Charles Faddis, former CIA chief of the Terrorist Weapons of Mass Destruction Unit, warns that post-9/11 U.S. lab expansion—from 4 BSL-4 to 15—creates risks of stolen pathogens like plague or ricin in Syria, where instability may allow diversion. He calls biological attacks "poor man’s nukes," citing low barriers and global chaos potential, while dismissing EMP threats without nuclear sources. Faddis also links water table depletion in India, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia to future conflicts, though he denies CIA drug smuggling claims. His book CAFA explores bio-martyr tactics, and he stresses that real defenses lag until after an attack, with Pakistan’s nuclear vulnerabilities and Iran’s "virtual bomb" progress as critical flashpoints. [Automatically generated summary]
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 20s.
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 splinter 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.
But 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, before, everybody sends me their back cura 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 little teeny 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 a 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 tough.
Anyway, every now and then, a couple times a year or more, it does that to me, and it's scary.
All right, let me cover.
Oh, oh, by the way, just before I get to that, you know what?
When budding talk show hosts contact me by email or phone or however they're going to contact me, and they do by the score, many, many of them, they 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.
What do we do to get into talk radio?
What do we do?
And my comment is always the same.
Be yourself.
That's the only advice I ever give anybody trying to get into this business because if you're doing long-form talk radio and you're not yourself, you're going to get caught.
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?
I'm 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 Nori.
Well, it's not true.
I met George Nori, the guy on Coast to Coast, at a lunch 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 yourself.
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, is 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 Ghostmaster Roland.
But, I mean, there's something to be won here.
A radio, a SiriusXM radio, and a one-year subscription.
Go to the winner.
Send your ghost pictures to webmaster at artbell.com.
Webmaster at artbell.com.
Send your ghost stories to me.
Include a short, oh, please make it short.
Like a paragraph or two, sort of a summary of your story, to artbell at artbell.com.
And we may call you on Spooky Matter.
That'll 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.
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 once again, I just put the interesting stuff up.
If I think it's cool, it goes up there.
If you want to complain about it, it's 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 rfel.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 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. Fattis.
I hope I'm getting that right.
F-A-D-D-I-S.
Fattis.
President of Orion Strategic Services, LLCA, 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 first-hand experience with their methodology and tactics.
His last assignment prior to retirement in May of 2008 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, Kaffa, 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 all 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, counterterrorist 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 a much grittier street-level look at a world where people stay alive mostly by being quick and thinking two steps ahead.
And 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 mean, what you're talking about, I mean, there's also the possibility of engineering 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.
Well, both, let's talk about the U.S. 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, see, there's a little, I mean, so, and I think largely that's true, but 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 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 with the attacks in D.C., 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.
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.
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 is 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.
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 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 their 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 will kill everybody on the planet.
It will kill vast numbers of individuals, potentially millions and millions of people.
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 this 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 was a bad day for you.
So biological weapons, obviously, yes, you cut it loose, and now it's rampaging through a population.
Well, you know, every day in Dulles Airport, there are planes taken 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.
Well, one of the conclusions you can draw is before I ended up 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 took me to.
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.
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.
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.
Wow.
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 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 the 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.
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.
So he got rid of the weapons, but then told his own people, including his most senior officers, many of whom with 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 U.N. 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.
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.
The decision was made that we were going to get rid of Saddam.
I think they legitimately had convinced themselves that, and 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 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 in.
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 02.
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.
Gotcha.
Be the first guys on the ground to prep the ground for the military invasion.
The decision has already been made by the president.
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.
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.
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 Khafa, 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, 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 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 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 things, 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 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.
What you need is a very small group of 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.
And then you're spending more money and getting less.
And we could broaden that, frankly, I think, to the whole intelligence community and even Homeland Security.
I mean, we have 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.
We did give the CIA, for instance, to focus on them more money.
They needed more money because they had been shortchanged.
It's not the end-all, it'll 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.
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 grand.
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.
So 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 to be.
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.
And 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.
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 compatible.
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.
You know, they might just say, okay, good, why don't you just get out of town now and move on?
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 U.S. government, you would really have to put yourself on the other side with some group that is targeting Americans.
You'd have to join al-Qaeda or some similar group that's now I think what you could much more easily do, 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.
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 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.
What happens when you're working the way I was working, you're obviously undercover the entire time you're working because 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 or 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 I never will.
Well, I mean, when I said 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, CIA will begin to curse a blue streak and tell you that, you know, it's ridiculous and 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 cough 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.
I mean, that's 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 also 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 that picked up exactly 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 to, 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, 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 trade it over the internet.
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 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 this is ongoing and it happens.
You can see that a manual that one guy wrote one place in Lebanon within a year has been recovered everywhere on the planet, you know, hundreds of times.
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 of one kind 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 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.
You know, any place you've 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.
So you're going to be 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.
And 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.
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 our way there.
But you're going to be doing this for a long time.
I mean, you know, look at Africa.
We'll look at 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.
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, I think people have this vision that every time a drone fires that we must basically know exactly who's sitting in that car.
And I think that's not a valid assumption to make.
So there's that issue.
And then they look, here's just sort of 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.
If you're not prepared to, you know, so just accept that and either accept it or don't do it or whatever, but don't pretend like you're surprised when it happens.
Charles, 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 this 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, 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.
The Italians, mostly Italians who were defending the city, began to flee by ship and fled back to Italy.
And historically, this is 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, the term CAFA 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.
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 were sent across perhaps our southern border to various different places in the United States.
would there be any way that we could effectively stop them?
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 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.
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.
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.
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, certainly days after the attack has started, somebody is going to say, well, I got a plague victim here in Baltimore.
And by that time, every single person that was infected.
Now, there's a question here about 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, L.A., 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, you know, whatever the medication is, good luck with that.
So, you know, and 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, you know, then it's just going to burn itself out.
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 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 health care 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 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 people that don't have health insurance.
And 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, D.C. 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 Dietrich, 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, 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 I've 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 three labs.
Nobody actually knows how many there are now because no one agency counts them, but rough number, 1,500.
All of those labs, BSL3 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 that it came out of one of our own laboratories.
There are so many choices, but 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 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 basically these giant bumps, these black bumps that appear in your, what they're called, bubos that occur in your groin and in 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 mnemonic form, which basically means it infects your lungs.
Here's the other key thing.
The plague typically is referred to as being spread by fleas.
I mean, what happens is it lives, 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 flag.
And that's typically, if you ask people how the plague spreads, that's what they're going to tell you.
Well, 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, yada yada.
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 is in 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.
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.
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, 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, locked down, just kind of 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 we've been attacked and we need to move now.
And then somebody's 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?
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.
You know, in general, when I was chief of the Weapons of 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.
No, I mean, here's the other kicker.
You know, the Weapons and 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.
I would like to ask you if you have any advice for those listening now when it does happen.
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If you don't have one of these, you certainly ought to.
He's 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 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 talk about biological attack, that are going to be talking about stockpiling medications or antibiotics and stuff like that.
And 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 food, water, other basic essentials, and just be prepared to fend for yourself and sustain yourself for, I don't know, at a minimum days, ideally a week or two.
But 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.
It's a curfew.
People are off the streets.
You're not going out 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 don't know anymore how they're going to survive if they can't run down to the supermarket every day.
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.
And 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, and do whatever.
Well, there's definitely not going to be enough time.
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 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 it's like, that's great, man, but we just ran out of the antibiotic, and now we've 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.
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 potentially could happen really, really, really fast in some areas.
I mean, 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.
You know, people are in the same family and somebody's infected and they're sealing themselves off from that individual and no longer making any efforts to treat them because they know they can't treat them and they're 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.
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 a terrorist is acquiring nuclear weapons.
It just means that 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 going everywhere.
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.
I mean, you don't need big engineering projects and the capacity to machine uranium to certain tolerances and all this other stuff.
I mean, really simple laboratory, if you know what you're doing, you can do all this stuff.
So there has been a lot of discussion, a lot of reporting for a long time that the Syrians were working with biological agents.
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.
And so at least in regard to that, they have openly and freely admitted that they have ricin in their possession.
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 is 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 been moved away.
You know, look, in any trade, I think when you're in the trade and then 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.
But so, you know, one of the things about Homeland 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 pencils stacked up in front of them and the legal pads would be the analysts.
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.
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.
And I 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 out of the best interest, 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 Americans 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.
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.
But also, let's keep in mind that 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 rein this in any time it wants.
I think that going back to we were talking earlier about the size of the Intelligence community, national security apparatus, and so forth.
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.
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 loath 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, I think I can answer your question without naming specific programs.
I don't think that this is the way.
Having spent a lot of time doing counterterrorism 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.
Well, look, 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.
And 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 off 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.
From the high desert, the great American Southwest.
I'm Mark Battis.
That's a way to get us.
Charles Battis is my guest.
He's retired.
CIA.
And really been working at last design required to retirement.
May of await at CIA's terrorist weapons and mass destruction units.
So you know what he speaks.
So, Charles, 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.
Now, 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?
You know, 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 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 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.
You know, 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.
I agree 100%.
But we're not just compromising.
We're not just discussing that.
We are now discussing every day, it seems, the 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 was planning or al-Shabaab is getting ready to do.
And every time we compromise one of those things, an adversary changes their methodology.
Every time you find out your telephone is 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.
Well, I mean, yeah, and we're talking, and 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, 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 bales of intelligence on name and issue, and now we've gone blind.
And we will pay for that.
You know, we will find that 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.
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 Spy Games with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford.
Right, right.
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, here, you know, 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 to 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, what he has to narrate it.
But it's like, really, because here would be my prescription.
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 a...
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, in most cases, that means something has gone catastrophically wrong.
You know, I was involved in a significant number of operations in areas like Iraq or other areas where counterterrorist operations, where obviously we, U.S. 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.
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 picture.
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.
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 mean, 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.
And, you know, they may be fascinating parts of the world, but they're also not the easiest parts of the world to live and operate in.
So, you know, you got it.
And it's not like, I mean, even 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 and tell you you're doing a good job and slap you on the back, you're doomed.
And also, you're usually working 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.
Well, 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'd never had anything to do with the military.
I mean, it tends to be a very eclectic group of individuals.
You know, you've got guys from all walks of life.
I had a guy that actually 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 a, 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 of, you know, you have to be able to deal with massive shades of gray, lots of ambiguity.
You have to be able to change plans, you know, make a plan, scrap it, you know, 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.
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 is 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 is a colonel in the KGB who can smuggle 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.
I could probably add a few more rillies 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.
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.
Now, this is a country that's filled with terrorist activity, filled with drug cartels.
It's a 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 at 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, speak to no one, never come outside.
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, who are these guys?
Not necessarily that they would say, hey, I bet that's bin Laden, but this doesn't smell right.
unidentified
These guys 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.
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.
You know, 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 plans 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're going to be back in the dark ages real fast.
Well, as I mentioned, it seems to me the inclination, once they're beginning to exchange a city gone here, a city gone there, then you're faced very quickly with an we're all in and we've got to 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 is 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 countries, the chance of having some sort of restraint is now you're going to get spasmatic responses.
Plus, as you said, everybody that's got a nuclear weapon in 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 yeah, 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.
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.
This brings us to sort of the question of Iran and the lessons that they drew from our invading Iraq.
One of the big, 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 because you 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 be able to push us around because we can bite back.
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?
You know, well, I don't know what the alternative would be.
I mean, 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 would 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 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.
But, 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 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?
This is all nonsense, and none of it means anything other than a tactical maneuver.
It does not change their objective.
Their objective is 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 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.
You know, it could be either, but I mean, here's the 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 act exactly the same way.
A lot of this verbiage about sort of like, you know, you Americans better do something or we're going to do it ourselves is, in my opinion, a tactic on the part of the Israelis to exert pressure on us.
And, you know, for good reason, because 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.
We have munitions that are specifically designed for hitting underground bunkers and things like that.
Now, ultimately, whether they prove successful, nobody knows till 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 in 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.
I mean, that's the thing that 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.
I mean, 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, they're still a very large wildcard factor.
They could just do something completely irrational.
That said, I will 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 concessions, 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.
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.
I mean, if the Chinese did not 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 it anytime they want.
So, you know, we were talking before about al-Qaeda and how it's morphing and how it feeds off of various factors.
That's right.
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, 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 till 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, even all of that only works for a certain period of time.
I mean, this is just, there's a clock ticking.
And you're going to have, you know, 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.
Population growth.
And what results when all of a sudden you've got people and you can't feed them and entire cities can't get water?
Madness, chaos, breakdown, civil order, violence.
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.
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 counterterrorism, it was all working Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups or state-sponsored Palestinian groups and guys like that.
And by and large, none of those groups were motivated by religion.
So we can face terrorist threats from groups that don't have anything to do with Islam or for that matter, religion, sort of end-of-days groups.
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.
Yeah, we're tired of waiting for the world to end, so we'll just make it happen.
Yeah, we could see any, we could see, we could see people get a hold of biological weapons, this kind of stuff.
And absolutely, they could be saying, hey, we're cleansing the planet.
We're saving Mother Earth.
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.
Now, 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 their justification for committing the most heinous acts on the face of the planet.
You know, I think that's probably a fair characterization if you look over where we have intervened, where we haven't intervened.
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 interests 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 killed and wounded to secure oil.
Look, I think this whole idea of these ruinous nation-building exercises are just horribly ill-advised.
And 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 has consisted, you know, in the case of Iraq or Afghanistan, 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?
And 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'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 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.
Yeah, 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.
Steve in Virginia, you're on the air with Charles Fettis.
unidentified
Hi.
Nice to talk to you.
New listener.
I've been listening for a few weeks since you come on the air and really enjoy your program.
Very interesting.
It makes the long nights driving all night go by a lot faster.
Charles, very interesting show.
I'm former Army as Airborne Infantry as a long-range reconnaissance patrol guy and got to do a little bit of stuff, nothing like probably what you did.
So 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 Omshin Rikyo 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 the 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.
Well, yeah, I mean, mildly, 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-9-11, 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 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.
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?
Well, so if you're talking about a fully functional nuclear device and 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 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 will 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 they 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 law-floated.
And by the way, there won't be any sophisticated army mechanism.
As per a possible biological attack, two parts of 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 go through a biological attack without being completely decimated?
And no, we do not necessarily just automatically have the 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 that, there are a 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.
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.
We 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 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.
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, 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 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.
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.
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, is not really a practical thing.
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 powers go out, 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.
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 community.
In the Syrias, or in the Syria controversy right now that we're kind of watching, is there any likely that Russia is going to take stance with Syria and turn against us if there was ever to a war breakout or a conflict escalated into much higher tensions?
Well, I think on some level, 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 pragmatists and realists, 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.
Bruce in Washington, you're on the air with Charles.
Hi.
unidentified
Yes, sir.
Thanks for coming back on the air, Art.
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 EMP attack and the use of that by terrorists against the United States.
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.