March 26, 2025 • 69 mins
Forget pretty much everything you've heard about James Bond. While loosely based on espionage tactics of yesteryear, actual human-based tradecraft is far less glamorous -- around the globe, intelligence organizations make long-term investments in games that run for decades, carefully cultivating assets with such secrecy that, true story, some folks genuinely don't know who they're working for. In recent years, an extraordinary amount of these individuals have been arrested, tortured, murdered, or simply... disappeared. So what's going on? Why are so many spies getting busted? Tonight, Ben, Matt and Noel aim to find out.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They call me Ben. We were joined with our guest
super producer JJ. The main way, pause way. Most importantly,
you are you. You are here. That makes this the
stuff they don't want you to know. Fellow conspiracy realists,
Tonight's episode has been I would say a few years
in the making, decades arguably for sure.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
No question, Oh man, spies, a bridge of spies, a
bridge too far of spies?
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Perhaps what is the collective group name for spies in English?
And how there's a pride of lines, of flock of geese,
a murder of us and unkindness of ravens. Maybe it's
a conspiracy of spies.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Yeah, that's good, that's good. Or maybe uh holdan no, no, Matt,
I think you got on.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
An anonymous you go an anonymity of smitties.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I like all of these answers. Here's the thing that
happened in twenty nineteen. The news hit the US public
in a way it doesn't usually with a prominence it
doesn't often attain. And the argument from the press was,
not only did it appear multiple spies were getting their
cover blown, but something untoward had been happening to these
(01:45):
assets or these operators or these agents for years. One
by what, people were arrested, some were murdered, others, according
to official sources, simply disappeared. And as we record this evening, observers,
including former government officials, will tell you this compromise, whatever
(02:06):
it is, continues today. We've talked about this off air.
Opinions differ on how this is occurring, why this is occurring,
what role government US government institutions play, and what this
strange conflict between competing conspiracies means for the future. So
before we go on and ask what's happening, do you
(02:28):
guys remember these stories like they popped in the news
and then they sort of popped out of the zeitgeist.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, it's rather strange because it's kind of just how
that world works. Spies go missing, because when an asset
disappears or is killed, nobody is really supposed to acknowledge
that that occurs. Really, Yeah, unless it's being you know,
(02:57):
disclosed for a purpose. Right. You don't say, oh, yes,
our asset was taken out, like, you don't say that
publicly unless you're doing it for a reason.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
That's true, unless it's some sort of political maneuver. But
I guess is it fair to say that we've been
seeing more stories in the press where we kind of
do get some of that information like weirdly, like in
terms of you know, spies being discovered and their covers
being blown.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Yeah, it is true. That's why it's not normal. At least,
the disclosure is abnormal. And the purported rate of attrition
there's always a rate of attrition baked in. The reported
or purported rate of attrition is much higher than would
have been permitted ostensibly during the days of the Cold War,
(03:47):
which our Russian friends don't believe ever ended. That's the question.
What is happening here? Is it a bunch of sound
and fury signify nothing or is there something more through
the story?
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Well, we'll get right into it after a tiny, tiny
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Here are the facts. This is so dumb, but just
real quick, can we play a number station just for fun,
just to set the movie.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Yeah, yeah, we still have those left over, the ones
we didn't get to in our live show at the
National Sawdust in Brooklyn. Here we go.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Ah, Yes, the old school trade. As we explored in
a previous series on the history and Future of espionage,
a lot of the intelligence or trade work you see
in film and read and fiction, it's based on older
collection methods, you know, dead drops, handlers, aliases.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Yeah, whatever. The spy who is, you know, oftentimes depicted
a little bit stereotypically as a dashing hero, some sort
of brilliant, you know, quick on their feet, punchy character
who is fighting against some sort of shadowy super villain,
you know, or the spy themselves is the super villain.
(05:20):
As we've seen in you know again, pretty cliche depictions
of say, like Russian spies, like like Boris and Natasha
from Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Sure, or like Carla in the excellent I think was
John Lecuerr novels adapted into The most famous one would
be Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy. Yeah right.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
But you know, as we've learned over the years in
our explorations of human or you know, human intelligence, human
derived intelligence, we found that the most effective spy is
not someone who's secretive and you could look at in
a crowd and go, that guy seems like a spy.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Fella.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, it's just it's somebody that just looks like nobody
the exists in a crowd.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Like the gray Man in the Wheel of Time series
by Robert Jordan. Right, you want someone who is not,
you know, too short, not too tall, not too outside
of like one specific genre. You don't want them too attractive.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
Well, but I'm sure you don't remember the name of
this character. It is totally escaping me. But the guy
that Gary Oldman plays in Slow Horses the schlubby, alcoholic,
but like part of that, you know, unkempt. The look
of his and the way he carries himself in the
most low key way imaginable is what makes him really
good at what he does. What's that guy's name, Ben
Jackson Lamb Jackson Lamb, what a character? Love that show?
(06:44):
And I need to read the books.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
They're pretty great, honestly, but it might ruin the next
seasons for you. You know. Again, obviously, if you were
the head of an intelligence agency, you would want to
have read the books so that you could see what
was coming up next.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Well, Ben to that point, I'm wondering if a lot
of this news that we're talking about maybe has created
a resurgence and fascination with spies. There's a lot of
big spy shows right now that are very successful.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Black Bag is upcoming.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Black Doves is another one, really good one.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, there's a proliferation, right, and that goes into the
question of how much art and reality inform each other
and what the chicken in the egg situation is there.
We do have to tell you, folks, we cannot recommend
our earlier series enough, but check it out if you can.
Simply put, you can learn all about the history of
(07:43):
espionage in our previous series. But right now these evenings,
there aren't a lot of James Bond types, by which
we mean there aren't a ton of specific individuals going
country to country, region to region, mission with secret identities,
doing acts of intrigue and bravado and daring do people
(08:06):
doing right? Yeah, these people do exist, They do exist,
but there are far fewer now because they're less effective.
You know, think of all the technology that occurred since
he and Fleming was inspired to write Bond.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Yeah, and if you want to find out about a
real life spy type individual, dashing, daring, do kind of guy.
Check out the Ridiculous History episode on Roll Dahl, who
weirdly was very much that thing and may well have
been the inspiration for James Bond.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
And what's that guy? I always bring him up with
these who did the Oh he played sorrowmon Christopher Christopher
Lee Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, also had some also had
some dirt on his jacket. As they say. The thing is,
you know, if you're looking at the world now, you're
(09:00):
at widespread facial recognition, right, and you're looking at biometrics,
you're looking at big data algorithms, the bread crumbing of
activity in ways that ordinary like previous governments couldn't couldn't
have done. And you're looking at government hacks, intelligence sharing
like five Eyes long term wasn't super great for some operations.
(09:24):
And so each of these factors makes our sort of
old school roll doll h James Bond approach a little
less tenable but human. As you mentioned there, Matt is
far from a relic of the past. The game doesn't end.
The game shifts, you know, like when you're in like
(09:44):
when you beat a boss at the first act of
a final fight and then all of a sudden there's
a crazy animation and they recharge face too damnable.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Elden ring bosses. Who's that one at the end, Matt
with the with the striking red hair and the knife arms, Millennia.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Something like that.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
You know I'm talking about Matt. You probably beat her
in one pass, you monster.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
No one beats her one past.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
No, No, you got.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
To learn the pattern. What was her name though it
was Melina, meant some with it.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Characters confused, But that game, uh famously, at the very
end you fight a pretty tough boss and then a
very tough boss after that. It's like the second phase the.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Eld and Beast right right, the game doesn't end, the
game changes. So while our idea in fiction of a
living action figure is it's pretty great, you know, if
you're if you're making a script, a real human asset
is going to be a careful, long term investment, not
(10:56):
to too extraordinary. You want the infamous Deeper Agents of
Russia check out our upcoming episode on Operation ghost Stories.
Or you want someone like the Cambridge five asterisk because
we don't know how many there were.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Or you want socialites the Cambridge plus or minus five.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
We'll get We'll get to them at just a second,
because they're a great example. There are socialites that can
also get pulled, people who already exist in the upper
echelons of some kind of political economics structure, people who
have that access.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
I like your Glain Maxwell's sure.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Yeah, that's a great example, your gallains. Maybe as the
Os put it back in the day, your glorious amateurs.
It's it's pretty nuts, and it is all positioned toward
the idea of getting an edge of mitigating information asymmetry
(11:58):
on your side while propagating information asymmetry on the side
of the enemy. And these folks who are who are
real human, they're often they're not going to be doing
like a single mission or a paramilitary thing would be
very rare for this genre of person. We're talking years
(12:19):
and decades, quiet small moves, you know, getting that.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
Promotion, laying on the groundwork, getting other assets in place,
you know, informats, things like that, establishing networks, contacts, all
of that kind of stuff. That's that's again pretty well
depicted in Slow Horses. I think a lot of that
stuff is relatively on the mark.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
Yeah, and the weird thing is if we exercise empathy
for these people deep in hostile territory, they're making small
moves and they themselves have very limited information and somewhat ironic. Right,
they know a handler, they might know another couple people
like since we referenced a wheel of time, it's like
(12:59):
how the Black Asia is organized into what they call hearts.
I'm not going to go too deep into it. It's sorry,
that's already a spoiler. But the big things like having
someone in place to foil ironian nuclear activities, you know,
or Jimmy up there centrifuges.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Uh, it's a great expression that I gotta say, Jimmy
up a centrifuge. It's got to be the the whole back.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Well, we serve at the pleasure of Dylan Fagan, who
is our handler. So that kind of stuff is there
is the culmination of many other things that take a
lot longer. And if you are you know, if you're
like Noel Matton and JJ and Ben and you're you're
evaluating how to how to exercise intelligence or counterintelligence in
(13:52):
an enemy regime, the first question that occurs to you
when you're talking human is not how do I put
one of my my own outsiders on the inside. It's like,
why don't I find someone who's already on the inside,
you know, and just get them over to my cause
you save so much money, you save so much time.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Right oh yeah, yeah, But to do that you have
to either be extremely likable or extremely good at quietly
blackmailing someone.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Right. Yeah, This, this idea of turning someone to an
informant can happen through all sorts of means blackmail. Like
you said, financial compensation, appeal to ideology, or appeal to romance.
I would say romance is itself an ideology, you know,
but each avenue has their own sets of pros and
(14:46):
cons and strengths and weaknesses.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Yep. And every intelligence agency that you've ever heard of
works very, very, very astigiously, to to borrow word from
Ben's lovely vocabulary, towards acquiring high value informants. And once
you have one of those, to your point been that
rate of attrition can be high here because these are investments,
(15:11):
these are human capital. These are long term, long game
assets that are very expensive to maintain and also very
costly to lose.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Oh yeah, they're loath to let them go. Imagine you
have a car. Like imagine you bought a beat up car, right,
and you restored it yourself, and now you want to
drive it forever, right, you want to maybe the car
can take you to places you couldn't reach earlier. Sure,
that's a very bad comparison, but somewhat Well.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
The car also requires maintenance. The car also requires you know,
checking in on from time to time to make sure
everything's running as it's supposed to, that all that work
you did isn't being damaged by something that you can't see.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Well, you also have to spy on and all of
your spies, right, that's the like, one of the biggest
jobs you have as an intelligence agency is to keep
tabs on absolutely everything each individual human does. It is
just sounds like a horrifying existence.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
I don't think the quality of life is super great
if I'm being honest that I mean, yeah, the handlers
have handlers, right, the assets have handlers, The handlers have handlers.
The people at the top are fucking Orwellian.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Everybody in there is like you're an enemy. You're an enemy.
You're an enemy. You're an enemy, You're an enemy. I mean,
you're just like Jesus just just go have some ice cream.
Lay down.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Yes, the issue is sometimes they're right, but whole cloth.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
They're right about they're right about their own fears.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Well that's the problem. I mean, all this stuff is
very very much at play, and you know, to your
point about keeping tabs on all the spies, it's so
important too, because when one of your assets flips, especially
one that you've invested all that time and energy and
information intelligence into, how much they know can directly impact
(17:13):
you if they are turned, you know, to the enemy
or an enemy.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yeah, it was an interesting comment just a second ago
that reminded me of that line from Incubus, don't let
fear take the wheel and steer.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Wow, that's that's a good okay from the band to
use Incubus in conspiracy sense. No, it's true. That is
the seminal two thousands Classic Drive from the album Make
Yourself by Incubus.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
References are so.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Fresh because fear is what drives all this stuff, right,
Fear that somebody else's ideologies are going to overtake my ideology,
and then that world is going to change, and then
all the you know, all this stuff is going to
change because I'm so afraid that's ultimately what it is.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
I don't know if I could agree with that, Like
I hear you in some in some aspects, but would
we not also say there's ambition in there as well.
I don't.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Like it can be wrapped up in fear though. That's
a really good point, Ben, and that distinction I think
is important. But to me too, part of ambition is
fear that someone's gonna be better than you.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, I guess it, just don't I personally am not
comfortable putting a broad brush on on this, but I
do hear you fair enough.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I'm cool with it.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
But well, let's go to uh, let's go to Cambridge.
Let's start to get a sense of scale here with
the story of the Cambridge Spies. Cambridge is one of
the world's most prestigious universities, and the Cambridge five asterisk
or a group of spies that were turned by the
Soviet Union and pulled purposely from the upper crust of
(18:50):
British society.
Speaker 4 (18:52):
Sounds like bad news exactly. The Cambridge plus or minus
five they they you know, took time for this to
take place, this turn to the Soviets. They were active
from about the nineteen thirties until at least the early fifties.
This process took decades. The general public knew nothing about
(19:12):
the conspiracy until nineteen fifty one, and we still don't
really know entirely how many people were turned. Hence the
asterisk the plus or minus. Originally the group was the
Cambridge four, which sounds kind of like a do wop group,
and then they found a fifth person. Then they called
it the Cambridge five, and at some point just the
(19:34):
count kind of ended, right.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
That's an editorial thought. Yeah, it feels like at some
point they just stopped adding to the name. In a
couple of cases, these guys attained very high positions in government.
As we record today, there's still standing allegations against other
possible members of the group, pretty much all of whom
are dead at this point, which is often, you know,
(20:01):
one of the most shore fire ways for an operative
like this to escape. Funny story because partially because of
their socioeconomic position, none of the confirmed members were ever prosecuted.
This is a multi decade operation, and if we exercise
empathy then we can see that this had two very
different meanings to people on the other side of the
(20:23):
board from the UK Allied perspective, there's fear, right they
are damaged. From the Soviet perspective, there's ambition. It's a
huge win over multiple decades, like it changed the course
of the Cold War in some ways.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
But I guess, I guess what I'm trying to figure
out is how did it change anything if they had
these high level people, you know in the nineteen fifties,
But then the Cold War ends and the Soviet Union
is like collapses, So like, what did they actually win?
Speaker 4 (20:56):
What did they accomplish? Yeah, by turning these folks, that
is a good point. They didn't win, and they didn't make.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
The big win, right. They didn't win the war, they
would say, but they won battles, right, And we are
coming to you with the benefit of retrospect, so we
have the spoilers. We know how things worked out well.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
And one could argue that the Soviet Union in Russia
have been playing a much longer game than just this
period of time and not doing too bad at it
by today's measure.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Right, going back to the earlier point, did the Cold
War ever end? A lot of us in the US
will say, yeah, immediately there's no more Soviet Union, But
then we have to realize a lot of people putin
among them don't believe the Cold War ended. And I
think we did an episode about that a few years back.
That's right, okay, Well, without getting into the weeds of it,
(21:54):
we could argue the story of the Cambridge five asterisk
teaches us a crucial lesson matter how long it takes
to build something, to place an asset, to leverage an informant.
Even the oldest operations are kind of a house of cards.
Hashtag no Kevin Spacey. You know, the wind can come
from any direction, and when things go wrong, they can
(22:14):
go south quickly.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
And we'll see just how quickly that southern path can
be traversed, you know, going south quickly. I'll here worthmore
sponsor and be right back to it.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Here's where it gets crazy, all right, we teased at
the top right. Twenty nineteen, different US media outlets reveal
stunning news. They say, it turns out that a few
years back, US intelligence officials were so worried the White
House might accidentally expose a covert assets identity that they
(22:55):
secretly extracted this person from Russia and say this happened,
And in twenty seventeen, this is during the first Trump administration.
Other news outlets do pick up the story Washington Post,
New York Times, et cetera. But they start spending entirely
different reasons for this extraction, like what motivated someone to
(23:17):
pull such a precious asset. It's a wild story, but
I think it's a good example.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
And from what we know and from what was reported. Again,
we're looking back at this from twenty twenty five. It
wasn't as though they were worried that any specific person
within the Trump administration or the current State Department would
be exposing any assets like purposefully, right, just doxing somebody.
They were worried about the state of overall security as
(23:49):
it was being handled by that new administration and everybody
coming in.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Yeah, they were concerned things had grown so lax for
one or another that it was not only possible, but
plausible for operations even this level to get compromised. This
will give you more background on this Russian asset in
a second, but just so you know, during the previous
(24:15):
Obama administration, fellow conspiracy realist, these activities were secret enough
that intelligence heads were not putting it in the President's
daily brief. Instead, they were sending secret sealed envelopes just
in case the daily brief was somehow compromised. But we
(24:39):
do know a little bit about the background of this,
and it kind of follows the story of the Cambridge
five and other similar you know, hangout session for sure.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Decades ago, the CIA recruited a particularly ambitious Russian official
who was guided to an ascension through the ranks of
government functioning just as any you know, young upstart might.
He wasn't breaking any laws. You know, he wasn't doing
(25:09):
any you know, saboteur type behavior, sabotaging nukes, any of
that kind of stuff. However, the CIA was waiting for
him to get in the right position. They're playing some
serious forty chess here.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, and helping him suddenly become better at his job
than he was by you know, one way or another.
And he might not have even known the methods deployed.
But eventually, to your point, now, the four D chess
or whatever what I call it, it pays off. They
hit a milestone achievement. This guy gets promoted to a
(25:50):
position that doesn't put him in the inner circle of
the Kremlin, but it gives him high level access to
several sensitive things. This would be akin to Israel's Mosad
controlling a guy who reads, who doesn't get in meetings
with the Supreme leader, but reads all the notes from
(26:11):
those meetings.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
And then there's people on the CIA side, just a
handful of them, who go into their own dark rooms
and then read the notes that were brought from the
guy that got to see the notes, and they're just like, oh,
look I can see their stuff. Yeah, that's getting off
in the dark as art.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah. Fast forward. You know twenty sixteen, there's an election
in the US, right, we all remember that one, and
the Western intelligence community, not just the US, is increasingly
concerned that Russian operatives are attempting to compromise the election.
(26:55):
If that is true, then this, you know, young up
and coming level Russian bureaucrat has now become our golden goose.
Right if he can, as he said, Matt, go off
in the dark and read some notes, then he might
be and send some notes. Then he might be giving
the US, which often sees itself as the world entire,
(27:17):
a heck of an edge in a game.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
But again, if done correctly, this is something that we
let alone. The American people should know nothing about.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Yeah, the problem is the streets are watching so like,
for instance, if this guy got promoted too fast, if
he was too good when he was on the way
to the Kremlin, he probably would have gotten caught. If
something seems too good to be true, or if the
pattern seems to not have a certain amount of guesswork
(27:55):
and mistake, then you have to wonder why someone is
right all the time, you know what I mean. Where
that's where we see this narrative unfolding. Something about Uncle
Sam's new confidence in their claims of election interference, coupled
with the timelines of their announcements, the specificity of some
of these claims, it triggers suspicion. What does suspicion always
(28:19):
lead to investigation, at least in this sphere.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
So here again shouldn't be the case, but yet there
it was making the rounds in the news that the
US had somehow put an operative a person inside of
the Kremlin.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
I remember back to just how confident like major news
outlets in the US were saying, yes, there was definitely
some election stuff going on, and I do recall just
feeling okay, well, they must have some evidence, like they
definitely have evidence if they can come forward and say that,
even if they're anonymous officials or whatever, they're close to
(28:56):
the investigation and from the State Department or whatever. You
just you know that somebody somewhere has evidence or you
can't make a claim like that against another country, at
least publicly like that unless you've got something exact. So
it does make sense. You know that there would be
rumors at least swirling around that somebody somewhere very close
(29:19):
to this thing has eyes.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
On a source familiar with the events, right, something like that. Yeah,
and this is this guess work two of the motivation
behind a public statement is key to the conversation and conspiracy. Here,
the CIA, whatever the narrative may be, felt they had
no choice. In twenty sixteen, they came to this guy
(29:44):
and they said, look, the s is going to hit
the f We can get you out. If we don't
get you out, you're going to be screwed over. And
at first this guy said, nah, thank you, pass thank you,
but I'm all right, And then I think as the
wind picked up, he did agree to be extracted. This
(30:06):
extraction occurs in twenty seventeen. Uncle Sam is reluctant to
pull this guy out because it's awesome. It's awesome to
have that inside. Look. This person had sent secrets of
some sort to DC for decades. They were able to
read papers from Vladimir Putin that were not you know,
(30:27):
public to the Russian people or even outside of that
inner circle. So this is a huge l for the
United States. But there is a happy ending. The exfiltration
is successful and as of twenty late twenty nineteen, this
individual is living safely in the metro area of Washington,
d C. May he live life well, hopefully in a
(30:49):
one story ranch style house.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
Do we know? Do we know the style of his house?
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Well? Because you know, third stories winds got Russia?
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Ah, okay, good call, good call, Ben.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Just put really bouncy bushes down.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
Below a bouncy castle. Perhaps just keep it there year round,
you know.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Long enough for it to be normalized.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
So that would be really Yeah, that would be really funny.
I X Russian assets x CIA assets functioning in Russia.
Then got third story mansions. But there's there's like a
trampoline mote all around it.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Love it?
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Also, yeah, if we're teaching people to fish, maybe that's
a great cover. A guy retires from the private import
export business. And now he just sells bouncies and inflatables,
and he's on the road. So sometimes he shows up
in Arizona, right in Tempe or something, and he just
installs some bouncies.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
I want to see a bouncy house shaped like Vladimir Putin,
all right, Like you did, you bounce within his giant
outstretched arms in his lap.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Oh okay, I like that propaganda. So he's holding you,
catch like he's catching you. Okay, nice, all right. I
can't wait till this gets translated to Russian. Maybe it'll
be a good idea. It's a good idea, and I
hope they keep it now. Like the Cambridge five, we
could say this one example again from just a few
(32:20):
years ago, is it's yet World War footnote about how
quickly things can go wrong? Or as you said, Noel
traverse the southern direction. But the story adds a few
more factors of conspiracy worth considering. First off, they are
two competing claims for the ex filtration. The first is
(32:42):
that journalist got too close to the truth. The second
is that one way or another, the US spilled the
beans on itself. So why are there competing claims.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
What just spill your beans.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Well, it's an interesting idea of the United States telling
on itself. When it kind of goes back to some
stuff we're going to talk about at the end of
the episode, it makes you wonder what the motivation. Oh gosh,
this is hard to talk about without spoil it. There
(33:19):
are questions about perhaps the loyalties of some of the
new administration that came in in twenty sixteen, and how
some of that election engineering went, and why they wanted
a specific person in the White House who ended up there, right.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Que bono? Who benefits and to what ends? Yeah, And
the second condition that is revealed to us in this
story is kind of day one stuff. Not everybody will agree,
but in this milieu of action, you never assume an
event exists in isolation. It's okay if an event is
(34:00):
a one off. It's totally fine if it exists as
a one time thing. But you can never make that assumption.
So if something goes south, we have to look at
everything related to it, however seemingly tangential, however ostensibly irrelevant.
We're not looking for just the next compromise spy. We're
(34:22):
looking for a pattern of how compromises occur. We're looking
for any sort of timeline that would square with this,
even if it's something this sounds dumb, but even even
if you looked back and you said, hey, every time
a World's Cup event happens, these terrible things seem to
(34:43):
occur in coincidence. We talked about reading tea Leaves earlier.
Reading tea Leaves gets, you know, kind of into what
intelligence folks do. And sometimes you could say they're being paranoid,
but it's not the nine times they ask crazy stuff.
It's the tenth time when they're right.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
Exactly, and that seems to be precisely what is happening
right now. Little by little, by hook, or by crook,
one by one, intelligence operatives around the world are getting
blown their covers, getting forced away, or to the point
(35:20):
you guys were talking out at the top of the show,
just simply either being disappeared, disappearing, falling off the map,
being taken out. You know, who's to say, we're going
to talk more about all of these possibilities, and who
is to say After a quick word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
We've returned fast forward with us to twenty twenty one,
four years ago. Now, some of the top counter intelligence guys. Counterintelligence,
it makes sense as a word, but it's still like
when you hear it, it sounds silly. Right, we talked
about this before. Oh your intelligence, counter intelligence. It sounds
(36:08):
like that. Good, I'm going to fight you with the
powers of dumb.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Yep, I'm not that intelligent at all. So top counter
intel crews put out a call into the CIA into
their various stations and bases around the world, noting that
a disturbing number of informants were being captured and or killed.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yeah, this was again to references something we mentioned earlier.
This has attributed The existence of this secret cable is
attributed to sources familiar with the situation. There were a
couple of journalists who said they have viewed the cable.
But the fact that there's not a specific person assigned
(36:53):
to the creation of the cable and the fact that
there are specifics missing is a whole other bag at Badgers, right.
It makes us question the motivation of allowing this thing
to go public, And for an informat just got to
say it, that's rant. It is a wide group term here.
It could describe our high level Kremlin insider. Sure, it
(37:15):
could also be someone who just happens to be a
grad student at the right university working with the right professor.
It could be the house chef for a fancy family
that not every year, but every few years has some
cool politicians over for like a dinner party, you know
(37:35):
what I mean. It could be almost anyone with very
little in common.
Speaker 4 (37:39):
And just to really quickly bring it back to pop
culture for five seconds, there's a show, a Taylor Sheridan
show called Lioness that I really really enjoyed the first
season of, and I think it was the second season.
Actually one of these assets was a housekeeper, like in
a super super super high level targets home.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
M Well, it could be a food delivery person that
often ends up at the American embassy in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, right, Like just somebody who every once
in a while gets eyes on an individual that's being
spied upon.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
Sure, it could be someone providing nonprofit medical resources they
the right country. Yeah, it could be any of those things.
That the issue is that if you are on the
outside and looking in, these people have extremely little in common.
(38:37):
They have not met each other, you know what I mean.
They don't kick it. They don't have a bowling night
or something. The only way you could plausibly know what
they have in common is the single thread. They all
secretly engage knowingly or unknowingly with US intelligence And in
(38:58):
some cases, you know, there's Matroshka doll stuff going on.
Right our food delivery guy talks to someone. He hasn't
no that someone talks to someone, and so they are
maybe getting the short end of the stick because now
they're being held responsible even though they had no idea
what was going on. That is quite possible. So the
(39:19):
only way to know that secret thread is to be
on the inside, to know the inner workings of an
intelligence apparatus. The coal is coming from inside the house.
That's the accusation. Dun dun zah dun dun duh dun
du what yeah? I mean. Also, it looks like they
(39:41):
noticed that rival nations were becoming much better at hunting
down sources, like on an unprecedented level. The rivals in Iran,
in Russia and China and Pakistan in particular, we're getting
way better at finding people. And the CIA at the
(40:02):
same time was having a way tougher experience recruiting new people,
especially people that were worth it, to be.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Honest, Yeah, it is crazy. It feels like ideological illusions
are being kind of wiped out right now across the
board when it comes to, you know, especially what people
believe in with nations, with religions, with all this kind
of stuff, just the shine is gone. So it's harder
to get people to convince somebody, hey, do this for
your country or do this for God, or do you
(40:34):
know whatever.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
It is.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Sure, it's just kind of kind of going away, and
you got to convince them in a different manner or
where there has to be a different motivation.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Now, yeah, there's also an existential aspect to this, a
matter of survival. People are not stupid. They can sense
something in the wind, especially if they're in a relatively
small group. Like let's say, and this is completely hypothetical,
Let's say you're a physics professor and you work on
(41:06):
something specific. And let's say a person you have never met,
but you also know of because you've read their papers,
because you're one of the few people who can understand
and respond to them. Let's say something bad happened to
that person. Let's say there are questions about it, and
then someone comes to you and says, hey, you know
(41:26):
it's me, your buddy from earlier. I know there are
only fifteen of you guys, excuse me, fourteen of you? Now,
would you like to you know, would you like to
hang out with us? Your answers, You're going to have
a higher likelihood of saying no unless they force you
to say us, because you don't want to be identified.
You know, there's something in the wind, and that's that's
(41:49):
the thing, right. Everybody looks for patterns. That's why what
is it? Paradelia is real where humans see patterns even
when none exists.
Speaker 4 (41:57):
Like seeing faces on the back of like a semi truck.
Are the little hooks in the bathroom that look like
a fighting octopus?
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Or sometimes, as we've discussed on the show, all the
other Iranian nuclear scientists are dying and you're still one
of them.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Yep, yep? Do you want? I mean, do you want
to answer that blind cold call? Are what are you
going to say to the pretty lady at the hotel bar?
I hope you say something diplomatic, careful and at arm's length.
So this is the logical conclusion if we're looking for patterns,
(42:35):
if a rival agency or any agency playing the home game,
playing defense, playing goalie, the rival agencies, anybody involved in this,
they must logically conclude that any source that didn't get
caught past a certain threshold may have been turned. And
(42:55):
that's because they all acknowledge the dirty secret. If you
are sophisticated enough, you genuinely try to not kill enemy
sources when you find them, especially if they're local informants.
Oh yeah, someone's already put it. Yeah, someone's already rebuilt
the car. Now you can just do a carjacking, little
grand theft auto and make them drive where you want
(43:17):
them to go.
Speaker 4 (43:18):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah, I guess you just you you throw the ones
that messed up bad enough out of window. But then
the tools, yeah, you get in your toolbox somehow. I
just don't understand some of it. I guess there's enough
example making. Is that what it is? When you throw
somebody out a window, you make a quick example for
(43:41):
everybody else to see as an intimidation tactic.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
In that case, Yeah, it's similar to polonium poisoning or
something that is sending a message. That's an example for
the class, right.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
But but you aren't going to send a message when
it comes to you discover a foreign asset in your
nest and you yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Yeah, that's a great question. Depends upon the circumstances of
discovery and the information. Sometimes they might historically, or only
speaking historically, sometimes a person would be tortured or executed
to send the message to a domestic population, especially in
(44:20):
an authoritarian government. Other times, if you perhaps discover a
group of people, you don't go public, but the whole
group you find one, you make it an example for
the class and kill them, maybe in a way that
looks like a helicopter accident, for example, And then that
(44:42):
raises the likelihood that the survivors, who know they've already
been blown, are going to do whatever they can to
keep themselves and their families safe. Sweet dehumanizing, not treating
people like people, that's for sure.
Speaker 4 (44:57):
No, but that's the name of the game on both sides,
you know.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yeah, Well, the CIA does also in this cable, according
to reports, take it self to task and they say, look,
part of this is that the work the craft has
become sloppy. We've got people who are kind of overestimating
their abilities. There's too much trust in new sources, and
(45:22):
there's an underlying with that sort of arrogance. There's an
underestimation of foreign intelligence capabilities because these guys are reading
a lot of the same books, you know what I mean.
Everybody is playing a very similar game. So don't think
the person on the other side of a board doesn't
know how a rook works, you know what I mean.
(45:43):
That's how you lose a chess Oh.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
No, never underestimate your opponent.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Rooks can go really far, but only in one direction.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
Right, Brooks can move forward and vertically and horizontally.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
I'm thinking of bishops. We're talking about castles.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
Right, Bishops are the compliment the castles, sorry, and really
highly skilled chess player, and knights are on bath salts.
Speaker 4 (46:12):
Clearly, what the hell's up with that weird wonky movement
that they do a little only move in an L shape, strange.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
Just to shake it up, you know. And that's what
they've ben talking about, things like the Wazir or the
other non canonical chess pieces. All right, So part of
what the CIA is maybe suffering from per its own
cable is a thing we could call a commission issue.
We all have known someone working in sales maybe with
(46:41):
a commission structure. Have you guys did you guys ever
work on commission in our previous lives gracefully No?
Speaker 4 (46:48):
Yeah, well I was a salesperson in a music store,
but they didn't pay me any commission. For sure, I
should have gotten some, but I did not. They were
not willing to pass on the profits.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yes, I've worked for a weird, roundabout way of commission before.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
And the commission structure we're all familiar with is the
idea that you can earn a significant portion of your
livelihood through a one time piece percentage or reward from
a transaction. And the problem with commission in some industries,
in some places is that it can encourage an individual
(47:30):
actor to put their own perspective of personal gain over
the larger goals of their customers, their company, or their mission.
So the CIA might have a similar issue because look,
if you score a new informant, it's historically a fast
pass to increasing your odds for promotion. So if that's true,
(47:55):
if you are incentivized what you want a new informant
to work out, would you maybe feel that you needed
that pull to work?
Speaker 4 (48:04):
Oh, I think that's entirely possible. I mean it's sort
of the same way that when we see certain benchmarks,
very high pressure benchmarks placed on testing scores, you know
in the US for example, and then that kind of
leads to some sticky situations when it comes to maybe
teaching for the test and or cheating on the test,
because these things are so crucial to meet m Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:27):
No, obviously, we have just referred to many, many things
to scope it back into talking about the CIA and
the agency in particular. The pickle of the CIA is this,
if you do things right, you can save innocent lives,
not just in the US but across the world. You
can prevent disasters, and if you do it correctly, nobody
(48:51):
is going to know the full extent of your efforts
and or heroism. There are some actual heroes, you know,
there are historical issues, but there are wins that go unacknowledged.
And we're going somewhere with this. The key takeaway is
somehow there's some gap in the armor. A piece of
US intelligence has been inarguably compromised. Is it technology? Has
(49:16):
just technology made the old game irrelevant? What do you
guys think?
Speaker 4 (49:20):
Oh, that's a good point. I mean, it does seem
like a lot of this stuff we're hearing about her,
that's like you know, making the news has to do
with you know, data breaches and hacks, and you know,
while we have the names of organizations and hacker groups
and things, we sometimes don't get individual names. But maybe
that's a good point, or I think we set off
Mike for a moment, been our spies just like getting worse,
(49:43):
like is there are there more leaks? Like is the
is the boat leaky? Just in general, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
There are still maybe not fully but close to the
real wall facers that exist in these worlds of think
tank and where that over you know, where that crosses
over with intelligence agencies, and where that crosses over with
this with various state departments, and I don't know, advisors
people at the top levels of governments across the world,
(50:13):
who are the ones who don't say a lot of
stuff electronically right when we're thinking about the technology, and
could you just use that to spy on everybody at
all times? I think there are probably people who keep
stuff under wraps enough where you need a human being
to at least attempt to get as close as possible
(50:33):
to some of those high level targets. If your goal
is to if your goal is to just find out
what everybody's doing and make sure everybody's going to do
what you want them to do, or else their enemies.
Speaker 3 (50:47):
Yeah. I would agree with the first half of that.
I think, yeah, yeah, because there are some people who
do have that lockdown opsec right, And like in the
case of China hacking the US Treasury, they were mainly
looking for signals, right, they were looking to again mitigate
(51:08):
information asymmetry. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about
with the technology. You know, speaking of China, we see
that a lot of a lot of what we would
call us spies or assets in China got busted, maybe
(51:29):
just because the technology is better. There was a firewall.
The official narrative is a firewall that worked very well
for Middle East North African operations was deployed in China
by the CIA, and it turns out China is a
lot better at dousing the fire on those walls. So
(51:49):
they compromised it. They got the folks. It took a
little time to figure it out, but eventually one of
the boffins on the US side said, hang on adding
this right. Too often, they're no longer guessing. So it
could just be tech or is this gap in the
(52:09):
armor more of a Darien gap references references? Is it
something meaning? Is it something fundamentally unfixable, irreparable, something inherent
to the structure as it currently stands. Perhaps it could
be as small as personal motivations within the structure. Perhaps
(52:29):
it could be legacy organization. Perhaps it could be you know,
incorrect assumptions about the people on the other side, saying
all these folks are motivated by this one single thing,
you know, the capital e enemy. That can also be
a stumbling block. That's the trillion dollar question, you know.
It leads us to the most the biggest question which
(52:51):
we've seen a lot of people asking, did the US
compromise itself? As you said, Noel, is it an own goal?
Speaker 4 (53:01):
Yeah, it seems like it's certainly possible and or plausible unfortunately.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
Yeah, but a self compromise, it's like informant. It can
meet a bunch of different things.
Speaker 4 (53:14):
It's consent.
Speaker 3 (53:15):
Yeah, a self compromise is consent.
Speaker 4 (53:20):
I like that.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
That's pretty clever. Well, it could be accidental disclosure, you know,
negligence rather than malice, a firewall that doesn't work in
one place. It could be sharing classified information without realizing
that could help someone else do something you don't want
them to do, like we're not going to do. I
(53:42):
don't think we need to serve an analogy here. We
can just say this. The Trump administration did give classified
info to Russian forces during a White House visit. This
has been confirmed. This was This was information given to
the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, an ambassador named serge
(54:06):
A Kislak Kislyak. It is possible. We don't know what
was it it, We don't know the specifics, but it's
possible maybe that you accidentally give somebody information that they
can incorporate or synthesize with other information they have, and
(54:29):
maybe they can reach a conclusion you weren't thinking about,
you know what I mean, I do. So that's just
messing up, right. But then the other thing is maybe
people have conflicting or contradicting priorities in their own organizations.
Speaker 2 (54:48):
Yeah, it's possible. That's the whole thing where there are
splinters within one group. We've talked about that before on
this show, about whenever anyone comes forward and says something like, oh, well,
the CIA slash the FBI allowed nine to eleven to happen,
or something like that, there's always that concept that, oh,
there was perhaps a splinter group within one of those
(55:10):
organizations or those organizations that wanted something to occur, when
the vast majority of the organization entire didn't want something
to happen, or was attempting to stop something. It gets
very convoluted in the world of spies.
Speaker 3 (55:27):
Yeah, and this can happen with any large organization, right,
But the problem is this kind of loggerhead of conflicting
goals or poor communication. It could explain at best a
few incidents, not the overall.
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Pattern one hundred percent. So the third and most terrifying
option is something that I think many folks have been
thinking about lately, is the potential for a wilful collusion
of some kind. I'm not trying to be vague about it.
I think you mentioned Ben with the you know, the
(56:01):
the administration sharing assets, you know, openly with Russia, and
there is a sense that there's some moves being made
that could well be in cahoots with who many Americans
might see as a not an ally the idea of
willful compromise.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
Yeah, yeah, and you're you're referring to, I think, no specifically,
the accusations and allegations regarding the current president of the
United States.
Speaker 4 (56:32):
Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be like super
tiptoeing around it, but I just think there's a certain
point where you just can't ignore some of this stuff,
some of the smoke. And I don't even think it
even is super conspiratorial or conspiracy theory esque to speculate
about some of this stuff. There's just some moves that
are taking place that just don't make sense otherwise.
Speaker 3 (56:54):
Right, Right, that's we have to we have to acknowledge
that there have been long standing allegations about conflicts of interest,
whether those be allegations of extortion, blackmail, financial shenanigans, you know,
shout out Krassnov. That's the mimetic version of this making
(57:16):
the rounds the other ass the other concept is just
a double agent. Someone got turned maybe inside the CIA,
maybe inside Langley, and they're just doing their job, right
Varius as little whispers and so on, little birds, Yeah,
which is why the people who are I was talking
(57:37):
about this and then that show the agency the people
who are spied on the most are often spies, at
least back in the day. So as as you had
mentioned earlier, Matt, I believe so something about this is
frightening to people. Of course, it is frightening, and it's
very politically charged now such that people are people are
(58:01):
hesitant sometimes to talk about that possibility. But that goes
back to what was set up earlier, the idea of
erosion of faith in not just religion, but in various institutions,
government institutions in specific. Matt, I think we had talked
(58:23):
a little bit off air, or we talked extensively off
air about US AID. Do you think that's familiar to
most Americans? Pretty current news cycle.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
Yeah, it's everywhere. There's been a massive effort to shut down,
or at least temporarily stop most of the functionality of
the United States Agency for International Development, And it coincides
with a lot of learning we've done on this show
about NGOs, about foreign aid, about state departments from various countries,
(58:57):
and how they move in and offer big loans and
then those loans get paid back, and then they've got
soft or hard power over the people who control, you know, countries,
whether it's private or public. And then this agency, this
specific agency is one that appears to have had a
lot of power in other countries, right, and it's being
(59:19):
systematically shut down.
Speaker 4 (59:21):
It just it.
Speaker 2 (59:24):
I don't know, Ben, as you said in the outline,
it's something to think about because you're this organization, This
United States Department, it provided forty two percent of all
humanitarian aid that the United Nations tracked last year in
twenty twenty four has a staff of ten thousand people
(59:46):
for now functions with the State Department all around the world. Right,
And we know what the State Department is, what it does,
especially when it comes to tradecraft and those things. We know,
we know how those mechanisms work. And if you don't
go back and listen to episodes of our show, and specifically,
Usaidea has been accused back in twenty fourteen of doing
(01:00:08):
this weird thing in Cuba where they like set up
a whole social media social media sites zunzunio I think
zu n zu n eo. It was being accused of
basically trying to undermine the Cuban government. And Mexico also
has accused them just a couple of years ago of
(01:00:28):
trying to undermine their government by supporting specific groups that
are anti Mexican government. So you know, I'm only bringing
this up because it feels like a weird thing to
attack from within, because that's what's happening, right, This is
being shut down by the current administration. Right, Yeah, it
(01:00:51):
seems like a helpful thing for spycraft.
Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
It seems like a helpful thing for people who don't
agree with the existence of the United States, yep, as
it currently stands, right.
Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
And well, yeah, taking it down seems like that, right,
Having it and having it be as robust as possible
seems like a good thing for intelligence agencies.
Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
Right, Ethics aside, you know what I mean, Just if
we're looking at it, if we're looking at the the choreography, right,
if we're looking at the dance itself, and we're not
looking at whether or not the dance involves murdering people,
then this is you know, you would want the dance
to continue. This is also right, Sorry, there's a difference
(01:01:35):
between destabilization and murdering people. Sure, Matrix dodge of that one.
So we've got I mean, there are other organizations to
What I love about The point you're bringing up here, Matt,
is that there are other similar things you don't hear about.
And is it is it illegal to to pop online?
(01:01:57):
Right and make body accounts. No, it's it's actually it's fine.
Now in the in the example you brought up of Zunzunio,
they are that was a secret platform of its own
right and the funding like it wasn't clearly USAID at first. Uh.
Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Yeah, these are accusations. USA ideas or USAID is has
been historically very often accused by other countries of acting,
you know, as an in some type of destabilizing way
within their country, right, and it's often just because of
the amount of dollars. And yeah, I mean you are
(01:02:38):
talking about billions of dollars fourteen point four billion dollars
from USAID to Ukraine in twenty twenty three, Yemen, Afghanistan
receiving hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
I don't know all the all the good ones. Yeah,
this is also one funny note we have to add
on the side forgive our accents. We're not native Spanish speakers.
But you know, zuon zunio is a pun, right, It's
it's Cuban slang for the sound of hummingbird.
Speaker 4 (01:03:10):
Makes every time it's like it kind of like Twitter.
It's so funny, but every time you say it reminds
me of that zoom Phil Collins song Zusue studio, There
go zoon zunzuo. Maybe it's related, who knows?
Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
Who knows? This goes all the way to the top,
by which we mean Phil Collins, Oh yeah, this is
I mean, this is an example. There is a reason
people are across the world distrustful of these various institutions,
and we're not We're not denigrating the people working for
these institutions. If you meet someone who it's like dnng
(01:03:50):
O's and the US have a really tough relationship abroad
because of previous shenanigans. So if you should meet someone
working for green Peace, they're probably just working for green peace,
you know what I mean. They're not out to like
steal your organs or overthrow your government. That happened just
a few times, just a few times.
Speaker 4 (01:04:12):
Won't let them live it down.
Speaker 2 (01:04:17):
Isn't it pretty frustrating guys that there's that Just thinking
about how much money gets moved around for stuff like this,
and then it does seem like there's a whole bunch
of time wasted, resources wasted because everybody is looking at
everybody else as an enemy and not just helping the
human beings and fixing the problems. I don't know. I
(01:04:39):
know that's idealistic and blah.
Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
No, I mean, yeah, but it's really sometimes I think
it's you have to have a little shread of that remaining.
We can't be completely stripped of our humanity, you know,
living in this world. I think that's something we all
strive to hold on to. I would hope so.
Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
No, it's also an ideal that we're pretty unanimous about
and consistent about on this show. You know, a lot
of these problems can be solved. The decision not to
solve those problems is very much a decision, and you
can always make a different decision without sounding too preachy
(01:05:18):
about it. While we're at it, we got to take
a moment and ask all our fellow conspiracy realists to
avoid vilifying individual members of the US Intelligence apparatus. Vilify
politicians all you want, that's what they signed up for.
But the intelligence apparatus, none of these agencies anywhere in
the world, have a perfect track record. But the people
(01:05:40):
working there, the actual facts shout out more and Vogelbaum
human people in these positions. They're professionals. They're motivated by
this goal of yes, doing a good job at their career,
but also of keeping the US and the world overall
a safer place. That's like the aim. They're not conspiring again,
just by the nature of them existing.
Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
They're they're keeping the US safe for the US sake, right, Well,
it's pursuing the national security and interest of the US.
Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
Sure. Yeah, so let's add an asterisk there. This is
sometimes imperfect goal. I do think it is still important
to defend the humanity of people involved. You know, It's
like we said years back, there's not one group that
runs the world. There are instead multiple groups who feel
(01:06:36):
like the world would be a better place if they
were in charge, and the most dangerous of those groups
already have a lot of power. Is that something we
could agree on? I think so, well, there's there is
one other thing we can agree on, and simple, and
it's kind of horrified. Around the world. Assets that were
once safe are getting blown left and right. And the
(01:06:59):
thing about paranoia is we may never know how many
people or how because they are people, how many assets
lives were ruined or ended, Because the US's own agencies
don't disclose that information. It's a rabbit hole of smoke
and mirrors at every turn your face forward with the
(01:07:21):
stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 4 (01:07:23):
Matt, did you just chuckle at assets getting blown?
Speaker 2 (01:07:25):
We've said it so many times in this episode so far,
people getting blown left and right.
Speaker 3 (01:07:30):
This is everywhere, all the way down. And with this
we pass the torch to you. Be it yours to
hold it high. If you break faith with those who
die shout out to the poem Flanders Fields. I want
to say, let us know your thoughts here, folks, let
us know what to make of all this strange, conflicting
(01:07:51):
conspiracy and allegations thereof. You can find us on the emails.
You can find us on the telephones. You can find
us on the lines, not secret cables though, public cables only.
Speaker 4 (01:08:02):
Yeah, only above ground cables can you reach us on.
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff where
we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where
it gets crazy. On x FKA, Twitter, and on youtubee.
We have video content galore for you to sift through
peruse at your leisure. On TikTok and Instagram. However, you
(01:08:22):
can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
We have a phone number. It is one eight three
three std WYTK when you call in, you've got three minutes,
give yourself a cool nickname, and let us know within
the message if we can use your name and message
on the air. If you've got more to say than
can fit in a three minute voicemail, why not instead
send us an email. We are the.
Speaker 3 (01:08:46):
Entities that read every piece of correspondence we receive. Be
well aware, yet unafraid. The void does right back. Also,
it doesn't have to be along when it could just
be some thoughts that are on your mind. Don't feel
don't feel limited by any men or macs of word counts.
We honestly can't wait to hear from you. You are
(01:09:06):
the most important part of the show. Join us out
here in the dark conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:09:32):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They call me Ben. We were joined with our guest
super producer JJ. The main way, pause way. Most importantly,
you are you. You are here. That makes this the
stuff they don't want you to know. Fellow conspiracy realists,
Tonight's episode has been I would say a few years
in the making, decades arguably for sure.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
No question, Oh man, spies, a bridge of spies, a
bridge too far of spies?
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Perhaps what is the collective group name for spies in English?
And how there's a pride of lines, of flock of geese,
a murder of us and unkindness of ravens. Maybe it's
a conspiracy of spies.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Yeah, that's good, that's good. Or maybe uh holdan no, no, Matt,
I think you got on.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
An anonymous you go an anonymity of smitties.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I like all of these answers. Here's the thing that
happened in twenty nineteen. The news hit the US public
in a way it doesn't usually with a prominence it
doesn't often attain. And the argument from the press was,
not only did it appear multiple spies were getting their
cover blown, but something untoward had been happening to these
(01:45):
assets or these operators or these agents for years. One
by what, people were arrested, some were murdered, others, according
to official sources, simply disappeared. And as we record this evening, observers,
including former government officials, will tell you this compromise, whatever
(02:06):
it is, continues today. We've talked about this off air.
Opinions differ on how this is occurring, why this is occurring,
what role government US government institutions play, and what this
strange conflict between competing conspiracies means for the future. So
before we go on and ask what's happening, do you
(02:28):
guys remember these stories like they popped in the news
and then they sort of popped out of the zeitgeist.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, it's rather strange because it's kind of just how
that world works. Spies go missing, because when an asset
disappears or is killed, nobody is really supposed to acknowledge
that that occurs. Really, Yeah, unless it's being you know,
(02:57):
disclosed for a purpose. Right. You don't say, oh, yes,
our asset was taken out, like, you don't say that
publicly unless you're doing it for a reason.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
That's true, unless it's some sort of political maneuver. But
I guess is it fair to say that we've been
seeing more stories in the press where we kind of
do get some of that information like weirdly, like in
terms of you know, spies being discovered and their covers
being blown.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Yeah, it is true. That's why it's not normal. At least,
the disclosure is abnormal. And the purported rate of attrition
there's always a rate of attrition baked in. The reported
or purported rate of attrition is much higher than would
have been permitted ostensibly during the days of the Cold War,
(03:47):
which our Russian friends don't believe ever ended. That's the question.
What is happening here? Is it a bunch of sound
and fury signify nothing or is there something more through
the story?
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Well, we'll get right into it after a tiny, tiny
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Here are the facts. This is so dumb, but just
real quick, can we play a number station just for fun,
just to set the movie.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Yeah, yeah, we still have those left over, the ones
we didn't get to in our live show at the
National Sawdust in Brooklyn. Here we go.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Ah, Yes, the old school trade. As we explored in
a previous series on the history and Future of espionage,
a lot of the intelligence or trade work you see
in film and read and fiction, it's based on older
collection methods, you know, dead drops, handlers, aliases.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Yeah, whatever. The spy who is, you know, oftentimes depicted
a little bit stereotypically as a dashing hero, some sort
of brilliant, you know, quick on their feet, punchy character
who is fighting against some sort of shadowy super villain,
you know, or the spy themselves is the super villain.
(05:20):
As we've seen in you know again, pretty cliche depictions
of say, like Russian spies, like like Boris and Natasha
from Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Sure, or like Carla in the excellent I think was
John Lecuerr novels adapted into The most famous one would
be Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy. Yeah right.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
But you know, as we've learned over the years in
our explorations of human or you know, human intelligence, human
derived intelligence, we found that the most effective spy is
not someone who's secretive and you could look at in
a crowd and go, that guy seems like a spy.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Fella.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, it's just it's somebody that just looks like nobody
the exists in a crowd.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Like the gray Man in the Wheel of Time series
by Robert Jordan. Right, you want someone who is not,
you know, too short, not too tall, not too outside
of like one specific genre. You don't want them too attractive.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
Well, but I'm sure you don't remember the name of
this character. It is totally escaping me. But the guy
that Gary Oldman plays in Slow Horses the schlubby, alcoholic,
but like part of that, you know, unkempt. The look
of his and the way he carries himself in the
most low key way imaginable is what makes him really
good at what he does. What's that guy's name, Ben
Jackson Lamb Jackson Lamb, what a character? Love that show?
(06:44):
And I need to read the books.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
They're pretty great, honestly, but it might ruin the next
seasons for you. You know. Again, obviously, if you were
the head of an intelligence agency, you would want to
have read the books so that you could see what
was coming up next.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Well, Ben to that point, I'm wondering if a lot
of this news that we're talking about maybe has created
a resurgence and fascination with spies. There's a lot of
big spy shows right now that are very successful.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Black Bag is upcoming.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Black Doves is another one, really good one.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, there's a proliferation, right, and that goes into the
question of how much art and reality inform each other
and what the chicken in the egg situation is there.
We do have to tell you, folks, we cannot recommend
our earlier series enough, but check it out if you can.
Simply put, you can learn all about the history of
(07:43):
espionage in our previous series. But right now these evenings,
there aren't a lot of James Bond types, by which
we mean there aren't a ton of specific individuals going
country to country, region to region, mission with secret identities,
doing acts of intrigue and bravado and daring do people
(08:06):
doing right? Yeah, these people do exist, They do exist,
but there are far fewer now because they're less effective.
You know, think of all the technology that occurred since
he and Fleming was inspired to write Bond.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Yeah, and if you want to find out about a
real life spy type individual, dashing, daring, do kind of guy.
Check out the Ridiculous History episode on Roll Dahl, who
weirdly was very much that thing and may well have
been the inspiration for James Bond.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
And what's that guy? I always bring him up with
these who did the Oh he played sorrowmon Christopher Christopher
Lee Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, also had some also had
some dirt on his jacket. As they say. The thing is,
you know, if you're looking at the world now, you're
(09:00):
at widespread facial recognition, right, and you're looking at biometrics,
you're looking at big data algorithms, the bread crumbing of
activity in ways that ordinary like previous governments couldn't couldn't
have done. And you're looking at government hacks, intelligence sharing
like five Eyes long term wasn't super great for some operations.
(09:24):
And so each of these factors makes our sort of
old school roll doll h James Bond approach a little
less tenable but human. As you mentioned there, Matt is
far from a relic of the past. The game doesn't end.
The game shifts, you know, like when you're in like
(09:44):
when you beat a boss at the first act of
a final fight and then all of a sudden there's
a crazy animation and they recharge face too damnable.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Elden ring bosses. Who's that one at the end, Matt
with the with the striking red hair and the knife arms, Millennia.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Something like that.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
You know I'm talking about Matt. You probably beat her
in one pass, you monster.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
No one beats her one past.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
No, No, you got.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
To learn the pattern. What was her name though it
was Melina, meant some with it.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Characters confused, But that game, uh famously, at the very
end you fight a pretty tough boss and then a
very tough boss after that. It's like the second phase the.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Eld and Beast right right, the game doesn't end, the
game changes. So while our idea in fiction of a
living action figure is it's pretty great, you know, if
you're if you're making a script, a real human asset
is going to be a careful, long term investment, not
(10:56):
to too extraordinary. You want the infamous Deeper Agents of
Russia check out our upcoming episode on Operation ghost Stories.
Or you want someone like the Cambridge five asterisk because
we don't know how many there were.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Or you want socialites the Cambridge plus or minus five.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
We'll get We'll get to them at just a second,
because they're a great example. There are socialites that can
also get pulled, people who already exist in the upper
echelons of some kind of political economics structure, people who
have that access.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
I like your Glain Maxwell's sure.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Yeah, that's a great example, your gallains. Maybe as the
Os put it back in the day, your glorious amateurs.
It's it's pretty nuts, and it is all positioned toward
the idea of getting an edge of mitigating information asymmetry
(11:58):
on your side while propagating information asymmetry on the side
of the enemy. And these folks who are who are
real human, they're often they're not going to be doing
like a single mission or a paramilitary thing would be
very rare for this genre of person. We're talking years
(12:19):
and decades, quiet small moves, you know, getting that.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
Promotion, laying on the groundwork, getting other assets in place,
you know, informats, things like that, establishing networks, contacts, all
of that kind of stuff. That's that's again pretty well
depicted in Slow Horses. I think a lot of that
stuff is relatively on the mark.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
Yeah, and the weird thing is if we exercise empathy
for these people deep in hostile territory, they're making small
moves and they themselves have very limited information and somewhat ironic. Right,
they know a handler, they might know another couple people
like since we referenced a wheel of time, it's like
(12:59):
how the Black Asia is organized into what they call hearts.
I'm not going to go too deep into it. It's sorry,
that's already a spoiler. But the big things like having
someone in place to foil ironian nuclear activities, you know,
or Jimmy up there centrifuges.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Uh, it's a great expression that I gotta say, Jimmy
up a centrifuge. It's got to be the the whole back.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Well, we serve at the pleasure of Dylan Fagan, who
is our handler. So that kind of stuff is there
is the culmination of many other things that take a
lot longer. And if you are you know, if you're
like Noel Matton and JJ and Ben and you're you're
evaluating how to how to exercise intelligence or counterintelligence in
(13:52):
an enemy regime, the first question that occurs to you
when you're talking human is not how do I put
one of my my own outsiders on the inside. It's like,
why don't I find someone who's already on the inside,
you know, and just get them over to my cause
you save so much money, you save so much time.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Right oh yeah, yeah, But to do that you have
to either be extremely likable or extremely good at quietly
blackmailing someone.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Right. Yeah, This, this idea of turning someone to an
informant can happen through all sorts of means blackmail. Like
you said, financial compensation, appeal to ideology, or appeal to romance.
I would say romance is itself an ideology, you know,
but each avenue has their own sets of pros and
(14:46):
cons and strengths and weaknesses.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Yep. And every intelligence agency that you've ever heard of
works very, very, very astigiously, to to borrow word from
Ben's lovely vocabulary, towards acquiring high value informants. And once
you have one of those, to your point been that
rate of attrition can be high here because these are investments,
(15:11):
these are human capital. These are long term, long game
assets that are very expensive to maintain and also very
costly to lose.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Oh yeah, they're loath to let them go. Imagine you
have a car. Like imagine you bought a beat up car, right,
and you restored it yourself, and now you want to
drive it forever, right, you want to maybe the car
can take you to places you couldn't reach earlier. Sure,
that's a very bad comparison, but somewhat Well.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
The car also requires maintenance. The car also requires you know,
checking in on from time to time to make sure
everything's running as it's supposed to, that all that work
you did isn't being damaged by something that you can't see.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Well, you also have to spy on and all of
your spies, right, that's the like, one of the biggest
jobs you have as an intelligence agency is to keep
tabs on absolutely everything each individual human does. It is
just sounds like a horrifying existence.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
I don't think the quality of life is super great
if I'm being honest that I mean, yeah, the handlers
have handlers, right, the assets have handlers, The handlers have handlers.
The people at the top are fucking Orwellian.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Everybody in there is like you're an enemy. You're an enemy.
You're an enemy. You're an enemy, You're an enemy. I mean,
you're just like Jesus just just go have some ice cream.
Lay down.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Yes, the issue is sometimes they're right, but whole cloth.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
They're right about they're right about their own fears.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Well that's the problem. I mean, all this stuff is
very very much at play, and you know, to your
point about keeping tabs on all the spies, it's so
important too, because when one of your assets flips, especially
one that you've invested all that time and energy and
information intelligence into, how much they know can directly impact
(17:13):
you if they are turned, you know, to the enemy
or an enemy.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yeah, it was an interesting comment just a second ago
that reminded me of that line from Incubus, don't let
fear take the wheel and steer.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Wow, that's that's a good okay from the band to
use Incubus in conspiracy sense. No, it's true. That is
the seminal two thousands Classic Drive from the album Make
Yourself by Incubus.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
References are so.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Fresh because fear is what drives all this stuff, right,
Fear that somebody else's ideologies are going to overtake my ideology,
and then that world is going to change, and then
all the you know, all this stuff is going to
change because I'm so afraid that's ultimately what it is.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
I don't know if I could agree with that, Like
I hear you in some in some aspects, but would
we not also say there's ambition in there as well.
I don't.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Like it can be wrapped up in fear though. That's
a really good point, Ben, and that distinction I think
is important. But to me too, part of ambition is
fear that someone's gonna be better than you.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, I guess it, just don't I personally am not
comfortable putting a broad brush on on this, but I
do hear you fair enough.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I'm cool with it.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
But well, let's go to uh, let's go to Cambridge.
Let's start to get a sense of scale here with
the story of the Cambridge Spies. Cambridge is one of
the world's most prestigious universities, and the Cambridge five asterisk
or a group of spies that were turned by the
Soviet Union and pulled purposely from the upper crust of
(18:50):
British society.
Speaker 4 (18:52):
Sounds like bad news exactly. The Cambridge plus or minus
five they they you know, took time for this to
take place, this turn to the Soviets. They were active
from about the nineteen thirties until at least the early fifties.
This process took decades. The general public knew nothing about
(19:12):
the conspiracy until nineteen fifty one, and we still don't
really know entirely how many people were turned. Hence the
asterisk the plus or minus. Originally the group was the
Cambridge four, which sounds kind of like a do wop group,
and then they found a fifth person. Then they called
it the Cambridge five, and at some point just the
(19:34):
count kind of ended, right.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
That's an editorial thought. Yeah, it feels like at some
point they just stopped adding to the name. In a
couple of cases, these guys attained very high positions in government.
As we record today, there's still standing allegations against other
possible members of the group, pretty much all of whom
are dead at this point, which is often, you know,
(20:01):
one of the most shore fire ways for an operative
like this to escape. Funny story because partially because of
their socioeconomic position, none of the confirmed members were ever prosecuted.
This is a multi decade operation, and if we exercise
empathy then we can see that this had two very
different meanings to people on the other side of the
(20:23):
board from the UK Allied perspective, there's fear, right they
are damaged. From the Soviet perspective, there's ambition. It's a
huge win over multiple decades, like it changed the course
of the Cold War in some ways.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
But I guess, I guess what I'm trying to figure
out is how did it change anything if they had
these high level people, you know in the nineteen fifties,
But then the Cold War ends and the Soviet Union
is like collapses, So like, what did they actually win?
Speaker 4 (20:56):
What did they accomplish? Yeah, by turning these folks, that
is a good point. They didn't win, and they didn't make.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
The big win, right. They didn't win the war, they
would say, but they won battles, right, And we are
coming to you with the benefit of retrospect, so we
have the spoilers. We know how things worked out well.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
And one could argue that the Soviet Union in Russia
have been playing a much longer game than just this
period of time and not doing too bad at it
by today's measure.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Right, going back to the earlier point, did the Cold
War ever end? A lot of us in the US
will say, yeah, immediately there's no more Soviet Union, But
then we have to realize a lot of people putin
among them don't believe the Cold War ended. And I
think we did an episode about that a few years back.
That's right, okay, Well, without getting into the weeds of it,
(21:54):
we could argue the story of the Cambridge five asterisk
teaches us a crucial lesson matter how long it takes
to build something, to place an asset, to leverage an informant.
Even the oldest operations are kind of a house of cards.
Hashtag no Kevin Spacey. You know, the wind can come
from any direction, and when things go wrong, they can
(22:14):
go south quickly.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
And we'll see just how quickly that southern path can
be traversed, you know, going south quickly. I'll here worthmore
sponsor and be right back to it.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Here's where it gets crazy, all right, we teased at
the top right. Twenty nineteen, different US media outlets reveal
stunning news. They say, it turns out that a few
years back, US intelligence officials were so worried the White
House might accidentally expose a covert assets identity that they
(22:55):
secretly extracted this person from Russia and say this happened,
And in twenty seventeen, this is during the first Trump administration.
Other news outlets do pick up the story Washington Post,
New York Times, et cetera. But they start spending entirely
different reasons for this extraction, like what motivated someone to
(23:17):
pull such a precious asset. It's a wild story, but
I think it's a good example.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
And from what we know and from what was reported. Again,
we're looking back at this from twenty twenty five. It
wasn't as though they were worried that any specific person
within the Trump administration or the current State Department would
be exposing any assets like purposefully, right, just doxing somebody.
They were worried about the state of overall security as
(23:49):
it was being handled by that new administration and everybody
coming in.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Yeah, they were concerned things had grown so lax for
one or another that it was not only possible, but
plausible for operations even this level to get compromised. This
will give you more background on this Russian asset in
a second, but just so you know, during the previous
(24:15):
Obama administration, fellow conspiracy realist, these activities were secret enough
that intelligence heads were not putting it in the President's
daily brief. Instead, they were sending secret sealed envelopes just
in case the daily brief was somehow compromised. But we
(24:39):
do know a little bit about the background of this,
and it kind of follows the story of the Cambridge
five and other similar you know, hangout session for sure.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Decades ago, the CIA recruited a particularly ambitious Russian official
who was guided to an ascension through the ranks of
government functioning just as any you know, young upstart might.
He wasn't breaking any laws. You know, he wasn't doing
(25:09):
any you know, saboteur type behavior, sabotaging nukes, any of
that kind of stuff. However, the CIA was waiting for
him to get in the right position. They're playing some
serious forty chess here.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, and helping him suddenly become better at his job
than he was by you know, one way or another.
And he might not have even known the methods deployed.
But eventually, to your point, now, the four D chess
or whatever what I call it, it pays off. They
hit a milestone achievement. This guy gets promoted to a
(25:50):
position that doesn't put him in the inner circle of
the Kremlin, but it gives him high level access to
several sensitive things. This would be akin to Israel's Mosad
controlling a guy who reads, who doesn't get in meetings
with the Supreme leader, but reads all the notes from
(26:11):
those meetings.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
And then there's people on the CIA side, just a
handful of them, who go into their own dark rooms
and then read the notes that were brought from the
guy that got to see the notes, and they're just like, oh,
look I can see their stuff. Yeah, that's getting off
in the dark as art.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah. Fast forward. You know twenty sixteen, there's an election
in the US, right, we all remember that one, and
the Western intelligence community, not just the US, is increasingly
concerned that Russian operatives are attempting to compromise the election.
(26:55):
If that is true, then this, you know, young up
and coming level Russian bureaucrat has now become our golden goose.
Right if he can, as he said, Matt, go off
in the dark and read some notes, then he might
be and send some notes. Then he might be giving
the US, which often sees itself as the world entire,
(27:17):
a heck of an edge in a game.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
But again, if done correctly, this is something that we
let alone. The American people should know nothing about.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
Yeah, the problem is the streets are watching so like,
for instance, if this guy got promoted too fast, if
he was too good when he was on the way
to the Kremlin, he probably would have gotten caught. If
something seems too good to be true, or if the
pattern seems to not have a certain amount of guesswork
(27:55):
and mistake, then you have to wonder why someone is
right all the time, you know what I mean. Where
that's where we see this narrative unfolding. Something about Uncle
Sam's new confidence in their claims of election interference, coupled
with the timelines of their announcements, the specificity of some
of these claims, it triggers suspicion. What does suspicion always
(28:19):
lead to investigation, at least in this sphere.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
So here again shouldn't be the case, but yet there
it was making the rounds in the news that the
US had somehow put an operative a person inside of
the Kremlin.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
I remember back to just how confident like major news
outlets in the US were saying, yes, there was definitely
some election stuff going on, and I do recall just
feeling okay, well, they must have some evidence, like they
definitely have evidence if they can come forward and say that,
even if they're anonymous officials or whatever, they're close to
(28:56):
the investigation and from the State Department or whatever. You
just you know that somebody somewhere has evidence or you
can't make a claim like that against another country, at
least publicly like that unless you've got something exact. So
it does make sense. You know that there would be
rumors at least swirling around that somebody somewhere very close
(29:19):
to this thing has eyes.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
On a source familiar with the events, right, something like that. Yeah,
and this is this guess work two of the motivation
behind a public statement is key to the conversation and conspiracy. Here,
the CIA, whatever the narrative may be, felt they had
no choice. In twenty sixteen, they came to this guy
(29:44):
and they said, look, the s is going to hit
the f We can get you out. If we don't
get you out, you're going to be screwed over. And
at first this guy said, nah, thank you, pass thank you,
but I'm all right, And then I think as the
wind picked up, he did agree to be extracted. This
(30:06):
extraction occurs in twenty seventeen. Uncle Sam is reluctant to
pull this guy out because it's awesome. It's awesome to
have that inside. Look. This person had sent secrets of
some sort to DC for decades. They were able to
read papers from Vladimir Putin that were not you know,
(30:27):
public to the Russian people or even outside of that
inner circle. So this is a huge l for the
United States. But there is a happy ending. The exfiltration
is successful and as of twenty late twenty nineteen, this
individual is living safely in the metro area of Washington,
d C. May he live life well, hopefully in a
(30:49):
one story ranch style house.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
Do we know? Do we know the style of his house?
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Well? Because you know, third stories winds got Russia?
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Ah, okay, good call, good call, Ben.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Just put really bouncy bushes down.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
Below a bouncy castle. Perhaps just keep it there year round,
you know.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Long enough for it to be normalized.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
So that would be really Yeah, that would be really funny.
I X Russian assets x CIA assets functioning in Russia.
Then got third story mansions. But there's there's like a
trampoline mote all around it.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Love it?
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Also, yeah, if we're teaching people to fish, maybe that's
a great cover. A guy retires from the private import
export business. And now he just sells bouncies and inflatables,
and he's on the road. So sometimes he shows up
in Arizona, right in Tempe or something, and he just
installs some bouncies.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
I want to see a bouncy house shaped like Vladimir Putin,
all right, Like you did, you bounce within his giant
outstretched arms in his lap.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Oh okay, I like that propaganda. So he's holding you,
catch like he's catching you. Okay, nice, all right. I
can't wait till this gets translated to Russian. Maybe it'll
be a good idea. It's a good idea, and I
hope they keep it now. Like the Cambridge five, we
could say this one example again from just a few
(32:20):
years ago, is it's yet World War footnote about how
quickly things can go wrong? Or as you said, Noel
traverse the southern direction. But the story adds a few
more factors of conspiracy worth considering. First off, they are
two competing claims for the ex filtration. The first is
(32:42):
that journalist got too close to the truth. The second
is that one way or another, the US spilled the
beans on itself. So why are there competing claims.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
What just spill your beans.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Well, it's an interesting idea of the United States telling
on itself. When it kind of goes back to some
stuff we're going to talk about at the end of
the episode, it makes you wonder what the motivation. Oh gosh,
this is hard to talk about without spoil it. There
(33:19):
are questions about perhaps the loyalties of some of the
new administration that came in in twenty sixteen, and how
some of that election engineering went, and why they wanted
a specific person in the White House who ended up there, right.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Que bono? Who benefits and to what ends? Yeah, And
the second condition that is revealed to us in this
story is kind of day one stuff. Not everybody will agree,
but in this milieu of action, you never assume an
event exists in isolation. It's okay if an event is
(34:00):
a one off. It's totally fine if it exists as
a one time thing. But you can never make that assumption.
So if something goes south, we have to look at
everything related to it, however seemingly tangential, however ostensibly irrelevant.
We're not looking for just the next compromise spy. We're
(34:22):
looking for a pattern of how compromises occur. We're looking
for any sort of timeline that would square with this,
even if it's something this sounds dumb, but even even
if you looked back and you said, hey, every time
a World's Cup event happens, these terrible things seem to
(34:43):
occur in coincidence. We talked about reading tea Leaves earlier.
Reading tea Leaves gets, you know, kind of into what
intelligence folks do. And sometimes you could say they're being paranoid,
but it's not the nine times they ask crazy stuff.
It's the tenth time when they're right.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
Exactly, and that seems to be precisely what is happening
right now. Little by little, by hook, or by crook,
one by one, intelligence operatives around the world are getting
blown their covers, getting forced away, or to the point
(35:20):
you guys were talking out at the top of the show,
just simply either being disappeared, disappearing, falling off the map,
being taken out. You know, who's to say, we're going
to talk more about all of these possibilities, and who
is to say After a quick word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
We've returned fast forward with us to twenty twenty one,
four years ago. Now, some of the top counter intelligence guys. Counterintelligence,
it makes sense as a word, but it's still like
when you hear it, it sounds silly. Right, we talked
about this before. Oh your intelligence, counter intelligence. It sounds
(36:08):
like that. Good, I'm going to fight you with the
powers of dumb.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Yep, I'm not that intelligent at all. So top counter
intel crews put out a call into the CIA into
their various stations and bases around the world, noting that
a disturbing number of informants were being captured and or killed.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yeah, this was again to references something we mentioned earlier.
This has attributed The existence of this secret cable is
attributed to sources familiar with the situation. There were a
couple of journalists who said they have viewed the cable.
But the fact that there's not a specific person assigned
(36:53):
to the creation of the cable and the fact that
there are specifics missing is a whole other bag at Badgers, right.
It makes us question the motivation of allowing this thing
to go public, And for an informat just got to
say it, that's rant. It is a wide group term here.
It could describe our high level Kremlin insider. Sure, it
(37:15):
could also be someone who just happens to be a
grad student at the right university working with the right professor.
It could be the house chef for a fancy family
that not every year, but every few years has some
cool politicians over for like a dinner party, you know
(37:35):
what I mean. It could be almost anyone with very
little in common.
Speaker 4 (37:39):
And just to really quickly bring it back to pop
culture for five seconds, there's a show, a Taylor Sheridan
show called Lioness that I really really enjoyed the first
season of, and I think it was the second season.
Actually one of these assets was a housekeeper, like in
a super super super high level targets home.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
M Well, it could be a food delivery person that
often ends up at the American embassy in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, right, Like just somebody who every once
in a while gets eyes on an individual that's being
spied upon.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
Sure, it could be someone providing nonprofit medical resources they
the right country. Yeah, it could be any of those things.
That the issue is that if you are on the
outside and looking in, these people have extremely little in common.
(38:37):
They have not met each other, you know what I mean.
They don't kick it. They don't have a bowling night
or something. The only way you could plausibly know what
they have in common is the single thread. They all
secretly engage knowingly or unknowingly with US intelligence And in
(38:58):
some cases, you know, there's Matroshka doll stuff going on.
Right our food delivery guy talks to someone. He hasn't
no that someone talks to someone, and so they are
maybe getting the short end of the stick because now
they're being held responsible even though they had no idea
what was going on. That is quite possible. So the
(39:19):
only way to know that secret thread is to be
on the inside, to know the inner workings of an
intelligence apparatus. The coal is coming from inside the house.
That's the accusation. Dun dun zah dun dun duh dun
du what yeah? I mean. Also, it looks like they
(39:41):
noticed that rival nations were becoming much better at hunting
down sources, like on an unprecedented level. The rivals in Iran,
in Russia and China and Pakistan in particular, we're getting
way better at finding people. And the CIA at the
(40:02):
same time was having a way tougher experience recruiting new people,
especially people that were worth it, to be.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Honest, Yeah, it is crazy. It feels like ideological illusions
are being kind of wiped out right now across the
board when it comes to, you know, especially what people
believe in with nations, with religions, with all this kind
of stuff, just the shine is gone. So it's harder
to get people to convince somebody, hey, do this for
your country or do this for God, or do you
(40:34):
know whatever.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
It is.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Sure, it's just kind of kind of going away, and
you got to convince them in a different manner or
where there has to be a different motivation.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Now, yeah, there's also an existential aspect to this, a
matter of survival. People are not stupid. They can sense
something in the wind, especially if they're in a relatively
small group. Like let's say, and this is completely hypothetical,
Let's say you're a physics professor and you work on
(41:06):
something specific. And let's say a person you have never met,
but you also know of because you've read their papers,
because you're one of the few people who can understand
and respond to them. Let's say something bad happened to
that person. Let's say there are questions about it, and
then someone comes to you and says, hey, you know
(41:26):
it's me, your buddy from earlier. I know there are
only fifteen of you guys, excuse me, fourteen of you? Now,
would you like to you know, would you like to
hang out with us? Your answers, You're going to have
a higher likelihood of saying no unless they force you
to say us, because you don't want to be identified.
You know, there's something in the wind, and that's that's
(41:49):
the thing, right. Everybody looks for patterns. That's why what
is it? Paradelia is real where humans see patterns even
when none exists.
Speaker 4 (41:57):
Like seeing faces on the back of like a semi truck.
Are the little hooks in the bathroom that look like
a fighting octopus?
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Or sometimes, as we've discussed on the show, all the
other Iranian nuclear scientists are dying and you're still one
of them.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Yep, yep? Do you want? I mean, do you want
to answer that blind cold call? Are what are you
going to say to the pretty lady at the hotel bar?
I hope you say something diplomatic, careful and at arm's length.
So this is the logical conclusion if we're looking for patterns,
(42:35):
if a rival agency or any agency playing the home game,
playing defense, playing goalie, the rival agencies, anybody involved in this,
they must logically conclude that any source that didn't get
caught past a certain threshold may have been turned. And
(42:55):
that's because they all acknowledge the dirty secret. If you
are sophisticated enough, you genuinely try to not kill enemy
sources when you find them, especially if they're local informants.
Oh yeah, someone's already put it. Yeah, someone's already rebuilt
the car. Now you can just do a carjacking, little
grand theft auto and make them drive where you want
(43:17):
them to go.
Speaker 4 (43:18):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah, I guess you just you you throw the ones
that messed up bad enough out of window. But then
the tools, yeah, you get in your toolbox somehow. I
just don't understand some of it. I guess there's enough
example making. Is that what it is? When you throw
somebody out a window, you make a quick example for
(43:41):
everybody else to see as an intimidation tactic.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
In that case, Yeah, it's similar to polonium poisoning or
something that is sending a message. That's an example for
the class, right.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
But but you aren't going to send a message when
it comes to you discover a foreign asset in your
nest and you yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Yeah, that's a great question. Depends upon the circumstances of
discovery and the information. Sometimes they might historically, or only
speaking historically, sometimes a person would be tortured or executed
to send the message to a domestic population, especially in
(44:20):
an authoritarian government. Other times, if you perhaps discover a
group of people, you don't go public, but the whole
group you find one, you make it an example for
the class and kill them, maybe in a way that
looks like a helicopter accident, for example, And then that
(44:42):
raises the likelihood that the survivors, who know they've already
been blown, are going to do whatever they can to
keep themselves and their families safe. Sweet dehumanizing, not treating
people like people, that's for sure.
Speaker 4 (44:57):
No, but that's the name of the game on both sides,
you know.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yeah, Well, the CIA does also in this cable, according
to reports, take it self to task and they say, look,
part of this is that the work the craft has
become sloppy. We've got people who are kind of overestimating
their abilities. There's too much trust in new sources, and
(45:22):
there's an underlying with that sort of arrogance. There's an
underestimation of foreign intelligence capabilities because these guys are reading
a lot of the same books, you know what I mean.
Everybody is playing a very similar game. So don't think
the person on the other side of a board doesn't
know how a rook works, you know what I mean.
(45:43):
That's how you lose a chess Oh.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
No, never underestimate your opponent.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Rooks can go really far, but only in one direction.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
Right, Brooks can move forward and vertically and horizontally.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
I'm thinking of bishops. We're talking about castles.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
Right, Bishops are the compliment the castles, sorry, and really
highly skilled chess player, and knights are on bath salts.
Speaker 4 (46:12):
Clearly, what the hell's up with that weird wonky movement
that they do a little only move in an L shape, strange.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
Just to shake it up, you know. And that's what
they've ben talking about, things like the Wazir or the
other non canonical chess pieces. All right, So part of
what the CIA is maybe suffering from per its own
cable is a thing we could call a commission issue.
We all have known someone working in sales maybe with
(46:41):
a commission structure. Have you guys did you guys ever
work on commission in our previous lives gracefully No?
Speaker 4 (46:48):
Yeah, well I was a salesperson in a music store,
but they didn't pay me any commission. For sure, I
should have gotten some, but I did not. They were
not willing to pass on the profits.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yes, I've worked for a weird, roundabout way of commission before.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
And the commission structure we're all familiar with is the
idea that you can earn a significant portion of your
livelihood through a one time piece percentage or reward from
a transaction. And the problem with commission in some industries,
in some places is that it can encourage an individual
(47:30):
actor to put their own perspective of personal gain over
the larger goals of their customers, their company, or their mission.
So the CIA might have a similar issue because look,
if you score a new informant, it's historically a fast
pass to increasing your odds for promotion. So if that's true,
(47:55):
if you are incentivized what you want a new informant
to work out, would you maybe feel that you needed
that pull to work?
Speaker 4 (48:04):
Oh, I think that's entirely possible. I mean it's sort
of the same way that when we see certain benchmarks,
very high pressure benchmarks placed on testing scores, you know
in the US for example, and then that kind of
leads to some sticky situations when it comes to maybe
teaching for the test and or cheating on the test,
because these things are so crucial to meet m Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:27):
No, obviously, we have just referred to many, many things
to scope it back into talking about the CIA and
the agency in particular. The pickle of the CIA is this,
if you do things right, you can save innocent lives,
not just in the US but across the world. You
can prevent disasters, and if you do it correctly, nobody
(48:51):
is going to know the full extent of your efforts
and or heroism. There are some actual heroes, you know,
there are historical issues, but there are wins that go unacknowledged.
And we're going somewhere with this. The key takeaway is
somehow there's some gap in the armor. A piece of
US intelligence has been inarguably compromised. Is it technology? Has
(49:16):
just technology made the old game irrelevant? What do you
guys think?
Speaker 4 (49:20):
Oh, that's a good point. I mean, it does seem
like a lot of this stuff we're hearing about her,
that's like you know, making the news has to do
with you know, data breaches and hacks, and you know,
while we have the names of organizations and hacker groups
and things, we sometimes don't get individual names. But maybe
that's a good point, or I think we set off
Mike for a moment, been our spies just like getting worse,
(49:43):
like is there are there more leaks? Like is the
is the boat leaky? Just in general, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
There are still maybe not fully but close to the
real wall facers that exist in these worlds of think
tank and where that over you know, where that crosses
over with intelligence agencies, and where that crosses over with
this with various state departments, and I don't know, advisors
people at the top levels of governments across the world,
(50:13):
who are the ones who don't say a lot of
stuff electronically right when we're thinking about the technology, and
could you just use that to spy on everybody at
all times? I think there are probably people who keep
stuff under wraps enough where you need a human being
to at least attempt to get as close as possible
(50:33):
to some of those high level targets. If your goal
is to if your goal is to just find out
what everybody's doing and make sure everybody's going to do
what you want them to do, or else their enemies.
Speaker 3 (50:47):
Yeah. I would agree with the first half of that.
I think, yeah, yeah, because there are some people who
do have that lockdown opsec right, And like in the
case of China hacking the US Treasury, they were mainly
looking for signals, right, they were looking to again mitigate
(51:08):
information asymmetry. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about
with the technology. You know, speaking of China, we see
that a lot of a lot of what we would
call us spies or assets in China got busted, maybe
(51:29):
just because the technology is better. There was a firewall.
The official narrative is a firewall that worked very well
for Middle East North African operations was deployed in China
by the CIA, and it turns out China is a
lot better at dousing the fire on those walls. So
(51:49):
they compromised it. They got the folks. It took a
little time to figure it out, but eventually one of
the boffins on the US side said, hang on adding
this right. Too often, they're no longer guessing. So it
could just be tech or is this gap in the
(52:09):
armor more of a Darien gap references references? Is it
something meaning? Is it something fundamentally unfixable, irreparable, something inherent
to the structure as it currently stands. Perhaps it could
be as small as personal motivations within the structure. Perhaps
(52:29):
it could be legacy organization. Perhaps it could be you know,
incorrect assumptions about the people on the other side, saying
all these folks are motivated by this one single thing,
you know, the capital e enemy. That can also be
a stumbling block. That's the trillion dollar question, you know.
It leads us to the most the biggest question which
(52:51):
we've seen a lot of people asking, did the US
compromise itself? As you said, Noel, is it an own goal?
Speaker 4 (53:01):
Yeah, it seems like it's certainly possible and or plausible unfortunately.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
Yeah, but a self compromise, it's like informant. It can
meet a bunch of different things.
Speaker 4 (53:14):
It's consent.
Speaker 3 (53:15):
Yeah, a self compromise is consent.
Speaker 4 (53:20):
I like that.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
That's pretty clever. Well, it could be accidental disclosure, you know,
negligence rather than malice, a firewall that doesn't work in
one place. It could be sharing classified information without realizing
that could help someone else do something you don't want
them to do, like we're not going to do. I
(53:42):
don't think we need to serve an analogy here. We
can just say this. The Trump administration did give classified
info to Russian forces during a White House visit. This
has been confirmed. This was This was information given to
the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, an ambassador named serge
(54:06):
A Kislak Kislyak. It is possible. We don't know what
was it it, We don't know the specifics, but it's
possible maybe that you accidentally give somebody information that they
can incorporate or synthesize with other information they have, and
(54:29):
maybe they can reach a conclusion you weren't thinking about,
you know what I mean, I do. So that's just
messing up, right. But then the other thing is maybe
people have conflicting or contradicting priorities in their own organizations.
Speaker 2 (54:48):
Yeah, it's possible. That's the whole thing where there are
splinters within one group. We've talked about that before on
this show, about whenever anyone comes forward and says something like, oh, well,
the CIA slash the FBI allowed nine to eleven to happen,
or something like that, there's always that concept that, oh,
there was perhaps a splinter group within one of those
(55:10):
organizations or those organizations that wanted something to occur, when
the vast majority of the organization entire didn't want something
to happen, or was attempting to stop something. It gets
very convoluted in the world of spies.
Speaker 3 (55:27):
Yeah, and this can happen with any large organization, right,
But the problem is this kind of loggerhead of conflicting
goals or poor communication. It could explain at best a
few incidents, not the overall.
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Pattern one hundred percent. So the third and most terrifying
option is something that I think many folks have been
thinking about lately, is the potential for a wilful collusion
of some kind. I'm not trying to be vague about it.
I think you mentioned Ben with the you know, the
(56:01):
the administration sharing assets, you know, openly with Russia, and
there is a sense that there's some moves being made
that could well be in cahoots with who many Americans
might see as a not an ally the idea of
willful compromise.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
Yeah, yeah, and you're you're referring to, I think, no specifically,
the accusations and allegations regarding the current president of the
United States.
Speaker 4 (56:32):
Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be like super
tiptoeing around it, but I just think there's a certain
point where you just can't ignore some of this stuff,
some of the smoke. And I don't even think it
even is super conspiratorial or conspiracy theory esque to speculate
about some of this stuff. There's just some moves that
are taking place that just don't make sense otherwise.
Speaker 3 (56:54):
Right, Right, that's we have to we have to acknowledge
that there have been long standing allegations about conflicts of interest,
whether those be allegations of extortion, blackmail, financial shenanigans, you know,
shout out Krassnov. That's the mimetic version of this making
(57:16):
the rounds the other ass the other concept is just
a double agent. Someone got turned maybe inside the CIA,
maybe inside Langley, and they're just doing their job, right
Varius as little whispers and so on, little birds, Yeah,
which is why the people who are I was talking
(57:37):
about this and then that show the agency the people
who are spied on the most are often spies, at
least back in the day. So as as you had
mentioned earlier, Matt, I believe so something about this is
frightening to people. Of course, it is frightening, and it's
very politically charged now such that people are people are
(58:01):
hesitant sometimes to talk about that possibility. But that goes
back to what was set up earlier, the idea of
erosion of faith in not just religion, but in various institutions,
government institutions in specific. Matt, I think we had talked
(58:23):
a little bit off air, or we talked extensively off
air about US AID. Do you think that's familiar to
most Americans? Pretty current news cycle.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
Yeah, it's everywhere. There's been a massive effort to shut down,
or at least temporarily stop most of the functionality of
the United States Agency for International Development, And it coincides
with a lot of learning we've done on this show
about NGOs, about foreign aid, about state departments from various countries,
(58:57):
and how they move in and offer big loans and
then those loans get paid back, and then they've got
soft or hard power over the people who control, you know, countries,
whether it's private or public. And then this agency, this
specific agency is one that appears to have had a
lot of power in other countries, right, and it's being
(59:19):
systematically shut down.
Speaker 4 (59:21):
It just it.
Speaker 2 (59:24):
I don't know, Ben, as you said in the outline,
it's something to think about because you're this organization, This
United States Department, it provided forty two percent of all
humanitarian aid that the United Nations tracked last year in
twenty twenty four has a staff of ten thousand people
(59:46):
for now functions with the State Department all around the world. Right,
And we know what the State Department is, what it does,
especially when it comes to tradecraft and those things. We know,
we know how those mechanisms work. And if you don't
go back and listen to episodes of our show, and specifically,
Usaidea has been accused back in twenty fourteen of doing
(01:00:08):
this weird thing in Cuba where they like set up
a whole social media social media sites zunzunio I think
zu n zu n eo. It was being accused of
basically trying to undermine the Cuban government. And Mexico also
has accused them just a couple of years ago of
(01:00:28):
trying to undermine their government by supporting specific groups that
are anti Mexican government. So you know, I'm only bringing
this up because it feels like a weird thing to
attack from within, because that's what's happening, right, This is
being shut down by the current administration. Right, Yeah, it
(01:00:51):
seems like a helpful thing for spycraft.
Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
It seems like a helpful thing for people who don't
agree with the existence of the United States, yep, as
it currently stands, right.
Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
And well, yeah, taking it down seems like that, right,
Having it and having it be as robust as possible
seems like a good thing for intelligence agencies.
Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
Right, Ethics aside, you know what I mean, Just if
we're looking at it, if we're looking at the the choreography, right,
if we're looking at the dance itself, and we're not
looking at whether or not the dance involves murdering people,
then this is you know, you would want the dance
to continue. This is also right, Sorry, there's a difference
(01:01:35):
between destabilization and murdering people. Sure, Matrix dodge of that one.
So we've got I mean, there are other organizations to
What I love about The point you're bringing up here, Matt,
is that there are other similar things you don't hear about.
And is it is it illegal to to pop online?
(01:01:57):
Right and make body accounts. No, it's it's actually it's fine.
Now in the in the example you brought up of Zunzunio,
they are that was a secret platform of its own
right and the funding like it wasn't clearly USAID at first. Uh.
Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Yeah, these are accusations. USA ideas or USAID is has
been historically very often accused by other countries of acting,
you know, as an in some type of destabilizing way
within their country, right, and it's often just because of
the amount of dollars. And yeah, I mean you are
(01:02:38):
talking about billions of dollars fourteen point four billion dollars
from USAID to Ukraine in twenty twenty three, Yemen, Afghanistan
receiving hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
I don't know all the all the good ones. Yeah,
this is also one funny note we have to add
on the side forgive our accents. We're not native Spanish speakers.
But you know, zuon zunio is a pun, right, It's
it's Cuban slang for the sound of hummingbird.
Speaker 4 (01:03:10):
Makes every time it's like it kind of like Twitter.
It's so funny, but every time you say it reminds
me of that zoom Phil Collins song Zusue studio, There
go zoon zunzuo. Maybe it's related, who knows?
Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
Who knows? This goes all the way to the top,
by which we mean Phil Collins, Oh yeah, this is
I mean, this is an example. There is a reason
people are across the world distrustful of these various institutions,
and we're not We're not denigrating the people working for
these institutions. If you meet someone who it's like dnng
(01:03:50):
O's and the US have a really tough relationship abroad
because of previous shenanigans. So if you should meet someone
working for green Peace, they're probably just working for green peace,
you know what I mean. They're not out to like
steal your organs or overthrow your government. That happened just
a few times, just a few times.
Speaker 4 (01:04:12):
Won't let them live it down.
Speaker 2 (01:04:17):
Isn't it pretty frustrating guys that there's that Just thinking
about how much money gets moved around for stuff like this,
and then it does seem like there's a whole bunch
of time wasted, resources wasted because everybody is looking at
everybody else as an enemy and not just helping the
human beings and fixing the problems. I don't know. I
(01:04:39):
know that's idealistic and blah.
Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
No, I mean, yeah, but it's really sometimes I think
it's you have to have a little shread of that remaining.
We can't be completely stripped of our humanity, you know,
living in this world. I think that's something we all
strive to hold on to. I would hope so.
Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
No, it's also an ideal that we're pretty unanimous about
and consistent about on this show. You know, a lot
of these problems can be solved. The decision not to
solve those problems is very much a decision, and you
can always make a different decision without sounding too preachy
(01:05:18):
about it. While we're at it, we got to take
a moment and ask all our fellow conspiracy realists to
avoid vilifying individual members of the US Intelligence apparatus. Vilify
politicians all you want, that's what they signed up for.
But the intelligence apparatus, none of these agencies anywhere in
the world, have a perfect track record. But the people
(01:05:40):
working there, the actual facts shout out more and Vogelbaum
human people in these positions. They're professionals. They're motivated by
this goal of yes, doing a good job at their career,
but also of keeping the US and the world overall
a safer place. That's like the aim. They're not conspiring again,
just by the nature of them existing.
Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
They're they're keeping the US safe for the US sake, right, Well,
it's pursuing the national security and interest of the US.
Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
Sure. Yeah, so let's add an asterisk there. This is
sometimes imperfect goal. I do think it is still important
to defend the humanity of people involved. You know, It's
like we said years back, there's not one group that
runs the world. There are instead multiple groups who feel
(01:06:36):
like the world would be a better place if they
were in charge, and the most dangerous of those groups
already have a lot of power. Is that something we
could agree on? I think so, well, there's there is
one other thing we can agree on, and simple, and
it's kind of horrified. Around the world. Assets that were
once safe are getting blown left and right. And the
(01:06:59):
thing about paranoia is we may never know how many
people or how because they are people, how many assets
lives were ruined or ended, Because the US's own agencies
don't disclose that information. It's a rabbit hole of smoke
and mirrors at every turn your face forward with the
(01:07:21):
stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 4 (01:07:23):
Matt, did you just chuckle at assets getting blown?
Speaker 2 (01:07:25):
We've said it so many times in this episode so far,
people getting blown left and right.
Speaker 3 (01:07:30):
This is everywhere, all the way down. And with this
we pass the torch to you. Be it yours to
hold it high. If you break faith with those who
die shout out to the poem Flanders Fields. I want
to say, let us know your thoughts here, folks, let
us know what to make of all this strange, conflicting
(01:07:51):
conspiracy and allegations thereof. You can find us on the emails.
You can find us on the telephones. You can find
us on the lines, not secret cables though, public cables only.
Speaker 4 (01:08:02):
Yeah, only above ground cables can you reach us on.
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff where
we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where
it gets crazy. On x FKA, Twitter, and on youtubee.
We have video content galore for you to sift through
peruse at your leisure. On TikTok and Instagram. However, you
(01:08:22):
can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
We have a phone number. It is one eight three
three std WYTK when you call in, you've got three minutes,
give yourself a cool nickname, and let us know within
the message if we can use your name and message
on the air. If you've got more to say than
can fit in a three minute voicemail, why not instead
send us an email. We are the.
Speaker 3 (01:08:46):
Entities that read every piece of correspondence we receive. Be
well aware, yet unafraid. The void does right back. Also,
it doesn't have to be along when it could just
be some thoughts that are on your mind. Don't feel
don't feel limited by any men or macs of word counts.
We honestly can't wait to hear from you. You are
(01:09:06):
the most important part of the show. Join us out
here in the dark conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:09:32):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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