Speaker 1: The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.
Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Teamhouse. I am David Park.
Speaker 1: This is Jack Murphy. We are here episode one with
Speaker 1: a very special guest, the former director of Counterintelligence at
Speaker 1: the CIA, Jim Olsen. Jim has written a couple of
Speaker 1: phenomenal books, the one that will kind of talk about tonight.
Speaker 1: In addition, well we'll talk about both of them tonight.
Speaker 1: But one is to Catch a Spy and the other
Speaker 1: one is fair Play.
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1: Fair play about the like the ethical issues in an espionage.
Speaker 1: We we really appreciate you being here with us nide Jim.
Speaker 2: But you're most welcome. It is a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2: There's nothing like better than talking about spying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's and and I mean you honestly have a
Speaker 1: spot verse by career.
Speaker 2: Yes, I spent a lot of time on counterintelligence, so
Speaker 2: I would call myself a spy catcher. And I found
Speaker 2: nothing more rewarding of my career than tracking down American
Speaker 2: traders and bringing to justice. And I had the opportunity
Speaker 2: to be involved in several such operations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll talk about those.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about some of the some of the bigger
Speaker 1: operations you've been in, and also just some of the
Speaker 1: threats that America has faced and is currently facing. Because
Speaker 1: I'll tell you, Stephen King has nothing on you. This
Speaker 1: book is terrifying. It's terrifying.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I reacted the same way when I was writing it.
Speaker 2: This scary stuff. Yeah, because our country is really a peril.
Speaker 2: We face multiple threats from foreign intelligence services, and I
Speaker 2: believe that we are not taking that threat seriously enough.
Speaker 2: We need to do a lot more. So. I make
Speaker 2: the point quite frankly openly in my book that we're
Speaker 2: losing the counter intelligence war. That's got to change.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we will.
Speaker 1: We will definitely talk about some ways that we're losing
Speaker 1: that as we get into it, because especially like with
Speaker 1: some things with China, like they're they're they're terrifying implications there,
Speaker 1: but also Russia and Cuba, which was really surprising to me.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've had on like uh Mark Polymeroopolis and
Speaker 1: some other people have had you know, who have been
Speaker 1: affected by their policies. But you talk about what a
Speaker 1: what a high degree of professionalism they operate with the Cubans.
Speaker 2: Yes, Yeah, that's right. They're kind of my nemesis throughout
Speaker 2: my career. I have no love for Cuban Intelligence Service.
Speaker 2: They did a lot of harm to us. They're still very,
Speaker 2: very actively operating against the United States, so I don't
Speaker 2: to have any reservations at all about ranking them as
Speaker 2: now the number three threat to our country security in
Speaker 2: terms of espionage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fascinating and we'll get into all that. One
Speaker 1: of the things we like to do though, on this
Speaker 1: show is always start from the very beginning. So can
Speaker 1: you tell us a little bit about your origin story,
Speaker 1: how did you grow up, and how did that lead
Speaker 1: you eventually to the CIA.
Speaker 2: It's a very unlikely story. I was raised in a
Speaker 2: small town in Iowa. I didn't think at all about
Speaker 2: international affairs. We joked among ourselves out in Iowa. Unless
Speaker 2: it affected the price of corn, we weren't all that interested.
Speaker 2: But when I went off to college at the University
Speaker 2: of Iowa to study mathematics and economics, I began to
Speaker 2: develop a little bit more of a sense of what
Speaker 2: was going on in the world. It was the height
Speaker 2: of the Cold War. I was at university in the
Speaker 2: and Ristal crisis went on, so that definitely focuses I
Speaker 2: was also preparing to become a United States Navy officer,
Speaker 2: so I was beginning to think of my of myself
Speaker 2: in terms of national security and national defense. I then
Speaker 2: took a commission in the Navy. When I graduated, served
Speaker 2: aboard guided miss or destroyers and frigates. Really loved it.
Speaker 2: It kind of reinforce a sense of service to country,
Speaker 2: but it was still very unformed. I didn't know exactly
Speaker 2: what direction that would take. I did know that I
Speaker 2: wanted to go back to my home state of Iowa.
Speaker 2: So I left the Navy after about four years and
Speaker 2: applied for law school the University of i was accepted,
Speaker 2: and that was my dream at the time. I wanted
Speaker 2: to get my law degree in practice law in a
Speaker 2: small county seat town in Iowa, serve my community, finalize
Speaker 2: Iowa girls, settled down, a family, not a bad life.
Speaker 2: I thought that would be a good way to serve
Speaker 2: my community. But of course that was not the way
Speaker 2: it turned out, because in my last year of law school,
Speaker 2: I received this mysterious phone call out of the blue,
Speaker 2: mister Olson, we think we have a career opportunity that
Speaker 2: might be of interest to you. And that was a
Speaker 2: CIA call and they had spotted me. They had found
Speaker 2: me somehow out there in the middle of Iowa, and
Speaker 2: that was the beginning of a lengthy process of secret
Speaker 2: trips to Washington and interviews, meetings in safe houses, eventually
Speaker 2: leading to an offer to join the sei's clandestine Service.
Speaker 2: What kind of funny I remember distinctly as I was
Speaker 2: packing up in Iowa to go off to this SEAI place,
Speaker 2: whatever it was. I was determined that I would do
Speaker 2: it for only a couple of years, and then I
Speaker 2: guaranteed myself. Jim, after two or three years, you are
Speaker 2: going back to Iowa and pursuing that Richard Gimat. Of
Speaker 2: course it did work out that way, because it did
Speaker 2: take long to realize that the CIA was where I belonged.
Speaker 2: I found it just incredibly fulfilling, and so I ended
Speaker 2: up spending thirty one years there.
Speaker 3: What year was that that you were recruited, Jim, that
Speaker 3: you started the record.
Speaker 2: Was recruited by the CIA as I was coming out
Speaker 2: of law school in sixty nine.
Speaker 3: Okay, so tail end of the Vietnam War, getting there,
Speaker 3: still very much in the Cold War.
Speaker 2: Very much a Cold War period. That's our focus. We
Speaker 2: all thought about that and when I joined the CIA,
Speaker 2: I wanted to do my part above all, like most
Speaker 2: of the other recruits at that time, in fighting Soviet Communism,
Speaker 2: in protecting our values from the expansionist Soviet regime.
Speaker 3: So what was your training like at that time?
Speaker 4: And then I'd love to hear about your first job,
Speaker 4: you know, when you finally dip your feet into this world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the training was awesome, Jack. You know, it's not
Speaker 2: much different now than it was back then, but most
Speaker 2: of it took place down at this undercover base that
Speaker 2: we call the farm. And out at the farm, we
Speaker 2: learned the art of intelligence, as we called it. We
Speaker 2: learned the recruitment cycle. We learned about detecting and defeating surveillance.
Speaker 2: We learned about all the different spy gadgets that we used.
Speaker 2: We also went through a fair amount of paramilitary training
Speaker 2: because it was assumed that many of us would in
Speaker 2: fact have, at some point in our career need for
Speaker 2: paramilitary skills. Most of us in my class, with owning
Speaker 2: maybe one or two exceptions, were former military officers, so
Speaker 2: doing the paramilitary training was quite natural for us. And
Speaker 2: in that era, of course, we expected to be going
Speaker 2: to Llaos, Vietnam or somewhere else in Southeast Asia. And
Speaker 2: I remember when I was completing training down at the farm,
Speaker 2: when headquarters came down, I assume I'm on my way
Speaker 2: to Vietnam or to Laos, because first of all, I
Speaker 2: was a former military officer. That was a big plus.
Speaker 2: I spoke good French already, which would be valuable in
Speaker 2: Southeast Asia, allows Vietnam, Cambodia. I was still single, and
Speaker 2: so I thought, listen, this is a lot. I'm going
Speaker 2: to be going to Vietnam or Laos as most of
Speaker 2: my classmates did. And when the CI came down and
Speaker 2: chose me for a different assignment, I was feeling some
Speaker 2: guilt that I wasn't going to be out doing my
Speaker 2: duty on the front lines as my classmates were. And
Speaker 2: when I lost classmates in Laos and in Vietnam, that
Speaker 2: guilt was compounded. The CIA had reasons for wanting to
Speaker 2: send me where it did, so I don't regret that
Speaker 2: I did my duty as best I could. But the
Speaker 2: kind of people will recruit want to be where the
Speaker 2: action is right, and the current generation of CI officers
Speaker 2: wanted to be in Afghanistan. They wanted to be in Iraq.
Speaker 2: If you don't have that in your resume. You know,
Speaker 2: you have a little bit of a sense of shirky, right,
Speaker 2: and so we had no problem finding volunteers to go
Speaker 2: out to those hotspots.
Speaker 1: Right now, Before you went to the farm, you were
Speaker 1: an intern for a while, right, because there was a
Speaker 1: formative I thought that in your book you mentioned that
Speaker 1: this was actually kind of a formative part of your
Speaker 1: CIA vision.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, you've done your homework day. Yeah. I described
Speaker 2: that in my first book, fair Play. My training out
Speaker 2: of the farm wasn't going to start for a couple
Speaker 2: of months after I arrived at the CIA, so I
Speaker 2: I needed an interim assignment, and not knowing any better,
Speaker 2: I took an interim assignment in the counter Intelligence staff
Speaker 2: and it was really interesting work because my assignment was
Speaker 2: to update a study that the counter intelligence staff had
Speaker 2: done on the Rhoda Kappel, which was the the Russian
Speaker 2: networks in German occupied Europe during World War Two, and
Speaker 2: NSA at the time was finally, all those years later,
Speaker 2: breaking some of the traffic between the center in Moscow
Speaker 2: and their operatives out in occupied Europe. They were communicating,
Speaker 2: of course, via clandestine radios. I found it absolutely amazing
Speaker 2: to read the first person at CI headquarters as these
Speaker 2: transcripts came in from and to say, the drama, the tension,
Speaker 2: the actual patriotism of these Russian spies throughout Europe, putting
Speaker 2: their lives on the line to communicate intelligence. My job
Speaker 2: was to incorporate what we were learning about these Russian
Speaker 2: networks of the Rhoda capella into the previous study. And
Speaker 2: I worked pretty hard on that, and I thought I
Speaker 2: had done a pretty good job, and in fact some
Speaker 2: of my supervisors did also. So they said, as I
Speaker 2: was getting ready to leave the counter Intelligence staff to
Speaker 2: start my training down at the farm gym, you've done
Speaker 2: a good job here and we want you to get
Speaker 2: the appropriate recognition. And so we've arranged a meeting, a
Speaker 2: farewell meeting for you with the man himself, and by
Speaker 2: the man himself. Of course, they met the chief of
Speaker 2: the counter Intelligence Staff, a legendary James Jesus Angleton. And
Speaker 2: on the appointed day, I showed up to see a
Speaker 2: corridor at ciad quarters. I went into the outer office.
Speaker 2: You didn't go into the presence without being briefed on
Speaker 2: how to comport yourself. So all of his attendants are
Speaker 2: telling me how to behave. When I got there, I'm
Speaker 2: getting pretty nervous. So finally they said, okay, go on in,
Speaker 2: and so they opened the door and I kind of
Speaker 2: walked in. They had told me that it would be
Speaker 2: a dark room, and in fact it was. He had
Speaker 2: big black curtains, he had just one desk lamp and
Speaker 2: these awl these eyes looking at at me, and the
Speaker 2: big haze of smoke because he was a chain smoker.
Speaker 2: And they had told me standing at attention in front
Speaker 2: of his desk, he might not speak, So just launch
Speaker 2: into your grief on Euroticapella study. I did that, and
Speaker 2: I'm going I'm feeling pretty good about myself. Was flowing
Speaker 2: pretty well. I said, this is going pretty well. He
Speaker 2: cannot fail to be impressed by my ci acumen at
Speaker 2: this very early stage in my career, not at all.
Speaker 2: Because at a certain point he stopped me. He looked
Speaker 2: me in the eye and he said, mister Olsen, don't
Speaker 2: you realize that the rood A Capella was nothing more
Speaker 2: than a German controlled deception operation? And that took me back,
Speaker 2: and I realized then, as arrogantism might have seen that
Speaker 2: this great mind, this counterintelligence genius, had really lost touch
Speaker 2: with reality, because that made no sense at all. I
Speaker 2: had dug deeply into the road of Capella. I knew
Speaker 2: it wasn't German controlled, but that was his thesis. He
Speaker 2: saw conspiracies everywhere. He was a double fake expert, and
Speaker 2: so he rudely dismissed me, said that I had wasted
Speaker 2: his time, I had wasted the CI staff's time by
Speaker 2: coming up with these totally erroneous conclusions. I go out
Speaker 2: to the outer office. Everybody, how did you go? How
Speaker 2: to go? And I'm crushed. And as I'm walking down
Speaker 2: the corridor afterwards, I honestly was saying to myself, you know, Jim,
Speaker 2: you had such high hopes for this career, and what
Speaker 2: a shame because it has ended before it even started.
Speaker 2: There's no way you're going to survive that kind of
Speaker 2: a chewing out by the most powerful man in the CIA.
Speaker 2: So I said to myself, if by some miracle, this
Speaker 2: CIA career survives, which I doubt, I don't know what
Speaker 2: direction don't take me, but I know one thing. I
Speaker 2: will never ever again go anywhere near counterintelligence, which is
Speaker 2: pretty ironic, isn't. Because I ended up being number seven
Speaker 2: in the chain of counter intelligence chiefs at the CIA
Speaker 2: later on in my career, and.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because you probably didn't know it at that time,
Speaker 1: but later you realize how much damage Angleton had actually done,
Speaker 1: not only to the CIA, but to the field of
Speaker 1: counterintelligence in general.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's exactly right, Dave. That's the legacy of
Speaker 2: James E's and Angleton continued for many, many years after
Speaker 2: he was finally forced out. He discredited counter intelligence and discipline.
Speaker 2: He made it useless for the twenty years that he
Speaker 2: was the chief from nineteen fifty four to nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: four because he was chasing fantoms. He did not allow
Speaker 2: us to run any Russian operations because he was too
Speaker 2: smart to fall into the KGB's machinations. So we had
Speaker 2: no volunteers, we had no walk ins, we had no recruitments,
Speaker 2: we had no Russian off rations. During those twenty critical
Speaker 2: years of the Cold War. He lost so much it
Speaker 2: was a disaster. And it was only after we finally
Speaker 2: got rid of him and at the end of nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy six that we were able slowly to try to
Speaker 2: get back into real counter intelligence operations, running operations against
Speaker 2: the Russians. He had destroyed our Russian operational program for
Speaker 2: all those years, and I can forget that. But even
Speaker 2: after he left, the reputation of count intelligence was so tainted,
Speaker 2: it was so out of vogue for anybody to go
Speaker 2: into count intelligence that we had trouble attracting good people
Speaker 2: to go into counter intelligence. That persisted for many, many years, and.
Speaker 4: At the same time, there actually were moles at CIA
Speaker 4: and other governmental institutions. Correct me if I'm wrong, Jim,
Speaker 4: We're not being sust out because of this.
Speaker 2: That's right. Counterintelligence was use. It was worse than useless
Speaker 2: because it was preventing us from doing real counterintelligence. You know,
Speaker 2: some people said that Angleton could not have harmed us
Speaker 2: more if he'd been a Russian agent because he paralyzes,
Speaker 2: and we were not able to overcome that until much later.
Speaker 2: I would say that we really were only able to
Speaker 2: rehabilitate counter intelligence at the CIA in the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 2: when we finally began to get our act together and
Speaker 2: good people went into it.
Speaker 3: So let's just rewind a little bit.
Speaker 4: Your first job at CIA, after the farm, you said
Speaker 4: you didn't get sent the layouts like you expected to.
Speaker 3: Where did you end up Jim.
Speaker 2: We're not going to talk about that, really, you can't that.
Speaker 3: You're sort of secrecy on that one to this day.
Speaker 2: We're not going to talk about that one.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, fair enough. Second position after.
Speaker 2: That position, okay, after that first one, which I'm not
Speaker 2: talking about. I was selected for what we call the
Speaker 2: pipeline to go to Moscow. And the pipeline is this
Speaker 2: lengthy training period, preparation period for going into a deep
Speaker 2: cover assignment in Moscow. And I can tell you that
Speaker 2: for all of us in the CIO, that was the
Speaker 2: dream assignment. We all wanted to go to Moscow. They
Speaker 2: were the main enemy. That's where the real critical action was.
Speaker 2: So to be selected for assignment to Moscow was a
Speaker 2: tremendous honor, and the competition to get there was fierce.
Speaker 2: So I was very, very grateful that I had had
Speaker 2: the opportunity to be selected for that assignment. You go
Speaker 2: through a rigorous selection program. Your spouse also has to
Speaker 2: qualify and she has to go through the same kind
Speaker 2: of scrutiny. You train together as a husband and wife team,
Speaker 2: and the training is very tough. A lot of couples
Speaker 2: don't make it. It's stressful, beyond words, we put our
Speaker 2: people who are going to Moscow into what we call
Speaker 2: the Moscow rules, even in Washington, DC, which means we
Speaker 2: put you into an apartment that is bugged, we put
Speaker 2: you under surveillance, we harass you, we require you to
Speaker 2: do operational acts under surveillance and get away with it.
Speaker 2: So we try to recreate as best we can the
Speaker 2: real environment of Moscow. And of course it depending on
Speaker 2: your language ability. If you don't already have Russian, which
Speaker 2: I happen to have had, is going to be part
Speaker 2: of your preparation period that you're going to get some
Speaker 2: addition intensive Russian language training. My wife had to start
Speaker 2: from scratch. I already had a pretty good hit start,
Speaker 2: but to see I perfected my Russian as part of
Speaker 2: my pipeline experience around.
Speaker 3: What year was this, Jim, where you started the pipeline.
Speaker 2: I started the pipeline in seventy six and came out
Speaker 2: of the pipeline in seventy eight fully trained and linguistically
Speaker 2: qualified for the assignment.
Speaker 1: So just out of curiosity, was it when was she?
Speaker 1: Were you there about the same time as Marty Peterson?
Speaker 2: Just after Marty Okay, yeah, Marty Peterson is a good
Speaker 2: friend of mine. We were involved together in the Dry
Speaker 2: Gone operation. I was at the headquarters end of it.
Speaker 2: Marty was, of course the field operator.
Speaker 3: We've had Marty on the show before.
Speaker 2: She's great, She is terrific, a real hero of mine,
Speaker 2: a great personal friend. We did a podcast together on
Speaker 2: the Trygone case. And a side note to Marty Peterson
Speaker 2: is that her husband, John was a good friend and
Speaker 2: classmate of mine down at the farm and John was
Speaker 2: one of those who, like so many of my classmates,
Speaker 2: went to Wouse and was killed there. So Marty was
Speaker 2: a CIA widow when she came to us and said
Speaker 2: that she wanted to honor John's memory by becoming a
Speaker 2: CIA case officer. And I remember looking at Marty and saying, Marty,
Speaker 2: you know, we don't do that, nothing against you, but
Speaker 2: you are a woman, and we are not going to
Speaker 2: send women case officers out to an assignment like Moscow.
Speaker 2: And Marty kind of said, well, yes you are, and
Speaker 2: she was right, and she sold us on the concept
Speaker 2: of sending her out to under deep cover because we knew,
Speaker 2: all of us how chauvinistic the KGB was. They did
Speaker 2: not use women for high risk operations. They assumed we
Speaker 2: didn't either. So the concept was, I think a brilliant one.
Speaker 2: Let's send Mosque Marty through the pipeline, Let's teach her Russian.
Speaker 2: Let's bury her inside the embassy under official cover in
Speaker 2: Moscow in the hope that the KGB will ignore her,
Speaker 2: they will dismiss her because she's a woman. And so
Speaker 2: Marty goes out to Moscow. Her first task for us,
Speaker 2: of course, is to do what we call probes, and
Speaker 2: so Marty went on these probes just to test whether
Speaker 2: or not the KGB was paying any attention to her
Speaker 2: or not. I was back at the headquarters following all
Speaker 2: of this. We needed to get someone black, free of
Speaker 2: surveillance to handle try gone Okarodnick, this great news source
Speaker 2: we had, and Marty reported back, I'm not getting surveillance.
Speaker 2: They're not there. I'm doing my probes. I'm pushing them,
Speaker 2: I'm getting provocative and they're not responding. I am not
Speaker 2: under surveillance. I am black. And you know, there was
Speaker 2: a mindset back at headquarters one that I regret I
Speaker 2: was not part of that group, but there were some
Speaker 2: senior people back at the headquarters said Marty's reporting no
Speaker 2: surveillance but yeah, okay, she's just not seen. So they
Speaker 2: were still very chauvinist, and they were dismissing Marty as
Speaker 2: the professional that she was. But those of us who
Speaker 2: had worked with Marty, who had participated in their training
Speaker 2: with her, knew how good she was, how professional was,
Speaker 2: and so we were able to prevail. And she turned
Speaker 2: out to be a brilliant handler of try Gone. Her
Speaker 2: trade craft was impeccable, and.
Speaker 4: Her cover was she was a secretary, right, that was
Speaker 4: her cover. And everyone they called they called her party Marty,
Speaker 4: and that that.
Speaker 2: Was her party. Martin old, you know, present yourself as
Speaker 2: kind of a frivolous bachelorette out time, not a serious person,
Speaker 2: and she told it off perfectly perfect. Now, as you know,
Speaker 2: Marty did get ambushed, no fault of her own. Trygon
Speaker 2: was betrayed from within by someone else, and so she
Speaker 2: was declared persona and grata. When she came back to Washington,
Speaker 2: she became a trainer in the pipeline, and so my
Speaker 2: wife Meredith, who was in the pipeline at the time,
Speaker 2: really benefited from Marty's encouragement. Marty as a role model.
Speaker 2: Marty's experience in Moscow so Meredith was really a great
Speaker 2: beneficiary of of Marty's expertise, and of course in the
Speaker 2: process we be game very close frames.
Speaker 1: You know, you mentioned that that, you know, we really
Speaker 1: suffered against the Russians from a counter intelligence perspective at
Speaker 1: that time, from what you know about trygand and maybe
Speaker 1: you guys, maybe none of this has ever come to light,
Speaker 1: but do you feel that if our stance towards Russian
Speaker 1: you know, for towards counter intelligence more penetrations, that that
Speaker 1: might have gone differently, that we would have had some
Speaker 1: awareness of it.
Speaker 2: I think that's a good point, Dave, because our counterintelligence
Speaker 2: was very, very weak at the time, and I think
Speaker 2: if it had been better, we might have done a
Speaker 2: better job of screening someone like Kloro Kutcher out or
Speaker 2: identifying his betrayal earlier on. So I don't dismiss that
Speaker 2: as a possibility as well, where counter intelligence was very,
Speaker 2: very incompetent at that time and so people like Kutcher
Speaker 2: were able to get away with it. You know, what
Speaker 2: happened after after we got rid of Ngleton, beginning in
Speaker 2: seventy seven with Trigon, was that we discovered, hey, we're
Speaker 2: pretty good at this. We can recruit Russians. And so
Speaker 2: with Angleton out of the way, the big naysayer, we
Speaker 2: started building an inventory of assets inside Russia that we
Speaker 2: could only have dreamed about. And it really reinforced our
Speaker 2: mind that what a loss those previous tony years have
Speaker 2: been because we could have had sources. And we started
Speaker 2: building all of these recruitments and sending them back to
Speaker 2: Russia to Moscow, and we had penetration, sometimes multiple penetrations
Speaker 2: of every real organization in Russia. We cared about KGB,
Speaker 2: gru Ministry of Defense, Foreign Ministry, and those were the
Speaker 2: glory days of CI operations in Moscow. We call them
Speaker 2: the golden years of Moscow station operations and Meriton Mire
Speaker 2: during those years, and it was pretty exciting, and our
Speaker 2: country was benefiting from these unprecedented penetrations throughout the Soviet government.
Speaker 2: Really good stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's fascinating, and you know it's it's it's
Speaker 1: tough too, because there's so many things that I want
Speaker 1: to I want to mention about your book right now,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to take us out of chronological order,
Speaker 1: because so much of what we discovered about spies in
Speaker 1: our own country have to do with with a more
Speaker 1: open stance towards Russian walk ins, towards recruiting Russians, And
Speaker 1: we'll get to that. Like I said, I want to
Speaker 1: jump ahead, but uh so from so when you were
Speaker 1: in Russia, what was your experience there?
Speaker 2: Well, my experience was that I was handling assets. I
Speaker 2: was a case officer. We had all of these Bians
Speaker 2: who were risking their lives by cooperating secretly with us,
Speaker 2: and we had to handle it. Many of them wanted
Speaker 2: to be met personally, so my job was to defeat
Speaker 2: KGB surveillance. MERITMI were under constant KGB surveillance, so our
Speaker 2: job was to be able to evade that surveillance, to
Speaker 2: break it when necessary, also use some high tech methodologies
Speaker 2: to get free of surveillance and not let the KGB
Speaker 2: know you were even out of pocket, so they think
Speaker 2: they've got you here, but you're not there. You use
Speaker 2: high tech to get out, you go do your operational
Speaker 2: act black and then you slip back in close the
Speaker 2: loop and they never knew you were going. So that
Speaker 2: was kind of the ultimate. But there were many times
Speaker 2: when I had to force the issue. We rarely got
Speaker 2: automatic any kind of free breaks. Occasionally there might be
Speaker 2: a vip in down and they take teams off us
Speaker 2: and put them on someone else. We couldn't count on that.
Speaker 2: The whole job was to be studying our surveillance constantly
Speaker 2: and looking for ways that we could break free of
Speaker 2: surveillance to go handle these Russian agents. Disguise played a
Speaker 2: big part in that. I don't know if you've read
Speaker 2: the John Amndez book The Moscow Rules, but I'm in
Speaker 2: that book as someone who used disguise effectively to carry
Speaker 2: out operations in Moscow. Our disguise technology something that all
Speaker 2: Americas can be proud of if they can see how
Speaker 2: good it is. We used it very, very effectively against
Speaker 2: the KGB.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're not just talking about throwing on a
Speaker 1: ball cap now.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about very sophisticated, high tech technology of disguise
Speaker 2: and of course changing your appearance completely, in my case,
Speaker 2: making me look like a Russian, giving me slaving features.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's amazing, good stuff. Were the Russians?
Speaker 1: Were they discreet or were they just like you're at
Speaker 1: the embassy, so we're following you, and you know we're
Speaker 1: following you.
Speaker 2: Their surveillance. I think buying large was very professional. They
Speaker 2: took great pride in their work. They did not like
Speaker 2: to be embarrassed, so we took them very, very seriously.
Speaker 2: They were not easy to beat. They put a lot
Speaker 2: of resources on us. They would have large teams devoted
Speaker 2: to each of us, multiple vehicles. They changed their team members,
Speaker 2: their license plates, their other distinguishing characteristics very frequently to
Speaker 2: make as hard to get a fix on them. In fact,
Speaker 2: Mary and I read that if we had not had
Speaker 2: all the training in the States that we did before
Speaker 2: we went to Moscow, we would never have seen them.
Speaker 2: They were that good. They were very, very professional, so
Speaker 2: beating them was not that easy. So our job was
Speaker 2: to be better than they were, and fortunately we were.
Speaker 4: Did you ever have any moments in Russia where, like
Speaker 4: I remember with Trygone, there was an instance where a
Speaker 4: case officer met with him personally in a park.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: Did you ever have meetings like that with assets?
Speaker 2: Yes? I did. I had human meetings, personal meetings in Moscow.
Speaker 4: Could you describe, I mean, as far as you're able
Speaker 4: to even with if you can't identify who they are,
Speaker 4: you know, what it was like to meet them in person?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't just specify which operations they were for example, hypothetically,
Speaker 2: it might have been a KGB officer who was cooperating
Speaker 2: secretly with us and he wanted to be met in person.
Speaker 2: He didn't trust dead drops. He wanted to make certain
Speaker 2: that the exchange of materials was secure hand to hand.
Speaker 2: So our job was to get people black to go
Speaker 2: out and meet him, and I did that more than once.
Speaker 2: And there were other cases where I also was involved
Speaker 2: in operations where I had to get pre of surveillance
Speaker 2: one way or the other. It was pretty tense stuff
Speaker 2: to go out and meet a KGB officer on the streets.
Speaker 2: The consequences of getting caught would have been bad for
Speaker 2: him as well as for me, and I had to
Speaker 2: be able to count on his professionalism to make certain
Speaker 2: that he didn't bring surveillance to that meeting himself. So
Speaker 2: a lot of trust in both directions. I trusted him,
Speaker 2: he trusted me for the security of that meeting, and
Speaker 2: he would pass over the documents the discs at that time.
Speaker 2: My job was to get them safely back to the station.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's amazing. I mean I can't even imagine working
Speaker 3: in such a high threat environment. Yeah, I mean, this
Speaker 3: is like the super Bowl of espionage. Right, Moscow.
Speaker 2: I think that's accurate. You were very aware of the
Speaker 2: consequences of making mistake. Now, the margin for error was
Speaker 2: pretty close to zero, because human lives were at stake,
Speaker 2: and we took that very seriously. All of us in Moscow,
Speaker 2: all of US case officers, knew that these Russians were
Speaker 2: risking their lives by cooperating with us, and we had
Speaker 2: not only a professional responsibility, but a moral responsibility to
Speaker 2: make absolutely certain that nothing that we did would in
Speaker 2: any way risk their lives. Yeah, you had a very
Speaker 2: heavy sense of responsibility. We all were very aware of that.
Speaker 2: A lot of pressure, a lot of stress, and you
Speaker 2: have to learn how to live with that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and Ashley traygon I kind of brought
Speaker 1: that home, you know, in terms of the danger to
Speaker 1: the actual asset or Asian.
Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, I asked Marty. And Marty was a great
Speaker 2: example of someone who felt deeply that responsibility that she
Speaker 2: had for this man. She was much more concerned about
Speaker 2: his welfare, his safety than she was for her own. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I think we all felt that way. I remember
Speaker 2: when I was back at headquarters. It was a Saturday morning.
Speaker 2: I was getting toward the end of the pipeline. I
Speaker 2: had gone into headquarters to read in on the operations
Speaker 2: because we could not predict in advance which ones we'd
Speaker 2: be able to handle or be required to handle. It
Speaker 2: really was a function of who could get free of surveillance.
Speaker 2: And the cable came in from Moscow, an overnight cable
Speaker 2: that try Gone had not appeared at the meeting, but
Speaker 2: Marty had been ambushed. I'll never forget that morning walking
Speaker 2: into the USSR desk, and everybody was there, the entire staff,
Speaker 2: and it is no exaggeration to say they were all crying.
Speaker 2: They were all crying. Not for Marty so much, although
Speaker 2: we were very concerned about her, but we knew that
Speaker 2: Marty had diplomatic community and she would be expelled and
Speaker 2: she would eventually be safe back in the United States. The
Speaker 2: emotion was for try Gone because we knew that if
Speaker 2: Marty had been ambushed, that they had try Gone, that
Speaker 2: they knew when and where that dead drop was to
Speaker 2: take place. Otherwise he could not have set up the ambush.
Speaker 2: And that's where we were so deeply affected by losing
Speaker 2: this man who had done such valiant service for our country,
Speaker 2: and to know what his fate had been in the
Speaker 2: hands of the KGB.
Speaker 4: And folks who are watching tonight, if you're interested in
Speaker 4: our interview with Marty Peterson his episode one and three,
Speaker 4: I highly highly recommend that everyone go take a look
Speaker 4: at it and try gone. Of course, bit down on
Speaker 4: a suicide pill that the CIA revived pen Cat when
Speaker 4: he was compromised again, not because it was Marty's fault,
Speaker 4: but there was. I mean, Jim, you're you're the expert here.
Speaker 4: Do you want to say how that came about?
Speaker 2: But Trygon knew what he was going to face if
Speaker 2: the KGB captured him. He knew that he would be interrogated.
Speaker 2: He knew he would be tortured. He knew he would
Speaker 2: have to reveal everything that he had done on our
Speaker 2: behalf under torture and negate a out of its value.
Speaker 2: He didn't want that, but he also knew that he
Speaker 2: would then be taken to the basement of Lebyanka, put
Speaker 2: on his knees, and a bullet fired through the back
Speaker 2: of his head. And to preclude that from happening, he
Speaker 2: pleaded with us, give me an l give me a
Speaker 2: lethal device, so that if I see the KGB closing
Speaker 2: in on me, I can avoid all of that by
Speaker 2: committing suicide. And it was agreed that he would have
Speaker 2: his L in a pin. And when he was captured
Speaker 2: by the KGB and he was being interrogated, he said,
Speaker 2: I will confess. I will write out a confession. I
Speaker 2: will tell you everything that I did. Could you hand
Speaker 2: me my pin from my coach Jack and the KGB,
Speaker 2: not suspecting anything and happy that he was about to
Speaker 2: confess everything, handed him his pen. He bit off the
Speaker 2: tip and he was instantly dead because the poison acted instantaneously,
Speaker 2: and the KGB was of course furious. And we know
Speaker 2: that all future spies who were arrested in Moscow were
Speaker 2: instantly immobilized. Their heads were held firmly to be prevented
Speaker 2: from using an L themselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Marty had mentioned it when like that, that she
Speaker 1: had a pen or something on her, and they like went,
Speaker 1: they went trying to get it away from her.
Speaker 2: Yea, And they were interrogating Marti. They put everything out
Speaker 2: on the table that she had in her possession, including
Speaker 2: a pin. They were afraid to touch it because they
Speaker 2: didn't know what the heck that pin was. It was not,
Speaker 2: in fact a L, it was not a weapon, but
Speaker 2: they were very very wary.
Speaker 1: So Jim after Russia, like, how did your Russia to
Speaker 1: our wind end up? If there was anything else notable
Speaker 1: that you can or want to talk about from that time,
Speaker 1: we'd love to hear it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or we can move to the next phase.
Speaker 2: Now. There are a couple of highlights that you now
Speaker 2: that you bring them update that I would like to
Speaker 2: please point out about my time in Moscow. One was
Speaker 2: the handling and exfiltration successful a tiltration of Victor Shamoff,
Speaker 2: and I had a part in that. I met shame
Speaker 2: Off on the streets of Moscow and was involved in
Speaker 2: the expiltration. It's the first time we'd ever successfully efiltrated
Speaker 2: someone from inside the Soviet Union, and this case was
Speaker 2: particularly significant because we not only got shame Off out safely,
Speaker 2: we also got out his wife and their five year
Speaker 2: old daughter. So that was quite an operation, quite an
Speaker 2: operational feed, if I can say so. We were very
Speaker 2: very proud of that. Another operation that I would want
Speaker 2: to highlight would be the cable tapping operation that I
Speaker 2: was personally involved in. The Russians had a secret underground
Speaker 2: cable system for their top secret communications underneath Moscow and
Speaker 2: I trained on that markup in the United States before
Speaker 2: I went to Moscow. I was selected as a candidate
Speaker 2: to carry out the operation when I got to Moscow,
Speaker 2: and in fact, I was chosen to be the first
Speaker 2: person to go down the man hole. I visited the
Speaker 2: site twice. The second time went down the manhole and
Speaker 2: did what I was trained to do. And that was
Speaker 2: a pretty dicey operation. I don't want to only dramatize it,
Speaker 2: but the fact is, if I've been caught down that hole,
Speaker 2: a chance I would to come.
Speaker 3: Back, right.
Speaker 4: It was like a like an induction tap or something
Speaker 4: with a tape recorder.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, good, good for you. Yeah, it was an
Speaker 2: induction tap, which was breakthrough technology at the time, and
Speaker 2: it first became publicly known in the Sawntag and Drew
Speaker 2: book on our tapping.
Speaker 3: Of unders underwater.
Speaker 2: Sea cables, you know, in their book Blind Man's Bluff.
Speaker 2: We were unhappy that that came out, but yeah, this
Speaker 2: was a genious technology because we did not have to
Speaker 2: penetrate the protective core of the cable, which would have
Speaker 2: been detectable. So that was the remarkable technology. I was
Speaker 2: given Intelligence Medal of Merit for that operation. But this
Speaker 2: is not false modesty. I didn't think I deserved it.
Speaker 2: I just did what I was trained to do.
Speaker 4: That's great.
Speaker 2: People who deserved the metals were thesations, the people who
Speaker 2: had the audacity and their creativity even to conceive of
Speaker 2: an operation like that, and think about it from a
Speaker 2: technical standpoint, how do you get that much data out
Speaker 2: of a hole underneath Moscow safely back to CI headquarters
Speaker 2: without being picked up by Russian SIG. It was a
Speaker 2: remarkable achievement.
Speaker 4: Well, that was going to be my next question, Jim,
Speaker 4: because I mean the undersea cables initially anyway, they were
Speaker 4: analog cassettes that they that they recorded. That is that
Speaker 4: what you were installing in this case. I don't want
Speaker 4: to go there, okay, but I mean that.
Speaker 2: I can confirm I can't confirm that it was analog
Speaker 2: technology should not have to break the skin of the
Speaker 2: cable to be able to read the communications. And there
Speaker 2: were multiple cables down there, and so we we tapped
Speaker 2: more than one of them.
Speaker 4: Because I mean, I guess the point I was getting
Speaker 4: too is that you know, obviously the spool runs out
Speaker 4: of tape eventually, Yeah, and.
Speaker 1: Somebody has to go back down there or like replace them. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's one thing when you're diving. It's a totally different
Speaker 1: thing when you're like walking through the streets and mastit.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's another thing having solid state hard drives
Speaker 4: today versus what you guys had in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the front end of that operation was pretty impressive,
Speaker 2: wasn't Because from our satellites, we watched that cable line
Speaker 2: being built. Oh wow, watch, we watched the trenching, we
Speaker 2: watched the cable schools being rolled up. We saw them
Speaker 2: building the man hole covers at certain intervals. So we
Speaker 2: were able to build a precise mock up because we
Speaker 2: knew exactly from our satellite imagy and what that looked like.
Speaker 2: So when I went out to the manhole cover, it
Speaker 2: was no mystery to me. I knew exactly what I
Speaker 2: was going to find when I got there. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: pretty remarkable. Yeah, hands off to our engineers. That's amazing.
Speaker 1: Anything else, I mean, I'm sure there are tons of
Speaker 1: notable things in Moscow, But are there any other highlights
Speaker 1: that you'd like to pick out for us or do
Speaker 1: you want to.
Speaker 2: I think I think Dave the overall highlight from that
Speaker 2: period in Moscow was the intelligence that the CI is
Speaker 2: providing to our policymakers back in Washington. Because of all
Speaker 2: these sources that we had. It was beyond our wildest
Speaker 2: dreams that we would ever be able to have that
Speaker 2: kind of access into the criminal into the inner circles
Speaker 2: of the KGB and the g r U and the
Speaker 2: Defense Ministry. Yeah, we we served our country quite admirably
Speaker 2: during those years at a critical time in the Cold War, right,
Speaker 2: and getting intelligence to the President and to other senior
Speaker 2: policymakers are something all of a sudden the CI, I
Speaker 2: think we're rightfully proud of.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, and for people who weren't, who maybe a
Speaker 1: little bit younger like I was, you know, in.
Speaker 3: You know, elementary and junior high at that time.
Speaker 1: And I mean when you talk about the Cold War,
Speaker 1: like we're talking about an existential threat.
Speaker 3: When we would do bond drills waiting for the Russian
Speaker 3: nukes to hit, you know, all the kids in the
Speaker 3: school would go down to the shelter during one of
Speaker 3: these drills.
Speaker 1: That was that was sort of you know, the existential
Speaker 1: threat that the Soviet Union posed at that point in time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we all knew that that's why we signed up
Speaker 2: in the first place, right right, and we knew that
Speaker 2: they had the power to destroy as many times over.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a game, right, it was life and death
Speaker 2: and we were on the front lines of that historic battle.
Speaker 3: That's incredible. It's incredible.
Speaker 4: So d I think it's trying to hit us up
Speaker 4: that this is the time where we're supposed to plug
Speaker 4: our Patreon below. If you guys want to support the stream,
Speaker 4: we really appreciate it. There's a link right below you
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Speaker 1: And you can buy us some lafroy or you know,
Speaker 1: keep us in whatever, whatever you know.
Speaker 4: So back back to our guests, Jim, what's up next?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Jim, you, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna say that because we're not because this
Speaker 1: is so much about counterintelligence and we want to know
Speaker 1: about you. I'm going to rely on, like I have
Speaker 1: a lot of your personal anecdotes from the book, but
Speaker 1: I'm going to rely on you to sort of help
Speaker 1: us drive along through your story.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, guys, get this. I'm telling you read this book.
Speaker 1: You will not It will open your eyes. I mean,
Speaker 1: it'll probably keep you up at night, it'll make you
Speaker 1: little paranoid, but it is a phenomenal need compelling. I
Speaker 1: can't recommend it high enough. Check it out. And then
Speaker 1: if you were interested in the ethics of spine, it's
Speaker 1: in the description how to catch a spy, It's in
Speaker 1: the description, and.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the moral dilemma of spying. Yeah, So what was
Speaker 4: the next assignment then, Jim? After Moscow? I mean, you
Speaker 4: came back. It sounds like you were highly successful there,
Speaker 4: proved that you could operate as a spy in denied territory.
Speaker 3: I mean, so you had you had your bona fides
Speaker 3: at this point.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I wanted to continue working against the Soviet Union,
Speaker 2: and one of the best places to do that throughout
Speaker 2: the Cold War was Vienna. A lot of people don't
Speaker 2: realize it is the major venues of Cold War espionage
Speaker 2: were Vienna and Berlin. So I applied for a position
Speaker 2: as the chief of Soviet operations in our station in
Speaker 2: Vienna and was selected for that assignment. So Meredth and
Speaker 2: I made a quick trip back to Washington to learn German,
Speaker 2: and we were force fed in German because we didn't
Speaker 2: have any German up to that point, and then it
Speaker 2: went out to Vienna. We loved Vienna because it was
Speaker 2: where the East met the West. It was a real battleground.
Speaker 2: We were nose to nose with the KGB on the
Speaker 2: streets of Vienna. All major intelligence services in the world
Speaker 2: were there, so it was very, very exciting, lively place
Speaker 2: to be. Vienna was where the action was, so our
Speaker 2: job was to monitor what the Russians were doing in Vienna.
Speaker 2: The Russians were meeting a large number of their American
Speaker 2: assets in Vienna. They felt safe there during their occupation
Speaker 2: after World War Two. In Vienna, they had built an infrastructure,
Speaker 2: so they had a lot of resources there which they
Speaker 2: used much later, and the Austrians were neutral. Their counterintelligence
Speaker 2: was frankly not well developed, so we all felt very
Speaker 2: comfortable working there. In fact, the Austrians kind of were
Speaker 2: happy to look the other way if we didn't embarrass
Speaker 2: them too much. They were content to let us go
Speaker 2: out on the streets of Vienna and do our thing,
Speaker 2: and we did. We were all over the streets of Vienna.
Speaker 2: So I loved being in Vienna working against the Russians,
Speaker 2: and in fact, when our assignment there was up Mareth
Speaker 2: and I were sent back to Washington. I became a
Speaker 2: chief of internal operations Soviet operations, East European operations for
Speaker 2: the CI back at headquarters, which was a good job.
Speaker 2: And I did that for a while and then I
Speaker 2: remember one day I'm sitting in my desk at Langley
Speaker 2: and I get a call from the Deputy director for Operations,
Speaker 2: the chief of the CI Clandessein Service Acrust, the old
Speaker 2: pro and he called me up, very gruff, Jim, get
Speaker 2: up here, okay. On my way shop to the seventh floor.
Speaker 2: So I walk in and without any introduction, he said, Jim,
Speaker 2: we're sending you to Vienna. I thought he'd misspoken because
Speaker 2: I just come back from Vienna. But he wanted me
Speaker 2: to go back to Vienna to build a counterintelligence program there.
Speaker 2: We didn't really have one. And he was tired of
Speaker 2: seeing that the Russians were meeting all of these Americans,
Speaker 2: all of the double agents, all over the cases that
Speaker 2: were compromised in Vienna. They had a field day. They
Speaker 2: owned Vienna, and his mandate to me was go and
Speaker 2: take possession of Vienna. And that meant to build a
Speaker 2: counterintelligence capability on a scale that we'd never done it before.
Speaker 2: And he told me this is going to cost a
Speaker 2: lot of money, and I'm aware of that. So he said, Jim,
Speaker 2: how much do you want? And I'm thinking quickly. I
Speaker 2: knew Vienna, I knew what the real estate there, I
Speaker 2: knew what the costs would be. It's an expensive city.
Speaker 2: So I gave him a number that I thought was outrageous,
Speaker 2: completely out of balance. He's in bad and eye. He said,
Speaker 2: you got it, and when you need more, come and
Speaker 2: see me. So that's how it started. And my job
Speaker 2: was to build a team and to go out and
Speaker 2: to take it to the Russians. And we did, and
Speaker 2: it was pretty momentous for us to go and to
Speaker 2: beat the Russians on what they had considered their private
Speaker 2: territory for many, many years. We did such a good job.
Speaker 2: I think in UH Encounter Intelligence Indianna that it was
Speaker 2: almost inevitable that my next assignment was going to be
Speaker 2: back at headquarters as a chief of counter intelligence. Mike
Speaker 2: wanted to go elsewhere. I had always dreamed of an
Speaker 2: exodi African assignment. I was kind of penciled in for
Speaker 2: Conchasa and we were running our warning goal out of Conchasta.
Speaker 2: That would have been a great assignment. I also was
Speaker 2: being considered for Tel Aviv, which I thought would be
Speaker 2: a great place to be. So I was excited about
Speaker 2: those two options. But Headquarters, in his wisdom, said nope, Jim,
Speaker 2: you're coming back and you're gonna You're gonna build a
Speaker 2: counter intelligence center with Ted Price's help, Ted Price's leadership
Speaker 2: back at Headquarters, and that's what they did.
Speaker 3: Good.
Speaker 4: I was just gonna ask who was the d d O,
Speaker 4: the gruff, salty DdO that called you in.
Speaker 3: I mean, he must be out by now.
Speaker 5: Claire George, Oh, Claire George Clark to Lorge, one of
Speaker 5: the old barons, one of the cowboys. We called him
Speaker 5: a great character, a great operator, and someone I admired greatly.
Speaker 5: Claire and his you would have trouble in the CIA
Speaker 5: or in.
Speaker 2: The United States government today because they were anything but
Speaker 2: politically correct. You.
Speaker 1: You know, you had a couple of the stories from
Speaker 1: the inner A couple of the cases were your personal
Speaker 1: experiences in Vienna. Because for people who don't know, like
Speaker 1: a vast majority of this book is just about the
Speaker 1: counter intelligence, it's wages against this, it's about your ten commandments,
Speaker 1: of counterintelligence. It's a number of case studies, but there
Speaker 1: are a couple. Can you tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about about the young Marine sergeant Clayton loan Tree who
Speaker 1: approached you in Vienna.
Speaker 2: I'll be happy to Clayton Loan Tree was one of
Speaker 2: the marine security guards in our embassy. They do a
Speaker 2: wonderful job. He had previously served in Moscow as the
Speaker 2: marine security guard. Mareth and I were at the ambassador's
Speaker 2: Christmas party in Vienna in December of nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 2: and all the embassy staff had been invited. It was
Speaker 2: a great party. The ambassador was Ronald Louder, the son
Speaker 2: of a Stay Louder, the cosmetics magnet. Very wealthy people.
Speaker 2: Ron and his wife entertained lavishly, a great party, having
Speaker 2: a wonderful time. Mareth and I were really enjoying ourselves.
Speaker 2: But toward the end of the evening, as I'm in
Speaker 2: this one conversation group, I noticed out of the corner
Speaker 2: of my eye that this young man, who I recognized
Speaker 2: as one of our marine security guards, was watching me intently,
Speaker 2: and as I moved on my way toward the next
Speaker 2: conversational group, he came over and intercepted me. He was
Speaker 2: visibly shaking. I thought he was having some kind of
Speaker 2: a breakdown, some kind of an episode. So I took
Speaker 2: him around the corner, out of sight of the rest
Speaker 2: of the party, and finally he was able to tell
Speaker 2: me that he knew who I was. In other words,
Speaker 2: he was telling me that he knew I was the
Speaker 2: CIA undercover chief of station in Vienna. And that got
Speaker 2: my attention because he shouldn't have known that. When he
Speaker 2: said they told me who you are, that could only
Speaker 2: mean the KGB. So I knew we had a problem,
Speaker 2: and I arranged to meet with him the next day
Speaker 2: outside the embassy, and Clayton Loan Tree began to tell
Speaker 2: us his story. It didn't take long to get to
Speaker 2: the bottom of it. When he was in he was
Speaker 2: seduced by what we call a swallow, a KGB seduction specialist,
Speaker 2: young women who were trained to lure Americans into unauthorized
Speaker 2: sexual relationships so that they can compromise them and then
Speaker 2: put pressure on them. And Clayton Loan Tree was an
Speaker 2: easy mark. He was a native American. He had never
Speaker 2: had a successful, emotionally satisfying relationship with a woman, and
Speaker 2: so in Violetta as her name was working as a
Speaker 2: secretary in the US embassy, began to flirt with them.
Speaker 2: He was a goner, and she eventually seduced him, and
Speaker 2: once they became intimate, she introduced him to her uncle, Sasha,
Speaker 2: a KGB officer obviously who closed the deal, and Loan
Speaker 2: Tree was in over his head. He wanted to do
Speaker 2: what he could for Violetta by cooperating, and so he
Speaker 2: started working with the KGB in Moscow. He then was
Speaker 2: transferred to Vienna as his next assignment. I think the
Speaker 2: KGB probably asked him to request Vienna because Vienna was
Speaker 2: a great post for them to have a spy in,
Speaker 2: and a marine can do a lot of damage. They
Speaker 2: have access to all of our spaces, and Loan Tree
Speaker 2: was under a lot of pressure. The KGB was using
Speaker 2: a very heavy hand against him. In Vienna. They wanted
Speaker 2: to do more and more. They wanted physical access to
Speaker 2: our embassy. They wanted to get into the Ambassador's office,
Speaker 2: into the CI spaces, into the communications center, and Loan
Speaker 2: Tree was going to be the way to do that.
Speaker 2: US Marines would sometimes be the only American building a night,
Speaker 2: so he could have let in a whole KGB technical team.
Speaker 2: So the worst case was a very, very damaging So
Speaker 2: we talked to him. We couldn't trust him to be
Speaker 2: telling us the whole truth. He told us that he'd
Speaker 2: never gotten that far. He came to me because he
Speaker 2: wanted out, He was scared. He wanted to work with
Speaker 2: us as a double agent. In other words, he wanted
Speaker 2: to continue meeting with the KGB in Vienna, but from
Speaker 2: now on, of course under our control. And ordinarily I
Speaker 2: would have found that very very attractive, as it's clear
Speaker 2: from what I wrote in To Catch a Spy. I
Speaker 2: love double agent operations and I would have done it here,
Speaker 2: except that Clayton Longtree was emotionally fragile. It was apparent
Speaker 2: to us from the beginning that he was still very
Speaker 2: emotionally attached to via letter, so we would never have
Speaker 2: the control that we would need for successful double agent operation.
Speaker 2: And secondly, he was not equipped to carry off the
Speaker 2: fiction of being cooperative with the KGB. He wouldn't be
Speaker 2: enough of an actor to do that convincingly, so we
Speaker 2: had to rule that out. And once we ruled out
Speaker 2: a double agent role for him, we had no alternative
Speaker 2: but to turn him over to the Naval Investigative Service
Speaker 2: now called NCIS for arrest and prosecution. I testified at
Speaker 2: his court martial and Quantico he's the only Marine ever
Speaker 2: to have been charged with espionage treason. So the Marine
Speaker 2: Corps through the book adding thirty years, and we then
Speaker 2: debriefed him fully and it turned out that he had
Speaker 2: not done damage. They had not gotten that far with him.
Speaker 2: He was very repentant about what he had done, so
Speaker 2: I felt that he deserves some leniency, and we did
Speaker 2: end up petitioning the court. So he only spent about
Speaker 2: nine years in prison for what he had done, so
Speaker 2: the sentence was reduced significantly. Clayton long Tree when he
Speaker 2: got out, you know, the first thing he did he
Speaker 2: sent a wedding proposal to Violetta. He refused to believe
Speaker 2: that she said him up, which we knew, of course,
Speaker 2: that she had done. Violetta declined the wedding proposal. She
Speaker 2: had moved on. But Clayton was was heartbroken because he
Speaker 2: truly believed that what they had was real. So that
Speaker 2: was quite a potentially damaging case. But and reality was
Speaker 2: not nearly as bad as it might have been.
Speaker 1: And then the other case, I think that you mentioned
Speaker 1: the vienna that you received a call from marine guard
Speaker 1: about a walk in and it was a Latino looking
Speaker 1: gentleman sitting in the wedding air with.
Speaker 3: A a young woman who you thought might be his daughter.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, that's right, Dave. I was at home on
Speaker 2: the weekend, and of course we'd arrange with the marine
Speaker 2: guards who were on duty over the weekend that if
Speaker 2: the walk in showed up, they should call one of us,
Speaker 2: and they had a parole that they would use. So
Speaker 2: I got a call at home on that weekend afternoon
Speaker 2: and from the marine guard. He used the pro to
Speaker 2: indicate that there was a walk in. I drove into
Speaker 2: the embassy and as I'm walking past the entrance up
Speaker 2: towards the marine desk, I noticed this Latino looking gentleman
Speaker 2: with a girl, a young lady, and that's right, I
Speaker 2: thought she was his daughter. It's about the age that
Speaker 2: made sense to me. I go up to the marine
Speaker 2: I said, corporate, what do we have here? He handed
Speaker 2: me two official Cuban passports. I go down to the
Speaker 2: vestibule to speak to this this Cuban, and it turns
Speaker 2: out that this was not his daughter, his teenage mistress.
Speaker 2: He had been the DGI, the Cuban intelligence head of station,
Speaker 2: the resident in Prague. He and his girlfriend on the run.
Speaker 2: They had left Prague, they'd driven down to Vienna, and
Speaker 2: they wanted a life together in the United States. The
Speaker 2: defector's name was Aspiaga, and he had left a wife
Speaker 2: and family behind in Prague. They weren't part of the deal.
Speaker 2: I didn't speak in Spanish at that time, didn't learn
Speaker 2: Spanish until later, so we're having trouble communicating. The only
Speaker 2: language we had in common was Russian, and his Russian
Speaker 2: was not very good. So he was having trouble making
Speaker 2: himself understood. He was getting frustrated, so finally emotion for
Speaker 2: me to come closer to him, and he whispered in
Speaker 2: my ear the names of several undercover CI officers who
Speaker 2: had served in Havana named I knew, so I realized,
Speaker 2: this person is probably bonified. He's probably what he claims
Speaker 2: to be, a senior DGI officer. So we put him
Speaker 2: in a safe house. I called in one of my
Speaker 2: Spanish speaking officers and we had him on a plane
Speaker 2: with his girlfriend to the United States the next day.
Speaker 2: Ospiaga turned out to be an incredible source for us,
Speaker 2: the first real inside book that we'd ever had had
Speaker 2: of the CUBANDGI, and the look that he gave us
Speaker 2: was a shock because he told us some things that
Speaker 2: we hadn't known before. He told us that the former
Speaker 2: CIA case officer, Philip Aging, had been working for the
Speaker 2: Cubans for many years and had been paid over a
Speaker 2: million dollars. But he also told us, and this was
Speaker 2: shattering to me and to all of us, that all
Speaker 2: thirty eight of the recruitments that we CI thought we'd
Speaker 2: made of Cubans, including on Island, were controlled by the DGI.
Speaker 2: They were all doubles. They owned us, they had duped us,
Speaker 2: they had beaten us. And that's something that sticks on
Speaker 2: my goal to this day, that we were so gullible,
Speaker 2: that our counter intelligence was so weak that they could
Speaker 2: do that to us. It was one of the worst
Speaker 2: days in my CI career when we heard that the
Speaker 2: Cubans had carried that off.
Speaker 1: Against this It's also interesting because you make the point,
Speaker 1: like you said earlier, that that like people don't want
Speaker 1: CI around, and it's for reasons like that, because when
Speaker 1: they're successful, everybody else looks bad. You know that that
Speaker 1: all these recruitments that people had gotten wards for, probably
Speaker 1: gotten promotions for. Probably they were all fake. They're all
Speaker 1: fake recruitments.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point, Dave, and one that I
Speaker 2: think accounts for why we had allowed the Cubans to
Speaker 2: run all these doubles against this. Counter Intelligence, as I said,
Speaker 2: was inexcusably weak. During those years. The components did their
Speaker 2: own so called counter intelligence, and they wanted these operations
Speaker 2: to be good because people had made their careers out
Speaker 2: of recruiting Cubans people in the Latin American Division, and
Speaker 2: they didn't want any counter intelligence people coming to them
Speaker 2: and saying, you know, we're looking into that case and
Speaker 2: there's some problems with it. You know, first of all,
Speaker 2: there's not much production. Secondly, the polygraph really had some
Speaker 2: issues associated with it. Also, the vibes just don't look
Speaker 2: good in this case. All those warning signals, which were significant,
Speaker 2: were disregarded because they wanted those cases to be good, right.
Speaker 2: They wanted to have They wanted to be able to
Speaker 2: go up to the seventh floor and tell CI management,
Speaker 2: we've got thirty eight agents that we're running against the Cubans.
Speaker 2: So that was a major contributor when we set up
Speaker 2: the counter Intelligence Center. We told the components, hey, listen,
Speaker 2: this is a new era of counter intelligence, and you're
Speaker 2: not going to police yourselves. We're going to send people
Speaker 2: who are working for us in the counter Intelligence Center,
Speaker 2: who are objective, who aren't beholden to you, to go
Speaker 2: in and look at your cases. Oh no you're not,
Speaker 2: No you're not. We don't want that kind of outside scrutiny, compartmentation, reasons,
Speaker 2: you don't know our culture. Well, the fact is they
Speaker 2: didn't want anybody looking over their shoulders. And when we
Speaker 2: got in, when we got into those area divisions, had
Speaker 2: to overcome a lot of resistance because the old hands,
Speaker 2: the people who ran these area divisions, didn't want independent ci.
Speaker 2: They wanted to continue doing it themselves. We had to
Speaker 2: break down that resistance. I had to go to the
Speaker 2: seventh floor and tell the seventh floor, listen, we want
Speaker 2: to do oversight. We want to do independent count intelligence
Speaker 2: scrutiny of the operations in this division. That won't name
Speaker 2: the division, but there were more than one who were
Speaker 2: resisting us, trying to stiff arm us, not letting us
Speaker 2: get access to their cases. We can't do our job
Speaker 2: unless we overruled It didn't make me very popular. But
Speaker 2: the seventh floor INCLU the director said, Okay, you've got it.
Speaker 2: You've got the access you need, and if you have
Speaker 2: any more trouble with them, let me know. So we
Speaker 2: got into the case. What did we find? Junk? Worthless
Speaker 2: cases They were running just for the sake of running operations.
Speaker 2: So we had to weed all that out to give
Speaker 2: it to the junk. We found other cases that were
Speaker 2: doubled against us. It was a nightmare, but we cleaned
Speaker 2: the house and it was long overdue.
Speaker 3: It's like the original form of cat fishing.
Speaker 1: It's so good, it looks so good that you just
Speaker 1: wanted to be true in your north.
Speaker 4: All in the professional incentive is to rack up numbers. Right,
Speaker 4: we're running all these assets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course what was overlooked was they weren't
Speaker 2: producing anything, right, We weren't getting any real intelligence.
Speaker 6: We're getting up and not only that, in the case
Speaker 6: of the Cubans, anything that was Cuban was a valid target.
Speaker 6: You know, you could be a circus performer, you could
Speaker 6: be a hotel clerk, didn't make any difference.
Speaker 2: If you were Cuban. You were meant to be a valatar. Right,
Speaker 2: So they recruited junk, worthless people with no access. They
Speaker 2: allowed themselves to be beguiled into the belief that as
Speaker 2: these people were trained to do by the DGI. Okay,
Speaker 2: when you're danging yourself, let them think that you are
Speaker 2: on the verge of getting something that's worthwhile you got
Speaker 2: a neighbor who works in the Cuban military was talking
Speaker 2: too much, or you're in line for a job in
Speaker 2: this ministry. Of course, it never panned out. We never
Speaker 2: got any intelligence from right, disgraceful something that any good
Speaker 2: counter intelligence officer should be ashamed of that I was
Speaker 2: ashamed of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and there are a lot of
Speaker 1: personal like I mean, there's like a lot of personal
Speaker 1: refleshing insight in this too. Can you tell us, because
Speaker 1: we've talked about the Russians, can you tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about the Chinese? And I don't know how
Speaker 1: much they were in that sphere because we've heard about
Speaker 1: the Russians and the Cubans. Were the Chinese very acted
Speaker 1: during that period of time.
Speaker 2: They were, but they weren't our major threat at that time.
Speaker 2: Of course, it was all Russia throughout most of the
Speaker 2: Cold War. China didn't really emerge as a major espionage
Speaker 2: threat in the United States until later. I would say,
Speaker 2: beginning in the early nineteen nineties, we recognize we have
Speaker 2: a problem. The Chinese are very aggressive, They are very good.
Speaker 2: They are infiltrating the United States. They are stealing our technology,
Speaker 2: they're hacking into our databases. So very quickly we came
Speaker 2: to realize we got a major new threat on our hands.
Speaker 2: The Cuban MSS, or the Cuban or the Chinese MSS,
Speaker 2: and the Chinese PLA. They're formidable adversaries and they're flooding
Speaker 2: resources in the United States. So I would say by
Speaker 2: the end of the nineteen nineties, China had emerged as
Speaker 2: our number one a national security threat. What they were
Speaker 2: doing was several magnitudes greater than what the Russians were doing.
Speaker 2: The Russians did not go away. Their level of espionage
Speaker 2: against the United States stayed very high. Putin was obsessed
Speaker 2: with the United States, but we had a good reason
Speaker 2: to believe that what the Chinese were doing was unprecedented.
Speaker 2: It was massive, it was pervasive. Their number one target
Speaker 2: was to get our technology, particularly military technology, but not exclusively.
Speaker 2: And I came to realize before I left ACTIY duty
Speaker 2: that China is now the number one national security the
Speaker 2: United States, and that has been compounded over and over
Speaker 2: again since I left, and my courses at the Bush School,
Speaker 2: my intelligence classes, I tell our students that China is
Speaker 2: going to loom very large in their counter intelligence careers
Speaker 2: because they are the name of the game, they are
Speaker 2: the threat. I make a point in the book that
Speaker 2: if I could start my CI career all over again,
Speaker 2: and I'd love to, I would try to get into
Speaker 2: the CI's China program. I would learn Mandarin, I would
Speaker 2: become a China count intelligence specialist, because that's the future.
Speaker 2: That's the future. What they're doing is outrageous and we
Speaker 2: need to do a lot more to stop them.
Speaker 4: As what are in jim As a counterintelligence professional, did
Speaker 4: you ever experience any frustration in trying to approach the
Speaker 4: problem of Chinese espionage? Because at the time, in the
Speaker 4: nineteen nineties particularly, we're trying to integrate China into the
Speaker 4: global economy, We're setting up all these trade arrangements. There
Speaker 4: was even some rose our glasses on with a lot
Speaker 4: of people who thought that China would democratize eventually. And
Speaker 4: I have read that some of the espionage cases were
Speaker 4: kind of ignored.
Speaker 3: Swept under the rug.
Speaker 4: It wasn't something we wanted to deal with at that time,
Speaker 4: and I was wondering if you encountered any of that.
Speaker 2: I counted out a lot, and that was a problem. Jack.
Speaker 2: I think there's still a bit of a problem in
Speaker 2: that area. The Chinese have been given a pass or
Speaker 2: too often we have not held them accountable enough for
Speaker 2: what they're doing when we catch them a slap on
Speaker 2: the wrist. Maybe we do have some prosecutions, but it
Speaker 2: is small compared to the enormity of what they're doing here.
Speaker 2: They're an awful lot of people in I State's government.
Speaker 2: We don't want to embarrass the Chinese. They don't want
Speaker 2: to call them out. They don't want to change the
Speaker 2: pattern of business that we have with them. And you've
Speaker 2: seen it when policymakers that proposed tariffs on Chinese products,
Speaker 2: there's a hue and crime. Can't do that. It's going
Speaker 2: to raise the price. Americans like those cheap Chinese products
Speaker 2: coming in. They own so much of our DBTS. You know,
Speaker 2: if we irritate the Chinese, they could call in some
Speaker 2: of that DBTS and that could be disastrous. So we're
Speaker 2: not holding them nearly accountable enough for the enormity of
Speaker 2: what they're doing. And I remember during the Olympics and
Speaker 2: in Beijing, one of the big races, one of the
Speaker 2: long distance races, was being held in Tinaman Square and
Speaker 2: NBC at broadcasting this. Mary and I are watching all this,
Speaker 2: and we say to ourselves, there's no way that NBC
Speaker 2: couldnt mission what happened to tinam And Square in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty nine. And they're talking about the fact that we
Speaker 2: are participating in the Olympics from that location, not a word,
Speaker 2: you know, you don't want to embarrass the Chinese nonsense,
Speaker 2: you know. I found it very disturbing that the Justice
Speaker 2: Department canceled what was called the China Initiative. Chinese Initiative
Speaker 2: was established to put more focus on Chinese espionage, particularly
Speaker 2: their theft or technology. And I was involved in a
Speaker 2: couple of cases as an expert witness where that was
Speaker 2: paying off, where the additional attention was leading to some
Speaker 2: arrests and prosecutions. I don't know what we're thinking when
Speaker 2: we back off from something like that which was paying dividends.
Speaker 2: And of course the excuse that was given was is
Speaker 2: that the China Initiative was focusing heavily on ethnic Chinese
Speaker 2: Chinese Americans, And that's true to some extent, and we
Speaker 2: don't want to racially profile, but as counter intelligence professionals,
Speaker 2: whether in the CI or the FBI, we would be
Speaker 2: remiss if we ignored the reality of how they target.
Speaker 2: They go after ethnic Chinese, right, that's their targeted preference,
Speaker 2: finding Chinese Americans who are in key positions, who might
Speaker 2: have some residual affinity for things China, some affection for
Speaker 2: mother China. They share a language, they might even have
Speaker 2: relatives still living back in China, so that makes it
Speaker 2: a very attractive target. The Chinese don't miss that opportunity,
Speaker 2: right because by no means there's bloosy. We've seen the
Speaker 2: Chinese intelligence services get increasingly brazen and they're going after
Speaker 2: non ethnic Chinese now more and more as well. But
Speaker 2: all things considered, when they have an option, they're going
Speaker 2: to target ethnic Chinese first and foremost.
Speaker 1: And in a lot of cases because you like you
Speaker 1: like with the Thousand Talents program, like it is their
Speaker 1: plan to get these people over here, get in to school,
Speaker 1: get them into advance technical fields, and feel them through
Speaker 1: and and basically, I mean basically, if they have family
Speaker 1: back in China, they're as good as an agent that there.
Speaker 1: They don't have a choice. They're they're going to do it.
Speaker 2: Biing goes yeah or Dave, you're right on with that.
Speaker 2: That's a that's a mechanism and the Chinese have discovered
Speaker 2: and have been exploiting for years. If they send over
Speaker 2: a bright young Chinese student to the United States, it's
Speaker 2: generally going to be an engineering probably something with military application.
Speaker 2: That's that student gets his or her master's degree in
Speaker 2: electrical engineering or a computer science or aeronautical engineering, whatever
Speaker 2: it is. If that person can get sponsorship from an
Speaker 2: American high tech company, which is hard to do because
Speaker 2: they're all short in hiring engineers, they can get sponsorship,
Speaker 2: they get a green card, they get PR status and
Speaker 2: five years of PR status, entitles of the citizenship and
Speaker 2: five years of citizenship. They are eligible for code word
Speaker 2: top secret US government security clients. So that is something
Speaker 2: that requires patients. But any intelligence service worthy of the
Speaker 2: name would identify that as a channel to get their
Speaker 2: people emplaced in US high technology companies with US citizenship
Speaker 2: and clearances, or in the government directly or in the
Speaker 2: national labs. It's a gold mine for an intelligence service,
Speaker 2: and they certainly don't ignore that.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just this is what was truly terrifying
Speaker 1: about your book is you know, the Russian espionage was
Speaker 1: one thing, the Cuban espionage is another thing, but your
Speaker 1: first section on China, where they are number one competitor
Speaker 1: and Russia is a distant second. And the amount of technology, basically,
Speaker 1: if we've created the United States military technology and information
Speaker 1: technology whatever, if we've created it, they have it that
Speaker 1: we are no longer ahead of them in any kind
Speaker 1: of arms race. They have basically everything we do, and
Speaker 1: it continues to walk out the door on a regular basis.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right, Dave. In fact, there is not a
Speaker 2: significant piece of Chinese military technology is not based completely
Speaker 2: or heavily on stolen American technology. They discovered a long
Speaker 2: time ago that it's a lot cheaper and a lot
Speaker 2: faster for them to steal Western technology and specifically American
Speaker 2: technology than to do the R and D themselves. And
Speaker 2: there are, after everything they can get their hands on.
Speaker 2: It doesn't have to be military technology. If it's more
Speaker 2: advanced than what they have they go after it. It
Speaker 2: might be industrial technology, it might be civilian aviation, it
Speaker 2: might be medical technology, it might be agricultural technology. Their
Speaker 2: appetites are voracious and they are very very successful. But
Speaker 2: of course the number one target is going to be
Speaker 2: anything that's going to strengthen the PLA, strengthened the militarily.
Speaker 2: You probably noticed, as I did not, all that long ago,
Speaker 2: at a big airfare in Shanghai, the Chinese unveiled their
Speaker 2: new UA V, a Mandaria vehicle, and those of us
Speaker 2: who have been around for a while looked at that
Speaker 2: Chinese UAV. That's the predator. Of course, the spinning image
Speaker 2: of the US predator.
Speaker 4: The J twenty, it looks just very eerily similar to
Speaker 4: the F twenty two.
Speaker 2: You bet absolutely, And you mentioned.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're like, they're the world leader when it
Speaker 1: comes to nano technology now right because of a.
Speaker 3: A recruitment of a non Chinese American.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yeah, they're ahead of us. It shouldn't be
Speaker 2: that way. We should be the world leader in all
Speaker 2: aspects of natotechnology or computer science. But for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: they're beating us. Their offensive cyber is overwhelming our cyber defences,
Speaker 2: and we got to we've got to put more resources
Speaker 2: into it. They are everywhere. They're in classified databases, they
Speaker 2: are in all of our high tech companies, they're in
Speaker 2: the national labs h they're in our electrical grid. You know,
Speaker 2: the Deputy Director of NSA testified before Congress that we
Speaker 2: know they're there. We know they are solved malware which
Speaker 2: they can activate at some point of their choosing in
Speaker 2: the future. We've got it. We know they're in the Internet.
Speaker 2: We know we can bring that down, presumably at some
Speaker 2: point in the future. So you've got to put a
Speaker 2: lot more into cyber I tell my students here at
Speaker 2: the Bush School we're going into intelligence careers. If you
Speaker 2: want to have a successful intelligence career today, you need
Speaker 2: to develop expertise in one or more of the following fields.
Speaker 2: First of all, you've got to know China. You've got
Speaker 2: to know how the Chinese intelligence services operate. Secondly, you've
Speaker 2: got to have a grounding and financial intelligence, because if
Speaker 2: you can get into their money flows, you can bring
Speaker 2: them down. So for I now, natural intelligence is a
Speaker 2: rapidly growing area. And then of course the third area
Speaker 2: is cyber You've got to develop expertise in in cyber technology.
Speaker 2: So our students are doing that, and they're not going
Speaker 2: to be the programmers themselves, but they're going to be managers.
Speaker 2: They're going to be the policy people who understand what
Speaker 2: the threat is and understand how to dedicate the appropriate
Speaker 2: resources to it.
Speaker 1: No, it's it's truly terrifying because not only from a
Speaker 1: military aspect in terms of military power that we've done
Speaker 1: all the research and that now and they have all
Speaker 1: our technology, but but they essentially have the off switch
Speaker 1: two to everything. Basically, they're in all of our companies
Speaker 1: and into the systems that there's really almost no way
Speaker 1: to get them out right.
Speaker 2: You know what one of the major venues of the
Speaker 2: Chinese spionized the United States his day, it's the college campus,
Speaker 2: the United States college campus. They are going after our
Speaker 2: professors and they are putting our students in place. The
Speaker 2: thousand Talents program is insidious. Charles Lieber is a great
Speaker 2: example of that. They are able to insinuate themselves into
Speaker 2: a very sensitive area. To recruit him was very lucrative
Speaker 2: for him, but he had to conceal the extent that
Speaker 2: he was cooperating with the Chinese setting up a laboratory
Speaker 2: for them. Thank good as we got him. But Charles Lieber,
Speaker 2: I think is just the tip of the iceberg, and
Speaker 2: the Chinese are going after or targeting a lot of
Speaker 2: professors on college campuses the United States as we speak.
Speaker 1: And that's not just with with like.
Speaker 3: A the technical.
Speaker 1: Espionage, but that's also I feel fomenting, not necessarily like
Speaker 1: a cultural war, but definitely trying to play both sides
Speaker 1: against each other, trying to because they they have been
Speaker 1: they've been well them and the Russians also, but they've
Speaker 1: been like throwing both the left and the right these
Speaker 1: fake bones to get everybody riled up.
Speaker 2: Correct, that's correct, That's exactly right, and that's a standard
Speaker 2: ploy that they utilize. In my home state of Iowa.
Speaker 2: This was brought home not too long ago when Chinese
Speaker 2: were actually caught out in a cornfield in the middle
Speaker 2: of Iowa digging up hybrid corn seats because those hybrids
Speaker 2: were more advanced, had better yield than they think the
Speaker 2: Chinese were doing, and so they were stealing our seed
Speaker 2: right from the field to send back to China so
Speaker 2: that they could grow it and replicate it. They are
Speaker 2: absolutely shameless what they go after.
Speaker 4: You.
Speaker 2: Now, the United States, to its credit, shut down the
Speaker 2: Chinese consulate in Houston, just next door to where I am,
Speaker 2: because we knew that the Chinese intelligence services in Houston
Speaker 2: were having a field day going after NASA, going after
Speaker 2: oil and gas, going after M. D. Anderson for medical technology.
Speaker 2: So we shut him down, and that was a wake
Speaker 2: up call that I'm certain glad we did that.
Speaker 1: Jeff, in your experience, with your background and what you
Speaker 1: see now and obviously teaching, you always learn.
Speaker 3: But during the.
Speaker 1: Cold War, would we have taken a Russian teenager or
Speaker 1: Russian adult and put him in one of our national laboratories.
Speaker 2: I don't think we would have, Dave, I don't think
Speaker 2: that was part of our philosophy of operating, and we
Speaker 2: called young people like that futures. The other hand, the
Speaker 2: Chinese and the Russians have been very effective at recruiting futures.
Speaker 2: They will recruit a young American who doesn't have any
Speaker 2: current access, and they will direct that person and compensate
Speaker 2: that person and hope that that person can eventually maneuver
Speaker 2: himself or herself into a position of access. Glendulfi Schreiver
Speaker 2: is a good example of that. He was recruited as
Speaker 2: a student with no access. They paid him a lot
Speaker 2: of money to go back to the United States and
Speaker 2: to apply for the State Department or for the CIA
Speaker 2: to become an asset or Chinese intelligence. The Russians have
Speaker 2: done the same thing. You know, they recruit young Americans
Speaker 2: who don't have access. Students, for example, they get back
Speaker 2: and study Russian and apply for a government job. And
Speaker 2: when you're there, then we will compensate you royally. And
Speaker 2: they established that relationship early on. They groomed these people.
Speaker 2: We don't do that. We don't recruit futures. We don't
Speaker 2: recruit young people who we hope can be steered into
Speaker 2: future positions of access. We want people to have access.
Speaker 1: Now, do you think that that is for ethical reasons
Speaker 1: or do you think that America in general, and particularly
Speaker 1: in our government, where everything flips so often, we just
Speaker 1: don't have the long view of intelligence that other countries do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there may be a little bit of that, but
Speaker 2: I think we've just decided that it's not efficient. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not cost effective because most of these young people,
Speaker 2: even with guidance, they're not going to successfully end up
Speaker 2: in a position of access or stay oil to their
Speaker 2: intelligence sponsors. So we've decided that we've got better things
Speaker 2: to go after, more likely to be productive for us,
Speaker 2: and to waste time and energy on a young person
Speaker 2: who's only a future Jim.
Speaker 4: For the public out there watching this, I was wondering
Speaker 4: if you could recommend some literature on Chinese espionage, Like,
Speaker 4: who do you like that's out there, Matthew Brazil or
Speaker 4: Michael Pillsbury? Are there some experts that you would recommend
Speaker 4: people read.
Speaker 2: I definitely recommend Pillsbury. I think I think what he
Speaker 2: wrote is brilliant. Uh More, specifically on Chinese espionage, I
Speaker 2: think the best book that you can read is one
Speaker 2: on the case. I think that's very instructive. I'll think
Speaker 2: some more. Maybe you can post it on Yeah.
Speaker 4: I'm just curious because it is a very dense subject
Speaker 4: and it's something that, as you point out, a lot
Speaker 4: of people out there should probably get smart on with they.
Speaker 3: Might want to read to catch you spy, Yes, with
Speaker 3: you have to read.
Speaker 2: Well first chapters on China and some case studies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's it's I mean, uh like just I
Speaker 1: mean there's just kind of a quick list. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you guys can see that they're not highlighted,
Speaker 1: but just a quick list of some of the names.
Speaker 1: But but the Chinese have just been destroying at this
Speaker 1: and and they're almost untouchable. And you know, especially in
Speaker 1: our country where we we do want to be fair
Speaker 1: and we don't want to, you know, have the appearance
Speaker 1: of profiling. How do you go after an enemy that
Speaker 1: is that is ethnically different, And.
Speaker 3: I would, I would take it a step further than that.
Speaker 4: Even Dave, the Chinese government knows this is a pressure
Speaker 4: point and they play can come after us and say,
Speaker 4: you America, you're racings, right, We're going after our spies, right,
Speaker 4: and we feel bad about that?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, let me, for what it's worth tell you
Speaker 2: Jim Olson's recipe for please improvement our counter intelligence against Chinese.
Speaker 2: First of all, we've got to upgrade our cyber defenses
Speaker 2: because they're hacking will now we've got to we've got
Speaker 2: to stop that. Secondly, we've got to find ways to
Speaker 2: penetrate the intelligence services. We should be recruiting Chinese intelligence officers.
Speaker 2: The best counter intelligence is penetration. So we need to
Speaker 2: reach out to more Chinese intelligence officers, typically the ones
Speaker 2: who are accessible to us here in the United States,
Speaker 2: go after them very very aggressively, get in their face,
Speaker 2: let them know that we are open for business. We've
Speaker 2: got deep pockets, and we can make a deal. Hang
Speaker 2: out the shingle, let them know that we are very
Speaker 2: eager to recruit them. And then the next thing we
Speaker 2: need to do is double agent operations. That's the second
Speaker 2: problem of being offensive, which is one of my counter
Speaker 2: intelligence commandments. We should be absolutely flooding the Chinese with
Speaker 2: double agents. If anybody's interested, you might want to look
Speaker 2: at the Jandulum shoecase out of Cincinnati, because that was
Speaker 2: a brilliant FBI double agent operation against an MSS office
Speaker 2: and this person was convicted. It's the first time that
Speaker 2: we've ever been able to convict a serving MSS staff officer,
Speaker 2: so it was groundbreaking. And what the FBI did in
Speaker 2: that case was a textbook a double agent operation, brilliantly
Speaker 2: conceived and executed. So I would recommend that anybody's interested
Speaker 2: want to look into that case.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you know you you like you mentioned
Speaker 1: the h the China Initiative and it being shut down
Speaker 1: by the DOJ and a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: the reason was because it looked bad, right, it looked
Speaker 1: bad targeting Chinese, you know, Americans or Chinese naturalized you know, Chinese,
Speaker 1: you know American, you know, and it's it's kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: it's hard not to look bad.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, it doesn't make counterintelligence sense. I remember going
Speaker 2: out and briefing some of our high tech partners for
Speaker 2: the CIA Corporate America invaluable contributions to the intelligence community,
Speaker 2: and I was briefing him on the Chinese counter intelligence threat.
Speaker 2: And I looked at this one company and the hundreds
Speaker 2: of ethnic Chinese engineers that they had, and I'm going
Speaker 2: to ask a very politically incorrect question, what do you
Speaker 2: do to monitor those ethnic Chinese? Because you know they're
Speaker 2: being targeted? And this chief of security out there, a
Speaker 2: friend of mine, former counter intelligence officer, said, jem, I
Speaker 2: know exactly what you're saying, but what would you have us?
Speaker 2: Do we need engineers and we go to the best
Speaker 2: American universities looking for engineers, what do we find? We
Speaker 2: find ethnic Chinese? So there's no choice. And I said
Speaker 2: to him, well, all right, how many of the ethnic
Speaker 2: Chinese working at your company who have access to our programs,
Speaker 2: clearances to our sense the programs CIA programs or other
Speaker 2: d D programs were born in the mainland, he said
Speaker 2: about half. So I said, you know, what are we
Speaker 2: going to do? That is a counter intelligence nightmare, But
Speaker 2: he said, we are very limited and what we can
Speaker 2: do because it would be dismissed as racial profiling. Now,
Speaker 2: don't get me started in Wine and win Oe actually
Speaker 2: graduated from Texas A and M. And he's never reconvicted
Speaker 2: of anything. So I'm not saying anything. But when win
Speaker 2: Hoe was subjects of prosecution, as soon as he raised
Speaker 2: the racial profiling card, he was home free. Right, he
Speaker 2: was free and he was never prosecuted. He actually sued
Speaker 2: the United States government for racial profiling. Right.
Speaker 1: It's uh yeah, it's it's scary. It's frustrating because it's
Speaker 1: almost like, what's the point because we're not going to
Speaker 1: do anything about it. I mean, and I know that
Speaker 1: our our CIA counter intelligence people are FBI counter intelligent.
Speaker 1: I know they are working as hard as they can.
Speaker 1: They they must be completely frustrated.
Speaker 3: In these suits.
Speaker 4: It's the same thing on the on the cyber warfare
Speaker 4: or cyber intelligence even aspect of it, that the Chinese
Speaker 4: have consistently penetrated our systems they've hacked our systems, and
Speaker 4: through through experience they have shown they have tested us,
Speaker 4: and we have demonstrated back to them that we won't
Speaker 4: do a damn thing in retaliation.
Speaker 3: So they can just take they can steal.
Speaker 4: All of our data, they can hack into all of
Speaker 4: our systems, and we won't do shit about it.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, that's true. It's so very one sided. You know,
Speaker 2: they've got a large intelligence presence in the United States,
Speaker 2: with the United Nations, with the embassy, with the consulates.
Speaker 2: We are very limited in the number of people that
Speaker 2: we CIA can get into China, and even when they
Speaker 2: get there. If you think it was hard to operate
Speaker 2: in Moscow during the Cold War when I was there,
Speaker 2: with the suffocating surveillance, we were all under think about
Speaker 2: how it would be to operate in downtown Beijing today,
Speaker 2: or any city in China with the unlimited resources they
Speaker 2: throw against us, with cameras everywhere, with sensors, with drones,
Speaker 2: with observation posts. It's a counter intelligence challenge unlike anything
Speaker 2: we faced before. Now that doesn't mean we can't do it,
Speaker 2: and I would hope and believe that we are doing it,
Speaker 2: but it's never been harder. So they make it make
Speaker 2: life very difficult for us to operate back there, whereas
Speaker 2: in the United States they have pretty much carte blanche.
Speaker 2: The FBI, as good as they are, as committed as
Speaker 2: they are, as professional as they are, honestly are overwhelmed
Speaker 2: by the number of Chinese cases that are coming away.
Speaker 2: Array had been very outspoken and pointing that out that
Speaker 2: the Chinese are killing us, that they are the number
Speaker 2: one threat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jim, real quick to kind of get back to
Speaker 1: the book a little bit, because I want to give
Speaker 1: people a little insight into into the delicious treat that
Speaker 1: they will be getting when they do order this book
Speaker 1: and read it. You have the Ten Commandments of counter Intelligence. Yes,
Speaker 1: and and what I really like about that is because
Speaker 1: you state what it is, you give a description of it,
Speaker 1: and then and then you uh sort of show how
Speaker 1: that how that plays out. Can you let me get
Speaker 1: to it real?
Speaker 3: Okay? Can you tell us what they are? So Commandment
Speaker 3: number one, uh be offensive?
Speaker 2: Yes? Yeah. The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence the result of
Speaker 2: my years of experience and counter intelligence, and I learned
Speaker 2: some things I think that I wanted to share with
Speaker 2: other counter intelligence professionals, maybe even future counter intelligence professionals
Speaker 2: ways that I think we can do our job better.
Speaker 2: And the first commandment may be the most important that
Speaker 2: I refer to it already, That is, be offensive. US
Speaker 2: counter intelligence is too passive. It's too defensive. You know,
Speaker 2: we're sitting back, we're hunkering down, We're looking for things
Speaker 2: to come our way. We've got to do a better
Speaker 2: job than that. We've got to take the action to them.
Speaker 2: We got to hit in a hard and we're going
Speaker 2: to do that, I believe through a better effort of
Speaker 2: recruiting their intelligence officers and also by sending double agents
Speaker 2: their way. So that's the two prongs that I was
Speaker 2: referring to, penetrations and double agent operations. If we do
Speaker 2: a better job of offensive counter intelligence against the Chinese,
Speaker 2: we can tell the scale back in our favor.
Speaker 3: Commandment two, Honor your professionals.
Speaker 2: Honor our professionals is very important. We talked about this also.
Speaker 2: We count intelligence professionals have not been respected. We've not
Speaker 2: been treated as the full professional colleagues that we should be.
Speaker 2: We're inconvenient, were unpopular. You know, I refer to counter
Speaker 2: intelligence professionals as the skunk at the garden party. When
Speaker 2: we show up. It's not pleasant. We don't bring good news.
Speaker 2: There's our job is to point out which the threats
Speaker 2: are and how you're vulnerable and how your operations may
Speaker 2: be flawed. They don't want to hear that. We've got
Speaker 2: to treat our counter intelligence people better. We've got to
Speaker 2: recruit them from the top ranks of the different agencies.
Speaker 2: We've got to promote them. We've got to recognize them.
Speaker 2: We've got to give them awards. We've got to appreciate
Speaker 2: what they do. They basically are underappreciated professional category and
Speaker 2: that needs to change.
Speaker 3: This is an adult show.
Speaker 1: You can say that they get shot upon, like yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, I mean honestly, reading this and I'll
Speaker 1: tell you, like, reading this made me realize, like I've
Speaker 1: never not, you know, not respected somebody because they're in
Speaker 1: counter intelligence. But this book gave me a true appreciation
Speaker 1: for what that is. Because I can see where people
Speaker 1: might accuse you of being chicken little. But but the
Speaker 1: thing is is that all the cases in here had
Speaker 1: indicators that were ignored.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, and you need good counterintelligence professionals to be
Speaker 2: on the job and to pick up on those indicators.
Speaker 2: And quite too often these cases, these indicators have been missed. Yeah,
Speaker 2: when you go back, Dave and Jack and look at
Speaker 2: all the cases that we know about, all the Americans
Speaker 2: will be traders when you do the damage says, and
Speaker 2: you go back and talk to people. In every case
Speaker 2: I can think of, people saw something, they saw anomalies,
Speaker 2: they saw things that were questionable in the behavior, the attitude, changes,
Speaker 2: the lifestyles, the finances of these people, but they didn't
Speaker 2: speak up or those signs were missed because the worn't
Speaker 2: counter intelligence security people there to see what was going on. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: we need to do a much better job with that.
Speaker 2: That's been a recurring problem.
Speaker 1: I actually And one of the things that you're that
Speaker 1: you're you know, like you're reflective, ab out and forthright
Speaker 1: in this book is that you said even I'm guilty
Speaker 1: of that because you happen to be friends with a
Speaker 1: relatively famous person.
Speaker 3: Uh, mister Ames, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's a ainful topic because I didn't live
Speaker 2: up to my responsibility sufficiently, and I will take full
Speaker 2: blame for that. I've known Rick since nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 2: I knew he was a substandard performer. I knew he
Speaker 2: was abusing alcohol. I should have gone to security. Early on,
Speaker 2: I said, listen, there may not be anything to it,
Speaker 2: but I've got concerns about the suitability of this officer.
Speaker 2: But I didn't do it, and you know I didn't
Speaker 2: do it because it was countercultural for us to rent
Speaker 2: out a colleague. And you'll see that in any close
Speaker 2: knit group. You both saw it in your careers. You
Speaker 2: don't want to make life difficult for a colleague and
Speaker 2: friend that are one of us. You just don't call
Speaker 2: him out on it, and that's a mistake. We've got
Speaker 2: to change that culture. We got to make it acceptable
Speaker 2: to go forward when we see something. But it's a
Speaker 2: tough nut to crack because we are close knit. We
Speaker 2: are bonded as colleagues when you share a mission, when
Speaker 2: you share some risk in your careers, and you both
Speaker 2: know as well as I do what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2: You have a special closeness that you feel with these
Speaker 2: people who worked and risk their lives beside you. You're
Speaker 2: not going to go forward when you see something wrong.
Speaker 2: It's just a fact.
Speaker 1: I think we also have a tendency to make excuses
Speaker 1: for people that we are close to. We don't see
Speaker 1: it in the same life that we would if it
Speaker 1: were somebody who.
Speaker 3: He has a drinking problem. But he's a good dude.
Speaker 3: He's a good dude.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and we I mean we do this
Speaker 1: with family, We do this for friends, We do it
Speaker 1: with people that work close to It's a natural human
Speaker 1: tendency to make excuses for them.
Speaker 2: It's so easy to do, isn't it to rationalize those
Speaker 2: concerns away. And also you can tell yourself, you know,
Speaker 2: it's not my job. It's not my job to react
Speaker 2: to these telltale signs that they see. Well, it is
Speaker 2: your job. I think anybody who has classified access United
Speaker 2: States government has the responsibility to come forward when you
Speaker 2: see something. But that's a work in progress. D i
Speaker 2: A I think leads the pack. They have training programs
Speaker 2: for their people where they acquaint them to how to
Speaker 2: report something when they see it, and it's paid off.
Speaker 2: You can even do it anonymously if you want. We
Speaker 2: can protect your anonymity. But people have gone to the
Speaker 2: security and counter intelligence people of DIDA and they have
Speaker 2: enabled them to start investigations. Anna Montes is a perfect
Speaker 2: case in point. It was an alert coworker who said,
Speaker 2: you know, something just doesn't smell right. About Anna, and
Speaker 2: I'm going to go to the counter intelligence people. I
Speaker 2: just make my instinctive reaction to her known to them
Speaker 2: and put it in the hands of the professionals. Let
Speaker 2: them move forward, and they can do it discreetly. They
Speaker 2: can protect her long term professional equities if she's innocent.
Speaker 2: But she wasn't. She inspired for the Cubans for years,
Speaker 2: and that goodness that person came forward, because Anna Montes
Speaker 2: would probably be retiring about now with all kinds of
Speaker 2: medals and awards and have been working for the China
Speaker 2: for the Cubans all those years, not having been caught.
Speaker 1: And and it's not as if her coworker was she
Speaker 1: was Montana. She was not shy about her anti American
Speaker 1: pro Cuban views, which she was.
Speaker 2: She was blatant about it. Uh, And people knew it,
Speaker 2: but nobody really went to the right people express those concerns.
Speaker 2: And then again, uh, you know, we are people that
Speaker 2: have freedom of speech. You just work for the government.
Speaker 2: You can have a difference of opinion with our government
Speaker 2: in a given country. H And so she was not
Speaker 2: alone in expressing some sympathy for the Cuban revolution and
Speaker 2: the Cuban people. There were a lot of people in
Speaker 2: our own government were soft on Cuban right that in
Speaker 2: itself would not have been disqualifying or grounds for dismissal,
Speaker 2: but it should have problems. Did a closer look. Thank goodness,
Speaker 2: that's what happened.
Speaker 4: We have a few viewer questions I'd love to get into,
Speaker 4: but before that, there's something I really I got to
Speaker 4: ask you since we have you here, is about this
Speaker 4: theory out there about the so called fourth man, that
Speaker 4: there were these three traders Edward.
Speaker 3: Lee, Howard, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hansen at FBI.
Speaker 4: There's this theory out there that there was a fourth
Speaker 4: unidentified mole at CIA. And you are that you are
Speaker 4: the subject matter expert, so I would really love to
Speaker 4: hear your thoughts. You got Robert Bears Bob Bear's book there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bob Bear's book is on my desk, and I
Speaker 2: talked to Bob Bear a lot about this. I mentioned
Speaker 2: in the book a couple of times. I'm a believer,
Speaker 2: a believer I have come to believe that there is
Speaker 2: a fourth man who has not been on coverage yet.
Speaker 2: And Bob Bear points his finger pretty squarely ut at
Speaker 2: a suspect. So yeah, I'm glad Bob wrote that book. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it took a lot of research on his part. You
Speaker 2: probably know Bob. He comes from similar backgrounds to two
Speaker 2: of you. He is a bulldog. He is tough, ruthless.
Speaker 2: When he's got a hold of something, he's not gonna
Speaker 2: let it go. And way back, a long time ago,
Speaker 2: they talked to me about his Fourth Man theory and
Speaker 2: I listened respectfully, patiently. Milk Bearden in his book The
Speaker 2: Main Enemy also raised the prospect of the Fourth Man.
Speaker 2: In other words, if you look at Ames, if you
Speaker 2: look at Edward E. Howard, if you look at Jim Nicholson,
Speaker 2: all who will be traders from within the CIA. There
Speaker 2: are things that we lost, assets that we lost. They
Speaker 2: cannot be attributed to any of them. So who did it?
Speaker 2: And I believe it was the fourth Man. I would
Speaker 2: like nothing better see the fourth Man brought to justice.
Speaker 2: There's no statute of limitations in my mind for someone
Speaker 2: who portrays our country.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we will have Milt on this summer. We'll
Speaker 4: be able to discuss that with him a little bit. O.
Speaker 2: Mel Beard. Oh, he's terrific. Yeah, he'll be a great interview. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and he Milt Knife talked about Bear's book and about
Speaker 2: the fourth Man theory, and he's a He's a very
Speaker 2: interesting person and very knowledgeable and a great interviews. He's
Speaker 2: very very colorful and outspoken. I think the world of
Speaker 2: Milk a real pro We work very closely together.
Speaker 4: I'm going to get through some some of our viewers
Speaker 4: have questions.
Speaker 3: I'll try to get through here.
Speaker 4: Kjam asks while serving in the Soviet Union, was the
Speaker 4: CIA primarily focused on developing assets or were they also
Speaker 4: monitoring audiologues or opportunists and positions of authority, perhaps like
Speaker 4: Putin as well.
Speaker 2: Now, the reality of our presence in Moscow was that
Speaker 2: we could not do active recruitment operations there. We were
Speaker 2: so covered by the KGB that we could not have
Speaker 2: any meaningful contact, even assessment contact with targets there. We
Speaker 2: were dependent on the people who were recruited outside Russia,
Speaker 2: Russian intelligence officers, Russian diplomats, other Russian so we could
Speaker 2: get our hands on outside the country well we had access,
Speaker 2: and then prepare them, train them to send them back
Speaker 2: to Moscow. So our job was not to do the
Speaker 2: classic recruitment cycle, we couldn't really do that in Moscow,
Speaker 2: but to handle the recruited sources, including people who have
Speaker 2: been recruited outside. Now, that is not one hundred percent accurate,
Speaker 2: because there were some people who were able to make
Speaker 2: contact with us inside Russia, inside Moscow, and that we
Speaker 2: were then able to recruit and handle without that external component.
Speaker 2: One real good example of that is Adolf Tokunchhov, a
Speaker 2: billion dollar spy. We didn't recruit him outside the country.
Speaker 2: It came to us in Moscow volunteered in services. But
Speaker 2: that's really more of an exception than the rule. Shame off,
Speaker 2: shame off. Who I worked witherly was someone who also
Speaker 2: who was not technically to recruited outside Russia, although he
Speaker 2: did approach one of our people in another Eastern European country,
Speaker 2: but he was basically an internal volunteer.
Speaker 1: You know, And I don't think like sometimes it's hard
Speaker 1: to have an appreciation for what the what's going on
Speaker 1: with these people when they do approach you, because if
Speaker 1: an American gets caught, they'll get arrested. In a lot
Speaker 1: of these countries, they get caught, they're going to get executed.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, the penalty for espionage in Russia is almost
Speaker 2: always execution. Ames killed many many Russians yeah, I betrayed
Speaker 2: their identity. I don't know how I can live with himself,
Speaker 2: you know, not only betrayed our country. He's a murderer.
Speaker 2: I feel the same way about Edward le Howard to
Speaker 2: a lesser extent. Yeah, that's true. There's a disparity and
Speaker 2: the risks that we face. Those people are risking their lives.
Speaker 2: And let me tell you what were so heartening for
Speaker 2: me as a CI officer operating in Moscow handling some
Speaker 2: of these people. So many of them came our way
Speaker 2: for physiological reasons. They were people who saw how the
Speaker 2: Russian system, the Soviet regime was oppressing their own people,
Speaker 2: was denying their own people basic rights, strangling their economy,
Speaker 2: and they wanted to strike back against that, and they
Speaker 2: courageously decided that one way that they could do that,
Speaker 2: but by secretly working with the CIA. I have tremendous
Speaker 2: respect for those people. Some of the people I handled
Speaker 2: categorically refused to accept any money from US because that
Speaker 2: would team the purity of their motivation. They were doing
Speaker 2: what they were doing because they loved Russia. They wanted
Speaker 2: to see Russia return to a democratic process. They wanted
Speaker 2: the Russian people to be liberated from that terrible communist
Speaker 2: system that they were living under. Those people I respected tremendously,
Speaker 2: and to lose them was particularly painful because they were
Speaker 2: doing what they were doing for a very, very noble reason.
Speaker 2: I won't reject Russians who come to us because they
Speaker 2: want the money. If they give us the intelligence, they
Speaker 2: earn it, and I'm happy to pay it to them.
Speaker 2: In fact, if you have a Russian who is venal,
Speaker 2: who wants to do espionage on our behalf for money,
Speaker 2: those are the easiest recruitment you ever make, because if
Speaker 2: you can buy them, it's just question negotiating the price.
Speaker 2: So those are easy. Those all aren't always nice people, right,
Speaker 2: They're quite often fairly sleazy people. You deal with some
Speaker 2: people in this business that you would not want to
Speaker 2: befriend under any other circumstances. But we owe them respect
Speaker 2: because they're helping our country, right and even if their
Speaker 2: motive is impure in our eyes, we're still going to
Speaker 2: protect it. We're still going to appreciate what they do
Speaker 2: for us.
Speaker 3: Brad asks is. I think we've talked about this a bit.
Speaker 4: Is China the new Russia Cuba in terms of how
Speaker 4: hard it is to collect human intelligence.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Yeah, squared multiplied many times over.
Speaker 3: K jam asks.
Speaker 4: I remember watching former CIA agents in the eighties on
Speaker 4: Phil Donahues speaking out against covert ops, and I believe
Speaker 4: if there were eventual changes at the CIA, was that
Speaker 4: important or still controversial. Maybe maybe he's referring to Iran Contra,
Speaker 4: but I'm not sure what you think, Jim.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we had, particularly in the eighties, turncoats, some people
Speaker 2: from inside who went rogue, who didntnounced what we were doing.
Speaker 2: Philip Aigy is a good example of that. I regret
Speaker 2: that they reacted to some of the legitimate abuses that
Speaker 2: we've been involved in Iran Contra. A he needed a
Speaker 2: lot of people, some of our patronage of right wing dictators.
Speaker 2: Some of the things that we did that raised ethical
Speaker 2: issues that I point out in my first book, fair
Speaker 2: Play Turned. Some people against us couldn't accept what we
Speaker 2: were doing, but they had no right to speak up,
Speaker 2: to betray secrets, to reveal our operations. So I have
Speaker 2: contempt for those people. I hate makers of any kind
Speaker 2: because there are channels where they can express their descent,
Speaker 2: but they cannot take it upon themselves to betray our
Speaker 2: personnel and our operations. AG betrayed every CI case officer
Speaker 2: he knew about, ruining careers, putting him in danger. There's
Speaker 2: no excuse for that. Jim Nicholson did the same thing.
Speaker 2: He was on the faculty down at the farm, so
Speaker 2: he knew the identity of all of our junior case
Speaker 2: officers being trained down there, So he was compromising their
Speaker 2: covers even before they got to the field.
Speaker 1: Right, he compromised like like a year's worth of agents.
Speaker 2: Right, he did. Despicable. Jim Nicholson is one of my
Speaker 2: case studies, but he's beneath contempt in my eyes.
Speaker 1: And then there was also the was it the chief
Speaker 1: of station who was killed in Athens after his identity
Speaker 1: was leaked by Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's the welch. Yeah, after he was outed in AG's book.
Speaker 2: A short time later he was killed by terrorists on
Speaker 2: the streets of Athens. And I put that, I put
Speaker 2: that to the discredit of of of a G. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's horrible. Uh. Well, James President Bush was very aware
Speaker 2: of that operation, and when he lectured in my classes
Speaker 2: at the Bush Pool, he always brought that case up,
Speaker 2: and he always teared up because he felt deeply the
Speaker 2: loss of CI officers who fell in the land of
Speaker 2: duty like I was, particularly those who were killed because
Speaker 2: of trader treasures like like like a.
Speaker 4: G uh Mohammad says, I had the pleasure sure of
Speaker 4: meeting mister Olsen at w T A m U absolutely
Speaker 4: life changing. A question if I could reading unrestricted warfare
Speaker 4: by China's intelligence and the not Russian Russian hack, how
Speaker 4: do we develop cybersecurity offensive talent here in America.
Speaker 2: I think we've got the raw material. I mean, so
Speaker 2: many young Americans are very skilled in computers, so I
Speaker 2: think we need to go out and recruit the brightest
Speaker 2: from that crowd that we can. I find young men
Speaker 2: and women who have a particular talent for cyber with
Speaker 2: computer science degrees, who have shown a knack for hacking
Speaker 2: in their own rights, sign them up and subject them
Speaker 2: to a really intense training program. Make them world class hackers.
Speaker 2: You know, I want, I want us to be more
Speaker 2: offensive against the Chinese than they are against us.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting because when you look at like
Speaker 1: these ransomware gangs in Russia like Kanti and Yuk, and
Speaker 1: then you look at the Chinese, Well, the Chinese hackers
Speaker 1: are are are a lot of those persistent threats are
Speaker 1: part of the Chinese government, even though they say they're not.
Speaker 1: But it's almost like America sort of needs to kind
Speaker 1: of let the gloves off and go back to the
Speaker 1: idea of privateers with you know, in the sense of,
Speaker 1: you know, these kids get arrested when they hack, when
Speaker 1: they hack anything.
Speaker 3: It's like, let them.
Speaker 1: Form their own groups and do whatever they want against
Speaker 1: Russian and China as long as it doesn't you know,
Speaker 1: because that's what with these ransomware groups. They're not allowed
Speaker 1: to touch anything in Russia or part of the Russian Federation.
Speaker 1: You know, they're not allowed to do that. But its
Speaker 1: hands off legal wise, as long as they're you know,
Speaker 1: operating against you know, other nations.
Speaker 2: I like that you're thinking like a CI officer, Dave,
Speaker 2: and I hope the right people are listening and it
Speaker 2: can implement.
Speaker 3: Some of that.
Speaker 2: That's a good approach, I mean, a good approach.
Speaker 3: We had privateers before, right, I mean, I wouldn't do
Speaker 3: that and use letters of mark.
Speaker 4: Yeah exactly, Andrew says on a letter note. He's asking you, Jim,
Speaker 4: did he ever get to meet the guy in the
Speaker 4: CIA who decided to put a microphone inside a cat,
Speaker 4: the so called acoustic kitty.
Speaker 2: I was very familiar with that operation. Yeah, I thought
Speaker 2: it was brilliant. I thought it was brilliant for your
Speaker 2: your audience is not familiar with acoustic kitty. We know
Speaker 2: that from surveillance, from observation that this high priority target
Speaker 2: group quite often made in a conference room and we
Speaker 2: could see through the window and we saw that they
Speaker 2: had a pet cat at that quite often was in
Speaker 2: the room when these probably probably sensitive conversations was going on.
Speaker 2: And so the CIA kidnapped the cats, cat napped cap
Speaker 2: and performed ah an operation to insert a listening device
Speaker 2: into the cat underneath the fur so it wouldn't be detected,
Speaker 2: and acoustic kitty, uh sitting in on those meetings could
Speaker 2: broadcast to our listening post outside what was going on.
Speaker 3: I liked.
Speaker 2: I liked the creativity of.
Speaker 3: Did it actually work?
Speaker 2: Jim? I can't comment on that. Bob Gates talks about
Speaker 2: him a lot, and he hints that there was a payoff,
Speaker 2: because I.
Speaker 4: Mean the story I think that, like if you if
Speaker 4: you google this and try to read what's on like Wikipedia,
Speaker 4: the story is like they did a test run and
Speaker 4: the cat immediately just wandered out of the park end
Speaker 4: of the road and was hit by a car, and
Speaker 4: that was kind of like the end of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's possible, but I can't say that the
Speaker 2: concept of the operation, some of the implication was not apocryph.
Speaker 3: So there is a there is a bit more.
Speaker 2: There's a kernel of truths that maybe more than a colonel.
Speaker 3: A bit, a bit more to the story.
Speaker 1: We missed one of Andrews' questions to what extent might
Speaker 1: have Anglton been grasping after the signs that the Walker
Speaker 1: ring had been at Heck compromised us communications.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Walker was doing his dirty when Angleton was
Speaker 2: writing Supreme at the agency. Walker is another great example
Speaker 2: of someone who should have been caught a lot earlier.
Speaker 2: He was very flamboyantly showing off his unexplainable wealth. He
Speaker 2: was recruiting subordinates, recruited his own family is his strange
Speaker 2: wife actually came forward at some point to denounce him,
Speaker 2: but she was dismissed as an alcoholic, embittered spouse x
Speaker 2: spouse not taken seriously. So he got away with it
Speaker 2: for a long longer than you should have. And I'll
Speaker 2: put that I'll put that on Angleton's doorstep. If my
Speaker 2: counter intelligence had been better, I think we might have
Speaker 2: done a better job of detecting Walker a lot earlier.
Speaker 2: Johnny Walker, he did a lot of damage. I was
Speaker 2: in the Navy myself. I'm familiar with the kW seven,
Speaker 2: the kW twenty six, and for him to give them
Speaker 2: the key list for our coding machines was it would
Speaker 2: have been devastating because and only Kalugan makes a point
Speaker 2: of this. Only Kalugan handled Walker, and he said during
Speaker 2: that period, that lengthy period, thanks to Johnny Walker, the
Speaker 2: KGB could decrypt all of the encrypted communications of the
Speaker 2: United States Navy during those years.
Speaker 4: Last question here my peers early twenties. I guess my
Speaker 4: peers in the early twenties are inundated with ideology, critique
Speaker 4: of the Chinese state, with buzzwords like racism or imperialism.
Speaker 4: How do you approach young people about this issue pragmatically?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's not that hard. Jack. Of course,
Speaker 2: I'm in an a privileged position here because we select
Speaker 2: our students at the Bushel School so carefully. They are
Speaker 2: highly motivated, very patriotic, very idealistic. So that's not a
Speaker 2: good cross section. But there are a lot of young
Speaker 2: people out there who are thinking straight, who don't buy
Speaker 2: any of this idiological indoctrination, who love our country, who
Speaker 2: want to serve our country, and so they should step forward.
Speaker 2: They should not be deterred by any of that, They
Speaker 2: should not allow themselves to be brainwashed, and they should
Speaker 2: find a way to prepare themselves for a very meaningful career.
Speaker 2: And I hope some of those people listening will pursue
Speaker 2: this call to serve our country because it is indescribably
Speaker 2: rewarding to be able to serve our country. You both
Speaker 2: did that in your way. I had the honor of
Speaker 2: doing that myself. You know, it's not all about money,
Speaker 2: it's not all about power, it's not all about prestige
Speaker 2: and status. There are a lot more important things in life,
Speaker 2: and what could be more honorable, more meaningful at the
Speaker 2: end of the day than serving our country. So I
Speaker 2: urge young people to take a really good look at
Speaker 2: the military, at law enforcement, and in my case specifically
Speaker 2: the intelligence community, and find your niche find a way
Speaker 2: to become involved. We're all hiring and you'll never regret it.
Speaker 2: You go on one night feeling good about which you
Speaker 2: did not everybody can say that now. I've got nothing
Speaker 2: against corporate America. Our country needs good corporate executives, our
Speaker 2: economy needs good corporate executives. But for me and for
Speaker 2: most of the students that I deal with, a career
Speaker 2: in corporate America would never be fulfilling. You would not
Speaker 2: be serving something you truly believe it. You're not making
Speaker 2: a difference in an area that you care about. So
Speaker 2: I think all of us who were there now you
Speaker 2: can confirm this in your own careers feel privileged to
Speaker 2: have had the opportunity to serve the way we did.
Speaker 2: I hope there are some young people out there. I
Speaker 2: hope to look at graduate programs or service in the military,
Speaker 2: service in law enforcement, any level. I'll put in a pitch.
Speaker 2: I may for the Bush Bull of Texan and University,
Speaker 2: because we are designed specifically to prepare high quality young
Speaker 2: men and women for meaningful careers in the United States
Speaker 2: intelligence community. We do other things here too, diplomacy, law enforcement,
Speaker 2: international organizations, but our intelligence studies program is something we're
Speaker 2: very proud of.
Speaker 4: I have one final question, and I promise we'll wrap
Speaker 4: things up. Jim Isaac asks has there been any more
Speaker 4: proof of Russian interference of the twenty sixteen election. Is
Speaker 4: there anything that could have been done to prevent it,
Speaker 4: or at least less than the damage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think that I've ever seen any convincing
Speaker 2: evidence there was particularly meaningful significant I don't think it
Speaker 2: changed any votes. Sure, they were playing around with some
Speaker 2: of those websites, some of that social media, they were
Speaker 2: tinkering with it, but I don't think it had any
Speaker 2: real impact. And I've never seen any real evidence that
Speaker 2: there was this monster plot to steer the election one
Speaker 2: way or the other. I think a lot of that
Speaker 2: was concocted. I think it was something that was totally inappropriate,
Speaker 2: verging on illegal to have fabricated. If it was fabricated,
Speaker 2: some of that some of the most lurid accusations against
Speaker 2: against Russia. I don't put anything past Putin Voted is
Speaker 2: someone I followed since the nineteen eighties. I know what
Speaker 2: he's capable of. He is a vicious man with no
Speaker 2: scruples whatsoever. You just look at what he's doing in
Speaker 2: Ukraine now, unspeakably cruel. But no, I don't think he
Speaker 2: had any kind of a massive role in our elections, certainly,
Speaker 2: hope not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Iranians were also trying to influence that. They
Speaker 1: didn't make much headway either.
Speaker 2: Correct. Our system, I think is good. I think it's
Speaker 2: basically secure. We can always tighten it up. We can
Speaker 2: do what we can to prevent any kind of fraud,
Speaker 2: cheating in the elections. That's not American. But I believe
Speaker 2: in our democracy. I believe in our institutions, and I
Speaker 2: think that our elections are basically secure and that we
Speaker 2: do a pretty good job of policing them. We can
Speaker 2: always do better. We have to close some loopholes, perhaps,
Speaker 2: but it's not a massive violation of our democratic principles
Speaker 2: what we've seen here so far. That's my opinion.
Speaker 3: Scott. Also, do we have another.
Speaker 4: Let's see here, Scott, Oh, okay, last one for real
Speaker 4: this time I promised. How did you How did your
Speaker 4: law degree impact your decision making during your CIA career.
Speaker 2: That's a good question. I never really used my legal
Speaker 2: experience on the job. I was not recruited by the
Speaker 2: CI as a lawyer, but in my training class at
Speaker 2: twenty five down at the farm, eight of us had
Speaker 2: law degrees, and that meant that the CI recognized the
Speaker 2: value of the legal training that we received. And I
Speaker 2: did not specifically apply my knowledge of the law, but
Speaker 2: things I learned at laws school, I think we're valuable
Speaker 2: to me. The critical thinking, the ability to sort through
Speaker 2: a lot of data and extract what was relevant, the
Speaker 2: advocacy skills. I think we're things that I could use.
Speaker 2: So I didn't end up practicing law as I had
Speaker 2: originally intended, but I don't regret having gone to law school.
Speaker 2: I'll tell young people today that if you want a
Speaker 2: career in intelligence, law school is not the best path
Speaker 2: to get there because you do a lot of coursework
Speaker 2: that's totally irrelevant. Now there are graduate programs that are
Speaker 2: much more designed to prepare you specifically for a career
Speaker 2: in national security. That's the direction I would go. They
Speaker 2: didn't really exist in my day. But when I went
Speaker 2: to law school, I wasn't thinking national security. I was
Speaker 2: thinking serving my community as a small down lawyer. If
Speaker 2: CI had not come calling, i'd probably be practicing law
Speaker 2: in Clinton. I what today because they were making the
Speaker 2: best offer. They would have been a good life. And
Speaker 2: I was heading to Clinton because they offered me a
Speaker 2: paid membership in the Clinton Country Club. If I went
Speaker 2: to Clinton, a nice little county seat town on the
Speaker 2: Mississippi River. It would have been nice. I could have
Speaker 2: had a good life. I certainly don't would never trade
Speaker 2: places with my law school colleagues who went into the
Speaker 2: practice of law. I'm sure it was fine for them.
Speaker 2: It's very important, but what I did was far, far
Speaker 2: above and beyond what I ever would have dreamed. I'd
Speaker 2: love the CIA, but I will say that is rewarding
Speaker 2: as the CIA career was. I think what I'm doing
Speaker 2: now and working with the next generation of intelligence officers,
Speaker 2: next generation of spycatchers, next generation of FBI special agents,
Speaker 2: is even more of I told Meredith the other day
Speaker 2: and that I think what we are doing here has
Speaker 2: more long term impact for our country that our services
Speaker 2: the CIA. I'm very sincere about that. I can't give
Speaker 2: you any numbers, but no, I agree. I wish school
Speaker 2: Bush School is doing its part and sending young men
Speaker 2: and women in the intelligence community.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to. I want to, if you don't mind.
Speaker 1: I know we've kept you really long, but I would
Speaker 1: like to end this interview with one quick story from
Speaker 1: your book, if you would, because you know you paint
Speaker 1: this picture of Angleton and what he did to counterintelligence
Speaker 1: at the time, where he had all these kind of
Speaker 1: weird theories and stuff like that, and that that environment
Speaker 1: was kind of filtering down. Can you tell us about
Speaker 1: the counterintelligence officer that worked in the vault.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's a good case because it's illustrave of
Speaker 2: what have happened to people. You know, one of my
Speaker 2: ten comme admascount intelligence. Don't stay too long because if
Speaker 2: you live constantly in that world of illusion, deception, manipulation, conspiracy,
Speaker 2: double thinking, it can play tricks on your mind. That's
Speaker 2: what happened to Angleton in twenty years. He lost touch
Speaker 2: with reality. He went off the deep end. And this
Speaker 2: person that we're talking about was one of what we
Speaker 2: call the fundamentalists. They were the true believers. They were
Speaker 2: the people who surrounded Angleton and who were like minded.
Speaker 2: They'd been infected by the same disease of a conspiracy
Speaker 2: and the double think. And this person I used to
Speaker 2: see him go through this big vault door in the
Speaker 2: morning and look around, make certain odes watching, and then
Speaker 2: spin the dial and then pull this big vault door
Speaker 2: open and disappear inside clank. And I'm thinking to myself,
Speaker 2: what are they doing in there? What's he doing in there?
Speaker 2: How did they even breathe in there? And what I
Speaker 2: know now what he was doing was his life's work.
Speaker 2: He was doing endless research, counter intelligence, probing to prove
Speaker 2: that Angleton was the most that Angleton was the trader,
Speaker 2: which was crazy, totally irresponsible, unwarranted, unjustified. Angleton did a
Speaker 2: lot of damage, said I, but he was no Russian Bold.
Speaker 2: But anyway, that was the conclusion that this.
Speaker 1: When I read that, I imagine him and his vault
Speaker 1: with like st all the dots connected, because you said
Speaker 1: like he presented like a twenty five point summary of his.
Speaker 2: He produced his opus, the ci opus that actually went
Speaker 2: up to the seventh floor with his proof that Angleton
Speaker 2: is the trader, and of course it was dismissed for
Speaker 2: the ludicrous proposition that it was, but he believed it incredible,
Speaker 2: And there were people among the fundamentals who believe the
Speaker 2: craziest things. And I'm not I'm not going to give
Speaker 2: the FBI a pass either, because that same mindset was
Speaker 2: true with Jae Garruver. So all those years we had
Speaker 2: James's Angleton writing supreme at the CIA, and Angleton or
Speaker 2: and Hoover over at the FBI with the same kind
Speaker 2: of totally out of.
Speaker 4: Touch without entrenched bureaucrats with a conspiratorial worldview.
Speaker 2: Very dangerous and the disservice they did to our country
Speaker 2: cannot be exaggerated. Yeah. We uh, we suffered as a
Speaker 2: country because of their narrowness, their inability to see the
Speaker 2: real threats and to do something about the real threats.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So, folks, I hope you'll go out and check it.
Speaker 4: Check out the books to Catch a Spy and fair play.
Speaker 4: By our guest here tonight, Jim Wilson, former CIA head
Speaker 4: of Counterintelligence.
Speaker 3: We really appreciate your time, Jim. This has been an
Speaker 3: awesome interview. Yeah, we we did everybody by the Scott,
Speaker 3: I thank.
Speaker 2: You, Jack. I'm sorry, thank you, Dave appreciate it. Uh.
Speaker 2: We need to recruit some people to go out and
Speaker 2: catch some more spice warts.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: Hey, Scott, we know you asked the question. Sorry, we
Speaker 1: don't want to keep from anymore. But the answer to
Speaker 1: your question about the indicators are in this They're in
Speaker 1: the book. But I'm telling you, folks, read this book.
Speaker 1: It will open your eyes. It's it's truly amazing.
Speaker 4: And next week, next Friday, we'll be here with former
Speaker 4: Delta Force operator Dale Comstock.
Speaker 3: So it's gotta be a thank you very much for
Speaker 3: joining us tonight.
Speaker 2: I have a good night too, assas