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.
We now continue with part two of our conversation with Robin Kerno, former journalists for CNN and all around South African.
Actually, South Africans are having quite an impact on us here politically in the United States now right. So there's a tech bros. Elon musk is the best known David Sachs, Peter Teel who have strong views about what the US government should be, what should happen to the future, where are we going with technology? And they're playing a very
large role in our politics. Is there something based on your experience with South Africa that is South African about that or is there anything as we look at them and we try to figure out what impact is having on us, Is there something that we should know based on their background in South Africa that will help us put it into context.
A lot of people have asked me this, and I've tried to listen to them as well. I'll listen to sax on the All In podcast. There's also David Freeberg who's also South African. Elon, you know, I've listened to a lot of his conversations. I've listened to and Chris Cuomo asked me this and then got Elon's dad on his show and asked him, you know, were you racist
aparty topologists? And Elon's father dealt with it in he said no. The other question with that, which sometimes I think is also dangerous, is if is anybody who isn't black who grew up in white South Africa racist and therefore a crazy person who believes in things that aren't cool.
And there's also that you've got to be careful that you're not painting an entire generation it just happened to be unfortunately born during a totalitarian race government that you all get tempered with some sort of race brush.
Yeah, but the things that they're saying this is the sort of viewpoint about what the role of government is and what the future is and what has I don't necessarily think of it as a racist thing, but there's something. Is there something cultural that's behind that sort of mental I don't know the answer, maybe no, But the.
Only way I can I could probably bring some sort of light into it. So if you think about conspiracy theories, and I say we because I'm almost the same age as all of those men, and we grew up in Johannesburg Pretoria area, so you know, I had almost for some of the same childhood and news was censored. There was the SABC, it was the only news. The apartheid government was extremely good at propaganda and censorship. We lived
in isolation. It was deliberate by the outside world. Of course, like the Soviet Union and the South Africans were cut off. The apartheid media machine was vicious. It was highly proficient at what it did, and it worked hand in hand with the apartheid government and the apartheid intelligence authorities. So when you grow up in an environment where nothing, you don't know anything, you and this is I think of true of any totalitarian state. Because South Africa and Apartheid
at his basis was a Christian nationalist totalitarian state. When you grow up in that with no information, your instinct is to just not trust anything. If you're not a believer in the in the state, which you know none of us. I don't think you know the sac set. You know, they were a Jewish South African family who moved to the state. So did the Freeburgs. I think Elon Musk hated it, and they got out there as quickly as possible. I mean he was out of there
before we could. And you know my family as well, liberal white English speaking South Africans. You know, you were stuck in this place and you couldn't leave, and so your instinct was, I don't believe any of this stuff, So I'm just not going to believe anything, or you take everything with a pinch of salt, or in that environment, you then say, okay, this seems to be vaguely true. This is maybe I saw this the past books or
some violence on the street. But then there are a bunch of gaps like why is this happening, who gave the orders? What are the implications? So you start filling in the gaps, and that's where the conspiracy theories come in. And so you grow up either in a society which there's no information, or you start believing maybe this is true.
I think an American diplomat once described the old South Africa as the republic of rumors, and so, you know, information became power because if you knew something, you could protect yourself, you could use it, you could just be an ostrich and bury your head in the sand. So South Africans, black and white, tend to have a very instinctive reaction to information sometimes because we're like, well, I don't know if that's true. You know, is it an official source? Who's telling me this?
Why?
Why are they telling me this? Why are they telling me in this way? Is this something I need to read between the lines or is it not. So I think that that kind of anarchist, maybe kind of deconstructionist Peter teele version of the world might have come from that. I don't know. I think maybe Elon's obsession with free speech to the point that it's just overwhelmed, maybe comes from growing up in an environment where speech was so
limited and no, you couldn't say anything. I still my grandmother's I still call home and my grandmother will, well, just be careful what you say on the telephone. Don't say that, Robin. You never know who's listening. Now, nobody's going to be listening to a one hundred year old lady and her granddaughter sitting in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
But that instinct that somebody's listening and that you've got to fight the system can maybe create the Elons and the Peter Teals and their sort of nilistic views sometimes of the world. And that would be my only explanation. I think the interesting thing when we talk about information and conspiracy. So in those days, like a totalitarian state, no information, you how use conspiracy theories, rumors, half truths, mythstruths to kind of fill in the blanks of what
you don't know. And then in a place like America now or in the sort of social media world were living in, there's too much information, so people are so overwhelmed by all the information coming at them that they then start to distrust it all and then come up and try and fill in the bits. So I think there's this sublime and the ridiculous here, and that is my kind of convoluted way of trying to understand the world views perhaps of the teals and the sexes and
the Musks. I don't know if you think that makes.
It so there's a word I use. I use lots of words that I don't actually understand that I don't understand, and it's it's it's it's algorithm, right, and algorithms give us the news that we want, right, and so that. But did they well sort of? I think that you know, if you're interested in something, it tends to come your way to sell you more snow tires or beer, you know, whatever we sell. It also goes back to again when
I was in the living in the third World. I'm not sure that's the right term, but in Africa and the Middle East and Asia that people often use conspiracy theories and lack of information and Hollywood weirdly to make themselves the heroes of their own of their own movie. And so I was shocked when I first went to Zimbabwe, where it was clear that everyone in the Zimbabwean government thought that the president would wake up and he wants to know what's going on in Zimbabwe. What is Mugabi
up to now? What about the white farmers, what's the what's his concern on the Shona and de bella split, right, what are his real views on it? Like, we obviously want to take over Zimbabwe and Botswana. And I found that in the Middle East as well, where people are like, yeah, you know that the president wants to know about the ismaily angle on. It's like, you know, look, you'll be
lucky if they can figure out she you know. And so also with the US though, I find it also through family members who are into conspiracy theories that like, I get it. I'm the hero. I figured this out. I have a narrative and often it's me against the world, right, if you know, it's like they're almost superheroes. I was wondering, if you've talked to a lot of people around the world, do you get a sense that there's also this sense of ego as well?
Yeah, but isn't that it? And it does because it's sort of like if.
You if you and with Jesus, right, he's there for you.
Yeah, and I think that person. Isn't that the whole point of it? You know, in times of chain, a conspiracy theory will offer you a false sense of security or an explanation for the unknown. A conspiracy theory, to your point, also creates a social identity. So whether it's the bridge ladies discussing something in the northern suburbs or whether it's a group of Shauna having a conversation over warm beer. At the end of the day, there's a social oh did you hear this? And we feel a
sense of belonging. Superiority I think comes into it. But victimhood two. Sometimes I think that they're the same sides
of the you know, different sides of the coin. The sense of superiority or victim or shared victimhood that you'd get from sharing a conspiracy theory, and that confirmation bias that comes from that that we all agree that we're either being done in by somebody together, the victimhood one, or we know something that those other folks down the road don't know and we have evidence whatever is you know, also creates that confirmation bias. So yes, and I think
I think in Africa, what's so funny? And then you probably saw too. I spent a lot of times also being fascinated by witchcraft. You mentioned it, and I think a World Health organization said ninety five percent of sub Saharan Africans visit a witch doctor a sangoma and younger
first before they go to a traditional doctor. Now this cuts across class, and this is generally Black Africans, tribal Africans, but it also is infused within sort of white society too, I would argue, but just a different type of a younger. You're going to trust your restuctor, you know, your physiotherapist before you trust or whatever I think is the wrong. You're going to trust your acupunctures before you touch the doctor.
But for me, I always found it so interesting how that sense of superiority played into the conspiracy theories around health and power and social status in Africa. So the witch doctor would be the kind of dispenser of the conspiracy theory. Often whether it's sleeping with a virgin to cure your aids, or whether it's to chase away a cheating wife, or whether it's to get good luck so
you can be employed next year. And various tasks are given out, whether you slaughter a goat or a cow, or whether you go and you walk into the you know, and whatever the different tribal rituals are. That then creates this sort of narrative that then younger the san gorm has power. And then if you do this, you too
will get power. And often I found it fascinating that the people who rejected the conspiracy theories or said no, this is BS, or I disagree with this, or no, you shouldn't rape children, or your wife wasn't cheating on you. Often those people would then be punished. It wouldn't be
the soun gorma who would be punished. And so these witchcraft killings that would often turn up, these sort of tribalized killings were often often that sense of superiority by the group silencing somebody who was questioning their confirmation bias around whatever that theory was, and that sense of superior to ority often came, I think because people were threatened by somebody who was different or had a different point of view. And I think that group dynamic plays into everything.
It plays into stuff we're seeing here in the States. And you don't have to be in rural vendor in the Soappunsburg getting someone dispensing information from a mad hut to know that those instincts can be amplified.
I saw in our old world right, everybody the hero of their own movie. I'm armed, I can fight off bad guys when they come in intelligence, you'd see the same thing. Especially I remember when the snowed and thing happened and he left, there's this view, Oh my god, you know they're going after my privacy, They're coming after you, and like if you work in the intelligence, you're like nobody cares about you. No one is looking at the
Americans stuff. There's millions and million, hundreds of millions of Americans like this is not something that we are interested in, have time for, have legal reason to do. And it goes further, like when you talk to people who are voting, it's like the government's not solving my problems, and like it's everybody sees the world through their own lens, which is not surprising, but they take it incredibly seriously.
But why do you think, why do you think America is such a bogey man? Because there is even now the sense of And that's one of the reasons I've realized with this podcast is that the sort of anti Americanism clearly is is a fear of what Trump is doing and the sort of the global implications of his policies. But there's also very easy anti americanism even without even during the Obama days, when people loved him. You know, you know, you guys are listening or you following, or
you know, are you following me? You know, like you know, nobody's listening in Americans have far more important things to deal with right now than, like you said, whether or not at even a cabinet meeting in some random country. This is going one way or the other.
Let's passib a second. We'll be right back. Remember a senior Iraqi official who was running one of their versions of the FBI said to me that he doesn't trust the United States because President Obama is anti Shia, because what do you mean his father was a Sunni. He's a Sunni. He bought into the conspiracy theory that he was born in Kenya and that he's a Muslim, right that was a given to him. And as a Sunni,
he doesn't like that shea dominated Iraqi government. And I had to try to dissuade him to the fact that Obama knows a difference between She and Sunny a little bit, but like he doesn't really care.
About that, and that plays into a superiority thing, like if that was it's your grouping that.
But he was riffing off of American conspiracy theories right that he was picking up on the internet. Robert, there is one thing. So we've got two CIA guys and we've got an award winning journalist here. I just want to say, for the record, what record, Well, I don't know whatever anybody, So all.
The people who are listening in and taking that.
Everybody shut over your own story. Someone's keeping a record of what we're.
Saying, really truly common. No shit, CIA does not use journalistic cover. It is like death to us. Now. I think we church committee like before the nineteen seventies, like you know, fifty years ago, we may have dabbled in that, but.
But you can protest that until the cow's come and nobody's going to believe you that a journalist in a place is not that we that I wasn't feeding back information to the president. I just think we know that.
The way to tell the CIA guy in a diplomatic function, if you're a journalist, is the person who runs away from you because we have to report it, and it's like it's trouble.
I would love to know now who, Yeah, because I and also I'm not particularly interested in your point of view as a journalist either. I'm trying to get my own stuff. My output is different from.
Your outputes are very thin too. We're all interested in like, very specific security related issues, not wider cultural and bigger news related things.
And I mean you get you know, the ambassador you can see from when the CA you talk what Snowden, when the cables releaked, I mean the ambassadors are painting a picture of you know, you know, the power elite within a country. Often you know those that's often an interesting anecdotal stuff. You know, some of those cables were fascinating, but it wasn't I'm assuming what you guys were doing.
You're not particularly interested in who's on top and who isn't unless it's a very specific angle that you're trying to get. I was more interested in painting a picture of what was important and what was happening, and again probably narrow, how is Mandela? Is he dying? Will he
die tomorrow? That I spent a whole year of my life having that conversation, and that was important, I think for the US diplomatic call, because they needed to know if the president, if Obama, would be able to come to Mandela's funeral, for example, that was a political state argument nothing to do with what you guys were doing, obviously, But I think a lot of countries do use journalists as covered and there are a lot of stories of that.
But yes, not the Americans. We have put it on the record for all the Chinese and listening.
But I did a lot of counter terrorism in my time, and I remember Dick Cheney being Vice President United States, being really upset saying peterberg In, a journalist gets into the cave and sits with Osama bin Laden and we the CIA, we can't do We the US government, you, the CIA, you can't do this. And the answer was bin Laden actually believes that CIA doesn't use journalistic cover because we don't. So we had convinced beIN Laden that we don't do it. I don't know, can you tell me?
I think.
I think we've had this conversation, and I said, our output was different. I think the method of gathering is the same. It's getting information from people, and more often than not, that comes from connecting with people, looking them in the eye, getting them to trust you, keeping them, keeping them safe. The storytelling in terms of how you get somebody to share something with you. I was just putting it out publicly, you were just putting it out internally.
It's probably the same skill set on some level, but very different, no doubt.
That's what we like. We like talking to journals. There are very similarities in what your work was and what our work was. But the one thing that's not similar, which I do want to ask you about, is in your career you've interviewed lots of famous and interesting people and powerful people. Can you talk a little bit just in just like who you found most interesting or I know you've talked to Oprah for example, is she willing to accept blame for doctor Osby? Or who have you interviewed?
What was interesting? Any anecdotes that those of us who live in a sort of loved run.
Would find, especially Mandela, who is still a hero of mine.
Yeah, I think, and I think again. I wanted to meet those people and interview those people because I was interested in what made them tick. And I'm particularly interested in people who aren't that nice. I'm sure you're saying some of the most fascinating.
People, which is while you're here, which is.
Exactly is the sort of nefarious I just like the way power works, and I like to watch it, and I also like to watch people when they leave power because I think that's sometimes the most interesting place for someone to be. And with that in mind, one of funnal LEO that for the most interesting people I found who surprised me, because I don't get surprised by much,
was actually George W. Bush. He surprised me a because he was so likable, and I went into the interview kind of thinking, and it was under an acacia tree in Zambia. He was opening up a clinic for to encourage the HPV vaccines. So he had saved all these lives with pepfar by giving HIV positive Africans entry retrovirals, which is an amazing program that saved so many lives.
It was a Bush administration thing. And then he realized a lot of people, a lot of women were dying of cervical cancer because there were their immune systems were down, so he was saving them from HIV AIDS and then they were getting cancer. And so just the hot that's a George W. Bush conversation, you know what I mean. It was just he surprised me on so many levels. And this was during the snowdon time. So I actually said to him, I said, do you think Snowden is
a traitor? And he was like absolutely. He was very angry about Snowden. He also seemed to be fascinating you guys. He also seemed to be asked him about waterboarding, and he seemed to be very indignant that it wasn't it wasn't his fault, the whole waterboarding stuff, because it Congress had given permission or there'd been like a whole process. Yeah, and he said, they knew what everybody knew what they were signing off on. So why am I cutting the crap?
Why am I getting Why am I getting in trouble for something? And he was wounded and hurt as if he had followed procedure and now he was being slapped on the wrist, and so that was interesting. But then and then he just became very chatty, and I just I could see why he had at a president because he was so authentic. You didn't have to agree with his politics, but you saw what you got, and I understood then the motivations behind the Americans. Mandela was the
fleet opposite. I remember sitting with Mandela in one of his sort of one of his last official interviews. He was ninety. He was at home in Kunu, which is in the rural Eastern Cape, and he was looking out of his window and his cattle, and his Jerry cattle of very important wealth, particularly to a tribal leader in Southern Africa. And I was sitting there, and I was with a cameraman and quite and a few other journalists,
and he just wanted to talk about his cattle. He just wanted to talk about what he saw out of his window. And he was he had grown up in those hills, walking barefoot as a sort of young boy. And he was just so difficult to make small talk with, you know. And I think someone like Bush was very easy to sort of shoot the breeze with. We talked about all sorts of things off the record. Mandela was never really very easy to be off the record with.
You couldn't massage him before an interview, you know, and soften him up or just make yourself seem a little less intimidating, which is what you would do as a journalist, and probably when you're meeting a source, so you like self deprecating, or you make a joke, you try and sort of make yourself not too intimidating. Because it's CNN or whatever. Mandela was just very difficult to make small talk with. And then even when he spoke, he was
very guarded. I mean, that's what happens when you know, spend twenty seven years incarcerated by a racist regime. You learn to keep things very close to your chest. So he was very difficult to get to know Mandela. And funnily enough, that's what I actually that what I literally this conversation I'm having with you now is the one I had with Michelle Obama before I interviewed her. The one thing we softened each other up about was our both of our inability to break the ice with Mandela.
Interesting.
He was just, even to Michelle Obama as the sitting first lady at the time, he wasn't a natural raconteur, or he didn't let you in and I remember that time, or he just wasn't that kind of guy. So I think it's about trying to understand people's motivations and why they act in a way, and what you can get out of them in terms of information. And you have to be flexible, and you have to be organic, and you have to read somebody very well to be able to extract what you need from them. And yeah, Bush
was an open book, Mandela, I mean closed book. I'm probably forgetting some of the others. Oprah was. Oprah was just on. She had as on switch on. She was fully one hundred and twenty percent to eleven Oprah. So she was very huggy. She kind of touched me and hugged me a lot, which is, you know, it's an interesting device. But yeah, I mean I'm fascinated by and I mean I was there at Fidel's. I didn't interview Fidel,
you mentioned at the beginning. I didn't ever interview Fidel, but he obviously was a huge supporter of the South African Liberation movements and so he was there a lot in sod Africa supporting the ANC. So I saw him with a few times. Same with Gadaffi. I don't know about you guys. I don't know how much you guys
saw Godaffi in Africa. But seeing Gadaffi with his ladies in tow and Gadaffi in full tinfoiled regalia, like, yeah, he had his female little these hot chicks and his sort of personal bodyguard.
I want to make a dictator. That's I probably will go that way too.
He was got to make on female journalists as well, right He would send them special clothes before they interviewed him, and it was really what you get. It's just saying, I don't think you got anything about you.
Look you must look so pretty in one of God's dresses. I don't know. It's you tell me? Is that what you miss about is not It's not about being in the know. It's more about watching people and wondering what makes them tech. I think that's what I missed from being in the field, and I missed that when I moved to Atlanta and was anchoring a show. That sort of disconnect between either being in the field or being in a studio. It's probably like being in the field
and then going to Langley. You feel a little bit of use, a lot left behind in the field.
We'll be right back in a moment. All the people you've talked about, the famous or there people who like really impressed you. You've been involved in change in South Africa, the death of Mugabi at least, a change in Zimbabwe, Israel, Palestine issues, Russia, Ukraine issues. The biggest heroes often are people that are unsung. But you talk to a lot of those people and people that may just feel good about being a human being. Real heroes. Were there people
out there Israelis or Palestinians or Russian dissidents? And I'm just thinking of this, and I'm trying to remember her name, that this Ukrainian journalist who was just tortured and murdered by the Russians, right, Victoria. Yeah, they returned. She was detained for a year without charges, finally returned without her eyeballs, brains or internal organs. Peers should be She'd had been
strangled and tortured, muchecuted on her feet. This is a journalist who like risked everything, right, there are real heroes out there who were journalists and people that journalists work with, same with CIA, we work with. Some of our assets are like true heroes. I'm just wondering if there's any one or two sort of people or stories that made you feel good about being a journalist or a human being.
I was always in awe of grandmother. There's something quite astounding about a grandmother. In Africa in particular, they're like Atlas. They hold the world on their shoulders, particularly during the HIV AIDS crisis, particularly during some of the political violence in the townships, the younger people were either killed or died or exiled or and a lot of these grandmothers
were raising their grandchildren. And for me that I have, there are a number of images of grandmothers who I've encountered over my career, and I will always think to myself, if you ever if you know, they're the backbone of society, but they're some of the strongest, bravest people I ever have come across. You go back to our original thing, like what happened with the world right now? And why is there a sense of people not believing the news
the stuff that is important? And I think a lot of it is that these are moral conundrums, these are complicated issues, and there's this sort of binary kind of perspective, this very simplified version of the world that is being put out and that bothers me, the sort of black and white binary lack of nuance, whether you want to couch it in oppressed versus the oppressor, the colonizer versus
the colonized. I think the oversimplification of the effects after October the seventh, all the stuff we've seen in Southern Africa, you know, Syria and the terrorists.
Go back to that personalized stuff, Like the sort of view is the world's out there, there's right and wrong, something went bad. I would have chosen right. You people chose wrong. That's a very simple narrative. I look good in the narrative, whereas these things that we're talking about are situations that there wasn't a right, like there was gradations of different things, whether you believe in truth or
read that you believe in equality. I mean, those are hard issues and you almost have to lane a background to someone and say, Okay, here's the decision you are stuck with. How do you make that decision? And if people want to get out of it, they're like, well, I would you know? Move? No, no, no, we're stuck. This is the decision now. Both choices are bad, Both choices
have consequences. That's where we are, Like everybody wants to back out and make it easy right and wrong, and if it was just right and wrong, we would almost always make the right decision.
Yeah, And I don't think you know these comms. And that's the problem right now is that I think if I think about Mike, we didn't even talk really about Zimbabwe, And I think about all the coverage and times and detained in Zimbabwe and how mcgaby just played footsy with us the whole time with the media. In the end, I knew what was happening because I had I had accessed through the way you do things is build sources
within mcgaby's own inner circle. And so in the end, in those last few hours, I was getting messages from within the Blue House by the people who were with him.
And I think, I think a lot of people see journalism now as you these champions for truth and then you you know, put a thirty second video on TikTok and this will explain why I was you know, this is right, Whereas if you try and explain why you're building relationships with the bad guys so you understand the impact in the end in a way that kind of shows the nuance, do you know what I mean? Like, I think that depth, that analog way of reporting, old school.
I think that's what we're missing. And I you know, I sound like a when we you know, when we were you know, to think better. But I do think some of the nuance and the complexity gets lost particularly with the younger generation and the need to see another someone's point of view.
You've got to spend some of those twenty minutes with these things.
And or you've got to go away into the bush for the week and know and you say, listen, I can't be doing live shots and updating my YouTube and treating and putting it on Instagram and doing a little short vignette reel. Do you know what I mean? You just need to go and immerse yourself, get the story come back. And so I think Sann is still doing that to some extent, But you know, it's a double you know. I think all these media organizations are trying
to hold onto that analog way of storytelling. At the same time they're also trying to commoditize the algorithm. And it's a very it's a very uncomfortable juggling act. And I think that's the kind of messiness of where we are now.
You know, we can talk to you forever and hopefully we can do this again. Absolutely, to the people out there, it is very much worth listening to her podcast as she tries to explain our crazy country to the rest of the world. So thank you for what you're doing and thanks for your time with us.
Thanks Jerry, thanks John, appreciate it. We also thank you for all the work you did for this great, crazy, beautiful country.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, 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.