The Team House - CIA Covert Ops from Afghanistan to Sudan | Milt Bearden | Ep. 178

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

A 30-year veteran of the CIA, Milton Bearden masterminded and ran the CIA’s covert operations in Afghanistan. He was station chief in Pakistan, Germany, Sudan, and head of Soviet Division at CIA HQ, and trained the Afghan freedom fighters who overthrew the Soviets—many of whom, like Osama bin Laden, have now turned against the United States. He received the Donovan Award and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the CIA’s highest honor. Bearden was born in Oklahoma and spent his childhood in Washington State, where his father worked on the Manhattan Project. He lives in Reston, Virginia. Today's Sponsors: Private Internet Access VPN (PIA VPN) If you want to enjoy all the benefits of Private Internet Access, now’s the time to subscribe. 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 SAP Gear (Stately Asset Protection)  https://SAPGEAR.com Veteran-owned company, Stately Asset Protection’s retail store specializes in handmade and unique survivability products. Use the code “TEAM” for 15% off your order! https://SAPGEAR.com Thanks for supporting the companies that help 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] #cia #afghanistan #ciaparamilitaryBecome 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 Team House 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 in 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 host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone, I'm Jack Murphy. This is episode 178 of the Team House. We are here tonight with Milt Bearden. Milt served as CIA station chief of Germany, Sudan, Nigeria. He was the Soviet

division chief at CIA headquarters, amongst many other positions he held during his time there. In his long career, he is also the author of the main enemy, which, I mean, not to suck up, but probably my favorite espionage memoir, just a really terrific book. I hope that people will go and check out. But today, actually, we're here to talk about a story that Milt did not include in his book, which is about a really a humanitarian mission that took place in Sudan. And, you know, we'll start, we'll get right into it, Mill. I mean, can you tell us about, let's start off with what the situation was in Sudan at this time. What year was it? What was going on? This was, I went to Sudan directly from Nigeria in 1983. So I was there from 83 to 84.

And it was at this moment next door in Ethiopia that a brutal dictator, Mengistu Haile Meriam, was in charge, and he was brutalizing pretty much everybody in the country with very few exceptions. And this led to the large, a growing movement of the... a lost tribe of Israel, the Fallasha Jews of Ethiopia, to begin to make their way out of Ethiopia into Sudan. And they became a huge humanitarian problem, and the only people that could step up to it was the United States. And the way things worked in Sudan is that CIA probably had as good amount of leverage with the government as almost anybody.

And that's from President Nimeri and his first vice president, Omar al-Tayyib, and the security service that we supported. So we were faced with a situation of what to do. But the background to it was that Mossad had established with the knowledge of a handful of Sudanese, the president, the vice president, and a couple of others, a non-official cover station in Sudan, and they had this Red Sea diving school. There's been a movie made out of it, and they were using that as a cover to exfiltrate handfuls of these Ethiopian Jews by sea back over to Israel. We then came together with them and I said, let's try to do something if you'd like to get this thing moving at a faster pace.

And I was able to work with the president of Sudan to allow flights in quite literally every other night to fill up a Boeing 707 with these people. And they were very quietly brought in to Khartoum Airport, put on the airplane, and off it went. So this was going on for many months, and you figure a couple of hundred a night going out, and that begins to be a lot of them. But it became compromised by some media coverage of it at the European end, and it was brought to a halt.

And so then you had a situation where hundreds upon hundreds of these Fulashid Jews were out in the Sudanese desert, and they were in quite a difficult situation. Somebody had to do something about it. At about that time, H.W. Bush was vice president, and he came out, and I'd known him when he was director, and I'd also met him at a couple of stations when he visited his vice president.

So he came out and he said, there's a little pressure in Washington. What are we going to do about these people out there in the desert? So I wrote him out some notes on a three-by-five card. And I said, see the president, see Joffron and Mary, the president of Sudan, and use this approach within. And he'll probably agree to anything you want to do. He went and had his meeting with the president and came back. And he said it went just like that.

Tick, tick, tick. So now I want you to come back to Washington and set this thing up. I'll give you whatever resources you need. So I took the vice president of Sudan with me. And we flew back on a C-141 to Washington with one of those modules in it. set up with both the vice president and the key people in Washington that I needed. And we pulled together a team that was, let's call it the unit, a handful of those guys.

And they flew back with us to Sudan. And then we pulled together our assets. We went out in the desert and rounded up several hundred of these falasha Jews that were out there in a great pickle. And found an area that had a hard surface, an old, old unused strip that C-130s could work on. and I had taken a C-130 pilot out there. We checked it all out, and he said we can do it. So then I had my team out taking these people and literally throwing Kim lights on the path towards this strip. And you've got to imagine, it's almost biblical, these little.

people who have maybe never even been on a bus are very obligingly following our people across the desert to the strip and following Kim lights. And they all sit there on the side of what this strip was and overnight patiently waiting for whatever is to come for them. They know that several before them were hundreds and hundreds before them had gone off to Israel. And so at first light, in comes the first C-130, hits the ground, blowing red desert dust all over the place, comes to a halt, the ramp comes off, out comes another team from the Air Force. and Delta and with these knobby wheeled motorbikes and off they go, set up some more navigational gear for the remaining C-130s and they're still on their way. And then we start, we tied together about 25 of these falasches with yellow clothesline on their wrists. And then a couple of Air Force guys would take a clothesline and then walk these people up through this blowing red dust.

They'd never even been on a bus. And they get up the ramp on this machine. God knows what, but they didn't make a peep. In they go, ramp up, and off it goes taking off. And God knows where. Then another C-130, another C-130, until we hit quite literal. moved almost a thousand of these people out by these C-130s and off they had all gone off to Israel. And to this day, those of you that go to Israel, you'll see these Ethiopian Jews with their fine features.

These guys walking around in Israeli Defense Force uniforms with their weapons. on them. You can see them at an ATM in the plaza there, and they're just part of the scene over there now. So that was essentially that story. Milton, can I ask a few follow-up questions? Yeah, yeah. Let me break it there, and then we'll give you sort of what we call the rest of the story. So it sounds from what you're describing that the Israelis were running a righteous mission there with this using this dive school as cover, but they had limited resources to bring these people out. But you had some experience ramping up covert operations quite quickly and

quite extensively from Afghanistan and elsewhere, I believe. And I mean, how, I was wondering if you could detail a little bit closer, kind of like how that relationship with Mossad came together and you sort of came up with that plan in tandem with them. Well, you know, when I arrived and Khartoum as the CIA chief there. One of the first things I did after I got halfway settled in was go make a special meeting

in a special hotel with Mossop. We knew they were there. Their instructions were whatever they were, but the final page of their instructions always read and if all else fails, you go to the COS's house, the CIA chief's house, and let him take care of the problem. So I met with these guys face to face.

We would meet occasionally clandestinely to where we worked out this airlift of them using the 707s until that got compromised. And I had brought in the Sudanese security service as well, who was told by their president to do what these guys wanted them to do, us. And so that's sort of the way we got that going. And CIA has resources for this kind of stuff. And, you know, if you want 10 C-130s tomorrow morning and he does a strip, we can do that. And you mentioned that the late President H.W. Bush was sort of instrumental. greasing the wheels, so to speak, at a political level. I was wondering if you could tell a little bit more about what HW was like as a director, as a officer, as he worked with him during his

political career. I mean, what was he like as a man? Well, he was, the first word that comes to mind with him is a gentleman. I mean, he was a Bush. There's no question about that. But he, by the time I linked up with him. He was a foreign policy guy. I mean, he'd been ambassador to the UN. He then comes to be, he was, he was opened up our liaison office in Beijing. He then as the CIA director for just a year. But he always told me that was one of the greatest jobs he'd never have. Now, when I was overseas, he is vice president would take these trips around the world, leave Reagan at home, and he would come out. And I was in Nigeria when he made a visit. What he always did on the visit, you know, he would do the head of state, and he would do the embassy

and all that. And then he would have a very private meeting with the CIA people, because he always always wanted to sit with them quietly and hear what they had to say and just to kind of let them know that he still felt part of their team. So that's the kind of a man he was, absolutely reliable, smart as a whip, and decides him. And so, you know, he could make a decision and stick with it. And so when he came out to Sudan, we scripted this thing on a three by five card. And the next thing I know I've got, I'm back in Washington. And I took, as I said, the vice president of Sudan

back with me. And we had dinner at, or no, we went and had breakfast with the vice president with HW out there at the vice president's residence by the Naval Observatory in Washington. The only thing there is that his kitchen staff also served baking and pork sausage to this in this this Muslim kind of moved it around on his plate. But yeah, you know, he was a terrific human being. So, you know, he got this thing going.

but then we were still left after the compromise of the normal flow that the Israelis were working with the Sudanese on. Then we had all these people out there, and Bush said, we'll do whatever we have to. And you let the cat out of the bag a little bit there, Milton. I think this is probably previously undisclosed that the J-Soc guys had some involvement in this rescue operation. And what was that like, I mean, obviously the Air Force and the C-130s were involved. What was that like bringing the military and the special ops guys into this project? Well, God, it was just as smooth as it could be. When I went after I had taken the vice president back to Washington, we made all the contacts.

And I had a few contacts with J-Soc. and the next thing is we're on the C-141, the vice president and I are in a VIP module, you know, that little bubble they can lash down inside a C-141, and then a whole bunch of these guys in the back. And they got it, you know, they knew what the problem was. They knew what we all had to do, and it went off like clockwork. We almost lost one of the C-130s, but finally the Pinetop brought it down. And these guys, you know, they were helping lead these little sticks of yellow clothesline-tied phaloshas

up onto the aircraft until we had no more. Well, you know, J-Soc and Desert Landing Strips, it didn't work out the way anyone wanted it to in 1980. but here we are talking about Sudan, a successful rescue, and very few people, I think, understand that it happened. I don't think many, I've never written it up in any great detail. It's been out there here and there. Right, right. Not as much detail as we're doing now. Right. I mean, I feel like the, the Mossad, as you mentioned, there's been a documentary made about the Mossade side of it. But even I was unaware, really, of the level of CIA and U.S. military involvement. But that movie didn't do much for us.

They sort of had a C-130 at the end of it. But the Red Sea Diving School, that was a trickle. It was a nice try, but it didn't move too many of the people. And that's why we got ourselves involved and were able to pull this thing off. Now, but, you know, there's not always a happy ending. that operation, I think someone on the American side gave it all to a L.A. Times reporter, and the thing came out in the L.A. Times reporter, and the thing came out in the L.A. Times. And this was while the President N. Mary was actually often the states trying to get a little more money out of the United States. And a revolution started in a coup. So he was overthrown. And the town was coming completely unstuck.

The military wasn't holding everything together. And the vice president was arrested by a bunch of rowdies. And he said, look, you let me go. And I'll tell you something. There are a bunch of Israeli intelligence officers here. And this is where they are. And so he gave them up to get himself and a bag of money out of the country. And so the next thing I see is my doorbell rings.

And I've got three MOSAT guys. And they said, essentially, the balloon is up. I brought them in quickly, put them upstairs in my house, gave them some VHS movies and some guns and said, stay there, become, let me see what we're going to do about this. And then two days later, another guy shows up. My wife answers the door, and the guy starts speaking French and says, essentially my name is Jean-Claude, I'm French. And she said, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're not French.

I am, but come in. go upstairs and turn to the right and go in that room and stay there and be quiet. And then she found me. And I said, oh, God, we got four of them now. I gave them some Dallas Cowboys baseball hats and then set up for the next month, moving them around town between safe houses, making them look like they were TD wires in from the U.S. doing some sort of a modification. on the embassy or something like that.

And we were able to manage this until the airport finally opened up. They had put garbage trucks all along the runway, so no flights in, no flights out, for most of the next few weeks after this revolution. So we got a plan together. And, you know, sometimes the best thing to do is to keep it simple. So what we did was we had four boxes, crates, and four oversized diplomatic pouches, big orange, nice big orange diplomatic pouches. Inside the boxes, we had a solid state oxygen generator, very small.

and a plastic tube that would go up through the top of the box and through the gathering of the diplomatic pouch once we had locked it, to whether they could breathe through the tube or if all else fails, they could, in fact, use the solid state oxygen generator, except the problem was there would be some heat. But so we said, this is it. This is what we're going to do. and the time came, I moved these guys into the embassy. It was on a weekend. We had permission for what was a routine supply flight, which was something in the normal scheme of things in Sudan,

a supply flight coming to pick up communications equipment or something from the embassy, arriving on that morning. So we were in touch with the aircraft. We put the guys in the box, patted them on the head, sealed up the diplomatic pouches. They seemed okay, out the door onto a flatbed, with these four big diplomatic pouches. And off we go to the airport.

There's still much confusion at the airport, airport and they looked at our documents and tried to figure out, you know, what to do. And basically, my orders were drive through the gate and we just sort of pushed the gate open and then drove out just as the C-141 was making this downwind leg and going to make its final approach. we pull out on the strip as he comes in. He's still rolling almost about 50 knots and the paratrooper jump door is open. We come alongside him, throw in the boxes on.

One, two, three, four, slam the door. And the tower, as he moves down to the takeoff point at the airport, the tower is saying, sir, you're not cleared for takeoff. And we were seeing some other activity. We thought, oh, we've got a big problem now. But this cool pilot, one of the guys that had worked with us quite a bit,

he said, Roger Cartoon Tower, thank you very much, cleared for takeoff. And the cow coming back and say, no, sir, no, sir, you're not cleared for takeoff. He said, thank you very much, Cartoon Tower, cleared for takeoff. And he made the turn at about 90 knots. And then the next thing, he was airborne. And we did a little bit of a wheels-up party when he cleared Sudan airspace into Kenya. And the next thing was he let down in Kenya. These guys were home free.

Milt, I got a couple questions to follow up on that amazing story. like reminds me of Argo in so many ways. I just want to take one minute out there to give a shout out to the sponsors of this show. The first one is private internet access. They are a VPN service. They anonymize your internet access, help for all of you spooky characters out there, maybe having to access information or engage in free information in parts of the world that aren't so cool with that that you may have to work in. So private internet access provides that VPN service. And they also don't keep tabs on you or what you're doing at the same time.

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So I hope you guys will go check them out at sapgear.com. We're really happy to work with them. And again, what's the promo code, Dee? team yeah okay and so you use the promo code team and you'll get 15% off your water so again sapgear dot com and team to get 15% off your water use that promo code so um thank you for bearing with me milt um sure so the the boxes with the solid state oxygen system in them and the uh breathing tube and everything was this something that kind of like the cia's version of q dreamed up for extractions like this Well, it was designed by the Office of Technical Services, and we were able to, you know, we had a good communication with them.

They told us, okay, here's what you're going to do. You're going to build these boxes. And we had technicians and all that at the station, and so we built them. And but imagine, I mean, you know, the next four guys walking by your office. you know, explain, oh, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put you in a box, and you're going to turn this little thing on here and admit oxygen if you need it, but it gets real hot.

Be careful. And then here's a tube, and you can, you know, breathe through that. And then we're going to lock it in with a big diplomatic pouch, and we're going to try to throw you on an airplane and get you the hell out of Sudan. Is that okay with you? Okay. Well, maybe not the next four guys,

but these Mosad guys, You know, we had had long discussions and the option was for them to try to make it to the Red Sea by Port Sudan and get somehow picked up off the beach there by the Israelis. Or let me get them out of there this way. And they weighed the options and they took their vote. They said, we'll go with you. and I pat him on the head, close up the diplomatic pouches, and then the rest of the story, there you are. And that evening they were out at this wonderful barbecue place on the outside of Nairobi.

We're eating grilled zebra. And you mentioned that you basically broke on to the airfield. Well, it was, they didn't know what to do to the airfield. had been closed and it had just opening, starting to open up. But the truck with the boxes, the pouches, pulled up

to this kind of flimsy gate on the far side of the airfield, which we used to do to go and meet our own aircraft. The guy at the gate didn't seem to know what, and we showed him some old ID cards of this and that, and then finally just sort of kept

easing up, pushed through the gate sort of opened for us, and he stood there looking at it. It's like, okay, what hell do I know? And then out, and it was, you know, in Cartoon Tower trying to tell this guy, no, sir, you are not cleared for takeoff. And that cool Air Force Bina saying that's a Roger, Cartoon Tower. Thank you very much. And what did you hear from the, from Masad or the Israeli guys?

government after this whole incident. I mean, presumably they were pleased that, you know, they, you got their guys out in one piece. Oh, Lord. Yeah, you know, they take that stuff seriously. We, my wife and I, she took care of these guys for a month. We were invited to go through Israel on the way out of Sudan in 85 and God. It was almost embarrassing because they take, they take that very seriously. If somebody has saved the lives, which they believed was probably the case of some of their people. And so we were treated.

And to this day, we go to Israel, and it's the same thing. And they've been three or four more Mossad directors. But, yeah, we're still persona grata. You and your wife got the VIP tour of Jerusalem. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. We really did.

And got all over the country and everything. But, yeah, but I mean, that's a special relationship, as you well know, between Musa and CIA. It is. Sensitive one in that part of the world, too, I'd imagine. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's sensitive, but these guys, they play to win.

And they're a special group. Milt, I mean, these are some incredible stories, and really I'm so glad that you were able to share some of these with us tonight. Well, you know, I think these are, that's what you guys do as well. I mean, you know, the whole team house is to get stories out there. Yeah, yeah. Things that we did. Yeah, yeah.

And I think the people in that, I mean, even if we can't mention them by name, deserve to be acknowledged for, you know, their hard work and taking these risks on, you know, like I said in the beginning, I mean, it's a, it really is a humanitarian mission to get some of these people out. Well, I mean, but, you know, we're talking about the whole, the whole thing of these Ethiopian Jews. I mean, you've got to look at, you know. A CIA station chief has given an operating directive. And back in those days, okay, number one would be the Soviet Union and whatever they're doing in your country.

Number two, China, whatever they're doing in your country. Number three, whatever your country is doing in your country. And then there's a fourth thing and other tasks as directed. Well, this is sort of an other tasks as directed. I mean, you know, so what do you do? But I mean, here's H.W. Bush, who was former CIA director, current vice president. And he says, we've got to do something about this. This is this is not right.

These people are going to die out there. And, you know, they don't even have, he admitted, he said, they don't have a constituency in Washington, not under any great pressure, because some quarter in Congress is all up about this. Nobody's talking about it, but we're going to do something. And so, you know, and he operated in Sudan like a case officer, you know, like he was a CIA guy. And I thought, well, you know, that's okay.

You didn't do a bad job. I'm sure it was fun for him too. He got the president, the president of Sudan to say, okay, do this, but do it right. That's all he said. So Bush told me, he said, okay, Mel, do it. But he went right. So, Mil, this is the fun portion of the interview where some of your colleagues and former agency people, they text me during the week when they find out you're going to be on the show. And they're like, oh, you got to ask, this or that.

They really wanted me to ask you. And, I mean, I think this could be an interesting conversation about after your retirement. And they said you did some Hollywood consulting and advising, specifically working with Robert De Niro. Yeah, yeah, I was actually in New Hampshire writing a book on the phone rang. And I answered, and he said, that milk? And I said, yeah. And he said, this is Bob, Bob De Niro. And I said, okay, yeah, right.

Yeah, okay, okay. And he said, no, no, no, no, no. Well, Holbrook gave me your number. Dick Holbrook was a good friend of his when he was ambassador at the UN in New York. And I said, holy shit, okay. And he said, can we meet? He was, at that time, he wanted to do two or three movies about this world of spies like he'd done on the mafia. all of that stuff, those that he had done.

And so I went down to New York, we started talking about it. Then he flew up to New Hampshire, and we talked about it some more. And then at that time, he was doing Meet the Parents. And so Jay Roach, a young director, was directing that movie. and he called me and he said, we're missing something. And he said, what are we missing here in the script? We need to do something.

And I said, you know what? Why do we give, you probably remember the movie, the De Niro's is this ex-CIA guy. And I said, let's give him a secret room. And he said, a secret room, yeah. And what's in it? I said, well, you know, his stuff. But maybe let's put a polygraph in there, too, just for the hell of it.

And so one of, then that led, we did the secret room. And then we did De Niro polygraphing Ben Stiller. Right. That is the only polygraph that has ever been done in a movie that was really proper. I don't know if you've been polygraphed. No. But, okay. Most of the polygraphs you see are just nonsense.

It's not right. But he did it just exactly right. And the rest was sort of history. And then so we did meet the parents and then a little bit on later on meet the fuckers. Then I used to travel.

Bob and I then went off to Moscow. We went to Pakistan and Afghanistan and then Moscow. And then when we went to Moscow, I dug up my old KGB guys, and we spent a week hanging out. Wow.

With the KGB guys and going to casinos with them and just the regular hangout so that he got a feel for what these guys. were like and all of that. And then as it turns out late, he still didn't have something until he got this Eric Roth screenplay, The Good Shepherd. So then we did The Good Shepherd, which was probably not as well appreciated as it ought to have been, but it was really terrific, a terrific screenplay. And well done, Matt Damon played the sort of the Jim Angleton.

guy very, very well. And to this day, you know, we meet De Niro here a couple of weeks, maybe a month ago he came down here. But, you know, we're really very, very close and probably do another project or two.

That's really cool. He did me, he then, Mike Nichols, the director, called Bob and said, who's that guy you got, that CIA guy? And Bob called me, he said, Nichols wants you, he wants to do Charlie Wilson's War with Tom Hanks.

So I said, well, yeah, I'll do that. And so we did Charlie Wilson's War. And we shot that in Dominican Republic and Morocco. And it was a terrific movie. And Hanks was as good of Charlie Wilson as Charlie Wilson was. I just to backtrack a little bit, I have to ask and meet the parents, were any of those conversations that Robert De Niro has with his future sonning law derived from conversations that you had with future, you know,

people were trying to marry your kids? Kind of. You know, but he's, yeah, but, but he, the combination of De Niro playing that role and Ben, Stiller, who is the guy who can be humiliated more than anybody in the world. I mean, he does humiliation better than anybody. But that polygraph scene, if you get a chance, run it up on the streaming device, whatever you've got, and take a look at Meet the Parents and look at that polygraph scene.

He really nailed it. Did, down to the little moves of making notes on the, on the, the paper that's going through the machine and all that. Great. Did all... Actually, we went out and talked to polygraph operations at CIA too. Oh, cool. De Niro, he does everything the right way.

I mean, he doesn't just make it up. So he acted like as good a polygraph operator, and I've been involved in dozens and dozens of polygraphs of agents. and he he was as convincing as any polygraph operator I've known. Did you work with him on Ronan? Yeah, yeah. We went over to Paris. We did Ronan.

That's one of my personal favorites. I love that movie. Yeah, it was not my favorite as far. It was a great movie, but not my favorite as far as authenticity, but it was, that was the script. Yeah, it's a lot more gunplay. Anything to do with that, the script or the reality of it. But, yeah, that was all we did, Ronan, Meet the Paris, Meet the Fawker's Good Shepherd,

and then Charlie Wilson. Those are the movies I was involved in. That's kind of fun stuff, you know, for something to do after you don't have anything else to do. Well, you mentioned, I mean, I don't know if you're NDA'd sworn in secrecy. but are there any future projects that you're working on, either film projects or books? I've got a couple of book projects that I'm working on now, but I'm not going to get into those. But yeah, yeah, I've always got one book going. And I do everything with Random House so far and we'll see how it all works out.

That's, you know, you've got to do something. Yeah, absolutely. What are you going to do? Watch daytime TV for that sense? No, I think you would get restless. We all would. I want to shift gears a little bit to talk some current events. But first, I wanted to show you this picture, this meme that circulates. D, if you can throw it up on screen real quick, I feel like this is something that like cultural anthropology students will be looking at in 100 years and trying to decipher what in the world is going on here. So the people who are supporting your in support of the Ukrainian resistance against the Russian invasion, they've taken this dog as their mascot and they took this, they made this one sort of an homage to you, Milt,

and sort of your involvement in resistance against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. I don't know if you'd seen this before or what you'd think of it. No, I haven't seen that. but it's actually I would forget the dog but when I was wandering around the hills with the Moja Hitting commanders

I would wear a shawlwarkamese which is what this guy has got on and then one of those those vests that you get at what is the story where you get that I remember it's not the gap but it was a banana republic.

Like a photographer's vest? Well, it's like the thing in that. It's whether it's a photographer's vest or whatever, but I, I wore one of those on the Afghan thing. So I would always be out with meeting the commanders in Afghanistan or in the Pakistan tribal areas dressed like that. but I would on one occasion a commander gave me a macharoff that

you know always the mocker off if they cried the cold dead fingers of his nuts, Colonel, you know the story and he gave me a mocker off and I gave him my Banana Republic vest then through the Pakistanis the word comes to

Mr. Milton you have to get 300 of those vests. I said everybody had to have one, and all commanders in the Afghan Mujahideen had to have a Banana Republic test. So I go back to headquarters. And I can only imagine what's going on in Northern Virginia and Maryland

on one weekend. You know, guys calling up from Banana Republic in Tyson's Corner to Banana Republic over in Maryland. So I think, you guys got any of those vests? And what's going on here? Guy came in and bought all 19 that I had. And they said, shit, and same guy got, yeah, yeah, we're sold out too. And so the next thing is, you know, by a month later, flying out in the C-141, all the main major commanders, except Ahmed Shah Masood had a banana republic place.

Yeah, but so, so, but that's what, that picture you had with the dog. Yeah, it's about right the way I was usually doubled up. Nilt, I mean, shifting gears to kind of current day, I mean, you have a ton of experience, obviously running covert operations against Russian invasion forces. I wanted to ask your thoughts a little bit about the current state of the conflict in Ukraine and sort of what your analysis is of where we're at right now and what you see maybe happening over the next six to 12 months. You know, unless Putin goes completely off the reservation, and that's what we all need to worry about,

is him, you know, jerking the lanyard on the big one, he's going to lose it. I'm probably going to be working on a piece about the Russian army. We, you know, I don't want to denigrate it. Don't get me wrong. But what we did for about 70 years of a Cold War, we built it up into something that it probably never was. The Russian military. Yes.

We did it. I mean, yes, Stalin, Grad, all of that. But we built it up, not maliciously, but as a means of justifying a $300 billion American defense budget. I mean, you can't go out and say, well, there is these guys that have a crappy little third-rate army, but we need $300 billion to make ours really good. Well, I'm overdoing it, obviously. But so we did that for all these years. I get to Afghanistan.

And first thing I'm beginning to see is there's something wrong here. there's something really it's not the red menace that we had built up in our analysis it's not it's not this this clockwork superpower army they're doing stuff that we would even the most basic gang of recruits on the American side wouldn't do and so I started you know I was

as a CIA station Chief, I was also a writer, and I would write my assessments. And I got, I sort of got a buzzsaw reaction, you know. I didn't say they were the gang that couldn't shoot straight, but I was saying, hey, you know, have you considered that maybe this, this is a deeply troubled institution. And, you know, there were people whose lives had been focused on the Red Army at CIA headquarters or elsewhere. And, you know, they came back at me like vipers. But I think that this is an awful, awful thing happening to them, a tremendous,

self-inflicted wound. And I think that Ukraine can somehow be the end of our good friend, Dr. Putin, because this thing is not going to get better. And I don't even think that unless he's got his own hand on the lanyard, that his military is going to let him launch a big one. So stay tuned on this. This thing is really, really serious as if you're Vladimir Putin, because they're not going to win. So you think the Russians really are doomed over there? Well, you take a look at the map. Everything begins with a map.

And how many hundreds of miles of border we've got with Romania, Poland, when I think of how we were able to supply the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, you know, thousands and thousands of miles, and then through mountain passes and snow, all of this, and we did it with everything from, I bought every mule on the world market, for three years to haul supplies in when, you know, this thing is so easily supplied. And, you know, there are Americans in Washington, in our government, whining about the cost of our support to the Ukrainians. We spent about probably $10 trillion.

That's with a T. I don't know how many zero that is. during the Cold War. If you do the math, you'll find out this is nickels and dimes to put the final wooden stake into the heart of that thing. And so quit your whining and get on with it.

It would be my advice. And the Ukrainians, you know, I mean, they've just put out their losses. They, well, they said 13,000, it's more than that. But give them, let them use whatever numbers they like. Yeah, I think we've given them about 10.5 billion in military aid. thus far.

And you, I mean, you told me at one point, I remember you saying that this is the cost of being America. What do you mean when you say that? Well, when, you know, people, most of the people who complain about how much things cost, also very much want to be the United States of America, which is the unquestioned leader of what we still, for whatever, for lack of a better word, called the free world. But we are the most

powerful entity in the history of mankind. That's not bragging, it's just a statement. But you have to do that if you want to be who we are in every other venue

of international affairs. So that's the cost of doing business as the United States. And it's actually been a pretty good, I think it's been a pretty good thing for the system. You know, we've gotten ourselves into trouble. You know, I can also say that we probably haven't really won a war since 1945 career. Korea was a tie. Vietnam put it in the loss. Afghanistan over in the loss.

They can blame politicians or whatever you like to do, whatever it makes you feel better. But there is also a little truth that nobody in the last 100 years who started a war, I think is one one. I had a rangerist, number two, someone was a ranger. his son was a ranger officer and you know he went into grenada and i don't count the panama i mean guys died there and all that stuck yeah but i'm not counting them as a war with a capital w so if you're really talking about wars rather than military actions uh people that start those

things don't don't end up winning them anymore and i wonder why that is It's a good thought sometimes to examine. It does seem like a small monetary cost on the American side to hollow out the Russian military without losing any American lives. It is from a purely American national security standpoint, a pretty amazing opportunity. I know that sounds maybe McAvelli into some people's ears, but kind of it is what it is. And I was wondering what you see as when your prediction is that Russia is going to lose this thing. Between a military defeat in Ukraine and all the sanctions that have been dumped on Russia, what do you see post-Ukrainian war Russia looking like?

Where do you think they're going to stand? I don't see a post-Ukraine Russia with Putin still in charge. and then you know with somebody else in charge the whole equation could change when I was chief of the Soviet East European

division I kind of ramped up after the Berlin Wall fell I established a liaison intelligence liaison with all the Warsaw Pact countries you know, Poland, Hungary, all of that crowd, checks. And then started working with the Russians.

And I brought over a KGB team and took them all over the U.S. and all of that. And we went all over there. And there's, you know, things can change rather rapidly when the policy from the top is no longer, that he was to invade neighboring countries. Yeah, okay. Ukraine, I mean, Kiev-Rousse was the beginning of Russia.

But, you know, the last 30 years are important, and that's where Ukraine really became its own thing. And so that's the way it's going to be. And it's not the way it was. Sorry, Vladimir, working out. You mentioned that, you know, the one thing we do have to worry about is him going totally Colonel Kurtz and yanking the lanyard. What do you think can be done from an American perspective or even a European perspective to mitigate that? Is there anything we can do, I mean, to try to mitigate the risk of the conflict escalating to that level?

Well, I think all that we can really do at this point is for him to understand the cost of that. Right. Don't forget, you know, we've got the 101st Airborne is sitting, a good piece of it is sitting in Romania right now. A lot of people don't know that. Romania, Hungary, Germany. Yeah, we're talking about every last platoon of Russian army troops in Ukraine would probably be taken out by NATO stuff. Right. And if he did that, if he did a, you know, pulled it on a nuclear warhead. And then you see where that goes. Obviously, he would, he has to know what we what we would do in that case.

And what we're not talking about. We're not talking about getting into an exchange, nuclear exchange with him. but we would say your army and Ukraine would cease to exist. And that is a promise. And does he, does Vladimir Vladimir Vladimir Rovich, does he think that's okay? Maybe not. But his, you know, he's got generals and we're probably in touch with someone. And they're the guys that are going to make some serious decisions. decisions, not ours, but his.

So this thing can be one of the last big struggles of what was a Cold War contest. Right. It's like an epilogue of the Cold War almost. It kind of an epilogue of the Cold War since Winston Churchill said, you know, the Iron Curtain has descended when he went to Fulton, Missouri. 1947. And so that would be the epilogue. You're right. That's a good characterization. Milt, I could talk your head off all night, and I literally would if someone doesn't stop me. Dee, did you see any questions from the audience that they wanted to ask?

And, Milt, if you had any thoughts that you'd like to address anything that you want to talk about as we start to wrap it up? Oh, I'm good. Good to go and always like working with you, Jack. Yeah, I love talking to you too, Milton. I wasn't exaggerating. I would sit here and talk your ear off until, you know, one in the morning. But I'm going to resist doing that. And we can have you back, I hope, on another episode sometime in the future.

We'll do it. Okay. Dee, what was that? Isaac has a question. Oh, sure. Hold on. Let me stand up. Yeah, this is the beauty of doing live internet podcast.

interviews. Isaac asked, when Putin became, did you were, I guess when he's saying when he became president, did you or any of your IC members say, wait, I think we know that guy might be trouble? Well, you know, I was, I was, I was nowhere near the intel community when he took over. I had, the last guy, you know, actually Yeltson was, my. my last head of state over there. And I last saw him in Germany in 1994, probably, 93. And then I retired, started writing books and making movies and didn't pay much attention when Vladimir took over.

So I started noticing what's he up to. Did you even hear of Putin during your time at the agency? Because I mean, the reality is he was just like a low-level KGB punk. I mean, he was nothing- He was a lieutenant colonel in Dresden. Yeah. And, you know, nobody heard. Interesting how he kind of turned his Petersburg links into taking over the whole thing. Because there wasn't much going on with him in the KGB. Yeah, we'll have to have that conversation about Putin and Russian policy. politics and other time, I guess.

Sure. Next Friday, we're going to have a gentleman who served with Sadi. They do the electronic warfare piece for U.S. Special Ops. So we're very excited to have that conversation. And then a few days later, we're going to have a guy who is with the Army Rangers. It's going to be here in studio, actually, for an interview. So we're excited. We've got some good stuff coming next week.

I hope that you guys will go and take a look at Milt's book, the main enemy. Really, like I said, I wasn't exaggerating or just sucking up because he's here. Probably my favorite book about espionage. You will be shocked by the details that are in this book. Miltz also written a novel, Black Tulip, correct? Black Tulip, yeah. You find that out there on Amazon as well. Milt, if you don't have anything else to promote out there, you know, I'm always happy to try to sell your book. I think it's great. And really appreciate you taking the time to tell us some of these

told stories from from the vault so to speak great good to be with you again jack you take care you too let's talk again soon and uh everyone out there we'll see you again next friday