The Team House - The CIA's Head Spy Hunter | Jim Olson (throwback episode)

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Originally aired 6/17/22Professor 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.Jim's books:To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligencehttps://a.co/d/huymTyNFair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spyinghttps://a.co/d/ctwB7bGSupport the show on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseJoin our newsletter:https://teamhousepodcast.kit.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

The Team House with your host, 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, I, 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. 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,

terrifying implications there, but also Russia and Cuba, which was really surprising to me. I mean, we've had on like Mark Polymeropolis 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 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. I don't have any reservations at all about ranking them as now the number three threat to our country 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 out in Iowa, unless it affected the price of corn, we weren't all that interested. But when I went off to college at the University of Iowa to 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 a height of the Cold War, I was at university when the Cuban Rissel crisis went on. So that definitely focuses. 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. to kind of reinforce 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 of Iowa 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, serve my community, find an ice 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 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 CI's clandestine service what kind of funny i remember distinctly as i was packing up in iowa to go off to this CI place whatever it was i was determined that i would do it for only a couple years and then i guaranteed myself jim after two or three years, you are going back to Iowa. And pursuing that, Richard G.man had.

Of course, it didn't work out that way because it did take long to 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 recruited 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 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 art of intelligence

as we called 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. Most 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 assumed I'm on the way 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 was 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 was going to be out doing my duty on the front lines as my class class. 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 who recruit want to be what the action is. Right.

And 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 shirky. Right. And so we had no problem finding volunteers to go out to those hot spots. 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 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 road of Capella.

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 Rhodicapela. into the previous study. And I worked pretty hard on that.

And I thought I'd 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 at 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 of 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 his 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 the 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 road to Capella 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. He cannot fail to be impressed by my CI acumen 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 nothing 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. sense at all. I mean, 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 realize 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 of 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 1917. 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. Yeah. 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 didn't 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 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 worthful and 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 sworn a secrecy on that one to this day? We're not going to talk about that one. Okay. Fair enough. Second position after that. In the second position, okay, after that first one, which I'm not 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 Moscow was a tremendous honor. And the competition you 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, is going to be part of your preparation period that you're gonna get some intensive Russian language training. My wife had to start from scratch. I already had a pretty good head 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, when was she? Were you there about the same time as Marty Peterson?

Just after Marty. Okay. Marty Peterson is a good 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 Peter. 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 and 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 Smarty 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. I was back at headquarters following all of this. We needed to get someone black, free of surveillance, to handle Trigon, Ogorodnik, 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 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 the 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 bachelorette. Right.

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. Drygon was betrayed from within by someone else.

And so she was decurbed. persona and 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 mentioned that, that, you know, we really suffered against the Russians at it, 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. But 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 Engleton, beginning in 77 with Trigon was that we discovered, hey, we're pretty good at this. 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 it really reinforced our mind that what a loss those previous 20 years had been, because we could have had sources.

Right. 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 Moscow. We call them the golden years of Moscow Station operations. And Marathon I 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 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. much of what we discovered about spies in our own country have to do with 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 a 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. 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 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 very sophisticated, high-tech technology of disguise. and, of course, changing your appearance completely. Yeah. And 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 the embassy? So we're following 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 agreed 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. 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 sequelae 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 of surveillance. one way or the other. It was a 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 risking 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 Trajan 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 Mardi 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. Yeah. 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 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, bit down on a suicide pill, but the CIA had provided. The Penn 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 instant 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 it held themselves. Yeah, Marty had mentioned that when, like, that she had a pen or something on her, and they like went, that they went apes shape trying to get it away from her. And 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, in hell. It was not a weapon. Yeah. 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't,

or want to talk about from that time we'd love to hear it. Yeah. Or we can move to the next phase. No, there are a couple of highlights that you, now that you bring them up, Dave, that I would like to point out about my time in Moscow. One was the handling and exfiltration, successful infiltration of Victor Schaimov. And I had a part in that. I met Shame off on the streets of Moscow and was involved in the exfiltration.

It's the first time we'd ever. successfully equilitated someone from inside the Soviet Union. And this case was particularly significant because we not only got Shamov 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 capable of 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 to 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, over-dramatize it. But the fact is if I've been caught down that hole, yeah, there's a good chance I wouldn't have come back. Right, right. Was this like like a induction tap or something with a tape recorder? Yeah, good for you. Yeah, it was induction. a tap, which was breakthrough technology at the time. Right.

And it first became publicly known in the Sontag and Drew book on our tapping of underwater sea cables. You know, 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 an 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. The people who deserve 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 Sigitt? 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. But I mean, I can confirm, I can't confirm that it was analog technology. You do 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.

Yeah, it's one thing when you're diving. It's a totally different thing when you're, like, walking through the streets of Moscow. Yeah. Yeah. And it's another thing, having solid state hard drives today versus what you guys had in the 1970s. Yeah, well, the front end of that operation was pretty impressive, wasn't 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. It'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, Dave, the overall highlight from that period in Moscow was the intelligence that the CI 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 inner circles of the KGB and the GRU and the Defense Ministry. 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 our. 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 and junior high at that time. And I mean, when you talk about the Cold War,

like we're 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 gain. Right. It was life and death. And we were on the front lines of that historic battle. That's incredible. It's incredible. So, D, 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 and you can get the show ad free if you'd like to listen to me. And you can buy us some LeFroy or, you know. Keep us inside. Whatever, whatever, you know. So back to our guest, Jim. 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 there, 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. The major venues of Cold War espionage were Vienna and 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 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 CI clandescent service, a crusty old pro. He called me up. So very gruff. Jim, get up here. Okay, I'm on my way. Stop to the 7th 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 over 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 Vietnam. 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. He isn't bad an eye. He said, you 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 for us to 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. That's what he did. Go ahead. I was just going to ask, who was the DDO, the gruff, gruff, salty DDO that called you in? I mean, he must be out by now.

Claire George. Oh, Claire George. Okay. 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 because they were anything politically correct. You had some, a couple of the stories from Vienna,

or a couple of the cases were your personal experiences in Vienna. Because for people who don't know, like a vast majority of this book is just about the counterintelligence as 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 the Marine Security Guard. Mayor Deith 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 the Stay 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 the corner of 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. And 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, well, 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 Loentree was in over his head. He wanted to do what he could for Violetta 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 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 communications center. And Lone Tree was going to be the way to do that. U.S. Marines would sometimes be the only American American into building a 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 actor 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 as 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 on, which we knew, of course, that she had done. Right.

Violetta declined the wedding proposal. She had moved on. Right. But Clayton was heartbroken because he truly believed that 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 Ring 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 that 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 Vesviel to speak to this Cuban, and it turns out that. This was not his daughter. This was 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 in 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 understableness. 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. 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 for the Cubans from any of 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 island, 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 was 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 like people don't want CI around and it's it's for reasons like that because when they're successful everybody else looks bad you know that 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 counterintelligence 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 CI. Right. They wanted to continue doing it themselves. Right. 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, count intelligence 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, including the director, said, okay, you've got it. You've got the access you need. And if 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 they had to get into 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 it's so good it looks so good that you just wanted to be true and you ignore all the professional incentive is to rack up numbers right we're running all these assets yeah yeah and uh course what was overlooked was they weren't producing 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. disgrace 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 inside 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. Of course, 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 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 Cuban 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 1990s, 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 a 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 loom very large in their counterintelligence careers because they are the name of the game. They are the threat. I make the 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 them. 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 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. 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, a 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 that propose tariffs on Chinese products, 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. 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 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

mission. 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. 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. Right. 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, or 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. 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 this. 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 to 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. Bigos, yeah, or 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 in 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 we're. was truly terrifying about your book is, you know, the Russian espionage was one thing. The Cuban espionage is another thing. But 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 rate. 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 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 thereafter 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 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, a bandaria 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. So they stole that technology. The J20, it looks just 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. 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 lab. 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 it. 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 what the one of the major venues of chinese espionage nine states is they it's the college campus yeah 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 the 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 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 utilize. Yeah. In my home state of Iowa, this would 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 would 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've 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 is brilliant. And more specifically on Chinese espionage, I think the best book that you can read is one on the Larry Uttai Chin case. I think that's very instructive. I'll think some more. Maybe you can post it on your 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 and some case studies. And some case studies, yeah.

No, it's, it's, I mean, like just, I mean, there's just kind of a quick list. I don't know if you guys can see that. I're not highlighted, but just a quick list of the, some of the names. But the Chinese have just been destroying us at this. And they're almost untrue. touchable. 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, that is ethnically different? I would take it a step further than that even, Dave. The Chinese government

knows this is a pressure point. And they play it 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 the Chinese. 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 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 Shoecase 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 bad. 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, 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. 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 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 and what we can do because it would be dismissed as racial profiling.

Don't get me started at Win OLE.E. And Win O.E actually graduated from Texas. and him and he's never been convicted of anything so i'm not saying anything but when win hoee 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 uh yeah it's it's scary um 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 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. 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.

Right. Now, that doesn't mean we can't do it. And I would hope and believe that we are doing it, but it's never been harder. So they make it very, 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 professionals as they are, honestly, are overwhelmed. by the number of Chinese cases that are coming away. Christopher Ray has 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 get people a little insight 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. Can you tell us what they are? So commandment number one, be off. 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 professionals, 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 are counterintelligence people better. You 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, 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 it 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 but the thing is is that all the cases in here had indicators sure that were ignored sure yeah and you need good counter challenges professionals to be on the job and to pick up on those indicators. And quite too often these cases, 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,

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 reflected about in

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 him out on it. And that's a mistake. We've got to change that culture. We 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 college. 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're.

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, 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. We, it's a natural human tendency to make excuses for them. It's so easy to do, isn't it? Yeah. To rationalize those concerns away. Yeah. And also you can tell yourself, you know, it's not my job. Yeah. It's not my job to, to react to these telltale signs that they're seeing. Well, it is your job. Right. I think anybody who has classified access, 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 counter intelligence, 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 to 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 Cubans all those years.

Right. And not having been caught. And it's not as if her coworker was he, she was Montana, she was not shy about her anti-American pro-Cuban views. She was, she was blatant about it. And people knew it.

but nobody really went to the right people. Right. Express those concerns. And then again, you know, we are people that have freedom of speech. Right. You just 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 who 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 Baer'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 the book a couple times. I'm a believer. You're 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 of 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, if you look at Jim Nicholson, all of whom betrayed us within the CIA, there are things that we lost, assets that we lost that 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 Milton 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, very, knowledgeable and a great interview. He's very, 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, 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 have 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 and volunteered in services.

But that's really more of an exception than the rule. Shame off, 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 the, what, 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. They betraying their identity. I don't know how he can live with himself. You not only betrayed our country, but he's a murderer. 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 them. that. And they courageously decided that one way that they could do that, but 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 team the purity of their motivation. They were doing what they were doing because they loved Russia. They want to see Russia return to a democracy.

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. Brad. 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, 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. squared, multiplied 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 Aegee 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. Haiti 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 Welsh. 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 to the discredit of Aegee. So it's horrible. President Bush was very aware of that operation. And when he lectured in my classes at the Bush School,

always brought that case up. Yeah. And he always teared up because he felt deeply the loss of CIA officers who fell in in the land of duty, like course, particularly those who were killed because of a traitor. Right. Right. Just like, like, like, A.G. Uh, Muhammad says, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Olson at W.T.A.M.U.

Uh, absolutely life changing. A question, if I could. Reading unrestricted warfare by China's. intelligence and the Natpetya 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. Right.

Sign them up and subject them to a really intense training program. Yeah. Make them world-class hackers. You know, I want, 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 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, 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 Russian China as long as it doesn't, you know, because that's, 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, we had privateers before, right? I mean, it wouldn't be bad. 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 Acousticitty. 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 same thing, CIA kidnapped the cats. Catnapped. The catnapped. And performed 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 him a lot, and he hints that there was a payoff. Really? 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. 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 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's questions. To what extent might have Angleton been grasping after the signs that the Walker ring had been 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 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 long than you should have. And I'll put that on Angleton's doorstep. Yeah. If our counterintelligence has 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 coating machines was, would have been devastating. Yeah. Because only Kulugan makes a point of this. Holy Kulugin 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 the 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 use 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, if I may, for the Bush School 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 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 them. 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 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 lord accusations against Russia. I don't put anything past Putin. Putin is someone I've followed since the 1980s. 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 of a massive role in our elections. Certainly hope not. Yeah, the Iranians were also trying to influence that 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. 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.com calling,

I'd probably be practicing law in Clinton, Iowa. because they were making the best offer. It would have been a good life. And 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 would have been nice. It 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 in 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.

John, 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 officer that worked in the vault? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a good case because it's illustrative of what happened to people. One of my Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence, 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 call the fundamentalists. They were the true believers. They were the people who surrounded Angleton and who were like-minded. They've 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 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 CI, but he was no Russian mold. But anyway, that was a conclusion with this.

When I read that, I imagined him in his vault with like strings and paper, you know, all the dots connected. Because you said like he presented like a 25 point summary of his. Oh, yeah. He produced his opus, this 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 believed the craziest things. And I'm not going to give the FBI a pass either. Because that same mindset was true with 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 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 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 get some more spice for us. That's right. Hey, Scott, we know you're asked the question. Sorry, we don't want to keep any more, but the answer to your question about the indicators are in this. They're in the book. I'm telling you, folks, read this book. It will open your eyes. It's truly amazing. And next week, next Friday, we'll be here with former Delta Force operator, Dale Comstock. So it's going to be listening. It's going to be. It's got a good one.

Thank you, Jim. Thank you very much for joining us tonight. Have a good night. You too.