The CIA from 9/11 to Present Day | Tim Weiner | Ep. 360

This show features an in-depth conversation with author Tim Weiner about his new book, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century." Drawing from the full span of the 21st century, Weiner discusses the agency's evolution, covering everything from the rise of counterterrorism and controversial programs like torture and renditions, to significant successes such as dismantling nuclear proliferation networks and penetrating the Kremlin. The discussion also delves into the complex realities of intelligence work, the challenges posed by foreign threats and domestic political shifts, and personal anecdotes that shaped his career covering the CIA. Order Tim's new book here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-mission-the-cia-in-the-21st-century-tim-weiner/22062129?ean=9780063270183&next=t or here: https://www.amazon.com/Mission-CIA-21st-Century/dp/0063270188 Today's Sponsors: GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️ https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.com Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 - Start 00:46 - Putin's War Plans 03:40 - Post-Cold War CIA: Rise of Counterterrorism 10:09 - Post-9/11 CIA: Torture & Renditions 25:27 - Success: Dismantling AQ Khan's Nuclear Network 50:09 - Bin Laden Mission & Chinese Intelligence 1:29:08 - US Response & Support for Ukraine 1:35:19 - Eroding Democracy & Threats to US Intelligence 1:50:54 - The Challenges of Writing and Selling a Book 2:07:27 - Reflections on Afghanistan & The Author's Calling Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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  Special Operations.

• 1:36Speaker 04

  Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 1:52Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, this is episode 360 of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave and our guest in studio tonight is Tim Weiner. Tim is the author of the upcoming book, The Mission. This will be out in a couple of days, or what, a week?

• 2:07Speaker 06

  July 15.

• 2:08Jack Murphy?

  July 15th. So yeah, like a week from today, for people who are watching this when it comes out, when most of you watch this, it'll probably already be on bookshelves. So the topic is the CIA in the 21st century. It's sort of a follow-up, a sequel to Legacy of Ashes, which charted the CIA's history from its inception up until early war on terror, like 04.

• 2:31Speaker 06

  2006.

• 2:32Jack Murphy?

  2006. And so The Mission kind of picks up where you left off.

• 2:36Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:36Jack Murphy?

  And goes to today. Writing, trying to convince your editors to insert information that is up to the last minute, as I understand it.

• 2:46Speaker 06

  We pushed it. We locked up the book about three months ago.

• 2:51Jack Murphy?

  So let's start off with, I'm not going to go into a lot of preamble about, you know, yourself and your previous work, because this is the third interview we've done. But tell us about how this book in particular came about.

• 3:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:04Jack Murphy?

  Why did you decide to write it now?

• 3:06Speaker 06

  So the moment I realized I had to write the book was when it became clear that CIA had done something that it had aspired to do since its creation in 1947, but never really achieved, which is to penetrate the Kremlin. The CIA had, in 2021, stolen Vladimir Putin's war plans to invade Ukraine. And Bill Burns, the Director of CIA under Biden, convinced the White House and the State Department that this information had to be declassified, that they had to tell the world about it.

• 3:53Speaker 06

  And they told a skeptical world about it. Like the NATO nation said, oh yeah, right. Aren't you the people who said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? But the intelligence was absolutely on the money.

• 4:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Speaker 06

  One of the highest goals of the CIA throughout its history had been achieved to penetrate the Kremlin and obtain absolutely solid information on the intentions and capabilities of the Russian leader.

• 4:24Jack Murphy?

  And to prevent strategic surprise.

• 4:28Speaker 06

  And when I saw they had done it, I said, okay. This is something new. Okay. And different. And I had to find out from the start how they did it. But it was also necessary to, as you say, pick up where I left off and tell the story of the CIA in the 21st century, in which it was thrice transformed.

• 4:55Jack Murphy?

  Sure. Yeah. And a string of failures, some successes. I mean, it is a turbulent 25 years.

• 5:03Speaker 06

  It's been, it's been a hell of a century, so far. But yeah, we, we start off in the months before the 9/11 attack. And, you know, for a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CIA was groping for its new mission. It's like, you took the Soviet Union away from us. How can we be a great intelligence service without a great enemy? What is the mission? Okay. And they were asking themselves this throughout the Clinton administration. It began to dawn on them.

• 5:45Speaker 06

  And this was a story I covered, you know, I got on the plane and went the moment it happened. When Al Qaeda blew up two American embassies at the same time in August 1998, one in Nairobi, one in Dar es Salaam.

• 6:04Speaker 06

  And the fact that Al Qaeda, about what the CIA knew very little, okay, could, from a base in Afghanistan, hit two targets at the same time 3,000 miles away. This was something new in the annals of terrorism. It showed a level of sophistication, planning, and rat-like cunning that had never been experienced. At that moment, it began to dawn on the leaders of CIA that counterterrorism was going to replace anti-communism as the mission.

• 6:41Jack Murphy?

  So, tell us, in the run-up to 9/11, you know, we get into the late 90s, early 2000s, it sounded like the big things going on were Serbia and Latin America, or the Balkans and Latin America. Want to tell us a little bit about what the agency's activities were up to that point?

• 6:58Speaker 06

  Well, you know, the counter-narcotics mission in the Andes was a mess. CIA never really wanted to get in the war on drugs. They knew, you know, the drugs would win the war because of the, you know, insatiable demand for dope in this country. There would always be a supply. And the history of counter-narcotics operations, you know, you squeeze them in the Caribbean and the balloon surges, you know, in Colombia, and you squeeze them in Colombia and it surges in the Caribbean.

• 7:40Jack Murphy?

  And then West Africa.

• 7:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, what do you, you know, it's a losing battle. But the CIA was deeply invested in a program called the Air Bridge Denial Program. And the epicenter of this was in Peru.

• 8:02Speaker 06

  And the CIA had made a deal in the early 90s with a very bad actor named Vladimir Montesinos, who was the intelligence czar and the Rasputin of Peru. Vladimir Vladimirovich Lenin Montesinos. God help us all. And this guy was a very bad dude, who in the end was indicted for murder, bribery, drug dealing, extortion, you name it. And went to prison for the rest of his life. So anyway, they paid Montesinos a million dollars a year for free use of the Peruvian

• 8:41Speaker 06

  Air Force and for intelligence liaison. And the deal was that the CIA had a base in the Amazon jungle in Peru. They flew in a light plane and a modified Cessna, the Peruvian Air Force flew in a modified light fighter. They would intercept what they thought to be drug planes. That was the plan. Okay. And then, spot of bother.

• 9:19Speaker 06

  The United States had passed a law after the shoot down of KAL 007 over Korea in the 80s. Soviets, you know, shot down a civilian airliner with 240 something people on board, one of whom was a right wing congressman named Larry McDonald. And, you know, it was a federal law. You couldn't shoot down a civilian airliner. Okay. And after long struggle, President Clinton promulgated rules on engagement here. You had to make radio contact with the suspect aircraft.

• 10:03Speaker 06

  You had to order, you know, had to waggle your wings. You had to tell them to lower their landing gear. There were four steps, and if they ignored all that and took a base of action, boom, you could shoot them down.

• 10:14Speaker 06

  So one great day in the morning, it was April 20, 2001. They shot down a light plane with four American, with a family of American missionaries on it. Husband, wife, two little kids, and a pilot. And killed the woman and her infant daughter. As far as I know, no CIA covert operation had ever killed an American before that. The Air Bridge Denial Program, as it developed, had followed none of the rules of engagement

• 10:58Speaker 06

  ever in the shoot down of 15 aircraft prior to this disaster in April 2001. The guy who was in charge of the program, overseeing the program, as chief of the Latin American Division for most of these shoot downs, was a gentleman who we came to know very well at CIA, named Jose Rodriguez. Jose would one day become the chief of the clandestine service.

• 11:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you kind of chart his like interesting career trajectory throughout this book. And yeah, like you said, I'm sure we'll come back to him. But to fast forward a little bit, I'm not going to belabor 9/11. We've talked about it many times on this podcast. We got caught with our pants down, and suddenly the CIA does have a mission now.

• 11:52Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. So Bob Gates said something interesting apropos that day. Gates, of course, had been CIA Director and later Secretary of Defense.

• 12:07Speaker 06

  He said, "On the 12th of September, we didn't know daft shit about Al Qaeda. If we had had a great dossier on who these people were, how they moved money around, how they moved people around, if we had had intelligence about Al Qaeda, the secret prisons and the torture and, you know, all that insanity would never have been necessary. But we didn't know anything." And so, CI went out, and this was largely directed by Jose Rodriguez, who had been removed as chief of the Latin American Division for a terrible judgment.

• 12:51Speaker 06

  Jose was awaiting a forward assignment at headquarters in 9/11. He thought his career was in the shitter. And Kofor Black, who's chief of counterterrorism, said, "I'll find something for you to do." And Jose invented a third-ranked chief of operations job, and eventually became the counterterrorism chief. And it was largely Jose, not him alone, largely Jose, that got the secret prison program and the torture program going.

• 13:31Jack Murphy?

  One of the interesting facts that you kind of dig up in this book that I don't think many people are aware of, is you mentioned how there were 14 renditions before 9/11. I don't think people have really grasped that, and, you know, can you tell us a little bit about pre and post and how that developed?

• 13:49Speaker 06

  So, in the Clinton years, extraordinary rendition, authorized by the president 14 times, basically involved grabbing people, suspected terrorists, and shipping them off to the dungeons of Cairo and other friendly Middle Eastern countries.

• 14:15Speaker 06

  Now it's just to get them off the street, okay? Interrogation, getting intelligence from them was not uppermost in CIA's mind. By, I'm gonna say, six months after 9/11, early 2002. The CIA and the military have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of prisoners. A lot of them in Camp Rhino, under General Mattis's leadership in near Kandahar, Afghanistan. And they're from all over the world. Who are these guys? Are they somebodies? Are they nobodies?

• 15:00Speaker 06

  And it was Jose Rodriguez who basically said, "We gotta find a way to sort out these people and figure out who loves us and who hates us, you know? And who's a somebody and who's a nobody." And the upshot of that was the secret prison programs.

• 15:22Jack Murphy?

  Which you cover in both books, actually. And now I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. WMDs in Iraq. We've talked about it a lot around here. What, you know, based on your research, what went wrong there? If we're to put our finger on what the fuck happened, what would you say about it?

• 15:44Speaker 06

  Same problem: lack of good intelligence. So, really, you know, what little the CIA knew about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs dated back to 1998, which is when there were UN inspectors in Iraq and CIA officers using the UN operation for cover. And Saddam kicked them all out in 98.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  See, I didn't have any spies in Iraq. And, you know, it's hard to fault them for that. The price of getting caught was, you know, you would die, your entire family would die, your entire extended family would die, your livestock would die, your house would burn down and salt would be sown in the ashes. For starters. Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 06

  A difficult operating environment for recruitment.

• 16:52Speaker 06

  You know,

• 16:54Speaker 06

  all of a sudden, after 9/11,

• 16:59Speaker 06

  everybody has to work counterterrorism, right? And one day, you know, you're the Mali analyst and you get tapped on the shoulder and said, okay, you're a counterterrorism analyst now. Okay.

• 17:13Speaker 06

  The whole operation of getting intelligence analyzing, intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was a newly created outfit called Windpack.

• 17:27Speaker 06

  They didn't know what they were doing, okay? They didn't know, they didn't have a lot to work with. And so, among other things, they took the word of an unvetted source, Iraqi defector who'd been held by the Germans, whom they had never met, okay?

• 17:45Speaker 06

  Whose identity they did not know and whose code name was Kurball.

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  So, you know, a very, very smart Margaret Henoch, a very smart woman in the European division with long experience in operations, challenged him and said, "You don't even know who this guy is, okay? How can you believe what he's saying?" And one of the weapons analysts said, "Well, you know, his information matches what we found on the internet." And Margaret Henoch says, "How do you know that's not where he got it, right? You have to know who this person is before you accept what he says." Well, that didn't fly. And there's a scene...

• 22:23Speaker 06

  I mean, it breaks your heart thinking about this stuff. Okay.

• 22:28Speaker 06

  So President Bush says to Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, the most popular general since Dwight Eisenhower, the most respected person in political life in the United States. He says to him, "You have to sell this to the United Nations and the world." And Powell has handed this piece of crap that Dick Cheney's bucket shop has cooked up,

• 23:02Speaker 06

  with like a mushroom cloud on the cover and, you know, all this neocon horseshit in it. And he and his chief of staff, Colonel Larry Wilkinson, you know, toss that right out. So CIA has to deliver the brief, the case for war.

• 23:22Speaker 06

  And Colin Powell is out there for the weekend, long weekend before he has to go to the United Nations to present the case. We all remember what that scene looked like. Here's Colin Powell, and here's George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, sitting right behind him, looking bone weary and exhausted.

• 23:42Speaker 06

  And Powell says, "If it ain't like triple vetted and you like signed, sealed, delivered, seal of approval on it, I, I deliver it." So this curveball nonsense gets in, and a lot of other nonsense gets in. And Mike Morell, who is the smartest analyst at the CIA, is sitting in the room during this long weekend at CIA headquarters. And he has this terrible sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He's saying, "I don't know if this is true or not." And nobody knows if this is true or not. Does he speak up?

• 24:17Speaker 06

  He does not.

• 24:20Speaker 06

  It's just a terrible case of group think and again, a want of great intelligence, of solid intelligence.

• 24:26Jack Murphy?

  Um, and to jump a little bit further ahead, you know, I'm going to do this a few times or a lot of actually during this interview because we're kind of like going to event to event.

• 24:35Speaker 06

  You got two hours to cover 25.

• 24:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. Um, I wanted to hear because you got a great story in this book about the debathification process in Iraq and how that came about. And I mean, it's as shady as the W N D stuff, frankly.

• 24:50Speaker 06

  It's like, okay, let's make an important point here. When people accuse the CIA of intelligence failure, as they so often do, it is more likely than not that it is a policy failure. The CIA is an executor of American foreign policy. It does not make foreign policy. Okay. The President of the United States makes the foreign policy. Um, and if it fucks

• 25:27Speaker 06

  up, the CIA gets hung for it. I mean, that's just a classic truth. Um, so the President of the United States sends a guy named Jerry Bremer out to be the imperial viceroy of Iraq.

• 25:49Speaker 06

  And, uh, he's replacing a general named Jay Gardner, who had done a great job, uh, supporting the people of Iraqi Kurdistan after Gulf War One. So who knows the terrain? And the arriving station chief, CIA station chief, who has actually been the station chief in Baghdad at the time of Gulf War One, is a guy named Charlie Seidel. He's probably the most talented Arabist in the United States government. Uh, he's known all over the Arab world, not a true name probably, but, uh, he's one of the most talented CIA

• 26:28Speaker 06

  officers of his generation. He's been overseeing intelligence ops from Tommy Franks headquarters in Doha. Uh, and now he's flying in, he's, congratulations, you're the station chief in American occupied Baghdad. And so Bremer comes up with this.

• 26:47Speaker 06

  Idea out of whole club, one, debathification. Everybody who belongs to the bath party is banned from the new Iraq. Okay, that's everybody.

• 27:00Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Speaker 06

  You couldn't be a schoolteacher without belonging to the bath party. That's every, that's the entire professional class in Baghdad. And we're disbanding the Iraqi army.

• 27:13Speaker 06

  And Charlie Sidell, the station chief, gets wind of this and he goes running up the steps of, of, of the palace, you know, uh, uh, where Bremer presides and says, if you do this, you'll have 50,000 enemies in this town before nightfall. Does Bremer listen to him? No, he does not.

• 27:44Jack Murphy?

  I mean, but there was more to it than just.

• 27:46Speaker 06

  There was more to it.

• 27:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, it wasn't just Bremer's big idea, right? Like, he, he, he was being backed.

• 27:53Speaker 06

  I think it was news to everybody in the sit room.

• 27:56Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 06

  Except for a few of the Weasley neo-cons, uh, uh, like Paul Wolfowitz and his, uh, pal Doug Fith at the Office of Special Plans in Rumsfeld's Pentagon.

• 28:14Jack Murphy?

  Why do you think they made this decision at the end of the day? Uh, which seems so nonsensical to all of us. Completely, like it, it changed the nature of what that war was and would become.

• 28:28Speaker 06

  Well, if the American occupation of Iraq was one of the, uh, less brilliant foreign policy decisions in American history, uh, the debathification plan and the disbandment of the Iraqi army was, I would say, top 10 worst foreign policy, uh, decisions, uh, ever.

• 28:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 06

  Okay. Bremer dreamed it up. Where does Bremer get the imperiousness to do this? He'd worked for 15 years for Henry Kissinger.

• 29:03Jack Murphy?

  I don't, would Henry Kissinger make that decision?

• 29:06Speaker 06

  Uh, this, we cannot speculate.

• 29:10Jack Murphy?

  Dr. Strangelove.

• 29:18Speaker 06

  I mean, even Kissinger thought Bremer was kind of an asshole.

• 29:22Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 11

  For, for people who, you, you guys, most of our viewers are probably aware of this, but the Ba'ath Party was, was Saddam's political party. It's, I think a good correlation, sort of like the Communist Party in China.

• 29:36Jack Murphy?

  It was a Communist Party.

• 29:37Speaker 11

  It's the CCP where if you hold a position, it's like the union. It's like the government's union.

• 29:43Jack Murphy?

  Exactly.

• 29:44Speaker 11

  For, for everything. So you have to be a member of the party to work in public works, to work in schools, to, to be, to, to be anything. And so when, not only did, like you say, were there 50,000 enemies overnight, but all of Iraq's infrastructure stopped.

• 30:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 11

  Every piece of what made the country.

• 30:08Speaker 06

  And you've got tens of thousands of cashier soldiers.

• 30:10Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 06

  Who are pissed off.

• 30:12Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 06

  And penniless.

• 30:13Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 30:13Speaker 06

  And who know where the guns are.

• 30:14Speaker 11

  Yep, yep.

• 30:15Speaker 06

  And this is the genesis of the armed resistance to the American occupation, which eventually evolved into ISIS.

• 30:24Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I always said that, you know, during the invasion, they should've just dropped leaflets on all the bases and said, "We're invading. Put down your weapons. Maintain your positions. We're taking over your payroll." Right?

• 30:38Speaker 06

  Trust us.

• 30:38Speaker 11

  We're taking, yeah, we're taking over your payroll.

• 30:41Speaker 06

  We got you.

• 30:43Jack Murphy?

  The next one I wanted to talk about was, you know, the CIA actually having a, a good W, putting a W in the box. We've had Jim Waller on the show before. You have a whole chapter in the book about Jim working with another CIA officer, Paula Doyle.

• 30:58Speaker 06

  And a third one named Robert Gorlick.

• 31:01Jack Murphy?

  And a pretty impressive operation.

• 31:04Speaker 06

  Dream team, baby.

• 31:04Jack Murphy?

  That they, they've rolled up, you know, AQ Cons Network.

• 31:08Speaker 06

  Okay, so this is a beautiful op. Okay. And it proved, by the way, it came to fruition in this same time period at the end of 2003, when we're going after Saddam's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. This operation proved that you could take down an existential threat of weapons of mass destruction through espionage without firing a shot. Okay?

• 31:41Speaker 06

  The genesis of this operation, whose true code name has never been revealed, I don't know it, but Jim Lawler, who was sort of the team captain, gave it a pet name of Excalibur. He was really into the legend of Camelot. The CIA in 96 created a counterproliferation team. Okay. Prior to that, stopping the spread of nuclear weapons in rogue nations was largely a diplomatic effort under the rubric of nonproliferation. Okay.

• 32:25Speaker 06

  Nonproliferation wasn't cutting it. Okay. You needed covert operations in the name of counterproliferation to cut the head off the snake. So, one day, 96, 97, a justly famous FBI agent named Dave Major. Yep. Who had spent the better part of the Cold War going up against the Russians, gives a lecture at CIA. And the lecture is about the first great operation of the Cheka, the Soviet intelligence service, and that operation was called the Trust.

• 33:10Speaker 06

  Long story short, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution after World War I, there were a number of counterrevolutionary groups, mostly coffeehouse schemers in the European capitals, trying to, say, mostly Russian exiles, saying, you know, we gotta stop the frickin Bolsheviks. We gotta like get back and counteract the Russian Revolution.

• 33:46Speaker 06

  So the Cheka, under the command of the famous Felix Terzinski, sets up a number of false fronts in European capitals that are pretending to be

• 34:00Speaker 06

  big time counter revolutionary operations. And they lure the counter revolutionaries into their trap, roll them up and kill them. Okay. A operation called the Trust. So Lawler, who's now, you know, congratulations here in charge of counter proliferation of the CIA, listens to this and he says, "Well, if the Bolsheviks can do this, why can't we?"

• 34:27Speaker 06

  So Jim Lawler and Paula Doyle, who's an extraordinary intelligence officer, retired in 2017. And Robert Gorlick, who had been a knock

• 34:38Speaker 06

  for many years, working under non official cover, without diplomatic

• 34:44Speaker 06

  identity or passport.

• 34:48Speaker 06

  They become nuclear proliferators. Okay. And they set up a number of false fronts, particularly in Dubai, the free port of Dubai.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  And they suck the operations of AQ Khan into their operation. AQ Khan, Pakistani metallurgist, had been working since the 70s to build the Islamic bomb. Okay. And the Pakistanis exploded and tested their first bomb in 98. What no one realized at the time was that AQ Khan then reversed the switch. And instead of being an importer of nuclear weapons technology, he became an exporter of nuclear weapons technology to places including Libya, Iran, North Korea. He had a global operation.

• 35:39Speaker 06

  C I director George Tenet called him after nine eleven. The most dangerous man in the world, including Osama bin Laden. Because, you know. The great terror was that. You know, A Q Khan's operation is about one hundred and fifty miles from Al Qaeda's base. In Afghanistan, what if, what if he gives? Bin Laden the bomb? Which was a far fetched possibility, but. The world is full of far fetched possibilities. So painstakingly with great patience and cunning. Um. Uh, and a tremendous sense of humor. Um. The patience was the key. Okay.

• 36:23Speaker 06

  Because at one point they've located sort of. A Q Khan world headquarters warehouse outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And the question is, do we blow it up? Or not? And Cheney's like, yeah, let's blow it up. And Lawler and the C I counsel patience. Because if we blow it up. Yeah, you know, you turn on the light, the cockroach is scurrying, it's gonna be somewhere, you know, he'll, he'll work somewhere else.

• 36:51Jack Murphy?

  Find him somewhere else, yeah.

• 36:53Speaker 06

  So they wait and then they track a huge shipment of nuclear weapons technology that is transiting the Mediterranean on, on its way to. Mohammed Qaddafi in, in Tripoli Libya. They intercept the ship. They expose it to the world. They roll up A Q Khan. And again, here is a global threat of the spread of nuclear weapons. Taken down through espionage. Not by putting warheads on foreheads.

• 37:25Jack Murphy?

  I remember Jim telling us the, a story about how. He. Basically. Knew somebody and. Basically, long story short, he waited like twenty years to recruit this guy. Like building the relationship, building the relationship, building the relationship. Before it came to fruition, which takes a lot of patience. And when I asked him, I was like, is that normal? He's like, no, that's not very common at the agency.

• 37:53Speaker 06

  Recruiting agents, recruiting foreigners to work in secret for the United States is the sine qua non of the CIA. That's why they're there, okay? And the recruited foreign agents are why the CIA exists. Without them, it's, you know, it's not a secret intelligence. And Jim, and many other of the clandestine service officers that I interviewed for this book, were pains to explain to me, okay, what the relationship between CIA operations

• 38:36Speaker 06

  officer and the recruited foreign agent is. It is an admixture of betrayal and trust.

• 38:47Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 38:48Speaker 06

  Okay. The officer, the CIA officer, is asking the recruited foreign agent to enter into a criminal conspiracy to commit treason against his country. The agent may have many motivations: revenge, money, or to make, to change the world around him.

• 39:17Jack Murphy?

  The next one I wanted to ask you about was the Mughnir assassination.

• 39:21Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:22Jack Murphy?

  And it sounded like you, I don't know if you're the first to report, but some interesting stuff about the agency's relationship with Israel and their assets in Syria. You want to tell us how that came about?

• 39:36Speaker 06

  There are a couple pieces of this puzzle I don't know. And let me tell you what I don't know.

• 39:40Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 39:41Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 39:46Speaker 06

  I don't know precisely how much the CIA

• 39:53Speaker 06

  contributed in terms of intelligence on finding Mugnea in Damascus. But they did pouch the bomb. They pouch the bomb, but here, I mean, here's a really interesting fact. Tom Sylvester is not a name that most people know. Tom stepped down on Memorial Day as the chief of the Atlantis in service, the DDO. Okay. In 2006, Tom Sylvester was station chief Damascus. Okay.

• 40:29Speaker 06

  And he ran a black station, obviously undeclared to the Syrians. Damascus. Yeah. Um, and under extraordinary counter espionage and counter surveillance by the Syrians.

• 40:51Speaker 06

  His deputy was a fellow who has since become the second most famous Greek in the history of the CIA after George Tenet, Mark Palomaropoulos.

• 41:04Speaker 06

  I am

• 41:07Speaker 06

  certain that Tom Sylvester and his station were instrumental in this operation. By the time Mugnea was killed, Sylvester had moved on as chief of station Damascus. And was replaced eventually by a guy who went on to become chief of station in Moscow, Beijing,

• 41:34Speaker 06

  somewhere else really significant, I forget.

• 41:39Speaker 06

  What we know is that

• 41:44Speaker 06

  the chief of Mossad

• 41:47Speaker 06

  goes to Mike Hayden, the CIA director, in 2007 and proposes the assassination of Ahmad Munier. Okay.

• 41:58Speaker 06

  Briefly, Munier had more American blood on his hands than Osama bin Laden. Okay. He had been the mastermind of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982. Okay. In which 200 some odd American sailors and soldiers and airmen were killed. He blew up the American Embassy in Beirut, destroying the station and killing the CIA's top expert on the Middle East, Robert Ames. He

• 42:39Speaker 06

  was the military chief of Hezbollah from its inception until his death, 25 long years. Okay. And worked hand in glove with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Okay. The bad motherfucker, Ahmad Munier.

• 43:00Speaker 06

  So Mayyad al-Dawandi, the head of Mossad, goes to Mike Hayden and says, "We have a bead on Munier. Let's kill him."

• 43:11Speaker 08

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• 43:22Speaker 09

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• 43:45Speaker 08

  Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vypt.com.

• 43:54Speaker 02

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• 44:19Speaker 03

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details.

• 44:32Speaker 06

  The bomb that killed Imad Munyeh, to the best of my knowledge, was manufactured at the CIA's Bang and Boom Center in Harvey Point, North Carolina, okay, and was delivered to the CIA Station in Damascus in a diplomatic pouch.

• 44:52Speaker 06

  It was fitted, I don't know how, into the spare tire on the back of Munyeh's SUV.

• 45:01Speaker 06

  He drove to the same location, Bad Tradecraft, Imad, for sexual assignations in one of the most closely-guarded neighborhoods in Damascus, near the Syrian intelligence headquarters. And one great day, one night, I should say, at the end of 2007, he walks back to his SUV, boom.

• 45:28Speaker 06

  Killing a terrorist with a terrorist methodology

• 45:31Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  is a new thing for the CIA.

• 45:37Jack Murphy?

  In a way that really is deniable.

• 45:41Speaker 06

  Not for long. It did take eight years to bear it out, you know, even the bear-out ones.

• 45:47Jack Murphy?

  What you're describing, though, I mean, there had to be a lethal finding on this guy to clear all of that. Even if we were just giving, you know, quote-unquote lethal aid to the Israelis, I mean, there's no way that, I don't think, they get around that.

• 45:59Speaker 06

  Yes, there would have to have been a lethal finding.

• 46:01Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:04Jack Murphy?

  So then let's talk about the drone campaign in Pakistan. It's like basically, I think it was the largest paramilitary operation in CIA history.

• 46:16Speaker 06

  Oh, without question. Um, little did the CIA know, or contemplate, again, to the best of my knowledge,

• 46:28Speaker 06

  when inaugurated drone warfare as a military technology, as a strategic way of fighting war.

• 46:43Speaker 06

  That drones would revolutionize warfare.

• 46:49Speaker 06

  Leaving ahead the Ukrainians have shown what drones can do. Okay.

• 46:58Speaker 06

  At the time, it was just a neat weapon, right?

• 47:03Speaker 06

  Uh, no risk to American airmen.

• 47:14Speaker 06

  Immoral hazard.

• 47:17Jack Murphy?

  Because we hadn't quite refined the technology and the methodology at that time.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  Moral hazard was that you were killing civilians right, left, and center.

• 47:25Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 06

  Um, and, you know, the smarter military commanders and the smarter CIA officers

• 47:36Speaker 06

  who were prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, realize, you know, we're never going to win this fucking war if we keep killing civilians.

• 47:50Speaker 06

  It is bad juju to kill civilians.

• 48:00Speaker 06

  And there's another thing that this is not intelligence, you know. Uh, obviously you need intelligence on your, you know, where your targets are. But, uh, how great it would have been to be able to recruit some of these people rather than kill them. When you kill them, you're not getting any intelligence out of them. Um, and latterly, around, I'm gonna say 2006, 7, 8. The CIA in Pakistan was recruiting Al Qaeda.

• 48:39Speaker 06

  And that and not torture was what led to Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.

• 48:47Jack Murphy?

  I'm, I'm gonna get you there, uh, in just a second. Um, the, the other little vignette that I wanted to touch upon, which I feel like, you know, we'll, we'll quickly get at loggerheads between Gina Haspel and Jose Rodriguez, the destruction of the torture tapes.

• 49:02Speaker 06

  That was Jose. You know, Gina was his chief of staff. Gina Haspel, we should explain, you know, became the director of the CIA, uh, in 2018. Jose ordered the destruction of the tapes of the waterboarding and torture of the first two high-value detainees, as they were called, uh, at a secret black base in, in Thailand. And why were they videotaping the torture? Well, this is a theme that will repeat itself in the book.

• 49:45Speaker 06

  They didn't know what they were doing. The CIA was not set up to run secret prisons. The CIA didn't know anything about interrogating prisoners or torture.

• 49:57Jack Murphy?

  There's that story, and I, I think it may be in your book, certainly it's been reported before, like the CIA psychologists were emailing back to headquarters like, hey, I don't think these guys know anything. And headquarters is emailing them back like, hey pussy, keep torturing these guys.

• 50:12Speaker 06

  And that was the analysts.

• 50:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 06

  That was, that was the analysts on the, uh, bin Laden team who were doing that, who were later glorified in the film Zero Dark Thirty.

• 50:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's gotta be holding something back, right?

• 50:35Speaker 06

  They didn't know what they were doing, and the videotapes might be educational someday. I'm not kidding you. Gonna put it on Sesame Street for the kids to learn from? No, it's like, we're gonna, you know, we don't know what we're doing, so maybe we ought to record this to figure out if we're doing it right.

• 50:54Speaker 06

  So these videotapes, you know, 96, I think, hour-long VHS cassettes are sitting at CIA Station in Bangkok. And a reporter for the New York Times has gotten wind that this secret base exists. And the second that happens,

• 51:21Speaker 06

  the CIA Public Affairs Office calls up Gina Haspel as Jose's chief of staff. Jose is now the chief of the clandestine service. And Jose has proposed destroying these tapes before. They've just been sitting there festering for years. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

• 51:37Speaker 06

  And he asked the CIA Director, Porter Gus, can I destroy them? No. He asked the top lawyer, John Rizzo, can I destroy them? No. Jose, you cannot destroy the tapes, okay? And they go to the White House Counsel, Harriet Mears, under George Bush. Can I destroy the tapes? No, he's playing a... Mommy, daddy. Gaming them, may I, may I? Yeah. And she's like, no, Jose, you cannot destroy the tapes. They're under subpoena in a federal court case.

• 52:21Speaker 06

  And he says, fuck it, as he often did.

• 52:26Speaker 06

  Uh, damn the torpedoes. And he drafts an order. Haspel transmits the order. That's the only thing she did. Okay. To CIA Station Bangkok. And they destroyed the tapes.

• 52:41Jack Murphy?

  And the CIA lawyer, it sounded like he shat ten different kinds of bricks.

• 52:45Speaker 06

  And so this, this, you know. The, the memo goes up through channels, uh, from Bangkok, say, okay, tapes destroyed. And the CIA lawyer, John Rizzo, looks at this and he types a one word reply, all caps, what? Question mark, exclamation part. And of course. Porter Gosse, the hapless director of Central Intelligence from, uh, oh, four to oh, six, nineteen terrible months. Under this guy.

• 53:24Speaker 06

  He is legally obligated to tell Congress about this violation. Does he do it? Uh-uh. Couple of years later, Mark Mizetti of the New York Times gets wind of this. And, you know, John Rizzo has the unhappy duty of calling up Porter Gosse, who has now been sent off into, you know, unhappy retirement, saying, please tell me you told Congress about this. And Porter was like, nah.

• 53:55Jack Murphy?

  Slipped my mind.

• 53:56Speaker 06

  I didn't have the heart to do it. And poor John Rizzo, who's been this, you know, the CIA lawyer since before Iran-Contra.

• 54:07Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 54:07Speaker 06

  Okay. And knows the scandal when he smells one. Is, is like, this is, this is a four alarm fire. And it is all on Jose Rodriguez, who through a series of misadventures, uh, went from the penalty box at headquarters to chief of counterterrorism to the chief of the clandestine service.

• 54:30Jack Murphy?

  At the end of the day, I mean, despite this, you know, brewing scandal, I mean, nothing ever came of it.

• 54:43Speaker 06

  That is because, among other things, there's a lawyer named John Durham, who is in the news recently as having signed off on an audit of the CIA's reporting on Russians' monkey wrenching of the 2016 presidential election. And John Durham is where CIA scandals go to die.

• 55:12Jack Murphy?

  He's Mr. Fix-It.

• 55:16Speaker 06

  Former federal prosecutor, he's like, "You have a four alarm fire scandal? Tell Durham to investigate it. He'll slow-roll it for you." Until, you know, the statute is run. You know, there was a CIA officer who murdered a guy in the salt pit prison outside of Kabul in 2002. It's like, hmm, murder. Just kill him, you know? Just beat him to death, let him freeze. Beat him unconscious and let him freeze to death on the floor. It's like, yeah, it's probably, you know, probably should like, look into this, right? The guy gets promoted, you know?

• 56:01Speaker 06

  In part because, again, the same former federal prosecutor, John Durham, has this magic briefcase. And, you know, you put documents, classified documents concerning scandalous behavior into it. They vanish.

• 56:23Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so this-

• 56:24Speaker 06

  It is very difficult to get prosecuted for a crime committed in secret. And under the imprimatur of the authority of the President of the United States.

• 56:40Jack Murphy?

  Um, so this brings us to the Bin Laden mission. What's new? What new information do you have to share with us that folks haven't heard yet?

• 56:53Speaker 06

  I mean, the one, I think, really new noteworthy thing is that it was not torture extracted from detainees that paved the way to Abbottabad. It was the recruitment of Al Qaeda terrorists largely in Pakistan and largely under the tenure of the then station chief in Islamabad, whose name, am I gonna forget it now? God damn it. It'll come to me. Who became the chief of the clandestine service in 2010.

• 57:35Speaker 06

  And he, you know, managed to get intelligence out of recruits from Al Qaeda to protect them from, you know, betrayal and exposure. And that was the key. It was intelligence work, not torture.

• 57:56Jack Murphy?

  There's a bunch of stuff you turned up in this book too about Chinese intelligence.

• 58:03Speaker 06

  John Bennett, I'm sorry. John Bennett. John Bennett, station chief Islamabad when these recruitments took place, later the chief of the clandestine service 2010 to 2012, at the time of the killing of Bin Laden.

• 58:16Jack Murphy?

  You turned up a lot of stuff in the book about Chinese intelligence being this escalating threat against the United States, that before long, the Chinese MSS, the Ministry of State Security, is 12 times bigger than the CIA. Like, this has kind of snowballed into a fucking problem for us. And you have some really interesting stuff about how the CIA was able to recruit assets, recruit sources in China, and how they got compromised and probably killed.

• 58:45Speaker 06

  This was a singular accomplishment of espionage and intelligence work, and a singular disaster at the end of it. Beginning around 2003.

• 59:02Speaker 06

  The CIA in Beijing began to understand the corruption of the Chinese political class. Okay. And to understand that the way you got promoted, the way you clawed your way up the greasy pole to a position of influence and power in the Chinese Politburo, or in the Chinese military, or in the Chinese intelligence service, was what was called promotion fees, bribes.

• 59:39Speaker 06

  Pay to play.

• 59:44Speaker 06

  And so, years of painstaking work and a considerable sum of money went into this. Recruiting promising, up and coming, smart, young people, talent spotting. Okay. Many cups of tea and probably many bottles of expensive whiskey.

• 1:00:12Speaker 06

  And paying their promotion fees, recruiting them by saying,

• 1:00:16Speaker 06

  Uncle Sam's got you. Have I got a proposition for you?

• 1:00:24Speaker 06

  The only phrase I know in Mandarin is, "Washo, need a make well pang you." I'm your American friend.

• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  And it worked. It worked beautifully. And by circa 2010, before Xi took over in 2012,

• 1:00:53Speaker 06

  the CIA had a network of, precise number I can't say, but upwards of 20,

• 1:01:03Speaker 06

  well-placed recruited agents in positions of influence in the Chinese political, military, and intelligence systems.

• 1:01:17Speaker 06

  One by one by one.

• 1:01:21Speaker 06

  Starting in roughly 2011.

• 1:01:24Speaker 06

  These people were captured,

• 1:01:27Speaker 06

  imprisoned, tortured, and executed.

• 1:01:34Speaker 06

  An entire agent network rolled up.

• 1:01:38Speaker 06

  And with a greater effect than the roll-up of recruited Soviet and Russian agents inflicted by the betrayals of Alder James and Robert Hanson.

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  Twice as many agents betrayed.

• 1:01:56Speaker 06

  And with a lasting effect that probably lasts until this day.

• 1:02:02Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 06

  How did it happen?

• 1:02:12Speaker 06

  The full story has not yet been told, but at the heart of it was the covert communications systems that CIA used to communicate with its recruited Chinese agents, the COVCOMs. The COVCOM

• 1:02:34Speaker 06

  was also used in Iran, okay? For the recruitment and running of Iranian agents of the CIA. And it was really primitive.

• 1:02:49Speaker 06

  It was bogus websites for like sports, okay? And you entered a portal of the website and then you were into the purportedly secret realm of communications. It was so clumsily constructed that it was like a badly knitted sweater. If you pulled one thread,

• 1:03:13Speaker 06

  you could unravel the whole thing.

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  And the Iranians figured it out. And they told the Chinese.

• 1:03:27Speaker 06

  It can't account for it all because the Chinese system was more sophisticated than the one used in Iran. There was also a Chinese CIA officer who washed out.

• 1:03:41Jack Murphy?

  Lee.

• 1:03:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. But he's not the whole story either. It was a COVCOM plus Lee plus some X Factor. And, you know, this is the nature of counterintelligence cases. They go on for years and decades, sometimes without resolution. To be a counterintelligence officer is to know the meaning of patience.

• 1:04:08Jack Murphy?

  And paranoia.

• 1:04:09Speaker 06

  And paranoia. And, you know, if some of them drink too much or wonder if God is merciful and just, you can't blame them.

• 1:04:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Another thing I wanted to ask you about, I feel like we got to mention Uncle Dave, the resignation of David Petraeus and how that all came about. I mean, my understanding was that he never really fit in with that job.

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  So, of course, David Petraeus had been the four-star commander of CENTCOM. Okay. And that is a job that comes with valets, cooks. You go out to dinner, you got a 20-car motorcade, you know, you've got some valet screwing your pants on in the morning. It's your king, is my understanding.

• 1:05:01Speaker 08

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYPT, eptinezumab, JJMR, an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults.

• 1:05:15Speaker 09

  Don't receive if allergic to VYPT. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure or color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions.

• 1:05:37Speaker 08

  Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vypt.com.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

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• 1:06:12Speaker 03

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• 1:06:21Speaker 06

  And you have just an enormous staff, you know, of, of, of people to do strategic planning and five-year plans and, you know, figure out the world for you. It's a top-heavy organization. CIA is a very flat organization. There are like two steps in the chain of command. And, you know, you got a problem, you call on your people, say, "Well, I want, you know, a six-month study done on us." And they say, you know, "No, we're on it." You know, and they come back to you a week later and say, "Okay, we did that. What's

• 1:07:04Speaker 06

  next?" Um, and Petraeus got one piece of advice from Bob Gates, former CIA director, former SecDef. He said, "When you roll up in your black limousine at CIA headquarters your first day, check your generalship at the door." Petraeus couldn't do that. Um, and, you know, CIA didn't take to him. And he didn't take to CIA. And, you know, but ultimately, this is a story of vanity.

• 1:07:49Jack Murphy?

  Because of the Paula Broadwell stuff and the classified information.

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  There was no love affair in American public life greater than the romance between David Petraeus and David Petraeus.

• 1:08:08Speaker 06

  And, you know, yes, he had this affair with this woman who was like exactly like him, only a woman in twenty years younger, you know, incredibly ambitious, zero body fat, you know, run ten miles before breakfast. And she was writing his biography, you know, as a PhD thesis. And he shared code word level, you know,

• 1:08:36Speaker 06

  notebooks of information with her. None of which he used in her book, but you can't do that, you know, you cannot do that.

• 1:08:45Jack Murphy?

  The pillow talk?

• 1:08:46Speaker 06

  Because a CIA director has to have moral authority. Because he is asking his officers to do immoral or immoral things for a greater good. And if he cannot hold himself to a moral standard, he gotta go.

• 1:09:04Jack Murphy?

  And that, what was, there was a meeting at some point between him and Clapper, I think? Where they're like, eh.

• 1:09:10Speaker 06

  Well, this is extremely embarrassing because it's a long story, but, but

• 1:09:17Speaker 06

  a woman who was Broadwell's, he was married, by the way, this whole time.

• 1:09:21Jack Murphy?

  I recall.

• 1:09:23Speaker 06

  A woman who was a rival of Paul Broadwell's for, for, for Petraeus's affection, claimed that she was like stalking her on the internet or something. And she had a friend who had a friend in the FBI. And so the FBI looks at this and talks to Broadwell and figures out,

• 1:09:44Speaker 06

  one, the director of CIA is having, you know, an affair. Well, FBI doesn't investigate people's sex lives, or at least not since James or Hoover died.

• 1:09:54Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:09:55Speaker 06

  And not since Bill Clinton, you know, had a dalliance in the White, in, in the White House.

• 1:10:01Speaker 06

  But it does investigate the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

• 1:10:07Speaker 06

  And that was his downfall. And he said, who, me, you know? And got a fantastic job at private equity firm and denied everything and eventually copped the plea and paid a fine. And is a very respected person in certain circles.

• 1:10:23Jack Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:24Speaker 06

  Boo.

• 1:10:25Jack Murphy?

  Go ahead, Dave.

• 1:10:26Speaker 11

  No, I was just gonna say that it's, it's very, you know, that a lot of GWAT veterans are very salty about the general staff, like general officers, no matter who they are. Because their inability to, to do a job during the GWAT, but they've all landed very nicely. But I think Petraeus, that love affair with himself, I think that that's very indicative of, of these, you know, general officers during that timeframe. They got all these accolades for doing nothing.

• 1:11:03Speaker 06

  Well, I never served, so I, I can't, you know, give you a salient analysis of what four-star generalship does. It apparently doesn't screw up everybody. It didn't screw up Dwight Eisenhower.

• 1:11:17Speaker 11

  Yeah, well.

• 1:11:19Speaker 06

  Who also had a secret affair, but that's a different story.

• 1:11:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, he also won the war.

• 1:11:22Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, right.

• 1:11:26Speaker 11

  Made hard decisions.

• 1:11:27Speaker 06

  And he knew something about secret intelligence.

• 1:11:28Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:30Jack Murphy?

  The one part of the book that I, I took some issue with.

• 1:11:36Speaker 06

  Exception, umbrage.

• 1:11:36Jack Murphy?

  Some umbrage. Not, not in the broad strokes, but more in the, maybe in the phrasing, but we'll talk about it, was the portion about the RDI network and the Panetta report. Let's talk a little bit about what happened there.

• 1:11:49Speaker 06

  All right. Don't use jargon. What's the RDA?

• 1:11:51Jack Murphy?

  The Rendition Detection Interrogation Network.

• 1:11:54Speaker 06

  The secret prisons.

• 1:11:55Jack Murphy?

  Yes. So, the, so Congress is investigating the torture prisons and all this other jazz. And they reach an arrangement with the CIA that they had, they had written the Panetta report, I believe it was called, and there's an edited version of it that they share with Congress. Is that the sequence of events?

• 1:12:13Speaker 06

  No. This is, this is more complicated than Chinese math. It took me, it took me quite a while to be able to tell this story in a simple and direct way.

• 1:12:27Speaker 06

  Congress, at the urging of John McCain, who has moral authority in this matter, right? Decides that they're going to investigate the whole secret prison network. And how it happened. Who bore responsibility? Although the short answer was the President of the United States, George W. Bush, who authorized it.

• 1:12:51Speaker 06

  And they spent years on this. Okay. And Leon Panetta, an incredibly successful CIA director, because of his political acumen, his humanity, and his having been both a longtime member of Congress, White House Chief of Staff, knows how Congress works, right?

• 1:13:31Speaker 06

  Says, you know, "Yeah, you can go ahead and do this."

• 1:13:37Speaker 06

  To the great umbrage of some.

• 1:13:46Speaker 06

  While the Senate is investigating, Panetta wants his own, you know, report on how did this happen? Who shot John? You know, give me the A to Z on this. And so this becomes a classified report that's known colloquially as the Panetta Report. The Panetta Report falls into the hands of the Congressional, of the Senate staffers. Okay. And the reason this happened was that the CIA set up a computer system off-site for sharing documents in a classified, you know, a SCIF.

• 1:14:30Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Speaker 06

  But also, you know, with computer access that ran both ways.

• 1:14:37Speaker 06

  And it's best anybody can figure out. See, I misconfigured this.

• 1:14:41Jack Murphy?

  My understanding is that it was a hyperlink. That in that, you know, classified system that they agreed this is what we're sharing with Congress. There's a hyperlink that the staffers were able to click on. And that was what like brought them through the tunnel to the full report.

• 1:14:56Speaker 06

  I think we're talking about the same thing using different language.

• 1:14:58Jack Murphy?

  Perhaps. Yeah, I think so too.

• 1:15:00Speaker 06

  But the irony here is that according to Panetta himself, in the interview I did with him. The Panetta report wasn't different from the Senate report at all.

• 1:15:11Speaker 06

  Not different. Okay. Same set of facts. Same set of documents. Well.

• 1:15:19Speaker 06

  Uh, when, uh, the Chief of Counterintelligence at CIA. Figures out that the Senate staffer has, you know, in his mind. Hacked into the CIA, right? He authorizes his counterintelligence IT people to hack into the Senate.

• 1:15:40Speaker 06

  No, you cannot do that. The CIA by its charter cannot spy on Americans. This was very bad business.

• 1:15:48Jack Murphy?

  So that that's the the phrasing that I guess I take some issue with is that. Did they hack into Congress or did they simply close the loophole? That hyperlink that they were able to access?

• 1:16:01Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:16:05Speaker 06

  The decision of the CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence. Mark Kelton to send his people after the Senate.

• 1:16:16Speaker 06

  In the name of plugging a leak.

• 1:16:17Jack Murphy?

  Was ill-advised.

• 1:16:19Speaker 06

  Ill-advised and triggered a criminal investigation.

• 1:16:23Jack Murphy?

  And Senator, I mean, it was such a big deal. Senator Feinstein at the time was talking about like the CIA should be disbanded for doing this. I mean, it was like.

• 1:16:31Speaker 06

  Well, yeah.

• 1:16:32Jack Murphy?

  Fire and brimstone.

• 1:16:33Speaker 06

  So the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden. Had a come to Jesus meeting, uh, between Feinstein and Panetta. And, you know, said, come, let us reason together and, you know.

• 1:16:48Speaker 06

  Let's, let's like not beat each other's brains out over this.

• 1:16:52Jack Murphy?

  Let's not collapse the United States government over this.

• 1:16:54Speaker 06

  Right. Joe Biden peacemaker.

• 1:16:59Speaker 06

  But, but yeah, I mean, he did the right thing.

• 1:17:03Jack Murphy?

  I, so also what's going on during this time is, uh, modernization as it was sold.

• 1:17:11Speaker 06

  Are, are we speaking here of the?

• 1:17:12Jack Murphy?

  The mission centers.

• 1:17:13Speaker 06

  Brennan reforms?

• 1:17:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:18Speaker 06

  All right, here, here we're talking about bureaucracy, which is like the least fascinating subject in the world.

• 1:17:23Jack Murphy?

  I get it.

• 1:17:27Speaker 06

  But basically, the, the Brennan reforms, um, uh, came from a curious place, which is hard to explain.

• 1:17:42Speaker 06

  John Brennan washed out of spy school.

• 1:17:46Speaker 06

  He, he was deemed not suited for the clandestine service and became an analyst.

• 1:17:53Speaker 06

  And, uh, his detractors at CIA said he, that he had a bar bout.

• 1:17:59Jack Murphy?

  Got a chip on his shoulder.

• 1:18:00Speaker 06

  For, for the clandestine service. And, and the, the reforms were a way of, uh, taking them down a notch.

• 1:18:10Speaker 06

  Which is bizarre because espionage is the heart and soul, you know, of the CIA.

• 1:18:18Speaker 06

  Whether or not these reforms, the creation of mission centers that were country-based, all it did really was to add another layer of bureaucracy to an already bureaucratized spy service. Okay. Another realm of, another layer of espionage who are sitting at headquarters, making budget decisions, um, uh, and, uh, you know, turning the 7,000 mile long screwdriver, uh, against station chiefs in far-flung capitals.

• 1:18:56Speaker 06

  Was it good? Was it bad? Was it ugly? It was all those things. Okay. But it sparked considerable resistance, so much so, um, that, uh, the head of the clandestine service at the time told Brennan that, you know, this is no good. And Brennan said, you're fired.

• 1:19:15Speaker 06

  Which did not endear him, everybody. On the other hand, the guy who was running interference for him on the reforms was one of the most talented CIA officers of his generation, Greg Vogel, twice station chief in Kabul, among other things. And Greg Vogel became the chief of the clandestine service in this dust-up from 2015 to 2017.

• 1:19:44Jack Murphy?

  So, in the meantime, there's another shitstorm brewing. Tell us about Russia and WikiLeaks.

• 1:19:57Speaker 06

  No less a figure than Mike Hayden, former CIA director, former NSA director, has described the Russian covert operation to monkey wrench 2016 presidential election as like the greatest covert operation since the Trojan horse. Political warfare, okay, is using all the means at a nation's disposal, short of war, to take down your opponent. This was a masterpiece of political warfare, okay, in which the Russian intelligence services identified

• 1:20:38Speaker 06

  the wounds in the American body politic that already existed and rubbed salt in them with the goal of denigrating the Democratic candidate for President Hillary Clinton, whom Putin despised to the marrow of his bones because his Secretary of State, she stood up to him and said he had stolen the presidential election in Russia in 2012.

• 1:21:06Jack Murphy?

  And Libya also pissed them off.

• 1:21:09Speaker 06

  Side issue. Total side issue. And Putin said in his own words, "We think Donald Trump is the leading presidential candidate." And he said it, you know, a couple of months after Trump rode down his golden staircase at Trump Tower and announced his candidacy. There is no question.

• 1:21:38Speaker 06

  That Russia worked this covert operation and no question that Julian Assange was a linchpin in it. Assange was now in

• 1:21:48Jack Murphy?

  The Guccifer leaks and

• 1:21:50Speaker 06

  Julian Assange was the warlock of WikiLeaks.

• 1:21:54Jack Murphy?

  How do you think that relationship worked? I mean, because I think that the implication here is that Russian intelligence was feeding information to WikiLeaks.

• 1:22:03Speaker 06

  Well, they absolutely did. Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid prosecution on charge of rape in Sweden.

• 1:22:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Speaker 06

  At which time he became a paid employee of RT, the Russian propaganda and news outlet.

• 1:22:35Speaker 06

  Assange

• 1:22:40Speaker 06

  was the distributor of the Russian intelligence services hack and leak operation at the Democratic National Committee. The Russians broke into the DNC just as Richard Nixon's burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Watergate in 1972. Only they did it electronically.

• 1:23:15Speaker 06

  There is no question that Assange was a paid agent of the Russian intelligence services. And he has pleaded guilty to a charge of espionage.

• 1:23:31Speaker 06

  It is difficult now, at a distance of ten years, to describe how completely screwed up the American body politic was by the Russian operation and how screwed up the Washington political press corps was by this sprinkling of poison confetti

• 1:23:53Jack Murphy?

  How bonkers, yeah, how bonkers it was. I mean, there were a series of different things that were blowing up at the time with BLM and a bunch of things that the Russians were able to twist that knife a little bit.

• 1:24:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, Black Lives Matter didn't exist in 2016, but they, they were, not, not in the way it did after George Floyd.

• 1:24:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:13Speaker 06

  But they identified every sort of weak node in the American body politic. And it's rumsalt into the wounds through, you know, online persona. And, you know.

• 1:24:29Jack Murphy?

  And the Obama administration was kind of like, eh, there's nothing we can do.

• 1:24:33Speaker 06

  The entire Obama administration, and indeed, the entire American intelligence community was watching this happen like a cow watching a train go by.

• 1:24:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:44Speaker 06

  You know, seeing it, but not understanding what it was.

• 1:24:48Jack Murphy?

  I remember seeing the ads on Facebook myself that came out and, you know, the, the reports subsequently that they were sponsored by the Russians. I mean, I remember seeing them, some of them personally, and I, I had at least some inkling of what was going on there.

• 1:25:06Speaker 06

  And the result was we got Donald Trump as president.

• 1:25:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's impossible to really, you know, say, I mean, I guess history will be the judge, but like, did they put their thumbs on the scale enough to tip the election? Yes or no? I don't know the answer to that.

• 1:25:22Speaker 06

  Well, it is the judgment of the, at the time, senior members of the American intelligence community, every man, jack of them, that the Russians skewed the election for Trump.

• 1:25:34Jack Murphy?

  Let's also talk about Tomas Rakusan. He's an interesting character in this book that I don't think anyone's ever really written about before.

• 1:25:44Speaker 06

  No, his name is unknown to the American public, or at least until the publication of this book next week. Utterly unknown.

• 1:25:57Speaker 06

  Tomas Rakusan, Tomas Rakusan, was one of the most distinguished, brave, resourceful, and ballsy American spies of his generation, of my generation.

• 1:26:19Speaker 06

  Rakusan's roots are Czech.

• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  His parents were Czech. And he was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 to crush popular resistance to the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia. So his feelings about Russia, Russia and the Russians bred in the bone.

• 1:26:47Speaker 06

  They were not warm feelings.

• 1:26:50Speaker 06

  Rakusan ran operations against the Russians from like before the end of the Cold War.

• 1:26:59Speaker 06

  And he ran absolutely extraordinary mission into Baghdad before the American invasion in 2003. He was stationed in an Eastern European country and went into Baghdad posing as a member of the Czech Security Service to run ostensibly security operations at the Czech Embassy in Baghdad before the war. That was his cover.

• 1:27:40Speaker 06

  At night, he was going all over Baghdad, doing low weight assessments of bridges, scouting out weapons depots, getting targeting information. That's

• 1:27:55Jack Murphy?

  Ballsy.

• 1:27:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:58Speaker 06

  That's pretty impressive work. And he was awarded the Intelligence Star for that, which is the highest decoration CIA has.

• 1:28:08Speaker 06

  Fast forward, early 2017, after it is determined that the Russians have monkey-wrenched the 2016 presidential election, Tom Rakuusen succeeds Greg Vogel as the chief of the clandestine service. Let's bring him to 2017.

• 1:28:28Speaker 06

  And he calls in his top dogs. Okay. And these are guys who have been running

• 1:28:38Speaker 06

  counterterrorism operations for the last 15 years.

• 1:28:43Speaker 06

  These are heart-bitten people

• 1:28:46Speaker 06

  who have been working in garden spots like Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 1:28:54Speaker 06

  Station chiefs in Jordan.

• 1:28:56Jack Murphy?

  This is when we finally started striking back, right? With this stuff with Pat Weiner.

• 1:29:03Speaker 06

  Tom calls them all in and says in so many words, "The Russians just manipulated our fucking elections. How are we gonna make sure this never happens again?" Okay? And he calls in his crew, maybe 20 or 30 guys, and he tells them to take their talents, their experience in targeting terrorists. And by targeting, I mean identifying them. Finding out who they are, where they live, what they think, who they love, who they hate, where their weak spots are. How can you recruit them?

• 1:29:43Speaker 06

  And turning that talent against Russian spies, diplomats, officials, oligarchs.

• 1:29:53Speaker 06

  They wrote a manifesto called "Call to Arms."

• 1:29:58Speaker 06

  For Tom Rakuusen, the Russian attack on the American presidential election in 2016 was the intelligence equivalent of 9/11.

• 1:30:12Speaker 06

  And the response he demanded and the response he got was every bit as powerful as the CIA's response to Al Qaeda's attacks on America.

• 1:30:26Speaker 06

  One thing that Tom did was to open up the back rooms of Russia House. Okay, Russia House is that component of the CIA that trains its attention on the Russians.

• 1:30:43Speaker 06

  And Russia House had long been, um, had long been, um, the most Secretive. Secretive, cloistered, uh, and, uh, what is the word I want?

• 1:31:03Speaker 06

  Kind of insular. The most secret part of the CIA. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

• 1:31:14Speaker 06

  And Rakusin says, "We are gonna put a little sunlight into this.

• 1:31:21Speaker 06

  I want you, denizens of Russia House, to start sharing information, not only with your brothers and sisters in the CIA, but scrub it for sources and methods so that we can share it with our friends abroad." Okay.

• 1:31:40Speaker 06

  I should add parenthetically, the CIA relies on its allies in foreign intelligence services in countries that we think of as friends of the United States and countries we don't think as being friends of the United States, to an almost unimaginable extent. Okay. The CIA is not and cannot be a global intelligence service without the help of its foreign partners. We don't have the languages. We don't have the people. We don't have the country knowledge that they collectively can give us.

• 1:32:19Speaker 06

  And so, the sharing of intelligence with the British, the Dutch, the Estonians, the Ukrainians, the Spaniards, you name it, okay, um, was probably the most powerful thing that the CIA did to, as a force multiplier, okay, in its history. Okay.

• 1:32:46Speaker 06

  It was a revolutionary concept.

• 1:32:52Speaker 06

  To dare to share the carefully extracted secrets of what makes Russia tick and how to penetrate the Kremlin with our allies. The penetration of the Kremlin had been one of the highest, if not the highest, goals of the CIA since its inception in 1947, to get over the Iron Curtain

• 1:33:24Speaker 06

  and ascertain the intentions and the capabilities of the Russians. Okay. Well, lo and behold, Tom Rakuzen and his successors and the clandestine service did that.

• 1:33:40Speaker 06

  And by the fall of 2021, and I can give you the precise time. It was five weeks after the fall of Kabul in October 2021.

• 1:33:55Speaker 06

  Lo and behold, the CIA stole Vladimir Putin's war plans for Ukraine.

• 1:34:03Speaker 06

  And that is a singular accomplishment. And when I learned that they had done that, that's when I decided I had to write this book. Because that is just a revolutionary sea change. It is transformative in the history of the CIA and very much underappreciated by the American public.

• 1:34:24Speaker 11

  So what? I know that, you know, the report was viewed with skepticism due to, you know, the history with Iraq and stuff like that. But did the United States government take any action at all to? You know, they have this information.

• 1:34:43Speaker 11

  But it seems as though we didn't really do anything anticipating it.

• 1:34:53Speaker 06

  So CIA has, has, you know, stolen Putin's war plan. Right. And, uh, Bill Burns is the director of the CIA at the time. And William J. Burns was, in addition to being universally regarded as the greatest diplomat of his generation, he had been the deputy secretary of state, he had been the undersecretary for the Middle East, he had been ambassador to Russia under Putin, and ambassador to Jordan before that. This is a brilliant man. Mm-hmm. And probably one of the greatest directors ever. Mm-hmm. At CIA. And, um, what Burns practiced was intelligence diplomacy.

• 1:35:36Speaker 06

  It was Burns and the CIA, they got Evan Gershovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, and the other, and Brittany Grineer, the basketball player, and other American hostages out of Russian prisons. Okay. Um, and Burns goes to the President of the United States and the Secretary of State and says, "We have to declassify this. We have to tell the world about this."

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• 1:37:15Speaker 06

  And they go, "Okay, if you think so, we can do it." And they do it, and they tell the world. And the world, and in particular, the nations of NATO, cocked a collective eyebrow and said, "Oh, really? Aren't you the people that told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?"

• 1:37:34Speaker 11

  Right.

• 1:37:35Speaker 06

  The stench of that still lingered 20 years later. Okay. But they were right. Okay. And the intelligence didn't stop the war, but it had an electric, unifying effect on the nations of NATO and was one of the things that the CIA did. Not the only thing that has been crucial to the survival of Ukraine since the Russian seizure of Crimea and eastern Donbass in 2014.

• 1:38:07Speaker 11

  But I think, like, my question is more like, the United States had that information, but we didn't start arming Ukraine until, well, you know, I mean, you know, like, we could have conducted training exercises.

• 1:38:23Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, no. Disagree. The CIA has been on the ground in Ukraine since 2014. You know that.

• 1:38:29Speaker 11

  Right.

• 1:38:30Speaker 06

  Training, equipping.

• 1:38:31Speaker 11

  Right.

• 1:38:32Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, purging Russian spies from the Ukrainian military intelligence services, working with them, okay? Sweating with them, okay? Figuring out how to defend this country against Russian aggression.

• 1:38:48Speaker 11

  Sure, but that's Trump since 2014. But what I'm saying is, why not do a joint military training exercise with, with Ukraine in the weeks leading up to the war?

• 1:38:59Speaker 06

  Military.

• 1:39:01Speaker 11

  Okay. What I'm talking, I'm not talking about the CIA. I am talking about our country, our administration. Like, we know five weeks before the invasion that they're going to invade, but it didn't seem like we took any steps to, to inhibit that invasion.

• 1:39:17Speaker 06

  This calls to mind a conversation that the then Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, had with the then Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell, uh, back around 1994, concerning, uh, the horrors, uh, of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the slaughter.

• 1:39:36Speaker 11

  Right, yeah.

• 1:39:37Speaker 06

  Uh, and Shremenica and other places.

• 1:39:41Speaker 06

  And she said to General Powell, you have this great military, why don't you ever use it?

• 1:39:48Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:39:49Speaker 06

  Right? Or words to that effect.

• 1:39:52Speaker 06

  Why didn't we, why didn't the United States military in all its grandeur get up off its hind legs? You know, go to war? Because nuclear weapons.

• 1:40:03Speaker 11

  No, no, but I'm not even talking about.

• 1:40:05Speaker 06

  They were afraid that Russia would like start.

• 1:40:08Speaker 11

  I'm not, I'm not a neocon. I don't think US soldiers should be on the ground during the war.

• 1:40:13Speaker 06

  Training equipment.

• 1:40:14Speaker 11

  But, but, but what I'm saying is though, had we, and again, this is outside the scope of the, I'm just thinking out loud right now and you, you guys can ignore me, but like if we had this information, we could have done a joint, we could put US troops in there for a joint training exercise because Russia didn't know we knew they were going to invade. And is Russia going to invade while US troops are there doing a training exercise?

• 1:40:37Speaker 06

  You know that some two star. Uh, you know, in the E ring is telling the Secretary of Defense, you can't do that, you know, nuclear war.

• 1:40:49Speaker 11

  But this would be, but I'm talking about as a deterrent to the invasion, would Russia had invaded if there were US troops on the ground doing, just doing training with the Ukrainians?

• 1:41:01Jack Murphy?

  There were Americans doing training in Ukraine. There wasn't a large scale, like training exercise, the way you're talking about.

• 1:41:06Speaker 11

  Yeah, like, like if they would have announced like in two weeks, hey, we're going to do this big training exercise with Poland and Ukraine.

• 1:41:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is far outside the scope of the book.

• 1:41:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:41:16Speaker 06

  But you war game this out one step and you've got Russian soldiers killing American soldiers and American soldiers killing Russian soldiers and that ain't good.

• 1:41:25Speaker 11

  Yeah. And again, I'm not advocating going to, you're putting boots on the ground now that the war has started. It just seems like our administration could have.

• 1:41:36Speaker 06

  Remember Kabul had just fallen ignomiously.

• 1:41:41Speaker 11

  Yeah, there wasn't a big appetite for.

• 1:41:42Speaker 06

  It was the.

• 1:41:44Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Speaker 06

  Um, and, uh, a, a 20 year American military.

• 1:41:51Speaker 11

  Yeah, but we have.

• 1:41:52Speaker 06

  You know, effort in Afghanistan had crumbled into dust.

• 1:41:55Speaker 11

  No, I, I, I get all that. And again, like, I'm not advocating for us going to war now. I'm saying prior to the war, but it, yeah.

• 1:42:03Speaker 06

  What it could have shown to do.

• 1:42:04Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:42:06Jack Murphy?

  Uh, so you know, I gotta ask you, the full scale invasion kicks off. And there are some things that the CIA has to try to keep at arm's length. But nonetheless, the sabotage operations in Eastern Ukraine and deep, deep inside Russia in some cases.

• 1:42:24Speaker 06

  Who else?

• 1:42:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:27Speaker 06

  Um, controversial subject, uh, uh, there were lethal operations that the Ukrainians conducted, uh, on which CIA was either briefed or well aware of, uh, that CIA wouldn't touch with a 10 foot bow. Okay. Um.

• 1:42:50Speaker 06

  The CIA was not going to get into the business of killing Russians.

• 1:42:55Speaker 06

  Directly.

• 1:42:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Exactly.

• 1:42:58Speaker 06

  Um. Uh.

• 1:43:03Speaker 06

  It will take years

• 1:43:06Speaker 06

  before the full story of the American role and the American intelligence role in particular in Ukraine can be told. However, I spent a good deal of ink in this book describing an extraordinary effort

• 1:43:23Speaker 06

  uh, by CIA uh, to keep the Ukrainians alive and to keep the Russians out of Kiev.

• 1:43:32Jack Murphy?

  Another controversial one I gotta ask you about Nord Stream.

• 1:43:37Jack Murphy?

  The Nord Stream pipeline. None of the stories make sense to me to this day.

• 1:43:42Speaker 06

  I mean.

• 1:43:45Speaker 06

  You know, did the Russians do it to themselves?

• 1:43:51Jack Murphy?

  I couldn't say.

• 1:43:52Speaker 06

  Ken sabe. Did the Ukrainians do it in an unauthorized by the United States operation? Yeah, probably. But there were no fingerprints on that one, you know.

• 1:44:14Speaker 06

  Some intelligence stories are like a photograph in a bath of chemicals that take 10 years.

• 1:44:22Jack Murphy?

  To develop.

• 1:44:24Speaker 06

  And that's one of them.

• 1:44:27Jack Murphy?

  And along with this subject, something else you talk about in the book is, you know, President Biden not really understanding that the rules-based order that he grew up in and lived in and worked in for so many decades was dissolving, kind of like right before his eyes.

• 1:44:51Speaker 06

  I think

• 1:44:56Speaker 06

  that this is a story with a very long tail.

• 1:44:59Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 1:45:04Speaker 06

  It is a remarkable fact

• 1:45:07Speaker 06

  that in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the number of democracies on this planet began growing and growing, until in the spring of 2001, the number of democracies and the number of autocracies in this world were roughly equal, and that had never happened before in the history of civilization.

• 1:45:42Speaker 06

  After the American invasion of Iraq.

• 1:45:50Speaker 06

  Which George Bush said was going to ignite the fires of freedom all over the world.

• 1:46:01Speaker 06

  The American invasion of Iraq was going to create democracy in the Middle East.

• 1:46:08Speaker 06

  The American invasion of Iraq would solve the Israeli Palestinian problem. It was good for what ails you.

• 1:46:17Speaker 06

  He was wrong about that. And in the years, immediately thereafter, oh three, oh four, oh five, the number of democracies in the world began declining.

• 1:46:32Speaker 06

  Flatlined and declined and has, we have been in a democratic recession in this world for twenty years.

• 1:46:46Speaker 06

  And we are now

• 1:46:49Speaker 06

  a failing democracy ourselves.

• 1:46:53Speaker 06

  We are living in an age

• 1:46:57Speaker 06

  of American autocracy. This has a number of terrifying implications domestically.

• 1:47:09Speaker 06

  It has a number of

• 1:47:12Speaker 06

  truly horrifying implications for the Central Intelligence Agency.

• 1:47:23Speaker 06

  One of the CIA's superpowers throughout the Cold War and the decade thereafter was that when it came to the recruitment of foreign agents, which is the heart and soul of the CIA, that's how we understand the world, that's how we get intelligence.

• 1:47:42Speaker 06

  The United States, for all its faults, was the shining city on the hill. We stood for freedom, we stood for democracy, and if you were a Russian or an Iranian,

• 1:47:58Speaker 06

  you could turn to America through the CIA.

• 1:48:05Speaker 06

  Maybe your motives were revenge, maybe you needed money, maybe you wanted a new life in America, or maybe you wanted to change the world around you.

• 1:48:17Speaker 06

  And you could look to America.

• 1:48:22Speaker 06

  The lights in the shining city on the hill are going out.

• 1:48:28Speaker 06

  And this is

• 1:48:31Speaker 06

  dangerous, if not fatal, to the recruitment

• 1:48:36Speaker 06

  of foreign agents who want to help the United States. Do we stand for democracy and freedom today?

• 1:48:46Speaker 06

  Will we stand for democracy and freedom a year from now or two years from now?

• 1:48:57Speaker 06

  The destruction

• 1:49:02Speaker 06

  of the architectures of American foreign policy and national security over the last six months since the inauguration of Donald Trump have been profound.

• 1:49:16Speaker 06

  Our alliances

• 1:49:19Speaker 06

  are being ripped up and destroyed.

• 1:49:25Speaker 06

  Our standing in the world is plummeting.

• 1:49:31Speaker 06

  The State Department is closing embassies and consulates around the world, destroying cover for CIA officers who operate out of those places.

• 1:49:48Speaker 06

  The institutions of American national security are in the hands of crackpots and fools.

• 1:49:56Speaker 06

  The Pentagon is being run by a white Christian nationalist, a Fox News host. This is a trillion-dollar enterprise, being run by a guy who couldn't organize a cocktail party for eight.

• 1:50:13Speaker 06

  The evidence of chaos in the e-ring is evident. The National Intelligence Directorate is being run by a conspiracy theorist and Putin apologist, Tulsi Gabbard. She's in charge of the president's daily brief, not that he reads it. The FBI, its national security and intelligence directors are being dismantled by a MAGA acolyte named Kash Patel.

• 1:50:53Speaker 06

  And the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, is a man who will twist intelligence and distort the facts to please the president. And it was just called for, the criminal prosecution of his predecessor, John Brennan, for his role in investigating the Russian attack on the 2016 election. This is dangerous.

• 1:51:29Speaker 06

  And God forbid, in this time of chaos in the American national security establishment, which has been exacerbated by John Ratcliffe's actions at the CIA, he is forcing senior people in the clandestine service and the intelligence analyst directors out the door. He cashiered every one of the CIA's new hires from 2023 and 2024.

• 1:52:12Speaker 06

  He has imposed ideological purity tests on senior people. Who do you really think won the 2020 election? What do you think about the January 6th insurrection?

• 1:52:30Speaker 06

  Ideology, these people are ideologues. Ideology is the enemy of intelligence. If you're an ideologue, you don't care what the intelligence says. Your mind is made up. And Trump himself, and the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, himself, have said in recent days, "Forget about the intelligence. Who cares about the intelligence? This is what we think of the world. This is our reality. We make our own reality."

• 1:52:59Jack Murphy?

  The politicization of intelligence seems that, yeah, we're in a dangerous point there. The recent strike in Iraq, or I'm sorry, in Iran, being kind of a case study of that, like, did we destroy all their nuclear weapons? Did we, like, it totally depends on what your ideological...

• 1:53:16Speaker 06

  The president says we destroyed the nuclear weapons program. The intelligence says otherwise. And he says, "Forget about the intelligence."

• 1:53:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So where does this leave the CIA in the next couple of years with Director Radcliffe?

• 1:53:31Speaker 06

  Okay, imagine, if you will, that you were a member of the CIA's call to arms. And you fought, as your predecessors at the CIA fought, against Russian imperialism. And you wake up last February 24. And you see that the President of the United States has ordered the UN ambassador to vote with Russia and North Korea and Iran

• 1:54:15Speaker 06

  against a resolution condemning the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine. And you think to yourself, "My God. The President of the United States has gone over to the other side."

• 1:54:39Speaker 06

  What do you do?

• 1:54:42Speaker 06

  If you are a senior CIA officer?

• 1:54:47Speaker 06

  And you think to yourself, the greatest threat to American national security today is the President of the United States?

• 1:54:55Jack Murphy?

  Do you agree that right now is sort of an intelligence, foreign intelligence bonanza? As far as our opposition trying to recruit, you know, agency people who are just recently laid off, may have been read into programs?

• 1:55:07Speaker 06

  Okay, take this case that I just mentioned of Radcliffe cashiering hundreds of people who had been trained, hired by the CIA in 2023 and 24. Most of them hired to fill the new China Mission Center that Director Bill Burns had created three years ago.

• 1:55:34Speaker 06

  Those people probably pissed off.

• 1:55:38Speaker 06

  And they're out of a job.

• 1:55:44Speaker 06

  Very much a potential intelligence target. Elon Musk ordered Radcliffe to fire these people. Okay, Elon Musk's Doge people, okay? Gained access to the most sensitive information

• 1:56:04Speaker 06

  about CIA through their penetration of the Office of Personnel Management and the IRS.

• 1:56:12Jack Murphy?

  The Treasury.

• 1:56:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, through the Treasury.

• 1:56:17Speaker 06

  These are like 22-year-old tech bros, okay? And if one of them has a drug problem, a grudge against the United States, or, you know, the other classic counterintelligence vulnerabilities, they got a giant target on their back.

• 1:56:35Speaker 06

  Um, it's a very dangerous time.

• 1:56:42Speaker 06

  And, look, I'm not a doomsayer. I'm an optimist, actually. And I know that he who lives by the crystal ball will wind up eating broken glass. But imagine,

• 1:57:00Speaker 06

  unpleasant though it may be,

• 1:57:03Speaker 06

  what would happen if the United States

• 1:57:07Speaker 06

  were attacked again?

• 1:57:10Jack Murphy?

  Another 9/11 scale attack?

• 1:57:17Speaker 06

  An attack at home or abroad,

• 1:57:23Speaker 06

  enabled by the chaos in our national security and intelligence systems.

• 1:57:31Speaker 06

  What do you think Trump would do?

• 1:57:35Jack Murphy?

  I don't know. I don't think anyone would-

• 1:57:37Speaker 06

  Look at what he's done already.

• 1:57:42Speaker 06

  Sending, you know, armed troops

• 1:57:47Speaker 06

  into American cities and masked thugs.

• 1:57:51Jack Murphy?

  Oh, well, yes, certainly domestically it would escalate the authoritarianism. Um, I'm thinking foreign policy-wise, like, just the incoherence we have right now, it's hard to even imagine how incoherent the response would be.

• 1:58:07Speaker 06

  What if he declared martial law?

• 1:58:11Speaker 06

  What if he suspended elections? Would the Supreme Court stop him? Would Congress stop him?

• 1:58:19Jack Murphy?

  Nope.

• 1:58:23Speaker 06

  You know, here we are, coming up on our 250th birthday as a nation.

• 1:58:32Speaker 06

  No free republic in the history of civilization has lasted longer than 300 years, and that was the Roman Empire. You think we're gonna make it to 300?

• 1:58:44Jack Murphy?

  Not unless we get our shit together.

• 1:58:48Speaker 06

  I hope we make it to 250.

• 1:58:51Jack Murphy?

  So some of the things that did not make it into the book, or were in there a very little bit, I'd like to hear, you know, a little bit about what was left on the cutting room floor, or what you'd like to circle back around. I mean, some things that popped out at me, the special tactics unit in Iraq, the CTPTs get like a sentence in the book, Havana syndrome's like a paragraph, the Syria covert program is like a paragraph, the CTOPs, I don't think are mentioned. What else is out there that you think folks should know about?

• 1:59:23Speaker 06

  You're gonna make me cry.

• 1:59:26Jack Murphy?

  I know, I know, because this book could be 1,500 pages.

• 1:59:31Speaker 06

  A book needs a back cover.

• 1:59:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, I know.

• 1:59:34Speaker 06

  You remind me of when I was writing, reporting Legacy of Ashes, I went up to Craftsbury Common Vermont, northern Vermont, to visit Tom Twetton. That name ring a bell? He was the last chief of the clandestine service before the end of the Cold War. Amazing guy. And in retirement, he was working as a bookbinder.

• 2:00:04Jack Murphy?

  Interesting.

• 2:00:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was making hand tool leather covers for books. So I went up to talk to him, and he said, remind me what you're doing again, what you're writing about. And I said, well, I'm trying to write a history of the CIA, you know, from 1947 up to the present day. And he looked at me, not unkindly, but skeptically, and said, and will this be a 12-volume study?

• 2:00:42Speaker 06

  I wish I knew more about what the CIA had been up to in Syria.

• 2:00:51Speaker 06

  Very short script in the book. I mean, I know people who were there after the Arab Spring I'm talking about.

• 2:01:03Speaker 06

  But they won't talk about it.

• 2:01:06Speaker 06

  And remember, this book is entirely on the record. I don't do blind quotes. I don't do anonymous sources.

• 2:01:15Speaker 06

  But I didn't even have anonymous sources on that one. I just, I wish I knew.

• 2:01:22Speaker 06

  And the, you know, the military stuff.

• 2:01:34Speaker 06

  And by that I mean.

• 2:01:36Jack Murphy?

  The PM stuff.

• 2:01:37Speaker 06

  The nexus between CIA and JSOC.

• 2:01:42Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:42Speaker 06

  Okay. I get a little bit of that, but not enough. Okay? And that was really key, you know, to military history and intelligence history. And I just, the only people I interviewed were CIA people. Like, I didn't sit down with Stan McChrystal or Bill McRaven, you know, because that's above my pay grade, really.

• 2:02:09Jack Murphy?

  The, uh, the Omega Team stuff is kind of the, I, I, I would point that to the case study, I, I guess, between the relationship between special operations and CIA.

• 2:02:25Speaker 06

  Okay, here's a classic reporting problem that I confronted. So there was some reporting that the CIA's Afghan shock troops.

• 2:02:39Jack Murphy?

  The CTPTs or the Zero Units.

• 2:02:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43Speaker 06

  Did many terrible things, okay, and slaughtered civilians.

• 2:02:50Speaker 08

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• 2:03:58Speaker 03

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• 2:04:07Speaker 06

  And there have been some very impressive journalistic accounts of the terrors that these people inflicted in the name of the United States. And I was reasonably persuaded that some of those accounts were sourced to the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. There are duplicitous intelligence services all over the world, but there is few more duplicitous than the Pakistani inter-services intelligence.

• 2:04:43Jack Murphy?

  It's interesting you bring up that particular instance because I had also a very frustrating experience looking into that subject. And I remember being on the phone with somebody who's a representative from one of the major humanitarian organizations that says the Zero Units were doing all kinds of war crimes.

• 2:05:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:03Jack Murphy?

  I'm like, okay. Can you give me some examples? Do you have eviden- you know, show me this evidence. You know, let's like, I'm a journalist, let's air this out. You know, can't share it with you. All right, wait, so you have evidence of war crimes that you're just sitting on? Like, what the fuck is going on?

• 2:05:17Speaker 06

  And, and, and, and, this is, this is an NGO. And, and they're protecting their source?

• 2:05:24Jack Murphy?

  They're protecting evidence of war crimes? I mean, that's what, de facto, what, what this woman was telling me on the phone.

• 2:05:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, if, if, if.

• 2:05:34Speaker 06

  I never sussed that out. Okay? And I'm not going with a single source story if the source is the guy.

• 2:05:41Jack Murphy?

  Or, or if the source is the Taliban, like, oh, yeah, they came and killed my cousin and, you know, he's buried somewhere over there.

• 2:05:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. Going back to nineteen eighty-seven. During the Soviet occupation. I, I did six tours there as a reporter. Uh, starting with the Soviet occupation.

• 2:06:01Speaker 06

  And ending with the American occupation. So I know a little bit about Afghanistan. I've spent cumulatively, maybe, I don't know, nine months on the ground there. And not embedded with anybody. Just walking around.

• 2:06:18Speaker 06

  Um.

• 2:06:24Speaker 06

  The problem that we're talking about, sourcing.

• 2:06:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:28Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:06:28Jack Murphy?

  In a war zone.

• 2:06:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:06:32Speaker 06

  Is.

• 2:06:35Speaker 06

  If not the biggest, one of the biggest problems. Uh, that, uh, was the, uh.

• 2:06:44Speaker 06

  Proximate cause of the American failure of the war in Afghanistan. The war. Twenty-year war.

• 2:06:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, big picture.

• 2:06:50Speaker 06

  Okay. So, you know, let's, uh, set the scene.

• 2:06:56Speaker 06

  Uh, you're an army colonel, uh, and, uh, you're trying to, like, walk around and make friends. You know, in a village in Kunar province. Okay? And you go down and sit down with the head men. You drink many cups of tea.

• 2:07:15Speaker 06

  And you say to the head men, through your interpreter, of course, you, you don't speak Pashto.

• 2:07:21Speaker 06

  Who are the bad guys around here?

• 2:07:25Speaker 06

  And the head man says, huh.

• 2:07:28Speaker 06

  That motherfucker over in the next valley.

• 2:07:31Speaker 11

  The Khan.

• 2:07:32Jack Murphy?

  That village over there.

• 2:07:32Speaker 06

  The Khan over in the next valley. He's a bad motherfucker. And you're the army colonel, you know, and you report this up to the J2 and said, dude over in the next valley is a bad motherfucker.

• 2:07:47Speaker 06

  Well, the Khan in this village, diming out the Khan in the next village. This is a spat. It's been going back to the 14th freaking century.

• 2:07:59Speaker 11

  Yes, the happy end of the coys. Yeah, exactly.

• 2:08:03Speaker 06

  And, and he's, he's just diming out a rival.

• 2:08:08Speaker 06

  And, you know, likely as not, the American military is going to call an airstrike in, on the Khan in the next valley.

• 2:08:16Speaker 06

  Sourcing.

• 2:08:19Speaker 06

  It's

• 2:08:21Speaker 06

  a central problem of the American experience in Afghanistan. Okay, that problem.

• 2:08:29Speaker 11

  It's also like the AQ and the Taliban learned early on the, the power of propaganda. So if, if they called war crimes, like the, the AO would get shut down and the Red Cross, the UNHCR, like they would all come in and like do their investigations. And meanwhile, all the ground that had been taken from the Taliban, the Taliban would just move back into during, during those times.

• 2:09:01Speaker 06

  You know,

• 2:09:04Speaker 06

  in, in, in the many months that I spent in Afghanistan between 1987 and 2002.

• 2:09:14Speaker 06

  You ever been there?

• 2:09:15Jack Murphy?

  Afghanistan?

• 2:09:16Speaker 06

  Yeah. Where were you?

• 2:09:18Jack Murphy?

  Mostly in Khaust.

• 2:09:26Speaker 06

  Beautiful country.

• 2:09:28Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it'd be a backpacker's haven, paradise if, uh, they could get the politics together.

• 2:09:33Speaker 11

  An outdoor sports paradise.

• 2:09:34Jack Murphy?

  Yes, skiing and all that stuff.

• 2:09:36Speaker 06

  Really beautiful country.

• 2:09:37Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:40Speaker 06

  And.

• 2:09:48Speaker 06

  We went there ostensibly for one reason, to kill Al Qaeda. Right.

• 2:10:04Speaker 06

  And the President of the United States

• 2:10:11Speaker 06

  didn't have idea one about what to do. Like, what's the next paragraph? Right. Right.

• 2:10:25Speaker 06

  And we didn't kill Al Qaeda.

• 2:10:31Speaker 06

  And one of my favorite stories in the book is how Greg Vogel,

• 2:10:38Speaker 06

  Greg "Spider" Vogel, really one of the heroic figures in this history of the CIA in the 21st century, befriends Hamid Karzai.

• 2:10:56Speaker 06

  And basically helps Hamid Karzai become the king of Afghanistan after the American invasion. And Hamid Karzai ruled for 13 years.

• 2:11:15Speaker 06

  And he fell from power a couple of months before Greg Vogel became the chief of the clandestine service of the CIA.

• 2:11:26Speaker 06

  And Hamid Karzai

• 2:11:31Speaker 06

  came to power and stayed in power because of the CIA.

• 2:11:39Speaker 06

  The CIA, he was the chosen one.

• 2:11:43Speaker 06

  Okay, he was the guy who was gonna be, uh, who could rule Afghanistan.

• 2:11:52Speaker 06

  And once he came to power,

• 2:11:57Speaker 06

  the CIA supported him

• 2:12:00Speaker 06

  with a cascade of hundred dollar bills. And the hundred dollar bills was how he ran his government. Okay? Uh, Ryan Crocker, one of the greatest diplomats, you know, America has ever seen, uh, was the first ambassador there after the Taliban fell. And Hamid Karzai would came to him and say, "Who should I appoint as governor of Ghazni province?" You know, and like,

• 2:12:33Speaker 06

  Ryan Crocker said, "Like, I had a clue," you know?

• 2:12:37Speaker 06

  But, you know, he said, "Harzai had nothing." I mean, I was in Afghanistan after the American invasion.

• 2:12:47Speaker 06

  Kabul had been destroyed, not by the Russians, not by the Americans, but by the wars between the Mujahideen that we had supported, who struggled for power after the Soviets left Afghanistan.

• 2:13:02Speaker 06

  You know, there wasn't any electricity in Kabul. There wasn't, you know, uh, uh, heat. There wasn't gas. Uh, there was, you know, people burned manure and wood for heat. There was hardly a stone upon a stone.

• 2:13:19Speaker 06

  Uh, the road in from the Bagram Air Base, it took like five hours to drive 10 miles.

• 2:13:27Speaker 06

  And that was the damage that our, you know, guys had inflicted upon each other.

• 2:13:34Speaker 06

  And so struggled for power. Harzai had nothing, except the CIA and their money. And that's how he ran his country.

• 2:13:47Speaker 06

  Huge sacks of shrink-wrapped hundred dollar bills. Good work if you can get it. Was how he ran the government, okay?

• 2:14:00Speaker 06

  He was a hero who was corrupted by power and corrupted by American.

• 2:14:05Speaker 11

  Money?

• 2:14:06Speaker 06

  Money.

• 2:14:09Speaker 06

  You know, his brother was one of the biggest heroin dealers

• 2:14:14Speaker 06

  in the country.

• 2:14:24Speaker 06

  The fall

• 2:14:28Speaker 06

  of

• 2:14:30Speaker 06

  the government to the Taliban and the failure of the American twenty year effort in Afghanistan wasn't because of Taliban, it was because of corruption. Okay, and the corruption,

• 2:14:47Speaker 06

  you know, you can put it in a picture, a postcard, there's a stack of a hundred dollar bills.

• 2:14:55Speaker 11

  But the corruption also, like, it's so relevant, I think, because Afghanistan isn't a country, it is a a group of tribes and villages that we drew a border around.

• 2:15:12Speaker 06

  No, we didn't, the Brits did.

• 2:15:13Speaker 11

  Well, when I say we, I mean Westerners. That we drew a border around and they're, you know, going out and doing like PRTs and dropping off cricket bats and cooking oil and rice to villages. Like, you see what it is. It's me, it's my family, it's my village, it's my tribe. And that, those are the priorities. And, you know, whether it's the Hazard or the, you know, the Pashtun, like, they don't, they don't identify with each other. They don't identify as a country. They will always, they will always put their tribes first.

• 2:15:57Speaker 11

  And there's a lot of animosity between the tribes. They will talk shit about each other nonstop, you know, so I think a lot of the corruption is just inherent to that tribal system that I'm gonna take care of me and mine.

• 2:16:11Speaker 06

  I gotta disagree with you.

• 2:16:12Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 2:16:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is a tribal country.

• 2:16:20Speaker 06

  Aren't we?

• 2:16:23Speaker 06

  No. Increasingly a tribal country.

• 2:16:27Speaker 06

  But, no. It is, it is a country that did not ever have the blessings of development. The British occupied Afghanistan for a long time. They never built a railroad.

• 2:16:43Speaker 06

  They never built a civil service. They left nothing in its wake. Because, you know, every time they tried to actually assert dominance, the Afghans killed them.

• 2:16:55Speaker 06

  Um, because they don't like being occupied by foreign powers. Uh, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Brits three times and the Soviets once. Sure.

• 2:17:11Speaker 06

  Uh, knocked out. Um, not by one tribe, uh, but by, uh, an antipathy toward foreign domination. Sure. Okay, of course they fought among one another. Sure. Um.

• 2:17:32Speaker 06

  The point I'm trying to make is that the failure of the American occupation in Afghanistan was very different from the failure of the American occupation of Iraq. I agree, 100%, absolutely. Um.

• 2:17:49Speaker 06

  It is, it is

• 2:17:52Speaker 06

  a story that remains to be written.

• 2:17:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I, I think maybe what Dave's getting at is that the corruption is so endemic because there aren't this governmental, federal, or social, or state provincial system, like none of those sorts of constructs that we have exist there. So it becomes like, how do these people relate to each other? And money is the common denominator, I guess.

• 2:18:17Speaker 06

  It's a long conversation and not germane to the book. Yeah.

• 2:18:21Jack Murphy?

  Maybe not.

• 2:18:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. But someday someone will write a great history of the American occupation of Afghanistan.

• 2:18:30Jack Murphy?

  So your book, coming out on the 15th, July 15th. Most people listening to this will probably already be able to go and order the book. It'll probably be out by then. The book is called The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. Tim, tell us about the victory lap. What's coming next? Three years writing this thing.

• 2:18:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, three years is a short time for a book.

• 2:18:57Speaker 11

  Well, compared to Legacy of.

• 2:18:58Speaker 06

  That took 20 years.

• 2:19:00Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:19:01Speaker 06

  Um.

• 2:19:09Speaker 06

  You know, there are times when you're writing a book.

• 2:19:16Speaker 06

  And you're staring at a blank screen.

• 2:19:20Speaker 06

  And little beads of blood are running down your forehead. And you think, my God.

• 2:19:30Speaker 06

  Will this ever be done?

• 2:19:36Speaker 06

  And

• 2:19:40Speaker 06

  when it's done, and you write the end.

• 2:19:48Speaker 06

  Then it's like, the shortest time between writing the end and the publication of the book that you can really achieve is three months. So we wrapped up this book, uh, three months ago, to try and get as much of the chaos of the Trump administration and the damage being inflicted on American intelligence, as much of that into the book as possible.

• 2:20:19Speaker 06

  We had to, I had to bring it to an end. A book needs a back cover. And here we are.

• 2:20:31Speaker 06

  You bring a book into the world, you know, it's like having a kid.

• 2:20:37Speaker 06

  You love your kid, okay?

• 2:20:42Speaker 06

  Even if it's an ugly baby, you love your kid.

• 2:20:48Speaker 06

  So.

• 2:20:52Speaker 06

  But what you really want is for people to buy the book and to read the book.

• 2:21:00Speaker 06

  There's no point in writing a book if people don't read it. So then you have to sell the book, okay? And you're writing a novel, okay? Okay, so you will confront this in the fullness of time.

• 2:21:16Speaker 06

  So the book publishing business is very odd, okay? Yes.

• 2:21:24Speaker 06

  You would think, okay, I've written a book. And you say to your publisher, you know, are you gonna advertise the book you're gonna put in? And the New York Times, you're gonna... How are you gonna sell it? And they're like, that's your job, dude. Yeah. You know, how many socials do you have? Right, that's wild.

• 2:21:50Speaker 06

  So, you know, there's no advertisements. The book publishing business is a lot like Hollywood now. The common denominator here is that nobody knows anything. Nobody knows. Yeah, yeah. If a book is gonna sell or not. Why books sell or they don't? But they all want you to have a tent pole weekend. You know what I mean by that? Go do the radio shows. Like, when the book comes out? It has to like sell a hundred million billion copies in seventy-two hours? Or you're a flop. You know, like a Hollywood opening. Right.

• 2:22:33Speaker 06

  So there are like three ways to do this.

• 2:22:39Speaker 06

  Book reviews don't sell books, shockingly.

• 2:22:43Jack Murphy?

  Blurbz don't sell books either.

• 2:22:46Speaker 06

  What is it?

• 2:22:46Jack Murphy?

  Blurbz.

• 2:22:47Speaker 06

  Blurbz don't sell books. Nobody cares about blurbz. It's like, one of the greatest books of 20th century. Yeah, really? Um, who cares? Uh, here's what sells books.

• 2:23:07Speaker 06

  Going on TV.

• 2:23:08Jack Murphy?

  I thought you were gonna say sex.

• 2:23:15Speaker 06

  There's no sex in this book, except David Petraeus.

• 2:23:21Jack Murphy?

  That's not the kind we wanna see. We don't wanna see it.

• 2:23:24Speaker 06

  Going on TV. So on Monday, when are we going on air, you and I?

• 2:23:30Jack Murphy?

  What do you, what do you think?

• 2:23:32Speaker 06

  Friday night. Beautiful. So that's gonna be the first Going on Air. Team House. Awesome. Leading the way. Always. Um, Team House leads the way. Monday night, barring, you know, world crisis, Rachel Maddow.

• 2:23:50Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:23:53Speaker 06

  Uh, Tuesday, pub date, All Things Considered. I did an interview with Mary Louise Kelly, uh, this morning. And Mary Louise Kelly, you know her, beautiful voice, NPR anchor of All Things Considered, covered intelligence for 15 years. So she knows whereof she speaks.

• 2:24:17Jack Murphy?

  So when are they having you on Fox and Friends?

• 2:24:22Jack Murphy?

  I think you're right up their alley, Tim.

• 2:24:26Speaker 06

  Haven't got a booking.

• 2:24:29Speaker 06

  For Fox and Friends. Uh, I'll, I, I, you know, wherever you are, uh, I'm, I'm available. Um, I would totally do that. Um, but, uh, uh, uh, I'm waiting for the phone to ring.

• 2:24:49Speaker 06

  But you know, I'm not an ideologue. I mean, I may come off as, you know, an old hippie. Or, or, you know, an anarchist, but I'm not. Well, I am an old hippie, but I, I, I, I love what I write about. I'm, I'm fascinated by CIA and intelligence. The people I interviewed for this book are amazing people. And I want readers to understand the incredible importance of having good intelligence. Okay?

• 2:25:33Speaker 06

  When intelligence succeeds, it, it saves lives. Okay? And when intelligence fails, people die.

• 2:25:43Jack Murphy?

  So I read the book. I can definitely recommend it. I can blurb your book, so to speak, for whatever that's worth. I think it's definitely worth your time. I think people who watch this show will definitely enjoy reading this. Final thing, Tim, tell people where they can go to find the book. Where should they go and buy it?

• 2:26:05Speaker 06

  In a bookstore. Preferably in a bookstore. I'm not a big fan of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, but that's one. The alternative is an outfit called bookshop.org. Okay? I actually have a social media account.

• 2:26:30Jack Murphy?

  Oh, wow. You're coming, coming around.

• 2:26:33Speaker 06

  Dude, I'm like-

• 2:26:33Jack Murphy?

  You're going places.

• 2:26:34Speaker 06

  Cutting edge.

• 2:26:35Jack Murphy?

  Did your kid show you how to set that up?

• 2:26:36Speaker 06

  Yes. It's on Blue Sky.

• 2:26:42Speaker 06

  Are you and, you know, and your people familiar with Blue Sky? Some of them certainly. Okay. I don't do X.

• 2:26:52Speaker 08

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYEPTI, eptinezumab, JJMR, an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults.

• 2:27:04Speaker 09

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• 2:27:26Speaker 08

  Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vyepd.com.

• 2:27:36Speaker 12

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• 2:28:01Speaker 03

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• 2:28:10Speaker 06

  I don't do X. It's a toxic waste of them. Yeah, I popped smoke five, six months ago. Yeah. Nope. Not missing it. Not a fan of me line.

• 2:28:24Speaker 06

  But yeah, there are bookshops all over the world. There's a software called bookshop.org, which is an alternative. And if you can find me on Blue Sky,

• 2:28:36Speaker 06

  under my name, there are various buttons you can push to purchase the book directly from the publisher, Harper Collins. But like, if you live in America, you're generally within, you know, driving distance of a bookstore. So go to your friendly local bookstore and buy it. If you are in New York...

• 2:29:00Speaker 06

  We're launching the book at a place called Powerhouse in Dumbo, 26 Adams Street on Monday night at 6:00 PM. If you're in DC, we're launching the book at Politics and Prose, great bookstore, Thursday, July 17th at 7:00 PM. My interview with Luchador is the great intelligence reporter Donna Priest of the Washington Post, who first broke the secret prison story. But like, I have a bumper sticker on my car from a bookshop in Seattle.

• 2:29:45Speaker 06

  And the bumper sticker has a very simple and direct message. Read a fucking book. Like, you may not trust the mainstream media. I mean, I worked for 16 years at the New York Times. I like the New York Times. But a book, okay, a book, this is actual information. It's all on the record, okay? There are no anonymous sources. There's no like spin, right?

• 2:30:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, and I mean-

• 2:30:21Speaker 06

  And it's not ideological. It's not some fucking liberal saying intelligence is bad. I hate America.

• 2:30:29Jack Murphy?

  I'm a very big advocate of literacy and that we need more literacy and that people need to spend time by themselves, reading and just thinking and reflecting and getting the fuck off of the internet.

• 2:30:46Speaker 06

  You know, the kids talk about brain rot.

• 2:30:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:50Speaker 06

  You know, and if you spend all your time looking at your phone.

• 2:30:54Speaker 11

  It's depressing.

• 2:30:55Speaker 06

  It's like you can hear a brain cell popping every second. You don't want that to happen. This is not germane to our discussion, but you know, if you're within the sound of my voice, I think Team House is a remarkable operation that brings voices, not mine, I'm kind of an outlier, but people who have actually lived the life, okay, and worked in garden spots like Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq and, you know,

• 2:31:34Speaker 06

  know about

• 2:31:38Speaker 06

  the

• 2:31:40Speaker 06

  marvels and the dangers of trying to execute American foreign policy in the world.

• 2:31:47Speaker 11

  We appreciate it. Totally agree, Tim. Yes, we appreciate it. Like, you know, we just want to give good people time to tell their story and, you know, in cases like you and Pat O'Donnell and, you know, people who are more, you know, who haven't necessarily like been in government service, but, you know, write about it and things like that. Like, we love you guys.

• 2:32:12Speaker 06

  All right, can I tell one last story before we wrap?

• 2:32:14Speaker 11

  Yes, please.

• 2:32:14Speaker 06

  Or are we way over?

• 2:32:15Speaker 11

  No, no, no. One last story.

• 2:32:16Speaker 06

  One last story.

• 2:32:20Speaker 06

  So people sometimes ask me,

• 2:32:25Speaker 06

  how did you get into this line of work covering the CIA?

• 2:32:34Speaker 06

  I was 30 years old.

• 2:32:38Speaker 06

  39 years ago.

• 2:32:42Speaker 06

  And I decided I wanted to go to Afghanistan

• 2:32:48Speaker 06

  because I had read about a not terribly secret but enormous CIA covert operation

• 2:32:56Speaker 06

  to arm the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan.

• 2:33:05Speaker 06

  And

• 2:33:08Speaker 06

  Again, a not-secret covert aspect of this operation was that the decision had been made to introduce the American anti-aircraft weapon, Stinger, the Stinger, shoulder-fired missile into the Afghan battlefront to smuggle it over the Khyber Pass into the hands of the Mujahideen.

• 2:33:33Speaker 06

  I thought, "That's a great story, man." So I called up the CIA

• 2:33:40Speaker 06

  and their Office of Public Affairs, which is a thing,

• 2:33:45Speaker 06

  despite its oxymoronic

• 2:33:49Speaker 06

  aspect. And I said to the CIA Public Affairs Officer, whose name is Pete Ernest,

• 2:33:58Speaker 06

  "Hey, I'm gonna go to Afghanistan to write about this secret operation that you people are running to smuggle the Stinger into the hands of the Mujahideen. And I understand you people sometimes do country briefings for reporters who are off to weird places. How about it?" And he said, "Absolutely not."

• 2:34:22Speaker 06

  So off I went to Afghanistan,

• 2:34:28Speaker 06

  staging for a month in Peshawar and then spending seven weeks running with the Muj, mostly in Kunar Province. Saw a Stinger fired in anger, which was my goal. The Stinger operator of the Muj had not been well-trained and, you know, he misfired.

• 2:34:48Speaker 06

  Fifty thousand dollars' worth of technology, courts strewn off in the sky. And I came back alive with a beard that I had grown for camo.

• 2:35:03Speaker 06

  And I'd been back at my desk, at my newspaper in Washington, for more than a day when the phone rang. Guess who?

• 2:35:12Speaker 11

  The CIA.

• 2:35:13Speaker 06

  "It was my new best friend at the CIA, Peter and Tim," he said. "How are ya?" And I said, "Great." And I said, "How was your trip?" And I said, "It was amazing." And he said, "How would you like to come in for that briefing?"

• 2:35:29Speaker 06

  And I said, "I'd be delighted." Have you ever been to CIA headquarters?

• 2:35:33Speaker 11

  No.

• 2:35:36Speaker 06

  So, you know, it's seven miles outside of Washington, in the woods of Langley, Virginia. And, um, so I make the drive, parked in the parking lot, and I walk into the old headquarters building. And, you know, it's the cathedral that Allen Dulles built for himself, you know, the great white father of the CIA. Onyx marble, it's quite elegant. And on the left-hand wall, in bowerleaf letters about this high, the stars, the memorial stars are off to your right, but on the left-hand wall, in big bowerleaf letters set into the wall, is John 8:32, Gospel of John.

• 2:36:19Speaker 06

  "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free." And I looked at that, and like Jeff Lebowski, I said, "That's fucking interesting." And I went up to the sixth floor, and there were four CIA analysts there to meet me. And I had a lot of questions for them, but they only had one question for me, which is, "What's it like in Afghanistan?" They didn't ask you if the missile worked or not? These were purportedly, oh, I told them that it failed.

• 2:37:01Speaker 06

  These were purportedly, you know, four top CIA analysts, and they were like, "What's it like over there?" And I realized, they had never been to Afghanistan. They'd never been within a country mile of Afghanistan. And so I went back down the elevator, and then I looked over my, now my right-hand shoulder at the Gospel of John, and I said, "You know what? I believe I have just found my life's calling. I'm gonna cover these people. Like, you know, as a cub reporter, I cover the cops and the courts. I'm gonna cover them, you know, and know the truth."

• 2:37:37Speaker 06

  And that was thirty-eight years ago. And here I am today.

• 2:37:44Jack Murphy?

  And still trying to pry secrets out.

• 2:37:46Speaker 06

  Still trying to figure out what the hell are these people up to?

• 2:37:53Jack Murphy?

  Well, thank you, Tim. There will be links down in the description of this podcast where you can go and find Tim and his books, including the new one. Again, it's The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century. Hope you guys will go and check it out. And thank you for joining us tonight. We'll see all of you guys next time.

• 2:38:12Jack Murphy?

  Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show if you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this. You can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com/the team house. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of The Team House ad-free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast, Eyes On, with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, Mick Mulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad-free. And you support the channel and the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members are literally what has helped this company, this small business survive, especially during our early years.

• 2:38:57Jack Murphy?

  And you are what continues to help this thing going even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's going to be a link down in the description to that Patreon page. And there is also going to be a link to our new merch shop. So if you guys want to go and get some Team House merchandise, we got stickers. And we also have patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month, we will mail you this patch.

• 2:39:28Speaker 08

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYAPT. Eptinezumab J.J.M.R. An IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults.

• 2:39:39Speaker 09

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• 2:40:42Jack Murphy?

  ...as well. So we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop. And additional...

• 2:40:50Speaker 08

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYAPT. Eptinezumab J.J.M.R. An IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults.

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• 2:42:04Jack Murphy?

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• 2:42:11Speaker 08

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• 2:42:45Speaker 08

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• 2:43:26Jack Murphy?

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• 2:43:34Speaker 08

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYAPT. Eptinezumab J.J.M.R. An IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults.

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• 2:44:08Speaker 08

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• 2:47:39Speaker 08

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• 2:47:50Speaker 09

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• 2:48:13Speaker 08

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  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 2:50:29Speaker 01

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see Zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair,

• 2:51:13Speaker 01

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 2:51:16Speaker 10

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