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.
So this is the first episode after the election results, and I don't know, John Adam, I'm shocked at the fact that the one candidate declared victory and has launched over sixty court cases to try to overturn this. And there are people are armed and marching on the Capitol. And isn't that what's going on?
No, I mean, what's amazing is how well run the election was. Nobody's questioning the results.
That was the last election. This is the way an election should be run. I may not like the outcome, or you may like the outcome, But no conspiracy theories this time. Why is that?
It's an obvious point, but conspiracy theories are not about truth seeking. They are a tool to achieve certain ends and.
Who uses them and who does it. And at this particular point.
Yeah, I'm a little let down that the Democrats put together a full plan to steal the last election and then apparently just forgot to do it, forgot to do it this time. Maybe they didn't pay their bills or some kind of stuff.
It was a fair election, got to say that, and the votes were counted fairly, and as far as we can tell, Russia, China and the others didn't have a huge least overt impact on the certainly tried.
They were calling in bomb threats to the Democratic.
But there wasn't like Rudy Giuliani coming in ten days before the election and saying he's got the goods on the other candidate to show that they are criminals and then not producing the evidence. This time around, they neither side really engaged in that, and that was maybe a small slid of bright light.
I wouldn't hold onto that too tightly because all of that can, like all of that can bounce back pretty quickly.
Okay, I eat those words pretty soon.
But yeah, yeah, the last time people observed that a lot of the folks calling foul on the election had been elected in that same election and didn't seem to want to redo their own elections. On the long list of things I don't understand, one of them is the nature of truth. Like not in some philosophical there is no truth, but in a just very basic here are facts that are undeniable way. It's not just it doesn't penetrate or people don't have the right information. It's this
idea that truth is just not relevant. And I think there's no way all of these groups who voted for Trump want all the things that Trump says he's going to bring, since they contradict each other. Right, decisions are being made for reasons that are not rational. I mean, this is an obvious point. This is how the human
brain works. But I think the value of studying conspiracy theories are one value of sudden conspiracy theories if you think of it as like, how do I compose a bunch of words to paint a picture of how the world works that satisfies something that has nothing to do with truth or not truth or a description of the world or not, it's some other thing. It's about power. It's about making yourself feel better or making yourself feel bad,
but feel bad about a particular person. Like it's somehow different from a thing of Oh, let me evaluate what happened in the world. Let me list a bunch of facts, and then let me come to some conclusion about it.
It's a whole different process.
It's creating a mental model that fits you what you want, and then things fit into that and stuff that doesn't just rolls off you. We all do that to a certain extent.
We can almost predict what the conspiracy theories to tom are going to be. If you round up millions of people who are plucking chickens and cleaning the streets and doing construction and picking crops for minimum wage or less and can't replace them, food prices are going to go up, right, and you're going to get inflation. And so you say, oh, that's our fault that in tariffs. You have to come up with a conspiracy theory as to why somehow the Democrats or your opposition is responsible for this.
Right So, what you're saying is is the right wing is it going to become the left wing, and they're going to say that that's the big corporations that are gouging. This might turn the whole country around.
I think conspiracy theories allow you to explain the world in a way that you don't have to take responsibility for.
I remember dealing with somebody who is an alcoholic and realizing, oh, denial isn't some super complicated psychological process. It's just here's an obvious fact, let me deny it. So can I ask?
You?
Know, Trump in his first term did not have the easiest relationship with the CIA. What do you think the vibe is at CIA right now?
I think it is inescapable that our relationship with NATO and Ukraine is going to be different and certainly strained in our relationships with our allies, and I think CIA is going to struggle with that as well as our State Department colleague.
Has there ever been a president who's been so hostile to CIA, so openly, has said such critical things about the intelligence community, been so dismissive.
Well, he did that last time. He was pretty negative towards the intelligence community. We've mentioned a number of the ways before, but in some sense, the CIA, for example, or the Intelligent Committee were able to keep themselves out of the regular daily political fighting at the White House, and I think they protected themselves with it, and they might have been more careful about bringing in what He didn't want to hear, those kind of things which slowly
over time hurt the professionalism of the organization. The concern now in what they're talking about is they want to put like true Trump believers in a position to make the organization, not just CIA, but probably the FBI and just Department of other places, to be essentially openly partisan, to work for Trump. Their job is to dig through material, find stuff that benefits him, get it to Trump, over time, change some of the regulations to weaponize as he can
use it against his politicetical, or personal enemies. The intelligence community has been over the last decades slowly reforming itself, and by the time when Jerry and I were there, it was a very professional, non partisan group. We took great pride in speaking truth to power, and we realized that we were restrained by congressional and Justice Department oversight such that and we saw ourselves as a professional working for the American people, not working for political party or whatever.
And if it changes, it's really going to be difficult. There's gonna be lots of people officers inside the CAA who are probably Republicans or even supported Trump, but they still believe in that ethos that the organization should not be partisan. And if it's going to be made head and ly partisan, I think it's gonna be a real problem. You can see a lot of people leave. Our hope is that it just doesn't get degraded to the point where it's unfixable.
But the real danger is that it turns into a partisan organization. You know, they should be careful what they create, because if they create, if they go on to people's social media, you know, senior agency officers and only take those in who are Republican, four years later, there's going to be a change and all those people are going to be out, and the Democrats are going to do the same thing, and we'll have a sort of I
guess a right to do so. John's really right. We've created an intelligence community that's a political and that does its job and answers questions that policymakers need to at least be informed about whether they do the right thing or not. Is up to them, and I think that is really the danger with Trump, not only with the intelligence community, but probably more importantly with law enforcement, DOJFBI and so forth. That's I think one of the greatest fears.
We look back to the Nixon time period and before and JAGR hoovert FBI. We look back at those places now at times and realize that using those organizations for personal vendettas the FBI was going after Martin Luther King, they were doing essentially illegal break ins and listening to people's phones. The CIA was overthrowing governments without full congressional oversight,
all those kind of things. Those days are gone, and with good reason over time that the publics are turned against the view that these organizations where their power could be used against us. There's been people who claim snowed new who defected and gave out information claiming that he was listening to people's phones and all that kind of stuff. It wasn't true. Our organizations are pretty focused on foreign intelligence,
not on Americans. But they are really powerful organizations, and if they are used and turned against American people that the president or the administration considers enemies, these are incredibly powerful organizations that can cause great problems.
For there's also just basic competence like it. You know, I think of Iraq like that first year in Iraq rather famously the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US presence in Iraq was staffed by a ton of Republican operatives and the children of Republican operatives. There were all these like kids in their twenties.
As a twenty eight year old kid who was trying to build the Iraqi basically the Iraqi stock market, and you know, no surprise it failed.
That is a false statement.
He was twenty three and I spent some time with.
Him being fit.
Yeah, it really was stunning because it was people. You know, there are a whole bunch of things went into it, including the fantasy that they could decapitate. You know, they'll just put someone in charge of the oil ministry and then this massive complex bureaucracy will just function the same as it used to. But it was a very young team and none almost no, maybe zero Arabic speakers. I had a friend who was a career diplomat.
You know.
We took over Baghdad in May of two thousand and three, and this guy came in August. He says he was the only Arabic speaker he knew in the CPA, and he would start each morning's American Guy, lifelong diplomat. He would start each morning with a bunch of Arabic newspapers so he could see what's going on. And several people.
Said, why are you reading that stuff? What are you one of them?
Like that kind of thing, And there is and I think you saw this with Hitler, you saw it with Saddam himself, that staffing people for political willingness to be co opted is the opposite staffing people for skills, so you just also have incredible incompetence. The people who will do that don't tend to be our best.
That's what our government did in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century is a political job was a job where you could give out positions and jobs to friends for your own personal purposes. So it wasn't a professional bureaucracy you had. It was essentially just handing out jobs. And it sounds like that's what they want to go back to.
And I think it's important to state that at the very bottom of this the whole reason for weaponization that's given and I've argued with family members about this is either a lie or a conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory is that the Biden administration that they had weaponized DOJ to go after Donald Trump. So there's two options here.
Option A is that a guy who's cheated on his wife, whose charitable organizations turned out to be scams, who ran a scam university, r on sketchy casinos, that he engaged in illegal activity and no one's above the law. Or B it's a huge conspiracy theory of thousands of people to include like jury members and grand juries to convict an innocent man, and that the weaponization has already begun. I think it's B. I think any rational person would say, the guy broke the law, you got a fair trial,
he was found guilty. He's not getting a feld trial for these other things like stealing documents, which should be an open enclosed case. But the justification for using this now is that we didn't start it, and it's like, you know, either he committed crimes and he's out above the law, or B it's a huge conspiracy theory.
All right, we're going to get right back into that, but first let's hear this John you ran You're in Moscow for many years for CIA, you ran the Russia desk at CIA headquarters, Like, how could that be different?
Under an administration that either in the most benign sense sends out a message we don't see Russia as a strategy a top of the list strategic threat anymore, or a less benign like we want to really help Russia with their aims and goals, or see we want to make a corp ton of money and embarrass our friends and stuff, Like.
How does that work? Within CIA?
These organizations are in the executive branch and work for the president. So if in fact, US foreign policy writ large by a president by an administration professionally pushed through, is changed so that Russia is meant to be our friend, we will change. We have sources that are providing us information. If those sources are providing us real information, we will try to keep those sources, even if they're telling us
things we don't want to hear. We take great pride in the fact that we may get information that presidents and things don't want to hear, but that doesn't matter. Our job is to find what's truth. If it turns out that information is something that the White House really doesn't want to hear either we'll turn it off or we just want for that information up.
And if foreign.
Policy changes, then yeah, we'll try to work with the Russians. We already do have a professional relationship with them. We'll share counter terrorst information and other kinds of things. And the US changes and allies all the time. But it's crazy as is. But I think the bigger threat, frankly, is that turning against our allies or creating an impression around the world to all of these places that take
their own secrets very seriously. And because of decades and decades of close relationships working with the United States, working with the CA, working with our officers that live there night and day for year after year, that will share sensitive information with US countries, you don't even think about that we have these relationships with that maybe even aren't the allies that you're thinking of, share very sensitive information with us, and we sometimes help them and find ways
to find mutual places we could work together if those places think that we can't be trusted with information because when information gets to the White House, it's just on sale to the highest bidder, or that we're no longer a professional security service that keeps our secrets, or that the President of the United States is disparaging allies and friends from giving us things. They just won't do it. They'll still smile and we'll have drinks together and we'll chat.
But when it comes time to saying, hey, let's share with the Americans this information we found out about this terrorist group, or this shipment of arms going from here to there, what have you, they're just not going to
share it. And I've told people before a good seventy to eighty percent of the secrets that the Clandestine Service gets are from partners around the world that share stuff with US, and we spent years and decades building those relationships so that they share stuff that is very sensitive to them.
I'll give you a secret, not really. It's directly from the newspapers just a couple of days ago, and the US air security folks are saying that it's true. Is that Russia was looking for I assume Russian gau is looking for ways to put incendiary devices into airplanes heading for the US. They're going to like bring down airplanes full of US people. And that was serendipitously. The devices were mailed from Lithuania, and the guys who mailed them
have been arrested. And these are Russian proxies. And fortunately they both went off and exploded when airplane had landed, one and I think in Germany and the other in the UK. So we got lucky on this. But in order to make this work, and in order to protect ourselves, to keep our airplanes from being blown out of the sky, we need the Lithuanians, we need the Poles, we need the Germans, we need the British. We can't do it
by ourselves. And the true genius of American diploonacy at the end of World War two is that we build a system of alliances at Europe and in Asia, and Russia has zero allies. It only has people who are afraid of an Turkey. Yeah, but they're completely true. Yeah, Syria, there's an ally until sod dies and then they don't have an Ala anymore.
Ron neither, that's a good one.
They don't even have Mongolia, and neither does China. And so the US we actually have a robust set of alliances. And yeah, it's messy and it's difficult. They don't always come through, they don't always paying off via true all of that. I was there in Afghanistan after nine to eleven and they were like frigging Mongolian troops there, Lithuanians
and land fans who fought with our troops. And that's not going to happen if, as John says, if we start screwing with them or you know, basically go isolationists and then say they're on their own, and that would be shocked when we're on our own.
One of our other episodes, we were talking about the JFK assassination, and there's some information that has come out, and we were using the example that some of the CIA documents that have not come out publicly. We're respecting that some of that is because foreign services and foreign friends have shared stuff with us that we promise to keep secret forever. So it's not that it's we're hiding stuff that we don't want to come out about the assassination.
It's that you name your country gave us stuff that hurts them. And Jerry brought up a concrete example that were apparently the Mexican I don't remember the maximum President of Mexican head of the service actually gave us information that they had collected illegally in their own country and shared it with the United States. Those relationships are so strong. They said, listen, I'm giving you something that could get
me arrested in my own country. It's against my countries if I'm giving it to you because we have this relationship, and of course we promise to keep that secret forever. We didn't. It sounds in this case, but in general we try to do that and people just aren't going to be doing that in the future.
Journalists love to quit in protest when an editor intervenes, what like would you imagine massed affection from CIA, like people just quitting and refusing go along with it and a different cohort coming in, or is it hey, our job is to do what the president asks. President says Russia as our friends, well.
Senior people who've got their pension, I think a lot of them will say I'm leaving. So you know, at fifty we get to the baseline pension and you can it's a good time to leave. And people because they love the job and they're committed, stay longer and they use their expertise. I suspect that a lot of younger people will just like other places, they'll go into internal legs. I yeah, I'll pretend to work you pay me. I think that would be become less professional and less hard hitting.
If you're not taken seriously, or if you feel you're being used, I think there would be some people who will leave. But loyalty in a sense commitment. I mean speak for John, but almost all of us. You don't pay us enough to take our families to places where there's disease and poisonous snakes and poor health care and your wife can't have a baby there. But we go because we believe that what we're doing is the right thing. And if we don't believe that anymore, people aren't going
to do it, or they're not going to go. They're not going to be willing to go to war zones anymore. I left a wife and three kids, and you know what, with two days notice, jumped on an airplane to fly off in Afghanistan and O two because I believed in it right. But if I thought I'm being I'm sorry, I thought I was being fucked with, or I'm being used as a political pond. No, I'm going to think
twice about that. So I think younger people will tend to stay, but commitment will disappear, professional will disappear, and some of the older folks will just say goodbye.
But it is fun to be in the know. I mean being in the CI and finding out the sort of secrets. I saw one that finally came out publicly about the North Korean troops that were sent from North Korea for the first time ever to fight on behalf of Russia. And some secret information has come out that the North Korean troops, being in Russia for the first time where they had access to the internet, had become hooked on porn after being allowed unfettered access to the
Internet for the first time. That's the kind of cool information you can't yeh wow.
So you wouldn't quit, And I'll give you something exact opposite of that. That's a great example. So there was a very there was a very senior agency officer who came in and it was a political appointee. So one of the top guys and another a group of professional officers met him and he says, Okay, let's have a meeting. Let's talk about what we're doing and why we're doing it. But before we do, I want everyone to hold hands and we'll have a prayer. And the prayer was it
was very skewed towards one particular, very evangelical denomination. And I'm standing there and I'm thinking, there's a Mormon in this group, there are two Muslims here, there's a Jew, and a bunch of Catholics, and all of them are going, what the fuck. I'm not doing this for like your version of God, right, I'm doing this for the Constitution
of the United States. What binds us together is not this evangelical prayer about how Jesus died for my sins and you can't be saved unless you're washed again in the spirit, in my particular version of events. And afterwards people say it around and I'm like, I don't like this. This isn't what we do. And if that becomes the culture of the place, or even in a political sense, I think it's really harmful to what we stand for.
On the plus side, though, they are all going to hell, and he did give them a shot at not going to hell if they chose not to take thoughts on.
That, and we'll be right back. It's not to be coy. None of us like him.
We all see him as very dangerous, But where are you on the All Right, this is gonna be a really rough four years, but we'll get through it too. This might be a fun mental strategic shift in our national security that will last generations.
Well, in a practical sense, one of the things that's already started to happen is is some people I know who are reaching out, who are interested in applying to the intelligence community, the State Department, or reaching out and saying should I still do it? Because you can imagine now that it's out there, there's people who it's a long process, a lot of security polygraphs, background checks that can take a year more to get in to one
of these organizations. And as you can imagine, a lot of people come to us and say, you know, what's it like. And already people are coming saying I'm in the process of applying now that I see Trump's going to be in, I don't know if I can work for that. And so I've been giving the advice so far, and as we're only a couple of days into this, is that these organizations need good people. They need good young,
talented people. You don't want to just give up and assume it's going to be bad and just give over the place to the partisans and anyone that just want to bring in. When you're young, you're still learning the learning the rule US, you're learning languages, you're preparing to go, you're learning background. You know, you really aren't engaged with anything partisan or political or senior like that. So you know, I've been telling people, I think you should still continue
to try to go there. But I have some other friends that are getting the same questions and saying the opposite, saying, listen, if they have too much far of a partisan leader and they're going to try to turn these organizations into something that we didn't plan to join, you should think twice and not perhaps go work for the State Department or the CIA, or the FBI or what.
You and we should say, this is not us floating conspiracy theories like there's an explicit overt plan or multiple plans, like even before Project twenty twenty five, although it's very much in Project twenty twenty five. The idea of increasing the number of people throughout the administration, but especially in the intelligence and law enforcement areas, to increase the number of them who are politically loyal is an explicit goal that's not us making that up.
That is an explicit goal.
So I think this is really tiara incognita here. We don't really know. So on the one hand, if if you listen to what is being said and what they're saying, they're going to do, militarization of the border, militarization of law enforcement, the politicization of civil service, throwing out millions of people who are gainfully employed, huge tariffs, recalibrating NATO, perhaps abandoning Ukraine. If you see all these things, you're like,
holy shit. But on the other hand, these are the sort of this is the same guy who said he was going to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it, and so he was like, if they only do half of it, how bad will it be? And the answer is, we don't really know, because we don't really know what he really means. And more to the point, I think what the people around him intend to do and what they're going to be able to do, and whatever guard wheels are left, what they're going to be able to hold back.
But indicators are not good at this point. When you're talking about putting RFK Junior in charge of our entire health system, and people like Mike Flynn and Kash Patel and these said, these are not serious people. These are conspiracy theorists who said horrible things. In the first administration, there was people Radcliffe and Grenelle and others who clearly tried to use their positions to cherry pick material and try to get information from intelligent community that they could
use to help President Trump get reelected. These type of things which goes against our ethics and our way of doing things, and it created problems. But if you're going to bring in people that are even far less professional than those people were, it's.
A real danger.
So super fun show, guys, really uplifting and it's i will say, really good time to keep listening to a podcast about conspiracy theories. We're gonna have a lot to talk about.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Ceipher, and Jonathan Stern.
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts. Oh