Art Bell welcomes intelligence expert John Nolan, whose credentials span U.S. Army training and top-tier institutions, to dissect global surveillance—like Echelon’s alleged monitoring of Americans, including plausible but unconfirmed intercepts of Senator Strom Thurmond’s calls—and Lourdes, Cuba’s Soviet-turned-Russian listening station now selling U.S. economic and personal data to citizens. Nolan’s Confidential book reveals waste archaeology tactics (e.g., cross-cut shredders) and ethical lines in intelligence, though he notes privacy is eroding via political correctness and workplace speech controls. Callers debate Orwellian surveillance, from customs seizing devices to NSA holographic tech, while Nolan admits oversight struggles despite skilled committees. The episode underscores how intelligence secrecy and commercial data leaks blur the line between security and control, leaving citizens vulnerable to unseen monitoring. [Automatically generated summary]
But the voting, the shouting, the screaming, as I sadly predicted, Bush, gore, Bush, gore, gore, Bush, gore, Bush, Bush, gore.
God, who even cares?
This has just caused me to lose all interest in the race between these guys.
I don't care.
They're going to talk some real different talk.
You know, that's what I have to say about Bush Gore.
They're going to talk some real different talk.
Their rhetoric is going to be very specific toward the party faithful.
And the difference in the way the two of them would govern eaten as much.
And I'm holding my fingers as close together as I can get them.
That's my opinion.
There's no difference in the way they're going to govern.
So, you know, this is the kind of thing that, in my opinion, gives a lot of ammunition to all the conspiracy people who are always saying the fix is in and, you know, at the top, the thing that's going to happen is going to be the party thing, the money thing.
Can't argue with that, huh?
Certainly the way it turned out.
So again, my comment in the election, and I will not do this much more, I promise.
Absolutely disinterested.
Now, this is something kind of intriguing.
Oh, my, this mission to Mars movie.
I may have some answers for you tonight.
I don't know.
I've got some feedback.
Now, I don't have the trailer yet, the one Richard was talking about, but a zillion people have written to me saying they have seen the trailer.
So it exists out there.
The websites don't point to it, the ones that you gave me, the URLs you gave me.
They don't have the original Face on Mars in the trailer, movie trailer, or preview as some people know them.
I haven't seen it yet.
But a zillion people have said, yeah, it's there.
I got this email from somebody supposedly on the inside.
And it says, unfortunately, the conspiracy, in quotes, trailer was originally conceived by the advertising department.
And yes, somebody there did indeed say, quote, I bet this'll drive Hoagland effing nuts.
My emailer says, ah, the price of celebrity, Richard.
There were two, he goes on, this is Mr., well, we'll just use CR.
There were two, CR says, there were two separate endings filmed indeed.
I have no idea which one was prepped for distribution.
This is not an uncommon practice.
M2M, or Mission to Mars, was well tested at consumer opinion services.
Well, maybe, but this is one explanation.
And I got a lot of these, so it may be.
Just let me read it.
This is Rick.
Rick writes, Dear Art, I just got back last night from a theater employee screening of Mission to Mars.
My girlfriend called and said that they were going to show it.
She works at the theater, so I jumped in my little Geometro Mobile and was there.
I think the real reason De Pama left town was because of negative press.
This was a long, bad movie.
I really wanted to like it, and it does have its moments.
They actually had character development, which most MTV-watching people have no time for, somewhat like The Right Stuff did, which was great.
The audience was composed of theater workers and their girlfriends and boyfriends, and no doubt a few other people who must have been friends of friends.
Sounds right, doesn't it?
He goes on now.
Here's where he fries it.
About 20 minutes into the movie, the hissing began, and by the time people started dying in the movie, people in the theater were shouting, I'm glad you're dead.
I hadn't seen anything like this since Jar Jar Binks first appeared on the screen.
But back to De Palma.
I came home and heard your show with Richard, and I think the real reason he left was so many bad reviews.
I don't think any filmmaker of his status wants to face bad press.
Well, I don't know.
He'll eventually have to say something, right?
I have no way of knowing Whether this is the way you or I would feel.
Here's another one.
I have so many.
Dear Art, I've been listening to last night's archive show from the internet, obviously written today.
My wife was able to procure two passes to the sneak preview of MDM, and we saw it last night in Cincinnati, here in Cincinnati.
Now, I'm not going to go into any details because I don't want to spoil your viewing, but I will say that we were terribly disappointed with the picture's production.
The basic story is good, and obviously, the writers listen intently to Coast to Coast A.M. and Richard.
Contrary to possible implications Richard raised pertaining to the flight of De Palma, I feel he fled due to embarrassment.
So there is a couple of really heavy raps on this movie now.
I wonder if how the rest of us will view this.
Remember 2001 when that movie came out?
People in droves were saying, hey, I don't get it.
Actually, a lot of people still don't get it today.
I'm not sure I do.
I have my own concept of the ending of that movie, but it became a wonderful cult movie.
Right?
2001 was great.
So maybe this is in that category.
You know, the line here that worries me is the one that says about 20 minutes into the movie, the hissing began, and by the time people started dying in the movie, people were shouting, I'm glad you're dead.
That's got to be, that's pretty rough stuff, I would say.
But you've got to consider that this is a distinct possibility of all the other ones that we have been considering in this area.
Got a picture I want you to see.
Tomorrow night, we're going to have a really unusual lady here, Georgia Durante.
Now, Georgia wrote a book called The Company She Keeps.
Georgia was a getaway driver, a getaway driver for the mafia.
And I've got to tell you, if ever there was a classic photograph, the one I'm going to send you up to my website to see is really a classic photograph.
First of all, Georgia is, by anybody's definition, a stone fox.
Oh, I mean, she is really good looking.
But a getaway driver for the mafia.
Now, that's going to be an interesting story.
You've got to see the photograph of this lady that's going to be on tomorrow night.
Absolute stone fox.
Drove for the mafia.
I wonder how much she'll say.
Don't you?
I wonder how much she'll tell us.
All right, I have some serious news here.
This is from all of you.
For example, Hiart, the winds in western Nebraska, eastern Wyoming, and the Denver-Boulder area were up to 100 miles per hour last night and into today.
A whole subdivision has been evacuated outside Boulder.
Now, you listen to this.
100 mile per hour winds.
A lot of roofs gone, of course, parallelines down, what you would expect from 100 mile-an-hour winds.
But that's serious, serious stuff.
Western Nebraska, eastern Wyoming, and the Denver Boulder area.
Then I got this.
Heartbreaking news.
The city of Milwaukee was hit by a tornado.
Now, I don't know that Milwaukee was hit.
Somebody in Milwaukee can tell me.
I don't know what hit means.
It says here, here in winter, numerous reports of injuries, damages, especially by the Milwaukee airport.
Breaking news, he says, wow.
Well, I don't have any other news article on it, but I don't doubt it.
There probably was a tornado somewhere near Milwaukee.
Somebody I'm sure will tell us.
Or how about this?
70 cities broke records yesterday as the March, quote, heat wave continued to build across the Northeast and the Great Lakes states.
Temperatures have touched 80 degrees.
80 degrees.
West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania.
New York City and New Jersey will have a cooler day as a kind of backdoor cold front comes down.
But I guess what I'm trying to say to you is, late in the show yesterday, I read to you an article entitled, Science Turns to Indians.
And what it is, is basically that NASA has decided that they are going to put money into having consultations with American natives about climate change.
Now you can read this article if you want to.
It was a Gannett News Service article by Missy Globerman entitled Science Turns to Indians.
And I wish some climatologist would call me.
Maybe one with guts.
You know why?
Because our weather is not just wrong now.
It's way wrong.
Everything is wrong everywhere.
Everything has been upside down.
The weather has obviously massively changed on us.
Certainly in my opinion from reading the stories.
I think most of You share that.
So, in my opinion, it is time for some climatologist who cares about all of us out here to come forward with something other than El Niño, La Niña, or whatever else you've got to explain away the outrageously changed weather.
And in my view, it's just beginning.
I mean, it's just beginning.
So I want somebody to come forward.
I don't know how else to appeal other than to say some climatologist who's willing to discuss, perhaps come and calm our fears.
And maybe he will tell us why all of this is normal, a normal cyclical thing within the weather cycles.
And, you know, that might be something I guess a climatologist might say.
But, and that's fine.
I understand why they would say it, but I've got to tell you this.
I wouldn't believe it.
There's something else happening, and I don't think they know what it is, and I think they want to know, and I think they're trying to find out.
And I think, as we discussed last night on the show, that NASA's going to the American natives is not just some political tactic.
I think they know something's wrong.
And their doing that is roughly the, in my mind, the equivalent of, well, how best to put it.
It's the equivalent of a police force that has been trying to solve some sort of murder, some sort of hard to solve, no clues, don't know what the hell we're doing, murder.
You know, finally, somebody picks up a phone and calls a psychic.
And so to me, NASA's doing this is almost in that category.
I really think that's a pretty good parallel.
So I'm after a climatologist.
You know how to reach me.
Artbell at mindspring.com is my email.
If any climatologist out there would like to come and attempt to tell us what's going on, I would very much appreciate that.
I'm sure the audience would too.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
We'll be right back.
Now we take you back to the night of March 8, 2000, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
The End All right, as you know, I sleep a weird double shift to be able to do this program, and so I had a lot of sleep interruptions, so I had a lot of dreams.
And here's a dream I had last night, and you can laugh at it if you want, but it's a dead truth.
I have never in my life, first of all, you should know, I have never been a salesman.
By that I mean somebody who calls up people and sells even commercial advertising on the radio, television, or any media, or never sold vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias, or I've never been a salesman and sold anything in my life.
But the dream I had last night was like a scene out of Glen Gary Glen Ross, the movie, you may not have seen that or you may have, about some real estate salesmen.
And it was a pretty sad movie.
But it was like a scene out of that, except get this.
I was hired by this company to do advertising in a world under the earth where gnomes lived.
Whole world down there.
And moreover, there were levels of this world, and you had to walk down steps to get to either.
And I was complaining bitterly about there not being any elevator.
Nevertheless, you had to, I needed this job, I guess, in my dream.
And I forget it paid $60,000 or $70,000 to start.
I'm trying to give you an idea of the detail of this dream.
And I went down, for example, one of my clients was going to be this gnome, this little gnome that had advertising tattooed all over him.
And this was going to be one of my clients.
And I'm thinking, what the hell am I getting into?
And the world above, even the office, the scene out of Glen Ross, that's hard to say, especially fast.
Glengarry, Glen Ross.
Was that the flora was collapsing and the world on top was slowly falling in on the gnomes.
Anyway, the dream went on in great detail.
It's like I was just dropped into somebody else's body.
I had no relationship to my life whatsoever that I know of.
Now, I know dream interpreters will say, yes, of course it has some relationship to your life right now.
But it was a cool, it was a weird dream, and I felt like I worked when I was done.
unidentified
You're listening to Archbelt somewhere in time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 8th, 2000.
Dreamin', love will be mine Searching.
I'm always searching.
Hoping, someday I'll find.
Where are those happy days?
They seem so hard to find.
I tried to wait for you, but you have closed your mind.
Whatever happened to our love, I wish I understood.
It used to fade from life, it used to fade from blue.
Oh, when you hear me, darling, can't you hear me?
It's the way.
Oh, when you're gone, how can I even try to go on?
When you're gone, go and try, how can I carry on?
Oh, when you're gone, how can I carry on?
You're listening to Arkbell somewhere in time, the night featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 8th, 2000.
However, I don't think there's one chance in hell that that's going to happen.
Not a chance.
If you think people are going to cast away their automobiles, which rank probably somewhere next to the wife in terms of endearing feelings, or maybe sometimes even ahead of, in some cases, you're crazy.
People are not going to give up their cars.
Forget it.
unidentified
In Eugene here, we have actually quite a few people who have done it.
And sitting in my picture window every morning, easily a dozen people ride by on their bikes.
It's just the beginning of March, and we're having tornadoes that far north.
Now, I really need a climatologist to come on board because I don't know what your memory is like, but this crap doesn't happen.
unidentified
No, this is, you know, the news up here seems to be saying that we are an additional city to this growing list of major metropolitan cities getting this type of strange weather.
Art Bell Here's the facts that got John Nolan on here with me.
And it was just as Echelon was currently.
Echelon is a program that literally can listen to everything being transmitted in the world.
According to most definitions I've heard of echelon.
From baby monitors to telephones to email to everything you do.
Dear Arn, I spoke with Peter Klein, the 60 Minutes producer for this piece, about the numerous inaccuracies reported in his piece last night, according to Rod, Rod Mitchell.
Considering that CBS's sources were primarily from Europe and that NSA would not come, it is no big surprise.
There is a much bigger story here that you could break on your show and your audience would find what Nolan has to say about it fascinating.
I'm also trying to reach the radiant lady in Las Vegas and of course I've had her on the air.
So we did connect.
John Nolan connected with me or I with him and he's in biz and has been.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree Magna Cum Laude with double majors in international relations and foreign languages from Mount St. Mary's College, his Master of Arts degree in international relations distinction from the University of Southern California and his Master of Science in Security Administration from Central Michigan University.
His professional training includes coursework at the U.S. Army Intelligence School, Fort Hovard, Maryland, Defense Language Institute, Fort Bliss, Texas, and Monterey, California.
Oh, yes.
U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Pachuca, Arizona.
Numerous other courses and other institutions and locations.
That's worded in an interesting way, such as elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and many formal courses and specialized tutorials in a variety of settings and technologies, ranging from certification and practitioner training at the Center for Application of Psychological Type to Behavior Modeling.
So there's your background, and here's John Nolan.
Hi, John.
Good morning, Art.
How are you?
Oh, pretty good, I would say.
This phone has a little bit of hum in it, by the way, John.
You are plagued with interesting phone problems over there.
Well, that's life in the big city.
Maybe that is life in the big city these days, John.
That was an interesting laugh, which I'll recall and possibly record and play back.
John, let's first talk about Echelon, all right?
You saw the 60-minutes piece done on it?
Sure did.
You did?
Did you see the lady on there that said that she'd been privy to a conversation with Senator Helms?
Actually, I think she said Strom Thurman.
I'm sorry, Strom Thurmond.
You're right.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's not really altogether that remarkable.
I can imagine somebody sitting down doing his knob twisting routine with his headphones on, and suddenly he comes across something that he recognizes as being reasonably interesting.
It doesn't mean that he was looking for Strom Thurmond.
It's just that he got Strom Thurmond.
And it doesn't mean that he was spying on Strom Thurmond to see what kind of sexual appetites he has at the age of 96 or anything like that, marrying a much younger woman.
But rather, it was simply a matter of, hey, listen to this.
Guess who this is?
A pretty prominent guy at that time and still at this time.
So that would be the kind of thing that would pique a young operator's interest as he's sitting at a console.
And I can very easily see where he would wave to someone as your guest alluded.
That as she walked by, he said, Hey, listen to this.
Guess who I'm talking, or guess who I'm listening to.
And I mean, when you're picking up literally millions of conversations a week or a month, and as you scan through them, because of whichever keywords the dictionary has caused to come up in a conversation, tag it to be listened to.
There is a list of those words floating around, by the way.
Should be the official list.
The official list starts off with.
Have you seen it?
Oh, sure.
Is it accurate?
The first word on the list is art, and the second word on the list is bell.
Of course, an alphabetical deal.
I can see this is going to be fun tonight, John.
You have seen that list, though.
In actuality, no, I have not.
I do not know what the list says.
I do not know how long that list is, although I would imagine that you're two pages of small type.
Every keyword you can think of, and the ones you might imagine, of course, like terrorism, bomb, fuse, kilo, on and on.
Right.
Whack, snuff, snatch, those kinds of things.
No, all of those things.
And all of the variations in the various languages, of course.
And so it's not just listening to people speaking in English, but people speaking in other languages is the reason that they have so many different languages.
But it certainly includes English, John, and apparently at times includes us.
Now, if they would venture.
Now, look, I understand your story about, ooh, cool, look who I found.
Maybe.
But the other possibility, of course, is that it is used domestically to some great degree.
Or if it isn't, then the other truth is that we have the British listen to us and we listen for them.
Either way, the American people are being spied on.
Now, is that the bottom line or not?
I think that that's probably the bottom line.
But please understand that those are people who are mixed in with all the rest of the people that are on the airwaves as well, whether they're French or whether they're Algerian.
Well, fine, so we share this lack of privacy with the rest of the world, is what you're telling me.
Yeah, effectively.
But I guess that the real issue is, are you waiting for the jackboot of fascism to come down on our individual necks here in the United States?
Yeah, some people would ask that question.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, I read something just the other day.
It was a quote of a German professor who was visiting in the United States, and he was giving a speech in New York, and he talked about the black cloud of fascism that's descending upon the United States.
And I think it was somebody like Moynihan pointed out that, yeah, while Europeans very often see the black cloud of fascism floating over the United States, it always seems to come to roost in Europe, however.
Well, Europe is a lot different.
The English are a lot different with regard to their internal security than we are.
Really, a whole lot different.
You and I couldn't be having this conversation legally in Great Britain.
There's no way that the Official Secrets Act would have had both of our hearts cut out.
We have far greater rights, and the very fact that we're having these kinds of conversations.
We think we have.
Well, every freedom is an illusion of one sort or another.
It's just kind of like one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
that's really something to think about freedom is I think I said every man's freedom is his own illusion or something.
That's what you said.
That sounds like the Matrix itself.
I mean, here we are walking around thinking we're free and we're private and, you know, happy days are here again or still here or something.
And the world is a pretty cool place, but the world is actually a pretty scary place.
A very dangerous place.
And so I guess that one of the questions is to what extent are you willing to give up a certain degree of your privacy as long as it doesn't affect you directly?
Or for safety.
Yeah, in exchange for your safety.
And I would venture that if somebody were to have a complete and full understanding of the degree to which intelligence operations have been successful impediments to international terrorist activities directed against and within the United States.
I don't doubt it for a second.
Then people would probably say, yeah, I'd be more than happy.
I mean, I'm not a company man.
But you are a company man, though, huh?
Well, no, I'm not.
I haven't been.
I've been out of the business since 1988.
The argument you're making is the company argument.
Oh, yeah, it's the company argument.
What I'm suggesting.
And I'm not saying you're wrong.
I'm just saying you're giving us the straight-line company argument here.
Well, I'm suggesting that perhaps people, if they stood back from it and said, how much of that am I willing to surrender?
I'm also not saying you're right, by the way.
Oh, I understand.
I understand that wholeheartedly.
what i'm suggesting is that if people were given the opportunity to make a decision between surrendering some of that and not then they would probably surrender it in exchange for the safety of their children it's kind of like your that your Absolutely.
Well, you know, if you look at the East Bloc, people who live in Eastern Europe and people who are still very much communist-oriented people in the former Soviet states, you know, they saw a great deal of comfort in knowing that the state was protecting them.
And they make a very legitimate case now for saying that communism, practiced, socialism going toward communism, in the Soviet model was actually very effective for stemming hooliganism and hoodlums and murderers and dope dealers.
Look at what capitalism is.
Just like echelon is, in the same sense, right?
Yeah, and so it provides you a certain degree of stability in an unstable situation.
But other people would say, hey, yeah, but that's like communism here.
Yeah.
Well, that's that to a certain extent.
Government intrudes in all of our lives to a certain perhaps even inexorable degree.
And I personally am not necessarily in favor of it.
Please understand that, too.
Personally, you're not in favor of it.
Personally, you're arguing the case for it, though.
Yeah, if I were to want to trade my family's well-being and ultimately comes down to trust, is my family going to be disadvantaged by the government, or would the government, for its basic purpose, and that is protecting its citizens from internal and external threats, then if it's doing that, then at some point you just got to say, ladies and gentlemen, I trust them.
Or I don't trust them.
That's an individual decision that people have got to make.
But I go back to your earlier statement.
The freedom that we believe we enjoy and the privacy is in fact an illusion.
You know, there are lots of constraints placed on government agencies, and so that's one of the other things that you kind of need to walk the fine line about when you're trying to assess the level of problems in a person's privacy, on a personal privacy level.
That is to say, which bureaucrats are willing to actually break all of the laws that were put into place by the Congress in order to monitor and provide oversight of the intelligence community during the 1970s.
Who is really willing to go to jail for violating someone?
But technically, these, you know, unless you want to talk about echelon actually spying on Americans as a regular practice, it doesn't matter.
I mean, if the British are doing the work for us with a wink and a nod, passing the information to us, then, you know, what's the diff?
I mean, we, American citizens, have got to face straight up to it.
We're being monitored full time.
Full time.
All of our stuff, emails, telephone calls, not listened to all the time, but monitored all the time.
Right.
And there's a very that's a serious, serious thing when you think about it.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 8, 2000.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
A very old friend came by today, cause he was telling everyone in town, of the laws that he just found, and the reason they, of his latest thing.
He talked and talked, and I heard him say, that she had the longest, blightest hair, the prettiest green eyes anywhere, and the reason they, of his latest spring.
Though I smiled and tears inside were burning, I wished him luck and then he said goodbye.
He was gone but stood at first, kept returning, what else was there for me to do with crying?
Would you believe, that yesterday, this girl was in the realm and swore to me, she'd be my attorney, and the reason they, of his latest spring.
You're listening to Arch Bell somewhere in time on Premiere Radio Networks tonight.
An oncore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 8th, 2000.
And we're talking to him about echelon and privacy and whether we really want to trade the privacy we have.
You know, actually, I guess academically you can consider that question if you want to, but the fact of the matter is that we weren't asked about that, or at least I don't remember being asked about that.
Would I be willing to trade the privacy that I thought I had, this little world that I was living in, this bubble that I had, thinking that my phone calls and emails were really private.
Nobody ever asked me if I'd be willing to trade it.
They just, you know, they took it away.
unidentified
They just, you know, they took it away.
Now we take you back to the night of March 8, 2000, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
The End You know, I'd like to warn that computer running those commercials that I have shot machines before.
I really have.
I shot a computer once, an entire computer.
So if you and your electronic blackness can hear me in there in that machine, that's a two.
That's a two.
When we get to three, it's a bullet hole time.
Now, very briefly, Daryl, a friend who taxes frequently, with regard to my final caller of the last hour, said, I wonder if that caller voted in Tuesday's primary.
Then again, I don't.
For those of you who heard that caller.
All right, back to John Nolan.
As I said, it's kind of fun to talk to a spook because you can ask all kinds of questions that they can only answer in certain ways.
But, you know, you do your best and it's fun to try.
Hi, John.
Hi, all right.
So now, do you see what I'm saying when I say when you pose the question to us about whether we'd give up that much safety for give up that much privacy for that much safety, it's not like you're asking us before you do it.
That's true.
What I'm saying is they didn't ask us.
They didn't ask you.
Well, as a matter of fact, this has all been part of a very mystical and serpentine process by which I'm actually on your show tonight because Bill Casey asked me, or assigned me, to ask you tonight if you're willing to surrender in the interest of your personal safety.
You know, Bill Casey now, of course, the former CIA director who's been dead for eight or nine years.
It was a very long distance call.
But he asked me to ask you if you're willing tonight.
So are you willing?
So obviously you're not.
But, you know, it's, you know, John, John, John.
I don't know.
The answer is, I'll give you my answer right now.
I don't know.
I'm thinking about it.
I'm thinking about it.
That's my honest answer.
I really don't know.
I'm not prepared to give you an answer.
Well, how about this?
Let me ask you the question.
Now, I'm not sure if I'm not sure if you're a good person.
What I'm pissed off about is the fact that I wasn't asked.
You understand that?
They're listening to me, and I wasn't asked.
I understand.
And that's a real concern that a lot of people have justifiably got.
So I guess the question is, what do you do about it?
And that's the next logical follow-on question is what do you do about it?
And I think that there are some things that you can do about it.
Yeah, you could try to have some law passed that the U.S. could not receive intelligence on any domestic electronic transmission from any other country.
But I figure that's about one in a billion.
Yeah, well, I mean, it gets to kind of like the issue of gun control.
You're going to pass another law because a six-year-old shot another six-year-old?
I mean, another law is not going to help, right?
And you know as well as I do that, and as all of your listeners know, that laws are essentially just like locks.
I mean, they're put there to keep honest people out of your house.
Laws are put there to keep honest people from doing bad things, and law breakers have a tendency to do that anyway.
So, I guess that the issue is if you want to go beyond trying to cause that one in a billion piece of legislation to make it up the chain, then what do you do?
You take some personal actions.
And there are personal actions that you can take as companies take action.
Like what?
Well, for example, you know, you remember last time I was on, we were talking about my book, Confidential.
And the third section of that is all dedicated to helping a company protect itself.
But, you know, the exact same principles apply when you're protecting yourself.
Give me a specific.
Okay.
First thing is, you know, you've got to have a rational level of awareness of what the threat is to you and who poses that threat to you.
Well, I don't know that, though.
I know I'm being listened to.
I don't know what kind of threat that may represent.
Sure.
Well, on one level, you say everybody now understands, courtesy of you and many other people, that Echelon is capable of intercepting every phone call that everybody makes.
So that means I will not discuss anything over a telephone line that I wouldn't want my mother to know about or that I wouldn't want on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
I mean, there are very few times.
But that includes a whole lot of stuff, John.
Oh, sure, it does.
I mean, a whole lot of stuff.
I mean, let's face real facts here.
There's a lot of guys who've got mistresses.
Sure.
There are a lot of guys who probably have mistresses of the same sex.
There's a lot of guys who have a lot of secrets out there.
A lot of guys who have gone to visit a hooker and their wife doesn't know about it.
There's, boy, we could just go on and on in every category you can business.
Gee whiz, there's secrets you wouldn't want a competitor to know about.
If you were an inventor, you might have a really big secret until the patent was approved.
You're absolutely right.
And all of these things could be at risk.
Right.
And that's what I'm suggesting, is that if you don't have an awareness of that to begin with, then you're going to go off will-ny-nilly, and you're going to say the wrong things in the wrong places through the wrong medium, and it's going to have the chance of being picked up and identified, identified with you, and etc.
And then you have to have an understanding of what it is that is important for you to protect.
I mean, that's at the very core of it.
What is it that I want to protect?
If I don't have one, but if I were to have a mistress, then I would say I want to maintain a certain level of secrecy.
this would be a very poor day for you to say on the radio actually i've got a mistress but so it would really really If you really did have a mistress, would you be likely today to admit it?
Oh, probably not.
Probably not.
And I certainly wouldn't.
With some of my friends anyway.
You know that my wife is a nurse and she works with sharp objects.
I see why I know.
She knows all about John Wayne Bobbitt and stuff.
wanted to be clear on that and I'm clear now so the deal is that if She may not.
As a matter of fact, that's why she's sleeping upstairs now.
The deal is that if you know what it is that you need to protect, whether it's your secret patent application elements, whether it's your mistress, whether it's your bank account, whether it's the dope that you're selling to the guy down the street, whatever it is, and you know that that's got certain nuggets to it, then you just don't place those nuggets out there where people can find them.
You don't put them in the newspaper.
You don't talk about them over the phone, and etc.
The second part of it is knowing who can get that from you, who has an interest in getting that from you.
Okay, may I ask you a question?
Sure.
I know that a bunch of the high-profile drug dealers in South America that were caught were caught with the help of Echelon.
Yep, you're right.
And now, they've had some pretty big busts here in this country, too.
Yes.
Is it not reasonable to conclude that a lot of those have been with the help of the British version of Echelon?
That would be a reasonable conclusion, I would think.
Okey-dokie.
What I would suggest even further is that from time to time, when you hear an explanation for how a terrorist activity was prevented, or a law enforcement breakthrough occurred.
You know, I'll give you all this, that all of this is happening and that it is to our benefit as society.
And the important part is that maybe half of the time you're only given part of the story as to how they uncovered it.
Oh, I firmly believe that.
And most successes of Echelon or programs like it are the ones that you never, ever know about.
You're never going to hear about them.
And that's absolutely true.
The good things they did.
And that's absolutely true.
You know, there's another element, and it's who is going to use what it is that they've gotten from you.
Now, we've so far talked about echelon and American...
That is the UK, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Those are the five countries involved in the Echelon project, right?
That share.
Yeah.
You must also understand that there is a French alon as well.
That is a joint venture between the Germans and the French.
Well, now there's a surprise.
Usually the French don't want a damn thing to do with anybody else.
They do it themselves.
Well, that's, well, you know, back in the days of the Cold War, the East Germans had a terribly difficult time with their signals intercept sites being able to pick up American military American, German, and British military and aerospace defense industry information from Bavaria and southern Germany and Bavaria.
And so what they did was because they couldn't get enough coverage there, they relied upon their ability to penetrate the French who were monitoring the Brits, the Americans, and the Germans.
And then when the French were downloading their stuff and sending it back to Paris from BCT and Mont Volérian, their primary listening stations, that's when the East Germans put the grabs on the information that the French had already collected against the Americans, the Brits, and the Germans.
Oh, yeah.
See, I imagine all that, and I imagine very high deals made and swaps of information made.
And my imagination just virtually runs away with me, John, and I don't think I'm wrong.
No, let's go to another piece of it, though, that may be a little bit more close to home that you may even find of some interest.
And it may have been what Rod was talking about.
As you know, my company, the whole reason for my book and the whole reason for me being on with you tonight is that I'm a former intelligence officer and that now we do business intelligence work.
Companies hire us to find out what their competitors are doing and to help protect them from their competitors.
And we don't operate just in the United States.
We operate outside the country as well.
No kidding.
In the private sector, you operate outside as well.
Oh, absolutely.
Today we undertook two new projects in Eastern Europe.
One in the Czech Republic and one in the Slovak Republic.
Not unusual.
And who are we using?
We're using people who are our former intelligence adversaries.
Okay?
Really?
Oh, absolutely.
We have a group of folks that have offices in Kiev and Moscow who are former KGB and GRU guys.
And we meet them now.
We've got a kind of...
Virtually, truly falling apart.
Basket case, Tom.
You got it, right?
And so you're saying you've hired former KGB agents.
And they have access to information of competitive value relating to businesses in the former Soviet states.
And when we have clients who are interested in doing business in those areas, they come to us and say, do you have people whom you can access there?
And the answer is yes.
We've built up a network around the world of former intelligence officers from a variety of friendly and not so former friendly countries.
And when we're getting information on behalf of our clients, we're using a wide range of people like that.
So this group of former KGB GRU guys made me an interesting offer not too long ago.
Probably 10 months ago.
We haven't taken them up on it.
We haven't had occasion to do it yet.
What kind of offer?
Well, let me tell you what this offer was.
Are you familiar with Lourdes?
Do you know what Lourdes is?
Lourdes is a listening station that the Russians, or that the Soviets, built back in the days of the Cold War and put on the island of Cuba to listen to, to intercept, U.S. military and political telephone conversations up and down from the Gulf Coast up to Maine.
Look, never for one second did I doubt that that was there.
Sure.
Now, in the high point of the Cold War, there were about 1,200 people there, Russians, mostly English speakers, and some Spanish speakers, who would be intercepting voice communications along the eastern seaboard and up the Gulf Coast, up the Mississippi.
Now, you know that in the early 90s their economy started to go toes up.
Oh, yes, indeed.
And as a result, they had to withdraw, not retrench and withdraw all of their forces from the group of Soviet forces in Eastern Europe and a massive amount of the aid that had been going to Cuba and other places got cut off.
I know.
And so you would think that those 1,200 people sitting there at Lourdes would have gone away, right?
Well, or at least they certainly would have been downsized.
The right version of downsize.
And that's exactly what did happen.
In the KGB and GRU presence in the United States, they went from about 250 officers in the United States down to like 70-something.
Last fall, they were back up over 400 in the United States.
This is case officers operating in the United States.
Wow, yeah.
There's a bunch of material on that.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Gore talked to Kriuchkov about that, and Khrushchev told him, stick it in your ear.
You know, Al said, hey, get these guys out of here.
Why are you sending so many more spies to the United States?
We're supposed to be friends.
And he said, hey, we'll do what we want to do.
But the interesting thing is...
Oh, no, that's no different than the French.
But the interesting part is that at Lord's now, there are 2,300 people.
And what are they collecting?
I don't know.
They're collecting economic and personal information now.
But the funny part is available for sale.
It's available for sale.
It's available for sale.
Great.
Now, that's just really spiffy.
So then are you telling me that an American citizen, if he knew the right route to go and had the money, could purchase information about a corporation's activities in America?
Yes, holy crap.
But he could buy it from the Russians who have got everything for sale.
So that's the scary thing as far as I'm concerned.
Now I want you all to understand that actually I understand intellectually the need for the kind of security that we're talking about tonight.
Drastic as it may be, I actually do understand the need for it.
The others are doing it.
We've got to do it for our own national protection.
I mean, that's something we have to do.
But we also, at least, apparently, have enough freedom to be able to talk about what's really going on and tell you what the other side of the matrix looks like.
You know, the one you're living in.
unidentified
and this is what it looks like
we'll be right back with john noah Don't pour your love out on me, baby.
If you do the thing to maybe lay me down, but I won't forget.
Don't pour your love out on me, honey.
Take my heart, my soul, my money.
But don't leave me drowning in my tears.
You say you're gonna leave.
Gonna take that big white bird.
Gonna fly right out of here without a single word.
But you know you'll break my heart.
Well, I won't you go back.
Cause I know I won't see you anymore.
Don't worry about me, baby.
If you do, then I'll leave it, baby.
I just believe it.
Remier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired March 8th, 2000.
We'll tell you about his book in a moment because he's been very kind and hadn't plugged anything, so we'll have to do that.
He does have a book, and he's being pretty straight with us all, I think.
Which is interesting.
And I mean, you know, to some degree, obviously, whenever you're talking to somebody like this, you have to, you know, listen a little bit between the lines.
But to his credit, thus far, not that far between the lines.
Music Music Alright, we're about to go to the phones, and this ought to be really, really interesting.
John Nolan, however, has a book out.
Or is it two books now?
I don't know.
It's just the one right now.
one right now and that book is And what is it?
And it's uncovering your competitors' top business secrets and protecting your own.
And protecting your own.
Protecting your own.
Which is what I was alluding to earlier, that companies have to take certain measures to protect themselves, and so do individuals.
And individuals can follow the same format that's laid out in that whole third of the book on protecting themselves, developing the appropriate countermeasures to whatever it is that you see the people who are working against you are using.
Say, for example, you've got people going through your trash can looking for your credit card bills.
Then obviously what you do is you start either burning them or shredding them.
You don't put the things out in your trash can.
I've always done that.
Well, not everybody does, you know.
And I mean, I'm not here hawking shredders at your local office depot or anything like that.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
We could sell a shredder, and if I had a shredder to offer tonight, I bet I'd sell a zillion of them.
Well, make sure that you get a cross-cut shredder, not one of those script shredders, because cross-cut shredders are infinitely better.
Cross-cut.
So you've got to have a cross-cut.
In other words, it not only makes the thin little lines, but then cuts across them.
Right, and it'll cut it into things that are about an eighth inch square, as opposed to rendering it to the point where even the best puzzle person in the entire world would throw up their hands and say, get me out of here.
One would hope.
Well, one would hope that if he's serious about it, he doesn't throw his hands up because then another 10 million pieces of confetti will fly all over.
So that is effective, though.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, it's really surprising.
People think that, you know, well, I'll just tear this in quarters.
You know, when we're doing penetration projects, when companies hire us to find out what their vulnerabilities are, and we'll do some waste archaeology, that is the thing that I've done.
There, I fail.
I tear it in as many pieces as I can with my hand, and that's it.
Well, you know, most people, when they go to tear something up that's got some importance, they tear it into quarters and then throw it into the trash can.
What does that do?
That sets off a signal for our guys.
Oh, good.
They thought this was sensitive enough that they would tear it in quarters.
And so, I mean, it takes hours and hours and hours, of course, to try and figure out how those four pieces of paper go back together again.
Yeah, but if a credit card company got some application that was all messed up, crumpled up, and obviously scotch-taped together.
Sure.
Wouldn't they?
Well, they wouldn't do that.
You see, what they would do is they would put that all together.
Okay.
you take the four pieces or however many and then you put them all together and you see what the draft of the application looks like and then you just fill it out in your own hand and then that way when the signature goes in for the credit card people then and with the phony address to which you're having the then it's your signature Oh, God.
I mean, that's the whole nature of that beast.
I'm not trying to tell people how to be crooks, because crooks already know.
It's interesting you brought up the word beast.
Well, yeah.
666 on your forehead.
And a lot of people think that these things that we're talking about right now don't happen.
No.
No, they don't think that.
They think these...
Right.
A lot of other people, though, think that this is, in fact, the sign of the beast.
Would you disabuse them of that thinking?
Well, I guess that now you're getting into my theology a little bit.
A little.
I mean, would you disabuse that notion?
No, I would not.
You wouldn't?
No, I would not simply because I try and look at the history of our civilization, and I look at people doing things now that 10 years ago, 15 years, 30 years ago, 50 years, 100 years ago, they would never have thought about doing to their fellow man.
And there has to be some influence.
I mean, I really believe in the balance between good and evil.
And I mean, you know, I spent 20-plus years in the intelligence community, looking after things that I thought had relationship to the forces of good versus the forces of evil.
And I firmly and fully believe that somebody is an influencing agent, either for good or for bad.
And in our situation these days, we've got an awful lot of evil about in the world.
Yes, but is there any place in the world to equal the intelligence agency with regard to its view of good and bad?
And any place where it is more mixed, where it is harder to delineate between good and bad than in the kind of work you do?
Well, you know, that's really a tough and a very good question, Art.
People who do intelligence work are expected on one hand to do some of the most difficult and, I won't be dramatic by saying most dangerous stuff, but challenging, intellectually challenging, and many times physically challenging, spiritually challenging as well in many respects.
And sometimes often very important things.
And in so doing, you make a value judgment as to whether this is more important than that.
And as a result, you say, some eggs may have to get broken in order to make this omelette.
Some people need to die as a result of, in order to be able to achieve this objective.
So you were an egg breaker.
Yeah.
Omelette maker.
Omelette maker.
And so you have to make those kinds of choices at certain points, right?
Well, and this is the interesting paradox of the intelligence community, is while you get people who will be willing to do those things that are necessary to be done, and sometimes many times, you're asking them to break international laws, because as you are well aware, espionage is one of the few international crimes.
So you're asking them on behalf of the nation to become a felon, an international felon, whether apprehended or not.
And yet you hold them to a standard that's almost like a Caesar's wife's standard.
You've got to be pure as the driven snow when dealing with your national command authorities, your elected leadership, as well as the people who are appointed over you.
Well, let's see how that translates.
Hypothetical situation.
You are in one of the alphabet agencies.
Yeah.
Who cares?
NSA, CIA, whatever.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, mothers against cracked age.
Yeah, whatever.
And so you get this assignment that has you, in essence, listening to a person you know to be a political opponent of the administration now in office, right?
Do you follow your orders?
The truth.
Would I?
no do you think that most uh...
All right.
And I'll pull you away from this.
What percentage of those serving our government in such a capacity, in your view, would refuse those orders?
98, 99.
Really?
Absolutely.
I mean, think about it.
I'm not.
On my level, I would say, on a personal gut level, I'm not going to jail for some SOB's political machinations.
That's on the one hand, right?
That's on one level.
On the other hand, you're holding your career in your hands.
Remember I was talking about the level of morale in the intelligence community these days?
Right.
It makes me crazy to think that when I give a lecture at one of the letter agencies and people come up to me when we take a break after, say I'm going to give a three-hour lecture.
And at the midpoint, we're taking a break and a quarter to a half of the group come up to me and hand me resumes.
I mean, these are mid-course, mid-career intelligence officers who come up and hand me resumes that they're carrying around in their briefcases.
Now, I will tell you, Art, when I was getting ready to leave the government, it was over 20 years before I even thought about writing a resume.
And yet here are people who are so uncertain of their careers, so uncertain of their ability to remain, that they're not waiting for the axe to drop on them anymore.
They're not looking to be able to fulfill a career.
Now, are there careerists who will do anything in order to enhance their career?
What they are ordered to do.
Or what they're ordered to do.
They will either undertake orders, they will undertake to fulfill illegal orders.
There will always be those people, and it will be a very, very small minority, whether they're in the military or whether they're in the intelligence community or wherever they are in government or in business.
There are people who will always do whatever it is that the boss wants them to do in the interest of career enhancement.
that's going to be given across every aspect of human endeavor Sure.
Sure.
On one level, the whole book was written for the purpose of leveling the playing field.
And the origins of it were in protection.
That is, helping people understand how others get information from you, the techniques used by intelligence people.
Many of the people who bought the book as a result of the last time that we talked, and I thank you very much for your having mentioned it previously as well.
Many of the people who have done that have written to me and said, hey, I'm a nurse.
I bought this book, and I used it to deal better with my patients.
Some guys, PIs, have written and said, this opens a whole new realm for me of gathering information instead of having to interview or interrogate people for it.
At the same time, when you understand how people get information from you, then you can take certain protective measures.
Once you appreciate how somebody is going to approach you, then you can be much more on guard.
And that's whether you're afraid of a government guy coming to you or a private guy or a scam artist of some sort.
Because these kinds of techniques are not peculiar only to the intelligence community.
But do you realize what you've told the American people this morning?
That really they're living in this matrix where they think they're really free, where they think they're really they have real privacy, where the old-fashioned view of America, if anybody has listened to you tonight, and even slightly listened between the lines, all of that is shattered.
That's a bunch of BS.
There's no such thing.
That's a big thing to tell the American people, and it really is.
Well, you know, it's really a true statement.
I understand that.
I just say it's really something to lay on.
Let's take a few calls.
I'm East of the Rockies.
You're on the air with John A. Nolan.
Hi.
unidentified
Well, I lived in Canada for two years.
I still think we've got more freedom here than in Canada.
Last time I tried to enter Canada, they took my word processor and all my discs and kept them for two months.
That's really, really, really interesting because we were talking about the difference between Britain and the U.S. And John, let's address Canada for a second.
How does Canada stack up in the scale between, say, Britain and the U.S.?
Is Canada closer to Britain in terms of what it can do and will do for national security?
Well, certainly, and you've got to understand that virtually all of the Canadian laws derive from their relationship as part of Great Britain.
The whole nature of their economic structure and the whole nature of their political structure and their legal structure are mirrors of the ways that the Brits operate things.
Even to the level of taxation, to the great dismay of many of my Canadian friends who hate...
In England, if they want to stop a story, that damn story dies.
It never gets on the air.
If they stop it, they have the power to stop it.
How about in Canada?
I'm not 100% certain, but I believe that it's very close.
Although the Canadians are in many respects a little bit more iconoclastic than the average Brit.
That's just my experience, a little bit more cowboy-ish, a little bit more like Americans than they are Brits.
But still, the fundamental aspects of their laws relate to the British model as opposed to the American model.
Yeah, that's exactly what I thought.
Thank you.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with John A. Nolan.
unidentified
Thanks, Art.
Dago Dave here in Phoenix.
Yes.
I want to preface my statement with a Dago Daveism for you.
How free is a society if the government is afraid of its own people?
Now, I want to go back to your question about trading, well, privacy, I guess, for security.
You know, do we need to feel so safe that we should let these intelligence agencies invade our private communications all for the sake of, quote-unquote, security?
I would suggest that there's a possibility of that.
There's always a possibility that some guy sitting at a console is going to see that pop up.
But in point of fact, the issue is that it's not for the purpose of identifying whether they are statements that support your constitutional right to bear arms, your appropriate personal right to bear arms, whether constitutionally guaranteed or not.
but the simple fact of the matter is that yours that you're not saying anything that is inflammatory or or that is uh...
what may be slightly inflammatory to some people's ears it is nonetheless of a legal expression if you however were to be saying You know what would be John.
If I'd let that statement, even the way you just said it, go out on the air, they'd be knocking on my door, and they've done it plenty of times in the past.
The Secret Service would be here before you could say, how come you didn't hit the button on that one?
No, I'm serious about that.
Okay.
Well, I was giving you as an example.
Yeah, Paula, your broader question about security for safety.
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, you know, it takes me back to my original statement.
You know, how free is a society if the government is afraid of its own people?
You should have seen when I was in Egypt and Zahi was taking me around, when I tell you that he is like more like the dictator of Giza, I'm telling you the truth.
I mean, when he said something, man, people hopped.
I want to echo the sentiments of the caller before the top of the hour.
You know, I'm not anti-government.
I'm a pro-constitutional republic form of government.
Not the imperial federal government that we have right now.
I'm sure I'll get in trouble for that.
But call me old-fashioned or naive, but I agree with what Ben Franklin said when he said those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security.
Exactly.
But I guess we deserve it because we've allowed our government to meddle in everyone's affairs and entangle ourselves in alliances and treaties and world organizations.
And in my opinion, most of this activity has done nothing but increase our risk.
Is it negative to be an isolationist, to stay out of world affairs and shun alliances and foreign aid?
Thomas Jefferson said peace, commerce, anonymous friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
See, the thing is, actually, we do have a defense against that.
We have this intelligence community that, on the one hand, seems so intrusive, so anti-constitutional, so un-American in every way you can think of.
But on the other hand, they are defending us against exactly that kind of thing.
Right, John?
That's the objective.
Absolutely.
The issue is that there are many dollars being spent right now on national and theater missile defense things that are designed to identify launch vehicles and to knock them out of the air.
This administration has not been particularly enthusiastic about that.
That's exactly right.
And one of them knocked down the missile.
They did exactly right.
and that's uh...
fad the theater high altitude anti-defender defense system and it's a it's a uh...
because it's essentially trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.
It's more like the shotgun approach.
Yeah, to a certain extent.
In other words, they have many objects traveling at many thousands of miles per hour that are suddenly hurled at this incoming missile that spread out like a shotgun blast would spread out.
Yes.
I likened it the other day to a million little ginzu knives.
Indeed.
But the other side of it is that while you've got an understanding of something that launches, I mean, that's really the last time.
That's the last line of defense.
The very first line of defense is the intelligence community's ability to penetrate somebody else's delivery system, their development system and delivery system, in order to be able to identify it early on.
You remember back in the 70s when the Iraqi capital Baghdad was bombed by the Israelis?
Are you referring now to the nuclear facility that they're, yes, exactly.
They knew that the Iraqis were pretty close to the development of a nuclear weapon that would place the state of Israel at risk.
And so, I mean, that did not happen to be something they got out of the newspaper, and it certainly wasn't anything that they said, well, we'll just wait until they launch one, and then we'll try and catch it or knock it down.
They said, we'll cut off the head of the beast now.
And that's what they went after.
That's what you generally have to have, an intelligence system that tells you that such an event is likely to occur in order to meet the definition of the intelligence product.
We've provided the decision-maker timely and actionable information.
Yeah, we've done some stuff like that ourselves.
Yeah, we have.
I do believe there was an action or two at Osama bin Laden, whether it was proper or just a baby milk factory.
I don't know, but we did.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I joke with some people every once in a while that it must have been really a tough job to get those 47 tons of chemically treated sand in there before the inspectors came in around the baby factory.
The baby food factory.
My friend, I know.
East of the Rockies, you're on there with John Noel and I. Hello.
Well, they're trying a pretty good thing at politically correct.
I mean, there are a bunch of thoughts that you can't make expressed.
Well, yeah, that is true.
I'm not necessarily a fan of John Rockers one way or the other.
But he doesn't seem to have any ability to think his thoughts about the population of New York City and be a guy who's able to open his mouth because it's not politically appropriate.
And that's not pretty close to, I mean, getting massive numbers of people.
Wait a minute.
Hold it.
That's a thought control process.
Yeah, but okay, yeah, sure.
But, you know, when you consider the rocker thing.
Yeah.
The retaliation was also political.
In other words, he wasn't charged with any criminal thing.
Absolutely not.
Right?
The retaliation was in the same arena in which it was issued.
What he said was horrible.
Right.
And so they just came back at him in the same arena.
It's not like they called the DA and said this is somewhere else.
What I'm suggesting to you, however, is that if it's going to be a thought control thing, as your caller from Texas is talking about, then we're almost partly there, if you really step back and think about it, from what is politically correct, the kinds of things that you are allowed to say publicly now.
And that's not whether you're going to get in trouble with the law.
If you say the wrong thing at work these days, you have any number of potential civil actions that can be brought to you.
Not to mention goodbye job.
Not to mention goodbye job.
And if that's not thought control at a certain level, I don't know what is.
In other words, yeah, I can imagine that helicopters, stealth helicopters in a cause of national security might be called upon to go listen to somebody or something or whatever.
Whatever they can do.
Spy satellites, used whatever, all the assets they've got, but not for some disabled guy who hasn't said anything particularly wrong.
What do you think?
Well, my observation is that it would probably not be your caller, but maybe his next-door neighbor who's an arch criminal.
Well, that's a very good point.
How would he know whether they were actually after him or a neighbor?
Exactly.
Secondly, you know, there are lots of things.
I mean, I live in Huntsville, Alabama, and we have down in the southern part of the state, Fort Rucker, where they train helicopter pilots.
And then up north of us at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, is 101st Air Mobile, where they live in helicopters as well.
And very often you see flights of helicopters moving about, and you wonder Whether or not it's just a troop movement or an exercise or something like that.
But you don't think necessarily of them flying over your house in a hovering pattern.
Would it be possible for a hovering helicopter to issue a laser that would hit your window and allow them to hear everything being said in your room, just hypothetically?
Would that be possible?
Yeah, because it's already established as a technology.
Whether they use them out of helicopters, there's a lot of shimmy and shake in a helicopter that might make it a little bit problematic.
But they probably got that figured out, though.
The technology is there to do that, if somebody needed to do it.
Only if somebody needed to do it, of course, yes.
We'll be right back.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Arkbell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 8, 2000.
We've been traveling far Without our home, but not without us a star Only one will be free, with heart and close
Hang on to a dream Lonely days, lonely nights Where would I be without my warm mind?
Lonely days, lonely nights Where would I be without my warm mind?
Lonely days Lonely days, where would I be without my warm mind?
Lonely days, lonely nights You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 8th, 2000.
Now, I want you all to understand that actually, I understand, intellectually, the need for the kind of security that we're talking about tonight.
Drastic as it may be, I actually do understand the need for it.
The others are doing it.
We've got to do it for our own national protection.
I mean, that's something we have to do.
But we also, at least, apparently, have enough freedom to be able to talk about what's really going on and tell you what the other side of the Matrix looks like.
The End Just bear in mind, as you're listening to what many perceive as terrible horrors that we're talking about right now, that in Britain, for doing this program right now, well, I would never have gotten this far.
I would have been arrested, well, I don't know, two and a half hours ago.
And my guest, John Nolan, would have been arrested two and a half hours ago.
You cannot talk about something like this there.
So there is a difference.
Maybe after all is said and done, not a really gigantic difference.
When you get down to the minutiae of capability, it is not a lot of difference, really.
But that is a difference that remains for the moment.
Welcome back, John.
thank you uh...
anything anything water While we're justifiably concerned about the ability of the echelon system to gather up all manner of conversations and etc.
from the ether, the flip side of it is that as technology advances, fiber optics are not susceptible to intercept from such systems.
I know they're really worried about that, and they're working on a solution.
Yeah, and they're working on a solution.
That's the issue.
They don't have a solution set to that right now.
But they will.
That cuts down a lot of the...
They will.
That's exactly right.
All of these sophisticated scrambling systems have been broken.
That's another piece of it, is which encryption techniques are being used, and to what extent is it worth checking.
Take an early version.
How do you pick out the nuggets?
I'll tell you.
One way.
Let's set something up here.
Let's say you want to email a friend and you want it to be secure.
The urban legend is that if you use one of the early versions of PGB, pretty good privacy.
Pretty good privacy, right?
That nobody is going to be able to read what you have sent.
But the probable truth of the matter is that that's bull poop.
And that if our agencies had the ability to decrypt PGP, we wouldn't know about it.
They obviously wouldn't tell us.
True.
Because now we can sit here thinking that in safety we are encrypting what we're sending.
Nobody can read it.
I don't believe that for a second, John.
Well, you know, I agree with you.
You do?
Yes, because there isn't an encryption protocol that is not susceptible to being decrypted, except for what, of course, are known throughout the trade as one-time pads.
And one-time pads means that the sender and the receiver are the only ones who know it, and they're completely random.
Even with a changing key, you have the opportunity to break it.
And so what it means is you have to have a terrifically powerful computer to be able to break something.
And then you have to say to yourself, well, who is it who's sending it and what is it that they're sending?
And how much interest is there for us to do that?
If we know that this is a terrorist group, well, then we're going to do everything that we can to decrypt that.
If it is Art Bell and John Nolan sending traffic back and forth, and we're sending dirty jokes back and forth, and we're encrypting those just because we like to giggle a lot, then they're not going to waste their resources.
I mean, bear in mind a while ago they shut down the system because it went into overlay.
Wait a minute here.
If anything, you know, the keywords that we were talking about that will get a conversation tripped, kicked out, and listened to, then obviously the use of a cipher is going to raise your profile.
In two seconds flat.
Sure, it is.
I mean, these are the realities that I don't think people really think all that much about.
But if you're sending something out in a cipher, man, that's going to be kicked out right along with bomb and other words.
Right.
All right.
First time calling the line, you're on the air with John Nolan.
A friend of mine told me when I was a kid, this was in the early 80s, he never mentioned the word echelon, but his dad worked at an annex of the Pentagon about it.
Maybe that's this case of today, but let me just finish it this out, Art.
After about an hour, and I'm sure your man there can confirm this, if you mess with it and they determine that you're just somebody goofballing off, they sent a noise through the phone that literally rattled my brain.
Look, a telephone, first of all, is not capable of issuing enough DB to destroy your hearing.
That's all there is to it.
A telephone has a constricted bandpass of audio that can come through it.
And it could be real loud and real annoying, but it would not destroy your hearing.
Right, John?
To my understanding, and I'm not a technical guy, but that's roughly my understanding of it.
Yeah.
So, now, on the other hand, if you particularly went after them to annoy them and continually said things like you were going to bomb some building or you were going to whatever you were going to do, you know, something awful, you had just purchased a brand new shiny backpack nuke, you know, from the Russians or something.
Now, that's going to get you a visit, probably.
But, you know, this thing of clicks on the telephone, that's silly.
You're never going to hear a click because you're being monitored.
Would you agree, John?
Well, your caller is talking about the early part of the 80s, and there were still some mechanisms that were not as discreet as they are today,
still in use at that time, but mostly those were local law enforcement and people like that who were using relatively unsophisticated direct line and direct line taps.
Yeah, let me put it to you this way.
In the 80s, if I had wanted to tap somebody's line and with nary a click, nary a decrease in the apparent volume or any other giveaway, I could have done it.
I could have done it.
Oh, sure, sure.
And so.
And what I'm talking about are the guys who run down to their local SPY's R Us and buy something for $19.95.
Oh, there you'll get clicks.
And there you'll get all kinds of interference.
You'll get all kinds of demodulation and you'll get all kinds of problems.
Sure.
And recognizable drifts in and out.
Absolutely.
But if the big guys are trying to listen to you.
If it's the big guys, you're not going to know it.
And I linked to the site that she had, I believe it was in Finland, and there was a link concerning a patent for a holographic memory storage device that the NSA had patented.
And I was wondering, I've heard a couple of times when the government has procured sensitive or high-tech devices and kept them for national security.
Are these things also available to be used within the public as well, or are they kept just for the government?
Actually, there are a number of different variations on the basic theme.
The typical variation on the theme is that a place like Lawrence and Livermore National Laboratories scientists may develop a patentable process and then what they will do is license that process to various commercial entities who will then have the opportunity to use it either fully or in part.
And even in some cases, they'll use, they'll be so concerned about the national security implications of it that they will license only portions of a patent to various competing companies, for example, in order that nobody is able to achieve the fullest technical capability.
And so it gets out into the public's hands, but it doesn't have the same degree of, say, for example, lethality that it might otherwise have.
unidentified
I see.
And my last question, please.
I was wondering, considering that most of these agencies are under black budgets and Congress really doesn't know what they're up to, I mean, do they have oversight committees that really keep up to their day-to-day activities?
John, are you convinced the oversight committees know everything that's going on?
No, I'm not convinced of that because of what we talked about earlier.
Are there opportunities for people to be rogues about things?
Are there opportunities for people in this current administration to be rogues about certain things?
Yeah.
Is there a way that somebody, I mean, think about this.
We're talking about a community of people who live behind a veil in the first place.
And the whole mental gymnastic activity is one of secrecy and being able to protect your secrets.
So if you ever wanted to have a group of people who are capable of donut, it would certainly be the intelligence community.
They've got some equally smart folks on the oversight committees.
Some of the greatest challenges, I think, are between those two groups of folks.
But you really don't want to screw the pooch by getting caught doing something like that.
And I think that it's every bureaucrat's nightmare to be one of the intelligence bureaucrats who steps over the line, does the wrong thing, and has an oversight committee catch you in the act, because then you're like John Poindexter standing up there raising your hand in front of a congressional committee, which is not good for your morale.
And so the Poindexter example is certainly not necessarily preventing all of that going on right now.
Oh, no.
No, absolutely not.
I would be the first to suggest that when just about anything to include the towels in the Lincoln bedroom are for sale, courtesy of this administration, you can buy anything in this world from them.
Well, so then the Poindexter example stands more as an example of why it's bad to be caught.
Yeah, exactly.
And so that's the major disincentive is the getting caught part.
You and I talked about something on the air, off the air briefly before we went on, because I was talking about the weather.
I mean, they're having, you know, like tornadoes in Wisconsin.
We are having weather that is outrageously wrong.
80s along the East Coast in winter.
I mean, just a full-blown tornado season all winter long in the American South.
It's been unblanking believable.
And you had a comment or two about that.
Yeah, and frankly, I only know on the periphery.
I don't even know that I know.
I know that I've been told by people who claim to have knowledge of some advanced climatological research and applications of some of the research done by various countries in order to wreak havoc with another country's crops, for example, in a particular year.
Weather wars.
Do you remember, I know you do because we talked about it, the Russians actually publicly offered to put out the terrible fires in Southeast Asia that were raging.
Yes.
By creating a cyclone.
Yes.
They claimed they could create a cyclone.
They said they would do it once as a demonstration for free if that country wanted it.
And then after that, they would charge for the service.
I don't think that Marcenko needs to take anything from me.
He has a wellspring of certain experiences and a lot of imagination and quite a few contacts throughout the community who will continue to feed him things.
He doesn't need to rely on anything from me.
unidentified
Okay, and I think Marcenko would make a fantastic guest for Art Bill.
And so you believe that the Third Reich came along with them and all its tactics?
You bet.
See, I'm not, I guess I haven't entered that level of cynicism just quite yet.
John?
Well, actually, here in Huntsville, Alabama is where many of those people who came over under the paperclip operation, which is the one that this gentleman's referring to, at the close of the war, bringing over rocket specialists with Werner von Braun and a bunch of other people in Huntsville, Alabama is where I live.
And they call it a rocket city because it's where they manage the space shuttle programs.
Actually, the Russians got a lot more of them than we did.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
They got a great deal more of them.
And with that technical competency, we were able to do a whole lot of things that we might not have otherwise been able to do as rapidly as we were.
But the simple fact of the matter is that those were, as you quite accurately pointed out, art is that these are scientists who are rocket scientists, not psychologists.
As a matter of fact, the nature of most psychological research was not German, but rather Swiss and Austrian.
John, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the air.
We're going to have you back again soon.
I hope to.
What you're saying is just scary as hell and absolutely true.
And I hope everybody goes out and buy your book one more time.
Your book's name is Confidential.
Confidential.
Uncover your competitors' top business secrets and protect your own.
And even though you won't get a real cheap copy on Amazon.com, you will get a slightly cheaper copy on Amazon.com.