The Team House - Army Intel Case Officer & Editor of SpyTalk | Jeff Stein | Ep. 181

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Jeff Stein is the editor-in-chief of SpyTalk, a newsletter covering U.S. intelligence, defense and foreign policy, on the Substack platform. Previously, he was the SpyTalk columnist (and national security correspondent) at Newsweek, and before that, the SpyTalk blogger at The Washington Post. From 2002 to 2009, he was the founding editor of CQ/Homeland Security, and later national security editor at Congressional Quarterly, where he first launched his SpyTalk column. He had already covered the spy agencies and national policy topics for decades. He has also written three books and hundreds of news articles, opinion pieces and book reviews for a wide array of magazines and newspapers. He has also made numerous television and radio appearances. Today's Sponsor:   Athetic Greens ⬇️ https://athleticgreens.com/TEAMHOUSE If you’re looking for a simpler and cost-effective supplement routine, Athletic Greens is giving you a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase.  Go to:⬇️ https://athleticgreens.com/TEAMHOUSE  Check it out! Private Internet Access VPN (PIA VPN)⬇️  Head to, https://PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE and get an 83% discount. Seriously… 83%! That’s just $2.03 a month, and you also get 4 extra months completely free. But you MUST go to PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE for a truly private digital life!  ⬇️ https://PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #spytalk #covertoperations #specialoperationsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Teamhouse know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our team house. and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page, and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review,

why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the team house, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey, good evening, everyone. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. This is episode 181 of the Team House. We're here tonight with our guest, Jeff Stein.

Jeff served in Vietnam as a case officer, an Army case officer in Danang. And he has been a long time national security investigative journalist. He is the editor of Spy Talk. You guys can find it out there right now. Go subscribe to it. There's not just Jeff, but a whole series of journalists. and experts, subject matter experts that write for the website on all sorts of national security issues on defense, espionage, all kinds of cool stuff. People who watch this podcast or listen to it

will definitely get a kick out of the kind of work that Jeff and his colleagues do. So, Jeff, thank you for joining us on a Friday evening. I couldn't be anywhere else. Where would I be except with you guys? So, Jeff, I'd like to kind of start off by asking you to tell us your origin story, kind of about your upbringing and what took you towards service in the military, especially during the Vietnam years. Well, those two are linked, as they often are. I grew up in a kind of a Republican home, a moderate Republican.

We didn't have moderate. They were just Republicans. They were big admirers of Rockefeller in that wing of the. Republican Party. Anyway, they were a Republican and family. And when you grew up in that era, you know, when you got your draft notice, you kind of went, you know, I never had a thought. I really had informed a hard opinion that early on in the Vietnam War about it, except that, you know, was pretty odd what was going on over there. But my dad had been in the Navy, my uncle had been in the Navy. All my relatives had done military service. My brother had done his two years in the Army.

So it was kind of death taxes in the Army You did it You did your two years And you got out and went on with your life It was just it was a universal draft back then Which people under 40 probably don't know much about Or what it was like to live with that But it was just part of your life

You had to do your military service and move on It wasn't until later Like 68 and so on Especially 69 when there was widespread resistance To the draft because of the Vietnam War So anyway, you know, I did sort of little feints and half-hearted maneuvers to not be drafted. But I just tested the system too much. I went down to Martha's Vineyard.

I was playing in a folk trio. That was quite an era. And I got my draft notice. I threw away the first one, but then the second one, they said, no, we're serious. We're going to arrest you if you don't show up. So anyway, I had a. this good friend of mine who I'm going to name because he might be watching Bob Cooper in Rhode Island, he was in Army counterintelligence.

And I asked him for advice. He says, I can get you into it. I can help get you into intelligence. So you can avoid the draft because the draft then at that point in late 66, early 67, you were pretty much guaranteed to go straight into the infantry in Vietnam, the big muddy. and I didn't like, I like to say, I didn't even like camping, so I knew I would be no good at the art, as a grunt. So anyway, so I managed to elude the draft board and get into intelligence, which meant I'd sign up for an extra year. But if it kept me out of the big money, that was fine.

So I went into, I had no real idea what it was going to be, some kind of spooky business. I mean, the CIA and all that stuff had been written about back then. There was the CIA, the invisible government, I think it was called. It was a book on it. But that was about it. There wasn't much written about it. So I didn't really know what I was getting into until the first day of class. Even to this day, Jeff, I don't think people really understand that the Army has case officers,

that the Army has people who do similar things in the intelligence field. Yeah. Well, it's now a career branch, I think. in the Army. It wasn't when I was in. But anyway, you know, the first day of class, the school was then at Fort Hallibird. And let me turn off the alerts. Okay. So the first day, they said they pulled down in the blinds and put a big red secret sign on the wall and said, this is the only thing you can volunteer for. in the Army and get out of it if you change your mind after what we've told you. And so they explain we're going to be taught espionage.

And some people find that immoral, unethical, distasteful, or whatever. Because you're going to be involved in illegal activities. Activities that are illegal when they're practiced in foreign countries. So if you want out, you know, raise your hand. You could leave. And so one guy did raise his hand at the end, and he got out. Later, you know, he was around the base for several weeks more before he got his transfer. It turns out he went into ballistic missiles a lot more, a lot more ethical.

Anyway, it was a boy's life. You learn how to do all the spy stuff, you know, invisible writing and secret, you know, micro cameras and dead drops and brush passes and all the stuff of espionage. You get to learn that stuff and carry out an exercise in which started in a submarine in Long Island Sound, paddling ashore, you know, then going on my mission, one of my classmates acted as a case office for me, sent me on a mission. It turned out to Minneapolis to photograph a power station and to contact a stay behind agent, somebody playing the role of a stay behind. And then I sent a classmate on a mission. It was just fascinating. It was all the training was predicated on, you know, you would go to Berlin or something, you know, some European place. Did it surprise you at all now?

Had little to do with Vietnam. Did it surprise you at all that you took to the training and were so excited about it, you know, being almost this erstwhile draft dodger? They do this vetting, you know, all these personality tests on you. and they know what they're looking for. And they must have found something slippery in my character. You know, and said, this guy's for us. At the time, was this a relatively new program for the Army? And were you tied in with the CIA at that time?

Or was it kind of its own separate thing? Well, I end up being tied in with him. But, you know, there was the World War II era OSS, you know, it was essentially, it was a military service, right? It had arms length, distance from the Army, but it was essentially a military service doing stay behind operations,

sabotage and spying in World War II. And then the military services started, particularly the Army, started doing its own spying missions during the Korean War. And then in Vietnam, the Green Berets were doing some espionage and stay behind operations in concert with CIA

in the very early 60s, late 50s, early 60s, I operated another level of secrecy in Vietnam. It's called a unilateral collection operation. We didn't identify ourselves to the South Vietnamese authorities. We considered them

every bit as much of the enemy as the communist because we knew they were infiltrated by the communists. and we wanted to do our own operation. So I took over an ongoing operation that was targeting the headquarters of North Vietnamese forces in the South. And I had one principal agent I worked through, and he had subagents who were rice peddlers and woodcutters and stuff like that, who would work or merchants who would be operating in areas controlled by the communists, and they would come back and report back on pretty strictly military intelligence. You know, the 141st North Vietnamese Steel Regiment is encamped at such and such coordinates,

and they have such and such and such weapons, and they are training to do such and such and their uniforms are such and such, or insignia and so on. It was pretty strict military intelligence, but about six months in, I was pressed to do more political intelligence on the communist, underground. And that's when I got caught up in a lot of cross currents, because there were a number of political factions in South Vietnam. But one of the main customers for that information was the CIA, the Phoenix program. Right. And so I got to know, in fact, because I was a total rookie at this, you know, in all the tradescraft and trade craft. And so on. And I would be nervous going out to meet my agent, you know, in some shady hotel room someplace, you know, doing all the counter surveillance and all that kind of stuff. And so I got to know the CIA base chief pretty well. And I would drink cognac on his balcony at night. It would be a bunch of Air America pilots coming through. And I knew so. I knew a lot of the secret air operations that were going on in Laos at the time.

And this guy taught me tradecraft. You know, he was kind of my muse and gave me a lot of guidance. But through official channels, I was providing political information to the Phoenix program. And I discovered something pretty upsetting and startling in that regard, because I would get their after-action reports. And I saw some bulletins from inside the organization that they had been penetrated by the communists. No surprise. But it was pretty startling at that time.

because I thought it might, you know, implicate me and my safety. So I worked closely with CIA. I got to know a number of CIA people, and that's where I first met Frank Snepp, actually, and encountered him years later in a congressional hearing room when he did whistleblowing about CIA screwups during the evacuation of Saigon. And so anyway, it was a spy's life. It was really interesting,

And the big takeaway for me was that I got very familiar with what was called later on, became known as the clandestine mentality. And there really is such a thing as the clandestine mentality. I suppose it's like a cop mentality or maybe even a baker's mentality, you know, a certain way of looking at the world. You become, it takes a while. It took me, even with my limited experience, it took me years to get used to not looking for suspicious things around me.

And, of course, then I went into journalism eventually, and there are certain interviewing techniques and so on that were applicable. That gave me a leg up, I think, in terms of reporting on intelligence, because I knew the mindset of the people I was talking to, and they respected me from my experience. Could you tell us a little bit about that transitional experience, Jeff? You finished your mandatory time in Vietnam, and I was reading about how you you, you know, grew to have some real misgivings about the conflict in general. And so what was it like kind of leaving Vietnam, leaving the military?

What was, how did you, how, and what was it like transitioning into journalism? Well, like a lot of veterans, you just want to get on with your life, you know, when you get out. And I did. I had to go back to college and finish up to get my degree because I had dropped out of college, which is why I got drafted or was going to be drafted in the first place. You know, I was playing in a band in Martha's Vineyard, having a really good time, you know, peckless youth. And so I just, but I had that Army experience. It was, I wasn't anywhere on the political spectrum.

I just wanted to get my, I knew it was a mess. You know, I came back and said, man, that is really a mess. But I just wanted to get out with life. So I went back to school, night school at Boston University. and ended up getting my degree. But in my last year, in 1970, you know, came the twin barrels of the invasion of Cambodia, which I thought was, oh, man, that is really crazy.

That's nuts and horrible. And then the Pentagon Papers, which confirmed all my worst suspicions about what we had been doing in Vietnam, very provocative stuff in North Vietnam, I'm really bringing the war to North Vietnam in a very subversive way. And it kind of radicalized me. And so by the time, so my politics had become swung to the left in this sort of non, you know, sort of this vague way.

You know, I was against the war, big time. And I became good friends with another Vietnam veteran at graduate. in graduate school at Berkeley, I did China Studies at Berkeley, got my MA and China Studies, and I became really best friends with another Vietnam veteran, no surprise. And we both felt the same that it was just this hell horrible thing that had happened and was ongoing in Vietnam. The level of destruction was just horrible. So that was my politics and the war.

It's a crime. Get it over with it. So I became a little bit of an activist. Not much, but that was where my head was at. And then this was also the Watergate era. Watergate had also, you know, burst on the scene. And I can't believe, looking back, that no one really believed that the White House wasn't involved in that. I mean, really, you know, people don't realize it.

All of journalism word did not jump on the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein exposures back then. A lot of people wouldn't believe the Washington Post report. And I'm looking at that. I remember I had a waiter's job that summer that that story broke at a Boston. It's a Ritz Hotel in Boston before I went out to Berkeley. I'm reading about that in the Boston Globe. You know, these Cubans and former CIA people caught red-handed with a whole bunch of cash.

in the Democratic Party's headquarters at the Watergate. And, you know, Woodward, who had been a Navy intelligence officer, he kicked up on, he knew what was going on right away, and his partner, Carl Bernstein, was a naturally suspicious person anyway. So they immediately sensed what this was, was a covert political operation. But most of the press did not believe the Washington Post and thought the post was being sensationalistic.

It went on for another year or more before the rest of the press started saying, hey, there's really something to this. So here we have this domestic spying stuff going on. Vietnam War is going on. And I thought, well, I know a lot about this stuff, so I can write some stuff about this. I'll write. I was a pretty good writer.

And so I wrote a piece about stay behind what the U.S. intelligence was doing in Vietnam, creating stay behind operations, which I think turned out in the end to be very unsuccessful. But the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence was doing this and this and this. And I wrote it for a little liberal news service. but a lot of newspapers picked it up and put it on the front page, and I thought, well, I kind of like this, you know. I thought I might end up as a high school teacher or, you know, prep school teacher or something.

But I kind of like this. I'm sure I just like seeing my name in the lights, and I had written something that nobody knew about or very few. And so that started me on my path, and I headed to Washington. Washington, Washington posted not hire me. With my zero experience, what a shock. But I got my first experience working for a suburban weekly paper in Northern Virginia covering county supervisors and the business of the county. I learned how developers act like CIA when they're doing it,

secretly buying up plots of land, you know. And so to get around environmental research. and so on, and then springing it on in the public. So then I went into radio for a while. I worked at the very early NPR, all things considered, when you had to tell people what it was when you called up. And then for a weekly and this and anyway, I eventually ended up. I was swinging for the Christian Science Monitor and stringing for NPR covering

foreign policy and national security issues. Eventually, I got on with UPI. And I became deputy foreign editor at UPI when it was still really a real new service. But it was really financially wobbling after my four or five years there. And so I got a book contract to do this book about this Green Beret case in Vietnam. Which became, I'm going to do a plug here. Unwrap that for us, Jeff. I mean, I think most special forces guys are at least have some familiarity with this story.

It was a big deal at the time. Tell us about it. of what happened and what your investigation revealed? Well, I was in Vietnam at the time that the story broke that the commander of Fifth Special Forces and seven of his men, his top aides, have been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the connection with the disappearance of a Vietnamese national.

That was the bare-bones story. Did I remember, you know, I'm a case officer over there, and I remember reacting saying, wow, they're going to arrest people for murder, for, you know, getting rid of one Vietnamese suspected double agent. Wow, I mean, we're in the palming villages every day, you know? So, anyway, I was always curious about that. And then I saw this Australian movie called, you know,

a dramatic movie called Breaker Morant. And it takes place in South Africa. during the Boer War at the early 20th century in which these Australian special forces conscripts are kind of ordered to get rid of a

of a German spy and they do it and the Germans go absolutely nuts about it and they demand that the British try these guys for murder or they're going to come in full force in the war and so these guys are. tried and they're executed. And I walked out of the theater thinking, boy, I know a Vietnam version

of that story. So, I got talking about it to a literary agent in D.C. I was very friendly with, and she said, boy, that's a book. You got to write a book about that. I hadn't even written a major

magazine piece at that time, so I couldn't imagine writing a book, but eventually years went by and she kept bugging me about it. And by that time, I had written some major magazine stories, and I felt common that I could write a book. So I tracked down a number of the key participants enough to write a book proposal, and I got a contract to write the book. And it came out.

It didn't sell very well, but it got some great reviews. One reviewer in the Chicago Tribune called it Better Than Watergate, because there was murder involved in conspiracies within conspiracies. I thought, as we were talking before the show, Jack, I thought the Special Forces Association would really embrace this book because it was really the true story of what had happened, but they hated it because in their version of events, the Special Forces commander had been persecuted by the Army,

because the army, the commander of the army in Vietnam, General Abrams, an old tanker, hated the special forces, which I don't believe is true. And none of the evidence I dug up showed that he hated the special forces, but he hated the idea that they thought they were independent from the chain of command. But the real blow came when General Abrams called down the commander of the Green Berets. What did happen is that they suspected this Vietnamese spy for them was a double, agent. So they brought him in and interrogated him and they interrogated the shit out of him for 10 days. He never confessed. They used drugs on him. But they decided, well, if he wasn't a communist when he came in,

he's a communist now. So they took him out of a boat, shot him in the head and dumped him overboard with weights, the tire rims and chains. But his widow showed up and his wife showed up and says, where's my husband? I suspect something bad happened. She wasn't any peasant. These were middle class Vietnamese people. She was educated and she said, where's my husband? They gave her answer that weren't persuasive to her. She went right to the U.S. embassy

and started banging on doors. And it eventually rattled up the chain of commander General Abrams. And he called in the commander of the Special Forces Colonel Robert Roe, R-H-E-A-U-L-T, commanding and said, what's going on up there? What's going on with this Vietnamese? And he said, oh, we sent him on a mission. He's just been

out of contact. And As soon as the row walked out of his office, he said, that son of a bitch is lying to me. And he told his aid to order the CID, criminal army detectives, to go and clean that place out. And they went in, and the whole middle third of my book is like a police procedural with army detectives investigating the green berets and the green berets trying to cover up what happened. They weren't all that smart.

They had requisitioned the boat, the motor, the, the tire rims, the chains, and the silencer for the pistol. I mean, they signed chips. So I tracked on the detectives that worked on the case, and they told me the whole story. I interviewed everyone involved in that case, except for Nixon and Kissinger. And they played a big role.

I hate to do the spoiler here, but Nixon made the case go away because the head of the CIA, Richard Helms, came to him and said, we can't have this case go to trial because the lawyers for the defendants know all about the Phoenix program, the assassination program, and they're going to bring that up if we go to trial. So you can't have that happen. So Nixon shut down the prosecution, but these guys were up for first-degree murder. And so it was really quite a cause-seleb in 1969. It was front-page news. Congress got on the side of all the defendants and saying they were

being screwed. But the real, here's the contemporary angle for this story. I'm sure I probably half the people listening probably turned it off by now. And the issue is that the lawyer for one in the Green Beret defendants arrived in Saigon and he was met by a big gaggle of the press who had heard about him coming over. And he, they say, so what happened? What's going on here? And he says, in his thick South Carolina accent, he said, now I'm not going to stipulate that my client did anything wrong, much less a murder. But if these boys did kill this suspected Viet Cong, shouldn't they be getting medals?

I mean, why are they in jail? I mean, we're not here to capture cities or, you know, or even mountaintops. We don't even hold on to mountaintops. We're not here capturing cities or territory. We're here to kill communists. and that's what they may have done. Boy, does that sound familiar?

Yep. We're here to kill jihadis. We're not here to capture cities. We're here to kill AQ. We're here to kill ISIS. It became a war of murder or assassinations. Whatever you want to call it. And that's what we've been involved in for the last 20 years.

Yeah, why are you prosecuting our heroes? I mean, we went through all of that just the last couple of years. For 20 years. Well, I mean, when you mentioned this story, I'm thinking specifically about the Eddie Gallagher case where that narrative really came to the forefront, I think. Perfect. Yep. Exactly. Jeff, just one moment.

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without a VPN. Yeah, we're in Iran or China. Yeah, we're in Iran or China. We're not asking. what you're looking at. We're just saying that you might want a VPN. So, Jeff, back to you here. I actually, I need to order a copy of the book. You and I have had conversations about it before, and I've encountered this story, but you really investigated it. Give us the title for the folks out there listening. They can go find it on Amazon. It's called A Murder in War Time. By Jeff Stein.

A lot is used copies very cheap and paperbacks. And as time went on, I mean, you worked for a lot of different places. You worked for Newsweek, Washington Post. Tell us a little bit about spy talk. Like how, where did that first evolve from? Where did that come out of? Oh, okay. That's, that's fun to talk about.

I was the Homeland Security Editor at Congressional Quarterly, which has no longer, hasn't been a quarterly for many years. It does a whole variety of reports on what Congress is up to, right down to a very granular level. They had the foresight in early 2002 to start a daily covering Homeland Security. That was all new. You know, I mean, the 911 attacks is late, you know, September 2001. And so the very smart editor-in-chief of Congressional Quarterly said, we ought to be covered Homeland Security on a daily basis.

This is probably some good business in that for us. It was a paid newsletter. So I had about seven reporters and sub-editors, and we started this thing, and it went like gangfire. It just really caught on and it was doing really well. But it didn't. The subject area didn't interest me at all that much. It was, you know, a lot of, you know, domestic, bureaucratic issues of, you know, setting up the Department of Homeland Security.

and, you know, hustling all these various agencies under one roof, which was going disastrously. And still, some people will tell you that DHS is still a big mistake. But in any event, I was covering that. And, you know, my real territory was national security, foreign policy, military. And so just out of bored, I started. And, you know, sources were still coming to me and telling me things. And I was, of course, keeping up on the news in those areas. And so I started a weekly column called Spy Talk.

And that caught on. And then it got popular enough that we started doing it daily, you know, and people were paying for it. So then the Economist Group bought CQ, and there were massive layoffs. There were 45 of us laid off in one day, me being among them. but a few months later the Washington Post hired me to continue it as a daily blog at the Washington Post. So I did that for a year, so it didn't work out all that well because they wanted kind of instant analysis on major developments in the intelligence world where I tended to do more investigative stuff and real insider bits and pieces of information. and so it was a mediums, immediately,

mediumly successful. But I didn't like doing that kind of thing every day, a daily blog. Anyway, some people were good at instant wisdom, but I'm not. So anyway, meantime, a friend of mine, or a guy I knew,

had become editor of the resurrected Newsweek. And he called me up and said, hey, you want to come work for us? And I said, sure. So he hired me to do investigative reporting and to do spy talk. So I started there, and that ran for six years, and then new ownership, more new management took over Newsweek. I mean, so that was like going through the UPI experience, again, where the owner just stopped paying his bills and so on. So anyway, I did that, and then again, fortuitously, just.

as we were lopped off at Newsweek, the last of us, real reporters, were lopped off. A substact came along, and a friend of mine was one of the first people they signed up, signed up Bill Bishop, who does a China daily for substack, and it was an instant success, and he's making a lot of money. I'm very happy for him.

And he said, Subtack would love having spy talk. So I was talking about it with a bunch of my friends over drinks, you know, fellow long-in-the-tooth national security reporters who were semi-retired and not ready to quit. And it was sort of like doing a play at summer camp, you know, you do the scenery and I'll do the music. So we all came together and we said, well, let's do this. So we did and started it. And the first story was in August 31st, 2020.

And it got good play. It was about Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and his odd connections with the Russians. And it was done by Peter Eisner, a former deputy editor, a deputy foreign editor at the Washington Post, former editor at News Day and an AP reporter. And I had all these other guys with Sterling credentials who had worked for elite publications. and had very distinctive careers of great distinction. And so we put out that story, and then it was like, holy shit,

we got to do another story. People were suddenly signing up. I definitely enjoy seeing some of the, some people that either I've read their work or I've met them over the years and see them pop up on spy talk, John Dingus, who was a professor at Columbia.

I met with him once in his office hours to talk, about his book. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then... One of my best friends. And then we talked about him earlier, Matthew Brazil, who writes about Chinese espionage.

Who are some of the other interesting folks you have writing at Spy Talk? Well, like I mentioned, Peter Eisner, the former Japanese foreigner at the Post. a blank. Well, recently we had Frank Snepp, former CIA officer who wrote that groundbreaking expose about the last days in Saigon. He's been writing for me. And let me look. I don't want to leave anybody out. I want to name some of the principles. Like you say, Peter Eisener, I mean, John Dingus is a former managing editor of news at NPR, as you might know, and it's written three extraordinarily important books on Latin America and the killing machine that came out of Chile Operation Condor.

James Grady, another contributing editor. He wrote the original Six Days of the Condor, which became three days of the Condor for the movie. Olga Loutman, who's an expert on Russia. I know, I know Olga, she's terrific. Elaine Monaghan, who was a distinguished Reuters correspondent and Bureau Chief in Moscow and Kiev, years ago, by the way. Gus Russo, who's written nine books on organized crime and intelligence stuff, JFK assassination. Elaine Shannon, who was a star correspondent at Newsweek and Time at various times,

writing about the drug war, the Queen of Drugs and Thugs is what I call her, and so on and so forth. Oh, I forgot, Jonathan Broder, who was a Chicago Tribune, an AP reporter in the Middle East for many years. who also worked for Congressional Quarterly as a foreign editor, worked for Newsweek as a foreign policy correspondent. He writes on the Middle East for me quite often. Let's see who else I'm spinning down. And then occasional contributors who aren't really journalists so much like David Charnie,

who's a Washington psychiatrist who has a large clientele of intelligence people and who has been authorized to do interviews with moles, you know, guys who were spying for the Russians and who were caught. And he's done extensive prison interviews with those people. Adam Zagrin, a longtime former Time magazine correspondent, Mark Stout, former CIA historian, Gail Helt, former CIA analyst at East Asia. She's been a guest on the show before. She's fabulous. Yeah. Jim Lorry, former long-time correspondent, ABC correspondent in Southeast Asia.

It goes on and on and on. Craig Unger, who's written for us, wrote a book about Trump and the Russians. Aalco Doi, who was a U.S. correspondent for the Japan Daily for many years. She's writing a piece for me now about what's going on in Japan and their military services. So it's been a great It's just a great crew And everybody You know, there are no employees

It's just people contribute when they can't And that's great And they bring, you know The only rule is, you know Be interesting and bring something new to the table Tell our readers something they don't know Or they probably don't know Or let them see stuff

Through another looking glass. So that's the idea. We're kind of special for us, hit and run, you know. We sneak in in the night, boom, and then we're gone. I would like to ask you about some of your own rabble rousing. And I was wondering if you could tell us about the Jane Harmon, APEC story that you broke. Wow. Well, that was really something. That was way back almost probably 15, no, it was 2009, I guess. So it was what, 13 years ago, if I can remember. Anyway, the basic story. There was this case going on where the Justice Department was prosecuting two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and that's essentially a lobbying arm for Israel.

And they were being prosecuted as unregistered. I think the charge was that they were unregistered foreign agents. And there was a lot of things wrong with that prosecution, I think. But anyway, I think the administration wanted to make a point that we're talking about. of this sort of essentially lobbying by these people and they're not registering as foreign agents. And so an Israeli agent, agent of influence, I couldn't name him because I couldn't absolutely confirm, corroborate from multiple sources that he was an Israeli agent of influence, very big Hollywood figure, a figure who was big in Hollywood, very influential.

that he called Jane Harmon and said, look, I'll tell you why. If you'll, you'll, you know, you're friendly with the Bush White House. They like you, even though you're a Democrat. If you'll intervene and persuade them to drop these charges against the APAC guys, I'll tell Nancy Pelosi to make you chairman of the Intelligence Committee, which was something that Jane Harmon had really been yearning for. So how did I know this? Because I was leaked a transcript of an NSA intercept that was on to this Israeli agent.

And they picked up this conversation. And my sources, who had long been pissed off about this extensive Israeli influence operation in Washington and elsewhere, they leaked it to me. And so I wrote the story about that. and it caused a big, big hullabaloo. It was picked up by the Washington Post and New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, who all very generously gave me direct credit for the piece. We're breaking the story.

And the reason they moved it so fast is because they knew it was true because they had done their own investigations. Jane Harmon went nuts, you know, went on TV saying, you know, this isn't true. And how dare the NSA spy on me? Of course, she knew damn well they weren't spying on her. The Ganesi would be crucified if it did that. They were spying on an Israeli agent.

She got caught up in it. And then I wrote a follow-up story that's just really too complicated to explain here about other machinations in that conspiracy to get these charges dropped. And that got another round of conspiracy stories and headlines. Anyway, but I was reminded when I was telling you about that, story. I had been become quite astounded at the ignorance on the intelligence

communities about basic facts of what we were doing in Iran and Afghanistan. And I'd read a transcript of an congressional investigation where FBI officials were quizzed about what they

knew about al-Qaeda and the Iranians and so on. and they showed and they essentially said the head of Countertelters actually told his committee it didn't matter

if he knew anything about him criminals or criminals and we know how to go after them so I put this all together and I was talking to I was sharing that with a friend who was then running the op-ed page

of the New York Times and he said well put it all together for us in an op-ed piece William so I did and they ran it with it gave it huge space and the headline was

can you tell a SUNY from a Shiite. And it was very embarrassing to a number of these members of Congress on the Intelligence Committee and the FBI, you know, and how little they knew about the enemy we were spending money and lives on going after in Iraq and Afghanistan. So that got a lot of attention, a lot of attention, because it was essentially writing a story that everybody knew was true, but nobody was. and written it, which is kind of the best kind of story to do.

People, you know, somebody say, yes, I'm so glad somebody finally wrote that story, you know. But only a couple months after that, in the elections of November 2008, I guess, the Democrats retook control of Congress and a congressman from El Paso, became chairman, the designated incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. And so, and I was working for congressional quarterly, often, you know, called up members of Congress and asked them what their position was and this and that, real granular kind of stuff. So I called him up and asked for an interview, and he said,

because we're congressional quarterly and widely red on the hill, closely red on the hill. He said, sure, so I went and interviewed him. and I asked him, are you in favor of the troop surge in Iraq? And he said, definitely, definitely am. I said, well, what do you want it to accomplish? He said, I want him to go out there and kill people who are killing the Americans. And I said, well, which people are you talking about?

Are you talking about Iran-backed militias? Are you talking about al-Qaeda? You're talking about double agents in the Interior Ministry? Any number of suspects who were killing Americans, And he said, whoever. And I asked him, let me ask you about al Qaeda. He said, are they Sunni or Shia? Now, this is, again, only a couple of months after this huge piece I had written from the New York Times or a piece that had gotten huge circulation.

I said, what's Al Qaeda? Are they Sunni or Shia? He said, hmm. He said, Shia. Wrong. You know, Al Qaeda. It's Sunni. They're fundamentally Sunni. They're very, very Sunni. And so I wrote that up. And that got a huge amount of attention. And that's because just of what he said. Of course, people like Fox News, they love that. They had me on around the clock virtually because, you know, it was a Democrat. Sure. Oh, sure. And same with the Jane Harmon story, by the way. Fox had me on all their shows.

and because it was a Democrat that I was maligning and you know Fox and Friends was kind of new back then

that's the early morning show I guess everybody knows that anyway I was in the you know the prep room the makeup room and it was like

5.30 in the morning and I said who's watching television at ungodly hour and they said the White House So that was during the Bush administration.

So anyway, oh, so there's just a couple of the stories. I've gotten kind of a kick out of doing. I'm often said to be in the tank for the Democrats. I can assure anyone who comes to my site that that is not the case. I have criticized Obama. quite a bit of it. We have criticized Biden. We ran a piece of viscerating the Biden White House on the last days of Kabul. We reported information that had not been reported before on how bollick stuff that evacuation was. I mean, we know it was bollick stuff, but more ballic stuff than had been known.

So, you know, we don't care about. I mean, we are for loyalty. and patriotism. Right. We're not on the side of people who want to overthrow the government, you know, invade the capital, kill cops, try to kidnap governors,

suspend the Constitution. We're not for that because they're not loyal Americans. So we're against that bullshit. Dangerous bullshit, I must say. You know, not to be minimized. So we're against that. We're for patriotism and we're for, you know, the American way.

Truth God in the American way. But whoever's in the White House, we're going to look at them very closely. Can I ask you about your journey? Because, you know, you did your time in Vietnam as an intel officer in the Army. And you left, is it fair to say that you left kind of jaded, that you, that you said you went kind of left that you were anti-war. and well anti that war anti that war right right fair enough

sorry about that and then you started working as a journalist and then you sort of got pulled back into this world of espionage and in the sense of you know writing about espionage but also also hosting

a lot of people who had been in that community so obviously you didn't have a hate or you didn't have you know you weren't you weren't like oh like anti espionage and anti-war in general and anti-national defense how how did that journey was was there a cooling off period for you after Vietnam I was never anti-warner and like you say in terms of all war I got war II with a just war in Korea fighting back again I mean there was some really stupid things you had in Korea which encouraged the North Korean invasion but um

and the Chinese invasion, I should say. But no, I'm against stupid. I'm against stupidity, unnecessary war. I was totally against the invasion of Iraq. And I had written a book with a former Saddam scientist in the nuclear program, Saddam's bombmaker. I knew that Saddam Hussein was a very evil, evil person. but I thought invading Iraq would be about the stupidest thing we could do.

So I was against that. Getting rid of, you know, going into Afghanistan to get rid of al-Qaeda, I was all for that. I held my breath, but I was for it. I thought it was a horrible irony that Republicans who had campaigned against nation-building suddenly decided to become nation-builders in Afghanistan, and I thought, man, this is Vietnam all over again. Right. Or Iraq all over again. I mean, this is going to be a horrible thing.

We're not good at this counter-insurgency thing. Our guys don't fight as well as their guys, you know, because they're fighting for something. As the Russians are finding out in Ukraine, I am a hardliner on Putin, by the way. I am. You can't get – you can hardly get to the right of me on – supporting the Ukrainians to throw out to Russians. I'm very worried about where this is going and how it's going to end, but I'm a hard line on that. So, no, I'm not anti-war.

I was against these stupid wars. Right, right. But it was a transition to go through. You're right. And I think also it's just getting older and hopefully wiser. knowing getting to know the news business more and more learning how to temper my

instincts and emotions. Has there been? I mean, you had to leave. I'm sorry, go ahead. You had to leave those at the door as a wire service, that's for sure, at UPI.

Has there been anybody that you've come across in your, and I'm sure there have been a number of people, but was there any, Was there anybody who really sort of educated you to the to the overall intelligence apparatus at any point in time? Anybody was there ever anybody who maybe changed your opinion or if not changed it, expanded it or anything like that? Well, I'd say I wouldn't put it that way because I, you know, being trained as a case officer, one of the basic orientations you get is what the intelligence community is.

although nobody used that term back then that I remember. And so I got to know, I mean, it was a real eye-opener to learn all the clandestine activities that we were involved with. And back in the 60s. And you never unlearn that. But I would say that there were certain intelligence officials who enlightened me. further. I remember one revealing conversation. It kind of jolted me at the time.

I was sitting with an ex-senior CIA operations officer who had quit because he just got tired of bad stuff that was going on in the 60s. And

we were having lunch in downtown Washington, and it was not long after the mullahs that Kamene took power in Iran, the Iranian Islamic Revolution. And I was railing on about sputtering on about what, you know, how stupid

it was to overthrow the Shah and then put these, back the Shah through thick and thin. And look what happened now the Islamic Revolution. And he kind of gave me a droll smile and he said, hey, we got 25 years out of the Shah.

that wasn't too bad. Yeah. And I said, oh, that's how, that's the way they look at it, you know, okay. You know, I mean, I remember that just really striking me as a kind of somewhere between stoicism and cynicism. Yeah. But further educated me on the clandescent mindset. And then there was a whistleblower who had been a very senior guy at CIA, Victor Marquetti,

who came in, who, quote, with a team. up with a former State Department intelligence officer by the name of John Marks, and they wrote a book called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. And it was a real mind-blower, and it had a lot of exposés about stuff. But it's really where Victor, in personal meaning in the book, and then I got to be very friendly with him, he really clarified my thing about how this clandescent mentality that only we can solve this problem through our covert means and let's overthrow this guy and kill that guy and so on it sort of takes over you know and there weren't wasn't a cooler head around as someone

just sort of parachute and say which should be the president actually to say this is not a good idea and we shouldn't be doing this and i don't mean to be as richard helms said we a famous ex-CIA director. He said, we're not Boy Scouts, and we shouldn't be confused with that. Well, you don't want the CIA to be boy scots, but you want them to be smarter and shrewder than they often have proven to be. And I think they're going to be really tested now with the challenges of Russia, China, and Iran and North Korea.

So they've got to do a smart thing. Of course, in the end, it's the president who, makes the final decision on covert action. We got to do a better job. Again, see, I'm not anti-CIA. I want them to do a better job of spying. We want to know what our adversaries are up to. They're spying on us, and they're doing a pretty good job.

If you consider that every arrest of an agent of China, Russia, or Iran, here means that you, there are 90% more of them, you know? Yeah. You arrest one. That means they're, it's like catching a rat or a mouse, you know. There's a whole bunch more behind the wall. Yeah. So, um, we got to do more on counterintelligence and we, uh, which conflicts with, you

know, uh, freedom of speech and all that stuff. Uh, we got, but we got to definitely do better, uh, in spying on China, Russia and, and, and Iran and North Korea. I don't think we're getting anything out of North Korea. I think we're too dependent on one NSA electronic intercepts. And various varieties are the kind of things that NSA does

as the Air Force does, satellites do and so on. But there's no substitute for having an agent in the inside circles of power. You know? Yeah. I mean, the famous Russian spy, a Russian

spy for his Pankowski told us you know, chipped us off to the Russian missiles in Cuba. And it's just no substitute for espionage, really good espionage. So we got to do better at that. We may be doing better than I think. I hope so. Yeah. You know, you mentioned that you guys have eviscerated politicians about the left and the right.

What do you think our politicians need to do better? What are the mistakes you see them making over and over again? Well, I think we're really in an extraordinary era now that's sort of like the 1850s, where the country is on the verge of some kind of civil war. I mean, it's not like we're going to have, you know, armies and cannons, you know, firing each other, you know, rampaging through Virginia or Tennessee or Georgia. But it's playing out in social warfare. I think, you know, you're going to have to do something. about these seditionists who are holding office in Congress,

unfortunately it takes like two-thirds of a vote in Congress to expel somebody. But we essentially have Confederates, at least 20, in the House of Representatives, and a handful more, maybe a dozen in the Senate, who are trying to bring down the government. I mean, what do you do about that? I mean, the Germans just uncovered a very ambitious and startling coup conspiracy to bring down the German government. We have learned through hearings and media investigations that we were a lot closer to losing our government on January 6th than we thought at the time. I mean, the conspiracy was deep, and they were close to getting these.

altering the electors in. They, you know, they wanted to bring, Trump and his inner circle wanted to essentially destroy the U.S. Constitution. And as badly run, as sloppy as our democracy is, there's nothing around that we know of any better, right? We found out that the communist form of government, no good leads to excesses.

Fascism leads to a bad place. So we're stuck with capitalist democracy as the next best thing, is the best thing we got going. And we just need to really work hard to save it. I'm very, very worried about what's coming down to the pike. Jeff, what did you make of this German coup plot that's really just kind of come to light over the last week, that it seems to be organized around a German noble, a noble family, that they wanted to sort of reinstall him.

And it sort of brings to light a lot of things that, I mean, well, it's been going on in Germany since the 1930s that there's this sort of like agrarian nostalgia, a desire to return to monarchy. And then that brings about with it, you know, the purity of the race and all of these sorts of ideas as well. I'm just curiously, you know, what was your thoughts or if you have any information that, you know, spy talk published about, you know, this attempted coup because the German authorities did arrest like 100 people in this last week.

Yeah, I think the guy who he was sort of the titular head or he's sort of a figurehead, this guy who claimed the aristocratic bloodline, he's kind of a figure guy. What worries him to me is how deeply penetrated the German special forces units are. their delta force the KSK yeah you're deeply infiltrated by these right wangers

ultra right wangers who wanted to bring down the government you know I ran a story I dug up a story last year about how the Intel link chat rooms were full of hate speech Intel link for people don't know that's a

classified communication system that the intelligence agents agencies use and it goes from very low level confidential all the way up to top secret compartmented American intelligence services. American intelligence service. They have to have a way. People have to have a way to communicate. You know, an agent in Tanzania has to be able to communicate with headquarters, you know,

or his station chief or her station chief. So, you know, there's Intel link It's a classified email system and they have discussion rooms and so on so on. So there's one level it's a little bit more than confidential classified. They have chat rooms for people to just trade ideas and thoughts. Well, it just became full of hate speech

and pro-Trump sympathies even after January 6th. And the guy who ran it shared some of the content with me. It was really startling. And I've been hearing from other sources over the previous year that people in special forces units or the special forces, people who work with the CIA's ground branch,

paramilitaries, more and more outspoken about their anti-government sympathies, their pro-Trump sympathies. And again, it's not just being pro-Republican here. It's being pro a guy who wants to destroy our Constitution. Well, it's alarming. I've gotten some hate myself for writing about and talking about. I mean, there are Q&N people in the special operations community, in the FBI, and in the CIA.

I'm not saying they're in large numbers. I don't believe they are at all. But these people do exist. Yeah, they shouldn't exist at all. I mean, when I signed up for the Army and intelligence, I had to fill out, you know, check off this form that listed about 50 organizations. Was I a member of them or had I ever do that? Did I have friends in them? Had I done any business with them?

And, you know, you just weren't allowed to have, you weren't allowed to have, you weren't allowed to. to traffic with anti-constitutional organizations. And I don't know where we are. I mean, we've got members of Congress and the Senate who are anti-constitutionalists. I mean, what else you say about them if they're favoring the, they're still in the embrace of the guy who wants, who said just the other day, he thinks the Constitution should be suspended so he can stay in all.

office, Trump. He wants to come back and find a way to suspend the U.S. Constitution. So who are these people? They are disloyal Americans, as far as I'm concerned. And so it's not surprising that you have them in the most boldly aggressive patriotic organizations like Special Forces Group. These guys are aggressive. My team sergeant, when I was in fifth group, was convicted this week just a few days ago. He was at January 6th. He was not charged, actually, with January 6th. Because of threats he was making against law enforcement, they raided his home in Tampa, Florida. And the result of that was they charged him with a lot of illegal weapons charges,

and he was convicted on six of the 10 charges. He hasn't been sentenced yet, but I believe each of those charges carries 10 years in federal prison. he's probably flipping his vast he's flipping faster than a large mouth bass I know no I think he wants to be a martyr actually oh well see these people in our intelligence again I think it's a very small number

and CIA seems to be located in the ground branch you know the paramilitary people it seems to be and they're the CIA's version of Delta it seems to be pretty much located just in those branches, it's not very strong in the operations branch, the clandestine services.

You just have to be too broad-minded to be a good case officer, especially if we're going to operate in Africa or Latin America or in Europe. You know, your job is to recruit people to spy for us, right? And you can't be some hard right, you know, close-minded person. I don't know. on race issues. NCS is like, what, half former military at this point? I mean, there's a lot of Republicans.

I'm not saying that they're bad people. I'm just saying they're Republicans. I got you. And that's why that branch of the Clinton and Service has become more and more Trump-friendly because of the military guys who have come in. I'm told it's the same with the FBI, the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have gone to Quantico, become instructors and so on

very outspoken against liberals against Democrats and so on very militant against Democrats and liberals and it's not far if you're in law enforcement and you hold those view or intelligence it's not

a big leap from there to embracing Q& conspiracy ideas and and how that happens how otherwise bright, interesting people become Trump supporters, especially after January 6th is a mystery

to me. It has to do with cults and the psychology of cults. There's a lot of anger from guys who have devoted 20 years of their life to fighting two failed wars. And as a country, we have not even come close to trying to examine what the social impact of that is and what that means for us. We have, I mean, whether you're a Q&N adherent or not, or you're just, or you're a Democrat or whoever you are, I mean, you have a lot of guys out there who dedicated 20 years of their life to this conflict, and now they're all having to ask themselves individually, it's like there's a gap in their existence. Like, what was that? What does that mean? Totally. I totally get that because I'm a Vietnam veteran. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a

Vietnam Veteran. And not only that, but in the 1980s, I ran the magazine of the Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc., the service organization. And so I took up again with veterans, and I know of this anger and disgust. That existed after Vietnam, and for years, it still does, that Vietnam was a total waste of lives and money. So I know that, but we didn't, at that era, in the 1970s, 60s, 70s, 80s, there weren't these conspiracy. Oh, yeah, there were.

Yeah, there were. Yeah, there were. There were, but they weren't, they were not at the same volume that social media has given them. They were not necessarily members of Congress. I'll say that much, but there were definitely a lot of left-way conspiracies about the military industrial complex. Oh, sure.

I know you've heard this stuff. That's right. That's right. And I think, in fact, I have some theories about that. Some people found it easy to jump from the left-wing critique of the military industrial complex and who killed Kennedy and that's to move over. To the Trump side, because they're really going to the same place, but just from a different direction. So I totally agree with you. And I get that.

But all I'm saying is that there wasn't the Internet, the Internet. internet didn't exist to amplify and make very accessible these conspiracy theories. All you have to do is click on your computer now and you just Google something and you can get into that world, go down that rabbit hole very, very easily. And then there's, you know, the radio shows. Talk radio is a big recruiter, too. As you probably know, a lot of AM talk radio is, you know, Trump territory. So the only talk radio existed back then

Didn't have the internet to make it So you had to go seek it out To get down these rabbit holes In the 60s and 70s I think you had to work harder to find it And now it's just right at your fingertips Yeah Or my well for my generation

It's our parents they got on Facebook And Facebook radicalized Not my parents But but still So you've Boomers? Yes, yeah, my boomer parents. Yeah. But no, thankfully they're not, they're not in, my parents are not into that kind of stuff. But you recently published on Spy Talk a piece that I found fascinating about the final days in Kabul and the Kabul evacuation. And it was a really startling sort of insider account of what happened out there. And I was wonder if you could tell us about that. Well, one of the interesting anecdotes that my writer who wrote had to write under a pen name, one of the interesting anecdotes he provided is that, you know, that famous C-17 airlift vehicle that rolled down the runway with people falling off the sides and out of the wheel wells.

it was rushing off because there was a night stalker's helicopter in there, kit it up with all the advanced gear. And they had come in just to pick up some people with that chopper in it. And when they then the crowd surged across the runways. They said, we've got to get out of Dodge. So they rolled down that, they rolled down the run. It was only one runway. They rolled down the runway and ran over people, and people fell off the plane.

But there were also the CIA's killer squads who were very active and were just mowing down people. The zero units? The NDS units? Yeah. Yeah. Now, it may be very understandable in their panic that they would just be mowing down these people, but whatever. The fact is that they did. and we were, I think, the first to report that.

I think there is a yet lot to be reckoned with on the issue of the collapse in Kabul. And you just know that the Republicans, when they take over the House, are going to really be bearing in on that because the president is a Democrat. that kind of touches on, I think it was a question from Dave, you know, about where are we going? And that's where we're going.

Hyper-partisanship where if it's a Democrat, just go out and destroy them. I mean, we haven't heard anything from Republicans lately about their big campaign issues was inflation, right? And the border? Of course, you hear, still hear about. the border because there are a number of states that are being affected directly by the surge of people coming over the border. A bipartisan issue, if there ever was one. I mean, I'm old enough to remember George H.W. Bush putting forward these very earnest

plans to, which bipartisan plans to deal with border issues and couldn't get, even with bipartisanship back then in the 1980s. And so there have been Democrats and Republicans in the White House for the last 50 years, and neither of them been able to deal adequately with a border problem. But you don't hear Republicans talking about that right now. You hear them talking about, you know, Hunter Biden and Kabul, and we're going to reopen that investigation. That's what you hear about.

I don't know. I mean, I know they are looking at, like, reopening an investigation. And, I mean, honestly, maybe rightly so, into the last. days of our Afghanistan withdrawal. But I mean, I'm for that. I think that the, the actually, it's kind of a stunning silence from the American public about how disastrous the withdrawal from Afghanistan is, to me really speaks to how unimportant the conflict was, how little it actually mattered. Well, the same happened after Vietnam. Yeah. It was over and people said, But, clad is over, let's move on.

And that was, of course, the official sentiment of every government, the Department of Defense and the CIA and everybody else is, let's move on. Yeah. Let's move along. And it's natural, I think, that people say, most people would say, I don't want to go back and revisit that issue. I can see that. I can even agree with that if you ask me, you know, an hour from now. I mean, because we have learned, unfortunately, that we don't learn. We don't have lessons learned.

We have commissions and studies and so on that look at the Vietnam, starting with the Pentagon Papers, by the way, that look at these issues and iron them all out and say, we made a mistake here, we shouldn't have done this, we should have done this, we didn't do that. including congressional hearings there was congressional hearings on the CIA in the 1970s about all the assassinations and so on and that led to a real reform I think

I think it needed reform but you know how we lost the war in Afghanistan well my my erstwhile colleague at The Washington Post is still a good friend Craig Whitmer. He did the Afghanistan paper's book and rooted out, you know, that these generals knew that they were losing and yet would say to the president and to the American people, oh, no,

it's going great. You know, we've got some problems. Yeah, just need another year. And they said that forever and ever and ever. It's the same thing that happened in Vietnam. So what lessons have we learned? What the generals have learned is to keep their job, getting promoted, getting big. your budgets to keep saying we're winning until we're not until it's over that's a lesson

to learn that's a real lesson to learn yeah get that fat paycheck that rathion uh director's board appointment after the war everyone goes home happy well except for the kids that contractor heavens yeah except for the kids are missing live the families destroyed um the uh the uh You know, the terrible destruction and tragedy left in the wake of these wars is horrible. And it's not just Americans, of course, as Afghans and Iraqis. So, geez, I just wish we would get smarter on some of these things. And so the bottom line is that the real lesson learned is by the contractors in the Defense Department and CIA and so on. You get bigger money, bigger budgets and so on.

but in the American people don't want to talk about it generally speaking I think the Republican review of the last days of Kabul was going to be such a hatchet job and I'm all for oversight but I just think you'll end up as a hatchet job because these are the same people

who made a big deal about Benghazi and put Hillary Clinton under Klegalite for many what six hours seven hours she testified at least you came and testified you wouldn't find trouble doing that I think there maybe there were some good things that came out of the Benghazi stuff as far as like finally DOD kind of sat down and uh or or you know the congressional committees and explained blow by blow minute by minute what happened there but as we spoke about underneath all of that there's also the

conspiracy that you know Hillary and Obama were sitting there laughing drinking martinis while people died in Benghazi which I mean that simply didn't happen that wasn't how it went down speaking of martini so what do you drink in there Jack I noticed a bottle on the table you've got to have a

cocktail yeah we drink quite a bit of scotch here on the show Scotch okay Belvinine was a gift from 12 year old So, Jeff, this is a 14 year. So tell me. It used to be the joke.

How old is it? What time is it? Here it's nine. But why don't you tell us, Jeff? No, I meant it used to be about liquor. Oh. Tell us what's the, what's the future for Spy Talk? Can you tease anything you guys have coming up in the future?

Well, you know, I had this serious surgery. and a long lab out in the hospital for the rest of the summer. So I'm just slowly getting up to full speed. So, and when I get up to full speed, there's a number of things I'm going to be working on that we are already starting to work on. We're looking at intelligence and covert action

in regard to China, Russia, and Iran, and North Korea. what the options are, what's going on. Of course, we don't know everything is going on because we're not sitting in the director's suite at CIA. I'm going to take a look myself at assessing the new management at CIA. It's getting pretty good reviews to this point. Everyone I've queried says they really like Bill Burns that he may be the best CIA.

director in some time. They didn't get everything right on Ukraine. I wrote a piece, by the way, about how, you know, the intelligence. They did a lot of really great things in regard to pre-war intelligence, you know, calling out, going public about, at least I believe, their reports, about, you know, false flag stuff the Russians were planning and so on. but one thing they got really wrong was that they expected the Ukrainians to pretty much fold when they came across the border from Bila Rajah, you know, when they invaded.

And I did a piece about that, about, you know, based on a lengthy interview I did with former general who, the Army General, a very smart guy who, of course, named it suddenly I was going out of my head. But one of the things he's through the exchange programs, the military exchange programs, of the 1990s, he was astonished to learn that the Russian army, the remnants of the great heralded Red Army, didn't have functional NCOs. You know, our army runs on NCOs. Can't have an army run without NCOs. And the Russian Army pretty much just officers, and NCOs in name only.

and he had been part of a team-building exercises with the Ukrainians for the last several years to to implicate, you know, American training methods and tactical training, maneuver training with the Ukrainians. It really brought them up to speed. So if they knew how to deal with the Russian advance, of course, they were highly motivated, but they had NCOs, you know, and citizen soldiers who could maneuver around and sabotage these tank columns coming in toward Kiev. So Kiev didn't fall, and we know what's happened since then. So I thought that was kind of a breakthrough in reporting.

So we're going to look with somewhat of a critical eye what's going on in regard to Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia. I'm going to look at Bill Burns. I think I'm going to end up writing a very positive piece about Bill Burns, which all my lefty friends will probably hate me for. But he looks to be doing a pretty good job. It's middle management. Just like the Army runs in COs.

The guys who, you know, it's the middle management at CIA. he really determined whether it works or not. The station chiefs, the middle managers, and upward to senior managers, to make sure things are being done right. And don't cover up problems. That's always the problem in any big organization, right? The cover up is the problem.

You don't want to say what's wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Sweep the problems under the rug. So you just can't have that in intelligence and military operators. It just cannot because it's lethal. You can get people. killed when you do that.

Or you can keep going in a war that shouldn't be pursuing. So I'm hopeful that we're having better management at CIA because we need them to do a good job. I haven't

been keeping up with what's going on in NSA. That's a little bit of a blind side for me. I'm not a cyber guy. I wish I had a regular contributor who was a cyber guy. as for the future of spy talk you know i am getting a little long in the tooth um i'd love to have a deputy a part-time deputy right now who i could train up into

uh take it over spy talk at some point the daily running of spy talk uh haven't found that person yet you know it's a very specialized knowledge uh about intelligence, not easy to find people who, I mean, all the people who are good at it are working someplace now, you know, at the Post of the Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, some of the television networks, there's a very, very good national security and intelligence reporters there, so, and they're all pretty young. So, I guess the other bit of news is the Spy Talk podcast, which was suspended when I went into the hospital in July, it's going to start up again in January.

Awesome. I'm only going to, I'm just going to, I'm going to do it every other week because it was just taking too much time away from the SpyTalk News operation. Jeff, where can people find SpyTalk? Where can they find the podcast? Where can they find you? Thanks for asking SpyTalk. is spytoc.co.

That's c.o.com. Spytoc. It's so prominent that you can just Google SpyTalk. And I suppose you could add my name, Jeff Stein, but this SpyTalk.co, you're just Google SpyTalk. It'll come up right at the top of your list.

The same with just Google Spy Talk podcast. You'll find all the archives there. My co-host was Gene Miserve, the former CNN correspondent and anchor. She was great, but she's got other requirements for her time right now, so she won't be able to continue. But on the other hand, it will give me a lot more, some more latitude in how to do the show and the format

and go into depth with intelligence professionals on what they're doing or what they were doing. And so I'm looking forward to that in January. just Google SpyTalk podcast it'll pop up it's on our producer the company that produces us is MSW Media awesome Jeff and they've been great I'm I'm looking forward to seeing what you have coming out next I was keeping eye actually I get your emails every morning about Spy Talk what you're publishing so I hope other people will go that's great Jack yeah I hope people go and sign up and keep an eye on what you guys are doing.

Some great national security news. So great for you guys to invite me on. I'm just thrilled. Yeah, thank you. I mean, we appreciate your time on a Friday evening. I'm already getting critical messages. And one is your macroaggression makes me feel unsafe. This is somebody I know.

I'm talking and he goes on to say, I'm talking about the dossier that told vicious lies about the, I think he's talking to the steel dossier, so-called steel dossier, who told lies about the Trump's and was fed piecemeal to the FBI and the Justice Department

in an effort to undermine the Trump administration and it feeds into all the conspiracy theories that are developed on the right as we are learning from the Twitter files podcast again see it's all of one weave yeah I mean there's a lot to unpack there but

the yeah I guess there are a lot of lies all across the board on that to say the least well yeah it's you can't once someone has really embraced that you can't budge them from that position This is a good friend of mine and who's gone over to the, like I call it, with him

the dark side of the Trump world. And once they're there, I try to avoid politics with him now because I love the man, he's a dear friend, but we're on, we're speaking, he's, I'm speaking Swahili to him, you know. The challenge like Jack said, though, is that there's enough stuff with Strach and Page

and the Steele dossier and, you know, the FISA warrants and everything else that, you know, it's, there's, there's, there's, there's been malintent and, and, and wrong action on both sides. And generally, people on the right, people on the right will not acknowledge what, what has happened on that side and people on the left will not acknowledge what's happened on that side. But it's been it's been very contentious. And there, I think there are a lot of reasons why, not Q and on and things like that, but why people, you know, and for a while I think people saw Trump as the underdog that, that these people were, you know, against him and doing things. So, you know, it gets very messy, I think. It is very messy. Yeah, you're right.

We have a few questions. Oh, sure. You can get to those real quick if you don't mind. Sure. Let me get there. Is that something I'm supposed to be hearing? No. Dave's going to pull them up.

Yeah, I got to pull them up. Okay. All right. Oms, thank you very much for the donation. Brendan G., thank you. Love the Australian reference. The breaker rule 0.303 from Breaker Marat. I have that

thank you very much for the very generous donation what a great man thanks for bringing him on what he's saying about ignorance of the Mides and the lack of our people's understanding of who the different players are in that region

is so true. It's astonishing. Do you find that our politicians just tend to be undereducated when it comes to like current events? Well, there's the how could I forget this?

The hidden government government, you know, that the Trump people are constantly talking about the, um, help me out here. The deep state. Say again? The deep state. Yeah. How can I forget that? It's with us everywhere.

Now, there is a deep state in the sense that there's a core of professionals, whether it's economists or foreign policy people or intelligent people who just stay on in Washington decade after decade. You know, they work for the government for 20 or 30 years. Just applying this conspiracy notion to them all is, you know, if they control things, this is really ridiculous. I mean, I wish they were that competent, frankly, in some days. But, and also, you know, nobody can keep a secret,

a political secret for five seconds in Washington. So if there was a deep state really controlled, controlling things we know about it. But there is a deep state in the terms of the, that there are foreign policy and the subcategories of Middle East experts and so on that really know the stuff. And they tend to, you know, dominate the policies that come out.

And they're middle ground people. They're sort of center bending a little bit to the left. But there's also a number of center-right experts who I also talk with and agree with on issues. But so it's center-right-to-center-left experts on national security and policy. They know the Middle East or, I mean, they know the players and they know the issues going on. They may have totally different prescriptions of what's going on and what we should be doing about it. but generally

you know the politicians they mean the elected officials is that if that's who we're talking about their main issue is getting reelected you know in the house especially because they got to get reelected every two years

so like five minutes after they're sworn in they're on the phone trying to raise money for the next election and their main interest is in pleasing their constituents and getting reelected. So they've got to please their constituents, and in conservative rural areas,

that means, you know, being on the far right. Senate less so because they are six-year terms. And so senators can develop an expertise in a particular area in the intelligence world as Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Menendez,

Bob Menendez, who's involved with that and hostage issues. They develop specialties and bear down on their, and they have the luxury to do that because they're elected not from a district, but the whole state, and they can be more

fungible on their politics. But, you know, so there is actually, that's, you know, there are people, but I'd say there is a kind of a, a bureaucracy that kind of forms the consensus on issues. It is not very broad.

There hasn't been. I mean, now you've got people like Marjorie, Taylor Green, who says we should all be armed and who said the other day that we, you know, January 6th would have succeeded if I had been in charge. So you've got extremists now over there on the right. And the extremists, quote unquote, on the left, like AOC, they're political extremists. They're not conspiring.

bring down the government you know um and um so that doesn't uh doesn't give them a lot of time to develop expertise is there's not a lot of payback there's no benefit for people for congressmen or woman to become an expert in foreign policy because generally the feeling is we're giving away too much money uh we're we're over involved in foreign countries and so on. And you can't bring home the bacon, as the saying goes, as a member of Congress, when you're becoming an expert on the CIA oversight or military oversight. You've got to bring home a factory. You've got to bring home federal aid. Even the people who, the Republicans who rail against for the Biden infrastructure plan, once it was passed, they were out there taking credit for it.

Yeah, remember wasn't DeSantis going around handing out giant checks to people for the bill he voted against? Yeah, and many Republican ministers of Congress saying, this bridge is going to be repaired, thanks to me, this road is going to be repaired, thanks to me. And they had campaigned against it. You know, they didn't campaign against bridges and roads, but they campaigned against Biden and Democrats is giving it spending too much money. But once that money was spent, they were glad to take credit for it. So our politics are so whacked up now. There used to be a general consensus about national security and foreign policy, and it wasn't all that good to tell you the truth.

I mean, you had a foreign policy consensus that we should be in Vietnam. Yeah. You know? So, and the people who were saying, no, we shouldn't, you know, they were very much in a minority. And they were attacked as being anti-American. Do we have any more questions? We do.

Ahmed, thank you again. Despite the damage and failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, do you think the U.S. military tech and the intelligence tradecraft are more advanced because of them? There's a lot of technological advances in technology. The communication is a key issue in intelligence operations. You've got to be able to communicate with your spies, right, in a very secure manner. because there was a communications lapse in 2005, I think it was, in regard to the CIA's Iran assets, a whole CIA network was rolled up by the Iranians. The Chinese reportedly rolled up some 20 CIA spies because of a communication lapse.

So there's a lot of time and money has gone into better and better communication. That's as so critically important. We have these huge... There's an arms race on now with artificial intelligence for one, which I don't even really grasp myself. I don't really quite... Can't get my head around the artificial intelligence,

but I know it has something to do with developing hypersonic missiles, which the Russians and the Chinese have both, I think both have demonstrated their hypersonic missiles now. And I know if we're not flying them for public inspection already, we're working on it. And you know that some weapons are surreptitious weapons, classified weapons are being worked on,

tried out in Ukraine now. I think that we're giving a lot of help to the Ukrainians for targeting and counterintelligence. So that's a big asset that CIA brings to all their foreign operations, by the way. They can help a friendly service with their communications technology and surveillance technology, you know, of phone tracking, which was unleashed against al-Qaeda. link tracing and so on so you could you could you if you could get access to one al-Qaeda phone right you could you could take that a whole network you could diagram you could diagram a whole network of al-Qaeda people and then the drones came in yeah so that was a big advance uh from unknown

uh name redacted i suppose thank you very much great show uh and then um let's see here I think we got a couple more, right, that popped up. Yeah, Clayton Jensen is one. Say again? Clayton, okay. Oh, thanks, Clayton. Thank you. Do you think the U.S. intel community is handicapped by our unwillingness to play as dirty as our adversaries? Does our American righteousness hinder our ability to be effective on the battlefield?

Are we too nice to win? What? Well, if anybody thinks that they're not following the... the recent Special Forces operation in northeast Syria, which took out a major Al-Qaeda or ISIS figure just, what, last week? Yeah. We're definitely not playing nice in the Middle East.

We're still, we took out with a drone strike, the head of al-Qaeda. Zahahir, right. Took him out. I mean, what? He was standing on his balcony and Kabul. We're not playing nice.

We're playing. I don't know if you call that playing dirty. I think we're just playing. We're in the game. And we're going after them. And we're helping the Ukrainians strike deep within Russia. I think we are. Again, with technology that we're loaning them or applying to their forces.

So no, I don't think we're not playing. I don't think we're not playing. We're playing dirty, if you want to call it dirty. They're out there in the battle. They're out there in the trenches. The game is the game. Never changes. And that's it for the questions.

All right. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Really appreciate you taking the time. I hope people go check out Spy Talk. Next Friday, we're going to be on with Scott Mann. Scott Mann, former Special Forces officer. He is the least. and the producer of the play last out that Dave and I went and saw.

He's also the author of Operation Pineapple. He was one of the guys helping the Afghans get out of Kabul last year. Scott Mann's a really good guy, really interesting guy, too. So we'll have him on the show next Friday speaking to him. And then our Christmas episode that following Friday is going to be with Shawnee Delaney, DIA, Hugh Minter. super good interview it's already recorded so that's going to go out for christmas so that's kind of what we have playing in the next two weeks yeah jeff what's i can i give a plug before we go to my

to my it combines intelligence and and good works and a very deserving individual my friend ron caps a former army intelligence and cia officer state department officer um is now um writing and performing music related to his wartime experiences. And it's really, he's a fabulous. He's got a great singer, a great guitar player. And I did a podcast about him, with him last year. And you can find his music online. It's Ron Caps, C-A-D-P-S, Ron Caps.

If you're a veteran, go listen to his music. go look him up and listen to his music and download it. It's really worthwhile. I met Ron because he came to me to be on the board of the Veterans Writing Project, which encourages veterans to write about their experiences and write short stories to write books, which is a noble pursuit. And so Ron started that up, and now he does it with music with veterans. So he's a noble figure himself, but

But teach yourself to his fabulous music, Ron Capp's C-A-P-P-S. That's cool. And again, I hope people go check out SpyTalk, SpyTalk.C-Tock.C-O. And again, Jeff, thank you. And we appreciate it. And all you out there, we'll see you next Friday with Scott Mann. Hope you have a good weekend. That was really fun.

Thanks, Jeff.