[00:00] And we had a pot. I mean, I'm not exaggerating when I say they made a pot of venison stew like this, and these guys ate until they practically burst. >> Oh my god, that's great. I I didn't think I was going to be skinning a deer tonight as part of work. >> [laughter] >> Oh, man. Was that uh you And you said that was in a rural part of the United States? >> Yeah. Was it near Virginia? No. No. >> No, it was out in the sticks. So, one could assume that maybe some training operations were going on. One could make that assumption. >> [laughter]
[00:32] >> You know what was so funny to me? >> [snorts] >> We had a break. We had a break and it was part of it was classroom instruction. So, we had a break. So, I go into the men's room. A whole bunch of guys went to the men's room. It was all men. And it was one of the toilets, the urinals were these ones that flushed themselves. So, you know, you take a leak, you walk away, it flushes itself, you wash your hands. The Jordanians are standing there, they're all done. And they're like pressing the pipe and tapping the pipe and then they're
[01:02] punching the pipe cuz they couldn't figure out how to flush it. And they hadn't like like they're still hanging out. They're just standing there with their things hanging out, like trying to And I'm trying to explain to them you can walk away. It It flushes itself. They just couldn't And then finally the the one who was the colonel, he's like, "You Americans, you're so advanced. How do you have these things? How does it know that you're not there anymore?" I said it's got a little thing in there. I don't know. I don't know. I said we've
[01:33] had these for a little while. It just knows. It knows when you're when you're all done. That's great. So, um what's uh not specific, you don't have to say a specific intelligence agency, but is there any like joint training that stands out? Like what kind of stuff would you guys do with other friendly intelligence services? >> It depends on the service cuz some are really good at some stuff and really bad at others. Um the first job that I had that I came back where I when I came back from Athens but before 9/11 was I
[02:04] uh I was in an instructor in a group that that trained intelligence services around the world in counterterrorism operations. So, because of my Arabic and my field experience in the Middle East, I handled all the Middle East. But, that was specifically counterterrorism operations, you know, busting down doors or if you can't bust down the door, you put a charge on the door and blow it open and we spent weeks weeks doing surveillance and counter-surveillance. So, everybody
[02:35] I mean, just as a rule of thumb, the CIA will work with with any country that's friendly. And even some that aren't friendly so long as you have joint interests, you know? I've always maintained, for example, that there are areas that we can work with the Russians on right now, even in a state of war. Such as? Counterterrorism, counternarcotics, counterproliferation. Definitely. So, yeah, we started talking about
[03:06] started talking about ground branch um a little bit before. So, I guess just to kind of start start off there. Like, what what is what has been your experience with ground branch and special activities and whatever they're calling it now? Honestly, my experience with all of those special activities uh groups was seeing them in the in the office and saying, "Hope you had a good weekend." Those guys, first of all, almost none of them are career CIA officers. They had long successful
[03:37] careers in special forces of some sort, the Navy SEALs, the Army Rangers, you know, whatever. Delta Force. And at first, post-9/11, they were seconded to the CIA for, you know, quick strike operations. And then as the years went by, the agency decided to make many of them official. So, you put them under global services or special activities division or counterterrorism center. And um and they are actually
[04:09] CIA employees. Others have retired from the military and are at CIA as contractors. So, it's a much more efficient way of of bringing them on board. But what they do is so secret. I mean that the nuts and bolts of it is so secret that they just don't talk about that stuff. You know what they're doing, I know what they're doing, everybody in the office knows what they're doing. Nobody mentions it. Mhm. Can you explain like what it is that they actually do to
[04:39] people? Yeah, the job is to kill or kidnap uh and render anybody who might be a threat to the United States, to an American citizen, or to an American installation. Now, at the top of the food chain, yeah, we we want those guys to be out there killing the Osama bin Ladens and the Ayman al-Zawahiris of the world. We want them dead.
[05:09] On the other hand, you know, mistakes get made. And you've got people being snatched off the street and rendered to third countries and then tortured in those third countries only then to have that country's intelligence service come back to the CIA and say, "Look, this is the wrong guy." And here you've been torturing him mercilessly for the last 9 months, which has happened repeatedly. So, on the one hand, it's it's great. Like, you know, who was it that said it was it was Jose Rodriguez, the former
[05:40] deputy director for operations, that you need somebody who's willing to um who's willing to take these tough decisions, right? On the other hand, as as American government officials, we live by the rule of law and by the Constitution. And so you also have to protect the Constitution. And just going out there wantonly murdering people and kidnapping people and torturing people,
[06:11] that's not upholding the Constitution. So when I when I think about ground branch or special activities division, I think about, like you said, all those retired special operations guys, ex-Delta Force guys, ex-SEAL Team 6 guys that basically go there to do the same exact [ __ ] that they were doing, Mhm. you know, a special operations mission set. Like, put like you said before, put a charge on a door, blow it open, shoot people in the face, and leave. But then you hear about things like we'll get into the Mossad, but that, you know, they that one, it was Khaled Mashal, the
[06:44] attempted uh assassination in Jordan, Mhm. where they sprayed him with poison. But like so, my question is, at the CIA, is it How is special activities structured? Do they have like specialized units? There are two different special activities components. One is its own division within the CIA's Directorate of Operations called the Special Activities Division. Before 9/11, that's that that were the that was the only one, right? And they would go do things in
[07:15] the cover of darkness that nobody talked about. Then after 9/11, the Counterterrorism Center created its own special activities group. So these were guys that were on loan to CTC who would go out and specifically target terrorists, people who were planning operations against us. I left before they could really figure out who was going to do what over the long term. So, I don't know how it's
[07:45] structured. I do know that both organizations still exist. And a lot of what the special activities guys do in CTC is not assassinations, it's kidnappings. So, you know, it's it's parachuting in somewhere, stealing a van, and snatching somebody off the street. And then you meet the helicopter at the at the departure point and then just fly the guy to wherever it is you're going to fly him. It's very dangerous, very very
[08:17] dangerous work. Cuz you're you're not snatching people off the street in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, for example. You're snatching them off the street in Benghazi or Khartoum or, you know, Karachi or something. So, a lot of moving parts, very very dangerous. And if CIA people are being killed, we wouldn't even know it because they get their star on the wall of honor and there's no name attached to the star. So, we we don't really know what's going on with these groups. So, you said what um people were on loan
[08:50] to CTC from special activities? No, from the military. >> Oh. Mhm. And would that be like um I forget what it's called, the Omega program? Do you have Do you Does that ring a bell? Mhm. I think [clears throat] that was uh >> my time. So, that was when the CIA worked with uh JSOC components. So, I think it was I think it was mainly SEAL Team Six. I want to say it wasn't uh Delta Force, but JSOC and the CIA worked together and You know, I will tell you in CTC at the time, post-9/11,
[09:21] picture picture this. It's a big bullpen. Got 100 150 people all in cubicles. So many people, I said this before, that we had to name the aisles, right? So, there's like Bin Laden Boulevard. Seriously, Hezbollah Highway. So, you could tell people, "Oh, I I I sit at the intersection of whatever." Um and then around the perimeter of that big bullpen are all the private offices. You have the chief CTC, deputy chief for ops, deputy chief for analysis, deputy chief for military affairs, and then the
[09:52] group chiefs, and all the big muckety-mucks have their own small private offices. Once those guys on loan from, say, SEAL Team Six came to the office, they never interacted with any of us. I mean, not even so much as a good morning. And so, I mean, we we kind of knew what these guys were there to do. We knew who they were. They just appeared one day, you know, in the weeks after 9/11, and then they would vanish for a week at a time or two weeks at a time, and then
[10:22] come back whispering to each other and not interacting with you. So, it was pretty easy to figure out who they were and what they were up to. I want to talk to you about CTC specifically, but not related to CTC necessarily, was there a point when you were at the agency after 9/11 where you saw it turning into a paramilitary organization? The day after 9/11. Seriously. The day after 9/11, Cofer Black an hour after the attacks began, Cofer
[10:54] Black stood on a chair right outside of his office and it was dead silent. There were hundreds of us. Silence. And he said, "Today we're at war and we're all going to have to fight. Not all of us are going to come home. So, if you want to walk out now, walk out and no one will think less of you." One woman walked out. And then her branch went to
[11:24] went to the deputy director for analysis and said, "We don't have confidence in her leadership." And so, she was removed. But, uh I mean, everybody volunteered. It was literally within 24 hours that we began this transition into a paramilitary force. There was no more uh focus on recruiting spies to steal secrets, right? It was just about destroying Al-Qaeda. Destroying it permanently.
[11:56] And to tell you the truth, among core Al-Qaeda, that that core of Al-Qaeda that was based in Afghanistan, they were destroyed by Christmas. Right? The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, um uh years before I joined it, of course, came out with a with a study that probably should have been classified and wasn't. And they said that by the end of 2001, there were 25 active Al-Qaeda members still in Afghanistan. 25.
[12:27] It had been destroyed. And everybody else who had made their way across the border into Pakistan, we were capturing. So, it was done. Now, of course, there was Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, there was Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Levant, there was Al-Qaeda in North Africa. Uh they were all in Al-Qaeda inspired, but but weren't coordinating operations. And and also, of course, we hadn't yet killed either bin Laden or Zawahiri. But in terms of Al-Qaeda as a fighting force, it was done by Christmas of '01.
[13:01] Did you Did you happen to see, um did you happen to see the bin Laden documentary? Yeah, on Netflix? Yes. Dude, I uh I I can't tell you how many people reached out to me and were like, "Oh, did you see Did you see this? Did you see this?" And I was like, "No, I didn't see it." And then I watched it, and it was cool. It wasn't necessarily any new information, except for one thing, talking about CTC. I didn't know that uh the cover quote, "The flies on eyeballs" thing, was at Camp David, and that's how he got the nod over Rumsfeld and the DOD. That is I didn't know that. That's a pretty cool story. That is a cool story and everybody
[13:33] picked it up at the time. Cofer I always had deep respect for Cofer. We can certainly have disagreements on policy, but man, what a patriot. Um Cofer meant he was going to see flies on Bin Laden's eyeballs when he was done. And um you know, you have to you have to remember, too, that this was the greatest intelligence failure in American history. 3,000 Americans died because we didn't do our jobs.
[14:04] And so there was a deep desire for revenge after 9/11, which I understood fully. And that's why, like everybody else in the building, I kept volunteering over and over to go to Afghanistan and do whatever was required of me. Anything. Anything. And so in the end, you know, we all we all had our roles. But Cofer I was glad that Cofer uh headed the effort rather than Rumsfeld because if if Rumsfeld had headed it,
[14:35] it would have been a completely different landscape in Afghanistan. Yeah. There's a couple things that are in my head right now, but I have a feeling people would really want me to ask you about this. Did you Did you happen to see Sean Ryan on Tucker? You did? Okay. So, for people that maybe haven't, he he talks about um he interviewed this guy that was a CIA and FBI agent that is an asset. He Sean had him on his show. And I didn't I didn't watch the full episode, but just for context, let's say this guy was um his story and his
[15:08] credentials were, I don't know, Al-Qaeda. Let's say that, right? And let's say that he's Middle Eastern based and that's where his story lives. And at one point, he says something to Sean about it was either the Russians trying to proliferate nuclear material or bring nuclear material somewhere and it was something alarming related to Russia. And Shawn talks on Tucker about he's like, well, I looked at the guy and I asked him immediately I was like, when is the last time that you had contact with the agency? And apparently this guy's story was that
[15:38] he got burned by the agency. The agency [ __ ] him. That's what he claims. So he says, well, no, it was, you know, when they screwed me. That was the very last time. And Shawn goes, well, I'll tell you what I'm thinking. If the CIA found out that you were going to come on this podcast, obviously the Shawn Ryan Show has quite a bit of reach and he's a uh I think there's a difference between a show having a lot of reach and the show's host being reputable, which in my opinion Shawn is. He's very reputable. Um Yeah, he's the he's the real McCoy. Yes. I'm dude, I modeled this whole show off of him. I respect him a lot. I think he's the goat. Anyway, um
[16:10] he asked the guy, when's the last time you had contact with the agency because Good question. he seemed he felt like he just threw that Russia thing in there. And it was totally out of place. And the theory would be like, if the agency said, okay, you're going on this podcast, say whatever you want, just work in this one thing. And that got the wheels turning in my head. >> insightful. I just hadn't thought about it that way. Like you would think there people claim other famous CIA officers are plants. I won't say who. >> [laughter] >> Uh we don't need to go there, but just
[16:42] that one nugget. Mhm. What do you think about that? I think that's a brilliant insight. And I could absolutely see it. 100% absolutely see it. Yes. Yes. You know, people talk about Operation Mockingbird and and the the CIA's influence over the media. They don't need to recruit media figures anymore because the American media just will gladly take whatever the the CIA gives them and
[17:13] they're they'll run with it. They'll just gist a a CIA press release and call it call it news. So, yeah, you know, a friend of mine Jason Leopold. I don't know if you know Jason. He's a He's an investigative journalist with Bloomberg. He started off at the LA Times. He went to Vice and a couple of other different places. This guy is absolutely brilliant. He's a gifted writer. He's a dogged investigator. And breaks big stories. He's the one who broke the Hillary Clinton email server
[17:43] story. And the way he did it, the way he does it every time is he files these gigantic Freedom of Information Act requests. Knowing that the agency's never going to respond within the 60 days or 90 days or whatever it is. And so he sues them every time. And he wins every time. And so he filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for all correspondence between the CIA's Office of Public Affairs
[18:15] and all American journalists, period. From this date to that date. And they didn't respond and he sued and the judge ruled in his favor and they had to just turn over everything. And he found such interesting information. He found first there was a um a reporter who wrote a story that was a little bit anti-CIA. And so the CIA emailed him and said, "You better not publish this. If you
[18:46] publish this, so help me God, you will never be invited to the Christmas party ever again and we will not comment on any of your stories." And so he withdrew. They don't need to recruit the guy to kill the story. They just threaten him. Another thing that he found was Ken Dilanian, who is the chief national security correspondent at NBC News and MSNBC. He was writing articles about the agency. And then he was sending the articles to the agency for clearance before he sent them to his own editor.
[19:18] That is absolutely unacceptable. So, they don't need to recruit anybody in the media. They already own everybody in the media. And if you're anti-agency and you're not working for a well-funded media outlet, uh you're screwed cuz you're just not going to be able to get your message out there. That's why we're so fortunate to have people like Matt Taibbi, for example, who's able to get his message out thanks to Substack. You know, we need we need a thousand Matt Taibbis, not these weaklings who
[19:49] are just going to take whatever the CIA gives them and just it and put their name on the byline. And then we find ourselves propagandized by the agency. I mean, that's the thing, man. Now that I'm thinking about it, if you're an independent podcaster and like me, I am my team. I don't have a team. I don't have a team of producers like Tucker to try to verify That's right. >> prior. So, first of all, I would say the onus is on people individuals that listen to what they listen to to decide what they want to believe. That needs to be number
[20:20] one. Uh let me interrupt you on that point cuz that's a very, very important point that I hope everybody takes to heart. You can't trust anybody. And so, you have to trust yourself. And the only way you can trust yourself is to consume everything. You know, I get up in the morning, people, friends of mine, accuse me of being too mainstream. And I'm actually not mainstream. But, you have to know what the mainstream is saying so that you can refute it. So, as
[20:50] soon as I wake up in the morning, I read the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal. And then I go to CNN, Fox, the Guardian, a couple of others. I read the Greek papers just cuz I'm Greek and I have an interest in it. And then I go to the blogs and the substacks and stuff like that. You have to consume everything and have confidence in your own intellect. So, you can read something and say, "Uh that's [ __ ] That's just not true." And then you read something else, you say, "That's plausible. That makes
[21:21] sense. I'm going to watch that issue." Because who you going to believe? You're going to believe Ken Dilanian? Right? I'm not. You're going to believe the Washington Post? I like uh Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick, but then that's pretty much it. There maybe are one or two people at the New York Times. Nobody at the LA Times anymore. So, you you've got to be confident in your own ability to discern what's true or what's not true, or you just get overwhelmed with what is likely to turn out to be
[21:53] propaganda. Yeah. Yeah, dude. I mean, shoot. I don't I don't know how to uh you know, I think guest selection as a podcast host is an important one. You can't just platform anybody, but at the same time >> the truth? there's an argument to be made that again, I think, you know, each individual draws the line as you do, you have a show. Um and you know, it's for you or I to say where that line is, but at the end of the day, you know, information is out there. Make up your mind on your own. Yeah, that's it. Like like uh we talked about Scott Horton a
[22:25] minute ago. Um I've become something of a like a semi-regular on the Piers Morgan uh show. And uh the last time I was on, it was like a last-minute I think cuz somebody dropped out. So, they said, "Can you come on in 15 minutes?" I said, "Sure." So, I I log on and I see Scott and I was like, "Oh, thank God, Scott's here. Okay." So, this is going to be a serious discussion. Yeah. So, he wasn't scheduled to be Like he's like a fill-in, you mean? Or Yeah, he and I were both fill-ins, but as soon as I saw Scott Horton, I thought, "Okay, this is going to be a serious
[22:55] intellectual conversation." Do you know anything I think it was Scott that mentioned this. Um >> [sighs and gasps] >> it might have been Scott or Darrell Cooper, actually. I which Okay, I don't I don't know what Darrell Cooper has been canceled for, I'll say that. I I listen to a lot of Tucker. I I like Tucker's podcast. >> Tucker a lot. It was one of those guys. >> too. Yeah. Say what you want about Tucker, I don't give a [ __ ] I'm just telling you I I listen to his podcast sometimes and these two guys, one of them said something about the National Endowment for Democracy. >> Mhm. Do you know anything about that? >> Huh? I and I believe the context was that it
[23:27] was a proxy for the CIA. Yeah, it is. What does that mean? The National Endowment for Democracy has taken many millions of dollars from the CIA to promote American propaganda. Uh, mainstream American government propaganda. So, when it talks about things like nation building, it's not really talking about nation building. It's talking about encouraging the development of leaders in foreign countries that are going to be knee-jerk supporters of the US and US foreign policy.
[24:00] So, it's mainly a propaganda psyop sort of machine, for lack of better term. It's not like actual boots on the ground type operations. >> Not not at all boots on the ground. >> Okay. >> Not at all. No. You know, when we liberated Kuwait in 1991, I I've told you in the past, I went in with the Marines on Liberation Day. It was very, very exciting. One of the highlights of my life, my adult life. And then within days of Kuwait being liberated, these Americans just kind of show up.
[24:31] And they came to the embassy to register, and then we would bump into each other at events. Remember, the country's literally on fire. The Iraqis had blown up all the oil wells, and there are these giant, you know, 100-ft high flames gushing out of the ground. It turned out these people were from the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. I'm like, "What are you doing here?" And they said, "Well, oh, we're here to help them transition to democracy." Well, it's a it's a monarchy. It's not going to be They they have this little
[25:01] elected, you know, Majlis al-Watani, a national assembly, but it's not going to ever be democratic. Well, I was in my 20s then, not really savvy enough to know that this is all part of the plan. You use the National Endowment for Democracy, you use, you know, NPR, you use the DNC and the RNC, and you all smile and get along and go to cocktail parties, and it's all just to promote American propaganda. I I worked with a guy
[25:32] briefly, John Rendon. God bless him. Awesome guy. And I asked him one time, this is before he hired me to do a contract, I asked him what he did. He said, "Oh, I'm a professional propagandist." I said, "What does that mean?" And he said, "Well, you were in Kuwait on the liberation day?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "You remember when the American tanks are rolling down the the main street, the Corniche?" I said, "Sure." And he said, "And a million people are out there waving little American flags?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Where the hell do you think those flags came from?"
[26:03] The country's destroyed. It's it's liberation day, but everybody has American flag, and they're all waving their little flags. And I was like, "You know what? I never even thought of it." Mhm. It's good living in propaganda. What What was the contract that he asked you to do? When was this? Oh. >> [clears throat] >> He hired me in 2008. I'm not I'm not I'm not proud of this. He hired me in 2008 to work with Karl Rove, of all people.
[26:33] Karl Rove, who had run the George W. Bush campaigns, both of them, to work on a presidential campaign in Indonesia. So, it was a guy named General Joko Widodo. That was his name. And I was the good cop cuz I'm always the good cop and Carl was the bad cop. So we fly into Singapore and then we helicopter over to uh Jakarta. You can see Indonesia, it's right across the water.
[27:05] So this guy owns a chain of Holiday Inns. He's a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Indonesia. And um and Carl's like, "Yeah, you know, we can do this and we can do that and we've got TV commercials and radio commercials." And I said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute." I said, "General with all due respect there's video of you on YouTube stabbing six peaceful protesters in the heart.
[27:36] How do we get past that? You're You murdered six college students because they participated in a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration. I said, "You're banned from the United States for human rights reasons. We can't just pretend it didn't happen." And so I know, right? So the job was um that I was going to write these op-eds saying, "Oh, he's misunderstood." And so I wrote these op-eds, no one would publish them. You did this. I had So he paid me to do it. He paid me very handsomely.
[28:07] So I wrote these op-eds, we sent them to like the Wall Street Journal the LA Times the New York Times and people were like, "Ooh, no, we're not touching this." So nothing ever came of it. He ended up He was running for president. And we we needed to rehabilitate his reputation. He said, "Murderer." And um in the end he dropped out of the race and got himself elected vice president. But the ban the the American ban on his travel was never lifted. He was never welcomed in the United States again.
[28:39] Yeah, he lined these guys up. It was six college students. He li- He lined them up and one by one stabbed each of them in the heart. Yeah. Not good. I I guess they didn't have a a plethora of wonderful candidates if that was the guy that they wanted to choose. >> Indonesia is a tough gig, and it has a lot of people. Good god, man. Yeah. Well, I respect the fact that you shared that. And to to our point about nonsense, you know, if you were sticking to a narrative, then you probably
[29:09] wouldn't have. So, I appreciate that you did, and that speaks to me >> I'm not proud of it, but I had just blown the whistle on the torture program. I lost my job. I had five kids or I had four kids at the time, and I really, really needed an income. And so, this opportunity comes, you know, "Hey, would you take 25 grand to write four op-eds?" And I said, "Yes, definitely." Um going back to Tucker again, when you were on Tucker, I think it was, you mentioned that there is agency psychologists that you can take with you
[29:40] on ops. >> Mhm. To again, going back to what we're talking about before, find that crack and make it wider. Yes. >> What Like what would they help you with? I have to tell you, the the one operation that I did with a with an agency psychologist was the most fun I have ever had in a single operation. We had a walk-in. We had a walk A walk-in is somebody who literally walks in to an to an American embassy off the street and says, "I have intelligence I want to pass to the CIA." 95% of them are lunatics.
[30:14] The The other 5% are intelligence peddlers who just want you to give them a couple of hundred dollars, and then they go to the British embassy, and the Russian embassy, and the French embassy, and the Israeli embassy, and they just do the same thing, and then that's a month's salary, right? Um some are uh probes from terrorist groups or enemy countries. They're just looking to see where the cameras are, how thick the doors are, who's armed or not armed, how far into the embassy they can get before they're stopped.
[30:46] But most of them are just lunatics. And then there's 1% that's the real deal. If you look historically by reading Cold War era memoirs, the best recruits the CIA has ever had were walk-ins. Because you don't know who this Russian KGB colonel is, you're never going to encounter him. But then one day he just walks into an embassy somewhere and says, "I'm a KGB colonel and I want to give you everything I have. And I want a million
[31:16] dollars." And you say, "I'll get the giant sack of money, you start writing, you know." I'm being facetious, of course, but not too much. So, we had a walk-in who said that he had seen an assassination. He He said that he's driving down this highway and he has to take a leak. And so he pulls off an exit and there's this old abandoned church there and he parks his car behind this big banyan tree and he takes he's taking a leak.
[31:47] And while he's taking a leak, a van pulls up. A bunch of guys get out of the back of the van. The source sees two motorcycles in the back of the van and hears one of the guys say, "Does he still live?" And the other one says, "He should be dead by now." So, he says, "I think this was this terrorist group that you guys are after." And we said, "Will you sit with a sketch artist?" He said, "Yes."
[32:20] And he did the sketches and they were really, really close to photographs we had of people that we suspected were in this terrorist group. So, we turned him over to the FBI. And the FBI interviewed him and they said, "He's full of [ __ ] He's nuts. We're done." Well, we just took him back. And we said, "How about if we fly to London?
[32:53] We have a nice dinner. Everybody's relaxed. We're all friends. And we talk about this in more detail." He said, "Great." So, we fly him to London. He was so poor, the poor guy. I remember this. He flew to London. It was freezing. And he didn't own a coat. So, I went out and bought him a coat. Uh just so he wouldn't, you know, be frozen solid by the end of the the three or four days. So, I flew out to London with two psychologists. But, one of the psychologists was a licensed hypnotist.
[33:25] And um Uh and uh I flew out there with another case officer. So, we both spoke the language. And so, we're going to act as translators for the hypnotist. It's hard work being a translator. And let me tell you. And you have to be like speaking like this. We're going to count backwards. 10 9 8. It's very hard. So,
[33:56] the night before, we go out to some bookstore. We go to a nice restaurant without the guy. The guy hasn't arrived yet. So, just the agency people. We went out. This is going to be our plan. We're going to you know, have all the lights off. We're going to be in the darkened hotel room. Speak very softly. We're going to put him under. And I said, "Come on." I said, "Hypnosis isn't really a thing, right? It always just seemed like [ __ ] to me." And he said, "No, no, no." He said, "We're going to We're going to really put him under." And he said, "You know, the funny thing is that smart people go under much more
[34:28] quickly than stupid people do." Which I still don't fully understand. But, he said we're going to we're going to ask him all these questions. I said, "Well, how long does this last?" He said, "If If we get him under quickly, we could do this for 2 and 1/2 or 3 hours." I'm like, "Okay, this is going to be tough being the translator. So, the guy arrives and you know, welcome. This is Dr. So-and-so. This is the other Dr. So-and-so. You know my colleague. And so, you know, get comfortable. You need a drink or you use the
[35:00] bathroom. We're going to We're going to hypnotize you to help you remember some of the things that you saw that day. So, this is one of the wackiest things that ever I ever witnessed at the agency. So, I was the first translator. And I told him, "We're going to count backwards from 10. And just relax. And think about the numbers, right?" So, we start. And he
[35:31] said, "I want you to raise your hand like this." And it wasn't propped. It was up in the air like this. And he said, "Don't put your hand down until I tell you to." He held his arm there for 3 hours. It was inhuman. A conscious person couldn't do it. So, the guy is out before we get to zero counting back from 10. So, I start asking him questions.
[36:02] Okay, you pull off the exit. You drive to the church. The church is right off to the side of the road. You go behind the banyan tree. Then what are you doing? He said, "I'm peeing." And then what happens? A van pulls up. What does the van look like? It's painted red. And it has some rust spots over the the rear wheels. Then what do you see? The back door's open. I see two motorcycles and two men inside. I said,
[36:35] "Can you see a license plate?" This freaks me out. Oh, I got chills just thinking about it. I said, "Can you see a license plate?" He says, "Yes." And he's he's like this with his eyes closed. I said, "What does the license plate say?" And he goes And then he reads off the plate. So, I write it down. I hand it to my colleague. He goes into the other room and he calls headquarters. He says, "We need to run a plate ASAP." So, headquarters sends an immediate cable out to the field. Call liaison. Run this plate right now.
[37:06] And the plate comes back stolen. I couldn't [ __ ] believe it. I couldn't believe it. And he's like this the whole time. So, I said, "Are the men talking?" Yes. "What are they saying?" "Does he still live?" "He should be dead by now." "And then what happens?" And he says, "They see me." I said, "They see you?" "Do they approach you?" He said, "Yes, and one punches me in the face." "And then what?" He said, "I'm bleeding
[37:36] and I told them I didn't hear anything." And he went on like this. It was this long elaborate 3-hour long story. So, I took notes like ridiculous, you know, filled a notebook full of notes. I called my boss at headquarters. I said, "This is the craziest thing I've ever seen." And my boss says, "I'm freaking out over the stolen license plate." He goes, "This may be the real deal." I I write all the notes. I go back to station in London. I I write all the notes and I send it back out into the
[38:06] field. And they're like, "Oh my god, the details incredible. Okay, we're going to try to get with him when he returns to country." So, a couple of weeks pass and then he triggers a meeting. And so, my colleague who I'd been with in London, flies out to meet with him. And the guy says, "They know who I am. They kidnapped me, and they took me to a house, and they beat me." And we're like, "Okay, where? Where was the house? When did
[38:38] this happen? How many of them were there? What did they look like? Were the Were they the same guys you saw at the church?" He answered all these questions. And I said to my colleague, I said, "This doesn't make sense. Because the only way they would know who he was is if they were, you know, with us. We knew where he lived, but there's no way that they would know. It just didn't make any sense." So, I go to the FBI. And it was There's this one agent.
[39:09] She's actually big muckety-muck now in the FBI, and she goes, "You CIA people, you all have your heads up your asses," she said. And I said, "No, you FBI people. I said, you think everybody's lying to you. I said, we're going to get medals when we crack this case." And she goes, "Ah, you people." So, she wasn't helpful to me. Then he calls a second time, and he says, um, that they kidnapped him again, but he had a tape recorder on him, and
[39:40] the tape recorder was in his pocket, and he recorded the whole encounter. We're like, "Okay, that's way too good to be true, but let's listen to the tape." So, we play the tape, and he's like, it's his voice, and he says, "Hey, >> [clears throat] >> I know you. Don't hurt me." And then, also his voice, "I am the Minister of Public Order, and I demand that you tell me about the CIA people that you're meeting with." And I
[40:12] was like, "Motherfucker. You made the whole [ __ ] thing up, didn't you? So, we decided to fly him back out to London. Oh, let me finish the first part first. So, he's got his arm like this. And the hypnotist says, "I'm going to count backwards to five and then you're going to wake up." And he goes, "Five, four, three, two, one." And he wakes up and his arm falls and he looks around and he says, "What happened?" And then he goes,
[40:45] and then vomits all over himself. So, he runs into the bathroom in the hotel room to clean himself up. And the hypnotist, who was like 110 years old, he goes, "You know, I've read about this in the literature, but I've never seen it happen." I said, "I can't believe you held his arm up like that for 3 hours." It was nuts. So, anyway, we fly him back out to London. We said, "No more [ __ ] You made this up." No, no, it was the Minister of Public Order. He's with the
[41:15] terrorists. We're like, "No, we we ran a spectro- spectroscope on this. It's it's you with your hand over your mouth to try to make a different voice." And he's like, "Oh, well, my wife has cancer and I I was hoping that if you believed me that you would pay for her cancer treatment and I wanted her to go to the Mayo Clinic." And we're like, "Doesn't work that way." And then the FBI just says, "I told you, you [ __ ] idiots. I told you in 3 months ago it was a lie."
[41:46] So, I was like, "Yeah, okay. Well, you win this one." But the hypnosis part was actually that was real? >> That that He saw something at the church that day. It probably wasn't the terrorists. But it was something untoward. It was probably a bunch of guys that stole two motorcycles. That is spooky, dude. And like you hear about um >> [clears throat] >> you hear the about the agency taking a crack at like this remote viewing stuff? >> Right. Since the 50s. Yeah. I
[42:18] I've kind of not looked into it, but like I've heard a couple people talk about it in interviews. Um I don't really know what to make of it, but as far as like spooky [ __ ] like that, like what what do you make of it? It was kind of the craze in the 1950s, you know, ESP and UFOs and astral projection and moving items with your mind and and the CIA had a an endless budget. There was no such thing as an oversight committee to say, "Hey, this is a waste of the taxpayer's money."
[42:49] And I'll tell you what really was the was the motivator for the CIA is is the Chinese were successful in planting disinformation in the CIA that the Russians were developing the same technology. So, we were like, "Oh my god, we recruited this Chinese intelligence guy and he said the KGB's already doing it. We have to catch up to The KGB wasn't doing anything. They had never heard of this stuff. And then the Manchurian Candidate came out and freaked everybody out in the
[43:19] mid-50s. So, the CIA spent millions and millions of dollars experimenting with everything from remote viewing to to you know, UFOs and all this crap just lumped into one thing. And nothing ever came of it. I mean, that this is how MK Ultra was created. Where okay, let's start with LSD. There's this new thing called LSD that this Swiss scientist accidentally invented and you can see crazy [ __ ] when
[43:51] you take it and maybe we can microdose it to make people do what we want them to do like under hypnosis but without them realizing that they're doing it. And then we can double them back against the KGB. And then people are jumping out of hotel windows and they're killing their families, and losing their minds, and and then as part of MK Ultra, there was like MK Chickwit and MK Seesaw, and there was a whole bunch of them, like a half a dozen of them under MK Ultra, where you know, we
[44:21] we created a germ in a lab and we just blew it into the atmosphere in San Francisco just to see if anybody would get sick. And lots of people got sick. 11 of them were sick enough that they happened to be uh to need hospitalization. And it turned out that they all suffered from the same rare respiratory infection. And the doctors are like, [clears throat] "Where the heck did this come from?" Well, the CIA had it in a big tube, and they were shooting it into the fog.
[44:51] And they did it in San Francisco cuz the fog is heavy, and they knew that the fog would keep the germ close to the ground where people are breathing it in. And then the CIA said, "You know what we should do? We should hire a whole bunch of prostitutes and rent a rent a cathouse, a safehouse, and we get these prostitutes to bring Johns back to the back to the cathouse, and then we dose them with LSD and see if we can control their minds." These are American citizens. You can't just dose somebody with LSD. It's "Ooh, let's see. Is he going to go
[45:22] crazy? Is he going to kill himself? Is he going to confess to, you know, his deepest darkest secrets?" Like, what the [ __ ] wrong with people? But we did that from 1952 to 1975. And then in '75, when the Church Committee realized that this program had been going on for more than two decades, Senator Frank Church ordered the CIA, "Do not destroy the documents." And so they immediately destroyed the documents. There were about 20% of the documents
[45:54] that had been misplaced and were found later. So, what we know about MK Ultra today is just from the 20% that survived. Everything else was destroyed. And then they were like, "Yeah, well, they're destroyed. What are you going to do about it?" That's the insane part is it's such a fraction of the available information, and there's all of this stuff. And you think about stuff like the psychic driving stuff is so gnarly. >> Right. Well, now now compare psychic driving with the technologies that we have. And you've created a monster. You know,
[46:25] when the when the Vault 7 documents were released back in What was it? 2017? What are those? Um there was a CIA computer engineer who named Joshua Schulte who swears that he's innocent, but is now serving a sentence of 40 years for espionage. He was apparently allegedly a disgruntled engineer. He didn't like his boss. He didn't like his coworkers. They didn't like him. So, he just downloaded the crown jewels of the
[46:56] Directorate of Science and Technology and sent it all to WikiLeaks in 2017. Google Vault 7. Vault 7 documents, Vault 7 revelations, it will knock your socks off. Um thousands and thousands of pages. It makes what Chelsea Manning leaked look like, you know, scroll from a sixth grader. So, he revealed that the CIA has developed technologies to,
[47:26] for example, remotely take over your car by hacking into the chip, right? Why would the CIA want to take over your car? To make you drive off a bridge? Maybe? To make you drive into a tree and kill yourself? To make you drive into an abutment and make sure that there's no way you can survive cuz they've got the thing going 140 miles an hour and you can't control it? They develop technology to to reverse your smart TV to make the speaker into a microphone
[47:57] with the TV still appearing to be off so you don't know that it's broadcasting everything that's being said in your house to CIA headquarters? You know, they were able to they were able to hack into other countries um most sensitive technological systems and to leave little scraps of code but the scraps of code are written in Russian or in Persian in Farsi. So people say oh the [ __ ] Russians hacked into us or the Chinese or the
[48:28] Iranians. And actually no, it it was us. But you'll never know it. I mean there's almost too much in Vault 7 to even go into. It's incredible I'm going to give a talk about it at a hacker conference this coming weekend. So um you know, couple what the CIA was trying to do in the 50s with MK Ultra and its subcomponents compared to what it is technologically able to do today and it is terrifying.
[48:59] Terrifying. Damn dude, yeah that is uh that is gnarly. Um going back to the the psychologist what what kind of psychological pro okay, let me let me frame it up before they ask the question. Let's say you recruit me as an asset. I work in you know, the Iranian Embassy somewhere and you meet me at a cocktail party and I say oh John this this guy is
[49:29] he's he's a wonderful guy. I'm going to get to know him a little bit. >> Yeah. And we become best friends as you say over 6 9 months whatever the period is. >> Yep. And you pitch me one day. Uh-huh. And what I'm getting at is what is the psychological process that an asset goes through? Like what kind of crisis goes on as this happens? Yeah, that's a great question. There's a There's a little dance that's happening here. I I asked one of my instructors when I first went into the operational training,
[50:01] "What percentage of people that you have pitched in your career said yes?" He said 100. 100%. He said, "If you are not 100% certain that this guy is going to say yes, run for the hills. Because he's going to out you, you're going to get arrested, you're going to get expelled from the country, he's going to report you to his own intelligence service, and then you're not going to be able to travel to half the countries in the world." That happened to a colleague of mine where you know, we we all read each other's cables, and we're like, "Dude, keep up
[50:32] the good work, man. You're going to get him. Next meeting you're going to get him." Right? So, I'm reading my colleague's cables, and it's It couldn't be going any better. And he asks headquarters permission. You have to get permission to make the actual pitch. It's very paperwork heavy. So, headquarters says, "Go for it. Go with God." And he makes the pitch, and the guy literally runs screaming from the room. And next thing you know, his ambassador calls our ambassador, and his government lodges a formal diplomatic complaint
[51:03] with our government. What are you going to do? You're going to say, "Yeah, my guy's a an undercover CIA guy." So, you can't say that. So, you say, "No, no, no, no, no. This is just a misunderstanding. It was a language thing. Our guy doesn't really speak your language very well, and your guy doesn't speak English very well. This was just an innocent misunderstanding. But, we understand if you're upset, so we're going to instruct our guy not to ever talk to your guy again." And that's uncomfortable. Besides the fact that you look like an
[51:33] idiot at headquarters because you've been telling us for 9 months how well things are going, and in fact the guy never had any intention of allowing you to recruit him. Like, what have you been doing all this time? You're supposed to be wining him and dining him and showing him the better finer things in life so that he says, "Hey, you know, I'm kind of liking I make $500 a month. This guy's ordering $200 bottles of wine, and he paid for us to go on vacation, and he bought me a Rolex. I'm going to say yes to this." And in fact, he says not just no, but oh hell no.
[52:05] So, what you're looking for is a vulnerability. This is This is a very important word in the what's called the the asset acquisition cycle. The asset acquisition cycle is spot, assess, develop, recruit. I spot you at a diplomatic cocktail party. I assess that you have access to information that I that I want. I develop you by creating this friendship. And then, I recruit you. Now, by the time I recruit you, you know exactly what's going on. You're
[52:36] not an idiot. And why am I spending all this money on you? You know, where am I getting all this money? Rolexes and, you know, fancy vacations and What's up? So, you're not an idiot. You know what's happening here. And so, you do it very gently. And I say, "Dalton, listen. You know how I feel about you. You're my best friend. I love you. I love your wife. My wife loves you. My wife loves your wife. Our
[53:07] kids are friends. We're going to be friends forever. But, I haven't been 100% honest with you. And I hope you're not going to be upset, but I'm actually a CIA officer undercover." That's called breaking cover. And I I hope you're okay with that. I know you're going to be okay with that, cuz you know exactly where this is going. I've already identified your vulnerability. Maybe your kid is sick and needs medical treatment in the
[53:39] United States. Maybe your kid wants to go to school in the United States. I can get your kid accepted to literally any university in America and I'll pay for it. Any university in America. 100% paid. So long as you keep giving me and my, you know, colleagues who replace me and replace each other what they ask for. Um So I take you off to the side and I say, "Listen, just for your protection
[54:12] we can't be seen as friends anymore. Our relationship has to become clandestine from this point on. And so we're going to meet once a month at a predetermined site at a predetermined time and date and then we'll carry on from there. Now, if you're from an enemy country I don't want you to defect. That's the last thing I want because if you defect your value ends today cuz you lose your access. Well, I don't care what was
[54:43] happening yesterday. I want to know what your country's going to do tomorrow. Right? So the goal is let's say you and I are stationed in uh you know, Bogota. I want you to go back to Iran or Russia or China or Cuba and you're going to take with you a bedroom
[55:13] a bedroom set that I give you. Right? And the dresser is going to have a a transmitting device embedded in the back of it. And so you're going to type your reports onto a chip. You put the chip in the device, you hit a button that's hidden in the back of the drawer, and it does a burst transmission that lasts about a half of a second or a tenth of a second, and it's going to send your report back to CIA
[55:44] headquarters. And because the burst only lasts for a tenth of a second, nobody's going to be able to intercept it. They're going to say, "Oh, there was just a transmission. It lasted a tenth of a second. We have no idea where it came from." Because once you get back to Iran or Cuba Russia or China or whatever, I want you to tell me what's going on every single day in your office. And then I want you to try to get a promotion, and then get transferred to the office of American Affairs.
[56:15] And I want the names of everybody in that office. I want to know the names of their sources inside the United States, so the FBI can start arresting them. And then we take it from there. And then I can pay you in any way you want. You know, we can open an account at the CIA Credit Union, which we're very happy to do. Or we can give it to you in gold or diamonds or Bitcoin or you know, however you want to handle it. We'll give it to you.
[56:45] How many of them Okay, so I'm just thinking like an asset, they a lot of them are probably very prideful, right? I know a big a big vulnerability is I'm the smartest guy in the room. I'm older than them. I'm smarter than them. I'm more experienced than them. I'm more connected than them. So they fancy themselves as smart people. Shrewd, perceptive. And yet they didn't see this coming. So internalizing that, how many of them want to know if it was a setup from the start? And like do they ask you for like a face-saving thing?
[57:16] You know what I mean? None of them want to know. That that they were duped into this or that they walked right into it. Right? So what you do in every single meeting is you tell them how important they are. Your information is so important. It's going directly to the President of the United States. I made a I got to cry once in a meeting. So, he gave me some information. It was good. It was the analysts were happy with it. It helped fill in a couple of gaps.
[57:46] He thought it was the greatest information that's ever been passed to the American government. So, I said, "Listen." I go, "Buddy, your information went directly to the President of the United States." He said, "You're kidding me." I said, "No. Directly to the President." I said, "I wrote the report. I sent it to the White House. He looked at the report." What did he say? I said, "The President read the report and he said, 'You're kidding me.'" Oh, he goes like this, "Oh my god." So, I I write this up. I said, "Oh, I told him it went to the President." My
[58:17] boss says, "You want to have some fun?" He goes, "Dummy up a uh an award certificate. Put the CIA seal on it." So, I said, "Oh, that would be fun." So, I did a I did a in in just in Word, you know? And clip art. So, I did this, you know, Central Intelligence Agency, United States of America. I had the guy's name, uh certificate of whatever. You put the CIA seal on it and then I just forged
[58:48] the director's name cuz how's he going to know what the director's signature looks like? So, I go to the meeting the next month and I said, "I told you last month that your information went directly to the President of the United States." And he said, "Yes." I said, "I have something for you from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency." And I give him this phony certificate. He looks at it and he bursts into tears. And I said, "Congratulations, my friend." >> [laughter] >> I said, "But listen, you know, I have to
[59:19] take this back and keep it in the safe because you can't be seen with this. You'll be killed." He goes, "Of course, of course. I can't believe it. Oh my god, Aubrey. I had him hooked. He was ready to name his kids after me. That's how successful it was. But you just play on their egos and they eat it up. They eat it up cuz they're all narcissists anyway. Not all, but you know, most of them are narcissists. They need to be stroked. So after you after you assess what the
[59:51] vulnerability is, right? You do like, you know, actually let me let me ask that first. Is how much of how much of the work is done on the front end by analysts and targeting officers versus you in the field asking discovery questions? None of it. None of it's done by them. No. None of it. Um I shouldn't say none. 99% of it is is not done by them. When I was an analyst,