This is a plausible minnesote of mission implausible.
You and I both spent time in South Asia, and I don't think Americans think much about the region, but it is a place that's taken really seriously by national security professionals. The second and fifth largest countries in the world are neighbors. They're nuclear powers, and they hate each other. Pakistan has problems with terrorism and instability, and has even used terrorism against India. The New York Times had a story about street performers, mimes and top hats that are
painted head to toe in gold paint. The story is that people in Pakistan who see these people on the streets believe that they're either informants for the powerful ISI military intelligence service or they're possibly CIA spies. What's interesting is the conspiracy that people believe that essentially anything that happens has to do with them being under surveillance or that the powerful security services are involved.
I think what people don't realize is in Pakistan, most countries, you've got like a country has an army, But in Pakistan, it's an army that has a country, and it's exactly right, exactly and who runs the army is actually this thing what is it called the interncer Services Intelligence, And it's this powerful intelligence agency that runs the military, that runs
the country. And so I think people are paranoid and frightened about how their country is run and the role of security services in their society.
Yeah, the ISI is more powerful than the politicians. And the ISI worked with US, meeting that CIA in the United States government in Afghanistan against the Soviets, as we know from Charlie Wilson's War for example, right, But they also worked against our interests. In fact, that is, I were the ones who created the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It's funny. I never served in Pakistan, but I served on both sides of it, right, you know, in Afghanistan and India. And I got to say, we always sat with friends like ISI. Who needs enemies. They were just as big as Taliban in a lot of ways.
They were allies with the United States for years and years during the Cold War. But like you said, they've been involved in supporting terrorist groups. They've been involved in supporting groups that have done terrorist activity in India. So it's a complicated, very complicated place, although.
It shouldn't be. So I want to go back to two thousand, was it two thousand and eight? There was this group called Lashkarrie Toiba based in Pakistan and it attacked India. One hundred and sixty people were killed, including six Americans in Bombay or Mumbai as they call it now. And lash caarry Toiba is an instrument of ISI and the head of lashcarriy Toybe. Even after they attacked India and killed all these Americans, this guy half as sais
the head of lashkarriy Toiba. He never even went to jail. He was supposed to be in house confinement and he didn't even do that because ISID they were so close to him that they didn't give a shit. Despite Americans killed in one hundred and sixty Indians, we almost went to nuclear war over that between the Indians and the Pakistanis.
But again to go back to the complexity of this thing, those things are all true, and Pakistan has supported the Taliban and done these things in India. But at the same time, there is probably no service that did more to help US kill and capture key l KAEDA members than Pakistan. Most of the top people that the US government went after who were involved in killing Westerners and Americans in cooperation with the Pakistanis were the way that
we often got to these guys. But also at the same time, as you recall, Bin Laden himself was living in Pakistan within a mile of their version of West Point.
Let's go back to the conspiracy theory, right, these guys are either CIA plants right who we're standing. So they're standing on street corners, motionless, covered in like metal paint, gold or silver paint for tips or for whatever they're doing. So I think there's some plausibility in this, not that I believe this, but we did have surveillance, and one of the most difficult things to pick up was static surveillance, where a surveillance would stay in one point exactly.
If we're going to go meet a source, the one thing we have to know with one hundred percent certainty is that we haven't been followed, that nobody sees us meet that source. And one of the ways we do that is we have to move throughout the city or wherever we are to prove that we don't have surveillance. And the problem is if there's a massive number of surveillance,
many of them aren't moving with you. It's very difficult to know whether that person at that corner is working for the service and paying attention to you, or whether they're just a regular bystander.
Right, And unlike in the movies, we don't try to shake them, We just want to try to bore them. But a surveillance who just stands there and you see them, you don't know whether he's, you know, somebody pretending to be a stantue or whether he's he's Also like taking down your license plate number and noticing when you go by.
And passing it on to someone further down the line. So you could drive through the city never see anybody following you, but this people standing at corners could be actually watching you and passing you on to the next ones.
I wouldn't name the country, but I'd served in a third world country for a while, and out in front of my house was a little tea stand like this. The couple of guys hunched down the ground and they had a little fire and they made tea if you went by. And it turns out it was a real tea stand. But what their real job was was determine who was coming and going from my house. So when I left, when I went, when my kids went to school, they would mark this all down and they were static surveillance.
They just sort of sat there and watched what I was doing and there was no getting around them.
Well, then you got to give the Pakistani Isi credit. Then if they're able to get guys to paint their entire bodies in gold and stand on the stand on street corners to follow the occasional foreigner, good for them, right.
Well, I think the conspiracy theory though, is not that they're after foreigners, that they were after every day Pakistani's And I think what doesn't work these days is if you wanted to have static surveillance, it's much easy to do it technically. I mean, you just put a ambra up and you know, because you're depending on this human being who's standing at the street corner for ten hours, that he's going to remember, you know when you went by he was, wasn't daydreaming that he writes down the
right license plate. It's just much easier to stick a camera up and do it without the human factor involvement.
Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and we're back. But it is true that the Pakistan government and many internal services want to monitor the society and make sure there's no political opposition or anybody who can threaten the ruling powers. But also in that part of the world, conspiracy theories are really prevalent. Remember there was catastrophic floods in twenty ten, and I remember at the time people asserted that they had been caused by the CIA's weather
controlling technology. They thought that oh Sama bin Laden was actually Jewish, and also that the CIA staged the assassination attempt on Malala use of side when.
I never got Yanistan is even our allies would say, like, oh, UCA, guys like bin Laden is CIA, or bin Laden is Jewish. You guys are working with the ISI the Pakistanis to run al Qaeda, because what America really wants to do is take over Afghanistan, like is if we wanted this place right for all our natural resources, Like we want to take over this desperately poor country. But I certainly saw that in Afghanistan, all these crazy theories about the ISI and CIA.
Where did you see that kind of paranoia and conspiracy stuff in India? Because obviously the Indias and the Pakistanis are the ones that are sort of at each other's throat.
That's a good question. I saw a huge amount of paranoid in place like Afghanistan with no central government.
In India, it.
Was different because they actually had reason to be paranoid.
It's a massive country. It's the fifth largest country in the world, right next to the second largest country in the world. Nuclear weapons on both sides of the border terrorism instability.
It may come as a surprise to the audience, but if there is ever a nuclear conflagration, it's probably most likely going to be Indian Pakistan. I do want to say though, that when Indian Pakistan were united under the British and the Raj they did undertake one of the most incredible feats of espionage ever. Even Rudyard Kipling and Kim, his famous novel is about espionage, and there's parts of
Kim that are taken from true life. There's the Great Game and the eighteen fifties, sixties and seventies between Britain that ran India and Russia that was coming down, and the place in the space in between Tibet and China
and all that part of the Krikora Mountains. They didn't know it was there, and so the British needed to know and they got two Indians known as panned It one and panned It two, and these guys were outfitted as Buddhist monks and they were given Buddhist rosaries, and each rosary bead was ten thousand steps, and they figured it out that they had thirty three inches per step,
so one ring around was five miles. And they had prayer wheels and they would note in the prayer wheel on a little piece of paper how many miles they went, how many times they did this rosary. And they also had little thermometers where they would check at what level the tea boiled, because they could tell their altitude. And they went out and they created up until the nineteen sixties, some of the most accurate maps of the Hindu Kush and of the Caracorn mountains. And these guys went out
for years. So these Indian spies, operating by themselves disguised as Buddhist monks, were some of the greatest, most successful spies and conducting I think one of the most interesting spy operations ever. And if they were caught, they would have been murdered. Buddhist prayer rosaries have one hundred and eight beads, but their rosary only had one hundred beads on it. If they ever anybody'd ever counted them, they would have been executed.
So they were probably the greatest spies until these fully gold painted dudes on the street corners in Pakistan. Did you ever paint yourself gold?
I never did, but I have been I have been a static surveillant. However, one of my favorite surveillance stories was in South Asia. I got lost and I had my two kids in the car and they weren't feeling well, and I knew that the car next to me were surveillance local guys. And I looked over at him and like, you're not supposed to acknowledge them, And I just said which way to go back home? They spoke English, and they pretended. I said, come on, do I go right
or left up here? And one of the guys looked at me and he sheepishly smiled and he went go that way, thank you. You know, It's like these were like nice surveillance. I doubt that they put that in their surveillance report.
I was driving home one time in Moscow and I went to cross one of the big boulevards and got hit. My car got hit, so I would run a red light.
It was a student, a Middle Eastern student, and the student got out and there's police on the street corners all over Russia, and police came up and the students started screaming in better Russian than I had that I had gone through the red light, and the policeman was listening to him, and then the policeman looks off to the side, and my surveillance who had been following me, were sort of standing on the street corner nearby, and
just motioned to the policeman to come over. The policeman came over, chatted with the surveillance who had been following me, came back out in the street and grabbed the student and arrested him. And clearly the surveillance realized that I was the one in the right and the other guy had gone through the light, and so in that case, my surveillance actually sort of helped me out of a jam.
So Jeda, I get why everyday pick Stanny's would be paranoid to these creepy guys standing around looking like statues. But I'm not thinking that isis professional as they are, that they would use these guys for stantic surveillance. I don't know, maybe they would.
I just think it comes from years and years of living in a society that promotes conspiracy theories and has been tracking and following their people for years and years. So essentially, you have society that thinks everything possibly could be controlled by the government because so many things are controlled by the government. But I would suspect that these poor dudes painted in all gold are probably not part
of the ISI. No, and I don't think they're being paid very much either, So thank you for joining us. Please join us for our next episode of Mission Implausible.