Speaker 1: This episode was recorded before the election on November fifth.
Speaker 2: She was out of Czechoslovakia and she had committed an
Speaker 2: illegal act, and she had illegally emigrated with this illegally
Speaker 2: gotten passport to Canada, and then she filled in forms
Speaker 2: to come to the United States that she filled in illegally,
Speaker 2: and she met and married Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she. I served in
Speaker 3: the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover
Speaker 3: all around the world.
Speaker 2: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 2: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 3: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 3: created conspiracies.
Speaker 2: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 2: weren't true.
Speaker 3: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 3: news almost every day.
Speaker 2: We'll break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 2: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mission Implausible.
Speaker 1: This is a two parter on whether Trump is a
Speaker 1: Russian asset, Beginning with a business trip to Moscow thirty
Speaker 1: seven years ago. Immediately after he returned, he began doing interviews,
Speaker 1: obsessed with many of the same things he still speaks
Speaker 1: about today. We continue with the conversation with Peter Struck.
Speaker 1: He's a former deputy Assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division,
Speaker 1: and he led the investigation into the Russian interference in
Speaker 1: the twenty sixteen United States elections. He's an author and
Speaker 1: hosts the popular podcast Clean Up in Aisle forty five.
Speaker 4: Would it surprise me at all if Donald Trump is
Speaker 4: a businessman in the seventies and the eighties traveled to
Speaker 4: Moscow or had Soviet then Russian businessman or private citizens
Speaker 4: coming in and wanting to invest in his real estate
Speaker 4: or casinos anywhere else. Wouldn't surprise me at all. Would
Speaker 4: the Russians try and look at that information that they
Speaker 4: obtained to say, Hey, who is this person? How can
Speaker 4: we leverage him now or even ten, twenty thirty years
Speaker 4: in the future. Because maybe in ten years that person
Speaker 4: is suddenly a prominent real estate mugel. Maybe in twenty
Speaker 4: years that person's president of the United States. But just
Speaker 4: because somebody is there in Moscow, somebody is there dealing
Speaker 4: with people who have either director in direct contacts with
Speaker 4: the Russian intelligence, doesn't make them, oh they're a source,
Speaker 4: right they're in bed with the Russians. It doesn't work
Speaker 4: that way.
Speaker 2: It's often not a binary thing. I think it's important
Speaker 2: for people to realize that they think that you're either
Speaker 2: a spy or you're not right, there's a big spectrum
Speaker 2: in between and on the long game, this is something
Speaker 2: that the Russians have been doing for a long time.
Speaker 2: There's this famous story from nineteen sixty eight that Hubert
Speaker 2: Humphrey was running for president and he and Johnson were
Speaker 2: not getting along. Humphrey had a much softer line on Vietnam,
Speaker 2: and the Humphrey campaign was really low on money because
Speaker 2: Johnson wasn't getting the big donors to contribute to his campaign,
Speaker 2: and the KGB then asked Soviet Ambassador to the US Dobreenen,
Speaker 2: to have breakfast with Humphrey, and he offered Humphrey money
Speaker 2: for his campaign and a way to get the money
Speaker 2: to Humphrey without it being obviously from the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: Humphrey turned him down flat and one of the reasons
Speaker 2: for that, Humphrey said later was that he knew that
Speaker 2: once he took the money, it's not as though he
Speaker 2: was their spy, but they would have leverage on him.
Speaker 2: For the rest of his life.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I think that's a great example, and a couple
Speaker 4: of takeaways from that. One is that you're absolutely right.
Speaker 4: The recruited agent, the recruited source on whichever side. The
Speaker 4: person who is sitting there, they know they were working
Speaker 4: for a foreign intelligence service. There engaged in clandestine intelligence collection.
Speaker 4: They're using covert communications to respond to the tasking and
Speaker 4: receive that tasking. They're getting paid clandestinely. That is, in
Speaker 4: my experience, the tiny, small number of percentage of people
Speaker 4: that you get information from, either foreign collectors, Russians, Chinese
Speaker 4: here in the United States, the number of people they
Speaker 4: have actually working in that context are tiny compared to
Speaker 4: the number of people who are agentsy influence, who have
Speaker 4: mental red lines or fig leafs that they want to
Speaker 4: maintain or Jerry to your point, they don't want to
Speaker 4: take money because they feel if they do that they'd
Speaker 4: be exposed to coercion, and they want to be able
Speaker 4: to say they never took it. Even though they're doing favors.
Speaker 4: They're willing to do things short of Hey, I want
Speaker 4: you to be in on the book's asset, and we're
Speaker 4: going to give you a code name, and again wants
Speaker 4: you to behave in all these very specific ways that
Speaker 4: you have to do if you're going to operate at
Speaker 4: that level. And the second point to your example, Jerry
Speaker 4: is you know, our political system in so many ways
Speaker 4: relies on people having the good sense and also a
Speaker 4: sense of morality to say I'm not going to take
Speaker 4: this money because it would expose me to coercion and
Speaker 4: it would look bad. When you look at Donald Trump,
Speaker 4: that's one of the concerning things is there's no apparent
Speaker 4: compunction to not take that money. Has statements about, you know,
Speaker 4: towards the end of his administration, well, if she offered
Speaker 4: me apoh on Biden, I'd probably take it, or at
Speaker 4: least said look at it before I'd consider telling the FBI.
Speaker 4: There's this recent reporting, again without saying whether it's true
Speaker 4: or not, from Carolina at the at the Washington Post,
Speaker 4: that there was this alleged payment of ten million dollars
Speaker 4: from the government of Egypt to Trump. But those sort
Speaker 4: of traditional ways in which intelligence services seek to exploit
Speaker 4: people to gain leverage short of formal recruitment, that's the
Speaker 4: area where he's a counterintelligence guy. When you look at Trump,
Speaker 4: he's extraordinarily susceptible to that, but also doesn't mean the
Speaker 4: guy's like a formal everybody's like, oh, he met Putin
Speaker 4: and he got his tasking for the next court and
Speaker 4: he didn't get his fucking next tasking for the next quarter.
Speaker 4: They were just talking and Putin was playing him like
Speaker 4: he's played him the entire time through. And it wasn't
Speaker 4: like a little card or a one time pad where
Speaker 4: he could use that to decrypt what the seventeen documents
Speaker 4: where they wanted.
Speaker 3: To imagine Trump try to decrypt one time?
Speaker 4: Oh my god, no, fuck no. Can you imagine like
Speaker 4: sitting there and like doing the math, and.
Speaker 2: Well, there was a corrupt politician was taking money for
Speaker 2: the Egyptians for political favors. But it wasn't Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: It was Senator Menendez, right, And his sin was that
Speaker 2: he got the money in gold bars and one hundred
Speaker 2: dollars bills that he stuck in his freezer. If he'd
Speaker 2: been a little smarter on how he did it, he
Speaker 2: might not have gone to jail.
Speaker 5: So, Peter, let me ask you a question.
Speaker 3: Was the Mueller investigation a counter intelligence investigation? And how
Speaker 3: would it have been different if it were?
Speaker 4: So the answer is No. And one of the frustrating
Speaker 4: and confounding things is that we the FBI, after Director
Speaker 4: Comy was fired, a case was opened on Trump. So
Speaker 4: one of the takeaway is there was not some case
Speaker 4: on Trump going back to the summer twenty sixteen. That
Speaker 4: case on Trump was not opened until whenever that was
Speaker 4: spring is twenty seventeen, and it was a twofold opening. Right.
Speaker 4: One was did he engage in the crime of obstruction
Speaker 4: by firing Comy? And there's a criminal statute that lays
Speaker 4: out the elements of the crime to obstruction, it would
Speaker 4: be just a traditional criminal investigation. But there was a
Speaker 4: second component of that case, which was a counterintelligence case
Speaker 4: about Trump, which was designed to sit there and ask
Speaker 4: those questions that I talked about earlier about what is
Speaker 4: Russia trying to do? What has Russia done with Trump
Speaker 4: in the past.
Speaker 3: Was that an investigation of Trump or of the campaign.
Speaker 4: That was Trump? There was never an investigation in the campaign.
Speaker 4: Now another lot that you'll hear out of the far right.
Speaker 4: There was never an investigation of the campaign. We don't
Speaker 4: investigate campaigns. And what is frustrating to me is I
Speaker 4: talked with Amie McCabe, who was the acting director of
Speaker 4: the FBI at the time and said, okay, in addition
Speaker 4: to going and working with Muller with agents and investigators
Speaker 4: to investigate those crimes, at the same time, the FBI
Speaker 4: contingent was going to do this counterintelligence investigation and recognizing
Speaker 4: that Muller couldn't and didn't want to and didn't have
Speaker 4: the authority to do it. But the only place where
Speaker 4: all that sort of information came together was sitting there
Speaker 4: in the Special Counsel's office. And then when I was removed,
Speaker 4: to my surprise and Amie McCabe saying his surprise, that
Speaker 4: never continued. It essentially stopped. And I think that is
Speaker 4: to the FBI's discredit, to the harm of the nation.
Speaker 4: That again, when you look at whose job is it
Speaker 4: to take the lead on counter intelligence within the United States,
Speaker 4: what's the fbis, and that nobody has ever looked at
Speaker 4: the very I think reasonable question of counterintelligence concerns surrounding
Speaker 4: Trump is a problem, is a gap, is a failure,
Speaker 4: and we haven't done it, and frankly, I don't think
Speaker 4: at this point in our history we're ever going to
Speaker 4: do it. Because my suspicion is if he's elected never
Speaker 4: going to happen. If he's not elected, people are going
Speaker 4: to he's an old man, he's at least four years
Speaker 4: later down the line. Just let it go because it
Speaker 4: is also hard to do right with somebody like Trump.
Speaker 4: That's an extraordinarily daunting prospect. So the short takeaway from
Speaker 4: that is, this person, where it's been demonstrated, has extraordinary
Speaker 4: counter intelligence concerns around him, will never ever be subjected
Speaker 4: to a professional counterintelligence investigation to try and understand it.
Speaker 2: In two and eight, and this is something that Trump
Speaker 2: talks about. It's effect. In two thousand and eight, he
Speaker 2: sold a six acre Palm beach piece of real estate
Speaker 2: to Russian billionaire Dmitri Rabolov got the name bolovv Ribolovov.
Speaker 2: Trump initially bought the real estate for forty million dollars. Now,
Speaker 2: Ribolovov is very close to Putin, he's a Russian oligarch,
Speaker 2: and he bought it several years later in two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight, when the market was bad for real estate,
Speaker 2: he bought it for one hundred million. So it's a
Speaker 2: sixty million dollar increase in the price of the real estate,
Speaker 2: which my understanding was only frimerally fixed. Up and renovated. So,
Speaker 2: from a counterintelligence point of view, was this a way
Speaker 2: to funnel money into Donald Trump? And from a law
Speaker 2: enforcement point of you, is that anything illegal?
Speaker 4: Again, Jim, that's a great question because the sort of
Speaker 4: evil glory of Trump is that his overlay of vulnerabilities
Speaker 4: from account intelligence perspective, overlay with the shadiness of a
Speaker 4: lot of is. In my opinion, business empire real estate
Speaker 4: is well suited for corrupt actors to take advantage of
Speaker 4: for very specific reasons and ways that you pointed out right.
Speaker 4: On the one hand, you can have false valuations to
Speaker 4: evade taxes, which Trump has been convicted of in New York.
Speaker 4: The other thing that's been done is that you can
Speaker 4: either inflate or deflate costs to engage in the transaction.
Speaker 4: And you're the example you gave. Both parties knew that
Speaker 4: the property was not worth what it eventually sold far,
Speaker 4: but they ultimately agreed to sell it at that price
Speaker 4: because it's hard to show that it wasn't in fact worth,
Speaker 4: that there was a buyer's premium, that they found it
Speaker 4: was worth that, and how do you prove that in
Speaker 4: a court. To show it's illegal is very difficult.
Speaker 2: So well, as you leverage buy you influence.
Speaker 4: And that comes up in two contexts, right. One could
Speaker 4: be this is absolutely a payment for influence. It's a
Speaker 4: payment for an action to be taken that's already been taken.
Speaker 4: The other thing, where it comes up in real estate
Speaker 4: all the time, is to launder money. If you have
Speaker 4: illicit money, whether you're an oligarch, whether you're a drug dealer,
Speaker 4: one of the ways that you take these illicit moneies
Speaker 4: that you've gotten and make them turn them into legitimate,
Speaker 4: tangible things of value is to buy real estate. And
Speaker 4: that's why it's concerning when I think it was Eric Trump,
Speaker 4: not Donald. I think it was Eric who said at
Speaker 4: some point in the twenty sixteen campaign a disproportionate amount
Speaker 4: of the Trump's real estate holdings were from Russian entities.
Speaker 4: So that's an alarm belt, right, because one, Russians may
Speaker 4: be trying to buy real estate because they want to
Speaker 4: park value in the West, but two, they could be
Speaker 4: laundering moneys through there. And if you look at Trump,
Speaker 4: it's like his entire career, in my opinion, has been
Speaker 4: doing that. It's real estate, but it's also look at
Speaker 4: his casinos. Another amazing way for laundering moneies that are
Speaker 4: ill gotten gains that you go and you buy chips
Speaker 4: and then maybe lose ten percent, But when you cash out,
Speaker 4: you can take illegal moneies and make them more legal.
Speaker 4: So Trump has spent his entire business career in and
Speaker 4: around business that is well suited to illicit movements of money.
Speaker 4: And one of his casinos, if I remember correctly, got
Speaker 4: in trouble, I think because they failed to do sufficient
Speaker 4: to know your customer type checks when somebody rolled in
Speaker 4: with a bunch of money. Their state and other licensing
Speaker 4: entities require you as a casino to go out and
Speaker 4: do a certain amount of due diligence to make sure
Speaker 4: that these are legal moneies. And if I recall correctly,
Speaker 4: his casino, at least one of them was written up
Speaker 4: for not doing that sufficiently. So he's got a history
Speaker 4: of this. On the one hand, it serves him in
Speaker 4: my opinion on shady business dealings, but it also serves
Speaker 4: him in a making himself vulnerable in an intelligence context.
Speaker 3: So, Peter, do you have a theory of the case
Speaker 3: on Trump vis a VI compromised with the Russians? And
Speaker 3: let me just put out my case around just around
Speaker 3: the twenty sixteen election, is that Donald Trump's lifestyle business
Speaker 3: practice has made him uniquely vulnerable to blackmail and extortion
Speaker 3: by the country that is un arguably the best in
Speaker 3: the world at those dark arts. His campaign team, with
Speaker 3: its own unusual shady ties of Russia, was willing to
Speaker 3: work with a hostile form power and eager to accept
Speaker 3: material stolen from Americans. None of them went to the
Speaker 3: authorities to report the illicit contexts, and many of them
Speaker 3: were subsequently arrested. When the issue of Russian involvement surfaced publicly,
Speaker 3: every single one of them lied and covered up their actions.
Speaker 3: Trump then attacked the very institutions and people you one
Speaker 3: of them that could hold him on account, and sought
Speaker 3: to obstruct the investigations, eventually then pardoning anyone who could
Speaker 3: provide evidence of wrongdoing. And then, even after all of that,
Speaker 3: even his most fervent supporters have been unable to provide
Speaker 3: any innocent explanation why a domestic political campaign would need
Speaker 3: such deep engagement with a hostile form power. To me,
Speaker 3: that is very damning and suggests that there should be
Speaker 3: a counterintelligence investigation around the twenty sixteen election and Trump,
Speaker 3: if nothing else.
Speaker 2: His campaign manager. Man Form admits publicly in his book
Speaker 2: that he was meeting with a Russian an intelligence officer
Speaker 2: and passing him information from the campaign that the Russians
Speaker 2: could then use to manipulate our election.
Speaker 4: Intelligence agencies. Typically, certainly when you look at the Russians
Speaker 4: are competent right broadly, they're going to play somebody with
Speaker 4: a view towards the long game. They're not going to
Speaker 4: push an issue to cause that person to turn away
Speaker 4: or put them in a position where it's going to
Speaker 4: make them not want to do something. So what I
Speaker 4: mean by that is if you're Russia and you are
Speaker 4: well versed in the ways to identify vulnerabilities and people,
Speaker 4: and again it isn't just you and the three of
Speaker 4: us sitting around having a beer and shooting the shit
Speaker 4: about how somebody might be vulnerable. I mean, it's like
Speaker 4: the agentcy like any intel service, you have teams of
Speaker 4: people who are sitting there through a formal process looking
Speaker 4: at somebody to identify their vulnerabilities, to evaluate their psychology
Speaker 4: and what makes them tick, and to go out there
Speaker 4: and leverage that. Some of that has got sense as
Speaker 4: a case officer, but a lot of is backed up
Speaker 4: by a huge organization, well resourced. It's looking into it.
Speaker 4: And when you look at Trump, the things that motivate
Speaker 4: Trump are his ego, his insecurity, his affection and love
Speaker 4: of authoritarian figures. And the psychologists can figure out if
Speaker 4: that's like a daddy issue when he was little, and
Speaker 4: money and all of those are things that the Russian
Speaker 4: intelligence services are extraordinarily competent and exploiting. And again this
Speaker 4: isn't and would never be the SVR is showing up
Speaker 4: at some sidebar between Putin and Trump and handing him
Speaker 4: over a bag of money or a wallet full of bitcoin.
Speaker 4: It's going to be ways that are explainable, that are
Speaker 4: hard to trace. And to your point, during the twenty
Speaker 4: sixteen election, Michael Cohen was convicted and went to jail,
Speaker 4: was literally in and around Moscow dealing with Russian folks
Speaker 4: about the prospect of a Trump Tower of Moscow. Literally
Speaker 4: at the moment Trump was on the campaign trail saying
Speaker 4: I have no financial ties to Russia, none, which is
Speaker 4: obvious bullshit. And Trump knew that Cohen was dealing with
Speaker 4: Moscow at the moment he said that, and of course
Speaker 4: the Russians knew that Michael Cohen was dealing them. So
Speaker 4: the minute that happen happens, the Russians are like, wait
Speaker 4: a minute, Trump denied it and we're doing it. So
Speaker 4: therefore we've got this ongoing back and forth that gives
Speaker 4: us leverage because Trump just denied it, and if we
Speaker 4: go there and publicize it's going to hurt him politically.
Speaker 4: Trump knows they know that, and so it's this unspoken
Speaker 4: agreement between those two parties. Then you know, wink and
Speaker 4: a nod, this is fine. And again, look at Trump's
Speaker 4: sexual history, look at what's been proven with Egene Carroll,
Speaker 4: look at what's been alleged by the scores of women
Speaker 4: in the US. You can't tell me knowing what you know.
Speaker 4: And the way Russians are willing to use compromise in
Speaker 4: women to target Westerners in your experience, what you saw
Speaker 4: happening in Russia, that they don't have the ability to
Speaker 4: one understand that appetite and Trump and to apply that
Speaker 4: it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back in a moment, welcome back.
Speaker 3: When Donald Trump pushes back against the stuff he always says, Russia, Russia, Russia.
Speaker 3: And you said something which I thought was really interest
Speaker 3: you said that these kind of things, this gangster mentality,
Speaker 3: doesn't just work with Russia and Russian intelligence, it could
Speaker 3: work with others. If you look into Trump's experience and
Speaker 3: his family and money coming from China, that there's as
Speaker 3: much a concern with China and perhaps the Egypt or
Speaker 3: others as it would be with Russia.
Speaker 4: I mean, you look at Jared Kushner. After the administration,
Speaker 4: you got wet like some of more than one one
Speaker 4: to two billion dollars of investment money from the Saudi
Speaker 4: having Wealth Fund and others within weeks and hasn't turned
Speaker 4: a profit and has made one two hundred million. I
Speaker 4: forget the exact amount in fees for managing that money
Speaker 4: for zero return for their investors, and that fund has
Speaker 4: little to nothing to show for it has no competence
Speaker 4: in it. The Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund advisors were saying,
Speaker 4: don't put your money here because it doesn't make sense
Speaker 4: financially from a risk perspective. But nonetheless that money is
Speaker 4: flowing in there. There are other countries. We talked about
Speaker 4: Egypt earlier. There's some I think the Katari's there's some
Speaker 4: indication that they're making licensing deals with Trump for a
Speaker 4: high rise, not that he's building just to put his
Speaker 4: name on it. But any time you get countries who
Speaker 4: are willing to pay tribute through some legally coverable way,
Speaker 4: Trump is going to take it. And then the other thing,
Speaker 4: of course, is this odd like he does have a
Speaker 4: fascination with strongman. He talks about Kim Jong un and
Speaker 4: not just this stupid no he wrote me love letters,
Speaker 4: but comments he made to White House staff about when
Speaker 4: he Kim Jong un talks, his people will snap to attention.
Speaker 4: And Trump sees that as something he wants emulated. Right.
Speaker 4: He wants his people, he wants, whether that's his government
Speaker 4: or the US population, to snap to attention. And they
Speaker 4: have big parades and cry hysterically singing his praises on
Speaker 4: the evening news. And Trump is the mark in the bizarre.
Speaker 4: He is the guy that walks in and everybody's like,
Speaker 4: there's the sucker that we are going to get ten
Speaker 4: thousand dollars to this two hundred dollars carpet, and everybody
Speaker 4: knows it.
Speaker 3: For you or for the audience. I would like to
Speaker 3: aim people towards An article I wrote in twenty nineteen
Speaker 3: for Just Security called is Trump a Russian agent, which
Speaker 3: tries to lay out the terms and the explanations, which
Speaker 3: comes to that same conclusion, it's more of this gangster
Speaker 3: culture than it is. He's likely a controlled asset of
Speaker 3: any foreign intelligence zone.
Speaker 2: When I was on the inside, I know of an
Speaker 2: instance where there was a young agency officer and he
Speaker 2: was posted to an authoritarian government, met a young woman,
Speaker 2: fell in love. And the way the agency works that
Speaker 2: is that when an agency office is going to marry
Speaker 2: a foreign or, she has to be polygraphed, and on
Speaker 2: her polygraph she said yeah. At one point in the
Speaker 2: dating processes it was getting serious. The local service, the
Speaker 2: local intelligence service from this authoritarian government which has close
Speaker 2: ties to Russia, came to her and didn't say, don't
Speaker 2: fuck with us, you need to work with us, but said,
Speaker 2: we would like to persuade you to talk to us
Speaker 2: from time to time through a family member. You know,
Speaker 2: we'll talk to your dad or he or she is
Speaker 2: willing to do it, and from time to time we
Speaker 2: can chat. And she said no. So she admitted this
Speaker 2: on the polygraph, and the agency said, you know what,
Speaker 2: we think this match is for real. They really love
Speaker 2: each other. But to the CIA officer We said, you
Speaker 2: need to choose either to remain in the agency and
Speaker 2: not get married to this woman, or you need to
Speaker 2: leave because she will always be vulnerable her family members.
Speaker 2: Two or three years from now, something will happen. So
Speaker 2: it's just set the stage. So in nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 2: way back then, Donald Trump, the real estate bogul, married
Speaker 2: a Czech citizen. Czechoslovakia at the time. You're smiling, You
Speaker 2: know the story. Czechoslovakia at the time was a really
Speaker 2: hardcore like the East German Stalinist government with a really
Speaker 2: hardcore intelligence service. Now she was out of Czechoslovakia and
Speaker 2: she had committed an illegal act. She had entered into
Speaker 2: a sham marriage with an Austrian Evanna did, and she
Speaker 2: had eagerly emigrated with this illegally gotten passport to Canada,
Speaker 2: and then she filled in forms to come to the
Speaker 2: United States that she filled in illegally. She made claims
Speaker 2: that she had a veil at Austrian passport and she
Speaker 2: did not. And she met and married Donald Trump. This
Speaker 2: is a tremendous honor for me. I guess in a
Speaker 2: lot of ways, my wife is sitting right over here.
Speaker 2: She just became an American citizen, and that's a honor.
Speaker 2: We do know from the Czech files left over from
Speaker 2: when the turn of the Fall of the Wall and
Speaker 2: so forth, that the Czech Service, the STB opened an
Speaker 2: investigation into her, that we know her father, who I
Speaker 2: understand informally was a hardcore communist, her father was talking
Speaker 2: to the Chech Service, and that they opened an operational file.
Speaker 2: I they had a specific operation in mind for this
Speaker 2: young influential entrepreneur. That file has disappeared, that's never been found,
Speaker 2: so there is no smoking gun. And this is conspiracy
Speaker 2: theory light. But in the counterintelligence world, if I was
Speaker 2: the Czech Service working closely with the Russians, I would
Speaker 2: probably use that to bump into Donald Trump, to have
Speaker 2: Evanna or her father who was working with a Czech
Speaker 2: Service engineer or relationship, or bump somebody into him to
Speaker 2: just talk to you know, we could talk from time
Speaker 2: to time, perhaps to begin this operation.
Speaker 3: But you're mentioning, Jerry, is a failure of the FBI
Speaker 3: to investigate properly this young woman or there.
Speaker 2: This is almost a conspiracy theory, but it's not right,
Speaker 2: as the sets of facts that lead to suspicion is
Speaker 2: all it is. But what's your sense of that?
Speaker 4: Yes, so look one my sense is like, at least
Speaker 4: on the counterintelligence side, this is absolutely what the Soviets
Speaker 4: and Soviet client states would do, whether it is the
Speaker 4: Soviet In many cases like I, as good as the
Speaker 4: KGB was, the size of these Germans were better. In
Speaker 4: my opinion. The checks were amazing, the polls were very,
Speaker 4: very good. And when it came to the immigrant communities,
Speaker 4: in particular, levaging those personnel who moved into the West,
Speaker 4: and whether it was immediately or just you know, you've
Speaker 4: got a huge field and you put out a thousand
Speaker 4: seeds and you just watch which ones grow up. No
Speaker 4: good intelligence service. They're not going to wield their power
Speaker 4: and influence like a blunt instrument. It is what. You're
Speaker 4: not going to say something that is going to force
Speaker 4: somebody to an uncomfortable choice of either I'm in with
Speaker 4: you one hundred percent or I'm going to walk away.
Speaker 4: You give people latitude and leeway so that whether consciously
Speaker 4: or subconsciously, they think they're okay, and you maintain that relationship.
Speaker 4: And so again, going back to the earlier question about
Speaker 4: the counter intelligence investigation of Trump, without saying one way
Speaker 4: or the other. It is a reasonable question to ask.
Speaker 4: Because the Bureau had a vibrant counter intelligence program during
Speaker 4: the Cold War, they looked at emigrats like this. Did
Speaker 4: anybody ever look at Evanna Trump? Did anybody look if
Speaker 4: not her, the people that she was connected to, who
Speaker 4: were in contact with the Czech services, did anybody look
Speaker 4: at them? That's one of the things you do. If
Speaker 4: you had a counterintelligence case on Trump, you would go
Speaker 4: back and say, let's look at all these factors and
Speaker 4: see potential intersections between Soviet or Soviet client state intelligence
Speaker 4: services and not only Trump but anybody around them. And
Speaker 4: Avana screams, I mean, it was a weird Like if
Speaker 4: you go back and look at the timeline that's known
Speaker 4: about her movement to the West and the time she
Speaker 4: spent in Canada and what she did or didn't do,
Speaker 4: and where this lie that I think Don Trump Junior
Speaker 4: is saying my mom was an Olympian. No, she was
Speaker 4: never an Olympian. Never, And so where, you know, where
Speaker 4: did that story come from? What was the timing of
Speaker 4: her application for permanent residency in the United States, the
Speaker 4: data that was put down to support that permanent residency,
Speaker 4: Whether there's sham marriages or not. All those a reasonable
Speaker 4: questions because those are techniques that were used by the checks,
Speaker 4: by the polls, by the East Germans, by the Soviets
Speaker 4: to get immigrats into the United States.
Speaker 3: I have a question for you, Peter, what was it
Speaker 3: like to work with the CIA.
Speaker 2: I'll be honest, Yeah, were you in Awe? How did
Speaker 2: you the name was?
Speaker 4: It was good. I mean a lot of it was
Speaker 4: just learning, you know, and my I grew up around
Speaker 4: the world and overseas, so I think and then just
Speaker 4: through education, I think at a little bit of a
Speaker 4: different appreciation of what the CIA did and how they
Speaker 4: work than the average bureau agent.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: I remember my agents getting frustrated because they would have
Speaker 4: some back and forth to somebody at headquarters and then
Speaker 4: give them different names. But I don't know if your
Speaker 4: listeners know you've got your true name, and then you've
Speaker 4: got potentially a cover name which you might use if
Speaker 4: you're overseas, but then also internally you have a pseudo
Speaker 4: or a different name, so you all walk around with
Speaker 4: multiple different names, which all makes sense if you're on
Speaker 4: the inside, because you know, every email's got your funny
Speaker 4: name or whatever. But for an agents sitting there saying, well,
Speaker 4: I talked to John, but really he called himself storm Hammer.
Speaker 4: I don't know what the fuck that's all about. And
Speaker 4: so they're not trustable and storm Hammer, storm Hammer.
Speaker 2: John and I are pseudos. Were pretty lame.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that most of them are, Like I can count
Speaker 4: on one hand. I'm like, oh, that's badass. The other one.
Speaker 2: The funny thing is that it's you get a first name,
Speaker 2: a middle initial that doesn't have a name, and then
Speaker 2: you get a weird name. And I remember there was
Speaker 2: the this is a Nicaragua a long time ago, but
Speaker 2: they shot down an airplane that the Sandin Easts did it.
Speaker 2: It was Eugene J. Hassen Fuss And I'm like, that
Speaker 2: is a pseudo, but it was it sound like yeah.
Speaker 4: But and so setting aside that and and some of
Speaker 4: this dependent on the officer. Like the biggest thing that
Speaker 4: aggravated me is like occasionally come across people that, in
Speaker 4: addition to working with you, would try to case office
Speaker 4: you you know what I mean by that. I don't
Speaker 4: know if your listeners do, but like we are colleagues,
Speaker 4: I am not a recruitment target. So don't sit there
Speaker 4: and all of a sudden started launching into pro questions.
Speaker 4: But when you go to school own no kidding, what
Speaker 4: did you major? And don't don't I know what you're
Speaker 4: fucking doing. Stop asking me question.
Speaker 3: I'm a poor case officer because every.
Speaker 4: That is a poor case officer, because like, yeah, John,
Speaker 4: you've been doing it to me for like five years now,
Speaker 4: and I have no fucking clue right way to get
Speaker 4: an f.
Speaker 3: THEI officers just pay for his food.
Speaker 4: That's or travel or travel. Hey, we need to take it,
Speaker 4: and we need to take it into the UK and
Speaker 4: we'll pay for business class whatever you want.
Speaker 3: All right, I'm in Thank you very much for coming
Speaker 3: on with us. You're not only you're a good profession,
Speaker 3: but you're a good friend and that we hope we
Speaker 3: can have you on again sometime soon.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it would be great.
Speaker 3: Hold on just a second, well we take a quick break.
Speaker 6: All right, back to Mission implausible.
Speaker 5: Now, let's bring back Adam Davidson, so.
Speaker 6: Can I Here's what I think the single best defense
Speaker 6: Trump has, which is he's so obviously an agent of
Speaker 6: the Russians that he can't possibiz.
Speaker 3: We'll use the term asset because asset has two terms.
Speaker 3: I'm resourcing benefit, he's a benefit to Russian talking points Russia.
Speaker 6: But I mean on the idea that he's an actual agent.
Speaker 6: He's not acting like an agent, right. An agent would
Speaker 6: be the leading voice against Russia.
Speaker 7: Right, if you use the dictionary term, he's an agent, right,
Speaker 7: someone who does something on behalf of someone else.
Speaker 6: But I mean when you guys have an agent at
Speaker 6: an agent back, you know, many years ago before you
Speaker 6: became old and retired and had wouldn't you tell them, like,
Speaker 6: don't go defending America and don't feed the loudest voice
Speaker 6: in favor agent.
Speaker 3: I'd like to think, Adam, you read my definitive article
Speaker 3: called is Trump a Russian Agent? In Just Security in
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen. But I go through it all of how
Speaker 3: the CIA looks at recruiting sources and what it means,
Speaker 3: and how you handle them, how you communicate with them,
Speaker 3: and then also look at the history of how Russians
Speaker 3: do it. Russians have a different way. They look at
Speaker 3: a much wider variety of things. They don't have to
Speaker 3: have that same sense of control and things that we do.
Speaker 3: But I come to the same conclusion is he may
Speaker 3: be of value to them in the fact that they
Speaker 3: can put stuff in front of him and hope that
Speaker 3: he doesn't know any better and regurgitates it. But the
Speaker 3: notion that he would actually follow their direction or could
Speaker 3: report to them on what's going on, or that he
Speaker 3: could follow any direction and do communications with them or
Speaker 3: something is crazy. He just doesn't have the discipline to
Speaker 3: do those kind of things. So the notion that he
Speaker 3: would be a spy in the sense that we and
Speaker 3: CIA run spies just doesn't make any sense. But whether
Speaker 3: he's of value to the Russians and that he's somehow
Speaker 3: compromised or treated by them in a way that helps them,
Speaker 3: it certainly is possible.
Speaker 2: The former Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schruder, I think he
Speaker 2: is depending on your definition, he is certainly an agent
Speaker 2: of the Russian government now right.
Speaker 7: They hit even the Trump Yeah, yeah, And I think
Speaker 7: they have appealed to his ego, They've appealed to his
Speaker 7: sense of wanting to remain important, and they have said
Speaker 7: to him, you can build a bridge intellectually. And of
Speaker 7: course they're paying him a shitload of money through nord
Speaker 7: Stream almost and yeah, two shiploads of money.
Speaker 2: And he has consistently defended Putin and defended the invasion
Speaker 2: of Crimea by not criticizing, by saying, you need to
Speaker 2: understand the Russian point of view. Ukraine's aren't perfect either.
Speaker 7: They get it common and I don't think they said,
Speaker 7: hey man, we got dirty pictures of it.
Speaker 2: He's been married five times, so it's not going to
Speaker 2: work anyway. We've got we've got.
Speaker 7: Dirty pictures, or you've done this, we are going to
Speaker 7: blackmail you into this. You blahahaha a spine now, but
Speaker 7: he is an agent of the Russian government.
Speaker 2: Now. I don't get to use the word indubably all
Speaker 2: that often, but it was a it fits there.
Speaker 3: Got to be a professional journalist. Would you use the
Speaker 3: word indubitably?
Speaker 6: First of all, I know how to pronounce it, which
Speaker 6: is an important part.
Speaker 2: Of using it.
Speaker 6: But indubitably, yeah, but I was you know, I was
Speaker 6: trained don't use a ten dollars word when a nickel
Speaker 6: word'll do. Although you know the New Yorker has been
Speaker 6: known to use a ten dollar word every now and again.
Speaker 5: So do we do that?
Speaker 6: Are there, maybe in Russia, or in China or in
Speaker 6: other countries, people who are working on our behalf without
Speaker 6: being agents or is that not something we do as much.
Speaker 3: I mean, we're a bigger, richer country, so there might
Speaker 3: be people who believe in our system better. But as
Speaker 3: a bureaucracy, the CIA, the clandestine Service, we get promoted
Speaker 3: by recruiting someone who is in a position that can
Speaker 3: give us secrets, follows our direction, is under our control,
Speaker 3: so that they can say John or Jerry recruited this source.
Speaker 3: This source is providing us information we can't get any
Speaker 3: other way. And this person is going to take a
Speaker 3: turnover to another officer and will continue to work for us,
Speaker 3: and is motivated to do so. But as a Russian system,
Speaker 3: when we've seen it over the decades, they have what
Speaker 3: they call useful idiots, and they have agents of influence,
Speaker 3: and they have fellow travelers, and they have a journalist
Speaker 3: who they talk to, and the journalist says mildly pro
Speaker 3: Russian things. They're comfortable with that that's good, that's a
Speaker 3: benefit to their system. So they have a much wider
Speaker 3: view of how they run sources than we see how
Speaker 3: you do.
Speaker 6: So I really look at this. It's my background through
Speaker 6: economic eyes and capital flight from the former Soviet Union.
Speaker 6: So like oligarchs sending their money to the US and
Speaker 6: the UK and some other offshore havens. It's like half
Speaker 6: the wealth. It is trillions of dollars. Like one of
Speaker 6: the largest industries in the world is capital flight from
Speaker 6: former Soviet states and oil rich states, and that money
Speaker 6: that has flowed disproportionately to a handful of cities London,
Speaker 6: New York, Miami, LA, disproportionately into real estate. When your
Speaker 6: capital flight is not investment, you're not like picking small
Speaker 6: startups based on your sophisticated analysis of which ones might
Speaker 6: be successful. You know you're going to lose it around
Speaker 6: twenty percent on average of your money. So you have
Speaker 6: a billion dollars in Moscow or bak Who or tush
Speaker 6: Kent or whatever. If you have a billion, you're willing
Speaker 6: to have eight hundred million in London because that's eight
Speaker 6: hundred million in London or eight hundred million in New
Speaker 6: York is worth a lot more than a billion in
Speaker 6: toush Kent. So as a result, you have this very
Speaker 6: corrosive lubrication of American business activity. Where the way I
Speaker 6: think about it is, if you're in New York real estate,
Speaker 6: say I'm just randomly picking one industry just in geographic
Speaker 6: area out of the blue. You know, New York real
Speaker 6: estate was basically a bunch of oligarchs. It was a
Speaker 6: handful of families that owned everything, and it was very
Speaker 6: close to the mob and every like. I think Trump's
Speaker 6: dad was a sketchy dude, but there were a bunch
Speaker 6: of Trump's dads. But in the nineties into the two thousands,
Speaker 6: what you saw is a professionalization. The families that endured,
Speaker 6: they got real accountants, they built real systems, and they
Speaker 6: became much more established businesses in a modern sense. So
Speaker 6: you have that option, But then you have this other option,
Speaker 6: which is you just facilitate this capital flight, this money laundering.
Speaker 6: It's an easier option. I don't think you really become
Speaker 6: a billionaires easily that way.
Speaker 2: But if you pick your facilitator, they owe you, right.
Speaker 2: It's like I'm going to wash my money through you,
Speaker 2: but you need to do me a favor too, so
Speaker 2: it's not a one way transaction. So both get dirty
Speaker 2: and both become vulnerable.
Speaker 6: Now what's interesting about Trump though, So there's the people
Speaker 6: who are coming to New York or Miami or la
Speaker 6: or London, and that is billions and billions of dollars
Speaker 6: of people buying over priced houses, buying condos that they'll
Speaker 6: visit once for eighty million dollars. So that's a thing,
Speaker 6: and there's lots of people who touch on that. And
Speaker 6: then there's international you know, Exon Mobile or Bechtel or whatever,
Speaker 6: like massive conglomerates that have to do work in kind
Speaker 6: of sketchy countries and they somehow find a way to
Speaker 6: do business. But what Trump has done is really interesting
Speaker 6: is he's essentially become a partner of local developers. There's
Speaker 6: not a Trump Tower Paris, There's not a Trump Tower London, Baku, Azerbaijan.
Speaker 6: He tried and failed a project in Batumi, Georgia. He
Speaker 6: tried and failed projects in Kazakhstan. Has five big projects
Speaker 6: in sort of second tier cities in India, a couple
Speaker 6: projects and second tier cities in Indonesia, and really working
Speaker 6: in the local economy, facilitating in every one of those cases,
Speaker 6: the people sketchy in the context of that kind of
Speaker 6: those highly corrupt nations, like people who are not if
Speaker 6: you compare it to four Seasons or Ritz Carlton, who
Speaker 6: are also doing business. Very often they will have a
Speaker 6: local oligarch, but they'll have the international oligarch. The person
Speaker 6: whose kids go to Harvard, who is hiring like American
Speaker 6: law firms, American accounting firms, to really make sure this project.
Speaker 6: So the Ritz Carlton whatever. I don't want to make
Speaker 6: any specific accusations that this project is clean, even if
Speaker 6: the partner is not clean. But Trump's stuff. The reporting
Speaker 6: I did on Azerbaijan, this was the bottom tier oligarch,
Speaker 6: like a mini gark who's paying people in duffel bags
Speaker 6: full of cash, like in Azerbaijan, one of the most
Speaker 6: highly corrupt nations in the world. It was the guy
Speaker 6: who everyone laughed at how crudely corrupt he was that
Speaker 6: Trump did business with, And that to me is so risky,
Speaker 6: it's so stupid. It's not that other business people aren't
Speaker 6: doing it because they're more moral. It's that it's way
Speaker 6: too little money. You know, Trump's making a million bucks here,
Speaker 6: five million bucks there. So I think when I think
Speaker 6: about Trump, it's he's a salesman who's trying to just
Speaker 6: get these piece of crap little deals, and he thinks
Speaker 6: that by saying these things, he's helping. But that got
Speaker 6: him into a situation where they do have things on him.
Speaker 6: These deals are inherently corrupt. He is no legal way,
Speaker 6: non corrupt way to do what he did.
Speaker 2: I just want to underline this with so the two
Speaker 2: times he tried that we know of for a Moscow tower,
Speaker 2: Moscow Trump Tower, he used Felix Sayer, who is this
Speaker 2: Russian low level mafiosa guy, And that was one of
Speaker 2: the guys he was trying to use to build Trump Tower.
Speaker 6: So I anyway, I think there's a very clear and
Speaker 6: clean story that doesn't require he's an official agent. It's
Speaker 6: a very simple story. He doesn't dispute it. There's no dispute.
Speaker 6: There's all this money pouring in to the US. It's
Speaker 6: relatively easy money. He took advantage of it. No question
Speaker 6: Trump Tower, Trump Soho filled with dirty Russian money. But
Speaker 6: so are all these new apartment towers in Manhattan, Florida too.
Speaker 6: So in that sense, Trump's not an outlier, but nobody's
Speaker 6: going there. And forget about Moscow going to these like
Speaker 6: third tier cities to work with the fifth tier oligarch.
Speaker 6: It is such an outlier from how American business people behave,
Speaker 6: and it's guarantees that you're going to have profound dirt.
Speaker 6: There's a feign corrupt practices act that you can't. You
Speaker 6: can go to jail for bribing a foreign official. He
Speaker 6: was part of a ton of deals where they were
Speaker 6: fundamentally bribing foreign officials. There's taking money from Iran's Revolutionary Guard.
Speaker 6: Trump took money, it was cleaned through this guy, Ziamamadov,
Speaker 6: but from the Runnian Revolutionary Guard. You could go to
Speaker 6: jail for that. These are crazy, stupid risks that he
Speaker 6: took that exposed him to a level of compromise that's unimaginable.
Speaker 6: He did lots and lots of things that if all
Speaker 6: the evidence came out, it would reveal how little money
Speaker 6: he has and how little money he got from these deals.
Speaker 6: And the evidence of those are in file cabinets in Baku,
Speaker 6: in Batumi and Tubilisi. And there's just a whole world
Speaker 6: of people who have dirt on him. As Felix Sayer actual,
Speaker 6: they said to me once, Trump is what a Russian
Speaker 6: man thinks a man.
Speaker 1: Should be like.
Speaker 6: That's and they liked him for all of those reasons.
Speaker 6: But I don't think they were like, oh, let's collect
Speaker 6: information on this guy because this guy might wan day
Speaker 6: be president. We can use it. It's and John, you know,
Speaker 6: this better than I do. Going way back to Soviet
Speaker 6: and even pre Soviet days, Russia collects intelligence on people
Speaker 6: that they can then use if those people happen to
Speaker 6: get out of line or become powerful. So I think
Speaker 6: there's a very simple story to tell that's pretty much undisputed,
Speaker 6: that he is an asset of not just Russia, but
Speaker 6: a whole bunch of important people in the former Soviet Union,
Speaker 6: a whole bunch of people in the Gulf, a whole
Speaker 6: bunch of people in Indonesia, in Malaysia, in in China.
Speaker 6: And I think if we asked him that, and he'd
Speaker 6: be like, yeah, man, you know, like, I don't like this.
Speaker 6: To me, isn't even like a content like the is
Speaker 6: he an actual and relisted agent of the FSB or something?
Speaker 6: Is like a distraction? We don't need that.
Speaker 1: Who cares?
Speaker 6: Maybe he is.
Speaker 4: I don't think.
Speaker 3: What's interesting about that is, in a sense, he would
Speaker 3: have been fine if he didn't run for president.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he would have been totally fine.
Speaker 3: But he's so angry now that he's getting accountability or
Speaker 3: attention for this. But he hasn't hasn't occurred to him
Speaker 3: that it's a different level. If you're the president of
Speaker 3: the United States, You're expected to have a certain sense
Speaker 3: of security values.
Speaker 6: So this is depressing.
Speaker 2: Guys, welcome to the world of counter rescionage.
Speaker 6: But from your standpoint, like John, when you you were
Speaker 6: in Moscow when there were lots of American business people
Speaker 6: going over leaving aside the presidency, does he seem like
Speaker 6: a dime a dozen?
Speaker 3: Or does he seem he fits exactly the kind of
Speaker 3: people who do business in places that are wild West
Speaker 3: and crazy like that, where they can make a quick
Speaker 3: buck and they don't mind dealing with corruption. What's odd
Speaker 3: about this is that those people don't usually then apply
Speaker 3: for serious national security positions that require a security class.
Speaker 2: Do we have people rainmakers assets that mainly often generally
Speaker 2: don't pay. Rich influential guys who like to sit down.
Speaker 2: And I could think of one individual in a country
Speaker 2: I was in where he could meet with the prime
Speaker 2: minister of this country, he could meet with a defense minister,
Speaker 2: he could meet with a Russian ambassador, and he'd like
Speaker 2: the agency, he liked the US, he wanted his kids
Speaker 2: to go to school in the US. Basically, you would
Speaker 2: sit with him, he'd say, could you go talk to
Speaker 2: the president for me, He's like, yeah, sure, I'll go
Speaker 2: talk to him. And then when you would debris from
Speaker 2: he would say, oh, the President said this and the
Speaker 2: other thing, and you'd write it down. And then he'd say,
Speaker 2: and what I think about that is And one time
Speaker 2: is he was going on what his interpretation what the
Speaker 2: President said is. I put my pen down and he's Jenny,
Speaker 2: you're not writing this down. I'm like, oh, because we
Speaker 2: only care what the president said. I don't actually care what.
Speaker 1: You're about that.
Speaker 5: There's no way that's not intelligence.
Speaker 7: It is intelligence, your relationship, what he said to you
Speaker 7: or what you're saying.
Speaker 2: He said, Trump could be just one of these guys
Speaker 2: that struck the lottery and ended up running for president.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 8: So yeah.
Speaker 5: To wrap this up, let's hear a little more of
Speaker 5: Rob Quadr's recitation of Trump's nineteen ninety interview with Playboy.
Speaker 8: I think of the future, but I refuse to paint it.
Speaker 8: Anything can happen. But I often think of nuclear war.
Speaker 8: It's a very important element in my thought process. It's
Speaker 8: the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has,
Speaker 8: and nobody's focusing on the nuts and bolts of it.
Speaker 8: It's a little like sickness. People don't believe they're going
Speaker 8: to get sick until they do. I believe the greatest
Speaker 8: of all stupidities is people believing it will never happen
Speaker 8: because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody
Speaker 8: uses weapons.
Speaker 1: What bullshit.
Speaker 9: The Mission Implause is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay,
Speaker 9: John Seipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 9: Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable
Speaker 9: pictures for iHeart Podcasts.