Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Noah.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We were joined with our guest
Speaker 3: super producer JJ. The main way, pause way. Most importantly,
Speaker 3: you are you. You are here. That makes this the
Speaker 3: stuff they don't want you to know. Fellow conspiracy realists,
Speaker 3: Tonight's episode has been I would say a few years
Speaker 3: in the making, decades arguably for sure.
Speaker 4: No question, Oh man, spies, a bridge of spies, a
Speaker 4: bridge too far of spies?
Speaker 3: Perhaps what is the collective group name for spies in English?
Speaker 3: And how there's a pride of lines, of flock of geese,
Speaker 3: a murder of us and unkindness of ravens. Maybe it's
Speaker 3: a conspiracy of spies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's good, that's good. Or maybe uh holdan no, no, Matt,
Speaker 4: I think you got on.
Speaker 2: An anonymous you go an anonymity of smitties.
Speaker 3: I like all of these answers. Here's the thing that
Speaker 3: happened in twenty nineteen. The news hit the US public
Speaker 3: in a way it doesn't usually with a prominence it
Speaker 3: doesn't often attain. And the argument from the press was,
Speaker 3: not only did it appear multiple spies were getting their
Speaker 3: cover blown, but something untoward had been happening to these
Speaker 3: assets or these operators or these agents for years. One
Speaker 3: by what, people were arrested, some were murdered, others, according
Speaker 3: to official sources, simply disappeared. And as we record this evening, observers,
Speaker 3: including former government officials, will tell you this compromise, whatever
Speaker 3: it is, continues today. We've talked about this off air.
Speaker 3: Opinions differ on how this is occurring, why this is occurring,
Speaker 3: what role government US government institutions play, and what this
Speaker 3: strange conflict between competing conspiracies means for the future. So
Speaker 3: before we go on and ask what's happening, do you
Speaker 3: guys remember these stories like they popped in the news
Speaker 3: and then they sort of popped out of the zeitgeist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's rather strange because it's kind of just how
Speaker 2: that world works. Spies go missing, because when an asset
Speaker 2: disappears or is killed, nobody is really supposed to acknowledge
Speaker 2: that that occurs. Really, Yeah, unless it's being you know,
Speaker 2: disclosed for a purpose. Right. You don't say, oh, yes,
Speaker 2: our asset was taken out, like, you don't say that
Speaker 2: publicly unless you're doing it for a reason.
Speaker 4: That's true, unless it's some sort of political maneuver. But
Speaker 4: I guess is it fair to say that we've been
Speaker 4: seeing more stories in the press where we kind of
Speaker 4: do get some of that information like weirdly, like in
Speaker 4: terms of you know, spies being discovered and their covers
Speaker 4: being blown.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is true. That's why it's not normal. At least,
Speaker 3: the disclosure is abnormal. And the purported rate of attrition
Speaker 3: there's always a rate of attrition baked in. The reported
Speaker 3: or purported rate of attrition is much higher than would
Speaker 3: have been permitted ostensibly during the days of the Cold War,
Speaker 3: which our Russian friends don't believe ever ended. That's the question.
Speaker 3: What is happening here? Is it a bunch of sound
Speaker 3: and fury signify nothing or is there something more through
Speaker 3: the story?
Speaker 4: Well, we'll get right into it after a tiny, tiny
Speaker 4: word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3: Here are the facts. This is so dumb, but just
Speaker 3: real quick, can we play a number station just for fun,
Speaker 3: just to set the movie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, we still have those left over, the ones
Speaker 4: we didn't get to in our live show at the
Speaker 4: National Sawdust in Brooklyn. Here we go.
Speaker 3: Ah, Yes, the old school trade. As we explored in
Speaker 3: a previous series on the history and Future of espionage,
Speaker 3: a lot of the intelligence or trade work you see
Speaker 3: in film and read and fiction, it's based on older
Speaker 3: collection methods, you know, dead drops, handlers, aliases.
Speaker 4: Yeah, whatever. The spy who is, you know, oftentimes depicted
Speaker 4: a little bit stereotypically as a dashing hero, some sort
Speaker 4: of brilliant, you know, quick on their feet, punchy character
Speaker 4: who is fighting against some sort of shadowy super villain,
Speaker 4: you know, or the spy themselves is the super villain.
Speaker 4: As we've seen in you know again, pretty cliche depictions
Speaker 4: of say, like Russian spies, like like Boris and Natasha
Speaker 4: from Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Speaker 3: Sure, or like Carla in the excellent I think was
Speaker 3: John Lecuerr novels adapted into The most famous one would
Speaker 3: be Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy. Yeah right.
Speaker 2: But you know, as we've learned over the years in
Speaker 2: our explorations of human or you know, human intelligence, human
Speaker 2: derived intelligence, we found that the most effective spy is
Speaker 2: not someone who's secretive and you could look at in
Speaker 2: a crowd and go, that guy seems like a spy.
Speaker 3: Fella.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just it's somebody that just looks like nobody
Speaker 2: the exists in a crowd.
Speaker 3: Like the gray Man in the Wheel of Time series
Speaker 3: by Robert Jordan. Right, you want someone who is not,
Speaker 3: you know, too short, not too tall, not too outside
Speaker 3: of like one specific genre. You don't want them too attractive.
Speaker 4: Well, but I'm sure you don't remember the name of
Speaker 4: this character. It is totally escaping me. But the guy
Speaker 4: that Gary Oldman plays in Slow Horses the schlubby, alcoholic,
Speaker 4: but like part of that, you know, unkempt. The look
Speaker 4: of his and the way he carries himself in the
Speaker 4: most low key way imaginable is what makes him really
Speaker 4: good at what he does. What's that guy's name, Ben
Speaker 4: Jackson Lamb Jackson Lamb, what a character? Love that show?
Speaker 4: And I need to read the books.
Speaker 3: They're pretty great, honestly, but it might ruin the next
Speaker 3: seasons for you. You know. Again, obviously, if you were
Speaker 3: the head of an intelligence agency, you would want to
Speaker 3: have read the books so that you could see what
Speaker 3: was coming up next.
Speaker 4: Well, Ben to that point, I'm wondering if a lot
Speaker 4: of this news that we're talking about maybe has created
Speaker 4: a resurgence and fascination with spies. There's a lot of
Speaker 4: big spy shows right now that are very successful.
Speaker 3: Black Bag is upcoming.
Speaker 4: Black Doves is another one, really good one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a proliferation, right, and that goes into the
Speaker 3: question of how much art and reality inform each other
Speaker 3: and what the chicken in the egg situation is there.
Speaker 3: We do have to tell you, folks, we cannot recommend
Speaker 3: our earlier series enough, but check it out if you can.
Speaker 3: Simply put, you can learn all about the history of
Speaker 3: espionage in our previous series. But right now these evenings,
Speaker 3: there aren't a lot of James Bond types, by which
Speaker 3: we mean there aren't a ton of specific individuals going
Speaker 3: country to country, region to region, mission with secret identities,
Speaker 3: doing acts of intrigue and bravado and daring do people
Speaker 3: doing right? Yeah, these people do exist, They do exist,
Speaker 3: but there are far fewer now because they're less effective.
Speaker 3: You know, think of all the technology that occurred since
Speaker 3: he and Fleming was inspired to write Bond.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and if you want to find out about a
Speaker 4: real life spy type individual, dashing, daring, do kind of guy.
Speaker 4: Check out the Ridiculous History episode on Roll Dahl, who
Speaker 4: weirdly was very much that thing and may well have
Speaker 4: been the inspiration for James Bond.
Speaker 3: And what's that guy? I always bring him up with
Speaker 3: these who did the Oh he played sorrowmon Christopher Christopher
Speaker 3: Lee Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, also had some also had
Speaker 3: some dirt on his jacket. As they say. The thing is,
Speaker 3: you know, if you're looking at the world now, you're
Speaker 3: at widespread facial recognition, right, and you're looking at biometrics,
Speaker 3: you're looking at big data algorithms, the bread crumbing of
Speaker 3: activity in ways that ordinary like previous governments couldn't couldn't
Speaker 3: have done. And you're looking at government hacks, intelligence sharing
Speaker 3: like five Eyes long term wasn't super great for some operations.
Speaker 3: And so each of these factors makes our sort of
Speaker 3: old school roll doll h James Bond approach a little
Speaker 3: less tenable but human. As you mentioned there, Matt is
Speaker 3: far from a relic of the past. The game doesn't end.
Speaker 3: The game shifts, you know, like when you're in like
Speaker 3: when you beat a boss at the first act of
Speaker 3: a final fight and then all of a sudden there's
Speaker 3: a crazy animation and they recharge face too damnable.
Speaker 4: Elden ring bosses. Who's that one at the end, Matt
Speaker 4: with the with the striking red hair and the knife arms, Millennia.
Speaker 2: Something like that.
Speaker 4: You know I'm talking about Matt. You probably beat her
Speaker 4: in one pass, you monster.
Speaker 3: No one beats her one past.
Speaker 4: No, No, you got.
Speaker 3: To learn the pattern. What was her name though it
Speaker 3: was Melina, meant some with it.
Speaker 2: Characters confused, But that game, uh famously, at the very
Speaker 2: end you fight a pretty tough boss and then a
Speaker 2: very tough boss after that. It's like the second phase the.
Speaker 3: Eld and Beast right right, the game doesn't end, the
Speaker 3: game changes. So while our idea in fiction of a
Speaker 3: living action figure is it's pretty great, you know, if
Speaker 3: you're if you're making a script, a real human asset
Speaker 3: is going to be a careful, long term investment, not
Speaker 3: to too extraordinary. You want the infamous Deeper Agents of
Speaker 3: Russia check out our upcoming episode on Operation ghost Stories.
Speaker 3: Or you want someone like the Cambridge five asterisk because
Speaker 3: we don't know how many there were.
Speaker 4: Or you want socialites the Cambridge plus or minus five.
Speaker 3: We'll get We'll get to them at just a second,
Speaker 3: because they're a great example. There are socialites that can
Speaker 3: also get pulled, people who already exist in the upper
Speaker 3: echelons of some kind of political economics structure, people who
Speaker 3: have that access.
Speaker 2: I like your Glain Maxwell's sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great example, your gallains. Maybe as the
Speaker 3: Os put it back in the day, your glorious amateurs.
Speaker 3: It's it's pretty nuts, and it is all positioned toward
Speaker 3: the idea of getting an edge of mitigating information asymmetry
Speaker 3: on your side while propagating information asymmetry on the side
Speaker 3: of the enemy. And these folks who are who are
Speaker 3: real human, they're often they're not going to be doing
Speaker 3: like a single mission or a paramilitary thing would be
Speaker 3: very rare for this genre of person. We're talking years
Speaker 3: and decades, quiet small moves, you know, getting that.
Speaker 4: Promotion, laying on the groundwork, getting other assets in place,
Speaker 4: you know, informats, things like that, establishing networks, contacts, all
Speaker 4: of that kind of stuff. That's that's again pretty well
Speaker 4: depicted in Slow Horses. I think a lot of that
Speaker 4: stuff is relatively on the mark.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the weird thing is if we exercise empathy
Speaker 3: for these people deep in hostile territory, they're making small
Speaker 3: moves and they themselves have very limited information and somewhat ironic. Right,
Speaker 3: they know a handler, they might know another couple people
Speaker 3: like since we referenced a wheel of time, it's like
Speaker 3: how the Black Asia is organized into what they call hearts.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to go too deep into it. It's sorry,
Speaker 3: that's already a spoiler. But the big things like having
Speaker 3: someone in place to foil ironian nuclear activities, you know,
Speaker 3: or Jimmy up there centrifuges.
Speaker 4: Uh, it's a great expression that I gotta say, Jimmy
Speaker 4: up a centrifuge. It's got to be the the whole back.
Speaker 3: Well, we serve at the pleasure of Dylan Fagan, who
Speaker 3: is our handler. So that kind of stuff is there
Speaker 3: is the culmination of many other things that take a
Speaker 3: lot longer. And if you are you know, if you're
Speaker 3: like Noel Matton and JJ and Ben and you're you're
Speaker 3: evaluating how to how to exercise intelligence or counterintelligence in
Speaker 3: an enemy regime, the first question that occurs to you
Speaker 3: when you're talking human is not how do I put
Speaker 3: one of my my own outsiders on the inside. It's like,
Speaker 3: why don't I find someone who's already on the inside,
Speaker 3: you know, and just get them over to my cause
Speaker 3: you save so much money, you save so much time.
Speaker 2: Right oh yeah, yeah, But to do that you have
Speaker 2: to either be extremely likable or extremely good at quietly
Speaker 2: blackmailing someone.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, This, this idea of turning someone to an
Speaker 3: informant can happen through all sorts of means blackmail. Like
Speaker 3: you said, financial compensation, appeal to ideology, or appeal to romance.
Speaker 3: I would say romance is itself an ideology, you know,
Speaker 3: but each avenue has their own sets of pros and
Speaker 3: cons and strengths and weaknesses.
Speaker 4: Yep. And every intelligence agency that you've ever heard of
Speaker 4: works very, very, very astigiously, to to borrow word from
Speaker 4: Ben's lovely vocabulary, towards acquiring high value informants. And once
Speaker 4: you have one of those, to your point been that
Speaker 4: rate of attrition can be high here because these are investments,
Speaker 4: these are human capital. These are long term, long game
Speaker 4: assets that are very expensive to maintain and also very
Speaker 4: costly to lose.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they're loath to let them go. Imagine you
Speaker 3: have a car. Like imagine you bought a beat up car, right,
Speaker 3: and you restored it yourself, and now you want to
Speaker 3: drive it forever, right, you want to maybe the car
Speaker 3: can take you to places you couldn't reach earlier. Sure,
Speaker 3: that's a very bad comparison, but somewhat Well.
Speaker 4: The car also requires maintenance. The car also requires you know,
Speaker 4: checking in on from time to time to make sure
Speaker 4: everything's running as it's supposed to, that all that work
Speaker 4: you did isn't being damaged by something that you can't see.
Speaker 2: Well, you also have to spy on and all of
Speaker 2: your spies, right, that's the like, one of the biggest
Speaker 2: jobs you have as an intelligence agency is to keep
Speaker 2: tabs on absolutely everything each individual human does. It is
Speaker 2: just sounds like a horrifying existence.
Speaker 3: I don't think the quality of life is super great
Speaker 3: if I'm being honest that I mean, yeah, the handlers
Speaker 3: have handlers, right, the assets have handlers, The handlers have handlers.
Speaker 3: The people at the top are fucking Orwellian.
Speaker 2: Everybody in there is like you're an enemy. You're an enemy.
Speaker 2: You're an enemy. You're an enemy, You're an enemy. I mean,
Speaker 2: you're just like Jesus just just go have some ice cream.
Speaker 2: Lay down.
Speaker 3: Yes, the issue is sometimes they're right, but whole cloth.
Speaker 2: They're right about they're right about their own fears.
Speaker 4: Well that's the problem. I mean, all this stuff is
Speaker 4: very very much at play, and you know, to your
Speaker 4: point about keeping tabs on all the spies, it's so
Speaker 4: important too, because when one of your assets flips, especially
Speaker 4: one that you've invested all that time and energy and
Speaker 4: information intelligence into, how much they know can directly impact
Speaker 4: you if they are turned, you know, to the enemy
Speaker 4: or an enemy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was an interesting comment just a second ago
Speaker 3: that reminded me of that line from Incubus, don't let
Speaker 3: fear take the wheel and steer.
Speaker 4: Wow, that's that's a good okay from the band to
Speaker 4: use Incubus in conspiracy sense. No, it's true. That is
Speaker 4: the seminal two thousands Classic Drive from the album Make
Speaker 4: Yourself by Incubus.
Speaker 3: References are so.
Speaker 2: Fresh because fear is what drives all this stuff, right,
Speaker 2: Fear that somebody else's ideologies are going to overtake my ideology,
Speaker 2: and then that world is going to change, and then
Speaker 2: all the you know, all this stuff is going to
Speaker 2: change because I'm so afraid that's ultimately what it is.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I could agree with that, Like
Speaker 3: I hear you in some in some aspects, but would
Speaker 3: we not also say there's ambition in there as well.
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 4: Like it can be wrapped up in fear though. That's
Speaker 4: a really good point, Ben, and that distinction I think
Speaker 4: is important. But to me too, part of ambition is
Speaker 4: fear that someone's gonna be better than you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess it, just don't I personally am not
Speaker 3: comfortable putting a broad brush on on this, but I
Speaker 3: do hear you fair enough.
Speaker 2: I'm cool with it.
Speaker 3: But well, let's go to uh, let's go to Cambridge.
Speaker 3: Let's start to get a sense of scale here with
Speaker 3: the story of the Cambridge Spies. Cambridge is one of
Speaker 3: the world's most prestigious universities, and the Cambridge five asterisk
Speaker 3: or a group of spies that were turned by the
Speaker 3: Soviet Union and pulled purposely from the upper crust of
Speaker 3: British society.
Speaker 4: Sounds like bad news exactly. The Cambridge plus or minus
Speaker 4: five they they you know, took time for this to
Speaker 4: take place, this turn to the Soviets. They were active
Speaker 4: from about the nineteen thirties until at least the early fifties.
Speaker 4: This process took decades. The general public knew nothing about
Speaker 4: the conspiracy until nineteen fifty one, and we still don't
Speaker 4: really know entirely how many people were turned. Hence the
Speaker 4: asterisk the plus or minus. Originally the group was the
Speaker 4: Cambridge four, which sounds kind of like a do wop group,
Speaker 4: and then they found a fifth person. Then they called
Speaker 4: it the Cambridge five, and at some point just the
Speaker 4: count kind of ended, right.
Speaker 3: That's an editorial thought. Yeah, it feels like at some
Speaker 3: point they just stopped adding to the name. In a
Speaker 3: couple of cases, these guys attained very high positions in government.
Speaker 3: As we record today, there's still standing allegations against other
Speaker 3: possible members of the group, pretty much all of whom
Speaker 3: are dead at this point, which is often, you know,
Speaker 3: one of the most shore fire ways for an operative
Speaker 3: like this to escape. Funny story because partially because of
Speaker 3: their socioeconomic position, none of the confirmed members were ever prosecuted.
Speaker 3: This is a multi decade operation, and if we exercise
Speaker 3: empathy then we can see that this had two very
Speaker 3: different meanings to people on the other side of the
Speaker 3: board from the UK Allied perspective, there's fear, right they
Speaker 3: are damaged. From the Soviet perspective, there's ambition. It's a
Speaker 3: huge win over multiple decades, like it changed the course
Speaker 3: of the Cold War in some ways.
Speaker 2: But I guess, I guess what I'm trying to figure
Speaker 2: out is how did it change anything if they had
Speaker 2: these high level people, you know in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 2: But then the Cold War ends and the Soviet Union
Speaker 2: is like collapses, So like, what did they actually win?
Speaker 4: What did they accomplish? Yeah, by turning these folks, that
Speaker 4: is a good point. They didn't win, and they didn't make.
Speaker 3: The big win, right. They didn't win the war, they
Speaker 3: would say, but they won battles, right, And we are
Speaker 3: coming to you with the benefit of retrospect, so we
Speaker 3: have the spoilers. We know how things worked out well.
Speaker 4: And one could argue that the Soviet Union in Russia
Speaker 4: have been playing a much longer game than just this
Speaker 4: period of time and not doing too bad at it
Speaker 4: by today's measure.
Speaker 3: Right, going back to the earlier point, did the Cold
Speaker 3: War ever end? A lot of us in the US
Speaker 3: will say, yeah, immediately there's no more Soviet Union, But
Speaker 3: then we have to realize a lot of people putin
Speaker 3: among them don't believe the Cold War ended. And I
Speaker 3: think we did an episode about that a few years back.
Speaker 3: That's right, okay, Well, without getting into the weeds of it,
Speaker 3: we could argue the story of the Cambridge five asterisk
Speaker 3: teaches us a crucial lesson matter how long it takes
Speaker 3: to build something, to place an asset, to leverage an informant.
Speaker 3: Even the oldest operations are kind of a house of cards.
Speaker 3: Hashtag no Kevin Spacey. You know, the wind can come
Speaker 3: from any direction, and when things go wrong, they can
Speaker 3: go south quickly.
Speaker 4: And we'll see just how quickly that southern path can
Speaker 4: be traversed, you know, going south quickly. I'll here worthmore
Speaker 4: sponsor and be right back to it.
Speaker 3: Here's where it gets crazy, all right, we teased at
Speaker 3: the top right. Twenty nineteen, different US media outlets reveal
Speaker 3: stunning news. They say, it turns out that a few
Speaker 3: years back, US intelligence officials were so worried the White
Speaker 3: House might accidentally expose a covert assets identity that they
Speaker 3: secretly extracted this person from Russia and say this happened,
Speaker 3: And in twenty seventeen, this is during the first Trump administration.
Speaker 3: Other news outlets do pick up the story Washington Post,
Speaker 3: New York Times, et cetera. But they start spending entirely
Speaker 3: different reasons for this extraction, like what motivated someone to
Speaker 3: pull such a precious asset. It's a wild story, but
Speaker 3: I think it's a good example.
Speaker 2: And from what we know and from what was reported. Again,
Speaker 2: we're looking back at this from twenty twenty five. It
Speaker 2: wasn't as though they were worried that any specific person
Speaker 2: within the Trump administration or the current State Department would
Speaker 2: be exposing any assets like purposefully, right, just doxing somebody.
Speaker 2: They were worried about the state of overall security as
Speaker 2: it was being handled by that new administration and everybody
Speaker 2: coming in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were concerned things had grown so lax for
Speaker 3: one or another that it was not only possible, but
Speaker 3: plausible for operations even this level to get compromised. This
Speaker 3: will give you more background on this Russian asset in
Speaker 3: a second, but just so you know, during the previous
Speaker 3: Obama administration, fellow conspiracy realist, these activities were secret enough
Speaker 3: that intelligence heads were not putting it in the President's
Speaker 3: daily brief. Instead, they were sending secret sealed envelopes just
Speaker 3: in case the daily brief was somehow compromised. But we
Speaker 3: do know a little bit about the background of this,
Speaker 3: and it kind of follows the story of the Cambridge
Speaker 3: five and other similar you know, hangout session for sure.
Speaker 4: Decades ago, the CIA recruited a particularly ambitious Russian official
Speaker 4: who was guided to an ascension through the ranks of
Speaker 4: government functioning just as any you know, young upstart might.
Speaker 4: He wasn't breaking any laws. You know, he wasn't doing
Speaker 4: any you know, saboteur type behavior, sabotaging nukes, any of
Speaker 4: that kind of stuff. However, the CIA was waiting for
Speaker 4: him to get in the right position. They're playing some
Speaker 4: serious forty chess here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and helping him suddenly become better at his job
Speaker 3: than he was by you know, one way or another.
Speaker 3: And he might not have even known the methods deployed.
Speaker 3: But eventually, to your point, now, the four D chess
Speaker 3: or whatever what I call it, it pays off. They
Speaker 3: hit a milestone achievement. This guy gets promoted to a
Speaker 3: position that doesn't put him in the inner circle of
Speaker 3: the Kremlin, but it gives him high level access to
Speaker 3: several sensitive things. This would be akin to Israel's Mosad
Speaker 3: controlling a guy who reads, who doesn't get in meetings
Speaker 3: with the Supreme leader, but reads all the notes from
Speaker 3: those meetings.
Speaker 4: Nice.
Speaker 2: And then there's people on the CIA side, just a
Speaker 2: handful of them, who go into their own dark rooms
Speaker 2: and then read the notes that were brought from the
Speaker 2: guy that got to see the notes, and they're just like, oh,
Speaker 2: look I can see their stuff. Yeah, that's getting off
Speaker 2: in the dark as art.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Fast forward. You know twenty sixteen, there's an election
Speaker 3: in the US, right, we all remember that one, and
Speaker 3: the Western intelligence community, not just the US, is increasingly
Speaker 3: concerned that Russian operatives are attempting to compromise the election.
Speaker 3: If that is true, then this, you know, young up
Speaker 3: and coming level Russian bureaucrat has now become our golden goose.
Speaker 3: Right if he can, as he said, Matt, go off
Speaker 3: in the dark and read some notes, then he might
Speaker 3: be and send some notes. Then he might be giving
Speaker 3: the US, which often sees itself as the world entire,
Speaker 3: a heck of an edge in a game.
Speaker 4: But again, if done correctly, this is something that we
Speaker 4: let alone. The American people should know nothing about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the problem is the streets are watching so like,
Speaker 3: for instance, if this guy got promoted too fast, if
Speaker 3: he was too good when he was on the way
Speaker 3: to the Kremlin, he probably would have gotten caught. If
Speaker 3: something seems too good to be true, or if the
Speaker 3: pattern seems to not have a certain amount of guesswork
Speaker 3: and mistake, then you have to wonder why someone is
Speaker 3: right all the time, you know what I mean. Where
Speaker 3: that's where we see this narrative unfolding. Something about Uncle
Speaker 3: Sam's new confidence in their claims of election interference, coupled
Speaker 3: with the timelines of their announcements, the specificity of some
Speaker 3: of these claims, it triggers suspicion. What does suspicion always
Speaker 3: lead to investigation, at least in this sphere.
Speaker 4: So here again shouldn't be the case, but yet there
Speaker 4: it was making the rounds in the news that the
Speaker 4: US had somehow put an operative a person inside of
Speaker 4: the Kremlin.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I remember back to just how confident like major news
Speaker 2: outlets in the US were saying, yes, there was definitely
Speaker 2: some election stuff going on, and I do recall just
Speaker 2: feeling okay, well, they must have some evidence, like they
Speaker 2: definitely have evidence if they can come forward and say that,
Speaker 2: even if they're anonymous officials or whatever, they're close to
Speaker 2: the investigation and from the State Department or whatever. You
Speaker 2: just you know that somebody somewhere has evidence or you
Speaker 2: can't make a claim like that against another country, at
Speaker 2: least publicly like that unless you've got something exact. So
Speaker 2: it does make sense. You know that there would be
Speaker 2: rumors at least swirling around that somebody somewhere very close
Speaker 2: to this thing has eyes.
Speaker 3: On a source familiar with the events, right, something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and this is this guess work two of the motivation
Speaker 3: behind a public statement is key to the conversation and conspiracy. Here,
Speaker 3: the CIA, whatever the narrative may be, felt they had
Speaker 3: no choice. In twenty sixteen, they came to this guy
Speaker 3: and they said, look, the s is going to hit
Speaker 3: the f We can get you out. If we don't
Speaker 3: get you out, you're going to be screwed over. And
Speaker 3: at first this guy said, nah, thank you, pass thank you,
Speaker 3: but I'm all right, And then I think as the
Speaker 3: wind picked up, he did agree to be extracted. This
Speaker 3: extraction occurs in twenty seventeen. Uncle Sam is reluctant to
Speaker 3: pull this guy out because it's awesome. It's awesome to
Speaker 3: have that inside. Look. This person had sent secrets of
Speaker 3: some sort to DC for decades. They were able to
Speaker 3: read papers from Vladimir Putin that were not you know,
Speaker 3: public to the Russian people or even outside of that
Speaker 3: inner circle. So this is a huge l for the
Speaker 3: United States. But there is a happy ending. The exfiltration
Speaker 3: is successful and as of twenty late twenty nineteen, this
Speaker 3: individual is living safely in the metro area of Washington,
Speaker 3: d C. May he live life well, hopefully in a
Speaker 3: one story ranch style house.
Speaker 4: Do we know? Do we know the style of his house?
Speaker 3: Well? Because you know, third stories winds got Russia?
Speaker 4: Ah, okay, good call, good call, Ben.
Speaker 2: Just put really bouncy bushes down.
Speaker 4: Below a bouncy castle. Perhaps just keep it there year round,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 3: Long enough for it to be normalized.
Speaker 2: So that would be really Yeah, that would be really funny.
Speaker 2: I X Russian assets x CIA assets functioning in Russia.
Speaker 2: Then got third story mansions. But there's there's like a
Speaker 2: trampoline mote all around it.
Speaker 3: Love it?
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, yeah, if we're teaching people to fish, maybe that's
Speaker 3: a great cover. A guy retires from the private import
Speaker 3: export business. And now he just sells bouncies and inflatables,
Speaker 3: and he's on the road. So sometimes he shows up
Speaker 3: in Arizona, right in Tempe or something, and he just
Speaker 3: installs some bouncies.
Speaker 4: I want to see a bouncy house shaped like Vladimir Putin,
Speaker 4: all right, Like you did, you bounce within his giant
Speaker 4: outstretched arms in his lap.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, I like that propaganda. So he's holding you,
Speaker 3: catch like he's catching you. Okay, nice, all right. I
Speaker 3: can't wait till this gets translated to Russian. Maybe it'll
Speaker 3: be a good idea. It's a good idea, and I
Speaker 3: hope they keep it now. Like the Cambridge five, we
Speaker 3: could say this one example again from just a few
Speaker 3: years ago, is it's yet World War footnote about how
Speaker 3: quickly things can go wrong? Or as you said, Noel
Speaker 3: traverse the southern direction. But the story adds a few
Speaker 3: more factors of conspiracy worth considering. First off, they are
Speaker 3: two competing claims for the ex filtration. The first is
Speaker 3: that journalist got too close to the truth. The second
Speaker 3: is that one way or another, the US spilled the
Speaker 3: beans on itself. So why are there competing claims.
Speaker 4: What just spill your beans.
Speaker 2: Well, it's an interesting idea of the United States telling
Speaker 2: on itself. When it kind of goes back to some
Speaker 2: stuff we're going to talk about at the end of
Speaker 2: the episode, it makes you wonder what the motivation. Oh gosh,
Speaker 2: this is hard to talk about without spoil it. There
Speaker 2: are questions about perhaps the loyalties of some of the
Speaker 2: new administration that came in in twenty sixteen, and how
Speaker 2: some of that election engineering went, and why they wanted
Speaker 2: a specific person in the White House who ended up there, right.
Speaker 3: Que bono? Who benefits and to what ends? Yeah, And
Speaker 3: the second condition that is revealed to us in this
Speaker 3: story is kind of day one stuff. Not everybody will agree,
Speaker 3: but in this milieu of action, you never assume an
Speaker 3: event exists in isolation. It's okay if an event is
Speaker 3: a one off. It's totally fine if it exists as
Speaker 3: a one time thing. But you can never make that assumption.
Speaker 3: So if something goes south, we have to look at
Speaker 3: everything related to it, however seemingly tangential, however ostensibly irrelevant.
Speaker 3: We're not looking for just the next compromise spy. We're
Speaker 3: looking for a pattern of how compromises occur. We're looking
Speaker 3: for any sort of timeline that would square with this,
Speaker 3: even if it's something this sounds dumb, but even even
Speaker 3: if you looked back and you said, hey, every time
Speaker 3: a World's Cup event happens, these terrible things seem to
Speaker 3: occur in coincidence. We talked about reading tea Leaves earlier.
Speaker 3: Reading tea Leaves gets, you know, kind of into what
Speaker 3: intelligence folks do. And sometimes you could say they're being paranoid,
Speaker 3: but it's not the nine times they ask crazy stuff.
Speaker 3: It's the tenth time when they're right.
Speaker 4: Exactly, and that seems to be precisely what is happening
Speaker 4: right now. Little by little, by hook, or by crook,
Speaker 4: one by one, intelligence operatives around the world are getting
Speaker 4: blown their covers, getting forced away, or to the point
Speaker 4: you guys were talking out at the top of the show,
Speaker 4: just simply either being disappeared, disappearing, falling off the map,
Speaker 4: being taken out. You know, who's to say, we're going
Speaker 4: to talk more about all of these possibilities, and who
Speaker 4: is to say After a quick word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3: We've returned fast forward with us to twenty twenty one,
Speaker 3: four years ago. Now, some of the top counter intelligence guys. Counterintelligence,
Speaker 3: it makes sense as a word, but it's still like
Speaker 3: when you hear it, it sounds silly. Right, we talked
Speaker 3: about this before. Oh your intelligence, counter intelligence. It sounds
Speaker 3: like that. Good, I'm going to fight you with the
Speaker 3: powers of dumb.
Speaker 4: Yep, I'm not that intelligent at all. So top counter
Speaker 4: intel crews put out a call into the CIA into
Speaker 4: their various stations and bases around the world, noting that
Speaker 4: a disturbing number of informants were being captured and or killed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this was again to references something we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 3: This has attributed The existence of this secret cable is
Speaker 3: attributed to sources familiar with the situation. There were a
Speaker 3: couple of journalists who said they have viewed the cable.
Speaker 3: But the fact that there's not a specific person assigned
Speaker 3: to the creation of the cable and the fact that
Speaker 3: there are specifics missing is a whole other bag at Badgers, right.
Speaker 3: It makes us question the motivation of allowing this thing
Speaker 3: to go public, And for an informat just got to
Speaker 3: say it, that's rant. It is a wide group term here.
Speaker 3: It could describe our high level Kremlin insider. Sure, it
Speaker 3: could also be someone who just happens to be a
Speaker 3: grad student at the right university working with the right professor.
Speaker 3: It could be the house chef for a fancy family
Speaker 3: that not every year, but every few years has some
Speaker 3: cool politicians over for like a dinner party, you know
Speaker 3: what I mean. It could be almost anyone with very
Speaker 3: little in common.
Speaker 4: And just to really quickly bring it back to pop
Speaker 4: culture for five seconds, there's a show, a Taylor Sheridan
Speaker 4: show called Lioness that I really really enjoyed the first
Speaker 4: season of, and I think it was the second season.
Speaker 4: Actually one of these assets was a housekeeper, like in
Speaker 4: a super super super high level targets home.
Speaker 2: M Well, it could be a food delivery person that
Speaker 2: often ends up at the American embassy in the Democratic
Speaker 2: Republic of Congo, right, Like just somebody who every once
Speaker 2: in a while gets eyes on an individual that's being
Speaker 2: spied upon.
Speaker 3: Sure, it could be someone providing nonprofit medical resources they
Speaker 3: the right country. Yeah, it could be any of those things.
Speaker 3: That the issue is that if you are on the
Speaker 3: outside and looking in, these people have extremely little in common.
Speaker 3: They have not met each other, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: They don't kick it. They don't have a bowling night
Speaker 3: or something. The only way you could plausibly know what
Speaker 3: they have in common is the single thread. They all
Speaker 3: secretly engage knowingly or unknowingly with US intelligence And in
Speaker 3: some cases, you know, there's Matroshka doll stuff going on.
Speaker 3: Right our food delivery guy talks to someone. He hasn't
Speaker 3: no that someone talks to someone, and so they are
Speaker 3: maybe getting the short end of the stick because now
Speaker 3: they're being held responsible even though they had no idea
Speaker 3: what was going on. That is quite possible. So the
Speaker 3: only way to know that secret thread is to be
Speaker 3: on the inside, to know the inner workings of an
Speaker 3: intelligence apparatus. The coal is coming from inside the house.
Speaker 3: That's the accusation. Dun dun zah dun dun duh dun
Speaker 3: du what yeah? I mean. Also, it looks like they
Speaker 3: noticed that rival nations were becoming much better at hunting
Speaker 3: down sources, like on an unprecedented level. The rivals in Iran,
Speaker 3: in Russia and China and Pakistan in particular, we're getting
Speaker 3: way better at finding people. And the CIA at the
Speaker 3: same time was having a way tougher experience recruiting new people,
Speaker 3: especially people that were worth it, to be.
Speaker 2: Honest, Yeah, it is crazy. It feels like ideological illusions
Speaker 2: are being kind of wiped out right now across the
Speaker 2: board when it comes to, you know, especially what people
Speaker 2: believe in with nations, with religions, with all this kind
Speaker 2: of stuff, just the shine is gone. So it's harder
Speaker 2: to get people to convince somebody, hey, do this for
Speaker 2: your country or do this for God, or do you
Speaker 2: know whatever.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: Sure, it's just kind of kind of going away, and
Speaker 2: you got to convince them in a different manner or
Speaker 2: where there has to be a different motivation.
Speaker 3: Now, yeah, there's also an existential aspect to this, a
Speaker 3: matter of survival. People are not stupid. They can sense
Speaker 3: something in the wind, especially if they're in a relatively
Speaker 3: small group. Like let's say, and this is completely hypothetical,
Speaker 3: Let's say you're a physics professor and you work on
Speaker 3: something specific. And let's say a person you have never met,
Speaker 3: but you also know of because you've read their papers,
Speaker 3: because you're one of the few people who can understand
Speaker 3: and respond to them. Let's say something bad happened to
Speaker 3: that person. Let's say there are questions about it, and
Speaker 3: then someone comes to you and says, hey, you know
Speaker 3: it's me, your buddy from earlier. I know there are
Speaker 3: only fifteen of you guys, excuse me, fourteen of you? Now,
Speaker 3: would you like to you know, would you like to
Speaker 3: hang out with us? Your answers, You're going to have
Speaker 3: a higher likelihood of saying no unless they force you
Speaker 3: to say us, because you don't want to be identified.
Speaker 3: You know, there's something in the wind, and that's that's
Speaker 3: the thing, right. Everybody looks for patterns. That's why what
Speaker 3: is it? Paradelia is real where humans see patterns even
Speaker 3: when none exists.
Speaker 4: Like seeing faces on the back of like a semi truck.
Speaker 4: Are the little hooks in the bathroom that look like
Speaker 4: a fighting octopus?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Or sometimes, as we've discussed on the show, all the
Speaker 2: other Iranian nuclear scientists are dying and you're still one
Speaker 2: of them.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep? Do you want? I mean, do you want
Speaker 3: to answer that blind cold call? Are what are you
Speaker 3: going to say to the pretty lady at the hotel bar?
Speaker 3: I hope you say something diplomatic, careful and at arm's length.
Speaker 3: So this is the logical conclusion if we're looking for patterns,
Speaker 3: if a rival agency or any agency playing the home game,
Speaker 3: playing defense, playing goalie, the rival agencies, anybody involved in this,
Speaker 3: they must logically conclude that any source that didn't get
Speaker 3: caught past a certain threshold may have been turned. And
Speaker 3: that's because they all acknowledge the dirty secret. If you
Speaker 3: are sophisticated enough, you genuinely try to not kill enemy
Speaker 3: sources when you find them, especially if they're local informants.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, someone's already put it. Yeah, someone's already rebuilt
Speaker 3: the car. Now you can just do a carjacking, little
Speaker 3: grand theft auto and make them drive where you want
Speaker 3: them to go.
Speaker 4: Nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess you just you you throw the ones
Speaker 2: that messed up bad enough out of window. But then
Speaker 2: the tools, yeah, you get in your toolbox somehow. I
Speaker 2: just don't understand some of it. I guess there's enough
Speaker 2: example making. Is that what it is? When you throw
Speaker 2: somebody out a window, you make a quick example for
Speaker 2: everybody else to see as an intimidation tactic.
Speaker 3: In that case, Yeah, it's similar to polonium poisoning or
Speaker 3: something that is sending a message. That's an example for
Speaker 3: the class, right.
Speaker 2: But but you aren't going to send a message when
Speaker 2: it comes to you discover a foreign asset in your
Speaker 2: nest and you yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question. Depends upon the circumstances of
Speaker 3: discovery and the information. Sometimes they might historically, or only
Speaker 3: speaking historically, sometimes a person would be tortured or executed
Speaker 3: to send the message to a domestic population, especially in
Speaker 3: an authoritarian government. Other times, if you perhaps discover a
Speaker 3: group of people, you don't go public, but the whole
Speaker 3: group you find one, you make it an example for
Speaker 3: the class and kill them, maybe in a way that
Speaker 3: looks like a helicopter accident, for example, And then that
Speaker 3: raises the likelihood that the survivors, who know they've already
Speaker 3: been blown, are going to do whatever they can to
Speaker 3: keep themselves and their families safe. Sweet dehumanizing, not treating
Speaker 3: people like people, that's for sure.
Speaker 4: No, but that's the name of the game on both sides,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, the CIA does also in this cable, according
Speaker 3: to reports, take it self to task and they say, look,
Speaker 3: part of this is that the work the craft has
Speaker 3: become sloppy. We've got people who are kind of overestimating
Speaker 3: their abilities. There's too much trust in new sources, and
Speaker 3: there's an underlying with that sort of arrogance. There's an
Speaker 3: underestimation of foreign intelligence capabilities because these guys are reading
Speaker 3: a lot of the same books, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: Everybody is playing a very similar game. So don't think
Speaker 3: the person on the other side of a board doesn't
Speaker 3: know how a rook works, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: That's how you lose a chess Oh.
Speaker 4: No, never underestimate your opponent.
Speaker 2: Rooks can go really far, but only in one direction.
Speaker 3: Right, Brooks can move forward and vertically and horizontally.
Speaker 4: I'm thinking of bishops. We're talking about castles.
Speaker 3: Right, Bishops are the compliment the castles, sorry, and really
Speaker 3: highly skilled chess player, and knights are on bath salts.
Speaker 4: Clearly, what the hell's up with that weird wonky movement
Speaker 4: that they do a little only move in an L shape, strange.
Speaker 3: Just to shake it up, you know. And that's what
Speaker 3: they've ben talking about, things like the Wazir or the
Speaker 3: other non canonical chess pieces. All right, So part of
Speaker 3: what the CIA is maybe suffering from per its own
Speaker 3: cable is a thing we could call a commission issue.
Speaker 3: We all have known someone working in sales maybe with
Speaker 3: a commission structure. Have you guys did you guys ever
Speaker 3: work on commission in our previous lives gracefully No?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well I was a salesperson in a music store,
Speaker 4: but they didn't pay me any commission. For sure, I
Speaker 4: should have gotten some, but I did not. They were
Speaker 4: not willing to pass on the profits.
Speaker 2: Yes, I've worked for a weird, roundabout way of commission before.
Speaker 3: And the commission structure we're all familiar with is the
Speaker 3: idea that you can earn a significant portion of your
Speaker 3: livelihood through a one time piece percentage or reward from
Speaker 3: a transaction. And the problem with commission in some industries,
Speaker 3: in some places is that it can encourage an individual
Speaker 3: actor to put their own perspective of personal gain over
Speaker 3: the larger goals of their customers, their company, or their mission.
Speaker 3: So the CIA might have a similar issue because look,
Speaker 3: if you score a new informant, it's historically a fast
Speaker 3: pass to increasing your odds for promotion. So if that's true,
Speaker 3: if you are incentivized what you want a new informant
Speaker 3: to work out, would you maybe feel that you needed
Speaker 3: that pull to work?
Speaker 4: Oh, I think that's entirely possible. I mean it's sort
Speaker 4: of the same way that when we see certain benchmarks,
Speaker 4: very high pressure benchmarks placed on testing scores, you know
Speaker 4: in the US for example, and then that kind of
Speaker 4: leads to some sticky situations when it comes to maybe
Speaker 4: teaching for the test and or cheating on the test,
Speaker 4: because these things are so crucial to meet m Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, obviously, we have just referred to many, many things
Speaker 3: to scope it back into talking about the CIA and
Speaker 3: the agency in particular. The pickle of the CIA is this,
Speaker 3: if you do things right, you can save innocent lives,
Speaker 3: not just in the US but across the world. You
Speaker 3: can prevent disasters, and if you do it correctly, nobody
Speaker 3: is going to know the full extent of your efforts
Speaker 3: and or heroism. There are some actual heroes, you know,
Speaker 3: there are historical issues, but there are wins that go unacknowledged.
Speaker 3: And we're going somewhere with this. The key takeaway is
Speaker 3: somehow there's some gap in the armor. A piece of
Speaker 3: US intelligence has been inarguably compromised. Is it technology? Has
Speaker 3: just technology made the old game irrelevant? What do you
Speaker 3: guys think?
Speaker 4: Oh, that's a good point. I mean, it does seem
Speaker 4: like a lot of this stuff we're hearing about her,
Speaker 4: that's like you know, making the news has to do
Speaker 4: with you know, data breaches and hacks, and you know,
Speaker 4: while we have the names of organizations and hacker groups
Speaker 4: and things, we sometimes don't get individual names. But maybe
Speaker 4: that's a good point, or I think we set off
Speaker 4: Mike for a moment, been our spies just like getting worse,
Speaker 4: like is there are there more leaks? Like is the
Speaker 4: is the boat leaky? Just in general, I don't know.
Speaker 2: There are still maybe not fully but close to the
Speaker 2: real wall facers that exist in these worlds of think
Speaker 2: tank and where that over you know, where that crosses
Speaker 2: over with intelligence agencies, and where that crosses over with
Speaker 2: this with various state departments, and I don't know, advisors
Speaker 2: people at the top levels of governments across the world,
Speaker 2: who are the ones who don't say a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff electronically right when we're thinking about the technology, and
Speaker 2: could you just use that to spy on everybody at
Speaker 2: all times? I think there are probably people who keep
Speaker 2: stuff under wraps enough where you need a human being
Speaker 2: to at least attempt to get as close as possible
Speaker 2: to some of those high level targets. If your goal
Speaker 2: is to if your goal is to just find out
Speaker 2: what everybody's doing and make sure everybody's going to do
Speaker 2: what you want them to do, or else their enemies.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I would agree with the first half of that.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, yeah, because there are some people who
Speaker 3: do have that lockdown opsec right, And like in the
Speaker 3: case of China hacking the US Treasury, they were mainly
Speaker 3: looking for signals, right, they were looking to again mitigate
Speaker 3: information asymmetry. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about
Speaker 3: with the technology. You know, speaking of China, we see
Speaker 3: that a lot of a lot of what we would
Speaker 3: call us spies or assets in China got busted, maybe
Speaker 3: just because the technology is better. There was a firewall.
Speaker 3: The official narrative is a firewall that worked very well
Speaker 3: for Middle East North African operations was deployed in China
Speaker 3: by the CIA, and it turns out China is a
Speaker 3: lot better at dousing the fire on those walls. So
Speaker 3: they compromised it. They got the folks. It took a
Speaker 3: little time to figure it out, but eventually one of
Speaker 3: the boffins on the US side said, hang on adding
Speaker 3: this right. Too often, they're no longer guessing. So it
Speaker 3: could just be tech or is this gap in the
Speaker 3: armor more of a Darien gap references references? Is it
Speaker 3: something meaning? Is it something fundamentally unfixable, irreparable, something inherent
Speaker 3: to the structure as it currently stands. Perhaps it could
Speaker 3: be as small as personal motivations within the structure. Perhaps
Speaker 3: it could be legacy organization. Perhaps it could be you know,
Speaker 3: incorrect assumptions about the people on the other side, saying
Speaker 3: all these folks are motivated by this one single thing,
Speaker 3: you know, the capital e enemy. That can also be
Speaker 3: a stumbling block. That's the trillion dollar question, you know.
Speaker 3: It leads us to the most the biggest question which
Speaker 3: we've seen a lot of people asking, did the US
Speaker 3: compromise itself? As you said, Noel, is it an own goal?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it seems like it's certainly possible and or plausible unfortunately.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but a self compromise, it's like informant. It can
Speaker 3: meet a bunch of different things.
Speaker 4: It's consent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a self compromise is consent.
Speaker 4: I like that.
Speaker 3: That's pretty clever. Well, it could be accidental disclosure, you know,
Speaker 3: negligence rather than malice, a firewall that doesn't work in
Speaker 3: one place. It could be sharing classified information without realizing
Speaker 3: that could help someone else do something you don't want
Speaker 3: them to do, like we're not going to do. I
Speaker 3: don't think we need to serve an analogy here. We
Speaker 3: can just say this. The Trump administration did give classified
Speaker 3: info to Russian forces during a White House visit. This
Speaker 3: has been confirmed. This was This was information given to
Speaker 3: the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, an ambassador named serge
Speaker 3: A Kislak Kislyak. It is possible. We don't know what
Speaker 3: was it it, We don't know the specifics, but it's
Speaker 3: possible maybe that you accidentally give somebody information that they
Speaker 3: can incorporate or synthesize with other information they have, and
Speaker 3: maybe they can reach a conclusion you weren't thinking about,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean, I do. So that's just
Speaker 3: messing up, right. But then the other thing is maybe
Speaker 3: people have conflicting or contradicting priorities in their own organizations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's possible. That's the whole thing where there are
Speaker 2: splinters within one group. We've talked about that before on
Speaker 2: this show, about whenever anyone comes forward and says something like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: the CIA slash the FBI allowed nine to eleven to happen,
Speaker 2: or something like that, there's always that concept that, oh,
Speaker 2: there was perhaps a splinter group within one of those
Speaker 2: organizations or those organizations that wanted something to occur, when
Speaker 2: the vast majority of the organization entire didn't want something
Speaker 2: to happen, or was attempting to stop something. It gets
Speaker 2: very convoluted in the world of spies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this can happen with any large organization, right,
Speaker 3: But the problem is this kind of loggerhead of conflicting
Speaker 3: goals or poor communication. It could explain at best a
Speaker 3: few incidents, not the overall.
Speaker 4: Pattern one hundred percent. So the third and most terrifying
Speaker 4: option is something that I think many folks have been
Speaker 4: thinking about lately, is the potential for a wilful collusion
Speaker 4: of some kind. I'm not trying to be vague about it.
Speaker 4: I think you mentioned Ben with the you know, the
Speaker 4: the administration sharing assets, you know, openly with Russia, and
Speaker 4: there is a sense that there's some moves being made
Speaker 4: that could well be in cahoots with who many Americans
Speaker 4: might see as a not an ally the idea of
Speaker 4: willful compromise.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and you're you're referring to, I think, no specifically,
Speaker 3: the accusations and allegations regarding the current president of the
Speaker 3: United States.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be like super
Speaker 4: tiptoeing around it, but I just think there's a certain
Speaker 4: point where you just can't ignore some of this stuff,
Speaker 4: some of the smoke. And I don't even think it
Speaker 4: even is super conspiratorial or conspiracy theory esque to speculate
Speaker 4: about some of this stuff. There's just some moves that
Speaker 4: are taking place that just don't make sense otherwise.
Speaker 3: Right, Right, that's we have to we have to acknowledge
Speaker 3: that there have been long standing allegations about conflicts of interest,
Speaker 3: whether those be allegations of extortion, blackmail, financial shenanigans, you know,
Speaker 3: shout out Krassnov. That's the mimetic version of this making
Speaker 3: the rounds the other ass the other concept is just
Speaker 3: a double agent. Someone got turned maybe inside the CIA,
Speaker 3: maybe inside Langley, and they're just doing their job, right
Speaker 3: Varius as little whispers and so on, little birds, Yeah,
Speaker 3: which is why the people who are I was talking
Speaker 3: about this and then that show the agency the people
Speaker 3: who are spied on the most are often spies, at
Speaker 3: least back in the day. So as as you had
Speaker 3: mentioned earlier, Matt, I believe so something about this is
Speaker 3: frightening to people. Of course, it is frightening, and it's
Speaker 3: very politically charged now such that people are people are
Speaker 3: hesitant sometimes to talk about that possibility. But that goes
Speaker 3: back to what was set up earlier, the idea of
Speaker 3: erosion of faith in not just religion, but in various institutions,
Speaker 3: government institutions in specific. Matt, I think we had talked
Speaker 3: a little bit off air, or we talked extensively off
Speaker 3: air about US AID. Do you think that's familiar to
Speaker 3: most Americans? Pretty current news cycle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's everywhere. There's been a massive effort to shut down,
Speaker 2: or at least temporarily stop most of the functionality of
Speaker 2: the United States Agency for International Development, And it coincides
Speaker 2: with a lot of learning we've done on this show
Speaker 2: about NGOs, about foreign aid, about state departments from various countries,
Speaker 2: and how they move in and offer big loans and
Speaker 2: then those loans get paid back, and then they've got
Speaker 2: soft or hard power over the people who control, you know, countries,
Speaker 2: whether it's private or public. And then this agency, this
Speaker 2: specific agency is one that appears to have had a
Speaker 2: lot of power in other countries, right, and it's being
Speaker 2: systematically shut down.
Speaker 4: It just it.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Ben, as you said in the outline,
Speaker 2: it's something to think about because you're this organization, This
Speaker 2: United States Department, it provided forty two percent of all
Speaker 2: humanitarian aid that the United Nations tracked last year in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four has a staff of ten thousand people
Speaker 2: for now functions with the State Department all around the world. Right,
Speaker 2: And we know what the State Department is, what it does,
Speaker 2: especially when it comes to tradecraft and those things. We know,
Speaker 2: we know how those mechanisms work. And if you don't
Speaker 2: go back and listen to episodes of our show, and specifically,
Speaker 2: Usaidea has been accused back in twenty fourteen of doing
Speaker 2: this weird thing in Cuba where they like set up
Speaker 2: a whole social media social media sites zunzunio I think
Speaker 2: zu n zu n eo. It was being accused of
Speaker 2: basically trying to undermine the Cuban government. And Mexico also
Speaker 2: has accused them just a couple of years ago of
Speaker 2: trying to undermine their government by supporting specific groups that
Speaker 2: are anti Mexican government. So you know, I'm only bringing
Speaker 2: this up because it feels like a weird thing to
Speaker 2: attack from within, because that's what's happening, right, This is
Speaker 2: being shut down by the current administration. Right, Yeah, it
Speaker 2: seems like a helpful thing for spycraft.
Speaker 3: It seems like a helpful thing for people who don't
Speaker 3: agree with the existence of the United States, yep, as
Speaker 3: it currently stands, right.
Speaker 2: And well, yeah, taking it down seems like that, right,
Speaker 2: Having it and having it be as robust as possible
Speaker 2: seems like a good thing for intelligence agencies.
Speaker 3: Right, Ethics aside, you know what I mean, Just if
Speaker 3: we're looking at it, if we're looking at the the choreography, right,
Speaker 3: if we're looking at the dance itself, and we're not
Speaker 3: looking at whether or not the dance involves murdering people,
Speaker 3: then this is you know, you would want the dance
Speaker 3: to continue. This is also right, Sorry, there's a difference
Speaker 3: between destabilization and murdering people. Sure, Matrix dodge of that one.
Speaker 3: So we've got I mean, there are other organizations to
Speaker 3: What I love about The point you're bringing up here, Matt,
Speaker 3: is that there are other similar things you don't hear about.
Speaker 3: And is it is it illegal to to pop online?
Speaker 3: Right and make body accounts. No, it's it's actually it's fine.
Speaker 3: Now in the in the example you brought up of Zunzunio,
Speaker 3: they are that was a secret platform of its own
Speaker 3: right and the funding like it wasn't clearly USAID at first. Uh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these are accusations. USA ideas or USAID is has
Speaker 2: been historically very often accused by other countries of acting,
Speaker 2: you know, as an in some type of destabilizing way
Speaker 2: within their country, right, and it's often just because of
Speaker 2: the amount of dollars. And yeah, I mean you are
Speaker 2: talking about billions of dollars fourteen point four billion dollars
Speaker 2: from USAID to Ukraine in twenty twenty three, Yemen, Afghanistan
Speaker 2: receiving hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 3: I don't know all the all the good ones. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this is also one funny note we have to add
Speaker 3: on the side forgive our accents. We're not native Spanish speakers.
Speaker 3: But you know, zuon zunio is a pun, right, It's
Speaker 3: it's Cuban slang for the sound of hummingbird.
Speaker 4: Makes every time it's like it kind of like Twitter.
Speaker 4: It's so funny, but every time you say it reminds
Speaker 4: me of that zoom Phil Collins song Zusue studio, There
Speaker 4: go zoon zunzuo. Maybe it's related, who knows?
Speaker 3: Who knows? This goes all the way to the top,
Speaker 3: by which we mean Phil Collins, Oh yeah, this is
Speaker 3: I mean, this is an example. There is a reason
Speaker 3: people are across the world distrustful of these various institutions,
Speaker 3: and we're not We're not denigrating the people working for
Speaker 3: these institutions. If you meet someone who it's like dnng
Speaker 3: O's and the US have a really tough relationship abroad
Speaker 3: because of previous shenanigans. So if you should meet someone
Speaker 3: working for green Peace, they're probably just working for green peace,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. They're not out to like
Speaker 3: steal your organs or overthrow your government. That happened just
Speaker 3: a few times, just a few times.
Speaker 4: Won't let them live it down.
Speaker 2: Isn't it pretty frustrating guys that there's that Just thinking
Speaker 2: about how much money gets moved around for stuff like this,
Speaker 2: and then it does seem like there's a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of time wasted, resources wasted because everybody is looking at
Speaker 2: everybody else as an enemy and not just helping the
Speaker 2: human beings and fixing the problems. I don't know. I
Speaker 2: know that's idealistic and blah.
Speaker 4: No, I mean, yeah, but it's really sometimes I think
Speaker 4: it's you have to have a little shread of that remaining.
Speaker 4: We can't be completely stripped of our humanity, you know,
Speaker 4: living in this world. I think that's something we all
Speaker 4: strive to hold on to. I would hope so.
Speaker 3: No, it's also an ideal that we're pretty unanimous about
Speaker 3: and consistent about on this show. You know, a lot
Speaker 3: of these problems can be solved. The decision not to
Speaker 3: solve those problems is very much a decision, and you
Speaker 3: can always make a different decision without sounding too preachy
Speaker 3: about it. While we're at it, we got to take
Speaker 3: a moment and ask all our fellow conspiracy realists to
Speaker 3: avoid vilifying individual members of the US Intelligence apparatus. Vilify
Speaker 3: politicians all you want, that's what they signed up for.
Speaker 3: But the intelligence apparatus, none of these agencies anywhere in
Speaker 3: the world, have a perfect track record. But the people
Speaker 3: working there, the actual facts shout out more and Vogelbaum
Speaker 3: human people in these positions. They're professionals. They're motivated by
Speaker 3: this goal of yes, doing a good job at their career,
Speaker 3: but also of keeping the US and the world overall
Speaker 3: a safer place. That's like the aim. They're not conspiring again,
Speaker 3: just by the nature of them existing.
Speaker 2: They're they're keeping the US safe for the US sake, right, Well,
Speaker 2: it's pursuing the national security and interest of the US.
Speaker 3: Sure. Yeah, so let's add an asterisk there. This is
Speaker 3: sometimes imperfect goal. I do think it is still important
Speaker 3: to defend the humanity of people involved. You know, It's
Speaker 3: like we said years back, there's not one group that
Speaker 3: runs the world. There are instead multiple groups who feel
Speaker 3: like the world would be a better place if they
Speaker 3: were in charge, and the most dangerous of those groups
Speaker 3: already have a lot of power. Is that something we
Speaker 3: could agree on? I think so, well, there's there is
Speaker 3: one other thing we can agree on, and simple, and
Speaker 3: it's kind of horrified. Around the world. Assets that were
Speaker 3: once safe are getting blown left and right. And the
Speaker 3: thing about paranoia is we may never know how many
Speaker 3: people or how because they are people, how many assets
Speaker 3: lives were ruined or ended, Because the US's own agencies
Speaker 3: don't disclose that information. It's a rabbit hole of smoke
Speaker 3: and mirrors at every turn your face forward with the
Speaker 3: stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 4: Matt, did you just chuckle at assets getting blown?
Speaker 2: We've said it so many times in this episode so far,
Speaker 2: people getting blown left and right.
Speaker 3: This is everywhere, all the way down. And with this
Speaker 3: we pass the torch to you. Be it yours to
Speaker 3: hold it high. If you break faith with those who
Speaker 3: die shout out to the poem Flanders Fields. I want
Speaker 3: to say, let us know your thoughts here, folks, let
Speaker 3: us know what to make of all this strange, conflicting
Speaker 3: conspiracy and allegations thereof. You can find us on the emails.
Speaker 3: You can find us on the telephones. You can find
Speaker 3: us on the lines, not secret cables though, public cables only.
Speaker 4: Yeah, only above ground cables can you reach us on.
Speaker 4: You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff where
Speaker 4: we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where
Speaker 4: it gets crazy. On x FKA, Twitter, and on youtubee.
Speaker 4: We have video content galore for you to sift through
Speaker 4: peruse at your leisure. On TikTok and Instagram. However, you
Speaker 4: can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff Show.
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