Speaker 1: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. 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.
Speaker 3: We now returned with part two of our interview with
Speaker 3: author and Policerprise within the journalist Tim Wyner.
Speaker 4: You guys spent decades of your life at CIA, and
Speaker 4: you were there when Porter Goss came in in two
Speaker 4: thousand and four. The President was not happy with CIA
Speaker 4: for several reasons. The invasion of Iraq, which CI contributed to,
Speaker 4: might stay with faulty analysis of saddamis Arsenal alb A.
Speaker 4: Bush was going to invade iraqany way, you know, if
Speaker 4: they had a paper clip and a rubber band to
Speaker 4: put your eye out right, And he wanted Porter Goss,
Speaker 4: who was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and
Speaker 4: a former CIA officer, to come in there and basically
Speaker 4: clean house and impose loyalty oaths and ideological tests on people.
Speaker 4: And what happened next The leadership of the Clandestine Service
Speaker 4: headed for the parking Lot ads did the top analysis,
Speaker 4: and the whole place was in turmoil. Mike Morell, who
Speaker 4: spent thirty three years at the CIA and Weiss deputy
Speaker 4: director twice acting director, said it was the worst nineteen
Speaker 4: months of his thirty three year career.
Speaker 2: What some people may not realize is that Porter Goss
Speaker 2: came in.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: First of all, he didn't want to work hard. He
Speaker 2: complained publicly that he had to put in more than
Speaker 2: eight hours and had to work on weekends, harder than
Speaker 2: I thought it would be. That's right, this is hard. Tenants,
Speaker 2: say what you will. He worked seven days a week,
Speaker 2: of course, seventeen hours a day. But Porter Goss brought
Speaker 2: in what we called on the inside, the Goslings. And
Speaker 2: these were a group of disgruntled form agency officers, almost
Speaker 2: all of whom had been fired or let go for cause,
Speaker 2: with chips on their shoulder, who thought things were easy
Speaker 2: and simple and black and white. They had been his
Speaker 2: staff at the House Intelligence Committee. And this was like
Speaker 2: seei's a great plane, Like, let's fire these guys because
Speaker 2: they're incompetent. But they're all good. They still keep their
Speaker 2: clearances and they're all going to go work for Congress
Speaker 2: and be our bosses. And then they came back and yeah,
Speaker 2: that didn't work out.
Speaker 4: Now, But the key here, I think is not the
Speaker 4: Goslings or personality disputes or anything like that. Ordered Goss's
Speaker 4: marching orders from the President of the United States, where
Speaker 4: I want loyalty. I need the CI to fall into line,
Speaker 4: and I don't want any analysts criticizing the course of
Speaker 4: the war in Iraq. And people were leaking, It's true,
Speaker 4: but every ship of state leaks from the top, and
Speaker 4: it didn't go well. And the one thing we know
Speaker 4: about Donald Trump is that he wants loyalty like a
Speaker 4: mob boss. What's going to happen would you say, based
Speaker 4: on your decades of experience, if a new director comes
Speaker 4: in at CIA and starts saying, I want you, I
Speaker 4: need you to sign an loyal I'm going to impose
Speaker 4: ideological betting on you people, and are you modo or not?
Speaker 4: What's going to happen.
Speaker 1: If that happens at DoD or in the intelligence community,
Speaker 1: it just we take very seriously our focus on the mission,
Speaker 1: our focus, and we take it oath to the Constitution.
Speaker 1: We're not loyal to individuals, and in fact, we take
Speaker 1: great pride in providing truth to power, which sometimes means
Speaker 1: telling them stuff they don't want to hear. So this
Speaker 1: is it goes just against every part of our culture.
Speaker 2: CIA at its best is when we do our job,
Speaker 2: we try to find the truth and we provide it
Speaker 2: to policy makers. We're at our worst when we become
Speaker 2: an instrument of policy that we do specifically what the
Speaker 2: President says, irregardless of what the laws are or what's ethical.
Speaker 2: Where we've done it worse it things like around contrary. Well,
Speaker 2: actually CA may have done all right by refusing to
Speaker 2: get involved in it. Where we've done our worst is
Speaker 2: when Higgs, when we were told to do these things,
Speaker 2: and we take the hit, not the guy who orders it.
Speaker 4: But two things here. When I was brand new on
Speaker 4: the CI, I went to learn at the feet of
Speaker 4: Richard Helms, who was the gray eminence of American intelligence
Speaker 4: at the time. Mike Holder joined the CI as a
Speaker 4: charter member in forty seven and its director from sixty
Speaker 4: six to seventy three. Until Nixon fired him for refusing
Speaker 4: to help him cover up the Watergate breaking. And one
Speaker 4: of the things Helms told me about CI was if
Speaker 4: we are not believed by the President of the United States,
Speaker 4: if we are not believed, we have no purpose. People
Speaker 4: run great risks to dig up secrets of state, analysts
Speaker 4: work hard to figure out the big picture, and all
Speaker 4: of this goes into reporting that the president on not
Speaker 4: only the present day, but threats over the horizon. One
Speaker 4: of the things that we know about Donald Trump is
Speaker 4: that one, he never took intelligence briefings very seriously. Two,
Speaker 4: he's an ideologue, and ideology is the enemy of intelligence.
Speaker 4: If you're an ideologue, your mind is made up. My fear, guys,
Speaker 4: is that people are really going to head for the exits.
Speaker 4: And the last time that happened, like in a major way,
Speaker 4: not just people on the seventh floor, but throughout the
Speaker 4: rank was in the nineties after the Cold War was over.
Speaker 4: You guys were young and coming up in the nineties,
Speaker 4: The guys with fifteen twenty twenty five years in were
Speaker 4: headed out because they were like, Okay, mission accomplished. We
Speaker 4: beat the goddamn Russians. Cold War's over. I'm done. People
Speaker 4: will leave now because they feel they cannot accomplish the
Speaker 4: mission under this president, whether it's analytical or operational, and
Speaker 4: the ranks will be depleted. And the depletion of the
Speaker 4: CIA during the decade of the nineties was one of
Speaker 4: the proximate reasons for the success of al Qaeda's attack
Speaker 4: on nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: I share your concern, certainly, having been there caring about
Speaker 1: it too. But one thing to add to the helms thing,
Speaker 1: just a little nuance, is I think it is true
Speaker 1: if the president isn't interested in what the CIA has
Speaker 1: to say, what is the purpose. But the one thing
Speaker 1: I've learned from working in CIA, and I suspect under
Speaker 1: Trump it was very much like this at least Trump won,
Speaker 1: is we provide intelligence not just to the President, but
Speaker 1: to the Secretary of State, ambassadors around the world, to
Speaker 1: people in the Pentagon generals. So there is a process
Speaker 1: there that kept going even if Trump was in La
Speaker 1: La Land or not interested in issues. We continue to
Speaker 1: provide information on what was happening in Russia.
Speaker 4: And then you what does the station chief do when
Speaker 4: the ambassador is an idiot or convicted fellas herschall walkers,
Speaker 4: Herschel Walker, a convicted felon. That's in the case of
Speaker 4: Jared Kushner's father, who's going to France or just a bosa. Furthermore,
Speaker 4: what does the CI do with the Director of National Intelligence?
Speaker 1: I can answer that one for you, because you, as
Speaker 1: a journalist, rightly hold the CIA to high standards and
Speaker 1: therefore when we make mistakes. But the CIA, in a
Speaker 1: genius move, created this thing called the DNI, which is
Speaker 1: a fake organization to protect the CIA.
Speaker 4: So John in Fairnessress created the di Congress.
Speaker 1: Oh please, Congress wouldn't know. It's we manipulated Congress to
Speaker 1: create this thing so that when they can put the
Speaker 1: morons over there and they can do almost no damage
Speaker 1: to what's actually happening in the CIA.
Speaker 4: Now that is a conspiracy theory right there. There you go. No,
Speaker 4: but okay, but in serious Chelsea Gabbard is the titular
Speaker 4: head of the American intelligence community. God forbid, correct me
Speaker 4: if I'm wrong. But CIA relies to a largely unappreciated
Speaker 4: extent on liaison and intelligence sharing with friendly and not
Speaker 4: so friendly intelligence services around the world, in countries you
Speaker 4: might immediately think of, and some countries you couldn't possibly
Speaker 4: imagine fair statement.
Speaker 1: Yes, we get in the clandestine service side of the organization,
Speaker 1: we get the bulk of our intelligence from partners and
Speaker 1: not just allies, from partners around the world. Now it's
Speaker 1: different with the NSA. It's going to be harder for
Speaker 1: the NSA because it's much more integrated with the Brits
Speaker 1: and Australians and stuff. Where I think you're going you're
Speaker 1: saying is some of these organizations that partners we deal with,
Speaker 1: they are going to be hesitant to share their secrets
Speaker 1: with us, and I agree with that, but it's going
Speaker 1: to be harder for them on the SINGANT side because
Speaker 1: they're integrated.
Speaker 4: Is great stuff. But human intelligence, when it succeeds, gets
Speaker 4: you the information that Singant cannot. Ten analysts can listen
Speaker 4: to the same Singant transcript and come up with ten
Speaker 4: different analyzes, whereas when you're actually in the room with
Speaker 4: the person who's talking, you get a sense of the reality.
Speaker 4: Is that fair?
Speaker 2: And an inordinate amount of is human enabled? Right, The
Speaker 2: reason you have the Singen is because of a human
Speaker 2: being interacting with the technology and so recruiting that human being.
Speaker 2: Is actually that a lot of the SIGANS, huge amount
Speaker 2: of Sycains streams are based on people.
Speaker 4: The point I'm trying to make is if particular head
Speaker 4: of American intelligence is a longtime PULP member who has
Speaker 4: shown strange affinities with people like Bashar al Asad and
Speaker 4: Vladimir V. Putin and on the head of oh, I
Speaker 4: don't know the Jordanian Intelligence Service or the Ukrainian Intelligence Service?
Speaker 4: Am I going to play foot seat with that person?
Speaker 2: So when I was in a rock senior officer there
Speaker 2: and back in fourteen fifteen, we had a group of
Speaker 2: congressmen and senators come in. Now we live in Iraq,
Speaker 2: we go out into the Red Zone. We've got assets
Speaker 2: who were both in Isis. We have a lot of
Speaker 2: Arabic speakers. We live there. And we had this group
Speaker 2: of lawmakers come in and I'm not gonna see who
Speaker 2: it was, and there were like seven or eight of
Speaker 2: them with their staffs there, and we were giving them
Speaker 2: a briefing about what's going on in Iraq. Right now,
Speaker 2: we're surrounded on three sides. Isis is ascended, Moses has fallen,
Speaker 2: they're just after Mosa felt And one guy takes his
Speaker 2: loafers off and picking his toenails while we're briefing. So
Speaker 2: this is incredible disrespect to the officers who are risking
Speaker 2: their lives to be there. And when they finish, he says, basically,
Speaker 2: this is a lot of hohoi. And he says they're
Speaker 2: only in it for the money. And one of my
Speaker 2: officers couldn't help themselves and says, you can't offer them
Speaker 2: like an extra hundred dollars to blow themselves up. Now,
Speaker 2: the other lawmakers around it were clearly embarrassed at this guy.
Speaker 2: But what happens if like they they're all picking their
Speaker 2: toes right, and they look at the people who live
Speaker 2: there and say, I know you understand that you live there.
Speaker 2: But none of this is true because we have our
Speaker 2: own reality. But as to who will stay and who
Speaker 2: will go, I think a lot of people with integrity
Speaker 2: will leave, people with options will leave. People who will
Speaker 2: stay will fall into a couple different categories. One will
Speaker 2: be career quizzlings who are like, yeah, I'll do it
Speaker 2: if you or you give me a big promotion. I'll
Speaker 2: say whatever you want. We saw that during the gospeling time.
Speaker 2: Other people will basically just put their heads down and
Speaker 2: do what bureaucrats everywhere in the world always do. They'll
Speaker 2: just try to do their job and wait it out.
Speaker 4: In any large organization, I could talk about the New
Speaker 4: York Times, which is about maybe eight percent the size
Speaker 4: of the CIA. But in any large organization, you have
Speaker 4: the talented tenth okay, and the talented tenth at the
Speaker 4: top of intellect, at the top of experience, at the
Speaker 4: top of expertise are going to bring you ninety percent
Speaker 4: of your successes. And if the talented tenth head for
Speaker 4: the door, that's bad news. I hate to be a
Speaker 4: harbinger of doom. In many ways, the situation we're about
Speaker 4: to be and is absurd and orderline hilarious until stuff happened.
Speaker 4: It's a mean old world out there, gentlemen. The Russians
Speaker 4: and the Chinese are each through their intelligence services, coming
Speaker 4: out of it with ill intent. That Chinese, it seems to me,
Speaker 4: love to have your take on this. Want to know us.
Speaker 4: They want information dominance. They want to know everything about
Speaker 4: the United States government. They want to tap our phones,
Speaker 4: they want to rate our computers, they want our personnel files,
Speaker 4: and they got it. They want to know us. So
Speaker 4: if the balloon goes up in twenty or thirty forty years,
Speaker 4: they have information dominance. The Russians just want to screw us.
Speaker 4: They don't want to know us. They want to subvert
Speaker 4: and sabotage our form of government. And they have achieved
Speaker 4: more than Marginal's success over the last eight ten years.
Speaker 4: You have a real crisis, and it is almost inevitable
Speaker 4: that there will be one. What are these knuckleheads going
Speaker 4: to do to protect our country?
Speaker 3: We'll be right back.
Speaker 4: In the last year of his first term, Trump installed
Speaker 4: John Ratcliff and Cash betent Well at the very top
Speaker 4: of the Directorate of Natural Intelligence. Were they there to
Speaker 4: make sure that big pieces on whither China were going
Speaker 4: to be like expertly thought out and edited. No, they
Speaker 4: were there to raid the files Russia House where you
Speaker 4: used to work, John, to try and dig up dirt
Speaker 4: on the president's political enemies and to try and find
Speaker 4: a smoking gun that would magically absolve him of his
Speaker 4: and his campaign and his teams plussy footing with Vladimir Poot.
Speaker 2: It's a conspiracy theory, but it's one I'm open to.
Speaker 2: Is that another reason he's so interested in Russia and
Speaker 2: Cia and having it is he doesn't want evidence coming
Speaker 2: out of collusion. Right, there was collusion. It's like there was.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure they could prove it in a criminal
Speaker 2: court of law, but certainly man Afford, his campaign manager
Speaker 2: was dealing with the Russians. His own son was talking
Speaker 2: to the Russians in line of the FBI about it.
Speaker 2: His campaign advisor was lying to the FBI about and
Speaker 2: destroying evidence and his relationship with the Russians. So there's Russia,
Speaker 2: Russa Russia. There was a lot of it. There is
Speaker 2: a smoking gun someplace, and they need to make sure
Speaker 2: that it doesn't come out, that we don't find it.
Speaker 4: I don't know how you feel, Jerry John. I know
Speaker 4: you have mixed feelings about Federal Bureau of Investigation events
Speaker 4: counter counterintelligence capacities. But in American counterintelligence, which is spycatching
Speaker 4: among other things, you can't do it without the FBI
Speaker 4: in this country. CEEI has no police powers in this country.
Speaker 4: Yet cash Betel says, do you guys go play cops
Speaker 4: and robbers? I would disestablish the national security of the FBI.
Speaker 4: They ain't good.
Speaker 1: No, In fact, I think yeah, the danger Keshpertel, the
Speaker 1: FBI is more dangerous than Tulsea Gabbert at DNI for
Speaker 1: the American public. Obviously partners are on the world and
Speaker 1: the things we need to worry about incredibly important, and
Speaker 1: the D A and I just doesn't control a lot
Speaker 1: of the actual collection and processing of intelligence.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of the lists talk going around about
Speaker 4: the deep state, and the deep state, which does not exist,
Speaker 4: is supposedly this nefarious conspiracy of spies and soldiers and
Speaker 4: bureaucrats who are have dedicated their professional and personal lives
Speaker 4: to undermining Donald Trump. Once upon a time, way back
Speaker 4: in the twentieth century, there was a deep state in
Speaker 4: who it was embodied in one man, and that man
Speaker 4: was Jaegar Hoover. JEdgar Hoover, an unelected bureaucrat who ruled
Speaker 4: the FBI for forty eight years, used his powers to
Speaker 4: spy on people without warrants, to break into their homes,
Speaker 4: to rifle through their papers, to conduct wiretapping, to destroy
Speaker 4: people for political purposes. That was political warfare. And presidents
Speaker 4: never said no to Hoover. Attorneys general never said no too,
Speaker 4: And it wasn't until he died in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 4: six weeks before the Watergate breaking. That never would have happened.
Speaker 4: If Hoover was around. And then two things happened. When
Speaker 4: Jaeger who were died literally the next week, the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court outlawed wartless wire tapping this country. And then the
Speaker 4: Watergate break can happen. Okay, and the whole panoply of
Speaker 4: Cold War national security began to break down. Helms got
Speaker 4: fired because he wouldn't cover up Watergate for Nixon, and
Speaker 4: the old national security state that had existed since the
Speaker 4: end of World War Two began to break down. Okay,
Speaker 4: we run the risk under this president his nominees for
Speaker 4: national security position of the return of a national security
Speaker 4: state in which the powers of American intelligence and national
Speaker 4: security are turned on Americans for political purposes. I think
Speaker 4: that's a real danger.
Speaker 2: So that no no podcast is complete without at least
Speaker 2: a couple of Nazi references. And I got two for
Speaker 2: you that I want to say that that remind me of.
Speaker 2: One is you talked about Hoover and he had the
Speaker 2: goods on everybody right. Every American president was afraid of him,
Speaker 2: politicians were afraid of him. And in Nazi Germany, Hermann Goering,
Speaker 2: despite the fact that he wasn't didn't do anything right.
Speaker 2: He didn't really have a job he ran the Lufaffe,
Speaker 2: did it poorly, and yet nobody came for him. And
Speaker 2: one of the reasons for that was because when he
Speaker 2: was head of the Prussian Police he had this new
Speaker 2: technology called telephone wire tapping act. He had been nobody
Speaker 2: knew about this and really hit it and Hermann Goering
Speaker 2: during the Nazis rose, I know, I can't help, but
Speaker 2: I speak a freaking language, a gorn. He had the
Speaker 2: goods on everybody, including Hillery. So right up until the
Speaker 2: nineteen forty five they were all afraid of Gourring, not
Speaker 2: because of his insight, but because he, like Hoover, he
Speaker 2: had the goods.
Speaker 4: He could walk up to some senior Nazi officers said, yeah,
Speaker 4: should see you'll have been a bad.
Speaker 2: Boy, your male boyfriend that you have not told us
Speaker 2: about it, he says. But the other thing, and more ominous, though,
Speaker 2: is you talked about loyalty tests. And I think this
Speaker 2: is in the air with this administration. The illustration coming
Speaker 2: in is Hitler's rise to power. When he really took
Speaker 2: power is after Hindenburg died, and one of the first
Speaker 2: things he did is he had the military swear an
Speaker 2: oath to him personally, right not to the Constitution. Right,
Speaker 2: and soon after all his deep state guys bureaucracy swear
Speaker 2: an oath to him personally, not to the country, not
Speaker 2: to the fatherland, not to the Constitution, and that was
Speaker 2: the end of their democracy, right, the last gas. And
Speaker 2: when we start going down that road where loyalty, you know,
Speaker 2: call me ran into that first the buzzsaw, Are you
Speaker 2: loyal to me? The only answer we can have as
Speaker 2: Americans is no. You should swear two oaths in your life.
Speaker 2: One is when you get married and the other is
Speaker 2: when you're when you work for the federal government or
Speaker 2: the military. Is you swear an oath to the institution
Speaker 2: and that should be your only loyalty. And for some
Speaker 2: reason United States citizens they're somehow like, okay, that's been normalized,
Speaker 2: swearing an oath to a political figure. That's really dangerous.
Speaker 2: That's not a conspiracy theory. That's a real conspiracy. When
Speaker 2: you start telling senior CIA, FBI people, you must be
Speaker 2: loyal to me, and.
Speaker 4: It is a conspiracy against the Constitution and ultimately against
Speaker 4: the American people.
Speaker 1: Hold on just a second, Well we take a quick break. Tim.
Speaker 1: I know you're working on a new book or a
Speaker 1: new book's coming out, so can you tell us about
Speaker 1: it a little bit.
Speaker 4: The book is called The Mission the CIA in the
Speaker 4: twenty first Century. It starts in the spring of two
Speaker 4: thousand and one. It goes right up to the present day.
Speaker 4: I'm writing the epilogue right now. It is entirely on
Speaker 4: the record, as was Legacy of Ashes, my earlier history
Speaker 4: of the CIA, widely if not universally acclaimed.
Speaker 1: I was going to ask you with a very negative history,
Speaker 1: so as Wry, are you ready to take it all
Speaker 1: back now?
Speaker 4: Well, I'll tell you, John, the old book was based
Speaker 4: on literally three hundred thousand declassified documents from CIA, from State,
Speaker 4: from the Pentagon, from the White House, from the end
Speaker 4: of World War Two up to the early twenty first century.
Speaker 4: So I talked to people. I talked to an amazing
Speaker 4: array of people, including the top people on the seventh floor,
Speaker 4: including sitting chiefs of the clandestine Service, including the man
Speaker 4: who was tasked with setting up the black sites, including
Speaker 4: the three unbelievable officers who took down aq KHN, who
Speaker 4: ran the world's biggest and by far most dangerous nuclear
Speaker 4: weapons technology smuggling ring. I talked to people who were
Speaker 4: freezing their asses off in Iraqi, Curtisan before the American
Speaker 4: invasion in two thousand and three, executing a covert action
Speaker 4: plan to take down Saddam, knowing that it would take
Speaker 4: the eighty second Airborne to actually do it, but they
Speaker 4: had their marching orders. I talked to officers who served
Speaker 4: in Baghdad Station, as you did Jerry earlier in the
Speaker 4: war in Kabble, in the worst places on Earth, like
Speaker 4: the Shikin Base in Afghanistan. There's a t shirt from
Speaker 4: there that says, Ella is only skin deep. Who served
Speaker 4: in Pakistan, who served in Jordan, who served in Syria.
Speaker 4: And I listened to them and I wrote down what
Speaker 4: they said.
Speaker 2: And so had they been drinking, yeah you didn't talk
Speaker 2: to us, we would have suayed you.
Speaker 4: I did talk to Cipher, and yes you were drinking.
Speaker 4: It was a very cold, dry martini, as I recall,
Speaker 4: which is what all good intelligence officers drink. It is
Speaker 4: a human book. I think Legacy of Ashes, the book
Speaker 4: that came out now seventeen years ago, is a book
Speaker 4: about an institution, but it's a book about an institution
Speaker 4: that came out at a very dark time for the institution.
Speaker 4: Nine to eleven, the WMD reported the Iraq War going
Speaker 4: south one hundred miles an hour, the Goss regime, and
Speaker 4: at the sixtieth anniversary that took place a few months
Speaker 4: before the book came out, there was a lot of hanks.
Speaker 4: There was a lot of sorrow, and I think the
Speaker 4: book was a product of its time. What I like
Speaker 4: about this book, might me repeat it's called The Mission
Speaker 4: that it'll be out July fifteenth, is it? It really talks
Speaker 4: about the mission when we started out before nine to eleven.
Speaker 4: For the past decade, people have been wandering around saying,
Speaker 4: what the what's the mission? The mission's over? We dislayed
Speaker 4: the Soviet beast, what's the mission now? And that relative
Speaker 4: handful of people after al Cada blew up our two
Speaker 4: embassies in Africa in August nineteen eighty eight, said well, yeah,
Speaker 4: we know what the mission is now. But the President
Speaker 4: of the United States didn't, the Secretary of Defense didn't,
Speaker 4: and Condy Rice as a National Security advisor, they didn't
Speaker 4: know what the mission was. And Rice and Cheney thought
Speaker 4: the whole arcaded thing was like some big strategic deception.
Speaker 1: And the Attorney General he told the FBI guys to
Speaker 1: quit wasting your time on this terrorism stuff.
Speaker 4: Well, it's not the mission until the president says its mission. Frankly,
Speaker 4: the CI is exquisitely sensitive to presidential commands, and for
Speaker 4: the better part of fifteen years, counter terrorism was the mission.
Speaker 4: And then starting about ten years ago, roughly twenty fourteen,
Speaker 4: give or take, there was a generational chain. Bin Laden
Speaker 4: was dead. There was still a lot of danger in
Speaker 4: the Islamic world, but espionage began to regain its proper
Speaker 4: place of privacy at CI. And as evidence of that,
Speaker 4: just in the fall of twenty one, the CI stole
Speaker 4: Ladimir Putin's warp plans for Ukraine right out of the Kremlin.
Speaker 4: That's what you want your intelligence service to be. You
Speaker 4: wanted to know the intentions and capabilities of your enemies.
Speaker 4: That's what y'all are there for. That's why they pay
Speaker 4: you the small change.
Speaker 1: We were running some good cases prior to twenty fourteen. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but I understand what you're saying in
Speaker 1: terms of I do think that not just CI, but
Speaker 1: this country over invested in counter terrorism, oversold. Obviously it
Speaker 1: was incredibly important. Okay, there was a danger. The American
Speaker 1: citizen don't really have a choice, did you. No, it
Speaker 1: was a big deal, but it couldn't bring down the
Speaker 1: United States, whereas China rush at these places at least
Speaker 1: have the ability done to have a war with US.
Speaker 1: That would be a much more serious thing. We did
Speaker 1: a good job on the counter terrorism fight, but I
Speaker 1: think we probably focused too much on that for a
Speaker 1: little bit too long.
Speaker 2: If anything, maybe product of our successes, there was inside
Speaker 2: of CIA in a sense that we need to deprioritize
Speaker 2: a vitual human spying, recruiting spies, And it wasn't so
Speaker 2: much deprioritizing that is prioritizing other elements of CIA, which
Speaker 2: are also important, analysis and these all these other things.
Speaker 2: But I think a lot of people who recruit and
Speaker 2: run spies, espionage networks, traditional stuff that CIA does, they
Speaker 2: were seen as like yesterday's movie stars, and it was
Speaker 2: no longer it was no longer a necessity when you've
Speaker 2: got technology that we no longer need to recruit spies.
Speaker 2: And we still did, but I think there was a
Speaker 2: and maybe still is to a certain extent, a d
Speaker 2: emphasis on that, And it would be good to say
Speaker 2: CIA go back to its human espionage roots and focus
Speaker 2: on that.
Speaker 4: I say that's been happening, and I think that you
Speaker 4: can attribute in some the survival of Ukraine since twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: I wish the rest of the administration upped its game
Speaker 1: and supporting Ukraine. But I hear you.
Speaker 4: If you're gonna blow up Russian generals in the heart
Speaker 4: of Moscow, you've been around of some good intelligence. I'm
Speaker 4: not saying CI provided the intelligence. Who knows where they
Speaker 4: got the intelligence from. But it is not a war
Speaker 4: that can be won with weapons. It is a war
Speaker 4: in which intelligence plays a central and a crucial role.
Speaker 2: That's fair, and arguably we are at war with Russia,
Speaker 2: just not traditional war. Russia looks at warfare different in
Speaker 2: the United States, that's right. So to them, it's you
Speaker 2: got to think about what you want to accomplish, and
Speaker 2: armed force is just one piece of that. And war
Speaker 2: never ends for the Russians like for us, it's like
Speaker 2: we're either fighting a kinetic war or we're at peace.
Speaker 2: For Russians, it's a NonStop political warfare.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The first person who articulated that was George Kennan,
Speaker 4: the man who dreamed up the Cladist service of the
Speaker 4: CI in which he served.
Speaker 1: He did indeed, Yeah.
Speaker 2: He was just saying what Lenin was already doing.
Speaker 4: Lenin and yeah, there is war never ends for those guys.
Speaker 1: Now, it's a different way of looking at things. And
Speaker 1: they've been quite successful. I mean they're killing people around
Speaker 1: Europe and around the world, and they're spreading disinformation and
Speaker 1: they're using deception to break on us, and they're missing
Speaker 1: in elections and all those kind of things.
Speaker 4: Well, that's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: It's always enjoyable and it was great Vita.
Speaker 3: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
Speaker 3: and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Speaker 3: Implausible it is a production of honorable mention and abominable
Speaker 3: pictures for iHeart Podcasts.