so I had to
Speaker 2: take extra time to write it. And in that time
Speaker 2: some of the more recent developments came out. But a
Speaker 2: couple of years ago I had a relapse. It was
Speaker 2: the first time, and Hopkins took me back and I
Speaker 2: was talking to one of the doctors in the special
Speaker 2: program and they said, you know, we've learned a lot
Speaker 2: about brains and heads since you were here before, and
Speaker 2: they were telling me that they think this condition is
Speaker 2: you have to it's like congenital you have, like a
Speaker 2: malformation or a deformity in your head that makes you
Speaker 2: more susceptible to these kinds of vestibular disturbances. And it
Speaker 2: just all clicked into place when they told me that, because,
Speaker 2: like I said, there were other people at NSA who
Speaker 2: had some of the same physical symptoms that I did.
Speaker 2: But NSA would always push back and say, well, why
Speaker 2: aren't the other people next to you having the same problems.
Speaker 2: It can't be real. I think it's a combination of
Speaker 2: the effect of the emanations and whether or not you
Speaker 2: have these congenital problems, whether or not you have malformations
Speaker 2: that predispose.
Speaker 1: You to you here's an interesting parallel. So most of
Speaker 1: the people out there have probably heard of Gulf War syndrome,
Speaker 1: which was also something that our government denied, you know,
Speaker 1: like agent Orange. And then it was Golf War syndrome
Speaker 1: that we had got Golf War veterans coming back and
Speaker 1: they were kind of like bedridden, depressive, like they were
Speaker 1: experiencing strange symptoms that no one could really explain why
Speaker 1: they were having them, and the government said it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: There's actually some science out now, like credible science, showing
Speaker 1: that what happened was Saddam Hussein did not deploy chemical
Speaker 1: or biological weapons, but we did blow up some bunkers
Speaker 1: during the Golf War where those weapons were, so there
Speaker 1: were very low levels of some of that stuff in
Speaker 1: the air in certain places. And again, why did some
Speaker 1: people have gol syndrome and some don't. Well, they saw
Speaker 1: that it has to do with a genetic receptor that
Speaker 1: certain people have, not everyone has it, So some people
Speaker 1: are uniquely susceptible to those low lefs of like sarin
Speaker 1: gas that gives them these symptoms. So I think that
Speaker 1: you know what you're describing, exposure to microwaves, Why does
Speaker 1: it affect some people and not others? I think it
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense. But then when we talk
Speaker 1: about actual Havana syndrome, now we're talking about a system
Speaker 1: that is weaponized and designed to hurt you. So I
Speaker 1: don't know if that would hold true when you start
Speaker 1: talking about people who are specifically targeted with the weapon.
Speaker 1: Probably at that point it doesn't matter, you know, what
Speaker 1: the genetic receptor is or the shape of your brain.
Speaker 1: Probably you're going to get you know, microwavety regardless.
Speaker 2: Possibly. But let me ask you about this because you've
Speaker 2: probably looked into this part more than I have. You know,
Speaker 2: if you think back to the fifties and sixties when
Speaker 2: the Russians were bombarding the US embassy, right, yeah, it
Speaker 2: wasn't It was a collection attempt, right, They were trying
Speaker 2: to collect information, and it was just pulsed microwave. That's
Speaker 2: just a band of the radio spectrum, radio frequency spectrum,
Speaker 2: and that's used for a lot of different technologies, not
Speaker 2: ones that most people run into every day, like radar
Speaker 2: systems or something like that. But it's there, and I know,
Speaker 2: of god, it must have been thirty years ago, seeing
Speaker 2: NESSA knew about these types of collection systems right where
Speaker 2: you collected the emanations and you could pull information out
Speaker 2: of them. So I do think in a lot of
Speaker 2: these cases, it's not that they're trying to intentionally hurt
Speaker 2: an individual, but they're aiming a collection device against them,
Speaker 2: you know, And this comes up in my story but now,
Speaker 2: of course, we are seeing the age of using these
Speaker 2: kind of disruptive technologies that the prohibition, the moral prohibition
Speaker 2: is off, and we're seeing more development of these kind
Speaker 2: of pulse weapon systems.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know that some of the doctors I've spoken
Speaker 1: to they think that, And apparently the military is testing
Speaker 1: some captured device, so maybe they'll have better information. But
Speaker 1: the best, to the best of my knowledge, the theory
Speaker 1: is that it is pulsed microwaves. But when I say pulsed,
Speaker 1: I mean like hundreds of pulses a second, and that's
Speaker 1: creating some sort of like cumulative effect inside the human cranium.
Speaker 1: That that's the prevailing theory about how it works right now.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I certainly would not preclude that there
Speaker 1: are people that you know, the Moscow signal and others,
Speaker 1: you know, people who are harmed by uh, you know,
Speaker 1: attempts at collecting intelligence. But I would I would assert
Speaker 1: that there are quite a few people who are deliberately
Speaker 1: targeted with a weaponized version of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean there's research programs now even in the
Speaker 2: United States, Yeah, that are looking at you know, what's
Speaker 2: his name, what's his name? The president when they did
Speaker 2: the Venezuela hit, right, he was talking about a disruptors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's BS myself, the discombobulator ray, and
Speaker 1: then more recently in Iran we got the ghost murmur h.
Speaker 1: You know, we can read a heartbeat from ten kilometers
Speaker 1: like they're they're kind of like inflating themselves up. I
Speaker 1: think a little bit here.
Speaker 2: Well, I do think some of that technology, the descriptions
Speaker 2: are overblown, but that is some of the applications, at
Speaker 2: least in the research stage for these types of weapons,
Speaker 2: that you can use them to disrupt, you know, a
Speaker 2: computer system or something like that, or take down you know,
Speaker 2: in movies they always make EMPs is like this world
Speaker 2: ending thing, but actually in real life you can design
Speaker 2: EMP attacks, you know, that can be very localized, like
Speaker 2: against the room or against the campus. You know, it'll
Speaker 2: be less effective of course across the campus. But I
Speaker 2: I think you know, that's the class of the next
Speaker 2: generation non kinetic weapons we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's it's fascinating stuff. And your book is
Speaker 1: about a Is it a CIA officer that gets hit
Speaker 1: in Central Asia?
Speaker 2: Yes, he's he's in Baku. He's there meeting an asset.
Speaker 2: He runs into just by chance, an old adversary who
Speaker 2: a Russian who happens to be there. He does the
Speaker 2: best SDR of his life. He feels like he can
Speaker 2: go ahead and meet his asset. He comes back to
Speaker 2: the hotel, he knows there's a watcher on him downstairs,
Speaker 2: and then he's hit that night and doesn't know what
Speaker 2: hit him and it ruins his life.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, that part is uh not fictional.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sadly true. But then a White House staffer is
Speaker 2: hit in the parking garage are the White House, and
Speaker 2: it just insenses him. And the President at the time,
Speaker 2: of course, is talking about how the Russians are going
Speaker 2: to be our new best buddies, and so nothing is
Speaker 2: being done about this, and you know, everything at the
Speaker 2: agency about for himana syndrome is being smothered and he
Speaker 2: just is furious, and so he decides he's going to
Speaker 2: conduct his own investigation.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, so they're going off book, yes, cool.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of Mark in it, it's not
Speaker 2: all mark.
Speaker 1: When when is the book do out?
Speaker 2: It's going to be spring of next year, looking like March.
Speaker 4: At this point, as we get back to your story,
Speaker 4: where did we leave off going to work with S
Speaker 4: and T.
Speaker 2: Let's see what happened. I was the lead analyst for
Speaker 2: social media. I sold my first book in twenty ten,
Speaker 2: and in twenty eleven, when the book was coming out,
Speaker 2: CIA started giving me a lot of hassle. They were
Speaker 2: hassling me and the book has nothing to do with intelligence.
Speaker 2: It was like a fantasy book, right, And I told
Speaker 2: them there's no reason why you should need to review
Speaker 2: it or anything like that, and they didn't believe me.
Speaker 2: But then it came down to press being able to
Speaker 2: interact with the press, and my publisher at the time,
Speaker 2: Simon and Schuster, decided it was going to be a
Speaker 2: big book, so they were sending me on tour. And
Speaker 2: you know, you go to a festival and you sit
Speaker 2: in a tent, so any press person can come up
Speaker 2: to you and ask you questions. And CIA said, no,
Speaker 2: you have to give us four days to approve any
Speaker 2: contact with the press. You don't get the golden ticket
Speaker 2: and publishing every day. So I quit and I went
Speaker 2: to work for RAND for a few years, and then
Speaker 2: n Essay hired me back and I was working in
Speaker 2: science and technology. At that point. Did the office director
Speaker 2: thing them set up an office to do technology forecasting,
Speaker 2: which I had done at RAND and done for CIA
Speaker 2: as a contractor.
Speaker 1: It's unfortunate sometimes the way the CIA makes it difficult
Speaker 1: for employees to you know, be a human being. You know,
Speaker 1: I've heard all kinds of stories over the years about
Speaker 1: somebody who works at the CIA falls in love with
Speaker 1: a British citizen. They want to get married, and the CIA,
Speaker 1: even though it's a brit and there's not an intelligence
Speaker 1: threat there, they're like, no, you can't marry this person. Well,
Speaker 1: like they can actually put the kaibash on it, like
Speaker 1: that's wild.
Speaker 2: It is crazy, and I want to feel like they're
Speaker 2: getting better over time. I put NSA in a separate
Speaker 2: box because it is incredible management issues and always has. Now,
Speaker 2: my experience at CIA was different, right, Like I said,
Speaker 2: I came in as a mid careerst so maybe I
Speaker 2: didn't see the things that people who came up through
Speaker 2: the ranks would see. Or maybe it's just the comparison
Speaker 2: to NSA. But CIA didn't say it as bad. You
Speaker 2: just had to remember that it was. You know, they
Speaker 2: couldn't They could sometimes come up with the right answer.
Speaker 2: You just had to figure out a way to get
Speaker 2: them there, whereas at NSSAY a lot of times it
Speaker 2: was like a bad parent. There was just no way
Speaker 2: to get them to be reasonable. Yeah, so I don't
Speaker 2: doubt that some people have had very unreasonable experiences with CIA.
Speaker 2: I mean the four I don't think they would probably
Speaker 2: do that now to people. You got to remember too,
Speaker 2: this was right around the time that Mike go what's
Speaker 2: his name he wrote Imperial Rubris and he really pissed off. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the Bush administration and Cheney was furious, and he didn't
Speaker 2: want any more CIA people to get publishing contracts after that,
Speaker 2: and so they were really clamping down on everyone. And
Speaker 2: they couldn't really clamped on me because it was a
Speaker 2: fantasy book, right, so they needed some other way to
Speaker 2: control me.
Speaker 1: So funny, Yeah, I was I heard a gentleman speak.
Speaker 1: I don't want to speak out of turn, but he
Speaker 1: was a former CIA case officer and he was talking
Speaker 1: about he wrote a non fiction book about his experiences
Speaker 1: early in the Afghan Afghanistan war working with special forces
Speaker 1: and fighting out Kaeda, and this story or other people's
Speaker 1: similar stories has been written many times from the CIA perspective,
Speaker 1: the special forces perspective, and the CIA came back to him.
Speaker 1: They're like, now you can't publish this because we don't.
Speaker 1: We won't let you publish anything about CIA and Special
Speaker 1: Forces working together. And it's like they made a movie
Speaker 1: about I mean, well, what what what are we doing
Speaker 1: here and this? You know, it's probably about the current
Speaker 1: administration and the current political appointees at the agency are
Speaker 1: just like, we're not doing books.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean it was very much in my space,
Speaker 2: like a pendulum switch, right, So when they were getting
Speaker 2: political pressure, they would really lamp down on things. Other
Speaker 2: times they could be very reasonable. I mean when I
Speaker 2: started vetting books through them, which was in the mid
Speaker 2: two thousands, you know, they would not let you use
Speaker 2: the expression chief of station in a book, even though
Speaker 2: of course it had been published and was in movies
Speaker 2: and all this stuff. And their argument back to you was, well,
Speaker 2: you're you know, you work here, so you're validating this.
Speaker 2: You know, now they'll let you use chief of station.
Speaker 2: You know, it's I think they do. I'm trying to
Speaker 2: know to me, but I imagine if you're in the building,
Speaker 2: they would.
Speaker 1: Some of my favorites. Oddly enough, they would let guys
Speaker 1: use the term special forces, but not the term special operations.
Speaker 1: One of my favorites. I spoke to this gentleman many
Speaker 1: years ago. Now I should try to go and find him.
Speaker 1: He wrote a book, put it through the PRB, and
Speaker 1: there's a scene I believe it's a memoir. He goes
Speaker 1: and meets with his source at night in a field
Speaker 1: and he says, the field has a bunch of rocks,
Speaker 1: football sized rocks in the field where he meets his asset.
Speaker 1: And the CIA is like, now, you can't say that
Speaker 1: because it could identify, you know, what field that you
Speaker 1: met the person in. And he had to have his
Speaker 1: lawyer go back and forth with the CIA people and
Speaker 1: like they confabulated with themselves and came back and they're like, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll give you rocks. You can have rocks.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, you hear those kinds of stories and
Speaker 2: you think it's run by crazy people, But you know,
Speaker 2: part of it sometimes depends on the situation, just the
Speaker 2: threat of the legal you know, problems they think might
Speaker 2: deter you, or.
Speaker 1: Just exactly that's exactly what it is. It's the same
Speaker 1: with the family members and everything else. The CIA is
Speaker 1: not going to press charges. And can you imagine the
Speaker 1: discovery on some of these cases, like it's never ever
Speaker 1: going to happen.
Speaker 2: I have a friend who's a talking head on the
Speaker 2: news and stuff a lot. We were both interns together
Speaker 2: at NSA many many years ago, and we've stayed friends.
Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, I fictionalized him for a
Speaker 2: character in Red Widow, and you know, so I was
Speaker 2: asking him at one point, what do you do? You know,
Speaker 2: sometimes I'll get these questions and I don't feel comfortable,
Speaker 2: just you know, I don't need to go and tell
Speaker 2: NSA in advance or CIA in advance, I'm going to
Speaker 2: be talking about this. And he said, you know, I
Speaker 2: used to worry about that, but I don't anymore. They
Speaker 2: can just catch me and they never have got back
Speaker 2: to him. Can you imagine they can't keep an eye
Speaker 2: on all of us?
Speaker 1: The only thing? And this is reasonable. I understand they
Speaker 1: get pissy when you start naming names people who are
Speaker 1: still under a cover. Certainly you don't want to be
Speaker 1: talking about sources and assets and that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: and I get that. I understand that. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of other stuff, anecdotal stories that can be told
Speaker 1: in more vague terms, and sometimes it's funny what they
Speaker 1: won't let you say, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, maybe I shouldn't have admitted this, maybe somebody will
Speaker 2: be watching. But I generally don't go back to them
Speaker 2: for anything. But mostly what.
Speaker 1: I'm asking you also learned over time, like what you
Speaker 1: would need to and whatnot. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right, And I'll tell you what was really helpful in
Speaker 2: that is working and recruiting because you would be going
Speaker 2: out and you're speaking at comies constantly, and you really
Speaker 2: have a sense of what's allowable to and what people need.
Speaker 1: To hear, and the kids are asking you questions all
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 2: You stay away from sources and methods. And mostly because
Speaker 2: the last part of my career was in technology, I
Speaker 2: ended up talking a lot about you know, how technology
Speaker 2: is used in intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, and you
Speaker 2: know it's all it's all open source information.
Speaker 1: Uh, And so I mean that's really interesting. I didn't
Speaker 1: know that you retired from the government so that you
Speaker 1: could become a writer. That's awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was not maybe the best decision of my life,
Speaker 2: but I.
Speaker 1: Was so mad. Well, you you did your thirty five years.
Speaker 1: I think that's great, and you were ready to transition
Speaker 1: into something new and you know, it sounds like the
Speaker 1: time was right. So you started off in fantasy novels
Speaker 1: and uh, there's and then later the spy novels. I mean,
Speaker 1: what are the other ones? I mean, is it you know,
Speaker 1: you do some saucy romances.
Speaker 2: I'm not good at saucy romances. But the so the
Speaker 2: fantasy novels came at a time when those kinds of
Speaker 2: books were very popular. Well, no, not Harry Potter, more
Speaker 2: like I hate to say it, but like Twilight. Okay,
Speaker 2: so these dark, you know, kind of tempestuous romances. But
Speaker 2: I did not write why yeah, and I did not
Speaker 2: write romances. They were very dark. And also it took
Speaker 2: me ten years to write it. So by the time
Speaker 2: I got it to the point where it was saleable,
Speaker 2: that genre was kind of on the downhill slide. So
Speaker 2: by the time the third book came out, the market
Speaker 2: had really fallen away. And so at that time my
Speaker 2: agent came to me he had actually been approached by
Speaker 2: these people who needed a writer. Now, normally this is
Speaker 2: what we call work for hire. If you're a writer
Speaker 2: and you're hired to do an idea, companies called book
Speaker 2: packagers will come up with the idea. They'll put the
Speaker 2: deal together. They'll hire a writer. And this company was
Speaker 2: very successful with their film rights. They hadn't been around
Speaker 2: very long, but like ninety percent of their books got
Speaker 2: the film rights option. And I was having a really
Speaker 2: hard time making that jump. So I said, I tell
Speaker 2: you what, all this was going to be their first
Speaker 2: adult book. They only had done young adult up till then.
Speaker 2: I said, we'll be partners. I am not work for hire,
Speaker 2: but if we go partners on this, I'll give it
Speaker 2: a shot. So that first book was The Hunger, which
Speaker 2: is considered horror, but really it's more mainstream fiction. It's
Speaker 2: a reimagining of the story of the Donner Party with
Speaker 2: just this little twist what if there was something following
Speaker 2: the Donner Party. That is my most successful book ever.
Speaker 2: It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It was
Speaker 2: translated in twenty languages. Ridley Scott optioned the film rights.
Speaker 2: He's about to option him again. It was very, very
Speaker 2: lucky with that book. So then I wrote two more
Speaker 2: historical horror novels and got the opportunity to do the
Speaker 2: spy novels. They kind of inner wove like that, and
Speaker 2: now I'm probably known for the horror novels more. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the next one that's coming out is a horror novel.
Speaker 2: It's Incarnate, but it's actually sort of based on how
Speaker 2: I view technology now. It's about technology, it's about social
Speaker 2: media and deep faith. Yeah, and it's going to be
Speaker 2: interesting promoting that one.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, No, I mean that is like, that's definitely
Speaker 1: the modern horror novel, right, it kind of has to
Speaker 1: be about that almost.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I went to Hollywood to talk to some of
Speaker 2: the producers I deal with and asked them. I said,
Speaker 2: I can't imagine that you're really interested in like artificial
Speaker 2: intelligence horror and they said, no, we're really getting slammed
Speaker 2: with kind of the same pitch over and over again.
Speaker 2: So we're just about to go out with this book
Speaker 2: to pitch it to studios. Incarnate. I'll let you know,
Speaker 2: it's not quite what you think the book's going to
Speaker 2: be about, but it is about influencers and what we
Speaker 2: used to call fake personas avatars. Cool, you know how
Speaker 2: you can now now it's you know, in the news constantly.
Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, I just did a Substack
Speaker 2: newsletter on this, But you know, fake influencers and how
Speaker 2: it's that's going to be the norm pretty soon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, no, that's a very topical subject.
Speaker 2: Let's hope.
Speaker 1: And so is this what you do full time? Now?
Speaker 1: You're full time writer.
Speaker 2: Full time writer, and trying to get the media side
Speaker 2: of things up. So we have about four or five
Speaker 2: projects in development right now. And like screen port, I
Speaker 2: knew nothing. I'm sorry, what like screenplays? And yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't write I don't write screenplays. They don't like novelists
Speaker 2: to be anywhere near a script. Apparently you really have
Speaker 2: to convince them that you can do it. So I'm
Speaker 2: going to be working on a script. But usually we
Speaker 2: try to get the as a producer of some kind.
Speaker 2: So I'm trying to learn the business. It's tough. It's
Speaker 2: really tough to get something made these days.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean this has been super cool. Is
Speaker 1: there anything else that I haven't asked or anything else
Speaker 1: you'd like to talk about?
Speaker 2: Not really, I guess I could bitch.
Speaker 1: But uh, but airing the grievances.
Speaker 2: The airing of the grievances, I guess the one thing.
Speaker 2: You know, you've heard me talk and maybe some people
Speaker 2: just don't believe I did all these crazy things that
Speaker 2: I did over my career I did, believing no one's
Speaker 2: more amazed than me, especially the technical stuff, which was
Speaker 2: so rewarding. But it's very frustrating trying to get people
Speaker 2: to pay attention to you when you're a woman and
Speaker 2: you're old. You know, I've also been a critic. I
Speaker 2: was a book reviewer for the Washington Post. I have
Speaker 2: a master's degree in fiction. I'm an analyst, so I'm
Speaker 2: highly analytical when it comes to evaluating things. And I
Speaker 2: know my writing's good. I mean, I won a bunch
Speaker 2: of awards too. I end up. You know, it comes
Speaker 2: down to our society especially, but many societies around the
Speaker 2: world do not value women, and they especially do not
Speaker 2: value older women. But I do think I have interesting
Speaker 2: things to say and that I could say them in
Speaker 2: very interesting ways, and Hollywood agrees. I'd just like to
Speaker 2: get more readers to give me a troney.
Speaker 1: You know, if you need a pen name, you know,
Speaker 1: you feel free to use Jack Murphy and see if
Speaker 1: that gets you some traction. It hasn't worked out so
Speaker 1: great for me at all times, but you know, maybe
Speaker 1: you have better luck. You never know.
Speaker 2: I'll keep that in mind, Thank you, Yo, No, I.
Speaker 1: Can see that for sure. That's got to be very
Speaker 1: frustrating that I don't know it's a novel. It's like,
Speaker 1: why would why would I necessarily even care if it's
Speaker 1: a man or a woman writing it? I mean, I
Speaker 1: think the only time that it would make a difference
Speaker 1: is there's certain types of like literary genres where you know,
Speaker 1: if it's the female author talking about you know, how
Speaker 1: she has her hair highlighted and her nails done, like,
Speaker 1: I only have so much patience for that. But it's
Speaker 1: a woman writing a spy novel or political thriller, it's
Speaker 1: kind of who cares? You know?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I'm glad to hear that. I know
Speaker 2: there are men like you out there that are more
Speaker 2: open minded or maybe don't even give it a thought.
Speaker 2: But you'd be surprised how many times I'll be doing
Speaker 2: a book event or something and some white haired man
Speaker 2: will come up to me and kind of imply that
Speaker 2: I should be writing romance novels or children's books. You
Speaker 2: know that what makes me think I can write an
Speaker 2: adult book? And it's all I can do to not
Speaker 2: just slap the shit.
Speaker 1: You're a little missy.
Speaker 2: Really, it's just.
Speaker 1: Like, h where can people go to find you do
Speaker 1: you have a website. I think you mentioned a substack.
Speaker 2: Yes, the subset took over my newsletter because it just
Speaker 2: it's such a great platform for that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: So you can find me at Alma Katsu my name
Speaker 2: and books Almacatsu books dot com, or just look for
Speaker 2: me on substack. I would love it if your listeners
Speaker 2: would subscribe. I kind of rotate between writing about writing,
Speaker 2: like the craft of writing, or talking about the business
Speaker 2: of writing for those who want to break into writing.
Speaker 2: I write occasionally about technology. I have a whole series
Speaker 2: on jen Ai. Hey, I spoke at MIT. I know
Speaker 2: what I'm talking about. And then I also just kind
Speaker 2: of give personal things because some people like to hear
Speaker 2: about my crazy life.
Speaker 1: And will have some links down the description for folks
Speaker 1: that can go subscribe to the sub stack check all
Speaker 1: that out. And I believe we have a viewer question
Speaker 1: for you, Alma.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have multiple actually from Alexander. He asked, what's
Speaker 3: the best slash worst part of working for the NSA
Speaker 3: and CIA, respectively.
Speaker 2: Well, the worst part of working at NSA, which you
Speaker 2: got to understand, you know, I grew up there, right,
Speaker 2: so as a matter of fact, when I left the
Speaker 2: first time and I did my exit interview. The woman
Speaker 2: who interviewed me had also been a second National Intelligence officer,
Speaker 2: and she said to me, ohma, why do you think
Speaker 2: it's going to be any better at CIA? And I said, Maureen,
Speaker 2: it's like this, This is like my first marriage, and
Speaker 2: NSA broke my heart. I'm going into my second marriage
Speaker 2: a little wiser, so NSA is. It's real, really misogynistic,
Speaker 2: even to this day. I mean the stories I could
Speaker 2: tell you from my last three years, and I was
Speaker 2: fairly senior at that point, and still the way I
Speaker 2: saw them, the way they treat women, and how it's
Speaker 2: baked into the culture, which is terrible because, especially as
Speaker 2: you move more and more into emerging technologies, new technologies,
Speaker 2: you need every brain you can get your hands on.
Speaker 2: You cannot afford to put, you know, a whole class
Speaker 2: of people off to the side and not value their input.
Speaker 2: You need them. So that was the worst thing. The
Speaker 2: best thing. I don't know. They had good cookies at
Speaker 2: one point. I don't think they have those cookies anymore. CIA.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, there's so much there, so much I
Speaker 2: saw that as a recruiter, that you could go into
Speaker 2: that database, and you could hire a locksmith, someone who
Speaker 2: was in prison for being able to you know, break
Speaker 2: and enter. You needed those skills as much as you needed,
Speaker 2: you know, the postdoc in artificial intelligence. Just the range
Speaker 2: of things you needed was mind boggling, and you could
Speaker 2: end up working in any of those areas. You know,
Speaker 2: it was really something. It's very elitist though, that is
Speaker 2: the bad part.
Speaker 3: All right, we got one from the kind of answer
Speaker 3: this slightly. What could CIA slash NSA do to improve
Speaker 3: working conditions for women?
Speaker 2: Oh? Oh, my goodness, so much. You know, I can't
Speaker 2: even imagine it. At NSA. It would be like a
Speaker 2: you know, like a fantasy, just one you know, how
Speaker 2: to tell you. It's like it's baked into the culture
Speaker 2: that they're just not going to see women as whole
Speaker 2: human beings. It's insane CIA. So my perspective is different.
Speaker 2: I mean, I do think that operations is still tough
Speaker 2: for women to crack. I would imagine some of it
Speaker 2: comes down to the types of characteristics and skills that
Speaker 2: they value that maybe is hard for a woman, a
Speaker 2: woman to embody without not being a woman anymore. On
Speaker 2: the analytics side and science and technology, I think it
Speaker 2: was a little fairer. Believe it or not, it's more
Speaker 2: just dog eat dog. On the analytics side, it's incredibly combative.
Speaker 2: You have to be able, but it's all, you know,
Speaker 2: brain power. You have to brainstorm constantly. And so like
Speaker 2: the thing I described with the Open Source Center, where
Speaker 2: you would have the senior analysts of say the Russia
Speaker 2: Shop argue with me about the value of social media
Speaker 2: in the Russian population. You know you were doing that
Speaker 2: every time you turned around. You were just but that
Speaker 2: was so that you were coming to the right conclusions.
Speaker 2: You had to sort of fight it out to make
Speaker 2: sure that the best thought, you know, raised to the top.
Speaker 2: No one's going to want to work for CIA or
Speaker 2: especially NSA if they After this interview.
Speaker 1: We have one more from you.
Speaker 3: What are your thoughts on media consolidation in the Paramount
Speaker 3: Warner Brothers Discovery deal in particular.
Speaker 2: Well, I haven't watched that super closely. So one thing,
Speaker 2: and you've probably experienced this with other analysts on the show,
Speaker 2: is we don't really like to talk about things unless
Speaker 2: we really know what we're talking about. We tend not
Speaker 2: to be bullshitters. So I don't really have much to
Speaker 2: say on that. Also, you know people in intelligence. I
Speaker 2: don't know about now, but when I was coming up,
Speaker 2: we really tend not to focus on domestic things. We
Speaker 2: really focus on moreign intelligence. So I just have this
Speaker 2: bad habit of not following domestic situations very well. All
Speaker 2: I know is for me as now, someone who's trying
Speaker 2: to break into that side of media is probably a
Speaker 2: really bad thing.
Speaker 1: Well, Alma, thank you for taking some time out of
Speaker 1: your evening to do this interview. Really appreciate it. Any
Speaker 1: final thoughts before we.
Speaker 2: Go tonight, Well, thank you. I hope I didn't sound
Speaker 2: like too much of a jerk. And it's not often
Speaker 2: where you just get to pontificate about yourself for way
Speaker 2: too long. So thank you very much for putting up
Speaker 2: with me. This was so much fun. You are so
Speaker 2: sweet and really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you and everyone else out there. Thank you
Speaker 1: for joining us tonight and we'll see you guys next time. Hey, guys,
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