Speaker 1: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
Speaker 1: CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
Speaker 1: in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2: And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
Speaker 2: and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
Speaker 2: our adversaries.
Speaker 1: Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories large and small.
Speaker 2: Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1: This is mission implausible. Today's guest is David McCluskey. He's
Speaker 1: actually a friend and a former colleague, and he is
Speaker 1: now best known for his best selling spy novels Damasca, Station,
Speaker 1: Moscow X and The Seventh Floor, all worth reading. We'll
Speaker 1: probably talk about him in the podcast, but he's probably
Speaker 1: even better known nowadays, especially in England, for his well
Speaker 1: regarded podcast The Rest Is Classified with British security journalist
Speaker 1: Gordon Carrera.
Speaker 2: It's good.
Speaker 1: David previously worked at the CIA on issues related to
Speaker 1: the Middle East and worked in embassies abroad, but he
Speaker 1: was in the sort of snotty, whimpy side of the agency.
Speaker 1: Jully and I who were busy saving the world so
Speaker 1: that it could be destroyed later. So sorry about that.
Speaker 2: So I can't be friends, you know, Manars and Venus
Speaker 2: can d O and d I people. We'll explore that.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry over here, you go.
Speaker 3: I was I was trying to translate all the garbage
Speaker 3: you were writing up in the field so the people
Speaker 3: making the decisions in DC would know what the hell
Speaker 3: you were talking about.
Speaker 1: I have lots of questions, but here's where I'd like
Speaker 1: to start off with. What is it like now to
Speaker 1: be making a living off of our exploits?
Speaker 3: I like I like to I like to say John
Speaker 3: that you know, I was certainly not a I was
Speaker 3: certainly not a case officer like you out there saving
Speaker 3: the world regularly day by day. But but you know
Speaker 3: every day. Yeah, what better person to actually be able
Speaker 3: to write down on paper those exploits than an analyst, right?
Speaker 3: I mean, this is this It's just a continuation of
Speaker 3: my sort of prior career right now. Now I get
Speaker 3: to write more fantastical stories and UH and occasionally you know,
Speaker 3: poke fun at you guys, and UH and some of
Speaker 3: my analysts friends as well. So it's not too bad.
Speaker 3: It's not too bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to say as we start that when
Speaker 2: I entered the agency the first couple of tours, I
Speaker 2: was like the agency version of hermaphrodite, sort of a
Speaker 2: I was because I was between I was between the
Speaker 2: d I, the intelligence guys, the analysts, guys, intelligence folk,
Speaker 2: the analysts, and the operations officer, tough guys like John
Speaker 2: and both of you, the DI analyst and the do
Speaker 2: O operators. Both of you gave me noggies and swirlies
Speaker 2: right and looked good.
Speaker 3: Point, this is a real besmirching of our reports, officer friends,
Speaker 3: isn't it. It is. It's terrible.
Speaker 1: I all of us deserve a besmirching, So that's not
Speaker 1: that's true. I was trying to go on offense til
Speaker 1: that my besmirching is a little further down the pike.
Speaker 3: That's true. That's true. Yeah, No, I mean, uh, I
Speaker 3: mean analysts, though I don't think they were analysts, weren't
Speaker 3: the type to be given out like noggi's and swirlies. Jerry,
Speaker 3: and I feel like it was very much a heads down,
Speaker 3: eating lunch at your desk crowd for the most part, right,
Speaker 3: That's what I remember.
Speaker 2: Mostly I got like eye rolls and like oh yeah,
Speaker 2: you got oh And then I get use a big
Speaker 2: word and I have to go look it up and
Speaker 2: realize I've been besmirched.
Speaker 3: But this is an influencing thing. We were talking, We
Speaker 3: were talking about this before we even hit record, that
Speaker 3: what Jerry just did is a classic case officer influencing
Speaker 3: tactic for analysts, which is, when you're sitting down in
Speaker 3: a briefing, they tell you, they the case officers, tell
Speaker 3: you how smart you are and how they don't know anything,
Speaker 3: and how they're just desperate for your knowledge, and then
Speaker 3: use the analyst. You know, even if you kind of
Speaker 3: know what's happening, you feel good when the briefing starts
Speaker 3: right and it's just a classic I swear that they
Speaker 3: taught you that somewhere along the line, because I got
Speaker 3: every case officer I sat down with ever period.
Speaker 2: I have to get this out, so they get this
Speaker 2: out early. We had a a an analyst, a very
Speaker 2: senior analyst woman. She came to Manila and we were
Speaker 2: talking and you know, around the table, and we were
Speaker 2: giving a briefing. And at the time, one of the
Speaker 2: terrorist groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, was something we
Speaker 2: were concerned with. And so the reports officer says, well, well,
Speaker 2: there's no way around this, you know. He says that
Speaker 2: it's called the MILF, And everybody smiles around the table
Speaker 2: except for the analyst, and she's like yeah, and he's
Speaker 2: like the mill and uh, she's like and she's like
Speaker 2: smart enough to pick up that's supposed to mean something.
Speaker 2: He says, well, maybe you should look it up later,
Speaker 2: but don't use a government computer.
Speaker 3: Well it was abbreviated milf in' that's the name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the MILF. Yeah. Yeah, we're going down. We're
Speaker 2: already sort of launching down a path, and conspiracy theories
Speaker 2: come out of like the CIA, And David, I was
Speaker 2: wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe
Speaker 2: some of the tribes inside of CIA really briefly, and
Speaker 2: then discuss what the DII the analysts do, and then
Speaker 2: we can sort of talk about conspiracy theories and conspiracies
Speaker 2: both within the agency and who gets blamed for conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories and so forth. So why don't you why don't
Speaker 2: I kick it over to you?
Speaker 3: I'm sure you're well, yeah, I mean, and the most
Speaker 3: important tribe is the analyst, because they're the ones writing
Speaker 3: and stuff that goes goes to the policymakers, right, that's
Speaker 3: what the CIA is there to do. For the most part.
Speaker 3: Occasionally we'll spin up some covered action stuff which usually
Speaker 3: doesn't go that well. But you know, the analysts are
Speaker 3: sort of we're holding the flame. I mean, so the
Speaker 3: analysts is certainly one tribe, right, your your case officer
Speaker 3: brethren are another.
Speaker 2: Relations officers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: There's there's a whole host of like teers and ness
Speaker 3: in tiers. Yeah, yeah, the support guys. But like even
Speaker 3: within like the d O, right, there's a bunch of
Speaker 3: different sort of you know, there's like a sort of hierarchy.
Speaker 4: Right, And how do you see the hierarchy? That's that's all.
Speaker 4: How do I see it in the operations side?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well I was thinking that, Yeah, there's there's reports officers,
Speaker 3: there's cmos, there's there's sues, right, and I always forgot
Speaker 3: what that stood for, essentially, like essentially like an analyst.
Speaker 1: In the d O.
Speaker 3: Is that right? Okay? There were targeting officers, which I
Speaker 3: guess could be in either the d I or the
Speaker 3: d O, as I recall, you know, interestingly enough, the
Speaker 3: last time I went into Langley up in the newly
Speaker 3: renovated museum. There is a wall that has a list
Speaker 3: of every or what seems like every possible job title
Speaker 3: you could have at the CIA, and it is an
Speaker 3: entire wall. Have you seen this. It's well, let us in.
Speaker 4: There anymore to be clear.
Speaker 2: And you still have pictures in me on a horse
Speaker 2: in Afghanistan. Those are all going we didn't go real
Speaker 2: well yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3: My perception was always the case. Officers believed themselves to
Speaker 3: be the reason the entire place existed, and thus the
Speaker 3: most important people there thatived believed, yes, believed themselves to
Speaker 3: be the most important Who I mean, who else there was?
Speaker 3: You know, a variety of techie type roles. There were
Speaker 3: those guys in the green jackets who monitored the uh,
Speaker 3: the contractors who came in who I always like to
Speaker 3: include them in any kind of book, if I could
Speaker 3: just randomly throw a reference at them.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: You've done a good job with your books. You've thrown
Speaker 4: in that you had the hot dog machine, and the hot.
Speaker 3: Dog machine in there, sadly was it was ripped out
Speaker 3: at some point in the past decade, probably for like
Speaker 3: code violations. I tried to get a reference to the
Speaker 3: you know, the gift shop in there as much as
Speaker 3: I can, and I used I think John, I actually
Speaker 3: took this line from you with permission, of course, because
Speaker 3: at one point in some conversation you said that we
Speaker 3: stopped being a real spy service as soon as the
Speaker 3: gift shop went in. You know, we put that. Put
Speaker 3: that in the mouth of.
Speaker 4: The CIA on it the end.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But David, so there's there's the analysts and the operator,
Speaker 2: so the two core tribes. But there's another split, another
Speaker 2: schism inside of the agency. And I want to know
Speaker 2: which side you fall on. Were you dunkin Donuts or
Speaker 2: were you Starbucks? There's two places to get coffee.
Speaker 3: That's right, That's right. You know what I I migrated
Speaker 3: over the course of my career. I began as a
Speaker 3: dunkin Donuts.
Speaker 4: Man, made more money, went to Starbucks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And then once I made gs ten I started,
Speaker 3: I went to Starbucks. It was Duncan to start, and
Speaker 3: then it became Starbucks. Although I heard a rumor, I
Speaker 3: wasn't there. A director at some point wanted to like
Speaker 3: rip out the coffee stands, right, I don't know which one.
Speaker 4: Our friends Rob Danberg wanted to do that.
Speaker 3: He oh, Okay, yeah, yeah, get rid of them. But yeah, no,
Speaker 3: I'm I became a Starbucks man as it went on,
Speaker 3: and there were plenty of my analyst friends who probably
Speaker 3: spent good portions of their days kind of like just
Speaker 3: milling around the Starbucks writer having various like ostensible work
Speaker 3: chats in the cafeteria or at the Starbucks that were
Speaker 3: that were not.
Speaker 4: That's why he wanted to rip them out, because.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly exactly the strength.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about you for a second. I mean, really,
Speaker 1: you have become quite popular both for your books, which
Speaker 1: are high praise, but also this podcast, which is newer.
Speaker 1: So which do you like better nowadays? The writing or
Speaker 1: the podcasting.
Speaker 3: Oh that's hard. I mean I enjoy both of them.
Speaker 3: I think the writing is the central thing that that
Speaker 3: I don't know, I will never I will never stop writing,
Speaker 3: and I hope the podcast never stops. But kind of
Speaker 3: the central piece of all of it's the books. But
Speaker 3: Gordon and I having a ton of fun on the podcast,
Speaker 3: and I see it as very like symbiotic with the
Speaker 3: writing because it's an opportunity to go into spy stories
Speaker 3: that I know some thing about and then actually go
Speaker 3: deep and do the research to come up with kind of,
Speaker 3: you know, the arc for a tour or four six
Speaker 3: part series and and learn a whole bunch of stuff
Speaker 3: that I don't I didn't otherwise know, and then frankly,
Speaker 3: you know, try to find ways to work some of
Speaker 3: that material into books if I can. And so kind
Speaker 3: of going into real stuff and finding interesting characters or
Speaker 3: situations is really fruitful. So I think the two things
Speaker 3: really work well.
Speaker 2: Again, fiction and John's war stories are pretty much the
Speaker 2: same thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, there I was. It does be an igor.
Speaker 4: Let's take a break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: So I want to I'm gonna endeavor to say something
Speaker 2: good about.
Speaker 3: Analysts, okay, And I know it's gonna be hard for you.
Speaker 2: And it's and I'm going I want to get down
Speaker 2: this rabbit hole. And this gets into conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: So one of the bigger ones is IRAQ w WEMD
Speaker 2: and it's something that I have an indirect insight into,
Speaker 2: and I imagine also you indirect through hearsay and so forth.
Speaker 2: But my sense was it is billed as and on
Speaker 2: permission to swear, because this is a big one. This
Speaker 2: is like a huge agency fuck up. And I think
Speaker 2: I'm not going to shy away from that, but I
Speaker 2: think the real for me, in any case, the real
Speaker 2: conspiracy here is that the Bush administration basically had decided
Speaker 2: to go to war, and they built their own with
Speaker 2: Doug Fife, they built their own intelligence service in the
Speaker 2: Pentagon for a little while for two years to basically
Speaker 2: prove that case and to throw out any evidence that
Speaker 2: didn't support it. And then of course they went down
Speaker 2: the road of Saddam and al Qaeda were very close,
Speaker 2: which was completely untrue. And then they said that, you know,
Speaker 2: they hooked into a whole host of scammers that claimed
Speaker 2: that Saddam had this you know, curveball and all the
Speaker 2: rest of this. And my understanding is that the analysts
Speaker 2: who wouldn't go along with this were systematically weeded out,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of pushed off to the side or
Speaker 2: demoted or asked to move off, and that the analyst
Speaker 2: at the end said, the evidence that we have indicates
Speaker 2: that they likely do. There was sort of probability, I
Speaker 2: don't know as high, medium, low, and the White I
Speaker 2: said that's not good enough. And George Tennant, who I
Speaker 2: think highly uncaved is my understanding, and he said, look,
Speaker 2: it's it's yes or no. There's no maybe's here. We're
Speaker 2: going to war. Say yes or no, and you'd better
Speaker 2: be friggin yes, right, And so they did they said yes.
Speaker 2: And so the agency, through a conspiracy, has been stuck
Speaker 2: with this has been pinned to us as a one
Speaker 2: of our great failures. And I think it's you know,
Speaker 2: the analysts are sort of at the center of this,
Speaker 2: the pressures on them. So I'm wondering from where you sat,
Speaker 2: from what you heard, you weren't involved in this. It's
Speaker 2: your sense of pressure on analysts. And this goes today
Speaker 2: with this administration to all sorts of things like you know,
Speaker 2: where COVID came from and so forth. So I wonder
Speaker 2: wonder if you could go into that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's my understanding as well. The rock WMD story
Speaker 3: is that it's a it is in some sense a
Speaker 3: story about analytic failure, because at the time there wasn't
Speaker 3: I actually don't think that there were embedded across the DII.
Speaker 3: There weren't sort of the the confidence statements and all
Speaker 3: these kind of other and frankly, a lot of the
Speaker 3: clarity around how good or bad or fragmentary or otherwise
Speaker 3: the sourcing was like those were not as consistently embedded
Speaker 3: in the assessments, and so it was easier in some ways,
Speaker 3: I think, to sort of handwave maybe or for consumers
Speaker 3: of the intel to take away different stories from what
Speaker 3: they were reading. And a lot of the changes made,
Speaker 3: like just as I was joining, were to try to
Speaker 3: like systematize the way that we communicated INTEL assessments and
Speaker 3: to be very clear about what we knew and what
Speaker 3: we didn't know and things like that.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: The art of the story you told on Rock WMD,
Speaker 3: I think is a that's a particularly egregious example of
Speaker 3: the politics kind of dipping in and dictating or really
Speaker 3: influencing what the CIA puts down on paper. I think
Speaker 3: the politicization of analysis, though it's rarely that easy. I
Speaker 3: think to sort of go back and say that's exactly
Speaker 3: what happened, I think a Rock WMD, because I mean
Speaker 3: my understanding is that sometimes like there were NSC or
Speaker 3: Pentagon or White House officials who would literally I mean
Speaker 3: it came out to Langley on multiple occasions to like
Speaker 3: basically sit with the analysts right and right and like
Speaker 3: so I mean that's a lot of pressure right, and
Speaker 3: to your point, like, if the decision has already been
Speaker 3: made to do this, to go to war, I guess
Speaker 3: becomes more of a political question for you know, the
Speaker 3: director for the seventh floor to figure out how do
Speaker 3: you not lose the trust of the White House, right
Speaker 3: if they've already made the decision. But but yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean the politicization pressure and sort of I guess the
Speaker 3: risk is real and it is really I think hard
Speaker 3: to it's not It shouldn't be hard for the line
Speaker 3: analysts to navigate because they're the ones that are looking
Speaker 3: at the stuff, and ideally they're being backed up the
Speaker 3: chain by people who have an interest in like maybe corny,
Speaker 3: but like, yeah, speaking the truth regardless of what the
Speaker 3: politics are. But there's really many different ways that the
Speaker 3: analysis can get politicized at different parts of the chain.
Speaker 3: A lot of different people are touching it, and frankly,
Speaker 3: stuff can get politicized by what's not written or what's
Speaker 3: not reported into the White House or what doesn't get
Speaker 3: read in the PDB. So brief yeah, yeah, so you know,
Speaker 3: it's a really and it's really subtle, I think, because frankly,
Speaker 3: the politicization could start with you know, someone who's editing
Speaker 3: one of those pdbs just kind of softening some stuff
Speaker 3: a little bit, or saying, is this really a moderate
Speaker 3: confidence judgment? This seems more like a low confidence judgment
Speaker 3: to me based on this definition, And that's more art
Speaker 3: than science. And if something's a low confidence judgment, then
Speaker 3: maybe it's you know, maybe it's not worth actually briefing
Speaker 3: to the president period. And so it never makes, you know,
Speaker 3: it never makes it into any kind of higher level
Speaker 3: conversation down in the oval. So there's lots of different ways.
Speaker 3: I mean, frankly, i'd be curious for your guys thoughts
Speaker 3: on this, And you know, on the collection side, I'd
Speaker 3: imagine there's plenty of ways that someone on the seventh
Speaker 3: floor in the DdO shop could say on these three
Speaker 3: or four topics, I want to see the stuff before
Speaker 3: it gets descemnded. And you could decide, for any reason,
Speaker 3: you kind of cook up maybe we don't descend this
Speaker 3: kind of thing, and because it's gonna set off fireworks downtown,
Speaker 3: and maybe I make up some stuff about how the
Speaker 3: sourcing's bogus or whatever in order to justify it. So
Speaker 3: there's a lot of different ways you could play around
Speaker 3: with it. I think throughout the chain, right, I.
Speaker 2: Think it's important to discuss what descend means, right. People
Speaker 2: that may not realize this. So people like John and I,
Speaker 2: we would collect the information from a source what it
Speaker 2: just putatively get a human source. He gives us the information.
Speaker 2: We don't like hand it to the president. We actually
Speaker 2: hand it to a reports office or a CMO and
Speaker 2: they take the information, decide how it's written up. Then
Speaker 2: it goes to headquarters where they look at it again,
Speaker 2: and then they descem it to whomever needs it, whoever
Speaker 2: is in need to know, so to the analysts. And
Speaker 2: there's always a danger that if that raw disseminated report
Speaker 2: goes directly to the White House and it's wrong, or
Speaker 2: if it's lanted, then you've got other problems. But so
Speaker 2: that's the way it should go. But there's lots of
Speaker 2: places to slip TwixT the it fixed the spoon in
Speaker 2: the lip, right I mean, and not always to influence it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if you go to go back to the
Speaker 1: WMD a rock WND problem, A lot of people have
Speaker 1: gone back after the analysts for making a bad call there,
Speaker 1: but frankly there was no good collection then either. So
Speaker 1: it was a real intelligence failure. We had no good sources. Really,
Speaker 1: we had a White House that decided they needed to
Speaker 1: go to war, and we had no Americans living in
Speaker 1: the country. We had no good sources, and the analysts
Speaker 1: were being pressured to come up with an analytic judgment,
Speaker 1: and I think they tried to use what would be logical. Well,
Speaker 1: he had WMD before and he tried to hide it,
Speaker 1: so we must be doing so again. And so it
Speaker 1: was a real problem. And I think we've seen even
Speaker 1: more recently. You talked about it in one of your
Speaker 1: podcasts recently about the twenty twenty two invasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 4: It seems in that.
Speaker 1: Case we actually had good collection. We had some sort
Speaker 1: of source or sources. They were telling us that Putin
Speaker 1: was about to invade. But some of the analysis clearly
Speaker 1: was wrong because we had information Putin was going to invade.
Speaker 1: But then were the decision was what's going to happen next?
Speaker 1: And essentially our analysts in some fashion must have told
Speaker 1: the White House, well, Ukraine's gonna lose quickly, and so
Speaker 1: you better get Lenski out of there, and that's not
Speaker 1: what happened.
Speaker 4: Someone had to.
Speaker 1: Make a decision on how were the Ukrainians willing to fight,
Speaker 1: and we obviously did not have good intelligence on that either.
Speaker 2: And David, so you were involved a lot with Syria
Speaker 2: that's reflected in your book. You were there for Prog
Speaker 2: Prog Spring, Christ dates me for the Arab Spring. Spring
Speaker 2: springs and people tend to think, in conspiratorial thinking that
Speaker 2: the agency is omnipotent when things surprise us. So like
Speaker 2: the Arab Spring, people tend to think that the agency
Speaker 2: is involved in prophesying that we've got You guys have
Speaker 2: a crystal ball. So I was wondering if you could
Speaker 2: give us your senses an analyst of what we could
Speaker 2: know about the Arab Spring. Right, a fruit seller gets
Speaker 2: slapped in the world falls apart and then whether and
Speaker 2: then more recent is like when a sad fell, like
Speaker 2: everybody was like holy shit, I mean nobody predicted it.
Speaker 2: So I just wondering if you could give folks a
Speaker 2: sense of like how you guys are just as much
Speaker 2: at sea as the rest of us, right, and it's
Speaker 2: not a conspiracy to hide or that we've got all
Speaker 2: this information. Yea, this information, we have all this power
Speaker 2: that people assume we have.
Speaker 3: I think that The way I would maybe frame it is,
Speaker 3: I think making a call on the eruption of mass
Speaker 3: sort of popular uprising in the Middle East is a mystery.
Speaker 3: It is a sort of mass psychological phenomenon that is
Speaker 3: inherently unpredictable and actually nobody is capable of predicting it.
Speaker 3: Whereas does Saddam possess chemical, biological weapons whatever is a secret,
Speaker 3: We in theory could have collected information that would have,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of proved or disproved whether or not
Speaker 3: that's true, Which is why I think I would say
Speaker 3: to your point, John, I'd never thought about WMD. Actually
Speaker 3: is a doo failure, a collection failure that's also a
Speaker 3: piece of it. The whole kind of chain failed because
Speaker 3: the analysts we didn't have good information, and then the
Speaker 3: analysts sort of through pressure and otherwise, you know, messed
Speaker 3: up the call. But I think an intelligence failure involves
Speaker 3: like are there secrets to collect that should have been
Speaker 3: collected or analysis that should have been conducted given the
Speaker 3: available information that wasn't right, Whereas I think predicting Syria
Speaker 3: it's not possible, and so we certainly did not have
Speaker 3: a crystal ball, and most of what the country analysts
Speaker 3: were doing in those late twenty ten early twenty eleven
Speaker 3: months were either writing pieces that explained sort of what
Speaker 3: are the hurdles to a protest movement or to an
Speaker 3: insurgency or a civil war, like what has to be
Speaker 3: overcome to get there? So said differently, like what would
Speaker 3: you have to believe for this to happen? Or writing
Speaker 3: scenarios that lay out, you know, three or four worlds
Speaker 3: or paths you could travel down should the sort of
Speaker 3: security apparatus and general kind of pillars of stability in
Speaker 3: a given country start to crumble, And none of us
Speaker 3: had any eye. I mean I had friends who were
Speaker 3: working on other you know, milliased accounts at that point
Speaker 3: in time, who were literally writing essentially writing pieces that
Speaker 3: had them in draft form that were like, this is
Speaker 3: why it's not going to happen here, and then the
Speaker 3: protest movement would start to May would be like delete these,
Speaker 3: you know, So like no one saw that stuff coming, right,
Speaker 3: I mean no more than like nobody saw the sort
Speaker 3: of collapse of communism across Eastern Europe happening so quickly
Speaker 3: in eighty nine either, right, So it's just it's not predictable.
Speaker 3: Those kind of mass events.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know. I don't know about that. I
Speaker 2: mean I went to West Berlin in the in April
Speaker 2: of eighty nine, and you know, five months later it
Speaker 2: all fell apart, the wall came down. Coincidence.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm in analysis right there.
Speaker 2: In my mind.
Speaker 1: No, and more of this enlightening banter after a quick break.
Speaker 2: Just because I was sort of involved in this. It
Speaker 2: was also a process issue. So there was this source
Speaker 2: called Curveball. Now Curveball, he was the main source. Singles
Speaker 2: never do things on single source. He was the main
Speaker 2: source that told us with great confidence and specificity about
Speaker 2: the state of the WND programs. And Curveball was living
Speaker 2: in Munich at the time, and German Station and I
Speaker 2: got a pretty good view into this talked to the
Speaker 2: Germans about him because he refus to meet the CIA,
Speaker 2: but he did talk to the German intelligence and he said,
Speaker 2: I won't meet the CIA, but you know, you can
Speaker 2: give their information to HIT to them, to US intelligence.
Speaker 2: I think the station took a look at his stuff
Speaker 2: and said, we can't verify any of this and maybe
Speaker 2: it's true, maybe it's not, but it's like we can't
Speaker 2: verify it. So it's really not any good. And then
Speaker 2: what happened is the military came in and they said, well,
Speaker 2: we'll do it, right, but they didn't tell the station.
Speaker 2: So all that reporting that went out went out through
Speaker 2: the US military, and we in the station and our
Speaker 2: analysts were getting it, but we didn't know where it
Speaker 2: was coming from, right, I mean, we didn't have a
Speaker 2: need to know that it was coming out of Munich.
Speaker 2: And it only sort of at the very end did
Speaker 2: we solve that. Yeah, it was like.
Speaker 3: A big circular references.
Speaker 4: This is that same guy.
Speaker 2: There's the same guy. And I think it's been in
Speaker 2: the press that the station chief actually wrote and said,
Speaker 2: I hope this isn't the case, and Tyler Drumhill are famously,
Speaker 2: again according to the media, went and said, I hope
Speaker 2: you're not basing it and on this guy in Munich
Speaker 2: on curveball, And by then it was sort of too late.
Speaker 2: But the process, the military and you know, they they
Speaker 2: talked to each other, but they didn't talk about sourcing
Speaker 2: to each other, right, So it gets I don't want
Speaker 2: to get too much into the weeds, but yeah, it
Speaker 2: was also a process issue for sure.
Speaker 3: And the way I remember this kind of rolling Downhill.
Speaker 3: To me as an analyst when I joined a few
Speaker 3: years after, this was being really really explicit. When you're
Speaker 3: writing a finished intelligence product. You know, you're not giving
Speaker 3: obviously the name of the source, you're not describing where
Speaker 3: they work, but you don't cure like like extensive descriptions
Speaker 3: of how much confidence we have in the source and
Speaker 3: whether they actually have good access and all of that,
Speaker 3: like have they been vetted? So there's there was a
Speaker 3: lot more information that got included post like three oh
Speaker 3: four oh five than if you go back and read
Speaker 3: stuff that was written in one or two, like oftentimes
Speaker 3: the sourcing statements were very thin.
Speaker 2: Trust me, dude, you know that it's a sourcing statement.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean kind of yeah, that's the way
Speaker 3: it read.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: To go back to Syria, I think Syria is a
Speaker 1: big deal. Like there was environmental concerns and things that
Speaker 1: led to you know, lots of people leaving Syria, which
Speaker 1: led to problems in Europe and political problems that related
Speaker 1: to immigration and things that put pressure on political leaders.
Speaker 1: What do you think is happening now? Do you think
Speaker 1: this is a policy question not an intelligence question? Do
Speaker 1: you think we are handling it well, we have a
Speaker 1: new leader in Syria, and it sounds to me like,
Speaker 1: you know, the administration wants to sort of blow him off,
Speaker 1: and I worry that more problems in Syria are a
Speaker 1: potential problem for outside of Syria as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm weirdly as an analyst. I'm a natural pessimist,
Speaker 3: and I think Syria for like fifteen years, has given
Speaker 3: me plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about pretty much everything,
Speaker 3: a lot of reasons to continue to be pessimistic, although
Speaker 3: strangely enough, at this point I'm sort of cautiously hopeful
Speaker 3: or optimistic about the future. I mean, and it is.
Speaker 3: It's not to say that I think it's possible that
Speaker 3: we get like a flowering Jeffersonian democracy in Syria. That
Speaker 3: seems unlikely, but I think it's also very possible, if
Speaker 3: not even likely, that we get a better outcome than
Speaker 3: Assad by a wide margin in terms of it is
Speaker 3: a low bar, but I think it's it's possible that
Speaker 3: we end up with a Syria that is at least
Speaker 3: not sort of actively creating, you know, massive problems for
Speaker 3: all of its neighbors, and maybe hopefully in the future
Speaker 3: politically more stable and also more open, right than the
Speaker 3: regime Osad Ran and frankly managing you know, it's repressive
Speaker 3: apparatus on a much less sort of industrial horrific scale.
Speaker 3: We will cross that bar for sure, right is that
Speaker 3: this is going to be a far less repressive regime
Speaker 3: than the one oside Ran. That's said, I mean, you
Speaker 3: know where to start with the problems. And frankly, you know,
Speaker 3: even though we still have true groups in the northeast,
Speaker 3: I think maybe about nine hundred or so that are
Speaker 3: there supporting our comrades in the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't think this administration has any Do
Speaker 3: they have a Syria policy or an interest in developing one?
Speaker 3: I mean, and if so, what would it even be.
Speaker 3: You know, I think this is kind of one of
Speaker 3: those pockets of the world that's just probably not going
Speaker 3: to be getting a lot of interest from Trump two
Speaker 3: point zero.
Speaker 4: But it will be getting a lot of interest from
Speaker 4: Israel and Turkey.
Speaker 3: And we will be getting a lot of interest from
Speaker 3: Israel and Turkey, and I think they're the two major
Speaker 3: geopolitical winners here. I read that the Israeli Air Force
Speaker 3: in the days after Osad fled flew more air sorties
Speaker 3: over Syria than they had in any day in any
Speaker 3: conflict since nineteen sixty seven. They essentially destroyed most of
Speaker 3: Syria's military capacity in like about seventy two hours. And
Speaker 3: the Turks, you know, have are probably the group with
Speaker 3: the most influence both in the North and then with
Speaker 3: the new new crew in Damascus, so big winners. Iran
Speaker 3: US not so much. So we'll see.
Speaker 2: We just need an independent Curtis stan that'll fix it exactly.
Speaker 3: I've got an idea for the Middle East. I do
Speaker 3: feel I mean, I do feel bad for that. It's
Speaker 3: like the Kurds is just the constant every time, like
Speaker 3: every time at one of these conflicts ends, it's the
Speaker 3: Kurds end up getting screwed. So it's really tragic.
Speaker 5: We're gonna stop here for today and continue next week
Speaker 5: with more of our conversation with David McCloskey here on
Speaker 5: Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha,
Speaker 5: John Ceipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 5: Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable
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