The Team House - The CIA's Head Spy Hunter | James Olson | Ep. 150

Episode Date: June 18, 2022

Professor James Olson received his law degree from the University of Iowa. He is a professor of the practice at the Bush School, where he teaches courses on intelligence and counterintelligence. He served for over thirty years in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, mostly overseas in clandestine operations. In addition to several foreign assignments, he was Chief of Counterintelligence at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Professor Olson has been awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the Donovan Award, and several Distinguished Service Citations. He is the recipient of awards from the Bush School and the Association of Former Students for excellence in teaching. Professor Olson is the author of Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying and To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence. Prior to his career in the CIA, he served in the US Navy, where he attained the rank of lieutenant commander. James' books: James' books: To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence https://www.amazon.com/Catch-Spy-Art-Counterintelligence/dp/1626166803 Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying https://tinyurl.com/mr3ba6se For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #counterintelligence #cia #covertopsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Team House. I am David Park. This is Jack Murphy.

We are here for episode 150 with a very special guest, the former director of counterintelligence at the CIA, Jim Olson. Jim has written a couple of phenomenal books. The one that we'll kind of talk about tonight in addition, well, we'll talk about both of them tonight, but one is to catch a spy. And the other one is fair play, right?

Yes, that's right. Fair play about the, like, the ethical issues in espionage. We really appreciate you being here with us, now, Jim. Well, you're most welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. There's nothing like better than talking about spying. Yeah, that's, and I mean, you honestly have a spy versus spy career. Yes, I spent a lot of time on counterintelligence.

So I would call myself a spy catcher. And I found nothing more rewarding of my career than tracking down American traders and bringing them to justice. And I had the opportunity to be involved in several such operations. Yeah. We'll talk about those. We'll talk about some of the bigger operations you've been in and also just some of the threats that America has faced and is currently facing.

Because I'll tell you, Stephen King has nothing on you. This book is terrifying. It's terrifying. Yeah, I reacted the same way when I was writing it. This is scary stuff. Yeah. because our country is really in peril. We face multiple threats from foreign intelligence services.

And I believe that we are not taking that threat seriously enough. We need to do a lot more. So I make the point, quite frankly, openly in my book, that we're losing the counterintelligence war. That's got to change. Yeah. And we will definitely talk about some ways that we're losing that as we get into it. because especially like with some things with China, like there are, there are terrifying implications there,

but also Russia and Cuba, which was really surprising to me. I mean, we've had on like Mark Polymopolis and some other people have had, you know, who have been affected by their policies. But you talk about what a what a high degree of professionalism they operate with. The Cubans? Yes. Yeah, that's right. They're kind of my nemesis throughout my crime.

career, I have no love for Cuban intelligence service. They did a lot of harm to us. They're still very, very actively operating against the United States. So I don't have any reservations at all about ranking them as now the number three threat to our country's security in terms of espionage. Yeah, it's fascinating. And we'll get into all that. One of the things we like to do, though, on this show is always start from the very beginning. So can you tell us a little bit about your origin story. How did you grow up and how did that lead you eventually to the CIA? It's a very unlikely story. I was raised in a small town in Iowa. I didn't think at all about international affairs. We joked among ourselves on in Iowa, unless it affected the price of corn, we weren't even

all that interested. But when I went off to college at the University of Iowa, the study mathematics and economics. I began to develop a little bit more of a sense of what was going on in the world. It was the height of the Cold War. I was at university when the Cuban Rissel crisis went on. So that definitely focused this.

I was also preparing to become a United States Navy officer. So I was beginning to think of myself in terms of national security, national defense. I then took a commission in the Navy when I graduated, served aboard Guided Missile Destroyers and Friggins. Really loved it. It kind of reinforced a sense of service to country, but they're still very unformed. I didn't know exactly what direction that would take. I did know that I wanted to go back to my home state of Iowa. So I left the Navy after about four years and applied for law school.

the university law. I was accepted. And that was my dream at the time. I wanted to get my law degree and practice law in a small county seat town and Iowa. I would serve my community, find nice Iowa girl, settle down, raise a family. Not a bad life, I thought. Yeah. It would be a good way to serve my community. But of course, that was not the way it turned out because in my last year of law school, I received this mysterious phone call out of of the blue. Mr. Olson, we think we have a career opportunity that might be of interest to you. And that was the CIA call. And they had spotted me. They had found me somehow out there in the middle of Iowa. And that was the beginning of a lengthy process of secret trips to Washington and

interviews, meetings and safe houses, eventually leading to an offer to join the CIA's clandestine service. What kind of funny? I remember distinctly as I was packing up in Iowa to go off to this CIA place, whatever it was, I was determined that I would do it for only a couple of years. And then I guaranteed myself, Jim, after two or three years, you are going back to Iowa. And pursuing that Richard Jim had, of course, it didn't work out that way because it did take long and realize that the CIA was where I belonged. I found it just incredibly fulfilling. And so I ended up spending 31 years there. What year was that that you were recruited, Jim?

that you started the recruitment process? I was included by the CIA as I was coming out of law school in 69. Okay. So tail end of the Vietnam War getting there still very much in the Cold War? Very much a Cold War period. That's our focus. We all thought about that. And when I joined the CIA, I wanted to do my part, above all,

like most of the other recruits at that time, in fighting Soviet communism. in protecting our values from the expansionist Soviet regime. So what was your training like at that time? And then I'd love to hear about your first job, you know, when you finally dip your feet into this world. Yeah, the training was awesome, Jack. You know, it's not much different now than it was back then. But most of it took place down at this undercover base that we call the farm.

And down at the farm, we learned the, the art of intelligence, as we call it. We learned the recruitment cycle. We learned about detecting and defeating surveillance. We learned about all the different spy gadgets that we used. We also went through a fair amount of paramilitary training because it was assumed that many of us would in fact have at some point in our career need for paramilitary skills. of us in my class with only maybe one or two exceptions were former military officers.

So doing the paramilitary training was quite natural for us. And in that era, of course, we expected to be going to Laos, Vietnam or somewhere else in Southeast Asia. And I remember when I was completing training down at the farm when headquarters came down. I assume I'm on away to Vietnam. or to Laos because first of all, I was a former military officer that was a big plus.

I spoke good French already, which would be valuable in Southeast Asia, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia. I was still single. And so I thought, listen, this is a lock

I'm going to be going to Vietnam or Laos as most of my classmates did. And when the CIA came down and chose me for a different assignment, I was feeling some guilt that I wasn't going to be out in doing my duty on the front lines

as my classmates were. And when I lost classmates in Laos and in Vietnam, that guilt was compounded. The CIA had reasons for wanting to send me where it did, so I don't regret that. I did my duty as best I could. But the kind of people were recruit, want to be what the action is.

Right. The current generation of CIA officers wanted to be in Afghanistan. They wanted to be in Iraq. If you don't have that in your resume, you know, you have a little bit of a sense of shirking. Right. And so we had no problem finding volunteers to go out to those hotspots. Right. Now, before you went to the farm, you were an intern for a while, right? Because there was a formative, I thought that in your book you mentioned that there was,

this was actually kind of a formative. part of your CIA vision. Yeah. Yeah, you've done your homework, Dave. Yeah, I described that in my first book, Fair Play. My training out of the farm wasn't going to start for a couple of months after I arrived at the CIA. So I needed an interim assignment. And not knowing any better, I took an interim assignment in the counterintelligence staff.

And it was really interesting work because my assignment was to update a study that the counterintelligence staff had done on the Rhoda Capelph, which was the Russian networks in German-occupied Europe during World War II. and NSA at the time was finally all those years later breaking some of the traffic between the center in Moscow and their operatives out in occupied Europe. They were communicating, of course, via clandestine radios. I found it absolutely amazing to read the first person at CIA headquarters as these transcripts came in from NSA. the drama, the tension, the actual patriotism of these Russian spies throughout Europe, putting their lives on the line to communicate intelligence.

My job was to incorporate what we were learning about these Russian networks of the Rota Capella into the previous study. And I worked pretty hard on that. And I thought I had done a pretty good job. and in fact, some of my supervisors did also. So they said as I was getting ready to leave the counterintelligence staff to start my training down on the farm. Jim, you've done a good job here, and we want you to get the appropriate recognition.

And so we've arranged a meeting, a farewell meeting for you with the man himself. And by the man himself, of course, they met the chief of the counterintelligence staff, a legendary James Jesus Angleton. And on the appointed day, I showed up to see a corridor at CIA headquarters. I went into the outer office. You didn't go into the presence without being briefed on how to comport yourself.

So all of these lieutenants are telling me how to behave when I got there. I'm getting pretty nervous. So finally, they said, okay, go on in. and so they opened the door and I kind of walked in. They had told me that it would be a dark room. And in fact it was. He had big black curtains. He had just one desk lamp and these owlish eyes looking at at me.

And a big haze of smoke because he was a chain smoker. And they had told me, standard attention in front of his desk. He might not speak. So just launch into your brief. on your rhoda cappella study. I did that. And I'm going, I'm feeling pretty good about myself. I was flowing pretty well.

I said, this is going pretty well. You cannot fail to be impressed by my CI ecumen at this very early stage in my career. Not at all. Because at a certain point he stopped me. He looked me in the eye and he said, Mr. Olson, don't you realize that the rhoda capello was not

more than a German-controlled deception operation. And that took me back. And I realized then as arrogant as it might have seen, that this great mind, this counterintelligence genius had really lost touch with reality because that made no sense at all. I had dug deeply into the road of Capella. I knew it wasn't German-controlled. but that was his thesis.

He saw conspiracies everywhere. He was a double-think expert. And so he rudely dismissed me, said that I had wasted his time. I had wasted the CI staff's time by coming up with these totally erroneous conclusions. I go out to the outer office. Everybody, how did it go? How did it go?

And I'm crushed. And as I'm walking down the corridor afterwards, I honestly was saying to myself, you know, Jim, you had such high hopes for this career. And what a shame? Because it has ended before it even started. There's no way you're going to survive that kind of a chewing out by the most powerful man in the CIA. So I said to myself, if by some miracle, this CIA career survives, which I doubt, I don't know what direction don't take me, but I know one thing.

I will never, ever again go anywhere near counterintelligence, which is pretty ironic, isn't it? Because I ended up being number seven in the chain of counterintelligence chiefs at the CIA later on in my career. And it's interesting because you probably didn't know it at that time, but later you realized how much damage Angleton had actually done, not only to the CIA, but to the field of, counterintelligence in general, right?

Yeah, that's exactly right, Dave. That's the legacy of James Jesus Angleton continued for many, many years after he was finally forced out. He discredited counterintelligence and discipline. He made it useless for the 20 years that he was the chief from 1954 to 1974 because he was chasing phantoms. He did not allow us to run any Russian operations because he was too smart to fall into the KGB's machinations.

So we had no volunteers, we had no walk-ins, we had no recruitment, we had no Russian operations during those 20 critical years of the Cold War. He lost so much. It was a disaster. It was only after we finally got rid of him in the end of 1976. that we were able slowly to try to get back into real counterintelligence operations, running operations against the Russians. He had destroyed our Russian operational program for all those years.

And I could never get that. But even after he left, the reputation of counterintelligence was so tainted. It was so out of vogue for anybody to go into counterintelligence that we had trouble in attracting good people to go into counterintelligence. That persisted for many, many years. And at the same time, there actually were moles at CIA and other governmental institutions that, correct me if I'm wrong, Jim, were not being sussed out because of this. That's right.

Counterintelligence was useless. It was worse than useless because it was preventing us from doing real counterintelligence. Some people said that Angleton could not have harmed us more if he'd been a Russian agent because he paralyzed us. And we were not able to overcome that until much later. I would say that we really were only able to rehabilitate counterintelligence at the CIA in the late 1980s when we finally began to get our act together and good people went into it. So let's just to rewind a little bit.

Your first job at CIA after the farm, you said you didn't get sent to layouts like you expected to. Where did you end up, Jim? We're not going to talk about that. Really? You're a sworn to secrecy on that one to this day? We're not going to talk about that one. Okay. Fair enough.

Second position after that one. Okay. After that first one, which we're not talking about. talking about. I was selected for what we call the pipeline to go to Moscow. And the pipeline is this lengthy training period, preparation period for going into a deep cover assignment in Moscow. And I can tell you that for all of us in the CIA, that was the dream assignment. We all wanted to go to Moscow. They were the main enemy. That's where the real critical action was. So to be selected for assignment at Moskow was a tremendous honor and the competition

to get there was fierce. So I was very, very grateful that I had had the opportunity to be selected for that assignment. You go through a rigorous selection program. Your spouse also has to qualify and she has to go through the same kind of scrutiny. You train together as a husband and wife team and training is very tough. A lot of couples don't make it. It's stressful beyond words. We put our people who are going to Moscow into what we call the Moscow rules, even in Washington, D.C., which means we put you into an apartment that is bugged. We put you under surveillance. We harass you. We require you to do operational acts under surveillance and get away with it. So we try to recreate as best we can the real environment of Moscow.

And of course, depending on your language ability, if you don't already have Russian, which I happen to have had, it's going to be part of your preparation period that you're going to get some intensive Russian language training. My wife had to start from scratch. I already had a pretty good hit start, but to see I perfected my Russian as part of my pipeline,

experience. What, around what year was this, Jim, where you started the pipeline? I started the pipeline in 76 and came out of the pipeline in 78. Okay. I'm fully trained and linguistically qualified for the assignment. So just out of curiosity, was it, when was she, were you there about the same time as Marty Peterson? Just after Marty. Okay.

Yeah, Marty Peterson is a good friend of mine. friend of mine. We were involved together in the Trigon operation. I was at the headquarters end of it. Marty was, of course, the field operator. We've had Marty on the show before. She's great. She is terrific. A real hero of mine. A great personal friend. We did a podcast together on the Trigon case. And a side note to Marty Peterson is that her husband John was a good friend and classmate of mine down at the farm. And John was one of those who, like so many of my classmates, went to Laos. It was killed there.

So Marty was a CIA widow when she came to us and said that she wanted to honor John's memory by becoming a CIA case officer. And I remember looking at Marty and saying, Marty, you know, we don't do. that. Nothing against you, but you are a woman. And we are not going to send women case officers out to an assignment like Moscow. And Marty kind of said, well, yes, you are. And she was right. And she sold us on the concept of sending her out to Moscow under deep cover because we knew all of us, how chauvinistic the KGB was. Right. They did not use women for high-risk operations.

They assumed we didn't either. So the concept was, I think, a brilliant one. Let's send Mosque smarting through the pipeline. Let's teach a Russian. Let's barrier inside the embassy under official cover in Moscow, in the hope that the KGB will ignore her. They will dismiss her because she's a woman. And so Marty goes out to Moscow.

Her first task for us, of course, is to do what we call probes. And so Marty went on these probes just to test whether or not the KGB was paying any attention to her or not. Now, I was back at headquarters following all of this. We needed to get someone black, free of surveillance to handle Trigon, Okarodnik, this great new source we had.

And Marty reported back, I'm not getting surveillance. They're not there. I'm doing my probes. I'm pushing them. I'm getting provocative. And they're not responding. I am not under surveillance. I am black.

And, you know, there was a mindset back at headquarters, one that I regret. I was not part of that group. But there were some senior people back. back at headquarters said, Marty's reporting no surveillance. But yeah, okay. She's just not seen it. So they were still very chauvinistic. And they were dismissing Marty as a professional that she was. But those of us who had worked with Marty, who had participated in her training with her, knew how good she was, how professional was. And so we were able to prevail. And she turned out to be a brilliant handler of Trigon. Her tradecraft was impeccable.

And her cover was, she was a secretary, right? That was her cover. And everyone, they called her party Marty. And that was her. They called her party Marty because we told her, you know, present yourself as kind of a frivolous bachelor's at a time, not a serious person. Right. And she pulled it all perfect.

Yeah. Now, as you know, Marty did get ambushed. Yeah. No fault of her own. Trygon was betrayed from within by someone else. And so she was, uh, decurbed. person on grata. When she came back to Washington, she became a trainer in the pipeline. And so my wife Meredith, who was in the pipeline at the time, really benefited from Marty's

encouragement. Marty as a role model, brought Marty's experience in Moscow. So Meredith was really a great beneficiary of Marty's expertise. And of course in the process, we became very close frames. You know, you mentioned that, that, you know, we really suffered against the Russians from a counterintelligence perspective of that time, from what you know about Trigon, and maybe you guys, maybe none of this has ever come to light, but do you feel that if our stance towards Russian, you know, towards counterintelligence, more penetrations, that that might have gone differently, that we would have had some awareness of it?

I think that's a good point, Dave, because Our counterintelligence was very, very weak at the time. And I think if it had been better, we might have done a better job of screening someone like Coral Cutscher out or identifying his betrayal earlier on. So I don't dismiss that as a possibility as well where counterintelligence was very, very incompetent at that time. And so people like Coutcher were able to get away with it. You know, what happened after we got rid of Angleton, beginning in 77 with Trigon, was that we discovered, hey, we're pretty good at this. You know, we can recruit Russians. And so with Angleton out of the way, the big naysayer, we started building an inventory of assets inside Russia that we could only have dreamed about.

and really reinforced our mind that what a loss those previous children of years had been because we could have had sources. And we started building all of these recruitments and sending them back to Russia, to Moscow. We had penetration, sometimes multiple penetrations of every real organization in Russia we cared about. KGB, GRU, Ministry of Defense, Foreign Ministry. And those were the glory days of CIA. operations in in moscow we call them the the golden years of moscow station operations and merth my were there during those years and it was pretty exciting and our country was benefiting from

these unprecedented penetrations throughout the soviet government really good stuff yeah yeah it's fascinating and you know it's it's it's tough to because There are so many things that I want to mention about your book right now, but I don't want to take us out of chronological order because so much of what we discovered about spies in our own country have to do with a more open stance towards Russian walk-ins, towards recruiting Russians. And we'll get to that. Like I said, I want to jump ahead. So when you were in Russia, what was your experience there? Well, my experience was that I was handling assets. I was a case officer. We had all of these Russians who were risking their lives by cooperating secretly with us, and we had to handle them.

Many of them wanted to be met personally. So my job was to defeat KGB surveillance. Merit and I were under constant KGB surveillance. So our job was to be able to evade that surveillance, to break it when necessary. Also use some high-tech methodologies to get free of surveillance and not let the KGB know you were even out of pocket. So they think they've got you here, but you're not there. You use high-tech to get out. You go do your operational act, black, and then you slip back in, close the loop, and they never knew you were gone.

So that was kind of the ultimate. But there were many times when I had to force the issue. We rarely got automatic any kind of free breaks. Occasionally there might be a VIP in town and they would take teams off us and put them on someone else. We couldn't count on that. Right. So all the job was to be studying our surveillance constantly and looking for ways that we could break free of surveillance to go handle these Russian agents. disguise played a big part in that.

I don't know if you've read the John and Mendes book, The Moscow Rules, but I'm in that book as someone who used disguise effectively to carry out operations in Moscow. Our disguise technology, something that all Americans can be proud of, if they can see how good it is. Yeah. We used it very, very effectively against the KGB. Yeah, and you're not just talking about, throwing on a ball cap no i'm talking about uh very sophisticated high tech technology of disguise and of course changing your appearance completely yeah and make in my case making me look like a

russian giving me slavic features yeah it's amazing good stuff were the russians were they discreet or were they just like you're at you're at the embassy so so we're on you and you know we're following you. Their surveillance, I think by and large, was very professional. They took great pride in their work. They did not like to be embarrassed. So we took them very, very seriously. They were not easy to beat.

They put a lot of resources on us. They would have large teams devoted to each of us, multiple vehicles. They changed their team members, their license place, their other distinguishing characteristics very frequently to make it's hard to get a fix on them. In fact, Mirra and I read that if we had not had all the training in the states that we did before we went to Moscow, we would never have seen them. They were that good. They were very, very professional. So beating them was not that easy.

So our job was to be better than they were. and fortunately we were. Did you ever have any moments in Russia where, like I remember with Trigon, there was an instance where a case officer met with him personally in a park. Yes. Did you ever have meetings like that with assets? Yes, I did. I had human meetings, personal meetings in Moscow.

Could you describe, I mean, as far as you're able to, even if you can't identify who they are, you know, what it was like to meet them in person? Yeah, I can't specify which operations they were. Sure. For example, hypothetically, it might have been a KGB officer who was cooperating sequela with us, and he wanted to be met in person. He didn't trust dead drops. He wanted to make certain that the exchange of materials was secure hand-to-hand. So our job was to get people black to go out and meet him. and I did that more than once.

And there were other cases where I also was involved in operations where I had to get pre-surveillance one way or the other. It was pretty tense stuff to go out and meet a KGB officer on the streets. The consequences of getting caught would have been bad for him as well as for me. and I had to be able to count on his professionalism to make certain that he didn't bring surveillance of that meeting himself. So a lot of trust in both directions. I trusted him. He trusted me for the security of that meeting. And he would pass over the documents, the disks at that time.

And then my job was to get them safely back to the station. Wow. It's amazing. I mean, I can't even imagine working in such a high-threated environment. Yeah, I mean, this is like the Super Bowl of espionage, right, Moscow. I think that's accurate. You were very aware of the consequences of making mistake. The margin for error was pretty close to zero because human lives were at stake.

And we took that very seriously. All of us in Moscow, all of us case officers, knew that these Russians were risky. their lives by cooperating with us. And we had not only a professional responsibility, but a moral responsibility to make absolutely certain that nothing that we did

would in any way risk their lives. You had a very heavy sense of responsibility. And we all were very aware of that. A lot of pressure. A lot of stress. And you have to learn how to live with that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and Ashley Traycon, I kind of brought that home, you know, in terms of the danger to the actual asset or agent. Sure. Yeah, I asked Marty. And Marty, who's a great example of someone who felt deeply that responsibility that she had for this man. Yeah. She was much more concerned about his welfare, his safety, than she was for her own.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think we all felt that way. Yeah. I remember when I was back at headquarters, it was a Saturday morning. I was getting toward the end of the pipeline. I had gone into headquarters to read in on the operations because we could not predict in advance which ones we'd be able to handle or be required to handle. It really was a function of who could get free of surveillance.

And the cable came in from Moscow, an overnight cable, that Trigon had not appeared at the meeting, but Marty had been ambushed. I'll never forget that morning, walking into the USSR desk. And everybody was there, the entire staff. And it is no exaggeration to say they were all crying. They were all crying, not for Marty so much, although we were very concerned about her. But we knew that Marty had diplomatic community and she would be expelled. And she would eventually be safe back in the United States. The emotion was for Trigon.

Because we knew that if Marty had been ambushed, that they had Trigon. Right. That they knew when and where that dead drop was to take place. Otherwise, they could not have set up the ambush. Right. And that's where we were so deeply affected by losing this man who had done such valiant service for our country. Yeah. And to know what his fate had been in the hands of the KGB.

And folks who are watching tonight, if you're interested, our interview with Marty Peterson is episode 103. I highly, highly recommend that everyone go take a look at it. And Trigon, of course, um, bit down on a suicide pill that the CIA had provided. Pen cap when he was compromised. Again, not because it was Marty's fault, but there was, I mean, Jim, you're the expert here. Do you want to say how that came about? But Trigon knew what he was going to face if the KGB captured him.

He knew that he would be interrogated. He knew he would be tortured. He knew he would have to reveal everything that he had done on our behalf. under torture and negate a lot of its value. He didn't want that. But he also knew that he would then be taken to the basement of Lubyanka, put on his knees and a bullet fired through the back of his head. And to preclude that from happening, he pleaded with us, give me an L, give me a lethal device,

so that if I see the KGB closing in on me, I can't avoid all of that. by committing suicide. And it was agreed that he would have his L in a pin. And when he was captured by the KGB and he was being interrogated, he said, I will confess. I will write out a confession. I will tell you everything that I did.

Could you hand me my pin from my coat jacket? and the KGB not suspecting anything and happy that he was about to confess everything handed him his pen he bit off the tip and he was instantly dead because the poison acted instantaneously and the KGB was of course furious and we know that all future

spies who were arrested in Moscow were instantly immobilized their heads were held firmly to be prevented from using an L themselves. Yeah, Marty had mentioned that when like that she had a pen or something on her and they like went, they went apeship trying to get it away from her. When they were interrogating Marty, they put everything out on the table that she had in her possession, including a pin, they were afraid to touch it.

They didn't know what the heck that pin was. It was not, in fact, an L. It was not a weapon, but they were very, very wary. So, Jim, after Russia, like, how did your Russia tour wind and up? If there was anything else notable that you can or want to talk about from that time, we'd love to hear it, or we can move to the next phase. No, there are a couple highlights that you, now that you're bringing them up, Dave, that I would like to point out about my time in Moscow.

One was the handling and exfiltration, successful alteration of Victor Schaimov. And I had a part in that. I met Shame off on the streets of Moscow and was involved in the extortration. It's the first time we'd ever successfully infiltrated someone from inside the Soviet Union. And this case was particularly significant because we not only got Shame off out safely, We also got out his wife and their five-year-old daughter. So that was quite an operation, quite an operational feat, if I can say so. We were very, very proud of that.

Another operation that I would want to highlight would be the cable tapping operation that I was personally involved in. The Russians had a secret underground cable system for their top secret communications underneath Moscow. And I trained on that mock up in the United States before I went to Moscow. I was selected as a candidate to carry out the operation when I got to Moscow. And in fact, I was chosen to be the first person to go down the manhole. I visited the site twice and the second time went down the manhole and did what I was trained to do. And that was a pretty dicey operation. I don't want to Yeah. It's a little dramatized, but the fact is, if I've been caught down that hole,

there was a good chance I wouldn't have come back. Right, right. Was this like an induction tap or something with a tape recorder? Yeah, good for you. Yeah, it was an induction tap, which was breakthrough technology at the time. Right. And it first became publicly known in the Sautag and Drew book on our, tapping of

underwater sea cables in their book Blind Men's Bluff. We were unhappy that that came out. But yeah, this was ingenious technology because we did not have to penetrate the protective core of the cable, which would have been detectable.

So that was a remarkable technology. I was given intelligence metal of merit for that operation, but this is not false modesty. I didn't think I deserved it. I just did what I was trained to do. That's incredible. The people who deserved the medals were the engineers.

Yeah, the S&T. The technicians, the people who had the audacity and their creativity, even to conceive of an operation like that. And think about it from a technical standpoint. How do you get that much data out of a hole underneath Moscow, safely back to CIA headquarters, without being picked up by Russian sighing. It was a remarkable achievement.

Well, that was going to be my next question, Jim, because, I mean, the undersea cables initially, anyway, they were analog cassettes that they recorded. Is that what you were installing in this case? Don't want to go there. Okay. I mean, I can confirm that it was analog technology. Sure.

not have to break the skin of the cable to be able to read the communications. And there were multiple cables down there. And so we tapped more than one of them. Because I mean, I guess the point I was getting to is that, you know, obviously the spool runs out of tape eventually. Yeah. And somebody has to go back down there, like, replace them. Yes, it's one thing when you're diving.

It's a totally different thing when you're, like, walking through the streets in Moscow. Yeah. And it's another thing, having solid state hard drives today. versus what you guys had in the 1970s. Yeah, well, the front engine of that operation was pretty impressive, was it? Because from our satellites, we watched that cable line being built. Oh, wow.

We watched the trenching. We watched the cable spools being rolled up. We saw them building the manhole covers at certain intervals. So we were able to build a precise mock-up because we knew exactly from our satellite imaging what that looked like. So when I went out to the manhole, cover. It was no mystery to me. I knew exactly what I was going to find when I got there.

Yeah. That's pretty remarkable. Yeah. Absolutely. My hats are off to our engineers. That's amazing. Anything else? I mean, I'm sure there are tons of notable things in Moscow, but are there any other highlights that you'd like to pick out for us? Or do you want to? I think, I think, Dave, the overall highlight from that. period in Moscow was the intelligence that the CIA was providing to our policymakers back in Washington. Yeah. Because of all these sources that we had, it was beyond our wildest dreams that we would ever be able to have that kind of access into the criminal, into the inner circles of the KGB and the GRU and the defense ministry.

Yeah. We served our country quite admirably during those years at a critical time in the Cold War. Right. And getting intelligence to the president and to other senior policymakers. That's something all of us in the CIA, I think, we're rightfully proud of. Well, yeah. And for people who weren't who maybe a little bit younger, like I was, you know, in, you know, elementary junior high at that time. And, I mean, when you talk about the Cold War, like, we're talking.

talking about an existential threat when we would do bomb drills waiting for the Russian nukes to hit. You know, all the kids in the school would go down to the shelter during one of these drills. That was, that was sort of, you know, the existential threat that the Soviet Union posed at that point in time. Yeah, we all knew that. That's why we signed up in the first place. It was an existential threat. And we knew that they had the power to destroy as many times over. It wasn't a game. Right. It was life and death. And we were on the front

lines of that historic battle. That's incredible. It's incredible. So, Dee, I think it's trying to hit us up that this is the time where we're supposed to plug our Patreon below. If you guys

want to support the stream, we really appreciate it. There's a link right below. You can get access to bonus segments and clips. You can get the show ad-free if you'd like to listen to it. And you can buy us some LaFroy or, you know. Keep us in stock. Whatever, whatever, you know.

So back to our guest, Jim. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging.

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Bakers, fresh for everyone. $35 order minimum restrictions may apply, subject to availability. You can save an extra $10 when you spend $40 or more on a great selection of participating items. Just look for the signs and save. What's up next? Yeah, Jim, I'm sorry. I'm just going to say that because we're not, because this is so much about counterintelligence and we want to know about you, I'm going to rely on, like, I have a lot of your personal

anecdotes from the book, but I'm going to rely on you to sort of help us drive along through your story. Yeah. Oh, guys, get this. I'm telling you, read this book. You will not, it will open your eyes. I mean, it'll probably keep you up at night. It'll make you a little paranoid.

But it is a phenomenal deed, compelling. I can't recommend it high enough. Check it out. And then if you were interested in the ethics of spying, it's in the description, how to catch a spy. It's in the description. The moral dilemma of spying. So what was the next assignment then, Jim?

after Moscow. I mean, you came back. It sounds like you were highly successful. They are proved that you could operate as a spy in denied territory. I mean, so you had your bona fides at this point. Yes, and I wanted to continue working against the Soviet Union. And one of the best places to do that throughout the Cold War was Vienna. A lot of people don't realize it.

But the major venues of Cold War espionage were Vienna. Berlin. So I applied for a physician as the chief of Soviet operations in our station in Vienna and was selected for that assignment. So Meredith and I made a quick trip back to Washington to learn German and we were forced to head in German because we didn't have any German up to that point. And then I went out to Vienna. We loved Vienna because it was where the east met the west. It was a real battleground. We were nose to nose with the KGB on the streets of Vienna. All major intelligence services in the world were there.

So it was a very, very exciting, lively place to be. Vienna was where the action was. So our job was to monitor what the Russians were doing in Vienna. The Russians were meeting a large number of things. their American assets in Vienna. They felt safe there. During their occupation after World War II in Vienna, they had built an infrastructure,

so they had a lot of resources there, which they used much later. And the Austrians were neutral. Their counterintelligence was frankly not well developed. So we all felt very comfortable working there. In fact, the Austrians kind of were happy to look the other way. If we didn't embarrass them too much,

they were content to let us go out on the streets of Vienna and do our thing. And we did. We were all over the streets of Vienna. So I love being in Vienna working against the Russians. And in fact, when our assignment there was up, Meredith and I were sent back to Washington. I became chief of internal operations, Soviet operations, East European operations for the CI back at headquarters, which was a good job. And I did that for a while.

And then I remember one day I'm sitting in my desk at Langley and I get a call from the deputy director for operations, the chief of the CIA clandescent service, a crusty old pro. He called me up. Very gruff. Jim, get up here. Okay, I'm on my way. Stop to the seventh floor. So I walk in and without any introduction, he said, Jim, we're sending you to Vienna. I thought he'd misspoken because I'd just come back from Vienna.

But he wanted me to go back to Vienna to build a counterintelligence program there. We didn't really have one. And he was tired of seeing that the Russians were meeting all of these Americans, all of the double agents, all of the cases that were compromised in Vienna. They had a field day. They owned Vienna. And his mandate to me was go and take possession of Vienna. And that meant to build a counterintelligence capability on a scale that we'd never done it before.

And he told me, this is going to cost a lot of money. And I'm aware of that. So he said, Jim, how much do you want? And I'm thinking quickly, I knew Viena. I knew what the real estate there. I knew what the cost would be. It was an expensive city. So I gave him a number that I thought was outrageous, completely out of bounds. And he isn't bad an eye. He said, you've got it. And when you need more, come and see me. So that's how it started. And my job was to build a team and to go out and to take it to the Russians.

And we did. And it was pretty momentous for us to be. go and to beat the Russians on what they had considered their private territory for many, many years. Who was? We did such a good job, I think, in counterintelligence in Vienna that it was almost inevitable that my next assignment was going to be back at headquarters as Chief of Counterintelligence. I wanted to go elsewhere. I had always dreamed of an exotic African assignment.

I was kind of penciled in for Kinshasa, and we were running our Warren Angola out of Kinshasa. That would have been a great assignment. I also was being considered for Tel Aviv, which I thought would be a great place to be. So I was excited about those two options. But headquarters and its wisdom said, nope, Jim, you're coming back and you're going to build a counterintelligence center with Ted Price's help, Ted Price's leadership back at headquarters. and that's what they did. I was just going to ask, who was the DDO, the gruff, salty DDO that called you in?

I mean, he must be out by now. Claire George. Oh, Claire George. Oh, Claire George. Yeah, one of the old barons, one of the cowboys, we called him a great character, a great operator, and someone I admired greatly. Claire and his ilk would have trouble in the CIA or the United States government today. government today because they were anything but politically correct.

You, you know, you had some, a couple of the stories from Vienna, or a couple of the cases where your personal experiences in Vienna, because for people who don't know, like a vast majority of this book is just about the counterintelligence, it's wages against us, it's about your 10 commandments of counterintelligence. It's a number of case studies, but there are a couple. Can you tell us a little bit about the young Marine Sergeant Clayton Lone Tree who approached you in Vienna? I'll be happy to. Clayton Lone Tree was one of the Marine Security Guards in our embassy.

They do a wonderful job. He had previously served in Moscow as a Marine Security Guard. Mayor and I were at the Ambassador's Christmas Party in Vienna in December of 1986. And all the embassy staff had been invited. It was a great party. The ambassador was Ronald Lauder, the son of Estey Louder, the Cosmetics Magnet, very wealthy people. Ron and his wife entertained lavishly. A great party. having a wonderful time

and I were really enjoying ourselves but toward the end of the evening as I'm in this one conversation group I noticed out of corner my eye that this young man who I recognized as one of our Marine security guards

was watching me intently and as I moved on my way toward the next conversational group he came over and intercepted me he was visibly shaking. I thought he was having some kind of a breakdown, some kind of an episode. So I took him

around the corner out of sight of the rest of the party. And finally, he was able to tell me that he knew who I was. In other words, he was telling me that he knew I was the CIA undercover chief of station in Vienna. And that got my attention because he shouldn't have known that. When he said, they told me who you are that could only mean the KGB. So I knew we had a problem. And I arranged to meet with him the next day outside the embassy. And Clayton Lone Tree began to tell us his story. It didn't take long to get to the bottom of it. When he was in Moscow, he was seduced by a what we call a swallow, a KGB seduction specialist, young women who were trained to lure Americans into unauthorized sexual relationships

so that they can compromise them and then put pressure on them. And Clayton Lone Tree was an easy mark. He was a Native American. He had never had a successful, emotionally satisfying relationship with a woman. And so when Violetta, as her name was, working as a secretary in the U.S. Embassy, began to flirt with him. He was a goner. And she eventually seduced him.

And once they became intimate, she introduced him to her uncle Sasha, a KGB officer, obviously, who closed the deal. And Loentrade was in over his head. He wanted to do what he could for Villaletta by cooperating. And so he started working with the KGB in Moscow. He then was transferred to Vienna as his next assignment. I think the KGB probably asked him to request Vienna because Vienna was a great post for them to have.

have a spy in. And a Marine can do a lot of damage. They have access to all of our spaces. And Lone Tree was under a lot of pressure. The KGB was using a very heavy hand against him in Vienna. They wanted to do more and more. They wanted physical access to our embassy. They wanted to get into the ambassador's office into the CIA spaces, into the communication center. And Lone Tree was going to be the way to do that. U.S. Marines would sometimes be the only American in the building at night. So he could have led in a whole KGB technical team. So the worst case was very, very damaging.

So we talked to him. We couldn't trust him to be telling us the whole truth. He told us that he'd never gotten that far. He came to me because he wanted out. He was scared. he wanted to work with us as a double agent. In other words, he wanted to continue meeting with the KGB in Vienna,

but from now on, of course, under our control. And ordinarily, I would have found that very, very attractive. As it's clear from what I wrote in To Catch a Spy, I love double agent operations. And I would have done it here, except that Clayton Lone Tree was emotionally fragile. It was apparent to us from the beginning that he was still very emotionally attached to be a letter.

So we would never have the control that we would need for successful double agent operation. And secondly, he was not equipped to carry off the fiction of being cooperative with the KGB. He wouldn't be enough of an act. to do that convincingly. So we had to rule that out. And once we ruled out a double-agent role for him,

we had no alternative but to turn him over to the Naval Investigative Service, now called NCIS for arrest and prosecution. I testified at his court-martial in Quantico. He's the only Marine ever to have been charged with espionage, treason. So the Marine Corps threw the book at him, 30 years. And we then debriefed him fully. And it turned out that he had not done significant damage. They had not gotten that far with him. He was very repentant about what he had done. So I felt that he deserved some leniency. And we did end up petitioning the court. So he only spent about

nine years in prison for what he had done. So the sentence was reduced. significantly. Clayton Launtrey when he got out, you know the first thing he did, he sent a wedding proposal to Violetta. He refused to believe that she set him up, which we knew, of course, that she had done. Right. And Violetta declined the wedding proposal. She had moved on. Right. But Clayton was heartbroken because he truly believed what they had was real. So that was quite a potentially damaging case, but in reality was not nearly as bad as it might have been. And then the other case, I think, that you mentioned in Vienna, that you received a call from

Marine Guard about a walk-in, and it was a Latino-looking gentleman sitting in the wedding air with a young woman who you thought might be his daughter. Yes. Yes, that's right, Dave. I was at home on the weekend. And of course, we'd arrange with the Marine guards who were on duty over the weekend that if the walk-in showed up, they should call one of us and they had a parole that they would use.

So I got a call at home on that weekend afternoon from the Marine Guard. He used the parole to indicate that there was a walk-in. I drove into the embassy and as I'm walking past the entrance, up toward the Marine desk. I noticed this Latino-looking gentleman with a girl, a young lady,

and that's right, I thought she was probably his daughter. It's about the age that made sense to me. I go up to the Marine, I say, Corporal, what do we have here? He handed me two official Cuban passports. I go down to the vestibule to speak to this Cuban. And it turns out that this was not his daughter. This was his teenage mistress.

He had been the DGI, the Cuban intelligence head of station, the resident in Prague. He and his girlfriend were on the run. They had left Prague. They'd driven down to Vienna. And they wanted a life together in the United States. the defector's name was Aspiaga and he had left a wife and family behind in Prague. They weren't part of the deal.

I didn't speak Spanish at that time. Didn't learn Spanish until later. So we're having trouble communicating. The only language we had in common was Russian and his Russian was not very good. So he was having trouble making himself understand. stood. He was getting frustrated. So finally, he motioned for me to come closer to him. And he whispered in my ear the names of several undercover CI officers who had served in Havana,

names I knew. So I realized this person is probably bona fide. Yeah. He's probably what he claims to be a senior DGI officer. So we put him in a safe house. I called in one of my Spanish speaking officers and we had him on a plane with his girlfriend to the United States the next day. Aspiaga turned out to be an incredible source for us. The first real inside look that we'd ever had of the Cuban DGI and the look that he gave us was a shock because he told us some things that we hadn't known before. He told us that the former CIA case officer, Philip Agee, had been working. working for the Cubans for many years and had been paid over a million dollars.

But he also told us, and this was shattering to me and to all of us, that all 38 of the recruitments that we see I thought we made of Cubans, including on Ireland, were controlled by the DGI. They were all doubles. They owned us. They had duped us. They had beaten us. and that's something that sticks on my goal to this day that we were so gullible that our counter intelligence were so weak

that they could do that to us. It was one of the worst days in my CIA career when you heard that the Cubans had carried that off against us. It's also interesting because you make the point, like you said earlier, that people don't want CI around, and it's for reasons like that because when they're successful, everybody else looks bad.

You know, that all these recruitments that people had gotten awards for probably, got promotions for probably, they were all fake. They were all fake recruitments. Yeah. That's a good point, Dave, and one that I think accounts for why we had allowed the Cubans to run all these doubles against us. Counterintelligence, as I said, was inexcusably weak during those years. The components did their own so-called,

counterintelligence. And they wanted these operations to be good because people had made their careers out of recruiting Cubans, people in the Latin American division. And they didn't want any counterintelligence people coming to them and saying, you know, we're looking into that case and there are some problems with it. You know, first of all, there's not much production. Secondly, the polygraph really had some issues associated with it. Also, the vibes just don't look good in this case.

all those warning signals, which were significant, were disregarded because they wanted those cases to be good. Right. They wanted to have, they wanted to be able to go up to the seventh floor and tell CIA management, we've got 38 Asians that were running against the Cubans. Right. So that was a major contributor. When we set up the counterintelligence center, we told the components, hey, listen, This is a new era of counterintelligence. And you're not going to police yourselves. We're going to send people who are working for us in the counter intelligence center

who are objective, who aren't beholden to you, to go in and look at your cases. Oh, no, you're not. No, you're not. We don't want that kind of outside scrutiny. Compartmentation reasons. You don't know our culture. Well, the fact is they didn't want anybody looking over their shoulders. Yeah.

And when we got into those area divisions, had to overcome a lot of resistance because the old hands, the people who ran these area divisions, didn't want independent CIA. They wanted to continue doing it themselves. We had to break down that resistance. I had to go to the seventh floor and tell the seventh floor,

listen, we want to do oversight. We want to do independent, counterintelligence scrutiny of the operations in this division. I won't name the division, but there were more than one who were resisting us, trying to stiff arm us, not letting us get access to their cases. We can't do our job unless we overrule them. It didn't make me very popular, but the seventh floor, the director said, okay, you've got it. You've got the access you need. And do you have any more trouble with them?

Let me know. So we got into the cases. What did we find? Junk. Worthless cases that they were. running just for the sake of running operations. So we had to weed all that out. We had to get rid of the junk.

We found other cases that were doubled against us. It was a nightmare. But we cleaned house. And it was long overdue. It's like the original form of cat fishing. It's so good. It looks so good that you just wanted to be true in your north all. And the professional incentive is to rack up numbers, right?

We're running all these assets. Yeah. Yeah. And, of course, what was overlooked was they weren't produced. anything. Right. We weren't getting any real intelligence. Well, we were getting junk. And not only that, oh, I'm, in the case of the Cubans, anything that was Cuban was a valid target. You know, you could be a circus performer. You could be a hotel clerk. It didn't make any difference. If you were Cuban, you were

determined to be a valid target. Right. And so they recruited junk, worthless people with no access. Right. They allow themselves to beguiled into the belief that as these people were trained to do by the DGI, when you're dangling yourself, let them think that you are on the verge of getting something that's worthwhile. Right. You got a neighbor who works in a Cuban military who's talking too much, or you're in line for a job in this ministry. Of course, it never panned out. Right. We never got any intelligence from them. Right. Disgraceful. something that any good counterintelligence officer should be ashamed of that I was ashamed of. Yeah.

I mean, and there are a lot of personal, like, I mean, there's like a lot of personal reflection insight in this, too. Can you tell us, because we've talked about the Russians. Can you tell us a little bit about the Chinese? And I don't know how much they were in that sphere because we've heard about the Russians and the Cubans. Were the Chinese very active during that period of time? They were, but they weren't our major threat at that time, It was all Russia throughout most of the Cold War. China didn't really emerge as a major espionage threat to the United States until later.

I would say beginning in the early 1990s, we recognize we have a problem. The Chinese are very aggressive. They are very good. They are infiltrating the United States. They are stealing our technology. They're hacking into our databases. So very quickly, we came to realize we got a major new threat on our hands. The Cuban MSS or the Chinese MSS and the Chinese PLA,

they're formidable adversaries and they're flooding resources in the United States. So I would say by the end of the 1990, China had emerged as our number one, a national security threat. What they were doing was several magnitudes greater than what the Russians were doing. The Russians did not go away. Their level of espionage against the United States stayed very high. Putin was obsessed with the United States. But we had good reason to believe that what the Chinese were doing was unprecedented.

It was massive. It was pervasive. Their number one target was to get our technology, particularly military technology, but not exclusively. And I came to realize before I left active duty that China is now the number one national security threat to the United States. And that has been compounded over and over again since I left. In my courses at the Bush School, my intelligence classes, I tell our students that China is going to be. loom very large in their counterintelligence careers because they are the name of the game. They are the threat.

I make a point in the book that if I could start my CI career all over again and I'd love to, I would try to get into the CIA's China program. I would learn Mandarin and I would become a China counterintelligence specialist because that's the future. That's the future. What they're doing is outrageous. and we need to do a lot more to stop. I was wondering, Jim, as a counterintelligence professional, did you ever experience any frustration in trying to approach the problem of Chinese espionage?

Because at the time in the 1990s, particularly, we were trying to integrate China into the global economy. We're setting up all these trade arrangements. There was even, you know, some rose-colored glasses on with a lot of people who thought that China would democratize eventually. And I have read that some of the espionage cases were kind of ignored, swept under the rug. It wasn't something we wanted to deal with at that time. And I was wondering if you encountered any of that. I counted that a lot. And that was a problem, Jack.

I think there's still a bit of a problem in that area. The Chinese have been given a pass far too often. We have not held them accountable enough for what they're doing. When we catch them, slap on the wrist maybe, we do have some prosecutions, but it is small compared to the enormity of what they're doing here. There are an awful lot of people in the United States government who don't want to embarrass the Chinese. They don't want to call them out. They don't want to change the pattern of business that we have with them. You've seen it when policymakers have proposed tariffs on China.

There's a human cry. Can't do that. It's going to raise the price. Americans like those cheap Chinese products coming in. They own so much of our debts. You know, if we irritate the Chinese, they could call in some of that debt, and that could be disastrous. So we're not holding them nearly accountable enough for the enormity of what they're doing. I remember during the Olympics and, you know,

and in Beijing, one of the big races, one of the long-distance races was being held in Tiananmen Square. And NBC is broadcasting this. Mayor and I are watching all this. And we say to ourselves, there's no way that NBC could not mention what happened to Tiananmen Square in 1989. And they're talking about the fact that we are participating in the Olympics from that location. not a word. You know, you don't want to embarrass the Chinese. Nonsense.

You know, I found it very disturbing that the Justice Department canceled what was called the China Initiative. Yeah. China Initiative was established to put more focus on Chinese espionage, particularly their theft or technology. And I was involved in a couple of cases as an expert witness where that was paying off, where the additional attention was leading to some arrest and prosecutions. I don't know what we're thinking when we back off from something like that, which was paying dividends. And, of course, the excuse that was given was that the China Initiative was focusing heavily on ethnic Chinese, Chinese Americans. And that's true to some extent, and we don't want to racially profile, but as counterintelligence professionals,

whether in the CIA or the FBI, we would be remissed. We ignored the reality of how they target. They go after ethnic Chinese. That's their target of preference, finding Chinese Americans who are in key positions who might have some residual affinity for things China, some affection for Mother China. They share a language. They might even have relatives still living back in China. So that makes it a very attractive target.

The Chinese don't miss that opportunity. Right. It's by no means there's close. We've seen the Chinese intelligence services get increasingly brazen, and they're going after non-ethnic Chinese now more and more as well. But all things considered, when they have an option, they're going to target ethnic Chinese first and foremost. And in a lot of cases, because you like with the Thousand Talents Program,

like it is their plan to get these people over here, get in with school, get them into advanced technical fields, and feel them through. And basically, I mean, basically if they have family back in China, they're as good as an agent.

They don't have a choice. They're going to do it. Bingo, Dave, you're right on with that. That's a mechanism in the Chinese have discovered and have been exploiting for years, if they send over a bright young Chinese student to the United States,

it's generally going to be in engineering, probably something with military application. That student gets his or her master's degree in electrical engineering or a computer science or aeronautical engineering, whatever it is. if that person can get sponsorship from an American high-tech company, which isn't hard to do because they're all short in hiring engineers, if they can get sponsorship, they get a green card. They get PRA status. And five years of PRA status entitles them to citizenship.

And five years of citizenship, they are eligible for code word, top secret U.S. government security clerances. So that is something that requires patience. But any intelligence service worthy of the name would identify that as a channel to get their people in place in U.S. high technology companies with U.S. citizenship and clearances or in the government directly or in the national labs. It's a gold mine for an intelligence service, and they certainly don't ignore that. And, Jim, this isn't just this is what was true. truly terrifying about your book is, you know, the Russian espionage was one thing. The Cuban

espionage is another thing. But your first section on China where they are our number one competitor and Russia is a distant second. And the amount of technology, basically if we've created the United States, military technology, information technology, whatever, if we've created it, they have it. That we are no longer ahead of them in any kind of arms race. They have basically everything we do, and it continues to walk out the door on a regular basis. That's exactly right, Dave. In fact, there is not a significant piece of Chinese military technology that is not based completely or heavily on stolen American technology.

They discovered a long time ago that it's a lot cheaper and a lot faster for them to steal Western technology, and specifically American. technology than to do the R&D themselves. And after everything they can get their hands on. It doesn't have to be military technology. If it's more advanced than what they have, they go after it. It might be industrial technology. It might be civilian aviation.

It might be medical technology. It might be agricultural technology. Their appetites are voracious. And they are very, very successful. But, of course, the number one target is. it's going to be anything that's going to strengthen the PLA, strengthen the militarily. You probably noticed, as I did,

not all that long ago, at a big airfare in Shanghai, the Chinese unveiled their new UAV, unmandaria vehicle. And those of us who've been around for a while looked at that Chinese UAV, that's the predator. It was the spinning image of the U.S. predator.

Yeah, what is it? The J20? It looks just very, very, eerily similar to the F-22. You bet. Absolutely. And you mentioned, I mean, we're like they're the world leader when it comes to nanotechnology now, right? Because of a recruitment of a non-Chinese American. Yes.

Yes. Yeah, they're ahead of us. It shouldn't be that way. We should be the world leader in all aspects of nanotechnology or computer science. but for whatever reason, they're beating us. Their offensive cyber is overwhelming our cyber defenses. Yeah. And we've got to put more resources into it.

They are everywhere. They're in classified databases. They are in all of our high-tech companies. They're in the national labs. They're in our electrical grid. You know, the deputy director of NSA testified before Congress that we know they're there. Right. We know they installed malware, which they can activate at some point of their choosing in the future.

We've got to, we know they're in the internet. We know they can bring that down, presumably, at some point in the future. So you've got to put a lot more into cyber. I tell my students here at the Bush school, we're going into intelligence careers. If you want to have a successful intelligence career today, you need to develop expertise in one or more of the following fields. First of all, you've got to know China. You've got to know how the Chinese intelligence services operate. Secondly, you've got to have a grounding in financial intelligence.

Because if you can get into their money flows, you can bring them down. So financial intelligence is a rapidly growing area. Then, of course, the third area is cyber. You've got to develop expertise in cyber technology. So our students are doing that. And they're not going to be the programmers themselves. Yeah. But they're going to be managers.

Right. They're going to be the policy people who understand what the threat is and understand how to dedicate the appropriate resources to it. No, it's truly terrifying because not only from a military aspect in terms of military power that we've done all the research and that now and they have all our technology but but they essentially have the off switch to to everything basically they're in all of our companies and and into the site into the systems that there's really almost no way to get them out right you know one of the major venues of chinese espionized nine states is dave it's the college campus

the United States College campus. They are going after our professors and they are putting their students in place. The 1000 Talents Program is insidious. Charles Lieber is a great example of that. They were able to insinuate themselves into a very sensitive area and to recruit him.

It was very lucrative for him, but he had to conceal the extent that he was cooperating with the Chinese. setting up a laboratory for them. Thank good as we got him. But Charles Lieber, I think, is just the tip of the iceberg. And the Chinese are going after, are targeting a lot of professors on college campuses

across the United States as we speak. And that's not just with like a technical espionage, but that's also I feel fomenting not necessarily like a cultural war but definitely trying to play both sides against each other trying to because they they have been they've been well them and the Russians also but they've been like throwing both the left and the right these fake bones to get everybody riled up correct that's correct yes exactly right that's a standard ploy that they that they utilize yeah in my home state of Iowa This was brought home not too long ago when Chinese were actually caught out in a cornfield in the middle of Iowa digging up hybrid corn seeds because those hybrids were more advanced to have better yield than anything the Chinese were doing. And so they were stealing our seed right from the field to send back to China so that they could grow it and replicate it. They are absolutely shameless what they go after. So the United States, to its credit, shut down the Chinese consulate in Houston just next door to where I am. Because we knew that the Chinese intelligence services in Houston were having a field day going after NASA,

going after oil and gas, going after M.D. Anderson for medical technology. So we shut them down. And that was a wake-up call, and I'm certain glad we did that. Jim, in your experience with your background and what you see now, and obviously teaching you always learn, but during the Cold War, would we have taken like a Russian teenager or Russian adult and put them in one of our national laboratories? I don't think we would have, Dave.

I don't think that was part of our philosophy of operating. and we call young people like that futures. At the other hand, the Chinese and the Russians have been very effective in recruiting futures. They will recruit a young American who doesn't have any current access. And they will direct that person and compensate that person

and hope that that person can eventually maneuver himself or herself into a position of access. You know, Glenn Duffy Shriver is a good example of that. He was recruited as a student with no access. They paid him a lot of money to go back to the United States and to apply for the State Department or for the CIA to become an asset for Chinese intelligence. The Russians have done the same thing.

They recruit young Americans who don't have access, students, for example, and say get back and study Russian and apply for a government job. and when you're there, then we will compensate you royally. And they establish that relationship early on. They groom these people. We don't do that. We don't recruit futures. We don't recruit young people who we hope can be steered into future positions of access.

We want people who have access now. Right. Do you think that that is for ethical reasons or do you think that America in general, and particularly in our government, where everything flips so often, we just don't have the long view of intelligence that other countries do. Yeah, there may be a little bit of that,

but I think we just decided that it's not efficient. Yeah. It's not cost effective. Because most of these young people, even with guidance, they're not going to successfully end up in a position of access or state oil to their intelligence sponsors. So we've decided that we've got better things to go after

more likely to be productive for us and to waste time and energy on a young person who's only a future. Jim, for the public out there watching this, I was wondering if you could recommend some literature on Chinese espionage. Who do you like that's out there, Matthew Brazil or Michael Pillsbury?

Are there some experts that you would recommend people read? I definitely recommend Pillsbury. I think what he wrote brilliant. And more specifically on Chinese espionage, I think the best book that you can read is the one on the Larry Uttai Chin case. I think that's very instructive. I'll think some more. Maybe you can post it on the website. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm just curious because it is a very dense subject and it's something that, as you point out, a lot of people out there should probably get smart on.

I think they might want to read to catch a spy. Yes. You have to read. The whole first chapter is on China. It's not a case study. And some case studies. Yeah. No, it's, it's, I mean, like, just.

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connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. I mean, there's just kind of a quick list. I don't know if you guys can see that or not highlighted, but just a quick list of some of the names, but the Chinese have just been destroying us at this. and they're almost untouchable. And, you know, especially in our country where we do want to be fair and we don't want to, you know, have the appearance of profiling. How do you go after an enemy that is ethnically different?

And I would take it a step further than that even, Dave. The Chinese government knows this is a pressure point that they can come after us and say, you America, you're racist for going after our spies. And we feel bad about that. Right. Yeah. Well, let me, for what it's worth, tell you, Jim Olson's recipe for improving our counterintelligence against Chinese. Sounds great.

First of all, we've got to upgrade our cyber defenses because they're hacking at will now. We've got to stop that. Secondly, we've got to find ways to penetrate the intelligence services. We should be recruiting Chinese intelligence officers. The best counterintelligence is penetration. So we need to reach out to more Chinese intelligence officers, particularly the ones who are accessible to us here in the United States. Go after them very, very aggressively.

Get in their face. Let them know that we are open for business. We've got deep pockets and we can make a deal. Hang out the shingle. Let them know that we are very eager to, to recruit them. And then the next thing we need to do is double agent operations. That's the second prong of being offensive,

which is one of my counterintelligence commandments. We should be absolutely flooding the Chinese with double agents. If anybody's interested, you might want to look at the Yanjum Shue case out of Cincinnati because that was a brilliant FBI double agent operation against an MSS officer. And this person was convicted. It's the first time that we've ever been able to convict

a serving MSS staff officer. So it was groundbreaking. And what the FBI did in that case was a textbook, a double agent operation, brilliantly conceived and executed. So I would recommend that anybody's interested might want to look into that case. Yeah, I mean, you know, you, like you mentioned,

the China initiative and it being shut down by the DOJ. And a lot of the reason was because it looked bad, right? It looked bad targeting Chinese, you know, Americans or Chinese naturalized, you know, Chinese, you know, American, you know. And it's kind of like, well, it's hard not to look back. Sure. Yeah, it does make counterintelligence sense. I remember going out and briefing some of our high-tech partners.

for the CIA, corporate America, invaluable contributions to the intelligence community. And I was briefinging them on the Chinese counterintelligence threat. And I looked at this one company and the hundreds of ethnic Chinese engineers that they had. And I said, I'm going to ask a very politically incorrect question. What do you do to monitor those ethnic Chinese because you know they're being targeted? And this chief of security out there, a friend of mine, former CIA, a counterintelligence officer, said, Jim, I know exactly what you're saying. But what would you have us do? We need engineers.

And when we go to the best American universities looking for engineers, what do we find? We find ethnic Chinese. So there's no choice. And I said to him, well, all right. how many of the ethnic Chinese working at your company who have access to our programs, clearances to our sensitive programs, CIA programs, or other DOD programs,

were born in the mainland. He said about a half. So I said, you know, what are we going to do? That is a counterintelligence nightmare. Right. But he said we are very limited in what we can do because it would be dismissed as racial profiling.

Don't get me started at Win O'E. And Win O.E actually graduated from Texas A&M. And he's never been convicted of anything, so I'm not saying anything. But when Win O'E was subject to prosecution, as soon as he raised the racial profiling card, he was home free. Right.

He was home free. And he was never prosecuted. He actually sued the United States government for racial profiling. Right. It's, yeah, it's scary. It's frustrating because it's almost like what's the point because we're not going to do anything about it. I mean, and I know that our CIA counterintelligence people, our FBI counterintelligence, I know they are working as hard as they can.

They must be completely frustrated in these situations. Well, it's the same thing on the cyber warfare or cyber intelligence, even. aspect of it, that the Chinese have consistently penetrated our systems. They've hacked our systems. And through experience, they have shown, they have tested us, and we have demonstrated back to them that we won't do a damn thing in retaliation. They can just take, they can steal all of our data. They can hack into all of our systems if we won't do shit about it. Sure. Yeah, that's true. It's so very one-sided. You know, they've got a large intelligence presence in the United States. with the United Nations, with the embassy, with the consulates.

We are very limited in the number of people that we, CIA, can get into China. And even when they get there, if you think it was hard to operate in Moscow during the Cold War when I was there, with the suffocating surveillance we were all under, think about how it would be to operate in downtown Beijing today or any city in China, with the unlimited resources they throw against us, with cameras everywhere, with sensors, with drones, with observation posts. It's a counterintelligence challenge unlike anything we faced before. That doesn't mean we can't do it. I would hope and believe that we are doing it, but it's never been harder.

So they make life very difficult for us to operate back there. Whereas in the United States, they have pretty much carte blanche. the FBI as good as they are, as committed as they are, as professional as they are, honestly, are overwhelmed by the number of Chinese cases that are coming away. Christopher Ray had been very outspoken in pointing that out that the Chinese are killing us. Yeah. That they are the number one threat. Yeah. Jim, real quick, to kind of get back to the book a little bit, because I want to give people a little insight in.

into the delicious treat that they will be getting when they do order this book and read it. You have the Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence. Yes. And what I really like about that is because you state what it is, you give a description of it, and then you sort of show how that plays out. Can you let me get to it real quick. you tell us what they are. So commandment number one, be offensive.

Yes. Yeah, the Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence, the result of my years of experience in counterintelligence. And I learned some things, I think, that I wanted to share with other counterintelligence maybe even future counterintelligence professionals, ways that I think we can do our job better. And the first commandment may be the most important. I've referred to it already. That is, be offensive.

U.S. counterintelligence is too passive. It's too defensive. You know, we're sitting back, we're hunkering down, we're looking for things to come our way. We've got to do a better job than that. We've got to take the action to them. We've got to hit them hard. And we're going to do that, I believe,

through a better effort of recruiting their intelligence officers. and also by sending double agents their way. So that's the two prongs that I was referring to penetrations and double agent operations. If we do a better job of offensive counterintelligence against the Chinese, we can tilt the scale back in our favor. Commandment two, honor your professionals. Honor our professionals is very important. We talked about this also.

We counterintelligence professionals have not been respected. We've not been treated as the full professional colleagues that we should be. We're inconvenient. We're unpopular. Right. You know, I refer to counterintelligence professionals as the skunk at the garden party. Right. When we show up, it's not pleasant.

We don't bring good news. Right. Because our job is to point out which the threats are and how you're vulnerable and how your operations may be flawed. They don't want to hear that. Right. So we've got to treat our counterintelligence people better. We've got to recruit them from the top ranks of the different agencies. We've got to promote them.

We've got to recognize them. We've got to give them awards. We've got to appreciate what they do. They basically are an underappreciated professional category. And that needs to change. This is an adult show. You can say that they get shat upon. We like, yeah.

And, and, you know, I mean, honestly, reading this, and I'll tell you, like, reading this made me realize, like, I've never not, you know, not respected somebody because they're in calendar challenges. But this book gave me a true appreciation for what that is because I can see where people might accuse you of being chicken little. But the thing is, is that all the cases in here had indicators that were ignored. Sure. Yeah, and you need good counterintelligence professionals to be on the job and to pick up on those indicators. And quite too often these indicators have been missed. When you go back, Dave and Jack, and look at all the cases that we know about, all the Americans who have betrayed us, when you do the damage assessment, and you go back and talk to people, in every case I can think of, people saw something.

they saw anomalies. They saw things that were questionable in the behavior, the attitude changes, the lifestyles, the finances of these people. But they didn't speak up. All those signs were missed because there weren't counterintelligence

security people there to see what was going on. So yeah, we need to do a bunch better job with that. That's been a recurring problem. I actually, and one of the things that you're, you know, like you're reflective about and forthright in this book, is that you said even I'm guilty of that because you happen to be friends with a relatively famous person,

Mr. Ames, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a painful topic because I didn't live up to my responsibility sufficiently, and I will take full blame for that. I've known Rick since 1976. I knew he was a substandard performer. I knew he was abusing alcohol. I should have gone to security.

Early on, I said, listen, there may not be anything to it, but I've got concerns about the suitability of this officer. But I didn't do it. And you know why I didn't do it? Because it was countercultural for us to rat out a colleague. And you'll see that in any close-knit group, you both saw it in your careers. You don't want to make life difficult for a colleague and friend.

They're one of us. You just don't call them out on it. And that's a mistake. We've got to change that culture. We've got to make it acceptable to go forward when we see something. but it's a tough nut to crack because we are close-knit we are bonded as colleagues

when you share a mission when you share some risk in your careers and you both know as well as I do what I'm talking about you have a special closeness that you feel with these people who worked and risked their lives beside you you're not going to go forward

when you see something wrong. Yeah. It's just a fact. I think we also have a tendency to make excuses for people that we are close to. We don't see it in the same light that we would if it were somebody. Yeah. He has a drinking problem, but he's a good dude. He's a good dude.

Yeah. I mean, but, and we, I mean, we do this with family. We do this for friends. We do it with people that we're close to. It's a natural human tendency to make excuses for them. It's so easy to do, isn't it? Yeah. To ration.

lies those concerns away. Yeah. And also you can tell yourself, you know, it's not my job. Yeah. It's not my job to react to these telltale signs that I've seen. Well, it is your job. Right. I think anybody who has classified access in the United States government has a responsibility to come forward when they see something.

Right. But that's a work in progress. DIA, I think, leads the pack. They have training programs for their people. where they acquaint them to how to report something when they see it. And it's paid off. You can even do it anonymously if you want. We can protect your anonymity.

Right. But people have gone to the security and counterintelligence people at DIA, and they have enabled them to start investigations. Anna Montez is a perfect case in point. It was an alert coworker. who said, you know, something just doesn't smell right about Anna. And I'm going to go to the counterintelligence people. I just make my instinctive reaction to her known to them.

And put it in the hands of the professions. Right. Let them move forward. And they can do a discreetly. They can protect her long-term professional equities if she's innocent. But she wasn't. Right. She's been a spy for the Cubans for years.

Right. And thank goodness that person came forward because Anna Montez would probably be retiring about now with all kinds of medals and awards and have been working for the Chinese for the Cubans all those years. Right. And not as if her co-worker was he, she was Montana, she was not shy about her anti-American pro-C Cuban views, which she was. She was blatant about it. And people knew it. But nobody really went to the right people. Right.

To express those concerns. And then again, you know, we are people that have freedom of speech. Right. If you work for the government, you can have a difference of opinion with our government on a given country. And so she was not alone in expressing sympathy for the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban people. Right. There were a lot of people in our own government were soft on Cuba. Right.

So that in itself would not have been disqualifying or grounds for dismissal, but it should have prompted a closer look. Right. Thank goodness that's what happened. We have a few viewer questions I'd love to get into, but before that, there's something I really, I got to ask you since we have you here, is about this theory out there about the so-called fourth man, that there were these three traders, Edward Lee Howard, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hansen at FBI.

There's this theory out there that there was a fourth unidentified mole at CIA. And you are the subject matter expert. So I would really love to hear your thoughts. You got Robert Baer, Bob Bear's book there. Yeah, Bob Bear's book is on my desk. And I talked to Bob Bear a lot about this. I mentioned in a book a couple times. I'm a believer

I'm a believer. I have come to believe that there is a Ford man who has not been uncovered yet and Bob Bear points his finger pretty squarely at a suspect so yeah I'm glad Bob wrote that book

it took a lot of research on his part. You probably know Bob. He comes from similar backgrounds to the two of you. He is a bulldog. He is tough, ruthless. When he's got a hold or something, he's not going to let it go. And way back a long time ago, he talked to me about his fourth man theory, and I listened respectfully and patiently. Milk Bearden, in his book, The Main Enemy, also raised the prospect

of the fourth man. In other words, if you look at Ames, if you look at Edward E. Howard Howard, if you look at Jim Nicholson, all of whom betrayed us from within the CIA, there are things that we lost, assets that we lost, they cannot be attributed to any of them.

So who did it? And I believe it was the fourth man. I would like nothing better to see the fourth man brought to justice. There's no statute of limitations in my mind for someone who betrays our country. Yeah. And we will have Milt on this summer. We'll be able to discuss that with him a little bit. Oh, Mel Bearden?

Yes. Oh, he's terrific. Yeah. He'll be a great interview. Yeah, and he, Mel and I have talked about Bear's book about the fourth man theory. And he's a very interesting person

and very knowledgeable and a great interview. He's very colorful, now spoken. I think the world of milk, a real pro. We work very closely together. I'm going to get through some of our viewers have questions.

I'll try to get through here. Kjam asks, while serving in the Soviet Union, was the CIA primarily focused on developing assets, or were they also monitoring ideologues or opportunists in positions of authority, perhaps like Putin as well? No, the reality of our presence in Moscow was that we could not do active recruitment operations there. We were so covered by the KGB that we could not have any meaningful contact, even assessment contact with targets there. We were dependent on the people who were recruited outside Russia, Russian intelligence officers, Russian diplomats, other Russians who we could get our hands

on outside the country, where we had access, and then prepare them, train them to send them back to Moscow. So our job was not to do the classic recruitment cycle. we couldn't really do that in Moscow, but to handle the recruited sources, including people who've been recruited outside. Now, that is not 100% accurate because there were some people who were able to make contact with us inside Russia, inside Moscow, and that we were then able to recruit and handle without that external component. One real good example of that is Adolf Tokachov, the billion dollar spy. We didn't recruit him outside the country.

He came to us in Moscow, the volunteer services. But that's really more of an exception than the rule. Shame off, who I worked with personally, was someone also who was not technically recruited outside Russia, although he did approach one of our people in another Eastern European country. But he was basically an internal volunteer. You know, and I don't think, like, sometimes it's hard to have an appreciation for what's going on with these people when they do approach you,

because if an American gets caught, they'll get arrested. And a lot of these countries, if they get caught, they're going to get executed. Yes. Yeah, the penalty for espionage in Russia is almost always execution. Ames killed many, many Russians. Yeah. Like betraying their identity. I don't know how he can live with himself.

You not only betrayed our country, but he's a murderer. Right. I feel the same way about Edward Lee Howard to a lesser extent. Yeah, that's true. There's a disparity in the risks that we face. Those people are risking their lives. and let me tell you what was so heartening for me as a CIA officer operating in Moscow, handling some of these people.

So many of them came our way for ideological reasons. They were people who saw how the Russian system, the Soviet regime, was oppressing their own people, was, denying their own people basic rights, strangling their economy. And they wanted to strike back against that. And they courageously decided that one way that they could do that was by secretly working with the CIA.

I have tremendous respect for those people. Some of the people I handled categorically refused to accept any money from us. Wow. Because that would tame the purity of their motivation. They were doing what they were doing because they loved Russia. They want to see Russia return to a democratic process. They wanted the Russian people to be liberated from that terrible communist system that they were living under.

Those people I respected tremendously. And to lose them was particularly painful because they were doing what they were doing for a very, very noble reason. Right. I won't reject Russians who come to us because they want the money. Right. If they give us the intelligence, they earn it, and I'm happy to pay it to them. In fact, if you have a Russian who is venal who wants to do espionage on our behalf for money, that's the easiest recruitment you ever make.

Because if you can buy them, it's just a question negotiating the price. Right. So those are easy. Those aren't always nice. people. Right. They're quite often fairly sleazy people. You deal with some people in this business that you would not want to befriend under any other circumstances, but we owe them respect because they're helping our country. Right. And even if their motive is impure in our eyes, we're still going to protect it. We're still going to appreciate what they do for us. Brad asks, is Sean, I think

we've talked about this a bit. Is China the new Russia, Cuba, in terms of how hard it is to collect human intelligence? Absolutely. Yeah. Squared. Multiply many times over. K-Jam asks, I remember watching former CIA agents in the 80s on Phil Donahue speaking out against covert ops, and I believe there were eventual changes at the CIA. Was that important or still controversial. Maybe he's referring to Iran-Contra, but I'm not sure what you think, Jim. Yeah, we had, particularly in the 80s,

some turncoats, some people from inside who went rogue, who denounce what we were doing. Philip Agee is a good example of that. I regret that. They reacted to some of the legitimate abuses that we've been involved in. Iran-Contra. He needed a lot of people.

Some of our patronage of right-wing dictators. Some of the things that we did that raised ethical issues that I point out in my first book, Fair Play, turned some people against us. Couldn't accept what we were doing. But they had no right to speak up to betray secrets, to reveal our operations.

So I have contempt for those people. I hate beakers of any kind, because there are channels where they can express their dissent, but they cannot take it upon themselves to betray our personnel and our operations. AG betrayed every CIA case officer he knew about, ruining careers, putting them in danger. There's no excuse for that.

Jim Nicholson did the same thing. He was on the faculty down at the farm. So he knew the identity of all of our junior case officers being trained down there. Right. So he was compromising their covers even before they got to the field. Right. He compromised like a year's worth of agents, right? He did.

Despicable. Yeah. Jim Nicholson is one of my case studies. But he's beneath contempt in my eyes. And then there was also the, was it the chief of station? who was killed in Athens after his identity was leaked by it? Yeah, that's Welch. Yeah, after he was outed in Aegee's book, a short time later,

he was killed by terrorists on the streets of Athens. And I put that, I put that to the discredit of, of Aegee. So it's horrible. President Bush was very, very aware of that operation. And when he lectured in my classes at the Bush School, he always brought that case up. And he always teared up because he felt

deeply the loss of CIA officers who fell in the line of duty, like those, particularly those who were killed because of a traitor. Right. Just like, like, like A.G. Muhammad says, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Olson at WTAMU.

Absolutely life-changing. A question, if I could, reading Unrestricted Warfare by China's Intelligence and the Natpetia Russian hack. How do we develop cybersecurity offensive talent here in America? I think we've got the raw material. So many young Americans are very skilled in computers. So I think we need to go out and recruit the brightest from that crowd that we can. I find young men and women who have a particular talent for cyber, with computer science degrees,

who have shown a knack for hacking in their own rights. Sign them up and subject them to a really intense training program. Make them world-class hackers. I want us to be more offensive against the Chinese than they are against us. Yeah. We're not even close. You know, it's interesting because when you look at like these ransomware gangs in Russia, like Conti and Ryuk, and then you look at the Chinese, well, the Chinese hackers are, are a lot of those persistent threats are part of the Chinese government, even though they say they're not.

But it's almost like America sort of needs to kind of let the gloves off and go back to the idea of privateers with, you know, in the sense of, you know, the, these kids get arrested when they hack, when they hack anything. It's like, let them form their own groups and do whatever they want against Russia and China, as long as it doesn't, you know, because that's what with these ransomware groups, they're not allowed to touch anything in Russia or part of the Russian Federation. You know, they're not allowed to do that, but it's hands off legal-wise as long as they're, you know, operating against, you know, other nations. I like that. you're thinking like a CIA officer, Dave, and I hope the right people are listening

and it can implement some of that. I do too. That's a good approach. I mean, it's a good approach. We had privateers before, right? I mean, it wouldn't be that. Use letters of Mark. Yeah, exactly.

Andrew says on a letter note, he's asking you, Jim, did he ever get to meet the guy in the CIA who decided to put a microphone inside a cat, the so-called acoustic kitty? I'm very familiar with that operation. Yeah, I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was brilliant for your audience

is not familiar with the Kustakini. We know that from surveillance, from observation, that this high priority target group quite often met in a conference room and we could see through the window and we saw that they had a pet cat that quite often was in the room when these probably

sensitive conversations was going on. And so the CIA kidnapped the cats. Catnapped. The catnapped. And performed a an operation to insert a listening device

into the cat underneath the fur so it wouldn't be detected. And acoustic kitty sitting in on those meetings could broadcast to our listening post outside what was going on. I like the creativity. Did it actually work, Jim? Can't comment on that. Bob Gates talks about it a lot, and he hints that there was a payoff.

Really? That's amazing. Because, I mean, the story, I think that, like, if you Google this and try to read what's on like Wikipedia. The story is like they did a test run, and the cat immediately just wandered out of the park into the road and was hit by a car. And that was kind of like the end of it. Yeah.

Well, that's possible, but I can't say that the concept of the operation, some of the implication was not apocryph. So there is a, there is a bit more. There's a kernel of truth that may be more than a kernel. A bit more to the story. We missed one of Andrews. questions. To what extent might have Angleton been grasping after the signs that the Walker ring had compromised U.S. communications? Yeah, well, Walker was doing his dirty when

Angleton was riding Supreme at the agency. Walker is another great example of someone who should have been caught a lot earlier. He was very flamboyantly showing off his his unexplainable wealth. He was recruiting subordinates, recruited his own family. His estranged wife actually came forward at some point to denounce him, but she was dismissed as an alcoholic, embittered spouse, ex-spouse, not taken seriously. So he got away with her for a lot longer than you should have.

And I'll put that on Angleton's doorstep. If our counterintelligence had been better, I think we might have done a better job of detecting Walker a lot earlier, Johnny Walker. He did a lot of damage. I was in the Navy myself, and I'm familiar with the KW7, the KW26. And for him to give them the key list for our coding machines would have been devastating. Yeah. Because it allowed, and only Kalugan makes a point of this. Oli Kalugan handled Walker.

And he said during that period, that lengthy period, thanks to Johnny Walker, the KGB could decrypt all of the encrypted communications of the United States Navy during those years. Last question here. My peers, early 20s, I guess my peers in their early 20s, are inundated with ideology, critique of the Chinese state with buzzwords like racism or imperialism. How do you approach young people about this issue pragmatically? Yeah, you know, it's not that hard, Jack. Of course, I'm in a privileged position here because we select our students at the Bush School. So carefully, they are highly motivated, very patriotic, very idealistic. So that's not a good cross-section.

But there are a lot of young people out there who are thinking straight. who don't buy any of this ideological indoctrination, who love our country, who want to serve our country. And so they should step forward. They should not be deterred by any of that. They should not allow themselves to be brainwashed. And they should find a way to prepare themselves for a very meaningful career. And I hope some of those people listening will pursue this call to serve our country

because it is indescribably rewarding to be able to serve our country. You both did that in your way. I had the honor of doing it myself. You know, it's not all about money. It's not all about power. It's not all about prestige and status. There are a lot more important things in life. And what could be more honorable, more meaningful at the end of the day than serving our country?

So I urge young people to take a really good look at the military, at law enforcement, and in my case, specifically the intelligence community, and find your niche, find a way to become involved. We're all hiring, and you'll never regret it. You go home at night feeling good about what you did. Not everybody can say that. Now, I've got nothing to any in its corporate America. Our country needs good corporate executives. Our economy needs good corporate executives.

But for me and for most of the students that I deal with, a career in corporate America would never be fulfilling. You would not be serving something you truly believe in. You're not making a difference in an area that you care about. So I think all of us who were there, and you can confirm this in your own careers, feel privileged to have had the opportunity to serve the way we did. I hope there are some young people out there.

I hope to look at graduate programs for service in the military, service in law enforcement at any level. I'll put in a pitch by May for the Bushful of the Texas A&M University because we are designed specifically to prepare high quality young men and women for meaningful careers in the United States. States intelligence community. We do other things here, too, diplomacy, law enforcement, international organizations. But our intelligence studies program is something we're very proud of. I have one final question, and I promise we'll wrap things up, Jim. Isaac asks, has there been any more proof of Russian interference of the 2016 election? Is there anything that could have been done to prevent it, or at least less than the damage?

Yeah, I don't think that I've ever seen any convincing evidence that it was particularly meaningful, significant. I don't think it changed any votes. Sure, they were playing around with some of those websites, some of that social media. They were tinkering with it. But I don't think it had any real impact. And I've never seen any real evidence that there was this monster plot to see. steer the election one way or the other. I think a lot of that was concocted. I think it was something that was totally inappropriate, verging on illegal to have fabricated, if it was

fabricated, some of that, some of the most lurid accusations against Russia. I don't put anything past Putin. Putin is someone I've followed since the 1980s, and I know what he's capable of. He is a vicious man with no scruples whatsoever. Just look at what he's doing in Ukraine now. It's unspeakably cruel. But, no, I don't think he had any kind of a massive role in our elections. Certainly hope not. Yeah, the Iranians were also trying to influence it.

They didn't make much headway either, correct? No. No, our system, I think, is good. I think it's basically secure. We can always tighten it up. We can do what we can to prevent any kind of fraud, cheating in the elections. That's not American, but I believe in our democracy. I believe in our institutions.

And I think that our elections are basically secure and that we do a pretty good job of policing them. We can always do better. We have to close some loopholes, perhaps. But it's not a massive violation of our democratic principles, what we've seen here so far. That's my opinion. Scott, also, do we have another on Patreon? Let's see here. Scott.

Oh, okay. Last one for real this time, I promise. How did your law degree impact? your decision making during your CIA career? It's a good question. I never really used my legal experience on the job. I was not recruited by the CIA as a lawyer, but in my training class at 25 down at the farm,

AID has had law degrees. And that meant that the CIA recognized the value of the legal training that we received. and I did not specifically apply my knowledge of the law, but things I learned at law school, I think were valuable to me. The critical thinking, the ability to sort through a lot of data and extract what was relevant. The advocacy skills. I think were things that I could choose.

So I didn't end up practicing law as I had originally intended, but I don't regret having gone to law school. I'll tell young people today that if you want a career in intelligence, law school is not the best path to get there because you do a lot of coursework that's totally irrelevant. Now there are graduate programs that are much more designed to prepare you specifically for a career in national security. That's the direction I would go. They didn't really exist in my day. But when I went to law school, I wasn't thinking national security. I was thinking serving my community as a small town lawyer.

If CI had not come calling, I'd probably be practicing law in Clinton, Iowa today because they were making the best offer. It would have been a good life. I was heading to Clinton because they offered me a paid membership in the Clinton Country Club if I went to Clinton. A nice little county seat town on the Mississippi River.

It would have been nice. I could have had a good life. But I certainly don't, would never trade places with my law school colleagues who went into the practice of law. I'm sure it was fine for them. It's very important. But what I did was far, far above and beyond what I ever would have dreamed. I love the CIA. Yeah.

But I will say that as rewarding as the CIA career was, I think what I'm doing now, and working with the next generation of intelligence officers, next generation of spy catchers, next generation of FBI special agents is even more meaningful. I told Meredith the other day that I think what we are doing here has more long-term impact for our country than our service in the CIA. I'm very sincere about that. I can't give you any numbers, but...

No, I agree. Bush school. Bush school is doing its part in sending young men and women in the intelligence community. Joe, I want to, if you don't mind, I know we've kept you really long, but I would like to end this interview with one quick story from your book, if you would, because you know, you paint this picture of Angleton and what he did to counterintelligence at the time where he had all these kind of weird theories and stuff like that, and that that environment was kind of filtering down.

Can you tell us about the counterintelligence office? sir that that worked in the vault yeah yeah well that's a good case because it's illustrative of what happened to people you know my 10 commandments account of intelligence don't stay too long because if you live constantly in that world of illusion deception manipulation conspiracy double think

it can play tricks on your mind that's what happened to Angleton in 20 years he lost touch with reality he went off the deep end and this person

that we're talking about was one of what we called the fundamentalists and they were the true believers They were the people who surrounded Angleton and who were like-minded. They'd been infected by the same disease of conspiracy and a double-think. And this person, I used to see him go through this big vault door in the morning

and look around, make certain no one's watching, and then spin the dial and then pull this big, big, vault door open and disappear inside clank. And I'm thinking of myself, what are they doing in there? What's he doing in there? How do they even breathe in there? And what I know now, what he was doing was his life's work. He was doing endless research, counterintelligence probing, to prove that Angleton was the most

that Angleton was the traitor which was crazy totally irresponsible unwarranted unjustified Angleton did a lot of damage to the CIA but he was no Russian mold

but anyway that was a conclusion that this when I read that I imagined him in his vault with like strings and paper or you know all the dots connect Because you said like he presented like a 25 point summary of his Oh yeah, he produced his opus, the CI opus that actually went up to the seventh floor

With his proof that Angleton is the traitor and of course it was dismissed for the ludicrous Proposition that it was but he believed it Incredible And there were people among the fundamentalists who believe the craziest things. And I'm not going to give the FBI a pass either because that same mindset was true with J. Edgar Hoover. So all those years we had James Jesus Angleton writing Supreme at the CIA and Angleton or in Hoover over at the FBI with the same kind of totally out of touch reality.

Entrenched bureaucrats with a conspiratorial worldview, very dangerous. And the disservice they did to our country cannot be exaggerated. Yeah, we suffered as a country because of their narrowness, their inability to see the real threats and to do something about the real threats. Yeah. So, folks, I hope you'll go out and check out, check out the books to catch a spy and fair play by our guest here tonight, Jim Olson, former CIA head of counterintelligence. We really appreciate your time, Jim. This has been an awesome interview.

Yeah, we, we deeply, everybody by this. Scott, I know you asked. Thank you, Jack. Oh, sorry. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it. We need to recruit some people to go out and catch some more spies for us. That's right. Hey, Scott, we know you asked the question. Sorry, we don't want to keep it anymore. But the answer to your question about the indicators or in this they're in the book i'm telling you folks read this book it will open your eyes it's it's truly amazing and next week next friday will be here with former delta force operator dale comstock so i'll be listening it's got to be a good one got to be a really good one thank you very much for joining us tonight have a good night be too