The interesting thing about conspiracy theories is they explain everything. They're self licking ice cream cones. And this one, we have a mystery about a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, and we don't have the answers to it, and we're still looking for it, and it has real victims.
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. This week's podcast, episode two on Havana Syndrome, a series of a parent attacks on American diplomats and intelligence officers that left many national security professionals with serious brain injuries, was recorded prior to new details that surfaced on Sunday March thirty, first, the news magazine sixty Minutes, along with investigators at The Insider, published new information highly suggestive that Russian military intelligence operatives are behind
these attacks which have been occurring since twenty fourteen. We would encourage you to watch and read the articles. The Insider piece, entitled Unraveling Havana Syndrome was written by Michael Weiss, who we interviewed for an episode coming out shortly. Also, our guest today who was a victim of these attacks, Mark Palmeropolis, has a powerful and personal story in the Insider.
The new information surfaces really serious questions. So far, the government denies that any foreign entity is behind the attacks, as we posited, and the new information seems to confirm there is clearly strong, circumstantial evidence that our public servants are victims of a Russian attack. Why is the administration so adamant that the brain injuries were not the result of an attack. Does the CIA have information surfaced in
the recent articles, but is keeping it secret? And if so, why are they afraid to'll deter US diplomats and intelligence officers from serving overseas. Do they not want to face the implications of a foreign attack which would pressure the administration to respond forcefully in any event. All of this is consistent with Russian activities over the past decade. Their actions are just deniable enough to force inaction and take advantage of our doubt and hesitancy. While we fight over
what is true, Vladimir Putin acts. We will discuss these issues and many more on today's episode of Mission Implausible. Adam, I understand you have moved away from the big city and you now live somewhere in the rural parts of New England. Is that true?
That is very true. I gotta say, I am really learning that a kind of New York way of living in the world, a sort of directness, an abrasiveness, doesn't go over well. I guess what I'm saying is, don't move here, whatever you do, John.
So, Adam, I grew up in the country, and I give you a bit of wisdom that when it's not actually dangerous to roll your windows down and feed the bears, it's actually quite safe. What's unsafe is stop feeding the bears.
All right, guys, Well, we're getting back to I mean, I think, on a very special episode of Mission Implausible. Let's get into part two of Havana syndrome.
I'm really pleased to have Fay Flam with us today, who is a genuinely cool person. So, Fay, you're a columnist for Bloomberg, but in your past you're a science person, right, You've got a degree of geophysics and science writing.
Yeah, I'm still a science writer. I do science columns for Bloomberg for their opinion section.
Let's talk a little bit about this thing that's been called Havana syndrome in the intelligence comunity. Now they call it traumatic brain injuries or TBIs. So can you give us a little bit of a sense of some of your thoughts on that.
Yeah, well, it started out as a small group of people and then it grew and grew and grew on. There were news stories recently that said that about fifteen hundred people have actually claimed to have Havana syndrome. And at first there was a theory flow to that it might be a sonic weapon, because one of the very first people to develop part problems was a young guy who heard a loud sound and then developed hearing loss and ten itis. But then other people didn't hear a
noise or they heard different kinds of noises. And then somewhere along the line, somebody floated the idea of a microwave weapon, that somehow, some enemy faction was actually beaming microwaves into people's heads. And this actually was something that a certain number of doctors kind of latched onto early on.
There was even a National Academy of Sciences panel where they deemed this the most likely cause, but physicists who know something about microwaves dismissed it pretty quickly, because, as one person pointed out, it's actually a myth that microwaves cook things from the inside out, and that's part of what makes people think, oh, yeah, I could like get to your brain, you know, without causing any external damage.
And then another group called the Jason's That Jason is a group of physicists that's been advised the government on nuclear weapons and all kinds of different science related issues. They've looked at this too, and they concluded that it was most likely to have a psychosomatic origin. And I have written a couple columns about this, and in one I talked to a neurologist who's an expert on psychosomatic conditions, and I learned something really important about this, which is.
We tend to sort of dismiss psychosomatic as meaning fake or all in your head, imagined in some way, that it's not real and not really a problem. But the way she described it, I realized it has to do with the you know, the connection between the mind and the body, which is not well understood, and that people are really suffering and can't just get over it when
they have psychosomatic conditions. And so I left thinking Havana syndrome is real, it probably has a big psychosomatic component, and that people are suffering from that.
So I want to explore what you say by when we talk about this, and I want to be clear that we don't have any certainty what this is is right, so piss big prologue. We know, because John is a victim of it, that the Russians do do things like be microwaves at the embassy, and we know that it goes back to the nineteen seventies. We know that Kissinger was talking with then Soviet foreign Minister Dobreenan about the issue of bombing.
The embassy with microwaves.
And when I say microwaves, I want to sort of work back as we use the termine we all think of like the microwave oven, but microwaves are not actually that they are.
It's a form of help me out here, FAE.
Elect electromagnetic radio electromannet radiation exactly right, Yes, And it's a long wavelength so we can go through things. It's not like l you know, it's it's a big spectrum. And this is on the long wavelength end.
Right.
So we know that the Russians have bathed our embassy in microwaves. We know they be electromegletic energy, whether it's microwaves or other sorts at the embassy for all sorts of reasons. We know they put carcinogenic spy dust on our officers. And I'll just throw this in that my understanding is that the Russians did experiment with this sort of thing, as has the US military. There was there was the MEDUSA project, and I'm just going to bring
it up because I love what MEDUSA stands for. It's the mob Excess to turrent using silent audio, a weapon crowd control device that was worked on in the year two thousands, and that the US military was looking at this in the late sixties and early seventies, where they determined that as far as they could tell with what they were using, it was having no impact on Reese's monkeys.
And then lastly on the demographic fifteen hundred, I would say, if it's that large, knowing how things operate, that's too large a number, too large a demographic.
Well, yeah, let me address that. One of the problems we have here is that this happened largely to people who live inside a closed secret system right in the CIA, and so therefore we're responding to what media account, let's say, of this. So what happened was there were several people in several places after the original Havana victims that reported that they thought they suffered from this I got brain injuries from what they believed was some sort of targeted attack.
And for a long time, the agency and the agency leadership didn't want to deal with it. They'd pushed back against these people. They're worried about if they agree that these people got hit, then other people are going to say they did it. So once the new director came in,
he said, Okay, we have to deal with this. We have to try to help these people who believe they were hurt, and they sent out a message to everybody in the organization saying, if you think there's anything that you're having, some sort of brain injury or anything that might have happened to you, please stand up and report it. And yes, fifteen hundred or more people said, yeah, maybe me. And of course, now we've had people in Afghanistan and in Iraq and they've been around bombings and all these
other kind of things. And my understanding is they've come down to the fact that maybe twenty or thirty of these people are ones that they believe are the ones that could be legitimate victims of this thing. The other people may have something, they may have problems, but it doesn't fit into this pattern of a potential attack.
Yeah, and that's why, I mean, there can be more than one thing going on. And I know there were a lot of reports about different kinds of really bad harassment, especially in Havana, that people were reporting, you know, that dog excrement was in their cars and people were breaking into their homes. And when it comes to science and technology, the things that are really unlikely are things that would
violate the laws of science as we know them. But if something is sort of not scientifically impossible, but just a technology that we don't quite understand, well, then it may be possible. I think the research there is actually quite a bit of research, and I think that's why the Jason group was skeptical.
One thing I want to say about the Jason's because we in the Agency would use the Jacon's to bring them in to look at things that we saw. For example, when I was in Moscow, we had reporting about some of the things that the Russians were doing scientifically, like Jerry talked about in cmbassy and these type of things, and we would actually bring the Jasons in to study these things, and frankly, I've seen times when they were wrong.
So they we would present them things that we were getting reporting that the Russians were doing, and we would get reports back from them saying, oh, this is impossible, this is not something doesn't make any sense, it doesn't make scientific sense. And over time we would actually then find out more specifics about this and they'd be like, oh, yeah, well, actually we never thought about it that way. The Russians are approaching things in a completely different way than they
should or we would or other things. So and in my case, these adjacents, in this case that was an early report, and none of them had any access to any of these victims. So yeah, I trust them as scientists. But we in the government, when we get involved somewhere, if we're going to be successful, say you know, in Afghanistan or whatever, we weren't successful, we often talk about an all of government approach and you could say, ohause,
this could be sort of mass hysteria or something. But then from people on the ground, how do you explain, for example, then that some of the patterns that we've seen, we've seen patterns of these twenty or thirty people who believe that they've been hit by this, they are overwhelmingly people in the CIA who worked on Russia issues that are in specific countries where the Russians and others have
freedom of movement. And so how does mass hysteria happen to one person here, one person there, one person there, and that now it's possible.
I mean, obviously the first case can't be mass hysteria. It starts with something, and so something happened to a few people. When it starts to blow up to fifteen hundred people, then there's something psychological going on. In the power of suggestion, I guess the question is you know, why settle on a microwave weapon?
You know exactly, Let's put that away.
Yeah, I think using the word attack we also may be going down a wrong path. So what the Russians again from an intelligence offers perspective, and John is the Russia exper.
We're also assuming Russia here too, which is what we're also going in a certain direction.
We're making an assumption that it would have to be a nation state with significant resources.
We don't know.
It could be that the attacks are not actually at tacks against people, but it takes against devices. And it could be that the Russians, the adversaries, you may not even know themselves. Why the impact is going to be on human beings when you're trying to shut off a cell phone or go after a cell phone or a piece of specialized electronic equipment and you use some sort of electroathletic energy.
But is there anything existing, any sort of scientific thing that could be weaponized that could have this kind of effect?
Well, you know, I have interviewed a couple of different people on this that I think were helpful. One was a scientists who had worked at Los Alamos for years and was familiar with our own US research on microwave weapons,
and was very skeptical that such a thing exists. You know, people have looked at a few things, you know, since people were breaking into their homes, people have looked at whether it could be some sort of a virus, even you know, some sort of a microbe, some sort of a chemical or poison that their homes had been tampered with,
their furniture had been rearranged. But maybe they had experimented with ways to poison people in a low level way so that it wasn't obvious exactly when and where it started, but where they did start to feel sick.
When I lived overseas and places where that it didn't like us, people did break into our houses routinely, in things and nervous. The thing I was maybe most nervous is when I would go to get a haircut. I'd be sitting there and I think, like this guy could just slip my throat.
Oh my god, let's take a break. We'll be right back, and boom, we're back.
When you get a dog whistle and you blow into it, we don't hear anything, and yet this high pitched auditory stimulus will hurt a dog's ear because it impacts on the bone and it's in their ear.
Is it possible.
Also sort of audio waves or just on the noise spectrum that could.
Impact a lot of people reported hearing noises.
So if I was wanted to build a machine, they had vibrations like in the audio, you know, noise vibrations, but we can't hear it like dogs hand some sounding that might shake a person's brain.
That was actually part of the theory behind the microwaves. Is there something called the Fray effect? I don't know if you cloked at the guy that was studying the physiological effects of microwaves. I think he was originally commissioned by the Navy to look at whether naval officers on ships who were being exposed to radar were being damaged by it. And I guess he actually put himself in the path the microwaves and heard this clicking sound.
When this was taking place.
Initially, my understanding is that senior agency officials did not.
Want to take this to the White House.
It was precarious to tell the White House that Vladimir Putin is a bad guy, right and to go after this aggressively. To do this, because if you found out that the Russians were doing something or if it was likely that is either a causes belly attacking us inside of our own embassy, right that has serious consequences for this, and that White House didn't want to know, and so there was a huge bureaucratic, but very real disincentive to follow this up aggressively.
I think even this White House would not want to do that because you're forced to then respond. In other words, you know, you've made their life more difficult, only if you have.
One hundred percent certainty. Right what you're doing is, let's go back to Russia. You're accusing Russia, so you have to be one hundred thousand friggin percent certain, not ninety nine percent.
So you're talking to a science person and you're calling one hundred thousand percent, like, well, it's like, yeah.
One hundred thousand percent, it's more than nine hundred and ninety nine thousand percent. The fact that it walks like a duck and clacks like a duck doesn't always mean it's a duck. So I think we're I think we're in agreement that we simply don't have enough data to determine whether or not some sort of device was used to impact on an officer rights.
This is still an open question, right.
Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, that was fun.
Thank you Faith for putting up with Jerry. Our next guest is Mark Palmeropolis. Mark is a friend of ours and a career CIA Clandestine Service officer like we were. He spent most of his career in the Middle East and in war zones before working in senior leadership back at CIA headquarters, and his career sadly was cut short when he suffered an attack by what was then called
the Havana syndrome. Since he was sort of forced out of the government and it needed to get medical help, he's become a senior Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He's a regular on MSNBC and The Joe Scarborough Show, among other places, has written a variety of opinion pieces and a well respected management leadership book. And so Mark,
it's really great to have you here today. I was wondering if you could provide our listeners maybe just sort of a short overview of what happened to you both in the field physically and then sort of the follow up.
Sure. Sure, and it's good to be here. With old friends, and I will say, as you know, as I tell my story, I have to give some credit to people like John and Jerry who actually stood by me. There are some really hard times when you go through the kind of what I went through and battle the government frankly in public. Ultimately win, but you make some enemies from inside our old outfit and you end up knowing
who your true friends are. So both of you have been that, and trust me, it's noticed by me and my family, and you know, my life really changed in December of twenty seventeen. I had been a long time CIA officer, a case officer. I'd spent a lot of
time in the Middle East. As you noted, the last job I actually had when I was promoted at the Senior Intelligence Service, I was made first the deputy and then the chief of operations over it's called the Europe and Eurasian Mission Center, which was the entity responsible for our work from everywhere from Ireland to the farthest time zones of Russia. And with that, because I was a career Middle East officer, I wanted to take a trip
to Russia. I wanted to meet the ambassador John Huntsman, and then I wanted to just see for myself because I was overseeing this part of the world. So in December of twenty seventeen, I made a faithful trip to Moscow again to meet the ambassador, and of course I actually was meeting with counterparts and the Russian security services,
and a lot of folks ask you know why is that. Well, even the darkest days of the Cold War, John, we had not a productive but a relationship with the KGB where the CIA and a KGB would have open channels, and so we still have that with Russia, and that, frankly, is important. So I was going to meet my counterparts, both in the external service, the SPR and the internal service the FSB. The Russians did not want me to
take the trip. As we applied for the visa, received the visa, they called back they wanted to rescind it. They thought I was going to be doing something to Farius there, which is ridiculous. I was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service. I was going there very overtly
telling them I was going. But for some reason they were spooked by this, and so we insisted on myself and one other officer going and about two or three nights into the trip, as I'm staying at a five star hotel within what John you probably know, there's two blocks of the US Embassy, that's the Marriott. I woke up in the middle of the night with an incredible case of vertigo, a splitting headache. I felt physically sick.
I had tonight is ringing in my ears. And this started really this terrible medical journey which caused me to retire from the CIA, ultimately to go public begging for medical care and ending up at Walter Reid with the traumatic brain injury diagnosis. But something seriously, it did happen to me that night in Moscow. I was at the kind of the top of my game and physical and mental health, and I turned into someone that you could
almost not recognize. So quite a story, and I hope it doesn't define my career, but something that I always have to live with.
So, Mark, when this happened, you had to retire. I think you still say that even to this day you have daily splitting headaches. Had to go to Walter Reed as you mentioned, and get help. And so I want to ask, sort of probably a tough question, who are the people that handled it well inside and outside the US government, and who are the people who you think handled it poorly.
It's a very fair question and answers to that question, I've provided directly not only to senior CIA leadership over heres, but also to the oversight committees both in the House and the Senate who have investigated this, because I was very upset on how this was handled. So I came back from ten days in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and I was in agony. I had terrible splitting headaches. Things got worse when I got back. I developed brain fag my long distance vision, I couldn't drive, I had some
cognitive issues. And I went to our office medical services and I said, look, something happened to me there. And in the back of my mind I thought of what had occurred back in twenty sixteen to our diplomats at the US Embassy in Havana, Cuba, and I said, you know, could this be that? And they put me through some
very rudimentary tests. I literally walking down, touching my finger to my nose or something, and they said, no, you don't have those same kind of symptoms, even though I did have kind of vertigo and occipital neualogia, which is a splitting headache in the back, and some of the things that actually the other Havana victims did have. But originally the Offico Medical Services said no, and this started a long standing back and forth. There was a young
doctor there who was a champion. The senior elements of the Office of Medical Services kind of said no. And basically what I was asking to do was go to the University of Pennsylvania where they were treating some of the Havana victims. And I said, look, something is wrong with me. I can't even go to work for more than two or three hours.
I just was a mess.
And the Office of Medical Services senior leadership rejected this. Then I finally had to retire because of it, which was pretty tragic. Just as I was retiring, the then deputy Director of Operations, actually she called me and she said, would you come be one of my deputies one of the addo's associate deputy director of operations, John and Jerry. You both know, that's a tremendous honor. That's getting to the seventh floor of CI. But I had to say no, I couldn't do it, and so I retired. And just
as I was retiring. Some other officers were coming in from the field afflicted by this, and they did get treated at Walter Reed's Traumatic Brain Injury Center. It's called the National Intrepid Center of Excellence called NICO. And so, while the Offesome Medical Services at first kind of rejected me, as I now retire and I have dialogue in with CIA, OFFESO Medical Services is saying no as well, but this time senior leadership CIA also is kind of denigrating my request.
All I wanted was a frickin' doctor's appointment. I'm not asking for anything else. But for whatever reason, CIA just kept saying no. And so finally I went public a good friend now I think a journalist John that you know as well, Julia Yaffi, who's a Russian specialist. I contacted her and I said, I have a story to tell. I went to the agency and I told them I was going to do this so they wouldn't be surprised,
even though they were very angry. And so the story finally came out and embarrassed the agency to such an extent three former CIA directors actually called our seventh floor and asked, what the hell are they doing? Please? Send Mark to the doctor, and then they did at that point approved me going to Walter Reed and So, which was a one month intensive program for traumatic brain injury where I was diagnosed with the TBI. But you talk about who are the good guys in this good guys
are my friends or the good gals my friends? You stuck with me? It's the junior doctor at CIA. And those that really did me a lot of harm were the senior medical staff at the Office of Medical Services and senior officials. But those that again rejected a simple
request for me to get medical treatment. And finally, when this all kind of became much more in public, both Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, and Bill Burns, the CI director, actually visited with Walter Reid and met with my doctors and the deputy director at NIKO at Walter Reed told them. They said, the delay in Mark's care was really detrimental. You caused him an immense amount of suffering.
But do you think it was because it was either something to do with you or something to do with the Havanna syndrome in general, or is it something that they didn't want to confront the possibility of Russia causing harm to one of our officers because that demands a response, right and with that administration, that's a tall order without to be clear and playing devil's without having like specific evidence.
And maybe not even wanting to have that evidence. So what are you your.
Thoughts, No, Jerry, that's a great question. I've gone through this in my mind so many different times. I will say there was an Inspectral General's report that was done on this that detailed the agency's response, and I can't talk about the details of it, but I was allowed to read it, and it's not very flattering towards senior
officials in terms of denying care. And these are you know, other kind of tip of the spirit case officers who served around the world who I've seen them go out to the field and I've seen them come back after something like this had happened, and they are in fact vegetables, and it's a terrible thing to even say. They're medically retired, they've gone blind, they some have had cancers, they have lost the total ability to work. So let me just
start that with something indeed happened. And so I think that the organization just by default doesn't want to have this kind of unknown cold case hanging out there, because then it caused into question and your ability to keep yourself and your family safe overseas. And frankly, and both of you know this, both of you have been on unaccompanied assignments, will go in harm's way, and the drop of a hat taking your families is a different story.
And I'm sure you're going to have others on say this is all psychosomatic or there's you know, there's some kind of mass hysteria. Well that doesn't apply to someone like myself, who was in top physical condition when this happened to me. But if it is a hostile foreign actor, it's an act of war against our personnel, it's probably a brilliant COVID action plan. It's caused enormous dissension within
our ranks. It's still in essence non attributable. But if we ever found out who did it, what do we do in response? What I equate with the most? And again, and it's another issue that I think that a previous administration kind of fouled up is the bounties that the Russians put on our soldiers in Afghanistan. Everyone I've talked to in our old service there's one hundred percent convinced
by this. They've seen all the intelligence. There's no doubt the Russians were behind this, and we never held them accountable because how do you hold the Russians accountable?
There?
We got to take a break now and we'll be back in just a minute.
And we're back, So.
Mark, tell me about the medical side of this. What have you learned about what happened to your head and to others? And what do the doctors say.
I've seen every doctor under the sun. I mean, I've done everything. I've been through traditional medicine. I've been through alternative medicine. I've been poked and prodded and acupuncture, and I was willing to do just about anything because I was in so much pain. So the doctors at Walter read you know again, this is the most advanced traumatic brain injury clinic on the planet. I've had seven MRIs. If things come up on imaging for me, I've had
so many blood tests under the sun. We yet some of us have received compensation for this, and under what's called the Havana Act. And under the Havana Act, compensation this was to provide some remuneration for those of us and it's not wasn't a lot of money, but my doctors had to actually write and sign and provide to CIA that YEP, mark as a traumatic brain injury is from an external event and it's not based on a pre existing condition.
So where exactly do we stand on this? Is it?
The agency just doesn't know if something happened, or they accept something happened, but they don't know how or when or has that shifted at all?
Well if everything shifted wildly. So let me just say that there are a couple dozen cases that they can't solve, and that's always buried in the headlines, and I'm one of those cases. These are also the cases that they're providing compensation to. The agency trying to do the right thing really screwed up by basically sending a worldwide message out saying everyone who's got a headache, right in, And
they got a thousand cases. Then they solved the ninety nine point one percent of the cases, and then they patted themselves in the because they saw them all. But these were never real to begin with, so ultimately you're left with several dozen. When they're briefing journalists. My friends were in the National Scurity Media went down there and they said, none of that's true, even the two dozen cases. And some of my friends were journalists, said what about
Mark and they said no pre existing condition? Well's I know, that's bullshit. So I got pissed off and I called into the agency and I went and they admitted to me, no, you know, you were actually one of the two dozen who were not sure about and we have no intelligence whatsoever that suggests that anything happened or that nothing happened. So basically, you know, so they're making conclusions on everybody based on an absence of evidence.
For outsiders, they don't understand that the agency has made up of very different tribes or groups. The analytic cadre are the people who make assessments by getting all the information from all the various collectors, technical and human and and everything else, and they have to put together assessment for sort of all sorts of things that administrations would
be interested in on their security issues. And frankly just the recent history as they've been burned several times by making false assessments or bias, and they take that very and they've trained their new analysts and they're very careful not to go too far anymore, because essentially there's a lot of things around WMD in the Iraq War that in some ways analysts got blamed for things, maybe more
than they needed to be. But in this case, I think they're so nervous about providing an analytic judgment because they know that if they say something happened and administration is going to be forced to act. If you're going to put something down on the desk of the present United States and say a foreign country attacked and harmed American intelligence officers and diplomats, the administration has to do something as an active war.
One of the theories that I always had was that some kind of device, originally probably used for signals intelligence collection, they actually realize harmed people and they start deploying.
This mark for people listening in, I want to make a quick comment and get your take on it. So, like you, I've served in difficult places and brought my family unhealthy places. You know, Cobra's malaria, Dangyo, were medical care, right, no blood transfusions, you know, nothing, and yet we brought our families there knowing it was unsafe, right, brought our young kids there.
And I have to say I was pretty satisfied with.
The agency's willingness to engage on those traditional things, to include things like mental health care right for families. I thought they were very engaging as a coos in some of these places they've seen family struggle with mental health. The agency was always very good about that. So what you're saying here, and I completely accept it, it's sort of an anomaly at least to what I personally have experienced with the agency.
They've been pretty darn good.
There's one outstanding thing here that may have suggested why
senior management would be hesitant, and that was Donald Trump. So, as we know, Donald Trump in his administration was very close to Vladimir Putin, and to this day he says wonderful things about Vladimir Putin, even after the invasion and the murders and rapes in Ukraine, and it was well known to the outside world that anyone who came to him with something bad about Russia, he would sort of snap at them in the back in their face, like it, what doesn't do your career well to come continue to
come into the White House saying bad things about Latim Reputin and Russia.
And we know that from our former senior colleagues saying that, hell no, we're not going to go you know, with the former briefers, so like we're not briefing stuff on Russia to Trump today, he'll go crazy. Let's just keep it out. To me, it's much more a case of just kind of gross incompetence. And of course the analytic assessments on this did occur in the next administration that they occurred under President Biden, who my understanding did take this very seriously.
During the Trump administration abroad, we were told many times, don't write this down, like what senior officials were saying about the adminision. Don't write this down, don't tell us this officially, don't make this happen because we'll have to deal with it. And eventually you do that once or twice and you just don't anymore. You just kind of know. Mark, thank you very much for coming in today. As always, it's really enjoyable talking to you. If this time not
over a beer, certainly next time. So yeah, thank you very.
Much, Thank you all very much, appreciate all your support.
Now our friend and producer Adam Davidson is joining us. Well, welcome Adam.
Hey guys, it feels like this episode around a Vanas syndrome is tempted to call it a very special episode, because this one really touches you, right, This affects your friends. This one isn't some theory. This is your life.
Well, I think you know from the interview with Mark he was a colleague and friend, and so it's important to us in that way, but in a bigger sense for the work we did living around the world. It's a big deal because it's a mystery that still hasn't been solved, but it's impacting our diplomats and our intelligence officers and our military officers around the world every day.
Yeah.
The interesting thing about conspiracy theories is they explain everything right. They're self licking ice cream cones. And this one. We have a mystery about a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, and we don't have the answers to it, and we're still looking for it, and it has real victims.
I put it in the same bucket a lot with the Russian efforts against our election in twenty sixteen. And it is not a mystery necessarily that we're going to get an answer to, because if in fact, foreign intelligence agencies are involved in these kind of things. It's their job, their professional obligation, to keep secrets. When sometimes we are lucky and we find spies that give us the answer
to these questions, maybe years after the fact. But it isn't as if this is just out there in the ether and all of a sudden it's going to come to us. It may be something that we never learned the true story behind.
There's an impact too that we don't talk about so much. If people are worried about exposing their families. If like if you go to Moscow and you're worried that your kids, so your spouse is going to be exposed to this and damage, you may not go. Just like in the case where going to places where journalists are routinely murdered Somalia, Afghanistan, Northern Iraq, there's no good journalism on that because it's simply too dangerous.
I worked in Pakistan and there would be stories about from the tribal areas in Pakistan where and others were living, and you'd see these stories in the Western press about what American drone strikes might be doing. And you knew that there was no Western press that went in there, none because it was too dangerous for them. So these stories are coming second and third hand and also oftentimes manipulated by the local government to get their point of
view across because people can't go in there. And so think about those just personal things that are happening to all these people as they try to get out and do the work for the American public well, whether they be journalists, diplomats, or spies.
Do you think the chaos is the goal, like the lack of us knowing the kind of invisible menace is that serving the interests of whoever's doing this.
Absolutely, menace is a really good word. I think in Russia there's a saying John would know it better you kill a chicken to scare the monkey.
Yeah.
I mean actually the field of like FIGN correspondence, there's fewer of them, and part of that is there's less money.
Yeah.
But I have a bunch of friends who died, and there are few who died in Libya. There are a few who died in Syria. There used to be more rules that journalists were sort of seen generally as noncombatants and both sides had an interest, So that has gone away.
That's an interesting point.
Adam in that really truly, and no shit, CIA does not use journalism cover because we don't want to taint them.
And the Russians know that.
Even Al Kaida knew that they didn't go after journalists because they knew CIA didn't use them. And then you get into the current Russian government and isis and it simply doesn't matter anymore. It's about terror, intimidation and the word you use menace.
So this is a real conspiracy.
Probably, I think something's happening, whether it's directed to do harm specifically, or it's some sort of surveillance device that creates this type of damage.
Perhaps, Yeah, Adam, I think it's important for people to understand that when looking at conspiracy theories and conspiracies, it's not always a binary answer. It's not always yes it's true or no it's false. But there's a sliding scale. And on this one, and I'd say it's credible to likely, even if there's no specific proof that we can point to.
Oftentimes it takes years and years and we have to get a lucky break before we figure out what's happening.
For this, if I had to make a prediction, it would be that one fine day a disgruntled Russian guy is going to walk in and say, for five million bucks, I'll tell you whether it's a duck or not.
Do you think most things do eventually come out? My view is a lot of things never come out. We just won't know.
I think there's a chance with this one that it may come out. But in the intelligence world, like we may get a source who tells us exactly what's happening, but we want to keep that source secret because that source probably knows other things that are important to us. But we're not going to publicize that or put it out into the public because we want to protect that source for the information that person has on other things.
And for anybody out there listening in from say Moscow, write us.
We'll make it worth your while.
Of all the promises you've given agents is you'll get to be on a podcast. Where would that be?
Thought? Is? So?
One thing I keep thinking about with all of this is what is this a solution for? Assuming there is something happening and someone's doing it, why what are like, if it's a threatening thing, wouldn't they want it known?
Interesting that you bring that up, because we call it we just call it implausible deniability, Right, So the Russians would do things that were they were done by their secret services, but they wanted people to know. So when they murdered someone in England with some form of chemical attack colonium, they didn't admit it, but everybody knew what was happening, and it sent a signal to people. And when they killed navalny, it sent a signal even though
they didn't admit what they did. And so it's not clear, like, why are they hurting people? When this first happened, I wrote an article saying it could be some sort of surveillance technology or something they're using that has the effect of hurting people. And so at this point it's still not clear whether this is meant to send a signal that the gloves are off. Is this meant to send a signal that American Intelligence Office should never feel safe around the world?
All Right, the two of you know as much much as anyone does about this. What's your theory? What do you think is happening here?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that apparently we can't pin it on a particular actor doesn't mean that it can't be pinned on one someday for me. Evaluating all the evaluable evidence, I think the most likely story is that some of these people were the victims of some sort of hostile intervention or attack.
I agree with that.
So I see enough patterns here that are consistent with what Russian special units have been seen to be doing in recent years. I think Vladimir Putin has decided that he's going to get serious, and he's willing to take steps that aren't normally taken in this world. And we've seen special units travel in Europe and get involved in assassinations. We've seen special units get involved in explosions in Eastern Europe and the Central Europe. We've seen them go after
their enemies. And so I tend to think we're going to find that this is a Russian operation to go after people that they believe are involved in Russian operation, because Laimir Putin has sort of changed the rules of the game.
And I'll go out on a limb here and I'm going to say that this guy Alexander Khu's mienof who was the defector to the Ukrainian side when in Spain he was found with twelve bullets in the back of his head and a parking garage. I'm going to say that that wasn't an accident, right, I mean, I can't prove it, but I'm just thinking.
I thought it was suicide.
Well, yeah, the first seven maybe the bullets were a problem, but then when they ran over his body back and forth.
That's right. This is a light look at And I really had a serious subject though.
I mean, you know, people have been really heard, and you know that's underlines that conspiracy theories.
Well, I'm glad we had Mark on because I mean, I've seen what's happened to me. He was an aggressive and talented officer who suffers every day with you know, brain injury.
You know, there used to be typically not always, but there was something of the rules of the road. If you covered a war, you were taken on risk. Both sides tended to respect journalists right to exist. Saw some benefit and that's gone, and it's scary in a different way to cover more. All Right, I'm looking forward to going back to shows about Goofy's conspiracy theories that are clearly not true. So join us next time on Mission Implausible.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry o'sha John Cipher and Jonathan Stern.
The associate producers are Rachel Harner and David Sollinger.
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