The Team House - The CIA from 9/11 to Present Day | Tim Weiner | Ep. 360

Episode Date: July 12, 2025

This show features an in-depth conversation with author Tim Weiner about his new book, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century." Drawing from the full span of the 21st century, Weiner discusses the agency's evolution, covering everything from the rise of counterterrorism and controversial programs like torture and renditions, to significant successes such as dismantling nuclear proliferation networks and penetrating the Kremlin. The discussion also delves into the complex realities of intelligence work, the challenges posed by foreign threats and domestic political shifts, and personal anecdotes that shaped his career covering the CIA.Order Tim's new book here:https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-mission-the-cia-in-the-21st-century-tim-weiner/22062129?ean=9780063270183&next=tor here:https://www.amazon.com/Mission-CIA-21st-Century/dp/0063270188Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseNew merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.comSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️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/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 - Start 00:46 - Putin's War Plans03:40 - Post-Cold War CIA: Rise of Counterterrorism10:09 - Post-9/11 CIA: Torture & Renditions25:27 - Success: Dismantling AQ Khan's Nuclear Network50:09 - Bin Laden Mission & Chinese Intelligence1:29:08 - US Response & Support for Ukraine1:35:19 - Eroding Democracy & Threats to US Intelligence1:50:54 - The Challenges of Writing and Selling a Book2:07:27 - Reflections on Afghanistan & The Author's CallingBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey guys, this is episode 360 of the Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave and our guest in studio tonight is Tim Weiner. Tim is the author of the upcoming book, The Mission.

This will be out in a couple days or what, a week. July 15. July 15th. So yeah, like a week from today for people who are watching this when it comes out. When most of you watch this, it'll probably already be on bookshelves. So the topic is the CIA in the 21st century. It's sort of a follow-up, a sequel to Legacy of Ashes, which charted the CIA's history from its inception up until early War on Terror, like 2004. 2006. 2006. And so the mission kind of picks up where you left off. That's right. It goes to today.

writing, trying to convince your editors to insert information that is up to the last minute, as I understand it. We pushed it. We locked up the book about three months ago. So let's start off with, I'm not going to go into a lot of preamble about, you know, yourself and your previous work, because this is the third interview we've done. But tell us about how this book in particular came about. Why did you decide to write it now?

So the moment I realized I had to write the book was when it became clear that CIA had done something that it had aspired to do since its creation in 1947, but never really achieved, which is to penetrate the Kremlin. The CIA had in 2021 stolen Vladimir Putin's war plans to invade Ukraine. and Bill Burns, the director of CIA under Biden, convinced the White House and the State Department that this information had to be declassified that they had to tell the world about it. And they told a skeptical world about it, like the NATO nation said,

oh, yeah, right, aren't you the people that said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? But the intelligence was absolutely on the money. One of the highest goals of the CIA throughout its history had been achieved to penetrate the Kremlin and obtain absolutely solid information on the intentions and capabilities of the Russian leader. And to prevent strategic surprise. And when I saw they had done it, I said, okay, this is something new. Okay. and differed.

And I had to find out from the start how they did it. But it was also necessary to, as you say, pick up where I left off and tell the story of the CIA in the 21st century in which it was thrice transformed. Sure. Yeah. And a string of failures, some successes, I mean, it's a turbulent 25 years.

It's been a hell of a century. so far. But yeah, we start off in the months before the 9-11 in that. And, you know, for a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CIA was groping for its new mission. It's like, you took the Soviet Union away from us. How can we be a great intelligence service without a great enemy? What is the mission?

and they were asking themselves this throughout the Clinton administration it began to dawn on them and this was a story I covered I got on the plane and went the moment it happened when Al Qaeda blew up two American embassies at the same time in August 1998 one in Nairobi, one in Dar es Salaam and the fact that Al Qaeda

about what you see I knew very, very long, little, okay, could from a base in Afghanistan hit two targets at the same time 3,000 miles away? This was something new in the annals of terrorism. It showed a level of sophistication, planning, and rat-like cunning that had never been experienced. At that moment, it began to dawn on the leaders of CIA that counterterrorism was going to replace anti-communism.

as the mission. So tell us in the run-up to 9-11. You know, we get into the late 90s, early 2000s. It sounded like the big things going on were Serbia and Latin America or the Balkans in Latin America. You want to tell us a little bit about what the agency's activities were up to that point? Well, you know, the counter-narcotics mission in the Andes was a mess. See, I never really wanted to get in the war in drugs. They knew, you know, the drugs would win the war because of the, you know, insatiable demand for dope in this country. There would always be a supply. And the history of counter-narcotics operations, you know, you squeeze them in the Caribbean and the balloon surges, you know, in Colombia.

And you squeeze them in Colombia and it surges in the Caribbean. In West Africa. Yeah, what do you, you know, it's a losing battle. But the CIA was deeply invested in a program called the Air Bridge Denial Program. And the epicenter of this was in Peru. And the CIA had made a deal in the early 90s with a very bad actor named Vladimir Montesinos, who was the intelligence czar and the Rasputin of Peru. Vladimir

Vladimir Lenin Montesinos God help us all and this guy was a very bad dude who in the end was indicted for murder, bribery, drug dealing,

extortion, you name it and went to prison for the rest of his life. So anyway, they paid Montesinos a million dollars a year for free use of the Peruvian Air Force

and for intelligence liaison and the deal was that the CIA had a base in the Amazon jungle in Peru. They flew in a light plane and a modified Cessna, the Peruvian Air Force, flew in a modified light fighter. They would intercept what they thought to be drug planes. That was the plan. Okay. And then

a spot of bother. The United States had passed a law after the shootdown of KAL-O-7 over Korea in the 80s. The Soviets shot down a civilian airliner with 240-something people on board, one of whom was a right-wing

congressman named Larry McDonnell. and, you know, it was a federal law. You couldn't shoot down a civilian airline. Okay. And after long struggle, President Clinton promulgated rules of engagement here. You had to make radio contact with the suspect aircraft. You had to order, you know, had to waddle your wings. You had to tell them to lower their landing gear.

There were four steps. And if they ignored all that and took a base of action, boom, you could shoot them down. So one great day in the morning, it was April 20, 2001. They shot down a light plane with four American, with a family of American missionaries on it, husband, wife, two little kids, and the pilot, and killed the woman and her infant daughter. As far as I know, no CIA covert operation had ever killed an American woman. before that the air bridge denial program

as it developed had followed none of the rules of engagement ever in the shootdown of 15 aircraft prior to this disaster in April 2001 the guy who was in charge of the program overseeing the program as chief of the Latin American division

for most of these shootdowns was a gentleman who we came to know very well at CIA named Jose Rodriguez Jose would one day become the chief of the clandeson service yeah you kind of chart his like interesting career trajectory

throughout this book and yeah like you said I'm sure we'll come back to him but to fast forward a little bit I'm not going to belabor 9-11 we've talked about it many times on this podcast we got caught with our pants down and suddenly the CIA does have a mission now Oh, yeah. So Bob Gates said something interesting.

Apropos that day. Gates, of course, had been CIA director and later Secretary of Defense. He said, on the 12th of September, we didn't know DAC's shit about al-Qaeda. If we had had a great dossier on who these people were, how they moved money around, how they moved people around. if we had that intelligence about al-Qaeda, the secret prisons and the torture and all that insanity would never have been necessary. But we didn't know anything. And so CI went out, and this was largely directed by Jose Rodriguez,

who had been removed as chief of the Latin American division for a terrible judgment. okay Jose was awaiting a forward assignment at headquarters in 9-11 he thought his career

was in the shitter and Cofer Black who's chief of counterterrorism said I'll find something for you to do and Jose invented a third-ranked

chief of operations job and eventually became the counterterrorism cheat. And it was largely Jose, not him alone, largely Jose, that got the secret prison program and the torture program going. One of the interesting facts that you kind of dig up in this book that I don't think many people are aware of

is you mentioned how there were 14 renditions before 9-11. I don't think people have really grasped that. Can you tell us a little bit about free and post and how that developed? So in the Clinton years, extraordinary rendition, authorized by the president 14 times, basically involved grabbing people, suspected terrorists, and shipping them off to the dungeons of Cairo and other friendly Middle Eastern countries. And that was just to get them off the street. Okay.

Interrogation, getting intelligence from them, was not uppermost in CIA's mind. by, I'm going to say, six months after 9-11, early 2002, the CIA and the military have hundreds and hundreds of prisoners. A lot of them in Camp Rino under General Mattis's leadership in near Kandahar, Afghanistan. And they're from all over the world. Who are these guys? Are they somebodies? Are they nobodies?

And it was Jose Rodriguez who basically said, we've got to find a way to sort out these people and figure out who loves us and who hates us, you know, and who's a somebody and who's a nobody. And the upshot of that was the secret prison programs. Which you cover in both books, actually. And now I'm going to skip ahead a little bit. WMDs in Iraq.

We've talked about it a lot around here. Based on your research, what went wrong there? If we're to put our finger on, what the fuck happened? What would you say about it? Same problem. Lack of good intelligence. So really, you know, what little the CIA knew about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs, dated back to 1998, which is when there were UN inspectors.

in Iraq and CIA officers using the UN operation for cover and Saddam kicked them all out in 98. CIA didn't have any spies in Iraq

and you know it's hard to fault them for that the price of getting caught was you know you would die, your entire family would die your entire extended family would die your livestock would die your house would burn down and salt

would be sewn in the ashes for starters yeah okay a difficult operating environment for recruitment you know all of a sudden after 9-11

everybody has to work counterterrorism right and one day you know you're the Molly analyst and you get tapped on the shoulder and said, okay, you're a counterterrorism analyst now. Okay. The whole operation of getting intelligence analyzing intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was a newly created outfit called Winpack.

They didn't know what they were doing, okay? They didn't have a lot to work with. And so among other things, they took the word of an unvetted source Iraqi defector who being held by the Germans whom they had never met whose identity they did not know and whose code name was Curbball. Hey guys, our show is sponsored by GhostBed.

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the show and thank you for supporting the companies that help support the show Ghostbed.com slash house for 10% off made in the U.S., made in Canada. Shout out to our brothers in Canada. They rock. Check them out. I love Ghostbed. Thanks, guys. So, you know, a very, very smart, Margaret Henock, a very smart woman in the European

division with long experience in operations. Challenge them and said, you don't even know who this guy is. okay how can you believe what he's saying and one of the weapons analysts said well you know his information matches what we found on the internet and margar henock says how do you know that's not where he got it right you have to know who this person is before you accept what he says well that didn't fly and there's a scene i mean it breaks your heart thinking about this stuff So President Bush says to Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, the most popular general since Dwight Eisenhower, the most respected person in political life in the United States, it says to him, you have to sell this to the United Nations and the world. And Powell has handed this piece of crap that Dick Cheney's.

bucket shop has cooked up with like a mushroom cloud on the cover and, you know, all this neo-conn horse shit in it. And he and his chief of staff, Colonel Larry Wilterson, said, you know, toss that right out. So CIA has to deliver the brief, the case for war. And Colin Powell is out there for a weekend, long weekend before he has to go to the United Nations to present the case. We all remember what that scene looked like. Here's Colin Powell and here's George Tennant, the director of Central Intelligence, sitting right behind him looking bone weary and exhausted.

And Powell says, if it ain't like triple vetted and signed, sealed, delivered, seal of approval on it, I ain't delivering it. So this curb ball nonsense gets in and a lot of other nonsense gets in. And Mike Morel, who is the smartest at the CIA is sitting in the room during this long weekend at CIA headquarters. And he has this terrible sinking feeling the pit of his stomach. He's saying, I don't know if this is true or not. And nobody knows if this is true or not. Does he speak up?

He does not. It's just a terrible case of group think. And again, a want of great intelligence, of solid intelligence. And to jump a little bit further ahead, you know, I'm going to do this a few times or a lot of actually during this interview because we're kind of like going to event to event. You got two hours to cover 25 years. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to hear because you got a great story in this book about the debathification process in Iraq and how that came about.

And I mean, it's as shady as the WMD stuff, frankly. It's like, okay, let's make an important point here. When people accuse the CIA of intelligence failure, as they say, so often do. It is more likely and not that it is a policy failure. The CIA is an executor of American foreign policy.

It does not make foreign policy. The President of the United States makes the foreign policy. And if it fucks up, the CIA gets hung for it. I mean, that's just a classic

truth. So the President of the United States sends a guy named Jerry Bremmer out to be the imperial viceroyte of Iraq. And he's replacing a general named Jay Gardner, who had done a great job supporting the people of Iraqi Kurdistan after Gulf War I. So he knows the terrain. And the arriving station sheet. CIA Station Chief, who has actually been in the station chief in Baghdad at the time of Gulf War I, is a guy named Charlie Seidel.

He's probably the most talented Arabist in the United States government. He's known all over the Arab world, not in true name probably, but he's one of the most talented CIA officers of his generation. He's been overseeing intelligence ops from Tommy Frank's headquarters in Doha. And now he's flying in. He's, congratulations, you're the station chief in American Occupied Baghdad. And so Bremer comes up with this idea out of whole cloth. One, debathification. Everybody who belongs to the bath party is banned from the new Iraq.

Okay, that's everybody. Yeah. You couldn't be a school teacher without belonging to the bath party. That's every, that's the entire professional class. and Baghdad. And we're disbanding the Iraqi army. And Charlie Sidel, the station ship, gets wind of this, and he goes running up the steps of the palace, you know,

where Bremer presides, and says, if you do this, you'll have 50,000 enemies in this town before nightfall. Does Bremer listen to him? I mean, but there was more to it than just. It was more to it. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't just Bremer's big idea, right?

Like, he was being backed. I think it was news to everybody in the sit room. Yeah. Except for a few of the Weasley neocons, like Paul Wolfowitz and his pal, Doug Feith, at the Office of Special Plans in Rumsfield's, Why do you think they made this decision at the end of the day, which seems so nonsensical for all of us? Completely. Like, it changed the nature of what that were, was, and would become.

Well, if the American occupation of Iraq was one of the less brilliant foreign policy decisions in American history, the deep-authification plan and the disbandment of the Iraqi army, was, I would say, top 10 worst foreign policy decisions ever. Yeah. Okay. Bremer dreamed it up. Where does Bremer get the imperiousness to do this? He'd worked for 15 years for Henry Kissinger. Would Henry Kissinger make that decision?

We cannot speculate. Dr. Strange Love. I mean, even Kissinger thought, Bremer was kind of an asshole. Yeah, yeah. For people who, you guys, most of our viewers are probably aware of this. But the Ba'ath Party was Saddam's political party. I think a good correlation sort of like the Communist Party in China. It was a communist party.

It's the CCP where if you hold the position, it's like the union. It's like the government's union for everything. So you have to be a member of the party to work in public works, to work in schools, to be to be anything. And so when not only did, like you say, were there 50,000 enemies overnight, but all of Iraq's infrastructure stopped. Yeah. Every piece of what made in a country. And you got tens of thousands of cashiered soldiers who are pissed off and penniless and who know where the guns are. Yeah.

Yeah. And this is the genesis of the armed resistance to the American occupation, which eventually evolved into ISIS. I mean, I always said that, you know, during the invasion, they should have just dropped leaflets on all the bases and said, we're invading, put down your weapons, maintain your positions. We're taking over your payroll. Right?

Trust us. We're taking over your payroll. We got you. The next one I want to. to talk about was, you know, the CIA actually having a good W, putting a W in the box. We've had Jim Waller on the show before. You have a whole chapter in the book about Jim working with another CIA officer, Paula Doyle. And a third one named Robert Gorlick.

And a pretty impressive operation. Dream team, baby. That they rolled up, you know, AQ Cons Network. Okay. So this is a beautiful op. Okay. And it proved, by the way, it came to fruition in this same time period at the end of 2003 when we're going after Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

This operation proved that you could take down an existential threat of weapons of mass destruction through espionage without firing a shot. The genesis of this operation, whose true code name has never been revealed, I don't know it, but Jim Lawler, who was sort of the team captain, gave it a pet name of Excalibur. He was really into the legend of Camelot. The CIA in 96 created a counterproliferation team. Okay.

Prior to that, stopping the spread of nuclear weapons in rogue nations was largely a diplomatic effort under the, rubric of non-proliferation. Okay. Non-proliferation wasn't cutting it. Okay. You needed covert operations in the name of counter-proliferation to cut the head off the snake. So one day, 96, 97, a justly famous FBI agent named Dave Major who had spent the better part of the

Cold War going up against the Russians, gives a lecture at CIA. And the lecture is about the first great operation of the Cheka, the Soviet Intelligence Service, and that operation was called the Trust. Long story short, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, after World War I, there were a number of counter-revolutionary groups, mostly coffee house steamers, in the European capitals trying to say mostly Russian exiles saying, you know, we got to stop the freaking Bolsheviks. We got to like get back and counteract the Russian Revolution. So the Cheka under the command of the famous Felix Dersinski sets up a number of false fronts in European capitals that are

pretending to be big-time counter-revolutionary operations, and they lure the counter-revolutionaries into their trap, roll them up, and kill them, okay, operation called the trust. So Lawler, who's now, you know, congratulations here in charge of counterproliferation of the CIA, listens to this and he says, well, if the Bolsheviks can do this, why can't we? So Jim Lawler and Paula Doyle, who's an extraordinary intelligence officer retired in 2017, and Robert Gorlick, who had been a knock for many years, working under non-official cover without diplomatic identity or passport, they become nuclear proliferators.

And they set up a number of false fronts, particularly in Dubai, the free port of Dubai. and they suck the operations of AQCon into their operation. AQCon, Pakistani metallurgist, had been working since the 70s to build the Islamic bomb. And the Pakistanis exploded and tested their first bomb in 98. But no one realized at the time was that AQCon then reversed the switch. And instead of being an importer of nuclear weapons technology, he became an exporter. of nuclear weapons technology to places including Libya, Iran, North Korea. He had a global operation.

CIA director of George Tenet called him after 9-11, the most dangerous man in the world, including Osama bin Laden. Because, you know, the great terror was that, you know, AQ Khan's operation is about 150 miles from al-Qaeda's base. in Afghanistan, what if he gives bin Laden the bomb, which was a far-fetched possibility, but the world is full of far-fetched possibilities. So painstakingly, with great patience and cunning

and a tremendous sense of humor, the patience was the key. Because at one point, they've located sort of AQCon, World headquarters, a warehouse outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And the question is, do we blow it up or not? And Cheney's like, yeah, let's blow it up. And Lawler and the CIA Council patients. Because if we blow it up, yeah, you know, you turn on the light, the cockroach is scurry.

They're going to be somewhere, you know, he'll work somewhere else. Yeah. So they wait and then they track a huge shipment of nuclear. weapons technology that is transiting the Mediterranean on its way to Muhammad Qaddafi in Tripoli, Libya. They intercept the ship, they expose it to the world, they roll up AQ Khan. And again, here is a global threat of the spread of nuclear weapons taken down through espionage, not by putting warheads on foreheads. I remember Jim telling us a story about how he basically knew somebody and basically, long story short,

he waited like 20 years to recruit this guy, like building the relationship, building the relationship, building the relationship before I came to fruition, which takes a lot of patience. And when I asked him, I was like, is that normal? He's like, no, that's not very common at the agency. recruiting agents recruiting foreigners to work in secret for the United States is the sine qua non of the CIA

that's why they're there okay and the recruited foreign agents are why the CIA exists without them it's you know it's not a secret intelligence soon And Jim and many other of the Clientesal Service officers that I interviewed for this book were pains to explain to me, okay, what the relationship between the CIA operations officer and the recruited foreign agent is.

It is an admixture of betrayal and trust. Right. Okay. The officer, the CIA officer, is asking the recruited for an agent to enter into a criminal conspiracy to commit treason against his country. The agent may have many motivations, revenge, money, or to make, to change the world around him. The next one I wanted to ask you about was the Magnea assassination. Oh, yeah. And it sounded like you, I don't know if you're the first to report, but some interesting stuff about the agency's relationship with Israel and their assets in Syria. You want to tell us how that came about?

There are a couple pieces of this puzzle. I don't know. And let me tell you what I don't know. Sure. Okay. I don't know precisely how much the CIA contributed in terms of intelligence on. finding mugnia in Damascus. But they did pouch the bomb.

They pouched the bomb. But here's a really interesting fact. Tom Sylvester is not a name that most people know. Tom stepped down Memorial Day as the chief of the clandestine service, the DDO. Okay. In 2006, Tom Sobester was station chief Damascus. Okay. And he ran a black station, obviously undeclared to the Syrians.

The Mask of Sykes. Yeah. And under extraordinary counter-espionage and counter-surveillance by the Syrians, his deputy was a fellow who has since become the second most famous Greek in the history of the CIA after George Tenet, Mark Palomaropoulos. I am certain that Tom Sylvester and his station were instrumental in this operation. By the time Mugnia was killed, Sylvester had moved on as chief of station, Damascus, and was replaced eventually by a guy who went on to become chief of station in Moscow, Beijing. somewhere else really significant, I forget.

What we know is that the chief of Mossad goes to Mike Hayden, the CIA director in 2007, and proposes the assassination of Imab Mugniz. Okay. Briefly, Mugier had more American blood on his hands than Osama bin Laden. Okay. He had been the mastermind of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982, in which 200 some odd American sailors and soldiers and airmen were killed. He blew up the American embassy in Beirut, destroying the station and killing the CIA's top expert on the military.

East Robert Ames. He was the military chief of Hezbollah from its inception until his death, 25 long years. Okay. And worked hand and glove with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Okay. The bad motherfucker, Imad Mugn. So Maire Degh, the Hadl Mossad goes to Mike Hayden, and says, we have a bead on Mughey, let's kill him.

The bomb that killed Imad Mugier, to the best of my knowledge, was manufactured at the CI's bang and boom center and Harvey Point, North Carolina, okay, and was delivered to the CI station at Damascus and a diplomatic pouch. It was fitted, I don't know how, into the spare tire on the back of Munger's SUV he drove to the same

location bad tradecraft imad for sexual assignations in one of the most closely guarded neighborhoods

in Damascus near the Syrian intelligence headquarters and one great day one night I should say at the end of 2007 he walks back to his SUV

killing a terrorist with a terrorist with a terrorist methodology is a new thing for the CIA. In a way that really is deniable. Not for long. It did take eight years to parrot out, even the bare-out ones.

What you're describing, though, I mean, there had to be a lethal finding on this guy to clear all of that. Even if we were just giving, you know, quote-unquote lethal aid to the Israelis, I mean, there's no way that I don't think to get around that. Yes, there would have to have been a lethal finding.

So then let's talk about the drone campaign in Pakistan. It's like basically, I think it was the largest paramilitary operation in CIA history. Oh, without question. Little did the CIA know or contemplate, again, to the best of my knowledge, when inaugurated drone warfare, as a military technology as a strategic way of fighting war

that drones would revolutionize warfare leaving ahead the Ukrainians have shown what drones can do okay at the time it was just a neat weapon right no risk to

American airmen immoral hazard because we hadn't quite refined to the technology and the methodology at that time. The moral hazard was that you were killing civilians right, left, and center. Yeah. And, you know, the smarter military commanders and the smarter CIA officers who were prosecuting

the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan realized, you know, we're never going to win this fucking war if we keep killing civilians. It is bad ju-ju. to kill civilians. And there's another thing that this is not intelligence, you know, obviously you need intelligence on your, you know, where your targets are, but how great it would have been to be able to recruit some of these people rather than kill them.

When you kill them, you're not getting any intelligence out of them. And latterly, around, I'm going to say 2006, 7, 8. The CIA in Pakistan was recruiting al-Qaeda. And that, and not torture, was what led to

Osama bin Laden in Abadabad. I'm going to get you there in just a second. The other little vignette that I wanted to touch upon, which I feel like, you know, we'll quickly get at loggerheads between Gina Haspel and Jose Rodriguez,

as the destruction of the torture tapes. That was Jose. You know, Gina was his chief of staff. Gina Haspo, we should explain, became the director of the CIA in 2018. Jose ordered the destruction of the tapes of the waterboarding and torture of the first two high-value detainees, as they were called, at a secret black base in Thailand.

And why were they videotaping the torture? Well, this is a theme that will repeat itself in the book. They didn't know what they were doing. The CIA was not set up to run secret prisons. The CIA didn't know anything about interrogating prisoners or torture. There's that story. And I think it may be in your book. Certainly it's been reported before like the CIA psychologists were email.

emailing back to headquarters like, hey, I don't think these guys know anything. And headquarters is emailing them back like, hey, pussy, keep torturing these guys. And that was the analyst. Yeah. That was the analyst on the bin Laden team who were doing that. We were later glorified in the film Zero Dark. Yeah. Yeah, he's got to be holding something back.

Right. They didn't know what they were doing. And the videotapes might be educational someday. I'm not kidding you. I'm going to put it on Sesame Street for the kids to learn from. No, it's like we're going to, you know, we don't know what we're doing. So maybe we ought to record this to figure out if we're doing it right. So these videotapes, you know, 96, I think, hour long VHS cassettes are sitting at CI Station in Bangkok.

And a reporter for the New York Times. has gotten wind that the secret base exists. And the second that happens, the CIA Public Affairs Office calls up Gina, Haspel, as Jose's chief of the staff. Jose is now the chief of the clandestine service. And Jose is proposed destroying these tapes before. They've just been sitting there festering for years. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

And he asked the CIA director, Porter Gus, can I destroy him? No. He asked the top lawyer, John Rizzo, can I destroy him? No. Jose, you cannot destroy the tapes. Okay. And they go to the White House counsel, Harriet Mears under George Bush. Can I destroy the tapes?

No, he's playing... Mommy Daddy gas. May I may I. Yeah. And she's like, no, Jose. You cannot destroy the tapes. the taints. They're under subpoena in a federal court case.

And he says, fuck it. As he often did, damage torpedoes. And he drafts an order. Haspel transmits the order. That's the only thing she did. Okay. To a CIA station, Bangkok. And they destroy the tapes. And the CIA warrior, it sounded like he shat ten

different kinds of bricks. And so this, you know, the memo goes up through channels from Bangkok, say, okay, tapes destroyed. And the CI lawyer, John Rizzo, looks at this, and he types of one word reply, all caps, what? Question mark, exclamation part. And of course, Porter Goss, the hapless director of central intelligence from 04 to

606, 19 terrible months under the sky. he is legally obligated to tell Congress about this violation. Does he do it? A couple years later, Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times gets wind of this. And, you know, John Rizzo has the unhappy duty of calling up Porter Goss, who has now been sent off into, you know, unhappy retirement, say, please tell me you told Congress about this. and Porter was like,

slipped my mind. I didn't have the heart to do it. And poor John Rizzo, who's been the CIA lawyer since before Iran Contra. Wow. Okay. And knows a scandal when he smells one. It's like, this is a four alarm fire. And it is all on Jose Rodriguez,

who through a series of misadventures, went from the penalty box at headquarters to chief of counterterrorism to the chief of the clandestine service. At the end of the day, I mean, despite this, you know, brewing scandal, I mean, nothing ever came of it. That is because, among other things, there's a lawyer named John Durham, who is in the news recently as having signed off on an audit of the CIA's reporting on Russian Russian's monkey wrenching of the 2016 presidential election. John Dorm is where

CIA scandals go to die. He's Mr. Fix It. Former federal prosecutor. He's like, you have a four alarm fire scandal. Tell Dorm to investigate it. He'll slow roll it for you until, you know, the statute is run. You know, there was a

CI officer who murdered a guy at the assault pit. prison outside of Kabul in 2002. It's like, hmm, murder. Just killed him, you know, just beat him to death, let him freeze. Beat him unconscious and let him freeze to death on the floor. It's like, you know, probably, you know, probably should like look into this, right? The guy gets promoted, you know, in part because, again, the same. former federal prosecutor John Durham has this magic briefcase

and you know you put classified documents concerning scandalous behavior into it they vanish. Okay so this is very difficult to get prosecuted for a crime committed in secret

and under the imprimatur of the authority of the president of the United States. So this brings us to the bin Laden mission. What's new? What new information do you have to share with us that folks haven't heard yet? I mean, the one I think really knew, noteworthy thing is that it was not torture extracted from detainees that paved the way to Abadabad. It was the recruitment of al-Qaeda terrorists.

largely in Pakistan and largely under the tenure of the then station chief in Islamabad, whose name, am I going to forget it now? God damn it. It'll come to me. Who became the chief of the clandis in 2010. And he managed to get intelligence out of recruits from al-Qaeda. to protect them from, you know, betrayal and exposure. And that was the key. It was intelligence work, not torture.

There's a bunch of stuff you turned up in this book, too, about Chinese intelligence. I'm sorry. John Bennett. John Bennett, station chief, Islamabad, when these recruitments took place, later the chief of the clandestine service 2010 to 2012 at the time of the killing of bin Laden. you turned up a lot of stuff in the book about Chinese intelligence being this escalating threat against the United States that before along the Chinese MSS, the Ministry of State Security is 12 times bigger than the CIA. Like this is kind of snowballed into a fucking problem for us. And you have some really interesting stuff about how the CIA was able to recruit assets, recruit sources in China, and how they got compromised and probably killed.

This was a singular accomplishment of espionage and intelligence work and a singular disaster at the end of it. Beginning around 2003, the CIA in Beijing began to understand the corruption of the Chinese political class. Okay. And to understand that the way you got promoted, the way you clawed your way up the greasy pole to a position of influence and power in the Chinese Politburo or in the Chinese military or in the Chinese intelligence service was what was called promotion fees, bribes, pay to play. And so years of painstaking work and a considerable sum of, of money went into this. Recruiting promising, up and coming, smart, young people. Talent spotting. Okay.

Many cups of tea and probably many bottles of expensive whiskey. And paying their promotion fees, recruiting them by saying, Uncle Sam Scott. Have I got a proposition for you? The only phrase I know in Mandarin is, Oshu, Nita Maywe Pongil. I'm your American friend. And it worked.

It worked beautifully. And by circa 2010, before Xi took over in 2012. The CI had a network of precise number, I can't say, but upwards of 20, well-placed, recruited agents in positions of influence in the Chinese political military and intelligence systems. One by one by one, starting in roughly 2011, these people were captured, imprisoned, tortured and executed. An entire agent network rolled up

and with a greater effect than the roll-up of recruited Soviet and Russian agents inflicted by the betrayals of Alder James and Robert Hanson. Twice as many agents betrayed and with a lasting effect

that probably lasts until this day. Yeah. how did it happen? The full story has not yet been told, but at the heart of it was the covert communications systems that CIA used to communicate with its recruited Chinese agents, the COVCOMs. The COVCOMs was also used in Iran, okay,

for the recruitment and running. of Iranian agents of the CIA. And it was really primitive. It was bogus websites for like sports. Okay. And you entered a portal of the website and then you were into the purportedly secret realm of communication. It was so clumsily constructed

that it was like a badly knitted sweater. If you pulled one thread, you can unravel the whole thing. And the Iranians figured it out. And they told the Chinese, it can't account for it all because the Chinese system was more sophisticated than the one used in Iran. There was also a Chinese CIA officer

who washed out. Lee. Yeah. But he's not the whole story. either it was a cobcom plus lee plus some X factor and you know this is the nature of counterintelligence cases they go on for years and decades sometimes without resolution uh to be a counterintelligence officers to know the meaning of patience and paranoia and paranoia and you know if some of them drink too much or wonder if god is merciful and just you can't blame them yeah

Another thing I wanted to ask you about, I feel like we got to mention Uncle Dave, the resignation of David Petraeus, and how that all came about. I mean, my understanding was that he never really fit in with that job. So, of course, David Petraeus had been the four-star commander of Sincol. Okay. And that is a job that comes with valets, cooks. You go out to dinner, you got a 20-car motorcade. You know, you've got some valet screwing your pants on in the morning. Your king is my understanding.

And you have just an enormous staff, you know, of people to do strategic planning and five-year plans and, you know, figure out the world for you. It's a top-heavy organization. CIA is a very flat organization. There are like two steps in the chain of command. And, you know, you got a problem. You call on your people and say, well, I want, you know, a six-month study done on us. They said, you know, no, we're on it. You know, and they come back to you a week later and say, okay, we did that.

What's next? And Petraeus got one piece of advice. from Bob Gates, former CI director, former sectep. He said, when you roll up in your black limousine

at CIA headquarters, your first day, check your general ship at the door. Petraeus couldn't do that. And, you know, CIA didn't take to him. And he didn't take to CIA.

And, you know, but ultimately this is a story of vanity. Because of the Paula Broadwell stuff and the classified information, There was no love affair in American public life greater than the romance between David Petraeus and David Petraeus. You know, yes, he had this affair with this woman who is like

exactly like him only a woman in 20 years younger, you know, incredibly ambitious, zero body fat, you know, run 10 miles before breakfast. And she was writing his biography, you know, as a PhD thesis. And he shared code word level, you know, notebooks of information with her, none of which she used in her book, but you can't do that. You know, you cannot do that. The pillow talk? Because a CIA director has to have moral authority because he is asking his officers

to do amoral or immoral things for a greater good. and if he cannot hold himself to a moral standard, he got to go. And what was there as a meeting at some point between him and Clapper, I think, where they're like, eh? Well, this is extremely embarrassing because it's a long story. But a woman who was Broadwell's, he was married, by the way, this whole time. I recall. A woman who was a rival of Paul Broadwell's for Petraeus's affection,

claimed that she was like stalking her on the internet or something and she had a friend who had a friend in the FBI and so the FBI looks at this and talks to Broadwell and figures out one, the director of CIA is having, you know, an affair. Well, FBI does investigate people's sex lives or at least not since Jane or Hoveman died. Right, right. And not since Bill Clinton, you know, had a deliance in the White House

but it does investigate the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. And that was his downfall. And he said, who me? You know? And got a fantastic job at private equity firm and denied everything

and eventually copped the plea and paid a fine. And is a very respected person in certain circles. Go ahead, Dave. No, I was just going to say that it's very, you know, a lot of jobs. GWAT veterans are very salty about the general staff, like general officers, no matter who they are, because their inability to do a job during the GWAT. But they've all landed very nicely.

But I think Petraeus, that love affair with himself, I think that that's very indicative of these general officers during that time frame. They got all these accolades for doing nothing. Well, I never served, so I can't, you know, give you a salient analysis of what four-star generalship does. It apparently doesn't screw up everybody. It didn't screw up Dwight Eisenhower. Yeah. Well. Who also had a secret affair, but that's a different story.

Yeah. But he also won the war. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Made hard decisions. He made hard decisions.

Yeah. Yeah. The one part of the book that I took some issue with. Exception, umbrage. Some umbrage. Not in the broad strokes, but more in the, maybe in the phrasing, but we'll talk about it, was the portion about the RDI network and the Panetta report. Let's talk a little bit about what happened there.

Don't use jargon. What's the RDAA? The rendition, detention, interrogation network. The secret prisons. Yes. So the, so Congress is investigating the tort. prison and all this other jazz. And they reach an arrangement with the CIA that they had written the Panetta report, I believe it was called, and there's an edited version of it that they share with

Congress. Is that the sequence of events? This is more complicated than Chinese math. It took me quite a while to be able to tell this story in a simple and direct way. Congress at the urging of John McCain, who has moral authority in this matter, right? decides that they're going to investigate the whole secret prison network and how it happened who bore responsibility, although the short answer was the President of the United States George W. Bush who authorized.

And they spent years on this. And Leon Panetta, an incredibly successful CIA director because of his political acumen, his humanity, and his having been both a long-time member of Congress, White House Chief of Staff, knows how Congress works, right? Says, you know, yeah, you can go ahead and do this.

To the great Umbuds. of some. While the Senate is investigating, Panetta wants his own, you know, report on how did this happen? Who shot John? You know, give me the A to Z on this. And so this becomes a classified report that's known colloquially as the Panetta report. The Panetta report falls into the hands

of the congressional of the Senate staffers. Okay. The reason this happened was that the CIA set up a computer system offsite for sharing documents in a classified, you know, a skiff. Yeah. But also, you know, with computer access that ran both ways. And as best anybody can figure out, the CIA misconfigured this.

My understanding is that it was a hyperlink. That in that, you know, classified system that they agreed, this is what we're sharing with Congress, there's a hyperlink that the staffers were able to click on, and that was what, like, brought them through the tunnel to the full report. I think we're talking about the same thing using different language. Perhaps. Yeah, I think so, too. But the irony here is that according to Panetta himself, in the interview I did with him, the Panetta report wasn't different from the Senate report at all.

Not different. Okay. Same set of facts. Same set of documents. Well, when, the chief of counterintelligence at CIA figures out that the Senate staffer has, you know, in his mind,

hacked into the CIA, right? He authorizes his counterintelligence IT people to hack into the Senate. No, you cannot do that. The CIA by its charter cannot spy on Americans. This was very bad business. So that's the phrasing that I guess I take some issue with Is that did they hack into Congress or did they simply close the loophole, that hyperlink that they were able to access?

Well, the decision of the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, Mark Kelton, to send his people after the Senate in the name of plugging a leak. Was ill-advised. Ill-advised and triggered a criminal investigation. A criminal reform. I mean, it was such a big deal. Senator Feinstein at the time was talking about like the CIA should be disbanded for doing this. I mean, it was like. Well, yeah. So the vice president of the United States, Joe Biden had a come to Jesus meeting between Feinstein and Panetta and, you know, said, come let us reason together. And, you know, let's let's like not beat each other's brains out over this. It's not collapse the United States government over this.

Right. Joe Biden peacemaker. But, but yeah, I mean, he did the right thing. So also, what's going on during this time is modernization as it was sold.

Are we speaking here of the mission centers? Brennan reforms? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, here we're talking about bureaucracy, which is like the least fascinating subject in the world. I get it. But basically, The Brennan reforms came from a curious place, which is hard to explain.

John Brennan washed out of spy school. He was deemed not suited for the clandestine service and became an analyst. And his detractors at CIA said that he had a barb out. He had a chip on his shoulder. For the clandestine service. And the reforms were a way of taking them down a notch, which is bizarre, because espionage is the heart and soul of the CIA. Whether or not these reforms, the creation of mission centers that were country-based,

all it did really was to add another layer of bureaucracy to an already bureaucratized spy service. okay another realm of another layer of espiocrats who are sitting at headquarters making budget decisions and you know turning the 7,000 mile long screwdriver against station chiefs and far-flung capitals was it good, was it bad, was it ugly, it was all those things okay but it sparked considerable resistance so much so that the head of the clandestine service at the time told Brandon that, you know, this is no good. And Brennan said,

you're fired. Which did not endear him to everybody. On the other hand, the guy who was running interference for him on the reforms was one of the most talented CIA officers of his generation, Greg Vogel, twice station chief in Kabul, among other things.

And Greg Bowdo became chief of the clandestine service in this dustup from 2015 and 2017. So in the meantime, there's another shitstorm brewing. Tell us about Russia and WikiLeaks. No less a figure than Mike Hayden, former CIA director, former NSA director, has described the Russian covert operation to monkey wrenched, 2016 presidential election as like the greatest covert operations since the trojan horse political warfare okay is using all the means in a nation's disposal short of war to take down your opponent this was a masterpiece of political warfare okay uh in which the russian intelligence

services, identified the wounds in the American body politic that already existed and rubbed salt in them with the goal of denigrating the Democratic candidate for President Hillary Clinton, whom Putin despised to the marrow of his bones because his secretary of state, she stood up to him and said he had stolen the presidential election. In Russia, in 2012. And Libya also pissed them off. Side issue. Total side issue.

And Putin said in his own words, we think Donald Trump is the leading presidential candidate. And he said it, you know, a couple of months after Trump rode down his golden staircase. That Trump Tower announced his candidacy. is no question that Russia worked this covert operation and no question that Julian Assange was a linchpin in it. Assange was now in the Gusifer leaks and Julian Assange was the warlock of WikiLeaks. How do you think that relationship worked? I mean, because I think that the implication here is that Russian intelligence was feeding information to WikiLeaks. Well, they absolutely did. Asage

hold up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid prosecution on charge of rape in Sweden. Yeah. At which time he became a paid employee of RT, the Russian propaganda and news outlet. Assange was the distributor of the Russian intelligence services hack and leak operation at the Democratic. National Committee. The Russians broke into the DNC. Justice Richard Nixon's burglars broke in to the Democratic National Committee

headquarters at Watergate in 1972, only they did it electronically. There is no question that Assange was a paid agent of the Russian intelligence services. And he has pleaded guilty to a charge of espionage. It is difficult now at a distance of 10 years to describe how completely screwed up the American body politic was by the Russian operation and how screwed up the Washington political press corps was by this sprinkling of poison confetti into the political...

Yeah, how bonkers it was. I mean, there were a series of different things that were blowing up at the time with BLN. and a bunch of things that the Russians were able to twist that knife of a little bit. Yeah, Black Lives Matter didn't exist in 2016, but they were not the way it did after George Floyd. Yeah, yeah. But they identified every sort of weak node in the American body policy. And it's rumbed salt into the wounds through, you know, online persona.

Mm-hmm. And, you know. And the Obama administration. was kind of like, eh, there's nothing we can do. The entire Obama administration, and indeed the entire American intelligence community, was watching this happen,

like a cow watching a train go by. Yeah. You know, seeing it, but not understanding what it was. I remember seeing the ads on Facebook myself that came out and, you know, the reports subsequently that they were sponsored by the Russians. I mean, I remember seeing some of them personally, and I had at least some inkling of what was going on there.

And the result was we got Donald Trump as president. Yeah. I mean, I think it's impossible to really, you know, say, I mean, I guess history will be the judge, but like did they put their thumbs on the scale enough to tip the election? Yes or no? I don't know the answer to that. Well, it is the judgment of the at the time senior members of the American intelligence community, every man jack of them, that the Russians skewed the election for Trump.

Let's also talk about Thomas Rekhusen. There's an interesting character in this book that I don't think anyone's ever really written about before. No. His name is unknown to the American public or at least until the publication of this book next week. utterly unknown. Thomas Rakuzen, Thomas Rakuusan, was one of the one of the book. of the most distinguished, brave, resourceful, and balzy American spies of my generation. Raku-san's roots are Czech.

His parents were Czech. And he was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 to crush popular resistance to the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia. So his feelings about Russia and the Russians bred in the bone. They were not warm feeling. Raku-san ran operations against the Russian from like before the end of the Cold War. And he ran an absolutely extraordinary mission into Baghdad before. the American invasion in 2003.

He was stationed in an Eastern European country and went into Baghdad posing as a member of the Czech security service to run ostensibly security operations at the Czech embassy in Baghdad before the war. war. That was his cover. At night, he was going all over Baghdad, doing load weight assessments of bridges, scouting out weapons depots, getting targeting information. That's... Balsy. Yeah. That's pretty impressive work. And he was awarded the Intelligence Star for that,

which is the highest declaration CIA has. Fast forward early 2017 after it is determined that the Russians have monkey wrenched the 2016 presidential election. Tom Rukusan succeeds Greg Vogel as the chief of the clandestine service in spring of 2017. And he calls in his top dogs. Okay. And these are guys who have been running. counterterrorism operations for the last 15 years. These are hard-bitten people who have been working in garden spots like Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan,

station chiefs in Jordan. This is when we finally started striking back, right? With this stuff with Pat Wenninger. Tom calls them all in and says in so many words, The Russians just manipulated our fucking elections. How are we going to make sure this never happens again? Okay. And he calls in his crew of maybe 20 or 30 guys.

And he tells them to take their talents, their experience, in targeting terrorists. And by targeting, I mean identifying them, finding out who they are, where they live, what they think, who they love, who they love. who they hate, where their weak spots are. How can you recruit them? And turning that talent against Russian spies, diplomats, officials, oligarchs. They wrote a manifesto called a call to arms. For Tom Raku-sun, the Russian attack on the American presidential election in 2016 was the intelligence equivalent of 9-11.

And the response he demanded and the response he got was every bit of, is powerful as the CIA's response to al-Qaeda's attacks on America. One thing that Tom did was to open up the back rooms of Russia House. Okay. Russia House is that component of the CIA that trains its attention on the Russians. And Russia House had long been, had long been, had long been, The most secretive. Secretive, cloistered.

And what is the word I want? Kind of insular. The most secret part of the CIA. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And Rekusin says, we are going to put a little sunlight into this. I want you, denizens of Russia House,

to start sharing information. not only with your brothers and sisters in the CIA, but scrub it for sources and methods so that we can share it with our friends abroad. Okay, I should add, parenthetically, the CIA relies on its allies in foreign intelligence services in countries that we think of as friends of the United States and countries we don't think as being friends of the United States

to an almost unimaginable extent. The CIA is not and cannot be a global intelligence service without the help of its foreign partners. We don't have the languages, we don't have the people, we don't have the country knowledge that they collectively can give us. And so the sharing of intelligence with the British, the Dutch, the Estonians, the Ukrainians, the Spaniards, you name it, okay, was probably the most powerful thing that the CIA did to as a force multiplier, okay, in its history, okay,

it was a revolutionary concept to dare to share the carefully, secret of what makes Russia tick and how to penetrate the Kremlin with our allies. The penetration of the Kremlin had been one of the highest, if not the highest goals of the CIA since its inception in 1947

to get over the iron curtain and ascertain the intentions and the capability of the Russians. Well, lo and behold, Tom Rakusin and his successors and the clandestine service did that. And by the fall of 2021, and I can give you the precise time,

it was five weeks after the fall of Kabul in October 2021, lo and behold, the CIA stole Vladimir Putin's war plans for Ukraine. And that is a singular accomplishment. And when I learned that they had done that, that's when I decided I had to write this book. Because that is just a revolutionary sea change. It is transformative in the history of the CIA and very much underappreciated by the American public. So what I know that, you know, the report was viewed as skepticism due to, you know,

the history with Iraq and stuff like that. But did the United States government take any action at all to, you know, they have this information, but it seems as though we didn't really do anything anticipating it. So CIA has, you know, stolen Putin's warplanes. Right. And Bill Burns is the director of the CIA at the time. And William J. Burns was in addition to being universally. regarded as the greatest diplomat of his generation. He had been the deputy secretary of state. He had been

the undersecretary for the Middle East. He had been ambassador to Russia under Putin and ambassador to Jordan before that. This is a brilliant man. And probably one of the greatest directors ever at CIA. And what Burns practice was intelligence diplomacy. It was Burns and the CIA. They got Evan Gershowitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter and Brittany Grinier, the basketball player and other American hostages, out of Russian prisons. Okay. And Burns goes to the President of the United States and the Secretary of State and says,

we have to declassify this. We have to tell the world about this. And they go, okay, if you think so. We can do it. And they do it. And they tell the world. and the world, and in particular the nations of NATO, cocked a collective eyebrow and said, oh, really?

Aren't you the people that told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Right. The stench of that still lingered 20 years later. Okay. But they were right. Okay. And the intelligence didn't stop the war, but it had an electric, unifying effect on the nations of NATO. and was one of the things that the CIA did,

not the only thing that has been crucial to the survival of Ukraine since the Russian seizure of Crimea and eastern Donbass in 2014. But I think, like, my question is more like the United States had that information. But we didn't start arming Ukraine until, well, you know, I mean, you know, like, We could have conducted training exercise in Ukraine. Disagree. The CIA has been on the ground in Ukraine since 2014. You know that.

Right. Training, equipping, you know, purging Russian spies from the Ukrainian military intelligence services, working with them, okay, sweating with them, okay, figuring out how to defend this country against Russian aggression. Sure, but that's Trump since 2014. But what I'm saying is, why not do a joint military training exercise with Ukraine in the weeks leading up to the war to give. Military. Okay.

What I'm talking about, the CIA. I am talking about our country, our administration. Like, we know five weeks before the invasion that they're going to invade, but it doesn't seem like we took any steps to inhibit that invasion. This calls to mind a conversation that the lens. Secretary of State, Madeline Albright had with the then Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell, back around 1994, concerning the horrors of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the slaughter. Right. Yeah. And Shrevanitsa and other places.

And she said to General Powell, you have this great military. Why don't you ever use it? Right. Right? Or words to that effect. why didn't we why didn't the united states military in all its grandeur get up off its hind legs you know go to war because nuclear weapons no no but i'm not even talking about they were afraid that russia would like i'm not i'm not a neocon i don't think u.s soldiers should be on the ground

during the war but but what i'm saying is though had we and again this is outside the scope of I'm just thinking out loud right now, and you guys can ignore me. But like if we had this information, we could have done a joint, we could put U.S. troops in there for a joint training exercise because Russia didn't know we knew they were going to invade. And is Russia going to invade while U.S. troops are there doing a training exercise? You know that some two-star, you know, in the E-ring, is telling the Secretary of Defense, you can't do that, you know, nuclear war.

But I'm talking about as a deterrent to the invasion, would Russia had invaded if there were U.S. troops on the ground, just doing training with the Ukrainians? There were Americans doing training in Ukraine. There wasn't a large scale like training exercise the way you're talking about. Yeah, like they would have announced like in two weeks, hey, we're going to do this big training exercise with Poland and Ukraine. Yeah, this is far outside the scope of the book.

Yeah, sorry. But you war game this out. one step and you've got Russian soldiers killing American soldiers and American soldiers killing Russian soldiers and that ain't good. Yeah. And again, I'm not advocating going to, you're putting boots on the ground

now that the war started. It just seems like our administration could have interrupted. Remember, Cobble had just fallen. Ignomiously. Yeah, there wasn't a big appetite for it. Yeah.

And a 20-year American military, you know, effort in Afghanistan had crumbled into dust. No, I get all that. And again, like, I'm not advocating for us going to war now. I'm saying prior to the war. But, yeah. What it could have shown to do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, I got to ask you, the full-scale invasion kicks off. and there are some things that the CIA has to try to keep at arm's length, but nonetheless the sabotage operations in eastern Ukraine and deep, deep inside Russia in some cases. Who was?

Yeah. Controversous subject, there were lethal operations that the Ukrainians conducted on which CIA was either briefed or well aware of, that CIA wouldn't touch with a 10-football. Okay. The CIA was not going to get into the business of killing Russians. Directly. Yeah.

Exactly. It will take years before the full story of the American role and the American intelligence role in particular in Ukraine can be told. However, I spent. a good deal of ink in this book describing an extraordinary effort by CIA to keep the Ukrainians alive and to keep the Russians out of Kiev. Another controversial one I got to ask you about Nord Stream, the Nord Stream pipeline. None of the stories make sense to me to this day.

I mean, you know, did the Russians do it to themselves? I couldn't say. Can't say. Did the Ukrainians do it in an unauthorized by the United States operation? Yeah, probably. But there were no fingerprints on that one. You know, some intelligence stories. are like a photograph in a bath of chemicals to take 10 years to develop and develop and that's one of them

and along with this subject uh something else you talk about in the book is you know president Biden not really understanding that the rules based order that he grew up in and lived in and worked in for so many decades was dissolving kind of like right before his eyes I think that this is a story with a very long tale. Sure. It is a remarkable fact that in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the number of democracies on this planet began growing and growing until in the spring of 2001, the number of democracies and the number of autocracies in this world.

were roughly equal. And that had never happened before in the history of civilization. After the American invasion of Iraq, which George Bush said, was going to ignite the fires of freedom all over the world. The American invasion of Iraq was going to create democracy in the Middle East. The American invasion of Iraq would solve the Israeli penitaphil. Palestinian problem. It was good for what ails you.

He was wrong about that. And in the years, immediately thereafter, 0.3, 04, 05, the number of democracies in the world began declining, flat-lined and declined,

and we have been in a democratic recession in this world for 20 years. And we are now a bailout. in democracy ourselves. We are living in an age of American autocracy. This has a number of terrifying implications domestically.

It has a number of truly horrifying implications for the Central Intelligence Agency. One of the CIA's superpowers throughout the Cold War in the decade there. after was that when it came to the recruitment of foreign agents, which is the heart and soul of the CIA, that's how we understand the world, that's how we get intelligence. The United States, for all its faults, was the shining city on the hill. We stood for freedom. We stood for democracy. And if you were a Russian or an Iranian, you could turn to America,

through the CIA, maybe your motives were revenge. Maybe you needed money. Maybe you wanted a new life in America. Or maybe you wanted to change the world around you. And you could look to America. The lights in the shining city on the hill are going out. And this is dangerous, if not fatal, to the recruitment of foreign agents who want to help the United States.

Do we stand for democracy and freedom today? Will we stand for democracy and freedom a year from now or two years from now? Destruction of the architectures of American foreign policy and national security over the last six months since the inauguration of Donald Trump have been profound. Our alliances are being ripped up and destroyed. Our standing in the world is plummeting. The State Department is closing embassies and consulates around the world,

destroying cover for CIA officers who operate out of those places. The institutions of American National Security are in the hands of crackpots and fools. The Pentagon is being run by a white Christian nationalist, a Pox News host. This is a trillion-dollar enterprise. being run by a guy who couldn't organize a cocktail party for eight. The evidence of chaos in the earring is, you know, evident. The National Intelligence Directorate is being run by a conspiracy theorist and Putin apologist, Telsie Gabbard.

She's in charge of the president's daily brief, not that he reads it. The FBI, its national security and intelligence directors, are being dismantled by a maga acolyte named Cash Patel. And the director of the CI, John Ratcliffe, is a man who will twist intelligence and distort the facts to please the president. And it was just called for the criminal prosecution of his predecessor. John Brennan for his role in investigating the Russian attack on the 2016 election.

This is dangerous. God forbid in this time of chaos in the American National Security establishment, which has been exacerbated by John Radcliffe's actions at the CIA. He is forcing senior people in the clans. Service and the intelligence analyst director, it's out the door. He cashiered every one of the CIA's new hires from 2023 and 24. He has imposed ideological purity tests on senior people. Who do you really think won the 2020 election?

What do you think about the January 6th insurrection? Ideology. These people are ideologues. ideology is the enemy of intelligence. If you're an ideologue, you don't care what the intelligence says. Your mind is made up. And Trump himself and the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, himself, I've said in recent days, forget about the intelligence.

Who cares about the intelligence? This is what we think of the world. This is our reality. We make our own reality. The politicization of intelligence seems that, Yeah, we're in a dangerous point there. The recent strike in Iran being kind of a case study of that, like, did we destroy all of their nuclear weapons? Did we, like, it totally depends on what their ideology will.

The president says we destroy the nuclear weapons program. The intelligence says otherwise, and he says forget about the intelligence. Yeah. So where does this leave the CIA in the next couple years with Director Radcliffe? Okay. Imagine, if you will, that you were a member of the CIA's called to arms, and you fought as your predecessors at the CIA fought against Russian imperialism. And you wake up last February 24.

And you see that the president of the United States has ordered the UN ambassador to vote with Russia and North Korea and Iran against a resolution condemning the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine. And you think to yourself, my God, the president of the United States has gone over to the other side. What do you do if you are a senior CIA officer? And you think to yourself, the greatest threat to American national security today is the president of the United States. Do you agree that right now is sort of an intelligent foreign intelligence bonanza as far as our opposition trying to recruit, you know, agency people who have just recently laid off, may have been read into programs? Okay. Take this case that I just mentioned of Radcliffe cashiering hundreds of people who had been trained, hired by the CIA in 2023 and 24. Most of them hired to fill the new China Mission Center that director Bill Burns had created for years ago.

Those people probably pissed off and they're out of a job, very much a potential intelligence target. Elon Musk ordered Radcliffe to fire these people. Okay. Elon Musk's doge people, okay, gained access. to the most sensitive information about CIA through their penetration of the Office of Personnel Management and the IRS. The Treasury. Yeah, through the Treasury. These are like 22-year-old tech bros, okay, and if one of them has a drug problem, a grudge against the United States or, you know, the other classic counterintelligence vulnerabilities, They got a giant target on their back.

It's a very dangerous time. And look, I'm not a doomsayer. I'm an optimist, actually. And I know that he who lives by the crystal ball will wind up eating broken glass. But imagine, unpleasant though it may be, what would happen if the United States were attacked again? another 9-11 scale attack. An attack at home or broad

enabled by the chaos in our national security and intelligence systems. What do you think Trump would do? I don't know. Look at what he's done already. Sending, you know, armed troops into American cities and mask thugs. Oh, well, yeah, certainly domestically

it would escalate the authoritarianism. I'm thinking foreign population. policy-wise, like just the incoherence we have right now, it's hard to even imagine how incoherent the response would be. What if he declared martial law? What if he suspended elections? Would the Supreme Court stop him? Would Congress stop him?

Nope. You know, here we are coming up on our 250th birthday as a nation. No free republic in the history of civilization is a nation. lasted longer than 300 years. And that was the Roman Empire. You think we're going to make it to 300? Not unless we get our shit together. I hope we make it to 250.

So some of the things that did not make it into the book, or were in there a very little bit, I'd like to hear a little bit about what was left on the cutting room floor or what you'd like to circle back around. I mean, some things that popped out at me, the Special Tactics Unit in Iraq, the CTPTs get like a sentence in the book Havana syndrome's like a paragraph

the Syria covert program is like a paragraph the C tops I don't think are mentioned what else is out there that you think folks should know about you're going to make me cry I know I know because this book could be 1,500 pages

A book needs a back cover Yeah yeah I know You remind me of when I was writing reporting legacy of ashes i went up to craftsbury common vermont northern vermont to visit tom twetton that name ring a bell he was the last chief of of the clandescent service uh before the end of the cold war amazing guy and uh in retirement he was working as a bookbinder interesting yeah he was uh making hand-tooled leather covers for books.

So I went up to talk to him and he said, remind me what you're doing again, what you're writing about. And I said, well, I'm trying to write a history of the CIA, you know, from 1947 up to the present day. And he looked at me, not unkindly, but skeptically, and said, and will this be a 12-volume study? I wish I knew more.

more about what the CIA had been up to in Syria. Very short-shripped in the book. I mean, I know people who were there after the Arab Spring, I'm talking about. But they won't talk about it. And remember, this book is entirely on the record. I don't do blind quotes. I don't do anonymous sources. but I didn't even have

no sources I just I wish I knew and and the you know the military stuff

and by that I mean the P.M. stuff. The nexus between C.I. and J. Suck. Oh yeah. Okay. I get a little bit of that but not enough. Okay, and that was really key, you know, to military history and intelligence history.

And I just, the only people I interviewed were CI people, like I didn't sit down with Stan McChrystal or Bill McRaven. I know, because that's above my pay grade, really. The Omega team stuff is kind of the, I would point that to the case study, I guess, between the relationship. between special operations and CIA. Okay, here's a classic reporting problem that I confronted. So there was some reporting that the CIA's Afghan shock troops. The CTPTs or the zero units. Yeah.

Yeah. Did many terrible things and slaughtered civilians. and there have been some very impressive journalistic accounts of the terrors that these people inflicted in the name of the United States. And I was reasonably persuaded that some of those accounts were sourced to the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. There are duplicitous intelligence services all over the world, but there is a few more duplicitous than the Pakistani inter-services intelligence. It's interesting you bring up that particular instance because I had also a very frustrating experience looking into that subject.

And I remember being on the phone with somebody who's a representative from one of the major humanitarian organizations that says the zero units were doing all. kinds of war crimes. I'm like, okay, give me some examples. Do you have evidence, you know, show me this evidence, you know, what's like, I'm a journalist, let's air this out. You know, I can't share it with you. Wait, so you have evidence of war crimes that you're just sitting on? Like, what the fuck is going on? And there's an NGO. And they're protecting their source. They're protecting evidence of war crimes. I mean, that's what, de facto, what this woman was telling me on the phone. Yeah. If, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if,

I never sussed that out, okay? And I'm not going with a single source story if the source is the guy. Or if the source is the Taliban, like, oh, yeah, they came and killed my cousin and, yeah, he's buried somewhere over there. Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan going back to 1987 during the Soviet occupation. I did six tours there as a reporter, starting with the Soviet occupation and ending with the American occupation. So I know a little bit about Afghanistan. I've spent cumulatively maybe, I don't know, nine months on the ground there. And not embedded with anybody, just walking around.

The problem that we're talking about, sourcing. Yeah. Okay. In a war zone. Yeah. Is, if not the biggest, one of the biggest problems that was the, proximate cause of the American failure of the war in Afghanistan. The war, 20-year war.

Yeah, big picture. Okay. So, you know, let's set the scene. You're an army colonel, and you're trying to, like, walk around and make friends, you know, in a village in Kuhnard province. Okay. And you go down and sit down with the headmen. You drink many cups of tea.

And you say to the headman, through your interpreter, of course, you don't speak push to. Who are the bad guys around here? And the headman says, huh, that motherfucker over in the next valley. Yeah. That village over. The Khan over in the next valley. He's a bad motherfucker.

And you're the Army Colonel, you know, and you report this up to the J-Tun and said, dude over in the next valley is a bad motherfucker. Well, the Khan in this village, diming out the Khan. In the next village, this is a spat. It's been going back to the 14th freaking century. Yes, the happy end of the Coys. Yeah, exactly. And he's just diamond out a rival.

And, you know, likely he's not, the American military is going to call an airstrike in on the Khan in the next valley. sourcing. It's a central problem of the American experience in Afghanistan. Okay, that problem. It's also like the AQ and the Taliban learned early on the power of propaganda. So if they called war crimes, like the AO would get shut down and the Red Cross. to the UNHR, like, they would all come in and, like, do their investigations. And meanwhile, all the ground that had been taken from the Taliban,

the Taliban would just move back into during those times. You know, in the many months that I spent in Afghanistan between 1987 and 2002, you ever been there? Afghanistan. Yeah. Yeah. Where were you? Mostly in Kowst.

Beautiful country. Yeah, it would be a backpacker's haven paradise if they could get the politics together. An outdoor sports paradise. Yes, skiing and all that stuff. It's a really beautiful country. Yeah. And we went there ostensibly for one reason to kill Al Qaeda. Right.

And the president of the United States didn't have ideal one about what to do. like what's the next paragraph right right and we didn't kill al-Qaeda and one of my favorite stories in the book is how Greg Vogel Greg Spider-Vogel really one of the heroic figures in this history of the CIA

21st century bef friends Hamid Karzai and basically helps Hamid Karzai become the king of Afghanistan after the American invasion

and Hamid Karzai ruled for 13 years and he fell from power a couple months before Greg Vogel became the chief of the clandestine service of the CIA and Hamid Karzai came to power

and stayed in power because of the CIA the CIA, he was the chosen one. He was the guy who was going to be who could rule Afghanistan. And once he came to power

the CIA supported him, with a cascade of $100 bills. And the $100 bills was how he ran his government. Okay. Ryan Crocker, one of the greatest diplomats, you know, America has ever seen, was the first ambassador there after the Taliban fell. And Hamid Karzai, we came to him and say,

who should I appoint his governor? from Ghazni province, you know, and like Ryan Cracker said, like, I had a clue, you know. But, you know, he said, Harzai had nothing. I mean, I was in Afghanistan after the American invasion. Kabul had been destroyed, not by the Russians, not by the Americans, but by the wars between the Mujahideen that we had supported, who struggled for power after the Soviet slept Afghanistan. You know, there wasn't any electricity in trouble.

There wasn't, you know, heat. There wasn't gas. There was, you know, people burned manure and wood for heat. There was hardly a stone upon a stone. The road in from the Bagram Air Base, it took like five hours to drive 10 miles. And that was the damage. There are, you know, guys had inflicted upon each other.

And so he struggled for power. Haarza had nothing except the CIA and their money. And that's how he ran his country. Huge sacks of shrink-wrapped $100 bills. Good work if you can get it. Was how he ran the government, okay? He was a hero who was corrupted by power and corrupted by American money money

You know his brother was one of the biggest heroin dealers in the country The fall of the government to the Taliban And the failure of the American 20-year effort in Afghanistan Wasn't because of the Taliban It was because of corruption. Okay. And the corruption, you know, you can put it in a picture, a postcard. There's a stack of $100 bills.

But the corruption also, like it's so relevant, I think, because Afghanistan isn't a country. It is a group of tribes and villages that we drew a border around. No, we didn't. The Brits did. Well, when I say we, I mean Westerners. Yeah. That we drew a border round. And they're, you know, going out and doing like PRTs and dropping off cricket bats and cooking oil and rice to villages.

Like, you see what it is. It's me. It's my family. It's my village. It's my tribe. And that those are the priorities. And, you know, whether it's the Hazard or. the poshtun like they don't they don't identify with each other they don't identify as a country they will

always because they will always put their tribes first um and there's a lot of animosity between the tribes they will talk shit about each other non-stop you know so i think a lot of the corruption is just inherent to that tribal system that i'm going to take care of me and my i've got to disagree with you. Okay. Yeah, it is a tribal country. Aren't we? Increasingly a tribal country. No. It is a country that did not ever have the blessings of development. The British occupied Afghanistan for a long time. They never built a railroad. They never built a civil service. They left nothing. in its wake because, you know,

every time they tried to actually assert dominance, the Afghans killed them because they don't like being occupied by foreign powers. Alexander the great Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Brits three times and the Soviets once.

Sure. Knocked out. Not by one tribe, but by an antipathy toward foreign domination. Sure. Okay, of course they fought among one another. Sure.

The point I'm trying to make is that the failure of the American occupation in Afghanistan was very different from the failure of the American occupation of Iraq. I agree 100%. Absolutely. It is a story that remains to be written. Yeah. I think maybe what Dave's getting at is that the corruption is so important. endemic because there aren't this governmental, federal, or social or state provincial system.

Like none of those sorts of constructs that we have exist there. So it becomes like, how do these people relate to each other? And money is the common denominator, I guess. It's a long conversation and not germane to the book. Yeah. Maybe not. Yeah. But someday someone will write a great history of the American occupation of Afghanistan. So your book, coming out on the 15th, July 15th. Most people listening to this will probably already be able to go and order the book. It will probably be out by then. The book is called The Mission, the CIA in the 21st century by Tim Weiner.

Tim, tell us about the victory lap. What's coming next? Three years writing this thing. Yeah, three years is a short time for book. Well, compared to a legacy of action. That took 20 years. Yeah. You know, there are times when you're writing a book

And you're staring at a blank screen And little beads of blood Running down your forehead And you think, my God, will this ever be done? And when it's done, then you're at the end Then it's like the shortest time between writing the end and the publication of the book that you can really achieve is three months. So we wrapped up this book three months ago to try and get as much of the chaos of the Trump administration

and the damage being inflicted on American intelligence as much of that into the book as possible. I had to bring it to an end. A book means a back cover. And here we are. You bring a book into the world. You know, it's like having a kid. You love your kid. Okay.

Even if it's an ugly baby, you love your kid. So, but what you really want is for people, to buy the book and read the book. There's no point in writing a book if people don't read it. So then you have to sell the book. Okay. And you're writing a novel. Okay.

Okay. So you will confront this in the fullness of time. So the book publishing business is very odd. Okay. Yes. You would think, okay, I've written a book. and you say to your publisher, are you going to advertise the book?

You're going to put it in the New York Times unit. How are you going to sell it? And they're like, that's your job, dude. Yeah. You know, how many socials do you have? Right, that's wild. So, you know, there's no advertisements. The book publishing business is a lot like Hollywood now.

the common denominator here is that nobody knows anything. Nobody knows if a book is going to sell or not. Why a book sell or they don't? But they all want you to have a tent pole weekend. You know what I mean by that? Going through the radio shows. Like when the book comes out, it has to like sell 100 million billion copies in 72 hours. Or you're a flop.

You know, like a Hollywood opening. Right, right. So they're like three ways to do this. Book reviews don't sell books. Shockingly. Blurbs don't sell books either. What is it? Blurbs.

Blurbs don't sell books. Nobody cares about blurbs. It's like one of the greatest books of 20th century. Yeah, really? Who cares? Here's what sells books. Going on TV. I thought you were going to say sex.

There's no sex in this book, except David Petraith. That's not the kind we want to see. We don't want to see it. Going on TV. So on Monday, when are we going on air? You and I? What do you think? Friday?

Friday. Beautiful. So that's going to be the first going on air. Team House. Awesome. Leading the way. Always. Team House leads away.

Monday night, barring, you know, world crisis. Rachel Maddo. Okay. Tuesday, pub date, all things considered. I did an interview with Mary Louise Kelly this morning. And Mary Louise Kelly, you know her. Beautiful voice, NPR anchor, of all things considered, covered intelligence for 15 years. So she knows where she speaks. So when are they having you on Fox and Friends?

I think you're right up their alley, Tim. I haven't got a booking for Fox and Friends. You know, wherever you are, I'm available. I would totally do that. But I'm waiting for the phone to ring. For Fox and Friends. But, you know, I'm not an idologue. I mean, I may come off as, you know, an old hippie or, you know, an anarchist, but I'm not. Well, I am an old hippie. But I love what I write about. I'm fascinated by CIA intelligence.

The people I interviewed for this book are amazing. people. And I want readers to understand the incredible importance of having good intelligence.

When intelligence succeeds, it saves lives. And when intelligence fails, people die. So I read the book. I can definitely recommend it. I can blurb your book, so it is.

speak for whatever that's worth. I think it's definitely worth your time. I think people who watch this show will definitely enjoy reading this. Final thing, Tim, tell people where they can go to find the book. Where should they go and buy it? In a bookstore. Preferably in a bookstore. I'm not a big fan of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, but that's one.

The alternative is an outfit called. called bookshop.org. Okay. I actually have a social media account. Oh, wow. You're coming around. Dude, I'm like, you're going places.

Cutting it. Did your kids show you how to set that up? Yes. It's on blue sky. Are you and, you know, and your people are familiar with blue sky? Some of them, certainly. Okay.

I don't do X. I don't do X. It's a toxic waste of. Yeah, I popped smoke five, six months ago. Mm-mm. Yeah. Nope. Not a fan of Elon.

But, yeah, there are bookshops all over the world. There's a Southford called bookshop.org, which is an alternative. And if you can find me on Blue Sky under my name, there are various buttons you can push to purchase the book directly from the publisher, Harper Collins. But like if you live in America, you're generally within, you know, driving distance of a bookstore. So go to your friendly local bookstore and buy it. If you are in New York, we're launching the book at a place called Powerhouse in Dumbo, 26 Adams Street, on Monday night at 6 p.m.

If you're in D.C., we're launching the book at Politics and Prose, great bookstore. Thursday, July 17th at 7 p.m. My interlocutor is the great intelligence reporter Donna Priest of the Washington Post, who first broke the secret prison story. But I have a point. I have a bumper sticker on my car from a bookshop in Seattle. And the bumper sticker has a very simple and direct message. Read a fucking book.

Like, you may not trust the mainstream media. I mean, I worked for 16 years at the New York Times. I like the New York Times. but a book Okay a book This is actual information It's all on the record Okay

There are no anonymous sources There's no like spin Right Yeah and I mean And it's not ideological It's not some fucking liberal Saying intelligence is bad I hate America

I'm a very big advocate Of literacy And that we need more literacy And that people need to spend time by themselves reading and just thinking and reflecting and getting the fuck off of the internet you know the kids talk about brain rot yeah you know and if you spend all your time looking at your phone it's depressing it's like you can hear a brain cell popping every second you don't want that to happen um this is not germane to our discussion but you know if you're within the sound of my boys

I think Team House is a remarkable operation that brings voices, not mine, I'm kind of an outlier, but people who have actually lived the life and worked in garden spots like Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq. And, you know, know about the marvels and the dangers of trying to execute a moment. American foreign policy in the world. We appreciate it. Totally agree. Yes. We appreciate it.

Like, you know, we, we just want to give good people time to tell their story. And, you know, in cases like you and Pat O'Donnell and, you know, people who are more, you know, who haven't necessarily like been in government service, but, you know, write about it and things like that. Like, we love you guys. All right. Can I tell one last story before we wrap? Okay.

Or are we way over? No, no, no, one last story. One last story. So people sometimes ask me, how did you get into this line of work covering the CIA? I was 30 years old, 39 years ago, and I decided I wanted to go to Afghanistan because I had read about a not terribly secret but enormous CIA covert operation to arm the Afghan resistance against the state. Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. And again, a not secret, covert aspect of this operation was that the decision had been made to introduce the American anti-aircraft weapon, the Stinger, the shoulder-fired missile

into the Afghan battlefront to smuggle it over the Khyber Pass into the Hibankan. hands of the Mujahideen. I thought, that's a great story, man. So I called up the CIA and their office of public affairs, which is the thing, despite its oxymoronic aspect. And I said to the CIA public affairs officer, his name is Pete Ernest, hey, I'm going to go to Afghanistan to write about this secret operation that you people are running to smuggle a stinger into the hands of the Mujahideen. And I understand you people sometimes do

country briefings for reporters who are off to weird places. How about it? And he said, absolutely not. So off I went to Afghanistan. then, staging for a month in Peshawar and then spending seven weeks running with the Muge, mostly in Kunaar province, saw a stinger fired in anger, which was my goal. The stinger operator of the Muge had not been well trained, and, you know, he misfired. $50,000 worth of technology, courts threwing off into the sky. and I came back alive with a beard that I had grown for camo and I had been back at my desk at my newspaper in Washington for more than a day when the phone rang

guess who? The CIA. It was my new best friend of the CIA, Peter, Tim. He said, how are you? And I said, great. And I said, he said, how was your trip? And I said, it was amazing. And he said, how would you like to come in for that briefing?

And I said, I'd be delighted. Have you ever been to CIA headquarters? No. So, you know, it's seven miles outside of Washington in the woods of Langley, Virginia. And so I make the drive, pardon the parking lot. And I walk into the old headquarters building. And, you know, it, it, it. It's the cathedral that Alan Dulles built for himself,

you know, the great wide father of the early CIA. Onyx, marble, it's quite elegant. And on the left-hand wall in bar-relief letters about this high, the stars, the memorial stars are off to your right. But on the left-hand wall, in big bar-relief letters, set into the wall, is John 832, Gospel of John. And he shall know the truth. and the truth will make you free.

And I looked at that, and like Jeff Lobowski, I said, that's fucking interesting. And I went up to the sixth floor, and there were four CIA analysts there to meet me. And I had a lot of questions for them, but they only had one question for me, which is, what's it like in Afghanistan? They didn't ask you if the missile,

worked or not. These were purportedly, oh, I told them that it failed. These were purportedly, you know, four top CIA analysts. And they were like, what's it like over there? And I realized they had never been to Afghanistan. They'd never been winning a country mile of Afghanistan. And so I went back down the elevator. And then I looked over my now my right hand shoulder at the gospel of John. And I said, you know what? I believe I have just found my life's calling. I'm going to cover these people. Like, you know, as a cup reporter, I covered the cops and the courts.

I'm going to cover them, you know, and know the truth. And that was 38 years ago. And here I am today. And still trying to pry secrets out. Still trying to figure out what the hell are these people up to. Well, thank you, Tim. there will be links down in the description of this podcast where you can go and find Tim and his books,

including the new one. Again, it's The Mission, the CIA in the 21st century. Hope you guys will go and check it out. And thank you for joining us tonight. We'll see all of you guys next time. Hey guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show if you've been watching it, enjoying it. But you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this.

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