The Team House - Sr. CIA Officer in Charge of Taking Down the AQ Khan Network | James Lawler | Ep. 125

Episode Date: December 18, 2021

Mr. Lawler serves as a national security consultant and is the Senior Partner at MDO Group, which provides HUMINT training to the Intelligence Community and the commercial sector focused on WMD, CI, technical and cyber issues. Mr. Lawler is a noted speaker on the Insider Threat in government and industry. Prior to this, Mr. Lawler served for 25 years as a CIA operations officer in various international posts and as Chief of the Counterproliferation Division's Special Activities Unit. His overseas assignments include Bern (1982-1985), Paris (1985-1989), Oslo (1989-1991), and Zurich (1991-1994). Today's Sponsors: 👇 A-TAC FITNESS (Veteran owned and operated) https://www.ATACFITNESS.com Use the promo code "TEAM10" for 10% off! Selection Starts Here. PAR WEBER WATCHES https://parweber.com/teamhouse Through December 31st, get a free strap with your purchase of The Coefficient. Just go to parweber.com/teamhouse to activate the offer. Thanks for supporting the companies that support the show! Want 2 bonus episodes per month and access to the bonus segments? Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Check out Ryan’s Channel: https://youtube.com/c/CombatStory Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media Links: 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] #cia #covertops #espionageBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Just look for the signs and save at Bakers. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Team House. This is episode 125. I'm Jack Murphy here with my co-host, Dave Park. Tonight, our guest on the show is Jim Lawler. Jim had an extensive career in the Central Intelligence Agency, including overseas assignments in Bern, Paris, Oslo, in Zurich. He was also the chief of the AQ Khan Nuclear Takedown Team, which resulted in the disruption of the world's most dangerous nuclear smuggling network. Jim, welcome to the Teamhouse. Thank you very much for coming on the show. show. We're really excited to talk to you tonight. Thank you very much to both Jack and Dave.

I appreciate it. And I should also mention that Jim is the author of Living Wise, a novel of the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program. It is the first part of a series of books. The second in the series is going to come out next month. And what was the title again, Jim? It's called In the Twinkling of an Eye. And then book three is currently in the works. Jim's still working on that one. So, Jim, if you could start off telling us a little bit about your upbringing and your background and sort of the path that took you into governmental service with the CIA. Absolutely. It was really an accident.

I backed into this completely. I was in my last year of law school. And anytime you're in your last year of college or graduate school, there's only one thing on your mind, and that's, I need a job. And so I was interviewing with law firms. I was interviewing with whomever was coming to the University of Texas law school campus. And lo and behold, the CIA came to campus looking for attorneys for our office of general counsel. You know, every government organization has a whole host of attorneys.

And so I thought, what the heck? I went to this interview and this gentleman, a retired case officer named Bill Wood, started talking to me. He wanted to, he was there to hire attorneys. But after about five minutes, he said, Jim, have you ever thought about the clandestine service? And I said, no, and I'm not even sure what you're talking about. This was 1976. CIA didn't even have a sign out on Dolly Madison Boulevard. In fact, it said federal highway administration out there.

We were under deep cover. No books, no movies. Yeah, there'd been three days of the condor, maybe. But nothing really to tell us about what the clandestine service was. was. And I said, again, I said, I don't know what you're talking about. And he said, well, I can't tell you much about it, but I think you'd be good at this. Well, I thought about it. I took his application. But unfortunately, my wife's mother was terminally ill at the time. And there was about zero chance that we were going to be able to take a job in Washington, D.C. with an overseas deployment, thousands of miles from home. So instead of that, I turned the application back in with some regret. And I went into a family-owned business. Now, I don't know if either you, Jack, or Dave, have ever been at a family-owned business. But if you have, there's probably a reason why you're no longer in a family-owned business.

And it focuses on that first word of family. I love my brothers. I love my dad. And I was making a lot of money. And that's what's incredibly interesting was I was making more money than I'd ever make again in my life. And I was absolutely, absolutely miserable. Came home every night complaining to my wife. wife about how meaningless this job was. And she finally said, after three and a half years of putting up

with me, she said, Jim, either do something about it or stop your belly aching. So I thought, well, that's impeccable logic. So I had taken Mr. Woods card, Bill Wood's card, William Woods card. I went into my office and I wrote him a letter. Unfortunately, it was before Al Gore invented the internet. So I had to write a letter. And I wrote him the letter. It said, you know, back then in 1976, I was very interested in this job, but I couldn't do it for family reasons. Well, now those reasons no longer exist, and I'm interested in that job if it's still around. Three days later, I got a phone call from a young lady who never used the initials, CIA. All she said was, Mr. Lawler, you wrote Mr. Wood a letter a few days ago. He's going to be at the holiday in on Thursday, out on the Gulf Freeway at three o'clock.

Could you meet him in the lobby? I said, yes, ma'am, I can. So I went to that. And we spent about two hours talking. He said, I'd like to fly you to Washington in a couple of weeks for some tests. They did two or three days worth of tests. Came back and after about three and a half months, they flew me back. More tests, a polygraph test, a shrink exam. God knows how I passed that, but I did. and the next thing I know, a few weeks later, I get this phone call saying, Jim, we'd like to offer you a job as a GS-11 case officer. Now, I had no idea what a case officer does, but I was so miserable in this family-owned company. I would have taken a job on a planet Neptune.

Anyway, get out of Texas, get away from the company. And so I said, great. And they said, well, we're starting in two weeks. I said, well, I can't do that. I can't just walk out of my dad's business with two weeks notice. They said, no problem. We've got another class starting in three months in February of 1980. So my wife and I, we had three and a half months to basically, you know, pack up,

put the house up for sale, moved to Washington. She was pregnant with our first child. We get in the car and then here's the absurd thing. I had absolutely no idea what they wanted me to do, but I didn't care. So I came to CIA. My first day was February 19, 1980. And then I found out what they wanted me to do. How did that hit them? Well, I don't know. It was kind of like a wave rolling over me, but what they wanted me to do, quite frankly.

And I know you've had Doug London, my friend Doug London on this program before. And he probably explained it as well. But in essence, not to put too final line on it, what a CIA operations, officers expected to do is to manipulate, to exploit, to subvert, to suborn, to convince people to betray a trust, to commit treason, to commit espionage. And I found out that not only was I pretty good at it, but I enjoyed it. I was got to say, you spent quite a bit of time at the agency. You must have enjoyed your work. I did immensely. I still dream about it. That's why I write about it now because I can't really do operations anymore. So I live, you know, through my writing. So going through the farm during that time frame, the Cold War was still in motion,

Soviet Union, a looming threat. What was it like going through the training to become a CIA case officer during those years? I loved it. It was, I mean, it was like, it was like I was a duck in water. I just really enjoyed it. Maybe it's because of my sociopathic nature. You know, they said, how much sociopathy should we dial into a case officer? In fact, I had a friend of mine who said, Lawler, you're nothing but a sociopath, but one within lanes. Those lanes are called U.S. laws. And sometimes I think he's right. I mean, I would do virtually anything that's legal to get a recruitment, and it was such a rush. We talked about this before, but I had a shrink once say that people in the, like the special operations community, aren't sociopaths, but they all have

sociopathic tendencies. Maybe that's right, Dave. Maybe it's, maybe that's correct. I'm maybe not a classic sociopath, but I have sociopathic tendencies. I like breaking other people's laws. I like recruiting clandestine sources.

I like recruiting spies. That's what I'm good at. And I found that out. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Were you, you know, when you were going through this training,

because they just kind of dumped it on you, you had no idea what it was. Could, did you ever sit there and think, Wow, I can't believe I'm doing this. I can't believe this is real that this is happening? Not really. It was like I finally had hit my stride and found something I really enjoyed and I was really good at.

And again, like I said earlier, I just backed into this. Now, maybe Mr. Wood saw something to me. He was there at the University of Texas law school to recruit attorneys. Right. But because he was a fellow case officer, maybe he thought, you know, Jim would actually be better at this than being an attorney in our legal department. And he was right. I would have hated being in the legal department, frankly. I practiced law for three or four years in that family company.

And I've never practiced law since. And I don't regret it a bit. Yeah. Yeah. So how long was the farm at that point at that time? It was about four or five months. Yeah, about four or five months. And we would come home maybe every other weekend or most weekends. But it was, yeah, it was long. But I loved it. You know, it's a very bucolic. I want to. tell you where, even though 99% of the world knows where it is. You know, it was a very bucolic setting, very pretty. I'd go running. I'm a long-distance runner, so I'd go running in the mornings.

And, you know, I very much enjoyed it. And so then your first overseas posting being Burned Switzerland, which is a fascinating country in the intersection of no shortage of intrigue and espionage and subterfuge. What can you tell us about being assigned to Byrne? and what it was like at that time? It was quiet, but it was ideal for my family. We had one child, we had another child that was born there.

We had, you know, Baron is like Vienna or any of these major European cities. There's a whole lot of what we call targets, diplomatic targets, intelligence targets, military targets that are there. And so I found it to be very inviting, very conducive to ed, espionage operations. And as long as you didn't, you know, cross the host country, uh, do something wrong. I mean, they really didn't care much what we did against the, uh, the other diplomats or the other intelligence targets. So I, I found it ideal. Now, some people told me before I went, they said, oh, this is a backwater. This, there's nothing ever

goes on there. I don't believe in that. I believe you make your own luck. You know, it's funny how the harder I work, the luckier I get. I'm just so I try it. But it's a lot. But it's not. I'm not. try it's saying but it's really true and I worked at it really hard my first year I had not recruited anybody I used to have what I call mirror talks in the morning I'd look at myself in the mirror and I'd say why should the United States not take away my salary because I haven't recruited anybody and it was it was kind of a sad awakening well then things started to click and anyways I was very successful after that what what do you know what it was it started to click.

Part of it was opportunity. You know, I have this theory about luck, that everybody has equal opportunities typically over time, but there are a few people who can perceive opportunity and even fewer people who sees opportunity. And I have the ability to perceive an opportunity. I'm patient. I'm a good listener.

I have a soft voice. I don't frighten people. I have two brothers, you know, One of my brothers is an extreme extrovert. He sucks oxygen out of the room. He dominates that. You know, dominates the room. My other brother is very shy.

And I'm a slight extrovert. And it turns out that the best case officers are either slight extroverts or slight introverts. We're willing to, in a sense, we can swing either way. And I, you know, if I really take an effort, make an effort, I can basically put a sock in it, shut up and listen. Because you don't recruit people when you're talking. transmit mode, you recruit people when you're listening and finding out what is the stress in your life. And over time, you can find out what is stressing this person out and how can I relieve that

stress? And you have to be patient. In one case, it took me 11 years to recruit a very sensitive source who was not recruitable in the first 10 and a half years. But I was patient. I was his friend. In fact, I was best man at his wedding. I mean, really, if I'm going after you, I'm coming after you. you and I already be friends. And he had everything going for him, everything going for him. He was single. He was part of the dominant ethnic group in this country. He had plenty of money.

None of these vulnerabilities at all, none at all. But he developed a really close relationship with me, and we shared a hobby of long distance running. So we would go running quite a bit, and he would confide in me a lot of sensitive things. And so I came, I went off to another post. He invited me to come back to be best man at his wedding. And he married a young woman from this particular country that we were posted in.

And then he went overseas on another assignment. And like, you know, life happens. His wife was very disenchanted with what was going on overseas. She didn't like living so far from home. They had a small child at that point. And in the end, she left him. And I've discovered that one of the most psychologically disruptive parts of anybody's life is a divorce. Suddenly, not only are you financially probably devastated, you're psychologically devastated. And so guess what? I was in his orbit. I was there. And he also had other things going on in his life that were going bad. And that's that his ethnic group was no longer on top. A new regime had come in. There was a new sheriff in town. And so he had worked hard. He's a very bright guy. Worked very hard. And he wrote me a

note one day. And he says, Jim, I don't know how people can give allegiance to a country that treats its citizens like this. Well, this is like a big neon sign that says, recruit me. And so I said, look, I'm coming through this European country that, you know, your wife's from. I know you're going to visit your baby daughter. Why don't you and I talk about some job opportunities? So I met him, broke cover. That's where I exposed the fact that I'm really a CIA officer. And that recruitment took me about maybe 15 seconds, 15 seconds. And I said, I want 11 years of foreplay. Right, right. But I said, I want you on my team. And he said, you know, I'd love to do that. And ultimately about six months later, this kind of puts a little bit of a time parameter on it.

9-11 happened. And he was at his foreign ministry. He'd gone back to his country. He was at his foreign ministry. And he confessed to me later. He said, you know, it was almost a counterintelligence problem for me. Because when those twin towers were coming down, he said, I started crying because I felt like an American. And my colleagues were looking at me wondering, why are you so upset?

These are just the Americans, you know? But that's how they transfer their allegiance from a regime that had basically betrayed them. And that's how they justify it. You know, I'm not betraying anybody. I've been betrayed first. And now he was with a new team, one that gave him that he wanted to be loyal to. And that was my team. You know, you talk about the team house.

Well, let me tell you, team is everything. My son was a Marine. He fought in Iraq. And I know he was fighting for his country. But first and foremost, he was fighting for those fellow Marines. on those fast boats that he was on. You fight for the guy next to you. You fight for the person that you can give allegiance to. I mean, that's incredible, Jim. And I mean, it shows an incredible amount of patience. And it's exactly what I think we would all hope the sort of both tactical

and strategic patience that we would hope an intelligence service has. I mean, do you think it's common that the organization has that kind of patience to cultivate a potential source over a decade? No, not often. Yeah. But by this time, people just basically left me alone. They let me run my operations. They knew I was good at it. And there are a few exceptions, but most of the time, they just let me alone.

And I, you know, I've pitched maybe, I don't know, 50 or 60 people in my career. And in fact, I sometimes give this talk, a classified version of this talk out in the national laboratories. And scientists are wonderful people, but they always want to know about statistics. And they said, well, what's your batting average, you know? And I said, well, in the early years, not that great, but as I went on, it was probably well over 90, 95%. If I'm, you know, and they said, really? I said, yeah, why would I pitch somebody whom I think is going to turn me down? I've already felt them out.

I already kind of know where this is going to go. There's always that little uncertainty that makes it fun, maybe 5% in there where I'm not quite sure that you're going to say yes, but I've already run some test balloons. I've done some hypotheticals. And you're saying, yes, maybe you've accepted different types of gratuities you shouldn't have accepted. You've confided in me things that maybe not totally classified, but they're very sensitive things. We have become friends. You can share with me.

I had an asset tell me once that, Jim, when I'm talking to you, it's like my brain is in a warm waterbed. I became these people's therapist. If I hadn't become a case officer, I think I would have enjoyed being a. a psychologist. And I've got a lot of friends who are psychologists and psychiatrists. The difference between them and me is they understand how what I do, but they can't do it. Right. I can do it. In fact, I jokingly say that one of my good friends, he's a forensic psychiatrist. I said, I want you to meet the epidemiologist. I'm the disease. He can explain why my techniques work, but he can't do it himself.

That's really interesting. Can you tell us about your first recruitment, like the first time it clicked for you? Right, right. Absolutely. Okay. So I had gotten a classified cable from headquarters, and they listed a need for a certain type of target

who met the following criteria. It was in a country, I will say it's a country in the Western Hemisphere. It was a country that we have. have had difficult relationships with before, and we were about to go into some very, very complicated and very high risk negotiations. And they had absolutely no sources. So they put out a cable to all stations and bases worldwide saying, if you were in touch with any what we call a developmental, somebody who you've got a relationship with, but is not a recruited source, who meets the following

criteria, we would be, we would ask you to intensify your relationship with that person and get them to the point where you can pitch them to commit espionage. As luck would have it, I had a contact that I had met in a totally innocent setting in a ski school during the winter, and he and I'd become friendly. I had no idea that he was of any interest to my headquarters until I got this cable about a few weeks later. And as luck would have it, I'm an extremely lucky person, this guy met the criteria exactly. So I accelerated the friendship phase, the developmental phase, and eventually not far, not very long, after a few weeks of lunches and dinners and things like that, again, I'm reminding you, I'm a first tour officer. I don't have a lot of experience

at this, but my headquarters was so desperate for me or anybody like me to recruit someone who had the access, and we knew he had access, to, they basically agreed to this cockamamie recruitment proposal that I sent in. I mean, basically, I sent in a proposal that was totally insane, very naive, saying, I think I can recruit this guy based solely on the force of my personality. We're friends, I'm sure that I can convince him. Now, this is absolute insanity, naivete. You know, you need to really have something you can peg it to. What's the stress in this guy's life. Right. What are the, I was a rock climber and I used to say, okay, I'd ask people, how do you climb when you go rock climbing? How do you do that? You look for the crack system.

You look where you can put your fingers and toes. You cannot, unless you're a fly, you or a lizard, you can't, you know, climb bald rock. Right. But if you study the rock long enough, you find the crack system and people are the same way. I would study per people for a while. And I find, what is the stress? I'm good at stress relief. But instead, here's, here's, my first pitch. And it's basically, if you'll do this for me, I'm going to give you so much, you know, a referral fee, a consulting fee per month. So I take this guy to dinner. This is my first big pitch. And I take him to dinner and I launch into my pitch, which was pretty crude, pretty naive. And essentially it was that. If you do this for me, you know, share this with us. I will pay you so much a month.

and he looked at me and he said, Jim, you and I are friends, but what you're proposing is morally wrong. And I said, well, I don't think it's morally wrong for a couple of friendly nations and a couple of friends to work together. And he says, no, no, it's morally wrong. Well, I thought, okay, yeah. And let me, let me digress here just a moment and say, again, I've pitched, like I say, 50 or 60 people. he's the only person I ever pitched that posed a moral problem with it. Why do you think most people reject a pitch? Got any idea?

Fear of getting caught or? There you go. Thank you, Dave. Fear of getting caught. They've measured, what is Jim offering? What is the chance of getting caught? And if the chance of getting caught is here and the chance of whatever I'm offering

is here, they're looking at that delta and it's the fear of getting caught. I had an African developmental that I, pitched and he said, Jim, they hang people in my country for doing that. They do. And I said, okay. But he said, can I take a rain check? I said, a rain check? He said, yeah. He said, you know, my son, he's three years old. I don't need you now, but in 15 years, he'll be college age. And then I might need you. 15 years later, he's posted to Washington. Africa division comes to me and says, okay, your buddy here said this 15 years ago. Do you think he meant it? Let me tell you, folks,

Rainchek was cashed in. Yeah, he meant it. Okay, so my friend has turned me down. Now, we have a saying at CIA that it's okay to be turned down, but not turned in. You know, I've propositioned this guy to commit espionage, and he's turned me down. But what if he goes to his ambassador who had a reputation for being a real loudmouth, son of a gun? And he goes in, storms into our ambassador, pounds on the desk and says what an outrage it is that young Mr. James Lawler, third secretary of the American embassy, just proposition my employee, in fact he was the number two in the mission, who was the deputy, and just proposition my deputy to commit espionage, to commit treason. This is outrageous. I could have, I could just, I was like, oh my God,

there goes my career. Right. Yeah, headquarters approved it probably in a stupid moment. And they're going to say, how did Lawler mess this up? You know, who's going to be twisting in the wind? 5,000 miles from Washington is going to be me. So I thought, you know, I'm going to be hung out to dry. I better call this guy and see if he and I are still talking even. I mean, we were still on good relations when we left the dinner. But I thought, you know, I got to take his temperature and see if we're okay. So after about three days, I finally screwed up my courage and I called him.

And I said, you know, last week, well, first I was relieved. They didn't slam the phone down in my ear. He didn't. And I said, I was, had so much fun last week. I was wondering if we could do that dinner again this coming Friday. And to my great relief, he said, Jim, you know, I was thinking the same thing. That would be, that would be fun. That would be really enjoyable.

So I went into this following dinner a week later with the only expectation that I'm going to take his temperature and make sure that he hasn't, you know, made a complaint about me and that he and I are still buddies. So that was my only goal. I still remember it just like it happened yesterday that we went to this very nice restaurant, the waiter brought the menus out. First words out of my friend's mouth after the waiter left, Jim, that offer you made me last week, is that still good? I said, yeah, yeah, we're friends. Of course it's good. He said, well, what you don't know is my wife, a couple of days after our dinner, said that she wants a divorce. and I can't afford to pay her the alimony to which she's entitled and put our sons in private schools.

And in my country, you can only go to a private school if you want a good education. I can't do that unless I accept your offer. And he said, now, I know it's morally wrong. And I started to interrupt him. And he said, Jim, don't start. Don't do that. I know it's morally wrong. Well, one of the things I learned in law school is if the judge rules in your favor,

shut up and get out of court. And so I shut up. Being a parent can be really challenging. 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 on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. At Bakers, no matter where you order free pickup,

you get the same great deals as you'd get in store. So you can save when you order during band practice or at the dog part. or wherever. Start your cart with the Bakers app and save from wherever today. Bakers, fresh for everyone. $35 order minimum restrictions may apply, subject to availability. You can save an extra $10 when you spend 40 or more on a great selection of participating items. Just look for the signs and save at Bakers. He accepted the proposal and then he started bringing out classified material. I mean, he brought it out like this. He'd bring it out. And then I said, discovered what some of the real motivations are. Yeah, he was financially and psychologically

devastated by the divorce, but there was a much more burning motivation. And I like to say that nobody ever commits treason on one motivation. It's usually a whole mosaic of them. And in his case, as he handed me the stack of classified material, he said, you know, I absolutely loathe my ambassador. That little cocky son of a gun, he goes around, and he takes credit for everything that I do and everybody in the embassy. He takes credit for everything. He goes around this country like a batting rooster claiming credit. He says, I can't stand

this son of a gun. And he says, every time I hand, when I hand you this, it's as if I'm kicking the son of a bitch in the face. I said, you know, you and I are buddies. Bring me some more of that. Let's kick him again. Sure enough, revenge. It's that dish, best eating cold, the Jesuits say, this is covert compensation. And that's how somebody can justify betraying their

country or betraying whatever, because they feel like, I'm not the one who started this. You betrayed me first. Yeah. Yeah. And they can justify it that way. And he would bring this stuff out and hand me this stuff. And it was wonderful. It was just wonderful. And it was all because he was so mistreated. you know, he also was a very light-complected, blonde, blue-eyed guy in a country that most of the natives are mixed race and substantially darker than he is. So he used to say, well, you know, I'm the victim of reverse discrimination. Now, whether he was or not, I don't know, but perception is reality to a lot of people. So he had justified it based on the fact that he hated the ambassador, he, you know, was being mistreated. And that, by the way, played through a number of my cases where people were had been mistreated somehow.

I like to say, you know, a lot of times we do, in fact, I never, ever, ever recruited a happy person. You don't recruit happy people. Right, right. You recruit unhappy people. Right. And frequently, you don't recruit winners. You recruit the losers. I hate to put it like that, but you have, you know, you recruit the people that are down, have been mistreated.

Maybe they've, maybe they've done it themselves. They're going through divorces. I've just mentioned that he was going through a divorce. my other friend was going through a divorce. I had a third one. In fact, they nicknamed me Dr. Divorce at headquarters. I was there for them. Pulling their chestnuts out of the fire and was their friend.

I mean, you know, I've never been through a divorce. Our son was. And man, it's devastating, you know, financially, emotionally, whatever. And if somebody like me comes along and gives you a life ring, guess what? I'm your new best friend. So that's, you know, the funny thing was, though was when we put him through a polygraph. I don't know if either you guys ever been through a polygraph.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, they're fun. And so this was going to be a counterintelligence polygraph. And the reason we were going to do this is because when he was going to be reassigned back to his home country, he was going to be handled by one of my colleagues who we call a knock, a non-official cover officer. And an officer like that does not have the luxury of diplomatic pretent. like I do. If they get arrested, they go to jail and they get for maybe forever. There was a, you know, a couple of CIA officers that were caught in China in the early 50s. They spent 20 or 25 years in prison. This was Downey Infecto. 20 or 25 years. Okay. So we need to make doubly sure that anybody, their handling is in fact a bona fide recruitment and not a dangle or a double agent. What if his sudden change of mind had been

directed by his home's intelligence service? And it was unlikely because he is giving me such unimpeachable intelligence. I mean, stuff you wouldn't believe. But still, we've got an officer, a colleague of mine who has no diplomatic protection who's going to be handling him. So headquarters said, we've got to put him through a counterintelligence polygraph. Now, these are typically very black and white questions. I mean, the questions are essentially, have you told anybody about your secret relationship with CIA? That's pretty easy. That's black or white.

Yes or no? Are you working with another intelligence service other than CIA? Again, pretty easy. And finally, did anybody direct you to work with the CIA? Pretty black and white. Now, the polygraph operator is basically, he, confers with the case officer, they go over the questions, and the polygraph operator is not supposed to stray from those questions unless the person being tested gives them reason to do so. They're not

supposed to go off in fishing expeditions and ask extraneous questions that have no bearing on the case. Well, as luck would have it, I get a young, naive polygraph operator who probably had never been overseas before, had never met a foreigner, and the first question out of his mouth was, golly gee, I'm just wondering, why are you doing this? And I went, oh, God. Now my friend's going to have a moral epiphany, and he's going to storm out of this room. I was amazed when the guy, he laughed and he looked at the polygraph operator,

and he said, because I think this is going to be a lot of fun, he was a thrill seeker, a thrill seeker, and he went on to do many great things for us. In fact, in these negotiations, he was at the heart of these negotiations. And I'm sure both of you have bought at least a car and maybe a house or an apartment. How would you like to know the bottom line that your seller would go and they would walk away if it was a dollar less? Right. He gave us not only their positions, but their fallback positions and the ones at which they would have to walk away.

It was estimated that he saved the United States, not billions, but tens of billions of dollars, because we had a total transparency into what they were wanting out of these negotiations. I'm guessing this was somehow related to the arms race of the times with the Soviets. I can't comment on that, but believe it, believe me, it saved us a lot of money. That's amazing. Well, this has been an amazing introduction to Jim Waller, and we're going to get into a lot more. I just want to take two seconds to talk about one of our sponsors for the show. Paul Weber.

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selection, they're your source. So atacfitness.com. So Mr. Waller, you had a number of other overseas assignments in Western Europe, Paris, Oslo, Zurich. How did your career progress from there after the initial assignment and to burn? I mean, you said you enjoyed your work. You liked what you were doing. Well, I was promoted in Bairn and I was promoted twice in Paris. Oslo was only a two-year tour. I was literally on the edge of, when you're in Norway, you're on the literal edge of everything, the world, edge of the world. It was fun. The Norwegians are good allies of ours, probably the least interesting of my tours.

And then I was posted back to Switzerland in Zurich and found out that there was a lot going on. Again, it's like Austria, Switzerland, Austria. you know, basically pools of espionage going on there. So by the time I left Europe, I was the GS-15, rough equivalent of a colonel in the military, and was asked to come back to headquarters and head up the counterproliferation shop for the European division. Tell us a little bit about how you came into counterproliferation, because your background now is as a case officer, and of course you were an attorney before that. But counterproliferation, obviously, is deeply scientific and deeply technical.

How did you come into that field? And was there any additional training you had to go through to prepare for that? No, not really. I was when my first year at Rice University, I was actually a physics major. But I was not doing well in physics. I was making a bee. I think I was going kind of girl crazy. I was chasing my future wife.

And I was making bees in physics. and chemistry and I thought they're telling me something. I just I liked it but I didn't love it. And so I switched to political science my second year and that's what led me to go into a law school and we're at the University of Texas. But I've always had a I guess a scientific American appreciation for technical subjects. I can't get I can't tell you exactly how to design a nuclear weapon, but I can tell you why they work and how they work. And I know the essential components. I know the inside out the essential components for a centrifuge enrichment plant for uranium. I've, you know, I get the, we have subject matter experts at CIA that can explain it in

the layman's terms, what we call the scientific American terms, so that even even a liberal arts major such as myself, I can understand it. And if it gets to the point where I can't understand what my asset is telling me, then I can always bring a subject matter expert where they can talk tech to one another. And it's not a, it's not a real problem. Where I had to learn to adjust my approach is scientists and engineers are wired differently up here. They're just wired differently. And they are very, very thoughtful people, and they want to make sure that they're right. And they frequently are more introverted, not always, but frequently more introverted.

And you have to learn how to slow down the pace and let them take over and teach you. Let them be the professor and teach you. but they have the same wants and needs as any other human being. You know, they have some jealousies of their colleagues. They may have a problem with their boss. They may be having an affair with another scientist. So, you know, they have the same human needs that anybody else does, but they're just wired a little bit differently,

and you have to approach them and not be scared by the science. Don't be scared by the science. Get them to be your teacher, your professor. And frequently, they love that. They just love to teach you all, about what their research is about. This was a very interesting time, if I'm getting the timeline right,

when you took over the counter proliferation, now the Soviet Union has collapsed. There's a fear of fizzile material leaking out of former Soviet states. Right. Are you able to tell us about what you were working to counter at that time? Well, we were very concerned.

That was not my particular focus, but we were and still are very concerned about fissile material or expertise leaking out of the former Soviet Union. And we had several cases of actual sizable quantities, not enough to make a bomb, but sizable quantities of fissile material, usually uranium 235, sometimes plutonium, but we had some seizures in parts of the Eastern Europe, where this was leaking out of Soviet Union and this caused a lot of concern. My particular focus, though, was on some of the enabling technologies

that Western countries were supplying to these, the wannabes, you know, the Iran's, the Syrias, the Liby's, and these people, they didn't have the fissile material, but maybe they could get, you know, uranium yellow cake and enrich that to highly enriched uranium. That was our big fear, and that they would get the technology to do that. We used to call, before the term proliferation was invented, in the early 80s, we had another term. We called it tech transfer.

If you remember, tech transfer, but that's where the Soviets primarily were coming in and buying high-powered American computers, which they could use then to design state-of-the-art military equipment or weapons and things like that. Well, proliferation was basically tech transfer, but to a lower class of customers. It was basically those who wanted to develop a weapon of mass destruction, be it nuclear or biological or chemical or have a delivery system. And a lot of these countries, you know, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, a lot of these countries, well, Pakistan, Pakistan was, you know, Pakistan actually did it.

They saw what India had done in the early 70s. And the president of Pakistan said, we will eat grass, but we're going to have a nuclear weapon. And Dr. AQ Khan, who was a student, had been a student in the Netherlands. he was a metallurgist, Ph.D. metallurgist. He went to work for the, what is a consortium of the Dutch, the British, and the Germans called the Uranium Enrichment Corporation, or Yorinco. And then he was what I guess I'd say, he was loyal to Pakistan. He thought he could help Pakistan. So he contacted the Pakistani government, and he basically stole the plans for a lot of the centrifuge enrichment equipment, and he just went east back to Pakistan.

And they started with what's known as engineering research lab. It ultimately became con research lab named after him. And he is the father of the Islamic bomb. And you eventually became put in charge of the team of disrupting and dismantling this, you know, WMD network. That's correct. But the amazing thing was, is it was not the proliferation activity was not directed to Pakistan. It was, you know, aimed elsewhere. So we had tolerated, barely tolerated Pakistan having a nuclear weapon, and we knew they had nuclear weapons.

And then in 1998, India tested, again, tested weapons in Pakistan, their mortal enemy, or India's a mortal enemy of Pakistan. They then tested five nuclear weapons as well. So there was no doubt that they had the nuclear weapons capability. And but what we had discovered was that there was a private network out there that was selling, the technology to the highest bidder. And that was what was absolutely unacceptable. That, you know, basically they were taking proliferation private. And so when you were put in charge of this team at CIA, I mean, how do you even begin to approach such a complex problem?

I can't really get into it, but I'll give you an analogy. I don't know if either one of you are familiar with the man's name, Felix Scherzinski. Do you know who Felix Scherzinski was? No. Felix Jürzinski was the first head of the Russian secret police, the Cheka. He was selected by Lenin to head up the Soviet secret police to fight the counter-revolutionaries. The Soviet Union was in a very fragile state after it overthrew the Tsar because both the United Kingdom and the U.S. and other Western powers were absolutely terrified that Bolshevism could spread through Europe. And so a number of countries sponsored counter-revolutionary efforts to overthrow the

Bolsheviks. So this was an existential question for the Russians, for the Soviets. And so Lenin hand-picked Felix Gerzinski to fight the counter-revolutionaries. And the funny thing was, is Zerzinski wasn't even a Russian. He was a Polish aristocrat. But he was confronted with this question, how do I fight the counter-revolutionaries? He came up with a brilliant idea. He said, I'll become one. So he created an organization, it's called the Trust, and they fanned out across the Soviet Union,

pretending to be counter-revolutionaries. In fact, they were all Czechos stage. The Czechos is what later became the NKVD, the KGB, and now the FSB and the FSB, they fanned out across Russia, pretending to be counter-revolutionaries. And over the next year and a half to two years, they systematically detected every one of their safe houses, all of their assets, all of their

funding lines, rounded up these people and shot them. So I thought, okay, if this works for the old Bolshevik, maybe if I want to fight proliferators, what do I become? So I can't comment anymore on that. But by setting myself out, my people out there posing, it's the same thing. you know, Gersinski bless his evil heart. He actually came up with this idea. It's a brilliant idea and it worked. Right, right.

You create a fictional network to draw them out. Right. There you go. But one that we control. Right. Right. That's fascinating. Yeah, it really is.

And I hope that someday some of, at least parts of this story get declassified and maybe we'd have a more in-depth conversation about how all of that went down. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about is, you know, you worked and didn't retire until 2005. You were a member of the Senior Intelligence Service at CIA. So you were there for the whole run-up to the Iraq War, which was from the Bush administration predicated much of that war and why we went there on WMDs. And this is a subject, of course, that you have a deep understanding about. and I wanted to ask about your opinion about the WMD situation in Iraq and the general premises for the conflict and what you thought about it or felt about it.

So I'm going to couch my statement as Jim's opinion. Sure. Okay. But I was in the senior levels of the counterproliferation operations. And I kept looking, I was running my own operation, believe me. I was running that. But I was paying attention to this. I was read in. We have compartments of information. I was read into the, what else was going on in the division.

And so at one point, I asked some senior officers where we were about to go to war in Iraq. And I said, is there some source that is giving us the smoking gun? Is where is the Cassis bell eye? The United States typically does not go to war unless there is a reason for war. I guess there's maybe some exceptions, you know, back the 1898, the war with Spain. over Cuba. Maybe you could say that was trumped up. But, you know, normally the United States doesn't just go to war casually. We have to have a Cassus Belli. And so I said, where is the smoking gun? And these senior officers looked at me. And they said, Jim, you've read everything, but the train has left the station. And I love President Bush, but he had some people around him

that were pandering and, you know, that were coming up, taking little bits and pieces of things and making an assumption. And I'm not defending Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein really had a nuclear program. He really had a biological program. And we know he had a chemical program because he used it against the Kurds. So here we have a malefactor, a very evil person who's got all this. And yet, and he lives in a rough neighborhood. And yet he didn't have, ultimately was proven he didn't have that, you know. And some of the so-called intel we had was provided by people like Curveball, who was a fabricator. And yet we were, we were pandering, we, some analysts, you know, basically went along with the train has left the station, I think, and it became a self-fulfilling

prophecy that, well, he's got to, you know, he's a bad guy. He's got to have these things. He's had him in the past. And he had some rudimentary parts of these things still, you know, hidden away and things like that. But he didn't have it. And here I am sitting on a real WMD program. I briefed President Bush, I brief Vice President Cheney, and they were very supportive, as was Director-Tennant, extremely supportive of what we were doing. And that ultimately led to the real disarmament of Libya. And Libya, Moimar Gaddafi, in fact, a friend of mine once said to me a few years ago. He said, can you imagine if Molyar Gaddafi in the year 2011

when he was overthrown, if he had actually had a nuclear weapons program, he would have used it. Yeah. Yeah. A wacko like him. Yeah. A wacko like him, he would have used it. And these weapons were capable of killing not just tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people. He had a proven technology. It was tested.

And I thought, well, I never had really thought about it in that thing. But I thought, yeah, yeah, you're right. He would have used it. Anything to distract from the fact that he was going to be overthrown and killed. And you're saying part of the reason why he agreed to disarmament was because you guys have previously cut off the supply chain that he had. Well, yeah, I can't go into the reason here. But also in one of his rare moments of lucidity, he saw one of the good things to come out of our invasion of Iraq was he thought, you know, maybe it's better to be a friend of the United States than an enemy of the United States.

You know, Libya is sitting on a fortune in oil. There's only like five or six million people in Libya, maybe even less than that. And they have some of the lightest, sweetest crude oil and gas in the world. They could divide it all up and all be ultra rich. And yeah, he had an embargo going on. He couldn't get the latest oil field equipment. He couldn't get the latest technologies, things like that. He sees Saddam Hussein is about to be invaded.

And so suddenly, you know, again, a rare moment of lucidity. He has his intelligence chief make probes with us and with the British about a, how do we, how do we normalize relations? And our response was, well, you have to give up your WMD programs. And the good thing was we knew all about them thanks to my operation. And another question I wanted to pose to you back to the issue with fizzile material coming out of Russia. I wanted to just kind of gauge with you a little bit, what your opinion is or what your

feeling is of how serious that threat is as far as both scientific knowledge of WMDs in terms of like former scientists leaking out of the country, but also like actual material, plutonium, uranium. I mean, how serious is that threat today? It's, well, as of right now, I don't know. I haven't been an access for a while. But I think the biggest fear is the technical expertise, you know, that a rogue scientist would sell himself to a rogue country, you know, he comes out of the Soviet Union. In fact, that's why the nun Lugar, you know, trying to employ these scientists, giving them benign, you know, peaceful, legitimate things to do rather than going to work for these countries. And we were following

known science, known weapons scientists around the world that were talking to some of these countries. And it was a very scary time. If you read my novel, Living Lies, I mean, how does Iran get the fissile material. You know, they give up their centerfuge program. Now, this is fiction, but they give up their centerfuge program. They get the United States to drop sanctions. And the reason they do that is because they've already got the fissile material from smugglers. They don't need the enrichment program.

So that's fiction, but it's one of my nightmare scenarios that this could happen, that they would say, okay, fine, we won't have a centrifuge enrichment program, mainly because they don't need it anymore. They don't have to, they've already got enough. In my book, they had enough. a fissile material for at least four or five weapons. Was that, that must have been a scary time for you guys, especially in counterproliferation, the fall of the Soviet Union and all their materials, their scientists, all that

open to the world now and unaccounted for. Were we close, did we come close to some real tragedies? I think so. again, we did uncover some seas with the, okay, fortunately, okay, on the one hand, we had the danger of the Soviet Union falling apart, but on the good side, a lot of the former Soviet states suddenly became good friends, the United States, and they didn't want this stuff leaking through their borders either. A major victory was accomplished by a good friend of mine, Andy Weber, and he was out in Kazakhstan, and Kazakhstan, when it became independent, was sitting on a

being a parent can be really challenging. 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 on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Load of fissile material, a lot of highly enriched uranium. and he basically convinced the Kazakh authorities that they should basically sell that to the United States, that they didn't need a nuclear weapons program.

Andy Weber, who literally became the assistant secretary at the Pentagon for WMD, he gets a lot of credit. I mean, I think he was the lion's share of the credit for basically disarming Kazakhstan and bringing them into the fold of Western countries. It required some really, you know, good negotiations. He did an excellent job. But yeah, it was frightening because, you know, once you've got the fissile material, you can, you get a pretty good scientist. You can figure out how to make a bomb.

Because Afghanistan had actual bombs when the Soviet Union broke up, didn't they? Those went back. Those were repatriated. But then they had a lot of just highly enriched uranium that was not repatriated. And we agreed to buy it from them, in essence. It's called Operation Sapphire. It's been published. It's been talked about. And my friend Andy Weber is a real hero. He basically, you know, took that stuff off the table. Yeah. No, that's pretty surreal.

And thank God somebody was there to do that. Right. Okay, so I think we need to give a word. A shout out to Parr Weber. Yeah. Par Weber is one of the sponsors for today's show. Dave, if you want to show off the goods there, he's actually wearing one of the watches. These are manufactured in Switzerland by an American-made company.

super nice, heavy. It's got some heft to it, right? Oh, it's, it's a nice watch. Like, uh, we're watches like Rolex, we're having, was having a nice watch like a big deal for you guys. So what we're offering here from our friends of Parr Weber is another very nice watch, uh, Swiss parts, an amazing, uh, it has an illumination system that is always on and it lasts like four or five years before you have to change out the. battery. It's a proprietary to this watch to Par Weber. Yeah, you don't have to sit here and charge it forever. Yeah. And through December 31st, you can get a free strap with your purchase of their watch called the Co-Efficient. You go to parweber.com slash team house to activate the offer. So it's

Parweber, P-A-R-W-E-B-E-R dot com slash team house to get that offer. And, okay. So I think I think we have a few of your questions here for you if you're if you're game, Jim. Sure. Let's see here. Jackson asks, how often did you interface with ground branch? Additionally, how different is the organization post-G-WAT compared to pre-GWAT? People are always interested in the guys who shoot guns and do cool things. I had some interaction with him, but you know, I wasn't serving in war zones, but I had people that, I mean, ground-branch people that were helping us out in a number of cases.

these people are very, very capable, courageous folks who do things that I wasn't doing. A number of them are trained as case officers so that if they see someone who is basically prospective recruitment, then they can either recruit the person or turn them over to somebody who can. I mean, I had a lot of interaction with ground branch, AirBanch, and the maritime branch. Wonderful people. Andrew asks, what's he saying here? So UN offices plus neutral nation equals a den of spies. I guess he's referring to Switzerland.

A lot of truth in that. Were the countries that seemed boring? Were they profitable as an intelligence officer because they were cush assignments for people from other governments? And places like that? I think so. Yeah. You know, there's an assignment is what you make out of it. And like I told you earlier in the program, people said, well, Baron's going to be boring. It was never boring. Yeah. And I mean, the only, the only assignment that I was a little bored with was in Oslo. And that was because it was on the edge of the known world. And but the Norwegians are wonderful folks. We had some good operations going on. Yeah. But in fact, they offered me a third year there. And then they said, they said, but if you really want to go back. to Switzerland, we'd love for you to run that office there. So I said, I think I'll do that. Jim, what year did you move to counterproliferation? It depends on how you define it, but I guess I,

you know, started out in Zurich, but I basically came back from my last assignment in 94 and spent the rest of my career the next 11 years to devoted 98% to prolifer, counter proliferation operations. Was there such a thing as counterproliferation prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, or was that sort of a cause effect type thing? It was only fragmentary, very fragmentary, not really a focus of the agency. And I was on, I guess, in the vanguard of this, I've always been concerned about nuclear weapons, especially although biological weapons are ever bit as frightening. when I was a 16-year-old, I read John Hersey's book, Hiroshima. And in that book, he describes the three shadows that were cast on a wall by the blast when these people were vaporized.

And because they shadowed the wall, the outlines of their bodies were there. And it just struck me as a 16-year-old that you could be killed and nothing is left but your shadow cast on a wall. And then ultimately, we discover that, you know, the context. network is peddling a bomb with the same yield. So it kind of came full circle. I used to tell my officers and I've told people who are working counterproliferation, I said, working against weapons of mass destruction is a psychologically righteous job. I mean, you can be very pleased with what you're doing, saving lives. Isaac, I think I got your question. Anthony asks, how do you pick who to recruit as a human

controlled source, or I guess a human source, is it all up to your discretion or are their recommendations pushed from higher? I think maybe you answered that a little bit, Jim, but do you have anything you'd like to add? Well, we became more sophisticated. Originally, when I first came in, it was up to you to find out, okay, does this source have access to information we really need? And then are there vulnerabilities? Is there any way I can approach this person over time within a reasonable amount of time? And really, recruit the person. We became more sophisticated and created a class of officers called targeting officers, and they would take a much more rigorous look at say, let's take a foreign

country's nuclear weapons program, and they would put together a chart showing this is what we know about the nuclear weapons program, and here are all the people in their roles. And then they would educate the case officers, you know, here are these people, here's when they are going to be going to someplace where you can get access to them. And this is what we think they could provide. So it became more scientific, more rigorous. And plus, the targeting officers frequently had subject matter expertise that the operations officers didn't. So we took a more scientific, rigorous approach to it. You don't want to be over rigorous because there's always serendipity. and the targeting officers rarely knew everything about the targets or about the organizations.

I told a friend of mine, I said, it's like that biblical verse that we see only through a glass darkly. And, you know, we don't have total transparency into these things. So sometimes we have to take a chance and maybe recruit someone and see what their access is or see. Have you guys ever heard of a seating operation? No. It depends what kind of seating we're talking. about. Please tell us, Jim. Okay, a seating operation is you recruit someone who has no access whatsoever, but they have lots of capability and talent and they may be a citizen of a certain

country and you feed them into a program rather than recruiting an existing as, you know, an existing officer in that program. The most successful seating operation in history was the Cambridge five. These five British students were recruited at Cambridge, mostly because of a Marxist ideological orientation, and they were fed into the British secret services. The most famous of them was Kim Philby. And all of them had access, such golden access to British intelligence that Soviet counterintelligence on the other end thought this is too good to be true. And, you know, we couldn't have gotten people that high up in the British intelligence service,

but they did. And Kim Philby almost became head of MI6. So that was, he was a seating. It was a brilliant seating operation. Others, his, you know, his colleagues, the other four, absolutely high-place British sources that were not initially members of their Secret Intelligence Service, but were recruited before then and then fed in as this very patient seating operation. Do you feel, especially, you know, you talked about the asset that you worked 10 or 11 years to get,

And then a seating operation obviously takes a long time, too. Do you feel that Americans or Westerners, the agency, intelligence organization, whatever, have the same type of patience today that they used to back then? No, I don't, Dave, I don't. I wish, I wish, I hope they do. I hope, you know, things that I'm not, I don't have access to. But based on what I knew, no, they're, we've gotten into the world of metrics. If I hear somebody else use that term, I'm going to take a meter stick and beat it across

They want, you know, quarterly results. Corporate bullshit. And something like a seeding operation, you can't do that. I mean, a sleeper asset that you put out there, you know, like the Russians running illegals, things like that. And they've got to be able to plant people. And when they need them, they really need them. But they may be totally unproductive until then.

Or, you know, you can imagine unseating operations. Inevitably, somebody's going to change their mind. They're going to fall in love. They're going to get sick. They're going to just say, I'm now to heck with this. I don't want to do this anymore. And so they probably, I have no access to this, but I would imagine whoever runs the Russian Illegals program,

their version of the NOC program, but it's actually much more devious because they obtain foreign citizenships that have nothing to do with Russia, just like the 10 that were wrapped up in the year 2010. These people were just like that television series, the Americans. These people spoke unaccented, American English, different personalities, different names, different citizenships. These were true deep cover. And I'm not sure how effective any of them were at their intelligence gathering. But if the Russians or the Chinese throw enough people like that at us,

they're going to get access. They're going to work their way up into the structure. Brad has an interesting question. He says, the biggest need for Knox, how are they chosen and are they still relevant in today's intelligence operations directed against China and Russia? I think they are. I had a lot of contact with Knox. Some of my colleagues don't care to, but I always had a knock is like a surgical instrument. You cannot use it just, you cannot use him or her and just about anything you want. You have to use them for very specific reasons. And the fact that they have a non-official cover, could it be business, it could be something else. that gives them wonderful low profile access that can be absolutely irreplaceable.

And I worked with a number of them. I have a lot of them are my friends. Myself, I would never want to be one of them because they really have a hard life. It's there at the pointy end of the spear. And a lot of inside officers, I was what is known as an officially covered or inside officer. A lot of them have never worked with Knox and don't appreciate both the limitations, but also the opportunities that Knox present. I love all of my friends who are Knox.

They did wonderful work. But I think sometimes the structure that manages them, they don't understand the opportunities that these very, very loyal, very brave officers are doing. Jim, to the best of your ability, you mentioned non-official cover, but for people in our audience who aren't familiar with that term or what a knock does,

can you sort of give an overview of how they're brought in, how they're trained, how they're deployed, and what they do? Well, I mean, I never went through it, but unlike me, I mean, I had a state department cover, some people have military cover. That's official cover. But these people would get some American company or some other company to sponsor them as an official employee. And so they have to basically do full-time job for their cover provider. And then they have to do their clandestine work out of out of, you know, out of the rhythm of business. And the training,

They, we go through cycles where we train them only by themselves. Then we have other cycles where we swing around and they train with us, but they train an alias so that we can't compromise. If somebody's bad on the inside, we can't compromise. In fact, I'll tell you, I know the true names of very few knocks. I know a lot of knocks, but I know them by another name. And I really don't want to know their real names. So they get, they're chosen through a psychological profile that's different than mine. line. These people are standalones. They are the kind of people that don't require a lot of

camaraderie. They can act on their own a lot. And me, I'm much more of a people person. I like talking to my fellow officers and things. They don't have the luxury of doing that. So all their communications is through their covert communication device. And periodically, we may meet them in person somewhere where they're not compromised. But it's a very, very difficult job. If one of my children were to say that they'd like to become a knock, I'd say, you really need to think about this. It's a hard life.

It's a hard life. It's very necessary. We have to have these people. But they're, it's a necessary. Yeah, it sounds like you kind of have to be a loner, right? Yeah, to an extent, to an extent, or be able to compartment that life and do it. I have, again, I have a lot of friends who are Knox, and I respect exactly what they did because they did things that I couldn't do. And you mentioned earlier when you were talking about the

knock that you were turning the asset over to, how risk it was for them. And part of that is because when you're under official cover, you have the support of the United States government, the ambassador, but if you're a knock, if you're a civilian working in a country, you don't have that same type of safety net, correct? Correct. I mean, I have a, I had a black passport, a diplomatic passport. And if I'm caught spying or committing some indiscretion, I'm told to leave the country within 24 hours. I'm declared persona non grata. That doesn't, that diplomatic protection does not extend to a knock. A knock is basically in jail.

I mean, their lives can be at stake. Jim, this is a, I think, an interesting foreign policy question. One of the viewers asks, he says, how do you deal with the narrative that attempting to get the bomb is a way to secure sovereignty or fight foreign interference or quote unquote neo-imperialism. I think what he's asking is when we've overthrown the regime in Iraq or Libya, how does that play into our negotiations with, say, Kim Jong-un and denuclearization in North Korea when he has seen these other dictators who gave up the WMD program and were subsequently overthrown by the United States? Well, I think it certainly plays in his mind. I mean, I don't, you know, I'm not sure how

of the North Korean people, he's got convinced that he's truly a god on earth. But I know he fears for his regime's survival and his inner circle. And so, yeah, he looks and sees what happened to Gaddafi, what happened to or what happened to Iraq, what happened to these countries, you know, they're not popularly elected people. And maybe the nuclear program or the biological program is the only thing keeping them in power. And I have no, I know, I have no answer. There's a good, editorial in the post this week by Max Boot about how we may have to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. And I read that, and I'm coming to the opinion that we may have to do that. We already live with a nuclear armed North Korea. They have a proven nuclear capability.

They have a proven delivery system, and they have a stated intention to use it against the United States. None of those things has Iran. We don't know that they have a nuclear program. They don't have a delivery system capable like the North Koreans do. And they've denied having nuclear weapons and said they won't do it. So I don't know, we may have to live with that, just like we live with the North Koreans. This is a very difficult diplomatic thing. I would urge that we continue to run clandestine operations against all of them so that we really know the truth. You know, what President Reagan said about trust but verify, I think is very true.

you can't take them at their word for what they're doing. If Iran goes nuclear, are we going to see Saudi Arabia do the same very quickly? Absolutely. Another wild card or another thing that's preventing the Iranians for doing something totally crazy is their nearby neighbor Israel, which has a proven nuclear capability. And the mullahs may be off the mark in some things, but they're not absolutely crazy. So Israel. would be kind of the guarantor that they're not going to do something totally stupid.

Yeah. Saying that the moles aren't totally off the rockers on some stuff, do you see us returning to a policy of mutually assured destruction with some of these countries where that's the only stalemate we have? I think that may be where it evolves. Yeah. It's horrifying because all we need is one leader with an itchy finger, you know, or a mistake. Right now we've got, what, six or seven countries in the world that have,

have a nuclear capability. And it's scary to think that there may be more. You know, it becomes the more you multiply, the greater the chances that something's going to go terribly wrong. Now, I am not, again, I am not for total disarmament because we can't trust the Russians and the Chinese. I mean, how much would you trust the Russians and the Chinese to destroy all of their nuclear weapons?

I wouldn't. So, I mean, it sounds good. It'd be great if we could prove it. but we can't. Right. Another question that came in, how did interagency cooperation, say between CIA, NSA, DIA, military change over time?

And what's the best way for agencies to work together to avoid missing or miscommunications when it comes to like intelligence sharing? Well, what we did in the Counterproliferation Division, and I think a lot of people have imitated this since then, is we would actually get DIA and NSA officers assigned to our ranks to where they knew who to reach out to and their parent organizations to apply the unique capabilities that these other organizations have. We'd get FBI agents too.

And rather than calling down to the FBI, somebody I don't even know, I'd have an FBI agent who knows me, goes to lunch with me. And he says, well, I'm going to call this guy up and they get, they get, you know, same thing for NSA. And we used all of these people in my operations. My operation was sometimes referred to as a blended operation. It was a term I'd not heard before. But later I thought, you know, what I had actually thought of was this is like a symphony. I'm the symphony conductor and I'm bringing in the brass and the woodwinds and the chorus and the strings and whatever I need. I'm not wed necessarily to a CIA solution. If I think that NSA with their cyber capabilities can do better than we can, well, by God, that's what we're going to

use and or the FBI if it was a domestic thing. And, and, And my first priority was always the national security of the United States. And it wasn't, this has got to be a CIA solution. So I would hope that other people would say, you know, and nowadays, I know that we have these joint area of mission centers where they get a lot of people from the other organizations. And I'm not saying that there aren't still some tensions. You always are going to have personality clashes between certain leaders. But I think in essence, it's much smoother these days.

when we can get a rotation, have an FBI agent or an NSA officer assigned to CIA and vice versa. CIA officers assigned to them to where we have much better integration and unified operations. Find the right tool for the job. Yeah. And how hard was it to coordinate law enforcement activities in other countries with the counterproliferation since the CIA doesn't have any real detention authority? Well, okay, so we have FBI legal attaches abroad, and if they needed to be brought into the picture, they would be. But the chief of station, if we have a liaison relationship, a friendly liaison relationship with the country, then we would, you know, hopefully enlist their aid and seeing that this was lunacy that, say, the Iranians or the Libyans are going to develop a nuclear weapons capability that could hurt them.

I had one person I approached, I won't say the country, country, but we knew that his company was supplying some very high-tech equipment to the Iranian program. And I went to him and said, you know, we would really like you to stop selling this very unique high-tech equipment to their program. And he said, well, Mr. Lawler, we sell it to your nuclear program. I said, that's right. But there's a big difference. He said, what's that? And I said, we're never going to use a nuclear weapon against your country. He said, you know, good point. Jim, tell us about how you know, you retired in 2005. What made you start writing novels?

And why not a memoir? Is it because much of your professional life was still classified? That's exactly it, Jack. I can't write a memoir. Maybe after I'm dead, they can publish something that I couldn't. So, and I've always wanted to write a novel. I mean, I love good spy stories. And so back in 2016, during the first set of nuclear negotiations with Iran, I asked one of my best friends, Rolf Moat-Larsin, I said, what if the Iranians cheat?

And then I came up with the idea for my story, my living lies. And so I created that novel. And it's, in essence, that's what it's about, about a U.S. administration that badly wants to have a disarmed Iran. and Iran that badly wants the sanctions to end. And so I get my creative outlet through writing fiction now instead of creating operations. I describe operations in the book. That book, by the way, had to be cleared by the publication review board at the agency. It took a year.

In the end, they only had five minor redactions. And none of the redactions were, in my opinion, classified, which is supposed to be the criteria. But they didn't affect the storyline. line and I thought, okay, fine. So I just struck those few offensive words out. And I submitted another novel a few weeks later, and that only took four weeks to clear with no redactions. So maybe because I was a reasonable person, maybe they thought, okay, you know, this is good. In fact, they even asked me for a copy of that one. So, oh, that's great. So Living Lies, the first novel in the series is up on Amazon right now and Kindle and Paperback,

if you guys want to go and pick it up. And when is the sequel due out? In a few weeks, it's called In the Twinkling of an Eye. And as I said earlier, it's about a Russian, North Korean conspiracy to develop a very devastating genetic bio weapon that they're going to use for assassination and genocide. And it's due out sometime in an electronic version, in Kindle version, in probably late January, maybe mid-January. and then the hard copy will be out hopefully by mid-March or late March. Andrew is in here joking. He says, so DOE guys are basically the nerds of the intelligence community.

Actually, this is a good question. Asking your thoughts on what's come to be called the Havana syndrome, that CIA and other State Department, other governmental officials are apparently being targeted with some sort of directed beamweigh. weapon, you know, it's been written about in the Washington Post and elsewhere at this point. What's your take as somebody who has studied various kinds of weapons and presumably exotic weapons systems that maybe have come across your desk during your career? What do you make of the Havana syndrome? Well, I know three of the actual victims and they're not faking it.

These people, one of the first was actually irradiated or beamed in Havana. And I had not seen him for a couple of years, but when I saw him, it looked like he had aged 20 years. And he was a physician. So I think he should know about his own physical condition. And he was outraged that people were not believing him that he had actually been the victim of something. Well, finally, this has been swung around. I think people are now, you know, believe about folks like him and some other people that I know. This was an actual, in essence, it's like an act of war. They're trying to get people scared to serve overseas. And it's working, by the way. My wife told me, she said, Jim, we wouldn't be going overseas right now with this going on. You can imagine

not just you, but your children. You know, children have been victims of this. Now, this, the following is is just Jim Malal are talking. I don't represent the administration, but I have been known to say, I know how to stop this. If we are 99% sure that this is the Russians, then all we have to do is use the same technology and we have it against a senior Russian official or two, and it will stop. Yeah. I know that's in politic to say, but I guarantee you it would stop. Right, right. Well, we had Mark Polymop Polymopos on. I know, Mark. He's one of my friends. Who really put himself out on a limb with, you know, with everything by coming forward with all of it. Very, very brave man. He has worked ceaselessly, not just for his own case, but for all the

200 plus victims of this. It's literally like an act of war and it's, you know, it's outrageous. It can't be allowed to stand. And I think the new director, Director Burns has certainly said that, but we may have to follow up with action rather than just words. Yeah. Well, I mean, if they were putting bullets instead of radiation into people, we would, we would take an action. So it's really not any different. In some ways, it's worse because with a bullet, you can. you might recover from a bullet. Some of this, I don't know what the long-term effects are. Right. Jim, in your professional opinion, what is this technology that's being used?

You know, I'm not a scientist. You know, it could be microwaves. It could be something else, but I've directed energy weapons. I've been told that we have similar technology, that this is not a super sensitive, super advanced thing that we don't have. So whatever it is, it's, you know, it's something we could retaliate with if we really know fairly confidently that it's Russians or whomever. And from your point of view, this is part of a potentially a Russian strategy to kind of like clear some pieces off the chessboard. I think exactly that's what it is. And it's working. Yeah. Yeah. You've recruited a lot of people. What is, what are one or two of the weirdest situations or funniest situations that you've been in with recruitment.

That's a good question. I had, I don't know how much time we have, but I have one story where it was a, it was a Middle Eastern target. And I was running an asset who had been retired from this Middle Eastern government. He had been part of the former regime and a new new regime came in. And so after a couple of years, he'd been a mid-level diplomat. He was basically said, you've got to retire. So he retired in a very pleasant Western city, as did one of his good friends, a colleague of his. And this colleague had a younger sister who worked for the same foreign ministry, come and spend a, she decided to take a sabbatical and spend it in this very beautiful, mountainous country and spend the summer with her brother. And her brother's good friend, my

asset would take her out for dinner and coffee and basically, you know, chat her up. And she was a very chatty person. And she gave my friend, my asset, a lot of very, very sensitive intelligence about what was going on at very senior levels of the foreign ministry. And so I was getting some absolutely stunning intelligence reports through my friend who would take her out and she would gossip with him. To her, it was just gossip with a trusted friend of her older brother, and yet I was getting these wonderful grades. So I went to him and I told him how Washington just loved this information. And if he could get more of it, it would be great. And he looked at me and he said, Jack, which was my alias, Jack, I was using your name.

He said, Jack, you know, this woman is not anti-American like the current regime is. She actually likes Americans. You could recruit her. So I had to come up with a scheme on how to recruit this woman without, without tainting my friend. Because if he introduced me to her and I pitch her and she rejects the pitch, guess what she's going to suspect about my friend? Right. That he's a CIA asset. And my top commitment is always to protecting my assets. So I came up with a scheme where I would basically have him show up at a restaurant 15 minutes before I showed up. And then I would stand up at the front like I was waiting for a dining companion to show up. And he would turn to her and say, oh, look, there's Mr. Jack Mitchell. I just met him at a cocktail party three nights ago.

I'm going to say hello. So he'd come over, chat with me. Oh, yeah, I remember you now. I'd act like I barely knew him. And then he would sit down. And a few minutes later, he would turn to the young lady and say, you know, let's ask Mr. Mitchell if he doesn't want to join us for a drink until his friend shows up. So I very reluctantly join them for a drink. And then he introduced her to me. Turns out that her country, like a lot of Middle Eastern countries, is sitting on a fortune in oil and gas. And I decided to pose not as an embassy officer, which might cause her some anxiety, but as an oil and gas commodities trader. And so I said, man, I would just love to have lunch with you and chat about things.

And she was very friendly. She said, sure, that's okay. Well, I happen to have some insight information about her that she needs. needed a surgical procedure that was going to cost about $5,000. It was an overnight procedure. And her ministry wouldn't pay for it because their ruling was, if you want that procedure, you can come home to the capital city, to where the foreign ministry is, and we'll do it for you. But you're not posted permanently to this European country. So it's going to be out of your pocket. Well, she didn't have it. So I took her for a couple of lunches. And basically,

I commercially recruited her as a consultant on what her country was doing in oil and gas, what they were doing in OPEC, which way this was going. And by the way, in reality, this would have meant a lot of money to a real oil and gas trader because of the way this particular country dominates the oil and gas scene in the world. If I just knew they were shifting this way or that, an oil and gas trader could have made plausibly a lot of money. And of course, Jack out of the goodness of his heart, offers her a, a $5,000 signing bonus for as a consultant, you know, to meet and tell me about the oil and gas markets.

So she's happy. I'm happy. We had a bottle of Don't Perignon, champagne to celebrate. I go back. We're celebrating. And my boss says, okay, Jim, now you need to go back down and break cover and tell her she's really working for the CIA. I said, what? He said, well, yeah. He said, first off, she's going to have to be put on a covert communication system. which means we're going to have to polygraph her. And she can't go around bragging to her friends that she's got a new sensitive consultancy. And finally, there's a whole host of questions

that we want to know about her country other than oil and gas. I said, well, I don't think she's going to go for this. He said, yeah, you can, you can figure it out. So I go back down, meet this woman, break cover, apologize for having deceiving her, having deceived her, and said she's really going to be working for the CIA. She looked at me and she said, no, no, Jack. She said, look, you're a nice guy.

I like you. But before we were talking about something, it's, okay, it's a little bit touchy, you know, being a consultant, giving you that inside information on oil and gas. But now you're asking me to be a spy. I can't do that. I just, emotionally, I can't do it. Somehow, I'll get you the money back that you gave me, but I can't do this. And my thought was, lady, you're really a smart woman.

So I go back to my office. I told the boss, well, this basically took place just like I said it would. She's basically turned me down. She's quit. He said, Jim, what is it that I didn't say the first time that maybe you didn't understand? But, you know, this is the first person from this country we've recruited in this entire area in the last year. Our chief is ecstatic. The chief of that division is ecstatic.

And you want to take the score. off the scoreboard. He said, think about this. You go recruit her. Nothing like a little pressure. So I'm thinking, oh my God, how am I going to do this? She had about at this point two or three weeks left in her sabbatical. And I had to somehow persuade her to change her mind when in fact she was, I mean, she was scared, terrified. And I couldn't come up with anything, but I thought, okay, at least let me have a farewell dinner with her. So I called her out. and I said, you know, I'm going to be coming back through your city this weekend, wondered if you'd have dinner with me, a little farewell dinner.

She said, sure, Jack. Yeah, that'd be fine. She was very noncommittal, but, you know, she's okay, sure. So I took her to one of the most fabulous restaurants in that part of Europe. I mean, it's absolutely impeccable cuisine, impeccable service, a setting like you wouldn't believe, a lake, mountains around it, wonderful, wonderful service, very romantic. Now, one thing I haven't mentioned was her and what she looked like.

People from her country, the women from that country are some of the most beautiful, gorgeous women in the world. They're dropped dead gorgeous. They're just, you know, you just look into their eyes. It's like you could fall into their eyes like pools of water. Well, she wasn't. She was that old exception that tests the rule. and I you know I this sounds very sexist but if you guys I don't know if either one of you've ever been on a blind date

but what's the first question you asked the guy or the person who's arranging the blind date what do you ask what she looked like that's a typical male attitude what she looked like and if the answer is well she's very sweet and she's got a good sense of humor right you get you get where I'm going with this right you know and this woman was very sweet and she did have a good sense of humor and she was still living with her mother at the age of 32 or 33, and she's probably still living with her mom, you know, but a real sweet woman, very bright. So I'm with her. And before dinner, as I was going through the train station, I happened to see a gift shop, and I bought her a little bud vase that cost me the equivalent of maybe $30 or $40 and had a gift wrapped as just a going away present.

So we go through dinner. I made absolutely no effort to try and recruit her or persuade her to change mind. All we did was we talked about our lives, our families, and just kind of what our hopes and aspirations were, nothing else, no attempt whatsoever to recruit her. And they served coffee and dessert, and my foot touched my little gift wrapped present under the table, and I remembered it. And I brought it out, and I put it in front of her. And she said, so what's this? I said, we'll open it. So she opened it. And I said, what I'd like you to do is take that when you go home to the ministry in about three weeks and put it on your desk. And whenever you look at it, you'd think about me. She looked at it. I started to see tears coming down. And I thought,

what did I say to upset her? And I heard her mumble something through her tears. And I leaned in and I said, what did you say? And she said, I can do this. And I said, yeah, I know you can do it, but I don't want you to do this unless you really want to do this. She said, I can do it. Let me tell you guys, she did it. She did it for the next five years. And what I didn't tell you was what her access, why it was so good. It was because, and she was just a secretary,

but to secretary to the foreign minister. And so everything that he saw, she saw, and we saw, including the identity and location of every intelligence operative from that country in the world and a lot of other very sensitive information. Wow. Jim, you're a pretty hardcore dude. You come off pretty mild mannered, but you're a pretty hardcore agency guy. Well, I give talks on this about how you have to be, and I use the word ruthless.

It's a harsh word, but you have to always remember why you're doing this. And yes, you've made a friendship, but in fact, what you're really doing is you're recruiting a spy. A lot of people, the most mediocre or poor case officers, the reason they're poor is, number one, they are afraid of offending people. And number two, they're afraid of failure of being turned down. And my advice to all young case officers is, if you've never been turned down, you haven't pitched enough people. So it's like a poker player. If your bluffs are never called, you're not bluffing enough.

Right. Jim, one thing I did promise I would ask. Apparently you had the nickname Mad Dog. Where did this nickname come from? I was in Paris. I'm a long distance runner. I would run every morning through the Baud Bologna. And one morning I passed a German Shepherd that was just very calm, quiet, not doing anything.

I got about 10 yards past him when suddenly I felt the most horrendous pain in my right calf, which was now in his jaws, and a German shepherd has the ability to exert, I don't know how many thousands of pounds per square inch with those jaws. I pulled my leg bleeding profusely out of his mouth, started to run, but of course he's right on me, and then I picked up a big branch that had fallen down. I beat him over the head with it, and I struggled home. I had my wife take the children so they wouldn't see all the blood coming out of my leg. I showered and I went into the embassy where they gave me a tetanus shot. But then they said, you know, that dog was acting so erratically, you need to go to the Pasteur Institute that has the rabies vaccine. So first we tried to find

the dog with a French policeman. And he explained to me that a lot of the hookers that work in the Bois have dogs for protection. But of course, they go out into the suburbs on the weekends. And there they are, there is a string of rabies around the, around the city of Paris. So I went to the Pasteur Institute and the doctor was very kind and he explained to me, he said, Mr. Lawler, if you get the shot, the shots, the rabies shots, within 30 days of having been bitten, you'll survive and you'll be fine. And it consists of one shot in this arm, one shot in this arm. The following week will give you one shot here, week after that, one shot here. You'll have immunity, not only from the rabies infection, the virus, but also for a whole year. There's been one

one person in history who has ever survived rabies. And it is a horrible death. Yeah. He said, so that's your choice. Well, this is not much of a choice. I'm getting the spots. About that time, I'd been having a lot of tension, though, with headquarters, people trying to run my operations, tell me how the cow ate the cabbage.

And so I made a list of all the people I was going to bite if I got rabies. That's where the nickname came from. Yeah. That's your own, your own personal zombie apocalypse back at headquarters. Absolutely. You don't, you didn't want to be in the top of my list. Jim, I, that leads to a question I have. You had these long relationships with these assets.

And I know from speaking with previous guests from the agency, there were always turnovers, you know, in the turnover meeting and how difficult those turnovers can be sometimes. Did you ever hear from assets you recruited said, I'm not working with this person? I either work with you or like I'm done. Like somebody came in after you and messed things up? No. And of course, okay, one thing that we want to make sure it's a real recruitment. And one of the tests of a real recruitment is the ability to turn that asset over to a successor officer.

And I had a number of happy cases where people, yeah, they liked working with me because I was the recruiting officer. But periodically, we would maybe have a celebratory dinner, give this person some kind of medal or something, I'd show up, there'd be lots of hugs and everything. And so, you know, we, we try and keep that relationship alive. And your obligation as the recruiting officer is always to say what a great person, your successor is and to build that person up so that the relationship continues and that the productive, that the asset remains productive. You know, some people I've stayed in touch with, you know, for years afterwards. In fact, the one guy that I recruited 10 or 11,

after 10 or 11 years, he worked for us for a number of years and then went on to establish a very successful business. And he jokingly said that he'd love to have a picture of me in the business with the caption, our founder. Yeah, I mean, you, I won't, I won't say that I liked everybody I recruited, but I can find redeeming qualities in them. I always had to focus on the few, maybe few redeeming qualities these people had so that I could, you know, recruit these people. We don't recruit nuns. We don't recruit really super nice people a lot of times. We recruit unhappy people. Sometimes we recruit losers. We recruit malcontents a lot of times. I mean, sometimes they're narcissists, but you have to try. I had to try and find what's the redeeming

quality of this person. There's a reason why this person acts that way. Right. And I need to become their friend. Right. Right. Like an actor, you're understanding their motive, right? Empathy. It takes empathy. If I want to recruit you, Dave, I've got to get inside your head and see what makes Dave tick. And then what does Dave need? Dave, you know, you have to become a shapeshifter and be able to give you what you need. Steak and bourbon. You got there you go. Whatever. Jim, this has been an amazing interview, and I feel like I could sit here and listen to these stories literally all night. We really appreciate you taking some time out of your Friday to share a few stories from your career with us, and it really just enlighten us with some of the knowledge that you gained over the course of your career.

Before we close up here for the night, is there anything that you think I failed to ask or anything final comments that you'd like to leave people with? I really can't. Somebody asked me if the main character in my book here, Living Lies, if the main character is that me? And I said, the main character is what I wish I could be. I think everybody, every writer invests a certain amount of themselves in the characters they create, including the bad guys. I mean, I have one bad guy in this thing, and he would be me on a really bad day if I had no scruples whatsoever. Right. They're kind of fun. Actually, to create a bad guy, You're talking about a person with no scruples, no moral limits, total narcissist. I mean, you just let yourself go wild if there was nothing to constrain you.

But the good guys, yeah, I mean, the good guy, he's better than me. He's what I wish I could be. And he shares the same passions that I have, the same focus, the same recruiting ability. But he's not me. He's, he's, you know, if I'm a six, he's a 10. Yeah, I've written four. like military fiction novels, Jim. And I kind of feel the same way.

The protagonist gets the jobs I wish I had gotten. And he's actually more courageous. And he's much more confident, yeah, more confident. You wish you could be this person. So he's what I wish I could be. You know, I think that's a very interesting characteristic that we see in a lot of people that we have on the show and a lot of high achievers is they're always able to look at somebody else, no matter what they accomplished, they always look at somebody else and go, oh, wow, like,

yeah, I did some stuff, but like this person really did something. What? I'm not even sure where I'm going with that, but it's such a humble statement. What, were there any big misses in your career that you look back on that? I was working a Bulgarian intelligence officer. And this was towards the end of the. Cold War. And I pitched him and he didn't accept. He didn't really turn it down. I can see he was struggling with it. And he had actually talked about his father, who had been a doctrinaire

communist had, you know, towards the end of the Cold War, woke up and said, this is bullshit, you know, this communism is. So the guy, he was already predisposed to accepting my offer. And yet I was going to PCS. I was going to leave within a day or two. And I'd, I didn't persist. I didn't keep going at him. So there was a miss right there. Had I had I been a little more persistent, I could have gotten a really remarkable asset. There was another one. This was an Asian gentleman from a certain embassy. And I happened to meet a younger Asian from the same embassy. And we kind of have not an ironclad rule, but if you're working one target, you usually don't want to work two targets at the same embassy.

So I gave up the older gentleman and went after the younger guy and had moderate success. I got a few little things, but nothing that I would say was remarkable. So I had a going away party and I invited the older gentleman that I really hadn't been working. I invited him to the party as well. And he told me this most amazing story about how at the end of after World War II, sometime in the late 40s, his brother had been out swimming in a lake and got cramps and was drowning. And there was an American GI walking by this lake. And he dove into the water and saved his older brother.

And then this man said to me, he said, Jim, I would do anything for America. And I thought, I've wasted all my time. I'm leaving. And here was the real target. And I didn't even know it. Yeah. So that was a real miss. I mean, he meant it too.

I would do anything for America. And I thought, well, that was a miss. What can I say? Jim, we feel so privileged and so honored that you joined us here tonight. Would you mind holding up your book one more time? I'm going to post the Amazon link. Folks. It's Living Wise, a novel of the Iranian nuclear weapons program by James Lawler.

You can find it on Amazon now. I hope you guys will go pick it up. Check it out, guys. You order it or get it on your Kindle? The sequel's about to come out soon, so no better time to get started, right? That's right. George Tenet read it. He loved it. And the deputy director, Mike Morel, read it, and he liked it too. And so there's a lot of inside baseball in it. And that may not resonate with some people, but if you have any exposure to the intelligence community,

there's a lot in there about it. And I've got both good guys and bad guys on both sides, which a lot of times you have only good guys on one side and only bad guys on the other. I happen to know the truth. There's good guys and bad guys on both sides. This show is all about the insider baseball, so our viewers will definitely go for it. Yeah. And one of the things is, even though it's a novel, it's not a true story, everything in there is going to be realistic, which is rare, I think, in that genre sometimes. Well, some of the stories I've told tonight, I've fictionalized and put in this book. So readers, anybody who listened to this program tonight might think, I've heard this story before.

Well, yeah, you did. It was just in a different context. So folks, please remember to like, share, and subscribe to the channel here. Check out the links down in the description to get on board with our Patreon if you want to support the channel. There's links to our Instagram, links for merch. And next week, we are not going to be live, but we're going to have a pre-recorded episode because it's Christmas. I'll leave it a little bit of a surprise. It's going to be a Christmas special that we'll have out next Friday.

It's a musical. A song and dance number. that Dave and I do. We've been practicing for months. Yeah. And Jim, aside from your book, is there any place how people can find you if they want to check you out more? Well, I think there's an email address in the book. They can send me a note. I'm on LinkedIn. They could send me a note via LinkedIn. If anybody who lives in the Washington area wants me to autograph the book, I'd be happy to do that. They could just send me a message through LinkedIn. So yeah, they could contact me that way.

Fantastic. Thank you for your service and thank you so much for your time. We deeply, deeply appreciate it. Well, thank you for inviting me on the program. You guys were very good, very good interviewers. Thank you. I hope we can do it again sometime. Maybe when you have another book out or something that you want to come out and promote,

we'd be happy to have you back. Sounds great. Yeah, we still have, I think, what, like 60 other assets to go through, talk about my case. Yeah. All right, guys. So we'll see you next Friday. Merry Christmas, everyone. And take care.