December 14, 2025 • 51 mins
An expert on psychological manipulation and politics, including Nazi propaganda and Stassi, NYU professor Tamsin Shaw studies conspiracy theories and how they might be changing with the internet and A.I.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go
to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on
the link to our channel. In our show notes, I'm
John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers
in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around
the world.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
And part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. So today's guest
is Tamson Shaw. She's a professor of European and Mediterranean
Studies and Philosophy at NYU. She's written about psychology, Silicon
Valley and the effects of social media, the rise of
oligarchs overseas and at home, American intelligence, at ri Snowdmen,
much else often in The New York Review of Books
(01:05):
and elsewhere. She's now working on a book on our
susceptibility to influence operations than So welcome, Thank you, I
know you teach a course at NYU and psychological manipulation
in politics, including like Nazi propaganda and Stasi, etc. But
in it you talk about conspiracy theories and how they
might be changing with the Internet, and AI.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
Yeah, I'm very interested in the form that they take nowadays,
partly because everybody's so focused on disinformation as a national
security concern and a general political concern. But a lot
of the conspiracies and now conspiracy theories are just put
together with true facts and they leave the audience to
(01:47):
make the inferences, the causal inferences about what's going on.
So a good example would be the Loose Change documentary
about nine to eleven, where it just starts in with
reciting facts, actually starting with the Reichstag fire, going through
Roosevelt having known about Pearl Harbor. I'm not saying that
all of these facts are true, by the way, but
(02:08):
it's just resenting them as facts, and then everything up
through Vietnam and JFK of course to the present day.
So it just presents the sequence of events and it
doesn't tell you who the conspirators are or what the
conspirator is. It just leaves you to draw the inferences yourself,
and I think that's something people like doing because then
they feel as though they're discovering something if they put
(02:31):
it together for themselves. And that's I think something that
the Internet has really encouraged, because people used to get
information in some kind of critical context, like if you
wanted to find out what happened, you'd go to a
book or a newspaper or congressional papers, whatever it was.
But now on the Internet, you can just look up
(02:52):
facts in this very piecemeal way, join the dots yourself,
and it doesn't exist in any critical context at all,
so there aren't really any constraints on what people are
going to do with those facts. And I think it's
encouraged this way of putting something together yourself. That is
a very exciting narrative, and you're the hero in the narrative,
(03:13):
of course, because you're finding out about this big plot
that nobody else knows about. And I think organizations like
WikiLeaks encouraged that a bit with putting out, as they said,
raw information. Of course it was always very highly edited
in fact, but they're saying, look, we're just giving you
the information and you can put together yourself what's happening.
(03:34):
All of their audience. We're putting together the deep state
being in charge of everything.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
We use the terms of conspiracy theory and conspiracy and
they mean different things, right, And you deal a lot
with philosophy, and like why is it that people want
to deal in conspiracies and conspiracy theories. And we're talking
about Steve Bannett, right, great conspiracy theorists, and he loves
the Knights Templar. Let's go back to the thirteen hundreds
(04:03):
with the Knights Templar. There's this powerful organization. They're rich,
they're actually the bankers of Europe. They bring in all
these this revolutionary new for those days banking banking procedures,
and in the end, the King of France accuses them
of heresy and of worshiping a goat headed figure called Baffamet,
(04:26):
and he burns them at the stake. But this is
this grand conspiracy that's been pushed by the King of France.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
But in the end, of course, he takes their money.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
And the whole point of this is that the King
of France then seizes all the assets that they have,
and the King of France is in a dire financial situation.
So there was a real set of conspiracy theories pushed
out to the larger population. There are a lot of
facts involved in this and that, and yet in the
end of the day, it was a conspiracy. To push
(04:57):
a conspiracy theory is that it was pretty clear that
the Knights Templar were not worshiping a goat headed figure,
and we could play that all the way to today.
So when people are looking at their phones, sitting on
the toilet and coming up with connecting these facts, oftentimes
they're led in a certain direction. So I was wondering
(05:18):
returning Bick to this century, his things changed all that
much with people being directed in certain ways.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
No, I think people are directed. Even in these fact listing,
as I call them, conspiracy theories, they're still selecting the
facts carefully to lead people in a particular direction. So
I think they always tend to be led top down.
Maybe QAnon involved in a slightly more organic way because
it originated as LARPing or live action roleplay on four Chan,
(05:48):
but then there's been a lot of directing it for
a particular political agenda, of course.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
So yes, suchly what you're saying is it used to
be conspiracy theorists had to come up with sort of
complex elaborations, right, whatever, Nazi propaganda about the Jews and
things like that. But now you're saying, essentially because of
the Internet really and Twitter and all these other social
media things, is you don't need to really fabricate anything sophisticated.
You can just do your own research, put a few
(06:14):
facts together, and the Internet helps all those things connect.
And then what comes out of there is you get
the thrill of discovery of thinking you're putting together some
really cool and complex thing that nobody knows about. It
does seem to me if that's true, that means that
there's more and more conspiracy theories making their way to
the Internet, and it seems like AI would then suck
that in and turbocharge the process.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
Yeah, you worry about it.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
I do worry about that, not because I think AI
developed conspiracy theories. If you actually ask it to, it's
very old school. So I asked for a conspiracy theory
showing that Frank Sinatra killed JFK, for instance, and it
gives you a whole lot of complex motives and relationships
between people that are really dispensable for today's conspiracy theories.
(06:57):
You don't need them. What you need to do is
just list some pertinent backs and then ply a causal
relationship between them, and that's very easy to do now
with facts on the end, and the way that AI
generates knowledge for people, Again, if they ask it a question,
it will give them a factual answer, but the one
(07:18):
that isn't part of any critical context unless they look
at the sources. And then the sources are often very
bad because they have to be ones that are just
most appropriate for these large language models to use. And
I've found that if it's anything to do with SAJFK,
they go straight for the conspiracy theory ones, and of
course there's way more of that content out there for
(07:41):
them to use. And there's going to be this recursive
problem where people rely on the lms to get information
and then they use that information in what they write,
and then that's all such back up into the lms,
and it's so much harder to get the truth out
there and to research and find out the truth that
(08:03):
it just seems clear to me that we're going to
end up with endless nonsense and people having very little
capacity to differentiate between what's true and what's not.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Before the advent of the Internet, by and large, we
would look to experts for facts, right, and what a
fact is the very definition of the word. I've spent
three decades as John did in CIA. What do I
know about making vaccines? I'm not even sure what RNA
enabled venis. I don't even have the terminology for it.
(08:35):
And I looked to the FDA, and I look to
medical experts, right, And yet I don't know these things right.
And so it seems before you studied the third rite,
and Hitler could claim that, oh, we were we were
attacked by the Soviet Union. We had no choice but
to invade poll the polls were And yet even he
(08:55):
had to sort of, you know, he had to set
up a fake attack, and so to present that, are
we losing the ability to have rational discourse if we
can make up our own facts and that there are
no referees? And I'm just thinking RFK Junior, right, I mean,
you have the entire medical basically the entire medical community
it saying he and him saying, I've got a brain worm.
(09:16):
But it's because it's got the fact, and I have
the power.
Speaker 5 (09:19):
People can't invent facts, because facts just exist in the world,
but people can invent claims about facts, and a lot
of them are going to be false. Actually discovering the
fact is relatively difficult. Making them up is very easy.
And that's why with the immediacy of communication on the Internet,
it's just bound to be the case that you drown
(09:42):
out the true facts with the nonsense unless you have,
as you say, gatekeepers or expertise. And people believe in
that lesson less partly for it does a good motivation,
which is that people want to know not just what
the facts are, but what somebody's justifications are for saying
those are the facts. So they want to go through
(10:04):
the whole process themselves and find out where this comes from.
But the Internet has encouraged these forms of interaction that
are very fast, and they don't actually give people time
to do that research and find out whether a claim
is justified.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Well, you know, it is a fact that forty seven
point three percent of all statistics are made up on
the spot.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Yeah, I've heard.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So when you work with a class like this and
you talk about these things AI and Silicon Valley and
what are the students take out of it? What is
it that surprises them? Is this generation different in how
they process these things?
Speaker 5 (10:40):
And you, yeah, sometimes they surprise me, because they so
much more online than people of my generation that they
know a huge amount of this stuff. One of them
was just telling me this week about white nationalists propaganda
on I think it's which doesn't say anything explicit about
(11:00):
white nationalism. It just shows you these, for instance, streets
from the nineteen fifties full of white people who are
nicely indirect or shopping or whatever it is, and there's
no explicit message. But the people who subscribe to that
content are going to understand what the message is supposed
to be, and other people are going to get sucked
(11:22):
and just out of curiosity.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Very often, it seems to me. I also studied the
rise of fascism in Germany and other places, and a
lot of it was around the basic myths that people believed.
Right in Germany, it was the time of the time
of past greatness, the folk of Andero and the Germanic
people's coming in, and the whole sense not so much
racial purity, but the sense of pride in German nationalism
(11:48):
comes much earlier the vanderfugel and where people were playing
folk music, singing with guitars as they wandered through the
streets of Germany, and then this was taken in a
different direction by the Nazis, and white nationals today are
also doing this. It's a myth that in the nineteen
fifties did everybody was like leave it to Beaver, right.
I mean, if you were African American that the United
(12:09):
States was not that all great in the nineteen fifties,
or there was polio in the nineteen fifties, and there
were higher instances of domestic abuse.
Speaker 5 (12:18):
So I'm very interested, as you say, in the example
of the Nazis, because they really exploited these existing myths
in German culture. I was playing my students a bit
of Wagner to show them how powerful this was. Of course,
(12:42):
Hitler was obsessed with Wagner, and I don't think you
can understand the power of somebody like Hitler without seeing
how this myth of his charisma developed. And that's because
people already had this really strong desire for a leader
that was part of the this cult of Germany being
(13:05):
in need of salvation, and people were looking for some
kind of strong, charismatic leader. In fact, Hitler was early on,
and then it only gradually became clear to everybody that
it should be him. People like Goebbels were looking for
this savior everywhere and just describing it in very pseudo
religious terms. So there's I guess, there's the mythic content,
(13:28):
which refers to the past, and all forms of nationalism
are mythic in the sense that they create this imaginary past.
And then there's what I would call fantasy, which is
the idea that's somehow infusing the present, and something like
national socialism contains an enormous element of fantasy and just
(13:48):
fantastical beliefs.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
I just want to chip in and say it wasn't
just that the Nazis are the easiest, because yeah, we've
got movies about it, but this was also the same
tendencies were present in Japan. You know that they are
the chosen race. Their emperor was descended from the Sun
God himself, and Mussolini going back to the Roman Empire,
and the Hungaris going back to the time of the
(14:11):
mod Hoards coming in. So this was this is really
something that was widespread, This looking back to the glories
of the past, looking back for a leader who can
take us back there, and then matching that with intolerance
of others, and most important, most importantly, but also vital
to this was you have to blame someone for why
(14:32):
we're not there.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
You see this playing out in Britain now, because of
course the English especially have been really good at this
myth making. They've co opted a lot of artists and
musicians and we all see land of hope and glory
at the prongs and the kind of imperial patriotism that existed.
(14:54):
I'm reluctant to call it nationalism because we have English
and Scottish and Welsh nationalisms that are separate from that
patriotism about Britain and about the Empire. So Britain I
think developed and the Victorian times, especially the height of
the Victorian Empire.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
A huge amount of mythology around this, and a lot
of it was just very flimsy. Of course, it's based
on untruth or just the pseudo religious stuff. And now
Britain is no longer a great power and people are
I don't think exactly resentful of that, but there's a
(15:34):
kind of nostalgia for the Britain that was a great power,
and people like Nigel Farage and Reform UK are obviously
playing on that and they're identifying the enemy, which of
course is immigrants and the immigrants is somehow polluting that
idea of Britain, or sometimes it's that idea of Englishness.
(15:58):
The conservative philosopher Roger Scrutens, who a lot of these
guys liked, wrote a lot about Englishness, and it's very
much this myth of the village green and playing cricket
and tea and waving the flag. And it's a very
kind of cliched Victorian image.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
So we're doing the same thing. Maga is looking back
at a mythic past. These immigrants are some sort of enemy,
when it's in fact we're all immigrants. I wondered when
you talk about these things, utiple, are leaders knowingly taking
advantage of this or is this something that's just deep
in human beings and they just they want to grasp
for something to make themselves feel better about themselves, and
(16:39):
that's about others and about sort of power against their
enemies in the next state over.
Speaker 5 (16:43):
People will always say it's something deep in human beings
and they're just tribal. But if you try to give
explanations in any particular case, you find that nationalism especially
hasn't always existed as a form of belonging. It was invented.
I don't want to always go back to the fascists
because it's such a cliche. But Hitler wanted to create
(17:04):
this idea of populist leadership where he and the people
were won. And he says in his nineteen thirty or
speech at the Nuremberg Rally that it's not the state
ruling the people, but the people in the state are
the same thing, and everybody has to believe in this WI,
so that they're part of this we with the leader.
And the way that you can most easily get that
(17:24):
isn't by making everyone to subscribe to some common values
or set of common beliefs. It's just by having a
common enemy. You just have them and us, and that's
the easiest way to do it. And it's clearly what
people are doing now on the populist ride.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
The we changes the we.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
During the Third Reich, just running with this was the
Germanic people and they would test bloodlines going to join
the SS. You had to go back generations to make
sure there was no Jewish or French or Italian blooding,
and the United States were no different. So there's My
favorite political party was the No Nothing. So the eighteen
fifties right, and they were built on a conspiracy theory
(18:04):
that the Irish in the Germans, the Catholics were coming in,
the Papists were coming in to destroy their Protestant Republic
by being there. And yet today Irish and the descendants
of those Irish and Catholics who were supposedly a fifth
column to destroy the republic are now themselves embracing conspiracy
(18:27):
theories about Central Americans coming in right, fellow Roman Catholics
as the as the other. And then we had in
the nineteen twenties we had the KKK, where like President
of the United States was in the KKK. And the
only explanation I could come up with, I think there
is it's being manipulated by I know this sounds conspiratorial,
but it's being manipulated by people with power.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Right, Who is us? Who were they?
Speaker 3 (18:50):
And how do I You may actually believe it in
this there I think Steven Miller probably does, right, But
who was us and who is they?
Speaker 5 (18:58):
It's always something that's constructed. So Irish people weren't originally
considered to be white, and if you look at what
white means in America, there are a lot of people
who in fact, don't really know whether they count as
part of this white nation that the white nationalists are
talking about. It's a big gray area because these terms
(19:18):
are just invented and they don't necessarily have anything to
do with any physically existing reality, whether it's genetic or
skin color or whatever it is. And that's I think
always the case that this exclusion takes place, and it's
people in power defining categories in order to do that,
and then other people who want to be part of
(19:41):
the inn group, of course, willingly subscribe to it, so
it takes on a power of its own.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
I believe it's in the nineteen twenties, the Supreme Court
had to decide whether Armenians were white. Yes, and it's
actually a court case that they came up, and then
they had to just figure out whether Punjabis are white.
And they're like, okay, Armenians are white because they're Christians.
But Punjabis from northern India who may have like green
or blue eyes, yeah, they're not even if they're Christians.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
So it's so interesting to use that example because my
daughter's father is Armenian and she considers herself Armenian, and
she's very recently been coming and asking me, am I
White because of content she's seeing online where people are
saying Armenians are Middle Eastern or Armenians are Asian, and
it's an area of confusion. And mostly what people in
(20:30):
America know about Armenians comes from the Kardashians. And I
don't think that's a share share share ye yeah, oh yeah,
and share.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Of course, Let's turn to some of the tools, because
you write a lot about Silicon Valley and a lot
of the tools that we're using now. You write about
the sort of toxic role of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, how
(21:01):
they help in some ways are rewiring our minds. But
I know you just did a book review of someone
in the New York Times and talked about how some
people are trying to look at you know, yet not
everybody gets sucked in. So what is it about the
mind's wiring that protects some and then brings in others?
Speaker 5 (21:16):
I wish I knew the answer to that. Yeah, I know,
it's also designed to exploit certain people. That the divisiveness,
the trolls and the bots that are responsible for it,
they know what they're doing. The people that the uniquit Yeah,
people think that information has become more democratic because we
(21:38):
have the Internet and we have AI and we can
consult these llms. We just have to remember that all
of those companies are owned by these oligarchs essentially or
polygarch and they have their own agendas. They're all far right,
a lot of them are pushing white nationalism, and they
set the algorithm to tell people what they want to
(22:00):
tell them. So if you look up on chat GPT,
for instance, describe Ukraine to me, it will give you
a description. And then if you say DISCRIPSI Ukraine and
Ukraine in the style of RT, the Russian Propaganda channel
will give you a completely different description, just selecting the
backs differently, creating a different narrative. And you realize whatever
(22:23):
the default setting is for the algorithm is set by
these guys like Musk and Teal and their friends, who
all share a very particular political agenda. And that's not
something democratic. It's everybody being manipulated by the same group
of people. Again, this sounds like a conspiracy.
Speaker 4 (22:43):
Tip well, it.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Sounds like a conspiracy, but it's one that I'm open to.
Who does control the algorithm? John and I coming out
of CIA, the algorithms in Russia are controlled by the
state who what you get to read and what is
affect is controlled by the state, And increasingly in the US,
it is a fact that it the algorithms by which
(23:04):
they were strongly influenced, are controlled by a small cabal
of politically influential people who have who want to I
don't get it, want to make yet another billion dollars
or want yet more power.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
I mean, you know, I don't know how many.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
Well you have to understand the fantasies to understand him
and his followers. These people are just such florid fantasists.
Speaker 7 (23:28):
They were all gamers, all gamers, Yeah, and they all
think that they're going to pioneer a life on other planets,
or that they're going to discover how we can all
live forever.
Speaker 5 (23:39):
They're not interested in real world problems. They just have
this fantastical set of beliefs and ambitions. That's partly what's
so worrying about having them be in con charge, because
in charge, because they're actually very detached from reality. But yeah,
you mentioned putin having to control the media, including the
(24:00):
internet there. I mean, if anybody wants to establish themselves
as a dictator in the long term. Now they're going
to have to bring those oligogs to heal and just
the way that Putin did so, I don't know why
those guys would feel so comfortable recommending an authoritarian form
of government when they would probably be what's most standing
(24:23):
in the way of that. Ultimately, a lot of people
were saying this about Elon Musk a few months ago.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
But when I grew up, the Republican Party was quote
the party of capitalism, But now it seems more and
more like the party of state monopoly. Like it's yeah,
we've seen in Russia. It's more like state capitalism or
economic nationalism. And you've written about Bannon and some of
these social media folks. How do we get here? How
did a party that thought it believed in one thing
turn itself into believing something else?
Speaker 5 (24:49):
Think about the evolution of Silicon Valley and the establishment
of those huge monopolies, not really in terms of one
party or another, because of course it was under Clinton
that you had all of this deregulation. Bob Ruman and
Larry Summerson, all of those people, and it was Clinton
that wanted to privatize these industries that were essential to
(25:13):
national security, as a way of fighting terrorism. I mean,
already in nineteen ninety eight, that's what Clinton was saying
we needed to do. And then, of course, the Silicon
Valley economy becomes established in a context where we need
to develop these technologies for the government and harness our
innovation for those ends, for national security ends. But you're
(25:37):
letting the private companies keep all the profits, even though
they're heavily subsidized with government funds. And you're allowing these
monopolies to develop, and because the government very quickly becomes
dependent on them. When they update their software, everybody has
to update with them, and they're competing with China, of
course in a commercial marketplace, and that has a lot
(25:59):
of ramifications for government. So in the end, you would
think government would want to align their interests much more
closely with the interests of the Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Oligogus, because it is true when Jerry and I started,
we didn't have we weren't tied to these companies to
the same extent. We often created our own technology that
eventually made its way into companies in the market. So
how did you get interested in that? And then what
is your sense of the intelligence community as you look
at it now.
Speaker 5 (26:30):
I was always interested in Snowden, actually as soon as
that movie came out, because I just had a deep
distrust of the way they presented the information in the movie,
Laura Patress and Glenn Greenwald, and it was so much
part of this gaming fantasy, which is a character just
like Edward Snowden being the lone hero battling these great
(26:51):
powers and leaking information. Glenn Greenwold, I guess, started out
as a lawyer defending people on the far right, and
here they were being celebrated by the left as these
great heroes, and I was just instinctively suspicious of that.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
The hero fantasy is I think a big problem for
I mean, I don't know I'm oversimplifying here, but even
our gun culture, I think there's this view that I
watch these movies. It's all about heroes and defending yourself
and if I have these guns and they're coming after me,
I can take on the state and all these I
just think people love being the hero of their own story.
It's dangerous actually, because in real life individuals can't take
(27:28):
on the state like they think they Yeah.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
And you ask what I think about the intelligence services, Now,
I do worry about the revolving door with the private companies,
just because people can go they can get government positions
for the training and then take that to a private
company run by one of these oligogs. And of course
that happens all the time, and it happens with most
(27:52):
sad as well, especially where they've got a really strong
tech sept. That there's always been this interaction of the two,
but that is going to increasingly mean that there are
these big financial motivations and maybe also ideological motivations for
people when they're in government. That will mean a decline
(28:12):
in the sense of mission that probably your generation had.
So that's something that I worry about.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
The real danger is XCIA guys who start up podcasts
to like manipulate people.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Well, I think there's there are a few XCIA people
have podcasts who are lying about.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
Stuff like us unlike US.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Oh no, there's good ones. But there's also people who
have much bigger followings than we do. It's true, essentially
pretending that they were these superheroes when they say when
they were nobody's yeah, like people follow that stuff and
they're full of shit.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
Frankly, I know it's interesting you talk about the death
of expertise. But there are all these people who are
self appointed experts that have huge followings.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
So expertise arguably is what makes the human race function.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Right.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
We can't all we can't all do everything. I don't
know how to make a computer, and the parts come
from all over the world.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
I mean, we have to specialize.
Speaker 5 (29:05):
And it's also ironic because knowledge has become more more
specialized with scientific advances and engineering advances, and people used
to be able to repare their cars. They can't repare
their own computers the same way as the military could
their planes, and now they can't prepare their software. The
(29:26):
Soviets in general really hampered science there where they had
many great scientists, but they hampered what they could do
just because they were so ideological that they had to
censor anybody or get rid of anybody who wasn't ideologically
aligned with them. And once you do that and you
can't have open scientific debate, then you can't have the
(29:50):
cultivation of that independent expertise, and you really need it
to have any meaningful scientific progress.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
We see very senior people, politicians, congressmen, people you associated
with government, who if we asked them a question about
something might be very strong opinion on what they believe
based on their experience. Then if present Trump says the
opposite is true, they just immediately change and say they
say that's the right thing.
Speaker 5 (30:14):
And also do they really believe it. I'm assuming that
if they change their view that quickly, they're just going
along with something and don't really care what they believe.
So in the nineties, I guess it was no. The
two thousands, a philosopher at Princeton called Harry Frankfurt wrote
a book called On Bullshit. It was about this phenomenon
where people just don't really care what's true and what's not,
(30:36):
and so they'll say anything regardless. So they're not lying
and they're not being hypocritical, they just don't really care.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
In US, where myth controls fact, you get to things
like if you don't like the labor statistics, fire the
head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And then the
same with climate change. If you don't like climate change,
you know, stop stop acquiring data to support or not
support it, right, just defund defund it. And then basically,
(31:03):
my myth is bigger than your myth.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
So get back to intelligence. Are there questions that you'd
like to talk to us about well, because a lot
of bad things have happened in the intelligence world. Mostly
they're Jerry's fault, and I'm willing to talk about them openly. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (31:15):
No, I've got so many questions because you guys devise
conspiracy theory, so of course I want to know how
you did it.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
If you're going to make a conspiracy, Let's just pretend
the conspiracy is you want to bump into a North
Korean scientist.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
Right, you can't walk over to him and.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Say, Hi, I'm with the CIA, I'd like to talk
to you. You have to engineer a set of circumstances
that will allow that to happen. So the conspiracy is
something that is small and manageable, and even then doesn't
always stand up to deep scrutiny, just enough to get
you in the doorle So.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
You might pretend to be a Malaysian businessman who meets
this person when they're traveling and develops some sort of
relationship and then turns them over to someone else who
might have a business interest in them. It's also a cipra,
so you're stringing somebody along so that you can get
to understand them. And understand what makes them ticke and stuff.
So you're creating a mini conspiracy. But I would argue
that intelligence officers often the least conspiratorial people know one
(32:13):
because how essentially impossible it is to create these big,
complex conspiracies Because he's a bureaucracy. People sign off for things,
there's lawyers, rules, regulations, there's lots of people involved. So
the notion that you could create this very complex conspiracy.
Look at the JFK thing. Okay, they made sure the
phones were all turned off in this city at that time,
(32:34):
and they made sure that the plane was over this
certain area when this thing happened, and they made sure
this group of people, they turned off all the security
and they brought new security. All of those people involved
having to understand what they're doing and understand they're doing
something very different.
Speaker 5 (32:48):
It Just imagine governments were that competent.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Nobody's that competent.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
So there was that we had a the d n
I was created, right, the direct cognition, Oh it was.
I'll say it was Dennis Blair and he's he was
a second or third one.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
He's I'm the big guy.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I looked at this ORG chart and you all you all,
you motherfuckers, you got to come and bow to me, right,
So he puts out this worldwide thing saying all chiefs
of station must report to me by next week. And
then we said chiefs of station, like, okay, where do
we get our plane tickets? We don't have money in
our budget for this, so d and I what's our
(33:24):
budget number that we can do this? And where are
we going to stay? And who pays for the rental cars?
So it was like the bureaucracy just didn't you know.
He's like, yeah, you may be the boss, dude, but
you don't have a budget. You got your lawyers, like
I got shit going on. And then it was a disaster.
And so people who think by and large that in
(33:45):
the federal government, even in the CIA and the intelligence community,
somebody can per fiat just say oh dude, oh And
then everybody talked about it for years. It was like
it's like, you know, everybody knew, because it's not like
all the chiefs of station kept their mouths shut. They
all had coffee with their buddies and people are overhearing,
and that was a disaster well.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
And they hid us for a personality that we actually
are the kind of people who like are happy saying
no to leadership and y and so like you've got
a bunch of like, you know, you're trying to herd
cats and all these people think they're smarter than everybody else.
They're not, but they have they're pretty smart, and they
have their own sort of views, and they don't care
what people say. Because intelligence is about providing oftentimes information
(34:28):
to policy makers. We don't want to hear it. Yeah,
so that's part of the culture. And so the notion
that like this group could keep a deep conspiracy for
decades it's nuts.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
I have to say that.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Every once in a while, in the Washington Post, Lesson
less Lately or New York Times, there will be some
expos on some past operation that the agency pulled off,
and I'll look at that and go, oh, I know
about this one. And then I'll start reading it and like, oh,
I didn't know those details.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
WHOA.
Speaker 5 (34:55):
I know a bunch of investigative journalists and they will say,
it's really hard to find out what's going on because
you don't just get this one source like deep throat
who knows everything. People have their own area of specialization
and they have some sense of what's going on elsewhere,
and there isn't just this one font of information that
(35:15):
you can go to.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
No, And there's need to know. You might be in
the middle of an operation, and I know a lot of
stuff about that, but there's other pieces that you don't
have any sense for. And then you say, well, the
people above you must know. But they're managing tons and
tons of these operations, so they know only as much
as they need you or get money or to brief
that up. If the North Koreans of Russians had drugs
and they got the director of CIA and ask them, okay,
(35:37):
tell us all the secrets, you wouldn't get a lot.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
And the things account like sources and methods. I'll tell
you if you get three CIA guys drinking around a bar, right,
and they're really gonna say it is most of us
could not remember the names of our agents or what
was the name of that operation again, even just a
few years afterwards, because these are small details, and in
(36:00):
our thing is like you may look at it once
and then a year later you don't really use that
small detail.
Speaker 5 (36:05):
That The myth of the deep state really relies on
the idea that it's a bunch of people who know
exactly what they're doing and have a common cause. But
I've been looking at the origins of that myth, and
so one of them, of course is the Bay of Pigs,
when people started to become aware of what CIA were
doing and that they have this disastrous operation, and Kennedy
(36:29):
said that it was all on him, that he took responsibility,
but at the same time he fired Alan Dulles.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
I think one of the great misunderstandings was a misunderstanding
at the time was I think a lot of people
involved in the app and lower down thought that if
it went bad, Kennedy would and had freed to employ
the US Air Force, And I think there were some
indications that he would have, but I think I don't
think he ever said I will and then went back
(36:54):
on his words. I think they just a lot of
it was just a human fuck up.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Yeah, they made assumptions about what and of course this
is pre reform cias. When so you go to see
the president, they would say, maybe not give you a
direct order. They might like, listen, we're going to do
something about the leader in Chile or whatever it is,
and the director would come back without a specific order,
but like a general thing and go back down to
people generally, we need to do this, we need that.
So I've always making assumptions about what people above them
(37:20):
want and think, and then the real world is complex
and dirty and it gets carried out and then everybody's like, oh,
I thought you wanted this or wanted that. Once we
got to the reforms in the seventies, it became much
clear that presidents when they wanted to see I had
to do covert action, which is this kind of stuff.
They had to write written orders that were then shared
with the congressional committees as well as the agency, which
(37:41):
could then write back. And then everything we do is
incredibly documented. Yeah, so I think the intelligennity change fundamentally
at that time. But I also think there was still
a culture that people from that from intelligence don't speak,
they don't speak publicly, And it wasn't until I think
like the nineties, maybe early two thousands that if you retired.
So Jerry and I were both under State Department cover.
(38:02):
When we were retired, we were allowed to what we
call roll back our cover and then write articles and speak.
And you know, I can remember General Hayden saying it was.
It's a responsibility if you work for a secret organization
that if you have the opportunity to try to explain
what you can to the American public, you have an
obligation to do that. The public relies on the fact
that we are doing a mission for the American public,
so we can give you as much as we can.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
But there's an inherent contradiction in having a clandestine a
secret intelligence agency inside a transparent democracy. The two don't fit,
and they shouldn't fit. We should control our intelligence agencies
very closely by elected officials in other countries. It's not
the case that the GRU and the SVR fit just
(38:43):
fine hand in glove and are central to Putin's Russia,
but CIA and MI sixter they're not. You're trying to
save sources and methods. You're trying to keep people for us.
People come to us and they say, I'll tell you
what's really going on, but you've got to keep me alive.
And we take that very seriously, and yeah, so we're
not going to tell we're not going to tell news
(39:04):
of the world. Well, according to this guy, you know,
the Russians are lying to us because he and his
family are you know, be executed.
Speaker 5 (39:33):
So I think Dylan Avery is the name of the
person who made the Loose Change documentary about nine to eleven.
The conspiracy theory one.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
Please experience on that. Now everybody knows what that is.
Speaker 6 (39:44):
Well, the nine to eleven truthers who think that it
was all a government conspiracy have various sources, but the
most mainstream one is this documentary called Loose Change.
Speaker 5 (39:55):
The final version of.
Speaker 6 (39:56):
It ended up having Roger Stone as one of their producers, so.
Speaker 5 (40:00):
You can imagine, oh wait, maybe it was Alex Jones. Yeah,
it was Alex Jones. But it started out just this
guy who was actually writing a fictional screen so it
was precisely supposed to be one of these Hollywood stories
about the loan hero discovering the big conspiracy, and then
he became the hero of his own movie and turned
(40:23):
it into a documentary. And I think that's just something
that is really tempting for people. It's what's been glamorized
more than anything else in our societies. The fact most
buy movies are about people like Jason Bourne, who are
that loan hero that are going against all of the
authorities and finding out everything for themselves and changing the world.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
But the reality of an intelligence organization, it's a team sport.
Like Jerry and I are trying to meet a recruit,
a source, but we're counting on lots of people behind
us expertise. If we have to get special equipment, people
who have records back home that can help us understand
what's going on about, what the issues are, what kind
of questions they ask, and so you talk about common
cause to us mission is very but the mission is
(41:11):
providing unbiased information to policymakers they make better policy and
protect the American citizens. And it's non but it is nonpartisan.
Speaker 4 (41:19):
I don't talk.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
I don't remember ever talking to anybody inside, even my
best friends about politics or politicians, even when we were drinking,
even when we're overseas. It wasn't really till you were
tired and you see them on Facebook or these other
places talking and you're like, oh my god, I had
no idea that, and like, I would you know, until
Jerry and I got to know each other after we retired,
I don't know Jerry's politics.
Speaker 4 (41:39):
Yeah, no clue. He just knew I was right all
the time.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
And focus on You're focused on doing your work and
if anything we sort of look down on politicians because
they come out to our stations. We have to brief
them all the time. The questions are often stupid. They
don't really understand us. They're in a game where they're
trying to self promote. We're in a game where it's
not about self promotion.
Speaker 5 (41:58):
So you know, if any president comes into office and
has a whole new vision for what CIA should be
and what everybody should be doing that conflicts with the
sense of mission and people going to push back.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
That's a great question, because I don't it never happened before.
Jerry and I worked for Reagan and Bush and Obama
and Clinton and everybody, and it was there would be
policy changes and questions and what happened with this country
in that country and what we're doing, But in terms
of our business, almost no real change in.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
The day to day work.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
If you're in India trying to collect information on Russians
and Chinese and other kinds of things and a new
president comes in, there's not a lot of difference. However,
now it might be true because the administration wants the
CIA to be a partisan weapon to help the presidents
stay in power or to carry through his thing. So
now might be the real challenge and to try to
see how much of that is filtering down through the organization.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
Yeah, so, Tamson, you talked about being a hero in
euro movie, and I would be remiss if I didn't
throw in this anecdote. I was in a place and
it was in a war zone, right, It was a
very dangerous place, and a congressman flew in and he
was inside this secure military base, but outside the base
the bad guys were there and they kind of like
(43:13):
ruled the turf. And he said, I want to go
out and I want to get in a firefight. Right,
I want to go out, have the bad guys attack us,
and I want to get in a firefight, and I
want it photographed me shooting a weapon in them.
Speaker 4 (43:27):
And first of all, we would go out in a
convoy with jeeps and things like that, and they would
ambush us.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
The rule of an ambush is they get the first
with automatic weapons, They get the first thousand rounds to
shoot at us, and then if and when we survived,
we get to shoot back.
Speaker 4 (43:41):
But they're hiding. But I didn't tell them that.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
And then he went a step further and said, oh,
be good if I just got wingked, you know, just
like a little you know, just like just you know,
just a little bit of blood and like you.
Speaker 4 (43:55):
Do what a modern round does to you.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
You know, it's like, you know, you're more likely to
This was a guy from the House of Representatives, and
he was so steeped in the mythology.
Speaker 4 (44:06):
Of the movies because he had seen.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
This on TV so many And I'm not an ex
military guide. The military guys who are like flood the block.
Speaker 4 (44:13):
Yeah, and you know I too, I know. It was like,
I'm not going with you. I'm not.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Yeah, And so I think I jokingly told them that
it wouldn't be good for my career. It's not a
career improver to get a congressman killed, Like who's your guest? Right,
By and large, we have some really good officers and
to see the vast majority are because these are people
who could have made lots more money on the outside.
They wouldn't have taken their kids to places where there
(44:41):
are cobras and malaria. You worry about your family, and
yet they did it because of mission, because of those
values and the constitutions you talked about that we believe
in those things.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
But we have a few.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
Like any place else, we have a few people who
either our shipballs or become crazy.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (44:56):
I just read Tim Winer's book on CIA in the
twenty first centuries, and that was amazing because there are
people in there who he names that I either met
or just follow on social media, and I'm suddenly finding
out about the things they've done that are just mind
blowing to ordinary people who live safe lives in urban settings.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
It was a fun job. Like honestly, God and I
sound like we're proselytizing here, but you know, I spent
almost thirty years in the organization. I don't regret any
of it. I think what I did. You know, we're
trying to do the right thing. There were so many
fun and interesting people. We got to work around the world,
different cultures, meeting and working with foreign organizations. It was
really interesting, fun stimulating. You felt like you were doing
(45:39):
something bigger than yourself. I don't have any regrets.
Speaker 5 (45:42):
How do you guys pick up languages just like that,
You don't.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
Pick them up from this, Well, that's part of the
diversity that we are languages right, or we take a
year off and you get okay with the language.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yeah, I learned Finnish and Russian and server e creation,
but it was painful. So when I learned Russian, I
was in a room with one or two other people
for a year, all day long, trying to speak, trying
to read, and then at going back and back. Then
when there's cassettes, having to listen home and do someone homework.
Speaker 4 (46:10):
And just it's just it's your job.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
You work for CIA, and that whole year you're working
in a language lab preparing to learn the language.
Speaker 5 (46:17):
So can I ask how does it feel when members
of the public who now know that your former CIA
start without knowing anything about what you did, obviously, will
start to blame you for every covit oh that they've
heard about, like Operation paper Clip to Nazis or Operation
Phoenix or whatever it is. That you know that a
(46:40):
part of the culpiller idea of CIA.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Operation paper Clip is a good one. So do you
allow the sow Do you allow Stalin, who's murdering millions
of his own people to get scientists who know how
to make a nuclear bomb in missiles? Or do you
take these Nazis and bring them to the US where
Stalin doesn't get them? It's not a black or white issue,
it's a gray issue, and oftentimes in CIA we deal
(47:05):
with those right. And there's one of the really interesting
things in being a CIA. If it was easy black
and white, obviously good or bad, then you wouldn't need us.
So we deal often with gray, whereas how gray is it?
And what's our mission and what's what's our political masters want?
Is what's good for the democracy? And what's the downside
of not doing it?
Speaker 5 (47:26):
But when it goes wrong, you guys seem to get
the blame wrong than the president did it Is that
because of plausible deniability?
Speaker 2 (47:33):
For I think that's the idea. But if you go
to the working boy, like I said, when people bring
that stuff up often, I'm glad to have the discussion
because some of the things that the early CI did.
First of all, it was a new institution brought out
of nowhere, and the fear was World War three was
right around the bend. Russians were going to come over
take over Europe. We had to act like the Russians did.
And the people who were in the early CIA came
(47:54):
out of working in World War Two. They were paramilitary officers,
and so in those early years, the presidents used the
CIA as is like a secret weapon, and the people
there were learning on the fly, and so I think
we did make a lot of mistakes. I think a
lot of stuff. You look at it with Iran or Guatemala,
all of these kinds of things. Number One, presidents were
behind it. Number Two, the agency didn't have any real
oversight and didn't have much experience, and so it's fair
(48:16):
to have those discussions and what was right and what
was wrong. I think it's changed a lot, and it's true.
You don't hear people say the Department of Defense invasion
of Iraq. They say the US invasion of Iraq. But
when you talk about enhance the derogation, the CIA enhanced derogation.
It was actually the US program of its interesting. President
gave it, the Justice Department cleared it. I mean, Congress
(48:38):
was briefed fully on all of it. And you can
argue whether it was good or bad. But the CI
didn't invent it and say we're just going to do
this without anybody.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
And context is important.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
Right twenty five years later, twenty almost twenty five years later,
after nine to eleven, we haven't had another major attack
inside the US. So people are like feeling safe now,
But twenty three years ago, we're picking up chatter from
al Qaida that another attack is coming, right, they are
going to and they were working on it like a
dirty bomb, all sorts of things. And we're looking at
(49:08):
not just three thousand dead, but tens of thousands potentially dead. Okay,
So what would you do morally to stop ten thousand
Americans dying? Would you make someone discoss you know, you're
not pulling their fingernails out, that's illegal, that's torture, But
how uncomfortable would you make them? And who decides and
how is that decided? So it gets into a cause.
If you don't do it and ten thousand people die,
(49:30):
you know the gifts here, But at the time this
was considered a genuine possibility. How do you live with yourself?
Speaker 4 (49:37):
Right? And so.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
The same congressional people who complain about we went too far,
if there was far strikes, they would have said, you
guys didn't do enough. And so we understand that where
it's sort of about the edge, and so you're going
to get criticism.
Speaker 4 (49:52):
Is it torture to put somebody in isolation? Right?
Speaker 3 (49:55):
We do it in prisons all the time. So is
that torture or isn't it. You can make an argument
both ways, and so where is the line and torture
to just be to be sadistic is one thing, But
pressure on another person to say lives when it's a
ticking time bombing you don't have six weeks, it's quite
something else.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
I think it's in Tim Winer's book where he talks
about the head lawyer of the counter Terrorism Center when
this came up, that they were talking about waterboarding, and
she said, well, I'm not signing off on waterboarding. I
know we use it against our own troops and training,
but I'm not signing off on that until you waterboard me.
And she was she was waterboarded, and she said that
was awful, but it's not worse than childbirth. And so
(50:35):
these are hard choices and if you don't if you
can't make hard choices, you shouldn't get in that business.
Speaker 4 (50:40):
I do something right.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
So we're not defending it, We're just simply saying it's
a very interesting conversation. And at the end of the day,
I think those decisions need to be made by our
elected representatives, not by members of the intelligence company.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
But then we need to elect smarter people. Then yeah, listen,
I think we probably kept you too long. It's been fasting.
We want to thank you for coming on with us today.
Speaker 5 (51:01):
Thank you, it was great talking to guys.
Speaker 8 (51:08):
Mission Implausible was produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart Podcasts.
Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go
to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on
the link to our channel. In our show notes, I'm
John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers
in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around
the world.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
And part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you
may not have heard.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. So today's guest
is Tamson Shaw. She's a professor of European and Mediterranean
Studies and Philosophy at NYU. She's written about psychology, Silicon
Valley and the effects of social media, the rise of
oligarchs overseas and at home, American intelligence, at ri Snowdmen,
much else often in The New York Review of Books
(01:05):
and elsewhere. She's now working on a book on our
susceptibility to influence operations than So welcome, Thank you, I
know you teach a course at NYU and psychological manipulation
in politics, including like Nazi propaganda and Stasi, etc. But
in it you talk about conspiracy theories and how they
might be changing with the Internet, and AI.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
Yeah, I'm very interested in the form that they take nowadays,
partly because everybody's so focused on disinformation as a national
security concern and a general political concern. But a lot
of the conspiracies and now conspiracy theories are just put
together with true facts and they leave the audience to
(01:47):
make the inferences, the causal inferences about what's going on.
So a good example would be the Loose Change documentary
about nine to eleven, where it just starts in with
reciting facts, actually starting with the Reichstag fire, going through
Roosevelt having known about Pearl Harbor. I'm not saying that
all of these facts are true, by the way, but
(02:08):
it's just resenting them as facts, and then everything up
through Vietnam and JFK of course to the present day.
So it just presents the sequence of events and it
doesn't tell you who the conspirators are or what the
conspirator is. It just leaves you to draw the inferences yourself,
and I think that's something people like doing because then
they feel as though they're discovering something if they put
(02:31):
it together for themselves. And that's I think something that
the Internet has really encouraged, because people used to get
information in some kind of critical context, like if you
wanted to find out what happened, you'd go to a
book or a newspaper or congressional papers, whatever it was.
But now on the Internet, you can just look up
(02:52):
facts in this very piecemeal way, join the dots yourself,
and it doesn't exist in any critical context at all,
so there aren't really any constraints on what people are
going to do with those facts. And I think it's
encouraged this way of putting something together yourself. That is
a very exciting narrative, and you're the hero in the narrative,
(03:13):
of course, because you're finding out about this big plot
that nobody else knows about. And I think organizations like
WikiLeaks encouraged that a bit with putting out, as they said,
raw information. Of course it was always very highly edited
in fact, but they're saying, look, we're just giving you
the information and you can put together yourself what's happening.
(03:34):
All of their audience. We're putting together the deep state
being in charge of everything.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
We use the terms of conspiracy theory and conspiracy and
they mean different things, right, And you deal a lot
with philosophy, and like why is it that people want
to deal in conspiracies and conspiracy theories. And we're talking
about Steve Bannett, right, great conspiracy theorists, and he loves
the Knights Templar. Let's go back to the thirteen hundreds
(04:03):
with the Knights Templar. There's this powerful organization. They're rich,
they're actually the bankers of Europe. They bring in all
these this revolutionary new for those days banking banking procedures,
and in the end, the King of France accuses them
of heresy and of worshiping a goat headed figure called Baffamet,
(04:26):
and he burns them at the stake. But this is
this grand conspiracy that's been pushed by the King of France.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
But in the end, of course, he takes their money.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
And the whole point of this is that the King
of France then seizes all the assets that they have,
and the King of France is in a dire financial situation.
So there was a real set of conspiracy theories pushed
out to the larger population. There are a lot of
facts involved in this and that, and yet in the
end of the day, it was a conspiracy. To push
(04:57):
a conspiracy theory is that it was pretty clear that
the Knights Templar were not worshiping a goat headed figure,
and we could play that all the way to today.
So when people are looking at their phones, sitting on
the toilet and coming up with connecting these facts, oftentimes
they're led in a certain direction. So I was wondering
(05:18):
returning Bick to this century, his things changed all that
much with people being directed in certain ways.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
No, I think people are directed. Even in these fact listing,
as I call them, conspiracy theories, they're still selecting the
facts carefully to lead people in a particular direction. So
I think they always tend to be led top down.
Maybe QAnon involved in a slightly more organic way because
it originated as LARPing or live action roleplay on four Chan,
(05:48):
but then there's been a lot of directing it for
a particular political agenda, of course.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
So yes, suchly what you're saying is it used to
be conspiracy theorists had to come up with sort of
complex elaborations, right, whatever, Nazi propaganda about the Jews and
things like that. But now you're saying, essentially because of
the Internet really and Twitter and all these other social
media things, is you don't need to really fabricate anything sophisticated.
You can just do your own research, put a few
(06:14):
facts together, and the Internet helps all those things connect.
And then what comes out of there is you get
the thrill of discovery of thinking you're putting together some
really cool and complex thing that nobody knows about. It
does seem to me if that's true, that means that
there's more and more conspiracy theories making their way to
the Internet, and it seems like AI would then suck
that in and turbocharge the process.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
Yeah, you worry about it.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
I do worry about that, not because I think AI
developed conspiracy theories. If you actually ask it to, it's
very old school. So I asked for a conspiracy theory
showing that Frank Sinatra killed JFK, for instance, and it
gives you a whole lot of complex motives and relationships
between people that are really dispensable for today's conspiracy theories.
(06:57):
You don't need them. What you need to do is
just list some pertinent backs and then ply a causal
relationship between them, and that's very easy to do now
with facts on the end, and the way that AI
generates knowledge for people, Again, if they ask it a question,
it will give them a factual answer, but the one
(07:18):
that isn't part of any critical context unless they look
at the sources. And then the sources are often very
bad because they have to be ones that are just
most appropriate for these large language models to use. And
I've found that if it's anything to do with SAJFK,
they go straight for the conspiracy theory ones, and of
course there's way more of that content out there for
(07:41):
them to use. And there's going to be this recursive
problem where people rely on the lms to get information
and then they use that information in what they write,
and then that's all such back up into the lms,
and it's so much harder to get the truth out
there and to research and find out the truth that
(08:03):
it just seems clear to me that we're going to
end up with endless nonsense and people having very little
capacity to differentiate between what's true and what's not.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Before the advent of the Internet, by and large, we
would look to experts for facts, right, and what a
fact is the very definition of the word. I've spent
three decades as John did in CIA. What do I
know about making vaccines? I'm not even sure what RNA
enabled venis. I don't even have the terminology for it.
(08:35):
And I looked to the FDA, and I look to
medical experts, right, And yet I don't know these things right.
And so it seems before you studied the third rite,
and Hitler could claim that, oh, we were we were
attacked by the Soviet Union. We had no choice but
to invade poll the polls were And yet even he
(08:55):
had to sort of, you know, he had to set
up a fake attack, and so to present that, are
we losing the ability to have rational discourse if we
can make up our own facts and that there are
no referees? And I'm just thinking RFK Junior, right, I mean,
you have the entire medical basically the entire medical community
it saying he and him saying, I've got a brain worm.
(09:16):
But it's because it's got the fact, and I have
the power.
Speaker 5 (09:19):
People can't invent facts, because facts just exist in the world,
but people can invent claims about facts, and a lot
of them are going to be false. Actually discovering the
fact is relatively difficult. Making them up is very easy.
And that's why with the immediacy of communication on the Internet,
it's just bound to be the case that you drown
(09:42):
out the true facts with the nonsense unless you have,
as you say, gatekeepers or expertise. And people believe in
that lesson less partly for it does a good motivation,
which is that people want to know not just what
the facts are, but what somebody's justifications are for saying
those are the facts. So they want to go through
(10:04):
the whole process themselves and find out where this comes from.
But the Internet has encouraged these forms of interaction that
are very fast, and they don't actually give people time
to do that research and find out whether a claim
is justified.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Well, you know, it is a fact that forty seven
point three percent of all statistics are made up on
the spot.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Yeah, I've heard.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So when you work with a class like this and
you talk about these things AI and Silicon Valley and
what are the students take out of it? What is
it that surprises them? Is this generation different in how
they process these things?
Speaker 5 (10:40):
And you, yeah, sometimes they surprise me, because they so
much more online than people of my generation that they
know a huge amount of this stuff. One of them
was just telling me this week about white nationalists propaganda
on I think it's which doesn't say anything explicit about
(11:00):
white nationalism. It just shows you these, for instance, streets
from the nineteen fifties full of white people who are
nicely indirect or shopping or whatever it is, and there's
no explicit message. But the people who subscribe to that
content are going to understand what the message is supposed
to be, and other people are going to get sucked
(11:22):
and just out of curiosity.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Very often, it seems to me. I also studied the
rise of fascism in Germany and other places, and a
lot of it was around the basic myths that people believed.
Right in Germany, it was the time of the time
of past greatness, the folk of Andero and the Germanic
people's coming in, and the whole sense not so much
racial purity, but the sense of pride in German nationalism
(11:48):
comes much earlier the vanderfugel and where people were playing
folk music, singing with guitars as they wandered through the
streets of Germany, and then this was taken in a
different direction by the Nazis, and white nationals today are
also doing this. It's a myth that in the nineteen
fifties did everybody was like leave it to Beaver, right.
I mean, if you were African American that the United
(12:09):
States was not that all great in the nineteen fifties,
or there was polio in the nineteen fifties, and there
were higher instances of domestic abuse.
Speaker 5 (12:18):
So I'm very interested, as you say, in the example
of the Nazis, because they really exploited these existing myths
in German culture. I was playing my students a bit
of Wagner to show them how powerful this was. Of course,
(12:42):
Hitler was obsessed with Wagner, and I don't think you
can understand the power of somebody like Hitler without seeing
how this myth of his charisma developed. And that's because
people already had this really strong desire for a leader
that was part of the this cult of Germany being
(13:05):
in need of salvation, and people were looking for some
kind of strong, charismatic leader. In fact, Hitler was early on,
and then it only gradually became clear to everybody that
it should be him. People like Goebbels were looking for
this savior everywhere and just describing it in very pseudo
religious terms. So there's I guess, there's the mythic content,
(13:28):
which refers to the past, and all forms of nationalism
are mythic in the sense that they create this imaginary past.
And then there's what I would call fantasy, which is
the idea that's somehow infusing the present, and something like
national socialism contains an enormous element of fantasy and just
(13:48):
fantastical beliefs.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
I just want to chip in and say it wasn't
just that the Nazis are the easiest, because yeah, we've
got movies about it, but this was also the same
tendencies were present in Japan. You know that they are
the chosen race. Their emperor was descended from the Sun
God himself, and Mussolini going back to the Roman Empire,
and the Hungaris going back to the time of the
(14:11):
mod Hoards coming in. So this was this is really
something that was widespread, This looking back to the glories
of the past, looking back for a leader who can
take us back there, and then matching that with intolerance
of others, and most important, most importantly, but also vital
to this was you have to blame someone for why
(14:32):
we're not there.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
You see this playing out in Britain now, because of
course the English especially have been really good at this
myth making. They've co opted a lot of artists and
musicians and we all see land of hope and glory
at the prongs and the kind of imperial patriotism that existed.
(14:54):
I'm reluctant to call it nationalism because we have English
and Scottish and Welsh nationalisms that are separate from that
patriotism about Britain and about the Empire. So Britain I
think developed and the Victorian times, especially the height of
the Victorian Empire.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
A huge amount of mythology around this, and a lot
of it was just very flimsy. Of course, it's based
on untruth or just the pseudo religious stuff. And now
Britain is no longer a great power and people are
I don't think exactly resentful of that, but there's a
(15:34):
kind of nostalgia for the Britain that was a great power,
and people like Nigel Farage and Reform UK are obviously
playing on that and they're identifying the enemy, which of
course is immigrants and the immigrants is somehow polluting that
idea of Britain, or sometimes it's that idea of Englishness.
(15:58):
The conservative philosopher Roger Scrutens, who a lot of these
guys liked, wrote a lot about Englishness, and it's very
much this myth of the village green and playing cricket
and tea and waving the flag. And it's a very
kind of cliched Victorian image.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
So we're doing the same thing. Maga is looking back
at a mythic past. These immigrants are some sort of enemy,
when it's in fact we're all immigrants. I wondered when
you talk about these things, utiple, are leaders knowingly taking
advantage of this or is this something that's just deep
in human beings and they just they want to grasp
for something to make themselves feel better about themselves, and
(16:39):
that's about others and about sort of power against their
enemies in the next state over.
Speaker 5 (16:43):
People will always say it's something deep in human beings
and they're just tribal. But if you try to give
explanations in any particular case, you find that nationalism especially
hasn't always existed as a form of belonging. It was invented.
I don't want to always go back to the fascists
because it's such a cliche. But Hitler wanted to create
(17:04):
this idea of populist leadership where he and the people
were won. And he says in his nineteen thirty or
speech at the Nuremberg Rally that it's not the state
ruling the people, but the people in the state are
the same thing, and everybody has to believe in this WI,
so that they're part of this we with the leader.
And the way that you can most easily get that
(17:24):
isn't by making everyone to subscribe to some common values
or set of common beliefs. It's just by having a
common enemy. You just have them and us, and that's
the easiest way to do it. And it's clearly what
people are doing now on the populist ride.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
The we changes the we.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
During the Third Reich, just running with this was the
Germanic people and they would test bloodlines going to join
the SS. You had to go back generations to make
sure there was no Jewish or French or Italian blooding,
and the United States were no different. So there's My
favorite political party was the No Nothing. So the eighteen
fifties right, and they were built on a conspiracy theory
(18:04):
that the Irish in the Germans, the Catholics were coming in,
the Papists were coming in to destroy their Protestant Republic
by being there. And yet today Irish and the descendants
of those Irish and Catholics who were supposedly a fifth
column to destroy the republic are now themselves embracing conspiracy
(18:27):
theories about Central Americans coming in right, fellow Roman Catholics
as the as the other. And then we had in
the nineteen twenties we had the KKK, where like President
of the United States was in the KKK. And the
only explanation I could come up with, I think there
is it's being manipulated by I know this sounds conspiratorial,
but it's being manipulated by people with power.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Right, Who is us? Who were they?
Speaker 3 (18:50):
And how do I You may actually believe it in
this there I think Steven Miller probably does, right, But
who was us and who is they?
Speaker 5 (18:58):
It's always something that's constructed. So Irish people weren't originally
considered to be white, and if you look at what
white means in America, there are a lot of people
who in fact, don't really know whether they count as
part of this white nation that the white nationalists are
talking about. It's a big gray area because these terms
(19:18):
are just invented and they don't necessarily have anything to
do with any physically existing reality, whether it's genetic or
skin color or whatever it is. And that's I think
always the case that this exclusion takes place, and it's
people in power defining categories in order to do that,
and then other people who want to be part of
(19:41):
the inn group, of course, willingly subscribe to it, so
it takes on a power of its own.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
I believe it's in the nineteen twenties, the Supreme Court
had to decide whether Armenians were white. Yes, and it's
actually a court case that they came up, and then
they had to just figure out whether Punjabis are white.
And they're like, okay, Armenians are white because they're Christians.
But Punjabis from northern India who may have like green
or blue eyes, yeah, they're not even if they're Christians.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
So it's so interesting to use that example because my
daughter's father is Armenian and she considers herself Armenian, and
she's very recently been coming and asking me, am I
White because of content she's seeing online where people are
saying Armenians are Middle Eastern or Armenians are Asian, and
it's an area of confusion. And mostly what people in
(20:30):
America know about Armenians comes from the Kardashians. And I
don't think that's a share share share ye yeah, oh yeah,
and share.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Of course, Let's turn to some of the tools, because
you write a lot about Silicon Valley and a lot
of the tools that we're using now. You write about
the sort of toxic role of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, how
(21:01):
they help in some ways are rewiring our minds. But
I know you just did a book review of someone
in the New York Times and talked about how some
people are trying to look at you know, yet not
everybody gets sucked in. So what is it about the
mind's wiring that protects some and then brings in others?
Speaker 5 (21:16):
I wish I knew the answer to that. Yeah, I know,
it's also designed to exploit certain people. That the divisiveness,
the trolls and the bots that are responsible for it,
they know what they're doing. The people that the uniquit Yeah,
people think that information has become more democratic because we
(21:38):
have the Internet and we have AI and we can
consult these llms. We just have to remember that all
of those companies are owned by these oligarchs essentially or
polygarch and they have their own agendas. They're all far right,
a lot of them are pushing white nationalism, and they
set the algorithm to tell people what they want to
(22:00):
tell them. So if you look up on chat GPT,
for instance, describe Ukraine to me, it will give you
a description. And then if you say DISCRIPSI Ukraine and
Ukraine in the style of RT, the Russian Propaganda channel
will give you a completely different description, just selecting the
backs differently, creating a different narrative. And you realize whatever
(22:23):
the default setting is for the algorithm is set by
these guys like Musk and Teal and their friends, who
all share a very particular political agenda. And that's not
something democratic. It's everybody being manipulated by the same group
of people. Again, this sounds like a conspiracy.
Speaker 4 (22:43):
Tip well, it.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Sounds like a conspiracy, but it's one that I'm open to.
Who does control the algorithm? John and I coming out
of CIA, the algorithms in Russia are controlled by the
state who what you get to read and what is
affect is controlled by the state, And increasingly in the US,
it is a fact that it the algorithms by which
(23:04):
they were strongly influenced, are controlled by a small cabal
of politically influential people who have who want to I
don't get it, want to make yet another billion dollars
or want yet more power.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
I mean, you know, I don't know how many.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
Well you have to understand the fantasies to understand him
and his followers. These people are just such florid fantasists.
Speaker 7 (23:28):
They were all gamers, all gamers, Yeah, and they all
think that they're going to pioneer a life on other planets,
or that they're going to discover how we can all
live forever.
Speaker 5 (23:39):
They're not interested in real world problems. They just have
this fantastical set of beliefs and ambitions. That's partly what's
so worrying about having them be in con charge, because
in charge, because they're actually very detached from reality. But yeah,
you mentioned putin having to control the media, including the
(24:00):
internet there. I mean, if anybody wants to establish themselves
as a dictator in the long term. Now they're going
to have to bring those oligogs to heal and just
the way that Putin did so, I don't know why
those guys would feel so comfortable recommending an authoritarian form
of government when they would probably be what's most standing
(24:23):
in the way of that. Ultimately, a lot of people
were saying this about Elon Musk a few months ago.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
But when I grew up, the Republican Party was quote
the party of capitalism, But now it seems more and
more like the party of state monopoly. Like it's yeah,
we've seen in Russia. It's more like state capitalism or
economic nationalism. And you've written about Bannon and some of
these social media folks. How do we get here? How
did a party that thought it believed in one thing
turn itself into believing something else?
Speaker 5 (24:49):
Think about the evolution of Silicon Valley and the establishment
of those huge monopolies, not really in terms of one
party or another, because of course it was under Clinton
that you had all of this deregulation. Bob Ruman and
Larry Summerson, all of those people, and it was Clinton
that wanted to privatize these industries that were essential to
(25:13):
national security, as a way of fighting terrorism. I mean,
already in nineteen ninety eight, that's what Clinton was saying
we needed to do. And then, of course, the Silicon
Valley economy becomes established in a context where we need
to develop these technologies for the government and harness our
innovation for those ends, for national security ends. But you're
(25:37):
letting the private companies keep all the profits, even though
they're heavily subsidized with government funds. And you're allowing these
monopolies to develop, and because the government very quickly becomes
dependent on them. When they update their software, everybody has
to update with them, and they're competing with China, of
course in a commercial marketplace, and that has a lot
(25:59):
of ramifications for government. So in the end, you would
think government would want to align their interests much more
closely with the interests of the Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Oligogus, because it is true when Jerry and I started,
we didn't have we weren't tied to these companies to
the same extent. We often created our own technology that
eventually made its way into companies in the market. So
how did you get interested in that? And then what
is your sense of the intelligence community as you look
at it now.
Speaker 5 (26:30):
I was always interested in Snowden, actually as soon as
that movie came out, because I just had a deep
distrust of the way they presented the information in the movie,
Laura Patress and Glenn Greenwald, and it was so much
part of this gaming fantasy, which is a character just
like Edward Snowden being the lone hero battling these great
(26:51):
powers and leaking information. Glenn Greenwold, I guess, started out
as a lawyer defending people on the far right, and
here they were being celebrated by the left as these
great heroes, and I was just instinctively suspicious of that.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
The hero fantasy is I think a big problem for
I mean, I don't know I'm oversimplifying here, but even
our gun culture, I think there's this view that I
watch these movies. It's all about heroes and defending yourself
and if I have these guns and they're coming after me,
I can take on the state and all these I
just think people love being the hero of their own story.
It's dangerous actually, because in real life individuals can't take
(27:28):
on the state like they think they Yeah.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
And you ask what I think about the intelligence services, Now,
I do worry about the revolving door with the private companies,
just because people can go they can get government positions
for the training and then take that to a private
company run by one of these oligogs. And of course
that happens all the time, and it happens with most
(27:52):
sad as well, especially where they've got a really strong
tech sept. That there's always been this interaction of the two,
but that is going to increasingly mean that there are
these big financial motivations and maybe also ideological motivations for
people when they're in government. That will mean a decline
(28:12):
in the sense of mission that probably your generation had.
So that's something that I worry about.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
The real danger is XCIA guys who start up podcasts
to like manipulate people.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Well, I think there's there are a few XCIA people
have podcasts who are lying about.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
Stuff like us unlike US.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Oh no, there's good ones. But there's also people who
have much bigger followings than we do. It's true, essentially
pretending that they were these superheroes when they say when
they were nobody's yeah, like people follow that stuff and
they're full of shit.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
Frankly, I know it's interesting you talk about the death
of expertise. But there are all these people who are
self appointed experts that have huge followings.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
So expertise arguably is what makes the human race function.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Right.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
We can't all we can't all do everything. I don't
know how to make a computer, and the parts come
from all over the world.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
I mean, we have to specialize.
Speaker 5 (29:05):
And it's also ironic because knowledge has become more more
specialized with scientific advances and engineering advances, and people used
to be able to repare their cars. They can't repare
their own computers the same way as the military could
their planes, and now they can't prepare their software. The
(29:26):
Soviets in general really hampered science there where they had
many great scientists, but they hampered what they could do
just because they were so ideological that they had to
censor anybody or get rid of anybody who wasn't ideologically
aligned with them. And once you do that and you
can't have open scientific debate, then you can't have the
(29:50):
cultivation of that independent expertise, and you really need it
to have any meaningful scientific progress.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
We see very senior people, politicians, congressmen, people you associated
with government, who if we asked them a question about
something might be very strong opinion on what they believe
based on their experience. Then if present Trump says the
opposite is true, they just immediately change and say they
say that's the right thing.
Speaker 5 (30:14):
And also do they really believe it. I'm assuming that
if they change their view that quickly, they're just going
along with something and don't really care what they believe.
So in the nineties, I guess it was no. The
two thousands, a philosopher at Princeton called Harry Frankfurt wrote
a book called On Bullshit. It was about this phenomenon
where people just don't really care what's true and what's not,
(30:36):
and so they'll say anything regardless. So they're not lying
and they're not being hypocritical, they just don't really care.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
In US, where myth controls fact, you get to things
like if you don't like the labor statistics, fire the
head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And then the
same with climate change. If you don't like climate change,
you know, stop stop acquiring data to support or not
support it, right, just defund defund it. And then basically,
(31:03):
my myth is bigger than your myth.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
So get back to intelligence. Are there questions that you'd
like to talk to us about well, because a lot
of bad things have happened in the intelligence world. Mostly
they're Jerry's fault, and I'm willing to talk about them openly. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (31:15):
No, I've got so many questions because you guys devise
conspiracy theory, so of course I want to know how
you did it.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
If you're going to make a conspiracy, Let's just pretend
the conspiracy is you want to bump into a North
Korean scientist.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
Right, you can't walk over to him and.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Say, Hi, I'm with the CIA, I'd like to talk
to you. You have to engineer a set of circumstances
that will allow that to happen. So the conspiracy is
something that is small and manageable, and even then doesn't
always stand up to deep scrutiny, just enough to get
you in the doorle So.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
You might pretend to be a Malaysian businessman who meets
this person when they're traveling and develops some sort of
relationship and then turns them over to someone else who
might have a business interest in them. It's also a cipra,
so you're stringing somebody along so that you can get
to understand them. And understand what makes them ticke and stuff.
So you're creating a mini conspiracy. But I would argue
that intelligence officers often the least conspiratorial people know one
(32:13):
because how essentially impossible it is to create these big,
complex conspiracies Because he's a bureaucracy. People sign off for things,
there's lawyers, rules, regulations, there's lots of people involved. So
the notion that you could create this very complex conspiracy.
Look at the JFK thing. Okay, they made sure the
phones were all turned off in this city at that time,
(32:34):
and they made sure that the plane was over this
certain area when this thing happened, and they made sure
this group of people, they turned off all the security
and they brought new security. All of those people involved
having to understand what they're doing and understand they're doing
something very different.
Speaker 5 (32:48):
It Just imagine governments were that competent.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Nobody's that competent.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
So there was that we had a the d n
I was created, right, the direct cognition, Oh it was.
I'll say it was Dennis Blair and he's he was
a second or third one.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
He's I'm the big guy.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I looked at this ORG chart and you all you all,
you motherfuckers, you got to come and bow to me, right,
So he puts out this worldwide thing saying all chiefs
of station must report to me by next week. And
then we said chiefs of station, like, okay, where do
we get our plane tickets? We don't have money in
our budget for this, so d and I what's our
(33:24):
budget number that we can do this? And where are
we going to stay? And who pays for the rental cars?
So it was like the bureaucracy just didn't you know.
He's like, yeah, you may be the boss, dude, but
you don't have a budget. You got your lawyers, like
I got shit going on. And then it was a disaster.
And so people who think by and large that in
(33:45):
the federal government, even in the CIA and the intelligence community,
somebody can per fiat just say oh dude, oh And
then everybody talked about it for years. It was like
it's like, you know, everybody knew, because it's not like
all the chiefs of station kept their mouths shut. They
all had coffee with their buddies and people are overhearing,
and that was a disaster well.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
And they hid us for a personality that we actually
are the kind of people who like are happy saying
no to leadership and y and so like you've got
a bunch of like, you know, you're trying to herd
cats and all these people think they're smarter than everybody else.
They're not, but they have they're pretty smart, and they
have their own sort of views, and they don't care
what people say. Because intelligence is about providing oftentimes information
(34:28):
to policy makers. We don't want to hear it. Yeah,
so that's part of the culture. And so the notion
that like this group could keep a deep conspiracy for
decades it's nuts.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
I have to say that.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Every once in a while, in the Washington Post, Lesson
less Lately or New York Times, there will be some
expos on some past operation that the agency pulled off,
and I'll look at that and go, oh, I know
about this one. And then I'll start reading it and like, oh,
I didn't know those details.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
WHOA.
Speaker 5 (34:55):
I know a bunch of investigative journalists and they will say,
it's really hard to find out what's going on because
you don't just get this one source like deep throat
who knows everything. People have their own area of specialization
and they have some sense of what's going on elsewhere,
and there isn't just this one font of information that
(35:15):
you can go to.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
No, And there's need to know. You might be in
the middle of an operation, and I know a lot of
stuff about that, but there's other pieces that you don't
have any sense for. And then you say, well, the
people above you must know. But they're managing tons and
tons of these operations, so they know only as much
as they need you or get money or to brief
that up. If the North Koreans of Russians had drugs
and they got the director of CIA and ask them, okay,
(35:37):
tell us all the secrets, you wouldn't get a lot.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
And the things account like sources and methods. I'll tell
you if you get three CIA guys drinking around a bar, right,
and they're really gonna say it is most of us
could not remember the names of our agents or what
was the name of that operation again, even just a
few years afterwards, because these are small details, and in
(36:00):
our thing is like you may look at it once
and then a year later you don't really use that
small detail.
Speaker 5 (36:05):
That The myth of the deep state really relies on
the idea that it's a bunch of people who know
exactly what they're doing and have a common cause. But
I've been looking at the origins of that myth, and
so one of them, of course is the Bay of Pigs,
when people started to become aware of what CIA were
doing and that they have this disastrous operation, and Kennedy
(36:29):
said that it was all on him, that he took responsibility,
but at the same time he fired Alan Dulles.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
I think one of the great misunderstandings was a misunderstanding
at the time was I think a lot of people
involved in the app and lower down thought that if
it went bad, Kennedy would and had freed to employ
the US Air Force, And I think there were some
indications that he would have, but I think I don't
think he ever said I will and then went back
(36:54):
on his words. I think they just a lot of
it was just a human fuck up.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Yeah, they made assumptions about what and of course this
is pre reform cias. When so you go to see
the president, they would say, maybe not give you a
direct order. They might like, listen, we're going to do
something about the leader in Chile or whatever it is,
and the director would come back without a specific order,
but like a general thing and go back down to
people generally, we need to do this, we need that.
So I've always making assumptions about what people above them
(37:20):
want and think, and then the real world is complex
and dirty and it gets carried out and then everybody's like, oh,
I thought you wanted this or wanted that. Once we
got to the reforms in the seventies, it became much
clear that presidents when they wanted to see I had
to do covert action, which is this kind of stuff.
They had to write written orders that were then shared
with the congressional committees as well as the agency, which
(37:41):
could then write back. And then everything we do is
incredibly documented. Yeah, so I think the intelligennity change fundamentally
at that time. But I also think there was still
a culture that people from that from intelligence don't speak,
they don't speak publicly, And it wasn't until I think
like the nineties, maybe early two thousands that if you retired.
So Jerry and I were both under State Department cover.
(38:02):
When we were retired, we were allowed to what we
call roll back our cover and then write articles and speak.
And you know, I can remember General Hayden saying it was.
It's a responsibility if you work for a secret organization
that if you have the opportunity to try to explain
what you can to the American public, you have an
obligation to do that. The public relies on the fact
that we are doing a mission for the American public,
so we can give you as much as we can.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
But there's an inherent contradiction in having a clandestine a
secret intelligence agency inside a transparent democracy. The two don't fit,
and they shouldn't fit. We should control our intelligence agencies
very closely by elected officials in other countries. It's not
the case that the GRU and the SVR fit just
(38:43):
fine hand in glove and are central to Putin's Russia,
but CIA and MI sixter they're not. You're trying to
save sources and methods. You're trying to keep people for us.
People come to us and they say, I'll tell you
what's really going on, but you've got to keep me alive.
And we take that very seriously, and yeah, so we're
not going to tell we're not going to tell news
(39:04):
of the world. Well, according to this guy, you know,
the Russians are lying to us because he and his
family are you know, be executed.
Speaker 5 (39:33):
So I think Dylan Avery is the name of the
person who made the Loose Change documentary about nine to eleven.
The conspiracy theory one.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
Please experience on that. Now everybody knows what that is.
Speaker 6 (39:44):
Well, the nine to eleven truthers who think that it
was all a government conspiracy have various sources, but the
most mainstream one is this documentary called Loose Change.
Speaker 5 (39:55):
The final version of.
Speaker 6 (39:56):
It ended up having Roger Stone as one of their producers, so.
Speaker 5 (40:00):
You can imagine, oh wait, maybe it was Alex Jones. Yeah,
it was Alex Jones. But it started out just this
guy who was actually writing a fictional screen so it
was precisely supposed to be one of these Hollywood stories
about the loan hero discovering the big conspiracy, and then
he became the hero of his own movie and turned
(40:23):
it into a documentary. And I think that's just something
that is really tempting for people. It's what's been glamorized
more than anything else in our societies. The fact most
buy movies are about people like Jason Bourne, who are
that loan hero that are going against all of the
authorities and finding out everything for themselves and changing the world.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
But the reality of an intelligence organization, it's a team sport.
Like Jerry and I are trying to meet a recruit,
a source, but we're counting on lots of people behind
us expertise. If we have to get special equipment, people
who have records back home that can help us understand
what's going on about, what the issues are, what kind
of questions they ask, and so you talk about common
cause to us mission is very but the mission is
(41:11):
providing unbiased information to policymakers they make better policy and
protect the American citizens. And it's non but it is nonpartisan.
Speaker 4 (41:19):
I don't talk.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
I don't remember ever talking to anybody inside, even my
best friends about politics or politicians, even when we were drinking,
even when we're overseas. It wasn't really till you were
tired and you see them on Facebook or these other
places talking and you're like, oh my god, I had
no idea that, and like, I would you know, until
Jerry and I got to know each other after we retired,
I don't know Jerry's politics.
Speaker 4 (41:39):
Yeah, no clue. He just knew I was right all
the time.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
And focus on You're focused on doing your work and
if anything we sort of look down on politicians because
they come out to our stations. We have to brief
them all the time. The questions are often stupid. They
don't really understand us. They're in a game where they're
trying to self promote. We're in a game where it's
not about self promotion.
Speaker 5 (41:58):
So you know, if any president comes into office and
has a whole new vision for what CIA should be
and what everybody should be doing that conflicts with the
sense of mission and people going to push back.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
That's a great question, because I don't it never happened before.
Jerry and I worked for Reagan and Bush and Obama
and Clinton and everybody, and it was there would be
policy changes and questions and what happened with this country
in that country and what we're doing, But in terms
of our business, almost no real change in.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
The day to day work.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
If you're in India trying to collect information on Russians
and Chinese and other kinds of things and a new
president comes in, there's not a lot of difference. However,
now it might be true because the administration wants the
CIA to be a partisan weapon to help the presidents
stay in power or to carry through his thing. So
now might be the real challenge and to try to
see how much of that is filtering down through the organization.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
Yeah, so, Tamson, you talked about being a hero in
euro movie, and I would be remiss if I didn't
throw in this anecdote. I was in a place and
it was in a war zone, right, It was a
very dangerous place, and a congressman flew in and he
was inside this secure military base, but outside the base
the bad guys were there and they kind of like
(43:13):
ruled the turf. And he said, I want to go
out and I want to get in a firefight. Right,
I want to go out, have the bad guys attack us,
and I want to get in a firefight, and I
want it photographed me shooting a weapon in them.
Speaker 4 (43:27):
And first of all, we would go out in a
convoy with jeeps and things like that, and they would
ambush us.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
The rule of an ambush is they get the first
with automatic weapons, They get the first thousand rounds to
shoot at us, and then if and when we survived,
we get to shoot back.
Speaker 4 (43:41):
But they're hiding. But I didn't tell them that.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
And then he went a step further and said, oh,
be good if I just got wingked, you know, just
like a little you know, just like just you know,
just a little bit of blood and like you.
Speaker 4 (43:55):
Do what a modern round does to you.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
You know, it's like, you know, you're more likely to
This was a guy from the House of Representatives, and
he was so steeped in the mythology.
Speaker 4 (44:06):
Of the movies because he had seen.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
This on TV so many And I'm not an ex
military guide. The military guys who are like flood the block.
Speaker 4 (44:13):
Yeah, and you know I too, I know. It was like,
I'm not going with you. I'm not.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Yeah, And so I think I jokingly told them that
it wouldn't be good for my career. It's not a
career improver to get a congressman killed, Like who's your guest? Right,
By and large, we have some really good officers and
to see the vast majority are because these are people
who could have made lots more money on the outside.
They wouldn't have taken their kids to places where there
(44:41):
are cobras and malaria. You worry about your family, and
yet they did it because of mission, because of those
values and the constitutions you talked about that we believe
in those things.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
But we have a few.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
Like any place else, we have a few people who
either our shipballs or become crazy.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (44:56):
I just read Tim Winer's book on CIA in the
twenty first centuries, and that was amazing because there are
people in there who he names that I either met
or just follow on social media, and I'm suddenly finding
out about the things they've done that are just mind
blowing to ordinary people who live safe lives in urban settings.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
It was a fun job. Like honestly, God and I
sound like we're proselytizing here, but you know, I spent
almost thirty years in the organization. I don't regret any
of it. I think what I did. You know, we're
trying to do the right thing. There were so many
fun and interesting people. We got to work around the world,
different cultures, meeting and working with foreign organizations. It was
really interesting, fun stimulating. You felt like you were doing
(45:39):
something bigger than yourself. I don't have any regrets.
Speaker 5 (45:42):
How do you guys pick up languages just like that,
You don't.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
Pick them up from this, Well, that's part of the
diversity that we are languages right, or we take a
year off and you get okay with the language.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yeah, I learned Finnish and Russian and server e creation,
but it was painful. So when I learned Russian, I
was in a room with one or two other people
for a year, all day long, trying to speak, trying
to read, and then at going back and back. Then
when there's cassettes, having to listen home and do someone homework.
Speaker 4 (46:10):
And just it's just it's your job.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
You work for CIA, and that whole year you're working
in a language lab preparing to learn the language.
Speaker 5 (46:17):
So can I ask how does it feel when members
of the public who now know that your former CIA
start without knowing anything about what you did, obviously, will
start to blame you for every covit oh that they've
heard about, like Operation paper Clip to Nazis or Operation
Phoenix or whatever it is. That you know that a
(46:40):
part of the culpiller idea of CIA.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Operation paper Clip is a good one. So do you
allow the sow Do you allow Stalin, who's murdering millions
of his own people to get scientists who know how
to make a nuclear bomb in missiles? Or do you
take these Nazis and bring them to the US where
Stalin doesn't get them? It's not a black or white issue,
it's a gray issue, and oftentimes in CIA we deal
(47:05):
with those right. And there's one of the really interesting
things in being a CIA. If it was easy black
and white, obviously good or bad, then you wouldn't need us.
So we deal often with gray, whereas how gray is it?
And what's our mission and what's what's our political masters want?
Is what's good for the democracy? And what's the downside
of not doing it?
Speaker 5 (47:26):
But when it goes wrong, you guys seem to get
the blame wrong than the president did it Is that
because of plausible deniability?
Speaker 2 (47:33):
For I think that's the idea. But if you go
to the working boy, like I said, when people bring
that stuff up often, I'm glad to have the discussion
because some of the things that the early CI did.
First of all, it was a new institution brought out
of nowhere, and the fear was World War three was
right around the bend. Russians were going to come over
take over Europe. We had to act like the Russians did.
And the people who were in the early CIA came
(47:54):
out of working in World War Two. They were paramilitary officers,
and so in those early years, the presidents used the
CIA as is like a secret weapon, and the people
there were learning on the fly, and so I think
we did make a lot of mistakes. I think a
lot of stuff. You look at it with Iran or Guatemala,
all of these kinds of things. Number One, presidents were
behind it. Number Two, the agency didn't have any real
oversight and didn't have much experience, and so it's fair
(48:16):
to have those discussions and what was right and what
was wrong. I think it's changed a lot, and it's true.
You don't hear people say the Department of Defense invasion
of Iraq. They say the US invasion of Iraq. But
when you talk about enhance the derogation, the CIA enhanced derogation.
It was actually the US program of its interesting. President
gave it, the Justice Department cleared it. I mean, Congress
(48:38):
was briefed fully on all of it. And you can
argue whether it was good or bad. But the CI
didn't invent it and say we're just going to do
this without anybody.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
And context is important.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
Right twenty five years later, twenty almost twenty five years later,
after nine to eleven, we haven't had another major attack
inside the US. So people are like feeling safe now,
But twenty three years ago, we're picking up chatter from
al Qaida that another attack is coming, right, they are
going to and they were working on it like a
dirty bomb, all sorts of things. And we're looking at
(49:08):
not just three thousand dead, but tens of thousands potentially dead. Okay,
So what would you do morally to stop ten thousand
Americans dying? Would you make someone discoss you know, you're
not pulling their fingernails out, that's illegal, that's torture, But
how uncomfortable would you make them? And who decides and
how is that decided? So it gets into a cause.
If you don't do it and ten thousand people die,
(49:30):
you know the gifts here, But at the time this
was considered a genuine possibility. How do you live with yourself?
Speaker 4 (49:37):
Right? And so.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
The same congressional people who complain about we went too far,
if there was far strikes, they would have said, you
guys didn't do enough. And so we understand that where
it's sort of about the edge, and so you're going
to get criticism.
Speaker 4 (49:52):
Is it torture to put somebody in isolation? Right?
Speaker 3 (49:55):
We do it in prisons all the time. So is
that torture or isn't it. You can make an argument
both ways, and so where is the line and torture
to just be to be sadistic is one thing, But
pressure on another person to say lives when it's a
ticking time bombing you don't have six weeks, it's quite
something else.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
I think it's in Tim Winer's book where he talks
about the head lawyer of the counter Terrorism Center when
this came up, that they were talking about waterboarding, and
she said, well, I'm not signing off on waterboarding. I
know we use it against our own troops and training,
but I'm not signing off on that until you waterboard me.
And she was she was waterboarded, and she said that
was awful, but it's not worse than childbirth. And so
(50:35):
these are hard choices and if you don't if you
can't make hard choices, you shouldn't get in that business.
Speaker 4 (50:40):
I do something right.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
So we're not defending it, We're just simply saying it's
a very interesting conversation. And at the end of the day,
I think those decisions need to be made by our
elected representatives, not by members of the intelligence company.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
But then we need to elect smarter people. Then yeah, listen,
I think we probably kept you too long. It's been fasting.
We want to thank you for coming on with us today.
Speaker 5 (51:01):
Thank you, it was great talking to guys.
Speaker 8 (51:08):
Mission Implausible was produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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