It's hard to explain, but when you look in somebody's eyes and their pupils are you know it. It's like they're afraid and they're not afraid of me. This is a good meeting, right because they're afraid they're going to get caught.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'she. I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the.
World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
Will break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission implausible.
Welcome to Mission Implausible. I'm Adam Davidson. I'm here with CIA officer veterans Legends. That's Jerry O'sha and John Seifer for so we always jump into the conspiracy theories and I love that, But I just realize I was just talking to my son. I'm like, I talked to these two. You guys together have about four hundred and seventy three years of experience as intelligence officers, and I never ask you questions about what it's like to be an intelligence officer,
and so I wanted to. Can I ask you a few questions.
As long as you don't mind as lying to sure.
Yeah, okay, great, Well no, that wouldn't be the first time. That wouldn't be the novel thing.
This is like the anti conspiracy theory episode, because this is what is really not what like Hollywood or the conspiracy theory say that.
Yes, No, I've gotten to know you guys, so I know there's no like impressive physical feats or like sudden moments of profound insight or anything like that. It's more basic than that, all right. One thing that I've heard about, I've read about, I feel like I've seen in movies, but I don't fundamentally understand surveillance detection routes. What do you call DSR?
Where you SDR surveillance detection route or run or whatever?
How does that work? And explain what it is? What is it?
Essentially for us? Obviously, the thing that's most important to us in the Clandestine Service part of the CIA that oversees running spies outside the CIA is cool if you have someone who's willing to risk their life to provide you the secrets that the US government needs. If they're seen with you even once by the local police and local security services anybody, they can be arrested, they can
be killed, their family can be arrested. And so for us, that period of time is you cannot be seen together with your source. So everything we do is to try to find a way to communicate with the source or meeting personally so that it's completely hidden, so nobody sees what's happening, even if they were trying to disguise it, and someone sees it and reports it, even if we think we've done something clever that can get that person
arrested or killed. And a lot of it depends on the kind of country we're in and the house the security services as So what we do is when we're on our way to me a source physically somewhere in a hotel room, in a safe house, in an alleyway even or just exchange money for information or what have you, we have to be sure that there's nobody following us.
That the security service who tracks us. Oftentimes they put cars on us, they follow us around town, they listen to our phones to see where we are, those type of things, and so essentially a surveillance detection, which is just the means by which you become sure that you're what we call black you don't have surveillance, so that when it's time to meet that person, you're one hundred percent confident.
And do you get to one hundred percent, like, isn't there always a chance that someone.
Well, there's always a chance that somebody could come in at the end, but you need to be confident that no one has tracked you to that meeting. Now there's a chance that you're meeting someone and by happenstance, you're in the wrong place or what have you. But you
still you need to do that. And so it's just a process of knowing your environment, knowing the city, knowing how to move around that city, knowing how the other security services were, how do they surveil, how many people do they have on the streets, do they have cameras
in places? And so you're sort of moving through space and time, maybe stopping the shop or do something that looks natural, so that even if you are followed, that people are following you don't know that you're on your way to meet a secret source.
So you have to be doing this without it obvious that you're doing this.
That's right.
That's what the movies always get wrong.
That's right, Yeah, because they need to be sort of lulled to sleep. Or if you decide you're under surveillance and you can't meet this person, you can break off and not meet them, and the other side, the security service wants to say, oh my god, he was on his way to meet someone. We need to put more
resources on him next time. But over time you sort of move along through this way, and the more confident that you are you don't have surveillance, maybe the more aggressive or provocative you are to try to move and make sure that there's nobody following you. So by the end, when you're about to meet someone, you might be doing things to try to pull somebody out. So if there's a surveillance, you might go into an apartment building and wait in there to see if somebody comes in to
see what's happening, or those type of things. It's just a means to meet someone securely.
And it's not surveillance escape, Like you're not trying to lose them, you're just trying to see if they're there.
Yes, because if you lose them, they're like, oh, this guy is clearly a spy, and then they'll just put more on you. And this is what John said is this is the most simple form of fans. It's this is one oh one. But it gets exponentially more complicated and difficult as you go along, as you get to technical questions, and they have different rings of surveillance, and are you going to see this source to like have a discussion.
Are you going to do.
Like a bump where you just like bump into each other and exchange something. Are you going to not see a source but do a dead drop where you place a package and you're going to go pick it up. It gets really more complicated than that. But and it's basics at what it is. But Jenn if you could briefly tell the story of the shoes, that's a really good one. They how they you've got to make surveillance feel as though they're in command.
Right, So, when I was in Moscow, as I've probably said on that podcast, before you know, in Moscow, the KGB, the local security services are paranoid. They don't want any Americans or any foreigners to be meeting Russians that they're not unaware of. And so the surveillance is stifling, right. There's people who follow you everywhere you go. It's not hyperbole for me to say I was there two years. I had surveillance tam I mean the entire time, twenty
four hours a day. If you got up in the middle of the night, left my apartment, there would be surveillance teams following me. My house was bugged with audio. We had that bugged with video. Everybody I met was questioned, and so you're trying to understand their capability and figure out how to meet someone securely even in that environment.
But just to give a sense of the kind of surveillance a place, as one of my colleagues in the embassy was a runner, and as you can imagine, long nasty, cold winters in the middle of this big city, and it was starting to get springtime and he was going to start running again. He hadn't run through the whole winter, and so he got home from work on what was finally a decent enough day, and we live in these big,
nasty apartment buildings. And he made his way down the apartment building in his running gear and took off and went across the street and to a tunnel to the other side, made his way to Gorky Park where he ran through the park along the river and then back home. And he just went for a run. And so the next day he went to work, and he came back and went to go to sneakers to go for a run again, and one of his shoes was gone, and he's pretty meticulous. Everything is together, and he's, okay, I
don't know. So I went to work the next day and during work he got some time off, and it was it's hard to move around Moscow. It's just so much traffic and stuff. But he found a place to go get a new pair of running shoes. So he went home that night, same thing, down the elevator, out through town to Gorky Park to go for a run, went to work the next day, came back that night and one of his shoes has gone again. So he says, oh, okay,
I know what's going on. Surreilles is upset and they're coming in and they're taking the shoe to send a signal to me. So he said, but I know my house is bugged. So he went to the living room and he stood and he looked at his ceiling and said, Okay, here's the deal. I'm going to run and I'm going to keep buying shoes every time i need to run.
And here's my route. I'm going to go down the escalator or elevator and I'm going to go out this door, through this place, under this tunnel to this gates, said Geky Park, going to run along the river here, and I'm going to come back out loud in his apartment building. And so, because the work the next day comes back and both sets of shoes are back in his house
and he goes for a run. And so he does exactly what he says, and he's going for a run, and when he gets to the gates to go into Gorky Park, he sees the surveillance car pull up and they opened the trunk of the car and they had these little foldable bicycles where they can follow him through the park when he's running. So essentially what happened is surveillance wasn't ready. They probably tracked him. They followed him.
They go back to their bosses every day. Okay, he did this, he did that, and all of a sudden he went for a run and they were like, and they couldn't follow him, and so they had to go back to their bosses and say, oh, we lost them. And that's in a bureaucracy, that's the worst thing. And so they were sending a signal to him, like you need to stop running, and so he sent a signal.
Back and negotiated.
Awesome, Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for a minute or two.
And we're back.
How long does it take to do a surveillance detection run?
What's interesting, It takes as long as necessary, depending on what the service does, how hard they are, how much resources they put on you. I've done surveillance detection roots that took a week, and I've done some that took an hour or two. Usually a little more than that.
But and go to other countries. I feel like you mentioned once, like you're going to somewhere, let's say Greece or whatever, and it's a bunch of trains and buses and moving around to different countries.
That's part of the process of yeah, making sure that you're meeting someone securely. You might use alias documentation or something, but yeah, the goal is you have to if you're going to meet that source, you need to be confident that they're one hundred percent secure when you do so, there's nothing to keep.
Saying a undred percent that feels like overcompeted.
Well, that's you have to Everybody talks about sometimes, oh what you did, it must have been dangerous and scary. It's not dangerous so much for us. It is in places like we talked about Bagdad and Afghanistan, it can be certainly dangerous. But the biggest concern you have is for your source. That person is put their life in your hands, and you need to be confident that you're
you are not leading them to be arrested. And so if you're on your way to meet someone and you're about five minutes out and all you realize, oh my god, do I am I really confident? I'm like sure that I've done everything that I need to do. Am I walking this person into their death? So it's a pretty heady thing, pretty much nerve wrecking.
Now.
I was reading a spy novel, so obviously factual, and there's a line there. You can never beat static surveillance, Like if they really want you, they could just have people positioned all over the city and just.
Be like they have to know where you're going to have the static surveillance in place. The static surveillance can catch you. And what we're discussing too is we retire a bit ago is basic stuff once you introduce technology. So in the old days you had static surveillance in Russia, you might have Babushka sitting in an apartment like looking out the window or a policeman. Today, like in London, static surveillance is everywhere. It's a m CCTV cameras, right, they can go and trace it.
So yeah, that's drones with like well.
We used to have airplanes that would be up when we go out to try to so that was part of them, is like making sure that goods are right.
Maybe the biggest problem now is our phones that we carry around with us. They tell us where we're going, and if you turn it off, that's a tell that you're up to no good. They're like, oh, he turned his telephone off. Why and so let's swarm and yeah, so like we need to like, really look at this guy.
Man.
That's a game on their side too in some of these places, is we want to catch Jerry, meet his source. We know he's a CIA guy. What we'll do is we'll follow with three four cars every day and then on holidays, what we'll do is make it look to him like we're not there. And we'll do that by instead of three four cars, we're going to put two hundred and fifty people on them. And no car is ever going to turn the corner with him. I'm just going to call it to someone else who's going through.
And so his ability to then say, oh, I've seen that car before and the other part of town therefore might be surveillance is going to be harder. So their goal is to make you think that you're clear and clean and make a thing so it can be a difficult and time consuming.
And now some of the FBI is doing this in DC and other places as well.
Or I'll talk about their sources and methods, but they not too.
But that is their job, though, to make sure that foreign intelligence officers are either thwarted or stopped or caught.
The best way to beat espionage, though, is with espionage if you recruit somebody who is a surveillance or is in charge of surveillance or in that program, they can tell you even in advance, ah, today we're going to put five cars on you, and this is what we be and this is who they are. Right, And people who are surveillance often they're not always pay real well, it's not like a great job, and they must know
that we'll pay a lot for that. So you've got to be pretty sure your surveillance aren't being turned and your surveillance can probably meet you, or somebody in the surveillance program running it could meet you easily because they know where to do it. So there's there's always okay, how do you do that? And you can always tell surveillance by their shoes. They'll change maybe their code, or
they'll put on a scarf if they're a woman. But if you've got to walk for like eight to ten hours a day, you're never sure whether you're going to be in a store or in a park. You've got to have sensible shoes. If somebody's wearing If a woman is wearing like high heels, like she's not a surveillance, right.
So we were talking about what are good jobs for XCIA officers, and we've talked about people becoming heads of security for corporations or whatever, but it sounds like shoe manufacturer might be like, that might be the one job you're actually qualified for.
Yeah, I've seen a number of spy novels. Now this piece of true information has now made its way, so it's now showing up in spine novels. For a period of time, in Moscow, one of the ways that we could tell surveillance cars was there was a small, little sort of diamond shaped piece of dirt on the front
of the car. So clearly what happened is the the surveillance has a car wash somewhere at the KGB and they would wash the car from time to time, but the brushes or whatever missed this small little place, and you couldn't just rely on that. But you'd be driving and you'd see this little diamond of dirt. You'd like, Oh, I bet you that's a surveillance car. I haven't seen them before, but I'm going to keep an eye on
that car. And some of them had license plates, so you'd be watching and you look for this license plate and you'd want what you'd want to do is later that night to see if you see that license plate again. They had license plate that could turn. I remember one time having one of those cars that obviously they tried to turn the light. They had a little button that they could push. They would turn and put a new license plate, but it got stuck and so it was
like pointed at me. So you could see two of the.
Different license plates, and you are literally walking down the street memorizing every license plate that seems impossible.
Not every license plate, but one's that looked like they could be in a moving with you or what have you.
Know. There's a friend of ours who his dad was in the agency and then he later joined it, and he's he and his dad served behind there and curtain and he was like twelve or thirteen, and they played this game where he would write down license plate numbers. But he didn't know his dad was CIA and he
didn't know this was surveillance. And when he came back to the States, he's like with his friends in high school and like you know that game when like you're with your dad and you're copying license plate numbers down and they're like, no, I thought everybody did that because mom did it.
Let's play the license plate game. There was one one country. There was one. I'm not going to I gotta be careful on this, but there was one country.
To save money, they didn't gas up their surveillance cars at any service station they had.
It was the government.
They had a special deal at this one sort of quasi government gas station, and all the surveillance cars had to gas up there. So all you needed to do was get a static surveillance or put a hitting camera up, and you could just see all their cars going in getting gassed up. And it's like you didn't need to know they were catch them all as they were doing it.
You could just like.
You could just you could just look at the feed and they're all lining up for gas along with the guys.
So that's really funny. Now I'm imagining in my mind the first time or two or three, it's exciting. It's wow, I'm really like I'm doing it. I'm an intelligence officer. And then it becomes unbelievably boring and annoying.
Is that well?
I felt actually liberated. So if you're in a place like Moscow or some other place, there's a lot of survellans and you have surveillance and a track you all the time, and they're listening to you at your house and everybody you question if you've done it right, and you've gotten away from surveillance, and now you are out somewhere in the city. You know it so well, how they might try to cover you, where they would be, where they would set up, and you know you're black,
you don't have survillance. It's like, ah, I'm like.
You just feel free.
They don't know where I am. And you'd be sitting there and hiding the park. You'd be looking long distance, maybe some binoculars or something to make sure. They just felt it's crazy, but it just felt like I beat them. I can do whatever I want right now.
There was one one famous story and it's declassified, but this is really more for John to teb but I'll do it anyway.
But there was this.
Really years ago, but this really high speed, really important technical operation we had going on and behind Thearon curtain, and I think we can even say it was Rushi at the time, but it was basically they would get black, take hours and hours and hours and finally get so that they didn't have surveillance on them, and then what they did is they like slipped into some overalls and went down a manhole. So basically you get free and then you basically got to jump into a pit full
of shit. It's like into a drainage pipe to go do something because there's your reward.
Yeah, Mozeltov, all right, we're going to get right back into that, but first let's hear this.
All right, back to the show.
Can you turn it off, like when you're back home on vacation or something, are you still walking around Virginia looking for surveillance.
No.
I can turn it off pretty easily. Like I don't get paranoid. I don't think people are following me. I don't try to when I'm back home.
No, Because I found in Iraq, I felt fairly safe. But then when I was back in Brooklyn was when I really I started looking for snipers and I started feeling like people are looking at me weird. That might just be PTSD or just the way you look, or just maybe I looked weird and there were snipers trying to kill me. That's possible.
But there's a difference though.
So you're describing two different things, and I've bumped into them both.
One is.
If you've been in the agency and you've been under surveillance, you also know what it's like to try to organize surveillance.
Right.
It's hard getting five or ten guys together a meeting beforehand, and like paying them, and there's surveillances. Oh I can't come in today, my wife is sick. I got to watch the kid. And you got to organize this team of five to ten people. It's like a full time friggin job. And then of course when they watch you, they got to write it up. You got to get these people, they got to sit down and they're going
to have to get on a typewriter a computer. So as far as being followed, I never have that feeling because I know how much work it goes into it, and I also know I'm not worth it, you know. It's like we do this podcast, like no one gives a hoot about me. However, when you're in a place like Bagdad or Afghanistan, you get something called a hyper vigilance where you're just really vigilant because you're afraid you're gonna go over an idea, a mind, or you're going
to get shot. And that is visceral. That's not mental where you're thinking about it. That's just a gut feel. And when you leave Afghanistan after being hyper vigilant for two or three months, that is really hard to turn off because it's not a thought process, it's something that it's just a it's an amigdal of response that's hard.
To turn off.
And also we don't have the training that you guys have, and we don't have we don't really talk about this as journalists that much. We're just basically sent to a war zone and sometimes you get like a two day training that's like try to stand behind the car engine, not the car door or something. But it's but not like we're not going to the farm for a few months and living in a culture where everybody's talking about this stuff. We're mostly talking about what stories are you getting?
But you are constantly you're hypervigilant. Both the actual vigilance like you're worried that, oh is that car following me?
Physical thing, but.
You're also like, I do think it's extra exhausting when you don't know what doing it well is. Nobody's taught you that, so you're also like, do I even know what the hell I'm doing? Am I varying my path and my times.
Enough.
This is the first time in my entire life I've ever talked to anyone professional about how do you do surveillance detection? And I'm now realizing, like I was doing amateur surveillance detection, I don't know that. I'm sure I was surveilled and I'm sure I didn't detect it so well.
There's different kinds of surveillance too. You almost have to know whether it's it's a danger of being killed or whether it's so many tracking. Even your car can have beacons on it, so you drive around and you don't see anything. Oh, I'm fine, but that doesn't mean you're fine necessary and.
You can do the best surveillance run in the world, but if you're the person you're meeting, is bad. So you call them up and say let's meet, and that that call is intercepted, and they want to be your source, Adam, and they want to give you a story and they really mean it. But then like you've called them and suddenly the security service kicks their door in and says, okay, we want you to go meet at them, but here's
the story. We want you to give them a false one, whether you love the government or whatever it is.
So you could do the greatest surveillance in the world. But if your agent, the.
Person you're talking to, has been turned or is bad, it doesn't matter that.
The one thing I did once based on someone's recommendation. I don't think there was any reason to do it. But I went to a Central Asian country that has I was told twenty year old KGB style surveillance was the way it was described to me, And the recommendation was get a cell phone at the airport, make it
clear your use your passport and everything. Then get a local to get you a second cell phone, and just give the first cell phone to somebody and have them just walk around the city and then use the second cell phone. But then I talked to a telecom expert who he was basically like, cute, that was cute. But if they want to know where you are, they know where you are.
That's the thing is is are you worth a serious target? Right any government? You know, if the United States or the FBI has somebody coming to the United States and they are concerned that person is really really important to hear, there is no way that person's going to get themselves away from that survanser what's happening, and it's the same
and what you want to do. That's why you want to act in a way that they don't think you're constantly you know, if you act Joe spy out there and trying to break away and hide from them, they're going to put more read more resources. And there is a point at which if you're public enemy number one, there's nothing you can do right, and so you're trying to avoid.
But that they have resource problems just like everybody else. John and I have set in on these meetings where it's Okay, our bandwidth is only so much, we've only got so many people working so many hours. Like in Baggdad, which isis guys, are we going to follow? Technically it's a I got a five pound bag and there's one hundred pounds of pooh? Which five pounds am I going to put in there? And the biggest questions were basically,
who aren't we going to do right? If we do this guy, then we can't do that guy, and or we'll do them both but not do them well.
It became a thing with the FBI after nine to eleven, when all of a sudden. They were going to run down any potential threat. So some jerk would call in and say I'm going to blow up the seven eleven. They would have to go out and use their surveillance
resources to make sure that didn't happen. So they were spread so thin that if there is stuff that came up that maybe oh there's a rushing in time, like we can't we're still busy run out to make sure there's not another bomb that goes off that we just don't have the resources to. Yeah, everything.
That's why that Dick Cheney one percent idea that if there's a one percent chance this could happen, we must treat it like one hundred percent chance. But then there's a lot of one percent chances.
Yeah, how many people do you want to hire for this? But there's one other thing and maybe you get a sense of this. So you've done your SDR and you're sure you're black, and you meet your source, you know, either for ESPIONAGI for journalism and this fingerspits and CAFU. You look at the guy and if he is like really confident, be wary, be careful. If they're taking a big chance. They're human beings, you know, I meet with
a source. Even when they met him like dozens of times, you can look in their eyes and you can see are they scared? And then there's also you can smell fear sometimes in sweat. I can remember this one guy and I got into the car and I wasn't sure he was like valid or not? Is he good or is he bad? Has even turned? And I opened the car door and this smell of sweat and year came out, and it was like, yeah, he's he's.
For real good because he's he is shit scared.
And if he had been turned by his own government, he would have been like, hey, you know, get it.
It's hard to explain.
But when you look in somebody's eyes and their pupils are you know, and it's like they're afraid, and they're not afraid of me. This is a good meeting, right because they're afraid they're going to get caught.
All right, guys. SDRs was going to be like one little it's I have a long list, so we'll get back to some we'll do some other stuff later. I am hearing from our listeners, by which I mean my wife, that they have our audience that's not our audience. Yeah, and I'm not sure she hears every episode, but that they actually really love when you guys just talk about what life was like in CIA. It's a rare opportunity. So I do want to revisit this and ask more questions.
If people have questions themselves, let us know. All right, Thank you guys so much. I love that. I want to do that more often. We'll see you next time. With some real conspiracies and some very not real conspiracy, aies on Mission Implausible.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and Jonathan Sterner.
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.