We've just captured an al Qaeda guy in the field and I'm there to talk to him. And then he basically said, I am a warrior of God in you are nothing, and eventually we're going to win, and we are going to win because we are more committed than you are. I am willing to kill myself and live here in Afghanistan and fight you for the next twenty years, and you're not that dedicated. And I thought, holy shit, he's right. I'm John Ceipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the world.
And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
We'll break them down for you to determine what whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission Implausible.
So, Jerry, you have told me how you got recruited, and it always blows my mind because it is not normal.
Yeah, I was a hippie.
I was.
I was. It's a long story, but I smuggled at one point cars into Iran when the Shah was still there and ended up smoking dope in Afghanistan, never thinking that, geez, thirty five years from now, when I'm balding and and got three kids and married, they're going to take that experience and they're going to send me back here to chase some six foot five Saudi guy.
So you were a criminal, sort of small un.
I didn't break American laws, that's right.
So why would CIA want someone who's smuggling cars into Iran?
Even the Iranians caught him and threw them in jail just to they did.
They threw me in jail for a little bit. But I'm surprised. That's actually a really good question. Oh for what John and I do did in operations, we're looking for people who don't fit the mold. We're looking for, you know, a diversity of experience, and we're looking for people with initiative and innovation who can like figure stuff
out that no one else can. And you know, I lived, I lived abroad and I basically lived as a German and I spent years in India and Middle East Africa, And when I came back, the agency asked me if I wanted to come on, and yeah, they sent me back to all those places where I was a hippie with long hair.
I think you're looking for people who are really interested in foreign cultures. There used to be the story like for you know, back in the USS stage, you're looking for a PhD who can win a bar fight. Yeah, you want people who are comfortable operating on the street, making choices on their own, but also aware of what's happening, reading, keeping up with things, interested in foreign culture, interested in
political and national security issues of the day. So it's it is a weird profession, but it's great fun.
The first place I got punched in the face in a bar fight was in Istanbul, And what I learned is you ever want to be in a bar fight because even if you win, you're still not winning, right, you still got splitlip or a broken nose.
You got to win the bar fight, gotcha.
You got to win the bar fight.
And often the best way to win a bar fight is a cheap shot, just a little Yeah.
That's right.
Now do operatives like you guys officers. Are you just also looking out for potential Americans wandering around or is there like a special team that is trying to find car smugglers and recruit them.
I think in the early days of CIA, it was very much word of mouth and who you went to school with and that type of thing. If you met someone overseas who seemed interesting, you could suggest them to the CIA and they might get in touch with them. Nowadays, it's much more like other jobs. As people come to it, there's a website, there's a larger recruitment center that follows
up with people who express an interest. There's advertisements because there's lots of different parts of the CIA too, not just the operative part, and so I think it's more certainly professionalized now.
They do look still for the same things, though. You're looking for people who can navigate and are comfortable with ambiguity, and they're also looking for people who understand that, you know, you can think two separate things at the same time. It's like you have to obey American law, but you understand that it's moral on occasion to break other people's laws.
So you've kind of told me, is there an age limit or can I just send in my application.
But if you think CIA guys are weird, you should talk to Congressman. I mean, those guys are an interesting group of cats.
Right, let's get to your pal, Denver Wriggleman.
So today we have Denver Riggleman. So for people who don't know Denver, he was a former Air Force intelligence officer and Republican congressman from Virginia. More recently, he worked on the House Select Committee looking at the January sixth attack. And one of the things that he's done from his background working in the Air Force and looking at sort of data analysis and things, he's tried to use data
to dig into some of these problems. So some people may remember he's one of the only members of Congress that has spoken up on the floor against QAnon. So there's a lot of stuff we could talk about.
Denver.
We'really glad to have you. Thanks, thanks having me.
Really it's an honor. Yeah, it's just funny you're talking about QAnon and being the one to speak on the floor. I remember that day because it was supposed to be a lot of people with me, like I was. I had co sponsors on the bill right. I was the Republican lead that I remember. I got on the floor and I look behind me, but on the side where the Dems were, you know, there was all kinds of support structure there for them, a bunch of their colleagues.
I'm on the right side of the aisle and I'm sitting at the lectern and I'm looking around and you could have heard crickets vain. It was. It was a lonely day. And I remember coming off the floor and even the Deputy whip at the time, he goes, hey, denver Man, I think this is a First Amendment issue. I said, well, no, shit, it's a first Amendment issue. But I could use my first Amendment as a cudgel against things that I think are ridiculous. And I'm a congressman,
for God's sakes. And he said, you know, I just think you're completely overreacting, and I think this is nuts. But I had seen the data, guys, so I stuck to my guns. I think my own staff thought I'd
lost my mind. But you know, when I gave my farewell speech on December tenth, I believe of twenty twenty, I really like it in because at that point, it was overwhelming amount of data that we were seeing on the social channels indicating there could be violenced by January sixth, and of course I hated to be validated.
You've been around for a long time. I just want to know, when do you think Colin Crazy became crazy? Do most of your colleagues in the house really buy into q and on or they just don't want to say it to piss off the people that claim to whatever QAnon is.
I think the first thing is, at the beginning, I believe that a lot of my colleagues were QAnon adjacent and didn't know it. Right, there was already this sort of baseline belief in the deep state and the globalist takeover, right, and a lot of people still had the Hillary Clinton
emails thing in mind. There was still this sort of underlying, i would say, belief system that was sort of baked in from the Tea Party movement that the Democrats had some kind of nefarious sexual activities going on that was somehow funding their activities to take over the United States using globalist principles, right, And so I think there is that's always sort of been underlying the sort of the
evangelical portion of this. I think the second thing is is that as it started to continue, I think they saw that the base was very, very powerful. I think they became afraid that they could lose their positions, but still didn't take it seriously because they just didn't understand data. A lot of the guys in Congress, this is their biggest job. I mean, John and Jerry, this is what
they've aspired to. I had one person tell me like, I have reached the pinnacle, and he's in his thirties and for me going to Congress, I went to much fuller parties in Oman in the early two thousand, so I'm like, what the I hate this place right, this is the worst job ever had. And it was I tell people I got fired from the worst job I ever had, you know. I think the third thing is there.
I would say sixty to seventy percent of the Republican Conference are like, Eh, it's probably nuts, But listen, cowardice and winning elections go hand in hand. And I would humbly submit that in a lot of ways now, I think integrity and winning elections are mutually exclusive. So what you have to do is you've got to play to the base at that time based on the hyperbole you're seeing fun raising and the leader of the party at that time. If you're not in that political current, you
get taken out. And you know, even me, you know, I fought with my incredible good looks in charisma I really.
Thought undeniable, undeniable.
I don't think I really had them because you know, after I officiated the same sex wedding in summer of twenty nineteen, QAnon came at me before anybody else. So that's before anybody I was the first target of QAnon adjacent you know, whack jobs. And I think that's what you got with the GOP right now, is you got the mob ruling roam. When it comes to some of these crazy belief systems.
I sort of get the cynical part that they want to win and we'll say anything to their base. I think it's disgusting, and you're right. I would like to take pride in my integrity. I would never say something that I knew to be false. But what you suggest also is that there's some true believers.
I think a lot of it is religion based, and I think that's the thing that I've been trying to be very careful with even with the books that I wrote. You know my background. When I wrote the Breach, I did go into my background as being raised very religious. I sort of was also summarily sort of odd size from the Freedom Caucus. Think about what you're talking to, right, A formal Republican, never been in politics before. I was told by my consultantsay, you're going to join the Freedom
Caucus and you'll win. I mean that my first political decision, right, John, you said, rather have your integrity. I didn't want to join the Freedom Caucus, but I made my first political decision that really painted what happened to me never being in politics. I remember my consultants said, you got to be a little bit crazy to be crazier, and I'm like, well, I'm a team player. Maybe I can get through this and become independent later. Now you can't.
Let's take a break. We'll be right back.
And Rebecca.
But I think when you're talking about my first meeting in the Freedom Caucus, I remember one of the members of the Freedom Caucus wanted to actually apply legislation and write it to stop a master algorithm that was executed across all the platforms that only suppressed conservative voices. Now, guys, I was Air Force Intelligence in NSA for sixteen years,
off and on, back and forth. Here I am forty eight years old, forty nine years old, and I'm looking at some buffoon talking about the master algorithm to suppress all conservative voices across all platforms needs to be made illegal. There is that old saying, right, you lose twenty IQ points as soon as you're elected, and I think some people maybe the tast sizes and it doubles every turn they're in.
So I spent a lot of time in the Middle East and long ago listening to Arab friends and colleagues from Arab states. The conspiracy theories that they come out with I thought were completely outlandish, And at the time, I thought, that's what's holding the society back. Rather than looking at their own issues. They're blaming everything on Israel and demonic forces and the West. And I thought, well, we don't do that until the q Andon thing came along.
And I'm wondering, sort of what is happening with our society that we're unable to have educated, complex conversations about problematic issues as opposed to with conspiracy theory. There's always like you know, five guys in a room with a plan or a master algorithm. There's always like this extremely simplistic explanation to really complex issues.
I think if you think you have a direct line to the supernatural, I think they're inclined to believe things that are overly simplistic. What we didn't have in the past. We had propaganda, We had all these things there, like well, Denver, propaganda and disinformation has been around since the dawn of time. Well yeah, but what hasn't been around is social media and alternative media. And I think if you can self select your echo chambers, I think it's just a powerful
racalizing agent. And I always say that digital profits make digital profits, and I think that hyperbole and outrage and that simplistic view of good against evil where democrats or people like me, you know, an independent now are somehow part of this deep state cabal, or you're a globalist, or you're trying to change the sexual orientation of children. I was called the tool of the Antichrist. I was
called the general the Sodomite armies. I thought that was pretty original, so, you know, and then I was accused of laundering money for George Soros in my distilleries.
If you had removed QAnon and you had put in isis right or al Qaeda, they have the same beliefs. This you know this the Jewish Cabal, George Soros, small group of people. The CIA really runs things, sexualizing our children, stealing our women, taking our faith. All those things, our example are exactly to include. We don't want to pay taxes, we want guns. We don't want the rule of law. We want God's word rather than having a secular rule of law.
If you saw the language that we saw leading up to January sixth, and it was say isis group or some kind of Muslim extremist group, we'd have been on that like stink on a monkey because it was so violent, and it's just amazing to me that we weren't.
How did you get into this sort of world of data and data analysis? Did it come from the Air Force?
I got married really young at nineteen, played a little college football, did some powerlifting when a couple of state powers championships, but lived in the basement. I got married so young because I sort of got kicked out of the Mormon missionary training center. I wasn't the best Mormon So what happened really is that at twenty two my wife got pregnant. She goes, either you go to work or I go to work. So three days later I
joined the Air Force. Then I had a captain named Captain Shwang, the Shwinger, So he got a hold of me and said, why aren't you an officer? Why don't you go to school full time? And then when I got into UVA by some kind of magic, when I won a scholarship, you know, I go to UVA and then I ended up getting distinguished graduate and had the
number one GPA out of my class. But I was too old to fly, and I became an intelligence officer, and immediately they sent me to Mountain Home Air Force Base and as the Air Expeditionary Wing, and we had a fifteens of F sixteens and B one's. I didn't know at the time they had a secret program with another three letter agency combining national data sources with tactical data sources.
How is it that you were able or not able to communicate with people who were conspiracy theory minded? I mean, how do you work with someone who thinks in a completely different realm than you are, or someone who operates on faith without evidence.
It's a difficult answer for me because it's so personal. When I came out against Trump and q Andon so violently in the middle of twenty twenty, you know, I was disowned by the closest person you can't have to you, not my wife, but my mom right, not really just but so she wished I never won my election. It was pretty brutal a lot of my family, and you know, I head the conversation like this is the facts of the matter. What I found out pretty quickly with her
and with other friends. I lost six friends of over thirty years. Jary, Wow, When I said QAnon was basically anti semitic, it went sideways so quickly for me and my friendships. You wouldn't believe I mean, yeah, you would. You would believe it was you're a piece of shit. How dare you say this is anti Semitic? How dare you say we're violent? And guys? I was right on
all of it, not even there's no question. I thought the fact that was friends for thirty years, They're going to listen to a guy who's who has my background right now? I had people say denvers, it's futile I'm like, no, it's not. I'm Denver fucking rhythlemen, man, I got this. But the thing is is that it was so humbling because I was just on ninety nine percent of the time. I was completely I just fell on my face, Jerry. So I just think, no matter what you do for them,
the means justify the ends. And that's because if God has ordained a leader like Trump, how dare you go against them in any way? And an imperfect vessel actually can satisfy a perfect mission, and that perfect mission is from God. That's really the feedback I would get.
So I was in Germany in the mid seventies and there were a lot of x Nazis around. I used to work as a waiter on a construction. I worked with a lot of guys, and you know what, not most of them, but a lot of them, at least talking to me as an American, they still believed right. I mean, they knew it. They shouldn't, but this was put in their heads when they were kids, when they
were younger. So the conspiracy theory there that the Jews had destroyed Germany, that there was an evil Bolshevik Zionist plot to keep them down. Nothing was their fault. It was a huge conspiracy theory that Nazi ideology was still something thirty years after the war, that they were still dealing with and there was still deep held beliefs that you could not argue with. And talking to the younger people,
they would say, yeah, it's my parents. The only way of dealing with it is generationally having it go away and to try to present the facts over and over and over again as best you can.
What's interesting to me is, at least in the political realm where were you were in Congress, is this group of people who seem to be speaking this way or believe this way are the ones who just a few years ago and still to a certain extent, throw out the Constitution constantly. Is this is the Constitution? Is the constitutional thing? Those two things don't mix. You can't believe in the Constitution and believe that one side is ordained by God and only the Christian side wins.
I know a lot of people say, well, everybody blames the prior generation, or you always think it's worse than the past. I think the cumulative IQ of Congress right now is the lowest in the history of Congress. I think some of this isn't play acting, and I think that is what to concern people, is that they're so unserious they're.
Dangerous to tie again back to your experience with data. You worked on the January sixth committee. Tell me a little bit about from the January sixth Committee, what you think you learned skill wise, and then what you're up to today.
I think what surprised me John, what I learned. Number one, Even if the stated objective is to show the American people everything, it's not, I ran into massive political head or winds with optics with what we found in data, one of them being the Jenny Thomas text which our team found, which I was one of the I was the first to read, probably outside of Jenny and Mark Meadows.
But what I really saw, you know, by parsing and by aggregating over thirty million lines of data most have from call detailed records too, from sms's MMS whatever voy landline sell really what we saw there was a much more coordinated command and control action that anybody could imagine. You know. We would break it down into groups, right, So we had Trump associates, we had rally planners, we
had Trump family, we had DJ charge defendants. We had specifically identified Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and other white nationalist groups. We had the alternative electors and state legislators, right, those are sort of the groups that were connected. We saw the connected group. I really thought from the call records we'd have we see more of the political people that had the massive amounts of sort of frequency. Right.
And now a.
Lot of the people we tried to get ahold of they fought us on their phone records, so we would run them as reference numbers against the kull f deed dealt records. We had. The only person that we could see that was connected to every single group was Roger Stone. So when you're looking at you across all of this, right, when you're looking at call records and data, I could just say that unequivocally that is just fact.
Could you make a determination based on just the network analysis of who were the believers and who were the ones that were the cynically figured out how to do? I mean, is Roger Stone such a brilliant to just say he could pull this?
Sid Roger Stone doesn't believe anything. The thing about Roger I just think he's a soulless Cretan who's really given his life to ridiculousness. But you know, when you look at the twenty three hundred and nineteen text messages, I guess what struck me most is how QAnon conspiracy theories
had saturated every level the GOP. And if you look at Jenny Thomas in text messages saying that she can talk, she was talking directly to Jared Kushner, And the fact she was coordinating with Louis Gohmert's office through Connie Hare, the chief of staff, and the fact that she's married to a Supreme Court justice and had direct lines to Trump and had direct lines to the CNP, ThEC Council
for National Policy. You would have to almost take out the frontal low of your brain not to think that all three branches of government at some point was involved in those coup like movements. I just think the money is so big, my god, that infrastructure is so healthy. You know, when you look at the two hundred and fifty five million dollars that Trump made between November and January on stop steel messaging, when you look at the
rnc's money, when you look at the fundraising. Now, when you look at Marjorie Taylor Green's quarters of over three million dollars in a quarter with forty thousand small dollar donors. It should scare the shit out of people. And I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I'm like, Okay, well, you know, I'm looking to follow the money. I'm looking at everything. I saw the JA six data, and I'm seeing the same people that did the JA six stuff
coordinating other things that I'm working on now. The people that are usually projecting and accusing people these awful things sometimes are the people actually doing it. That is really
important for the American public to know. And if they're accusing people like you, guys who have served our country with valor and honor, of saying that somehow this was made up or something like that, these people don't even know what they're talking about, and if they did, it doesn't matter to them because it.
Is war, right, war and profit. I mean, let's be clear that Steve Bannon said it was war, but he was also shaking down his own supporters to build wall that he never built, and he stole their money.
I called Donald Trump gotis grifter of the United States, right, You got a bunch of little stylins running around that want to grift like their daddy.
Let's take a breather and back in.
A moment, and we're back. And what's interesting about the sort of information revolution and the fact that there's big data out there, there's going to be bad actors that figure this stuff out too. I mean, I think one of the early signs was the cambrid Jenallytica thing. Right,
Bannon was on the board of Cambridgenallytica. They were using massive, massive amount of Facebook information to find new voters on the right, to find people who they could use information to make them so angry these people never voted in the past that they would come out and vote and to suppress no black groups and other groups on the left using data.
Denver does data really matter? I mean, if somebody's listening to this podcast, they're probably already there, right, So someone who latches only newsmax is never going to go down that road. Most people, if it's based on faith, how much does it matter?
I think that's the thing about folks who really do want to just do the right thing and look at facts and data, you're in a big disadvantage. I guess I haven't figured it out, I don't know how to break through.
We are happy you're doing it, and I think it's important that we all keep doing this because there is some things that you know, It's like dealing with the Russians or the Soviets and things. We and the West often forget our strength. We have the allies, we have the money, we have the power, and we often give into the Russians when they bully and threaten. We should
understand our strength and use it. You've got to be aggressive and offensive because at the end of the day, if they beat you, they don't care about the truth. They've won. They're in charge.
But it does make to what you're saying about facts and details and trying to talk to somebody who thinks fundamentally different than you based on faith in the worst sense of the word. So it's early two thousand and two. We've just captured an al Qaeda guy in the field and I'm there to talk to him. Right, I'm not going to use zero and terrogate, because i just want
to talk to the guy. He speaks, he speaks some English, and basically what he said is you started this, and I'm like, no, September eleventh, you know you started it, and he's like, no, you did, because you are trying to take over my society. You were trying to steal our children. You're sexualizing our children. You're showing TV shows with women walking around showing their arms and sitting in
bars and drinking alcohol. You are destroying our families. And then he basically said, I am a warrior of God and you are nothing. And eventually we're going to win, and we're going to win because we are more committed than you are. I am willing to kill myself and live here in Afghanistan and fight you for the next twenty years, and you're not that dedicated. And I thought, holy shit, He's right.
If you're a true believer, you are willing to play the long game. So we see this with the Russians in the history, we played an intelligence We would try to these operations do things, but we had a short time window. Rush would put stuff into play that they knew they weren't going to get anything out of for ten fifteen twenty years. The Chinese the same way, and these people that Jerry talked about in Afghanistan, the true al Qaida believers and stuff, and perhaps even in the
political space. Now, you know, we've seen Republicans played the long game on the judiciary on the Supreme Court that you know, over time definitely got them control of the Supreme Court. If you're a true believer, your time horizon might be different too.
Within al Qaeda, one of the tenets of al Qaeda, when you take by odd is you understand that lying in pursuit of a greater truth is a virtue.
You talked about being a Mormon and a lapse Mormon. A lot of Mormons in the Agency, a lot of our friends are elapse Mormons. Is the issue of religion. If we are growing people in our system that have such a deep view in faith that people who don't have their view or the enemy, this is a real problem. But of course none of us want to tackle like, is there a problem with religion? I don't even know how you would.
You know, it's funny. We had no problem attacking extremist Islam, did we.
No, that's a good point, exactly right.
Spiritual warfare is what you always talk about. I put on the armor of God. I'm a warrior for God. If you read a book that's against Christ or against God, you're an apostate right, those books were written of the
devil's hand. That is how I was raised. So we do have a religious problem if a majority of evangelicals believe in the storm or the Great Awakening or the Great replacement, or the hashtag say of our children or hashtag stop to steal, or that Italian satellite stole the election, or that hammer and scorecard from USA where use to manipulate votes, or that there were broken algorithms that was led by some Venezuhalen group, or that Ukrainians and Romanians
were digital mules coming over and stealing people's license by the way, sent by a congressman, and the text messages to Mark Meadows, a foreign disinformation video sent in the text messages to Mark Meadows. This video shocked me that fifty million votes had been turned somehow fifty million are you talking about?
Right?
There was fun one hundred and you know fifty six million taxs. What So when I read the text messages and read all of the God will change the election type of texts and what I've seen in my own life, my own friends and family, we have to come to grips that there is a portion of Christianity that believes Jesus is a really good, violent guy and that he
needs to go to war and do some fighting. And all of it's based on some unprovable myth of a satanic push by the globalists right to destroy our Christian way of life. It goes all the way back to the Constitution was a document creative by God, and there is no separation of church and state. And if you have Marjorie Taylor Green out there saying I am a
Christian nationalist. So I think right now, if we're afraid to touch on the fact that most of QAnon was evangelical, I think we're really sort of fooling ourselves that that problem doesn't exist in the United States right now.
Well, Denver, it was really great to have you. Thank you for that discussion. It was really it was really important. Now we're going to bring in our friend and colleague and producer Adam Davidson to sort of discuss this issue a little bit more.
Hey, guys, can I ask, like, if this was all happening in a developing country with a weak state that you were covering for the CIA, that you were responsible for learning about, how would you describe, like write a cable or something. How would you describe what's going on in the US right now?
Well, I think the first thing we would do if this is a similar situation in another countries, I think Denver would be exactly the kind of person we would
be going after to be a source for us. So, for example, this January sixth committee looking at what happened on January sixth, you know, lots of politicians, lots of experts, lots of people coming in to talk about what they saw, but they brought in Denver Riggleman as an expert to look at the data, right, to look at everyone's phone, so look at all the computers, look at the connections, and look at the analysis of the group and who's
connected to who and type of thing. His actually would be the perfect person for us to have as a spy in there to understand what's happening. So rather than sort of the pontificating of the politicians who are running the show, you'd want to know what's happening behind the scenes and where the data leads.
It feels like a fairly crude bunch of like this is not like wow, that's a sophisticated group of people that Denver uncovered.
Well, the issue with this conspiracy is it's pretty clear what's going on. It's an effort to deflect from other issues, right, and so one political party wants to damage another political party by using information and throwing ugly stuff out there and claiming that the other political party supports this. It deflects from there, either from their own problems or it is looking to smear the other side. Look over here,
look at this ugly thing. Keep looking at this, keep looking at this, while the real issue of what's happening is over here on the other side.
Yeah, but Bananda, your question about who the lowest character is, I just want to jump in and say, Rudy Giuliani for me, takes the case if you're going to run with a follow on conspiracy. Theory to this, which may actually be real, is Russian efforts and there are several Russian intelligence officers who were working closely with Rudy Giuliani to uncover this, which is something that is ignored completely.
And the Russian connection to Rudy Giuliani, I think is something as an intelligence officer, both John and I would like to have people look into a little more closely.
Boy, can you imagine being a Foreign Intience officer and having Rudy Giuliani, and.
To control Rudy Giuliani, I would feel sorry for those Russian guys.
I'll tell you that he's not a great advertisement for spying for the Russians. Well, guys, I found this incredibly interesting. I also found it super depressing. So can we have like a silly fun one next time?
Thank you all, and we'll see you next time on Mission and Plausible.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable, Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeartMedia