Angry Planet - The Double Agent Who Busted a Russian Spy at Hooters

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

In the minds of many Russians, the Cold War never ended. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many spies never came in from the cold and the intricate game of espionage and counter-espionage has continued to the present day.This week on War College, U.S. Naval intelligence officer Naveed Jamali shares his story about working as a double agent in the years after 9/11. Jamali posed as a Russian asset for years while passing on information to the FBI. He recounted the story in his memoir, How to Catch a Russian Spy, which is out now in paperback.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. They believe that NATO is still determined to finish off Russia. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Gull. Jason Fields is busy with a sick kid tonight.

A few days before Halloween in the early years of the war on terror, Navid Jamali took a Russian spy out to eat at Hooters. After they finished the meal, the pair walked out of the restaurant and into an FBI sting. Agents rushed Jamali and arrested him, but it was theater. The arrest was fake, but the Russian spy was not. Jamali was a double agent. He's here with us today to share his story. He's an interesting man with a fascinating life and career, and he's also the author of How to Catch a Russian Spy, a memoir of the years he's spent as a double agent,

which has just come out in paperback, and includes an epilogue titled, The Russians are coming. Naveed, thank you so much for joining us. All right, so my first question for you is, do you have any tattoos? Yes, yes, I do. It's something with the intro of Hooters,

of course there has to be a tattoo, right? It just goes hand and glove. You know, it's a great question, and the reality is you do this long enough. I was doing this for three years. It weighs on you, and there's a little bit of a psychological thing that happens. You're living undercover, and you sort of wonder at a certain point if you're ever getting caught. So, yes, indeed, I did get my codename, the FBI codename, which was green kryptonite, tattooed on my forearm in Morse Coden. and I did it because, you know, again, it's just this thing that you're living in this world.

No one knows what you're doing. And you wonder, does anyone know that you're doing this? It doesn't matter. And so it was sort of a way of pushing that boundary towards the end of it. You sort of take a little bit of risk. And it's just a psychological progression that happens with anyone who's doing this. So, yes, short answer, I do have a tattoo. The tattoo is a Morris Code.

It says Green Cryptonite, which is my FBI code. All right. Well, let's back up to way before you got the tattoo. And you tell me a little bit about, or tell the audience, rather, a little bit about your parents' bookstore. Sure. So it wasn't really just a bookstore. What my parents ran, both my parents says, as the name of Yajamali implies, you know, I can't trace my lineage down to the Mayflower. They're both immigrants.

My father from Pakistan, I'm a mother from France. They met in New York, and they're both academics. and they started a small company that was designed primarily to provide research material, pre-internets to law firms and such, but eventually morphed into a federal contracting firm. So they would provide books and training material to West Point or Annapolis or so that sort of. So it was a government contracting vehicle. And, you know, they didn't necessarily have access to classified information, but they did have access to government reports and the like. So, oddly enough, it just became an attraction point for, you can believe,

if the Soviets and the Russians. Okay, so they would come in looking specifically for documents? How did you know that they were Soviets, or how did your parents know? The story is actually, it started in 1988. So, you know, there's an interesting thing, Matthew, that not many people are aware of, but there are sort of two types of, quote, unquote, spies, right? They're those that are here under diplomatic cover, so they're posing at, you know, at an embassy or consulate, but they're known.

And then there's ones like Anna Chapman or the 13 that were named in the recent indictment by Bob Mueller. And those are what are known as Knox or non-official cover. They don't have the protection of diplomatic community. The Soviets and the Russians were dealing with my parents and then me were in fact diplomats. So as diplomats, they were constrained by diplomatic rules, one of which is I believe it's 25 miles that you can travel without prior approval. is just international law, international norms, rather, you can travel within that country without

prior approval to host nation. So the Russian in New York City actually have a, they have a consulate, but they also have a UN mission. So they have a pretty big staff there because they essentially have two offices. And because my parents had a federal contracting firm in New York City, it was within that 25 mile radius. My sense is that the Russians targeted them just because as a matter of ease, it was, they were able to travel freely, but they were. between the consulate in my parents' office, which was on Columbus Circle in Manhattan. So it wasn't just a bookstore, but I think a lot of it had to do with just an ease of access as a starting.

Okay, so from a very young age, you are kind of a part of this world because the FBI also got involved, right? They started coming in after the Soviet agents would come in and asking questions. That's right. Let me actually, if I can tell the story very, very quickly. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the story started actually in 1988. And again, my parents had a small office, not a storefront, but an office in Columbus Circle, for those New York Cityites who know where that is.

And one day, a man walks into their office, which was odd because they didn't get walkins, walks into the office, you know, wearing a trench coat and asked to speak to my father and essentially said, I want to buy some books and gave them a list of books. They were their books with titles like on nuclear disarmament and, you know, weapons proliferation. And they introduced themselves as being with the United Nations through the Soviet Union. And my father's thinking, oh, this is great. I just got someone, you know, usually I have to hustle to get an account. This is someone who just wants to come from the United Nations to do business here. And so my father was asking him, you know, what kind of books? And, you know, how should I ship them?

And I'll pick them up in a couple weeks. You go order them. And he showed him his business card, but didn't give it to him, put it back in his pocket. And probably within 15 minutes, the man had come and gone and just left the list with my dad. So my father got back to work thinking this is great, but kind of put it out of his head. until maybe 15, 20 minutes. There was another knock on the door. And this time it was two other men who introduced themselves as FBI special agents.

And they said, the man showed my father a picture of the man who had just been there, a man named Alex Tomikin, and said, this man is the Soviet intelligence officer. We'd like to know what he wanted. My father, so he just wanted to buy some books. And so essentially the FBI said, well, get him his books. And if he comes back, we will be in touch. Well, that was 1988. My efforts with the FBI ended in 2009. So you can sort of draw the path, how it started in 88, has started with the Soviets, with the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed.

The same people from the United Nations, the Soviet mission to the United Nations, now the Russian mission to the United Nations, came back asking for the same thing. So we had this long history with the Soviets and the Russians and the FBI that spans several decades. And that's really sort of how it started, this sort of innocuous knock on the door, followed by a Soviet agent and then two FBI agents. then in 2001, 9-11 happens. Yeah, so, you know, as a first generation American, I would often joke that, you know, I could, I learned to fit in. And if there was a group that was determined or whose primary mission in the world was to overthrow David Jamali, I sort of probably could have joined.

I just wouldn't have been, I would have been like the treasure. And we always had this way of sort of getting into groups and sort of fitting in, but I never quite felt like it. And, you know, 9-11 for me was a sort of culminating point. As a young man, as someone that bipacked to immigrants, especially in New York, the creation of a, you know, a Pakistani man and a French, you know, mother. New York has a strong residence for me. And the attack sort of redefined what I was doing. And I really wanted to join the military.

I wanted to join the Navy, become an intelligence officer, found this program. So my sort of foray into this whole adventure really started with that desire. And this long relationship that my parents had with the FBI, after I applied once to not get in and was sort of told, you want to apply for this program, you know, you really want this program, you're going to have to apply again and you have to work really hard. You just need to show some change. So I approached the FBI in 2005, essentially having been denied the commission the first time and wanting to reapply with simply asking that. I'm, hey, if I help you with the Russians, would you write me a letter of recommendation? So I almost looked at it as an internship, thinking that the adventure would start if I got into the military, not realizing what I was getting myself into. And what exactly were you getting yourself into?

As it turns out, from that first meeting with Oleg, who ended up, who was the Russian case officer, essentially what the Russians targeted me for was to recruit me to be one of their spies. And three years of essentially going through their process, and these are incredibly paranoid people, living undercover on operation where the FBI was watching me and watching the Russians through me. And the Russians were essentially looking for any signs of deception, making sure that I was willing and able. And that's what double agent was. The Russians essentially believed that I was a real spy and welcomed me into their fold of their network of spies. And it was quite an adventure. But I had no idea that that's how it would turn out. going into this. Well, let's back up just a minute. Who was Oleg and how did he approach you? How

did he even know to approach you? So Oleg Kulikov, as I said, my parents started this in 1988. So the Soviets and the Russians would assign what is known as a case officer. So think of an account manager, if you will, in sort of business terms, to oversee various operations and various assets. So over the years, they had a number of case officers that would come and take over my parents account. And when I returned, when I approached the FBI in 2005, the case officer at the time for the Russians was a man named Olin Kulikov, who was, again, a diplomat. He was a captain in the Russian Navy. He was a diplomat, named diplomat assigned to the United Nations from the Russian Federation. He sat on the military staff committee. He's, you know, again, a legit, appeared to be a

legit diplomat, but his side job was really to do what he did with me, which was to target, recruit, and task and communicate with Russia's spies in the United States. What exactly did that recruitment look like? Did he approach you? Did you approach him, knowing that you were going to be working for the FBI? How did that happen? The Russians by nature are incredibly paranoid. So because they, the Soviets and the Russians have been doing business with my parents for, you know, for a decade plus at this point, um, they kept coming to my parents' office. And at this, at this, at, at, at, I, I started working at the office.

My parents were retiring. I was going to take over. And so without, you know, knowing when this would happen, one day, Oleg just showed up at my parents' office like they always do. They would randomly come in, not without announcement, to collect their books, their order. They would pay in cash. They would deposit a list of titles for their subsequent order. And that would be it. So one day, out of the blue, I was sitting in the office.

And we'd move the office at this point to Westchester, right outside of New York City. And Oleg Koolik walked in, and my father introduced me to Oleg and said, essentially, you know, Naveed is going to be taking over. And Oleg looked very, very concerned about me, very distrustful, very uneasy. And I tried to sort of break the ice by moving towards comedy and using a joke, which did not go over well. But from that point forward, a curious thing happened. And that was that the Russians who would come maybe once a quarter, once every five months, started coming back. And the way I say the Russians, Oleg, started coming back several weeks later. So in a much more accelerated version.

So they seemed very, very interested in me. And the FBI, with our coaching, we started to kind of meet their demand and try to build a relationship with them. And I'm wondering, what do you do to make a man like Oleg believe in you? You say that they're very paranoid, so what kind of purity tests, for lack of a better word, do you have to pass to get in good? Well, the short of it is that they have to believe they're in control, which is very hard when you're trying to shape a conversation. So the trick here, it's psychological warfare of a caliber that is really incredibly intense,

because they have to believe they're driving the ship here. But the reality is you're trying to manipulate them, but they have to believe they're, in fact, manipulating that you. So the first thing is that because the Russians have been coming to my parents' office, there was a level of trust. Even though they were incredibly distrustful, there was no level of trust that existed there. They believe that my parents' office had not been compromised,

that it's been, you know, it's been around for a while. This was real. So their interests were there. But the second part of this, which you can't force, which is why if you read sort of history of espionage and FBI efforts to counter the Russians, things like walk-ins, things like people volunteering to help the Russians, they're incredibly distrustful of that because they often believe that to be a plan. So in this case, for the Russians to randomly show up, see me there, there's a belief that this probably couldn't have been an FBI operation from the beginning. And so that was their first step that they were interested in progressing. But essentially, you know, Matthew, for three years, the Russians do suitability assessment.

They're going to look at you and see the entire time, is there any signs of deception? Is there any signs that this is not real? And the reality is that they don't know, they might know who you are, they might know where you live, they might know what kind of car you drive. They might know where you went to, you know, college and graduate school. But they don't know your personality. So a lot of this is just absolutely required to be face-to-face. It has to be a conversation. These conversations were essentially interrogations where they're trying to sustenely.

out, am I telling the same story, the same one that I told six months ago? Am I, you know, any sign of deception? If I'm lying about something small, I'm probably lying about something big, and they're just going to drop you. That's it. So a lot of this is just looking for any signs of deception, so they can have some confidence in this? The second part, again, it just has to be, can they control you? Are you someone who's reliable? Are you someone who's manipulable, but also able to do what you're going to say? And these are all. all this sort of assessment. And that's why a lot of people that actually get approached by Russia for a number of reasons end up getting dropped because they're viewed as just not being suitable for this kind of assignment. So really, this was this incredible, intense thing where we were trying to manipulate the Russians and making them believe that they were in control when they really weren't. We were laying the breadcrumbs out for them to follow along. Did you like him?

You know, that's a great question. I didn't like him because I saw him as an adversary. And that was very important to build a, you know, a wall in the same way that he built a wall between him and I. I respected him. He was incredibly good. Never, you know, underestimate his ability in terms of interrogation, in terms of what they knew, in terms of them following me, never assume anything. He was damn good. He was really, really good at what he did.

But like him, no. I viewed him as a target. I viewed him as an adversary. I was as difficult and obtuse as I could be with him because that's the sort of character that I approached. And I didn't want to have any sort of relationship with him. It was very important to keep that separate. So when he would try to bridge the gap by asking about my wife or asking about my family, I absolutely shut that down because I thought anything that I disclosed on that level, anything personal that they knew about me, they could use against me. So, I would say that I respected the hell out of him. I appreciate how good he was. I also viewed him as a patriot for his country. This is not a terrorist. This is a man doing his duty. But I very much viewed him as an adversary. What's the mindset like that you have to get yourself into to do this kind of work

and to do something like this for several years? What do you have to tell yourself when you wake up every morning or when you know that you're going to go meet him? It was really hard. I'm not going to lie. It was hard because to the outside world, none of this was happening. And we would call it the circle of trust.

Besides my wife and two FBI agents, no one knew what I was doing. And that has a real heavy weight on a person. It has a heavy weight because there's no sense of satisfaction as to what's happening. Where is this going? Does it matter? There's no sort of conclusion that is, you know, from a day to day that's tangible. In terms of preparing, you know, it was very important to view this as like getting

amped up for playing a football game or I would actually watch movies and I preferred Michael Man movies like Miami Vice or or even James like the newer James Bond stuff just to prepare myself to kind of get a little fired up like I would actually

look at those movies and steal the the lines of the characters use and use those with Ol-like because again it was about being a separate person than you really were. You have to build that defensive wall to protect yourself. So it was like you created a and then inhabited that character?

That's exactly right. And that was very important because for the Russians, they wanted to know what was my motivation for wanting to help? And they had to understand who you were, what you were in order for them to trust you. They understand your motivation. They can believe you. And my motivation was really to get the FBI to help me get into the Navy. That was really why I was doing this. That wasn't going to be good enough.

So I had to figure out some other way to do this. And I came across, again, no training. There wasn't any classes or anything. that the FBI provided no guidance. But I came across and the readings that I did in terms of studying as much as I could about this, this great acronym called MICE, M-I-C-E, money, ideology, coercion, and ego. Those are understood to be the sort of four pillars that motivate people to spy. And I looked at that and I said, okay, well, Oleg knows who I am, he knows my name, he knows all these factual things about me, but he doesn't know what kind of a person I am. So I'm going to build

the character based on those four pillars. And when I selected was money and ego. It was just just the easiest thing. And it was, you know, so I basically went to Oleg and played the part of an arrogant, money-hungry, 30-year-old, 29-year-old who wanted to do business with the Russians because he saw it as a way to make a buck and he was too smart to get caught. And that was exactly the profile that the Russians were looking for. It was exactly what they wanted. And, you know, they took the bait, hook, line, and sinker. How is the espionage game different today than it was in the Cold War? What's changed? What are the Russians doing differently? Well, clearly, as we've seen, there's an element of technology.

But, Matthew, I go back to, I think that they're not, they're following, first of all, for the Russians, I don't believe the Cold War has ever ended. They're still in a war, cold war footing in terms of us being their main adversaries. When they're Russian spies come to the United States, they consider themselves being behind enemy territory and they act accordingly. And frankly, they're not wrong to think that. So a lot of the tactics that were used in the height of the Cold War, this is very important for people to understand, are still used today. So the idea of recruiting operational assets, you know, the Russians do not, as much as they want to use, as much as you hear about Twitter and trolls and bots and stealing emails and things like that, the reality is sensitive information, sensitive operations rather, they do not want to put them across electronic means because they very much fear compromise. So when it comes to gathering intelligence, they continue and will continue to use people like me to gather their intelligence and meet with them in person because they believe that that is more secure to meet and ask that in person and exchange information that is to do something over email, for example. So in a lot of ways, the sources and methods, a lot of the methods that they use are very much the same as in the Cold War.

That seems to be working out for them. It certainly does. I mean, the idea of recruiting assets and targeting and approaching and, and, and, and, you know, and dangles and understanding motivation. And, you know, we've seen it all. We're seeing it unfold. We're seeing what happened 26 unfolds before our eyes. It seems to me, at least, as an observer, that Russia has gotten better at soft power.

Or at least it's playing a different game than everyone else. Do you think that's true? Yes. That's a very, that's a great point. When you look at, they're clearly the difference between the Cold War and today. that clearly were not at a wartime military footing in the same way that we were at the height of the 50s or the 60s. That has changed. But look, the Russians were recruiting me to collect military intelligence for them.

You only collect military intelligence against someone if you're considered them a military threat. So they still have that desire. But you're right, the soft power is hugely important. And I think that they've really doubled down on their intelligence collection and active measures gain because why not? You know, it's a way to destabilize, a way to collect intelligence with little repercussions, little to no repercussions, rather. So I do think they've doubled down. And they also do things much more aggressively than other countries who are also very active. Iran, North Korea, China, Cuba, you know, these are all countries that do collection of the United States.

So, yeah, I think that they put a huge emphasis on this type of operation. It's been hugely effective and it's relatively inexpensive. What do you think the United States should learn from them? What are we doing or what aren't we doing that maybe they're doing that we should be doing? I think that we first, as a country, have to take the threat much more seriously. You know, when I was working, when I was operational, everyone was focused on terrorism. Counterterrorism was the flavor of the day. And not that it shouldn't be, but it siphoned resources away from counterintelligence.

and counterintelligence has really become, had become at this point with the end of the Cold War, had become the redheaded stepchild of the intelligence community. There was a point after 9-11 where the Department of Homeland Security was going to stand up its own sort of MI5S intelligence, domestic intelligence service. At the time the FBI director, Robert Mueller, successfully fought it and kept the National Security Division within the FBI. But it's been atrophying. And when I was working with these FBI agents, I would see it just in terms of money. The agents would have the hand-be-down cars. They wouldn't get the, you know, it was very clear that things like money were going to counterterrorism.

And I think that that's a mistake. I'm not saying that we should abandon counterterrorism, but it seems to me like counterintelligence simply did not get the priority that it deserves, that is equal to the threats and the risk to the United States. Do you think that that's why the 2016 election meddling stuff has gone down the way it's had just because the resources weren't pointed in that direction? I think it's part of it. I don't want to say that it's all of it. As you saw from the Mueller indictment, and this is an unclassified indictment, you know, the stuff that they released, it's pretty impressive when you think about it. When you think about what the intelligence community, rather, was able to collect and surveil against the Russians. I mean, they really had this stuff being viewed. So I do think there is part of that.

I think that part of it is political. A large part of this is political rather than it is just resource-wise. I mean, the acceptance of Russia and frankly other, again, China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, the acceptance that intelligence operations against the United States are going to become a thing as countries decide not to use hard power against it. No one wants to go to war. This is a convenient, easy, low-risk way to impact your adversary. So I do think part of it, leading to 2016, was not just the some atrophying of the counterintelligence community,

but rather politically a failure to respect the threat that Russia poses in the intelligence realm. Why do you think there's been that failure? I mean, I feel it. You know, as somebody that's been covering conflict and Russia for a while now, I feel that. I feel like people didn't take it seriously until, you know, this. Because we won the Cold War, man. No one wants to admit that we may have won the Cold War in a sort of military sense. You know, they call it war termination.

We declared victory. The Russians also declared victory. Or they didn't declare the war over. We declared victory and the war was over. the Russians remained on the intelligence side as the U.S. and NATO and democracy as their main enemy. So everything that they do is aligned, and that's their national interest. Everything they do is aligned to that. I think that we've put ourselves in a position that capitalism prevailed against communism, the free world prevailed,

and that's why the Cold War ended. And the reality is that there's truth to that, but there's a much more real. real politic way of looking at this, which are a realistic way of looking at this, which is Russia still exists. It might be smaller, but it's still aligned very much in sort of this Soviet approach to the United States. They're not looking at us as, as, you know, as a friend. They're looking us as their main adversary. Did you happen to watch? We're recording this, by the way, on March 1st. And I guess what would have been last night, kind of in the middle of the night here in the U.S., Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed,

the legislators and gave a two-hour-long speech. Right. Did you happen to see that? I've seen clips of it, and I think that it's, the tone of it is exactly what I'm saying. They're, the bluster of, you know, threatening weapons, you know, I think Americans don't understand how, how much NATO, for example, is something the Russians and, and democracy for other, the Russians fear. They see these former Soviet states either.

becoming part of NATO or becoming democracies. And Putin himself sees that as a threat. I mean, he sees NATO in this Cold War picture at his doorstep. We don't because we have the benefit of two oceans. He doesn't have that same vantage point. It's not, this isn't Sarah Palin, I can see Russia from my house. This is Vladimir Putin. I can see NATO at our borders.

And that really worries them. They believe that NATO is still determined to finish off Russia, The Cold War has never ended. So it just tells you their tone, their intent. And we have been ignoring that intent. We've been ignoring the threat. We've been deprioritizing that Russia has said over and over again, they view United States. They view a nuclear-armed NATO alliance.

They view democracy as a threat. It's as simple as that. And they're going to act accordingly. I want to ask you something I ask everybody that comes on here when we talk about Russia. That's a Russian expert. what does Vladimir Putin want and what does Russia want and are those the same thing? That's a great question. Vladimir Putin would say that what he wants is what Russia wants.

I'm sure of that. But I don't think I don't think that's the case. I think that Vladimir Putin is very, very worried about Vladimir Putin staying in power. You know, look, Vladimir Putin is essentially a Slavic Saddam Hussein. You know, despots don't fade away to Boka or retire to Boka to live out their days. So there is a legitimate concern of Vladimir Putin that if he's deposed or he leaves office, it's not just that his power wanes. I think there's a legitimate concern.

I don't see that he's ever going to leave power totally willingly. So there's part of it is self-preservation. That's Vladimir Putin. And that's clearly not what Russia wants. I mean, you know, it's sort of like China. The Russians control state media. They control the Internet. They control news in a total way that we are not used to.

We've seen disinformation here in the 2016 with the Russians pushing certain news stories. But that's not what Russia is. It really is a controlled vacuum of information. I think that Russian people, you know, they just like Americans, they want to live their lives, be prosperous and safe and raise their children. But that being said, I think that they are being sort of fed this propaganda. There's no doubt about that internally. And so in a lot of ways, Putin has an incredibly high rating by the Russian people. But I'm sure if there were free and open elections, I really wonder if he would continue to win.

I would say that the fact that they're, you know, that these aren't true democratic or free and open elections by any such of the imagination. Nivee Jamali, thank you so much for coming on War College and sharing your story. The book is How to Catch a Russian Spy and it is out in paperback. Thanks for listening to this week's show. You know, we've gotten an entire archive online at acast.com slash war college. That's more than two and a half years of episodes. So check them out. And we love reading your reviews, especially ones like this from Chucklehead 666.

Super Cogent, non-partisan insider info about the real global story. If you feel anything like that, please leave us a review on iTunes or anywhere else you get the show. It helps other people find us. War College is me, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. We'll be back next week.