I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. 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.
We now returned with part two of our interview with author and Policerprise within the journalist Tim Wyner.
You guys spent decades of your life at CIA, and you were there when Porter Goss came in in two thousand and four. The President was not happy with CIA
for several reasons. The invasion of Iraq, which CI contributed to, might stay with faulty analysis of saddamis Arsenal alb A. Bush was going to invade iraqany way, you know, if they had a paper clip and a rubber band to put your eye out right, And he wanted Porter Goss, who was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA officer, to come in there and basically clean house and impose loyalty oaths and ideological tests on people.
And what happened next The leadership of the Clandestine Service headed for the parking Lot ads did the top analysis, and the whole place was in turmoil. Mike Morell, who spent thirty three years at the CIA and Weiss deputy director twice acting director, said it was the worst nineteen months of his thirty three year career.
What some people may not realize is that Porter Goss came in.
Well.
First of all, he didn't want to work hard. He complained publicly that he had to put in more than eight hours and had to work on weekends, harder than I thought it would be. That's right, this is hard. Tenants, say what you will. He worked seven days a week, of course, seventeen hours a day. But Porter Goss brought
in what we called on the inside, the Goslings. And these were a group of disgruntled form agency officers, almost all of whom had been fired or let go for cause, with chips on their shoulder, who thought things were easy and simple and black and white. They had been his staff at the House Intelligence Committee. And this was like seei's a great plane, Like, let's fire these guys because
they're incompetent. But they're all good. They still keep their clearances and they're all going to go work for Congress and be our bosses. And then they came back and yeah, that didn't work out.
Now, But the key here, I think is not the Goslings or personality disputes or anything like that. Ordered Goss's marching orders from the President of the United States, where I want loyalty. I need the CI to fall into line, and I don't want any analysts criticizing the course of the war in Iraq. And people were leaking, It's true, but every ship of state leaks from the top, and it didn't go well. And the one thing we know about Donald Trump is that he wants loyalty like a
mob boss. What's going to happen would you say, based on your decades of experience, if a new director comes in at CIA and starts saying, I want you, I need you to sign an loyal I'm going to impose ideological betting on you people, and are you modo or not? What's going to happen.
If that happens at DoD or in the intelligence community, it just we take very seriously our focus on the mission, our focus, and we take it oath to the Constitution. We're not loyal to individuals, and in fact, we take great pride in providing truth to power, which sometimes means telling them stuff they don't want to hear. So this is it goes just against every part of our culture.
CIA at its best is when we do our job, we try to find the truth and we provide it to policy makers. We're at our worst when we become an instrument of policy that we do specifically what the President says, irregardless of what the laws are or what's ethical. Where we've done it worse it things like around contrary. Well, actually CA may have done all right by refusing to
get involved in it. Where we've done our worst is when Higgs, when we were told to do these things, and we take the hit, not the guy who orders it.
But two things here. When I was brand new on the CI, I went to learn at the feet of Richard Helms, who was the gray eminence of American intelligence at the time. Mike Holder joined the CI as a charter member in forty seven and its director from sixty six to seventy three. Until Nixon fired him for refusing to help him cover up the Watergate breaking. And one of the things Helms told me about CI was if we are not believed by the President of the United States,
if we are not believed, we have no purpose. People run great risks to dig up secrets of state, analysts work hard to figure out the big picture, and all of this goes into reporting that the president on not only the present day, but threats over the horizon. One of the things that we know about Donald Trump is that one, he never took intelligence briefings very seriously. Two, he's an ideologue, and ideology is the enemy of intelligence.
If you're an ideologue, your mind is made up. My fear, guys, is that people are really going to head for the exits. And the last time that happened, like in a major way, not just people on the seventh floor, but throughout the rank was in the nineties after the Cold War was over. You guys were young and coming up in the nineties, The guys with fifteen twenty twenty five years in were headed out because they were like, Okay, mission accomplished. We
beat the goddamn Russians. Cold War's over. I'm done. People will leave now because they feel they cannot accomplish the mission under this president, whether it's analytical or operational, and the ranks will be depleted. And the depletion of the CIA during the decade of the nineties was one of the proximate reasons for the success of al Qaeda's attack on nine to eleven.
I share your concern, certainly, having been there caring about it too. But one thing to add to the helms thing, just a little nuance, is I think it is true if the president isn't interested in what the CIA has to say, what is the purpose. But the one thing I've learned from working in CIA, and I suspect under Trump it was very much like this at least Trump won, is we provide intelligence not just to the President, but to the Secretary of State, ambassadors around the world, to
people in the Pentagon generals. So there is a process there that kept going even if Trump was in La La Land or not interested in issues. We continue to provide information on what was happening in Russia.
And then you what does the station chief do when the ambassador is an idiot or convicted fellas herschall walkers, Herschel Walker, a convicted felon. That's in the case of Jared Kushner's father, who's going to France or just a bosa. Furthermore, what does the CI do with the Director of National Intelligence?
I can answer that one for you, because you, as a journalist, rightly hold the CIA to high standards and therefore when we make mistakes. But the CIA, in a genius move, created this thing called the DNI, which is a fake organization to protect the CIA.
So John in Fairnessress created the di Congress.
Oh please, Congress wouldn't know. It's we manipulated Congress to create this thing so that when they can put the morons over there and they can do almost no damage to what's actually happening in the CIA.
Now that is a conspiracy theory right there. There you go. No, but okay, but in serious Chelsea Gabbard is the titular head of the American intelligence community. God forbid, correct me if I'm wrong. But CIA relies to a largely unappreciated extent on liaison and intelligence sharing with friendly and not so friendly intelligence services around the world, in countries you might immediately think of, and some countries you couldn't possibly imagine fair statement.
Yes, we get in the clandestine service side of the organization, we get the bulk of our intelligence from partners and not just allies, from partners around the world. Now it's different with the NSA. It's going to be harder for the NSA because it's much more integrated with the Brits
and Australians and stuff. Where I think you're going you're saying is some of these organizations that partners we deal with, they are going to be hesitant to share their secrets with us, and I agree with that, but it's going to be harder for them on the SINGANT side because they're integrated.
Is great stuff. But human intelligence, when it succeeds, gets you the information that Singant cannot. Ten analysts can listen to the same Singant transcript and come up with ten different analyzes, whereas when you're actually in the room with the person who's talking, you get a sense of the reality. Is that fair?
And an inordinate amount of is human enabled? Right, The reason you have the Singen is because of a human being interacting with the technology and so recruiting that human being. Is actually that a lot of the SIGANS, huge amount of Sycains streams are based on people.
The point I'm trying to make is if particular head of American intelligence is a longtime PULP member who has shown strange affinities with people like Bashar al Asad and Vladimir V. Putin and on the head of oh, I don't know the Jordanian Intelligence Service or the Ukrainian Intelligence Service? Am I going to play foot seat with that person?
So when I was in a rock senior officer there and back in fourteen fifteen, we had a group of congressmen and senators come in. Now we live in Iraq, we go out into the Red Zone. We've got assets who were both in Isis. We have a lot of Arabic speakers. We live there. And we had this group of lawmakers come in and I'm not gonna see who it was, and there were like seven or eight of them with their staffs there, and we were giving them a briefing about what's going on in Iraq. Right now,
we're surrounded on three sides. Isis is ascended, Moses has fallen, they're just after Mosa felt And one guy takes his loafers off and picking his toenails while we're briefing. So this is incredible disrespect to the officers who are risking their lives to be there. And when they finish, he says, basically, this is a lot of hohoi. And he says they're only in it for the money. And one of my officers couldn't help themselves and says, you can't offer them
like an extra hundred dollars to blow themselves up. Now, the other lawmakers around it were clearly embarrassed at this guy. But what happens if like they they're all picking their toes right, and they look at the people who live there and say, I know you understand that you live there. But none of this is true because we have our own reality. But as to who will stay and who will go, I think a lot of people with integrity will leave, people with options will leave. People who will
stay will fall into a couple different categories. One will be career quizzlings who are like, yeah, I'll do it if you or you give me a big promotion. I'll say whatever you want. We saw that during the gospeling time. Other people will basically just put their heads down and do what bureaucrats everywhere in the world always do. They'll just try to do their job and wait it out.
In any large organization, I could talk about the New York Times, which is about maybe eight percent the size of the CIA. But in any large organization, you have the talented tenth okay, and the talented tenth at the top of intellect, at the top of experience, at the top of expertise are going to bring you ninety percent of your successes. And if the talented tenth head for the door, that's bad news. I hate to be a
harbinger of doom. In many ways, the situation we're about to be and is absurd and orderline hilarious until stuff happened. It's a mean old world out there, gentlemen. The Russians and the Chinese are each through their intelligence services, coming out of it with ill intent. That Chinese, it seems to me, love to have your take on this. Want to know us. They want information dominance. They want to know everything about
the United States government. They want to tap our phones, they want to rate our computers, they want our personnel files, and they got it. They want to know us. So if the balloon goes up in twenty or thirty forty years, they have information dominance. The Russians just want to screw us. They don't want to know us. They want to subvert and sabotage our form of government. And they have achieved more than Marginal's success over the last eight ten years.
You have a real crisis, and it is almost inevitable that there will be one. What are these knuckleheads going to do to protect our country?
We'll be right back.
In the last year of his first term, Trump installed John Ratcliff and Cash betent Well at the very top of the Directorate of Natural Intelligence. Were they there to make sure that big pieces on whither China were going
to be like expertly thought out and edited. No, they were there to raid the files Russia House where you used to work, John, to try and dig up dirt on the president's political enemies and to try and find a smoking gun that would magically absolve him of his and his campaign and his teams plussy footing with Vladimir Poot.
It's a conspiracy theory, but it's one I'm open to. Is that another reason he's so interested in Russia and Cia and having it is he doesn't want evidence coming out of collusion. Right, there was collusion. It's like there was. I'm not sure they could prove it in a criminal court of law, but certainly man Afford, his campaign manager was dealing with the Russians. His own son was talking to the Russians in line of the FBI about it. His campaign advisor was lying to the FBI about and
destroying evidence and his relationship with the Russians. So there's Russia, Russa Russia. There was a lot of it. There is a smoking gun someplace, and they need to make sure that it doesn't come out, that we don't find it.
I don't know how you feel, Jerry John. I know you have mixed feelings about Federal Bureau of Investigation events counter counterintelligence capacities. But in American counterintelligence, which is spycatching among other things, you can't do it without the FBI in this country. CEEI has no police powers in this country. Yet cash Betel says, do you guys go play cops and robbers? I would disestablish the national security of the FBI. They ain't good.
No, In fact, I think yeah, the danger Keshpertel, the FBI is more dangerous than Tulsea Gabbert at DNI for the American public. Obviously partners are on the world and the things we need to worry about incredibly important, and the D A and I just doesn't control a lot of the actual collection and processing of intelligence.
There's a lot of the lists talk going around about the deep state, and the deep state, which does not exist, is supposedly this nefarious conspiracy of spies and soldiers and bureaucrats who are have dedicated their professional and personal lives to undermining Donald Trump. Once upon a time, way back in the twentieth century, there was a deep state in who it was embodied in one man, and that man
was Jaegar Hoover. JEdgar Hoover, an unelected bureaucrat who ruled the FBI for forty eight years, used his powers to spy on people without warrants, to break into their homes, to rifle through their papers, to conduct wiretapping, to destroy people for political purposes. That was political warfare. And presidents never said no to Hoover. Attorneys general never said no too, And it wasn't until he died in nineteen seventy two,
six weeks before the Watergate breaking. That never would have happened. If Hoover was around. And then two things happened. When Jaeger who were died literally the next week, the Supreme Court outlawed wartless wire tapping this country. And then the Watergate break can happen. Okay, and the whole panoply of Cold War national security began to break down. Helms got fired because he wouldn't cover up Watergate for Nixon, and the old national security state that had existed since the
end of World War Two began to break down. Okay, we run the risk under this president his nominees for national security position of the return of a national security state in which the powers of American intelligence and national security are turned on Americans for political purposes. I think that's a real danger.
So that no no podcast is complete without at least a couple of Nazi references. And I got two for you that I want to say that that remind me of. One is you talked about Hoover and he had the goods on everybody right. Every American president was afraid of him, politicians were afraid of him. And in Nazi Germany, Hermann Goering, despite the fact that he wasn't didn't do anything right. He didn't really have a job he ran the Lufaffe,
did it poorly, and yet nobody came for him. And one of the reasons for that was because when he was head of the Prussian Police he had this new technology called telephone wire tapping act. He had been nobody knew about this and really hit it and Hermann Goering during the Nazis rose, I know, I can't help, but I speak a freaking language, a gorn. He had the
goods on everybody, including Hillery. So right up until the nineteen forty five they were all afraid of Gourring, not because of his insight, but because he, like Hoover, he had the goods.
He could walk up to some senior Nazi officers said, yeah, should see you'll have been a bad.
Boy, your male boyfriend that you have not told us about it, he says. But the other thing, and more ominous, though, is you talked about loyalty tests. And I think this is in the air with this administration. The illustration coming in is Hitler's rise to power. When he really took power is after Hindenburg died, and one of the first things he did is he had the military swear an
oath to him personally, right not to the Constitution. Right, and soon after all his deep state guys bureaucracy swear an oath to him personally, not to the country, not to the fatherland, not to the Constitution, and that was the end of their democracy, right, the last gas. And when we start going down that road where loyalty, you know, call me ran into that first the buzzsaw, Are you loyal to me? The only answer we can have as Americans is no. You should swear two oaths in your life.
One is when you get married and the other is when you're when you work for the federal government or the military. Is you swear an oath to the institution and that should be your only loyalty. And for some reason United States citizens they're somehow like, okay, that's been normalized, swearing an oath to a political figure. That's really dangerous. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's a real conspiracy. When you start telling senior CIA, FBI people, you must be loyal to me, and.
It is a conspiracy against the Constitution and ultimately against the American people.
Hold on just a second, Well we take a quick break. Tim. I know you're working on a new book or a new book's coming out, so can you tell us about it a little bit.
The book is called The Mission the CIA in the twenty first Century. It starts in the spring of two thousand and one. It goes right up to the present day. I'm writing the epilogue right now. It is entirely on the record, as was Legacy of Ashes, my earlier history of the CIA, widely if not universally acclaimed.
I was going to ask you with a very negative history, so as Wry, are you ready to take it all back now?
Well, I'll tell you, John, the old book was based on literally three hundred thousand declassified documents from CIA, from State, from the Pentagon, from the White House, from the end of World War Two up to the early twenty first century.
So I talked to people. I talked to an amazing array of people, including the top people on the seventh floor, including sitting chiefs of the clandestine Service, including the man who was tasked with setting up the black sites, including the three unbelievable officers who took down aq KHN, who ran the world's biggest and by far most dangerous nuclear
weapons technology smuggling ring. I talked to people who were freezing their asses off in Iraqi, Curtisan before the American invasion in two thousand and three, executing a covert action plan to take down Saddam, knowing that it would take the eighty second Airborne to actually do it, but they had their marching orders. I talked to officers who served in Baghdad Station, as you did Jerry earlier in the war in Kabble, in the worst places on Earth, like
the Shikin Base in Afghanistan. There's a t shirt from there that says, Ella is only skin deep. Who served in Pakistan, who served in Jordan, who served in Syria. And I listened to them and I wrote down what they said.
And so had they been drinking, yeah you didn't talk to us, we would have suayed you.
I did talk to Cipher, and yes you were drinking. It was a very cold, dry martini, as I recall, which is what all good intelligence officers drink. It is a human book. I think Legacy of Ashes, the book that came out now seventeen years ago, is a book about an institution, but it's a book about an institution that came out at a very dark time for the institution.
Nine to eleven, the WMD reported the Iraq War going south one hundred miles an hour, the Goss regime, and at the sixtieth anniversary that took place a few months before the book came out, there was a lot of hanks. There was a lot of sorrow, and I think the book was a product of its time. What I like about this book, might me repeat it's called The Mission that it'll be out July fifteenth, is it? It really talks about the mission when we started out before nine to eleven.
For the past decade, people have been wandering around saying, what the what's the mission? The mission's over? We dislayed the Soviet beast, what's the mission now? And that relative handful of people after al Cada blew up our two embassies in Africa in August nineteen eighty eight, said well, yeah, we know what the mission is now. But the President of the United States didn't, the Secretary of Defense didn't, and Condy Rice as a National Security advisor, they didn't
know what the mission was. And Rice and Cheney thought the whole arcaded thing was like some big strategic deception.
And the Attorney General he told the FBI guys to quit wasting your time on this terrorism stuff.
Well, it's not the mission until the president says its mission. Frankly, the CI is exquisitely sensitive to presidential commands, and for the better part of fifteen years, counter terrorism was the mission. And then starting about ten years ago, roughly twenty fourteen, give or take, there was a generational chain. Bin Laden was dead. There was still a lot of danger in the Islamic world, but espionage began to regain its proper
place of privacy at CI. And as evidence of that, just in the fall of twenty one, the CI stole Ladimir Putin's warp plans for Ukraine right out of the Kremlin. That's what you want your intelligence service to be. You wanted to know the intentions and capabilities of your enemies. That's what y'all are there for. That's why they pay you the small change.
We were running some good cases prior to twenty fourteen. Oh, I'm not sure, but I understand what you're saying in terms of I do think that not just CI, but this country over invested in counter terrorism, oversold. Obviously it was incredibly important. Okay, there was a danger. The American citizen don't really have a choice, did you. No, it was a big deal, but it couldn't bring down the United States, whereas China rush at these places at least have the ability done to have a war with US.
That would be a much more serious thing. We did a good job on the counter terrorism fight, but I think we probably focused too much on that for a little bit too long.
If anything, maybe product of our successes, there was inside of CIA in a sense that we need to deprioritize a vitual human spying, recruiting spies, And it wasn't so much deprioritizing that is prioritizing other elements of CIA, which are also important, analysis and these all these other things.
But I think a lot of people who recruit and run spies, espionage networks, traditional stuff that CIA does, they were seen as like yesterday's movie stars, and it was no longer it was no longer a necessity when you've got technology that we no longer need to recruit spies. And we still did, but I think there was a and maybe still is to a certain extent, a d emphasis on that, And it would be good to say CIA go back to its human espionage roots and focus on that.
I say that's been happening, and I think that you can attribute in some the survival of Ukraine since twenty fourteen.
I wish the rest of the administration upped its game and supporting Ukraine. But I hear you.
If you're gonna blow up Russian generals in the heart of Moscow, you've been around of some good intelligence. I'm not saying CI provided the intelligence. Who knows where they got the intelligence from. But it is not a war that can be won with weapons. It is a war in which intelligence plays a central and a crucial role.
That's fair, and arguably we are at war with Russia, just not traditional war. Russia looks at warfare different in the United States, that's right. So to them, it's you got to think about what you want to accomplish, and armed force is just one piece of that. And war never ends for the Russians like for us, it's like we're either fighting a kinetic war or we're at peace. For Russians, it's a NonStop political warfare.
Yeah. The first person who articulated that was George Kennan, the man who dreamed up the Cladist service of the CI in which he served.
He did indeed, Yeah.
He was just saying what Lenin was already doing.
Lenin and yeah, there is war never ends for those guys.
Now, it's a different way of looking at things. And they've been quite successful. I mean they're killing people around Europe and around the world, and they're spreading disinformation and they're using deception to break on us, and they're missing in elections and all those kind of things.
Well, that's a lot of fun.
It's always enjoyable and it was great Vita.
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.