3 Takeaways - The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

The CIA may not be thrilled with this conversation. Here, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and highly regarded CIA expert Tim Weiner reveals stunning details about the agency’s  espionage and covert activities. Learn about the CIA’s greatest successes and failures, its best weapon, how China and Russia are spying on the U.S., and much more.

According to the CIA's website, the CIA is the world's premier foreign intelligence agency that collects and analyzes foreign intelligence and also conducts covert action for U.S. leaders. What is the CIA actually doing and how well are they doing at both foreign intelligence and covert action? Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Toman and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today I'm excited to be with Tim Weiner.

Tim is an American reporter and author. He worked for the New York Times as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan, as well as a national security correspondent in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of five books and co-author of a sixth, and he is the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His books include Legacy of Ashes, which is a history of the CIA, and Enemies, which is a history of the FBI. His upcoming book, which is titled The Mission, is going to be about the CIA. I'm excited to find out from Tim about both the CIA's espionage and

its covert activities. Welcome, Welcome Tim and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Happy to be with you. It is my pleasure. The CIA is such a storied organization. Its precursor, as everyone knows, was created by President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. But let's talk about how the CIA has done more recently. What do you think the CIA's greatest recent successes are? Well, the greatest success was the CIA through espionage

obtained Vladimir Putin's war plans for Ukraine in 2021. And rather than squirreled away that remarkable achievement, it decided to convince President Biden that it would be the best thing to tell the world about. And both Biden and the Secretary of State Tony Blinken did tell a disbelieving world that Russia would invade Ukraine imminently. And they were right. Trying to understand the intentions and capabilities of America's enemies, trying to anticipate surprise, has always been among the highest missions of the speedhike. In the beginning, what President Truman wanted when the C.I. was created in 1947 was a newspaper that was better than the New York Times, the Washington Post, at informing him what was

going on in the world to know the secrets of the Kremlin, to understand what Stalin was, what he really wanted as he pressed westward throughout Europe and took more than 58% of European territory hostage. Within a year, the mission changed. The Pentagon and the State Department wanted the CIA to conduct paramilitary activities, to fight fire with fire, and to try and roll the Russians back to their original borders and to liberate the captive nations of Eastern Europe like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps Russia itself. These led to a five-year flurry of paramilitary activities, which were suicide missions. Hundreds of people died. These missions stayed secret for many, many years. In the 21st century, the CIA was called

upon once again to become a paramilitary army and then to become jailers and torturers. The CIA was not equipped to do that, but the CIA does what the president tells it to do. This is a very important point that is lost on a lot of Americans. It was not the case, for example, that some CIA officers sat around drinking martinis one day and one of them said, hey, I've got a good idea. Let's overthrow Iran. Let's kill Fidel Castro. Presidents wanted those things to happen. The CIA was duty bound to salute smartly and do what the president said. Danielle Pletka So the president asked the CIA to run the prisons in Iraq and lead the interrogation of prisoners?

Richard H. C. Bush George W. Bush did so, and he acknowledged that he did so in his memoir, Decision Points. And how did that impact the CIA? I have interviewed quite a number of people who were involved in the secret prison system, the black sites, including the man who created them. They all knew that this would never stay secret, that it would come out one day, as it did rather rapidly, and that there would be hell to pay for it. But they didn't have a choice. Intelligence is usually broken down into two parts, human intelligence and signals or digital intelligence. Was the theft of Putin's war plans by human intelligence

or signals intelligence, or do we know? The answer to that is yes and yes. The crucial part of that was human intelligence, was the recruitment of Russians who had some access and in several, worked in the Kremlin. So what is the CIA now doing versus Russia and China in terms of both human as well as signals intelligence? Well, signals intelligence belongs almost entirely to the National Security Agency. That's their job. Since 2014, the CIA has been supporting Ukraine's military and intelligence services. And their intelligence support, primarily, has been a major factor in the survival of

Ukraine since the Russian invasion. The United States is under attack by Russia and China and has been for at least a decade. The Chinese intelligence services are massive. The main Chinese intelligence directorate, the Ministry of State Security, has probably 400,000 officers and analysts, the CIA a little more than 20,000. The Chinese, through digital warfare, have penetrated the government of the United States, and indeed the civilian computer telecommunications and data systems of the United States, to an extent few Americans realize.

In 2014, for example, Chinese intelligence penetrated the federal office of personnel management and stole the personnel files of every one of the 22 million Americans who worked for the government of the United States, including the security files of everyone who worked at CIA. Those files included their true names, passport information, in some cases biometric data. The Chinese took this purloined information, cross indexed it with passport and biometric data stolen from the nation's international airports

and developed profiles of most, if not all, CIA covert operations officers working abroad. It is extremely hard to spy on China when you're on the ground. You are under constant surveillance. There are an estimated half a billion closed-circuit television cameras in China, digital license plate readers,

and other forms of surveillance that make traditional espionage today virtually impossible to see eye-opening. And just recently in an operation, the United States is coding salt typhoon. The Chinese were found to have penetrated every single major telecommunications company in this country. Why are they doing this? The Chinese and the Russians have two different modalities of espionage against the United States.

The Chinese want information dominance. They want to know us. The Russians just want to screw us. And the Russians are also conducting political warfare in this country. And the CIA, along with the FBI, and the National Security Agency's cyber command has got to start playing better defense against this ongoing and escalating threat. What is the US doing in terms of offensive cyber and tech attacks? A great deal. And that's one of the most highly classified secrets in the government. I think

it is safe to assume that they are trying to do what the Russians and the Chinese are doing to us. And a lot of this, frankly, Lin, is preparing the battlefield for any conflict between the great powers that might arise in years to come. For example, both the American CIA and NSA and their Russian equivalents, the FSB and the GRU and the SVR, are able to take down the electrical grids of major cities by having implanted Trojan horses. If war or crisis arose or the threat of war, the Russians could take down the electrical grid in New York or Washington. The United States could do the same in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The chaos that this kind of thing would create is almost beyond imagining.

We know that Israel was blindsided by the attacks of October 7th. Was the U.S. as well? Was that also, in your opinion, a U.S. intelligence failure? And why did we fail? It was an Israeli intelligence failure and a massive one. The United States and the CIA in particular rely on liaison with foreign intelligence services. You know, the clandestine service of the central intelligence agency, the spies. This is not a massive army, it's somewhere between three and four thousand people. The CIA cannot function without liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services and some that are not so friendly. Warning of this attack on October 7th by Hamas was there but it was ignored. It must be remembered that Benjamin Netanyahu was covertly financing Hamas was there, but it was ignored. It must be remembered that Benjamin Netanyahu

was covertly financing Hamas as a way of undermining the Palestinian authority. Very often what we call intelligence failures are also political failures. It's not enough to ring the alarm. You have to make sure your leaders hear it. And leaders rarely want to hear bad news. Do we know what the CIA is doing in terms of intelligence and covert activity in other hotspots such as Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen? Well, the CIA stations in Damascus and in Beirut and in Israel and in Jordan in particular, the Jordanian intelligence services and the CIA have a long and extremely close relationship. They are primarily

listening, learning, trying to map the battlefield. There are few, if any, covert actions that the CIA could undertake that could change the current history of the Middle East. And the primary mission right now is to figure out what in the world is going on, which of course was the original mission of the CIA at its creation. In your opinion, how is the CIA done with respect to China? The CIA suffered a catastrophic loss in roughly 2013. It had remarkably recruited a network of about 30 recruited foreign agents in China, Chinese people who had access to the political leadership, the intelligence services, and

the military. And then that network, which had been developed over the course of a decade or more, one by one by one, these recruited foreign agents were arrested, tortured, and killed by the Chinese intelligence services. It took several years for the CIA to figure out how that happened. As it developed, the CIA had a covert communication system that it used to stay in touch with its network of recruited foreign agents. And this covert communication system or COVCOM was not terribly sophisticated. It could be hacked, and it was hacked, probably

first by the Iranians, who then shared their knowledge with the Chinese. And that's a tragedy. It certainly is. In your opinion, how is the CIA done with respect to espionage in Russia? Well, the fact that Putin's war plans was a remarkable feat and probably one of the greatest successes of the CIA in the 21st century. The CIA has gotten bolder, more aggressive about trying to recruit Russians. It has done so openly by publishing on the internet ways in which Russians can covertly communicate with the CIA. They've

obviously fixed the flaws in their covert communications networks over the past decade. And traditional recruitment, that is a CIA officer pitching a Russian spy, a Russian military officer, a Russian diplomat, a Russian oligarch. Apparently it's been quite good hunting for the CIA because there is clearly dissatisfaction among the Russian elites with Putin, with the way the war is going. And these recruitment efforts, according to the CIA itself, have borne fruit. And how about with respect to the Middle East? And how about with respect to the Middle East? With the limited resources that the CIA has, I think the best the CIA can do is to maintain and strengthen its liaison with the Jordanians, with the Israelis, with the Lebanese, and

perhaps now create liaisons with the new rebel force that has seized control of Syria. You know, the CIA station in Damascus is still there. And the best they can do is to try and figure out on a daily basis what was happening. The CIA cannot affect events in the Middle East the way it once tried to do during the Cold War. It can keep its eyes and ears open and report to the president what it sees and hears. So far, we've talked mostly about foreign intelligence. We've not yet talked much about covert activity. Where has the US been active covertly? And how do you think that is working out?

Well, the problem with covert action in the war on terror is that it wasn't covert. It was paramilitary warfare. The CIA's best weapon over the years and the decades was not a rifle. It was stats of cool green hundred dollar bills and the recruitment of foreign sources. You know, it's an art. It's not like firing a missile at a mud hut at Kenston. The relationship between the CIA officer and the recruited foreign agent depends not simply on money, although it almost always does depend on money. The going rate for an important source is a million bucks. The relationship has to be on the one hand built on trust. On the other hand, the CIA officer is trying to convince the recruit to commit treason against his own country, his own tribe, his own political

group or his own terrorist organization. It's a tricky business, a dirty and dangerous business, and sometimes you're going to get burned. Covert operations without underlying intelligence to guide them are a fool's errand. They depend on the quality of intelligence underlying. And in the war on terror, counterterrorism swamped espionage analysis. It has only been in the last decade or so that that balance has been restored. LESLIE KENDRICK Can you briefly summarize some of those successful activities? The most important for the CIA after 9-11 was financing and in some cases creating out of nothing foreign intelligence services. The Jordanian intelligence service was created by the CIA back in the 1970s when King Hussein was a young man came to power his son and successor and the

Jordanian intelligence service exists and hold power and authority with the steadfast support and financial assistance of the CIA. You could say the same for 20 different foreign intelligence services all over the world in places you wouldn't normally think of as being American allies. Uzbekistan, for example, the CIA simply doesn't have the number of people and foreign language skills and the reach to be a global intelligence service by itself. And so the financing of friendly and often not so friendly foreign intelligence services is a really big part of what the CIA does. Its liaisons with them are one of the most important, if not the most important, ways of gathering intelligence around the

world. There have been operations that stayed secret for many years. For example, the head of Hezbollah military wing, Zemaneh Ahmad Mughniyeh, his operations against the United States go back to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982, in which some 240 American soldiers and sailors were murdered. He kidnapped the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, who died in captivity. Mounier went on to lead, for example, the bombings as far afield as Buenos Aires

against Israeli and Jewish targets. By the early 20th century, Hezbollah with Iranian support was really the most powerful army in the Middle East. In 2008, the head of the Mossad came to the CIA director, General Mike Hayden, with a plan to assassinate him. The CIA built a bomb. The bomb was installed on the rear mounted spare tire of the targets Mitsubishi SUV and in the streets of Damascus in one of the most heavily guarded neighborhoods in the country, not far from the Syrian Intelligence Service headquarters in 2008, when it was blown to smithereens. The CIA was directly involved in that, and that operation stayed secret

for seven years until the press pieced it together. Tim, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? The CIA has been around since 1947. It operates as part of the American government and operates under law. Now overseas, it gleefully and sometimes very skillfully breaks the laws of foreign countries, espionage is illegal everywhere. Over the decades, presidents have ordered the CIA to do some very, very illegal things. A reckless president can make the CIA, not an intelligence service under law, but a secret weapon wielded by men above it.

A second thing I think people should know is that CIA support for Ukraine has been essential to that country's survival. If American military and intelligence support to Ukraine is diminished or eliminated in the near future, Putin will take Ukraine and he will not stop there. The third thing that I think it's important for people to think about when it comes to American national security is that from the end of

World War II until the beginning of the 21st century, the number of countries in the world who were democracies slowly grew and grew and grew and grew. And that growth escalated after the end of the Cold War. And by the turn of the century, the number of democracies and autocracies in the world were roughly equal, and that had never happened before in the history of civilization. Ever since then, the number of democracies in the world has flatlined and declined. Autocracies on the rise. We cannot encourage democracy in the world if we ourselves do not live up to democracy. Thank you, Tim.

I enjoyed your books, especially your histories of the CIA and the FBI. And I'm looking forward to your upcoming book, The Mission on the CIA. Thanks very much. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out.

If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at ThreeTakeaways.com where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman and this is 3 Takeaways. Thanks for listening.