NEW EPISODE! - Secrets of The National Security Agency (with Vince Houghton)

The Curator of the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum knows if the government is watching you. He knows how to tell who’s doing hidden nuclear testing. He’s written about some of the wilder (and unsuccessful) endeavors by the CIA, and how the CIA build Miami, the second largest hub of espionage in the world.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers
in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around
the world, and.

Speaker 3 (00:11):
Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about as well as some of
you may not have heard.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible. So today's guest
is doctor Vince how He's the former historian at the
International Spy Museum here in Washington. He was the museum's
subject matter expert. He created a lot of the content
and sibits and design of the new museum. He's a
PhD in intelligence history. He's the author of several books.

(00:45):
One we're going to be certainly talking about today called
Nuking the Moon, about intelligence schemes and plots that were
left on the drawing board. He did one on the
Cold War in Miami called Covert City, and one about
nuclear spies. He's currently the director of the National Cryptologic
Museum and Fort me which is adjacent to the NSA
and likely unfurlough now during the closure of the governments.

(01:05):
This is great to have you here.

Speaker 4 (01:07):
Yeah, I got plenty of time, John, I appreciate being here.
YEA not doing much right now.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
So just quick on your newest job. Jerry and I
remember we visited the NSA Museum. It's in an old
motel right there by the NSA.

Speaker 4 (01:17):
We're the only museum in the entire intelligence community that's
completely open to the public, so we're fully public facing.
But we got a good number of artifacts to classified,
some stories declassified. There's things like nuclear command and control,
but that's on display that had never been before. Caused
a little bit of a fuss one that went on
display because everyone's like, you're doing what you're showing the
nuclear codes, Like, yeah, they're obsolete now barely. They had

(01:39):
literally just been declassified a year before we reopen. Everything
on display is real. We've made a rule in the
very beginning that we would not do reproductions, we would
not do replicas. If you're looking at it, it's a
real artifact, and almost ninety percent are one of a kind,
meaning they are the only one left on Earth. We
have the rarest enigma in the world. It was Hitler's enigma.
It doesn't get any rareer than that. We know you

(02:00):
can go to FBI and you can go to other places.
You gotta get special permission. You got to get a
VIP pass to get on a CIA. I know that
civilians have been there. Here you just drive up and
park and walk in. Right.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
What's cool?

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, your job and Nuke in the Moon is espionage.
As we know, is a lot about conspiracies, and then
there's conspiracy theories and then the Venn diagrams the match
between those two, and in nuking the moon you catch
the seitgeist of the crazy banshit crazy stuff that intelligence

(02:31):
has been into that crosses into conspiracy theory categories. So
I think for the listeners, you got to tell the
cat story, keep it brief, but let's talk about the
acoustic kitty just for a second.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Is that real? And what did it ever work? And
what is it?

Speaker 4 (02:47):
Everything in the book is real, and I think that's
where these are stories that are absolutely verifiable, that these
are stories that aren't as well known because they don't happen.
That's the premise of the book is I tried to
hunt downe stories from intelligence and military history that were planned, funded, tested,
and got right to the point of going fully operational

(03:07):
and then were canceled for one reason or another. In
some cases that were superseded by events the war ended
or something else happened, and other cases, someone up high
decided this was an idea that we didn't want to
go after, and so Acoustic Kitty was a CIA operation
under the Office of Technical Services. So this is the
Director of Science and Technology. In essence, this is like
the nineteen fifties, right, this is in sixties, So you're

(03:30):
looking at a time.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Period before John and I were there.

Speaker 4 (03:32):
We would right, yes, Wait, when the CIA is finding itself,
This is when Alan Dalles is director. The CI is
figuring out it's got a charter, but the charter is
so vague that the CIA is making it up as
it goes along, and they're bringing in people like doctor
Sidney Gottlieb, who is the guy who runs MK Ultra.
They're bringing in people who given the same kind of
mandate I did, is go do fun stuff and see

(03:54):
what happens.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
And so one of.

Speaker 4 (03:56):
These ideas was spurred on by a case off officers
observation that Istanbul was just full of stray cats. Have
you ever been there? It is cat heaven. Cats everywhere.
And he was watching the Soviet embassy and he noticed
that cats were just going in and out of the
Soviet embassy with impunity, like no one even paid attention.
They'd open the door of cats would walk in, or
the courtyard cats were going out. They would jump up

(04:19):
on the laps of Soviet personnel and they'd get scratches
and cuddles, and man, if we could just get something
in there on one of these cats, then we could
listen to everything going on. And it turns out that
instead of putting something on one of those cats, they decided,
what if we can't put something inside one of these cats?
And the solution was a surgical operation. And I don't

(04:41):
mean that like they dropped the very specific bomb in
a specific place. They opened up a cat through surgery.
It implanted a listening device inside of it and ran
the antenna down to its tail, put a battery pack
in its abdomen, and then tested it. And they tested
it again and again and it turned out it worked.
Now what does that mean worked? That means that they
were able to get it to go from point A

(05:02):
to point B. The listening device actually was able to
pick up conversations and testing. They had to tweak the
wiring a little bit to get the cat to do
what they wanted, because it's a cat, of course. And
then the legend ends, and it ends very unsatisfactorily, because
there is the official version of what happens, and that
comes courtesy of people like Bob Wallace, who wasn't there

(05:24):
at the time. He was the head of technical service
at CIA. He comes in afterwards, but he hears what
they had done before him, and Bob's like, no, no, no,
we just canceled the plan. No one ever really did
field test of it. I'm like, Bob, that's terribly boring,
Like what The better story comes from Victor Marchetti, who
wrote a pretty scathing book of CIA, where he tells
the story of the field test of Acoustic Kitty, where

(05:46):
they bring it out to Northwest d C. To where
the embassies are and they're gonna test it in a
park and essentially they're going to send the kiddy into
the park to sit down and listen to the conversations
that are taking place on a park bench, and they
the tech guys are in the van and they put
the cat down on the street and they punch in
the commands, and the cat takes off straight across the
street from the park, and then as it's getting halfway

(06:08):
across the street, against run over by a DC taxicab.
And that's the end of the story as far as
the Marchetti's version is concerned. If you're a cat lover,
you like Bob Wallace's version better that they just you
know what, this isn't going to work out great. But
I love to think that's the story about the look
on the faces of the tech guys who can't just

(06:29):
drive away. Right there's a smoking, sparking cat roadkill in
the middle of Connecticut Avenue and they've got to go
grab it before the Soviet so god forbid. The Washington
Post comes and finds out what they're up to. And
it hadn't been a bad like, we don't get paid
enough for this.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
Wasn't there a bat story? You got cats, you got back.

Speaker 4 (06:46):
So the first section of the book is all the
different fun animals that were involved. The bat story actually
was World War Two and the US military had a
brand idea of attaching small explosives to bats and then
dropping them quasi hibernated over Japan, with the idea that
they would wake up halfway down as they're falling from

(07:06):
a bomber, and as bats do, they try to find dark, cold,
dank places, and that would mean if it's falling over
a city or a town, attics and easements and places
inside buildings and houses. And at this point, about ninety
five percent of Japan as a bit of wood, even
the major cities are made of wood. So if you've
got a bat with an explosive device and incendiary device

(07:27):
who goes up into attic, where you've got one hundred
bats that go up into a building's attic and they
all explode at the same time, you can basically burn
Japan to the ground using your bats. And this was
an idea that was not only pursued but funded by
the millions and millions of dollars and fully tested multiple
times throughout parts of the United States. And in fact,

(07:48):
one of the tests went so well that they burned
down a US airfield. They didn't mean to burn down
a US airfield, but the bats got loose and did
exactly what they thought they were going to do as
they went and they found all these nooks and crannies
inside these buildings and then exploded and burned all these
buildings at the ground. Unfortunately, it was an active operational
US Army air footfield, so there were some very pissed
off people who didn't know what happened because this was

(08:10):
a top secret program that they couldn't tell them that
they had to swear them in secrecy that they saw
bats flying in there earlier, and the Chief of Naval
Operations was asked for full funding for this to round
up millions of bats with millions of small bombs and
use them against Japan. And timing was really interesting because
it's only a couple of weeks after the CNO has

(08:31):
been informed about a very special secret project taking place
in Ala Monngorda, New Mexico and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
If they had asked him about a month earlier, he
probably would have fully funded this. But he had just
learned about a very special program that had been successful
on July sixteenth, nineteen forty five, that's the atomic bomb.
And he said, no, I can't give you money for this,
we don't need it. But it's a really good idea.

(08:53):
So when I talk about some of these programs that
were not canceled because they were ridiculous. This is a
program that was only canceled because the atomic bomb was
an easier solution potentially. But there's some of interesting names here.
Lewis Sfiser, who actually invented napalm, which you know is
still used today. Harvard chemist and napalm was he worked

(09:14):
on this program because they wanted to create these small,
little incendiary devices. They got the idea about what back
to you use by talking to the guy who invented
what we all learned in third grade about echolocation. Right,
he's the bat expert who discovered how bats actually can
see and operate. We're talking we're going to talk about
looney tunes here, right, We're talking about people who were
the Hogh Nobel Prize winning type scientists who were working

(09:35):
on these programs. And that's true for just about every
one of these, but.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Go to loony like of the different things that you
looked at most of these, there's a spark of common
sense even if it didn't pan out that you read
and went holy shit like mk ultra kind of stuff.

Speaker 4 (09:50):
So one of the almost didn't include and actually it
really coincides well with the podcast is Operation Northwoods. That's
one that it almost didn't put in the book because
that program has ins fired so many conspiracy theories since then.
And for those probably people listening to this podcasts know
exactly what I'm talking about. For those that don't, Operation
Northwoods was a proposed plan to essentially create a false

(10:11):
flag operation to pick a fight with Cuba. We after
Bey of Pigs and after the Cuban Missile crisis, we
were desperate to figure out a way to get Castro
out of power, and so we came up with a
lot of different options to try to get Castro to
do something stupid, right, We love Castro to do something
stupid and try to pick a fight that we could
justify an invasion. Castro, unfortunately, was not an idiot, and

(10:32):
he said, I'm not going to I'm doing great man.
I got a great new benefactor of the Soviet Union
who's giving me all that I need, and I'm certainly
not going to risk the ire of the United States,
especially since they really can't do anything about me right
now because of they're now twice failure. I mean, the
Cuban missile crisis was a success. When it comes to

(10:52):
not all dying. But it was a we luckily stumbled
into discovering that the Soviets had put nuclear weapons on
the Cuba, and so it's an intelligence failure. Ultimately repaired
it as being this wonderful. The U two finds the
missiles and were able to kind of bully them to leave,
but they they're almost stuck in under our noses. Back
to back failures with Baya Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis,

(11:12):
and so we're chastised. We can't really do much about it.
So in Operation Northwoods, it is a series of potential
policy options, military options that would make it look like
the Cubans had done something to deserve a retaliatory strike.
And by definition, this is a false flag operation. And
again this goes to the highest level, the Joint chiefs

(11:34):
of Staff. We're behind this plan. Edward Lansdale, who is
famous or infamous depending on who you ask, was the
policymaker behind this plan. And it included everything from kind
of simple things like dressing up Cuban exiles as Cuban
military and had them attack Guantanamo, to dressing up Cuban
exiles and having them attack American shipping to having an

(11:55):
American ship like outside of Guantanamo explode, i e. Kind
of the US Maine which led us into the Spanish
American War. And then some not so benign ones blowing
up planes traveling from Miami to Washington or actually putting
mail bombs or our IEDs as we call them now
throughout Miami. And these were actual policy proposals. And as

(12:17):
somebody whose parents met at the University of Miami in
the nineteen sixties exactly at the time, these plans kissed
me off a little bit. It's given a little bit
back to the future thing. Where did you.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
Look at it as a bureaucratic game by the DoD
to screw CIA, because if I remember correctly, there was
a d defense apartment was involved in coming up with this,
but they wanted the CIA to actually do it. Well, sure,
maybe they were just trying to set up the CIA
to fail.

Speaker 4 (12:41):
No, you're right in how you laid it out. The
conclusion is iffy, right, Are they trying to set up CIA?

Speaker 1 (12:46):
Maybe not?

Speaker 4 (12:46):
Because this is after Bay of Pigs. The DoD kind
of got a lot more power than they had. CIA
was right, and high Hippigs slapped the CIA down like
Dallas has fired every Wizner's gone everyone, basically any clean's
house and brings in John McCone, who is very studious
and buy the book, and the DoD gets a lot
of the power that CIA had beforehand, especially to do

(13:08):
covert operations. And that's where Lansdale comes in and many respects.
I think this is like they had power they weren't
expecting to have and they kind of ran with it. So, yes,
this would have been a joint operation with CIA. I
think that the people who were behind this legitimately wanted
to free Cuba or to aus Castro, and so a
lot of people have taken this idea and used it

(13:28):
as a justification for later on conspiracy theories. If the
Americans would plan something like north Woods, then what wouldn't
they do.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
There's all these fall.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
False flag like yeah, now you see the silliest like
that's is a false but.

Speaker 4 (13:39):
This was right, This is one. This was one that
like you can there's a paper trail, right, there's actually
US government documents that were declassified that says this was
going to happen. Now you can look at this as
a cess or a failure. I look at this as
a success, because this doesn't happen right. This gets to
a level where the higher up say, not a chance
in hell we're doing this. This is where the government

(14:01):
worked the way it was supposed to work, where these
policy proposals were put forward, and yes they cleared through
the chiefs of staff and everything else, but they got
to the civilian control, like Robert mcnamaron John Kennedy were like,
are you guys out of your minds? We're not doing this.
This is absolutely ridiculous. And that's exactly how the government's
supposed to work, right, And so I look at this.
This is a glass half empty, class full where you're like, wow, God,

(14:24):
thedod came up with these wacka doodle plans, but the
civilian control of the military, which is exactly what was
designed to do in the first place, said no, we're
not doing that. And this is just part of me goes, man,
I can't imagine why they'd come up with this idea.
The other part of me goes, that's their job. Their
job is to come up with every single potential option

(14:45):
you can come there. The bad scientists at US Army
trade off. If you had never heard of them. Their
job is literally to come up with some of the
craziest shit, and ninety percent of the stuff they come
up with doesn't work, but ten percent does. It's kind
of like what DARPA's mandate was back in the beginning,
and spend a ton of money. Most of the stuff
you're gonna research is going to not pan out, But

(15:05):
every so often, you're gonna get the Internet. You're gonna
get kevlar, you're gonna get them.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
Might have rebonded against us to this internet.

Speaker 4 (15:12):
Right, Sure, we're great when it was ARPA net. Not
so much now. But that's what the DoD is supposed
to do. People joke about, is there some kind of
an plan for Canada?

Speaker 3 (15:20):
There is.

Speaker 4 (15:21):
No one looks at it, no one really refines it
all that much. But they're someone in the poor bastard
in the do d's job is a plan and an
invasion of Canada. And because they're supposed to write this
is just one that got out of hand. Right, Northwoods
should have died on the vine, right, it should have.
There should have been some major at the Pentagon somewhere
that said I'm going to put this in a file
and lock it up. But it just kept working its

(15:43):
way up, and it kept going higher and higher at
the Pentagon and eventually got to generals and admirals who
were like, you know, this isn't a bad idea. Never
should have gotten that high. And eventually that was the ultimate.
Kennedy was like, how did this get to me? This
should have died a long time before it got to me.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
So Vince, in your work with this by museum, what
do you hear from the general public people coming in
about conspiracy theories that do they come in and say,
where's the spaceship? What's resonating with the public as far
as conspiracy theories in the agency or the US intelligence community.

Speaker 4 (16:12):
I mean, NSA is full of really interesting conspiracies, and
I can certainly talk about some of them. I mean,
for popular culture, the most famous movie about NSA's enemy
of the State, the Will Smith Gene Hackman movie from
the nineties.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
Right over there in your follows, a GPS SAT tracker
pulse is a twenty four gigger.

Speaker 4 (16:30):
I don't know what that means.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
It's like a love jack, only two generations.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Better than what the police have.

Speaker 4 (16:34):
And what does that mean?

Speaker 2 (16:35):
It means the NSA can read the time off your
fucking wristwatch right.

Speaker 4 (16:38):
Enoughing is bullshit?

Speaker 3 (16:39):
Right now?

Speaker 4 (16:39):
You either shoot me or tell me what the fuck
is going on? And that's some people's only impression of
NSA is people running around Washington, DC shooting people.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
You don't mean federal agents you had following you on
that ferry.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
I don't I mean working for me you're talking about
I'm not.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
Worries this about me?

Speaker 1 (16:58):
My target here? Do they know who is.

Speaker 4 (17:00):
The do they know me?

Speaker 3 (17:02):
I don't know what you're talking about?

Speaker 1 (17:06):
Either very smart or incredibly stupid.

Speaker 4 (17:09):
Number one, the NSA. There may not be two people
at NSA who were that fit at the entire agency,
right we were behind the There's not a lot of
running around even the military side whe where we do cyber,
we do signals, intelligence, but no one's shooting anybody. You know.
One of the first interviews I ever did is the
Spy Museum was one of the mission possible movies that

(17:29):
just came out, and they asked me it was the
one where coun cres hang off the side of the
plane and it was like vanity fair, Like, how real
is Adam? I'm on the plane hopping the door. How'd
you get in the plane. Not in the plane. I'm
behind the plane.

Speaker 5 (17:40):
Hut the the door.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
Benji opened that door right now?

Speaker 5 (17:43):
Yeah, I'm trying.

Speaker 4 (17:46):
Come on, Benj you ben you opened that door.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Come on, Benji noted that door the door.

Speaker 4 (17:53):
I'm like, you would haven't fired the next day? And
what do I mean fired? I'm like, look, you're shooting
at somebody. You failed. If you're in a car chase,
you failed. If you're running for your life, you've failed.
If you're hanging off the side of a plane, you've failed.
You know, NSA, if you're not sitting behind your computer,
you're probably not doing your job right. And so the
problem we run into is if no one knows anything
about the agency, and so pop culture fills in those gaps,

(18:14):
and CI and FBI have done a really good job right.
So in the last almost fifty years in guiding pop
culture and the direction they want it to go. Right,
there's fifteen TV shows where the FBI are the heroes
and a bunch of CIA, whether it's Jack Ryan or
anybody else. CIA basically co wrote Zero Dark thirty. So
you're looking at very good public relations people in NSA

(18:37):
just says, don't talk to us. No comment. That's the policy.
And so we let people fill in the gaps and
enemy the state's one thing where they filled in the gaps.
And so we get all the time, like how many
people have been killed today? And I say no, one's
early though, Right.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
When the Snowden came out, there was a lot of
misperceptions going on that everybody's worried that when they pick
up the phone and lie to their wife, right, and
they're like, people were genuinely worried, like whoa, And they're
listening in And if people from the audience understand when
you're on the inside, what it takes to actually exploit
something like that, to listen to it, to put it

(19:23):
into context, to write it up. Nobody is looking anybody
in this concist. No, unless there's some kb kgbs Russian
intelligence officer here, nobody is freaking listening to your phone call.

Speaker 4 (19:34):
And ever will I'm gonna gently walk around this question
while still answering it. The key is something that is
fundamental to intelligence is we can collect all you want, right,
You can collect the hell out. You can have billions
and billions of really interesting pieces of data and information.
But if you don't have the ability to analyze it,
and you have the ability to turn it into something
that you can hand over to a policymaker and actually
make sense to that policy maker, then you might as

(19:56):
well not collect it in the first place. Billions of
phone calls do no one any good if you can't
actually pull out the signals from the noise. And that
it's something that ROBERTA. Wolfstetter talked about in her book
about Pearl Harbor decades ago. Data comes in at floods
that you just get overwhelmed by the data, but you
can't pull out the stuff that matters, then there's no
point in it. And then that's not just ansay, that's
true for every agency. And then turn it into a

(20:18):
final product that members of Congress who are not necessarily
experts that anything can understand and do something about. Then
you know what's the point.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
I was in West Berlin just as the Cold War
was ending, and estimates are that up to twenty percent
one in five of the East German population was either
spying or being spied on inside of East Germany. And
what we found afterwards was that the Stazi, the East
German secret police, very effective. They were basically frigging drownding

(20:48):
in information. They had no way except for a few cases,
they had no way of prioritizing, collating, and analyzing the
vast majority of the information and it was just for nothing. Basically,
they just sucked it up, stored it away to include
and these I'm just sitting in your book. They had
the special pads where they would try to get like

(21:10):
a CIA guy or somebody there following, to sit on
a certain chair so they could capture their ass smell yep,
and then they would take this pad and put it
in a glass jar and label it so that later
dogs could smell it and they could follow you. And like,
apparently this is this huge program and they almost never
used it.

Speaker 4 (21:29):
I got the opportunity to go when I was at
the Spy Museum to Havana and several places around Cuba,
but in Havana, the Cubans and this is ten years ago, right,
so this is not during the Cold War. This is
when there's modern computing available. They had spies everywhere. There's
something called it the CDR, the Committee for the Defense
of the Revolution, which are essentially much in the same
way the informants worked back for the Stasse. One per

(21:51):
block essentially, and it ususally some old woman who had
sit on her porch all day and report on everybody
and kind of write down who was going in and
out of what buildings, and who was walking by and
who was to work, and that stuff got passed up
but just died them. It just went nowhere because unless
you've got one hundred thousand analysts going through all this information,
there's very little you can do with it that was
before AI, though, you know what, good luck AI. Look,

(22:14):
the technology is interesting in the way that it's being
used to try to filter and work its way through this.
NSA has been at the forefront of supercomputer technology and
that was the reason why, right it's can we sift
through all this information to figure out what it means?
Seymour Cray, who might not be a name people recognized
but maybe reorganized their last name, Cray Computers, Cray one,
which was the first supercomputer that he built. Serial number

(22:37):
one and serial number two what US US government customers.
One went to Los Alamos was the job of it
basically was the crunch numbers for nuclear weapons testing. And
two went to NSA with the idea of not only
breaking codes and ciphers, but also to mash data that
came in through signals intelligence. And so if you don't
have a football field sized building like NSA does, filled

(22:58):
with supercomputers that are crunching data twenty four hours a
day using the most advanced technology in the world, you
don't even have anything because you're not in a position
where you can take this information and then do anything
with it. And even in this case, NSA had supercomputing
technology before nine to eleven, and we're foiled by you know,
guys with box cutters. And yeah, there hasn't been a
major attack since knock on Wood, but there's been a

(23:19):
bunch of little ones, and there's been a bunch of
turmoil throughout the world that NSA hasn't been able to stop,
or SCIA or anybody else. And it's because usually that's big.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
Well the world's big languages.

Speaker 4 (23:31):
Languages are something we're good at. But yeah, lots of languages,
but lots of information coming in. And this is what
really the book is about. The reason I like these
stories is because they don't have endings. There's no outcome,
and we it's so good at Monday morning quarterbacking intelligence
operations and military operations and judging them in hindsight, and
I think unfairly right, we're judging the people who plan

(23:51):
this stuffuse we know how it turned out, and we're
so good at after action reports and so good at
going back and saying, boys, should we should have done
this differently, X, Y, and Z. And that doesn't help
us very much because right off the bat, people read
this book and they go, oh my god, what were
they thinking? And I'm like, I want you to say that,
but without the judgment. I want you to say, what
were they thinking? What was the analysis going on here?

(24:14):
What were these people trying to do? And that's how
we can actually learn from this stuff. And I think
that's the big hurdle that we have modern day in
intelligence communities is that we're thinking about outcome instead of process,
and it's trying to understand how do we work our
way through this and pull out the tidbit of information
to make it actionable.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
And not if you blow up the capital, then maybe
they can go back in time and pull up old
shit and figure out who the hell you are. I mean,
this is not Americans. I don't want people thinking and
I say, and see, I collect on Americans but yeah.

Speaker 4 (24:45):
No, I know there's a lot of back and forth
about that, and with the case of someone like Michael Flynn,
who didn't quite understand or release he throughout the fact
that like, why are they listening to my phone calls?
As you call the Russian ambassador, We're not listening to
your phone calls. Really, the referen Bassord's phone calls, you
happen to be on the other end of that. So
that's not our problem.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Quickly, go back to your book. Do you have a
favorite story from that or even since then? Because obviously
your history and you're continuing to look at things.

Speaker 4 (25:12):
There are stories that keep popping up again and again
where I thought I was writing history, and it turns
out that things weren't left behind. One of them is
the title of the book, Nuke in the Moon, because
every so often somebody brings up this idea of a
show of force. Let's set off a multi megaton nuclear
weapon on the moon to show everybody's business. Thankfully, that
doesn't get very far. But an idea that came up

(25:32):
as this book was coming out was the potential of
using nuclear weapons against weather patterns, specifically against hurricanes. There
was some discussion amongst the highest levels in Washington about
why can't we do this? If we use a nuclear weapon,
maybe we can turn a hurricane in a different direction.
I know won't hit the public, and I want to
be like This was discussed back in the nineteen sixties

(25:53):
and the nineteen fifties there was an attempt to talk
about peaceful uses of nuclear weapons. Project Plowshare goes from
the biblical kind of phrase to turn swords into plowshares,
the idea of take these weapons of war and make
them useful for kind of civilian life, you know, create
artificial reefs, artificial harbors, or tunnels through mountains or other

(26:14):
things like that. And one of the ideas by a
very good otherwise a very rational otherwise meteorologist, was if
we launch several multi megaton nuclear weapons into the eye
of a hurricane, we could potentially break it up. Now
this is before we have the computer modeling to understand
that this is not something that's going to happen and
not something that's going to work. But at the time
it was taken seriously, it was investigated, it was researched,

(26:36):
and it turned out that you could take every nuclear
weapon ever made on Earth and multiply it times a
thousand and launch them all at a hurricane, and it
would not do anything. You would basically create a radioactive hurricane,
which is a little bit worse than even just a
normal one. But some of these ideas came back up
like that. These were discussed, you know, twenty seventeen to
twenty twenty one ish time period about potential ways of

(26:58):
taking care of hurricanes. That's nuts, right. We actually put
an exhibit in the Spy Museum about a cloud seating
where during the Vietnam YEP Operation Popeye during Vietnam, where
we cloud seated in an attempt to create to extend
the monsoon season try to wash out the Hochiman trail.
I've seen multiple things about cloud seating and whether it's
drought for floods or other things like that, about government

(27:19):
weather modulation. I mean, every time a big storm comes
and it just co happens to go around DC in
a perfect it's like the DC weather Dome, and no
one says, hey, it's a tidle base and it's got
really weird weather patterns. That's why it's so damn hot,
and that's the reason the storms are not going directly
over it. No, it's because we have some kind of
shield against the weather. That's something you want to have

(27:40):
on from like Da or Nro who can talk more
about that than I can, And I say, it has
nothing to do with the weather.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
The operation Popeye was make mud, not war.

Speaker 4 (27:48):
It was great and that one that might have worked.

Speaker 1 (27:51):
Right.

Speaker 4 (27:51):
That's one of those wonderful things is we have no
idea because it rains a lot in Vietnam, right, And
so how do you know if you're going to make
it rain more? And it's one of these things where
do you then the monsoon season, which was the whole idea,
and how do you gauge that? And that's one of
the things where if you had brought aboard a scientist
at the very beginning of this instead of a bunch
of engineers, the scientists were like, look, the scientific method

(28:13):
was invented by Bacon centuries ago, and the concept is
is this testable? How do we know if we actually
do this successfully? And the answer to that is we don't.
It's one of these things where you can go, hey,
look it worked, it rains, it's the jungle, it's monsoon season.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
But you can even go so there's a scientific method.
Then there's also the bureaucratic problem. And we saw this
in Cia. If you're to do a program like Okay,
I'm going to do a program. We're going to try
to influence whatever voters in Serbia and Melosovich's running or something.
I don't make up your story, and so Congress wants
to pay money to whatever it is take over Chili. Well,
you know years ago. How do you measure that? How
do you measure the success. There's a lot of programs,

(28:51):
a lot of money, a lot of inputs that you
can measure the inputs, and a lot of times you
can't measure the outputs. And so they'll come back and like, okay,
was that successful, and you're like, I don't know, it
rained or it didn't rain.

Speaker 4 (29:02):
My favorite kind of intelligence theory concept is the paradox
are strategic warning, which is talk a lot about Richard
Betts and others, where they've written about the idea of
if you have the greatest intelligence agency in the world
and they come up with the perfect information and the
perfect analysis, and they hand that off to a policy
maker and they do great dissemination. They convince the policy
maker you have to act. If you act on this,

(29:24):
you're going to stop a horrible event from happening. And
then they do something and the horrible event doesn't happen. Well,
one of two things occurred. One is you stopped it, congratulations,
great job. Two is it never was going to happen.
And I had a lot of conversations with people like
Barbara Sude, who wrote the famous August sixth bin Lauden
determined to attack the United States memo for CIA, and

(29:45):
then people like Kopher Black, who is ahead of the
CATE Terrorism Center on nine to eleven, like, all right,
looking back, what would have done differently? And the answer
is always nothing. We think we did it right the
first time, Like what else could we have done? And that,
to me is one of the really interesting paradoxes of
let's say, literally on nine eleven, two thousand and one,
or you get great evident information that there's going to
be hijackings. They're going to run the planes into buildings

(30:07):
in New York and Washington or northern Virginia, and what
do you do? You ground all the aircraft? Right?

Speaker 2 (30:14):
No?

Speaker 4 (30:14):
George Bush wakes up at six am on nine to
eleven and says, all aircraft, they are grounded. At the
end of the day, what doesn't happen nine eleven doesn't happen? Great, No,
nine to eleven.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
But the president is a failure and horrible and stopped commerce,
and so it becomes a negative.

Speaker 4 (30:28):
For well, it not only becomes a negative, but you
at that point, how do you prove there was going
to be a nine to eleven in the first place? Right,
And or they do it on nine to twelve, or
they do it on nine thirteen. So this is one
of these things that we're constantly in the intelligence business
having to deal with. How do you measure success? It's
easy to measure failure. Failure is really obvious if you
don't know what If you're failing, you'll see it on
the front page of New York Times. They'll let you

(30:48):
know you're failing. But success is the tough one, right,
because sometimes your success doesn't appear for twenty years. Sometimes
your success starts out as great and then falls up
if there's blowback down the line. I mean, look, we
successfully ousted Moses dec in Iran looked great for a
little while until nineteen seventy nine, right, I mean, we
were happy that Saddam Hussein was dead for about an

(31:11):
hour until all of a sudden, Iraq falls apart.

Speaker 1 (31:15):
There's also the.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
Nature of intelligence for people that people tend to think
that it's.

Speaker 1 (31:18):
Black or white.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
Right If on nine to eleven we'd figured out these
guys on these days had box cutters, and that's very specific,
actionable information. But in the weeks running up to nine
to eleven, we knew something was in the air, right,
so it's I know it's in media that the CIA
director was calling around to other European counterparts and others saying,

(31:41):
we know from the chatter from hearing them talk the
seniors that something is going on. But then he said,
we don't know where, we don't know who, we don't
know how, but we know their playing something and we
know it's getting close. We knew it, didn't know know
is the wrong word. We had strong and occasions that

(32:02):
people whatever, but you go with what you got, And
so it's people tend to think, especially with so the
difference between CIA and and i SA is we look
through humans to find plans and intentions, and intentions are
things that haven't happened yet that you're still trying to.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Figure out whether you're going to do it or not.

Speaker 3 (32:20):
Right, Putin could put all his troops and he could
put him on the border. But to give that final
order easier, isn't he Like even the Russians didn't know
what's his intention, and you can come in and say, yeah,
they're massing their troops, but we don't know what's between
his ears.

Speaker 4 (32:34):
And that's where the community, part of the intelligence community
becomes so important. Right. So you've got the signals intelligence
coming from NSA, but you also have leadership analysis coming
from places like CIA and other like understanding who Putin
is as an individual and understanding his background. Then you've
got NNG and NRO doing their overhead stuff trying to
understand what's going on.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
Conspiracy theorists.

Speaker 3 (32:54):
They assume that we have a perfect insight into our
into our adversary, and I wish we could take some
of these conspiracy theories and show them like the cool
stuff we can do, but also our limitations are also huge.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
Were staying look at twenty twenty two with the community
got it right in the sense that we tried to
tell our allies and others that Britain was going to
go in and that was good but say some of
the same analysts really messed up what would Ukraine do?
So like at a time when we probably could have
supported or give more things to Ukraine, the view of
the analytic community was all they're going to get overrun

(33:28):
quickly in Ukraine, won't fight like whoa, whoa. And sadly,
many of those same analysts who are the ones that
media still talking to.

Speaker 4 (33:35):
I don't think you're completely right unless you can convince people.
They convinced American leadership, but they weren't able to convince
the leadership that mattered overseas, and that means that there's
systematic issues with liaison and with all sorts of other things.
That that's the thing about conspiracy theory is that we're
right one percent of the time and we barely can

(33:55):
tie our shoes the other ninety nine percent of the time.
And it's intelligence right. It's not a smart bomb through
an air shaft. It's very gray, it's very dirty.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
I'm going to try to play stump the chump just
for a bit and inflict a quick story on you
and see if you know it. But this hass to
do with toothpaste and the atomic bomb.

Speaker 4 (34:12):
Do you know what I'm talking about a little bit. Yeah,
I'll tell it.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, I'll let that.

Speaker 3 (34:17):
In Germany before World War Two, the leading brand of
toothpaste was called Dora met and it used God forbid,
it used radioactive thorium a little bit in the toothpaste
and it was said that it would make your teeth brighter,
and it probably did, but it's also going to rot
your jaw, but they didn't realize this at the time.

(34:38):
So thorium can also be used to make a nuclear weapon.
And so there was this team in the United States
called the Aesops Team, and they were trying to figure
out how close Germany was to the bomb, right because
we didn't know we knew they were working on it.
We know we had the Manhattan Project, and we were
trying to figure out, like what avenues are they taking

(35:00):
and how close are they. And in Paris, as the
Allies were landing on D Day, group of German officers
went into an office in Paris, a scientific office, and
they commandeered they stole all the thorium out of this
research facility. And the Allies learned this and the course

(35:21):
forum you can make a nuclear weapon with it.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
The Germans just hijacked all this thorium.

Speaker 3 (35:27):
Holy shit, So they're directing bomber missions over Germany to
go after what they think maybe German efforts to create
a nuclear weapon via thorium. After the war, it turned
out that the German officers realized, oh, we're going to
lose the war and we're going to need to do
something afterwards.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
What are we going to Let's make toothpaste.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
So they went in and they stole the thorium and
they hit it, and they figure out after the war,
we're going to make doort again, and unfortunately what happened
is we traked all them down.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
Just tell us about the nuclear weapon, dude.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
I just wanted to make toothpaste.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
And then we found out that the last thing you
want to put in toothpaste is radioactive.

Speaker 4 (36:09):
Thurial al sauce was chosen by the Pentagon, and it
sounds like it's just a random word, but it actually
tends it's a word in Greek for a grove, like
a grove of trees, and whoever picked up the Pentagon
was picking it as like an homage to Leslie Groves.
So basically, when Gross found out about this, he went berserk.
He said, you named the Secret Mission to go and

(36:31):
find out what the Germans were up to with the
atomic bomb, after me, what the hell are you doing?
But by that point actually would have been more obvious
if they had changed it, so they had to suck
it up and it was the Al Sauce mission going through.
But there's another great story from that same mission. Where
as they were working their way through France, they did
water samples and they sent them back to Britain to
g analyze by the scientists there, because the idea was

(36:53):
that fission by products may end up in the water
and they can determine whether or not it's coming from
a factory up river. And so they sent back a
crate of these water, like these basin jars full of water.
And then they're in wine country and champagne region, and
so they sent back a case of champagne to the
guys back doing this hard work inside the UK kind

(37:13):
of say hey, here's spoils of war. Have some champagne
while you're doing this. But they don't send a note, right,
they just send these two crates back. So about a
week later they get a like a frantic message, like
a flash traffic saying the creative water is completely negative
for any radioactivity. But the wine is just full. The
wine is absolutely and and so they're freaking out, like
where did you get this wine?

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Is it?

Speaker 1 (37:34):
Do you know?

Speaker 4 (37:34):
It's like it's champagne. And it turned out that they
finally asked science as a front. Scientists like it's naturally radioactive,
like it has small little radioactivity in it naturally, and
so you're not picking up a German nuclear weapon. You're
picking up the soil that this stuff has actually grown.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
In searching for like a dirty bomb. They were trying

(38:10):
to like, you know, all cargo entering the US, and
one of the big problems they had initially in the media.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
Now but there certainly is that bananas.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
They have a they you know, with the potannsium in
the banana that that there was certain the machine couldn't
tell whether it was bananas or a possible dirty nuclear
dirty bomb.

Speaker 4 (38:28):
You need to have a like a Conics trailer full
of bananas, but you sometimes you'd have a Conics trailer
full of the.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Intelligence is like the bananas are a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 4 (38:37):
And there are several good books about this that actually
talk about nuclear detection and that technology and how it advanced,
going all the way from figuring it out during World
War Two to how we discovered that the Russian table
bomb to how we did or didn't do a great
job in figuring out as each of these nuclear powers
sequentially became nuclear powers in the Chinese and the Israelis

(38:58):
and the Indians and Pakistanis and everybody else. The technology
is extraordinary. It's really thinking outside the box if you
want to think about using seismographs and spectroscopy and some
of these really we call it massins measurements and signatures
intelligence kind of you know, the really nerdy science stuff
that I love. It's not something you can get for
im mumane intelligence sources. It's not something you can get
for signals intelligence because people aren't on the phone talking

(39:19):
about it or writing about it. They're doing underground nuclear tests.
And how do you pick that up. You sniff the air,
you feel the actual vibrations of the earth you're doing.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
I've done a lot of it in my career, going
around with a thing to collect air or water or
whatever in places.

Speaker 4 (39:33):
And that was learning as we went. Right. This is
not something that anyone had done beforehand, because there was
no reason to do it I talked to a person
who worked for Sotheby's, the auction house, and they were
saying that they're able to determine forgeries of wine. So
like someone will bring like a case of wine to
auction and they'll say, this is an eighteen sixty five

(39:56):
blah blah blah, and they'll take one little test of
it and determine, no, it's not, And like, well, how
can you know it's because there's no season one thirty
five minutes, right, there's no strontium ninety trace and if
it was from that time period, there wouldn't be. So
we know this was made after nineteen forty five because
atmospheric nuclear fission byproducts would be in every single drop
of wine on earth. And that is here, which means

(40:16):
this is not in eighteen whatever. This is a nineteen
sixty poured into a bottle as a forgery. And that
was that's a civilian use of a technology that was
designed for intelligence purposes, that was designed to try to
figure out are the Soviets building a bomb? And later
on for are the Chinese building a bomb? And then
are the Takastanies building a bomb? And our Koreans and

(40:37):
everybody after that yeah, they.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
Should just figure out the answers. Yes all the time,
it's not.

Speaker 4 (40:40):
Yeah. There's a historian named jeff Richelsen who he's really
well known because he did The Wizards of Langley and
he got a ton of stuff at CID classified. But
he also did Spying on the Bomb, which is kind
of every chapter is in another country, and essentially the
theme is how we failed against just to figure out
what was going on against every single country. And my book,
The Nuclear Spies acting does is a great thing, but

(41:02):
he doesn't connect anyone. And what The Nuclear Spies does
is actually it looks at our intelligence against the Germans
in World War Two and then our intelligence against the
Soviets in the early Cold War and figures out why
one succeeds and one fails, and juxtapposed they're only a
couple of years apart. They had the same people involved,
a lot of the same technology. Why were we good
at one and bad at the other? I thought I
was writing a book about why were we so unsuccessful

(41:26):
in determining what the Soviets were up to? When we
were successful in determining what the Germans were up to?
All saw us and we had a lot of really
great singles intelligence and great human intelligence, all these other things.
And it turned out I was asking the wrong question.
The question I was, how did we get it right? Ever? Right?
That the mission against the Soviets, the operation of the
Soviets was the norm, not the exception. The operation is
the Germans was the exception, because we got it wrong

(41:48):
every time after that right, it was different degrees of wrong.
But every time a new nuclear power joined the nuclear family,
we were surprised. Now maybe it was surprised by days
or weeks, months, in some cases surprised by years, but
no one saw any of them coming. That goes back
to what we were talking about in the very beginning,
is we were collecting all the right stuff. We had

(42:09):
an analyst who understood it from a scientific perspective, But
could we put dots together? Could we actually put the
puzzles together to say, hey, that pakistanis are about to
test a nuclear weapon or the North Koreans you don't
know about a q kN right, you know that come?
Oh of course if they got a guy from Pakistan
telling exactly how to do it, of course they're going
to do it. That's the missing piece of the puzzle.
That you're not going to get so you're going to

(42:30):
get surprised. And the answer is it's really hard to
do exactly, and you can't just be like, let's solve
this questions. You don't know what the question is sometimes
and that doesn't help. If you just add a thousand people,
I will.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
Tell you somebody who worked on the inside, we get
a friggin lot, not always huge, but we've saved I
worked in counter terrorism center.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
We've saved a lot of lives.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
When they can't prove how many, you can't, No, you can't.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
So we do have a lot of successes.

Speaker 3 (42:57):
I feel good and sleep well knowing that. But yeah,
it's freaking hard.

Speaker 4 (43:02):
Not only can you not prove when you're successful, but
you can't publicize when you're successful. You don't want to anyway.
It's much better if our adversaries think we're idiots and
we don't want people to know our sources and methods
and so a lot of times we do things well
and we do things effectively and people don't know about it,
and it's frustrating as hell. Claricia stuff.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
From my experience, one thing I can say is NSA
does an amazing job. A tremendous job. A massive amount
of the important things that are protected this country have
come through NSSAY collection, analysis, and work, and so I
think the NSA is a gem for the American people.

Speaker 4 (43:34):
I think the thing that kind of saves the agency
every time that's some kind of hubbub happens, some kind
of scandal is the directorship. The leadership will go down
and do a closed session of Congress and then the
congressman will come out and be like, yeah, we can't
cut that. So I'm constantly pushing for stuff to be
declassified when I think it should be. But ninety nine
nine percent of stuff, I'm like, yeah, there's a reason.

(43:55):
And I get requestcause people know my back, people know
my personality, and they're like, Vince, i'd really love to
see X, Y and Z. And I'm like, let me
look into it. And I'm like and they trust me.
When I come back to and be like nope, and
they're like really why, I'm like, you're going to have
to trust me on this one. This is just not
going to happen. And I'm constantly That's the kind of
part of the house I work in is I'm constantly like,
what can we possibly like proactively declassify, Like where are

(44:19):
we in a position where something can be put out
that will make us look good number one, but also
that will give a good history lesson to the public.
And we've done it over the years that I've been there,
We've proactively declassified a bunch of stuff and said, look,
what took so long? It took long because until very recently,
there's a source that we were protecting, or there's a
methodology that we're protecting, or told very recently, there were

(44:42):
potential blowback from this being released to an ally or
to the grandkid of someone who work for us. See
how he deals with this all the time, right, Like
why isn't this stuff from nineteen sixty five de classified?
Because the government in nineteen sixty five that is still
the government today, and they're going to take it out
on their great grandkid that their great grandpa were for CIA.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
One of the great examples of this we mentioned before
is in the Kennedy papers and things that were still classified.
And one of the things that was classified isn't now
is that the President of Mexico personally gave us permission
against Mexican law to bug the Soviet embassy and the

(45:23):
Soviet Embassy was telephoning with.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
Lee Harvey Oswald. It is how we knew he was there,
and then we knew that they were talking.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
But the President the CIA gave the President of Mexico our.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Word that we would never.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
To classify this because this guy, this man's legacy is
the President of Mexico is breaking president Mexican law to
help us.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Vince has also written about Cold War Miami, which of
course ties into Kennedy, Cuba, all those type of things.
Can you give us a little bit of background on.

Speaker 4 (45:52):
That, Well, it's my hometown is one of the reasons
I researched it. Growing up, a buddy of mine had
a fascinating background. Grandfather was the head of the Cuban
Naval Academy under Bautista. So he's a commandant in the
naval Academy and actually left Cuba twice. He left Cuba
because Bautista was essentially hounding him to the point of

(46:13):
going to prison, and then when Castro took power, he
went back because he thought Castro coming to power would
actually be a great thing, and then said whoa, never mind,
and then left again and settled in Miami with his kids,
and one of his kids married actually someone from Operation
Patro Penn, which was an operation to get unaccompanied minors
over to the United States out of Cuba, and their

(46:34):
offspring was my friend. And so we grew up three
blocks from each other, and when all the same schools,
liked all the same sports, so dated some of the
same people, and so our upbringing all the way up
through college was identical, but we viewed it through very
different perspectives. He was a first generation America, first born
in America, and I'm like sixteenth generation, like the first

(46:55):
of my family came over in sixteen thirty. But we
had all the same experiences growing up in this town,
but we really understood them and experienced them in very
different ways because of our background. And so we're just
talking about this, probably at a bar two in the
morning when we were in college. Are like, we should
there's so much interesting history in Miami. We should write
a book about it one day, and we're like, ah,
that's funny, And we were both college students. We were

(47:17):
going to think about that, And so I went on
to do what I did and eventually got to the
point where I was in the Washington, DC area, with
a PhD and an intelligence historian, and he ended up
in DC also working for the Pentagon as a liaison
for the Coast Guard, and we're like, hey, we're both
in the city. We've got time to kill this COVID
y at the time. Let's revisit this book because I
think we can actually write this now. And so the

(47:38):
idea was to attack it from both angles, from the
bottom up angle of kind of understanding the transformation of
this city, Miami, from a perspective of the Cuban exiles
themselves and how they're transforming the city and how they're
embracing the intelligence world because they're really coming over and
being just sucked in by CIA. And then me tacking
it from the top down and looking at the US

(48:00):
government usage of this new army down in Miami and
how they were going to fund it and some of
the answers. Miami is the only city in America that
can claim to be built because of money from CIA,
and I'm not exaggerating. In the nineteen sixties, one third
of Miami's economy came from the agency from CIA, one third.
The CIA was the third largest employer in the state

(48:21):
of Florida during this time period. Any kind of how
is that possible? Well, it's possible because there were hundreds
of people working within the Miami station working for CIA
on actual salary, right one hundred gs whatevers working at
the Miami station, and they were controlling another fifteen thousand
or so Cuban exiles who were on contract, and every
single one of them needed houses and cars and furniture

(48:44):
and groceries and kids going to school and school supplies
and everything else. So millions upon millions upon hundreds and
millions of dollars were being funneled into Miami by CIA.
And what this did was built a city that during
World War Two in the nineteen fifties is a dinky,
little tourist trap into one of the premier cities in America.
And it's because of national security and because of intelligence.

(49:07):
And now Miami is considered jokingly the capital of Latin
America is all the trade that goes through there. Washington,
d C. Has more spies per capita than inner city
in the world. Miami at one point was a close second,
just because the CIA was doing and because of what
human intelligence was doing. And then later when the Soviets
got involved and then now the Russians today, it might
actually be more because today Miami is so much more

(49:29):
of an international city than ever was before. You've got
the Russians that are there, and Sunny Isles, which is
called Little Moscow. You've got the Chinese that are there.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
In mar A Lago or a lot of Marlan So
mar al Laga.

Speaker 4 (49:39):
Is a little north, but Sunny Isles is actually an
area where there are tons and tons of Russians who
live in properties owned not only by the current president
but also by others. And that's where, ironically, the real
anchor baby situation is taking place, because these oligarchs will
bring their wives or girlfriends over six months pregnant, and
they'll sit there for a couple of weeks and months

(49:59):
until they have kidskids, and then they'll bring the kids
back to Russia with a US passport because they were
born in the United States. And you don't have to
think about twenty years from now how problematic that might
be if they've been sitting inside Russia, sons of a
Russian millionaire with a US passport. You don't have to
know a lot about intelligence work to understand that getting

(50:19):
a passport is magic when it comes to being in
illegal or being undercover, because that gives you so much legitimacy,
you know, if you're an American citizen in this case.
So that's a real issue. And so one of the
things that we traced was essentially the history of CIA
and it goes from one person literally there was one
person who ran the CIA quote unquote office in Miami

(50:42):
at the time of the Cuban Revolution, to being the
largest in the nineteen sixties CIA station in the world
other than Langley, Virginia. And you can kind of call
it a station in business. It was in Miami, but
largest CI facility in the world other than in Langley, Virginia,
Bigger than Moscow Station, bigger than Beijing station, bigger than Bertilin.
And that's extraordinary. It's in a US city. And we'd

(51:04):
run all the way up to modern day because today
there's still people being arrested. We got to the point
where we had to cut it off at one point
because as we're going through the editing process, which is
a pain in the ass. As we're editing a copy editing,
there would be stories like once every couple of weeks
about some other spook who was arrested in Miami working
for the Cubans or for the Venezuelans or something like,

(51:26):
or one story about former Blackwater guy who tried to
foment to coup in Venezuela with a bunch of ex
Special Forces, or there was an attempting. Yeah, it just
keeps happening. There was a coup attempt in Haiti where
the president was killed, and I'm like and I texted
my co author and I'm like, one hundred bucks says
this was planned in Miami, and he's I'm not taking

(51:47):
that bet. It's a loser bet. And within two days
it was like planning done in Brickle Avenue and Miami
and yep, there it is. And so we're like, look,
we have to cut this off. And it ended up
being Bolsonaro was our cutoff. Where if you remember when
he escaped to Florida, and so we peruse social media
and every single one from the Cuban government to left
these all over the place, and even others were like,

(52:08):
of course, Bolsonara runs off to Miami. He had gone
to Orlando and actually was at disney World and at Epcot.
But Miami got blamed for it because that was that
was the reputation that Miami deserved at that point of
being the place where you go. We equate it to
most size Ley Cantina. It is the American version of
the Cantina from Star Wars, where it's a hive of
scum and villainy. And if you need to hire somebody

(52:30):
that off somebody that you can go to Miami to
do it. If you need to overthrow a country, you've
got the right people. You could offer so amount of
money to get anything done.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
There is there a museum in Miami, Spy Museum.

Speaker 4 (52:40):
So there is a Miami Military Museum. Actually that's really interesting.
So it actually is in the old jam Way of headquarters.
So they've taken over the old CIA station headquarters and
they built the Miami Military Museum down there. There's one
artifact that's by itself worth millions of dollars, which is
the trotsky Isacks, the iceacks that killed Trotsky. It's the
real one. There's a letter from George Washington that the

(53:01):
Spy Museum has that creates the first American intelligence organizations.

Speaker 3 (53:05):
You can go to Mexico City to co You can
go into the very room where trust cancer. There's still
blood on their rug. Yes, yeah, it was the old
Joe because it was the last words Trusk you ever
heard you.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
If I pick your brain, that's a good one.

Speaker 4 (53:19):
I have to if I was still giving tours of
the SLIV Exam, I would have to steal that one again.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
Vince.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Thank you know we love reading what you're putting out.
We'd like to be able to check in with you
from time to time on some of these things.

Speaker 4 (53:30):
Yeah. Absolutely. And I have a book in the works
right now that comes out in the spring. John, you
are so graciously talk to me about it. But I
can't really get into the topics specifically, but I can
say it's the Soviet Union in the eighties is the
setting for all this. So John was a perfect person
to have a conversation with about this. But and this
springtime there'll be yet another book, because despite what I

(53:51):
tell myself, I just can't stop doing though.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Thanks again.

Speaker 5 (53:57):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.

Speaker 5 (54:07):
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.