WEBVTT

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JACK: I want to tell you about Operation Lying Doggo. Have you seen those Lhasa Apso

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dogs? They’re the big breed dogs with really long, bushy hair. Like, you can’t even see their eyes.

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Or think about those mop dogs, you know, the ones that look like their hair is made of a mop? Well,

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there was a CIA operation which required the Special Agents to buy one of these big dogs

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that had this long, bushy hair. These agents then found someone who had permission to go

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into a high-security area. There were security guards in this area which would ID the people

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trying to come in and search the car. The CIA wanted to get into there, but they couldn’t;

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security was just too tight. But they came up with a plan to try to get this big-haired

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dog through the gate. So, they convinced some people who had access into the secure compound

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to let the dog ride in the back of the car every time they went in and out of the gate.

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The security guard would stop the car and check their IDs and see their clearances,

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and also look at the dog in the back. But when everything looked fine, he would let them go

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on. [MUSIC] The dog got into the high-security area. Phase 1 of the operation is a success,

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but now we’re on to Phase 2, which is to make the dog a regular visitor.

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They continued to put the dog in the back of the car and go in there over and over, driving

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through the security checkpoint, having the security guard look to see the dog in the back,

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and letting them through. Sometimes the dog was up walking around in the back of the car, sometimes

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it was laying down sleeping. This worked; Phase 2 is now complete. On top Phase 3. Once this

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routine was established, the CIA officers went to a wig-maker to create a fake version of this dog,

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sort of a disguise that was big enough that a CIA officer could put the costume on and hide inside.

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So, the wig-maker made the disguise, and when it was time for the CIA officer to sneak into the

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high-security compound, the officer put the dog disguise on and laid down in the back of the car,

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which looked just like how the real dog looked when it was sleeping in the back. The security

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guards were so used to seeing a big, fluffy dog in the back that they didn’t pay any attention

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to it and let the car right in. This is the length that the CIA goes through to

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sneak people into high-security areas. That was Operation Lying Doggo, and the CIA has

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conducted lots of secret plans to gather foreign intelligence like this. [INTRO MUSIC] This is

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called espionage and at times, it can be really intense. In this episode, I interview an ex-CIA

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officer to hear some stories about how he gathered foreign intelligence from people.

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(INTRO): These are true stories from the dark side

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of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

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JACK: In 1976, Jim Lawler was a law student in the University of Texas.

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He was in his senior year, so him and all his classmates were trying to find jobs.

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JIM: I saw on the job board that the CIA was coming to the law school and they

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were interviewing for attorneys for the agency’s Office of General Council. So,

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I went to this interview, and the gentlemen who interviewed me was a man named Mr. Bill Wood.

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JACK: Mr. Bill Wood from the US government came to the university, and he was there to scout for

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legal talent for the US government. He sat down to interview Jim Lawler,

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and he saw something in Jim, something that Bill thought would be a good fit for Jim.

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JIM: Two or three minutes into this interview,

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he looked at me and he said Jim, have you ever thought about the Clandestine Service? I said,

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no. In fact, I don’t even know what the Clandestine Service is.

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JACK: [MUSIC] The offer was intriguing, but Bill couldn’t tell him anything specific. Jim knew he

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was from the CIA though, and had a pretty good hunch that this had something to do with working

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for them. But Jim was a law student and was planning to work for his family business,

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and wasn’t ready to drop all that to go work for a Clandestine Service. So,

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he thanked Bill and declined whatever mysterious opportunity there was, and went to work in the

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family business. Three years later, Jim was working hard, making good money, but he was

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becoming unhappy. The family business wasn’t quite as rewarding as he thought, and he never did throw

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away Bill Wood’s card. So, he reached back out to him and said hey, are you still hiring? Because

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now I’m ready. Jim’s hunch was correct; it was an offer to be tested to work for the CIA conducting

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espionage. Jim had to go through a series of tests to see if he was cut out for it,

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and he passed. He was officially hired by the Central Intelligence Agency as a case officer.

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The first part of his training was to learn what a case officer is, or sometimes called an

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operations officer. So, let’s go over what that job entails. According to the cia.gov website,

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operations officers clandestinely spot, assess, develop, recruit, and handle non-US citizens with

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access to foreign intelligence that is vital to the US. That means it would be his job to

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travel to other countries and get people to tell him information that they shouldn’t be sharing

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with the US. On this show, I often talk about people known as social engineers, and there’s

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social engineering techniques to gather data that they’re not authorized to have. But the

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CIA uses the exact same techniques to gather foreign intelligence. The operations start with

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identifying the kind of information they want to gather. This might be military plans, trade deals,

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negotiations with other countries, or something that would be of interest to the national security

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of the US. Then they have to figure out who might know or have access to this kind of information,

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then they have to find a person who is susceptible to being persuaded to give the information up.

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JIM: They expected me to manipulate, to exploit, to subvert, to convince people to commit treason.

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JACK: Jeez, that’s intense. I mean, getting people to commit treason sounds illegal.

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JIM: Absolutely, illegal against foreign laws, yes. That’s what makes it fun. No,

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we’re breaking other people’s laws. We’re not breaking US laws, but it’s

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called espionage. That is typically against the law in most countries.

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JACK: [MUSIC] Okay, so there are some high stakes that come with this job. If you’re

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caught trying to recruit someone, it could be some serious jail time for you, or worse;

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you might be tortured or killed. But to Jim, this was exciting and he was eager

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to learn how to do it effectively, without getting caught. One of the parts of the CIA

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officer’s job is to identify the perfect person to recruit. This is often known as a source,

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since they’re the source of information. Today, you can easily look on LinkedIn to see who works

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for a certain department or office that you want to target, then just go down the line to find

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which person might be the most persuadable. But when Jim was in the CIA, LinkedIn wasn’t around,

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so Jim had to learn some techniques for how to find people’s names or job titles and as much

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information as he could gather from them to try to find their weakness. Did you use any of that

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spy gear, you know, secret pen microphones and cameras and stuff? Did you get into that much?

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JIM: Oh, occasionally, but that stuff, it’s just toys. To me,

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that was never interesting. The interesting thing is the human interaction. That’s what’s

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the variable. That’s the thing that’s so fascinating to me.

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JACK: Jim was drawn to the direct, face-to-face persuasion and manipulation of people,

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which is really important to the CIA. To get insiders to flip and help the CIA was

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always an important job, and this is called collecting HUMINT, human intelligence. Sure,

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some CIA operations are setting up long-range antennas and microphones to snoop on things,

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but Jim’s specialty was exploiting people, and during his time at the CIA, he learned

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that people will always be exploitable. After all, we’re only human, and humans

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make mistakes. There are flaws that exist in all of us which are like unpatched vulnerabilities.

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JIM: That’s a good way to put it, an unpatched vulnerability.

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JACK: So, they make something called a targeting package. [MUSIC] It identifies

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the information they’re after and the person who can potentially give up that information. Now,

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here is where Jim comes in to develop a relationship with the target person.

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He’ll need to fly into that country and somehow find that person and get close

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to them. The targeting package has everything you need to know in order to initiate contact,

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establish rapport, and build trust. What Jim likes to do is find the main source

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of stress in someone’s life, because people who are under stress are more recruitable.

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JIM: You do not recruit happy people. You recruit people who are under stress,

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and everybody’s under stress unless you’re dead. Everybody’s under stress,

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and my talent was – I was able to, over time, detect exactly what the stress was. So,

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I used to be a rock-climber. Are you a rock-climber, Jack?

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JACK: I have done some rock-climbing, yeah.

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JIM: Okay. When you are studying the rock, what are you looking for?

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JACK: I’m planning right, left hand, into the cracks.

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JIM: You’re looking for the crack system, right? If you’re a long way away from the rock,

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you can’t see that crack system. But if you get up close and you study it,

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you can find out what the crack system is. People are the same way; they have these

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emotional cracks and needs and stresses, just like the rock. So, if I study a person long enough,

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I can figure out what the crack system is. Sometimes it takes me a short time,

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other times it takes me a really long time. One time it took me eleven years.

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JACK: There’s an acronym the CIA uses called MICE, M-I-C-E,

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and it outlines the different ways you can persuade someone.

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JIM: M stands for money. I stands for ideology, because some people detest the country’s political

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system that they’re in, so they believe in the American system, so that’s an ideological

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recruitment. C stands for coercion. We don’t typically use coercion, but certainly the Russians

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and the Chinese will coerce people, blackmail them, frequently extort them to become a source.

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Then the final and actually most important letter in MICE is E, which stands for ego, because people

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do a lot of things for ego. In fact, rarely, never did I ever encounter anybody who did it purely for

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money. The money stands for something and yeah, I like to have money in the relationship because it

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focuses them, but it rarely was ever strictly a quid-pro-quo, strictly a financial thing.

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JACK: [MUSIC] On Jim’s first assignment, he was sent to a foreign country and was given

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a whole new identity. He was told he now works for the US Embassy in that country.

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JIM: I was operating under official cover. I was under State Department cover.

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JACK: The embassy job was his pretext. He needed a reason to be there. His real

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mission was to identify, assess, develop, recruit, and handle non-US citizens with

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access to foreign intelligence that his government determined was important to its foreign policy.

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JIM: So, I had to do both a – an official job as a State Department officer in an embassy,

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but I also had my clandestine job as a CIA case officer,

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and I would do that either after hours or when I had a free moment, I would go and do that.

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JACK: So, during the day, he would study his targeting package and learn about his target

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and the information he’s after. But then at night is when he’d try to develop relationships with the

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target. His official cover also provided him with diplomatic protection, which was really

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important if he got caught, because this was a way for him to avoid any serious punishment.

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JIM: Well, if you had diplomatic protection like I did, we call a black passport,

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the worst that can happen is you’re arrested, you’re taken downtown, and you demand to see

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a consular officer, somebody from the embassy, and then within a day or two, you’d be declared

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persona non grata, which means you have to leave the country along with your family.

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JACK: So, Jim is in this foreign country just doing his cover embassy work…

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JIM: When suddenly I – one day I got this cable, a classified cable from Washington,

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a message [MUSIC] which said in a couple of years or less than a couple of years,

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we are going to be engaged in some highly important negotiations with a certain country, and

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these negotiations are – we need to have sources to tell us exactly what their positions are.

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JACK: Okay, sounds like Jim’s being assigned his first mission as a CIA

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case officer. This operation is asking Jim to find a source who would be able

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to supply intelligence that would help with upcoming negotiations that this

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foreign nation is engaged in with the US. It’s a big deal, and the message goes on.

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JIM: We have very few, if any, sources on this. This is critically important

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to national security. So, they listed some qualifications that we should look for if any

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of us had these sources that had the following qualifications, then please increase your – what

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we call developmental activities, which is where you’re building trust with the person,

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the target, the person you want to recruit, and it turned out that I had

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met an individual who met that criteria exactly. I had met him in a ski class.

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JACK: A ski class. See, Jim is an outgoing social kind of person. He likes outdoor activities like

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running and skiing, and he likes getting together with others to do it. Of course, as he’s doing

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all these social events, he’s keeping an eye on everyone he meets just in case he can use that

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person. In this case, he did remember somebody who would be the perfect target for this operation.

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JIM: So, I then accelerated our developmental phase of the operation,

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where I started going out to lunch with him and having dinners and building that friendship. The

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most important thing is building the trust, and got to the point where I thought okay,

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I could pitch this person, basically lay out a recruitment pitch and recruit him.

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JACK: So, Jim has already made a friend who he knows has access to this privileged

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information that the CIA wants, and now he’s gotta figure out, how do you recruit someone

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who’s a friend to become an inside source of intelligence? Jim remembers his training,

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to look for certain areas of stress or cracks in someone’s life. Jim couldn’t find any areas

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of stress in this guy’s life. He had a good job, a nice wife, a kid, his health, and he was happy

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all around. On top of that, he knew this guy was loyal. What do you offer someone like that to get

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them to betray their country? Jim’s only idea was because they were such close friends, he might be

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able to convince him to share information based on the strength of their friendship,

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but this is not an effective recruitment strategy. It’s risky and it doesn’t work well.

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JIM: That’s typically not going to happen, but Washington was so desperate for sources, they

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absolutely – they agreed to this. So, I went into this meeting with him [MUSIC] and I laid my cards

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on the table, said I – we’ve got – our governments are about to go into these negotiations. I will

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pay you so much a month if you will provide me privileged insights and to share these with me.

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JACK: That’s a big ask. This guy worked for a foreign embassy. He knew Jim worked in the US

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Embassy, and now Jim is offering him cash money for secrets going on in that foreign embassy?

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This must have been a heart-dropping moment for both of them, to just casually come out and ask

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your friend to betray his own country. Espionage is illegal. It’s risky for both sides. Up until

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this point, Jim had not done anything wrong, but now suddenly the wind has changed in the room and

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it got much hotter, because Jim is hyper-aware that what he’s asking is breaking the law.

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JIM: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, typically – and this is not unusual, Jack, the person

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that I’m about to recruit, the person that I’m going to pitch sometimes is already giving me

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classified information. We’re just not rubbing their nose in it. But then at some point,

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I may want to make it abundantly clear, and they know what’s wrong.

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JACK: These were some intense moments for Jim as he waits for the guy to say something in response.

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He started thinking about some fallback strategies and things to say if it didn’t go his way.

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JIM: We have a saying in the CIA; it’s okay to get turned down, but not to get turned in. What

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if he goes to his ambassador and he says you know, that Mr. Lawler, the third secretary of

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the American embassy, he just propositioned me to become a traitor, to commit treason.

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JACK: This is why being a CIA operative is such a delicate job. If he’s too heavy-handed,

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it screws up the operation. If he’s too nervous, that could screw things up, too. At some point,

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you have to make a recruitment pitch, and if you miscalculated your source by the smallest margin,

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you could easily get turned in, which would be an absolute mess for you and your government.

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It could ruin the negotiations or the source could agree but then feed you false information.

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JIM: That’s when he looked at me and he said Jim – he said look, you and I are friends but

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what you’re proposing, that’s morally wrong. Now, I’ve pitched fifty or sixty people in my career,

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Jack, and I can tell you he’s the only guy who ever posed a moral objection

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to a recruitment pitch. Most of the time they object based on one thing and one thing only,

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and that’s fear. So, I went away from that dinner feeling pretty low. Here,

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I got turned down and I’m thinking uh-oh, what’s going to happen next? When is the

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next shoe going to drop? Then after about two or three days, I finally thought you know,

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I better call him and take his temperature and see if he’s mad at me or not. He didn’t act mad

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at the time, but I thought gee, this could be bad. So, I called him up and much to my relief,

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he didn’t hang up in my ear. I said to him you know, I had a really good time last week at

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that dinner. I was wondering if this Friday you might be free again; we could do it again. Well,

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I was greatly relieved when he said you know, Jim, I was thinking the same thing. That would be good.

00:19:57.800 --> 00:20:04.440
So, I thought okay, I don’t think he made a complaint about me to his ambassador, so I’m

00:20:04.440 --> 00:20:11.320
just going to go to this next dinner and make sure we’re still buddies. So, we went. I showed up,

00:20:11.320 --> 00:20:21.160
he showed up. He seemed in a good mood. The waiter came over, dropped the menus off, stepped

00:20:21.160 --> 00:20:29.080
away from the table, and the first words out of my friend’s mouth; Jim, that offer you made me

00:20:29.080 --> 00:20:38.000
last Friday, is that still good? I said yeah, it is. We’re friends; that’s why I offered it to you.

00:20:38.000 --> 00:20:44.160
He said well, what you don’t know is about three days after that dinner, my wife announced that she

00:20:44.160 --> 00:20:52.720
wants a divorce, [MUSIC] and I can’t afford to pay her the alimony to which she’s entitled and put

00:20:52.720 --> 00:20:59.280
my two teenage boys in private schools when we go home next summer, because in my country, you can’t

00:20:59.280 --> 00:21:05.040
get a good education unless you’re in a private school. He said, I can’t do that unless I accept

00:21:05.040 --> 00:21:12.560
your offer. I know it’s morally wrong. Well, I started to say something about it’s never morally

00:21:12.560 --> 00:21:17.560
wrong for two friends to help each other, but he kinda put his hand up and he said Jim, he said

00:21:17.560 --> 00:21:25.480
it’s morally wrong, but I’m going to do it. One of the things you learn in law school is if the judge

00:21:25.480 --> 00:21:33.960
rules in your favor, shut up and get out of court. Don’t argue with him. So, I said okay, great.

00:21:33.960 --> 00:21:40.520
Well, he started bringing me out a lot of classified information, sometimes – I mean,

00:21:40.520 --> 00:21:47.600
sometimes it would be six or seven inches thick. Then I found out it wasn’t just his financial

00:21:47.600 --> 00:21:54.080
needs that convinced him to do this. No, not – I mean, that might have pushed him over the top,

00:21:54.080 --> 00:22:02.080
but that wasn’t it, really. What it was was this guy absolutely detested his ambassador. As he

00:22:02.080 --> 00:22:09.800
would hand me the intelligence that he was giving me, he said Jim, when I hand you this, he says,

00:22:09.800 --> 00:22:17.040
I – what I’m gonna try and tell you right now is I absolutely hate my ambassador. He claims credit

00:22:17.040 --> 00:22:23.440
for everything that I do and everything that everybody else in the embassy does. This worthless

00:22:23.440 --> 00:22:29.560
son of a gun, he goes around this country saying what a great guy he is when the whole time,

00:22:29.560 --> 00:22:34.960
he’s stealing credit. He says, as I hand you this intelligence, it’s like I’m kicking that son of

00:22:34.960 --> 00:22:42.920
a bitch in the face. I said hey, we’re buddies. Go get me some more of this and let’s kick that

00:22:42.920 --> 00:22:49.760
son of a bitch again. He did, he did. He was – so, it was – what I’m trying to tell you,

00:22:49.760 --> 00:22:59.880
Jack, is revenge is a big, big motivator in espionage. Because most people – like he did,

00:22:59.880 --> 00:23:06.360
initially on the moral basis, most people have been taught from a early age you don’t betray

00:23:06.360 --> 00:23:12.520
your family, you don’t betray your country, you don’t betray your friends. But in his case,

00:23:12.520 --> 00:23:19.100
he felt like he had been betrayed first. So, all he was doing was evening the score.

00:23:19.100 --> 00:23:27.320
JACK: Remember MICE? Money, ideology, coercion, and ego? Revenge falls under ego. This guy really

00:23:27.320 --> 00:23:32.520
didn’t like his boss taking credit for his work, and because he didn’t like his boss,

00:23:32.520 --> 00:23:38.080
this really worked well for Jim. So, his source provided Jim with key information about the

00:23:38.080 --> 00:23:44.040
negotiations that country was conducting, and Jim passed this information back to Washington,

00:23:44.040 --> 00:23:49.400
who then used the intelligence to their advantage. As it turned out, the US used this information

00:23:49.400 --> 00:23:55.400
when negotiating with that country, and was able to save billions of dollars from this.

00:23:55.400 --> 00:24:00.600
Because imagine doing some kind of negotiation deal with someone when you already know what

00:24:00.600 --> 00:24:08.160
the lowest number they’re willing to negotiate with. It was a major success for Jim and the US.

00:24:08.160 --> 00:24:14.400
This was the beginning of what went on to be a twenty-five-year-long career for Jim as a case

00:24:14.400 --> 00:24:21.280
officer in the CIA. Over that time, he pitched lots of people and recruited many to be sources,

00:24:21.280 --> 00:24:25.760
and he did this in over a dozen countries all over the world. Over the course of his career,

00:24:25.760 --> 00:24:30.980
he mastered the art of persuading people and getting them to give him information.

00:24:30.980 --> 00:24:38.440
JIM: Sometimes it may be something very innocent. I might go to a lunch with somebody and they

00:24:38.440 --> 00:24:43.600
share some things not really classified, but something that’s maybe a little inappropriate.

00:24:43.600 --> 00:24:47.240
JACK: To Jim, these are signs that the person could become

00:24:47.240 --> 00:24:50.520
a source, [MUSIC] and he’s got a few tricks up his sleeve to

00:24:50.520 --> 00:24:55.320
try to recruit them so they can provide much more valuable information to him.

00:24:55.320 --> 00:25:00.560
JIM: I would come back at the next luncheon; I’d say you know, that information you shared with me,

00:25:00.560 --> 00:25:06.840
I’ve gotta thank you for that. I found out that Washington liked that so much, they gave me a

00:25:06.840 --> 00:25:12.800
$2,000 performance award. I can’t take it all; I’ve gotta share it with you, because this was

00:25:12.800 --> 00:25:19.760
your intellectual property. I had maybe $1,000 or $500, and I’d have it in an envelope and I’d send

00:25:19.760 --> 00:25:24.760
it across the table, and they say oh, you don’t need to do that. I say no, you gotta take it,

00:25:24.760 --> 00:25:31.080
because I feel guilty now. I took your words and Washington’s paid me, and we’re making a

00:25:31.080 --> 00:25:37.600
great team here. Get them boosted up. Somebody once said that I’m nothing but a cheerleader,

00:25:37.600 --> 00:25:43.200
and I said well, okay, if I make you feel good, if I say you know what, the president of the United

00:25:43.200 --> 00:25:50.660
States read this and he absolutely respects you like you wouldn’t believe, appeal to their ego.

00:25:50.660 --> 00:25:53.980
JACK: Another strategy he uses is called a reverse pitch.

00:25:53.980 --> 00:25:59.280
JIM: I’ll say well, Jack, two friends of mine – one guy, he had something that the

00:25:59.280 --> 00:26:04.120
other one needed and they worked on this, and man, it just worked out so well for both

00:26:04.120 --> 00:26:08.800
of them. Then after a while, Jack says well, gee, Jim, you and I could do that. I say oh,

00:26:08.800 --> 00:26:14.840
tell me how we could do that. It’s basically where you get the person to basically volunteer.

00:26:14.840 --> 00:26:20.440
JACK: Here’s one that’s really bizarre; sometimes the CIA recruits people who don’t have any access

00:26:20.440 --> 00:26:25.880
to any information, but they do what’s called a seeding operation, where they help get this

00:26:25.880 --> 00:26:32.120
source into a position that would give them access to the intelligence that the US wanted.

00:26:32.120 --> 00:26:37.200
JIM: So, you recruit the person before they have access, and then you seed them

00:26:37.200 --> 00:26:42.360
in or feed them into that organization to be a penetration. The most famous

00:26:42.360 --> 00:26:47.906
seeding operation in history was run by the Russians. It was called the Cambridge Five.

00:26:47.906 --> 00:26:52.760
JACK: [MUSIC] The Cambridge Five is a fascinating story. University of Cambridge is a prestigious

00:26:52.760 --> 00:26:57.600
school in the UK. Lots of students that go through there end up in high ranks of society, especially

00:26:57.600 --> 00:27:04.440
in the 1930s. So, what the Soviets did was they got one of their spies to be a professor at the

00:27:04.440 --> 00:27:10.640
university. This was right before World War II, so there was a lot of talk about Marxism, fascism,

00:27:10.640 --> 00:27:17.120
and capitalism. Well, the Soviet spy professor convinced one of the students that Marxism is

00:27:17.120 --> 00:27:22.600
better equipped to handle the oncoming problems of the world. Then he started asking the students if

00:27:22.600 --> 00:27:28.520
they wanted to help fight fascism. This is how the first of the Cambridge Five was recruited,

00:27:28.520 --> 00:27:33.840
Kim Philby. Now, once Kim was onboard to help, it was easy to get him to convince some of their

00:27:33.840 --> 00:27:38.520
other friends to help. Soon, there were five students within the University of Cambridge

00:27:38.520 --> 00:27:45.640
that were now working for the Soviets. But there’s not really much for some college kids to report,

00:27:45.640 --> 00:27:50.800
and that’s where the seeding comes in. It wasn’t about the information they had now;

00:27:50.800 --> 00:27:55.400
it was about the information they could get access to later in their careers.

00:27:55.400 --> 00:28:00.160
JIM: So, they recruited them and then fed them into the British Intelligence Service

00:28:00.160 --> 00:28:05.400
and the British Domestic Service. The most famous was a man named Kim Philby,

00:28:05.400 --> 00:28:12.080
and Kim Philby was so successful, he almost became head of British Intelligence, he and

00:28:12.080 --> 00:28:18.160
his four, the other four. Incredible amounts of secret information they

00:28:18.160 --> 00:28:22.860
provided the Russians over the years. Fabulously successful seeding operation.

00:28:22.860 --> 00:28:28.760
JACK: It’s absolutely incredible that the Russians would recruit teenagers and then

00:28:28.760 --> 00:28:36.080
help them get into top-secret jobs. Then the Russians would get fed this classified information

00:28:36.080 --> 00:28:42.000
all throughout World War II, even. This was one of the most successful spy rings ever,

00:28:42.000 --> 00:28:46.800
and I believe the CIA took notes on this kind of seeding operation and has conducted their

00:28:46.800 --> 00:28:52.800
own seeding operations since then. Now, sometimes when Jim is recruiting a source,

00:28:52.800 --> 00:28:58.000
he keeps his cover. He has an alternative persona and acts like someone else. But

00:28:58.000 --> 00:29:03.080
there are times when he has to drop this cover and say something like hey, well,

00:29:03.080 --> 00:29:09.440
actually, I’m a CIA officer and I have an offer for you. They call this dropping cover,

00:29:09.440 --> 00:29:13.440
and it’s gotta be a weird experience to make friends with someone for months and then

00:29:13.440 --> 00:29:18.900
suddenly discover they’re really a CIA officer and they want access to your classified information.

00:29:18.900 --> 00:29:24.120
JIM: It would depend on the target. If I think the most effective thing would be break cover,

00:29:24.120 --> 00:29:32.280
tell them I’m really a CIA officer, then I would do that. Or I might make allusions to my agency,

00:29:32.280 --> 00:29:38.440
my organization, without rubbing their nose in it. I’ve recruited people under commercial cover where

00:29:38.440 --> 00:29:43.520
I pretended to be a businessman. Basically, I pretended to be a – what we call a NOC,

00:29:43.520 --> 00:29:49.520
because they might be willing to, say, accept a consulting fee and provide

00:29:49.520 --> 00:29:56.040
information to a businessperson but not to a person from the American embassy,

00:29:56.040 --> 00:30:03.120
and I’ve done that successfully, where I pose as a businessperson and said you know, this is great;

00:30:03.120 --> 00:30:08.840
we could – I’m a consultant. I would like to hire you as a consultant, and if you just provide me

00:30:08.840 --> 00:30:14.560
all of the information on this, then I will pay you so much a month. But never any mention either

00:30:14.560 --> 00:30:21.720
of CIA or of the US government, ‘cause some people would find it more palatable to deal with, say,

00:30:21.720 --> 00:30:27.280
a businessperson than to know that they’re involved in real, legitimate espionage.

00:30:27.280 --> 00:30:31.320
JACK: What’s the most you think you’ve ended up paying someone?

00:30:31.320 --> 00:30:34.960
JIM: Oh, I know exactly. It’s highly classified,

00:30:34.960 --> 00:30:38.660
but let me put it this way; it’s in the millions. It was worth it.

00:30:38.660 --> 00:30:41.500
JACK: It was worth it because it saved the country…

00:30:41.500 --> 00:30:48.220
JIM: Potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives. [MUSIC] What’s that worth?

00:30:48.220 --> 00:30:54.480
JACK: Once a CIA case officer successfully recruits a source, then they give the source

00:30:54.480 --> 00:30:59.300
to a handler, which is a person who will work with the source to keep the information flowing.

00:30:59.300 --> 00:31:04.800
JIM: I was also a handler because once you recruit a source, then you are expected to

00:31:04.800 --> 00:31:12.040
handle the source; meet that source clandestinely, get the information that he or she are privy to,

00:31:12.040 --> 00:31:18.040
and then you report that information in classified channels back to Washington where it’s sorted out

00:31:18.040 --> 00:31:23.560
and combined with the intelligence from other case officers or perhaps all source

00:31:23.560 --> 00:31:29.760
intelligence from the signals intelligence that the NSA captures through phone conversations or

00:31:29.760 --> 00:31:37.120
through computer penetrations. But I would be a handler; I would set up a time to meet

00:31:37.120 --> 00:31:43.600
my sources clandestinely and I would find out exactly what kind of information – how much

00:31:43.600 --> 00:31:48.220
information they had stolen and then I would report that information back to Washington.

00:31:48.220 --> 00:31:54.360
JACK: How are you getting data from these people, information from your recruits, from your sources?

00:31:54.360 --> 00:31:56.360
JIM: Sometimes they would actually hand me,

00:31:56.360 --> 00:31:59.940
physically hand me documents, classified documents.

00:31:59.940 --> 00:32:02.560
JACK: How do you do that secretly? That’s what I’m wondering.

00:32:02.560 --> 00:32:07.880
JIM: Well, they’d meet me at a safe site, maybe at a safe house or at a car pickup or a brush

00:32:07.880 --> 00:32:14.400
pass where they hand me things. They might also just observe stuff. We have a verbal debriefing;

00:32:14.400 --> 00:32:20.320
I would ask them things, take notes. Again, meet maybe in a hotel room or a safe house

00:32:20.320 --> 00:32:25.400
or some place out of sight. We might equip them with what we call a covert communication

00:32:25.400 --> 00:32:29.960
device where they can electronically provide you with the information you

00:32:29.960 --> 00:32:36.400
need using some type of – nowadays, some type of encrypted system. These days,

00:32:36.400 --> 00:32:41.920
they might download stuff to a thumb drive and provide it to me either physically or

00:32:41.920 --> 00:32:48.360
do a dead drop where they hide the thumb drive or whatever it is somewhere at a pre-arranged

00:32:48.360 --> 00:32:54.360
spot. They make a mark on a wall that I observe, then I go by and I service

00:32:54.360 --> 00:33:00.340
the dead drop. I recover the thumb drive. So, there’s a bunch of ways you can do it.

00:33:00.340 --> 00:33:05.240
JACK: Yeah, yeah. It’s just all out of my purview, right? The mark on the wall;

00:33:05.240 --> 00:33:08.800
I walk by that wall, I don’t notice the mark, but you walk by it, you do.

00:33:08.800 --> 00:33:13.640
JIM: Right. So, that means that you or somebody, my source, has put something in

00:33:13.640 --> 00:33:18.600
a dead drop which may be miles away, but they’ve gone by with a piece of chalk or

00:33:18.600 --> 00:33:24.400
put a piece of tape on a wall. Nobody else even notices, but I notice that my friend, my source,

00:33:24.400 --> 00:33:30.720
has now concealed a thumb drive or some type of information somewhere that I need to recover.

00:33:30.720 --> 00:33:35.440
JACK: Gosh, there’s got to be a whole secret language that you’ve gotta learn,

00:33:35.440 --> 00:33:40.120
like which way your shoelaces are tied is your – are your glasses up on your

00:33:40.120 --> 00:33:43.840
head or are they down on your nose? All these different things I bet mean stuff.

00:33:43.840 --> 00:33:48.720
JIM: Right. If I’m meeting somebody and my source – I’ve told him look,

00:33:48.720 --> 00:33:53.600
if I see you take your glasses off, that means that you think you’ve been followed,

00:33:53.600 --> 00:34:00.040
and so, I’m not gonna meet you. Or if I’ve got my hat cocked to a certain side,

00:34:00.040 --> 00:34:04.800
that means just keep walking; don’t approach me. On the other hand, if I’ve got a certain

00:34:04.800 --> 00:34:10.520
color book or a newspaper in my hand, in my right hand, that means it’s okay; come on,

00:34:10.520 --> 00:34:17.520
let’s go to the nearest cafe or to a hotel somewhere. So, you have these secret signals

00:34:17.520 --> 00:34:23.820
to say that either you’re under observation or no, it’s – actually, it’s safe, and we can meet.

00:34:23.820 --> 00:34:30.040
JACK: What about encryption? You know, one-time pads and these kind of things.

00:34:30.040 --> 00:34:35.720
JIM: Yeah, those are all used. We would encrypt messages and send it,

00:34:35.720 --> 00:34:40.360
and then you have something – you decrypt it. For years and years,

00:34:40.360 --> 00:34:46.560
we and the Russians would use one-time pads which are basically, like they say, one time,

00:34:46.560 --> 00:34:51.200
you would decrypt a message, get a series of numbers and things, and then you’d have

00:34:51.200 --> 00:34:58.146
a code book that you would look in. It’s very tedious, but virtually impossible to break.

00:34:58.146 --> 00:35:00.680
JACK: [MUSIC] We’re gonna take a quick break here, but you’re gonna want to come back,

00:35:00.680 --> 00:35:04.400
because we’re gonna talk about one of the most important CIA

00:35:04.400 --> 00:35:12.320
operations ever. In another one of Jim’s assignments, he was handling a source,

00:35:12.320 --> 00:35:16.520
but that source retired. He was still providing good intel, though.

00:35:16.520 --> 00:35:23.680
JIM: Very friendly guy, much beloved by most of the people in his foreign ministry,

00:35:23.680 --> 00:35:30.160
and he started giving me some excellent information coming from a young woman who

00:35:30.160 --> 00:35:36.660
had decided to spend the summer with her brother who was my source’s best friend.

00:35:36.660 --> 00:35:41.760
JACK: Okay, so Jim had a good source to get intel on what’s going on in that target country,

00:35:41.760 --> 00:35:48.880
but that source retired. He was slowly losing his connections for gathering intel. But now

00:35:48.880 --> 00:35:55.760
Jim is hearing his old source is getting good intel from a woman. Now, the woman

00:35:55.760 --> 00:36:03.680
was a secretary at the foreign ministry inside her home country. Jim wasn’t in that country,

00:36:03.680 --> 00:36:09.040
but wanted intel from that country. But for Jim to go into that country to try to

00:36:09.040 --> 00:36:16.200
recruit sources, well, that’s a bit risky. So, luck would have it that the woman his

00:36:16.200 --> 00:36:21.400
source was getting intel from just happened to be traveling to the same country where

00:36:21.400 --> 00:36:26.840
Jim was. She was just taking a month-long break from work to visit her family. Well,

00:36:26.840 --> 00:36:33.160
this was quite an opportunity for Jim. If he could convert her while she’s on vacation and then she

00:36:33.160 --> 00:36:40.320
goes back home to work in the foreign ministry again, it could be a gold mine of intelligence.

00:36:40.320 --> 00:36:44.560
JIM: My friend, since he was working for us,

00:36:44.560 --> 00:36:49.360
he takes her out sightseeing, took her for coffees and dinners and things like that,

00:36:49.360 --> 00:36:55.520
and developed a good relationship with her. She was – really loved our guy. She liked him a lot.

00:36:55.520 --> 00:36:58.600
JACK: As a secretary in a foreign ministry,

00:36:58.600 --> 00:37:04.880
she wasn’t a decision-maker at all, but she saw what decisions were being made. So,

00:37:04.880 --> 00:37:08.600
now that he had learned about this secretary working for the foreign ministry,

00:37:08.600 --> 00:37:15.160
she made a really good target for Jim. Jim gets his source to arrange a meeting with her,

00:37:15.160 --> 00:37:21.120
but it was important that Jim not uncover his source. He did not want her to know that this guy

00:37:21.120 --> 00:37:28.360
is feeding information to the CIA. It might spook her. It might make her turn that guy in. For this,

00:37:28.360 --> 00:37:34.467
Jim decided to come up with a pretext, a cover story for why he needed information from her.

00:37:34.467 --> 00:37:37.560
JIM: [MUSIC] So, I had to engineer a scenario.

00:37:37.560 --> 00:37:40.920
JACK: Jim comes up with a pretext. He’s

00:37:40.920 --> 00:37:45.980
gonna call himself Jack Mitchell and pretend to be a commodities trader.

00:37:45.980 --> 00:37:51.560
JIM: I told him to show up at a certain restaurant at a certain day, and then I would show up a

00:37:51.560 --> 00:37:57.760
little bit later and pretend that I was waiting for someone. So, he’s seated near the door with

00:37:57.760 --> 00:38:03.960
this young woman and they’re having dinner, and he sees me come in and he turns to the young

00:38:03.960 --> 00:38:09.320
lady and he said oh, look, there’s Mr. Jack Mitchell. I just met him at a cocktail party

00:38:09.320 --> 00:38:14.400
three nights ago. I’m gonna go over and say hello, which was the polite thing to do. So,

00:38:14.400 --> 00:38:21.600
he did, and I chatted with him. Then after about five, ten minutes when my supposed dinner date

00:38:21.600 --> 00:38:25.360
has never shown up, he turns to her and says, why don’t we invite Mr. Mitchell to come over

00:38:25.360 --> 00:38:30.520
and at least sit down and have a drink with us? I pretended like oh, no, I’m sure my friend will be

00:38:30.520 --> 00:38:36.400
here any moment. He said well, look, just sit down with us, have a drink until your friend comes.

00:38:36.400 --> 00:38:41.160
JACK: He sits down at the table with his old source and this potentially new source that

00:38:41.160 --> 00:38:46.280
he’s trying to recruit, the secretary. She didn’t suspect this was anything other than

00:38:46.280 --> 00:38:51.920
a chance encounter, but of course it wasn’t, and now Jim needs to start making his moves.

00:38:51.920 --> 00:39:00.080
JIM: Introduced myself in my alias, Jack Mitchell, and I said that I was a oil and gas commodities

00:39:00.080 --> 00:39:06.840
trader. It turns out her nation is one of those nations in the world that is absolutely blessed

00:39:06.840 --> 00:39:14.600
with a – riches of gas and oil. [MUSIC] It’s obvious that her nation has access to a lot

00:39:14.600 --> 00:39:19.200
of information on what the organization for the petroleum exporting countries,

00:39:19.200 --> 00:39:23.760
OPEC, is doing, what their quotas would be, and that kind of information could be

00:39:23.760 --> 00:39:28.060
worth a gold mine to somebody who’s an oil and gas commodities trader.

00:39:28.060 --> 00:39:32.080
JACK: Hm, interesting cover, a commodities trader.

00:39:32.080 --> 00:39:36.960
It works because trade deals in her country do influence the stock market,

00:39:36.960 --> 00:39:41.400
so he was just making clear how valuable this kind of information would be to him.

00:39:41.400 --> 00:39:46.760
JIM: You can make or lose a fortune in oil, and if I have insights into what her country’s going

00:39:46.760 --> 00:39:53.200
to do, this – I’m not making this up; you really could make a fortune in the oil and gas market.

00:39:53.200 --> 00:39:58.720
So, I’m going to pay her a certain amount to give me advance heads up which way her government is

00:39:58.720 --> 00:40:04.160
going on quotas and things like that. Are they cheating on their other OPEC partners?

00:40:04.160 --> 00:40:08.280
JACK: At least, that was his plan, but this was the first dinner. He didn’t

00:40:08.280 --> 00:40:13.160
ask for any of this information on the day he met her. No, he’s gotta finesse it and take it

00:40:13.160 --> 00:40:17.640
slow to build the relationship. But he starts putting these questions in her head at least,

00:40:17.640 --> 00:40:21.260
making it clear what kind of information he would love to get his hands on.

00:40:21.260 --> 00:40:25.640
JIM: What are they going to do, how much oil are they shipping out of their ports? I mean,

00:40:25.640 --> 00:40:28.440
it really and truly would be worth a lot of money.

00:40:28.440 --> 00:40:33.080
JACK: First dinner went great. Jim or Jack Mitchell hit it off with her,

00:40:33.080 --> 00:40:35.300
and their relationship was going well.

00:40:35.300 --> 00:40:41.800
JIM: So, I said gosh, this is great. How about we have lunch together? She thought sure,

00:40:41.800 --> 00:40:48.880
why not? So, I asked her out to lunch a day or two later, took her to lunch. We had a good time,

00:40:48.880 --> 00:40:53.880
and within one or two meetings, [MUSIC] I proposed a commercial relationship with her,

00:40:53.880 --> 00:40:59.960
saying that if she would give me the privileged insights into what her country

00:40:59.960 --> 00:41:05.540
was doing in the oil and gas market, then I would provide her with so much money a month.

00:41:05.540 --> 00:41:10.080
JACK: Jim’s source had given him more information about the secretary,

00:41:10.080 --> 00:41:12.320
which showed Jim where her cracks were.

00:41:12.320 --> 00:41:19.280
JIM: She had a health issue that needed some attention. Her government back home

00:41:19.280 --> 00:41:24.800
wouldn’t pay for it. It was about a $5,000 medical procedure, because their philosophy

00:41:24.800 --> 00:41:29.280
was if you want us to pay for it, then you come home and we’ll do it here, in our home country.

00:41:29.280 --> 00:41:34.440
But we’re not going to pay somebody in this European country to do it. She didn’t want to

00:41:34.440 --> 00:41:40.920
stop her very nice summer vacation with her brother, so she was faced with this dilemma;

00:41:40.920 --> 00:41:47.920
I need 5,000 bucks to get this procedure done. I don’t have it. So, naturally, her new best friend,

00:41:47.920 --> 00:41:56.880
Jack Mitchell, proposes that for $5,000 and a certain monthly stipend, if she would share these

00:41:56.880 --> 00:42:03.060
insights with me, then she’s going to get this great consulting fee and the $5,000 signing bonus.

00:42:03.060 --> 00:42:07.440
JACK: I guess this one’s a little bit softer of an ask, ‘cause it sounds like oh, I’m just trying

00:42:07.440 --> 00:42:11.560
to make money on the stock market, so hey, would it be possible for you to give me some insight

00:42:11.560 --> 00:42:17.760
or info. That’s not as scary of an ask versus can you betray your country so my country can…?

00:42:17.760 --> 00:42:22.560
JIM: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s a much softer thing because she’s – all she’s doing is

00:42:22.560 --> 00:42:25.600
giving me a little heads up on which way the oil and gas market’s going to go,

00:42:25.600 --> 00:42:31.760
and I’m gonna make a fortune and she’s gonna make money, too. So, is it technically illegal? Yes,

00:42:31.760 --> 00:42:39.560
but it’s just consulting. It’s not treason. So, she readily agreed. We had a bottle of champagne,

00:42:39.560 --> 00:42:45.800
we celebrated. I went back to my home office and people were jumping up and down because

00:42:45.800 --> 00:42:49.480
she was the first one from this country who had been recruited in a long time.

00:42:49.480 --> 00:42:55.520
JACK: Success. Jim recruited a secretary in a foreign ministry. Now he could reliably

00:42:55.520 --> 00:43:01.360
continue to get intel from her and information about this nation. It was a big win for Jim.

00:43:01.360 --> 00:43:05.640
JIM: Then my boss dropped the hammer on me and he said now you gotta go back and tell her that you

00:43:05.640 --> 00:43:12.640
really work for the CIA. [MUSIC] I was stunned, ‘cause I hadn’t thought about that. He said we

00:43:12.640 --> 00:43:17.800
– when she goes back to her home country, we’re not gonna be able to communicate with her except

00:43:17.800 --> 00:43:22.360
through some kind of clandestine communication system, because we don’t have an embassy in

00:43:22.360 --> 00:43:28.240
that country anymore. He said there’s a lot of questions we need to ask her that we know she has

00:43:28.240 --> 00:43:33.440
access to that have nothing to do with oil and gas. So, you gotta go down and you gotta break

00:43:33.440 --> 00:43:39.360
cover and tell her she’s really working for the CIA. To be fair, you really need to let her know

00:43:39.360 --> 00:43:44.400
that this is a much more sensitive relationship than just a commercial consultancy, because if

00:43:44.400 --> 00:43:50.360
she thinks it’s a commercial consultancy, she might brag to some of her friends at her office

00:43:50.360 --> 00:43:57.560
and they may think, what is she doing? So, we need to let her know this is a sensitive relationship.

00:43:57.560 --> 00:44:04.680
I thought oh, jeez. So, I go down there and I apologize, I break cover, tell her I really

00:44:04.680 --> 00:44:11.360
work for the CIA, and then of course, that’s when she looks at me and she said Jack, look, listen;

00:44:11.360 --> 00:44:17.160
you’re a good guy, but she said before, that was just commercial consulting. Yeah, a little bit on

00:44:17.160 --> 00:44:23.240
the shady side, but it’s not espionage. Now you’re asking me to be a spy. Said, I can’t do this. I’ll

00:44:23.240 --> 00:44:29.440
try and get you your money back, but there’s no way I can do this. Of course, I was thinking lady,

00:44:29.440 --> 00:44:35.500
you’re a smart gal. I don’t blame you one bit, so I didn’t argue with her at all.

00:44:35.500 --> 00:44:38.840
JACK: Jim goes back and tells his boss she quit,

00:44:38.840 --> 00:44:43.760
just like he thought she would. But his boss was not having it. He wanted Jim

00:44:43.760 --> 00:44:47.860
to find a way to recruit her and said no, this is not acceptable; try harder.

00:44:47.860 --> 00:44:51.760
JIM: Nothing like a little pressure. She was scheduled,

00:44:51.760 --> 00:44:56.840
at that point, to leave in about three weeks and go home. So, I thought god,

00:44:56.840 --> 00:45:04.120
is there any way I can salvage this thing and turn her around? I struggled with that for a

00:45:04.120 --> 00:45:09.760
good two or three days. [MUSIC] I called her up; I said could we have a going – farewell

00:45:09.760 --> 00:45:17.080
dinner? ‘Cause even though she’s now turned me down and quit, she wasn’t that mad at me. So,

00:45:17.080 --> 00:45:24.040
I said how about a farewell dinner? She said, that sounds fine. So, I arranged to meet her at

00:45:24.040 --> 00:45:31.200
an extremely romantic restaurant that just had beautiful views of the mountains and the lakes.

00:45:31.200 --> 00:45:34.360
JACK: There weren’t any romantic intentions with this dinner,

00:45:34.360 --> 00:45:38.240
though. Jim wanted to try to salvage the relationship which fell apart.

00:45:38.240 --> 00:45:43.420
He wanted to seem like a nice guy, charming, caring, and maybe even come off as a friend.

00:45:43.420 --> 00:45:49.640
JIM: She liked me, I liked her. It was going to be a very nice farewell dinner, and yet, I had

00:45:49.640 --> 00:45:57.640
no intention of trying to dissuade her or persuade her to change her mind. I’d just given up on that,

00:45:57.640 --> 00:46:04.440
but what I had done when I arrived in the city that she was in, I had bought a little bud vase in

00:46:04.440 --> 00:46:11.600
a gift shop that I paid the equivalent of maybe $30 or $40 for. It was about six inches tall,

00:46:11.600 --> 00:46:18.360
very delicate, very pretty little bud vase. I had it gift-wrapped and I took it off to this

00:46:18.360 --> 00:46:26.680
very nice restaurant. We sat there and chatted for probably a good hour and a half or more just about

00:46:26.680 --> 00:46:33.080
our families and lives and things like that. So, here we are, seated at the restaurant, dessert and

00:46:33.080 --> 00:46:39.260
coffee have come and gone, and my foot touches the present that I had bought her under the table. I

00:46:39.260 --> 00:46:44.840
had almost forgotten about it, and I pulled it out and I put it in front of her. I said here,

00:46:44.840 --> 00:46:50.520
I did get you something. [MUSIC] She said well, what is it? I said well, just open it. You’ll see.

00:46:50.520 --> 00:46:56.680
So, she opened it and she’s looking at this little bud vase and I said, what I’d like you to do is

00:46:56.680 --> 00:47:03.400
I’d like you to take that with you when you go home in a couple of weeks, and if you want to,

00:47:03.400 --> 00:47:07.040
maybe you could even take it to the foreign ministry and put it on your desk. When you

00:47:07.040 --> 00:47:15.640
look at it, you’d be able to think about me. She looked at it, stared at it, didn’t say anything,

00:47:15.640 --> 00:47:22.600
and then I noticed that she was crying. I thought oh, what did I say to upset her? I heard her say

00:47:22.600 --> 00:47:30.080
something under her breath and I leaned in and I said, what did you say? She said Jack,

00:47:30.080 --> 00:47:37.040
I can do this. I said I know you can do it, but I said, I don’t want you doing this unless

00:47:37.040 --> 00:47:41.760
you really want to do it, which I really – I didn’t want her to do it if she wasn’t really

00:47:41.760 --> 00:47:50.640
in wholeheartedly. She said no, Jack, I can do this. And boy, could she do it. We trained her,

00:47:50.640 --> 00:47:58.760
we sent her in. She worked for us for five years and she identified every deep cover intelligence

00:47:58.760 --> 00:48:05.720
operative from her nation, all over the world. She was a secretary but she was a secretary to

00:48:05.720 --> 00:48:11.380
the foreign minister, so consequently, everything he saw, she saw, and we saw.

00:48:11.380 --> 00:48:14.240
JACK: It’s unbelievable that the CIA has these

00:48:14.240 --> 00:48:18.980
kind of eyes and ears that are – it’s in the secretary of the foreign minister.

00:48:18.980 --> 00:48:22.760
JIM: Well, we did.

00:48:22.760 --> 00:48:29.960
JACK: Of course, most nations with an intelligence branch do the same thing to us. They profile

00:48:29.960 --> 00:48:35.120
the people who work in US embassies or military bases, they hang out in the bars in Washington,

00:48:35.120 --> 00:48:40.760
DC, hoping to rub elbows with some senators or clerks or anyone who might have good intel

00:48:40.760 --> 00:48:46.480
to report back home. There’s a huge network of spies that span the globe,

00:48:46.480 --> 00:48:52.400
and it makes you wonder, you know, what would it take for someone to get you to flip,

00:48:52.400 --> 00:48:58.640
where you’re now handing information over to an intelligence officer in another country? Sometimes

00:48:58.640 --> 00:49:02.920
the bar is just real low. I’ve seen people who had bad days at work or just don’t know better

00:49:02.920 --> 00:49:07.160
and post stuff to social media, exposing some of the company’s secrets. But then,

00:49:07.160 --> 00:49:11.360
there are others who might feed information to someone for a few hundred dollars.

00:49:11.360 --> 00:49:17.760
But not you and me, right? We’re good, strong, loyal people who don’t accept money from some

00:49:17.760 --> 00:49:25.000
random person asking for information, [MUSIC] unless maybe you’re in a tough situation,

00:49:25.000 --> 00:49:30.600
you want your kid to attend a nice school but you can’t afford it, or your mother is dying

00:49:30.600 --> 00:49:35.280
and you can’t afford the doctor bills, or something else that makes you think,

00:49:35.280 --> 00:49:41.880
you know what? If I can get $10,000, my life would see a big improvement, and just then,

00:49:41.880 --> 00:49:47.040
someone from the CIA comes up and offers it to you and wants some classified information

00:49:47.040 --> 00:49:53.760
from you. Now, that becomes a much harder thing to turn down. It just kinda clicked

00:49:53.760 --> 00:49:59.360
in my head where people asked me hey, do you think everything is hackable? Every company,

00:49:59.360 --> 00:50:06.880
every computer? I say yes, because at a nation state level, you’ll have people like you who

00:50:06.880 --> 00:50:13.880
are getting people to work at the company that you want to take secrets from or information,

00:50:13.880 --> 00:50:18.480
and the NSA might be asking you for something like hey, can you get someone in this company

00:50:18.480 --> 00:50:23.860
for us? It’s not always a state secret; sometimes it’s, I don’t know, something else.

00:50:23.860 --> 00:50:28.000
JIM: Right. All of your cyber-defenses are worthless if I have somebody on the

00:50:28.000 --> 00:50:35.840
inside. It’s just totally worthless. If I have an employee in an organization I want to penetrate,

00:50:35.840 --> 00:50:40.200
then it doesn’t – I don’t care what their cyber-defenses are. It becomes

00:50:40.200 --> 00:50:45.120
an electronic Maginot Line where you think you’re protected and you’re not.

00:50:45.120 --> 00:50:51.760
JACK: Oh, and by the way, the CIA often works closely with the NSA to conduct certain missions.

00:50:51.760 --> 00:50:57.120
Sometimes the CIA needs information that the NSA can get, and sometimes the NSA needs help from the

00:50:57.120 --> 00:51:03.600
CIA, because the NSA collects signals intelligence and the CIA collects human intelligence, and when

00:51:03.600 --> 00:51:09.680
you combine these two together, it really becomes an unstoppable force. I guess that just makes

00:51:09.680 --> 00:51:15.080
me wonder, is there any kind of strategy to keep the CIA from getting people to leak information?

00:51:15.080 --> 00:51:20.400
JIM: Let me reinforce that; there is no way. There’s ways maybe to detect it over time,

00:51:20.400 --> 00:51:26.840
there’s ways to filter out some people. The best thing to do with your employees is to build trust,

00:51:26.840 --> 00:51:32.080
make them feel like they’re part of a team. If you do that, if they feel like they’ve been treated

00:51:32.080 --> 00:51:38.640
fairly, it makes my job as an operations officer very difficult to penetrate your organization.

00:51:38.640 --> 00:51:44.680
But if you don’t treat them right, you’re setting these people up to betray you, and they’ll betray

00:51:44.680 --> 00:51:49.760
a company much more quickly than they would betray a government. [MUSIC] This sounds self-serving,

00:51:49.760 --> 00:51:55.880
but I actually – I am a consultant; I’ve done talks like this. I have a talk that I call Soul

00:51:55.880 --> 00:52:03.640
Catcher where I give about an hour and a half’s worth of illustrations of how I recruited sources,

00:52:03.640 --> 00:52:08.920
and some big companies have hired me to give their employees this type of talk.

00:52:08.920 --> 00:52:14.080
The basic message that I try to convey is if something is too good to be true,

00:52:14.080 --> 00:52:20.640
it’s too good to be true. I talk about how I took advantage of people, exploited them,

00:52:20.640 --> 00:52:29.120
recruited them as sources just to enlighten people to be aware of people like me in their orbit.

00:52:29.120 --> 00:52:34.840
Again, I want to stress that if a company treats its employees well, it’s much more

00:52:34.840 --> 00:52:40.880
difficult for me to develop a relationship with them and to recruit them. It’s not impossible,

00:52:40.880 --> 00:52:46.960
but it makes my job a lot more difficult. Yet, you don’t give people everything they want. You can’t.

00:52:46.960 --> 00:52:53.200
But if people feel like they’ve been treated fairly and that everybody in the company gets

00:52:53.200 --> 00:53:00.240
basically the same fair deal, that really makes it hard to penetrate and be aware of stresses,

00:53:00.240 --> 00:53:04.640
be aware of people that are under stress, because that’s when they’re most vulnerable.

00:53:04.640 --> 00:53:10.120
I’m not saying that everybody who goes through a divorce is susceptible, but I can tell you this;

00:53:10.120 --> 00:53:15.440
in a certain short time period, I recruited three people going through divorces, and headquarters

00:53:15.440 --> 00:53:20.200
jokingly referred to me as Doctor Divorce. Because if you’re going through a divorce,

00:53:20.200 --> 00:53:25.480
you are in an absolute psychological and financial tumult, and if somebody like me is

00:53:25.480 --> 00:53:32.760
in your orbit and can become your best friend and I detect that you’ve got something I need, guess

00:53:32.760 --> 00:53:40.320
what? You become very susceptible to a recruitment approach. I’m looking for the loner who comes out,

00:53:40.320 --> 00:53:47.720
and he’s disaffected, he’s maybe shunned by the others, and guess which one we’re looking for?

00:53:47.720 --> 00:53:51.640
It’s that guy. We’re looking for the one who doesn’t feel like they’re part of the team.

00:53:51.640 --> 00:53:55.240
JACK: Jim has been an avid runner most of his life,

00:53:55.240 --> 00:53:58.100
and wherever he gets assigned, he likes to go on a run there.

00:53:58.100 --> 00:54:06.040
JIM: I was stationed in Paris and every morning I would go on a long run. One morning,

00:54:06.040 --> 00:54:12.440
I was running and I passed a German shepherd. Dog was just lying there;

00:54:12.440 --> 00:54:18.680
I ran past it. The dog didn’t growl or bark or anything. I got about maybe ten yards past

00:54:18.680 --> 00:54:27.760
that dog when [MUSIC] suddenly I felt the most horrendous pain in my right leg, and he was biting

00:54:27.760 --> 00:54:35.640
me with his jaws. German shepherds, I think, have the most powerful bite of any dog imaginable.

00:54:35.640 --> 00:54:40.360
JACK: He was able to get free and go to the doctor. The doctors were concerned this dog

00:54:40.360 --> 00:54:45.240
had rabies, and he went back to the spot to try to find the dog, but he couldn’t. Well,

00:54:45.240 --> 00:54:48.160
it just so happened that the rabies vaccine was invented in France,

00:54:48.160 --> 00:54:50.800
so he went to the Pasteur Institute to get treated.

00:54:50.800 --> 00:54:58.680
JIM: I went in, met a very, very nice French doctor, and told him what happened. He said well,

00:54:58.680 --> 00:55:03.080
then you’ve gotta get the rabies shots, because he said if you don’t get it,

00:55:03.080 --> 00:55:08.720
he said there’s only been one survivor of rabies in the entire history of man. But if you get

00:55:08.720 --> 00:55:14.920
the shots, you’ll be fine. In fact, you’ll actually be immunized for at least a year.

00:55:14.920 --> 00:55:18.920
JACK: So, Jim gets the rabies shot and was fine, but whenever there

00:55:18.920 --> 00:55:23.840
was someone he didn’t like at work, he would sometimes joke that he was gonna bite them.

00:55:23.840 --> 00:55:29.946
JIM: So, that’s how I earned my nickname Mad Dog.

00:55:29.946 --> 00:55:35.680
JACK: [MUSIC] The deadliest weapon on earth is the nuclear bomb, and Jim was in the CIA while

00:55:35.680 --> 00:55:41.920
some of the US’s adversaries were developing their nuclear capabilities. The US did not want some of

00:55:41.920 --> 00:55:47.400
these countries to have nuclear capabilities, and stopping opponents from gaining this power

00:55:47.400 --> 00:55:54.600
is a delicate job and done through diplomacy and espionage. There was a player in the underground

00:55:54.600 --> 00:56:01.240
nuclear arms scene called Dr. A.Q. Khan. He was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical

00:56:01.240 --> 00:56:06.800
engineer, and he was working for a company that enriched uranium when India, the enemy of his

00:56:06.800 --> 00:56:12.480
home country, successfully detonated their first atomic bomb. This made A.Q. Khan want

00:56:12.480 --> 00:56:18.560
to rush to get Pakistan nuclear weapons so they could defend themselves from India. One of the

00:56:18.560 --> 00:56:24.600
things he did was steal the plans for centrifuges and the enrichment process, which this helped

00:56:24.600 --> 00:56:30.920
Pakistan develop the bomb. Pakistan tested it by blowing up a mountain with their atomic bomb,

00:56:30.920 --> 00:56:38.040
and it was a success. But after that, some other countries started contacting A.Q. Khan, who also

00:56:38.040 --> 00:56:44.600
wanted these weapons. He was selling blueprints for centrifuges and enrichment materials to

00:56:44.600 --> 00:56:52.320
other countries like Iran and North Korea. This was not good for the US, since these were not

00:56:52.320 --> 00:56:59.680
friendly nations. So, the US wanted to stop the underground nuclear weapons trade. In the late

00:56:59.680 --> 00:57:06.200
90s, Jim led a team tasked with disrupting the spread of nuclear weapons technology, and one

00:57:06.200 --> 00:57:11.360
of the first things they start looking into was trying to figure out what A.Q. Khan was up to.

00:57:11.360 --> 00:57:17.040
JIM: We discovered that he was taking the proliferation of this technology

00:57:17.040 --> 00:57:24.320
private. He was offering this to other nations without the Pakistani government’s knowledge.

00:57:24.320 --> 00:57:31.080
I was running an operation where we became privy to this, to the knowledge of this.

00:57:31.080 --> 00:57:37.000
JACK: He learned that A.Q. Khan was preparing to provide Libya with nuclear capabilities. Now, at

00:57:37.000 --> 00:57:43.280
the time, Libya’s leader was Muammar Gaddafi, who the US did not have good relations with. Gaddafi

00:57:43.280 --> 00:57:48.640
had taken responsibility for a few terrorist attacks such as Pan Am Flight 103, which had a

00:57:48.640 --> 00:57:54.840
bomb on board and killed over 200 passengers. The US thought surely if Gaddafi had an atomic bomb,

00:57:54.840 --> 00:58:01.000
he would use it. So, this meant A.Q. Khan would have to be stopped, and it was on Jim to do

00:58:01.000 --> 00:58:06.620
it. [MUSIC] Jim had to come up with a plan, and he would turn to the Russians for inspiration.

00:58:06.620 --> 00:58:14.200
JIM: Back in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Lenin appointed a man named

00:58:14.200 --> 00:58:22.800
Felix Dzerzhinsky to be the first head of Soviet intelligence. Dzerzhinsky was not even a Russian;

00:58:22.800 --> 00:58:30.040
he was a Polish aristocrat, but he was extremely smart and he was faced with a real existential

00:58:30.040 --> 00:58:36.080
challenge to the Soviet regime, and that was the fact that the British and the Americans were

00:58:36.080 --> 00:58:44.440
sending in forces to overthrow the revolution. We were sending in counterrevolutionary forces

00:58:44.440 --> 00:58:51.080
into the Soviet Union. So, Dzerzhinsky thought if I want to defeat the counterrevolutionaries,

00:58:51.080 --> 00:58:58.160
I have to become a counterrevolutionary. So, he fanned his assets. The organization was known

00:58:58.160 --> 00:59:05.600
as the Cheka. He fanned his Cheka assets out all across the Soviet Union, pretending to be

00:59:05.600 --> 00:59:11.920
counterrevolutionaries, and they so penetrated the real counterrevolutionary’s organizations,

00:59:11.920 --> 00:59:16.960
that they were able to systematically roll them up. They even controlled the financing lines.

00:59:16.960 --> 00:59:24.160
JACK: Interesting. So, for the Soviets to defeat their enemies, they became their enemies. This

00:59:24.160 --> 00:59:30.100
looked like a great strategy for Jim to try to infiltrate the underground nuclear arms market.

00:59:30.100 --> 00:59:35.000
JIM: My decision was if I want to defeat proliferators, I have to

00:59:35.000 --> 00:59:41.100
become a proliferator. So, we created entities that held themselves out to be proliferent.

00:59:41.100 --> 00:59:47.280
JACK: Jim instructed his team to act as underground nuclear arms sellers.

00:59:47.280 --> 00:59:51.000
I don’t know what, exactly; maybe they were offering centrifuge plans. But they

00:59:51.000 --> 00:59:55.920
didn’t go straight to A.Q. Khan and tell him okay, look, we got these plans for sale. No;

00:59:55.920 --> 01:00:00.840
instead, they started working with some of the other people who A.Q. Khan was selling to,

01:00:00.840 --> 01:00:04.960
and this made them discover that there were a lot of people interested in what he was selling,

01:00:04.960 --> 01:00:11.240
which gave Jim and his team a great amount of intel related to the underground proliferation

01:00:11.240 --> 01:00:17.920
market. The story goes that you somehow made yourself known enough that they came to you.

01:00:17.920 --> 01:00:25.040
JIM: Right, which lowers their counterintelligence concerns, because you’re always suspicious if

01:00:25.040 --> 01:00:29.120
somebody comes to you, but you’re not suspicious if you were the one that approached the other

01:00:29.120 --> 01:00:35.660
person. So, we made ourselves attractive and guess what? They came knocking on our door.

01:00:35.660 --> 01:00:41.200
JACK: During this time, Jim was getting a good view into this market, which gave

01:00:41.200 --> 01:00:46.440
him knowledge of who some of the key players were, and he started getting close to some,

01:00:46.440 --> 01:00:51.960
and eventually got some to give him key information that was very

01:00:51.960 --> 01:00:58.020
helpful at knowing what was coming next. Can you talk about Urs Tinner?

01:00:58.020 --> 01:01:00.300
JIM: No, I can’t.

01:01:00.300 --> 01:01:04.800
JACK: Okay, can you talk about Friedrich or Marco?

01:01:04.800 --> 01:01:06.360
JIM: No.

01:01:06.360 --> 01:01:13.000
JACK: Hm, interesting. Jim did not want to go into any detail about his mission to stop

01:01:13.000 --> 01:01:18.920
A.Q. Khan. As far as I know, he’s not gone on the record with any author or journalist about this.

01:01:18.920 --> 01:01:24.440
JIM: I can’t go into details about how we did it, but it was using classic espionage.

01:01:24.440 --> 01:01:33.160
JACK: Hm, classic espionage. Well, there is a book by Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz titled

01:01:33.160 --> 01:01:41.160
Fallout, and it’s the story of the CIA’s secret war on nuclear trafficking. [MUSIC] In it, Frantz

01:01:41.160 --> 01:01:48.320
goes into some pretty good detail of what Jim did. Friedrich Tinner is a Swiss nuclear engineer and

01:01:48.320 --> 01:01:54.480
long-time friend and associate of A.Q. Khan. Friedrich and his two sons, Urs and Marco,

01:01:54.480 --> 01:02:00.680
were all part of Khan’s proliferation network. The CIA wanted to get inside Khan’s network quickly,

01:02:00.680 --> 01:02:04.600
and there simply wasn’t enough time or opportunities to develop a relationship,

01:02:04.600 --> 01:02:11.200
so they brought in Jim. Jim discovered that Urs had some legal issues in France and thought this

01:02:11.200 --> 01:02:16.440
might be a good way to apply pressure. So, he arranged for Urs to find out that the French

01:02:16.440 --> 01:02:21.440
authorities were looking for him. CIA agents surveiled Urs until they determined the best

01:02:21.440 --> 01:02:27.120
time and place to approach him, a hotel bar in Dubai that he frequented. That’s where

01:02:27.120 --> 01:02:33.160
Jim casually offered to buy Urs a drink one evening, and they chatted for a while until

01:02:33.160 --> 01:02:38.600
Urs was getting ready to leave. That’s when Jim mentioned that he knew about the problem with the

01:02:38.600 --> 01:02:46.640
French authorities and that he could help make it go away in exchange for some information. Urs sat

01:02:46.640 --> 01:02:53.560
back down, and Jim started talking. This wasn’t a position Urs wanted to be in. He tried to exit

01:02:53.560 --> 01:02:58.640
the conversation multiple times, but he was simply no match for Jim. A couple of meetings

01:02:58.640 --> 01:03:05.640
later and he became an informant, providing Jim with eyes and ears in the Khan network.

01:03:05.640 --> 01:03:10.800
Now, let me be clear; this is stuff I’m reading from a book. When I talked with Jim about what

01:03:10.800 --> 01:03:16.840
he supposedly did in this book, he says the book is wrong. The details are not correct,

01:03:16.840 --> 01:03:23.160
but he cannot say what details are wrong. You’d think, why should I even read from a book that’s

01:03:23.160 --> 01:03:28.760
wrong? Because the author is a Pulitzer Prize award-winning investigative journalist and did

01:03:28.760 --> 01:03:34.080
a lot of work to put this information together. So, I feel like there must be some truth to

01:03:34.080 --> 01:03:39.800
it. We just don’t know what to trust, which is kind of like what this whole episode is about,

01:03:39.800 --> 01:03:47.560
right? Trust? This book, Fallout, continues. It says the CIA wanted to stop Khan quick,

01:03:47.560 --> 01:03:51.440
because the last thing they wanted was for two dangerous regimes, Libya and Iran,

01:03:51.440 --> 01:03:57.480
to get nuclear weapons. So, they used coercion and money, paying Urs hundreds of thousands of

01:03:57.480 --> 01:04:02.320
dollars over the span of months to provide key information and sabotage

01:04:02.320 --> 01:04:08.680
shipments. The book says Jim also recruited Urs’ brother Marco, and his father, Friedrich,

01:04:08.680 --> 01:04:13.680
and they learned a lot from the Tinners, which gave them the opportunity to pull the plug on

01:04:13.680 --> 01:04:19.480
the largest nuclear proliferation network in history. There was just one more thing to do;

01:04:19.480 --> 01:04:25.360
verify that the Tinners had not been deceiving them. [MUSIC] So, Jim devised a plan. He set

01:04:25.360 --> 01:04:29.800
up a meeting with the Tinners at a hotel. All three of them were already on the payroll and

01:04:29.800 --> 01:04:34.160
had received a few hundred thousand dollars. However, this meeting, they were offering them

01:04:34.160 --> 01:04:41.240
a significant amount more, one final payout of a million dollars as well as continued protection.

01:04:41.240 --> 01:04:47.040
In exchange for this money, they wanted two main things. First was the willing participation in

01:04:47.040 --> 01:04:52.520
extensive interrogations over several days to ensure they accurately divulged everything they

01:04:52.520 --> 01:04:58.200
knew. Second was access to all the documents and drives. Since Jim didn’t trust them,

01:04:58.200 --> 01:05:03.600
the deal was conditional on taking the information while the Tinners were at the hotel. According to

01:05:03.600 --> 01:05:10.160
the book Fallout, under the cloak of darkness, Jim and a small hand-chosen team of CIA agents broke

01:05:10.160 --> 01:05:15.480
into Tinner’s office, copied all the drives, and photographed the documents. Marco was the

01:05:15.480 --> 01:05:19.560
record-keeper of the family business, so the following night, the agents picked the lock to

01:05:19.560 --> 01:05:24.720
his house and silently entered. They quickly went to work copying drives, photographing documents,

01:05:24.720 --> 01:05:30.040
and searching for everything relevant. Jim stepped into Marco’s closet and discovered a hidden

01:05:30.040 --> 01:05:35.960
laptop, which he handed to the tech. After copying thousands of files and documents and e-mails,

01:05:35.960 --> 01:05:41.760
they silently slipped out and vanished back in the night. Everything they recovered was

01:05:41.760 --> 01:05:48.240
quickly sent back to Langley, Virginia, CIA’s headquarters, to be analyzed. As expected,

01:05:48.240 --> 01:05:54.440
they found designs for two centrifuges that Khan had stolen and sold to Iran and Libya,

01:05:54.440 --> 01:05:59.560
and they also found designs for a third, more advanced centrifuge. This meant that

01:05:59.560 --> 01:06:05.000
Khan’s buyers were closer to nuclear weapons than they thought. They had underestimated

01:06:05.000 --> 01:06:11.040
Khan again. They also discovered something potentially far worse, a significant amount

01:06:11.040 --> 01:06:16.320
of centrifuge equipment had disappeared from shipments and were quite possibly sold to an

01:06:16.320 --> 01:06:22.827
unidentified fourth customer. This was far worse than they thought. It was time to pull the plug.

01:06:22.827 --> 01:06:30.200
JIM: [MUSIC] There was a – probably a period of a few months that were ideal to stop him,

01:06:30.200 --> 01:06:36.920
and we hit the sweet spot. George Tenet talks about it in his memoirs. He was, of course,

01:06:36.920 --> 01:06:44.400
the director of the CIA, and he finally decided that he was going to confront President Musharraf

01:06:44.400 --> 01:06:52.640
with the fact that Dr. A.Q. Khan was betraying his secrets to the Libyans. So, he met with President

01:06:52.640 --> 01:06:59.240
Musharraf, he revealed Khan’s treachery, and President Musharraf first said he was going

01:06:59.240 --> 01:07:05.840
to kill Khan, and Director Tenet said no, we don’t want you to do that. So, instead,

01:07:05.840 --> 01:07:10.440
President Musharraf put Dr. Khan under house arrest where he remained for the next five or

01:07:10.440 --> 01:07:18.600
six years. That led to the disarmament of Libya, Gaddafi turning over their nuclear technology to

01:07:18.600 --> 01:07:25.120
us, which could have been a nightmare, had – you probably remember that in – I believe it was in

01:07:25.120 --> 01:07:33.120
2011 when Gaddafi’s people rose up and basically killed him. Well, you can imagine if Libya had

01:07:33.120 --> 01:07:38.340
been a nuclear-armed nation then, how they might have used nuclear weapons on their own people.

01:07:38.340 --> 01:07:45.800
JACK: For infiltrating and disrupting A.Q. Khan’s network, Jim and his team received the Trailblazer

01:07:45.800 --> 01:07:52.920
medal, which is one of the most distinguished honors the CIA gives out. Oh, and in August of

01:07:52.920 --> 01:07:59.360
2021, A.Q. Khan tested positive for Covid-19 and was admitted to a hospital. He died two months

01:07:59.360 --> 01:08:05.480
later and is considered a national icon by the people of Pakistan. When Catharine Collins and

01:08:05.480 --> 01:08:12.320
Doug Frantz were researching their book Fallout, they met with Jim to ask him some questions. Here,

01:08:12.320 --> 01:08:16.680
let me read for you the opening section of the book. Quote, “Early in our research,

01:08:16.680 --> 01:08:22.760
we finangled a lunch with the CIA case officer known as Mad Dog. He’s a man of honor, tenacity,

01:08:22.760 --> 01:08:27.320
and humor. He wore a baseball cap to the meeting embroidered with the image of a bulldog and the

01:08:27.320 --> 01:08:33.720
words Mad Dog on it. He steadfastly refused to discuss any aspect of the decade he spent leading

01:08:33.720 --> 01:08:40.360
the CIA’s investigation of Khan or his role in bringing it down. He was scrupulously silent

01:08:40.360 --> 01:08:45.400
about everything except the weather, running, and how he got his nickname. He brought along

01:08:45.400 --> 01:08:51.280
a copy of our first book and said we got some things wrong it in, but he wouldn’t say what.

01:08:51.280 --> 01:08:56.200
As he stood to leave, he reached into his wallet and pulled out a slip of paper. I thought of you

01:08:56.200 --> 01:09:02.400
when I saw this, he said. The paper contained this quote from Barbara Kingsolver’s final novel, The

01:09:02.400 --> 01:09:12.360
Lacuna; ‘The most important part of the story is the piece you don’t know.’” End quote. The thing

01:09:12.360 --> 01:09:17.760
that kinda puts me in deep thought about this is the ethics of it all. As Jim says, espionage is

01:09:17.760 --> 01:09:23.400
illegal in most countries. If it had gone wrong, he could have been arrested or possibly killed,

01:09:23.400 --> 01:09:29.280
which means the CIA is knowingly breaking laws around the world in many countries. So, when the

01:09:29.280 --> 01:09:33.600
CIA goes around the world and completely ignores and disrespects the laws in those countries,

01:09:33.600 --> 01:09:40.200
how can the US expect other countries to respect their laws? You can’t. All you can

01:09:40.200 --> 01:09:46.080
do is brace for it. Because of the negotiation information that Jim was able to collect,

01:09:46.080 --> 01:09:54.160
he saved the US billions of dollars. But he also cost that other country billions of dollars, and

01:09:54.160 --> 01:10:00.160
the intelligence that Jim gathered saved the lives of thousands of people by keeping weapons of mass

01:10:00.160 --> 01:10:07.960
destruction out of the hands of Gaddafi. Sometimes people, even nations, have to work off of a higher

01:10:07.960 --> 01:10:15.840
code of ethics which transcends the law. Once you kinda have a permission to break the law,

01:10:15.840 --> 01:10:21.960
sort of thing, where does that stop? Or asked another way; what kind of oversight is there

01:10:21.960 --> 01:10:26.860
to make sure you don’t break the wrong laws or too many laws? Or what’s the limit there?

01:10:26.860 --> 01:10:35.080
JIM: Well, we have an approval process. Before I pitch anybody, I have to submit – there has

01:10:35.080 --> 01:10:40.600
to be – a, there has to be a need for whatever information or intelligence this prospective

01:10:40.600 --> 01:10:47.160
recruit has. We don’t just willy-nilly go around and pitch people unless we have a

01:10:47.160 --> 01:10:53.080
real need for their access. So, it all hinges on access. If we have a target,

01:10:53.080 --> 01:11:00.240
someone who we believe will cooperate with us and we have a strong indication that that

01:11:00.240 --> 01:11:07.560
person has access to protected information that we need for our national security, then I would

01:11:07.560 --> 01:11:14.240
outline a recruitment scenario for headquarters where I would say okay, I’ve known this person

01:11:14.240 --> 01:11:22.120
for X number of weeks or months or however long. We know or we strongly suspect that he or she,

01:11:22.120 --> 01:11:28.520
by virtue of their position, has access to this protected information, and therefore, I believe I

01:11:28.520 --> 01:11:35.600
could recruit this person because of the following vulnerabilities or the following statements

01:11:35.600 --> 01:11:41.840
from the person. Then headquarters would say okay, we’re going to give you a provisional,

01:11:41.840 --> 01:11:49.000
operational approval to do this. So, they would – I wouldn’t just pitch somebody without having

01:11:49.000 --> 01:11:54.740
headquarters, my headquarters, say yes, we think that’s worth the risk, go ahead and go for it.

01:11:54.740 --> 01:11:59.640
JACK: While Jim has not provided much information to journalists about the nuclear proliferation

01:11:59.640 --> 01:12:05.440
program that he brought down, he did recently publish a book himself called Living Lies: A Novel

01:12:05.440 --> 01:12:12.920
of the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program. Jim tells me it’s entirely a fictional story, but his book

01:12:12.920 --> 01:12:19.880
is about a CIA agent who disrupts Iran’s nuclear weapons program, only for a different agent to

01:12:19.880 --> 01:12:24.920
discover that there’s another nuclear program that the world doesn’t know about. If you’re into spy

01:12:24.920 --> 01:12:29.440
novels, this is a must-read, and that’s just the first installment of a series he’s working on.

01:12:29.440 --> 01:12:33.880
The second book in the series is titled In the Twinkling of an Eye, and it just came out a few

01:12:33.880 --> 01:12:44.537
days ago. It tells the story of state-sponsored development of a biological weapon.

01:12:44.537 --> 01:12:48.560
(OUTRO): [OUTRO MUSIC] A big thank-you to Jim Lawler, AKA, Mad Dog, for sharing some

01:12:48.560 --> 01:12:53.920
fascinating stories with us as a CIA officer. Don’t forget to check out Jim’s books. I’ll

01:12:53.920 --> 01:12:58.240
have links to them in the show notes. This show is made by me, the sleeping agent,

01:12:58.240 --> 01:13:03.480
Jack Rhysider. This episode is produced by the prodigy, Lowell Brillante. Sound design

01:13:03.480 --> 01:13:07.280
by the resonating Andrew Meriwether. Oh, and Andrew just started releasing some of

01:13:07.280 --> 01:13:12.360
his original music so that you can use it in your storytelling. He calls it the Cue Shop,

01:13:12.360 --> 01:13:19.720
spelled C-U-E. Visit cue-shop.com to listen to what he’s been making. Editing help this episode

01:13:19.720 --> 01:13:24.480
by the slippery Damienne, and mixing done by Proximity Sound. Our theme music is by the

01:13:24.480 --> 01:13:31.400
illustrious Breakmaster Cylinder. I had an idea for a movie where a retired CIA agent is searching

01:13:31.400 --> 01:13:44.760
for his daughter in Paris. Turns out that movie was Taken. This is Darknet Diaries.