Speaker 1: This is a plausible minnesote of mission implausible.
Speaker 2: You and I both spent time in South Asia, and
Speaker 2: I don't think Americans think much about the region, but
Speaker 2: it is a place that's taken really seriously by national
Speaker 2: security professionals. The second and fifth largest countries in the
Speaker 2: world are neighbors. They're nuclear powers, and they hate each other.
Speaker 2: Pakistan has problems with terrorism and instability, and has even
Speaker 2: used terrorism against India. The New York Times had a
Speaker 2: story about street performers, mimes and top hats that are
Speaker 2: painted head to toe in gold paint. The story is
Speaker 2: that people in Pakistan who see these people on the
Speaker 2: streets believe that they're either informants for the powerful ISI
Speaker 2: military intelligence service or they're possibly CIA spies. What's interesting
Speaker 2: is the conspiracy that people believe that essentially anything that
Speaker 2: happens has to do with them being under surveillance or
Speaker 2: that the powerful security services are involved.
Speaker 1: I think what people don't realize is in Pakistan, most countries,
Speaker 1: you've got like a country has an army, But in Pakistan,
Speaker 1: it's an army that has a country, and it's exactly right,
Speaker 1: exactly and who runs the army is actually this thing
Speaker 1: what is it called the interncer Services Intelligence, And it's
Speaker 1: this powerful intelligence agency that runs the military, that runs
Speaker 1: the country. And so I think people are paranoid and
Speaker 1: frightened about how their country is run and the role
Speaker 1: of security services in their society.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ISI is more powerful than the politicians. And
Speaker 2: the ISI worked with US, meeting that CIA in the
Speaker 2: United States government in Afghanistan against the Soviets, as we
Speaker 2: know from Charlie Wilson's War for example, right, But they
Speaker 2: also worked against our interests. In fact, that is, I
Speaker 2: were the ones who created the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: It's funny. I never served in Pakistan, but I served
Speaker 1: on both sides of it, right, you know, in Afghanistan
Speaker 1: and India. And I got to say, we always sat
Speaker 1: with friends like ISI. Who needs enemies. They were just
Speaker 1: as big as Taliban in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: They were allies with the United States for years and
Speaker 2: years during the Cold War. But like you said, they've
Speaker 2: been involved in supporting terrorist groups. They've been involved in
Speaker 2: supporting groups that have done terrorist activity in India. So
Speaker 2: it's a complicated, very complicated place, although.
Speaker 1: It shouldn't be. So I want to go back to
Speaker 1: two thousand, was it two thousand and eight? There was
Speaker 1: this group called Lashkarrie Toiba based in Pakistan and it
Speaker 1: attacked India. One hundred and sixty people were killed, including
Speaker 1: six Americans in Bombay or Mumbai as they call it now.
Speaker 1: And lash caarry Toiba is an instrument of ISI and
Speaker 1: the head of lashcarriy Toybe. Even after they attacked India
Speaker 1: and killed all these Americans, this guy half as sais
Speaker 1: the head of lashkarriy Toiba. He never even went to jail.
Speaker 1: He was supposed to be in house confinement and he
Speaker 1: didn't even do that because ISID they were so close
Speaker 1: to him that they didn't give a shit. Despite Americans
Speaker 1: killed in one hundred and sixty Indians, we almost went
Speaker 1: to nuclear war over that between the Indians and the Pakistanis.
Speaker 2: But again to go back to the complexity of this thing,
Speaker 2: those things are all true, and Pakistan has supported the
Speaker 2: Taliban and done these things in India. But at the
Speaker 2: same time, there is probably no service that did more
Speaker 2: to help US kill and capture key l KAEDA members
Speaker 2: than Pakistan. Most of the top people that the US
Speaker 2: government went after who were involved in killing Westerners and
Speaker 2: Americans in cooperation with the Pakistanis were the way that
Speaker 2: we often got to these guys. But also at the
Speaker 2: same time, as you recall, Bin Laden himself was living
Speaker 2: in Pakistan within a mile of their version of West Point.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to the conspiracy theory, right, these guys
Speaker 1: are either CIA plants right who we're standing. So they're
Speaker 1: standing on street corners, motionless, covered in like metal paint,
Speaker 1: gold or silver paint for tips or for whatever they're doing.
Speaker 1: So I think there's some plausibility in this, not that
Speaker 1: I believe this, but we did have surveillance, and one
Speaker 1: of the most difficult things to pick up was static surveillance,
Speaker 1: where a surveillance would stay in one point exactly.
Speaker 2: If we're going to go meet a source, the one
Speaker 2: thing we have to know with one hundred percent certainty
Speaker 2: is that we haven't been followed, that nobody sees us
Speaker 2: meet that source. And one of the ways we do
Speaker 2: that is we have to move throughout the city or
Speaker 2: wherever we are to prove that we don't have surveillance.
Speaker 2: And the problem is if there's a massive number of surveillance,
Speaker 2: many of them aren't moving with you. It's very difficult
Speaker 2: to know whether that person at that corner is working
Speaker 2: for the service and paying attention to you, or whether
Speaker 2: they're just a regular bystander.
Speaker 1: Right, And unlike in the movies, we don't try to
Speaker 1: shake them, We just want to try to bore them.
Speaker 1: But a surveillance who just stands there and you see them,
Speaker 1: you don't know whether he's, you know, somebody pretending to
Speaker 1: be a stantue or whether he's he's Also like taking
Speaker 1: down your license plate number and noticing when you go by.
Speaker 2: And passing it on to someone further down the line.
Speaker 2: So you could drive through the city never see anybody
Speaker 2: following you, but this people standing at corners could be
Speaker 2: actually watching you and passing you on to the next ones.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't name the country, but I'd served in a
Speaker 1: third world country for a while, and out in front
Speaker 1: of my house was a little tea stand like this.
Speaker 1: The couple of guys hunched down the ground and they
Speaker 1: had a little fire and they made tea if you
Speaker 1: went by. And it turns out it was a real
Speaker 1: tea stand. But what their real job was was determine
Speaker 1: who was coming and going from my house. So when
Speaker 1: I left, when I went, when my kids went to school,
Speaker 1: they would mark this all down and they were static surveillance.
Speaker 1: They just sort of sat there and watched what I
Speaker 1: was doing and there was no getting around them.
Speaker 2: Well, then you got to give the Pakistani Isi credit.
Speaker 2: Then if they're able to get guys to paint their
Speaker 2: entire bodies in gold and stand on the stand on
Speaker 2: street corners to follow the occasional foreigner, good for them, right.
Speaker 1: Well, I think the conspiracy theory though, is not that
Speaker 1: they're after foreigners, that they were after every day Pakistani's
Speaker 1: And I think what doesn't work these days is if
Speaker 1: you wanted to have static surveillance, it's much easy to
Speaker 1: do it technically. I mean, you just put a ambra
Speaker 1: up and you know, because you're depending on this human
Speaker 1: being who's standing at the street corner for ten hours,
Speaker 1: that he's going to remember, you know when you went
Speaker 1: by he was, wasn't daydreaming that he writes down the
Speaker 1: right license plate. It's just much easier to stick a
Speaker 1: camera up and do it without the human factor involvement.
Speaker 2: Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 2: But it is true that the Pakistan government and many
Speaker 2: internal services want to monitor the society and make sure
Speaker 2: there's no political opposition or anybody who can threaten the
Speaker 2: ruling powers. But also in that part of the world,
Speaker 2: conspiracy theories are really prevalent. Remember there was catastrophic floods
Speaker 2: in twenty ten, and I remember at the time people
Speaker 2: asserted that they had been caused by the CIA's weather
Speaker 2: controlling technology. They thought that oh Sama bin Laden was
Speaker 2: actually Jewish, and also that the CIA staged the assassination
Speaker 2: attempt on Malala use of side when.
Speaker 1: I never got Yanistan is even our allies would say, like, oh, UCA,
Speaker 1: guys like bin Laden is CIA, or bin Laden is Jewish.
Speaker 1: You guys are working with the ISI the Pakistanis to
Speaker 1: run al Qaeda, because what America really wants to do
Speaker 1: is take over Afghanistan, like is if we wanted this
Speaker 1: place right for all our natural resources, Like we want
Speaker 1: to take over this desperately poor country. But I certainly
Speaker 1: saw that in Afghanistan, all these crazy theories about the
Speaker 1: ISI and CIA.
Speaker 2: Where did you see that kind of paranoia and conspiracy
Speaker 2: stuff in India? Because obviously the Indias and the Pakistanis
Speaker 2: are the ones that are sort of at each other's throat.
Speaker 1: That's a good question. I saw a huge amount of
Speaker 1: paranoid in place like Afghanistan with no central government.
Speaker 2: In India, it.
Speaker 1: Was different because they actually had reason to be paranoid.
Speaker 2: It's a massive country. It's the fifth largest country in
Speaker 2: the world, right next to the second largest country in
Speaker 2: the world. Nuclear weapons on both sides of the border
Speaker 2: terrorism instability.
Speaker 1: It may come as a surprise to the audience, but
Speaker 1: if there is ever a nuclear conflagration, it's probably most
Speaker 1: likely going to be Indian Pakistan. I do want to
Speaker 1: say though, that when Indian Pakistan were united under the
Speaker 1: British and the Raj they did undertake one of the
Speaker 1: most incredible feats of espionage ever. Even Rudyard Kipling and Kim,
Speaker 1: his famous novel is about espionage, and there's parts of
Speaker 1: Kim that are taken from true life. There's the Great
Speaker 1: Game and the eighteen fifties, sixties and seventies between Britain
Speaker 1: that ran India and Russia that was coming down, and
Speaker 1: the place in the space in between Tibet and China
Speaker 1: and all that part of the Krikora Mountains. They didn't
Speaker 1: know it was there, and so the British needed to
Speaker 1: know and they got two Indians known as panned It
Speaker 1: one and panned It two, and these guys were outfitted
Speaker 1: as Buddhist monks and they were given Buddhist rosaries, and
Speaker 1: each rosary bead was ten thousand steps, and they figured
Speaker 1: it out that they had thirty three inches per step,
Speaker 1: so one ring around was five miles. And they had
Speaker 1: prayer wheels and they would note in the prayer wheel
Speaker 1: on a little piece of paper how many miles they went,
Speaker 1: how many times they did this rosary. And they also
Speaker 1: had little thermometers where they would check at what level
Speaker 1: the tea boiled, because they could tell their altitude. And
Speaker 1: they went out and they created up until the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: some of the most accurate maps of the Hindu Kush
Speaker 1: and of the Caracorn mountains. And these guys went out
Speaker 1: for years. So these Indian spies, operating by themselves disguised
Speaker 1: as Buddhist monks, were some of the greatest, most successful
Speaker 1: spies and conducting I think one of the most interesting
Speaker 1: spy operations ever. And if they were caught, they would
Speaker 1: have been murdered. Buddhist prayer rosaries have one hundred and
Speaker 1: eight beads, but their rosary only had one hundred beads
Speaker 1: on it. If they ever anybody'd ever counted them, they
Speaker 1: would have been executed.
Speaker 2: So they were probably the greatest spies until these fully
Speaker 2: gold painted dudes on the street corners in Pakistan. Did
Speaker 2: you ever paint yourself gold?
Speaker 1: I never did, but I have been I have been
Speaker 1: a static surveillant. However, one of my favorite surveillance stories
Speaker 1: was in South Asia. I got lost and I had
Speaker 1: my two kids in the car and they weren't feeling well,
Speaker 1: and I knew that the car next to me were
Speaker 1: surveillance local guys. And I looked over at him and like,
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to acknowledge them, And I just said
Speaker 1: which way to go back home? They spoke English, and
Speaker 1: they pretended. I said, come on, do I go right
Speaker 1: or left up here? And one of the guys looked
Speaker 1: at me and he sheepishly smiled and he went go
Speaker 1: that way, thank you. You know, It's like these were
Speaker 1: like nice surveillance. I doubt that they put that in
Speaker 1: their surveillance report.
Speaker 2: I was driving home one time in Moscow and I
Speaker 2: went to cross one of the big boulevards and got hit.
Speaker 2: My car got hit, so I would run a red light.
Speaker 2: It was a student, a Middle Eastern student, and the
Speaker 2: student got out and there's police on the street corners
Speaker 2: all over Russia, and police came up and the students
Speaker 2: started screaming in better Russian than I had that I
Speaker 2: had gone through the red light, and the policeman was
Speaker 2: listening to him, and then the policeman looks off to
Speaker 2: the side, and my surveillance who had been following me,
Speaker 2: were sort of standing on the street corner nearby, and
Speaker 2: just motioned to the policeman to come over. The policeman
Speaker 2: came over, chatted with the surveillance who had been following me,
Speaker 2: came back out in the street and grabbed the student
Speaker 2: and arrested him. And clearly the surveillance realized that I
Speaker 2: was the one in the right and the other guy
Speaker 2: had gone through the light, and so in that case,
Speaker 2: my surveillance actually sort of helped me out of a jam.
Speaker 1: So Jeda, I get why everyday pick Stanny's would be
Speaker 1: paranoid to these creepy guys standing around looking like statues.
Speaker 1: But I'm not thinking that isis professional as they are,
Speaker 1: that they would use these guys for stantic surveillance. I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe they would.
Speaker 2: I just think it comes from years and years of
Speaker 2: living in a society that promotes conspiracy theories and has
Speaker 2: been tracking and following their people for years and years.
Speaker 2: So essentially, you have society that thinks everything possibly could
Speaker 2: be controlled by the government because so many things are
Speaker 2: controlled by the government. But I would suspect that these
Speaker 2: poor dudes painted in all gold are probably not part
Speaker 2: of the ISI. No, and I don't think they're being
Speaker 2: paid very much either, So thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2: Please join us for our next episode of Mission Implausible.