The Team House - Senior CIA Officer Who Ran The Paramilitary Program in Afghanistan | Milt Bearden | Ep. 158

Episode Date: August 13, 2022

A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the dramatic inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them. Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose through the ranks to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War. The clandestine operations they masterminded took them from the sewers of Moscow to the back streets of Baghdad, from Cairo and Havana to Prague and Berlin, but the action centers on Washington, starting in the infamous "Year of the Spy"—when, one by one, the CIA’s agents in Moscow began to be killed, up through to the very last man. Behind the scenes with the CIA's covert operations in Afghanistan, Milt Bearden led America to victory in the secret war against the Soviets, and for the first time he reveals here what he did and whom America backed, and why. Bearden was called back to Washington after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and was made chief of the Soviet/East Euro-pean Division—just in time to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe, and the implosion of the Soviet Union. Laced with startling revelations—about fail-safe top-secret back channels between the CIA and KGB, double and triple agents, covert operations in Berlin and Prague, and the fateful autumn of 1989—The Main Enemy is history at its action-packed best. Grab the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Main-Enemy-Inside-Story-Showdown/dp/0345472500 Today's Sponsors: Mad Rabbit Tattoo https://www.MADRABBIT.com/team They’ve preserved over 1.5 MILLION tattoos and right now, they’ve got an exclusive offer just for The Team house Project listeners. If you go to MadRabbit.com/team and use promo code Team you’ll receive 25% off. Take care of those tats! 👇 https://www.MADRABBIT.com/team SAP Gear (Stately Asset Protection) https://SAPGEAR.com Veteran-owned company, Stately Asset Protection’s retail store specializes in handmade and unique survivability products. Use the code “TEAM” for 15% off your order! 👇 https://SAPGEAR.com 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:Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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espionage the team house with your hopes jack murphy and david park good evening everyone this is episode 158 of the team house i'm jack murphy here with in the other side of our hotel room uh david park just on the other side we're joining you live from las vegas nevada we're out here at defcon this weekend uh d is back in brooklyn doing the production work for us and we're very flattered here tonight to have special guests, Milt Bearden, joining us on the show. He's the author of The Main Enemy, the inside story of the CIA's final showdown with the KGB, co-authored with James Risen, a national security reporter. Milt served as the Soviet East European Division head at the time of the collapse of the USSR and also ran the Afghan task force in the 1980s,

the paramilitary program into Afghanistan that was confronting the Soviet Union. Milt's book is incredible. I finished reading it this week. Just a stunning level of detail about a very deadly game of cat and mouse that took place in the late 1970s and 1980s into their early 1990s, really, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. So Mr. Bearden, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It was great to be with you. We really appreciate to be with you. We really We appreciate it. I'm going to jump right into it with the classic first question of a team house interview. What's your origin story?

Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing and sort of the path that took you towards governmental service? I was born just ahead of World War II starting. And then my dad's generation and all my uncles and everybody went off to that war, except my dad got hijacked. into the Manhattan Project. So we moved off from Oklahoma to Washington State. And in Hanford, Washington was the Hanford Engineer Works. And that's where he did his part of the Manhattan Project. So I was sort of born into that sense of service. And the town that we lived in was Richland, Washington, which was a bedroom,

community for this whole Manhattan project up in Washington and everybody there was one way or another involved with that and I can remember vividly the the day that the Japanese surrendered finally after the second bomb which was the one that was produced in man in uh Hanford uh fat man they called it and the town went went wild I mean everybody was in the streets uh beating on pots and pans and the war was over. And so that was sort of my sense of early public service. Then I did the usual thing after high school started college and then said, well, maybe I'll take that guy up at the recruiting office and go into aviation cadets in the Air Force.

And so I went off to Lackland, ready to go into this aviation cadet program, which they had at the time, which was producing a lot of needed pilots. And instead, I got sidetracked there. And they said, well, you're not going into aviation cadetist. But that's the deal. They said, well, there is no deal. And they sent me back to Yale to go learn Chinese. And I thought, God, you know, I can't win for nothing on this deal.

So we went to Yale. And after about almost. two years of Yale in another place. We had enough Chinese to head off and go out to Korea and right around on C-47s over the Yellow Sea, listening to Chinese fighter pilots trying to shoot us down. And I think they thought that was really great intelligence. So after that, I went back to the University of Texas and then was teaching, actually teaching Chinese at UT in Austin. and when a CIA recruiter came up to my office and said, what do you think? Would you like to do something like this? And he kind of laid it out.

I said, let's do it. Let's go now. Come on. I'll go with you right now. Let's go. And so 64, off to Washington. Excuse me. And I spent a very short time in training because I had languages already, and so they sent me through this, you know, the usual ops training and all that. And then off to Germany in 65, I had German and Chinese, and I was there for the East Asia Division. And then Germany and then from there directly to Hong Kong for some years, and then from Hong Kong to Switzerland, German speaking, Switzerland for four years. then about a year in Washington back to Hong Kong then back to Washington for a while

and then off starting to take a look at the rest of the world went off to Africa, Nigeria, then Sudan. And that's about the time that Casey came along and decided that he'd really

liked me to do something different and so he brought me back and then sent me off to Pakistan. He had a plan that almost nobody knew the full details of. It included his great friend Maggie Thatcher and the Polish Pope and Casey was one of those go-to-mass on Tuesday-type Catholics, you know. So he had a, he'd get on his black airplane, the C-141 and fly off to Rome and Nobody knew what he was doing over there when we had that Polish Pope.

And he and Thatcher and a Polish Pope. And so we did all of that. I went out to Pakistan, Afghanistan for Casey. He said, I'll give you a billion dollars. This is part of something big. We're going after them. We don't want to fight to the last Afghan anymore. What we want to do is to beat them, drive them across the river.

You got a billion bucks. You need more. Call me. When he promptly went into the hospital after that in a coma and I never talked to him again. Oh, my goodness. When you're, I would like to backtrack a little bit on that because I thought it was absolutely fascinating in your book about how you talk about how Bill Casey had, he had a vision. He had a plan in his mind for the end game as far as this confrontation with the Soviet Union was concerned.

And I was wondering if you could tell us if you could set this stage a little bit for us, where by the time that your book opens, you're getting to be a senior CIA officer in the late, you know, mid to late 1970s. What was the, what were the front lines, what were the main points of contention between CIA and KGB as we roll into the twilight years of the Cold War? Well, it was still a battle that had sort of been engaged ever since Winston Churchill was in Fulton, Missouri, and said an iron curtain has descended across Europe. And that said in motion, something that was just a slug fest for the next 45 years. And it got a little tricky with the Bay of Pigs and a Berlin crisis. And I think both the KGB and the CIA said, this could get out of hand too quickly. Let's not go after each other directly. Let's kind of watch this stuff like Cuba and Berlin.

So we took the battle with them off to that third world playing field in Latin America and Africa. and to a certain extent still across some of Europe. And that's the way the game more or less proceeded for the next couple of decades. Later in the game, we very discreetly had opened up a liaison with a KGB to where the chief of SC, my predecessor, Burton Gerber, would take off with whoever was the counterintelligence chief at the time. and meet these guys somewhere. And then I picked it up and would do the same thing and go off to Helsinki or Potsdam or God knows where.

Just to sit down with them and say, look, here's what's going on, guys. They were particularly bothered by the fact that in the 80s, when everything was getting very wobbly in the Soviet Union, And they were losing KGB officers defecting to our side at a very high rate. We would, at one point, we were getting a KGB officer about every month. Wow. Yeah. And so, and it usually involved, you know, got his wife, his kids, a dog, or some other guy's wife, his kids, and a dog. and to resettle them.

And so they wanted to meet. And we were in Potsdam at that time. One of the senior officers, who was one of the head first chief director at Line K.R., which is a counterintelligence American guy, said, what's going on? These guys, these are the best and the brightest that we have. They have red diplomas from Moscow State University.

They were tops at the endrofen. Institute, what's happening? Why do they, why are they defecting to you? And I said, let me tell you a story. I said, picture this big conference room with a hand-rubed mahogany table, all kinds of people sitting around the table and the CEO of a dog food company sitting there at the head of the table holding a can of pile dog food or whatever it is. And it's open. And he smells it. And he says, this even smells good. I would even

eat it. So I want somebody to tell me, why can't we sell it? Why are sales constantly like that? What's going on here? It was total silence in the room until a guy kind of at the end of the table raises his hand. And the guy says, he says, dogs don't like it. And then the guy says, dogs don't like it. That's the KGB guy turning to me and trying to get the picture of this, dogs don't like it as an answer to his question. Why are all these guys affecting? I'm not sure he got it to the big.

I never did use that story again to explain. They're just not buying what you're selling. Yeah, they're just not buying it. No, when you said that, especially the early days, was a slug fest. What does that look like in sort of the spiver spiral? What does it were like CIA officers doing hits on KGB officers and they were doing hits on CIA or it does it how does that look for you? In the early days and that was even before my time. I came in in 85 into the Soviet world when I was deputy chief in the division but in the early days when let's talk about the 60s and around

there. It was a really provocative type stuff. There was no attempt to let it, let, let, let let things sell themselves. There was some pretty heavy-handed cold pitches going on on both in both directions. And occasionally, uh, oh, they would think we got out of line a little bit and and even a roughed up one of our very senior guys. Uh, and, and so there, there was also some roughing up of TGB officers being arrested by the FBI in the States. And so whatever happened if the FBI took down a guy and maybe

twisted his arm a little bit hard, the next guy we had taken down in Leningrad or something like that was going to have his arm torn out of a socket. And so that thing went on for some years and then finally, Coolerhead says, you know, let's not do this. And when I came in, I inherited a reasonably well-functioning, very discreet liaison with a KGB, very secret.

In my office, in the corner of the new building, there was a two-droar safe and on it, a black telephone. That phone wouldn't ring unless it was my KGB counterpart calling me. me and wanting to say, hey, we better meet. Let's meet in Tokyo in five days or something like that, or Helsinki or God knows where, to discuss something that he thought would be important. And we were able to keep a lid on things. And even that channel, when the diplomatic or government

to government channels were not functioning very well, that channel was always something. that worked. So were there, even though we are, we were sort of these exist, or at least perceived as existential enemies to each other for the intelligence world, there were still sort of like gentlemen's rules or like there were rules about how intelligence operations, even against the hostile enemy are conducted. Yeah, it became that way. I mean, as I told you, there was pretty provocative stuff early on. But we both had, you know, 30,000 warheads that would go down range. And that put us in a different level of competition. It's not east and West Germans taking

each other on. It's these are the guys that really have it all. And so we, yes, we had rules. And there was a degree of decorum. And if things got a little flage, lakey somewhere, we would call each other out. And not to wag your finger in somebody's face, but to say, hey, what are we doing here? Yeah. You know, I was wondering if you could talk about the 1985 losses of CIA assets. I thought that was very interesting. And especially the conversations you had with one of your colleagues, I believe it was Paul Redmond, coming to you and saying, we have a problem. I was wonder if you could talk about what that problem was

and how that idea began to percolate and resolve itself in your minds at that time. I had been in Africa, first in Nigeria, then in Sudan, and Casey really liked that. He was following everything I did, and he brought me back. And he brought another officer back from the Middle East, and he wanted us to take two jobs.

One was the Central American Task Force, which was doing Nicaragua and all of that stuff and the Sandinistas. And then the other one was being the deputy chief in the SE division. I drew that card and was to go in there and to maybe do some different things. That was Casey's quiet instruction to me. I get into SC Division and into my deputy chief's office and open the desk drawer and the guy's got one of those rubber things for his finger to go through all the cables every morning and it's all smudged with ink. And there are four empty accedron bottles in there. And I thought, I got the rubber finger and the empty excreterine bottles. That tells me a lot here.

And maybe part of it was being Burton Gerber's deputy, although I admire Gerber greatly to this day. But I walked in as the time of troubles was happening. It began with the takedown of Paul Stombo. And the case he was brought down on was Adolf, Tolkachev, which was the billion-dollar spy, the guy that paid our budget. He was in an advanced avionics development department in Moscow, and he gave us everything about what the next generations of Soviet fighter aircraft would be able to do. And we could even build ours around that.

And it's why even today, you know, a Soviet-produced fighter aircraft against an American-produced fighter aircraft, and I don't care who's flying it. We're going to win six-love, six-love. So, but the point was all of a sudden he went down, and then another went down, and another and another and all of a sudden, you know, we look up and we say we've lost all these assets. in Moscow, what's going on. There's only a couple of possibilities. One, they're reading our mail or two, somebody's in here. Most of us believed at that time that spies are almost never caught either KGB spies or CIA spies on the other side by the competent organs, as they say, like people doing good counterintelligence, which almost never happens. It's almost always a betrayal.

Somebody drops a dime on somebody. So we looked at it. I went off to Africa to a station and created a fake operation. And with the table traffic going back to Washington about Allegedly we recruited a GRU officer. And it went through all the places we thought it had to go through and nothing happened to the guy. We thought it doesn't prove anything 100%,

but probably since this guy is still operating, probably not our communications. At that moment, the cable traffic went through the office where Aldrich James was working except he had just left to go off to Italian language training for his assignment to Rome. So we learned nothing on that. And then he was gone for a while. We might have thought the problem was over, but nobody ever let up on that. But you saw from the troubles of 85 until when 94, when did he get arrested? right yeah something like right around there in the 90s uh early 90s so uh yeah yeah and each one of those

cases was you know a million dollars that we lost i mean yeah we talked to uh mr olson about this of course uh and you know we're so we're there's there's the three guys that are well known edward v howard Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen at FBI who compromised CIA operations and assets. But there's this lingering theory out there that I wanted to ask you, Milt, to this so-called fourth man theory, that there was yet another person in CIA who was committing acts of treason and has remained undetected to this day. What are your thoughts about that, Milt? I think I might have created that, the fourth man. When I was, I wrote the main enemy, I put that in there at the end in the epilogue of the fourth man.

Yeah. In the counterintelligence in looking at our losses, the 85 losses, first when Edward Lee Howard Defected went to Moscow, we said, ha, there it is, because he had been in the pipeline to go serve in Moscow, and he had read into a lot of cases, including Tolkutchev. And we said that's it. But then as we lost some more guys that he didn't know, we said, uh-oh, what do we have here? And so then we go off on that until, until the, you know, Ames. Okay, that's an answer. Well, no, it's not. Because then there's some things that we lost that Ames did not know. And then Hansen,

Yes, but no, Hansen wasn't it. So the only conclusion that I can have reached after I had gone and actually retired and looked at this and wrote, after I'd written the main enemy, I said, we've still got a fourth man out there. And I thought probably a half a generation ahead of me in the agency. so that makes him a little long in the tooth or even dead by now and I thought maybe we'll never catch it and we'll never find out but

if you still believe as I do that the competent organs almost never catch anybody that it's always a betrayal then there's a fourth man and we don't know who he is It's probably a heat because I'm not being... Yeah, they're mostly...

But it's kind of a guy thing to commit treason. I'm going to get and ask you about Afghanistan. I do want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors for this show. The first one is Mad Rabbit, Mad Rabbit Tattoo Aid. I know a lot of our viewers, military members, have tattoos, as I do, as Dave does. and they start to fade over time. They start to get damaged. And Mad Rabbit makes this right here, which helps restore and maintain your tattoos so that they don't fade over time.

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And first off, I just want to say, you know, we do have tattoos and Jack has a Sumerian Navy SEAL tattoo that you want to protect very well. So Jack and I have been fighting over this piece of year so far all weekend because we only have one between us. But being in DefCon and being that we're in rooms with like... Well, we lost him. Yeah, I think we may have. Oh, let me have you're back.

Oh, sorry about that. So, yeah, so a Faraday bag protects your electronics. from any type of, from any type of, you know, electrical interference. So if you put your phone in here, it won't ring, you won't get text. But at the same time, nobody will be able to get into this. It's really good if you're, you know, like if you're an activist, if you're a journalist, and you don't want to be trapped, like, if you're doing things that aren't nefarious. But, you know, or if you are a spy.

If you're a spy. But we've seen with just with the Pegasus spyware and how they, track journalists and things like that, you know, and gotten into their stuff, that if you go someplace that you don't necessarily want every app on your phone reporting back or people, you know, war driving or whatever to find you, these are great solutions. So we highly recommend SAPgear. I don't have their, but it's sapgear.com. It's up on the screen. There's a promo code team and you get a discount off of your order. Yeah, the promo code is team and it's 15% off your store at zapgear.com.

Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today.

Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. So, Mill, the next thing I'd like to ask you about is when Director Casey sent you off to Pakistan to take up the Afghanistan account as well from Jack Devine, if I recall correctly. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Well, Casey, the DDO had told me Casey had a bug and wanted to send me off to Pakistan. He wanted to alert me to that. And I thought, well, that's okay. So I went to see Bill and usual Casey. It's kind of like a Friday. He's leaning way back in his chair. He's got a stack of books about this high on the corner of his desk up there in the seventh floor and he's going to take him off to the Long Island over the weekend

and then probably read them all. He said, I want you to go to mumble, mumble, mumble, mumbled Pakistan and take over the Afghan thing. And then he kind of got in a different mood. He said, yeah, we've been really happy to fight to the last Afghan and sort of tie these guys up, kind of give him their Vietnam, all of that. And he said, the president and I don't think that's moral anymore. And I said, okay.

And he said, I want you to go out there, but this time you're not just going to go out there and hand out the usual money and weapons to just fight to the last Afghan. I want you to win this thing. And he said, I'm going to give you whatever you need. I'll start with a billion dollars. Is that enough? And I said, how do I know a billion dollars sounds like a lot of money? Let me try it. and I'll get back to you.

And so he said, I want you to go tomorrow or take a couple days more, maybe three days, and then go out to Pakistan, take a look, come back and talk to me about it. I went out, TDI, took a look, and came back and packed out and headed out in the summer of 86. At that moment, the Afghan resistance had been slugging it out with these guys for about five years. More, six and a half years. They came in December, Christmas Eve in 79. And they were sort of hunkered down and waiting to be marty. The Soviet attack helicopter fleet was.

just murdering them. And finally, we had gotten approval through a very obstreperous Washington, D.C., to give them something that might really work against helicopters. And it was the U.S. Stinger, heavy aircraft missile. And I got out there as we were training our first Stinger team. And you have to, you almost have to, to go out to Fort Bliss in El Paso and to their big Stinger training center,

which is like a giant dome with sky and stars and an environment that is absolutely like a Stinger gunner would be in a real fight. And it's an amazing thing to see. But I get out there and we've got a classroom It's about 50 feet long and 25 feet wide. And down at the end, there is a white sheet hanging. And it's like your nine-year-old daughter had drawn the world.

Here's the earth. Here's a tree. And there's a horse. And here's the sky. And there's a helicopter maybe. But behind that is a guy with an infrared. pointer that is moving it around as an infrared source like an aircraft. And back here in the room is a guy with a Stinger training unit trying to lock onto that infrared source. And then it goes

beep, beep, beep, beep, and it hits him on the cheek a little bit. And then he pulls the trigger and kills it. And the whole thing costs about $11 for that source. Stinger training room instead of $26.9 million for Fort Bliss or billion, I don't know, one way or the other. But we sent our first Stinger team out in September, and they went out by Jalalabad, and we said, hang out about this point here near the end of the runway, and there will be a flight of MI24 deltas coming in from Kabul on the afternoon of blah blah. And sure enough, they came in. First, the commander of that group stood up.

He acquired it. He heard the noise. He got the cheek bone rattling. And he fired and it came out of the tube. And the second engine didn't ignite. And it just clattered in the rocks. and instead of an Oahu Akbar, it was like a kind of, oh, crap, moment, except the other gunner had also acquired an aircraft

and had fired just about the moment when they were really upset, and that white tail arched across the sky and popped that first MI24 Delta and brought it down like a rock. The commander had reloaded by that time, and he had picked off the second one, and the war changed. and it wasn't so much that they were claiming to have shot down an aircraft today, and a lot of it we were being able to confirm from overhead imagery or from SIG-int. But some of them just say it's fine.

If you believe that you're magic now, if you guys are not hunkered down, if you've taken a stinger and a bunch of guys and said, patience, my ass, let's go in and look for some trouble, then it's okay. And the war never changed after that. It was always just murder, mayhem. And the Soviets in the next year started talking in Geneva, and then finally, in, God, it was February 15, 1989, Boris Gromoff, the commander of the Soviet 40th Army marched across friendship bridge about halfway across. He got off of his tank and then met his 13-year-old son, Maxime, who gave him a bouquet of carnations. And they walked out of Afghanistan together, and he was the hero of Afghanistan.

That's how he was played back in the Soviet Union. And then you take a look at 89. In February, he marched out. In May, the Hungarians cut the barbed wire on their borders and said, look, we're going to let people move a little more freely than they have up to now. In June, the Polish people went out and elected in a free and fair election for the first time. The electrician from G'dansk and communism was voted out of Poland. Then the most Stalinist of the eastern countries, East Germany had their Monday demonstrations. Every Monday, first a couple of hundred, and then more and more over the summer and into the fall until November 9th, 1989.

Berlin was full of these people, and through a comedy of errors, the Berlin wall was opened up, and they were able to flow from east to west. And basically, you know, by a year and plus later, the Warsaw Pact disappeared and came over. In 1991 on Boxing Day, little detachment of Soviet soldiers marched out on the Kremlin wall and hauled down the hammer and sickle for the last time and ran the Russian tricolor up, and it was game over. The entire career that I'd spent, it was over. Go ahead, Jack. Well, before we get to the end game, I did a couple of quick questions about Afghanistan. One of them I wanted to ask you, what was it like working with slash trying to manage a congressman named Charlie Wilson out there?

Oh, God. Yeah. Charlie was Charlie. I think Tom Hanks played a good Charlie Wilson. I was Mike Nichols' advisor on that film, so I tried to keep them all honest. But Charlie, he had needed something positive to do except womanizing and drinking and all that stuff.

And it happened to be Afghanistan. It also happened with this lovely lady in Houston, Joanne Herring, that Charlie had some dalliances with. And she was very caught up on Afghanistan. So it became Afghanistan. Then, you know, congressional interest in something a CIA station chief is doing cuts both ways. They can either hate you too much like they didn't like the Central American stuff or load us too much in Pakistan. So I had him out there all the time and Charlie always wanted to go inside Afghanistan. And a couple of times he tried and the Pakistanis wouldn't let him in.

I talked finally to the head of the Pakistani service. I said, let's just do it right. So we got it all lined up with one of the commanders and got him a white horse. And we even tried, we had skigger gunners all three. through the hills. We even had some people drag in a dusty road trying to kick up dust and attract some Soviet air. But we never did get that for Charlie, but he he rode around on his white horse in Afghanistan with a muja heading and fired off some rounds and that drove his testosterone levels up to beyond readable. And

but, you know, if anybody in Congress was important to helping bring down the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, it was charter. And even though some others, once it started looking like

we might be winning that thing, then they all wanted to come over and get a piece of it, but Charlie was the man. and I was sort of his dearest friend, Billy Dye. There was a conversation that you talk about on page 345 of the main enemy that I thought was very interesting that you had with somebody of the Russian embassy named Bacchanchanco. Oh, yeah, Bocchanchenko, yeah. And I thought this was an interesting conversation.

I mean, in the sense, Milta, I mean, you're clearly a. an intelligent, dedicated professional. But what came out of that conversation is that you were also playing this game for keeps. You were in it just as hard as the Soviets were, and you were not playing any games. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But see, I was, they all wanted to take shots at me one way or the other when I was in Pakistan. And I would go occasionally into Afghanistan, and they really wanted to pick me up there.

and that would have been a great benefit for him. But yeah, yeah, I think he was saying, well, what if we don't leave? And I just looked at him in the eye, I said, look, you know, we're just going to keep killing you until you do. And I said, I don't want to kill your boys. I mean, they're just like everybody else's boys, but yeah, that's what we'll do. And I don't know if he knew what to handle. He was carrying that message. But he was, you know, kind of a KGB phone.

And they all like to do that. Then they would ever so often send a nicer one in to see if they could get something out of me. Yeah. Well, it sort of sounded like you were saying like, hey, you're attacking our soldiers as they're trying to retreat back to the Soviet Union. Yeah. You were like, yeah, yeah, we are. I said, as long as you keep on the right roads, don't turn back. I'll try to keep those people.

When you turn around and look at us again, here we go. So that moment when they take down those first helicopters, because for people who don't know, the helicopters were just devastating. They were like unstoppable and they were devastating the Afghan population. What happened to the Russian military, to the diplomatic channels and then to the intelligence channels like after that very first attack. Well, before that, of course, all we had was really 12.7 machine guns, which is 50 caliber. And the Soviet attack helicopters are so heavily armed, it just pings off.

Unless you happen to be above them and they're flying below you in a valley, then you might get lucky, but almost never, ever happened. So when we brought down those first helicopters at Jalalabad, boom, we were monitoring as best we could through signals, intelligence, what was going on in Kabul. They sent a team down to look at and say, what's this, what's this, what happened here? Because they didn't, you know, their intelligence wasn't great. They knew there was a debate because it was very public in Washington by getting the stinger in there. but they didn't know if that was what that was. And the next thing that was most pronounced

is that the Stinger's operational altitude is really going to be about something under 10,000 feet, 3,000 meters plus. And we noticed that the ML24 attack helicopter guys were starting, their strafing runs at 10,500 feet. and pulling out of 10,700 feet, you know, I mean, they just tried to stay above it for a while because, you know, they were good pilots, brave guys, but a helicopter pilot surviving a crash and getting picked up by the Mujah heading, even though I offered every guy that turned one over to me, I offered them a Toyota high-lux pickup truck white with red pin stripes as a, as a, as a, reward to give me the pilots. So they stopped amusing themselves with their knives on these guys. But it changed everything, changed the tactics. And it changed the mood. And, you know, that's the

whole story. Is, you know, patience my ass. Let's go and look through some trouble. And then with hungry cutting that barbed wire, do you feel like it could. be just the general demise of the Soviet Union, the beginning of the demise of the Soviet Union. But do you feel as though their retreat from Afghanistan, the defeat in Afghanistan, kind of led Hungary to go like they're not all powerful? Yeah, the Hungarians, you know, they've been invaded before by the Soviets, and they are very cerebral. And I always thought more so than some of the other satellites.

And they figured they're not coming back. they watched that pull out they were very they were watching this whole story and they thought that these guys can't turn around and come here and then the polls were the next to watch it and then finally even you know God

the East Germans the most Stalinist of all of them and then it became you know the Czechs my God what a velvet revolution there with all that crowd from the Magic Lantern Playhouse, Watslav Havel and all his guys. What a, what a time. But then I was back as the chief of SC at that time.

And I was, as soon as that started happening, I was on an airplane, or one of my senior guys would be on an airplane to quietly start talking to the Poles and the Hungarians and everybody and saying, look guys, this is the moment where we may want to really talk and see about how your life changes after you've been locked up with these guys for the last 45 years. And we did some wonderful stuff that we've been trying to do for 40 years in those in that next year or two, giving good things that we always needed on the Soviet side through these other guys. as the, even the polls, the DDO of the police service, we had some people that were in real trouble in Iraq as that thing. The first goal for came off and I said, you know, I mean, you got a bunch of people there in a big project.

And I wonder if you might give me some help in getting a few guys out. And he said, and the DDO looked at me. He says, I'll go myself. Wow. You told me what to do. I'll go get him. And he did. He went there and got a few guys out. No, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit. I mean, you described how the Soviet Union began to go into free fall. Obviously, that's a huge topic in of itself. But this also shuffled the mental deck of cards for both CIA and KGB. And you talk in your book about how people who had dedicated their entire lives, decades of their lives to this fight, suddenly are having to adjust and adapt to a rapidly changing world. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and about. how the CIA, from your perspective, you found that the agency was fighting for relevancy with CNN, of all things. Now that we're in this era of live television news.

Well, yeah, I try. Actually, I was a big advocate to let CNN do its stuff. I mean, it's in many ways. You know, in some ways, it's like the closed circuit camera in the 7-Eleven store. We don't need to compete with those guys. We need to do real things. And because so much is opening wide open here, let's re-evaluate and say, what is it that's a secret? What is it that we have to know?

Or what is it that we want to do and not just to try to steal a secret here or there to do something and how are we going to do that? And so, you know, with the Berlin Wall down on November 15th, 1989, or November 9th, 1989, with that happened, the world changed. And in rapid succession, all of those, all of the Warsaw Pact fell apart. And then by 1991, it was back to Russia. And it was a shock to a lot of people that had spent their careers in SE Division at CIA, when all of a sudden, all the stuff that's in my

true door safe doesn't matter too much anymore. And we're going to have to adjust to what this is. And, you know, I even got in, you know, opened up, you know, serious liaison with the, with the KGB. be, and I did it partly because when you're, when, when anybody is undergoing rapid change, particularly dislocating type change, they're very vulnerable. And I remember, um, Bob Strauss, that old Texas poker player was the ambassador, our ambassador to Moscow. I went out to Moscow and I, and I had become fast friends. He's a good Texas buddy. And we, I said, I want to take you over to meet the new chairman of KGB, this guy, Voting Bakaten, who came way outside. And I think we can get them kind of maybe rattle a few cages here.

And he was all game for it. And so we're in the big conference room with this, Vardim Bakatten, and some of his minders. And we're talking about how maybe it's the time for us to start, stop doing some things to each other and start looking for new ways to go forward. together and he pointed over, he said, you see that safe over there. In there, I have the plans for everything this organization did to the embassy you're building here, all of the technical things that we did to you. And we're talking like that, and I've been taking notes for Strauss, and I wrote in big, and I said, ask him for it, and then just lay my notepad there.

And he kind of just glanced at it. And he said, Mr. Chairman, why did you just give me that stuff? And he said, then we can move into our embassy. We can take care of that stuff that y'all did. That's passed. And he did. And he gets the entire thing. A lot of people believe that there were still stuff they didn't get us.

But we're able to manage that. I mean, huge technical penetrations of this. half billion dollar embassy. I mean, we spent a couple hundred million building it. They spent a couple hundred million bugging it. And then we spent a couple hundred million pouching pieces back to Washington to look for stuff. And so it's the most expensive embassy in the world or building in the world. And just gave it to us.

Did we have any questions for, for milt? Yeah, we do. We have one from Danny. Thanks, Danny. Is the Philip Seabor-Hoffman character in the movie Charlie Wilson's War starring Tom Hanks partly based on Milt? No, no. I'm sort of, I kept it when I was working on the movie with Mike Nichols. I kept that absolutely minimal to where my name, true name was mentioned one time.

The main character is the CIA officer, true name Gus Avercados, who was, a very rambunctious Greek-American who he was with Charlie through thick and thin, and he was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the movie, that character. And that was certainly not me. Any other, Steve? Yeah, we have one from Isaac. How would you compare the Javelin program in Ukraine and the Stinger program in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion?

Yeah, a great one. Yeah, you know. It's, I tell you, completely different weapons systems, but the same silver bullet thing. Now, if it's Soviet or Russian armor that is making life awful for these Ukrainian fighters, and you get them something that takes out Russian armor at great distance, it's a silver bullet, and it shoots through, the resistance. And, you know, that's what you need is that kind of a thing that gives them a sense of a little more invincibility to where they're not just hunkered down waiting to get killed. And, you know, I don't think that thing is going to go where I thought it was going to go.

I thought that the Ukrainian thing, that the Russians wouldn't be so screwed up, that they'd actually be able to occupy the place. And then I thought, then the fun begins. If we thought we were able to make the Soviet Union's life miserable in Afghanistan after they occupied the place by running covert operations with the Mujahidean against them, what could we have done from Poland or Romania next door

with all that great long border and made life miserable for the Russians and Ukraine forever. But Putin is managing to do that without any help from us. What a mess he got himself into. That, I think, is the final topic I'd like to talk about for this interview, Mill. I know we have limited time with you. Sure. But sort of an open-ended conversation or question about, you know, not too many people have the amount of experience you have in running intelligence operations

or paramilitary operations against the Russians. I was wondering, I know you talked about it a little bit, but if you could expand the bit on your perspective about the motivations of Vladimir Putin and how the war has unfolded in Ukraine over the last, what are we at five or six months now? A couple of things that are important here is that from the time I joined the CIA in 1964

until I got to Afghanistan, I had gone along with the dogma, that the Soviet Union was this super powerful, major problem for us. The Red Menace. Yeah, but we had all blown up with that. When I got to Afghanistan and up close and watching how they managed to fight that war,

and I started sending back dispatches and saying that there's something wrong here, people. These guys are in many ways, either they kept their best out of here or they've got a third world army. And I got kind of beat up because our whole, we had a whole major part of CIA that have been telling everybody. us included for the last since 1947, the Soviet Union was a major military power. And in fact, there was nothing quite about what they were up to, their equipment, their medical kids. Nothing, nothing looked right. And now I carried that over into my observation of what's going on in Ukraine. and it's the same

it's the same it's not the gang that you couldn't shoot straight I don't want to get flippant but these guys are having their asses handed to them and yeah we're we're passing a lot of fine stuff to the Ukrainians but you know I don't think Putin

read Klausowitz to where you know Klausowitz said if a if a people puts up a spirit of struggle for its own liberty. They're invincible. And I don't think he understood this. I mean, he went in there and look at this. What?

I don't know if anybody knows, but have they taken about 20,000 casualties, not TIA? Yeah, estimated around there. It's in there somewhere. The army is a mess. I saw, you know, we would get the Afghans would capture Soviet soldiers every so often and I'd pay them off and give them a high-lecks pickup truck and they gave these guys to me. But they were a mess.

I mean, we're not talking about, you know, stand-up kids. And I've had a couple of kids in the military and an American military kids who were pretty stand-up people. And these guys were a mess. And I think that's what we're seeing in the United States. Ukraine too. And if you people are able to see the numbers now as they never saw them in the financial numbers in Russia as they never saw them before. And he's not going to pull out of this anytime soon. I mean, you know, the GDP is I think it's a 4% drop and it's going to do more next year. I mean, that's huge. And all he's got his gas and oil sales, and that's getting very troublesome for him. So I think Vladimir Vladimir, Vladimir Rolfich has really got himself into a pickle.

When I interviewed your colleague Jack Devine years ago, and he talked about how back in the old day, back in your day, back in your times, that they operated along Moscow rules. But at this time, when I spoke to Mr. Devine, that must have been five years ago. He said that Russia now plays as if there are no rules at all. Do you see our proxy war against the Russians and Ukraine as an attempt to, I don't want to say reset, but reestablish some sense of rules? You know, I don't know. That's a very good thought. but I think it's

I think that the problem is Putin and his vision of Russian Empire it's not that he wants to go back and get the Soviet Union cranked up again I think he wants Russia

as the Russian Empire with the pieces that belong to us I mean you can take a look at the history of Ukraine I mean, that's the beginning of Russia a thousand years ago, Kiev Rus. That's the history.

The reality is for 30 years, it's been an independent country. But he's living on the history idea. How can it not be part of this? Well, he's finding out, and it's not going to work for him. But he can't continue to pay the bills and particularly we're not only

you know quietly organizing NATO and the Europeans but you know helping them find alternate sources of gas and oil and that'll in another year or so that's going to get very tricky for Vladimir who else buys anything do people buy Tuolovs or Suhois

nobody buys anything except gas and oil and vodka I guess and caviar Mel, out of curiosity, you started out with the focus, with Chinese in a focus area, and then, you know, went into the Cold War with the Soviets and worked actively against the KGB. How do you see modern Chinese espionage in the United States and our espionage battle compared to what it was against like the KGB during the Soviet era? Well, you know, it's the Chinese, they have such a different approach to intelligence and to the game of agentry. Or they have to begin with a massive population of Chinese or a massive population of Chinese Americans or. at any given time about 30,000 Chinese students hoovering up everything that they can get their hands on. And perhaps the easiest place to run intelligence operations in the universe is America.

So they, you know, it depends on what they want. Do they want to try to recruit some blonde hair blue eye guy from Kansas in the CIA? No, not so much like the Russians might. They probably figure out everything they need from us, how they can get through a population that may not even understand what's happening, how they're helping out. And everybody, you know, everybody, you know,

you go up to Mr. Wong in Kansas City and say, oh, God, you know, I'm a Chinese intelligence officer. I said, you know, Mr. Wong. goodness gracious. How wonderful. You won't believe this. I met your auntie in Huxien County in Guangzhou province. And she even remembers that your family is here. How about that? And all over these kind of things can go on, whereas, you know, the KGB had its operation, kind of like ours. But this is, is something that they can

manage to collect without there's a lot of espionage going on but there's a lot of other stuff that doesn't even qualify for espionage and they get almost everything they need and basically if a Chinese American

or a Chinese immigrant has I think we may have lost Dave for a moment yeah hopefully we'll have Dave back in just a second. Milk, you had talked to me,

can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on today? You had mentioned to me that there might be a novel in the works. Yeah, I'm working on another novel. I won't tell you much about it, but I started, my first book was a fun novel,

The Black Tulip on Afghanistan. And then I got into this big non-fishing with my dear friend Jim Reis and New York Times, we just decided to do that back in 2003 and did it. And luckily, it's one of those things that ends up on political science courses and universities all across America. And so it just keeps the gift that keeps on giving. But I wouldn't do another novel that is something new probably has a biological side to it. and don't want to get into too much more than that.

But a novel writing is kind of fun because you get to make stuff up. Nonfiction, you're not supposed to make you up. I think a lot of guys don't pay attention on that rule, but yeah. So I'm doing that. And I always got something going. I'm a non-resident scholar on the national interest. and I every so often write for foreign affairs and stuff like that. Enough, you know.

Yeah, still got a time to garden, plant the cabbage and stuff. Dave, did you want to finish your thought because you broke up there at the end? No, it was fine. I was just kind of clarify, you know, just saying that basically that the Chinese are able, if a person has family back in China, that the Chinese government is not afraid to leverage that. Oh, not at all. And they leverage it in not a very aggressive way.

I mean, what else do you? I mean, you say, oh, I talk to your ante. Oh, that's all I need to hear. Right. Like, what? Oh, and yeah, I mean, this is for them. And I think it's, it's, there's not a lot of big counterintelligence type operations going. This is mostly S&T collection that they want and other economic intelligence and stuff like that.

And so they're going to get that. This is a great target country for that stuff. So everyone out there, I hope that you will go and check out the main enemy by our guest. A good fun book. Yeah. This is honestly, if anyone asks me for one book on espionage or on the CIA to read, this is probably the one I'm going to send them to now. It was really a stunning, shocking book to actually read it. And I don't think there are many authors that have really framed the global context of the Cold War quite the way that you did in the sort of back channels and double and triple agents and paramilitary campaigns and how all of that collided and worked with one another.

how those systems and institutions interact with one another. I mean, it's really it is an amazing book and I hope people go and pick it up. Well, thank you. It was a great battle between the shirts and the skins and then that Saturday morning the skins didn't show up. So next

Friday we're going to have William Walter on the show. He is a former, he's a gunship guy, AC130 guy. He wrote a book about it. So we're going to have him on next Friday to speak to him. Milt, again, thank you so much for joining us and taking some time out of your Friday evening with us. And I hope we can talk again sometime soon.

We just kind of scratched the surface of Miltz's real hair. Be happy, too, guys. It's just terrific being with you. Take care now. All the best. Thank you, Milt. And thank you, everyone watching. We'll see you guys next week.