A CIA Officer's Perspective

Hi everybody, Jeff Weiss back with you for another episode of Finding MH370, the podcast where we take a deep, detailed look at the full range of technical evidence. with the help of some of the world's leading subject matter experts in order to solve aviation's greatest mystery. Today I'm really excited to talk to someone whose expertise is unusually deep and unusually hard to get access to.

The Central Intelligence Agency is obviously a rather tight lipped organization as a rule, even if after the retired CIA officers are bound by strict rules about what they're allowed to say. So I feel really lucky to talk to Sean Wiswester, who has a new book out. He's concerned about what he sees as a dangerous lack of awareness about the threats facing the United States and the Democratic West. It's a concern that I share. He wants to speak out and try to raise awareness before it's too late.

Before we get into the meat of it, a little housekeeping. If you'd like to get a free newsletter that goes out with each episode, head over to the show page at finding mh370.com where you'll also find uh an archive of past shows. And if you want to support the show, you can sign up for a paid membership there. You can also contribute with a paid membership here on YouTube.

Going forward, I'm going to be adding exclusive content for members as a way to show my thanks and give something back to those whose support I'm so grateful for. So keep an eye out for that. Okay, back to Sean Wiswester. I wanna be clear up front, I'm not talking to Sean about what the CIA thinks happened to M H three seventy. That is not his bailiwick. Frankly, I don't think the US intelligence community has any idea what happened.

What we're going to talk about is the strategic environment in which the disappearance took place. That will help us understand the number one question that people always ask me when they know that I'm into the MH370. The thing they always ask is why? was the motive? Why was this plantation? That's a difficult question to answer no matter what your favorite theory about the disappearance might be. Frankly, it's not something that It's easy to say. We need to think about it carefully.

The default assumption, of course, has long been that the captain must have taken the plane. In the last three episodes, we saw how the three pillars underlying that main theory turned out to be Much more fragile than most people realize. And the implication is That the captain wasn't the culprit leaves us with only one plausible alternative explanation that the hijacking was carried out by an extremely ruthless and sophisticated outside actor, namely Russia.

Okay, why would Russia want to do such a thing? This is where Sean Westwester's expertise comes in. He has studied their motives, he has studied their mindset and their methodologies. He has gone toe to toe with Putin's Russia for decades. Let's hear what he has to say. Sean Wiswester, thank you for coming on the show. You have a new book out. It's entitled Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks, Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War. Congratulations

We call ourselves officers, but I was handling assets or agents that were helping us and then I was working with joint partners throughout my career countering their efforts to recruit Americans and our allies. So well said. Thank you.

of uh almost 28 years, was with CIA. Um I served 12 years overseas, uh tours in Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, um a lot of work in the former Soviet Union. Um and that's that's what they like me to leave it.

Um and we also knew that when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, former KGB officer himself, former head of the FSB, we we knew who he was. You know, the like the saying they s in sports they talk about sports teams, oh they were who we thought we were. Well Putin is who we thought he was.

He's a Czechist. He's a believer in the mentality of the of the Czechist of which I'm sure you read in the book, uh Jeff. Um thank you for reading it. You know, I spent time earlier in the book talking about that mentality, that culture of Czechism.

dating back to the Chekha, the first uh security committee in the in the USSR. So um so the book is about how they've been leading this undeclared war on us, the West, and we haven't been paying attention. You know, one anecdote that I shared is that uh Russian intelligence officer I mentioned I was debriefing, you know, in the years after nine eleven and I never state exactly where, when, or how I wanna protect our assets to help the

But as a younger officer back then, you know, decades ago, I was asking him what okay, so why are you still calling us the Geph in Russian, Vlovnik, the main adversary? I thought it's about the global war on terror. You know, I was trying to understand I don't understand why Russia would focus on us with so much energy and resources. You're still focusing us on the main enemy, and this is again many, many years ago.

And that was an education for me because this uh Russian intelligence officer said, Hey, Billy yes buddy. You were the in main enemy right after World War Two. That's what they called the Germans, by the way. They called the Germans the Glaubn. United States became the main enemy. You were always the main enemy through the Cold War. You are the main enemy today. And he was very adamant with you. That's never changing, it won't. For us, the United States comes number one.

And so I realized because of officers like that working with me, you know, and then the many examples over the past decades, they um they just will never stop focusing on us as the main adversary. And they focus the vast bulk of their resources against targeting the United States. So that's the undeclared war, Jeff. That's the war that we're not noticing, not paying attention to. Declared war by them against us, their intelligence services against us, and there are many examples.

Why would in this context Europe, which I think it's true more broadly, why does the West And I and I think it's I think it's true, maybe you would disagree, that the media and the the government, uh meaning both the opposition and the party in power Don't recognize, don't acknowledge, never talk about hardly the idea that we that this war is being waged on a kind of

Um we can talk about whether other wars were necessary or not. I tried not to get into policy in my book. Other experts have talked about that. But I do believe that we had no choice to go into Afghanistan and to take on Al Qaeda. Um, but that led to twenty years of war. You know, I don't think the United States n none of us saw that happening. Twenty years of nonstop war. And so we in the in Europe, our allies were engaged in um in in things that matter.

But we did take our eye off of Russia and China both. I I firmly believe and and um and many of my generation of CIA officers A lot are now retired as well, like me. We look back and we say, Yeah, you know what? We took our eyes off of our two main adversaries that have never stopped working against us, Russia and China.

Uh in the case of Europe, um I believe firmly in the alliance. So NATO and with our European partners, we have to work together. You know, Jeff, the the largest uh chapter in the book is on Ukraine, the Ukraine war and the Russian intelligence service. How they did it, how they promulgated it, uh their false prognostications of success.

And uh I believe very strongly, as I stated in the book, that we have to support Ukraine. Um but I think that, you know, there's enough mistakes sort of both in Europe and in the United States, looking back on twenty or thirty years of policy with Russia, um, that we weren't focused enough on the threat.

He he gave a speech that was very influential and he one of the things he talked about was this concept w in Russian it's called Gibridnya voina, hybrid warfare. And th this idea of something called the Gorasimov doctrine became very contentious. Um but I think the point is pretty incontestable. Um Russia w was about to embark at that time on a really widespread series of unconventional attacks against the West.

cutting undersea cables and pipelines, random acts of arson and sabotage. Um more recently they attempted to place incendiary devices on air cargo freighters. um all kinds of widespread and sophisticated computer hacking attacks, interfering with elections. I mean the list really goes on and on and on.

If you pointed to any of them in isolation, you would say, What's the motivation for this attack? Why put incendiary devices on cargo planes? It doesn't it doesn't seem to serve any particular purpose. What And and people might tend to think, well, if there's no motivation then that they they probably didn't do it. But when you take these singularly right random acts together, a pattern starts to emerge. Do you see a pattern?

Wars of the next generation, the new generation. So as I discuss in the book and I've also uh been published in two other books, I've had chapters on on these topics on hybrid war. Uh you know, I look at the Russian writings and the Russian doctrine. How do they articulate it?

Garazimov as chief of the general staff, you're quite right. He gave a famous talk in uh twenty thirteen and then he had a a uh in a uh article from the talk that was in a military courier magazine, I believe it was called, uh for the Russian military.

But what Gorazimov was articulating and what that writer you mentioned one writer called it the Grazimov Doctrine. He later said he regretted using that term because in Russia nobody refers to it that way. They refer to it as Yes, contact weina, non contact warfare, or they talk call it warfare of the next generation or new generation warfare.

Um they're hearkening back to a debate going back thirty years, Jeff. It's kind of like often happens. We in the United States, we in Europe, we're we're way behind the curve. The Russians have been talking about this for thirty years. And what first uh what it first came out of was when the Russian army after the Soviet Union collapse was in decline and they watched what the United States pulled off with air power in the Gulf War in nineteen ninety one.

The Soviet then Russian generals, they weren't stupid. They realized that this new uh revolution in military affairs or the reconnaissance strike complex it's called in military doctrine. meant that the United States was destroying armies entirely from the air. We took out Saddam's army entirely from the air. So for the Russians they realized, you know what?

We're in big trouble. Our plans that we could take Germany through the Folder Gap in a conventional war, the United States might have enough and the best air power in the world with its NATO allies that they could destroy our entire army before we'd ever get through the Folder Gap. And they knew too they were suffering from not keeping up funding and maintenance and tactics uh techniques, procedures, TTPs as they're called.

So Jeff, that's an important doctrinal basis of writers that like uh like I quote in the book, uh writers like Mahmoud Goreev and Slichenko, these are famous Russian generals before before Gorazimov, they were talking about these concepts. What's it all boiled down to? The important point is Karazimov articulated in twenty thirteen an idea of continual warfare against against their adversaries, Russia's adversaries. He didn't name them, but he just said, you know what?

In modern times, maybe what we need is continual warfare, especially accentuating what he called information means, what the Russians call active measure. So the idea was they're constantly going to have a second front undermining their adversaries so that if they do need to go to war, then their weak their adversaries will be weakened. So they practiced this in Georgia in two thousand eight.

And then again the big test of course was Ukraine in twenty fourteen, where to a large degree their information means they're they stalled the West, they stalled Europe into wondering, wait a second, what is going on here? Who are these little green men showing up in uniforms in Crimea? Of course they're Russian soldiers. But they had no markings on them. They were little green men as they were called.

So that's what Russian hybrid war non contact warfare is all about. It's compensating for their deficiencies in some of their military um and their air force in particular, the Russian aerospace forces, by using their intelligence services, information attacks. Hybrid war, cyber operations. That all falls on the case.

We're in a state of war, just shy of kinetic conflict with Russia. And he's correct, you know, the the the Russians, the GRU attempted to kill the CEO of Ryan Metal last year. The Germans have the GRU dead to right. They have all the evidence, they laid it out. There's been more cable cuts in the Baltic Sea in the past two years than anywhere else in the world. That doesn't happen by accident.

But you know, Jeff, one of the challenges is that NATO as an alliance, we haven't called every single one of these actions for what it is. Like the German intelligence chief said finally on the record, Hey, this is war. This is undeclared warfare by the Russian Federation against Europe. And so every one of these incidences that as you said, Jeff, sometimes the the various uh populaces in European countries want to sort of write it off and say, Wait a second, this isn't wait, is this war? No.

exemplified by the color revolutions against it. Wha the perceived strategies uh again, this is what's referred to as the Grasimov doctrine or hybrid warfare, this idea of using a wide spectrum of sub uh you know, outright warfare techniques. And it's a really interesting idea that Russia's ultimate goal is to achieve regime change essentially in the West.

You know, the Russian intelligence services were absolutely convinced these have to be CIA and Western intelligence boards.

didn't understand fundamentalis or democratically active governments. And by the way, let's look at the example of Ukraine, because the Russian picked leader, Yanukovych, was a complete fraud. This guy fled in disgrace, ran away like a coward to Russia after his corruption, the fact that Russia had literally paid him off as a leader. Um he fled.

So when we talk about whose legitimate leaders are not, Yanukovych didn't stay to fight democratically for, you know, his country and to say, Hey, I am the Democratic He fled like a coward. So um Garazimo's idea though is that oh we're gonna turn you know, we're gonna use information means in a constant state of a s of a second front against the West, because that's what Putin believed was happening in the former Soviet Union.

You know, the Baltic the Baltic countries are right behind Ukraine in terms of his list of grievances. Putin calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the quote greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century. He doesn't accept that these countries had a right to choose their own path forward. Uh and Yeltsin for all of his rights or wrongs in Korobachev before him, they were fundamentally heroic leaders that said, you know what?

Rather than fighting and having a civil war, we're gonna let these independent these republics go independent and choose their fate and choose what they want to do. Uh Putin doesn't accept that.

They they're they're fighting an an all all or nothing game. They believe, again, that democracies, fundamentally, they cannot tolerate democracies. It's not in Putin or Xi Jinping's world vision. And if you look at studies by the RAN Corporation and others over the past decades, unfortunately, Jeff, democracy is under threat. Democracy, unfortunately,

The concept of democracy, democratic rule in a lot of the developing world um has been under the gun, has been under fire. And so Putin's vision for his people I'm I'm a Russia expert, so I'm gonna stick to the things I know in Russia. Putin's vision he's articulated to the Russian people is say, hey, Give up your freedom.

It's okay, let me rule for you and my group of Siloviki, strongmen. Telling term by the way, when would the American people or any European power ever tolerate the cabinet of the of of important national security ministers being called strongmen. Jeff, we would never stand for that. We'd be like, what? Strongmen? That's what they call themselves? But his idea falls in line with an historic concept the Russians called wood.

It's the idea of a leader kind of like a con, a a very the German term would be Fjord. Okay, sorry, but that's about the closest concept. An all encompassing leader. The Russian concept of a vožhd is we're gonna give up our We're going to give up our freedoms so that we can live in security this guy's going to take care of us. That's fundamentally what what Putin's appealing to, whether he uses the term Vojd or not.

That's what he's appealing to, the autocracy, having an autocratic leader that decides everything for you. That's their vision. That's what Xi Jinping's doing in China, consolidating all all power to himself. And so they can't tolerate functioning democracies on their borders, uh Jeff. That's what the struggle is all about. They can't have the Baltic countries who chose their own path and who have succeeded dramatically. Look at how far the Baltics have come in thirty years versus Belarus.

Belarus is a disaster. I've been in Bel Belarus many times. Got to travel there as a student. They haven't progressed much at all from from nineteen ninety. Um the Baltics have tr tremendous progress. They've they're integrated into the EU, Europe, functioning democracies. Not perfect. Ukraine's not perfect either, but these are democracies. And they have c economies that work, market economies that work. For Putin, that's a problem.

Comes out with every presidential administration. Just came out this year with President Trump's second administration. And you look at that list, you've got a list of You know, proliferation concerns, China's certainly been on the list, a rising China, uh Russia's been on the list at one point or another over the past twenty twenty uh years plus. But where has Russia factored? I would argue unf unfortunately for me as a Russia expert,

And for my colleagues and I, as Michael Solik, our former DDO said, you know, it's Cold War veterans. He is a Cold War veteran. I coming into the service after the Cold War. We knew Russia never was off the map. They were always a national security threat. But if you looked at 2010, where was Russia?

Jeff, they weren't even really on the list. They were barely top ten. We had global war on terror, we had Iraq, we had counter proliferation, we had concerns over Pakistan and what was happening with that we know Pakistan and proliferation. And so while Russia's been keeping its focus number one on the United States, the GEPA, the main enemy, main adversary, while China's been resurgent in the past twenty years, now the Chinese Navy has more ships than we do, Jeff, unfortunately.

Um their Air Force, unfortunately, wants to arrival the United States, I would argue they still can't because of the the the pride of the United States is our pilots. The pride of the United States is our airmen, our soldiers, our Navy has have way more experience doing it right, and we understand campaign. But the Chinese are going they're all out. They're trying to build more fire fighters, better missiles that can go further. Chinese Navy's outpaced us in terms of ship production.

So that's what they're out for. China and Russia, they're out for global domination. And the United States, what are we focused on? Jeff, we've got a lot of their concerns, you know, let's not not to mention the current war with Iran right now.

Um I just wrote a piece I hope to get published soon on the fact that we can't take our eyes off China and Russia because they may act opportunistically right now. That's what I believe is the greatest threat right now, opportunism by Russia and China, while unfortunately we're at war with Iran.

So so it's actually a compliment to say you have good conspiracy. Whereas in the English speaking world, like to to say that something is a conspiracy theory is basically to say that it's crazy, that it's not really happening, you're imagining things. We don't like to think of that there's conspiracies. And and so we have two visions of society that are at war with each other, one of which

takes pride in carrying out elaborate, nefarious conspiracies. Oh, yes. And the other that refuses to believe that conspiracies exist.

pressed on the Russian people for decades now. Um yeah, Russians use the term Pravla Conspiracia to talk about the rules the that's their closest equivalent to rules of conspiracy is their close closest equivalent to what we call trade craft, where I talk title my book Tradecraft. And they take great pride in what they also call Maskrovka. Maskrovka is what we would call denial and deception, Jeff, the idea that you know what?

We're gonna dupe you into doing our will, the Russians are, and you won't even know it. And this comes into the term you know I also talk about in chapter six of the book, the Palezni Dorak, the useful idiot. The Russian concept back to the days of Lenin. Lenin said, Hey, you know what? Let's take advantage of idealistic idiots in the West that believe in the communist revolution, and we'll take advantage of them for our purpose.

This has always been a part of Russian intelligence culture. And it's why, with their active measures, what they also call measures of support, they're supporting their malign policies. They're trying to get academics, journalists,

Diplomats, politicians in the West and in Europe to say, you know what, and there are some of them now, I'm not gonna name which countries, but one of'em has an election going on right now, where there's politicians that say, Hey, you know what? Russia can be our friend.

You know, we don't need to worry about the threat from Russia. I don't know how in the world a country that suffered revolution uh a a revolution that was put down by the Soviets in the fifties could possibly a leader of that country could possibly believe Russia's gonna be a friend to them under Vladimir Putin blows my mind.

But again, trying to stay apolitical, focused on them and their mentality. You hit the nail on the head, Jeff. You know, they um they just view the struggle entirely differently, the United States, you know? Um and and the other c the other thing that I'll mention is, you know, I watch a lot of Russia. I try to keep my language sharp. We're we're headlining their news every single night.

Jeff, every single night the United States is all over their news with a widely propagandized, bizarro version of the war in Ukraine, which is that the US is there fighting them. Supposedly, according to the Russian version of the news, it's US troops on the ground, NATO troops on the ground.

Nothing further from the truth the reality we know of, um but that's their version of the war. They're fighting fascism in Ukraine despite the fact that the Ukrainian president is Jewish himself. He had members of his family die in the Holocaust. So what's the news in the United States? We've got a lot else to focus on. We've got our economy, we've got the Iran War now, we've got the war on Terranera base.

So yeah, um very different worldviews. And and fundamentally we can touch on this more if you like, but it's the Russian insecurity about the West which goes back hundreds of years.

I'm t I'm um so I think it has been fairly well established. You have a chapter in your book about Russian interference in the twenty sixteen election. This US Senate uh found evidence of this as well. I think it's at this point not really debatable that Russia engage in active measures to subvert the twenty sixteen presidential election in the United States. Would you agree with that?

Uh Rubio was part of that Senate report. He signed off on it too. What did it say? It said they meddled. It said they attempted to disrupt, disinform, misform, and sway the American public. But what what was the fundamental mission? It wasn't for any one or other candidate. Jeff, that was incidental to what the Russians were doing. The Russians were trying to undermine the very concept of democracy.

They're trying to get they were and they still are trying to get Americans not to trust our electoral system. It's back to what you and I just covered talking about this is a different views of civilization. It's about the Russian intelligence services saying, You know what, we can't have democracy. It's a mortal threat to this regime that they're trying to keep in power, Putin, and whoever follows him.

And so the disunion, the the the infighting that they created in the United States, you know, how do they do that? We can get into the nitty gritty if you like, but fundamental best proof I always point to is look at what those reports talk about. Look at what Facebook found in its own investigation about the unfortunately millions of likes that Russian trolls picked up on.

Jeff, they were arguing different sides of the same issues. They were picking the most emotional issues they could for the American electorate, and they were arguing both sides just to amp up the level of emotion and amp up the level of hostility.

And they continue to do that. And it's a lack of awareness among the American people I'm trying to change. That these guys are playing us for fools. The Russian intelligence services are making us fight one another. We should be focused on them. They're the mortal threat to our to our democracy.

Full disclosure, I have many times been described as a conspiracy theorist because I postulated that MH three hundred seventy might have been hijacked by sophisticated actors. That kind of framing, namely calling me a conspiracy theorist, it's intended to denigrate and minimize a point of view. Because here in the West we have a culture that treats the idea of conspiracy as inherently delusional and absurd.

But as Sean points out, in Russia, conspiracy is viewed as a real thing, as in fact an important tool, and it's even a compliment to say that someone has good conspiracy. So you can imagine if a culture that respects and admires conspiracy decides to use it as a tool against an adversary culture that sees, you know, acknowledging conspiracy as a sign of mental weakness. Well you can just imagine the mayhem that might ensue.

Or rather, you don't you don't have to imagine it, because we're living in the midst of it, and frankly, it isn't that pleasant. Okay, that's all I have for you today. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.