I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. 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.
Hey guys, I wait, have either of you been to Syria? Have you spent time in Syria?
No?
Yes, well I've crossed the borrier.
Put my foot over all right, I have friends who've served in Syria for a long time. You know what's interesting about Syria When you talk to former agency get people about where they've been and where they like. It is amazing to me how many people say Syria is the favorite place they've been. They like the people the most, They liked the culture, the food.
Like I loved Syria. I spent time in Damascus, time in Aleppo, not a ton of time, but a few weeks, and all of that. Like the people, the food, like the architect.
Like the torture.
No, I didn't like that so much. Yeah, and I was there long before I was there in two thousand and three, two thousand and four, that kind of timeframe, so well before the Civil War. So here's a question I had, like when suddenly the borders open, like I got into Iraq right when the borders opened, I have to assume I have a bunch of friends I haven't checked, who are like flooding into Syria right now? Are there CIA officers, people from other intelligence agencies? Are they just
flooding into Syrian right now? Is that what happens? Because journal let me tell you what's happening right now with journalists, every war photographer, radio, war reporter, print reporter. They're calling each other, They're texting each other. How are you going in? Are you going in from Turkey? Are you going in from Lebanon? Are you going up from Jordan? Are you you know? Are you going in from the Kurdish areas? What roads are good? What hotels are safe?
Hey?
I got a guy in Holmes who I trust, you can stay with him. And they're all talking this through and they're figuring out and where should we go? Is there a spokesman like can we find like, who's somebody who can tell us what's going on? Oh? Are there a different regions? So that a lot of journalists are doing that, And generally the way journalists work is it's not like the editor of the New York Times and
the editor. It's like a bunch of on the ground field reporters with experience trying to figure this stuff out. It's actually really fun, Like I loved figuring out all sorts of different routes into Iraq. And so what would be happening right now? What's your guests like at CIA? Are they sending a bunch of people in find out what's going on? Make contact?
I don't think there's a need to be sending people in right away. We're not really reporting in that sense. But what will be happening and has been happening all along is CIA people who work with our partners in Israel and in Jordan and Turkey, and also we'd be talking to all the folks there that have knowledge specifically of people who should we contact, what do we know they're doing. Some of the issues that are going to be top of mind are okay, regime had chemical and
biological facilities are they safe. What if the rebels get to them, does that matter who's staying there? Are they still secure? You saw it yesterday that the US military was hitting Isis areas to make sure Isis didn't flow in as part of this process. So it'll be a
process very quickly. I'm trying to work with everybody who has interest in Syria and figure out what's the best way so that if we do need to contact very quickly someone who's going to be setting up a new security system there to talk through some of the key issues we're going to have to deal with in terms of keeping some facilities secure, or you know, what is your plan with the Russian and the Russian bases and those type of things. So it's going to be a
busy time. But it isn't as if people are looking to rush across the border.
No, So the question you've got is wrong, as we're not trying to get in to take a snapshot. The work to a certain extent has already been done. I've got to assume that we already have contacts with most of the various gorilla groups or with governments that have contact, and it's something that we have worked on for years Weirdly, if we have really good assets in Syria, like in the ASCID government, they're not really worth anything to us anymore because they're not in powers. And if we did
our job, we should have structures already in place. We did in Afghanistan. I mean, we were talking to the Northern Alliance already, we were talking to to Dustin, We already had those pre existing relationships going in.
I don't know her personally, but I do know of one of Asad's top agents. Although she's gonna be Ndi so or Day and I that Director of National tell.
Us that would have been the perfect joke if you bummed that screwed it up.
Yeah, no, no, no, he's gonna have you know, a sod's gonna go. He's gonna have a condo next to Tulsi here in Kaylua.
I think he's going to be in a high rise in Moscow with a big window and a big balcony that could be used.
He may fall out of you.
I mean, we'll see what happens. But what use is he That is interesting. But I have to assume Israel must have people all over like the villages Jordan, Turkey. They have like proper intelligence, they have.
Relationships for They had a long time from Lebanon and the DRUS because it's their border and they've been paying attention to those issues. So there's going to be Those are people we're going to work with two figure out what are the key things that need to be done here.
One other thing is we sort of tend to assume there's a plan. And my best get guess is the way this rolled out and talking to people who know a lot more about serious me is even the rebels were surprised at how fast. I don't think they know what their government's going to look like or what their policy. So we can't really collect on something that hasn't been decided yet. And we're not in the business of getting our crystal ball out and saying this is what's going to happen.
Yeah, finding the plan when there is none is always a tough thing to do.
And you've talked a lot about how CIA changed tremendously in the seventies, Like there was a time where CIA played a role in succession in Iran, in Honduras and in Guatemala. Do we do that anymore? Like we would? There are people we would really want not to take power in Syria.
That would be a policy decision. So if the White House NSC sits down and says, okay, we have information that don't know there's nuclear weapons being made in Syria, the Ranians have been hiding there or something, and there's some issues that are of great concern, and we want the CIA to actually go in and find a way to get those out of there. That would be a covert action that the President would sign and brief to
the Congress and ask the CIA to do so. Or they might say, listen, there is a faction there that we want to be in charge, and we want you to try to go in and work with them and help them and pay them. Conceivably, yes, they could ask the CIA to do those kind of things. I suspect at this point they're just trying to figure out what's going on first.
I will say, having spent a little time as a reporter in immediate post crisis countries, literally nobody knows what's going on, and everyone who might tell you what's going on has a vested interest or so it just figuring out.
That's why they we do conspiracies, right. Conspiracy is actually trying to put a pattern too randomness, right, So I can't accept that there's no story here. I need to create a narrative. I need to understand what's going on here. And essentially that's what we do in these things. Someone comes in and the first person who writes an article for the New Yorker, for the Russian posts, or here's what's happening, and then everybody sort of flows from that.
It's not probably not clear to the people who were involved what's going to be happened.
What often happens these certainly in the past, places like Afghanistan or when the Soviet Union fell, a lot of the like the newly independent countries wanted to reach out privately to the US and not go through diplomatic channels and chieve it as quiet as they could, and they often used CIA as a back channel to like, look, we want to talk to you, we want to keep it quiet, and oftentimes that's what we function as. It's
just a way to communicate with these people. And then it's up to them do they want to put it up to the diplomatic level or do they want to maintain it, And often they do because they were often trusted and we do keep secrets.
Yea, when the Soviet Union fell. Part it is true we did send people in to like knock on the doors of some of these security services and heads of state in these new countries and just say, okay, with the CIA guy, we're here, let's talk what your plan, what do you want to do, How can we help what kind of diplomatic connection do you want to have the United States.
One thing CIA can do, really but we can do it is if we look at a guy who's like maybe the new head of the Syrian government, we can say, look, we can put your message on the desk of the President of the United States within twelve OZ. No one else can really do that, and oftentimes they don't want to say in public what they're really thinking.
If I wanted to take over Syria, I think what I would do is just to talk about how awesome Trump is. I think that would be the smartest thing for a rebel leader to do, just to be like, that guy's awesome.
Like the Aid family was in power for fifty four years.
Like what I'm looking for, That's what I want exactly.
The rebel group should be ordering golden sneakers and coins, coins, their Bible coins, the Bibles with the consenters to them.
All right, we're going to get right back into that, but first let's hear this. All right, I really want an update on Havana syndrome because I know that there's some news. I don't actually understand what the news is. First off, remind us what Havana syndrome is.
Well, you know, we did two episodes. We did one episode with John Lee Anderson from the New Yorker, and we did one with Mark Palmer Oppos, who was a former colleague of ours at CI who was hit by what was called Havana syndrome they're now calling anomalous health incidents. In other words, these look to be like beams of microwaves or acoustic ultrasound that were aimed at and shot at some of our diplomats and intelligence officials overseas, which
created brain injuries. And the new news is just recently the Congress, the House Permanent Select Committee Intelligence put out an unclassified report last week that said that increasingly looks likely that a foreign adversary is behind these cases that we call Havana syndro and that the CIA, which had earlier written a report that they made public that said they did not think there was an adversary, probably the Russians behind this. The new Congression report says that the
CIA report lacked analytic integrity. Senior staff at the NSC are now saying to some of these people who are involved with this that the CIA was wrong. You were right. It is a state actor. It looks like there is new information that suggests that someone is behind it, and that the CIA was not only incompetent but exhibited willful malfeasans in trying not to take this as serious as they should have.
Why would the CIA do that?
Yeah, so our analysts, certainly since WMD in Iraq, had been ultra conservative and they're unwilling to make any analytical leaps. And I think there are a lot of great people there, some of the smartest people I've ever met.
And of course there's a fear here that if you're an analyst and you're going to send a report to the White House that says there is a foreign actor behind these attacks on American citizens, that's an act of war. If I'm going to send that to the White House and the White House is going to have to act upon that, you know, you're really getting involved in something that could create a war between two countries. Like Jerry said,
there's going to be hesitancy in taking that seriously. So inside CIA, my understanding is there's been a friction between the operators, the people who live overseas and often suffered to these kind of attacks, and the analysts who have to put together the report to tell the White House that they believe it. So they may be patterns of information or something that they thought, but it wasn't enough to have strong evidence, and so they've hesitated to send
it down. And the other piece is there's a concern here that if it looks like foreign diplomats and intelligence officers are putting themselves in their families at risk, it's going to be hard to find people to go out and do those things for the CIA. And everybody who's been in war zones who's got brain injuries or other things are now going to come forward and expect very
high end health support for this. So if you agree that this has been happening, you're going to spend a ton of money on health things, and you're going to make it really hard for you to deploy people overseas, and you're telling the White House that it's an active war. Those three things would make any analysts very nervous about jumping on board.
And it's probably important to add that it's not a black and white issue. It's probably complicated like who got hit under what circumstances, and they look at it all sorts of things, and so I suspect there's some there's some bureaucratic where people just don't see eye to eye, and if you can't come up with a consensus, it's hard to write something that is discreet and hard hitting and punching like this is it.
I think it's a conspiracy. Definitely a conspiracy.
It is a conspiracy. And if it's the CI is actually holding back information as.
A conspiracy, so it actually, hey we got one, Yeah there.
All right.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible it's a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.