The Team House - Catching America's Most Damaging Spy | Eric O'Neill

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseEric O’Neill’s career began in the FBI’s counterintelligence trenches as an undercover operative. Since then, he has spent decades as a national security attorney, corporate investigator, and national cybersecurity strategist. He speaks to thousands each year across the globe, inspiring audiences to protect themselves and giving them actionable tools to do so. https://ericoneill.net/—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️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/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#fbi #roberthansenBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 297 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. And we're here tonight with Eric O'Neill, the author of Gray Day. He served as an FBI investigative specialist did a number of counterterrorism investigations,

including the one that led up to the arrest of Robert Hanson, who some say is maybe the most damaging spy in American history. We're excited to get into all of that with him. I want to tell people real quick before we jump into it, there's a link down in our description to our Patreon if you want to subscribe to the channel and support these shows and keep them going, and you get access to all of these episodes ad-free when you sign up.

So we really appreciate all you guys who do that. And I also just want to plug real quick my book I have coming out in December, December 9th, We Defy the Lost Chapters of Special Forces History, as chapters on blue light, green light, dead A, debt K, the guys who were undercover in Berlin during the Cold War, the liaison team that exists in Korea to this day. This was a lot of fun to work on, and I'm really excited to finally get it out there.

December. There's a pre-order page up on Amazon right now. I appreciate it if you guys check it out. So Eric, welcome to the show. It's good to be here, Jack. So, you know, the first question I usually ask people is about their origin story. If you can tell us a little bit about, like, what your upbringing was like and how that sort of eventually took you towards governmental service. Sure, no worries. I was sort of born into the government. I was born into the Navy. I was the last kid born in the Naval Hospital in the Navy base and Charleston, South Carolina. My father was a submariner. You know, he sort of followed his father's footsteps. His father was in surface warfare. So it was a tin can soldier, so I guess he went under a little different. And, you know, my plan growing

up was to join the Navy, just like my father and his father and two uncles and assorted other family members. You know, my father left the Navy. When I was rather young, we moved around a bit, and he ended up going to law school. So I was raised in the D.C. area from about age four and had that basic suburban D.C. upbringing. You know, my father's Irish, my mother's Italian, so I had the Catholic from both sides. You know, so that was a big part of the upbringing. Went to high school at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C., you know, it was an eagle, and finally ended up going to college. Now, my plan was to go study aerospace engineering for a year and then applied to the Naval Academy. I didn't get in right away and went to Auburn University, studied aerospace, and

decided after a year I wasn't going to stick with aerospace, and I also wasn't going to go to the Navy, which was the most complicated and difficult conversation I've ever had with my parents. My father was great about it. He was like, look, you've got to find your own path through life. But I think I always regretted that decision a little bit and wanted to definitely serve my country in some way, shape, or form. So when I graduated from Auburn, I started applying. And I applied to the FBI, the DEA, the CIA, the NSA, you know, Secret Service.

And in those days, I mean, we're talking the, you know, the early 90s, you, or 95, you, you, you sent a postcard and they sent you a packet. And you used to have these, these things called typewriters. I'm not even that old. And back then you had to type this whole thing. And it was, it was onerous and absolutely terrible. But I did it. I diligently sat there, typed up all those things. And I immediately heard back from the Secret Service, the FBI, and the DEA.

I had a friend who was in the Secret Service to talk me out of it, and it was between the FBI and the DEA, and the DEA gave me a spot at Quantico. I'm sorry, the FBI gave me a spot at Quantico, that both DEA and FBI train at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia. One day before the DEA recruiter called me to give me his spot. So that one day, you know, between the FBI and the DEA completely changed the whole outcome on my life. If it had been in the DA, I probably would have been deployed. I would have gone to South America, something like that. I wouldn't have met my wife. I wouldn't be married with three amazing kids. I'd have a completely different life than I have now. It's super funny to, you know, I interviewed a lot of folks like you or in this sort of career field. And I mean, talking to people who had these amazing careers like at CIA, I'm like, so why do you join the CIA?

Well, they were the first one that got back to me when I submitted to all these agencies. It's like, wow, okay, that's how you made up your mind, okay, but it all worked out. It worked out great. And look, you know, for me, I wanted to do something outside of the norm. I didn't want to just, you know, go be a consultant because that's what everybody was doing in 95 when I graduated. They were going to big cities and they were being a consultant to do something. I'm not even sure what consultants do. And now I'm a bit of a consultant, but very targeted way.

And I wanted to do something that made a difference that, you know, You know, I mean, you served. At the end of the day, you have that feeling like I made a difference in the world. And that's, I think everybody should at some point in their life do that. And that could be, you know, working for a charity. I ended up doing that for years as well. But going to the FBI gave me skills that I've used for the entire rest of my life. I've continued to use them.

It's a unique way of looking at the world, working in counterintelligence that just opened your mind to make connections that you wouldn't. make if you didn't have that sort of training. And I'm pretty damn good under pressure. So I took a lot from the FBI. You had an unconventional career at the FBI. You were not a special agent. Did you know that when you applied? Did you know that when you got recruited that you were not going to be a special agent? That there was actually this other thing that you were going to get sucked into. Yeah. Well, Jack, when I applied to the FBI, it was 22, 21, 22. And that was back then, back, you had to be 25 to be a special agent. But they came back to me and said,

we really love your application. I guess I spelled things right when I typed it. And they do these KSAs, knowledge skills, and aptitude, and I scored really high on those. And so they said, you know, we can't offer you a spot in special agents class, but would you consider this top secret group? Now, it's not top secret any longer

because I wrote about it in Gray Day, and the FBI gave me permission to talk about the special surveillance group, The classification is investigative specialists and the AKA is ghosts. And what we did is we work fully undercover. So the idea in the FBI was that special agents weren't doing so great at following people because in agents class you learned so many things. And back when special agents were starting to try to follow Russians around during the Cold War, it was, you know, a bunch of buzzcut guys who all looked the same in suits trying to follow

an intelligence officer down the street and it just didn't work out. So what the FBI decided to do is we're going to grab a group of individuals who look like the kind of people that you would see on the street that can blend in and are specially trained in how to investigate and follow a target without being seen or if they're seen, like I had a whole disguise kit and I could set up, you know, half a mile away from you and watch what you were doing, or I could be right next to you, and you would never even notice me. So it was a very particular kind of training and very specialized, and like I said, it opened your eyes to a whole new world that is around you. You know, people can't screw you over when you know exactly what they're trying to do before they do.

So talk to me a little bit more about how you, I mean, did you go to Quantico? Does the training even take place there. And tell us what that training consisted of. Yeah. So back when I got into the FBI, I also had a training slot at Quantico. And it's a lot of very specialized practical training and educational training. So, you know, we, we saw the DEA guys out the window while we're, you know, in classroom learning counterintelligence. And in order to learn counterintelligence, you have to learn the tradecraft of every other adversary. which is great if you're going to be pursuing targets because I could switch tradecraft based on all the different instructors that we had and we had instructors from all over the place.

You know, a lot of defectors, for example, teaching us their tradecraft. And then you see the DEA guys running down to the rifle range and shooting and running back and thinking, that could have been me. So it was very, you know, sort of like it was one or the other way. I was like, that could have been my life and now this is my life. And then there were a lot of practical exercises. And, you know, you'd live, you eat and sleep there, and you don't do much sleep because they're constantly waking you up. And you're running out to the cars and you're following your rabbit and learning those practical exercises.

But look, it's a classroom. It's a educational environment. And you can only do so many practical exercises. But it doesn't teach you how to follow a target effectively. And I really cut my teeth once I get assigned to a squad in D.C. following Russians around, who are the best of the best throughout D.C. And if you can follow a Russian and not be seen, you can follow pretty much anybody, because those intelligence officers have incredibly in-depth training in counter surveillance.

We'd follow, you know, I also work counterterrorism. We'd follow terrorists around and stop them before they did whatever they wanted to do. And they were easy. You could almost sleepwalk through that because they didn't have anywhere near the training of a of a true espionage adversary. The difference, of course, is, you know, the worst thing that's going to happen if a spy catches you is they might, you know, give you the finger or, you know, go home and then you get razed by your entire team, you don't get to work on that person for a while. You know, terrorists, they might blow you up or shoot you. So you had to be, still be careful

with the ladder. And following these Russians around was these were, I would assume, like, people who work out of the embassy but are suspected to be like GRU guys or something like that. Yeah, in the old ways that espionage used to be conducted, where they would actually come over to a country and have some sort of diplomatic covers. They'd be diplomats, you know, in the case of the Russians, you have the GRU, which are the military intelligence unit. And then you have the SBR, which was, you know, the KGB when Russia collapsed, the Soviet Union collapsed split into the FSB, which is where their state police in KGB, or SVR, which is the, you know, like the younger brother of the KGB who do the foreign intel. And they would come over here under some sort of cover, like the third

attichet agriculture and the embassy, you know, on Tonla Road in Washington, D.C. And their real job is to go and meet with sources or service dead drops or set signals or recruit. You know, there was a whole line in the SVR and their entire job was to recruit Americans to spy for them. You know, using the big three. Ideology, you think more like me. So help me. Or the best two, blackmail, I'm going to give you a lot of money and you're going to help me. Or bribery, I've learned something about you that you don't want your wife or your mom or your grandma to know. And if you don't help me, they're all going to know that. Nowadays, it's all cyber attacks. The game has has changed. There's a complete change to the old days when I started doing this to the

to the cyberspies that I'm working against right now. I'd like to drill down a little bit more to what the job was of this squad. I mean, you mentioned this counterintelligence, surveillance. I mean, is the intent to catch these guys conducting operational acts so they can be arrested or is it to follow them and see who their sources are? What is it that you're trying to accomplish out there? All of the above and it was different every day. I can't get into too many of the particulars. I got to be really careful to stay on sort of the script that I submitted to the FBI in Gray Day and they greenlit because much of what the ghosts do remains top secret. It's very classified and also the ways and

means in the particular way you do it. But the training is the ability essentially to investigate, to put all the pieces together, all the data points and come up with actionable intelligence and then follow someone, watch them, you know, there are many different ways to do that, until you catch them in the act. And that was always the goal to catch them in the act, because otherwise you don't really have a case. If you can't catch an intelligence officer as diplomatic immunity in the act, well, then you can't use that to embarrass the other country and PNGM, which means persona non grata. They're not allowed to come back to the U.S. to their career is basically over. We were always looking for illegals. Now, that would have been

the Holy Grail. Those are, and I'm not talking about. talking about illegals who are crossing our border. I'm talking about foreign intelligence officers or assets who are working for foreign intelligence who come over here without any diplomatic cover and without telling anybody that you're working on behalf of a foreign government. So that's a person who comes over to the U.S. somehow that is actually a spy but isn't using any diplomatic covers. They're truly hidden. And if you remember about 10 years ago, there was a case called Operation Ghost Stories. It was the 11 elite. who were identified, 10 were arrested.

Anna Chapman was sort of the star of that ring, just because she was the beautiful one who sort of slept her way into the halls of power. And they were living just like Americans. Some even had children who had no clue that their parents were spies. And correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as this portion of your career

that we're talking about, it sounds like you were following around foreign nationals. but at some point the FBI asked you to start looking at American citizens who, you know, were suspected spies. I mean, that's got to be like a whole different can of worms, like looking at suspected foreign spies versus an internal investigation. Yeah, no, I certainly worked other Americans as we went along. I mean, the spies were the ones that we were after. And the first case that I worked as a ghost was Earl Pitts, who was a Cold War spy that, and I detailed him in my book, great day, Earl Pitts had spied during the Cold War and the Soviet Union and then gone completely

inactive and continued to work for the FBI in the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. So he was a profiler. And Pitts was given up by a former KGB source who wanted a better life, sold his identity as a former spy for a bunch of secrets. Some great analysts learned all about him and a team was put on him to investigate him. And he was what's called false flag. So when you learn when you have an American that's an inactive and they've spied in the past, it's a lot harder to pin them down and build a legal case for something that happened, you know, like 10, 20 years ago. So what the FBI did was they sent a Russian speaking special agent who was trained to go undercover and pretend he was a Russian intelligence officer.

Comrade, we need you for one final mission. Yeah, approach them and said, you know, we need your help, you know, and, you know, would you spy for us and activated him? And he thought he was spying for Russia and he was actually spying for the FBI and everything he was handing over. And the FBI does this all the time. You know, a corporation, for example, might realize that they, you know, they're working for the U.S. government and they have a,

an employee who starts stealing secrets. And they report it to the FBI because they think, oh, maybe he's trying to give it to a foreign power. Well, the FBI will pretend they're that foreign power and roll the guy up once he's given a bunch of secrets over and they hand him money. And now you've got a case. So it got all pits. And there were others that I can't talk about that we investigated, both counterintelligence, spies and terrorists. And then finally, what ended up being the end of my career at the FBI, I was asked to go undercover to catch a very particular sty. So, yeah, tell us about that.

And I sense that this was also sort of a shift in roles for you because you'd never been an agent. You'd always been sort of on the outside and the periphery. But now you're going inside the bureaucracy. I mean, tell us about how you got recruited for that particular job. And why you? Yeah, so I might have been in Washington field office and headquarters five times in five years. I worked in off-sides, you know, behind 7-Elevens, you know, wherever my target was. I remember one morning setting up on a target, you know, of interest.

And I just said before I met my wife, and it was difficult to date, so I was really lucky I met my wife. And here's why I would, I know I had set up this date with a girl. that more I thought I'm I'm working this morning I'll be done by the early afternoon this be great and then I ended up having to call her from from a phone hours later you know I'm not going to make it tonight I'm in I'm in Miami. That dude got his car drove south and we just kept driving him you move where your target moves you eat when they eat you sleep when they eat they sleep and uh and she's like what are you doing Miami and I was just like I didn't have an answer I didn't want to lie it's like I can't

tell you that you know that was the end of that so So yeah, it's like that. So this case, it was incredibly unique, not only for me, but for the entire FBI. There was never a case that had been run like this, but Hansen was unique because for decades, the FBI had been after this mole that everybody knew. And I'm talking the entire intelligence community that we had this massive mole somewhere within the intelligence community. Didn't know if it was NSA, FBI, CIA, where this person was, or if he or she.

but knew that some of the most egregious secrets that ever been handed to a foreign power were being handed over and the Russians were eating our lunch. They knew our operations before we even got them off the ground. So there was this manhunt for this spy that was only known as gray suits. And when you don't know the identity of your target, there's a computer at the FBI that just spits out two random words and that becomes the codename. And it was gray suit. So everyone over all these years that the FBI had investigated was given a derivative name. So it's always gray something. Hansen was gray day. And there had been other gray so-and-soes that, you know, we'd worked on and off. They learned about Hansen at the very end of his career. And he was about to retire in April. And they learned of him in December 2000, because there was a joint FBI, CIA, force that recruited a former KGB intelligence officer that had long ago, and when the KGB was

abandoned, when the Soviet Union collapsed, he was out of a job. And he decided to go become a sky in the business. And then we wanted to retire. He decided to retire somewhere nice and warm. And he sold a little file of secrets to that joint task force. He said, I think this is the spy you've been after for your whole career, right? And for, for a little file. lot of money like millions of dollars and this is the kicker the guy's so brilliant i have a 16 year old and so we completely understand uh guaranteed school of his choice for his two college age kids uh full ride i mean that's gold that's worth more than the millions and and he's gone he's in witness protection the fbi opens the slim file of information and it's a cassette tape you know going way back a bunch

of letters and a trash bag it's like the worst game of clue ever trying to figure out who done it and the FBI is pretty good at this. So they run prints on the trash bag. You know, the FBI can do that. The KGB and the SBR can't. And it comes about like a partial match. They read the letters, which were all written by a spy only identified himself as Ramon Garcia, which turned out to be Robert Hanson's code name. And they listened to the cassette tape. And it was the one big mistake Hansen ever made. He called the consulate once to say, where's my money? He left the secrets under a bridge and he'd gone over to where he was supposed to go pick up his 50 grand and it wasn't there and he called to ask where and he had looked at the wrong side of a platform out in a

park amphitheater. Because the interesting thing about Hansen, right, is that he kept his identity concealed from his handlers in the Soviet Union and then Russia, right? Yeah, Jack, you're completely right. One thing that I attribute his longevity to as a spy and he was one of the most effective spies in history was the fact that he called the shots. He made sure that the Soviets and then the Russians were not in charge. He told them when, where, and how he would make his drops, and he never let them know his identity. And that's what kept them safe because, you know,

once your identity is known to an intelligence service, it just takes, you know, somebody to go rogue. And then suddenly the FBI knows who you are. So that protected him for a long time. But look, they ran the print. They listened to his voice. They read the letters, did some pattern recognition. And they had some really good circumstantial evidence that gray suit was Robert Hanson. So they give him the code name Gray Day, and they got this huge problem. He has stolen information from the FBI for decades because he penetrated computer systems at the FBI that were just never built to defend from a trusted insider within.

It was just institutional bias in the FBI. We can't be the bad guys. It's those CIA guys and NSA guys, right? Which is just short-sighted, but that was sort of the thinking, you know, in institutions for years until Hanson. And so they were never really looking within, and they weren't auditing what people were doing on computers. And he was just stealing stuff through computer systems and dropping it in discets under

a footbridge in Vienna, Virginia. And so they had to give him a job that was going to entice him to come back, stay in the FBI through his retirement. They usually these cases take two years, you know, one to two years to wrap up. And they came a computer job. They built a brand new division in the FBI. They called it the information insurance section. They gave it a really nice office and the ninth floor room 9930 in FBI headquarters.

They promoted him to executive service. And they essentially put Robert Hansen in charge of building cybersecurity for the FBI, which, you know, that's like the biggest brass. balls ever because they took one of the biggest spies, a suspected spies at that point, who had stolen from computer systems for his whole career and put him in charge of building cybersecurity for the FBI. So they're giving them access to things because they wanted him to spy. They wanted him to spy so he could catch him right hand.

And then they looked around the FBI for a, you know, crack, special agent, trained to go undercover face to face and have this elicitation conversation, right? Where, Jack, you and I are talking and you think we're just shooting this. off, but I don't know if I can curse on this. Yeah, sure. I'm at it. Yeah. We're shooting the shit.

But I have this agenda. I'm pulling information out of you. I'm gaining your trust. I'm learning all about you. I'm getting you to tell me things that you don't want to tell me, but I'm just great at this. And they couldn't find a single agent trained to do that who knew how to turn on a computer, who could sell the role, which was building cybersecurity. So, hey, look, the FBI is good at this.

They went deeper. They went into the realm of the ghosts. and I had written a program that did target analysis. It was mostly because I was in law school while I was working for the FBI. So I was trying to go at nights. And I needed something to get me off those horrible night shifts. So I said, look, on the, you know, I need to go to law school at night. So when my squad does nights, can I, you know, work on this program during the day and then get to class?

And the target analysis program worked. We were finding targets by looking at what they did over time. I won't go into all the details. but it got me some notoriety in the FBI as somebody who knows how to turn on a computer and use it. So they said, this guy kind of knows how to hunt a spy. And look, he knows how to turn a computer on, at least talk to talk. So they essentially built the office through Hanson in there, threw me in there, locked that big skiff vault door with the Navy SEAL code lock, you know, on it and trick the thing up and hoped I came out all right. And I did. Now, are they giving you a badge and a gun that part of your undercover? identity is that you're an actual special agent now?

No, I didn't. I went undercover as myself. And that was the most disconcerting part about this whole thing. Typically, you'd go undercover with a legend. So I would have a different name. I'd have different documents. I'd be something totally different. I didn't want a spy who's dropping information to the Russians to know who I was. But I couldn't do that because I'm investigating face-to-face a fellow FBI.

employee, you know, a decorated supervisory special agent who was going to be my boss. And think about it. We're walking down the hall in the FBI HQ together. Now, I didn't know a lot of people in the FBI because they kept us separate because we would investigate the rogue agents. I was really known only by a code name. You know, it was if you read my book, you have to read my book and my code name was werewolf. I tell why. You don't pick your your code name. It's not because I'm hairy. There's a story behind it. But I tell the story. in the book. But that's how I was known in the FBI, you know, or I asked O'Neill to some, but, but I didn't know people. So all that had to happen is he and I are walking down the hall and

somebody who says, hey, Eric, and I've got this other name and Hansen knows it's gone. Also, the FBI was so worried about his ability to penetrate the computer systems that they didn't know if he could identify who I was in a computer system that was going to tell him something different. So I didn't go undercover as myself. If I recall correctly, Hansen had a background in FBI counterintelligence too, right? He was a spy hunter. In fact, not only did he have a background in counterintel, he was a counterintel trainer.

He was a counterintel auditor. He would go to all the legal attache offices around the world and audit them to make sure they're doing their job right. And at one point, at one point, the squad looking for gray suit, remember, gray suit was the spy that it turned out Hansen was, asked their top Soviet analyst to help them identify the spy. So they went to Hansen and asked him to catch himself.

I mean, it's just crazy. He must have just loved that and loved it and loved it. And he sent the FBI on this insane wild goose chase. He gave him like 100 names of who it could be. And FBI agents were just spilling out around the country looking at people who had nothing to do with it at all. and he just must have been laughing the entire time. So going undercover to try to catch this guy,

it was difficult because he was better trained at this than I was. You know, the thing that I had going for me is he just didn't see me coming. Yeah, he didn't see you as. His pride, yeah. His pride would not allow him to believe that, you know, 26, 27 year old kid who wasn't even a special agent was going undercover to catch him. Now, he was suspicious, but he just couldn't make himself believe it. Tell us about your first meeting with Robert Hanson and tell us about him a little bit about who he was. Because, I mean, beyond his FBI professional life, I mean, I imagine as you came to learn over time, he's kind of an interesting guy.

Yeah. Not necessarily in a good way. Yes. So he was, he had been in the FBI at that point, almost 25 years. He was about to retire with his 25 year pension, gold watch and disappear and go take a job somewhere else probably. During that time, he had a number of roles and went through some of them. He was also one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history and certainly FBI's history. He gave some of the most egregious information that's ever been given to a foreign power. If you think

about the height of his espionage was during the Cold War between the years of 84 and 85, right in the middle of those two years, we lost every single asset in the Soviet Union, all of our spies. and he shares all of those deaths and imprisonments with Alder Games, a CIA spy. So, you know, unbeknownst to each other, they were both giving up similar information, which is golden intelligence for a foreign intel service. He also gave up secrets related to our nuclear weapons program and warfare program. So it turns out that it's really good there wasn't nuclear war because the Soviet Union knew exactly where we were going to fire and who we were going to fire at.

What would we do if they fired first? They knew our game plan. He gave up our continuity government plan. He gave up under-cover operations. He gave up undercover operatives, you know, like me and thankfully not me, whose entire careers were lost and much, much more. He was a bad guy, and he did it all for, you know, just a few million dollars, not that many. He was very careful in what he took.

He never took more than could get him caught. But he gave up billions for just a few million dollars, which is, you know, smart if you're a by, but a little crazy. He didn't have to give up all of that. I truly think he wanted to be the best. Now, on the other side, the conundrum that's Hansen, who betrayed, you know, his oath, his country, his family, his job, everything. He was known as an upstanding family man. He had seven children, sort of grandchildren by the time I was investigating him. He lived in the suburbs of Vienna, had a wife that, you know, he wasn't exactly faithful to, but she thought he was. And he was a Opus Day Catholic, a very strict Catholic who went to church every single day.

I know because he would make me go with him. Now, that's where me being a Catholic comes in, you know, I got to pay. I was foreshadding me a little in the beginning, Jack. I had to pay that off. But clearly the FBI looked at me and thought, okay, we've got some more connections. They're both Catholic. That's something that can talk about. They're both computer nerd.

They can talk about that too. Hanson's oldest, one of his sons, the oldest or second oldest, was at law school at Notre Dame. I was at law school at GW. There's more connections. The more connections you have, the better openings you have for conversation and dialogue,

and to gain trust. And my first job was gain his trust, because without trust, you can't get someone to tell you anything. So he was an interesting guy. He was also rude as hell. He was a really tough boss. He was like the worst boss.

I've had all sorts of bad bosses throughout my career, you know, until finally, you know, I just started my own companies and had enough of having any bosses and my own boss. And nobody has come close to him. So when I was in a law firm, I was able to work with every asshole partner because no one was going to be worse than working with Hansen. He could belittle you. He'd yell at you. And it wasn't for a long time until I gained his trust that he started easing up on me. So it was, it was grueling. It was mentally just. draining to work with this guy. How did how did you do that and build up that trust from that rocky start um to the point where you're able to start to scratch beneath the surface on this guy? It took a long time and you know I I see the first time that we started you know we got into we got into a situation where he really wanted to be a mentor to somebody and he I I could see it, right? But he was so reserved. And finally, I gained his trust when we went to church together the first time.

And I got to tell you, I was thinking like every nun in my entire Catholic career when we had to say the Our Father and, you know, like go through the order of the Mass. And, you know, he's watching me like a hawk. And I was like, no, I got this. I've been messing all sorts of stuff up, but this I've got. Like, I know how to say the Our Father, dude. You don't have to stare at me. And as we walked out at church, I mean, the conversation,

shifted. Suddenly he was being very open. He's talking about his family. He's talking, asking about my wife, like, when are we going to have children and how important it is to have children? And when I said, you know, I'm broke. I got an FBI salary. I live in a crappy apartment in Eastern Market. You know, it's like Section 8 type housing. It's like one room. They subdivided into three and they shouldn't have. We can't afford a kid right now. And he started saying things like, God will help you find a way. I was like, well, God better start. And he's like, no, there's a way. We can talk about that later.

Oh, shit. And as we started having, go ahead. Well, I mean, what was he alluding to right there? Well, as we started having conversations, the squad started talking to me because I was getting debriefed every night. But the agents running this case. And they told me he's recruiting you. Yeah, yeah. He's recruiting you.

He's recruiting you. And we want you to make it happen. I'd never left the FBI if he had got that far. Wow. Wow, man. I guess I want to ask a little bit about, like, his motivation, because, I mean, he was getting paid off in cash and diamonds, as I understand. So there's money. But was there something else going on here?

I'm really, I think this is, like, one of those really interesting things where you guys are both in the FBI. You're both Catholic. Have this religious connection. Like, what was it about him that made him a deviant, essentially? Yeah, well, he is, he, he, he. He had this personality, narcissistic personality. He was a true narcissist. And look, I've looked at a lot of trust insiders and, you know, with government, but also later in my career business.

And they have that. They have this overinflated sense of self-worth. And they look at themselves on where they are in their career and they just feel like they should be doing better. And they, you know, they're all sorts of narcissists. You know, I run a company that does competitive intelligence. And one thing that we find is we'll take a resume of someone, a CV of somebody that a client is looking to hire and put in charge of like a new CEO of a branch or something. And we found that the more accomplished the person is, the more likely they are to lie on their CV. And I think what it is is they're like, I have a doctorate, but I should have like two.

So they just add one, you know. And there's that, I'm not saying it's full-blown narcissism, but there's. that sense of entitlement, self-worth that some people have, some very successful people have. You lose that humility along the way. Hansen was just a narcissist. He believed that he was the best at everything and everyone should listen to everything he said. And if they didn't, they were idiots. And those are his words, not mine. So he had that. And the FBI is hard. The FBI is a bureaucracy. You either learn to swim with the tide. If you fight against it, it will drown you. It doesn't care about you.

It'll let you go. It'll chew you up. It'll spit you out. I mean, it's, people are in the FBI because they want to make a difference because they want to change the world because they want to make people safe. They're not, you know, at least career people might be a little different, but the people who are in the trenches like me, that's why you're there. Otherwise, go somewhere else and make a ton more money. But Hansen fought against it. And he, he swam against the tide.

He was angry about not being, you know, promoted where he felt like he should be or, treated the way he did. And he was a disgruntled employee. He was a disgruntled employee who also needed money. He joined the FBI because he had this idea of being a law enforcement officer and being James Bond. And he demanded that he'd be sent to a top counterintelligence squad. And he wanted New York City, which unless you've got a lot of money, don't be an FBI agent in New York City. You know, you don't live in the city. You do a lot of commuting. And he was having all these kids and he couldn't afford it. So he's mad at the FBI because they didn't make him a field up like I was. They made him an analyst, which is really the bread and butter of intelligence.

I mean, analysts do everything. People like me in the field, you know, running around. We can't do anything unless we have actionable intelligence and the analysts give us that. He was mad. And the way I like to put it is he joined the FBI to be James Bond and the FBI made him a librarian and he was mad about that. That'll do it. So he's mad. He needs money. That's his triggering event. He's got this personality that tells me, you know what? I can show the FBI.

And so he spies. His first active espionage, you got two people killed. He gave up two of our top assets in the Soviet Union with a letter, one letter, one piece of paper, short little piece of paper. He got two people murdered and that he was going to use to protect himself. And he became a spy. Yeah, there's a level of psychopathy there, all. also that you know you're putting that letter under the bridge, you know it's going to get two people whacked. I mean, it's on you in a very profound way. Absolutely. I mean, he has blood in

his hands. And when he was arrested, finally, you know, he does get caught in the end. I survive. Yay. He had one of accounts against him was the bloody hands that he had, his actions had led to deaths and he knew that they would lead to those deaths. So walk us through this process now. Now you're in this rhythm where he's trying to recruit you, he's trying to groom you to be the next Soviet or Russian spy, I should say. How did that process take place for you? And I mean, how did you feel about that as you're, at least he thinks he's recruiting you to do something, you know, to commit acts of treason? Well, you know, for a long time, I felt that I was just doing an amazing job, that, you know, I'd fooled him to such an extent that, you know, he'd, you know, he'd, you know, he'd, you know,

he felt that he was going to leave the FBI, but he could leave some of his legacy behind. That I was kind of be like the robin to his Batman, right? That's what I thought, which, which, you know, maybe that's a little bit of my own self-inflated ego, but, you know, a very, an agent that I respect a lot of we were chatting not too long ago, and she told me, you know, that's not what he was doing, Eric? And I was like, what was he doing? She said, he was going to leave, but he was going to, he was going to leave you there to spy for him. he was just going to run you.

And then when he was done with you, he'd just use you up and, you know, get you arrested and walk away. And I was thinking, yeah, that's probably what he was doing, you know, in the end, just try to fool me. But I think we would have got that point. We never really got there because I found the information that led to his arrest. You know, I like to say, you know, and maybe if I, it cannot be humble for once, you know, it took the FBI 22 years to learn about Hansen. And it took me three months to find the. information that got them. And, you know, that's something that I own and I'm proud of.

It was his pocket planner? It was his Palm Pilot. That's it. Yeah. You got to go back in time. You got to be in the 2000s. The Palm Pilot was the new flashy thing. It was a, it was a PDA, personal data assistant. And it was this big, thick thing that flipped open. And it had a screen, but to get information into the screen, you had to stab it with a plastic stick. That was the height of technology. Old school. It tapped it. The youth are learning something from this podcast tonight. That's right. So tell us about this PDA he had and how he used it.

Well, he loved the thing. He talked about it all the time. He kept it in his left back pocket and he was never apart from it. The only time that he didn't have it in that back pocket is when it was in his hand as he was using it. Or he was sitting at his desk because he can't sit on the thing. It was too thick. And so he would put it in his bag and like clockwork, like a machine.

As he sat down, he would put it in the bag, next to his desk. And as he stood up, you'd reach down and grab it and put it in his back pocket. Like it was a routine. And we all have routines. Go home. Don't put your keys on the hook or in the basket. And I guarantee you the next time you need to drive your car anywhere, they're gone. Right. So we have routines to protect things to make sure that we know where things are. And everyone uses routines to protect information. This was Hanson's. And when I asked him about it, he said that this is the only way that you can organize your life, if you were smart, if you were something more than a do-nothing, no-good, useless clerk, you would have one of these things. This is how he talked to me,

even when he was being nice. And so I went and I got two. I went to the Office of Science and Technology, who we technically worked for. I requisitioned two of these suckers. And, you know, he had a Palm Three. I got two Palm Vs. They were like thinner. They were faster. You could send an email on them. You could play games, like Mind Sweeper and that kind of stuff. And I gave him one. And I thought, I'll dear myself to the boss. And he pushed it back across the desk. It pulled out his and he said, I've written the encryption on this myself. And these idiots of the FBI couldn't crack it on their best day. Now, that is a huge clue. It's like we say clue, right? I used to have a team leader. And early on, and when you're out on the street and your radio

all fail and you're looking around trying to figure out where your target just went. I'd see the team later and he put his hands like that, which was like get a clue. And you know, like the dude just walk by you. You know, it's like our weird sign language. So that's my clue hat. But Hansen, you know, that was the big clue that we needed to get this thing away from him and find out what was on it because maybe it would give us something that would lead to his arrest. So how did you engineer concoct a situation wherein you were going to be able to do that? Well, we had to social engineer Hansen. We had to hack them because the guy was never apart from the thing. And maybe the movie version of me, you know, in the movie breach, Ryan Filby playing

me, could like bump him and, you know, pick his pocket and, you know, get it away long enough. But the problem is the second he reaches forward or sits down, it's game over. And I'm not a magician. I don't pick pockets. I can pick a lock. Not a pocket. So we needed to use a pretext, is what we call it. And here's what it came up with. There was an A-DIC and assistant director. They're actually in the FBI called A-DICS, get that. And the section chief, who was the only other person I knew in FBI headquarters who knew what I was doing.

He was like down the hall, this awesome guy named Richard Garcia, still friends today. And, you know, he was my escape plan. If everything went wrong, I was going to have to try to get out of the vault and get down the hall to his office. And he was just ready to shoot everybody. So, you know, we had Richard and the assistant director come in unannounced, startle Hanson, and invite him to come down to the sub-basement to go shoot with the two of them. and we basically used everything that I learned about Hansen in the psych profile, which was he doesn't like to be challenged,

he doesn't like to be interrupted. He dislikes everybody above him in the chain of command, especially these two people. And so I picked them, of course. But he really, really, really likes to shoot. The guy was gun nut. He had all sorts of firearms. He loved it.

He was always telling me, like, I'm going to take you down and we're going to go shoot. And I'm like, well, why don't we go do it? I think I could have probably outshot. him, but I don't know. He was apparently pretty amazing. And he can't say no. He tries to beg off. I'm busy. I don't have time. And the ADIC looks at him and says that wasn't a request. So now he's mad. He's off his game. He makes his mistake. He gets up and he grabs zero protection, eye protection. He holsters his firearms. No one actually walks around the FBI healed unless you're like the greenest of green, you know, new agents. You know, you get it. You get to your office. You

locking your deck. Like, who's going to attack the FBI headquarters? So he ulsters that thing, and he follows them out. And I'm super excited because for the first time, for the first time, he's forgotten that damn pilot. And I know it's just sitting in his back. And so you snatched that thing up and you have to drag it down the hall to Garcia's office or somewhere else to try to rip it? Well, it took me a while to get this right. This wasn't the first time we tried. But this is the time that worked. And so I'm really excited. It's there. So I go over to the bag. I check and I wait. You know, I was a little bit smarter about this. You know, as we went in, as we went along in the case, I was learning. I was actually learning from Hanson. So I had an asset that was down in the

shooting range. We're in the nine floor, nine 30, and they're all the way in the basement. In the parking level, which is where the range is. And so he sends me a page on my skytel alpha numeric pager. It's technically a text, but it says in-pocket shooting. So once I knew they was all the way down there in-pocket, they had eyes on them. I felt safe going through his bag and I found the Palm Pilot, but I also found a data card and a floppy disk. And I thought, all this stuff has data. I'll grab it all. I ran down three flights of steps to where there was this tech room that had just, tech team that had just been sitting around waiting for me to get this right. Hand off all the devices. They start, they hook it up.

up to their systems and start copying it. And the one guy says, look, it's all encrypted. I was like, well, what are you going to do? He's like, we're just going to copy it. We'll crack it later. And I was like, great, go for it. And you can probably tell, like, I'm talking to you. You're like chilling out in the seat.

I stand when I talk and I move around and I've always got this energy. So they threw me out of the room. They're like, this guy's distracting. So now I'm standing in the hall, like a recaltering child or something, like waiting for them to give me back the stuff. as I'm standing out there just like, oh, hi, as people walk down the hall, nobody knew what was going on in that room. It was like one of those rooms with a, you know, top secret, leave, you know, stay away. And I get another page.

And it says, out of pocket coming to you. So, you know, gently knocking the door. I'm like, hey, guys, I'm going to need that stuff. You know, he's on his way back. They're like, yeah, we're almost done. I'm like, you don't understand. He's armed and he's angry. And if I'm not there before him, he's going to shoot me.

And so it's not like James, you know, James Bond or Jack Bauer or Jack Ryan. You know, I start with E, not J. And I get the stuff and I run up three flights of stairs. And I get into the office before him and we had a main area where my office was. And then he had his own office, which was through another door. I slammed the big door to the main area, which is what saved me. I go into his office and I'm feeling just cool as cucumber. I'm sauntering in there.

I'm like, I win. We got it. I kneeled down in front of his bag and I realized there are four pockets and there are three devices and I, for the love of God, I can't remember which pocket I pulled these things out of. No idea. It's completely blank. And so I kneeled down in front of his bag and I'm just trying to remember like does the Palm Pablo go here and the Fabius here. And this is the most meticulous dude in the world. Like a leaf is out of place in his plant and he knows, right? So in this moment of stress, I'm like trying to cast my mind back, like self-hypnotize.

I don't know. And I hear him coming through the main door. So what do you do, right? I just zipped up all four pockets. You know, it's like you circle C on the Scantron when you don't know the answer. Ran to my desk and put the best poker face I've ever had in my life and ever will, like right here. And he comes through the main area. He glares at me.

And he goes into his office and I hear, of course, zip. And he busts out the PDF and starts typing away. He opens his bag and then he comes out a few moments later. And he walks right up to my desk and he leans over and he looks at me. And he says, were you in my office? And I said, yeah, you've got a plan for everything, every eventuality when you're in this business. And I had. And I said, yeah, I was in your office.

I walked in there. I put a memo in the inbox. Didn't you see it? And in my mind, in the back of my mind, I'm saying this and I'm sweating all down the back, but I'm like, I'm totally composed up here somehow. I don't know how.

And I'm thinking, like, my mind's going, like, I tripped over your bag and it all fell open and I put stuff back. Like, I'm just trying to come up with some stupid excuse. There's no excuse. I like, he's got me dead to write if I got it wrong. And he looks at me and he holds that stare, and he finally says, I don't want you in my office again.

and he leaves for the day. And we had another week or so after that where things were okay, but he was really tense and really stressed out. But about a week later, he walks out onto a bridge in Vienna, and he pulls a package out of his pocket, out of his sport coats about that big,

and it's wrapped in trash bags like he always has. So it's protected from the elements, and he slides it under the bridge at Foxstone Park in Vienna, you can go there. The bridge is still there. It's that first bridge when you get to the parking area.

And he gets back up on the bridge. He knocks it off his shoes and he smiles to himself because he's just loaded his final drop to the Russians. All the information that he's stolen the entire time he and I were working together. And from the amount of detail

you just used to describe that, I have to assume you guys had him under surveillance. But we were there before him. You're exactly right. We were there. And as he's leaving the point, park and he walks back to his car, his old Silver Ford Taurus, two vans screeched to a halt, SWAT jumps out, they point their guns at him, he's arrested, put in handcuffs, and he says,

the guns are not necessary, and then he looks at them and he says, what took you so long? And he's arrested for espionage. He ends up pleading guilty. We not only knew where he was going to be, but the exact time he was going to be there, because the Palm Pilot is really just a big digital calendar. That's how you catch a spy. So you knew from the, okay, yeah, so to rewind a little bit, how long did it take the FBI to crack his super spiffy home-brewd encryption? Not very long, a few days. And I mean, it was, it was strong encryption. It just, the FBI has very big computers. The thing about encryption is that, you know, unless it's, unless it's some serious military-grade encryption. And I mean, he wrote this himself. The bigger the computer, the faster you're going to

crack it. And the FBI also has, you know, things like the NSA. I was a part of the team that cracked it, but they were able to crack it. And we learned by reading through all his old letters and other information that I had found earlier in the case, his special code for how he translated dates. So he would transpose them. He didn't just put the date in his calendar. There was math you had to do the date to get the actual date in time. We also knew that from an earlier. search that I had done. And so they were able to know exactly not only where he'd be, but when. And that's gold because we caught him red-handed, loading a drop of secrets he'd stolen

into a known drop site. And that's about as red-handed as you can get. And then we tried to keep it quiet and catch the intelligence officer who would come out and service it, but he never did. I mean, that's pretty wild. So he had all the dead drops that he would service, all those locations. and the times and whatever, whatever time delay they were using, that was all in the PDF. That was in the PDF.

I mean, you have to put it somewhere because these things are planned out one, two years at a time. And unless you want to make a call like he did that one time and risk your life, essentially, by breaking protocol, you know, you have to have it somewhere. And so, you know, there's different ways to do it. There's one-time pads, you know, there's all sorts of things. modern, you know, modern spies probably used a lot of different kinds of technology, but this was his way of doing it. And that's why he never wanted to be separated from that device. So from this

point, we had talked a little bit earlier. You were not required to testify in court because of all this hard evidence they had on him at that point. I mean, were you off the case at this point? I mean, did you have visibility on the prosecution and how that was going? No. At this point, I wasn't actively part of the case. It was all part of the, it was the Department of Justice's case at that point. And so the indictment was written by the FBI, by the FBI case officer and then case agent.

And then the Department of Justice took it off, the handsome lawyered up, and then he decided to plead guilty. And because he decided to plead guilty, I didn't have to testify. I would have. And I was, I was nervous about that. You know, I'd have to face them

and watch him glare at me as I talked about all of the evidence that I collected. But he saved me that by and saved the FBI a long protracted case by pleading guilty, essentially for the first time in his life doing the right thing. What did they sentence them to? He was sentenced to life in prison. So without any opportunity for parole, I don't even think he could have been pardoned. and he had consecutive life turns. And part of the deal was that he would have to submit to constant interrogation.

You know, it was like they didn't have an end date. So the FBI, the NSA, and two commissions that were put together were given access to Hanson so that they could ask everything that he'd done so that it could be fixed. Like a damage assessment? Yeah, but the damage was incredible. He blew swiss, he blew holes, so many holes in counterintelligence, and U.S. counterintelligence. It was basically Swiss cheese.

You know, our adversaries knew everything we were doing before we did it. And everything else he did. But also the ways and the manner that he was able to penetrate the FBI so deeply in other agencies and how he did that, because that had to all be corrected. So in great day, I call Hansen, the modern architect of the FBI, because essentially he is, certainly the architect of the FBI's security. I don't think it would be very difficult for a trust insider to do what Hansen did. He's kind of one of a kind because the FBI, by learning from him,

built its internal security to the standard that is now used now and used very effectively. Before we move on to the next thing, any final takeaways about the Robert Hansen case that you like to get across to the American public or even to these bureaucracies, FBI, CIA, about the nature of these infiltrations? Certainly. I mean, there were always be spies. Even in an era where 99% of espionage is conducted through computer systems. I mean, why leave Moscow or Beijing or Tehran or Pyong when you can just attack a government official through a computer system? But you're attacking the person. You're fooling them. I mean, it's all the same deceptive techniques in a modern and environment, even though that's the easiest way to spy. There will always be spies. And so,

you know, part of looking for trusted insiders is, is understanding how to spot these things. You know, government works very hard to train on that. But look, espionage is the oldest profession. Sometimes they say the second oldest profession on earth. And it'll continue to be around as long as there are humans. So you, after finishing this case, you only had, you spent three more months at the FBI and then went to law school. What motivated that change, that life change, to leave the bureau and go to school? Yeah. So I'd been in school for about two years at this point, a little over two years, while I was in the FBI. So I was desperately trying to make classes and keep my grades up and, you know, chasing spies and terrorists all over the place. And it's one of the reasons I

I picked George Washington University. Most of the professors, as a night student, most of the professors are practitioners. You know, their attorneys, their judges, they understand in a way that, you know, the, the tenure-day student professors don't when you can't make it to class or you show up and you're half dead because everybody's working a job. And so, you know, five years of working undercover straight without ever coming out of cover, I decided that that was enough. Now, a big part of it was the Hansen case burned me out a little.

And I was married. You know, the day that my SSA, my supervisor special agent, Gene McClellan, showed up on my house, unannounced on a Sunday and asked me to work undercover, you know, to investigate Robert Hansen, I was married three years. We hadn't, I'm sorry, three months. We hadn't even had a honeymoon yet. And, you know, my wife was German and had come over to the, the U.S. to be with me and we were trying to build a life together. And, you know, for the entire time

I was on the Hansen case, there was no life. I was always gone. And I couldn't tell her what I was doing. I had lied to her the entire time. And so I really wanted to correct that, that relationship. And at the end of the day, I wanted to see what I could do as an attorney. And see what I'd do with a legal shingle. And so I hung that out there and went to work for what became one of the biggest firms on earth and did national security law and government contracts law and all sorts of stuff that still had ties to the government, but I wasn't in the government anymore. Any notable cases or clients that you can talk about during that time? Well, you know, what I did, I can't talk about them because they were, you know, they're still kind of confidential, but I worked, I ended up

working, well, you know, surprise, surprise on a number of internal investigations. So I built a pretty good practice on doing internal investigations of companies who, you know, had issues or some corruption or problems. And generally it was on behalf of the board of directors. So the board of directors would, you know, find out, you know, they'd get a letter from the Department of Justice or, you know, a government contracting agency saying that we think that there's, you know, financial fraud or contracting fraud and they would hire attorneys to not go undercover, but come in and find out where everything got wrong. And working with Hanson made me pretty good at spotting a liar,

all that time in the FBI. And I became very good at it in my practice. And that was kind of part of the primogenitor of deciding to leave then that career as an attorney and start a company that does competitive intelligence and a lot of that same work. I want to talk about your company and what you guys do now, the Georgetown Group. But I got to ask about the book, Great. day and then the movie breach that was based off of it. I mean, how did all of that come about? Well, the movie actually came before the book. Right. So I was taking, I was journaling during

the Hanson case. Now, I had to turn over all my notes. I had to write a log every single night. So basically, I would go to law school. I wanted my, the special agent, Kate, who was basically in charge of making sure I didn't screw up. would drive me to law school from FBI headquarters, and we'd debrief on the way. And then a lot of nights, she'd hang out for two, three hours and pick me up again and drive me right back to headquarters, and we'd do a search of the office because I had to be there for chain of custody.

And then I would go home, and I'd get like five minutes with my wife before she goes to sleep, and I'd wait for her to sleep, and then I'd sneak out of bed and go sit down and pull out this hidden laptop and type up my essentially surveillance log for the day, which would go right to the director of the FBI. And so I wasn't sleeping at all. I maybe got three, four hours of sleep a night. And it was pretty damn difficult. And so, you know, I had to find my way through that and, you know, going to law school and doing all that was part of the big reason that, you know, I chose to leave the FBI.

Now, the movie came before the book. And so when I finished, I had all this information. I had to turn over the journals, the logs, but I kept my journals, like what it was like to work with Hansen and some of the interactions. And I wanted to write a book. But by the time I got permission from the FBI to write a book, there were already six in publication. Just every reporter who grabbed the indictment just wrote something real fast in like record time. And I didn't want to work with another writer. And so I just decided to table it.

And then a few years later, I mean, I left the other. FBI in 2001, just before 9-11 or else I never would have left. If 9-11 had happened and I was still in the FBI, there's no way I would have left. But I left before that. And I was kind of like waiting by the phone. Are they going to bring me back in here? I kind of thought they would. And my brother was a screenwriter and an actor. And he just said, yeah, I've just, you know, over some drinks at my place, It was just telling them about this case after I could finally talk a little bit about it. And he said, this would make the perfect movie. I said, yeah, right, whatever.

And he was like, can I just talk to a couple producers back in L.A. where he lived? And I said, sure. And suddenly the producers were interested. And I didn't think anything would come out of it other than I'd get some free flights out there to hang out with my brother. So I'd let them go down the road. And suddenly it was getting bid on by all these studios and Universal one. we made the movie with them. So that movie came out first and absolutely changed my life.

I went from being a undercover ghost who was an attorney who was, you know, making waves, you know, as an investigator attorney, but, you know, never did an interview anywhere to suddenly doing interviews and podcast. Well, there weren't podcasts back then, but news and media and all sorts of things. And then I turned that into a career as a professional speaker. And as I'm speaking through these years and all these stages everywhere, and my first agent came to me and she said, do you have a book? I said, no. And she said, I find it very insulting to literary agents everywhere that there's a movie about your story, but you've never written it in a book.

And I said, well, I told her the story of like all the books that were out there. And he's like, well, you've definitely got a story to tell. If you just wrote up your keynote, like you just delivered it, we'd have a proposal. And I ended up working with her, Becky Swerin at Avitas in New York. And we came up with this proposal for Gray Day. And I wrote the thing in record time because I've been writing it in my head for years and years and every stage that I ever spoke on. What were some of the significant differences between the movie and the book? And what did you think of the movie when you saw it?

I really enjoyed them. I mean, I still have chills when I see that, you know, that initial universal screen with the, you know, the earth and the sun going over it. I mean, every time I hear that jingle, I like, I have that same moment. The first time I watched the movie was sitting in a screening room on Universal Studios lot right next to Chris Cooper and Billy Ray, who was the director. Oh, wow. And Billy brought us both out, but didn't tell either of us that we were going to watch it together for the first time. So the whole time, like every Hanson and Ryan Filpsey plays me, Chris Cooper plays Hanson. You know, every Hanson scene, he's leaning over and looking at me, you know, and I'm looking right back at him to see what he thinks.

And I love the movie. And, you know, I still do. It's taught. Scenes from that movie are taught in virtually every intelligence school in the world. Wow. You know, they teach it at FBI Academy. I've gone and lectured to the agents at the FBI Academy a number of times, which is really cool. and the movie for what it is as well.

Now, it's a Hollywood movie. The way I distinguish them is Breach is a movie about me. My book, Gray Day, is my story. So Hollywood takes licenses. It says, you know, based on our true story. Right. And they add things. You know, the core of it is very real.

If you read Gray Day and you watch the movie, anytime Hansen and I are alone in that room, you'll see all the elements because I helped write it. It's very true to life. So how we caught him, that investigation, it's all very well preserved. But it's not a documentary. So Hanson never shoots at me in the woods. That didn't happen in real life.

That's probably the scene that is farthest departure from reality. He never shows up at my apartment with his wife. The four of us couldn't fit in our apartment and have dinner together. And there wasn't that level of connection. between, you know, our wives and our families, that we weren't that intermashed. We were getting there, but we hadn't got there quite yet. But the core of it, the investigation is very true to life.

So you do the movie in the book, and then talk to us about the Georgetown group and kind of what you're working on now. Yeah, when I left DLA Piper, the law firm I was working at, I decided that I wanted to insert myself in the middle. There was something that attorneys were missing when they worked on mergers and acquisitions. You know, the attorneys look at their thing, the accountants look at their thing,

but there's this asymmetrical information that they were missing. So unless you hired an investigator, you weren't going to find it. And what I wanted to do was sort of the deep dive corporate investigative work that, you know, we're not PIs. We hire them sometimes, but we wanted to go deep into the documents and information and, you know, some stuff that we know as a group of investigators, a former investigators and different agencies and work, how to find that information. So what we do is competitive intelligence. We find information that gives an advantage to our clients, whether it's in a deal or a transaction, whether they're

going to hire someone or they think they have problems with a group or a business angle, or they're being attacked by a rival company, and they need some help to learn about that rival company. and maybe go on the counteroffensive. We'll do that too until the other company decides, okay, we're all going to stop and cool it because this is embarrassing for everyone. So competitive intelligence

can be an incredible advantage and we just saw a need for it and it's been great. Obviously, we work with a lot of attorneys and a lot of litigators because I know intrinsically how to do that work. But you have some crossover

with the field of cyber espionage as well or cybersecurity? Yes, I do. So when a breach came out, I started going out in the public speaking circuit, which is my passion, which is what I love to do. I love speaking with you, Jack, and being on podcasts and talking with crowds. But it was about the Hanson story, and that's not Evergreen. I do that keynote all the time, but, you know, close to the movie.

And then when the book came out, I did a lot of it. But I needed something more. And as I continued in my career, and I started working as a national security strategist for cyber companies, I returned to my roots and computers and what I was actually doing at the FBI. And the thought leadership all came from the conversations I had with Hansen, who was actually a brilliant cybersecurity strategist. If he had worked for the angels instead of the devils, then maybe he could have built a stronger, more secure FBI. Instead, he was the most damaging spy. And he did it sort of an asymmetrical way, in a different way. So I took what I learned from Hansen.

and all this information that I learned in counterintelligence, and I decided that I was going to deploy counterintelligence to cybersecurity, and it's been wildly successful, working with different cybersecurity companies, being a thought leader in cybersecurity, and the majority of my keynotes right now are talking about cybersecurity to crowds in a way that is entertaining, unlike many other cybersecurity speakers who either speak from fear

or they're just boring in PowerPoint. I don't even use PowerPoint when I get up on stage. Try and do that. I'm going to explain. how to protect yourself from cyber attacks. I'm not going to use PowerPoint. I'm just going to tell you really cool stories that you'll remember the next time someone tries to attack you.

And my next book is all about that. So, yeah, but at the end of the day, I learned all this stuff from Robert Hanson. Dee, do we have any questions for Eric? Tell people, while we wait, just tell people where they can find you if they're interested in having you for a public speaking engagement,

where they can find your book. Yeah, if you want to learn all about me, about my book, about, you know, the work I'm doing with the Georgetown group or a new company that I just founded with three very close friends called Nexusure, which is doing cybersecurity advisory work. You can go to www.a.org-O-Neil, E-R-I-L-L dot net. And, you know, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm really good at responding to people on LinkedIn. If you're too shot to ask a question here and you want to, you know, message me there, I'm certainly happy with doing that. you. We'll have some links down the description for those of you who are interested in finding

Eric. Right on. Okay. We have a question from KX. Thank you. I agree with FBI agent James Hosty that Marina Oswald is obviously a KGB wife, a swallow, quote unquote, still living her cover today in Dallas. Does the guest, does the guest have an opinion on that? Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I don't I don't really have an opinion. That's a little bit beyond you know, what I knew when I was in the FBI and I really haven't looked into that case. You know, the swallows, they existed. That's not a made-up thing in Red Sparrow. And they were very successful.

And I guess the way I want to answer this is that it still happens today. Intelligence services do deploy men and women, you know, women mostly, because it just turns out that guys are much more susceptible to this. but men as well to entice the opposite sex. And so what we say in the training is if you are in a foreign country and you're sitting at a bar and the most attractive person in the room comes over to you and sits down next to you and wants to have a drink with you and then go up to your room with you, it's probably a spy because that's too good to be true.

And it happens a lot, especially when you go to adversarial countries that don't have our best interest at heart. So could it be true? Sure. Do I know? I don't. The, we had somebody on here as a counter, I think army counterintelligence guy, you said, you got to know your number. You know, if you're a four and she's a nine, you got to ask yourself, what's going on here? Yeah, the way I say it is, like, you know, some Nigerian Princeton just doesn't want to really send you a fortune. You know, the cryptocurrency scheme that your new friend over text is trying to get you investing in is not true. like that incredibly beautiful woman who just sat next to you at the bar and is giving you all her attention

you know and ignoring the whole rest of the room you're maybe not that attractive so you just really have to look at things with the greatest doll and what i what i like to say is think like a spy hunter look for the con look for the problem see it and and don't don't get wrapped up in in feeling that um that it's it's true if it's too good to be true we have another one from Andrew does errone Eric have any funny stories that he could share about inept spies and would-be spies? Oh, certainly. There was a, there was a spy called David Allen Justice. So Justice, I talk about him in Gray Day, was working for a, he was working.

This is a really funny story. He's working for a contractor on the West Coast that's doing military satellite research. And he's working on this program. And he decides that he wants to spy. Now, he's watched the show the Americans. We know all this from the debrief, by the way. He doesn't get away with it. He's watched the show the Americans, and he loves it.

And he decides, I want to be a spy like that. I'm going to spy for Russia. So this dude goes out, and he orders these correspondence-type courses, like fight fast, evade detection, you know, understand espionage. And he takes three courses, and he thinks, Now I know everything about how to be a spy. And he's got these problems. His wife is very sick.

He can't pay all her medical bills. And he's just lost his car because it broke down and he can't pay to repair it. So he needs money fast. And he's spending way too much money on his girlfriend who he's never met. He knows her completely on text. Her name is Shea. It wasn't really a woman anyway. And he's sending all sorts of things to her through Amazon.

and he's sending her cash. So every time he makes a little bit of cash, he sends it to her, and he's not paying his wife's medical bills. So he's not only kind of a doofus, he's an asshole. And then he decides to spy to make money to pay for all this. So he goes into his employer, and he accesses his computer he's not supposed to access. He badges in, inserts a thumb drive,

and downloads this schematics to this classified, this classified satellite system. And then he calls the Russian consulate in San Francisco. And he tells him he wants to be a spy, and they think he's a crazy person and hang up on him. But at the same time, his employer has called the FBI, saying, we just identified one of our employees who shouldn't be accessing things accessing something.

And so the FBI gets involved and calls them up and says, in a Russian voice, we would like we heard you're looking to give us information we love for you to spy for us and he goes who is this and they're like well this is the russians he says how do you know that i was trying to spy for you and they said well you tried to call us and we're the russians he goes good enough for me so he starts spying and uh over i think something like six meets they get him to continue to steal more and more information and each time he shows up and hands over a thumb drive and they give him like a few thousand dollars and he keeps doing it until like the final meet where they put the

handcuffs on him and uh the the other funny thing is his first meet he says i want to spy for you um i love the movie the tv show the americans and that's what made me think of this and i need to spy codename now this guy's last name is justice that's pretty good but uh but they say well well what code name would you like and he says i want to be known as the spy named brian and every money and all the money he made from them he sent right to his not real girlfriend. Didn't use any of it, fix his car or help his wife.

Wow. Yeah. I have like a rogue gallery of weirdo spies and he really tops the list. Yeah, that's up there. All right, we have one last one. How would have Robert Haydson using a Blackberry instead of a Palm Pilot impacted the investigation?

Yeah, well the interesting about a Blackberry is you can send emails on it. And so today, stealing information is in a way a lot easier. He didn't, you know, now you don't have to save stuff on floppy disks. You don't have to, you know, save it on thumb drives, which is where Hanson was going. You can extract terabytes of information and upload it to dark web servers that publish it to everyone in the world. You can steal terabytes of information and dump it on WikiLeaks, and then it becomes weaponized.

So it's very dangerous when a spy has access to databases, and that's why cybersecurity becomes so important. And if he had that Blackberry, you know, and there were BlackBerry at the time, you know, the phones weren't exactly where they are now, obviously. He may have been able to get it out faster, but if you look back at the time when he was spying, intelligence officers were still trying to get stuff through holes in the ground, you know, behind the white rock under the footbridge. in the hollow tree. So he would have still had to get that information in some physical form over to the intelligence officers. It's just changed now because most of it is done digitally. There's a way to get, you know, this is a really cool way to get information. You know, spies have used photo sharing websites and they use a technology where they embed their intelligence

into a photo. So there's no way to know that it's filled with secrets other than that. you know, that image. It's like a modern, a modern version of micro dots. Exactly. And they just, they just upload the, the image to a photo sharing website and their intelligence officers sitting in Russia or China or wherever downloads the image. And, you know, someone else might have gone through and looked at the image, but unless you have the decryption code and you know that it's intelligence, it's useless to you other than it's a really big photo.

Before we get going, I mean, Eric, I really appreciate you taking the time and telling us your story. It's pretty incredible. Anything that I failed to ask or anything that I didn't bring up that you want to make sure we cover before we get going tonight? Well, Jackie, you've been a great interviewer, and this has been a lot of fun. Thank you. One thing I want to leave people with is maybe the first thing that Hansen told me.

And this first conversation I had with Hansen, day one, where I'm in there and I'm nervous and I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to endear myself to him. He looks at me and he says he wants to tell me about something called Hanson's Law, right? This is like the very beginning of my book. And I said, well, what's that? And he says, it's this simple. The spy is in the worst possible place. Now, I kept this composure. Like, I was thinking to myself, what's he trying to do here?

Like, does he know that I'm trying to investigate him? Is he suspicious? And I just looked at him. I said, well, what does that mean? I remember learning about that in Quantico, and he says this, Hanson's law is that the spy is in the worst possible place. Though that person who has access to the information that's going to do the most damage and the knowledge and the wherewithal to get it in the hands of those who are going to pay them the most for it. And that, Eric, is what we're here in counterintelligence to protect against and prevent. Hansen was the spy in the worst possible place. But that elegant law, really was the foundation of everything that you do in counterintelligence, because you're going to find the spy in the worst possible place.

And today, the worst possible place for all of us as individuals is where our most important data is. And that's what the spies are coming after. And that's the basis for my next book, which comes out early next year, called the Invisible Threat. So I get that plug in there, Jack. Awesome. And people can find Gray Day and The Invisible Threat.

Is that up for pre-order or anything on Amazon yet? Not up for pre-order yet. I finished my draft, you know, writing a nonfiction book is a difficult task. You've done it. And it's with my editor at Harper Collins. Great Day is with Crown. Gray Day is available wherever books are sold. If you get on my website, you can buy it right from there.

An invisible thread. I'm hoping for first quarter 2025. But that's the publisher's decision online. And for our viewers out there, we'll be back on Friday with Damon Brown. He is a former Special Forces Combat Diver, excited to talk to him. Eric, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Really appreciate having you on here and getting to hear your story. Thanks, Jack.

It was cool to be on the Team House podcast. I love the podcast and everything you guys are doing. So keep up the good work. All right, guys. We will see you on Friday. Have a nice night out there.