S1E11 Have Human Spies Become Obsolete?

THE BLURB: In this episode, John chats with former CIA officer turned wildly successful novelist BARRY EISLER about spying and how it lends itself to storytelling. After a three year stint as a covert officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, Barry worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earned a black belt at the Kodokan Judo Institute and began writing great, award-winning thrillers including the #1 bestsellers Livia Lone, The Night Trade, and The Killer Collective. John and Barry discuss the current state of spies, spying and spycraft - and whether it might be over for straight humint and the human spies who cultivate it. SHOW NOTES For more information about Barry Eisler, please visit barryeisler.com https://barryeisler.com/. For more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:06Speaker 02

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 1:18John Kiriakou?

  Hi, I'm John Kurriakas. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. Before we introduce you to our guest today, former CIA officer and multi-time bestselling author Barry Eisler, I want to thank you, as always, from storyteller to storytelly for listening. And if you would be so kind as to like, review, share, or comment on the podcast wherever you're catching us, that would really help us reach the widest possible audience. For podcasts and podcasters, that's the mission. Thanks for helping us succeed. Barry Eisler is hardly the first former intelligence officer to quit storytelling as a spy in favor of storytelling as a pure storyteller. You know, for fun and profit.

• 2:01John Kiriakou?

  But few former intelligence officers have succeeded in the way that Barry has. As you'll hear, since 2003, when he quit working for The Man and went full-time as a creative, Barry has come to view the secret world quite differently than he did when he worked inside it, as part of it. But the secret world can be incredibly constraining to a person with ideas and ambition. Barry's ideas and ambition have led to three very successful book series. Not books, book series. John Raine launched Barry into the fiction stratosphere. Then he did the Ben Treven series, and most recently, a series about a Seattle detective named Olivia Loane.

• 2:42John Kiriakou?

  Barry's secret sauce: he weaves a collection of great characters together into a compelling story, and the writing is sublime. Spies and writing, writing and spies, there is simply a literary quality to espionage. It's all that gray matter navigating all that gray territory. And one writes a lot as a spy. Writing is just part of the job. I don't think I can accurately count all the words I typed out over the years that were just me doing my job. So when you're done spying, it just seems natural to take all those stories and the storytelling skills you came in with, plus the ones you acquired, and do something productive, and maybe even lucrative with it.

• 3:25John Kiriakou?

  As with every spy, it starts with how that spy and spying found each other.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  I guess you could describe it as a wild hair. I was at Cornell Law School, it would have been 1988, my second year of law school. And I was really interested in the world and realizing I didn't much want to be a lawyer. And I thought, what can I do with this interest I have in geopolitics and also an interest in really weird stuff, which I sometimes refer to as forbidden knowledge, all the stuff the government wants only a select few people to know? And I thought, how about the CIA? And I liked espionage novels, Le Carre, read all the Ian Fleming books when I was in high school, that kind of stuff. So I went to the Cornell Career Center and picked up a brochure, this is before the internet. It's hard to imagine how anything got done in these days, but they had a brochure right

• 4:15Speaker 04

  next to General Electric and all the rest. Called the eight hundred number and that's how the ball got rolling. That's that was my route to the secret world, as John McCurry liked to call it.

• 4:26John Kiriakou?

  So you went in because because of the appeal of the actual act of espionage, developing, you know, spotting, assessing, developing and recruiting an agent. You were more interested in operations than in analysis or the science and technology.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  For sure, it was operations that blew my hair back. But it's also it's an interesting question. And I think, John, you and I have talked about this before, and it comes up often when when I talk in podcasts or whatever about the CIA. It's like, well, why, why did you do it? Was it ideology, love of country? It's a lot of different things. And I would love to hear the way you looked about the way you looked at this originally and your progression too. But I'll just say briefly this. In my experience, this is over thirty years ago. It might not be representative anymore. Most of the people, most of my classmates, anyway, were politically, they swung more left than right, I would say. But the more fundamental ideology that I encountered and that I shared was this belief

• 5:27Speaker 04

  that America was a force for good in the world and that when we did things that might be unsavory, whether they were overt things like a war or covert things like, well, the CIA, it was for a noble purpose that redeemed whatever it might have been. And that America was a city on a hill and a light unto nations and the last great hope of mankind and the American exceptionalism and all that kind of stuff. And I think you have to you have to buy into that ideology if you're going to be successful at the CIA. And whether you swing toward the Republican wing of the party, the Democrat wing of the Democrat wing of the party, it doesn't really matter compared to that more fundamental, foundational belief in American goodness and American exceptionalism.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  What was it like for you?

• 6:14John Kiriakou?

  Yeah, for me, it was just about the same thing. I I only considered public service. My grandparents were all immigrants. And on my dad's side of the family, my my grandparents were so grateful.

• 6:28John Kiriakou?

  That they were allowed not just to come into the country, but to become Americans.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:35John Kiriakou?

  That my grandfather kept a framed picture of Franklin Roosevelt on the TV until the day he died. Nineteen seventy-eight, we still had that picture of Roosevelt on the top of the TV. And he always instilled in us this notion that we needed to pay the country back because it had given so much to us. But I have to agree with you completely with regard to

• 7:00John Kiriakou?

  overlooking or even justifying

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:05John Kiriakou?

  Um, some of the more unsavory things that the country may have done. I sneak, I think back to the invasion of Grenada, for example, which took place in nineteen eighty-three when we were in college.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:18John Kiriakou?

  And I remember thinking, well, we had to rescue those American medical students. So this was a noble thing.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  Just whatever the government said. I mean, it must be true.

• 7:28John Kiriakou?

  Exactly. You know, watching the Falklands War back in nineteen eighty-one, I guess.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Argentina was bad and

• 7:35John Kiriakou?

  Yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Come on, what are you guys doing?

• 7:36John Kiriakou?

  Fascist dictatorship. Exactly. Exactly. And the Brits were freedom-loving democrats with a small d. And so, sure, I, I bought the whole mainstream government explanation of all these things.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:48John Kiriakou?

  In their entirety. I, the, the bottom line is I really believed we were the good guys.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 7:55John Kiriakou?

  And I wanted to be a part of that.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  You wouldn't be attracted to work at the CIA. You probably would have a hard time getting through the whole clearance process, the background check, everything. If you didn't honestly believe that America was fundamentally a force for good in the world.

• 8:12John Kiriakou?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  And yeah, so it sounds like you and I, I mean, I'm not at all surprised. Like I said, everybody I knew just believed this stuff. We believed that the US government was fundamentally honest with, with its own people, with, meaning if you're in CIA or a soldier or anything like that, a federal employee, and fundamentally honest with the citizenry. Um, I mean, I look back at this and it's almost embarrassing. But, you know, and especially, by the way, for anyone who's listening.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  It's interesting to me how quickly so many people react to this kind of criticism of the US government along the lines of like, why do you hate your country, you know, that kind of stuff. And I don't hate my country, I love my country. This is, I don't actually think America is the best country in the world or something. Why, I don't have a basis for thinking that. I've lived in exactly one other country out of about 180. It was Japan, and it was great. I really had a terrific experience there. But this notion of, I know what is the best country in the world, it just so happens to be the one I was born and raised in, and I'm a citizen of. And by the way, I haven't lived anywhere else, or I don't even have a passport. My attitude is, come on, you don't have a basis for saying it's the best. It'd be a little like if you love your parents, which, if you're lucky, you will have parents

• 9:26Speaker 04

  who deserved your love and respect and gratitude. I certainly did. But it wouldn't occur to me to say, oh, I had the best parents. Those are the best parents in the history of parents. That would be childish at best. So I certainly don't hate America, but I do try very hard to be dispassionate about the actions, the role, the effect of the US government in the world. I try to, I try to screen out my love of country, because it's a distortion in my ability to perceive the behavior, the effect, et cetera, of my own country as accurately as I'm able. That's all. But with a lot of people, when, when you're looking at your own country dispassionately, they don't see that you're making that effort.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Instead, they think, well, you don't love it, well, you must hate it. And I'm like, no, it doesn't have to be either one.

• 10:15John Kiriakou?

  No.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  Um, I'm trying to get, I'm trying not to have my feelings for my own country distort the accuracy of my view of the country, which I think is a worthwhile thing.

• 10:24John Kiriakou?

  Once you got into the CIA and you, you saw the mechanics of recruiting spies to steal secrets up close, did that have an impact on your worldview? Or, or did that maybe make you even more patriotic?

• 10:37Speaker 04

  I wish I could say that, oh, I had a kind of crisis of conscience when I saw the dirty methods that we had to employ, that kind of thing. It wasn't like that. To the extent I had any kind of crisis, it was in realizing that this organization that in my, admittedly, in my naivete, I imagined would be, um... A fast-acting nimble place to work, full of really smart, capable people, exceptional people, etc. It really, that was not my experience. I'm not trying to put anybody down. Anyone who's had a different experience, then that's great. But for me, my standard way of expressing my, the understanding I developed of the CIA was that it's like the post office but with spies.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  It's a very big federal bureaucracy. It's slow, it's sclerotic. Again, not trying to put down the post office, but I think it's fair to say that when you go to the post office because you got a package, you know, you can't just put it in a mailbox, your feeling is like, eh, it might be here for a while because it's not the most efficient organization in the world. Yeah, probably because it's underfunded, but whatever. And the CIA, in my experience, was like that. And when I look back at the course, the progression of my own life and my career, I started with the US government and then I, then I left the government, worked for a 600 attorney law firm, New York-based international law firm, so still a pretty big employer. Then I left the law firm to join a four-person startup, and it was a client of mine, and

• 12:05Speaker 04

  then finally I got published and I finally was able to work for myself. So this progression can't just be a coincidence. I'm a pretty entrepreneurial guy. I like to move fast, much more comfortable as a gorilla than I am in a conventional army. And at the time, 25 years old, or 26, or whatever I was, the CIA was a big, conventional, highly structured army, and that just was not a good fit for me. But so when I left, it wasn't because I, I thought, it's not because I had some sort of political awakening or anything, that all came much later. It was more just frustration with the pace of the place and how I was, what I was able to get that I wanted and what I wasn't able to get or what I had to wait for. It was just that I just couldn't take it anymore.

• 12:47John Kiriakou?

  You know, it's funny that you say that because I said exactly the same thing just a couple of days ago. I, I remember having to go to London to work a joint operation with MI6, and my boss said to me before I left, "Oh, I so envy you. I always loved MI6 because they don't have a bureaucracy like we do. If they want to go after someone, if they want to go after a group, they just do it." For us, we have to have layer after layer of approvals, and then you have to notify Congress. "Our bureaucracy is so, is so heavy," he said, "that half the time we just can't get things done." And I found that to be the case as well.

• 13:27John Kiriakou?

  So your experience, I think, was like most people who join the CIA, they're patriots. Yeah. They love their country. And then they don't make a career of the CIA. There isn't normally this, this revelation that suddenly changes their minds. It's just not, it's not a fit. It is more bureaucratic than people realize. You know, that's why when, when people attribute these superhuman powers to the CIA, I have to laugh. Yeah. Because it, it really is just a lumbering, heavy, slow government bureaucracy. Yeah.

• 14:09John Kiriakou?

  Sure, there are a lot of people, there are a lot of not so smart, I mean, a lot of smart people. There are a lot of not so smart people. I'll give you an example. I was working in the counterterrorism center. And one of the managers pulled me aside and said, hey, can you go to Beirut? And I said, yeah, why don't you ask Jimmy to go to Beirut? He covers Beirut. Right. And he says, no, Jimmy beat his wife. You can't go. Because if you are accused, not even convicted, if you're accused of beating your wife, you're not allowed to carry a gun. And you can't work in Beirut without carrying a gun. I remember getting ready to go on an operation in Islamabad. And one of the, the officers that I dealt with, you know, normally he was in another branch in the embassy, but, Yeah. but he would frequently help us on our, on our counterterrorism raids.

• 14:55John Kiriakou?

  Where's Chris? Oh, Chris was psychovacked. Psychovacked? Yeah, he went nuts. We had to put him on a plane, send him home. I was like, oh, okay. Well, Chris went nuts. So now we're down a man. Jesus. And you know, you don't realize the pressure that comes with a job like this. Yeah. You know, it, it, on the one hand, you think, well, you know, I work in this big bureaucracy. I get in the car, I drive to the office, I sit in a cubicle for eight hours and then I get in the car and drive home. We wish.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:24John Kiriakou?

  We wish it was that easy.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:26John Kiriakou?

  So as as you have entered the agency, now you're a young officer, as you said, you're in your mid twenties like we all were.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:34John Kiriakou?

  What were those initial months and years like? Did your feelings about the agency or your feelings about the work or even your your outlook on the world? Did they change in any way?

• 15:45Speaker 04

  No, they really didn't that much. And again, it's not something I'm proud of. I'm just being honest. It's funny. I think in some ways it was a little easier for me at at that time in my life. Because I just didn't have that much imagination. And it's nothing to be proud of, but again, I'm just trying to be accurate. There are various things in my life I look back on and I said, and I think to myself like, how could you not have seen that or spotted it or whatever? But if I didn't, I didn't. Uh, you know, they say when the student is ready, the teacher appears and I just wasn't ready for the teacher yet. Aside from what I would describe as the bureaucratic aspects, I made some good friends there who I'm still very close with. Couple of guys who went on to prominent careers, you know, thirty year, fifteen or thirty year careers. And we're still in touch, love them. So a lot of it was fun.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  I mean, I have to tell you, like the farm, the special operations training course, the field training. Court, the field tradecraft course. That was the most fun that to this day I've ever been paid to have. It was just ridiculous. And so I just didn't really think that much about it. I'm like. Oh, they're uh, they're paying me to run around the woods and blow off exotic weapons and learn how to make improvised explosive. I'm like, yeah, whatever, you know, it was fun. And I didn't really think that much about how it all fit in to the bigger picture, what I was really serving. And I think um, there are a lot of lessons in this regard for anyone who ever wonders like, well, you know, why would someone have ever joined the KGB? Or why would you want to be part of the North Korean security services or whatever?

• 17:14Speaker 04

  Not comparing, uh, except in a limited way. Say the CIA with one of these foreign uh, intelligence or security services. But. All you need is a young guy without a lot of imagination or critical judgment about the role of his country, his government in the world, that kind of thing. And you're looking for some adventure and a decent, stable paycheck or whatever. And that's about as much as it takes. I don't think it's more than that. Again, not proud of this, but if I'd been Russian, why wouldn't I have joined the equivalent? I'd be at least as heavily, probably not as heavily propagandized if I'd grown up in the USSR and read Pravda every day, at least in USSR, they knew Pravda was bullshit. In America, we don't realize the propaganda is propaganda. So why wouldn't I?

• 17:58Speaker 04

  It's just, um, people think like, well, I would, I would never join one of those foreign intelligence organizations, but this noble one, which just happens to be my own, I'll join that. Uh, anyway, so that's, that's about as much as it was to me. It really wasn't until later. And very briefly, I'll tell you what it was. It was my encounter with what was at the time called the blogosphere around, probably maybe 2007 or so. I had, up until then, a steady diet of establishment media, not television. I never got my news or information from television, but, but the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, The Economist, the Far East Economic Review, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  I read all this stuff obsessively and I thought I was getting a really varied information diet, but I, I was getting a lot of information, but I was not getting a variety of viewpoints. These are all the same, quite American, America-centric viewpoint that I was mainlining. And it wasn't until I encountered the blogosphere, as I say, around 2007, I guess it would have been, which was essentially talking back to establishment media that, that was an incredibly eye-opening experience for me, uh, that made me just realize this stuff that I was taking for granted as some sort of oracle of Delphi, Ten Commandments, objective truth, um, view of the world was heavily distorted and needed a corrective.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  And that, to the extent I would describe myself as having any sort of political awakening, it wasn't the CIA. It was quite a few years after, actually.

• 19:28John Kiriakou?

  I remember being in the CIA, I'm going to say 12 years or so, and realizing that people and offices for which I had had immense respect as a younger man in my twenties.

• 19:46John Kiriakou?

  People really didn't know what the heck they were talking about. We would go to meetings at the White House. And they would say stupid, like patently stupid things like, when we cross that border into Iraq tomorrow, the Iraqi people are gonna throw flowers at us. And I thought to myself, have you never read history? Do you know nothing about the Middle East? And I said something to my boss, who was the deputy director at the time of the CIA. And he said, no. They don't read history.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:20John Kiriakou?

  And they don't know what they're talking about.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that knowledge of history might interfere with their fantasies. If you don't understand humans, then you'll never understand geopolitics. And I'm not saying that humans are the only factor, but they're the foundational factor. There's systems, but systems are created by humans of humans. You have to have some baseline, accurate understanding of human nature. And the reason, I think, to study history, to learn other languages and live in other cultures, is because that's the best way to see the patterns that will reveal the fundamentals of human nature. So this notion that another culture that's primarily governed by another religion, they speak another language, they have a completely different history and frame of reference,

• 21:08Speaker 04

  that they're going to welcome foreigners, soldiers, entering their country, overthrowing their government, occupying them, providing all the kind of security, political stability, that sort of thing. It's, it's so wrong that, I think the kindest thing you could say about it is that it's neurotic. It's, it's a massive psychological projection of what you want to believe, the way, about what you believe about yourself, you're now projecting that onto other people. Do not see you the way you see yourself. And if you know a little bit of history, if you've ever lived abroad, then you'll see that actually, people don't really like it when foreign, strange-looking, strange-sounding guys with guns

• 21:51Speaker 04

  are in my country telling me what to do. It doesn't go over well.

• 21:54John Kiriakou?

  Just a couple of days after the Israeli bombing of Iran, or the 12-day, what they're calling now the 12-day war, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised address to the Iranian people.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:11John Kiriakou?

  If I didn't know better, I would have thought it was AI-generated comedy.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  If you didn't know Netanyahu.

• 22:17John Kiriakou?

  But he's offering them, you know, as soon as we overthrow the Ayatollahs and we liberate you and we make you free, we're going to send 100 experts on water to your country to show you how to dig water wells properly, so you can cultivate the desert. It's like, do you, do you listen to yourself? How many times did the CIA at all make that same kind of speech? We're going to liberate this country. We're going to liberate that country or the other country. They don't want to be liberated because they know we're not liberators. We're occupiers. I remember my own mother saying, I can't believe the Iraqis are fighting us. And I said, are you

• 23:00John Kiriakou?

  kidding me, Mom? I said, they would rather live under Saddam Hussein than have to deal with foreign invaders and occupiers in their land.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  This is just a thing. Ask a cop, why, why are domestic disputes so dangerous to interfere with? A husband and wife are going at it hammer and tongs. The husband would even be beating the wife, but it's inside the house. Now, when an outside presence shows up, you can get those two people who a second ago hated each other, but the one thing they'll agree on is that this has nothing to do with you. You're hostile. You're the enemy. It's dangerous. And that's just a microcosm of all these things. And these are all people who talk, speak the same language. They look, they look the same, whatever, from the same city. Multiply all the differences, doubts and suspicions. So these days, as you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, I make my living writing fiction, mostly novels, some short stories, some screenplays.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  And I learned a technique from a guy who, who writes and speaks a lot on the craft of storytelling. His name is Robert McKee. Really smart, insightful guy. I've learned a ton from him. And he, he has this exercise to help people understand their characters. He says, if you're trying to get in the heads, as you should be, of your characters, you don't ask, what would I do? And you don't ask, what would the character do? You ask, what would I do if I were this character? It's a hard question to ask. It's got to, you have to project out the empathy you feel is based on your own experience in the world, but, but then place it inside someone else's worldview.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  But if you can get that alchemy, you can really get a good understanding of what goes on in someone else's head, their worldview, their mind, their experience. And the paucity of this exercise by our US foreign policy establishment, or the blob, or whatever you want to call it, is jaw-dropping to me. So, as just one quick example, NATO expansion over the, I call it metastasis, but I'm happy to use a more neutral term like expansion, or enlargement, or whatever people prefer. But the numbers don't lie. At the end of the Cold War, NATO was, I think, 15 member countries, and now it's, I think, 32 or 34, following Finland and Sweden. So more than doubled in size, and it didn't just absorb new countries, it actually flipped

• 25:20Speaker 04

  the entire other team, the Warsaw Pact, and many of the former Soviet republics all joined NATO. So it wasn't like the other team just disbanded and went home. The other team actually joined the NATO team. It kept getting closer and closer to the borders of Russia. Russia kept saying, I mean, again and again, this is all documented, the Russian government was saying, "Stop, you're making us uncomfortable." And the response to this among the US foreign policy establishment, like Richard Haas and Michael McFaul, and these sort of solipsistic, America-centric people, is like, "This is bullshit, the Russian government's not upset, they know we're a defensive alliance, they know we have goodness in our hearts," that sort of thing.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  There's some fundamental flaws with this, this is a methodological approach. No one sees you the way you see yourself, start with that. Everything you know about yourself, all the slack you cut yourself, other people don't do that. And the farther away, maybe your spouse, maybe your family and your closest friends have a similar view of you as the one you have of yourself, but farther out than that, no, people don't see you the way you see yourself. So even if it were true, and it empirically is not true, that NATO were a purely defensive alliance, you can't ask a government on the other side of the world that's had a history of tetchy relations with America to see this so-called defensive alliance in the same way you do. So if you want to see it, if you want to see it accurately, the question is, "All right."

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Well, well, how would I see NATO expansion if I were the Russian government? Well, how did I see it when the USSR placed nuclear missiles in Cuba close to my? Oh, I didn't like that at all, did I? No, you didn't. You actually committed an act of war. You did. You called it a quarantine, but it was a naval blockade. That's a black letter act of war to stop them. That's what humans do when people on the other side of the world start encroaching, especially militarily on their own territory. By the way, we're doing it now. There was a Chinese company operating a port on the Panama Canal. The Trump administration had a freak out about it. I'm not saying the freak out is good or bad. That's not even my point.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  This was a private company that had too much influence in the minds of the American, in the mind of the American government on a critical port infrastructure close to America. And we've got, we got very irate about it. That's just what humans do. So understanding this is like, look, of course, Russia should understand that we're purely a defensive alliance because that's my understanding. That's a bit much to ask. They're not, they're telling you they don't like it and it's natural for them not to like it. You didn't like it when they did it to you. You wouldn't like it if anybody else did it to you. So don't do it. Think of them as having their own Monroe Doctrine. Okay, you have a Monroe Doctrine? They kind of have one too. Just stop what you're doing. You're going to provoke them.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  But our foreign policy establishment can't look at the world that way because we project this, um, this view we have of ourselves onto everyone else. And it excludes us from seeing other countries, cultures, other actors as accurately as we need to if we're, if we're not going to blow up the world.

• 28:30John Kiriakou?

  Barry, this kind of very intellectual assessment of the, of the state of the country and the state of the, the world was unusual in my experience in the Directorate of Operations, especially. You might get analysts sitting around a table saying, you know, hey, you know, what if? Or I talked to so and so at the White House and I think he's an idiot, something. In operations, it was more common for us to do as we were told. Or. If we were fast movers, we would have these, uh, these operational planning sessions where someone comes up with a, with an idea. Maybe it's even a far-fetched idea and you come up with plan A, plan B, plan C.

• 29:15John Kiriakou?

  Maybe even plan D, just in case things go down the toilet. What was your experience in the Director of Operations? Were, were there others who were sort of questioning the direction of foreign policy? Or some of the more strategic decisions coming out of the White House, the Pentagon?

• 29:31Speaker 04

  I didn't experience anything like that. In fairness, I was extremely junior. I mean, I, I was a career trainee and then went through, I barely even, I don't even remember now, but you, you remember that. You're like, you cycle through different desk jobs within the.

• 29:44John Kiriakou?

  CIA 101, we called it.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I don't remember that term, but, but it was just, it was actually, I thought a smart program. Uh, and then I know I did one stint with the DI, the Director of Intelligence, because the idea is, look, you should, you're gathering, you're, you're in the DO, you're gathering the intelligence and you should know how that intelligence is used, what the analysts do with it. I mean, this is just, this is smart. You have your specialty, but you should know how the whole system works. Sure, it's funny, it's true in Hollywood writing too, which is something that I've, I've dabbled in a little bit. Like, look, if you're gonna, if you're a writer, you should focus on the craft of writing, but it wouldn't hurt for you to know the way the whole production works. What do actors do? Read some books on acting. So you know how the, how does the whole system work? That'll help you. So I think they did a good job of setting up the career trainee program.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  But I just wasn't even remotely senior enough to, you know, to have meetings with policymakers, that kind of thing. I will say that when I was, when I did my, uh, rotation through the DI, I actually was at the Soviet desk. This was 1989 or 1990 and I.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  I don't want to overstate because, look, it was the DI is big and the Soviet Division was also big. And how much of a picture could I have had of all the facets of this organization? Probably not that, that big picture. But from what I saw, I wouldn't say there was a lot of outside the box thinking about what was going on in the Soviet Union and how we should deal with it. I felt it was pretty orthodox, especially in retrospect. And I'll give you one, I'll tell you just one anecdote, which was one of those things that became emblematic of like, oh, I don't know if I'm gonna, I don't know if I'm gonna have a good, satisfying time here.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  My superior at, the person I reported to at the DI tasked me with writing an analysis of the, of the new Gorbachev era Soviet Constitution. Now, I didn't speak Russian. I'd never visited the Soviet Union. I took a lot of history courses in college and read a lot of books, but that's about as much, as far as my expertise went. But, you know, I was game, 25 years old, your tax dollars at work. And I said, sure, I'll read this document, the translation, and try to share my insights for whatever they might be worth. And one of the things that struck me about the new Gorbachev era Constitution was that exactly like the Stalin era Constitution, the Gorbachev, the new Gorbachev Constitution

• 32:20Speaker 04

  guaranteed freedom of the press in Russia, in the Soviet Union. And I didn't think that the paper guarantee of freedom of the press could be worth all that much, because after all, the Soviet Constitution going back to Stalin guaranteed freedom of the press. So in my report, I said, well, the fact that this new Constitution guarantees freedom of the press itself cannot really alone mean that much. Right. Without some sort of cultural changes or other changes, political changes in the society, it's just a piece of paper with words on it. They've always had it before and it's never meant anything. And I thought, you know, that's a fair point, just kind of a common sense, logical point, even if you don't know very much, and I didn't. About the Soviet Union. Anyway, handed that into my superior and she came back with it

• 33:04Speaker 04

  a day later, whenever it was and said, "So I see you don't think that the new Gorbachev guarantee of freedom of the press is, is very important." And I said to her, what I just said to you, I was like, "Well, I'm not saying it's not important, I'm just saying that alone, you know, they've always had that before, there have to be some other, otherwise, just doesn't mean that very much by itself." And there's a pause and she's like, "But, but the constitution now guarantees freedom of the press?" And I'm like, "Huh, okay, maybe I'm not saying it clearly." I'm like, "Right, yes it does, but the old constitution also guaranteed freedom of the press, but there wasn't freedom of the press, so blah, blah, blah." And she just couldn't get it. And I, I remembered that movie, this is Spinal Tap.

• 33:40John Kiriakou?

  One of the greatest.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  The scene, the famous scene where Rob Reiner is interviewing a guy about his, and the guy who's just once goes to 11.

• 33:47John Kiriakou?

  Right.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  And he's like, "Well, it just doesn't mean it's louder. I mean, it's just like 11 gradations instead of 10, but the absolute volume might be the same, right?" And the guy keeps going, "But this one goes to 11." And it's like, you just, you just can't understand. And so that was, that was my exchange about the Gorbachev era constitution. So, so I don't know, maybe I wasn't explaining myself well, but there did seem to be a certain way of looking at the things. And at the DI, in my experience at the time, what they believed was that Glasnost and perestroika were a, a major thing. And I don't deny that they were, especially, I think in retrospect, it was quite major. But I don't think they were interested in anything that might have caused anyone to pause and say, not saying it's not major, but there must be more that's

• 34:32Speaker 04

  going on other than this document, which in this respect is the same as the old document, which meant nothing. They just didn't really want to hear all that. I think there was probably a kind of group think that was like, "Hey, no, no, no, perestroika, Glasnost, the new constitution, it's all this fresh wind blowing through the Soviet Union. We don't want to hear anything that might question that, even if it only, it's not even questioning it, it's more like, let's just find the thing that does matter. This document isn't alone it." Anyway, so that was, that was my experience of the DI, but I never really had a higher level experience dealing with policymakers.

• 35:07John Kiriakou?

  See, and that experience, as you've related it, tells me that you were perfectly suited to be a DI leader. Right? It would have been that kind of curiosity that they should have wanted in leadership positions.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Well, I like to think so. Of course, it's self-important to say so, but, um, but I do think it's clear that it's my nature to question. I don't say question everything. Some people say like, question everything. I'm like, you're not going to get anything done. Like, there have to be a few, you know, but, but I do.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over a hundred dollars off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like, offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  I, I do have a tendency, uh, that I just can't help it, even when it gets me in trouble, to just question things. Like, you know, back to NATO for a second. Uh, one of my buddies from back in the day, we were, this was about 10 years ago, we just got together when I was out east. And, and, and it's funny, like, we love each other, but geopolitically, man, we see the world very differently. And, uh, and at some point, I said to him, well, the, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact folded 20 years ago. Uh, you know, the whole NATO was founded supposedly to stop a Soviet armored thrust through the fold, a gap, and a takeover of Western Europe. There's no more Soviet Union, there's not even a Warsaw Pact. Why do we still have NATO? And it was interesting how long it

• 37:38Speaker 04

  took him to stammer out a response. Now, maybe, and, and all I mean here is, this is the difference. Maybe there's a good answer. Maybe there's an essential answer. Like Barry, you just don't see it. We need NATO now more than ever. By the way, that's another thing I always question. Everybody's always saying now it's more than ever, it's more dangerous than ever, it's more important than ever. Like, is it always true, like throughout time, everything is in fact more important or more dangerous or more whatever? Or is that just a thing that the humans keep telling us and telling themselves too? These are the sorts of things I question. Anyway, the difference between my friend and me is that I just questioned it. It wasn't, I don't treat NATO as dogma or holy writ or anything like that.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  I asked the question, what's it still doing here? I know what it was ostensibly founded for and that reason is gone. Is there a new reason? Is there something I'm missing? But my friend hadn't even thought about that. It was just like, this is NATO. It's almost like you're in a kind of church. And I do think that national security and the upper echelons of the so-called national security establishment in America, it does function a bit like a religion where there is, where there's dogma and there is apostasy. And questioning the, the role, the value of NATO, questioning whether NATO actually, its metastasis provoked, Soviet, rather Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that's apostasy, that's heresy.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Uh, it can get you in a lot of trouble. So anyway, that's, that's just me, you know? I'm always looking for an opportunity for a little questioning of dogma. And other people, I just, for whatever reason, they're not wired that way.

• 39:20John Kiriakou?

  If things were moving quickly back then, things that we had thought were set in stone were just falling apart. I remember in, in that very same time, 1990, maybe early 1991, we got a, a report.

• 39:39John Kiriakou?

  It was a CIA report that had been, of course, sanitized of, of sources and methods, and then released to the Director of Intelligence to use in their all source analysis. It was the very first time that any of us had seen a source line. That said, "An official Bulgarian service." Usually it said, um, you know, uh, an untested source, a reliable source, so this kind of source, so that kind of source. And I said, "Look at this. Look at this report. We're actually speaking to the Bulgarians." That's how quickly the world was changing.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:16John Kiriakou?

  You appreciated it at the time.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 40:19John Kiriakou?

  Do you think that leadership appreciated it? And understood what it meant?

• 40:26Speaker 04

  That is a really interesting question. Um, a few years ago, uh, I was trying to explain to my daughter, who's now 26, what it was like to live through the fall of the Soviet Union. Because I said, "Look, when I was her age and younger," I mean, I grew up. I was born in 1964, so, so I came of age at a time when the Cold War was, like, it was just, that's what the world was. There are these two rival blocks. Uh, what is there to discuss? It's never, like, nobody could imagine. I don't think, really, that the Soviet Union would one day collapse, the Warsaw Pact would collapse. I, I don't think, it, it was almost unimaginable.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  It's like what people say about, like, it's easier to imagine the, the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. I think it was like that with regard to the Soviet Union and the Cold War. So, I, I think it stands to reason that there are a lot of people who both psychologically, uh, but also institutionally were captured by the notion that this is the way it's always gonna be. Uh, my position in the hierarchy depends on this. And, uh, and so they probably had a lot of trouble getting their head around the fact that every, all your assumptions, everything you believed and that you built your career on, it's, it's just falling apart now. We're in, we're in wild times.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  All the rules that you believed in and lived by, they don't, they don't apply anymore. And unfortunately, I think...

• 42:03Speaker 04

  There may be something to the fact that people, people who believed that things couldn't really change, continued to look at Russia, even in its abject weakness, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, just couldn't let go of the fact that Russia was some sort of terrible enemy of the of the West. No matter what they said, no matter what their leadership said or believed or their behavior or anything, it's just like this mental occlusion that no, no, no, Russia is the enemy. Why?

• 42:37John Kiriakou?

  Why?

• 42:37Speaker 04

  This is another thing I always ask myself.

• 42:39John Kiriakou?

  Why do you think that was the case? Why, why, why did the, why was it so difficult for the intelligence community's leadership to apply a new situation, or what they, what they were learning about a new situation to the old way of doing business? Why couldn't they make that transition?

• 42:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, see, this is, you're asking great questions, Jonathan, which people, you should, even if you don't, even if we don't agree on the answer, or the answers, these are really important questions. And in this case, obviously, it's going to be a lot of things. For one is, we've had generations of Americans pummeled with the notion that the Soviet Union is evil and dedicated to the destruction of, of capitalism, free markets, freedom, democracy, the West. And if you pump that stuff out for long enough, it's just, it's hard for people to start seeing it differently. That's one thing. Another thing is, if you think about what Theodore White called in his book, The Paranoid Style

• 43:42Speaker 04

  in American Politics, there is a deep strain of paranoia in, in American politics. Always been the case. You can see it today, in, in full fever. But uh, but it is, one of my rubrics for understanding the behavior of people in general and the blob in particular is I call it cynical versus clinical. And it's hard to tell the difference, but I'm like, is, are they doing this knowingly? This is propaganda. Uh, the establishment needs an enemy. It's useful to point to overseas. Well, you know, you think you guys have it hard, uh, because we continue to bleed you and like you have increasingly shitty jobs and both you have to work and you still can't even afford a house and you know, medical and infrastructure and it's all getting worse

• 44:25Speaker 04

  and worse because we now have a trillion dollar military budget and all this kind of stuff. But if you think you've got it bad, well, look overseas. Now that's really bad, but at least you've got freedom, freedom, freedom. And don't you forget it, mister. That's useful. So that is what I would call cynical. But then some of it is clinical that this is the kind of stuff that got expressed in Stanley Kubrick's movie, Doctor Strange. You know, the fluoridated water, all that kind of stuff, the precious bodily fluids. There are people who just, they just, they need, they're clinically paranoid and the paranoia comes from within, but it needs to anchor itself to some ostensible external force. And here we've got Russia and the Soviet Union. So I think there's that thing

• 45:05Speaker 04

  too. Uh, and if you think of it, the American government always needs an enemy. I mean, at least since World War Two, we've just always had one. We had the Cold War, so that was the Soviet Union, but then Soviet Union went away. Well, shit, what are we going to do now? Thank God for Al Qaeda, new enemy. Then now, now we've got the threat of non-state actors. And then that for a little while, they tried a few different enemies when Al Qaeda as a brand was getting, um, was getting a little tired. And you know, people, when I used to say this, there'd be some outrage. Well, now what's happening? Petraeus and the US foreign policy establishment, Donald Trump, they're all welcoming this Al Qaeda guy like, like nothing ever happened. I mean, really, you couldn't write 1984 today. You couldn't say we've always been at war with East Asia because it wouldn't even be satire.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  So anyway, um, Al Qaeda started to get a little stale, but then thank God we had ISIS or ISIL or whatever we were calling it at the time. And then for a while, they broke out something new. They called it the Coruscant Group and that was supposed to be really bad. I think it sounded too much like Kardashian or something. So it was a brand name. It just wasn't getting any traction. So they abandoned that. And then there was a lot about China and there still is to some degree, but it's complicated because there's economic interdependence with China. And so then we just resurrected Russia, provoked them.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  Into a war that we would have started long before the Russian government ever did. You know, we wouldn't have waited until the foreign military alliance got that close. Before taking dramatic action. And so now we provoked Russia into doing exactly what we wanted, which was to to launch a war that we can use an excuse for. Yeah, I see. We told you they were evil. By the way, this isn't even, I mean, it is to some degree my own thinking, but don't take my word for it. George Kennan wrote about this in 1997 in an op ed in the New York Times. He said all this stuff. It's like you're going to provoke them into doing the thing that they don't want to do. And then you're going to say, see, we told you they're irredeemably evil. They did the thing we kept telling you that we're going. And you're going to use that as an excuse to gin up World War III. Stop the madness.

• 47:04John Kiriakou?

  He was exactly right, which is probably one of the reasons why he was pushed out of the State Department. And and marginalized despite the fact that he was probably one of the most.

• 47:18John Kiriakou?

  Or should have been one of the most celebrated thinkers on these issues, long term issues of American foreign policy.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  Of course. Well, it's not like he was the father of our whole containment policy.

• 47:29John Kiriakou?

  I know, right?

• 47:29Speaker 04

  Russian and served as America's ambassador to Sylvia Yama. What would he actually have known about any of this?

• 47:34John Kiriakou?

  Which he wrote when he was 26 years old.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  And it's incredible. It's incredible.

• 47:38John Kiriakou?

  You think intelligence gets its due from the leadership that it is supposed to serve? And the reason I ask that is because sometimes, at least in my experience, it was the opposite that was that was a truth. For example, in the run up to the Iraq war, the intelligence did not show in any way that there was any connection, no matter how remote between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And so the Bush administration, under the leadership of Dick Cheney and with his friends and underlings at the Pentagon, they just created a connection between Iraq and and Al Qaeda.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:21John Kiriakou?

  So what do you think about that? That symbiosis between the two?

• 48:28Speaker 04

  I think you just you just pointed it out yourself that.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  It's very sad. It's tragic, actually, but

• 48:38Speaker 04

  what the policymakers do with intelligence is probably primarily determined by whether the intelligence is useful to their existing designs. If it's useful, then they'll use it. They'll say, look, you can see it right here. This is the evidence in favor of the proposition. The proposition is usually that we need to go to war, or something like that. But if the intelligence doesn't support that proposition, or worse, if it contradicts it, then they'll find a way around it. They'll come up with a team B on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, for example, or they'll otherwise marginalize it. This is, it's funny, this is a specific manifestation of human behavior I've seen again and again.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  I'm seeing it, even see it every day, actually, in political, in a political context.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 50:36Speaker 04

  We don't realize this about ourselves, but we are outcome-oriented creatures. There's an outcome we psychologically or emotionally crave that we've already decided on. And then we rework everything to get ourselves to that predetermined outcome. And one of the ways, one of the things we rework is the principle we choose. Um, will it get us there? So if you don't, if you don't want to go to war, there are a lot of reasons not to. I mean, the whole history of how, how have our wars gone since World War II? Which are the successful ones really? Uh, it's, it's hard to name them. I mean, you know, you mentioned Grenada.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  You could mention these extremely small operations, which, you know, they probably didn't do very much one way or the other. But anything sizable, this has been catastrophe after catastrophe. Most recently, say in Afghanistan, 20 years, thousands of dead Americans. It's just the dead that doesn't even include the wounded, the burned, the blind, the brain damaged, the traumatized, the orphaned kids. It doesn't even include that number, not to mention all the Afghans who were killed or maimed or all this kind of stuff. 20 years to keep the Taliban out of power while we were there. And the day we left, they were right back again. It, it accomplished at best, nothing, nothing. Even Osama bin Laden, when we finally caught up with him, he was living in Pakistan at the time.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  So nothing, that's what you could say about America's wars. So if you don't want a war, it's easy to come up with lots of reasons not to. It's like, look, these things tend not to work out the way we want to. They're expensive, we're going to be, we're going to, we're consigning huge numbers of Americans and innocent people, civilians to their deaths. Let's not do it. But if you do want the war. Then there's just this smorgasbord of reasons to have it. The high-level general one, which you'll always hear the Richard Haases and the Michael McFalls. I think these guys must have had terrible childhoods. They must have been bullied. They must have had feelings of inadequacy. I don't know what, but it's always the credibility argument. You can always break that out. If we don't stop Russia in Ukraine, then China will invade Taiwan. Because that's all other countries do.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  They just look at what we're doing and they make all their strategic, the most consequential strategic calculus. Should I invade Taiwan or not? I don't know. What is America doing in Ukraine now? It's, again, the kind word would be neurotic. But you can come up with all these reasons if you want the war. If you don't like the intelligence, you question it. Who gave it the intelligence? What source, what method? Was this a triple-reviewed scientific peer, or peer-reviewed study? Oh, no, it wasn't. Oh, it was a guy. Well, yeah, but his intelligence has always been accurate before. Yeah, but you can't, past success is not a predictor of future success. So I don't know. You know, you said he's been, he's been accurate before, but can you really prove that he was accurate this time? And you just keep moving the goalposts, just changing the principle, demanding a higher and ultimately impossible burden of proof.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  And then nobody can meet that. And then you're like, oh, we better go to war. And you get the war you want. So that is a thing, I think, that goes on all the time. It's just endemic between policymakers on the one hand and intelligence professionals on the other. Why is it endemic in this field? Because it's the way we're wired as humans.

• 53:54John Kiriakou?

  And then add to that the revolving door between government and industry, between government and the think tanks.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:02John Kiriakou?

  Even government and the political parties.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 54:05John Kiriakou?

  And it just makes it worse.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. And there you get, there you get into the more cynical aspects of it. Because, yeah, I mean, when you think just the Pentagon's budget is now a trillion dollars, it's, it's mind blowing. And when you think about the structures that have been created around, within and around the military industrial complex.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  It's unfathomable. Millions of people depend on this structure for their living, for their status, their feeling of self-importance. It's funny, a thing I've been thinking about over the years is what happens when you create a distortion in a system. Initially, the rest of the system has to adapt to the distortion in some ways, but eventually, once that adaptation has happened, the distortion is now part of the system and all those adaptations will support the distortion because they've come to depend on it. I think like drug prohibition would be a good example of this. When you think about how much money is spent, how many institutions, just in terms of border,

• 55:13Speaker 04

  security, law enforcement, judiciary, how many people we have to imprison for drug offenses, you're talking about, and you get a knock-on effect in neighboring countries that get destabilized because there's so much money being made and so much military capability on the part of drug gangs, that then what do we have to do? Well, we've got to send military aid and form of men and material to these other countries. Like there is, there are fortunes being made because of this distortion. Now try getting rid of the distortion. Introducing it might have been a little tricky. Now try getting rid of it. Good luck. It's part of the whole system now.

• 55:52John Kiriakou?

  That's right. That's right. I wanted to end with your thoughts on whether we even need to have spies. You know, technology has so advanced where, you know, we're not, we're not looking to DARPA, for example, to provide the next generation of, you know, offensive technology. DARPA is working on five generations ahead of where we are today in terms of offensive technology. Some, some Americans would argue, some political leaders would argue that.

• 56:31John Kiriakou?

  That human intelligence is unreliable because it's human.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure.

• 56:35John Kiriakou?

  And that our money would be better spent at NSA, for example.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:41John Kiriakou?

  Or at the State Department, or in, in following the foreign media.

• 56:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:47John Kiriakou?

  Do you believe that there's still a role for human intelligence?

• 56:50Speaker 04

  That's a super, super interesting question. And look, if you like, you read a book like Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, you'll think, no, I mean, it's, it's worse than useless. It's actually pernicious. I mean, the CIA and the, the so-called intelligence community, that's one of those things. I'm like, why do they call it a community? It's so friendly. You know, I think of it as the intelligence apparatus, but whatever. Um,

• 57:15Speaker 04

  in general, and I did have a top secret clearance like you, so I read the cable traffic and I have some notion of, uh, you know, what, what, what's top secret? How valuable is it? I do think that we would get,

• 57:34Speaker 04

  you would have a perfectly accurate and actionable foundation for a useful approach to foreign countries without any intelligence at all, without anything top secret, without a top secret clearance, nothing.

• 57:51Speaker 04

  If you have a curious mind and a good, solid view of human nature as shaped by culture, I think you would have more than enough to conduct successful relations with other countries. So a lot of what gets produced, high level stuff, strategic stuff, I actually think is just make work at best. And it is pernicious because, because it gets used or abused by policymakers in the service of whatever policies they've already decided upon for their own reasons. So that kind of stuff, I would, I would just excise it. Tactical stuff. Is maybe different. Like if, if you wanted to know,

• 58:33Speaker 04

  how does the Pakistani government manage the command and control of its nuclear arsenal? Like if there's ever a problem there and the government falls, what's going to happen to those loose nukes? Where are they? How are they operated? I don't think it would be so bad for our policymakers to have an understanding of that kind of issue, but that doesn't really inform like, well, what should be our policy toward Pakistan? Generally, how should we conduct relations with the Pakistani government? You don't need the, the secret information for that stuff. I think it would be healthy if more policymakers realize that just because it's stamped top secret, doesn't make it more valuable. It often doesn't even make it secret. I think you're exactly right.

• 59:18John Kiriakou?

  I hope you enjoyed my chat with Barry as much as I did. And if you haven't read his excellent books, you owe it to yourself to at least sample him. The odds are you'll get hooked and you're welcome. You'll find links to Barry's Amazon page in this episode's show notes. Until next time, thanks for listening and don't forget to like, share, review, or comment on the podcast wherever you're catching us. I'm John Kiriakou.

• 59:46John Kiriakou?

  Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costar and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  This podcast, it's a Costar and Touchstone production.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

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• 1:00:57Speaker 01

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