Valuetainment - September 23, 2019


Episode 370： CIA Chief Disguise Officer Opens Up


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 1 minute

Words per Minute

187.2671

Word Count

11,458

Sentence Count

1,070

Misogynist Sentences

11

Hate Speech Sentences

17


Summary

In this episode of Value Timing, host Patrick Medvetson sits down with a former Chief Dismasculine Officer who used to work for the CIA. They talk about what it takes to become a CIA agent, how to get into the organization, and what makes a good one.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 30 seconds, one time for the underdog, ignition sequence start, let me see you put em up, reach
00:00:09.240 the sky, turn the stars up above, cause it's one time for the underdog, one time for the
00:00:16.240 underdog.
00:00:17.320 I'm Patrick Medevi, your host of Value Timing, and today's sit down is with the former chief
00:00:21.060 disguise officer of the government who used to be with the CIA.
00:00:24.080 She gets paid to disguise faces so you don't recognize them.
00:00:27.780 Yes, that's exactly what she does, and it's very interesting, we got into the details
00:00:31.940 of what makes a great CIA agent, and her answer will shock you.
00:00:36.040 Jonah, good to have you on the show with us.
00:00:37.820 Good to be here.
00:00:38.520 So, what does it take to be a CIA agent?
00:00:40.800 I mean, how do I become a CIA agent?
00:00:42.220 If I'm growing up, I'm saying one day I want to be a CIA agent, how do I do it?
00:00:46.040 You know, most of the CIA people I met didn't grow up wanting to be one.
00:00:49.040 They all kind of, they came into it through all kinds of different doors.
00:00:53.040 The main motivation is a desire to serve your country, and they find very unique possibilities
00:01:02.100 in working for the CIA.
00:01:03.600 You're not working at GSA, you're not in the military, but you are supporting your country,
00:01:08.440 you're making a difference, you're doing a job that hopefully matters, and if you get
00:01:14.460 the right job, you probably can even enjoy doing it.
00:01:18.500 The motivation varies person to person, but everybody that I've ever known that worked
00:01:24.620 for the CIA treated it almost like it was a calling.
00:01:28.020 Almost like a calling?
00:01:29.160 They don't pop around to other jobs, they don't work there for three years and then go
00:01:33.200 off to the next job.
00:01:35.100 Got it.
00:01:35.600 They stay.
00:01:36.160 They might move around within CIA, but they stay within CIA.
00:01:39.340 Does the CIA recruit me, or do I go apply and say I'd like to work for you?
00:01:44.220 Because, you know, there's this, for those who are not in the world, they wonder, is somebody
00:01:48.660 coming out to recruit you, or is it you applying?
00:01:50.940 It goes both ways.
00:01:51.860 Okay.
00:01:52.320 My husband, Tony, he was an artist working in Denver.
00:01:55.660 He saw an ad in the paper, now this was years ago, it said, artist to work overseas for the
00:02:00.680 U.S. government.
00:02:01.480 He's an artist.
00:02:02.700 He's working at Martin Marietta.
00:02:04.680 He's doing wiring diagrams.
00:02:06.140 He's drawing them for harnesses for Titan II missiles.
00:02:09.900 This is not art.
00:02:11.060 He's an artist.
00:02:11.780 He wants, so he replied to the ad.
00:02:14.340 It was the CIA.
00:02:15.940 They wanted an artist.
00:02:17.320 You've got to be kidding me.
00:02:17.880 He's thinking, what would they do with an artist?
00:02:20.900 They need someone with exquisite hand-eye coordination to do some documents for them,
00:02:27.260 to copy some things for them.
00:02:29.360 You could call it counterfeiting.
00:02:31.400 You could call it forgery.
00:02:32.400 But that's what he was really, really good at, and that's what they hired him for.
00:02:36.960 And that's how he got into it?
00:02:38.120 That's how he got into it.
00:02:38.900 So let me ask you, so when he went to the interview, at what point did he find out it's the CIA?
00:02:43.520 The way he tells it, he's on the outskirts of Denver in a kind of seedy motel room with
00:02:48.620 the guy who's actually wearing a hat, and the guy pulls up a bottle of bourbon and sets it
00:02:52.980 on the table, pulls out a book full of classified ads from the CIA, goes, you read it.
00:03:01.180 I'm not sure, but this is what they're looking for.
00:03:04.620 He kind of knew then.
00:03:06.040 So he knew kind of then that that's the case?
00:03:07.860 He knew it wasn't just the U.S. government.
00:03:09.440 So at what point, so after that, is it kind of like either you accept or you don't?
00:03:14.320 Is there a follow-up process to it?
00:03:16.320 There's an enormous background investigation that is so slow and so thorough that a lot
00:03:24.060 of people just fall by the wayside.
00:03:25.760 They can't wait.
00:03:26.540 They can't wait that long.
00:03:27.680 A year?
00:03:28.580 Oh, it's one year.
00:03:29.700 At least, yeah.
00:03:32.020 So I sit down, I do an interview.
00:03:34.060 After that, there's about a year-plus process of them accepting me?
00:03:37.040 Very likely.
00:03:38.000 It's a year.
00:03:39.280 What are some things they want to know about me?
00:03:41.380 They want to know if you're being sent by a foreign government.
00:03:45.060 They want to know if you're really a patriotic American.
00:03:47.400 They want to know if you have any criminal background.
00:03:49.800 They want to know if you've ever been arrested for drugs.
00:03:52.440 They want, they'll go visit your neighbors, your teachers, your friends, parents.
00:03:58.580 They'll check you out thoroughly, thoroughly.
00:04:01.060 Calling references and talking to them in the most indirect way without bringing up the fact
00:04:04.540 that it's going to be...
00:04:05.980 One of my best friends told me years later, she said, you know, when you were in Europe
00:04:10.240 and you've been gone a while, this man came and knocked on the door.
00:04:13.820 He said, he was investigating you, she said, for the government.
00:04:17.660 And I told him, she said what I knew.
00:04:19.400 But she said, I thought maybe you had married some guy who was a janitor or something.
00:04:23.960 He wouldn't say where you were working.
00:04:25.320 He wouldn't say what you were doing or what the work was.
00:04:28.980 Just checking you out.
00:04:29.980 Wow.
00:04:30.320 And I know you had a friend of yours that didn't know you were a CI agent for 20 years
00:04:34.740 and she was hurt apparently that she found out later on.
00:04:37.000 I couldn't, I couldn't tell her.
00:04:38.700 We talked all the time.
00:04:40.460 And you still couldn't tell her?
00:04:41.520 I couldn't tell her.
00:04:42.260 So when people ask her what you did, what'd you tell them?
00:04:44.900 Independent.
00:04:46.160 Independent what?
00:04:46.800 Independent contractor?
00:04:47.880 It depended on where I was living.
00:04:49.840 Oh, it depended.
00:04:50.340 It depended on where I was living and what environment I was in.
00:04:55.020 And then I could carve out a piece of it and that's where I worked.
00:04:58.640 So here in Washington, D.C., you could say the Pentagon.
00:05:02.980 You could say State Department.
00:05:04.880 Sometimes it depended on who you were talking to.
00:05:07.560 Because if you already told me that you worked at State Department,
00:05:10.440 I'm not going to tell you that I do.
00:05:12.380 Got it.
00:05:12.880 If you're a heart surgeon, I'm not going to tell you I'm a heart surgeon too.
00:05:16.520 Got it.
00:05:16.860 So you had to kind of feel your way.
00:05:19.200 Got it.
00:05:20.000 Got it.
00:05:20.420 But you had to do that.
00:05:21.140 How were you recruited?
00:05:22.300 Mine is boring.
00:05:24.200 I married my first husband who worked for the agency.
00:05:28.120 I didn't know that he worked for the agency until right before the wedding.
00:05:31.740 We got married in Switzerland.
00:05:33.320 Then we went to the Far East and I needed a job.
00:05:35.720 So I got a job with the CIA at the station.
00:05:40.300 We came back home and I got another job.
00:05:42.980 I just kind of segued into it.
00:05:46.220 Worked your way up.
00:05:47.160 Yeah.
00:05:47.540 So the first reaction when he told you I'm a CIA agent, what was that like?
00:05:51.460 I was from Wichita, Kansas.
00:05:52.880 I don't think I even know what the CIA was back then.
00:05:55.560 Got it.
00:05:55.940 Yeah.
00:05:56.400 Got it.
00:05:56.800 It didn't register.
00:05:58.180 So you and your husband, you were 27 years CIA.
00:06:01.620 He was 52 years.
00:06:03.700 He was 25 years.
00:06:04.860 That's combined 27 years.
00:06:06.400 How was it being married to a CIA agent?
00:06:08.380 Were both of you are CIA agents?
00:06:10.060 Perfect.
00:06:10.740 Is it really?
00:06:12.340 It was and it wasn't.
00:06:13.940 Because we each understood what the other one was doing.
00:06:16.960 But we still couldn't necessarily talk about everything we were doing.
00:06:21.460 So I know I was, I never say where I worked.
00:06:27.020 I can't say where I worked.
00:06:27.940 I was in the subcontinent.
00:06:29.160 I came home.
00:06:29.860 He had a conference.
00:06:31.280 He said, tell me about that thing you're doing.
00:06:32.920 This is my boss.
00:06:34.300 He's my boss back then.
00:06:35.720 I said, well, I can't tell you.
00:06:36.860 Your husband was your boss back then.
00:06:39.100 He wasn't my husband.
00:06:40.820 He was just my boss.
00:06:42.260 He was two tiers up, my boss.
00:06:43.880 He said, tell me about that.
00:06:44.880 I said, I can't tell you about it.
00:06:46.660 You're not on the list.
00:06:48.340 You know, I told him later.
00:06:49.700 If I had known I was going to marry you years and years and years later, I would have maybe told you.
00:06:54.940 You told him that.
00:06:56.120 I did.
00:06:56.380 Do you trust him?
00:06:57.520 Do you trust being married to a CIA agent?
00:06:59.680 Like, because they know they're a pro like you as well.
00:07:02.400 How do you handle that?
00:07:04.240 That's really one of the key questions when you're working.
00:07:07.220 Yeah.
00:07:07.380 It's one of the real compliments you can give a colleague.
00:07:11.300 You can say, I would work with you.
00:07:12.740 I would work with you.
00:07:14.780 You know, we go off to far-flung places and where there's really no support and where everything you need, you have to have with you.
00:07:22.280 You have to pack that bag.
00:07:23.840 You have to trust that person to have your back.
00:07:26.440 It's a very symbiotic kind of relationship to say, I trust you.
00:07:31.520 I would work with you.
00:07:32.520 It's a big deal.
00:07:34.040 We would lie for a living.
00:07:36.860 So there was this thing called a moral compass.
00:07:40.040 We used to talk about it because we lied for a living.
00:07:43.820 But when we weren't working, you couldn't do any more lying.
00:07:47.200 I didn't know the difference.
00:07:48.140 It was that you had to make sure that you kept those two things separate.
00:07:53.140 It's important that you kept them separate.
00:07:54.740 Yeah, that's what I wonder.
00:07:55.800 Some of these, you know, Andre James, some of these no-goodniks that we had working for us, they just lost their way.
00:08:02.680 They really lost.
00:08:03.760 If there was ever a line for them, they lost it.
00:08:08.820 So when you're saying, I would work with you, there are some people obviously you wouldn't work with.
00:08:14.220 And you're saying that because you don't trust them.
00:08:16.480 I would not trust them with my operation or with my agent's life.
00:08:24.620 So then why would the CIA keep them?
00:08:28.660 So isn't that kind of a credibility for you to be able to say, if CIA trusts John, so will I, or that's not the case.
00:08:35.240 CIA could have John, but you may not still trust John and want to do an operation with him.
00:08:39.420 I might not think John was as accomplished as other people did.
00:08:44.560 There would be a difference of opinion there.
00:08:46.820 I would maybe not want to work with him.
00:08:50.100 Maybe I had worked with him, and I knew that when push came to shove, he wasn't there.
00:08:56.140 I had a boss like that.
00:08:58.340 I couldn't say I wouldn't work with him.
00:08:59.980 I had to work with him.
00:09:01.120 But when I did, it was, I had to cover all the bases and make sure that everything was right.
00:09:09.440 Because the thing I think about is, okay, you said somebody who gets into the CIA, it's not like I work three years,
00:09:14.600 then I'm going to go be a cop, then I'm going to go work sales at Sears, then I'm going to go sell shoes,
00:09:19.020 then I'm going to go do this.
00:09:20.520 They stay in it for a while.
00:09:21.880 Most of the people have, one time I had the regional, I was in California, I was part of Vistage.
00:09:26.500 Vistage is where they have entrepreneurs come to get us like a board.
00:09:29.720 One of the speakers we brought was the regional CIA director for West Coast, and we had him come speak.
00:09:35.500 And he spoke to us for an hour.
00:09:36.600 Questions we were asking, he couldn't tell his wife for 25 years, and he kind of told her he worked for the government,
00:09:41.780 but wouldn't tell her all this stuff.
00:09:42.800 But the question I asked, that I'm curious to know what you're going to say about this is,
00:09:46.980 so I work for the CIA, hypothetically, and all of a sudden, things are not working out.
00:09:53.600 I leave the CIA.
00:09:55.760 How does CIA control me not saying anything to anybody?
00:10:00.020 What is the accountability there?
00:10:02.400 They can't.
00:10:03.640 So I can say anything to anybody if I want to?
00:10:05.940 Not exactly.
00:10:07.360 For instance, this book that I've just written.
00:10:10.180 I can write down anything I want.
00:10:12.220 I can put it, it could be like a dictionary.
00:10:14.960 They have the right, everyone who works for the CIA signs away their right to the written word.
00:10:21.120 You can, you the CIA, can review my written words, and if you find something classified in there,
00:10:26.500 you have the right to remove it.
00:10:28.060 You cannot remove something that you don't like, just because you don't like it.
00:10:32.600 But if it's classified, if it reveals sources and methods, you can take it out.
00:10:36.540 And I agree to that in advance.
00:10:38.260 When I sign up for the CIA, I've agreed to that 27 years ago.
00:10:42.920 Got it.
00:10:43.500 And I know you were talking about when you wrote it.
00:10:45.600 They can control me that way, or any CIA employee that way.
00:10:50.180 When you're speaking publicly, I think most of us stay within the lines.
00:10:56.240 Now, if I went out of the lines and started talking to you about things that are still considered to be classified,
00:11:03.740 there probably is some sort of a resolution that could take me to court.
00:11:08.920 I don't know.
00:11:10.260 I know that they have taken authors to court who have refused to remove the material and had it published anyway.
00:11:18.320 And they've confiscated any money that was made from that book.
00:11:22.240 They will do that.
00:11:23.680 So there is repercussions if you do something.
00:11:26.040 If you write it.
00:11:26.920 If you, okay, if you write it.
00:11:28.180 But, okay, so I guess what I'm trying to find out is rogue agents.
00:11:31.680 You know, you see it in movies.
00:11:33.200 You read about it in fiction novels.
00:11:35.800 But I'm sure there's some also in real life that you deal with.
00:11:39.080 How does CIA hold them accountable?
00:11:41.320 Edward Howard was the first CIA officer who defected to the Soviet Union.
00:11:45.400 And he was, he did it because he was so ticked off, because CIA fired him.
00:11:52.220 And we fired him because he was stealing money from the coffee fund.
00:11:56.140 He had done a lot of drug use.
00:11:58.000 He had lied on his forms.
00:11:59.440 He wasn't really, he should never have been hired.
00:12:02.600 We were getting him ready for Moscow.
00:12:04.380 And then we fired him.
00:12:05.180 When we got him ready for Moscow, he learned the true names of some of the most important
00:12:11.940 agents we ever ran.
00:12:13.980 And when he was fired, he went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, contacted the Russians, told them
00:12:21.640 all the names, all the people that he had, that he had learned about.
00:12:25.080 The case that he was to have run was a man named Tolkachev.
00:12:30.320 There's a book about him recently called The Billion Dollar Spy.
00:12:33.560 It's one of the best spies ever, that the CIA ever had.
00:12:37.600 CIA ever had?
00:12:38.780 Ever had.
00:12:39.440 In our history, we, that man provided us with billions of dollars in savings.
00:12:45.700 He gave us, he gave us the schematics, the blueprints, the, all of the information about
00:12:50.360 their next generation radar on airborne and on the ground.
00:12:54.440 He gave us everything.
00:12:56.140 The Pentagon said, oh my God, we don't have to do all this R&D.
00:12:59.980 We'll start building the countermeasures now.
00:13:02.100 And they did.
00:13:03.200 So we're able to build the defenses for what they have not even yet built.
00:13:08.440 This was just, it was remarkable.
00:13:10.120 It was solid gold.
00:13:12.060 And one of our guys, actually two of our guys, betrayed him.
00:13:15.780 And they arrested him.
00:13:16.980 And they executed him.
00:13:18.280 Because that's what they do.
00:13:20.220 Betrayed him.
00:13:22.060 Betrayed.
00:13:22.380 They executed the agent that saved billions or they executed the two?
00:13:25.640 Billions.
00:13:26.100 They executed the Russian.
00:13:28.980 And our American CIA employee, who betrayed everyone, went to Moscow.
00:13:35.660 Is he executed?
00:13:36.680 He was, he defected, he went to Moscow.
00:13:39.040 He's still active.
00:13:39.880 He's still working.
00:13:40.520 He died.
00:13:41.160 He died.
00:13:41.800 We're not sure he wasn't killed.
00:13:43.560 You're not sure he wasn't killed?
00:13:44.760 I'm not sure.
00:13:45.420 Do you know how long he lasted working or you don't have any idea?
00:13:47.860 I'm assuming this is like in the 70s when this happened.
00:13:51.580 How long did he work for the CIA?
00:13:53.260 No.
00:13:53.740 So post-CIA, he went to Russia.
00:13:55.620 How long was he with them?
00:13:57.140 I think he was there about 10 years.
00:13:59.120 He was there for about, I mean, that's plenty of time to give them up.
00:14:01.240 Oh, he gave them everything he had.
00:14:03.800 How much are you following what's taking place with Huawei, with the China, you know, the China cellular company with 5G?
00:14:10.200 The 5G thing.
00:14:10.820 What do you think about the fact that the boss of UK's CIA, their intelligence goes and works for Huawei and he gets approval from David Cameron to be hired by them?
00:14:21.780 I find it amazing.
00:14:23.120 You're okay with that?
00:14:23.940 I don't know.
00:14:25.440 I was just in the CIA talking to our director of DDS&T, science and technology, and she was saying she's a woman.
00:14:34.840 CIA, by the way, is run by a woman.
00:14:37.400 Four of the five top people at CIA right now.
00:14:39.600 They are women, too.
00:14:40.720 Not that I'm a feminist.
00:14:43.220 She was expressing concern about that.
00:14:44.980 That's kind of what she wanted to talk about.
00:14:46.560 We need to keep the edge there and we are losing the edge and what are we going to do about it?
00:14:51.160 That's kind of like Comey going and working for Samsung.
00:14:55.860 You could put it that way.
00:14:56.980 Wouldn't that be kind of weird if that happens?
00:14:58.540 Am I the only one that thinks that's weird for the former intelligence boss of UK to work for Huawei in 2010 and accept the job?
00:15:05.540 No, I think it's, I don't know enough about it to really discuss it, but in broad generalities it seems very, it seemed absolutely wrong.
00:15:13.220 The only thing I think about, I think about like, I bring that to US because to us we're not UK, we're not China, so that's their deal what they're doing.
00:15:18.460 It's not our business, but in UK, in US, if something like that were to happen, do companies typically go and hire CIA agents, former CIA agents that you've seen yourself or not really?
00:15:29.380 I know that some members of CIA I know go out into commercial, when they retire, they go out into the commercial landscape and they do this and they do that.
00:15:40.380 The ones I know, I don't know of problems with them.
00:15:42.660 I don't know really how that's controlled.
00:15:44.220 That's not something that I personally followed.
00:15:46.680 Got it. From your experience of being in it for 27 years and now, you know, with husband, you know, first husband, second husband, what made an ideal CIA agent?
00:15:57.020 If there were certain things to say, these were the qualities of somebody that was very good at it.
00:16:01.100 I know you said we were professional liars, we will, you know, pay to know how to lie, but what made it, what made somebody a prolific CIA agent?
00:16:09.180 If my husband was here, this is the question that he would love to answer.
00:16:14.940 One of the qualities that you need to have as a CIA officer, there's a dichotomy, because the people that we search for, we're talking operational now, we're talking, say, case officers.
00:16:25.240 We want big personalities. We want gregarious people. We want people with really strong interpersonal skills.
00:16:33.920 It's a big part of their job that they be able to approach people all over the world and convince them that they want to be our friend and they want to work for us.
00:16:43.860 We can't even teach this stuff to them. We have to find those people.
00:16:47.420 Wow.
00:16:47.960 Or they have to find us. And they are usually larger than life personalities. That's why we hire them. We know them when we see them.
00:16:55.700 And then we have to say to those guys, it's almost always guys, by the way, you could almost save the world tomorrow and you can't ever tell anybody what you did.
00:17:06.440 You could recruit one of these Soviet agents that's going to give us billions of dollars worth of intelligence, but you can never acknowledge the fact that you were involved.
00:17:17.420 You can never, ever expect to get any pat on the back, any, anything. Your ego has to be big enough that you can just swallow this and you have to have this approval that comes from within and you have to be able to think that that is enough.
00:17:36.840 That's a very hard thing. And a lot of people that start out wanting to work for us, they say, no, thank you. No, I can't do that. I can't do that.
00:17:47.020 Oh, my God. I just thought about a bunch of personalities. Let me bring an A-type personality that's good to talk to people and it's driven and competitive.
00:17:53.520 Goes gets the job done, but there's no celebration. That's right.
00:17:56.360 Babe, you won't believe what I did today. I was dealing with this Russian guy.
00:17:59.420 But I can't tell you. I can't tell you what happened there.
00:18:01.300 I can't tell you what I did today. That's the top. That's the pinnacle. That's the high quality.
00:18:04.960 Yeah. Tony thought that that was a sort of a romantic quality, that your approval comes from within. He felt that way.
00:18:14.760 Was he like that himself? Because he was an artist. He was creative. I'm assuming he had a big personality.
00:18:18.740 He did. He did. Although the Parkinson's took away that big personality.
00:18:24.660 So when Ben Affleck played Tony Mendez in the movie Argo, Tony and Ben Affleck went on George Stepanopoulos' show.
00:18:34.740 Good Morning America. Stepanopoulos said, Ben, a lot of people think you really underplayed that character.
00:18:41.220 And Ben said, have you met him? He's a very quiet guy.
00:18:45.360 And Tony just sat over there very quietly. Because Parkinson's just sucks that stuff out of you.
00:18:52.160 My husband was not a quiet man. He was a thoughtful man, but he wasn't a quiet man.
00:18:56.280 Well, I wonder how Ben played the role. Because is Ben playing how he is today or how he was before?
00:19:01.440 Ben played the man he met.
00:19:03.540 Ben played the man he met, but he wasn't like that.
00:19:05.740 But the man he met had Parkinson's. But Ben didn't know that he had Parkinson's.
00:19:09.680 We hadn't told anybody. So Ben just thought, oh, he's a quiet guy.
00:19:12.520 Did Ben interview with you to kind of get an idea from your end on how he was?
00:19:16.520 No. He spent more time with Tony than he did with me.
00:19:20.000 He spent some time with Tony. And Tony didn't say, Ben, by the way, I have Parkinson's.
00:19:24.500 And, you know, this is not me.
00:19:26.460 So Ben just played the guy he met. And he made a fabulous movie.
00:19:31.320 I mean, it was a great movie.
00:19:31.740 Oh, it was an incredible movie.
00:19:32.840 I mean, listen, my dad watched the movie and he got emotional watching the movie because his sister, my aunt, was stuck in the embassy when that took place.
00:19:41.060 So while we were watching this, he couldn't even watch the movie.
00:19:44.640 He says, I sat in the theater after it was over, but I can't even leave because my body was in shock watching this.
00:19:49.940 It reminded me of what I had to my sister.
00:19:52.000 I can't imagine how that must have felt.
00:19:54.580 It was very realistic what they did.
00:19:56.120 That airport scenes in particular were just, even if you didn't know somebody there, they were still emotional.
00:20:01.920 I can't imagine his reaction.
00:20:03.760 Yeah, no doubt.
00:20:04.600 Yeah, it's a very, very well-made movie.
00:20:11.780 And the way the whole story, you read about it.
00:20:14.060 So the part about ARGO, one thing I read is the fact that there's this 30-year rule.
00:20:17.740 Is that true or is that just something we, us citizens, hear about?
00:20:21.060 Like you can't tell a story of what happened for 30 years and then we can talk about it.
00:20:25.760 Is there such thing as a 30-year rule?
00:20:27.580 No, not that I know of.
00:20:28.040 Because I know it was 78 and the movie came out right after 2008 and that's 30-plus years.
00:20:33.020 Not that you know of.
00:20:33.920 I still, I still, we've got other books.
00:20:36.560 We've talked about other operations.
00:20:38.000 We couldn't say where they took place.
00:20:39.840 We still can't say where they took place.
00:20:42.260 I don't think there's a 30-year rule.
00:20:43.740 So how about this?
00:20:44.440 I know one of the things I was watching you talk about was how to tell a spy.
00:20:47.700 Like you're a spy.
00:20:48.400 How can you tell somebody else is a spy?
00:20:50.720 You know what I mean?
00:20:51.760 So you're dealing with somebody else.
00:20:53.200 How can you tell?
00:20:53.740 How do you read that?
00:20:54.280 You mean on the street or one-to-one or?
00:20:57.280 One-to-one is what I'm talking about.
00:20:58.940 Oh, I think you, I think it takes time and meticulous attention to detail and asking them
00:21:04.260 about their past and assessing them and watching how they respond to various things.
00:21:11.380 They're almost signals that you give off.
00:21:13.100 On the street, it's easier than sitting in a bar with a beer.
00:21:16.680 Sitting in a bar with a beer, everybody just gets comfortable and you have this conversation.
00:21:21.100 It's hard to tell.
00:21:22.120 But if you're worried about surveillance, if you're out on the street, you can see somebody
00:21:27.280 who's worried about surveillance.
00:21:28.760 So they have all kinds of body language that they give off.
00:21:31.300 All little ticks, little glances and little tying shoes and looking in windows and, you
00:21:37.220 know, you can kind of see it.
00:21:38.520 So our officers in Moscow, we trained them not to do any of those things.
00:21:43.680 We trained them not to look for surveillance, but to always assume they were there because
00:21:48.480 they always were there.
00:21:50.340 So don't go looking over your shoulder.
00:21:52.480 Don't go trying to, you know, jaywalk across the street or dive into a metro thing and you'll
00:21:57.920 lose them.
00:21:58.240 You won't lose them.
00:21:59.420 They'll just know that you're a spy.
00:22:00.480 You will solidify their suspicion that you are a spy and they'll come in tighter.
00:22:06.420 They will.
00:22:07.160 And if you're in a car, they'll do this thing called bumper locking you.
00:22:10.400 They'll get so tight on your car that you can't do anything.
00:22:14.680 You have to go home.
00:22:16.200 So I remember one of the stories you talked about that there was these two spies talking
00:22:20.660 to one another and they were counting.
00:22:22.760 And they said one, two, three, and that's not how they count.
00:22:25.260 What was that story about?
00:22:26.280 That was a movie.
00:22:27.820 That was a scene in a movie.
00:22:29.760 What was it called?
00:22:31.080 Some of the bastards.
00:22:32.720 Glorious?
00:22:33.400 Glorious Bastards.
00:22:34.340 It was a great movie.
00:22:35.220 I loved that movie.
00:22:36.440 It was a scene in a bar.
00:22:38.020 There was an Englishman, a German, and they were ordering more beers.
00:22:43.120 And the Englishman who was pretending to be a German held up the wrong fingers.
00:22:47.260 He ordered three beers to the bar.
00:22:49.840 He just put his fingers up.
00:22:51.080 And the German just sat up, looked at him because all of a sudden he knew that that man
00:22:56.180 wasn't a German.
00:22:57.360 A German wouldn't do that.
00:22:58.420 A German would do that.
00:23:00.220 It was just a small thing.
00:23:02.140 And I mean, it ended up being one of the goriest scenes I've ever seen of shooting everyone
00:23:07.040 in that bar, including the bartender.
00:23:08.860 Everyone died because of the fingers.
00:23:12.540 But it made a point.
00:23:13.420 The point was you have to be really careful about all the small things.
00:23:17.160 It's very easy.
00:23:17.660 How true is that though?
00:23:18.560 How true is that?
00:23:19.380 Are those types of tales you pay attention to?
00:23:22.720 Sure.
00:23:23.300 Yeah.
00:23:23.560 Around the world.
00:23:24.160 I mean, if you're working in a foreign country, you want to know, what are the basics here?
00:23:28.040 What do I not do?
00:23:29.940 Some places you don't touch someone's head.
00:23:32.580 Everyone has these areas you shouldn't go into.
00:23:35.760 But in general, if you flip it on its head, a lot of Americans want to know, how do they
00:23:41.980 know I'm American when I haven't opened my mouth?
00:23:44.280 How do they see me when I'm just part of a crowd?
00:23:50.060 And it's fun to go down that list and the telltale signs that we all give off.
00:23:55.700 You know, when I lived in the Middle East, I had to go to the airport maybe once a week
00:24:00.380 and greet a CIA officer coming in on a plane, coming in temporary duty, TDY.
00:24:06.380 I never would know them.
00:24:08.080 I wouldn't know what they look like.
00:24:09.420 I'd only know that a 747 is going to land, usually at 3 in the morning, because that's
00:24:13.560 a good time to bring those planes in.
00:24:16.100 And you're looking for your CIA guy.
00:24:18.440 And I could stand there and watch this crowd disembark, disembark, disembark, and I could
00:24:24.500 walk up to a guy and say, excuse me, is your name Jim?
00:24:27.600 And I'd take him to the driver and we'd take him into town.
00:24:31.060 I could find CIA people that way.
00:24:33.000 It was like a profile that I could see.
00:24:36.080 He wasn't a tourist.
00:24:37.800 He wasn't a foreigner.
00:24:38.960 How could you tell, though?
00:24:40.940 Because there was like a dress code, like almost a haircut.
00:24:46.280 But we, it's like you could tell a military guy from a group of civilians.
00:24:51.840 You could see if there's a Marine in there, you could tell a Marine from the other military
00:24:56.080 guys.
00:24:57.500 There are all these subcategories.
00:24:59.760 I could find my CIA guy, by the way he dressed, by the way, by the bags he was carrying, by everything.
00:25:06.860 You could see him.
00:25:08.380 Well, they could see us like that.
00:25:10.540 What was the best kind of intel, by the way?
00:25:12.480 Was it pictures?
00:25:13.360 Was it audio?
00:25:14.020 Was it video?
00:25:14.620 What's the best intel you got?
00:25:16.280 The best intel I ever got, that we ever got.
00:25:19.680 I'm having a conversation with a major bibliophile in the intelligence community.
00:25:24.980 Okay.
00:25:25.280 Because it has to do with cameras versus satellites.
00:25:27.920 And I said in this book that my cameras, I call them my cameras, but it's my account.
00:25:33.920 We had cameras that we could put in a pen.
00:25:36.320 And we did put them in a pen.
00:25:38.040 And it was a film camera.
00:25:40.380 But you could still write with it.
00:25:42.020 You could flip it over and you could take pictures with it.
00:25:44.560 And your boss came in and you could flip it over and make a note.
00:25:48.520 Take him to lunch.
00:25:49.920 Or you could put it in a woman's lipstick.
00:25:52.180 You could have your lipstick at your desk.
00:25:54.260 You'd be taking pictures.
00:25:55.360 Your boss walks in.
00:25:56.320 You could screw it up, freshen your lipstick, drop it in your purse, head off.
00:26:01.360 Those cameras, we could put them in Bic lighters.
00:26:04.340 We could put them in key fobs.
00:26:05.740 We could put them in anything.
00:26:08.220 No one knew they were there.
00:26:09.780 And you would, out of the camera, you would get a piece of film like this.
00:26:13.360 It'd have a hundred tiny dots on it.
00:26:15.860 And every dot, about the size of a period at the end of a sentence, was a full eight and a half by 11 page of text.
00:26:23.480 Come on.
00:26:24.900 Hopefully, of the minutes of the meeting or the agenda for the meeting, because we were looking for plans and intentions.
00:26:34.960 And you want those documents.
00:26:39.040 That's what we were collecting.
00:26:40.080 Now, my bibliographic friend says, well, the satellites, they were holding their own, and they were fabulous, right?
00:26:48.680 But the satellites were collecting what was already there.
00:26:52.480 They were telling you the status quo.
00:26:54.540 You could count the missiles.
00:26:55.880 Think of Cuba.
00:26:56.560 You could see what was on the ground.
00:26:59.760 And that was valuable information.
00:27:02.560 The plans and intentions was more valuable.
00:27:05.200 This is my case.
00:27:06.340 So I'm thinking today, what if you had someone in North Korea who had the today's equivalent of that?
00:27:14.500 And what if he's in those meetings?
00:27:16.320 Wouldn't you like to know what he's thinking?
00:27:18.980 What the leader of North Korea, what he's talking to his top, or Putin?
00:27:25.100 Wouldn't you love to have that camera in the room?
00:27:27.420 I would.
00:27:29.180 That's the kind of information.
00:27:30.780 We had an agent in Moscow who gave us the SALT 1 and SALT 2 positions of the Soviet Union before they went into the negotiations.
00:27:44.720 We knew the cards they were holding.
00:27:46.880 We knew what their lowest bids would be, their highest bids would be.
00:27:52.660 We had the guy with the radar.
00:27:54.320 We had Pinkovsky, one of the first agents that we ever really, really worked with in Moscow.
00:28:01.280 He gave to John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
00:28:05.620 He had all of the information about the missiles in Cuba.
00:28:08.480 He knew how many.
00:28:09.640 He knew their state of readiness.
00:28:11.480 He knew their range, their throw weight.
00:28:14.140 Kennedy had all this information on his desk.
00:28:16.740 When he was having that standoff with Nikita Khrushchev, he had the information that gave him the ability to call his bluff, put up that blockade, stop that thing in its tracks.
00:28:29.740 That's what good intelligence produces, and it's not always visible at the time.
00:28:35.440 Later on, these stories come out when the equities, when the intelligence equities are no longer going to be threatened.
00:28:42.720 But good intelligence is fabulous.
00:28:47.620 Based on what you're saying, if you know my intentions, you can find out someone's intentions versus how many missiles you have.
00:28:55.600 I mean, you're pretty much getting that country's next five moves, strategies on what they're going to be doing.
00:29:01.100 When we were chasing bin Laden, Tony was, you know, and the media was always saying, gee, it's too bad we don't have somebody in his camp.
00:29:08.360 And I was always thinking, how do you know we don't have somebody in this camp?
00:29:14.100 I mean, how do you know that?
00:29:15.080 You don't know that.
00:29:16.320 Tony said, not just someone, he said, you want his cook.
00:29:19.880 You want to recruit whoever's cooking for bin Laden.
00:29:22.760 That's the person you want.
00:29:24.340 They're going to hear every conversation that goes on.
00:29:27.080 But that was a tough nut.
00:29:29.640 You had to be a member of the family.
00:29:31.240 You had to, you know, you couldn't get in the circle without belonging to his family, practically.
00:29:39.460 That was tough.
00:29:40.720 Yeah, that sounds like it would be tough.
00:29:43.260 So how much, based on what you saw that was taking place versus what the media was reporting, how accurate was that?
00:29:49.320 You know, my friend's in the military, and he served 20 years, and he went from Army to Special Forces to highest level, similar to Navy SEAL Team 6.
00:29:59.160 And he had a presidential clearance, and he worked on the, you know, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, all this stuff.
00:30:04.820 And he would say, I said, which media do you trust?
00:30:07.040 He said, I don't trust anybody.
00:30:08.520 He says, half the time we'd be watching stuff.
00:30:10.040 That's not true.
00:30:10.880 I'm actually, I'm in it, and what you're saying is not true.
00:30:13.500 How did you feel when you're looking at the news, watching news, saying, they have no clue what they're talking about.
00:30:17.160 Did you ever feel that way?
00:30:19.320 I never really felt that they didn't know what they were talking about, but I sometimes felt that I knew some things that they didn't know that would come out someday and probably change their mind.
00:30:28.780 You know, that's having, and when I left the CIA, my friend said, that's what you're going to miss.
00:30:33.200 You're going to miss that inside knowledge, because it's kind of a, it's sort of a powerful thing.
00:30:39.020 It's powerful, but you can't use it.
00:30:41.020 It's interesting to pick up the paper and say, give it two days, and there'll be another story there.
00:30:46.500 That's, that's interesting.
00:30:48.240 I think, I think the attitude toward the media has changed today.
00:30:51.480 We weren't questioning the media like we are now.
00:30:54.200 We, we weren't relying on the media the same way that we are now.
00:31:00.020 Yeah.
00:31:01.320 Questioned and relied.
00:31:02.620 So you're saying we didn't question, neither did we rely on it.
00:31:07.200 The media had nothing to do with what we were doing.
00:31:10.320 We weren't working for them.
00:31:11.620 We weren't providing them information.
00:31:12.940 We were, we were a conduit to the policy makers in Washington, D.C.
00:31:17.180 Politics also didn't really play a part.
00:31:19.700 When I was working, I didn't really know the politics of the people I was working with.
00:31:25.260 It wasn't part of the conversation.
00:31:27.300 It didn't come up.
00:31:28.720 And I think people weren't as, as polarized into their positions then.
00:31:35.400 So it wasn't an issue.
00:31:37.300 It was, everybody went out and voted, but we never asked anybody who they voted for.
00:31:41.480 Would you vote?
00:31:42.060 Yeah, would you do?
00:31:42.540 It wasn't a conversation thing.
00:31:43.480 So I've heard of CEOs, chief executive officer, chief marketing officer, chief operating officer.
00:31:49.160 What is a chief disguise officer?
00:31:51.300 Ah, it was a great job.
00:31:53.680 Chief of disguise at the CIA was, had a worldwide staff.
00:31:57.920 Had people positioned around the world, forward deployed like the military does,
00:32:01.480 so they could respond very, very quickly.
00:32:03.780 Had a big budget, a robust budget.
00:32:05.980 And we used disguise everywhere in the world, but we used it in Moscow in different ways
00:32:12.840 because it was such a difficult place to work.
00:32:16.840 It drove a lot of our technology.
00:32:18.880 Moscow did.
00:32:19.540 How to defeat Moscow.
00:32:21.440 My husband, Tony, had started some R&D on masks early on, 10 years before me, when he was in disguise.
00:32:31.020 When I came into disguise, that was starting to produce some fruit.
00:32:35.980 And one of the first masks that came out of production was for me.
00:32:41.200 It was an African-American man.
00:32:44.000 It looked good.
00:32:45.320 It looked fabulous.
00:32:46.960 And gloves.
00:32:48.860 So I showed it to my office director.
00:32:51.120 We took it to the head of CIA, Bill Webster.
00:32:53.780 He said, oh, my God, let's take it to the White House.
00:32:57.300 I said, I can't.
00:32:58.640 It looks good, but I can't, you know, I can't really walk it and talk it.
00:33:02.240 This is not realistic.
00:33:03.760 It's just to show you the capability.
00:33:05.280 He said, well, then go make one that you can wear.
00:33:08.280 So we did.
00:33:10.080 We made a second one that turned me into a younger, prettier, better coughed woman.
00:33:20.260 I loved this mask.
00:33:22.300 I wanted to take it home, but they wouldn't let me.
00:33:24.660 So Judge Webster liked it, and he said, well, let's take it to the White House.
00:33:29.580 I said, I don't have any idea.
00:33:30.700 I have nothing.
00:33:31.520 He said, don't worry.
00:33:32.240 Just, you know, come with me.
00:33:33.900 And so we did.
00:33:34.560 I went to his house.
00:33:36.520 I was met at the door by the judge and his dog.
00:33:38.620 The dog didn't like me, barked at me.
00:33:40.200 And incessantly, I went in the powder room.
00:33:42.640 I put on the mask.
00:33:43.500 I got everything right.
00:33:44.920 Came out.
00:33:45.540 Dog loved me.
00:33:47.520 They say dogs don't like hats, but evidently dogs like masks.
00:33:51.060 So we went to the White House.
00:33:52.300 We got stuck outside of the Oval Office because they were going long.
00:33:55.580 And there was like a 10-minute period that was, I was a little paranoid.
00:34:00.820 I'd never worn one of these masks before in public, and you get nervous.
00:34:05.320 Nobody paid any attention, of course.
00:34:07.260 So I relaxed.
00:34:08.560 We went in the Oval Office.
00:34:11.120 There was a circle of us.
00:34:13.280 Brince Gowcroft, Bob Gates, John Sununu, Judge Webster, me, and another briefer.
00:34:22.000 And I went first.
00:34:23.500 I was the first one.
00:34:24.360 So I showed him some photographs of disguises we had done for him when he was chief of disguise.
00:34:30.120 I said, you might remember these.
00:34:32.020 He did.
00:34:33.020 I said, so I'm here to show you the next level.
00:34:36.320 He said, so show me.
00:34:37.880 I said, well, I'm wearing it.
00:34:40.140 And I'll take it off and show it to you.
00:34:41.600 And he said, no, no, no, no, don't take it off.
00:34:43.840 And he got up.
00:34:44.900 He came out.
00:34:46.180 He walked.
00:34:46.840 And he looked.
00:34:47.480 He went behind me.
00:34:48.180 He was checking it out.
00:34:49.660 He went back.
00:34:50.920 He sat down.
00:34:51.520 He said, take it off.
00:34:53.040 So I just peeled off my face.
00:34:57.660 John Sununu wasn't paying any attention to me because he was making notes.
00:35:02.820 He was going to go next.
00:35:04.220 He had some things he wanted to say to the president.
00:35:07.000 He glanced up.
00:35:08.720 He almost fell off his chair.
00:35:10.420 He was a big man.
00:35:11.480 And he was startled.
00:35:13.840 Bush really liked it.
00:35:15.060 Bush was smiling.
00:35:17.320 So we talked a few minutes.
00:35:19.100 It was a successful deployment.
00:35:21.760 I was the first one to leave.
00:35:23.580 I went out to play with the dog, Millie, and her puppies.
00:35:27.100 And the White House photographer came out.
00:35:28.880 She had been in the meeting, going around, taking pictures.
00:35:32.620 She came out and said, what did you do?
00:35:34.440 What was that?
00:35:35.380 What was that?
00:35:36.700 I said, I can't tell you.
00:35:38.900 He said, it was classified.
00:35:41.240 So it was a successful briefing.
00:35:45.760 Ten years later, I got a copy of a photograph, her photograph, that they had airbrushed the
00:35:53.920 mask out.
00:35:55.320 And this is the only photograph I ever got.
00:35:57.260 So I'm sitting in front of the president's desk with my hand in the air, holding the mask,
00:36:01.980 showing it to him, and they airbrushed it out.
00:36:04.860 So the picture in my library, I don't know what you would think I'm doing, but people say
00:36:10.240 that's...
00:36:10.400 They airbrushed the mask out.
00:36:12.260 Yeah.
00:36:12.780 It was classified.
00:36:14.380 They gave me the picture of me...
00:36:15.820 I mean, I've seen the picture, but you can't tell...
00:36:17.380 Well, you're seeing the recent pictures, because now we can talk about masks.
00:36:22.020 A year ago, I could not tell you this story.
00:36:24.860 It was still considered classified.
00:36:25.540 Why could you say it now?
00:36:26.860 Because they have allowed it now.
00:36:29.080 Which, to me, you know, what does that mean?
00:36:33.740 Sources and methods are classified.
00:36:36.120 This evidently is no longer classified.
00:36:38.820 Perhaps they're not using these anymore.
00:36:40.980 Or maybe they've gotten...
00:36:42.060 Wow.
00:36:42.280 It's so good that what I'm saying has nothing to do with the new ones.
00:36:47.100 I think that's more like it.
00:36:48.760 Let me ask you, how many times you guys made masks for presidents to distract the audience?
00:36:53.120 Like, are there duplicates out there as well that we don't know about, or we can't know
00:36:56.500 the answer to that question?
00:36:57.980 For the president?
00:36:58.880 Yes.
00:36:59.580 No.
00:36:59.880 No.
00:37:00.880 Never?
00:37:00.920 No.
00:37:01.420 No.
00:37:01.920 No.
00:37:02.420 Not that you know of, or never?
00:37:03.840 I would guess never.
00:37:05.560 What I know of is never.
00:37:08.060 You know what I'm asking, right?
00:37:09.380 And so there's, you know, I don't know.
00:37:12.400 Saddam had all these.
00:37:13.520 Yes.
00:37:13.760 Is that what you're talking about?
00:37:14.700 We have a picture of Saddam in a boat on the Bosphorus or something with his 26 doubles.
00:37:21.820 They're all paddling.
00:37:22.660 It's like 26 Saddams.
00:37:23.880 Have you seen this picture?
00:37:25.060 I have seen it.
00:37:25.540 They all look exactly alike.
00:37:26.920 It's brilliant.
00:37:27.440 So we've never done that, that you know about.
00:37:29.600 No.
00:37:30.080 There's a long, great history of presidents doing that.
00:37:33.180 Okay.
00:37:33.640 But I don't know that we've ever done that.
00:37:35.000 I got it.
00:37:35.660 Okay.
00:37:36.240 Very cool.
00:37:36.800 I mean, Winston Churchill did that.
00:37:38.760 Lots of people have done that.
00:37:40.840 George MacArthur is supposed to have done that.
00:37:44.460 I used to have, when I was chief of disguise, I'd get calls from the seventh floor.
00:37:49.200 They were going to have a party.
00:37:50.340 There was going to be a presentation.
00:37:52.260 There'd be something on.
00:37:53.000 Could we do some disguise scenario for them?
00:37:55.440 What's the seventh floor?
00:37:56.380 When you say seventh floor?
00:37:57.820 That's the suits.
00:37:59.440 Okay.
00:37:59.820 That's the upper level.
00:38:01.240 Got it.
00:38:01.900 We always said no.
00:38:03.380 We said this is not an entertainment.
00:38:06.400 I was a hard ass when I was there.
00:38:11.800 How much tougher is CIO's job today with social media?
00:38:17.980 Or is it easier today because all these cameras are, you know, you have so much footage because
00:38:22.860 your camera guys are pretty much seven billion camera people going around with their phones
00:38:25.840 recording.
00:38:26.380 Is it much easier to do their work today or when you were?
00:38:29.720 It probably cuts both ways.
00:38:31.440 I would imagine it's, it's, yeah, there's a phone in every pocket on the one hand.
00:38:36.800 On the other hand, if you're trying to use a cover identity, if you're trying to use a disguise, and
00:38:43.700 if you don't have a telephone in your pocket that mirrors that face and that background,
00:38:50.560 and I mean, you know, your shopping history, your everything, your driver's license, you
00:38:55.360 have to have your whole lifetime in that phone in your pocket when you approach an immigration or a desk clerk at a hotel in a foreign land, you have to, it all has to match.
00:39:07.820 That's hard.
00:39:08.820 On the other hand, we were the technical arm of CIA.
00:39:12.780 We were the Q. We were the ones that did the bugs. We did the phone taps. We did the fake identities. We did the disguises. We did the audio. All the technical stuff that our case officers needed, we did.
00:39:27.120 We can take those same tools that are making it so hard today and use them in a positive way to make it easier for us. It's an offensive and a defensive tool, so they can do it too. It's a, it's, it's, it's this kind of ridiculous battle.
00:39:41.260 Everyone though has an audio bug in their pocket. Everybody has an encrypted communication device in their pocket.
00:39:46.760 Everybody, that's right.
00:39:47.480 Everybody has a miniature camera in their pocket.
00:39:49.580 And are you yourself, since you were in that world, are you paranoid about PCs, computers, iPhones, smartphones?
00:39:57.120 The camera on the phone. Are you, are you paranoid about it? Cause you were in the world. Cause you know more than we do if that, if that stuff is used.
00:40:04.120 I pay attention to what I put online. I don't bank online. For instance, I'm, you know, I'm not sure you can save yourself anymore because your bank is online.
00:40:14.120 If you're not, they are, and they could still get hacked. The thing that, the thing that makes me paranoid is Alexa.
00:40:21.120 Alexa, I got to tell you, I have Alexis all over my house and she's doing my window blind. She's doing my lampshade.
00:40:28.120 She's telling me the weather. She's so I'm like, I wonder what else Alexa is doing. And that's a silly form of paranoia, but.
00:40:36.120 But it's normal. It's a lot of people. I have a 32 year old employee at my home office. His name is Mario.
00:40:41.120 He started off getting everybody on Alexa. And the other day he's like, I'm not using my Alexa anymore because he's, you know, she's listening to what I'm doing. I'm paranoid.
00:40:48.120 So he threw away his Alexa. And this is a 32 year old guy. That's paranoid about Alexa. So I don't think you're alone.
00:40:54.120 Every once in a while, my Alexa kind of spurts out a comment that has nothing to do with anything. I didn't say anything to her.
00:41:00.120 I'm walking by and she just says something. I'm like, you know, so it's, it's kind of a joke, but yeah, it's, it's a sign of what's coming.
00:41:10.120 How often were, were CIA, like for instance, you work at a company, I work at Google, I work at Amazon, I work at Morgan Stanley, Merrill.
00:41:19.120 Are there employees who could potentially be CIA employees, CIA agents or no?
00:41:24.120 CIA agents strictly works for the agency.
00:41:27.120 Not necessarily.
00:41:29.120 We have CIA agents undercover.
00:41:33.120 We have them working with private industry overseas.
00:41:37.120 You always have to remember that our, our mission, our assignment is foreign intelligence, FI it's called.
00:41:44.120 We're collecting FI.
00:41:46.120 Our people typically overseas.
00:41:47.120 If, if, if the work is being done here in the States or the targets in the States, it's probably the FBI is doing the work.
00:41:53.120 So take the overseas piece of it.
00:41:55.120 We've had people undercover in, in various large American organizations that the cover job was that they would work for a large American corporation.
00:42:04.120 In fact, they worked for the CIA.
00:42:06.120 It's called non-official cover.
00:42:07.120 Knock.
00:42:08.120 They're knock officers.
00:42:09.120 They're out there.
00:42:10.120 They do that job.
00:42:11.120 They, they go to work and report to work and, and actually do the work of the organization that they're situated in.
00:42:18.120 And then they do our work for us.
00:42:20.120 But they don't accept payment from the company that they're working for.
00:42:24.120 We pay them much less.
00:42:26.120 What does that mean?
00:42:27.120 They don't accept payments.
00:42:28.120 So when that company pays them and goes into a direct deposit, CIA agency takes that money out and you get your salary?
00:42:33.120 CIA takes, CIA turns the big money back to the corporation.
00:42:37.120 This is the understanding of the corporation.
00:42:39.120 And they get the much smaller CIA payments.
00:42:43.120 So the CIA, so the corporation knows that that employee is working for the corporation.
00:42:48.120 Some person in the corporation would know.
00:42:50.120 Some person knows.
00:42:51.120 Someone is brief.
00:42:52.120 Usually it's some very senior person in the corporation.
00:42:54.120 So, so is the senior person also an agent?
00:42:57.120 No, no, no.
00:42:58.120 They're just allowing their government to occupy a position for cover purposes.
00:43:05.120 So they're okay with it?
00:43:07.120 On a case by case basis.
00:43:09.120 This is not widespread, but it, it has been done.
00:43:11.120 Got it.
00:43:12.120 It's a knock program.
00:43:13.120 Got it.
00:43:14.120 The, the, the joke is that on occasion our officers have found themselves in these non-official positions, non-official cover positions.
00:43:25.120 They've worked with these big corporations.
00:43:27.120 They've seen that money and they've seen us turn it around and send it back.
00:43:32.120 And they say, hold on a minute.
00:43:33.120 I like this work.
00:43:34.120 I like this money.
00:43:36.120 And we've lost them.
00:43:38.120 I bet.
00:43:39.120 They go to work for the company.
00:43:40.120 They say, bye bye.
00:43:41.120 And what can CIA do?
00:43:42.120 Nothing?
00:43:43.120 Oh, no.
00:43:44.120 If that's what the person wants to do.
00:43:45.120 All the best.
00:43:46.120 Good luck.
00:43:47.120 Is it the, is the culture let them go gently?
00:43:50.120 Is that CIA's culture?
00:43:51.120 If you, if you lose a knock that way.
00:43:53.120 Yeah.
00:43:54.120 Yeah.
00:43:55.120 They can do that.
00:43:56.120 Got it.
00:43:57.120 Let's transition.
00:43:58.120 The movie.
00:43:59.120 I, I watched a movie, Red Sparrow.
00:44:00.120 I think it's called Red Sparrow.
00:44:01.120 Jason Matthews.
00:44:02.120 Yeah, Jason Matthews.
00:44:03.120 What did you think about that?
00:44:04.120 I know Jason Matthews.
00:44:05.120 Okay.
00:44:06.120 I worked with Jason Matthews.
00:44:07.120 He was one hell of a case officer.
00:44:09.120 Tony and I trained him, um, in surveillance detection.
00:44:12.120 Um, he showed us his overseas situation, which was awful.
00:44:18.120 I, I did not imagine that he could write like that.
00:44:21.120 I mean, the book is fabulous.
00:44:23.120 Did you read the book?
00:44:24.120 Oh.
00:44:25.120 Fabulous.
00:44:26.120 Phenomenal.
00:44:27.120 Yeah.
00:44:28.120 The movie was not so good.
00:44:29.120 I didn't think.
00:44:30.120 I met Jennifer Lawrence.
00:44:31.120 I, I was on a stage with her, New York's times, uh, reporter.
00:44:35.120 And we talked about the story and they did what they often do with the movies.
00:44:39.120 They watered down the story to make it fit the arc that they, that whatever.
00:44:44.120 So I didn't like the movie.
00:44:45.120 I thought the book was phenomenal.
00:44:47.120 His, when he writes about surveillance on the streets of Moscow, I am with him foot by foot.
00:44:53.120 Mm-hmm.
00:44:54.120 But it's just, well done.
00:44:55.120 Mm-hmm.
00:44:56.120 How much truth was there behind what he wrote about?
00:44:58.120 I think there was a lot of truth.
00:45:00.120 The, the, the one thing that nobody really knows, and I, I haven't really asked him, is
00:45:05.120 about the Sparrow School.
00:45:06.120 I don't know that there is a school, but there are Sparrows.
00:45:10.120 Uh, our, our people, um, and a lot of innocent Americans go over there and bump into them.
00:45:17.120 These women who are schooled in seduction and here they come.
00:45:21.120 They have gone after our United States Marines at the embassy.
00:45:25.120 Clayton Lone Tree was, uh, the only, the only United States Marine ever convicted of treason.
00:45:31.120 And what happened to him, he was an American Indian.
00:45:34.120 He met this beautiful young woman who was working at the American embassy.
00:45:38.120 Her name was Violetta Sena.
00:45:40.120 Um, he seduced her.
00:45:42.120 They had an affair.
00:45:44.120 Then it appeared that he allowed some KGB people into our embassy.
00:45:50.120 More than once.
00:45:52.120 Then he got transferred to Vienna.
00:45:54.120 And her uncle showed up in Vienna and said, you know, I want you to give us the plans to the embassy in Vienna.
00:46:03.120 We want to come in here too.
00:46:05.120 So he went to our chief of station and confessed and he went to prison.
00:46:09.120 He was there for eight years in jail.
00:46:11.120 That's what a swallow, the kind of pandemonium that can come out of one of those cases.
00:46:18.120 Red Sparrow is the name of the book, but it was called Swallow, I think based on what I, yeah, so.
00:46:24.120 Uh, a swallow and Sparrow are, are almost interchangeable.
00:46:27.120 Got it.
00:46:28.120 How much of that practice is used in U.S. intelligence?
00:46:31.120 You know, it's not.
00:46:33.120 We don't use that as a tool.
00:46:35.120 That doesn't mean that there hasn't been a seduction here or there.
00:46:38.120 It just happens sometimes, but it is not a tool of espionage that we use.
00:46:44.120 I mean, it's a very effective method.
00:46:46.120 Very effective because men, you know, if you want to seduce men, you know, they're typically, they like good food and they like good sex, so.
00:46:53.120 Yes, they do.
00:46:54.120 And there are old stories and maybe there are some new stories, but as a concerted tool, tradecraft, it's not.
00:47:05.120 That doesn't mean there haven't been seductions.
00:47:07.120 Got it.
00:47:08.120 There are some good old stories, maybe some newer stories, maybe a history of it.
00:47:17.120 With the East Germans, for instance, with the Stasi, it was a tool of their, of their tradecraft, especially when they went into West Germany.
00:47:25.120 They had a group of men.
00:47:26.120 We called them Romeos.
00:47:27.120 They went, they went into Berlin.
00:47:30.120 They went into Bonn and, and they, they were assigned particular women that were working in the West German government.
00:47:36.120 They married them.
00:47:37.120 They had children with them.
00:47:39.120 It was, the whole thing was a mock situation.
00:47:43.120 And when the wall went down, the men went home and these women are like, really?
00:47:49.120 I mean, it was their life and it was, it was a fake.
00:47:54.120 And that, it kind of comes out of that Soviet style of using sex as a, as a bargaining tool.
00:48:02.120 You know, something that I hear a lot, John McAfee comes out and he's a founder of McAfee Antivirus.
00:48:08.120 And he comes out saying, I want to run for president.
00:48:11.120 And it's pretty entertaining.
00:48:13.120 No one takes him serious about him running for office, but he does make a good point.
00:48:16.120 He says a lot of people are worried about nuclear wars where instead of being worried about nuclear wars,
00:48:22.120 what we have to really be worried about is a cyber war because cyber war can really mess up a lot of things.
00:48:27.120 How much, even your time or even today, based on what you know, how much is the CIA trying to work on preventing a possible cyber war?
00:48:36.120 Or that's not something that the CIA deals with?
00:48:39.120 I think they must be dealing with it.
00:48:41.120 They have to be dealing with it.
00:48:42.120 It's out of, it's out of my, my field of vision at the moment.
00:48:46.120 Now I know what you know, maybe, maybe you know more in the, what I've seen in the papers.
00:48:50.120 It's the new battlefield.
00:48:53.120 If the Cold War was a matter of, of settling the hostility without taking the field of battle, which it was,
00:49:02.120 then the cyber war that's following it is just going to be the new version, I think, of the Cold War.
00:49:10.120 Theoretically, without taking the field of battle, although I understand there were some planes in the air today.
00:49:15.120 I mean, this is starting to, they have planes up and we have planes up and starting to look a little dicey.
00:49:22.120 But, but cooler heads seem to have prevailed.
00:49:26.120 I think just keeping it in the cyber borders is going to be enough.
00:49:31.120 So, they theoretically have bugs in our system and now they're saying, well, of course we have bugs in their system and this is, this is where it's at.
00:49:44.120 It may, it may supplant nuclear as the ultimate threat.
00:49:48.120 It probably can do more damage than nuclear if it's, if it's carefully done.
00:49:54.120 I mean, if they shut down the electrical grids.
00:49:57.120 If they shut down the, the, the, the banking system or transportation.
00:50:02.120 And it looks like this could all be done.
00:50:05.120 I mean, everybody's over here worried about climate change, but hold on.
00:50:08.120 That's right.
00:50:09.120 What if they just turn everything off?
00:50:11.120 The other day, last week, our, our building was hit by lightning.
00:50:16.120 And we had no internet or power for three days.
00:50:20.120 We worked out of a hotel for, for two days.
00:50:23.120 With nothing.
00:50:24.120 Yeah.
00:50:25.120 So that's just the company.
00:50:26.120 I can only imagine if that happens as a country, what kind of an impact that could have.
00:50:30.120 Well, you know, there's, there's this, this, this generational thing.
00:50:33.120 We have a, we have a family graveyard in, in Nevada, up north of Las Vegas.
00:50:39.120 It's about 90 miles north.
00:50:40.120 It is in the middle of nothing and nowhere.
00:50:43.120 It's just, there's nothing there.
00:50:45.120 There's no internet.
00:50:47.120 There's none.
00:50:48.120 So when we go, when someone dies, we'll take Tony there next year.
00:50:51.120 We'll all go big, probably a hundred cars.
00:50:53.120 We'll go up.
00:50:54.120 And all the young people in the cars will drive with their hands out of the window, holding
00:50:58.120 their cell phones up, trying to find some connectivity.
00:51:01.120 And they cannot believe that there is a place that there isn't an internet.
00:51:06.120 I mean, they really don't know what to do.
00:51:09.120 If there isn't an internet, it's scary.
00:51:12.120 That is, that's everything.
00:51:15.120 Yeah.
00:51:16.120 It's how we're connected today.
00:51:17.120 I mean, that's, that's.
00:51:18.120 So if we lose our internet, we'll lose a generation.
00:51:20.120 The next generation will have to learn again, how to speak, how to talk, how to interact
00:51:24.120 with people, how to, you know.
00:51:26.120 May not, are you saying it may not be a bad idea?
00:51:28.120 Is that kind of what you're saying?
00:51:29.120 No, no.
00:51:30.120 I don't want to lose the internet.
00:51:31.120 I felt something there.
00:51:32.120 Okay.
00:51:33.120 So let's talk about the book.
00:51:34.120 So the Moscow rules.
00:51:35.120 Tell us a little bit about the book.
00:51:36.120 The Moscow rules is talking about our, our office that we worked in, OTS.
00:51:40.120 It was the, the, the, the queue to CIA.
00:51:43.120 It was the mission impossible kind of real life.
00:51:46.120 It really was.
00:51:47.120 We, we had engineers, we had electrical, mechanical, we had chemists, we had physicists.
00:51:53.120 And then we had all kinds of very esoteric specialties, people that just did batteries
00:51:57.120 for their life, people that did ink for their career, ink, hot air balloons, forensics.
00:52:05.120 We could make anything.
00:52:06.120 We could make any kind of paper.
00:52:07.120 We could make any kind of document.
00:52:09.120 We could actually make any kind of money, but we didn't.
00:52:12.120 Because did you know that making another country's money is an act of war?
00:52:16.120 It's an act of war.
00:52:17.120 It's an act of war and you cannot do it.
00:52:19.120 So we didn't do it.
00:52:21.120 We could do anything.
00:52:23.120 And as we were working, we were involved in, in these sub-miniature cameras, um, in,
00:52:30.120 um, creating documents, um, that could pass through international controls and, and coming
00:52:38.120 up with encrypted communications.
00:52:40.120 A lot of what we were doing was trying to keep our foreign agents safe, trying to keep
00:52:46.120 them from being arrested.
00:52:47.120 Because if they were arrested in Russia, they would execute them.
00:52:50.120 And they arrested a lot of them.
00:52:52.120 And they executed a number of them.
00:52:54.120 Uh, back in the eighties, in 85, it was called the year of the spy.
00:52:59.120 We lost, we lost a whole stable of agents.
00:53:02.120 Some of them were lost because of American traitors.
00:53:06.120 So it was, uh, it was compelling work.
00:53:09.120 It was, it was really very interesting.
00:53:11.120 The book is talking about some of the links to which we would go.
00:53:16.120 To invent the technology that didn't exist yet.
00:53:18.120 It wasn't commercially available.
00:53:20.120 Most of what we were working towards is now contained in a cell phone.
00:53:25.120 Encrypted communications.
00:53:26.120 The cameras, the, all of it, it's in your phone.
00:53:29.120 But the piece in here that we've never really talked about before was, um, deception and
00:53:34.120 illusion in Moscow.
00:53:35.120 The hardest place in the world for us to operate.
00:53:38.120 We had so much surveillance that we couldn't work.
00:53:41.120 You couldn't, you couldn't walk down the street.
00:53:43.120 You couldn't drive.
00:53:44.120 Couldn't go to your apartment.
00:53:46.120 They had bugs in the wall.
00:53:47.120 Even the American embassy was penetrated.
00:53:50.120 Both with technology and with people that worked there.
00:53:53.120 Uh, KGB was all over it.
00:53:55.120 Really?
00:53:56.120 There were foreign nationals working for us.
00:53:58.120 We had, uh, some ambassadors that thought that was a good idea.
00:54:02.120 So, as chief of disguise, Tony, initially, went out to Hollywood.
00:54:07.120 And, um, he was working on disguise things.
00:54:11.120 But he was very interested in the magic community out there.
00:54:14.120 And he got involved in it.
00:54:16.120 Uh, he wasn't as interested in the performances as he was in the engineering behind the performances.
00:54:22.120 So, like, how do you make an elephant disappear on a stage?
00:54:25.120 They've done that in London for years and years and years.
00:54:28.120 Classic old trick.
00:54:29.120 Elephant walks on the stage.
00:54:31.120 It's a big box.
00:54:32.120 People go in the box.
00:54:33.120 They say, yeah, there's nothing in the box.
00:54:35.120 The elephant goes in the box.
00:54:36.120 They close the door.
00:54:37.120 The magician talks for a moment.
00:54:38.120 Open the door.
00:54:39.120 Elephant's gone.
00:54:40.120 Where's the elephant?
00:54:41.120 It's a classic idea of where's your audience?
00:54:46.120 What's going on here?
00:54:47.120 How are they playing with you?
00:54:49.120 So, we told them our problems in Moscow.
00:54:52.120 They said, okay, you call it, um, an operation.
00:54:55.120 We call it a performance in magic.
00:54:58.120 The first thing you have to do is figure out where your stage is.
00:55:01.120 What is your stage?
00:55:02.120 Is your stage a sidewalk down the street of Moscow?
00:55:05.120 Or is it a parking garage in the American Embassy?
00:55:08.120 Where's your stage?
00:55:10.120 Then figure out who's your audience?
00:55:12.120 Who are you playing to?
00:55:13.120 Is it the Millie man who's guarding the shack at the embassy that you have to drive by?
00:55:18.120 Is he your audience?
00:55:19.120 Or is it the guys in the car trailing you down the street?
00:55:23.120 Or is it the video camera in the parking garage?
00:55:25.120 There were a lot of them.
00:55:26.120 So, you start dissecting your, your situation and then you start designing the illusion.
00:55:36.120 Um, in magic, a lot of the illusions are based on twins.
00:55:41.120 They don't actually have to really be twins.
00:55:44.120 They can just sort of look alike.
00:55:47.120 So, when we started making masks, really good animated masks.
00:55:52.120 Good enough that you can brief somebody wearing them.
00:55:56.120 We could start replicating people.
00:55:58.120 We could make a second you.
00:56:00.120 We'd have to find some tall guy with kind of your build,
00:56:03.120 but he didn't have to look like you and we could give him your head.
00:56:07.120 How close do you get to it?
00:56:08.120 Real close.
00:56:09.120 Real close.
00:56:11.120 We make, so now there are two of you.
00:56:13.120 Then you can start playing games with your surveillance,
00:56:16.120 wherever they are.
00:56:17.120 You can do it in a car.
00:56:19.120 You can do it on the street.
00:56:20.120 You can, you can switch people in and out.
00:56:22.120 And they think they're with you, but they're not.
00:56:25.120 You are over here doing the work that you want to do.
00:56:28.120 Um, so there was the twin thing.
00:56:31.120 We started working with something called a jib, a jack-in-the-box.
00:56:34.120 This was just proprietary from Moscow, nowhere else.
00:56:37.120 It was a briefcase that the passenger would put on the floor.
00:56:43.120 This would all be choreographed to within seconds, but you would be driving down the street with your surveillance behind you.
00:56:50.120 You'd take a right-hand turn.
00:56:52.120 They'd be coming along.
00:56:53.120 And then you'd take another right-hand turn.
00:56:55.120 And with that second turn, you're in what we call a gap.
00:56:58.120 And maybe it's five seconds.
00:57:00.120 Maybe it's ten seconds.
00:57:02.120 And in that gap, it's enough time for the man in the passenger seat to get out and for the driver to hit the button on the briefcase.
00:57:10.120 And the dummy pops up wearing the jacket, the shirt, your hair, and your face.
00:57:17.120 And so surveillance comes around the corner and there's still two people in the car.
00:57:21.120 There's an old Russian man walking down the street.
00:57:23.120 That's our case officer.
00:57:25.120 And off you go.
00:57:26.120 Those kinds of deceptions and illusions, we did a lot of that.
00:57:31.120 But my favorite, my favorite one was called The Skies on the Run.
00:57:36.120 And what we learned in magic is there's nothing like a crowd to shield what you're doing.
00:57:42.120 You can do anything in a crowd.
00:57:43.120 You can walk down the street at lunchtime in New York City.
00:57:46.120 And no one's looking.
00:57:48.120 So if someone's walking toward you and they see you walking down the street,
00:57:53.120 and maybe you just grab your shirt and tie and just pull it down because there's no arms and it's split at the back.
00:58:01.120 And just roll it up and stick it in the bag.
00:58:04.120 You can take off your coat and do the same thing.
00:58:07.120 Or maybe you take it off and peel it off.
00:58:10.120 Put it back on backwards and it's totally different.
00:58:12.120 You take a backpack.
00:58:14.120 You put it in a shopping bag.
00:58:15.120 You pull a beanie out of your pocket.
00:58:17.120 Put it on.
00:58:18.120 Put some earplugs in.
00:58:20.120 You have your Walkman out.
00:58:22.120 Now you're wearing a tank top and you've got a sleeve of tattoos going up it.
00:58:26.120 My son did this for a Wired.com video.
00:58:29.120 He's kind of bopping down the street.
00:58:31.120 He starts out a little businessman with a bag.
00:58:33.120 He turns into this dude.
00:58:35.120 It's all tatted and all.
00:58:37.120 And it's just, you can do a lot of that.
00:58:40.120 Tony sold that to our office director with a 45 second demo.
00:58:45.120 He started as a businessman with a briefcase.
00:58:48.120 And by the time he got to our office director, who was 45 steps, 45 seconds away, he had turned into an old lady in a pink coat with a shopping cart full of groceries.
00:59:03.120 What else?
00:59:04.120 An old lady with a pink?
00:59:06.120 My husband.
00:59:07.120 Yeah.
00:59:08.120 And that was what convinced our office director that we could use this technique.
00:59:13.120 So we used it in Moscow.
00:59:15.120 It was one of the best operations we ever ran.
00:59:18.120 One of the most important operations we ever ran.
00:59:21.120 took an American diplomat and turned him into a Russian who even smelled like vodka.
00:59:28.120 I mean, he was this old Russian pensioner who walked up to a manhole, lifted it, and went into the manhole because there was something in that manhole that was so important.
00:59:40.120 It was the beginning of a huge, successful operation, collecting against a nuclear target in Russia.
00:59:49.120 So the book goes behind the magic community and talks about how we got into some of that deception illusion stuff.
01:00:00.120 That sounds not frivolous, but it really made a huge difference in what we were doing.
01:00:07.120 That was Tony Mendez, who was an artist.
01:00:10.120 He was always an artist.
01:00:12.120 Started as an artist, ended as an artist.
01:00:15.120 He said to one of the writers that was doing a piece on him, he said, you know, I've always been an artist.
01:00:21.120 He said, but for 25 years I was a pretty good spy.
01:00:24.120 For 25 years I was a pretty good spy.
01:00:27.120 But the art, I think, in the end won out.
01:00:29.120 Tony was something of a legend at CIA.
01:00:34.120 I bet.
01:00:35.120 I mean, of course, when you read about him, it's endless stories that come up.
01:00:38.120 Yeah.
01:00:39.120 Well, I appreciate you coming out and being a guest on Valuetainment.
01:00:42.120 Thank you so much.
01:00:43.120 Appreciate you.
01:00:44.120 Thanks everybody for listening.
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01:01:05.120 With that being said, have a great day today.
01:01:07.120 Take care everybody.
01:01:08.120 Bye bye.
01:01:09.120 Bye bye.