Speaker 1: The best kind of useful idiot. The best kind of
Speaker 1: person who can be manipulated and used is somebody who
Speaker 1: feels himself to be deeply aggrieved and underappreciated or completely
Speaker 1: unappreciated in his own society. They detest the establishment, They
Speaker 1: detest a society to which they want badly to belong
Speaker 1: and to be celebrated by, but feel that they have
Speaker 1: been jilted. He's a loser, right. What I'm describing here
Speaker 1: clearly is Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 2: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she. I served in
Speaker 2: the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover
Speaker 2: all around the world.
Speaker 3: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 3: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 2: created conspiracies.
Speaker 3: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 3: weren't true.
Speaker 2: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 2: news almost every day.
Speaker 3: Will break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 3: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Mission Implausible. So, guys, we spent a lot
Speaker 2: of time talking about conspiracy theories, because that's what our
Speaker 2: podcasts about. But today I think we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about some real conspiracies because there are groups that conspire,
Speaker 2: and one of the most well known are the Russian
Speaker 2: intelligence services. So they conspire to do all sorts of things,
Speaker 2: but they also conspire to spread conspiracy theories inside our
Speaker 2: own countries. And so we're meeting today with Michael Weiss,
Speaker 2: who was an expert on Russian intelligence issues.
Speaker 4: I always find that fascinating that one of the most
Speaker 4: common actual conspiracies is a conspiracy to spread conspiracy theories. Yeah,
Speaker 4: oh yeah, So can we talk about the various conspiracies
Speaker 4: to create conspiracy theories. So one is you have an
Speaker 4: enemy and you want to undermine that enemy. My family
Speaker 4: were Russian Jews. Russian Jews were not a particular threat
Speaker 4: to the Czar of Russia in the eighteen nineties. Quite
Speaker 4: the contrary. They were a very weak, beliegued, incredibly poor,
Speaker 4: but there were.
Speaker 3: Someone to blame.
Speaker 4: Right, It's like a drive by conspiracy theory. You don't
Speaker 4: actually care about the people you're conspiring against. It's just
Speaker 4: helpful to have an enemy, right, So there's a we're
Speaker 4: going after our enemy we want to undermine our enemy.
Speaker 4: You can think of the US against Japan and World
Speaker 4: War Two. Then b there's the kind of drive by
Speaker 4: like we want all these people to think we're good,
Speaker 4: so we're going to create a fake shared enemy. But
Speaker 4: then there's this stuff of just we just want to
Speaker 4: create chaos, which is what I think of as Russia today.
Speaker 4: They'll be on all sides of an issue because they
Speaker 4: just want fighting and distrust.
Speaker 2: That's what they want when they put it against enemies abroad,
Speaker 2: but they also want it domestically. They don't want their
Speaker 2: citizens engaged in politics, and so what they do is
Speaker 2: they just put out so many false and crazy stories
Speaker 2: that people just eventually give up, and eventually you just
Speaker 2: back out of this thing. It's impossible to know what's true.
Speaker 2: Is therefore I give up? And they want their sentence
Speaker 2: ready to give up.
Speaker 3: This is the genius of nineteen eighty four Cast Your
Speaker 3: My Bag. You probably had to read it in high school,
Speaker 3: and the whole point is there is no objective truth.
Speaker 3: Oceana's our enemy. No, No, they're not. They were like
Speaker 3: last week, and the dish scale of conspiracy theories right
Speaker 3: now on the right, somewhat on the left, but mostly
Speaker 3: overwhelming on the right. Is just this cascade of conspiracy theories,
Speaker 3: and you can't keep up with it, and eventually you
Speaker 3: get tired and you just simply accept whatever your team says.
Speaker 4: Here's an interesting fact. I was in high school. I
Speaker 4: read it in nineteen eighty four, and you, Jerry, were
Speaker 4: in high school when it was published in nineteen forty nine. Right,
Speaker 4: you were in high school. So if all they want
Speaker 4: is to spread despair, the last thing in the world
Speaker 4: you'd want to do is create a podcast about conspiracy theories,
Speaker 4: that's just playing into their hands. Ah, what do you do?
Speaker 4: How do you fight that? Like, I never share my
Speaker 4: political preferences, so everyone will have to guess what the
Speaker 4: guy who worked at NPR and the New York Times
Speaker 4: and this podcast and the New Yorker thinks. But you know,
Speaker 4: people have often said it's easier to be a small
Speaker 4: government republican or a libertarian because all you have to
Speaker 4: do is make government look bad. It's much harder to
Speaker 4: build up to say no, no, it's got problems, it's
Speaker 4: got issues, but on balance, we think it's pretty good.
Speaker 4: So what do you do. It's like if you were
Speaker 4: a citizen of Russia. What would you do?
Speaker 2: That's the things I don't think you can do. They
Speaker 2: created a massive security service whose job right from the
Speaker 2: beginning was to keep your leadership in power at all cause,
Speaker 2: which means they had to control the population and make
Speaker 2: sure there's no opposition.
Speaker 3: So Adam I was in Germany and in Berlin actually
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy nine, and we all thought, oh, the
Speaker 3: East Germans and the Romanians, and the Bulgarians and the Poles,
Speaker 3: the Czechs, they all bought into this. They actually believe
Speaker 3: their propaganda, or were neolistic, they didn't want and yet
Speaker 3: given the chance, and within weeks or months, the entire
Speaker 3: population turned on their political masters and they basically said,
Speaker 3: we know you've been fucking lying to us for the
Speaker 3: last forty years. Every East German who came through that
Speaker 3: wall knew that they'd been lied to and understood that.
Speaker 3: And I think we were in shock at how poor
Speaker 3: Russian and East German authoritarian propaganda was. I think what
Speaker 3: the Russians have going for them now, at least in
Speaker 3: their own territories, is people are afraid to tell the truth.
Speaker 3: Yet no, they know the truth, but they don't want
Speaker 3: to say it. And I think even in deepest, darkest
Speaker 3: Trump Land, except for a few people who are truly ignorant,
Speaker 3: they know the election wasn't stolen, right, But they're fucking
Speaker 3: with you. They know people aren't stealing cats, right. They
Speaker 3: know that the Mexicans who come in who are cutting
Speaker 3: their lawn and serving their food, they know they're not
Speaker 3: rapists and murders. So there's this cognitive dissonance going on
Speaker 3: about what you want to say and what you want
Speaker 3: to believe, but what you really know.
Speaker 2: So to talk about these actual conspiracies that the Russians
Speaker 2: and others have been involved, we're going to speak with
Speaker 2: Michael Weiss. Michael Weiss as an investigative journalist author. He's
Speaker 2: reported on Ukraine, Syria, and Russian intelligence. He's the author
Speaker 2: of isis Inside the Army of Terror and is presently
Speaker 2: writing a book on the history of Soviet and Russian
Speaker 2: military intelligence. And he's one of the best connected journalists
Speaker 2: today writing on the Ukraine War and an expert on
Speaker 2: Russian intelligence. In fact, several of his recent articles have
Speaker 2: uncovered Western spies and secret Russian units. And so we're
Speaker 2: really happy to have you here today, Michael.
Speaker 1: That's good to be here, John, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: So on the podcast, we've spoken a lot about how
Speaker 2: people can come to believe various conspiracies. Many even seem silly,
Speaker 2: but there is a darker side. We've seen that conspiracies
Speaker 2: can be packaged and weaponized by malign actors. Can you
Speaker 2: speak to us a little bit about how intelligence services
Speaker 2: might use conspiracies as part of a strategy of political
Speaker 2: warfare or disinformation.
Speaker 1: I think the most famous case is the conspiracies surrounding
Speaker 1: the assassination of JFK. A lot of people don't realize this,
Speaker 1: and in fact, I didn't realize this until I started
Speaker 1: digging into the history of active measures, the KGB term
Speaker 1: of art to describe political warfare and disinformation and propaganda campaigns.
Speaker 1: And the film JFK by Oliver Stone, who not really
Speaker 1: very creative in hiding his pro Butin and pro Russian sensibilities.
Speaker 1: And I can talk to you about how he developed
Speaker 1: those sensibilities at length because I lived in Hollywood for
Speaker 1: a spell. He made this blockbuster movie starring Kevin Costner
Speaker 1: and Oliver Stone. Was seen as a self parodying figure
Speaker 1: of paranoia, your classic kind of countercultural sixties type who
Speaker 1: graduates to the nineteen seventies, eighties, and nineties believing that
Speaker 1: the government is capable of these far reaching, nefarious conspiracies
Speaker 1: to suppress dissidents at home and even take out the
Speaker 1: leader of the free world. And so this film Traffic
Speaker 1: and all kinds of paranoid nonsense, the CIA and league
Speaker 1: with the Johnson administration murder the President of the United
Speaker 1: States and all that. What people didn't realize was that
Speaker 1: the specifics of this conspiracy theory were cooked up by
Speaker 1: the KGB, and they were floated to an Italian newspaper,
Speaker 1: So they found this Italian journalist who was clearly either
Speaker 1: on the payroll or The KGB have a wide spectrum
Speaker 1: of definitions for people that they're working within the West,
Speaker 1: because a journalist is not all that dissimilar to an
Speaker 1: intelligence officer in the sense that they're training in secrets,
Speaker 1: and they have a whole rolodex of sources, many of
Speaker 1: whom are anonymous. So this is somebody who could be
Speaker 1: chatted up at a bar or taken out to dinner
Speaker 1: by a task reporter quote unquote, or a Russian diplomat
Speaker 1: quote unquote, who is actually in reality an SVR A
Speaker 1: g are you intelligence officer? So we don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: this Italian journalist could have been thinking he's on the
Speaker 1: receiving end of some really juicy gossip kicking around in Moscow,
Speaker 1: if not on the receiving end of Russian or Soviet intelligence.
Speaker 1: But the point is he wrote this story in this
Speaker 1: little known newspaper. And keep in mind, this is the sixties,
Speaker 1: before the era in which disinformation travels at the speed
Speaker 1: of light. And this story works its way all the
Speaker 1: way into the New Orleans Prosecutor's office, where it is
Speaker 1: lapped up by people who are tasked with investigating the
Speaker 1: murder of the President of United States, and lo and behold,
Speaker 1: a KGB active measure takes the form of a blockbuster
Speaker 1: movie that is produced thirty years after the fact, which
Speaker 1: to this day people will say, oh, that's a great film,
Speaker 1: and everyone wants to know who really killed JFK. And
Speaker 1: they will invariably come back to Oliver Stone without any
Speaker 1: awareness of the fact that again, this was a wholly
Speaker 1: produced piece of fiction by the Soviet security services. And
Speaker 1: you know, I think one of the problems we've had
Speaker 1: in the last almost ten years now, particularly looking at
Speaker 1: the Trump Russian investigation, the extent to which MAGA types
Speaker 1: either knowingly or unwittingly or accidentally parrot Kremlin talking points
Speaker 1: at a host of issues Ukraine, NATO, European security, etc. Etc.
Speaker 1: We tend to be a little cartoonish in our thinking,
Speaker 1: believing that everything is cooked up by the Russians, right,
Speaker 1: everything must be as Oliver Stone's JFK act measure, when
Speaker 1: in reality, a lot of the time we're so nuts
Speaker 1: and polarized and so maddened with our own feverish conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories that are very homegrown that all the Russians have
Speaker 1: to do is point to us and give us a megaphone.
Speaker 1: Or the metaphor I like to use is we're like
Speaker 1: lemmings running off of a cliff, and the Russian security
Speaker 1: services are standing there with big signs that say keep going,
Speaker 1: you can do it faster. And the work that I've
Speaker 1: done at any rate, apart from exposing fully recruited FSB
Speaker 1: agents who in many cases are compensated by the FSB
Speaker 1: and they're asking their FSB handler for money, when it
Speaker 1: comes to the realm of information warfare political warfare, more
Speaker 1: often than not, what I see as what begins at
Speaker 1: home is simply given that added oomph and boost right
Speaker 1: hostile foreign services?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I love the term misattributed to Lenin. But
Speaker 3: useful idiots, right, And you touched on this a couple
Speaker 3: of places here, And the question is if you han't
Speaker 3: Oliver's own and you set him there, it doesn't have
Speaker 3: to be Oliver Stone, but an Oliver stoneish figure. Would
Speaker 3: they be okay being a useful idiot? Would they recognize
Speaker 3: themselves being useful idiots? Would one particular political party of
Speaker 3: the United States recognize themselves as being partially useful idiots?
Speaker 3: What's your sense on this? The self awareness of being
Speaker 3: manipulated or just not given a shit. Look.
Speaker 1: I'm not a trained psychologist, but I think the most
Speaker 1: successful useful idiot is the one who genuinely believes that
Speaker 1: he is the recipient of a revealed truth that is
Speaker 1: inaccessible to the broader population. In other words, he's convinced
Speaker 1: of his own bullshit and he doesn't believe that it
Speaker 1: has been planted there, or that he's been steered in
Speaker 1: a certain direction by a hostile foreign intelligence service. The
Speaker 1: best kind of useful idiot, the best kind of person
Speaker 1: who can be manipulated and used, whether or not recruited
Speaker 1: to another point. But really an asset, let's say, is
Speaker 1: somebody who feels himself to be deeply aggrieved and underappreciated
Speaker 1: or completely unappreciated in his own society. He's a loser, right,
Speaker 1: there's a reason. For instance, the Russians have characteristically seized
Speaker 1: upon sex pests, people with weird pedophilia in their background,
Speaker 1: or have been caught doing naughty things on camera. Whether
Speaker 1: the Russians have compromised them themselves or they were just
Speaker 1: compromised by their own haplessness in their own country doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: People who've lost jobs and they haven't taken it on
Speaker 1: the chin as it were, I mean they've they've really
Speaker 1: they're snarling about it. They detest the establishment. They just
Speaker 1: to test a society to which they want badly to
Speaker 1: belong and to be celebrated by, but feel that they
Speaker 1: have been jilted. What I'm describing here clearly is Tucker Carlson,
Speaker 1: and I know we're all gonna oh, I thought about.
Speaker 3: That issue Rudy Giuliati in my mind, But okay, all right.
Speaker 1: That's the classic classic example of somebody who demands to
Speaker 1: be taken seriously. It's like the arrested Development thing with
Speaker 1: Job and the musicians. A lot we demand to be
Speaker 1: taken seriously, and they're not. They're comic figures. They've washed
Speaker 1: out of every enterprise. TV shows have failed. They could
Speaker 1: hack it as this, they couldn't hack it as that,
Speaker 1: And so they decide whether or not even they truly
Speaker 1: believe these things in their core, but they have decided,
Speaker 1: as a matter of principle, for their own sense of
Speaker 1: narcissism and self worth, that they're just going to stick
Speaker 1: it to everybody that they blame for their own misfortunes.
Speaker 1: And if sticking it to them means riding sidecar with
Speaker 1: Russian intelligence or Russian propaganda, who cares, That's just makes
Speaker 1: it even more delicious to them.
Speaker 2: Let's take a break.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back, and Rebecca Michael, let me jump
Speaker 3: into just I think for the audience. I'd love to
Speaker 3: get you with both you and John's take on this.
Speaker 3: Conspiracy theories, as we all know, generally revolve around some
Speaker 3: sinister force that you can never really it's the Jews
Speaker 3: or the Illuminati, and they're manipulating the rest of us.
Speaker 3: But in our society, in reality, forces by and large
Speaker 3: don't exist as organized forces, but in an authoritarian government
Speaker 3: like Russia, they actually do, right, I mean pregosion. That's
Speaker 3: how he made his money. So if you could bring
Speaker 3: an American audience into the reality of what it's like
Speaker 3: to live in an authoritarian government where people where the
Speaker 3: government actually sits down and comes up with conspiracies to
Speaker 3: inflict on either their own population or others.
Speaker 1: The Rosetta stone of conspiracy, theoris I mean you alluded
Speaker 1: to it talking about anti Semitism, right, is the Protocols
Speaker 1: of the Learned Elders of Zion, which people often refer
Speaker 1: to this as a forgery. But a forgery suggests that
Speaker 1: there's a genuine article that's been spoofed. There's no genuine
Speaker 1: article here. This is a wholesale fabrication. And who did
Speaker 1: the fabricating the Okrana the Czarist secret Police, which in
Speaker 1: many ways all of their tradecraft and their organizational structure
Speaker 1: was imported into the post Tsarus Soviet Cheka. And then
Speaker 1: I mean, through the succession of alphabet soup incarnations, that
Speaker 1: body took as the KGB or now we know it
Speaker 1: as the SVR and the FSB. So here's a case
Speaker 1: where in the nineteenth century, Jews are seen not just
Speaker 1: within Russia, where they're suppressed, but outwardly in the world,
Speaker 1: whether it's in Western Europe with the Rothschilds and positions
Speaker 1: or echelons of global finance politics, where even if they're
Speaker 1: not in a leadership position, they're not premiers or presidents,
Speaker 1: they're in war cabinets, they're advisors to these politicians. And
Speaker 1: you concoct this elaborate explanatory thesis for why the world
Speaker 1: doesn't go the way you want it to go. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a bogey man, there's somebody to blame. It's not
Speaker 1: that we're bad, it's not that we're inept. It's not
Speaker 1: that our trains don't make it to the station on time,
Speaker 1: or we don't have indoor plumbing because we didn't invest
Speaker 1: in infrastructure. No, no, no, no, no, it's those guys are
Speaker 1: responsible for all of our misfortunes right here in America.
Speaker 1: Henry Ford, who was a celebrated industrialist in the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: I mean, he believed every word of this and actually
Speaker 1: spent his own fortune putting out added conspiratorial nonsense about Jews.
Speaker 1: And again did he convince himself that he was taken
Speaker 1: in by Zara's secret police disinformation experts. Of course not
Speaker 1: He had his own, his own way of coming to
Speaker 1: the same conclusions. But these conclusions were only reinforced by
Speaker 1: what he was able to read cooked up in Moscow
Speaker 1: or in Saint Petersburg. I should say, way back.
Speaker 2: What Andy Michael, can I ask you? Why does this
Speaker 2: always seem to be Russia? Why is Russia the place
Speaker 2: that seems to be for a century, no hour more,
Speaker 2: the place that's weaponizing and spreading conspiracies for political reasons?
Speaker 2: And are there others that either have done it for
Speaker 2: a long time or picking up on what the Russians
Speaker 2: have done.
Speaker 1: I mean, it probably would take a true Russian historian
Speaker 1: to explain it. Actually, there is a great Russian historian,
Speaker 1: a Soviet Hungarian called Tibor Zamweli. I think he was
Speaker 1: the cultural attache and then he defected. He wound up
Speaker 1: in the UK and he wrote a book, and broadly
Speaker 1: his view is things Russia don't really change in erratic
Speaker 1: or unpredictable ways. It's a sort of sign curve of
Speaker 1: repression and liberalization. But even liberalization takes an asterisk right.
Speaker 1: It's not in the sense the Western sense of true enlightenment,
Speaker 1: open society, transparency of government, accountability of leaders. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's the authoritarian imprint has been there, and according to Tibor,
Speaker 1: it's been there for a very simple reason. Russia was
Speaker 1: conquered by Genghis Khan and not by Julius Caesar. Right,
Speaker 1: if they were the legatees of the Roman Empire and
Speaker 1: what we now call the collective West, the chance is
Speaker 1: that we wouldn't be faced with this. It's not even
Speaker 1: a level of sophisticated political warfare. It's so entrenched and
Speaker 1: it's so well invested in, and it's so relied upon
Speaker 1: that whether we know it or not, we're constantly being
Speaker 1: bombarded with this. Right, it's a lot easier to take
Speaker 1: societies or countries where there is things such as the
Speaker 1: rule of law and transparency or in our case First
Speaker 1: Amendment freedom of speech. Is a great gift to the
Speaker 1: other side because they don't have these things where they
Speaker 1: come from, and they know it, and they look for
Speaker 1: our virtues as they try to transform our own virtues
Speaker 1: into vulnerabilities and weaknesses. I mean, I'll give you a
Speaker 1: perfect example of this, and moral equivalency is one of
Speaker 1: the great sort of It really ties the room together
Speaker 1: of all Russian active measures. So today, as we sit here,
Speaker 1: and I know the show will come out in future
Speaker 1: at some point, as we sit here, Lexi Navalni, the
Speaker 1: leader of the Russian opposition, has been discovered dead in
Speaker 1: the Russian penal colony. And I've just heard President Biden
Speaker 1: say Putin bear's responsibility for this. I would say, actually,
Speaker 1: the Russian state, beyond Putin alone bears responsibility of this.
Speaker 1: He was murdered. And what did the Russian Ministry of
Speaker 1: Foreign Affairs just do? They said, unbelievable cynicism. How can
Speaker 1: the president be so upset about a Russian citizen who
Speaker 1: died in a Russian penal colony when American citizen Gonzalo
Speaker 1: Lira was tortured and killed in Ukrainian So, Gonzala Lira
Speaker 1: was a preferred conspiracy theorist, a sex tourist who moved
Speaker 1: to Kharkiv and then at the start of the full
Speaker 1: scale invasion, was basically cheering Russia's genocide. So he was
Speaker 1: arrested under Ukraine's civil code. You don't trade the propaganda
Speaker 1: of the enemy, right. He died in prison. We don't
Speaker 1: know the circumstances. But in other words, the leader of
Speaker 1: the Russian opposition twice poisoned with Novachuk, a military grade
Speaker 1: nerve agent by FSB assassins, whose identities we know thanks
Speaker 1: to my colleagues Christo Grozev and raumand de Brhotov. That
Speaker 1: is the moral equivalent of some asshole you've never heard
Speaker 1: of who was in a country cheering as a fifth colonist,
Speaker 1: cheering for the other side, and breaking those countries democratically
Speaker 1: determined laws. On the one hand, they know that that's
Speaker 1: going to tickle the funny bones of people in the west,
Speaker 1: far right magatypes. They've sunk their teeth into Gonzala Lira.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk has tweeted about him, Tucker Carlson has tweeted
Speaker 1: about him. And yet the wider population, who is this guy?
Speaker 3: Why should we care?
Speaker 1: Only we know leader of the opposition, right, the one
Speaker 1: nemesis that Putin has got. Now he's dead, that's a
Speaker 1: world historic event. There's another line that I'm quite fond of,
Speaker 1: and this tells quite strongly, I think on how intelligence
Speaker 1: operations and active measures applied. Russia is an inferiority complex
Speaker 1: wrapped inside of a superiority complex. They consider themselves to
Speaker 1: be the greatest civilization the world has ever known and
Speaker 1: ever will know, and yet they deeply resent the fact
Speaker 1: that no one agrees with them.
Speaker 2: When the Bolstvik regime took over, it was taken over
Speaker 2: by a bunch of revolutionaries that had been fighting the
Speaker 2: czar estate for a long time, and so all of
Speaker 2: a sudden they took over this massive, continental wide country
Speaker 2: and found the fact that they were actually pretty weak.
Speaker 2: Their enemies were the Western Powers. They did have quite
Speaker 2: serious internal opposition monarchists and white Russians and others, and
Speaker 2: they developed this form of political warfare, asymmetric warfare, this
Speaker 2: stuff we're talking about, how subversion, disinformation, and it's been
Speaker 2: part and parcel of Russian intelligence services ever since. And
Speaker 2: I see it in a way as like terrorism. It's
Speaker 2: the weapon of the weak against the strong. Terrorists can't
Speaker 2: take you head on, so they find weaknesses and take
Speaker 2: advantage of it. It's like a big, strong, huge boxer
Speaker 2: fighting someone much smaller and weaker. The weaker boxer is
Speaker 2: going to have to try to hit below the belt,
Speaker 2: and obviously is a much bigger and more powerful Western country.
Speaker 2: It's just not part of our DNA.
Speaker 1: There's another important point which you remind me of by
Speaker 1: likening it to international terrorism, folk emphasis on international So
Speaker 1: one of the things I realized in the course of
Speaker 1: researching my book on the GRU, there was a case
Speaker 1: to be made that the GRU, more so than the NKVD,
Speaker 1: which is another name for the KGB, what became the KGB,
Speaker 1: was the premier intelligence service on the planet for a
Speaker 1: period of years in the nineteen thirties. But one thing
Speaker 1: they were good at was capital e espionage, pure intelligence collection,
Speaker 1: running agents, getting agents to do things. And one of
Speaker 1: the reasons they were so good at it is some
Speaker 1: of the best spies that worked for the Soviet system
Speaker 1: were not Russian. They were European, or they were American.
Speaker 1: It was a thoroughly internationalized operation.
Speaker 2: It was communist worldwide, communist common turn.
Speaker 1: Members ideology itself. It brooked no sense of nationalism or patriotism.
Speaker 1: The head of what it was, the fourth Department, the
Speaker 1: GRU in its earlier incarnation, but the head of it,
Speaker 1: the first real head and the most successful one, was
Speaker 1: Jon Berzen Jan Burson was Latvian. He was a rifleman
Speaker 1: in World War One, and he fought against Russia in
Speaker 1: World War One and then flipped over to the other side.
Speaker 1: And basically he was a brilliant sort of director and
Speaker 1: case officer in his own right and basically managed the
Speaker 1: Republican effort in fratricidal Spain. Was recalled during the purges
Speaker 1: and of course killed, as were most of the good
Speaker 1: gru cadres from the twenties and thirties who essentially gave
Speaker 1: the keys to the Kingdom to Stalin. And of course
Speaker 1: he was so paranoid he didn't believe anything that he
Speaker 1: was told. But they were idealists, no disrespect of posterity
Speaker 1: to say they were true believing communists. They believed that
Speaker 1: Moscow was the Third Rome, it was the future, that
Speaker 1: the great depression world, the ravages of World War One,
Speaker 1: liberal democracy had failed, and Marxist Leninism was the future.
Speaker 1: And they gave themself body and soul to this movement.
Speaker 1: And then of course we're completely disillusioned and demoralized and
Speaker 1: in many cases murdered because they realized that they'd been
Speaker 1: sold to Bill of goods. But we don't have that anymore.
Speaker 1: And you notice we're talking about some of the more
Speaker 1: crude CAC candidate attempts by the Russians to divide and
Speaker 1: conquer and sow discord in the West, some of which
Speaker 1: are unfortunately successful. But I would blame ourselves for being
Speaker 1: so stupid, not for them being so clever. But the
Speaker 1: reason this it doesn't hold a candle to what they
Speaker 1: used to do is they're not relying on well trained
Speaker 1: Western cadres who understand their own systems and their own
Speaker 1: societies better than they do. They're relying on people like
Speaker 1: Mishkin and Chipega who are literally reading Wikipedia entries about
Speaker 1: the lovely spires of the Salisbury Cathedral.
Speaker 3: I want to stick up for the Russians. We're sort
Speaker 3: was coming down at that kind of heart. Let me
Speaker 3: put in a good word for Moscow. So my sense
Speaker 3: is conspiracy theories and pushing them isn't just a realm
Speaker 3: that the Russians do. They're just extremely good at it.
Speaker 3: But all, basically all all autocracies need this right because
Speaker 3: if whatever you decide, truth is what your dogma is,
Speaker 3: and truth interferes with it, you've got to get rid
Speaker 3: of truth. You've got to come up with an alternate narrative.
Speaker 3: So Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan. They had their conspiracy theories
Speaker 3: right wing, left wing. It doesn't really mean isis my
Speaker 3: lord talk about wacky conspiracy theories on how the world
Speaker 3: actually works and when the Chris When Isis became hostile
Speaker 3: to al Qaeda, isis bought into the fact that Ben
Speaker 3: Laden was a CIA guy.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: But I think what does separate the Russians from almost
Speaker 3: everybody else is that we look at it and we
Speaker 3: talk about it as though it's a state, a country,
Speaker 3: and it's in a lot of ways, it's a security
Speaker 3: service running a country, which is different than almost everybody else.
Speaker 1: Yes, but also you know, there are people I'm talking
Speaker 1: to formers here who there is a code of ethics
Speaker 1: and a covenant of serving an intelligence service for one's nation. Right,
Speaker 1: It's not just a security service run a state. It's
Speaker 1: a kleptocratic, a moral and corrupted security server. And you
Speaker 1: could see this in real time. I mean, you could
Speaker 1: chart the degeneration of the Soviet enterprise and the rise
Speaker 1: of Stalinism based on the case officers that were being sent.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for
Speaker 3: a minute or two, and we're back.
Speaker 1: So you had this guy Alexander Ulinovski who's an anarchist
Speaker 1: recruited in Odessa and fights in the Civil War with
Speaker 1: the Red Army. Even though he's not a card carrying Bolshevik,
Speaker 1: he really believes in fighting that the reactionary regime that
Speaker 1: was represented by Bizarre, which was also an anti Semitic regime, right,
Speaker 1: a lot of Jews did become hardcarring communists because of
Speaker 1: the entrenched state, homegrown anti semitism of the Empire. And
Speaker 1: you know, there's this great anecdote which kind of shows
Speaker 1: the shift in opinion and sensibility. So Julinovsky is a
Speaker 1: case officer because he believes Chained is an agent. Because
Speaker 1: he believes there's no consideration of compensation or money or
Speaker 1: stealing from the till using operational resources for your own
Speaker 1: it doesn't enter into it. Then you get this case
Speaker 1: officer Boris Bikoff, who is this again. He is a
Speaker 1: creature of high Stalinism. He's squirrely, he's angry. That's when
Speaker 1: he's in a good mood. Is most dangerous because much
Speaker 1: like Stalin, the pendulum will swing back in the other
Speaker 1: direction with force. And he's the guy who says, why
Speaker 1: don't we pay your friends in state department? Why don't
Speaker 1: we pay for information? He who pays his boss, And
Speaker 1: this is for Chambers, this kind of realization, what do
Speaker 1: you mean, he who pays his boss. We're not doing
Speaker 1: this for money. We're doing this for world revolution. It
Speaker 1: turns out by Kof was cynical enough, and he was
Speaker 1: correct enough. You incentivize, you provide some dusours, whether they're
Speaker 1: you know, oriental rugs or cash payments in hand. The
Speaker 1: Russians are at the present time all of the idealism
Speaker 1: that may have once obtained really ended in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: They are mass at instrumentalizing cynicism. And the worst thing
Speaker 1: is our own cynicism is now almost outpacing theirs in
Speaker 1: terms of what we're I mean, you know, Matt Gates
Speaker 1: under congressional investigation for a host of things that frankly
Speaker 1: I understand why this guy loves Russia. Prostitution, public corruption,
Speaker 1: taking bribes, sharing sex, picks of his former bedmtes on
Speaker 1: the house for Jesus Christ. And you should be a
Speaker 1: dooma deputy.
Speaker 2: Truly, just as an asside I would suggest to people
Speaker 2: who are interested in this history. Obviously, when Michael's book
Speaker 2: comes out, that will be the premier thing to read
Speaker 2: on this. But talking about Wittaker Chambers was a fascinating individual.
Speaker 2: And there's a book by Sam Tanneerhouse about Whittaker Chambers
Speaker 2: entitled Widowicker Chambers, and then Whitdiker Chambers himself for a
Speaker 2: book called Witness, which is also a fantastic book. And
Speaker 2: Ronald Reagan always said that was his favorite book and
Speaker 2: he would quote from as President by heart, you point.
Speaker 3: Head intellectuals talking books stuff. People should watch Death of Styalin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if only for Steve Buscemi speaking in a Brooklyn
Speaker 1: accent as khush No. But the reason that I think
Speaker 1: Chambers he gets short shripped for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 1: But he is the godfather of postwar American conservatism. I
Speaker 1: mean his protege William F. Buckley Junior, who at the
Speaker 1: time was just founding National Review. Richard Nixon was the
Speaker 1: main junior congressman on the House an American Activities Committee
Speaker 1: who believed Chambers and believe that ALGERR. Hiss was a
Speaker 1: spy and was correct, propelled him into the national limelight,
Speaker 1: which made him Vice President under Eisenhower Chambers impact on
Speaker 1: postwar American conservatism and also history is the direct result
Speaker 1: of cack handed stupidity by the GRU because they ran
Speaker 1: a guy who they should have realized from the very
Speaker 1: beginning was both too intellectual, too ideologically restless, and too
Speaker 1: humane and moral to be a really good GRU agent.
Speaker 1: So the Trump people will say, what you put the
Speaker 1: former president through, meaning the deep state and the Democrats,
Speaker 1: of course, was mccarthy'sm neo McCarthyism right, looking for Russians
Speaker 1: under the bed and blah blah blah. And yet the
Speaker 1: Trump people will then say the election was stolen by
Speaker 1: a Communist in Venezuela and the ghost of Hugo Chavez,
Speaker 1: and this is a cultural Marxism is ruining American I mean,
Speaker 1: the greatest bit of harm that McCarthy did, in addition
Speaker 1: to ruining innocent people's lives, was, if you were a
Speaker 1: knowledgeable and committed cold warrior, you just gave the Russians
Speaker 1: the greatest gift by allowing them to say everything is
Speaker 1: a hysterical witch hunt that is not founded in reality
Speaker 1: or fact, when in reality and in fact we know
Speaker 1: thanks to the Venona decrypts and memoirs and books and
Speaker 1: documents such as the Mctrochian Archive, which I referred to earlier,
Speaker 1: that there were Soviet agents embedded in very high levels
Speaker 1: of the US government, from the State Department to the
Speaker 1: Treasury Department, Department of Agriculture. The FBI knew they were
Speaker 1: Soviet agents, but they could not bring them to book
Speaker 1: for espionage. So what did they do. They went after
Speaker 1: peace people for illegal immigration crimes because a lot of
Speaker 1: these guys, you know, use fake passports and documents to
Speaker 1: come to the United States, and the other crime, lying
Speaker 1: to the FBI green mailing people. So we got you
Speaker 1: on something, so you can either work for us and
Speaker 1: give us more about the thing we really care about,
Speaker 1: which is what the Soviets are telling you to do
Speaker 1: in this country, or well, we're just going to throw
Speaker 1: you in prison for a couple of years for committing
Speaker 1: a minor infraction. By comparison, and a lot of them again,
Speaker 1: because they were idealists and because they didn't care about
Speaker 1: their own hide so much as they cared about history.
Speaker 1: But the capital age they took the hit, they went
Speaker 1: to jail. And so you know, I keep telling people
Speaker 1: the history of what has transpired in this country in
Speaker 1: the last ten years in change. Everyone thinks that we've
Speaker 1: seen the final definitive verdict, either the Molor Report or
Speaker 1: the Senate Intelligence Subcommittee and Intelligence Reports, which is five
Speaker 1: full volumes. Nobody's probably read it except David Corn and myself.
Speaker 1: It's not true. It's going to take decades for this
Speaker 1: stuff to come to light, for things to be declassified,
Speaker 1: for new bits of intelligence and information to be known,
Speaker 1: because people who are currently working from Moscow Center grow
Speaker 1: disillusioned and one day knock on the door of an
Speaker 1: embassy and say I have treasure to trade.
Speaker 2: That's what's interesting about this is it's a committed professional
Speaker 2: intelligence service which is weaponizing and using conspiracies against us.
Speaker 2: And as you mentioned earlier, what makes it bad is
Speaker 2: we get this weaponized conspiracy thrown into our system off
Speaker 2: and through social media, but via other ways too, and
Speaker 2: then we use it to attack each other. So this
Speaker 2: is oftentimes partisan tribalism that just takes a piece of
Speaker 2: information that was put there they may not realize was
Speaker 2: put there by the Russians, of Chinese or somebody, and
Speaker 2: then we use it to attack each other, and it
Speaker 2: creates chaos and weakness inside around country and they win.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what they want.
Speaker 1: Right, And you know a lot of the fervor surrounding
Speaker 1: Trump Russia. I mean, you know, I was living in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. I was watching cable news, and I was
Speaker 1: seeing people go up on television, and I got to
Speaker 1: be honest, I mean, saying that they were getting ahead
Speaker 1: of their skis was putting it generously. They didn't know
Speaker 1: what they were talking about, but they had feelings about things.
Speaker 1: And God, again, I'm with a bunch of four here.
Speaker 1: If you tried to ply your trade on the basis
Speaker 1: of feelings, you wouldn't be CIA officers for very long,
Speaker 1: would you. And these regimes and armies and intelligence they
Speaker 1: live to muddy the waters and to make you believe
Speaker 1: something that isn't true, right. Disinformation works by having you
Speaker 1: lean into your own priors, you know, telling people what
Speaker 1: they want to hear as opposed to what the reality is.
Speaker 1: A Part of the difficulty with will they or want
Speaker 1: they invade Ukraine was again the Kremlin is quite good
Speaker 1: at psychological operations and amassing one hundred thousand troops at
Speaker 1: the border. Oh no, no country. But Russia would do
Speaker 1: that just as a head fake, right, So we were
Speaker 1: all doubting ourselves when in fact, of course they intended
Speaker 1: to do that.
Speaker 3: And more so, the tone of this conversation, people could
Speaker 3: get the impression that Russia has a great advantage, that
Speaker 3: it's able to do this, and that's true to it
Speaker 3: to an extent, but it's also living in a conspiratorial
Speaker 3: society is also damning for those inside of it and
Speaker 3: weaken it.
Speaker 1: When your main instrument of power, your weapon, is conspiracy. There,
Speaker 1: it's you know what, the ouroboroses, the snake that devours
Speaker 1: its own tail. It's not something that can be controlled
Speaker 1: or contained, because it eventually affects the way you view
Speaker 1: your own system. It affects the way your people view
Speaker 1: their system. Look, Stalin had, as I said, some of
Speaker 1: the best agents scattered across the world in the lead
Speaker 1: up to World War two. Ricardsorge, a German gru Case officer,
Speaker 1: was a de facto diplomat working out of the Nazi
Speaker 1: embassy in Tokyo, and in such capacity he discovered two
Speaker 1: very important things. The first one was that Germany was
Speaker 1: planning to invade the Soviet Union, so Hitler was going
Speaker 1: to break the Hitler Stalin Pact before Stalin could get
Speaker 1: around to doing it. Stalin classed this as disinformation. He
Speaker 1: didn't believe. He said, the spies are working for Russia,
Speaker 1: for Germany, and they're planting disinformation with me, so that
Speaker 1: I miscalculated. No, it was true, and of course Operation
Speaker 1: Barbarossa commenced. The other important thing which he did heed
Speaker 1: was that the Japanese were not going to invade the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union from the east, which allowed the Red Army
Speaker 1: to divert resources from SIB and so on. Him lived
Speaker 1: by the sword, you die by the sword. And I
Speaker 1: think one of the things that Putin is discovering now
Speaker 1: coming back to the war in Ukraine. So the war
Speaker 1: in Ukraine, the political warfare for a decade leading up
Speaker 1: to February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, was in the
Speaker 1: hands of the FSB's Fifth Service. This is a military
Speaker 1: unit in the FSB, one of the successor agencies of
Speaker 1: the old KGB. The FSB is designed to maintain order domestically, right,
Speaker 1: it's the sword in the shield of the Russian state.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people didn't realize they actually have
Speaker 1: a foreign intelligence arm called the Fifth Service with spies
Speaker 1: and embassies around the world, and this was an organization
Speaker 1: created in the nineties but reconstituted after the color revolutions
Speaker 1: of the two thousand and four, which again coming back
Speaker 1: to the remit of the show. The conspiracy theory, as
Speaker 1: per Putin is all of those revolutions, they weren't people
Speaker 1: on the ground asking for democracy, and it was Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 1: It was Hillary Clinton and Victoria Newland landing out chocolates
Speaker 1: that cad CIA State Department, USAIV any ned. All of
Speaker 1: these people are this grand apparatus of puppeteers controlling you know,
Speaker 1: kids on the streets of capital cities of post Soviet
Speaker 1: So the Fifth Service was given the task destabilized Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Serghe Bisida, who was the head of it, was the
Speaker 1: guy who told Viktor Yanikovich, former president of Ukraine, opened
Speaker 1: fire on protesters in Maydan in twenty fourteen. So he
Speaker 1: was entrusted with, Okay, find me a bunch of recruit
Speaker 1: and pay. It's fifth columnists who can basically take over
Speaker 1: the government on our behalf when we our tanks roll
Speaker 1: in no more than three days to take Kiev. And
Speaker 1: turns out Bista probably in a combination of things. One
Speaker 1: he's a crook like they all are, and stole money
Speaker 1: that was given to him for trade kraft burp. This
Speaker 1: is number two. He probably did have a sense that
Speaker 1: things in Ukraine don't go the way you would like
Speaker 1: them to go in the Kremlin, meaning Ukrainians are patriotic,
Speaker 1: they are more nationalistic, and if the Russians come here,
Speaker 1: they're gonna go to war. So he was telling the
Speaker 1: Tsar what the Tzar wanted to hear. No, we got it.
Speaker 1: Don't worry, we got it. Time he was in ill oder,
Speaker 1: possibly under house arrests, covered in murkiness, but there you go.
Speaker 1: I mean, the reason Putin's war went sideways was conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: Conspiracy theories cooked up by his own intelligence services, designed
Speaker 1: to prosecute those conspiracy theories and sew them against the enemy,
Speaker 1: but in fact they were regurgitated within for lack of a
Speaker 1: better term.
Speaker 2: Well, let's hope that those conspiracy theories in Russia make
Speaker 2: Russia fall apart before conspiracy theories here make us fall apart.
Speaker 2: So we just wanted to thank you for spending time
Speaker 2: with us and talking about this. It's the real dark
Speaker 2: side of conspiracies, and so thank you very much and
Speaker 2: continue reaction reporting and we'll hope to have you on again.
Speaker 1: Happy to join.
Speaker 2: That's enough for today and we will be back next
Speaker 2: week with another episode of Mission Implausible.
Speaker 5: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry Osha, John Seipher,
Speaker 5: and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harners. Implausible
Speaker 5: is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for
Speaker 5: iHeart Podcasts.