The best kind of useful idiot. The best kind of person who can be manipulated and used is somebody who feels himself to be deeply aggrieved and underappreciated or completely unappreciated in his own society. They detest the establishment, They detest a society to which they want badly to belong and to be celebrated by, but feel that they have been jilted. He's a loser, right. What I'm describing here clearly is Tucker Carlson.
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, guys, we spent a lot of time talking about conspiracy theories, because that's what our podcasts about. But today I think we're going to talk about some real conspiracies because there are groups that conspire, and one of the most well known are the Russian intelligence services. So they conspire to do all sorts of things, but they also conspire to spread conspiracy theories inside our
own countries. And so we're meeting today with Michael Weiss, who was an expert on Russian intelligence issues.
I always find that fascinating that one of the most common actual conspiracies is a conspiracy to spread conspiracy theories. Yeah, oh yeah, So can we talk about the various conspiracies to create conspiracy theories. So one is you have an enemy and you want to undermine that enemy. My family were Russian Jews. Russian Jews were not a particular threat to the Czar of Russia in the eighteen nineties. Quite the contrary. They were a very weak, beliegued, incredibly poor, but there were.
Someone to blame.
Right, It's like a drive by conspiracy theory. You don't actually care about the people you're conspiring against. It's just helpful to have an enemy, right, So there's a we're going after our enemy we want to undermine our enemy. You can think of the US against Japan and World War Two. Then b there's the kind of drive by like we want all these people to think we're good,
so we're going to create a fake shared enemy. But then there's this stuff of just we just want to create chaos, which is what I think of as Russia today. They'll be on all sides of an issue because they just want fighting and distrust.
That's what they want when they put it against enemies abroad, but they also want it domestically. They don't want their citizens engaged in politics, and so what they do is they just put out so many false and crazy stories that people just eventually give up, and eventually you just back out of this thing. It's impossible to know what's true. Is therefore I give up? And they want their sentence ready to give up.
This is the genius of nineteen eighty four Cast Your My Bag. You probably had to read it in high school, and the whole point is there is no objective truth. Oceana's our enemy. No, No, they're not. They were like last week, and the dish scale of conspiracy theories right now on the right, somewhat on the left, but mostly
overwhelming on the right. Is just this cascade of conspiracy theories, and you can't keep up with it, and eventually you get tired and you just simply accept whatever your team says.
Here's an interesting fact. I was in high school. I read it in nineteen eighty four, and you, Jerry, were in high school when it was published in nineteen forty nine. Right, you were in high school. So if all they want is to spread despair, the last thing in the world you'd want to do is create a podcast about conspiracy theories, that's just playing into their hands. Ah, what do you do?
How do you fight that? Like, I never share my political preferences, so everyone will have to guess what the guy who worked at NPR and the New York Times and this podcast and the New Yorker thinks. But you know, people have often said it's easier to be a small government republican or a libertarian because all you have to do is make government look bad. It's much harder to build up to say no, no, it's got problems, it's got issues, but on balance, we think it's pretty good.
So what do you do. It's like if you were a citizen of Russia. What would you do?
That's the things I don't think you can do. They created a massive security service whose job right from the beginning was to keep your leadership in power at all cause, which means they had to control the population and make sure there's no opposition.
So Adam I was in Germany and in Berlin actually in nineteen seventy nine, and we all thought, oh, the East Germans and the Romanians, and the Bulgarians and the Poles, the Czechs, they all bought into this. They actually believe their propaganda, or were neolistic, they didn't want and yet given the chance, and within weeks or months, the entire population turned on their political masters and they basically said, we know you've been fucking lying to us for the
last forty years. Every East German who came through that wall knew that they'd been lied to and understood that. And I think we were in shock at how poor Russian and East German authoritarian propaganda was. I think what the Russians have going for them now, at least in their own territories, is people are afraid to tell the truth. Yet no, they know the truth, but they don't want
to say it. And I think even in deepest, darkest Trump Land, except for a few people who are truly ignorant, they know the election wasn't stolen, right, But they're fucking with you. They know people aren't stealing cats, right. They know that the Mexicans who come in who are cutting their lawn and serving their food, they know they're not rapists and murders. So there's this cognitive dissonance going on about what you want to say and what you want to believe, but what you really know.
So to talk about these actual conspiracies that the Russians and others have been involved, we're going to speak with Michael Weiss. Michael Weiss as an investigative journalist author. He's reported on Ukraine, Syria, and Russian intelligence. He's the author of isis Inside the Army of Terror and is presently writing a book on the history of Soviet and Russian military intelligence. And he's one of the best connected journalists today writing on the Ukraine War and an expert on
Russian intelligence. In fact, several of his recent articles have uncovered Western spies and secret Russian units. And so we're really happy to have you here today, Michael.
That's good to be here, John, Thanks for having me on.
So on the podcast, we've spoken a lot about how people can come to believe various conspiracies. Many even seem silly, but there is a darker side. We've seen that conspiracies can be packaged and weaponized by malign actors. Can you speak to us a little bit about how intelligence services might use conspiracies as part of a strategy of political warfare or disinformation.
I think the most famous case is the conspiracies surrounding the assassination of JFK. A lot of people don't realize this, and in fact, I didn't realize this until I started digging into the history of active measures, the KGB term of art to describe political warfare and disinformation and propaganda campaigns. And the film JFK by Oliver Stone, who not really very creative in hiding his pro Butin and pro Russian sensibilities.
And I can talk to you about how he developed those sensibilities at length because I lived in Hollywood for a spell. He made this blockbuster movie starring Kevin Costner and Oliver Stone. Was seen as a self parodying figure of paranoia, your classic kind of countercultural sixties type who graduates to the nineteen seventies, eighties, and nineties believing that the government is capable of these far reaching, nefarious conspiracies to suppress dissidents at home and even take out the
leader of the free world. And so this film Traffic and all kinds of paranoid nonsense, the CIA and league with the Johnson administration murder the President of the United
States and all that. What people didn't realize was that the specifics of this conspiracy theory were cooked up by the KGB, and they were floated to an Italian newspaper, So they found this Italian journalist who was clearly either on the payroll or The KGB have a wide spectrum of definitions for people that they're working within the West, because a journalist is not all that dissimilar to an intelligence officer in the sense that they're training in secrets,
and they have a whole rolodex of sources, many of whom are anonymous. So this is somebody who could be chatted up at a bar or taken out to dinner by a task reporter quote unquote, or a Russian diplomat quote unquote, who is actually in reality an SVR A
g are you intelligence officer? So we don't know. I mean, this Italian journalist could have been thinking he's on the receiving end of some really juicy gossip kicking around in Moscow, if not on the receiving end of Russian or Soviet intelligence. But the point is he wrote this story in this little known newspaper. And keep in mind, this is the sixties, before the era in which disinformation travels at the speed
of light. And this story works its way all the way into the New Orleans Prosecutor's office, where it is lapped up by people who are tasked with investigating the murder of the President of United States, and lo and behold, a KGB active measure takes the form of a blockbuster movie that is produced thirty years after the fact, which to this day people will say, oh, that's a great film,
and everyone wants to know who really killed JFK. And they will invariably come back to Oliver Stone without any awareness of the fact that again, this was a wholly
produced piece of fiction by the Soviet security services. And you know, I think one of the problems we've had in the last almost ten years now, particularly looking at the Trump Russian investigation, the extent to which MAGA types either knowingly or unwittingly or accidentally parrot Kremlin talking points at a host of issues Ukraine, NATO, European security, etc. Etc.
We tend to be a little cartoonish in our thinking, believing that everything is cooked up by the Russians, right, everything must be as Oliver Stone's JFK act measure, when in reality, a lot of the time we're so nuts and polarized and so maddened with our own feverish conspiracy theories that are very homegrown that all the Russians have to do is point to us and give us a megaphone.
Or the metaphor I like to use is we're like lemmings running off of a cliff, and the Russian security services are standing there with big signs that say keep going,
you can do it faster. And the work that I've done at any rate, apart from exposing fully recruited FSB agents who in many cases are compensated by the FSB and they're asking their FSB handler for money, when it comes to the realm of information warfare political warfare, more often than not, what I see as what begins at home is simply given that added oomph and boost right hostile foreign services?
Yeah, yeah, I love the term misattributed to Lenin. But useful idiots, right, And you touched on this a couple of places here, And the question is if you han't Oliver's own and you set him there, it doesn't have to be Oliver Stone, but an Oliver stoneish figure. Would they be okay being a useful idiot? Would they recognize themselves being useful idiots? Would one particular political party of the United States recognize themselves as being partially useful idiots?
What's your sense on this? The self awareness of being manipulated or just not given a shit. Look.
I'm not a trained psychologist, but I think the most successful useful idiot is the one who genuinely believes that he is the recipient of a revealed truth that is inaccessible to the broader population. In other words, he's convinced of his own bullshit and he doesn't believe that it has been planted there, or that he's been steered in
a certain direction by a hostile foreign intelligence service. The best kind of useful idiot, the best kind of person who can be manipulated and used, whether or not recruited to another point. But really an asset, let's say, is somebody who feels himself to be deeply aggrieved and underappreciated or completely unappreciated in his own society. He's a loser, right,
there's a reason. For instance, the Russians have characteristically seized upon sex pests, people with weird pedophilia in their background, or have been caught doing naughty things on camera. Whether the Russians have compromised them themselves or they were just compromised by their own haplessness in their own country doesn't matter. People who've lost jobs and they haven't taken it on the chin as it were, I mean they've they've really
they're snarling about it. They detest the establishment. They just to test a society to which they want badly to belong and to be celebrated by, but feel that they have been jilted. What I'm describing here clearly is Tucker Carlson, and I know we're all gonna oh, I thought about.
That issue Rudy Giuliati in my mind, But okay, all right.
That's the classic classic example of somebody who demands to be taken seriously. It's like the arrested Development thing with Job and the musicians. A lot we demand to be taken seriously, and they're not. They're comic figures. They've washed
out of every enterprise. TV shows have failed. They could hack it as this, they couldn't hack it as that, And so they decide whether or not even they truly believe these things in their core, but they have decided, as a matter of principle, for their own sense of narcissism and self worth, that they're just going to stick it to everybody that they blame for their own misfortunes.
And if sticking it to them means riding sidecar with Russian intelligence or Russian propaganda, who cares, That's just makes it even more delicious to them.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back, and Rebecca Michael, let me jump into just I think for the audience. I'd love to get you with both you and John's take on this. Conspiracy theories, as we all know, generally revolve around some sinister force that you can never really it's the Jews or the Illuminati, and they're manipulating the rest of us. But in our society, in reality, forces by and large don't exist as organized forces, but in an authoritarian government
like Russia, they actually do, right, I mean pregosion. That's how he made his money. So if you could bring an American audience into the reality of what it's like to live in an authoritarian government where people where the government actually sits down and comes up with conspiracies to inflict on either their own population or others.
The Rosetta stone of conspiracy, theoris I mean you alluded to it talking about anti Semitism, right, is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which people often refer to this as a forgery. But a forgery suggests that there's a genuine article that's been spoofed. There's no genuine article here. This is a wholesale fabrication. And who did the fabricating the Okrana the Czarist secret Police, which in many ways all of their tradecraft and their organizational structure
was imported into the post Tsarus Soviet Cheka. And then I mean, through the succession of alphabet soup incarnations, that body took as the KGB or now we know it
as the SVR and the FSB. So here's a case where in the nineteenth century, Jews are seen not just within Russia, where they're suppressed, but outwardly in the world, whether it's in Western Europe with the Rothschilds and positions or echelons of global finance politics, where even if they're not in a leadership position, they're not premiers or presidents, they're in war cabinets, they're advisors to these politicians. And you concoct this elaborate explanatory thesis for why the world
doesn't go the way you want it to go. Right, there's a bogey man, there's somebody to blame. It's not that we're bad, it's not that we're inept. It's not that our trains don't make it to the station on time, or we don't have indoor plumbing because we didn't invest in infrastructure. No, no, no, no, no, it's those guys are responsible for all of our misfortunes right here in America.
Henry Ford, who was a celebrated industrialist in the twentieth century, I mean, he believed every word of this and actually spent his own fortune putting out added conspiratorial nonsense about Jews. And again did he convince himself that he was taken in by Zara's secret police disinformation experts. Of course not He had his own, his own way of coming to the same conclusions. But these conclusions were only reinforced by what he was able to read cooked up in Moscow
or in Saint Petersburg. I should say, way back.
What Andy Michael, can I ask you? Why does this always seem to be Russia? Why is Russia the place that seems to be for a century, no hour more, the place that's weaponizing and spreading conspiracies for political reasons? And are there others that either have done it for a long time or picking up on what the Russians have done.
I mean, it probably would take a true Russian historian to explain it. Actually, there is a great Russian historian, a Soviet Hungarian called Tibor Zamweli. I think he was the cultural attache and then he defected. He wound up in the UK and he wrote a book, and broadly his view is things Russia don't really change in erratic or unpredictable ways. It's a sort of sign curve of repression and liberalization. But even liberalization takes an asterisk right.
It's not in the sense the Western sense of true enlightenment, open society, transparency of government, accountability of leaders. No, I mean, it's the authoritarian imprint has been there, and according to Tibor, it's been there for a very simple reason. Russia was conquered by Genghis Khan and not by Julius Caesar. Right, if they were the legatees of the Roman Empire and what we now call the collective West, the chance is that we wouldn't be faced with this. It's not even
a level of sophisticated political warfare. It's so entrenched and it's so well invested in, and it's so relied upon that whether we know it or not, we're constantly being bombarded with this. Right, it's a lot easier to take societies or countries where there is things such as the rule of law and transparency or in our case First
Amendment freedom of speech. Is a great gift to the other side because they don't have these things where they come from, and they know it, and they look for our virtues as they try to transform our own virtues into vulnerabilities and weaknesses. I mean, I'll give you a perfect example of this, and moral equivalency is one of the great sort of It really ties the room together
of all Russian active measures. So today, as we sit here, and I know the show will come out in future at some point, as we sit here, Lexi Navalni, the leader of the Russian opposition, has been discovered dead in the Russian penal colony. And I've just heard President Biden say Putin bear's responsibility for this. I would say, actually, the Russian state, beyond Putin alone bears responsibility of this. He was murdered. And what did the Russian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs just do? They said, unbelievable cynicism. How can the president be so upset about a Russian citizen who died in a Russian penal colony when American citizen Gonzalo Lira was tortured and killed in Ukrainian So, Gonzala Lira was a preferred conspiracy theorist, a sex tourist who moved to Kharkiv and then at the start of the full scale invasion, was basically cheering Russia's genocide. So he was arrested under Ukraine's civil code. You don't trade the propaganda
of the enemy, right. He died in prison. We don't know the circumstances. But in other words, the leader of the Russian opposition twice poisoned with Novachuk, a military grade nerve agent by FSB assassins, whose identities we know thanks to my colleagues Christo Grozev and raumand de Brhotov. That is the moral equivalent of some asshole you've never heard of who was in a country cheering as a fifth colonist, cheering for the other side, and breaking those countries democratically
determined laws. On the one hand, they know that that's going to tickle the funny bones of people in the west, far right magatypes. They've sunk their teeth into Gonzala Lira. Elon Musk has tweeted about him, Tucker Carlson has tweeted about him. And yet the wider population, who is this guy?
Why should we care?
Only we know leader of the opposition, right, the one nemesis that Putin has got. Now he's dead, that's a world historic event. There's another line that I'm quite fond of, and this tells quite strongly, I think on how intelligence operations and active measures applied. Russia is an inferiority complex
wrapped inside of a superiority complex. They consider themselves to be the greatest civilization the world has ever known and ever will know, and yet they deeply resent the fact that no one agrees with them.
When the Bolstvik regime took over, it was taken over by a bunch of revolutionaries that had been fighting the czar estate for a long time, and so all of a sudden they took over this massive, continental wide country and found the fact that they were actually pretty weak.
Their enemies were the Western Powers. They did have quite serious internal opposition monarchists and white Russians and others, and they developed this form of political warfare, asymmetric warfare, this stuff we're talking about, how subversion, disinformation, and it's been part and parcel of Russian intelligence services ever since. And I see it in a way as like terrorism. It's the weapon of the weak against the strong. Terrorists can't take you head on, so they find weaknesses and take
advantage of it. It's like a big, strong, huge boxer fighting someone much smaller and weaker. The weaker boxer is going to have to try to hit below the belt, and obviously is a much bigger and more powerful Western country. It's just not part of our DNA.
There's another important point which you remind me of by likening it to international terrorism, folk emphasis on international So one of the things I realized in the course of researching my book on the GRU, there was a case to be made that the GRU, more so than the NKVD, which is another name for the KGB, what became the KGB, was the premier intelligence service on the planet for a
period of years in the nineteen thirties. But one thing they were good at was capital e espionage, pure intelligence collection, running agents, getting agents to do things. And one of the reasons they were so good at it is some of the best spies that worked for the Soviet system were not Russian. They were European, or they were American. It was a thoroughly internationalized operation.
It was communist worldwide, communist common turn.
Members ideology itself. It brooked no sense of nationalism or patriotism. The head of what it was, the fourth Department, the GRU in its earlier incarnation, but the head of it, the first real head and the most successful one, was Jon Berzen Jan Burson was Latvian. He was a rifleman in World War One, and he fought against Russia in World War One and then flipped over to the other side. And basically he was a brilliant sort of director and case officer in his own right and basically managed the
Republican effort in fratricidal Spain. Was recalled during the purges and of course killed, as were most of the good gru cadres from the twenties and thirties who essentially gave the keys to the Kingdom to Stalin. And of course he was so paranoid he didn't believe anything that he was told. But they were idealists, no disrespect of posterity
to say they were true believing communists. They believed that Moscow was the Third Rome, it was the future, that the great depression world, the ravages of World War One, liberal democracy had failed, and Marxist Leninism was the future. And they gave themself body and soul to this movement. And then of course we're completely disillusioned and demoralized and in many cases murdered because they realized that they'd been sold to Bill of goods. But we don't have that anymore.
And you notice we're talking about some of the more crude CAC candidate attempts by the Russians to divide and conquer and sow discord in the West, some of which are unfortunately successful. But I would blame ourselves for being so stupid, not for them being so clever. But the reason this it doesn't hold a candle to what they used to do is they're not relying on well trained Western cadres who understand their own systems and their own
societies better than they do. They're relying on people like Mishkin and Chipega who are literally reading Wikipedia entries about the lovely spires of the Salisbury Cathedral.
I want to stick up for the Russians. We're sort was coming down at that kind of heart. Let me put in a good word for Moscow. So my sense is conspiracy theories and pushing them isn't just a realm that the Russians do. They're just extremely good at it. But all, basically all all autocracies need this right because if whatever you decide, truth is what your dogma is, and truth interferes with it, you've got to get rid of truth. You've got to come up with an alternate narrative.
So Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan. They had their conspiracy theories right wing, left wing. It doesn't really mean isis my lord talk about wacky conspiracy theories on how the world actually works and when the Chris When Isis became hostile to al Qaeda, isis bought into the fact that Ben Laden was a CIA guy.
Right.
But I think what does separate the Russians from almost everybody else is that we look at it and we talk about it as though it's a state, a country, and it's in a lot of ways, it's a security service running a country, which is different than almost everybody else.
Yes, but also you know, there are people I'm talking to formers here who there is a code of ethics and a covenant of serving an intelligence service for one's nation. Right, It's not just a security service run a state. It's a kleptocratic, a moral and corrupted security server. And you could see this in real time. I mean, you could chart the degeneration of the Soviet enterprise and the rise of Stalinism based on the case officers that were being sent.
Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for a minute or two, and we're back.
So you had this guy Alexander Ulinovski who's an anarchist recruited in Odessa and fights in the Civil War with the Red Army. Even though he's not a card carrying Bolshevik, he really believes in fighting that the reactionary regime that was represented by Bizarre, which was also an anti Semitic regime, right, a lot of Jews did become hardcarring communists because of the entrenched state, homegrown anti semitism of the Empire. And you know, there's this great anecdote which kind of shows
the shift in opinion and sensibility. So Julinovsky is a case officer because he believes Chained is an agent. Because he believes there's no consideration of compensation or money or stealing from the till using operational resources for your own it doesn't enter into it. Then you get this case officer Boris Bikoff, who is this again. He is a creature of high Stalinism. He's squirrely, he's angry. That's when
he's in a good mood. Is most dangerous because much like Stalin, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction with force. And he's the guy who says, why don't we pay your friends in state department? Why don't we pay for information? He who pays his boss, And this is for Chambers, this kind of realization, what do you mean, he who pays his boss. We're not doing this for money. We're doing this for world revolution. It turns out by Kof was cynical enough, and he was
correct enough. You incentivize, you provide some dusours, whether they're you know, oriental rugs or cash payments in hand. The Russians are at the present time all of the idealism that may have once obtained really ended in the nineteen thirties. They are mass at instrumentalizing cynicism. And the worst thing is our own cynicism is now almost outpacing theirs in terms of what we're I mean, you know, Matt Gates under congressional investigation for a host of things that frankly
I understand why this guy loves Russia. Prostitution, public corruption, taking bribes, sharing sex, picks of his former bedmtes on the house for Jesus Christ. And you should be a dooma deputy.
Truly, just as an asside I would suggest to people who are interested in this history. Obviously, when Michael's book comes out, that will be the premier thing to read on this. But talking about Wittaker Chambers was a fascinating individual. And there's a book by Sam Tanneerhouse about Whittaker Chambers entitled Widowicker Chambers, and then Whitdiker Chambers himself for a
book called Witness, which is also a fantastic book. And Ronald Reagan always said that was his favorite book and he would quote from as President by heart, you point.
Head intellectuals talking books stuff. People should watch Death of Styalin.
Yeah, if only for Steve Buscemi speaking in a Brooklyn accent as khush No. But the reason that I think Chambers he gets short shripped for a lot of reasons. But he is the godfather of postwar American conservatism. I mean his protege William F. Buckley Junior, who at the time was just founding National Review. Richard Nixon was the main junior congressman on the House an American Activities Committee
who believed Chambers and believe that ALGERR. Hiss was a spy and was correct, propelled him into the national limelight, which made him Vice President under Eisenhower Chambers impact on postwar American conservatism and also history is the direct result of cack handed stupidity by the GRU because they ran a guy who they should have realized from the very beginning was both too intellectual, too ideologically restless, and too humane and moral to be a really good GRU agent.
So the Trump people will say, what you put the former president through, meaning the deep state and the Democrats, of course, was mccarthy'sm neo McCarthyism right, looking for Russians
under the bed and blah blah blah. And yet the Trump people will then say the election was stolen by a Communist in Venezuela and the ghost of Hugo Chavez, and this is a cultural Marxism is ruining American I mean, the greatest bit of harm that McCarthy did, in addition to ruining innocent people's lives, was, if you were a knowledgeable and committed cold warrior, you just gave the Russians the greatest gift by allowing them to say everything is
a hysterical witch hunt that is not founded in reality or fact, when in reality and in fact we know thanks to the Venona decrypts and memoirs and books and documents such as the Mctrochian Archive, which I referred to earlier, that there were Soviet agents embedded in very high levels of the US government, from the State Department to the Treasury Department, Department of Agriculture. The FBI knew they were Soviet agents, but they could not bring them to book
for espionage. So what did they do. They went after peace people for illegal immigration crimes because a lot of these guys, you know, use fake passports and documents to come to the United States, and the other crime, lying
to the FBI green mailing people. So we got you on something, so you can either work for us and give us more about the thing we really care about, which is what the Soviets are telling you to do in this country, or well, we're just going to throw you in prison for a couple of years for committing a minor infraction. By comparison, and a lot of them again, because they were idealists and because they didn't care about their own hide so much as they cared about history.
But the capital age they took the hit, they went to jail. And so you know, I keep telling people the history of what has transpired in this country in the last ten years in change. Everyone thinks that we've seen the final definitive verdict, either the Molor Report or the Senate Intelligence Subcommittee and Intelligence Reports, which is five full volumes. Nobody's probably read it except David Corn and myself.
It's not true. It's going to take decades for this stuff to come to light, for things to be declassified, for new bits of intelligence and information to be known, because people who are currently working from Moscow Center grow disillusioned and one day knock on the door of an embassy and say I have treasure to trade.
That's what's interesting about this is it's a committed professional intelligence service which is weaponizing and using conspiracies against us. And as you mentioned earlier, what makes it bad is we get this weaponized conspiracy thrown into our system off and through social media, but via other ways too, and
then we use it to attack each other. So this is oftentimes partisan tribalism that just takes a piece of information that was put there they may not realize was put there by the Russians, of Chinese or somebody, and then we use it to attack each other, and it creates chaos and weakness inside around country and they win. That's exactly what they want.
Right, And you know a lot of the fervor surrounding Trump Russia. I mean, you know, I was living in Los Angeles. I was watching cable news, and I was seeing people go up on television, and I got to be honest, I mean, saying that they were getting ahead of their skis was putting it generously. They didn't know what they were talking about, but they had feelings about things. And God, again, I'm with a bunch of four here.
If you tried to ply your trade on the basis of feelings, you wouldn't be CIA officers for very long, would you. And these regimes and armies and intelligence they live to muddy the waters and to make you believe something that isn't true, right. Disinformation works by having you lean into your own priors, you know, telling people what they want to hear as opposed to what the reality is.
A Part of the difficulty with will they or want they invade Ukraine was again the Kremlin is quite good at psychological operations and amassing one hundred thousand troops at the border. Oh no, no country. But Russia would do that just as a head fake, right, So we were all doubting ourselves when in fact, of course they intended to do that.
And more so, the tone of this conversation, people could get the impression that Russia has a great advantage, that it's able to do this, and that's true to it to an extent, but it's also living in a conspiratorial society is also damning for those inside of it and weaken it.
When your main instrument of power, your weapon, is conspiracy. There, it's you know what, the ouroboroses, the snake that devours its own tail. It's not something that can be controlled or contained, because it eventually affects the way you view your own system. It affects the way your people view their system. Look, Stalin had, as I said, some of the best agents scattered across the world in the lead
up to World War two. Ricardsorge, a German gru Case officer, was a de facto diplomat working out of the Nazi embassy in Tokyo, and in such capacity he discovered two very important things. The first one was that Germany was planning to invade the Soviet Union, so Hitler was going to break the Hitler Stalin Pact before Stalin could get around to doing it. Stalin classed this as disinformation. He
didn't believe. He said, the spies are working for Russia, for Germany, and they're planting disinformation with me, so that I miscalculated. No, it was true, and of course Operation Barbarossa commenced. The other important thing which he did heed was that the Japanese were not going to invade the Soviet Union from the east, which allowed the Red Army to divert resources from SIB and so on. Him lived by the sword, you die by the sword. And I think one of the things that Putin is discovering now
coming back to the war in Ukraine. So the war in Ukraine, the political warfare for a decade leading up to February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, was in the hands of the FSB's Fifth Service. This is a military unit in the FSB, one of the successor agencies of the old KGB. The FSB is designed to maintain order domestically, right, it's the sword in the shield of the Russian state.
But a lot of people didn't realize they actually have a foreign intelligence arm called the Fifth Service with spies and embassies around the world, and this was an organization created in the nineties but reconstituted after the color revolutions of the two thousand and four, which again coming back to the remit of the show. The conspiracy theory, as per Putin is all of those revolutions, they weren't people on the ground asking for democracy, and it was Hillary Clinton.
It was Hillary Clinton and Victoria Newland landing out chocolates that cad CIA State Department, USAIV any ned. All of these people are this grand apparatus of puppeteers controlling you know, kids on the streets of capital cities of post Soviet So the Fifth Service was given the task destabilized Ukraine. Serghe Bisida, who was the head of it, was the guy who told Viktor Yanikovich, former president of Ukraine, opened
fire on protesters in Maydan in twenty fourteen. So he was entrusted with, Okay, find me a bunch of recruit and pay. It's fifth columnists who can basically take over the government on our behalf when we our tanks roll in no more than three days to take Kiev. And turns out Bista probably in a combination of things. One he's a crook like they all are, and stole money that was given to him for trade kraft burp. This
is number two. He probably did have a sense that things in Ukraine don't go the way you would like them to go in the Kremlin, meaning Ukrainians are patriotic, they are more nationalistic, and if the Russians come here, they're gonna go to war. So he was telling the Tsar what the Tzar wanted to hear. No, we got it. Don't worry, we got it. Time he was in ill oder, possibly under house arrests, covered in murkiness, but there you go.
I mean, the reason Putin's war went sideways was conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories cooked up by his own intelligence services, designed to prosecute those conspiracy theories and sew them against the enemy, but in fact they were regurgitated within for lack of a better term.
Well, let's hope that those conspiracy theories in Russia make Russia fall apart before conspiracy theories here make us fall apart. So we just wanted to thank you for spending time with us and talking about this. It's the real dark side of conspiracies, and so thank you very much and continue reaction reporting and we'll hope to have you on again.
Happy to join.
That's enough for today and we will be back next week with another episode of Mission Implausible.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry Osha, John Seipher, and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harners. Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.