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Oct. 23, 2013 - Art Bell
03:09:29
Dark Matter with Art Bell - Charles Faddis - Ex CIA - Biological Terrorism in the US
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Wanna take a ride?
From the high desert and the Great American Southwest.
Exclusively on Sirius XM Radio.
This is Dark Matter with your host, Art Bell.
Now, here's Art.
Extra!
Terrestrial Radio, actually.
Welcome, dark riders.
I couldn't resist.
This is not my idea.
Somebody sent it to me.
I can find it.
Probably I can't.
I'm gonna have to give him credit.
Oh yeah, here we go.
Here we go!
Who was this?
He starts out mega uber Roswells.
Anyway, it's an email and it was suggested in there that I call all of you Dark Riders.
What do you think?
It's from France.
FRAN.
Thank you, Fran.
Dark riders they are.
It's excellent.
Excellent work.
All right.
Welcome, everybody.
You may have heard that yesterday... A little history here.
Back when I worked in San Diego at the cable company there, we climbed poles.
That's what we did.
We climbed poles.
And worked on amplifiers and things like that.
That was when I was in my twenties.
And I'll tell you a couple of things.
When you're on a pole, and you start having trouble, I mean, really serious trouble, as in you're going to burn, what's called burn the pole, you have two choices in life.
One, you can grab the pole and go down Fairly slowly.
But, if you've ever looked carefully at a phone pole, you will see that there are upward-facing splinters.
Big mamas of splinters.
So if you grab the pole, as you go down, your body will ingest splinters wherever it touches the pole.
And then for the rest of your life, you will either have partial splinters within, or you will have A lot of splinters, scars.
And the second choice is push off.
At that critical moment, I decided to push off.
Well, I was pretty high up in the air.
When I came down, I came down on my butt and my elbow and impacted the lower part of my back.
And ever since then, it sometimes does what it did yesterday.
And I was walking The fact that I'm sitting here is amazing tonight.
I was walking and it was really hurting.
Now don't ask me what causes this, but it just locked.
And it was like somebody took a knife and stabbed it in my back and I went to the floor real quickly.
Where I stayed for a while, by the way, and then with the help of a chair got up.
So it was really bad.
Bad, bad, bad, bad.
That's what happened yesterday.
And for, well, all day I couldn't move much.
And yes, by the way, everybody sends me their back cure when they hear about this.
No need, folks.
Been to the doctors, had the MRIs, all that kind of stuff, so don't send it.
I know what's wrong.
They know what's wrong.
I've seen those ads on TV where you go in for back surgery, and they do a little tiny cut, and then when you're done, they put a Band-Aid on your spine and you leave.
I thought that was cool.
And I asked my doctor about that because, I mean, who doesn't want Couple minutes of attention and a band-aid, baby, compared to open her up and put a steel bar in there.
And so, of course, I asked my doctor about that commercially.
He said, yeah, but it's not for your back, buddy.
Actually, when I had my original MRI here just, oh, I don't know, a decade ago, the doctor came back in the room, said a word that I will not, cannot repeat here on the radio about the state of my back.
But it starts with F. You know, he told me it was really top.
Anyway, every now and then, a couple times a year or more, it does that to me and it's scary.
all right i'll let me cover all all by the way just before i get that
you know what uh... when budding talk show hosts conduct me by email or
owner however they're gonna contact me and they do by the score
many many of them and ask for advice how do you get in
and i've only ever given one response because it's the only one i know to give
uh... what we do to get into talk radio or what we do on and my comment is always
the same your
that's the only advice i ever give anybody trying to get into this business
because uh... if you're doing long-form talk radio and you're not yourself
you're going to get caught God.
It's as simple as that.
So be yourself and you'll stay out of trouble.
You know, it's like the advice your mama gave you.
I am going to call attention to one thing because you know, sometimes when you give advice, it doesn't sink in.
You know that other talk show host over there, right?
Getting all these emails and people are sending me wormhole messages.
And basically, it's... I want to clear up one more thing.
I have been... It has been said that I picked George Norrie.
Well, it's not true.
I met George Norrie, the guy on Coast to Coast, at a lunch.
Uh, here in my little town.
And that's the first I ever saw of him, so I obviously didn't pick him.
But what I did do is I gave him the same advice that I give every talk show host, and I really meant it in this case, you know, because he was stepping in to do that show.
And so I said again and again, be your self.
That means make it yours.
And this really is sincere advice because I don't think there's any other way to do it anyway.
I'm getting all these emails and now this from Lee in Asheville, North Carolina.
George all of a sudden started saying as of last night that he's raging in the night.
Really?
Really?
Well, sometimes advice over lunch is not heard.
This is going to be a really interesting night, and the reason it's going to be interesting is because we've got a CIA agent, big guy, on the show.
I have always wanted a CIA agent.
Now, of course, he's not current, because if he was, as soon as he went on the air, he'd be, well, probably not current.
If not at room temperature.
So that'll be coming up.
A few things, as usual.
The usual ghost photo contest ends Sunday.
This Sunday, guaranteed, coming at noon.
My webmaster calls himself Ghost Master Roland.
But, I mean, there's something to be won here.
A radio, a Sirius XM radio, and a one-year subscription.
Go to the winner, send your ghost pictures to webmaster at artbill.com.
Webmaster at artbill.com.
Send your ghost stories to me.
Include a short.
Oh, please make it short.
I like a paragraph or two.
Sort of a summary of your story.
To Art Bell at ArtBell.com and we may call you on spooky matter.
I don't be our Halloween show.
I've got a video up on Artbell.com and I want to talk to you about these videos.
Hear me, folks!
I'm going to put up videos and pieces on the website that I consider to be interesting.
It doesn't mean that somebody didn't hoax them, somebody didn't fake them, somebody didn't photoshop them.
I never can know for sure.
I'll leave that up to you.
I'm putting up the interesting stuff, whether you like it or not.
You know, people complain, oh, that's gotta be a fake.
Well, I know the dragon was a fake, duh.
The other stuff, I don't know.
This hotel photo.
Or, I should say, video.
Pretty damn scary stuff.
It's about a complaint of screaming.
A woman screaming in one of the rooms.
You'll see the guy on security camera footage go and And you'll hear the radio stuff, too.
And you'll see them go to the door.
And so much more.
Oh, God, that's scary.
I don't know if it's real.
Nobody can know if anything's real anymore.
You know what?
You can be on the Internet, right?
So I don't make any warranties about this stuff.
I just put it up.
And then there is this really cool British Columbia UFO video.
And these things just keep coming.
Who knows what that is.
And then, and then there's a video of 49 quadcopters at night.
It's like what you can be on the internet.
You know, we're going to have to be wary of all video that we get now.
And, and once again, I, I just put the interesting stuff up.
If I think it's cool, it goes up there.
If you want to complain about it as probably being hoaxed, then go right ahead.
Maybe it is, but unless I know for sure, I'm going to put it up and let you guys decide.
You want to see this hotel video, trust me.
It's at rfl.com.
UFOs in Canada, the 49 quadcopters at night that could be anything, and then there's so much more news to talk about.
The fact that in Montana and North Dakota, The, you know, the two-man crews that launched the missiles apparently have been leaving the blast doors open on a couple of occasions.
This is really bad.
Really, really bad.
I mean, these are the guys who would launch the nuclear missiles that would retaliate because we would never fire first, right?
Or whatever.
They're in control of the keys.
I think they each have a gun on their hip.
Right?
If the movies are correct.
They were caught apparently asleep twice while the blast doors Very important, you know blast doors very very important because the enemy of course would strike first at what?
At our offensive capability, right?
So leaving the blast doors open is just wrong on so many levels and worrisome I've got a lot more news, but I've already talked the best part of a quarter of an hour, so I'm done.
I'll save it for tomorrow.
In the meantime, go to Artbell.com and see all that is there for you, and there's quite a bit.
All right, coming up in a moment, Charles S. Faddis.
I hope I'm getting that right.
F-A-D-D-I-S, Faddis.
President of Orion Strategic Services, LLC, a former CIA operations officer, 20 years of experience in the conduct of intelligence operations in the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe.
He has worked against the most dangerous terrorist organizations on our planet, has extensive firsthand experience with their methodology and tactics.
His last assignment prior to retirement in May of 08, was as head of the CIA's terrorist weapons of mass destruction unit.
He took the first CIA team into Iraq in the summer of 2002.
That was in advance of the invasion of that country.
And he has worked extensively in the field with law enforcement, local security forces, and special ops teams.
Since his retirement He has written extensively and provided training to a wide variety of government and private entities.
His most recent book, CAFA, is about a fictional bioweapons attack on the U.S.
and is available at Amazon.com.
So, coming up in just a moment, prepare yourselves.
This could be really, really, really interesting.
My guest, Tonight, well, I've got probably a lot of tough questions for him.
Questions that he may not answer, but, you know, that's alright.
Sometimes, what you are asked, you cannot answer.
We're going to break here, because this is Dark Matter, Raging in the Night Time.
I'm Art Bell.
By the way, do you say raging or flailing?
That's not true Howdy everybody!
All right, bringing now Charles S. Pettis.
Charles, welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me.
It's great to have you.
I have never... Well, let's get it straight.
Have you been an agent, or were you a CIA officer?
Or both?
Well, I was what the average person calls a CIA agent, but C.I.A.
doesn't use that term.
They refer to them as officers.
Okay.
All right.
So, but either vision probably works pretty well, right?
So, I mean, my job was to recruit spies, run spies, conduct covert operations, clandestine operations.
That's, you know, that's what people mean when they see C.I.A.
agent.
Holy smokes.
I have always, all my life, wanted to interview somebody like yourself.
Are there questions that you cannot answer?
I guarantee you there are questions I cannot answer, but that doesn't mean you can't ask them.
Could you list a few?
Well, that doesn't seem fair.
Wait, I can start by saying that's one of the questions I can't answer.
That's fine, fine, fine.
You were involved in some incredible work.
I can't even imagine what it was like to go into Iraq, and we'll get that.
First, though, I want to talk about your book.
I guess when you retire from the CIA, you live on whatever you get from the CIA, and if you did retire after 20 or however many, how many do you have to have, anyway?
If you're in the clandestine service doing what I was doing, you can retire 20 years.
I had been in the Army before then, so that federal service is cumulative.
Anyway, yes, I was able to retire from them, so I get a pension from them.
I would imagine the odds are with them never having to pay the pension if your work is dangerous enough.
That depends on how good you are, you know?
Yes, I'm sure.
Listen, we've got a lot of time and we can go into all kinds of areas that'll probably get you in trouble.
But I do want to talk to you about your book.
I am, I'm a classic doomsday story lover.
I don't care whether it's nuclear conflict, biological, I guess the totality of a biologic attack, you know something really horrible.
I'm into all that kind of stuff and I read those books and see those movies and so you've written something, right?
Right.
So the latest book I've written is a novel, and it's called CAFA, and we can talk about the title and where that comes from.
And it's about a fictional biological weapons attack on the United States, in this case using the plague.
And, you know, when I write fiction, I try to do a couple of things.
I mean, one is I try to make it fun so it doesn't turn into a textbook or tedious.
You know, it should be a fast read.
It should be entertaining.
But the second thing is, you know, I do try to write something that actually reflects, as much as I can, the reality of intelligence operations, counter-terrorist operations, real threats.
So, you know, my books are not filled with cars that fly and nuclear wristwatches and all the James Bond stuff.
It's, you know, it's a much grittier, street-level look at a world where people stay alive mostly by By being quick and thinking two steps ahead and, you know, you sort of live by your wits.
And the biological weapons thing is actually a great topic for that because it's not science fiction.
It is unfortunately what most WMD experts call the number one most realistic terrorist WMD threat that we are facing.
I think so because biological agents multiply all by themselves with our help, right?
Exactly right.
I mean, what you're talking about, I mean, there's also the possibility of engineering, you know, nasty new things.
But by and large, what you're talking about is being worried about people spreading pathogens that are already out there and are already engineered to kill human beings.
Yes, but as you point out, something engineered could be all the more lethal and all the more contagious.
It could be designed to be all of that and I'm sure that there are things that we have that do that and you know Russia has and others have and what do you know about how much of that stuff is out there?
Well both, let's talk about the US and Russia right now, I mean both countries have had in the past Not only biological weapons programs, but large offensive biological weapons programs.
In other words, programs that were designed to develop weapons to kill or incapacitate millions of human beings, to be used offensively to attack other countries.
The U.S.
I think legitimately did walk away from that some time past.
The Russians claim to have.
But you know, there see there's a little I mean, so and I think largely that's true.
But here's here's there's always a catch, right?
So the thing is that both countries and a number of other people continue to pursue work that they would characterize as defensive.
In other words, they they pursue work in laboratories, which is characterized As being designed to prepare us to protect ourselves.
Well, in reality, if you're mucking with microorganisms and you're researching deadly pathogens, whether you're trying to figure out how to use them offensively or defensively, you're still cultivating deadly pathogens.
So even if you're not building bombs filled with anthrax, if you're cultivating anthrax and it's still sitting in laboratories, as we saw back in With the attacks in DC, you know, over a decade ago, then you've still got deadly pathogens.
You've still got stuff that can kill people.
And if it gets out of those labs, it doesn't really matter why you made it in the first place.
It's still going to kill people.
Bad as anthrax may be, I can envision a biological organism, as you pointed out, engineered That could be, I suppose, suicidal.
You know, that bad for whoever used it, because it would ultimately get back.
I'm sure that even those kinds of things, you know, doomsday weapons are probably being experimented with, and that's a scary thought.
Well, you know, you've got a couple of things that are going on in that vein.
First of all, we're facing terrorist threats from people who are Obviously, prepared to die.
In fact, in many cases, seeking death in the course of attacking us because that guarantees they're going to paradise.
So, if a guy's willing to strap himself with explosives and blow himself to pieces to kill people, he's certainly willing to, for instance, infect himself with a disease and serve in that way as a human bomb.
The other thing that's going on is there already is a lot of research with basically with engineering pathogens.
This has been very controversial in the U.S.
We have labs where they have been working basically taking a look at things they're afraid of like the avian flu and they're afraid it will mutate because these organisms mutate and evolve all the time.
They're afraid that they'll mutate and develop the capacity to be transmitted much more readily directly from human to human.
And so what they do is they then deliberately try to engineer it to do that so they can figure out how to defend against it.
If you think about that, that's a little, you know, and therein lies the rub, right?
That's the controversy is like, okay, wait, so you're afraid that this might happen.
So you're making it happen.
And what happens when that organism gets loose out of that lab, either unintentionally or because You know, one of your lab assistants took it out in a vial and handed it off to some group.
You've just doomed us all.
Yes.
Is there actually the potential for something so contagious, so deadly, that it would be suicidal to release it?
Do you know such an organism exists?
So you mean suicidal in the sense that it's going to kill everybody?
Yes, yes.
Well, the number one organism, frankly, that everybody is worried about, at the top of the list for biological weapons agents, is not one that's been engineered.
It's smallpox.
And, you know, we're always told that smallpox is extinct, but that's not quite true.
It's really gone, and it continues to exist, and it is a And, you know, like as you said, look, we're talking about natural organisms, right?
So they're already out there and they already have the capacity to kill.
They also, they grow.
They're organisms.
You don't have to steal a ton of a virus or a bacteria.
You steal enough to then culture it and cultivate it and grow it.
And then you have whatever quantity you want, depending on how much time you have and how good you are at doing that.
So tiny, tiny quantities of smallpox, in other words, could then Basically allow you to develop an entire program and that terrifies the hell out of people because that will I Mean, I'm not saying it'll kill everybody on the planet.
What do we get?
We'll kill vast numbers of individuals potentially millions and millions of people and the use of any such really really deadly pathogen like that would be I mean the risk would be that a great number of your own people whoever Your own people are would also die, right?
We've got air travel, I mean things go around the world real quickly.
That's right.
I mean, you know, I mean, when people talk about chemical weapons, one of the reasons why chemical weapons sort of were abandoned by many countries after a while was because you really can't control them.
You know, you release the stuff and whichever way the wind is going, that's where the stuff goes, right?
So sometimes it blows back in your own face and it didn't, it was a bad day for you.
So biological weapons, obviously, yes, you cut it loose and now it's rampaging through a population.
You know, every day in Dulles Airport, there are planes taking off and landing, going everywhere on the planet.
So once you've infected D.C., you've infected the planet.
It's going to spread worldwide.
So yes, it'll come home to you, but if you have this sort of end-of-time view of the world, and if you're convinced that God is on your side, and he's ultimately going to protect you and not the other guy, you're probably willing to light that fuse.
I hear you, and that is the mentality.
And now, a little while ago, you said the United States Walked away from biological weapons.
Okay.
But at the same time, you told me, well, you know, there's still this defensive research going on.
And then I would also like to ask, are you absolutely certain that we disposed of all of our stockpiles of such weapons?
Well, after as many years as I have spent in the intelligence business, I'm very hesitant to ever say I'm absolutely certain of anything.
I'm continuously surprised.
To the best of my knowledge, that is true.
To the best of my knowledge, that is true. That is legitimately true.
But if we're talking from a terrorist standpoint, it's largely irrelevant.
I mean, a terrorist is, you know, because a terrorist is not really looking to steal fully functional bombs that we keep on a shelf somewhere.
All he really needs to do is acquire the agent.
And then usually they're going to use, I mean, by agent, I mean, you know, the actual biological organism, the pathogen.
And then he's going to use it in what we would consider to be an incredibly crude way Using some relatively simplistic approach and it's not going to matter because people are going to be just as dead at the end of the day.
My question for you.
Yes, I'm sorry.
A question for you.
If I, if I note mentally a hesitation in your voice or you very carefully qualify an answer, can I draw conclusions from that?
Well, one of the conclusions you can draw is before I ended up in the bit in the, in the intelligence business is that I was a trial lawyer.
And so sometimes when we walk into sensitive territory, I will make sure that I am choosing my words very carefully so that my meaning is very precise.
Your meaning is?
So, you know, again, to the best of my knowledge, it is absolutely true that the U.S.
did in fact do that, but hey, you know, maybe there's a secret bunker somewhere that they never told me to.
I don't know.
Okay, alright, you see I'm going to give you a rough time, right?
That's cool, that's fine.
Alright, you were actually head of the CIA's Weapons of Mass Destruction, Destruction Terrorism Unit, and you were apparently so at the beginning of the whole, or even prior, rather prior to the Iraq situation, correct?
Well, I actually became head of that unit after, well, it depends on when the beginning of the Iraq situation is.
I became head of that unit 2006, I guess.
But one of the reasons I became head of that unit is because I had been heavily involved with things concerning weapons of mass destruction really throughout the bulk of my career.
I had done a whole slew of things prior to that that had to do with WMD, so it was natural for me to be the guy that was put in that position.
All right, now remember, you don't have to answer everything, but I mean, I've got to ask.
Ultimately, we didn't find WMDs in Iraq, or some have said that they got them the hell out of Iraq and that they went to Syria.
Do you know which is the case?
So I heard during my time, I spent almost a year in Iraq.
Wow.
You know, most of, almost all of that before there was really anybody else at the party.
I mean, beyond our team.
And before the war, right?
Right, right.
Before there were any boots on the ground, before the air war had started.
When we first went in, there were a grand total of eight of us.
And in the course of doing what you're doing, which is collecting intelligence, you know, you're talking to a lot of guys.
So you hear a lot of stories, and some of them turn out to be true, and some of them turn out to be lies, and some of them indicate that the guy you're talking to has a serious mental illness, and everything in between.
So in the course of that, I probably heard every possible story regarding Where the weapons of mass destruction had gone or what happened to them, including one that I recall in which the guy claimed that all the biological weapons had been sewn into the stomachs of cows and those cows had been driven across the border into Syria.
And all we needed to do was find those cows and we would have weapons of mass destruction.
He did not have a plan for how I was to identify the cows in question and differentiate between them and all the other cows in Syria.
Were you actually asked To chase cows?
Well, no, the guy that was talking to me was telling me this, the source.
He was telling me that I should go have our people go to Syria and find the cows.
He was obviously, he believed that.
I don't think he was deliberately lying.
I think he was just crazy.
To the best of my knowledge, what happened was that Saddam Hussein did something that would only happen in a place like Iraq in the Middle East, which is he made a decision That he was, in fact, going to disarm because he wanted to get rid of UN sanctions.
He wanted to get rid of UN sanctions, by the way, so that once the UN was gone, he could reconstitute his programs.
And then he simultaneously lied basically to all of his own people and everybody in neighboring countries, telling them that he was lying to the UN.
He got rid of the weapons, but then told his own people, including his most senior officers, many of whom we met, that this was a lie and that they were all still in hidden bunkers.
This is the kind of twisted logic that goes on in the Middle East.
Obviously, his rationale was, I need to disarm to get out from under UN sanctions.
But if my own people actually believe that, I am likely to be dead tomorrow and deposed.
It is necessary that they and the Iranians and everybody around me believe that I am doing what I have always done and that I have these weapons hidden away somewhere.
You would have thought at some point he would have figured out that this is kind of signing your own death warrant.
But apparently that never dawned on him.
Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, there really were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
When we went in afterward, and eventually we found some stores of old chemical munitions.
Mostly stuff that the Iraqis didn't even realize they still had.
Alright, well of course we prosecuted that war based on the premise that weapons of mass destruction were indeed there.
Yes.
Is it your view that that really was the premise that launched that war or just the publicly stated premise?
You know, it's my view that the people who launched that war believed that was true, but if that had not been the premise, they would have found another one, if that makes sense.
Oh, it does.
It makes a lot of sense.
The decision was made that we were going to get rid of Saddam.
I think they legitimately had convinced themselves We're talking now, the administration, that there were weapons of mass destruction and they weren't really going to be dissuaded.
But even if you had, even if they had been convinced to the contrary, they would have been looking for another pretext.
I should, you know, just to clarify here, I was actually named to head the first team going into Iraq in either January or February of 2002.
And at the time that I was named to head that team, I was told that I was in charge of that.
By the way, I shouldn't complain about that because I not only volunteered for it, I more or less demanded to take it.
So I got what I deserved.
But in any event, the word was we were sending in teams.
I basically demanded, you know, said, hey, based on prior experience, I need to be the dude who takes the first team.
And they agreed.
I went.
So we were told that we were going into Iraq, certainly by February 2002.
We didn't actually get in until that summer, but that has to do with delays.
We were attempting to get in there prior to that.
And our mission from the day the team was stood up was to prepare the ground for an invasion.
So we were not told.
I mean, obviously, when you go in on the ground in a mission like this, you have a lot of requirements.
And obviously you're going to go collect on weapons of mass destruction.
But we were not told, go find out whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction.
We were told, we know they have weapons of mass destruction.
We are going to invade.
That decision has already been made as of February 2002.
Primary, in addition to everything else you're doing, your number one mission is go, what we would call in the trade, prepare the ground for the invasion.
You'd be the first guys on the ground to prep the ground for the military invasion.
That decision has already been made by the President.
It will happen.
It's dangerous.
Can you give me a clue of what preparing for a ground invasion would entail for eight people?
So we go in with eight, and then obviously over a period of time we flow in a certain
number of individuals afterward, but the size of the team still stays small.
In other words, we're never talking more than a few dozen individuals total.
We're collecting intelligence on the Iraqi military, for instance, because the U.S.
Army and the U.S.
Air Force have endless Things they'd like to know about everything.
Their comms, their weapons, their morale, their logistical system, yada yada, everything in the world.
So we're collecting boatloads of intelligence.
We're establishing relations with the locals, with the Kurds in the north, so that we're prepared to bring troops in.
So we're checking roads, checking bridges, checking infrastructure.
We're identifying places for drop zones, helicopter landing zones.
I mean, there's an endless amount of work.
Some of it is strategic intelligence, some of it's groundwork.
I bet.
On what premise were you entered into Iraq?
You mean, like, what was our cover?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Non-existent.
We were hiding in the mountains with the Kurds.
That's what we were doing.
As we used to tell new guys when they would show up and be worried about their cover, we'd say, listen, I don't know if you've noticed, but you don't blend here.
Like in my cousin Vinny.
So there might be one really stupid guy in a village here who doesn't know that the Americans are up here, but he's the only guy.
Let me try this.
Did you enter Iraq with a passport or did you come in through Turkey?
Or can you not answer that?
I came in through Turkey.
Okay.
And we entered with the assistance of the Kurds, with the Kurdish people that live... Right, well, you said you were in the north, so that would have been... You said you were in the north, so that would have been my guess.
So we went in and worked with the Kurds, you know, so that gives us, if you will, some sort of base of operations.
It gives us allies.
It gives us people to help us with security, that kind of stuff.
Alright Charles, you're incredible.
Stay right where you are.
We're going to take a break.
You can relax for a moment and we'll be right back.
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I'm Art Bell.
This is Dark Matter.
Raging in the nighttime!
eight six three i'm art bell this is dark matter raging in the night time
my guest is charles s bannas and uh...
he was in the cia
In fact, his last assignment prior to retirement in May of 08 was as head of the CIA's Terrorist Weapons of Mass Destruction Unit.
If you get a better guess than this, I don't know where he comes from.
His book is Kafka, and it's a fictional book, but oh, I want it.
About a biological weapons attack on the United States.
Get it at Amazon.com.
This is right down my alley.
I mean, I just absolutely love this stuff.
However, having somebody like you on, Charles, I don't know, drives it home and makes it even scarier, I guess, in a way.
Getting back to Iraq for a second there, you mentioned that the intel coming to you was that The weapons were there, and I know there was a lot of high-level political stuff that was coming to Washington that I guess later turned out to be not so true about the state of our intelligence there.
What is, in fact, the state of our intel apparatus?
Is it flawed and getting better or flawed and sinking into the dirt?
I think that You know, it would be fair to say up front that, look, we have a lot of really good men and women doing work in intelligence.
We've got folks out there pulling off miracles every day.
We have, a lot of them are, you know, obviously still, a lot of them are folks that I work with, good friends, and there are some, you know, folks out there who have given their lives, particularly in the last decade.
But I think particularly to focus on human intelligence, so running spies and collecting intelligence the old-fashioned way.
Honestly, we have a lot of work to do.
I mean, it doesn't mean that we don't do good things or that we don't know anything or that there aren't great people, but I think that we're not performing at the level we need to.
We don't have the intelligence we need to have.
I think that Washington has a tendency To try to solve every problem by bureaucratizing it, throwing money at it.
And, you know, the espionage and this arcane world that we're talking about is not a bureaucracy, and you can't run it like the Social Security Administration, and you can't bury it in rules and regulations.
And quite frankly, sometimes the more people you have, the less well you're performing.
You know, what you need is a very small group A very eclectic people who think completely out of the box and who are very aggressive and very innovative.
And then you need to turn them loose.
I don't mean turn them loose in the sense of letting them break U.S.
law, subvert the Constitution.
I mean in terms of operations, legitimate operations.
Let them exercise that creativity.
You know, they'll go out and move mountains.
They'll steal the crown jewels.
They'll do the impossible.
But not if you bury it in the typical Washington morass.
Then you're spending more money and getting less.
Is that what's happening?
That's exactly what's happening.
And, you know, we could broaden that, frankly, I think, to the whole intelligence community and even Homeland Security.
I mean, it's a dangerous world.
There are people out there that really are out to get us.
We need to be vigilant.
That doesn't mean that we're not wasting a lot of money, that we're not employing a lot of people sitting behind desks in Washington, D.C., that quite frankly are probably not adding much of anything to the equation.
In fact, in some cases, they're taking away from the equation because they're just dragged on the system.
Okay, so getting back to my original question, flawed and getting worse at the moment, I guess, huh?
Post 9-11, good things had happened.
We did give the CIA, for instance, to focus on them more money.
They needed more money because they had been short-changed.
It's not the end-all be-all, as I just said, but they needed more money.
We gave them some more people.
They needed some more people.
They don't need any more.
And we gave them some more leash.
Operations that I know, kinds of operations that were proposed repeatedly pre-9-11.
And routinely denied, or in many cases they were never proposed because your boss wouldn't let you propose them.
So money was really tight.
So they didn't hand you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and send you across the Turkish border, right?
When I went into Iraq, you mean in terms of how much money we carried?
No, I think it was just a joke.
In other words, you were properly funded in that mission, right?
Yeah, we were not short of money in Iraq.
By the time we got to Iraq, we had plenty of money.
And money talks.
And money is the number one weapon, quite frankly, when you're running intelligence operations.
I mean, the weapon that you use.
You know, when you run sources.
They have lots of motivations, but to be really cold and calculating for a moment, in any source I ever ran that we weren't paying, I never fully trusted.
It's a cold game, but it's all about control.
Yeah, those who would say they're doing it because they believe in American democracy spreading around the world, you'd rather have somebody asking for a grant.
I don't want to run a guy who's only all about money, because if he's all about money and that's all there is, then I know that sooner or later somebody's going to show up with more, or he's just going to decide to double his cash by talking to me and somebody else.
He needs to have some other motivations and some other reasons, but at the end of the day, if he's being paid, that's a hook.
So if you're trying, if you're in the process of recruiting somebody, I imagine there's a very careful mental vetting that you do of this person before you decide to proceed, huh?
Yeah, if you're really recruiting a guy, if you're really recruiting a guy, in other words, we're not just talking about a guy that you speak to one time who shows up And tells you whatever fantastic story.
If we're really talking about a guy that's going to be a source, that's a whole game of mind melding with someone.
It's the same dance that's been done for centuries in this business.
By the way, none of this is new.
You know, the spy masters for Queen Elizabeth in the 1500s were doing the same thing.
You're climbing into this guy's head, you're figuring out what buttons to push, you're figuring out what motivates him, what his vulnerabilities are.
And then you're figuring out how to push those buttons and exercise control and manipulate him.
And I know that sounds very cold, but it is a cold business.
That's how it works.
Of course it's a cold business.
And I guess you were pretty good at it.
You did this how long?
I mean, more or less in the CIA, how long?
Well, I did that the entire time I was in and I was overseas almost the whole time I was in the CIA.
So that's, you know, roughly 20 years of doing that.
Were you ever close to apprehended?
Because it's not good to get caught if you're in the CIA, really in the CIA.
It's very bad.
Yes.
How's that for an expansive answer?
Maybe I should extend the question.
Were you actually caught?
I spent some time on one occasion talking to some local officials about what I was up to.
Well, you're a good talker.
Do you talk yourself out of it?
You know, I think by the end of the exercise, there was no ambiguity about what I was up to, and they decided to look the other way, and we moved on, if that makes any sense.
There are targets and operations that, while folks may not like us doing them without their permission, are what we might call In other words, if you're chasing bad people and you're doing it in somebody else's backyard and they didn't give you permission to do it, they're probably still not going to be excited when they catch you, but they may or may not react the same way as if they caught you running, say, the Prime Minister's personal secretary.
They might just say, okay, good, why don't you just get out of town now and move on.
Interesting.
Is there anything that you could say What knowledge do you have that you could say tonight that would likely get you killed?
Killed by our own people?
Maybe, yeah.
Does that happen?
You know, I think, all kidding aside, in order to get yourself targeted for lethal action, to use the euphemism, Or the antiseptic term by the US government you would you would really have to put yourself You'd have to put yourself, you know on the other side of with some group that is Targeting Americans, you know, you'd have to you'd have to join al-qaeda or some similar group.
That's an enemy combatant You would have to do something like that now.
I think what you could you could much more easily do is Especially these days in Washington, is put yourself in a position where nobody's going to come and put a bullet in your head, but they're going to prosecute you, they're going to pull your security clearance, they're going to do all sorts of other things to put pressure on you and make you shut up and make you be quiet.
Well in the case of a CIA operative, if he were to begin to turn, that would be far more dangerous than Somebody from Cleveland, Ohio, who decides to join Al Qaeda in Somalia.
I mean, you could potentially do so much more damage.
So I would think you would be a special threat.
You know, you worry anytime you're worried about somebody who's been involved in that kind of stuff.
You're not only worried about expertise, but you're worried about all the stuff that you carry around in your head, right?
Because you carry around in your head the names of we can talk all day about in generic terms about running assets, and nobody really cares because that That business hasn't changed in a very long time.
We start talking about identities of assets or specific pieces of intelligence or that kind of specificity, then we're in a whole different realm.
When you leave the CIA and you're going to embark on a new career, you're going to write books, you're going to go on talk shows like this or CNN or wherever you end up.
In other words, you're becoming media active.
Does the CIA have a way of having a chat with you about where you can and where you cannot go?
What happens when you're working the way I was working?
You're obviously undercover the entire time you're working because, you know, you don't run around overseas with a CIA badge.
When you decide that you want to leave and you want to acknowledge what you did, so in other words to say, tell people, I was in the CIA as we're having this conversation, you have to actually apply for permission to do that.
You have to request permission from them and then when they give you that permission, yes, they will effectively bless What amounts to a resume that says, you can go into this level of detail about where you were assigned and what you did.
And then when I write, I write magazine, you know, some kind of opinion pieces, basically every week, plus nonfiction, plus fiction.
Everything that I write that has any connection to national security, national defense, terrorism, all this kind of stuff, I send to the CIA in advance of publication.
And they actually clear all of that.
I have never had an issue with them, quite frankly.
Because it's them having an issue with you that you have to worry about.
Well, I mean, when I meant that, I meant in the sense that there are people, other officers who are out who have written who, if you ask them about the clearance process, the CIA will begin to curse a blue streak and tell you that You know, it's ridiculous in that they've torn the guts out of things that they've written, and it's all political.
I've never had that issue with them.
I have a good sense, obviously, of where the lines are between what's okay to talk about and what's not, and I don't try to cross them.
So, for instance, we were just talking about Kauff on my last book.
They cleared that in about two weeks, and they made no changes whatsoever.
They cleared it as is, word for word.
The entire thing from beginning to end.
When you wrote your book, how much of your professional experience did you incorporate in it?
A lot.
One of my objectives when I'm writing, as I said before, when I'm writing is to try to give people as much as I can a feel For what it is really like to be on the street involved in this game, if I can use that term.
So, are there points at which I have to hold back?
Yes.
Are there specific exact, precise techniques, what the CIA would call methods, that I do not incorporate, or I fuzz the picture slightly so that we don't give away too much Trade secret?
Yeah, 100%.
There are other times, for instance, in regard to biological weapons in this book.
I know exactly how this could be done.
I incorporate enough of that in this book to, I think, make it... I mean, most people that have read it tell me that it's so realistic that it's terrifying.
I will tell you that I still obviously leave some steps out.
I don't want to write a primer.
How to go kill a million people.
So I leave some steps out, but I don't think unless you're a real expert, you will understand that those steps are missing.
It'll never occur to you that there are any steps missing.
Should there be a limit on what people are able to put on the Internet?
That's going to be a tough question.
I mean, people are telling you how to poison other people, telling you how to blow up other people, telling you how to make bombs, telling you how, you know, perhaps even biological weapons or chemical weapons.
Probably there's a formula on the Internet.
I would imagine this has made your job or would have made your job, if you were still there at the moment, infinitely more difficult, wouldn't it?
Yeah, but this is, you know, this horse is out of the barn.
The ship's sailing, whatever other tired old expression I'm going to use.
You know, here's the thing about all of this stuff to do with weapons of mass destruction.
Any idea that this is science fiction, or that only three guys with giant brains somewhere in a lab know how to do this stuff, or that most terrorist groups aren't focused on this yet?
Um, all wrong.
Every terrorist group on Earth that I am aware of has for a long time been very, very focused on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
You kick in and they have manuals on all of this stuff.
And they send it to, and they trade it over the, you know, they distribute it over the internet and have been doing that for a long time.
So you kick in a random door to a safe house in Pakistan, Iraq, name a country, and grab their hard drive off their computer as you drag the boys away, and guaranteed there will be manuals on that hard drive along, by the way, with gigabytes of porn.
There will be, there will be manuals How to for sarin gas, mustard gas, ricin, anthrax, everything.
Now, thank God, most of them can't, many of them still can't make it work.
And thank God, many of the recipes they have are wrong.
But they are, this is ongoing and it happens.
You can see that it, you know, a manual that one guy wrote one place in Lebanon within a year is, it has been recovered everywhere on the planet, you know, hundreds of times.
Gee, for these radicalized Muslims, I'm shocked that not only do you get all the formulas, wrong as they may be, but a lot of porn, you said.
Gosh.
That is a shocker.
But, yes, massive, massive quantities.
And only, by the way, the most disgusting porn.
Really?
It's got to be.
The cruder and more offensive and more degrading, the better.
How you square that with the purity of your religious principles, I'm not quite sure.
That's my point.
And that's almost universally true?
Yes. Oh, I'll be darned. All right.
We are getting mixed pictures of How the war on Al-Qaeda is going.
I mean, for a long, long time, the media was suggesting, you know, there's just even the president.
There's just ragtag groups left that are not organized.
We have more or less, you know, not eliminated, but we've heard them so badly they really can't do anything at all.
And then here recently, they're popping up all over the place.
So what is the state of the war on Al-Qaeda?
So as far, you know, I was involved in counterterrorism for quite some time.
I mean, basically from the day I came out of training, I was working counterterrorism with one country or another and with a lot of different groups.
But, you know, increasingly that had to do with Al Qaeda well before 9-11.
And for those of us that were working counterterrorism in those years, it was very frustrating because as I alluded to before, you know, we were getting hit and more or less the decision had been made that we weren't going to shoot back.
9-11 changed that.
Operations that you wouldn't have been laughed out of town for proposing before 9-11 were all of a sudden being approved in a heartbeat, and you were told, be more aggressive.
So as soon as we started shooting back, that was a very good thing.
That changed the world for Al-Qaeda.
A lot of them are dead.
If you're the operations chief for Al-Qaeda, your life expectancy right now is about six months from the time you take the job.
So that has changed the world.
So that's good.
That's all positive.
And it has definitely put them in a situation where they don't have anything close to the freedom of maneuver they used to have.
But having said all of that, any idea that they are a static, fixed point, and you know, a set number of individuals, and we can just, because we have degraded them in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, that that means we win, is just kind of missing the whole nature of the conflict.
Because what you're fighting is an organism That spreads and morphs and evolves, and any place where you have the right conditions, it's going to pop up again.
So kind of spreading like a biological weapon almost?
Yes, and it's feeding on ignorance, unemployment, you know, any place you got lots of young guys in desperate situations, no access to secular education, their heads being pumped full, of this craziness from radical madrasas, it's going to continue to come up.
That doesn't mean we're losing.
That just means that this is going to be a very long conflict, and you're going to be doing this for a very long time.
One of the mistakes we made was trying to turn this into a conventional conflict, which seems to be a fixation of the United States.
I guess since we won World War II that way, we must win every war that way.
Well, we've moved a little more toward asymmetrical.
I mean, we've got the drones and so forth, right?
We are, you know, we are gradually evolving or have been gradually evolving toward recognizing that this is a conflict that needs to be fought with intelligence officers and special operations personnel, and not by sending 100,000 guys to Afghanistan occupying countries, nation building.
We are slowly working Working our way there.
But you're going to be doing this for a long time.
I mean, you know, look at Africa.
Look what just happened in Kenya.
The situation in Somalia.
Half of Nigeria has gone up in flames.
North Africa is a mess.
You know, Syria is devolving.
Libya almost has no central government now.
Yeah, you're going to be doing this for a very long time, fighting these brush fires.
How do you feel about the use of drones?
I think that the reliance on any particular method is exclusively or more or less exclusively a bad idea.
It's always a bad idea to stand on one leg.
I think that drones are an example of something that is very attractive and seductive to Washington, because it's technology, because they can control it directly from Washington, D.C.
So it's easy to get sucked into the use of this.
But I think, frankly, we've overdone it.
We've overused it.
I think, you know, it may seem really seductive to us that you can sort of pull a trigger in Washington, D.C.
and no Americans are exposed and the robot kills whoever it is it kills.
But it's not transparent or invisible to the people in the country where you're doing it.
If you're talking about the coverage of Pakistan, You know, you're, and I'm one of the world's biggest critics of the Pakistanis and their lack of support for us, but the fact of the matter remains that what you're talking about is without their permission roaming their skies and killing their citizens.
Well, if we have a drone strike and there is collateral damage, we've just made people who would probably give their own lives to get back at us in any way they could, I would think, right?
Yeah.
And look, I mean, there are two problems with collateral damage.
A is the quality of your intelligence.
And I think people should not assume that we, you know, we, I think people have this vision that every time a drone fires, that we must like basically know exactly who's sitting in that car.
And we don't always.
And I think that's not a valid assumption to make.
So, um, There's that issue, and then there's, look, here's just this sort of comment, in my opinion, applies to this and applies to all combat.
Just forget all these concepts about surgical strikes, antiseptic, this, limited, that.
I mean, yes, you can use more refined techniques, and you can try your best to limit collateral damage, and yes, you should, and I'm not saying you shouldn't.
At the end of the day, war is about killing people and breaking things, and it's ugly, And it's messy and the wrong people always die and people always get caught in the crossfire.
And the guy who never had women and children in his car before today will be transporting somebody in his vehicle, etc.
You will always, there is no way to blow things up in somebody else's country and not end up killing folks that didn't deserve to die.
And if you're not prepared to, you know, so just accept that and either Either accept it or don't do it or whatever, but don't pretend like you're surprised when it happens.
It's ugly and it's nasty.
I'm sure it is.
Charles, hold tight.
We're going to take a break.
This has got to be one of the best ever.
Charles Fattis is my guest.
XCIA.
Don't call right now.
Charles Fattis is my guest.
You may want to look this man up.
You may want to grab his book.
I certainly do.
It's Kappa.
And in a moment, I... You know what?
The heck with the moment.
I'll do it right now.
Charles, if... You know, I understand that it's a fictional book, but based on a lot of your experience, what I want to ask is, if you were to sort of give me a teaser with regard to your book, without giving away the farm, what would you say?
So the reference to Kaffa is the name of a city which is actually today in the southern Ukraine on the shores of the Black Sea.
And in the 1300s, Kaffa was a fortified city occupied primarily by Italian traders.
These are the days of the Spice Road and so forth.
And they were besieged by a Muslim army of Mongols and the army besieging them began to be swept by the black death of the bubonic plague.
And in desperation, the attacking army eventually began to catapult the bodies of its own dead into the city they were besieging to spread the disease amongst the defenders, which worked.
They didn't really understand how the plague spread, but anyway, it worked nonetheless.
uh... the italians mostly italians who were defending the city began to flee by ship and fled back to italy and uh... historically this is the traditionally been pointed to as the point of origin of the black death that spread through europe in other words they brought the plague with them it spread from italy to the rest of europe and depending on whose numbers you believe it killed over the next Many decades, roughly half of the entire population of the continent of Europe.
So in the book, it is the term Kaffa is used as the code name for an attack on the United States by a terrorist group using the plague and using a very similar methodology, which is to infect individuals and then send them in amongst our population.
Wow, scary stuff.
Really, really scary stuff.
And now a real-world question.
If a terrorist cell decided that it was going to infect the United States or attempt to attack us with a biological weapon, let us imagine carried by human beings infected, martyrs, and they We're sent across perhaps our southern border to various different places in the United States.
Charles, would there be any way that we could effectively stop them?
That's a close call, I guess.
It's a very good question.
Maybe, maybe not.
It depends on A variety of factors.
It depends on how fast we move.
Here's, you know, let me sketch this out and this is roughly the way the book works out is a terrorist group that's going to stage a biological weapons attack is not going to act like every group in a movie or in television where they tell everybody what they're going to do and that there's a clock ticking down and then you try to stop them.
In the case of a biological attack, so for instance, if terrorists bring a nuclear weapon into the United States, you're going to know that they have it here because there's going to be a mushroom cloud somewhere.
That's going to be the announcement that you're going to have.
With a biological weapon, they're going to release it in your situation using what actually, this is scary that there is a term, using bio-martyrs.
They're just going to do it, and they're not going to tell you that they did it.
They're not going to tell you they're going to do it, and they're not going to tell you that they did it.
So what's going to happen is they're going to infect people.
And then those people are going to do what people do when they start feeling sick.
First, they're probably going to ignore it.
Almost all these diseases start with the generic flu-like symptoms.
So you're achy, yada yada.
You think you got the flu.
You don't have time for it.
You work through it.
You might take a day off from work.
You don't immediately run to the emergency room because you got flu-like symptoms.
Right.
Now at some point, a day, two, three days, depends on what disease we're talking about, it begins to get a little more serious.
Now maybe you go to your doctor, you go to your emergency room, maybe.
The doc doesn't have a sign, see a sign hanging around your neck that says, I have the plague and he's dealing with a bunch of people and chances are that in half the cases, he's going to tell you, take two aspirin, call me in the morning or give you some other generic prescription and send you away.
Probably an antibiotic.
Which may or may not, depending on the disease we're talking about, have any impact on what you're doing.
Anyway, my point is, at some point long after, I mean it's certainly days after the attack has started, somebody is going to say, well, I got a plague victim here in Baltimore.
I have multiple plague victims here in Baltimore.
And by that time?
And by that time, every single person that was infected, now there's a question here about the different diseases and how they spread.
But assuming we're talking about something that spreads from person to person.
So by that point, everybody that was infected has obviously come into contact with God knows how many other people that have already come into contact with God knows how many other people.
And as you referenced earlier, we're not living in the 1300s when it spread quickly enough.
We got planes, trains, automobiles, right?
So by this point, people that have been infected have flown to Paris, London, LA, Phoenix, And now this thing, I mean, now you're talking about trying to catch a wildfire that started three days ago and trying to get your arms around it and hoping that you identify it quickly enough and that you actually have enough of whatever the medication is in stock, in existence.
Because you're never, forget movies, you're never going to make an antidote on the fly.
And if you have to start ginning up a factory and making new In fact, whatever the medication is, good luck with that.
Even for things that are cured with relatively straightforward antibiotics, you can very
rapidly have run through the entire stock that the country has on hand and basically
find that you're too late, that the fire is burning faster than you can stop it and then
it's just going to burn itself out.
Well, it just seems like too easy a scenario.
In other words, getting enough people who are sick across the border, it just doesn't sound in this day and age like really a rough job.
In fact, you could probably even pick people that are relatively healthy at the time they cross.
So they could in essence come in legally.
Yeah, there's no reason why you couldn't bring the people in and then actually administer the pathogen to them after they're here.
For that matter, these days, I mean, we find suicide bombers in Somalia who are American citizens, you know, working for Al-Shabaab.
So this is not necessarily a reason, and this is not intended to be some slam against the Somali community in particular.
I'm just saying there's no reason why the people that you infect necessarily have to even be individuals that you had to send here.
I mean people are... we have Americans going abroad to fight jihad.
I can't imagine a protection against this.
I just... I can't imagine...
How do we possibly protect against something like this?
You know, I think it's like most things in counterterrorism.
There isn't a silver bullet.
The way you fight it is you fight it on a variety of fronts.
So one thing is that we ought to be aggressively going after every group that, I mean,
every group has aspirations to acquire these kinds of weapons, but, you know, we ought to be vigilant.
We ought to be, any group that looks like it's actually seriously pursuing this capability,
we ought to be chasing them down.
We ought to be doing a tremendous amount of work with our hospitals and healthcare providers to make sure that they don't just tell the guy who has the plague Here, take two aspirin and call me in the morning.
That they're vigilant and that they're reporting and they're bringing things to people's attention very quickly.
There are systems for that.
There are a lot of people doing a lot of work on that.
It's a huge task.
I mean, if you're a doctor working in an emergency room in downtown Baltimore, then, you know, you can get briefed a thousand times on being alert for terrorist attacks and biological weapons.
And then most days you got your hands full with gunshot wounds and And people that don't have health insurance and you know, you got bigger fish to fry on a daily basis.
You know, the other thing, here's another thing that we talked a little bit about labs before.
After we had this terrorist attack, we had this attack, this anthrax attack on Washington DC over a decade ago.
The point of origin was one of our own biological labs.
It was the Biological Safety Level 4 lab at Fort Detrick, the U.S.
military's lab.
And one of their own doctors, who had some obvious mental health problems, took the anthrax out and he's the one that mailed it and staged this attack.
So in response to that, in an action that only can make sense to Washington, D.C., because we had just been attacked using agent that was taken out of one of our own labs, We then decided that we really needed a whole bunch more of these labs working with dangerous pathogens in the country.
So since 9-11, well, since those attacks in 2001, we have built hundreds more labs in which you can work with these agents.
So the most secure labs are called Biological Safety Level 4 labs.
There were, I think, If my memory serves, four of them in the country in 2001, they're now 15.
There were a few hundred of the next tier, Biological Safety Level 3 labs.
Nobody actually knows how many there are now because no one agency counts them, but rough number, 1,500.
All of those labs, BSL 3 and 4, every one of them is at a level where you can work with the plague and anthrax.
In any of those labs.
So what we now have is a huge problem with the possibility that a group can simply take one of these pathogens out of an existing lab.
And our safety measures and our security measures are not adequate.
And that's a gigantic danger.
And by the way, there have been a whole bunch of government reports that have pointed that out.
And no real action has been taken.
That's another door we ought to close really, really, really fast.
Before we find out that we get hit again with the plague or anthrax or something, and it came out of one of our own laboratories.
Let us take the plague.
There are so many choices, but just let's stay with the plague for a second, Charles.
From the time you would come in contact with somebody who has the plague to the time that you would, I guess, finally go to the doctor.
I mean, how much time are we talking about?
So, you know, with a lot of these questions, the answer always begins with the always helpful, it depends.
But the plague, like a lot of these diseases, takes different forms in the sense of what part of your body it infects.
So when people talk about the bubonic plague, that's a reference to these, basically these giant bumps, these black bumps that are appear in your, what they're called, buboes that occur in your groin and your armpits and stuff like that.
And that could take several days and you might have time to be treated.
But there is another form, which is the pneumonic form, which basically means it infects your lungs.
Here's the other key thing.
You know, the plague Typically, it's referred to as being spread by fleas.
I mean, what happens is the plague lives in the blood of rodents, really.
In the United States, by the way, in prairie dog populations in the southwest, it's still very common.
And then fleas bite these rodents, and then they bite humans, and they spread the plague.
And typically, if you ask people how the plague spread, that's what they're going to tell you.
It can also spread, if it's in the lungs, you can spread it directly person to person.
In other words, every time you breathe out, you will breathe out water vapor and droplets.
And it's like the flu.
Exactly.
Now, here's the thing.
When you read the actual accounts of the plague in Europe, what we were talking about before, when these guys got off the ships coming from Caffa, landed in Italy, and then the nightmare began.
It is very clear from those historical accounts, which I have read hundreds and hundreds of pages of, that the plague was spreading, much of the time, directly human to human by breath.
There are accounts from the times of the Black Death of people, literally travelers, showing up at a home You know, this isn't an age when there's no Motel 6, right?
So, people are putting folks up, and they show up, and they knock on the door, and they come to visit, and they're ill when they arrive, and by morning, people are dead in the house.
Like, you know, in less than 24 hours, people are dropping dead from this.
So, in that form, if you're spreading it, If we're talking about spreading it in the mnemonic form, you know, potentially we're talking about people dying really faster than you can do anything for them.
Well, it seems to me that what you'd want would be a long incubation period and a very fatal outcome.
But the longer the incubation period, the better.
That means you get to spread a lot more before the alarm bells start going off.
And by the time they have, incidentally, Most people will have gone and infected our first responders, our doctors, nurses, hospital personnel.
I see the way that would work.
They're going to infect them.
At some point, people are going to stop showing up for work, probably, if it becomes fatal enough.
In regard to the incubation period, you're right.
I mean, this is the kind of crazy, sick stuff that weapons designers think about.
This is why some forms of Things like the Ebola virus and so forth are not particularly effective as biological weapons because essentially the epidemic burns itself out faster than it can spread.
People die before they can really move around very much and infect other people so it can't get loose.
That of course doesn't mean that Ebola suddenly loose in New York City wouldn't be awful.
No, and you can just imagine the psychological trauma caused by any of this.
I mean, you wouldn't, even long before you got to the point of killing millions of people, you would, I mean, my God, you know, how many people have to die and how widespread does it have to get before nobody's going to work anymore, before nobody's going to the supermarket anymore, before nobody's letting anybody onto their lawn anymore?
You know, the country is terrified.
Lockdown just kind of got in.
Okay, on that very question, I'm curious, Charles, if an outbreak began, would the government, in your opinion, this is just an opinion question, level with the American people right away that we were experiencing a biological attack?
Or would they decide that the panic that would ensue should they announce that would be more
damaging than the attack?
I think that it's likely that for a variety of reasons you're going to have a delay.
First of all, because it's Washington and there's so much bureaucracy that somebody at the street level is going to say, we got a problem and that we've been attacked and we need to move now.
And then somebody is going to have to convene 37 different meetings at 12 different levels And prepare a bunch of briefing papers, and it's going to be three days later before anybody makes a decision.
And then you're going to kick in all the factors that you're talking about.
What are we going to tell them?
How much are we going to tell them?
Are we going to tell them some of the truth, but not really all?
This is not kind of stuff Washington's good at.
Washington's not good at this kind of thing.
No, no, no it isn't.
Or putting together healthcare websites either.
Oh, I got a laugh out of you, finally!
Okay.
So, you know, I don't see a lot of hope for us here, because it's just too easy to do.
Perhaps getting the biological in the first place is somewhat difficult, but it seems to me that getting it spread, if you were intent on doing that and had lots of volunteers, And certainly, the way the world's been going lately, there's lots of volunteers.
I don't see that we'd get away with that one.
I mean, they would do it.
Simple as that.
And apparently, when they want to, they will do it.
So, as you pointed out, people would stop going to work.
Eventually, cops would stop going to work.
There'd be a breakdown in civil behavior pretty quickly, I would think.
And it just would not be good at all.
I mean, have you sort of scenarioed that one out?
You know, in general, when I was chief of the Webster Mass Destruction Unit, I used to tell people that I should carry a scythe and wear a black cloak because this is where all discussions of WMD go.
My God, it's gloom and despair as far as we go.
Here's the other kicker.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, the WMD Commission, that has done studies on terrorist threats, five years ago said, within the next five years, we will be hit with a biological weapons attack by a terrorist group.
And when was that?
They said it five years ago that it would happen within five years.
So the end of this year, time's up.
So let's hope they're wrong, but that would give you an idea of how proximate people think this is.
They were not saying 10, 20 years.
They were saying, look guys, this is around the corner.
It's going to happen.
I would like to ask you if you have any advice for those listening now when it does happen.
Hold it right there.
That's a good place to break.
And you can relax for about five minutes or so.
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Dark matter, I mark that.
Sometimes music just sets it for me.
And it doesn't get any better than this.
Charles Pattis is my guest.
CIA.
C.I.A.
as recently as 2008 is retired and talking to us about all kinds of things and Charles, here's where I want to go.
If something like this were finally revealed and or you knew that it was coming or it had already begun, what would be the best advice that you would give people in Cleveland and you know Santa Barbara and Wherever, if it had already begun, what would you do?
You know, I know that there are a lot of people that are going to be, if you're talking about a biological attack, that are going to be talking about stockpiling medications or antibiotics and stuff like that.
You know, I actually do keep a stockpile of antibiotics, but I'm not going to go down the road of trying to specify medications that people should take.
What I would say is, In this kind of situation, what you ought to be prepared for is frankly the same kind of thing that would help you in a lot of other kind of disaster situations, which is you need to be prepared to hunker down for some period of time and sustain yourself.
So right now, I'm not talking about prepping, like digging a bunker in your backyard and being prepared to live for five years underground.
I'm just saying You need to have thought through how it is you're going to deal with the fact that the city is, you know, has been hit with a biological attack.
People are being infected.
It's spreading from person to person.
And what you need to do right now is effectively go into old-fashioned quarantine.
And therefore, you need to be prepared to not have to run to the supermarket every five minutes to, you know, food, water, other basic essentials, and just Be prepared to fend for yourself and sustain yourself for, you know, I don't know, at a minimum days, ideally a week or two.
But you know, while somebody tries to get on top of this thing to get a hold of the necessary medication, because that's what the government's going to tell you to do.
If it is spreading person to person, and we're talking about this for real, they're going to tell you, stay home.
Uh, you know, it's a curfew.
People are off the streets.
You're not going out, uh, because that's how we're going to stop this thing from spreading any faster and give us that chance to get our arms around it.
And so, you know, a lot of people, unfortunately, these days don't operate that way.
You know, they, they don't know anymore how they're going to survive if they can't run down to the supermarket every day.
That's right.
So isolation plus survival, in other words, you've got to eat, you've got to have water, and you've got to be isolated.
You've got your basic necessities.
Now, look, I mean, if you had an option, if the scenario shook out in such a way that you had an option to get yourself away from a populated area, if that presented itself as a reasonable option, would that be a good idea?
It would.
But look, if you're in a major metropolitan area and all of a sudden word has broken that this is happening.
You can imagine in any major metropolitan area that it will therefore be madness attempting to get out.
You're not going anywhere.
I mean, you're going to sit on the highway.
You're going to be jammed.
You're going to expose yourself to exactly what you're trying to avoid.
You know, what you need to do is just go to ground.
And yeah, it doesn't have to be fancy.
I mean, you know, food, water, whatever you need to survive for Some period of time without having to go out and circulate, and let the authorities try to get on top of it, get the amount of antibiotics, medication, medical personnel in, do whatever.
And if they have to come up with something to inoculate against whatever this is, then there just may not be enough time.
Is that right?
Well, there's definitely not going to be enough time.
You know, if you're talking about somehow trying to head it off completely and prevent there from being an epidemic, no, there's not going to be enough time.
You're not going to go to the lab and in TV movie style create something in the space of 24-48 hours, have a breakthrough, and then go around and inoculate everybody.
That's not going to happen now.
Are you potentially going to be able to deploy something and stop the epidemic at some stage?
Yes.
But by that point, a lot of people are going to have died.
I mean, it will have run its course.
It will have already done a tremendous amount of damage.
And again, it doesn't even necessarily need to be something that is an antidote, like some, you know, super secret antidote.
It could just be as simple as antibiotics.
I mean, the plague can, if you catch it in time, And you know what you're dealing with.
It can be treated fairly effectively with some pretty routine antibiotics.
That's if you catch it in time and you know what you're dealing with and so forth and so on.
Those are all big ifs.
But that doesn't guarantee that there are enough doses of that antibiotic for the number of people that may have been infected.
I mean, they're not just a big warehouse somewhere with bottles of pills sufficient to treat every person in America.
For every one of these diseases.
I mean, just forget it.
So, you know, if it spreads widely enough, it could be a disease that we know exactly how to cure and say, that's great, man, but we just ran out of the antibiotic and now we got to start up a whole production line again and start pumping this stuff out.
And it could be a couple of weeks minimum before we're getting any more.
So for two weeks, we're back in the 1300s and this stuff is just doing whatever it wants to do.
And at some point, civil unrest is a guarantee.
And when you look at the way a scenario would unfold, how quick would that be, in your opinion, the civil unrest part?
In other words, people would begin doing whatever they felt they need to do?
You know, I think it's going to depend on the area and I think it's going to depend on people's resources.
But it could potentially could happen really, really, really fast in some When you read stories about what happened in the Black Death in Europe, and you get past the archaic language, you can see exactly.
I mean, look, people are scurrying from house to house, and the bodies are stacking up in the street, and nobody's doing anything about it anymore, because it's every man for himself.
People are in the same family, and somebody's infected, and they're sealing themselves off from that individual.
No longer making any efforts to treat them because they know they can't treat them.
And there's just every man saving himself.
I mean, you know, because, well, that's the reality.
So, yeah, you're in your house and, you know, potentially, particularly in certain areas, all hell can break loose.
And it just depends on how far we go into this scenario, whether we're talking about hundreds of people dying, thousands of people dying, or God forbid, you know, millions of people dying where we've really lost control of it.
Do you consider that a biological attack is far more likely than a nuclear weapon going off and destroying one of our cities?
Yes.
I think there is no question, and I would suggest to you that every other person who is an expert of any kind on terrorist weapons of mass destruction threats would concur with that assessment, that this is the number one biological weapons threat to the United States.
It is not theoretical.
It is real.
It could happen any day.
That doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen tomorrow.
It just means you could wake up any day and find that this has occurred, and then we may or may not get our arms around it, and it may or may not really spread, or we may be able to contain it.
I don't know, but I would be very surprised to see that one does not occur in the relatively near future, whatever that means, five, ten years.
Which doesn't mean that it's also not a concern that terrorists are acquiring nuclear weapons.
It just means that biological, all the trend lines of biological weapons are bad because not only do we have all these groups and all this aspiration, but the spread of biotech worldwide is just, it's going everywhere, right?
I mean, and the infrastructure you need to work with pharmaceuticals and biological agents and all this stuff, Is really minimal.
I mean, that's why they call it a poor man's nuclear weapon.
When you don't need big engineering projects and the capacity to machine uranium to certain tolerances and all this other stuff.
Really simple laboratory.
If you know what you're doing, you can do all this stuff.
Let me drag you back to Syria for a second.
As we all know, they allegedly used nerve agents.
I saw the videos that look pretty convincing to me.
The nerve agents were used by the Syrian government.
If they have nerve agents, it seems to me they would have also been working on biological agents.
Do you know offhand if they have those as well?
So there has been a lot of discussion, a lot of reporting for a long time that the Syrians were working with biological agents that they want.
And then the question is, you know, What exactly does that mean?
Does that mean you're researching them?
Does that mean you're producing them?
They declared, actually, as part of this deal, if that's what it is, that we have, that the Russians and the United States struck regarding Syria and so forth.
The Syrians had to begin this whole process of getting rid of their chemical weapons by declaring what agents they had, what chemical agents they had.
They actually included on that list, ricin.
So, ricin is not a chemical weapon.
Ricin is a biological agent.
It is a toxin.
So, at least in regard to that, they have openly and freely admitted that they have ricin in their possession.
Is it your view, and by the way, after what you said, if I went to Syria, I would not eat beef.
They're the biological weapons.
Yeah, that's right.
Close up.
So if the Assyrians do have biologicals, and one can imagine if they have ricin that they have more, do you think those really horrible things will get turned over?
It seems to me it'd be awfully easy for them to spirit those away to a location where they could be used in a last ditch whatever.
Well, at this point, you know, look, you're talking about a war zone that's been going on for two years.
Big chunks of territory are not under government control anymore.
Stuff has been moved around.
Government bases have been overrun.
So the idea that somehow or another stuff is not going to leak out of government, it's crazy to assume that somehow in the midst of that, that the Syrians are going to retain complete control over whatever they have.
I mean, absolutely 100% possible real Could have already happened that chemical, biological agents, if they have them, have gotten into other people's hands and moved away.
Great.
We just live in wonderful times, don't we?
I'm searching for some good news.
I just haven't found any yet.
All right.
Well, let's I'll lighten it up by asking.
One of my favorite shows clearly is Homeland.
I'm sure you watch it.
You must watch it, right?
I have watched some of it.
I do not religiously watch.
Oh, really?
OK.
I was going to ask you, I mean, it deals a great deal with the CIA, and so I was going to ask you if it was realistic in that regard or... Some of it's realistic.
You know, look, in any trade, I think when you're in the trade and somebody writes about it or produces a show about it, there's all kinds of stuff that will drive you crazy as a person who's in the trade.
That probably does not matter at all to other people, right?
I mean, if somebody puts together a program about your business, they're kind of going to blur together people that do three or four completely different jobs into one composite character.
Absolutely.
And that's going to drive you completely nuts.
Dramatic license.
I mean, you'll find out.
If they make a movie out of your book, you'll find out.
There you go.
Well, you know, I'd be happy to have that problem.
So, you know, one of the things about home imagery that drives me crazy and probably turns me off to it is that every CIA person in every show these days is an analyst, who somehow is also a field officer.
So they're a headquarters officer and an analyst, and yet they run operations in the field.
And those are Not just different jobs, but completely different animals.
I mean, if you walked into a room in a briefing and there were analysts sitting down with case officers, with officers, you would know precisely.
The folks with the number two pencil stacked up in front of them and the legal pads would be the analyst.
And the guy sitting in the room with his feet up on the table looking like he's bored and wants to go back overseas, that's definitely your case officer.
You know, the guy who has a problem with authority.
So in other words, he is bored, he does want to get overseas, and he's wondering why he's locked in with these nerds.
Well, that's a bad word.
No, that's a perfect summation of exactly what the dynamic is that's going on.
He's like, get me out of geek town and let me get back to where the fun is.
Okay, well, just making friends as you go here.
We have this... I have read our Fourth Amendment.
Surprise, surprise.
I've read it.
And so I want you to comment a little on the NSA and what they're doing, listening to and reading virtually, I guess, everything.
Well, that's not fair.
They're not really.
They're reading what the computer tells them to read after it monitors what we write and what we say.
How do you feel about that?
I think that we have crossed a line here, I mean, to start with the bottom line.
I mean, I think that it troubles me greatly when I hear people talk about this issue and then say something to the effect of, well, it doesn't matter to me because I'm not doing anything wrong.
I don't have anything to hide, this kind of stuff.
You know, first of all, You don't get to decide what constitutes right and wrong once you allow the government to do this kind of thing.
It's the government that makes that decision.
And you may consider that everything you're doing is completely legitimate, but they may decide that they think to the contrary.
And their definition of what's right and wrong today may not be the same definition they have 10, 15, 20 years from now under a different government.
So, I mean, there's a reason why we have these hard lines.
And shouldn't cross them.
So that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of great people in NSA and that they don't do a very important job.
They do.
And also, by the way, I think that effectively everybody who's involved in this is acting genuinely in what they perceive to be the best interest of the country.
In other words, I don't think there's any secret plot on their part.
To install a communist government in Washington, D.C.
They're all doing what they think is the right thing to do to keep America safe.
I don't think that changes the bottom line.
The bottom line is the Fourth Amendment is there for a reason.
And we should not be allowing collection on American citizens to the degree that we are allowing it.
We've gone too far.
It's dangerous.
We ought to roll it back.
One would have to think that if this went to the U.S.
Supreme Court, if they ever accepted a case and looked at this, there is no way it could pass constitutional muster.
Just no way!
You know, I would hope so, but also let's keep in mind that, you know, the Congress has the capacity anytime it wants to revise legislation, pass new legislation, establish new standards.
So, I mean, just because, even if it was somehow declared that, yes, it's technically constitutional, does not mean it has to be allowed.
I mean, that's the outer boundary of what's permissible.
Congress can reign this in any time at once.
I think that, going back to, we were talking earlier about the size of the intelligence community, national security apparatus, and so forth.
Right.
Okay.
You know, we live in a dangerous world.
We need protection.
We must be vigilant.
We don't need all of the people we have.
We don't need to spend as much money as we do.
We, in many cases, it's not only not making us any safer, it may be making us more vulnerable because bureaucracy does not equal results.
I think a lot of people are afraid to just say that and confront that, and I think a lot of those people are on the Hill.
That when NSA claims, if we don't do this, We're all going to die tomorrow, and I know I'm being a little sarcastic, but that we have to do this, or we're all completely exposed, that they are loathe to say, you know, you look... It's very difficult to find somebody who will stand up and say, really?
I don't believe that.
I don't think that's true.
I mean, A, even if it is true, I'm not sure it justifies selling our civil liberties down the river, but in any event, I'm not sure that's true at all.
I'm not sure that this is the only way we can protect the country.
Well, here's a question for you.
Is it working?
It being this mass sort of... The NSA monitoring, mass monitoring, yeah.
Is it working?
Are we catching people with little vials of biological crap getting across the border?
Yeah.
Right, so here's my response, and I'm going to avoid talking about specific NSA things because we're going to get into territory that I really can't.
Well, I think I can answer your question without naming a specific program.
I don't think that this is the way, having spent a lot of time doing counter-terrorism, and I don't know, not in my experience, this is not the way you catch bad people.
I mean, which is not to say the technical capabilities are not extremely valuable, but they're very valuable typically when you already have a reason to be focused on somebody, or at least on a location, or at least on a group.
The whole idea that we intercept basically every electron flying through the air in the entire world and run it through a giant computer and it automatically tells us who the bad people are, A, I don't believe it's possible, and B, I don't know of any evidence that suggests that that actually works.
And that that's what's keeping us safe.
I mean, I think what keeps you safe is those capabilities in combination with actually having people, you know, I'm an old case officer, so I'll betray my prejudice, guys out doing it the old fashioned way, wearing out their shoe leather, running sources, focused operations.
And then you're listening to the bad guy's phone and you're reading the bad guy's email, not intercepting every email on the planet.
And then trying to figure out which one of them is talking about a real wedding and which one of them is talking about a terrorist attack.
That's right.
Alright, so having said all this, you don't think it works, particularly, and you do think that it slices and dices our Fourth Amendment rights.
So, having said all that, Snowden is a hero or a traitor?
Well, look, I, you know, obviously the discussion that has resulted, I think, is productive.
But when you take the quantity of data that Snowden took, jump on an aircraft, fly to Communist China, take another aircraft from Communist China to Russia, where you are now mysteriously living at their pleasure, I think it's really hard to characterize you as somebody who has chosen The right way to deal with these issues.
I know that there are no easy answers and I know that being a whistleblower often doesn't really seem to give you the protections you should, and I'm not sugarcoating any of that, but I'm just saying when you steal a whole bunch of classified information and you jump on a plane and you next show up in communist China, I think you're going to have a really hard time convincing me that you're really on the side of the angels now.
I think you've made some really bad decisions.
I think you've crossed some lines that you can't cross.
And I think if people really think that he has gone to Communist China and now to Moscow, and that somehow or another all of the information that he is in possession of did not end up in The hands of adversaries of ours that they are being exceedingly naive.
I'm with you all the way.
Stay right where you are.
We're going to break.
Relax for a moment.
Pretty heady stuff.
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I'm Art Bell.
That's a way to get us a message.
Charles Faddis is my guest.
He's retired CIA.
And he's really been working in a A rough feel.
Last assignment prior to retirement.
May of 08.
Head of CIA's Terrorist Weapons Mass Destruction Unit.
So, he knows of what he speaks.
So, um, so Charles, uh, if... I'm sure Snowden would say that, look, yeah, I crossed a line, but the United States crossed a big line.
Our Fourth Amendment line.
He would say that.
If he had not gone to Communist China, if he had not gone to Russia, if he had simply stayed here and taken what was going to come, would your attitude be different?
Well, it would depend, obviously, on exactly what he did when he was still here, but yeah, I think that would be a major distinction.
I mean, you know... Well, he goes to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and dumps And then holds his hands up and said, OK.
You know, I don't I don't have it.
I don't have some crystal clear, perfect answer to this situation.
I think the reality is that under this administration, which promised coming in that it was going to be the most transparent ever and so forth and so on, that we have actually seen More retaliation against journalists and individuals for leaks than we've ever seen before.
A lot of efforts to discourage people from coming out and talking things that, you know, are completely at odds with what the Obama administration represented it was going to do when it came in.
I understand that environment.
I've been critical of that environment as well.
What could he have done?
How about How about take all of this and go to members of Congress?
There are plenty of members of Congress that have been highly critical of this, that are supportive of the civil liberties arguments.
Look for measures like that to pursue it here domestically.
We have now, with revelations coming out, again, I think I'm on record pretty clearly where I stand in terms of Yes, we need to dial things back.
We are undertaking, we're taking actions we shouldn't be taking.
We have problems with the Fourth Amendment.
Agree 100%.
But we're not just compromising, we're not just discussing that.
We are now discussing, every day it seems, rather technical, intricate details of capabilities that the National Security Agency possesses.
Irrespective of exactly how they're being used, we're telling people all over the planet exactly what their capabilities are.
Well, fine, so we should not be using those capabilities on our own citizens, but we might very well want to be using them to know what the People's Liberation Army in China is up to, or what al-Qaeda is planning, or what al-Shabaab is getting ready to do.
And every time we compromise one of those things, an adversary changes their methodology.
Right?
Every time you find out your telephone's tapped or that they can access your computer this way or something, you change your methods.
You stop communicating on the channel you were communicating on.
You stop sending traffic the way you were.
And an entire stream of intelligence dries up.
And that's the reality of what happens when you compromise operations.
And that's the cost that we are paying.
So a bunch of bad guys out there probably going, okay, no more hotmail.
Well, I mean, yeah, and we're talking, yes, I mean, that's an example, and we're talking way beyond that to specific capabilities and ways in which NSA does it.
And, man, this, I guarantee you, for real, no hyperbole, this stuff is lapped up around the planet, and people make concrete changes, they plug holes, they cut things off.
We were getting bails of intelligence on, name an issue, and now we've gone blind.
And we will pay for that.
Uh, you know, we will, we will find that whether, you know, when we get into a conventional war or when we get hit with a terrorist attack, we will find that we've lost the capability and we paid a price for it.
All right, I'm going to lighten it up again.
Since you didn't much like Homeland, uh, what, what, what are your favorite spy movies or TV shows that deal with this genre?
So, you know, I think the best movie that I ever saw about the actual world of espionage was, I think it's the movie is Spy Games with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford.
Which, you know, I mean, at the end when the Navy SEALs invade China and rescue Brad Pitt, okay, that might be a little past the line of believability.
But because it goes a lot into the psychology of how the game Works.
You know, there's a scene in there where Redford is teaching Brad Pitt how to do the business and Brad Pitt chats up some, he's pretending, you know, he's an alias, he's pretending to be somebody else and he chats up some woman and he thinks he's done a very good job of playing this part and then Redford walks over to sort of critique him and says, you know, I think you just told six unnecessary lies that you now have to remember.
You know, like, Like, rein yourself in, buddy.
This is a much more serious game.
TV shows, you know, this will sound ridiculous.
The TV show that I always enjoyed was Burn Notice, probably because it is completely unbelievable and nothing whatsoever.
I always found the narrative by Michael Weston, where he was saying things like, When being pursued by your adversary and you're trying to shoot at him, you know, if you try to fire at the windshield, the bullets often glance off.
So it's better to bounce the bullets off the pavement, up through the floorboards of the vehicle.
And he says this all... I'm sure the actor's laughing too when he has to dare it, but it's like...
Really, because here would be my prescription.
Don't get pursued by people shooting at you.
That would be how I would handle that situation.
Don't get into a gunfight in the middle of the street.
That would be my sage advice.
Does a CIA officer, slash agent, whatever, go through an entire career without firing a bullet in anger?
Yourself as an example?
Without talking specifically about myself, it is most definitely possible, absolutely.
I mean, look, whether you're carrying a weapon or not carrying a weapon, and that probably depends on where you are and what's going on.
I mean, your job as a spy is effectively... Not to be caught.
Not to be caught, and for them to not even know that you robbed them.
I mean, your job as a spy is effectively the same job as a con man.
A con man does not simply Swindle you and take your money.
He swindles you and takes your money and you don't even realize you've been conned.
You're still, you know, you're blissfully ignorant of what has just happened to you that you have been fleeced.
That's the essence of a con.
That's what distinguishes him from a thief.
So, I mean, a spy doesn't break into an office, crack a safe, steal the plans to the secret weapon, and then run away in a blaze of gunfire because what happens is they just change the design of the weapon that you just stole the plans for.
What you do is you, you know, break in, take the plans out, copy them, put the plans back into the safe, put everything back exactly the way it was and creep off without anybody ever knowing that you were there.
You know, that's the essence of espionage.
So if you're pulling a trigger, yeah, in most cases, that means something has gone catastrophically wrong.
I sensed when you accepted yourself from the rest of the response.
Another one of my pregnant pauses?
Yes.
So I guess I should not go there, huh?
You know, I was involved in a significant number of operations in areas like Iraq or other areas where Counter-terrorist operations where obviously we, US government writ large, were heavily involved in lethal operations, which are not really classic espionage type stuff.
So, I mean, I'll leave it at that.
Yeah, I've been involved in a number of operations where plenty of people got killed.
Okay.
Did you, regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden, Did you know, without identifying, did you know the female depicted in that movie?
I know of her.
I don't really know her.
I know a lot of people who know her much better than I do.
Would they say that the movie was an accurate portrayal?
Those people?
No, I don't think that anybody on the inside thinks that that was an accurate portrayal.
I mean, in some ways it's an accurate portrayal of her personality.
But any suggestion, which I watched that movie and that movie, parts of it drove me crazy, but any suggestion which the movie, basically the movie is based on this premise that if it wasn't for this one person, we wouldn't have ever found Bin Laden and that she sort of spearheaded the entire effort over a period of years and that's, I'm not trying to take away from her contribution or say that she did not make a significant contribution, I'm just saying that's a completely erroneous I mean, that effort involved hundreds of people over years and many, many, many other people that made at least as big a contribution as she did.
What would you say to somebody who would come to you?
As I mentioned earlier in the show, a lot of talk show hosts come to me and say, hey Art, what do I do?
How do I do this?
Advice, please.
If somebody were to come to you, let's say graduating from college, and they would say, you know what?
I'm really thinking, I'd like to be in intelligence, I'd like to be in the CIA, I'd like to be an operative, actually.
What advice would you give them?
Well, you know, I actually do, I mean, I talk to a fair number of people who ask me that question.
Pretty much, you know, several times a month, I get approached by somebody who has exactly that conversation with me.
What I try to do is I try to be completely straight with them.
I think the CIA is a vitally important organization.
I obviously think there are things we need to fix.
There's a lot of very serious work that needs to be done, but it's a vitally important organization.
When I was a case officer on the street, abroad, running assets, running operations, as far as I was concerned, there was no better job in the world.
I mean, on those days when Washington would get out of the way and we were running assets and really making a difference, We were doing important stuff.
Frankly, we were having a blast.
Great time.
But I also tell them, you know, give them the reality.
It is incredibly long hours.
It is all-consuming.
I mean, in many ways, when you're abroad, you're never off-duty.
You're working 24-7, even if you're not technically working.
I mean, there's really no such thing as like a rear area.
You are on It's incredibly stressful.
If you screw up, if you don't have your stuff together, people die, people go to prison.
There are huge, huge, huge consequences.
You are often working in extremely difficult, dangerous areas.
It may be fascinating parts of the world, but they're also not the easiest parts of the world to live and operate in.
And it's not even really like the military where you have a larger unit.
There are no parades.
There are no public, you know, you don't get your medals and accolades.
I mean, everything sort of occurs in the shadows.
So you better be really self-motivated.
You better be able to, if you're looking for somebody else to validate you, Until you're doing a good job and slap you on the back, you're doomed.
And also, you usually work in a very small outfit, so you better also be a self-starter.
I mean, if you have an officer and you have to kick him in the rear to get him moving, he's worthless.
You don't have time for that.
You send him home.
How about this?
It seems to me with what you've described in terms of the job, you've almost described it as, you know, Part time, if not full time, con man, really.
And I understand that.
But if you're going to recruit for the CIA, it seems to me most people would think, oh, you go to the military, you know, get somebody with a military background.
But it seems to me that the military is so structured and people who have been in the military are very structured people.
I know I was there.
You have to be.
You're trained to be.
And that probably doesn't make you a good CIA type.
Am I wrong?
Well, you know, there are certainly going to be some people that come out of the military that have the characteristics of a case officer, but you're absolutely right.
It's not sort of an automatic assumption that just because you were an infantry officer or a special forces guy, That you can make it as a case officer.
I mean, it's about the psychological characteristics.
So, you know, I was in the Army for a while.
I had many classmates and many colleagues who had been in various military branches, but there are lots and lots and lots of other people who are case officers who never had anything to do with the military.
I mean, it tends to be a very eclectic group of individuals.
You know, you got guys, you From all walks of life, I had a guy that actually that I relieved in one position that came in.
He was my predecessor.
His primary claim to fame before he joined the agency is that he had been effectively a backpacker and low-level smuggler in South Asia for a number of years.
Other guys that have been ski bums, you know, I mean, it kind of takes all kinds.
It is more than anything else.
I mean, you've got to be fit and you've got to have certain skills, but more than anything else, it's a head game.
So that comes down to the psychology that you have to be able to deal with massive shades of gray, lots of ambiguity.
You have to be able to change plans, make a plan, scrap it in the middle of an operation, make up a new plan on the fly.
Yeah, back to your point, lots of guys that are in the military that are all great as long as they're in a structured environment and everything's black and white.
You throw them into that world and they're lost.
They have no clue what to do.
Okay.
I want to ask you about a different kind of spy and those are the casually recruited ones.
I have a very good friend, college professor, who lives in Bangkok and he travels extensively in Southeast Asia And there have been a couple of attempts to recruit him for specific jobs.
For example, reporting back, and I'm not going to name the country, but the progress of certain airfields at certain locations that he was able to go to because he's a college professor.
How frequently does the agency go to these kinds of people for relatively smaller jobs, but nevertheless information gathering?
Well, you're going to go to whoever you need to go to to get whatever the information is you're after.
And that might mean that you're going to go to the guy who's a colonel in the KGB who can smuggle, you know, Thumb drives out to you with classified information and in some cases it's much less sensitive than that.
It's just, hey, this American citizen or this third country citizen can travel legally to such and such a location and acquire just from simple observation stuff that we can't see.
He can tell us about the airport.
He can tell us about the customs procedures.
He can tell us Yeah, and so if that's actually something we're looking for and we don't have another way to get it, then whatever it takes.
Gotcha.
Alright, let's move on to something else.
The Pakistanis are constructing nuclear weapons as quickly as they can, and of course there are a lot of people in Pakistan who would like to get one or two, if they can.
How worried should we be that the Pakistanis are going to find a way to Hand a nuclear weapon to somebody we don't want to have it.
We should be really, really, really worried, I could probably add a few more really's in there, about the general idea that a nuclear weapon, a functional nuclear weapon, so not raw materials, pieces of, but a ready-to-rock-and-roll nuke is going to somehow or another find its way From the hands of the Pakistani government into the hands of one of a number of different Islamic extremist organizations.
I say one way or the other because not so much that I think the government of Pakistan as an entity would officially hand over such a weapon, but in a couple of different ways at least.
First of all, there is a rising level of extremism Islamic extremism within all of the Pakistani armed forces and security forces.
These are the guys that used to be referred to as sort of the bastions of secularism in Pakistan, and the reason why it was okay that they had all these nukes, because they would make sure they never got into the wrong hands.
But all of those organizations are now increasingly filled with extremists.
In other words, sympathizers with terrorist groups.
So, it is entirely possible that, not so much as an official act, but folks on the inside could take a weapon and give it to a group.
And then the other thing that has happened in Pakistan is there have been quite a number of assaults on major military installations that have been largely successful.
Like, Pakistani extremists in sufficient numbers have overrun the defenses of an airbase, gotten onto the runway, destroyed jet fighters, I mean, this kind of thing has happened multiple times.
So even if it's not given to them, there's a real possibility that at some point in the future, you could have these guys actually attack one of the installations where the nukes are kept and just steal one, throw it in the truck and drive off with it.
And then you will not have nuclear material that they have to turn into something.
You'll have a fully functional implosion device capable of taking out the heart of a city, and it'll be loose running around the world.
When we did go get Bin Laden, we didn't tell Pakistan.
This upset them greatly.
Had we actually told Pakistan, or anybody in the military, or, I guess, the political structure in Pakistan, would we have still found Bin Laden?
In your opinion?
I'm not sure, but I am sure that it was absolutely the right decision not to tell them, that the risk was way too high that he would have been tipped off.
I mean, where bin Laden was found is in a relatively modest-sized Pakistani city, filled with a lot of military personnel, and basically their military academy is there, but there are also a lot of retired people there.
This is a country that's filled with terrorist activity, filled with drug cartels.
It's the kind of place where there's a lot of nefarious stuff going on.
Every house of any consequence has a walled compound.
You have multiple servants, and you always have a guard on your gate at night, probably during the day.
Criminal activity, all this other stuff going on.
People pay attention to their surroundings.
You know, this is not some neighborhood in the United States where people don't talk to their next-door neighbors and don't even know their names.
In a society like this, you know who your neighbors are, you know what's going on, and if there's anything weird going on with them, you worry a lot, because there are real bad people floating around the country, selling drugs, killing people, blowing things up.
In the midst of this place, this town, with all of these prominent people, and in this kind of environment, you have these guys come in, Bin Laden and company, buy a house, retreat behind the walls, interact with nobody, Uh, speak to no one.
Never come outside.
Uh, nobody has any information on who they are.
So, all of those things ought to be red flags.
Sending out red flags to everybody around there, like, what, who are these guys?
Not necessarily that they would say, hey, I bet that's Ben Laden, but, uh, this doesn't smell right.
These guys could be, they could be involved in some kind of criminal activity.
And these are all retired colonels, generals, whatever, active duty officers.
These are all people that are plugged in the security service.
Nobody does anything, according to the Pakistanis.
Nobody inquires, nobody asks any questions, nobody pursues the matter.
Now, at the end of all of this, you're left with two conclusions, in my opinion.
A, the Pakistanis are incompetent on a scale that's mind-boggling, that this guy was hiding in plain sight in this kind of area, not up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere.
Or B, there's collusion on some level.
That somebody, not necessarily the Prime Minister of Pakistan, but somebody at some level in some security service was aware he was there and was assisting him.
Now, I don't know what the answer to that is, but neither one of those is an encouraging picture in any way.
I would say B sounds a lot more probable.
Probably.
I would agree.
Probably.
All right, hold it right there.
Here's a pretty good-sized break to relax, grab a cup of coffee, whatever, my guess.
The next CIA officer, Charles Battis, written a new book.
And I'm gonna go order that book as soon as I get off the air.
That's how good I think it's gonna be.
This is Dark Matter.
Alright, I'm gonna open the lines now.
That'll take a while.
We're gonna open all the lines and allow you an opportunity to call and ask a question.
And it's not frequently that you get somebody Recently retired from the CIA, willing to answer questions.
My guest is obviously a brilliant guy, Charles Faddis.
He's written a book called Kappa, which I intend to get immediately, because it's my kind of book.
So, Charles, welcome back.
We're on the subject of Pakistan.
Aside from a nuke making it out into hands we don't want, what are the odds of I know we've come close in the past.
India and Pakistan could be tossing nukes back and forth and it could happen quickly.
What do you think?
I think everybody who studies this kind of problem agrees that that is the most likely place on the entire planet to have the first all-out for real nuclear exchange between two countries and you're absolutely right.
It could happen Virtually any day.
I don't mean like we're in a crisis right now, but the conditions are ripe and in a very short order we could go from where we are at any point in time to them actually firing nukes at each other.
People have this idea that cooler heads would prevail if not prior to an act.
After the first few fell, cooler heads would quickly prevail.
Isn't it more likely, and I know these things are war games, but that once it began at any level It would quickly escalate to all-in on somebody's part.
Yeah, well it's certainly at least as likely as it is that somebody's going to actually gain control over it.
I remember, I'll leave the country out of this so we can talk about it, but I remember once discussing in a location on the planet when people were asking us about Why we didn't have the nuclear war plan for a particular country?
Why we didn't know what they were?
In other words, why hadn't we stolen them yet?
And my response was, you know, you presuppose that they have such a plan and that there is such a plan to steal.
Just because we think like that and we have that level of organization and detail does not require everyone else on the planet to act like we do.
They may, you know, and I think that would be a, I think you would have mass confusion and dysfunctional government and you would exchange nuclear weapons and then you would rapidly lose big chunks of the government completely in both countries because they would be annihilated and after that you'd have chaos.
And God knows how many nukes would be exchanged and Pakistan and India are There are a lot of amazing people there and fascinating parts of the world, and they're in very, very difficult economic circumstances.
And on a good day in that part of the world, in many places, people are struggling to survive.
So you can imagine what life's going to be like there after you launch a couple of dozen nukes each way into each other's country and take out most of the big cities.
You know, you're going to be back in the dark ages real fast.
Well, as I mentioned, it seems to me the inclination, once they're, you know, beginning to exchange a city gone here, a city gone there, then, you know, you're faced very quickly with an, we're all in and we've got to, you know, destroy everything we can destroy at once before we're destroyed.
It's an old story, one that we lived with, with respect to the Russians, the Soviet Union, excuse me.
So, it escalates, I guess, pretty quickly to an all-in situation.
Well, the first thing that's going to happen in any situation is you're going to hit the opponents.
You're going to go for his nuclear forces in his capital city.
So, the first thing you're going to do, as the Indians take out Islamabad and the Pakistanis are going to take out New Delhi.
So, in the process of doing that, presumably you're going to destroy a huge portion of the national leadership in both countries.
So, now that you've decapitated The country's the chance of having some sort of restraint.
Now you're going to get spasmodic responses.
Plus, as you said, everybody that's got a nuclear weapon and a delivery vehicle, an aircraft, a missile, whatever it is, is going to be thinking, I need to get it off the ground while it still works to shoot at the bad people before they blow it up on the ground here.
So all of that argues for reflexively launching more or less everything.
And yes, it's a terrifying situation.
The Pakistanis are building nukes at a fantastic rate.
They're rapidly going to overtake other countries.
I think they're now, what, number five in terms of nuclear arsenal.
In the midst of all of that chaos and craziness, they're pumping resources into building more and more and more nuclear weapons that they are less and less capable of keeping safe and secure.
How do you feel about proliferation?
It's an interesting conundrum, because on the one hand, any nation developing nuclear weapons is immediately a pariah, and they remain a pariah, and they suffer every possible sanction that anybody can think up.
However, it seems like once they actually get nuclear weapons, then they get to join the club.
Right.
Well, this is a really interesting question.
This brings us to sort of the question of Iran and the lessons that they drew from our invading Iraq.
I mean, they've been pursuing a nuclear weapon for some time, but one of the clear lessons to them was, you guys wouldn't have been so fast, so quick to go beat up on Saddam if you'd thought he actually had a few nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them.
You would have treated him With a lot more respect and restraint.
Absolutely.
They would have been afraid.
So they came away from that with the, we want to make it over that threshold at some point lesson.
We want to be in that position where we can say to you, yeah, you're not coming here.
You're not going to push us around because we can bite back.
Right.
So doesn't our attitude To some degree, force some of these countries to move ahead as quickly as they can, to go from being pariah to being possibly dangerous and respected in some weird way.
Well, I don't know what the alternative would be.
I think that it is a factor that we have to be aware of, that folks are going to try sometimes to get across that threshold as quickly as they can.
I don't think we could adopt a policy where we just sort of allow anybody that wanted to to acquire nuclear weapons because they're just, I mean, many of these countries just don't have the requisite level of stability.
I mean, as much as, you know, as much as we think about the Cold War in these dark terms, and the Soviets, no picnic, That was a fairly stable confrontation between two relatively stable regimes, and fairly predictable.
Not exactly my prescription for the way I'd like the world to work, but you could generally figure out what the Soviets were going to do, and they could generally figure out what we were going to do, and we would both act in the interest of self-preservation, and on that basis we managed to somehow figure out a way not to nuke each other for decades.
We sure did.
You know, for instance, if you... I would not be comfortable with the Iranians having a nuclear weapon and making that same... and thinking we could make that same calculus.
That's too many variables and it's too unpredictable.
They recently have sort of changed their tune and they've been actually saying friendly things lately to us by, believe it or not, Tweeting us in other social ways.
And so, do you think that that is all kind of a stall while they continue to work as hard as they can?
Yes.
This is all nonsense, and none of it means anything other than a tactical maneuver.
It does not change their objective.
Their objective It's not necessarily at this stage to make the decision to finally finish assembling the bomb, but to definitely be in a position where they have all the pieces and they can assemble it very, very, very quickly to have what the Israelis call a virtual bomb.
So close that they can effectively jump across that threshold at a moment's notice.
And every other decision is tactical.
So if they need to, if they can speed up in that process at certain times, they will run.
And if people are really watching them and threatening them and they need to put down their tools for a moment and make soothing noises until people stop leaning on them, then they'll do that.
But none of it changes the fact that in the end, their intention remains precisely the same.
They haven't changed anything.
If they have to be stopped, would you think we would be the ones or do you think that it would be a joint American-Israeli operation?
You're talking about something like bombing Iran now?
Yes.
You know, it could be either, but I mean, there's a lot of discussion about the Israelis doing this unilaterally, right?
And I've worked a lot with the Israelis, and I have great respect for them, and they live in a very tough neighborhood, and they're not always the easiest people to deal with, but you know what?
If I lived under their conditions, subject to that level of threat, I'd probably Uh, act exactly the same way.
Um, a lot of this verbiage about sort of like, you know, you bet you Americans better do something or we're going to do it ourselves is, is in my opinion, a tactic on the part of the Israelis to exert pressure on us.
And, you know, for good reason, cause they don't want us to let this happen.
The Israelis are great, but they do not have our level of military force and they don't have a lot of our capabilities.
And if you're going to go hit Iran and actually take out their nuclear, program, you need a lot of aircraft, you need a lot of particular types of munitions, you need mid-air refueling because the distances are vast.
And here's the bottom line, they don't have that capability.
They don't have the mid-air refueling capability, they don't have the munitions, and they don't have sufficient aircraft of the right type.
Do we have the right munitions?
And by that, I mean, something short of nuclear?
Well, we are closer than they are.
We have munitions that are specifically designed for, you know, hitting underground bunkers and things like that.
Now, ultimately, whether they prove successful, nobody knows until the shooting starts, but the Israelis don't.
We probably do.
That doesn't mean that if we really just drop the ball and they're up against it that the Israelis won't try.
That's not what I'm saying.
I mean, when push comes to shove, they'll do what they have to do.
But they won't magically acquire B-1s, B-2s, B-52s, mid-air refueling capability and the capacity to do that.
What they'll be able to do is launch raids, which will be much less effective.
All right.
We're short on time, but I want to ask you about other threats.
And another one that's been making lots of noise and then suddenly shut up is North Korea.
They successfully launched a missile, somewhat successfully, and they somewhat successfully have tested nuclear devices.
There's some argument about that, the amount of the actual yield and all that, but how much of a threat is North Korea with regard to the possibility of the Second Korean War?
I mean, Seoul is right there.
Yeah, right.
I mean, that's the thing that people have People who haven't been to Korea don't realize that Seoul is virtually in the front lines here.
I mean, when the war starts, the capital city is more or less in artillery range and a huge portion of the population is right in the middle of the war.
You know, I think it's a very significant threat in the sense that the North Koreans, it's just a pretty erratic and in some ways difficult and unpredictable regime.
It's just so bizarre that it's very hard to kind of rule anything out with the North Koreans.
Even when you've made your best calculus, there's still a very large wildcard factor that they could just do something completely irrational.
That said, I would say this.
I think what the North Koreans have done is they have fallen into a pattern for many years now of basically being what I refer to as nuclear brats.
So they throw a tantrum, they make all sorts of threats, they test a nuke, they fire a missile.
And we yell and scream and threaten them.
And then in relatively short order, we go back to talking to them.
And then in relatively short order, we typically make confessions.
And we ship them food or we loosen sanctions.
In other words, we reward them for their behavior.
So I think the best course of action with them is obviously to maintain military force to respond if they attack.
But by and large, when they're doing all of this madness, To just sort of ignore them.
Kind of the way you would ignore a kid that you sent to his room and now he's standing upstairs screaming.
Just whatever.
Well, you're certainly right about the way we treat them.
We scream and yell and then, as you point out, we talk and ship food.
That sort of thing.
So that goes back to the discussion we were having about proliferation.
If they didn't have nuclear weapons, it wouldn't be the same cycle at all, would it?
No.
I mean, you're right.
They made it across the threshold.
Of course, there is the added complication in the case of North Korea that they are directly under the protective wing of the Chinese.
I mean, the Chinese are good buddies now.
They make all of this possible.
If the Chinese really wanted to stop all of this behavior, it would be relatively straightforward because the economic survival of North Korea is
completely dependent on the Chinese. I mean, if they decide they
want the behavior to change dramatically, they can change at any time they want.
Okay. It has been alleged in the past that the CIA, in places like Afghanistan,
when they needed to, either supported or assisted in the
smuggling of drugs. Would you care to comment on that or not?
Uh, yeah.
Yeah, I think that there is no truth to any of those allegations that I have ever heard.
I mean, I have heard stories about stuff being moved back in the days of Air America in Southeast Asia.
I mean, I wasn't flying on Air America in Southeast Asia, so I can't swear to you that no drugs ever moved on an Air America plane.
But in my career, wherever I was, anybody I was involved with, any operation into which I had visibility, no.
We never, never did that.
Not only never did it as official policy, but never tolerated it.
You know, any shade of way you want to spin it, didn't happen.
Didn't smuggle coke into Los Angeles.
Didn't take opium out of Afghanistan or whatever other madness we have been accused of.
All right.
Good.
It's good to hear something good.
We're on a roll now.
In much of the developing world, this is something you suggested we bring up, so I will.
The water table is, we know, falling very rapidly.
Now, if you combine this with population growth, which is growing very rapidly, what happens when the water is exhausted?
And what are the prospects for hungry people all over the world?
So, you know, we were talking before about Al-Qaeda and how it's morphing and how it feeds off of various factors.
This is, you know, true more broadly than Al-Qaeda of problems, instability, violence, threats to world peace.
I mean, we, you know, we have a massive population growth issue.
And we have major issues like falling water tables.
So for instance, in India, which sort of for a time period kind of escaped from the threat of famine by bringing in all sorts of hybrid crops.
They paid the price for that by the fact that these hybrid crops, these new crops need a lot more water than what grew there originally.
So they now are in places where the water table in some places is falling like three feet a year.
You're chasing the water down.
Okay, well, obviously, at some point, you can't get the water anymore.
In Yemen, the places where the wells are now, the well used to be, say, 100 feet deep in Amos City, and now you're not finding the water table until you hit 2,000 feet.
And they're actually having to employ techniques from the oil drilling industry to get water out of the ground.
Well, You know, even all of that only works for a certain period of time.
I mean, there's a clock ticking, and you're going to have disaster.
Saudi Arabia decided a number of years ago it was going to go into wheat production to become self-sufficient in food.
They had an aquifer underground, but it was what's called a fossil aquifer, meaning there's a certain amount of water, but it's not recharging from rainfall.
Whatever the hell's in the aquifer, it's there, and when you Finish sucking it dry.
It's not going to recharge because, well, it's a desert now.
They've drained it.
So they don't produce their wheat crop.
That's done.
Now they've got to import food.
That entire effort is terminated.
They've already used all of that water.
So this is happening all over the place.
You know, population growth and, you know, what results when all of a sudden you've got people and you can't feed them.
Entire cities can't get water, you know madness chaos breakdown civil order violence and
And there are big portions of the world where this is what you're going to see
There are people Charles who?
feel that everything you just said is completely accurate and
That in order to avoid That outcome
something biological Should be released and the world's population should be
reduced Are you familiar with that line of thought?
Yeah, I'm familiar with it, yes.
Is that something to be concerned about?
Well, I think what's, you know, we have come, let me take this slant on it.
I said before I started working terrorism a number of years ago.
These days, when we think of terrorism, we think Al-Qaeda and then maybe some of the affiliated groups.
That's not the definition of terrorism.
That's not the world of terrorism.
It is not limited to purely Islamic extremist groups motivated by that.
When I was first cutting my teeth in the world of counter-terrorism, it was all working Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups.
Um, or state-sponsored, you know, Palestinian groups and guys like that.
And, by and large, none of those groups were motivated by religion.
Um, so, we can face terrorist threats from groups that don't have anything to do with Islam, or for that matter, for religion, you know, sort of end-of-days groups.
Um, Am Shinrikyo, which was the sect in Tokyo years ago that actually released nerve gas in the subway, was basically one of these You know, the end of times is here, group, and we're going to kind of hurry us along down that road, so yeah.
Yeah, if time won't end, we'll end it.
Yeah, we're tired of waiting for the world to end, so we'll just make it happen.
Yeah, we could see people get ahold of biological weapons, this kind of stuff, and absolutely, they could be saying, hey, we're cleansing the planet, we're saving Mother Earth.
Right.
They could be motivated by whatever ideology they've come up to.
In Central Africa, there's a group, the Lord's Resistance Army, right?
These guys, they engage in witchcraft, they kill people and take their kids and turn the kids into child soldiers, they mutilate people, gang rape, every nasty thing.
They classify themselves as a Christian group, and they believe that they are following the tenets of the Ten Commandments.
I obviously missed something when I read them, because I don't remember anything about gang rape, child soldiers, or witchcraft.
But, I mean, they've somehow managed to find a way to take the Ten Commandments and find in there justification for committing the most heinous acts on the face of the planet.
Interestingly, the Pope just said, essentially, God save us from ideological Christians.
Stay right where you are, Charles.
The phone lines are open and quite filled.
1-855-REAL-UFO.
If you have a question, we'll try and get an answer for you.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Dark Matter Raging in the Night.
Alright then, I've occupied Charles' status for a long time here.
This is how you have a real discussion on the radio.
Charles is Ex-CIA, last assignment prior to retirement in 08.
Head of the CIA's Terrorist Weapons Mass Destruction Unit.
And we've been all over the map, and now I invite you to take a trip across the map yourself with him.
I'm going to buy his book immediately, and I'm plugging it for him, consciously.
It is CAFA, C-A-F-F-A, CAFA, about a biological attack on the United States.
And I would say he would be one who would know how it would happen.
You want to read about how it would happen?
Kappa is the book you want.
So, back we are, Charles, and if you're ready, I'm going to open the lines.
I'm ready.
Okay.
Here we go.
You are on the air.
This is Dark Matter.
Hello.
Hello?
Yes, hi.
That would be Missouri and Connor.
Yes, sir.
I was calling to talk to Charles Patton.
I wanted to ask him really quick why we haven't gone into Africa at all.
We've only focused our military efforts on the Middle East, and I understand that, but with all the atrocities that have been happening for years and years, why haven't we at least tried to go there?
Well, you know, we have an intelligence presence, if you will, more or less worldwide.
So it's not like we don't have people in Africa.
But actually, even on a sort of special operations front or counterterrorism front, there are a fair number of activities going on in Africa.
I mean, Somalia, Kenya, those areas, Djibouti.
So we do have a presence there.
It doesn't get as much attention and It hasn't had as much emphasis, but there are people focused on those issues.
Is it fair to say, Charles, that we go where our interests are?
In other words, when one tribe slaughters another in Africa and half a million people die, or whatever, that's in Africa, we're not as interested.
Or Cambodia, if lots of people are killed in Cambodia, we're not as interested.
If it happens in the Middle East, where there's lots of oil, We're more interested.
Is that fair?
You know, I think that's probably a fair characterization.
If you look over where we have intervened, where we haven't intervened, that, you know, that seems to be accurate.
I mean, I'm a big proponent of the idea that we ought to be considerably more careful about where we intervene.
I'm not an isolationist, but I've had my fill of nation building.
So I think we ought to be a lot more sober, careful.
Focused where we're going to intervene, why we're intervening, and we ought to define very clearly what our national interest is before we get involved.
But then that begs the question of what constitutes a national interest.
Is it only securing energy supplies or is it also at some point does genocide rise to that level?
In regard to energy, I would rather see us pursue a policy that achieves energy independence rather than I would keep seeing American kids getting sent Yes, sir.
We have not, since the end of the Second World War, particularly done well with nation-building, have we?
Look, I think this whole idea of these ruinous nation-building exercises are just horribly ill-advised.
People, we have taken a lot of supposed lessons or parallels from the Second World War and tried to apply them to other places where they don't fit.
I mean, we went into France.
France was a nation that existed as an industrialized, liberal, democratic society before the Germans conquered it.
Then it was occupied for a number of years.
We liberated it and assisted them in rebuilding their country.
That's a completely different proposition From occupying a country that has no tradition of liberal democratic rule that doesn't even necessarily view itself as a country that is consisted, you know, in the case of Iraq or Afghanistan, it consists largely of separate tribes and ethnic groups.
And then we're now going to take on the process of fusing them all together and doing in the space of a few years what probably took centuries in Western Europe.
Is it fair to say that democracy is not always exportable?
Certainly not successfully.
In fact, in some nations, it may well be that other forms of government, perhaps more heavily handed forms of government, are going to be more successful than an attempted export of democracy.
I think it's certainly fair to say that if you're talking about current conditions, this is absolutely the case.
Now, I may be optimistic enough to think that eventually most countries may evolve at some point in the future there, but we're not going to do that in the space of a few years, and we're not prepared to pay the price in dollars and blood to make it happen, and I don't see any reason why it's essential to our national security that we do that.
Five months into the invasion of Afghanistan, we had destroyed Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
We achieved our objective.
Why did we need to occupy the country with conventional forces and then take on the task of turning it into Switzerland and Central Asia?
Why?
Okay, I've got to go to the lines.
Josh in North Carolina, you're on the air.
Hey Art, first time caller, been listening to your show for a couple months now, but my question is, Charles, why is the government putting a hold on ammunition, and like I go to Walmart or Cabela's and try to buy ammunition, and why are they trying to hoard up the ammunition?
Alright, have you heard anything about domestic tight supplies of ammunition?
I, you know, I'm aware that there are all kinds of rumors running around about what the government's doing in regard to ammunition.
I don't know of anything that actually supports that.
I mean, I suspect that anything that's going on with ammunition has to do with gun laws in various states.
And when people, when those laws start being tightened, people start buying weapons and ammunition ahead of the laws changing.
It's definitely happened.
I mean, I live in the state of Maryland where, oh my God, we have now tightened the Gun laws to the point where it's almost impossible to possess a firearm, so I know how that goes.
Well, thankfully I live out west where it's not at all impossible.
In fact, most households have weapons.
Something that anybody deciding to break in or take their share of whatever somebody else has would be well to keep in mind.
You're on the air from Texas, Jerry.
Hi.
Yes, thanks for taking my call.
Hello, Charles.
I've got a question for you.
I've heard a rumor that over in Jabal al-Lawz, over in Saudi, that they set up a missile air defense system, and they were trying to get those nukes to become nuclear, the air offensives.
Have they been successful at that, at nuclear or biological, or is all of that just a bunch of misinformation?
I don't know anything about nuclear or biological weapons in Saudi Arabia, which is, I understand what you said, although bootstrapping off the conversation we were having earlier about Iran, one of the things to think about in regards to the possibility of the Iranians getting a nuke is, you know, the Iranians are not Arabs, they're Persians, and the Arabs and the Persians, there's no love lost, not to mention that there's a religious division between Sunnis and Shias here.
So one of the first things that's going to happen, in addition to the Israelis going crazy, if the Iranians get a nuke, is that the Saudis will go get one.
Awesome.
And in their case, they will probably, knowing them, just fly a plane load of money to Islamabad and buy themselves an arsenal.
But they will not sit on the other side of the Gulf with the Iranians with a nuclear weapon without arming themselves.
Steve in Virginia, you're on the air with Charles Faddis.
Hi!
Nice to talk to you.
I'm a new listener.
I've been listening for a few weeks since you've come on the air and I really enjoy your program.
Very interesting.
It makes the long nights of driving all night go by a lot faster.
Charles, it's a very interesting show.
I'm former Army.
I was Airborne Infantry.
I was a long-range reconnaissance patrol guy.
And, uh, got to do a little bit of stuff, nothing like probably what you did, but, um, I've got a question.
I used to like that show, uh, 24.
How realistic is that one there?
Is that just all BS too?
Oh, I, I too was a fan of 24 Caller.
Um, it was great to watch, but hmm.
You know, not particularly realistic, but hey, I'm the guy that said that he liked Burn Notice, so I can't, I can't quibble about that.
Okay, off to Michigan, I think, and Bill.
Hi, Bill.
Hi, Art.
Just a quick question.
Have we actually found any deployable biological weapons with any of these terrorist groups?
Good one.
So the question, you know, the question becomes what we mean by deployable.
The issue with biological weapons and chemical weapons frequently, the biggest issue is less The capacity to make them and more the capacity to disseminate them, in other words, to spread them effectively.
So we were talking before about Aum Shinrikyo in Japan and hitting the subway with nerve gas, and their nerve gas was very, very deadly.
But they did a really terrible job of disseminating it, thank God, and they only killed a handful of people.
And that tends, on the biological side, to be a breakdown with terrorist groups as well.
They can acquire Or cultivate or create small quantities of the material, but they can't figure out yet how to use it effectively.
So let's hope they stay hung up like that for a while.
Okay.
Agreed.
All right.
Thank you very much.
All right.
I guess I would classify you, Charles, as surprised that we have not yet had a biological attack here of significance.
Well, yeah, I mean, mildly.
I mean, and apprehensive, maybe.
We have a tendency, unfortunately, it seems to me, to not really treat a threat as serious until such time as we have suffered the consequences.
So, for those of us who worked counterterrorism pre-911, there was no great surprise that, I mean, we were surprised by the specific attack.
But that Al-Qaeda was out to get us and was going to kill us and was going to keep doing that was very clear.
They had out already, after all, blown up two of our embassies.
They had tried to sink a warship in Yemen.
We were already at war with them, and yet it took 3,000 people getting killed before we could get people to all of a sudden cut us some slack and let us start going after these guys.
So, you know, my nightmare is that that's what it's going to take to get us to really get serious about a biological threat is that we're actually going to have to get hit somewhere and have thousands of people at a minimum die and then all of a sudden we will decide to employ serious measures to stop it.
Okay, the following is not a serious question at all.
Something I've always wondered about and maybe the CIA knows.
Could there be any truth to the fact that cold remedy companies are out with little vials of the flu every year spreading it about?
Prior to their advertising campaigns.
Wow.
I believe that that entire operation was secret until just now.
Now I realize the whole thing's been blown.
You gotta laugh once in a while.
Not to my knowledge, but again, back to my earlier response, you know, I've been wrong before.
So, who knows?
Yes.
Colorado brings David.
Hi, David.
Hey, welcome back there, and to your guest there, I'd like to thank him personally for his service to this country.
What I was wondering there is, he was talking about the possibility of a nuclear bomb being maybe stolen from Pakistan, something like that, but what kind of a danger are we really over here in the continental United States?
Because from my understanding, they have a very limited shelf life without maintenance to them, and do they really have the ability to get it over here that quick?
Well, so if you're talking about a fully functional nuclear device and, you know, you kind of wanted to put it on the shelf and then be able to guarantee that you can use it on a moment's notice, you know, at some undetermined time in the future, that turns into a pretty complicated engineering equation and requires all kinds of stuff.
But basically, here's my thesis and certainly what I've always said on this issue.
As soon as a terrorist group acquires a nuclear weapon, they're going to use the nuclear weapon.
As fast as they can get it to anything that they consider to be a target that's worthy of the use of that weapon, they will take it to that target.
It'll be largely opportunistic.
So if they have a capacity to get it to the United States, they'll get it to the United States, and they'll pretty much get it to whatever city they just happen to be able to get it to, based on whatever random factors are at play.
If not, they'll get it to Europe, or they'll get it to wherever.
Speed of delivery, I mean, you know what the most likely way to do it?
They're going to throw it in a container and put it on a cargo ship.
And then it's going to steam into port in Long Beach or it's going to steam into a port in Jersey.
And I'm not even sure it'll ever be even offloaded.
And by the way, there won't be any sophisticated army mechanism.
There'll just be a guy in there.
There'll be a guy with a button and whatever he needs to eat and drink in a bucket to relieve himself and he'll ride with the thing.
And then he'll press the plunger and boom.
And, you know, it'll go off on the docks in Long Beach, it'll go off on the docks in Jersey, or it'll go off in New York Harbor.
And just imagine the event.
I mean, no matter what the casualties are, catastrophic.
I'm afraid I can't imagine.
And it might occur before anything was even checked.
Not that they get to check that many containers, but why wait for that?
Yeah, exactly why I think it'll go off on the docks.
They won't take the chance of getting caught.
Alright, Texas and Will.
Hi, Will.
Hi, thanks for having me on the show.
Quick question for you, Mr. Charles.
As per a possible biological attack, two parts to this.
Could you consider that as a precursor to a more conventional attack?
And if so, or even if not so, Does our military, particularly our Navy, do we have measures on board their ships in order to cover all the personnel so that they could, you know, go through a biological attack without being completely decimated?
Both good questions.
A biological attack followed by something more conventional?
Yeah, sure.
It could absolutely be the case, and no, we do not necessarily just automatically have It means to defend against it.
Just real quick, when the Russians were hot and heavy on their biological program, they played with a variety of biological agents.
One of those was tularemia.
And one of the reasons they played with the variety of reasons, one of them is it's relatively easy to work with.
It lives for relatively long periods of time.
When you're looking to weaponize things, you don't want the weapon to basically Fade out on you anyway, but the tularemia basically was not designed to kill people.
I mean, the tularemia effectively, it will kill a small number of people, but for most people, it'll just make you really, really horribly sick and have to be hospitalized for weeks.
And that was the specific reason they wanted to use it because they figured they would make huge numbers of people sick.
And then those people would put a massive drain on our resources, hospitals, And so forth.
And so they wanted the people to stay alive, but be so ill that they would suck resources to be cared for.
And that was specifically to weaken us in conjunction with a conventional war or a conflict.
Sure.
Actually, I think that was sort of the theory in most every war.
You're better off wounding people, because then somebody else has to come along and try and carry them off the battlefield.
Or instead of taking out one, you take out two or three.
I used to be stationed, and Charles, nice to meet you.
Illinois and Scott. Hey Art Roswells and 51s, spoke to you last week. I used to be
stationed, and Charles nice to meet you, you've been a great great guest. I used to be in
the military as well, just retired last year and I was privy to some information
as far as getting briefings there in northern Japan.
We had to always, you know, the joke was we were closer to Pyongyang than we were Tokyo.
So we'd always worry about the threats that could come about and had to see those various briefings and be ready and prepared for that.
But one of the places that we were always kind of concerned with, and I know you brought it up earlier, was India and Pakistan.
And my question is, with their, pretty much my knowledge is that they've got a pretty antiquated detection system to where it's, they see you fire, they fire.
You know, there's no, there's no red phone, there's no 30 minutes coming over the Arctic Circle like there would be if it was a Russian attack.
And with those two countries going to war, it's almost guaranteed that nukes will be used if they were to ever go to war, and hopefully they don't.
What would the world's response and what would our response be to that scenario or would we stay out of it?
I mean, I can't see us staying out of it because, you know, it's obviously not in our nature to stay out of something of that gravity.
Really good question.
Yeah, well, I think your description of the situation in terms of lack of warning and so forth is pretty accurate.
I mean, they don't have the systems that geographically there's no distance.
I mean, yeah.
You know, they're going to be lucky to have notice before something impacts and then they're just going to fire.
What would we do?
You know, I think we would we would do whatever we felt like we could to try to convince them to stop.
But I suspect that there's nothing that we could do that would have any effect.
We're not going to jump into the middle of a conflict and try to disarm these two powers as they're shooting nuclear weapons at each other.
In any case, I think basically the exchange is going to be over In the course of a couple of days, and then you're just left with the aftermath, which is going to be unthinkable.
That would certainly define the term burn notice, wouldn't it?
If you spend time in the subcontinent and you know the challenges there, and how difficult life is, and how the infrastructure already doesn't work, and power goes out six times a day in Delhi, And water goes out, and the chaos, and the beggars, and all of that stuff.
And then you imagine nuking what little infrastructure exists.
Wow.
I mean, it's going to be hideous.
And it is absolutely possible.
It is the single most likely place on the entire planet to have the first ever for real nuclear exchange.
All right.
Very quickly, Mike in California.
Great show, Art.
Great show.
My question is, it seems like the terrorists want to get the biggest bang for their buck.
I mean, kill and maim as many people as they can.
Is there a biological agent that could be put into the water supply that would, you know, kill thousands of people?
Because in my area there's a lake that supplies a major city on the west coast that's only about A hundred acres.
If they were to dump an agent in there, it'd kill thousands of people.
At least.
So here's the, you know, we're always, we've been searching for the last several hours for good news.
So here's some good news.
There are plenty of toxins or a number of toxins which are incredibly lethal to people in really, really, really tiny quantities.
And if administered directly to you or into your food or your water will definitely kill you very quickly.
When you start doing the actual math on volume of even a modest size reservoir and trying to calculate how much toxin or biological agent you're going to have to put into that volume to have any impact on the population, the answer is you're going to have to start backing up dump trucks and tanker trucks and pouring this stuff in.
So that particular method If you're talking about any kind of poison or toxin, it's not really a practical thing.
In other words, it would be too diluted.
While we're on that subject, there is a horrible mess going on over in Japan right now, in Fukushima, and I wonder if you could comment quickly on it or what you might know about it.
I know there are some Just horrible dangers that we're facing as they try and clean this up.
The possibility of these fuel rods being exposed to the air and if number four lets go, you just don't even want to know what's going to happen.
Are you up on that at all?
Yeah, and I mean, just real quick, some factors about Fukushima.
First of all, I mean, what's happened there is an incredible disaster.
We have a dead zone, and it's not over, and they don't have control over what's going on with the water.
And yes, if we get fuel rods exposed to the air, wow, I mean, it's going to be a mess.
The other thing to know about Fukushima is that You know, what happened to Fukushima was basically they lost power.
I mean, the tidal wave didn't hit Fukushima, and the earthquake did not crack the reactors open.
What happened was they lost power.
They shut down because of the earthquake, they lost external power, their generators failed.
That's all that happened to Fukushima.
Everything else is a cascade effect from there, because even when you turn off a reactor, you have to continue to cool it because of the amount of heat.
So that actually could happen to any similar reactor in the United States from things that don't have anything to do with a tidal wave.
You could lose power in a hurricane, have your generators go out and your external power is gone, and we could have the exact same thing happen here.
The other thing is that all of that could also be done deliberately by terrorists.
They could come in, knock out power, take out down the diesel generators, and then basically just let physics do the rest.
There are so many ways, aren't there?
We're going to break here.
It's our final break.
You've been a real trooper.
So stand by, relax for a few moments, and then we'll do the final segment.
My guest is Charles Pettis, and his book is Kappa, C-A-F-F-A.
It's a book you're going to want to grab.
A-S-A-P.
This is Dark Matter.
Alright, Charles Thaddeus is my guest, and again, he's got a book that you're gonna want.
I know I want it, and we'll have it shortly.
It's called Kappa, and I recommend you get to it quickly.
It's obviously going to be a bestseller.
It's about a biological attack on the United States, and he would be one to Alright, good evening people.
Thank you for the show.
is fiction, unfortunately very likely to be reality. So buy it quickly. California brings
Matt. Matt, you're on the air with Charles. Hi.
Hi, good evening people. Thank you for the show. It's excellent tonight.
Thank you.
With the recent passing of one of my favorite authors, Tom Clancy, I was wondering if Charles
was familiar with his work, and he seemed to have a keen insight into the intelligence
I just wondered if you could comment on that.
Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously Tom Clancy is a great author, and one of the things he's known for is his research.
I mean, he did his own work, and Talk to a lot of people, and he got pretty much everything right.
So, I mean, that realism, that apparent realism was accurate.
Tim, in New Mexico, you're on the air.
Hello.
Yeah.
How are you doing, Art?
And the Syria controversy right now that we're kind of watching, is there any likely that Russia is going to take a stance with Syria and turn against us if there was ever to a war break out or conflict escalated into much higher tensions?
Very good question.
Of course, that seemed to be averted with the recent talk, but it's a good question.
If it had not been Averted Charles and we had gone in unilaterally to Syria.
What do you think would happen?
Well, I think on some level is the Russians have definitely already taken a stance against us in Syria and they're going to continue to Do so if we had gone in unilaterally, would they intervene militarily?
directly, I suspect not the Russians are a pragmatist and realist, and that probably would not have seemed like a winning proposition, but they probably would have looked for every place else on the planet to make us pay for that, and they definitely would continue.
I mean, if we were fighting the Syrian military and they could continue to pump arms to them with which to kill Americans, yeah, they would absolutely do that kind of thing.
Okay.
Ross in Florida, you're on the air.
Hey Art, Roswells and 51s to you.
My question to your guest tonight changes the subject a little bit.
I wanted to ask about the JFK assassination.
I'm obviously not expecting that you know anything that we don't know.
Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but I imagine if you did, that'd be something that they wouldn't allow you to talk about.
But your own personal theories, Do you believe in the lone gunman?
And with that said, the lone gunman, even if it was just him taking the shots, it still could have been a conspiracy.
And if you had anything to add to that?
Is this something that CIA guys, retired and otherwise, sit around and talk about over coffee or beers?
No.
No, and I have nothing exciting to say.
A, I don't know anything about it other than what I have personally researched.
I did at one point sit down for my own edification and read the entire Warren Commission report.
I personally believe he was killed by one guy, and no, I don't believe it was a conspiracy.
Bruce in Washington.
You're on the air with Charles.
Hi.
Yes, sir.
Thanks for coming back on the air on the air.
I just I've listened to you since you came on here in Seattle.
And anyway, just awesome.
Hey, my question has to do with I read a book called One Second After by William Fortune, I think his last name is, and it has to do with the EMP attack and the use of that by terrorists against the United States.
Oh, yes.
And then kind of a kind of a trailer.
I came into the show late.
Did you ask about Roswell, New Mexico?
No, I didn't.
Okay, gotcha.
But let's take your first one first.
One second after and the possibility of an EMP attack.
What do you think about that, Charles?
Well, there's a lot of people that are concerned about EMP.
In fact, I know even people in Congress that are concerned about the idea of an EMP attack, which would basically fry all electronics.
There's a lot of people that are concerned about it in the context of nuclear attack as part of the impact of a nuclear weapon going off.
I don't know of any other realistic options, real-world, near-term options for somebody to generate this electromagnetic pulse without a nuclear weapon.
That's the stuff of fiction.
Probably being worked on, though.
And as far as Roswell is concerned, I'm sure you've got absolutely nothing, right?
Yeah, I got absolutely nothing.
When I left the bunker where they keep the alien bodies, they made me swear that I would never talk about it.
I knew that.
All right.
Listen, my friend, you have been just fabulous.
What an incredible interview.
And I hope everybody runs out and buys your book, Kafa, because I'm going to.
So I appreciate your being here.
And again, a fabulous interview.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir.
Good night.
There you have it, Charles Pattis and his book, Kaplan.
Never had four hours with an XCIA guy before.
This was really something.
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