The Team House - Legacy of Ashes: The Secret History of the CIA | Tim Weiner | Ep. 167

Episode Date: October 8, 2022

Tim Weiner is a national security journalist who made six reporting tours running with the muj in Afghanistan, 1987 (Soviet occupation) to 2001 (American occupation) and war/conflict/crisis reporting from Sudan, Pakistan, Liberia, Haiti, and the Philippines. He won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on secret CIA/DOD programs and National Book Award for LEGACY OF ASHES. Signature song as rock and roll band leader: "Secret Agent Man." He is also the author of Enemies: The History of the FBI and The Folly and Glory. Legacy of Ashes can be found at: https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006/ Today's sponsor: BUB's Naturals  https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/ Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" for 20% your order! Pick up their collagen protein, MCT oil, and apple cider vinegar gummies today! BUBS Donates 10% of all profits to charity in Glens honor, starting with the Glen Doherty Memorial Foundation GO TO: https://www.BUBSNATURALS.com/?discount=TEAMHOUSE  or Use the code "TEAMHOUSE" at checkout for 20% off your order! FEEL GREAT. DO GOOD. Words that we live by. To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month  -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #legacyofashes #cia #covertoperationsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hi, everyone, good evening. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. This is episode 167 of the Team House. Welcome to our new set. Hope you guys like this. We really appreciate you joining us tonight and joining our guest, Tim Weiner. He is a national security journalist with extensive experience reporting around the world, certain hot spots like Afghanistan during the Mujahideen Times. Where else, Tim? Liberia, Philippines. You know, all the gardens. I mean, you know, the Liberian Civil War, Sudan during the war, Haiti, Cuba, Cuba, Cuba, you know, everywhere American interests extend.

that I could get to, I got to. And Tim is also the author of Legacy of Ashes, a history of the Central Intelligence Agency. He's also the author of Enemies, a history of the FBI. And The Glory and Folly is your latest book? The Folly and the Glory. The Folly and the Glory about the history of political warfare between Russia and the United States. Which goes on every day, every hour.

And you're currently working on, we'll get to this a little later, a sequel to Legacy of Ashes. your book your first one goes more or less up to what 2003 2006 okay yeah and you the sequel is going to cover the war on terror years the 21st century so i really wanted to jump right into talking first about you and sort of your backstory and what was the pathway that you took into national security journalism how did you end up there and if you could share some sage stories about Brooklyn. You once told me that you paid $150 rent, which I refuse to believe. That sounds like fake news to me. Yeah, I'm a Brooklyn guy. And here we are in Greenport. That's how we say it in Brooklyn, Greenpoint, Greenpoint. Green Pern. So, I was born in 1956. my parents are war refugees.

My father was born in Vienna. My mother was born in the Jewish ghetto of Nuremberg, Germany. He was born there 11 months after Henry Kissinger was born there. And I could always get Kissinger on the phone. I would call his secretary and say, please remind Dr. Kissinger that his father taught my uncle in the gymnasium. high school in Nernberg and then he'd get online and say yeah i'm divina what do you one now that's a good source to have um my favorite

kissinger aphorism is yaws it has the unpleasant odour of true uh but i digress um so yeah my i'm a first generation american my parents got out of war-torn Europe. My mother and her mother got out through Casablanca. They left on the second and last boat that left Casablanca in 1942. The reason that these were the last boat is that Jagger Hoover told President Franklin Delano, Roosevelt, no more boats with German refugees on it. They will be salted with them.

So they landed in Havana, two years in Havana. They eventually got out, and my mother became a history professor. My father born in Vienna, got out through London, went to Harvard. My mother got into a program for refugee women at Smith. So they became Ivy League graduates. And my father was a professor of medicine. My mother was a professor of history. And I was a history major in school, but I was also a Watergate baby.

Born in 56, Watergate happened when I was 17, 18 years old. And one of the chief consequences of the Watergate disaster for the government of the United States was the revelation that the CIA had been spying on Americans in violation of its charter, which says the CIA has no police powers in the United States. This revelation, which was the work of a reporter from the New York Times named Seymour Hirsch, 1974. 1974, December 1974, led to the Church Committee hearings, which was the Senate, led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, began to look into what the fuck the CIA had been up to. since its creation in 1947, a multitude of sins were revealed. Everyone accepted that the CIA had been created in 1947 for two reasons.

The first reason was to prevent the next Pearl Harbor. And the coordination of intelligence overall, right? the coordination of intelligence, Jack. In principle, yeah. Well, before you get too far, I do have extensive notes here on your book that we will get into the history of the central intelligence agency. Okay, so that's the backstory. Right. When I was a teenager, I got interested in the CIA.

And what is this organization? How does it fit into the government of the United States? And what does it really do? Because we've been fed so much, if I may use it, technical. You may. Bullshit about what the CIA is, what it does. All we know about the CIA is, you know, movies and television. And almost none of it is true.

Proceed. Or positive. I mean, not, and I'm not, like, generally the CIA. Jack Ryan is positive. There you go. That's true. Okay, he's a hero. That's true.

James Bond, you know, the American interpretation of James Bond is that, you know, the intelligence officer dons his trench coat, gets on a plane, flies into a foreign capital, overthrows the government, makes love to a beautiful woman after consuming several martinis. Sure. And leaves on the next plane. That was a job I was looking for. I never found it. for that. Okay. So how did you find your way into journalism?

I mean, this was your interest in sort of your government and some government malfeasance, perhaps, after Watergate. Well, yeah. So as a Watergate baby and a history major at Columbia at Columbia University, also your homo model, in the 70s, my mom's a history professor, or she sort of wanted me, you know, to follow her footsteps. I didn't have any languages.

I couldn't get a PhD, but I like to write. And Watergate convinced me that if you got a job as a newspaper reporter, you could get paid to kick the government in the ass. What could be better? And that led you into... So 74, you were a teenager. By the time you, what was your first job in journalism? In 79, I became a reporter. I had three jobs.

It was sort of like the gig economy is today. It's like you can't just have one job. You need a couple. So here in New York, I covered the courts in Foley Square in Manhattan, the federal court. and the state Supreme Court, and I covered white-collar crime. I also did features for a now long-defunct alternative weekly, the Soho News, and I filled in for the Associated Press Reporter in the Federal Courthouse, who was drunk after lunch.

the AP you know asked me for an assist if I could I was 23 years old I would do anything you know to get a byline

and said you know if Paul just let us know if Paul is not filing today so that was great and then I went off

to the, I couldn't get a job, I wanted a job at a daily newspaper. You know, so the New York Times is not hiring a 24-year-old kid, and neither were the tabs, the Daily News and New York Post. So here was the key. In my desk at State Supreme Court, I jimmied open this metal desk, in the press room, and there was a ream of stationary from the long defunct New York Journal Tribune, a Hearst newspaper, the screaming eagle, first logo, thick rag bond. So I typed up application letters to a bunch of newspapers on this striking letterhead.

I got a quick response from the Kansas City Times, which was a morning newspaper in Kansas City, Missouri. And I went out there, and the day I went out was January 20, 1981, the day that the American hostages in Iran were freed after 440 days of captivity, and the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the president of the United States.

So I fly in there with my, you know, New York outfit, and I walk into the newsroom, and the guy I'm supposed to meet is Paul Haskins. Paul Haskins was, you wouldn't have called him this to his face, but he was a punk. He was a East L.A. Bachuco. He was 6'5,

had a big old mustache, and he wore cowboy boots. He was about 6'7, his boots. So I walk in, say, hello, Paul has seen, he says, and this is a, just a little vignette from the gold name, of newspapers.

He says, he stands up and says, come on, let's go get drunk. Yes, sir. So we went to the restaurant bar that was across the street from every newspaper in the United States that served chili and whiskey and beer. And around about one o'clock, which was closing time, I realized this is a macho. tests. I came in at 9 the next morning. Oh yeah, he stood up at the end of the macho test a little more unsteadily than he had stood up at 5 o'clock and said, come on in tomorrow about nine and write some stories. I said, yes, sir. So, you know, I went to bed at the Muleebuck

Hotel, got up at nine, came in at and Paul was there at his desk. and with his head in his hands. And he looked at me and at first he didn't actually recognize who I was. And then he came into focus and he said, there's no peanut butter. And I said, what? He said, there's no peanut butter in Kansas City, find out why.

So it was not a complicated story. You know, there had been a bad peanut harvest, the Commodity Credit Corporation in Atlanta, you could call them up. They told me, it was a bad peanut harvest, you know. So I filed a story on triplicate carbon, and I was hired. I did 14 months at the Kansas City Times. And then the Philadelphia Inquirer was the hottest newspaper in the country.

So I'm still 24, 25 years old now. The Philadelphia Inquirer is where I made my bones. So short background. The Philadelphia Inquirer had been owned up until 1972 by a gentleman named Walter Annenberg. There were now Annenberg schools of journalism, you know, in Los Angeles, so forth. He was a thug. very rich thug his father

Moses Annenberg moish owned the racing form the Bible of horse racing in the United States and he was also the biggest bookie in the United States and he was convicted

of tax evasion and died in federal prison so Walter Annenberg oh and he bequeathed to his son, the TV guide, a long defunct, but incredibly important. Oh, at that time?

At that time, like, I remember growing up, like, you got it every week. Sure. So, Walter wanted to be a gentleman. Philadelphia Society did not recognize him as such. He was a Jew. His father was a crooked bookie. and he was a jerk.

So in 1972, in consideration of a totally illegal, $250,000 cash contribution to the committee to re-elect the president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. Walter Annenberg was appointed ambassador to the Court of Civil. St. James's in London. Nice.

He sold the paper. He sold the paper to a good guy named John Knight. And John Knight called up Gene Roberts, who was the national editor of the New York Times. He said, Gene, how'd you like to run the worst newspaper

in America? And Gene, who's a good old boy from North Carolina, said, oh, okay. Hey, hey, yeah. All right. I will fast forward. Ten years later, the Philadelphia Inquirer was pound for pound the best newspaper in America.

Gene, or tomorrow, we're going to have a 90th birthday party for Gene. Everybody who ever worked for the Enquirer is going to be there. What would you say the changes that he made that took a bad newspaper to the best, Not a bad newspaper. The worst, most corrupt, big city newspaper in America. From, like, as an editor, what did he do? What were his policies? How can one person affect such change in a paper like that?

Gene was the national editor of the New York Times. He had been the Saigon Bureau Chief before that. And the lead reporter for the Times on the Civil Rights Movement. in the south in the early mid-60s. He fired all the corrupt assholes and the deadwood. He hired everybody at the New York Times who hated the executive editor of the New York Times at the Times, Abrosenthal. And he attracted all the 20-something reporters in the United States who were hungry.

who wanted to kick ass and take names. Right. He didn't have a foreign desk. There was the budget for that. But he made one. The corporate owners didn't have a budget for the Philadelphia, I've inquired, to have a foreign desk. So the first foreign correspondent for the New York Times, they, Gene and his right-hand men created a cost center for a parking garage for the paper, and they funded the foreign desk out of that.

Okay, real quick, when did you get your first job in, like, as a journalist? 79. And how old were you? 23. Okay. Because this was leading up to, why? you're at the inquire nine years later you're a young buck still but yeah even nine years later so i was a white-collar crime reporter there was a lot of it in philadelphia i was a very busy kid uh

in uh the first week of december in nineteen eighty five uh jean wanders over to my desk i'm finding this complicated story about the corruption of Philadelphia Police Department he walks over to my desk

and Gene's a good old boy from North Carolina as I mentioned he says hey hey and I'm like hey Gene

how you doing you got a passport the sweetest words that a young reporter could ever hear and I said yeah

Gene I too said need you to go to the Philippines, the dictator of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, whose son, this is now,

let me do the math, 38 years later, is now the ruler of the Philippines. The dictator of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, had run the Philippines with an iron hand from 1965 until 1985,

85. He was the American bulwark against communism in Asia. American bases in the Philippines, Clark and Subic, Clark and Subic, the American naval and air force bases, were the launching pads for military strikes against North Vietnam. Marcos, in addition to being the American bulwark against commune in Asia, was a vicious dictator who had stolen at that point $5 billion rate the economy of the Philippines, tortured and killed his enemies. But he was our dude. He may be a bad dude, but he's our dude.

Right. So anyway, Marcos goes on a television program called Nightline. Remember Nightline? Yep. Ted Cople. And Ted Cople asked him, so, Mr. President, are you ever going to, like, hold an election or anything? It's been 20 years. He says, yes.

Yes, I will hold an election. I will be holding a snap election in six weeks. And everybody goes, what? You are? The next day, the Philadelphia Inquirers, lone foreign correspondent in Asia quits to join the L.A. Times. Then the next day, Gene wanders over and says, hey, hey, you know, got a passport. So, 29 years old, I go over to the Philippines, and I witnessed the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Marcos stole the election.

Everybody knew that he had. It stoned the election, and the people rose up in the millions. It was the first international event that CNN ever covered. Oh, wow. Like first live on television. That's right. Wall to wall. And the people of the Philippines rose up.

It was a four-day revolution. There were two million people in the streets of Manila. and on the fourth day, Ronald Reagan loved Ferdinand Marcos and his crooked wife, Imelda. With her 3,000 pairs of shoes. Yeah, yeah, you remember that? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan and Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Marcos had danced in the White House together.

He was our dude. He was the man who was the forward-facing... representative of American power against communism in Asia. And on the fourth day of the revolution, and I was there, and that was the first time I got shot at in my entire life, not the last, because there was an insurrection at the palace, at Malacanang Palace. And the people were there, and I was there as a reporter, and Marcos's troops started killing people.

And I hid behind a palm tree, and the fucking palm tree started shattering and I'm like maybe I had to crawl in a little deeper at the base of the roots of this palm tree but the next day Reagan

told him to go he let him fall and we didn't know it then but we know now that was the beginning of the end of the Cold War that America let its dictator fall because of people

Power Revolution. Three years later, same thing happened in Central and Eastern Europe. So I got to give a quick shout-out to actually to the sponsor of our show. God bless you. Little advertisement for Bubbs Naturals, Health Food Company. They make some proteins out here. I kid, Jack. I mean, I'm 29.

But that was my first look at the big world. Yeah, yeah. So I get back. from a six-month tour. And now I'm in the Washington Bureau, the Philadelphia Choir, and then Iran Contra hits. So for those of you in our listening audience, who don't remember Iran-Contrae,

here's what happened. You're interrupting the format. That's okay. It's your show. No, no, no, no. Let it happen naturally. No, I appreciate this, too, because a lot of times we talk about things that I'm not familiar with. So I think that for people...

No, go into it naturally. Absolutely, please. What's the leading question? The leading question is, what was Iran-Contra? That's what I was going to tell you. Great minds. Great minds, Nikolai. So, this was the biggest fuck-up.

of the American intelligence community since the CIA was created in 1947. The fuck up was that the president of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan, wanted two things. He wanted to support the anti-communist guerrillas, the contras in Central America, who were fighting to overthrow the Sainista government of Nicaragua. He also wanted to free American hostages who were being held by a Hezbollah unit. Hezbollah means party of God. Iranian-backed terrorist motherfuckers, if I can say that word.

Absolutely. Thank you. In Lebanon. The first hostage they had taken was the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, who died under torture. In 1986, they were holding six Americans under extreme duress, including the Associated Press Bureau Chief in Lebanon, Terry Anderson. So Reagan, on a daily basis, importuned, the director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, about whom more later,

can't you do anything to free the hostages? Casey and a gung-ho Marine Lieutenant Colonel on the National Security Council staff named Oliver North came up with what North called a good idea. A neat idea, sorry. His exact words. It was a neat idea.

We're going to sell American weapons to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The Iranians were then fighting the Iraqis in a brutal, vicious war in which at least two million people died. We're going to sell these weapons to the Iranians who are backing Hezbollah, who are holding the hostages. We will then overcharge them sixfold.

We will skim the profits and use the money to fund the Contras in Central America. despite the fact that Congress has banned American financial support for the countries. Good idea. Jack, you know a little bit about covert operations, right? A little. What is the worst thing that you could do when you have one covert operation over here and another covert operation over there?

What is the most fucked up, stupid thing that you could do? Oh, I know. Well, when you cross the streets. When you let them talk, yeah. You're violating compartmentalization and compromising both of them. When you cross the wires. Yeah. No more calls if we have a winner.

And so, yeah, I've heard some of the old war stories about the quote-unquote Iran program at CIA during that time frame and weird things that started happening. Well, the upshot was that the United States sold weapons of the Iranian-Ran. Revolutionary Guard in the hope that this was induced them to free the Contras. They overcharged them. They took the money and used it to fund the Contras and then the whole thing fell apart. The revelation that Ronald Reagan, the President of the United States, had paid ransom for hostages and skim the profits in violation of law to fund the Contras in Central America.

And the CIA had facilitated this. And the whole thing came unraveled. It was Eugene Hassanfoss, right? When he was shot out of this guy. There was a cargo kicker named Hassanfuss, who was, you know, kicking cargo down to the contras. The plane got shot down. he was like, duh, I'm just, you know, I'm just, I'm here because I work for the CI.

And the story was he was supposed to be sterile and not have anything on him. I'm going to try and make a long story shirt here. Okay. It was the most fucked up operation in the history of American intelligence. And there's some pretty fucked up ones. It almost brought you. Well, you know, we'll get to that. But it almost brought down the Reagan administration

because the president of the United States was caught lying on national television because he got up and said, who me? It was his up. And the whole concept of plausible deniability is that when the CIA does things in the name of the president of the United States, we will create a plausible deniability so that his fingerprints are not on the op.

Okay. After the revelations of the church committee, the idea of plausible deniability, we thought had been defeated. And among the reforms that were created in the 70s, where there would be, oversight committees in Congress to keep an eye on the CIA and that there would be a system where the present of the United States was signed a finding. It's called a finding because the president has to say, I find that this covert operation is essential to the national security of the United States. So yeah, there was a finding for the whole op, but they It backtated the fucking finding of the thing after they got caught doing it.

So here's Ronald Reagan. Reagan stance toward the CIA, and this is important, and it becomes important for the post-Coled war world, is that Reagan went to the CIA and gave a speech and said, You, you are the tripwire of democracy. We rely on you, the CIA, to be the pointed spear of American foreign policy. He didn't do all this sort of JFK thing about, oh, all your successes are secret and your failures are broadcasting. No, that was over. He said, you're it.

You're the pointed end of the spear. But he fucked the CIA. and the head of the CIA, William Casey, was his partner in this, by getting them by inference, not by any finding, formal finding, to do something that was so illegal and so contrary to to American foreign policy that almost it could have brought him down. We interviewed Danny Colson, a FBI agent who did the investigation into a ran contra, and you said to Ali and all of them they got off on a technicality. No one went to jail. Ali got arrested, but didn't go to jail.

No one went, sorry. No one went to jail. Bush, the elder, pardoned everybody. Seacord, Poindexter. Everybody. know everybody skated Bush part George

Dewey Clarege was in the middle of that too wasn't he? I'm going to get it's a perfect segue George H.W. Bush the 41st President of the United States who was Reagan's vice president pardoned everybody

including the Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger who were under indictment for violating the laws of the United States in the SOP. Okay. And all of this falls under the edict of President Richard M. Nixon

who famously said, if it's secret, it's legal. Right. It's the notion that if the White House, CIA, the Department of Justice are all on the same sheet of music, and it remains off of the newspapers, then it's lawful. And Nixon also said, if the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

Do you think that notion still exists, that there's a thought that if the order comes from the White House, it's lawful? That idea, that if the president doesn't, it is not. not illegal, is what is sustaining today as we speak the idea that President Donald Trump could stay out of jail. It's like, I am the king. I declassified these documents in my mind. Yeah. I'm a king. My word is law. Where this gets into the question of the CIA is important. this should be the launching point for, you know, what we really want to talk about tonight. In the popular imagination of what the CIA is and what it does, is the idea, which was instilled during the church committee times,

when it was revealed that there were assassination plots against Fidel Castro. among others, that there were coups in countries, including Iran, that the CIA was a rogue elephant. That was the statement of the head of the Church Committee, Senator Frank Church. The CIA is a rogue elephant, trampling people in nations. Bullshit!

They're executing the orders of the executive branch. What did that? CIA tramples peoples and nations, which it has done, it is because of the rogue, it's not a rogue elephant. It's the rogue Mahout, the elephant driver. And that Mahout is the president of the United States. Tim, take us back 1947, what happens? Okay. In 1947, the United States is a colossus bestriding the world.

Unexpectedly after 45? No. World War II ended in 1945. The war in Europe could not have been won without the Soviet Union. The Soviets lost 20. million dead. Like two and a half generations. 27 million dead in the war against Hitler.

The American dead in World War II were, I think, 330,000. Yeah, somewhere around there. Okay. So Berlin, 1945, three OSS officers. The OSS was the civilian intelligence organization. the Office of Strategic Services for folks out there. Right. Are in Berlin.

Alan Dulles, the future head of the CIA. Richard Helms, the future head of the CIA. And a guy named Tom Polgar, who was the last station chief, Saigon. He was 23, a Hungarian. And in the wreckage of Berlin, days after Hitler killed himself in May 1945, they're looking east to the Soviets. They don't look, they don't really look in a clinical way.

They're looking at a gigantic force that is moving west. Our allies, the Nazis could not have been defeated. Stalin, the Soviet, the Red Army. They want to keep moving. They want to keep moving west. They want Europe. They're taking everything that they can take out of Eastern Germany and moving it.

The intelligence assets, people, information files that the OSS had gathered were, I'm going to say deep sixth, but Harry Truman had just become present of the United States upon the death of FDR. Harry Truman was, you know, a senator from Missouri. Not a cloak and dagger guy. He hadn't been read into anything.

He didn't know that there was a bomb. He knew nothing. and when he looked at the idea of American intelligence, secret missions, secret operations, sabotage support for underground operations, he looked at it and he said, I do not want an American Gestapo. And Bill Donovan went and pitched his idea, right,

to Truman, who shot it down quite easily. Truman disestablished the OSS in September 1945. The people of the OSS ran kind of an underground operation to keep it alive, to keep the idea of American intelligence alive. when the CIA was created out of the fragments and ashes of the OSS in September of 1947, 75 years ago, as we speak, the idea was that American intelligence before World War II had been fragmented. And its fragmentation among the army and the Navy, there wasn't an Air Force, there wasn't an intelligence service, allowed Pearl Harbor to happen. There were pearls,

like, think of a pearl necklace. Okay, a broken pearl necklace. There were pearls that had been scattered around and nobody could string them together. And that's why. And that's why. why Pearl Harbor happened. And the idea of the CIA in the beginning was to prevent the next Pearl Harbor. And the idea was to gather and

analyze intelligence. Not to fight the Cold War. That came later. We spoke about earlier, the idea of coordinating intelligence. Nobody in their right mind could argue against

an administrative function like that. out what's going on in the world. Right. Right. I'm a newspaper reporter. I like that. Okay. Finding out what's going on in the world, analyzing it, and reporting it to the present. But very quickly, the idea became the notion of rolling Russia back to its previous borders, which has some relevance to our current situation.

Yeah, it happened. It started out in a political way, and then it got, into a paramilitary way. Right. So nobody understood anything that was going on in Russia, in the Soviet Union. It was a closed world. There was one guy, one guy, who could explain to Harry Truman, the president of the United States,

what is going to, what does Stalin want? Is he gonna go further? Does he want to take Western Europe? Is he our enemy now? Nobody knew that. Nobody could understand that. There was one guy, and his name was George Cannon. George Cannon was the Charger, the guy in charge,

of the American Embassy in Moscow in 1946. he'd spent many years in the Soviet Union. And Ken was asked by the White House, the fuck is going on. What does Stalin want? Are there our enemy now? After being our ally in the war? And Kenan reported back that the Soviets, the Russians,

lived in a world that was founded on an architecture of lives and that their military and their foreign policy and that their intelligence services were going to mystify, mislead, and surprise America. cannon after serving as you know the sergey in Moscow came back to the United States and wrote a report which said in its essence that the Soviets wanted to deceive the Americans about their purposes and to take as much of Europe as they can. Cannon became the first person who ran the policy planning division, newly created in the State Department,

and he reported to the new Secretary of the State General George C. Marshall. who was, I think, the greatest general who has ever served in the United States. Talk to us about what started going on in Italy and Greece in those early years. So Cannon supported the idea that not only should there be a CIA, but that the CIA should have a clandestine operations division to, in his words, fight fire with fire. We weren't good at this. The Americans, we didn't do this.

Espionage, sabotage, covert operations. That wasn't our thing. But Kenan, the diplomat, told George Marshall, Secretary of the State, and the Secretary of Defense, Jim

forestall that the newly created CIA, which was created as an analytical operation, needed to become a paramilitary operation to not only fight fire with fire, but to run covert operations against the Soviets. Canada is famous as a diplomat. He denied this to the end of his days. He did not, he died. He died. He died. He died. I wrote his obituary. The same canon. That wrote in forum affairs about containment? That guy. I wrote his obituary for the New York Times in 2005.

He died at the age of 101. Wow. He denied to the end of his days, and he had anything to do with the foundation of the covert operations of the CIA. But he did. because he understood the Russians. He had lived more of his life in Russia than in the United States.

He understood what they were. And what it took to fight them. To understand that you were up against an empire of lives. And so what did we start to do, subvert communism in Europe? The first stop. So it's 1948. war-torn Europe, the Italians are having an election. So the Italians were on the side of the Nazis, remember, during the war.

And Mussolini was overthrown and hung by his heels. But there was still a strong fascist element in Italy. and the communists were the anti-fascists. So there's a huge draw. A great problem of post-World War Europe. The communists were the anti-fascists. Stalin's armies, the Red Army,

killed 100 times more fascists than the Americans did. So the challenge for the Americans, there was an election, a free election coming up in previously fascist Italy. The anti-fascists were the communists. So how could you support the Christian Democrats? That was the literal name of the party, the Christian Democrats. I mean, they were around for a long time. it was the people who lied with the pope

although morrow was a Christian Democrat wasn't it that's a long story right so there's going to be an election canon is now sort of conceiving the covert operations of the CIA and it's like how are we

going to win this election long story short in its first covert operation of any consequence. The CIA plunges money and people into the Italian election of 1948. Suitcases of cash are exchanged in five-star hotels to the Christian Democrats, to priests, to create a legitimate opposition to the socialists who's a closer run election.

But that's the first CIA operation that changes the course of history. And they're like, whoa, we can do this. We can do this. We can change this. course of history. It just takes suitcases full of cash and alliances

with anti-communists. And they sort of repeated that process in Greece, right? Well, like, oh, now what could we do? But the problem was that

the challenges in Europe and in Asia were not elections. They were at of war. The OSS was the World War II civilian operation. That was the intelligence service that anticipated the CIA and OSS veterans were replete in the ranks of the CIA. When the CIA was formed in 1947, it was 200 people. Most of them were OSS. What the OSS had done during World War II that was striking was to parachute.

Jedberg teams and other elements behind enemy lines. Behind enemy lines for sabotage. And this was a hope more than a realized idea to gather intelligence, but mostly for sabotage. The tragic flaw of the early CIA was to think that they could do what the OSS had

done. In Hungary, Albania, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Poland, Korea. And they fed bodies into the woodchipper. All of this is in legacy of ashes. The idea We even tried it in the Vietnam conflict early on.

This is 1949 to 1954. The OSS veterans believed that they could roll back the communist conspiracy, worldwide conspiracy, by parachuting not Americans, but recruited foreign agents. behind enemy lines to set up intelligence networks. Like they had done in occupied France. Why didn't they work this time, though? Because the Soviets, from 1949 onward,

through the British representative to the CIA, Kim Filby had completely penetrated the CIA. The CIA and indeed the FBI did not have a sophisticated counterintelligence which we'll get to in a bit

network. In Korea, Korea is a different. Europe is one story. In Europe, the Soviet, the Soviet through Kim Filby and his network had completely penetrated the CIA's operational network

so that every op, not some of them, everyone in Ukraine, in Russia, in Poland. The Poland example is explicit. I want to talk about that. Everywhere,

The CIA was going to parachute recruited foreign agents over the Iron Curtain to gather intelligence and set up stay behind units to fight World War III when the Russians tanks came over the fold of a gap in Germany. To start the war, covert operations without intelligence to support them are suicide missions. you can't just parachute them into a black hole and think they'll establish a resistance and that is a lesson that we haven't learned completely talk to me about Frank Wisner or Frank Wisner Frank Wisner Frank and he was the

he was kind of the mastermind behind the stay behind networks in Europe early on the early CIA was basically Alan Dulles who ran the CIA from from 1951, sorry, 53 to 61, but who had been a deputy, the number two guy, Frank Wisner. So Frank Wisner cut his teeth in American intelligence in the OSS. In Romania, he had

developed a net of pro-American forces. The net was betrayed. He saw them shipped off in trains to their death by the Russians. He became the genius of covert operations at the CIA from its earliest days until the late 50s. So let's say 12 years. Wissner was mentally ill his mental illness resulted in his suicide

at his own hand in 1965 his mania manifested itself by plunging recruited foreign agents on suicide missions throughout Europe and Asia. He was part of the early cadre of CIA

who believed that they could run the Cold War in the ways that the OSS had run the war in Europe through parachute missions and through penetrations of foreign governments. The disaster of the American experience in Vietnam is predicated on his CIA missions, which were delusions. The idea that we can gather intelligence through covert action

rather than develop covert action through intelligence. Out of curiosity, because we talked about Philby and the penetration of the CIA, in your estimation, knowing you've researched this way more than either of us have, would any of those operations of sending these teams in in an OSS model, would they have, Would there have been the chance of them being more successful?

Could they have worked? Because we talk about, you also talk about Vietnam, and we also know that, like, MacB. Saug was thoroughly penetrated by communist Vietnamese. At the embassy. Without those penetrations, could those types of, if America would have been, if we would have been more CIA aware, if we would have been more. Maybe not underestimated the enemy. Right.

Well, and also, yeah. Axe, that's great. Not as underestimating the enemy. Could those operations have worked in the way they envision them? Counterintelligence is the business of catching spies who are penetrating your ops

and protecting your ops against those spies. The framework of American counterintelligence depended for the first 25 years of the Cold War. So from 1947 until 1972, on a gentleman named James Jesus Angleton. Jim Angleton had been OSS in London, amazing guy. A poetry major at Yale, his English professor at Yale recruited him into the OSS. In London, James Jesus Angleton befriended a gentleman in British intelligence named Kim Filby.

They became friends. Kim Filby was assigned to be the British intelligence representative in more, Washington in 1949. Jim Akelton, having run the successful

Italian op that we discussed to control the Italian election in 1948 was the nascent

chief of counterintelligence. It's a position he formerly held for 25 years. So here's a thing. The victors in World War II floated out in their victory on a sea of alcohol. And what we would now probably call post-traumatic stress, but was not so readily acknowledged in those days.

The friendship. of Angleton and Philby was sealed with the warm caress of whiskey and the cold kiss of martinis. They discussed everything. Philby was a Soviet agent. Angleton was the guy in the American intelligence establishment who was charged with preventing Soviet penetrations of the American intelligence establishment. And told Philby everything,

which is why every paramilitary operation launched by the CIA in Europe from 1949 until 1954 they were suicide missions. Angleton, oh, Philby, by the way, was recalled. His betrayal was not revealed for many years later.

He died a lonely alcoholic dickhead in Moscow in the 70s. Angleton destroyed American counterintelligence for years on end because he became, he would never admit, and Philby had betrayed him, but he had a source named Anatoli Golitsin, who convinced him in his, in Engleton's alcoholism, convinced him that he had the source.

Golitsyn convinced him that every Soviet who came to the United States, said, I want to work for you, was a double. That destroyed American counterintelligence. It's funny because have you ever, have you met Jim Olson? Have you ever had the opportunity to talk to him about Angleton? We had Jim Olsa on the show. And how Angleton, even the technical operations like the Berlin Tunnel operation,

Angleton was trying to tell Jim Olson that, oh, those are just dangles. they're just like pretending to send this this cable traffic back and forth. But yeah, but that paranoia that you said that, because the, this Russian ass, like this source instilled in him, you know, it was that case of never meet your heroes because Jim really looked up to Angleton.

And then when he actually, like, when he started working for him and he's like, everything is a Russian plot. And it's like, no, like this guy's coming in and telling us, No, it's a Russian plot.

And it's like, yeah. How destructive that was. The destruction of the American counterintelligence was destroyed by Angleton because he believed that every Soviet who came to the United States was a dangle, was a deception. American counterintelligence, to this day, and we'll get into this later, is fucked.

Because we don't know what we don't know. Right. About how to detect very sophisticated operations. Have a little refill there, please? Very sophisticated operations that are intended... Thank you, sir. To deceive, mystify and mislead us. it's not an American skill.

Well, and we, I mean, as much as people think that the CIA has all this hidden stuff, and they do, I'm not saying that our government doesn't hide stuff, but we are by comparison of other countries, a fairly transparent country. We're Americans! Yeah. Bates in the woods. We're Americans. Dude.

We're talking about intelligence, right? Right. The Chinese have been at this since Sun Tzu wrote the art of war. Twenty-six centuries ago. The Chinese crushed us at this. The British have been at this since Queen Elizabeth I. Yeah. Okay, 500-something years ago.

The Russians have been at this since Peter the Great. three hundred odd years ago we got into this after World War II yeah we don't know we are we walk in baby shoes yeah okay we don't know we don't know the history of intelligence when you go to the farm the CI's training unit they don't teach you about the history of intelligence. We're going to get this because we're going to talk about the AQ Khan network. But if you go to the farm, they're not going to teach you about like what we're talking about. The history of intelligence is the history of warfare. Sun Tzu tells us in the art of war. All warfare is based on

deception. Deception is the art of intelligence. Every discussion about how the Americans make war and how the Americans conduct intelligence operations should proceed from that. All warfare is based on deception. And that means not only do you have the art of deceiving your enemies, but how you understand how you might be deceived. Right. This is the essence. And Americans die in war because we don't get that. Speaking of this, Tim, another subject I wanted to ask you about post-World War II construct.

Your book mentions it. So does Danny Orbach's book, Fugitives, does a really good job on talking about this as well. There's a sort of, I think, almost fetishization. of the Nazis and, you know, their ruthless efficiency, if you will. But I was wondering if you could talk to us about the efficacy of the Gehrlen network. The Gehrin Network?

Uh-huh. What was it, first of all? Well, here we go. Here we go into the art of deception. In post-World War I, Germany, the Americans, realizing that the Soviets were suddenly not our friends,

Look to Germans who had fought the Soviets, who were Nazis, to develop a strategy. Reinhardt Gellon was a Nazi. The Americans, we, thought we could develop him as an anti-Soviet force. He ran intelligence into the Soviet Union for the Third Reich. Correct. His network was completely penetrated by the Soviets. So we signed up a guy, a Nazi, who come to find out, to our sorrow, was penetrated by the Soviets to be our guy who was going to spy on.

the Soviets. One of the Americans who was in the OSS, who was in Berlin in 1945, was a gentleman who I came to do quite well named Richard Helms, who was the director of Central Intelligence from 1965 to 1973. So Richard Helms, who was the director of Central Intelligence from 1965 to 1973. So Richard Helms had been a reporter, a newspaper reporter for United Press in 1936, and he scored an interview with Hitler. He was 23 years old. And he's like, this is a scoop, right?

And it was a scoop. But it convinced him that there was more to life than being a newspaper reporter. So Halems was in Germany. He was a charter member of CIA, having served OSS and he was trying to gather intelligence, right? There were all these displaced persons trying to sell there. There were grifters. I mean, they were intelligence rifters.

Displaced persons. Okay, Russians. In Europeans. Central Europeans. And the Americans were running. You know, Germany, we occupied Germany, who are selling their services. Helms called these people paper hangers. Yeah.

They were trying to deceive the Americans for money. Like, I know about X. Right. Give me $500, and I will tell you about why. Right. Helms understood deception. Helms was the guy who became the premier advocate for espionage

and counterintelligence over covert operations at CIA. And that's why Helms, when he was director, he spent his entire life at CIA. until Richard fucking Nixon fired him for refusing to support

the Watergate cover up. Like a month before his 60th. Exactly. Helms was the guy I knew him very well. I interviewed him every chance I got. Who said, intelligence is espionage.

It's not covert action. And intelligence is counterintelligence. Never go to sleep without thinking about where the... How do you feel about some of these guys personally, having met many of them? I mean, in so many ways, a lot of these guys are genuine American heroes who helped us, you know, defeat Nazi Germany. The CIA was a central factor in the collapse of... of the Soviet Union. Let's not can say that.

They helped. And they were incredibly patriotic guys who would, you know, were willing to do, you know, pretty much whatever needed to be done, right? But at the same time, bumbled into things, they made mistakes, especially in those early years, the first few decades.

Okay, so let's talk about the history, the CIA. Legacy of the The history of the CIA. National Book Award winner, I might add. There are eras. Let's carve them into 25 years. CIA is founded in 1947.

The purpose is to prevent the next Pearl Harbor. This quickly devolves into fighting the Cold War. 25 years pass and comes Watergate. And Watergate is a shorthand for the discovery that the government of the United States, the White House, is a corrupt force that has fucked with American democracy. The Nixon White House, the corruption of the Nixon White House, the discovery that the president of the United States was using the CIA, never mind the FBI.

to spy on Americans comes out at the end of 1974. This creates the Senate investigation, the Church Committee. The skeletons come tumbling out. And the skeletons are that the CIA has not only run coups against legitimate governments in Guatemala, And Iran, but has conspired to assassinate Fidel Castro, among other foreign leaders. Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically selected leader of Congo. Who gets hung for these?

CIA. Yes. What did the church committee fail to say? that they're enacting the president's will. They're taking their marching orders from the president. The whole concept of plausible deniability. The president doesn't go down for anyone. Is a lie.

You think a bunch of CIA officers sat around at the Vienna Inn. And went road. You know, and had a couple martinis and said, Hey, I have a good idea. Let's kill Fidel Castro. You guys know the Congo? Yeah. Yeah.

Never been? No! No! That's not what happened. It was John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby who wanted to feed him to Lede. The church committee never got to that. It was too hard. But as a consequence, a couple of reforms got created.

One, there are congressional oversight committee. that get to hear about the takeoffs and the crashes of covert action. Two, the president authorizing covert action has to sign what's called a finding, which says, I find that this covert operation is essential to the national security of the United States. no more plausible deniability. Well, gentlemen, if you're running a covert secret intelligence service in an open democratic society, those are guardrails that are important. Nevertheless, presidents will tell the CIA to do terrible things

without deniability. And then wash their hands when it blows up. When we talk about intelligence failures and we kind of need to move into the 21st century here

because we've been talking about the history of the 20th century CIA. I'll try to move you forward a little bit here. The idea that the president's, the idea that the CIA is a freestanding

organization that does shit because it thinks it's cool to do. It's bullshit. The CIA is the president's secret army. It does what the president tells it to do. And when things go wrong, as they always do, because the thing that really needs to be engraved on the wall of the CIA, On the wall of the CIA is engraved from the Gospel of John,

and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. There needs to be engraved next to that shit happens. Or Murphy's Law, if you will. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. And when it goes wrong, because the president wants the CIA to do X, Y, and Z, the president is going to hang the CIA for doing it. Before we move into contemporary times, there was an interesting contemporary parallel, I thought, in your book,

as far as Richard Nixon in his war against the so-called liberal CIA cabal or deep state. I just wonder if you could tell us about that and what it led to. So I wrote a whole book about Richard. Nixon. Nixon hated the CIA for a number of reasons, few of which were logical, but the fundamental reason that the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, hated the CIA, was that they were, he was convinced that the CIA had fucked him about the plans for the Bay of Pigs. What was Nixon's position when Babe Pigs happen under Kennedy? Nixon believed that the CIA hated him and concealed from him their future plans, so that when he debated John Kennedy, in the crucial first televised presidential debates

that he didn't know what was going on. Was that true, to your knowledge? No. Because the plans had not been germinated. Okay. Yeah. Nixon was a bit of a paranoid guy, wasn't it? Nixon saw enemies everywhere.

he believed that the CIA was a bunch of liberal academic Georgetown Democrats part of an establishment that he wasn't a part of Nixon said and I can tell you this because I've listened to the tapes for the book I wrote by Nixon what the hell is the CIA doing out there They're not 40,000 people reading newspapers. What are those clowns do out there?

He thought that they were part of a liberal establishment that was subverting him. Nevertheless, Nixon called Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, into the Oval Office in 1970. He had a problem. The problem was that Salvador Aende, a socialist politician, whom the CIA had worked to defeat in the previous election in Chile in 1964, had won an election in Chile. Nixon believed that Salvador Rionde was a fucking communist who was going to be the lead domino that was going to set off a series of communist rebellions that would undermine the United States. So Nixon calls Helmson, the Olaus. Aende has won the election, but it has to be certified by the Congress, right?

Just like us. Like the Congress has to accept the votes. Popular vote and then certified. And he tells Richard Helms, I want you to reverse the election in Chile that has happened. I will, you know, here's $10,000. I give you the bayonet. Fuck communism in Chile. What are you going to do with that?

The president has told you to reverse the results of an election in a democratic society. And Helms saluted smartly and set out to do that. It didn't work until it didn't. did work three years later. The CIA supported a military coup in Chile. This wasn't Nixon so much as it was Henry Kissinger, Secretary of SIG driving this. Running.

Like Salvador Aende wins and American. And this is all against the backdrop of Systema Condor, which is like South America's gladiotio, right? The result was. Augusto Peter Chet General Puget ran Chile for the next 17 years and took everybody who was opposed

to him into a state of fear and took his actual political opponents into helicopters and dropped them into the sea and murdered them. The CIA sometimes to its regret is the instrument of American foreign policy. The CIA, people didn't sit around and say, let's kill Fidel Castro.

Let's overthrow the shot. Right. Throw a dart on the map to see who we overthrow next. Let's change the course of history. Because we're the CIA and we're... And American presidents are rather unpatient. Presidents tell the CIA to do what they do. And then when things get fucked up, presidents deny it.

And that is the history of the CIA up until the end of the Cold War. There's a lot more in your book that we're not going to have time to get to. There's M.K. Ultra. There's Bay of Pigs. There's Vietnam. The wall comes down, much more. before we get into contemporary times one last question about the book

I want to ask you about the CIA's reaction to the book the review that was written they describe your book as a 600 page op-ed piece masquerading as history

they stopped just short of calling you a real son of a bitch what do you make of all that what do you think about it? I know the guy who wrote that yeah

so he wanted to write the official history of the And you wrote the unofficial one? I did. Nick, good guy, had been commissioned to write an official authorized.

A classified history? No! Oh, really? An official authorized history. Okay. And so this preempted that. And that book was never written. Never was.

That's a shame, though, isn't it? I would love to read that. Yeah. The problem is, oh gosh, this is a long discussion. When you go to the CIA as a reporter, you need to come armed with an understanding of the understanding of the right questions to ask. And now I'm talking about interviewing individual CIA officers and veterans, analysts. And I have interviewed 300-something people like this.

When you go to the CIA and say, you need to declassify your own history, Because I, Tim, am trying to write an authoritative history of what you have done, and I know about the failures. They are public. I need to know the successes. The general response is, fuck you. You don't say? The general response when you go to the CIA and you say, will you please declassify things,

fuck you is probably a little extreme. It's like, yeah, no. Fornicate you. Would be a more generous description. nevertheless, as a reporter who approaches CIA officers, if you come to them with an understanding, this is not going to the CIA's Office of Public Affairs. This is going to individual people.

if you go to them with a general understanding of who they are and what they have done, they understand you as a reporter. What they do, cultivating sources, is what I'm doing. There is a gigantic then diagram between what intelligence officers do and what reporters do. In more ways than one sometimes. It's enormous. We get to like parachute into Khartoum or Joe Al-Abal, you know,

and say, take me to your leader. They're like, cool, okay. And just for all of our viewers I hear, like you want to pay attention to Tim in the future because you have all the deets on the AQCon network and how it was taken down. I do. And it was a big deal, right?

Like, they were not, they were not that far from having nuclear capabilities. They had them. They had them. And this gentleman may have even been on the team house in the past, although he didn't reveal any details to us about exactly how that was done. Hey, guys. Hey, thank you, everybody. Hey, please join our Patreon.

The link is down below. you get a ton of bonus episodes and you support our drinking habit. And also this nice space. This nice space that you guys see right now is because of our patrons. And also

please check out Tim's book, Legacy Ashes, winner of the National Book Award. Tim's also a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He's got a ton of books. He's got some hot

folks coming out. He's got the scoop on some stuff. On some stuff. I mean, honestly, not only on the Islamic bomb nuclear capability

that was rolled up, but also, he's got a scoop. Can I tell the scoop about the... What now? Can I tell the... Any... Any little

a little scoop you want to tease out there? You want to give us a teaser of the scoop a teaser? Will you have a teaser about a raid, a very famous raid and you have information that nobody else has? You don't have tell us what it is. When that book comes out, we'll definitely have you on the show again, Tim. Yeah. I'm as excited as anyone to read about it.

Thank you everyone who joined us tonight. Thank you so much, Tim, for coming out here. I know you came in from D.C., super tired. This has been awesome. I hope we can do it again. And next Friday, we're going to have John Fox. We're going to be talking about... No way! YPG volunteers in Syria. That's next episode. He'll be here in studio, I believe. So we'll see you guys next week. You guys got anything before we roll out? No, thank you, everybody. Thank you, Tim. We deeply appreciate it, man.