The Team House - FBI Agent Sent to the CIA to Find Spies | Bill Evanina | Ep. 361

Starting point is 00:00:01 Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. This is episode 361 of the Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave.

Starting point is 00:00:26 And our guest on tonight's show is William Ivanina. He served as a FBI agent starting off his career working organized crime cases, robberies, was on the SWAT team. 9-11 happens, got involved in all types of investigations. And then he went and served on the joint FBI CIA counter-espionage task force going after people who are spying on the United States. All kinds of different stuff there with Snowden and Jerry Lee. We'll get into that in a bit. And then he went on to head up the Office of National Counterintelligence, which transitioned into the National Counterintelligence,

Starting point is 00:01:05 Security Center. And today he is running his own company, the Evenina Group. So we're going to get into all of this. But Bill, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate you coming on the show. And let's kick it off by, you know, tell us a little bit about, you know, your upbringing and how that took you eventually towards governmental service. Well, first of all, very humble to be here, man.

Starting point is 00:01:30 It's exciting, very familiar with the podcast and watched a lot of them. I'm excited to be here and add a little value to what you do already with the great Patriots. So it's excited, looking forward to it. Thank you. So I'm a kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania, a little bit north of Scranton, PA, grew up there. Mom and dad, so I was the first kid in my family to graduate in high school, so never mind college, but with a high school. Typical broken family story, you know, I played a lot of sports in high school, played baseball and football, little wrestling, and went college. I played baseball in college for my four years there.

Starting point is 00:02:08 So I was an athlete. And then basically I was going to go to the Navy and be a jag. That was my plan. And then I got offered this presidential internship. And with the federal government, I'm like a senior in college. And I'm like, what is this about? Oh, it was a GS-7, 8, 9 thing. And I'm like, how much money is that?

Starting point is 00:02:27 Well, it's 15,000 a year. I'm like, well, that's 15,000 more than my mom ever made. So I'm in. I'm in. So I joined the government. I was assigned to an agency called the General Services Administration, where I got put in one-year training program. I got kicked out into what's called the public building service.

Starting point is 00:02:47 So I end up being a project manager for building federal buildings and courthouses. Part of that process, I probably built four or five FBI buildings. So I got to work closely with the FBI, which ironically was my dream to be an FBI agent my whole wife since I was 12 years old. So I ended up applying and I got in the FBI when I was 28, 29 years old. And I started, I went to Quantico, which was an amazing 20 weeks there. And my first office assignment was Newark, New Jersey. So growing up in northeast Pennsylvania, a blue collar family for sure. My dad was a machinist. I had a polka band, right? So we're very eclectic neighborhood. My, my, my, my, my brother's an Orthodox priest, my sister's an FBI.

Starting point is 00:03:32 agent. We're really, really weird families, successful coming out of the crazy northeast Pennsylvania. So we're very proud to be up from that area. And so what year was it that you graduate from the academy and get assigned to New Jersey, Newark? Yep. So I went into the academy in the summer of 96. So I graduated in February-ish, 97 and went right to New Jersey, right at that point. And you first started off on organized crime. Yeah, my first assignment was the organized crime squad, which was plenty of the going on there in New Jersey. I was assigned to multiple cases which involved the Bonanos, the Lucchese crime family. One of them, I sort of ended up working a really good case on the Bruno Scarfo family out of Philly,

Starting point is 00:04:24 their faction that was up in New Jersey. We had a confidential witness, made a lot of tapes, worked hard, listened to those tapes, We took a new's attorney's office. We got an indictment, RICO indictment. We indicted like seven, seven mafia guys, guys like Joseph Scoops Lakata and Nicky O'O. Oliveri and Fat Lou Fizzini, all the typical names. So that was my big, first big case,

Starting point is 00:04:50 my first bunch of arrests of mob guys in New Jersey on a RICO case. They all end up pleading guilty. The funny thing about the Bureau, which makes it awesome, is so worked really hard on this, got them to plead guilty. They all got nice sentences. I go on vacation. I come home and I was transferred to a violent crime squad.

Starting point is 00:05:09 I was like, this is ridiculous. I'm a mafia agent. You can't just transfer me to violent crimes. I don't even like violent crimes, right? So I went there kicking and screaming until the first day. And day two, I was kind of like, I can't believe I haven't been doing this the whole time, right? So the first time you find somebody,

Starting point is 00:05:30 whether it be a fugitive or my, That first case was an armored car robbery, $800,000, bank robberies, kidnappings, kicking doors down 3 o'clock in a morning. And until you actually do it, you have no idea how awesome that is. What are you kind of learning about, you know, both law enforcement but also criminality during this time frame? I mean, it sounds like you're dealing with white collar crime, but also some pretty violent folks that are doing, you know, knocking off banks and things. Yeah. So I think looking back at the, that juxtaposing those maybe three or four years of work there, I think, the fundamental line that goes through that is evidence,

Starting point is 00:06:06 techniques and capabilities of your team, right? So my violent crime task force was agents, county detectives, city detectives, and Newark, like people have been on the street a long time, right? So, but, you know, the goal is to get the evidence. And for us, what you learn real quick is you're training in Quantical, you're training on the street. Once you get people in a room, you own them, right?

Starting point is 00:06:28 And we're really good at, well-trained at doing really good, interview is good cop back cop i was fascinated by that i was always the good cop i didn't have an enemy to be the back cop but that dynamics uh worked uh very well for me personally guys i'll tell you the hard part for me was with the lecosinosa guys you could just walk up to them in a cafe and start shooting the shit and say hey not for nothing but we're going to come arrest you on saturday just to have your shit in order um but and there be oh thanks bill appreciate it you know it's just just business you And they would be ready to go. When I got to the violent crime folks, completely different, right?

Starting point is 00:07:06 Because you were, they were strapping. I mean, I think in 1999 to 2000, we took about 190 guns off the street. So it's a different world. Those guys, it's not business, right? It's life or death for them. And back in the day, at that time, what we would do is we would take cases that the state had that were two-time felons because back then we had what was called trigger lock violations. So if you got them with a gun, the third time,

Starting point is 00:07:31 was minimum mandatory 25 years in prison. So those are the big cases we would go to get. And then we looked at every case, bankrupt and Cruz, we looked at Masrico's. You know, those are big gang cases. It was gangs that were doing violent crime at the time, right? So whether it be black game, gangs, the Puerto Rican gangs, we had a lot of Dominican gangs,

Starting point is 00:07:51 or it was like the Muslim Brotherhood. It would make a difference. Two or more people, they were a gang, so you automatically could charge them a conspiracy. Interesting. And Newark is a gamey play. to this day. Oh, it's the best food in the East Coast no one knows about.

Starting point is 00:08:07 But yeah, I wouldn't recommend anybody going there unless you're strapped or you know how to handle carjacket. It's a pretty rough area. The suburbs are getting pretty bad as well. I went to a concert there maybe like four weeks ago. Second, we got off the train at the train station there, a guy doing the clucking chicken on the sidewalk, puke all over himself, cops standing there writing him a ticket. I'm like, oh my God, where am I?

Starting point is 00:08:35 Yeah, so, and I'll tell you a weird part about being on a task force for me, you know, whether it be violent crimes or fugitives or bank robberies, you know, you're sitting next to newer cops or sitting next to Essex County detectives or whatever. And then, but what you know, they don't know, is from your friends that are working public corruption. Maybe the police chief is on their investigation or the mayor is on their investigation or one of their buddies were on investigation. So it's really complex scenario, right? it's really, really difficult to be in that space.

Starting point is 00:09:03 And you really have to be able to facilitate your own inner dynamics of politics pretty well. And is this how you started getting involved in the FBI SWAT team because you were doing these violent cases and you wanted to increase those capabilities? Exactly. So when I got transferred from the mafia squad to the violent crime squad, I'm going to say 90% of the guys there are on the SWAT team, right? So they're like, hey, you're going to train for you. for a year and you're going to try out for the team. I'm like, I don't, I don't think I'm a swat guy, a guy, you know, I'm a decent shot, but you know, so the guys around me, they took another new wing, we trained hard. I tried out. In January, it was like seven degrees. I did really well. I made to end up making the team, which was phenomenal. And they immediately sent me to a sniper school. So, which I fell in

Starting point is 00:09:53 love with that aspect of being an operator, right? So not only I was an operator, but I was also, you know, with sniper and I thought I love the tactitional part of that. I love the craft of being a sniper, building hides and do most of the FBI sniper work is surveillance work, right? It's basically get into a position and take pictures and watch stuff. And we'll talk about that later on anthrax if you want. But yeah, I loved it. And I thought, wow.

Starting point is 00:10:19 And you don't know you're going to like something until you actually get a chance to do it, right? And then being at sniper school and advanced sniper schools and you're training with some of the best shooters in the world who've come from real work, you know, whether it be Delta or Seals or, you know, the Israelis, you're like people that have really done this for a living. So what am I doing here, right? So it just makes you a better, working harder and understanding the craft,

Starting point is 00:10:43 whether it be on the rifle or off the rifle. And I was fascinated by that. I really enjoyed it. But I did know, guys, I'll tell you that, I did know early on, maybe about two, three years in, that I thought, I could be a better leader of these men than I was an actual man on the team. Right.

Starting point is 00:11:01 So down the road, 2014, a little later, I ended up getting promoted to my first supervisory job. And it allowed me, I was in charge of the Joint Terrorism Task Force threat squad there. But I also became the supervisor of the SWAT team, which was really, really fun, you know, to be the Onsen commander for operations. And as you know, in Newark, you mentioned it, we were a very busy SWAT team. From when I got on the team in 98 on, we were very busy, probably five, six jobs a month, which is a lot. Yeah. So for people who may not know, what is the difference between the roles that HRT has and then a like a regional SWAT team has? Yep.

Starting point is 00:11:43 Great question. So every FBI office has a SWAT team, right? They have 12 to 30 dudes on their team, depending on size. you know, Newark's probably got 30. Washington Fields probably got 40, 50, New York's probably got 40 or 50. Every office has those. H.R.T is located in Quantical, Virginia. Those are the special operators. They do this full time. So if you're like me, I was a SWAT agent in New Jersey or you're in California, it's a part-time job. You still have cases and investigations to work, right? So you've got to do both.

Starting point is 00:12:16 So you got to do four to five training days a month on top of all your cases, your informants, and it's a lot. A lot of those individuals who are on those teams get recruited to go trial for HRT. And a lot of the guys on my team, or whether you're in San Francisco or Houston, maybe your former Delta, your former Green Beret or SEALs, those guys are pretty apt at being able to go down and do that training, right? So I think that's where it gets. And over time, I think in 2009, they got smart.

Starting point is 00:12:47 They said, hey, listen, we're going to make a special track in the FBI so that you don't have to spend all your years doing investigations is you come from a special forces career. So now they said if you come from one of the special forces, you can go right into a SWAT program or you could go right to HRT and try out if you want. Those are the guys actually also that come to like Jersey or go to Houston and do training on, you know, two bluer targets or CQB or, you know, sniper, advanced sniper training. Big operations we would try, tabletop exercises. They would run that.

Starting point is 00:13:21 but if we have after a bunch of school shootings we have new TTPs that come into play HRT would develop those new tactics they would bring them to the field they would train us on a new way to hit a hallway in a school or a new way to do a stairwell in a school and then we would learn that and then we would take that and we would train

Starting point is 00:13:38 the state police and the local police departments. Yeah and then does that, having that kind of background, does that give you like some bona fides when you go kind of to a more like lower speed job. You know what I mean? Are people like, oh, he was in SWAT?

Starting point is 00:13:54 Like, listen to him. He knows what he's talking about. Without a doubt. I mean, not only, you know, within the FBI, everyone knows what it is. But when I went over the CIA to be the chief of the economy espionage program, there was a lot of like, whoa, tell us about your SWAT days, right? Because they don't know.

Starting point is 00:14:10 They don't know what they see on TV. Right. But what really manifests itself is like when you're out in public, right, and you're doing speeches or you're talking to CEOs or business. business people and you want to talk about China and intellectual property theft. They want to talk about what was it like to be a sniper on the SWAT team, right? Right, right. So, yes, I mean, really over beers and cocktails with people who make, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:33 multi-billionaires and people who want to hedge funds, they want to talk about your first SWAT arrest, right? Right. What happened? What's it like, you know, kicking a door down? Do you ever have a mistake with a flashbang, you know, all that? They want to know all those things, which is really good for business. But also, it's really cool for me to be able to talk about things I like to talk about.

Starting point is 00:14:50 with someone who has no idea other than what they've seen the movies. Sure. So I want to take a minute today to tell you guys about the perfect gene. I've been wearing them for a few weeks now and really enjoy them. And I just want to share it with our audience. You know, sometimes jeans have this problem where, you know, you guys all have seen these skinny jeans that they like crush your balls and, you know, it's just not comfortable to wear.

Starting point is 00:15:13 Or the other way around, jeans are like too baggy. You know, you have this sort of like diaper in your ass area, it looks like. So there are these problems that, you know, different fits of different types of genes have. And the perfect genes strives to fix that. Both the fit, but also the mobility, the maneuverability. It has a stretchy fabric. Like they say it's like yoga ready. But, you know, I would say it's athletics ready.

Starting point is 00:15:41 You know, moving furniture, doing things around the house. You're not going to have that like super tight, like constricted fit that you feel like you're not going to be able to move. around in. And there are over 400,000 people out there wearing these jeans at this point. So not all of them can be wrong. I hope you guys will go and check them out. So a few scenarios where you can wear these jeans and where they really come together, everything from, you know, doing yard work or doing things around your house. If you have to move furniture around or you have to do handiwork, they're perfectly comfortable. But you can wear them, you know, getting your man spread on on the Subway, if that's your thing.

Starting point is 00:16:22 So the perfect gene is great for all kinds of different environments, whether it's doing handiwork around the house or on the job or athletics. And we really hope you guys will go and check them out. For a limited time, our listeners get 15% off their first order plus free shipping at the perfect gene. Or Google the perfect gene and use the code house 15 for 15% off. That's 15% off for new customers at the perfect gene. NYC with promo code House 15. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them.

Starting point is 00:16:56 Please support our show and tell them we sent you. So fuck your khakis and get the perfect gene. So you're going through your career. Sounds like you're having a hell of a good time at this point. But now we're getting into the late 1990s, early 2000s. Can you tell us a little bit about what your experience was like sort of in the run up to 9-11 and then that day? Absolutely. So 9-11, so the morning of Tuesday, September 11th, we had a SWAT job. So we were out 3.30 the morning until, you know, 5.30. We had a big arrest about 10 or 12 gang members. We came back. We cleaned up. We do what we do always. We go to a great diner in Jersey. We have breakfast to the diner. We come back, all stuffed and ready for naps. We get back and walk in the office. We're not even in the walk us back in the office. probably 20 minutes where we see, I see, 20, 30, agency analysts huddled around this little 13-inch TV in the corner of the office maybe 50 feet away. I'm like, who knows what's going on there, just don't pay attention. And then you hear people yelling and screaming and running around.

Starting point is 00:18:05 I'm like, what's going on? So then you start working your way over there. And literally it's probably a 17-inch tubular TV back in 2001. And then you see the World Trade Center burning, right? it's crazy and then you have some people looking out the window going on our building roof we're in the 21st floor in newark and people go on the roof to see the smoke over there like what's going on one of my swat guys carl was a was a pilot and he's like that's not a says that there's no way look at this hole in that building and behold second plane hits um so you're now you're talking

Starting point is 00:18:38 about pre 10 o'clock in the morning uh we have two planes hit now I'll mind you to put this a little layer here. We don't have cell phones, right? So FBI agents at the time, you get a, you have a pager, you get a page, you got to go find a pay phone and call somebody. So that's where we are in the world of FBI. So we like, okay, crap, by 11 o'clock in the morning, maybe 11.05, we had the manifest from all the planes. So those manifest came in and we, you know, obviously had a plethora of literally Eastern males sitting in first class. At the time, we identified 13, maybe 15, maybe 14 of them by noon that were living in New Jersey. So it was an oh shit moment for us at a minimum.

Starting point is 00:19:24 So we decided to split up in teams. State police came in by probably 4 o'clock in the afternoon. At that time, we didn't have a special agent in charge and we didn't have an assistant special agent in charge. They had left. So we were a lot of acting dudes and dudettes that were, and some did really well. Some went into fetal position.

Starting point is 00:19:43 It depended. So we decided, who we're going to send over to New York into the pit to help, and then who was going to start working these cases. I got a sign to the to Zayadjar, who was the pilot of Flight 93, and we started dealing with that issue like right then. And then you probably know this story already, but then that night we had, you know, the urban mover guys driving around Jersey, taking pictures, and turned out to be a bunch of

Starting point is 00:20:07 Israeli guys. So it was really crazy first 24 hours in 9-11, for sure. and then to me, we didn't go home. So on Wednesday, it's a brand new day. And the weird part of this whole thing was Tuesday the 11th. Again, we lived in a, it's called the Gateway Building, a tall building in Newark. On Tuesday, 11th was the first day of the building of a new construction

Starting point is 00:20:33 for an FBI building in Newark, two blocks away. So we were starting that process, you know, a hole on the ground. So we had to secure that site. It was a lot of chaos on 9-11, New Jersey, to say the least. And how did your part kind of evolve on Flight 93 as the days go on? So it's funny. So I was assigned as a what's called a lead agent, an individual, one of the agents that sit around and get all the incoming leads and then you assign them to other folks.

Starting point is 00:21:04 What happened tangently, we're still working SWAT stuff, right? So we're still going jumping out and grabbing people and doing search warrants everywhere. So then you're doing that. At the time, we really didn't have what's called a public affairs officer. So I got sucked into doing a lot of public affairs. So if you go back in the media in 2001 and two, you're going to see me on TV a lot because they didn't really have anybody who could do it or who wanted to do it. So for me personally, I was involved in those three things around the clock.

Starting point is 00:21:34 I eventually dropped off as a lead agent. but my squad that I was on was assigned Flight 93. So I stayed with that probably for the next three years. And then Flight 93 end up, we end up prosecuting the Zacharias Massawi as a 20th hijacker. So that all came out of our Newark office. My good buddy and partner, Ray Geddi from the state police was the case agent. So a cool thing about this, if you talk about it. So this is September of all one.

Starting point is 00:22:03 Then shortly thereafter, in October, we have anthrax. Yes. And the post, the mailbox that was mailed by, it was in Princeton, New Jersey, which is about three miles somewhere I lived. So the fun thing on that is, I get to be a sniper, build my hides, hiding in bushes, taking photographs of every single human being that went to that post office. Let me just tell you, that's a long 12 hour shift. That's a long 12 hour shift. And then we had a month later, the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, who was the Wall Street Journal reporter and who would have known at the time that he was kicked. kidnapped and then sold to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Starting point is 00:22:38 It's a small world. So in New Jersey, we had a lot going on at the same time. Yeah, geez. So the anthrax thing, which is like one of these sort of enduring mysteries, I know they think they know who did it, a guy who has passed away since then. What do you recall from that investigation and kind of what came out of it? Yeah. I recall being scared.

Starting point is 00:23:01 Like I remember, you know, we had two things going on, two different types of people. Well, at the time, so the fall of 01, we still think it's Middle Eastern males doing anthrax. Like, we, I mean, it's hard to have revisionist history here. But so we're thinking, okay, they crashed planes in the buildings. Now they're poisoning people, anthrax. What's next? So there was a big spiel, I'd say, from maybe November of 01 to May of 2002,

Starting point is 00:23:26 we, you know, we thought they were going to, they were taking hazmat trucks and they were going to drive them in the buildings. We had all these things going on at the same time. But for me, the stress, was being assigned to that mailbox, right? So they identified the mailbox on NASA Street and Princeton as the place where these letters were mailed, right? So that was, you want to talk about 24-7,

Starting point is 00:23:48 unbelievable, technical, and humid coverage on that. It was pretty impressive. So everybody, you know, the first five people that I took pictures of, covertly going to the mailbox, I think the first three had gloves on. So we're like, what are you wearing gloves for? Go west of those people, right? Turned out to be, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:05 like they were today, crazy people wearing gloves, right? So I just remember that first probably four or five months just being scared of everything and scared of the unknown of what's next. And then what the cool part was that really helped, honestly, the investigations. At the time, this would have been probably late October. Two dudes come in our office with these two huge boxes, open up these boxes. There's all these really cool. Star Trek flip phones, boom.

Starting point is 00:24:37 It's like, this is really cool. So everybody got a flip phone. Everybody got a phone number and you're able to press these letters that for automatic answers, it was a company called Nextel at the time, right? And they had this new thing. They wanted us to try them out for free, which we did. And the ability to be out in surveillance and be able to text folks the way, not that we do now, but the way back then, hey, who has eyes?

Starting point is 00:25:02 I do, right? You just, and you press, you get to know, to me, that was for us. It was the most technological advancement, probably since the typewriter, you know, for FBI agents that we could have a cell phone and call people. But more important, the last thing, the coolest part of the nextel was the push to talk feature, right? So we didn't have to NIPBI radios. We could push to talk. Hey, Bill, Mark, where are you at?

Starting point is 00:25:25 I see him. I don't see him. Right. Hey, let's, I'll meet you the diner, you know, that kind of stuff. It was a really, it was earth shattering. So in New Jersey, we ended up getting about four. 500 of them and I think New York got about a thousand of them. Was that kind of like the end of your part of the anthrax investigation, the surveillance portion?

Starting point is 00:25:43 No. So after surveillance, say probably early part of 2011, they created an anthrax task force in D.C. Some of the New York agents, New Jersey agents were in Trenton. They went downtown. My work on that case ended up being more on the public affair side. So I ended up not being part of the act. investigation probably early part of 2002. Do you have an opinion about who is behind that and what their motivations may have been?

Starting point is 00:26:13 Yeah, I think the last guy that's now dead was the guy. I think that the Bureau screwed up a lot early on. I think very similar to Richard Jewel, you get locked in with intelligence bias and you get locked in that this has to be the guy. I think the Bureau made those mistakes. but fortunately that the last individual, his name's case right now, I think he was the guy. The evidence on the molecular part of the anthrax is too strong to really negate then, and he was the only one to be able to have that access to it.

Starting point is 00:26:46 I think I'm good, listen, there's a lot of things that aren't solved. I'm pretty confident he was the guy on that. Yeah, he was like a lab doctor or something like that that worked with that stuff. And he was the guy who was very cavalier about it. He was the, hey, I know, you know, he was trying to turn other people in. and, you know, he thought he could overplay the agents. I think early on we had the wrong agents on the case. We had the wrong agents doing interviews, right?

Starting point is 00:27:07 It's really easy to do. There's cases like that everywhere where initially it goes awry, but then we do get locked in on intelligence spies. At the end of the day, I've always said, let the evidence follow where it goes, but you've got to have evidence. And then, you know, your experience on the Danny Pearl kidnapping, as you point out, he was a Wall Street Journal, journalist who was killed by KSM from what we learned later.

Starting point is 00:27:34 Yeah. So again, my squad, the violent crime squad, we had a lot of senior agents that were really, really good. And I looked back at the way I talked about it is like you always have in your wallet. If your son is kidnapped, your daughter's kidnapped, who do you want your wife to call, right? And those three agents or four agents, all those agents in my office were on that squad, right? So one of one of really my good friends, John Mulligan.

Starting point is 00:27:57 and end up getting sent over to Pakistan to be the lead agent from our office. And we supported him from multiple aspects of that, working with his attorney's office and doing all kinds of work with the CIA and DIA out of the Newark office on our squad. And John ended up being the guy who actually ended up getting the videotape of Daniel Pearl being beheaded and was the first guy to watch it. And, you know, John sat literally next to me in my cubicle. So those were really trying times as well.

Starting point is 00:28:25 Again, the Moolahs, we didn't really know who was who, right? And then, as you know, it took a while to recognize that tattoo from the beheading and making that connection to KSM down the road. And then I think you worked in early counterintelligence case in Jersey. Was that during this time frame or was that later? Yeah. Oh, boy, that's a good point of that. So 2004, I get my first supervisory job in the,

Starting point is 00:28:55 joint terrorism task force in Jersey, which was phenomenal, right? And doing really good work and then also chasing down every suspicious bin Laden on the New Jersey return price. But in 2005, we have this case that came out of nowhere. So I'm now acting assistant special agent in charge, right? So I'm like number two. We're waiting for the new guy or gal to get assigned. Who knows when that's going to be?

Starting point is 00:29:19 We get a call from our office down at Red Bank that says, hey, we got a really suspicious one. here. We got a guy who's taking top secret classified data out of the high side and he's putting in the low side and he's changing in his name and he's sending it to the somewhere of the Philippines. I'm like, what? So they did a little work on this. It ends up being, you know, a captain, retired captain in the Marine Corps. His name is Leandro Aragon Seal. He was an analyst, a child point analyst for the FBI. What's he doing looking up terrorism stuff and Chinese stuff, right? And He shouldn't be doing that. Turns out, long story short, he was taking stuff and sending it to a senator Laxton in the Philippines.

Starting point is 00:30:04 They were trying to overturn the government. They were trying to do a coup. So they were working with Abu Sayyaf and a bunch of other things. The Marcos family had been removed. They're trying to get the Marcos family back in. So he was doing it out of ideology for the most part. Well, once we realized, oh my goodness, previously before coming to the FBI, he was the pre-briefer for vice president chady the white house so he had access to unbelievable

Starting point is 00:30:31 top secret classified information so we have an investigation on him for like three or four weeks we're following them around we're watching a move really really complicated stuff off from the high side to the low side because back then you were able to do that and send it over there and then the gig was up we issued a subpoena to his bank for bank records and unbeknownst to me the bank made manager was friends with his wife. So she calls up his wife and says, hey, is your husband doing anything crazy? Why would the FBI be looking at his records? Five minutes later, she calls him.

Starting point is 00:31:03 He starts putting stuff together. He bolts out of the office. And then we have a high-speed chase. We arrest him. He ends up playing guilty and spends 10 years in jail as being a spy for the Philippines. Just out of curiosity, how did these coup plotters think they were going to be able to use American intelligence information to sort of like plan their coup or a coup? kind of position themselves in the Philippines.

Starting point is 00:31:27 That's a great question. So I got to be careful. Some of this is on the classified side. But let me just say there were other countries involved helping the Philippines try and foster and facilitate the coup, right? And some of that was, hey, get us information on this stuff and we'll help you kind of stuff. Oh, geez. Yeah, okay.

Starting point is 00:31:49 Got it. Nothing is always as it seems, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's another player in the game. There's always another player. I mean, everybody talks about, you know, Cuban intelligence, Cuban intelligence and a Montas. Well, you don't think Cuba gives everything they got it to the Russians? I mean, it's really a Russian.

Starting point is 00:32:05 They're like a subcontractor for the Russians. Right, yeah. Okay, so the next stop for you, you go over to counter-espionage, a joint FBI, CIA endeavor. For people who don't know, can you tell them what that task force is? I will, but first, a couple big parts here I enjoy it in my life. Yeah, please. I don't want to get over. So I get, I'm fat dumb and happy in New Jersey.

Starting point is 00:32:31 I'm running my own office in Trenton, New Jersey. I got about 30 agents there. We're doing great stuff. And then there's this new policy, Director Mullis says five years up and out. You got to go. If you want to be a supervisor. So I got sent down the headquarters. Now, I am in charge of all, everything in New Jersey, right?

Starting point is 00:32:48 Except counterintelligence. It's different squad. I get a job in headquarters in the Russian counterintelligence program. It's kind of a little weird. So unbeknownst to me, I get down there. The reason I got sent down there because we were getting ready to arrest 10 Russian illegals who are working here and out in the United States and extradate a source out of Moscow. So I spent the next year planning that, working with the CIA, planning the, a lot of the

Starting point is 00:33:18 counterintelligence folks who had worked this for 10 years had never. never arrested anybody. They didn't even know where their handcuffs were, right? So we had to have find a way. How are we going to arrest these 10, 12 people in America systematically on the same day without anybody knowing about, you know, and then at the same time, get the source out, all that stuff. So I spent, you know, a year planning for that, which is really cool. But I ended up getting an ASAC job, which we call them assistant special agent in charge, and our Washington field office from that. We arrested all those guys. I became the counterintelligence ASAC in Washington Field, which was awesome.

Starting point is 00:33:56 I did that for about a year and a half. And then I got moved over to be the counterterrorism ASAC in Washington Field Office. So I had the Joint Terrorism Task Force, SWAT, H.R.T, and the threat squad. And then we had the Navy Yard shooting under my command there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that was Aaron Alexis. That was pretty gruesome and being on scene there was kind of crazy.

Starting point is 00:34:19 And then from there is when I went to the same. CIA to be chief of their counterrest management program, which was my first senior executive service job. Hey guys, our show is sponsored by GhostBed. Check them out. Please, they make awesome mattresses, awesome pillows, awesome betting. Ghostbred provides high quality and super comfortable award-winning mattresses crafted in the U.S. and Canada.

Starting point is 00:34:42 Did you know that 60% of U.S. adults report being too hot when they're trying to sleep? That's me. I'm a sweaty little baby. That's why we designed all of our products with cooling features. So you stay comfortable and asleep all night long. Pair any of our mattresses with GhostBeds award-winning adjustable base and get the ultimate sleep experience. Ghostbred rules are family-owned business, $60,000 plus five-star reviews.

Starting point is 00:35:07 They have sleep experts on staff with 20 plus years of experience. If you have any questions, you can hit them up and ask them, you know, maybe what kind of mattresses work for you? 20-plus-year warranty. That's two times the industry standard. Free shipping and returns on mattresses. Most of the products ship out within 24 hours. They have in-house customer support and sleep experts chilling in Plantation, Florida.

Starting point is 00:35:32 It rules. It's the best. They give you 101 nights risk-free to make sure that these beds are right for you. If you don't like it after 101 nights, you could send it back full refund. When you purchase a ghost bed mattress, your comfort guaranteed. I'm reading it right now and it's capital letters guaranteed. They do the right thing and they're a great company. If you're not sure which ghost bed's right for you,

Starting point is 00:35:56 like I said before, you could take their mattress quiz online or you can give a call to one of their sleep experts and they'll help you with exactly what you possibly could need, what works for you and what doesn't. And the best news about this is Team House listeners and viewers. You get an extra 10% off sitewide for a limited time. You just go to ghostbed.com slash house and use the code house at check. one more time that's ghostbed.com slash house with the code house h o u s e at checkout for an extra 10%

Starting point is 00:36:29 off site wide i want to thank ghostbed for their continued support i want to thank all the fans that listen and watch for their continued support without you guys we are nothing so thank you for supporting the show and thank you for supporting the companies that help support the show ghostbed dot com slash house for 10% off made in the u.s made in the u.s made in Canada. Shout out to our brothers in Canada. They rock. Check them out. I love Ghostbed. Thanks, guys. Yeah, the spy network that you guys broke up,

Starting point is 00:37:02 was that the Anna Chapman ring? It was very much, though. She stands out in my mind, sorry. I wonder why, right? I'm just curious how that would work for us. Red blood in Americans, why that would, you know, you know, and, you know, so for me, you know, being able to be part of that

Starting point is 00:37:19 and be exposed to not only the awesomeness of what we can do as the federal government and monitor a spy network for 10 years, the steganography, breaking the steganography, the coding, like just... Oh, their tradecraft that they used. Tradecraft, right? Anna Chapman had a recruited at the time, Susan Rice's secretary at the UN, right? So they were getting close, right?

Starting point is 00:37:44 They were doing good things. So for me, it was my first, I'm going to say, It was my first big, holy cow moment. This is how big this is, right? I had come from New Jersey, very myopic space. Now I'm in headquarters and I'm like, wow, we have these people all over the country. These are illegals? Like, what are they doing?

Starting point is 00:38:03 Right? So for me, it was an eye-opening experience. And I ended up falling in love with espionage and spy world and the evilness of Russia and China at the time, which for me was, yes, terrorism is always going to be there. but I had not been part of this ecosystem of badness of other countries in their intelligence services. And another thing you mentioned that I think sounds really interesting is if I understand correctly, you're saying the CIA had to exfiltrate their source about this spying because once you guys moved in and arrested them, the source would be compromised.

Starting point is 00:38:39 And is that what was going on there? That's kind of what's going on. You know, we'll get too deep into this. But that had happened first before we arrested anybody, right? And the cool thing about this is at the time, Medvedev was the president of Russia. Putin was running this operation. This was his baby. He was in the spy world.

Starting point is 00:38:57 He had tickets some time off. He took a sabbatical. And then Medvedev was running the show. So when we went, we, the Bureau and the CIA went to brief, you know, the President Obama and Hillary and everybody else was the late part of that week. We were going to make this arrest on Saturday Sunday. And I remember our director coming back from the White House and, you know, just telling us that, hey, Obama was excited about this. So was Hillary.

Starting point is 00:39:24 Hillary hated Putin at the time. But Medvedev was in D.C. Right. So we had to wait until he wheels up Saturday night before we could start this process. So it was a lot of drama going on. And then we arrested him, obviously. And then they had their initial appearances out over the country, which is really cool. and then globally we really embarrassed Putin, you know, really embarrassed him.

Starting point is 00:39:48 And he's still pissed about this, obviously. And then, you know, we had a spy swat in Vienna, which was really cool. And then obviously then we had the Americans, which is even cooler, a good, good TV show. So then tell us about the counter espionage task force. Yeah. So by legislation, subsequent to Ames and Hansen, the two big spies, Congress said, CIA's counter-ashmash program shall be led by an FBI senior, right? So that has always been the case.

Starting point is 00:40:20 So the senior who was there had recently left subsequent to the arrest of General Petraeus as a CIA director. And she had left and went to be an SAC out in California. So they put me over there to do this, which was just freaking amazing. Like here I am an FBI number two in Washington, D.C. I'm going over to be number one in charge of hundreds of people in the CIA tracking down American spies around the world. And my deputy at the time, a guy named Mike Berry, was just phenomenal. And he ended up being chief of station in Kabul twice. And he ended up being head of intelligence to NSA, good guy.

Starting point is 00:41:00 And we just clicked immediately and just doing amazing things. And for me, being in charge of that many people from different culture was probably like, first time in my life I had actually learned how to lead, like to actually be a leader of people who weren't familiar with your culture and the FBI way. So it was really exciting to learn, but it was also very difficult to learn because you had to build trust of how you do things in a much more secretive world than the FBI was at the time. So in the long-term cases, I found it fascinating and I loved not being under the proverbial thumb of the Department of Justice and be able to do things the CIA way.

Starting point is 00:41:43 It was pretty fascinating. As I understand it, correct me if I'm off base here, counter espionage is sort of like a subset of counterintelligence. Like counterintelligence can encompass like deception campaigns and things like that that were confusing the opposition. But counter espionage is like you're trying to catch spies. Absolutely. That's a very good way to say that.

Starting point is 00:42:06 You know, think of counterintelligence as an umbrella, right? And in that umbrella is, you know, disinformation, misinformation, spy ops, theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, right? Buying land here in the U.S., you know, sending rogue agents here to take Chinese people back to China. Like those are, we're trying to counter all that, right? Russian spies doing bad things. Espionage is one of those forks in the umbrella, right? Right.

Starting point is 00:42:36 So this was the, this was a joint counter espionage task force. We worked together since Ames and Hansen to try and vet out who in the American government is spying on behalf of other foreign countries. Mostly, you know, Russia and China, but we had some from Israel as well in Iran. But who are those people? And this joint group of people, a couple hundred, the FBI executive is in charge of that. That happened to be me. And it was a fascinating time there. And the first one you had to deal with, it sounds like, was the resignation of David Petraeus.

Starting point is 00:43:09 and that classified information was divulged to his mistress. Yep, yep, not an easy case for sure. Not an easy case to be able to facilitate. It wasn't easy for him. I mean, he landed on his feet, obviously. But I'm sure it was incredibly embarrassing, not only for his wife and everything, but, you know, he somehow escaped charges there.

Starting point is 00:43:30 I mean, a lot of top secret information went to her. She wrote books about it and agendas, and it is what it is, was what it was. But at the time, so now you're talking circa, 2013, 12, 13, 14 there. We had a lot going on. We had a lot of unsubbed, we call them unsub cases where we had, we knew Americans were spying on behalf of China and Russia and Iran.

Starting point is 00:43:52 We just didn't know who they were, right? So it was basically who done it? Like, who are these people? How do we find out, right? When that happens, what are your indications that it's going on in the first place? Like, what are generally the first, like, hints or clues that there are, is espionage happening? So great, great question.

Starting point is 00:44:13 So let's take China for instance, back in 2009 and 10, and it's been publicly reported. There's probably been between 25 and 40, we'll call them assets, the CIA had recruited, FBI had recruited, who disappeared, who were going to jail and they were murdered, right, publicly. So like, that's a problem. Something's going on here, right? And then if you go back to the hands in the names, day's, same thing. When you have all these assets, they're not showing up for their meat and they're getting killed.

Starting point is 00:44:42 You're like, something as bad is happening here, right? So someone in our shop is divulging this information of whose people are to the Chinese, the Russians, and Iranians. At the same time, not just humans, but you might have a collection, you know, of a specific office, like in someone's, you know, personal space, a foreign leader. And that goes dead, right? or you have maybe an informant that's driving that a guy around and they go missing. And then you have, you're up on your cell phone and that goes off. All these things, you got to put them, these little stars and bullets together to say something's a miss here, right? We have something to miss.

Starting point is 00:45:21 And then you get like human informants. CIA is phenomenal at this. And you have maybe an informant who tells you, hey, our main line K.R guy, Russian guy, who does human intelligence recruitment. Our main KR guy is going next Thursday. He'll be in Mexico City. Well, we know the only reason he's going there is to meet someone from the U.S., right?

Starting point is 00:45:47 So then we have to figure out who the hell in the U.S. government is going to Mexico City, right? And now you're literally on a mohunt trying to figure out, is it some of the CIA, the FBI, NSA, NRA, NGA, DIA. That's the first circle of people,

Starting point is 00:46:02 that work big top secret stuff or is it something from the Department of Energy, Department of Labor, right? You just don't know. But then how do we figure out, you know, get in flight manifest, you're gonna, who's going to Mexico City next week? Or maybe they're already there with their family on vacation, right? And when do they get, so that process begins in earnest to say, and then we say, okay, we're gonna send a joint surveillance team on Mexico City and we're gonna go follow this Russian guy to see who we meets with, right? So that's the process where this kind of Mass group would do all that work.

Starting point is 00:46:34 I've heard a story like that about how like the Russians would send like their main head hunter, like their best human guy that pitches and recruits the highest level people. They like send them to the United States and he'll be driving around on the West Coast like freaking

Starting point is 00:46:50 the FBI the hell out because God only knows what he's doing. But then as you describe, you guys have to figure out is it just deception? Is he just screwing with us? Or is this the real thing? Or is this the real thing, you know, but you can't, you can't ignore it. 100%.

Starting point is 00:47:06 And some, I was, yes. So if it was the main guy, he's meeting somebody, right? They're not sending him here for anything for nothing. But he might be here for two or three weeks and he might meet somebody on day 11, you know, for 13 seconds at a wah-wah in Philadelphia, right? So we got it, we can't even, you know, and there's been plenty of times when they were here and they'd be going to get coffee and we would get caught bringing into a hotel room, right?

Starting point is 00:47:30 Because they know we're doing this. Right. So his job is to be able to meet or do that dead drop and meet that person without getting caught. Our job is to somehow find, so that's a cat and mouse game, obviously. But yes, they also will send maybe the number two, number three, number four guy and then drive around for weeks and they're not meeting anybody. Yeah. It's probably, it's probably tough when an entire state is a cover stop, right? Oh, 100%.

Starting point is 00:47:57 They would go to Niagara Falls all the time. Yeah. He's like, oh, there we go. You know, the falls are nice, but they're not that, that nice, right? Yeah. Did, you know, during that time frame, do you recall ever, like, you were your guys observing an operational act, like catching one of these guys red-handed? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:48:17 So I'm going to say, when I was at the FBI, counterintelligence in Washington Field, at the CIA and then later as director of NCSC, there are multiple times where we would catch these individuals red-handed. but we didn't always know what they were doing. Right. So you would get like a technical officer of the FSB or an MSS officer going to a parking lot where there's a bunch of contractors and they would take a backpack out of their back of their car and they put up on their car.

Starting point is 00:48:45 They'd open it up. They'd look around and clearly they're infiltrating some data somewhere. We just don't know where. Right. So a couple times we had some rogue agents, rogue, you know, steal that backpack and we'd get in a lot of trouble don't have to give it back to them, but like, yes, it's frustrating. We know they're actually doing something technically, but we just don't know exactly what it is.

Starting point is 00:49:05 So it's problematic. Yeah, and of course, I mean, counterintelligence is known to be a little bit more aggressive than intelligence, as I understand it. But when you're working domestically, I mean, you have to work within the confines of American law. You do. And looking at a perspective from an FBI, you know, ecosystem where you're built in an ethos of arresting people and indicting and that's not the case.

Starting point is 00:49:30 So you're really excited about maybe a neutralization, right? Or, I mean, that's really, if you can neutralize an intelligence officer's activity here, that's great. Or PNG, right, where you can get state department to PNG, someone out of the embassy because you caught them arrested. That's like a big deal, right? So there's no really excitement where you get a rah-rah because you neutralize the guy. But if you could get them to not meet that source or not collect that intelligence,

Starting point is 00:49:57 I have a defense industrial-based contractor or whatever it is they're doing, that's a big deal, right? But, you know, growing up in that ecosystem where it's handcuffs, indictments in jail, now in counterintelligence, it is not that, right? It is neutralizations. And, you know, I would say that that would be the biggest aspect of the differentiation. What were some of the big cultural differences between FBI and CIA? I'd say the biggest difference, let's start with the way they work, right? So the FBI, they recruit and you work in teams, teams of two, three, five, ten. The CIA, you work by yourself, right?

Starting point is 00:50:41 So they recruit people who could go overseas and live a life by themselves and do great things and not have to worry about friendships and family, right? So there's two different people. Well, those people will end up growing up. through the CIA and they're still still the same. So there's a lot of reserviness in them, a lot of lack of trust because they grew their bonafetes and their successes in the CIA because they were phenomenal

Starting point is 00:51:06 at working alone, right, in doing amazing things for the US government that are never going to be known by themselves in an alleyway like in Cyprus, right? All of a sudden now they're back in Langley and they're asked to be on a team. It's a little bit different, right? So I was about a raw, I was more of a raw, well, let's make this team thing.

Starting point is 00:51:24 Let's get a little bit more. And where the FBI was all about team, team, team all the time. So that's the number one culture I see there. Numbers two is FBI agents are always, it's about the law, right? You have Department of Justice. You have the domestic guidelines book. You have all these rules. The CIA didn't have a whole lot of that, right?

Starting point is 00:51:45 So it's kind of like culturally, in this task force, what can we do that satisfies both books of being okay? Right? Oftentimes, we always yielded it to the CIA way because it was cooler, more fun, and less DOJ. And during this time, you also kind of dealt with some rogue CIA employees, some other rogue U.S. government employees. Not sure where to start. I mean, I think you touched on it a little bit, but Jerry Lee. Yeah. So I think just in general, just be able to do a lateral across time frame.

Starting point is 00:52:24 So, you know, I'm in the FBI. I'm in charge of counterintelligence there for a while with my partners who were doing espionage. And we're working these cases, these unsub cases. Then I go to the CIA, we're still working these unsub cases. We know things are going bad, right? And then by time I leave the CIA and I go to be head of counterintelligence, during that time, we end up solved these cases. We, I mean, the amazing women and men of the CIA and FBI who do just great work,

Starting point is 00:52:51 finally getting to the position where, you know, like Jerry Lee, he's one of them. We investigated him for a long time. And we finally, you know, sucked him in to come back to the U.S. and we got him to confess to being a spy. You know, we have, you know, Alex Ma, another CIA case officer who would eventually be caught him. They ended up confessing. And he had Kevin Mallory, a real jerk CIA case officer. We worked him for a long time. We ended up catching him because he had horrific tradecraft selling things to the CIA. So it's good for me over my years to little to say, okay, I was a part of that, part of that, I saw that, I saw that, and now they're all coming through fruition, right? So as you see, we just arrested, his name is Rocha from the State

Starting point is 00:53:35 Department. He was spying for the Cubans since the 70s, right? So you don't always get immediate gratification here. Over, over time, you know, it's a golf clap, exciting, but it's just also awesome to see that the women and men who do this for a living don't give up, right? And over years, they just don't give up. How, like, you know, I think that one factor that a lot of people might not consider is the caution that you guys have to approach something with, because if you do finger the wrong person or even put them under a lens, you don't even have to say this is the person to just put them under a lens, that could, like, tarnish their career forever if they are innocent.

Starting point is 00:54:18 It's happened multiple times, right? And then if you look back to Robert Hansen, the FBI spy, right? We caught him and we arrested him in 2001, February and March, I believe. Up to that point, we knew there was another spy, right? We knew Haines wasn't the only guy. We knew. And the FBI agents who were working this case, they thought for sure it was a guy named Brian Kelly, right? He was done.

Starting point is 00:54:42 And they investigated him, they fies at him and, you know, did a complete life enema with his family. It was terrible, right? Terrible. And then we finally, you know, through great human work by the CIA, we end up getting tapes from defector source in Moscow that has voice on it, who the spy is. And it turns out to be Rob Hansen. Well, what do you say to Kelly?

Starting point is 00:55:06 I'm sorry? Right. It's not easy, right? So this is a dirty world, and it's not always fun, and it always doesn't end well. Yeah. I want to ask you real quick, you know, as far as these CIA employees going rogue, based on your experience and observations, I mean, what's their motivations? What kind of makes these people tick and why do they go off the rails?

Starting point is 00:55:31 Yeah. So A, just challenged a question a little bit. It's not always CIA agents going rogue. I know, I know. We've had NSA, plenty of FBI. So they're, I would say, you know, intelligence officials going wrong. Right. So, and I've been in the insider threat business a long time.

Starting point is 00:55:49 It used to be up to probably 2001 to 5 to 8. It was a thing called mice, right? It was, you know, what motivated them is mostly money, right? So we look at Hansen Ames. They're making millions of dollars, spine on the Russians. It was up to probably 2012 and 13, the FBI agent who gave away all the radio codes, the Chinese. Again, money. His family lived in China.

Starting point is 00:56:15 He was helping all his family. And the Chinese are phenomenal at the way they micro-attack Chinese nationals here in the U.S. who have family back there. Just phenomenal to do that. And then, God forbid, you have a Chinese, your ethnic Chinese and you're working in the intelligence community, you're going to be screwed, right? So he was giving all this stuff up. He pled guilty to 10 years. NSA's got a bunch of them as well.

Starting point is 00:56:41 I think over time, you see the last 10 years, people who are saying, you're saying, you're saying, who are spying, specifically of China and Russia, very little money, very little money. You're like, wait a minute, you're going to give up your life and your career and go to jail forever for $10,000? What's going on? It turns out to be more ideology and I would call it disenfranchisement. Yeah. I look at it as that individual who says, what the cripes, nobody thinks I'm good.

Starting point is 00:57:08 You know, I applied for this job three times. I didn't get it. Like, my boss is not treating me well. they maybe have some trouble at home. It's an opportunity for, I would call disenfranchisement. And if you look at now, all the government employees who are being removed in the last, you know, three, four,

Starting point is 00:57:23 five months, the Doge effect, right? 1,300 State Department just got 1,300 State Department employees just got fired last Friday. I'm concerned about them, right? They have a lot of stuff up here. You just need one or two of them to say, screw this. I'm going to send an email to the Chinese or the Russians.

Starting point is 00:57:41 And then we give away out, we give away the farm, right? So it's really, really complicated. And I would say the 50s, 60s and part of 70s, it was ideology, 80s and 90s, early parts, it was money, a lot of money. And then subsequent that, it's backed a little bit more ideology. And I would say disenfranchisement because the Russians and Chinese know they don't have to pay anybody because it's not worth it.

Starting point is 00:58:06 And then the woman who left and defected to Iran, Monica Witt, ideology, right? So didn't take a dime and she gave up a lot of a lot of bad things in ideology. So I would say we're back to disenfranchisement, the angry employee. And it's changed over 30 years. Would you put Edward Snowden in that category? Absolutely. Absolutely. Disenfranchised employee.

Starting point is 00:58:33 He was lost. He was a contractor for a couple different organizations working in the NSA, CIA. No one liked him. He was an asshole, right? So he treated everybody bad. So the supervisors didn't. treat him well. And I say supervisors, not only in the NSA, but as well as at Booz Allen, where he worked and other contractors, he just wasn't treated well because he wasn't a nice dude.

Starting point is 00:58:54 And he thought he should be making more money, had more jobs, just wasn't the case. And then he was a technically proficient scumbag, right? So he was able to do really, really horrific things that at the time, I'm not sure anyone in the government and the ICE intelligence community knew that that was capable of being doing, what with Tor and the way he took. things. So that was a wake-up call for sure. And then you had some involvement in the Volt 7 case too, right? Well, not really. I was already the head of counterintelligence at that time. But the CIA worked that case, but that went back to those days, right? So that was an unsub case where we started to say, what's going on? Why are we missing this stuff? And he went to

Starting point is 00:59:36 trial. So it all blends together, but I didn't have any actually anything to do with that case. And I know this maybe gets into the sensitive side, but are there any operations from this time frame bringing in different agencies that you're allowed to talk about or maybe with some nonspecific information talk about? Yeah. So again, when I was head of counter intelligence, the cool part of it in my job was to be like the quarterback of all the agencies actually do stuff. Right.

Starting point is 01:00:07 So at NCSC, we really didn't do anything. You know, we were like the quarterbacks, the people who hosted and came up with a strategy, a policy that we would go after X, Y, and Z, and then we would facilitate and pay for all the agencies to do it, right? Oh my goodness, I can't even tell you. Being able to utilize maybe some tier one assets that as Iraq and Afghanistan were gearing down, we had some great human assets to be able to take them in a creative way and convince DOD to put them against hard target. in Europe. It was fascinating, right? And then give that a shot. And then you have, you know, DOD and J-Soc, are they okay with their assets reporting now to their chief of station, right?

Starting point is 01:00:49 So we had all that dichotomy, right? It was a challenge and being in the middle of that was really fun. At the same time, you know, we had some, we were doing some amazing things as the government like we do. We build things and we make things that we want to keep secret. So my organization would entail bringing in FBI, CIA, Coast Guard, Department of Transportation, and we would officiate around that, and we would get the Chinese and Russians to believe that we were actually doing it in Florida when in reality we were doing it in Washington State, right?

Starting point is 01:01:21 So then we would monitor the Chinese and the Russians doing surveillance in that location in Florida. We would have metrics and feedback to say how many ships are they putting in the Gulf, how many humans are they put in the ground, what kind of technical collection are they doing from Cuba on that location in Florida? Meanwhile, we're doing what we need to do

Starting point is 01:01:39 from maybe Washington to Alaska without them knowing it. I imagine, and I don't know, but I imagine whether it's like our shipbuilding or building the next generation fighter, that there has to be a counterintelligence plan built into all of that from the get-go. There is. From moment one, there is. And when you can look back to say where there wasn't, you can show me, I'll show you the failure, right? What didn't happen in the supply perspective. And I think to your other question, I'll top of my head, I just remembered something.

Starting point is 01:02:11 So 2020, we have COVID. And another Trump, you know, I'm in the job and we got to build a vaccine, right, from scratch. Well, so does the Chinese, right? So as part of an operation warp speed, my job was to lead the counterintelligence program to protect the development of that vaccine. From ideation to the small town. organisms labs that were doing testing to Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer,

Starting point is 01:02:42 protecting movement of stuff from point A to point B, working with sheriffs and state police. So from the time it was thought of until they actually went in an arm, we had to protect that vaccine. So it wasn't the Chinese were trying to not only steal it, but they were trying to disrupt us for making it, right? Because of the big deal. So that to me, that was working with the army hand in hand. but that was just fascinating.

Starting point is 01:03:08 Say what you want about the vaccine. Everybody's all over the map on that. But from a counterintelligence perspective, we, the women and men of the counterintelligence programs, the police departments of state police, and the Army did a phenomenal job of protecting that we actually developed. Wasn't there, I can't remember,

Starting point is 01:03:27 and my memory's not great, but wasn't there some weird stuff that went on, when there were like a Chinese, American scientist who was like working on the vaccine that was killed down, like Pennsylvania or something like that. I can't remember now. I don't know that.

Starting point is 01:03:41 Okay, all right. Yeah. I would not say it's not true, but I just, I don't recall that. Yeah. Because if I said yes, you would ask me if we did it, but so I'm not saying no. No, no, I, like, I think he was on our side working on it and got killed. But I don't, I don't remember the details. Yeah, so the last part of this thing is like from a domestic operation,

Starting point is 01:04:06 perspective during warp speed, we were able to waive a lot of the existing policies restrictions to be able to do stuff. So we were able to get up real quick and do things technically to avoid the Chinese from doing what they wanted to do, whether you deal with everything and all that kind of cool stuff that you can't normally do. But this was a big national emergency, right? And it was really fun to be in that space countering another countries want to steal what we were trying to develop.

Starting point is 01:04:38 That's cool. And so 2014, you get assigned to the Office of National Counterintelligence. I think, again, we should probably start by, you know, having you tell us what that office actually is and what it does and how it integrates with the rest of the government. Absolutely. And, you know, analogous to what I talked about with the Conoracientary Management Group, where there's a legislatively in-charged person of the CIA. Subsequent to Hansen and Ames, the Congress created the National Counterintelligence. executive. So this was the one person who would lead and run all counterintelligence activities of all the agencies and the government. That, that person had an office. So it was called the

Starting point is 01:05:20 office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. So that person, the first one was a guy named Bear Bryant from the FBI. So that job, that office existed. So I went over there in June of 14 and took over the job and I wanted to change it. So what we ended up doing is making it an office of counterintelligence. We wanted to make it a center under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Under the DNI, they had the National Counterterrorism Center, NCTC.

Starting point is 01:05:49 So I said, well, we should have the Counterintelligence Center. It should be the same. Sure. And then December of 2014, we ended up, we had the ribbon cutting on the National Counterintelligence Security Center like NCTC. And then next year, Congress loved everything we're doing.

Starting point is 01:06:04 They decided to make my position a presidential appointee in Senate-confirmed position. Did, I mean, so you were there beforehand, but did you then have to go and get confirmed by the Senate? Yep. Yep. So I got nominated by President Trump in 2018.

Starting point is 01:06:22 I had my hearing in May of 2018. I came out of the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously, and then I had a hold put on me by Senator Grassley because nothing about me, but he wanted. administrative information on the Department of Justice and so forth. So I probably was on hold for a year. I was still on the job, still doing it. And then the hold was dropped in 2020. And then I got confirmed by the entire Senate in 2020

Starting point is 01:06:54 as the first Senate confirmed head of counterintelligence security for America, which is pretty cool. So to be able to represent the women and men all over the world doing really cool stuff was pretty humbling for me. That's amazing. I'd love to ask you a little bit about that confirmation process. I think it would be great for people to hear that. Like, just ask you what that process was like when you went in and talked to the Senate.

Starting point is 01:07:19 Was there like a classified portion of that and a non-classified portion of it? Yes. So I had already been briefing these women and men on the Senate for years, right? So as an FBI agent, as a CIA head of Congress. So they knew me. I had briefed them a million times. So they knew my, my, but they knew all the cases. So that was pretty easy.

Starting point is 01:07:40 But so I would say for every one open hearing, there was 20 closed hearings, right, of really important stuff. So by time my actual open hearing came around, it was pretty uneventful, right? So at the time, you know, Senator Wyden hit me pretty hard on privacy and whistleblowers. So I had 89 votes. So I did pretty well. bipartisanly, right? And both Senator Burr at the time and Senator Warner, who were chair and vice chair, very supported me very much. And then Senator Rubio. So I had some bipartisan support during that time. And then that all went away during the election.

Starting point is 01:08:23 What else was I going to ask you about that? Oh, yeah. So what was your impression kind of interacting with the legislative branch, you know, as a counterintelligence official? Was that like a difficult process, were they pretty receptive to the, not just the investigations, but sometimes operations that you have to pitch. Yes. Yes. So that's a great question. And my goodness gracious.

Starting point is 01:08:47 So the answer is yes. So as part of my job also kind of intelligence security, I was also, you know, the guy and the organization that did security clearance reform, right? So a lot of that was like, why do the clearances take so long? So a lot of that drama, right, is part of that. But earlier on, I want to say, when I first got. in the job in probably 2010 to 2013-14 the house was the primary intelligence organization it's called hipsy the house permanent select committee intelligence back then they were the big dog and sissy in the

Starting point is 01:09:21 senate side was probably not as as big right over time so now you fast forward in 2014 i'm in the job now as the head of counterintelligence hipsy decides um to do their own investigation uh on Snowden, just because they can. So now I have that whole thing. So you have that whole budding heads with, you know, staffers and members of the Hill wanting to do their own investment because they don't believe that what we're doing is good enough. And over time, I'd say, you know, 2016, the House side goes high right, right?

Starting point is 01:09:56 So you have Democrats come in in power, Adam Schiff, and it goes really bad. They're not bipartisan anymore. or you have Schiff and Nunez. And then, you know, it's just not a good situation at all. And then the Senate takes primacy, right? So 15, 16, 17, the evening the Senate grows. You had great bipartisanship there between Senator Burr and Senator Warner and Senator Rubio, Senator Cotton.

Starting point is 01:10:19 You had a lot of really good senators that wanted to do the right thing for America. And they became the preeminent intelligence oversight committee, and they still are. But yes, in the depths of the classified briefings and the same, skiffs, it gets pretty hairy. It gets pretty knuckle dragging, yelling and screaming. But for the most part, these, the senators have some great ideas, some great thoughts. And they get their own briefings from individual agencies, so they have some ideas. And then we have to ask them for money to do some really cool stuff. So there's a lot of skiff meetings with members and staffers a lot. I mean, you're talking like three to four a week of that. So,

Starting point is 01:11:02 keeping them advised and informed of what's going on in our world. Same thing for terrorism. It's just they're really, if you get on one of the intelligence committees, it's a hard job. There's a lot going on there. The other thing about this time frame is I wanted to ask you, you were telling us a little bit before the show, about some of the cultural issues in counterintelligence, including in the counterintelligence center, and how you and some of the other guys are kind of like miserable by the judge. job because there's such an emphasis on the failures rather than the successes and how you kind of

Starting point is 01:11:37 reversed that. Yeah, a great question. I'm not sure I reversed it, but I certainly mitigated a little bit. But first on the culture side, yeah, you know, when the FBI, everyone's there. They're all type A's. Everyone does their job. You know, you're a born leader. You are, you aren't, but you don't have to lead a whole lot of people, right? Everything just happens really organically. When I went over the CIA, it was the first time I really had to work my ass off to be a good leader, right? Because now I'm in charge of a whole bunch of people from a different culture who don't know me and don't know the Bureau way, and I have to facilitate their way, right?

Starting point is 01:12:16 My job is to ingratiate myself with them and their culture. I worked really hard at that, and it was not easy. But I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about leadership, leading people from other cultures. It was really cathartic, and I learned a lot. And I became a great, a much better person. being in charge of women and men from a different agency. And they taught me a lot about being able to transform yourself into a human being

Starting point is 01:12:41 where you could thrive in someone else's culture. And I thought that was fun, challenging, and unique. The second part of it, you know, the question, I believe you were talking about the negativity of the job. I mean, listen, no one's going to say that counterintelligence and security is sexy, right? It's not. It's depressing. It's all bad stuff. And, you know, in my time as the director of NCSE, you know, from the breach of OPM on, right, you've got breach after breach after breach. Government private sector, the White House was breached. The State Department was breached. We had companies every day getting breached. It's negative. We had intelligence operations going bad all over the world. It was not good, right? We had underground cables and the oceans being caught by the Russians. And it was just,

Starting point is 01:13:30 nonstop negativity. So I want to say by the fall of my first year in the job, I was a mess, right? So I would come home. My wife was like, what is wrong with you? And at the time, I had a young, a young teenage boy and I was trying to coach Little League. I was a mess. So I said, there's got to be something out here. We got to be able to do something. So I had some people gave me some advice. So we ended up creating what's called a white binder. So that binder was basically four to five vignettes that you would read every day before we're going home of the awesome. success we've had around the world, right? Whether or not just here in the U.S.,

Starting point is 01:14:05 but things that we did in Asia and Africa and against the Russians or Chinese, their ratings, the Cubans, just successes, whether it be NCIS, OSI, DIA, Department of Treasury, didn't make a difference. That on day one was a winner, right? So day one, I'm going home now,

Starting point is 01:14:22 all revved up, excited because we were kicking ass around the world, right? And no one's going to know about this. No one's going to make a movie about these things. So you do that over four or five, five, six days. Now, three months in, it's like addictive drug. I can't wait until I'm getting ready to go home to read what they put in my white binder,

Starting point is 01:14:39 right? Because that's what's going to get me motivated to go home, hug my family, spend time with my kids and want to come back the next day, right? So to me, I found that to be something that I handed that off to my successor. And I think it's now a fairly commonplace in the intelligence community, is have your little white happy binder where you can learn about awesome things that awesome people are doing all in the world to protect them. America. And you were saying the information that was collected in those binders was eventually

Starting point is 01:15:06 used to hand out awards to these folks? Oh, yeah, yeah. Great point. So what we ended up doing, probably Christmas time that first year, I'm like, hey, listen, everyone should know about this amazing things. Like I remember one time, one of the ones I read was just an amazing counterintelligence operation the Marine Corps did with the Coast Guard. I'm like, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard doing counterintelligence, who would know? Like, I would never know this, right? So what we decided to do myself, my deputy at the time, Connie, who was a former COS of Beijing at CIA, she was a CIA case officer. We're going to have an award ceremony in the summertime.

Starting point is 01:15:43 And we're going to take the best and brightest of these and we're going to bring their families in. So we did. The first one we did was in summer of 2000, oh, I guess it would have been 15. And we brought, we had a board made up of maybe five or six agencies. their representatives that picked the winners. And when those winners, they came in, they brought their families in. We gave them a big medal and award.

Starting point is 01:16:10 We read what they did, as unclassified as we can, but their families got to come in and see, hey, my mom, my dad is doing amazing things to protect this nation, its people, its places, and I didn't know about this. And we recognized them

Starting point is 01:16:23 not only in front of their leadership, but in front of their family, and we end up doing that instill today. And tell us then I get, well, I mean, during this time frame before we move on to the next thing, I mean, was there any other ops or actions or anything that you'd like to highlight that you guys did? I'm trying to think what could be talked about here. Probably not a whole lot I can talk about right here. Oh, yeah, probably not that one either.

Starting point is 01:16:58 No, I'm sorry. That's all right. But I will say that the things that we got to do involve five, six, sometimes 10 or 12 agencies, right? And unique to this, not only are, you know, the agencies that never get looked at in this world, like the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, OSI, N-CIS, just do amazing work in these cases around the world. And the Coast Guard just doesn't get any credit for the amount of work they do in intelligence and counter-intelligence because they have amazing. and capabilities, resources, shipboarding. We boarded a lot of ships to help the FBI and CIA, the Coast Guard facilitated that.

Starting point is 01:17:41 So the world and the ecosystem of the military is pretty fascinating outside just, you know, kinetic weaponry. Okay, so then let's talk a little bit about the run-up to your retirement in 2021. So 2020, we're in the midst of this COVID chaos. and everyone's working, you know, 15 feet from each other. It was just surreal time to be a government employee working in the intelligence community with COVID. So we, as you know, 2016, the government did not do the best job in the election cycle, right? So whether it be Russian stuff, Chinese stuff, briefing of the candidates, it was poorly done.

Starting point is 01:18:29 So I get confirmed by the Senate in April, I think, of 2020. At that time, the decision was made by people bigger than me, that we are going to do a better job in 2020 election. And we are going to start giving classified briefings of the candidates, their staffs, the RNC, DNC, and every member of Congress. Well, lo and behold, I got in charge of that. So I was the principal briefer of all of this, right? So we started in a good, maybe May or June, we started off good, both the Trump and Biden campaigns, the RNC, DNC, and then we started briefing all the committees in the Hill.

Starting point is 01:19:13 It was going pretty well. And then I sent out a letter probably, oh, had to be July or August of that summer, basically saying, hey, we have 100 years to the election. Here's what we're seeing so far, declassified information. We're seeing the Russians do this, the Chinese do this, the Iranians do this. Well, the Democrats on the Hill went ballistic, the fact that we even recognized the fact that China, or Iran were doing anything because for them it was Russia, Russia, Russia, and I say the Democrats mostly like Schiff and Adam Schiff and those folks and Pelosi.

Starting point is 01:19:52 There were furious the fact that we declassified information that Chinese were favoring, this down whatever. So we did more classified briefings than I came up with a follow-up memo where we laid out actual people said, hey, this guy, Andre Durchak was actually doing things to facilitate election interference. And the intelligence community had some intelligence they released that said basically, we believe, you know, that one country is favoring this candidate, this candidate's being favored with this country. We put that out again. Again, the politicians went ballistic, berserk, right? So it just was an ugly, ugly situation.

Starting point is 01:20:31 And you want to talk about politicizing intelligence, right? That starts in Congress, right? It was because you have the anti-Trump, I don't say anti-Natheaval, right? And then you have Republicans going against Biden. To be an intelligence apparatus during the time frame was very difficult, right? Because you had women and men in the intelligence community

Starting point is 01:20:51 collecting information, doing assessments. And no matter what we gave to the members of the Hill, It was politicized, right? So it was problematic at that time. So I decided in September of that year that I was not coming back. I had been there six years, six and a half years. I said, I'm leaving an inauguration day regardless of who wins this election. But, you know, fortunately for us, we were able to vet out that, yes, the Chinese were doing stuff

Starting point is 01:21:16 and the Iranians were doing stuff. We had a big press conference on Iran. And then it all ended up working out well. but it was not for lack of incredible anxiety and stress on my part, right? So it was a rough six months for a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, I can't only imagine what it would be like that, you know, as a federal law enforcement officer, you're trying to maintain your impartiality, you know, serve, you know, just as a police officer, essentially.

Starting point is 01:21:45 But at the level you're at, you're having to deal with Congress and getting pulled in these two directions. it must have been very hard to maintain that balance. Yeah, it is. And again, you want to try and at the end of the day, number one, maintain your integrity, right? And it isn't. And fortunately for me, my boss at the time, the DNI, Rackcliffe and the Chief of Staff Meadows and the president, no one ever interfered with me. No one ever asked me to change anything.

Starting point is 01:22:11 No one ever asked me to make a comma or include this or not include that. So everyone was straight up on that. It's just that when he got to the hill, the politicization there was, you know, know, I mean, again, they got to win elections, right? I get all that, right? And then the women and men and the intelligence community and myself, we were part of the pawns in that game. It just, it is what it is.

Starting point is 01:22:30 You got to put your big boy pants on and go deal with it. So you retire in 2021 and then start up the Evenina group. Tell us about that. Yeah. So when I retired, I said I had a plan to be able to basically do what I was doing in my old job, but make more money to do it. So I wanted to be basically a strategic consultant for companies to help them neutralize defeat and defend against China. So it was my big thing.

Starting point is 01:23:04 So I was big on intellectual property theft. You know, I had worked really hard on China for years. And we had done these road shows myself and Senator Burr, Rubio and Warner would travel on the country. We would brief all these CEOs on what China is doing from my people. theft to trade secrets to penetration to cybers you name it whatsoever and then at the time i think 2020 we had the largest number it was like 600 billion dollars they had stole uh from theft of intellectual property and trade secrets just in one year 600 billion and then once we aggregated it up to be like four thousand dollars per america family of four after taxes i said listen we i got to do a better

Starting point is 01:23:45 job of this right we did not do a good job in the government so i i said listen i'm going to do this for business I'm going to go out and advise and inform companies and help them defend against China. So that's basically my company. So I have these really cool tabletop exercises that are 30 minutes long for executives to walk them through a breach or cyber or an insider threat, you know, an active shooter. It doesn't make a difference. But also just basically saying, hey, here's the threats we face from the Communist Party of China. Here's how we have to mitigate them.

Starting point is 01:24:14 And here's what you make, you sell, you procure that they're coming after. and here's how you can help defend it. I think we have some questions from viewers there, Dee, if you can pull those up. I actually have one follow-up question before we get into the viewer questions. From your point of view, I would love to hear your take on Havana syndrome. Well, I'm very clear about it in the public sphere. Oh, boy. Where to even start this?

Starting point is 01:24:49 Because it's a rabbit hole. Yeah. So President Obama, I'll go this way. And I've said this publicly on CNN a million times. Sanjay Gupta did a series, a whole special on this. And I was very clear about my thoughts. President Obama said in his second term that we were going to open relations with Cuba. And we opened an embassy there.

Starting point is 01:25:09 And we were doing very well. And we were doing very well. And the intelligence apparatus in the United States were doing very well, right? Not just against the Cubans, but who else is there? The Russians are there. Right. So all of a sudden, people start getting sick, getting hurt, injured. We've got to close the embassy. There's only one country in the world that wins with that.

Starting point is 01:25:32 That's not the Cubans, right? So for me, I am convinced without evidence. I think there's plenty of evidence. Sixteen minutes has done some really good pieces here on this, that it started in Havana. They called the Havana syndrome, but, you know, AHA, they call it now. is pretty prevalent. There's a lot of women and men who are incredibly bad shape. People have died.

Starting point is 01:25:57 It's been well documented. To me, there's only one country that benefits from doing this, and that's Russia. Now, that being said, proving it is a secondary thing. I think this administration is doing a much better job of being transparent about the evidence. The previous administration was not. But I think this administration, you're starting to see more data coming on on this. but I will say this as well. And even if we get a defector or we recruit a Russian, you know, Ivan to come out and say,

Starting point is 01:26:29 I was the guy that did this and here's the weapon, people are still going to think that's not enough evidence, right? So, you know, at the end of the day, we'll never get to a place where we could prove this. Secondarily, in big picture apparatus, what happens if we do prove this? What happens if it's unequivocally the Russians? Then what? Right. So we have a foreign country who has harmed severely a lot of U.S. citizens that are U.S. government employees. Then what do we do, right? So the answer sometimes is not always good to know, right?

Starting point is 01:27:01 So I think at the end of the day, if the government ever does find out unequivocally that it was the Russians, it probably won't be disclosed anytime soon. What do you make of the claims of people getting hit here in the United States? because it's been quite a few FBI people hit or have claimed to have been hit. I don't mean to be skeptical, but I mean, what do you think? Yep. So I'm not skeptical because I know some of the people that are sick, right? But to be able to say it's the same weaponry that was used in Havana or in Vienna or any place else in Mexico City, I don't know that to be true. I just know that people are really sick.

Starting point is 01:27:42 historically the Russians have been very reluctant to do anything here in the U.S. But doesn't mean they haven't done it systematically recently to obfuscate all the other stuff around the world, right? It could be another country doing it to blame the Russians, right, if that's the case. There's been some people that hit really close to the White House. So geopolitically, I find it hard to fathom Putin being okay with this, right? So you look about how he screws up everything else with the Scribbles and, you know, Lifenenko. They're not good at these ops. Russians are bad at these things, right?

Starting point is 01:28:20 So they get caught and most of their assassination attempt. So I'm really skeptical that they would let them do this. The other part of it is there's a lot of women and men in the State Department, CIA, and the FBI who are really sick. So I just don't know. My argument is I don't think we're putting enough resources to this that we should. This should be a massive undertaking with women and men, time doing this investigation, which is not. Dee, what do we have from viewers?

Starting point is 01:28:51 From M, we have, can you talk a bit about how closely China's publicly declared five-year plans seem to match the actions that you saw them take while the actions you saw them take during your time in government? Great question. So not only did they match, they over, they incredibly surpassed those. I mean, let's talk about China, it's made in 20, 2025 plan where they were very clear about, Xi was very clear about obtaining the world's best intelligence on, you know, quantum

Starting point is 01:29:22 and advanced manufacturing and biofarm. Not only did they reach that, but they out did themselves with mostly through theft, you know, of intellectual property and trade secrets and be able to do joint ventures and getting all to the technology. I mean, they have the Cormac airplane that this rolled out, which is basically they stole everything from, you know, Boeing. Airbus A320. So everything's been stolen. And I think if you look at their five-year plans, the 2025-year plan has been very successful from the Chinese perspective, obtaining an

Starting point is 01:29:57 intelligence they wanted to get in the top 10 tiers of technology. I have a question about the Chinese because, you know, in a free country against a, you know, kind of totalitarian country. Like, you know, you mentioned their tax. with like Chinese Americans who may have relatives over, you know, in China, where, you know, a Chinese agent will bump up against them and say, hey, you know, how's your grandmother? Have you taught her lately? Here's a picture of me with her.

Starting point is 01:30:30 How does the U.S. obviously not, you know, cut out Chinese Americans from technology and universities and laboratories, but how do we defend against that type of intelligence service? You got to fight through it, right? And again, I've been a victim of this a lot in many years that, hey, this is, you are, you are racist against Chinese. You are racist. This is a racist rant, right? Because that's what the Chinese intelligence services want everybody to do.

Starting point is 01:31:02 Right. Right. You got to fight through it. You can't cower, right? We've coward a lot. I had not cowered, and I basically make sure I tell them it's not the Chinese people. This is the government, the Communist Party of China that's doing. doing this.

Starting point is 01:31:12 Right. They're utilizing, like a lot of the students that are here in the U.S. spying on behalf of China, majority of them are doing it unwittingly, right? And they come over here, you know, if there's 320,000 students in China every year, there's only about 6,000 of them that are actually bad, right? The ones that are doing, you know, high-level STEM postgraduate work. And even those, they don't know that they're going to do anything to the government until they're asked.

Starting point is 01:31:34 Right. Or told. Yeah. Yeah. What are you working over there? I'm working on quantum computing and da-da-da-da-da. Oh, could you send us what you're doing? working on? Sure, I'll send it here. They don't even know that's bad.

Starting point is 01:31:45 Yeah. So that's the problem. Secondarily, like, from an education perspective, you know, there's 242 Chinese companies on the U.S. stock market. There's zero U.S. companies in the Chinese stock market. Yeah. Chinese government through fake companies have bought probably three to four hundred pieces of property in the United States around U.S. military installations and nuclear sites. We don't, we can't go to China and buy anything. Yeah. They have 320,000, there's probably not 30 in China of Americans. So it's not a two-way street. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:22 Can you also talk about how you think about China's corruption purges in the last few years? Clearly that was a genuine threat to them in certain ways, but to what degree do you think it was about Xi's consolidating power? Yeah, great question. It's both of them, actually. So you look, I'm going to say the last two years of not only the arrest, the disappearance of leaders around him, the quote-unquote retirement, the executions, right? It's two things.

Starting point is 01:32:52 Number one, three things. Him telling the desported people in China, I'm the boss, and I'll make all these decisions. Secondarily, he doesn't trust people around him, you know, at all, especially those who might be conspiring or might be someone who might challenge him in a couple of years, so he's got to get rid of those. Third, if they're not being aggressive enough, what he wants from a defense department perspective or making progress in Taiwan or the Philippines, you're going to be out. And the last one, money.

Starting point is 01:33:21 Chinese are incredibly corrupt. And it's part of their culture. Unlike in America, we look at corrupt as like a bad thing. China, it's not a bad thing. So if you are making a lot of money in a corrupt fashion in Beijing and to the point where Xi doesn't like it, you're out. And then if you're lucky, he'll let you walk away somewhere with your money, but usually they get jailed.

Starting point is 01:33:43 So he's very vicious. He might be more of the most mononical men in our lifetime, Xi Jinping, right? Putin is evil in his own way, but Xi Jinping's hatred for us is number one. But his fear of his own population makes him incredibly maniacal. Are you familiar with Operation Solo? If so, should this have remained for internal use only?

Starting point is 01:34:09 No, I'm not familiar with Operation Solo. A couple more. What can tech companies in U.S. government do to combat disinformation? Yeah, disinformation. So I got this one last week. You know, where do I get my news from? Well, honestly, I wake up in the morning. I'd go right to BBC, BBC America.

Starting point is 01:34:33 I find out where the news is, you know, where is it? And I go to Yahoo News because it's very straight down the middle. It's basically what's the news with no commentary. From the tech perspective, I would find the most conservative-based, technical news, bulletin, website, information gathering

Starting point is 01:34:53 that you can in your genre, whether you're doing micro biology or whether you're doing nanotechnology or you're doing the most latest

Starting point is 01:35:01 quantum physics, find a niche where you can go on through a forum and get the latest and greatest information and stay away from mainstream media.

Starting point is 01:35:10 All righty, one more. Nord Stream pipeline. Was that the Russians? I don't know what you're talking about. I have no idea. I never heard of that pipeline. I actually have a question.

Starting point is 01:35:29 So, Bill, in your career, have you ever had, like, holy shit moments? I can't believe this is going on. And, like, freaked out kind of moments in terms of, like, penetrations in whether it's the FBI, CIA, or any of the agencies? More than I could possibly imagine. Yes.

Starting point is 01:35:49 And they just, so I'll give you one of the topics. You know, when the Chinese breached and they took the data out of OPM, right? So, okay, okay, they took OPM data. You know, okay, it was a bad, it's a bad day, right? Bad day. They took all the, until you get into it and find out what they actually took. The, oh shit moment was for me, it's like, well, not only did they take Bill Avenina's information, but they took my entire top secret background investigation file.

Starting point is 01:36:17 Yeah. every page of it. Yeah. Right. So me and 21 other million, 21 million Americans, not only, not 21 million Americans who applied, but the people who actually didn't get clearances, all the negative derogatory, your old wives and girlfriends who said bad things about your college roommate who said you smoke cocaine on a car and a train track, they have all that, right?

Starting point is 01:36:38 So for me, that was the most, that was one of the biggest, oh, shit moments for me was like, oh, my goodness, this is really, really bad. right that's number one it's really bad but i'll fast forward to a recent event you know you may or not be familiar with vault typhoon and salt typhoon right so volt typhoon is the chinese putting malware on critical infrastructure in the u.s to make it to destroy it to make it not work right and preparation in the battlefield well salt typhoon was their penetration of verizon 18 tn tmobile so they were able to get in those tech telecommunications companies they were not only able to steal data, law fair data, FISA data,

Starting point is 01:37:20 data that the FBI has been using for subpoenas, but they were able to listen to U.S. telephone calls. Think about this. The FBI would need a search warrant or FISA to do this, right? NSA can't do it, nor can the CIA. But a foreign nation is listening to U.S.-based phone calls. For me, that's an oh-ship moment. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:42 You know, we've talked about the challenge. with the federal agencies and with corporate America. What about our politicians themselves, though, right? Because they get elected and they get a security clearance. It's not, you know, it's not like anybody's going to probably tell them no. Right. So how, like, is, how do you guys manage that? Difficantly.

Starting point is 01:38:11 So, and it's not just Congress. It's the White House, right? So if you work in the White House and you're on National Security Council, you're not getting polygraphed, right? You're going to get a security clearance because you ask for one. The president says you're getting one. And that also goes for, as you mentioned, members of the House and Senate. Now, fortunately, not everyone gets all the information, right? If you are in the Senate Select Committee Intelligence or House or you're on Hask for DOD or Sask on the Senate side, you're going to get some pretty intelligent.

Starting point is 01:38:41 You're going to house foreign affairs. You're going to get some pretty heavy stuff. But we try and the government, the intelligent community tries to do a pretty good job of bifurcating that information. So not everybody gets everything, right? So that's kind of the way we do the best job of it. But, you know, listen, these politicians are elected. Some of them weren't even elected. Some of them were just given their jobs because someone left, right?

Starting point is 01:39:02 So, you know, you're going to go brief a senator because he or she was given the job by the governor? Like what? It's for a career intelligent profession or law enforcement, it's a difficult thing. but you're just going to have to trust the system. Obviously we dealt with that in 16 and 20 on the election cycle every day. Yeah. All right, one more question. Of our allies, which of our allies are the worst in terms of spying on us?

Starting point is 01:39:33 Well, so by saying that question, the worst, maybe you want to change which one's the best? We have some pretty amazing allies. And we've, I can't say that we've officially ever caught the Brits or Canadians, the Australian spying on us. We have caught the Israelis spying on us. And the French. And the French, right. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:39:58 They're just the French. Don't get me stuck on the time. They're good at what they do. You know, if you fly into Charles de Gaul, you better not bring a telephone. Economic warfare. Yeah. So, but the Israelis, they do what they have to do, right? So when we're in the space race and you want technology, they do what they have to do. And they're in L.A. and we can't do anything without them where they're, you know, they're our second best partner in the world. So I think it's called friendly fire, you know, friendly spying. It is what it is. My argument with the Israelis is, if you just ask us, we'll give it to you. Yeah. You know, you don't you get caught spying and giving that stuff. But like, I think the Americans will all. always be best known for not only partnerships with our five eyes, but with our other friendly companies that are allies.

Starting point is 01:40:47 And it can be the most innocuous country. But when we send our women and men around the world to partner, whether it be the Italians or Thailand doesn't make a difference, we do amazing things. And everyone knows America is the big dog. And you better partner and they want a partner, right? So even some of our frenemies were willing to partner, right? So I think now when you see what's going on in Assyria, you'd be shocked at some of the things that the Syrians are doing to help and partner with us that was not even thinkable three years ago. Bill, is there anything else that you'd like to talk about and also tell people where they can go and find you and find the Evanina Group?

Starting point is 01:41:26 Yeah, so you can get me online. Bill at Avenina Group.com. Hit me up. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very, very popular on LinkedIn in terms of my mom there a lot. I have a Twitter at Bill Avanina. I tweet a lot, especially on China and Putin.

Starting point is 01:41:44 I do what I can out there. People are willing to get me there. They can. In terms of forget, we could do this for seven more hours, as you know. I wish I was there and we could smoke some cigars. Next time. There's tons of good stories here. But I think I just want to leave for you and your loyal audience,

Starting point is 01:42:02 Just know that the women and men in uniform, whether it be law enforcement, the intelligence community or DOD, worked our asses off every day to protect America. So we all know who they are. You have family members and friends that do this. I would just ask your viewers this coming week coming up, take a moment, pat them on the back, say, thanks for what you do. And then if you know someone who's maybe in the Middle East or in Asia and you don't know what exactly they're doing, send them a note, say, hey, I don't know what you're doing over there, but thank you for what you're doing, because my family appreciates it.

Starting point is 01:42:39 I think we just, as Americans, the government's going through some rough times right now, the intelligence community as well. I just think we have to rally and support those awesome people who are around the world, even here in the U.S., who are protecting us every single day. Just take a moment, send them a note, pat him in the back and say, thanks. I think that's what I think it would be a go a long way with giving them a little bit of fuel and emotion to keep doing what they do that's a passion and a livelihood they've wanted to do as a dream. We just as Americans got to support them a little bit moving forward.

Starting point is 01:43:12 Help them fill up that white binder a little bit. Help them fill up that white binder. And sometimes it's three or four little tops in the back saying, hey, could I buy your coffee today? Thanks for you do. Hey, maybe it's a baseball coach or a baseball kid. Hey, I don't know what you do, but I know you do something really cool, whatever it is. Thank you for what you do, right? You see a woman or a man in a U.S. military uniform, whatever the service, walk up to them, shake their hand.

Starting point is 01:43:36 Say, hey, I'm Dave, I'm Bill. Thank you for what you do. If it could be procurement, doesn't make a difference. Acquisition. Thanks for what you do. It goes a long way for those people motivating to get through that day. Bill, thank you so much for this interview and telling some really unique stories from the, you know, depths of counterintelligence that most people don't get to hear. Yes, fascinating.

Starting point is 01:43:58 Yeah, it's a very unique. perspective, and I thank you for coming on here and doing this. We'll have some links down the description for our listeners or viewers where they can find Bill and they can find the Evenina group. So thank you again for doing this. I hope you join us in studio next time, Bill. I look forward to it. I'm going to probably be up there in August to look you up and bring up some cigars. Outstanding. And we'll see all you guys next time. Thank you. Pleasure. Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment.

Starting point is 01:44:29 about how you can support the show if you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this. You can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com slash the Teamhouse. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of the Team House ad-free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast, Eyes On, with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, Mick Mulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad-free.

Starting point is 01:44:59 You support the channel and the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members are literally what has helped this company, this small business, survive, especially during our early years. And you are what continues to help this thing going, even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's going to be a link down in the description to that Patreon page. And there is also going to be a link to our new merch. shop. So if you guys want to go and get some Team House merchandise, we got stickers, and we also have

Starting point is 01:45:36 patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month, we will mail you this patch as well. So we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop. And additionally, they got T-shirts up there, water bottles, tote bag, coffee mugs, all that good stuff. So please go and check them out and support the show. We really appreciate it, guys. Thank you.

The Team House - FBI Agent Sent to the CIA to Find Spies | Bill Evanina | Ep. 361

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.