The Team House - How Bad Intelligence Helped Sell the Iraq War | Luis Rueda (throwback episode)

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

original air date - 01/19/24Former CIA officer Luis Rueda reflects on a career that took him from fleeing Castro’s Cuba to covert operations in Central America, Grenada, the drug war, Iraq, and eventually serving as Chief of Station in New Delhi. He also breaks down the failures behind the Iraq War, the reality of intelligence work, and what decades in the CIA taught him about power, policy, and counterintelligence.Support the show here:https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse00:00 - Start01:07 - Growing Up in Cuba and Fleeing After the Bay of Pigs03:50 - Being Recruited by the CIA07:07 - Training at the CIA’s Farm13:28 - The CIA and the Invasion of Grenada24:39 - CIA Operations in Central America39:44 - The CIA’s War on Drug Cartels50:17 - Cuban Intelligence Tries to Recruit Him55:14 - Eastern European Intelligence Operations After the Cold War1:01:23 - Running CIA Operations Against Iraq1:09:00 - Rumsfeld, General Franks and the Iraq War Plan1:18:09 - The Intelligence Behind Iraq’s WMD Claims1:28:51 - Chief of Station in New Delhi1:37:07 - India, China and the Fight for the Indian Ocean1:52:12 - Counterintelligence and Becoming Permanently ParanoidBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 254 of the Teamhouse. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. And our guest on tonight's show is former CIA officer Louis Roodaw. You guys missed the pre-conversation that we just had about the Roman Empire in ancient Greece. Maybe we'll get back into that one. But Lewis served as the head of operations in Iraq, Chief of Station in New Delhi, lots of assignments in Central and South America, was there for the invasion of Grenada. I mean, a very extensive career at Central Intelligence. And Lewis, thank you so much for joining us tonight. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. So I'm going to hit you up right off the bat.

Tell us about, you know, where you grew up, how you grew up, and how that took you towards the CIA. Ah, that's a story. I was born in Cuba. We had to flee immediately after the Bay of Pigs. and we ended up in Miami for a while. And there's a whole lot of detail. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt,

but when you say I had to, or your family had to flee right after the Bay of Pigs, it sounds as if maybe you had family members who were involved. Oh, yeah, my, my, I had a, my father and an uncle were involved in what passed for the anti-Castro underground on island in Cuba. and the whole Bay of Pigs invasion had been compromised from the get-go. My father and uncle were going home after work one day, and some woman from the town they lived in right outside Havana

came running up and said, don't go back into town. They were arresting all the men. They know what's coming. So they spent the night at the cemetery and then got refuge in the Brazilian embassy. After a few months, they let him go. and they landed in Mexico, and interestingly enough, at the foot of the stairs that they came off the plane was a State Department counselor officer from the U.S. Embassy and said, would you guys like to go to the United States? And they said, yes, and there we were. So get up there, moved to New York.

I grew up in an extremely anti-communist household, as you can imagine, with a sense that not only were we, engaged in a life or death struggle against communism, but we owed the U.S. a lot for having taken us in. I think every male member of the family volunteered for the military when they got asylum in the U.S. And so I grew up with that sense of I owe the country and we really are in a struggle that if we lose, we're screwed. So I thought of, you know, what I want to do.

And the agency offered that, and it also offered the ability to pick up and move every two or three years. You know, I get bored easily, and it's hard to stay at the same job or the same place for long. And the agency offered to, you know, a young guy, they offered adventure and excitement. So I joined. Where did, when did the idea? I mean, I understand the motivation now when you describe it. Like, when did this sort of come up on your radar? I take it when you were in college.

Did you interface with like an agency recruiter? That's very prescient of you. Yes, I had a Russian history professor who looked, there was a spit image of Teddy Roosevelt. And he sort of suggested and directed me toward, you know, I might be interested in this kind of work. this field. And I suspect he might have been spotting for the agency.

I don't know. I can't say. But he steered me. And in my senior year, I applied, knowing that the process took a while. Usually it takes about a year just to get in. And I remember having received a letter from the agency and it scheduled an appointment for me at the federal office building at that. time at the World Trade Center for an interview. And I went down there dutifully, you know, the interview was at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I got there early. And I couldn't find the

office. It was, you know, I had a number and I kept looking. There was no number. I couldn't find it for life for me. And I was now at this point I was late. And so in desperation, I walk into a nearby office, which is the wildlife licensing office where they give you the fishing license and all this kind of stuff. And I asked a lady behind the counter, I said, look, I'm looking for room, whatever it was, 221. She goes, oh, sweetheart, you want the CIA. Yeah, they're in the office between the broom closet and the bathroom. And I walked down there and there's this little door with a tiny little number and a peephole.

And that was my introduction to the agency. I went in there for the interview and the process took about a year before I got the okay. Was that part of the test to see whether or not you could find the job? I don't think it was because the guy was kind of annoyed that I was late. He had other people to talk to. But it's, you know, it's one of the things we sound about the agency. The quirkiness is sort of a nice way to put it. There's some oddities that seem to work across purposes to what they want to accomplish.

We talked to Rick Prado, also another Cuban-American, about this. What about sort of the staunch anti-communist, you know, the Cuban Americans? Was there was that represented pretty well in the agency? Yeah, there's, you know, it's probably an exaggeration, but there is a sort of quasi-Cuban mafia in the agency, specifically working Latin America. I knew a lot of people and who were Cubans and had joined the agency. again, you know, it's the, the Cuban exiles were staunchly anti-communists, true believers, you know, my father used to tell me, look, you know,

they got a name on our, our names on a list. And if the U.S. loses this struggle, we're all going to get lined up against the wall and shak. And so there was that deep belief that this was a life or death struggle. And a lot of them joined because they wanted, they wanted to fight back. Um, tell us about, you know, when you show up at the farm and your training, like, what year was this? And, you know, how, what was your thoughts about, you know, the farm and in that experience if you have any, any memories that stand out for you? Yeah. Well, memories. Jesus. You know, George Washington was, was president when I went down to the farm. It was still a farm. Yeah. It is, it's, it's, it's an interesting place. Yeah. It's a. It's a. Really, it's a very well-run program, I have to say.

And at one point in my career, I ran the program, the field tradecraft course. And as a student, I found the training logical and at times very challenging. It is meant to build up the start slow, get you acclimatized, get you used to it. And as it builds and builds, a pressure starts to mount until you near the end of the training. And you're thinking, you know, shit, I hope my job is not going to be like this for the rest of my life. Because you're, you know, it's like a lot of those kinds of training. You're functioning on four hours. It is, it is not designed to weed people out.

It is designed to train you. It does have, it does weed people out. But again, they don't, they're not there to harass. you and break you and do this, but they are there to test you. And all the instructors function under the understanding that sometime in the future, you will work for me or with me. And I have to understand that I want you there. Right.

And an interesting story, which is really has nothing to do with all this stuff, but it didn't put the farm. at the end of the farm, like most places, you put in your wish flipped and you put in the top three areas you want to go work for. Africa, Latin America, Europe, wherever. And they have a thing they call division night on a Sunday night. Each weekend is a different area division. Latin America division will come down one night, Europe division will come down. And they bring a team of people and they give you a dog and pony show.

and explain to you why you want to come and work for my division. And that's one of the things that left me an impression. I remember two presentations. I remember the presentation from Africa Division because they brought a team that had just returned from the field. Most of them looked like they had died in the field. They had suffered from dysentery, malaria, typhoid, whatever, and spent an in order. amount of time talking about how wonderful the Medevac facilities were and how they blew you out and they let you bring all this food because you couldn't get this food and you couldn't walk barefoot

because these weevils would go up your feet and all this kind of stuff and I thought never no thank you very much and then what was SE Soviet and East European Division night came and this gets into you know the the anti-communist thinking and the chief that division went down into the arena, the auditorium, and gave his presentation. And it was one sentence. He said, the CIA exists because the Soviet Union can wipe the United States off the faith of the earth in 20 minutes. Any questions? And that encapsulated in a nutshell while we were here.

It was, at least for us, we believed, it was in defense of the United States because we had a foe that can destroy us. And that left an incredible impression on me. And it's the CIA's job to prevent strategic surprise. Yes. And so, you know, that was it. That's where I wanted to go. I wound up in Latin America because we were fighting the wars in Central America. And like most places, they had a draft on.

They were allowed to take half the class. I mean, Tagusa Gapa, Honduras was a largest station in the world at the time. Wow. This is like 1980, five, six. Ah, yeah, let me see. I got an 83. So, yeah. Yeah, we were right.

MacDab in the middle, counterinsurgency in Guatemala and Salvador, insurgency in Nicaragua. And, you know, plus we had all the other programs in Afghanistan and Angola and everything. So the agency was hopping. And what they had done at the time, in addition to the operandi, course, which runs a little over four months, because the agency was managing so many covert action program, they felt that the case officers, the operations officers, should understand paramilitary operations. So they ran us through a four-month paramilitary course.

It was good and was bad. It was bad because it came after four months of being down there, and then they turn you around and bring you down to another four months and you just really don't want to go there. But it was great. Let me tell you. It was it was splendiferous. You got a couple jumps in. Huh?

You got a couple jumps in. Oh, yeah. And that's just that. They had an armory in the back. They had weapons from WW2 on. I got to fire MP 40s, car 98K. and every other kind of weapon you can imagine, light machine guns, heavy machine guns, motors, rocket launchers, we did air operations, maritime operations.

It was, you know, if it was for the fact that you were gone for another four months, it was a blast. But everybody got a lot of, a lot of paramilitary experience at the time. Well, I want to ask you about Central America, but before we get to that, I want to ask you about the 1983 invasion of Grenada in your role there. Yeah. I had been overseas at that point for three months. And I was home and I got a phone call one night about 10 o'clock from the secretary at the office asking if I can come in.

So I went in, fine, okay, showed up. And the chief was there and he handed me a ticket and said, you're flying out to Barbados. tomorrow, we're invading Grenada. Okay. My first invasion? Do I need to bring anything? Well, you know, I don't know, but bring a suit just in case. Okay.

I'll be a very well-dressed invader. I got there. Somebody met me at the airport. They took me in and said, okay, we're going to fly you in that night. And it was, I think it was emblematic of a lot of experiences I had with the agency. that it is small, inelegant, but gets the job done. And so these guys said, we're going to take you to the airport, we're going to fly you to Grenada.

And we're driving down toward the airport. And I noticed we missed the two exits to the airport. And I said, hey, we just missed the exits. He goes, no, no, no, no, we're not going there. And we pull up to the back of the airport by the chain link fence. And there's a hole cut into the fence. And he says, go through the hole. See that plane there with no lights on?

That's ours. Get on that plane. And I get on the plane and you take off. There's no lights. There's nothing totally blacked out. And we're flying over grenade. And the guy, the crew chief hands me NVGs and says, take a look. And remember, this is my first time.

I've never been in the military anything. And I put my NVGs on. I look down and tracers are going back and forth and bombs are going. and the U.S. is just blowing the shit out of the place. And I'm thinking, that's going to be wasted on this thing. And I spent the next two weeks debriefing, you know, exploitation, finding documents,

and things in whatever where they were located and living kind of rough in a house with 60 guys. But it was interesting. Did they tell you what your mission was, what they wanted, what information they wanted you to find? Or was it just go see what you can get? Yeah, it was a lot of the stuff is, it's on the fly. You know, this is clearly it's a military operation. The military has its mission and whatever.

and we're sort of there to support that and support U.S. policy. And U.S. policy was find whatever you can get your hands on. From the agency's point of view, there was a Cuban presence. So our goal was to find out anything we could about the Cubans. Who were they? What did they have? What their intentions were? What their capabilities had been.

We were trying to find out the details of what had happened. Because, you know, remember, they had a sort of. socialist slash communist revolution, and then they had had a counter-revolution where they killed Maurice Bishop, who was a prime minister, and were taking over. And we did not know whether that was a genuine internal movement, whether that had been directed by the Cubans or the Soviets. We need to find out what the intents. They were building this airport in Grenada that would have handled the largest Soviet transport aircraft. We wanted to know, was that indeed the intent? Were they going to use that as a launch point? So we were looking. We were looking for

stuff and whatever we get our hands on. Did you find any evidence of, you know, Soviet or malign, you know, communist influence in Grenada as you're doing your job out there? Yeah, you know, it's one of the things I have learned through my almost 30-year career. Just like being, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Maline is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, there was communist influence. Yes, the Cubans were there. The Grenadians wanted them to be there to help them because nobody else was going to help them.

So they thought, you know, they could help with this, that. We didn't find any hard evidence that the Russians or the Cubans were going to use Grenada as a jump-off point to some larger nefarious plot. They were sort of like, you know, reacting like the U.S. Hey, here's an opportunity. Let's take advantage of it. See what comes out of this. But there was no overarching plan. The Cuban presence, you know, everybody was, oh, there's a, you know, Cuban combat troops.

No, there really wasn't. There's about 35 Cuban military advisors because they were trying to build a Grenadian military. And the rest were Cuban construction units. now, you know, like all Cubans, they were trained as a paramilitary force, a reserve force. They all knew how to use an AK-47. That was about it. I talked to these guys and, you know, man, they were pure construction workers and wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there because they went in there. You know, I'm a bulldozer operator.

I pour concrete. I do this. Have you been trained in the military? Well, you know, I get two weeks a year how to fire an AK. Yeah, okay. So it wasn't the threat that it was brought out to be, but it was a potential long-term threat. And that's one of the things that we looked at. It's, you know, today, it's not a problem, but next week, you never know.

So how long had you been on the job at this point? I think six months. Six months? Yeah. How was it for you? Because I don't know if you had interacted much with the military prior to this, but how was it for you to be kind of thrown in this environment and now interfacing with the military wanting to debrief their you know their POW stuff like that yeah i did my first time really dealing with

the military uh i i've done that extensively throughout my career uh and i got to tell you it's it's it's it's great uh i've never had any problems dealing with the military uh it is the military it is the military speaks a very different language than we do. And they look at things slightly different. I mean, you know, their goal is to destroy things. Our goal is to sort of just not be seen and go and move around. But our objectives are pretty much the same. And they sort of go hand in hand.

I enjoyed it. I found the U.S. military to be professional, direct. Yeah, we all have our assholes, no doubt about it. We're human beings. But overall, it was great. They were very supportive of us. We did what they needed us to do for them. It was good. And while we're at it, please also consider supporting the show. There's a link to our Patreon down in the description. If you subscribe to us, you get all. these episodes ad-free, and we really appreciate all of our supporters out there. So, Lewis, I apologize for the interruption. I think I'd like to jump off if it's okay on sort of a larger conversation about your time in Central and South America. If we were to move a little further forward, or let's say from 83 into the mid to late 80s,

you know, it's controversial. The Contras were not a perfect partner force for the United States. But at the same time, Daniel Ortega was going to Moscow and receiving Soviet military aid, which got the United States involved in the conflict in Nicaragua. Could you tell us a little bit about your perspective and what you experienced while you were down there? Well, I'm still processing the breakfast for life free. Well, hook you up. Yeah, sure. You know, it's, I do think about Central America somewhat often nowadays.

And it's, it's one of those very difficult subjects. Yes, the Sandinistas and the Salvador and FMLN were communist. They were hell-bent on installing communist regimes. Yet at the same time, we were supporting regimes that were brutal and killed their own people and slaughtered and tortured. And trying to put myself in the shoes of everyday Central Americans. And it's one of the things I think that case officers try to do. is to understand all the different sides. And I say we agree with them,

but you have to understand what their thought process is. You're facing a choice of, I have a government now that is pretty much oppressing and trying to kill me versus the government is going to come in and oppress me and trying to kill me. And a lot of these people, you know, were taking the choice of, well, I'd rather get the ones that are coming in to kill me because I know these guys have killed me and my family and this kind of stuff and I want revenge.

We were not, we were not helping ourselves to drum up support against the FMLN or the St. Anistas by supporting regimes that would be no better than what was going to come in. and we were not offering the people a real choice. It was you can have hell or you can have hell. Take your choice. Instead of, you know, eventually we got around to giving Salvador some degree of democracy where they eventually had a free and fair election. But I think it would have gone better for us if we did that from the get-go.

There was, I'll give you an example of one of the things that I did admire about the other side. And they worked their insurgency much more different than we did. We took the Contras and we created this and we equipped them. We managed them. We did all this stuff. The Cubans were faced with five different insurricular. groups and the Cuban attitude and what they told them was, okay, here's two things. We will give you aid if you as an insurgent group can survive on your own for two years.

And that way what they were doing is this becomes a viable group. It's not something we're imposing. They can survive. They're viable, so we'll support them. And two, we will support you if you join the umbrella organization. If you don't, we'll make sure you don't get you starved of everything and we'll crush you. But if you come into the umbrella, you have survived, then we'll help you. And they created, they helped create viable, sustainable organizations.

We created groups that could not survive without us. And who had a hard time developing the support among the population because they were, you know, they were viewed as, as alien. These guys, these American tools. They had bourgeois leadership that was hanging out in Miami, right? Exactly. And it's not like the FMLN leadership was any better. They're all, you know, sitting in Mexico or Havana and not living hard.

But the fact that they have sustained themselves over time and they had to live among the people, gave them a degree of cachet among the population, which made it easier for them and harder for us. What can you tell us about your own experiences down there? I mean, you mentioned you did a couple trips down to Guatemala. I was assigned. I did Guatemala for about five years. Yeah. You know, it's, I like the country.

I enjoyed my time there. I have to say, you know, there's a point where you start to realize you are supporting a horrendously brutal regime. I got to tell you, there was part of Guatemala, and this was before I got there was a story I had been told by Guatemalans. There was an insurgency operating in the Patan, which is one of the regions in Guatemala. And the zone commander in the Patin had offered a bounty, $50, which was a lot of money. then in Guatemala, or each pair of ears belonging to gorillas that you brought back. They brought back 3,000 pairs of ears. The insurgent group was estimated at 150.

And you have to ask yourself, what are we doing? Right. Yeah. Right. We are not going to win these people over. And we're, you know, you can stand in, in the halls of. Congress and spout Jefferson and democracy and shit, but you get down there, and that's not what's going on. And the people know that. They may be uneducated peasants, but you can't fool

them. They see exactly what's going on. And you start looking and say, this is a no-win situation for us. We have chosen the wrong side. I sense, and correct me if I'm wrong, Lewis, that your, excuse me, your heritage is, you know, being a devout anti-communist a little bit conflicting with your values as an American. And I think that, and I mean, I want you to hear your opinion, but I mean, I think that conflict there really is, you know, defines the nature of our presence in Central America at the time, this conflict between these two values. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, it's, I can be as ruthless as amoral as the next guy. And if I look at it coldly, leaving those issues aside, it strikes me as a no-win situation.

Yeah. And we are digging a hole for ourselves that we don't need to dig and we shouldn't be in. If you bring the moral aspects in it, it's like, okay, you know, it's something that the U.S. struggled with for decades. Right. Now, at the end of the day, I believe for all the faults we have, and we have many, the fact that the U.S. exists is one of the reasons this world hasn't turned into a bigger pile of shit than it is now. And, you know, I'll tell you, I'll tell you a story. There was two Egyptian journalists talking when the U.S. invaded Iraq and one turned to the other and said, you know, my God, what are going to do?

Americans are just, they're out of control. They're bombing everywhere. They're invading everywhere. What do we do? And the other one turns out we do what we always do. We wait till the Americans fix themselves. And for me, that's always been the thing. Eventually, we will look and say, okay, this is not, this is not the way to go. And we try to do, we try to do better. Unlike a lot of other countries where they sit there and look at the, look at the Russians and the Ukraine, they're just going to dig themselves in and they're never just going to walk away. we'll look and say, okay, this is not the right way to go. But that haven't been said, you know, we have chosen sides in battles where you clearly look and say, this is a mistake.

This is not what we are supposed to stand for. And this is not what's going to give us the victory that we need to stop the other side. So, yeah, there's a conflict. And I think anybody who has a shred of, well, has a moral compass will say, yeah, okay, I'll do what I got to do. But this is not the right way to go. How did you feel when the elections were held in Nicaragua? I think it was 1989 when the Sandinistas lost. Did you see that as a victory? Or did you, I mean, what was your view of that? Yeah, it was a short-term tactical victory. I tend to look at things because I did study history and I tend to look at things long-term. And I don't think the history and the victory of Central America has been written yet.

But I saw the elections where the San Anisters were thrown out as a victory. But now we're faced with the same thing. The San Anisters are in power. The San Anisters are not going to let go of power. and unless something gets done, you know, they're going to stay in power for as long as they can. And you could see the whole thing repeating itself. And eventually it'll be another revolution and someone will try to house them.

And, you know, depending on who's in the White House at the time, you know, do we get involved? Do we not get involved? Do we let it go? It's just a cycle. It's a history of personal fiefdoms. And, you know, I've had people tell me to this day, if you go down there and you buy off the right general, you can do whatever you want. Oh, yeah.

In Guatemala, there were 300 families that controlled the country. They owned all the businesses. You had to deal with them. They owned the land. They owned the farms. And with these people, they funded everything. And between them and the 20 or 30 generals who ran the military, that was it. That was a power structure.

Nobody else had to say in what happened. You know, the CIA gets hate sometimes, along with like special forces working with indigenous and the sense of like the Contras, you know, it's promoted as the CIA run death squads. But, you know, would you say that America goes into these situations sort of with the same repeating sort of naivete? You know, that they see a strategic purpose and they imagine that the people that are, against the communists, the bad guys, the terrorists, the bad guys, whoever it is, are by the very nature going to be the good guys. And that's not always the case.

Yeah. That's, you know, that's a very good question. And I could do an entire, entire show on that issue. You know, one of the problems, yeah, we are naive and we are simplistic in our views. Like, as you pointed out, communist bad. anybody against them good no not no there's it's it's it's we like black and white we like the movie high noon and gary cooper walking down the street and they're the bad guy life isn't like that right and it is it is messy it is dark uh there are there are usually other choices

but we tend to pick the easiest choice but these guys here they're anti-communists they're in charge, let's go with them. And it's easier because despite the fact that we're democracy, it's a mess dealing with democracy. Holy shit. I mean, you know, you got one policy going. The next year there's an election.

The policy changes in who's up, who's down, this kind of. Here we've got a dictator and that ain't going to change. And it makes it easier for U.S. policy. But again, that's not necessarily the right way to do it. to your comment about, you know, CIA-funded death squads and stuff,

it's one of my pet peeves, you know, it's because that idea, you know, oh, the CIA overthrew this government, the CIA did that, is only partially correct. The more accurate statement is the U.S. of A over through that government. The CIA doesn't run around sitting there, you know, we're sitting there on a Friday afternoon, having a few drinks and said, hey, let's overthrow the government. At the Vienna Inn. Right. Yeah, exactly.

It comes down from the White House, and they said, we don't like this. I mean, Chile's a great example. The White House came and said, we don't like these guys. And the agency said, yeah, you want to come after that. We think it's a bad idea. What comes after them is going to be worse. And they said, we don't care. We want these guys.

We want Ayenda and his crew. Okay. You know, at the end of the day, We salute and we go do the job. But it's not a, you know, the CIA executes it, but it's not the CIA's policy. It is the White House policy. It is a U.S. government policy. And at the end of the day, which is something I always say, which probably does not make me popular, it's the American people's fault.

We live in a democracy. You chose these guys. This is what they did. Right. You don't like it. Get off your ass and get them out. you know it's it's we as a people bear a degree of responsibility and representative democracy right and this was a topic that would rear its head many years later for you in Iraq yeah but we'll get to

that um but after after Guatemala I mean you had some other interesting assignments in like South America I was wondering if you if you could talk a little bit about that oh yeah after you know after the the the central American wars uh narcotics reared its ugly head i mean it's always been there but it becomes uh the flavor of the month and it's one of the things i've i've noticed uh that a lot of this stuff is driven by domestic politics sure and and and so if if there's you know some domestic political gain to be had or there's a problem in the states it'll eventually start making its way overseas. And that's what happened with narcotics. And then the U.S. government, including the agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, DEA, engaged in decades-long war against narcotics cartels.

And I spent a lot of time doing that in South America and Central America, because everything, once the Central American wars were over, everything shifted towards. counter narcotics like most government agencies organizations private sector stuff everything moves where the money is and there was money in counter-arcotics they were dumping billions and everybody got money everybody got directed to do this and so huge programs were created and everybody chased the price for me Anonarcotics was the most frustrating job I've ever had. You know, it is, it's a proverbial whackamol. For every, every narcotics organization, you dismantle and guys put in jail,

there's a hundred people waiting to take their place. There's nothing you can do in that regard. They're willing to die for that kind of money. Right. cartels when I was there, and this was a long time, this was, oh, shit, 30 years ago, cartels were making profits of $1 billion a year each. They couldn't process the money. They had rooms, and I'm talking rooms, stacked ceiling to floor, wall to wall with cash.

They just couldn't launder the money fast enough. I went I went to a DA conference and they had a narcotics financier who had turned state's evidence and witnessed protection and the whole thing. And he gave a talk. And it was the most scary thing I've ever heard. He said, for you to make a dent in our finances, you have to interdict 95% of the drugs coming into. the U.S. Wow. That's when we stop making,

when we stop making a profit, 95%. We were interdicting 5%. And, you know, he said, what you guys sees, you seize two tons here, five tons,

20 tons, that's spoilage. That's just the cost of doing business. Wow. And, you know, I was in Bolivia,

and you can buy a kilo of pure cocaine, hydrochloride, pure cocaine for $900 a kilo. It was selling in New York for $18,000 a kilo at the time. Just, I'm not good at math. Just do the markup. That's a profit. And that's pure. If you cut that thing two or three times, oh my God. So it's, it's another one of these things that frustrates me is, you know, when the politicians talk about, well, we're going to go in and we're going to bomb Mexico. We're going to do this. We're going to send. It's like, guys, we have been doing this for decades. The war on drugs that was fought very quietly in Latin America was no, there was no gloves on. I mean, we, it was, you go and do it. And, you know, you watch the movie Sicario.

It's like, yeah, I lived that. That's what we were doing. And it had zero impact on the drug trade because you're not attacking the root causes. The consumption in the United States. the movement of weapons from the U.S. into Mexico and the laundering of money in U.S. banks who are making a fortune off this money. And the poverty in the countries where this starts.

Yeah. You know, a cop in Mexico makes, I don't know, $250 a month. Traffickers show up and say, yeah, I'll give you $5,000 a month. How can you compete with that? Right, right. I mean, I was at a country team meeting

where AID, the Agency for Nashville Development, was talking about the alternative crop program and how they were going to help the farmers who grew coca. Going to grow corn or whatever. Yeah, and change it into, they're going to make them strawberries. And the reality of life was, you know, picking strawberries, growing strawberries,

a backbreaking labor-intensive work. And at the end of it, they're getting about $5 a kilo or something. I mean, I'm not sure what the numbers are, but it's $5 a kilo. Cocaine, the coca leaf, basically grows wild. You don't have to do much. You plant it and you sit back and let it grow. It doesn't require a lot of tending.

It has two to three growing seasons a year, and you're going to get $500 for the kilo of the leaf. again, we're picking the wrong fight here. You're not going to get them. I want you to work harder and make less money. Right. Right, right. And it was funny to see that repeated in Afghanistan with Poppy Fields. Yeah.

You know, oh, we'll have them plant something other than poppy. It's like they're not going to plant something other than poppy. Yeah. No. Why? They're not stupid. You can't, I mean, which American can you go to and say, hey, I want you to work harder and make less money? Right.

Nobody's going to buy that deal. Right. Expect them to do it? No, it's, you know, you got, you got with the problem a different way, because all we're going to do is get stuck in another war. So you must have been down there during like the bad old days of the Pablo Escobar and all that. I mean, any, any war stories from that time that you can share? Uh, yeah. I do have some and I can't share them.

I would get in serious trouble. If you leave out names in specific locations, it's okay. No, because, no, it's bad stuff. So that'll be some post-show spice just for us, Jack. Yeah, I'll tell you offline. And I'm trying. There's a lot of stuff. I'll tell you, I'll tell you one story, which is not, but it shows you the scope of the problem.

No names, no countries. But a representative of trafficking cartel went to the office, sought an appointment, and got an appointment with the Attorney General of the country and came into the office. And he had a suitcase. And he put the suitcase on the guy's desks, opened it up, and said, here are $5 million. It is yours if you listen to our offer. You don't have to do anything. Just listen what I want to tell you.

And a guy just looked and, you know, closed the suitcase and put it under his desk and said, go ahead. And they said, we will give you $18 million a month if you get the police to the other way at certain times, on certain dates. That attorney general stayed in office for one year and then bought a mansion in a unnamed European country and moved there after that year. Good work if you can get it. Yeah. I'd sell my principles probably for $18 million a month. Like, uh, just kidding China. You know what with $200 million. Yeah. Well, I mean, I know this is like a sensitive question, uh, you know, with agency people getting pitched. But I mean, with a drug cartels and the kind of money that you explained. I mean, was there any time where they tried to buy you off? No. Um, damn it. I'll tell you this. It's, it's one of the things that has amazing. me throughout the years. I mean, we have, we have problems and we'll have problem children in

the ages. Sure, sure. But I've never seen or heard of anybody in the agency being bought by narcotics cartels. We've, we've been bought by the Russians, we've been bought by the Chinese, but nobody has succumbed to the cartels. And that's a hell of a lot more money. than Russian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for the life of me, I don't know. I used to, when I was in headquarters, I used to sit on camera, the name. I think we used to call the personnel evaluation board.

And that's the board that meets as the final say on whether you get fired or not and referred to the Justice Department. And never did I see anybody come in for that kind of thing. Never have I heard of an operation being compromised because somebody got bought by the narcotics traffickers. Before we move on from Central South America, there was one more question I wanted to ask about your Cuban heritage, but it sounds like they didn't actually have you work in Cuba. and I was just interested in did you ever touch Cuban operations or you know go to the island or

no no I never went to the island interestingly enough I was pitched by the Cubans oh really yeah when I was in I was in Guatemala there are no Cubans in Guatemala they take a dim view of communists but my father who has the same name or had the same name

as I did received the letter. He was living in New York, Staten Island, and he received the letter from the Cubans. They were thinking he was me. And it basically gave a pitch where they said, look, you know, after Aldrich Ames, the agency is looking at foreign-born officers and looking at Cubans. Your career is going to take a hit. You're going to have a problem. Yadda. yada yada next time you're out you know we'd like you to reach out and talk to us and this kind of stuff uh i found that about this is my father called me on the phone and and and was uh virtually incoherent the the the only words i can understand was a stream of obscenities because he's so pissed

yeah oh god was he pissed i said just just calm calm down this happens all the time uh send me the letter and then i went back to to headquarters said look this has happened yada yada yada and they said yeah we've about eight or ten of these things happened since Ames was arrested and the Cubans are making an effort to use that to try to recruit our people. But other than that, I have, you know, in some places there are Cubans and you do get involved in my first tour I was involved in some Cuban operations. But I didn't do a lot of that. It just, it didn't interest me and was probably a good thing because those Cuban operations were disaster that the agency ran. I've been told that DGI is particularly sinister.

I don't know about sinister, but boy, they're good. They are really good. And they are good because of, I think, two main reasons. They are great risk takers. Very creative, very imaginative, will take risk that we would not do. and they have, for all intents and purposes, one target, the United States. And it makes life easier when all you do is focus on one country, one target instead of 30, 40, 100, 150 different countries. And they become experts.

They understand. They know. They are formidable organization. They're very good. And they have, they handed our lunch to us. Do you think that Cuba eventually learned the lesson, their lesson about, like, pitching Cuban, you know, officers with the Cuban heritage?

I mean, they got Anna Montes, who was not Cuban. She was Spanish, right? I think Spanish. She's Puerto Rican. Puerto Rican. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the problem that Cubans have faced is that the first and second

tranche of Cuban exiles are. pretty fanatically anti-communist. Yeah, right. Again, I'm not trying to cast aspersions on anybody, but you'll have, you know, those memories, those feelings start to die out over time. Right. I mean, you saw it with people like Ames and Hansen. Right.

You know, that whole thing, when the wall came down in the Soviet clubs, they started to lose that inherent anti-Russian communist soviet attitude and it's like well yeah shit you know we money is money and you make money uh i think you know you could see you know the next generation of cubans lose that mean they're all going to run off and work for the cubans but that that intensity of feeling is not going to be there because the they were born here they grew up here they don't they don't have that sense of we lost everything uh you know i had family members in jail, all this kind of stuff. You know, that goes just the way it's gone.

Hell. I mean, you know, we've got politicians who are siding with the Russians. When you start losing that sense, it's going to make it easier. Right. Right. And after this period of your career, you moved on to Eastern Europe? Yeah, I went, I did, you know, I got. I got tired of Latin America.

So I, I, I, it's, you sort of, you sort of dealing with similar issues all the time. I got, I got tired of counter-ricotics because that just,

it wasn't, you know, you have successes, but in the big scheme of, of things, a big strategic picture, you had no success. They were all tactical.

You know, you were, you were winning battles and losing the war. So I, I went to the farm, uh, and eventually was, running the the trade craft course

that was sort of I requested that for you know it was for me it was a reward you know you lived on a really nice base for for three years I had I didn't even know where my house keys were because you never bothered locking the door your commute to work is five minutes

I used to bitch when I had two cars in front of me I thought my God rush out It's, you know, it was really nice. And then I got offered a job up in Washington to do East European operations. That was interesting in that it came at a time the Soviet unit had died out. And the East European countries were all pushing to join NATO. One of the tactics they were using to gain. entry into NATO was a very close intelligence cooperation with the U.S.

And again, you know, can't discuss it, but they would do things for us that we desperately needed to do that we couldn't do ourselves in the hopes, successful, that they could use that to get into NATO. Yeah. A certain country that's very helpful today with Ukraine. Yeah. And there's a lot of countries that were helpful in a lot of different places. And I really, I enjoyed working with the, with the East Europeans.

They were good. They were very professional. Some of those services, you know, clearly trained by the KGB. They were top-notch, top-tier. And I still remember the Russians were bitching, I guess, to the polls, how they could side with the West and this kind of stuff. and the foreign minister just turned to them and said, we are the worst.

And, you know, for me, that was the final nail in the coffin. Of the Cold War. Yeah. We are not with you. We're over there. And that was interesting. And then I got, I was offered a job, which was probably one of the best jobs I had in the agency.

And it was, it was scut work. I was, I was made executive assistance to the deputy director. And what that is is it's a glorified gopher job. You're there at the deputy director's beck and call. You get him ready for meetings at the White House. Make sure he gets briefings.

You handle liaison visits, trips and everything. And the beauty of it is you saw everything. You saw the entire U.S. intelligence community you saw how U.S. policy is made. You saw how the White House functions, how the different departments function. I mean, I was sitting in my desk one day and somebody drops a piece of paper on it on the desk.

And it's the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. All the weapons, all the warheads, where they are, what they're, you're looking like, oh, my God, this is amazing. And you saw all this stuff because you had to, you know, you had to prepare the deputy directorialist, of stuff and you learn so much. You learn bureaucratic stuff, but at that stage in my career, you know, there's a, there's a acceptable assumption that I know my trade as an operations officer. I know how to recruit. I know how to handle. I know how to produce intelligence. I

know how to run covert action. I know this stuff. Now you're being taught a different skill set. And yes, they're bureaucratic skill set. But when you start moving your way up the chain, they're looking for a different skill say. You know, if you as a senior officer have to go out and recruit sources, well, you know, the agency is destroyed. That's what other people do. Your job is to motivate those people, guide them to recruit, to represent the agency, to manage resources, people, money, all this kind of stuff. And that job was, it was a year-long job. It was, you know, again, long hours, six in a morning until about eight or nine at night.

But it was an incredible learning experience. I learned tons of stuff. The agency, the DO, I should say, not the rest of the year, the DO doesn't really have a lot, and that's for those out there don't know, Directorate of Operations, doesn't have a lot of leadership training. It's one of the things I've always admired about the military. You know, the military has got one-third. of the force doing the job, one third refitting, and the other third preparing. And that includes

going off to war colleges, going off to this assignment, that assignment to prepare you for bigger pictures. We don't do that. We're just always going overseas, go overseas, go to see. Now, that's great, but it doesn't create a core of senior leaders who have experienced doing that. This job gives you that kind of experience. It's sort of a training course. And from, that, then I slid into Chief of Iraq Operations. Talk to us about, you know, kind of the run-up to that. I mean, 2003, the invasion happens and sort of like, where are you? And what's that lead up to you going to Iraq? Well, I was, I was, I got to I.O.G, Iraq operations group in 2001. And it was obvious from, from the get-go that the incoming Bush administration was serious. about Iraq.

Under Clinton, they'd probably have an Iraq meeting once a month. Under Bush, they were having two to three meetings a week. So, clearly that was, you know, something was going to happen there.

And I got to Iraq operations, and the task became, you need to develop a corporate action program to support regime change in Iraq. that was an experience in of itself. I mean,

I had plenty of experience in covert action at all different levels. But to be handed a program, to develop a program, when there wasn't anything there to build a program on, right, with the serious test. I mean, you know, people have a sort of a semi-fals image of what the agency does from Hollywoods and books and stuff. And you flip a switch and you've got all these guys all over the place and are doing this

and are doing that and they're blowing this up. They're shooting it. It doesn't work that way. And if you want to have a successful program, there has to be something there that you build on. There has to be people. There has to be opposition groups. If you have to build them from whole cloth, you're going to have problems.

There have to be people there willing to do the job. with you. I had I had a senior officer tell me he said you know the one piece of advice I have with you is if you have to work with these people work with Patriots don't work with people who there for money or personal power work with people who want to do right for their country and finding people like that was difficult right. Yeah it's interesting because you mentioned how you know working with the Contra's and the leadership was elsewhere. Here You know, I don't know when it was decided, but it was Chalabi, right? A guy who lived in Virginia and said he had all these contacts.

I lived in London most of the time. London, London, okay. But how does that, so somebody who had previously had on the show said that there were people in the administration, like long-term administration, you know, the bureaucrats, there were people who had been gunning for Iraq for a very long time. And Bush was the right person to receive that message. Yeah. Like, how were they, when they're asking you to, you know, come up with plans for this regime change, I'm sure that there was pushback from your own analyst, from State Department, from people who knew, like, what was it supposed to be the counterbalance to Iran if Saddam went?

Yeah. Let me tell you, I was, for a very long time as I was a red-headed stepchild. people hated me, didn't want to see me, and when they saw me coming, it was painful. You had, you got to remember, at the time we started

the Iraq program, we had just had 9-11, and the agency, the DO, was in full counterterrorism swing. The agency is not a big organization, and the Directorate of Operations

is not a big organization. In terms, at that time, I don't know what it's like now. Case officers worldwide and in headquarters numbered less than the Ranger Regiment would. And that's what we had to do everything we had to do from, you know, the latest coup in Bangi to, you know, Chinese and North Korean missile tests and all this kind of stuff. and CTC, the counterterrorism center, put a strain on the system when they basically said, we're going to increase by three to four fold what we have here.

And the agency was like, we don't have them. They physically don't exist. Right. And they were pulling officers, closing stations, and this huge stress hit the system. And then Iraq shows up and says, oh, by the way, we need to do more. Right. And it was just like, oh, it's just physically impossible. So there was a lot of pushback from my own people in the building.

There were elements within the analytical community that said this is probably not a good idea. You know, the sense the analysts had was, and incorrectly so, you know, Saddam is a pain. Right. But he's not a direct threat to the U.S. He's not going to attack the U.S. He's a problem in the region, but he's a problem. He's not a threat. Right.

The military, the regular military is pretty much rotted from the inside. He doesn't have the capability anymore to launch a major invasion of any other country. He could harass, he can attack and do this kind of stuff. At most, he's a regional annoyance. and probably not worth a war. But at the same time, you had elements, as you pointed out, they were long-term elements that a lot of them, I would say,

were political guys who came in and out of government. That top-tier who are political appointees, but who have done multiple tours of duty in the Pentagon, in the white, House, you know, you know, Cheney's a great example. He had done this. Rumssel is the same way. They had been in the White House. They had been in the Pentagon and back and forth. And you had these guys who were hell-bent on, you know, we got to finish the job. We started in the first Gulf War. Right. And you had a group of neocons, especially people on the outside

of the Pentagon who were advisors to the Secretary of Defense and to the Vice President, who kept saying, touting the, we are now in a unipolar world. We're the top dog. And we have to, we have to show, we want to demonstrate that we can act unilaterally in a light, efficient, rapid manner and bring about change that we want.

And we pick a rock. It's Beaver dreams. Yeah. H.W. Bush did it in the Gulf War to show that. you could build this global coalition. But, I mean, after 9-11, I mean, for the reasons that you just laid out, I mean, it's completely unnecessary. Yeah.

And, you know, they weren't even concerned about building coalition. Their attitude was, we can do this by ourselves. I was at a meeting at CENTCOM with General Franks. And Rumsfeld had called on the phone. And I could only hear one part of the conversation, but they were going back and four on on the plan. And Franks had been able to strip the thing down to 250,000 troops. And, you know, you could hear from his tone that he was getting a lot of pushback.

And he eventually hung up and said, we are at 140,000. That's what the secretary wants. That's where his secretary is going to get. And you can see them, you know, we have a theory. We have an idea and we're going to prove it. And we're going to test it out here. Right. And it gets to some of the subsequent problems.

I'll give you an example. We had, the agency had gotten in touch with many, many, many of the major unit commanders in the Iraqi army. And we said, you know, this shit's going to happen. You don't want to be in the way. And they all say, okay, fine, we're going to surrender. But, A, we're not going to surrender until we see U.S. troops. because you know you did that to us last time and we got hosed so when the u.s troops show up we're going to surrender well the the the unintended consequence was as as sendcom explained we have 140,000 troops

that leaves us one MP unit and their sole job is to keep the traffic flowing from Kuwait to bagdad we can't take prisoners and so the the the the the military military launched a leaflet campaign before the invasion telling people, go home. Put your civvies on and go home. Because there's no facilities. We can't take prison. We don't have enough guys to do prisons. We got enough to punch our way up to Baghdad. That meant that 450,000 Iraqi guys put on civilian uniforms and their AKs with them. Right. It's ideological beliefs just completely overwhelming any sort of strategic rationality.

And like just wishful thinking and not good planning. Like you know, like I said, they're very smart analysts both in the State Department and the agency and the military. And you know, you have all these soldiers who why don't you drop pamphlets and say

remain in place, we're going to take over your pay. You know, like don't like stay in your barracks, don't come out, but we'll take over your pay. But this whole thing we went through with debathification. Like, it's almost like nobody thought this through or they did or, or they did think it through like smart people thought it through and then I don't know like grammar or who, whoever

looked at it. You know, God, it was, look, you're right. And it's one of the one of the things that is at least in my profession, the most dangerous is wishful thinking. Yeah. If I do A, then B is going to happen. The other guy's thinking, no, no, no, C is going to happen. No, no, B is going to have.

And there's a lot of wishful thinking. There was a lot of good advice that the powers in charge decided not to accept. The debathiccate, you know, they were told time and time again. The Army, I mean, the agency went and said, The Army is not a problem. Right. The Army right now exists, a regular Army, not the Republican Guard. The Army exists as a social welfare program.

You got 450,000 guys plus families, plus people who depend on them, who get a salary and they go do their stuff. You know, two, three million people depend on that. Don't disband them. Take them and put them on the borders as a border police force. Pay them a salary. Have them guard the borders. keep all the Iranians out and all this stuff. And I was at a meeting at the White House, and Bush asked,

how many Bathies are there? I said, oh, about 70,000. And he said, well, how many we've got to take care of? And I said, it's only about 5,000 or so who really are hardcore believers. The rest of them is like the Communist Party. You want to be a teacher? You got to be a party member. You want to be a copy?

You got to be a party member. You want to run the oil fields, party member. They don't give a shit. All they want is. a job. So all you got to do is deal with 5,000. Well, what do they do? Get rid of all 70,000. Right. Now you got 450,000

unemployed soldiers, 70,000 unemployed bathies, which meant that the teachers were all fired, which meant that you had thousands of teenagers with nothing to do, and you know what happens then. Right.

And it'll all turn to shit very quickly. And all the public works, like every functioning part of government, was like suddenly out. Yeah. Do you, do you, I mean, you may not want to throw shade or spill the tea, but were, were there specific people who were responsible for these decisions that went against all logic? Yes. Oh, yes.

I mean, yeah. For your listeners, I, you know, I, I, I would refer you to. There's a whole bunch of books out on a rack that does name. names and identify the people. But there was a coterie of senior people who were

most definitely responsible for the mess that came after. They were handed a document that said, you shouldn't do this, this, this, and this because it will lead to that. And they took that document

literally and said, we're going to do this, this, this, and this. And then they're stunned. I mean, I went, again, I was in the sit room. No names mentioned. But some senior officials in the Pentagon were briefing the president on the day after. What are we going to do with Iraq?

Right. And the first slide that goes up is the U.S. occupation of Nazi Germany in 45. And based on that, they start their president. And it was so bad that the secretary defense had to stop it and say, okay, we're not ready, Mr. President. We'll get back to you. And clearly they had no idea what they're doing. And you said, the analysts were saying you can't use Nazi Germany as a template for Iraq. Right.

Right. And there was no plan. Literally there was no plan. It was it'll fix itself. And that gets to your mention of challenge. Chalabi. Chalabi was a very articulate, very poised, westernized Iraq. He wore $4,000 suits, tailor-made in Savile Row in London, spoke excellent English, and had snowed all these senior officials. And his argument was it's going to be okay because I'm going to be welcomed. My guys will

be there. We'll fix everything for you. And it gets that wishful thinking. It's going to be fine. This is what's going to happen. And they bought it. It's going to happen. Was there any intelligence supporting that? Or did he just woo like the right politicians and make them believe it? There was no intelligence supporting that. You know, we told them. And they, senior officials in the Pentagon hated us because we went in there. And they hated the State Department because we said, Chalaby's a con man. Chalabee doesn't have anything. All the exiles have been exiles for 30 years.

They have no following inside Iraq. Yeah. We have no infrastructure, no capability, no organizations. They can't deliver on anything. And we're going to, it's going to have. go into these hands and we're going to have to deal with it. Not them. It's not going to get fixed. Nobody listened. Chalabi, excuse me, Chalabi worked his magic on him. Yeah. And they bought it. They believed it. He's going to fix it. And he got there and he's a total outsider with like nobody.

Yeah. So tell us about your your experience landing in Baghdad and running ops. Let's do this real quick. Because you have the Iraq operations group started, you know, you start there in 2001. How did we get to WMD's and Yellowcake? It's a good question. I don't know. It's not a cop-out. And back to our earlier discussion, I'm going to paraphrase Julius Caesar. Iraq was divided into three parts. The counterterrorism center handled Iraq counterterrorism issues. Counterproliferation Division, CP, Iraq, handled WMD and then everything else in the COVID action fell to a rock operations group. I was on, I mean, I was on the periphery because I would sit in some of the briefings.

But the best I can assess is there were no reliable human sources on Iraq WMD. Most of what we had came from liaison. services, you know, Germans, Brits, Italians, whoever. I mean, I don't know. I'm just rattling off names. I don't know if they provided anything. Technical means. And as the analyst explained it, pretty much a formula. In the first Gulf War, Iraq had so many chemical weapons. So many were decommissioned after. And this much is left. So this is what they have, chemical weapons. Then there was a whole host, and one of the problems you face in any kind of intelligence operation is, especially when it starts to be big like this and people smell money in the air is you get a lot of fabricators. People who will make up shit and tell you stuff in return for money. They say, oh, we can get some money.

The yellow cake thing came out of, if I understand it correctly, and I could be wrong, came out of Nigeria, I think it was, or Niger. I'm not sure which, the Iraqis were buying the stuff. But it was not very well sourced, and it was weak, but we had elements of the administration who would latch on to anything. Right, right. that would make their case. So I'll give you an example. I was sitting in my office in CIA headquarters, and a message came in from one of our stations saying

that this guy, this Iraqi, had volunteered, walked into the embassy and said he had information from the head of Iraqi intelligence who wanted to cooperate with us. So I had him do a check. And by the time the information on this guy came back to me, I had a senior agency officer, we won't name names, standing in front of me saying, the vice president wants you to send somebody to meet this guy because he has valuable information. And somehow he had gotten this information. I don't know how we got it, probably from the briefer. And I said, well, we ran checks on this guy.

The CIA terminated him for being a fabricator. The British terminated him for being a fabricator. The Austrians terminated him for being a fabricator. I think he's a fabricator. And I think the guys here with a load of bullshit just to get some money. And they kept insisting you got to meet the guys. I'm not going to waste somebody's time flying out there, talking to a guy who's lying to us. and then putting the information out knowing it's a lie.

And I said, you know, you guys pay me for my expertise and my experience. And when three different intelligence services terminate somebody for being a fabricator, I don't want to have to do it a fourth time. I look like an idiot. And boy, did I get a load of shit? You were not their buddy after that. No. And, you know, they tried to send somebody else out there.

And we had a lot of this stuff where there was badly sourced information or suspect fabricators. And they kept trying to force us. We met a guy who claimed to be an Iraqi nuclear physicist. And we thought, now, this guy's a fabricator. I said, no. Why do you think he's a fabricator? because Chalabee's people have directed us toward him. So we had to send people out.

So we had to send people out. This came out from the White House. So we sent people out to debrief the guy. And they were doing the debriefing, and the guy was clearly nervous because he kept going to the bathroom all the time. We were 15 minutes. He had a pee. Fortunately, we had an analyst there who was a nuclear physicist.

and the guy went to the bathroom. It's one of those old-fashioned doors. We had the glass paint on top. And the analyst stood in the chair and looked inside the bathroom. And the guy was pulling his sleeve out and reading all the notes that he had written on his arm. And that's where he was getting his information from. And he came back and he says, guy's nice. He's not a physicist.

He doesn't know what he's talking about. I ask him two or three questions. He doesn't understand. And the White House had the defense intelligence agency Parole the guy into the U.S. To provide additional debriefing information. We said this guy's in it. This stuff is like, I'll be honest, Lewis,

it's like mildly traumatic to hear because, you know, I served in Iraq and the Army. Dave served, thousands of American soldiers served a lot. son served in Iraq in the army. A lot did not come home. Yeah. And to hear that, you know, our troops were sent under such dubious circumstances. It is difficult. It is difficult to process. It is incredibly difficult to process. It is, you know, again, I, it's one of the things I struggle with. you can make you can make a logical argument that the neocons made that you know we're trying to to create a better rock and and you know saddam was was a savage and his sons were savages

and the world is better off without them but the end result is is we left a much more unstable middle east yeah yeah we created a lot more terrorist more insurgency, we lost a lot of goodwill that we obtained after 9-11. And I have a friend who, you know, he worked with me on a rock and he's going to be pissed about this stuff. But because he's a believer in getting rid of Saddam. But we sent a lot of American men and women into a situation they didn't have to be in. Yeah. You know, my son was in Iraq and I spent a year, I couldn't even watch the news.

Right. Because I, you know, and he lost friends. And I understand that at the end of the day, the soldiers fight for each other. Yeah. And that's what they're there for, to make sure the guy next to him doesn't get killed, that they have their back. And it's that bond and that whole flag shit and whatever. It's nice.

And the big picture is nice. But at the end of the day, you fight for your buddy. And that's the only saving grace I have toward this whole Iraq thing. You know, people, people who never served their country in that capacity had no qualms about sending men and women into this, this shitstorm for, you know, it's probably bogus is too strong a word, but it's, you know, it's a cause you look like it's not necessary. Yeah. Yeah.

And Congress wasn't finished. Yeah, I'm sorry. Congress wasn't that divided on this either. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, and it piss me off because it didn't have to be as hard and painful as it was. Right. Exactly.

Right. Yeah. They made it worse. They, and it kept making it worse. And it gives, I remember sitting in, in the sit room. They were having a meeting. I always went with the director as a plus one. And the president was there and they were all going back and forth.

And the only two guys in the room who kept raising objections were Colin Powell and Richard Armitage. And there were the only two guys in that room had fought in combat. And they kept saying, you know, this is not, just doesn't make any sense. Right. And everybody else who did not, never did, and their kids never went and none of them did this shit. They just, they didn't, they didn't heed the advice. Lewis, what was, could you tell us about your personal experiences in Iraq when you were running ops over there in Baghdad? No, I ran, I did, I did headquarters.

I did the lead up to the war and the end of conventional operations. I prepared for my next overseas assignment, which was India. I watched, I watched operations there from afar. Oh, I see. Okay. So let's jump into your time then as COS in New Delhi because I think India is just an absolutely fascinating country. Pivotal country, perhaps, in some of the conflicts that we're looking at in this century. Let's talk about that.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. When I joined the agency, India is one of those places I wanted to go to. I wanted to go to places that were as different from the U.S. as I can get. I wanted a different experience. In India, let me tell you, it is, I don't know if you've ever been there, but it is a feast for the senses. Fascinating place. I enjoyed my time in India.

Work there is challenging. The Indians are all over you. There are still significant elements of the Indian government and security services that grew up in a very pro-Russian world. They were part of the non-in-line movement, but they're buddy-buddy with the Russians. And the Russians are their main suppliers, their main trainers. and we are viewed as, as the Indians have three main enemies. The first one is obviously Pakistan. The second one is the U.S.

And the third was China when I was there. What was your opinion of R-A-W and IB? Not bad. there are, I mean, the I, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I. is a good domestic security service. R.A.W. has, uh, I, I think a good regional coverage. Uh, their, their officers are fairly well trained. Uh, they have a good training program.

Uh, the, the, the Indian services are getting, are getting, getting better because they are being pushed to expand capabilities. When I was there, the Indians were still struggling with what they wanted to be. They were trying to develop strategies, what the future was going to be, what their role was going to be. Was it regional? Did it expand more? And one of the things, obviously, was their intelligence capability.

And so they were trying to come to great. with that. You know, one of the the challenges, and I used to laugh with them because I was declared to them and I dealt with the Indian services. One of the challenges they were facing was keeping retaining and hiring employees. Because everybody says, oh, you know, India is a land of a billion people and they must have hundreds of thousands of surveillance and stuff. no, they were losing people to the IT industry.

Makes sense. Like the dot-com boom in America, I mean, we dealt with it, right? I mean, you know, the guys were telling it used to be the Indian Civil Service was a highly prestigious organization. They went to schools, to colleges, they graduated, they call them batches, almost like military academies where they all graduate and stuff. And it was good paying jobs. You got a pension. They gave you housing, all this kind of stuff. And then the IT boom came in and, you know,

IT companies and call centers are paying three, four, five, six times what an IB or a raw officer would get. And they're saying we're having a hard time. We're competing. And, you know, the agency was faced the same thing with, you know, we're competing with, with, for university graduates who can make three, four, five times what they make at the agency. But, you know, they were, there were, we've seen it with all these, these, these. accusations of of the Indians assassinating Sikh separatists in

different countries. They're starting to feel their oats. Yeah. And they're getting out there. It's a multi-polar world. Huh? It's a multi-polar world. Yes. India is now,

I think they have settled on the near or broad, as they call it. The Indian Ocean area, East Africa. Myanmar. Their environment. But I think, you know, yeah, we look at them as instrumental in some of our strategies

against China and in the ocean. India is never going to be the ally we need. And I don't say this maliciously or not. But for us to think, I mean, we look at an ally as somebody with shared common interest and agreed upon goals. We're never going to get that from India. They have different goals. They have different interests.

They have still a sense of a non-aligned movement. They don't want to get tied to the U.S. What do you think of, like, I believe it was Ambassador Blackwell penned a piece in foreign affairs about how we should basically just arm up the Indians and they're naturally going to do what we want them to do? No, never do what we want them to do. If anything, they'll get pissed off if we assume they're going to do what we want them to do. It's the Indian general like that.

They have, and this is where we get into that wishful thinking. Yes. Well, we view China as a threat. India must view China as the same threat. You know, you look at the region. Pakistan views India as a threat. India doesn't view Pakistan as a threat. They view them as an annoyance.

They view China as a threat. China doesn't view. India as a threat. They're a competitor, but there's no way that the Indians are going to be a threat to China. They're not going to invade China. They're not going to take over. They're not going to push China out of their spheres of influence, whereas China could do that to India. India doesn't want to have a problem with Pakistan. They understand that, you know, if you're going to be a power, a regional power at least, you can't spend time with bullshit border problems. Right. The Pakistanis, they can't afford India not to be a threat.

Right. The Pakistani military has so much power and authority and money because they have blown up the Indian threat to such a large extent. Right. And if they turn around and say, hey, let's make peace with India, which India would probably buy, then someone's going to say, well, why do we need all this crap that we give you? So India is basically the counter-narcotics program of the. 80s for Pakistan's military and intelligence. Yeah.

Yeah, you can say it that way. You know, I just, India is not going to give us what we want. They'll give us piecemeal stuff. They'll give us things where they think they will win more. It's sort of a, you know, a trade-off. But they're not going to be for us like Japan is or Australia.

Sure, sure. South Korea. You bring up an interesting point because I always wonder why we didn't more, you know, court India more because it seems as though there are regional counterpoint to China, that we have a lot of alliances. But what is it that India, you know, wants for themselves that wouldn't be in alignment with the U.S.'s strategic goals? Well, I think, I think India wants to, I think, be the, I think, be the, the premier power in the Indian Ocean.

The U.S. is uncomfortable with letting anybody be a premier power anywhere. They want to have the greatest extent of influence in East Africa. We're probably not comfortable with that. They want to be able to secure the lines of communication into the Middle East because of oil and the oil coming back and forth. We don't want that. I'll give you a fine example. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran was mining the Gulf and attacking shipping and stuff.

And the U.S. sent in the Navy to secure and escort the ships out and secure the Gulf. And we guaranteed the free passage. And this is where you get to. You can't do wishful thinking or mirror imaging because we saw ourselves as we are now guaranteed. freedom of the seas. China and India saw the opposite. Their attitude was, if the U.S. can keep the Straits of Hormuz open,

they can close them. And in a time of conflict, that's exactly what they're going to do. So we need to build naval capability to get in there and keep the straits open ourselves, which is one of the reasons why the Chinese are starting to build a big Navy that will eventually start to go into the Indian Ocean,

which is why the Indians are going to get started. You know, we've got to stop the Chinese. we need to build a big ocean because both these countries get a significant portion of oil from the Middle East. So in that regard, you know, we're all going to be competing for space and primacy in that area. So, I mean, look, the United States Army has been conducting training exercises, the Indians. They did won this last year, or in 2023, they did one, you know, not on the Chinese border, but within like 100 kilometers. Like this relationship exists, and I just wanted to kind of probe you a little bit as far as like, what do you think is a realistic U.S. India security relationship? Well, I think one of the first things is, and I don't know if it's going to happen, but what the Indians would like to see in order to improve that relationship is for us to begin divesting our obsession with Pakistan.

And that has always been a sticking point with them. When I was there, the Indians were always pushing. You need to help us with Pakistan. Pakistan is sponsoring terrorist attacks against India. And the U.S. was so heavily vested in Pakistan, giving us a corridor into Afghanistan that we weren't about to upset the Apple cart. Could that change now with our extraction from Afghanistan? It can. If the U.S. policy starts to shift, and if the U.S. has got to make a clear decision, we're choosing India over Pakistan.

Because Pakistan has pretty much chosen China over the U.S. Yeah. Which is, yeah, it's freaking Indians out. And now China is working on port facilities in Pakistan, and the Indians are really getting tense about that. But we've got to make a very clear situation. The Indians are interested in getting from us military know-how. Everybody has seen how the U.S. military functions. And they understand, you know, if you're going to fight a war, that's the model to follow right now.

So, yeah, they're going to host U.S. forces in India, the Navy, the Air Force, the Army. They're going to want to do joint things because they want to learn from us. but you know the trust issue remains are these guys going to ditch us as soon as Pakistan comes calling yeah we you know not to not to not to not to beat the us about the head and shoulders but but our reputation over the last 15 20 years has suffered significantly right we are not the reliable partners that people used to think we were right you know you got You got the Europeans right now planning for the eventuality that if Trump gets elected and decides to yank us out of NATO, they're on their own.

So how do they cushion themselves? And other countries are watching and saying, if the Europeans can't rely on them, we surely can't. Yeah. So, so, you know, a good deal is going to be we've got to rebuild those, those alliances, those trusts, those capabilities. It's, I'm just, I know I'm preaching to the choir and I'm just babbling here. But people don't understand. Yes, the U.S. has untold bases overseas. You know, how the hell do you think we project power?

You're not, you're not going to land, you're not going to go from Missouri to, to Pakistan overnight. You need bases, you need facilities. How do you think we get our wounded? Where do we get them to? Frankfurt. Right. You pull all that crap out and we're at, we're out. We're out of the Middle East.

We're out of South Asia. We're out of all these places. An isolated island. Yeah. So, and everybody in all these countries are looking, and they're looking with two ideas in mind. Is the U.S. dependable and trustworthy? And if the answer is no, how do we slip in and take over?

And I don't mean, you know, conquer, but how do we fill in that vacuum? Because there's going to be a vacuum there, and we need to fill it sooner rather than later. I know we've had some challenges dealing with Pakistan in the past, and partly because we've had an ambassador or two that had been in love with Pakistan and just would not let anything happen in their yard. Do countries like India, do they have that benefit also where ambassadors will just go to bat for them? Yeah. It's interesting to watch, and not just ambassadors. You know, there's a reason why we have two and three-year assignments, and that's to avoid client Titus. Yeah.

And the longer you stay in a country, the more you get client-titus. I have seen ambassadors in India who are a big cheerleader for that country. Yeah, there are appointees. They don't know anything about diplomacy. Yeah, and they forget. I mean, I worked for one ambassador who is independently wealthy. So you can't say, you know, you don't forget who pays your salary. He didn't even take a salary.

And, you know, they see it to some extent from the locals' eyes, from the Indian eyes. And they, instead of becoming a representative of the U.S. toward that country, they become representative of that country toward the U.S. Right. And a lot of these countries work really hard to establish that relation. They do it to our chief of station. You know, there's nothing like if you're the chief of station and the director of the CIA comes to visit that the local servers can get the director of meeting with the president

or prime minister. They take him on this trip and they go here and he sees all those kind of, and the glory goes back to you. Oh, he's got everything plugged in. you don't want to upset the apple card they're making you look good yeah right so you know you tend to be hands offish we don't want we don't want to we don't want to press them on some issues and i've seen it where you know the u.s policy is we got to press them on it's and oh you don't want to upset um so yeah it it goes it happens and it happens not infrequently so what was uh what was the

next stop for you after chief of station of new deli oh that was uh i i i i i i i i Out of all bizarre things, I went to be the scholar in residence in Miami, University of Miami. My then-wife, her parents had moved to Florida. Her father had had his second heart bypass, and her mother was recovering from breast cancer, so we needed to be close. So there was an opening where, you know, I taught national security issues and I did a couple of years there. And then went back up to Washington to do counterintelligence for CTC and retired out of there. And how has, how have you enjoyed retirement?

What's that like? Oh, God, I love it. I got to tell you. It's being in a director of operations, especially overseas, but in some headquarters assignment, from the military, it is a demanding job. Twelve hour days are the norm, working six, five and a half, six, seven days a week, not unknown. when I was doing Iraq, I would be in the office at 5.30 in the morning, go home and 10 at night when I didn't sleep in the office. You know, even overseas, especially when you start out, you have a regular job and then

you've got to do your agency job, which tends to be at night and weekends and stuff. So it takes us toll after a while. it is also it's an isolating job psychologically and then you retire and it's like it's when I went to the retirement program they had a speaker who was

a psychologist and he specialized in retirement stuff and he said the number one thing that that people extol about retirement

is sleep and the fact that they can sleep so it's it's nice it's it's different you know like you're in the agency and you're very isolated

you're in the building you can't you can't take phones in you don't have access to streams information people outside you can't really tell what you do you can't discuss your day even when you go home especially overseas and you go home, you can't talk to your spouse and say, how was your day?

You don't know if somebody's listening. So it tends to isolate you. And you retire and I mean, a guy I worked for retired, he's teaching at one of the universities. He says, I don't, I can't see ever going back. I am, I am now so plugged in, so much information, talking to people and all this kind of stuff, which you don't do. Even inside the agency, you know, we function. on the need to know basis. So I'm not telling the guy next to me who sits next to me necessarily what I'm doing or how my my cases are going because he doesn't have a need to know.

She doesn't have a need to know. So it does tend to get you isolated. And that changes when you retire. Where are you at today? What are you doing now? Talking to you. And we appreciate it. No, I'm not doing anything. It's, you know, I, I, I live in D.C. for a while after I retired, I did some contracting work. I did about for five years or so after I retired. And, you know, that's okay. A lot of people turn around and go back working for the agency as a contractor. I got to do, I'm fortunate.

I got to do pretty much I won when I join. join the agency. Yeah. And so there's nothing left to do any other than they would be there collecting a paycheck, which is not intellectually stimulating for me. I write a blog just to keep my, you know, my mind going. I read. I got a 12-year-old daughter who's in school that, you know, sucks up a lot of my time.

Wonderfully so. And not much. Where can people find your website? It's called the debrief, a rundown of today's national security interest. I should have given you something. But I'm too goddamn lazy to do anything about it. Again, it's, you know, it's the website, the blog is is more. We'll put it in the description.

Yes. It's for those of you listening, it's debrief, debrief a rundown. D-E-B-R-I-E-F-A-R-U-N-D-O-N-D-O-N dot com. Thank you. It's geared toward non-professionals. It's, you know, I believe that it is important for laymen, the people out there to understand how intelligence functions. Because we go to war or not based on intelligence. It affects our lives, whether we know it or not.

And while people do not have access to sources and methods, they should understand how it works. And the complexities involved. Because again, it's not what you see in Hollywood. It's not some guy sits in computer flips a switch and he's got all the cameras in the world pouring in there. It doesn't work. It is a different skill set. It is labor intensive. Anyway, I'm babbling.

But it is. And every now and then I babble on about what's going on in the. world. That's great. No, Lewis, this has been like a super informative episode. And actually, I would love to have you back at some point to talk like, like maybe zero in on some specific like geopolitical issues. But this has been a great conversation. I'd be happy to come back. There's no case officer on earth who doesn't want to babble to an audience and say, listen to me. Well, we, we deeply appreciate it. I don't want to keep you too long. But I do want to ask you one question about. your time as you know doing counterintelligence we had James Olson on you know who was

the director of counterintelligence for a while and he talked about how it's very different than being a case officer and that it if you let it get to you it can make you very paranoid and how was that for you ending your career in a CI post well i've i'll give you the the the The spiel should be that every case officer does counterintelligence. It's the only way you survive in the field. And I've had several counterintelligence positions. Mr. Olson is, you know, the term is used too loosely nowadays, but it does apply to him that he is a living legend.

He is really good at what he does, and he's right. the more you do it, the more paranoid you become, because you understand what can happen. And a good counterintelligence officer understands all the possibilities, all the permutations, and starts looking to see which is actually the case in this situation. But it does, look, I tell you, I have been retired since 2010. And I still look for surveillance. I step out of my house. And the first thing I do is I look up and down the street to see what cars are there.

Do I know the cars are the people sitting in the cars? What are they doing? And it's stupid because nobody's going to be following me. I'm nobody other than if it's criminal activity. But just like an army officer can never look at a piece of terrain without thinking, how do I hold it? how do I take it? A case officer looks at everything. Oh, that's a good dead drop.

Oh, that's a good meeting site. Oh, I can turn. I mean, I turn corners and I do it in a fashion that gives me a logical way to look behind me. So, yeah, you do get a degree of paranoia. You do get jaded. I am not judgmental about, yeah, maybe I am, but I'm not stuck. by the things people do. I got to say I've probably seen it all.

And I have dealt with people who have done it all. And there are people that I would never have over my house for dinner. So it does skew your view of people and life in general. It, it, it, again, I apologize for the landings, but it does fuck you up beyond belief. Yeah. Yeah. I get it.

Yeah. It's got to be hard, too, because you could potentially ruin somebody's career if, if, like, you're wrong and, you know. Oh, yeah. But you, but you, but you ruin your job if you're, if you don't pursue it. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's a high wire act. I mean, you know, it's always this, just, just like what you just did right now is what a

CI office is going to be doing. I could do this. This can happen. Here it is. And you start looking in all the different. from permutations and it'll start spinning you up. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like a tough job.

Let me get some questions real quick. Oms, thank you very much. Headphone, is that chilly cool? Thank you. There's probably some meaning that I just don't get. I'm too old. Chaba TV, thank you very much. Number one.

Ryan Joffrey, thank you very much. For my dead father, Chris, incredible man patriot. Our condolences. M. Corbin, thank you very much. after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the relationships between the U.S. and India begin to solidify in any form of cooperative training. Training, no, not from the intelligence perspective. The Indians are extremely proud and do not take agency training lightly unless it's of a technical nature that they don't have a capability of, which they're pretty well-heeled. No, it did not change. It actually, to some extent, exacerbated the relationship because we would not help them as much as they wanted us to help them because the Pakistan issue.

Where is their background in terms of their intelligence training? Who did they, like, did they base their intelligence methodology off in any particular country? Yeah, well, they started from the British, yeah. Okay. It is modeled on MI5 and MI6. But somewhere in the 60s, that split off. And the organization stayed the same, but a lot of the training came from the Russians.

Okay. And then on Patreon, oh, this is, we'll answer, this is this question about a Ranger tab. We'll answer this question on Patreon. So that's it. Louis, thank you so much. We deeply appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. Enjoyed it. Yeah, this has been an awesome interview. And like I said, I love to talk to you again. Should I announce who's coming up next week? Sure. I'm sorry if I'm a little delinquent on this. While Jack's looking that up, make sure you check out

debrief a rundown.com. And please take a look at our friends at Casa Carabello Cigars, casocaribeo.com. That's what we've been smoking here on the show. Next week we're going to have Frank Delosio and another ATF agent in studio. So, yeah, Frank was on the episode once or was on the show once before and he's going to come in studio. And I think actually he's going to, he's bringing one of his buddies with him too. So we'll have them here next Friday. We're definitely excited about that.

Thanks for reminding me. So, Lewis, thank you for an awesome episode, man. Thank you very much. Yeah, have a great rest of your weekend. And I hope to talk to you again soon. All right. Thanks. Mal.

All right. See you guys soon. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, everybody.