Empower U - Take 20 Eric Conroy for Congress

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
A six at fifty five GARACD Talk station Friday Eve,
last day of the week for me. He got Gary
Jeff Walker covering form tomorrow on Monday's vacation day be
covered by Dan Carrier in great hands. And thanks to
both of those guys, and thanks for joining the fifty
five CARC this morning to do the Take twenty seminar
and to power Youoamerica dot org. You'll find out some
information about what's going on tonight and Power You Studios

(00:22):
located at three hundred Great Oaks Drive. You can show
up live and in person at seven pm when the
kickoff time begins. We heard from Americans for Prosperity Donovan
O'Neil yesterday. He'll be talking about while Hiowa's government is
so overpriced compared to other state governments, with some ideas
from AFP on that. But you'll also get the Take
twenty which is a shorter little segment by my guest
this morning, and I'm so pleased to have him on

(00:43):
the morning show, Eric Conroy. He grew up on the
West Side, went to Elder High School. I know that
pleases my West Side friends. Apparently comes from a military family.
His grandfather World War two veteran convincing was the right
thing to serve his country and his community. He did so.
After nine to eleven, he graduated from the US Air
Force Academy near the top of his class a rose

(01:04):
to the rank of captain in Special Operations Unit. Then
he went on to this CIA as a case officer,
and that's what he's going to be talking about tonight
for the Empower You America Seminar his time as a
CIA case officer. Welcome to the program. It's a real
pleasure to have you on, and thank you for your
service for our country. Eric Conroy, Hey.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Good morning, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Happy to a lot of my Westside friends are really
excited about I hate you. A couple of people actually
text me yesterday and say, are you going to be
talking to Eric Conroy to Mark because he's doing an
Empower You seminar tomorrow and I'm like, okay, I think
we are, And of course Joe Strecker lined yup. First,
I got a couple of questions for you before we
get I want to deal a little bit with your campaign.
You're running against Greg Landsman and all my listening audience,
at least the vast majority of them are looking for

(01:47):
an alternative. So I'm going to give them your campaign website.
It's simple, Ericconroy dot com, boom right there, meet the man,
meet the issues, learn all about him, and yes, you
do have a better alternative to Greg Landsman. Moving over
to your time with the CIA, I got a quest
and you may take this the wrong way, Eric, I
have to ask you during the shutdown which just ended

(02:07):
last night, were the members in the CIA and the
CIA operations were they being funded or did they have
to take a pay freeze?

Speaker 2 (02:15):
It really depends on what part right. And you're you're dedicated.
You're dedicated. People in the field are working and defending
this country. So it's not much different than how the
military operates in that regard.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
It's just more covert. And yeah, and while you were
with the CIA, because I have I know people who
worked for the CIA, I have current but I will
call him a distant relative by marriage who walks around
and says he's with the State Department, but he's actually
with the CIA. Did you go around telling everybody with
the State Department?

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Eric, Yeah, Bright, I did some very great work for
our country overseas. I defended this country and it's been
a terrific experience of work for the CIA to last well,
god seven years, and then the Air Force for for
seven years before that. So there are great dedicated men
and women doing that work in the harms of way overseas,

(03:07):
and I was really just proud and privileged to be
a part of it. It was a tremendous experience.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Fair enough, as a litigation attorney, I'm going to say,
move to strike, non responsive. I'm just giving you a
hard time. Eric. I know, Eric, let's CIA again. I'm
with the State Department. I had a college professor who
literally worked for the CIA said that, here's somebody say,
with the State Department, you can pretty much back on
the fact of the CIA, all right, moving away. In
your time as a CIA case off operator, what were

(03:32):
your tasks? And I don't know how much detail you
can get into and you're gonna be talking about this
tonight the empower you, Sminar, But how much detail you
can get into some of the type of operations you
were involved in. But I think everyone views the job
is filled with intrigue and you know, spying and all this.
So what did the job entail? Eric?

Speaker 2 (03:50):
It is, well, Hey, what the CIA primarily does is
this is old school espanage, right, this is meeting people.
That's kind of like being a special journalist, right. You
need to go out and streets, meet people, understand who
they are and what they might have, and that could
be anyone from our foreign adversaries or tyrorist groups. And
you need to build relationships with people to get information

(04:11):
that will help protect this country. And I was able
to do that overseas, both in Eastern Europe and in
war zones. And it is very much different than maybe
other ways that the intelligence community may gain information, such
as pictures from satellite. So this is very old school. Yes,
it's very romantic, and there are a lot of great
movies on it as well. You might have seen Zero

(04:33):
Doct thirty or maybe Bridge of Spies, of people going
out and building relationships and trying to convince people to
hopefully provide information. And I did that for about seven
years and it was absolutely amazing.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
Well, there's that it's human versus sigan. You got signal intelligence,
which is electronic gathering, electronic you know, scooping up of
information doesn't involve human interaction. And that human intelligence component,
which is the old school way you're talking about, that's
where you were involved.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Exactly right, and you know the link that's exactly right.
It's human intelligence, which means they're using people as sources
of information. It's really not much different than being a journalist.
Instead of asking about, you know, Joe Burrow's toe, you
might be asking someone about Irani and nuclear missiles. So
when those are the topics that are involved, the dynamics
become much different, and that's when you need to really

(05:23):
start thinking about what you're doing and how you're meeting people,
because you need to protect the safety of both yourself
and whoever you're talking to as a source to get
that information and keep everyone safe.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Doesn't this require the target of your efforts to develop
these relationships for them to let their guard down, Because
if I'm in your role, I'm going to be painfully
aware of what I'm doing, which is I'm trying to
get my foot into the door in this person's world
so they trust me enough to hand off some information.
Aren't they in that position aware of people like you

(05:53):
out in the world trying to do that, and so
their guard is perpetually up. Or is this easier than
I might anticipate.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
You know, it's a people business, right, and it takes
getting to know people and relating to people and understanding
what their life is like and what they might need
and where they're at with their personal journey. So it's
no different than you know, pulling up to a bar
and talking to your buddies or talking to your friends. Right,
you have to be a good guy to be able
to talk to people like that, and people know, right,

(06:21):
it's really not rocket science. If you can build friends
as a salesman or as a really just a friend
and being a good family member and a good person,
you're probably actually going to be pretty decent at talking
to people from the other side to find out what's
going on.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
How do you hone an awareness skill that you like?
For example, there's a double agent concept that person, let's say,
becomes aware or new from the get go that you,
Eric Conroy, were actually a CIA operative trying to get
your foot in the going to get information that they
don't feed you intentional wrong information or maybe give you
a little bit of accurate information which gives you some
comfort that they're speaking truthfully, only this year in the

(07:00):
wrong direction. That kind of thing goes on all the
time as well, doesn't it.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
Well, you know, the Intelli DI community as a whole.
Think of it as like building a jigsaw puzzle, right
and maybe me meeting somebody and finding out one piece
of information is going to go into a jigsaw puzzle
combined with a bunch of other sources like you mentioned
from singing or imagery, think a pile a picture on
a topic. So that is the goal of the intelligence

(07:25):
community is to gather information from a range of ways
and sources to build that picture on a topic. So
it's really never like a single point of failure. It
shouldn't be right. It should be building that nosaic, that
jigsaw puzzle from a bunch of different angles to find
out what's really going on.

Speaker 1 (07:42):
Well and to the extent you were able to, And
I'm sure you're still bound by some secrets or confidential
audit rules or correct me if I'm wrong, if you're not,
But can you put an illustration together of how this
works a particular operation maybe you were involved with, or
how you got from point A to point B where
you can say, yes, I was successful in achieving goal
that I was assigned to. Is it possible for you
to do that in a real context.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
I'll talk about it in a round about way, and
what what it is is, it's it's no different than
really being a salesman. Right, you have a sales process.
Let's say you have you have a lead for a
maybe to make a particular sale, and you meet that
person and you cultivate a relationship and you be friends
with them, and you try to figure out if one
you're you're going to be good friends, because that's first

(08:25):
and foremost how anything else in life works. But also
you figure out there's a good professional fit. So it's
really not much different than a sales cycle in a
lot of ways.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
So I'm trying to imagine a scenario how you would
you would start this process. Are you placed in a
particular business or industry where you're assigned to a role
as oh, he's the director of you you know, HR
or something which puts you in a position to interact
with the folks you're trying to spy on. Is this
just like running into someone at a bar kind of thing?
You know where they're going to be and you show

(08:58):
up and you're like, hey, can I buy you a beer?
I guess contextually speaking, and wondering how this process begins.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
Well, I mean, I'm not going to talk about too
many specifics because I can't go into too many details,
but it can arise in a very varied, varied ways, right,
there are many different ways, so you can hopefully build
a relationship with someone and move it to the next level.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
This is I am thoroughly convinced, Eric, and I have
a feeling you're not gonna be able to answer this
one or all. But it seems so obvious to me.
We keep spending billions of dollars to keep the UN open,
and I keep wondering what we can show for the
money that we've spent. And the only thing I can
conclude is that it's a wonderful source, a resource for
us to gather secrets and information from foreign nationals, and
that's why we pay the bill. It's a spy operation.

(09:43):
Any truth that are you going to dodge that one?

Speaker 2 (09:45):
Eric, The UN is a radical leftist institution that we
maybe consider cutting some funny for, so I'm in that camp.
The UN has been particularly in f in a lot
of things over the years. You could probably use less
funding as opposed to more funding.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
All right, So I'm going to go with a yes
on that one as well, like this like the estate
Department answer. And now moving over to your campaign, ericconroyd
dot com. People get all the information and I hope Eric,
you and I will be talking quite a few times
before next year's election because my listening audience and I
would like to unsee Greg Lansman and you may be
demand for the job. So if you really had to
pinpoint something that is near and dear to your heart,

(10:24):
what's driving you to run for Congress? Among all these
issues transportation, infrastructure, border security, neighborhoods, jobs, economy, what's Eric
Conroy's main goal to at once elected to Congress?

Speaker 2 (10:35):
Sure? Well, I have become concerned and passionate about the
economic and social trajectory of this region for some time
and believe we need the common sense representative to take
it into the future. Right, we just saw our incumbent
Democrat vote no to reopen the government along with this
radical leftist Cronius to gain really very little if any

(10:57):
political leverage in the process to appear their radical leftist base.
To me, you just just demonstrates that Greg Landsman is
not the moderate he claims. It's not the moderate Democrat,
he claims, and he is unfit to lead. What we
need here is we need a leader to make common
sense decisions for this region and I hope to bring
that next year. And this is not Great landsman.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
I agree completely with that. So as we move forward
toward the election, hopefully get Eric on. You get to
come on the program again. We'll talk about issues as
we move forward toward next year.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Eric, Yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
That's yes, all right. Got an ask out of Eric
Conroy Ericconroy dot com and log in tonight from home
or show up at three hundred grede Oaks drive to
the Empower You Seminar where you can hear Eric with
his take twenty plus again Donald and' neil from Americans
for Prosperity about overpriced government here in the state of
Ohio tonight at seven pm. Make sure you're registered though
eight seventeen right now fifty five KRC the talk station.

(11:51):
Don't go way fifty five KRC after sixty years