I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
This is Mission implausible. Welcome back to Mission Implausible. Our producer John Stern is here with us today and he's going to introduce our guests. Yeah.
Sometimes Adam Davidson brings on one of his friends and everyone's very impressed.
Everyone meaning Jerry. But today I.
Am bringing on someone who is going.
To blow all of Adam's guests away.
The actually is one of my favorite people, same as AJ Jacobs. He's had a number of what I believe John Stewart called method writing books. Do you remember Aj would when you were writing The Year of Living Biblically you met me for lunch on the Upper West Side. I didn't know you were writing the book, and you showed up in a white robe, long beard long hair and barefoot.
I commit to the bit, that's right.
He also has a very fun and fascinating book called The Puzzler and his podcast called The Puzzler, and his most recent book is The Year of Living Constitutionally aj as is. His want was living the Constitution in practical terms. Aj When you got a cold, did you get like leeches to be bled?
Is that what you did?
Well?
First of all, I just want to say thank you for that lovely introduction and thanks for having me on the show. I love the show. Yes, I did try to order leeches and my wife put a cabash on it. I also when I went to the dermatologist and had to have a mole removed, I did request no no, no anesthetic, no anesthetic, and she said for insurance reasons
she couldn't. So that's my excuse for why I never did blood letting or the tobacco smoke enema, which was a very cutting edge and popular medical procedure of the day where they would literally blow smoke up your butt. That's where the phrase comes from. Most likely did insurance cover it, Ben, But what was the insurance situation they had for the founders? Carey quid Ben Franklin is considered to have started some insurance like thing, but I don't know if that was covered.
So getting into the weird intersection between puzzles and codes and espionage and conspiracy theories, I'm going to throw a story at you. This has to do with espionage and it has to do with codes. It's one of my favorites. I've been looking for an excuse to use it. So let's go back to the fifteen twenties. Elizabeth the Second is she's Queen of England and she has a spymaster, a guy by the name of John d Dee, and
he goes around Europe collecting intelligence for the Queen. Now d is a puzzle master like you, and he's also very big to numerology, and he's decided that he should
be represented by the number seven. It was his lucky number, and when he would write to the Queen, it was for her eyes only, so he would put zero zero, one for each eye, and then he would actually put in like a little eyeball, a little dot, and then number seven so she would know it was for her eyes only, and it was from number seven, So he was the first seven and when she responded to him.
She didn't write out Queen Elizabeth Majesty Rex. She just wrote M and so this is where from out of Cambridge, this is where seven comes from it.
I love this story. First of all, why didn't I interview you for my book? This is fantastic. So here's another one. World War two saw some interesting overlaps between puzzles and spying. The Telegraph newspaper in England in nineteen forty one, I believe, printed a very hard They love in England. They love their super tricky wordplaye crosswords. They're harder than in America. No offense to America. And they printed one and they said, if you solve this in
less than twelve minutes, get in touch. And it turned out that it was a recruiting tool for what would become the Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and his code breakers helped win US World War two by solving the Nazi Enigma code. So this is sort of like, are you good enough to be a code breaker? And I'll give you one example, just to give you an example of how tricky these were. They're almost like dad jokes on steroids. They're like a clue for seventeen across. In
this famous puzzle was is this town ready for a flood? Question? Mark is this town ready for a flood? And at six letters it starts with So the way to think about what do you think about when you think of a flood? What comes to mind? What's the most famous blood ever?
Noah?
Noah? And what did he use?
What did he use?
An arc? So if you're ready for a flood, you don't want an old arc, you want a newer Newark. So that's the kind of level of wordplay that they were going for. So I love that. And there was weirdly a sequel to that, because the Telegraph was involved in another spy puzzle incident at the end of World War Two. They printed these crosswords and the crosswords had in them the answers included words like oh, Maha and
Utah and neptune and mulberry. And someone noticed this and those were secret code words used by the Allies during D Day, and they freaked out and they said, oh my god, there is a leak in the crossword puzzle. And they rested this nerdy school master who had written the crosswords, and they thrilled them. But it turned out most people think It was a weird coincidence, because those
coincidences do happen. But whatever, the British spy Service got involved and arrested this poor guy and it turned out.
Ayja, you seem to be pretty supportive of nerdy puzzle guys.
Yes, I am very pro nerdy puzzle people. I think more nerdy puzzle people would make the world a better place. And I'll defend that, not physically because I'm nerdy.
So well. Here in the US, our short of first code breaking organization who I was tied to the Army, and it was in a building near where I'm living now in northern Virginia, near Washington. It's now the State Department's Preparation and Training school. And of course in the United States now the main sort of code breaking organization is the n essay, the National Security Agency.
In my book, I did actually go to Langley to the headquarters of this to see one of the great unsolved puzzles of all time right there at the headquarters of the CIA.
Cryptos yam, quick question, did you go to the Dunkin Donuts or did you go to the Starbucks? That's how we divide people there. Yeah, and which are you tribes, Dunkin Donuts, I'm Dunkin Okay good.
And it's Starbucks. When they say what name do you want? You can't give them your real name, right if you're under cover, you got to give them a fake name. And the baristas have to get security clearances.
It was a weekend, so I actually did not get to do either. But as you know, Cryptos is this sculpture that was commissioned in nineteen eighty eight to spruce up the CIA headquarters. And it was done by a sculptor named Jim Sandborn in collaboration with a cryptographer who used to work at the CIA. And it contains like hundreds of these characters, these letters, and they are a code, and some of the code has been broken, but not all of it. There's one section at the end that
has not been broken. And there are thousands, literally thousands of people whose passion, whose hobby is to try to break Cryptos number four, as it's called. And I'm on this bulletin board where every day I get like ten emails about, Oh, I think I got it. It's the wind Talkers, that's the It's actually no, it's from Moby Dick. All these crazy theories, and of course none of them are right yet. So yeah, I just visited it, but
you worked there. So what was it like from the inside, having this mysterious sculpture.
We have different tribes inside of the CIA, and so John and I were like the operators, right, we handle spies, we recruit spies, and quite frankly, we just look at it and go.
We we're the knuckle draggers, that's right.
But there we do hear people who are like the science and technology guys and the code guys, and like they're in there looking at it, and we're like, basically, it's beyond us. We don't even truck.
Yeah, it was beyond me. But what I found interesting about it, First of all, I loved going to the CIA because getting vetted for it was a hilarious and crazy long process. And then when I announced on the board that I was going to visit in person, they got all excited and they're like, look and see what the color of the grass is on this section? Is the water in the whirlpool? Which way is it going
clockwise or counterclockwise? Are the bolts in any particular? So they had all of these ideas, and to me, cryptos is a very good example of a phenomenon that is related to both puzzles and conspiracies, and that is apenia. And appenia is our tendency to find patterns where there are no patterns, to find signal in the noise. So if you see Jesus's face on a piece of French toast, that's apathenia, or maybe not, maybe as who knows, maybe it is a miracle, but it is at the heart
of so much conspiracy. You're seeing all of these connections that aren't there. You see, Ah, the word CP in these emails. That doesn't stand for cheese pizza. They're not ordering cheese pizza. That's child pornography. And that was literally one of the big breaks that QAnon came up with. And I think as humans were built to see patterns,
which was good from an evolutionary standpoint. When there was a rustle in the grass, you wanted to believe that it was a snake because the cost of being mistaken was pretty minimal, whereas the cost of being mistaken the other way. You thought it was wind, but it was really a snake. That is costly, that'll get you killed. So we have this tendency to apophenia, but now in the age of social media, not a good thing. That's where we get QAnon and all because we're seeing all
of these connections that don't exist. And my theory is that puzzles are a safe outlet for your apathenia because there is an actual connection and you can find it, but it's not going to inspire you to storm the capitol. It is a puzzle and it is for fun, and it also teaches you how to be wary of apia because you have to be very open minded and say you give me as much evidence as you want, doesn't matter. I am still going to stick with this crazy hypothesis.
Let's take a break, we'll be right back.
Let me switch and ask you about another one of your books about the Constitution that you wrote in your study the Constitution, So, what conspiracy theories were prevalent among the founding fathers. In fact, I've heard some British scholars suggest that the country was founded on a false conspiracy that King Georgia was much more oppressive than in fact he was. In those type of things. So I'm interested in your thoughts about conspiracies and defunding fathers.
It depends on which historian you talk to. I loved these British historians who I heard giving a lecture and they were saying just that the colonists were very conspiracy minded. They were paranoid. They thought the British were out to get them, whereas these British historians argued, no, actually, if you look at the data, the colonists were paying ten percent of the taxes that the British people were in the British homeland, so we were actually getting off easily.
I found it. It was hilarious because I got my patriotism up. I'm like, you, British bastard, I can't believe your call. You know, this was a fight for freedom, but it was fascinating to see their point of view. As with many things, I'm sure it was a mixture, but I do think after a while they were seeing the worst in what Britain did. And there were people who like
John Dickinson, who didn't want to go to war. And Dickinson's like, let's just calm down, let's just take a breath, but he lost out in the end.
Yeah, do you have any sense of the culpeper written? So this was George Washington's espionage network in New York and up the East Coast, and they had ad a guy's name was Talmadge came up with this elaborate code with like seven to eight hundred different sort of codes. George Washington was seven to point one famously in the code.
But they ran espionage operations that allowed for the numerically inferior and qualitatively inferior US forces defeat the British over and over again because we had better spy networks.
I love that.
And five years the Culpeper Ring operated inside of then British occupied New York and they were never hot and the British several times were able to acquire some of the messages, but they couldn't break the code.
And by the way, I believe that one of the centers of espionage and the Revolutionary War was France's tavern in downtown New York, where you can still go and have a pint. I know that one of the most famous codes is called the Arnold Code or the Arnold cipher, based on Benedict Arnold, and it's what he used to communicate with the British, and that one you probably know, it's you both have the same book, so maybe it's
the Bible, maybe it's a history book. And then the code is you give the page number, you pick a word that you need, so say the word is fort. You know that they're going to storm a fort, and you find it in the book, and you say the page number, so that like forty three then five lines down, four words in, so fifty three five four would be the word fort. I actually just watched The Sympathizer on Netflix, which is about Vietnamese spies, and they used the Arnold
czeipher even then. But I think, well, he certainly got caught. I don't know. I don't think. I don't think it was the thrilling that one book.
My wife is British, by the way, she mixes up as like the Patriot and the Trader, which one was which Arnold or Joel Washington is.
Like I've heard people try to defend Arnold, like, you know, you revisionist history, like sort of the wicked view of history where the wicked witch was actually the good person and that he was unfairly looked over because he runs a brilliant general. I'm not really buying it. I'm not a huge fan of Benedict Arnold. So I am glad that we caught.
Him going back to the thing with the Constitution and trying to tie it to today. From your study of the Funding Fathers and the Constitution, where do you see us shifting away from their intent? Now?
Thank god, we don't follow the way they followed the Constitution, because we're parts of it that were great in that time. But we are in a different era, and so that was part of the point of the book is to show the evolution of our morals. And my method was I decided to try to get inside the heads of the Founding Fathers by using the technology and mindset from the seventeen eighties. And that meant carrying a musket, eighteenth century musket around New York for my Second Amendment rights.
It meant writing the book with a quill pen. And it was fascinating. And there were parts of the Constitution and the Founding Father's vision that are wonderful. I'm so grateful for the idea of community and responsibility. But at the same time, it was a very different world. And so those who say that we should go back and live like the Founding Fathers intended, even they are not really following it. So, for instance, the First Amendment. I'm
a journalist, so I love the First Amendment. I love free speech, but our vision of free speech is not based on the seventeen eighty nine version of free speech, which was much more constrained. So back then they believed that you could be punished for what you said and what you wrote. And there were the sedition Acts from John Adams where they arrested dozens of people, including some poor guy who made an ass joke or more technically an art's joke about John Adams, and so they were
much more restrictive. And only in the twentieth century did we get this idea that it's an American value to be able to say whatever we think. I am glad that we have shifted. But neither side, neither conservatives or liberals would want to go back to that original one because the liberals would hate things like there were laws against blasphemy in New York. You got fined thirty seven and a half cents for saying the word damn or the F word. You would be find the same amount.
So liberals wouldn't like the original free speech, but conservatives wouldn't either because it would never have covered something like the idea that corporations giving money to politicians is considered free speech. The Founders would have been appalled by that idea.
They were very concerned about money corrupting politics. So the idea is, let's take some of the spirit of the Founding fathers, their best parts, but let's not try to stick to the letter of the Constitution because it's such a different world we live in and our technology and our morals have changed.
So I live here in Hawaii and the military here every year they have a big celebration and a dinner. It is to celebrate the Battle of Midway. And Midway was of course the turning point, and we're two where we could have lost, and Midway basically boiled down to we lure the Japanese into a trap, and we did this through a code. And we knew that the letters AF for the sound AF, that for the Japanese. That meant that was their target. And so we didn't know the whole code, but we knew if it was AF
like AF Malaysia, that meant they were attacking Malaysia. And so we had Midway put out in the open false statements saying that they were short on water, that they didn't have enough drinking water, and the Japanese picked that up and in their code they said af the place that didn't have enough water. And so the United States bet the farm that the Japanese fleet was heading out to take Midway, and it was a bet that won
us the war. And so when you'd sit down to talk with Navy personnel, for them, code breaking, espionage, and victory at sea are all wound into one.
And I also love spreading those false information disinformation I guess it would be, and that is one of my favorite I shouldn't say favorite parts of warfare, but I always find it fascinating. You know, Napoleon would print fake newspapers in the Russian I believe to throw off the Russians at D Day. They made these fake planes that looked like they were real planes when you were overhead, because they wanted to get the Germans to think that we were attacking from a different place.
Do you know who was put in charge of that fake army patent? Germans thought they would never do that, yet he was.
In the dog house. He was in trouble, but the Germans thought he was the main commander and so they put him in charge of that. So the Germans would think, oh, he's gonna be in charge of this attack to.
Klais, imagine how angry he must have been. I can't even he seems like a because.
He did want to Let's take a break. We'll be right back. I'm going back to the fact that you've studied so many different things. I recall that you also at one point got involved like heavy duty exercise and health and fitness, and one article you talked about calling yourself a germa full. You know, nowadays it seems like there's so much misinformation about health and things out there, and obviously RFK Junior is now going to.
Be our own My goodness.
Yeah, can you talk a little bit about misinformation, possibly conspiracies and things that you learned in the health, fitness and science area.
Oh yeah, I love this topic because it's so important. Ninety percent of health advice could be summed up in a paragraph. Get enough sleep, don't stress, have a group of friends, exercise in a way you like, don't eat processed foods, don't smoke, don't hit yourself in the face with an axe. Yeah, just very obvious stuff. But the problem is if you're a health health journalist or a health writer or a health influence So that's boring. No one's going to tune in to you saying that paragraph.
Every week. You have to come up with new ideas that they are keeping secret, the real secret. Here's the real herb that's going to make you live another one hundred years. And it's just ninety eight percent of it is bullshit. It's tied to our desire for new and secret information like that is exciting. We don't want to hear the same thing, even if it's true. I talk about the single study syndrome. Don't fall for the single study.
You can always find a study in health that says something like bacon is good for you and make you live forever. But that's just one study. You've got to look at the thousands of other studies that say, you know what, bacon is probably not good for you. So look at the big picture. But if you're in health journalist, you're gonna look at that one study that's exciting and counter and inuitive and new and be like, oh, look
at this, bacon is good for you. And that's where so much of the misinformation comes from.
Well, so you're blaming the media on this one. All right.
I'm a part of the media and I fully blame the media.
Yeah, but could you go deeper on it and go into like specific conspiracy theories, especially when it comes to like getting vaccines and things like that, and that is a Those are conspiracy theories.
Conspiracies, and they're really harmful to our politics, but more importantly to the general health situation.
It's so frustrating to see the anti vax movement have so much power. And as for why, I think it goes back to this idea that people love secrets. They love to assume that authorities are out to get them, and sometimes they are. Sometimes authorities are, but often they're not.
Paranoia is it feels good. It feels good to be like, oh, they're out to get make I actually talk about the opposite of paranoia is called pro noya, which is the idea that people are secretly plotting to make your life better. And I do think there are people in the government
who I should be pronoyed about. There are people who are trying to make our lives better, but that's not as exciting a story as that these secret authorities are out to get us, so that I think plays a big part in this anti vax.
My sense is people are out to get them, but it's not the government people. It's the people trying to sell them snake oil. I don't really watch Alex Jones, but I've tuned in a couple of times to see what it's about. You know, he's selling you vitamin supplements that will help you live. He's stoking the fear of government that doesn't defend itself. And what he's doing, he's making money of it, and he's gaining influence, and there's a whole industry, right.
It's interesting. I think it's I see it as a little more nuanced. I think that there are certainly some quacks who are out to get you, But I think quacks believe what they're selling. They believe their snake oil is good. And I think scientific literacy needs to be taught in schools more. We need to tell people this is how you read a study. But a lot of these people say, oh, I gave this guy in my snake oil and six months later he was cured. Oh
could that be a correlation and not causation? Probably the same with astrology and people who read poems. I think most of them actually believe that they are telling the truth and providing a service. And I don't know how to battle that is, except for teaching people scientific literacy.
Nowadays it's about typing just some stuff into the Google machine. And I know one of the things that you wrote about it is that you had read the encyclopedia from front to back. And there's probably people now that don't even know what an encyclopedia is, and they would probably think, well, did you read the whole Internet? But I saw a thing. A teacher tried to expose her children to the encyclopedia and they really jumped in and they said, oh, yeah,
we know how to do that. And then when she said, okay, look up D day or something, they started looking under W for what is D day? Because that's how you look, That's how you look on the computer. Right.
That is hilarious. I love it. Yeah, I did it. I read this book was about twenty years ago, and it was at the very tail end of physical encyclopedias of a year or two later they stopped. And that is it's a big problem because at the time that was seen as an authoritative source and they did try to be objective and they didn't always succeed, but they tried. Whereas now with online everything is flat, so it's very hard to tell what is authoritative and what is not.
I have a few heuristics that I use. You know, if it's dot edu, it gets like a plus one in my book. If they admit their mistakes, you get you're like, okay, then maybe that's something. If I don't use forty two exclamation points, that's probably a good thing. That's my job is to try to figure out what information is right and what is not. And for me it's a struggle. So if you don't have the time and it's not your job, I feel for you. And there needs to be some sort of you know how
bonds and securities have a rating. I think we need something like that on the internet.
No discussion of espionage and conspiracy theories and codes is complete without at least touching on a recent story that's come out. This is on cryptos a gay and it's it's it's all out and out. It was like incredibly secret CIA German B and D operation where the question was how do you defeat all the different codes? And the answer is you make the code machine. And so this Swiss company Cryptos, I gay it's been around for a long time. And CIA's ag in English, Jerry age.
That's right. So one hundred and twenty countries around the world, they had the most intricate codes that puzzle breakers aja, not even you could perhaps break. But they see I didn't even need to break them because they were making the codes. So they had basically all the countries and maybe not Russian, but all the other countries in the world all used this one machine and the Germans and Americans had a backdoor into it.
Well it is yeah, it's a perpetual cat and mouse game of will the code breakers be able to break the ultimate code? And that was why we won World War two as we broke the German Enigma code thanks to Alan Turing and thanks to the Polish. I have Polish ancestors. They used to tell Polish jokes back in my childhood, but no more. They helped us win World War Two.
The Poles and Finns who passed on some that code material from the Jerseys, the friends.
We stolen a Nigma machine in Washington, d C. We had a woman basically she slept with the German code clerk for her country.
But I do think I guess we do need codes because I did once and our on something called radical honesty. And this was a psychologist in Virginia who believed that the world would be a better place if everyone was totally honest all the time, but more than that, if whatever was on their brain came out of their mouth. So the classic you look fat in this dress, you would just say it, and he thought that's a more authentic and there would be bumps, but it's a more
authentic way to live. I tried it for a month and it was disastrous. It was just a horrible you know, it was awkward and our There were moments that were liberating and lovely and made my life better and made my friend's life better, but overall I don't recommend it. What do you all think of radical honesty? Do you think we could ever get to a society where we don't need secrets and the CIA would not be necessary?
No, not if people were involved there.
Yeah, I agree.
You know you're a polymath rights. We've talked all about the Constitution, and we've talked about health, and we've talked about puzzles. You also I think did a book on the Bible. Can you tell us about some conspiracies or misinformation or things you learned in that study.
Well, first of all, there is a famous conspiracy, or a few famous conspiracies in the Bible and code. You know the word shibboleth. It's a word that you can use to identify who is and who is not part of your tribe. And it was based on the word shibboleth, which I think the Philistines could not properly pronounce, so the Hebrews would say it. And if you said it correctly,
then you were part of the tribe. What I tried to try do was follow the Bible as literally as possible, to try to explore how literally should we take the Bible. And I went a little overboard, as it's might want. And so I you know, I wore a robe, and I couldn't shave the corners of my beard because the Bible says that you can't shave your corner. I didn't know where the corners were, so I let the whole thing grow. I stoned adulterers. I used very small stones,
but I was able to stone some adulters. But a lot of it is about how metaphorical are these words and how literally should we take them? And so I spent time with creationists who believe that the world is five thousand years old and that evolution is a false conspiracy by these intellectuals to try to bring down society. The problem is that they say, if one part of the Bible is proved to be metaphorical or wrong, then then why follow any of it? Why follow the parts
about loving your neighbor? But I think that's a very black and white view of the Bible. I think you can people talk about cherry picking like it's a bad thing, but we all cherry pick. We have to cherry pick. We pick the good cherries, and so pick the cherries about loving your neighbor, don't pick the cherries about homosexuality is a sin. So that was one of the points of the book.
Pronouncing Shibbaleth correctly is a way you could see which Triber and I didn't realize that. Do you know how you could do that? In the CIA? There's a couple of things that you can tell when someone doesn't have a connection to CIA.
Oh I want to know, I want to know.
Well, one is we don't say the CIA, we always just say when I was at CIA or CIA did this?
We never say the good.
The other one is people always make the mistake and call people like us that worked over the agents say, were you a CIA agent? Agents are our sources that people re recruit to spyflace officers were CIA officers or case officers? Is there's some things that like Lacare wrote, like the word mole. Apparently we never re used the word mole. He used it in his writing, and then all of a sudden it became the way to talk about a spy inside your own service.
Oh, I didn't know that.
One of my favorite codes. So I lived in India for a long time, and back in the eighteen forty he is a guy the named Charles Napier. He hunkeered a whole hunk of India, this western part of it called the sin Si n d H. Right, it's just Pakistan of India. He wasn't supposed to conquer it. He was just supposed to go in and put down this
local uprising. And so he went beyond his brief and he basically defeated the enemy and took it all over, annexed it for queen and country and he needed to send back a message, but he didn't want to send it back in English, and he didn't have a code handy because the messengers would be you know, the local maharajas would stop and read the letter and andy he didn't want them to know before brittened it. So he thought, well,
how do I do this? And of course they're all classically educated then, and so he wrote one word at tave, which, of course my Latin is rusty, but in Latin that means I have sinned, si n n ed. When they got it, they're like, I have sinned. Is like, oh he's got I have SI and d age. He's freaking conquered, like a big honk, you know, a thousand square miles that we didn't want and don't need. So that's a good hunk of Pakistan today.
Oh it's a great sorry plus a double meaning. I mean, he did sin He went against his orders, so he sinned and he got sinned. So it's a confession. It's a great story. I love that.
Well, a Jay, it's so nice to talk to you. You seem to know everything about everything, So thank you so much for spending time with us and putting up with our crazy questions.
No, my pleasure. First of all, that statement is huge misinformation. I know some things about some things, and some of those things are true, and some of them I think are true. But I love curiosity, and I do think that is at the heart of all of my books, and I think it's at the heart of what we as a society need to do to save democracy. Well, thank you, this was a delight, I really and I can't wait for you to come and puzzle with us.
On the puzzle of our pleasure.
I'll be gentle, I'll be general.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible it is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.