00:01:03.740I'm just going to ask you one, and it's about deception.
00:01:06.260So the business, to some extent, of intelligence is deception.
00:01:10.140It's being deceptive, but it's also detecting deception in others, which is a really important skill, I think.
00:01:17.480How have you been trained to tell when other people are lying?
00:01:22.720Well, there are a couple of different levels of training.
00:01:25.200For those of us who are just going out into the field as operations officers or case officers, you're given some some basic training in how to read body language.
00:01:36.020You know, when you ask someone a question and he looks up, for example, into the air as if he's trying to picture what it is that that you're you're asking, that's that's usually OK.
00:01:48.600If he looks down, for example, that's supposed to be alerting to you that that perhaps he's coming up with with a lie.
00:01:56.960And sometimes I catch myself doing things like that.
00:01:59.760I actually do tend to look up into the air as if I'm working out a formula or something.
00:02:16.180It's one of these these odd telegraphed behaviors that are just built into us.
00:02:24.460Unless somebody is suffering from, let's say, autism, you have to watch the eyes because the eyes, if a person averts his eyes unnecessarily or regularly looking away, looking away constantly, that's usually a sign of deception as well.
00:02:46.120Now, if you're going into the office of security, you're going to be a polygrapher, you're going to be an investigator, something like that.
00:02:54.460You get all kinds of training, training that lasts the better part of a year in how to detect deception.
00:03:02.380And if I could, Tucker, I wanted to add one thing.
00:03:05.240One of the ongoing problems at the CIA is that you're trained to lie all the time.
00:03:11.180You're living a lie in most cases, but a lot of guys just can't turn it off.
00:03:16.120So I had this boss who who acknowledged to me one time as a junior officer that we all lie.
00:03:23.220We're trained to lie. You lie every day, all day. But some guys don't know how to turn it off or
00:03:29.580when to turn it off. One of the things that this boss told me was I want you to lie all day. That's
00:03:35.720the nature of the job. But don't ever lie to security, finance or medical because they're
00:03:41.440the ones who can ruin your life or send you to prison. And I also don't want you ever to lie to
00:03:46.740me. And that, that always stuck in my mind that yes, we lie all day long in that job. And when
00:03:53.260you're serving overseas, your job is to break the laws of that country, which of course involves
00:03:58.960lying, but you really do have to turn it off. And then, you know, it's no wonder that so many
00:04:05.220people at the cia are married three four five times exactly i was just thinking that exact
00:04:11.780thing i mean it how easy is it to turn off if you're living undercover during the day
00:04:18.520it's a pretty short step to having a mistress no oh my gosh yes i worked for a deputy director
00:04:25.420tucker who had been married five times and every single one of his five wives had begun as his
00:04:33.200secretary. And this is a guy who made it right up to the top, but he couldn't turn it off.
00:04:39.580You know, you lie to people all day long and then you go home and you lie to your wife.
00:04:43.340So did when that guy, your your supervisor who married five of his secretaries, when he advertised
00:04:49.460for a new executive assistant, did they know that a marriage was part of the deal?
00:04:55.120You know, here's how sick the culture can be sometimes, because the answer is yes, they knew.
00:05:00.620but they also saw this as a way to get ahead. There was one woman in particular, and I'm sorry
00:05:06.260to get a little far afield. There was one woman in particular who was a member of the Senior
00:05:11.720Intelligence Service, which is a very big deal. When you get promoted above GS-15 and you enter
00:05:18.580the Senior Intelligence Service, you belong to the entire intelligence community. So you can go
00:05:23.500to the White House, you can go to state, you can go to DOD, all over the place. She had begun as
00:05:30.180his secretary. And as soon as she married him, she began getting promoted. And then as part of
00:05:39.420the deal that she struck with him so he could marry the new secretary, she was promoted into
00:05:46.360the senior intelligence service. Well, I mean, from a theological, religious, human point of
00:05:53.580that's all pretty evil i mean that right so on a basic level it's rotten exactly that's got to
00:06:01.420affect the behavior of the entire organization after a while oh my gosh yes i can't tell you
00:06:06.480how many times starting around the gs 13 level people would complain to me quietly sotto voce
00:06:15.300that um they had been passed over for promotion not because they hadn't met all the criteria for
00:06:22.600being promoted but because they weren't sleeping with one of the people on the promotion panel
00:06:27.180i don't know why i'm laughing used to have this joke at the cia tucker that when you go into a0.84
00:06:32.140conference room for briefing never touch the table because you don't know who was having sex on it
00:06:36.480last night that's so basically the cia is just like hollywood with guns with same moral structure
00:06:43.560really great way to say it hollywood with guns i'll tell you what i did um and and this is how
00:06:49.120I chose to live my life from the beginning of my career. My first wife was a ballet teacher. She
00:06:55.160had nothing whatsoever to do with the CIA. And so I would spend the day, you know, guns drawn,
00:07:04.040bulletproof vests, making high threat pitches. And I would go home and she'd say, how was your day?
00:07:09.880And I'd say, great. What'd you do? Nothing. See anybody? Nope. Exactly. And why lie?
00:07:18.420Just, I mean, that is a lie, but, you know, why go into the whole thing about, oh, listen, the meeting that I have tonight, it's going to be an important meeting, so I'm going to have to be out all night long.
00:07:39.640It's interesting if you take three steps back that you're describing a culture that is based on lying, that abets lying, that really is just itself a lie.
00:08:09.040I got divorced because of the CIA, because I chose that life over my ex-wife wanted me to move back to Ohio and sell insurance with her cousin.
00:08:19.900And I said, I would rather cut my throat than move to Ohio and sell insurance with your cousin.
00:08:26.260So, yeah, I chose the CIA over my first wife.
00:08:33.340I believed that, you know, this was God's work.
00:08:37.740I was I was working hard to keep the country safe and to protect Americans and to disrupt terrorist attacks and infiltrate terrorist groups.
00:08:46.100And, you know, at the end of the day, I realized that it was really every man for himself and everybody was lying.
00:08:55.340And not just lying, but actively punishing those who decide not to lie.
00:09:01.100I mean, that's that's kind of the crux of it.
00:09:02.740It's like, it's one thing to, you know, tell transactional lies because you think you're serving a greater good, but to hunt down and imprison truth-tellers is active evil.
00:09:14.440I mean, there's a difference, I think.
00:12:42.140One of the very first things that I saw when I first got to the CIA, well, not saw, I overheard.
00:12:50.000I overheard two psychiatrists from the CIA's Office of Medical Services, OMS, talking about
00:12:56.740how to push an employee over the edge because the guy just would not resign.
00:13:02.920And so a decision was made to make him crazy or to make him go crazy.
00:13:11.560And so they were discussing in the cafeteria, no less, how to push this guy over the edge so that he would either resign, have to go on a mental leave or commit suicide.0.96
00:14:38.360And we see it with the Armed Services Committee and to maybe a slightly lesser extent with the Foreign Affairs or Foreign Relations Committees.
00:14:46.760But the Intelligence Committees, forget it.
00:14:52.420Almost every single member of those committees, I know a bunch of them, has a dark personal life.
00:14:58.680And so it's impossible when Tom Cotton runs the Senate Intel Committee not to think like maybe there's a right, maybe these are people who are utterly controlled by the people they're supposed to be.
00:15:10.020Tucker, I'll tell you something funny.
00:15:12.640A sitting senator, a committee chairman, called me a few weeks ago and asked if I would come up for a private meeting.
00:15:19.300I said, of course. I'm a patriot. I want to serve my country. And if the senator needs my help, I run to Capitol Hill. And he told me that he was in a dispute with Tom Cotton. And I said, why don't you go to Leader Thune? And he said, I went to Thune. And Thune said he didn't want to get in the middle of a fight between two committee chairmen.
00:15:42.980i said well what the heck do you want me to do about it i mean seriously who am i i'm nobody
00:15:49.080and he said well i was kind of hoping maybe you could write something maybe for the post or the
00:15:54.080times calling him out i said why don't you write something for the post times calling him out
00:15:59.560right i've had enough trouble in my life you want me to take on the chairman of the senate
00:16:06.880Intelligence Committee. No thank you. I've done that. Was he afraid, do you think, the senator?
00:16:14.940Yes, I do. Of course. I do. The only reason we know that a lot of this stuff is real is because
00:16:22.240of you, and so I'm just so grateful. Because of you, the truth cannot be dismissed automatically
00:16:29.280as a conspiracy theory, so that is a huge contribution to mankind. Thank you. Thank you.
00:16:34.460John Curie. Thank you. Great to see you. All the best.