Joseph Cox: Dark Wire

In 2018, the FBI discovered that high level criminals around the world were using encrypted devices to plot intricate crimes. When a powerful, secure new app began courting these syndicates, members of the underworld flocked to it. One problem for the criminals: the app was created by the FBI. Joseph Cox tells us the incredible story from his book, Dark Wire. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
And they can see all of these messages and they
realize these phones this is where the criminals have been hided.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,

(00:48):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
publish details behind their stories. In twenty eighteen, the FBI
discovered that high level criminals around the world were using

(01:09):
encrypted devices to plot intricate crimes. When a powerful, secure
new app began courting these syndicates, members of the underworld
flocked to it. One problem for the criminals, though the
app was created by the FBI. Joseph Cox tells us
the incredible story from his book Dark Wire. Why don't

(01:31):
you give me sort of your elevator pitch of what
this book is about. When you're talking to someone who says, oh,
I heard you read a book. I don't know anything
about it. Tell me about it.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
I mean to come out swinging straight away. It is
about how the FBI secretly ran a tech startup for
organized crime in order to wiatap the world. It's very
crazy when you put it into one sentence like that,
but this was the largest sing operation ever. Usually you
may think about the FBI investigating one drug trafficking ring,

(02:03):
or some money launderers, or even one murder. Here they
investigated thousands, potentially over ten thousand at once. By providing
the critical infrastructure that these criminals use. It's basically the
biggest wire app that's ever existed. And of course tons
of interesting questions come up from that. And I really

(02:24):
think the book is about trust. These criminals trusted this
phone so much that they were willing to commit crimes
on it. The FBI trusted its international partners, which I'm
sure we'll get into, the Germans, the Swedes, the Dutch,
and hoping that this audacious operation would not leak. It
was basically a miracle and then also, I think for

(02:44):
us trusting, well, when are we really communicating in private?
And how do we know when the messaging apps that
we're using, or the phone line we're using or whatever
is really secure? And it's almost getting harder and harder
to answer that question.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
How did the FBI get this kind of information about
organized crime before we had wire taps and apps and
all of that, was that mostly informants.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, you're going to have human intelligence like informants, you're
going to have old fashioned police work. I mean, the
wiretap now is over a century old, right, and they
were very very quick to exploit that, as were other
law enforcement agencies. But then there is always this cat
and mouse between law enforcement and criminals, and criminals will

(03:31):
then move to something like a pager, for example, or
then maybe they start using cell phones and mobile phones
and that sort of thing. And you can imagine, of course,
you know, the wire or the sopranos or something like that,
and those are sort of the stereotypical cases of well,
this is how the FBI or other agencies investigate organized crime.
But there's been a technological leap that I think people

(03:54):
in the general public aren't really aware of, which is
that criminals have started using these very sophisticated encryptive phones,
and it's basically the most important technological leap that criminals
have made since the invention of the cell phone in
the first place. So whereas for decades upon decades, as
you say, going back, all of that time is informants

(04:15):
and the normal phone lines, we're in a different world
now where many top tier criminals can basically communicate securely,
and they can communicate in such a way where law
enforcement probably aren't actually going to get the contents of
their communications. It's an entirely different world now to even
you know, the eighties or seventies, the nineties, it's just

(04:37):
a different ecosystem now.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
I know this might be an odd question. I'm curious,
is there a way to easily explain why the FBI
at some point in history might have been able to
tap landlines but then not cell phones, Because I feel
like in every kind of cloak and Dagger movie, it's like, oh, no,
we're safe, let's talk on a cell phone, but we
can't talk on landlines. So what would be the difference.
As we're moving more towards the modern part of the story.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Back with original wire taps. It was literally that law
enforcement would go and they would place a device or
even crocodile clips or some sort of interception capability onto
the literal wires which are carrying the communication. Of course,
when criminals start to move towards cell phones, the infrastructure
of that has changed, and then that's where you see

(05:21):
the FBI or other agencies doing closer collaboration with AT
and TV, Verizon, T Mobile, whoever. And they're always catching
up to where the criminals are moving towards. And that's
just a constant theme over the past one hundred years
and decades. The criminals go a few little steps forward,
and then the law enforcement agencies catch up, and it's

(05:41):
gone from something that was purely physical as in touching
the cable getting the communication to of course, now not
just cell phones, but the Internet writ large, and there
are places where you can go and intercept Internet data.
Thinking about the NSA and GCHQ, where they literally tap
the undersea cables that carry the world data. Of course,
that's not something that law enforcement is typically going and doing.

(06:03):
That's in the realm of intelligence agency. So there's always
going to be a divide there as well.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Well. Before we get into the sting operation that just
seems so elaborate and overwhelming and creative. I do want
to dip in a tiny bit about the encrypted apps,
because you know, in the last month or two apps
that are encrypted, like Signal, have popped up in hearings
and house hearings through a lot of controversy. To simplify it,

(06:29):
are there sort of three levels of secure phone lines.
There's the lowest level like what I use, where anybody
could probably tap into it. Then there is something like Signal,
you know, an app where it says it's encrypted, but
obviously it's not as secure as the third highest level,
which would be whatever the government is using. I'm not
even one hundred percent sure what encrypted means, so maybe

(06:51):
give me the dummy version of all of that.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
I think that's a totally fair characterization, where you have
those free levels of a completely ordinary phone line, which yes,
it might be rypt in some ways, but it's not
exactly done in a robust way, and you can have
people intercepting it, or you can have wide apps as
well that next level, such as the Signals or potentially
the telegrams of people familiar with that app as well.

(07:13):
What that does is that it will take the message
that you've typed out on your phone, a text message
or a voicemail or whatever, and it will encrypt it
while it's still on the phone, so it hasn't crossed
the cables yet, it hasn't entered the wider Internet yet,
and it's safely packaged that up it transmits across and
then hopefully only the person who's supposed to receive that

(07:34):
is able to decrypt it. And you don't notice any
of this, right You're just using signal or whatever, and
it happens instantaneously, but in the background, that very robust
set of security steps is happening. Now, if somebody did
intercept that, it would just be absolute gibber. It should
be ones and zeros or random letters, and they could
intercept something, but they won't be able to read any

(07:55):
of it. And then, as you say, the next layer
is the device and the systems that hopefully members of
the US governments and other governments are using, whereas it
won't just be encrypted, but the phone or the device
itself will be hardened as well. You know, you can
have the best encryption in the world. If someone has

(08:15):
hacked your phone, that's the place where the message is landing, well,
then potentially they can read it as well.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
What is the danger of sending something that's very sensitive
through signal if they're not going to receive any kind
of a real quote unquote information.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
The benefit of signal is that you can send stuff
and then if it's intercepted, it's not going to be
readable by any authorities or any third parties they're getting it.
But yes, if you hack onto the if somebody hacks
the phone at the end of that, they're going to
be able to read that. And that's just something which
is the limit of encryption technology. Encryption can protect the

(08:50):
contents of your messages and can protect it as it's sent.
It can't protect you if a hacker is broken into
your phone, or if you accidentally add a journalist to
a group chat and then they are of course receiving
all of that data as well. It can't protect against
mistakes or to be less charitable, stupidity depending on the
way that you're looking at it. You have to use

(09:10):
the technology in the right way. And the great thing
about these consumer apps like Signal or other ones like it,
they try to eliminate the room for you to make mistakes. Basically,
encryption has been around for decades, but I remember when
I started using it round about the time of the
Edward snowd Of revelations of twenty thirteen. It was so difficult.
It was cumbersome. You had to use all these different

(09:33):
tools and encrypture email in this really fancy way. Nowadays,
you can just use WhatsApp, which is also end to
end encrypted. You can use I Message, you can use
any of these other ones and we don't even have
to think about it. And that's a net positive that
billions of people around the world are able to communicate
more privately with confidentiality, and of course criminals can now
do that as well.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
So was there to get to your story? Was there
an incident that started all of this for the FBI?
Did they start realizing that the criminal enterprises around the
world were getting these encrypted phones that they could not access.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
Yeah, So, in around twenty fifteen twenty sixteen, the FBI
is investigating this drug trafficker called Owen Hanson, and it
seems he's pretty successful. They use an informant to basically
bait him into doing a methmthetamine deal. They presume he's
selling many more drugs. But they actually can't get a
tap on his phone because he's using this very unusual

(10:34):
BlackBerry back when those were cool and popular.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
I love blackberries.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
They had they're very cool keyboard. Drug traffickers loved those
as well. But the FBI found that owen Hanson was
using one of those and it could send encrypted emails.
It also had the microphone removed, the camera taken out,
the GPS as well. It basically wasn't a phone, it
was like a computer in his pocket that could send
encrypted messages. So the FBI investigate him without fully understanding

(11:02):
all of the contours of his crimes, they still have
enough to prosecute him. They get hold of this phone
made by a company called Phantom Secure. Unfortunately for owen Hanson,
he hadn't changed the default password, so the FBI were
able to log in very very quickly, and they can
see all of these messages because again now they're on
the endpoint, they're on the device, and they're scrolling through

(11:24):
and there's just thousands talking about criminal activity and they realize, oh,
these phones, this is where the criminals have been hiding.
They're not on the normal phone lines anymore. They're not
on the cell phones. They're on these really sophisticated, customized
pocket sized computers, And that basically starts the FBI's near obsession,

(11:47):
or the San Diego fbis near obsession with looking into
these companies, shutting them down, and eventually running their own
as well.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
So the FBI's understanding in twenty fifteen or before was
that these enterprises were run over at and T cell phones,
normal cell phones that were encrypted.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
I think when they've been investigating drug trafficking rings before
or other criminals, the sort of approach of these criminals
has just been to sort of compartmentalize information, only tell
people certain things, maybe use code words, all of the
very stereotypical things you see in TV. But then when
they're scrolling through these messages Owen Hanson and other people

(12:26):
later on, they're not using code words. They're saying I'm
going to send the five thousand kilos of cocaine or whatever.
Because they're so confident in this encryption technology. Well, what's
the point of using code words. We can just be
explicit and blunt about it and say I'm sending the
heroin to this place. And as they were going through
the messages. There were addresses of where where these drugs

(12:47):
were being picked up, where they were being sent to,
as well the names of contacts. It was like opening
up an entire new window to criminality.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
So in twenty twenty five terms this twenty fifteen technology,
where does that fall, that encryption technology? Where does what
Owen Hansen was using. Where does that fall on our
three levels? Is it closer to the government level these days?
Or is it more the signal level.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
It's kind of in between two of them, in between
the signal one and the sort of the government level,
because yes, it's encrypted, so if it gets intercepted, you're
not going to be able to read it. But where
these companies selling these phones to organize criminals, they did
take that extra step of removing the camera, removing the GPS,
taking out the microphone as well, and you know, it's

(13:33):
kind of debatable how beneficial those removals are. But your
traffickers love it when these companies introduce bells and whistles,
new gadgets, or they take features out, when really the
most important thing is that it's sending encrypted text messages,
but it sits somewhere in between because they're highly customized
and they're really expensive as well. To get one of
these phones, it's going to cost you thousands of dollars

(13:55):
for a six or a twelve month subscription. This isn't
something you just go into the T mobile store and buy.
We go to Fison and his four three iPhones or whatever.
It is a completely different business model. And the drug
traffickers love is expensive as well, because well, if it
cost me thousands of dollars, that's got to mean it's good.
And I mean that literally. I've spoken to drug traffickers

(14:16):
and the people who sell the phones, and price is
a major factor of building that trust.

Speaker 1 (14:22):
So do you have to if we're just let's say
we're just talking about Phantom Secure number one, is this
an above board company in any way or do they
strictly deal with criminal Back then criminal enterprise.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
They started legit and then when it became clear that
criminals were the primary customer base, the CEO of the company,
a guy called Vincent Ramos, he leaned into that essentially
is very competitive space as well, and you have to
think that unlike the normal phone market, where there's potentially
an unlimited number of customers for AT and T to

(14:54):
get or whoever there's a finite number of drug traffickers
in the world, probably kind of want them to come
over to your company. If criminals are using your phone,
you start to lean into that, and that's what many
of these companies did.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
When Owen Hanson was using this encrypted phone, did he
have to message with somebody who also had a phone
from phantom secure or was it? Could it be any
kind of phone. What if he's calling somebody on AT
and T who's not upon the latest criminal technology.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Yeah, these operate generally as closed networks. So if you're
a phantom secure you can only message another phantom secure phone.
If you're on another phone from a different company called Sky,
for example, you can only message Sky people. And that
has sort of two reasons, the first being that presumably
it's more secure. You know, if only the phantom phones

(15:41):
are talking to each other, then maybe there's less chance
of law enforcement infiltrating or in informant getting in or
something like that. The other one is a pure business decision.
It's like, well, if I'm phantom secure, I only want
my customers to be able to talk to each other,
because that means other people have to come to my
ecosystem as well, kind of like Apple and its app store.
You know, you can't really move apps between an Android

(16:04):
phone and an Apple phone. It's the same sort of
business decision for these guys as well.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
When the FBI talks to Owen Hanson, I'm assuming he
doesn't illuminate anything about any of this. Is he at
all helpful to the FBI once he has been convicted.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
Not At first He's put into a room and the
authorities and Australian authorities which have been tracing him as well,
they start telling Hanson all about the alleged crimes that
he's done, and he very quickly shuts up and says,
this is the moment when I'm going to bring in
my lawyer. Later on. I think he does testify against

(16:38):
other people in his organization, But of course his arrest
is absolutely not the end, not just for the FBI
but for his story as well, because then they start
to round up more members of his criminal enterprise, because
now they're in the phone which has all of their
contact information as well.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
Oh my gosh, I wonder what his reaction was when
he found out he just had never changed that password
and didn't think it was necessary. In the FBI got
in within you know, thirty seconds.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
Yeah. I mean I've spoken to Owen Hanson a couple
of times. He didn't specifically talk about the password, but
he did admit that to me. And I mean, it's
a sloppy mistake for a drug trafficker to make. And again,
I think that just shows how much confidence these people
have in the technology, and technology can only go so far.

(17:24):
You may have the fanciest quantum encryption in the world,
just tons of fancy algorithms. What it doesn't matter if
you make a mistake like that, like not changing the password.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
So the FBI is realizing that their traditional methods of
monitoring these folks aren't working. What is their next step?
Is it sort of taking you know, Hanson's contacts and
looking through and then are they flipping these people? How
do they know how many how many criminals are going
to places like sky or Phantom Secure.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, so they do flip people in and around Hanson's
or organization, and they investigate them with sort of traditional
law enforcement tactics, but a prosecutor inside the San Diego office,
they start to have this really interesting idea, which is
that well, we're looking at the messages inside this one phone,

(18:16):
but presumably many other criminals are using Phantom Secure phones
as well, and they get some intelligence from other agencies,
the Canadians and the Australians, and they do start to
build up a picture of oh, Phantom Secure is a
serious player in this space with thousands and thousands of customers.
If we're looking at the messages of this one phone
because we got lucky with this guy's bad password, what

(18:39):
would it be like to look at the messages of
all of these customers. And that plants the seed of
an idea, which is, like, we need to infiltrate one
of these companies, and specifically they focus on Phantom Secure
because that's the one that's right in front of them.

Speaker 1 (18:53):
Eventually, their plan is to build their own telecommunications company
to draw these guys in, which I just think is
so brilliant and I'm sure a daunting task for them,
But they start with saying, we need to figure out
how this company works before we replicate our own company.
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah, So they focus first on Phantom Secure. They investigate
the CEO I mentioned, Vincent Ramos, and they do various
sort of undercover exercises. The Canadians try to buy the
phones while posing as drug traffickers, and Phantom Secure is like, sure,
here you go. In another case, I think the Canadians

(19:31):
also then ask Phantom to wipe one of their phones.
And that's sort of another key feature of these devices,
which is that for Apple iPhones, you have iCloud. You know,
your phone gets stolen or you lose it, you log
into iCloud and you wipe the device so nobody gets
all of your personal details or your photos or whatever.
Phantom Secure in these companies have that as well. But

(19:51):
you go to the company and you say, my phone
has landed in somebody else's hands, and you can say
specifically law enforcement, and there's a bunch of evidence about
cocaine trafficking on my phone. Can you wipe it? And
they will do that. And the allegation, which was later
proved in court, is that Phantom Secure knew it was
obstructing justice by wiping these phones, which is again is

(20:14):
different to Tim Cook and Apple. You know, Tim Cook
is not knowingly wiping Apple iPhones of criminal evidence, but
Phantom Secure absolutely was doing that. So the FBI, the Australians,
and the Canadians, they get all of these little bits
and bobs about Phantom Secure until crucially they trick Vincent

(20:34):
Ramos in a Las Vegas hotel room. They're filming it
with undercover agents posing as drug traffickers, who they say
they're interested in buying some Phantom Secure phones, and they
make it very clear that they're drug traffickers. You know,
we're trying to move cocaine from South America to Europe.
We want to use these phones as part of that expansion.
And they even ask Vincent Ramos, what if we wanted

(20:57):
to kill one of our associates who maybe steals money
from us or something, could we use your phones to
do that? And Vincent sort of dances around it until
eventually admitting, Hey, you don't know me, but we made
the phones for this, meaning drug trafficking. And that's the
moment where he's basically sealed his fate. Even though it
was like a very passing comment, he's just basically omitted

(21:19):
to under cover officials that Phantom Secure is made or
at least used for drug trafficking. So they let Vincent
go for a bit while they're still investigating. They lure
him back to Vegas, and this time the FBI is
not undercover. They're all waiting for him in the hotel room.
He comes in and the agents tell him, look, we

(21:40):
know what you're doing, we know all about Phantom Secure.
We are prepared to arrest you on the spot right now,
or you do something for us, and that's put a
backdoor into Phantom Secure so we can read all of
your customer's messages. Again, it would be like reading Owen
Hanson's messages, but not for one phone, for seven, eight, nine,

(22:01):
ten thousand, and that would I can't stress how incredible
that would be for the FBI. Vincent doesn't put the
back door in. Some people I speak to say he
couldn't do it. Others say that he wouldn't do it
because he doesn't want to impact the privacy of his customers.
I definitely think it's the former. He wasn't really a
tech guy who was a business guy. But he eventually

(22:23):
decides to cooperate somewhat with the authorities, and they spend
three or four days in there, sleeping on the floor,
getting takeout food, and the FBI and other agents are
grilling Ramos about the company, about the industry, until Vincent decides,
for some reason he gets cold feet and he leaves
the hotel suite while the agents are sleeping. He tries

(22:45):
to escape to the Canadian border, which is incredibly embarrassing
for the FBI, where you have your prime criminal suspect
and he basically slips out in the middle of the night.
I won't spoil everything about how he's caught, but the
authorities deploy every resource at their disposal to catch this guy,
and they eventually do. And Andrew Young, the main prosecutor involved,

(23:09):
who I spoke to many many times for this book,
he said it was like getting to the Super Bowl
and then losing. You finally track down this guy, you
might be able to get a backdoor into the network,
and then he does something stupid like runs away. Now
we're back to square one. Now we don't have anything.
We can just arrest the guy and shut down the company,
but how are we even going to get our backdoor?

Speaker 1 (23:31):
The theme here is dumb silly mistakes. Obviously for a moment,
Hanson's you know, not changing his password to the FBI,
letting this guy slip away. When the FBI comes to
him initially and says, hey, we're we're drug traffickers or
anybody who comes to Phantom Secure and says, I want
a phone. I'm a drug trafficker. Is there no criminal
background check, as in, let's find out if you're really

(23:53):
a criminal? Can somebody vouch for you? Situation happening with
this company, I mean that would to me, would say,
so I need Joe Shmo can come off the street
and if you've got a couple of thousand dollars, you
can buy one of our phones.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yes, And typically the companies do that. They do check
out who their customers or their potential customers are, to
know if they're legit, at least in the criminal world.
It seems that the FBI and his partners had a
pretty good backstory, Like it wasn't completely out of the blue.
From what I've read through court documents and speaking to
people involved, it was a pretty well developed undercover identity.

(24:29):
You know what authorities call a backstop, and it has
all of this context and history where this wasn't just
invented entirely out of cloth. There's enough to convince somebody that, Okay,
this person's a criminal, you know, and I can trust
them potentially.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
So they get Vincent Ramos and you said that he
does cooperate sort of, is that right? What happens after that.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
He cooperates someone and he says he's going to go
to San Diego, and then of course that goes out
of the window when he tries to escape, and then
eventually it's just that, well, the game is over for him,
you know, he tried to run away. He's now been recaptured.
He's completely blown the authorities attempts of getting a backdoor

(25:13):
into Phantom secure out of the water. But what does
happen is that as news spreads of Vincent Ramos's arrest,
and I actually learned of that before the FBI announced it.
I had a source come to me instead that the
FBI has arrest of Ramos, and I did an article
around that time as well. What becomes clear is that

(25:35):
it freaks out all of the other people who are
selling in cryptophones in this industry, so much so that
one of them comes forward, seeing the writing on the
wall and realizes, I need to make a decision here.
I either need to stay in the cryptophone industry and
maybe Laura Enforcement is going to come after me as well,

(25:55):
or how about I flip and maybe I approached the
FBI with a truly amazing off. And that's how we
start to get into the FBI running its own company.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
Okay, so who is this? Who's this person who's flipping
and coming forward? Is this a Sky person?

Speaker 2 (26:08):
This is somebody called afgu Afgo. I'm going to use
that moniker because you know, they're very much a threat
to their life for cooperating with law enforcement. But they
sold phantom secure phones. They sold phones for other company Sky.
What they were doing was developing their own encryptive phone

(26:29):
company almost to compete with Ramos and the other ones.
And that was going to be called a non anom.
And this person thinks, well, if the FBI is investigating
these companies, I need to play the ace at my sleeve.
And his lawyers contact the FBI and the prosecutors and
they say, my client has this encryptophone company they've just started,

(26:51):
called a non would you like to use it in
your own investigations? Of course, not for free. There will
be money involved, a relatively small amount of about one
hundred thousand dollars. More importantly, you will not prosecute, or
you will give a lighter sentence to my client for
charges they may or may not face in the future.
But this is an incredible deal for the FBI. Rather

(27:13):
than investigating a company like Phantom Secure have to deal
with all of the work they're trying to get a
backdoor in. This opportunity basically falls into their lap, which
is like, would you like this tech startup which is
probably going to be trusted by criminals because it's in
that world, is in that ecosystem, and you can put
a backdoor in yourself. Rather than shutting money these companies down,

(27:36):
they would become the phone of choice for criminals.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
And at this point you've got people scared who are
running these companies anyway, right, so maybe their competition is
even lighter than before because you know people are running
so anam. I know it needs to still be developed,
but has word gotten out that this is being developed
or you're gonna have another option. We're still working through
the kinks kind of thing. So there was no even

(27:59):
real hour advertise it needed once it was ready to
go by the FBI.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
It was still super early days, but there was absolutely
a void or a vacuum in place. Because the FBI
shuts down Phantom, all of the other companies are pretty spooked.
You know, they're not closing down just yet, but it's
pretty scary. But there is a vacuum, especially in Australia
where Phantom Secure was particularly popular, and criminals need a

(28:26):
phone obviously, and you can imagine how annoying it is
for us when what sapp goes down or a message
goes down. Imagine if you are a cocaine trafficker moving
multiple tons of drugs week after week, you need to
be online and if you don't have an encryptive phone
for a week, you are going to lose a lot
of money. So there is an urgent need and demand

(28:48):
for people to find a new provider. But it does
start exceptionally small. It's basically word of mouth at first. Afku,
the creator of a non even gives out some of
the phones for free just to get it in front
of people, like here's the new phone, I'm trying. Please
give it a go. And it's very very slow at

(29:08):
the start, but eventually major gangs in Australia star getting
onto it, biker gangs, members of the Italian Mafia, those
sorts of people, and it's effective. It's a cool new phone,
whereas Owen Hanson's BlackBerry was. I mean, we laugh because
Blackberries were cool back in the day. They're not cool
in this point in the timeline in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.

(29:31):
You know, we all want Android now. We want to
send encrypted photos, we want to send encrypted voicemails, videos,
all of that sort of thing. And a Noon was
promising that it was going to be the cool new
sort of player on the block when it came to
giving encryption to criminals.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
Let me ask a question. If they're moving forward, you know,
the FBI is moving forward with this plan tentatively. They
have all this information from Phantom Secure that they got
during this time with Vincent Romo's. Do they move on
any of those people, any of these messages that they've read,
or do they hold off because they don't want to spook,
you know, all of the potential customers they could have

(30:08):
later on with this new company.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
They and especially Australian foresties do make some arrests, particularly
of people who are helping sell the Phantom Secure phones.
They can't just like let that go. And they also
shut down servers, They seize websites and web domains used
by Phantom Secure. So it is a large scale disruption effort,
but absolutely the resources move pretty quickly over making no

(30:35):
the new sexy, interesting phone that criminals are going to
want to flock to.

Speaker 1 (30:41):
So as Afku the face of this company, how involved
is he this criminal? The FBI is now saying, we're
going to work with you to make this legitimate.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, so Afku definitely knows people in the criminal underworld,
and that's how it gets its start. It would be very,
very difficult for a norm or really any encryptophone company
in the criminal space to get any sort of headway
if you don't have those criminal connections. And that's another
crucial thing about trust is that if you're a cocaine

(31:11):
trafficker and you buy an a cryptophone from somebody like
AFGA or anyone in that space, there's a specific person
you can go and blame if something goes wrong. If
a criminal I don't know gets an iPhone and installs
signal of it, they're not going to go and beat
up Tim Cook. I mean they might do, but that
would be absolutely insane obviously.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
But when they buy a phone from somebody in an
alley in Amsterdam or from a safe house in South America,
there's a specific person you can go blame. You can
go hurt, you can torture potentially, and that comes up
in the book as well. So he is the face
of a nom, but he starts spreading out the phones

(31:53):
to people who then have more criminal connections, who can
then directly sell them to the actual cocaine traffickers or
the hit men or anybody else who wants to use
the phone. It's basically a pyramid scheme where you have
Afriga at the top, you have the sellers underneath, maybe
even more sellers underneath them. Then you have the end users,
the hit men, the traffickers, whoever. But in that pyramid scheme,

(32:15):
there's almost a secret top layer, which is the FBI
above the entire pyramid in the clouds, which is actually
dictating the entire thing.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
Are all of the people who work for a noom
like Afgu, I mean, are they all aware of what's
happening and what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
Afgu is the only one who knows at least is
my understanding. And I've spoken to people who coded the
actual phone, they developed the actual app, and these were
ordinary people based around Asia and Southeast Asia. They had
no idea they were building basically an FBI surveillance apparatus,
and I know that might be a a little bit

(32:51):
hard for people to believe, like, well, surely they must
have figured it out. I don't know. They were getting
one thousand bucks to make a chat app and they
log on. One I spoke to was working from his
bed with his MacBook Pro on his chest, just kind
of like anybody else working remotely anywhere else around the world.
It's just a paycheck. Only years later did they realize, oh,

(33:14):
I just helped wiite up the world. It was a
complete secret to of course the cocaine traffickers who are
using the phones, it has to remain a secret from them,
but even people inside the company itself as well.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
So we know the United States is the mastermind of this.
Who else is involved? It's Australia and Canada and other countries.
Who else is in this?

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, so it definitely changes over the years. The Europeans
eventually become involved, but right at the start it's the
Australians and specifically the Australian Federal Police AFP. And the
reason for that is not just because these phones are
so popular in Australia, because you can make a lot
of money if you get drugs to that island. Drugs
cost a hell of a lot more money inside Australia

(33:54):
than they do in the UK or the Netherlands or
the United States or whatever. But the FBI wanted the
Australians to sort of test it out first, like they
don't even know if this backdoor is going to work. Essentially,
this is a really crazy idea that nobody inside the
FBI or really any agency apart from potentially the CIA,
has ever done before. So the Australians try it out,

(34:16):
and very quickly they do realize, Wow, we're getting really
good intelligence. We're getting really good messages from these criminals,
and they can literally see them flash up on their
computer screens in a part of their headquarters called the Bunker,
and it's kept incredibly tight lipped. You know, only a
few people know about this incredibly sensitive capability. But then

(34:37):
when it starts to grow in Australia, it quickly becomes
apparent that we're going to need to rope in more
agencies just because of the globalized nature of organized crime.
You have these traffickers in Australia who are asking AFGU
and other people, well, can you start selling phones to
my contacts in Europe to my contacts in South America,
because of course drugs have to move. They're a physical

(34:59):
good and it's going to be connected to the worldwide
supply chain as well. So quickly as the phones go
abroad and they go into Europe and South American other locations,
the FBI has to bring in other law enforcement agencies
as well.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
At its height, Do I remember this right that you said?
It was they were looking into ten thousand different criminals
that have joined this their company. Is that right? Really?
Over how many years?

Speaker 2 (35:23):
Yeah? So the top number of phones sold was twelve thousand,
and then at some point they had nine thousand online,
all at the same time. And this stretch from twenty
eighteen up to twenty twenty one. So for years and years,
the FBI was reading these communications of all of these

(35:44):
criminals all over the world. And I think just to
stress sort of the safety and the danger to afgu
as you know, and as your listeners will know, if
you're an informant to a single criminal gang, your life
might be a risk. You know, obviously depends on the
crime involved. If you are the confidential human source who

(36:05):
provided the phone company that the FBI then used to
wipe up the world, which caught something like thousands of
thousands of criminals and about three hundred and fifty distinct
crime syndicates. You've just annoyed three hundred and three hundred
and fifty different criminal groups. Every single one of those
is probably going to want to kill you.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
Well, now I have some technical questions because you've brought
that up. What I was thinking was, how do you
move in these investigations? How does the FBI figure out
at what pace what order that you would move, Because
don't you think at some point they would all catch
on and say, wait a second, The common denominator here
is not the drug traffickers in Mexico or in Canada.

(36:47):
It's this phone company that we all happen to belong to.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
Yeah. That is the constant tension throughout the book and
throughout the FBI's investigation, is that we're getting all of
this intelligence. It's incredible, but if we move too quickly
and too aggressively, it's going to become obvious. There's the phones.
And then they have the tension of working with maybe
the Ecuadorian authorities or people in other countries as well,

(37:13):
and they want to seize the drugs. They don't want
cocaine flowing across their borders or whatever. So agencies would
take decisions to sometimes interceptor shipment, sometimes raid a drug lab,
but they would try to do it in such a
way that they were so spread out that it would
give the impression they were not connected whatsoever. Towards the end,

(37:35):
some people did start get suspicious when there's these thousands
of users all over the world and all of this
stuff is being shut down. But for years nobody had
any clue, and to the point where there's one particular
drug trafficker in the book called Maximilian Rifkin. He is
my favorite person I've ever covered. He is absolutely insane, crazy,

(37:57):
and I had a very good time digging in to him.
But he puts so much faith into a norm that
he tells all of his underlings, don't use Sky, don't
use these other companies all come to a norm because
not only was he using the phones to traffic drugs,
he was selling the phones as well, So he had
this duel motivation of protecting my drug trafficking and making

(38:21):
a lot of money by selling the phones as well.
And he puts so much blind faith into it, and
blind trust into these phones that it was his ultimate downfall,
not just of him but basically everybody he worked with.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
So is he working directly for the company or is
he like a scalper basically buying a lot of phones
in then reselling them.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
Here's why I would call a major distributor where he's
going to get the phones, he's going to resell them,
and he's going to take a commission or a cut
or try to upsell them and that sort of thing.
But often what I found through reading hundreds of thousands
of a non messages later that they managed to obtain
from the police and sources and courts and all of
that sort of thing. He would also give out the

(39:00):
phones for free because there was basically a turf war
between his company or a non incroachat and another one
Sky that we mentioned, and they're all trying to fight
for the same customers to the point where there's violence
as well. There isn't just violence in the drug trafficking world,
there's violence in the industry of selling the phones to
organize crimes as well, shooting, stabbings, bombings as well. But

(39:24):
he stood and others stood to make a lot of
money if they could provide the phones to drug traffickers.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
Is there any kind of an ethical concern that they
cannot keep up with all of these messages. They're not
making all of these arrests. They are facilitating murders probably
all over the world because they simply are not going
to be able to go in with a big net
and sweep all these people up. Yeah, I mean, I
know they would have gotten phones somewhere, but still, is
there any kind of did you hear anybody say that.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
One of the major concerns before the FBI got the
approval to go ahead was that this looks a lot
like Operation Fast and Furious, which is where US authorities
allowed the flow of guns into Mexico. And the idea
was that, well, we can follow the guns and then
we can arrest the cartel members who are using them.
That sort of thing that massively backfired, and those weapons

(40:15):
were then used in the murder of at least you know,
one border patrol agent and various other crimes as well.
There the US authorities are basically allowed the cartels to
get these weapons that were then used for horrible crimes
and people inside San Diego, inside the authorities, they made
that direct comparison and the counter which I find somewhat compelling,

(40:35):
even though I understand the concern is that, look, these
criminals are going to be using an encryptophone regardless, Like
these are all cocaine traffickers. They all use these phones.
This is standard operating procedure for drug traffickers nowadays. Wouldn't
it be better if they were using a phone that
we did have visibility into? And apparently that argument was

(40:56):
convincing enough for the FBI to get approved and for
the prosecutors in San Diego to go ahead as well.
That being said, just when there's that tension with well,
should we raid this drug lab? Should we seize all
of these narcotics, there's a lot of violence happening on
an arm as well. There's threats of assassination, torture as well,

(41:17):
and I document in the book there's one case where
a young man is unfortunately murdered in Sweden due to
assassins who used the FBI's own app. They sourced the gun,
they followed the target, they lured him to a specific location,
and then they murdered him. The FBI had all of
that information, but they didn't give it to the Swedish
authorities in time.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
So are they able to monitor all of these messages
that are coming through? How is that even possible?

Speaker 2 (41:43):
It's really really difficult. First of all, the messages come
to the FBI every three days, I think every Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
And the way it was prescribed to me by the
San Diego FBI was that they'd have a very long
week of going through all of these messages, translating them,
sometimes with automated technology or linguists as well disseminating it
to international partners. The weekend happens Monday, there's another batch

(42:07):
of messages, and now we have to go again. And
it absolutely became unsustainable. Towards the end, they're gathering something
like twenty twenty one million messages, to the point where
they're getting a million messages a day, and then every
single one of those messages has to be read, has
to be digested, because you don't know if you missed

(42:28):
this one single message, well maybe somebody's gonna get shot
or kidnapped or tortured or whatever. And they couldn't keep
up with it any longer. It's almost like the intelligence
and the capability was too good.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
Essentially before this is you know, revealed and arm and
the origins of it. You have these people, you know,
going on trial. So let's say it's a criminal syndicate
that they broke up somewhere in America. They go on trial,
and these criminals do their defense attorneys know how this
information came to them? Is that disclosed at all? I
would think you would have to write, you have to.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
Eventually, but especially and especially what the Australian authorities did
was that they would arrest people, they would intercept drug shipments,
and then they would basically publish Another reason why. One
concrete example is that some drugs were hidden inside a
shipment of welding machines being sent to Australia. The cops
knew where they were because they're reading all of the

(43:22):
messages on the encrypted app when they arrest somebody, and
then the issue at press release a couple days later,
the Australians just say, oh, well, we did an X
ray and then that's how we found the drugs, which
is technically true, but before that they had this gold
mine of intelligence that told them to do the X
ray in the first place. Now, of course, years after

(43:43):
the fact and many of these cases are still going
through the courts, especially in Australia, where Australian authorities remain
very very quiet about it because I mean they're still
legal proceedings and they can't discuss it basically whatsoever. But
now all of that information, all of that context has
come out. But at the time it just looks like
the authority's got incredibly lucky. But there's only so much

(44:06):
of that you can do. You can't get lucky again
and again and again and again before people start asking questions.

Speaker 1 (44:12):
And is Afgu just unshakable in this role that he's in.
Does the FBI ever doubt him in any way as
being someone who is legitimately working with them.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
I haven't seen any indication that they start to doubt
this person. And I think the reason for that would
be just like the back door works, you know. And
of course, if AFGU or anyone else is using those devices,
the FBI is going to see those messages as well.
So if Afgu decided to go do something silly and

(44:42):
start sending information to criminals, at least on a non
the FBI is going to see that as well. And
I mean, it would just be a very unfortunate thing
to do to agree to cooperate in a sort of backstab.
I saw no indication of that. If anything, I think
the FBI were ecstatic with the capability that this provided.

(45:02):
You know, I even heard that some of the geekier
employees inside the FBI and the AFP, they marveled at
this backdoor in this technology. And I'm sure they're thinking
of other ways to use it in the future as well.
Now that they've done it and they've built it, maybe
there's another way to build it again, at least potentially.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
Well, this was so recent, So how long did this
go on? It started in twenty eighteen. Tell me what
the different stages were. Twenty eighteen the beginning, they're building
the company, they're marketing it and all of that.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Yeah, twenty eighteen, it starts very quiet in Australia, word
of mouth. By twenty nineteen it's moved to Europe. They
start to bring in some really big drug traffickers who
sort of act as brand ambassadors for the phone. The
US authorities actually call them influencers. Instead of you know,
selling shampoo or whatever on Instagram, it's selling phones to

(45:51):
the cartel and that catapults it. And then when you're
at twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. It's basically one
of the main players in this space, and it basically
becomes the same size as Phantom Secure, if not bigger
in some instances, and the FBI basically became better at
running a tech startup for criminals than the criminals were

(46:15):
doing it themselves. I mean, it becomes absolutely successful, and
on one hand, it's a long time to run that
company over years. On the other that's a very short
amount of time for a non to become as big
as it was. You know, it really ramped up exponentially,
and I really try to draw this parallel between this

(46:35):
tech startup for criminals and Silicon Valley. Not that those
speaking for criminals, but you will have this phenomenon in
tech and business called hockey stick growth where it starts
rail ray stagnant, then all of a sudden it just
shoots up. And that's basically what happened with a numb.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
How many people total at its height knew about this
around the world. I cannot believe it didn't get out
at its height.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Was dozens of people knew about this at the start.
It's basically the organized crime squad inside San Diego FBI,
which to be clear, is a small office. I mean
I've been there. I walked through the rooms where they
read the a non messages. They're not the fanciest or
the biggest FBI field office. You know, they're not LA,

(47:20):
they're not DC obviously, or Southern District of New York.
They're very much an underdog. And I think that mentality
really permeated throughout the FBI of like, well, we're going
to show them that we can actually do this. And
that was you know, six seven, eight people at first,
and then they're superiors. And then as it starts to
spread to different agencies, the Germans, the Swedes, the Dutch

(47:42):
as well, most of which I spoke to, it was
a handful of people in each agency. And I think
it's a genuine miracle that this did not leak. Sort
of in parallel, as I go to go into in
the book, there were these other investigations into Sky, into
end Chat by the Europeans. They did leak. Criminals did

(48:04):
learn that those companies were being investigated, and we know
that because they were talking about it on a non
they were saying, don't use Sky, don't use Ancho Chat,
they're compromised. Whoever was saying that clearly had an insider
somewhere in those agencies, but they didn't know that a
non was compromised. So they were still in a trap,
but they didn't realize it.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
So run those numbers again for me. What were the
total number of convictions, investigations, all of that stuff, So
we can be impressed with this, with this enterprise.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
Yeah, nine thousand users, more than a thousand arrests, tons
of drugs, hundreds of weapons, one hundred and fifty threats
to life mitigated. And now I don't know whether that
necessarily means, you know, somebody would stopped being killed or
anything like that, but the FBI least intervened. Cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine,

(48:54):
and fetamine, all of these different drugs taken. But really
more than that was all of the smuggling techniques which
were detailed in the messages. They're now burned because now
the FBI knows that, oh, they do this thing to
move this drug. They somehow put it into the lever
of clothes or something like that in this amazing chemical

(49:15):
reaction to then smuggle the drugs. Well, now the cops
all know about that because they've read about it in
the messages. And most importantly, the overriding success of this
operation was that criminals don't trust these phones anymore. And
that was an explicit goal of the FBI, which is like, look,
it's great to see drugs, it's great to arrest people, obviously,
but the underlying goal was like they wanted to shatter

(49:38):
trust in the encryptophone industry in the hope that these
criminals were moved back to other forms of communication that
we were talking about earlier, maybe an ordinary phone. Maybe
they'll meet each other face to face, and the FBI
can use more human intelligence there. I mean, they were
absolutely successful in seeding paranoia. I know that from speaking
to drug traffickers and the people who sell those phones.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
Did the FB do I have any surprising discoveries. I
don't know what that would be, like a connection to
a government official in another country with a drug trafficker
that they had never known about. I was just wondering
if anybody got trapped in this web that they didn't
expect to be there.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
So they were so paranoid about leaks the FBI that
they did not share this secret with all countries. The
FBI were quite skittish and talking to me about this,
but they implied that, you know, countries in Eastern Europe, Serbia,
those sorts of places which absolutely have public corruption problems.

(50:34):
And then we've seen that through the non data later
on and other investigations, that officials in those countries do
collaborate directly with criminal entities. And that was absolutely the
paranoia of well, if we share this with XYZ country
too early, it could completely derail the operation as well.

(50:54):
And Andrew Young, again the main prosecutor on the case,
he was shocked by the amount of public corruption and
going across these platforms, and I think that's something a norm,
and these other investigations showed is that law enforcement often
catch drug traffickers, they often catch money launders, they never
get the people in public office or the insiders. Are
a law enforcement agency, they just don't see that activity.

(51:17):
And then that's what they saw on these encryptive footes.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
So we're talking about this, you've named the company. Clearly
it has come to an end and this program has
been shut down. How does that look and when did
that happen?

Speaker 2 (51:28):
Yes, so in early twenty twenty one, it becomes apparent
that the FBI cannot do this anymore. They're getting a
million messages a day. They simply cannot keep tempo with
the amount of intelligence coming in. So they decide on
a date in early June twenty twenty one to bring
an end to the operation. The European authorities don't want this.

(51:49):
They say, this is an incredible intelligence gold mine. Let's
just keep running it and we can keep arresting people quietly.
All of that sort of thing. That's just not possible.
This had to end at some point, and again the
FBI wanted it to end to some point because they
wanted to undermine criminals trust in these encryptophone companies. And
they can't do that unless they pull the rug underneath
and come clean on it was us the entire time

(52:12):
reading an arm. They have to do that very theatrical
sort of reveal. So it starts with a series of
raids and arrests in Australia in the early morning, and
then as the sun moves they start doing arrests in Europe,
and it's all very very dramatic. There's a big room
inside EUROPEOL, which is the European Union's law enforcement coordination body,

(52:35):
and you have German officers talking to Dutch officers, talking
to Swedish officers, and they're all coordinating. I have a
warrant for this guy. He's crossed over the border into
your country. Can you pick him up? They're doing all
that in real time, just like the criminals are presumably
as well, and they're rounding up hundreds upon hundreds of
people in this one single day. It's the single largest

(52:56):
law enforcement action ever. Something like nine thousand police officers
acted in some capacity on that day, I mean a
small army essentially of officers. Until eventually the sun moves
to San Diego and the DOJ holds a press conference
where they come clean and they say we were running
a NORM the entire time. I mean, I was blown away.

(53:18):
I found out the same time as everybody else. I
was speechless and stunned that, even after I've covered the
encryptophone industry for years, nearly ten years at this point,
I didn't think the FBI would go that far to
run their own and crypto company. And then of course
I start writing about it, and I'm pinging my sources
and asking them, did you know about a NORM? And

(53:38):
it turns out many of my sources did know because
they were selling the phones for the company. They just
didn't want to tell me as a journalist because they
thought they had a good They thought they had a
good gig going, they thought they were making a lot
of money, and then they got caught in the biggest
trap ever in law enforcement history.

Speaker 1 (53:54):
What about AFGU doesn't this just put him in mortal danger?

Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah? Absolutely, And I mean I don't know, of course,
specifically where this person is, but it's something they're going
to have to be very very careful for the rest
of their life. There was actually some potential dangers to
them recently in that, in a cruel twist, the DOJ
didn't just run this company, it then criminally charged the

(54:20):
people who sold the phones, even though they were doing
the FBI's dirty work for them, because technically you're selling
these to criminals, were gonna arrest you as well. Very recently,
some of these people were about to go to trial
in San Diego and as part of that after you
was going to have to testify, they were going to
have to be in court, they would have to show
their face, they were going to have to talk about
how they created the company. And maybe this was just

(54:43):
my naivety more as a technology journalist than an old
school crime journalist. But that was staggering to me. This
person's life is going to be in serious danger and
you're going to have him in court speaking. I was
blown away by that. But what it turned out in
the end was that all of these people took guilty please,
so that hadn't happened. But there are going to be
more cases coming through the courts and the coming months

(55:04):
and even years. So it's not over for that person.
It's not over for the FBI, and it's not over
for the Australians or the other foreign law enforcement agencies
as well. They still have investigations which they are starting
or continuing with this data.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
So ultimately, what is the lesson learned here? I'm the
FBI is on the lookout for what these guys are
going to next. They're not just going to give up
and they're not going to start using landlines.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
I think the lesson here is the FBI is willing
to go to extraordinary lengths to insert itself into criminal infrastructure,
and that's running a phone company for criminals. They've even
launched their own cryptocurrency since and they use that to
sort of arrest people who are doing pump and dump schemes.
There's actually an ARSK I'm working on right now which

(55:51):
isn't published yet, but it's about how the FBI secretly
ran a money laundering ring for nearly a year to
move criminals so then they could identify the criminal customers
as well. I think a NOM was a warning shot
not just of how resourceful the FBI is when it
comes to getting those criminals, but also encryption is such

(56:13):
an issue for police and for law enforcement agencies that
they're willing to spend what I think it's tens of
millions of dollars on this operation to get messages that
the otherwise would not be able to do.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
To me, this reminds me of the police officer sitting,
you know, at the keyboard pretending to be a young girl,
you know, approaching men on the internet. This is saving
you know, the people having to go out undercover and
you know, in bed with these criminal syndicates. I mean,
is that another thought here? As you really are, you're
able to cover so much just from a computer, rather

(56:47):
than putting agents lives at risks by trying to get
them into all of these places.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
I mean it would have been completely impossible to arrest
all of the people the authorities did through a norm
if they were doing it, for lack of a better term,
manually or using more old school techniques to get a
wire tap onto three hundred, three hundred and fifty different
criminal syndicates, maybe get the informant in there. Like, it's
completely unfathomable. You wouldn't be able to do that. What

(57:14):
the FBI did here, they basically did global law enforcement
at scale in one operation. And again I keep HARKing
back to the idea of tech companies, and that was
a very fun thing for me in the book when
I'm my guilty pleasure is reading about corporate fraud like
Farrnhose and Facebook, and they kind of married that into here,
because at the end of the day, this is like

(57:36):
a scam tech company it just happens to be is
run by the FBI, and they catching criminals. They were
able to enforce the law on a scale that's never
been seen before, and I don't know if you'll actually
ever be seen again.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
Well, simply a citizen spectator of all of this and
a fan of your book, I have to say it
gives me more confidence in the FBI. You know, you
don't know what's happening. You've no idea, we don't know
anything about how much they're actually trying to protect, you know,
our country. And so when I read things like this,

(58:08):
and you know, these undercover and these investigations, and you
have all of these people coming forward and talking to you,
I just think, well, thank god. I know that it's
not perfect, but at least we know that they really
are trying to pull off these big operations to protect people.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Yeah, and I think people involved are very proud of that.
They're very happy with the results. They're very happy with
how they went about it, I think most of all.
And I've spoken to many people who were in the book,
and I've spoken to them since in the months and
years after. They still talk about the lasting relationships between

(58:45):
the FBI and the foreign law enforcement agencies. And you know,
a lot of international collaboration happens. I cover a lot
of different investigations where that's the case. This was different.
These people became friends, They end up becoming drinking buddies,
going to the pub after you know, they've successfully intercepted
this drug shipment or whatever, and what they heard again

(59:06):
and again and again was that this operation may not
have been successful if it wasn't for those personal relationships.
And specifically there are two agents at the head of it,
Nicholas Chevron and Stephanie Stevens, and they were FBI agents
who basically ran a noom essentially, and they built the
personal relationships with the Swedish authorities, the Dutch authorities, the Australians,

(59:28):
And if you don't have that informal but strong bond
between the agencies, it's very hard again to trust we're
going to give you. We're going to tell you about
this secret. Hey, we're secretly running a phone company for criminals.
You don't just tell any person or any law enforcement
agency that. You need to know that you can trust
this person and the personal relationships. I think we're a

(59:49):
massive part of that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly Right Production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.

(01:00:26):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff, and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked

(01:00:47):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked, and on Facebook
at wicked Words Pod

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
Yeah