The CIA from 9/11 to Present Day | Tim Weiner | Ep. 360 - The Team House

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Special Operations, Cobert.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Espionage.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
The Team House with your hosts Jack Murphy and David Park.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Hey, guys, this is episode three hundred and sixty of
The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave and our
guest in studio tonight is Tim Winer. Tim is the
author of the upcoming book The Mission. This will be
out in a couple of days or what will week
July July fifteenth, So yeah, like a week from today
for people who are watching this. When it comes out,

(00:43):
when most of you watch this, it'll probably already be
on bookshelves. So the topic is the CIA in the
twenty first century. It's sort of a follow up sequel
to Legacy of Ashes, which charted the CIA's history from
its inception up until early War on Terror, like oh,
four thousand and six, two thousand and six, and so

(01:03):
The Mission kind of picks up where you left off.
That goes to today writing, trying to convince your editors
to insert information that is up to.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
The last minute. As I understand it, we pushed it.
We locked up the book about three months ago.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
So let's start off with I'm not going to go
into a lot of preamble about you know, yourself and
your previous work, because this is the third interview we've done.
But tell us about how this book, in particular it
came out. Why did you decide to write it now?

Speaker 2 (01:36):
So the moment I realized I had to write the
book was when it became clear that CIA had done
something that it had aspired to do since its creation
in nineteen forty seven but never really achieved, which is
to penetrate the Kremlin. The CIA had in twenty twenty

(01:58):
one stone Vladimir Putin's war plans to invade Ukraine, and
Bill Burns, the director of CIA under Biden, convinced the
White House and the State Department that this information had

(02:19):
to be declassified, that that to tell the world about it.
And they told a skeptical world about it, like the
NATO nation said, oh yeah, right, aren't you the people
who said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? But the
intelligence was absolutely on the money. One of the highest

(02:41):
goals of the CIA throughout its history had been achieved
to penetrate the Kremlin and obtain absolutely solid information on
the intentions and capabilities of the Russian leader, and to
prevent strategic surprise. And when I saw they had done,
and I said, okay, this is something new, okay and different,

(03:06):
and I had to find out from the start how
they did it. But it was also necessary to, as
you say, pick up where I left off and tell
the story of the CIA in the twenty first century,
in which it was thrice transformed.

Speaker 3 (03:24):
Sure, yeah, and a string of failures, some successes. I mean,
it's a turbulent twenty five years.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
It's been a hell of a century so far. But yeah,
we start off in the months before the nine to
eleven and you know, for a decade after the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the CIA was groping for its

(03:56):
new mission. It's like, you took the Soviet Union away
from us? How can we be a great intelligence service
without a great enemy? What is the mission? Okay? And
they were asking themselves this throughout the Clinton administration. It
began to dawn on them. And this was a story
I covered, you know, I got on the plane and

(04:19):
went the moment it happened when al Qaeda blew up
two American embassies at the same time in August nineteen
ninety eight, one in Nairobi, Wan and Dharis Salam. And
the fact that al Qaeda about what you CI knew

(04:39):
very little. Okay, could from a base in Afghanistan hit
two targets at the same time three thousand miles away.
This was something new in the annals of terrorism. It
showed a level of sophistication, planning and rat like cunning
that had never been experienced. At that moment. It began

(05:02):
to dawn on the leaders of CIA that counter terrorism
was going to replace anti communism as the mission.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
So tell us in the run up to nine to eleven,
you know, we get into the late nineties, early two thousands,
it sounded like the big things going on were Serbia
and Latin America or the Balkans in Latin America.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
You want to tell us a little.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
Bit about what the agency's activities were up to that point.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Well, you know, the counter narcotics mission in the Andes
was a mess. See, I never really wanted to get
in the war and drugs. They knew, you know, the
drugs would win the war because of the you know,

(05:52):
insatiable demand for dope in this country. There would always
be a supply, and the history of counter narcotics operations
that you know, you squeeze them in the Caribbean and
the balloon surges, you know, in in Colombian. You squeeze
them in Colombia and it surges in the Caribbean and
in West Africa. Yeah, what do you you know, it's

(06:14):
a losing battle. But the CIA was deeply invested in
a program called the air bridge denial program, and the
episoder of this was in Peru. And the SI had
made a deal in the early nineties with a very

(06:36):
bad actor named Vladimir Montesinos, who was the intelligence czar
and the rasputant of Peru. Vladimir Vladimirovich Lenin Montesinos. Huh,
God help us all. And this guy was a very
bad dude who in the end was indicted from murder, bribery,

(06:59):
drug dealing, in store and you name it, and went
to prison for the rest of his life. So anyway,
they paid Montesinos a million dollars a year for free
use of the Pervian Air Force and for intelligence liaison.
And the deal was that the CI had a base

(07:26):
in the Amazon Jungle and Peru. They flew in a
light plane and a modified Sessana of the Pervian Air
Force flew in a modified light fighter. They would intercept
what they thought to be drug planes. That was the plan, okay,

(07:46):
and then spot a bother. The United States has passed
a law after the shootdown of KLUB seven over Korea
in the the Soviets, you know, shot down a civilian
airliner with two hundred and forty something people on board,

(08:08):
one of whom was the right wing congressman named Larry McDonald.
And you know, it was a federal law. You couldn't
shoot down civilionaire, okay, And after long struggle, President Clinton
promulgated rules of engagement here. You had to make radio

(08:31):
contact with the suspect aircraft. You had to order you know,
had to waggle your wings, you had to tell them
to lower their landing gear. There were four steps. And
if they ignored all that and took a base of action, boom,
you could shoot them down. So one great day in
the morning, it was April twenty, two thousand and one,
they shot down a light plane with four American with

(08:56):
a family of American missionaries on it, husband, wife, two
little kids, and the pilot and killed the woman and
her infant daughter. As far as I know, no CIA
covert operation had ever killed an American before that the

(09:23):
airbridge denial program as it developed had followed none of
the rules of engagement ever in the shootdown of fifteen
aircraft prior to this disaster in April two thousand and one,
the guy who was in charge of the program, overseeing
the program as chief of the Latin American Division for

(09:46):
most of these shootdowns was a gentleman who we came
to know very well at CIA named Jose Rodriguez. Jose
would one day become the chief of the Clandestine Service.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Yeah, you kind of chart his like interesting career trajectory
throughout this book, and yeah, like you said, I'm sure
we'll come back to him, but to fast forward a
little bit, I'm not going to belabor nine to eleven.
We've talked about it many times on this podcast. We
got caught with our pants down and suddenly the CIA
does have a mission now.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Oh yeah, So Bob Gates said something interesting apropos that day. Gates,
of course it didn't SEEI Director and later Secretary of Defense.
He said, on the twelfth of September, we didn't know
dak shit about al Qaida. If we had had a

(10:48):
great dust yeah on who these people were, how they
moved money around, how they moved people around. If we
had that intelligence about al Qaeda, the secret prisons and
the torture and you know, all that insanity would never
have been necessary. But we didn't know anything, and so
CI went out and this was largely directed by Jose Rodriguez,

(11:12):
who had been removed as chief of the Latin American
Division for a terrible judgment. Okay, Jose was a waiting
forward assignment and headquarters of nine eleven. He thought his
career was in the shitter and cover. Black, who's chief
of counter terrorism, said I'll find something for you to do,

(11:35):
and Jose invented a third rank chief operations job and
eventually became the counter terrorism chief. And it was largely Jose,
not him alone, largely Jose that got the secret prison

(11:59):
program in the worship program going.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
One of the interesting facts that you kind of dig
up in this book that I don't think many people
are aware of is you mentioned how there were fourteen
renditions before nine to eleven.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
I don't think people have really like grasped that.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
And you know, can you tell us a little bit
about short and posts and how that develops.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
So in the Clinton years, extraordinary rendition authorized by the
president fourteen times. Basically involved grabbing people suspected terrorsts and
shipping them off to the dungeons of Cairo and other
friendly Middle Eastern countries. Now, let's just get them off

(12:46):
the street, Okay. Interrogation getting intelligence from them was not
uppermost in SI's mind. By I'm gonna say, six months
after nine to eleven, early two thousand and two, the

(13:07):
CI in the military of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of prisoners, a lot of them in uh Camp Rhino
under General Madison's leadership in near Kanada, Heart Afghanistan. And
they're from all over the world. Who are these guys?
Are they somebodies? Are they no bodies? Uh? And Uh

(13:33):
it was who Zey Rodriguez basically said, Uh, we got
to find a way to sort out these people and
figure out who loves us and who hates us, you know,
and who's somebody and who's a nobody. And the upshot
of that was the secret prison programs, which you cover

(13:53):
in both books. Actually, and now I'm gonna skip ahead
a little bit, uh w MDS in Iraq. We've talked
about it a lot around here. What you know based
on your research, what went wrong there. If we're to
put our finger on what the fuck happened, what would
you say about it? Same problem, lack of good intelligence.

(14:18):
So really, you know what little the CIA knew about
Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs ate it back to
nineteen ninety eight, which is when there were UN inspectors
in Iraq and CI officers using the UN operation for cover,

(14:43):
and Saddam kicked them all out in ninety eight. See,
I didn't have any spies in Iraq, and you know
it's hard to fault them for that. The price of
getting caught was, you know, you would die. Your entire
family would die, your entire extension family would die, your

(15:07):
livestock would die, your house would burn down, and salt
would be sewn in the ashes for starters. Yeah, okay,
a difficult operating environment for recruitment. You know, all of
a sudden after nine to eleven, everybody has to work

(15:30):
counter terrorism, right and one day you know you're the
MALLY analyst and you get tapped on their shoulder and say, okay,
you're a counter terrorist analyst. Now okay. The whole operation
anal of getting intelligence, analyzing intelligence on weapons of mass
destruction was a newly created outfit called wind Pack. They

(15:56):
didn't know what they were doing. Okay, they didn't know.
They didn't have a lot to work with, and so,
among other things, they took the word of an unvetted
source fo Iraqi defector who being held by the Germans,
whom they had never met, Okay, whose identity they did

(16:16):
not know, and whose code name was Curveball.

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Speaker 2 (18:55):
So you know, a very very smart uh. Margaret Hennock,
very smart woman in the European Division with long experience
and operations, challenged him and said, you don't even know
who this guy is. Okay, how can you believe what
he's saying? And one of the weapons analysts said, well,

(19:16):
you know, his information matches what we found on the internet.
And Mary Hennock says, how do you know that's not
where he got it right, You have to know who
this person is before you accept what he says. Well,
that didn't fly. And there's a scene. I mean, it

(19:38):
breaks your heart thinking about this stuff. Okay. So President
Bush says to Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, the
most popular general since Dwight Eisenhower, the most respected person
in political life in the United States. It says to him,

(20:00):
you have to sell this to the United Nations in
the world. And Powell has handed this piece of crap
that Dick Cheney's bucket shop has cooked up with like
a mushroom cloud on the cover, and you know all
this neo con horseshit in it, and he and his

(20:25):
chief of staff, Colonel Larry Wilkerson's, you know, toss that
right out. So CIA has to deliver the brief, the
case for war, and Colin Powell is out there for
the weekend long weekend before he has to go to
the United Nations to present the case. We all remember

(20:46):
what that scene looked like. Here's Colin Powell, and here's
George Tennant, the Director of Central Intelligence, sitting right behind him,
looking bone weary and exhausted. And Powell says, if it
ain't like trip vetted and you like sign sealed, delivered,
seal of approval on it, I delivering it. So this

(21:08):
kurveball nonsense gets in, and a lot of other nonsense
gets in. And Mike Morrell, who is the smartest analyst
at the see I, is sitting in the room during
this long weekend at CIA headquarters and he has this
terrible sinking feeling the pit of his stomach. He's saying,
I don't know if this is true or not, and
nobody knows if this is true or not. Does he

(21:29):
speak up? He does not. It's just a terrible case
of group think and again a want of great intelligence,
of solid intelligence, and to jump a little bit further ahead.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
You know, I'm gonna do this a few times or
a lot of actually during this interview, because we're kind
of like going to event to event.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
You got two hours to cover twenty five Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
I wanted to hear because you've got a great story
in this book about the debatification process in Iraq and
how all that came about. And I mean, it's as
shady as a WND stuff. It's like, okay, let's make
an important point here. When people accuse the CIA of

(22:14):
intelligence failure, as they so often do, it is more
likely and not that it is a policy failure. The
CIA is an executor of American foreign policy. It does
not make foreign policy, Okay. The President of the United

(22:35):
States makes the foreign policy, and if it bucks up,
the CIA gets hung for it. I mean, that's just
a classic truth.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
So the President of the United States sends a guy
named Jerry Bremer out to be the Imperial Viceroy of Iraq,
and he's replacing a general named Jay Gardner who had
done a great job supporting the people of Iraqi Curtistan

(23:15):
after Gulf War One. So who knows the train and
the arrival station chief? CIA station chief who has actually
been in the station chief in Baghdad at the time
of gol War one is a guy named Charlie Saidel.
He's probably the most talented Arabist in the United States government.

(23:35):
He's known all over the Arab world. Not in true name, probably,
but he's one of the most talented CI officers of
his generation. He's been overseeing intelligence ops from Tommy Franks
headquarters in Doha and now he's flying in He's congratulations
here the station chief in American occupied Baghdad, and so

(23:58):
Bremer comes up with this idea out of the whole cloth,
one debathification. Everybody who belongs to the bath Party is
banned from the new Iraq. Okay, that's everybody. You couldn't
be a school teacher without belonging to the Bath Party.

(24:19):
That's every that's the entire professional class and bad guy.
And we're disbanding the Iraqi Army. And Charlie said out
the station chief gets winded this and he goes running
up the steps of the Palace you know where Bremer
presides and says, if you do this, you'll have fifty

(24:47):
thousand enemies in this town before nightfall. Does Bremer listen
to him? No, he does not. I mean, but there
was more to it, just was more too.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
But yeah, I mean, it wasn't just Bremer's big idea,
right like he was being backed.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
I think it was news to everybody in the sit room. Yeah,
except for a few of the Weasley neo khans like
Paul Wolfowitz and his Paul Doug Fife at the Office
of Special Plans in Rumsfeld's Pentagon.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
Why do you think they made this decision at the
end of the day, which seems so nonsensical, completely.

Speaker 5 (25:34):
Like it changed the nature of what that work was
and would become.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Well, if the American occupation of Iraq was one of
the less brilliant foreign policy decisions in American history, the
deposification plan and the disbandment of the Iraqi Army was
I would say top ten worst foreign policy decisions ever. Yeah, Okay,

(26:08):
Bremer dreamed it up. Where does Bremer get the imperiousness
to do this? He'd worked for fifteen years for Henry Kissinger.
Would Henry Kissinger make that decision? We cannot speculator, Yeah,
doctor Strangelove. I mean even Kissinger thought Bremer was kind

(26:36):
of an asshole. Yeah, yeah, for people who you guys,
most of our viewers are probably aware of this. But
the Bath Party was it was Saddan's political party. It's
I think a good correlations like the Communist Party Communist Party.

Speaker 5 (26:52):
It's the CCP, where if you hold the position, it's
like the union. It's like the government's union exactly for everything.
So you have to be a member of the party
to work in public works, to work in schools, to.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
Be to be anything.

Speaker 5 (27:08):
And so when not only did like you say, were
there fifty thousand enemies overnight, but all of the rocks
infrastructure stopped.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Yeah, every piece of what made it turns of thousands
of cashiered soldiers, yeah, who are pissed off and penniless. Yes,
and you know where the guns are? Yeah. Yeah. And
this is the genesis of the armed resistance to the
American occupation, which eventually evolved into ISIS. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (27:38):
I mean I always said that, you know, during the invasion,
they should just drop leaflets on all the bases and
said we're invading. Put down your weapons, maintain your positions.
We're taking over your payroll, right, trust it, We're taking it.
We're taking over your payroll. We got you.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
The next one I wanted to talk about was, you know,
the CIA actually having a good w putting a w
in the box. We've had Jim Waller on the show before.
You have a whole chapter in the book about Jim
working with another CIA officer, Paul lad Doyle, and a
third one named Robert Gorlick, and a pretty impressive operation

(28:19):
that they've rolled up, you know, aq CON's network.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Okay, so this is a beautiful op Okay, and it
proved by the way it came to fruition in this
same time period, at the end of two thousand and three,
when we're going after Synonam's non existent weapons of mass destruction.
This operation proved that you could take down an existential

(28:45):
threat of weapons of mass destruction through espionage without firing
a shot. Okay. The genesis of this operation, whose true
code name has never been revealed, I don't know it,
but Jim Lawler, who was sort of the team captain,

(29:07):
gave it a pet name of ex Caliber. He's really
into the legend of Camelot. The CIA in ninety six
created a counter proliferation team. Okay. Prior to that, stopping

(29:29):
the spread of nuclear weapons in rogue nations was largely
a diplomatic effort under the rubric of non proliferation. Okay,
non proliferation wasn't cutting it. Okay, you needed covert operations
in the name of counter proliferation to cut the head
off the snake. So one day ninety six, ninety seven,

(29:59):
a US, the famous FBI agent named Dave Major, who
had spent the better part of the Cold War going
up against the Russians, gives a lecture at CIA, and
the lecture is about the first great operation of the Cheka,

(30:19):
the Soviet intelligence service, and that operation was called the Trust.
Long story short. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution
after World War One, there were a number of counter
revolutionary groups, mostly coffeehouse steamers in the European capitals, trying

(30:41):
to say, mostly Russian exiles, saying, you know, we got
to stop the freaking Bolsheviks. We got to get back
and counteract the Russian Revolution. So the Cheka, under the

(31:01):
command of the famous Felix Tarzhinsky, sets up a number
of false fronts in European capitals that are pretending to
be big time counter revolutionary operations, and they lure the
counter revolutionaries into their trap, roll them up, and kill them. Okay,

(31:27):
operation called the Trust. So Lawler, who is now you know,
congratulations here in charge of counterproliferation of the CIA, listens
to this and he says, well, if the Bolsheviks can
do this, why can't we. So Jim Lawler and Paula Doyle,
who's an extraordinary intelligence officer retired in twenty seventeen, and

(31:49):
Robert Gorlic, who had been a knock for many years
working under non official cover, without diplomatic identity or passport.
They become nuclear proliferators Okay, and they set up a
number of false friends, particularly in Dubai, the Freeport of Dubai,

(32:14):
and they sucked the operations of aq Khan into their operation.
Aq Khan Pakistani metallurgists had been working since the seventies
to build the Islamic bomb Okay, and the Pakistanis exploded
and tested their first bomb in ninety eight, but no
one realized at the time was at aq Con then

(32:37):
reversed the switch and instead of being an importer of
nuclear weapons technology, he became an exporter of nuclear weapons
technology to places including Libya, Iran, North Korea. He had
a Global operation. CEI director George Tennant called him after
nine to eleven the most dangerous man in the world,

(33:00):
including Osama bin Laden, because you know, the great terror
was that you know, aq CON's operation is about one
hundred and fifty miles from al Kada's base in Afghanistan.
What if he gives been loden the BOTMB which was
a far fetched possibility, but the world is full of

(33:21):
far fetched possibilities. So painstakingly, with great patience and cunning
uh and a tremendous sense of humor. The patience was
the key, okay, because at one point they've located sort
of aq CON world headquarters, the warehouse outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,

(33:47):
and the question is do we blow it up or not?
And Cheney's like, yeah, let's blow it up. And Lawlor
and the CIA counciled patients because if we blow show
it up, yeah, you know, you turn on the light,
the cockroach's scurry's gonna be somewhere. You know, he'll work
some violul somewhere else too. So they wait and then

(34:09):
they track a huge shipment of nuclear weapons technology that
is transiting the Mediterranean on its way to Lummer cut
off he in Triple Libya. They intercept the ship, they
expose it to the world. They roll up aq CON
and again here's a global threat of the spread of

(34:32):
nuclear weapons taken down through espionage, not by putting warheads
on fourheads.

Speaker 3 (34:40):
I remember Jim telling us a story about how he
basically knew somebody and basically a long story short, he
waited like twenty years to recruit this guy, like building
the relationship, building the relationship, building the relationship, before I
came to fruition, which takes a lot of patience. And

(35:00):
when I asked him, I was like, is that normal?
He's like, no, that's not very common at the agency.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Recruiting agents. Recruiting foreigners to work in secret for the
United States is the sine qua non of the CIA.
That's why they're there, okay. And the recruited foreign agents
are why the CIA exists without them. It's you know,

(35:31):
it's not a secret intelligence ser and Jim and many
other of the Glantesen Service officers that I interviewed for
this book, where pains to explain to me, Okay, what
the relationship between the CIA operations officer and the recruited

(35:52):
foreign agent is. It is an admixture of betrayal and trust, right, okay,
the officer, the CIA officer is asking the recruited boar
an agent to enter into a criminal conspiracy to commit

(36:14):
treason against his country. The agent may have many motivations, revenge, money,
or to make to change the world around him.

Speaker 3 (36:32):
The next one I wanted to ask you about was
the Magnea assassination. Oh yeah, and it sounded like you,
I don't know if you're the first to report by
some interesting stuff about the agency's relationship with Israel and
their assets in Syria. You want to tell us how
that came about. There are a couple pieces of a puzzles.

(36:53):
I don't know, And let me tell you what I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (36:55):
Sure, Okay, I don't know precisely how much the CIA
contributed in terms of intelligence on finding Mognia in Damascus.

(37:16):
But they did pouched the bomb. They pouched the bomb.
But here, I mean, here's a really interesting fact. Tom
Sylvester is not a name that most people know. Tom
stepped down Memorial Day as the chief of the Plants
and Service the DdO Okay. In two thousand and six,

(37:37):
Tom Silvester was station chief Damascus, Okay. And he ran
a black station, obviously undeclared to the Syrians. Yeah, and
under extraordinary counter recioge and counters surveillance by the Syrians.

(38:06):
His deputy was a fellow who has since become the
second most famous Greek in the history of the CIA,
after George Tennant Mark Palmeropolis. I am certain that Tom
Sylvester and his station were instrumental in this operation. By

(38:31):
the time Magnia was killed, Sylvester had moved on as
chief of Station Damascus and was replaced eventually by a
guy who went on to become chief of station in Moscow, Beijing,
somewhere else really significant, I forget. What we know is

(38:56):
that the chief of Mosade goes to Mike Hayden, the
CIA director in two thousand and seven, and proposes the
assassination of Mugnier. Briefly, Mugnier had more American blood on

(39:16):
his hands than Osama bin Laden. Okay. He had been
the mastermind of the bombing of the Marine barracks and
Beirut in nineteen eighty two, in which two hundred some
odd American sailors and soldiers and airmen were killed. He

(39:42):
blew up the American embassy in Beirut, destroying the station
and killing the SI's top expert on the Middle East,
Robert Dames. He was the military chief of Hesbola from
its inception until his death twenty five long years. Okay,

(40:03):
and worked hand in glove with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Okay,
the bad motherfucker Imad mugne So Mayra Dogan, the head
of Mosade, goes to Mike Hayden and says, we have
a bead on mugi Let's kill him. The bomb that

(40:32):
killed Imad mulgate, to the best of my knowledge, was
manufactured at the sei's Bang and Boom Center in Harvey Point,
North Carolina, Okay, and was delivered to the SAI station
at the Massai Center diplomatic pouch. It was fitted I

(40:53):
don't know how into the spare tire on the back
of Mugne's suv. He drove to the same location bad
trade craft Imad for sexual assignations in one of the
most closely guarded neighborhoods in Damascus, near the Syrian intelligence headquarters.

(41:17):
And one great day, one night, I should say, at
the end of two thousand and seven, he walks back
to his Suvople. Killing a terrorist with a terrorist methodology
is a new thing for the CIA in a way

(41:37):
that really is deniable, not for long. It did take
eight years to pare it out. You know. Even the
bear outlines.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
What you're describing, though, I mean it had there had
to be a lethal finding on this guy to clear
all that. Even if we're just giving you know, quote
unquote lethal aid to the Israelis, I mean, there's no way.
I don't think they get around that.

Speaker 2 (41:59):
Yes, there would have to have been. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:04):
I so then let's talk about the drone campaign in Pakistan.
It's like, basically, I think it was the largest paramilitary
operation in CIA history.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
Oh, without question, little did the CIA know or contemplate again,
to the best of my knowledge, when an inaugurated drone
warfare as a military technology is a strategic uh way

(42:36):
of fighting war, that drones would revolutionize warfare. Leaping ahead
the Ukrainians have shown what drones can do. Okay, at

(42:57):
the time, it was just a neat weapon, right, no
risk to American airmen. A moral hazard.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
Because we had to create quite refined the technology and
the methodology at that time.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
Moral hazard was that you were killing civilians right left
and center. And you know, the smarter military commanders and
the smarter CIA officers who were prosecuting the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan realize, you know, we're never going to

(43:43):
win this fucking war if we keep killing civilians. It
is bad juju to kill civilians. And there's another thing
that this is not intelligence. You know, obviously you need

(44:07):
intelligence on your you know where your targets are. But
how great it would have been to be able to
recruit some of these people rather than kill him when
you kill him. You're not getting any intelligence on them.
And latterly around I'm gonna say two thousand and six,

(44:31):
seven eight, the CI in Pakistan was recruiting al Kado
and that and not torture, was what led to Osama
bin Laden in a bottle.

Speaker 3 (44:46):
Lad, I'm gonna get you there in just a second.
The other little vignette that I wanted to touch upon,
which I feel like, you know, we'll quickly get at
loggerheads between Gena Haspell and Jose Rodriguez.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Destruction of the torture tapes. That was Jose. You know,
Gina was as chief of staff Gina Hospital, we should explain,
you know, became the director of the CIA in twenty eighteen.
Jose ordered the destruction of the tapes of the waterboarding

(45:22):
and torture of the first too high Value detainees as
they were called, at a secret black base in Thailand.
And why were they videotaping the torture? Well, this is
a theme that will repeat itself in the book. They

(45:45):
didn't know what they were doing. The CI was not
set up to run secret prisons. There's I didn't know
anything about interrogating prisoners. There's that story, and I think
it may be in your books.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
Certainly it's been reported before, like the CIA psychologists were
emailing back to headquarters like Hey, I don't think these
guys know anything, and headquarters is email on the back like, hey, pussy,
keep torturing these guys.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
And that was the Yeah, that was that was the
analyst on the bin Laden Teae who were doing that,
who were later glorified in the film Zero Wor. Yeah,
he's got to be holding something back, right. They didn't

(46:35):
know what they were doing, and they the videotapes might
be educational some days. I'm not kidding. You're gonna put
it on Sesame Street for the kids to learn from. No,
it's like we're gonna, you know, we don't know what
we're doing, so maybe we ought to record this to
figure out if we're doing it right. So these videotapes
is you know ninety six. I think our long vi

(47:00):
HS cossets are sitting it in at the CIS station
in Bangkok and a reporter for the New York Times
has gotten wind that the secret base exists, and the
second that happens, the CIA Public Affairs Office calls up

(47:23):
Gina Hospital as Jose's chief of the staff. Jose's now
the chief of the Clandestine Service, and Jose's proposed destroying
these tapes before. They're just sitting there festering for years.
Tic tic tic tick tick and Uh. He asked the
CIA director Porter Gus, can I destroy No? He asked

(47:44):
the top lawyer, John Rizzo, can I destroy them?

Speaker 3 (47:46):
No?

Speaker 2 (47:48):
Jose, you cannot destroy the tapes. Okay. And they go
to the White House Council Harriet Meres under George Bush,
can I destroy the tapes? Now he's playing Mommy, daddy, May,
I may And she's like, no, Jose, you cannot destroy

(48:13):
the tapes. They're under subpoena in a federal court case.
And he says fuck it, as he often did, Uh,
damn the torpedoes. And he drafts an order. Haspell transmits
the order. That's the only thing she did. Okay to

(48:35):
uh C, I stationed Bangkok and they destroy the tapes.

Speaker 3 (48:40):
And the CIA lawyor it sounded like he shad ten
different kinds of bricks.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
And so this this, you know, the memo goes up
through channels. Uh from Bangkok said okay, tapes destroyed, and
the CIA lawyer John Rizzo looks at this and he
types a one word reply all caps what question mark
exclamation part And of course Porter Goss, the hapless Director

(49:14):
of Central Intelligence from UH four to six, nineteen terrible
months under the sky, he is legally obligated to tell
Congress about this violation. Does he do it? A couple
of years later, Mark Monsetti of the New York Times

(49:36):
gets win of this, and you know, John Rizzo has
the unhappy duty of calling up Porter Goss, who has
now been sent off into you know, unhappy retirement, saying,
please tell me you've told Congress about this, and Porter
was like, nah, slip my mind. I didn't have the

(49:56):
heart to do it. Poor John Rizzo, who's been this,
you know, the CIA lawyer since before Iran Contra okay,
and knows the scandal when he smells her is like,
this is this is a foreur alarm fire. And it
is all on Jose Rodriguez, who, through a series of misadventures,

(50:23):
went from the penalty box at headquarters to chief of
counter terrorism to the chief of the Glandestine Service.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
At the end of the day, I mean, despite this
you know, brewing scandal, I mean, nothing ever came of it.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
That is because, among other things. There's a lawyer named
John Durham who is in the news recently, is having
signed off on an audit of the CIA's reporting on
Russian Russian's monkey wrenching of the twenty sixteen presidential elecgend

(51:07):
and John Dorm is where CI's scandals go to die.
He's mister fix it former federal prosecutor. He's like, you
have a four alarm fire scandal, Tell Dorm to investigate it.
He'll slow roll it for you until you know the
statute is run. You know, there there was this CI

(51:30):
officer who murdered a guy and a salt pit prison
outside of Cobble in two thousand and two. It's like, hmmm, murder,
just kill him, you know, just beat him to debt,
let them let him freeze, beat him unconscience to let
him freeze the debt on the floor. It's like, yes,

(51:51):
it's probably, you know, probably should like look into this. Right.
The guy gets promoted, you know, uh in part because
again the same former federal prosecutor, John Durham, UH, has
this magic briefcase and you know you put documents, classified

(52:13):
documents concerning scandalous behavior into it. They vanished, Okay, so
this is very difficult to get prosecuted for a crime
committed in secret and under the imprimature of the authority

(52:37):
of the President of the United States. So this brings
us to the uh Bin Laden mission. What's new? What? What? What?

Speaker 3 (52:47):
What new information you have to share with us that
folks haven't heard yet.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
I mean, the one I think really new noteworthy thing
is that it is not torture extracted from detainees that
paved the way to Abadabad. It was the recruitment of
Al Kaeda terrorists, largely in Pakistan and largely under the

(53:17):
tenure of the then station chief in Islam About whose
name am I gonna forget it now? Goddamn it, It'll
come to me who became the chief of Clandest Service
in twenty ten, and he, you know, managed to get

(53:42):
intelligence out of recruits from al Qaeda to protect them
from you know, betrayal and exposure. And that was the key.
It was intelligence work, not torture.

Speaker 3 (53:58):
There's a bunch of stuff you turned up in this
book too about Chinese intelligent Bennett.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
I'm sorry, John was John Bennett station chief Islamabad when
these recruitments took place. Later in the chief of the
clandestn Service twenty ten to twenty twelve at the time
of the killing Bin Laden.

Speaker 3 (54:16):
You turned up a lot of stuff in the book
about Chinese intelligence being this escalating threat against the United
States that before long the Chinese MSS, the Ministry of
State Security, is twelve times bigger than the CIA, Like
this is kind of snowballed into a fucking problem for US.
And you have some really interesting stuff about how the

(54:38):
CIA was able to recruit assets, recruit sources in China,
and how they got compromised and probably killed.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
This was a singular accomplishment of espionage and intelligence work
and a singular disaster at the end of it. Beginning
around two thousand and three, the CIA in Beijing began

(55:07):
to understand the corruption of the Chinese political class, okay,
and to understand that the way you got promoted, the
way you clawed your way up the greasy pole to
a position of influence and power in the Chinese poet
borough or in the Chinese military, or in the Chinese

(55:31):
Intelligence service, was what was called promotion fees, bribes, pay
to play, and so years of painstaking work and a
considerable sum of money went into this recruiting, promising, up

(55:55):
and coming smart young p bull talent spotting okay, many
cups of tea and probably many bottles of expensive whiskey,
and paying their promotion fees, recruiting them by saying, Uncle

(56:15):
Sam got out and I got a proposition for you.
The only phrase I know in Mandarin is wash up,
Nita Maywell, Paul yill, I'm your American friend. And it worked.

(56:37):
It worked beautifully, and by circa twenty ten, before g
took over in twenty twelve, the CI had a network
of precise number I can't say, but i'll words of

(57:00):
twenty well placed recruited agents in positions of influence in
the Chinese political, military, and intelligence systems. One by one
by one, starting in roughly twenty eleven, these people were captured, imprisoned, tortured,

(57:30):
and executed. An entire network rolled up, and with a
greater effect than the roll up of recruited Soviet and
Russian agents inflicted by the betrayals of Alder James and
Robert Hansen, twice as many agents betrayed, and with a

(57:58):
lasting effect that probably last until this day. Yeah, how
did that happen? The full story has not yet been told,
But at the heart of it was the covert communications

(58:19):
systems that CIA used to communicate with its recruited Chinese agents,
the covcoms. The covcom was also used in Iran, Okay
for the recruitment and running of Iranian agents of the CIA,

(58:44):
And it was really primitive. It was bogus websites for
like sports Okay, and you entered a portal of the
website and then you were into the purportedly see realm
of communications. It was so clumsily constructed that it was

(59:07):
like a badly knitted sweater. If you pulled one fread,
you could unravel the whole thing. And the Iranians figured
it out, and they told the Chinese it can't account

(59:27):
for it all because the Chinese system was more sophisticated
than the one used in Iran. There was also a
Chinese CI officer who washed out Lee. Yeah, but he's
not the whole story either. It was the cobcom plus

(59:50):
Lee plus some X factor. And you know, this is
the nature of counterintelligence cases. They go on for years
and decades, sometimes without resolution. To be a counter intelligence
officers to know the meaning of patience and paranoia and
paranoia and you know if some of them drink too

(01:00:12):
much or wonder if God is merciful and just you
can't blame them.

Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
Yeah, another thing I wanted to ask you about. I
feel like we got to mention Uncle Dave the resignation
of David Betraeus and how that all came about. I mean,
my understanding was that he never really fit in with
that job. So of course David Betrayus.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
Had been the four star commander who said okay, and
that is a job that comes with valets, cooks. You
go out to dinner, you got a twenty car motorcade.
You know, you've got some valets screwing your pants on
in the morning. It's you're a king, is my understanding.

(01:01:05):
And you have just an enormous staff, you know, of
of people to do strategic planning and five year plans
and you know, figure out the world for you. It's
a top heavy organization. SEEI is a very flat organization.

(01:01:31):
There are like two steps in the chain of command.
And you know you got a problem. You call on
your people, said, well, I want you know what six
months study done? And they said, you know, now we're
on it, you know, and they come back to you
a week later and say, okay, we did that, what's next?

(01:01:53):
And petray has got one piece of advice from Bob Gates,
h former CI director, former sector. He said, when you
roll up in your black limousine at c A headquarters
your first day, check your general ship at the door.
Beatreyce couldn't do that. And you know, see I didn't

(01:02:24):
take to him, and he didn't take the CIA. And
you know, but ultimately this is the story of vanity
because of the PAULA. Broadwell stuff and the classified information.
There was no love affair in American public life greater

(01:02:45):
than the romance between David Betrayus and David Beatreyus. And
you know, yes, he had this affair with this woman
who is like exactly like him, only a woman in
twenty years longer, younger, you know, incredibly ambitious, zero body fat,

(01:03:06):
you know, run ten miles before breakfast. And she was
writing his biography, you know, as a PhD thesis, and
he shared codeword level you know, notebooks of information with her,
none of which she used in her book. But you

(01:03:27):
can't do that, you know, you cannot do that for
pillow talking, because a CIA director has to have moral
authority because he is asking his officers to do a
moral or immoral things for a greater good, and if
he cannot hold himself to a moral standard, he gotta go.

Speaker 3 (01:03:49):
And what was there was a meeting at some point
between him and Clapper, I think where they're like, eh, well.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
This is extremely embarrassing because it's a long story. But
a woman who was broad Wells he was married. By
the way, this whole time, I recall a woman who
was a rival of Paul Broadwells for for for Petreus's affection,
claimed that she was like stalking her on the Internet

(01:04:18):
or something. And she had a friend who had a
friend in the FBI. And so the FBI looks at
this and talks to Broadwell and figures out one the
director of CI is having, you know, an a Farewellness
doesn't investigate people's sex lives, or at least not since
James or who died, and not since Bill Clinton, you know,

(01:04:41):
had a deliance in the in the White House, And
but it does investigate the unauthorized disclosure classified information. And
that was his downfall. And he said and who me,
you know, and got a fantastic job at private equity
f and denied everything and eventually caught the plea and

(01:05:02):
paid a fund and is a very respected person in
certain circles.

Speaker 5 (01:05:08):
Who go ahead, Dave, No, I was just gonna say
that it's it's very you know that a lot of
a lot of g WATT veterans are very salty about
the general staff, like general officers, no matter who they are,
because they're inability to do a job, uh during.

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
The g WAT. But they've all landed very nicely. But
I think betray us that love affair with himself.

Speaker 5 (01:05:35):
I think that that's very indicative of of these you know,
general officers during that time frame. They got all these
accolades for doing nothing.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
Well, I never served, so I I can't, you know,
give you a salience analogy of what four star generalship does.
It apparently doesn't screw up everybody. It didn't grew up
Dwight Eisenhower. Yeah, well, who also had a secret affair,
but that's a different story. But he also won the war.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, right about secret intelligence. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
The one part of the book that I took, uh
some erception umbradge, some umbradge, not not in the broad strokes,
but more in the maybe in the phrasing, but we'll
talk about it. Was the portion about the RDI network
and the Pinetta Report.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
Uh, let's talk a little bit about what happened there.
Don't use jargon. What's the D the rendition, detection, interrogation,
now secret prisons? Yes, so.

Speaker 3 (01:06:42):
The so Congress is investigating the torture prisons and all
this other jazz, and they reach an arrangement with the
CIA that they had they had written the Pinetta Report
I believe it was called, and there's an edited version
of it that they share with Congress.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Is that the sequence of events, this is this is
more complic kid in Chinese math. It took me. It
took me quite a while to be able to tell
this story in a simple and direct way. Congress, at
the urging of John McCain, who has moral authority in
this matter right, decides that they're going to investigate the

(01:07:20):
whole secret prison network and how it happened. Who bore responsibility,
Although the short answer was the President of the United States,
George W. Bush, who authorized it. And they spent years
on this, Okay, And Leon Panetta, an incredibly successful CIA

(01:07:51):
director because of his political acumen, his uh humanity, Uh,
and his having been both a longtime member of Congress.
White House chief of Staff knows how Congress works, right, says,

(01:08:15):
you know, yeah, you can go ahead and do this
to the great umbrage of UH. Some while the Senate
is investigating Panetta wants his own, you know, report on

(01:08:39):
how did this happen? Who shot John? You know? Give
me the agency on this, and so this becomes a
classified report that's known colloquially as the Panetic Report. The
Panetta report falls in to the hands of the congressionals

(01:09:02):
of the Senate staffers, Okay, And the reason this happened
was that the CI set up a computer system off
cite for sharing documents in a classified and the skiff
but also you know, with computer access that ran both ways,
and as best anybody can figure out, the see I

(01:09:23):
misconfigured this.

Speaker 3 (01:09:25):
My understanding is that it was a hyperlink that in
that you know, classified system that they agreed this is
what we're sharing with Congress. There's a hyperlink that the
staffers were able to click on, and that was what
brought them through the tunnel to the full report. I
think we're talking about the same thing using different language.
Per Yeah, I think so too.

Speaker 2 (01:09:44):
But the irony here is that, according to Benetta himself
in the interview I did with him, the Panetta report
wasn't different from the Senate report at all. Not different. Okay,
same set of facts, set of documents. Well, when the

(01:10:06):
chief of counterintelligence at CIA figures out that the Senate
staffer has, you know, in his mind, hacked into the CIA, right,
he authorizes his counterintelligence I t people to hack into
the Senate. No, you cannot do that. The CIA, by

(01:10:28):
its charter cannot spy on Americans. This was very bad business.
So that that's.

Speaker 3 (01:10:34):
The phrasing that I guess I take some issue with
is that did they hack into Congress or did they
simply close the loophole that hyperlink that they were able
to access.

Speaker 2 (01:10:45):
Well, the decision of the CI's chief of counterintelligence, Mark
Kelton to send his people after the Senate in the
name of plugging a league was ill advised, ill advised,
and triggered a criminal investigation. And Senator I mean it

(01:11:09):
was such a big deal.

Speaker 3 (01:11:10):
Senator Feinstein at the time was talking about like the
CIA should be disbanded for doing this.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
I mean it was like, well, yeah, so fron Brimstone.
So the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden
had a come to Jesus meeting between Einstein and Panetta,
and you know, said, come let us reason together, and
you know, let's let's like not beat each other's brains

(01:11:35):
out over this. It's not collapse the United States government
over this, right, Joe Budden peacemaker. But but yeah, I
mean he did the right thing.

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):
So also, what's going on during this time is uh
modernization as it was sold, are the mission centers Brennan reforms?

Speaker 2 (01:11:59):
Yeah yeah, yeah, h all right, here we're here. We're
talking about bureaucracy, which is like the least fascinating subject
in the world. I get it. But basically the Brennan
reforms uh came from a curious place, which is hard

(01:12:22):
to explain. John Brennan washed out of spy school. He
was deemed not suited for the clandestin Service and became
an analyst, and uh, his detractors at CIA said he
that he had a bar about get a chip on

(01:12:44):
the should for the clandestine Service, and and the reforms
were a way of taking them down a notch, which
is bizarre because espionage is the heart and soul, you know,
of the CIA. Whether or not these reforms the creation

(01:13:05):
of mission centers that were country based, all it did
really was to add another layer of bureaucracy to an
already bureaucratized spy service, okay, another realm of another layer
of s biocrats who were sitting at headquarters making budget decisions,

(01:13:28):
and you know, turning the seven thousand mile long screwdriver
against station chiefs and barflong capitals. Was it good? Was
it bad? Was it ugly? It was all those things, okay,
but it sparked considerable resistance, so much so that the

(01:13:51):
head of the Clandestine Service at the time told Brandon,
you know, this is no good, and Brendon said you're fired,
which you did not endear him to everybody. On the
other hand, the guy who was running interference for him
on the on the reforms was one of the most

(01:14:11):
talented CI officers of his generation, Greg Bogel, twice station
chief in Kabble, among other things. And Greg Bobel became
a chief of the Clandesne Service in this dust up
from twenty fifteen to twenty seventeen.

Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
So in the meantime, there's another ship storm brewing. Tell
us always a shit storm about Russia in Wiki weeks.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
No less a figure than Mike Hayden, a former CIA
director former NSA director, has described the Russian covert operation
to monkey wrench twenty sixteen presidential election as like the
greatest covert operation since the Trojan Horse. Political warfare, okay

(01:15:03):
is using all the means at a nation's disposal, short
of war, to take down your opponent. This was a
masterpiece of political warfare okay, in which the Russian intelligence
services identified the wounds in the American body politic that

(01:15:25):
already existed and rubbed salt in them with the goal
of denigrating the Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, whom
Putin despised to the marrow of his bones because his
Secretary of State chief stood up to him and said
he had stolen the presidential election in Russia in twenty twelve,

(01:15:50):
and Libya also pissed them off side issue, total side issue,
and Putin said, in his own words, we think Donald
Trump is the leading presidential candidate. And he said it,
you know, a couple of months after Trump wrote down

(01:16:13):
his Golden staircase that Trump Tower announced his candidacy. There
is no question that Russia worked this COVID operation, and
no question that Julian Massage was a lynchpin in it.
Assage was now in the Gus Leaks and Julian Massage

(01:16:36):
was the warlock of Wiki Leaks.

Speaker 3 (01:16:38):
How do you think that relationship worked? I mean, because
I think that the implication here is that the Russian
intelligence was feeding information to Wiki Leaks.

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):
Well, they absolutely did. Assage hold up in the Ecuadorian
embassy in London to avoid prosecution on charge of rate
in Sweden. Yeah, at which time he became a paid

(01:17:08):
employee of RT, the Russian propaganda and news outlet. Assage
was the distributor of the Russian Intelligence services hack and

(01:17:32):
league operation at the Democratic National Committee. The Russians broke
into the DNC just as Richard Nixon's Burglars broke into
the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Watergate in nineteen seventy two,
only they did it electronically. There is no question that

(01:18:01):
Assage was a paid agent of the Russian intelligence services,
and he has pleaded guilty to a charge of espionage.
It is difficult now at a distance of ten years,
to describe how completely screwed up the American body politic

(01:18:25):
was by the Russian operation, and how screwed up the
Washington Political Press Corps was by this sprinkling of poison
confetti to the BS. How bonkers it was.

Speaker 3 (01:18:40):
I mean, there were a series of different things that
were blowing up at the time with BLM and a
bunch of things that the Russians were able to twist
that night.

Speaker 2 (01:18:49):
Black Lives Matter didn't exist in twenty sixteen, but they
were not, none of the way it did after George Floyd.
But they identified every of weak node in the American
body and it's rum salt into the wounds through you know,
online persona.

Speaker 3 (01:19:12):
And you know, and the Obama administration was kind of like, Eh, there's.

Speaker 2 (01:19:16):
Nothing we can do. The entire Obama administration and indeed
the entire American intelligence community was watching this happen like
a cow watching a train go by. Yeah, well, you know,
seeing it, but not understanding what it was.

Speaker 3 (01:19:32):
I remember seeing the ads on Facebook myself that came out,
and you know, the reports subsequently that they were sponsored
by the Russians. I mean, I remember seeing them, some
of them personally, and I had at least some inkling
of what was going on there.

Speaker 2 (01:19:50):
And the result was we got Donald Trump's president.

Speaker 3 (01:19:54):
I mean, I think it's impossible to really you know say,
I mean, I guess history will be the judge. But like,
did they put their thumbs on the scale enough to
tip the election?

Speaker 2 (01:20:05):
Yes? Or no? I don't know the answer. Well, it
is the judgment of the at the time senior members
of the American intelligence community, every man jack of them
that the Russians skewed the election for Trump.

Speaker 3 (01:20:19):
Let's also talk about Thomas Rakusen. There's an interesting character
in this book that I don't think anyone's ever really
written about before.

Speaker 2 (01:20:29):
No, his name is unknown to the American public, or,
at least until the publication of this book next week,
utterly unknown. Thomas Rakusen. Thomas Rakusan was one of the

(01:20:50):
most distinguished, brave, resourceful, and ballsy American spies of his generation.
Minja Rakusan's roots are Czech, his parents were Czech, and

(01:21:10):
he was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into
Prague in nineteen sixty eight to crush popular resistance to
the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia. So his feelings about Russian
Russia and the Russians bred in the bone. They were

(01:21:31):
not warm feelings Rakusan ran operations against the Russian from
like before the end of the Cold War, and he
ran an absolutely extraordinary mission into Baghdad before the American

(01:21:52):
invasion in two thousand and three. He was stationed in
an Eastern European country and went into Baghdad posing as
a member of the Security Service to run ostensibly security

(01:22:16):
operations at the Czech embassy in Baghdad before the war.
That was his cover. At night, he was going all
over Baghdad doing load weight assessments of bridges, scouting out
weapons depots, getting targeting information. That's ballsy. Yeah, that's pretty

(01:22:42):
impressive work. And he was awarded the Intelligence Star for that,
which is the highest decoration CI has. Fast forward early
twenty seventeen, after it is determined that the Russians had
monkey wrenched the twenty sixteen presidential election, Tom Rakusin succeeds

(01:23:04):
Greg Vocal as the chief of the Clandestine Service. Let's
spring of twenty seventeen, and he calls in his top dogs. Okay,
and these are guys who have been running counter terrorism
operations for the last fifteen years. These are heartbeating people

(01:23:30):
who have been working in garden spots like Syria and Iraq,
in Afghanistan, station chiefs, and Jordan.

Speaker 3 (01:23:41):
This is when we finally start striking back right with
this stuff with pat Wenneger.

Speaker 2 (01:23:47):
Tom calls them all in and says, in so many words,
the Russians just manipulated our fucking elections. How are we
going to make sure this never happens again? Okay? And
he calls in his crew of maybe twenty or thirty guys,
and he tells them to take their talents, their experience

(01:24:12):
in targeting terrorists, and by targeting, I mean identifying them,
finding out who they are, where they live, what they think,
who they love, who they hate, where their weak spots are.
How can you recruit them and turning that talent against
Russian spies, diplomats, officials, oligarchs. They wrote a manifesto called

(01:24:39):
a Call to Arms for Tom ra Kusan. The Russian
attack on the American presidential election in twenty sixteen was
the intelligence equivalent of nine to eleven, and the response
he demanded and their sponse he got was every bit

(01:25:00):
is powerful as a Sei's response to Al Qaeda's attacks
on America. One thing that Tom did was to open
up the back rooms of Russia House. Okay, Russia House
is that component of the c I A that that

(01:25:23):
trains its attention on the Russians, and Russia House had
long been, had long been the most secretive, secretive, cloistered,
and uh, what is the word? I want kind of insular,

(01:25:48):
the most secret part of the CIA. Okay, thank you,
and Rakusin says we are going to put a little
sunlight into this. I want you, denizens of Russia House,

(01:26:09):
to start sharing information not only with your brothers and
sisters in the CIA, but scrub it for sources and
methods so that we can share it with our friends abroad. Okay,
I should add parenthetically, the CIA relies on its allies

(01:26:30):
in foreign intelligence services in countries that we think of
as friends of the United States and countries we don't
think as being friends of the United States to an
almost unimaginable extent. Okay, the CIA is not and cannot
be a global intelligence service without the help of its

(01:26:53):
foreign partners. We don't have the languages, we don't have
the people, we don't have the country knowledge that they
collectively can give us. And so the sharing of intelligence
with the British, the Dutch, the Estonians, the Ukrainians, the Spaniards,

(01:27:15):
you name it, Okay, was probably the most powerful thing
that the CI did to as a force multiplier, Okay,
in its history. Okay, it was a revolutionary concept to

(01:27:37):
dare to share the carefully extracted secrets of what makes
Russia tick and how to penetrate the Kremlin with our allies.
The penetration of the Kremlin had been one of the highest,

(01:27:58):
if not the highest goals of the SEA since its
inception in nineteen forty seven. To get over the Iron
Curtain and ascertain the intentions and the capabilities of the Russians. Okay, well,
Lo and behold tom Rakusin and his successors and the

(01:28:20):
clandestine Service did that, and by the fall of twenty
twenty one. And I can give you the precise time.
It was five weeks after the fall of Kabble in
October twenty twenty one. Lo and behold, the CIA stole

(01:28:41):
Vladimir Putin's war plans for Ukraine. And that is a
singular accomplishment. And when I learned that they had done that,
that's when I decided I had to write this book,
because that is just a revolutionary sea change is transformative

(01:29:01):
in the history of the CIA and very much underappreciated
by the American public.

Speaker 5 (01:29:08):
So what I know that you know it was the
report was viewed as with skepticism due to you know,
the history of Iraq and stuff like that. But did
the United States government take any action at all to
you know, they have this information, but it seems as

(01:29:29):
though we didn't really do anything anticipating it.

Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
So CIA has has you know, stone Putin's warplans, right,
and uh Bill Burns is the director of the CIA
at the time. William J. Burns was, in addition to
being universally regarded as the greatest diplomat of his generation,
he had been the Deputy Secretary of State, He had
been the Under Secretary for the Middle East. He had

(01:29:59):
been ambassad of Russia under Putin and ambassador of Jordan
before that. This is a brilliant man and probably one
of the greatest directors ever at CIA. And what Burns
practice was intelligence diplomacy. It was Burns and the CIA.

(01:30:21):
They got Evan Gershobtz, the Wall Street Journal reporter, and
the other in Brittany Grenier, the basketball player, and other
American hostages out of Russian prisons. Okay, and Burns goes
to the President of the United States and the Secretary
of State and says, we have to declassify this, we
have to tell the world about this. And they go, okay,

(01:30:46):
if you think so, we can do it. And they
do it, and they tell the world and the world,
and in particular, the nations of NATO cocked a collective
eyebrown said, oh, really, aren't you the people that told
us that I'm Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Right?
The stench of that still lingered twenty years later. Okay,

(01:31:08):
but they were right, okay, And the intelligence didn't stop
the war, but it had an electric unifying effect on
the nations of NATO and was one of the things
that the SI did, not the only thing that has

(01:31:29):
been crucial to the survival of Ukraine since the Russian
seizure of Crimea and Eastern Donbas in twenty fourteen.

Speaker 5 (01:31:37):
But I think, like my question is more like the
United States had that information, but we didn't start arming
Ukraine until well, you know, dude, you know, like.

Speaker 2 (01:31:49):
We could have conducted training exercise is disagree. The SI
has been on the ground in Ukraine since twenty fourteen, right,
you know that, right? Tin equipping right, you know, purging
Russian spies from the Ukrainian military and intelligence services, working
with them, Okay, sweating with them, Okay, figuring out how

(01:32:12):
to defend this country against Russian aggression. Sure, but that's
Trump since twenty fourteen.

Speaker 5 (01:32:20):
But what I'm saying is why not do a joint
military training exercise with Ukraine in the week's leading up
to the war to give military Okay, but what I'm
talking I'm not talking about CIA. I am talking about
our country, our administration, Like we know five weeks before
the invasion that they're going to invade, but it doesn't

(01:32:41):
seem like we took any steps to.

Speaker 2 (01:32:45):
Inhibit that. This calls to mind a conversation that the
then Secretary of State Madeline Albright had with the then
Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, back around nineteen ninety four
concerning the horrors of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia
and the slaughter right yeah, uh and shreve Anita and

(01:33:08):
other places. And she said to General Powell, you have
this great military, why don't you ever use it? Right? Right?
Or what to that effect, Why didn't we Why didn't
the United States military and all its grandeur get up
off its hind legs and you know, go to war

(01:33:31):
because nuclear weapons. No. No, but I'm not even talking
about the aid that Russia would like I'm not, I'm not.

Speaker 5 (01:33:39):
I don't think US soldiers should be on the ground
during training and equip But but but what I'm saying
is though had we and again this is outside the
scope of the I'm just.

Speaker 2 (01:33:49):
Thinking out loud right now, and you guys can ignore.

Speaker 5 (01:33:52):
Me, but like, if we had this information, we could
have done a joint we could put US troops in
there for a joint training exercise because Russia didn't know,
we knew they were invade. And is Russia got invade
while US troops are there doing a training exercise.

Speaker 2 (01:34:06):
You know that some two star uh you know in
the E ring is telling the Secretary of Defense you
can't do that, you know, nuclear war. But this would
be I'm talking about as a deterrent to the invasion.
Would Russia had invaded if there were US troops on

(01:34:26):
the ground doing just doing training with the Ukrainians.

Speaker 3 (01:34:30):
There were Americans doing training in Ukraine. There wasn't a
large scale like training exercise the way you're talking.

Speaker 2 (01:34:35):
About, Like if they would have announced like in two weeks.

Speaker 5 (01:34:38):
Hey, we're gonna do this big training exercise with Poland
and Ukraine.

Speaker 2 (01:34:42):
Yeah, this is far outside of the score. Yes, sorry,
but you wore gained this out one step and you've
got Russian soldiers killing American soldiers and American soldiers killing
Russian soldiers and then ain't good.

Speaker 5 (01:34:54):
Yeah, And again I'm not advocating going to you're putting
boots on the ground now that the worst are It.

Speaker 2 (01:35:00):
Just seems like our administration could have remember, had just
fallen ignominiously, there wasn't a big EVA Yeah, and a
twenty year American military definitely, you know, Afghanistan had crumbled

(01:35:24):
into the dust. No, I get all that.

Speaker 5 (01:35:26):
And again, like I'm not advocating for US going to
war now, I'm saying prior to the war, but yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:35:34):
Yeah, So you know, I got to ask you. The
full scale invasion kicks off, and there are some things
that the CIA has to try to keep at arm's length.
But nonetheless, the sabotage operations in eastern Ukraine and deep
deep inside Russia in some cases.

Speaker 2 (01:35:53):
Who else, Yeah, controversial subject. There were lethal operations that
the Ukrainians conducted on which CIA was either briefed or
well aware of that CIA would in touch with a
ten football Okay, the CI was not going to get

(01:36:20):
into the business of killing Russians directly, Yeah, exactly. It
will take years before the full story of the American
role and the American intelligence role in particular in Ukraine

(01:36:41):
can be told. However, I spent a good deal of
ink in this book describing unextraordinary effort by CIA to
keep the Ukrainians alive and to keep the Russians out
of Kiev.

Speaker 3 (01:37:01):
Another controversial one I got to ask you about Nordstream,
the nord Stream pipeline. None of the stories makes sense
to me to this day.

Speaker 2 (01:37:11):
I mean, you, you know, did the Russians do it
to themselves? I couldn't say, he can sab. Did the
Ukrainians do it in an unauthorized by the United States? Uh? Operation? Yep, probably,

(01:37:33):
But there were no fingerprints on that one, you know. Uh.
Some intelligence stories are like a photograph in a bath
of chemicals to take ten years to developed and development.

(01:37:53):
That's one of them.

Speaker 3 (01:37:57):
And along with this subject, something else you talk about
in the book is, you know, President Biden not really
understanding that the rules based order that he grew up in,
and lived in and worked in for so many decades,
was dissolving, kind of like right before his eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:38:20):
I think that this is a story with a very
long tail. Sure, it is a remarkable fact that in
the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and

(01:38:42):
the end of the Cold War, the number of democracies
on this planet began growing and growing, until in the
spring of two thousand and one, the number of democracies
and the number of autocracies in this world were roughly equal,

(01:39:04):
and that had never happened before in the history of civilization.
After the American invasion of Iraq, which George Bush said
was going to ignite the fires of freedom all over

(01:39:28):
the world, the American invasion of Iraq was going to
create democracy in the Middle East. The American invasion of
Iraq would solve the Israeli Palestinian problem. It was good
for what ails you. He was wrong about that, And

(01:39:49):
in the years immediately thereafter three four five, the number
of democracies in the world began declining, flatlined and declined.
And has we have been in a democratic recession in
this world for twenty years, and we are now availing

(01:40:19):
democracy ourselves. We are living in an age of American autocracy.
This has a number of terrifying implications domestically, it has
a number of truly horrifying implications for the Central Intelligence Agency.

(01:40:52):
One of the CI's superpowers throughout the Cold War in
the decade thereafter was that when it came to the
recruitment of foreign agents, which is the heart and soul
of the CIA, that's how we understand the world, that's
how we get intelligence. The United States, for all its faults,

(01:41:15):
was the Shining City on the Hill. We stood for freedom,
We stood for democracy, and if you were a Russian
or an Iranian, you could turn to America through the CIA.
Maybe your motives were revenge, maybe you needed money, maybe

(01:41:40):
you wanted a new life in America, or maybe you
wanted to change the world around you, and you could
look to America. The lights in the Shining City on
the Hill are going out, and this is dangerous, if

(01:42:01):
not fatal, to the recruitment of foreign agents who want
to help the United States. Do we stand for democracy
and freedom today? Will we stand for democracy and freedom
a year from now or two years from now. The

(01:42:28):
destruction of the architectures of American foreign policy and national
security over the last six months since the inauguration of
Donald Trump have been profound. Our alliances are being ripped

(01:42:49):
up and destroyed. Our standing in the world is plummeting.
The State Department is closing embassies and consulates around the world,
destroying cover for CI officers who operate out of those places.

(01:43:17):
The institutions of American national security are in the hands
of crack pots and fools. The Pentagon is being run
by a white Christian nationalist, a box news host. This
is a trillion dollar enterprise being run by a guy
who couldn't organize a cocktail party for eight The evidence

(01:43:43):
of chaos and in the ear ring is evident. The
National Intelligence Directorate is being run by a conspiracy theorist
and putin apologist, Chelsea Gabbard. She's in charge of the

(01:44:06):
President's daily brief, not that he reads it. The FBI
it's national security and intelligence directors are being dismantled by
a Maga acolyte named Cash Pttel and the director of
the CI, John Ratcliffe, is a man who will twist

(01:44:31):
intelligence and distort the facts to please the president, and
who has just called for the criminal prosecution of his
predecessor John Brennan for his role in investigating the Russian
attack on the twenty sixteen election. This is dangerous and

(01:45:01):
God forbid in this time of cass in the American
national security establishment, which has been exacerbated by John Ratcliffe's
actions at the CIA, he is forcing senior people in

(01:45:26):
the Clandestine Service and the intelligence analyst directors out the door.
He cashiered every one of the seahi's new hires from
twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four. He has imposed
ideological purity tests on senior people. Who do you really

(01:45:50):
think won the twenty twenty election? What do you think
about the January sixth insurrection? Ideology? These people are ideologues.
Ideology is the enemy of intelligence. If you're an ideologue,
you don't care what in the intelligence says. Your mind

(01:46:11):
is made up. And Trump himself and the Secretary of
State Marco RuView himself have said recent days, forget about
the intelligence. Who cares about the intelligence? This is what
we think of the world, This is our reality. We
make our own real.

Speaker 3 (01:46:28):
The politicization of intelligence seems that, yeah, we're in a
dangerous point there with the recent strike in Iraq being
or I'm sorry in Iran being kind of a case
study of that, like did we destroy all of their
nuclear weapons?

Speaker 2 (01:46:43):
Did we? Like, it's totally depends on what we destroyed
the nuclear weapons program. The intelligence says otherwise, and he says,
forget about the intelligence.

Speaker 3 (01:46:52):
Yeah, So where does this leave the CIA in the
next couple of years with Director Radcliffe?

Speaker 2 (01:47:00):
Okay, imagine if you will, that you were a member
of the CI is called arms, and you fought, as
your predecessors at the CI fought against Russian imperialism. And

(01:47:27):
you wake up last February twenty four and you see
that the President of the United States has ordered the
UN ambassador to vote with Russia and North Korea and
Iran against a resolution condemning the Russian invasion and occupation

(01:47:48):
of Ukraine. And you think to yourself, my god, the
President of the United States has gone over to the
other side.

Speaker 4 (01:48:08):
What do you do.

Speaker 2 (01:48:11):
If you are a senior CI officer and you think
to yourself, the greatest threat to American national security today
is the president of the United States.

Speaker 3 (01:48:24):
Do you agree that right now is sort of an
intelligent foreign intelligence bonanza as far as our opposition trying
to recruit you know agency people who are just recently
laid off and may have been read into programs.

Speaker 2 (01:48:37):
Okay, take this case that I just mentioned of Ratcliffe
cashiering hundreds of people who had been trained hired by
the CIA in twenty twenty three and twenty four, most
of them hired to fill the new China Mission Center

(01:48:57):
that Director Bill Burns had created four years ago. Those
people probably pissed off and they're out of a job,
very much potential intelligence target. Elon Musk ordered Radcliffe to

(01:49:21):
fire these people. Okay, Elon must doge people. Okay, gained
access to the most sensitive information about CIA through their
penetration of the Office of Personal Personnel Management and the
IRS the Treasury, and yeah, through the Treasury. These are

(01:49:46):
like twenty two year old tech bros. Okay. And if
one of them has a drug problem, a grudge against
the United States, or you know the other classic counterintelligence vulnerabilities,
they got a giant target on their back. It's a
very dangerous time. And look, I'm not a doom sayer.

(01:50:15):
I'm an optimist actually, and I know that he who
lives by the crystal ball will wind up eating broken glass.
But imagine unpleasant though it may be. What would happen
if the United States were attacked again, another nine to

(01:50:40):
eleven scale attack, an attack at home or abroad enabled
by the chaos in our national security and intelligence systems.

(01:51:01):
What do you think Trump would do? I don't know.
I don't think. Look at what he's done already, sending
you know, armed troops into American cities and mask thugs.

Speaker 3 (01:51:21):
Oh well, yes, certainly domestically, it would escalate the authoritarianism.
I'm thinking foreign policy wise, Like just the incoherence we
have right now, it's hard to even imagine how incoherent
the response would be.

Speaker 2 (01:51:37):
What if he declared martial law? What if he suspended elections?
Would the Supreme Court stop him? Would Congress stop him? Nope?
You know, here we are coming up on our two
hundred and fiftieth birthdays a nation. No free republic in

(01:52:04):
the history of civilization has lasted longer than three hundred years,
and that was the Roman Empire. You think we're going
to make it to three hundred unless we get our
shit together. I hope we make it to two fifty.
So some of the things that did.

Speaker 3 (01:52:24):
Not make it into the book, or we're in there
very little bit i'd like to hear, you know, a
little bit about what was left on the cutting room
for or what you'd like to circle back around.

Speaker 2 (01:52:33):
I mean some things that popped out at me. The
Special Tactics.

Speaker 3 (01:52:36):
Unit in Iraq, the ctpts get like a sentence in
the book, Havana syndromes like a paragraph. The Syria Covert
program is like a paragraph. The sea tops, I don't
think are mentioned. What else is out there that you
think folks should know about. You're gonna make me cry,

(01:52:56):
I know, I know, because this book could be fifteen
hundred page.

Speaker 2 (01:53:00):
The book needs a back cover. Yeah, yeah, you remind
me of when I was writing reporting Legacy of Ashes.
I went up to Craftsbury, Common, Vermont, Northern Vermont. There's
a Tom Twentton that name ring Bell. He was the

(01:53:21):
last chief of the Clandestine Service before the end of
the Cold War. Amazing guy, and in retirement he was
working as a bookbinder. Interesting. Yeah, he was making hand
tooled leather covers for books. So I went up to

(01:53:46):
talk to him and he said, remind me of what
you're doing again, what you're writing about. And I said, well,
I'm trying to write a history of the CIA, you know,
from nineteen forty seven up to the present day. And
he looked at me, not unkindly, but skeptically, and said,
and will this be a twelve volume study? I wish

(01:54:14):
I knew more about what the say I had been
up to in Syria, very short shipped in the book.
I mean, I know people who were there after the
Arab spring I'm talking about, but they won't talk about it.

(01:54:35):
And remember this book is entirely on the record. I
don't do blind quotes, I don't do anonymous sources. But
I didn't even have no sources. I just I wish
I knew and the you know, the military stuff, and

(01:55:04):
by that I mean the piece the nexus between C
I and j suck. Oh yeah, okay. I get a
little bit of that, but not enough, okay, And that
was really key, you know, to military history and intelligence history.

(01:55:24):
And I just the only people I interviate viewed were
CI people like I didn't sit down with STANM. Crystal
or Bill mcgraven, I know, because that that's about my
pay grade. Really.

Speaker 3 (01:55:38):
The the Omega team stuff is kind of the I
would point that to the case study. I guess between
the relationship between special operations and CIA.

Speaker 2 (01:55:54):
Okay, here's a classic reporting problem that I confronted. So
there was some reporting that the SI's Afghan shock troops,
the ctpts or the zero Units, yeah, did many terrible things, okay,

(01:56:15):
and slaughtered civilians. And there's been some very impressive journalistic
accounts of the terrors that these people inflicted in the
name of the United States. And I was reasonably persuaded

(01:56:36):
that some of those accounts were sourced to the Pakistani
Intelligence Service, the ISI. There are DUPLICITUS intelligence services all
over the world, but there is a few more duplicitous
than the Pakistani inter Services intelligence. It's interesting you bring up.

Speaker 3 (01:56:59):
That particular instance because I had also a very frustrating
experience looking into that subject. And I remember being on
the phone with somebody who's representative from one of the
major humanitarian organizations that says the zero Units were doing
all kinds of war crimes. I'm like, okay, you give
me some examples. Do you have evidence, you know, show

(01:57:21):
me this evidence, you know. Let's like, I'm a journalist,
let's air this out.

Speaker 2 (01:57:25):
I can't share it with you.

Speaker 3 (01:57:26):
Wait, so you have evidence of war crimes that you're
just sitting on like, what the fuck is going on?
And there's an NGO and they're protecting their source, They're
protecting evidence of war crimes.

Speaker 2 (01:57:40):
I mean, that's what the facto. What what this woman
was telling me on the phone. Yeah, if if, if
I never touched that out, okay, And I'm not going
with a single source story.

Speaker 3 (01:57:53):
If the sources yeah, or if the source is the Taliban,
like oh, yeah, they came in, killed my cousin and
you know he's buried some over there.

Speaker 2 (01:58:00):
Yeah. You know, I spent a lot of time in
Afghanistan going back to nineteen eighty seven during the Soviet occupation.
I did six tours there as a reporter, starting with
the Soviet occupation and ending with the American occupation. So
I know a little bit about Afghanistan. I've spent cumulatively,

(01:58:22):
maybe I don't know, nine months on the ground there
and not embedded with anybody, just walking around the problem
that we're talking about sourcing, Yeah, okay in a war zone. Yeah,

(01:58:46):
is if not the biggest one of the biggest problems.
That was the approximate cause of the American failure year
of the war in Afghanistan, the war twenty year war. Okay.
So you know, let's set the scene. You're an army

(01:59:12):
colonel and you're trying to like walk around and make friends,
you know, in a village in Kunar Province, okay. And
you go down and sit down with the headmen. You
drink many cups of tea, and you say to the
headman through your interpreter, of course you don't speak push too,

(01:59:35):
who are the bad guys around here? And the head
man says, huh, that motherfucker over in the next valley,
the khan that village, the khan over in the next valley,
he's a bad motherfucker. And you're the army colonel, you know,
and you report this up to the jay tune said,

(01:59:56):
dude over in the next valley is a bad motherfucker. Well,
the han in this village diming out the han in
the next village. This is a spat has been going
back to the fourteenth freaking century. Yes these yeah, exactly,

(02:00:17):
And and he's he's just diamond out of arrival. And
you know, likely it's not the American military is going
to call an airstrike in on the han in the
next valley. Sourcing. It's a central problem of the American

(02:00:38):
experience in Afghanistan, Okay, that problem. It's also like the
q and the Taliban learned early on.

Speaker 4 (02:00:50):
The the power of propaganda.

Speaker 5 (02:00:52):
So if if they called war crimes like the the
AO would get shut down, and the Red Cross and
the un HR like they would all come in and
like do their investigations, and meanwhile, all the ground that
had been taken from the Taliban, the Taliban would just
move back into during during those times.

Speaker 2 (02:01:15):
You know, in the many months that I spent in
Afghanistan between nineteen eighty seven in two thousand and two,
you ever been there Afghanistan? Yeah? Where were you?

Speaker 3 (02:01:32):
Mostly in coust Beautiful country that would be a backpackers
haven paradise if they could get the politics out.

Speaker 2 (02:01:50):
Really beautiful country. And we went there ostensibly for one
reason to kill al Kaeda, right, And the President of

(02:02:19):
the United States didn't have idea one about what to do,
like what's the next paragraph, right, right, and we didn't

(02:02:40):
kill al Qaeda. I mean, one of my favorite stories
in the book is how Greg Vogel, Greg Spider Vogel
really one of the heroic figures in this history of
the twenty first century. The friends Jamid Karzai and basically

(02:03:13):
helps Hmid cars I've become the king of Afghanistan after
the American invasion, and Hmid cars I ruled for thirteen
years and he fell from power a couple months before

(02:03:35):
Greg Bogul became the chief of the clandestine Service of
the CIA, and Hahamed cars I came to power and
stayed in power because of the CIA. The he was
the chosen one, Okay, he was the guy who was

(02:04:01):
gonna be who could rule Afghanistan. And once he came
to power, the CI supported him with a cascade of
one hundred dollar bills. And the one hundred dollar bills

(02:04:22):
was how he ran his government. Okay. Ryan Crocker, one
of the greatest diplomats, you know, America has ever seen,
was the first ambassador there after the Taliban fell. And
how many cars they came to and say, who should
I appoint his governor Cosni Province, you know, And like

(02:04:47):
Ryan Crocker said, like I had a clue, you know,
but you know, he said, I had nothing. I mean,
I was in Afghanistan after the American invasion. Couple had
been destroyed not by the Russians, not by the Americans,
but by the wars between the Mujaiden that we had supported,

(02:05:10):
who struggled for power after the Soviets left Afghanistan. You know,
there wasn't any electricity in couple. There wasn't you know, heat,
There wasn't gas, there was you know, people burned manure
and wood for heat. There was hardly a stone upon

(02:05:31):
a stone. The road in from from the background air base.
It took like five hours to drive ten miles. And
that was the damage that our you know guys had
inflicted upon each other as they struggled for power. Harzi

(02:05:51):
had nothing except the CIA and their money. And that's
how he ran his country. Huge sacks of shrink wrapped
one hundred dollars bills, if you can get it. It
was how he ran the government. Okay. He was a

(02:06:14):
hero who was corrupted by power and corrupted by American money. Money.
You know, his brother was one of the biggest heroin
dealers in the country. Uh. The fall of the government

(02:06:45):
to the Taliban and the failure of the American twenty
year effort in Afghanistan, it wasn't because of the Taliban.
It was because of corruption, okay. And the corruption, you know,
you can put it in a picture a post guard.

(02:07:05):
There's a stack of one hundred dollars bills. But the
corruption also, like it's so relevant, I think because Afghanistan
isn't a country. It is a.

Speaker 5 (02:07:20):
A group of tribes and villages that we drew drew
a border around. Well when I say we, I mean
Westerners that we drew a border around. And they're you know,
going out and doing like PRTs and dropping off cricket
bats and cooking oil and rice to villages like you

(02:07:43):
see what it is. It's me, it's my family, it's
my village, it's my tribe, and that those those are
the priorities.

Speaker 2 (02:07:51):
And you know, whether it's the hazard or the you know,
the posh tune, like, they don't they don't identify with
each other, they don't identify as a country. They will
always because they will always put their tribes first, and

(02:08:12):
there's a lot of animosity between the tribes. They will
talk about each other NonStop, you know. So I think
a lot of the corruption is just inherent to that
tribal system that I'm going to take care of me.
And I've got to disagree with you, Okay, Yeah, it
is a tribal country, aren't We increasingly a tribal country. No,

(02:08:43):
it is a country that did not ever have the
blessings of development. The British occupy Afghanistan for a long time.
They never built a railroad, they never built a civil service.
They left nothing in its wake, because you know, every

(02:09:04):
time they tried to actually assert dominance, the Afghanis killed
them because they don't like being occupied by foreign powers.
Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, tamer Lane, the Brits three
times in the Soviets once sure, knocked out not by

(02:09:28):
one tribe, but by an antipathy toward foreign domination. Sure, Okay,
of course they fought among one another. Sure. The point
I'm trying to make is that the failure of the

(02:09:49):
American occupation in Afghanistan was very different from the failure
of the American occupation of Iraq. I agree, one of
us said, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (02:10:03):
It is.

Speaker 2 (02:10:06):
A story that remains to be written. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:10:09):
I think maybe with Dave's getting at is that the
corruption is so endemic because there aren't this governmental, federal,
or social or state provincial system, like, none of those
sorts of constructs that we have exist there. So it
becomes like, how do these people relate to each other
and money is the common denominator.

Speaker 4 (02:10:28):
I guess.

Speaker 2 (02:10:31):
It's a long conversation and not germane to the book. Yeah,
maybe not. But someday someone will write a great history
of the American occupation of Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 (02:10:44):
So your book coming out on the fifteenth July fifteenth,
most people listening to this will probably already be able
to go and order the book.

Speaker 2 (02:10:55):
It'll probably be out by then.

Speaker 3 (02:10:56):
The book is called The Mission the Cia in the
twenty first Century by Tim Winer. Tim tell us about
the victory lap what's coming next?

Speaker 2 (02:11:05):
Huh? Three years writing this thing? Yeah, three years is
short time per book, well compared to le legacy years. Yeah.
You know, there are times when you're writing a book

(02:11:30):
and you're staring at a blank screen and little beads
of blood running down your forehead and you think, my God,
will this ever be done? And when it's done and

(02:11:55):
you write the end, then it's like, uh, the shortest
time between writing the end and the publication of the
book that you can really achieve this three months. So
we wrapped up this book, uh three months ago to

(02:12:16):
try and get as much of the chaos of the
Trump administration and the damage the inflict being inflicted on
American intelligence as much of that into the book as possible.
We had to. I had to bring it to an end.
A book needs a back cover, uh, And here we are.

(02:12:45):
You bring a book into the world. You know, it's
like having a kid. You love your kid, okay, h
even if if it's an ugly baby, love your kid.
So uh, but what you really want is for people

(02:13:09):
to buy the book and read the book. Theres no
point in writing a book and people don't read it,
So then you have to sell the book, okay, and
you're you're writing a novel okay, okay, So you will
confront this in the fullness of time. So the book

(02:13:32):
publishing business is very odd. Okay, yes, And you would think, okay,
I've written a book and you say to your publisher,
you know, are you going to advertise the book? You're
going to put it like that in the New York Times?
Are you how are you going to sell it? And
they're like, that's your job, dude. Yeah, you know how

(02:13:54):
many socials do you have? Right? That's wild? So you know,
there's no advertisements. The book publishing business is a lot
like Hollywood. Now the common denominator here is that nobody

(02:14:17):
knows anything. Nobody knows if a book is going to
sell or not, why books sell or they don't. But
they all want you to have a tent pole weekend.
You know what I mean by that? Going like when
the book comes out, it has to like sell one
hundred million billion copies in seventy two hours, or you're

(02:14:40):
a flop, you know, like a Hollywood opening, right right,
So they're like three ways to do this book. Reviews
don't sell books. Shockingly, words don't sell books either. What

(02:15:00):
blurbs don't sell books? Nobody cares about blurbs. It's like
one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. Yeah, really,
who cares?

Speaker 3 (02:15:16):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (02:15:16):
Here's what sells books? Going on TV? I thought you
were going to say sex. There's no sex in this
book except David Petray. That's not the we want. We

(02:15:36):
don't want to see it going on TV. So on Monday,
when are we going on air? You and I you
what do you think? Product beautiful? So that's going to
be the first going on air? Team House Awesome leading
the way always Monday Night, barring you know, world crisis.

(02:16:03):
Rachel Maddow Okay, Tuesday pub date All Things Considered. I
did an interview with Mary Louise Kelly this morning. And
Mary Louis Kelly, you know her beautiful voice, NPR anchor

(02:16:25):
of All Things Considered covered intelligence for fifteen years, so
she knows where she speaks. So when are they having
you on Fox and Friends? I think you're right up
there ally, Tim, haven't got a booking, found some friends,

(02:16:48):
you know, wherever you are, I'm available. I would totally
do that, but I'm waiting for the phone perros. But
you know, I'm not an iety logue. I mean I

(02:17:09):
may come off as you know, an old hippie or
or you know, an anarchist, but I'm not. Well, I
am an old hippie. But I love what I read about.
I'm fascinated by CIA and intelligence. The people I interviewed

(02:17:30):
for this book are amazing people, and I want readers
to understand the incredible importance of having good intelligence. Okay,
when intelligence succeeds, it saves lives, okay, and when intelligence fails,

(02:17:55):
people die.

Speaker 3 (02:17:57):
So I read the book, I can definitely reckon ment it.
I can burb your book, so to speak. Uh, for
whatever that's worth, I think it's definitely worth your time.
I think people who watch the show will definitely enjoy
reading this final thing, Tim tell people where they can
go to find the book. Where should they go and.

Speaker 2 (02:18:14):
Buy it in a bookstore, preferably in a book chart.
I'm not a big fan of Jeff Bezos in Amazon,
but that's one. The alternative is an outfit called bookshop

(02:18:37):
dot org. Okay, I actually have a social media account.

Speaker 3 (02:18:44):
Oh wow, you're coming coming around, dude, they're going places.
Did your kids show you how to.

Speaker 2 (02:18:50):
Set that up? Yes? It's on Blue Sky? Are are
you and you know? Uh? You're people familiar with Blue
Sky some of them certainly. Okay, I don't do X.
I don't do X. It's a toxic Wasteum. Yeah, I

(02:19:14):
pop smoke five six months ago. Not a fan of
but yeah. There are bookshops all over the world. There's
a Southfrid called Bookshops dot or work, which is an alternative.
And if you can find me on Blue Sky under

(02:19:36):
my name. Uh, there are various buttons you can push
to purchase the book directly from the publisher, HarperCollins. But
like if you live in America, you're generally within you know,
driving distance of the bookstore. So go to your friendly
local bookstore and buy it. If you are in New York,

(02:19:58):
we're launching the book at a place called Powerhouse in Dumbo,
twenty six Adams Street on Monday night at six pm.
If you're in DC, We're launching the book at Politics
and Pros Great Bookstore Thursday, July seventeenth at seven pm.

(02:20:22):
My interlocutor is the great intelligence supporter, Donald Priest of
the Washington Post, who first broke the secret prison story.
But like, I have a bumper sticker on my car
from a bookshop in Seattle, and the bumper sticker has

(02:20:47):
a very simple and direct message, read a fucking book.
Like you may not trust the mainstream media. I mean,
I'd worked for sixteen years at the New York Times.
I like the New York Times. But a book, Okay,

(02:21:08):
a book. This is actual information. It's all on the record, Okay.
There are no anonymous sources, there's no like spin right yeah.
And I mean, and it's not ideological, it's not some
fucking liberal saying intelligence is bad. I hate America.

Speaker 3 (02:21:28):
I'm a very big advocate of literacy and that we
need more literacy and that people need to spend time
by themselves reading and just thinking and reflecting and getting
the fuck off of the internet.

Speaker 2 (02:21:45):
You know, the kids talk about brain rot. Yeah, you know,
and if you spend all your time looking at your phone,
it's depressing. It's like you can hear a brain cell
popping every second. You don't want that to have. This
is not your maine to our discussion. But you know,
if you're within the sound of my boys, I think

(02:22:08):
Team House is a remarkable operation that brings voices not
not mine. I'm kind of an outlier, but people who
have actually lived the life, okay and worked in garden
spots like Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq, and you know,

(02:22:33):
know about the marvels and the dangers of trying to
execute American foreign policy in the world. We appreciate it,
totally agree. We appreciate it. Like you know, we we
just want to give good people time to tell their story.

Speaker 5 (02:22:55):
And you know, in cases like you and Patodonnald and
you know, people who are more you know, haven't necessarily
like been in government service, but.

Speaker 2 (02:23:06):
You know, write about it and things like that. Like
we love you guys, all right, Can we tell one
last story before we wrap up? Before we way over now,
one last story, one last story. So people sometimes ask me, UH,
how did you get into this line of work covering
the CIA. I was thirty years old, thirty nine years ago,

(02:23:41):
and Uh, I decided I wanted to go to Afghanistan
because I had read about a not terribly secret but
enormous CIA covert operation UH to arm the Afghan resistance
against the Soviet occupy of Afghanistan. And UH. Again, a

(02:24:07):
non secret covert aspect of this operation was that the
decision had been made to introduce the American anti aircraft
a weapon stair the stair shoulder fired missile into the
Afghan battlefront to smuggle it over the Kira Pass into

(02:24:28):
the hands of the Muchai Dian. I thought that's a
great story, man. So I called up the CIA and
their Office of Public Affairs, which is a thing despite
its oxymoronic aspect, and I said to the CI public

(02:24:51):
affairs officer, whose name was Pete Ernest, hey, I'm going
to go to Afghanistan and to write about this secret
operation that you people are running to smuggle the stinger
into the hands of the mooge I Dian And I
understand you people sometimes do country briefings for reporters who
are off to weird places. How about it? And he

(02:25:14):
said absolutely not. So off I went to Afghanistan, staging
for a month in Peshawar and then spending seven weeks
running with the Mooge, mostly in Kunar Province. Saw a

(02:25:36):
stinger fired in Anger, which was my goal. The stinger
operator of the Mooge had not been well trained, and
you know, he mispired fifty thousand dollars worth of the
technology court strewing off in the sky. And I came
back alive with a beard that I had grown for CAMO.

(02:26:02):
And I had been back at my desk at my
newspaper in Washington for more than a day when the
phone rang. Guess who CIA? It was my new best
friend at the CIA, Peter Tim. He said how are you?
And I said great? And I said he said how
was your trip? And I said it was amazing And

(02:26:23):
he said, how would you like to come in for
that briefing? And I said, I'd be delighted. Have you
ever been to CIA headquarters?

Speaker 3 (02:26:32):
Now?

Speaker 2 (02:26:35):
So you know, it's seven miles outside of Washington in
the woods at Langley, Virginia. And so I make the
drive to the park in the parking lot, and I
walk into the old headquarters building and you know, it's
the cathedral that Alan Dulles built for himself, you know,

(02:26:55):
the great white father of meterly Cia onyx marbles, right
elegant and on the left hand wall in bower leaf
letters about this high the stars, the memorial stars are
off your right. But on the left hand wall, in
big bower leaf letters set into the wall is John
eight thirty two, Gospel of John. And he shall know

(02:27:19):
the Truth and the truth will make you free. And
I looked at that and, like Jeff Lebowski, I said,
that's fucking interesting man. And I went up to the
sixth floor and there were there are four CI analysts

(02:27:42):
there to meet me, and I had a lot of
questions for them, but they only had one question for me,
which is what's it like in Afghanistan? And then ask
you if the missile worked or not? These were purportedly. Oh.
I told them that it failed. These were purportedly, you know,
four top CIA analysts. And they were like, what's it

(02:28:06):
like over there? And I realized they had never been
to Afghanistan. They'd never been winning a country mile of
Afghanistan and so I went back down the elevator and
then I looked over my now my right hand and
shoulder at the Gospel of John, and I said, you
know what, I believe I have just found my life's calling.
I'm going to cover these people like you know, as

(02:28:28):
a cup reporter, I covered the cops in the courts.
I'm going to cover them, you know, and know the truth.
And that was thirty eight years ago, and here I
am today and still trying to pry secrets, still trying
to figure out that owl are these people up to? Well,

(02:28:53):
thank you Tim.

Speaker 3 (02:28:54):
There will be links down the description of this podcast
where you can go and find Tim and his books,
the new one again, it's the Mission the CIA in
the twenty first century. I hope you guys will go
and check it out, and thank you for joining us tonight.
We'll see all of you guys next time. Hey, guys,
it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for
a moment about how you can support the show. If

(02:29:15):
you've been watching it enjoying it, but you'd like to
get a little bit more involved and help us continue
to do this, you can check out our Patreon. It
is patreon dot com, slash The Teamhouse, and for five
dollars a month you can get access to all of
these episodes of The Teamhouse ad free. The same goes
with our affiliated podcast eyes On with Andy Milburn, Jason

(02:29:38):
Lyons mcmulroy that one you will also get all of
those episodes ad free, and you support the channel and
the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members
are literally what has helped this company and this small
business survive, especially during our early years, and you are
what continues to help this thing going and as we

(02:30:00):
navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising.

Speaker 2 (02:30:04):
So we really appreciate all of you guys.

Speaker 3 (02:30:07):
There's going to be a link down in the description
to that Patreon page, and there is also going to
be a link to our new merch shop, so if
you guys want to go and get some Teamhouse merchandise,
we got stickers and we also have patches, and I
should mention if you sign up for Patreon at ten
dollars a month, we will mail you this patch as well,

(02:30:27):
so we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale
on the merch shop and additionally, they got t shirts
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Speaker 2 (02:30:44):
We really appreciate it, guys. Thank you,

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The CIA from 9/11 to Present Day | Tim Weiner | Ep. 360

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The CIA from 9/11 to Present Day | Tim Weiner | Ep. 360