The FBI's Former Spy Catcher | Holden Triplett (throwback episode)

Original airdate- 11/2/22 Holden Triplett is a national security and intelligence expert with extensive experience advising government and business. He spent nearly 15 years in the FBI, later serving as the FBI Faculty Chair at the National Intelligence University, teaching counterintelligence, national security law, and Chinese intelligence/information warfare. In 2017, he was Director for Counterintelligence at the National Security Council, leading U. S. counterintelligence policy and drafting directives and legislation to protect the government and private sector. Overseas, he was the FBI’s senior official in China (2014–2017) and held posts in Russia and Saudi Arabia. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching Chinese Intelligence, Security, and Influence. Find Holden here: 👇 https://trenchcoatadvisors.com Support the show and get ad free episodes here: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:15Jack Murphy?

  Hey, guys. Welcome to episode 172 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, and our guest today on this Wednesday episode is Holden Triplet. Holden is a former FBI counterintelligence agent. He served in here in New York. He served in Moscow, Beijing, Washington DC, did a year up at the White House with the National Security Council, real depth of experience, and also working eyeball to eyeball with the Russian FSB and the Chinese state, what was it, State Public Security?

• 1:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, the MPS, Minister of Public Security.

• 1:56Jack Murphy?

  So, yeah, Holden, I mean, I really appreciate you coming into the studio and doing this interview with us.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 2:03Jack Murphy?

  And I think, you know, I was telling you before the show, we've interviewed a number of counterintelligence people who come from various perspectives.

• 2:10Jack Murphy?

  But I think yours is very unique and contemporary. So I'm very interested to hear from someone like you who's an insider, especially about like the culture of these institutions, these foreign intelligence institutions that we have various types of interactions with, not all of them so pleasant.

• 2:31Jack Murphy?

  As opposed to, you know, what I can do is speculate and I can tell people what I read in the newspaper, but you actually lived it, so I'm excited to hear about it.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I'm happy to talk about it. It was really fortunate to have that experience and so I was happy to share it.

• 2:45Jack Murphy?

  So most of our shows, we start off asking our guests sort of about, you know, your upbringing and, you know, what your path was into federal service in your case. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what that journey was like on your end?

• 2:58Speaker 04

  Sure. So funny enough, I mean, my dad was actually in the FBI for 30 years, although I never considered going into federal service. It was kind of his thing. He did it. So I was going to go in a totally different direction. Although I will say, we grew up with, he came in like 68 until 99. So it was during the Hoover era and we had a lot of Hoover pictures all over our house. J. Edgar Hoover pictures. And I actually thought the guy was my grandfather because my grandfather had passed away before I was born. So for our first couple of years, I always thought they were like, grand, it was my grandfather. And so I'm sure I'll have a psychiatrist unpack that at some point. Help me through some things. But anyway, so maybe it was foreordained where I was going to end up at the end of the day.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  But I was actually in law school at Berkeley during 9/11. And, you know, as a lot of people felt that was sort of the calling of my generation, like I had to participate, I needed to be a part of it. And, you know, there were so many things, protect our country. So, I mean, the joke I make is I traded in my Birkenstocks for a Glock and went on my way.

• 4:04Jack Murphy?

  I was going to say, not too many FBI agents come out of Berkeley do that.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so I'm, for a while I was the only one. And the way I know this is, the head of alumni in recruiting at Berkeley Law School, he would always hit me up with people who are interested in FBI. He's like, hey, I'm sorry, hold on, I keep calling you. He's like, but you're the only one. There's no one else who went to Berkeley who's now in the FBI. I think there are a couple now, but anyway, back in, back in those days, there weren't that many. So it's not a typical trajectory.

• 4:35Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  But I will say, you know, a number of my friends went into federal service on the kind of prosecutor side from Berkeley, so it just tends to be a different pathway.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  Did he give you statistics of how many go into the MSP?

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly right. A lot of, yeah, going into, going overseas in China. And I will say there is a fairly leftist contingent. I mean, you know, at Berkeley, it fits the stereotype in some ways. But there's also, there are some fairly middle of the road and even some people who are kind of, you know, on the, on the right side of things there too. So, but anyway, it was an exciting time. But anyway, so soon after I graduated, I was at a firm and applied for a number of different agencies. The bureau actually moved faster than others. And this is right around the time the 9/11 report came out, which kind of designated the bureau to be sort of the main counterterrorism arm. And that's what I wanted to do. And so I applied and then entered, right at the beginning of

• 5:33Speaker 04

  2006, went to Quantico.

• 5:35Jack Murphy?

  And you had some interesting experiences growing up, international experiences, living in Russia, Japan during college. Was this already sort of in your mind that this was going to sort of lead you into a national security pathway?

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Maybe. I mean, I didn't plan it that well. It just sort of, I took a gap year after high school and, you know, maybe it was sort of always in the blood and went to, went to Russia back in 1993, when it was a total, total mess. But it was really a great experience. Only that I learned, like, about 10 years later, my dad told me, he was still in the bureau at the time, and he was sort of freaked out while I was there. He was working counterintelligence, Russia, while I was in Russia.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  But it was a very different time. Everything's kind of starting to fall apart. So it wasn't the same sort of threat level that they'd been dealing with, you know, during the Cold War. But no, I would always

• 6:27Jack Murphy?

  You're a second generation FBI counterintelligence agent.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:31Jack Murphy?

  There should be a series of novels written about your family.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  There was a lot of pressure on my kids, right? They gotta

• 6:36Speaker 05

  Right.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  Come at this in some way.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  You can't hide nothing.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  Start that paranoia early, right?

• 6:42Speaker 04

  I tried to. I mean, I may have a few cameras at home, just maybe all over their phones. But no, it

• 6:50Speaker 04

  You know, I sort of always interested in the international aspect of it and, you know, had learned Russian and then had spent some time in Japan and had spent some time in China, actually, after law school. And so I'd kind of, I always liked going overseas. And so that kind of drew me in to do something. The Bureau isn't typically, you know, the Bureau's mainly domestic, but does have some overseas offices, which I was fortunate enough to get to. But what's really changed is what used to be a really domestic mission. I mean, as you all know, I mean, the line between what's domestic and foreign now has pretty much been obliterated, right? So, I mean, just take the cyber world. Like, you have an individual in whatever country in the world, basically doing almost, you know, what they could do in person, you know, via a computer to someone in the United States. And so, you know, is

• 7:34Speaker 04

  that an FBI role? Is that another agency's role? You know, it's hard to say what's domestic and foreign now. So that mission's really kind of expanded.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  Now, while you were in law school and 9/11 went down, you were actually thinking about going a different way, right? You started thinking about going in the military?

• 7:47Speaker 04

  I did, I did. I thought about going to the military. And that's what everyone, you know, it looked like we were all going to go to war. And then, you know, soon after, you know, to go to Afghanistan. And obviously, very soon after that, we went into Iraq when I was still in law school. And so, yeah, I was very close to doing that. And then, you know, just sort of talking with people, I thought that my skill set we better used in the Bureau. Nothing against the military by any means, but it just, some of the things that with the law background, my dad had done, wanted to do investigations, the interviews and some of that, that's where I kind of got drawn to more or less.

• 8:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's great.

• 8:22Jack Murphy?

  And so you go through Quantico, and I think, I think we talked about Quantico just on the last episode with Greg Schaefer.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:30Jack Murphy?

  Before we, before you hit the ground in, in New York City, before we get to that, I mean, any fun stories, Quantico stories that you want to toss out there?

• 8:39Speaker 04

  So I have kind of long hair, and this is, this is about the length I had when I went to Quantico, which is not Quantico length, apparently.

• 8:46Jack Murphy?

  Not on J. Edgar Hoover's time.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  I guess not.

• 8:49Jack Murphy?

  No, sir.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  So, I mean, I was at a law firm and I, you know, I kept it professional, I thought. But, um, yeah, I mean, there was still a sort of a, um, yeah. The idea that you should have sort of a high and tight while you're there, or at least, you know, sort of a little bit more kept than I did kept it. So when I did my PT test, you know, pushups is a big part of it. And so I'm doing this and the guy's sitting there watching me and I'm one, one, one. And I look up and I'm like, what's going on? Like I'm going as low as, I'm touching the ground with my chest. And he's like, I'm sorry, your hair's in the way. So I can't really see if you're touching the ground at all. So anyway, that kind of fun hazing that went on there. So I ended up, yeah, buzzing it while I was there. Just more tongue in cheek, but I got a lot of, hey, great haircut, man. It isn't a haircut, it's just buzz.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Like, there's nothing to it. So, no, but it was a, it was a good time. You know, it's interesting going through there. My class was, average age was about 30 or 31. I was 30 at the time. So a lot of second career people who'd kind of gotten drawn in after 9/11.

• 9:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's not like the military, a bunch of 18 year olds.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  No, and which it's a different mentality. So, you know, there's not a, it's a little bit different, although the parts of that are the kind of the physical activity and kind of getting you into shape. That I think there's probably some similarities there in terms of some hazing, some aggression and trying to get it. But, you know, at 30, you're kind of like, dude, why is this guy yelling?

• 10:10Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Or at 18, I'm sure, you know, it's a little bit different of a, of an impact on you.

• 10:13Jack Murphy?

  I gotta do better, run faster.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Exactly. I'm like, I'll just go back to my law job. Like, it's not gonna work out.

• 10:18Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  But no, it was a, it was a great experience. And I actually thought I was gonna go back to San Francisco where we, I'd processed out of. But, you know, typical bureaucracy, the bureau was at capacity in San Francisco for like the first time in 40 years. These high cost of living offices are hard to fill. And so you can, if you want to go to LA or San Francisco or New York, you can usually get there. And so my wife and I wanted to go back to San Francisco. She was from California and anyway. But it was a two week period where the bureau was at capacity. So just the most bureaucratic process, you know, talking to say, well, right, but the next, in two weeks, you'll be under, you know, FSL as they call it, you'll be under the needs of the office. She's like, right, but that's not when you're processing.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  So of course, no one in my class goes to San Francisco. And I ended up going to New York, which was great. But then the next class, like five people ended up going to San Francisco, none of whom wanted to go. So very, you know, typically go to the needs of the bureau where they're gonna send you that kind of thing and stuff. But anyway, it was a great experience. And if you're gonna do counterterrorism in the FBI, New York is really the place to do it.

• 11:22Jack Murphy?

  Why is that?

• 11:24Speaker 04

  I mean, it's a good question. I mean, I think part of it is, I think, the, you know, just being an incredibly diverse place and, but being a symbol of the United States in many ways. I mean, people think about New York and obviously Twin Towers and just the entire skyline of New York, the economic power that's here. And that's what a lot of people, I think, feel around the world, for better for worse, can feel the economic power of the United States. And so I think that continues to be sort of a focal point for outside people when they think about what's a symbol of the United States, right? And so Al Qaeda's philosophy, right, they want to hit political, they wanted to hit military, and they want to hit economic, right? And so that's why they were trying to hit, you know, well, they hit the Pentagon, they hit the Twin Towers, and, you know,

• 12:07Speaker 04

  obviously still unclear if they're going to hit the White House or the Capitol exactly, but somewhere in the political sphere.

• 12:13Jack Murphy?

  And so when you hit the ground working in the counterterrorism office here in New York City, okay, 9/11 is in the past. What's going on in the timeframe when you hit, when you get here?

• 12:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's about five years later, not quite. And so still a big hole in the ground, no, you know, nothing had been built yet. City was fighting with itself about things, and everyone was still just on edge kind of constantly. And, you know, there were just a number of cases. Basically, every couple of weeks, we had a new sort of individual kind of trying to come through and, you know, cause mayhem death in some unique way. And so we were busy. Lots of command posts running around, you know, kind of trying to get a handle on things. Really great experience working with like a huge number of different agencies in the US government, overseas partners. So it was, and really, a lot of this had been built very quickly after 9/11, but it was still kind of coming together

• 13:09Speaker 04

  and coalescing. And so it was fun to be a part of that. I mean, I played a very small part kind of as a new agent, but, you know, trying to make those connections with people and to build that larger network to, you know, basically protect, you know, the United States and protect those countries. And it may seem obvious, you see in the movies that, hey, that we can share intel with the UK or with the Dutch or whatever, but like, there's a whole process, and it used to be extremely difficult. And 9/11 really kind of broke down a lot of those barriers and needs for it. And thankfully, we're kind of reaping the, you know, what we sowed during that time in a good way, that we've set up those connections for, you know, the fight that we have right now.

• 13:46Jack Murphy?

  What was it like being a rookie FBI agent, coming to really the epicenter of counterterrorism in the United States?

• 13:54Speaker 04

  I mean overwhelming in some ways because it was just, you know, New York is just a huge city and so to get your head around all that could be going on within the city itself was was hard. And then on top of the fact that you have just so many federal agencies here and then the NYPD and the NYPD itself is bigger than the entire FBI. So they could just really, they had just an enormous amount of, you know, power to kind of throw around. And so realizing that you were, you know, to do any, versus like if you're an FBI agent saying like Oklahoma City or Kansas City where I'm from, like then, you know, it's a, you have a lot more power in that in that sense because you're, there's just not as many agencies running around. Here you're one of many and so you've got to learn how to cooperate, how to talk to people, you've got to figure out, you know, what is the NYPD, what are they worried about?

• 14:39Speaker 04

  What are their sort of equities in these types of things? And so that's hard and that's a part I didn't really think was going to be a big piece of this, right? The sort of like bureaucracy almost and navigating that. But that's as important of a part of it, not as sexy by any means as the other pieces, but as important a part of it as anything else.

• 14:55Jack Murphy?

  Wondering like how, how heavily are we being targeted in this city? Were there any like near misses where you were just like really like that one got you sweating?

• 15:05Speaker 04

  No, no, not at all. No, I mean, there were, there were a number of things that like happened that, you know, I'm very happy that we had extremely capable and good overseas partners that helped give us information as well as other parts of, you know, the US government and the intelligence community. Because there were a lot of things that came in, you know, they got things last minute and, you know, doing their best and no, no, not disparaging anyone at all, but, and then we had to act very fast in order to kind of, you know, sort of play catch up. Because the difference really, you know, as the bureau, which is, operates sort of a law enforcement and an intelligence agency, but with regards to people in the United

• 15:46Speaker 04

  States, you're, it's really much more so on almost the law enforcement side of things. Because, you know, that everyone, whether a US citizen or not, you get More or less the same rights, certainly with regards to the Fourth Amendment. Any person here in the United States gets that protection. But so what that means is that there's just a whole like number of barriers to get through to meet, you know, needs of field. If you want to go up on a wire, if you want to be able to do other types of techniques in order to figure out what are these people doing. And so we might get one single piece of information about, hey, this individual is interested in, you know, joining a group and, you know, committing jihad. And that would be the extent of it. And you're like, all right, now what do we do with that? Right. Because that's not enough in and of itself to listen to their phones or to look at their

• 16:30Speaker 04

  email, but it's enough to do other things. You just have to start building. And if they're like, and they want to do this in two weeks, you're like, okay, we've got a really short timeframe in order to do that. So, um, so it was a pretty, it was fast paced for a lot of that, which was, again, great as a new agent. That's what you want to get really, you know, they talk about New York is like dog years, right? Like one year, you like it's equivalent to seven years in one of the other offices. And I don't, you know, again, I'm bad at my, my brethren in other places, but I mean, I really felt like you get a lot in a really short time. So, you know, I, I went overseas pretty quickly on various operations and then was in Saudi Arabia and in various other places in the Middle East for a few months, um, you know, kind of doing some joint work with their services and did that pretty early on.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  The opportunities, it wouldn't have been possible in any other office, but because of the work you do here, they, they want that experience and they're going to push it out overseas.

• 17:21Speaker 05

  On previous shows, when we've talked about different authorities like the CIA and the FBI have and why it's good for them to work together overseas and also in the United States sometimes, are there different authorities that the FBI has that the NYPD does and or the NYPD does?

• 17:37Jack Murphy?

  That's a really good, good conversation piece because people are under a lot of like misconceptions about like what the CIA does versus the FBI, especially domestically in the United States.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, I mean, one thing just to be really clear is like the CIA has to follow US law. We should be very clear about that. If they don't, they get in trouble. I'm not, I'm not going to say that, that people have made mistakes in the past, but what that means is that the same protections that US citizens have against the FBI or the police, like the Fourth Amendment or other things, that applies to the CIA too, applies to them. They do not have investigative authority to go and look at, um, you know, US citizens. They have certain intelligence powers that where they can essentially develop intelligence. Some of that can happen in the United States, but the vast majority of their resources are overseas in order to do that. But the difference between like the Bureau and NYPD. So there's a lot of similarities. I mean, one is just sort of federal versus kind of state and local, right?

• 18:31Speaker 04

  And they have, you know, wiretaps at the local level as we do. And there's a lot of parallels. Where it really takes a very.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  Diverges a lot is with regards to national security investigations and the ability to use FISA. Right? So this is something I think in the last few years, we've had some crazy investigations at the political, the top level and all these different things. And there's been a bit of a misconception about. So as I mentioned, you know. Generally, the Bureau looks at it as kind of using their law enforcement powers when they're dealing with people in the United States. The exception to that is if someone is a member of a or is associated with a foreign power. And then they can be treated sort of on the under national security laws, which includes FISA, right? So meaning that if someone is.

• 19:16Speaker 05

  Joins Al Qaeda.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  Exactly. And I don't need to show that they've committed a crime in order to potentially get a FISA to listen to their phones or to read their emails. I can show that they've they've joined a foreign power that's hostile to the United States and that's enough. Whereas, you know, if, you know, I went out and they heard some information that I was trying to commit some sort of. String of robberies or something like that, like they would have to get up to a certain level of evidence, right? To prove in court in order to get what's called the Title III. Right? So it's very different. They'd have to basically. Show a crime was, you know, being commissioned or there's information that's in the process of it or planning, etc. Versus someone who is part of a foreign power, just by the fact they're part of Al Qaeda.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Or they're part of the Russian Embassy or the Chinese Embassy. That is enough in order to, under FISA, for the investigation to be opened up. They don't have to be a criminal.

• 20:10Speaker 05

  And FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you.

• 20:13Speaker 05

  Which has been, we've had it for like 20, 30 years, 40 years, 50.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  We've had it.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  1980, right? 78?

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Um, we've had it for. I'm blanking right now on when it first came into being. But I can tell you an interesting story because my dad didn't have it. So there was no FISA back then. And there's a number of cases about this. It's really interesting. So let's think about this. If you are an FBI agent in San Francisco, as my dad was in the early 1970s, and the Soviets are building a new embassy. What is your ability to go and make sure that the Soviets aren't doing all the horrible things that they were doing during that time? If you go and try to do something criminally, it's in an open court, it's in a record. And if the Soviets are worth a damn, they're gonna go out and gonna make sure, they're gonna read these things, and they're gonna, "Oh, the Bureau's up on my phone."

• 21:03Speaker 04

  Well, I'll switch and get a new phone number or whatever, I won't use the phone. So there was really no ability within the system in order to handle national security threats. Hoover, in his eminent wisdom at the time, said, "Well, you know, those laws don't apply to the FBI in this circumstance, because this is national security, and so we're gonna do what we need to do." And, you know, there's all sorts of court cases about some of the things that they did do.

• 21:28Speaker 05

  Right.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  But there was no FISA. All sorts of things happened, a number of cases, COINTELPRO being one of them, the Bureau had a number of really horrible missteps, and this is a circumstance where really good people can do horrible things without the right type of oversight and controls. It happens all the time in the government, unfortunately. Not all the time, it happens with not a huge amount of infrequency, rather. And FISA came out of that, which is like, "Look, we need something outside of a normal criminal process that allows FBI and potentially others to be able to use these tools when you have a foreign power." And that's what FISA. And so, it came out of, really, in a sense of a way to protect Americans, because it has a very specialized sort of system for it.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Obviously, a lot of controversy around it, but the impetus for it was...

• 22:18Speaker 05

  Right. Essentially, that foreign governments do not enjoy American rights afforded by the Constitution, and if you're working for a foreign government, you also shouldn't enjoy those rights.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  So, yes, I mean, there's some nuance there, but they don't get the exact same level.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  And so, there still is court process, right? But in terms of what types of protections they get in certain, it's different. But partly, what you have to do in a FISA application, in many ways, is show that that foreign power is trying to do... You know, harm the United States.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  And so, there's a bit of nuance within it, you know, that, but I, the idea is that it is a somewhat different system for national security because of how it affects our country at such a deep visceral level, right, versus a crime which is as horrific as it is, is a limited set of people that it's affecting.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  Now, how does FISA work when it is, say, a member of AQ? Or a ancillary of that, because they're not a government?

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it was, it was crazy. You basically had to connect someone back to Osama Bin Laden, like, literally, like, connect this person to this person, to this person, to this person, and then, you know, so there was a, at once that had been done, you had to just connect it to the, you know, the 10 people at the bottom, if you had a new guy, and, okay, he's, he's gotten recruited by this person, but then, basically, every court application had to show that it was going through the entire line of all these people.

• 23:45Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  So, it was a little bit of a difficult system at that time. There's been some changes that make it a lot easier now, but it was, you know, that, in terms of the kind of bureaucracy that the Bureau has to work through to do its job, that's, that's one of the layers that makes it very difficult.

• 24:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I mean, I mean, I imagine it's challenging, because when you're dealing with non-nation-state actors, that that can start to move, you know, if we were to take the IRA, they're a non-state actor, right, and then you say that a person's part of that, or whatever.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, it could be abused, right? Because there's no, I mean, Al Qaeda's not putting out their membership list, right? It's not on their website, you can't look at our team, right, and click on that and find the whole list of people, right, in similar ways, so, yeah, if you don't, they want to make sure that there are rigorous rules surrounding how you know who's in that membership, right, because you're, it's a pretty significant powers, right, to be able to go and, and get into someone's privacy. People don't want that to happen, so there should be a high hurdle for that, and, and, you know, there is.

• 24:52Jack Murphy?

  For the folks out there watching, appreciate you guys joining us tonight. I just want to give a quick shout out actually to our podcast, our live stream here. There's a link down in the description to our Patreon page if you want to get all these episodes ad-free, without any advertisements.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  So Jack, are you saying our sponsor tonight is the fine people watching this show?

• 25:10Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 25:11Speaker 05

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• 25:12Jack Murphy?

  Viewers like you. Tell us then about making the jump from counterterrorism to counterintelligence.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so a couple things. I mean, just life. I mean, one, we were, as I said, we're kind of going pretty hard for a couple of years and wanted to do something that was a bit more regular. We started having kids and, you know, wanted to be around and, you know, and be a full parent participant in every way. And then we also had a pretty major change that was going on at the Bureau with regards to intelligence. So, you know, after 9/11, one of the big things that changed was how the Bureau used intelligence. And we don't have to go into the detail, but just at a broad level, it was, the Bureau's always used intelligence, but it's been basically sort of a eat what you kill, right? You develop

• 26:01Speaker 04

  intelligence for your case in order to go after your particular person, your group, and go for an indictment. And that's what your intelligence serves. There was not a whole lot of sharing of that intelligence to other people, because if it didn't affect their case, they didn't need to know it. But what changed after 9/11 is people realized that FBI was working on a number of matters, certainly in the counterterrorism world, that that information would be incredibly important, not only for other cases in the Bureau, but other members of the intelligence community. So needed a way to figure out, how do you pull this information out of the cases? How do you, you know, aggregate it together and then put it into products that you share with the rest of the community? And so that was a, really, it sounds very simplistic when I talk about it, but it was

• 26:43Speaker 04

  a major shift. So I got pulled into helping doing that, to kind of complete that. We started in New York. This is when Mueller was still the director, trying to make that shift. And started to really enjoy, did intelligence and counterterrorism, but it was a little bit different, but started to really kind of enjoy the, sort of the process, the art of it. And started thinking about, you know, I wanted to be a supervisor. So I became a supervisor over counterintelligence squad at that time. I was pretty new. I had about four years in the Bureau, so it was... They made a rule right after that that you had to have six years after me. So I don't know if I should take that personally or not. But anyway, I think I did a good job and but and did that for a couple of years. But really, it was enjoyed it.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  I was working on a a country that has to remain nameless, but they were had a a burgeoning nuclear program, let's just say that. So so they had a lot of individuals coming over, looking to get information to build up. You know, essentially, they were doing proliferation work. And so there was actually it was it was a great transition because within counterterrorism, there's a lot of counter proliferation work as well as concern about al Qaeda or other groups trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons or nuclear material to make a dirty bomb, radiological device, and very similar sort of on the state actor side. And so it was a good kind of transition there.

• 28:02Jack Murphy?

  I I imagine that this being a major, you know, metropolitan, very cosmopolitan city, but also with the United Nations here, it much as it must be mayhem for you guys and and the stuff you got to deal with.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  So it's really it is. I mean, and what's crazy, and I don't know if everyone appreciates it, so you the United States and New York are the hosts of the United Nations. And so in some ways, but the the missions that are here are being hosted by the UN. So while they have to have US visas in order to enter the United States, their host is really the United Nations itself. And that makes it sound like kind of a strange, kind of a weird nuance, but it makes a difference, right? Versus someone who is at a so the mission to the UN of, you know, say, the Russian mission to the UN versus, say, the Russian consulate up here, right? Which is, you know, which its relationship is to the United States.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  It makes the US government step a little bit more carefully and with good reason, right? We're the host here. So if we're kicking everyone out all the time, how can we have the United Nations here if, you know, you're if you're just because someone is from, say, North Korea or wherever else, you know, how can we kind of have them here?

• 29:12Speaker 04

  But that adds an extra layer of complication because obviously anytime they start doing something horrible as some of these countries do and then when you want to you know you're doing an investigation and you want to PNGM you know declare them persona non grata because you can't arrest them because they're on a diplomatic visa there is a whole dance with essentially the UN right because it's affecting the politics up there right and so if the US happens to be in a you know intense negotiation with that country on a particular committee at the time that you want to take law enforcement action it can be difficult.

• 29:49Jack Murphy?

  And you told us that you opened up Operation Encore. Can you tell us about that?

• 29:53Speaker 04

  I did. Yeah. So that was back when I was still in the counterterrorism side. So that came out you know President Biden released that the case a bit about the case on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and essentially it was an intelligence effort to really uncover well to look deeper into potential support of the 9/11 hijackers by the Saudi Arabian government. And so I was on a squad that still had what was called PENT bomb which was the Bureau's case for all of the events that had happened during 9/11. It was mostly sort of a repository

• 30:32Speaker 04

  to run the prosecutions but as I started looking into it there was information in there that you know as the investigators had gone through it they'd done a wonderful job in uncovering all this but they'd been really focused on like let's get these guys let's move prosecution forward who need who do we need to take out immediate sort of threats. The idea was let's go back through this again and let's see are there things that we not that we missed but that are worth a longer look because are they were they secondary tertiary connections maybe it didn't seem like as big of a deal now but maybe it was more important at the time. And so that's one of the things that we looked at pretty closely there.

• 31:11Jack Murphy?

  And what kind of conclusions came out of that investigation?

• 31:14Speaker 04

  So unfortunately the viewers the case is still it's still classified but what came out of it I would say is that in some ways is more questions than answers. There was a there was a A large amount of activity, I think just writ large of individuals who had either close or loose associations with the Saudi government that were kind of in this realm as the document that got released kind of talks about. And, you know, at the time, and this is just my personal opinion, let me just be clear about this part of it. You know, the Saudi government didn't, you know, the right hand didn't necessarily know what the left hand was doing at all times. It's a very large government and there were some concerns that, you know, there could be pieces of this that weren't fairly, you know, understood by them.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  And so that was sort of what the, the effort was kind of looking at that. But it was, again, it was super interesting and it took me all over the world for a while, checking into a lot of things that had happened previously and talking to people and trying to really narrow down and understand sort of the trajectory that the 9/11 hijackers had taken. And were there other individuals we could identify that were, you know, and even more important than the individuals were their techniques that they used that could be used again, right? And so that was kind of the, my biggest concern was less sometimes the network that could have been plugged into, but like a methodology that they used, right? So this is like the A-team that got inserted and that, you know, kind of ran circles around or ran straight through rather, all of our security apparatus.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  And could that happen again, right, if you had a similar one? And certainly there were, there were things that we saw in there that needed to be tightened up and that was a really positive part of it and say, hey, look, we should really, they did this, someone else could do this again, it's not as about as good as it could be. And so that was, I think, some good results out of that.

• 32:59Jack Murphy?

  So in, in your personal opinion, was there a faction or a branch of the Saudi government or Saudi intelligence apparatus that offered some level of support to the 9/11 hijackers?

• 33:12Speaker 04

  I honestly don't know. And I would say if I, if I, I think in my personal opinion, if I could give you one, I would. I will say that, and the reason I don't know is it just, I never came across any definitive information that made it clear that there was. You know, there were individuals that I, you know, we read about and, you know, one of them, there's, you know, were thought to be potential intelligence officers of, you know, associated with the Saudi government. It was unclear if they were working at the behest of the Saudis or their own. And I think part of the issue was trying to, I mean, this is the counterintelligence world, right, trying to disaggregate, all right, who's running their own operations for their own organizations and they just happen to be using government resources, right? And that part was always very difficult to disaggregate.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  And I never saw it. I never saw a clear, you know, command and control so and so who had, who was appointed and did this, you know, told them to do that. That I never saw.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  How hard is it in the modern age, like what you're talking about, sort of the nuance with these nation states and then their governments, people acting in, I mean, in the 1800s, some of the acts committed against us now would be considered an act of war. But like you talk about the UN and trying to diplomatically PNG somebody, where, like, how do, as a federal law enforcement agent, how do you deal with those things? Do people come down on you and say, this is how we have to handle this? Do you raise it up the flag and say, hey, this is the situation and we know what the relationship is with this country?

• 34:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it certainly comes in because, and it's a great question, because the Bureau deals with a lot of like, specific sort of threats, right, to people or to a particular situation. But often, the implication of us arresting someone who's at the, you know, Russian Embassy or the Russian consulate or the Russian mission at the UN, for example, or any of those, it has huge political implications, right? So you think of like ghost stories, which, you know, was the Russian illegals that were, you know, running around here and the Bureau had a long investigation on it. In the end, you know, a lot of those guys got traded, right? Got sent back. And we got back people that we wanted to get back. And I think, you know, that part of the Bureau on the counterintelligence side understands

• 35:28Speaker 04

  that that's part of the game, because that part has always been much more sort of closely associated with the intelligence community. It's less well-understood probably on the counterterrorism criminal side of the Bureau, because it's just not how things work on that side. You don't trade people in that way.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  That, there's always intention there. And you certainly get people kind of come back and forth and like, what? We're doing this? And you know, I don't care whose agency wants us to do this. It's helpful to whatever part of government. Like, this is a bad guy. So my years, you know, going after him, he should go to jail, he should do whatever, you know, this kind of thing. But it's a, at least for a while, it's been a very, it was a very different game. That's changing to some degree, especially as you've got, you know, places like China and others doing more of sort of on the economic espionage side. Where we have, we are arresting intelligence officers, right? There was a recent case, a guy named Xu Yonjun. He was at, he's a Ministry of State Security Intelligence Officer. And he was extradited from Belgium, which was pretty amazing.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  And, you know, back into the United States. And previously, I mean, that's not something that people would want us to do. And maybe people are wondering why. The idea is if you just think about the number of intelligence officers that the United States government might have, and that they might be sort of breaking laws of other countries because they're trying to collect, you know, essential, critical piece of intelligence for the United States, they don't want to be arrested and, you know, then put into jail.

• 36:54Speaker 05

  Right.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  Because it typically is that someone gets arrested and they get deported and that's kind of it, right? But this is potentially sort of, it's changed the game a little bit to where, again, we talk about barriers breaking down between foreign and domestic, the idea of law enforcement and sort of, you know, you think about like Title 18 and, you know, and, you know, and intel side of things, there's, there's much more of a blending now. And the Bureau is comfortable kind of flipping back and forth. Some other agencies are less comfortable doing that. There's a few that kind of, that kind of straddle both, so.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  And were there, were there times either for you personally or for people that you knew that, when like they were shut down for something that was just very frustrating?

• 37:37Speaker 04

  All the time. I mean, and some of that may not have been anything nefarious, but it just, it happens, right? They're just, you know, we're told, don't, don't dig into this farther, let this one go. And you don't ever know sometimes. Sometimes it's because some other agency has something going on.

• 37:53Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  And you think it's like, you know, hey, I'm, I'm right in the middle of this, I'm about to blow it wide open. And it's like, no, no, no, this is an operation that they set up. They've been running for, you know, six years and you're about to screw the whole thing

• 38:04Jack Murphy?

  up.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  And so that happens. The other side happens too, right? Like when you've got, you've been running an operation, all of a sudden someone shows up and you're like, that guy is just a little bit too smart for someone else. And so you go talk to, you know, someone across the river and say, hey, do you guys happen to be running an operation? And then that guy never shows up. They say, no, but of course that guy never shows up again. And so anyway, that we do some sort of, you know, deconfliction that way. And occasionally, it, it happens a lot more. And I, there's, there's a lot more sort of cross, you know, jobs that the bureau works, other parts of the IC and other parts of the IC work the bureau, NSA comes in, CIA, we flip back and forth. So there's a lot more closer understanding of how we work and like the, the powers that each one of them has.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  And that I think is really, basically when the, when the bureau and the agency and if you even put the NSA in there, when they work together, it is, they're, it's really an unstoppable team, the amount of sort of resources they can pull to it. And I think we do that a lot better than we used to. And that's really kind of the, I think the standard at this point where, you know, traditionally in movies, it's, we're always fighting with each other. That doesn't happen as much anymore.

• 39:08Jack Murphy?

  You mean, it's not like in the movies where like the station chief throws his latte across the room into the window?

• 39:13Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm sure that happens occasionally. I mean, and, but that's, but those guys both on both the agency and the bureau side get disciplined pretty quickly.

• 39:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  Because that, that creates some pretty bad blood pretty, pretty fast. But yeah, I mean, that, that, that was the old way, right? I mean, there was a lot of hatred on both sides and, you know. Bureau thinks all agency people are liars and the agency people think the Bureau people are knuckle draggers, right? And so that sort of rhetoric back and forth, you know, kind of continues.

• 39:39Jack Murphy?

  The next place you landed was Moscow.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:43Jack Murphy?

  Well, what was, why did the FBI send you to Moscow? What was your job there?

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Uh, I mean, basically no one else wanted to go. So, no, I mean, I'm only partially kidding. So I came into the Russia, the Bureau had kind of different designations. So I spoke Russian and then had law. And so that came into that program. So I thought I'd be working Russian CI, you know, and so instead I'd get, you know, doing like Arabian Peninsula terrorism, trying to learn Arabic and stuff. So it was typical government sort of puts you into different roles and no matter what your skill set. But I'd kept up the Russian and so wanted to go. And again, most of the time people go overseas once they're in the later part of their career because it's kind of a, in a sense, sort of a reward, right? And you have your long in the tooth and you can talk about these things. I'd only had six years in at this point.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  But again, people don't want to go to Moscow because it's not a relationship that worked, right? So the Bureau oversees, it's not like a station chief, we're not running operations, we're liaising and cooperating to do investigations with them. So if the relationship's crap, it's not, there's not a lot of work to do, right? You go to the UK, you're working closely with, you know, with MI5, you're working closely with, you know, Scotland Yard, do all these great operations, people really enjoy that. You know, if you're in Moscow, you're working with the FSB and all of those fun guys. For me, that was what I wanted to do because I was like, that's a place you can have an impact, you know, a place that doesn't function, where you can really kind of move the needle. Because my thinking was you could be a total jerk in, you know, in London and they're still going to work with you because, you know, they're not going to screw up the relationship.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  But in Moscow, you know, it might matter if you spoke Russian, if you understand them a little bit, if you could talk to them about things or why certain things mattered or why they didn't. And so that's what really kind of drew me to being over there. And, you know, despite the horrible things that are happening there now, I'd, you know, I'd been exchanged in there twice, I'd had a host family there, I had, you know, I have great affinity for the culture and for the people. The government is a totally different story, obviously. And so I thought it'd be fun to go back and then expose my kids to it as well, so.

• 41:44Jack Murphy?

  So I'm really interested to hear from you as somebody who has, you know, boots on the ground, so to speak.

• 41:51Jack Murphy?

  Interacting and working, liaisoning with Russian intelligence services. You know, to go beyond the caricatures in the movies and the spy novels and even what we read in newspapers is often limited in second or third hand information. Really interested in like the character and the culture and what these guys are like as individuals.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, some stereotypes live up to it.

• 42:17Jack Murphy?

  The drinking?

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that, that, that part is pretty rough. I mean, thankfully, I'd had some experience and kind of understood how that worked. I mean, there's, that's a big part of it. And there's a, I mean, you know, they're, they're just, they're so blatant about this stuff. So I, you know, we had a, they had a security and intelligence services like conference in Kazan. It's a city sort of south of, or to the east and south of Moscow. And, you know, it was all these intelligence, all the liaison services that were there in Moscow, working with the FSB. And every night at the hotel, there was, the FSB would bring in about 20 prostitutes

• 43:03Speaker 04

  and just, you know, send them around to talk to people. And so I asked, I was like, you, you know, really, does this, you know, why are you doing this? This is just ridiculous. Like, does anyone fall for this? They're like, we wouldn't do it if people weren't falling for this. And so, I mean, you know, these sort of tried and true techniques of sacks of cash and sex and that's what they, they absolutely work and that's why the Russians continue to do them. And so, and they live up to that stereotype in terms of, you know, people get into all sorts of trouble and have romantic relationships and then, you know, they think it's going great and, and then they, they show up and someone says, you know, their girlfriend says, well, I want you to be, you know, Uncle Sasha and you go ahead and Uncle Sasha's got pictures of you and, but don't worry, don't worry, we're all gonna make the pictures go away. We just need this. That's all we need, one thing, and it starts with one thing and then it kind of continues on.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  And so, I mean, that part is, is, is pretty stereotypical and it tends to work.

• 43:53Jack Murphy?

  How many times did they pitch you while you were there?

• 43:55Speaker 04

  So I never got pitched. So if you, if you get pitched, it kind of, it becomes a big deal.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  And but yeah, I mean, I it usually means that they are because if you're if you're declared, if they pitch you, it can generally mean one of two things. One, they want to send you home because they don't like you because once that happens, US government's like, all right, we're not going to let this potentially play out. Yeah. Get out of here. Yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Or two, they think that there's some reason you might say yes. Right. And so, you know, it's not ever a good position unless you purposely are messing with them, you know, that they want to they want to do that. So, no, I mean, you know, I had, I think, what was the kind of the constant sort of, you know, trying to make me see their way of thinking about things. Sure.

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• 46:38Speaker 04

  So I think as I mentioned to you, I was over in Moscow during, you know, when the Boston Marathon bombing happened. And so the Tsarnaev brothers' parents were actually in Dagestan, which is a republic in the south, near where I had been as an exchange student.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  And so we actually started doing some very close work with them. We were trying to figure out, the Tsarnaev brothers had spent a lot of time, or the summer before, in Dagestan. And there was a concern that they had been radicalized or trained, or maybe there were more people with them. So all these sort of typical things that you go through in a terrorism investigation, trying to determine what they were doing. And so we're working with the FSB to try to figure this out.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  And, you know, they set us up with an individual who had, you know, in many ways had, you know, sort of dusting off the, or scraping the blood off his boots because he had just come back from, you know, several tours and down in the Caucasus. And he was an extremely personable guy. And he just spent time talking to me about their position and their thinking about things of the world. You know, and look, it's always really fascinating to hear from my perspective because it helps to get into their head, how they're seeing things. I don't find it particularly persuasive. It was helpful to have been an exchange student there to like know the other side of a lot of these things. My host family was, they were Russian culturally, but my host mother was Armenian, the father was Ukrainian.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  And so they had a very different perspective on sort of Russian imperial sort of activity.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  But one of the things he always talked about, and many of them talked about, you know, they just... They wanted to emphasize that they're in a rough neighborhood. And it's not like the United States where you've got two oceans and two fairly friendly, you know, neighbors on your border.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  You know, and this guy and this general that I talked to a lot, you know, he wanted to emphasize that like, you know, he was like, as much as it seems peaceful now, things can change. This is something they talked to me about a lot because they would argue about NATO and expansion of NATO and all these things. I was like, you guys are ridiculous. Like NATO was not trying to take over Russia. It's the last thing we want. You can have your, you know, gas station masquerading as a country. We don't want it. Like, it's all yours. And their response was, yeah, we really don't believe that you want it. But, you know, in 1932, Nazi Germany was a basket case. It could barely feed its people. By 1936, it was the strongest military in Europe and possibly the world. Things change, and we

• 49:02Speaker 04

  have to be ready. So their perspective is NATO might be quiet, you know, at least back then, let me just, what they were painting to me was that might not be doing anything. But if they ever let it get to a place where it could take over Russia, then they're in a position where, you know, an untenable position, right, from a national security standpoint. And as much, as crazy as that might seem to us, that that would never happen, that's their perspective. Again, I'm not trying to defend it, but I think it's important to understand that they really do believe this.

• 49:32Jack Murphy?

  That's, that's the zeitgeist of the Russian security apparatus, is the sort of national trauma from World War II that carries through.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  And rightfully so. I mean, they paid a horrible price, you know, in, in World War II.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  They, they did, and they did. I mean, inquiry whether, I mean, they paid a horrible price by the, you know, the famine that they caused in Ukraine right before as well.

• 49:50Speaker 05

  Right, right. I'm not, I'm definitely not justifying them at all.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Absolutely not. No, and I, I didn't mean to imply that, but I, I think there, there's, it's a mess of, of things. And they did pay, you know, as a people, a horrible price for it. And, and I think it, it changes their mentality and sense of like what they're, they're dealing with. And again, I, I think it's really important, you know, I hear on the news and the perspectives and, you know, vilifying Putin and everyone else. And that's fine. I mean, I think, you know, Putin could be vilified, you know, and it's incredibly accurate. But I think it's important to understand at least that you want to call it propaganda, you want to call it the narrative, whatever that the people believe and what they see there is often very different than what we're hearing.

• 50:32Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  And so while there are certain people who, you know, are, you know, they've, they're worldly and cosmopolitan enough to recognize that is not the full story, the vast majority of the people in the country don't. They see it, they see, they have the propaganda every day, they hear this, and this is, this is their perspective on the world.

• 50:48Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  And so I, in terms of thinking about where things are going with Russia, I think it's important to know that like, it's not just Putin who feels this way, there's a lot of.

• 50:56Jack Murphy?

  When you hear the stories from some of these like recently liberated areas of Ukraine and what the Ukrainian civilians are saying, how they interact with the Russian soldiers and the Russians are like, why, why are you upset, like we're here to save you from, from the Nazis?

• 51:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:11Jack Murphy?

  Like, they whole ass believe the propaganda, at least many of them.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and, and, you know, for the, for the Russians, the way they think about Nazis and Nazism is a bit different than the way we define it, and so, and we have, it's kind of a academic sort of piece of it, but, but they, they really do believe that that's, you know, in a sense that the US is sort of Nazifying this place, right?

• 51:34Jack Murphy?

  Is that like anything that's an external threat is, is quote unquote Nazis? I mean, what is that in their minds?

• 51:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, essentially like, I mean, the idea of like a fascist government from the outside, like that's Nazism, right? And that's, and so, I mean, it's gotten a little bit crazy where they even talked about desatanization at this point.

• 51:49Jack Murphy?

  Recently, yeah.

• 51:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, but I mean, there's something to this in terms of World War II was a very different experience for them, and they call it the Great Patriotic War, right? And for the US, it's like, oh, it's just the second world war we're in, right? And so it's just, it's a very different experience and they think about it in a very different way. Again, not to say that it's right by any means, but I think that the perspective of the Russian people on this is very different.

• 52:11Jack Murphy?

  It's always like we're on the precipice of something.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, they, they think chaos is around the corner.

• 52:17Jack Murphy?

  And you were also there when the Edward Snowden affair happened. And you had to interact with FSB and some of the other Russian agencies about that whole debacle. What was that like from your perspective?

• 52:30Speaker 04

  Frustrating. I mean, he was at Chitomayev, like, one of the main airports in Moscow for a couple of weeks. I kept asking for permission to go to, because I assumed I could probably find him, right? He's in some room somewhere. But, you know, obviously, we were talking to them about, hey, look, this is gonna, this is on the tail end of having great cooperation after the Boston Marathon bombing, and this was gonna just tank the whole thing. But it became clear to me that, like, they had no interest in changing the trajectory of the relationship. They, not that they wanted it to necessarily go south,

• 53:09Speaker 04

  but in their mind, the US has been conducting, you know, these operations around the world with other countries that have, you know, diminished their security. You know, and obviously Snowden was just a great tool for kind of bringing that out, right? And so they wanted to highlight all the sort of, you know, in their mind, the hypocrisy within the United States government, right? And because, and they want to be able to undermine it because they don't want the US essentially causing a color revolution in Russia.

• 53:41Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 53:42Speaker 04

  They saw some of the things that happened in Central Asia. They saw what happened in the Arab Spring. And in their mind, that's chaos. And they, they think, they believe that that's what the US is intentionally doing around the world with its democracy spreading, right? They talk about the democracy, the spread of democracy is almost as bad as the US military.

• 53:58Jack Murphy?

  Like, 1991 is like an era in Russian history you, like, none of them want to go back to.

• 54:04Speaker 04

  Exactly. No, and they...

• 54:07Speaker 04

  They're very upset about lands that were lost. It's funny, going back to when I was an exchange student there, I used to talk to school and family and it was 1993 and I was like, hey, if you're interested in democracy, I'm happy to tell you about it. And they're like, no, no, no, we just want to know how to make money. We're not interested in this democracy nonsense. And so, I think we sort of misinterpreted, with a lot of hope that the fall of the Soviet Union would bring about a democratization in Russia and a change in the way that they deal with things. But really, if anything, they were just biding their time. They did not have the power to push back on us. But once they did, they started to with great abandon.

• 54:49Jack Murphy?

  And so, what was your interface like at that time with FSB? I mean, what was it you or us as Americans, what was our government trying to get from the Russians in regards to Snowden versus what Russians were willing to give up? Like, were you guys trying to get him back?

• 55:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:05Jack Murphy?

  Trying to extradite him?

• 55:05Speaker 04

  I mean, we were just talking about how bad it was going to be for the relationship to, and despite all the commentary of like, oh, he did this on his own and it wasn't an operation, we're like, it looks like anything but, or it looks like everything, it looks like exactly an operation, this is how it would go. And just talk to them about how it would hurt the relationship. And it did. It did. It ultimately cratered everything. And then, soon after that was the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and just everything went off the rails after that. Not my fault, totally. It was while I was there. But, yeah, I mean, it was those, it went from a fairly sort of, you know, good working relationship with

• 55:49Speaker 04

  them on particular things, and some things opened up after the Boston Marathon bombing, to everything very quickly closing down, where they just sort of changed. And I interpreted it a little bit as, you know, we had maybe made some progress with our counterparts in terms of like, all right, maybe there's a few areas we can, you know, we have some mutually, you know, I'm not saying they were like, oh, we should help the Americans, that was never part of it. It was like, all right, maybe we have our interests overlap in a couple of other areas. But once sort of the top was kind of like, all right, well, that's nice, stop playing around, this is the direction we're going to go. And it became very clear, it was a very different sort of kind of trajectory after that.

• 56:26Jack Murphy?

  I've talked to CIA people in the past who

• 56:31Jack Murphy?

  They speak of it as kind of tragic, but also and if they feel like, or at least some people feel that it's like the Russians are trying to remain relevant in our eyes. Like they're doing things to keep up on our radar, which is a little simplistic. I mean, is there some of that? Or is this really is there's a sort of imperialistic ambitions of Russia to secure their near abroad? I mean, how do you interpret it?

• 56:56Speaker 04

  No, I mean, look, it's hard to be in the head of every single Russian, right? It's a huge country, you know, hundred and however many, forty million, twenty million, something, wherever it currently is with the population shrinking. But there is a, again, a narrative. They have a messianic view of themselves, right? They, this gets really deep into sort of the rhetoric. They call themselves the Third Rome. Moscow's the Third Rome. So First Rome being Rome, Second Rome being Byzantium and, you know, and Constantinople. And basically that, you know, when there was the schism. And then when that place went to crap and was totally corrupt, then, you know, Moscow became the true center of Christianity.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  And so there is a belief system that Russia is going to sort of, you know, free, sort of protect the world with their, you know, their vision of how things should work. I'm not saying everybody has that view, but that is kind of a part and parcel of how Russia kind of sees itself in the world. So, I mean, I think in many ways, you know, the fourteen new countries that came out of the Soviet Union, some of which had existed before, to be clear, the Russians see that as traditional Russian lands. I mean, obviously, it's kind of, you know, where do you draw the line? If it's two hundred years ago, it's Russian, you know, if it's a thousand years ago, it's Mongol, so I, you know, maybe they want it back.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  But so it gets a little bit confusing, but obviously that's they draw the lines at a certain place and say, these are traditional Russian lands and we should have them back.

• 58:25Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 58:26Speaker 04

  And they're an insecure state.

• 58:27Jack Murphy?

  Tradition from this state to this state. Right.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  Right, right. As my Italian friend said, he's like, look, it was all Roman originally. We want it all back.

• 58:34Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  So maybe.

• 58:35Jack Murphy?

  Well, like Lithuania had a huge chunk of it at one point in history.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, and maybe the Vikings should get it back. I don't know. I mean, they were the ones going down the Volga and populating that area to begin with. So, you know, I mean, it gets a little bit, you know, kind of silly and to have that sort of academic argument. But I don't think, it's kind of irrelevant because whatever it is, they believe that those lands are theirs. It's real to them. And they need it, right? And so I think it's an important thing to remember, whether you agree with it or not, think it's crazy. When we are thinking about what we're, you know, we're doing vis a vis Ukraine, what is, how is that going to play out with regards to Russia? I think it's important to understand that there is a not insignificant part of their population on the other side, who is ready to go to the end with this.

• 59:17Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:17Speaker 04

  And what does that mean for how this plays out with us, right? We don't want to escalate, we don't want to lose the war. We're gonna keep it in some crazy limbo for five, 10, 15 years? I mean, you know, anyway, I'm not really sure how this plays out.

• 59:32Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  Because at some point, you know, we're dealing with a group of people who in some ways have nothing to lose.

• 59:38Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:39Speaker 04

  Right? So that makes a totally different kind of set of decisions.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  And not just have something to lose, but even though they are a Christian culture, they, like, my impression is that Russians share sort of a fatalistic worldview in the same way that a lot of Muslim cultures do, that...

• 59:57Speaker 04

  They're certainly very fatalistic, yeah. I mean, that is just, that is a quality about how the, and this kind of gets to the point of, you know, your worldviews. I basically, you know, I went to Russia as an exchange student and didn't know any Russian, I knew five words. I knew yes, no, maybe, toilet, shower, I think that was pretty much it. So learned, basically learned sitting around the kitchen, talking to my host mother the whole time. And we would have all sorts of discussions about the world. And, you know, I was 18 and, you know, I'd been to like a border town in Mexico, and that was the extent of my world travels at that point, and then now in the south of Russia, talking about this stuff.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  But it was really an eye-opening experience, you know, because clearly, the things I was expressing, optimism, you know, faith in the ability, you know, human ingenuity to solve problems, for life to improve, basically very American views, right? This is part of the American experience because this is what we have been able to do by and large, for a number of different reasons, right? And... But that hasn't been the Russian experience. And, you know, so informed by history and very fatalistic of like, look, you know, things are going to fall apart, there's going to be chaos, and you need a strong government in order to kind of keep the chaos at bay. And what is the United States doing? They're just turning up more and more chaos.

• 1:01:15Jack Murphy?

  There is a great Adam Curtis documentary that just came out, Trauma Zone.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 1:01:21Jack Murphy?

  And it's like eight parts, and it's old BBC footage.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:25Jack Murphy?

  From like 1975 through the collapse. And I mean, every American should really go and watch that because it's just so fascinating. It lends this insight into everything from like Yeltsin and Gorbachev, but also down to like Babushka, taking the spuds out of the basement and traveling to her sister's house, you know, hitchhiking there and then cooking up the mashed potatoes. I mean, it's just like a very fascinating insight into Russian culture and political history. But I would like to shift gears, a similar but separate conversation to your time in Beijing.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Jack Murphy?

  What was, was it, they said, hey, you did a knock-up job in Russia, we're sending you over to Beijing.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  Thanks for ruining that relationship.

• 1:02:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, thanks for blowing that one, Holden.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it was, I mean, Beijing is very similar to Moscow. It's not a desirable place, you know, it's not a Paris or Moscow, or a Paris or like London for FBI agents. And I thought, I mean, I think in, because I did a good job in Moscow and in terms of, and so I applied and I was lucky enough, so I ran the office in Beijing for three years, got there at the end of 2014, and then left the summer of 2017, so a little under three years.

• 1:02:43Jack Murphy?

  So same sort of question, interacting with the Chinese security state.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Jack Murphy?

  It is something, and we were talking earlier about Matthew Brazil and Peter Mattis' very good book, Chinese Communist Espionage. It's a sort of historical accounting, but I feel like we just have so few contemporary accounts or views or any sort of lens into the Chinese security apparatus, the Chinese security services. And I was wondering if you could talk to us about that.

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  Sure. I mean, it was, so our main interlocutor there was the Ministry of Public Security, which generally is thought of as, you know, when people think of like Chinese law enforcement, police or whatever, but actually, as that book notes, up until 1983, They ran counterintelligence within the country and they ran a lot of the intelligence operations. In fact, one of the first spies to come over to the United States was run by MPS. And because of the sort of digitization, police state that they run, they collect a lot of intelligence. So they worked very closely with the Ministry of State Security, who we also met with on a less frequent basis, just because of the work that we were doing. So my job was to work with them and to try to find, you know, areas to cooperate. And it was hard.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  It was really hard. Because we just, I mean, in so many ways, we just did not see eye to eye. You know, I'd spent a little bit of time in China, you know, after, after you take the bar, you take a bar trip. I went to Beijing for four months back in 2003, but it'd been a long time, but not nearly the same level of kind of knowledge and background that I had of Russia. And so I had less of a basis to kind of, you know, language as well to build up. And, you know, it, there's some significant differences. I mean, obviously, every people are different, right? But just in sort of trying to contrast the two of them, since we are dealing with them and are in the focus.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  But, you know, in some ways, we're, we would disagree with the Russians about, you know, like, how do I describe? It's almost like the facts of the, or we would have an argument. But in general, we could agree on the facts. We weren't totally off. But sometimes I felt like when we were, when I was talking to the MPS and the Chinese, we were just having totally different conversations about things. They approached it in our relationship in a very transactional way. And I'll give you a really horrific example of that. So because of the poor state of cooperation with both Russia and China typically, it's hard to work a lot of cases because they have sort of a political aspect to it. Everything does, right?

• 1:05:19Speaker 04

  It has an impact. So you often work matters that are, kind of have a visceral sort of, you know, reaction. And so one of them we work a lot are child sex crimes or child exploitation cases. And we work those with the Russians pretty frequently, you know, give them information about individuals who were creating materials, who were on forums and, you know, abusing kids, this type of thing. So really horrific stuff. And, you know, We never had any issues that the Russians, they would respond. Sometimes they'd respond a little too hard with them. ERDM running over the house? Yeah. So occasionally those things would happen. But, you know, it was, they would respond.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  We had an individual that we were dealing with with regards to MPS. He was an American at a school in China. And it was one of these quote international schools. The only thing international about it was the teachers. The students were all locals. And we had information that he was essentially, the horrible thing about some of these forums is that you don't get into them unless you're creating original material. Yeah, they're called producers. Yeah. And that makes, that creates a huge barrier for the bureau and others, right? Because obviously cannot create anything. So there's a whole, there's a process of basically trying to, you know, kind of get into these. With the Aussies. Yeah. It's come out. I want, well, anyway, I don't know what has or has, I'll let it go.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  But because it's, obviously it's great and really important work. But we had good reason to believe that this guy was creating material based on his access to students at this school. And so we asked for, said, hey, can you deal with this? I said, I, and they're like, well, what would you like? And I was like, you can deport him, we'll arrest him on sight. Yeah, yeah. You can arrest him, there's enough information on here to show you what he's done in China. You know, and put him into one of your dungeons for, you know, whatever amount of time is by your laws. You know, he's violated your laws in your country, that's up to you. I said, but can we just please like? Deal with it. Could we get this guy out of the public?

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  So they turned into me and then passed three names to me of individuals who were part of their anti-corruption campaign. And said, well, we want these three people. I said, I'm sorry, you're trying to trade these people? That's exactly what they wanted to do. They wanted to trade people that were part of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption fox hunt trade for this individual. And I was like, I can't do that, I'm not empowered. This is not my, you know, we make decisions based on facts and information, and then we follow the cases, this is how it works, which they did not believe that's how it worked. They saw it as purely transactional. So this went back and forth for probably a year before they actually. So they wouldn't arrest this guy who'd broken their laws because?

• 1:08:05Jack Murphy?

  Because you wanted to arrest him and wouldn't make the political trade.

• 1:08:07Speaker 04

  They, exactly, they wanted, so you may be familiar, they've had this long-term campaign, they're called Fox Hunt, Skynet is another one, which I know is the Terminator thing, I'm not sure why they picked that, so they needed a better marketing team. Anyway, but it's basically these individuals who had various connections to quote-unquote corrupt politicians in China and had been absconded to the United States, the UK, Australia, and other places, and they were searching for them and trying to get them back, and they wanted us to just deport them and send them back. As it turns out, it's much more of a political consolidation campaign, because, surprise, surprise, everyone's corrupt in China, and so just the fact that you are corrupt doesn't mean that, you know, you need to be arrested, it's only if you've also, you know,

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  you're outside of Xi's patronage network.

• 1:08:53Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  So anyway, they were wanting essentially a political move for what was law enforcement. And anyway, it took a long time to move this thing forward, but it just gives you an idea of, and this is, we've talked about this a lot, you know, the Ministry of Public Security, at the end of the day, they are a security service with a political mission.

• 1:09:13Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  If you want to think about public security, they are keeping the party secure from the public. That's their job. And so they espouse these sort of, what they call, you know, kind of traditional Chinese values of harmony and other things, but it's just sort of nonsense. They think of this stuff as just a way to kind of keep control.

• 1:09:33Jack Murphy?

  Turning, letting a pedophile loose on a schoolhouse isn't exactly maintaining harmony.

• 1:09:37Speaker 04

  No, no. And that's, at the end of the day, this stuff is where they're not putting resources towards it, it was going to be potentially embarrassing that, because they hadn't picked it up and they hadn't dealt with it. And it's just not something that they think of as important. You know, the ideas of like justice and enforcing laws, these are not the priorities for them. Ensuring that the public is, you know, kind of placid and following the rules and doing what they're supposed to be doing and not challenging the state, that's what they're supposed to be doing. And so it's a, that made it very difficult to where...

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  There was less and less that we could even do and it was just this constant dance of ensuring that they weren't pulling information out of us to try to use against us or to try to figure out what we were doing vis a vis other things and it became, you know, a much more of a difficult relationship.

• 1:10:25Jack Murphy?

  It sounded incredibly cynical.

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

  It was and this is, I mean, it kind of topped off with the Xi Obama agreement in 2015 on cyber. This is right after the OPM hack and obviously everyone was up in arms about that and then, you know, they signed an agreement saying they would no longer, you know, conduct espionage for commercial gain anymore, which was total nonsense. Of course, they never really, they may have slowed down a little bit in a few areas, but they just ramped it up in others and went at it a completely different way. And we were sort of trying to work out that agreement, but it was, it was, it was completely cynical, even just the negotiations with them and it was clear they had no intention of, of moving forward, of even fulfilling even the basic parts of it. And so in my mind, it

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  just became a matter of, all right, how can I record this, make data for this so that people in the future can be like, we cannot cooperate with them on this. They have no desire to do it. And so we don't have, so what we had at the time is everyone's like, well, we have to try. We haven't tried before. And it's like, oh, we've tried. It just never went anywhere.

• 1:11:25Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:11:25Speaker 04

  And so, but there wasn't the type of open documentation that people could look at. So that's what I kind of spent a lot of my time is just requests and ensuring that it was clearly documented what they did, didn't do, and how they were not fulfilling their end of the agreement and how it was being used for other purposes. And so, and that became helpful when I got to the White House and we started to focus on kind of policy towards China and thinking about shifting it. And it was a major US shift. But it was, it's such a long process to do that.

• 1:11:55Jack Murphy?

  Were there any areas that you found where you were able to cooperate in a somewhat productive manner on security issues?

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  Um, no.

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  I was just, I was trying to think there were a few who are like, wow, this wasn't so bad. I mean, the problem was, and this is, I think we have a tendency to think of, you know, the Russians, the Chinese are 10 feet tall, and they're making mistakes. That's not the case at all. They have some very capable parts of their services, but they're also a massively corrupt place. And so, some of the things that we try to work with them, you know, and we try to work with their, you know, where we need them to go get information from their banks, like they essentially kind of tells, hey, our banks are a total mess. They don't even like, you know, they can't even like keep complying. And I'm talking with the big four ones there. And so, it was just, they couldn't even do like basic investigations because they couldn't get information out of their banking system to do like sort of financial information. So, at least not consistently.

• 1:12:54Speaker 05

  Do you, do you feel as though they see us in some ways with law enforcement or not, as toothless because we do abide the letter of the law and international law for the most part?

• 1:13:08Speaker 04

  I actually think they think that that's total BS, that we actually don't. That's, that's, I think the Russians, the Chinese believe this, that we can do whatever we want.

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:13:16Speaker 04

  And that that stuff is just pure subterfuge, you know, kind of, you know.

• 1:13:20Speaker 05

  They've seen Jason Bourne, they know how it works, man.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  Well, I, I think it's that, but it's all, it's also like, the idea of like, if the US is that powerful, what country in their right mind would actually restrain their power? Right? I mean, it doesn't make any sense.

• 1:13:34Speaker 05

  Right, right, right.

• 1:13:34Speaker 04

  You have this, I mean, especially, think, think about after World War II, the US had, I mean, there's crazy estimates where like 60, 80% of all industrial production was in the US. We could have just taken over the entire world if we wanted to, right?

• 1:13:45Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:13:45Speaker 04

  And we didn't. We restrained ourselves for a number of reasons, but like, they can't imagine that because that's not how they operate. If they had the power to do something, they're going to use it.

• 1:13:54Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  And so, the idea that the US has this power and doesn't use it because we are principled and we have rules and regulations, it just does not compute.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  So, do, so by their math though, does that mean that they don't think we're very powerful? Like, we have the power and we don't use it, so which one of those things aren't true?

• 1:14:14Speaker 04

  So, we have the power and we won't use it for them, to help them, right? Essentially the things that they want. And if... You know, but there's also, we have corruption, we have other issues.

• 1:14:24Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  Sometimes that may be influencing why we're not using that power. But I think in their mind, we are using it, right? We could blockade China today, right? And we could block out all oil and gas from getting in, or all oil at least, you know, coming into the coast of China. And they would have major economic consequences today. They know that, right? This is about to focus on Taiwan and other things, the first island chain, get out. But they, I think in their mind, they're like, well, they're not going to do this. And they're a paper tiger, they're weak. Even if they have this power, they're not using it. That just means that they're weak in their heart. Rather than thinking it's principled or it's, you know, again, as we were talking about, we don't want tyranny in this country, so we limit the power of the government.

• 1:15:03Jack Murphy?

  Did you find that they, that there's a belief that they believe all sorts of conspiracy theories about what we're trying to do to them? Like in the Middle East, for example, I've come across many times, like, people think, like, we created ISIS. Like, you're so powerful, if you don't like ISIS, you just send Bruce Willis to wipe them out. Like, what doesn't make sense. But DASH, that's CIA.

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:15:25Jack Murphy?

  What are you, what, you know, people actually around the world believe stuff like that.

• 1:15:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I, I do. I think they have a lot of conspiracy, I mean, they, some of the stuff they see online, I think they absolutely believe about the US government. I'm trying to think of anything specific I could point to, but, no, I mean, I think that a lot of this stuff, they have a hard time understanding how our system works. And I think it's just, you know, you talk to people who have immigrated here, and it does take some time to get it around your head, that like, no, the police really are limited in what they can do, and they have to follow the rules. And yes, and that doesn't mean that there aren't mistakes and all sorts of problems. I don't want to ignore other parts of the country that need work, right?

• 1:16:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:16:04Speaker 04

  We're a project, and we're continuing to work on it, right?

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  There are people everywhere that are going to abuse whatever they're a part of.

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:16:10Speaker 05

  That's just

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:16:11Speaker 05

  Human nature.

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  But by and large, the difference between how our law enforcement works here versus theirs, it's night and day. And so, I mean, I think that there's, there's pieces of this that they just, they cannot figure it out. And so, you know, conspiracy theories come in, and they're happy to believe those, if that's how that works, or, you know. Who knows all this stuff that kind of comes into it. But I think also part of it is because those types of crazy theories, like they actually, like some of that stuff really does happen there, right? Because it's, you know, they've got these secret societies and these places that are very closed off.

• 1:16:43Jack Murphy?

  The palace coups and...

• 1:16:44Speaker 04

  Exactly. The US can't, you know, keep any secrets. Everything gets leaked. Like, there's no, and this is why I love these conspiracy theories about the US of like, you know, crazy, like, in the center, someone running some secret cabal to like, run the government. Are you kidding? Someone would leak that to The Times, like, tomorrow. Like, that would immediately be out there. Like, we can't keep secrets for any amount of time. But, anyway, I, I, I think that there's, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how we operate. And I think, in some ways, we, we have a pretty big misunderstanding of them. People tend to see them, you know, through their own prism of like, oh, well, they'd love to be like us if they, you know, if they could and do these things. And, and they really don't want to be.

• 1:17:20Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:17:20Speaker 04

  If, and in some ways, I'm not sure if our system would work quite as well with that power structure, right? That would mean a lot less power for the CCP. Like, they don't want that.

• 1:17:31Jack Murphy?

  Right. I heard a foreign diplomat, I won't say what country here, but a diplomat from the neighborhood, and he, he said something like, you know, how would a democracy work in a country of a billion people? Like, how would that, could it even function? And I, I don't know if it can or not, but, I mean, it's a question.

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  No, I, it's, I, I pose the same one to, just thinking about China, like, you know, so, population, and the world's grown, and it's, and China's started to level off. So, you know, somewhere between a fourth and a fifth of the world's people are there.

• 1:18:04Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  Just from a pure, like, logistics standpoint of like, you know, of, like, delivering services, goods, money and stuff, just like, like, don't even think about like, the sort of running, but like, a logistics standpoint, like, could even the best logistics company in the world, I don't know, FedEx, Walmart, somewhere like that, could they make this work? Like, a country that size, like, actually work?

• 1:18:26Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  From, that was, that centralized, right? And, and that's, I mean, the, a lot of very, much smarter sort of policy wonks and politicians, or, or policy people that need, know, looking at this of like... The difficulty of running a country that central, that large, with that diversified now of, you know, population, um, you know, if everyone's poor, it's a lot easier.

• 1:18:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:18:47Speaker 04

  But everyone's got different needs and wants because they're all starting to get wealthy. How can they adjust to that, that group now? And it's not clear that they can, right?

• 1:18:56Speaker 05

  And that's, that's been sort of a fundamental American sort of point of hubris, hubris, you know, for, for a long time that we always expect that other countries truly want democracy and need democracy. And if we could just give it to them, then they're going to be A-OK.

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, no, we've, we've, we've tried, I think, unfortunately, to influence more heavily the trajectory of, of some countries rather than, you know, look, I, and I think that's something that we had, especially with regards to China. If you look back at our policy for a long time, you know, the, we, we were doing, I mean, for taking as an example, we were purposely doing technology transfer to China from the government on all sorts of levels, all sorts of, you know, range of technology to build China up, um, for different reasons at different times. One, we wanted to have them oppose the, you know, Soviet Union, but then later because we want them to be bigger stakeholder and, and, you know, all sorts of other reasons. But it's not exactly clear that like they want stuff in the same way and they, they

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  think about it in the same way that, that we do. They're in a very different place in the world. They have a different historical context. Um, and so I think one of the big shifts happened in last administration and this administration has continued it, which is, all right, we're, we're not in the, you know, we're going to plan your future for your business anymore. We're going to lay out some standards. We're going to say this is the minimum you got to get to, and if you don't, then we're going to have problems. Um, and that's kind of where we are now, where I think we've laid some of these out and they're, they're not meeting them so that we're having some fights.

• 1:20:30Jack Murphy?

  Well, could you expand on that a little bit? Like where do you think we are in regards to our relationship with China and, and hate to like ask you to make predictions, but like thoughts about where you see it going in the near future?

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, I mean, in the, in the immediate term, if you just think about the massive economic relationship that we have with China, I think there's just going to be a huge. Number of new regulations, controls put on it, right? Or different ways of sort of monitoring or kind of regulating it. Everything from, you know, the most recent, I know some people following this, this is in my business now, the The semiconductor. Yeah, the export controls, right? We basically like told China like, hey, we're not selling you chips. We're not giving you stuff to make the chips anymore at a certain level because we don't want you to put them into your your military equipment and then come attack. And all the Americans who are working there like, eh, like come home or or else. So and it's it is a pretty massive decapitation of an entire industry there.

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  And they are scrambling right now to figure out what to do. So and and China will respond and, you know, respond a number of different ways. And one of which will just ramp up economic espionage and all the spies will be going after all the businesses stuff in a much greater way. But this is really just the beginning. This is just one industry. I mean, you could take quantum computing, you could talk about hypersonics, you know, any type of sort of cutting edge technology. And it's going to be hard to think about what is not going to be potentially regulated. You know, go back thirty, forty years, you know, what was clear, what was civilian technology versus military? It was there was a much clearer, certainly there was some stuff that was dual use. Now, so many things could be used for the military or used for intelligence purposes, right?

• 1:22:11Speaker 04

  I mean, you think about, you know, just even like geolocation data, right? This is some of the stuff that's coming out about the Tik about TikTok, right? That TikTok was pulling geolocation data data of Americans. And people may be like, well, who cares about that? They know I was at the Burger King, I mean, whatever. But if you take that and you aggregate it with other data you have in other places, it might be able to help you figure out lots of things that you're doing, right? These just individual pieces of this. But if you think about if that data now is thought of as essentially having a national security purpose, or at least needs to be protected from a national security perspective, there's almost nothing that wouldn't be in that realm. Right. So if you're thinking about the future, like how, what is our relationship then going to look like?

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  You know, these of these areas that got sort of designated as like, well, we're going to cooperate in some areas, compete in others, and then essentially confront in others. I think this is the sort of either Jake Sullivan or Biden, sort of, you know, these kind of different areas. I think the areas we're going to cooperate are going to probably shrink to zero. Yeah. And maybe you'll maybe you'll throw the environment, everything, but even John Kerry is ready to throw a hat in and say, well, this is going nowhere. The areas where we compete are going to expand massively. And then more and more of those are going to are going to kind of slip over into the confront area.

• 1:23:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:23Speaker 04

  I I don't know what's coming. I mean, you know. But I I I think we're in sort of for not just with China, but with Russia and with there's a number of other powers. It's a lot of it's easier and easier for smaller powers to kind of punch above their weight.

• 1:23:36Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  Um, the US's ability to kind of keep a lid on things that we have for the last seventy five so years. Is diminishing. Our desire to do it is diminishing and maybe that's even more important. The US doesn't want to exert, you know, blood and treasure out in the world to to do these things anymore. So the ability for other countries to push back is going to expand. Chaos kind of gets, you know, continues to escalate and that it's going to be a very different, different place.

• 1:24:01Speaker 05

  How how do we get? Because for instance, with China, you know, like you mentioned TikTok and and the data. Well, and we also know that that China owned a bunch of the DNA testing places that pregnant women were using, which could potentially be used to create designer viruses.

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:24:18Speaker 05

  You know, specifically targeting individuals or or whatever. How do we, you know, we talk about this in a way because we're we're US, United States, and we think about ourselves. And it's the US versus China, but there are all these other countries out there that also do not benefit from China. You know, sort of expanding that. Are they stakeholders? How do we get them to become stakeholders so that it is not a US-China?

• 1:24:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're working on it and it's it's going to be slow going. I think you're probably going to have, you know, blocks kind of slowly coalescing on both sides. And then you're going to have a lot of people kind of in between. They're trying to trying to straddle both parts of it. And I think, you know, the EU is sort of getting its head around it. Um, Australia certainly is. And I mean, the Five Eyes, there's been a number of um, things. I'm not as um, uh, confident about India. You know, I know where they're part of the the quad that we've got with that, you know, as as part of the bulwark to push back on China. Um, I, you know, it's not exactly clear, certainly some of their activity vis a vis Russia where they're they're they're buying a lot of buying a lot of Russian oil, a lot of Russian military equipment, as they've done for years.

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  Um, so I mean, I think we've got a lot of work to do. Um, and this is where I, you know.

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• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  Perspective, I mean, as an American, but also I think that other countries should think about is like, we've also got a little bit of an issue sort of internally. I don't want to not get political, but certainly we have some hyper partisanship going on, you know? Like, right now, we have a big disagreement about what are things going to look like in the US? For certain issues, but just even long term, what are we going to have? And so as we're in that sort of, you know, spirited discussion that's so wonderful in our country and as we work this stuff out, that's a lot of kind of navel gazing, right? And so if the US is focused internally and we're not projecting power out, that makes the world a very different place, right? So in terms of countries getting aligned and doing that, they may think, well, if the US is not paying attention, you know, but China's out here exerting power, I have to deal with what's at home, right?

• 1:28:14Speaker 04

  Or, you know, if you're Cambodia, the US is far away, right?

• 1:28:17Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:28:18Speaker 04

  And so I, I, I think they're still kind of waiting to see how much and what is the US sustaining power? And this is why, you know, maybe the Russians and the Chinese are ramping up all their malign influence in order to just kind of churn things here and the US get even worse.

• 1:28:31Speaker 05

  It benefits them for us to be hyper partisan, for the left and the right to be going at each other so much.

• 1:28:36Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, and, and this is, and they've done this before. The Soviets did this in the, in the 1950s, 1960s. It's, they've had a longstanding kind of operations against the United States to do it. And it, you know, and it, it essentially sucks all the oxygen out of the room because we're, we're arguing with each other. And so, and, and to be fair, like, there are some real serious issues that we do need to resolve. It's not being helped by the fact we've got crazy, you know, misinformation floating around, that it's being ramped up by outside parties. But I think that, you know, the US looking internally, other places haven't quite figured things out. Like, I think it's gonna be, it's hard right now for Russia and China, but I think it's probably gonna start to get easier for them.

• 1:29:17Speaker 05

  Do you, do you foresee at any point the US sort of, you know, just like FISA, super, you know, kind of goes outside of our protections for every citizen? Do you foresee any time in the future where our information policy also says, okay, if you're in an America, you have privacy laws. If it's an IP that's coming from outside or a hosted IP or VPN, it doesn't have those same, those same rights?

• 1:29:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a really good question. I don't know. I mean, I think we're in a really, you know, cyber has totally obliterated. I mean, as I talked to the, the walls between foreign and domestic at this point. And there's, there's two different models out there, right? The idea of cyber sovereignty, like what, what China and Russia call. And, you know, it's basically like you localize your data, you have control of it. You get to, you have a firewall around it. So you only, you know, you only see things that you want your citizens to see. And the US that's created this very kind of open system where everything can kind of flow.

• 1:30:17Speaker 04

  You know, and I think from a philosophical standpoint, you know, we like the idea of openness. But but we have to acknowledge there are some real problems with it in some way. And this is just going back to my time overseas. One, and this is a very legitimate complaint that both the Russians and the Chinese had against the United States was access to information. So think about this, if you've got, you know, two Russian citizens using Facebook to communicate, you know, using the Facebook Messenger, and they're communicating about wanting to blow up a bus in in Russia. How do they get that information? They don't have, you know, there's no Facebook representative there that they're going to go and sort of process to. It's an American company.

• 1:30:56Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Speaker 04

  So there is a process in place, and again, it's not to pick on Facebook, but, you know, and they have a, they've tried to deal with this, but at the end, they're at the, you know, the whim or the desire of that private company. They cannot enforce that where the US can go and tell Facebook, you have to give this information to them, right? This type of thing. That's a real issue, right? So but if data can free flow and go everywhere and people can have access to this stuff, that creates problems for governments to get access to information they need to protect their citizens. Flip side of that, of course, is they're also looking for all the dissidents who are talking about things.

• 1:31:30Jack Murphy?

  Correct.

• 1:31:31Speaker 04

  And so how do you, if you're Facebook, how do you figure out like, is this a real legit sort of like they want to blow up a bus?

• 1:31:35Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:31:35Speaker 04

  Or these two guys who are being oppressed by the Russian government and so they want, you know, they want information on them. But you're putting a private company in the, in the seat of an art, like a judge, like being an arbitrator of making these decisions, and that's incredibly difficult. So I just bring that up to your question of like, I think we've got a really hard road to hoe here because I don't know what the right answer is.

• 1:31:57Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:31:58Speaker 04

  But our current, like, our current setup that we're pushing from the US is not without problems, not without real legitimate issues. And certainly their side of it is not something we want either. So what does that mean? I think we've got a lot of things to work through over time. But if we can't even get people to agree and sit down and talk at these meetings and we're using them for like geopolitical head smashing, that's not going to happen anytime soon.

• 1:32:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Your next stop was the White House. You had an interesting title, National Security Council Counterintelligence Director.

• 1:32:30Jack Murphy?

  What was your job there? What did that entail?

• 1:32:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's, so National Security Council, there's a bunch of directorates. And then everyone is a director for something, right? So a director for, you know, Middle East, or sometimes you have a director for like Syria. When it was Syria was big, you had this. So I was director for counterintelligence. And so my job was really to help coordinate policy and changes and anything that were happening at the national level between all the different agencies with regards to counterintelligence. And the way, you know, I talked about this a little bit, how the Bureau thinks about counterintelligence is a little bit different than some other agencies. So, you know, in a very traditional strict sense, counterintelligence is you are countering the activities of an intelligence agency, right?

• 1:33:17Speaker 04

  But, you know, there was a recent report from the CICE, the Senate Select Committee, was talking about some of the changes that have happened and that it's almost come from, at least the FBI, and some of the ways that, there's not agreement on this, to be clear. But the way we deal with it sometimes, any actions by the government kind of becomes almost, you know, that's going to be countered by the US, sometimes gets thrown under the umbrella of counterintelligence. And so I mention that because I dealt with intelligence issues, I dealt with malign influence, I dealt with all sorts of other just influence issues that had nothing to do with intelligence services. But it was government agencies from other places, private sectors, some things, all these things have got kind of thrown under the umbrella, the rubric of counterintelligence. But it was essentially almost like any outside group that was trying to do harm to the US,

• 1:34:03Speaker 04

  I'd get pulled into meetings and they'd be like, alright, what does the Bureau think about this, or what's the counterintelligence perspective, or how do we protect ourselves from this?

• 1:34:12Speaker 04

  And so anyway, it was, I did a lot of China work at that time as we were trying to move the US from, really when we talked about these levels of, from a cooperative stance, where we were really trying to help China kind of continue to build up. And there were still, in 2017 when I got there, still a number of agencies that saw their job as cooperating with China, as providing information, helping them build things, helping them, and, you know, and... To be fair to them, they, this had been the, the.

• 1:34:38Speaker 05

  They don't see it as anything nefarious.

• 1:34:40Speaker 04

  No, no, and, and, and they, we were told to do this, right? I mean, this is what the agencies were supposed to do, you know, 10 years before. And, you know, and things just changed so quickly with, with China. I think they couldn't even imagine that like, we actually had to worry about China, right? This place is, you know, poor, developing, but it's not going to be, it's not a competitor by any means. And then all of a sudden, all, you know, certainly after the financial crisis in 2008, like power dynamics started to change pretty dramatically. So it was a lot of helping them understand, like, you can't be cooperating with them anymore. You can't be giving them misinformation. You can't be dealing with them, you know, having our scientists go over there and teach them to do these types of things. And so, but then it also got to, as I talked about other organizations,

• 1:35:21Speaker 04

  it's like trying to work with academic institutions, universities and help them understand like, look, you know, if you're receiving government money, you might have to think twice about who has access to your labs.

• 1:35:31Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:35:32Speaker 04

  You have these, this cutting edge, you know, equipments and, and you're doing this cutting edge experimentation, at least in part because of US government support. That doesn't mean that anyone can run into your lab then and use that same, you know, equipment to do things that we don't want them to do.

• 1:35:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:35:47Speaker 04

  But ran into a lot of cultural problems there, right? That's a, the university system doesn't want controls on, you know, on information and knowledge.

• 1:35:56Speaker 05

  And it's tough to, in today's climate management, we've talked about this before, that anti-Chinese government action, anti-CCP action could, will get branded by, as racist in a heartbeat and then it'll inhibit, it'll inhibit your, your ability to stop them.

• 1:36:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is something that, that Chinese intelligence pushes, absolutely. So one thing that they, they know that, that sort of is a third rail and a lot of times in American politics is if you're talking about sort of racial discrimination and that can make everything grind to a halt. So they've seen that as something to grab on to and to focus on. At the same time, I think it's important to note that there are people who have focused on that, people who are like, well, if you have this background, people have been attacked and say, well, oh, well, they're Chinese. You know, maybe three generations ago, their, you know, their ancestors came from China, but they're Americans, right? Or, or they came and they're naturalized and they're Americans now. So, I mean, there's, there's a piece of this.

• 1:36:56Speaker 04

  And so, one way that I always talked about is, is to, rather than think of the people with these connections, you know, based on ethnicity, but think about it in terms of vulnerability. Mm-hmm. Your ethnicity or your national origin really doesn't matter what you're, you're, what they are. It, it matters if you have financial connections or family connections. So, so I have no Chinese background whatsoever. If my sister worked for a multinational in Shanghai, I would be vulnerable. Because, because of her being there, the security services, intelligence services could lean on her in a way, right? And so, it's important to think about this stuff as, as a vulnerability, right? That, that connection can be a wonderful thing for, you know, in terms of cultural aspect

• 1:37:40Speaker 04

  and even helping in all sorts of ways, but it also can make people more vulnerable. It doesn't necessarily make them a threat. And so, I think part of the issue is that sometimes people jump to, well, if you're associated with that, you're a threat. Right. Rather than saying, no, you're vulnerable and you could be abused. Because sometimes it's unwitting, sometimes it's witting. But, so that's an important, I think, distinction to make. But, in, in some ways, you know, the CCP has got us chasing our tail because they'll focus on saying, well, you know, oh, it's purely a racist sort of like attack on us, you know, because your attackness is, and so there's- Huawei likes to play that game. Yeah, absolutely. And, so that, you know, the US government's made a real, um, strong attempt to focus on, one, saying PRC, People's Republic of China, right?

• 1:38:23Speaker 04

  And talking about that and using that as an, rather than saying, saying it's Chinese, because that can obviously not just be the country, it could be the ethnicity, right? And then it is also focused on talking about the party as the problem, um, rather than the people. And I think, and I think that's a really good, important distinction, right? Right. Because they're the vanguard, they're in charge, um, most of the people don't even know what's going on, much less have any ability to make any decision. So, whether they've been propagandized and are supporting them, that's important to note, but like, at the end of the day, it's the party that we really have a problem with and not the people.

• 1:38:53Jack Murphy?

  What was it like being up there at the White House at a high level? And kind of, I know there's probably a lot of things you can't talk about, but I mean, you must have been, you know, at least aware of some pretty gnarly counterintelligence investigations and some things that, I mean, probably kept you up at night.

• 1:39:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it was, I mean, it's a crazy experience because imagine, I mean, there's sort of, you know, the top secret, then there's SCI compartments, and then you have all these crazy programs where it's like 25 or 30 people in the country are right into them, whatever. And so the benefit of that job is I get right into pretty much all of them. And so you see, the wonderful thing about it that actually helped me sleep at night is you do see all the stuff that the US government is doing and like some of the things that we have going on and you're like, wow, that's really cool. Like this stuff is pretty amazing. We've been working at this for a long time and we're doing a really, really good job. And then sometimes we're doing such a good job, we get access to information that is so concerning that it does keep going.

• 1:39:53Speaker 04

  It kind of goes back and forth.

• 1:39:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55Speaker 04

  But there were some things, just, I mean, without going into detail, but like,

• 1:40:02Speaker 04

  I mean, in some ways this informs my ideas of what is kind of coming. And, you know, I think Americans tend to want to believe that the best and be optimistic. And I think that can sometimes make us a little bit naive about what might be happening. And, you know, there's a lot of much smarter commentators than me out there talking about, you know, this last period since World War II of relative quiet, certainly since 1991, you know, with, you know, global war on terrorism is a glaring exception. But it's been relatively quiet that it's probably an anomaly. And we're probably going back to a much more competitive and conflict-ridden world.

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  And so that was a lot of seeing sort of what appear to be indicators of that are kind of coming in from all different parts of the world, from different parts of the, you know, the US government has, you know, obviously bases and stations and everything all around the world, information kind of coming in about what is happening. And it's, the one thing that just struck me was just the turmoil and chaos, right? Freedom House, you know, does a survey each year. And I think last year, it was for the 16th year in a row, freedom has declined around the world. So for 16 years straight. And their prediction is it's going to continue to go in that direction. And so just some of the things you're seeing there is that like we're getting up to a time

• 1:41:27Speaker 04

  where it's going to be very different than what we faced before.

• 1:41:31Jack Murphy?

  Do you see a increase in foreign intelligence capability, or say foreign intelligence targeting us, but I'm interested in the volume, but also the capabilities, are they sort of like that, you know, vertical versus horizontal proliferation? Like, are they increasing their capability, coming up not probably able to match us, but getting closer?

• 1:41:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think if I recall, the most recent reports have come out, so it doesn't mean they're exactly quite, you know, exactly, but they're in our category.

• 1:42:03Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  And, you know, that's, that covers a lot, I mean, you know, MSS has 100,000, you know, people in their organization, so, you know, there's some who are really good and there are some who are like, you know, not.

• 1:42:14Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:42:15Speaker 04

  So, and that's why I think it's kind of confusing because you'll, you'll see these operations, you're like-

• 1:42:19Jack Murphy?

  Some kid going onto a Navy base taking pictures.

• 1:42:22Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly, stuff like that, or even the most recent one that came out, DOJ was charging those guys from Huawei, and like, you know, the kind of source control operations, you could see the dialogue, I mean, at least from my standpoint, it was pretty, you know, he's revealing a lot of things he shouldn't have revealed, you know, he's basically talking about what his boss wanted or didn't want, and, you know, and all sorts of information you wouldn't want to tell a source if you want to kind of keep them strictly controlled and focused on things and stuff, so, I don't know who it was exactly that was running it, but it didn't seem, that's great, but, but back to your point, I mean, so yes, I mean, I think that the number of agencies out there that are doing it, not just in Russia, China, but other places in the world, it's cheaper and cheaper to do this now, you've got a lot of private sector people getting into it, there's been some great articles recently

• 1:43:06Speaker 04

  about, you know, Indian hackers for hire, and you do that, there's a number of countries in the Middle East that tend to outsource a lot of their intelligence gathering, they pull in private organizations to do it. Because their intelligence services are more inwardly focused. And in some ways, the collapse of distance and ability to reach out and touch anyone has made your ability to run operations against anyone just increased by a millionfold. Think about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like the ultimate recruitment tool in many ways, right? I mean, you can set up the search parameters on that to find people in a company with certain backgrounds, you know, went to a certain school.

• 1:43:50Speaker 04

  You can figure out everything about them, all the things you would need to create a targeting package to go up and bump them and start a relationship with them. It's an amazing tool for being able to do all that. And so that type of stuff is really concerning in my mind because it makes it so much easier to run, you know, not just cyber operations, but a human operation where people can come in and start to run this. And it often doesn't take much to get people to want to, you know, persuade them to collect information.

• 1:44:18Jack Murphy?

  There's one more question I wanted to get before we talk about sort of your private sector experience. A question I wanted to ask you about potentials for abuse, things that are like, you know, the public has some concerns about. My friend Ken Klippenstein published an article this week about the Department of Homeland Security and they had, for a short time, Council on Disinformation that was disbanded. And he writes in the article about, it's a public-private partnership where the government will go to a Facebook and say, hey, we have some concerns about this baby being disinformation. Can you throttle that down or can you take that off your website?

• 1:45:02Jack Murphy?

  And now the government, it's not the government ordering the company what to do, but nonetheless, there are concerns about censorship. Who gets to define what disinformation is? And I was just wondering, since you've worked at like kind of all levels of this topic, what your thoughts are about that?

• 1:45:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean...

• 1:45:21Speaker 04

  This is a huge mess in my mind.

• 1:45:24Speaker 04

  I don't know what to do. I mean, you know, you've got Elon Musk just bought Twitter and, you know, whether you think that's the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. You know, you basically have, private companies are now in the business of arbitrating speech, right? Deciding what is acceptable, what isn't. You know, again, so this is ripe for the Supreme Court to step in to say, you can't do this or can't do this, or you're now sort of a, you know, you're going to be considered a

• 1:45:49Jack Murphy?

  Utility.

• 1:45:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, essentially, and, you know, people, everyone uses you, and so you're gonna, you're gonna be considered, essentially, you're gonna have to, you know, protect these types of rights as well. Because right now, I mean, like, First Amendment protects you against government action, right? And not necessarily against private action.

• 1:46:07Speaker 04

  So I, I think, you know, you've got the situation where the government is in a really, US government specifically, is in a tough spot. And we talked about this when I was up there. There's another place in the State Department called the Global Engagement Center.

• 1:46:22Jack Murphy?

  The GEC.

• 1:46:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24Jack Murphy?

  Run by a Navy SEAL and then a fighter pilot and then, I don't know, they're not quite as bad today, are they?

• 1:46:29Speaker 04

  No, no, I actually, I mean, you know, they originally started doing kind of work on trying to put out, you know, non-extremist information about Islam, right? Which is, I mean, you know, an important piece, just to go back to earlier story about the Tsarnaev brothers, you know, his mom talked about, you know, when Tomerlane was, you know, they were Muslim but not religious, and when he decided he wanted to find out about it, what did he do? Went on the internet. And if you, you know, back then, if you Googled Islam, you did not find the peaceful part of the religion that made up the majority of the people, you found the extreme stuff. And so that's what he encountered right away. And so the GEC was, you know, created to try to make sure that there's, you're getting

• 1:47:11Speaker 04

  a much, you know, richer kind of picture of how things go.

• 1:47:17Speaker 04

  And so I think similarly, you know, they've been expanding kind of focus on, you know,

• 1:47:23Speaker 04

  Some of the disinformation is put out by Russia, China and other places. But they're a tiny organization and there's a big question of like, should the US government even be involved in this? Right? Like, no, I mean, what American believes information that comes from the US government? Right? And there's just, there's an automatic sort of like, that's total nonsense, right? That's a politician saying that.

• 1:47:41Speaker 05

  Well, it depends on if it's, if it's, you are president or not, right? Like, if you're for Trump, then you believe what comes out. If you're for Biden, you believe what comes out. Obama, Bush, Clinton, right? Like, we identify with that. But what government has ever been completely honest with its people?

• 1:47:59Speaker 04

  Right. No, and that's, I mean, you see those stats, right? The common, like, what government institutions are always the lowest sort of level of trust and stuff, which...

• 1:48:08Speaker 04

  But no, I, I think it's a really tough spot. How does the US encourage this environment? You know, and I mean, it basically, the information environment in the cyber world is, is nascent and it has not fully developed. But like, like all industries that are new, the trash moves in first, right? So this is like, you know, what were the first, I'm gonna date myself here, but you know, back when videotapes became the thing? Like, what drove VHS tapes? Porn, right? I mean, what drove the internet to begin with? Porn, right?

• 1:48:36Speaker 05

  Porn made the VHS industry. I mean, it did, yeah.

• 1:48:39Speaker 04

  So all of these, I mean, you think that this sort of...

• 1:48:40Jack Murphy?

  We got all these cameras and mics in here, we're in the wrong business.

• 1:48:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. Getting uncomfortable now.

• 1:48:47Speaker 04

  But, I mean...

• 1:48:48Speaker 05

  Here, have a drink.

• 1:48:50Speaker 04

  This has changed, this is for the second half of the show here. All right, we're gonna delete that part right there. But no, I mean, I think there's a, a piece of this where it's like, this is the, we're the very early stages of this information environment. And, you know, it's the garbage that's in here right now and we can't like, kind of make sense of it. And so, over time, it's gonna, you know, get better. And I, I think that the private sector should be the, the main piece of it. But like, and there could be so much damage that could happen before that, before that comes about.

• 1:49:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:49:21Speaker 04

  But you've got, yeah, I mean, this is like... Again, get back to like, so Elon Musk now is gonna make more decisions about how, what speech is okay in, you know, on Twitter, and that's a huge forum for information now. A guy who has significant business interests in China.

• 1:49:38Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:49:38Speaker 04

  Is this, you know, a guy who was spouting essentially Chinese views on Twitter?

• 1:49:43Speaker 05

  Taiwan.

• 1:49:44Speaker 04

  And, and also, there's, you know, at least, Ann Brimmer says he talked to Putin or received talking points from Putin, he denies it, who knows, but he put out talking points that the Ukrainians were not particularly happy with. So, again, not to pick on Elon Musk, but the idea being, should you have any private citizen making these types of judgments, right, about what is in the, the, the public sphere?

• 1:50:07Speaker 05

  Well, they, I mean, in, in, I agree with you, and prior to that, whether it was an individual or a board, you know, they were banning people for questioning whatever, whatever it might be, right, they're, they banned the New York Post for the Hunter Biden story.

• 1:50:27Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:50:28Speaker 05

  Right, for the laptop. So, i- i- it's not just one individual, it's private citizens, right?

• 1:50:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:34Speaker 05

  And, and, you know, private citizens have agendas, regardless of what those agendas are, and these organizations, these, they, like you said, they, they have become, in a way, utilities.

• 1:50:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:51Speaker 05

  That people can, in a way, get depersoned, like, lose their livelihood or their career if they are not on these.

• 1:50:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:58Speaker 05

  Or they get banned. And, yeah, it's, it's a question of, how, how do you ensure that, whether it's an Elon Musk, or a Jack Dorsey in the board, or, or Zuckerberg, or whomever else, that, you know, how do they combat misinformation, but also, not just because the FBI says, hey, Facebook, this stuff on Biden's laptop is, you know, Russian disinformation, that they don't bury it?

• 1:51:26Speaker 04

  No, and that's a fair, and I don't mean to imply that it was better previously with the board necessarily, right? Maybe it was better in some ways and worse in others, or it was worse, I don't even know how to judge it, but the point, as you made, is, you've got private citizens doing their best, Facebook set up a similar kind of, you know, what, group of experts to kind of arbitrate this stuff, right? Which I imagine is a bit of, you know, sort of, you know, First Amendment theater, that they've kind of put in there to like, allow these things to go forward, but. You know, I, I think we had a big fight on our hands coming up like with this.

• 1:51:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's tough because, you know, we, like, right now, when we look at the COVID vaccines or whatever, and we look at the data coming out, like, one, you don't want to discourage people, but you want to have the scientific debate, like, what if, you know, what if this were the smallpox vaccine?

• 1:52:13Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:52:14Speaker 05

  And there were people like saying, no, don't do it, uh, you know, where, where it was necessary? Or, or what if it was electroshock therapy or lobotomies? Like, it's, it's difficult to determine when something is actual debate, when it is targeted misinformation.

• 1:52:32Speaker 04

  No, I, I don't have, I don't know if there's a good solution for it. I'm not, I'm not sure if the days of Walter Cronkite delivering the news for everybody were necessarily better in every ways, right?

• 1:52:41Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:52:41Speaker 04

  I mean, certainly some things were better than others, but like, you know, why did he have such a, you know, a kind of an ability to make those decisions?

• 1:52:48Speaker 05

  Right, right. What was the news, you know, was people decided was the news?

• 1:52:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I, again, this is one of those things that you think about could easily consume, you know, American society, you know, thinking about this and trying to figure it out. And, and it's rough. I, I will say without sign to, you know, rah rah patriarch. I, as much as, as rough as it is, I think it's the right way to do it, right? I don't want a, you know, take China as an example, having, you know, a bunch of technocrats who have my best interests at heart, you know, who are making the decisions about, you know, I need a firewall to protect me, so I don't, you know, have ideas bothering me. I don't want that. Um, the flip side of that, though, I think I hope most Americans come to understand is that then that means that we have these debates that can get kind of ugly and we should,

• 1:53:36Speaker 04

  which we should try to make them as less ugly as possible, less personalized, right? This is our, our methodology for, for trying to find some sort of middle ground compromise, and it takes time. Um, but if the, the less we try to kill each other during that, the better, right?

• 1:53:51Speaker 05

  Do you, having been in China and understanding their system, and, and maybe social credit wasn't kind of a thing then, I don't know.

• 1:53:58Speaker 04

  Sort of, yeah.

• 1:53:59Speaker 05

  But, but do you see a potential for the United States? Do you see any traces of the United States? Or do you think that we can slip by that and avoid it completely?

• 1:54:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a really good question. I think we're going to have to be really careful that we do not fall into or get kind of lured in by the siren song of surveillance technology. I think a lot of people see that as this sort of wonderful panacea that's going to solve our problems, right? Just in my current job, we talked to a lot of businesses and we talked to them about how to protect their employees and protect themselves from losing information. And their response a lot of times can be, well, we've got this wonderful tool that allows us to see everything that they're doing. I'm not sure the employees know that they have that tool.

• 1:54:49Speaker 04

  But I think we need to be very careful believing that technology is going to solve all this, right? Their ability to like watch all this stuff. And so social credit, I think, is just a kind of even larger system, right? Of where you're essentially surveilling their bankruptcy, their marital status and their, you know, maybe their Tinder feed as well as their Twitter feed, right? To see what they're doing and then coming up with a some wonderful algorithmic, you know, kind of results that no one can kind of peer inside it to figure out how it's actually done.

• 1:55:19Speaker 05

  Is it patriotic? Right, yeah. Yeah. Is it the right, yeah. Is it the right talking points?

• 1:55:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is going to be really difficult. And I mean, this is maybe the challenge of AI. I mean, of, you know, how, which we don't necessarily have. We just have machine learning at this point, but at some point we may have something much closer to AI. And how do we use it without sort of destroying ourselves, right? To go back to Elon, who's, he's very worried about it. And then even to connect to Putin, he said, the person who controls, you know, the country that controls AI will control the world.

• 1:55:51Speaker 05

  Right. And we've seen some, well, some bad experience with AI where, you know, they did the Twitter AI, I think. And after getting sort of stampeded or brigaded that it did nothing but curse and.

• 1:56:06Speaker 04

  Oh, it was like super racist?

• 1:56:07Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, right, right.

• 1:56:10Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we're still trying to learn how to figure that out. But I think there's this piece of like, you know, assuming that technology is going to solve all of our issues rather, you know, and that we just create the right formula, you know, at the end of the day, it's what, you know, what is that, how is that waiting going on? And then what is the information that's going in there? Someone is having to decide that, right? So you put good information, you know, the whole idea of garbage in, you're going to get garbage out.

• 1:56:36Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:56:36Speaker 04

  So. I'm, I think there's a little bit of, you know, we, I think particularly Americans get kind of enamored with technology and to think that's going to solve our problems.

• 1:56:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:56:48Speaker 04

  And I think there's parts that can make our lives better.

• 1:56:50Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:56:50Speaker 04

  But, you know, I've got kids, I've mentioned, and so my wife and I are constantly reading about, you know, all the sort of problems that are caused by social media to kids. You think about all the sort of negative effects of it, and I'm like, and so what are we getting out of this at the end of the day?

• 1:57:05Speaker 05

  Right. But almost every dystopian story we have that's been popular from like Fahrenheit 451 in 1984 onward to, you know, Brazil and Terminator and everything else, that has something to do with technology, right?

• 1:57:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Jack Murphy?

  Could you talk to us then about, you know, sort of going into the private sector and what you're up to today?

• 1:57:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Thanks. So, um, so I saw a need, and I mean, what the, being at the NSC and the Bureau, you know, would really focus on the playing field and how, like, how to protect that. But we realized that there's a lot of companies and individuals that just weren't getting the sort of kind of preparation that they needed. You know, we, I've, and the Bureau kind of always kept it arms-length with regards to companies and what they've got going on. And so, being out in the private sector now, it's a lot easier to kind of bring you into the fold. So basically, we have a boutique consulting that helps companies deal with nation-state threats, right? So these are human-driven kind of threats, and we have

• 1:58:08Speaker 04

  human-driven solutions. So we don't focus so much on the cyber piece of it, in terms of the technical piece of it. I think there's a lot out there, dealing with that, for better or for worse. We focus really on kind of how the people interact with technology, the facilities, and even interact with each other. You know, if you look at statistically, you know, Cyber intrusion still upwards ninety percent plus are because of, you know, poor control of credentials, you know, no multi-factor authentication, clicking on links, downloading things they shouldn't have. So ultimately, there's still vast injury relates back to people.

• 1:58:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44Speaker 04

  And so, you know, the, the best piece of software is not going to protect you from that. You have to like focus on people. And so for us, it's about having, you know, creating that awareness of like, you are an important part to this. And whether or not you appreciate it or not, your company has been pulled into a massive geopolitical struggle. And the quicker you get your head around that and realize that there are, there really are, you know, intelligence officers in China, in Russia, in Iran, you know, in all sorts of other countries in the world, trying to steal your information, the better you'll be able to protect your company, your family, your livelihood and that type of thing. So we.

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• 2:01:14Speaker 04

  Try to help give advice and think about this, depending on what kind of company you are, if you make semiconductors, or if you've got data or things. What are the types of assets that essentially intelligence officers and others are coming after? How they're going to come after you? And then how can you protect yourself in the private sector?

• 2:01:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:33Speaker 04

  It's a little bit difficult or different in some ways because you don't have the same tools of protection you do in the government, right? You don't have the same tools to find this stuff out. So it's a lot more sort of risk analysis versus investigations and stuff. So it's been an adjustment, but it's fun. It can be a lot more creative, I think, than you can in the government, which is often your blinders on. And we've gotten to touch a lot of different companies that didn't get to get as close to before.

• 2:02:00Jack Murphy?

  That's fantastic. Where can people find these services? Where can they find you if they're interested in?

• 2:02:05Speaker 04

  So we're on the internet. Trench Coat Advisors is the company. And we're happy to always talk with if companies are interested and work with individuals sometimes if they're concerned about themselves in terms of their own security. So my partner is Bill Priestup. He was the head of counterintelligence for three years. A few more people have joined us now and starting to work with them more. But really, it's about, for us, it's more kind of strategic, like how do you navigate this, right? Especially if you are one of those semiconductor companies that used to sell to China. What do you do at this point, right? What should you be prepared for? Which is ramped up economic espionage on your company, that type of thing.

• 2:02:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. It's really interesting what you're doing because it kind of rang a bell for me because I remember somebody, I think it was at Special Operations Command, saying at SOFIC one year, like, "We need a computer program that can identify disinformation." It's like, hold on a second, buddy. Like, if, if that programming up here, it doesn't matter what the soft software is.

• 2:03:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 2:03:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:05Speaker 04

  No, there's, and that's a big piece of it, right? I mean, it's, there's a lot of software out there that supposedly gives all these great solutions, but at the end of the day, you know.

• 2:03:14Jack Murphy?

  The people are vulnerable.

• 2:03:15Speaker 05

  And, and you're right, I mean, for, like you said, like eighty, ninety percent of, of cyber, cybercrime, not even the intelligence aspect, but just the crime, which is a multi-billion dollar. It costs businesses billions of dollars every year, just in the United States. Um, it, it's phishing, it's, it's those human-oriented attacks.

• 2:03:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Do we have, uh, any questions from, uh, folks out there?

• 2:03:38Speaker 05

  We do. We have, we have some questions. We got some spicy questions. I don't know.

• 2:03:42Jack Murphy?

  Some spicy ones?

• 2:03:43Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't know. I was just saying that. Uh, let me see what we got going on here. Um, pop over to the studio.

• 2:03:58Speaker 05

  And.

• 2:04:04Speaker 05

  All right.

• 2:04:09Speaker 05

  Danny, thank you very much. Uh, oh, this is a great question. Uh, was Holden's father a big J.D. Salinger fan?

• 2:04:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no, you know, I wish my parents were that, uh, literate or literate.

• 2:04:24Speaker 04

  Holden's actually, um, my grandmother, my paternal grandmother's maiden name, and so it's a family name, so. There's a bunch of, my dad's from, uh, Mountain View, Missouri, where there's, interestingly, no mountain and no view. Um, but, uh, and there's a bunch of Holden's and, and triplets around there for some reason, when they immigrated over there, so.

• 2:04:43Speaker 05

  So no Holden, calm.

• 2:04:44Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 2:04:45Speaker 05

  Caulfield. Um, Jerry, thank you very much. What is your opinion of the ports of New York and New Jersey? Do you think they are deliberately open to immigrants from China?

• 2:04:57Speaker 04

  I don't have not heard that. I can't imagine they'd be deliberately open to them. But I would, there's, you know, human sort of trafficking is a massive issue just around the country, around the world. And China has some huge issues with that. So it's funny, actually, that is one issue that we were able to work with them on was human trafficking to some degree when we were in China at times. And then there was, anyway, it became frustrating, but that was one that they had some time for us on. And it was a serious issue. There are some really powerful criminal operations. I mean, obviously, I haven't heard the Triads, but there's a number out throughout China that kind of bring people in. So I don't know if it's purposeful, but I mean, you know, that sometimes it's just the corruption is

• 2:05:42Speaker 04

  so endemic and rife, and it's pretty easy for a criminal organization to exploit it.

• 2:05:46Speaker 05

  Do you think, do you feel as though politicians are becoming more security aware when it comes to immigration issue, not just immigration, but like who they allow on their staff, who they're partnering with, who they're taking donations from, things like that?

• 2:06:04Speaker 04

  At the federal level, for sure. At the state level and the local level, I don't think so. I think that there's still, it's, there's been a couple articles that have come out. Axios did one probably about a year ago. And there was another one recently. They're still, you know, they're still at a point where it's like, you know, ex-Chinese city calls up and says, hey, we want to set up a friendship with your town in, you know, in Idaho. And they're like, great.

• 2:06:28Speaker 05

  They put out a warning like three months ago, warning like small businesses, like, you need to be aware of.

• 2:06:35Speaker 04

  And I think they're starting to get their heads around it, but there's still, there's a huge kind of gulf of understanding at this point. So I don't think it will take it as seriously. And again, you know, I think kind of your, to your point earlier, there's a little bit of people are like, well, I can't do this because then it, you know, I'll be considered discriminating or racist. And again, from my perspective is this is not approaches that that person's a threat. It's like understanding that people have vulnerabilities based on where they may have family.

• 2:07:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:07:04Speaker 04

  Their particular, you know, ethnic, you know, national background is irrelevant, actually, right? Just think, approach it that way. And so, you know, if this person happens to be of whatever ethnicity, but has no connection to China whatsoever, and they don't have any family over there, then they're probably just as safe as anyone else is.

• 2:07:21Speaker 05

  Right. Ohms, thank you very much for the donation. This is more a comment, I guess. I know the Bush administration administration offered ports to UAE and Saudi Arabia. Not sure about Saudi Arabia, but yeah, that's a thing. Thank you, Ohms. Danny, thanks again. Was Agent Triple involved in the investigation raid on Mar-a-Lago? Is he able to speculate on why Donald Trump hasn't been indicted yet?

• 2:07:46Speaker 04

  So, no, I left, I left the Bureau about two years ago, so I was, and have not been on the investigative side for a couple of years now. So, I, all I could say on any of those cases that I can't imagine the machinations and scrutiny that goes into, everyone is fully aware that, you know, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't at this point. There's, there is no safe answer on any side. So it's, it's probably pretty rough for, for everybody.

• 2:08:16Speaker 05

  RS, thank you very much for the donation. Thoughts on former Agent Robert Hanson, Eric O'Neill, and the movie Breach?

• 2:08:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I liked it. I mean, I, you know, I think, look, I mean, Hanson obviously was just devastating to, you know, to the, to the United States and to the Bureau specifically. It's, but I think there's something, and I can't go into any detail, but I, I understand now, you know, the feeling that, that people have, and they talk about it a little bit in the movie, which I thought was done pretty well, about the, someone that you work with, that you assumed was, you're on the same team, right? I mean, you know, you guys have been in government, you're doing jobs that are very difficult, you're often doing it for pay that is a quarter or less of what you could make in the private sector. And,

• 2:09:07Speaker 04

  you know, you're, you're doing it with people many times because you feel like you're part of a mission, part of a team. And if you suddenly realize that one of your team has been working against you the entire time, and undermining all the things that you believed in, it's pretty devastating. And I think that, I think that if I, it's been a while since I've seen the movie, I think it captures it well. But, you know, obviously, there's some huge intelligence

• 2:09:31Speaker 04

  Kind of issues with, you know, impact of what Hanson did. But I think that maybe underappreciated is the impact they had to the organization. Just the feelings of just mistrust and just, you know, that you've got someone in your midst that like, you know, worked against us.

• 2:09:47Jack Murphy?

  That was like, kind of the one thing that I noticed James Olsen get a little choked up talking about was Aldrick Ames. He was like, I knew Ames had a problem with alcoholism.

• 2:09:56Speaker 05

  They were friends.

• 2:09:57Jack Murphy?

  I didn't say, he's like, I didn't say anything because, you know, I liked him as a person. And he's like, I think he said it was like the one big oversight, the one lapse that he felt in his career.

• 2:10:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can understand, I mean, it's one of these things where, again, in the movies it's portrayed as like, it's clear, you know, it's someone that's shifty and, you know, all these things. And like, it's not, it's often, you know, people who are, like all humans are flawed. And they make a series of bad decisions, get themselves in a place. I don't, I don't think Alder James started off as a, you know, knew he was going to be a traitor for his entire life.

• 2:10:33Speaker 05

  Right, he didn't grow up, he was an eight year old laying in bed saying, I want to be an FBI traitor, yeah.

• 2:10:38Speaker 04

  Exactly, and same with Hanson, so.

• 2:10:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, sorry.

• 2:10:41Speaker 04

  But, no, but I, you know, and so you think about the trajectory that that person goes on to go from a place of where, at some point, I imagine they believed in what they did and believed that they were a part of it. And then to suddenly go to a place where they could betray everyone. You know, it's a very, it's a very human journey and I think it's upsetting. But at the same time, like, there's a piece of it, I think, that we don't really fully understand and have explored, like.

• 2:11:08Jack Murphy?

  Like what that person does psychologically to convince themselves this is okay.

• 2:11:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, some serious cognitive dissonance there with saying, you know, that this is, you know, I'm doing, I mean, Hanson believed he was helping the Bureau, right?

• 2:11:18Jack Murphy?

  Hanson was a curious case, he's not a, not a normal sort of traitor. He, uh, his motivations are more opaque.

• 2:11:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely, and it's.

• 2:11:29Speaker 04

  But you know, and sort of from an intel perspective, you know, kudos to the Russians for being, you know, flexible to deal with someone like that, right? But that's, I mean, that's part of the game in many ways of like, you have people come to you for all sorts of different reasons of why they want to provide information and you have to figure out if it is a good reason, if it's a reason that you can believe in the information, can you validate it, all these sort of things. And it's extremely complicated, but it's rare that it happens so cleanly that you can just say, oh, well, great, this is good.

• 2:11:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:11:58Speaker 04

  And if it is, it's probably such a low level, it's not impactful. But when it gets up to that level, it's horribly complicated.

• 2:12:04Speaker 05

  Right, yeah.

• 2:12:08Speaker 05

  Wiz Wiz, thank you very much. How do we disincent-

• 2:12:13Speaker 04

  Disincentivize.

• 2:12:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank, de-incentivize, economic disincentivize? Economic espionage carried out by our own geopolitical allies, example, France, Japan.

• 2:12:24Speaker 04

  Israel.

• 2:12:24Speaker 05

  Disincentivize.

• 2:12:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a great question.

• 2:12:30Speaker 04

  I don't think we can disincentivize them. I think we have to like, I think we're gonna have to, we just gotta put up protections for it. You know, I mean, this is the, this is the difficult thing, I think, with allies, you know, be it, you know, Israel or South Korea or France or whatever, that we align in many ways. But in their minds, you know, you gotta get inside their head, which is, all right, today the US cares about my issues, but will they tomorrow?

• 2:12:55Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:12:55Speaker 04

  And, you know, so what do I need to do? I need to get everything I can out of this relationship, right? Obviously, we don't like that from our perspective, but you can, you can understand why, why they see it that way, right? They don't, they don't have the, you know, hundreds of years of close relationship like the UK does, and that they can depend on that's gonna be there. But, I mean, one way to do it is to, you know, sort of have a much more open, well, a couple of different ways, you have a much more open sort of, you know- Where we share certain high technology with them, which I think we're starting to deal with some places like in Japan. And then the other is they develop their own sort of internal, you know, intellectual property regime that is worthwhile.

• 2:13:37Speaker 04

  And so that even if a company steals something, you just, you go to Japan, you can sue them. You go to France, you can sue them, right? And so that could happen over time, and it's something that the US could require them to, you know, sort of enact in order to have access to certain things.

• 2:13:51Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:13:51Speaker 04

  And so maybe that's something that, you know, my successors at the NSC can work on right now.

• 2:13:56Speaker 05

  Jerry, thank you very much. What, uh, who is your favorite Russian writer and why? I can type in Russian, but those guys would bitch for that. Yeah. You can answer in Russian. You can answer in Russian if you want. Jerry, you're showing your colors, man.

• 2:14:11Speaker 04

  Um, favorite Russian writer? I mean, I, probably, I, Dostoevsky, I would guess. And I mean, I, so I was a Russian literature major at, at Texas, so I read a bunch a long time ago. And I do really like it. It's very, it's very dark. And that seems kind of cliched to pick Dostoevsky. I'll have to think about it a little more. There's some, there's some more recent ones that are, that are more interesting, but.

• 2:14:47Speaker 05

  Um, and I, that is, oh, wait, let me check the Patreon real quick. Um, Isaac, you're asking some really political questions here. Um, so we, we talked about this a little bit, but what was it like being in China-Russian? How do you compare them? How are they different? Who is harder?

• 2:15:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think China was harder in a lot of ways. I just, I felt like there was a lot more distance between how we talked about things and how we saw things than Russia. It doesn't mean that it was necessarily we're gonna come to an agreement with Russia. You know, sometimes the worst fights can be between siblings, right? In some ways, like people that you agree on a lot of different things. But in some ways, just the perspective in China and the way that the system worked there, it was just so different. I can tell you, like, one of the things I spent a lot of time on is even trying to help them understand if they wanted to, because they had a lot of frustrations. And I saw part of my job is helping not only like the US communicate to China, but help China communicate to the US.

• 2:16:02Speaker 04

  Because in my mind, confusion on either side is not a good thing, right? For countries that could eventually get into some sort of hot conflict. And so if I can help them, you know, sort of think about what is important, like, how do you express what matters to you? Like, then I, helping them do that and, you know, kind of plug into the US system. And so they're actually talking to people that can hear this and make decisions based on it. But it was, it was, it was difficult. And I guess I attribute that to, not a cultural thing, but Russia at least had kind of gone back to a place where power is a bit more, as much as the security services had a lot of power, it had decentralized quite a bit, right?

• 2:16:47Speaker 04

  You had businesses that had a lot of power, business leaders. And so in many ways, it felt a lot more like the US where it was a lot more, there was, you know, there were connections, but at least when I was there in 2012 and 2014, it was more like decentralized, different areas of power. That's not how it was in China. It was really still sort of as a pyramid. And that part of it, I hadn't really, I mean, I'd been in Russia in 93, but things had already fallen apart. I had never really experienced before kind of being in a place that is They're not quite totalitarian yet, but they were on their way. And like you could kind of feel it in a, in a, in a way that was very different. And so being in a totalitarian state, I kind of missed the tail end of the Cold War and that. That's what it felt like, the sort of beginnings of it in China. Obviously, I'm sitting around talking to the security service, so my experience is different than other people.

• 2:17:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:17:32Speaker 04

  But, uh, that was a major difference, I'd say.

• 2:17:34Speaker 05

  When you were, when you were there in Russia and China, did you bother doing like surveillance detection? Or did you just assume that you were tailed all the time?

• 2:17:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I, I had a kind of, I mean, sort of a unique, and this is what I'd tell people when they'd come to visit from Bureau or from other places. I was like, do, so we're not running operations. I was like, do not do surveillance detection. So basically, I'm telling this to the FBI people, you've been on the other side where you've had to watch somebody.

• 2:18:00Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:18:01Speaker 04

  And when they make it difficult for you, it's kind of a pain in the ass.

• 2:18:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:18:04Speaker 04

  Like when they're being jerks and they'll cross the street like 50 times and they're just messing like then, you know, and so I, trying to think about it, some professional courtesy, if I'm going to the zoo, there were times where I would wait because they were slow and they got caught in traffic or they, you know, and so um, I hoped, you know, because look, they had to do a job and they had to make sure that I wasn't going and doing anything untoward or that I wasn't supposed to be doing there and I wasn't, so I didn't really, it didn't bother me. Um, and I thought that just make it easier for them to do their job.

• 2:18:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Speaker 04

  But every now and then they'd just, they'd just kind of appear to kind of do a little show of force.

• 2:18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:18:38Speaker 04

  I think one, when I was on the way to the zoo, we were with kids and like turned around and then there was like six guys just sitting at the fence, just staring at me all the time. Like probably about like two feet away.

• 2:18:49Speaker 05

  Smoking cigarettes.

• 2:18:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically.

• 2:18:50Speaker 05

  Where's Holden?

• 2:18:51Speaker 04

  Well, I was, I was like, I feel like there's someone watching me. I turn around, yeah, there's like six guys just sitting there watching and I was like, oh, there you are. And every now and then they'd do that, just, you know, kind of make sure you, you know that they're there.

• 2:19:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:19:02Speaker 04

  Sort of thing.

• 2:19:02Speaker 05

  Now, did you ever do the same thing, like walk into a sandwich shop and then just turn around at the counter and wait for them to come in and give them a nod?

• 2:19:09Speaker 04

  No, I didn't ever want to embarrass them to like make them, um, you know, you know, make them feel like they got, got made because if that would kind of make it more difficult for them, because then, you know, they don't have the same sort of restrictions and so there's all sorts of like, you know, they're going to come in and like, you know, like pee in my bed or something like that.

• 2:19:26Speaker 05

  Right, toss your apartment, yeah.

• 2:19:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, we had a dog, I didn't want to kill the dog, you know, it would have just been, I was, I was like, you know, what am I going to gain other than just being like, you know, kind of a jerk to them?

• 2:19:36Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:19:36Speaker 04

  The only thing I would do, and this is so childish, but now that I'm out of the government, I'll say this.

• 2:19:42Speaker 05

  Surveillance games, ladies and gentlemen.

• 2:19:44Speaker 04

  So this wasn't even surveill... This is me, just, I would, you know, every now and then I would Google something that was, you know, sort of something about Russian men and, you know, inabilities to do certain things, because I'm assuming they're reading through all of my Google searches.

• 2:19:58Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:19:59Speaker 04

  And so, you know, it's all like, you know, my Google, you know, Taylor Swift, or whatever else I'm Googling at the time, right? And then, you know, it comes in, "Why do Russian men, you know, are they unable to perform?"

• 2:20:08Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:20:09Speaker 04

  So all these very technical things about... So I just hope they would give them a little bit of a laugh, you know, when they're reading through all of my Google searches, that they would kind of see that. That was the only entertaining part I would do to them, but...

• 2:20:19Jack Murphy?

  I do that for the FBI agent that monitors this office. Holden, this has been awesome, man. I really appreciate you coming in and sharing, like, some really, like, unique insights that I don't think too many people have.

• 2:20:31Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 2:20:32Jack Murphy?

  And yeah, and I hope the next time you come through New York City, we can have you over again. And I mean, there's a lot to discuss here, and obviously, these issues are not going away at all. We're still going to be talking about this in 10, 20 years.

• 2:20:42Speaker 05

  We have two more questions, and please, thank you everybody much for your donations. We're not accepting any more after these two. I'm gonna, first off, Peter, thank you very much. "I never realized that Casey Jones, after working with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, became even more of a badass counterintelligence agent. Another great show." Yeah, you forgot, you're a hockey mask. Didn't Casey Jones wear a hockey mask?

• 2:21:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, he had hockey sticks and baseball bats.

• 2:21:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:21:09Jack Murphy?

  You call this and that over there a family?

• 2:21:14Speaker 05

  And then, right now, thank you very much. "Why won't the FBI give over Seth Rich's laptop?"

• 2:21:22Speaker 04

  Seth Rich? Oh, oh, I don't know.

• 2:21:27Speaker 05

  There you have it.

• 2:21:29Speaker 04

  I don't, I wasn't involved in that.

• 2:21:31Speaker 05

  There you have it. Holden doesn't know.

• 2:21:33Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:21:34Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, thank you, everybody. We really appreciate your questions, and thanks, Holden. We really appreciate it.

• 2:21:40Jack Murphy?

  We will see all of you guys on Friday with Mr. McCoy, Air Force 24th STS Special Officer.

• 2:21:49Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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  Dude, he'll be here in studio. We're excited to talk to him, too. And so until then, we'll see you guys.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

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  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

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  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

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  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

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  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

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  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:34:24Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:36:00Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:36:11Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:36:16Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:36:22Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:36:42Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:37:09Speaker 09

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:37:42Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:37:57Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:38:08Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:38:13Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:38:19Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:38:39Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, Study Mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:39:06Speaker 09

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:39:40Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:39:54Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:40:05Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:40:11Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:40:16Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:40:36Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:41:04Speaker 01

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:41:34Speaker 11

  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.

• 2:41:47Speaker 12

  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,

• 2:42:32Speaker 12

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 2:42:34Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:43:02Speaker 01

  Cash Flow Crunch, OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.