Danny Jones Podcast - #288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Watch the exclusive fan Q&A with Tom on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Thomas Drake is a former NSA senior executive who famously exposed the governments illegal domestic surveillance program. While at NSA, he blew the whistle on a multi-billion fraud and secret dragnet electronic surveillance and data mining program conducted by the NSA after 9/11. In April 2010 Tom was charged by the US Department of Justice with a 10 felony count Espionage Act indictment facing 35 years in prison, until the government's case against him collapsed in June 2011. SPONSORS https://shopmando.com - Use code DANNY for $5 off your starter pack. https://stopboxusa.com/danny - Use code DANNY to get BOGO StopBox Pro + 10% off. https://nordvpn.com/dannyjones - EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal: Risk-free w/ a money back guarantee. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off GUEST LINKS https://x.com/Thomas_Drake1 FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Torture survival training 10:41 - Tom's first intelligence mission 18:36 - Nuclear War 38:31 - Being recruited by CIA 48:46 - Top secret Nuclear War protocols 55:56 - The keyhole program & SR-71 01:02:56 - Strategic deception 01:10:28 - The REAL deep state 01:19:15 - USAID 01:27:26 - Working the Pentagon's terrorism desk 01:35:14 - 1993 WTC bombing 01:44:58 - TWA Flight 800 01:53:06 - Military plane training exercises 01:56:18 - NSA's "jackpot" program 02:02:07 - NSA / Google Partnership 02:09:03 - Secret data hidden at NSA 02:21:26 - Government AI program in 1989 02:31:42 - What happened at NSA after 9/11 02:53:57 - How NSA & FISA betrayed the 4th amendment 02:57:28 - Legal punishments for whistleblowers 03:11:28 - Tom whistleblows to the press 03:20:08 - FBI raids Tom's home 03:37:35 - Tracking Osama Bin Laden 03:49:06 - Indicted for 35 years in prison 04:01:58 - Tom's plea agreement 04:14:03 - Meeting Elon Musk in 2007 04:23:23 - Tom's rare cancer battle 04:37:12 - Is America getting better or worse? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I've been waiting to have you on for a long time, man. John Kariaku's been on the show a few times, and he's the one who connected us. So shout out to John, love John. You guys are both in good company being fellow whistleblowers. You worked for the NSA, John, or for the CIA. And for people out there who are listening to you, why don't you just, we're listening to the show for the first time and may not be aware of who you are. Why don't you just give us like a brief introduction to your background? Well, no one knew who I was until I became what I call an asterisk American at the point that the government made me a very public figure, especially in United States, when I blew the whistle on a number of different things going on NSA.

So if you want to start there in terms of just I'm in NSA as a senior executive day, day one when I reported to my duty station reporting to number three person. was 9-11. That day was my first day on the job. We'll talk about the whole story on how you blew the whistle on the NSA and how all that came to be. But going back before that, like what made you decide you wanted to be in the NSA in the first place? Long story. So in my early 20s, I made a choice. It's a volunteer military, so I volunteered. It's no draft. They still, you know, there's technically, there's still the, you have to register. So I joined the Air Force in 19, late, late, late 1979.

It was right before Christmas. Okay. After going through a bunch of screenings and tests. And one of the tests you take is a very special test to see if you qualify for a very special program, which is in the crypto linguistics arena. And they actually make up a language. Crypto linguistics. Linguistics.

Wow. Yep. And they actually test your propensity or proficiency and being able to pick up a language and the structure. It's made up. It's a made up language. Okay. There's no resemblance other than just basic linguistic structure. Okay.

And then they asked you a whole bunch of questions, and I scored high enough to qualify. So that was the first thing. Now, you can still choose to not enter into that program. I also chose to go airborne. I wanted to go airborne, and I wanted to be assigned overseas. C's. So I went through basic training of Lackland Air Force Base, and then it went on to Monterey. It's the Foreign Language Center, Bersidio Monterey, Defense Language Institute. And that's where I learned basic German to a level where you could have at least basic understanding. Focus was

oral comprehension. You're spending your time listening. You're not spending your time talking. So it was primarily, but with a military flavor. I went to advanced classified training, highly classified training a Goodfell Air Force Base in San Angelo. So now we're in the spring of 1980. Then a very interesting series of trainings. This is even before I go overseas, which involves survival school. So I was at Fairchild Air Force Base. And I went through in the field surviving. I mean, this is the SEAR program. It's the whole survive, escape, resist. It's a whole program in which you learn how to evade, how to survive, how to resist, and how to escape. That's, well, the initials for Sear.

So they had a prisoner war camp. It had a highly classified component, which is how do you resist when they're psychologically torturing and interrogating? Oh, really? Oh, yeah. This is still super classified stuff, right? Still super classified. It's probably of all the trainings I received in the military. It's the one that has stuck with me the most after all these years. Really?

And we can get back to that later because there were certain things about that training that actually helped me resist the government, deal with the government. Oh, wow. So I was actually using training that the government paid for during my survival school. Wow. At Sear in Fairchild, Air Force Base, you know, in eastern Washington. The actual in the field part of survival and evading. And it was pretty, we're talking extremely rigorous.

It's still a training environment. So, you know, they had safety monitors. There was boundaries. But we were out in the woods for quite a few days. During this training. During this training, learning how to survive. And then you come back, you go through prisoner war camp. That was quite something.

I actually went through everything you heard about later, which became the torture program, which they called enhanced interrogation techniques. Yeah. It was torture because they reverse engineered it. I went through all of that. I know exactly what I mean. I was waterboarded a couple times in a training. environment.

Uh-huh. It feels like you're drowning alive. I was put into pretty interesting stress positions. Chinese, the one that was the worst is the Chinese water drip. What's the Chinese water drip? They strap you down and they just slowly drip water onto your forehead. How long do they do that for? For a while until the point where you just, you just want to itch, itch and you can't because

you're, you're strapped down. And it just goes, you just really get crazy. This is all the type of shit they do like Guantanamo and all those black sense, right? But remember, the construction. The restraints were, and they had safety monitors, right, is in a turning environment, but it's extraordinarily realistic. Right. The other one, which a lot of people freaked out in, was the box, something they did later, but that is part of their torture. They stick you in a box, and then they close it, meaning they actually, it's a specially designed box.

And what they do is they bind it down until there's no room to move. You cannot move, and you're all crouched. Oh, yeah, I've seen this. They did this to Abu Zabeda, I think. Yeah. I went and you did the box I did the box I went to sleep I went I did the box is it really that small oh yeah yeah and the box is interesting design because it's not just a fixed a volume they actually they can actually shrink it shrink it oh no and you cannot move they can shrink it down to a point where you cannot move that's so me they threw me in the hole yeah I heard that they have in guad i specifically at guantanamo some of the stuff they were doing some of the nine eleven uh prisoners they had was that they would like put them in a room and play like sponge bob

square pants for days on end and like urges play like barney i love you you love me for a week straight until we we had a version of that in this prisoner war camp at very high decibel with the lights blaring plus you'd have a bag over your head most of the time where you couldn't even see anything and Like, the purpose of putting you guys through this stuff is to kind of numb you to it. Is that what the goal is? Not numb you to learn how to resist it. To learn how to resist it. And not have them break you.

And you're not allowed to talk about how to resist it. I can talk a bit more about the prisoner war part, but not the classified training. The classified training. So you have like, what do you deal with when they're pounding on you physically and putting you in all kinds of weird positions, sleep deprivation, bright lights, loud music, and a whole other things I haven't even mentioned yet, a whole range of other, because it goes on for a while. Yeah. I mean, they are, they're really, and in fact, they have special instructor, I mean, the instructors themselves had to be carefully trained, and because what happens if you start

enjoying the pathological set? Oh, enjoying the abuse of people? Oh, yeah. I mean, I'll, I can say it right now, they had instructors who started enjoying it and they would have to pull them out of the program. Oh my God. Stanford, we're talking way worse. So dark. Extremely dark. Oh, no, even that part of the training

sticks to me this day. And speaking of sticking, one song I remember was a name palm song. It was basically a war protest song from the Vietnam era. And they would just play that at super high decibels. Plus they had all kinds of psychological. I mean, they would try to

break you in terms of you being an American and they would bring up all the literal facts about all the all the issues that yeah there's some dark history in America and it's it's going across you know the continent and pushing all the indigenous peoples out of the way and slavery they would actually tell you the truth in training about your own country and that was one way because that was indoctrination they would basically attempt to re-indocrine at you but but they have to basically separate you from your own culture and your own history. And pointing out, of course, all the worst of its evils.

I put evils, a quote. Wow. Some of which were pretty dark. There's no question that there are aspects of American history that are dark. We're not a perfect nation. Right. But we are America. Yeah.

So what was it like getting through that, getting out on the other end of that? Pretty challenging. And what after the seal, after the seer training? I went to water survival, homestead, Air Force space, which doesn't exist. anymore because of Hurricane Andrew. But I was there before that. So this is still 1980, 81 now. We're now in 81.

Right. Yep. So I went through water survival. That was the funnest one. That one is still strength, but it wasn't psychological. It was just learning how to survive if you found yourself having to bail out of an airplane. Right. So parachutes.

They would take us out out into Biscayne Bay. Oh yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, because that was a fun part. It was a very last of the training. Some people go to the, other way. They don't end up with the nice training. They end up with it first, and then they go to the real survival school. But this was water survival, and it was several days. But we're out in the bay,

you know, with all the sharks floating around, and they would actually lift you up into a helicopter. Now, for safety, they wouldn't bring you all the way up. But you'd have to learn, depending on your ground or air, what it was like to get onto the hoist or what was at the bottom. So there's different, there are different ways they could extract you. Right. But you also, you also, you all, were exposed to the the the prop wash the the the rotor wash right right pretty pretty huge out in the and we're talking a couple of miles plus out in the bay right so yeah you can on the horizon you can see the city but so at what point did you finally deploy somewhere to gather surveillance or intelligence or

what specifically were you doing so I show up at Mildon Hall in June of 1981 and then my training begins and I wasn't wasn't fully qualified to listen in. This is intelligence collection, peacetime over constants program. It's actually the name of it. There was a number of different missions I flew on, but it was on the RC 135 airframe. But it has different missions depending on how it's modified. Okay.

They call it Rivet Joint. That was like the primary name of the platform. But then each mission had its own name as well. Everything has a program name. Right. So we did intelligence collection. and we're we used to say, you know, we were the vacuum cleaner of the sky, and this is primarily analog. The digital world was just beginning, but it had already started with computers, and then we

have a computer-assisted technology that rapidly came in into the fleet. But it was you're learning some radio spectrum. We had to learn all kinds of different signals, not just voice, but all kinds of different signal types. you have to understand and recognize multiple languages. I specialized in the languages was spoken in what was then East Germany, the DDR. So you're listening in, right? You're listening in, picking up signals, you're reporting out. Sometimes there were world events where you'd actually have to send out, you know, certain messages that reach a certain threshold.

So, very long missions, by the way. I mean, these, you know, these would, minimum was the minimum was. the 9 to 11, some went sometimes 20 plus hours. And I imagine you're flying over countries that don't know that you're flying over them, right, or that we, that you were flying into airspace that you didn't have permission to fly into. Is that how it works? That never, that was never the case. It was always either over allied or friendly countries.

Oh, okay. Yep. Known air routes, right? It's not like you're invisible. We weren't stealth in that regard. No, okay. As we say, we were alone, unarmed, but unafraid. Right.

Because you have to rely on our ears, literally, although we had ground support. And we primarily flew in international airspace. So international airspace, when you're out over water, it was international airspace. So flying over like ships and stuff? Well, just over the ocean, but very high altitude. You're talking, you know, 40,000 feet plus. Oh, wow, that high. Oh, yeah.

Easily. Oh, yeah. No, I had the experience. Extraordinary. I mean, I kind of look back on it. There were some missions. We went even higher than that. And when you looked out the portal window, you know, the portholes of the plane and looked up is starting to get a lot darker.

And you started when you looked out to the horizon, you could start to say, yeah, it looks like it's beginning to curve. You're that high. When you approach 50,000 feet, that's when you start to see the curvature. See the curve. Yeah. Looking down inside of a thunderhead, like it was cut out. That was pretty cool. Yeah.

So how long did you do this kind of work? That was four years. And then I was sent to Davis-Montan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. And I was a mission crew supervisor flying on EC-130H compass call electronic warfare aircraft. So a different application of my training. Combat support, direct combat support. Combat support. So like flying into combat zones and stuff?

Could if we had to train for it. So if the balloon goes up or some operation or you're going to support. what they call C suppress enemy air defense. That was our fundamental. You're protecting fighters, bombers, et cetera, and other military assets going in to whatever. When the decision had been made at the highest and what you call the National Command Authority level,

then you were there to support it. What kind of combat would you have been in? What year are we talking about? I never actually deployed a combat. We did training. Like we would go to Europe for training. We would go up into Nevada. Right.

We would support red flag, green flag exercises. we would fly out near Fort Irwin, the National Training Center, and play games, I say play games. War games? War games. All kinds of war games.

Oh, yeah. And then we actually provided specialized support. Any kind of stuff involving nukes? No. Or like nuclear war games, things like that. Well, there was always in the background, the SIEOP, the single integrated operating plan. I mean, that was always there.

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Yeah. Oh, yeah. And on the RC-135, we did have a post, I'll say, nuclear Holocaust mission, which was what's left. That's interesting. You're the second person who ever heard use that term SIA. Oh, yeah. The S-I-O-P version. Well, super classified because it was operational.

operational, meaning depending on the scenario, the military doesn't do anything without plans. And plans always change. Right. But you always had plans. And you're always updating. And you're always playing games. You're always doing war game war planning scenarios. Right.

We, I would participate. Yeah. The other time I heard the term SIOP was when John Newman was in here explaining how the Joint Chiefs of Staff were, had a plan, a plan to drop nukes on China and Russia when Kennedy was president. They wanted to do it. And there's meetings were called SIOP meetings or something like that. And then Bobby Kennedy was in the meetings and stuff like that.

And they had this full all-out nuclear war plan. And they wanted to do it before December of 63 before Russia was able to get ICBMs. Because I guess they didn't have intercontinental ballistics before that. So anyways, that's. Plans were not just defensive. they were also offensive. I mean, that's part of what makes them so classified. It wasn't just what would happen if someone, they launched,

then what do you do? Because you didn't have much time. But then there was first strike, right? So if you had to plan for the possibility of a first strike that you would launch. There's times where it came really close. Abel Archer is one of the exercises where they actually thought that we were, engaged in a first strike. This, it goes back to 83.

What was that one? It was called what, Naval Archer? Abel. There's all, remember, all exercises of any kind, no matter what it is. Yeah. We'll have either operation or it just, they'll have the NATO phonetic, you know, like able, and then there'll be a series depending on what it is. Okay.

I was fully immersed in that environment. Oh, look, 1983. Military exercise conducted by NATO that took place in November 1983 as part as an annual exercise is simulated a period of heightened nuclear tension between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, leading to concerns that it could have been mistaken for a real attack by the Soviet Union. Wow. And what's interesting, it was actually on the Soviet side realized it was a notional exercise, but it was it was ultra realistic. It was so realistic that they were actually preparing to defend themselves with their launch.

of their nuclear weapons. Really? And he was in the command and control. He was an alert officer and he said, this is an exercise, stand down. And then it's like, what if of history? What if's a history? That's so crazy.

And that's just one example of how close we. The nuclear war thing blows my freaking mind, man. It's just like, you know, from what I understand, the last time that the president of the US was able to get the president of Russia on the phone, just with a phone call was not quick. It took days, I think. So like,

if there was a, just say like a rogue nation, like North Korea, for example, launched a nuke towards us. And we saw it coming. We have that, what's that? There's a term where we have to basically use it or lose it,

where we have to empty our ICBMs. Because if there's one coming at us, it's called first, I forget what it's called. Anyways, where we have to empty our silos, our ICBM silos, because they're super vulnerable. And we can't risk a nuke hitting that. So if there's one coming at us, we have to empty those. And assuming we know where this is coming from, for example, say we know it's coming from North Korea.

We have to blast those out towards North Korea. But the problem is this all happens within like 20 minutes. Oh, yeah. And those nukes that we launched towards North Korea will have to fly over the North Pole. over Russia, right? And what are the chances we're going to be able to get Russia on the phone in five, ten minutes to tell them these nukes aren't coming for you. They're going for North Korea or whatever. And that's probably not going to happen. So Russia's, their generals, are going to see all these new companies on. They're going to empty their silos. And it's like before you know,

within 10 minutes, there's just, it's just Armageddon. That's why they called it mad, mutually assured destruction. No one really wanted to do it, right, especially at the great power level, particularly Soviet-U-S because what could happen. It wasn't just one, you know, nuclear, you know, mushroom popping up. You're talking just dozens, hundreds. But that was why we had a triad.

Because, true, the fixed sites, the like minute man, right? Right, right, right. Are very vulnerable. Right. Even, even, although my father, who was a war II veteran, and then was strategic air command, he actually helped develop almost single-handedly the whole plan, the whole fail-safe, Chrome Dome plan,

where the B-52s in particular, because they were the intercontinental bombers that carried multiple nuclear weapons. At least they were mobile. But they were basically, once you launched, and then they would have their particular locations and it would change depending on world events and all of that. But if they got the signal, then they would go in.

But they knew that it was probably a one-way mission. So you had the other part, part of the triad, which are the submarines. Submarines, yeah. So the submarines were the ones that were super mobile, but essentially hidden. And they have the Mervs? They have the MERS. Well, the MERS can be placed on any nuclear, yeah, nuclear.

Any kind of missile. Yeah, sure can. That was developed later. Typically three warheads. Multiple. You could have multiple targets. I mean, that's really multiple, independent reentry. Reentry, right, right.

So the, so the idea is the booster, after the booster gets knocked off. the rocket goes up into orbit and then the three individual warheads. Or more, depending on the type of platform. Reenter the atmosphere. And they can literally be programmed to go multiple different spots. And then we start wild. But then you started like the Tomahawk missile, right? Then you started getting into cruise missiles, which could be launched from beef twos,

could be launched in a number of different ways or from ground sites. Right. Yep. And the, the submarines, they're nuclear power too. So like in an all-out global thermonuclear war, they would be the last ones to survive. Yes. Because they'd be underwater. They have nuclear power.

I mean, they would just basically be locked in that tube until they ran out of food and water, I imagine. But that could be months. Potentially months. Oh, they had that much. In a wartime scenario, they could be, they could stay underwater for quite a while. Yeah. Yeah. But all that, all the, like the parameters of all that's classified.

Have you seen, I saw recently, actually, Annie Jacobson published it in her book, nuclear war, her recent book. She published, and Steve, I don't know if you still have this screenshot saved, you might be able to Google it, but she saved, she basically published an image of the traffic patterns of all the nuclear submarines throughout the, from Russia and China. And Russia and China both have literally submarine highways that are coming right off the coast of the east coast of Florida and right off the coast of Southern California. It's crazy.

Some of the routes are known. Some of them are loiter. Some of them, you can remember. What if, I mean, think about it. You don't have to, you don't have to launch from your homeland. Right. You can launch adjacent to the coastlines of a country. And then you're talking maybe a couple of minutes at best.

A couple of minutes. Right off the coast of Miami. At best. Because once it reaches the surface of the wall, water, then, yeah, it doesn't take very long after that. I mean, that's, that's part of the problem. That's, that's the thing with the submarines. And there's so many, there's also, her map showed all the, their targets, like their top targets and their priority of all the targets, which was even more terrifying. Because like, like two of the top 10 targets are right here in

Florida. McDill. And then there's another, like a strategic command down in Sarasota or something. Short of all out war on civilians. There's going to be, there's always, there's this is been the case, Cold War even now, there are designated targets that now they'll change, they'll update them. But that's why, you know, the, you know, the little, that case that, the briefcase. The football, right? The football has been carried for decades now. It always follows the president and the backup vice president, always. There's a special, there's a whole team incredibly specialized. Right. There's specialized codes. You don't, you want, you don't want an accident, right? So if you decide to make that, I mean,

we were talking about an incredible decision that you would be making under a dire circumstances it'd only be under the direst of circumstances you even launch whether it's to defend yourself or to go on the offense but the offense typically is is is because yeah we only get wiped out first but then what do you what are you initiating that's why people don't you know this the horror of nuclear war I don't talk I haven't talked about it much but you know it's those weapons are just and especially now you see you'll see. I mean, all you have to look at is the original atomic,

which became then hydrogen. And then you look at some of the tests when they still were blowing them, you know, either on land or sea or in the air. My father actually was one of the last, he was part of a team. It was actually, it was a team Christmas Island west of,

it was a site. Yeah. Where they would do air bursts. Then, of course, there was a treaty that banned all that. But they actually do nuclear. They would actually blow up a nuclear. a nuclear weapon in the air at high altitude.

Yeah, like EMPs. Yep. And he got radiation poisoning and was actually in the hospital for a while. This early 60s. Have you heard of, I think it was Operation Starfish Prime where they were blowing up nukes in outer space? Yeah, there's. They actually had a plan to blow one up on the moon. Yeah, it's.

Like they wanted to hit the moon with a nuke. Like how, like we're such stupid monkeys. It's crazy. Yeah, stupid monkeys kind of. reflects, I'll say, the dark side of the human condition. Yeah, man. Just a, because all the, one of the things, technology ultimately is used at some point. It has been historically used in war, combat conflict.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. We've detonated them in space, upper atmosphere, underwater, under the ground. And a lot of our nuclear tests have been just like in Nevada. Well, Nevada, there's still a place in Nevada that are off limits. The biggest struggle with keeping a firearm within reach in your house is, number one, it's got to be in reach when you need it. And two, you got to keep it safe and away from your children if you have them. And keeping it in the closet is just too far away.

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irradiated and they didn't know it they didn't realize the effects at the time even the original um in in alma gordo really that test the very first test people there were actually it turns out there was living close enough downwind guess what happened And then there's, you know, all these cases later are people getting sick and cancers. Right. And the government. Trinity, Trinity, the Trinity. The atomic or the, I think it was the atomic nuclear commission or something like that.

And the Department of Energy, I think, I don't, I mean, there was, I know there's multiple cases where, like, there was contamination in the water and the food and like the cattle and stuff like that. It's not clean. right and these people these people just like and like now that now this is the number one place in the world to go gamble and bet on shit and go to the casino they there it used to be it was it used to be uh visitors it was like it was like a disney thing right you'd go see you'd see the cloud go up really from a distance oh yeah there was places yeah oh my gosh i know you can imagine that oh yeah let's go see the little mushroom cloud a little mushroom cloud yeah that's the crazyest thing about the Cold War, I mean, even before the Cold War, after World War II, like starting with Operation Paperclip and everything that we did secretly and for the military and with the innovate, with like science, with just getting these rocket scientists and these other physicists and all these, you know, brilliant mathematicians like John von Neumann and all these people that literally were using all.

of their brain power to figure out how to kill more people and how to develop more instruments of war and i think it was von noyman who was the i think he was the one who calculated like the he came up the exact calculation of how high in the atmosphere fat man and little boy needed to be to cause the most civilian deaths oh yeah no it was it was total war so we had it and we we dropped two of them They had plans for more, but it turns that only two were necessary to demonstrate what they were going to do with the rest of the country. If the military high command and Emperor Hirohudo decided to keep fighting. See, part of it, there's a lot of controversy over should those, I would argue they didn't need to be, but it was also to send a message post-World War II to the Soviet Union, that we have this weapon.

Right. It was clear already at the end of World War II that the Soviet Union was going to be something other than a friend, unfortunately. Even though they're allies, people, somebody forget this, allies during World War II. During World War II. Oh, yeah. And as soon as World War II is over, we have the competition to go get all the freaking... But there is my stepfather. Passed away.

Father's passed away now. But he was actually on a troop transport. He was a combat engineer. they had plans 10 million 10 I mean we're talking a million men and then some invading Japan homeland and they were anticipating I mean tens of actually millions there was going to be millions they anticipated upwards of a million casualties if you go back and actually look at what they were planning for up to a million casualties wow because you can imagine based on the island came man that's why they started bypassing all the islands because they just put up they were

extraordinary fighters right i mean there's unbelievable fighters as good as we were they just were next level really we're talking to samurai yeah spirit and right and the willingness to just die for for the homeland i mean they just they and dug in like really dug in you can imagine how they would have resisted if we'd invaded mainland japan i mean the main island right yeah man that history is so it's so crazy but war itself is hell. My father always said, you know, war is hell. But if you find yourself, you know, there's no such thing as a fair fight. If you have to fight, then you take the gloves off if you need to. Right. But I mean, he saw a lot and it definitely affected him. He was a lone survivor. You know,

it's part of my history and my legacy. He flew B-25 missions in Europe for the OSS. Oh, really? 40-41 super secret at the time. Like over-flying Europe. This was a lot of it. Like overflying. Europe. This Oh, yeah, he's flying out of North Africa, then later Italy as we went up the spine of Italy. Whoa. Got, the plane got hit. It was on a night mission, right? They had special, you know, special goggles and everything else. He operated the, he, at that time, he was a bombardier navigator, Norden bombsite, fascinating instrument.

Wasn't quite as accurate as some people said it was, but it at least would give you, you know, within, right. So they're dropping things, you know, to the partisans, right? The partisans, they were fighting a guerrilla war against the Germans. Plain got hit, caught fire, was going down. He was the only man. He just happened to be close enough to the hatch door and bailed out. Took a swing and a half in the harness hit the side of a hill, lone survivor. All the rest of the, all this crew, you know, he's got survivor's guilt.

He was behind the lines for six months until the British Hunter. ground picked him up, which means he was always indebted to the British for saving his life because the Germans really wanted him. I mean, they wanted their hands on someone doing OSS missions for obvious reasons. Whoa. Oh, yeah. He didn't talk about behind the line for six months. He lost, he lost 50 pounds. He would never eat yogurt again because the Greek yogurt is super sour. He just always stayed away from yogurt. And we didn't know this. This is a family secret. We didn't know. we knew we had served in World War in World War II, but it was a family secret

and we always wonder, anytime we had food in front of us, right, you say, eat everything in your plate, we couldn't leave the table until everything was finished because you never know, and you would say that never know where your next meals coming from. Why was he saying that?

How did you eventually learn the story? He told you later? Much later. Yeah. Well, what was happening? He retired. This is much later in life. He's in San Antonio. and it was USA Towers.

It's now just the towers. It was actually part of their real estate venture. It was only one was built. Beautiful place, right? And he would play Penny Annie Poker, you know, with his fellow residents. And, of course, they're going to relive because that's all you got left to talk about. Now is you got your memories, right? So they would share their memories.

And they say, Bill, Bill, you got to write about this. You got to talk about this. So he did write it. It was a monograph. It was published by military publishing house press called Down in Greece. Yeah, northern Greece was what, well, it's no longer about Yugoslavia. It was then it was what became that part of Yugoslavia, but that's where he went down. But he got picked up.

He actually got picked up north in north of Greece. Oh, okay. Yeah. But the partisans they were supporting were in northern Greece. Of course, the Germans occupied Greece at that time. Right. So going back to your story, you were doing the reconnaissance stuff. 81, 85.

Fascinating. Lots of war games, stuff like that. And how long did that go on for? Oh, so the war games stuff in particular. I mean, the war games we did were extremely detailed. I mean, so a lot of those as well. But most of our mission overseas, when I was on the RC-135 platforms of various types, with different types of equipment and capabilities.

That was all real world reconnaissance. And a lot of, if depending on, we are sending reports out, we would actually have to process our mission, as we called it. But if the information, even real time in the air, was significant enough, we had different types of systems that we would use, the different types of thresholds by which you would send out reports, up to and including what was called a critic, which if it was depending on the level,

right you know if it rose to that level had to be on the president's desk within 10 minutes wow because we were a field site we were part of the other half of nsa that no one talks about which is the military side the nsa slash cSS oh interesting cryptologic service support yeah yeah so okay so you were already part of nsa oh yeah i was part of the 698th electronic security squadron electronic security command we we worked and we even said ourselves we we worked for big I mean, our reports went back through NSA. But we were the military, the military wing. Oh.

But remember, NSA is a military organization. It's headed up, well, then a three star, now a four star general with a civilian head underneath him as a deputy. Oh, wow, man. Yeah. How old were you back then? Overseas. When I got there, I was 20, I had just turned 24 after all the training. Right.

Okay. I was there for four years, came back, did the electronic warfare. For another four years, got out, went to the CIA. Oh, we did the CIA. I did. What made you want to go to the CIA? Because it's my background and interests, and it's like, hey, you know, I knew, I finished up my first master's when I was in Tucson in international relations and national security policy.

And I applied and went through a very extremely. rigorous review process, including even more enhanced background investigations. And you had to have a poly, it was the first time I was exposed to the, you know, where you're hooked up to the polygraph machine. Yeah. And all kinds of tests, tests after, test after test. I was finally offered a position. I left.

I had an opportunity to go to operations and go overseas, basically undercover. There's different covers at NSA. say, there's like, you know, official, non-official. There's what they call Knox. You probably heard Knox. Yeah, yeah. Not official. I heard about that recently.

They won at one point, they wanted me of a official. And knock is someone who's like, denialable, right? Yeah, well, deniable, but you're on your own. If something happens, they're not going to, it's the most risk, it's the riskiest of all. Right. Like you're not going to come to save you. That's correct.

Exactly. Oh, yeah. So I chose not to go that route. I had a young family. I'd come back and stay out now out. It's like, no, I just, I'm not that. anymore so I but I did go into the their director of intelligence and so I was working what they call national technical means satellite intercept collection

technology so and I was at a downlink site the primary downlink site in which you processed all that so going back to when you decided you want to go to CIA is that an easy process I mean I imagine it's way I imagine it's more seamless coming from NSA oh yeah of course yeah military background That was partly why they were interested, right? Oh, so they reached out first? No, no, no, I did. I did.

But just to give you just a sense of the initial phase of it, they give you an address, which was a nondescript motel, you knock on a door a certain number of times. There was basically, there was a code. They opened the door, and that's how it started. That was the first interview. Wow. Yep.

Yeah. And what kind of stuff did they ask you? What kind of? Everything. John alluded to. to a little bit of the stuff that he had talked about. Everything and anything, including sexual preferences. Yeah, that's what John was saying.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, they get nitty-gritty with that stuff. I mean, it is about as a true, think of, and of course, you know, I ended up experienced this in a different way later when I was under electronic and physical surveillance when they decided that I was, you know, such, such a threat to the NASS security that we're going to have to, I charge him. during the investigation, I was under all kinds of surveillance. Right.

But just imagine an electron microscope being pointed at your life. And anything you have ever done, any evidence at all of your entire, all of it, no matter who you met, where you worked, what you did, and then they get into your head. How do they know, Walt? I mean, especially what years is? This is 88. The background of escape, they don't even, they don't even, what's interesting, they don't even start the clearance because they can leverage, obviously, they leveraged my, I had all kinds of background because I was one of the highest levels. Right.

Right. It was sensitive compartment information. That was the baseline. Never mind, Sapsar and a lot of compartments later. Or even more when I got to NSA as a senior executive. I'm talking just that. So they could leverage that. for them the psychological was probably by far i mean that was where they really get in true and they

had special permission this is similar to what i went through in in the classified training okay so the class of the classified training the resistance training but the highly classified part of it is they had special permission to violate your privacy fourth amendment they could it was basically you're just saying you're consenting to just we can get anything on you. We don't have to have you sign a paper or we're going to go here and go there. It's just anything. And they literally had things than somebody I had forgotten about. It would come up. And what is the means of finding stuff in the 80s? They use, they use, in the 80s. They use. Like there's no cell phones. There's no computers, right? Yeah, but they've got all kinds of

access to databases, even then. And interviews they have with neighbors and friends and where you lived. And what's your potential. Remember, the whole thing is about truck. Trust and risk. Trust. Yeah. Well, yes. There was some, but you have to forget, there were still computers back then. Right.

There were computers, right. But they were, they were, they were, and most of them were, you know, mainframes, right? But there were still tons of paper base records, still tons. Much more laborious to go through. Yeah. Incredibly intrusive. So yeah, they're just drilling down into your life. They want to know how trust,

where you were. So they, they test you. Yeah. And the tests, the tests were very sophisticated in terms of preferences and how you thought

and if you were in these circumstances, but extremely, extremely rigorous. To you, what was the most interesting one? The ones were actually the face-to-face interviews. Yeah?

Those were the most dramatic. Really? Well, because in part, there was interviews without the polly, there was interviews with pollies. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And which one, like, to you was like, what the hell are they trying to get us? It was the ones where they're really lifestyle questions. Those are the hardcore lifestyle, girlfriends, friendships, associations, who you may have been a part of. I mean, like I said, they just try to make you uncomfortable. The onion and just keep peeling your life away, right? Ring by ring. So you get admitted, they say, okay, Tom. Tom, you're in, baby.

Yeah, so then I went. You're officially a spook. Well, I was in the, I was an intelligence analyst and all of those imagery analysts. Okay. I could have gone that route, but that's in essence its own CIA. CIA at the time, central intelligence agency. But the one you always hear about is the operations. There's a whole other, there's several different parts of CIA.

Right. The one I was in with the director of intelligence. So this is the part that's linked to NRO. Oh. Yeah. Plus a SIGN division. NRO is a funny one. That was even more secret than NSA.

I know. That's crazy. Yeah, it's 61. A lot of people don't know about NRA. They don't because it was one of the other agencies. The irony, of course, for me, I mean, I jump in ahead a little bit. NSA itself was never part of the NAS Security Act of 47. It was never legislated by Congress.

It was literally created out of thin air by the stroke of Harry S. Truman's pen in 1952. as a secret military agency to collect and analyze and report on foreign intelligence. Foreign intelligence. Foreign intelligence. Foreign, which got you, they were given carte blanche. And when was the NRO created again?

61. 61. You're talking in the Cuban, that period, that's like, oh, my God, it became formalized, right? Right, right, right. And NRO. But it operated, it operated in secret under sort of the agis of CIA.

It was its own, it was, but it operated under. It was like under the umbrella. Yeah, and it still was, even when I was there. So it's like CIA of the sky. You could say that. And in essence, it was a subsidiary. You want to use a corporate term. It was a subsidiary of CIA specializing in national technical means.

That's what was always the phrase it was used. National technical means typically meant primarily space-borne assets. Like satellites. Satellites. But there are other types of assets. Yeah. What other types are there? Well, there's...

Like planes and stuff? Yes. Yeah. I mean, remember, the original SR-71 was it was actually a CIA asset. Right. Right, right, right. U-2 flights, right? Yes.

We're under, right. That was all part of NRO. Well, there was CIA. CIA. Right, right, right, right. You just, I mean, this is where it gets, I mean, you get into the weeds with all the different assets. But NRL primarily was focused on, on, on, that was national technological, means in terms of spaceborne.

Right, okay. And that's spaceborne across the board. So you were operating. Vandenberg. Vandenberg's part of all that in terms of launches, both military and secret. Yeah. But people forget about Vandenberg. I've heard a lot of crazy stories about Vandenberg.

Well, Van derbyber has significant launch capability, but it was always the secret launch capability, primarily. It's not like Cape Kennedy. Right. I heard that. So we have that interceptor system to intercept ICBMs, like nuclear rockets that are coming for us or warheads that are coming for us. And I know that a bunch, I think we have, we have, I think it's 44 interceptor missiles currently in the U.S. And I think most of them are in Alaska, but a couple of them are at Vandenberg. I know Vanderberg has some of those interceptor missiles. I don't keep up with that. Yeah, yeah. And I,

I didn't work in that part of the government. Right, right, right, right. No, I've just heard this is just, this is relevant to the whole nuclear war. Well, I remember, even when I was at survival school, I mean, just as another sort of a vignette here, an anecdote, where I stayed. So in between some of the courses I was taking at Farrow of Air Force Base, I was in the barracks. Guess where the barracks that I was in were located right outside where they kept all the nuclear weapons and bunkers, besides, you know, three, three roads of bob wire and dogs and lights and everything else. And then I actually watched what they call the elephant walk.

Oh, really? Or a father used to fly in B-52s as well. In fact, you know, buff, we always call them buffs. Big, ugly flying effers. Yeah. And they had the elephant walk. They practiced what would happen if. The alert is given launch.

And one after the other, two-minute intercourse. interviews going down the runway at Fairchild. Just one after the other, it was quite amazing. I had read about it, heard about it, but I'd never seen the elephant walk, what they call the elephant, just like that. Exactly. This is it, the elephant walk? Elephant walk with B-52s.

So these are B-52 bombers? Those aren't B-52s. Oh, okay. No. So B-52s carry- Those are more cargo or cargo, that's C-130. C-130. We're talking to eight-engine B-52s, elephant walk. That is a version of an elephant walk, but they're just lined up.

We're talking about they're taking off. They come in, take off. Wait, two minutes, take off. So if NRO gets intelligence of a rocket, of a missile coming out of us, that's basically what they do. Highly classified early alert systems, which I also worked with. Cibbers. When I was at the Pentagon leaders, a Navy intelligence officer, another part of my career, that was part of the alert center at the Pentagon. There was a specialized system that would do those kind of alerts.

Wow. Oh, yeah. Get all the planes in the air, get all the nukes. It could be that bad, right? We're not just talking like a mission, but they have to practice. You always had to practice. Worst case scenario. Yeah, right, right, right.

Yeah. But it was amazing, just watch them, and they can can't their wheel because you have to take off. What if the wind's blowing sideways the other direction? They could actually turn. The wheels could bicycle the wheels. Wow. So they could, it was really, they're going down the runway, but they'd be defending on the wind. you would see them turned.

Right, right. But the wheels stayed straight. Oh my God, dude. Yeah, pretty cool. That is pretty much. That's why you still have it. It's a massive platform. Yeah.

Yeah, the other thing, the plane, the president has to get in the middle of nuclear war is interesting, too. That's a difference. I forget the name of that plane. It's called the doomsday plane or something. We always call the doomsday plane. Yeah, the doomsday plane. And they have, they have like, there's a stratcom command. center in that plane for like I think the president the head of Stratcom.

Yeah. And it's a highly specialized. It's not the normal Air Force One. Right. It's got yeah, yeah. It's got like I think all the windows are blacked out. It's like it's like super protective for nuclear blast. It can survive a nuclear blast.

It can even defend itself. But again, there's all kinds of classified stuff on it. I mean, that's where you assigned things. There are secrets worth keeping. I'm the first to acknowledge that. There's a lot of secrets that aren't worth keeping because they're using the secrecy system to protect a lot of stuff that this will get into my whistleblowing. Yes, yes.

And why would the government charge me, right, as they did. But in the military, including our own, there was equipment still to this day, or modern versions of it, upgrades that are incredibly sensitive. You would not want that to fall into the wrong hands by any means. We're talking the very leading edge of how do you collect, store, analyze, pick up, transmit. I'll give you one example, though, without going into all the details, just to give you a sense of we had to be able to operate on our own. We had, we had satellite capable, well, it was early satellite. I had to remember the whole global position GPS, right?

It was just beginning to emerge. That was DARPA. Right. So our primary radio, which is still, by the way, you know, like H.A.m. operators, it's all HF. Oh, okay. HF super long distance. So HF was always our If the primary means of communication

That's how you would communicate Because you no matter what was going on Even with atmospherics Even even in terms of like stratosphere ionis You could still get a message out And it could be picked up So there were specialized ground stations All over the world

That even though we had ones that were designated That could then communicate with you But we had to know where we were Because of shoot down attempts forced down attempts in years past because of the sensitive

of the missions I flew on how do you know where you are and you also had to keep track of where they thought you were

they, I put they in quotes. So we had a special nav system called the LN20. Amazing system. The accuracy, I am not kidding you,

is so accurate assuming you put in the correct longs and we're talking way down to within 25 feet accuracy, 25 feet. This was in what year? Late 70s, early 80s.

Wow. Imagine what the frick they have now. Once we knew, in assuming there was no failures, there was always we had no-go criteria, both on the ground, it sometimes would happen, even in the air going to our way called the SACC-sensitive area, or even in, and then there were certain types of reactions, there were a threshold at which we would have to abort.

Okay, I was on a couple of those missions, not pleasant. But the nav system was such that once you had it properly calibrated, it always knew where it was in reference to your base. Wow. Your hard stand, literally the hard stand on your parking spot at your base. That's amazing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating.

It's fascinating just to hear stories of like some of the crazy technology that we've been able to develop since the 50s essentially. And then like, just to be like, okay, now we're learning about this stuff in 2024, 2025. Like, imagine what we're going to be learning about in 2050. Here's one. I'll just give you another one. I have any number of these, but I guess even though I know I'm going to be here a while

with you. Here's just one. So some of the systems I worked with, when it's the CIA involving national technology, satellite technology. Did you know, and this gets back to, and you'll read, there's a lot of stuff out there now, the keyhole program. I'll just mention that. That was the name of it. It was super secret.

It's still secret, but the fact that there was a keyhole program is not secret. Okay. So this is when they went digital. There was all kinds of analog. I was part of that because I was part of the transition. You're talking late 80s. So there was still analysts I work with who had grown up during the early 60s, Cuban Missile Crisis. In fact, one of the older hands, he took me under his wing to learn the trade because I was an imagery analyst.

And I'm just saying imagery. Okay. We're talking 70s, incredibly, I mean, breakthrough in charge, a couple devices, digital camera in the sky, which kept improving over the years. When it was, for the years and years, no one knew how good it was. They just didn't because it was a state secret. Wow, man. And I can't even to this day reveal. It's like how fast could the SR-71 go?

We used to fly coordinates with the SR-71. We called that particular program name when it was on that mission was giant reach, right? I was on Rivet Joint or it was Burning Wind was the mission. Okay. Where I was on the RC-135 other variant, which was a specialized variant. I flew on that one as well called Combat Sent. But we would fly coordinates with, and you see this play coming in, man. It's, you know, multiple times, you know, the speed of sound, right?

Way over 2,000 miles an hour. Right. The top, top speed, yeah, you'll see books out there. There's things that have come out, but it was never reveal what its true top speed was. But it could cruise it easily three times and then some the speed of sound. I mean, easily. That is bananas. Yeah. It was difficult for ground stations to maintain contact even as a blit because it was moving so fast.

Yeah. But that was advantage. Yeah. Fly super high, 80,000 plus feet. And if you need to, fly really fast. I mean, it was faster than a bullet. Wow. Oh, yeah. Fascinating airplane. I used to watch it. So I used to go. I used to my, my, I had a little moped because I live right off the, the, the west end. of the runway at Mildenhall. And I had a little moped. It was a 49-c-moped. My aircrew members would joke around. So, oh, yeah, here comes Tom and his RC-49, you know, with my big bag, right? And you go around the back of the runway, and the SR at that time were stationed there. They would rotate, but they were stationed there, had their own special hangar maintenance

and everything else in a more secluded part of the base. but it was so fascinating watching them get ready to take off from the end of the runway. In a world where international spy agencies are constantly collecting your data, it's easy to see why a company like NordVPN has grown in popularity, and I'm super happy to have them sponsor the show. Imagine you're sending an email or making an online purchase. Without protection, your bank details and passwords can be intercepted and might not get used for months later.

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This also gives you four extra months on the two-year plan. And with a 30-day money-back guarantee, there's no risks. Again, that's NordVPN.com slash Danny Jones to get 56 to 76% off your plan. It's linked below. Now back to the show. because you would see the shock diamonds, you know, as an accelerated at speed down the runway. Steve, can you pull up an image of the SR 71 so we can see it? But you're seeing like all the fuel be dripping out of it, right at the end of the runway, just dumping.

Because it wasn't until it got to speed when the titanium, when it started to heat up, they would actually seal the tanks. Amazing airplane. Even to this day, remember, this was drawing, we're not analog era. They were using computers to create this, right? That is so crazy. This is Kelly Johnson's skunk works, right? Yeah.

So you can understand, I was exposed, because this is extremely relevant to a, no doubt, another part of our conversation. The very best of American innovation ingenuity was creating things like the SR 71. Wasn't the edge, like, really sharp? Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, it looks. Yeah, look at it. Just stunning. Even today.

today. You mean, just it's, I mean, it looked kind of out of this world almost. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's, it's a stunning airplane. And that's just one of any number of technologies. And weren't they, weren't they first developing these and testing them out of Area 51? Yeah. Well, Groom Lake.

Groom Lake, yeah. That's what they do in a lot of the first test flights of these stealth crafts. Well, this is even like radar. We had, I'll get, I'll get into that. I have, I have, I have, he passed away a few years, some number of years. years ago. Joseph Lockhart, we'll get to him. December 7th, 1941. I interviewed him. Yeah. It's part of my 240 hours of community service. Oh, yeah, we talked about that. Oh, I heard you talking about that. Joseph Lockhart. He was there on the North Shore Oahu with the

newfangled radar, which was super secret because it was an edge. Arthur C. Clark was part of inventing radar. Really? Oh, yeah. But remember what he said about technology? Yeah, what did he say Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. Right, right. So you can imagine even back in the early 60s, when this started flying, right, even in prototype form, if you happen to see that flying over in the, particularly the western part of the U.S., what would you think it was? It didn't look like anything that flew.

Exactly. You know, I just had, we, we were talking to a gentleman. in here yesterday about this story. There's a fascinating documentary that I suggest everyone who's interested in this stuff watch. It's called Miragemen. And it's a really sad story about this man who lived in New Mexico right off, like within probably a couple miles of one of the big Air Force bases out there. And this guy was obsessed with UFOs. And he was in all the UFO communities, move on, going to all these meetings and conferences about UFOs all the time, reading all the folks. And he started to, and this guy was a former, I think, former Air Force guy. And he started to

see every time, every day at the same time, these crazy aircrafts shoot up off the ground, move around and come back down and like weird things that he couldn't explain. And he started to collect video and photos and make notes of all this stuff and try to, he was even trying to intercept the radio signals and communications that were going on there. and the Air Force caught wind of it and they sent one of their counter-intel guys over to meet up with him and he let him look through all the photos listen to all the recordings he had of the radio stuff

and he knew this guy was a big UFO guy so he goes wow man I don't know what this is you know what I think these really are UFOs I think these really are aliens and then the NSA moved in across the street from his house and started beaming shit into his house and this code, like beaming code into his house

that he was collecting. And basically with the information they're beaming to him was like, we are an extraterrestrial civilization, our planet rained out of water, and we need to come to Earth, we'll be there in two years, and all this stuff literally drove this man insane. ended up in an insane asylum. And I think he ended up either,

I don't know if he committed suicide, but he ended up in a mental institution, like lost his whole life over this stuff. And like they really dedicated. It's amazing the amount of resources that the Air Force and the NSA were able to dedicate to this one guy just because they could use him

as a conduit of disinformation to poison the well of this UFO community that they knew was infiltrated with Soviets, right? Poising the well is a technique to keep prying eyes from noticing things you don't want them to notice. Right. So creating this confusing cauldron of stew of misinformation, disinformation. There's probably a few little truths in there, right? But you'll never be able to fucking find it.

It probably sounds more crazier than the disinformation. Yeah. So it's a layering technique. Yeah. So you always protect, as I learned, right, you always protect the core. protect what's a really secret that you don't want anybody know about and some for legit reasons. Yeah, it's amazing, man. And even in today, like just in today's day and age, like the level it's gotten to is like out of control, I think. I have, I have people right now in, in my circle,

right? Family, friends who basically are shutting down from like involving themselves with any news of any kind because the level of of cacaf the cacophony the the chaos the the disinformation the what's true what is and uh i'm going to go crazy trying to crazy and just right right just trying to figure it all out i just don't want to figure it out right no yeah people how can i this is where discernment we may talk about this later discernment becomes really critical in these kind of environments. Yeah. Well, it's like, yeah.

Not only is all of the perception management out of control, but like we have evidence over the last few years that FBI and CIA have been meddling with social media companies with the Twitter files, which John Kariaku talks about a lot. And that combined with the fact that there are more people than ever independently on the mind just talking about stuff and getting their message out there. So there's like more podcasts out there that like there's a fucking zillion podcast just in this zip code probably. I get all kinds of invites to subscribe to some new Patreon or subscribe to right.

And and. Substack. I mean it's like it's like 50 bucks a year, 60 bucks a year. And I don't even have. I don't even remember as much as I don't. Right. And part of this is flood the zone gets flooded. It's flooded.

It's absolutely flooded. And one of the one of the downfalls, I think, of social media is that in order for these people, in order for you to get any sort of recognition for the work you're doing, like you're constantly fighting this, who can be the most sensational, who can come up with the next end of the world story? You know, the world is falling apart. We're all going to die. Aliens are invading like, like, let's try to keep up. that game and that combined with all the people that are doing it, then you add in the layer of disinformation to it. It's just like so hard to figure out what's real now. It's like the amount of work you have to do to do the research to find out how legitimate a story really is is absurd.

And that like I talk about this all the time too. I think it's really interesting how you have all these people like I'm one of them. I'm guilty of it being one of the, I sit here and I talk about great things, right? Yeah. I haven't been to these places. I haven't seen the shit first person, like some of the people like you have done, right? Like, I'm not going out and filming this stuff and, like, talking to the people on the ground.

I'm just getting information from people that have posted stuff that they heard from someone else. Yeah. That they heard from someone else that they heard from somebody who might have been on the ground there. But you know about the telephone game. Oh, yeah. It's amazing.

It's a kid. I mean, just how easy it is. is when you pass on something, how it's so completely distorted by the time it gets to the other end of the classroom. Right. Yep. In fact, it often has no bearing on what was whispered

into the first ear. Yep. Remember in 1938, Orson Wells War of the Worlds? Of course. How many people were convinced that the Martians were invading? And they were calling up neighbors, the newspapers, keeping them up to date, because This is this radio, even though at the beginning of the radio broadcast, he said, it was just a story.

It was not real. Right. That's 38. Right. There was a social media. That was a social media of the day. Mm-hmm. It was radio.

Yeah. It's crazy how we're evolving. Yeah. And it's crazy how much, like, I mean, like, I don't even know, just like the speculation, the speculation of how. how much organizations like NSA and CIA are wrapped up and all this stuff and benefiting from it and like how much more they can get away with just because there's so much chatter

there's so much noise. Most aren't because I can tell you there's a bureaucracy. See the real deep state, I put that in huge quotes because it's been completely just it's an overloaded phrase now is the bureaucracy. Some like to call it the administrative state, but it's really the bureaucracy. The everyday running, right?

They're just people sitting at doing their job going home with real families and bills and mortgages and there's two million employees in the US government I mean it's like the vast majority of those aren't involved in anything close to what is alleged right but having said that if and remember part of the problem here is I worked in a very very secret world for umpteen years it does do something to you in terms of sort of there's that world, then there's the real world. And then there's years, I couldn't say what I did outside of work. The only place I could even talk about it was at work.

It does, it does do something to you. But on the other hand, you're also doing things that no one else knows about, I say no one else, that the public at large doesn't know about it. Can we speculate about. When you have secret agencies and secret organizations, it's very easy to ascribe to them, to them certain activities, certain events. And it can make sense. And you even create logic, logic trees from it.

Right, right, right, right. But you're also generating a whole bunch of rabbit holes. Right. And people get lost in the rabbit holes. Yeah. You can imagine, I'll just share this because I have inside knowledge on this, the kind of phone calls that the main desk,

just the operator, the main operator, public operator, public operator NSA receives is a team of people. You can only imagine the bizarre at times calls that come in on that line. It's stunning. I can't imagine. Oh, no. I've had a conversation with people that have had the conversations, right? And it's just they shake their head.

They have a whole protocol for how they handle it. There's people that actually allege all kinds of things. Right. Or they'll start saying, you know, I've got. got a chip planted in my head. And I'm communicating. Or someone's communicating with me. And it's secret.

But, you know, I need to share this. In some cases, you know, they definitely want to share it. But they're going to call it. Yeah. People ascribe. On the other hand, it has enormous power. You know, this is where the spider web comment, remember the uncle? You know, with great power comes great responsibility.

Well, also, you can. commit all kinds of irresponsibility with the power. And too often, as it was my experience, for all the things that are legit, right, what happens when it's turned for other purposes? What happens when they use national security to bend law, get around law, violate your privacy, conduct operations in the shadows? Right. See, the shadow land.

Is that, you know, I call it the shadow land? Yes. And this is another thing that they do. is they work with private organizations and private companies to avoid the accountability, right? Like we talked about this on the phone, and I've talked about this on recent podcasts,

but like I just read this fantastic series of articles about a report about the history of Google and how it was funded and incubated by NSA, CIA, and DARPA. Like the tools came from DARPA, but there were CIA and NSA folks quite literally visiting Larry Page, or not Larry Page, Sergey Brin at Stanford,

him and his professor, through the whole process of developing Google, and they were giving him money through some sort of cutout or whatever. And like, that's crazy. That's insane. And then if you, so if you can have these crazy multinational

monopoly organizations that control all the information around the world, like the one is Google, and then YouTube comes second. And you say, okay, it was created by them, but it's not really connected. Nobody knows that that is the case. And it's literally a separate private or a public company, but it's not connected to those agencies. It's a convenient kind of.

Imagine what they can get away with. And imagine how much they can freaking control. It's just so crazy to me, man. And learning this stuff blows my mind, even though it should have blow my mind after seeing things like the Twitter files. This goes back decades, though, well before all of the digital age. It goes back Operation Shamrock, Special Program, NSA, 1950s. Actually, it was in the government, even before NSA. The precursors, NSA.

So one of the means, how did you send out electronic messages back in the 50s or even earlier? Remember, with the invention of the telegraph, one of the things that came about was telex. well there was a small set of companies rca was one of them that were response western union okay they're responsible for tellex guess what they were who they were sharing it with this became this all came out in the 70s people forget all this came out during those investigations of 70s pipe committee church bell absug the rockefieler commission and others right secretly sharing extort it was supposed to be protected information but it quote unquote had intelligence value so basically Basically, they had a special conduit, which all of those telegrams are being provided en masse to NSA.

Minaret, spying on Americans. Remember, foreign intelligence. Wait a minute, this is the best thing. You're not, you're not the agency that does de met or they did under Minaret for years. All came out in the 70s. Yeah. So it's not like NSA has always operated lawfully. It's part of the problem when you're secret. It's too tempting. It's too convenient. you partner with certain companies. Right. A lot of the partnerships that I'm aware of, the precursor of partnerships, this is pre-9-11, we're already in existence, super secret. There's a special office. They change the name to quote-unquote protect the guilty over the years.

There's a special office that deals with corporate partnerships. But you imagine, it's incredibly sensitive. But it's literally, it's quite literally by, like in the charter, Isn't it illegal for these agencies to be involved in domestic stuff? What's, you know, if it's the U.S., you know, if it's support national security of the United States, who's going to argue with that? Right. Remember a lot, a lot goes under the imprimatur of national security. Yeah, I mean, I imagine it was a lot, a lot easier back in the 50s, 60s.

Way easier. And they're much smaller. To infiltrate the media, right? Oh, yeah. Because there's only, you know, so many media outlets. but now like well the CIA had a standing program where they would actually have their journalists and they would seed certain things into the media years

way before 9-11 this is like project mockingbird mockingbird is the primary one the mockingbird was a during kennedy right yeah well yeah but there was a lot of other programs similar they yeah where you're using fronts u.s aid for example which was great i mean this is They're huge in the, they're big in the news right now. Because it's too convenient. I mean, if you're overseas, Peace Corps, unfortunately, Peace Corps got used. This is where, for all the right reasons, the Peace Corps, right, did exist.

But what if they're being used to, quote, unquote, collect intelligence? Well, what if you're in that country and they find out that you're really a spy, quote, unquote, civilian, but you're really a, you're operating like a spy. Even when you're, quote, unquote, helping the locals, that's a compromise. there's a corruption of the mission. Yeah. But it's too tempting. I, it's just, you get into the whole dynamic of this and the psychology of, I've always said, this is where he gets into sort of my own, because, yeah, I was part

of that environment. You know, I was part of the well called the normal part of the environment. Not, not the sort of the compromise part until later, where it's just, it becomes, I mean, remember, this, spying is the world's second oldest profession. That's kind of the joke. Yep. Yep. What do you make of all this recent stuff coming out about with the U.S. controversy with the U.S.Aid and... There's a lot of corruption. I would just say it that way. It doesn't surprise me. And it's, I think, remember the government at large, but it particularly the agencies that don't get a whole lot of, like, direct public attention, even though you may hear about them in the news. National Security, like U.S.A. Pentagon at large.

how do you audit them? How do you audit them? Remember, follow the money. But what if you don't want to follow the money? Right. Meaning you don't want people to follow the money because if you follow the money, you're going to find out where the money went.

And when you find out where the money went, you're going to find out that the money went for things that you don't really want the public to know about. So the story is USAID has been funding stuff all over the world in countries, like our ally countries, right? third world countries and it's under the guise i mean the funny thing about it is it's u.s aid but the stands for something completely different right what is u.s. agency for international development

that was the originacy for international development right no i knew people remember because of my long government career i knew people i had neighbor i had a neighbor that was a senior in in the u.s. aid uh agency so like the idea is we're giving huge donations we're building infrastructure and building stuff in these other countries in exchange exchange for us to be able to have a footprint there. But we did that as I well know, as I discovered, but I well knew. We were doing that with certain, you know, our own corporations. Hey, if you go overseas and have a contract with even an allied government.

Yeah. Let's backdoor. Let's just use it and you funnel everything back to us. So the argument against the argument for this is like, is it better to not do it and let China and Russia do it? I've heard that argument. I understand the argument. I understand that.

then just be open about it. But see, that's the problem. If that's true. It doesn't work if you're open about it. Oh, that's, see, but that's the paradox, isn't it? Yeah. But then it justifies continuing it because, oh, we don't want them to take it over. Now you're in just this vicious cycle. Yeah, and that's the conundrum with this whole thing.

Sure is. Like, we live in this, we kind of take it for granted that we live in, like, the number one military superpower country in the world, and we, We have, we live in like, like kings. Like we have everything at our disposal. We can do anything we want with all the technology and, and freedom that most countries don't have. And then, you know, we want to criticize the government for taking, for going so far and in certain areas.

But like, like, God damn, if they, if there's some of this stuff they didn't do and some people can be blind to this stuff. Like, if we didn't do some of this stuff, like, if we didn't do some of, this fucked up shit for lack of a better term, like we wouldn't be where we are. And we wouldn't have the luxury of being critical of the government. So yeah, I hear that argument a lot. And it's hard for me to, it's hard for me to navigate sometimes. But, so let's get back to your story. You, you went to the C we were, we were, we left off when you went to the CIA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Working in the national.

National Photographic Interpretation Center. NPEC. Okay. It changed its name. There is now an agency. Which was part of the NRO, right? Well, it was the analytic side that took what would come down from national technical means, including NRO primarily, and analyze it. Right.

And it could even end up in the president's daily brief. But there was, I was, you know, later on, I was even part of a joint team at the military in the alert. Center at the Pentagon working for the J2 where you put together, you know, a morning report. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah, which would include it was all source. It would include imagery of all types. It would include signals intelligence, which was a huge component because there's, you know, obviously, I worked on the Eeylint disk for a while, right? So this overlaps. What is that? Electronic intelligence. So there's a double different ints. Okay. SIGN incorporates basically communication intelligence, electronic intelligence.

Okay. Signals intelligence. Yeah. But, you know, I worked in multiple ints. Oh, got it. So there was a time when I was in the Navy, so this goes, now we're talking 91. So I left the CIA. And the reason is that an opportunity to become a contractor doing similar work.

It ended up being something completely different. It was a government contractor getting paid a whole lot more money. I'm in the D.C. area. Okay. And without even going all the details, it was better at that point. with a 40% increase plus in salary and a young family. Right. Who wouldn't?

You get to keep your clearance. Correct. Do all of that. Yep. But working as a contractor. Yep. But it was the first time that I actually worked as a contractor. Of course, I worked with contractors even overseas.

Highly specialized contractors that help support like e-systems. Right. Greenville, Texas. They were one of the contractors that supported the RC-135 program. Okay. Or Lockheed Martin when I was in electronic warfare. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I ended up applying. I wanted to continue to serve my country. I'm a contractor, but is there a way to do that without going back into the military full-time? Because it's clear that I moved on from that.

So one way to do that is in the reserves. So it was a direct commission program. I had the master's degree and I had the background. I had the qualifications. And they were looking doctors, lawyers, intelligence specialists. So I applied was accepted. I went through their training program. And then I was assigned to the DIA headquarters unit in the Alert Center in the National

Military Joint Intelligence Center at the Pentagon, reporting directly to the general bring directly to the J2. DIA was a day-to-day agency that... For people that don't know, what is J-2? The J-2 is the most senior intelligence officer in the military, in the Pentagon, and they are the, they provide the consolidated intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Right. Okay.

So they work within the Joint Chiefs of Staff office. You have different Js. I was in the J-2 part. Okay. But we got, I'm feeding, we're big feed. from all over the world. Fascinating. I was there for a number of years. I got to, I got to the rank lieutenant. So I was, you know, the railroad tracks on my naval uniform, my Navy uniform. What do you mean when you say feeds from all over the world? Feeds. Multiple desks, civilian

and military. So for example, I, the first desk, I'll just give you an example. I won't have time to go into every, because it's a huge. Sure. It's in, it's in, but it's the, it's kind of like the Sagan Operation Center, the SOC is they called to NSA. This. This is the Pentagon's version of that. But we had multiple agencies there. CIA had its own desk. State Department had its own desk. Wow.

The CIA had its own desk. Later, NSA had a desk. I was first assigned because of my technical background to the Eeylint desk. Fascinating, right? It was another aspect of this. Then I was assigned, and I'm going to, this is critical to the rest of the story, which is really at the heart of what we're going to be talking about, because of what led up to it, what happened on 9-11,

and then what happened in the aftermath of 9-11. Okay. And then how did I find myself on the front pages of all major newspapers in the country? Right. Some years later. Right. Okay. How did that all happen, right?

And so I was sitting on the terrorism desk. Terrorism desk doing incredibly advanced link analysis. Link analysis, meaning we're doing advanced social, I'll just simplify this, right, without getting into the weeds, social network analysis. You're going beyond just raw intelligence. What you're doing is because it's terrorism, which is an idea, right? But where is it embedded? It's embedded in people who decide, you know what?

I'm going to commit acts of violence or the equivalent against others, right? Because I have an ideology. I have a beef. I've got a bone. It could be historical. It could be personal. But it's not basically non-state actors. Those states obviously involve themselves terrorism and even helped sponsor with proxies and everything else.

So I'm sitting on the terrorism desk. Guess what happened in 1993 in lower Manhattan? People forget about this. They attempted to drop the World Trade Center Towers of truck bombs. And if they went off, people were killed, people were injured. There was a lot of damage. And if they've been positioned differently, it may have caused way more damage. Right.

I'm sitting, I'm in the alert center. We're following all of this. I literally issued a report. It's a written report. I am sure it's buried. I'm in the alert center. I'm wearing my uniform, my naval uniform. I'm sitting at the desk.

I later, shortly after, I went to the Middle East North Africa desk. That was interesting as well. But on the terrorism desk, which was a unique desk, a unique desk, because it was, it was, it was an essence focused on a particular challenge of how do you deal with non-state actors, primarily, or the proxies of state actors. Right. They don't wear uniforms all the time. They blend and disappear into the population.

They have their own unique ways of communicating, both in terms of language and even technology. So I'm sitting on the desk. I used to report. I said, because we've been following any number of terrorist groups and individuals, including al-Qaeda. If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, Playoff Hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level, overtime, big hits, and no-one coasts. The studio crew with Paul Bissonette cracking jokes,

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are you working with other agencies to follow them? Yeah, it's all source. I had different phones on my desk. I could call up and, oh yeah, or my colleagues right there in the Alert Center. Like the FBI and... Right there. Right there. Right there. that was the beauty of it

it was a fusion center it was one of the really it was really the first fusion center they had the 9-11 triggered all fusion centers but we already had that at least the military right reporting to the J2 but it wasn't just military

you had all the other representing agencies that had anything to do with intelligence world affairs challenges period we even had we even had people dealing with weather I mean, we're talking, it's a whole, holistic,

as we would call full spectrum. Yes. Why were you guys worried about weather? Yeah, because depending where you were, right? I mean, things happened. Yeah. We had the specialized desk that dealt with alerts for nuclear, like certain, or not just nuclear, but certain launches.

You're always tracking launches. You're always tracking. They're signatures, specialized technology to, to analyze in real time or near real time, what those signatures were. Right. What, where the angle was, what, I mean, the Sibber satellites are a huge part in there, right? Then there's all kinds of, how do you determine, like, strength of signals, emanations, emissions of all kinds, right? Mazint is in a whole other int as well.

What is Mazant? Mazint. That's basically the technical, more technical ints in terms of things that, basically anything that provides a signature. Got it. Yeah, besides normal signals, besides normal electronics. Yeah. Like smoke or vapor? Yeah, there's all, this is, we're talking full spectrum.

Full spectrum. Full spectrum. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and there's even specialized even within that, right? It gets really specific. Yeah, I mean, even in the imagery space, we had specialized instruments to measure things. Did you ever, did you ever work with the Sibbers system? I'm aware of it.

Okay. I didn't know if you ever like monitored the Sibber stuff. Okay. No. Yeah. My understanding of it is there's like basically a bunch of them that are traveling around the globe like constantly. And there's a constant essentially like with all of the different Sibber satellites constantly rotating the globe the earth. Every single square inch of earth is covered at all times by these.

Sibber satellites that are recording that were recording what's going on on in the ground, what's going on in airspace and all that stuff. There was partial versions of that when I was there. Remember, there's been an evolution in technology that has advanced that. Find out, Steve, find out when

Sibbers became... See, a lot of the early stuff was prototype or it was in the highly classified military space. That was always like one of the covers. Or operating under military as a cover for other agencies okay so cibbers when did that come come about is there a date Steve um 1924 it started in the 80s yeah that's oh that's the advanced warning system and then the boost surveillance and tracking

system they've had that for a while that's been evolved i remember that for me that my period is the 80s and and through the late 90s follow on early warning system in the early 90s yes oh by the way i just remember what I was trying to, when we were talking about the nuclear stuff. It's a launch on warning. That's the, that's the term they have for launch on warning. For when they see a ICBM going up, that we have to empty our silos. Well, that's a, it's a, it's a shorthand to say that's what you launch when you're warning that is, oh, whether it's head, they're heading. They're incoming. Just like use it or lose it with the ICBNs. Use it or lose it. It's no way, launch on warning. Yeah, right. It looks like 2009 is when they started the earliest launch.

launches of the satellites. Remember, I'm only aware of prototypes. It had nowhere near the coverage. You have to remember, I mean, the extraordinary evolution of technology is enabled all this. Right. And even the ability to launch on a regular basis. One of the things that Musk can do is SpaceX. I met him, by the way. You met Elon? That's a whole other story. Really? When did you meet him? Oh, 2007, before the first successful launch of Falcon. Now, 2007 was when you were going through everything, right? When you were on your way out. Not yet.

Oh, not yet. So you were still in NSA when you met you. I was still in a essay. I was teaching at the National Defense University at the time. What was the context of this? We'll get to it. That's a whole not. I mean, if you want to jump around, I can.

Okay, we'll get to it. I'll get to it. You might want to make a note. Yes. People always say, you meant Musk? What was he like? I'd say, yeah. You heard of folks.

You better keep watching this because we're going to hear a great story about Elon and the deep state. Yeah, it's a story all right. He's fascinating. You got to remember, when I met him, he was in his mid-30s. Right. Yeah. Right. 2007, yeah.

Yeah. Full of mojo and just, yeah, he was, it's a new story. It's, but it's, you know, this fascinating startup. It was. Also, so you mentioned that the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Oh, yes. This is critical to what literally became the split in the time space continuum for me, the U.S. and the world. Okay.

Because without this particular event, so let me go back. Joseph Lockhart, you'll want me to talk about Joseph Lockhart from Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, a day of infamy. That never should have happened either. I can tell you, in terms of the damage. let alone the warning. There was a warning. The warning went out. It got rejected.

Why did it get rejected? It wasn't considered important enough. The duty officer said, he decided that it's not worth reporting. Not worth sending out the alert. To move airplanes on the fails pointed nose, basically wingtip to wing tip to move ships out or to alert the crews.

They got to actually man the anti-aircraft guns. But that gets, I'm in an interview Joseph Lockhart. Yeah, there's a lot of documents. documentaries out there that speculate that that was, that they let that happen as an excuse to enter the war. I'll just, I think there's a both hand here. It's not either or. This is all people want this simplistic. People want to be black and white. It's not black or white. It's not. It's not. But Roosevelt was looking for a way. He was already supporting Britain. Many things can be true at once.

Yes, many things can be true and they can even appear to be contradictory. Yep. Yeah. And yet it's still Yes. So 1993, I sent out a message. This is one that's going to haunt me for the rest. This is the first haunt of my life, right? Being within the deep state. I sent a message saying, they may have failed to drop the World Trade Center.

I said it this way. I'm paraphrasing myself. They may have failed to drop the World Trade Center, but they're coming back. They're coming back. We must warn all the command authorities about what their intent is. They're coming back. This is not a one-time event. This is not a one-off event.

And how? We've been doing long-term, short-term, mid-term analysis. So this was the analysis of it. Yes. We knew they were coming back. Remember, I'm drawing on my entire, it's just the thing. People don't realize what it takes to become fully,

like is knowledgeable in your space. You're basically, you're not just an area special, In this case, I was sitting in the terrorism desk. I had to know as much as I could know that was possible. And we had all kinds of updated, updated topic areas on terrorism, right? What's the latest? And you keep iterate, iterate, iterate, publish it, iterate, iterate, publish it. Because the desk rotates.

I mean, I was only there on weekends. I was a weekend warrior because I was in the reserves, usually at least once a month. So I was there for, you know, for two full cycles, sometimes Friday night till Sunday, sometimes from Saturday through Monday morning. And then I would go to work. And at that time, I was working at Booz Allen and Hamilton, a whole other part of my career. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. So I sent out this report. Now, it's an internal, it's an internal, but it gets all the way to the J2, which is usually a one or two-star general. Okay. He comes down to the Alert Center. And the Alert Center itself, it's 24 hours. Normally run usually by a 06, usually a captain Navy or a colonel Air Force Army. And it rotates, right, depending on who's on shift and working.

It can be temporary filled by a senior like lieutenant colonel in 05. But flag level, because it's a flag level position, it's usually in 06. Generals begin at 07 and then go up to 010. And so he comes down, he literally, which is rare, he rarely ever came down, right? But he comes down, the Alert Center says, yeah, I saw your report. And this is almost literally what he said out loud. Yeah, who cares? Who cares about some raghead issuing fatwas in the desert sitting under a fig tree?

And I pause because it's like, he just dismissed it. I was classically trained in terms of intelligence. It's an art and a science. It's not perfect. It has confidence levels. You know, in some cases you have low confidence. Sometimes you have high confidence. Right.

We had pretty high confidence that they meant business. There already been a series of terrorist incidents. You can go back to the Reagan, right? Remember Beirut? And we didn't do anything. He just pulled us out. People have argued about why did he do that? someone say it actually emboldened the terrorists.

Never mind sort of the larger geopolitical dynamics in terms of history, which in itself gets complicated enough. Right. But remember, a bunch of French military lost their lives, too, in the very, not just U.S. So it was clear the system, I say the system, and this is where you get in its people, it wasn't considered. Remember, you got to remember what year it is. This is critical in context.

Context is everything here. Remember what's classically trained. Indications warning. Duty to warn, but indications. You don't want to wait until you warn. You also want to be in the decision loop, no matter what it is ahead of time. And what's the whole focus to keep people out of harm's way? Not just U.S.

It could be allies friendly, period. If you know there's an international airliner by KL007, I'm jumping ahead again, okay, but the same year, I mean, back 10 years in 1983, which I have inside knowledge on that one, if you know there's an international air line flying flying outside of its route okay and you know that it's now being perceived as an RC-135 that's how the Russians in the west the far eastern district perceived it they're not going to take it too kindly they're particularly sensitive to that part of their of their country it never should have been shot down I'm just going to tell you but that's a what if for me because it did got shot down

all those passengers on a 747. This was what year? 1983. 83. KL.O7. Korean Airlines. Oh, yes. Iowa station at Milden Hall, but we got all the reports.

I knew people that worked at the Masawa unit. There was then a secret collection unit way up Wakanai, I can say it now, way up on the coast, It was the most northern collection, but at the time it was highly super sensitive. I knew people that worked there. And they sent out the, I mentioned the critic reporting system, which is supposed to get on the president's desk within 10 minutes. Issued it, got rejected by NSA. Issued it again, got rejected by NSA. Then it was too late.

Oh, my God. They thought it was an exercise back at headquarters. They didn't trust the field. That's why you have the alert system. The field site is supposed to. provide for that type of coverage. You didn't just have responsibility to quote-unquote spy collect intelligence on an adversary. You also had responsibility to the civilian side of the world.

This is a civilian airliner. It's not a military airliner at all. But they thought it was an RC-135. Why? Because a cobra ball mission, another variant of the RC-135. Didn't fly on it, but I certainly knew people that did, happened to be in the area. What were they waiting for? A launch from Kamchatka,

because that's typically how the Soviets at the time they would launch into the Pacific. Got thousands and thousands of miles. It's out in the boonies on this huge peninsula. But we monitor it with super specialized equipment. Without going all the details, they ended up going home. They switched the tracks,

so they call it on the radar, because radar back over there wasn't that as advanced, and they kept thinking as they saw this, what they thought was an RC-135, violating their airspace as it flew over the peninsula and into the sea of Otkoss, and they said, well, we better go up and shoot it down. The order was given to shoot it down. And they got shot down. All this was captured.

Now, Reagan made a big deal out of it because it was incredibly embarrassing because it turns out they shot down a civilian airliner. In the profile, if you're on radar, the profile, even looking at it, even though a 747 is actually quite a bit larger than an RC 135, but it kind of looks the same. Can you pull up a picture of an RC 135, Steve? They both have four engines. It's similar in terms of the angle of the wing.

That's one of the, yep, plane. That's the, I believe, is a combat scent variant. Wow. There's different variants, of course. Okay. But if you look at that and then compare it to a 747. Very similar. In profile from a distance, it's similar.

on the radar a few feet here and there can't really tell they thought it was an RC 135 that's a 747 yeah what's the story there was also um and this is probably after your after you were out of NSA but there was a story similar where an airline got shot down right off of New York or maybe it didn't get shot down oh TW 800 TW 800 yes that is wrapped in a mystery inside of a puzzle that's then smothered with an enigma. I had a paraphrase Churchill. I had a, yeah, I had a fellow, a former FBI agent on the show about a year ago who was there on site cleaning up like trying to rescue people that were, I mean, there was no rescues,

but like he was there like in the recovery process of that. Yeah. And he said it was the worst day of his life having to see that. And the official story is what? Like the, what was the official story of that? Electrical short. That's the official story. I think he said on the podcast,

he said it looked like it got shot down. Many people said, and they's, yes. I can't definitively say, but by virtue of how they sealed the whole investigation and a lot of the mystery around what really happened in terms of reporting, it raises some really hard questions

that still remain unanswered to this day. I think there was an accident. But I can see, and some have argued, that that variant of the 800, right, it was a flight, but a variant of that plane could have been susceptible to, and this gets into static electricity, and it could have ignited. But, you know, there are safety mechanisms. Yeah, machines are imperfect. But there is other things around that in terms of what appears to be some kind of launch.

coming from the vicinity of the ground that would lead to a possibility that was, this reminds me, it reminds me of what happened with the Airbus, never mind KLW7, the Airbus, the Arrana Airbus that took off from the airfield and they shared it with the military. And they're the Vincennes, you go back in the history, this is interesting. They thought, they thought the Vincennes, they thought that it was an F-14. that was coming in at an angle to attack them. Well, there was a ferry flight that they always flew back and forth. There was an airbus that flew back and forth across the Gulf routinely.

And it was on descent. You know, it peaks out. It's a very short flight across the Gulf. You know, when you're flying 350, 400, 450 miles plus miles an hour. So they fired off a standard wind. I was in the Navy, a standard missile, which is basically fire and forget. you can't really recall it per se and boom and not to our horror we shot down a civilian airliner you know god well it turns out even though there was an instrument panel that showed it it was an

f14 squawking on the airbase but it got mixed up they trans and in the heat of the battle and that was you got to remember the dynamics then that was one of those periods where they were sending out their little boats and needling like a you know like a like a like a flea right just you know and you And the Vincennes is, you know, Tycone or class, you know, cruiser. So, but a whole bunch of civilians lost their lives. Yeah. I mean, so, but it caught, it was an international incident of major proportions. Steve just found a great animation of that TWA 800 flight on, like, I guess they somehow, based on the trajectory of all the debris, they figured out, like, what the explosion looked like and how it ripped the plane apart.

Go ahead and play it, Steve. So the head of the airplane just freaking came off, got decapitated. Yep. Wow. Actually, that's the first time I've seen this. I've never seen the animation. I imagine these guys are blacked out already, right? They're unconscious.

Oh, yeah. It's just the forces involved. Right. And then the people that are in the plane. Well, you're at altitude. That's the other problem. You immediately, I had to, we went through special chambers to learn what would happen if you lost air. or had a blowout or whatever or even got hit at altitude.

You had to go on oxygen almost immediately. Right. Because you would lose consciousness. Right, right. There wasn't enough pressure to keep the oxygen, you know, the air in your lungs. Yeah. Wow. You saw what happened to the plane that was coming in on about 300 feet off.

This is the helicopter that ran into. Oh, yeah, just recently. What was the story with that? The commuter jet. Oh, oh, the private jet. Was it a commuter? It's Eagle, it's Eagle. It's a subsidiary.

I saw two things. I saw one thing that was like a mid-air collision. It looked like. And another one where a private jet just nosed up into a highway. That was apparently some kind of meta-flight. They were actually on their way to the central part, the Heartland America, and then going into Mexico. Someone got flown in for special treatment in the Baltimore area,

I mean, Philadelphia area. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't, that one is, that one's like, wow, it was like a missile. Right. They were talking, it was incredible. I mean, just, just dropped out of skies. Straight down. Yeah, super steep angle.

It put an eight foot hole, apparently, from people on the scene, and it was scattered debris everywhere. But that was, yeah. But you saw, what I'm saying is how quickly that commuter jet broke up, got hit. You can see that helicopter. the UH is plowing right in the UH 60, which is their kind of the workhorse helicopter goes back 40, 50 years now. Can you find a video of it, Steve?

The UH 60. Yeah. I mean, I'm very familiar with that because we used to some of the mission, you would see them flying around besides the patchies and everything else, but the UH 60 is a workhorse. And it just like didn't even know it was there. It's pretty clear. There was no evasive maneuvers. Just flew right in, it flew right into it.

Oh, the videos. The video is really kind of hard to see. 300, well, 300 feet, because it was basically just before 9 o'clock on Wednesday. It just flew right into it. That's all that is. And it just everybody's dead. Yeah. Including a helicopter.

How does that happen, man? Well, see, that's, that's, there's been a lot of close calls, as it turns out, a lot. Because they have all these helicopter routes. You're now, and Reagan has been expanded. Thank you. Because if you're in Congress, you want to get home as quick as possible. You want me, it's right there, but it's, you know, basically it's in downtown. It's that close.

Yeah. And it's just a very congested area. And this was, this was also near Philadelphia? No, this is D.C. This is Reagan. This is Reagan. He's on final approach. Yeah.

It's just crazy that this is all happening like right on the heels of all that drone controversy. Oh, the drone stuff. I think the Trump, Trump just came out and said that it was, they said that it was surveillance, some sort of surveillance thing combined with hobbyists. Yep. You don't hear about it anymore. You're not hearing about it now. I mean, you don't, it became this thing.

It just reminds me of war of the worlds. People started seeing all kinds of things. People were showing, hey, there's a whole other one. And it's got regular blinking lights, it turns out, because there's all kinds of air, you know, there's all kinds of airfields, both public and private and military in that area. Right, everywhere.

People just started, people just, well, you're talking in New York, the New York area, right? The Greater New York, New Jersey, right? That's very congested as well. Yeah. People were just on regular, flight paths people in and out of airports and they're saying their UFOs they were they were definitely

conventional drones but like why yeah like why all of a sudden are all these drones out there and only at night yeah and then there was a couple stories that came out one that they were looking for like a rogue nuke i heard that i heard that plus there's all kinds of people there are training exercises and sometimes with the training exercises in the military or or sort of the secret side of government they do it under the cover of civilian right it just makes it more real we used to do that right right Look, I'll give you, you want to another example? Yeah, of course. We used to fly all kinds of training flights with a compass call as a wartime mission.

Remember, it was combat support, right, wartime, but conflict. You just didn't routinely go out and jam stuff. You didn't. We had a special, it was basically an oil bath where if you could send the signal, the jamming, right, the electronic into this. It never, it never radiated outside. We had a special, it was basically we called a cheese cutter. It never radiated outside of the airplane. But there was a switch, and it was actually because it was a weapons system, it was technically an electronic weapon system, it was controlled by an officer.

So I reported in the back of the plane, there was the front end crew. I reported as a mission crew supervisor to a mission crew commander, an officer. I was a non-commissioned. He was commissioned. But he had a switch. In the switch, there was one, it's live or it's the oil pot, right? You had to flip the switch to an on position for any radiation that was electronic, you know, a suppressant, is a suppressant version of electronic signal, multiple frequencies depending.

You could target it. You could broadband it. You could be very, and you had to flip a switch. Well, we were flying a certain part of the western U.S. and we had special permission because we're going to we'll get to this the whole thing with you can't listen in spy on collect on Americans right without a warrant yeah not that it matters anymore but that's part of the Constitution right part of the reason why we're Americans because we had a revolution for Christ's sake

and we're flying around right and of course that plane flew a lot lower we're talking about 20,000 feet 15 20,000 feet it could go higher but that was sort of its normal thing. And it's a prop playing, turbo prop, four engine, accidentally flipped on the switch and shut down. Good news, rather remote part of the western, this western part of the United States, shut down radio stations in the area. People were calling in saying, uh, I, what happened to the radio station, right? Whoops. Oops. What plane is that? this. EC-138. EC-13.

All right, so let's jump back to your story and let's get into the good stuff. The good stuff? Well, I mean, let's start that trajectory at least. All right. Okay. So I think we left off when you were in NSA and it was 1993, that whole terrorist thing. You were working on the terrorist. Oh, Navy.

Navy. That was Navy. On the terrorism desk. Terrorism desk. Okay. Cool. And then how did you get from there to NSA? So I was also a contractor, NSA.

This was where I was at Booz Allen Hamilton and later with a couple of boutique.coms doing management information technology consulting. So I had become very, very familiar with NSA. And I was actually working on a special program called Jackpot, which was an out-of-the-box program, separately funded, had five-year funding. It was actually part of interesting enough Al Gore's reinventing government initiative. Now, Al Gore did not invent the Internet. That's popular meme at the time. It was basically an expand internet, enhance internet.

But under reinventing, a number of agencies were given special money to take the best of American ingenuity innovativeness in the IT digital space and bring it in NSA. NSA had become very institutionalized. It had become very reliant on its legacy. I didn't, this gets into, you can remember, it was designed to deal with a very rigid command and control system called the Soviet Union primarily, even though it had a worldwide mission, but that was its primary focus. Okay. Even when I flew in RCs, the bulk of the linguists, the cryptolinguists were Russian. Not all of them. And I had to know enough Russian to understand it, just another part of my job. Yeah.

But the primary function, the primary, in terms of the set of people that were on that plane were Russian, were Russian. Okay. Just by virtue of the priority. Right. So, Cold War ends. I'm sitting on deaths that are dealing with emerging threats, but it was being basically ignored or dismissed by those in power. Yeah, you mentioned the general came in and basically said, I don't give a shit about a couple of rackheads. That's right.

Yeah. So, but I was working on the special program called Jackpot. So we're now bringing in the best because they realized, here's the kicker, the key, but it's a kicker. They did study after study after study. Some were pretty significant, including a Rand Corporation study. There was others, including stakeholders with the oversight committees. Remember, there was a form late 70s under Carter because of all the scandals that emerged and all the spies. and everything all operation chaos in the field intelligence program with the military spying on

americans the operation minaret uh the coin intel pro with fbi i just like just going crazy yeah right and it all culminated under the nixon administration in terms of of of course that's when i grew up i grew up as a young teenager during that period so i'm working on this program because nsa a realize they had a problem. How do you deal with all this data? How do you deal with these new non-state actors? They're murky. It's hard to figure them out, let alone follow them. A lot of they don't use any normal means of, regular means of communication that we're used to. So part of my job at the time, and this is where I got very technical, but it was also in the management side. How do you form organizations? How do career organizations deal with

this new digital age, analog to digital. Okay. The analog didn't disappear, believe it. But now increasingly, it's digital. So they just sat there staring at their naval, most of the time, because it would require change. And in a large organization, and this is what, this is the challenge we're seeing now emerge with Trump 2.0.

You're seeing institutionalized, very rigid organization, organizations who have gotten used to the way they do business. And that way that they do business is business as usual. The last thing they want to do, and some of it's justified in part, especially when they're supporting directly like Social Security payments, right? Medicare, for example, those built on systems, basically, COBOL, which I'm very familiar with, cobal, common orienting business language, right? to um but very difficult as an organization to change never mind corruption never mind sure right so

in this space right i'm coming in from the outside and i'm basically saying i'm even as a contractor we weren't looked on very kindly we would go into organizations and actually do a full scope basically a full scope. We called it it was, we had ways we did this. Technical examination of the organization

in terms of what they were creating, their projects and programs. We also examined the leadership and management structure. And then we would create a report. And we invite all the key principles, including basically the entire organization into like a conference room.

A lot of the managers in particular did not, leaders, right? some quite senior did not appreciate this, right? Because they're being exposed, even from within, even though it's a safe environment, they're still being exposed. Took great exception to it. Just to give you an indication of how difficult it is,

even when it's for all the right reasons and when it's actually necessary for the continuance and the sustainment of the mission. Remember the whole thing, my upbringing was mission, mission, mission. Right. So bringing in outside, expertise. And it's ironic because

this is where NSA is like, well, and it's started in the mid-80s, by the way. We're just going to go buy solutions, spend tons of money. We can't do it. We don't want to do it. So we'll go to the corporate America, military industrial complex,

or some of the new emerging Silicon Valley companies that we mentioned earlier, like Google, for example. I'm actually responsible. I'll take credit, but with some with some embarrassment,

responsible of bringing the first Google appliance in NSA, which then got summarily rejected. We'll get to that one. Okay. Because of what it found. Right. These are the boxes that would send out to all the little spiders to pick up all the information, you know, any, right?

Well, it turns out, even I'll just mention it now, I might as well say it now. NSA, even though I had a very high clearance, beyond the high clearance, there were special red zones, special compartmented programs off limits to very few people. Most people wouldn't even known about them. Some of them for legitimate reasons why you're protecting very, very, very sensitive sources and methods.

Certain operations overseas, certain types of technology you're employing that you don't want anybody to know about outside those that are using it. I knew what that was like when I was involved in sap and sara in the military. Only the people that inside that mission compartment would know, and we have access to the information. Okay. Even the commander of our unit would know. You just know that this is how you protect for legitimate reasons. You don't want to compromise, remember, military operations,

especially when they're hypersensitive. Right. Okay. So it found, the Google appliance found, who went right through what they thought was the firewalls, bypassed the firewall, went cruising right through. And this is, it's, in essence, cataloging all these.

hyper-sensitive, like I'd say hyper-sensitive programs. Of course, you can imagine the embarrassment if your NSA leadership shut it down. Just shut it down. It was penetrating firewalls? Yes. Inside NSA. Oh, Penitring NSA firewall. Remember, NSA, their way, they just kept, it's Rube Goldberg. Remember, it had its own net, old school, right? But there was a point where they're even arguing whether an individual should even have access to email. That's how bad it was in the early days. So what they did is they built this very complex, Rube Goldberg just kept adding and adding on. And it called the NSA net. It's like internet, but it's inside NSA. Got it. Okay. Okay. It's all network. Everything's networked. Yep. So there is, there was a net. This goes way back. This goes back, right?

But it was very difficult post-9-11 to figure out what you have. had what's important, what's critical. How do we keep? I mean, there's just staggering amounts of data. Right. We're not just talking regular internet. We're talking about the vast, just volumes of information data, raw info data coming, streaming in from all the collection sites from everywhere.

Everywhere. Right. And that's that's the vast enterprise. And where was it all being stored? Various places, right? There's a huge data center now in Utah now. They have to be developed because they're running out of room, quote unquote, physical room to even put the servers up, which had, you know, we're talking at the petabyte level.

Okay, all the data. So now there's an entire facility which can actually grow even more if they needed to. So there is locations, physical locations, without mentioning where they are, on the campus, they call it the NSA larger campus at Fort Mead, where they would have special buildings that are all cool, you know, air chilled, right? Chillers and everything else. Vast. Some are underground.

Some are in special buildings, right, where they would store all the data and where you and this data is being stored in databases. So this Google appliance was in essence to figure out what we had, right? It was, it's part of the network. But of course, it does his job really, really well. It just goes out, finds it, and brings it all back. It was an attempt for the right reasons to help facilitate communication, to help provide sharing of information within NSA. But it found things that they didn't want the rest of NSA to know about, which were these special red zones, compartmented programs, highly sensitive.

Because they thought, the text thought, oh, no, our firewalls are strong enough that it'll never penetrate. We're not talking a physical barrier. We're actually talking firewalls at the software firmware level, which would prevent even other parts of NSA because it's... To get through it. Right. It would just reject it. Any attempt.

And it was a Google appliance. It was a Google appliance. But they didn't realize the power of the Google appliance. I did because I was spending all kinds of time in Silicon Valley consulting. I had this dual thing. It was an interesting place. I just happened to be there. That's what you say, you know, where's Waldo?

I was Waldo. I work in a super secret world. Then I'm going out into the burgeoning explosion of Internet in terms of commercial. And where am I going most of the time? Silicon Valley. Learning, I mean, just fun it fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Doing consulting.

I was even allowed to engage with separate, basically consulting efforts, projects, what I was there. And what kind of consulting were you doing? Management and technology. But I was also part of my entree. I was doing what we were doing inside NSA, but I was even doing it now both ways. So they were getting the benefit of what I was doing inside NSA. They're willing to share its national security.

Right? Remember, I'm... They can share everything with you. Well, not everything, but this wasn't surveillance. Right. We're just talking about, I mean, I'm going to different labs. I went, I actually went to Park, Palo Alto Research Center. Fascinating trip.

I went to AT&T Bell Labs. It doesn't exist anymore. up in New Jersey, fascinating, phenomenal stuff, right? Leading edge, but all in labs. People don't even realize what's, this again, this extraordinary thing about America in terms of inventing, hey, because we have this mentality, problem solve it, problem solve it, problem solve it. Why wouldn't you?

Exactly. Necessity, the famous phrase, necessity is the mother of invention. Yes. Why not? Why would you stop that from happening? Why would you prevent that from happening? So I'm at NSA. I begin, because I'm bringing back, right, new thoughts, new.

And then there's people at NSA that I'm, because I had an enterprise, I had enterprise responsibility. I'm going through the ends, I even went overseas in a couple of cases. So I'm going to the ends of NSA to find the very best projects. The very best program is to help those improve themselves at the same time. And that's why we were doing these special reviews. Okay. In the course of doing all that, just to compress all this, to get to 2001, I was finding

phenomenal, call it Siggins skunk works, like Lockheed Martin Skunkworks, it built the U2 in the SR 71, okay? Phenomenal, because NSA realized in the 90s in particular, they faced a huge challenge with the digital age. They couldn't just, because that's the only thing they knew. Oh, we'll just bring everything back, store it and figure it out later.

Bring everything back, store it. Yeah. How do you suck the ocean dry? Can you just, wait a minute, leave the ocean where it is. Just keep track. And this is how I was taught, even on the RC-135.

Essential elements of information, metadata, the critical information, the things that you need to know, know about. The stuff that's routine, you just keep track of that. It's only when it turns to something other than routine that you care. That's kind of the signal to noise ratio. When it rise above a certain level, you then say, you notice it, but you can't notice everything. Right. I can't always look at every straw in the haystack. Can I? I need to know, though, if one of the, if one of the straws, right, turns. How do I know that? Well, I have to know when it turns.

or it catches on fire. I got to know about that. Right. That's part of indications of warning as well, ultimately in terms of how you provide that to support, which is stated in the preamble of the Constitution, providing for the common defense of the United States. I only just took that at the heart. I lived it as well as others did, silent warriors for years and years and years.

That's how I was taught. It's what I experienced. It's what I provided the American people in. secret in the national security space. So NSA kept pushing back resisting because it meant change. They were so wedded to their legacy systems that they weren't willing to look at something differently. You know the famous quote from Einstein. Keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. It's a form of insanity. This is institutional insanity. As I was told at one point after I got to NSA, well, join NSA as a senior executive, Tom, you just don't

understand. That's not how we do things around here. So, but this is actually going to improve how we do things around here. Oh, that's not how we do things. They just were wedded to how they did things. So huge resistance. In fact, they tried to shut the program down because it was embarrassing. But I'm bringing back and then I'm meeting people inside NSA super frustrated because the new director, now it's 1999, Michael V. Hayden, who's central to my story, central to my history, central to what then happened with, as though he's done a very good job, okay, of faking or in diluting, he's very articulate and he has a lot of respect still, you know, as a former and he became CIA director after you as the principal deputy director of the new

director of national intelligence. So it's 1999. He said, you know, this is the same thing as we encountered in World War II, Manhattan Project. We've got to treat this as a Manhattan Project. We have to partner with industry. We need to buy this solution. And it's going to cost a lot of money. You know, why? Because it's a really big problem. Why is it a big problem? Because all kinds of data. It's a big data problem. They actually called it that, the big data problem. Here's the funny thing. In the 90s, particularly the latter part of the 90s, NSA historically for a number of years had published their five top challenge problems. They had more than that.

But the five top was for the priorities. One of them was the big data problem. So you can imagine NSA, the necessity being the mother of invention, let's go solve it. I met the engineers, met the program and project, and a whole collection analysis, right, in reporting, to do exactly that on behalf of the American people. They solved the big data problem, the core of it prior to 9-11. had already solved it. But NSA, nope, the corporate decision is and there are people actually got punished for this internally,

punished. We've already made the decision. We're just going to go to and they spent, we're talking the initial version of this transformation, that has this whole transformation effort, which I was actually a part of. I was in the inside of it. But it became clear all they wanted to do

was create a contract vehicle to spend billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars. Now, I'd already got an insight on that back in the late-ed-up. I partnering with private industry. Yes. Okay. Commercial private, but military.

We're talking those who had access and had the proper security cleaners or could. We're talking like the SAICs of the world. We're talking about the Booz Allen's of the world. We're talking about the IT portions of those companies. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. So just to clarify, when you say you had already solved it, you had already solved it by doing NSA had already solved it internally not by buying it they

already were going to make it but that was her that was the historical legacy of NSA we will make we don't they had contractors going all the way back yeah but they weren't just going out to industry and just just just wholesale here we'll just give you a bunch of money figure it out right remember what Eisenhower warned the nation about in his farewell address in 1961 the rise of the military yep in the halls of the rides of the military industry and the rise of the military complex. Now it's a military military industrial intelligence complex. Right. Right. If you're a contractor and you have shareholders, guess what you're going to, you know,

perversely incentivized to do? Why solve the problem? You're going to lit, I mean, I started seeing it. I was seeing it in the 90s. I was already seeing it on this program. People were like, we're going to buy, we're going to buy lines of code. Well, if I'm a contractor, okay, people, there's a joke about this, I'm just going to code me up a Winnebago today because I could just crank a bunch of lines of code just to get paid more. There was one project that we analyzed. They literally, the government was paying the contractor $8,000 for every line of code. So we'll get it.

That's what you do. More lines of code. It's not about lines of code. It's about the functions that provide support to the mission. Fulfill the mission. Yes. Right. Provide for the common defense on behalf of the American people.

That's your responsibility. And you have a fiduciary responsibility. responsibility to make sure that the money is spent wisely and that you account for it. Right. So he decided trailblazer is the program. Trailblazer. Three 9-11, 199. He was on Newsweek magazine front page.

He was inviting reporters and whining and dining him at his residence on Fort Meade. I mean, he went political and he was dazzling, dazzling the overseers, the oversight committee, because he carried that and he had those three stars, right? He's sitting there in front of him and he wasn't, he was not a technologist. That's the last thing he was.

He actually used to be a Bulgarian linguist in the military. At one point he actually headed up the very, one of the units that I was a part of in the military, not when I was in, but he goes all the way back, okay? But he had also worked, interesting enough,

under, in George Bush first. He also had been part of basically the military, the intelligence side of the NASS Security Council. So he had inroads. He was operating with the players, as it were. That's one reason he was called when he was in Korea. Hey, how would you like to become the director of NSA? Right.

So he's going to buy the solution. The original program was just shy of $4 billion. The amount of money that was spent originally on one of the programs, this is one of them, but don't have time to go into all of them, but there was a number of these really skunk works that were solving these challenge problems at NSA, that they actually had defined as a challenge problem. This wasn't like, we're just going to go off and just play. No, there were labs that they did that too.

This was to solve the problem. So, a little over $3 million solved it well prior to 9-11. Thin thread? Thin thread. But if you're spending millions, but then you've got this other program that's billions, and you're going to buy it now. make it why would you know what was happening is it people's careers promotions are being based on how large you grew your organization right how much money did you bring in

how much money did you allow out to a contractor you didn't in fact you became further and further away from the day-to-day of the and even the big contractors got all kinds of pass-through fees because they're just giving it to the subs to actually do they didn't meant a lot of cases didn't even do the real work themselves right who's doing real work oh it's not about real work look i had already blown the whistle on an earlier program one of the at the time, the most expensive automated data processing system at NSA called minstrel. Anytime you bring up minstrel at NSA, probably not as much now because most of the principles have gone or are dead. It was super, super embarrassing. At the time, it was incredibly expensive.

You're talking in 1985, it was awarded, right? For almost 200. We're talking almost 200 million dollars. That's a ton of money for an IT system. They bought a bunch of hardware, right? At, at, at, inflated prices and then it never delivered. They ultimately spent about $250 million on it by the time they were finished. The same core people

that were on minstrel got another bite at the apple under Trailblazer, but way bigger. Way bigger. But this was going to catapult NSA because they were under

a huge pressure. You're falling behind becoming less relevant. You're going deaf. Right. Literally. Bringing all this data back can't make sense of it. Or you're getting to know more and more, and this is sort of a twist here,

about what I'm going to say, knowing no more about less and less. So you become your, myopia, right? Incredibly narrow. Because there's all this stuff that's just like on, as they would say, it's on the cutting room floor in some database, obscure database somewhere. How do I know its value? How to this problem was solved. Now, I was part of that because what I was doing was advanced analysis.

On the technical side, I was analyzing software and how is being developed, how it was being designed and developed and deployed. So we're talking soup to nuts, full, you call it life cycle, okay, including maintenance, operates O&M, operates in maintenance, where a lot of the contractors knew they would get even more money just because they could just milk it, milk it. We used to joke about that at booze, we'll milk it. And if we can't get them to milk it, we'll just repacket it and sell it to some other government agency and milk it some more. So I developed, I developed using very advanced script technology at the time. Okay, because guess where I had been when I was on another contract, when I was before minstrel, I was in the AI. This is early, early. This is just part of my background.

I was part of an AI department in this government contract office in the late late 1989 summer fall of 89 really yes expert systems machine machine learning and who was developing this this is GTE doesn't exist anymore GTE GTE as a continent used to be the great one of the largest rural telephone pay phone carriers right rural but they had a government, they had a government operation. So I blew the whistle on that program, long story short, but remember in this, I mean, I jumped, I went jump back, but this gives you, this gives you sort of the grounding of what I was confronted with already as a contractor before I even joined NSA as a senior executive. I went to, we'll go into the details of how I blew the whistle. That's a story all by itself, but we're talking the 91 time frame.

I got kicked off the program, okay? I was a test engineer, customer, uh, basically, a special, I had, because I had the background, but I, at the time I was operating. And then later, I was actually part of the software engineering team on the voice, it was a voice processing system. It was supposed to basically catapult NSA into the digital age when it came to voice processing,

which was a space I worked on for years when I was overseas. Right. So they in their infinite wisdom had issued, they had, had issued this contract to this to g tee i blow the whistle nsa itself was getting antsy about it because years have gone by now it's six years in and where are we going to where where's it where's a delivery where's a delivery where's a delivery so and the ai was the voice processing no and i but this is before that i just happened to be there i'm just saying this gives you i mean because i i i i'm AI is huge now.

That's a whole other conversation. AI, which I'm also playing with that myself, even at home. It's stunning. I mean, but there are risks. There are issues. There are lots of, you know, how do you hold AI accountable? What are it's ethical?

Oh, wait a minute. AI? Well, it's not actually, it could be artificial at best, but it's definitely not intelligent. I did a whole talk on this at my opening remarks in Berlin at a conference recently. back in late November when I was invited to come to this conference. So here we are. So they actually had investigation. The General Counsel comes out from Mountain View.

That was their home office. It was Mountain View, California. He comes out. He does his own internal investigation. Brings in all of us, a lot of us, to interview. And I looked at him and I said, weren't we under, remember, give you know my background, right? My background already.

just the summary of it. He's sitting there in his chair, and I looked at him at one point in his interview, and I said, were we under an obligation to deliver something that actually work? No, we weren't. Contract plus. All we had to do is show best effort. I just stopped.

I mean, my jaw just, like, dropped. He didn't care whether or not the program delivered. All he cared about was the funds kept flowing. It didn't matter what was developed. It didn't matter. It didn't work. It didn't matter that it was a piece of crap, and I'm being polite when I say that. Didn't matter.

This was my now dawning realization after having worked with extraordinary people that you'll never hear about in the field when I flew, right? Especially overseas. Dedicated to the mission not to just lining their pockets. Yeah, I get in the American capitalists, yeah, make a profit. Right. But now you're talking obscene levels. a profit and then wait a minute it didn't matter that we've it's one thing you've spent a lot of money you actually deliver something it's a whole other thing to spend a whole lot of money and not deliver

increasingly they weren't delivering and then they would just because it's what they call sunk cost in the economics you just keep spending dumping more money and money into the hole right right so long story short in february of, so you give you a background that I was very sensitive now to corruption, to fraud, waste, and abuse had already been a whistleblower. I was even a whistleblower in the military, but that's another story when I was on the Compass Call mission, Big Safari. Oh, right? Big Safari is another interesting program. It's sort of the umbrella program. Funds a lot of this, including what I was doing overseas. February 2001, I just moved into a new house where I live, right, in Maryland.

I was doing really, really well. Okay. I had special projects, contracts. I was working with like the University of California, Riverside. I was still doing all my consulting. He had been expanded. I was now a principal in a boutique.com. This is the late, the 98, 99, 2000 early aughts flying all over. I used to fly in the nerd bird flight.

They called it a nerd bird flight. Dulles to San Jose. A lot of spying went on in that plane. What was that about? The nerd bird, because people are flying back and forth. Tech lobbyists. This is when the sort of the growth of the tech bros, venture capital, Silicon Valley, venture capital, got involved in all of that, right?

Okay. Wow. Including up to Sandhill Road to make the case for small boutique.coms who are given a bunch of venture capital money, nondescript office, technology level of playing field. They had a, you know, good looking secretary sitting up front just so anybody came to the front door but the building itself was done to script some office complex meanwhile in the back room you know the couple of three or four or five back rooms depending how much money they got they had a bunch of code code cutters say that loosely developing the next killer app that became the phrase we got to

develop the next killer app because people internet had exploded yes okay and the interview just in a lot especially with the web okay and browsers right and it's like how do we how to exploit this how do we're gonna make and people were just, it was staggering amounts of money being dumped. It's only getting every customer's order right. It's only a point of sale system connected by Spectrum fiber-powered business internet, helping you track hundreds of secure transactions. And it's all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based customer support and local technicians. It's only everything.

Get business internet advantage free forever when you get four mobile lines from Spectrum. Visit Spectrum.com slash free for life to find out how. Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas. And the conferences that I went to, this is when, this is the heyday of you would go into, you know, you would go into where they have all, all the companies. And they all started outdoing each other. Who had the fanciest stand and all the little things they would give away?

And some got really fancy. I mean, it was quite, it was quite something. It was a world. Oh, yeah. Dot com bubble. Dot com bubble. And I could tell, I even almost moved to San Jose. I almost moved there.

But I realized it had become a gambling environment. People are just rolling the dice. Right. The fact is about the on average, only about one out of 14 companies ever actually made it. And then they got, we usually get swallowed up by some bigger company. Okay. I saw all this happen, right, all in front of me. Right.

So I'm sitting there February of 2001. NSA was under huge pressure because they weren't solving the problem. Just say it simply. huge pressure from stakeholders and other studies like you got to do something maybe you need to stir up the gene pool maybe you need to bring in senior people with outside experience both government industry and bring them into nsa put them in senior positions and let them make the necessary changes i was part of about six month period roughly there was a couple people who had been hired in a little sooner where about a dozen of us were hired in from the outside i applied they actually went to career builders remember monster dot com they tried to they tried to do this like high tech ITs would do or startups how do you hire people they realize on the government they couldn't go through the normal government cycle because it would just take too long right way too long and they have security clearance on top of that right so they accelerated compressed it all I went

through even though it wasn't the position I originally applied for I went through a multi-month process but for NSA it was basically two months and then I started going up, I kept getting, I kept making the cut. To the point where I made the cut, two of us made the cut with the person I ultimately reported to when I was hired. And I got hired. They accelerated because I already had a clearance. Okay, so that only took a couple of months. I started in late August.

I had a different color badge. I took the oath, and this is critical. I'm now taking the oath as a senior civilian, defense intelligence, senior executive. of service. I'm taking the oath for the fifth time in my career to do what. Support and defend the Constitution in the United States of America against all enemies foreign to domestic. I'm taking an oath, not loyalty, not to a person, not to an agency, not to secrets or secrecy, not to corruption, not to cover up. I'm taking oath to a piece of paper. To defend the Constitution. The thing that defines who we are as a country and makes us Americans with all the amendments, particularly the first 10.

Okay. Fifth time, I had done, you know, twice in the Air Force because I had re-upped. Yep. Once in the Navy, once at CIA, as an officer there, and then now as a senior executive. In fact, all the jobs I had when I was at NSA over a six and a half year period, my supervisor was always reporting to the top deck, the civilian. head, which was the deputy director, who then reported to the director as a military head. Okay. So, first day I reported to my new duty station as a senior executive was 9-11.

And this is where life rapidly shifted in short order a little bit later that morning. And I pause because even to this day, and I feel it right now emotionally, okay? You're probably going to see it in my face because almost 3,000 people were murdered that day and they never should have disappeared. They never should have lost their lives. It never should have happened. I literally am haunted the rest of my life with that reality, the what ifs of history. I still wake up sometimes in, you know, sweating over the what ifs of history. I pause again because did I know, even though the system was blinking red since 1998, per George Tenet at the CIA, they knew that Al-Qaeda was up to something.

Remember 93 when I was sitting there on the terrorism desk? Yep. It's not like we didn't know. Remember, we already had cold incident, Kaibar towers, a bunch of others. But it wasn't a priority. Bush was the new president. wasn't a priority. Counterterrorism was not even on the list.

It was on a list, but it wasn't where it mattered. It just wasn't. And I went home and I remember calling in very early the next morning. Of course, I was, I sat in front of the TV. I just sat there just absolutely, it was hard to break it away. way just everybody went home i went home because i see i was so new right they had crisis teams remember there had been crises yeah this clearly was going to be something way different and remember there were other planes that they had attempted or one of them we know shanksville right

pentagon right yep would have been way worse they hadn't hit the part of the pentagon that had just recently been modernized and then of course the two towers people don't realize those towers were actually quite susceptible, that type of terrorist attack. Right. And it wasn't like there hadn't been attempts. Bohika had been exposed where they're going to hijack airliners. Okay. Remember.

But 93 sort of had been forgotten, I guess. Remember what they said? Remember the general what he said to me personally, right? Yep. I was right there when he said it. Yep. So I went home because I wasn't part of a crisis team. I call in later, said, yeah, you better come in.

And then the next four months are a blur, a total blur. It would take hours and hours, if not days, to unwind those next four years. But it's critical that I then tell you what I was confronted by. Because what I was confronted by was the very thing, the very thing that I had taken an oath to support and defend. And yet I was confronted in the secret world with, what happens if your own government decides to violate the Constitution? willfully as an act of commission not omission commission I mean I'll even ask this

rhetorically to any and all of your listeners okay mm-hmm right subscribers what if you're confronted you just as I was you know looked the other way so I'm in four months later I didn't even become feeling normal again and I was sitting there in a Marriott hotel in New Orleans celebrating Mardi Gras in mid-January with family. So what happened after 9-11? All a bunch of meetings were taking place. Cheney, who had basically been given

the national security portfolio by Bush, just kind of seeded that to him, plus energy. They went into like deep, deep emergency mode. Right? And there were certain, may have heard of cog continuity of government. Yep.

I used to be a part of that in terms of what happens if, right? special procedure put in a place and there's actually emergency executive orders on the books right so they went into a version of that yeah can you explain that to people who who may not know what it is so what happens if you know it could be an extreme natural disaster it could be war right where the president as the executive does have certain where certain emergency powers are allowed to invoke certain number and there's basically a standing standing state of which is a standing set of executive orders basically that and some are acts right that prescribe what you do

and there's basically there's there's facilities where government can reassemble they can go through training for that right so he's down the situation room which is underneath the white house cheney cheney in particular yeah i mean that bush would be there too but cheney was he basically was leading and of course there have these meetings right after 9-11, what else can we do? What else can we do? Are there any other authorities? There are certain executive orders without getting into the weeds that allow the government to increase their ability, right, to provide protection for the country. Still has to be within the bounds of the Constitution. You're not allowed even under emergency circumstances to basically suspend the

Constitution. You're not. Right. But there are things where you have some flexibility. Even under FISA, I'm going to introduce FISA under the Foreign Intelligence Civilization Act, which I was like, we had annual training to ensure that, because of the scandals in the 70s, to ensure that we did not, without a warrant, right? We couldn't just routinely collect, except under special training circumstances.

Sure. And even then, it was highly controlled. Right. You couldn't collect, analyze, et cetera, because that's sacrosan. It's the Fourth Amendment, okay? Super high bar. But you can. And even under FISA, there was provisions to hot pursuit.

Meaning you could go after somebody, foreign intelligence, U.S. person, U.S. citizen, resident, basically foreign, but resident, right? Legal resident, right? Slash visitor, but legal. It could be visa, could be green card, or, some equivalent or there's different visas. Okay. Or interestingly enough, U.S. Corporation. Not just stateside, not just boundaries, but also overseas. Okay. Which means even when it was an RC 135, we couldn't just start collecting. Now, we did have an emergency support mission.

If someone was in distress, ship in distress or in distress, we then could help assist. But that was specifically to help save lies or rescue, search and rescue. Right, sure. So FISA had criminal sanctions. You violated $10,000 fine five years in prison for every incident in which you violate the Fourth Amendment rights of a U.S. person. Okay. Criminal use of the 18, U.S. 18, right?

That's the criminal code. I pause because this is here I want. was. Shortly after 9-11, I discovered that they were taking the vast power of NSA. Extraordinary power. Power in which they essentially had carte blanche to do just about anything when it came to collection. But now use that vast power, in addition to overseas, use that vast power. Remember, they had failed. Remember, that's why Pearl Harbor, what happened was so critical. Because the whole thing, this whole NASCAR security establishment was set up after 9, after 9, after, the end of World War II was to preclude another surprise attack. Here not only were we, quote, I'll say, surprise, we weren't, failed to keep 3,000 people.

We did not keep them out of harm's way. That's our fundamental, right? We failed the nation. The workforce knew it. Management leadership went into denial mode. They just could not accept, right? Workforce, there's a, I could tell you just horror stories about it was doing to the workforce. Because that's not, this is not supposed to, it's on our watch.

We are the watchers. We're the protectors of the nation electronically. We failed. And they're asking what you can imagine. Congress is now asking questions, what the heck happened? Now, I will be the first to acknowledge. It was a systemic failure. And there's a lot of reasons for that.

But NSA had a critical part of all this in terms of what they should have known, could have known, and didn't provide. and report, even with the mess of their IT and the databases and everything else that I mentioned earlier. I'm finding out that they're now turning the vast years of NSA in partnership with certain key corporations for access and retrieval on the U.S. It was always, U.S. was always blacked out and allies, right? You didn't just routinely spy on your friends, quote unquote.

You didn't. sort of it was bad. It was bad form. This is not, this is September, this is the member, September 11th. So in the two weeks after 9-11, I'm finding out the decisions had been made in the deepest of secrecy, super hush-hush. Right. We're going to essentially suspend the Fourth Amendment.

We will bypass FISA. There was special procedures even at one point I was part of the affidavit process. We go up to the secret court. court, which is housed in the Department of Justice to provide affidavit to say, we need a warrant from the secret judges, which are actually on rotation appointed by the chief justice. And you bypass the secret judges. Bypassed. Bypassed FISA.

They wouldn't even know about it in the early days, early years. Didn't even know about it. Bypassed it. So I mean, you talk about what do I do. I'm now, I'm saying, wait a minute. I took an oath to support and fend the Constitution. Now my government is suspending that part of the Constitution. because they've under the imprimatur of national security, it's necessary.

I began to blow the whistle within September, within channels at NSA. That's where I started. Boss, Office General Counsel stopped there, because then I went to Inspector General later. Okay. Office of General Counsel, I'm on a phone call with him. This is early October. How much thought did you put into this before you started to blow the whistle? Before you started to...

a lot but it was all super compressed because remember i had a full-time job i was leading a team communications how do you keep people informed is they're coming in round the clock people are burning out you can't get people burn out you can only sustain crisis mode for so long right you're about a week or two and then you just start getting fried people are having heart attacks people were collapsing people are sleeping the cars out in the parking lot jesus christ because they really oh my god you can imagine people's guilt the guilt they felt yeah yeah and so they're doubling down but they're burning themselves out. Right. And I was in all the leadership team meetings, right? The ones I weren't in, the only ones I weren't in were the ones that were my supervisor who was the number three person,

the signals intelligence director, she would have special meetings with the very top deck, right? That was a much smaller, even smaller. It was part of sort of the 40, but then there was sort of like the seven or 10. And by the way, sorry, sorry to just to clarify, who specifically was making the orders to that or who was specifically telling you? or instructing you that now we're going to start bypassing the secret court in the FISA. Well, this is where I had my moment of truth. Okay. True moment of truth.

I already was aware that they were shifting equipment, buying equipment from like the HPs of the world, to put them on U.S. networks to quote-to-quote consume and just suck up all kinds of data. Okay. Raw, just raw data. No constraints. No, didn't matter. Okay. Bult collection is what they called it, but it's really mass surveillance.

Right. without getting into deep, but they started starting with, you know, phone calls, starting, you know, emails, later expanded very quickly. How long of a time period are we talking? Only a couple of weeks. Couple of weeks, phone calls, emails. I already started. Remember, I already had the capacity to do all that. Already already had all that. Yes. I became directly aware of it. Then I started poking around. I was making trouble already. Good trouble. Okay. Okay. Good trouble.

early, early on. I was already being tagged. America was a new hire and I'm already being tagged. So what do you do? So I confront the Office of General Counsel. Now, it turns out because this program is so secret, it was in its own compartment. The name of the program was its own compartment, which was inside what they call exceptionally controlled information,

ECI, which is way beyond even SCI. But it had its own compartment. Its own compartment was the name of it. of the program. This program name in itself was classified. You never said it. Oh, no, I can say it now. Oh, you can't? But back then, people who said it was way under their breath. What was it called? Stellar Wind. Oh, okay. We called it colloquially between us, cosmic fart. That's amazing. I'm in, okay, so stellar wind. Interesting. name, but there's a whole office that handles program project name.

Very famous name now. But the name itself, right? The program name itself, which is extraordinarily rare because the program in itself this piece uses a cover. This program was so secret. It turns out. More secret than secure comp, what is SCI? Yes.

Compartmented. Sensitive compartmental information. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now there's handling caveats, which are basically compartments or can be. Right. how do you distribute right there's but just there's there's classified secret top secret standard we but then there's uh then there's the the SCI world and above okay got it and it just gets hyper you know you're super secret the more there's Q level old we call OCCC queue level clearance which

was for like nuclear stuff okay my mom is a secretary at Barksdale where she met my dad because he was you know in strategic air command back in the mid 50s had a cue clearance because she was the secretary for one of the senior officers. Holy shit. Because she's looking at stuff that's quite sensitive, right? Even though she was an administrative assistant, right? Right. Okay.

I got it. Wow. So, just a couple of weeks before they start sucking up phone calls and emails from just every, from everybody. They thought, they didn't know if there was another attack. I understand why they did what they did. I understand. I get that.

And I remember under a short term, you're allowed to go after threats. without a warrant, but you still have to go seek it shortly thereafter. It's all, it's all prescribed in FISA. But they just buy, they didn't say, we don't have time for that. Forget it. Don't have time for it. Just bypass it. Right.

They just wanted the data. Now, why? I'm now, it's like, I'm incredibly alarmed at the developments within just a couple of weeks. Okay. First week in October, turns out it's also, I didn't know it at the time, was officially when the president's surveillance program, went into effect. It's called a PSP under Bush. PSP.

PSP. President's surveillance program. Okay. Umbrella program, authorized by the president, the primary umbrella program at NSA, which became the executive agent, right, for the program was Stellar Win. That was the umbrella program itself, encompassing a number of other sub-programs. Got it. There was one council that I'm aware of it, based on my understanding, standing even to the state. There was one particular lawyer in the Office of General Counsel.

He was actually interviewed once as part of a larger NPR, a frontline report. Actually, it was interviewed for that. Myself, Diane Roark, Bill Benny, Keirich, Weeby, Ed Loomis. On the, I'm on the phone. I said, what are we doing? We're violating the Fourth Amendment. FISA is the person, and there was a whole, there was a whole set of, you know, there was a whole set of, of internal NSA, nothing is done without, you know, you have to have authorities, right? And it goes all the way down to just like individual procedures, standing procedures. NSA had and been refined over the years based on the FISA. FISA been updated five times to keep up with the times since 1978.

Wow. Most of you don't realize that. So they had special procedures for handling FISA because you're, and now you're quote unquote spying on a U.S. person. with sometimes without a warrant initially, but the normal procedure was you have to get the warrant, right, up front. So I said, what are we doing? He says, exigent conditions apply, direct quote,

exigent conditions apply. We just need the data. Don't ask any more questions, Mr. Drake. I say, wait a minute. This is the attorney. The attorney inside the Office of General Counsel who happened to be read into the program. Oh, thank you, Steve, for defining it for my third grade education. Situations that allow law enforcement to conduct warrantless searches and seizures under certain urgent conditions.

Okay. Exigent circumstances apply. We have to go outside the Constitution here. Yes. Right there. Yeah. Now, Hopper suit. That is allowed.

Hot Pursuit was allowed under FISA for a short period of time. Oh, okay. It was. It wasn't, yeah, exigent, but it was, there was a legal standard built into FISA, Fourth Amendment compliant, but you could temporarily, because sort of the immediacy of it, you could actually go after surveil a U.S. person. What if they were intending harm? What if it was that immediate?

Sure. Okay. That's one reason it was there. That was actually in the FISA. All that was bypassed. I mean bypassed meaning it was going to be a permanent warrantless, basically a general warrant, which is actually unconstitutional. Now some would say people even then said, Tom, you understand. You didn't make the decision.

Shut up. Be quiet. Things will take care of themselves. This is the crisis. Sometimes we have to do things differently. I kept talking, so back to the conversation with this attorney. said, well, then why don't we go to Congress? Congress legislates. One of the things that's happening now, you see this in Trump 2.0, where even Congress, you get in this whole thing about, can an executive override or can they re, well, that's another conversation,

legislates, if the law of the land and FISA, which applies in this case, is no longer sufficient, remember, they passed a Patriot Act a couple months later, or actually late October. Right. Basically, which is another component in all this. To begin totally the next month, right? To begin legalizing what was, okay, to being legalizing they did through acts, which is ex post facto, which in itself expost facto law, which in itself, that's unconstitutional. You can't pass a law to, in essence, legalize what you were doing or conducting, even executive action that was unlawful or unconstitutional, particularly if it's unconstitutional.

Right. But remember, FISA ultimately falls under the Fourth Amendment. Okay. It is a statute in law with criminal sanctions if you violate it. It didn't matter anymore. All this didn't matter. I was told it's a quaint document. It's another conversation. You know, dustbins of history. We live in different times now, Mr. Drake. Okay. Different times. We're just going to be different. We're just going to take the thing that makes us American, the very thing it defines the foundational law of the land. go to Congress. I'm talking to the attorney. Go to Congress. Change the law. He says, with what we want to do, they would say no. In that moment, right as he said it, here's standing up on the back of my neck. Because I realize in that moment, moment of truth, it didn't matter what law was. We're not going to even bother. They were so worried that if they went to Congress and Congress saying no, because they wanted to get away with this. They wanted to do this. They wanted to do this.

anyways didn't matter. Like law doesn't matter in this regard, which is to me central to even why we have United States of America. I could argue that the First and Fourth Amendment, because of all the abuses of the colonists, colonial America, because of the severe abuses that rose to such a crescendo and got to such a fever pitch that we ended up having a violent American revolution to cast off King George III and all of his officers that would literally show up at people's homes

with a piece of paper and say, I can take your effects, your papers, and even you with just the piece of paper, a general warrant. That's why we have a Fourth Amendment, which Louis Brandeis later, one of my all-time favorite Supreme Court Justice says, a right to privacy, wrote his phenomenal paper on it.

what defines us as American, right? This is free speech. You get in a member, okay, First Amendment. Those are two things. I mean, that's really the basis for it means to be American. He's saying and said, wow, we're going to spend all that too permanently. Like, it's like permanent now. This is not even temporary.

We're not even going to go back. We're not even going to, we're not even going to even, even what's the phrase, even show, even face value. We're not even going to pretend. We're not even going to pretend. But we're doing all this in secret because you can protect. Did you talk to anyone else, any of your colleagues that felt the same way you did that express your sentence? Yeah. Thin thread people in particular.

Here's why. Again, without getting all the details, thin thread had already solved the big data problem, also protect the privacy of U.S. persons. It could go through vast amounts of data, leave all the ocean where it was, leave the sand on the beach, don't. touch it, just see what changes. It protected U.S. persons. It encrypted. It also provided basically two levels of suspicion. Didn't go any further, right? But they decided not, they would not allow thin thread to be employed. Even after 9-11, I begged them. We have the program. Nope. We're not going to, didn't matter. There were solutions not just thin thread. They were never put into the fight after 9-11. Wouldn't you think because of the failure you'd want to put the

best you had, even if you hadn't used it before. Yeah. Wouldn't you think you would want to put the best you had in the fight? You're trying to, you've got to protect, you got to protect more people from getting placed into harm's way. What is the, what do you think the ultimate motive is for this, this way of going about it? Just, why? Yeah.

Because they were so, this is just, this is just a psychology. We need to make a, we need to make, that's part of it. We need to make, he would say, Hayden, the general, we need to make, we just need to make Americans feel safe again. That's not in the Constitution to make Americans feel safe. And it's not like we're pansies and we have to be afraid. But it was actually you have to do the reverse psychology thing. It was they knew they had failed. They had to project it. Their way was, oh, my God, even he's argued, oh, if we had all this technology prior to 9-11, 9-11 probably wouldn't have happened. They actually had the technology prior to 9-11. He's in denial about what NSA.

Not only do they had the technology, they had the Intel. Yes, had that too. Oh, I hadn't gotten to that story, which is the punchline for me when it comes to thin thread. Right. What do you do? This is a moment of truth for me. I was already incredibly alarmed. I'm already gone to the most senior people at that time.

I've already gone to the Office General Counsel. I've already confronted the Director of the Signal's intelligence. In that moment, is I got off the phone with that attorney. I said, I cannot remain silent. If I remain silent, I am complicit. In the subversion of the Constitution, I took an oath, support, and defend. By basically my entire military career, government career. Right.

I'm not going to let the government violate the Constitution. You could have both. This thing about it's black or white, liberty or security, you actually can have both at the same time and compromise neither. There's that famous Benjamin Franklin quote. Right. Security for free. For those who will, yes. You can still both. They aired and even hate himself admitted.

We drew that line. He kept, he always sports. What is it exactly? He's like, don't, if when you trade your freedoms for securities, you had. A little bit. Those who seek a little will lose both. We'll lose both. Right, right, right.

Right. Yeah, a little liberty for security will lose both. Mm-hmm. There's a larger quote around. Right. Yeah, right. I moment, in that moment, I knew I could remain silent, but I knew by not remaining silent I put myself at extraordinary risk I'm a senior executive I

taken the oath I have a fundamental responsibility but you decided to go about doing it all through channels through the the correct legal way it should be yes so I'm going to accelerate this because it's really because then how was I punished right and this is where life literally was turned upside down for me because even then I was being tagged as a troublemaker. So I decided to blow the whistle. I went to Inspector General. I then went secretly, which was allowed under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, an actual act of Congress.

I could go at the time, they modified it later. I could go directly to the intelligence committees oversight, both Hipsy and Sissy. I'm just without expanding it, but it's the secret. I could go to them to share my concerns in private. Now there's a risk that I could be exposed. It turns out every channel that I went to, all the official channels were exposure channels. So I'm disclosing, but I'm being exposed at the same time. You could argue in part the intelligence communities were already co-opted, owned by the intelligence community in large part.

Right, they're beholden, remember, it's secret, right? You go to a secret chamber even in, in, in, in, you know, in, in the intelligence community, owned by the intelligence community, in large part. even in the capital, right? So you went to these proper secret channels? Then I was subpoenaed, equivalent of being subpoenaed, Prima facie testimony, evidence, material evidence and testimony to two 9-11 congressional investigations. One was Saxby Shambles. They had been a recently formed Homeland Security,

provide all kinds of information to them, which was basically the precursor to the joint 9-11. to the joint 9-11, the 9-11 joint inquiry. Both, both, both of the committees. Okay. Wow. All that was suppressed. No one to this day can find my testimony or the highly classified information I gave them.

Really? And I didn't keep it at home. And I didn't secret it away. Right. I didn't hide it somewhere in a basket or, or in a pumpkin. Right. So I can laugh about it now. Okay.

But that's spring, fall, or summer. I was not part. People think I was interviewed by the 9-11 commission. I know why it wasn't because they didn't want me on the record. But no one can find. In fact, I was told later that what I provided the joint 9-11 inquiry was so classified that couldn't be in the classified report. What does that tell you?

They covered up. They helped cover up for NSA. NSA had a lot of, you know, egg on its face. Now it's- And some of the stuff. that you said you still can't even say today. Not the classified stuff. Right, not the classified stuff, right.

But they were at the heart of the failure. There gets into great detail because I'm about this is what happened. So I was able, I couldn't get, I couldn't put any of these programs. I'm the ones I was telling you about, including Thindredd and a bunch of others, weren't allowed to go operational. Because they were continuing to spend. They were fact, oh no, I was sitting in a meeting and my supervisor, the director of the Signals Intelligence Directorate says, 9-11 is a gift to NSA.

We're going to get all the money we want and then some. And that's certainly what happened. Congress just opened it up. They opened up the coffers and just started pumping even more billions. Who said 9-11 was a gift to NSA? My supervisor. Your supervisor. The signals intelligence director.

It was just a, it became, it's now this haunting quote sitting right next to her where she says 9-11, it's a gift to NSA. I was in a meeting. She was, people were so, we were going around together, because I was led the communications part of my leadership and communications team were going around to the workforce because people they needed to be held they need to be people are just really taking this hard I encouraged her to go around not just a console that to be seen and explain what are we going to do and she's sitting in this meeting this one particular meeting saying I'm just sitting there with my like where she says 9-11 is a gift dentist there we get all money on and then some Christ, man. Because there always are, we never got enough money. If we just had enough money, we could, you know, no, it's not about the money.

And you'd already solve the core challenge problems already. So I then was part of a, this, just, the thing about this is the Department of Defense, Inspector General. My other colleagues, I was anonymous because I was still working, they were all retired, including Diane Roark, who was the staffer on the High Department Select Committee, she had the primary NSA account, Republican primary NSA account. I had made secret connections with her to give her a heads up on what the heck was going on in NSA early on, early on, okay, after 9-11. Okay.

But remember, then I was in with formal, right, with investigators. In fact, under 9-11, they were so hyper about, See, NSA went to put child minders along with me. They did not want, they wanted to know exactly what I was going to share. The investigators to their credit said no. But I was spirited down to basically a secret, it was a nondescript government building where I was then interviewed in this building. I was interviewed like at NSA or for the joint inquiry.

Right. Because that's what was happening, all this pushback. Because it was exposing a lot of embarrassing details about how the entire intelligence community had failed to prevent. And all Congress said, how do we stop this again? How do we prevent another 9-11? That was a big thing. How do we prevent another 9-11? So I was part of this DOD, Inspector General investigation, went on for a while. I was the primary source. Thousands of pages corruption, the fraud, the billions in waste, the thin thread versus trailblazer, thin thread versus Stellar Wind, which was obviously super classified.

The, that had that time, and it had been for this for several years, as it turns out, right? That went on for a while. I was flagged and tagged left and right. All kinds of retaliation or appraisal started occurring. I started getting shifted. That's how I ended up at the National Defense University out of sight, out of mind. We accelerate to November 2005. I make a fateful decision.

And by the way, as a side note right now, this is about the furthest and longest I've ever publicly said how all this transpired. There's a lot more behind what I said in terms of details and fascinating human dynamics, right? But I've never really gone this far, right? Because most interviews don't last very long. Right, right. So here it is November 2005. I decided I had one last chance to make my case to the new director of NSA. Keith Alexander, who actually was much more technologically savvy. He did not take kindly to my blowing the whistle.

I sent him a letter. Caused quite a stir. But the last thing, he, Trailblazer, they had decided Trailblazer, it got, basically got canceled in 2006. Okay. But he was convinced that he could do it better. And there was a following program called Turbulance, all these T programs, Yeah, tea programs.

See, this is the kicker for me. I'm just on a kind of a weird masculine, this masculine level. Yeah. We had the T at NSA. The T in NSA had already been fully demonstrated, okay? But low T is what they focused on. Right. As much as they projected high T, I'm just, I haven't ever said this before.

It was low T for sure. Look, if you take on and you're, you solve the problem. You know, that has its own reward. Not just, it's not about spending money. You want to make sure you create and deploy systems that actually provide for the common defense. Yep. So he didn't like it. Shortly thereafter, middle of December, this above the fold old school print newspaper, New York Times, Eric Lickblow, James Risen,

publishes for the first time a exposure of, of this warrantless wiretapping program. They've been in existence just after 9-11. Now, there was a huge scramble in the entire intelligence community, but particularly NSA. They went apoplectic, Bush, there's public statements. You go on the internet, you'll see public statements from Cheney and Bush and a bunch of others about, oh my gosh, they just blew, oh, it was one of the most secret

programs. Yeah. And it was, it's one of the most secret programs in history. What year did this come out? This was December 2005, still out there. Okay. The article itself. And there was updates to it.

When did Snowden blow the whistle? 2013. Way later. Way. Okay. Okay. Remember, I've been following all the developments internally. The program was rapidly metastasizing.

Even before it got out in public. Remember, I'm going through channels. I'm spending lots of time in front of investigators sharing with them what I know. Right. at great risk. Extraordinary risk. Again, I was already, so the article comes out. Two weeks later, a massive national security leak investigation is launched by the DOJ.

I knew, even when the article came out a couple weeks earlier in December 2005, that I would be immediately targeted. Right. Because so few people do. In fact, this program was so secret that the only authorizing document was a, letter memo that was stored in David Addington safe chief of staff slash attorney for Cheney in his office safe. Wow. Even NSA sent their own attorneys down to get to get the authorization because they were so

worried they wouldn't have cover. You're always looking at what's the cover. You want a lawful order. You get into lawful orders. I know that from from my, you know, the uniform code of military justice. You only have to follow lawful orders. Nuremberg trials principle which was their excuse

we're just following orders no lawful orders it wasn't lawful to break the constitution and there's lawful means to update the constitution but national security just like was it had this huge

carve out like this huge exemption remember exigent conditions but now it's like permanent we're now in 2005 so accelerate four I knew that I became a target, a person of interest and a target as of spring 2006.

Back up just a couple of months. I wrestled with this for quite a while after my last conversation, last email with the director of NSA. There was one last route I could go, but it wasn't authorized. I grew up in an era when I became in in inally familiar until I met him later, but in him be feeling in terms of the history, Daniel Ellsberg. Oh, Pentagon Papers. Pentagon Papers, yeah. Yes.

He went through channels. No one would listen to him in terms of the bright and shining lie of Vietnam. A whole other story. He was part of the study that showed it was. But it was buried. It was classified. He, not all of them, there was stuff in there. It was quite secret that even he didn't release to the press.

He ultimately went to the press. Unauthorized. Ended up facing 115 years because of government malpractice. they ended up the judge threw the case out. I was there wrapped by a young teenager, right? Danny Sheehan. Yes. Big part of that.

So I had one last route. I could touch the third rail, go to the press. And NSA, if you go to the press without authorization, and I had gone, I knew it was like if you have to have something published, I had something published based on my work I did in Jackpot in I, AAA Computer Magazine in 1996 when I was doing all my really highly technical stuff. I had to go through the whole with a classification review officer just to make sure it was good. It took months.

Right. Here, I'm going to go to the press without any authorization. But at that time, it was it only violated administrative policy. It didn't violate the Constitution. It was not a crime. It wasn't criminal to go to the press.

However, I knew if I did, I could end up just like Ellsberg. I already knew that. Some people thought I was stupid and naive and didn't know that. That's not true at all. I knew exactly what the risks were. I knew not only could I lose my job, probably would, but worse, I could be charged on the espionage. I knew that. So how do you go to the press where they're, and this is, I wouldn't get into all this. Part of it is still technically classified. Yeah, wasn't the NSA spying on the press? Yes. They had a special program as part of this

larger. It's called First Fruits. Where they were monitoring certain media outlets and even individual reporters and journalists because they were so scared that something would come out, not just about the secret surveillance program, but the torture program. Right. Torture program came out way before this one did. Okay. Abu Ghraib. Yep.

Yep. Yeah. Shai Hirsch. Right. Milai. That's where he became famous as a journalist. So I had that choice, and I won't go all the details, but I had one chance to make contact a reporter, which worked and ended up anonymously communicating with the reporter for about a

year before I knew that I would ultimately have to go face-to-face. And so actually, through 2007, I was having infrequent apurotic face-to-face meetings with this reporter, at even greater risk. Because as things progressed, I was under extraordinary electronic surveillance. I knew they'd eventually catch up with me. I knew that I might find myself being pulled out of my house or having my house raided or my office down at the National Defense University. And that's exactly what happened. Yeah, let me ask you this. What was it like when you realized, or was there like a specific point when you realized that the NSA had turned all of the surveillance onto you? The early, this is my technical background. I knew that they were.

would start monitoring me electronically with because they could via your their own means i could see i set up i set up logs i could see where they're attempting to break into my system i had a network at home or i've been in long into this okay i was you know back in the early days pre-interested bbss so you so you know i before internet was internet was internet in terms of public eye back in the 80s you had you had stuff in place monitoring yes being And you were prepared for it. Weird things like the Verizon DSL box would get reset. I call them up and they say, oh, you have to pass.

It's like, wait a me. Yeah, they were remotely resetting it. But I had multiple firewalls, both hardware and software. Wow. I don't ever believe, although it's possible, I never saw that they actually got into my computers. Oh, really? No, that's right. I don't have any, in some ways I take some pride in that with all their, I knew what they had,

what their capabilities were. But the problem was there's what's called zero-day exploits. There was always possible, right? So I had to assume I was compromise anyways. But see, people say, well, gee, if you know that, why didn't you get rid of everything? I had nothing to hide to use that, which I don't like that phrase, because that comes from Joseph Goebbels, right? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. So who cares what we know about you?

Wait a minute. That's not the point. I used to do exercises on privacy and people get to, oh, yeah, no, that's me. Why is it you? No, because I don't want them to know it. Why? Because that's my, that's me. Oh, so there is some ownership here in terms of your own privacy.

Ah, right? Privacy is essential to even living. Yes. As much as people want to dump stuff out there, right? It's amazing what people put out there, right? But there is something about who we are, the essence, but that's a different conversation. Yes. So I'm getting here.

Then they start physically surveilling me. One, it was covert, covert. This is where John Kirakku knows that really, really well, better than I do. But it was clear that they, and then it started to be overt. They wanted to make clear that we're on to you. Like they were now sort of- They want you to know that they're following you. Wanted me to know I was getting stopped quite frequently.

They would have random searches. My searches weren't random at all, coming to the gate, right? They had already alert based on the tags, the car description. It's intimidation. Oh, of course. Huge. Yeah. So that went on until my colleagues, NSA, all retired, and then Diane Rourke, were raided all in the same day in July of 2007.

I knew that I was now the primary target and probably had been for a while. I was still at NSA. they probably had suspicion that I was in contact with a reporter although later they actually thought I was really in contact they actually thought that was a cover a cutout there was like a cover and that I was like a convenient hangout as they call it right just a limited hangout a limited hangout with her but I had really been in contact for a longer period of time in the New York Times

even oh really later made up a whole chronology that I but it turned out it wasn't I never had any contact with the New York times. That's crazy. So I knew in July that I was, I was now the target. Yeah. And it was clear based on the last couple of meetings with the reporter, Chavon Gorman, who at the time was worked for the Baltimore Sun. Later went to the Wall Street Journal. Now she's more in private in consulting practice has been for quite a while. I knew that there was, there were agents in the room. Including, by the way, I found out later that they were actually using a significant number

of agents from the mole hunter unit at the I. Those are the ones that are trained to go after spies. Like legitimate spies. Oh, yeah. Foreign spies. But that's how I was being traded worse than a spy. That's clear. I was now the threat.

I was the leaker. I found out later that Cheney had issued a fine and fry the leaker. He just said, fine and fry them. I don't care. Just make sure it's someone, you know, apparently. you know, it has to be senior enough, but fry, burn them, burn them, make an object lesson of them. That's how I interpreted it. Right.

So late November, I'm getting ready to go to work. I had two vehicles at the time. I had my hybrid, which is a Prius, and then I had one, a Toyota RAV for EV. It was all electric. Limited, it was a limited run. They had, they, they, they, they, they, I'm getting ready. in the other bedroom, right? To get in my car, go down to the metro and go down,

and then there was a bus that would shuttle me over from the Coast Guard headquarters over, or take me to one of the metro stations, drop me off by bus, a government bus in front of, and then I walked to my office where I was teaching had been for a couple of years. It was actually during that time, it's when I met,

we'll probably want to take a break here shortly, but that's when I met Elon Musk. Oh. During that, during the time I was at the National Defense University where I was teaching in the industrial ecology of armed forces. Okay. And I was a co-lead on their space industries team. That's how I ended up going to SpaceX. Oh, wow.

With some students. Okay. Yeah, a bunch of different. We went to Cape Kennedy. We went out to Cheyenne Mountain. I mean, went inside the Cheyenne Mountain, right? We went to a number of different sites, right? So I'm getting ready for work.

I look out the window and I see a bunch of agents streaming across the front yard and a bunch of cars pulling up as they're piling out. Oh, no. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord paired with vanilla, each with its own distinct attitude, each with its own universe, bold elixir, sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic elixir, sweet and romantic like a lingering touch. solar elixir, a radiant expression of joy, ultra-concentrated for amplified impact and lasting power. Find your euphoria. Discover the euphoria elixir collection by Calvin Klein. And that's where, I mean, the moment is another one of those moments because, you know, this is years later, right? But that article had come out, right, almost two years ago, right? This is talking. And so, remember, they've had this multi-million dollar National League investigation going on as to who were the sources.

for the New York Times in particular. I got caught up in that for all the reasons I gave earlier because I was so few people knew about the program. Even though they argued later, oh, just some disagreement between two programs in Thread Trailblazer while they, you know, that was like the limited cutout

as to why they came after me when in fact it wasn't that at all. It was the fact that Stellar Wind had been revealed even though I did, had not I had not provided any classified information about the program to anybody outside of channels. Right. Not even the reporter. Right.

So you can imagine knocking on the door. They later, they said, you know, they told me later if you hadn't opened it, they knocked twice. They had a battering ram with them. No kidding that they would have used the battering ram to punch through the door. And then you can file a claim later for damages. Your son answered the door because it's upstairs. I just said, Zachary, go answer the door. he's got the presence of mine

he's and you knew you didn't say oh I knew I knew I didn't tell him I hadn't told anybody man I kept this a secret from my own family no I mean you didn't tell the FBI's at the door no of course not how old was he he was okay

95 he would have been 12 middle school so normally my spouse would take him to the middle school right in the local town and then I would pick him up right after school so yeah a bunch of agents come in they start sweeping the house i had a choice they read them a Miranda rights i didn't have to cooperate obviously i could have said i'm getting

you know you're going to have to deal with my attorney i didn't have attorney at that time right at that moment didn't have an attorney so i said this is one final time to blow the whistle i named president The vice president, senior people, including Hayden, about what had gone down over the last six plus years. No, we're not here for that. We understand you violated certain laws, and so we're here to collect evidence. And we can interview you or we don't have to. I didn't have to be interviewed. Obviously, I had Miranda rights.

I could have to remain silent. I said, no, I'm going to, I'll. It was an interview as interrogation. That was one of three, by the way. They took notes. I knew anything I said would be... Right. Of course.

Used against me? It was. That was an interesting experience all by itself. I remember at one point, there was an anecdote where one of the techs is coming up from a basement. I was really into computers, a lot of retro stuff going way back into the 70s. This was a highly modified. My first computer that I owned was an Atari 800 home computer. That's where I learned everything.

That's where I learned. computing, programming, networking, you know, dial up, right, all that. And it was a highly modified, basically was a closed circuit version modified in a box. I looked down on him and said, you know, the last time they modified that operating system, so 10K was back in the late 70s, you really think you need that? And he stopped at the top of the stairs going into the basement in my office and he looked down, looked up and he said, nah, we don't need it. It went back and put it back on the shelf.

But they took a bunch of Amiga stuff. I was also new Amiga, right? That was kind of follow on to the Atari 8 bit in terms of the technology. Went through all of my library. I mean, they just ransacked that house. Meanwhile, they're ransacking my office and my car, looking for evidence.

I knew in that moment that I was behind several eight balls. And I knew that I would probably get charged. I knew that. I interviewed twice more. The last interview was in April of 2008. I was a place on administrative leave in November 2007. The last interview, the last interview was in April. It was a setup. They brought in the chief prosecutor. It's first time I met the chief prosecutor at the time. It was a different one later. But the chief prosecutor said, we have more than enough evidence, just short. He confronted me. He said, we have in a, in a, in a, in a windowless room and an FBI facility outside of D.C.

Right? It was the windowless room right behind where the mole hunters were. I'm no kidding. He said, we have more than enough evidence to put you away for a long, long time. You better start talking now because he said, how would you like to spend the rest of your life in prison? And you can imagine, I'm sitting there. We might be able to, you know, 25 years, 20 years, no guarantees. That's better than that. than life in prison. In 2008, I had just turned, it was, oh, I hadn't quite turned yet. I was 50, I was 52, right?

I knew I could no longer continue having any, any, said, nope, you're going to have to deal with an attorney from now on. Yeah. They already, they were moving to revoke my clearance because I was a senior executive. It was either you could have a set of your peers or the director of himself. Right. Okay. I said, I'm just going to resign. I resigned. Got an attorney, criminal defense attorney. They tried to get me to plead out multiple times between April of 2008, the first time with the confronted by the chief prosecutor, and April of 2010. Now we're in a new administration.

I wasn't indicted. Obama. Obama. Bush is important to note, even though it began under Bush, I was not indicted under Bush. They had a draft indictment. I have a copy of that. But I was not indicted under Bush. I was indicted under Obama. Wow. The irony.

Huge irony. And the reason Bush even made sort of passing reference to it in his memoir, right, biography, his autobiography, where he says, you know, he just, why go after? Because it's like, for him it wasn't like, I think even he had problems of changing. later. They kind of like kind of went their ways a little bit after the second in the second administration. Yeah. There's a passage in his book that makes sort of indirect reference to because I think you realize he had actually, without even admitting it fully that he had gone over the line, right? Because he had listened to Cheney. Right. So I'm sitting, I'm working at Apple now. I had no job. I couldn't get any work. That's a whole story in itself. I couldn't get work.

I was prosona nangrada. I was, you know, I was hot potato. There's literally prosona non grata. No one would hire me. I formed my own company, a small LLC. No one would touch me. In part when they would find, even though my security clearance didn't show anything was negative. They said, you're under national security investigation. We would do I understand. So here it is April 2010. I'm sitting at lunch. I'm working at Apple in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the stores. where I work for 13 years. Quite a jump, quite a distance

going from senior executive to wage grade specialist in a retail store. I'm sitting there. I get a call for my attorney. My attorney says, where are you? And remember, I had this attorney now for two years. He said, oh, I'm at lunch. He said, did you know you were just indicted?

Now, there had been a, it was Kafkaesque, again, we're going to the detail where he, myself, and the prosecution team with NSA personnel were there in that same window of the room again. It was clear that they were moving to indict me. And it was basically you're on notice, right? We're basically on notice as to why we're doing this. And they actually, in essence, had the outline of the indictment. Wow. So I got indicted.

I was not pulled off the street. I ended up having who I was, it was in arraignment. I pled not guilty to all 10 charges, 500 of the espionage act, one for obstruction to justice for, for making false statements to FBI agents during the interviews, which themselves were actually true. Well, when your lawyer called you,

didn't he also tell you that they approached your wife? Yes. How did that go? Not very, she still works there. And what exactly did he say? Oh, they had one of their security officers inform her that that her husband

had been indicted and was facing 35 years in prison. And then what? Yeah, and I don't want to cost the family. I mean, this is where you... So, and then what? Well, what do what you...

You know, my criminal defense, I had spent umpteen money, remember, there was a whole lot of history. I just bypassed because... John told, well, just... When Kariaku was in here, he was saying that they gave her an ultimatum. they tried they later did a uh interrogated her so what they that was but then they interrogated her and

they tried to get her there's this thing called basically you sort of the pillow privilege where right yes right i never told her anything she had nothing to share because i had never told her anything anyways but they're threatening to take away her clearance remember that's like and she she worked how she had worked at nsa and still does to this day she's worked in nsa her entire life Or related contracts. She's been a contractor, although she was a, for short time, she actually worked. Summer hires, intern than hire. And she had not been aware of this whole investigation.

I never told them. Of course I wasn't going to say anything. I didn't want to expose them. I had to protect them too. That's so crazy. I'm protecting the nation, but then I have to protect the constitution against my own government. And I've got to protect my family at the same time. All these years, you're going through all.

this shit and you didn't say a word to your word no word well I had learned how to be silent right no I know it's just like I could keep secrets yeah yeah is there in there I just can't imagine how fucking hard that must have been oh I'm unwinding it now I'll say to share something off the record with you maybe during the break but I uh because I don't really want there's certain things I don't advertise still this okay let's let's let's let's let's quick right now I got to pee anyway and we'll come back. All right, where were we? We just talked about how you got news from your lawyer.

Yes. That you were indicted. And one of the special agents, I guess, contacted your wife and let them know you were indicted. And I'm now facing a very dark future. Right. Because the indictment included five charges counts. under the Espionage Act. It's the same Sperinage actor was used against.

John? Well, yes. Okay. It was the same. At this time, I was only the second American, and this guy's a whistleblower who had been charged. Ellsberg was the first. Ellsberg was the first for non-spy activities.

And for context, can you explain for people who aren't familiar with him? He was involved in the Pentagon Papers leak. He was a senior. He was a senior as, sir. similar in terms of his position in government. And he exposed, was part of the study, but then exposed the Pentagon papers to the press, caused a huge stir. It was, it was no doubt partially responsible for the demise of the Nix administration. And he had facing 115 years in year, 15 years in prison and went to trial. And the trial went on for a couple of years

until they broke into a psychiatrist office looking for dirt and the judge threw the case out because of malpractice. Oh, so. Misconduct on the part of the prosecution. So did that count as some sort of precedent? Yeah, well. Or did that kind of screw it up? Yeah, the way, well, you know, the Supreme Court

left room open to go after a source with the same charge. Got it. There was more protections. this gets into a whole, you know, press reporting, right? Right. Is the press liable or is it the source? Now, that's changed, especially in Obama, where it was clear they were also saying, hey, press, you know, you could be next.

And then under, well, in terms of Sterling, that he's another one charged on the S-Prient Act, Jeffrey Sterling, another CIA employee. Not familiar with that one. Ended up in prison. He, they tried. tried to get James Reisen, right? This is the same one who was the co-author of the December 2005 article, wrote this article about Operation Merlin, interesting.

And they thought that Jeffrey Sterling was a source, and they ended up trying to get him to testify against his own source. Alleged source? Several times until they dropped it. Remember, all under Obama. Oh, wow. Operation Merlin involving providing flawed nuclear weapon design information to Iran? Yeah, it backfired.

The leak aimed to expose the CIA's missteps and potential dangers into national security. They're sharing actual nuclear technology, okay, even though it was quote unquote flawed. Right. As a way to get inside their program. Like a Trojan horse? type thing. Kind of like that, but it was, this is sort of the arrogance of, I'd say the arrogance is that we'll be able to get away with it.

It backfired. So like if we give you the technology, we'll now understand the technology. Slip it in, that's right. And they'll think it's real and they'll take advantage of it because they have cutouts, right, just cutouts. Yeah, right. It's kind of the operational limited hangout. I mean, limited hangout can be used, but in this case, it was actually an operational

cutout. Wow. Not a limited hangout. It was a cutout. Oh, yeah. Oh, there's all kinds of programs like that. That's so crazy. Think about Switzerland.

Which is supposed to be a super secure system. Look that one up. That's a good one. Which one was that? So this one has to do with certain types of encryption. These are devices that protect like the secrets of Switzerland. U.S. had already managed to compromise that too. It's fascinating.

I mean, the spy, I mean, this, you get into, you know, combo of the technology of James Bond you see in movies and John LaCarr, which is a pen name, and just all the games people play, right? All the games, Spy versus Spy. Actually, a game I used to play on my Atari 8 bit. Oh, wow. Spy versus Spy. There was a whole comic book series on Spy versus Spy, and it's hilarious, sort of like Tom and Jerry or Wiley Coyote and Roadrunner, right? It's just funny. It's funny, but it's real. It's real stuff, and it has consequences. Right?

People don't realize the extent, I mean, the games, the cutouts, the distractions, the misinformation, the propaganda. In my world, when I was in, you know, there's ways you can, what's called meekening, right? Meekening is a way to fake out somebody, you know, this electronically. They think it's a real signal, like a nav signal, but it's actually, it's actually fake. Oh, wow. Yeah, I think obviously you can cause disruptions and I wouldn't even get it. classified means by which I used to engage, right, certain types of signals.

Get inside the decision loop, literally, or the command stream. Oh, wow. Fascinating stuff. But, you know, it's all, you got to keep it all into wraps for obvious reasons. It was similar to what happened. We actually had Osama bin Laden's cell phone. There's a different system that's used the, so you have a couple of different protocols in terms of cell phone technology, the communication protocols.

There's an international, oh, I say international. I mean, there's, you know, I have Verizon, AT&T. Verizon kind of uses, it's a CDMS. Without, again, all the different types of waves with inside the cell phone frequency band. Well, he was using a cell phone who had access a satellite, no satellite comms out over the Indian Ocean. Well, some intrepid,

reporter exposed the fact that we had a cell phone number and of course which i would consider to be a secret that at least was worth keeping for a while yep i would think so that's one of those and of course he stopped using it and he went to a courier system which was way more secure way more how do you get so that's and then the c i's playing games trying to get inside the courier network you know so it's there's a lot there's a lot of weird shit about bin laden there's uh the stories of billy wae who was tracking him taking photos of him. I'm not just familiar with Billy Waugh. He was in Vietnam.

And then he, I am not. Really, really old. He got really, really old. And he kept going to CIA headquarters and say, send me back over there. Send me back over there. He was like 80 years old in the Middle East.

And he was like spying on bin Laden and taking photos of him and stuff. He was like with right across the street from him many times, tried to ask them like, can I take him out? Can I take him out? They would never let him engage in Billy Wall for probably legal. reasons but or in Obama in Osama bin Laden and he was like the crazy story is how he was jogging right by his compound every day like he was like watching him pull up in his Mercedes walking into the mosque every day and Billy Waugh was fully dressed up and like dressed up as like an African

American going for a jog crazy shit like one day he says oba there was one story where he said Osama's dog is one of his guard dogs was like chasing him down the road the kicker was he was right outside of military academy in al-Badabad. Right. Just crazy. John, we'd probably get a lot more insight on that. It's just, and it was under Obama that we ultimately took them out. Right.

We had them, though, at Toribora. That's the kicker. But see, the decision was made, Iraq, we've got to go into Iraq. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. Nothing. Have you ever heard the story about how he had, Stephen, we pulled this up before, but bin Laden had some sort of like pancreas disease or kidney problem and he was flown to a hospital in Saudi Arabia and escorted by CIA agents into a hospital.

That I hadn't heard. Can you find that, Steve? Jeez, that one I hadn't heard. I knew I had heard about the pancreas and being kind of spirited out, right, for treatment, but I hadn't heard about that one. It wouldn't surprise me by the article. Wow. Yeah, that's another dynamic of 9-11 that was kept. There was the pages. that were kept out of the report, the missing pages. Oh, yeah. What was the story with that? Because of the links to the Saudi government.

Protecting. Now, this gets into the details that we wouldn't have time to go into. Right. But this is where, you know, what was missed with the hijackers. But there were a couple of them were living in California. Yeah, California. Being supported. And where was that support coming from?

Well, follow the money. We always, there was this whole thing. We had a whole thing in a SA, follow the money. And there was a Saudi intelligence guy who I think set up a safe house for them in California. Yeah. And what I didn't, I skipped over the part where I was able to take thin thread pointed to the main databases. This is right after, you know, 9-11. I was given a couple of million dollars based on all, all I had, you know, my background, everything I learned in terms of agile development.

So you develop, you iterate, okay? and then you go back. So you code a little Tesla. Code a little, Tesla, deploy. Code a little Tesla to deploy. And you just keep doing that in very, very tight cycles. We ended up, I still, I begged, right? I begged to deploy thin thread to the 18 most.

So there's a whole other storyline here, which again, we don't want to go into. The Defense Authorization Act has an intelligence component. There was $14 million set aside to deploy thin, I am not kidding you. Remember, language is authorizing language that once it's approved, you appropriate the money, you are then, the executive branch then actually has to execute. If it says $18 million or $14 million, $9 million of it was supposed to deploy thin thread to the 18 most critical, which are classified, terrorist collection sites in the world.

some very interesting locations and say what they are. Operational, congressional, congressional language signed into law by the president. This goes back to 2002, late 2002, because they delayed, they delayed because of 9-11. Another 5 million different program, another I'm intimately familiar with called sweep forward, which is an extraordinary out-of-the-box skunk works, an analytic program using non-traditional means of various types. Culture, history, just a much and even esoteric sources. I'll just say it that way.

Which gets into another part of someone I ended up meeting who actually predicted 9-11. He's a precognitive thing. psychic completely non-linear got to know him really really well that's a whole story in itself i had a guy in here once we don't have to go down this rabbit hole but it's just an interesting cat an interesting little side bar this guy was a he's dedicated his life to studying um pre-cognition and dreams people were having that would predict the future yep and there's like hundreds of cases of people having about 9-11 before it happened.

He had, he had a crisis in a life, and when he came out of it, he had this special gift, and he can't even fully explain it. It's one of those things because it's, it kind of, remember what Arthur C. Clark said? Yeah, yeah, imagine. And it's, people, for some people, it's weird stuff. How do I explain it? If I can't explain it, it sounds too kooky, why, why? But he actually had worked with police. This is not unusual.

where you have psychics working in police departments to track or to go to the site of a crime or alleged crime and they would pick up additional information. He got very good at it. He was even on special undercover operations, right, even at great risk himself. He had a dream about 9-11, went to the authorities and they just, they couldn't believe. You know, he's a very unassuming man, right? They just, it's like, what are you talking about? You had a dream, right? we all have dreams don't we you have dreams he dreamed about 9-11 before 9-11 there was also an entire communication system set up by by the terrorists which i don't i won't go into detail here that was

used how do you communicate worldwide with with the with the cell it's a cell and there in the cell itself was broken up how do you communicate in the open without anybody known about it well without going to the details they did right that was fascinating well anyways so i'm just i don't I'm leaving it hanging. Yeah, yeah. Five million was set aside for this special analytic program called Sweet Ford. NSA completely ignored it. Defied the Authorization Act.

Crazy. Why? Circle the wagons. Even though Congress is signed into law, we got a better solution. They didn't have any solution. That was the problem. But the thing was that neither program was ever part of what they called the official production chain on the analytic side. nor on which in the tin thread sort of was both so they just it was convenient to just ignore it so

i got two million what i ended up becoming the executive basically the the program manager the executive program manager i had a actual program manager that that reported to me un officially right this is why i was still in the signals intelligence intelligence so this is like november december january we just rapidly evolve thin thread to make it even better it wouldn't let us go operational. Remember, we didn't. So I remember this came out. That thing came out later. This is before the Intelligent Authorization Act. So I was able to get permission to point thin thread against the databases, the primary databases. So vast, we're talking terabytes on end of terabytes of data. Right. And we set it up. We turned it on for about 24 to 30,

roughly 24 to 36 hours, and guess what? One, we found out about 40% of the database was corrupted, the databases. Then we found all kinds of information pre and post 9-11 regarding the plot in terms of movement and a lot of other evidence that they had not been able to uncover or discover. Thinthread did because of the way it was that worked. Good Lord. So what do you think, if you were sort of, if you're, have a. responsibility to look at yourself to be better going forward so another 9-11 doesn't happen,

what would you think once you know that you would want to improve the way in which you discover information, even from the existing databases, the traditional RDMS, the relational database systems? Why would, nope, guess what they did? Immediately shut the program down. Famous scene. First Indiana Jones movie. Warehouse.

arc on a crate with wheel on a little cart with wheels you see it going down what appears to be this incredibly long aisle turns left never to be seen whoops yeah never to be seen again well they figured out later right

because a certain power is magnetic right right right that's what happened to this to thin thread this sweep forward was summarily shut down It was a research project shut down.

This is I live with all this. I'm an American. You know, I was brought up in Texas in Vermont, two republics before they became states. Vermont, in fact, the constitution part most a lot, a lot of the constitution of what then became the United States America was based on the Vermont constitution.

It became the 14th state. I just, you know, I just, so there I was, okay? I'm facing 35 years. in prison. What do you do? I had spent umpteen amounts of money to my private criminal defense attorney. He no longer wanted to represent me in part because I had no money left. How much they say it would cost? A million dollars, a million dollars between the point I was indicted and just the start of the trial. Jesus. Do you think it's possible that they got to your attorney? No. No. He was being

practical in part. He agreed to stay on. We tried to get other high-power lawyers to take it pro bono without cost because certain law firms are required as part of their community service, quote unquote, to take pro bono cases for cases in which that are significant enough, but the person, in this case, the client doesn't have the money. Guess what? The firm said, yeah, you can represent Mr. Draper, you've got to leave.

the firm and they weren't going to leave the firm right and that's it was the reason why is because a conflict because they had senior government clients right so i'm i'm in front but so he part the public defenders that was i was i was literally formally declared indigent by the court which meant i was now eligible to be to be represented by the federal public defenders deer in the headlights the last time it was the the nicholson you might remember there was a he was a he was a spy, Navy spy. It was the last time that that court and we're going back, you know, we're going back 30 years. This is the, it was the year of the spy. It was 1985. The year, the so-called year of the spy. Pollard, there was a number of number, right, during that period.

The court had no institutional memory, right, of how, I mean, there was all kinds of special procedures to put into place. They had a special skiff built inside the courtroom. Just, I could, I could meet with my attorneys. So I'm behind several eight balls. I'm staring into Pandora's box and guess what's staring back? I mean, the abyss. I also knew I had to influence the court of public opinion. But the problem is you say anything outside of the, in the federal court, guess what?

They can actually use that against you. But I knew I was going to have to influence the court of public opinion. I also knew that I was going to need someone. And so I was just an extraordinary individual, Jesslyn Radak, had written an op-ed in LA Times just after I was indicted. And I ended up, she became my primary, she's not a criminal defense attorney,

but she became my primary whistleblower. So she provided a legal counsel, advocacy, and she was the liaison with the press. So I met her in May. You sign basically, you sign an agreement, right? it's a representation letter. Excuse me, at the time, she's with the government accountability project. So, and then there was other attorneys as well.

And my original criminal defense attorney agreed to at the government rate, which was nowhere near. He was charged me, well, originally 550 an hour and gave me a $50 an hour break. You know how fast your money goes, even though I had a middle class America, but I'm a senior executive. I've done really well in industry, right? I've, you know, pulling down 200,000 a year plus, right? But you know how fast your money goes when you're being charged? Oh, yeah.

Over two years, 500 an hour. So I couldn't afford a million. There was no way. Other attorneys later, they wouldn't want either. I said, no, it'll be 750,000. Nope. So public defenders was the only, basically the only person I could, people I could rely on for criminal defense.

So once you're at the public defenders, how long did that process take between And then the time you had to actually go in front of the judge. The first, there was an initial hearing in the October-November timeframe. That was after they got their clearance. They had to have a clearance before. Remember, the government is saying that I, that I had not just damage now security, I had not just grave damage. It was exceptionally grave damage.

It was the highest level of damage. Right. And you're dealing with top secret sensitive compartment and information, allegedly. So they have to have a clearance. They didn't have a clearance of this kind. They're not even close. They basically what called collateral. It's like basically just a national background investigation check.

And that was it. I mean, it's basically straight secret. So they have to go through that whole process, which in itself was, you know, that was a journey for them. Right. We used to talk about it. So the hearings began in the fall, and all kinds of shenanigans were played, right? Because it's just, it unwinds week after week, month after month, because they kept alleging that I had really damage.

I was worse than a spy because not only did I give up secrets like a spy does, but I give them to a press outlet, a reporter, which means everybody got to see the secrets. Yeah. How many times did they try to come at you with some sort of a plea deal? Once I was indicted, there was no further attempt at a plea agreement. Okay. They already tried and failed prior. I didn't even tell you the other attempts, right?

Prior. So we get to the spring. Things are starting to develop rather quickly. So it's important to know. Remember I said my Justin Radak, my attorney on the outside, although she was partnered with the public defenders. She even filed briefs, right? There was an advocacy brief that she provided on my behalf, right?

And the judge actually accepted it. It was one of his first orders of business, right? It was he actually accepted the brief. Remember, one of the few public hearings because practically every hearing had to be behind closed doors. There was a special security officer. They had to basically empty the room. Only certain people were given access.

there was a special court recording or a quarter right? Sure. Because it was national security. So in essence, it became a star chamber. So most of the hearings were, again, in secret. We get to the spring. I was awarded the Ridenauer Truth Telling Prize for what I did. It's out there.

I gave a speech. Jesselan introduced me. Jane Mayer. had met with her off the record with Jesslyn, ends up dropping, she's an investigative journalist of some renown. She dropped everything she was doing. This was in early 2011. And remember, we're now, you know, if you think about when I was raided,

now we're, you know, this has gone on for a while. She dropped everything she was doing, did a compressed investigation of my entire case in history. sources that were willing to talk with her off the record. Most were off the record. But you could quote, right, but you couldn't attribute it. Sure. So that came out in the New Yorker in May.

The Secret Share, Longform article, many, many thousands of words. Then I was interviewed by Scott Pelly 60 Minutes. That's the one where to all kinds of people ended, up like seeing because it's 60 minutes. Right. That was pretty dramatic. It was, that was a very interesting experience in itself. Washington Post and other publications started weighing in.

It's like, maybe he is a whistleblower. And oh, and Post, kind of remember like Watergate era, like Woodward and Bernstein. So it came to a fever pitch. So the week before, a week and a half, before I was scheduled a trial. We were going through the final days was actually selecting the jury. Right, and there's strikes and everything else.

You have to have the 12 and the alternates. And there was four selected. So they came in the well of the courtroom. They approached, I didn't know it at the time, but I knew something was up. And remember in the press, it's like, what's going to happen? Ellsberg was willing to fly all the way out from Kensington, California to be out on the federal courthouse steps

to say how critical. Wow. Oh, yeah. So in the well of the Senate, the chief prosecutor, William Welsh, interesting history, reported at the time, Lainty Brewer, who had a criminal division who reported to Eric Holder, who I actually confronted earlier in the Apple Store because he loved his Apple products, the whole story in itself. So he's, he approaches right after that. So he approaches my public defenders in the well right below the, the dais where the judge sits and and says we would like to enter into if you're if the defendant

agrees we'd like to enter into plea negotiations that was an extraordinary seven days from that Friday all the way to Thursday the next week remember this trial schedule to start that following Monday basically the 40th anniversary of when the Pentagon papers were released wow kind of interesting juxtaposition in terms of history or oh yeah I remember I got to know Ellsberg really well at this point. They then tried to get me multiple. I lost count. It was like five, six attempts.

First, well, five years in prison. Then it was like two years in prison. And then it was like one year in prison. And then it was still pleading out as a felon, pleading out to a felony. I had told them back in April of 2008 when the original chief prosecutor confronted me that I would never plead bargain with the truth. And I wasn't going to do it then. But you can imagine the pressure. sure I was under. Oh, yeah. And it gets

very, it gets sensitive for me in terms of my criminal defense, but they actually tried to strong army into pleading out under the criminal code to two years. So you can handle two years.

There was no way I was going to plead out to something I hadn't done. And I already admitted during the interviews that I had gone to the press, even though it was only administrative policy violation. Right. So I got to the press way back in 2006 and 2007 long story short this was just I mean it's just right they come to my house the public defenders they're putting pressure on my on my spouse it's like oh you know what

they do to you in prison they tried to pull all that angle and we're this is our bread and butter we we know how to do plea agreements right right last break of the day that Thursday prior to the Monday when the trial began. I would never plead out, but if there was an off ramp that emerged, however faint or slim it was, you better take it. Here's why. Because if you don't, they could basically just go basically do an interlocutory review, have the higher court. This is the Fourth Circuit. Review the decisions, because they were already starting to complain about the judge, have it in review, and they could just suspend it. Did it with Jeffrey Stur and they basically hung them out to drive for almost two years before they came back, waiting for the

decision. It's a way to suspend it. It takes all the heat off the press, right? I was still being pressured to plead out. Okay. I'm talking to Justin Radak. I'm on the phone out in the hall of the courtroom, right outside. They kept changing the language, right? Because the last thing you wanted to do was hook me on classified. I said it cannot, there has, there was no classified they had already demonstrated that in fact it was acknowledged by both parties that no classified information was released. So I plea agreement, no jail time, no fine, there was administrative fee, and 240 hours of community service. Misdemeanor for doing what under the computer fraud and abuse Act. Because it's a federal member I was charging a federal, you have to stick within the

federal crime under the Code 18, U.S. Code 18. So it was a for doing what, exceeding authorized use of a government computer. Jesus Christ. I know. Huge relief. Oh, pro forma sentence. The judge still had, but we're now agreeing to a plea. Right. They drop, the proviso was they drop all the felony counts and no time in jail and nothing involving classified. So that's what happened. And huge victory. I mean, it was just like, wow. I mean, all these years.

No felonies, no jail time. No felony, no jail time. Two and four hours of community service. That was in July 15th of 2011. The judge did note at the time, I was sent to Fort Detrick to the community service director. At Fort Detrick, this is outside of, of, um, Frederick Maryland. It just so happened that he was a civil engineer,

but he also was part of the Veterans History Project, the Library of Congress. He said, how it's like to interview veterans? He saw my military background. Because the community service, like, we're not going to have you paint rocks. That's not who you are. That was like they were paint rocks on base. Yeah. Or bust up rocks, not just paint them?

Or dig holes in fill them in again or the equivalent. I'm not going to do that. Right. I ended up over the next number of months. It took paperwork. I had a probation officer. The first one, the first two that came out realized they thought of some hard core. I had really done something bad.

And they realized, nah. So one of the probation officer is about to retire, shows up in his motorcycle, visits the house. They had that right to visit your house. Visit me one time. And the rest was just over the phone or through the. a male. Oh, that's great. So guess what I did is my community service. Interviewed veterans from War II to the present day, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I got to

interview Daniel Ellsberg, who had never been interviewed for the Veterans History Project. Oh, wow. Fascinating. Joint Chiefs of staff, chiefs, people, veterans from the battle the bulge of machinists from World War for two um Korean war in between campaigns. That's amazing. Yeah. And Afghanistan, Iraq. Stunning. I mean, just and all kinds of interviews as you know press everything. You can you can imagine. This is 2011. Now I didn't know at the time although I had obviously secretly hoped that someone like Snowden would reveal how far all these secret surveillance programs had metastasized. But this is 2011. So I was on the circuit for quite a while.

Overseas, Europe, Canada, Australia. Yeah. And I had to find a way to, after a shattered life. Yeah. How do you end up rebuilding it? And just the psychological, I mean, there's a whole lot that the ordeal created a lot of suffering. I had PTSD at one point. I was actually, it's a weird condition.

I was actually, you know, people sweat. I actually started sweating blood. What? Yes, sweating blood. It was weird. I thought, like, what the heck's going on here? Like blood coming out of your skin? Blood started coming out of pores.

If you look it up, it's a special medical condition. It's really interesting. I actually, it's the stress, let's put it this way. I'll give you the hematodrosis. Yes, that's exactly what I. also known as hematidrosis is a very rare condition where a person sweats blood it occurs when capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture causing blood to be exuded yes holy shit is right i am not kidding you it was it was like dramatic so imagine an anvil this is how i

that's how i that's how a share what was it like up until the plea agreement and then the the pro forma sentencing. It felt like an anvil had been sitting on my, on me, just crunching, pressing for all those years. Never mind, the whistleblowing before 2007. You know what it was like when the anvil released itself? But the anvil, so I was just being compressed, like in a press, like hydraulic press, life turned inside out. The only thing I had left is my integrity. What else was left? They took everything else. away and we're about to take away my life in terms of confining it to a prison. I had PTSD. I didn't know it at the time. This was one of the symptoms, though. How did your wife continue working for the NSA

after all this? That's so crazy to me. Awkward is a very simplistic way of awkward. I was actually separated for a while because it caused some real issues, as you might imagine. Yeah. I used where I, where I located myself, you know, a battle fatigue. My father used to call it battle fatigue. That's what they referred to it. That was the, that was a term for what we didn't even until PTSD, right? Yeah.

Vietnam. I know now exactly what it's like to stare into the abyss at a distance and be completely empty. Not pleasant. Everything you ever stood for, everything you ever took an oath, the Constitution, all of your service to the country,

faithfully serving the country, completely blown apart. They systematically dismantled your life for... I took an oath. Remember, the fidelity to the oath. That meant something to me. Yeah.

Yeah, I think the CIA missed a couple things in your psychological evaluation. Probably did. Now, they did profile me. It's really interesting. You know what they said later? So part of what happened with me is they actually said, and this came out after Snowden. If you go out there, you'll see a chart. Basically, it's a Rhodes Gallery of spies.

Guess who's also on there? We're talking the real spies in U.S. history. Snowden's on there and I'm on there. they all have flags under the countries to which they quote unquote gave up secrets or were operating on behalf of no flag there's this you'll go it's you'll see it if you go out there and to assert it's the insider threat insider threat program insider they gave briefings they put they actually formed a joint committee i'm not just joint d oj d and i a joint sorry a joint right they formed a joint task force insider threat task force and they put together briefings and they kept updating them and for the longest time and i understand even recently from another source i'm still being flagged as representative historically of an insider threat to the government you know what they said about me i self-radicalized oh my gosh so underneath our portraits and by the way the picture they had there was from the

riddenauer. It was a picture, ironically enough, for my truth-telling prize. It was a picture, a press picture. All the spies had flags under their, under their portraits, quote-unquote. Remember, rogue gallery. No flags under Snowden or mine. None. We were men without a country. They just put an image of the U.S. Constitution next to your guys' faces. Well, it just... Well, Snowden's was different because he was a con. contractor, right? Yeah, but I had been one like him. Remember, he worked at Booz Allen one time, so did I. But you're right. I was a senior executive when all this happened. He was a contractor working in Hawaii. Right. And he was faced with a similar thing. He, he saw what it happened to myself and the others and said, he knew, given what he was going to bring out, that he would end up in prison for the rest of his life. Yeah, right there. You right next to Snowden. But do you see a flag? Nope

All the others have flags Couple guys, four guys at the bottom Right But we don't have flags Didn't this guy like shoot up his base? Oh yeah that's how we're part We're in the same league Same league

You're sitting across from a real You know bad guys You think the NSA is still fucking with you They're still tracking you You paying attention to you? No No It'll be interesting

well, what I told you off the record. It'll be interesting to see anytime, technically, if you write, speak, you're supposed to run it through. Oh, yeah, because you were an employer. Correct. There is a, what's called a lifetime obligation. But the non-disclosure agreements I sign,

which they technically think are loyalty owes to secrecy, they're not, actually reflects directly the paragraphs in the executive orders governing classification. You cannot use classification, and it's still on the book, books to use his cover for for embarrassment, cover for wrongdoing, cover for violations of the law. How ironic. Because they kept throwing that in my face.

You signed multiple times military NSA non-disclosure agreements. Okay, so what takes priority? The oath to the Constitution or the non-disclosure agreement? I realized joining this secret system, Deep State, National Security. security system that you are giving up certain rights. But you certainly don't just give them all up. Right. They just have some restrictions.

I had restrictions in the military. It's fucking crazy story, man. Yeah. So it took a while to, you know, I kept working at Apple. Mm-hmm. And you go back to a quieter life. But then when Snowden, of course, that just reignited everything. Right.

I was on every, you can imagine, every major Lou Dobbs, for example, had me, I mean, I lost track after a while. I was getting special permission to leave work at Apple just for these interviews. Wow. Because there were so few people that could talk about what had happened to Snowden. Right. I ended up going to Moscow in 2013. Oh, really? We're the first Americans with myself, Kolding Rally, Justin Radak, and Ray McGovern.

and we went there to present him the San Adam's Award. It was a candlestick holder. We spent many, many hours with them one day. Wow. Yeah, that was a very interesting experience being in Moscow. Also, let's go back. What was the story with Musk again? Tell the story with Elon, Elon and SpaceX.

Thanks. Okay, so now we'll kind of, the things where I didn't elaborate, you want to hear. Yes. Live. Okay. So, I mentioned I was teaching. I was actually the NSA rep to the national.

the defense university in ICAF. There was actually one over at the War College, and then there was one at ICAF. They had just created, it was a new position. So NSA chair at ICAF, Industrial College General Forces. Because of the Industrial College Ground Forces, they have civilians, military, and even overseas, they actually come, it's a compressed master's program

over about a year. Full-time, the companies that send them, they still get paid full-time, and then military or civilians, still get paid full-time, but their full-time job is being in this master's program. Fort McNair in D.C. Okay.

Beautiful. You look across to the cherry blossoms in the spring in the Lincoln Memorial and it's... So, Anacostia. So I... I was teaching strategic leadership information technology. Cohort groups, right? 15 to 20 students.

And each of the professors would lead up an industry team. I ended up on the, well, you had choices, right? And I ended up on this because of my background, in part, national technical means, I end up on the space industry team. Oh, wow. In the spring of 2007 is when that portion of the master's program kicks in. So you visit local sites.

That includes government, Goddard, contractors. We went to JPL. California trip. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. We went to Cape Kennedy. We went out to Colorado. On the trip to California, which at the time was SpaceX headquarters, we all of course, I'm leading in this, I'm the one it's leading the team at this point. we ended up going to SpaceX and meeting Musk and he it was amazing we sat there in the lunchroom

right lunchroom which was basically off sort of the main it was amazing sort of the early dragon mock-up was there yeah they were still working on improving the the original falcon of the merlins the merlin engine but the early falcons there's like a falcon one remember they This is before any successful launch occurred. Okay. So you imagine they were under enormous pressure. Remember, he was also at Tesla. You have to remember, that's the other thing is Tesla, but the roadster hadn't come out yet.

It was in advanced development, but the roadster hadn't come out yet. Right. Oh, yeah. This was very, very early on. 2007. Yeah. I had just graduated high school. Musk.

It was amazing. I mean, he's in his mid-30s. I remember we walked in sort of the office, right? into like a startup office. He says, yeah, that's where he sits, right? But if we don't see much of him there, because you imagine, he's very out and about, right? And very hands-on, very much the on Trump andure,

very much the marketing, very much, right, that's who he is. Right. And he regaled us. I have to say it this way, right? No matter what else you think of Musk, and what's going on right now with him, right? And his association with Trump. And all that's apparently unfolding within the government,

where he's taking teams and visiting certain agencies already. He regaled us for over two hours plus his entire vision of becoming a space-faring species, why he wanted to go to Mars, the technology, right, behind all this, and why he also wanted to commercialize space as well. I mean, it was just an amazing, just an incredibly passionate. And of course, this is like an old. open cafeteria, clanging noises, machines, you know, forklifts going by. I mean, there's all like just the hubbub and activity.

Sometimes I think he very much like, that's where he kind of gets energy from. Yeah. And he just was fired up. And you just, you could, I mean, it was just fascinating. It's like you walked away and says, wow, right? He could sell ice to Eskimos. I mean, that's. Yeah.

So it's, it was, that was. Yeah. I reminded more of that because no one, I mean, this is before Musk went political. Yeah. Yeah. Way before. Well, it's just interesting to see the rise of people like Musk and Peter Thiel who have made so much money off government contracts. Well, this is, this is kind of irony and hypocrisy at the same time. I'll be very blunt. The bulk of his money, even on the Tesla side, his credits, credits. Yep. He, he, he, he's, this reminds me, because remember, the era I grew in was Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. Yes.

So you're, so this is the, but these are the tech bro, tech bro, the emerging, they came out of the 90s. Mm-hmm. They're now in their 50s, most of them. Mm-hmm. And now they're ascendant. And they, they, they want to create a technocratic utopia. I'll just say it.

That's, that's sort of their vision and there's different flavors of it. Right. And there's different, there's, people are trying to sort of. of speak to this philosophically or with political philosophy like what does this mean right to create this technocratic utopia some of them are a very personal level right i'm going to live longer than normal right cry cryostasis type stuff i mean it's just some of it's kind of out there right almost like interstellar type technology right what do you make of palantir wow palatier see for me palat it was before i mean i'm well aware

of Thiel. Another tech bro, billionaire, Pallantier is very much in the surveillance business. Yeah. Oh yeah? They started picking up very aggressively a lot

of some of the early contracts where when things became privatized in terms of when things started coming, all this exposure as I was a part of, right? You have to remember, there was a bunch of things that hit the press during the time I went in the 2006-2007 time frame. Mark Klein. that special room, right?

The AT&T room where we actually had special like NAROS devices, just sucking up everything in the optical networks. I used to consult a Nortel networks before they collapsed. This is, again, my background, right? I just was on a contract in Triangle Park, North Carolina, deeply involved in what do you do? It's just like, we have all this dark, all this dark net, right? Dark optical, what are we?

We're talking like 40 gig like capacity in terms of, bandwidth. What do we do with it? Like, what do we do with it? People, this goes back, right? We didn't know what to do with it. We have to develop programs. So they're buying up a super high inflated prices. All these small companies, they were building apps, right, and services for the new net, the high end net. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Palantir is head over heels and then some and fully, fully embedded in the national security establishment. Money from Incutel and all this stuff. Well, I think you tell it actually goes back. So I'm familiar for my CIA and then my, I'll just say it this way.

I'll go into detail. Even at NSA, I would liaison. There was a time period where I was lia because 9-11 happened. How do we, we had to, oh my gosh, we better like, what else are there any other pockets out there? What are other people doing? How do we help? This is like predicting the future at one level, but I also had to develop technology and processes, even organizationally, to deal with, quote, unquote, the new threat or emerging.

threats. Right. I spent some time at CIA going over and exploring this. We're talking like really getting into it. We're like talking workshopping it. They call it workshopping it. Yeah, fascinating. But in Kutel was an early, you know, this was one of those, you know, early seeds. I mean, basically they were seeding. And they were giving significant amounts of money to promising companies. Right. And some existing companies that were- I think Google. was one of them, right? Incutale is just one, there's a number, but that was a more public for,

I mean, it was their own, in essence, a government, there's all these like special government entities, John Hopkins University. Right, right. Wow. Tom. Then, that's the sweep. Yep.

There's a whole lot of other, all kinds of other background to this. But then the last few years, I've had near-death experiences in my life, and that's a whole story in itself. What is it like to be like not just on the edge, but, you know, in the tunnel and coming back? But a few years ago, when I was at Apple,

something was happening to me in terms of my health, and it turned out I actually had a very rare form of lymphoma. And it was equivalent of stage four. Invaded my kidneys and invaded my bone marrow. And I had to retire early. I realized I had to devote whatever energy I had left. I was 65 years old. I was planning on working a few more years before I wanted to move on,

maybe go back to teaching. But then I'm confronted by an expiration date that appeared to be rapidly approaching the closure distance, like two fighter planes far faster because the closure, right? Yeah. I could see the event horizon of my own death appearing in front of me, and it wasn't far in the far into the future. So they did a diagnosis in October of 2022, and then I had a relapse.

I was back, I was in the hospital for two and a half weeks. I had another relapse in early 2023. I was put on a very advanced therapy, which had severe reactions. What year were you diagnosed? 2022. Oh, wow. October. Holy shit.

Had a relapse. Was put on a first generation targeted therapy after immunotherapy and chemo booster didn't work. Yep. I then had another, they had to take me off all of that. That goes back to September 23. Long story, end up NIH with a new diagnosis. They realized something wasn't right. advanced blood test determine the rare form of lymphoma.

It's the Waldenstrom variant for, I have to really get into this. I took this on just like I did anything else in life. I said, you know what, lymphoma, you showed up, you're about to kill me, but you're an uninvited guess. It's time for you to leave. So I partnered as my own advocate with extraordinary set of doctors, right? Just extraordinary. And I'm now, I say the second path of recovery, but it looks like I'm pretty stable.

I'm on a second generation version of the therapy. It's a pill I take every day. Super expensive, but it's a pill I take every day. What is the pill called? Akela Brutnib. Calquence is the brand name. And what is the mechanism of action? Targets a special protein where the cell, the lymph cells, basically,

malignant. there is a there is a particular marker and it basically what it that's the tart that's how it hones in you know this sensor you're basically it's it's help it's because obviously my immune system was totally overwhelmed right i couldn't do the car tea which they paid blood out they super energize your tea cells put it back into you because my kidneys are compromised yeah what is the car tea car tea is uh what they do with kids right well car tea is uh it's very expensive but it's basically a one and done, but some people have psychotic reactions. They have to be in a special facility. Psychotic?

Psychotic because, oh yeah, because it's really intense. Okay. But I didn't qualify. Okay. They wanted me to go that route if things got, but I didn't qualify. At one point, I even thought I was going to be bone marrow, but 10% of people to do bone marrow die. And, you know, I wasn't going to, that's worst case scenario. So then I was like, okay, what do I do? I can, I can control everything I eat. now it's you know what's the cause of it none of the doctors could say for sure they said it could be

environmental it could be triggered by a whole host of things you know i talked a little bit about i was putting her enormous pressure the anvil yep the hydraulic press for many many years who knows i don't know right i don't know for sure i can suspicion but i don't really want to conjecture some people say a lot of people have a lot a small number of people will have kind of have a lymphone, but it's called smoldering. It never manifests. It just, it just the immune system keeps it up by. That's correct. If you looked at the cat scan and the PET scan, you know, which is they put a small main, it's a radioactive isotope and basically in a sugar solution, and it's IV'd into you, pretty much every lymph node in my body was lit up. Whoa. And it was

getting to the point where I was going to have problems on the urinary side of the house to be a little bit more TMI where it was going to close off, right? So they got, they were really worried because the last thing you want to do was to go in. I mean, remember, this is a blood cancer. It's a liquid cancer. It's not, it's not, it's not in the form of a tumor. It is, yeah, it's a tumor, but it's a, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a like, it's like, wow.

So I'm now on a second generation, which is this calquence. And I'm comp, um, on a, on a, on a renal friendly. There are certain things I have to avoid or minimize. Like what? I don't, can't eat a whole lot of tomatoes or basically I can't eat bananas. Alcohol is out. Yeah. Broccoli's out, spinach is out.

Did you ever try the ketogenic diet? Yeah, well, there's aspect to that that I'm incorporated, but as long as it's renal friendly. Okay. There's certain fruits like I can't eat grapefruit because it would, but that's not unusual for a lot of people with these types of medicines because it would interfere with the absorption. of this pill. And then I have certain dietary supplements to help boost my immune system and just stabilize me. And there's still some things that are balancing out because they thought, this is interesting,

they thought just to indulge a bit because it's obviously extruded personal to me because I'm there. Right. They thought when they first began to run the blood test, they actually came into my, in my bedroom in the hospital, and they said, Are you vegan? All the indicators was I was hardcore vegan. Really?

My, but I'm not. There was a time in my life that I was lacto-ovo, right? For other health reasons, because I was very sickly as a kid. I was not vegan by any, not even close. Right. But the profile of the blood test was that I was vegan. Wow. Hemoglobin was in the five range.

Anybody knows about your, I was incredibly anemic, super anemic. Oh, yeah. I had to have, I had 20, I lost count, 20 units of blood over a period of four months just to keep me going. So life, and I get a little emotional still, okay? Life is incredibly precious. And so I just live each and every day. I get up in the morning, right, in the hotel and pinch myself virtually. I'm still here.

I get to live another day, seize it. live it to the fullest each and every moment. What else do I have? Against a backdrop of my entire life. Good God. Because I realize we have an expiration date at a certain point, but I'd rather it be further into the future. Did you have any kind of autoimmune issues prior to this?

Not that I'm aware of. No. Now I'm wondering. Did you ever get COVID? No. Interesting enough, no indication that I got COVID, none. Apparently, some people don't believe that. It's like, well, everybody, I never got it.

No. Not that if I got it, I was asymptomatic. But I got antibody test and I didn't have the antibodies. Well, it also turns out that certain blood types, interestingly enough, are more immune. I'm O positive. Okay. And apparently even when the O positive, I happen to have apparently, this is what I've been told, that my type of my blood type makes it harder for the COVID to.

Interesting. Yes. With a spike protein. Now, having said that, because I worked at Apple, initially it wasn't required, but then they forced, if you wanted to continue working, and remember, I'm in massive debt, right? I'm still, I'm still crawling out of it. I have nowhere near the income I had discretion or otherwise. Basically, I have no retirement, right?

I have a 401K from Apple. I have a small annuity from I was able to convert. There is an annuity, but nowhere near. Right. Okay. And obviously my salary, my hourly rate, Apple is nowhere near what I used to make or what I made in industry, okay, just not, even though Apple pays pretty well and has a lot of benefits.

So I ended up having the original COVID shots. We're talking FISA Moderna. Multiple? Multiple, multiple, with several boosters. Oh, wow. Over the intervening two years. But the last one that I took. And this was what year?

This is, you're talking. So remember, they took, you know, they did the, again, Trump to, I say Trump to his credit. You know, they put everything they could, you know, into the accelerating warp speed. Warp speed, literally, right, into coming up with the, RNA, right, the MRNA. Right. And it would have been, I'm just thinking, it was, it's interesting, I was in actually Australia in late 2019, just ahead of the wave, as it turns out.

So that would have been, it would have been into 21. So starting in early, as I'm just trying to remember now, early 2021, when they started to release. Holy shit. Yeah, it was 2021. one there was that first and then like you have to get another one for six months later and then I'm there I was still there all the way through until the fall of 2022 yeah although for part of that time I worked from home okay so I didn't I'm aware of people that have had you know

reactions I'm aware of people that have gotten long like have had other especially with a multiple yeah people had strokes um people are myocarditis yeah Yep, I'm aware of that. And I've, yep. And I, and I've, you know, I don't, I won't go down the path because I've wondered, but I don't, part of it is the lymphoma itself has its own sort of unique, sort of the, sort of the later stages. Sure. One of them. And then it turns out, when you have the targeted therapy that I did, it has side effects.

They're known. There's a small percentage of people, usually over 60, that develop rapid heart palpitations. as a result of the therapy. This therapy. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So imagine your resting heart rate, whatever that is,

average person somewhere between 55 and 75. Uh-huh. Imagine that triple to four times. How would you feel? Not good. Imagine that, not just for seconds or minutes. Imagine that for an entire day plus. That's what I experienced.

Good God. I had to have a whole bunch of heart tests. to make sure that i was i because you can't sustain that you just can't it's like i used to run that was i used to run i used to run competitively so it turns out i had an extremely robust heart but they did say there's a point at which it's just going to start breaking down so and that subsided oh yeah i do have so i do take special medicine very small dose um but uh The this second generation, there is actually a third generation that's emerged in the last couple of years.

But they don't want, there's no need to change it as long as this one is now. Because I'm in a recovery mode, it's more of a suppressant. It's not like getting, it doesn't have, because after, even after the first one within months, it got rid of all the malignant cells, literally cleared them. Wow. With only four left. But those four started coming back after I had the severe reaction from the first generation. So, you know, it's just like our bodies are just these incredible.

biological, you know, machines. I mean, it's stunning. It's stunning. But, yeah, I, life's precious. I just going to say that. You are a testament to that, man. You have been through hell and back. Well, and I'm still just going to keep showing up.

People, well, there's people said, why do you do this, Tom? Why do you even bother with interviews? Why do you do any of this? I said, well, part of this is for history, but part of it is, for the next generation. Right. You know, I've, you know, my youngest son is 29. I mean, and there's, I worked with a lot of young people at Apple.

I mean, what world are we leaving behind? What world do we want to keep? Yeah. Remember what happened when, frankly, came out at the Constitution Convention? Yeah. There was a woman reporter reportedly asked him, what did you guys do in there? Create a republic, you know, if you can keep it. Yeah, well, that's the great experiment, right?

That is the great experiment of America. I don't want to see that disappear. And we don't need to compromise ourselves. We just don't. Yeah, man. I mean, everything that you just alluded to and described in your story and what you were trying to expose, unfortunately, seems like we've seen continue to rot over the decades. And we are in, it doesn't seem like the country's in a great spot in regards to the control. of this private military industrial complex that seems to run the world and be connected to fucking everything

that's a very street language way to express what we're facing yeah and part of it's like well then how do we see part of it i think we're in retrograde that's the fear i have is we're in retrograde i thought we're supposed to i mean this is the great promise of america what do you leave behind right for the next generation. Think of your young, you're young, right? Your young one. I mean, I think even though my son's 29, my youngest son's 29, his future, his history. What are we inheriting?

Right. I don't want them to inherit the wind. Right. So I've, I've said this, but I'll say it again. Where do I center myself? I go back, say origin story, constitution before that, the declaration of independence, that extraordinary document. The one that has, there's certain enable the rights. Well, I've dedicated the rest of my life to defending what life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

It's a beautiful story, man. Yeah. You're a good man, Tom. That was the first five-hour podcast I've ever done. Wow. You got the record. A first. A first.

Broke them old. And now we got Patreon questions. Okay. Go for it. So thanks again for coming, man. Tell people that are listening and watching on YouTube or Spotify, where they can, A, get a hold of you, find out more about you, anything like that. I'm on social media, both blue sky and on X. Okay.

That's probably in terms of public. Okay. Okay. Perfect. I'll link that stuff below. So people, if they can follow up there or just follow me there. Okay. And, you know, I've had people to DM me and then follow up from there. Awesome. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks again, man. This has been incredible. I appreciate the space that you provided in which I could show up and share a far greater insight into what happened to me and some fascinating history.

that apparently people find rather interesting just given everything I just happen to be there this is sort of the Waldo where's Waldo but this was Waldo you know member it always comes back to well who is I representing if that was probably who you were I was spying for a man I was actually serving the nation mm-hmm and providing for the common defense for who the American people period now have I gotten a whole lot of people around the world as a result of being an asterisk American and being semi-public yes yeah but you paid the price for doing the right thing yeah but i would do it all over again there be some tweaks here and there but i do it all elseberg has said that right he just wish more people would have you know said something but a lot of people knew what he knew they just remain silent but then guess what in silence right if you remain silent i mean at one point they were telling when all this sort of broke and remember this goes back. It's like, even Clapper, right, used to be very senior in the, in DoD. He actually said,

I just wish people in the NASCAR, basically, I'm paraphrasing him. Just be like my, is, you get, this is how we said, be like my grandchildren, seen and not heard, direct quote, seen and not heard. Price says more about who he is as a grandfather. Right. And who he is as a person. I got, I met him. That's a whole, I met Clapper. When he headed up the advisory board at NSA, I used to have me, we used to have meetings with the advisory board. Seen and not heard, just what, shut up,

do your job, follow orders. Right. Follow orders. Wow. That's how you climbed the ladder. My father ended up on the ground for six months doing what? Fighting the Germans. Have we forgotten history?

Well, you know, history doesn't necessarily repeat, but it certainly rhymes. That's a fact. Yeah. But life is life. And I have a garden and I've got my hobbies and I hold family and friends, right, close because that's what matters. Remember in the end, what matter? What does matter, right?

What really matters. Right. Very, very powerful story, man. I'm really happy we were able to do this. So Patreon questions. Patreon. All right. That's it for YouTube.

Good night, everybody.