Julian Dorey Podcast - 😳 [VIDEO] - CIA Nuclear Spy: I am a Sociopath | Jim "Mad Dog" Lawler • #129

Episode Date: December 10, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Jim “Mad Dog” Lawler is a spy, nuclear weapons expert, and author. Mad Dog was a 25-year Covert CIA Nuclear Spy who carried out missions around the world and became one of the agency’s most decorated senior officers. He is allegedly no longer in the CIA and has become a prolific author in his “retirement.” Mad Dog Lawler’s books are fictional spy thrillers “based on” his personal experiences at the CIA. BUY “In The Twinkling of an Eye” by Jim Lawler: https://amzn.to/3FCYqzd BUY “Living Lies” by Jim Lawler: https://amzn.to/3FIDHdr 0:00 - How Jim joined the CIA; What is a Case Officer? 12:28 - Jim: I am a sociopath 25:54 - The assets CIA recruits & how they do it 31:13 - Jim’s first asset recruit story; How Jim pitched people to become traitors 45:46 - America’s role in the world; A funny asset story 52:54 - How polygraphs work; How CIA paid foreign spies 57:40 - Did you ever lose a spy? 1:03:55 - How contact with CIA at Langley HQ works 1:06:04 - How Jim Became a Nuclear Spy; The Khan Network 1:15:17 - Appealing to different cultures 1:25:35 - How CIA approached changed post Sepp 011; Libya & WMD 1:29:17 - CIA paramilitary ops in Afghanistan 1:33:49 - Jim revisits Iraq & Nuclear Weapons 1:38:15 - Former CIA Director George Tenet’s career 1:48:11 - Politics in the CIA & Gov Agencies 1:54:19 - CIA involvement in Iran; Iranians developing nuke? 2:00:17 - The Iran Nuclear Deal; Jim’s books’ ties to Iran 2:06:03 - The current uprising in Iran 2:12:49 - Russia Ukraine War; Putin’s status 2:21:38 - Does US have say over Ukraine & Zelensky? 2:27:12 - The 4th Turning; Fears of Nuclear Weapon Use 2:36:37 - The protests in China against the CCP 2:42:53 - Chinese spies; The US’ main foreign foe, according to Jim 2:50:09 - How Jim got the name “Mad Dog” Intro Credits: “Body of Lies” (2008) AP CNN CSPAN “The Devil’s Double” (2011) “The Dictator” (2012) Journeyman.TV VICE News ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's interesting to talk with you because your expertise was in the field undercover with nuclear arms deals and things like that. And it's like the whole reason we went to Iraq was because they had WMD. And that turned out to not be true. That's exactly right. People ask me about that sometimes. And it is true that Saddam Hussein had been working on nuclear weapons before then. He had used chemical weapons against the Kurds. The Kurds are an ethnic group there in Iraq. Killed thousands of them. In fact, one of his cousins was known as Chemical Ali. And Chemical Ali used... Jim Lawler, thank you for being here, sir.

Oh, my pleasure there, Julian. How was the drive up here this morning? Actually, it was great. You had a long one. Yeah, it was about two and a half hours, maybe a little less than that, but pretty smooth, nice weather. Sun was shining, my heart was singing. And you live right outside D.C., right? That's correct. In McLean, Virginia, about four miles from CIA headquarters.

Dangerously close. Dangerously close. I've been known to bicycle it, and I've actually run it before. And you run every morning now, right? 364 days a year, I take Christmas off. Oh, just one day? One day. Unless I'm injured. Wow. Which seems to be happening more and more as I get a little older, but I still get back into it.

How long do you run? I try and do 20 miles a week running and another 10 walking, 10 to 15. Wow. Yeah. That's really good for you. I used to do 45 miles a week, but I've gotten a little older and scaled back to a good 20 miles a week. That's interesting because I would imagine, could you pull that mic in just a little older and scaled back to a good 20 miles a week that's interesting because i would imagine if you could you pull that mic in just a little bit thank you i could

imagine we're going to talk a lot about your many years as a spy today at the cia and everything but i can imagine like guys like you constantly being in new places and high stress situations one of the best ways to to reset yourself every single day is to start the day off with some sort of workout no absolutely it keeps you not only physically fit but psychologically fit i could review what i was going to go be doing during the day i could review a particular operation i was trying to do think of a way if i was going to pitch somebody i would think about you know the exact way i would do the recruitment pitch so it was a great way plus just seeing some beautiful scenery in europe right so it was wonderful oh so europe was one of the places yeah europe was definitely

one of the places yeah because you were in we'll get to it for sure but it's always crazy when i have someone in here who i found on the internet a while ago and I thought to myself like, oh, wow, it would be so cool to have that guy here. I had seen you on a podcast called The Team House. Those guys do a really nice job. I think you were on that maybe nine, ten months ago, something like that? Yeah, about that. Yeah, Jack and his partner had me on. Yeah. jack and his partner had me on yeah yeah so one of the things i do is when i'm working there's

certain types of work i can do where i could be listening to podcasts and then you know when i'm like editing i can't because i'm editing like words and everything but i'll throw it up on that screen right behind you right there whatever show i'm listening to and or watching and i'll just kind of you know if something crazy is going on, I'll glance over and that's about as much as I watch. But late one night, I threw on your podcast maybe six, seven months ago and I found myself over and over again turning to the screen just like mouth open, like entranced with how you were explaining some things. And I got to tell you you i can see how you were so good at recruiting people because making people feel things and the ability to tie a story together for for a larger purpose has got to be

right up there with the most important things to get through well you know there's a reason why jesus taught in parables a good story that's pretty good there's gonna be some people in the comments saying the cia spy just compared himself to jesus well no not really but if i could emulate some of his methods yeah well i think all of us could kind of use some of that he was a pretty cool guy but let's just start off with where like how this all happened So you became a spy around 1980, right? That's correct, 1980. I'd actually considered it four years earlier. I was in my last year of law school at the University of Texas in Austin. And I was interviewing with law firms. And like anybody

who's in their last year of graduate school or college, you're concerned about one thing, it's that J word, job, get a job. And guess what? The CIA was coming to the University of Texas Law School campus, and they were interviewing for attorneys for the Office of General Counsel. Because like any large bureaucracy, the CIA needs attorneys to either keep them out of trouble or get them out of trouble. And we have a propensity sometimes for getting into trouble. And so they've got to try and keep us on the right side of the law. And I had an interview with a former CIA case officer named Bill Wood. And Mr. Wood and I went into this interview. We were only chatting for maybe three or four minutes when he looked at me and he said, Jim, have you ever thought about the clandestine service? Now this was 1976. And

other than a few movies, a few books, there wasn't really a lot of information about the CIA out there. And so my question to Mr. Wood was, well, I don't even know what the clandestine service is. And he said, you know, I think you'd be really good at this. I can't really tell you much about it, but I think you'd be good. So I did think about it. I took an application. I thought about it for all of about a nanosecond because unfortunately at the time, my wife's mother was very ill and there was absolutely no chance that we would be moving away from Texas. Her mother lived in Houston. No way we're going to move from Houston to Washington, D.C. and then thousands of miles overseas. It just wasn't going to happen. So I returned the application the very next day, a lot of regret. And instead of that, I went into a family business. And I don't know

how many of your listeners have ever been in family businesses, but if they're no longer in a family business, it probably focuses on the F word family. And ironically, I was making a lot of money, more money I'd ever make again in my life, but it was meaningless. It was a steel fabricating business and we really did well. And I was making money, but increasingly unhappy because it simply wasn't fulfilling. And I started coming home at night complaining to my dear wife, Ellen, and I'd say, ah, this is just miserable. And she put up, what's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.

Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. With that for about three, three and a half years. And then finally one night at dinner, she looked at me and she said, Jim, either do something about it or stop your belly aching. Now that's really good advice because if all you're doing is complaining and you don't do anything about it, you really don't have a right to complain. So I had kept Mr. Wood's

card and after dinner, I went into my office and I wrote him a letter. I jokingly say this was before Al Gore invented the internet. So I had to write a snail mail letter and ask him if he would consider my application that he and I had spoken three and a half mail letter and ask him if he would consider my application. He and I had spoken three and a half years earlier, and I wasn't ready then, but now I was ready to consider a career in the CIA. And I mailed that letter, and it was probably three days later, a young woman phoned me up. And all she said, never used the letter CIA. She said, Mr. Lawler, Mr. Wood received your letter today, and he wondered if you might be available for an interview next Thursday at 3 p.m.

at the Holiday Inn out on the Gulf Freeway, if you could be in the lobby. I said, yes, ma'am, I'll be there. So I went to that interview, and after a little bit, he said, Jim, I'd like to fly you to Washington in a couple of weeks for about three days of testing and interviews. And so a couple of weeks later, I flew to Washington, went through the tests and the interviews, and really only about three or four months later, I was invited to come back for another round of interviews, more tests. This time it included the polygraph test, which some people call a lie detector test, but it's really a stress detector test. How old are you when this is happening? This was when I was 28.

Yes, 28. Actually, no, during the testing phase, I was 27. I turned 28 shortly thereafter. But so I took all the various tests, even the shrink exam. You know, you talk to the shrinks to make sure you don't have a few screws loose in your head. Somehow I got through that. And about maybe three or four weeks later, a very short time, I got a phone call. And they said they would like to offer me a job as a GS-11.

That's a government grade GS-11, case officer and gave me a starting date. We negotiated the starting date because I just couldn't leave my dad's business abruptly. Sure. I mean, I love my father and my two brothers. I didn't want to do them any harm. And so they said, sure, why don't you start in February of 1980, which was actually two or three months away. But it gave us a lot of time to take care of affairs and things. Neither my wife nor I had ever really, other than college, lived away from home. We lived in Houston, Texas residence all our lives, except for the time when she was in college and when I was in law school. So on February, early February of 1980, we packed up the car.

She was pregnant with our first child. And we moved to Washington, D.C., actually to Virginia, northern Virginia. And a bizarre thing, though, Julian, was I had no idea what a CIA case officer does. I had no idea. I didn't care. You took the words out of my mouth because like for people listening right now, we hear these terms thrown around and stuff. But can you explain, I guess, when you learned when you went in there and walked don't like to put some kind of glossy coat on this, what they expected me to do was to manipulate, to exploit, to subvert, to suborn people, to convince them to commit treason, to commit espionage. Over the next 25 years, that's exactly what I did.

And I found out that not only was I really good at doing this, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. Yeah, so they, in essence, the translation is they said, you're going to be a spy. And we'll talk about like what the different types of spies are and get to that. But it's just curious to me because it sounded like when they were first interviewing you and it was his name was Mr. Wood. Yeah, Mr. Wood. In 1976 when you were getting out of law school, it sounded like they were trying to get you to be like the lawyer for the CIA. And now you come back and they're like, oh, you're going to be a spy. Well, that's what Office of General Counsel wanted.

They were wanting Mr. Wood to recruit attorneys. But I found out that Mr. Wood was a former operations officer. So he saw something in me that told him that I'd be better being a case officer than being an attorney for the CIA. What did he say? I guess maybe it's my ability to engage people. We can teach operations officers a lot, but we cannot teach them interpersonal skills. Frequently, you either have that or you don't. And I imagine he saw in me my ability to communicate with people. And he was impressed by that. And he basically exceeded his brief. He was supposed to be hiring attorneys. No, instead, he was hiring a spy just like him. And the old saying about it takes one to know one. So I imagine he saw something thinking, I think Jim would be good at this. And quite honestly, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but I was quite good at it. Yeah, obviously. For sure.

He did it for a long time. Another thing I'd heard you say, I think this was on the Team House podcast actually, that really got me thinking and changed a lot of my view on how I even approach listening to ex-CIA spies and when they're talking on different platforms or notably talking with Andy Bustamante here or Danny talking with him on Concrete. concrete. One of the things was you said that a key trait that the CIA looks for in prospective new spies is they want people, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, but they want people who are dangerously on the line or straddling the line of being a sociopath. That's exactly right. In fact, a good friend of mine, he was an operational psychologist at the CIA, and he would review the criteria for hiring more folks like me. And he wondered, you know, how much sociopathy are we dialing in to these particular case officers? And in fact, a good friend of mine, another operational psychologist, once told me, he said, Lawler, you're nothing but a sociopath, but one within lanes. Those lanes are U.S. laws. And where a CIA officer gets into trouble is when he exceeds those and

strays over that lane outside the U.S. law. Because the CIA, they can waive administrative rules, but they can't waive a law. So I'm bound by U.S. law. But when I describe what I did, it is rather sociopathic. I'm manipulating people. I'm exploiting people. These are terms that were pejorative, negative terms that your parents probably told you, Julian, you don't manipulate people. You don't exploit people. You don't do that. And yet I found out doing it against foreigners, it was a hell of

a lot of fun. It's that sociopathic part where you enjoy breaking other people's laws because that's what we do. We break foreign countries' laws. We are convincing people to become traitors. Now think about that. You know, again, your parents said you don't betray your family, you don't betray your family you don't betray your country and i was telling people convincing people that's exactly what i want them to do and when they would agree to do that it was such a rush of adrenaline those mental endorphins were pumping i loved it and that's when you're getting spoken with before this though, before you've ever gone to another country and done any of this, they have to spot some – what's the word? Like some sort of relatability to doing things like that that you already have.

And it's not like these people interviewing you knew you before. I'm sure they did a lot of legwork. They're probably guys watching you. But like I think when the average person hears that, the spy angle of it makes total sense because just like you said, you got to manipulate people, convince them to do a crazy, crazy thing here. So you better be great at mind jujitsu if you will. That's a good way to put it. Mind jujitsu. I'll have to remember that term. Right.

I said that on something else the other day and people were like, oh, what's that one? And I'm like, I'm pretty sure people have said that before. But either way, you're tinkering with how people are going to come to where you are and get them to where you want them to be. Just like any person wants to win in a debate or something like that so i think where people get lost is when they're like does that mean that you're a sociopath or like you're like that or does that mean that you possess you in some ways knew how to possess the skills to do that but were in control of when you turn that on or turned it off i think it's much the latter i mean clearly I'm not a true sociopath. Yeah, you don't strike me like that. No, I'm not. I'm not. But literally, if I'm going

after someone, you know, to recruit them, I will do virtually anything that's legal to get them to become a spy for me, because that's what I'm recruiting recruiting the spies. I'm recruiting people to become traders to their country or traders to their organization. And so I would seek out ways to do that. But you're right. I'm not a true sociopath, not the classic kind. I mean, I'm not Hannibal Lecter. So good. Yeah, it's just you and me. Well, yeah, I know. I might be eating you for lunch. But no, I'm not that. It's simply that people that get a thrill out of doing what I do, it's considered to be sociopathic. So there is a certain amount of sociopathy involved. Hey, guys.

If you haven't already, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends. Sharing the show is the best possible way we can grow it and continue to get great guests like this. So thank you to all of you who have been doing that. And thank you to all of you who are going to do it now. But did you feel like you were doing it for a higher reason? Absolutely. Because you're serving the country, right? For U.S. national security.

And then sometimes people have asked me, well, have you ever used it when it wasn't a U.S. national security thing? And I can recall about three times where I've used my special skills just for something selfish. Twice, getting out of traffic tickets. Okay, so I'm under stress. The guy's coming over here. I just ran a red light or I ran a stop sign or something, or I've maybe going 15 miles an hour over the speed limit. And I use my special skills to basically convince him we're not going to write a ticket, are we, sir? How do you how does that happen? And how fast does that happen? It was instant. I mean, I knew I had to do it. I didn't even think I just snapped into it. And he said, well, have a good day, sir.

Just keep it slow. What'd you say to him? Something like, well, officer, I know I did that. But I said, you know, let's not waste our time. We're not going to write a ticket today, are we? And he looked at me and he smiled and he said, no, I don't think we are. He said, just slow it down. And I've done that a couple of times. I've done a few other things where, you know, just pure self-aggrandizement, really. I mean, it was not national security. I just didn't want a ticket. And so I can convince somebody to do something. Another time, a good example, one time I was at an airport and I was standing in the line hoping that I could get an upgrade to business class. I mean, how many of us have gotten an economy class ticket and we're hoping we'll get upgraded to business class? So I happen to be in

line in front of the ticket counter and the young ticket agent, she's speaking to a gentleman in front of me who is being a total jerk. He is berating her. He's demanding business class because his company does so much business with this particular airline and he is just berating her. He's demanding business class because his company does so much business with this particular airline. And he was just berating this poor woman. I mean, she was almost in tears. And she turned him down. He stalks away. And I walked up and I said, you know, there's no excuse for the way that man just treated you. I said, I know you have a hard trying job. And yet that guy, he was just being a total jackass. And she looked at me and she said, Mr. Lawler, would you like an upgrade to business? I said, I'd love one. Thank you. That simple. That simple. It was that simple. It's a bit of

what I call the metaphysical mental hook when I actually go into a recruitment pitch, where I envision that there's almost like an invisible link between your brain and mine, and I pull you into my rhythms, I pull you into under my voice. One of my assets said, Jim, when you're talking to me, it's like my brain is in a warm waterbed. I want you to feel so relaxed that I'm your therapist, and you'll tell me everything that you would never tell your closest lover, your family, anybody else. But you're so relaxed, you know you can trust me. And you can. You can trust me. Because the foundation of any

relationship is always trust, and especially espionage. I have to be able to trust you, and you have to be able to trust me. And so I relax you and I get you to where you just want to hear my voice and you want to do what I want you to do. But it's more than simply my voice. A student of mine, one of our deep cover, non-official cover officers who I'd mentored for a number of years, he told me one time, he said, Jim, you may not know it, but you're using the same voice, the same cadence, the same rhetoric that Dr. Milton Erickson, who developed hypnotherapy back in the 20th century, did. And I had never even heard of Dr. Milton Erickson, although I've done some studies since then. But he says you're using the same type of techniques that he did. And so part of it

possibly is hypnotic. I believe in strong eye contact. In fact, when you start looking away, I lose that. I lose that link. So I want you to be totally focused on me, and I'm totally focused on you. And explosions could be going off, and you and I wouldn't even hear it. We're in another world. We're in a separate dimension. And that's what i want you to do i want you to relax and i want you to hear me out on what i want you to do you have a brilliant use of micro expressions too when you talk and and i could see that on camera when i was when i was watching you on on the other podcast as well with danny on concrete too it's like there's something about it like i just saw it right there looking at you dead in the eyes i'm looking into your eyes and it's

like twin laser beams going into yours and i'm pulling you in yeah to where you feel almost hypnotically seduced because your eyes it's really kind of sick the stuff i have to watch when i do this because i edit people for so long and I'll see people say the same thing a thousand times. So I do think about this stuff. And the way that you move your eyes with your words is like a song. It's like on a note. I can see it. I think that's what this young knock officer meant.

And he said, you're not even aware of this, but subconsciously that's what you're doing because it's just natural for me. I've had this since a child and maybe that's what mr wood saw i i bet he did you know if when you're talking with people i mean you know better than anyone this is what you did to recruit people you you get a deep understanding of them the longer time you spend with them and the more you're actually like focused on their presence like how do they make you feel you know how do they how what mood did you walk into the room with and what mood are you walking out with well i think one of my talents is i'm extremely empathic you know i before we did this broadcast you and i were chatting a lot about your career and that's not so i'm going to recruit you it's because'm naturally curious. How did you get into this? How did you become a podcaster? And I, you know, if I hadn't been a case officer,

maybe I'd have been a good psychologist or psychiatrist, but I'm naturally curious. I want to know about people. And you know what? They love that. Who doesn't like to talk about themselves? People sometimes ask me how much did I have to defend my cover you know rarely because people don't really care about me they care about themselves what do you mean defend your cover saying that i was truly a state department officer or i was truly this or that they didn't they didn't really care most of the time they really care about themselves and that you know is where their interests and my interests converge because i'm really interested in them too where most of the time they really care about themselves. And that, you know, is where their interests and my interests converge because I'm really interested in them too. Sincerely

interested. I want to know all about you. I want you to tell me what your stresses are because that's how I recruit people. People under stress. I never recruited a happy person in my life. You don't recruit happy people. You recruit people who are stressed. And everybody at some point is stressed enough to do things they would never do otherwise. But you get, see, this is another interesting psychological line here. You get yourself interested in these people. I'm talking about your targets now. Because they're a target, because they possess information that you want on your side. So what I think people at home could think about right now about how hard this would be is like relate it to when you have to – when you got to fake it, right? Like if you go to – if you go to a ticketing counter and you're – and the lady up there is pissed off or something, you have to suddenly try to put on a nice face to get your way.

Yeah, except I really wasn't – I didn't have to try. I really did feel nice face to get your way except i really wasn't i didn't have to try i really did feel for that woman i'm very empathic i was inside her head i felt the way she had just been berated how horrible that was she's standing on her feet there eight hours a day probably has a child who knows what and i genuinely felt for her and then she felt my sincerity so for the average person though who's not like that, when they go up there and they're like, all right, I have to put on a nice face or like be able to say something simple to get what I want here. You are doing that for years sometimes with one person. That's correct. It's not one ticket encounter.

For years in every interaction. And you have to be able to turn your brain towards like genuinely caring even if you're dealing with someone that you're going to make a spy who you don't really respect or you don't think is is a good person you're sitting here telling me and i believe you that like you would genuinely take an interest in them and and it's hard to get yourself to that point where it's not like oh this fucking guy you You know what I mean? Truly. I mean, of all the people we recruit, a certain percentage of them are really scumbags. They really are.

I mean, we're not recruiting nuns and boy scouts. That's not what we're interested in. We frequently are interested in people who are scum. And so my talent was that I could get inside their head and find out, well, why are they the way they are? And everybody needs something. They need somebody to listen to them. There is a reason why people become, say, a weapons proliferator or become a terrorist or become something else. And my talent was that I could recognize what the stress was, maybe not instantly, but over time, and I was willing to

listen to them. You do not recruit people when you're talking. You recruit people when you're listening. And everybody, almost everybody that I know, would love a listener who is so attentive and is paying attention only to them. I mean, it's an ego thing that suddenly, Julian, I'm interested in you and just about you. I'm not thinking about anything else. That is very seductive. It's a very relaxing thing. It is like therapy. Completely.

And I don't sit in a seat like you did. I'm a podcaster, right? I'm not worried about national security issues here and out there dealing with the craziest shit the world has to offer but in doing the job you are you're doing something similar to what i'm forced to do which is you you have to study people and i think you use this term but what makes them tick and what's what's important to them? And I just kind of wonder all the time about how different people who are true empaths judge people. So obviously you're in high-stakes situations and the job is to do with them or all the bad they've done, but did you find yourself actually empathizing with why they ended up the way they did and seeing them differently? Absolutely. I was able to find at least one or two redeeming qualities in everybody. I mean, that sounds terrible because some of these people really are. Yeah.

Dreadful people. But there's a reason why they're that way. And frequently they do have something that's redeeming about them. I mean, you know, they jokingly talk about Adolf Hitler. He loved animals. So you can at least say, well, he didn't. Yeah. no. They had laws in Nazi Germany, and it was okay to kill Jews, but not animals.

I'm not making this up. But he was a big, loved dogs, loved animals. So, I mean, I'm not trying to recruit Adolf Hitler, but what I'm saying is, yeah, I could find something redeeming in just about anything. And I would focus on that because that would make me, at least temporarily, overlook the fact that this person is not somebody I would ever be friends with. This person may be a merchant of death. And yet I need to get that person to work with me, to be on my side. And how do I do that? I have to focus on maybe something way down deep in him or her

that's good did you ever find yourself losing yourself in the role when it came to things like that and what i mean by that is forgetting not forgetting no i understand what you're saying forgetting who i truly am and who say that yeah yeah, I – Or what you know about them. That, but also what you know about – so you may know that someone's like a dick. Yeah. Like not a good person. Right. But then you find yourself convincing yourself that they are. Well, I convince myself to a certain point.

I don't forget the fact that this person may be supplying nuclear weapons technology to a rogue country, as one of my operations did. And, you know, horrible. And they knew that too. They knew that that was a bad business. This was a shady business. It was a dirty business. And somehow they had slid down the slope, you know it was so easy they got financially dependent upon it and they were doing stuff that any rational person would say i got to get out of this business so i was able to convince people to get out of some businesses join my team how much of it though like what are the different types of things that you do with that because what you're what you seem to describe in a lot of your stories and what you've been describing on a very broad basis so far today is that you would be building relationships most often when you had something on them? Or was it more they have access to something and there's something that they – I'm going to find something in their life that they're upset about that I can help them with?

Or both? Usually – well, sometimes it was both, but frequently it was the latter. I knew they had access to information that we absolutely had to have. My first tour, I received a classified cable from CIA headquarters asking everybody worldwide, all the CIA stations and bases, to look for people from a certain country that we were going to be negotiating a very, very high stakes treaty affecting national security about 18 months later. This is in the early 80s. I'm going to be vague about it. It's in the 80s. Let's say this. And we were negotiating a very high stakes national security treaty. And we had no spies on the other side to tell us who those

negotiating positions were. So consequently, you know, CIA headquarters is saying, okay, case officers, wherever you are, if you meet a person from this country that has this type of access, we need to recruit that person as a spy. Now, this is one of my early tours, and actually, to be quite blunt, it was on my first tour. I'd never done this, at least not for the CIA before. Maybe I'd done it myself. I'd done some things in training, but I'd never really popped a question, what we call a recruitment pitch,

and tried to convince somebody to become a spy for the United States. Well, luck would have it, and I tend to be a lucky person. I had met someone who met this criteria exactly, exactly the type of person that officially someone who was a spy working in the nuclear weapons portion of it? No, not at this part. That came later in my career. Got it. This was – we were just what we would call a generalist. You know, like a doctor can be a general practitioner.

Well, case officers can be a general practitioner, a generalist. And so you're out after targets that are identified by headquarters as having access to information we need. So, you know, it could be a financial target. It could be a terrorist target. It could be another intelligence officer. In this case, it was someone who had access to privileged classified information that this government had going into their negotiations with us. And as I said a few moments ago, I met somebody who had exactly that access. And I had met this person in a social setting. Actually, it was a ski class.

And we hit it off. I wasn't looking for a spy. I was just a nice guy. But as soon as I get this cable from CIA headquarters, I thought, well, I think that guy might fit the bill. Sure enough, you know, it turns out it looked like he does. So I increased what we call the developmental activities. That means we try to increase the relationship, the friendship, everything else to the point where you can identify some stress in that person's life that you can key a recruitment pitch to. How do you increase, like how fast? I think that's something a lot of people wonder,

like you had just met this guy at a ski class, so you didn't know him like that well. How fast from like day one to day whatever do you get to the point where like you're getting beers with this guy three times a week it all depends but in his case we started having lunches started having his family over for uh or he and his wife over for dinner you know going out maybe maybe every couple of weeks we'd see each other and started to increase that friendship we were both strangers in this country so we're both foreigners and um you know developed a friendship he was a bit older than me does your wife know you were in the state department is that how she knew you or did she think you know she knew exactly who i was okay working for you yeah you usually you tell your

spouse yeah there's got to be a reason why you're well there's got to be a reason why you're going out late at night or early in the mornings and things like that. No, she knew and was very supportive. That's great. No, she was. She was great. Tremendously supportive my entire career. But I increased my developmental activities with this gentleman. oh, I don't know, a few weeks possibly, I decided, I got it into my head naively, that I could

simply pitch this person to share that classified information with me for a certain amount of money as a consulting fee, a stipend, a consulting fee for a monthly amount of money. Would you reveal who you are or would you be acting under some sort of cover? Let me put it this way. A regular State Department officer would never be authorized to do this. So you'd have to be dumb as a doornail to not realize that you're talking to a CIA officer at that point. You know, I want classified information. I'm willing to give you so much a

month, things like that. Well, I wrote this proposal out, sent it to headquarters and headquarters was so desperate. Obviously they're going to let a first tour case officer pop this guy and based on simply on the strength of my friendship, my personality with this guy, which is crazy. You're not going to recruit people like that unless there's a handle, something that I can, you and I might be friends, but it's not going to work for you to become a trader simply because we're friends typically. But they approved it. So I took him to a restaurant. I pitched him and he looked at me and he said, Jim, you're in our friends, but you know, that would be morally wrong. Now I've pitched, I know between 50 and 60 people in my career, he's the only person who ever posed a moral objection. The only person out of 50 and 60 people in my career, he's the only person who ever posed a moral objection.

The only person out of 50 or 60 people that posed a moral objection. Most of the time, if they're going to turn you down, they'll say, well, Jim, they hang people in my country for doing things like that, which I had one senior African officer tell me. and he's right, by the way, they would have hanged him. But then he, in his case, he asked me if I would give him a rain check. I said, a rain check? He said, well, yeah, you know, my son, he's three years old. You've met him. I don't need you now.

But 15 years from now, he'll be college age. Oh, shit. He was thinking long term. I was thinking long term. And you know what, Julie? I wrote that down in a file, and 15 years later, this guy was posted to Washington. And they came to me and said, your buddy said this 15 years ago. Do you think he meant it? I said, absolutely. That rain check was cashed in 15 years later.

But I digress. That's why people turn you down. It's usually fear of getting caught. You say that's the only guy who presented a moral question. That was your very first one. Right. You never had someone say some line of the phrase or along the lines of like, this would be betraying my country? Well, that's the same thing as being morally wrong. Right. So no one ever said that? No.

No. Nobody. country well that's the same thing as being morally wrong right so no one ever said that no no nobody if they turned me down and by the way my success rate was pretty high so i had very few turndowns what was your batting average probably overall in my career 90 90 percent wow so are those 10 alive yeah somebody once asked me if i would pitch somebody that i thought was going to say no and i said why would i pitch somebody if I thought they were going to say no? So you have little hints ahead of time. You know, it's frequently not just out of the cold. You know how this is going to go. You know how this conversation is going to go frequently, not all the first time? Because this guy was 15 years later. How many of them, the very first time you sat down and said, listen, I'm not Jimmy. I'm CIA Jimmy. You want to work with me? Well, like I said, overall, probably about 90%. Really? Yeah.

On the first time? Well, not the first time I met them. That's called a cold pitch, by the way. Yeah, that's different. That's different. Yeah. But of all the recruitment pitches I did, yeah, it was probably somewhere around 90%. That's because you can judge when somebody's going to say no or yes.

But anyways, back to my friend. I pitched him. He said, no, I'm not going to do it. All right. So I was disappointed. My first big pitch, I get turned down. Are you afraid that he's going to go blow your cover? Well, you just hit what I was going to say, Julian.

Yeah. We have a saying at CIA that it's okay to get turned down, but not turned in. Meaning, yes, what if he went to his ambassador? And something I didn't tell you was he was number two in the embassy. He was the deputy chief of mission. What if he complains to the ambassador the very next day that young mr lawler just propositioned him to commit treason for an amount of cash and that ambassador was a hot tempered son of a gun and he would storm into our ambassador's office at least in my mind's eye i was imagining this and he would present what we call a demarche, I mean, a strongly worded complaint, a protest that an employee of the American embassy had just propositioned his deputy to commit treason. Outrageous. Now, I'm thinking all this, and I'm also thinking now, I know CIA

headquarters approved this, but they're about 6,000 miles from here. And they're all going to be doing, you know, CYA, cover your ass, and wondering how Lawler messed this up. And I could see my career going down the toilet. So I brooded on that for two or three days. And finally, I thought, you know, I'm going to call this guy up and see if we're still friends. See if I can smooth out any anger, anything like that. So I was greatly relieved when I called him and he didn't hang up on me. And I said, well, you know, I just had a great time with you last Saturday. Wondered if maybe we could do it again this coming Friday night. It was a lot of fun. I was ecstatic when he said, you know, Jim, I was thinking the same thing. That'd be fun.

That would be nice. Were you worried that he was sitting next to the head of that country's intelligence? Well, one could worry. I mean, this is why I tell people, you know, we're risk takers. CIA does not stand for central insurance agency. We do things that are risky. Now, we try and measure risk and not careless things, but yeah, there was a chance that he was now being controlled. Okay. All right. So we go

to the second dinner a week after the first dinner where I had propositioned him. The waiter put the menus down, walked away. First thing my friend says, Jim, that offer you made me last Friday, is that still good? I said, well, yeah, we're friends. That's why I made you that offer. And he said, well, I know it's morally wrong, but a couple of days after we had that dinner, my wife announced that she wants a divorce. And I can't afford to pay her the alimony to which she's entitled, plus pay for my boys' private schools when we go back to my country next year. Because in my country, you have to go to a private school if you want

a decent education. I can't do that unless I accept your offer. This is a week later. A week later. A week. All this happened in a week. That's all. All this happens in a week. So my point is that somebody can be not recruitable one day, and within a few days, stress happens. And of course, divorce is one of the most stressful times you'll ever go through. Both psychologically and financially, you are at sea. You are in rough seas. And if somebody like me is in your orbit and you have something I need, you and I are going to be best friends. And so anyways, he said, well, I know it's morally wrong. I started to say something, but then I remembered another lesson that I learned in law school.

When the judge rules in your favor, shut up and get out of court. So I put a sock in my mouth and just accepted the fact that now he's going to become a spy. And I can tell you, Julian, he became a fabulous spy. The very first time after that, he brought me a stack of maybe six inches of classified information out of his embassy. And as he handed it to me, I learned another lesson that typically people who become spies commit espionage. They don't do it for a single reason. They do it for a lot of reasons, a mosaic of reasons. And as he handed me that classified information, he said, Jim, I've never told you this, but I hate my ambassador. He says, that little son of a bitch, he goes around claiming credit for everything I do and everything everybody a smart guy he is. He says, I hate the guy. And as I hand you this classified information, it's as if I'm kicking that son of a bitch in the face. And I took the information and I said, you know, you and I are buddies. Why don't you bring me some

more of that and let's kick that son of a bitch again. He smiled and he said, we're going to do that. Comes back to personal pride and everything. He said, we're going to do that. Comes back to personal pride and everything. He said, we're going to do that. But I learned too that revenge is probably the purest motive for espionage. The Jesuits call this covert compensation, where you do something secretly to get back at somebody. And I've asked myself, why would somebody, why would he accept my offer like that? Okay, he needed the money for his divorce. He needed the money for his kids. But we're talking about betraying his country, except that in his case, he feels like his country betrayed him first because his boss was basically undercutting him, stealing credit for everything he was doing. And so that's how people psychologically can compensate, cope with this by thinking, well, you know, I'm not the one that's the traitor. They are. They betrayed me.

Was this one of the guys that you characterized more as like a pretty good dude? He was a wonderful guy. Right. So he wasn't like one of the guys that you characterize more as like a pretty good dude? He was a wonderful guy. Right. So he wasn't like one of your scumbags? No, he was – no, absolutely not. So I always wonder how you psychologically level this or if it's just – it's a part of the game. But you think about people in America, Americans, who have turned on America and given intelligence to other countries. Right.

Guys like you, guys like me, all of us would, I mean, there's some exceptions if there's like, if they're not giving intelligence to a country and they're trying to whistleblow on something. But I'm talking about when they actually become a spy for another country. Right. We all think that's like the lowest shit you can do. And we're like, fuck that person, throw him in jail right right yet your job is to do the same thing to all these people and you're on their side when when you're doing it and then you're like oh i like this person my job is to turn them to bring them over to us and to yeah to convince them to become traitors, to become moles. Is it because you think that what we do here is the beacon of light in the world and it's automatically better than any of these other places?

I believe that with my whole heart and soul. I believe that. And I have recruited a few people ideologically. That means they believed in our system rather than, say, a communist system or a corrupt government at home. I mean, we're fortunate that we live in America. There's a, you know, I think that that attracts a lot of people. They have a yearning to be Americans. A good friend of mine, he was going after a hard target, a very hostile Arab country target.

And anyhow, they had somehow arranged to where he visited this guy at his home. And he saw on a grand piano a picture of this man's nephew in a Marine Corps uniform. This guy was so proud of the fact that his nephew was a United States Marine. Oh, wow. So guess what? It didn't take long for my friend to recruit this guy from an otherwise hostile country hostile yeah but he was so proud that his nephew was a u.s marine that's something because people do you've been around the world more than i have

obviously but people do still see america as, like, oh, the best system of democracy and everything. And yeah, when, look, when you are dealing with a communist country or a fascist country, I don't see how you wouldn't see that if you were exposed to it, you know? Well, it depends on how you're raised, but a lot of people do see it. And they, you know, let me put it this way. How much immigration do you see going to Russia or to China? You don't. You see them coming this way. Okay, I think that speaks well for us.

And sure, we have our flaws. We have problems. There is still a certain degree of racism in this country. I won't deny that. I was very privileged. I was born to a middle-class family. I won't deny that. Yeah, I was very privileged. I was born to a middle class family I had a good education. I had good parents things like that But yeah, I think I still and part of my motivation for working for the cia was I honestly believe in our country and what we do yeah, and and I mean I would expect that and and

I do too i often think though i try to think about you know what is good and what is bad you know can we is that is that all a matter of perspective or are there things that are definable and to that i always say well yeah like you look at something like hitler that's I'm willing to say that was all bad. That was absolutely terrible all the way around. So like you can't take these arguments. Like there's a line, I guess you could say, where it's like, yeah, that's good. That's bad. taking actions or doing things where we again like you like that guy that you're turning

who if it if the tables were turned around you'd throw him in in prison forever that's it that's a tough one for me to think about well i felt at times kind of like a a gunslinger you know like and i was very deadly with my gun and you know know, basically my mental gun. And so if I'm given a target, I figure out ways to get the target because it's for us. It's for United States national security. And everybody that I recruited contributed substantially. In this case, this gentleman, it was funny. We had to put him through a polygraph test. I think I described that earlier. Some people call it a lie detector test, but no, it's a stress test. And we were going to put this gentleman through a counterintelligence polygraph test. By that, I mean we want to make sure that we and he have an exclusive relationship that nobody else knows about. So the polygrapher or the operator, he would rehearse with the case officer, me, the questions that we would be maybe most concerned about. Because... And what are those questions? Okay. So the questions are very simple and they're very black and white. Have you told anyone about your secret relationship with CIA? That'd be the first question. The second question might be, are you working with any intelligence organization other than CIA? That's number two. That gets to your point about was he sitting next to an intelligence

officer from his country. And number three, did anybody direct you to volunteer to Mr. Lawler at that dinner the other night? These are very black and white questions. And hopefully the polygrapher would be able to detect if somebody was lying or deception indicated. Well, they're not supposed to. The polygrapher is not supposed to stray from those questions. He's not supposed to go off on a fishing expedition, you know, like, do you pull legs off of ants or, you know, what if you, do you have bad thoughts? Things, things that are

very ambiguous. They're supposed to stick to those questions. Well, I had the misfortune of having a polygrapher who had never been overseas before and probably never met a foreigner. And the first question out of my polygraph operator's mouth to my new friend, the spy, is, golly, I'm just wondering why you're doing this. Very open-ended question. And I thought, oh, gosh, okay. It's going to make him think about it now yeah right the guy who had the moral epiphany he's going to stalk out of this room but he didn't he started laughing and he told the polygrapher he said because i think this is going to be a lot of fun

he had this kind of walter middy uh image of being a spy and he was getting into it and he was enjoying it what happened like when you turn somebody and they become a cia spy outside of this polygraph test which by the way like where where do you do something like that it was usually in a third country in a hotel room and you obviously figure out if they had a tail coming there and all that you plan all that okay so you have some guy in a hotel room with this machine you and the other so it's usually like three people right the the polygrapher would usually you you get a two-bedroom suite or something like that and everybody meets in one room and then the polygrapher and the subject the target the spy stay in one room and you you know you make

sure there's not a language problem you've already talked to the polygrapher about the questions to be addressed and so you go to another room and they have privacy and then they tell you if everything's fine or not okay so besides this process which is to make sure everything's on the up and up as best you can, like I become a CIA spy for you today. Is there like an orientation? Like, do I go somewhere? Are there like guest speakers saying like, welcome to the CIA? No. What happens? Well, I'm not making you a CIA employee with a retirement plan. Okay. That was the next question. We try and instill on you, you know, a certain amount of, you know, how this has got to be a secret relationship. It's just us. You can't brag about this. There may be some financial angle

to it. How do you want to receive your compensation? Do you want it in cash, which most people do, or do they prefer it deposited in a secret bank account somewhere, which we can do, or do you want to be paid in some kind of precious commodity i have a friend this is kind of funny he talked about recruiting a certain nationality and the guy wanted his pay in diamonds yeah sierra leone yeah diamonds and so they're standing there my friend hands him a bag of diamonds and he drops it and diamonds are all over the ground you know it's like that Paul Simon song, you know, but diamonds in the soles of her shoes. It was really funny. So they're

scrambling on the ground, picking up all their diamonds. One of my cases, first cases as a junior, you know, first tour case officer, I was directed to go to a store in this one town that had a very famous stamp collecting shop. They sold to stamp collectors. And I was told to get a specific issue of a very rare stamp worth probably about $10,000. And this is how this asset that we had, this spy that we had recruited, how he wanted to be paid in these very expensive stamps. Actually, it was a pretty smart thing to do because if they had ever looked and found these stamps, 99% of the people in the intelligence service wouldn't know that that's worth $10,000. And so it was a small thing that he could easily be passed by his case officer. And then he was

able to put it in his stamp album, and that's what turned him on. And you could say he's a longtime collector. Right, whatever. A lot of deniability. And most people would never even look at the stamp collection and realize that this stamp collection is maybe worth millions of dollars. How do people hide cash, though? Like when I hear about people getting paid paid and sometimes if they're like a great spy obviously you know we can use our imaginations and see they're probably getting

paid a fuck ton of money like if they're a state department employee at their respective country or some sort of like ambassador or any sort of government employee who's not like an entrepreneur with a lot of money how do they hide that money without raising the alarm bells well hopefully they hide it well because we have had some of our spies uncovered because they you know spend money like a drunken sailor and attract attention and we try and see do not do this don't you know don't don't go off just spending this like a fool in fact sometimes what we'll do is we'll give them a certain amount of cash and then we will start an escrow account for them, which they would be, it would be an interest bearing escrow account. They can, if they really need it, they can touch it. But otherwise there's no trace to them, no connection to them. So sometimes they would ask, well, so how much is in my account? And you'd

have, you know, the figures and show them the balance sheet in essence. And if there's a family emergency or a real need, they can touch it. But we are always counseling them, be careful in how you're spending this money so that you don't attract attention. There's a lot of third world countries where we operate where anybody who got something different, the nosy neighbors who are jealous are going to wonder, now how did that guy get that? So it can be a real counterintelligence problem if they don't know how to handle the money. Did you ever lose a spy? No. No one ever got caught?

No, but a good friend of mine, well, let me talk about that in a moment. But I do – I never lost a spy who was killed. Let me put it that way. A friend of mine had recruited one of the Russians who was betrayed by Audra James back in the mid-'80s. And Ames betrayed I think at least 10 of our Russian spies, and they were all shot. Can you explain who he was to people who don't know? He was a CIA officer, very mediocre. He had drinking problems.

He had a divorce problem. And he basically had a lot of financial issues because his second wife was very greedy and living well beyond their means. And he volunteered to the Russians. And he thought, okay, for them to not find out who I am, for the CIA not to find out, we're going to kill these 10 Russians that I know of. I mean, that's how he offered his bona fides to the Russian KGB. And so he had a list of the 10 officers, the 10 KGB agents that we had recruited over the various years. And these people were systematically rounded up, tortured, tortured and shot. And one of the people who was rounded up, tortured and shot had been recruited by a friend of mine. And this guy was so upset,

he asked me to go to lunch with him one day. And we walked around the compound at Langley. And he got very emotional. And he literally wept because he said, if I hadn't recruited this guy, he'd still be alive. And I told him, I said, Francis, you didn't betray him. Aldrich Ames did. But it strikes us like that. Now, I never lost anybody. I had some folks that I recruited that were arrested for a while, and through no fault of mine and no fault of their own, because we have had people arrested who they were being careless, but these people weren't careless. They simply came to the attention of the press, and for a very dramatic operation that we were being careless, but these people weren't careless. They simply came to the attention of the press

and for a very dramatic operation that we were involved in, and they were arrested. And as I've told folks before, we will go to hell and back to get you out of trouble, and we did. It took a while to get them out, but we got them all out. In fact, we made a senior appeal to the head of their country to let these people go because what they ultimately had done was in our collective interest. And so it took a long time, but I gave not only my word, I gave our director's word that we would absolutely put their

national or their security as a priority and we would get them out and we did so you had people who had betrayed their country working for you sitting in a jail right in that country right under the suspicion or flat-out smoking gun that they had been oh they were guilty they were they were guilty no no doubt doubt. I'm saying what the country didn't know was that they were working for us. And actually, it was in the country's best interest as well, that we intervened. I intervened, recruited these people, and that's how we were able to stop this. So ultimately, the country saw sense. Well, you know, A, they were negligent in not noticing this to begin with.

And the fact that we had turned them and brought them over to our side was what enabled us to stop this. So they would get caught for the things that they were involved in, which is why you recruited them in the first place. And it would be viewed as illegal. It was. It was more than viewed. It was illegal. Right, right. So it was illegal. They'd recruited them in the first place and it would be viewed as illegal and they'd be like it was it was more than viewed it was illegal right so it was illegal they'd have him in jail said country would not know that they were your asset right and you would then go we had to go you would go and tell them that guy sitting in the jail so over there who's from your country right works for us and they wouldn't kill? He's really one of the good guys.

Well, this was a more benign country, shall we say. Okay. And it was in their interest, in their national interest, for him to stop doing what he had been doing. Because it involved a third country, not their country, but they were selling nuclear weapons technology to a hostile country. And so we had gone in, I'd recruited these people, and then we were able to bring this nuclear weapons network down. But we had to make protestations.

Yes, they had actually technically broken the law of that country, but ultimately what they did was for the West. It was for peaceful, stopping nuclear weapons proliferation. When you were out there though because you keep referring to like talking to Langley or getting the okay from them and you even mentioned that conversation with your friend happened where you're at Langley. I guess you were at the actual compound. Right, right. It was a colleague, yeah. So there were – first question is I guess there were times throughout those 25 years where you would spend months at a time stationed in the United States? No. Actually, I was gone for 12 straight years overseas.

But you happened to be at Langley when that happened? Well, actually, it was after I came back from overseas. Okay. from overseas. Yes, I was at Langley. And I mean, I would come home for a temporary assignment, you know, for a week or two, occasionally. But we lived overseas for straight 12 straight years. So when you have your contact, though, with base, how does that work? Are you talking with anyone who wants to get on the phone with you over there in the offices, other spies around the world? Or are you generally talking in code in some sort of setup procedure with one person? So we have – at CIA headquarters, you'd have what we call a desk, an office that would handle whichever country's affairs that you're in. And so you would know the desk officer, and that person would be your go-between back at basically your person

back at headquarters to service any requests or to send you communications. And you might chat with them on a secure telephone, but those didn't come around until later in my career. So usually you would do an encrypted cable, an encrypted telegram back to CIA headquarters, and they'd send you a telegram back, which was then decrypted and put into plain text. Can you explain to the young people out there what a telegram is? Sorry. A piece of paper with a message on it. I know you're only 40 years old but still right a piece of paper with a message on it so it's like a letter but it's going electronically

and you know back then you had actually pieces of paper that would be you would receive and with plain text meaning in english plain text had been decrypted, but we would transmit it in an encrypted form so that anybody that was intercepting it couldn't read it. And when you were working with the desk, I guess, of whatever country you were with, the people there, are there ever those who have been out in the field as spies themselves, or is this generally always those who have been working on the desks like this, as like the analyst? I'd say most of them had been overseas.

Okay. And so they were either having a temporary assignment back in the United States for a few years, or they had family considerations that caused them to want to be home. They might have elder care issues. They might have become married to somebody who might have, you know, become married to somebody who is now stationed in the U.S. And so, and some people were just got tired of overseas life and were now basically semi-permanently at Langley. Now, you had mentioned that you were eventually declared an expert like undercover nuclear spy meaning you're working in weapons of mass destruction and things that affect our national security interests here in the united

states when when approximately did that happen five years in ten years in that was in about let's see probably about 10 years in yeah so I spent about the latter 15 years of my career focusing primarily, not exclusively, but primarily on preventing nuclear weapons or biological weapons technology from spreading from countries that have it to countries that don't have it. Now, did that happen because you happened to recruit a slew of undercover assets who were in that realm and had access to that information, so you were already having success there? Yes, that's exactly it. They saw that I had a certain talent for recruiting people in those programs. And so when I came back from overseas in about 94, then they wanted me to continue in the counterproliferation operations directorate. Now, yes.

So this is – just thinking about the time period too that you were around because it was 1980 to 2005, right? Correct. So you worked through the closeout days of the Soviet Union. The growing days of what wasn't exactly a successful growth of Russia. Right. The 9-11 and the war on terror and the destabilization that occurred in the Middle East, specifically in the buildup to that in the 90s. This was a very, very interesting time. And at the end of your career, you're there during the whole WMD Iraq thing and all that.

So naturally at home, all of us understand the significance, at least like passively, of when we say weapons of mass destruction and what nuclear bombs are capable of. To say nothing of biological weapons, that's something i want to ask you about later but how in your experience like did you see a lot of situations where you sat back and said if only people knew how close we just came well i think in the case of libya for example li. Libya was acquiring nuclear weapons technology from Dr. A.Q. Khan, the father of the Islamic bomb in Pakistan. He was doing this on his own. He was not doing this with the Pakistani government's knowledge. He just took it on himself to take proliferation private. And so he and his network were supplying Muammar Gaddafi, a sworn enemy of the United States,

and Libya with nuclear weapons technology. Not just uranium enrichment technology, but also real working diagrams of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons that we knew would work. And as you may recall, Muammar Gaddafi was, he ultimately declared those nuclear weapons and to the United States and the United States took all of that stuff out of Libya because Libya decided that they would rather be a friend of the United States than an enemy. So this is one of his few lucid moments where he did something really smart. I think part of it was undoubtedly influenced by the fact of seeing Saddam Hussein fall

for not declaring, you know, whatever weapons he might have had. And he thought, you know, it's better to be a friend of the U.S. than an enemy. And Libya has one of the most wealthy oil and gas reserves in the world, and they needed a modern American technology to fully exploit those oil and gas fields. So he directed his head of intelligence, a man named Musa Kusa, to conduct secret negotiations with the United States and Great Britain to see what it would take to normalize diplomatic relations to ones where we would exchange embassies and have normal relations

rather than hostile relations. And our bottom line demand was you have to give up all your WMD programs. Whatever you have, you have to give it up. And he agreed. Unfortunately, his negotiators didn't really get the message, or maybe they were on the take, and they didn't really come clean at our negotiations as to what they possessed. Now, my program, an operation I was running, had penetrated the AQ Khan network. We knew exactly what was going on. And we knew that he, the Libyans, were acquiring actual working diagrams of nuclear weapons. The same yield, by the way, that destroyed Hiroshima, 14 kilotons, capable of killing 140,000 people. Did you have – I just want to make sure I understood what you just said correctly. Did you have a network of CIA undercovers who reported to you as well?

Or when you say your network, are you just talking about your assets? So I had my team. Let's put it just that way, on my team, people who helped penetrate the network, and then I personally penetrated the network by recruiting spies inside of the AQCon network. Ultimately, what's what we call human intelligence, human. I mean, we depended upon SIGINT, which is signals intelligence, cyberint, which is, you know, if we penetrate your computers. Ultimately, though, what you really want is a well-placed spy. You want to recruit somebody on the other side. So we recruited some penetrations of the Khan network. And through that, we were able to bring the entire thing down and get the nuclear weapons technology out of Libya.

We basically called the Libyans bluff and said, we know for a fact. In fact, we stopped a shipment, a ship called the BBC China in 2004. This BBC China had hundreds of thousands of components for a nuclear weapons program, for uranium enrichment up to highly enriched uranium. And so we stopped that, seized those 40-foot containers, and so we called the Libyans bluff and said, you know, you can't sell us this fable that you don't have a nuclear weapons program because we just took these containers off this boat. That was all due to my team's intelligence collection. So he declared it. We got the nuclear weapons technology out of Libya. A few years later in 2011, so this was

only about six or seven years later. Sounds like your crowning achievement at the end, it sounds like. Well, a few years later, you may recall that Gaddafi was overthrown. And a friend of mine once said, Jim, you know, if your team had not basically discovered what he was doing and then enabled us to take those nuclear weapons out of Libya, think what he would have done with actual working nuclear weapons against his own people or maybe create a distraction in Europe by using one of those weapons. You weren't concerned that he would try to use one against America, who he viewed as the primary enemy? Well, you need to, sure, but you need a delivery system capable of launching it that far.

It was much more likely that he would have used it against his own people, or Europe is just across the Mediterranean. So, you know, everything depends on a delivery system. So I'm just trying to think though, the AQ Khan guy, I might be totally wrong here, but is that the same dude who met with Osama bin Laden in the hills of Pakistan where bin Laden famously said, according to U.S. intelligence, that who says we don't already have nuclear weapons? That wasn't him. It was another guy that's similar to him. I don't remember the man's name.

But yeah, you're right. Somebody did, a Pakistani nuclear scientist, did meet with Osama bin Laden. Now, we were very concerned that at that same time that Khan might be talking to al-Qaeda, but he didn't. He was not doing that. Interesting. Because I always hear, like, when I talk with people, especially about, like, Pakistan, it's, what's the line they say? Like, Bustamante said this line for sure. Some other people did, too, though. It's like, it's about who's paying the most or something like that. Like, they'll

just go with, like, including their intelligence service and everything, like, they're all over the place. And if someone's offering them money, like, they'll give them with – like including their intelligence service and everything. Like they're all over the place. And if someone is offering them money, like they'll give them information and they're not reliable. Well, I don't know if it's that easy. But clearly we had a very big concern that – in Pakistan, you have an unfortunate convergence of both state and non-state, meaning terrorist interests. And there's some people in Pakistan who probably have a few fuses burned out in the back of their head on the subject of religion and might be willing to assist a terrorist group. So we were always concerned about that. And the case that you just mentioned of the Pakistani scientist meeting with Osama bin Laden, it was not dr khan

but it was somebody else that was a skilled scientist got it one of the things i keep on just being amazed by talking with you because of the exact type of intelligence work you did is that very clearly even without going to specifics as you did with libya there you were dealing with so many different countries around the world significantly different cultures i mean i could play fantasy football in my head with all the types of countries you probably had some sort of intelligence work in over the years over a 25 year period and it's like these are wildly different like they don't if you're dealing with someone in ukraine the things that that part that appeals to that person have very little or nothing

in common with someone you're dealing with in iran or something like that so how much like you're one person how much like what did you do to to be able to not blend in, obviously, but to not draw attention and actually understand, like, be on a level culturally with the different people you dealt with? So there is a veneer of culture. You're right, a cultural veneer. However, there are certain human basic needs. You may recall from college Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You may recall from college, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So you've got food, shelter, you know, your children, your loved ones. Well, it doesn't matter if you're an Iranian, a Libyan, a Chinese, a North Korean. You know, if you are a North Korean and your boss has just berated you

and treated you like scum, you're going to hate that guy. And if there's a way you can get back at him, you know, we used to talk about hard targets. My contention is there are no hard targets that every human being, basically their cultures may be slightly different. The cuisine is different. The language is different. But the basic human needs are the same. And therefore, if I can get access to somebody, then I'm confident that I could probably recruit them over time. Sometimes it takes me a long time. But to detect the stress, I used to be a rock climber. I don't know if you've ever done any rock climbing, Julian.

Well, in order to climb a rock, you look for the crack patterns. that's how you put your fingers and your toes as you climb the rock. You can't climb smooth rock. You have to look for crack patterns. And you can't tell those crack patterns from a long way off. You have to get near the rock and study it. And people have crack patterns. They have emotional crack patterns. And so my talent was to be able to detect what the stress is in your life, what's upsetting you. And then over time, I can figure that out. In one case, it took me 11 about the 10 and a half year mark, I started detecting what those crack patterns were. His case, he and I had a fabulous relationship. In fact, it was a very close fraternal relationship. Very good friends. We were both long distance runners. We'd go running

together. He'd share a lot of things, but nothing sensitive with me. And he was on top of the world. He was from a country where his particular ethnic group at that time was the predominant one. And he was from that ethnic group. He was young. He was single. He was well-paid, very bright, very competent at what he did. He didn't have any cracks, none that I could see. Certainly nothing that would be justifying a recruitment pitch, even though we would have loved to have recruited this guy. What type of job did he have? He was a diplomat, just like me. In fact, I cold called him and asked him to lunch. And then over lunch, we discovered that we both liked to go running. And so we started running once a week. I'd say three Saturdays out

of four, he and I would go running. And when you go run, you know, you share a lot of details and a lot of things, you know, you could joke and you have a good time. And so we became quite close, but there were no crack patterns that I could see. Well, I moved away from that country to another country, but we stayed in touch. And one day he called me and asked me if I'd come back and be his best man at his wedding. He was going to marry a lady from this country. Yeah, I mean, when I'm coming after you, you and I are going to be buddies. Holy shit.

So I was best man at his wedding. And the night before the wedding, I just kind of showed him a little bit of what we call, show him a little bit of thigh. I just said, you know, you and I are like brothers. And I meant that. And I said, if you ever have a problem, I've got special connections in Washington, and I can help you. And he nodded and everything. I was not

breaking cover technically. No, that's a great way to do it. Floating a thing, you know, that we were so close. Obviously I'm your best man. Yeah. And so anyways, he gets married. He goes off to another country a couple of years later. Turns out his wife, I guess, did not sign on for being 10,000 miles from home. And they'd had a child by then, but she was very upset being so far from home, and ultimately she divorced him. And by the way, if you detect a pattern here where I go after divorced people, headquarters named me Dr. Divorce for a while. Because divorce is such a psychologically and financially tumultuous time. It's a horrible time in people's lives. So he gets divorced. The wife, ex-wife, takes their baby daughter and goes home. And then he, about a year and a half later, gets reposted back to his

home country after having been gone for six or seven years. Oh, so he married a woman from the country he was in? From the country where he and I were or seven years. Oh, so he married a woman from the country he was in? From the country where he and I were both posted before. Yeah, exactly. Well, he goes home, and in the time that he had been gone from his home country, his ethnic group had lost their predominance. And now there was a new group in charge, and he discovered to his horror that no matter how hard he worked, no matter what he did, he could never get promoted beyond a certain grade.

And he found that so frustrating, he wrote me an email, and he said, Jim, he said, I don't understand how a country can treat people like that and expect them to give allegiance to that country. Well, that's like a big sign saying, come recruit me. I'm now disaffected. He was so upset. So I urged him to meet me in another country. He was going to go visit his ex-wife and see the baby daughter on her birthday. And that took me maybe 30 seconds to break cover and offer him a job to be on my team. And he said, well, now I've got something to believe in. And so he went on and he was fabulous at what he did. In fact, he told me later, he said, when 9-11 happened, he saw those twin towers coming down in New York.

He became very emotional at his business, at his foreign ministry. And he became so emotional that some of his colleagues were asking him, why are you so emotionally invested in this? You're not an American. And he said, Jim, they didn't know. I'm on your team now. Wow. So he went on, had a successful career. Ultimately, he started a business, still has the business today.

It's done very well. Do you still talk with him? Through email and things, yeah, I still do. Encrypted email? No. Well, actually, yeah. But he jokingly sometimes says says you know i wish i had a picture of you i could put it up in my business and the caption would be my our founder

oh that's cool yeah i love the guy i mean he and i we refer to each other as brothers and i mean we truly i had this was one of the guys i recruited i have genuine affection for and so it was never i didn't have to search out good things he was a good person and he so he has a you're saying he has a business now right he retired from his government and now he has his own business i mean i think this is probably an easy question to answer maybe i don't have to ask it but is this guy from like a totalitarian-ish type country it's one that could go that way. But yeah, I mean, I'm not going to provide any more details.

But believe me, his particular ethnic group, they're now second or third class citizens. And that's something that when you feel like that, it's a devastating thing. You know, like suddenly, no matter how hard I work, there's a glass ceiling. I can't do anything. How can I give allegiance to a country that treats me like that? So in essence, like I said at the beginning of this program, it doesn't feel like they're betraying anything because they've been betrayed. Yeah, I'm thinking of a few places that could be i'll ask

you off camera but it it's it's wild to me how you can develop a relationship for so long and then when you sense that like you were saying earlier and you get to that point where it's like time to go i'm gonna get a yes if i go right now that in 30 seconds it can just shift like that like you said he was literally like well now I have someone to play for. Yeah, he's now on my team. And we were already close, so he wanted to be on my team. I'm the team captain, but he's part of my team. It's amazing that there's not like – it seems like the way you explain it, he had no level of shock there.

Like, oh, Jim's in the CIA? It was like, way you explain it, he had no level of shock there. Like, oh, Jim's in the CIA? Like, it was like, okay, cool. I think I prefaced my comments by saying, you know, you may have suspected this, but I know you wanted to protect me. And I want to protect you. And I've never seen a need to tell you who I really work for. I really work for the CIA, and I'd like you to be on my team. And he said, yeah, now I've got something to believe in smooth way to say it sir that's pretty good but you you mentioned

the the image that he described of of 9 11 and seeing that and becoming emotional right you know you've been on the same team this whole time you're from america it's it's your country and everything and at that point when that happens you're over 20 years in the CIA. I would imagine one of their senior spies at that point. That's correct. insane operation that they pulled off that was horrifying in in every level but it it did represent the the worst terrorist attack and that this country has ever seen and hopefully will ever see when you see something like that though i would imagine there's a part of you that thinks that everything in the world suddenly is very fragile because that's the type of event that can cause not just your country but all kinds of countries everywhere to get very tight and perhaps escalate some things, for lack of a better word.

What's the full thought process that goes through your head though and how much did that change your approach to doing the job? Like, did there, did a lot more urgency come into you needing to get new assets? And, and, and also like, what, what, how did the goals change? Well, it certainly added emphasis. At the time, I was working on, basically on the operation I referred to earlier, the AQ Khan operation. So here's a man who is spreading nuclear weapons, which as horrible as 9-11 was, where we lost 3,300 Americans in a single day, a nuclear weapon could do maybe anywhere from 10 to 100 times that or more. Yeah. And, therefore, we had to have extra emphasis, more acceleration of the operational pace to make sure that Dr. Khan did not transfer any more of that nuclear weapons technology and that we got what there was, what had been transferred out of Libya. At the time, you may recall, Libya was a state sponsor of terrorism. So even though it was unlikely that

Gaddafi would give that to a terrorist group, he might. And what groups were they? Well, he was, he was certainly not a fan. Gaddafi was not a fan of Al Qaeda, but he had sponsored some of the Red Brigades in Europe, some of the other terrorist groups in Europe. Those were Libyan sponsored, the Irish Republican Army, some others that were Libyan, I mean, terrorist groups. Again, the Red Brigades in Germany and Spain and France. Sponsored the IRA? Oh, yeah.

They were. Yes, they did. What's Libya's interest in doing that? Just to prick the West. Hmm. It was not a anything. I mean, they had no cultural no religious commonality nothing but um yeah i mean he supported a number of terrorist groups didn't support al-qaeda

why was that i think there were some religious differences and of course qaddafi would pretend to be religious but he really wasn't uh well a lot of people do, for that matter, let's be honest. But he would, and so he was never a fan of al-Qaeda. But not out of the realm of possibility that if he had nuclear weapons technology and actually working nuclear weapons, then some terrorist group might get them. So it added a lot of acceleration and emphasis that we need to accelerate the pace of this operation and stop this. And what about the, I'm sure the question you got to get all the time comes back to Iraq and

what happened there? Because, you know, just to be transparent about my stance on this whole thing when when people go to re-litigate the past including me there is that hindsight 2020 bias with things and you can claim that certain things were absolutely ironclad that really weren't at the time based on information you had and and run with a narrative so when i look at this i do always say to people yeah we had to go to afghanistan when that happens and frankly for the first while there we did a great job i mean that was outside of bin laden getting out of the country almost everything that needed to happen there and say that first year that needed to go right went right. It went extremely right. In fact, I just lost one of my best

friends, Gary Schroen, who led our forces, CIA forces into Afghanistan about two weeks after 9-11. He led a small group of CIA paramilitary officers in and they were on the ground long before our military special forces were there but yeah and then they made it you know basically expelled the taliban expelled al-qaeda and it ended up they didn't get bin laden but they were extremely courageous people who did this poor gary passed away at the end of july sorry to hear that yeah dear friend well that's another thing like as a side note when they went in there this is something i don't hear a lot of people like reanalyze but it's so interesting to me this all happened within a few days of those within like a week of those towers coming down they they were there but the way we did that military operation was so unlike anything we had ever done because the way I understood it, Bush basically said to George Tenet, who was the director of the CIA at the time, if you had to do X, Y, and Z to get done, what would need to happen?

And I will make it happen. And so Tenet set up a system in coordination with the military where your friend Gary there, along with other people at the CIA, were essentially sent in as like, say, like black ops CIA officers to get assets on the ground and be able to take over villages and work the way across the country with the assistance of the military, where it seemed like the CIA was kind of calling the shots. Is that fair to say? Well, the CIA had pre-existing contacts, especially with the Northern Alliance. There's different ethnic groups in Pakistan, and the Northern Alliance was opposed to the Taliban, unlike some of the folks in the southern part of the country. But, you know, Gary's one of his big strengths was he knew these people. He spoke their language. He told me that when he was greeted on the ground by these various Afghan warlords, I think 75% of them, he knew these people. So we had existing relationships that had been cultivated over a long period of time.

They trusted us and we trusted them. And so together, we then, along with the military who came in, they basically kicked the Taliban out, kicked al-Qaeda out, and did this in a remarkably short period of time. We're talking about weeks. Yeah. Yeah, it was fast. It was very fast. There was the line, I think Kofor Black said it, where he's like, these guys are going to have spiders crawling across their eyes or something. Yeah, basically he said, I'll bring bin Laden's head on a spike. Yeah, Kofor, great guy.

And other people too, Hank Crumpton, Rick Prado. Rick Prado just wrote Black Ops. Great guy, he's a good friend of mine um these people were the ones that were directing our forces in afghanistan and and did a remarkably courageous job every american should be proud of them yeah and i feel like it was the ultimate injustice how things ended in afghanistan because it was so many years later and again it's like that felt like a slow death of a situation because you could kind of see that happening even a decade ago. Like, oh, this is not still there. Americans have a short time attention span.

They got this. We get distracted by other things. And sure enough, Taliban creeps back in. And pretty soon, you know, we've lost it. And just a total waste of blood and treasure. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we've lost it and just a total waste of blood and treasure. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's exactly what I was getting at with all this, because the way I always say it is I do always separate the people who went there. You know, people in the military, they go where they're told to go. They do the job. Like, I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. And I don't want to be misheard on that.

But like when I look at the Iraq war iraq war is like what took our eye off the ball from afghanistan i agree and other things if we had not been distracted by iraq the taliban wouldn't be back in afghanistan today in my opinion i agree with i don't see a good argument even against that i think that's probably what would be the case but it's interesting to talk with you because your expertise was in the field undercover with nuclear arms deals and things like that. And it's like the whole reason we went to Iraq was because they had WMD, and that turned out to not be true. That's exactly right. Now, people ask me about that sometime, and it is exactly – it is true that Saddam Hussein had been working on nuclear weapons before then.

He had used chemical weapons against the Kurds. The Kurds are an ethnic group there in Iraq. Killed thousands of them. In fact, one of his cousins was known as Chemical Ali. And Chemical Ali used chemical weapons on the Kurds. They'd used them on the Iranians when they were on Iraq war. Was that sarin gas? Among other things.

Okay. But yeah, various chemical weapons. Sarin was one of them. And they were working on ballistic missiles. They had been working on nuclear weapons beforehand. It was a terribly tragic set of circumstances. Saddam Hussein basically could have avoided all this if he had been truly honest and candid about their nuclear weapons program. But he wanted to give off the image that maybe he had nuclear weapons because they live in a tough neighborhood.

Right. So ultimately that cost him his life. It cost a lot of Iraqis' lives. It cost a lot of American lives. So, you know, it was like deception upon deception. And nobody could argue. He used to have these, but he's probably still got them. Saddam Hussein was a jackass. He was a terrible person. I mean, literally like an Adolf Hitler. And so it would be hard to come to Saddam Hussein's defense and say, yeah, he's gotten rid of everything.

It must have been, I think, some poor analysis, some other things, you know, maybe a bit of pandering. We know Saddam Hussein's a bad guy, so we pandered to the White House and we just, we're going to go in and clean house. Maybe, I don't know. I was not involved in the Iraqi WMD issues. I was absolutely focused 100% on other nuclear weapons issues, the Iranians, the AQ Khan operation, things like that. I never actually participated in any of the Iraqi WMD ops. That is weird to me. That's really weird to me. Well, I didn't see an op to participate in, so. Still, like that was – again, at this point, when this is all going down, after 9-11, you are a very senior officer, successful. This is your expertise. This is what you've been doing. This was the – not that you don't have a focus everywhere on nuclear weapons at all times. I know you do, and when the average person thinks about it they realize well of course they do but at the time like you listen to the media you listen everything all the focus is on

one country with nuclear weapons and we're deciding whether or not to put what's going to end up being billions trillions of dollars into a war there right and you're not involved i'm not involved no that's a cia mistake right there well it be, but I would have been looking for nothing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, okay, and, you know, it's hard. Yeah, the tinfoil hat just got on my head, I'll tell you that. It's harder to prove a negative than it is a positive, and we had no telltale signs there.

I was read into all of the intelligence that we had. Read in, meaning I had access to this. But I was devoting literally 99.99% of my time to defeating A.Q. Khan. We knew he had nuclear weapons technology. We knew this was going to a hostile country, Libya. We suspected there was going to be another country after that one. And so we had to stop that. So I had the, I guess you could say, the luxury of devoting all of my attention to that.

Interesting. All right. Very quick question, because then I'm going to explain why. But did you enjoy working for George Tenet? I love the guy. I told George, he's a good friend of mine, I told him, if I ever write your biography, the title is going to be The Spy Who Loved Us. Yeah. Because he is a natural, he was not trained as a case officer, but he's an extremely warm, charismatic person who absolutely cared about his people. A hundred percent. And I love the guy. All right, we're going to get along well on this because I you just said exactly how what my interpretation of him is. So that's a guy when all the people out there throw on their anti II, George Tenet from 97 to 2004 was at the helm of the hardest years in the history of the CIA.

I can't think of a more tumultuous time as far as how many things were going on and what the threat level was on a, no pun intended, nuclear scale. Well, it was incredible. His memoirs were entitled At the Center of the Storm. I read it, yeah. And he was absolutely one of the, he was certainly the best CIA director I ever served under, and I served under about seven or eight of them. He was the best and genuinely cared about us. I feel like, personally, I feel like he was misled by some people on the WMD issue, and he's had to pay the emotional price for that. And the personal price, too. But if he had known that there were no WMD, we would not have gone to war in Iraq.

But he didn't know that. He was being told by people that he trusted and counted on that we've got a case. We've got to do it. And who were those people? I'm not going to say. Not their names, but like what types of – Senior analysts that were – maybe they sensed that this is the answer he wants to hear, what the White House wants to hear. That's what I call pandering.

Yes. This is when you tell somebody something, you whisper in their ear something they want to hear even though you know it's not true. I don't know that anybody was 100 percent deceptive, but they were assuming something that just wasn't there. But George Tenet, absolutely the best director I ever served under and one of the strongest directors we ever had. He cared about us. Yeah, see, I don't – I'm not one of these people. I look at things on the facts as best I can and also integrating in that human beings are imperfect too and I try to give everyone their fair shake including people I'm not

going to sit with or anything like that. And George Tenet is a guy who if you just looked at it on paper and listen to some of the rhetoric around what's happened in our country over the last 20 years, people again who don't like the CIA especially could point to and call a boogeyman but i i read his autobiography after a documentary came out in 2015 it was called spy masters and the crosshairs on showtime did you ever see that no i never did so very cool concept the two brothers who did who were on the ground during 9-11 by chance that day who then happened to film everything those guys became famous after that this was another documentary they did which also was a

little bit certainly a lot reflective for them because we were focused that the documentary was focusing on the response to the war on terror more than anything which started that day essentially and started before that but it blew up that day in new york and so they interviewed every single at the time surviving cia director so even like george bush senior was being interviewed on that and by far to me the star of the show and the most likable human being on there and it wasn't close close, was George Tenet. Absolutely. He's a tremendously charismatic person, and it's sincere. It is so sincere. He genuinely cares about you. He cared about us. He cares about America.

I think he was done a terrible disservice by some people close to him. And so I have – he actually sent me a note. I'll read it to you. I would love that. He sent me a note the day before he resigned. And if I can find this here. What is that right there? Is that a – that's not a wallet, obviously. Is that like a mini notebook? Yeah.

This is the analog version of a digital assistant. Can I see this real quick? It's just a, you know, look, see all my... I'm not going to turn it to the camera, not the papers, but this is great. For people now watching, I'm holding like a, what's that, a four-inch, three-and-a-half-inch wallet-looking thing, and it's got cards that look like some of them could be new and some look like they could be 40 years old let's see pretty cool fine but i'm still somewhere in here because i carried this around with me for years i still i still have it um so he wrote me this note he said

jim thank you very much for your note what you and your team have achieved will rank up there as one of the most spectacular intelligence accomplishments in the history of the CIA. It occurred because of your exemplary leadership. It occurred because of the focus and dedication to the mission of terrific men and women. It's testimony to the technical, analytic, surveillance, liaison in a focused, relentless effort, we are absolutely together on disarming a country as a result of your fine work. This kind of effort should be memorialized against very different targets. Your dad would indeed be very proud of you, but no prouder than I am, and I want to come down to see your team. With respect, George J. Tennant.

Wow. I carry that around because his words meant a lot to me. We loved him. We still do. Yeah. I'm really happy that I walked into this and you liked him because, like I said, I'm a fan of who he is as a guy. More than liked him, I love the guy. I think he's tremendous. Yeah, I think the thing in that documentary

Was that really got me? was the the combination he had of brutal honesty and emotion and There were a couple moments that were certainly like whoa made me think but one of them I'm thinking about Where it was a little less emotional but very very reflective was he said something to the effect of and this might be word for word but let's just say something to the effect of i wish the world were a really simple place i wish it were a place where we could just you know understand what the issue is come together solve it and that's it but that is not reality the world is extremely complex it, solve it, and that's it. But that is not reality. The world is extremely complex.

It's filled with a lot of different people and all kinds of issues, some of which are unsolvable. I think that's wonderful. And he believed that. Very hardworking guy. Bright guy. But here he was basically on, in essence, on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout his time as director yeah and and i guess the the the takeaway there for me at least you know someone sitting in an armchair here just listening to this kind of thing and who didn't live it is that you know we do try to

when we're pointing about out all the things we complain about, we're also in a way trying to prove that it should be something that's solvable and solvable in the right way because of this one thing right here. Like, aha, there it is. But that's not at all how it works. It's not simple. Like I told you earlier, CIA, not Central Insurance Agency. We take risks for the national security yeah and and with a guy like him though you know like the cia director role it's it's politically assigned right you have the president nominate somebody and sometimes they

can nominate someone like trump nominated pompeo a few years ago he was not from in the cia at all he was i think he was like a congressman or something right so it's not necessarily going to be someone who's come up through the agency or something like that but what like how much effect on the day-to-day does the actual director have and how much can it change the agency having you know a competent director insider versus an incompetent director outsider well it can mean a lot of a lot of difference the emphasis they put on things what the workforce how the workforce perceives the director does he have our back is he going to protect us? Operations, again, are not 100%. They're inevitably, some of them, even well-conceived ones, are going to go wrong.

They will fail. Some of them will. Some of them fail because of circumstances that are far beyond our control. Some of them were ill-conceived to begin with. I mean, the Bay of Pigs is probably a classic one. And there's other snafus where we probably should not have become engaged. Although, as I've told some correspondents before, I said, you look at any covert action that the CIA does, and it has been ordered by the White House. We are not the rogue elephant you think we are. It is because the White House has directed us to do something. And sometimes there are very competent people running these operations.

And still, shit happens sometimes on these things. We are the ones there taking the risks for the United States. And sometimes really good things happen. And sometimes bad things happen. And we do the things at the direction of the president. For the people out there, though, that, you know, don't want to buy something like that, they're, first of all, a lot of them aren't going to be convinced no matter what anyone says. That's correct. But in the interest of the people out there who do listen for evidence and do listen

to things that make sense to them, thing that i often struggle with with not just the cia but any major agency that's involved in national security think nsa homeland homeland security fbi now especially after 9-11 and it's like a lot of the people who work in these agencies have been there for years, right? And sometimes it also is literally the leader of the place is someone who may have been there for 30 years or something. And it's like they have access, especially at CIA and NSA. They have access to the worst, most dangerous shit that exists around the world and they constantly live in a state of knowing information that the average person they walk on the street can't even fathom is going on and how much in the snap of a finger every a bomb could go off right so

seeing as they have access to all that i respect that and I respect their urgency on issues and I respect the fact that there's a lot of people who give decades of their life to do this and they don't make the maximum amount of money that they'd be capable of making. But there's the concept that the politicians who come through these offices – and let's look at the highest office just for the simplicity of this example. The president who comes through is maximum going to be president for eight years maybe it's four and the people who walk in the first day from the cia the nsa the fbi whatever chances are as a whole as a collective these people were there they were obviously there before the president got there but more importantly they're going to be there after this guy leaves, right? And so, a lot of people wonder about that quote-unquote groupthink, almost without planning it, shadow government that forms in the sense that

these agents are, they're focused on a couple different things. Of course, they're focused on their objectives, but they're also focused on the fact that they want to make said if they come in there and you go to them and say mr president this thing we've been working on for a decade whatever it is it's a current danger here's why and he looks at you and says i don't agree and you know takes away the value of your job you may feel threatened that like oh my god all the shit we're working on some dude in washington can just tell us that the stroke of a pen or a quick comment like that. Like, I don't care. We're not doing it. And you may be biased to want to act against their interests.

How much of that actually happens? this focus on their survival as an organization and for their own job where it could impact how they butt heads with the people who are elected to call the shots? So people are people. And I would think that almost all of my colleagues, they might think that, but they also are responsive to a president or an administration. And so as long as we think it's legal and that we're going to follow the president's orders. But they may not like the president. What's been sad for me is that only in recent years have I even known what the politics of my colleagues are. Before, nobody asked.

It didn't care if you were a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian. Nobody asked. In fact, you could have said, well, what do you think he is? I would have said, I have no idea. That's how it should be. That's exactly how it should be. We had no political comments among ourselves. It wasn't like it was forbidden. It wasn't forbidden. It's just nobody, you know, we serve the country. We don't serve necessarily this particular administration as much as we serve the country as a whole. And if this administration in the 70s, we want to normalize relationships with Red China, then we normalized relationships with Red China.

We normalized relations with Libya. We normalized, look at all the Eastern European countries that used to be our opponents. And now they love us. We are allied with countries that were controlled by the Soviet Union. And there are certain Soviet, former Soviet republics, Ukraine being a big one that loves us. And that's good. That's good. But we serve the United States people, you know, and we serve the president. But none of us would talk about, well, this is Republican or this is Democrat. In fact, I have found a uniformity actually of good relations between whoever is in the White House and us. When I would have to go downtown and brief some of the Senate leaders on my operations, I didn't, it didn't really matter

to me if they were Democrats or Republicans. They gave us strong support. That's good to hear. I mean, I think the cynics out there are looking at different things throughout the CIA's history. You mentioned one of them that's at least known, like the Bay of Pigs and things like that. And they see evidence to suggest certainly that there was some CIA involvement, at least members of the CIA involved in the JFK stuff. And they take that throughout the years. They look at things like Operation Northwoods. They look at a guy like Epstein. They look at all these different, quote-unquote, potentially linked debacles, right?

And it doesn't mean that any or all of them are linked but there's potential things and they look at the cia constantly working to overthrow regimes in other countries sometimes i would say probably for the better of the world exactly well i don't think we have any involvement in what's going on in iran at the moment but i definitely hope that the regime of the mullahs is overthrown i I seriously doubt that we're in there. We would not want any evidence of CIA involvement. Otherwise, the mullahs would point to, see, it's another CIA revolution. So I'm sure we're – personally, I'm sure that we are being extremely careful.

We may emotionally and psychologically be totally on their side but we would not want a direct cia connection to what's going on in iran these people are coming to their senses they're had they're going to throw the mullahs out on their asses that's my fervent hope yeah actually let me cut off what i was saying because i'm more interested in this right now because you did do as you've mentioned now several times today you did extensive work with relation to the Iranian nuclear program. Right. So for people out there who are wondering what specifically is going on in Iran right now and why is this so different from anything we've seen since 1979?

Well, a few years ago, they did have some other riots and things going on. I mean, most of the people in Iran are like a lot of people in America. They're not going to get involved with the government. They just want to live their lives. And I'd say probably that's 75%, 80% of the Iranian people just want to live their lives. And unfortunately, because their government is hostile to our government, their lives have been difficult economically with all the trade sanctions they're on. That's what has motivated Iran, at least originally, to try and have some kind of negotiations with us on their nuclear weapons program. Unfortunately, that's an abeyance right now, and I fear that the Iranians are, in fact, going to develop a nuclear weapon. I really think that there's strong indications that they will do that.

They have a fair supply right now of 60% highly enriched uranium. And that's just a few steps away from weapons grade and something that they need for a working nuclear weapon. Let me say this. My concern is not only that Iran has nuclear weapons, because actually the Iranians are not totally irrational. They know that if they were ever to launch a nuclear strike against Israel, that Israel would obliterate them. What I'm more concerned about is if the Iranians get nuclear weapons, we're going to see other countries in the region and their close neighbors that will feel like we've got to have nuclear weapons too. And the more countries that have that, the chances of an accident or an intentional detonation go up logarithmically. You're going

to see somebody will use that in anger yeah and and it is an easy concept for everyone to get a hold of that like yeah we'd like there as few countries as possible around the world to have nuclear weapons what about the fact though that like when we ask all these countries or demand of them not to have them we have a fuck ton of them though like psychologically let me ask you this who would you prefer to have them them or us you know what i'm going to say all right okay okay so for example some of my friends with good intentions would love to us would love for everybody in the world to go to zero nuclear weapons. Now, how much do you think I trust the Russians or the Chinese to come down to zero nuclear weapons? Zero. No, you've got

to have the fact that we are nuclear armed just to dissuade them from doing something. We are much better than either the Chinese or the Russians in conventional weapons. And I actually had a KGB officer I was talking to, and I said something about maybe if we went to zero. And he says, Jim, he says, that's never going to happen because your conventional weapons are much better than ours. The only thing we have are nuclear weapons. And you can't trust them. My comeback to that, though, is that you're still asking these other countries to not have them. And they could even point, forget us having, they could even point and say, why the fuck aren't you talking to China and Russia about that? Like, why should we listen to you?

We have, to give us some credit, we and the former Soviets, the Russians, have reduced the number of nuclear weapons we collectively have. We have. We've come down from tens and tens of thousands to now where I think there's fewer than 4,000 or 5,000. It's still not good. Right. It's not good. But it was a lot fewer than it used to be. It's like a billionaire looking at the person with no money saying, well, I only have $990 million now. Things could be worse. But the fewer weapons we have where you just get down to some bare minimum that we need for national security, I'm fine with that. I think we need to stay on

top of the technology. The Russians and certainly the Chinese are improving their nuclear weapons technology. And ours has been kind of, I think, kind of at a standstill. I think we are putting some money into next generation things. But, you know, nuclear weapon development went like this, and then it kind of went like this. Because, you know, you can't make it any stronger. We've had multi-megaton weapons. Well, how much more do you need?

You know, you might need smaller ones. The reason you want a smaller one is you can throw it. It won't take long to tell you neutrals ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. So that's one thing that we're fearful of, that the more you miniaturize a nuclear weapon,

that means you can throw it a lot further and probably more accurately. But as far as nuclear weapons technology itself, it's pretty much stabilized since the 60s. And back to Iran, though, you're concerned about, for logical reasons too, about them potentially getting a weapon quick question to go back maybe six seven years like 14 15 what were you pumped about the iran deal i was conflicted on the iran this is 2015 the jcpoa the joint comprehensive program of. It's a mouthful, if ever there was one. Always is. Yeah. I felt like it's better to talk, you know, Churchill said, better to jaw jaw than war war. So if we don't have some kind of agreement, then they're going to maybe feel pushed into a corner to rapidly escalate their nuclear weapons program.

But if you ask me, Jim, do you trust them? No, I don't trust them. In fact, my first novel, Living Lies, was all about the United States and Iran having a set of nuclear negotiations, but the Iranians enter into it wanting only one thing, and that's to get the trade sanctions off. We want them to give up their program. They pretend to give up their program, but they secretly move it to another spot because they want an ace in the hole. That was the subject of my first spy novel. And it came about when I was having this discussion with one of my best CIA friends,

Rolf Maud Larson. And my question to him was, Rolf, what if they cheat? And I thought, no, I'm going to write a novel about whether Iranians cheat on a nuclear weapons negotiation. And that becomes something that you got to get sent through the CIA. So they did approve it.

Oh, they approved it. Yes, they did. After a year. After a year. And they redacted some in that first one? A little bit. About five things. A word or two here, a phrase there.

None of it, in my opinion, honest opinion, was it classified, but none of it affected the story. So I just thought, okay, I'm not going to argue. You have a right to appeal. You don't have to just automatically take their redactions. You can try and appeal to common sense or say, well, you know, this is very public over here. This has come out, or it's been, you've approved it before. That's one thing. If they had approved it in some other books, then I could point to that. But I didn't want to waste another few months doing that. It didn't affect the story. So I just thought, okay, fine. Take those offending words out. And now on the side note, though, you have two out. So you did In the Twinkling of an Eye after that as well. And that's another fictional story.

Right. The first one focuses on nuclear weapons. The second one on biological weapons. And the second one, In the Twinkling of an Eye, is about a North Korean and Russian conspiracy to develop a very, very devastating genetic bioweapon, both for assassination, but also for genocide. And so both countries have reasons to want things like that. And so in my story, they collaborate on a very secret program and a very industrious FBI special agent, she recruits a penetration of the Russian program. Link in description everybody i got both books down there check them out they're they're really really good but i i've heard you talk about them

on another podcast and it's like it's hard for me to not take that leap and be like that's got to be something that he worked on like even that one with russia and north korea working together it's like we don't think about that that's never something that's crossed my mind but chances are if you're writing something like that maybe it's not russia and north korea but it's russia and some other country that you've seen things like this go on right and i based scary i based a number of my characters on actual cia officers i know in both books people especially the good guys and i would get a friend of mine who I really respect and admire. And I'd say, would you mind if I used you in a book?

And I let them pick their own name. You know, they can pick a different name for their character. But it's so much easier for a writer to write about someone he actually knows than trying to just create somebody from whole cloth. Yeah. And so I made sure that, you know, that these were part of the good guys. write about someone he actually knows than trying to just create somebody from whole cloth yeah and so I made sure that you know that these were part of the good guys and so a number of my friends are actually in my books and I respect the real person as much as I do the character it's kind of wild and and I guess like cool that the CIA lets you do that, too. And it's not just you. There's other people who have done similar things.

But, you know, that information can be extrapolated for people like me to draw some conclusions. Well, I can't run real operations anymore, but I can live in my own fantasy world in these books. And I just love – I live and breathe operations. So I can't run them anymore but i can have operations in my books and i'm working on a third one and it's also about spies and treachery what what uh specific topic is that more like weapons of mass destruction stuff i don't think i'm going to have a weapons of mass destruction element in this this is just pure human treachery it's called the traitor's tale and it's a Tale. And it's about a CIA officer who is

accused of being a Russian mole. And he's not. And he's ultimately exonerated. But he was, during the time he was under suspicion, most of his so-called friends abandoned him. And he's very bitter at this. And so after he's exonerated he decides well fuck them and now I'm gonna really do it so anyways that's this is pure espionage pure counter espionage and that's something that you were telling me before you're gonna have that book finished next year sometime and put it hopefully hopefully in the spring yeah cool I need to focus on it and get it done we'll definitely have to have you in here when you do that one too to promote that but one more time back to finishing up the iran point

because we've gone off on a couple tangents there so we talked about the nuclear deal and you had said the churchill quote better draw a jaw than war war so you were mixed emotions on it but fast forwarding to 2022 with the uprisings that are happening it the very basics is that it centers around women's rights within the country so there was if if i understood this correctly there it started with a young woman who had been arrested for not following certain elements of like sharia law and then they she died she had some i hate to use the expression wardrobe malfunction but she had something she didn't have her hijab on just totally correctly i think she had it on but just not 100 the way the morality police the religious police wanted it she also was an ethnic minority she's a kurd okay yeah yeah she's not a Persian. She was a Kurd.

And sometime between the point when they arrested her and within a few hours, she's dead. And they're claiming, well, she had a heart attack. Yeah, sure. 22-year-old had a heart attack. Right. She has a heart attack or something like that. So a lot of women in Iran and a lot of men too, they've had it up to here with all these people telling them how to live their lives. It's a theocracy, you know, except it's a hypocritical theocracy. So it's no surprise that a lot of the folks in Iran have just got to the bursting point. Now, you know, a lot of them have been killed. Hundreds of these people have been killed. I think there was like 15,000 protesters or something were just supposedly killed. Well, I hope it's 150,000. But no, I don't think it's 15,000 killed. But I think there's been several hundred killed.

I don't follow it that closely. I was having dinner with an Iranian friend the other day, and she said that there's quite a mood of discontent in the country. It's terrible. Is she like an Iranian scholar? Not a scholar, but, well, she's a professional woman. I may talk to you about that because I've been working on getting someone who's like an expert on this in here. I wouldn't claim that she's an expert, but she's from there. And so naturally she has a lot of emotional and family ties back there.

I mean she still has – like most of them, a lot of family. And so what is she saying right now? She said it's really bad. It's really bad. Bad in the sense that it's so bad that people are uprising that this may finally turn the course or bad in the sense that it's going to end awful? Well, she's hopeful. She's hopeful that somehow it will cause the regime to fall. Hopeful. But nobody has any confidence in this. I mean that regime has don't remember. But this is from a few years ago where he said they were asking him about strategy in Iran and like how – something along the lines of like how realistic it could be that we could see regime change to a more 21st century type regime and he said the best way to do that is keep trying to pump in 90210 in there and and you know shows that are basic american shows western shows things like that because it it

if you can get it in there somehow it forces people to see some realities that they clearly don't enjoy well i think if you look at the demonstrations probably the predominant uh number of them are younger people. Yeah. Yeah. They're tired of this. They don't want people dictating their morality and their religion to them. They are probably – most of them are at least nominally Shiites, Muslims.

But they're tired of the clerics telling them how to live their lives and what to wear and this and that. You know, it's incredible. On the ski slopes, they have ski slopes for men, ski slopes for women. Now, that's not so bad as some of the other things they've done to people. But, you know, I'm 100% behind the people. Yeah, and you say there's no – you don't think there's any CIA involvement there. I don't know of any. I think that – well, you haven't been there since 05.

That's true, but it's the kind of delicate situation. If the mullahs ever caught somebody with demonstrable CIA – I mean they're already claiming that the two women – there were two women that were arrested that were so upset. There were two reporters, two Iranian reporters were arrested for covering, you know, doing an article on the woman that died. Well, of course, the accusation is, well, they're CIA agents. Well, they're not. But that's a common accusation that the government is going to make. Propaganda. Propaganda. So we're not going to go in there and give them ammunition to say well look it's just a cia provocation yeah i

i understand that strategy there i would be almost for something like this you know i think the way this came up was i was starting to talk about some other things in the past where there was overthrows and stuff like that but for something like what's going on in Iran I actually I hope the CIA has some stuff going on there. We might. I don't know. Yeah because you worry about it from a first person

perspective of having seen it up close but you know that is an extreme regime and if they had their hands on weapons or just in general being in control and sponsoring forms of terrorism and stuff around the world, it's not good for anybody. realize how i don't want to say i don't want to go too far but how like decent comparatively speaking the freedoms in iran were prior to the overthrow in 1979 you had women that could wear miniskirts right things like that um there you know they were we had a lot of well-educated we still have a lot of well-educated people in iran um a lot of them have immigrated here yeah and and

it's crazy how fast that can change and like we don't have any appreciation for that here because we're used to just you know doing whatever the hell we want right but like you see some of these pictures you look at afghanistan that was another one you see pictures of like women on the beach in like whatever it was 1970 something and then you can look at pictures from a year before they were taken over by in that case the taliban and a year after and it's like it's like a cloud just oh it's the dark ages it's nuts yeah it's nuts and it's crazy shit but the the main issue that people are obviously focused on internationally right now is in uk. And that's another thing that I'm sure is quite relevant to you because they are a former Soviet bloc country.

They are on the border of Russia and you dealt in nuclear proliferation. So this is certainly something I'm sure you had work going on in at least in that area. So, you know, I find myself making very few friends on this issue because i find there to be at least the people who get attention are in one of two camps they are either in camp ukraine can do no wrong we should send them money forever and they're completely the the government's great everything's hunky-dory and then the other side is like you know ukraine actually sucks completely this is a total corrupt state russia's not that bad which there are some people who actually do say that which is kind of wild to me and you know we should

never send shit and we need to get out of there i think as with most things in life the answer is somewhere in the middle of that and probably just to be transparent where i stand is that i've thought putin's like a huge problem for a very long time and people didn't take him seriously and it's kind of like old news to me when people are out there actually talking about it now because i'm like well there's i know other people who've been saying this for years and i've been saying it too not that anyone cares what i think but you know what they did here to me is absolutely an illegal invasion i don't buy the argument that like oh well nato was threatening them i could buy the argument that nato was careless and perhaps a little brazen the idea that they're going to start almost a genocidal type invasion though is in no way on a parallel playing field to me i just don't

buy that argument at all and i think that it's a problem if russia overtakes ukraine and and now we set up some form of a worse iron curtain again at the same time i also do think that the amount of money where blanket checks sending to ukraine is at least worth asking questions like okay how long is that going to go on and i do think that there's certainly been questions about corruption in Ukraine that existed before this issue that I worry about those people within, say, their government or around their government who have been a part of some not so great things are going to, in the power vacuum here, seize control. And there's just a lot going on there. So, where do you, let's just start with like where do you stand on the issue? How do you see how things are going so far and what do you think is a good realistic outcome here for not just Ukraine but the world? But I'm not saying the Ukrainians are blameless in everything that they've done. Yes, there is a certain degree of corruption.

But what Putin has done in Ukraine is very similar to what Hitler did in the Sudetenland and in Austria, basically moving in. And if we try and accommodate him, he will not stop. He will take that as a sign of weakness in the West. And the next countries that will be threatened would be like the Baltic countries, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, that used to be – had been for 60 or 70 years part of the Soviet Union by force. That's why Sweden and Finland have decided to join NATO. These were two absolutely neutral countries. And Putin has achieved 180 degrees opposite from what he had hoped to achieve. He complains about NATO encirclement. Well, he just created two more NATO members by having Finland and Sweden join the alliance. But I think – okay, I'm concerned, too.

How much money do we give to the Ukrainians? I think we need to supply them with basically as much as we can to stop this aggression. I'm not arguing we don't give them nuclear weapons, no. But I think as much conventional weapons as we can supply the Ukrainians is in our collective western interests. Not that we want to invade Russia. We don't. The Russians have this paranoid feeling that that's what we're after. We're not. I could give a damn about what goes on in Russia. But I'm very concerned about the Ukrainians. And I know CIA has worked with the Ukrainians. We've

been working with them for years. The Ukrainians realized that they were threatened. We saw the Crimea taken over a few years ago. And now,, and now Putin has decided he wants to leave his legacy of taking over basically most of the rest of Ukraine. Now, how this plays out, I don't know. I don't think we ought to show weak knees to the Ukrainians. We ought to basically let Zelensky, President Zelensky and his senior advisors make the decision. If they want to negotiate with the Russians, it's got to be their decision. And at some point, maybe if they pushed them back out of those regions in the eastern part of the country to a point where they felt like they could have a ceasefire, then it may not be that they would permanently legalize those boundaries, but they could have at least a ceasefire, then it may not be that they would permanently, you know, legalize those boundaries, but they could have at least a ceasefire. Kind of what happened in Korea in the

Korean War. We pushed them back, you know, they would all the way to China and then the Chinese invaded and we ended up stabilizing around the 38th parallel. Now, I don't know if that's what's going to happen. It's going to be terrible this winter. The Russians have destroyed a lot of the Ukrainian infrastructure, power stations, and things like that. It's going to be a hard winter for the Ukrainians. And frankly, it's going to be a hard winter for a lot of the Europeans because the gas is being cut off. The Europeans should never have gotten as dependent upon Russian gas. How stupid is that to be dependent on an unreliable partner like the russians even you know the the germans have traditionally been against nuclear power i bet you they're

wishing they had nuclear power plants now yeah yeah there's there's there was so much short-sightedness with that because i think it seems to me just looking at it from the outside, there was some sort of excitement about dealing with a completely new Russia in the 90s and 2000s. And that was so naive. So naive. It's crazy. There were a few months in there maybe, and we all had hopes that they would rejoin – or not rejoin, but join the West in essence. But they don't share our values many times. They don't. I'm not saying we should not be aggressive against them. We don't need any Russian territory. We don't want that. They don't believe it, but we really don't. And they can't

stand the fact that all of their former allies, like Bulgaria and Romania and Poland, these are all NATO allies now. They're NATO members. They can't stand the fact that they lost the Cold War. Yeah. I mean, do you take any comfort in the fact that it does appear here Putin's going to be dead within a few years? God, I hope so. Yeah, I mean, he's sick as all hell well yeah i mean i've i've

thought one way to resolve this this situation is either that or a coup d'etat and the kremlin so who takes over though that's the question that's true i mean you could go from bad to worse you could but i think people would be so relieved that there would be a way to maybe withdraw their troops but now you have to change their constitution and stuff again too because he changed all that People would be so relieved that there would be a way to maybe withdraw their troops. But now you have to change their constitution and stuff again, too, because he changed all that. I mean, it seems so simple, like how – Yeah, but – okay, that's their internal issue. Right. They need to – we can't force American democracy.

Yes. We've learned this. That's right. We can't force it. Look at what happened in Iraq. That's damn right. People are not interested, most of them, in becoming American Democrats or Republicans. They're not.

I appreciate you saying that too because I think that's an argument a lot of people go to. Like, oh, we just think we're going to put our values on people because that is one thing we have respectfully not been good at, especially over the past few decades. I would agree. In fact, I'm trying to think of a single time we've succeeded. There isn't one. I don't think so. No. I mean, every time we go in somewhere, it's like, oh, they'll just take on what we think.

And that's not how it works because people like to make their own decisions. interests around this war that you know I find myself being more and more reserved on on things that I'm even willing to bring up because I'm like I don't know you know even with videos of stuff I'm like how can I know where this is sourced or where it's from because we live in a different world now where everyone's got a goddamn camera and everyone's got access to social media and they can manipulate things exactly exactly so I think there are some narratives forming that aren't the best but when you talk about it being ukraine's decision here's one reason that that doesn't make sense to me their gdp i'm not looking at it right now but i believe it is in the the neighborhood of 200 billion dollars a year as ukraine's full gdp as a country ours is in the neighborhood of 19 20 trillion we've given them 12 figures worth of money so far it's been less

than a year if we're giving and it's other countries giving them money too in in the west too like if we're giving them that much money, how can we not have a say? Not that I want us to have a say or like think that that's right. If you're sitting in the Oval Office, not just the president, and you're people in the White House, you are advisors in the CIA, the NSA, stuff like that. How can you say that we don't have a say in that decision when we're the we are the reason that they have been able to have the support to put on the fight that they have we may be having that discussion privately with them but we should never publicly make statements like that to give aid and comfort to the russians fair to say that the americans now have weak knees so they may be having discussions

you know like okay how much more do you need? We've got to have some limits on this, things like that. But that would be a very, you know, private discussion with President Zelensky and his close advisors and with our Western folks, you know, basically the Americans, the Brits, and everybody else in the world that's supporting the Ukrainians. That has to be private. That's a great answer. That completely clears that up for me because that tells me that this is a little bit of a – naturally so. In the world, it's a little bit of a PR stance in a way.

I get that completely. So I hope that is the case. But the other thing that happened there recently was you had the Progressive House caucus put forth a letter to Biden that was leaked. It was about a page and a half long where – and I'm summarizing here, but people can Google the letter and read it. It's up there. where essentially what they said is fully support Ukraine, have loved supporting them, have supported all the financial measures so far and everything, and we would like to see them get a win. get their lines back to February 1st negotiate a ceasefire de-escalate this nuclear problem and at least like and they didn't say this part in the letter but maybe create yourself a little situation where you can wait out Putin dying now from natural causes as he is sick and as this progressive house caucus

we believe that we should at least explore that from our seat in the United States here. That letter the next day was then suddenly retracted and they said, oh, a staffer leaked it, which, sorry, that's 100% not true. Someone like you went and knocked them on the shoulder and said, you guys are going to take that back. And my question is, you may have just answered it with your previous answer, but is that strictly because we are focused on that like PR of not saying that publicly versus doing it privately? Or is it because they don't want that and they're trying to escalate it? I'm sure that's what it is, Julian. I can imagine President Biden's discomfort.

Here, members of his own party are criticizing our stance on Ukraine. That's not what we need. In fact, both parties should be bipartisan support for stopping Putin's aggression in Ukraine. I don't know if... You may recall in the late 30s, and actually 1940, the America First folks,

they were sympathetic to hitler they wanted to be accommodationists make concessions to hitler took the words out of my mouth so yeah that's what i was just going to say because and this is this is the one place i'm constantly like checking myself with that because we all know the neville chamberlain story and that one piece in our time right yeah well hitler got peace piece of this a piece of that pretty soon soon he had a piece of everything right so there it it always feels like a catch-22 to me because i don't want to rush to make everyone out to be on a power level of hitler forget their psychology like putin is a total scumbag and i think he's on a very similar trajectory in that way to hitler but in the

interest of like safety of the world especially when we have weapons of mass destruction everywhere i don't try to rush i do my best not to rush to say this person is the same threat as hitler but i also don't want to be the guy that then says this time the Chamberlain method will work. You see what I'm saying? I understand. I understand. I mean the Hitler meme becomes artificial, becomes cheap. Yes.

You say that. It's overused. But there are parallels. You know Mark Twain said history may not rhyme, or history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I think there's a certain amount of, you can see parallels. It's human nature again. Yeah, it's a great quote, and it is, that's something I think about a lot, is the patterns of history. I don't know, have you ever, have you ever read the book The Fourth Turning?

No. Very, very interesting concept. It was written by two sociologist historians in the 1990s. And one of the ironic things about even great historians is that most of the time they're some of the worst predictors of the future and i think it has to do with the fact that they spend so much time looking at things and knowing things inside now as to what happened that this psychological bias comes in where they don't realize that because they know so much they're convincing themselves that they can analyze how the chess pieces are going to fall next while injecting their own like opinions from what they learned into it what these guys did in 1996 is

they basically just said oh shit here's some patterns and this is all we're going to do we're going to take that pattern we're going to lift it right here and just we're not going to go beyond that but that's roughly how things will go in the future. And I don't – I've talked about it on other podcasts. I don't want to spend like 10 minutes explaining it. But essentially they – at the highest level, they broke down things into these roughly 21, 22-year time periods to represent generations. like each time period has a name and they named each of the say four dominant age levels age bracket generations of people that exist during each of those periods on a constant cycle and they broke down you know at least the last 300 years into these 80 85 year cycles where you see that things follow a similar pattern so that a high level example that's easy,

Revolutionary War, 1776, roughly to 1783. Roughly 80 years later, 80 to 85, you have the Civil War, 61 to 65. 80 years later, you have Pearl Harbor and World War II. And 80 years after that, you run into smack dab right where we are right now that begins with coronavirus and god knows what the hell else is coming knock on wood hopefully some things are going to break here but they even have it where you had the global financial crisis which they predicted in this book they said it would happen between they didn't say how they didn't try to analyze what but they said between 05 and 2010 because 80 years before that, in 1929, you had the stock market crash and everything. So they broke down these behavioral patterns that we as collective humans have over time. some sociopaths doing things around the world like Putin and things do feel more fragile than

they ever have in my lifetime including not that I was old enough to understand but looking back on it including like right after 9-11 like that was pretty bad but we felt like we knew what we were dealing with and we had a lot of alignment in other places agreed so you know when when you look at at a place like Russia attacking a smaller country and as you've already said today, Russia has an insanely large nuclear arsenal and they have a maniacal guy running their country who's probably not long for this world. Like how much do you sit up at night worried about not just like a bomb coming here but going somewhere else in Europe or going to some ally country or killing millions of people? Like do you think that's extremely realistic or do you think a lot of that is like fear-mongering? I think everything's relative. We have a very dear friend who's our neighbor next door. She's a British diplomat. Spent a lot of time

with her during the pandemic where we were kind of in our own little cell, you know, our own, you know, my wife and I would have our dear friend Lois come over for dinner. And we remarked one time that as bad as the pandemic seemed, it's not the London Blitz where Germany was launching buzz bombs and bombing the hell out of England. So it's all, and that was only back in the 19, you know, 1940, 41. It's not the London Blitz. So as bad as things are, you know, what, over a million Americans have died from the pandemic, from coronavirus. I realize that. But every year we have many tens of thousands or maybe more die from the flu and other things that are there. So you said earlier, Julian, the media tends to hype things.

That's what sells podcasts. It's what sells newspapers. It's what sells all of these blogs and stuff like that. They get a sponsor and they want to make it interesting. Interesting usually means death and destruction yes so you accentuate that how often do you see a really good news story you know come along and they really accentuate that not not rare not not very often as it doesn't i mean fear sells and it doesn't inspire the need to be glued to it yeah so it doesn't keep me up at night maybe maybe that's one reason

why i write my novels so as i can create my own little world well it sounds blasphemous but there's no other way you can be as close to being god as being an author creating characters yeah and the plot line in the story that would be odd in fact, none of us really exist. We're just characters in a plot that some super being has created. Yeah. I mean, look, it makes me feel better for you to revert to having to go to your fictional world to do that because you've seen this up close. I just don't think... Some of my friends worry about the stock market. I've seen the stock market go up and then drop like it wouldn't. I'm in for the long term you know i'm not going to worry about it yeah it's a good look i think that's a really good attitude to have but to your point i mean i always use the steven pinker example

the the harvard psychologist he talks about he actually writes his works are often on how great things are like he writes about backing it with statistics about how we have constantly been at the best time in human history. And one of the examples he used in I think the book Enlightenment Now is he talked about moms against drunk driving. And he said now when you see moms who are part of that group, obviously they lost a child to a drunk driver. It's extremely sad and it is a problem. Of course, we feel awful for them and of course they want to solve the problem. But he said on January 1st every year when they send their first email of the year, they don't send the email that says, hey, guys, great work last year. We have drunk driving accidents down 20% in the country. We're making headway. Donate here. They send the email that says in the last week, 370 people were killed in a drunk driving accident. The problem persists. It's enormous, and we have to help. You have to donate right now. Donate here.

Right. And it's like, I get that, but how does that exacerbate on everything we do? Well, you know, Warren Buffett has made billions of dollars basically because he's an optimist. Yeah. He's an optimist. He knows that over time, he's going to make money. And you shouldn't be too greedy. One of the most famous financiers of the 20th century was a guy named Bernard Baruch.

And he was once asked the secret of his financial success. And he said, I always sold too soon. So I think, and for the long term, I'm not discounting the threats that disease, war, everything else presents to us. But look at how much our lives or our life expectancies have increased dramatically just since World War II. And we have robotics, we have artificial intelligence, other things

actually are creating a lot of labor-saving devices. We developed a vaccine for COVID in absolutely rapid time. Before, it usually took five or six years to develop vaccines. This was done Operation Warp Speed. It really was at warp speed. One of my dear friends, Dr. Bob Kadlec, spearheaded that at Health and Human Services. And I said, Americans should be down on their knees thanking God for Bob Kadlec and his people for getting those vaccines out to us. Yeah, we lost a million people. We could have lost five or six million if it hadn't been for them. Yeah, and I think that obviously that's a prime example of things where the media formed different ends,

very opposite ends of the spectrum to drive people to fight with each other. Let me give you a great example. This is just hypothesizing, but let's suppose that in the next five or six years, they develop some techniques for curing cancer. Okay. How many lives that would save? And then you're going to have some people thinking, yeah, but we're going to have overpopulation and hunger and famine. So they're always going to find something to complain about. Yeah. And I just saw someone tweeted out the other, I think Pomp tweeted out the other day, they're just on that topic. The Hungarian government is now creating tax incentives for mothers who have at least four children. They never have to pay income tax again.

So they're actually trying to increase their population. Well, actually, and the Chinese went from the one-child policy to now at least two children because they have a grain population. It's predominantly male because back then if you had one child, if it wasn't a boy, frequently they killed. It was infanticide. I'm not kidding you. Really?

Oh, yeah, because it's very important in some parts of the world, China, that you have a male child. And so there was a certain degree of not government-supported infanticide. But guess what? We've got a lot more males in China than we do females. And they're finding that as the population age, they need people to support that aging population. They don't have it. Japan, it's worse. Yeah, Japan's kind of really bad, but in China now

You'd think country with 1.3 billion people. Well, they need somebody to support those folks. They would kill Well, some would kill a infant daughter just because they wanted one a boy. Holy shit Yeah That's some I'm not saying that was common but it was not unheard of that's scary for obvious reasons but on on that note with china there's some very interesting things happening over there right now with which i didn't plan because you and i scheduled two months ago but last month or six weeks ago eight weeks ago whatever it was you had seen G have a public display of his power by having a hujintau ushered out of the people's

Congress yes exactly it was it was shameful yeah but I mean it happened and he sat there and that was his predecessor right right and basically they it didn't quite look like but he looked like he was almost strong-armed out of the hall i would say he was yeah okay and it's like at least it looked that way yeah well one of my good friends dr ken de clava he's a does a lot of leadership profiles and he made the same observation yeah so it just that that whole scene was bizarre because g was just sitting there calm as cucumber this guy's getting yanked out of his chair and everything and no one andy bustamante pointed out no one else looked at him as he went by isn't that shameful yeah so it's like a show of power so you would you would think you see that and you're like

oh wow he's no they're all there i'm not watching this yeah you would think looking at that like oh wow chinese communist party is really they're in control over there and now you see the people finally rising up and the the thing i've always said to people over the past few years when this topic comes up is i'm like it's always something like high six percentages of the of the chinese population so less than 10 of the population is a card carrying member of the communist substantially fewer than 10 that's right and you said there's 1.3 billion people there right right so i always make the point you've got to separate that the people there from that government absolutely in fact one of my best friends who was the chief of station, our CIA chief of station in Beijing, he said if you want to recruit a Chinese, you never, ever criticize the Chinese people.

But you can say things about the Chinese Communist Party because he says, frankly, a lot of them can't stand the party. Right. But you don't criticize Chinese culture, Chinese people. They're very proud of their culture, as they should be. But it's the Chinese Communist Party. There's a big difference. So you see right now a prime example of that because they've had this crazy level of like zero COVID policy and everything where they're building – I can put the video in the corner. But they're building like cities of like quarantine communities it's really like orwellian sick level

shit and as we're sitting here talking now these videos that are also put in the corner are showing the people or at least a subset of them are starting to fight back right and my friend david satter who was in here and i'm going to have him in here again danny had him in as well he he was the guy who blew the whistle on putin in 1999 he is the only reporter journalist as of like at least the beginning of this war after it happened he is the only journalist from not from Russia who has ever been kicked out of post-soviet Russia and he was actually kicked out of pre end of Soviet you say that's a badge of honor it is a badge of honor so he really you know he's the guy who was blowing the whistle on Putin blowing up

his own people in 99 the guy lit Venenko who was murdered in London he was the Russian guy doing it he was killed David was the Russian guy doing it. He was killed. David was the US guy doing it. So when I hear him talk about the fall of the Soviet bloc. Of which he's one of the preeminent world historians on it. He mentions how it was 15% of the Soviet population was responsible for doing that. 15% of the Russian people were able to topple that thing. So I look at China and I go you're telling me 93% of these people of 1.3 billion aren't in this party. And I start seeing videos like this. And maybe it's wishful thinking. I want you to correct me if it is. But like, I start thinking to myself, oh, shit, this might people, not a single Chinese who lives in the People's Republic of China has ever won the Nobel Prize. But a lot of ethnic Chinese who live in America and in the West have won the Nobel Prize.

You know, we have a tremendous brain drain from China of them coming here. I mean, and that's our strength. We get very smart people here. It's one of the strengths of America. Not just the Chinese, but we get the Iranians. We get other people that cannot stand their home governments, and they come here and they create and do remarkable things. I agree, and I've always said, like, you know,

why don't we pick that drain up? You know what I mean? We should. We should be more accepting of really bright, hardworking immigrants coming in. We need them. We need them. We have a labor issue right now. Yeah. It helps us.

You get smart people too. It's like everybody wants that. Absolutely. that you know absolutely so the other question there is though how much do you worry about those who are then working on behalf of china or undercover like how do we assess that it is a concern julian but it's a very small percentage of the people if if you have a hundred chinese there may be one or two that are either consciously or subconsciously working on behalf of China, maybe even far fewer than that. I mean, the Chinese government has control over them,

their families back in China and things. So you may get some folks who are stealing technology, stealing intellectual property. Absolutely, it goes on all the time. The Chinese are mounting human wave attacks at us, stealing technology. My friends in the FBI are overwhelmed. I said, it's almost like those Korean War movies you see where Chinese are just coming at you in hordes. It's a little bit of an exaggeration, but they are stealing technology right and left.

But that's a very, very, very small percentage. And yet there are people who have immigrated from china here uh our former secretary of energy was ethnic chinese he didn't immigrate here he was born here but what i'm saying is we have a lot of these bright bright scientists that have come from china or from other from india from pakistan from other places that we need these people we need their intellectual capital yeah yeah and i that does that makes me happy to hear that you you see it as a very small percentage of that happening because i do feel like we were smart enough that we can have some decent systems in place to be able to catch a lot of that too i think we gain a lot more than we lose let me put it that way if if out of that 100, 99 are contributing

to America, contributing to our industry, to our scientific advancement, the small one or less than 1% that where we get stolen, I think we can, that's just something we're going to have to take as the cost of doing business. Well, what about the place where I really have the concern less than that, or more than that, I should say, is when I look at the financial ties. So even recently, a week or two ago, you had Apple. It came out, American company obviously, who's very reliant on Chinese supply chains and the Chinese market for their products apple released a new software update as these protests were ramping up where they made it more difficult for airdrop to occur because what was happening is the chinese protesters the citizens were using airdrop to get information to each other to get around i guess

like i'm going to use some of the wrong terminology here but some of the firewalls that the Chinese government was setting up. So when I see our corporations playing for team CCP, that's concerning. Yeah. I mean, there's the Chinese word to kowtow. Well, Apple kowtowed to the PRC just to boost their sales. They shouldn't be doing that. I'm not a big fan of Elon Musk. For many years, I've thought he was a visionary. I think lately he's been pretty erratic. But I do recall that he was sponsoring in some countries, you know, more satellite transmissions and things like that. That's good. Yeah. American industry should be promoting democracies as much as they can.

But they shouldn't be kowtowing to some authoritarian or torrent tyrannical government the problem is the same wealthy individuals who come from china to put money in our stock market to support our companies also control the ability to sell that stuff and it's not just them it's regular investor like you and me who puts money in companies we do it with the idea that the stock's going to go up and not a lot of people unfortunately think like you or think like me which is when i buy some i don't look at it again like whatever i believe in it right most people they're in and out you're like you're like woody allen he said i just invest my money until it's gone right right yeah might as well say that right so you know seeing as a lot of people aren't like that and they're more

behaviorally inclined to react to things and move markets, these companies are pressured with that quarterly report to have to hit a certain number. And when they don't, the people who make those reports are done. They can get fired and replaced. There's talk right now that Meta is going to replace Zuckerberg who just had a bad quarterly report. So I'm not excusing what they do. Trust me. I'm the one who brought it up. It's a huge concern to me.

But how do we – I feel like we have to change the system in some way to make it even a little more advantageous for companies so that they don't have to just chase the dollar at all costs at all times. I'm not sure how you do that. I don't know either. Ideally, that sounds great. I have these discussions with some of my friends sometimes, but I really, being basically a libertarian, I kind of want to keep my hands off the market as much as possible. But in the case of Apple, for example, there are Apple shareholders who can have a lot of stock that ought to be making protests to their chairman, saying, you know, we need to be supporting these people in China, not doing this, not bowing down just because of the bottom line.

Are they the place that you, over the long haul, like say the next long haul, but the next 10 to 15 years, you have the most concern about as an adversary the chinese yes yes and is that because of the size of their gdp and the politics and in their government simply they've made rapid advances in their military spheres i mean supposedly i don't have any hard evidence about this but in certain technologies like hypersonic missiles and things like that they're actually supposed to be ahead of us. There's other things that they're doing. Supercomputers, they always control some of the biggest and fastest supercomputers in the world. So I am concerned. Am I scared silly of? No, I'm not. Why? I'm just not. I have, again, I'm basically an optimist. I always see the glass is half full, not half empty.

And I think enough smart Chinese actually eventually will get tired of the system, just like we were discussing earlier in this program about the Iranians and maybe the Russians who, you know, they've gotten some influence from the West. They see that, you know, to be in a free society is actually a very good thing. Are you concerned about the economic investment that the Chinese have made in so many countries around the world where they effectively, you know, as I always use this one example because it's simple, like they own the ports in Greece. In Africa, they basically own almost whole African countries. Yeah, it's very concerning. I'm not sure what we can do about it. But yeah, they've basically bought themselves friends and supporters. They're Belt and Road Initiative where they're going in and investing a lot.

We just have to make these countries aware of it that you're playing with fire. Yeah. these countries aware of it that you're playing with fire yeah yeah it's uh it's a topic that i keep on trying to learn more and more about because it it does concern me and there's a lot to be concerned about right now to be honest with you it's a weird time but i know we're coming up on the end here because i got to get you out of here to get you home but one last thing i and i heard you tell this story on concrete but for our listeners out there who didn't hear that episode, how did you get the name Mad Dog as a nickname? In 1989, I was running in the big park in Paris, the Bois de Boulogne. It's maybe even bigger than Central Park.

It's very big. And I've been a runner since 1975. And so every morning I would go running in the Bois de Boulogne. And I was running through an area and I passed a German shepherd. No sound comes from the German shepherd. I just ran maybe within 10 yards of it. I got about another 10, 15 yards when I felt the most excruciating pain in my right leg. And basically this German shepherd now was exerting God knows how many thousands of pounds per square inch into my leg and its jaws. And I jerked my leg out of its jaws and tried to run, but you're not going to outrun a dog. And he came after me.

And so I picked up a big branch and beat him over the head with that. And then I limped home, ran home, bleeding profusely, went into the embassy and they immediately gave me tetanus shots. But then because of the erratic nature of the dog, no barking or anything until I, after I was attacked, they said, you know, there's a fair chance that that dog was rabid. You need to go to the Pasteur Institute, Pasteur Institute in Paris. Louis Pasteur had founded that back in the 1800s, and they developed the rabies vaccine.

There's a high chance that that dog has rabies. And I'd even gone around the park later with a French cop trying to find the dog so we could definitively determine if it was rabbit or not. Couldn't find the dog, of course. How fast does rabies set in? Well, that's what I'm going to explain to you. So I go to the Pasteur Institute. French doctor was so kind.

And I was fearing that I was going to get 21 shots in the belly, which was what I'd always heard, how they treat rabies. He said, oh, no, they treat rabies, you know. He said, oh, no, monsieur. He says, you know, we're the Pasteur Institute. We developed this vaccine. He says, today you're going to get a shot in each arm. Next week you're going to come back and I'm going to give you a shot in this arm. A week after that I'm going to give you a shot in this arm.

So four shots. Truthfully, they were less painful than the tetanus shot I'd had earlier that day in the embassy. And the physician told me, he said, as long as you get those shots within 30 days of having been bitten by a rabid animal. And he said, by the way, we are surrounded by rabies in the suburbs north of Paris. A lot of times the hookers who are in the Bois, in the Bois de Boulogne, they will bring a dog for protection. And on the weekends, they'll go out to the suburbs and the dog is bitten and becomes rabid. So he says, there's a high chance you do have that virus. But if you get this vaccine, you'll be fine. He said, if you don't get the vaccine within 30 days, you will go progressively mad and you will die the most horrible death. Only one person to their their knowledge in history, has ever survived rabies.

So at that time, I was having some issues with people back home, Langley, and so I decided to make a list of all the people that I was going to bite if I got rabies. And so therefore, my nickname was dog that is that's a pretty epic story right there and it just stuck it's stuck do your friends like call you mad oh they do yeah all the time all the time yeah that's my nickname they frequently people call me that yeah it's an incredible name yeah it's because of my sweet, tender nature. Yeah, it is like a weird paradox, too. It is.

You have the good draw to you. But there is so much we did not get to today that I would love to get to. So I'm going to have to have you in again. Like so many questions of stuff you were bringing up. But I really, really enjoyed this. And getting the perspectives you have also having some time now having been out of the game. Air quotes there, but having some time away from that to now break down the things going on around the world. It's pretty cool because I think based on your experiences, you have to be a pretty amazing analyst for especially some of the specific countries we're dealing with right now that are huge problems. So thank you again for coming through here to share that with everybody. My pleasure, Julian. It was a real delight to be on your program.

Well, we'll do it again. And before we get out of here, one more time, we got In the Twinkling of an Eye is the most recent one. What was the first one called again? Living Lies. Living Lies. And that's about the Iranian nuclear weapons program and how we penetrate it. And I'll let you – I don't want to steal the thunder from my book or have a plot divulgence. But I think you'd enjoy both of them. Are we going to get these things developed into a little series or something? I have had some people who've approached me about streaming series of these books. And if anybody out there knows someone that's interested i'd be happy to chat about it because i actually wrote these books like in scenes of a movie in my head yeah they're

always looking for stuff like that too so yeah we got to figure that out i think that'd be really good but the link is in the description for everyone to get those and then when you come out with the third book after the cia approves for sure we'll have you on after that one but thank you again and i look forward to having you in somewhere down the line. Thanks, Julian. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought.

Get back to me. Peace.