¶ Start
Hey, everyone, Welcome to the episode four hundred and eleven of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest Alma Katsu. She served as a analyst at NSA and CIA. I'm also delving into the technical side as well, some of the technological development work that they do. And she is the author of ten books, including some spy novels, the bigger one being Black Vault, which is being made into a television show, and an upcoming novel about Havana syndrome.
So a thank you for joining us on the show tonight. Your name has been circulating around for a while. I think I've had you on our list for a while. Actually, I'm glad this is finally happening.
Yeah, thanks for having me here. I'm really looking forward to this. I know it's kind of confusing because I'm not really known for my spies stories, but then when people find out my background, they're like really surprised. That's not all I write.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think it's always enjoyable when somebody kind of brings their personal experience into the novel, whatever kind of novel. You know, if you were a police officer or a CIA officer or whatever the case may be, and kind of lend that sort of like that insider baseball is what I think, kind of like, at least for me, kind of makes the book what it is.
It was really interesting. I never thought that I would actually write a spy novel. I tried early on when I was you know, my very first book was It came out in twenty eleven, and it took me ten years to write that book. And while I was writing it,
¶ Writing spy fiction after a career at NSA and CIA
I would jump in and try to write, you know, like a spy thriller, and I was terrible at it. So I just figured I'd never write one. And then after the first three books came out and I was retiring from NSSA actually it was twenty seventeen, and my editor at Putnam and I'd done a couple books with her, and she said, you know, I know you've always wanted to write a spy novel. Why don't you get to try? Because she knew I wanted to write one about the
female experience in the spy business and a CIA. So you know, I was really lucky. I was kind of gifted that experience and I knew what I was going to write about because when I was there, there was a really horrible thing that happened that if I told you, you would recognize it because it was in the news for years, but it was never publicly associated with CIA. And I always knew i'd write a story and incorporate a version of what happened there in it, so I
got the chance to do it. But you know, it was really an eye opener. I don't know what your experience has been, but you know, you go into this thinking, just like you said, I'm going to tell I'm going to be a truth teller. I'm going to give the inside baseball, you know, and it feels like it's going to be cathartic for you. And then once you get into it, you realize that that's not necessarily what the
public wants. You know, they're kind of conditioned more for you know, Jason Bohn and Jack Reacher and you know, James Bond, and that's not what the job is really like. And so as a writer, you're sort of torn between these two things. You you want to be true to your to the profession and the wonderful people that you work with, who you want to honor, you know, and not make them into characters or you know that sort of thing. But you're also an entertainer and you have
this obligation to try to entertain your readers. So it's that's made it not what I thought it would be in.
My mind, you know, when when I'm writing like mostly like special ops stuff, I kind of picture that this guy is having like such a singular career, like every amazing thing that could possibly happen is happening to this one person. It's like, no one has a career like that, like just to be clear, like nobody has a like something out of a video game. So yeah, it becomes like this you know, combination of of all these other experiences packed into like one protagonist.
Yeah, but you know, in your in your business though at least is full of action in real life for most even case officers, right, it's not like they're running down the streets waving again for people, and you know, which is unfortunately kind of the expectation of a lot of the public, especially if they don't really read spy novels. If really they're they're understanding of the profession is based on movies and TV shows, you know, which is a
visual medium. There's certainly a lot of great spy novels that are more realistic. You know, I'm thinking jehan Lecery and you know, Charles Cummings and those kind of guys. But but you know, it's really hard, you know, even Mheron for instance. You know, I got to be on a panel with Mchern and I asked him, I said, how did you know that there actually are offices like the slow Horses? And he looked at me and he said, I didn't, but there are. And I accidentally got to
the boss of one of them once. When I was at NSA. One of my last jobs was I was
¶ Real spies, "Slow Horses," and the myth of James Bond
made the director of one of the research labs. And I only got the job because the person who had been the director for six years was horrible and had run it into the ground. And what they had done was they put all these deadwood, all the people they didn't want to deal with in the S and T back in NSA. They sent them down to my lab twenty miles away so they wouldn't have to deal with them. So I just felt like Jackson Lamb. I just had
this team of you know, useless, argumentative, you know people. Unfortunately, I could not get the work out of them that Jackson Lamb gets out of his people.
Yeah, I mean, no disrespect at all to anybody, any of the case officers out there, but like, and it's not just like an aberration, but I think it's like almost intentional. A lot of these guys look like insurance claims adjusters. They don't look they don't look like uh, you know, James Bond. And they shouldn't, right, because they got to blend in in different places, you know, they shouldn't look like a CrossFit athlete, right, I.
Mean, that's what what's his name? Colby said? Right, the little gray man, the man that can just blend into the background. And that's the most successful case officers. But I'll tell you a funny thing. On the analytics side, you do get some very attractive people.
There was Yeah, we noticed, Alma, thank you not.
Some of the people I worked with were like, one of them looked just like Gwyneth Paltrow. I am not kidding. And we were thinking this particular office chief kind of went out of his way to hire really leggy, attractive blondes.
Yeah. Yeah, well, well that's well, we'll get into that when we start talking about the female experience of the Cia and some of the dubious characters that you cross paths with. But well, let's uh, before we get too deep into the into the I want to kind of start at the beginning with you and ask a little bit about kind of your upbringing and how that took you towards governmental service. You know, what was your first stop at the NSSA or did you have something in
between there? And you just walk us through it.
¶ From aspiring writer to accidentally joining NSA
Sure.
Well, when I started out, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. I mean, I think, like with most writers, I was a little introvert, you know, was more comfortable with a book than with people, and pretty much spent all my time in the library, so much so that the librarians gave me a job as a page when I was fifteen, so kind, you know, And so I thought I would be a writer. And I actually started out as a reporter while I was still in high school and while I was in college.
And you know, back then, this was pre internet years. Most people didn't know any you know, like a novelist. I had no idea how you would become a novelist. The only thing I could see was newspaper work where people were really making a living and writing. So I sort of figured i'd go in the newspaper work. But then,
you know, the job market crashed. This was in the late seventies early eighties, and my dad, who'd been in the military, you know, he was really after me to get a government job, that security, that sort of thing. And so just just on a whim, I applied to NSA. My sister, who was a wild child, she went to Woodstock and she hitch hyped across the country during the Summer of Love. Right. She told me all these crazy
stories she'd heard about the place that it was. You know, it just made us sound insane, and so I thought, well, you know, even the application process was an experience, you know, go down to the corner, knock three times kind of thing. Right, So I applied, and I never thought I would get a job with them, and I never thought I would go, but they offered me a job, and at the time, my job where I was working, which had only been for about a year, I was working at a college,
was looking pretty shaky. So I went ahead and took the job. And when I went I told them, look, I have no interest in national security. You know, this is not my thing. I'm just coming here for the experience. I'll stay a few years and I'm going to leave. That's what I told them, and they were like, sure, sure, come on down, you know, reel me in. And I stayed. You know, I had a thirty five year career and then some so I stayed because, as you know, it's
such a singular profession and you get opportunities. I got opportunities that if I had stayed in Boston and followed what I thought was my you know, path, I never would have gotten. And when we talk about the career a little bit more, you'll see so, you know, while it wasn't perfect, and there were a lot of things that, you know, were disappointments. Everyone has disappointments in their career, you know. I have to say it made me into a person, you know, I never never dreamed I would be.
And that includes the science and technology part because when I was a little kid growing up. Even though I grew up in a town that was home to one of the first computer companies, so all of us were exposed to computers way before most people were, they still kind of treated girls like, you don't know math, and you're not going to be good at science. So I thought I wasn't good at math and science, And it wasn't until I got to NSA and they know how to train you from what you need to know, I
found out that I was actually good at it. So yeah, I mean, it really opened up a lot of doors for me.
What was the position they hired you for?
So I got hired into what was then their intern program, which was a little bit like the PMI program, but I was hired as what they called a reporter, which is a kind of analyst at NSA. I think it's changed now, But when I started, and this was decades ago,
¶ Starting as an NSA analyst and learning the intelligence world
reporting and I mean, as I should say, was sort of a hybrid. It was you were working with linguists, but a lot of times the linguists were not so good at stepping away from the content of what they were translating and really understanding the so out of it. So a lot of times a reporter, someone who was better at writing, would then step in and kind of take it to the final you know, take it to a finished product. That changed for me, of course when
I went to CIA. They have a very different view on what an analyst is and when an analyst would be able to produce. So but that's how I started out. I started out as a reporter, did that for about I can't remember how long, fifteen years or so, made it all the way up to a sigate national intelligence officer in my field, so very fulfilling job. That got
to look kind of my and IO. So when you're a national intelligence officer, generally that's associated with CIA, the NICK, the National Intelligence Council, but other intelligence agencies often have their equivalent to sort of lead in that particular area, and for me it was multilateral affairs. I ended up becoming a specialist in like Phase four operations and operations other than combat. In the nineties, there was a lot of that going on, especially genocides and atrocities. That's kind
of what I'm famous for. Not the thing you want to be famous for, but because my NIO, who was wonderful David Gordon, brilliant man, but he came from outside the intelligence community, so he didn't really understand how intelligence supported his work. So I ended up working very closely with him, and yeah, it was an amazing time. But it all ended when nine to eleven happened, and I ended up going down to do two policy years to try to support the Bush administration in their objectives.
Well, let's take a second to talk about those first fifteen years at NSA. I think the people that listen to this podcast generally understand what NSA does that they're sort of the big ears listening to the interceptions and everything else. But it sounds like you got there probably in the nineteen eighties and worked there into the nineteen nineties. What was it like at that time? I mean technology
was kind of analog transitioning to digital. What was it like working at NSA at that time frame and what were the kind of technological constraints you know?
So it is interesting. I came to NSA like a lot of my peers, you know, we came from all over the country. I had come from a very sort of protected, unworldly family, right, so getting there just trying
¶ NSA before computers: analog intel, index cards, and the digital transition
to sort of get my feet on the ground was about all I could wrap my head around and trying to learn the job because it was so different from anything i'd been exposed to. As you can imagine, because you're not only having to say, learn a target, you're also having to absorb the culture. When you work in intelligence, you have to learn a lot of stuff like how to handle classification. There's just all these components that are more than what your average job is asking of you.
The technology was incredibly analog. We did not even have computers. There was one computer, a Delta Data at the end of the aisle, and you kind of sorted through your papers and looked at things and trying to draw your little confute conclusions, and then you would run down to the computer, you know, to try to access the data. It was just insane when I look back on it. A lot of analysts did their work on index cards, kept notes on everything. Right, if you try to tell
the kids about it today, they won't be right. But I was there. I was starting to get in the upper echelons by the time the transition what they called the transition at NSA, and that was the transition, the world's transition from analog to digital, and that was huge. That was so eye opening and it really made an
impression on me for the rest of my career. So later when I went into technology forecasting, I drew a lot on that experience, what the agency went through to you know, you hear the expression you're building the plane as you're flying it. They were building the plane as because we knew if we did not change in five years, we were going to go blind. We would not be the communications we're going to move on. How you process them, how you make sense of them, everything is completely different
from analog, and so it was a huge investment. They had to stop working on certain targets that were bringing that were our bread butter that you know, we're answering policy makers needs today. But the management had to make this very difficult and very brave decision to do that and put up with a lot of flack. I mean, you can imagine people were so upset, right this is
the it's rights bullism. This is their job. What are they going to do if they can't make that transition, if they can't understand how to deal with this new technology, especially as analysts. It was frightening. And we'll talk about that more because we were going through that right now. The intelligence community continues to go through a second digital age right now.
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¶ Inside one of NSA's first hacking teams
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Bye.
But yeah, so that was very interesting. I mentioned to you before the show, and I guess I need to shove this in there somewhere. Early on in my analytic career, I got to be on the team that was the first hackers at NSA.
Yeah.
That was well crazy because the technology then is not the technology now. So we were chasing entities around the Internet in a method that does not exist now. And the funniest thing, well, the weirdest thing is I'm still friends with one of the you know, I was one of the analysts. So we supported the programmers trying to find it was entirely a research endeavor, right, it was not operational We were the team that had to prove
that you could do this. We had to figure out how to do the back end processing, all that kind of stuff. So we had programmers who were just I mean excellent hackers, right. They were the best of the best, really, these kids. And then they had a team of reporters like me, analysts who supported them and we'd shift through a lot of data and look for patterns and say, okay, I think there's something here, let's reverse engineer or whatever.
So you know, got to sit in the room with them while they were doing the very first intrusions and things like that. It was it was something, I mean, made a big impression on me, so much so that years later, for now, I was asked to write what we call design fiction for CIA. It's fiction. It's like science fiction, right, but it shows up for particular outcomeing or objective and in it I had to do something
that was very much akin to hacking. But I haven't done it in twenty years, so I'm like, I'll just write what I think might be going on. And I got a friend of mine who had been one of the programmers, and he stayed in the career field. He stayed in computer security information operations his whole career, and I asked him to read it before I handed it in to see IA, and he said, yep, that's pretty much what we're still doing. He made a couple suggestions, so that was pretty eye opening.
Yeah. I mean, so this is again the kids may not understand what we're talking about, but this was the days of dial up modems. The Internet was in a nascent sort of form, to say the least. It wasn't exactly what people see on the Internet today. What was kind of I understand this was sort of a proof of concept at the time, but sort of what was going on in NSA's had at this time, like because mostly it was just like universities really that were on
the internet. Was it sort of like trying to project forward, like governmental institutions are going to be on this platform eventually, so we need to be there.
Well, I mean I was just a little peon on the team they you know, I didn't hear what was happening at the higher levels, the direction that was being given to our management. And it was a very small office and this was quite a few years before the transformation, so I think at that point there were probably knowing what I know now for technology forecasting. There was probably a lot of naysayers who were like, this is never going to change, You're wasting our time, blah blah blah.
What you were saying is so true. It was so unlike the Internet today. For instance, back then you got what was known as a DNI, a dial number indicator. It was like a telephone number that you used on the internet, so you had to know the person's telephone number. There was no you know it was. It was just so completely different. Yeah, and you could I can understand
¶ Building the CIA's early social media intelligence program
why it didn't take off.
Yeah. Oh, so at the time, the NSA was kind of like, we don't really know what to do with this, I.
Would say, because when I started out, I was an intern for three years and then I was pulled into an office that ended up being the beginning of something that ended up being really big for an essay, and it was their interface really with the commercial sector in technologies of interest, and so I was exposed. I was actually on standards committees for I'm actually one of the drafters of an old American national standard for encryption for
key encryption. I'm sure it's been superseded many times by now, But so I was exposed to that world, and then I had the opportunity to go work on this in this hacking cell, just because I'd already had that sort of technical exposure. So I'm sure there were people who were skeptical of it. That's just the nature of emerging technologies and it's a little.
I'm sorry, anything new, there's always going to be some skepticism.
Yeah, there's always a town of naysayers. I'd say, like eighty twenty eighty percent are people who just think things are going to continue the way they are. And you know, so you know, I really kind of made my name in this area with social media. I was at CIA at the time, and the center they have that is the lead on open source was supposed to be taking the lead and developing an approach to social media. But the question at the time, I mean this was two
thousand and seven. You know, none of the platforms are anywhere near what they are today, and you know, people were just saying, this is for kids, this is not gonna this is not a serious thing, and this is and they needed somebody who had a technical background because they were kind of looking at and then what I call the hunt and Peck method. You know, they were just looking, but they had no plan, like how you
systematically figure out what's out there? And then there are a lot of associated intelligence questions with that, like how do we know this person is who they say they are? You know, how do we know when information is authentic? Just all of these sort of validation issues that as an analyst you have to be able to answer. So they hired me to be the first senior analysts for social media and I spent three years in that program and I approached it like I would as an NIO, right.
I reached out to like the best researchers in the country, you know, working with them to try to develop methodologies. I took nssa's approach, where you have systematic sort of a systematic look at the environment, the communications environment. NSA does it through frequencies. We had to figure out a way to replicate that in an environment without frequencies, which
we made some headway towards. So anyway, a fair amount of people ended up knowing me for that work, and when I went to RAND, it was based on that work. But ooh, I kind of lost the track.
What was the Yeah, you jumped right onto the social media thing. But I mean, we can dwell on that for a minute. So two thousand and seven. Facebook came around two thousand and four, I believe, and my Space was around back in those days. Also, yeah, a.
Few years before Facebook took up Twitter. I can't remember the exact year. Two thousand and six was Miracle on the Hudson, which was you know, when Sully landed the plane, you know, outside of New York, and it was the first time that we had seen the news break on Twitter faster than we were seeing it break in the news media, you know. So and.
How did you already see how did you already seen that phenomena take place once already in your career with the advent of satellite live news from CNN and so on starting to come online.
Well, so that I wasn't in a technical position during that time. I was working you know, operations other than combat, and so I was running a lot of war rooms, and we were having to deal with that because you'd have your policy makers, you know, listening to CNN, and you're trying to do your keep on top of the intelligence and at the same time you've got to constantly bounce it against this never ending stream of open source
information to try to, you know, not cross wires. If you have something that is contradicting what the media says, you've got to deal with that. So I had to deal with it more on that in that regard, rather than trying to figure out its role was. When I took over as the senior analyst, it really was the question that was posed to me is is there intelligence
value in social media? So that's what we had to answer, and to do that, we had to have a good sense of what was out there, who's talking, you know, what are the conversations. I could go on for hours about how this is done. But it's what folks who aren't exposed to but don't understand, is it's all that measurement is done with highly sophisticated physics models. It's highly technical. It's not just oh I looked at Twitter today and I saw these things, or these are the top ten
trending topics on whatever. You know, when you're answering the president, you know, you have a very high bar. You really need to know what you're talking about, and in order to do that, you have to run all these complex analytics so that you understand, you can validate what you're seeing out there on social media, which is pretty much an invisible platform to most people.
Yeah, and I mean, well, nowadays our policy makers are definitely taking cues off of Twitter on a daily basis, for better or worse. But what was the question I wanted to ask? Oh, I'm surprised that the intelligence community didn't jump on social media sooner for targeting, that all of these people, just the very nature that somebody is uploading their profile onto a social media platform must be a bonanza for targeters.
I think targeting was probably one of the first fields that actually did take advantage of social media the early years, though for me at least, it was just so much pushback against you know, the rank and file. And I'll just talk about this one organization, for instance, that was supposed to have the lead, and that was the Open Source Center. I don't think it's called the Open Source Center anymore. It might be called the Open Source Enterprise. But you know, there were just like it at CIA
in the DA. You know, you have all these offices that have a regional focus or they have a topical focus, right the Office of Transnational Issues or counter Terrorism or the Office of Russia, the Office of South America and those people at the Open Source Center. It was really run like a wire service. They were responsible for understanding what the foreign media was talking about in their area, right, so it was very language based. There was a lot
of translation of you know, traditional media. And what they didn't appreciate at the time is that this was all going to be challenged and eventually done away with. That the digital revolution was going to come and it was going to make all those sources that were so important to them less meaningful in some cases meaningless. And so they fought us tooth and nail for the three every
day in three years. And I was there. It was just a battle, and the management did not want to side with us because you know, what happens is was the same thing as as with n Essay during the transition. As a manager, you have responsibility to look forward and to put your agency in the best position to deal with what's coming over the horizon. But knowing what's coming
over the rising is very hard. And at the same time, you still got to deliver the mail every day, and the stuff that's coming in on your legacy syss is your bread and butter, and you don't want to upset the people who are making your bread and buttering it by telling them I'm going to take twenty or twenty
¶ AI, propaganda, and the collapse of trust in open-source information
five percent of your resources and turn it towards this news source which may or may not, you know, come to fruition. And so they at NSAY they made the tough decision to take that twenty percent of the workforce and give it over to the transition so we could figure out how to do the processing and we could see where we were going, and we made a successful transition. At the Open Source Center. They did not do that, and I kind of got off the social media wagon.
I mean, I was working as a consultant for companies for a while on this, but I stopped a while ago. When I did, I estimated that the intelligence community was almost ten years behind what the commercial sector can do in evaluating social medium. That was the upshot of that, you know, I understand and the attitude of my peers not wanting to give up what they were doing, but it came at a great cost.
Yeah, I mean, it's another tangent, but I think a lot of intelligence professionals have had sort of this criticism that there are these open source investigators that are able to put things together and connect things that even the intelligence community hasn't been able to do, or at least
not able to do very well. But then there's also some thought now that because of AI, that the golden era of open source intelligence is basically over, that that the information environment's becoming so polluted with artificial intelligence content and so on, that even those types of that type of intelligence isn't going to be as fruitful as maybe it used to be.
Yeah, I can't imagine it would be. We are sitting seeing the inditientification of the Internet. As Cory Doctoro says, he's absolutely true. AI is already messing shit up and plowing it back into the you know, like the septic field that is our Internet. Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen in the future. I did a lot of work recently before I finally gave up consulting work
on generative AI and artificial intelligence. So, but I jumped off it about a year and a half ago, so I'm not up to speed on the on what's happening now in the last year and a half is orders of magnitude and sophistication. Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen.
Okay, So we've been jumping around a little bit, which is totally fine. I just don't want to blow over a few things. One of them was your work on Phase four operations, and it sounds like you were kind of knee deep maybe in like the West Africa stuff, the Balkans and things like that back in those days. Yeah, yeah, could you explain to the listeners what Phase four operations are sort of what your role was there.
So the nineties, which we sometimes called the Golden Age of genocide, there were many many civil conflicts, internal conflicts in countries, a lot of them in Africa, but not solely in Africa, and at that time it was less, you know, American boots on the ground than multinational forces. So the US was being called to, you know, put forces on the ground. Sometimes it was NATO, sometimes it would be combination of things. And so whenever that happens,
the intelligence community has to support those. You know, NSA is a defense department institution. You are supporting the warfighter in addition to supporting policymakers. So we would have to spin up these war rooms to try to help support
these things. Also, just sort of the approach that intelligence community agencies have, which I sort of mentioned a little bit, It tends to be sort of split up between the offices, get divided up geographically, so you know regions you'll have, so you'll have the right resources to support whatever you're doing in that particular area, language, et cetera, et cetera. And at that time, there weren't a lot of people that were used to dealing with these kinds of operations.
It wasn't strictly combat. There would be other components to what usually had humanitarian component. That's why they were called operations other than combat. It wasn't just war fighting. And so it became useful to have people like me to go from one to the next because we carried this knowledge of what you could expect, how the multinational forces were going to work, how they were going to interact with international organizations, what was going to be called upon
in the event of humanitarian relief. That ended up being a huge part of my job was following a humanitarian in operations, and that's what I did for Rumsfeld's office. When I ended up going down to OSD after nine to eleven so yeah, it was sort of a hybrid thing, and it was always, always, always, always a war room component whenever there were US forces there. When something happened, often you had to be twenty four hours with a small staff. So yeah, there was a lot of watchstanding
for instance. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Two and a half years on the Balkans, I had Somalia, Sierra Leone, They're all fading in the midst of time. I think it started with Rwanda, d Rock, Yeah, East Liberia, how can I forget Liberia?
Did you do North Iraq? Also with the Kurds.
Not so much prior to the Iraq War? I do you think there was something.
Else they had? There's the military did a big humanitarian operation to head off a famine in the Kurdish areas of Iraq after the Gulf War, I believe, so maybe like ninety four, ninety three or something like that.
Yeah, I was doing Africa. Then we did have a team that looked at Iraq, but they were focused on WMD.
So you had a pretty broad experience doing that in these different theaters. I'd be interested to ask you what kind of grade would you give the United States? Did we do better in some areas than others. What made the difference between success and failure? I mean, just from your unique perspective, I'm really interested, like what kind of like lessons learned you may have pulled out of that experience.
Well, you know, I mean just from my my little corner of it is the intelligence community, and it was sort of the same experience as when I was finding I would later find in the technical area, and that is you know, when you're doing something that is not the standard, it's it's rough because you're not going to
get the resources you need. So for instance, and I laugh at myself today, but I remember when I was going through this in the nineties and we were watching Russia implode and they were complaining because you know, there was a lot of call to draw down the incredible amount of resources we threw. You know, Russia was target number one. And then with the Cold War seemingly dissolving, you know, did we really need six hundred Russian linguists now? You know? Could I have a few of them to work?
You know, I'll give you an example. When I worked on the Balkans, for instance, the team I had, which was the Multilateral team, we had maybe twenty people, and that's to do round the clock operations, whereas the Balkans office itself had one hundred and fifty people, and they NATO had blown up their communications, so they weren't even as busy right as we were. And yet I could not convince them to hive off a handful of people
and give them to us. So, you know, it was hard to keep the wheels on the train and to meet the high demand from customers when you were not being given the resources, which from my perspective, you know, I thought that was bad management. Then after I became a manager, I realized how hard it is to make people do something against their will. You know, if they
¶ Iraq War planning and the failure of Phase Four strategy
studied Russia and got their advanced degree in it, they're really not going to want you to tell them to just go over there for a year and do this other job.
And what year was it that you made the jump from NSA to CIA.
Well it was two thousand and three. After nine to eleven, I went downtown for two years, so and I was still an nsay or at that time, but I was sent to State Department and I worked on policy there in the multinational arena. Because of my background in multi nationalism, and it was to work on the team that helped prevent the people that we thought were responsible from fleeing to other countries, mostly North Africa. So we worked on the National Security Council trying to get them, you know,
member states to support us in preventing this. It was the what did we call it, I forget, you know, the Flea States. So I did that for a year, and then I ended up going to the what used to be called the Office of Humanitarian Assistance until Bush's people decided we didn't do that, and then it became the Office of Reconstruction and something else I forget now. So I worked on the Iraq war planning for a year. That was the most eye opening.
Experience tell us about that.
So I was one of the few people in there who actually had ever worked Phase four combat operations, and I was brought in to help advise on what would happen in Phase four, which is what happens after combat as your troops are moving through a country and you're trying to secure the back area and make sure that the humanitarian stuff is in place and all that kind of stuff. Work with the civil affairs officers, and it became quickly apparent that they had no interest in that that really.
I'm not telling nation building was a bad word at the time.
Very much so, but also just their whole concept going into that war was wrong, was wrong. I was at the Iraq Rock Drill, which is where you get together before operations, and everybody goes around the room so we are all on the same page. And it became very apparent listening to all the different components that were there, that no one was on the same page. Some of the offices were told we were there for WMD, and other offices were being told we were there for other purposes.
And I remember General what is his name, the first guy we sent in. General I want to see I'm sorry, no, I'm sorry for humanitarian assistance. He was a retired general. I can picture space. And he realized at that moment he was screwed that he was being sent in there and he was going to take the blame. And I told him, I said, you're going to be twisted in the wind. And you know, he was sent back within six months because as soon as he got there, he
realized that this was a setup. So yeah, and so at a certain point, you know, I was telling people. I was telling their generals, this is not how it's going to work. You're not going to go in and they're going to welcome you as saviors and everything's going to be great. I didn't see them ripping copper out of the walls by day three, but you know, that
was what happened, destroying buildings and all this stuff. I mean, I knew from everything I had seen we were going to have a humanitarian crisis on our hands, and they butter put things in place, which of course they did not.
Why so I think there was such a disinterest in planning for this when you know, for starters, it's a part of military doctrine, the demobilization or transition process. But also there's this sort of like real politic just bureaucratic incentive. If you're the Bush administration, you don't want to preside over a failed war, and if you don't have some sort of like legitimate reconstruction plan, you know, then you're condemning our forces to just like kind of camp out
there forever. I guess, which is sort of what happened.
Yeah, you know, I'm I wish I knew the answer. I just know what I felt from the meetings I was in and talking to various officials, you know, I was at the as D level, not the you know, under secretary level, So God only knows what went on in those meetings, But partly there was just a feel, a feel I think that we had the most powerful war machine on earth. There was no way we were
going to fail. Sure, we were going to be able to take the country pretty easily, and I don't know why they didn't think that that it was going to be as hard as it was afterwards. But also going into it, you know, there was a big fight between the agencies. There were departments like State Department that did not agree with what Bush wanted to well Bush, what
Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to do. And they actually started their planning process first, and they held conferences and they brought in as many Iraq experts as they could, and the Defense Department really wanted to get a hold on their strategy, but State Department wouldn't give it to them. And I was one person who really knew the guy at State Department who was running that really well, and so I was kind of caught in the middle for a little while, and we tried to hold our own conferences.
But when the experts told the defense officials the same thing, this is a horrible mistake and you're not looking at this correctly. They basically just told us to pound sand I mean, I was called a trader to my face, right, twenty yes, after twenty years working in intelligence, being an athal time like that.
You like lacked sufficient patriotism to support the war, that kind.
Of thing, right, right, So we tried our best to advise and they didn't want to listen to us. We tried our best to try to manage the case us afterwards, but it just could not be held. I mean, it's you know, it's a crime, really, what they did.
It's the saddest thing for me is that we have learned basically or we have learned absolutely nothing from the experience. If you look at what we're doing in Iran right now, there's no plan. There's no plan for this. You know. The plan is, hey, we're going to drop some bombs and if that doesn't work, we're going to drop some more bombs. And no one's thought beyond that.
It's absolutely ludicrous. But the only way, of course that this administration can get away with this is that they have people with absolutely zero experience leading these departments, and it's such a disservice to the professional people who have run this government and the people in the military, and you know, the government workforce who work so hard to develop this expertise so we understand how to do these things.
It's like it all over again, but worse, like having clown tell you, you know, to shut up and sit in the corner, and you're absolutely right. There's no plan. I have been through war planning for something like this. There's nothing even remotely like it. So the American people, I don't understand. I just don't understand what they want.
Well, well, the American people have this weird thing. And you know, they've been conditioned also for twenty five years at least now maybe more, that airstrikes in special ops is not war in their mind. I don't know why that is. They think that, like if we're blowing the shit out of like a girls' school in a foreign country, in their mind, that's not war. I don't get it, but they've been conditioned to believe that that's true.
That's true. And yeah, I don't understand either. Is it the movies? Is it because they see it on a movie and they think, well, that's different. It's not real to them.
I know, I think that's I think that's a big part of it. And I think also there is a such thing is you know, the Fortress America and just the distance we have from it, that politics doesn't have the immediacy for us that it has for people who live in contentious parts of the world where you know, the politics go hey wire in your country's being invaded. You know, we don't really have that sort of experience here.
That's true. But you know, even in the nineties, you know, where I was closer to this, there were other things that the American people cared about and that registered with them, right, so, and yet none of that seems to have the same impact anymore on Americans where what is important to us? And you know, I actually blame technology for a lot of this. I do feel that, you know, especially social media. Social media is how people around the world communicate now, right,
used to be telephones and letters, not anymore. It's all the social media, and it's different, right, It's asynchronous, and it's also all propaganda. That was a big part of my work. My first teams. We're the ones who started looking at how do you measure disinformation? How can you, you know, authenticate information, how can you authenticate users? What the hell's going on out there? And we are just totally in an age of propaganda now. You really can't
believe anything you hear from people. And you know, when I say that to people, especially kids, they're like, yeah, yeah, we know, and yet they don't.
Right, right, but they go along believing it anyway, right, right, what's the answer.
I don't know. I've been yelling for years that really what we need in this country is strong regulation of technology, especially social media, and we need it for AI too. It's from what I saw working with these companies when we first started doing the disinformation work, and I had ended up retiring and was working with one of these
companies helping them in their outreach, especially to government. So we did a lot of cases, studies and that sort of thing, and at that time Congress got it, but unfortunately Trump was on the horizon and they knew he did not want any policies looking into He did not want, you know, regulation of the technology interesting and didn't believe said he didn't believe it that disinformation. So you know
that kind of closed the door. Then there was a time when Congress kind of looked at whether or not we should do this. So a lot of the people I knew and I still worked with on the outside researchers, they were working on projects for the big platforms. They worked with Google, they worked with Facebook, they worked with Twitter, and you know, and then they told me and we would just what we needed was like a quasi governmental organization.
Because the platforms won't talk to each other, they see each other as competitors, and you can't shut down disinformation platform by platform because the actors jump around, they move, they're very fluid. There has to be coordination and the only way that we could see that working was through a quasi government governmental organization. We actually came close to having some Congress support that, but it passed because you know, went away because of Trump and we're in this mess word today.
Yeah, it does seem that our government has been so captured by these companies at this point that they're they're the possibility of regulation just seems so far away. It's almost inconceivable, even though I think everyone knows exactly what you said, that kind of we desperately need some type of regulation that also protects people's you know, right to express themselves and so on.
But it can be done, but it would shut down this open season onling right. But obviously there are some, especially politicians, who have a vested interest that this, yeah, remain well.
And also the companies themselves bounce around to They're very nimble in how they're able to court the government. You know, whether it's some Democrats or Republicans. They'll go and tell them what they want to hear it, and you know, walk away with goodies from the government. It seems that it's not a big deal for them.
It's not. I mean in early on though, I will say that they were it wasn't even handed. They were courting conservatives because the conservatives were so critical of the social platforms. Right around the time I retired and I was looking for my next job, I was looking at what was available at places like Google or whatever in the policy areas, and they were looking for policy people government to be liaisms with the government. But they only
wanted them for right wing organizations. They weren't doing anything for the left leaning organizations.
Yeah, yeah, I mean definitely there's this sort of like bouncing back and forth, and you know, I think we can all remember like the rhetoric about big tech and they wanted to get big tech under control. And then you know, after the election, Zuckerberg and Elon or they're at the inauguration. It's like all that just went away apparently.
Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, that is that's a big tragedy really for this country. And maybe it'll swing back. I mean there was the finding against Meta recently that they did contribute.
To mental health addictas behaviors, Yeah.
Which they certainly did. You know, it's it's just insane that you can see these behaviors out there. You know they're doing it, they're lying about doing it. You know, it's gaslighting, to use a popular word. I guess maybe that'll make a difference.
I don't know, Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's really depressing, you know how our government has sort of abdicated its responsible ability to protect the public, even like the FBI saying recently that you should use Signal or another encrypted app to protect your communications because we can't and won't protect them. How does that work? I don't know.
Hopefully the people a Signal are overjoyed. Of course, they started because they didn't trust the government, So yeah, that's
¶ Leaving NSA for CIA after the Patriot Act era
kind of interesting. Well, you know, we did put ourselves in this fix. One of the technologies that we have that I've watched my whole career is computer security, and the companies know, everybody knows we need more computer security baked into our products, but companies have said, we're not going to put it in there unless consumers want it, and consumers don't want it enough to make it, you know, worth the investment for them. We do this to ourselves.
So to get us back on the time mine a bit after the Iraq War planning, what was sort of the next step in your career.
Well, I was at the Pentagon when who was it Hayden. Now I love Hayden, General Hayden. He was the chief of NSA for the transformation, and like I said, he did a tremendous job. But I was there when he came to talk to the workforce about the Patriot Act because of course it had a big impact for NSA, right, and it really ran against the policies that singand analysts are trained to go by. And I was it just shocked me how much he was in Rumsfeldt's pocket. And
you know, that there was no pushback on this. So I was complaining to David Gordon, my friend who was the NIO and at the time he was a office manager at CIA, and I said, I really don't want to go back to the Defense Department, and he said, come work for me. So I went to CIA. At that point they hired me and I went and I was the senior humanitarian analyst for five years. Cool so I had to become an all source analyst, had to
learn how to do that. It was a really eye opening experience because I was coming in as a mid careerist. As you know, probably most agencies, government agencies like you to come in as a young person, and so you come up through the ranks and you really are just you know, immersed in the culture and all those things that I talked about, you know, like learning, classification and all. You learn their ways and it just seeps into your pores, right.
So everyone has the same experiences, and so it's hard when you come in mid career. It's very hard bringing in people from industry, you know, from outside the government. You bring them in for their expertise in a particular domain, but they didn't come up through the ranks and so they don't have the same experiences and the same understanding and all that. It was very hard, and David brought several folks in from other agencies as mid careers, and
it was hard for all of us. Yeah, so at the end of five years, he ended up becoming assistant secretary for Condoleeza Rice. He left left me high and dry, and then I had to fight off the wolves because you know, I was an outsider. But after five years, that's when I got the gig. Basically, I did a year of recruiting and during that time Open Source Center came to me and said, we need someone who has a technical background to work on social media.
So and what was this horrible story that got turned into a novel.
It happened in when I was in the Office of Transnational Issues. The new office director, who had been my friend David's deputy, did a really stupid, stupid thing and he he basically dabbled in operations without telling the Directorate
of Operations he was doing this. And it was a disaster, I mean like a really bad disaster, and they frog marched all the analysts into the bubble and said, you're never going to do this again, and they put down all these new coordination rules, you know, so no one would ever make this horrible mistake again. And yeah, that's the most I can tell you about it, sorry, because if I say anything more, you'll know what the incident was.
Uh well, how did how did that get fictionalized in the book?
Well, so somebody died during this operation that this guy authorized, and in a denied territory, and so I just how to put this? I thought it was interesting that a manager could well he didn't survive, he got thrown out, but he should have gone to jail. Somebody died. But you know that's not what happens in the intelligence, especially CIA, right, their mandate is to do these impossible things, you know, for a policy objective. Basically, you know, he wanted the
right outcome. He just went about it the wrong way and so his punishment was to be banished from the kingdom. But I just thought that was so weird. And I'll tell you in publishing, when I talked to my editors and agents and I told them the story as much as I could, they were flabbergasted that all he got was fired, that he didn't go to jail. I think it kind of showed that the public doesn't really understand
¶ Secret backchannels, Havana Syndrome, and real incidents behind the novels
what intelligence does, what you know, the rules that apply to it, and that sort of thing. I can't I really can't tell you more, even though it's been quite a while.
The uh was I mean, that's like one of those kind of like hard lines, right that analysts aren't supposed to be running operations.
Oh, absolutely absolutely. But this guy you knew dealing with them, that he thought too much of himself, and he was always he prided himself on thinking outside the box, and you had to be prepared to tell him, no, I won't do that, Amy, you'll do that. You have to find another person to do that for you. And a couple of people didn't tell him that.
It reminds me, as you're telling me this story, it reminds me about you know, what's been said about Oliver Worth in the nineteen eighties, that he was going to these embassies and saying, hey, I'm a direct representative from the White House. I have this letter from President Reagan saying this to the station chiefs, you're going to do, you know, parallel unilateral operations for me, and all the station chiefs reported back to the CIA even though they
Oliver North said, you cannot to tell anyone. All of them reported back. I believe the one that didn't was the station chief in Honduras, and he was the one that cut canned.
Yeah. See, they were smart. They were smart. Now, the Havana syndrome story has something in it. That was another thing that happened in my career. Happened when I was at NSA, and it has to do with an official on the policy side getting caught making a secret deal with the enemy. So that was fun. I got to go back, and I mean it wasn't fun at the time. We felt very bad for this person. This person his heart was actually in the right place. He was trying
to do the right thing. It's just that he believed the adversary when the adversary puffed up his ego and told him, you know, you're the only one and you're going to be our man.
Piece is going to break out if you work.
With us, right, uh, yeah, something like that. And he couldn't see that he was he was doing a treason this thing, right, But we caught him on intercept and we had to tell his secretary and that was not a pleasant thing. Yeah, But I It was another one of those instances that I thought, if I ever write a story, I'm going to stick this in there.
Yeah, I mean, so while we're talking about that, this is the uh the well. First off, tell us what's the title of the novel about the analysts that was you know that you fictionalized the the analysts dabbling in operations. What was the name of that book.
That was my first spy novel. It is called Red Widow. Came out five years ago, I think, and there was a second book in the series, Read London, came out three years ago, and unfortunately those are the only two books in the series. We will not be getting any
more read books. I'm very proud of the books. They did well critically, Like Red Widow was the New York Times book editors picked it as an editor's choice, and it was nominated by International Thriller Writers for Best Novel of the Year, and it got optioned a couple times, but it ended up not being picked up. And then I did a couple like novella length pieces for Amazon
Original Stories. So one is Black Vault, and that is actually a UFO story because you probably maybe had the same idea when the sixteen minutes piece came out about the Navy, you know, and everybody was talking about it, and I was like, Oh, here's going to be a congressional directive, which means every agency is going to be told to do a report or you know what your experience is, and I know exactly how the CIA one's going to go. So I wrote a story about that,
and it's basically this case officer fifteen years ago. He has what seems to be like a close encounter with the UFO, and like an idiot, he insists on writing a cable about it, and he's told by his deepestation, don't do that. You're going to destroy your career. You're gonna make us look like idiots. They're going to think we're smoking something out here. But it falls through the cracks and it gets released and it ruins his career.
Fast forward fifteen years the sixty minutes piece comes out, the congressional directive comes through, So what a CIA do? It sets up a task force to write report, and he is assigned to the task force. He is six months away from retirement. He thinks somebody is yanking his chain and trying to get him to quit by putting him on this task force. And you know what these task forces are, it's dead wood. That's where you send the people who are not doing a liquor work anyway.
You just don't want to look at them for a year. So it just gets filled up with all these useless, you know, slow horses characters. And he goes down there and he's just furious, and he ends up mouthing off to somebody, somebody who's high up who used to be a friend of his, and he says, you can't put people who know that the last thing you can do with CIA is fail. They're not going to write a truthful report. You've got to put young people on it
who don't know to be afraid to fail yet. And so the guy does and they end up finding out what actually happened fifteen years ago, and they uncover this massive there was a massive mole problem. Minute blows the doors open that maybe there are aliens out there. So that's the story that it got picked up by for TV by AMC, and the producers of Breaking Bad and the producers of The Walking Dead are my producers on it. And right now we're looking for a star to attach
to it. It has been. It was such a fun story to write, and the reaction from Hollywood has been very gratifying. I really like the story, so fingers crossed, we'll see something before too long.
Yeah, no, I'm glad to hear that that. You know, it got the attention after the two Spine novels. It sounded like they really resonated with people, but for whatever reason, didn't get you know, maybe the traction that you'd hoped for.
Well, you know, my experience with Hollywood has been interesting, Hollywood versus the books. Sorry, I'm looking at myself here, my hair looks terrible. Readers seem to like books that follow sort of a predictive, a familiar pattern, right, whereas Hollywood likes stories that are grounded, very truthful. So there's some of that, but it takes you beyond them. So Unfortunately, the read books because they're women protagonists and even the antagonist is usually a woman, it really is written from
that point of view. But the readership of spine novels tends to be a male. It's one of the few categories in in fiction that is more male readers.
Science is the only other one.
Maybe, Yeah, And you know, they find that men tend to not want to read a story from a woman's point of view. So the main character, you know, like putting themselves in the head of a woman and seeing how she sees the world, and they tend not to want to read books by women too, So that that has been sort of a double whammy for the Red Books. But oddly enough, Hollywood loved the idea. Unfortunately, the movies from a woman's perspective tend to do as well either.
So that's the lesson I took away from all that.
So I'm surprised for one. I mean, I would rather watch a movie with Charlie's then than Gerard Butler or somebody just my opinion. Take it for what it's worth.
I agree. I love The Atomic Blonde.
Yeah, and so the Havannah book, you have a working title for that.
The Invisible Enemy.
And so I've done a lot of like journalistic work on Havana syndrome, and I've had folks tell me, and this has been reported publicly now too, that it's suspected that the first Havana syndrome victim was actually an NSA employee in the nineteen nineties. I was wondering if you ever crossed paths with any of that back in those days.
So here's a crazy story and it'll lead to the book I swear In two thousand, I was a National Colligence officer. At the time. I was supposed to go a participate in a war game for a friend of mine. I woke up and I had complete vertigo, spin, spin, spin, and the worst head pain of my life. I thought my skull was splitting open. This went on for nine months. Now.
It didn't come out of the blue. There had been I'd had a couple of years of continuous problems with my head and pressures and ear and all that kind of stuff, But of course NSA didn't want to talk to me about it. If you had been in the building at the time, you would have thought there's got to be environmental issues here because the building was not kept up well. But the main thing was the roof. And this was I was always in the main headquarters building.
The roof was completely covered with microwave antennas. The walls were riddled with cabling where transmissions are going around you and underfoot. You were just and occasionally you would get somebody else complaining of the same issues that their heads felt funny and whatever, but they would do nothing for you. So long story is short. I thought I was going to have to retire. We didn't know what it was.
It took nine months to get to Hopkins. They have a special program, and they gave me a diagnosis and I stayed under their care for six years. To this day. I still take daily medicine to try to suppress a migraine. That's how it is, right.
What was the diagnosis that Hopkins gave you for that?
So twenty five years ago the I diagnosed this is this rare form of migraine called vestibular migraine where its actu vestibular system. So it was twenty twenty one. I think that I ran into Oh I should explain a few things. One is they got it under control enough so that by the time nine to eleven came around. I could just go from the frying pan into the fire. You know, I was in the office of the Secretary of Defense for the Iraq War.
Right.
If pressure was going to make my head erupt, that would have been it. I was literally working like sixteen hours days in commuting three so it didn't come back. I went back to NSA in twenty fourteen, and it wasn't until that day I thought, Ooh, I haven't had those problems since I left that building. I wonder if I'm going to have those problems if I have to go back to that building. Luckily I did not have to go back to that building. I ended up being
in the out buildings. But also they cleaned up their act. There's not an army of microwave antenna's on the roof anymore, so didn't have any problems. Twenty twenty one, I think I was at a speaker at a conference when a Valerie Plames conferences, and she had Mark Polyoff I scrap name, Polly, thank you. He talked about his experiences with Havannah syndrome, and you could have knocked me over with a feather. It was exactly the same what he went through, the feelings,
the headaches, that just crazy. When he finished, I sat down with him and I said, look, I'm not saying I had what you had. I'm not saying you had what I have, but this is weird, and he agreed it was weird. That's actually how the book that I worked on, The Invisible Enemy, came about because when Cia came out a little while after that with there they said,
we don't believe it's a directed energy weapon. He contacted me and he said, you know, he was doing a lot of interviews at the time and telling them his experience and how he felt betrayed and that the agency, you know, was doing a disservice to his fellow officers who'd also been struck. And he said, we need to write a story about it. And he said, a story is not going to get what you want. You know, it's not going to do it any better than your nonfiction.
He said, I don't care. I want a story. So that's why I ended up writing the story. At the time, I was doing a lot with Amazon, and I thought for sure they would publish it, and so I wrote it to a novella length and long story short. It took a year and a half to actually get them to give me a contract on it, and they wanted it a novel length by then, so I had to take extra time to write it. And in that time some of the more recent developments came out. But a
couple of years ago I had a relapse. It was the first time, and Hopkins took me back and I was talking to one of the doctors in the special program and they said, you know, we've learned a lot about brains and heads since you were here before, and they were telling me that they think this condition is you have to it's like congenital you have, like a malformation or a deformity in your head that makes you
more susceptible to these kinds of vestibular disturbances. And it just all clicked into place when they told me that, because, like I said, there were other people at NSA who had some of the same physical symptoms that I did. But NSA would always push back and say, well, why aren't the other people next to you having the same problems.
It can't be real. I think it's a combination of the effect of the emanations and whether or not you have these congenital problems, whether or not you have malformations that predispose.
You to you here's an interesting parallel. So most of the people out there have probably heard of Gulf War syndrome, which was also something that our government denied, you know, like agent Orange. And then it was Golf War syndrome that we had got Golf War veterans coming back and they were kind of like bedridden, depressive, like they were experiencing strange symptoms that no one could really explain why they were having them, and the government said it doesn't exist.
There's actually some science out now, like credible science, showing that what happened was Saddam Hussein did not deploy chemical or biological weapons, but we did blow up some bunkers during the Golf War where those weapons were, so there were very low levels of some of that stuff in the air in certain places. And again, why did some
people have gol syndrome and some don't. Well, they saw that it has to do with a genetic receptor that certain people have, not everyone has it, So some people are uniquely susceptible to those low lefs of like sarin gas that gives them these symptoms. So I think that you know what you're describing, exposure to microwaves, Why does it affect some people and not others? I think it makes a lot of sense. But then when we talk about actual Havana syndrome, now we're talking about a system
that is weaponized and designed to hurt you. So I don't know if that would hold true when you start talking about people who are specifically targeted with the weapon. Probably at that point it doesn't matter, you know, what the genetic receptor is or the shape of your brain. Probably you're going to get you know, microwavety regardless.
Possibly. But let me ask you about this because you've probably looked into this part more than I have. You know, if you think back to the fifties and sixties when the Russians were bombarding the US embassy, right, yeah, it wasn't It was a collection attempt, right, They were trying
to collect information, and it was just pulsed microwave. That's just a band of the radio spectrum, radio frequency spectrum, and that's used for a lot of different technologies, not ones that most people run into every day, like radar systems or something like that. But it's there, and I know, of god, it must have been thirty years ago, seeing NESSA knew about these types of collection systems right where you collected the emanations and you could pull information out
of them. So I do think in a lot of these cases, it's not that they're trying to intentionally hurt an individual, but they're aiming a collection device against them, you know, And this comes up in my story but now, of course, we are seeing the age of using these kind of disruptive technologies that the prohibition, the moral prohibition is off, and we're seeing more development of these kind of pulse weapon systems.
Yeah, you know that some of the doctors I've spoken to they think that, And apparently the military is testing some captured device, so maybe they'll have better information. But the best, to the best of my knowledge, the theory is that it is pulsed microwaves. But when I say pulsed, I mean like hundreds of pulses a second, and that's creating some sort of like cumulative effect inside the human cranium. That that's the prevailing theory about how it works right now.
And I mean, I certainly would not preclude that there are people that you know, the Moscow signal and others, you know, people who are harmed by uh, you know, attempts at collecting intelligence. But I would I would assert that there are quite a few people who are deliberately targeted with a weaponized version of this.
Yeah. I mean there's research programs now even in the United States, Yeah, that are looking at you know, what's his name, what's his name? The president when they did the Venezuela hit, right, he was talking about a disruptors.
Yeah, I think that's BS myself, the discombobulator ray, and then more recently in Iran we got the ghost murmur h. You know, we can read a heartbeat from ten kilometers like they're they're kind of like inflating themselves up. I think a little bit here.
Well, I do think some of that technology, the descriptions are overblown, but that is some of the applications, at least in the research stage for these types of weapons, that you can use them to disrupt, you know, a computer system or something like that, or take down you know, in movies they always make EMPs is like this world ending thing, but actually in real life you can design EMP attacks, you know, that can be very localized, like against the room or against the campus. You know, it'll
be less effective of course across the campus. But I I think you know, that's the class of the next generation non kinetic weapons we're talking about.
Yeah, no, it's it's fascinating stuff. And your book is about a Is it a CIA officer that gets hit in Central Asia?
Yes, he's he's in Baku. He's there meeting an asset. He runs into just by chance, an old adversary who a Russian who happens to be there. He does the best SDR of his life. He feels like he can go ahead and meet his asset. He comes back to the hotel, he knows there's a watcher on him downstairs, and then he's hit that night and doesn't know what hit him and it ruins his life.
Yeah yeah, that part is uh not fictional.
Yeah, sadly true. But then a White House staffer is hit in the parking garage are the White House, and it just insenses him. And the President at the time, of course, is talking about how the Russians are going to be our new best buddies, and so nothing is being done about this, and you know, everything at the agency about for himana syndrome is being smothered and he just is furious, and so he decides he's going to
¶ CIA publishing battles, pre-publication review, and returning to NSA
conduct his own investigation.
Okay, yeah, so they're going off book, yes, cool.
So there's a lot of Mark in it, it's not all mark.
When when is the book do out?
It's going to be spring of next year, looking like March.
At this point, as we get back to your story, where did we leave off going to work with S and T.
Let's see what happened. I was the lead analyst for social media. I sold my first book in twenty ten, and in twenty eleven, when the book was coming out, CIA started giving me a lot of hassle. They were hassling me and the book has nothing to do with intelligence. It was like a fantasy book, right, And I told them there's no reason why you should need to review it or anything like that, and they didn't believe me.
But then it came down to press being able to interact with the press, and my publisher at the time, Simon and Schuster, decided it was going to be a big book, so they were sending me on tour. And you know, you go to a festival and you sit in a tent, so any press person can come up to you and ask you questions. And CIA said, no, you have to give us four days to approve any contact with the press. You don't get the golden ticket
and publishing every day. So I quit and I went to work for RAND for a few years, and then n Essay hired me back and I was working in science and technology. At that point. Did the office director thing them set up an office to do technology forecasting, which I had done at RAND and done for CIA as a contractor.
It's unfortunate sometimes the way the CIA makes it difficult for employees to you know, be a human being. You know, I've heard all kinds of stories over the years about somebody who works at the CIA falls in love with a British citizen. They want to get married, and the CIA, even though it's a brit and there's not an intelligence threat there, they're like, no, you can't marry this person. Well, like they can actually put the kaibash on it, like that's wild.
It is crazy, and I want to feel like they're getting better over time. I put NSA in a separate box because it is incredible management issues and always has. Now, my experience at CIA was different, right, Like I said, I came in as a mid careerst so maybe I didn't see the things that people who came up through the ranks would see. Or maybe it's just the comparison to NSA. But CIA didn't say it as bad. You
just had to remember that it was. You know, they couldn't They could sometimes come up with the right answer. You just had to figure out a way to get them there, whereas at NSSAY a lot of times it was like a bad parent. There was just no way to get them to be reasonable. Yeah, so I don't doubt that some people have had very unreasonable experiences with CIA. I mean the four I don't think they would probably
do that now to people. You got to remember too, this was right around the time that Mike go what's his name he wrote Imperial Rubris and he really pissed off. Yeah, the Bush administration and Cheney was furious, and he didn't want any more CIA people to get publishing contracts after that, and so they were really clamping down on everyone. And they couldn't really clamped on me because it was a fantasy book, right, so they needed some other way to control me.
So funny, Yeah, I was I heard a gentleman speak. I don't want to speak out of turn, but he was a former CIA case officer and he was talking about he wrote a non fiction book about his experiences early in the Afghan Afghanistan war working with special forces and fighting out Kaeda, and this story or other people's similar stories has been written many times from the CIA perspective, the special forces perspective, and the CIA came back to him.
They're like, now you can't publish this because we don't. We won't let you publish anything about CIA and Special Forces working together. And it's like they made a movie about I mean, well, what what what are we doing here and this? You know, it's probably about the current administration and the current political appointees at the agency are just like, we're not doing books.
Yeah. I mean it was very much in my space, like a pendulum switch, right, So when they were getting political pressure, they would really lamp down on things. Other times they could be very reasonable. I mean when I started vetting books through them, which was in the mid two thousands, you know, they would not let you use the expression chief of station in a book, even though of course it had been published and was in movies
and all this stuff. And their argument back to you was, well, you're you know, you work here, so you're validating this. You know, now they'll let you use chief of station. You know, it's I think they do. I'm trying to know to me, but I imagine if you're in the building, they would.
Some of my favorites. Oddly enough, they would let guys use the term special forces, but not the term special operations. One of my favorites. I spoke to this gentleman many years ago. Now I should try to go and find him. He wrote a book, put it through the PRB, and there's a scene I believe it's a memoir. He goes and meets with his source at night in a field and he says, the field has a bunch of rocks, football sized rocks in the field where he meets his asset.
And the CIA is like, now, you can't say that because it could identify, you know, what field that you met the person in. And he had to have his lawyer go back and forth with the CIA people and like they confabulated with themselves and came back and they're like, okay, we'll give you rocks. You can have rocks.
Yeah. You know, you hear those kinds of stories and you think it's run by crazy people, But you know, part of it sometimes depends on the situation, just the threat of the legal you know, problems they think might deter you, or.
Just exactly that's exactly what it is. It's the same with the family members and everything else. The CIA is not going to press charges. And can you imagine the discovery on some of these cases, like it's never ever going to happen.
I have a friend who's a talking head on the news and stuff a lot. We were both interns together at NSA many many years ago, and we've stayed friends. As a matter of fact, I fictionalized him for a character in Red Widow, and you know, so I was asking him at one point, what do you do? You know, sometimes I'll get these questions and I don't feel comfortable, just you know, I don't need to go and tell NSA in advance or CIA in advance, I'm going to be talking about this. And he said, you know, I
used to worry about that, but I don't anymore. They can just catch me and they never have got back to him. Can you imagine they can't keep an eye on all of us?
The only thing? And this is reasonable. I understand they get pissy when you start naming names people who are still under a cover. Certainly you don't want to be talking about sources and assets and that kind of stuff, and I get that. I understand that. But there's a lot of other stuff, anecdotal stories that can be told in more vague terms, and sometimes it's funny what they won't let you say, yeah.
Well, maybe I shouldn't have admitted this, maybe somebody will be watching. But I generally don't go back to them for anything. But mostly what.
I'm asking you also learned over time, like what you would need to and whatnot. Yeah.
Right, And I'll tell you what was really helpful in that is working and recruiting because you would be going out and you're speaking at comies constantly, and you really have a sense of what's allowable to and what people need.
To hear, and the kids are asking you questions all the time.
You stay away from sources and methods. And mostly because the last part of my career was in technology, I ended up talking a lot about you know, how technology is used in intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, and you know it's all it's all open source information.
Uh, And so I mean that's really interesting. I didn't know that you retired from the government so that you could become a writer. That's awesome.
Yeah, that was not maybe the best decision of my life, but I.
Was so mad. Well, you you did your thirty five years. I think that's great, and you were ready to transition into something new and you know, it sounds like the time was right. So you started off in fantasy novels and uh, there's and then later the spy novels. I mean, what are the other ones? I mean, is it you know, you do some saucy romances.
I'm not good at saucy romances. But the so the fantasy novels came at a time when those kinds of books were very popular. Well, no, not Harry Potter, more like I hate to say it, but like Twilight. Okay, so these dark, you know, kind of tempestuous romances. But I did not write why yeah, and I did not write romances. They were very dark. And also it took me ten years to write it. So by the time I got it to the point where it was saleable,
that genre was kind of on the downhill slide. So by the time the third book came out, the market had really fallen away. And so at that time my agent came to me he had actually been approached by these people who needed a writer. Now, normally this is what we call work for hire. If you're a writer and you're hired to do an idea, companies called book packagers will come up with the idea. They'll put the deal together. They'll hire a writer. And this company was
very successful with their film rights. They hadn't been around very long, but like ninety percent of their books got the film rights option. And I was having a really hard time making that jump. So I said, I tell you what, all this was going to be their first adult book. They only had done young adult up till then. I said, we'll be partners. I am not work for hire, but if we go partners on this, I'll give it a shot. So that first book was The Hunger, which
is considered horror, but really it's more mainstream fiction. It's a reimagining of the story of the Donner Party with just this little twist what if there was something following the Donner Party. That is my most successful book ever. It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It was translated in twenty languages. Ridley Scott optioned the film rights. He's about to option him again. It was very, very
lucky with that book. So then I wrote two more historical horror novels and got the opportunity to do the spy novels. They kind of inner wove like that, and now I'm probably known for the horror novels more. Yeah, the next one that's coming out is a horror novel. It's Incarnate, but it's actually sort of based on how I view technology now. It's about technology, it's about social media and deep faith. Yeah, and it's going to be interesting promoting that one.
Yeah. Yeah, No, I mean that is like, that's definitely the modern horror novel, right, it kind of has to be about that almost.
Yeah. I went to Hollywood to talk to some of the producers I deal with and asked them. I said, I can't imagine that you're really interested in like artificial intelligence horror and they said, no, we're really getting slammed with kind of the same pitch over and over again. So we're just about to go out with this book to pitch it to studios. Incarnate. I'll let you know, it's not quite what you think the book's going to be about, but it is about influencers and what we
used to call fake personas avatars. Cool, you know how you can now now it's you know, in the news constantly. As a matter of fact, I just did a Substack newsletter on this, But you know, fake influencers and how it's that's going to be the norm pretty soon.
Yeah, okay, no, that's a very topical subject.
Let's hope.
And so is this what you do full time? Now? You're full time writer.
Full time writer, and trying to get the media side of things up. So we have about four or five projects in development right now. And like screen port, I knew nothing. I'm sorry, what like screenplays? And yeah, I don't write I don't write screenplays. They don't like novelists to be anywhere near a script. Apparently you really have to convince them that you can do it. So I'm going to be working on a script. But usually we try to get the as a producer of some kind.
So I'm trying to learn the business. It's tough. It's really tough to get something made these days.
Yeah, well, I mean this has been super cool. Is there anything else that I haven't asked or anything else you'd like to talk about?
Not really, I guess I could bitch.
But uh, but airing the grievances.
The airing of the grievances, I guess the one thing. You know, you've heard me talk and maybe some people just don't believe I did all these crazy things that I did over my career I did, believing no one's more amazed than me, especially the technical stuff, which was so rewarding. But it's very frustrating trying to get people to pay attention to you when you're a woman and you're old. You know, I've also been a critic. I was a book reviewer for the Washington Post. I have
a master's degree in fiction. I'm an analyst, so I'm highly analytical when it comes to evaluating things. And I know my writing's good. I mean, I won a bunch of awards too. I end up. You know, it comes down to our society especially, but many societies around the world do not value women, and they especially do not value older women. But I do think I have interesting things to say and that I could say them in
very interesting ways, and Hollywood agrees. I'd just like to get more readers to give me a troney.
You know, if you need a pen name, you know,
¶ Substack, viewer questions, NSA vs. CIA culture, and final thoughts
you feel free to use Jack Murphy and see if that gets you some traction. It hasn't worked out so great for me at all times, but you know, maybe you have better luck. You never know.
I'll keep that in mind, Thank you, Yo, No, I.
Can see that for sure. That's got to be very frustrating that I don't know it's a novel. It's like, why would why would I necessarily even care if it's a man or a woman writing it? I mean, I think the only time that it would make a difference is there's certain types of like literary genres where you know, if it's the female author talking about you know, how she has her hair highlighted and her nails done, like,
I only have so much patience for that. But it's a woman writing a spy novel or political thriller, it's kind of who cares? You know?
Well, I mean, I'm glad to hear that. I know there are men like you out there that are more open minded or maybe don't even give it a thought. But you'd be surprised how many times I'll be doing a book event or something and some white haired man will come up to me and kind of imply that I should be writing romance novels or children's books. You know that what makes me think I can write an adult book? And it's all I can do to not just slap the shit.
You're a little missy.
Really, it's just.
Like, h where can people go to find you do you have a website. I think you mentioned a substack.
Yes, the subset took over my newsletter because it just it's such a great platform for that sort of thing. So you can find me at Alma Katsu my name and books Almacatsu books dot com, or just look for me on substack. I would love it if your listeners would subscribe. I kind of rotate between writing about writing, like the craft of writing, or talking about the business of writing for those who want to break into writing. I write occasionally about technology. I have a whole series
on jen Ai. Hey, I spoke at MIT. I know what I'm talking about. And then I also just kind of give personal things because some people like to hear about my crazy life.
And will have some links down the description for folks that can go subscribe to the sub stack check all that out. And I believe we have a viewer question for you, Alma.
Yeah, we have multiple actually from Alexander. He asked, what's the best slash worst part of working for the NSA and CIA, respectively.
Well, the worst part of working at NSA, which you got to understand, you know, I grew up there, right, so as a matter of fact, when I left the first time and I did my exit interview. The woman who interviewed me had also been a second National Intelligence officer, and she said to me, ohma, why do you think it's going to be any better at CIA? And I said, Maureen, it's like this, This is like my first marriage, and NSA broke my heart. I'm going into my second marriage
a little wiser, so NSA is. It's real, really misogynistic, even to this day. I mean the stories I could tell you from my last three years, and I was fairly senior at that point, and still the way I saw them, the way they treat women, and how it's baked into the culture, which is terrible because, especially as you move more and more into emerging technologies, new technologies, you need every brain you can get your hands on.
You cannot afford to put, you know, a whole class of people off to the side and not value their input. You need them. So that was the worst thing. The best thing. I don't know. They had good cookies at one point. I don't think they have those cookies anymore. CIA. Oh my god, there's so much there, so much I saw that as a recruiter, that you could go into that database, and you could hire a locksmith, someone who was in prison for being able to you know, break
and enter. You needed those skills as much as you needed, you know, the postdoc in artificial intelligence. Just the range of things you needed was mind boggling, and you could end up working in any of those areas. You know, it was really something. It's very elitist though, that is the bad part.
All right, we got one from the kind of answer this slightly. What could CIA slash NSA do to improve working conditions for women?
Oh? Oh, my goodness, so much. You know, I can't even imagine it. At NSA. It would be like a you know, like a fantasy, just one you know, how to tell you. It's like it's baked into the culture that they're just not going to see women as whole human beings. It's insane CIA. So my perspective is different. I mean, I do think that operations is still tough
for women to crack. I would imagine some of it comes down to the types of characteristics and skills that they value that maybe is hard for a woman, a woman to embody without not being a woman anymore. On the analytics side and science and technology, I think it was a little fairer. Believe it or not, it's more just dog eat dog. On the analytics side, it's incredibly combative. You have to be able, but it's all, you know,
brain power. You have to brainstorm constantly. And so like the thing I described with the Open Source Center, where you would have the senior analysts of say the Russia Shop argue with me about the value of social media in the Russian population. You know you were doing that every time you turned around. You were just but that was so that you were coming to the right conclusions. You had to sort of fight it out to make sure that the best thought, you know, raised to the top.
No one's going to want to work for CIA or especially NSA if they After this interview.
We have one more from you.
What are your thoughts on media consolidation in the Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery deal in particular.
Well, I haven't watched that super closely. So one thing, and you've probably experienced this with other analysts on the show, is we don't really like to talk about things unless we really know what we're talking about. We tend not to be bullshitters. So I don't really have much to say on that. Also, you know people in intelligence. I don't know about now, but when I was coming up, we really tend not to focus on domestic things. We really focus on moreign intelligence. So I just have this
bad habit of not following domestic situations very well. All I know is for me as now, someone who's trying to break into that side of media is probably a really bad thing.
Well, Alma, thank you for taking some time out of your evening to do this interview. Really appreciate it. Any final thoughts before we.
Go tonight, Well, thank you. I hope I didn't sound like too much of a jerk. And it's not often where you just get to pontificate about yourself for way too long. So thank you very much for putting up with me. This was so much fun. You are so sweet and really appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you and everyone else out there. Thank you for joining us tonight and we'll see you guys next time. Hey, guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about
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