Title: S1E11 Have Human Spies Become Obsolete?
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2026-01-19
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/695ad02c18c941d6d66b194c/media.mp3
Duration: 0:58:44

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[00:00] This podcast is a casted in touchstone production. Hi, I'm John Curioca. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy tick? Before we introduce you to our guest today, former CIA officer and multi-time best-selling author Barry Eisler, I want to thank you, as always, from storyteller to storyteller for listening. And if you would be so kind as to like, review, share, or comment on the podcast,

[00:34] wherever you're catching us, that would really help us reach the widest possible audience. For podcasts and podcasters, that's the mission. Thanks for helping us succeed. Barry Eisler is hardly the first former intelligence officer to quit storytelling as a spy in favor of storytelling as a pure storyteller. You know, for fun and profit. But few former intelligence officers have succeeded in the way that Barry has. As you'll hear since 2003, when he quit working for The Man and went full-time as a creative,

[01:07] Barry has come to view the secret world quite differently than he did when he worked inside it. As part of it. But the secret world can be incredibly constraining to a person with ideas and ambition. Barry's ideas and ambition have led to three very successful book series, not books. Book series. John Rain launched Barry into the fiction stratosphere. Then he did the Ben Trevon series, and most recently a series about a Seattle detective named Olivia Lone.

[01:37] Barry's secret sauce. He weaves a collection of great characters together into a compelling story, and the writing is sublime. Spies and writing, writing and spies, there is simply a literary quality to espionage. It's all that gray matter navigating all that gray territory. And one writes a lot as a spy. Writing is just part of the job. I don't think I can accurately count all the words I typed out over the years that were just me doing my job. So when you're done spying, it just seems natural to take all those stories and the storytelling

[02:12] skills you came in with plus the ones you acquired and do something productive and maybe even lucrative with it. As with every spy, it starts with how that spy and spying found each other. I guess you could describe it as a wild hair. I was at Cornell Law School. It would have been 1988, my second year of law school. And I was really interested in the world and realizing I didn't much want to be a lawyer. And I thought, what can I do with this interest I have in geopolitics and also an interest

[02:44] in really weird stuff, which I sometimes refer to as forbidden knowledge, all the stuff the government wants only a select few people to know. And I thought, how about the CIA? I like despionage novels, Le Carré, read all the Ian Fleming books when I was in high school, that kind of stuff. So I went to the Cornell Career Center and picked up a brochure. This is before the internet. It's hard to imagine how anything got done in these days, but they had a brochure, next to General Electric and all the rest. Called the 800 number and that's how the ball got rolling.

[03:15] That was my route to the secret world, as John Le Carré liked to call it. So you went in because of the appeal of the actual act of espionage, spotting, assessing, developing and recruiting an agent. You were more interested in operations than in analysis or the science and technology. For sure it was operations that blew my hair back, but it's an interesting question. And I think John, you and I have talked about this before and it comes up often when I

[03:47] talk in podcasts or whatever about the CIA. It's like, well, why did you do it? Was it ideology, love of country? It's a lot of different things. And I would love to hear the way you looked at this originally and your progression too, but I'll just say briefly this. In my experience, this is over 30 years ago, it might not be representative anymore. Most of the people, most of my classmates anyway, were politically, they swung more left than right, I would say. But the more fundamental ideology that I encountered and that I shared was this belief

[04:21] that America was a force for good in the world and that when we did things that might be unsavory, whether they were overt things like a war or covert things like, well, the CIA, it was for a noble purpose that redeemed whatever it might have been. And that America was a city on a hill and a light unto nations and the last great hope of mankind and the American exceptionalism and all that kind of stuff. And I think you have to buy to that ideology if you're going to be successful at the CIA.

[04:52] And whether you swing toward the Republican wing of the party, the Democrat win of the party, it doesn't really matter compared to that more fundamental, foundational belief in American goodness and American exceptionalism. But what was it like for you? Yeah, for me, it was just about the same thing. I only considered public service. My grandparents were all immigrants. And on my dad's side of the family, my grandparents were so grateful that they were allowed not just to come into the country, but to become Americans.

[05:28] Yeah. That my grandfather kept a framed picture of Franklin Roosevelt on the TV until the day he died. 1978, we still had that picture of Roosevelt on the top of the TV. And he always instilled in us this notion that we needed to pay the country back because it had given so much to us. But I have to agree with you completely with regard to. Overlooking or even justifying

[06:00] some of the more unsavory things that the country may have done. I think back to the invasion of Grenada, for example, which took place in 1983 when we were in college. And I remember thinking, well, we had to rescue those American medical students. So this was a noble thing. Just what the government said. I mean, it must be true. Exactly. You know, watching the Falklands War back in 1981. Yeah, Argentina was bad. Yeah. It was just come on. What are you guys doing?

[06:30] Fashist dictatorship. Exactly. And the Brits were freedom loving Democrats for the small D. And so, sure, I bought the whole mainstream government explanation of all these things. Yeah. In their entirety. I the bottom line is I really believed we were the good guys. Absolutely. And I wanted to be a part of that. You wouldn't be attracted to work at the CIA. You probably would have a hard time getting through the whole clearance process, the background check, everything. If you didn't honestly believe that America was fundamentally a force for good in the world.

[07:06] And yeah, so it sounds like you and I, I mean, I'm not at all surprised. Like I said, everybody I knew would just believe this stuff. We believed that the US government was fundamentally honest with with its own people, with meaning if you're in CIA or a soldier or anything like that, a federal employee and fundamentally honest with the citizenry. I mean, I look back at this and it's almost embarrassing. But, you know, and especially, by the way, for anyone who's listening,

[07:37] it's interesting to me how quickly so many people react to this kind of criticism of the US government along the lines of like, why do you hate your country? You know, that kind of stuff. And I don't hate my country. I love my country. This is I don't actually think America is the best country in the world or something. Why? I don't have a basis for thinking that I've lived in exactly one other country out of about 180. It was Japan and it was great. I really had a terrific experience there. But this notion of I know it is the best country in the world. It just so happens to be the one I was born and raised in and I'm a citizen of.

[08:09] And by the way, I haven't lived anywhere else. So I don't even have a passport. I'm a passport. My attitude is, come on, you don't have a basis for saying it's the best. It'd be a little like if you love your parents, which if you're lucky, you all have parents who deserved your love and respect and gratitude. I certainly did. But it wouldn't occur to me to say, oh, I had the best parents. Those are the best parents in the history of parents. That would be childish at best. So I certainly don't hate America, but I do try very hard to be dispassionate about the actions, the role, the effect of the US government in the world.

[08:42] I try to I try to screen out my love of country because it's a distortion in my ability to perceive the behavior, the effect, etc. of my own country as accurately as I'm able. That's all. But with a lot of people, when when you're looking at your own country dispassionately, they don't see that you're making that effort. Instead, they think, well, you don't love it. Well, you must hate it. No, it doesn't have to be out of their one. No, I'm trying to get. I'm trying not to have my feelings for my own country distort the accuracy

[09:15] of my view of the country, which I think is a worthwhile thing. Once you got into the CIA and you you saw the mechanics of recruiting spies to steal secrets up close, did that have an impact on your worldview? Or or did that maybe make you even more patriotic? I wish I could say that, oh, I had a kind of crisis of conscience when I saw the dirty methods that we had to employ that kind of thing. It wasn't like that. To the extent I had any kind of crisis, it was in realizing that this organization that in my admittedly in my naivete, I imagined,

[09:47] would be a fast acting nimble place to work full of really smart, capable people, exceptional people, etc. It really that was not my experience. I'm not trying to put anybody down. Anyone who's had a different experience then that's great. But for me, my standard way of expressing my the understanding I developed of the CIA was that it's like the post office, but with spies. It's a very big federal bureaucracy.

[10:19] It's slow. It's sclerotic. Again, not trying to put down the post office, but I think it's fair to say that when you go to the post office because you got a package, you know, you can't just put it in a mailbox. Your feeling is like I might be here for a while because it's not the most efficient organization in the world. Probably because it's underfunded, but whatever. And the CIA and my experience was like that. And when I look back at the course, the progression of my own life and my career, I started with the U.S. government and then I then I left the government worked for a 600 attorney law firm, New York based international law firm.

[10:50] So so pretty big employer. Then I left the law firm to join a four person startup. It was a client of mine. And then finally I got published and I finally was able to work for myself. So this progression can't just be a coincidence. I'm a pretty entrepreneurial guy. I'd like to move fast, much more comfortable as a gorilla than I am in a conventional army. And at the time, 25 years old or 26 or whatever it was, the CIA was a big, conventional, highly structured army.

[11:23] And that just was not a good fit for me. But so when I left, it wasn't because I thought something because I had some sort of political awakening or anything. I thought that all came much later. It was more just frustration with the pace of the place and how I was what I was able to get that I wanted and what I wasn't able to get or what I had to wait for. It was just that I just couldn't take it anymore. It's funny that you say that because I said exactly the same thing just a couple of days ago. I remember having to go to London to work a joint operation with MI6. And my boss said to me before I left, oh, I so envy you.

[11:57] I always loved MI6 because they don't have a bureaucracy like we do. If they want to go after someone, if they want to go after a group, they just do it for us. We have to have layer after layer of approvals. And then you have to notify Congress. Our bureaucracy is so is so heavy, he said, that half the time we just can't get things done. And I found that to be the case as well. So your experience, I think, was like most people who join the CIA,

[12:27] their patriots, they love their country. And then they don't make a career of the CIA. There isn't normally this this revelation that suddenly changes their minds. It's just not it's not a fit. It is more bureaucratic than people realize. You know, that's why when when people. Attribute these superhuman powers to the CIA, I have to laugh. Because it really is just a lumbering, heavy, slow government bureaucracy.

[13:03] Sure, there are a lot of people. There are a lot of not so smart. I mean, a lot of smart people. There are a lot of not so smart people. I'll give you an example. I was working in the counterterrorism center and one of the managers pulled me aside and said, hey, can you go to Beirut? And I said, yeah, I wanted to ask Jimmy to go to Beirut. He covers Beirut. Right. And he says, no, Jimmy beat his wife. He can't go because if you are accused, not even convicted, if you're accused of beating your wife, you're not allowed to carry a gun. And you can't work in Beirut without carrying a gun.

[13:34] I remember getting ready to go on an operation in Islamabad. And one of the the officers that I dealt with, you know, normally was in another branch in the embassy, but he would frequently help us on our counterterrorism raids. Where's Chris? Oh, Chris was psychovacked. Psychovacked. Yeah, he went nuts. We had to put him on a plane, send him home. I was like, oh, OK, well, Chris went nuts. So now we're down a man. And, you know, you don't realize the pressure that comes with a job like this.

[14:07] You know, on the one hand, you think, well, you know, I work in this big bureaucracy. I get in the car, I drive to the office. I sit in a cubicle for eight hours and then I get in the car and drive home. We wish. Yeah. We wish it was that easy. Yeah. So as you have entered the agency, now you're a young officer. As you said, you're in your mid 20s like we all were. Yeah. What were those initial months and years like? Did your feelings about the agency or your feelings about the work or even your outlook on the world?

[14:37] Did they change in any way? No, they really didn't that much. And again, it's not something I'm proud of. I'm just being honest. It's funny. I think in some ways it was a little easier for me at that time in my life because I just didn't have that much imagination. I was not going to be proud of. But again, I'm just trying to be accurate. There are various things in my life I look back on. And I said, and I think to myself, like, how could you not have seen that or spotted it or whatever? But if I didn't, I didn't. You know, they say when the student is ready, the teacher appears and I just wasn't ready for the teacher yet. Aside from what I would describe as the bureaucratic aspects,

[15:11] I made some good friends there who I'm still very close with. A couple of guys who went on to prominent careers, 30 year, 15 or 30 year careers, we're still in touch. Love them. So a lot of it was fun. I mean, I have to tell you like the farm, the special operations training course, the field training, the field tradecraft course. That was the most fun to this day I've ever been paid to have. It was just ridiculous. And so I just didn't really think that much about it. I'm like, oh, they're they're paying me to run around the woods

[15:42] and blow off exotic weapons and learn how to make improvised explosive. I'm like, yeah, whatever. You know, it was fun. And I didn't really think that much about how it all fit in to the bigger picture, what I was really serving. And I think there are a lot of lessons in this regard for anyone who ever wonders, like, well, you know, why would someone have ever joined the KGB? Or why would you want to be part of the North Korean security services or whatever, not comparing, except in a limited way, say the CIA

[16:12] with one of these foreign intelligence or security services. But all you need is a young guy without a lot of imagination or critical judgment about the role of his country, his government in the world, that kind of thing. And you're looking for some adventure in a decent stable paycheck or whatever. And that's about as much as it takes. I don't think it's more than that. Again, not proud of this. But if I've been Russian, why wouldn't I have joined the equivalent? I'd be at least as heavily, probably not as heavily propagandized. If I'd grown up in the USSR and read Pravda every day, at least in the USSR,

[16:46] then you'd probably was bullshit in America. We don't realize the propaganda is propaganda. So why wouldn't die? It's just people think like, well, I would never join one of those foreign intelligence organizations, but this noble one, which just happens to be my own, I'll join that. Anyway, so that's that's about as much as it was to me. It really wasn't until later and very briefly, I'll tell you what it was. It was my encounter with what was at the time called the blogosphere around probably maybe 2007 or so.

[17:18] I had up until then a steady diet of establishment. Media, not television. I never got my news or information from television, but but The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Economist, the Forest Economic Review, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs. I read all this stuff obsessively, and I thought I was getting a really varied information diet. But I was getting a lot of information, but I was not getting a variety of viewpoints. These are all the same, quite American, America centric viewpoint that I was mainlining.

[17:50] And it wasn't until I encountered the blogosphere, as I say, around 2007, I guess it would have been, which was essentially talking back to establishment media that that was an incredibly eye-opening experience for me that made me just realize this stuff that I was taking for granted as some sort of Oracle of Delphi Ten Commandments, objective truth view of the world was heavily distorted and needed a corrective. And that, to the extent I would describe myself as having any sort of political awakening, it wasn't the CIA.

[18:20] It was quite a few years after, actually. Remember being in the CIA, I'm going to say 12 years or so, and realizing that people and offices for which I had had immense respect as a younger man in my 20s, that people really didn't know what the heck they were talking about. We would go to meetings at the White House and they would say stupid, like patently stupid things like

[18:53] when we cross that border into Iraq tomorrow, the Iraqi people are going to throw flowers at us. And I thought to myself, have you never read history? Do you know nothing about the Middle East? And I said something to my boss, who was the deputy director at the time of the CIA, and he said, no, they don't read history. And they don't know what they're talking about. Yeah, that knowledge of history might interfere with their fantasies. If you don't understand humans,

[19:23] then you'll never understand geopolitics. And I'm not saying that humans are the only factor, but they're the foundational factors. There's systems, but systems are created by humans of humans. You have to have some baseline, accurate understanding of human nature. And the reason, I think, to study history, to learn other languages and live in other cultures is because that's the best way to see the patterns that will reveal the fundamentals of human nature. So this notion that another culture

[19:54] that's primarily governed by another religion, they speak another language, they have a completely different history and frame of reference that they're going to welcome foreigners, soldiers entering their country, overthrowing their government, occupying them, providing all the kind of security, political stability, that sort of thing. It's it's so wrong that I think the kindest thing you could say about it is that it's neurotic. It's it's a massive psychological projection

[20:27] of what you want to believe the way about what you believe about yourself. You're not projecting that onto other people. Do not see you the way you see yourself. And if you know a little bit of history, if you've ever lived abroad, then you'll see that actually people don't really like it when foreign strange looking strange sounding guys with guns are in my country telling me what to do. It doesn't go over well. Just a couple of days after the Israeli bombing of of Iran or the 12 day what they're calling now the 12 day war,

[20:57] Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised address to the Iranian people. Yeah. And if I didn't know better, I would have thought it was a generated comedy. If you didn't know Netanyahu. But he's offering them, you know, as soon as we overthrow the the Ayatollahs and we liberate you and we make you free, we're going to send one hundred experts on water to your country to show you how to dig water wells properly so you can cultivate the desert.

[21:31] It's like, do you do you listen to yourself? How many times did the CIA at all? Make that same kind of speech? We're going to liberate this country. We're going to liberate that country or the other country. They don't want to be liberated because they know we're not liberators. We're occupiers. I remember my own mother saying, I can't believe the Iraqis are fighting us. And I said, are you kidding me, mom? I said, they would rather live under Saddam Hussein than have to deal with foreign invaders and occupiers in their land.

[22:06] This is just a thing. Ask a cop. Why are domestic disputes so dangerous to interfere with? Husband and wife are going out at hammer and tongs. The husband even be beating the wife, but it's inside the house. Now, when an outside presence shows up, you can get those two people who a second ago hated each other. But the one thing they'll agree on is that this has nothing to do with you. You're hostile. You're the enemy. It's dangerous. And that's just a microcosm of all these things. And these are all people who speak the same language. They look the same, whatever, from the same city.

[22:36] Multiply all the differences, doubts and suspicions. So these days, as you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, I make my living writing fiction, mostly novels, some short stories, some screenplays. And I learned a technique from a guy who who writes and speaks a lot on the crafters storytelling. His name is Robert McKee, really smart and insightful guy. I've learned a ton from him. And he has this exercise to help people understand their characters. He says, if you're trying to get in the heads, as you should be, of your characters,

[23:07] you don't ask what would I do and you don't ask what would the character do. You ask, what would I do if I were this character? It's a hard question to ask. You have to project out the empathy you feel is based on your own experience in the world, but then place it inside someone else's world view. But if you can get that alchemy, you can really get a good understanding of what goes on in someone else's head, their world view, their mind, their experience.

[23:38] And the the paucity of this exercise by our US foreign policy establishment or the blob or whatever you want to call it is jaw dropping to me. So as just one quick example, NATO expansion over the I call it metastasis, but but if I'm happy to use a more neutral term like expansion or enlargement or whatever people prefer, but the numbers don't lie at the end of the Cold War. NATO is I think 15 member countries and now it's I think 32 or 34

[24:08] following Finland and Sweden, so more than doubled in size. And it didn't just absorb new countries. It actually flipped the entire other team, the Warsaw Pact and many of the former Soviet republics all joined NATO. So it wasn't like the other team just disbanded and went home. The other team actually joined the NATO team. It kept getting closer and closer to the borders of Russia. Russia kept saying, I mean, again, again, this is all documented. The Russian government was saying, stop, you're making us uncomfortable. And the response to this among the US foreign policy

[24:41] established like Richard Haas and Michael McFall and these sort of solipsistic America centric people is like, this is bullshit. The Russian government is not upset. They know we're a defensive alliance. They know we have goodness in our hearts, that sort of thing. There's some fundamental flaws with this. This is a methodological approach. No one sees you the way you see yourself. Start with that. Everything you know about yourself, all the slack you cut yourself, other people don't do that. And the farther away, maybe your spouse, maybe your family

[25:12] and your closest friends have a similar view of you as the one you have of yourself. But farther out than that, no, people don't see you the way you see yourself. So even if it were true and it empirically is not true, that NATO were a purely defensive alliance. You can't ask a government on the other side of the world that said a history of techie relations with America to see this so-called defensive alliance in the same way you do. So if you want to see it accurately, the question is, all right. Well, how would I see NATO expansion if I were the Russian government?

[25:45] Well, how did I see it when the USSR placed nuclear missiles in Cuba close to my... Oh, I didn't like that at all, did I? No, you didn't. You actually committed an act of war. You did. You called it a quarantine, but it was a naval blockade. That's a black letter, act of war to stop them. That's what humans do when people on the other side of the world start encroaching, especially militarily on their own territory. By the way, we're doing it now. There was a Chinese company operating a port on the Panama Canal.

[26:17] The Trump administration had a freakout about it. I'm not saying the freakout is good or bad. That's not even my point. This was a private company that had too much influence in the minds of the American government on critical port infrastructure close to America. And we've got very irate about it. That's just what humans do. So understanding this is like, look, of course, Russia should understand that we're purely a defensive alliance because that's my understanding. That's a bit much to ask.

[26:48] They're not, they're telling you they don't like it. And it's natural for them not to like it. You didn't like it when they did it to you. You wouldn't like it if anybody else did it to you. So don't do it. Think of them as having their own Monroe Doctrine. OK, you have a Monroe Doctrine. They kind of have one too. Just stop what you're doing. You're going to provoke them. But our foreign policy establishment can't look at the world that way because we project this view we have of ourselves onto everyone else. And it includes us from seeing other countries, cultures,

[27:18] other actors as accurately as we need to if we're if we're not going to blow up the world. Very this kind of very intellectual assessment of the of the state of the country in the state of the world was unusual in my experience in the directorate of operations, especially. You might get analysts sitting around a table saying, you know, hey, you know, what if or I talked to so and so at the White House and I think he's an idiot, something in operations. It was more common for us to do as we were told.

[27:53] Or if we were fast movers, we would have these these operational planning sessions where someone comes up with a with an idea. Maybe it's even a farfetched idea and you come up with plan A, plan B, plan C, maybe even plan D, just in case things go down the toilet. What was your experience in the directorate of operations? Were were there others who were sort of questioning the direction of foreign policy or some of the more strategic decisions coming out of the White House, the Pentagon?

[28:25] I didn't experience anything like that. In fairness, I was extremely junior. I mean, I was a career trainee and then went through barely even. I don't even remember now, but you remember that you like you cycle through different desk jobs within the directorate of operations. We called it. Yeah, I don't remember that term, but but it was just it was actually I thought a smart program and then I know I did one stint with the D.I., the directorate of intelligence, because the idea is, look, you should you're gathered, you're you're in the D.O. You're gathering intelligence and you should know how that intelligence is

[28:57] used, what the analysts do with it. I think this is just this is smart. You have your specialty, but you should know how the whole system works. Sure, it's funny. It's true in Hollywood writing, too, something that I've dabbled in a little bit. Like, look, if you're going to, if you're a writer, you should focus on the craft of writing, but it wouldn't hurt for you to know the way the whole production works. What do actors do? Read some books on acting. So, you know how the whole system worked. That'll help you. So I think they did a good job of setting up the career trainee program. But I just wasn't even remotely senior enough to, you know, to have

[29:31] meetings with policymakers, that kind of thing. I will say that when I was when I did my rotation through the D.I., actually, was at the Soviet desk. This was 1989 or 1990. And I I don't want to overstate because, look, it was the D.I. is big and the Soviet division was also big. And how much of a picture could I have had of all the facets of this organization, probably not that that big picture.

[30:03] But from what I saw, I wouldn't say there was a lot of outside the box thinking about what was going on in the Soviet Union and how we should deal with it. I felt it was pretty orthodox, especially in retrospect. And I'll give you one. I'll tell you just one anecdote, which was one of those things that became emblematic of like, oh, I don't know if I'm going to I don't know if I'm going to have a good satisfying time here. My superior at the person I reported to at the D.I.

[30:34] tasked me with writing an analysis of the of the new Gorbachev era Soviet Constitution. Now, I didn't speak Russian. I'd never visited the Soviet Union. You know, I took a lot of history courses in college and read a lot of books, but that's about as much as far as my expertise went. But, you know, I was game 25 years old, your tax dollars at work. And I said, sure, I'll read this document, the translation and try to share my insights for whatever they might be worth. And one of the things that struck me about the new Gorbachev era Constitution

[31:08] was that exactly like the Stalin era Constitution, the Gorbachev, the new Gorbachev Constitution, guaranteed freedom of the press in Russia in the Soviet Union. And I didn't think that the paper guarantee a freedom of the press could be worth all that much because after all the Soviet Constitution going back to Stalin guaranteed freedom of the press. So in my report, I said, well, the fact that this new Constitution guarantees freedom of the press itself cannot really alone mean that much. Right. Without some sort of cultural changes or other changes, political changes

[31:40] in the society, it's just a piece of paper with words on it. They've always had it before and it's never meant anything. And I thought, you know, that's a fair point, just kind of a common sense, logical point, even if you don't know very much. And I didn't about the Soviet Union. Anyway, handed that into my superior and she came back with it a day later whenever it was and said, so I see you don't think that the new Gorbachev guarantee a freedom of the press is very important. And I said to her what I just said to you, so well, I'm not saying it's not important. I'm just saying that alone, you know, they've always had that before.

[32:12] There have to be some other otherwise just doesn't mean that very much by itself. And there's a pause and she's like, but but the Constitution now guarantees freedom of the press. And I'm like, OK, maybe I'm not saying it clearly. I'm like, right, yes, it does. But the old Constitution also guaranteed freedom of the press, but there wasn't freedom of the press, so blah, blah, blah. And she just couldn't get it. And I I remember that movie. This is Spinal Tap. No, one of the greatest. The scene, the famous scene where Rob Reiner is interviewing a guy about his and the guy who's just one goes to 11. Right. Well, it doesn't mean it's louder.

[32:43] I mean, it's just like 11 gradations instead of 10. But the absolute volume might be the same. Right. And the guy keeps going, but this one goes to 11. And it's like, you just can't understand. And so that was that was my exchange about the Gorbachev era Constitution. So so I don't know. Maybe I wasn't explaining myself well, but there did seem to be a certain way of looking at the things and at the D.I. And my experience at the time, what they believed was that Glasnaus and Perestroika were a major thing. And I don't deny that they were, especially I think in retrospect,

[33:15] it was quite major. But I don't think they were interested in anything that might have caused anyone to pause and say, not saying it's not major, but there must be more that's going on other than this document, which in this respect is the same as the old document, which meant nothing. They just didn't really want to hear all that. I think there was probably a kind of group think that was like, hey, no, no, no, Perestroika Glasnaus, the new Constitution, it's all this fresh wind blowing through the Soviet Union. We don't want to hear anything that might question that, even if it only

[33:47] is not even questioning it. It's more like, let's just find the thing that does matter. This document isn't alone. It anyway, so that was that was my experience at the D.I. But I never really had a higher level experience dealing with policymakers. See, in that experience, as you've related it, tells me that you were perfectly suited to be a D.I. leader. Right. It would have been that kind of curiosity that they should have wanted in leadership positions.

[34:20] Well, I like to think so, of course, it's self important to say so. But but I do think it's clear that it's my nature to question. I don't say question everything. Some people say like question everything. I'm like, you're not going to get anything done. Like there have to be a few, you know, but but I do. Summertime and the living is easy. Am I right, John? That is one of the best parts of Summer Allen. Living really does feel easier. You're about to travel. Good thing you've got a couple of quince pieces going with you. They are as relaxed and comfortable as I want to feel.

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[42:22] leadership to apply a new situation or what they what they were learning about a new situation to the old way of doing business? Why couldn't they make that transition? Yeah, I think this is you're asking great questions, John. I think which people you should even if you don't even if we don't agree on the answer or the answers, these are really important questions. And in this case, obviously, it's going to be a lot of things. For one is that generations of Americans pummeled with the notion that the Soviet

[42:56] Union is evil and dedicated to the destruction of capitalism, free markets, freedom, democracy, the West. And if you pump that stuff out for long enough, it's just it's hard for people to start seeing it differently. That's one thing. Another thing is if you think about what a steward or white called in his book the paranoid style in American politics, there is a deep strain of paranoia in in American politics. Always been the case. You could see it today in in full fever.

[43:29] But but it is one of my rubrics for understanding the behavior of people in general in the blob in particular is I call it cynical versus clinical. And it's hard to tell the difference. But I'm like, is they doing this knowingly? It's just propaganda. The establishment needs an enemy. It's useful to point to overseas. Well, you know, you think you guys have it hard because we continue to bleed you and like you have increasingly shitty jobs and both you have to work and you still can't even afford a house and, you know, medical and infrastructure. And it's all getting worse and worse because we now have a trillion

[44:02] dollar military budget and all this kind of stuff. But if you think you've got it that look overseas. Now that's really bad. But at least you've got freedom, freedom, freedom. And don't you forget it, Mr. That's useful. So that's what I would call cynical. But then some of it is clinical that this is the kind of stuff that got expressed in Stanley Kubrick's movie, Doctor Strange. You know, the fluoridated water, all that kind of stuff, the precious bodily fluids. There are people who just they just they need their clinically paranoid. And the paranoia comes from within, but it needs to anchor itself to some

[44:34] ostensible external force. And here we've got Russia and the Soviet Union. So I think there's that thing too. And if you think of it, the American government always needs an enemy. I mean, at least since World War Two, we've just always had one. We had the Cold War, so that was the Soviet Union. But then the Soviet Union went away. Well, shit, what are we going to do now? Thank God for Al-Qaeda, new enemy. But now we've got the threat of non-state actors. And then that for a little while, they tried a few different enemies when Al-Qaeda as a brand was getting was getting a little tired.

[45:06] And, you know, people used to say this, there'd be some outrage. Well, now what's happening? Petraeus and the US foreign policy establishment, Donald Trump, they're all welcoming this Al-Qaeda guy like like nothing ever happened. I mean, really, you couldn't write 1984 today. You couldn't say we've always been at war with East Asia because it wouldn't even be satire. So anyway, Al-Qaeda started to get a little stale. But then thank God we had ISIS or Isola, whatever we were calling at the time. And then for a while, they broke out something new. They called it the Coruscant Group, and that was supposed to be really.

[45:37] But I think it sounded too much like Kardashian or something. So it was a brand name. It just wasn't getting any traction. So they abandoned that. And then there was a lot about China and there still is to some degree, but it's complicated because there's economic interdependence with China. And so then we just resurrected Russia, provoked them into a war that we would have started long before the Russian government ever did. You know, we wouldn't have waited until the foreign military lines got that close before taking dramatic action. And so now we provoked Russia into doing exactly what we wanted, which was to

[46:13] to launch a war that we couldn't use an excuse for. Yeah, I see. We told you they were evil. And by the way, this isn't even. I mean, it is to some degree my own thinking. But don't take my word for it. George Cannon wrote about this in 1997 in an op-ed in the New York Times. He said all this stuff is like you're going to provoke them into doing the thing that they don't want to do. And then you're going to say, see, we told you they're irredeemably evil. They did the thing we kept telling you that we're going and you're going to use that as an excuse to gin up World War three. Stop the madness. And exactly, right. Which is probably one of the reasons why he was pushed out of the State Department

[46:45] and and marginalized despite the fact that he was probably one of the most or should have been one of the most celebrated thinkers on these issues, long term issues of American foreign policy. Of course. Well, George, it's not like he was the father of our whole containment policy. I know, right? Russian and served as America's ambassador to the Soviet Union. But what would he actually have known about any of that? Which he wrote when he was 26 years old. And it's incredible. It's incredible. I think intelligence gets its due from the leadership that it is supposed to serve.

[47:18] And the reason I ask that is because sometimes, at least in my experience, it was the opposite that was that was a truth. For example, in the run up to the Iraq War, the intelligence did not show in any way that there was any connection, no matter how remote between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And so the Bush administration under the leadership of Dick Cheney and with his his friends and underlings at the Pentagon,

[47:50] they just created a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Yeah. So what do you think about that? That symbiosis between the two? I think you just you just pointed it out yourself that. It's very sad. It's tragic, actually. But. What the policymakers do with intelligence is probably primarily determined by whether the intelligence is useful to their existing designs.

[48:25] If it's useful, then they'll use it. They'll say, look, you can see it right here. This is the evidence in favor of the proposition of the proposition is usually that we need to go to war or something like that. But if the intelligence doesn't support that proposition or worse, if it contradicts it, then they'll find a way around it. They'll come up with a team B on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, for example, or they'll otherwise marginalize it. This is it's funny. This is a specific manifestation of human behavior. I've seen it again and again.

[48:56] I'm seeing it even see it every day, actually, in political in a political context. We don't realize this about ourselves, but we are outcome oriented creatures. There's an outcome we psychologically or emotionally crave that we've already decided on. And then we rework everything to get ourselves to that predetermined outcome. And one of the ways one of the things we rework. Is the principle we choose.

[49:28] Will it get us there? So if you don't want to go to war, there are a lot of reasons not to. I mean, the whole history of how have our wars gone since World War Two? Which are the successful ones really? It's hard to name them. I mean, you mentioned Grenada. You could mention these extremely small operations, which they probably didn't do very much one way or the other. But anything sizable, this has been catastrophe after catastrophe.

[49:59] Most recently, say in Afghanistan, 20 years, thousands of dead Americans. It's just the dead that doesn't even include the wounded, the burned, the blind, the brain damage, the traumatized, the orphaned kids. It doesn't even include that number, not to mention all the Afghanis who were killed or maimed or all this kind of stuff. Twenty years to keep the Taliban out of power while we were there. And the day we left, they were right back. It accomplished at best nothing, nothing. Even Osama bin Laden, when we finally caught up with him,

[50:31] he was living in Pakistan at the time, so nothing. That's what you could say about America's wars. So if you don't want to war, it's easy to come up with lots of reasons not to. It's like, look, these things tend not to work out the way we want to. They're expensive. We're going to be we're going to we're consigning huge numbers of Americans and innocent people, civilians to their deaths. Let's not do it. But if you do want the war, then there's just this smorgasbord of reasons to have it. The high level general one, which I always hear the Richard Haas's and the Michael

[51:03] McFaul's, I think these guys must have had terrible childhoods. They must have been bullied. They must have had feelings of inadequacy. I don't know what, but it's always the credibility argument. You can always break that out. If we don't stop Russia in Ukraine, then China will invade Taiwan, because that's all other countries do. They just look at what we're doing and they make all their strategic, the most consequential strategic calculus. Should I invade Taiwan or not? I don't know. What am I? What is America doing in in Ukraine now? It's it's again, the kind word would be neurotic, but you can come up with all these reasons if you want the war.

[51:35] If you don't like the intelligence, you question it. Who gave it the intelligence? What source? What method? Was this a triple reviewed scientific peer or peer reviewed study? Oh, no, it wasn't. Oh, it was a guy. Well, it's a bit as intelligence though has been accurate before. Yeah, but you can't. Past success is not a predictor of future success. So I don't know, you know, you said he's been he's been accurate before, but can you really prove that he was accurate this time? And you just keep moving the goalpost just to change in the principle, demanding a higher and ultimately impossible burden of proof. And then nobody can meet that. And then you're like, oh, we better go to war and you get the war you want.

[52:08] So that is a thing I think that goes on all the time. It's just endemic between policymakers on the one hand and intelligence professionals on the other. Why is it endemic in this field? Because it's the way we're wired as humans. And then add to that the revolving door between government and industry, between government and the think tanks, even government and the political parties. Yes. And it just makes it worse. Yeah. And there you get there, you get into the more cynical

[52:38] aspects of it because, yeah, I mean, when you think just the Pentagon's budget is now a trillion dollars, it's mind blowing. And when you think about the structures that have been created around within and around the military industrial complex, it's unfathomable. Millions of people depend on this structure for their living, for their status, their feeling of self importance.

[53:09] It's funny. I think I've been thinking about over the over the years is what happens when you create a distortion in a system? Initially, the rest of the system has to adapt to the distortion in some ways. But eventually, once that adaptation has happened, the distortion is now part of the system. And all those adaptations will support the distortion because they've come to depend on it. I think like drug prohibition would be a good example of this. When you think about how much money is spent, how many institutions, just in terms of border security,

[53:41] law enforcement, disierry, how many people we have to imprison for drug offenses, you're talking about and then you get a knock on effect in neighboring countries that get destabilized because there's so much money being made and so much military capability on the part of drug gangs that then what do we have to do? Well, we've got to send military aid and form men in material to these other countries. There are fortunes being made because of this distortion. Now try getting rid of the distortion.

[54:12] And introducing it might have been a little tricky. Now try getting rid of it. Good luck. It's part of the whole system now. That's right. That's right. I wanted to end with your thoughts on whether we even need to have spies. You know, technology has so advanced where, you know, we're not we're not looking to DARPA, for example, to provide the next generation of, you know, offensive technology. DARPA is working on five generations ahead of where we are today

[54:48] in terms of offensive technology. Some Americans would argue, some political leaders would argue that that human intelligence is unreliable because it's human. Yeah, sure. And that our money would be better spent at NSA, for example. Yeah. Or at the State Department or in in following the foreign media. Yeah. Do you believe that there's still a role for human intelligence? That's a super, super interesting question.

[55:20] And look, if you like read a book like Tim Winer's Legacy of Ashes, you'll think, no, I mean, it's worse than useless. It's actually pernicious. I mean, the CIA and the so-called intelligence community, that's one of those things. I'm like, why do they call it a community? It's so friendly. You know, I think of it as the intelligence apparatus, but whatever. In general, and I did have a top secret clearance like you. So I read the cable traffic and I have some notion of, you know,

[55:50] what what's top secret, how valuable is it? I do think that we would get. You would have a perfectly accurate and actionable foundation for a useful approach to foreign countries without any intelligence at all, without anything top secret, without a top secret clearance, nothing. If you have a curious mind and a good, solid view of human nature

[56:24] as shaped by culture, I think you would have more than enough to conduct successful relations with other countries. So a lot of what gets produced, high level stuff, strategic stuff, I actually think is just make work at best. And it is pernicious because because it gets used or abused by policymakers in the service or whatever policies they've already decided upon for their own reasons. So that kind of stuff, I would I would just excise it.

[56:54] Tactical stuff is maybe different. Like if if you wanted to know how does the Pakistani government manage the command and control of its nuclear arsenal? Like if there's ever a problem there and the government falls, what's going to happen to those loose nukes? Where are they? How are they operated? I don't think it would be so bad for our policy makers to have an understanding of that kind of issue. But that doesn't really inform like, well, what should be our policy

[57:26] toward Pakistan generally? How should we conduct relations with the Pakistani government? You don't need the secret information for that stuff. I think it would be healthy if more policymakers realize that just because it's stamped top secret doesn't make it more valuable. It often doesn't even make it secret. I think you're exactly right. I hope you enjoyed my chat with Barry as much as I did. And if you haven't read his excellent books, you owe it to yourself to at least sample him. The odds are you'll get hooked and you're welcome.

[57:57] You'll find links to Barry's Amazon page in this episode's show notes. Until next time, thanks for listening and don't forget to like, share, review or comment on the podcast wherever you're catching us. I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costard and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

[58:44] This podcast is a costard and touchstone production.
