The Team House - FBI Counterintelligence Agent | Holden Triplett | Ep. 172

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Holden Triplett has extensive international and domestic experience in national security and intelligence matters, especially with respect to their impact on businesses and private enterprises. In addition to his work at Trenchcoat, Holden is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he teaches a course on Chinese Intelligence, Security and Influence. Holden left the FBI in mid-2020, after almost 15 years of service. In his last position, Holden was the FBI Faculty Chair at the National Intelligence University where he taught courses in Counterintelligence, National Security Law and Intelligence, and Chinese Intelligence and Information Warfare. In 2017, Holden was designated the Director for Counterintelligence at the National Security Council. While at the White House, he led the development of counterintelligence policy for the United States; drafting Presidential Directives and legislation to protect the U.S. government and the private sector from exploitation by foreign governments. Holden has substantial overseas experience. He served as the FBI’s senior official in the People’s Republic of China from 2014 – 2017. During his time in Beijing, Holden was the primary U.S. interlocutor with the Chinese security services on a number of cyber intrusion and economic espionage matters involving U.S. companies. Immediately prior, he was an FBI representative to the Russian Federation in Moscow for two years, where he engaged with the Russian security and intelligence services. Following the Boston Marathon bombing, Holden persuaded Russian security services to provide wide-ranging investigative support to the FBI. He conducted joint activities in Dagestan and other locations in the Caucasus. Holden previously served as the FBI representative to the Joint Task Force on Terrorism Financing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2008. Earlier in his career, Holden was assigned to the FBI’s New York City office. In New York, Holden gained significant national security and intelligence experience, conducting sensitive investigations and enforcing over 300 federal statutes. In addition, he successfully led an effort to enhance the office’s intelligence capabilities. Later, Holden managed a counterintelligence team of special agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, and linguists dedicated to protecting the United States from a national security threat country. Find Holden here:👇 https://trenchcoatadvisors.com To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month  -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #fbi #counterintelligenceBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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

why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House. With your hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey guys, welcome to episode 172 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. And our guest today on this Wednesday episode is Holden Triplett.

Holden is a former FBI counterintelligence agent. He served here in New York. He served in Moscow, Beijing, Washington, D.C., did a year up at the White House with the National Security Council. Real depth of experience. And also working eyeball to eyeball with the Russian FSB and the Chinese state public security section. Yeah, the NPS, Minister Public Security. So, yeah, Holden, I mean, I really appreciate you coming into the studio and

doing this interview with us. And I think, you know, I was telling you before the show, we've interviewed a number of counterintelligence people who come from various perspectives, but I think yours is very unique and contemporary. So I'm very interested to hear from someone like you who is an insider, especially about like the culture of these institutions, these foreign intelligence institutions that we have various types of interactions with, not all of them so pleasant, as opposed to, you know, what I can do is speculate and I can tell people what I read in the newspaper, but you actually lived it. So I'm excited to hear about it. Yeah, no, I'm happy to talk about it. It was really fortunate to have that experience,

and so I was happy to share it. So most of our shows, we start off, Asked our guests sort of about, you know, your upbringing and, you know, what your path was into federal service in your case. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what that journey was like on your end. Sure. So funny enough, I mean, my dad was actually in the FBI for 30 years, although I never considered going into federal service. It's kind of his thing. He did it, so I was going to go in a totally different direction. Although, I will say we grew up with, he came in like 68 until 99, so it was during the Hoover era, and we had a lot of Hoover pictures all over our house.

And I actually thought the guy was my grandfather. My grandfather had passed away before I was born. So for the first couple of years, I always thought they were like, it was my grandfather. And so I'm sure I'll have a psychiatrist unpack that it. I'll help me through some things. But anyway, so maybe it was foreordained where I was going to end up at the end of the day. But I was actually in law school at Berkeley during 9-11.

and, you know, as a lot of people felt, that was sort of the calling of my generation. Like, I had to participate. I needed to be a part of it. And, you know, there were so many things to protect our country. So, I mean, the joke I make is I, you know, traded in my Birkenstocks for a Glock and went on my way. I was going to say, not too many FBI agents come out of Berkeley, do that? So, for a while, I was the only one. And the way I know this is, I, they're the head of alumni. and recruiting it at Berkeley Law School,

he would always hit me up with people who are interested in FBI. He's like, hey, I'm sorry, hold on I keep calling you. He's like, but you're the only one. He's like, there's no one else who went to Berkeley, who's now in the FBI. I think there are a couple now, but anyway, back in those days, there weren't that many. So it's not a typical trajectory.

And so, but I will say, you know, a number of my friends went into federal service on the kind of prosecutor side from Berkeley, so it just tends to be a different pathway. Did he give you statistics, statistics of how many go into the MSP? Yeah, yeah, exactly right. A lot of, yeah, going overseas in China.

I will say there is a fairly leftist contingent. I mean, you know, at Berkeley, it fits a stereotype in some ways. But there's also, there are some fairly middle of the road and even some people who are kind of, you know, on the right side of things there too. But anyway, it was an exciting time. But anyway, so soon after I graduated, I was at a firm and applied for a number of different agencies. The Bureau actually moved faster than others.

And this is right around the time the 9-11 report came out, which kind of designated the Bureau to be sort of the main counterterrorism arm. And that's what I wanted to do. And so I applied and then entered, right, beginning of 2006, went to Quantico. And you had some interesting experiences growing up, international experiences living in Russia, Japan during college. Was this already sort of in your mind? mind that this was going to sort of lead you into a national security pathway?

Maybe. I mean, I didn't plan it that well. It just sort of, I took a gap year after high school and, you know, maybe it was sort of always in the blood and went to Russia back in 1993 when it was a total, total mess. But it was really a great experience. Only did I learn, like, about 10 years later, my dad told me he was still in the bureau at the time and he was sort of freaked out while I was there. he was working counterintelligence Russia while I was in Russia. Yeah. But it was a very different time. Everything's the kind of starting to fall apart.

So it wasn't the same sort of threat level that they've been dealing with, you know, during the Cold War. But no, I would always be a second generation FBI counterintelligence agent. Yeah. There should be a series of novels written about your family. There was a lot of pressure on my kids, right? They got to come into this in some way. That's right. Start that paranoia early, right?

I tried to. I may have a few cameras at home, maybe all over their phones. But no, I, you know, I sort of always interested in the international aspect of it. And, you know, I learned Russian and then it spent some time in Japan. And I spent some time in China, actually, after law school. And so I'd kind of always liked going overseas. And so that kind of drew me in to do something. The Bureau isn't typically, you know, the Bureau is mainly domestic, but does have some overseas offices,

which I was fortunate enough to get to. But what's really changed is what used to be a really domestic mission. I mean, as you all know, I mean, the line between what's domestic and foreign now is pretty much been obliterated. Right. So, I mean, just take the cyber world, like you have an individual in whatever country in the world basically doing almost, you know, what they could do in person, you know, via a computer to someone in the United States. And so, you know, is that an FBI role? Is that another agency's role? You know, it's hard to say what's domestic and foreign now. So that mission's really kind of expanded. Now, while you were in law school in 9-11 went down, you were actually thinking about going

a different way, right? You started thinking about going to the military. I did. I did. I thought about going to the military. I mean, that's what everyone, you know, it looked like we were all going to go to war, and then, you know, soon after, you know, to go to Afghanistan, and obviously very soon after that, we went into Iraq when I was still in law school.

And so, yeah, I was very close to doing that. And then, you know, just sort of talking with people, I thought that my skill set we'd better used in the bureau. Nothing against the military by any means, but some of the things with the law background, my dad had it done, I want to do investigations and interviews and some of that, that's where I kind of got drawn to more or less. Yeah, that's great. And so you go through Quantico, and I think we talked about Quantico just on the last episode with Greg Schaefer. Oh, yeah, great. Before you hit the ground in New York City, before we get to that, I mean, any fun stories, Quantico stories that you want to toss out there?

So I have kind of long hair, and this is about the length I had when I went to Quantico, which is not Quantico link, apparently. Not on Jay Edgar Hoover's time. I guess not. No, sir. So, I mean, I was at a law firm, and, you know, I kept it professional, I thought. But, yeah, I mean, there was still sort of a, the idea that you should have sort of a high and tight while you're there, or at least, you know, sort of a little bit more kept than I did, kept it.

when I did my PT test, you know, pushups is a big part of it. And so, you know, I'm doing this and the guy said, they're watching me, and I'm one, one, and I look up, and I'm like, what's going on? Like, I'm going as low as, I'm touching the ground with my chest. And he's like, I'm sorry, your hair's in the way, so I can't really see if you're touching the ground at all. So anyway, that kind of fun hazing that went on there. So I ended up, yeah, buzzing it while I was there. Just to, more tongue-in-cheek, but I got a lot of, hey, great haircut, man.

I'm like, it isn't a haircut. It's just buzzed. Like, there's nothing to do it. So, no, but it was a good time. You know, it's interesting going through there. My class was average age was about 30 or 31. I was 30 at the time. So a lot of second career people who had kind of gotten drawn in after 9-11.

Yeah, it's not like the military bunch of 18-year-olds. No. Which it's a different mentality. So, you know, there's not a, it's a little bit different, although the parts that are the kind of the physical activity and kind of getting you into shape, I think there's probably some similarities there in terms of some hazing, some aggression, trying to get it, but, you know, at 30, you're kind of like, dude, why is this guy yelling? We're at 18, I'm sure, you know, it's a little bit different of an impact on you.

I got to do better. Run faster. Exactly. I'm like, well, I'll just go back to my law job. It's not going to work out. Right. But no, it was, it was a great experience. And I actually thought I was going to go back to San Francisco where I'd processed out of. But, you know, typical bureaucracy, the Bureau was at capacity in San Francisco for like the first time in 40 years. these high cost of living offices are hard to fill. And so you can, if you want to go to L.A. or San Francisco or New York, you can usually get there. And so my wife and I wanted to go back to San Francisco. She was from California. And anyway, but it was a two-week period where the Bureau

was at capacity. So just the most bureaucratic process, you're talking to say, well, right, but the next, in two weeks, you'll be under, you know, FSL, as they call, they'll be under the needs of the office. She's like, right, but that's not when you're processing. So, of course, no one in my class goes to San Francisco and I ended up going New York which was great but then the next class like five people ended up going to San Francisco none of whom wanted to go so very you know typically you go to the needs of the bureau where they're going to send you that kind of thing and stuff but anyway it was a great experience and if you're going to do counterterrorism in the FBI New York is really the place to do it so why is that

I mean it's good question I mean I think part of it is I think that you know just being an incredibly diverse place and but being a symbol of the United States in many ways. I mean, people think about New York and obviously Twin Towers and just the entire skyline of New York, the economic power that's here. And that's what a lot of people, I think, feel around the world, for better for worse, can feel the economic power of the United States.

And so I think that continues to be sort of a focal point for outside people and they think about what's a symbol of the United States, right? And so Al-Qaeda's philosophy, right? They want to hit political, they wanted to hit military, and they want to hit economic, right? And so that's why they were trying to hit, well, they hit the Pentagon and they hit the Twin Towers. And, you know, obviously still unclear if they're going to hit the White House of the Capitol exactly, but somewhere in the political sphere. And so when you hit the ground working in the counterterrorism office here in New York City, okay, 9-11 is in the past.

What's going on in the time frame when you get here? Yeah, so it's about five years later, not quite. And so still big hole in the ground, no, you know, nothing had been built yet. city was fighting with itself about things and everyone was still just on edge kind of constantly. And, you know, there was just a number of cases basically every couple of weeks we had a new sort of individual kind of trying to come through and, you know, cause mayhem death in some unique way. And so we were busy.

Lots of command posts running around, you know, kind of trying to get a handle on things. Really great experience working with like a huge number of different agencies in the U.S. government. overseas partners. So it was, and really a lot of this had been built very quickly after 9-11, but it was still kind of coming together and coalescing. And so it was fun to be a part of that. I mean, I played a very small part kind of as a new agent, but you know, trying to make those connections with people and to build that larger network to, you know, basically protect, you know, the United States and protect those countries. And it may seem obvious, you know, you see in the movies that, hey, that we can share intel with the UK or with the Dutch or whatever.

But like, there's a whole process and it used to be extremely. extremely difficult. And 9-11 really kind of broke down a lot of those barriers and knees for it. And thankfully we're kind of reaping the, you know, what we sow during that time in a good way that we've set up those connections for, you know, the fight that we have right now. What was it like being a rookie FBI agent coming to really the epicenter of counterterrorism in the United States? I mean, overwhelming in some ways because it was just, you know, New York is just a huge

city. And so to get your head around all that could be going on within the city, it's itself was hard. And then on top of the fact that you have just so many federal agencies here and then the NYPD. And the NYPD itself is bigger than the entire FBI. So they could just really, they had just an enormous amount of power to kind of throw around. And so realizing that you were, you know, to do any, versus like if you're an FBI agent, say in like Oklahoma City or Kansas City where I'm from, like, then, you know, it's a, you have a lot more power in that in that sense because there's just not as many agencies running around. Here you're one of many.

And so you've got to learn how to cooperate, how to talk to people. You've got to figure out what is the NYPD, what are they worried about, what are their sort of equities in these types of things. And so that's hard. And that's a part, I didn't really think was going to be a big piece of this, right?

Sort of like bureaucracy almost and navigating that. But that's as important of a part of it, not as sexy by any means as the other pieces, but as an important part of it is anything else. I'm wondering like how heavily are we being targeted in this city? Were there any like near misses where you were just like really like that one got you sweat? No, no, no, not at all. No, I mean, there were a number of things that like happened that, you know, I'm very happy that we had extremely capable and good

overseas partners that helped give us information as well as other parts of, you know, the U.S. government and the intelligence community. Because there were a lot of things that came in, you know, they got things last minute and doing their best and no, no, not disparaging anyone at all, but, and then we had to act very fast in order to kind of, you know, sort of play catch-up. Because the difference really, you know, as the Bureau, which is, you know, operates sort of a law enforcement and an intelligence agency, but with regards to people in the United States, it's really much more so on almost the law enforcement side of things. Because, you know, everyone, whether a U.S. citizen or not, you get more or less the same rights,

certainly with regards to the Fourth Amendment, any person, here in the United States gets that protection. But so what that means is that there's just a whole like number of barriers to get through to meet, you know, needs of feel if you want to go up on a wire, if you want to be able to do other types of techniques in order to figure out what are these people doing. And so we might get one single piece of information about, hey, this individual is interested in, you know, joining a group and, you know, committing jihad. And to be, that would be the extent of it.

And you're like, all right, now what do we do with that, right? Because that's not enough in and of itself to, you know, to be, you know, to be, you know, to listen to their phones or to look at their email, but it's enough to do other things. You have to start building. And if they're like, and they wanna do this in two weeks, you're like, okay, we've got a really short time frame in order to do that.

So it was a pretty, it was fast-paced for a lot of that, which was, again, great as a new agent. That's what you want to get really, you know, they talk about New York is like dog years, right? Like one year, like, it's equivalent to seven years in one of the other offices. And I don't, you know, again, the bad of my brother in other places,

but I mean, I really felt like, you get a lot in a really short time. So, you know, I went overseas pretty quickly on various operations and then was in Saudi Arabia and various other places than the Middle East for a few months, you know, kind of doing some joint work with their services and did that pretty early on. Opportunities that wouldn't have been possible in any other office,

but because of the work you do here, they want that experience and they're going to push it out overseas. On previous shows, when we've talked about the different authorities that like the CIA and the FBI have and why it's good for them to work together overseas and also in the United States sometimes. Are there different authorities that the FBI has, that the NYPD does, or the NYPD does? That's a really good conversation piece, because people are under a lot of misconceptions about what the CIA does versus the FBI, especially domestically

in the United States. Yeah. So, I mean, one thing to be really clear is, like, the CIA has to follow U.S. law. You should be very clear about that. If they don't, they get in trouble. I'm not going to say that people have made mistakes in the past. But what that means is that the same protections that U.S. citizens have against the FBI or the police, like the Fourth Amendment or the things, that applies to the CIA too, applies them. They do not have investigative authority

to go and look at U.S. citizens. They have certain intelligence powers where they can essentially develop intelligence. Some of that can happen in the United States, but the vast majority of their resources are overseas in order to do that. But the difference between like the Bureau and the NYPD, so there's a lot of similarity. I mean, one is just sort of federal versus kind of state and local, right?

I mean, they have wiretaps at the local level as we do. And there's a lot of parallels where it really takes a very, diverges a lot is with regards to national security investigations and the ability to use FISA. So this is something I think in the last few years we've had some crazy investigations at the political, the top level and all these different things. And there's been a bit of a misconception about, so as I mentioned, you know, generally the Bureau looks at, it's kind of using their law enforcement powers when they're dealing with people in the United States. The exception to that is if someone is a member of a, or is associated with a foreign power.

And then they can be treated sort of under national security laws, which includes FISA, right? So meaning that if someone is... Joins Al-Qaeda. Exactly. And I don't need to show that they've committed a crime. in order to potentially get a FISA to listen to their phones or to read their emails. I can show that they've joined a foreign power that's hostile to the United States and that's enough. Where versus if, you know, I went out and they heard some information that I was trying to commit

some sort of string of robberies or something like that. Right. They would have to get up to a certain level of evidence, right, to prove in court in order to get what's called the Title III. So it's very different. They'd have to basically show a crime was, you know, you know, being commissioned or there's information that's in the process of it or planning, et cetera, versus someone who is part of a foreign power, just by the fact they're part of Al-Qaeda or they're part of the Russian embassy or the Chinese embassy, that is enough in order to,

under FISA, for an investigation to be opened up. They don't have to be a criminal. And FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Yes, thank you. Which has been, we've had it for like 20, 30 years, 40 years, 50. We've had it. 1980, right? 78? We've had it for, I'm blanking right now on when it first came into being, but I can tell you an interesting story because my dad didn't have it. So there was no FISA back then.

And there's a number of cases about this and it's really interesting. So let's just think about this. If you are an FBI agent in San Francisco, as my dad was in the early 1970s and the Soviets are building a new embassy, what is your ability to go and make sure that the Soviets aren't doing all the horrible things that they were doing? during that time. If you go and try to do something criminally, it's in an open court. It's in a record. And if the Soviets are worth a damn, they're going to go out and going to make sure they're going to read these things and they're going to, oh, the bureau's up on my phone. Well, I'll switch and get a new phone number or whatever. I won't use the phone. So there was really no ability

within the system in order to handle national security threats. Hoover and his eminent wisdom at the time said, well, you know, those laws don't apply to the FBI in this circumstance. because this is national security, and so we're going to do what we need to do. And, you know, there's all sorts of court cases about some of the things that they did do. Right. And, but there was no FISA. All sorts of things happened. A number of cases, Cointel Pro being one of them, the Bureau had a number of really horrible missteps. And this is a circumstances where really good people can do horrible things without the right type of oversight and controls.

It happens all the time in the government, unfortunately. Not all the time. It happens with not a huge amount. of infrequency, rather. And FISA came out of that, which is like, look, we need something outside of a normal criminal process that allows FBI and potentially others to be able to use these tools when you have a foreign power. And that's what FISA.

And so it came out of really in a sense of a way to protect Americans because it has a very specialized sort of system for it. Obviously a lot of controversy around it, but the impetus for it was... Right. that foreign governments do not enjoy American rights afforded by the Constitution, and if you're working for a foreign government, you also shouldn't enjoy those rights. So, yes, I mean, there's some nuance there, but they don't get the exact same level, right? And so there still is court process, right?

But in terms of what types of protections they get in certain, it's different. But partly what you have to do in a FISA application in many ways is show that that that foreign power is trying to do, you know, harm the United States. Right. And so there's a bit of nuance within it, you know, but the idea is it is a somewhat different system for national security because of how it affects our country at such a deep, visceral level, right? Versus a crime, which is as horrific as it is, is a limited set of people that it's affected.

Now, how does FISA work when it is, say, a member of AQ or, ancillary of that because they're not a government. Yeah, so it was, it was crazy. You basically had to connect someone back to Osama bin Laden, like literally, like connect this person, this person, this person, this person, and then, you know, so there was a, at once it had been done, you had to just connect it to the, you know, the 10 people at the bottom if you had a new guy and, okay, he's, he's gotten recruited by this person, but then basically every court application had to show that it was going through the entire line

of all these people. Wow. So, it was a little bit of a difficult. system at that time. There's been some changes that make it a lot easier now. But it was, you know, in terms of the kind of bureaucracy that the Bureau has to work through to do its job, that's, that's one of the layers. It makes it very difficult. And I mean, I mean, I imagine it's challenging because when you're dealing with non-nation state actors, that that can start to move, you know, if we were to take the IRA, they're a non-state actor, right? And then you, you, you,

say that a person's part of that or whatever. Yeah, exactly. It could be abused, right? Right. Because there's no, I mean, Al-Qaeda's not putting out their membership list, right? It's on their website. You can't look at our team, right, and click on that and find the whole list of people, right, in a similar way. So, yeah, if you don't, they want to make sure that there are rigorous rules surrounding how you know who's in that membership, right? Because you're, it's a pretty significant powers, right, to be able to go and get into someone's privacy. People don't want that to happen. So there should be a high hurdle for that. And, you know, there is.

For the folks out there watching, I appreciate you guys joining us tonight. I just want to give a quick shout out, actually, to our podcast, our live stream here. There's a link down the description to our Patreon page. If you want to get all these episodes ad-free without any advertisements. So, Jack, are you saying our sponsor tonight is The Fine People Watching This Show? Yes. Join our patron. Viewers like you.

Tell us then about making the jump from counterterrorism to counterintelligence. Yeah, so a couple things, I mean, just life, I mean, one, we were, as I said, we were kind of going pretty hard for a couple of years and wanted to do something that was a bit more regular. We started having kids and, you know, wanted to want to be around and, you know, and to be a full parent participant in every way. And then we also had a pretty major change that was going on at the Bureau with regards to intelligence. So, you know, after 9-11, one of the big things that changed was how the Bureau used intelligence. And we don't have to go into the detail, but just at a broad level, it was, the Bureau has always used intelligence, but it's been basically sort of a eat which you kill, right? You develop intelligence for your case in order to go after your particular person, your group, and go for an indictment, and that's what your intelligence serves. There was not a whole lot of sharing of that intelligence to other people, because if it didn't affect their case, they didn't.

didn't need to know it. But what changed after 9-11 is people realized that FBI was working on a number of matters, certainly in the counterterrorism world, that that information would be incredibly important not only for other cases in the Bureau, but other members of the intelligence community. So needed a way to figure out how do you pull this information out of the cases, how do you aggregate it together and then put it into products that you share with the rest of the community. And so that was a really, it sounds very simplistic when I talked about it, but it was a major shift. So I got pulled into helping doing that to kind of complete that. We started in New York.

This is when Mueller was still the director trying to make that shift and started to really enjoy, did intelligence in counterterrorism, but it was a little bit different, but started to really kind of enjoy the sort of the process, the art of it. And started thinking about, you know, I wanted to be a supervisor. So I became a supervisor over a counterintelligence squad at that time. I was pretty new. I had about four years in the Bureau. So it was, they made a rule right after that that you had to have six years after me. So I don't know if I should take that personally or not. But anyway, I think I did a good job and did that for a couple of years.

But really, it was enjoyed it. I was working on a country that has to remain nameless, but they had a burgeoning nuclear program, I just to say that. So they had a lot of individuals coming over looking to get information to build up. You know, essentially they were doing proliferation work. And so there was actually, it was a great transition because within counterterrorism, there was a lot of counterproliferation work as well as concerned about al-Qaeda or other groups trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons or nuclear material to make a dirty bomb,

radiological device, and very similar sort of on the state actor's side. And so it was a good kind of transition there. I imagine that this being a major metropolitan, very cosmopolitan city, but also with the United Nations here, it must be mayhem for you guys and the stuff you got to to deal with. So it's really, it is. I mean, and what's crazy, and I don't know if everyone appreciates us. So, you know, the United States and New York are the host of the United Nations. And so in some ways, but the missions that are here are being hosted by the UN. So while they have to have U.S. visas in order to enter the United States, their host is really the United Nations itself.

And that made just sound like kind of a weird nuance, but it makes a difference, versus someone who is at a, so the mission to the UN of, you know, say the Russian mission to the UN versus, say, the Russian consulate up here, right, which is, you know, which its relationship is to the United States. It makes the U.S. government step a little bit more carefully and with good reason, right, we're the host here. So if we're kicking everyone out all the time, how can we have the United Nations here if, you know, just because someone is from, say, North America?

Korea or wherever else, you know, how can we kind of have them here? But that adds an extra lay of complication because obviously anytime they start doing something horrible as some of these countries do, and then when you want to, you know, you're doing an investigation and you want a P&GM, you know, declare them persona persona non grata because you can't arrest them because they're on a diplomatic visa, there is a whole dance with essentially the UN, right, because it's affecting the politics up there, right? And so if the U.S. happens to be in a, you know, intense negotiation with that country on a particular committee at the time that you want to take law enforcement action, it can be difficult. And you told us that you opened up Operation Encore. Can you tell us about that?

I did. Yeah. So that was back when I was still in the counterterrorism side. So that came out, you know, President Biden released a bit about the case on the 20th anniversary of 9-11. And essentially it was a, um, an intelligence effort to really uncover, well, to look deeper into potential support of the 9-11 hijackers by the Saudi Arabian government. And so I was on a squad that still had what was called Pentbomb, which was the Bureau's case for all of the events that had happened during 9-11. It was mostly sort of a repository to run the prosecutions. But as I started looking into it, there was information in there that, you know, as the investigators had gone through it, they'd done a wonderful job in uncovering all this, but they'd been really focused on, let's get these guys, let's move prosecution forward, who do we need to take out immediate sort of threats? The idea was, let's go back through this again and let's see. Are there things that we, not that we missed, but that are worth a longer look because, are they, were they secondary, tertiary connections?

Maybe it didn't seem like as big of a deal now, but maybe it was more important at the time. And so that's one of the things that we looked at pretty closely there. And what kind of conclusions came out of that investigation? So unfortunately, your viewers, the case is still classified. But what came out of it, I would say, is that in some ways, is more questions and answers. There was a large amount of activity, I think just writ large of individuals who had either close or loose associations with the Saudi government that were kind of in this realm as the document that got released kind of talks about. And, you know, at the time, and it's just my personal opinion, let me just be clear about this part of it.

You know, the Saudi government didn't, you know, the right hand didn't necessarily know what the left hand was doing at all times. It's a very large government and there were some concerns that, you know, there could be pieces of this that weren't fairly, you know, understood by them. And so that was sort of what the effort was kind of looking at that. but it was again it was super interesting and it took me all over the world for a while checking into a lot of things that had happened previously in talking to people and trying to really narrow down and understands sort of the trajectory that the 9-11 hijackers had taken and were there other individuals who could identify that were you know and even more important than the individuals were their techniques that they used that could be used again right and so that

was kind of the my biggest concern was less sometimes the network that could have been plugged into, but like a methodology that they used, right? So this is like the A team that got inserted and that, you know, kind of ran circles around or ran straight through, rather, all of our security apparatus. And could that happen again, right, if you had a similar one? And certainly there were things that we saw in there that needed to be tightened up and that was a really positive part of it and say, hey, look, we should really, they did this, someone else could do this again, it's not as good as it could be. And so that was, I think, some good results out of that. So in your personal opinion, was there a faction or a branch of the Saudi government

or Saudi intelligence apparatus that offered some level of support to the 9-11 hijackers? I honestly don't know. And I would say if I, I think in my personal opinion, if I could give you one, I would, I will say that, and the reason I don't know is it just, I never came across any definitive information that made it clear that there was. You know, there were individuals that I, you know, we read about, and, you know, one of them, there's, you know, there were thought to be potential intelligence officers of, you know, associated with the Saudi government. It was unclear if they were working at the behest of the Saudis or their own. And I think part of the issue was trying to, I mean, this is the counterintelligence

world, right, trying to disaggregate, all right, who's running their own operations for their own organizations and they just happen to be using government resources, right? And that part was always very difficult to disaggregate. And I never saw it. I never saw a clear command and control so-and-so who was appointed and did this, told them to do that. That I never saw. How hard is it in the modern age,

like what you're talking about, sort of the nuance with these nation states and then their governments, people acting in. I mean, in the 1800s, some of the acts committed against us now would be considered an act of war. But like you talk about the U.S. UN and trying to diplomatically PNG somebody where like how do as a federal law enforcement agent how do you deal with those things do people come down on you and say this is how we have to

handle this do you raise it up the flag and say hey this is the situation and we know what the relationship is with this country yeah I mean it it certainly comes in because it's a great question because I think the Bureau deals with a lot of like specific sort of threats, right, to people or to a particular situation. But often the implication of us arresting someone who's at the, you know, Russian embassy or the Russian consulate or the Russian mission at the UN, for example, or any of those, it has huge political implications, right? So you think of like ghost stories, which, you know, was the Russian illegals that were, you know, running around here in the bureau had a long investigation on it. In the end, you know,

a lot of those guys got traded, right? Got sent back. And we got back people that we wanted to get back. And I think, you know, that part of the Bureau on the counterintelligence side understands that that's part of the game, because that part has always been much more sort of closely associated with the intelligence community. It's less well understood probably on the counterterrorism criminal side of the Bureau because it's just not how things work on that side. You don't trade people in that way. There's always some tension there. And you certainly get people who kind to come back and forth and like, what, we're doing this? And, you know, I don't care whose agency wants us do this, it's helpful to whatever part of government.

Like, this is a bad guy. So my years, you know, going after him, he should go to jail, he should do whatever, you know, this kind of thing. But at least for a while, it's been a very, it was a very different game. That's changing to some degree, especially as you've got places like China and others doing more of the sort of on the economic espionage

side. Where we have, we are arresting intelligence officers, right? There was a recent case, a guy named Shuianjun. He was a, he's a Ministry of State Security. intelligence officer and he was extraded from Belgium, which was pretty amazing, and, you know, back into the United States. And previously, I mean, that's not something that people would want us to do. And maybe people are wondering why, the idea is if you just think

about the number of intelligence officers that the United States government might have and that they might be sort of breaking laws of other countries because they're trying to collect, you know, essential, critical piece of intelligence for the United States, they don't want to be arrested and then put into jail. Right. Because it typically is that someone gets arrested and they get deported and that's kind of it, right? But this is potentially sort of, it's changed the game a little bit to where, again, we talk about barriers breaking down between foreign and domestic, the idea of law enforcement and sort of, you know, you think about like Title 18 and, you know, and, and, you know, in Intel side of things, there's much more of a blending now. And the Bureau is comfortable kind of flipping back and forth. Some other agencies are less comfortable doing that. There's Q that kind of straddle both.

And were there times either for you personally or for people that you knew that when like they were shut down for something that was just very frustrating? All the time. I mean, and some of that may not have been anything nefarious, but it just, it happens, right? They're just, you know, we're told don't dig into this farther, let this one go. And you don't ever know sometimes. Sometimes it's because some other agency has something going on. And you think it's like, you know, hey, I'm right in the middle of this. I'm about to blow it wide open.

And it's like, no, no, no, this is an operation that they set up. They've been running for, you know, six years and you're about to screw the whole thing up. Right, right? And so that happens. The other side happens too, right? Like when you've got, you've been running an operation. All of a sudden, someone shows up and you're like, that guy is just a little bit too smart for someone else. And so you go talk to someone over across the river and say, hey, you guys happen to be running an operation.

And then that guy never shows up. They say no, but of course that guy never shows up again. And so anyway, that we do some sort of, you know, deconfliction that way. And occasionally, it happens a lot more. And there's a lot more sort of cross, you know, jobs that the Bureau works, other parts of the IC and other parts of the IC work at the Bureau. NSA comes in, CIA, we flip back and forth. So there's a lot more closer understanding of how we work and, like, the powers that each one of them has.

And that, I think, is really, basically, when the, when the Bureau, bureau and the agency and if you can put the NSA in there when they work together, it's really an unstoppable team, the amount of sort of resources they can pull to it. And I think we do that a lot better than we used to. And that's really kind of the, I think, the standard at this point where traditionally in movies, we're always fighting with each other. That doesn't happen as much anymore. You mean, it's not like in the movies where the station chief throws his latte across the room into the window. I mean, I'm sure that happens occasionally. I mean, but those guys both on both the agency and the bureau side get disciplined pretty quickly.

Because that creates some pretty bad blood pretty fast. But yeah, I mean, that was the old way, right? I mean, there was a lot of hatred on both sides. And, you know, the Bureau thinks all agency people are liars. And the agency people think the Bureau people are knuckle-draggers, right? And so that sort of rhetoric back and forth, you know, kind of continue. The next place you landed was Moscow. Yeah.

But why did the FBI send you to Moscow? What was your job there? I mean, basically no one else wanted to go. so no I mean I'm only partially kidding so I came in under the Russia the Bureau had kind of different designations so I spoke Russian and

and then had law and so that came in into that program so I thought I'd be working Russian CI you know and so instead I'd get you're doing like Arabian Peninsula terrorism trying to learn Arabic and stuff so you know it's a typical government sort of put you into different roles and no matter what your skill set

but I had kept up the Russian and so wanted to go and And again, most of the time people go overseas once they're in the later part of their career because it's kind of a, in a sense, sort of a reward, right? And you have your long in the tooth and you can talk about these things. I had only had six years in at this point. But again, people don't want to go to Moscow because it's not a relationship that worked, right? So the Bureau overseas, it's not like a station chief.

We're not running operations. We're liaising and we're cooperating to do investigations with them. So if the relationship's crap, it's not, there's not a lot of work to do, right? you go to the UK, you're working closely with, you know, with my five, you're working closely with, you know, Scotland Yards, do all these great operations, people really enjoy that. You know, if you're in Moscow, you're working on the FSB and all of those fun guys. For me, that was what I wanted to do, because I was like, that's a place you can have an impact, you know, a place that doesn't function where you can really kind of move the needle.

Because my thinking was you could be a total jerk in, you know, in London, and they're still going to work with you because, you know, they're not going to screw up the relationship. But in Moscow, you know, it might matter if you, you know, you know, spoke Russian, if you understand them a little bit, if you could talk to them about things or why certain things mattered or why they didn't. And so that's what really kind of drew me to being over there. And, you know, despite the

horrible things that are happening there now, I'd been exchanged in there twice. I'd had a host family there. I had you know, I have great affinity for the culture and for the people. The government is a totally different story, obviously. And so I thought it'd be fun to go back and then expose my kids to it as well.

So I'm really interested to hear from you as somebody who has, you know, boots on the ground, so to speak, interacting and working, liaisoning with Russian intelligence services, you know, to go beyond the caricatures in the movies and the spy novels and even what we read in newspapers is often limited in second or third-hand information.

Really interested in like the character and the culture and what these guys are like as individuals. Yeah, I mean, some stereotypes live up to it. The drinking? Yeah, I mean, that part is pretty real. I mean, thankfully, I had had some experience and kind of understood how that worked. I mean, that's a big part of it. And there's a, I mean, you know, they're just, they're so blatant about this stuff.

So, you know, we had a, they had a security and intelligence services like conference in Kazan. It's a city sort of south of, or to the east and south of Moscow. And, you know, it was all these intelligence, all the liaison services that were there in Moscow working with the FSB. And every night at the hotel, there was, the FSB would bring in about 20 prostitutes and just, you know, send them around to talk to people. And so I asked, I was like, you know, really, does this, you know, why are you doing this? This is just ridiculous. Like, does anyone fall for this? Or like, we wouldn't do it if people weren't falling for this.

And so, I mean, you know, these sort of tried and true techniques of sacks of cash and sex, and they absolutely work. And that's why the Russians continue to do them. And so they live up to that stereotype in terms of, you know, people get into all sorts of trouble and have romantic relationships. And then, you know, they think it's going great. And then they show up and someone says, you know, the girlfriend says, well, I want you to be, you know, Uncle Sasha. And you go ahead and Uncle Sasha's got pictures of you. But don't worry, don't worry, we're all going to make the pictures go away. We just need this.

That's all we need one thing, and it starts with one thing, and then it kind of continues on. And so, I mean, that part is pretty stereotypical, and it tends to work. How many times did they pitch you while you were there? So I never got pitched. So if you get pitched, it kind of, it becomes a big deal. But, yeah, I mean, it usually means that they are, because if you're declared, if they pitch you, it can generally mean one of two things. One, they want to send you home because they don't like you. because once that happens, U.S. government's like, all right, we're not going to let this potentially play out.

Walk around. Get out of here. Or two, they think that there's some reason you might say yes, right? And so, you know, it's not ever a good position unless you purposely are messing with them, you know, that they want to do that. So, no, I mean, you know, I had, I think what was kind of the constant sort of, you know, trying to make me see the, their way of thinking about things. Sure. So I think as I mentioned to you, I was over in Moscow during, you know, when the Boston Marathon bombing happened. And so the Tsarnaya brothers' parents were actually in Dagestan, which is a republic in the south, near where I had been as an exchange

student. And so we actually started doing some very close work with them. We were trying to figure out that the Tsaraya brothers had spent a lot of time, or the summer before, in Dagestan, and there was a concern that they had been radicalized or trained or maybe there were more people with them. So all these sort of typical things that you go through in a terrorism investigation trying to determine what they were doing. And so we're working with the FSB to try to figure this out. And they set us up with an individual who had, you know, in many ways, had, you know, sort of dusting off the, or scraping the blood off his boots because he had just come back from, you know, several tours down in the caucuses. and he was an extremely personable guy,

and he just spent time talking to me about their position and they're thinking about things of the world. You know, and look, it's always really fascinating to hear from my perspective because it helps them get into their head how they're seeing things. I don't find it particularly persuasive. It was helpful to have been an exchange student there to know the other side of a lot of these things.

My host family was, they were Russian culturally, but my host mother was Armenian, the father was Ukrainian. And so they had a very different perspective on sort of Russian imperial sort of activity. But one of the things he always talked about, and many of them talked about, you know, they just, they wanted to emphasize that they're in a rough neighborhood. And it's not like the United States where you've got two oceans and two fairly friendly, you know, neighbors on your border. You know, and this guy and his general that I talked to a lot, you know, he wanted to emphasize that, like, you know, he was like as much as it seems, peaceful now, things can change. This is something they talked to me about a lot because they would argue about NATO and expansion of NATO and all these things. I was like, you guys are ridiculous.

Like, NATO was not trying to take over Russia. It's the last thing we want. You can have your, you know, gas station masquerading as a country. We don't want it. Like, it's all yours. And their response was, yeah, we really don't believe that you want it. But, you know, in 1932, Nazi Germany was a basket case. It could barely feed its people. By 1936, it was the strongest military in Europe and possibly the world. Things change. And we have to be ready. So their perspective is, NATO might be quiet, you know, at least back then, let me just, what they were painting to me, was it might not be doing anything. But if they ever let it get to a place where it could take over Russia, then they're in a position where, you know, an untenable position, right,

from a national security standpoint. And as much as crazy as that might seem to us, that have never happened, that's their perspective. Again, I'm not trying to defend it, but I think it's important to understand they really do believe this. That's the zeitgeist of the Russian security apparatus is the sort of national trauma from World War II. And rightfully so. I mean, they paid a horrible price, you know, in World War II. They did, and they did. I mean, they paid a horrible price by the, you know, the famine that they caused in Ukraine. Right, right. Right. I'm not, I'm not justifying them at all. Absolutely not. No, and I didn't mean to imply that. But I think it's a mess of things.

And they did pay, you know, as a people, a horrible price for it. And I think it changes their mentality in a sense of, like, what they're dealing with. And again, I think it's really important where, you know, I hear on the news and the perspectives and, you know, vilifying Putin and everyone else. And that's fine. I mean, I think, you know, Putin could be vilified, you know, and it's incredibly accurate. But I think it's important to understand that at least the, you want to call it propaganda, You want to call it the narrative, whatever that the people believe in what they see there,

is often very different than what we're hearing. And so while there are certain people who are, you know, are, you know, they're world-in, cosmopolitan enough to recognize that is not the full story. The vast majority of the people in the country don't. They see it. They have the propaganda every day. They hear this. And this is their perspective on the world.

Right. And so in terms of thinking about where things are going with Russia, I think it's important to know that, like, it's not just Putin who feels this way. There's a lot of... When you hear the stories from some of these recently liberated areas of Ukraine and what the Ukrainian civilians are saying, how they interact with the Russian soldiers

and the Russians are like, why are you upset? Like, we're here to save you from the Nazis. Like, they whole ass believe the propaganda, at least many of them. Absolutely. And, you know, for the Russians, the way they think about Nazis and Nazism is a bit different than the way we define it.

And so, it's kind of an academic sort of piece of it, but they really do believe that it's, you know, in a sense that the U.S. is sort of notifying this place, right? Is that like anything that's an external threat is, quote unquote, Nazis? I mean, what is that in their minds? Yeah, I mean, essentially, like, the idea of like a fascist government from the outside, like, that's Naziism, right? And so, I mean, it's gotten a little bit crazy where they even talked about desatainization at this point. Recently, yeah. Yeah. So, but, I mean, there's something to this in terms of World War. two was a very different experience for them and they called the great patriotic war right and you know for the u.s it's like oh it's just a second world war we're in right and so it's just

it's a very different experience and they think about it in a very different way again not to say that it's right by any means but i think that the perspective of the russian people on this is very different it's always like we're on the precipice of something yeah i mean they they think chaos is around the corner and you were also there when uh the edward snowdon affair happened and you had to interact with FSB and some of the other Russian agencies about that whole debacle. What was that like from your perspective? Frustrating. I mean, he was at Chirmetabu, like one of the main airports in Moscow for a couple weeks. I kept asking for permission to go to, because I assumed I could probably find him, right? He's in some room somewhere. But, you know, obviously we were talking

them about, hey, look, this is going to, this is on the tail end of having great cooperation after the Boston Marathon bombing, and this was going to just tank the whole thing. But it became clear to me that, like, they had no interest in changing the trajectory of the relationship. They, not that they wanted to necessarily go south, but in their mind, the U.S. has been conducting, you know, these operations around the world with other countries that have, you know, diminish their security. You know, and obviously, Snowden was just a great tool for kind of, you know,

bringing that out, right? And so they wanted to highlight all the sort of, you know, in their mind, the hypocrisy within the United States government, right? And because, and they want to be able to undermine it because they don't want the U.S. essentially causing a color revolution in Russia. Right. They saw some of the things that happened in Central Asia. They saw what happened in Arab Spring, and in their mind, that's chaos. And they think, they believe that that's what the U.S. is intentionally doing around the world with its democracy spreading, right? They talk about the the spread of democracy is almost as bad as the U.S. military. Like, 1991 is like an era in Russian history.

Like, none of them want to go back to. Exactly. No, and they're very upset about, you know, the lands that were lost. It's funny, going back to when I was an exchange student there, I used to talk to school and family, and, you know, it was 1993, and I was like, hey, if you're interested in democracy, I'm happy to tell you about it. And they're like, no, no, no, we just want to know how to make money. they're not interested in this democracy nonsense

and so I mean I don't I think we sort of misinterpreted you know with a lot of hope that the fall the Soviet Union would bring about a democratization in Russia and a change in the way that they deal with things but really if anything

they were just biding their time they did not have the power to push back on us but once they did you know they started to with great abandon so and so what was your interface at that time with FSB, I mean, what was it you or us as Americans, what was our government

trying to get from the Russians in regards to Snowden versus what Russians were willing to give up? Like, were you guys trying to get him back, trying to extradite him? I mean, we were just talking about how bad it was going to be for the relationship to, and, you know, that despite sort of all the commentary of like, oh, he did this on his own and it wasn't an operation where like it looks like anything but, it looks like everything, you know, it looks like exactly an operation, this is how it would go. and just talked to them about how it would hurt the relationship. And it did.

It ultimately cratered everything. And then, you know, we had, soon after that, was the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and just everything went off the rails after that. Not my fault, totally. It was while I was there. But, yeah, I mean, it was those, it went from a fairly sort of, you know,

good working relationship with them on particular things, and some things opened up after the Boston Marathon, bombing to everything very quickly closing down, where they just sort of changed. And I interpreted a little bit as, you know, we had maybe made some progress with our counterparts in terms of like, all right, maybe there's a few areas we can, you know, we have some mutually, you know, I'm not saying they were like, oh, we should help the Americans. That was never part of it. It was like, all right, maybe we have our interests overlap in a couple other areas.

But once sort of the top was kind of like, all right, well, that's nice. Stop playing around. This is the direction we're going to go. And it became very clear it was a very different sort of kind of trajectory after that. I've talked to CIA people in the past who they speak of it as kind of tragic, but also in if they feel like, or at least some people feel that it's like the Russians are trying to remain relevant in our eyes. Like they're doing things to keep up on our radar, which is a little simplistic. I mean, is there some of that or is this really is there sort of imperialistic? ambitions of Russia to secure their near abroad? I mean, how do you interpret it?

No, I mean, look, it's hard to be in the head of every single Russia. It's a huge country, you know, 100 and however many, 40 million, 20 million, something, wherever it currently is with the population shrinking. But there is a, again, a narrative. They have a messianic view of themselves, right? This gets really deep into sort of the rhetoric. They call themselves the third Rome. Moscow's the third Rome. So first Rome being Rome, second Rome being Byzantium and Constantinople and basically that when there was the schism and then when that place went to crap and was totally corrupt then you know Moscow became the true

center of Christianity and so there is a belief system that Russia is going to sort of you know free sort of protect the world with their you know their vision of how things should work I'm not saying everybody has that view but that is kind of part and parcel of how Russia kind of sees itself in the world. So I mean, I think in many ways, you know, the 14 new countries that came out of the Soviet Union, some of which had existed before, to be clear, the Russians see that as traditional

Russian lands. I mean, obviously it's kind of, you know, where do you draw the line? If it's 200 years ago, it's Russian, you know, if it's a thousand years ago, it's Mongol, so I don't, you know, maybe they want it back. Right. So it gets a little bit confusing, but obviously that's, they, they, they, you know, they, They draw the lines at a certain place and say these are traditional Russian lands and we should have them back. Right.

And they're an insecure state. Tradition from this state to this state. Right. Right, right. As my Italian friend said, he's like, look, it was all Roman originally. We want it all back. Right, right. So maybe...

Like, Lithuania had a huge chunk of it at one point in history. Yeah, I mean, and maybe the Vikings should get it back. I don't know. I mean, they were the ones going down the Volga and populating that area to begin with. So, you know, I mean, it gets a little bit, you know, kind of silly to have that sort of academic argument. But I don't think it's kind of irrelevant. because whatever it is, they believe that those lands are theirs. It's real to them.

Right. And they need it, right? Right. And so I think it's an important thing to remember whether you agree with it or not, think it's crazy. When we are thinking about what we're doing vis-à-vay Ukraine, what is how is that going to play out with regards to Russia, I think it's important to understand that there is a not insignificant part of their population on the other side who is ready to go to the end with this. Right. And what does that mean for how this plays out with us, right? We don't want to escalate.

We don't want to lose the war. We're going to keep it in some crazy limbo for five, ten, 15 years. I mean, you know, anyway, I'm not really sure how this plays out. Right. Because at some point, you know, we're dealing with a group of people who in some ways have nothing to lose. Right.

Right. So that makes a totally different kind of set decisions. And not just have something to lose, but even though they are a Christian culture, they, like, my impression is that Russians share. sort of a fatalistic worldview in the same way that a lot of Muslim cultures do that. They're certainly very fatalistic, yeah. I mean, that is a quality about how the, and this kind of gets to the point of, you know, your worldviews.

I basically, you know, I went to Russia as an exchange student and didn't know any Russian. I knew five words. I knew yes, no, maybe toilet and shower, I think that was pretty much it. So, I basically learned sitting around the kitchen, talking to my host mother the whole time. And we would have all sorts of discussions about the world. And, you know, I was 18 and, you know, I'd been to like a border town in Mexico. And that was the extent of my world travels at that point. And then now in the south of Russia talking about this stuff.

But it was really an eye-open experience, you know, because clearly the things I was expressing, optimism, you know, faith in the ability, the human ingenuity to solve problems for life to improve. We see very American views, right? as part of the American experience because this is what we have been able to do by and large for a number of different reasons, right? And but that hasn't been the Russian experience. And so informed by history and very fatalistic of like, look, you know, things are going to fall apart, there's going to be chaos and you need a strong government in order to kind

of keep the chaos at bay. And what is the United States doing? They're just churning up more and more chaos outside. There is a great Adam Curtis documentary that just came out, Trauma Zone. Oh, really? Okay. And it's like eight parts, and it's old BBC footage from like 1975 through the collapse. And I mean, every American should really go and watch that because it's just so fascinating. It lends this insight into everything from like Yeltsin and Gorbachev, but also down to like Babushka, taking the spuds out of the basement and traveling to her sister's house, you know, hitchhiking there and then cooking up the mashed potatoes.

I mean, it's just like a very fascinating insight into Russian, culture and political history. But I would like to shift gears a similar but separate conversation to your time in Beijing. Yeah. What was it they said, hey, you did a knock-up job in Russia. We're sending you over to Beijing. Thanks for ruining that relationship. Yeah. Thanks for blowing that one. Yeah. Holden. Yeah. So it was, I mean, Beijing is very similar to Moscow. It's not a desirable place. You know, it's not a Paris or Moscow. Or a Paris or London for FBI agents. And I thought, I mean, I think in, because I did a good job in Moscow and in terms of, and so I applied

and I was lucky enough. So I ran the office in Beijing for three years. Got there at the end of 2014 and then left the summer of 2017, so a little under three years. So same sort of question, interacting with the Chinese security state. It is something. And we were talking earlier about Matthew Brazil and Peter Mattis' very good book. Chinese communist espionage. It's a sort of historical accounting, but I feel like we just have so few contemporary accounts or views or any sort of lens into the Chinese security apparatus, the Chinese security services.

And I was wondering if you could talk to us about that. Sure. I mean, it was, so our main interlocutor there was the Ministry of Public Security, which generally is thought of us, you know, people think of like Chinese law enforcement police or whatever. But actually as that book notes up until 1983, they ran counterintelligence within the country and they ran a lot of the intelligence operations. In fact, one of the first spies to come over to the United States was run by MPS. And because of the sort of digitization police state that they run, they collect a lot of intelligence. So they work very closely with the Ministry of State Security, who we also met with

on a less frequent basis just because of the work that we were doing. So my job was, to work with them and to try to find, you know, areas to cooperate. And it was hard. It was really hard. Because we just, I mean, in so many ways, we just did not see eye to eye. You know, I'd spent a little bit of time in China. You know, after you take the bar, you take a bar trip, I went to Beijing for four months back in 2003, but it had been a long time, but not nearly the same level of kind of knowledge and background

that I had of Russia. I had less of a basis to kind of language as well to build up. And, you know, there's some significant differences. I mean, obviously, every people are different, right? But just in sort of trying to contrast the two of them since we are dealing with them or in the focus. But, you know, in some ways where we would disagree with the Russians about, you know, like, I don't I describe it, it's almost like the facts of the,

or we would have an argument. But in general, we could agree on the facts. We weren't totally off. But sometimes I feel like when I was talking to the NPS and the Chinese, we were just having totally different conversations about things. They approached it in our relationship in a very transactional way. And I'll give you a really horrific example of that. So because of the poor state of cooperation with both Russia and China, typically,

it's hard to work a lot of cases because they have sort of a political aspect to it. everything does, right? It's an impact. So you often work matters that are kind of have a visceral sort of reaction. And so one of them we work a lot are child sex crimes or child exploitation cases. And we work those with the Russians pretty frequently, you know, give them information about individuals who were creating materials who were on forms and, you know, abusing kids, this type of thing. So really horrific stuff. And, you know, we never had any issues that the Russians that would respond. Sometimes they'd respond a little too hard with the, but they'd respond. them.

The RDM running over the house. Yeah. So occasionally those things would happen. But, you know, it was, they would respond. We had an individual that we were dealing with with regards to MPS. He was an American at a school in China. And it was one of these, quote, international schools. But the only thing international about it was the teachers.

The students were all locals. And we had information to that he was essentially. the horrible thing about some of these forms is that you don't get into unless you're creating original material. Yeah, they call them producers. And that creates a huge barrier for the Bureau and others, right? Because obviously cannot create anything.

So there's a whole, there's a process of basically trying to, you know, kind of get into these. With the Aussies. Yeah. It's come out. I won't, well, anyway, I don't know what it has, I'll let it go, but because obviously it's great and a really important work. But, but

we had good reason to believe that this guy was creating material based on his access to students at this school. And so we asked for, he said, hey, can you deal with this? I said, I, and they're like, what would you like? And I was like, you can deport him. We'll arrest him on site. You can arrest him. There's enough information on here to show you what he's done in China, you know, and put him into one of your dungeons for, you know, whatever amount of time is by your laws. You know, he's violated your law is in your country, that's up to you. I said, but can we just please, like... Deal with it.

Could we get this guy out of the public? So they turned into me and then passed three names to me of individuals who were part of their anti-corruption campaign. He said, well, we want these three people. I said, I'm sorry, you're trying to trade these people? That's exactly what they wanted to do. They wanted to trade people that were part of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption fox hunt trade for this individual.

And I was like, I can't do that. I'm not empowered. This is not my, you know, we make decisions based on facts and information, and then we follow the cases. This is how it works, which they did not believe. That's how it worked. They saw it as purely transactional. So this went back and forth for probably a year before they actually. So they wouldn't arrest this guy who'd broken their laws because you wanted to arrest him and wouldn't make the political trade.

They, exactly. They wanted, so you may be familiar, they've had this long-term campaign. They've called Fox Hunt. Skynet is another one, which I know it was. the Terminator thing. I'm not sure why they picked that, so they need a better marketing team. Anyway, but it's basically these individuals who had various connections to quote unquote corrupt politicians in China and had been absconded to the United States, the UK, Australia, and other places, and they were searching for them and trying to get them back. And they wanted us to just deport

and send them back. As it turns out, it's much more of a political consolidation campaign because surprise, surprise, everyone's corrupt in China. And so just the fact that you are corrupt doesn't mean that you need to be arrested. It's only if you've also, you're outside of she's patronage network. Right. So anyway, they were wanting essentially a political move for what was law enforcement. And anyway, it took a long time to move this thing forward. But it just gives you an idea of, and this is, we talk with this a lot,

the Ministry of Public Security, at the end of the day, they are a security service with a political mission. Right. If you want to think about public security, they are keeping the party secure from the public. That's their job. And so they espouse these sort of what they call, you know, kind of traditional Chinese values of harmony and other things, but it's just sort of nonsense.

They think of this stuff as just a way to kind of keep control. Turning a, letting a pedophile loose on a schoolhouse as an exactly maintaining harmony. No. And that's, at the end of the day, this stuff is where they're not putting resources towards it. It was going to be potentially embarrassing that because they hadn't picked it. up and they hadn't dealt with it. And it's just not something that they think of as important.

You know, the ideas of like justice and enforcing laws, these are not the priorities for them. Ensuring that the public is, you know, kind of placid and following the rules and doing what they're supposed to be doing and not challenging the state, that's what they're supposed to be doing. And so it's a, that made it very difficult to where there was less and less that we could even do and it was just this constant dance of ensuring that they weren't pulling and information out of us to try to use against us or to try to figure out what we were doing vis-a-vis other things and it became, you know, a much more of a difficult relationship. It sounded incredibly cynical.

It was. And this is, I mean, it kind of topped off with the Xiobam agreement in 2015 on, you know, cyber. This is right after the OPM hack. And obviously, everyone was up in arms about that. And then, you know, they signed an agreement saying they would no longer, you know, conduct espionage for commercial gain anymore, which was total nonsense. Of course, they never really, they may have slowed down a little bit in a few areas, but they just ramped it up in others and what happened to a different way. And we sort of were trying to work out that agreement,

but it was, it was completely cynical, even just the negotiations with them. And it was clear they had no intention of moving forward, of even fulfilling even the basic parts of it. And so in my mind, it just became a matter of, all right, how can I record this, make data for this, so that people in the future can be like, we cannot cooperate with them on this. They have no desire to do it. And so we don't have, so what we had at the time is everyone was like,

well, we have to try. We haven't tried before. And it's like, oh, we've tried. It just never went anywhere. Right. And so, but there wasn't the type of open documentation that people could look at. So that's what I kind of spent a lot of my time.

It's just requests and ensuring that it was clearly documented. What they did, didn't do, and how they were not fulfilling their end of the agreement, and how it was being used for other purposes. And so, and that became, helpful when I got to the White House and we started to focus on kind of policy towards China and thinking about shifting it. It was a major U.S. shift. But it was such a long process

to do that. Were there any areas that you found where you were able to cooperate in a somewhat productful manner on security issues? I was just, I was trying to think there were a few are like, wow, this wasn't so bad. And I mean, the problem was, and this is, I think we have a tendency, I think, of, you know, the Russians, the Chinese are 10 feet tall, they're making mistakes, and that's not the case at all. They have some very capable parts of their services, but they're also a massively corrupt place. And so some of the things that we try to work with them, you know, when we try to work with their, you know, where we needed them to go get information from their banks,

like they essentially kind of tells, hey, our banks are a total mess. They don't even like, you know, they can't even like keep compliant. And I'm talking about the big four ones there. And so it was just, they couldn't even do like basic investigations. because they couldn't get information out of their banking system to see like sort of financial information. So at least not consistently. Do you feel as though they see us in some ways with law enforcement or not as toothless because we do abide the letter of the law and international law for the most part?

I actually think they think that that's total BS, that we actually don't. I think the Russians and the Chinese believe is that we can do whatever we want. And that that stuff is just pure subterfuge, you know, kind of, you know, put out. They've seen Jason Boren. They know how it works, man. Well, I think it's that, but it's also like the idea of like, if the U.S. is that powerful, what country in their right mind would actually restrain their power? Right.

I mean, it doesn't make any sense. Right, right, right. I mean, especially, think about after World War II, the U.S. had, I mean, there's crazy estimates where, like, 60, 80 percent of all industrial production was in the U.S. We could have just taken over the entire world if we wanted to, right? Right. And we didn't. restrained ourselves for a number of reasons, but like they can't imagine that because that's not how they operate. If they have the power to do something, they're going to use it.

Right. And so the idea that the U.S. has this power and doesn't use it because we are principled and we have rules and regulations, it just does not compute. So do, so by their math, though, does that mean that they don't think we're very powerful? Like, we have the power and we don't use it. So which one of those things aren't true? So we have the power and we won't use it for them to help them, right? Essentially the things that they want. And if, you know, but there's also, we have corruption, we have other issues. Sure.

Sometimes that may be influencing why we're not using that power. But I think in their mind, we are using it, right? We could blockade China today, right? And we could block out all oil and gas from getting into, or all oil, at least, you know, coming into the coast of China. And they would have major economic consequences today. They know that, right? This is about a focus on Taiwan and other things, the first island chain, get out. But they, I think in their mind, they're like, well, they're not going to do this and they're a paper tiger, they're weak.

Even if they have this power, they're not using it. That just means that they're weak in their heart. Rather than thinking it's principled or, again, as we were talking about it, we don't want tyranny in this country. So we limit the power of the government. Did you find that there's a belief that they believe all sorts of conspiracy theories about what we're trying to do to them? Like in the Middle East, for example, I've come across many times. Like, people think, like, we created ISIS. Like, you're so powerful.

If you don't like ISIS, you just send Bruce Willis to wipe them out. Like, what doesn't make sense? DASH? That's CIA. Right. What are you, what, you know, people actually around the world believe stuff like that. Yeah. No, I do. I think they have a lot of conspiracy.

I mean, some of the stuff they see online, I think they absolutely believe about the U.S. government. I'm trying to think of anything specific could point to. But, no, I mean, I think that a lot of this stuff, they, they have a hard time understanding how our system works. And I think it's just, you know, you talk to people who have immigrated here and it does take some time to get it around your head that like, no, the police really are limited in what they can do and they have to follow the rules. And yes, and it doesn't mean that there aren't mistakes and all sorts of problems. I don't want to ignore other parts of the country that need work, right? We're a project and we're continuing to work on it, right?

There are people everywhere that are going to abuse whatever they're a part of. That's just human nature. But by and large, the difference between how our law and enforcement works here versus theirs, it's night and day. And so, I mean, I think that there's, there's pieces of this that they just, they, they cannot figure it out. And so, you know, the conspiracy theories come in and they're happy to believe those if that's how that works or, you know, who knows all this stuff that kind of comes into it. But I think also part of it's because those types of crazy theories, like they actually, like some of that stuff really does happen there, right? Because it's, it's a, you know, you've got these secret societies and these places that are

very closed off. And you, you know, palace coups and. Exactly. The U.S. can't, you know, keep any secrets. Everything gets leaked. Like, there's no, and this is why I love these conspiracy theories about the U.S. of, like, you know, crazy, like, in the center, someone running some secret cabal to, like, run the government. Are you kidding? Someone would leak that to the Times, like, tomorrow, like, that would immediately be out there. Like, we can't keep secrets for any amount of time. But anyway, I think that there's, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how we operate. And I think in some ways, we have a pretty big misunderstanding of them. and people tend to see them through your own prism of like,

oh, well, they'd love to be like us if they could and do these things. And they really don't want to be. Right. And in some ways, I'm not sure if our system would work quite as well with that power structure, right? That would mean a lot less power for the CCP. Like, they don't want that. Right. I heard a foreign diplomat.

I want to say what could country here, but a diplomat from the neighborhood. And he said something like, you know, how would a democracy work in a country of a billion people? Like, how would that, could it even function? I don't know if it can or not, but I mean, it's a question. No, I pose the same one to, just thinking about China. Like, you know, so population in the world's grown and China's started to level off.

So, you know, somewhere between a fourth and a fifth of the world's people are there. Right. Just from a pure, like, logistics standpoint of like, you know, of like delivering services, goods, money, and stuff. Just like, like, don't even think about, like, the sort of running, but like a logistics standpoint, like, could even the best logistics company in the world,

I don't know, FedEx, Walmart, somewhere like that, could they make this work? Like a country that size, like actually work? Right. From it that was that that centralized, right? And that's, I mean, a lot of very much smarter sort of policy wanks and politicians, or policy people that need, no, looking at this is like the difficulty of running a country that central, that large, or that diversified now of, you know, a population, you know, if everyone's poor, it's a lot easier, but everyone's got

different needs and wants because they're all starting to get wealthy. How can they adjust to that group now? And it's not clear that they can, right? And that's been sort of a fundamental American sort of point of hubris, hubris, you know, for a long time that we always expect that other countries truly want democracy and need democracy. And, you know, for a long time that we always expect that other countries truly want democracy and need democracy. And if we could just give it to them, then they're going to be a-okay. Yeah.

No, we've tried, I think, unfortunately, to influence more heavily the trajectory of some countries rather than, you know, look, and I think that's something that we had, especially with regards to China, if you look back at our policy for a long time, you know, we were doing, I mean, taking as an example,

we were purposely doing technology transfer to China from the government on all sorts of levels, all sorts of, you know, range of technology to build China up for different reasons at different times. One, we wanted to have them oppose the, you know, Soviet Union, but then later because we want them to be bigger, a stakeholder, and, you know, all sorts of other reasons. But it's not exactly clear that, like, they want stuff in the same way. And they think about it in the same way that we do. They're in a very different place in the world. They have a different historical context.

And so I think one of the big shifts that happened to last administration and this administration has continued it, which is, all right, we're not in the, you know, we're going to plan your future for your business anymore. We're going to lay out some standards. We're going to say this is the minimum you've got to get to. And if you don't, then we're going to have problems. And that's kind of where we are now where I think we've laid some of these out and they're not meeting them so that we're having some fights. Well, could you expand on that a little bit? Like, where do you think we are in regards to a relationship with China and hate to like ask you to make pretty? predictions, but like thoughts about where you see it going in the near future?

Yeah, so I mean, in the immediate term, if you just think about the massive economic relationship that we have with China, I think there's just going to be a huge number of new regulations controls put on it, right, or different ways of sort of monitoring or kind of regulating it. Everything from, you know, the most recent, some people following this, this is in my business now, the semi-conductors. Yeah, the export controls. We basically told China, like, hey, we're not selling you chips and we're not giving you stuff to make the chips anymore at a certain level because we don't want you to put them into your military equipment and come attack.

And all the Americans who are working there, like, come home or else. So, and it's, it is a pretty massive decapitation of an entire industry there. And they are scrambling right now to figure out what to do. So, and China will respond and, you know, respond a number of different ways. And one of which it'll just ramp up economic espionage and all the spies will be. going after all the businesses stuff in a much greater way. But this is really just the beginning. This is just one industry.

I mean, you could take quantum computing, you could talk about hypersonics, you know, any type of sort of cutting-edge technology. And it's going to be hard to think about what is not going to be potentially regulated. You know, go back 30, 40 years, you know, what was clear, what was civilian technology versus military, there was a much clear decision. Certainly there was some stuff that was dual use. Now, so many things could be. use for the military or use for intelligence purposes, right?

I mean, you think about, you know, just even like geolocation data, right? This is some of the stuff that's coming out about TikTok, right? The TikTok was pulling geolocation data of Americans. And people may be like, well, who cares about that? They know I was at the Burger King. I mean, whatever. But if you take that and you aggregate it with other data you have at other places, and I'll be able to help you figure out lots of things that you're doing, right?

These just individual pieces of this. But if you think about if that data now is thought of as, essentially having a national security purpose or at least needs to be protected from a national security perspective, there's almost nothing that wouldn't be in that realm. Right. So if you're thinking about the future, like how, what is our relationship them going to look like? You know, these areas that got sort of designated as like what we're going to cooperate in some areas, compete in others, and then essentially confront in others. I think this is the sort of, either Jake Sullivan or Biden sort of, you know, these kind of different areas. I think the areas we're

going to cooperate are going to probably shrink to zero. Yeah. And maybe you'll throw the environment everything, but even John Kerry's ready to throw a hat in and say, well, this is going nowhere. The areas where you compete are going to expand massively, and then more and more of those are going to kind of slip over into the confront area. Yeah. I don't know what's coming.

I mean, you know, but I think we're in sort of for, not just with China, but with Russia and with there's a number of other powers. It's a lot of, it's easier and easier for smaller powers to kind of punch above their weight. the U.S.'s' ability to kind of keep a lid on things that we have for the last 75 so years is diminishing. Our desire to do it is diminishing, and maybe that's even more important. The U.S. doesn't want to exert, you know, blood and treasure out in the world to do these things anymore. So the ability for other countries to push back is going to expand.

Chaos kind of continues to escalate and it's going to be a very different place. How do we get? Because, for instance, with China, like you mentioned TikTok, and the data. Well, and we also know that China owned a bunch of the DNA testing places that pregnant when we're using, which could potentially be used to create designer viruses, you know, specifically targeting individuals or whatever. How do we, you know, we talk about this in a way because we're the United States and we think about ourselves and it's the U.S. versus China, but there are all these other countries out

there that also do not benefit from China, you know, sort of. expanding that. Are they stakeholders? How do we get them to become stakeholders so that it is not a U.S. China? Yeah. I mean, I think we're working on it and it's going to be slow going. I think you're probably going to have, you know, blocks kind of slowly coalescing on both sides and then you're going to have a lot of people kind of in between. They're trying to straddle both parts of it. And I think, you know, the EU is sort of getting its head around it. Australia certainly is. I mean, the Five Eyes and there's been a number of things. I'm not as confident about India. I know where they're part of the quad that we've got as part of the bulwark to push back on China. You know, it's not exactly

clear. Certainly some of their activity vis-à-vis Russia where they're buying a lot of Russian oil, a lot of Russian military equipment, as they've done for years. So, I mean, I think we've got a lot of work to do. And this is where I, you know, the big problem from my perspective, I mean, as an American, but also I think that other countries should think about is like, we've also got a little bit of an issue sort of internally. I don't want to not get political, but certainly we have some hyper-partisanship going on. You know, like right now we have a big disagreement about what are things going to look like in the U.S. certain issues, but just even long-term, what are we going to have? And so as we're in that sort of, you know, spirited discussion that's so wonderful in our

country and as we work this stuff out, that's a lot of kind of naval gazing, right? And so if the U.S. is focused internally, then we're not projecting power out, that makes the world a very different place, right? So in terms of countries getting a line and doing that, they may think, well, if the U.S. is not paying attention, you know, but China's out here exerting power, I have to deal with what's at home, right? Or, you know, if you're Cambodia, the U.S. is far away, right? Right. And so I think they're still kind of waiting to see how much and what is the U.S. staying power. And this is why, you know, maybe the Russians and the Chinese are ramping up all their malign influence in order to just kind of churn things here in the U.S. get even worse.

It benefits them for us to be hyperpartisan, for the left and the right to be going at each other so much. Absolutely. I mean, and this is, and they've done this before, right? The Soviets did this in the 1950s, the 1960s. They've had a longstanding kind of operations against the United States to do it. And it, you know, and it essentially sucks all the oxygen out of the room because we're arguing with each other. And so, and to be fair, like, But there's some real serious issues that we do need to resolve. It's not being helped by the fact we've got crazy, you know, miss and disinformation floating around,

that it's being ramped up by outside parties. But I think that, you know, the U.S. looking internally, other places haven't quite figured things out. Like, I think it's going to be, it's hard right now for Russia and China, but I think it's probably going to start to get easier for them in the long run. Do you foresee at any point the U.S. sort of, You know, just like FISA, you know, kind of goes outside of our protections for every citizen. Do you foresee any time in the future where our information policy also says, okay, if you're in an America, you have privacy laws.

If it's an IP that's coming from outside or a hosted IP or VPN, it doesn't have those same rights. Yeah, that's a really good question. I don't know. I mean, I think we're in a really, you know, cyber has totally. totally obliterated. I mean, as you talked to the walls between foreign and domestic at this point. And there's two different models out there, right? The idea of cyber sovereignty, like what China and Russia call. And, you know, it's basically like you localize your data, you have control of it. You get to, you know, you have our firewalls around it. So you only, you know, you only see things you want your citizens to see and the U.S. that's created this very kind of open system where everything can kind of flow.

You know, and I think from a philosophical standpoint, you know, we like the idea of openness. But, but we have to, knowledge, there are some real problems with it in some way. And this is just going back to my time overseas. One, and this is a very legitimate complaint that both the Russians and the Chinese had against the United States was access to information. So think about this, if you've got, you know, two Russian citizens using Facebook to communicate, you know, using the Facebook messenger, and they're communicating about wanting to blow up a bus in Russia. How do they get that information? they don't have you know there's no Facebook representative there that they're going to go and sort of process to it's an american company yeah so there there is a process in place and again it's not to pick on facebook but um you know and they have a they've

tried to deal with this but at the end they're at the you know the whim or the desire of that private company they cannot enforce that where the u.s can go and tell facebook you get you have to give this information today right this type of thing that's a real issue right so but if data it can free flow and go everywhere and people can have access to this stuff, that creates problems for governments to get access to information they need to protect their citizens. Flipside of that, of course, is they're also looking for all the dissidents who are talking about things. And so how do you, if your Facebook, how do you figure out, like, is this a real, legit, sort of, like, they want to blow up a bus? Right.

Or are these two guys who are being oppressed by the Russian government, and so they want, you know, they want information on them. But you're putting a private company in the seat of an, like a judge, like they're being an arbitrator of making these decisions, and that's incredibly difficult. So I just bring that up to your question of like, I think we've got a really hard road to hoe here because I don't know what the right answer is. Right. But our current, like our current setup that we're pushing from the U.S. is not without problems, not without real legitimate issues. And certainly their side of it is not something we want either. So what does that mean? I think we've got a lot of things to work through over time.

But if we can't even get people to agree and sit down and talk at these meetings and we're using them for like geopolitical head smashing, that's not going to happen anytime. soon. Yeah. Your next stop was the White House. You had an interesting title on the National Security Council, Counterintelligence Director. What was your job there? What did that entail? Yeah. So there's, so National Security Council, there's a bunch of directorates. And then everyone is a director for something, right? So a director for, you know, Middle East or sometimes you have a director for, like, Syria when it was Syria was big. You had this. So I was director for counterintelligence. And so my job was really to help coordinate policy and changes and anything that were happening at the national level between all the different agencies with regards to counterintelligence. And the way, you know, we talked about this a little bit how the Bureau thinks about counterintelligence is a little bit different than some other agencies.

So, you know, in a very traditional, strict sense, counterintelligences, you are countering the activities of an intelligence agency, right? but there was a recent report from the Sissy, the Senate Select Committee was talking about some of the changes that have happened and that it's almost come from at least the FBI and some of the ways that there's not agreement on this to be clear but the way we deal with it sometimes is any actions by the government kind of becomes almost, you know, that's going to be countered by the U.S. Sometimes gets thrown under the umbrella of counterintelligence.

And so I mentioned that because I dealt with intelligence issues, I dealt with malign influence, I dealt with all sorts of other, just influence issues that had nothing to do with intelligence services. But it was government agencies from other places, private sector, some things, all these things that got kind of thrown under the umbrella, the rubric of counterintelligence. But it was essentially almost like any outside group that was trying to do harm to the U.S., I'd get pulled into meetings and they'd be like, all right, what's the Bureau think about this, or what's the counterintelligence perspective, or how do we protect ourselves from this? And so anyway, it was, I did a lot of China work

at that time was we were trying to move the U.S. from really when we talked about these levels from a cooperative stance where we were really trying to help China kind of continue to build up. And there were still, in 2017, when I got there, still a number of agencies that saw their job as cooperating with China, as providing information, helping them build things, helping them. And to be fair to them, they, this had been the, the, they, they don't see it as anything nefarious. No, no. And, and they, we were told to do this, right? I mean, this is what the agencies were supposed to do, you know, 10 years before. And, you know, and things just changed so quickly with China. I think they couldn't even imagine that, like, we actually

had to worry about China, right? This place is, you know, poor, developing, but it's not going to be, it's not a competitor by any means. And then all of a sudden, you know, certainly after the financial crisis in 2008, like power dynamics started to change pretty dramatically. So it was a lot of helping them understand, like, you can't be cooperating with them anymore. You can't be giving them misinformation. You can't be dealing with them, you know, having our scientists go over there and teach them to do these types of things. And so, but then it also got to, as I talked about other organizations, it's like trying to work with academic institutions, universities, and help them understand, like, look, you know, if you're receiving government money, you might have

to think twice about who has access to your labs. Right. You have these cutting edge, you know, equipment and you're doing this cutting edge experimentation, at least in part because of U.S. government support. That doesn't mean that anyone can run into your lab then and use that same equipment to do things that we don't want them to do. But we ran to a lot of cultural problems there, right? That's a university system doesn't want controls on you know, on information and knowledge. It's tough in today's climate I imagine we've talked about this before that anti-Chinese government action, anti-CC action, will get branded by as racist in a heartbeat and then it'll inhibit your ability to stop them.

Yeah. So this is something that Chinese intelligence pushes. Absolutely. So one thing that they know that sort of is a third rail and a lot of times in American politics is if you're talking about sort of racial discrimination and that can make everything grind to a halt. So they've seen that as something to grab onto and to focus on. At the same time, I think it's important to note that there are people who have focused on that people who are like, well, if you have this background, people have been attacked and say, well, they're Chinese. You know, maybe three generations ago, their ancestors came from China, but they're Americans, right? Or they came and they're naturalized, and they're Americans now.

So, I mean, there's a piece of this. And so one way that I always talked about is to, rather than think of the people with these connections, you know, based on ethnicity, but think about it in terms of vulnerability. your ethnicity or your national origin it really doesn't matter what they are it matters if you have financial connections or family connections

so I have no Chinese background whatsoever if my sister worked for a multinational in Shanghai I would be vulnerable because because of her being there the security services intelligence services could lean on her in a way right and so it's important to think about this stuff as a vulnerability right

that that connection can be a wonderful thing for, you know, in terms of cultural aspect and even helping in all sorts of ways, but it also can make people more vulnerable. It doesn't necessarily make them a threat. And so I think part of the issue is that sometimes people jump to, well, if you're associated with that, you're a threat. Rather than saying, no, you're vulnerable and you could be abused. Because sometimes it's unwitting. Sometimes it's whitting. But so that's an important, I think, distinction to make. But in some ways, you know, the CCP has got us chasing our tail because they'll focus on saying, well, you know,

oh, it's purely a racist sort of like attack on us, you know, because you're attacking us. And so there's... The way likes to play that game. Yeah. Absolutely. And so the U.S. government's made a real strong attempt to focus on one saying PRC, People's Republic of China, right, and talking about that and using that as an, you know, rather than saying something as Chinese, because that can obviously not just be the country,

could be the ethnicity, right? And then it has also focused on talking about the party as the problem rather than the people. And I think that's a really good, important distinction, right? because they're the vanguard, they're in charge. Most of the people don't even know what's going on, much less have any ability to make any decision. So whether they've been propagandized and are supporting them, that's important to note.

But at the end of the day, it's the party that we really have a problem with and not the people. What was it like being up there at the White House at a high level and kind of, I know there's probably a lot of things you can't talk about, but I mean, you must have been, you know, at least aware of some pretty, like, norley counterintelligence investigations

and some things that, I mean, probably kept you up at night. Yeah, no, it was, I mean, it's a crazy experience. Because you imagine, I mean, there's sort of, you know, the top secret, then there's SCI compartments, and then you have all these crazy programs. It's like 25 or 30 people in the country are read into them, whatever. And so the benefit of that job is I got read into pretty much all of them. And so you see the wonderful thing about it that actually helped me sleep at night is you do see all the stuff that the U.S. government is doing.

and like some of things that we have going on, and you're like, wow, that's really cool. Like, this stuff is pretty amazing. We've been working at this for a long time, and we're doing a really, really good job. And then sometimes we're doing such a good job. We get access to information that is so concerning that it does keep up. Yeah. It kind of goes back and forth. Yeah.

But there were some things just, I mean, without going into detail, but, like, I mean, in some ways, this informs my ideas of what this kind of. coming. And, you know, I think Americans tend to want to believe the best and be optimistic. And I think that can sometimes make us a little bit naive about what might be happening. And, you know, there's a lot of much smarter commentators in me out there talking about, you know, this last period since World War II of relative quiet. Certainly since 1991, you know, with, you know, global war on terrorism is a glaring exception. But it's been relatively quiet. that it's probably an anomaly,

and that we're probably going back to a much more competitive and conflict-ridden world. And so that was a lot of seeing sort of what appear to be indicators of that are kind of coming in from all different parts of the world, from different parts. The U.S. government has, you know, obviously, bases and stations and everything all around the world, information kind of coming in about what is happening.

And the one thing that just struck me was just the term, turmoil and chaos, right? Freedom House does a survey each year. And I think last year, it was for the 16th year in a row, freedom has declined around the world. So for 16 years straight, and their prediction is that it's going to continue to go in that direction. And so some of the things you're seeing there is that like we're getting up to a time where it's going to be very different than what we faced before. Do you see a increase in foreign intelligence capability, or say foreign intelligence targeting us, but I'm interested in the volume, but also the capabilities, are they sort of like that, you know, vertical versus horizontal proliferation? Like, are they increasing their capability? Coming up, not probably able to match us, but getting closer. Yeah, I mean, I think, if I recall, the most recent reports have come out. So it doesn't mean they're exactly quite, you know, exactly but they're in our category right um and you know that's that that covers a lot

i mean you know MSS has 100,000 you know people in their organization so you know there's some who are really good and there are some who are like you know not right right so and that's why i think it's kind of confusing because you'll you'll see these operations you're like some kid going on to a navy base taking pictures yes exactly stuff like that or even to the most recent one that came out DOJ was charging those guys from Huawei and like you know the kind of the source control operations. You can see the dialogue. I mean, at least from my standpoint, it was pretty, you know, he's revealing a lot of things he shouldn't have revealed. You know, he's basically time of what his boss wanted or didn't want and, you know, and all sorts of information.

You wouldn't want to tell a source if you want to kind of keep them strictly controlled and focused on things and stuff. So I don't know who it was exactly was running it, but it didn't seem that's great. But back to your point, I mean, so yes, I mean, I think that the number of agencies out there that are doing it, not just in Russia, China, but other places in the world, It's cheaper and cheaper to do this now. You've got a lot of private sector people getting into it. There's been some great articles recently about Indian hackers for hire. And you do that.

There's a number of countries in the Middle East that tend to outsource a lot of their intelligence gathering. They pull in private organizations to do it. Because their intelligence service is more inwardly focused. And in some ways, the collapse of distance and ability to reach out and touch anyone, has made your ability to run operations against anyone just increased by a million fold. Think about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like the ultimate recruitment tool in many ways, right?

I mean, you can set up the search parameters on that to find people in a company with certain backgrounds, you know, you know, with, you know, went to a certain school. You can figure everything about them. All the things you would need to create a targeting package to go up and bump them and start a relationship with them. It's an amazing tool for being able to do all that. And so that type of stuff is really concerning in my mind because it makes so much easier to run, you know, not just, you know, cyber operations, but a human operation where people can come in and start to run this. And it often doesn't take much to get people to want to, you know, persuade them to collect information. There's one more question I wanted to get before we talk about sort of your private sector experience. A question I wanted to ask you about potentials for abuse, things that are like, you know, the public.

has some concerns about my friend, Ken Clippenstein published an article this week about the Department of Homeland Security and they had for a short time counsel on disinformation that was disbanded. And he writes in the article about it's a public-private partnership where the government will go to a Facebook and say, hey, we have some concerns about this baby being disinformation. can you throttle that down or can you take that off your website? And now the government, it's not the government ordering the company what to do, but nonetheless there are concerns about censorship who gets to define what this information is. And I was just wondering, since you worked at kind of all levels of this topic,

what your thoughts are about that. Yeah, I mean, this is a huge mess in my mind. I don't know what to do. I mean, you know, you've got Elon Musk just bought Twitter and, you know, whether you think that's the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. You know, you basically have private companies are now in the business of arbitrating speech, right, deciding what is acceptable and what isn't. You know, again, so this is right for the Supreme Court to step in to say you can't do this or can't do this. Or you're now sort of a, you know, you're going to be considered a utility. Yeah, I mean, essentially, and, you know, people, everyone uses you.

and so you're going to be considered, essentially you're going to have to protect these types of rights as well. Because right now, I mean, like First Amendment protects you against government action, right? And not necessarily against private action. So I think, you know, you've got the situation where the government is in a really, U.S. government specifically is in a tough spot.

And we talked about this when I was up there. There's another place in the State Department called the Global Engagement Center. The Geck. Yeah. Run by a Navy SEAL and then a fighter pilot and then, I don't know, they're not quite as bad today, are they? No, no. I actually, I mean, you know, they originally started doing kind of work on trying to put out, you know, non-extremist information about Islam, right? Which is, I mean, you know, an important piece.

Just to go back to earlier a story about the Tsarnaya brothers, you know, his mom talked about, you know, when Tomerlane was, you know, they were Muslim but not religious. and when he decided he wanted to find out about it, what did he do? Went on the internet. And if you, you know, back then, if you Googled Islam, you did not find the peaceful part of the religion that made up the majority of the people. You found the extreme stuff. And so that's what he encountered right away.

And so the geck was, you know, created to try to make sure that there's, you're getting a much, you know, richer kind of, you know, picture of how things go. And so I think similarly, you know, they've been expanding kind of focus on, you know, some of the disinformation is put up by Russia, China, and other places. But they're a tiny organization. And there's a big question of, like, should the U.S. government even be involved in this, right? Like, no, I mean, what American believes information that comes from the U.S. government, right? I mean, there's an automatic sort of like, that's total nonsense, right?

That's a politician saying that. Well, it depends on if it's your president or not, right? Like, if you're for Trump, then you believe what comes out. If you're for Biden, you believe what comes out. Obama, Bush, Clinton, right? Like we identify with that, but what government has ever been completely honest with its people. Right. No, and that's, I mean, you see those stats, right, the common, like what government institutions are always the lowest sort of level of trust.

Right. But no, I think it's a really tough spot. How does the U.S. encourage this environment? You know, and I mean, it basically, the information environment in the cyber world is nascent and it has not fully developed. But like all industries, that are new, the trash moves in first, right? So this is like, you know, what were the first, I'm going to date myself here, but, you know, back when videotapes became the thing, like, what drove VHS tapes?

Porn, right? I mean, what drove the Internet to begin with? Porn, right? Born, right. Born made the VHS industry. I mean, it did, yeah. So all these, I mean, you think that this are. We got all these cameras and mics in here.

We're in the wrong business. Yeah, right. It's getting uncomfortable now. So, anyway, but, I mean. Here, have a drink. This is for the second half of the show. All right, we're going to delete that part right. But no, I mean, I think there's a piece of this where it's like this is the, we're the very early stages of this information environment.

And, you know, it's the garbage that's in here right now and we can't like kind of make sense of it. And so over time, it's going to, you know, get better. And I think that the private sector should be the main piece of it. But like, there could be so much damage that could happen before that comes about. Yeah. But you've got, yeah, I mean, this is like, again, get back to, like, so Elon Musk now is going to make more decisions about how, what speech is okay in, you know, on Twitter. And that's a huge forum for information now, a guy who has significant business interests in China. Right.

Is this, you know, a guy who was spouting essentially Chinese views on Twitter? Or one. And also there's, you know, at least in Bremer says he talked to Putin or received talking points from Putin. He denies it. Who knows? But he put out talking points that the Ukrainians were not particularly happy with. So, again, not to pick on Elon Musk, but the idea being, should you have any private citizen making these types of judgments, right, about what is in the public sphere? Well, I mean, I agree with you. And prior to that, whether it was an individual or a board, you know, they were banning people for questions.

whatever it might be, right? They banned the New York Post for the Hunter Biden story. Right, right. For the laptop. So it's not just one individual. It's private citizens, right? Yeah. And, you know, private citizens have agendas, regardless of what those agendas are.

And these organizations, these, like you said, they have become, in a way, utilities. Yeah. that people can in a way get depersoned, like lose their livelihood or their career if they are not on these or they get banned. And yeah, it's a question of how do you ensure that whether it's an Elon Musk or a Jack Dorsey in the board or Zuckerberg or whomever else,

that, you know, how do they combat misinformation but also not just because the FBI says, hey, Facebook, this stuff on Biden's laptop is, you know, Russian disinformation that they don't bury it. No, and that's a fair. And it don't mean to imply that it was better previously with the board necessarily, right? Maybe it was better in some ways and worse than others. Or it was worse. I don't even know how to judge it.

But the point, as you made, is you've got private citizens doing their best. Facebook set up a similar kind of, you know, a group of experts to kind of arbitrate this stuff, right? Which I imagine is a bit of, you know, sort of, you know, First Amendment theater that they've kind of put in there to, like allow these things to go forward. But, you know, I, I think we've got a big fight on our hands coming up, like with this. Yeah. And it's tough because, you know, when we, like right now when we look at the COVID vaccines or whatever, and we look at the data coming out, like, one, you don't want to discourage people,

but you want to have the scientific debate. Like, what if, you know, what if this were the smallpox vaccine? Yep. And there were people like saying, no, don't do it, you know, where it was necessary. or what if it was electroshock therapy or lobotomies? Like, it's difficult to determine when something is actual debate, when it is targeted misinformation. No, I don't have a, I don't know if there's a good solution for it.

I'm not sure if the days of Walter Cronkite delivering the news for everybody were necessarily better in every ways, right? I mean, certainly some things were better than others, but, like, you know, why did he have such a, you know, a kind of an ability to make those decisions? Right, right. Right. What was the news? You know, what people decided was the news?

Yeah. I mean, I, again, this is one of those things that you think about, could easily consume, you know, American society thinking about this and trying to figure it out. And it's rough. I will sit without time to, you know, Rar or our patriotic, as much as rough as it is, I think it's the right way to do it, right? I don't want a, you know, take China as an example, having, you know, a bunch of technocrats who have my best interests at heart, you know, who are making the decisions about, you know, I need a firewall to protect me, so I don't, you know, have your ideas bothering me. I don't want that. The flip side of that, though, I think I hope most Americans come to understand is that that means that we have these debates that can get kind of ugly, and we should, which we should try to make them as less ugly as possible, less personalized, right? This is our methodology for trying to find some sort of middle ground compromise, and it takes time. time. But the less we try to kill each other during that, the better, right?

Do you, having been in China and understanding their system, and maybe social credit wasn't kind of a thing then, I don't know. It started to be, yeah. But do you see a potential for the United States? Do you see any traces of the United States? Or do you think that we can slip by that and avoid it completely? Yeah. It's a really good question. I think we're going to have to be really careful that we do not fall into or get you know kind of lured in by the siren song of surveillance technology. I think a lot of people see that as this sort of wonderful panacea that's going to solve our problems, right? Just in the current job, we talked to a lot of businesses and we talk to them

about how to protect their employees and protect themselves from losing information and their response a lot of times can be, well, we've got this wonderful tool that allows us to see everything that they're doing. I'm not sure the employees know that they have that tool. But I think we need to be very careful believing that technology is going to solve all this, right, their ability to watch all this stuff. And so social credit, I think it's just kind of even larger system, right, of where you're essentially surveilling their bankruptcy, their, you know, their marital status and

their, you know, maybe their, their Tinder feed as well as their Twitter feed, right, to see what they're doing. and then coming up with some wonderful algorithmic, you know, kind of results that no one can kind of peer inside it to figure it how it's actually done. Right. Yeah. Is it the right, yeah. I mean, is it the right talking points? Yeah.

I mean, I think this is going to be really difficult. And, I mean, this is maybe the challenge of AI, I mean, how to, which we don't necessarily have. We just have machine learning at this point. But at some point, we may have something much closer to AI. and how do we use it without sort of destroying ourselves? Right. To go back to Elon, he's very worried about it. And then even to connect to Putin,

he said the person who controls, you know, the country that controls AI will control the world. Right. And we've seen some bad experience with AI where, you know, they did the Twitter AI, I think, and after getting sort of stampeded or brigaded, that it did nothing but curse. Oh, it was like super racist?

Right, yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we're still trying to learn how to figure that out, but I think there's this piece of like, you know, assuming that technology is going to solve all of our issues rather, you know, and that we just create the right formula, you know, at the

end of the day, it's what is that, how is that waiting going on? And then what is the information that's going in there? Someone is having to decide that, right? So you put good information, you know, the whole idea of garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. Right. So I'm, I think there's a little bit of, you know, we, I think particularly Americans get kind of enamored with technology and to think that's going to solve our problems. Right. And I think there's parts that it can make our lives better.

Right. But, you know, I've been kids, I'm mission. And so my wife and are constantly reading about, you know, all the sort of problems that are caused by social media to kids. You think about all the sort of negative effects of it. And I'm like, and so what are we getting out of this at the end of the time? Right. But almost every dystopian story we have that's been popular from like Fahrenheit, 451 and 1984, onward to, you know, Brazil and Terminator and everything else that has something to a technology, right? Yeah.

Could you talk to us then about, you know, sort of going into the private sector and what you're up to today? Yeah. Thanks. So I saw a need. I mean, being at the NSC and the Bureau, we would really focus on the playing field and how, like, how to protect that. But we realized that there's a lot of companies and individuals that just weren't getting this sort of kind of preparation that they needed. You know, we, I've, in the Bureau, you kind of always kept at arm's length with regards to companies and what they've got going on. And so, being out in the private sector now, it's a lot easier to kind of bring you into the fold.

So basically, we have a boutique consulting that helps. helps companies deal with nation-state threats, right? So these are human-driven kind of threats, and we have human-driven solutions. So we don't focus so much on the cyber piece of it, in terms of the technical piece of it. I think there's a lot out there dealing with that, for better for worse.

We focus really on how the people interact with technology, the facilities, and even interact with each other. If you look at statistically on cyber intrusion, still upwards 90% plus are because of, you know, poor control of credentials, you know, no multi-factor authentication, clicking on links, downloading things they shouldn't have. So ultimately, it's still the vast majority relates back to people. Yeah. And so, you know, the best piece of software is not going to protect you from that.

You have to, like, focus on people. And so for us, it's about having, you know, creating that awareness of, like, you are an important part to this. And whether or not you appreciate it or not, your company has been pulled into a massive geopolitical struggle. and the quicker you get your head around that and realize that there really are, you know, intelligence officers in China, in Russia, and Iran, you know, in all sorts of other countries in the world trying to steal your information, the better you'll be able to protect your company,

your family, your livelihood, and that type of thing. So we try to help give advice and think about this, you know, depending on what kind of company you are if you make semiconductors or, you know, if you're making, you know, if you've got data are the things, what are the types of assets that essentially intelligence officers and others are coming after, how they're going to come after you, and then how can you protect yourself in the private sector? Yeah. It's a little bit difficult or different in some ways because you don't have the same tools of protection

that you do in the government, right? You don't have the same tools to find this stuff out. So it's a lot more sort of risk analysis versus investigations and stuff. So it's been an adjustment, but it's fun. It can be a lot more creative, I think, than you can the government. which is often, you know, kind of your blinders on. And we've gotten to touch a lot of different companies that didn't get to kind of get as close to before.

That's fantastic. Where can people find these services? Where can they find you if they're interested in? So we're on the Internet. Trench Coat Advisors is the company. And, you know, we're happy to always talk with if companies are interested in work with individuals sometimes if they're kind of concerned about themselves, you know,

in terms of their own security. So my partner is Bill Prestep. He was the head of counter-enestep. intelligence for three years. A few more people have joined us now and starting to work with Moor. But really, it's about, for us, it's more kind of strategic. Like, how do you navigate this, right? Especially if you are one of those semiconductor companies that used to sell to China.

What do you do at this point, right? What should you be prepared for, which is, you know, ramped up economic espionage on your company, that type of thing. Yeah, that's really interesting what you're doing because it kind of rang a bell for me because I remember somebody, I think it was at Special Operations Committee and saying, at SOFIC one year, like, we need a computer program that can identify disinformation. It's like, hold on a second, buddy. Like, if that program ain't up here, it doesn't matter what the software is.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah. No, and that's a big piece of it, right? I mean, there's a lot of software out there that supposedly gives all these great solutions, but at the end of the day, you know, the people are vulnerable. And you're right, I mean, for, like you said, like 80, 90 percent of cyber, cyber crime, not even the intelligence aspect, but just the crime, which is a

multi-billion dollar, it costs businesses billions of dollars every year just in the United States. It's fishing, it's those human-oriented attacks. Do we have any questions from folks out there? We do. We have some questions.

We got some spicy questions. I don't know if we asked. Some spicy. I don't know. I was just saying that. Let me see what we got going on here. Pop over the studio. All right. Danny, thank you very much. Oh, this is a great question. Was Holden's father a big J.D. Salinger fan?

No, you know, I wish my parents were that literate or literate. Holden's actually my grandmother, my paternal grandmother's maiden name, and so it's a family name. So there's a bunch of my dads from Mountain View, Missouri, where there's interestingly no mountain. no view. But there's a bunch of Holdens and triplets around there for some reason when they immigrated over there. So no Holden. Combe. Nope. Jerry, thank you very much. What is your opinion of the ports of New York and New Jersey? Do you think they are deliberately open to immigrants from China? I don't have not heard that. I can't imagine they'd be deliberately open to them.

But I would, there's, you know, human sort of trafficking is a massive issue just around the country, around the world. And China has some huge issues with that. So it's funny, actually, that is one issue that we were able to work with them on was human trafficking to some degree when we were in China at times. And then there was, anyway, became frustrating. But that was one that they had some time for us on. And it was a serious issue. There are some really powerful criminal operations. I mean, obviously I've heard of the triads,

but there's a number throughout China that kind of bring people in. So I don't know if it's purposeful, but, I mean, you know, that sometimes it's just the corruption is so endemic and rife, and it's pretty easy for a organization to exploit it. Do you feel as though politicians are becoming more security aware when it comes to immigration issue, not just immigration, but like who they allow on their staff, who they're partnering with, who they're taking donations from, things like that.

At the federal level, for sure. At the state level and the local level, I don't think so. I think that there's still, there's been a couple articles that have come out. Axios did one probably about a year ago, and there was another one recently. They're still at a point where it's like, you know, ex-Chinese city calls up and says, hey, we want to set up a friendship with your town in Idaho. And they're like, great. They put out a warning like three months.

months ago warning like small businesses like you need to be aware of and and I think they're starting to get their heads around it but there's still there's a huge kind of goalful of understanding at this point so I don't think it will take it as seriously and again I you know I think kind of your your point earlier there's a little bit of people are like well I can't do this because then it you know I'll be considered discriminating or racist and again I from my perspective is this is not approach as if that person is a threat it's like under understanding that people have vulnerabilities based on where they may have family. Their particular ethnic, national background is irrelevant, actually.

Just approach it that way. And so, you know, if this person happens to be of whatever ethnicity but has no connection to China whatsoever and they don't have any family over there, then they're probably just as safe as anyone else is. Right. Right. Oms, thank you very much for the donation. This is more a comment, I guess. I know the Bush administration offered ports to UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Not sure about Saudi Arabia, but yeah, that's a thing. Thank you, Olms. Danny, thanks again. Was Agent Triple involved in the investigation raid on Mara Lago? Is he able to speculate on why Donald Trump hasn't been indicted yet? So, no, I left the Bureau about two years ago, and have not been on the investigative side for a couple of years. now. So all I could say on any of those cases that I can't imagine the machinations and scrutiny

that goes into, everyone is fully aware that you know, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't at this point. There's no safe answer on any side. So it's probably pretty rough for everybody. R.S. Thank you very much for the donation. Thoughts on former agent Robert Hansen, Eric O'Neill and the movie Breach. Yeah, I liked it I mean I think Look I mean

Hanson obviously was just devastating To You know to the United States And to the Bureau specifically It's But I think there's something And I can't go into any detail But I understand now

You know the feeling that people have And they talk about a little bit in the movie Which I thought was done pretty well About the Someone that you work with that you assumed was you're on the same team, right? I mean, you know, it's been in government. You're doing jobs that are very difficult.

You're often doing it for pay that is a quarter or less of what you could make in the private sector. And, you know, you're doing it with people many times because you feel like you're part of a mission, part of a team. And if you suddenly realize that one of your team has been working against you the entire time and undermining all the things that you believed in,

it's pretty devastating. And I think that it's been a while since in the movie, I think it captures it well. But, you know, obviously there's some huge intelligence kind of issues with, you know, impact of what Hansen did. But I think that maybe underappreciated is the impact they had to the organization. Just the feelings of just, you know, mistrust and just, you know, that you've got someone in your midst that, like, you know, worked against us. That was, like, kind of the one thing that I noticed James Olson get a little choked up talking about it was all. Aldrich Ames. He was like, I knew Ames had a problem with alcoholism. They were friends.

He's like, I didn't say anything because, you know, I liked him as a person. And I think he said it was like the one big oversight, the one lapse that he felt in his career. I can understand. I mean, it's one of these things where, again, you think in the movies that it's portrayed is like, it's clear, you know, it's someone they're shifty and, you know, and all these things. And like, it's not. It's, it's often, you know, people who are. like all humans are flawed

and they make a series of bad decisions to get themselves in a place I don't think Alder James started off as a new is going to be a traitor for his entire life. Right. He didn't grow up. He was an eight-year-old's laying in bed saying I want to be an FBI like a traitor. Yeah. Exactly. And same with Hanson.

And so. No, no. But I, you know, and so you think about the trajectory that that person goes on to go from a place of where at some point I imagine they believed in what they did and believed that they were a part of it and then to suddenly go to a place or they could betray everyone. It's a very human journey.

And I think it's upsetting. But at the same time, like, there's a piece of it. I think that we don't really fully understand and have explored. Like what that person does psychologically to convince themselves, this is okay. Yeah, I mean, some serious cognitive dissonance that saying, you know, that this is, you know,

I'm doing, I mean, Hansen believed he was helping the Bureau, right? Hansen was a curious case. He's not a normal sort of traitor. His motivations are more opaque. Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, from an intel perspective, kudos are the Russians for being flexible to deal with someone like that, right? But that's part of the game in many ways of like you,

you have people come to you for all sorts of different reasons of why they want to provide information and you have to figure out if it is a good reason, if it's a reason that you can believe in the information, can you validate it, all these sort of things. And it's extremely complicated. but it's rare that it happens so cleanly that you can just say, oh, well, great, this is good.

Right. And if it is, it's probably such a low level. It's not impactful. But when it gets up to that level, it's horribly complicated. Right. Yeah. Wiz-Wis, thank you very much. How do we dissentivize?

Yeah, think de-insensitize economic discentivized economic espionage carried out by our own geopolitical allies. example, France, Japan. Israel? Disaccentify. Yeah. That's a great question. I don't think we can disincentivize them. I think we have to like, I think we're going to have to,

we just got to put up protections for it. You know, I mean, this is the difficult thing. I think with allies, you know, be it, you know, Israel or South Korea or France or whatever, that we align in many ways. But in their mind, you know, you got to get inside the, their head, which is, all right, today the U.S. cares about my issues, but will they tomorrow? Right. And, you know, so what do I need to do?

I need to get everything I can out of this relationship, right? Obviously, we don't like that from our perspective, but you can understand why they see it that way, right? They don't have the, you know, hundreds of years of close relationship like the UK does, and that they can depend on that's going to be there. But, I mean, one way to do it is to, you know, sort of have a, a much more open, well, a couple of different ways you have a much more open sort of, you know, where we share certain high technology with them, which I think we're starting to deal with

some places like in Japan. And then the other is they develop their own sort of internal, you know, intellectual property regime that is worthwhile. And so that even if a company steals something, you just, you go to Japan, you can sue them. You go to France and you can sue them, right? And so that could happen over time, and that's something that the U.S. could require them to, you know, sort of enact in order to have access to certain things. and so maybe that's something that my successor's at the NSC can work on right now.

Jerry, thank you very much. Who is your favorite Russian writer and why? I could type in Russian, but those guys would butcher that. Yeah. You can answer in Russian. You can answer in Russian if you want. Jerry, you're showing your colors, man. No. My favorite Russian writer.

I mean, I probably Dostoevsky, I would guess. And I mean, so I was a Russian literature major at Texas. So I read a bunch a long time ago. And I do really like it.

It's very dark. And that seems kind of cliche to pick Dostoevsky. I have to think about a little more. There's some more recent ones that are that are more interesting. And I, that is, oh, wait, let me check the patron real quick um isaac you're asking some really political questions here um so we we talked about this a little bit but what was it like being in china russian how do you compare them how are they

different and who is harder um yeah i think china was harder um in a lot of ways i just i felt like there was a lot more distance between how we talked about things and how we saw things than than russia It doesn't mean that it was necessarily we're going to come to an agreement with Russia. You know, sometimes the worst fights can be between siblings, right? In some ways, like people that you agree on a lot of different things. But in some ways, just the perspective in China and the way that the system worked there was just so different. I can tell you, like, one of the things I spent a lot of time on is even trying to help them understand if they wanted to, because they had a lot of frustrations.

And I saw part of my job is helping not only like the U.S. communicate to China, but help China communicate to the U.S. Because in my mind, confusion on either side is not a good thing, right, for countries that could eventually get into some sort of hot conflict. And so if I can help them, you know, sort of think about what is important, like, how do you express what matters to you? Like, then I'm helping them do that and, you know, kind of plug into the U.S. system. And so they're actually talking to people that can hear this and make decisions. based on it. But it was difficult. And I guess I attribute that to, not a cultural thing, but Russia at least had kind of gone back to a place where power is a bit more, as much as the security services had a lot of power, it had decentralized quite a bit, right? You had

businesses that had a lot of power, business leaders. And so in many ways it felt a lot more like the U.S. where it was a lot more, there was, you know, there were connections, but at least when I was there in 2012 and 2014. It was more like decentralized different areas of power. That's not how it was in China. It was really still sort of as a pyramid. And that part of it, I hadn't really, I mean, I'd been in Russia 93, but things had already fallen apart. I had never really experienced before kind of being in a place that is, they're not quite totalitarian yet, but they were on their way. And like, you could kind of feel it in a way that was very different. And so being in a totalitarian state, I kind of missed the tail end of the Cold War and that. That's what it felt like,

the sort of beginnings of it in China. Obviously, I'm sitting around talking to the security service, so my experience is different than other people. Right. But that was a major difference, I'd say. When you were there in Russia and China, did you bother doing surveillance detection, or did you just assume that you were tailed all the time?

Yeah, so I had a kind of, I mean, sort of a unique, and this is what I'd tell people when they'd come to visit from the Bureau or from other places. I was like, do... So we're not running operations. I was like, do not do surveillance detection. So basically, I'm telling this to FBI people, you've been on the other side where you've had to watch somebody. And when they make it difficult for you, it's kind of a pain in the ass.

Right. Like when they're being jerks and they'll cross the street like 50 times and they're just messing. And so I'm trying to think about it, some of professional courtesy, if I'm going to the zoo, there were times where I would wait because they were slow and they got caught in traffic or they, you know, and so I hope, you know, because, look, they had to do a job and they had to make sure that I want. wasn't going and doing anything untoward or that wasn't supposed to be doing there and I wasn't so I didn't really it didn't bother me and I thought that just make it easier for them to do their job yeah um but every now and then they just they just kind of appear to kind of do a little show of force yeah I can think once when I was on the way to the zoo we were with kids and like turned around and then

there's like six guys just sitting at the fence just staring at the time like probably about like smoking cigarettes yeah basically where's holding well I was I was like I feel like there's someone watching me I turn around Yeah, and there's like six guys just sitting there watching. I was like, oh, there you are. And every now and then they'd do that, just, you know, kind of make sure you know that they're there. Right.

That sort of thing. Now, did you ever do the same thing, like walk into a sandwich shop and just turn around at the counter and wait for them to come in and give a nod? No, I didn't ever want to embarrass them to, like, make them, you know, make them feel like they got made because if that would kind of make it more difficult for them, because then, you know, they don't have the same sort of restrictions. And so there's all sorts of, like, you know, they're going to come in and, like, you know, like pee in my bed or something like that.

Right, right. Toss your apartment. Yeah, we had a dog. I didn't want to kill the dog. Right. It would have just been, I was like, you know, what am I going to gain other than just being like, you know, kind of a jerk to them? Right. The only thing I would do, and this is so childish, but now that I'm out of the government, I'll say this.

Surveillance games, ladies and gentlemen. So this wasn't even surveillance. This is me, just I would, you know, every now and then I would Google something that was, you know, sort of something about, Russian men and, you know, inabilities to do certain things because I'm assuming they're reading through all of my Google searches. Right. And so, you know, it's all like, you know, Taylor Swift or whatever else I'm Googling at the time,

right? And then, you know, it comes in, why do Russian men, you know, are they unable to perform and all these very technical things about, so I just hope they would give them a little bit of a laugh, you know, that when they're reading through all of my Google searches that they would kind of see that one night. That was the only entertainment that part would do to them. But I do that for the FBI agent that monitors this office. Holden, this has been awesome, man. I really appreciate you coming in and sharing some really, like,

some really, like, unique insights that I don't think too many people have. Not my pleasure. And, yeah, and I hope the next time you come through New York City, we can have you over again. And, I mean, there's a lot to discuss here. And obviously, these issues are not going away at all. We're still going to be talking about this in 10, 20 years. We have two more questions.

And please, thank you everybody much for your donations. We're not accepting anymore after these two. I'm going to, first off, Peter, thank you very much. I never realized that Casey Jones, after working with the teenage mutant ninja turtles, became even more of a badass counterintelligence agent. Another great show. Yeah, you forgot. You're a hockey mask.

Didn't Casey Jones wear a hockey mask? Yeah, he had hockey stakes and baseball bats. Yeah. You call this and that over there, a family? And then right now, thank you very much. Why won't the FBI give over Seth Rich's laptop? Seth Rich? Oh, oh.

I don't know. There you have. I don't know. I wasn't involved. There you have it. Holden doesn't know. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, everybody.

We really appreciate your questions. And thanks, Holden. We really appreciate it. We'll see all of you guys on Friday with Mr. McCoy, Air Force 24th STS, special ops dude. He'll be here in studio. We're excited to talk to him, too. And so until then, we'll see you guys.