Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Team House. My name is
Speaker 1: Jack Murphy, and our guest on tonight's show is Wayne Barnes.
Speaker 1: He is a retired career FBI agent and he is
Speaker 1: the author of a new book called A Trader in
Speaker 1: the FBI The Hunt for a Russian Mole. Now, I
Speaker 1: guess a little bit of a spoiler alert. This interview
Speaker 1: is going to dovetail very well with a past interview
Speaker 1: we did with Eric O'Neil.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: But that story, as interesting as it is, Wayne brings
Speaker 1: a totally new aspect of this mole hunt in the
Speaker 1: FBI that I was completely unaware of. I read the
Speaker 1: book on Kindle. The Kindle edition of it is really good,
Speaker 1: but it's also available as paperback, and it's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite espionage books out there, nonfiction espionage books out there,
Speaker 1: because of the amount of detail really that Wayne was
Speaker 1: able to get into. And also you're just a good writer.
Speaker 1: I mean, you have a talent for it.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
Speaker 3: I'm really glad to be here, and I'm glad if
Speaker 3: this is a recent read for you to have it
Speaker 3: reach your top ten or your top five books, because
Speaker 3: I know you've only read hundreds of it that's been
Speaker 3: counter intelligence books, so that's a high, high standard to reach.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I work very hard at the craft of writing.
Speaker 3: We can talk more as we go. But I had
Speaker 3: a niche in debriefing defectors Cold War defectors, that is
Speaker 3: Romanian generals KGB colonel's probably total of about twenty four.
Speaker 3: Most agents will meet one or two defectors in their career,
Speaker 3: maybe during a counterintelligence school at Quanticod Academy. But I
Speaker 3: had a niche in debriefing defectors. If you think holding
Speaker 3: a straight face and a casino in Las Vegas playing
Speaker 3: poker requires a poker face, that is nothing compared to
Speaker 3: what you have to do with debriefing a Cage B colonel,
Speaker 3: for instance, because they're looking for information. They're looking for
Speaker 3: information to learn that if they decide to read defect
Speaker 3: they don't go back and be executed. They want to
Speaker 3: go back and have information which is positive eligence about
Speaker 3: the West to make it so they can have a
Speaker 3: soft landing instead of an execution. So you can't give
Speaker 3: them anything, which is very difficult, but it's important anyway.
Speaker 2: The briefing defectors was a special deal.
Speaker 1: So Wayne, let's start at the beginning, tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about your upbringing in the path that that
Speaker 1: took you towards the FBI.
Speaker 2: All right, you read this in chapter four.
Speaker 3: At Invariably, if you write a book, you get people
Speaker 3: to read it as a beta readers that is not pros,
Speaker 3: but to see how it flows. And invariably everyone would
Speaker 3: come back and say, well, what led you to get
Speaker 3: in the FBI? What was your childhood? Like, you have
Speaker 3: to incorporate that into the book. So chapter four is
Speaker 3: called a childhood that led to the FBI. That seems
Speaker 3: obvious at this point. I was raised, I'd like to say,
Speaker 3: a poor boy in Philadelphia. I have a girlfriend of
Speaker 3: many years who's a city planner, and she says, no,
Speaker 3: you were raised in a working class neighborhood. But she
Speaker 3: was raised in Princeton, so she doesn't have the right
Speaker 3: to say where I was raised. Anyway, It was primarily
Speaker 3: a Catholic neighborhood. My elementary school was down the street,
Speaker 3: but my neighborhood, West Oak Lane in Philadelphia and Mount Airy,
Speaker 3: where their junior high school was, was almost all Jewish
Speaker 3: other than the Catholic folks who went to parochial schools.
Speaker 2: Big division.
Speaker 3: In philadelphitween Catholic and public schools, and then high school
Speaker 3: was in a place called Germantown. It was probably a
Speaker 3: ninety black area with the high school. Because of our
Speaker 3: feeder school neighborhoods, it made it maybe about sixty five
Speaker 3: percent black. When I started high school, I was five
Speaker 3: foot tall, weigh one hundred pounds, a bright, platinum blonde hair.
Speaker 3: I was the littlest kid in the school, and so
Speaker 3: in my school, if you weren't black, you were Jewish.
Speaker 2: If you wrent Jewish, you were me.
Speaker 3: So I understood minority status, you know, early on, but
Speaker 3: I managed to succeed pretty well. I grew thirteen inches
Speaker 3: in three years. So I started too small to be
Speaker 3: on the football team. I started too small to be
Speaker 3: the water boy for the football team, but eventually I
Speaker 3: was on swim, gym, soccer, and track. I had a
Speaker 3: gymnastic scholarship to the University of Iowa by the time I graduated,
Speaker 3: but I had never been across the Mississippi. I had
Speaker 3: never even been across the Susquehanna. So going to college
Speaker 3: in Iowa was like Mars. So it wasn't on my
Speaker 3: game plan, but I ended up. I love Philadelphia, the Eagles,
Speaker 3: the Phillies and all the Philly things, but being in
Speaker 3: where I was raised was not a good place. It
Speaker 3: was a difficult place.
Speaker 1: But it sounds like I taught you how to talk
Speaker 1: to people and how to manage conflict, and you know
Speaker 1: how to how to make friends with people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was as that's also part of the book.
Speaker 3: But it was very, very significant to survive who was
Speaker 3: a survival attack.
Speaker 2: Had I been much taller, may not have made a difference.
Speaker 2: But my hair was so satiny.
Speaker 3: If you if you picture the baby's blanket that has
Speaker 3: like satin on the edge, like a light blue blanket,
Speaker 3: and it's so soft.
Speaker 2: That's what my hair was like. Was my bangs were like.
Speaker 3: And anybody passed me on the street in a hallway
Speaker 3: where I knew them not they would pat my head
Speaker 3: like this down on my forehead, trove me nuts.
Speaker 2: It's a little kid thing. But there's a story I
Speaker 2: think it's in the book.
Speaker 3: But when I got to the high school, my father feared
Speaker 3: for my life. My mother cried when she knew I
Speaker 3: was going to Germantown. But I went in the men's room,
Speaker 3: the boys room the first day between classes, and there
Speaker 3: were three big black guys in the school. A fellow
Speaker 3: named Friedman Washington about six foot four, which put him about,
Speaker 3: I don't know, sixteen inches taller than me. And he
Speaker 3: was known as a great grandson of a slave. And
Speaker 3: he was a mean character. And I did my thing
Speaker 3: at the urinal. As I was getting ready to leave,
Speaker 3: I washed my hands on a hero fella. Say hey, like,
Speaker 3: that's freemanly and he says, come here. So I turn
Speaker 3: around and he says, give me a cigarette. Well, give
Speaker 3: me smoke, like I don't have any smokes, right, and
Speaker 3: so he said give me smoke like I really mean it.
Speaker 2: So I walked over to him. I said, if I
Speaker 2: had to smoke, you could have it.
Speaker 3: So he sticks his finger in my pocket and I
Speaker 3: have a box of sun made raisins.
Speaker 2: He thinks it's a box of like Lucky Strike.
Speaker 3: So I pull it out and I opened it and
Speaker 3: I say, it's just raisins. So he puts his hand
Speaker 3: and so I pours him in his hand and he
Speaker 3: tasted him and he said, looks at his boy. He says, hey, raisins. Raisins.
Speaker 3: So I said, listen, you keep these raisins I'll bring
Speaker 3: you some more Raisins tomorrow.
Speaker 2: He says, okay, Raisins, you do that.
Speaker 3: So he became my protector and I was Raisins, and
Speaker 3: he helped me get through school, you know, unscathed. And
Speaker 3: a few months later there was a fight that broke
Speaker 3: out in one of these wide hallways schools built nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 3: so high rooms and old columns, and as I was
Speaker 3: trying to get past it, one of the guys reached
Speaker 3: out for me, and somebody else ran on the edge
Speaker 3: of pace said no, no, no, he Freeman's boy. So he
Speaker 3: saved my bake without knowing it. So that's the concept. Now,
Speaker 3: I called recruit everybody every day and you don't know
Speaker 3: that it's going to work. But in counterintelligence, too worked
Speaker 3: an awful lot. But that was the principle anyway.
Speaker 1: And so you went to college in Iowa and you
Speaker 1: had no no, no, no.
Speaker 3: I went to Penn State. I did not go to
Speaker 3: gymnastics at Iowa. I went to Penn State, and I did.
Speaker 3: I did some gymnastics, but I went through college in
Speaker 3: three years. I studied very hard, I took extra credits.
Speaker 3: I had no money, so the money I saved for
Speaker 3: my fourth year from being a boy Scout counselor at
Speaker 3: the Council camps.
Speaker 2: Philadelphia had a lot of boy Scouts.
Speaker 3: I saved that money up and I had enough for
Speaker 3: four years college, but I want to graduate in three.
Speaker 3: I took the last year's money and put it toward
Speaker 3: tuition at law school and I went to Villanova Lodge
Speaker 3: just outside of Philly.
Speaker 2: So that was it was a big deal.
Speaker 1: And you had some conception that you wanted to go
Speaker 1: into law enforcement pretty early on, right.
Speaker 3: What I did not exactly, but what I did have
Speaker 3: was an early life which gave me the straight and narrow.
Speaker 2: My parents were honest, they were decent.
Speaker 3: I mean, my father joke that if you ever went
Speaker 3: through a stop sign, there would be a police officer
Speaker 3: right there. That's not a reason not to go through
Speaker 3: a stuff signed, but it tells you the mentality.
Speaker 2: But it was straight.
Speaker 3: Now, in my neighborhood, if you could escape without having
Speaker 3: a criminal record, you were you were fortunate.
Speaker 2: There will be fights all the time.
Speaker 3: All the boys would have one of their front teeth
Speaker 3: would be chipped like a little v and I swore
Speaker 3: I was going to survive childhood out of chipped tooth,
Speaker 3: which means no fights and whatever. But so that was
Speaker 3: that was a big deal for me. I had no
Speaker 3: idea that was going to be important for an FBI application,
Speaker 3: not just having no criminal record, but leading this straight
Speaker 3: and narrow.
Speaker 2: It was actually when I was in law school.
Speaker 3: I died my last year at Penn State. I had
Speaker 3: I've been accepted at Villanova and George Washington and a
Speaker 3: couple other places. So I talked to the dean of
Speaker 3: men at the law school and I said, I want
Speaker 3: to come money for tuition, but I got a I
Speaker 3: don't know where I'm going to stay. My parents lived
Speaker 3: in Cherry Hill, which was a long ride there. I
Speaker 3: couldn't afford an apartment. So he sent me to the
Speaker 3: dean of men undergraduate and he said, go see this man.
Speaker 3: So the next Friday, I hitchhiked from Penn State down
Speaker 3: to Philadelphia and out to Villanova and I met with
Speaker 3: him and Joe Bevloqua, a little guy and you know
Speaker 3: me for a while, he said, look, you're big enough,
Speaker 3: you're strong enough. Would you like a counselorship? So I
Speaker 3: became a dorm counselor. So for the next three years
Speaker 3: that was room and board, which.
Speaker 2: Saved my bacon.
Speaker 3: But having that, you know, not intuition, but the inspiration
Speaker 3: to succeed. So I was in my last year of
Speaker 3: law school and people were coming to the school from
Speaker 3: law firms, from the various alphabet government organizations, the sec FCC.
Speaker 3: They all want lawyers who just graduated law school. Of course,
Speaker 3: the top flight law firms, the white shoes law firms.
Speaker 3: They really only wanted people what they called a law review,
Speaker 3: the top five or ten in the class out of
Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty. But so I didn't know what
Speaker 3: I was going to do at that point, this be
Speaker 3: a lawyer someplace I had never the first day I
Speaker 3: started law school, I had never even met.
Speaker 2: A lawyer, did not know a lawyer.
Speaker 3: And most people there their fathers were lawyers, or there
Speaker 3: were father's own businesses where they one of their sons
Speaker 3: to go to law school to learn how to think
Speaker 3: or learn how to organize themselves.
Speaker 2: Mine was a survival deal. So I had been at
Speaker 2: Penn State.
Speaker 3: I was a second base in the men's glee club,
Speaker 3: which was a wonderful experience. Hopefully the three years at
Speaker 3: Penn State was great. But I sat Sudbi side a
Speaker 3: guy who was became a good friend. His name was
Speaker 3: Bill Gutteau. And in my dorm my third year of
Speaker 3: law school, a fellow knocked on the door wearing a
Speaker 3: business suit and he said he was with military intelligence.
Speaker 3: Asked me if I knew Bill Gutteau, and I said,
Speaker 3: bood beside him as the second base for a couple
Speaker 3: of years. And they said, well, he's in the military.
Speaker 3: He's in a military base in Turkey. And he got
Speaker 3: into the military and I went in a language school
Speaker 3: and learned Turkish. And he was going to move up
Speaker 3: to be the translator for the commandant, which means he
Speaker 3: needed a higher clearance. So he needed to get more
Speaker 3: names and more people. So from three years before he
Speaker 3: somehow dug into his brain and got my name. The
Speaker 3: guy stood beside from the glee club, so he was
Speaker 3: a good guy. Didn't spoke pot, didn't get drunk. He
Speaker 3: be a decent fellow. And I spoke with this pill
Speaker 3: about an hour and a half and I was wondered
Speaker 3: why he didn't wear uniform if he was in the army,
Speaker 3: but it was army intelligence. So an hour and a
Speaker 3: half later he said, you know, this is the first
Speaker 3: time I ever interviewed someone where I felt like I
Speaker 3: was one being interviewed. He said, would you consider a
Speaker 3: career in military intelligence? They offered me a job like
Speaker 3: right there. I thought, gee, that's interesting, and he said, oh,
Speaker 3: that's right. You're in law school. The place for he
Speaker 3: was the FBI. And that was the first time you
Speaker 3: even thought of it. I had watched that from zimbalists
Speaker 3: in the FBI when I was younger, and the police
Speaker 3: shows in general, but it never occurred to me to
Speaker 3: carry a badge or have a gun. I only had
Speaker 3: like firearms training with rifles at boy scout camps.
Speaker 2: Nothing, you know. Twenty two.
Speaker 3: So a few a couple of weeks later, someone from
Speaker 3: the FBI Philadelphia office came to the school law school
Speaker 3: and he had one hundred and fifty people in his class.
Speaker 3: I guess at the time were probably six or seven women.
Speaker 3: This was nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 3: So he started to speak about the bureau and what
Speaker 3: they did, why they needed lawyers, account and whatever, and
Speaker 3: finally someone that raised the hand and they said, do
Speaker 3: you have a visual requirement and he said, yes, we do.
Speaker 3: It's twenty forty correctable at twenty twenty, which at which
Speaker 3: point one hundred and forty six guies got up and
Speaker 3: walked out of the class and the four of us
Speaker 3: left with four of us left with good vision. So
Speaker 3: and I was one at twenty fifteen vision at the time.
Speaker 3: So I filled out the application and I got hired
Speaker 3: in October. I went into the bureau.
Speaker 1: There was also like a heart requirement at FBI.
Speaker 3: Right there was was there was was like five eight
Speaker 3: five eight and a half. It was mister Hoover's height,
Speaker 3: so he wanted to have everybody his height or taller,
Speaker 3: which whatever else you may say about them. Man he
Speaker 3: got a lot of big agents who could arrest bad guys.
Speaker 3: But later on when women came in in the seventy
Speaker 3: three and four that timeframe, I trained many of them.
Speaker 2: I was. I did, really it was really good.
Speaker 3: I have one older brother, so I didn't have any
Speaker 3: girls growing up with other than people I knew in
Speaker 3: the neighborhood. But so the the idea had women in
Speaker 3: the bureau, I knew was a good thing. And not
Speaker 3: to sound despicable, but we had a case where there
Speaker 3: was a tube wasn't a sewer pipe, but that size
Speaker 3: we had to get through that tube down to here,
Speaker 3: and it was a female agent who was about five
Speaker 3: five when they had still turned the requirement for height off,
Speaker 3: and that knocked a lot of women at five eight.
Speaker 3: I mean a man to be parallel with what how
Speaker 3: told a man would have to be like six three
Speaker 3: or four for women five eight with percentage of how
Speaker 3: many women that fall. But when they when they got
Speaker 3: rid of the height requirement entirely, and this she squeezed
Speaker 3: through this thing and got whatever we needed. And so
Speaker 3: it was good to have a smaller person. Plus they're smart,
Speaker 3: they trained, they know defensive tactics, they can shoot, so
Speaker 3: those things were important anyway. So I yeah, I was
Speaker 3: in the FBI and it was extraordinary career for twenty
Speaker 3: nine years.
Speaker 1: I And so you go to Quantico, go to the academy.
Speaker 1: What was your first assignment with the.
Speaker 3: FBI before you get there, I'm not My point is
Speaker 3: not to correct you, but I want to like the
Speaker 3: record straight. Yeah, I enter on duty in October nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy one, so I was in until the end of
Speaker 3: two thousand. If I've been retired twenty six years, I'm
Speaker 3: my last birthday a couple of weeks Agar was seventy
Speaker 3: nine years old. Every morning I do forty five minutes
Speaker 3: of yoga stretching, I do fifty push ups, one hundred
Speaker 3: sit ups, I do five miles and a bicycle and
Speaker 3: every year I do a handstand.
Speaker 2: I do handstand every month.
Speaker 3: But I have a friend who takes a picture of
Speaker 3: my handstand every birthday and I post it.
Speaker 2: People say, is that you? Is that you? Yeah, it's me.
Speaker 2: It's anyway.
Speaker 3: So handstands are show your handstand, but handstands are a
Speaker 3: good thing. When I do the exercise, people say, oh,
Speaker 3: your shoulder is going to collapse. You're gonna hurt yourself,
Speaker 3: but you know not yet. Anyway, this, uh you can
Speaker 3: see this from there?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you set me that photo.
Speaker 3: Yeah, send that photo. Yeah, it's a handstand. There's some
Speaker 3: place anyway. At seventy nine'm happy to do that. So
Speaker 3: when I entered on doing the Bureau, there was no
Speaker 3: FBI Academy. The FBI Academy was beginning to be under construction,
Speaker 3: so our classes were in the old post office, which
Speaker 3: became was an old post I think is now Trump
Speaker 3: Tower or Trump something, but it's been many things in
Speaker 3: the meantime. Was built in I think eighteen ninety six,
Speaker 3: and it decided which costs moremony to knock it down
Speaker 3: than to you know, remodel it, So that's what was done.
Speaker 2: But we were in the old post office. For training.
Speaker 3: We go to Quantico for a couple of weeks every
Speaker 3: month for firearms training and some defensive tactics.
Speaker 2: But so there was no academy.
Speaker 3: The FBI Hoover building across the street from the old
Speaker 3: Twass office was one hundred foot hole in the ground
Speaker 3: and it was under construction. So I preceded the FBI academy.
Speaker 3: I preceded the Hoover building, which is now it's so
Speaker 3: old to getting rid of it, you know, Thank good,
Speaker 3: it's not getting me because I'm old.
Speaker 2: But something like that for retirement.
Speaker 3: And also mister Hoover's alive, so he died in I
Speaker 3: guess may have seventy two, so I was in for
Speaker 3: about a year when he was still alive. That's a
Speaker 3: demarcation today. But when I started, my first assignment was
Speaker 3: in Los Angeles and the first agent's older agents I met.
Speaker 3: They were the case agents so on Mab Barker and
Speaker 3: Babyface Nelson, so that was their era.
Speaker 2: Now I'm a cold warrior. So people coming in new now.
Speaker 3: In fact, what makes you really feel old is we
Speaker 3: have a retired agent's luncheons. There's organ the chapters organization
Speaker 3: all around the country. And the agent's retiring now in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty six. They came into the bureau like two
Speaker 3: thousand and three, two thousand and five. I've have twenty
Speaker 3: years in so the agent's retiring now ended on duty in.
Speaker 2: The bureau after I had already retired. That would make
Speaker 2: you feel but I'm not.
Speaker 3: I don't feel it. I feel like I'm forty seven.
Speaker 3: I do a lot of things that are still active.
Speaker 3: I have five children. I do all things all the time.
Speaker 3: I traveled around the world. I recovered stole an art
Speaker 3: Impressionist paintings. I had signature at analysis all around the place.
Speaker 3: But anyway, so I started in Los Angeles and that
Speaker 3: time had to go to the first office agent. You
Speaker 3: were in your first office for one year to the day,
Speaker 3: and you learned the trade of the FBI, how to investigate,
Speaker 3: arrest people, to cases, and you you know, someone teaches
Speaker 3: are the ropes, and then when you get to a
Speaker 3: second field office, you pretty much know what you're doing.
Speaker 3: And you're more competent and they've changed the system now,
Speaker 3: but that was how it was then. So I was
Speaker 3: first office in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: So tell us this story about how you joined the
Speaker 1: Black Panther Party.
Speaker 4: Uh. This podcast is brought to you in part by Stash.
Speaker 4: You don't accomplish a mission by winging it. You have
Speaker 4: a plan, you stick to the fundamentals, and you stay disciplined.
Speaker 4: Where conditions changed, investing should be no different. That's where
Speaker 4: Stash comes in. It gives you expert guidance and a
Speaker 4: clear plan so you're never left wondering what to do next.
Speaker 4: Stash is a registered financial advisor built right into an app.
Speaker 4: It gives you personalized next steps and expert guidance designed
Speaker 4: to help you build long term wealth. You stay in
Speaker 4: control of your money while getting the structure and direction
Speaker 4: to invest with confidence. Whether you're still serving, planning your
Speaker 4: next chapter, or years into civilian life, Stash helps you
Speaker 4: stay focused on your long term goals no matter what
Speaker 4: comes next. Because the hardest part of investing isn't getting started,
Speaker 4: it's staying discipline over the long term. Let's Stash show
Speaker 4: you the way. Join more than one million active subscribers
Speaker 4: who are building wealth the Stash Way with guidance, structure,
Speaker 4: and support every step of the way. For America's two
Speaker 4: hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Stash wants to make it easier
Speaker 4: for those who served and are serving to get the
Speaker 4: financial advice they need. Go to stash dot com slash
Speaker 4: House to get fifteen percent off a monthly subscription or
Speaker 4: thirty percent off an annual subscription and to view important disclosures.
Speaker 4: That's stash dot Com slash House paid nonclient endorsement, not
Speaker 4: a guarantee nor representative of all clients. Investment in advisory
Speaker 4: and services offered by Stash Investments, LLC and SEC registered
Speaker 4: investment advisor. Investing involves risk. Offer is subjects to terms
Speaker 4: and conditions. Thank you. All right, think about this for
Speaker 4: a second. Every guy has those go to pieces, right,
Speaker 4: the shoes that go with everything, that one pair of
Speaker 4: jeans that fits just right, that T shirt that always
Speaker 4: looks clean no matter what you pair it with. You
Speaker 4: don't have to overthink those pieces. You just grab them
Speaker 4: and they work every time. But most guys are missing
Speaker 4: the one thing in their lineup, and that's jewelry. That's
Speaker 4: where GLD.
Speaker 1: Comes in gold.
Speaker 4: They make the kind of pieces that become part of
Speaker 4: your routine, not just something that you say for special
Speaker 4: occasions or once in a while, just clean quality pieces
Speaker 4: like I'm in right now. This is white gold because
Speaker 4: I'm a fancy baby. Just clean quality pieces that instantly
Speaker 4: make your fit look more fresh. Once you add a
Speaker 4: gold chain to your rotation, you'll never go back. And
Speaker 4: this isn't the cheap stuff. GLD only uses real gold.
Speaker 4: Every stone is handset and their production process is on
Speaker 4: a completely different level. You could see it, you can
Speaker 4: really feel it when they have it in your hand.
Speaker 4: This is one of those pieces you put on once
Speaker 4: and it never comes off. They got everything to change
Speaker 4: pen and it's bracelets, even nice selection of watches, whether
Speaker 4: you keep it simple or you like a little shine
Speaker 4: that you got, you covered and it's not just hype.
Speaker 4: They're over two million customers and fifty thousand and five
Speaker 4: star reviews with GLD being worn by names like Justin Bieber,
Speaker 4: Sleigh Malik, Neighbors, Micah Parsons, Asap Rocky and plenty more.
Speaker 4: The best part, every single piece is guaranteed for life.
Speaker 4: If you want to look, feel, and be your best
Speaker 4: or just want to level up any outfit. This is
Speaker 4: a missing piece you've been sleeping on. GLD offers every
Speaker 4: price point from the entry level eighteen carat gold plated
Speaker 4: like this one here that I'm walking right now, which
Speaker 4: is also offering every piece in additional material such as
Speaker 4: solid gold natural diamonds. You can find what you're looking
Speaker 4: for at any price point. Work hard and change the game.
Speaker 4: For a limited time only, new customers are getting an
Speaker 4: insane deal. Use the Code Teamhouse to get forty percent
Speaker 4: off GLD dot com. That's forty percent off with the
Speaker 4: Code Teamhouse at GLD dot com after you purchase. They
Speaker 4: the last two we heard about them. Please support the
Speaker 4: show and let them know that we send you and
Speaker 4: thank you GLD for supporting the show.
Speaker 5: I love gold Well, fortunately you've already heard about Germantown
Speaker 5: and Freeman Washington.
Speaker 2: In Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: They would put you on a rotation every four months.
Speaker 2: Every three months you would.
Speaker 3: Switch squads, so you learned about bank robberies versus kidnapping
Speaker 3: versus other other kinds of investigations for aud et cetera.
Speaker 3: And then you moved to the next squad. So the
Speaker 3: second squad I was on was an extremist squad. We
Speaker 3: called them one to fifty sevens, but extremists. They had
Speaker 3: La Rasa, which was doing some bad things. They had
Speaker 3: the Nation of Islam under Lewis Farakhon, we're doing some
Speaker 3: bad things. There were white hate groups of various sorts.
Speaker 3: There's one called Youth Action where they were they had
Speaker 3: a plan to kill President Nixon at his Western White
Speaker 3: House in San Clementy. I was the inside guy on
Speaker 3: that that assassination effort. But there was also the Black
Speaker 3: Panthers and a couple of years before there had been
Speaker 3: a shootout between the Black Panthers and the Los Angeles
Speaker 3: Police Department and they had maybe a couple hundred shots exchanged.
Speaker 3: No one was hit, a lot of holes in the
Speaker 3: brick walls around them, but they had very difficult connections
Speaker 3: with anybody involved in law enforcement. And there was a
Speaker 3: group within the Panthers which came alive as an organizational
Speaker 3: structure within them, and they called themselves the Nation of Nigritia,
Speaker 3: and Nigresia was a made up word, made up name
Speaker 3: of various black African nations, and they said we are
Speaker 3: a nation which is all the slaves who were brought
Speaker 3: against their will to the United States, many who don't
Speaker 3: know where their families had come from in Africa, but
Speaker 3: who are in the US for generations. And we ourselves
Speaker 3: are a nation without land. We are the nation of
Speaker 3: Ni Grecia. And the interesting thing was there were two
Speaker 3: major leaders of the Panthers at the time, Huey Newton,
Speaker 3: who was in jail in northern California and Eldridge Cleaver
Speaker 3: who had escaped to the US and was in Algeria
Speaker 3: as wanted fugitive, but he was living in Algeria, and
Speaker 3: all of the people in the nation in I Grecia
Speaker 3: were Cleaver Faction people, which was also curious. So if
Speaker 3: you remember the movie The French Connection, Gene Ackman, he's
Speaker 3: Popeye Doyle. He's in a pretty gritty restaurant and a
Speaker 3: table there the guys who were actually doing the drugs deal,
Speaker 3: Frog won Frog two, Sal and his wife at that
Speaker 3: table and you know, living it up and Gene Hackman
Speaker 3: and his partner the later was in Jaws, I forget
Speaker 3: his name, but his partner.
Speaker 2: They looked at the.
Speaker 3: Table and they looked and they said, that table's dirty,
Speaker 3: Like there's something wrong with that table. Those people that
Speaker 3: just that sixth cop sense. So all the agents in
Speaker 3: the squad who were doing in screamers matters for years
Speaker 3: and years, they looked at Nation of Na Grecia and
Speaker 3: they said, it's it's something wrong here. It's the same
Speaker 3: six cop sense. We had a number of black agents
Speaker 3: in the office, but they were all known in the
Speaker 3: community outreach and that sort of thing. So I went
Speaker 3: into my supervisor, I took the case. Agent main guy
Speaker 3: had the ticket on the case for the black Panther party.
Speaker 3: I went into the supervisor's office and I said, you
Speaker 3: know I can do this, And I said, I my past,
Speaker 3: and I told my history of Germantown, even about Freeman Washington.
Speaker 3: But growing up, I was in the track team. Track
Speaker 3: team had a Germantown High had like one hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty five kids on the team. There were six white
Speaker 3: boys on the team. As a little kid, I realized
Speaker 3: I wasn't going to run faster than anybody. But what
Speaker 3: I did have was gymnastic muscles. The pectoral muscles are
Speaker 3: the ones enabled to do pole vaulting. That's where you
Speaker 3: pull yourself up on the poll and go over. So
Speaker 3: I was a pole vaulter. On the team. So I
Speaker 3: ended up being elected president of the student government. And
Speaker 3: as I said before, somebody black had a vote for me,
Speaker 3: but the track team was on my side, and the swimming
Speaker 3: team and the soccer team. So anyway, but that's how
Speaker 3: I got along really with everybody. So something that I'm
Speaker 3: almost reluctant to say because of the nature of what
Speaker 3: goes with it, but your audience would appreciate this. There
Speaker 3: was a fellow sat two seats away from me in
Speaker 3: my class on alphabetical basis. His name was Bob Cosby,
Speaker 3: and he was Bill Cosby's younger brother by ten years.
Speaker 3: So Bill would start his routines by coming to our
Speaker 3: morning assembly session with a whole auditorium full of kids
Speaker 3: giving out notifications and you know, news of the day
Speaker 3: and whatever, and he would come on and the first
Speaker 3: routines he ever had, like where the Lord is telling
Speaker 3: Noah to build the arc and you cubits and it's
Speaker 3: the Lord Noah and right, that all came the first
Speaker 3: time we ever gave those presentations. Those routines were in
Speaker 3: front of the Germantown High School morning assembly sessions. So
Speaker 3: I knew him pretty well because that was the President's
Speaker 3: I had to introduce him. We talked to him, but
Speaker 3: because his younger and the fact that a lot of
Speaker 3: his early routines it was him picking on his younger brother,
Speaker 3: but in a very humorous way. Were about the projects.
Speaker 3: And the Cosby family had a lot more money than
Speaker 3: my family had. I can tell you that Bob would
Speaker 3: come to school every day with a white dress shirt.
Speaker 2: And I had won for.
Speaker 3: Christmas and for Easter, right, so I didn't have what
Speaker 3: they had anyway, So I knew him in that regard.
Speaker 3: So I told my supervisor of my past, and they
Speaker 3: looked at me carefully.
Speaker 2: They couldn't possibly believe it, even though.
Speaker 3: I had pretty platinum hair and a six to one
Speaker 3: blond hair, blue eyed guy.
Speaker 2: So I went and I said, I can do this.
Speaker 3: So I went out to Sanfraderna Valley State University which
Speaker 3: is now cal State Northridge, and I learned the campus.
Speaker 3: I went to several sociology classes, you know, one hundred
Speaker 3: easy classes for undred graduate classes.
Speaker 2: I met some of the.
Speaker 3: Professors that appeared though I was an auditor auditing the classes,
Speaker 3: just sitting on them, knowing there was you know, taking
Speaker 3: names or having any id that needed I went to
Speaker 3: the cafeteria and met the people there. I learned the
Speaker 3: streets and the whole campus. I got alias identification. I'm
Speaker 3: Wayne Barnes. My mother's last name. My maiden name was Johnson.
Speaker 3: And they always say your first undercover role, you have
Speaker 3: your own first name, and you use your mother's maid
Speaker 3: names your last name. So I became Wayne Johnson. I
Speaker 3: had a Dots in two forty Z, the bullet shaped
Speaker 3: car of the year. We had a new license plate
Speaker 3: or Wayne Johnson. I got a driver's license for Wayne Johnson,
Speaker 3: and so I drove down the Panther headquarters in South LA,
Speaker 3: parked right in front of the building with my nice
Speaker 3: sparkling new car, not dressed like an fbigen but in
Speaker 3: jeans and the great College T shirt I had bought
Speaker 3: it and washed it a few times, would faded out,
Speaker 3: looked like I've been around for a while. So I'd
Speaker 3: already been out of high school, college, in law school,
Speaker 3: and had passed a new Jersey bar. And now I
Speaker 3: was assuming the role of a graduate student at San
Speaker 3: Feranda Valley State.
Speaker 2: So I went in.
Speaker 3: There's a big guy behind the desk, and I said,
Speaker 3: you know, my name is Wayne Johnson.
Speaker 2: I'm doing a.
Speaker 3: Master's thesis at San Fverda Valley State. I have to
Speaker 3: do one on an American ethnic group. I picked you guys,
Speaker 3: what do you think? He stood up, gave me a
Speaker 3: big toothy smile for to stay out. He said, welcome
Speaker 3: to the Black Panthers. So I became a card carrying
Speaker 3: blond or blue eyed white guy as a Black Panther
Speaker 3: party member, which was exciting, but agents before I left
Speaker 3: to go to the South LA. The last thing that
Speaker 3: case Aaytan said is you know, if they knew what
Speaker 3: you were, they'd choot you just as soon as look
Speaker 3: at you. That was this party advice.
Speaker 2: Crushed.
Speaker 3: So anyway, so in the Nation Night Gresia, which I
Speaker 3: picked as my specific topic. They didn't know why, but
Speaker 3: that was part of it. And they would have meetings
Speaker 3: that the High Priestess of Ni Gresia, she also lived
Speaker 3: in the Compton area, and she would clear a dining room,
Speaker 3: put about twenty some chairs five by six in rows
Speaker 3: of folding chairs. People would sit there, have meetings talking
Speaker 3: about you know, lunch for kids and trying to get
Speaker 3: What they did was they tried to get n Gresia
Speaker 3: recommended recommended, recognized recognized by various other Black ay the
Speaker 3: African nations. By the time I was there and that
Speaker 3: time span in seventy two, four Black African nations had
Speaker 3: recognized them, and one of them, Senegal, even gave them
Speaker 3: a couple of acres of land in case I wanted
Speaker 3: to build an ambassy or have some official building to
Speaker 3: be quote a nation. So what they wanted was recognition
Speaker 3: from the UN, but they wanted to be a nation,
Speaker 3: which would have been a unique situation nation of that land.
Speaker 3: But there's some really as we've seen from the World Cup,
Speaker 3: there's some really small countries that are out there, and
Speaker 3: so they would have a lot of thousands of people
Speaker 3: all around the country. And there was a chapter of
Speaker 3: the Nation a Grecia, and all of the places in
Speaker 3: the majority of black cities in the country that had
Speaker 3: Black panther parties, they all had sections there. So I
Speaker 3: took notes every other Tuesday night, I think it was
Speaker 3: for a couple hours, and I would take notes like crazy,
Speaker 3: like I was the secretary for the Nation of a Grecia,
Speaker 3: to takeing notes and giving the records of what took
Speaker 3: place the minutes.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, I'm writing this stuff down. So the next morning,
Speaker 2: I can.
Speaker 3: Write a memo in the FBI what happened to the
Speaker 3: Na Grecia thing the night before? It goes into a
Speaker 3: file old purpose which the other they didn't know about.
Speaker 3: So about the third meeting, the High priests came down
Speaker 3: a hallway with two big guys behind her and a
Speaker 3: fella beside her about twenty years old. I looked a
Speaker 3: lot like the Nation of Ni Grecia High Priestess, and
Speaker 3: she said, Wayne, this is my son, Rodney. He's a
Speaker 3: student at Safronana Valley State. Like, oh shit, this could
Speaker 3: have been the end of me, right, I mean, I
Speaker 3: was expecting a test, but this was pretty bad. So
Speaker 3: he asked me about my classes, you know, who I had,
Speaker 3: professors and things, which who was vetting me? If I
Speaker 3: had been real with what I said I was, it
Speaker 3: would have been no problem. And I had to have
Speaker 3: those same interests as part of my backstopping, which I did,
Speaker 3: but at that point it was the spur of the moment.
Speaker 3: So I turned the tables on him as quickly as
Speaker 3: I could, and I said, who do you have?
Speaker 2: What are you have? You have sociology?
Speaker 3: So he mentioned one fellow who I'd seen around, but
Speaker 3: then another fellow who I saw in the four hundred class,
Speaker 3: the graduate class. And it wasn't that I disagreed with
Speaker 3: him when he was giving the class, but I listened
Speaker 3: to him carefully than others. And the Rodney, Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: his son was Rodney. He mentioned this guy and I said,
Speaker 3: oh yeah. I said, he's an old, fat, bald, white
Speaker 3: Jewish guy, has no idea what he's talking about. And
Speaker 3: the three faces there, four faces. They just stared at
Speaker 3: me and their mouths were open, and I had no idea.
Speaker 3: So I looked around and said what and he said,
Speaker 3: we've never heard a white person to fame another white
Speaker 3: person before, and so they don't get out very much.
Speaker 3: That's pretty far off, but that was really the test.
Speaker 3: So I powered around with Rodney. Two or three meetings later,
Speaker 3: I would see him afterwards, we wake out to a
Speaker 3: bar or someplace, and it was just all, you know,
Speaker 3: I got the right credit cards for Bean Johnson. So
Speaker 3: at one point a meeting a few couple months later,
Speaker 3: he said, you know what this is all about, don't you?
Speaker 3: And I said, they were trying to do good for
Speaker 3: the community. We're trying to get recognized. And he said,
Speaker 3: he said all that yes, but we want to get
Speaker 3: recognized by the UN. If the UN recognizes US as
Speaker 3: a nation, then we will have Eldridge Cleaver come back
Speaker 3: to the US as our ambassador to the United Nations
Speaker 3: for night Gretia, and he'll have dipomat a community.
Speaker 2: And he won't be arrested by the FBI. That was
Speaker 2: the plan. So I jumped for joy with him, like
Speaker 2: that'd be great.
Speaker 3: We're doing high fives, we're running circles like that'd be
Speaker 3: wonderful for the organization.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking, like I got to get out of here,
Speaker 3: like now I know what it's all about.
Speaker 2: So I wrote it up the next morning.
Speaker 3: It became what we call a letterhead memorandum if you're
Speaker 3: a letterhead on top a disseminable piece of paper, just
Speaker 3: paragraphs explaining what it taken place. And it went off,
Speaker 3: went through the Bureau, went to headquarters, went the State Department,
Speaker 3: went to the White House, and the Bureau was very
Speaker 3: happy with it. Not happy with that it was happening,
Speaker 3: but happy that we had someone inside. I don't know
Speaker 3: if they ever knew it was a white guy back
Speaker 3: at headquarters. I don't think they assume they presume I
Speaker 3: was black, but you know Barnes. If you see a
Speaker 3: name with Barnes on a NBA shirt or a NFL shirt,
Speaker 3: the guy's black, who's wearing a Barnes thing? So a
Speaker 3: fifth all the needs that I had, even the name
Speaker 3: would have worked. So anyway, part of my backstopping was
Speaker 3: the Bill Cosby story, and the story with him was
Speaker 3: that when he he had been on I Spy I
Speaker 3: Guess was the first TV show he was on with
Speaker 3: Robert Kolpe as a camera as a CIA guy, and
Speaker 3: then he had he set up The Cosby Kids, which
Speaker 3: was the cartoon TV show.
Speaker 2: Fat Albert was in my gym class.
Speaker 3: He was about three times as wide as most people,
Speaker 3: and he could be on the offensive line, but not
Speaker 3: the defensive line. He couldn't go forward, but it was
Speaker 3: wide enough to stop people. Who was a fellow in
Speaker 3: the cos because named Junior Barnes, I knew him personally.
Speaker 3: He sat beside me gym class, and there were others.
Speaker 3: So Cosby created the Cosby because he was literally picking
Speaker 3: friends of his brother and there were real people modeled
Speaker 3: after them. And at one point he said, you know,
Speaker 3: if there was what the debate was whether we would.
Speaker 2: Have one white kid and the cosmic kids.
Speaker 3: And he said, if there was a white kid in
Speaker 3: the cosmic kids would be modeled after you. But he
Speaker 3: decided against it. Well, how's that for backstopping If you're
Speaker 3: telling people in the panthers the Cosby said this, and
Speaker 3: there's no Google, there's no Google, there's no web searching.
Speaker 3: You know, you just have to believe it. But if
Speaker 3: it weren't true, that Samerity to say it would be
Speaker 3: right off the scope. So that worked well for me,
Speaker 3: and that was how I was able to survive it.
Speaker 3: So I sent my memo out and it went to
Speaker 3: every place that needed to know, and I was told
Speaker 3: that the Ambassador to the United Nations for the US
Speaker 3: at the time was George H. W. Bush, and he
Speaker 3: got the memo and he personally walked it down the
Speaker 3: hallways in the building to all four of the ambassadors
Speaker 3: for the Black African nations that had recognized Nigritia, and
Speaker 3: he stood there as they read it. Instead of having
Speaker 3: this reached their in box and have them read it sometime,
Speaker 3: this as important to the US security. So he stood
Speaker 3: there as they read it. And the especially Senegal, which
Speaker 3: had given some land and the nation of Ni Greecia
Speaker 3: slowly slipped away. They went through recognition and that would
Speaker 3: be the end of the story, which is a decent
Speaker 3: story in itself.
Speaker 2: And that was seventy two. So ten years later or.
Speaker 3: So, I was in the Washington Field Office. I was
Speaker 3: a working counter intelligence at that point against the KGB,
Speaker 3: the political line of the KGPR, and I was debriefing defectors.
Speaker 2: And that's a special niche I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 3: We have to have skill in writing and have to
Speaker 3: have the stories, you know, pan out. So one of
Speaker 3: the individuals had been a Soviet official in Morocco and
Speaker 3: when he defected, the the agency debrief them and the
Speaker 3: FBI debriefed them as well. So while I had him
Speaker 3: there across the table, I guess we'd gone to lunch.
Speaker 3: He tried to talk about other non intel things at lunchtime.
Speaker 3: But I asked, I said, when you were in assigned
Speaker 3: to Algeria, you know, a decade before. He said, did
Speaker 3: he happen to come across the sky in Eldridge Cleaver?
Speaker 3: And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, And he said, oh,
Speaker 3: I've I've got a good story about Aldridge Cleaver. I said, well,
Speaker 3: this is a good story for you. This will be
Speaker 3: a great story for me. So he told the story,
Speaker 3: and he said, Eldrich Cleaver came into one of the receptions.
Speaker 3: They have gall of cages all the time. He said,
Speaker 3: we know most people hate the Soviet Union, so anybody
Speaker 3: wanted to come into our evening bashes, we'd have them.
Speaker 3: So he came in and one night and he said.
Speaker 3: The odd thing is with medical technology in Russia. He said,
Speaker 3: it's not very good compared to what you have in
Speaker 3: the US. He said, we had heard two things about him,
Speaker 3: both that he had syphilis and then he had a leprosy.
Speaker 3: I don't forget either, but they said, so no one
Speaker 3: wanted to shake his hand because all the Russian diplomats
Speaker 3: and the people catering to it, they thought if they
Speaker 3: shook his hand it might break off as they were
Speaker 3: talking to him, and they didn't want to have that happened.
Speaker 3: That's Russian medical knowledge. It's in nineteen seventy two. So
Speaker 3: he said. At one point through the evening he came
Speaker 3: to a Soviet deficienci I want to talk to someone
Speaker 3: in the KGB, And that would have been this fellow
Speaker 3: who was our later to be our defector and they
Speaker 3: met in a room in the back and he said,
Speaker 3: I have a way of getting back to the US
Speaker 3: without being arrested by the FBI, and what I want
Speaker 3: is to have the KGB the Soviet Union supply me
Speaker 3: with weapons.
Speaker 2: And his term was so I can foment revolution in America.
Speaker 3: So the Russian, he said a telex to Moscow a
Speaker 3: couple of days later, came back and the answer was,
Speaker 3: we will give them the weapons, but first he must
Speaker 3: get back to the West without being arrested, and then
Speaker 3: we'll give them weapons to foement revolution. Now a picture
Speaker 3: this is in every major city in the country, especially
Speaker 3: the black cities, Philip Baltimore, La, all those places that
Speaker 3: were obvious.
Speaker 1: CIA loved that.
Speaker 3: I don't know what they did, but we got the information.
Speaker 3: They didn't get that. I don't know how they would
Speaker 3: have gotten it. So anyway, but at that same moment
Speaker 3: in time, George H. W. Bush was walking down the
Speaker 3: hallway in the UN and.
Speaker 2: The Nation n I.
Speaker 3: Greisha's recognition was withdrawn. So they didn't get their weapons.
Speaker 3: But picture this if that operation hadn't taken place, that
Speaker 3: undercover case. If you think the riots in Minnesota recently
Speaker 3: and after George Floyd, even after Rodney King, picture people
Speaker 3: with Koleshnerkov rifles in every major city in the country
Speaker 3: wanting to p foment revolution. What would that have looked like?
Speaker 3: And it's his own book, it's his own horror story.
Speaker 3: But fortunately it didn't happen. Now, a number of years later,
Speaker 3: Frank Church, the senator from I think Tennessee, had the
Speaker 3: Church Committee, and he wanted to close the door on
Speaker 3: the FBI having to do fewer operations. He wanted a
Speaker 3: tighter leash. And everybody I talked to you said, if
Speaker 3: the Church Committee had been in season when my undercover
Speaker 3: operation taking place, they never would have allowed it. You know,
Speaker 3: there's no probable cause. It's not your six cop instinct.
Speaker 3: That's not enough.
Speaker 2: So it would have never existed.
Speaker 3: And I have you know, it makes me, you know,
Speaker 3: not want to go to sleep, and I thinking what
Speaker 3: might have happened?
Speaker 2: But it didn't happen. But that was a that was
Speaker 2: a big deal.
Speaker 1: What was the other case that you know? I think
Speaker 1: it's largely an un a documented assassination attempt on President Nixon.
Speaker 1: You said there's a white extremist group that was looking
Speaker 1: to kill the president yes.
Speaker 3: So I was a young agent. I think it was
Speaker 3: twenty four. I think it's the youngest you can be
Speaker 3: because I treated years in college. I was younger than
Speaker 3: I would have been having just gotten out of law school.
Speaker 3: The Bureau when they hire people, they want you to
Speaker 3: be I think it's no less than twenty three or four,
Speaker 3: but they want you to have three years three years
Speaker 3: after college so you have some experience of life.
Speaker 2: So I managed to meet that.
Speaker 3: But fortunately I was still younger than most even out
Speaker 3: of law school, which helped me on that particular case.
Speaker 3: So there was a fellow who was another Fellows hitchhiking
Speaker 3: across the country, and he was a white guy in
Speaker 3: his late twenties, and he was a rebel.
Speaker 2: Rouser and he had a lot of personal confidence.
Speaker 3: And when he got to LA there were chapters of
Speaker 3: his organization which were called Youth Action, which I never
Speaker 3: heard of it before. Afterward, but it became a case
Speaker 3: from the squad because as he was hitchhiking across the country,
Speaker 3: he would tell people who picked him up what he
Speaker 3: was going to do, that he had this organization where
Speaker 3: you're going to go get I'm sure he asked him
Speaker 3: some upfront questions to make sure that they were not
Speaker 3: Nixon people, but like, we're going to go kill Nixon
Speaker 3: at Saint Clementy. So he had, you know, eighty people
Speaker 3: or so who were his followers, and their plan was
Speaker 3: to go to Sant Clementy with weapons and when Nixon
Speaker 3: was there. And this was the same timeframe, and interestingly enough,
Speaker 3: one evening on a Tuesday, I would be with the
Speaker 3: Nation night Grisia undercover as a black panther, and the
Speaker 3: very next night I was undercover with Youth Action planning
Speaker 3: to help kill Nixon.
Speaker 2: So it was an active first Office, I'll say that.
Speaker 3: So, as it turns out, they had an auditorium and
Speaker 3: they were going to get themselves together, a big flag
Speaker 3: on a on the curtains, and I was then posing
Speaker 3: as a person who was.
Speaker 2: Not fully alert.
Speaker 3: Maybe I had a push cart with a bucket and
Speaker 3: it was a fall spottom of the bucket where the
Speaker 3: FBI handy talkie was talking to the people out of
Speaker 3: the street. There were police officers and FBI there, and
Speaker 3: we knew from what I had done undercover, what they
Speaker 3: were planning to do, and had records of it from
Speaker 3: others in general. But I was there on the inside
Speaker 3: so they could hear outside was taking place. And literally
Speaker 3: they were cheering up and it was like a soccer people.
Speaker 3: But it was like, you know, ok, hey, everybody up,
Speaker 3: we're going to go. And it's like you know the
Speaker 3: coach when it's halftime and you go back out to
Speaker 3: the field, the football field. You know, it's everybody go
Speaker 3: and you charge and you run outside. It was just
Speaker 3: about like that, and but everybody, the people outside in charge,
Speaker 3: they heard it and they came in and shut the
Speaker 3: whole thing down. And that took people away because that
Speaker 3: was the undercover guy. I was never involved with the
Speaker 3: rest or learning what happened, and eventually I was transferred
Speaker 3: to my second office, which was New York, so I
Speaker 3: lost all track of what had happened with that and
Speaker 3: where it went.
Speaker 2: But they didn't even the witness for anything.
Speaker 3: But that was attempt toous I don't and the public
Speaker 3: never heard about it unless I told this story. Now
Speaker 3: how many years later, it wouldn't be known. But that
Speaker 3: was you know, I was the right person at the
Speaker 3: right time for the right case.
Speaker 1: If upgrading your full sleep setup has been on the
Speaker 1: list for a while, ghost Beds fourth of July sale
Speaker 1: is the time to actually do it right Now. You
Speaker 1: can get two hundred and fifty dollars off mattress bundles,
Speaker 1: which means you can add cooling pillows, cooling sheets, or
Speaker 1: an adjustable base and still come out well ahead of
Speaker 1: what you'd pay anywhere else. And as a Teamhouse listener,
Speaker 1: you get an extra ten percent off on top of
Speaker 1: that using the code House. Ghostbed is a family owned
Speaker 1: company with more than twenty years of mattress making experience.
Speaker 1: Their background is in manufacturing, so every product in their
Speaker 1: lineup is built with the same focus on materials and
Speaker 1: construction rather than marketing spend in inflated markups. Every Ghostbed
Speaker 1: mattress is built with cooling from the ground up and
Speaker 1: their pro core support layer, which reinforces the center of
Speaker 1: the mattress where your body puts the most weight. Don't
Speaker 1: take it from me, They've got more than one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand positive reviews from people who made the switch and
Speaker 1: didn't look back. Mattresses are made in the USA and
Speaker 1: Canada and come with a one hundred and one night
Speaker 1: sleep trial, fast and free shipping and a warranty up
Speaker 1: to twenty five years. Twice the industry standard. Not sure
Speaker 1: where to start, head to ghostbed slash house and take
Speaker 1: their mattress quiz to find the right mattress. Then build
Speaker 1: from there. Go to ghostbed dot com slash house and
Speaker 1: use the promo code house at checkout. That's ghostbed dot
Speaker 1: com slash house promo code House. Some exclusions apply. Seasite
Speaker 1: for details. One thing I love about summer is how
Speaker 1: easy everything feels. The days are a little more relaxed,
Speaker 1: and I find myself reaching for the same comfortable, go
Speaker 1: anywhere pieces again and again. That's why I keep coming
Speaker 1: back to Quints. They focus on well made essentials that
Speaker 1: naturally become those everyday staples you actually live in all
Speaker 1: season long. Quins is one hundred percent European linen. Pants
Speaker 1: and shirts are breathable, easy to throw on, and the
Speaker 1: summer upgrade your rotation needs. Starting at just thirty four dollars.
Speaker 1: Their teas are soft enough to live in all day,
Speaker 1: and lightweight cotton sweaters are exactly what you want when
Speaker 1: summer nights cool down. Everything at Quint's is priced fifty
Speaker 1: to eighty percent less than similar brands. They work directly
Speaker 1: with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're
Speaker 1: paying for exceptional quality, not brand mark up. And it's
Speaker 1: not just clothing. Quints has become a trusted favorite for
Speaker 1: everything from home to travel to everyday essentials. Make your
Speaker 1: summer wardrobe easier. Go to quints dot com slash house
Speaker 1: for free shipping on your order and three hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty five day returns now available in Canada too. That's
Speaker 1: q u i ncee dot com slash house for free
Speaker 1: shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns quints
Speaker 1: dot com slash house. And as your career went on,
Speaker 1: I mean you've had some other interesting detours. I mean,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, you debriefed a lot of defectors and
Speaker 1: you got brought into this joint CIA FBI counterintelligence outfit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good, good scenario. The CIA and the
Speaker 3: FBI had never really gotten along. Well, they have offices
Speaker 3: in the United States. They're not all just abroad nickelled
Speaker 3: fr which is I think foreign resources, so.
Speaker 1: Off national resources.
Speaker 3: But yeah, so if a professor from Georgetown goes to
Speaker 3: a meeting in Moscow or in China, when they come back,
Speaker 3: well the FBI could do it. It's really the CIA's territory.
Speaker 3: Because the essence of the concept of what was interesting
Speaker 3: took place abroad. They'll interview someone and may have sources,
Speaker 3: but that's really the Cis Baily way. Essentially. The CIA
Speaker 3: at the time don't how much it's changed now. But
Speaker 3: they saw themselves as being like the Ivy League, and
Speaker 3: they saw the FBI is arresting thugs, bank robbers, and
Speaker 3: they didn't think we would were the right people to
Speaker 3: do intelligence. But it was counter intelligence once we actually
Speaker 3: started recruiting intelligence officers. That gives the positive intelligence that
Speaker 3: the CIA was responsible for doing, usually abroad, but in
Speaker 3: the US.
Speaker 2: But when the FBI got.
Speaker 3: Good at recruiting people we had recruited. I worked the
Speaker 3: Eastern Bloc country and go back on that. I Spanish
Speaker 3: in high school, in French and college. One of those
Speaker 3: strange people that actually remembers things that I've taught. And
Speaker 3: they give you the Army Language Aptitude Test the ALAT
Speaker 3: during training. So they have to base it on Romance languages.
Speaker 3: They can't have Cyrillic or Chinese characters. It has to
Speaker 3: be American. You know, English language and for the grammar.
Speaker 3: So I scored well in the test. So when I
Speaker 3: was in New York for a few months. I got
Speaker 3: a call from people the headquarters saying, to the next
Speaker 3: high score in the language test, you can go to Monterey,
Speaker 3: California and learn Romanian for us. The first thing I
Speaker 3: did was get at a map and find out where
Speaker 3: Romania was. That was important anyway, So I went to
Speaker 3: Monterey for nine months and Spanish, French or six month Portuguese, Hungarian, Romanian.
Speaker 3: Romania has a lot of Slavic sounds in it, so
Speaker 3: it makes it more difficult than the straight Romance language,
Speaker 3: but it's Romance grammar. So after nine months I spoke Romanian.
Speaker 3: Should come up for biscuits as Limba and now I
Speaker 3: speak Romanian. So I was sent to a counterintelligence squad
Speaker 3: which had the major warsaw packed the block countries Romania, Czechisava, Capol,
Speaker 3: and Hungary, Bulgaria, and you learned some of the languages
Speaker 3: of all those countries. You're a bus at some point
Speaker 3: and there's a guy looks like a little guy Meastern Europe,
Speaker 3: and you go and.
Speaker 2: Say Este and no, no, no, no, no, no, Pal
Speaker 2: I'm less Spanol.
Speaker 3: You nappot Kievano, Hungarian, and you go through various languages
Speaker 3: and he said, oh yeah, and he speaks Serbo, right,
Speaker 3: gindobre pandu. So anyway, you can get his name and
Speaker 3: number and give it to one of the guys in
Speaker 3: the squad to go find him, which is very helpful
Speaker 3: to speak at least.
Speaker 2: Matherings of a lot of languages. So on that squad.
Speaker 3: Uh, I, we were just successful recruiting intelligence officers. It
Speaker 3: was that simple and compromising those intelligence services. So after
Speaker 3: enough years of doing that, I went to work Soviet work.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry you had a question I should have, but no,
Speaker 3: no's been there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it was pretty unique at that time, right,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, CIA and FBI didn't play well together, right.
Speaker 2: Exactly right. So when I left, Romanian work was moved
Speaker 2: over to Russians.
Speaker 3: Actually, the general who was a two star intelligent general
Speaker 3: in charge of the remaining intelligence service like the head
Speaker 3: of the Kajubir the CIA, he was there Romanian intelligence chief.
Speaker 3: His name was i Bhai Pacheppa, and General Pacheppa was
Speaker 3: the most senior ranking defector from the Cold War. He
Speaker 3: knew everybody, not just all the Romanian stuff, but he
Speaker 3: knew Khrushchev and Yasser Arafat and the Castro brothers and
Speaker 3: Mau Sedong, and he knew all the bad guys in
Speaker 3: the world. Nikolai Shoshska was the evil president for life,
Speaker 3: and he was with him on his cotails every place
Speaker 3: he went. And we did not know that he would
Speaker 3: eventually defect to the US, and no one knew that
Speaker 3: he was defecting. But when we did debrief from years later,
Speaker 3: what was most entertaining and with I know your mindset,
Speaker 3: you would find this interesting. He came with Nikolai Shoshsku.
Speaker 3: They went to Dallas, they went to see Boeing in Seattle.
Speaker 3: They would buy Boeing airplanes. And at the airport he'd
Speaker 3: get off the plane. This is when you're coming out
Speaker 3: of the runway, the steps down from the plane, not
Speaker 3: in a tunnel, from the doors, and he would go down,
Speaker 3: bend down and tie his shoe like it was untied,
Speaker 3: but tie his shoe. And what he would do is
Speaker 3: pick up a pebble from the ground of the tarmac
Speaker 3: he put in his pocket. And every place he went,
Speaker 3: when they got off a plane, he would bend down
Speaker 3: and as he described it, pick up a small piece
Speaker 3: of America.
Speaker 2: So when he got back to Romania. He had a
Speaker 2: little container that had like sixteen little pebbles from America.
Speaker 2: If we had known that then that that was his mindset,
Speaker 2: we could have tried to do something else with him.
Speaker 2: But that's like halfway recruited. But he was, so that
Speaker 2: was that was tremendous.
Speaker 3: So anyway, in debriefing General Pacheppa, he knew, like I said,
Speaker 3: he knew all the bad guys. So he helped compromise
Speaker 3: the entire intelligence service with his defection. And that was
Speaker 3: when they said, you know, the CIA had a section
Speaker 3: which resettled defecting intelligence officers. It used to be called well,
Speaker 3: they had different names for it, but it was Alien Branch.
Speaker 3: I think at the time they changed names. And they
Speaker 3: had a map on the wall of Europe, Eastern Europe,
Speaker 3: Russia and all the Eastern Bloc countries. And at one point,
Speaker 3: when we got some defectors, they put some cross hatschmark
Speaker 3: hash marks through Romania, and then we had more defectors,
Speaker 3: they put more hash marks through it, and then when
Speaker 3: Patcheppa defected, they blacked out the entire country of Romania,
Speaker 3: so it wasn't on the map anymore. One day I
Speaker 3: went in and someone actually cut out Romania so you
Speaker 3: could see the green wall through the map that were
Speaker 3: completely compromised. So we didn't have anything work on counter intelligence,
Speaker 3: so I went to work Russians. So while I was
Speaker 3: working Russians, having had a past of between a lot
Speaker 3: of undercover things and now years of experience, there was
Speaker 3: a squad that was begun in about nineteen seventy nine
Speaker 3: or eighty early eighty and there was the meeting between
Speaker 3: the CIA director who was Santisfield Turner, Admiral Turner, and
Speaker 3: the CIA excuse me, the FBI director was William Webster
Speaker 3: at the time previously a judge, and they met at
Speaker 3: a meeting somewhere and they knew of this harsh relationship
Speaker 3: between the Bureau and the agency, and they said, we
Speaker 3: need to put this behind us. We have too many
Speaker 3: people that could work well together with our combined knowledge.
Speaker 3: So they created they they and with the administration of
Speaker 3: the Bureau and the agency, started a single squad in
Speaker 3: the FBI they called Courtship and it was three CIA
Speaker 3: case officers, three FBI special agents, and we had an
Speaker 3: off site location in Springfield, Virginia, far far away from DC,
Speaker 3: and we had a rented space we at least cars,
Speaker 3: so there was no connection with the intelligence community at all.
Speaker 3: And they had the name Courtship, which actually came from
Speaker 3: the court was from the judge and the ship was
Speaker 3: from the admiral. They called it Courtship, and we like
Speaker 3: to think that it showed that we were how we
Speaker 3: were recruiting intelligence officers, you know, we were like courting them,
Speaker 3: and that was the kind of thing with which we
Speaker 3: had as an objective to be able to recruit people.
Speaker 3: So they were they like to pick what they considered
Speaker 3: the best and the brightest from all the agencies, Like
Speaker 3: how do you pick some of it?
Speaker 2: But it's not like it's like the Academy.
Speaker 3: Awards where you can't like volunteer to get Academy award
Speaker 3: or buy for the position. So I wasn't in the
Speaker 3: first round, but I was in the second round and
Speaker 3: I was I was happy to be. There was a
Speaker 3: two year assignment. I was there for three and a
Speaker 3: half years, and we were very successful with the efforts
Speaker 3: we did what was all undercover work. And for you
Speaker 3: and your audience, do you want to have an example
Speaker 3: of working undercover activities? Besides what I mentioned with panthers
Speaker 3: and the White extremists. Of the three officers or agents
Speaker 3: from the different agencies, two agents were required for each case.
Speaker 3: One would be what we called the control of the
Speaker 3: case sag neether to be the undercover operative for the UC.
Speaker 3: So you had the CIA and the FBI involved in
Speaker 3: every case in one position or the other.
Speaker 2: That was good. So we learned things from them and
Speaker 2: they learned things from us, for sure. So at one
Speaker 2: point there was a.
Speaker 3: Case I'm not sure why Meyers picked his name was Ladimir,
Speaker 3: but someone said he's the next case to be assigned
Speaker 3: to courtship. Maybe he was a nice guy. There's something
Speaker 3: that led someone to believe he should assigned to courtship.
Speaker 3: So the question is what do we know about him,
Speaker 3: you know, personality wise. And as we're there sitting around
Speaker 3: our table in Springfield, Virginia business conference table, we're on
Speaker 3: the on the horn with a surveillance squad person in
Speaker 3: the FBI who was on the street and he said, Valdimir,
Speaker 3: he just pulled into a spot across from the embassy
Speaker 3: and he's sitting in his car and the window was down,
Speaker 3: And Russians are allowed to do that. They get there,
Speaker 3: they're time, they can only see people. They're authorized to
Speaker 3: see that the sign in sign out all every minutes
Speaker 3: covered You're sitting in his car listen to the radio.
Speaker 3: So I said, well, go right now, what he's listening to?
Speaker 3: So well, I'm thinking this could be you know, Divorgac,
Speaker 3: you could be symphony stuff.
Speaker 2: It could be jazz. Who knew what now.
Speaker 3: I was raised in Philadelphia. I was a bandstand boy.
Speaker 3: I was a you know, dance one of the TV shows.
Speaker 3: I was a rock and roll kind of guy. So
Speaker 3: as he walks down the street, he comes back and says,
Speaker 3: he's listening to country music like Kicks one oh six,
Speaker 3: you know country in your car. I thought, I don't
Speaker 3: know anything about country music, like I'm a rock and roller.
Speaker 3: So I had all of a sudden become an expert
Speaker 3: in country music. I mean, I met the guy that's
Speaker 3: one of my fellow agess knew a fellow managed the
Speaker 3: country station that was involved.
Speaker 2: And I listened to music. I went to concerts, you know,
Speaker 2: Don't You Make My Brown.
Speaker 3: Eyes Blue with Crystal Gale and all the other songs
Speaker 3: that I would have never known or heard of. But
Speaker 3: I had to have no more than Vladimir about country music.
Speaker 3: Table to meet him, so we can lean on me
Speaker 3: for knowledge that's backstopping, but it has to happen with
Speaker 3: the case. So he was in the political section of
Speaker 3: the embassy. There was another individual who was in the
Speaker 3: commercial section of the embassy, which was far separated.
Speaker 2: Just like in the bureau.
Speaker 3: You can work out intelligence or you can work bank
Speaker 3: robberies down the hallway, and you'd never connected. You know,
Speaker 3: you make carpool to work, but your work is unconnected.
Speaker 3: And then there was a third one who was a
Speaker 3: military out of Shay in what they called the Soviet
Speaker 3: Military Office of Smoke at another building in Washington farther away.
Speaker 3: So I turned out to be the undercover agent working
Speaker 3: against three Soviets at the same time. And to do
Speaker 3: a thing like this, you know, the title Basin is
Speaker 3: beautiful with the cherry blossoms in the springtime, and everybody
Speaker 3: has pictures taken of what's going on there. So at
Speaker 3: this point I think I have two or three. I
Speaker 3: have three sons born every other year, and so with
Speaker 3: my then wife, we would take pictures of us at
Speaker 3: the Title Basin. Us and our oldest son maybe was three,
Speaker 3: and then just my wife and my son, me and
Speaker 3: my son and just my son, and then we'd bring
Speaker 3: Sebastian and my other child to take catures of all
Speaker 3: four and the pictures of juste Bastian and me just
Speaker 3: to best me and my wife, and the same way,
Speaker 3: so that every possible combination. So if you meet a
Speaker 3: Russian and say I have two children, and then somebody
Speaker 3: else says, why met an American?
Speaker 2: He had two sons? Also like how old were they?
Speaker 3: And you can't have that confusion, So you prepare years
Speaker 3: in advance to take the right pictures at the springtime
Speaker 3: terry blossoms, so when you meet a Russian four years later,
Speaker 3: you have a picture to show him. And I would
Speaker 3: never have a picture of my wife and one son
Speaker 3: if I had two sons. Ever, so I have the
Speaker 3: right picture of the one son for one Russian, and
Speaker 3: then for the next Russian, it's my wife and me
Speaker 3: and the other son, and for the third Russian it's
Speaker 3: my wife and me and two sons. And no one
Speaker 3: gets to write up in the report my exact family
Speaker 3: definition because they don't know it. That's how far is
Speaker 3: that in advanced planning. And it worked more than that,
Speaker 3: because I end up having three sons and then two daughters,
Speaker 3: and we did the whole thing every time. So I
Speaker 3: had two wallets in my back pockets, one on each side.
Speaker 3: Usually a man will have a thick wallet on one
Speaker 3: side and his wife always complains about you wallet so fat.
Speaker 2: In half of it.
Speaker 3: It was a fold over wallet, and half of each
Speaker 3: wallet was a different identity. Who was me Wayne Barnes.
Speaker 3: There was another one who I think was like William
Speaker 3: Arthur Brewster. There was another one who was Wayne t
Speaker 3: you know, Burnside, and then there was another one with
Speaker 3: another name. So I had three different identities, so in
Speaker 3: each wallet there were two identities. So one day walking
Speaker 3: down the Springfield Wall with my son, who was three
Speaker 3: years old at the time, and I happened to see Vladimir.
Speaker 3: They were with his son who was about the same age.
Speaker 3: The coincidence, i'd want to bump into him, and I
Speaker 3: saw him, and at first so I put myself in
Speaker 3: front of him so he would see us, and oh, Wayne,
Speaker 3: Wayne or John John, you know. So we say let's
Speaker 3: go to the milkshakes. We sat there with milkshakes and
Speaker 3: we talked and it was a surprise meeting. But I
Speaker 3: was going to pay for it, so I had to
Speaker 3: pick out the right wallet and the right identification and
Speaker 3: signed my right name on the credit card, not Wayne something,
Speaker 3: with John something, and then.
Speaker 2: Put them back in my pocket.
Speaker 3: So I had four identities on me at all times
Speaker 3: in case I met someone by a chance, and I did.
Speaker 2: That's an undercover operation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have to live your cover in so many ways,
Speaker 1: and it is.
Speaker 2: Like you're like in a drug case.
Speaker 3: We might be deep cover for you know, weeks and
Speaker 3: months away from home, but when you are doing it,
Speaker 3: it is intense.
Speaker 2: So you see.
Speaker 1: Now, let's get into when you were first approached about
Speaker 1: there being a mole in the FBI. It sounds like
Speaker 1: this was more on the tail end of your career.
Speaker 1: But they came to you for a very specific reason.
Speaker 1: Who were those people that came to you? What did
Speaker 1: they say? How did how did that transpire?
Speaker 2: Why did they come from me? Again? Why did they
Speaker 2: come to me?
Speaker 3: Yeah, tough one. So in uh So, I worked, like
Speaker 3: I said, eight or nine years and remain in block country.
Speaker 3: He said, then another nine or ten in for Russians,
Speaker 3: and I was the undercover coordinator. When I first took
Speaker 3: the position, we had like I think seventeen agents who
Speaker 3: had alis ID So if we made a source who
Speaker 3: was a lobbyist or something on a Thursday and he said, Hey,
Speaker 3: i'veens coming to my party on Saturday night, why don't
Speaker 3: you come and meet him.
Speaker 2: You have no ID.
Speaker 3: You can't do that as an FBI agent. So I
Speaker 3: wanted to get IDs for everybody I possibly could. So
Speaker 3: I arranged with a Virginia DMV at seven o'clock. They
Speaker 3: opened up early one day and I brought down fifty agents,
Speaker 3: got the pictures taken the ELIAUS identification all to get
Speaker 3: false ID and the same thing with credit cards. So
Speaker 3: I made it a mass things. We'd have more people
Speaker 3: have the ability to do undercover you know, activities. So
Speaker 3: besides being the undercover coordinator, I had worked undercover against Remanians,
Speaker 3: checks polls, Hungarians and several Russians. When I had come
Speaker 3: off of the courtship, by assistant Special Agent in charge
Speaker 3: said we're looking for someone to work for the night shift.
Speaker 3: It's midnight to eight am shift. Guys hate it. You know,
Speaker 3: it's like you live the life of a bat. You know,
Speaker 3: you sleep in the daytime and you're out at night.
Speaker 3: And he said it's tough to have anybody do it. Consistently.
Speaker 3: So I said, you know, I have more experience in
Speaker 3: working undercover than most people would dream of having. I said,
Speaker 3: but there are things that are difficult to do. Said,
Speaker 3: what I want to write is a handbook, a manual
Speaker 3: about how to work counter intelligence undercover activities, like, for instance,
Speaker 3: how do you pick a name, and how do you
Speaker 3: pick a house? And how do you use a credit card?
Speaker 3: And if you pick a house, do you rent a house?
Speaker 3: Do you lease house to borrow a friend's house for
Speaker 3: a night just to show you have a house. But
Speaker 3: there are a lot of questions that if you've done it,
Speaker 3: you can answer. But if you haven't done it, you know,
Speaker 3: don't try it by yourself. So over the next you know,
Speaker 3: six months, I wrote a manual about undercover activities. So
Speaker 3: at about the same point in eighty six, I became
Speaker 3: the security officer for the Field Office, which is another
Speaker 3: whole story. But you can't do that in Washington Field
Speaker 3: Office without yards and yards of experience with all the
Speaker 3: matters that you may have to deal with as a
Speaker 3: security officer. So in nineteen ninety, my daughter Natalia was
Speaker 3: born because you had spina bifida, and who was unexpected
Speaker 3: and all the doctors.
Speaker 2: Is in the Fairfax Hospital now in Nova. All the
Speaker 2: doctors who had skills.
Speaker 3: They said, the best orthopedic surgeons in the world are
Speaker 3: in San Diego at Children's Hospital, which was interesting to know.
Speaker 3: And they said, you ought to get a transfer to
Speaker 3: San Diego. So it took a couple months, but I
Speaker 3: did get a transfer. We moved to San Diego. I
Speaker 3: thought that was the end of my counterintelligence career. You know,
Speaker 3: there's no embassies there, no diplomats in San Diego. There's
Speaker 3: a lot of big military base, but you know how
Speaker 3: many Russians were there, So I thought that was the
Speaker 3: end of that career. So I got there in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety I worked counter terrorism. I did backgrounds on federal judges.
Speaker 3: I was working healthcare for at the time. In ninety
Speaker 3: eight and Jean McClellan, a dear friend who I worked
Speaker 3: Russian with for years, he called me up on a
Speaker 3: Sunday and he said, uh, hey, Mike and Dave and
Speaker 3: I are coming out to see you on Tuesday. And
Speaker 3: Mike was Mike Rochford and Dave was Dave Greb and
Speaker 3: they were senior people in the intelligence line at headquarters
Speaker 3: in Washington, and I thought, see like to see me.
Speaker 3: I mean, everybody thought I was like a maverick. I
Speaker 3: needed a long leash. A supervisor once said, we have
Speaker 3: short lease agents and long lease agents. He said, you're
Speaker 3: a lawyer. You're pulling, tugging real hard at the end
Speaker 3: of a long leash. Every case you work. That's I
Speaker 3: call that walking up the stream, turning over all the
Speaker 3: rocks in the stream, trying to find new leads through
Speaker 3: things to do different.
Speaker 2: So like working under cover as a panther, that's that's
Speaker 2: far and away a long leash thing. So I couldn't
Speaker 2: believe it.
Speaker 3: Why they would come out to see me, why three
Speaker 3: of them would come, or why they couldn't talk on
Speaker 3: a secure phone, which we had. So I met him
Speaker 3: at the Bahia Hotel and we sat down and Mike
Speaker 3: was in charge, and he got their right to the
Speaker 3: business here. With his penetration of the US intelligence community,
Speaker 3: we hope it's a CIA as opposed to the FBI,
Speaker 3: but likely the FBI. And he said that there's a.
Speaker 2: Russian who we know has seen.
Speaker 3: In He has seen what we considered be the trader
Speaker 3: in the FBI, the trader, the mole and that was
Speaker 3: from other sources. We had recruited some Russians and they
Speaker 3: knew this into this story so unequivalently. They knew the
Speaker 3: guy was coming, had seen what we call the unsubbed
Speaker 3: the unknown subject. So he was going to be coming
Speaker 3: in two months to a film festival in Santa Monica.
Speaker 3: It's the American Film Market AFM, and so that gave
Speaker 3: us a lot of lead time. But we were able
Speaker 3: to find out the locations and travel of people who
Speaker 3: we suspected the Bureau suspected might know the identity of
Speaker 3: the mole in the FBI, and this was one the
Speaker 3: first one was actually coming to the US. Others who
Speaker 3: they thought might know had been to place like Tokyo
Speaker 3: in London, and they tried to do various things. They
Speaker 3: were at warn six, but this was the first one
Speaker 3: coming to the US. So they sat around a table
Speaker 3: in Washington. The guy was coming. Now I had the
Speaker 3: FBI chance to have someone, you know, try to meet
Speaker 3: this guy. And it's really a mission impossible. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's just that simple. There were two superpowers. The Russians
Speaker 3: thought they were members of the best superpower, So why
Speaker 3: would a guy want to talk to American about this stuff.
Speaker 3: Tom Cruise's movies with Mission Impossible. He's jumping out of
Speaker 3: airplanes and motorcycles off the cliff, but they're all physical obstacles.
Speaker 3: This was a psychological issue, so and I saw that
Speaker 3: as a big barrier, depending what the man's personality was.
Speaker 3: But I had never known heard about him, so.
Speaker 2: We had to get.
Speaker 3: They The last thing they said was, we want you
Speaker 3: to go to the festival, you know, find him, meet him,
Speaker 3: befriend him, recruit him, and show him photos of a
Speaker 3: dozen senior agents we suspect might be mold the FBI.
Speaker 3: They narrowed it down to a certain extent who they thought.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know if you knew this at
Speaker 1: the time, but if I remember from your book, there
Speaker 1: was a defactor that showed them internal FBI memos that
Speaker 1: the Russians had that only could have come from a
Speaker 1: certain number of people in the.
Speaker 2: Organization, right right.
Speaker 3: I mentioned that before the defector debriefings. They were written
Speaker 3: up in a form called a letterhead memorandum Lahm. The
Speaker 3: internal memos would have a's a memo at the top
Speaker 3: and would say from into the special Agent in charge
Speaker 3: of this office to this office, and it would have
Speaker 3: other file numbers of other things on it. They were
Speaker 3: internal memos. They're not disseminated. The Bureau disseminates prosecutor reports
Speaker 3: in the criminal field to the US Attorney's Office and
Speaker 3: letterhead memorandums to all the agencies heard of in the
Speaker 3: counterintelligence field, but nobody gets a memo. So someone had
Speaker 3: a memo, it came from the FBI. There were no
Speaker 3: memos in the State Department in CIA anyway. So let's
Speaker 3: say you have six or seven documents. Let me prefaced
Speaker 3: that by saying, almost every defector who came out, no
Speaker 3: matter what country they came from, and I debrieve many,
Speaker 3: they would always say, oh, we have you guys penetrated,
Speaker 3: like to tell us during training that you know, like
Speaker 3: they we have you guys, I mean not affected openly
Speaker 3: and they can't hurt me, but we know we have
Speaker 3: you guys penetrated. So when General Pacheppa, mean in charge
Speaker 3: of Romanian intelligence, because I had to break Romanians who
Speaker 3: had said the same thing, he came out and he said, nah,
Speaker 3: that's bullshit. We just tell him not during training, so
Speaker 3: they won't work for the FBI. Nice, So they really
Speaker 3: didn't have it. So here you had a Russian who,
Speaker 3: like all the others, said oh, we have you penetrated,
Speaker 3: just like you learned in training. But in this situation
Speaker 3: he had documents. So whoever the source was in US intelligence,
Speaker 3: he didn't just want to say we've got you penetrated.
Speaker 3: He got photocopies of documents that someone in US intelligence
Speaker 3: had given to the Russians. He photocopied them and they
Speaker 3: were Some of them were FBI memos, which meant someone
Speaker 3: in the FBI was involved.
Speaker 2: So here's the theory.
Speaker 3: You have like say, six documents, and you put a
Speaker 3: circle around this document, and they say who saw that
Speaker 3: memo and who saw this memo and who saw this memo.
Speaker 3: And the theory is, if you manage to figure from
Speaker 3: the cases that were worked with the information was in
Speaker 3: it at one point, you would have an ellipsis in
Speaker 3: the middle where there's one person who saw all of them.
Speaker 3: But the problem was, you're sitting at your desk at headquarters,
Speaker 3: for instance, and you have an important memo on your
Speaker 3: desk or detailed of some operation, and you go to
Speaker 3: the bathroom when you went back and get some coffee,
Speaker 3: and the guy sitting the desk beside you looks over
Speaker 3: and he sees it. He picks it up, goes to
Speaker 3: the photocopy machine, photocops it, puts it back on your desk,
Speaker 3: and he goes back to his desk. His name isn't
Speaker 3: on any piece of paper, So it meant it expanded
Speaker 3: the number of people who could have been the bad
Speaker 3: guy by a lot.
Speaker 2: So it made it meant it very difficult.
Speaker 3: So one of the reasons they came out to see
Speaker 3: me was I had left Washington in nineteen ninety and
Speaker 3: they knew that the intelligence operation of the Trader was
Speaker 3: alive and well in nineteen ninety two and ninety three,
Speaker 3: but I wasn't there at the time, so I wasn't
Speaker 3: the bad guy. This harkens back to the Kim Philby
Speaker 3: case with British intelligence. It was the five guys from
Speaker 3: Cambridge who were recruited by the Russians. Was very liberal socialists,
Speaker 3: gay guys from Cambridge, Kim Philby and Anthony Blounton who
Speaker 3: were total I think of five. They ordered thardit data positions.
Speaker 3: He well, Philby was in the military, I was in
Speaker 3: their intelligence service. One of them was the director of
Speaker 3: a museum. But they all knew influential people. They could
Speaker 3: all do informational things, and it was an extraordinary compromiser
Speaker 3: of their intelligence service.
Speaker 2: So when they learned that Philby was the one who
Speaker 2: was in.
Speaker 3: The military, was in the intelligence service, who was working
Speaker 3: for the Russians, they sent a cable to the US,
Speaker 3: to the British embassy in Washington, d C. So I
Speaker 3: think nineteen fifty to fifty one, and they said, arrest Philby.
Speaker 2: He's the bad guy.
Speaker 3: As it turns out, Philby wasn't the one who decrypted
Speaker 3: that communication, and the next time I saw him he
Speaker 3: was walking down the streets in gout, live in a life.
Speaker 1: So they came to you because they knew emphatically that
Speaker 1: you could not be the mole in the FBI.
Speaker 2: You could not get now without letting my ego get
Speaker 2: in the way.
Speaker 3: I did have a lot of experience working undercover, but
Speaker 3: ultimately that was that was to me the last last
Speaker 3: block to check with.
Speaker 2: And he's not the bad guy. You know, you don't.
Speaker 3: You don't want to send an FBI agent who is
Speaker 3: the bad guy to recruit a Russian and have a
Speaker 3: point out what this should be your own picture.
Speaker 2: That would be a bad thing. Well, I mean investigatively,
Speaker 2: that would be brutal.
Speaker 1: That was a huge issue, as I will get to
Speaker 1: i'm sure in a bit. But the issue that this,
Speaker 1: the position this mole had was he was supposed to
Speaker 1: catch spies himself, but he was the chill spy.
Speaker 2: Yeah he was. Well.
Speaker 3: So the movie Breach came out in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 3: I think Hansen was arrested in on President Day in
Speaker 3: two thousand and one. My operation was nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 3: and so we came out with an answer. What I
Speaker 3: was asked to do was to have Ivan pointing out
Speaker 3: a photo from the photo spread, and he did that.
Speaker 3: As you know from the book, what I just said
Speaker 3: was the most simple way of saying the most complicated.
Speaker 2: Operation they want you to imagine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I don't want to have too much of
Speaker 3: a reveal for your your viewers. But it didn't take
Speaker 3: the eight days of the conference. It took much longer
Speaker 3: than that and was much more complicated. But all the
Speaker 3: tools in the toolbox were used on this one, all
Speaker 3: of them. Anything, all the stuff we had learned, all
Speaker 3: the stuff I had made up, everything. So anyway, it
Speaker 3: was important that it it wasn't me So when the
Speaker 3: movie came out two thousand and seven Breach. In the movie,
Speaker 3: Laura Lenny playing the senior person over Eric O'Neil his
Speaker 3: real name, which is he was Flotten Ryan Leap in
Speaker 3: the movie, he said, gee, you know who had been
Speaker 3: placed in the office with Hanson just we could monitor him,
Speaker 3: just so he would know, try to get his PDA
Speaker 3: and just see what he was doing, because they believed
Speaker 3: at that point that he was the one for sure.
Speaker 3: So when the movie came out and that thing came
Speaker 3: up where the clerk said to Laura Lenny, I don't
Speaker 3: think he's a bad guy. He goes the mass every morning,
Speaker 3: you know, he does all these other things in the bureau,
Speaker 3: Like what does he work for the mafia? And she
Speaker 3: said no, we paid a KGBI guy seven million dollars
Speaker 3: for that information. And I sat there in a movie theater.
Speaker 3: I thought, I didn't give anybody any money, Like does
Speaker 3: that work. There's a lot of reasons we could discuss
Speaker 3: now or later about what Russians will or will not
Speaker 3: take by way of financial aggrandizement. If they're going to
Speaker 3: give away secrets which could change their lives, that's psychological
Speaker 3: and it's a little different part of the story. But
Speaker 3: so I went I talked to my colleagues who were
Speaker 3: involved in the case. The problem was I retired in
Speaker 3: two thousand, so I was out of the loop. I
Speaker 3: no longer had clearances, a no one was telling me
Speaker 3: what went on after I left. We know that I
Speaker 3: even pointed out a photo, and I don't know what
Speaker 3: they did with that because I don't have privy to
Speaker 3: that I was. I was still in San Diego, and
Speaker 3: I had no no connection And because of the sensitivity
Speaker 3: the case, only very few people in the bureau and
Speaker 3: in the vertical administrative line above it, very very few people,
Speaker 3: so I did not know what happened at that point.
Speaker 1: I'd like to take a bit to look at this,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of your part in the case, because
Speaker 1: I thought what made it such a great espionage story
Speaker 1: was that it required a lot of thinking on your feet,
Speaker 1: a lot of finesse. This was a very delicate thing,
Speaker 1: and both in terms of the operational security around it
Speaker 1: and also handling these different personalities that you came in
Speaker 1: contact with. You were and your your role was also subtle.
Speaker 1: You weren't going right up to this guy and trying
Speaker 1: to pitch him say hey, I'm from the FBI, work
Speaker 1: with us. You had this whole game plan where you
Speaker 1: were kind of like setting the stage to warm things up,
Speaker 1: to ingratiate him to you, and ultimately it wasn't going
Speaker 1: to be you making the pitch. I mean, if you
Speaker 1: could tell us a little bit about how that came about.
Speaker 3: Well earlier today, speaking a little out of school here,
Speaker 3: earlier to that, I was watching one of your earlier
Speaker 3: shows with Michelle I think Brigby and she had been
Speaker 3: in the CIA, in the in the Middle East, and
Speaker 3: you said the phrase a cold bump. So that is,
Speaker 3: if you find one of your targets an embassy reception
Speaker 3: or someplace, you kind of just bump into them cold
Speaker 3: and you meet them.
Speaker 2: Okay, not knocking what you said or what may have
Speaker 2: happened to her. It is a term. But but you
Speaker 2: can't do it and make an operation work exactly what
Speaker 2: you had said. You can't.
Speaker 3: You can't do a coum. There is such a thing,
Speaker 3: and it depends one of your circumstances. But you know,
Speaker 3: we have a s expression I dts f al I
Speaker 3: do this shit for a living. You're people in the
Speaker 3: bureau know what that is. So, and there's no one
Speaker 3: we can go to for consoling or for assistance, especially
Speaker 3: when I was by myself in San Diego. But there
Speaker 3: were a few factors which were very important which began
Speaker 3: the first few chapters of the book. We needed some
Speaker 3: help which people inadvertently would not have known that they
Speaker 3: could be the ones really helping us. There was a
Speaker 3: fellow who was well known to the FBI, who was
Speaker 3: Jack Platt, and he was in this fr He was
Speaker 3: in the local office in Roslin, Virginia of the CIA,
Speaker 3: and he was his nickname Codny was Cowboy, and he
Speaker 3: had a big Budweiser tumor auto about here. And he
Speaker 3: was a real jolly lea guy and everybody loved him.
Speaker 3: Helped the beer with surveillance training. He did it for
Speaker 3: the CIA and for the FBI in various areas, and
Speaker 3: he was just well known.
Speaker 1: He was liked.
Speaker 3: And Gene McClelland one of the colleague who called me
Speaker 3: from Washington back in the ninety eight. They were very
Speaker 3: close because Jane was running what they called the Special
Speaker 3: Surveillance Group SSG, which is all the people doing surveillance
Speaker 3: which are really just like the Watch Service in London.
Speaker 3: And they've been doing this forever. I mean they started
Speaker 3: it up I think in nineteen seventy three or so,
Speaker 3: and from there on they were just became very good.
Speaker 3: And then the older they got, the more they blended
Speaker 3: in with every age and every style and everything. So
Speaker 3: several number of them were out at this at the
Speaker 3: film Festival in Santa Monica, which I thought was a
Speaker 3: great part of the book because they never did know
Speaker 3: that we're trying to recruit a Russian who would point
Speaker 3: out a mole in the FBI just another Russian surveillance.
Speaker 3: They had no idea what the goal was, and they
Speaker 3: never did until either the movie or until this came
Speaker 3: out because it was so sensitive. So we needed help
Speaker 3: if possible, so Jean said, Well, Jack's sister is an
Speaker 3: Academy Award Academy member and lives in Los Angeles. And
Speaker 3: the few things that would stand out in her background
Speaker 3: that you would appreciate, she wrote the screenplay for Pretty Baby,
Speaker 3: and she personally discovered Brookshields to play the role of
Speaker 3: Pretty Baby. So she's a screenwriter. That's mostly what she
Speaker 3: loves and does. But did the Barbara streisand movies, She
Speaker 3: did the set design, She was nominated for Academy Were
Speaker 3: for set design in one of those movies, the Romcom
Speaker 3: that Barbara Streisan hadn't been in those kinds of things.
Speaker 2: So she was known in Hollywood.
Speaker 3: At one point, she'd married to Peter Bodanovitch, was a
Speaker 3: well known director, producer of movies, and so she was.
Speaker 2: A known quantity.
Speaker 3: But she had broken all the glass ceilings because she
Speaker 3: became a producer director. She was the epitome and she
Speaker 3: was a tiny person. So anyway, so Jean talked to
Speaker 3: Jack Blatt and said, you know, Wayne's working this case
Speaker 3: with this you know, do you think your sister could
Speaker 3: help us?
Speaker 2: So he called her and you know, would you help
Speaker 2: the FBI with something?
Speaker 3: And she had also no idea why she knew there
Speaker 3: was a Russian involved, but ultimately no one could have
Speaker 3: even guessed what the reason was to meet the Russian.
Speaker 2: It was just another kind of intelligence cold war type case.
Speaker 3: So she said, I have to have to meet him
Speaker 3: who I'm going to work with, which is smart because
Speaker 3: she could be losing her whole career.
Speaker 2: Someone knew what she was doing. So I drove from
Speaker 2: San Diego to.
Speaker 3: Hollywood Burbank Airport and the Carcy Warner Studio, and I
Speaker 3: met her there her I kept step step niece, stepdaughter,
Speaker 3: Kelly Wade was there as her assistant, and she was
Speaker 3: about as tiny a person in height and in width
Speaker 3: as you could possibly imagine.
Speaker 2: She was the opposite. In fact, they looked like Jack
Speaker 2: could have eaten her and you would not have known it.
Speaker 2: He was just just so tiny. But she was wonderful.
Speaker 2: And I'm a fairly big guy at six one two twenty.
Speaker 3: But we got along well, and she understood the seriousness
Speaker 3: that I was approaching this and some of my passed,
Speaker 3: so she was willing to pitch in.
Speaker 2: So that was something I needed. I was a tool.
Speaker 2: It was a piece of the puzzle that I saw
Speaker 2: lining up.
Speaker 3: I also needed backstopping, and there was nowhere to go
Speaker 3: in the Bureau to find backstopping. So my old pal,
Speaker 3: George Ramnis, he had been the legislative assistant for a
Speaker 3: Senator Pete de Menicci from New Mexico who was on
Speaker 3: the Budget Committee when Reagan was president, and he was
Speaker 3: with the White House a lot. He knew a lot
Speaker 3: of Capitol Hill. Things later became a loveliest covering both
Speaker 3: sides of the Aisle, but a dear friend, and he'd
Speaker 3: helped us when I was on courtship with various backstopping
Speaker 3: for cases that the Biera just couldn't imagine how we
Speaker 3: would backstop certain things we were doing, and they didn't care.
Speaker 3: But we were successful with it even though had they known,
Speaker 3: just like Undercover Panthers, had senator at church known we
Speaker 3: were going undercovered the Panthers, you were done crazy.
Speaker 2: So you're working.
Speaker 3: I like to describe it as walking up a stream,
Speaker 3: splashing up a stream and turning over all the rocks
Speaker 3: in the stream to try to make a casework.
Speaker 2: It's that simple, just up the stream as an investigative concept.
Speaker 3: So I went back to George and I said, I
Speaker 3: have an operation coming up, and it's meeting of Russians
Speaker 3: like we had before, but this has got to do
Speaker 3: with the movie industry. So he helped set up a
Speaker 3: backstopping which would be I would be a previously a
Speaker 3: lobbyist in Washington, now a lawyer in San Diego, but
Speaker 3: in fact I would represent Texas millionaires who would like
Speaker 3: to invest money in a movie which could possibly show
Speaker 3: in the theater down to the corner from where they live,
Speaker 3: and as they said, it's just just as much gambling
Speaker 3: as where you're drilling your next oil well, or what
Speaker 3: the situation is with cattle next year, and that's where
Speaker 3: they made their millions. So we set up this ostensible thing.
Speaker 3: And George had been doing this with me for so long.
Speaker 3: He was just so so good and helpful to the FBI.
Speaker 3: So we set that up. But then I have to
Speaker 3: have business cards. And back then, unlike today where you
Speaker 3: can go online and get business card the next day
Speaker 3: or print at your own business cards, back then you
Speaker 3: cannot meet a Russian and pull out a napkin and
Speaker 3: write your phone number on the back of it.
Speaker 2: You got to be professional.
Speaker 3: So as soon as we could get the cover, I
Speaker 3: had a phone installed in my bedroom in San Diego,
Speaker 3: had a fireplace in a marble hearth, and the phone
Speaker 3: was there that the bureau installed. Then the answering machine,
Speaker 3: message machine the bureau installed, and a sign on the
Speaker 3: phone that said to my children, don't ever touch this phone.
Speaker 3: This phone rings and they say, you know, Barnes residents
Speaker 3: were dead, you know, so I did everything you said,
Speaker 3: put a lock on it. But those are the kind
Speaker 3: of things that you have to take in consideration. The
Speaker 3: most wouldn't think about if you have a phone in
Speaker 3: your house, who can answer it? Nobody did the message
Speaker 3: come in, So we set up that kind of backstopping.
Speaker 3: And I was going to go to the film festival
Speaker 3: on a given day to get there on the first day,
Speaker 3: but the business cards weren't ready, they weren't finished, so
Speaker 3: I had to sit around and wait till the next
Speaker 3: afternoon until they finally arrived. Because you had to have
Speaker 3: the perfect business card to make it look like you
Speaker 3: were what you said you were, and they of course
Speaker 3: give you five hundred. So I ended up panning I
Speaker 3: think three during the operation. So I still I had
Speaker 3: four ninety seven cards, and you just don't hand them
Speaker 3: out to people at the film festival, you know, because
Speaker 3: when that phone rings residing.
Speaker 1: I loved all the chicanery that you built around it,
Speaker 1: that you had, like other FB eye agents like in
Speaker 1: the crowd, pitching you their ideas as if you're this
Speaker 1: big shot financier as Ivan comes walking by to sort
Speaker 1: of build up your legend, and then and then you
Speaker 1: kind of concocted this situation where he saved you from
Speaker 1: falling into the pool, and that's your introduction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, these are the kind of things that I'm
Speaker 3: sure someone could make up, But I couldn't make this up.
Speaker 3: And this happened just as told. The first one was
Speaker 3: I needed to have backstopping, and that came through Polly.
Speaker 3: I needed backstopping on a financial basis, and that came
Speaker 3: from George.
Speaker 2: But actually.
Speaker 3: I needed to have something else. That's where the idea
Speaker 3: of the cold the cold bump. I could not introduce
Speaker 3: myself to Ivan. I could not find him. I mean,
Speaker 3: we have been following the wrong person for a day
Speaker 3: and a half or so, and when we finally located him,
Speaker 3: he was in the crowd and I was the other
Speaker 3: side of the crowd looking at all the other faces,
Speaker 3: and finally I saw him. And then we had surveillance
Speaker 3: where he was staying, who is with, and what the circumscaners.
Speaker 3: We needed all those things as soon as we could
Speaker 3: because someone's going to pitch. This guy has to have
Speaker 3: the right moment at the right time. So the process
Speaker 3: was I know, psychologically, and I'm sure this is in
Speaker 3: my undercover handbook, but if not, I can write more
Speaker 3: or another. At any point, you don't want to meet
Speaker 3: someone where a person like that the Russian has not
Speaker 3: already seen you first.
Speaker 2: I don't want to bump into him and have it
Speaker 2: look like a possible cold pitch, like a setup.
Speaker 3: And there's don't know, two or three thousand people at
Speaker 3: this conference in who was then the Low's Santa Monica
Speaker 3: Beach Hotel. Now I think it's condos, but a big,
Speaker 3: beautiful atrium and all the rooms have been converted to
Speaker 3: shooting movies and tables converted, and all the beautiful women,
Speaker 3: all the want to be directors, and all those sort
Speaker 3: of things, just the circus you'd expect to have it
Speaker 3: of conference like this. So we set up some of
Speaker 3: the SSG the surveillance people. Again didn't know why, but
Speaker 3: I took him aside. And one of the agents in
Speaker 3: the g Handah was Crab. Another one's hooker, and they're
Speaker 3: good friends from Washington. But they were out there and
Speaker 3: I took them aside, and I said, I need to
Speaker 3: have I even see me, and I need to know
Speaker 3: surreillson him as he's going through the crowd. And then
Speaker 3: they need to step six or seven in a line
Speaker 3: and watch people pitching their movies. I mean they're doing
Speaker 3: it all the tables. It's a thing. That's what they do,
Speaker 3: not just Los Angeles, but at the film festival itself.
Speaker 3: So I said, and then when I say so, when
Speaker 3: you give me the word, I want you guys to
Speaker 3: start pitching me. And I remember the first one. Someone
Speaker 3: had the idea of having a after the TV show Friends,
Speaker 3: which was very popular then, but making it into a
Speaker 3: movie a little different actors and whatever. And then it's
Speaker 3: what is your pitch and how much money do you need?
Speaker 3: Those are the two ingredients, and that means you know
Speaker 3: what you're doing, right. So you remember from the book.
Speaker 3: People would come up to me, they'd lie to me
Speaker 3: right away, but how much money they have or didn't have.
Speaker 3: Someone was saying I have two million, i'd need four
Speaker 3: so I only need two more from you, and they
Speaker 3: say I would come up behind him and turn him
Speaker 3: in and say he doesn't have any money, he wants
Speaker 3: only two million, until he's trying to get it off
Speaker 3: from you, you know, lying and cheating and stealing. In fact,
Speaker 3: about the same time the movie Argo came out argu
Speaker 3: with Ben att Fleck where he's rescuing I think Americans
Speaker 3: from the Canadian embassy in Tehran.
Speaker 2: I think that's what it was.
Speaker 3: It was just at the same time, essentially, and I'm
Speaker 3: watching Ben Fleck where he and the two guys in Holly.
Speaker 3: I forget the actors, old older time actors at that point,
Speaker 3: but they were Hollywood and they knew that people were
Speaker 3: lying to them, and they were lying to other people,
Speaker 3: and it showed you, like the greasy undercoating of boy.
Speaker 3: Hollywood is a really disgusting place. And I'm like, I'm
Speaker 3: right there now. I couldn't say to my wife, that's it.
Speaker 3: That's that's what I'm going all these days and nights,
Speaker 3: that's what it is. I couldn't say that boy boy
Speaker 3: was the close parallel anyway. So I had to have
Speaker 3: him see me first. So we set it up with
Speaker 3: the with the SSG and they got in line and
Speaker 3: they said, okay, and I couldn't have a handy talking
Speaker 3: somebody else had it. I couldn't have any ears, you know,
Speaker 3: ear plugs or biggly wiggly tails coming out of my ear.
Speaker 3: I could not be on their connection, their communications system.
Speaker 3: So they said, oh, he's coming, He's twenty feet away,
Speaker 3: and they started pitching. And then as they started pitching
Speaker 3: other people part of the festival, they pitched as well.
Speaker 3: They got in line, so I had like fifteen people
Speaker 3: in front of me instead of the sixth I started with.
Speaker 2: So we went on did it.
Speaker 3: And then when I haven't gotten nearby and someone one
Speaker 3: of my people start saying something a little louder, a
Speaker 3: little more, you know, to draw attention, and so I
Speaker 3: haven't stopped. He turned out he watched it. Of course,
Speaker 3: my deal is I cannot have eye contact with him.
Speaker 3: I cannot have him believe I ever saw him or
Speaker 3: know him at all. But he has to see me
Speaker 3: right for what I have. And this is not I mean,
Speaker 3: I have pride in what I do, but this is
Speaker 3: not ego thing.
Speaker 2: This is acting. I have to have the play. So
Speaker 2: he sees me and knows that I'm there already.
Speaker 1: I'm a person's you're building his comfort level.
Speaker 3: Right, so the first time we meet, he has to
Speaker 3: know me at least that I'm there already. And it
Speaker 3: was successful. And then I told I thank the g's,
Speaker 3: I think everybody else and the Hooker he was one
Speaker 3: of the He got his handle from General Hooker in
Speaker 3: the Civil War.
Speaker 2: He's a Civil War buff. He does the.
Speaker 3: Reenactment things and he was in the Washington Field office.
Speaker 3: But h I said, I hope it's okay with the
Speaker 3: g's that you know we did this, and he said,
Speaker 3: I told him, he said, he's on my handle, but
Speaker 3: I was in Washington was your training agent. And when
Speaker 3: you're in a senior office will give you your handle.
Speaker 3: He'll figure who you what you should be as your
Speaker 3: handle on the radio. And he decided I was Captain Cosmic,
Speaker 3: So I was either Captain coswor just the captain, and
Speaker 3: they all knew what that was. So he said, I
Speaker 3: told him, when you're dealing with Captain Cosmic, like expect
Speaker 3: the unexpected, right that no one had done that before,
Speaker 3: that kind of an operation.
Speaker 2: So that worked.
Speaker 3: Then it came for Polly, and I figured the Russian
Speaker 3: had no idea who Polly was, and he was traveling
Speaker 3: with an Armenian woman who was a producer in Armenia
Speaker 3: in the Erava on their capital, and that was a
Speaker 3: big step for them to come here.
Speaker 2: So I don't know they wouldn't know who she was.
Speaker 3: But if you've been nominated for Academy Award, if you've
Speaker 3: done all things Polly did, you were Hollywood Royalty essentially.
Speaker 3: So I went out and got Polly, I said, like
Speaker 3: it's time, and so he said it the same sort
Speaker 3: of a deal.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: A couple of days before that, when I was trying
Speaker 3: to find we're trying to identify Ivan in the group
Speaker 3: of people, Leah Thompson came in and she was interviewed
Speaker 3: at one of these tables where at the bright lights
Speaker 3: and the.
Speaker 2: Cameras and this is almost gonna be interviewed here.
Speaker 3: And this guy with a sharp blasier and too much
Speaker 3: makeup to be not on camera, and he interviewed Leah Thompson, right,
Speaker 3: And I saw Ivan there in the crowd looking at her.
Speaker 2: And she was known for being the mother and the
Speaker 2: girlfriend and back to the future, and everybody there know
Speaker 2: who she was. But did he know who she was?
Speaker 3: And if he didn't know that, he certainly wouldn't know Polly,
Speaker 3: but he might know the movies that she had done.
Speaker 3: But I had to make it so that she became
Speaker 3: a known quantity. So I said the same thing. When
Speaker 3: I went out got Poby, we came back the surveillance people,
Speaker 3: I said, we're following her when she comes in. We
Speaker 3: get nowhere, Ivan is exactly by the front Hrium. We
Speaker 3: had to either pay money or get a pass to
Speaker 3: get in. And as soon as I came in with Polly,
Speaker 3: somebody right beside ivan. She said, look, it's poll Platt,
Speaker 3: and then four or five brothers said, oh yeah, poll Platt,
Speaker 3: and they started to follow her wherever she went, because
Speaker 3: she explained to me, the American film market is not
Speaker 3: a place where the more senior.
Speaker 2: People in the movie industry would go, right.
Speaker 3: It's a place where people come with their scripts, where
Speaker 3: they come with their movies, where they're from abroad, and
Speaker 3: they want to have someone buy distribution rights for the
Speaker 3: movies they already have with they go on the can
Speaker 3: I already made. So it's not as much what Polly
Speaker 3: would come to. And as she explained, without being an
Speaker 3: ego miniafual person, she said, like, I'm elevating the whole
Speaker 3: thing here by coming to this because my kind of
Speaker 3: people don't come to this. So that's like, you know,
Speaker 3: that's the benefit from the FBI to the film festival.
Speaker 2: You know, have at it. That's good.
Speaker 3: So when we came through the door and the retinue
Speaker 3: started behind her, she was like the pied piper of Hamlin,
Speaker 3: all those people behind her, and then others who knew
Speaker 3: who she was. But I've said in the book, unless
Speaker 3: you knew her personally, you wouldn't have approached her. You
Speaker 3: wouldn't take your script and like throw it in her
Speaker 3: face and say, please read this.
Speaker 2: She was way above all that. In fact, she had
Speaker 2: business cards, but she never needed one.
Speaker 3: If you didn't who Polly Platt was, you didn't need
Speaker 3: her business card. You wouldn't be seeing it at all.
Speaker 3: She was of consequence. So as he went through with
Speaker 3: the retinue, we knew where Ivan was, and we made
Speaker 3: sure that he saw not this, but as we went through,
Speaker 3: and then when he was going farther down the path,
Speaker 3: we made sure we stopped at certain spots and he
Speaker 3: would catch up and see all the more people.
Speaker 2: And then people she did know who were more.
Speaker 3: Senior, older people at the festival that she'd known from
Speaker 3: years and years in Hollywood, you know, four or five
Speaker 3: decades in Hollywood. They would come over and hugger and
Speaker 3: talk for a minute, very formal, but very very my commode,
Speaker 3: what's that? My just friendly, just a good relationship with
Speaker 3: people that already knew her. But all these things stood
Speaker 3: out for Ivan, who watched whoever this lady was, and
Speaker 3: of course I was the one there with her. You know,
Speaker 3: she was on my arm as who worked with the crowd,
Speaker 3: So we made sure he saw all of that. So
Speaker 3: not only did he have to see me in advance,
Speaker 3: I wanted him not to see who Polly was. I
Speaker 3: want him to know that Polly would Polly is a thing,
Speaker 3: She's a person. She's a person of consequence, and he
Speaker 3: would have no idea that all this took place or
Speaker 3: why we were doing it. But eventually, when I wanted
Speaker 3: to have get close to him, she was my ticket
Speaker 3: to do that because he knew already she was a somebody.
Speaker 3: And I think of him sitting back in his room, thinking, boy,
Speaker 3: this is great. This this guy whatever my name was
Speaker 3: at the time, This guy, this guy doesn't know but
Speaker 3: I know I saw him before, and I saw this
Speaker 3: lady Polly, and I know she's a big thing.
Speaker 2: He doesn't know, but I know all about her.
Speaker 3: He could even home and looked her up, he could
Speaker 3: google her, you know, and that would have been important.
Speaker 3: But that all was that setup, just to get to
Speaker 3: the moment so I could have Ivan be right where
Speaker 3: I needed him and able to do some manipulation.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's complicated, and I.
Speaker 1: Don't think we've said it explicitly maybe, but it should
Speaker 1: point out Ivan's background. He is not some KGB kernel.
Speaker 1: He is actually a music journalist. He's a he's a
Speaker 1: civilian really.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he was that wasn't music, but the film
Speaker 3: he was not your film film he did. It was
Speaker 3: he was a good writer and he did journalism things.
Speaker 1: And so the reason why you guys were approaching him
Speaker 1: was because he had been in one room at one
Speaker 1: point in time, many years prior, in a Soviet embassy
Speaker 1: and had seen an American come in and demand to talk.
Speaker 2: To the KGB exactly.
Speaker 1: That's outsidunding. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now we had we had two Russians, specifically two Russian
Speaker 3: intelligence officers recruited Valerie Martinev and Sergary Motorin and again
Speaker 3: in the intelligence community. They did not know they were
Speaker 3: both recruited by the FBI, but they were, and they
Speaker 3: called him Eminem Motored and Martinov, and one of them,
Speaker 3: when he was being debriefed, he told this story and
Speaker 3: he explained that it was because it was a buzz
Speaker 3: through the embassy because a US intelligence guy walked into
Speaker 3: one of their establishment offices and he said what he said,
Speaker 3: which it could only be because he's doing spy things.
Speaker 3: I mean, you're not looking for a project for your
Speaker 3: kid who was in high school about maps of Russia.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not the same thing.
Speaker 3: But he was there when this took place, so he
Speaker 3: wouldn't have known his name, even though the bad guy
Speaker 3: never gave the Russians his name. But the fact that
Speaker 3: he saw that made him a target for us. And
Speaker 3: it was such a unique moment. The question is if
Speaker 3: you met someone fifteen years ago, would remember their face? Well,
Speaker 3: if you're in that situation, in that office and someone
Speaker 3: comes in and has that conversation, you don't forget them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's that's right.
Speaker 3: And plus the fact that the buzz went around in
Speaker 3: the embassy of what happened, it was something to remember.
Speaker 3: So it would take having a conversation with him and
Speaker 3: taking his brain back if you could convince him to
Speaker 3: do that. And that's what the story is. But what
Speaker 3: I've said before not to sound too long winded, I
Speaker 3: realized I'm long winded at this point.
Speaker 2: I apologize.
Speaker 1: No, it's great.
Speaker 3: All of that, all of that was a necessary set up,
Speaker 3: and while this time it didn't require the pictures every
Speaker 3: year at springtime of how many children are by the
Speaker 3: red cherry blossoms. But that's the mentality to piece it together,
Speaker 3: how to make the case work, so you will have
Speaker 3: all the ammunition you can possibly have to make the
Speaker 3: cases work.
Speaker 1: So you were really working to develop this sort of
Speaker 1: intelligence picture around Ivan and the entire setup. And I
Speaker 1: guess we should point out that a couple other FBI
Speaker 1: agents did cold pitch him and he basically told them
Speaker 1: to fuck off. It sounds like, and so you had
Speaker 1: to reassess the entire situation and like kind of start
Speaker 1: over again from the beginning, get him back to the
Speaker 1: United States and try this again. And the big epiphany
Speaker 1: I think that you had was you realized it's got
Speaker 1: to be a woman that makes the pitch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want to.
Speaker 3: I don't know how much you would like to reveal
Speaker 3: in case someone wants to buy the book and have
Speaker 3: any suspense go.
Speaker 1: Over as much as you prefer.
Speaker 3: Okay, let me go back to something which you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 3: because you let certainly send a cat out of the
Speaker 3: bag the moment of with all that preparation. Uh, it's
Speaker 3: redundan to say in advance but all that advanced preparation,
Speaker 3: I still had a meeting, and the question is.
Speaker 2: How to do that? I did. We didn't know anybody
Speaker 2: in common.
Speaker 3: He was with a lady for Marmenia's book ar meaning
Speaker 3: in Russian, so that was not the ticket in and
Speaker 3: while there are other Russians at the film festival on
Speaker 3: their own accord as from film studios in Moscow, they
Speaker 3: were not connect with him at all.
Speaker 2: In fact, they didn't even know him at that point.
Speaker 2: So how do you howd he meet the man? How
Speaker 2: do you? How can you possibly do that?
Speaker 3: And uh, boy, like they said, elementary school, put your
Speaker 3: thinking cap on, like it's got to happen somehow.
Speaker 2: So they.
Speaker 3: Her name was Anna Hit, which is an Armenian name,
Speaker 3: but so and the surveillance people kept calling him the girlfriend,
Speaker 3: but this was not a girlfriend. He's traveling, he's a
Speaker 3: traveling translator and he's writing articles about her. But the
Speaker 3: film festival, you know, he's a very business orient in
Speaker 3: that regard. So they would go outside to the pool
Speaker 3: almost any any moment where there wasn't some kind of
Speaker 3: speech or something that they would be attending on a
Speaker 3: normal basis, And they seem like they're at the pool
Speaker 3: too much to me. But if you come, I guess
Speaker 3: in February from Moscow, you'd like to sit outside at
Speaker 3: Santa Monica by the pool where the sun beating down
Speaker 3: instead of where you came from, which is like minus
Speaker 3: twenty degrees in Moscow. So they would go to the
Speaker 3: same table, the same place every time, right at the
Speaker 3: edge of the pool. And this is where there's like
Speaker 3: thirty forty tables. It's a beautiful blue pool. It's in
Speaker 3: the in the right beside this enormously beautiful atrium building,
Speaker 3: and the ocean is right out there and you can
Speaker 3: see it in the beach, and it's just an exceptional spot.
Speaker 3: And they're out there sitting behind the pool, and to
Speaker 3: a certain extent they were talking, but as the surveillance
Speaker 3: people reported, they're just sitting there, like why are they here?
Speaker 3: And it was really for the woman, so she could
Speaker 3: have made contacts, maybe have someone get her connected to
Speaker 3: stuff in America.
Speaker 2: I didn't think that was going to happen, but at
Speaker 2: least that's what it seemed to be.
Speaker 3: So I noticed that the edge of the pool of
Speaker 3: the cowling for the pool was identical to what I
Speaker 3: had at my house in Swlana Beach and just where
Speaker 3: it's a little up at the edge and it's like bricks,
Speaker 3: but it's round it. And I had two daughters at
Speaker 3: the time who were like, I don't know, six and seven,
Speaker 3: and I would play act with them. I would come
Speaker 3: home from work and I would be still in my suit.
Speaker 3: I'd have a suit nine millimeter forty rounds of amoal handcuffs,
Speaker 3: and I would play by the pool as though I
Speaker 3: was falling in. I would do this, oh that sort
Speaker 3: of a thing, and they would always laugh. If I
Speaker 3: was doing that with either my regular clothes and no
Speaker 3: phones or but a bathing suit, I would fall in
Speaker 3: with a big splash, and everybody would have a good
Speaker 3: time other than I would just pretend.
Speaker 2: To fall in. And I had done this before. Had
Speaker 2: I not had those games with my daughters, this case
Speaker 2: would not have worked.
Speaker 3: This could not have happened. So they were at a
Speaker 3: table which is right by the edge of the pool. Coincidentally,
Speaker 3: so they had been outside, and I stood in a
Speaker 3: corner outside in the shade looking at the sequence, at
Speaker 3: which point I recognized what was going on with the pool.
Speaker 3: So they got up to get in line with the
Speaker 3: barbecue started and the spell of hamburgers and cheeseburgers, and
Speaker 3: it was just a great smell wafting through the air.
Speaker 3: And they got in line behind twenty or thirty people
Speaker 3: to get their stuff. You get a starpham plate and
Speaker 3: you have a can of soda and a hot over
Speaker 3: or a burger and thing of potato chips, and you
Speaker 3: walk back to your table and you sit down. And
Speaker 3: so I got in line about ten people behind them
Speaker 3: to get my burger and whatever. So when I got it,
Speaker 3: I I locked my hand on it and with a
Speaker 3: coke can over it and the potato chips so nothing
Speaker 3: fell out. And I walked around to where I'd been before,
Speaker 3: and then I went toward where they were by the pool,
Speaker 3: and I'm weaving myself between these tables. They're round tables
Speaker 3: six feet across, and place is fairly crowded. So I'm
Speaker 3: walking between Ivan's table and the pool, and I'm balancing
Speaker 3: on the edge. I'm kind of teeter tottering. And this
Speaker 3: is exactly what I'd done like the day before, two
Speaker 3: days before, with my own daughters. So I have my
Speaker 3: hand with a styrofoam plate over the pool, and my
Speaker 3: other hand is the left. You kind of balancing it
Speaker 3: and hit the cowling. So I knew exactly where it
Speaker 3: was and how to play with it. And I went
Speaker 3: back and forth tottering and I did made the oh
Speaker 3: like I was about.
Speaker 2: To pool in the pool.
Speaker 3: And all of a sudden, now he had a nice family,
Speaker 3: he had twin daughters. We knew he was a good father.
Speaker 3: I thought, this is the guy would save somebody if
Speaker 3: he could. He wouldn't push him in the pool like
Speaker 3: some of the KGB guys who were dogs would have done.
Speaker 3: This guy reached out, he grabbed my arm and he
Speaker 3: pulled me away from it because I was pretty much
Speaker 3: unbalanced whatever, and he yanked me over and I sat
Speaker 3: down on the table and yeah, I was wayne for this,
Speaker 3: so I you know, I was just so relieved that
Speaker 3: and fall in the pool and it was like a
Speaker 3: heroic thing. And people all the tables around us, they're
Speaker 3: giving him applause, they're clapping for him. He saved this
Speaker 3: guy from falling in the pool. They don't know this
Speaker 3: is part of an FBI operation, which is okay. So
Speaker 3: so like he pointed a chair and I sat down,
Speaker 3: and so I said, I want to thank you. He said,
Speaker 3: your name is you know? And he said John, and
Speaker 3: I said Wayne, And I was Wayne for this occasion, right,
Speaker 3: And it came so quickly when I I what he
Speaker 3: said nically, John Wayne heard it say it out loud
Speaker 3: right away, and everybody nearby was still listening and watching
Speaker 3: because it was such an entertaining scene. But it ringing
Speaker 3: the name of the old Hollywood cowboy, John Wayne. It
Speaker 3: was an amazing coincidence. Also, if his name was Ivan,
Speaker 3: that translated in English as John. Most languages have something
Speaker 3: like Ivan, and remaining they have Yuon or Yon and
Speaker 3: in English ers Ian, you know Ian Fleming, but that
Speaker 3: is all Ivan. It's based on Ivan the Terrible. It's
Speaker 3: based upon John the Baptist, but all those of Ivan.
Speaker 3: So anyway, so he went by John, and I call
Speaker 3: him Ivan the book for clarity's sake. But to have
Speaker 3: a Russian be I would say, kind enough or good
Speaker 3: enough to make it easy for Americans to deal with him.
Speaker 3: Instead of being called Ivan. If they could call him John,
Speaker 3: they were feel much closer to him right away psychologically.
Speaker 2: That was good for him.
Speaker 3: So that worked, and I hadn't planned on that, but
Speaker 3: it worked the way it did. So almost falling into
Speaker 3: the pool. You know, it made the next piece of
Speaker 3: the case fall together. And we sat down and talked
Speaker 3: for you know, a long time. I learned about them,
Speaker 3: all the stuff we wanted to do, I learned about them.
Speaker 1: So eventually the meeting, the actual meeting that the FBI
Speaker 1: wanted to have with Ivan, did occur, and he did
Speaker 1: point out to somebody, do you want to kind of
Speaker 1: like tell us, kind of like the follow up, like
Speaker 1: what happened after your part of the operation.
Speaker 3: You would mentioned something earlier about another couple of agents
Speaker 3: that made a cold pitch. I just I wanted to
Speaker 3: get back and address that just for a second. Psychologically,
Speaker 3: if you want something to do, an action that they
Speaker 3: might never do on their own or never want to do,
Speaker 3: especially someone has any level of moral principles, you can't
Speaker 3: pay them to do it.
Speaker 2: You can't pay them to subvert their principles.
Speaker 3: And everything showed me that he had high standards, raised
Speaker 3: nice daughters, and had a good marriage, and seemed like
Speaker 3: an honest and decent guy. And if you should have
Speaker 3: a suitcase, which you say is like a million bucks, first,
Speaker 3: it's very heavy.
Speaker 2: It's heavything.
Speaker 3: I've been involved in a number of cases, both in
Speaker 3: the bureau and after with other investigations. If you have
Speaker 3: a regular leather briefcase, it will only hold two hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: If you have all money in one hundred dollar.
Speaker 3: Bills, that's all that fits in a suitcase briefcase two
Speaker 3: point fifty. Someone says, I have a million dollars here
Speaker 3: or the lion to you, Okay, it doesn't fit. If
Speaker 3: I got a million, you better have four briefcases. Bad
Speaker 3: guys don't know that. Bad guys are selling back stolen
Speaker 3: paintings for instances.
Speaker 2: You know they don't know that.
Speaker 3: So if you have a suitcase has a million dollars
Speaker 3: in it, four suitcases or four briefcases worth, and you
Speaker 3: say to someone you know, have knowledge I'd like to have,
Speaker 3: and I'd like to give a million dollars for it,
Speaker 3: that's called a cold pitch. Cold pitches and insult. You
Speaker 3: don't want to insult people, But picture it this way.
Speaker 3: If a Russian is offered or anybody, but if Russian
Speaker 3: is offered a million dollars for certain information, first, it's insulting.
Speaker 2: You know, you don't know me, you don't thing about me,
Speaker 2: You haven't. I would say profiled him, but you don't
Speaker 2: knowing about me. But worst of all is what's the
Speaker 2: downstream from that? Say?
Speaker 3: The man says, yes, he's in Santa Monica. He's on
Speaker 3: a visa to get here. You cannot take a suitcase
Speaker 3: with a million dollars in it through customs and get
Speaker 3: back to Moscow. You can't put it in a bank here.
Speaker 3: You can't put it in a bank there. You can't
Speaker 3: hide it under rock. You have no friends here. You
Speaker 3: can't turn it into cashier's check. There's nothing you can
Speaker 3: do with a million dollars in his suitcase. It sounds good,
Speaker 3: but it's simply impossible, not possible. There was another example
Speaker 3: of why the coal pitch wouldn't necessarily work, and that's
Speaker 3: based upon an extraordinary case which I've mentioned in the book,
Speaker 3: but it's worth doing the vignette. There was a great
Speaker 3: supervisor whose name was Nick Walsh, and he was over
Speaker 3: the KGB, the gru Squad, the Soviet military intelligence.
Speaker 2: They were really hard liners.
Speaker 3: The KGB guys somewhere soft, some are harder, but all
Speaker 3: the military guys were really hardliners. It was their job
Speaker 3: to be hardliners. I mean they would meet people in
Speaker 3: the Pentagon. They want to learn stuff, but they were
Speaker 3: just hardline people. So we wanted to have an operation,
Speaker 3: which Nick called pitch abum a month. We consider the
Speaker 3: military guys to be bumbs like the bum on the street,
Speaker 3: but pitch above a month. So what happened was in
Speaker 3: January we had sources of various individuals who knew the
Speaker 3: military people would have lunch with them. So on like
Speaker 3: I think the third Thursday of the month, we made
Speaker 3: sure at least a couple of our sources we're having
Speaker 3: lunch with some of the military people at just a
Speaker 3: restaurant out in DC. And at one point, if the
Speaker 3: American drinks enough beer and has enough water and convinces
Speaker 3: the Russian have as much, somebody has to go to
Speaker 3: the bathroom.
Speaker 2: Somebody has to pee.
Speaker 3: So you would wait until the Russian would get up
Speaker 3: to go to the bed's room to relieve himself, and
Speaker 3: you take an FBI agent looks like an FBI agent,
Speaker 3: we're in a suit. He would go into the bathroom
Speaker 3: right after him, go to the urinal right beside him.
Speaker 3: There's only a little partition there, and he would start
Speaker 3: to peek. Russians they're paying and he would say, Hey,
Speaker 3: I'm an fbigin. I have a lot of money to
Speaker 3: buy secrets. You know, can you sell me some secrets?
Speaker 3: And we would have a briefcase for something, but he
Speaker 3: would do we call hard pitch, which is not made
Speaker 3: to succeed, but it's made to be a hard pitch. Well,
Speaker 3: Russians could normally just look nonchalant about it, but the pitches.
Speaker 2: Were so hard.
Speaker 3: So like, you know, I meet you tonight, I give
Speaker 3: you this money, like your wife would really like it,
Speaker 3: and you know you can you know, but I only
Speaker 3: want good secrets. I mean to the point that they
Speaker 3: have to report when they're pitched by the Americans if
Speaker 3: you run right. And what eventually a person like this
Speaker 3: would do is he'd go back out to the restaurant
Speaker 3: and not even talk to the guys having lunch with,
Speaker 3: right out the door in his car and right back
Speaker 3: to the embassy.
Speaker 2: And the guy had have security and say that, you know,
Speaker 2: the Americans just pitched me.
Speaker 3: So we did that once a month on a Thursday,
Speaker 3: And the next month we did the same thing with
Speaker 3: a different KGB, a different GRU officer. Next month, a
Speaker 3: different gro officer, same deal. Third Thursday of the month,
Speaker 3: and then in September, the ninth month, we didn't pitch anybody,
Speaker 3: but in October we did it again, and November we
Speaker 3: did it again. In December, so we made eleven pitches
Speaker 3: but nothing in September. So the man in charge of
Speaker 3: counterintelligence and security for the embassy, he gets these reports
Speaker 3: and he has eleventh and no one came into him
Speaker 3: on the third Thursday of September to say, hey, the
Speaker 3: FBI pitched me today.
Speaker 2: So what's going through his mind. He's going to be
Speaker 2: a colonel in the KGB.
Speaker 3: What's going through his mind is which of my officers
Speaker 3: is now working for the FBI that didn't report the pitch.
Speaker 2: It will drive him nuts.
Speaker 3: Now, if one of them had said yes, we would
Speaker 3: have real quickly pitched somebody else. But the whole idea
Speaker 3: was to screw up the Russian system and the security people,
Speaker 3: to put a bee in their bonnet. And it's a
Speaker 3: cold war fun and games, but that's an operation, but
Speaker 3: it's based on the fact that if you pitch somebody
Speaker 3: cold for.
Speaker 2: Money, it will be rejected. The whole base of the
Speaker 2: operation was this doesn't work there, I was harassing, yeah, right,
Speaker 2: So what happened.
Speaker 3: In Santa Monica with two agents, decent guys, they knew
Speaker 3: them well, but they were given this assignment.
Speaker 2: To do a cold pitch with a suitcase full of money,
Speaker 2: and like that was made to fail. But that was
Speaker 2: the effort.
Speaker 3: But then when that didn't work, and they tried twice.
Speaker 3: When that didn't work, then they did the fallback of
Speaker 3: you know, the Wayne guy. So now instead of just
Speaker 3: being the undercover guy, now I was going to be
Speaker 3: the pitch man. So I didn't I didn't make a
Speaker 3: lot of noise about it. But how could they think
Speaker 3: that would have worked with any Russian? So that's that's
Speaker 3: more of intel knowledge and how a case works and
Speaker 3: what the psychology.
Speaker 2: Is for it.
Speaker 1: Anyway, interesting, those those types of those types of details
Speaker 1: were what made this book so amazing. And but let's
Speaker 1: kind of like finish up.
Speaker 2: Thank you for that, by the way, I really appreciate it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm glad.
Speaker 1: Well if you can kind of round out the robber
Speaker 1: Hanson aspect of it, so you're part of the investigation.
Speaker 1: Resulted in Ivan pointing to this picture saying, this is
Speaker 1: the guy I saw come in And then what have
Speaker 1: you learned? Since you know the subsequent years. How the
Speaker 1: rest of the Hanson investigation panned out.
Speaker 3: First that from the day I retired, which was the
Speaker 3: last day of two thousand December thirty first, two thousand,
Speaker 3: I wasn't class cleared for anything. I had no one
Speaker 3: more clearances, and I wasn't given any information. But during
Speaker 3: the operation I did learn that he pointed out a
Speaker 3: photo that's unequivocal.
Speaker 2: That was the goal.
Speaker 3: All this enormously complicated things took place, including getting back
Speaker 3: him back to the US, which was an incredible story
Speaker 3: in itself. The whole point was, as Gene McClelland, who
Speaker 3: handles Red Pop everybody knows him as that as the
Speaker 3: head of the SSGGIUS was like the father of all
Speaker 3: the surveilling people. So Jean said that we were given
Speaker 3: an assignment and we did everything they asked us for fine.
Speaker 3: I meet him, befriend and recruit him, and show them
Speaker 3: photos and have a point out a photo that was
Speaker 3: our end game. Now, if the bad guy's pace wasn't there,
Speaker 3: that wasn't on me.
Speaker 2: I believe that it was.
Speaker 3: But I don't have any idea because the photos when
Speaker 3: they first met me in a hotel room in January
Speaker 3: and San Diego. They showed me the photos they had,
Speaker 3: like did I know any of these people? And they
Speaker 3: were the ones suspected of being.
Speaker 2: The bad guy. There were some CIA, some FBI, but
Speaker 2: of a.
Speaker 3: Certain age because this stuff happened in the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 3: so they wouldn't be brand new people.
Speaker 2: I only knew one or two, and I told them
Speaker 2: the ones I knew, like this guy is suspect.
Speaker 3: But after that, at various times the people who were suspected,
Speaker 3: some were removed because they were no longer suspected, and
Speaker 3: somewhere added to it as now this person suspected. So
Speaker 3: I don't know who the pictures were I'd done other
Speaker 3: than one or two I knew before that. I didn't
Speaker 3: know who was added, who was subtracted, And I certainly
Speaker 3: did not know who the photos were of that Ivan
Speaker 3: had sitting.
Speaker 2: In his lap at one point, so I was out
Speaker 2: of that. But I know that I was.
Speaker 3: Waiting for some headlines in the news from two thousand,
Speaker 3: from the January first, two thousand and one on waiting
Speaker 3: for some aspying the FBI, and it wasn't until President's
Speaker 3: Day two thousand and one, which was January eighteenth. I
Speaker 3: guess that it came out in Hanson was arrested. Now
Speaker 3: I had every reason to believe that I was involved
Speaker 3: with that, And if I weren't involved with that, at
Speaker 3: the very least, I was a piece of the puzzle
Speaker 3: of what was an enormous case which had his tentacles
Speaker 3: all around the world. I know there were pitching people
Speaker 3: in places like Tokyo, places like London. I mean I
Speaker 3: was involved in one involved one in London, but there
Speaker 3: are other places in the world. But you have to understand,
Speaker 3: you can only make a cold pitch so many times
Speaker 3: before you realize this isn't working right. Cold is not
Speaker 3: the answer. So having that kind of experience helped.
Speaker 2: Me to work the case. Also, like this has to
Speaker 2: be soft, really soft, and then psychologically I have to.
Speaker 3: Profile him. So that's where John Douglas came into it.
Speaker 3: He wasn't with us at the time, but he invented profiling.
Speaker 3: He started interviewing serial murderers in prison with something which
Speaker 3: was not a lead.
Speaker 2: For the FBI in general.
Speaker 3: But he was in what they call behavioral sciences at
Speaker 3: the time now it's Behavioral Analysis Unit BAU, and the
Speaker 3: TV show Criminal Minds was based upon what John Douglas
Speaker 3: and those people did.
Speaker 2: I knew several of them. It helped with other counter
Speaker 2: intelligence cases.
Speaker 3: But John did criminal things, but we weren't doing the
Speaker 3: same thing, but taking a hint from that, we were
Speaker 3: doing it in counter intelligence assessing what is in a
Speaker 3: person's personality, who's an embassy official who we could possibly
Speaker 3: recruit a way before the Ivan case. Also, what is
Speaker 3: it in the personality of a defense contractor, who's an employee,
Speaker 3: maybe he's working for Boeing in the new B two
Speaker 3: bomber wing, and what would cause him to want to
Speaker 3: sell secrets to the Russians for money. That's a profile.
Speaker 3: So worked in counter intelligence in those two diametric oppositions,
Speaker 3: and essentially the answer was a crisis in their life.
Speaker 3: We had a diplomat whose child was born at seven
Speaker 3: and a half months by eight months, a pregnant woman,
Speaker 3: wife of an embassy official all the block countries in
Speaker 3: the Russians, but after back in Moscow or back in
Speaker 3: their home country, so they weren't born in the US,
Speaker 3: even though with the diplat father they wouldn't be quote
Speaker 3: US citizens, but they didn't want him born here during
Speaker 3: the any time pregnancy had to end in Moscow and
Speaker 3: ra Pooch arrested. Whatever, so one fellows his daughter. His
Speaker 3: son was born at seven and a half months and
Speaker 3: the child needed heart surgery right away, and that particular
Speaker 3: Russia knew that if his child were taken back to
Speaker 3: Moscow he would die for sure if they couldn't possibly
Speaker 3: do this. So we realized this, we learned what it was,
Speaker 3: and we found exactly the situation. Doctors were very helpful
Speaker 3: and we said, who is the best doctor in America
Speaker 3: to pull this off? And this is very difficult, but
Speaker 3: there's a guy and he'said a city, so he reached
Speaker 3: out to him. He flew in for us and he
Speaker 3: did the surgery and the kid lived. Wow, okay, so
Speaker 3: what it's not leverage? But what does the Russian then
Speaker 3: think of America? Like to picture all the people from
Speaker 3: the World Cup soccer now where the scotsman coming in
Speaker 3: in Norwegians and they're rowing and they're cheering, and they're
Speaker 3: taking over Boston. Everybody loves them. You know, that's that's
Speaker 3: a that's a fun fest, that's a celebration. What was
Speaker 3: in the Russian's head when he realized that only in
Speaker 3: America you know, he doesn't have to have an allegiance
Speaker 3: to us. But that's the kind of thing that enables
Speaker 3: you to pitch somebody, even soft pitch. You know, the
Speaker 3: surgeon can say, you know, when you're here next time,
Speaker 3: let me talk to you, and then they can have
Speaker 3: a person like me in the room, say this is
Speaker 3: a gentleman who was partly responsible for your son surviving today.
Speaker 2: I will tell you he's in the FBI. He means
Speaker 2: no harm, but he's a freendom mine.
Speaker 3: That's that's kind of intelligence. Yeah, counter intelligence at his best.
Speaker 3: So anyway, so now get back to your question. I
Speaker 3: had no connection with it after I retired, but I
Speaker 3: did know that the photogen pointed out they're trying to
Speaker 3: find a way to zero in on the person whose
Speaker 3: face was pointed out. I did not know until much
Speaker 3: later that there was a fellow whose name was Brian Kelly,
Speaker 3: who was a senior CIA officer at Langley, that he
Speaker 3: had come under suspicion.
Speaker 2: I didn't know why. I wasn't part of that, and
Speaker 2: the books of various sorts hadn't come out at that point, so.
Speaker 3: They was decided investigatively that he was the bad guy.
Speaker 2: He was the mole. It was in the CIA, but
Speaker 2: it didn't matter. He was the mole.
Speaker 3: And I to my friends, I said, can't be. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's just not the right pattern when the KGB would
Speaker 3: do dead drop activities. That is, to have a person
Speaker 3: like in the nineteen eighties, Johnny Walker worked for the Russians.
Speaker 3: He was a naval intelligence guy, and then he had
Speaker 3: a PI business in Richmond or someplace in Virginia, and
Speaker 3: he was still getting secrets. He had his son who
Speaker 3: was in the Navy and his daughter who was given
Speaker 3: were giving his secrets to him, or that was his plan,
Speaker 3: and he was selling them to the Russians. You know
Speaker 3: that that kind of a person by hooker, by crook.
Speaker 3: You know, they're stealing secrets and they're trying to get
Speaker 3: in there. How you find out who these people are,
Speaker 3: how you assess their personalities. Who would be a thief,
Speaker 3: who would be a person giving away secrets. It's all
Speaker 3: part of that profiling deal. So the idea of having
Speaker 3: Brian Kelly be the bad guy took some investigation.
Speaker 2: And then it became much more open.
Speaker 3: And I learned that they had found the map in
Speaker 3: his sock drawer, which they thought was a KGB map
Speaker 3: or GRU map about where the next drop site might be.
Speaker 3: And the problem was Brian lived in Great Falls, which
Speaker 3: is good neighborhood north of east of Langley by the
Speaker 3: Potomac River. Nice neighborhood, but it's also where Soviets had
Speaker 3: done veryous dead drop activity. But he's this non person
Speaker 3: communications over years, but he lived in that area and
Speaker 3: he had the map which he said was his jogging trail,
Speaker 3: you know, which he would jog, and the GRU maps
Speaker 3: they looked very specifically in a certain way. Plus the
Speaker 3: Russians wrote made the maps, not the Americans. And there
Speaker 3: was always an X mark where the spot was going
Speaker 3: to be, you know from Harrison Ford and his Indiana Jones.
Speaker 3: X never marks the spot, you know, well, it does
Speaker 3: mark the spot at the KG maps have the X
Speaker 3: on him, and that's where the drop's going to be.
Speaker 2: You go to across a one lane bridge, make a
Speaker 2: hairpin turn, pulled to the side ten.
Speaker 3: Feet in there's a stump. Put the rock right behind
Speaker 3: the stuff that has the secrets in it. That's your
Speaker 3: ex Well, they didn't have any extras on these maps,
Speaker 3: and they weren't made by the Russians. But that was
Speaker 3: one thing that seemed like evidence against him, and I
Speaker 3: wish I had done the interview, but I wasn't around
Speaker 3: to do the interview, so there was zero on to
Speaker 3: somebody else. And at one point I learned that if
Speaker 3: Evan had pointed out Brian Kelly, all would have been
Speaker 3: right with the world for the people doing the investigation,
Speaker 3: but they were in the wrong, and he didn't point
Speaker 3: out Brian Kelly.
Speaker 2: So at that point I don't know.
Speaker 3: Whether they threw away the pictures or whatever happened to it,
Speaker 3: but I wasn't part of that situation. Even within the bureau.
Speaker 3: Was still the most tightly held case in the bureau.
Speaker 3: I mean understanding the tightliness of the pace.
Speaker 2: At this point.
Speaker 3: The Bureau had a computer system, the Federal Information Management
Speaker 3: Forms they call it, and all documents went in on
Speaker 3: a digital basis. So if we had information about this
Speaker 3: case or mafia cases or any kind of case, you
Speaker 3: could search for the FBI computer, and he could search
Speaker 3: to see if it was a case mounted against him
Speaker 3: in the FBI computer. So I would meet him for
Speaker 3: a meal or with Polly, and I type it up
Speaker 3: at my hotel in Santa Monica that night I printed
Speaker 3: out on the hotel printer and make sure that I
Speaker 3: ran clean sheets through so my document was not left
Speaker 3: on the barrel, if you will, And then go to
Speaker 3: FedEx office and send it double wrapped to Jean McClellan
Speaker 3: and alexandri Vige and he'd walk in in the next
Speaker 3: morning to the office and they all read it. But
Speaker 3: they never scanned them, never put them in the machine,
Speaker 3: because the bad guy could have found out whatever was
Speaker 3: taking place. So I did a Freedom of Information Act
Speaker 3: request around twenty thirteen when I started to write this book,
Speaker 3: and I gave them the code name I had, and
Speaker 3: I gave them the file numbers, which I still knew,
Speaker 3: and they came back a few months later like no record,
Speaker 3: I don't have that.
Speaker 2: They never scanned these things in So if I didn't
Speaker 2: write this book, this wulld be gone.
Speaker 1: So I had somewhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I I met a hill named Cliff Stall in the
Speaker 3: early nineties at Quantico at a I was teaching some
Speaker 3: classes at the FBI Academy and counter intelligence like that is.
Speaker 3: They flew me back from San Diego to talk. I'm
Speaker 3: happy that they did such a thing. But he he
Speaker 3: was an astrophysicist at Berkeley, and he had he had
Speaker 3: discovered a case which he wrote a book called The
Speaker 3: Cuckoo's Egg and it was the bestseller at the time.
Speaker 3: And a few years before, doing extra money at the
Speaker 3: library at Berkeley, California, they gave him some accounts and
Speaker 3: they said, you know, figure these accounts and just figure
Speaker 3: where the numbers are. And he was an astrophysicist, he
Speaker 3: could do numbers and accounts. And he found one account
Speaker 3: it was seventy five cents off. This is when you
Speaker 3: had telephones. You're putting in a receptacle and it's beeping,
Speaker 3: and you're taught using computer time that sort everything, and
Speaker 3: that was from that time in the late eighties.
Speaker 2: But it was seventy five cents off. And he said
Speaker 2: it can't be.
Speaker 3: They said, dont worry about it's only seventy five cents.
Speaker 3: He said, no, it can't be seventy five cents off.
Speaker 3: I have to find out how that happened. So he
Speaker 3: traced back through it and he found that it came
Speaker 3: from the Red Stone Arsenal in Alabama, and he found
Speaker 3: that someone had hacked into there and it turned out
Speaker 3: with two East German guys working for the KGB hacked
Speaker 3: from East Germany into the US military system, which is
Speaker 3: what the original Internet was. And somehow when they put
Speaker 3: their stuff in with the time, it screwed up the
Speaker 3: numbers with how much money was being spent for time
Speaker 3: on the computer that was seventy five cents. So he
Speaker 3: wrote his book. He wrote his book called The Cuckoo's Egg.
Speaker 3: That's Cliff Stall, that's coll and was he became famous,
Speaker 3: but it was extraorday. It was the first computer hacking book.
Speaker 3: There's people really understood about computer hacking. So he was
Speaker 3: at Quantico also talking about his book and what happened
Speaker 3: with the class to the class. So because he had
Speaker 3: clearances at that point, he was allowed to stay in.
Speaker 3: Here are some of my stories. So I told him,
Speaker 3: you know stuff, I was undercover against the Hungarian against
Speaker 3: the Czech intelligence guy.
Speaker 2: And he stopped me after class and he said, you have.
Speaker 3: To write a book, like I was two thirds of
Speaker 3: the way through my career at this point, like FBI,
Speaker 3: just don't write books that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2: And he said, you don't understand.
Speaker 3: He said, if every seventy five years the people from
Speaker 3: the past, whether you were cavemen, or astronomers or dark ages.
Speaker 3: People didn't write down that they saw this flame in
Speaker 3: the sky, today, we would not know. That was Haley's comment,
Speaker 3: And he said, it wouldn't be like they didn't write
Speaker 3: it down, would be like.
Speaker 2: It never happened. He said.
Speaker 3: If you don't write this down, it won't be like
Speaker 3: you didn't work this case. It would be like this
Speaker 3: case never took place, he said. And that wasn't this case,
Speaker 3: that was other earlier cases. He said, this is too
Speaker 3: good not to write down.
Speaker 2: He said, you have to. So that was the inspiration
Speaker 2: for it. So he's still a an astrophysicist.
Speaker 3: When I was in the process of getting approval by
Speaker 3: the pre publication review people again, you might recall that
Speaker 3: I sent it to the manuscript of in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: and they have thirty to forty five days to review
Speaker 3: a book, and usually they get back at that time.
Speaker 3: But three years later, three years later, they wrote back
Speaker 3: and said, no, you're laughing with me, right, So I
Speaker 3: submitted it again with some revisions. I flew to Washington
Speaker 3: three times from Fort Lauderdale, where I live, and argued
Speaker 3: my case for all various reasons it should not have
Speaker 3: been classified and Finally in the end of twenty twenty
Speaker 3: three they approved it. So it took seven years, seven
Speaker 3: years to get a complete publication review. And I've had
Speaker 3: literally agency what took you so long, and said, well, hey,
Speaker 3: talk to those people.
Speaker 2: I didn't do that.
Speaker 3: So that's how long it took to get the book reviewed.
Speaker 3: So that gives an example of why in the nineteen
Speaker 3: nineties I had no reason to believe I could write
Speaker 3: a book with it whatever approve. But I had the temerity.
Speaker 3: I had the timerity to write a book. But if
Speaker 3: you want to write a book about your big drug
Speaker 3: case in Detroit or a big kidnapping case in Tampa,
Speaker 3: have at it. It was never classified. It was briefly
Speaker 3: classified confidential what it was one going, so the bad
Speaker 3: guys didn't know what's happening. But this one was the
Speaker 3: most highly classified case in the bureau. To get to
Speaker 3: the squad, which was called Gray Suit, that was the
Speaker 3: undercover operation for the whole case, which turned out to
Speaker 3: be the Answer case, you had to go into the
Speaker 3: Fueld office and he went down a hallway and it
Speaker 3: was a cipher lock, and you went through the cipher lock.
Speaker 2: Ten feet later, there's the next hallway with another door
Speaker 2: and through that cipher lock and in there is where
Speaker 2: Graciouet worked. And there were a dozen maximum fifteen people,
Speaker 2: but I think a dozen or so people there every
Speaker 2: Friday afternoon. They were all polygraphed to make sure they
Speaker 2: hadn't given up conversation anybody else. If they had, they
Speaker 2: would be bent from the squad. And also they would
Speaker 2: you not be able to tell any secrets after that either.
Speaker 2: So it was the most tightly held case in all
Speaker 2: the FBI because it was a penetration of the FBI.
Speaker 2: So that was tense.
Speaker 3: So when they came out to talk to me, I
Speaker 3: didn't realize all of that how intense it was. But
Speaker 3: so all those things go round the case. It isn't
Speaker 3: just catching the bad guys. It's like Jesus. Yeah, the
Speaker 3: logistics were absolutely extraordinary. Again, so I'm a long leash
Speaker 3: agent and I'm happy they gave me the assignment.
Speaker 1: I one more question. I was talking to a friend
Speaker 1: and he asked me, or he advised me, that I
Speaker 1: should try to get you to tell a story you
Speaker 1: had about Robert Redford.
Speaker 2: I'm sure was Robert Redford. Let's see, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe it wasn't.
Speaker 2: I don't know some Hollywood person. Oh gosh, well I
Speaker 2: can't think. Oh, yes, yes I know who. It wasn't
Speaker 2: what it was? Oh you led me astray there. I'm
Speaker 2: sorry to say.
Speaker 1: Sorry.
Speaker 2: You're my friend, now right, we can talk all right?
Speaker 3: Gosh, boy, you just ping the right bell. So I
Speaker 3: have a dear friend for years and years. His name
Speaker 3: is Harry Gossip, and he was a criminal supervisor in
Speaker 3: the Washington Field Office. Now of course long retired, and
Speaker 3: he did a lot of organization of undercover things in
Speaker 3: the criminal field, and I was doing the coordination of
Speaker 3: uncovered counter intelligence. Like I said, two completely different spectrums.
Speaker 3: You're working on a bank robery squad here, you're working
Speaker 3: Romanians over here. You guys never see each other unless
Speaker 3: you have lunch together. You never know contact at all.
Speaker 3: It's like a different agency almost. But I had Harry
Speaker 3: and I had befriended each other and we were good friends.
Speaker 3: And Harry was having a party at his house and
Speaker 3: an in Alexandria. One night he said, you ought to
Speaker 3: come to my party. So I came to his party
Speaker 3: and among other twenty or thirty people there, his wife
Speaker 3: was an assistant US attorney and she worked at Maine Justice.
Speaker 3: She was really a phenomenal individual, passed away during the pandemic,
Speaker 3: but she was a great lady. So between the two
Speaker 3: of them, they knew people from far and wide, all
Speaker 3: sorts of individuals. So you wouldn't who would meet at
Speaker 3: Harry's party. Wasn't like the guys down the street haven't
Speaker 3: beer together. It was a much more cosmopolitan occasion. So
Speaker 3: at the party was this spell named Grady, I think
Speaker 3: James Grady, and I learned that he had been the
Speaker 3: one who wrote the book which became the movie Three
Speaker 3: Days of the Condor, which is your Robert Redford connection.
Speaker 1: I've met him, small, I've met that author. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: good guy.
Speaker 2: That's a small tale in the end of this well.
Speaker 3: I saw him somewhere connected with all of your page,
Speaker 3: which has voluminous information on it.
Speaker 2: But I saw him there, much older guy than what
Speaker 2: I had seen.
Speaker 3: So Grady was at the party, and in fact he
Speaker 3: had just written another book, writing detective type of stories.
Speaker 3: And the cover was like a curb where there's a
Speaker 3: evening and it's a woman's red high heeled shoe and
Speaker 3: it's by itself in the curb, like a woman was
Speaker 3: running away and shoe fell off, you know, a la
Speaker 3: Cinderella or whatever.
Speaker 2: But that wasn't cover of the book.
Speaker 3: Harry had on his fireplace in a mantle and I
Speaker 3: saw it and I thought, I got to meet this guy.
Speaker 2: So Harry introduced us.
Speaker 3: So I had a conversation with him, and when he
Speaker 3: wrote Three Days of the Condor, as he explained it,
Speaker 3: he didn't write that first. He was from Montana. I
Speaker 3: think he'd never been outside the border of Montana. You
Speaker 3: got to know how much cosmopolitan things are in Montana.
Speaker 3: So he had never been outside in Montana, if maybe
Speaker 3: for a short trip. But he was born and raised
Speaker 3: and lived there, and he wanted to write a book,
Speaker 3: and he thought of something exciting co'd write about. Obviously
Speaker 3: turned to the CIA. I don't know if there's anybody
Speaker 3: in CIA in Montana. But nevertheless we wrote the book,
Speaker 3: which was Seven Days of the Seven seven Days of
Speaker 3: the Condor, and it was the story of what happened
Speaker 3: each success day.
Speaker 2: Robert Redford, I can't believe this. We pieced this together.
Speaker 3: Robert Redford at the same time was in Hollywood and
Speaker 3: he was looking for a script or a story that
Speaker 3: he could make in the movie where it would be
Speaker 3: very inexpensive to buy the rights to the book, to
Speaker 3: the book or wherever it came from us this book
Speaker 3: to screenplay and screenplay the movie. So he had stacks
Speaker 3: in when I was in polly Plats office, she had
Speaker 3: stacks and stacks and stacks of screenplays scripts, each one
Speaker 3: hundred and seventeen pages long, which I didn't know, but
Speaker 3: they're in piles, and I can picture what Redford had
Speaker 3: the piles, but he had the book. So he read
Speaker 3: the Seven Days of the Condor and he thought, gee,
Speaker 3: this would be really inexpensive to buy, and it looks
Speaker 3: like an exciting story. So he ended up, you know,
Speaker 3: buying the right show before grade even knew it. So
Speaker 3: they had the screenplay written and they decided seven days
Speaker 3: was too many days for a movie, so they did
Speaker 3: Three Days of the Condor. So Robert Redford and Fade
Speaker 3: Unaway where the lead characters in the book, and it
Speaker 3: was very successful movie. The book then came out at
Speaker 3: seven Days Conduit and it's sold, but it was the
Speaker 3: movie which was successful. But here was the actual story.
Speaker 3: So I met Grady at Hire's party and this is
Speaker 3: it's after the movie by many years. And I said,
Speaker 3: do you have any idea what the effect was when
Speaker 3: the intelligence community? And I like, his brain is not
Speaker 3: knocking him. I'm sure he's more cosmopolitan now, but his
Speaker 3: brain was still the Montana brain. And I said, you
Speaker 3: should know you set the US intelligence community back at
Speaker 3: least twenty years, maybe twenty five years, in the relationship
Speaker 3: with American citizens, because every American now saw that movie.
Speaker 3: They think there's a special organization within the CIA that
Speaker 3: has the goal of both getting money for themselves and
Speaker 3: subverting US security.
Speaker 2: And you told them that this is what the CIA does.
Speaker 3: You told them that it's a building that reads all
Speaker 3: the books that are published, try to find some conspiracy
Speaker 3: theory in there, and then they find one, and then
Speaker 3: people will start dying, and CIA hit group team comes
Speaker 3: in and kills everybody who's there. That's what people believe
Speaker 3: to say. Who set the US intelligence behind twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five years because of your book and your thing. He
Speaker 3: stood there like white faced. So I said, I'll tell
Speaker 3: you one other thing. I said, a couple of years
Speaker 3: after your book came out, there was a in the movie,
Speaker 3: and the movie, of course came out. I said, there
Speaker 3: was an Iranian not dissenter. What do you call them
Speaker 3: against the Iran sim right, so who lives in the
Speaker 3: Silver Spring, Maryland, And we had them with Russian people,
Speaker 3: the Romanians and checks and polls when he got the
Speaker 3: relatives out for prairaade air and the embassy make a
Speaker 3: lot of noise to carry signs and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: But this guy was one of those individuals and he
Speaker 3: was from Iran, and he lived in Silver Spring. And
Speaker 3: one day he and the Iranian government, just like the
Speaker 3: Russian government, they hate people like that in the US
Speaker 3: because when you carry signs in their countries, it means
Speaker 3: a big is like a demonstration. But out here cares
Speaker 3: guy's got a sign on Capitol Hill. You know, give
Speaker 3: him some money for lunch.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It's not the same thing in America, but there makes
Speaker 3: a big difference. So one day a guy as a
Speaker 3: mailman comes to his door, knocks on his door and
Speaker 3: has a you know, a letter you have to sign for.
Speaker 2: The guy opened the door and he took out his
Speaker 2: ak forty seven.
Speaker 3: He blew the guy I think it was an Uzi
Speaker 3: and he blew the guy away and he killed this
Speaker 3: This spellow from Haran and the story is that was
Speaker 3: exactly what happened in Three Days of the Condor. But
Speaker 3: the mailman comes to the door of Faye Dunnaway's living
Speaker 3: and Robert read for a season. He looks on and
Speaker 3: he sees his shoes and then not the shoes a
Speaker 3: mailman should be wearing. It's a different kind of boot
Speaker 3: and he knows that, so he quick slams the door.
Speaker 3: Then they have a fight, tussle and repent. I's killed
Speaker 3: in the guy the Iranian intelligence that Savakh. They took
Speaker 3: that directly from this man's movie in order to kill
Speaker 3: this guy. It'silver Spring again. His face went whitely. He
Speaker 3: had no idea. But so that's the results of seeing
Speaker 3: intelligence things which are either real or not real, and
Speaker 3: having a bad action with it.
Speaker 1: It's very odd to me. And this is like a
Speaker 1: whole podcast and of itself about how fictional works are
Speaker 1: made that claim to portray real events but they're not.
Speaker 1: It's not really how espionage works. It's a work of fiction.
Speaker 1: But those works of fiction sometimes actually do inspire people
Speaker 1: in the real world and in a negative way, And
Speaker 1: so they're mimicking the fiction thinking that it's the reality.
Speaker 1: You know, I've heard stories even in the military, how
Speaker 1: foreign militaries will watch American action films to get, you know,
Speaker 1: tips for tactics, to learn how to clear rooms and things.
Speaker 1: When it's like no Erld Schwartz and Agger in the
Speaker 1: movie Commando is not you know, you know, a great
Speaker 1: mentor for doing that. So it's just very interesting and
Speaker 1: odd to me how the fiction is more real than
Speaker 1: reality at a certain point.
Speaker 3: Well, we've learned certain things from TV and certain things
Speaker 3: that are that are clearly wrong, right. I mean, there
Speaker 3: was a program in the FBI called the Development of
Speaker 3: Espionage and Counterintelligence Awareness DECCA. We would give decal lectures
Speaker 3: about security matters to all defense contractors in whatever area
Speaker 3: you were in the country. I gave a few dozen
Speaker 3: myself at Langley, at military units, but defense contractors, and
Speaker 3: invariably someone would say what books should we read to
Speaker 3: understand more about intelligence and security? And someone would always
Speaker 3: ask about the Born supremacy of the Born conspiracy, you know,
Speaker 3: Jason Bourne and I said, the difficulty is if you
Speaker 3: read a Robert Ludlum book, by the time you finish it,
Speaker 3: you'll have less knowledge of actual intelligence matters than before
Speaker 3: he started.
Speaker 1: The book.
Speaker 3: So he was in the Pentagon, Ludlam in his youth,
Speaker 3: in military uniform, and he went into a room where
Speaker 3: there was a meeting he believed was part of and
Speaker 3: colonel of whatever coming. He starts doing a briefing or talking.
Speaker 3: He looks around, he's loved him. He says like, who
Speaker 3: are you and the guy says, he says, you're not
Speaker 3: supposed to be here. So that was less than fifteen
Speaker 3: minutes in an intelligence briefing, and that was love them,
Speaker 3: complete and utter only contact with the US intelligence. Everything
Speaker 3: else was made up. Everything made up entirely. I mean,
Speaker 3: it drives my girlfriend's name of Cynthia drives her nuts.
Speaker 3: We're watching TV. Simple happened to say? They wouldn't do that.
Speaker 3: Say it's not that because they wouldn't, especially intelligence things like,
Speaker 3: for instance, if you want to pitch are Russian, who's
Speaker 3: got the most piece of valuable piece of information the
Speaker 3: US wants to have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we wonder about the Soviet submarines and they're running
Speaker 2: this net. But the penetration of the FBI.
Speaker 3: If you want to that one piece of information and
Speaker 3: you say, hey, I know, let's take a suit case
Speaker 3: full of money and make a cold pitch that'll work,
Speaker 3: Like ask me that question.
Speaker 2: You know, pitch Obama month. How can you do that?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: So even within the bureau, they're asking things that they
Speaker 3: say on TV which was which was a hor horrible thing.
Speaker 3: So yeah, there's a lot of stuff on TV that's
Speaker 3: still not real and it could be bothersome to people
Speaker 3: who don't know the actual story. I've been in a
Speaker 3: lot of writing courses in classes and eventually someone will
Speaker 3: call me and they're writing a book which is like
Speaker 3: a procedural cop thing where they have never carried a badge,
Speaker 3: they've never carried a gun, but they want to have
Speaker 3: this thing with cops.
Speaker 2: And they say, so, how do you handcuff somebody?
Speaker 3: I'm supposed to tell them the phone how to handcuff
Speaker 3: somebody so they can write it in the book.
Speaker 2: That's who's writing the books.
Speaker 1: And well, your book is a trader in the FBI,
Speaker 1: The Hunt for a Russian Mole. Look, I have this,
Speaker 1: it's up. You find it on Amazon right now, the
Speaker 1: hard copy or the books.
Speaker 2: Wayne.
Speaker 1: Thank you for doing this interview. Like I said, I
Speaker 1: love the book. I'll be recommending it to more people.
Speaker 1: And is there anything any final words? That you want
Speaker 1: to put out there before we go tonight.
Speaker 3: I'm very glad to be I'm very proud that we've
Speaker 3: met each other somehow, and it's it's very special. I
Speaker 3: was at the Crime Con convention in the end of
Speaker 3: May early April that Nancy Grace started seven years ago,
Speaker 3: like the Comic Con, but had six thousand people there,
Speaker 3: and I ended up meeting her and she endorsed my
Speaker 3: book on Instagram. So if people read it, I'd like
Speaker 3: them to read it and without saying and this is
Speaker 3: the this is the truth, this is it from my
Speaker 3: part of it. Whatever happened after my piece of the
Speaker 3: puzzle was over and someone said, he pointed out a
Speaker 3: photo and that's that's my pop the cork day for
Speaker 3: the Champagne. As Jane McClellan had said, we did everything
Speaker 3: they asked us to do if they'd have the right
Speaker 3: picture there. Not my fault, but what I would like
Speaker 3: to And one of the objections that pre publication Review
Speaker 3: had was, as they said, this is hard to say.
Speaker 3: They interviewed Gene McLellan because he still had clearances, he
Speaker 3: was still doing background and they didn't want to talk
Speaker 3: to someone who didn't still have clearances. This is now
Speaker 3: long after most people had retired, and they said, we
Speaker 3: don't want Wayne giving the KGB a manual about how
Speaker 3: the FBI catches spies. And he said, this is how
Speaker 3: this is how the FBI catches spies. This is how
Speaker 3: Wayne catches spies. And that's one of the nicest things
Speaker 3: anybody said. So it is not to tell them, but
Speaker 3: it's to tell young agents and advanced agents. Now, these
Speaker 3: are the things you can do, and you just have
Speaker 3: to have a clear mind and see what the goal is.
Speaker 3: But you know, long leash, have a long leash, splash
Speaker 3: up the stream, cover all the leads. It was a
Speaker 3: great career, as you could tell. I loved every minute
Speaker 3: of it. Sorry I'm not to now. I recover stolen
Speaker 3: impressionist paintings. I'm a signature expert for personality and forgeries nationwide.
Speaker 3: I John Solomon from Justin News. He asked me to
Speaker 3: do a Hunter Biden's signature on the receipt for the
Speaker 3: laptop in Delaware, and I did it and it was
Speaker 3: in fact his signature. A few days later, fifty one
Speaker 3: intelligence professionals came out and said it wasn't but it was,
Speaker 3: and we all knew it. I did a paper on
Speaker 3: whether Trump had signed the page in Jeffrey Epstein's fiftieth
Speaker 3: anniversary birthday book, and in fact it was his signature,
Speaker 3: but it was an apple qu applied to it. He
Speaker 3: did not write that thing. So I do those kinds
Speaker 3: of things as well. Now I testedify a lot, so
Speaker 3: I had to reinvent myself. Time took to write the
Speaker 3: book was enormously long, as well as the seven year
Speaker 3: wait to get it out in public. So I'm very active.
Speaker 3: As long as my ex wife still has half of
Speaker 3: my FB annuity, I will work every day.
Speaker 2: You're not laughing with me. I can tell you're not
Speaker 2: laughing with me.
Speaker 1: No, it's okay. I am also divorced. Where can people
Speaker 1: go to find you online?
Speaker 2: Additionally, well they can do.
Speaker 3: The book is available on Amazon, like you say, for
Speaker 3: ebook and audiobook, but Barnes and Noble has it online
Speaker 3: as well target Simon and Schuster. My publisher is Republic
Speaker 3: Book Publishers. I think they went through Simon and Schuster
Speaker 3: for the actual publication. But I have a website which
Speaker 3: is Waynebarnes Writing dot com. Wayne Barnes Writing dot com.
Speaker 3: It has maybe five dozen essays about various things besides signatures,
Speaker 3: just other cases that I've involved. There's also a Barnes
Speaker 3: Hyphen Investigations Barnes hyphen Investigation, which has more cases things
Speaker 3: I've written. Me just one last thing, and on writing.
Speaker 3: When you tell someone that you work for the federal
Speaker 3: government and you wrote a book, they pretty much think
Speaker 3: you've written a book like a police report, like a
Speaker 3: car of the color blue. And I spent a lot
Speaker 3: of time in not just debriefing a record number of
Speaker 3: intelligence people, but writing it up. And if I write
Speaker 3: a poor page memo, a letter head Memoran would just
Speaker 3: like the black panther memo. If I write it for
Speaker 3: the a KGB colonel and Rominian generals and Hungarian whatever.
Speaker 3: If I don't write it so by the page three,
Speaker 3: If I write it so by page three, they're yawning
Speaker 3: and they really aren't interested in page four, that's no good.
Speaker 2: So I started using the adjectives and adverbs.
Speaker 3: And Truman Capoti wrote the first book which we call
Speaker 3: narrative nonfiction, that was in cold blood. He went out
Speaker 3: the canvas Kansas, he saw the family killed in the farmhouse,
Speaker 3: all the blood, and he wrote it like fiction.
Speaker 2: But nonfiction, so that began that genre. This is narrative nonfiction.
Speaker 2: It happened, but it's written like it worked.
Speaker 3: So one day when I had sent one of these
Speaker 3: four page memos to headquarters, which was a good story
Speaker 3: from some defector, but comply a story completely within itself,
Speaker 3: I was crossing Pennsylvania and he was coming from the
Speaker 3: other side and he stopped me in the meetings to
Speaker 3: He said, Wayne, Wayne, I have to talk to you.
Speaker 3: Stop like the cars are zipping by. What do you
Speaker 3: want And he said, I read that memo and he
Speaker 3: mentioned the topic and he said, I got the page
Speaker 3: four and I turned it over. He said, I wanted
Speaker 3: more pages. And that was the first moment I realized
Speaker 3: there may be something to this, that maybe I can.
Speaker 2: Write this to make it a book. And that was
Speaker 2: the craft of writing. So that's how it happened.
Speaker 1: Well, we will have links down the description for the
Speaker 1: viewers and listeners to find you to find the book.
Speaker 1: And we really appreciate you joining us on the show tonight,
Speaker 1: Wayne and telling us your story.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much. I hope you smiled most of
Speaker 3: the time. I certainly did, but I'm glad to tell it.
Speaker 3: You know, there's more. I'll be glad to come back.
Speaker 3: But the point is, if this book had any level
Speaker 3: of success, I have other books that I've written. I
Speaker 3: have saga about the FBI from the beginning of my
Speaker 3: part of it from seventy one onto the nineties, the
Speaker 3: FBI's role during the Cold War, and how we helped.
Speaker 2: The Berlin Wall come down.
Speaker 3: That's longer, but it has too many words to be
Speaker 3: a first book.
Speaker 2: Like Ken Follett would write.
Speaker 3: He wrote I the Needle and various spy books, and
Speaker 3: he said, I want to write a different book, and
Speaker 3: they said, no, no, no, you've got a great way
Speaker 3: you're writing. We've got we'll make a lot of money.
Speaker 3: He said, I won't writ into the book until you
Speaker 3: publish this book. I want to write now.
Speaker 2: And his publisher, in his literation, said what's it about?
Speaker 3: And he said, well, it's about building a cathedral in
Speaker 3: southern England in the year twelve sixty five. And they said,
Speaker 3: no way. So he wrote it and they published was
Speaker 3: Pillars of the Earth. It sold more books than all
Speaker 3: of his other books combined. Then it was movies, three
Speaker 3: part series on Netflix. It was phenomenal, but he couldn't
Speaker 3: get that publish because it was too long. So my
Speaker 3: other book, which is called The Dance Before the Wall,
Speaker 3: Interplay of intelligence actions on.
Speaker 2: Our side of the Berlin Wall, it is it's the best.
Speaker 2: I like it more than this, but it is the
Speaker 2: story of the FBI and the Cold War. But it
Speaker 2: was far too long for first book. So this is
Speaker 2: the book.
Speaker 1: But when you're ready to get it out there, shoot
Speaker 1: me an email please.
Speaker 3: All right, thank you very much for this. I really
Speaker 3: really appreciate it. Yeah, it's been very, very wonderful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you Win and thank you everyone who joined
Speaker 1: us tonight. We will see you guys again next week. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I want to take a moment to tell you about
Speaker 1: the Team House podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe,
Speaker 1: it's totally free, and what it will do is aggregate
Speaker 1: all of our data, all of our content that we
Speaker 1: put out, the things that are on the Team House
Speaker 1: on our geopolitics podcast, Eyes On, things that I write
Speaker 1: journalistically with Sean Naylor on the High Side, anything else
Speaker 1: that we have going on books, we recommend upcoming guests
Speaker 1: that we have coming on the show, and also you know,
Speaker 1: filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If
Speaker 1: you go and check it out. We send it out
Speaker 1: just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys.
Speaker 1: It's just a kind of roll up of all of
Speaker 1: our content on a weekly basis. You can find our
Speaker 1: newsletter at teamhouse podcast dot kit dot com slash join again.
Speaker 1: The website for that is teamhouse podcast dot kit dot
Speaker 1: com slash join. Uh So we hope to see you there.
Speaker 1: The link will be down the description