How did you know that these guys were looking to ambush us? And he goes, oh, one of them was my cousin. So we saw the guy in months later and he just mentions off to the side. I says, oh, my sister got her leg blown off. Yeah, well, people know that I'm working with you, And he says, in just this one morning, I had malaria and my sister walked out and they put a mind down, and later I heard through my cousins that it was meant for me.
And then several months later he was assassinated. I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
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 I 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.
We'll break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission Implausible fears. I feel a little bit of guilt because I tried to shame Adam by using his wife as leverage, and it's had an impact.
It's been a busy summer. I have some things going on, but I missed some tapings and you called me out through the show directly to my wife, and Jen let me know, and I was like, would be really good on this show, Jen Banburry, So can I introduce you John and Jerry to Jen Vanburry?
Please do hi?
Gentlemen, who gen.
First mistake?
Oh no, she's already got low standing.
Aside from that, she is not someone who likes whatever I do. She will let me know when she thinks it's not that great.
And Adam makes a ton of crap that I'm like and I tell him so, but.
She I think, Jen, you're like the biggest fan of this show. You love the show, not because of me.
I am a fan.
Yep, I already have the Jerry John bobbleheads.
We met on the set of Friends in nineteen ninety eight, although we were both with other people. Her husband at the time wrote for Friends, and my girlfriend at the time had a friend who wrote for Friends, so we met as friends and then five years later, I mean, we had hit it off and would hang out every once in a while. She was much more impressed by my girlfriend at the time than by me. She was really cool, Nancy Updyke of this American life. And then
five years later Jen was single. I was single, and I was living in Iraq, and Jen, after a career as a novelist and fiction writer playwright, was doing journalism and came out to Iraq and we fell in love in the romantic city of Baghdad.
For us, it's amazing.
We went from barely knowing each other to living together within twenty four hours.
Essentially, it's probably hard to find like your own place there in Begdad.
When Adam was like, oh, no, you can just crash with me and it'll be fine, And I went there thinking that I was not interested in anything else except a crash pad. But I got to say very quickly, and I'm sure you guys have experienced this. When you're in a situation like that, it's it's a great way to date somebody because you know right away, oh, this is the kind of person that I can trust in a really fucked up situation, And like you see people
in a slightly different way. I think we talked a lot in Iraq about how the people that we gravitated to and spend time with were the ones who we knew we could count on if something bad happened, and that's not true for everybody in that environment. Do you guys feel like there's a relationship shorthand I don't even mean romantic relationships, but like a relationship shorthand when you're in a pretty potentially dangerous situation.
In Cia, we do traditional espionage where we look for secrets, but in war zones we do the same thing but under very different circumstances. And there really is something where you create these bonds of affection even inside of three or four months, that will last year in your entire life. And just one story, I was in a side abod and we got rocketed. Siren's goes off, which means within the next thirty seconds we're gonna have rockets hitting the camp.
And we had a big sewage pipe buried in the ground which you could like crawl into, And so the thing goes off and I'm the last one out the door and the sewer pipe. It's full of people, but I'm getting in that thing, so I crawl in and I end up sitting on this guy's lap and we're stuck there for the next hour, and of course the
jokes start. So two years later, I'm in London Station and I'm wearing a suit and I'm with a division chief and we're walking through the hallways of London Station and this door opens and this guy leaps out because he's forgot we're in London, and he leaps onto my back, piggyback, and he starts yelling, yeah, right, and then he realizes that, oh, we're not in Afghanistan anymore. And he could often say, oh, it's shook hands properly and things like that. So there's
a sort of those two modes of existence. You basically you shit in a slip trench together, which brings you together and you're scared, and then being in London or Paris or Berlin very different existences.
There's a danger for us in war zones and for families because in that heightened environment where everybody's in one place, you might be living in a shipping container or whatever, those people become like your immediate family. You're sharing something that the people back home don't share. And you don't have your family with you like we often do, Like when Jerry and I work overseas, usually our family's with us.
But if you're in Bagdad, or if you're in Cobble, or if in one of these other places, you're with this group all the time in a really tense situation, and relationships startup that probably are pretty intense.
And they're the only ones who understand you. So there are war zone romances and they generally don't work out well because you go back to the real world. But yeah, we had that. John and I were both in leadership positions and really tough places, and we would watch like a fair start, a fair stop, marriages come to a begin and end there. It is a thing.
Yeah, we definitely know a ton of journalists whose relationships don't survive one of them getting posted to a war zone, because I think precisely that. I mean, sometimes they get involved with other people, and then other times it's just a question of they get back home and it's like you've learned a foreign language and you get back there and your partner doesn't speak that language and you're having
a hard time figuring it out. So I went over there thinking I was going to stay just a couple of weeks and do some freelancing back when freelancing was possible in that environment. And then we fell in love and we decided that we were going to stay there for a while, but in the interim go back to the US for a month or so so that I could like pack up my apartment, put stuff in storage, and back in New York.
We really didn't like each other as much.
It was a struggle, and we went and spent some time in this farmhouse in Nova Scotia that I had used to go to, and we were just not on the same page at all, and thinking like, oh, this might be the end of it. And I just started saying, we got to get back to a rock. Now, Let's get back to a rock, because if this relationship is going to work, that's where we need to be.
And I was serious that when I first started coming back from Afghanistan, my marriage took some real hits in it. And it wasn't until later, going back and forth that we started figuring out what was wrong and what happens is one partner, so my wife is home with the three kids, and she fills your role right and she's like taking care of finances, getting the kids to school,
and you're there's no room for you anymore. And then you show up after three months, six months, and you're in a place, especially if you're in a leadership position where you're working eighteen hours a day and situations are coming answer and you're like, yes, no tomorrow, don't do that.
That's safe, that's not safe. And then you show up at home and because you're there inside of twenty four hours, you get in an airplane and your suddenly you're in northern Virginia and your wife says, should we have pasta tonight? And you're like, yes, you know, it's like maybe we can have burgers, okay, yes, question and the babies I was thinking of painting it bundling board blue or maybe yes Bunny and the Moore blue. Next question, and they're like,
I don't like you anymore. And so because you're just in two friggin different worlds, and eventually you're like you show up and she's yeah, let's not actually talk for a little while. We need to like figure this out. But when you're not used to it, and I think a lot of soldiers and a lot of agency people and diplomats coming out of war zones will get divorced after that if they don't figure it out right away, because it's a whole different way of being when you're in a war zone.
I'm always fascinated by.
There's like the time period where whaling was a really big New England industry and Nantucket basically became like a matriarchy because all of the men were off on these whaling voyages pretty much all the time. They would be gone anywhere from six months to four years or something, and they would get back and their families were so happy to see them, Oh my god, you're actually alive. We didn't know, like big celebrations blah blah blah.
And then a week.
Later the women were like, oh crap, Like, no, we have a system and just because you're back, like you don't get to change the whole system, and it would cause all these big problems. And basically like they just go out whaling again and that would solve the problem. Both of you guys started before you had partners, Is that right?
You both entered the CIA before.
You had that's right.
So, like, at what point in the dating process do you let someone in on the on what your job actually is, like, how does that work?
It'll depend. So my wife is British. When you're in the CIA and you're dating a foreigner, it is a whole different kettle of fish. So there's a whole bunch of different rules involved, things like whether or not you're allowed to cohabitate, and what cohabitation what means?
Right?
Is it three nights a week, four nights a week? Does it mean that they have a key? Does it mean if you spend half the night. So we're not allowed to cohabitate, and we're not allowed to tell them until we get permission. So when I finally proposed to my wife, I told her, A who I really work for? And she's, yeah, I don't really care. And I suspect
it as much because you're a rotten liar. And b you have to take a polygraph where they're going to ask you all sorts of intrusive questions, and of course I wanted to sit in on the polygraph, but they don't allow you to do that. Ask her. She lied to me that one time.
And then they have to she had to take a polygraph she did.
To make sure she wasn't a commy spy. It's all counter intelligence, and so they want to know that if you're going to bring somebody on board into the circle of trust, that they're not that a. They're going to stay and be they're not sent there to suborn you. And then we have to write a letter of resignation, which if the polygraph doesn't go well, they accept or they say it's either her or us. It's one or the other. And we worked it out that I said, if they say no, I'll resign. Yeah. So we did
get married. They it all worked out and not like I think. Six months after she became a citizen, we were working abroad and she basically joined the agency as well, and so she joined CIA.
Wow.
For us, well that's all it works for the kind of guys that can't get an American wife because they try to find someone overseas, because if you're my wife. Used to work in the visa section of Moscow and they used to have a thing for giving visa to these Russian women that were trying to marry American men and they would call American men American zero my hero.
Wait, but the polygraph is like across the board, no matter who.
Not for Americans So what if she had been like and I knew I grew up with a bunch of people who were born in Iran, they were Iranian citizens, but had lived in America maybe with a green card. What if it was a more hostile country than the UK.
Oftentimes people don't get in and it's not their fault. It's like the Iranians will pressure family members. So like one of the issues would be if you're marrying, say an Iranian American, one of the issues would be, like, if you have a cousin back in around what happens if like the Iranian Intelligence Service shows up and says to the cousin or says to the wife, gets word back that your cousin's going to go to jail unless you like give us information on your husband. So they
can be put in difficult situations. So for Russia, a Russian American, Iranian American, I think can be a little more dicey, even if it's like your spouse is not a spy, But can they be blackmailed?
Do you know any stories of someone failing the polygraph, like much to the surprise of their.
One story that I really like, it was in Kosovo and it was not in America, and it was a British colleague am I six guy, but he was with a coast of our girl and they she sort of moves in with him and people could the neighbors could see, and they were together for a while and he has the talk with her and he said, I think we're getting close. This is going a little too fast. I
think we need to slow this down. And she says, you slept with me, like and people have seen, and he's, yeah, I know, that's why we need to slow this down. She goes, no, no, you've slept with me. You can't back out of this now. But the neighbors know. I've been here all night. And he's like, yeah, that's why I don't think we should get married. I think we should, And so she shorts a long story short. She takes a butcher knife as they're arguing in his kitchen and
she sticks them in the stomach with it. She guts them, and then she calls her parents and says he wasn't going to marry me, and the parents are like, but the neighbors have seen you spent the night there, and she's, I know, should I call an ambulance and They're like, he is a foreigner, although he has it coming. So she does call an ambulance. They show up and he's got a knife sticking in a butcher knife sticking in
his stomach. So they metavac him to London and he's laying in his bed like a couple of days later and the door opens up and in she walks, and he's like, oh fuck, she's here to finish me off. And she comes over. She says, hey, I'm really sorry, but in my culture, the neighbors have seen us sleep together, and like, my reputation is gone. I can never date again because people know. And he's like, oh, I didn't realize,
and so she basically says I love you. He says I love you back, and they're like, let's get married anyway. And the British fired him because he was marrying someone up for like attempted murder of him. So he had to resign because he married his attempted murder who put a butcher knife in his stomach. So this is the kind of thing that can happen in the world of Espa.
Wow, Yeah, that does sound like truly that instinct on his part, or it.
Would make a great brom com right, except for the butcher knife part.
Okay, Old, I'm going to need to go to the bathroom, so let's take a quick break and we'll be back shortly. All right, welcome back.
By the way, I didn't forget the fact that you said that your wife knows that you're a terrible liar.
You're a terrible liar and you're in the CIA.
Isn't like rule number one being in the CIA that you're pretty good at lying?
Well, I mean, part of what we do is we try to develop relationships with people that are are real and deep and build trust with them. So in some ways it's showing that empathy, showing that understanding and befriending people that make us more successful than the fewer lies the better essentially, And if that's part of it, sort of ties to this whole conspiracy thing. The best conspiracy
is the ones that have some truth to them. And so for us most of our work, you know, if you can avoid lying is probably the smartest way to go. And there's periods of time where you can't where you're undercover or something sensitive it's happening, or you have to help you skate your background or like Jerry sometimes pretended to be a foreigner doing some work or something. In those cases, certainly you have to lie and be good at lying, but a lot of our work is just the opposite.
You're like, it's a switch in your head, at least for me, John, will you turn it on and off? So it's and it's maybe actors have this or journalists where you turn it on where it's like, it's my time to be charming and to put this foot forward. And you deal with like people outside, but what do we deal with your family? They know what the switch is on or off. So like the people you know really well, colleagues or your family, they can tell when
you're like case officering, them will say. And even in the agency, we're like, don't case officer me, Like, turn that fucking off. I can tell you're doing the trying to be the charming case officer. Don't do it inside. And so, yeah, I don't know. How'd you do with your family, John, did you.
I've never seen you guys be charming.
No, we don't never turn it on with you. That was an easy one.
I was going to do one in Iraq because we were there a long time and we were there most of the first year of the US occupation, which is very few journalists worse, and I speak Arabic pretty well, which was unusual for journalists. And I always since I was covering economics, I was asking a lot of boring questions, boring questions and people would say, oh, he's CIA. That was like, we would hear that all the time, he's CIA. And Jen, what did you always say about me?
Yeah, I said, there's no way he could be CIA because he cannot keep a secret like he if there's some like juicy tidbit that he's in on, I'll be like, I know I shouldn't tell you.
This, but i'd have Trump's approach to national security.
Yeah, so running with conspiracies and let me ask you, you guys a question. So when I was spent my time in Rock, the Iraqi police hid these like rods that would go beep if you ran them over cars or people. The police would have supposedly it could tell whether or not you had explosives, and it came out afterwards that it was a total con job. There was nothing in these that either showed you had exploit or even a weapon, or could even tell whether you had
something on. But the conspiracy was because people believed it. The police could like run this wand up and down a guy or over a car and they could just see that the people in there started to sweat or they look nervous, and they're like, yeah, they must have explosives.
I remember hearing about that. It was like a scam. It was like a specific Yes, it made a funny way, like a rock had all these we met these like American, Australian British arms dealers who were there were these two guys. One was Australian or New Zealand and the other was American, And every time we saw them, we'd see them like every few months. They were in a different business at one point where we sell copier machines and printers, and then the next time we sell armored cars. We're shipping
in armored cars from Germany. And then it was.
We sell like the big magnetized signs that you put on the side of a car that says police.
Those guys probably made those ones for sure.
Yeah they would have done.
The guys who made them went up on charges really scamed. Oh yeah, yeah, they arrested them. So what they did is they bribed rocky officials to spend millions and millions of dollars of our money by the way of American money, to buy these things. And then it turned out there was no There was all magic, right it was. There was no science to them, but everybody got rich off of them, and the Iraqi police refused to give them
up because they success. And then the conspiracy was they just telling you they don't work, but they do.
The double negative conspiracy.
Whoever came up with that obviously knew Iraq well enough to know that conspiracy theories there at that time period, like any conspiracy theory could get even the most outrageously crazy one got a foothold so easily because of life under Saddam, when they were used to being sold a bill of goods, the craziest stuff all the time, and nobody.
Knew what to believe.
You can believe the word on the street as well as you can believe what you're hearing on the news.
Well, actually, you know for sure the official story is not true. Yeah, right, so that's one hundred percent. So the conspiracy theory at least as a five percent shot.
Is that something that you guys say would ever take advantage of there was a conspiracy that you know, the military had satellites that could look right into somebody's home and figure out what they had inside. And I think military people actually use that to their advantage sometimes.
And the sea through glasses that they had X races that the soldiers had ex respects, and we're looking at naked women through their bias.
I don't know if we do it like organizationally, but I'll be careful how I say this. I don't want to reveal. So there was a senior official in a country and he was riding through the desert in his car, and he told me he was going to go do this dangerous thing out in the boonies, out in the desert.
And I'm like, dude, if you're out there with the bad guys, let's say isis and you're right, and you're driving around in a convoy, you're liable to get shot up by American helicopters because if you're in the you're in the bad zone. And so it's three in the morning and my phone rings and it's him. He's on the phone and he's I'm in the desert. There's four cars. I can hear helicopters. You gotta save me. And he says, quick, call in to scent Com and tell them to call
off the jets. And and I'm like, they're going to find my phone. You're going to tell them where my phone is. They're going to tell the jet it's not going to drop the bomb. I'm going to be safe. I said, here's what you do. Drive your car into the desert, get out of your car, and just like get away from your car for a couple of hours until you don't hear noise anymore. You shouldn't be able there to begin with. But he didn't. And he says,
just call scent Com, tell the military. So I put the phone down see in the morning, and I went back to sleep. And I woke up the next day and he survived, and he said, oh, thank you. I knew, he said, I would have been really scared, except I knew you were there. And I have to say, I said, hey, man, I'm here for you, right. I never told him. I rollback in reality, if I really wanted to do this, I would have had to go on into the embassy. That would have taken time. I would have had to
like geared up our machines. I would have had to have written a cable send it to Santacom. They would have gone. It would have been like he would have already been charred right by the time I got around to sending this in or any of it. He just assumed that we had these like superpowers like on TV.
I think, you know, if you're looking to accomplish a goal or an operation, if there's a conspiracy theory that
can benefit you, you might do it. And I wasn't involved in this, but I remember reading about maybe it was a sixties or seventies in Indonesia, there was a you know, a real strong belief in like ghosts and things like that, and I think they needed to get into a house or a building or something, and they essentially made up fake noise and whatever, like a ghost was there so that people would leave the house and they could break right into it. And that type of thing.
One of the biggest conspiracy theories, conspiracies out there that isn't put out. There are six are British colleagues. They are still dining out on James Bond movies right, People who like, there's a guy in Iran he wants to spy against his government. He's like, I'm going to go to the British because he's seen all the James Bond movies. And in reality they're certainly not driving around in Austin Martin's with machine guns in their cars. But I think
there is this grand conspiracy Mosad too. People just think they're better than they are when in reality they're maybe good. Their feet stink too, right, It's not like there anything.
Is there a room somewhere where some nerdy guys are coming up with, like you know, a gun that's in a lighter.
Well, it's our job when we're overseas and we're trying to accomplish something to try to come up with the most the best way of doing it, and it might be something creative or different, or involve conspiracy or whatever. But what you're talking about is the technical services like
in the Bond. Yeah, that's what they have to And yes, we do have what's called Office of Technical Services, which throughout the Cold War created all kinds of cool stuff, and some of it which would lead to real stuff that we use We use now miniature cameras and phones and things like that. Nowadays, there's so much actual commercial stuff that can be used for spy purposes. We don't have to create it out of whole cloth as much
as we did in the past. But yeah, they do disguises and they come up with things that we might need for an operation.
Yeah.
So say, like you are on an operation and unied camera inside a sandwich or whatever, is there some form that you fill out and submit and.
Sadly yes, yeah.
One point one of the oddest conversations I had and it didn't work out, by the way, but we had an agent with one arm, but he had a fake prestsis on his arm and he basically said, I can get you this senior Al Qaeda guy. He says, what I want you to do is make me a p static arm that's a bomb, and like that I can time and then what I'll do is I'll just leave my arm behind when I leave, putting like Hitler putting the bomb under the table.
Forgot your arm, right, Oh, you forgot your arm?
And so we sait it there. We're like, this is bizarre. We're sitting around target, like, you know, how much explosives got to be in there? What kind of explosives? And how do we put the timing device in and the weight of the arm and how big is it and how much of an arm? Maybe just a hand he could just screw his hand off and leave it there. And yeah, we say it with these ots guys, and they built it, and as it turns out, we never used it, but yeah, we would do that.
Although that sandwich gun sounds like a really good you guys can have that. I wanted to go back to dating. So that moment of revealing, like you said, having the talk, it sounds like it went pretty uneventfully. What did your eventually to be wife think you did for a living?
The answer is she'd figured it out. We've been together so long, and like we were going through training and she's like, where's your parking spot at State Department? And who's your boss? And she was in DC at the time, and she's none of this makes sense, and.
So yeah, tell her you did it first.
I told her the State Department guy he was getting hired. So where we were being trained was this was nowhere is near Foggy Bottom. And then we went off to the farm and you have to explain, like why you're gone for an entire week and you come back unshaven, stinking because you've been out living in the woods for a week and I don't think you've been at State Department. You've been gone for a week, and you smell of bo and you haven't shaved in a week. So there's yeah, there's.
Something Cia is known for bo.
In Washington. There's this thing where I work for the State Department and then like real estate guys that go, oh, what section, and then you like wink at them and go the other State Department and they're like, oh, so you haven't admitted it, but they all know.
Yeah. I met my wife in Moscow in the embassy, and because we're under surveillance and our house is are bugging, like our stuff, you got to maintain your cover. She held her on in the political section and this and that, but she you know, worked in the ambasshy she worked doing immigrant visas and interviews and that type of thing.
But she sort of knew because inside the embassy you could tell sort of who was who, Like the State Department, this is awful people, but a lot of them are sort of like they hang together, sort of nerdy or whatever, and that THEIA guys look different and she would see who I would like stand in line with and get food at the cafeteria or something.
That thing about who you hang with is important too. So I was in Berlin between eighty ninety ninety three when the wall came down, and before the wall came down, we had a softball league that we played in the embassy and our team was mostly CIA guys, not all, and we played teams, and we had a couple of teams in Berlin. We had a West Berlin team and East Berlin team. Teams would come from Poland and Czechoslovakia. We'd play softball against each other, all all good fun.
But the CIA guys we all would like talk, right, we'd hang together. And there was this South African guy called Steve Laufer, and Steve would show up to play. He was he worked in the embassy in West Berlin. It wasn't it was the mission, actually he worked there and he was like almost an American and he but he worked. He had lunch with them all the time and he would always come and he would play softball with us. And he was terrible because he grew up
in South Africa. He was good playing soccer, but he couldn't throw, he couldn't bat, and everybody knew Steve got four strikes, like the outfield would sit down when Steve got up. He was an automatic out, like his team would get four outs. And people were like, why is he coming here? He's like terrible, and he didn't look like he was having fun. And then one week he wasn't there and I mentioned this to the RSO, the regional security officer. I was like, where's Steve? And he
looked at me and said, shut up. And he was like, really, like serious is if I'd known something? And He's telling me to keep my mouth shut, And I'm like, I don't know what's going on about. I'll keep my mouth shut. And the next day he thought I knew, but I didn't. The next day it was announ Steve was arrested for espionage. He was spying for the Russians, the KGP, and his whole point was hang out with the Americans and see who hangs together, and just from the social interactions you
could tell who were the CIA guys undercover. So we weren't really good undercover for those inside the embassy.
When you were stationed in places not with your family, I guess more like in the war zones where did you stay.
Totally depends that they can talk about a rock. They had essentially a series of shipping containers that they would divide up and people would stay in those. I lived in Pakistan and we lived on the embassy compound and there was old college dorms essentially that had been in apartments and people had lived on there. But then there were also people who lived out in the community too, in apartments or houses.
Because that was something we wondered about in Iraq, because we just lived out. We had a house in a neighborhood and would go shopping in the regular markets and eat at restaurants and we had a fairly normal life. We'd go over to people's Iraqis houses for her and the Americans who were stuck in the Green Zone, we just felt like, how did they even know Iraq at all? How did you know? Like they didn't, Yeah.
Except CIA guys. We were always out right. Our guys were out meeting assets like all the time and also running black right, going out with battered up cars to look like Iraqis. And when I was there, I would deal with as I was declared, meaning the Iraqis knew I was CIA, and I dealt with Iraqi officials and the job that I had, going back to the bit
about turning it on and turning it off. I would sit down with officials who we would we had ways of knowing what they really thought, and there would be instances where we knew, like the Iraqi official I'm sitting down across from that he was discussing with Shea militia's whether or not to murder me, like a couple of hours before, And it wasn't oh no, don't kill Jerry. It was the US is giving us this money, or this would look bad or they might think I had
something like maybe another time or another way. Because when you leave the embassy and you're going to like that ministry, you've got to go through all these checkpoints, and some of the checkpoints are manned by Shea militias, not by government forces, or you're not sure who's manning them. And you're sitting in these vehicles and all they need to do is put an RPG into you and sort of like is this the right time to kill the Americans?
And they would discuss this, and then you would sit down with this guy and pretend you didn't know this, talk about turning it on, how's the wife, how's the family? Oh, and then you would offer them assistance to fight Isis. And of course, because they're Shia, they actually want the money to actually fight Isis because they hate the Sunnies. But they're also Shia working very closely with the Iranians, and so we're both using each other to fight Isis.
But you know this guy is also your mortal enemy and he's like willing to kill you. So everybody's lying to everybody, and it's just like the way it is. They would never like a journalist, of course, but they would light to us. Yeah, right.
Actually, what we something that we started doing a bunch was we would meet and befriend people in the CPA who lived in the Green Zone and didn't really have an opportunity to get out at all, and we would invite them over for dinner. We would smuggle them out for dinner. We would get them royally drunk, like as drunk as we possibly could, off the record, and we
did always obey that. We would just get them to like explain all the incredibly crazy shit that was happening that we knew that was happening anyway, but it was nice to hear it confirmed by people from inside.
We'll need those names.
We were drunk too, I don't remember any.
Names here go.
One of the worst conspiracies I heard was when I first went to Afghanistan, and I was there like in March of two, two thousand and two, so it was like the third or fourth wave, and we met these Afghans and we really needed their help, right, And these are tod Jeeks up in the northern Afghanistan and they came to us and they said, hey, in our culture, we venerate Alexander the Great because he went through He went through Jalalabad and on his march into India, and
he said, there's something that we have been hiding from Taliban. It is a suit of golden armor that we've hidden in the cave, and we've hidden it for all these years. It's like out of an Indiana Jones movie. And if you pay us like three thousand dollars, we will go up because we've been hiding it for song. But we need to be recompensed for this. We will get the armor and we will bring it down and we will give it to the museum and Cobble and they're like
looking at you, like is he buying it? And you're thinking like this is like the dumbest conspiracy, like, and I think we actually went into it. We actually gave them the money, but like five hundred bucks, so we didn't laugh in their face because we needed their help for all these other things and we didn't want to like make them think like we think they're liars, although we knew they were, and so we did give them something. And of course, surprisingly the suit of armor never shows up.
But I was yeah, but it was like they'd seen too many Indiana Jones movies and they wondered just how gullible we are. But we couldn't say fuck you, we're never talking to you again, because they had guns and they were important to us. So yeah, okay, we'll go with this. But writing this up afterwards is like I paid five hundred dollars not really for a suit of like golden armor from Alexander the Great. Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for a minute or two.
All right, I hope you found that time productive. Welcome back.
You guys were saying that, in fact, lying is not necessarily a skill that you have to use a whole lot the questions that I had was, is there a skill that you've come to recognize is really important to have in your job that when you first got into it, it.
Never would have occurred to you that you needed it.
Basically figuring shit out. We are presented with these problems like I don't know how to solve this, and your job is to like figure it out. Dealing with ambiguity. So okay, there's no book that says what do you do when an Afghan ally comes to you and wants three thousand dollars for a suit of golden armor that you know doesn't exist. And the end of the line is what is your mission? What are you trying to accomplish? A year out? What is the USG trying to accomplish?
What is CIA's mission? And you try to subsume it within that and try to do it. And one last thing on the not lying part is what really counts as when you sit down with somebody and you look at them and say what you're doing is important. I veil you what you're doing and I can keep you alive that you have to mean. You can't lie. Then you've got to really mean it and don't lie on that part, right, It's like I will keep you and
your family safe. And if you can say that, all the rest of the stuff about your cover doesn't really matter.
Or so it's it's dealing being comfortable, dealing with ambiguity and operating the gray. In fact, I can remember a lot of people that came into the training that were marines, seem to former marines seem to have a tough time because they wanted like an answer, right, is it this way or that way? And the answer is when you go through training, it's as well, it depends. It depends on the person the issue that is what's happening. So we're training people, you're looking for people who have like
a really honed sense of judgment. They're comfortable in foreign languages, living overseas, learning foreign cultures. They're able to develop deep relationships and gender trust with people. They like people. They got to be good listeners. They have to have a facility of foreign languages. They have to have a sense of spatial awareness and ability to operate in the street
and see what's happening and done that. They have to build a right effectively and be comfortable in foreign languages and be up to data on political, diplomatic, scientific, and military issue. So it's a variety of things, but the most important one is the one I think Jerry said is you just got to be comfortable. Each situation is different, each person is different, each person is motivated differently, and so it's just yeah, it's operating in the gray.
Although you also have this huge bureaucracy that you have to be true to, like these operate within.
That's part of the gray too, is learning to deal with your bureaucracy. You can be handstrung by it and ossified by it, but there are ways of doing things like yeah, I'm not going to write that up. Is like Washington doesn't need to know that because they won't misunderstand. But there's also one one thing Jenda I want to throw in is you have to and then I know this sounds really weird, but you have to believe in
the mission. There's almost a missionary zeal. You're not going to put your life on the line in war zones. You're not going to take your family into places with disease and poisonous snakes if you don't actually believe you're doing a good thing. That with all the warts and all the mistakes and missteps you make, you think you're act making the world a better place. And I really
thought that. I still do. I think the agency has fucked up a lot, but by and large, we were trying to do the right thing in a really gray and often brutal world.
See that's so interesting because the soldiers that we spend time with in Iraq, and I knew this was the case, but hearing it from them, it really felt different.
Which is like.
Most of them, even if they had, say, signed up because of nine to eleven whatever, they weren't ideologues, Like almost every single one had that attitude of I am here to help make sure that my buddy next to me doesn't get killed.
Like I think the military.
Really ingrains that in them because they realize that it actually works better to do it that way than with the ideological stuff. But yeah, you guys are not in that position, so you really do have to be true believers.
No, I think we take very seriously about informing policy makers about what's really happening in the places and the issues that really matter. I mean, I think we take great pride in fact providing information that is more nuanced or more accurate than what politicians are saying they think is happening in places and running really important spies and really important places that are sharing information that can save American lives or help make American policy better. That stuff
really is important. It matters to people. And so when you have like a spy you're dealing with and that person is like risking their life and they're in and a really important place, and the information is going right to people who pay attention to it in high places, that stuff becomes addictive.
It is, And for me it was this coin of love and hate. I viscerally hated authoritarian governments, dictators and isis and I mean because you see what they do isis al Qaeda, the Russian security for us is what Iran does. I see them as something that is bad for mankind. It's a bad thing to go down road. And I also think that America, for all its faults and representative democracy and the ideals that we strive for in the Constitution, is an overall good for the world.
People should make their choices. And so I was patriotic, but I was also like, I believe in representative democracy, and I just remember the first time I went into East Berlin and saw the Berlin Wall and the old days and what was on the other side and fear, And I remember I went to Czechoslovakia once in the old days and people were like afraid to talk to you. It's really hard for Americans to understand that people look over their shoulders like before they like even talk to you,
and they might lower their voice. We never do that, and it's like, this is like fucking awful that people are living a lie and you get to fight against that. And that was very heavy for me.
So was there for either of you guys. There have to have been one or more moments where you were in a situation where you just seemed like something had gone completely tits up, as a British say, and maybe in a seriously dangerous way.
So there's dangerous to our asset. So we have diplomatic community. So in most places, the worst that's going to happen you is they're going to just beat the shit out of you, and then if you're caught and they're going to kick you out of the country or your reputation is shattered, right because your op wasn't secure enough for whatever reason. In war zones. It's more than that. It's people die and in front of you, like when you get it wrong and what you do about it. There
is one thing. It was we were working with the US military in Afghanistan and we had recruited a source and we're driving down this narrow road in this valley and our set phone rings and the source says, where are you. We explain where we were, and he says, oh, there's forty people up ahead of you and they're going to kill you all and they're like a mile and
a half ahead of you. I'm glad I got you when I did, like fucking a And so we called in Apache helicopters and they were there and everybody scattered and we were able to get through and thought, oh, this went really well. And the asset came in and the military said, hey, we made it. Nobody got hurt. And he said, yeah, you guys were really lucky, says the Afghan and I were like, no, we weren't really lucky. We had you, and he goes, no, you were lucky
because you drove over this huge ied. But the guy with the command detonator also ran away, so like, you guys actually drove over this huge ied that they put down in the middle of the road, and then the land of the question is like, how did you know that these guys were looking to ambush us? And he goes, oh, one of them was my cousin Wall. So we saw the guy a month later and he just mentions off to the side, he says, oh, my sister got her leg blown off. Like what he says, Yeah, well, people
know that I'm working with you. And so every morning he would go to the sluice gates and open the gate for the let water go through for the irrigation thing, and he says, in just this one morning, I had malaria and my sister walked out and they put a mind down and they blew her leg off. And later I heard through my cousins that it was meant for me. And so I'm like, oh, my god, your sister lost her length because of working with us, and he's, oh,
I wanted to. And then several months later he was assassinated. So Afghan refugees come into the US here, and I know Jadie Vance apparently had said, oh, they're all interpreters, and every Afghan coming here is like a lot of these guys have given their lives, their family members' limbs, and like, this is something that years later you sit and think about, did I do something wrong? Should I have even associated with him? Even though it saved my life, it cost him his life.
A lot of people ask us it's a dangerous and the anxiety I had was it's not. We're not soldiers, we're not in fighting all the time. In fact, we're trying to stay away from situations where there's kinetic activity. We're trying to give soldiers information to keep them safe, to make them more effective. But like Darry said that the guilty anxiety that I feel is to that person who's providing it really important information, who is risking their lives.
Because if you're an Iranian or a Russian or a Chinese person who's committing treason against their own country, it's that person who's providing the information that's putting themselves and their family at risk. And if I do anything that gets them caught, that's what I worry about. So if I'm out and I'm trying to make sure I don't have surveillance, and I'm trying to go to make a
meeting with them, and I want to be prepared. I want to make sure that those few fleeting times when we get together that I'm providing them the support they need. I'm making sure I ask the key questions so I don't have to come back more times than I need to. I need to make sure that one hundred percent certainty that there's no chance anyone sees this meeting or that I had surveillance. That's the anxiety I feel that am I doing enough to make sure this person is safe.
I just want to go because this is a big trope in the movies, and it touches on conspiracies. That is why, because we do care deeply for our assets more than our own lives in a lot of ways. And when we have a mole like inside like aims and he gets these people killed, that is huge for an intelligence organization that is debilitating and something that it cuts really deep. Yeah, a conspiracy inside the agency to spy is something that can eat an intelligence agency from
the inside out. So one thing that people might be interested in is we're intelligence officers and both of us have spouses and kids, and people always often ask about families. Most of the time, when our kids are smaller, they're not witting of our agency affiliation, but our spouses are and so as we are developing people who may become agents assets later on, our spouses generally get a sense of who it is or what we're doing. And they're
not paid for this. But one of the things with the agency is we ask a lot of agency spouses, male or female, like, you must come to this reception, you must come to this party. And then before you go in, I know about you, John, I would say to my oftentimes my wife, I want you to go over to that woman over there, and I want you to befriend her, to see what she says about her husband, or see if you can get invited to her house, because then maybe I'll get invited, right Or she's friends
with somebody I want to be friends with. And our wives e they're not paid, be they're not trained. See, they may have differing views on mission and things like that. For the most part, my spouse went along with it, but not always. How about you is.
John, No, that's exactly true. It's sort of like the old fashioned military spouse that's meant to entertain their generals and this and that. Well, you're hosting people, you're going out to dinners. You're doing things. So even on those times when you're out at night doing things without your spouse, you're putting pressure on your spous They're the one that has to be there without you, taking care of kids and getting them ready for school and doing all those
other kinds of things. So's it really is a team effort, and used to be a lot of divorces in the agency, I think less Now.
How and when do you tell your kids? How does that work?
That is interesting in the sense that there's no regulation, there's no rule, it's individual. Your job is to figure out when a child is mature enough or needs to be told for some other purpose, for security or what have you. What you don't want to do is you don't want to put that child in a tough position where they now have to lie for you if they're
incapable of that. They have to go to school, and they know that you work for CIA, and they know they can't say the wrong thing or they can't tell their friends, and you may be putting them under undue pressure when you do that. And there's times when you might tell one kid and not the other because one kid will blab too much or what have you, because you're essentially asking them now to lie for you.
Yeah, that's got to be tough too.
I remember, like in I don't know, fourth grade or something, my friend Linda said, my dad told me that he's actually superman, but I can't tell. And of course, like Linda was spilling the beans everywhere, like how do you?
That's got to be so hard.
Hoes were asking them to really trust us. So when we say, like I'm going to disappear for a weekend and I can't tell you where I am, or I'm going to come home at four in the morning, shit faced, smelling your perfume and smoke because I've been You go with this one Russian guy. He's like, I want to go to strip clubs and I want to be with a Russian guy. So we go there and I'm working and I'm paying for all the booze and some chickens sitting on his lap and maybe sitting on mine, and
I just want to go home and watch TV. You're out till four in the morning, and then you take
a taxs and you go home. Of course, and then you've got to remember how much you spent because the next day you have to put in your expense account, like exactly what it was for and all this, But you get into bed with your wife at four in the morning and you smell the booze and you're like, yeah, it was working, So yeah, it's a It puts a lot of extra strains on a marriage because you can start seeing conspiracies inside of marriage that don't exist.
If you are a spouse whose partner is in the CIA but also has a predilection for cheating, you must just feel like gas.
Lit all the time when I think about it.
I've had three friends who thought their dad was CIA, and one of them it turned out it was. Our friend Scott Johnson wrote a memoir about his dad was in Afghanistan. Anyway. I have two friends who were sure their parents were CIA, but they were never told.
Is that a thing you've met?
Our other colleague, Meredith, when she took over the recruitment center, she actually changed to tell people you had to tell your spouse. But in the older generation before we came in, there were people who actually didn't tell their spouses they worked for CIA.
There was one CIA officer famous story in the agency. He had two spouses at the same time that didn't know about each other.
Oh, I have that.
It turns out both of them knew he was CIA, but neither knew that there was another CIA spouse.
This was amazing. You guys actually are interesting. Adam told me that you were not, and I was like, no, Adam, I've listened to the podcast.
He was like, no, that's all in the editing. I still edit them to be interesting.
But he was an excellent point.
Do you still believe that Adam is just a journalist?
Again, he cannot keep juicy stuff like that to himself.
So that's what I would say. I would want you to believe that.
Then well, thank you for shaming him, and thank you for joining us, and you're welcome anytime.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher, and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.