February 9, 2025 • 27 mins
Previously, we talked with Tim Weiner about an actual U.S. government conspiracy, The Iran Contra Affair, and a conspiracy theory, the Iranian hostages October Surprise. It was almost kept undetected, and plenty of people escaped accountability. In a continuation of that conversation, we look at the many routes to our executive branch pulling off similar actions in secrecy. Specifically, the INCOMING executive branch, which seems to be being designed for it. And if it’s that doable, there must be so many that remain undiscovered.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
This is mission implausible.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
We now returned with part two of our interview with
author and Policerprise within the journalist Tim Wyner.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
You guys spent decades of your life at CIA, and
you were there when Porter Goss came in in two
thousand and four. The President was not happy with CIA
for several reasons. The invasion of Iraq, which CI contributed to,
might stay with faulty analysis of saddamis Arsenal alb A.
Bush was going to invade iraqany way, you know, if
(00:59):
they had a paper clip and a rubber band to
put your eye out right, And he wanted Porter Goss,
who was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and
a former CIA officer, to come in there and basically
clean house and impose loyalty oaths and ideological tests on people.
And what happened next The leadership of the Clandestine Service
headed for the parking Lot ads did the top analysis,
(01:22):
and the whole place was in turmoil. Mike Morell, who
spent thirty three years at the CIA and Weiss deputy
director twice acting director, said it was the worst nineteen
months of his thirty three year career.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
What some people may not realize is that Porter Goss
came in.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
Well.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
First of all, he didn't want to work hard. He
complained publicly that he had to put in more than
eight hours and had to work on weekends, harder than
I thought it would be. That's right, this is hard. Tenants,
say what you will. He worked seven days a week,
of course, seventeen hours a day. But Porter Goss brought
in what we called on the inside, the Goslings. And
these were a group of disgruntled form agency officers, almost
(02:02):
all of whom had been fired or let go for cause,
with chips on their shoulder, who thought things were easy
and simple and black and white. They had been his
staff at the House Intelligence Committee. And this was like
seei's a great plane, Like, let's fire these guys because
they're incompetent. But they're all good. They still keep their
clearances and they're all going to go work for Congress
and be our bosses. And then they came back and yeah,
(02:23):
that didn't work out.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Now, But the key here, I think is not the
Goslings or personality disputes or anything like that. Ordered Goss's
marching orders from the President of the United States, where
I want loyalty. I need the CI to fall into line,
and I don't want any analysts criticizing the course of
the war in Iraq. And people were leaking, It's true,
(02:48):
but every ship of state leaks from the top, and
it didn't go well. And the one thing we know
about Donald Trump is that he wants loyalty like a
mob boss. What's going to happen would you say, based
on your decades of experience, if a new director comes
in at CIA and starts saying, I want you, I
(03:08):
need you to sign an loyal I'm going to impose
ideological betting on you people, and are you modo or not?
What's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
If that happens at DoD or in the intelligence community,
it just we take very seriously our focus on the mission,
our focus, and we take it oath to the Constitution.
We're not loyal to individuals, and in fact, we take
great pride in providing truth to power, which sometimes means
telling them stuff they don't want to hear. So this
is it goes just against every part of our culture.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
CIA at its best is when we do our job,
we try to find the truth and we provide it
to policy makers. We're at our worst when we become
an instrument of policy that we do specifically what the
President says, irregardless of what the laws are or what's ethical.
Where we've done it worse it things like around contrary. Well,
(03:56):
actually CA may have done all right by refusing to
get involved in it. Where we've done our worst is
when Higgs, when we were told to do these things,
and we take the hit, not the guy who orders it.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
But two things here. When I was brand new on
the CI, I went to learn at the feet of
Richard Helms, who was the gray eminence of American intelligence
at the time. Mike Holder joined the CI as a
charter member in forty seven and its director from sixty
six to seventy three. Until Nixon fired him for refusing
to help him cover up the Watergate breaking. And one
(04:30):
of the things Helms told me about CI was if
we are not believed by the President of the United States,
if we are not believed, we have no purpose. People
run great risks to dig up secrets of state, analysts
work hard to figure out the big picture, and all
of this goes into reporting that the president on not
only the present day, but threats over the horizon. One
(04:53):
of the things that we know about Donald Trump is
that one, he never took intelligence briefings very seriously. Two,
he's an ideologue, and ideology is the enemy of intelligence.
If you're an ideologue, your mind is made up. My fear, guys,
is that people are really going to head for the exits.
(05:14):
And the last time that happened, like in a major way,
not just people on the seventh floor, but throughout the
rank was in the nineties after the Cold War was over.
You guys were young and coming up in the nineties,
The guys with fifteen twenty twenty five years in were
headed out because they were like, Okay, mission accomplished. We
beat the goddamn Russians. Cold War's over. I'm done. People
(05:39):
will leave now because they feel they cannot accomplish the
mission under this president, whether it's analytical or operational, and
the ranks will be depleted. And the depletion of the
CIA during the decade of the nineties was one of
the proximate reasons for the success of al Qaeda's attack
on nine to eleven.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
I share your concern, certainly, having been there caring about
it too. But one thing to add to the helms thing,
just a little nuance, is I think it is true
if the president isn't interested in what the CIA has
to say, what is the purpose. But the one thing
I've learned from working in CIA, and I suspect under
Trump it was very much like this at least Trump won,
is we provide intelligence not just to the President, but
(06:21):
to the Secretary of State, ambassadors around the world, to
people in the Pentagon generals. So there is a process
there that kept going even if Trump was in La
La Land or not interested in issues. We continue to
provide information on what was happening in Russia.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
And then you what does the station chief do when
the ambassador is an idiot or convicted fellas herschall walkers,
Herschel Walker, a convicted felon. That's in the case of
Jared Kushner's father, who's going to France or just a bosa. Furthermore,
what does the CI do with the Director of National Intelligence?
Speaker 1 (06:57):
I can answer that one for you, because you, as
a journalist, rightly hold the CIA to high standards and
therefore when we make mistakes. But the CIA, in a
genius move, created this thing called the DNI, which is
a fake organization to protect the CIA.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
So John in Fairnessress created the di Congress.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Oh please, Congress wouldn't know. It's we manipulated Congress to
create this thing so that when they can put the
morons over there and they can do almost no damage
to what's actually happening in the CIA.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Now that is a conspiracy theory right there. There you go. No,
but okay, but in serious Chelsea Gabbard is the titular
head of the American intelligence community. God forbid, correct me
if I'm wrong. But CIA relies to a largely unappreciated
extent on liaison and intelligence sharing with friendly and not
(07:49):
so friendly intelligence services around the world, in countries you
might immediately think of, and some countries you couldn't possibly
imagine fair statement.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yes, we get in the clandestine service side of the organization,
we get the bulk of our intelligence from partners and
not just allies, from partners around the world. Now it's
different with the NSA. It's going to be harder for
the NSA because it's much more integrated with the Brits
and Australians and stuff. Where I think you're going you're
saying is some of these organizations that partners we deal with,
they are going to be hesitant to share their secrets
(08:20):
with us, and I agree with that, but it's going
to be harder for them on the SINGANT side because
they're integrated.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
Is great stuff. But human intelligence, when it succeeds, gets
you the information that Singant cannot. Ten analysts can listen
to the same Singant transcript and come up with ten
different analyzes, whereas when you're actually in the room with
the person who's talking, you get a sense of the reality.
Is that fair?
Speaker 2 (08:47):
And an inordinate amount of is human enabled? Right, The
reason you have the Singen is because of a human
being interacting with the technology and so recruiting that human being.
Is actually that a lot of the SIGANS, huge amount
of Sycains streams are based on people.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
The point I'm trying to make is if particular head
of American intelligence is a longtime PULP member who has
shown strange affinities with people like Bashar al Asad and
Vladimir V. Putin and on the head of oh, I
don't know the Jordanian Intelligence Service or the Ukrainian Intelligence Service?
(09:24):
Am I going to play foot seat with that person?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So when I was in a rock senior officer there
and back in fourteen fifteen, we had a group of
congressmen and senators come in. Now we live in Iraq,
we go out into the Red Zone. We've got assets
who were both in Isis. We have a lot of
Arabic speakers. We live there. And we had this group
of lawmakers come in and I'm not gonna see who
(09:47):
it was, and there were like seven or eight of
them with their staffs there, and we were giving them
a briefing about what's going on in Iraq. Right now,
we're surrounded on three sides. Isis is ascended, Moses has fallen,
they're just after Mosa felt And one guy takes his
loafers off and picking his toenails while we're briefing. So
(10:08):
this is incredible disrespect to the officers who are risking
their lives to be there. And when they finish, he says, basically,
this is a lot of hohoi. And he says they're
only in it for the money. And one of my
officers couldn't help themselves and says, you can't offer them
like an extra hundred dollars to blow themselves up. Now,
(10:30):
the other lawmakers around it were clearly embarrassed at this guy.
But what happens if like they they're all picking their
toes right, and they look at the people who live
there and say, I know you understand that you live there.
But none of this is true because we have our
own reality. But as to who will stay and who
will go, I think a lot of people with integrity
(10:51):
will leave, people with options will leave. People who will
stay will fall into a couple different categories. One will
be career quizzlings who are like, yeah, I'll do it
if you or you give me a big promotion. I'll
say whatever you want. We saw that during the gospeling time.
Other people will basically just put their heads down and
do what bureaucrats everywhere in the world always do. They'll
(11:11):
just try to do their job and wait it out.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
In any large organization, I could talk about the New
York Times, which is about maybe eight percent the size
of the CIA. But in any large organization, you have
the talented tenth okay, and the talented tenth at the
top of intellect, at the top of experience, at the
top of expertise are going to bring you ninety percent
(11:34):
of your successes. And if the talented tenth head for
the door, that's bad news. I hate to be a
harbinger of doom. In many ways, the situation we're about
to be and is absurd and orderline hilarious until stuff happened.
It's a mean old world out there, gentlemen. The Russians
(11:55):
and the Chinese are each through their intelligence services, coming
out of it with ill intent. That Chinese, it seems to me,
love to have your take on this. Want to know us.
They want information dominance. They want to know everything about
the United States government. They want to tap our phones,
they want to rate our computers, they want our personnel files,
(12:17):
and they got it. They want to know us. So
if the balloon goes up in twenty or thirty forty years,
they have information dominance. The Russians just want to screw us.
They don't want to know us. They want to subvert
and sabotage our form of government. And they have achieved
more than Marginal's success over the last eight ten years.
(12:37):
You have a real crisis, and it is almost inevitable
that there will be one. What are these knuckleheads going
to do to protect our country?
Speaker 3 (12:46):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
In the last year of his first term, Trump installed
John Ratcliff and Cash betent Well at the very top
of the Directorate of Natural Intelligence. Were they there to
make sure that big pieces on whither China were going
to be like expertly thought out and edited. No, they
were there to raid the files Russia House where you
(13:15):
used to work, John, to try and dig up dirt
on the president's political enemies and to try and find
a smoking gun that would magically absolve him of his
and his campaign and his teams plussy footing with Vladimir Poot.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
It's a conspiracy theory, but it's one I'm open to.
Is that another reason he's so interested in Russia and
Cia and having it is he doesn't want evidence coming
out of collusion. Right, there was collusion. It's like there was.
I'm not sure they could prove it in a criminal
court of law, but certainly man Afford, his campaign manager
(13:51):
was dealing with the Russians. His own son was talking
to the Russians in line of the FBI about it.
His campaign advisor was lying to the FBI about and
destroying evidence and his relationship with the Russians. So there's Russia,
Russa Russia. There was a lot of it. There is
a smoking gun someplace, and they need to make sure
that it doesn't come out, that we don't find it.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
I don't know how you feel, Jerry John. I know
you have mixed feelings about Federal Bureau of Investigation events
counter counterintelligence capacities. But in American counterintelligence, which is spycatching
among other things, you can't do it without the FBI
in this country. CEEI has no police powers in this country.
Yet cash Betel says, do you guys go play cops
(14:32):
and robbers? I would disestablish the national security of the FBI.
They ain't good.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
No, In fact, I think yeah, the danger Keshpertel, the
FBI is more dangerous than Tulsea Gabbert at DNI for
the American public. Obviously partners are on the world and
the things we need to worry about incredibly important, and
the D A and I just doesn't control a lot
of the actual collection and processing of intelligence.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
There's a lot of the lists talk going around about
the deep state, and the deep state, which does not exist,
is supposedly this nefarious conspiracy of spies and soldiers and
bureaucrats who are have dedicated their professional and personal lives
to undermining Donald Trump. Once upon a time, way back
(15:18):
in the twentieth century, there was a deep state in
who it was embodied in one man, and that man
was Jaegar Hoover. JEdgar Hoover, an unelected bureaucrat who ruled
the FBI for forty eight years, used his powers to
spy on people without warrants, to break into their homes,
to rifle through their papers, to conduct wiretapping, to destroy
(15:40):
people for political purposes. That was political warfare. And presidents
never said no to Hoover. Attorneys general never said no too,
And it wasn't until he died in nineteen seventy two,
six weeks before the Watergate breaking. That never would have happened.
If Hoover was around. And then two things happened. When
Jaeger who were died literally the next week, the Supreme
(16:03):
Court outlawed wartless wire tapping this country. And then the
Watergate break can happen. Okay, and the whole panoply of
Cold War national security began to break down. Helms got
fired because he wouldn't cover up Watergate for Nixon, and
the old national security state that had existed since the
end of World War Two began to break down. Okay,
(16:27):
we run the risk under this president his nominees for
national security position of the return of a national security
state in which the powers of American intelligence and national
security are turned on Americans for political purposes. I think
that's a real danger.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
So that no no podcast is complete without at least
a couple of Nazi references. And I got two for
you that I want to say that that remind me of.
One is you talked about Hoover and he had the
goods on everybody right. Every American president was afraid of him,
politicians were afraid of him. And in Nazi Germany, Hermann Goering,
despite the fact that he wasn't didn't do anything right.
(17:11):
He didn't really have a job he ran the Lufaffe,
did it poorly, and yet nobody came for him. And
one of the reasons for that was because when he
was head of the Prussian Police he had this new
technology called telephone wire tapping act. He had been nobody
knew about this and really hit it and Hermann Goering
during the Nazis rose, I know, I can't help, but
(17:34):
I speak a freaking language, a gorn. He had the
goods on everybody, including Hillery. So right up until the
nineteen forty five they were all afraid of Gourring, not
because of his insight, but because he, like Hoover, he
had the goods.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
He could walk up to some senior Nazi officers said, yeah,
should see you'll have been a bad.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Boy, your male boyfriend that you have not told us
about it, he says. But the other thing, and more ominous, though,
is you talked about loyalty tests. And I think this
is in the air with this administration. The illustration coming
in is Hitler's rise to power. When he really took
power is after Hindenburg died, and one of the first
things he did is he had the military swear an
(18:20):
oath to him personally, right not to the Constitution. Right,
and soon after all his deep state guys bureaucracy swear
an oath to him personally, not to the country, not
to the fatherland, not to the Constitution, and that was
the end of their democracy, right, the last gas. And
when we start going down that road where loyalty, you know,
(18:43):
call me ran into that first the buzzsaw, Are you
loyal to me? The only answer we can have as
Americans is no. You should swear two oaths in your life.
One is when you get married and the other is
when you're when you work for the federal government or
the military. Is you swear an oath to the institution
and that should be your only loyalty. And for some
(19:04):
reason United States citizens they're somehow like, okay, that's been normalized,
swearing an oath to a political figure. That's really dangerous.
That's not a conspiracy theory. That's a real conspiracy. When
you start telling senior CIA, FBI people, you must be
loyal to me, and.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
It is a conspiracy against the Constitution and ultimately against
the American people.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Hold on just a second, Well we take a quick break. Tim.
I know you're working on a new book or a
new book's coming out, so can you tell us about
it a little bit.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
The book is called The Mission the CIA in the
twenty first Century. It starts in the spring of two
thousand and one. It goes right up to the present day.
I'm writing the epilogue right now. It is entirely on
the record, as was Legacy of Ashes, my earlier history
of the CIA, widely if not universally acclaimed.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
I was going to ask you with a very negative history,
so as Wry, are you ready to take it all
back now?
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Well, I'll tell you, John, the old book was based
on literally three hundred thousand declassified documents from CIA, from State,
from the Pentagon, from the White House, from the end
of World War Two up to the early twenty first century.
So I talked to people. I talked to an amazing
array of people, including the top people on the seventh floor,
(20:31):
including sitting chiefs of the clandestine Service, including the man
who was tasked with setting up the black sites, including
the three unbelievable officers who took down aq KHN, who
ran the world's biggest and by far most dangerous nuclear
(20:52):
weapons technology smuggling ring. I talked to people who were
freezing their asses off in Iraqi, Curtisan before the American
invasion in two thousand and three, executing a covert action
plan to take down Saddam, knowing that it would take
the eighty second Airborne to actually do it, but they
had their marching orders. I talked to officers who served
(21:15):
in Baghdad Station, as you did Jerry earlier in the
war in Kabble, in the worst places on Earth, like
the Shikin Base in Afghanistan. There's a t shirt from
there that says, Ella is only skin deep. Who served
in Pakistan, who served in Jordan, who served in Syria.
And I listened to them and I wrote down what
(21:35):
they said.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
And so had they been drinking, yeah you didn't talk
to us, we would have suayed you.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
I did talk to Cipher, and yes you were drinking.
It was a very cold, dry martini, as I recall,
which is what all good intelligence officers drink. It is
a human book. I think Legacy of Ashes, the book
that came out now seventeen years ago, is a book
about an institution, but it's a book about an institution
(22:02):
that came out at a very dark time for the institution.
Nine to eleven, the WMD reported the Iraq War going
south one hundred miles an hour, the Goss regime, and
at the sixtieth anniversary that took place a few months
before the book came out, there was a lot of hanks.
(22:23):
There was a lot of sorrow, and I think the
book was a product of its time. What I like
about this book, might me repeat it's called The Mission
that it'll be out July fifteenth, is it? It really talks
about the mission when we started out before nine to eleven.
For the past decade, people have been wandering around saying,
what the what's the mission? The mission's over? We dislayed
(22:47):
the Soviet beast, what's the mission now? And that relative
handful of people after al Cada blew up our two
embassies in Africa in August nineteen eighty eight, said well, yeah,
we know what the mission is now. But the President
of the United States didn't, the Secretary of Defense didn't,
and Condy Rice as a National Security advisor, they didn't
(23:07):
know what the mission was. And Rice and Cheney thought
the whole arcaded thing was like some big strategic deception.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And the Attorney General he told the FBI guys to
quit wasting your time on this terrorism stuff.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
Well, it's not the mission until the president says its mission. Frankly,
the CI is exquisitely sensitive to presidential commands, and for
the better part of fifteen years, counter terrorism was the mission.
And then starting about ten years ago, roughly twenty fourteen,
give or take, there was a generational chain. Bin Laden
(23:42):
was dead. There was still a lot of danger in
the Islamic world, but espionage began to regain its proper
place of privacy at CI. And as evidence of that,
just in the fall of twenty one, the CI stole
Ladimir Putin's warp plans for Ukraine right out of the Kremlin.
(24:03):
That's what you want your intelligence service to be. You
wanted to know the intentions and capabilities of your enemies.
That's what y'all are there for. That's why they pay
you the small change.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
We were running some good cases prior to twenty fourteen. Oh,
I'm not sure, but I understand what you're saying in
terms of I do think that not just CI, but
this country over invested in counter terrorism, oversold. Obviously it
was incredibly important. Okay, there was a danger. The American
citizen don't really have a choice, did you. No, it
(24:34):
was a big deal, but it couldn't bring down the
United States, whereas China rush at these places at least
have the ability done to have a war with US.
That would be a much more serious thing. We did
a good job on the counter terrorism fight, but I
think we probably focused too much on that for a
little bit too long.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
If anything, maybe product of our successes, there was inside
of CIA in a sense that we need to deprioritize
a vitual human spying, recruiting spies, And it wasn't so
much deprioritizing that is prioritizing other elements of CIA, which
are also important, analysis and these all these other things.
(25:13):
But I think a lot of people who recruit and
run spies, espionage networks, traditional stuff that CIA does, they
were seen as like yesterday's movie stars, and it was
no longer it was no longer a necessity when you've
got technology that we no longer need to recruit spies.
And we still did, but I think there was a
(25:33):
and maybe still is to a certain extent, a d
emphasis on that, And it would be good to say
CIA go back to its human espionage roots and focus
on that.
Speaker 4 (25:44):
I say that's been happening, and I think that you
can attribute in some the survival of Ukraine since twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
I wish the rest of the administration upped its game
and supporting Ukraine. But I hear you.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
If you're gonna blow up Russian generals in the heart
of Moscow, you've been around of some good intelligence. I'm
not saying CI provided the intelligence. Who knows where they
got the intelligence from. But it is not a war
that can be won with weapons. It is a war
in which intelligence plays a central and a crucial role.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
That's fair, and arguably we are at war with Russia,
just not traditional war. Russia looks at warfare different in
the United States, that's right. So to them, it's you
got to think about what you want to accomplish, and
armed force is just one piece of that. And war
never ends for the Russians like for us, it's like
we're either fighting a kinetic war or we're at peace.
For Russians, it's a NonStop political warfare.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Yeah. The first person who articulated that was George Kennan,
the man who dreamed up the Cladist service of the
CI in which he served.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
He did indeed, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
He was just saying what Lenin was already doing.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
Lenin and yeah, there is war never ends for those guys.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Now, it's a different way of looking at things. And
they've been quite successful. I mean they're killing people around
Europe and around the world, and they're spreading disinformation and
they're using deception to break on us, and they're missing
in elections and all those kind of things.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
Well, that's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
It's always enjoyable and it was great Vita.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible it is a production of honorable mention and abominable
pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
This is mission implausible.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
We now returned with part two of our interview with
author and Policerprise within the journalist Tim Wyner.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
You guys spent decades of your life at CIA, and
you were there when Porter Goss came in in two
thousand and four. The President was not happy with CIA
for several reasons. The invasion of Iraq, which CI contributed to,
might stay with faulty analysis of saddamis Arsenal alb A.
Bush was going to invade iraqany way, you know, if
(00:59):
they had a paper clip and a rubber band to
put your eye out right, And he wanted Porter Goss,
who was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and
a former CIA officer, to come in there and basically
clean house and impose loyalty oaths and ideological tests on people.
And what happened next The leadership of the Clandestine Service
headed for the parking Lot ads did the top analysis,
(01:22):
and the whole place was in turmoil. Mike Morell, who
spent thirty three years at the CIA and Weiss deputy
director twice acting director, said it was the worst nineteen
months of his thirty three year career.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
What some people may not realize is that Porter Goss
came in.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
Well.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
First of all, he didn't want to work hard. He
complained publicly that he had to put in more than
eight hours and had to work on weekends, harder than
I thought it would be. That's right, this is hard. Tenants,
say what you will. He worked seven days a week,
of course, seventeen hours a day. But Porter Goss brought
in what we called on the inside, the Goslings. And
these were a group of disgruntled form agency officers, almost
(02:02):
all of whom had been fired or let go for cause,
with chips on their shoulder, who thought things were easy
and simple and black and white. They had been his
staff at the House Intelligence Committee. And this was like
seei's a great plane, Like, let's fire these guys because
they're incompetent. But they're all good. They still keep their
clearances and they're all going to go work for Congress
and be our bosses. And then they came back and yeah,
(02:23):
that didn't work out.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Now, But the key here, I think is not the
Goslings or personality disputes or anything like that. Ordered Goss's
marching orders from the President of the United States, where
I want loyalty. I need the CI to fall into line,
and I don't want any analysts criticizing the course of
the war in Iraq. And people were leaking, It's true,
(02:48):
but every ship of state leaks from the top, and
it didn't go well. And the one thing we know
about Donald Trump is that he wants loyalty like a
mob boss. What's going to happen would you say, based
on your decades of experience, if a new director comes
in at CIA and starts saying, I want you, I
(03:08):
need you to sign an loyal I'm going to impose
ideological betting on you people, and are you modo or not?
What's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
If that happens at DoD or in the intelligence community,
it just we take very seriously our focus on the mission,
our focus, and we take it oath to the Constitution.
We're not loyal to individuals, and in fact, we take
great pride in providing truth to power, which sometimes means
telling them stuff they don't want to hear. So this
is it goes just against every part of our culture.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
CIA at its best is when we do our job,
we try to find the truth and we provide it
to policy makers. We're at our worst when we become
an instrument of policy that we do specifically what the
President says, irregardless of what the laws are or what's ethical.
Where we've done it worse it things like around contrary. Well,
(03:56):
actually CA may have done all right by refusing to
get involved in it. Where we've done our worst is
when Higgs, when we were told to do these things,
and we take the hit, not the guy who orders it.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
But two things here. When I was brand new on
the CI, I went to learn at the feet of
Richard Helms, who was the gray eminence of American intelligence
at the time. Mike Holder joined the CI as a
charter member in forty seven and its director from sixty
six to seventy three. Until Nixon fired him for refusing
to help him cover up the Watergate breaking. And one
(04:30):
of the things Helms told me about CI was if
we are not believed by the President of the United States,
if we are not believed, we have no purpose. People
run great risks to dig up secrets of state, analysts
work hard to figure out the big picture, and all
of this goes into reporting that the president on not
only the present day, but threats over the horizon. One
(04:53):
of the things that we know about Donald Trump is
that one, he never took intelligence briefings very seriously. Two,
he's an ideologue, and ideology is the enemy of intelligence.
If you're an ideologue, your mind is made up. My fear, guys,
is that people are really going to head for the exits.
(05:14):
And the last time that happened, like in a major way,
not just people on the seventh floor, but throughout the
rank was in the nineties after the Cold War was over.
You guys were young and coming up in the nineties,
The guys with fifteen twenty twenty five years in were
headed out because they were like, Okay, mission accomplished. We
beat the goddamn Russians. Cold War's over. I'm done. People
(05:39):
will leave now because they feel they cannot accomplish the
mission under this president, whether it's analytical or operational, and
the ranks will be depleted. And the depletion of the
CIA during the decade of the nineties was one of
the proximate reasons for the success of al Qaeda's attack
on nine to eleven.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
I share your concern, certainly, having been there caring about
it too. But one thing to add to the helms thing,
just a little nuance, is I think it is true
if the president isn't interested in what the CIA has
to say, what is the purpose. But the one thing
I've learned from working in CIA, and I suspect under
Trump it was very much like this at least Trump won,
is we provide intelligence not just to the President, but
(06:21):
to the Secretary of State, ambassadors around the world, to
people in the Pentagon generals. So there is a process
there that kept going even if Trump was in La
La Land or not interested in issues. We continue to
provide information on what was happening in Russia.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
And then you what does the station chief do when
the ambassador is an idiot or convicted fellas herschall walkers,
Herschel Walker, a convicted felon. That's in the case of
Jared Kushner's father, who's going to France or just a bosa. Furthermore,
what does the CI do with the Director of National Intelligence?
Speaker 1 (06:57):
I can answer that one for you, because you, as
a journalist, rightly hold the CIA to high standards and
therefore when we make mistakes. But the CIA, in a
genius move, created this thing called the DNI, which is
a fake organization to protect the CIA.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
So John in Fairnessress created the di Congress.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Oh please, Congress wouldn't know. It's we manipulated Congress to
create this thing so that when they can put the
morons over there and they can do almost no damage
to what's actually happening in the CIA.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Now that is a conspiracy theory right there. There you go. No,
but okay, but in serious Chelsea Gabbard is the titular
head of the American intelligence community. God forbid, correct me
if I'm wrong. But CIA relies to a largely unappreciated
extent on liaison and intelligence sharing with friendly and not
(07:49):
so friendly intelligence services around the world, in countries you
might immediately think of, and some countries you couldn't possibly
imagine fair statement.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yes, we get in the clandestine service side of the organization,
we get the bulk of our intelligence from partners and
not just allies, from partners around the world. Now it's
different with the NSA. It's going to be harder for
the NSA because it's much more integrated with the Brits
and Australians and stuff. Where I think you're going you're
saying is some of these organizations that partners we deal with,
they are going to be hesitant to share their secrets
(08:20):
with us, and I agree with that, but it's going
to be harder for them on the SINGANT side because
they're integrated.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
Is great stuff. But human intelligence, when it succeeds, gets
you the information that Singant cannot. Ten analysts can listen
to the same Singant transcript and come up with ten
different analyzes, whereas when you're actually in the room with
the person who's talking, you get a sense of the reality.
Is that fair?
Speaker 2 (08:47):
And an inordinate amount of is human enabled? Right, The
reason you have the Singen is because of a human
being interacting with the technology and so recruiting that human being.
Is actually that a lot of the SIGANS, huge amount
of Sycains streams are based on people.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
The point I'm trying to make is if particular head
of American intelligence is a longtime PULP member who has
shown strange affinities with people like Bashar al Asad and
Vladimir V. Putin and on the head of oh, I
don't know the Jordanian Intelligence Service or the Ukrainian Intelligence Service?
(09:24):
Am I going to play foot seat with that person?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So when I was in a rock senior officer there
and back in fourteen fifteen, we had a group of
congressmen and senators come in. Now we live in Iraq,
we go out into the Red Zone. We've got assets
who were both in Isis. We have a lot of
Arabic speakers. We live there. And we had this group
of lawmakers come in and I'm not gonna see who
(09:47):
it was, and there were like seven or eight of
them with their staffs there, and we were giving them
a briefing about what's going on in Iraq. Right now,
we're surrounded on three sides. Isis is ascended, Moses has fallen,
they're just after Mosa felt And one guy takes his
loafers off and picking his toenails while we're briefing. So
(10:08):
this is incredible disrespect to the officers who are risking
their lives to be there. And when they finish, he says, basically,
this is a lot of hohoi. And he says they're
only in it for the money. And one of my
officers couldn't help themselves and says, you can't offer them
like an extra hundred dollars to blow themselves up. Now,
(10:30):
the other lawmakers around it were clearly embarrassed at this guy.
But what happens if like they they're all picking their
toes right, and they look at the people who live
there and say, I know you understand that you live there.
But none of this is true because we have our
own reality. But as to who will stay and who
will go, I think a lot of people with integrity
(10:51):
will leave, people with options will leave. People who will
stay will fall into a couple different categories. One will
be career quizzlings who are like, yeah, I'll do it
if you or you give me a big promotion. I'll
say whatever you want. We saw that during the gospeling time.
Other people will basically just put their heads down and
do what bureaucrats everywhere in the world always do. They'll
(11:11):
just try to do their job and wait it out.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
In any large organization, I could talk about the New
York Times, which is about maybe eight percent the size
of the CIA. But in any large organization, you have
the talented tenth okay, and the talented tenth at the
top of intellect, at the top of experience, at the
top of expertise are going to bring you ninety percent
(11:34):
of your successes. And if the talented tenth head for
the door, that's bad news. I hate to be a
harbinger of doom. In many ways, the situation we're about
to be and is absurd and orderline hilarious until stuff happened.
It's a mean old world out there, gentlemen. The Russians
(11:55):
and the Chinese are each through their intelligence services, coming
out of it with ill intent. That Chinese, it seems to me,
love to have your take on this. Want to know us.
They want information dominance. They want to know everything about
the United States government. They want to tap our phones,
they want to rate our computers, they want our personnel files,
(12:17):
and they got it. They want to know us. So
if the balloon goes up in twenty or thirty forty years,
they have information dominance. The Russians just want to screw us.
They don't want to know us. They want to subvert
and sabotage our form of government. And they have achieved
more than Marginal's success over the last eight ten years.
(12:37):
You have a real crisis, and it is almost inevitable
that there will be one. What are these knuckleheads going
to do to protect our country?
Speaker 3 (12:46):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
In the last year of his first term, Trump installed
John Ratcliff and Cash betent Well at the very top
of the Directorate of Natural Intelligence. Were they there to
make sure that big pieces on whither China were going
to be like expertly thought out and edited. No, they
were there to raid the files Russia House where you
(13:15):
used to work, John, to try and dig up dirt
on the president's political enemies and to try and find
a smoking gun that would magically absolve him of his
and his campaign and his teams plussy footing with Vladimir Poot.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
It's a conspiracy theory, but it's one I'm open to.
Is that another reason he's so interested in Russia and
Cia and having it is he doesn't want evidence coming
out of collusion. Right, there was collusion. It's like there was.
I'm not sure they could prove it in a criminal
court of law, but certainly man Afford, his campaign manager
(13:51):
was dealing with the Russians. His own son was talking
to the Russians in line of the FBI about it.
His campaign advisor was lying to the FBI about and
destroying evidence and his relationship with the Russians. So there's Russia,
Russa Russia. There was a lot of it. There is
a smoking gun someplace, and they need to make sure
that it doesn't come out, that we don't find it.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
I don't know how you feel, Jerry John. I know
you have mixed feelings about Federal Bureau of Investigation events
counter counterintelligence capacities. But in American counterintelligence, which is spycatching
among other things, you can't do it without the FBI
in this country. CEEI has no police powers in this country.
Yet cash Betel says, do you guys go play cops
(14:32):
and robbers? I would disestablish the national security of the FBI.
They ain't good.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
No, In fact, I think yeah, the danger Keshpertel, the
FBI is more dangerous than Tulsea Gabbert at DNI for
the American public. Obviously partners are on the world and
the things we need to worry about incredibly important, and
the D A and I just doesn't control a lot
of the actual collection and processing of intelligence.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
There's a lot of the lists talk going around about
the deep state, and the deep state, which does not exist,
is supposedly this nefarious conspiracy of spies and soldiers and
bureaucrats who are have dedicated their professional and personal lives
to undermining Donald Trump. Once upon a time, way back
(15:18):
in the twentieth century, there was a deep state in
who it was embodied in one man, and that man
was Jaegar Hoover. JEdgar Hoover, an unelected bureaucrat who ruled
the FBI for forty eight years, used his powers to
spy on people without warrants, to break into their homes,
to rifle through their papers, to conduct wiretapping, to destroy
(15:40):
people for political purposes. That was political warfare. And presidents
never said no to Hoover. Attorneys general never said no too,
And it wasn't until he died in nineteen seventy two,
six weeks before the Watergate breaking. That never would have happened.
If Hoover was around. And then two things happened. When
Jaeger who were died literally the next week, the Supreme
(16:03):
Court outlawed wartless wire tapping this country. And then the
Watergate break can happen. Okay, and the whole panoply of
Cold War national security began to break down. Helms got
fired because he wouldn't cover up Watergate for Nixon, and
the old national security state that had existed since the
end of World War Two began to break down. Okay,
(16:27):
we run the risk under this president his nominees for
national security position of the return of a national security
state in which the powers of American intelligence and national
security are turned on Americans for political purposes. I think
that's a real danger.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
So that no no podcast is complete without at least
a couple of Nazi references. And I got two for
you that I want to say that that remind me of.
One is you talked about Hoover and he had the
goods on everybody right. Every American president was afraid of him,
politicians were afraid of him. And in Nazi Germany, Hermann Goering,
despite the fact that he wasn't didn't do anything right.
(17:11):
He didn't really have a job he ran the Lufaffe,
did it poorly, and yet nobody came for him. And
one of the reasons for that was because when he
was head of the Prussian Police he had this new
technology called telephone wire tapping act. He had been nobody
knew about this and really hit it and Hermann Goering
during the Nazis rose, I know, I can't help, but
(17:34):
I speak a freaking language, a gorn. He had the
goods on everybody, including Hillery. So right up until the
nineteen forty five they were all afraid of Gourring, not
because of his insight, but because he, like Hoover, he
had the goods.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
He could walk up to some senior Nazi officers said, yeah,
should see you'll have been a bad.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Boy, your male boyfriend that you have not told us
about it, he says. But the other thing, and more ominous, though,
is you talked about loyalty tests. And I think this
is in the air with this administration. The illustration coming
in is Hitler's rise to power. When he really took
power is after Hindenburg died, and one of the first
things he did is he had the military swear an
(18:20):
oath to him personally, right not to the Constitution. Right,
and soon after all his deep state guys bureaucracy swear
an oath to him personally, not to the country, not
to the fatherland, not to the Constitution, and that was
the end of their democracy, right, the last gas. And
when we start going down that road where loyalty, you know,
(18:43):
call me ran into that first the buzzsaw, Are you
loyal to me? The only answer we can have as
Americans is no. You should swear two oaths in your life.
One is when you get married and the other is
when you're when you work for the federal government or
the military. Is you swear an oath to the institution
and that should be your only loyalty. And for some
(19:04):
reason United States citizens they're somehow like, okay, that's been normalized,
swearing an oath to a political figure. That's really dangerous.
That's not a conspiracy theory. That's a real conspiracy. When
you start telling senior CIA, FBI people, you must be
loyal to me, and.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
It is a conspiracy against the Constitution and ultimately against
the American people.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Hold on just a second, Well we take a quick break. Tim.
I know you're working on a new book or a
new book's coming out, so can you tell us about
it a little bit.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
The book is called The Mission the CIA in the
twenty first Century. It starts in the spring of two
thousand and one. It goes right up to the present day.
I'm writing the epilogue right now. It is entirely on
the record, as was Legacy of Ashes, my earlier history
of the CIA, widely if not universally acclaimed.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
I was going to ask you with a very negative history,
so as Wry, are you ready to take it all
back now?
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Well, I'll tell you, John, the old book was based
on literally three hundred thousand declassified documents from CIA, from State,
from the Pentagon, from the White House, from the end
of World War Two up to the early twenty first century.
So I talked to people. I talked to an amazing
array of people, including the top people on the seventh floor,
(20:31):
including sitting chiefs of the clandestine Service, including the man
who was tasked with setting up the black sites, including
the three unbelievable officers who took down aq KHN, who
ran the world's biggest and by far most dangerous nuclear
(20:52):
weapons technology smuggling ring. I talked to people who were
freezing their asses off in Iraqi, Curtisan before the American
invasion in two thousand and three, executing a covert action
plan to take down Saddam, knowing that it would take
the eighty second Airborne to actually do it, but they
had their marching orders. I talked to officers who served
(21:15):
in Baghdad Station, as you did Jerry earlier in the
war in Kabble, in the worst places on Earth, like
the Shikin Base in Afghanistan. There's a t shirt from
there that says, Ella is only skin deep. Who served
in Pakistan, who served in Jordan, who served in Syria.
And I listened to them and I wrote down what
(21:35):
they said.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
And so had they been drinking, yeah you didn't talk
to us, we would have suayed you.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
I did talk to Cipher, and yes you were drinking.
It was a very cold, dry martini, as I recall,
which is what all good intelligence officers drink. It is
a human book. I think Legacy of Ashes, the book
that came out now seventeen years ago, is a book
about an institution, but it's a book about an institution
(22:02):
that came out at a very dark time for the institution.
Nine to eleven, the WMD reported the Iraq War going
south one hundred miles an hour, the Goss regime, and
at the sixtieth anniversary that took place a few months
before the book came out, there was a lot of hanks.
(22:23):
There was a lot of sorrow, and I think the
book was a product of its time. What I like
about this book, might me repeat it's called The Mission
that it'll be out July fifteenth, is it? It really talks
about the mission when we started out before nine to eleven.
For the past decade, people have been wandering around saying,
what the what's the mission? The mission's over? We dislayed
(22:47):
the Soviet beast, what's the mission now? And that relative
handful of people after al Cada blew up our two
embassies in Africa in August nineteen eighty eight, said well, yeah,
we know what the mission is now. But the President
of the United States didn't, the Secretary of Defense didn't,
and Condy Rice as a National Security advisor, they didn't
(23:07):
know what the mission was. And Rice and Cheney thought
the whole arcaded thing was like some big strategic deception.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And the Attorney General he told the FBI guys to
quit wasting your time on this terrorism stuff.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
Well, it's not the mission until the president says its mission. Frankly,
the CI is exquisitely sensitive to presidential commands, and for
the better part of fifteen years, counter terrorism was the mission.
And then starting about ten years ago, roughly twenty fourteen,
give or take, there was a generational chain. Bin Laden
(23:42):
was dead. There was still a lot of danger in
the Islamic world, but espionage began to regain its proper
place of privacy at CI. And as evidence of that,
just in the fall of twenty one, the CI stole
Ladimir Putin's warp plans for Ukraine right out of the Kremlin.
(24:03):
That's what you want your intelligence service to be. You
wanted to know the intentions and capabilities of your enemies.
That's what y'all are there for. That's why they pay
you the small change.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
We were running some good cases prior to twenty fourteen. Oh,
I'm not sure, but I understand what you're saying in
terms of I do think that not just CI, but
this country over invested in counter terrorism, oversold. Obviously it
was incredibly important. Okay, there was a danger. The American
citizen don't really have a choice, did you. No, it
(24:34):
was a big deal, but it couldn't bring down the
United States, whereas China rush at these places at least
have the ability done to have a war with US.
That would be a much more serious thing. We did
a good job on the counter terrorism fight, but I
think we probably focused too much on that for a
little bit too long.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
If anything, maybe product of our successes, there was inside
of CIA in a sense that we need to deprioritize
a vitual human spying, recruiting spies, And it wasn't so
much deprioritizing that is prioritizing other elements of CIA, which
are also important, analysis and these all these other things.
(25:13):
But I think a lot of people who recruit and
run spies, espionage networks, traditional stuff that CIA does, they
were seen as like yesterday's movie stars, and it was
no longer it was no longer a necessity when you've
got technology that we no longer need to recruit spies.
And we still did, but I think there was a
(25:33):
and maybe still is to a certain extent, a d
emphasis on that, And it would be good to say
CIA go back to its human espionage roots and focus
on that.
Speaker 4 (25:44):
I say that's been happening, and I think that you
can attribute in some the survival of Ukraine since twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
I wish the rest of the administration upped its game
and supporting Ukraine. But I hear you.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
If you're gonna blow up Russian generals in the heart
of Moscow, you've been around of some good intelligence. I'm
not saying CI provided the intelligence. Who knows where they
got the intelligence from. But it is not a war
that can be won with weapons. It is a war
in which intelligence plays a central and a crucial role.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
That's fair, and arguably we are at war with Russia,
just not traditional war. Russia looks at warfare different in
the United States, that's right. So to them, it's you
got to think about what you want to accomplish, and
armed force is just one piece of that. And war
never ends for the Russians like for us, it's like
we're either fighting a kinetic war or we're at peace.
For Russians, it's a NonStop political warfare.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Yeah. The first person who articulated that was George Kennan,
the man who dreamed up the Cladist service of the
CI in which he served.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
He did indeed, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
He was just saying what Lenin was already doing.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
Lenin and yeah, there is war never ends for those guys.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Now, it's a different way of looking at things. And
they've been quite successful. I mean they're killing people around
Europe and around the world, and they're spreading disinformation and
they're using deception to break on us, and they're missing
in elections and all those kind of things.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
Well, that's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
It's always enjoyable and it was great Vita.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible it is a production of honorable mention and abominable
pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com