James "Mad Dog" Lawler details his 25-year CIA career, recounting how he recruited targets by exploiting their vulnerabilities rather than offering money. He warns that the JCPOA's sunset clause risks triggering a regional arms race and argues non-nuclear U.S. advantages might deter Russia better than nuclear threats alone. Lawler highlights the dangers of private contractors like Palantir outnumbering federal employees, creating massive insider security risks. While debunking some JFK conspiracy theories, he confirms MKUltra's existence and Operation Northwoods' declassification. Ultimately, he suggests that future espionage will rely on psychological manipulation and that unexplained UFO phenomena may involve extraterrestrial origins or parallel universes. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Why They Call Me Mad Dog00:02:23
Thank you very much for traveling here and doing the show, man.
I very much appreciate it.
My pleasure, Danny.
You have a fascinating story.
But first, first thing I wanted to ask you why do they call you Mad Dog?
Well, we could be here all day talking about that, but I'll give you a quick synopsis.
In 1989, when I was stationed in Paris, I'm a long distance runner and I would go running through the big park there, the Bois de Boulogne.
And the Bois de Boulogne is many, many acres.
It's probably at least as large as Central Park in New York.
And I passed a dog one morning, a German shepherd, got about maybe 10 yards past him.
No barking, nothing.
Suddenly, I felt the most intense pain in my right leg.
And it turns out that German shepherds, on a pound per square inch basis, have probably the most vicious bite of all dogs.
And my leg was in his jaws, and I jerked my leg out.
It was bleeding profusely.
I started to run, but you're not going to outrun a dog.
So I picked up a heavy.
Tree branch, and I attacked the dog and ran him off.
And then I hobbled home and I got to the embassy that day, to the American embassy where I was working.
And the people in the medical clinic said, Well, we're going to give you tetanus shots, but considering how erratic that dog was, no barking, no nothing before he just unprovoked attacked you, there's a good chance he's got rabies.
And so you need to go to the Pasteur Institute where they developed the rabies vaccine and get the rabies shots.
Now, at the time, I thought this was going to be.
21 shots in the belly, which people tell you about.
Yeah, horrible, horrible thing.
I got there, nicest people in the world.
The French doctor said, Oh, Mr. Lawler, no, we've developed new vaccines.
You're going to get one shot in each shoulder today.
Next week, you'll get another shot.
And the week after that, a shot in the other shoulder.
And if we do that within 30 days of your having been bitten, it'll basically immunize you from the rabies virus.
And he said, if you don't get it, however, within 30 days, the survival rate is there's only been one person in history who's ever survived rabies.
And he says, you'll go progressively mad and it'll be a horrible death.
So I thought, no choice there.
I'm taking the rabies vaccine.
The List of People to Bite00:05:37
But I got back to my office in the embassy and I'd been having some trouble with some folks back at headquarters.
So I made a list of all the people I was going to bite if, in fact, I got the rabies.
So my nickname was born in 1989.
I thought it was justifiable.
I mean, you know, I was going to go out with a bang.
What an amazing story.
And there's no, I couldn't even think of a come up with a better answer than that to being called Mad Dog.
That's perfect.
That's funny.
Yeah.
So you started in the CIA in what year?
In 1980, in February of 1980.
In 1980.
And your career, and how many years were you in the CIA?
25.
25 years.
Right.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but the majority of your career was dedicated to dismantling the spread of the WMD programs.
About two thirds of it was, yes.
So the latter two thirds was, yes.
And what was the rest of it doing?
Traditional espionage.
Okay.
Counterterrorism, counterintelligence, going after high value targets that we needed to recruit to basically steal secrets.
What is, from your perspective personally, from your personal experience and from a broad general perspective of the CIA, what kind of person or what kind of people do the CIA want to recruit?
As spies, and why do you think they recruited you?
Well, it's again a bit of a story.
I was in my last year of law school at the University of Texas, and the CIA, this is in 1976, the CIA came to campus hiring for attorneys for the Office of General Counsel.
Because, like any large bureaucracy, we have to have a certain number of attorneys to keep us out of trouble or to get us out of trouble if we're in trouble.
And so I had an interview with a former CIA operations officer named Bill Wood, and Mr. Wood and I spoke for three or four minutes.
You know, in this interview.
And then he looked at me and he says, Jim, have you ever considered the clandestine service?
And I looked at him and I said, No, and I don't even know what you're talking about.
So this was in 1976.
There weren't movies.
You didn't have the television series like 24 or Alias or anything like that.
And there, yeah, there had been some books written, but nothing really about what CIA does.
I knew vaguely what it does.
And he looked at me and he says, Well, again, I can't tell you much about it, but I think you'd be good at this.
So I thought, Whoa.
Unfortunately, at the time, my Wife's mother was very, very ill.
And the chances that we were really going to move to Washington from Houston, Texas, where we'd been living, and then overseas several thousand more miles, it wasn't going to happen.
So I returned the application with some regret the next day.
And instead of becoming a CIA officer or pursuing that career route, I instead went into a family owned business.
And I don't know how many of your listeners have ever been in family businesses.
Or still in family businesses.
But there's usually a big reason why you're no longer in a family business, and it's that F word, family.
And I love my dad, my two brothers, but I was so frustrated and making a lot of money.
In fact, I was making more money than I'd ever make again in my life.
But it was absolutely unfulfilling psychologically.
I didn't think that I was earning my money.
I was being paid a lot, and I thought it was only because I'm the owner's son.
And I don't want that.
I want to be self validating, I want to accomplish something on my own.
And so I would come home at night and was constantly complaining to my wife.
And finally, after gosh knows how many months of that, she looked at me and she said, Jim, either do something about it or shut your belly aching.
So I'd kept Mr. Wood's business card.
And that night after dinner, I went in my office.
I typed out a letter.
And this was before the days of the internet.
Al Gore had not invented it yet.
And so, uh, I typed out a letter, mailed it the next day, and it wasn't three days later that I got a phone call from a young woman who said, You mailed Mr. Wood a letter a few days ago, and he would sure like to talk to you if you'd be available next Thursday at the Holiday Inn at 3 o'clock on the Gulf Freeway.
And she never used the letter CIA, nothing like that.
It was just Mr. Wood sent you a letter.
And I said, Fine.
So I went to this interview a couple hours, and he said, I'd like to fly you to Washington.
So, a couple of weeks later, I went to Washington for three days for testing.
Then I was invited to come back about three or four months later.
They'd been doing my security check, my background check, sat through what they call the full lifestyle polygraph for counterintelligence and lifestyle reasons.
They want to make sure they're not hiring a penetration of the CIA or a criminal or a complete nutcase.
I don't know how I got through the psych exam, but I did.
A few weeks after that, they called me up and said, We'd like to offer you a position as a CIA operations officer.
Now, again, the bizarre thing, Danny, is I had no idea what they wanted me to do.
It was very, but I was so desperate to get out of Texas, to get away from the family business and to make my own mark.
You know, even though the job offer was probably one third of what I was making financially, and we knew nobody in Washington.
Escaping the Family Business00:12:43
My wife was actually pregnant with our first child, and I thought, we've got to do this.
And she said, sure, let's do it because I know you're unhappy doing the other.
So we packed up the car and the baby and everything, you know.
Actually, she was pregnant then.
We didn't have the baby until a few months later, but we packed up the car, moved to Washington, and I did not have a clue as to what I was going to be doing.
But after I started in February of 1980, it became apparent what the CIA wanted me to do.
And what they want me to do, in blunt terms, is to manipulate people, to exploit them, to subvert them, to suborn them, to convince them, to commit espionage, to betray a trust.
And those are all pejorative terms, but that was essentially what I was having to do.
I was going after people and would gauge their vulnerabilities and their stresses, and then I would recruit these people to become spies for the United States.
So when we hire operations officers, we look for the ability to communicate, we look for sincerity, we look for resilience, we look for creativity, we look for people who can think on their feet.
I guess I had a fair share of some of those qualities.
And so I began my career, again, manipulating, exploiting, subverting people.
And I found out that not only was I pretty good at it, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.
What were the traits that the people who recruited you saw in you that you didn't necessarily know about yourself?
I think my ability to communicate on a both on a mental and a physical level and almost a A metaphysical level.
And they see, I know that sounds strange, spooky, and I could get into that later on the metaphysics.
But the ability to hold on to somebody, to focus in on them, to be so intent that the other person is totally relaxed.
I become their therapist.
I said before the show, one of my assets once said that talking to me was like her brain was in a warm waterbed.
And I just want to totally relax them.
Get them to do what I want them to do.
And so I have a talent for number one, spotting stress.
You don't recruit happy people, you recruit unhappy, stressed people, and you are able to offer them a solution to some of their problems.
And so I was able to do that.
And you're right, it was an amazing thing because Mr. Wood was there at the University of Texas Law School to hire attorneys, not to hire ops officers.
But he had been an ops officer, and that old saying about it takes one to know one.
I think he must have seen in me the fact that Jim would actually be better as an operations officer.
We have enough attorneys.
In fact, I was talking to a young man the other day and I said, You know, don't worry if you don't have a foreign language.
We can teach you the foreign language.
What we can't teach you is interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate.
By that time, you're usually born with that.
And we can develop it and we can take you from a certain level and tell you some of the ways to appeal to people more.
But Frankly, you're either born with that or you're not.
What is the difference between recruitment within the United States versus internationally?
Because your recruitment, the job you were doing was mostly or all international.
100%.
100% international.
Well, for one thing, if you mess up in the United States, you're not going to jail.
But if I messed up overseas, you know, there's a chance that the security police would be called and I could be expelled.
Typically, I had diplomatic cover.
I mean, I was under State Department cover, so I had diplomatic protection.
And, you know, if I pitched somebody, basically made a recruitment pitch, and they rejected it or reported it, I could be arrested.
And expelled from that country.
And that happens sometimes.
Now, the people you were recruiting, the people that you were targeting and recruiting, were those people similar to yourself?
Some were.
Some were fellow intelligence officers.
In fact, that makes it easier sometimes because you're kind of dancing around the subject.
And yet, if you're a fellow intelligence officer, you know precisely what I'm doing.
But if you're still there, if you want to be recruited, then it makes it somewhat easier.
The other.
Folks, though, were not necessarily intelligence officers.
They were diplomats.
They were scientists.
They were, you know, folks that had access to critical information that we needed for our national security.
So, all job types, all genders, I've recruited males and females.
It didn't matter.
What was your first assignment?
I won't go into it.
Let's just put it it's an alpine country.
Alpine country.
Right.
Okay.
And what you can't get into the details of the specific location.
I would not like to say that.
I mean, can you tell what you were doing?
Well, yeah, I was being an ops officer pursuing multiple targets.
You know, anything that our headquarters singled out as a high priority for us, we would get what we call a cable, a classified message from Washington, which outlined exactly we need people who have access to the following type of information.
And they might send it to some selected offices or they might send it worldwide and then just have all the operations officers start pursuing these targets.
So I had one particular cable I received from Washington that said that, you know, in a short time, a year or two from now, we are going to be engaged in some highly, highly difficult negotiations with a country and we have no access.
To what their negotiating positions are, or what you know, how they're going to approach this set of negotiations.
And so, therefore, if you know anybody in your circle of contacts that has this type of access, you need to go after them.
And it turned out that I had met a gentleman in a ski school a few weeks earlier, and he fit the bill exactly what I needed.
So, I started developing him.
That's where you increase the contact.
And where you're trying to find out what are the target's vulnerabilities?
You know, what is it that I can do to make, to try a recruitment pitch and get him to spy on his own country?
And so I started intensifying the relationship.
And after, I don't know, maybe a couple of months, you know, I had it in my head that I could recruit this guy.
Now, I was incredibly naive, incredibly naive, thinking I could recruit this gentleman simply on the force of my personality and hopefully our friendship.
Well, that's, I mean, I had identified really no vulnerabilities at all, except he really liked me.
But you're not going to get somebody to commit espionage just because they like you.
But, anyways, Washington was desperate.
And so I put together some proposal that I was going to recruit this man.
And they bit off on it.
Yeah.
And, you know, in retrospect, I'm amazed that they agreed to it.
So it showed you how desperate they were.
Well, I took the guy out and I pitched him.
And the first time you do a recruitment pitch, it's like the first time you do anything.
The chances are it's rather awkward.
You know, it's kind of nerve wracking because it's going to become very apparent as to who you really are that you're really a CIA spy, an officer, and that you are trying to convince the other person to commit treason, to commit a crime.
In fact, usually it can be a deadly crime.
It can be in some countries they hang people for doing things like that.
In fact, a lot of countries they do.
So, But I launched into it, and my target looked at me and he says, Jim, he says, you and I are friends, and I'd like to help you, but what you're proposing, that's morally wrong.
Now, I've pitched Danny maybe 50 or 60 people in my career.
He's the only person, only person who ever posed a moral objection.
People usually pose an objection of fear.
Well, they hang people in my country for doing things like that.
Yeah, they do.
I had one guy I pitched, and he said, Well, no, not right now, but you know, my son's three years old.
In 15 years, he'll be university age, and I might need you then.
Well, I made a note of that.
And 15 years later, the agency came to me and said, Your friend said this way back when.
Do you think he meant it?
I said, Yes.
And so we'd taken that rain check.
He actually said, Can I take a rain check on this?
I mean, literally, the offer that I was making him.
And I said, yes.
So we cashed that rain check in 15 years later.
To go back to my first pitch that was a failure, the guy turns me down.
He says, no, I'm sorry, morally wrong.
So I go away from this dinner.
My first recruitment pitch has just gone down the tubes.
But we have a saying in the CIA that it's okay to get turned down, but not to get turned in.
So if he complained to his boss, In this other foreign embassy.
And by the way, his boss was the ambassador because he was the number two in the embassy.
Wow.
Yeah.
Very senior officer.
And I could just imagine if he tells his boss, his boss will come storming into our embassy and into our ambassador's office and pound on the table and say, This is an outrage that young Mr. James Lawler, third secretary, has just propositioned my deputy to become a traitor, to commit treason.
This is outrageous.
And then I was thinking, and what's Washington going to say?
Yeah, they approved it, but it must be Lawler that screwed it up somehow.
I'm going to be left hanging here.
So that was what I was thinking about for two or three days.
And finally, I thought, let me call him and just test his feelings towards me, take his temperature.
So I called.
I was relieved that he didn't hang up in my ear.
And all I said was, I really enjoyed our dinner last week.
I was thinking maybe if you were.
Free this Friday, we could have another dinner.
And to my great relief, he said, Jim, you know, I was just thinking that too.
That would be very nice.
So I go to the second dinner with him, with my only goal being to smooth the waters.
If there's any feathers that have been ruffled, to smooth it.
You know, if he brought it up, I'd say, well, you know, let's not even think about that.
You know, we're still friends.
Let's not get into this.
That was what I was prepared to do.
Instead, I get to the restaurant.
The waiter goes away after leaving the menus.
First thing out of my friend's mouth is Jim, that offer you made me last week, is that still good?
And I said, Well, of course it is.
I made it because we're friends.
He said, Well, what you don't know was that a few days after our dinner, my wife announced that she wants a divorce.
And I can't afford to pay her the alimony to which she's entitled and put my two high school age boys into private schools.
I can't afford to do all that unless I accept your offer.
And he said, I know it's morally wrong.
And I started to say something about that, and then I said, No.
You know, one of the things you learn in law school is if the judge rules in your favor, shut up, get out of court.
Becoming a Very Good Spy00:09:05
And so I just took it, and he proceeded to become a very, very good spy.
In fact, he started bringing me out stacks of classified material, sometimes inches of it.
And the first time he did that is he was handing it to me.
Now, this is highly classified material from his embassy to me.
And he said, What I haven't told you.
Is that I hate my boss.
Our ambassador is a real son of a bitch.
He goes around taking credit for everything I do and everything everybody else in the embassy does.
So when I hand you this material, it's like I'm kicking that son of a bitch in the face.
And I took the material and I said, We're buddies, go get some more and let's kick him again.
So revenge, because you ask yourself, normal people, unless they're a complete sociopath or completely narcissistic, aren't going to do this unless.
They feel like they've been betrayed first.
If they feel like their government, or in this case the boss, has betrayed them, then they're just evening score.
The Jesuits even call it covert compensation.
You're compensating.
And so I'm not the traitor.
They are.
They betrayed me first.
That's how they deal with it psychologically.
And he was an amazing asset.
We had to put him through a polygraph test.
That's some of you may.
Have heard it called a lie detector test.
It's more of a stress detector test.
It really, there's little validity that it actually proves that you're lying or telling the truth.
But it does measure if you are reacting to some questions.
And so we would go in a counterintelligence, a strict counterintelligence polygraph test, we try and make it pretty black and white to make the questions yes or no.
Absolutely yes or absolutely no.
For instance, have you told anyone about your secret relationship with CIA?
That's an easy yes or no.
Did anybody direct you to volunteer to us, meaning that second meeting?
That's an easy yes or no.
And thirdly, are you working with any intelligence service other than the CIA?
Very easy to answer.
And the polygrapher, the operator, is not supposed to ask questions that are not already rehearsed with the ops officer, me.
They're not to go off on fishing expeditions or anything like that.
As luck would have it, I had a very naive young operator who'd never even been overseas before.
Lord knows how many foreigners he'd even met.
First question out of his mouth, he goes, Well, I'm just curious, but why are you doing this?
And I thought, Oh my gosh, let's not get into the morality of this or anything like that, because I could just see my new asset, my newly recruited asset, becoming suddenly having an epiphany and storming out of the room.
No, he laughed and he said, Because I think this is going to be a lot of fun.
He was a spy wannabe, and boy, did he help us out.
It was later estimated when he went back to his home country and he would provide not only their negotiating positions, but all their fallback positions, everything.
For instance, the last time you bought a car, wouldn't you like to know the bottom dollar that the dealer would take?
Or if you bought a house?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And otherwise they would walk away and laugh at you.
Right.
Yeah.
You'd love to know that figure.
Well, that's what we got.
And it was estimated that it saved the United States, and this was very national security related, billions of dollars.
So this wasn't just.
Getting it for the grins.
It saved the country billions of dollars because of that.
So I learned that, you know, that usually motivations to commit espionage are multiple.
There's never, hardly ever, a single motivation.
And it's never about money per se.
It's always money.
In this case, he was, he needed money for his children to put them in private schools.
He did it also because he was now in a, literally a psychological hurricane, you know.
If you go through a divorce, you are just psychologically adrift.
And if somebody like me is in your orbit and you've got access to classified information and I want it, I'll become your best friend.
And so I became his best friend.
Did you ever get into a situation where you had somebody question your friendship to them after you approached them with the CIA side of things?
No, but that is a, that is a, Something you think about.
In fact, I'll tell you this the ops officers who are rather poor ops officers or mediocre ops officers are afraid of hurting people's feelings, of saying exactly what you just said.
Well, Jim, so now I see you really wanted to just get me to do this and that this friendship is meaningless.
No.
I mean, and you have to take that chance.
I tell my students, I teach CIA officers, FBI special agents about.
Recruiting.
I said, if you've never had a recruitment pitch turned down, you haven't pitched enough people, meaning you're not taking the chance, pushing the limit a little bit, controlling the situation.
But a poor ops officer would, A, fear rejection, and B, fear insulting the person or hurting their feelings.
Well, that's part of the thing.
You just got to take that on board.
But I never had anybody.
I had some people gently turn me down.
They weren't ready.
Maybe I misgaged it, but nothing like that.
So, is what you're saying the people that you would try to recruit or pitch, for example, somebody you had been building and maintaining a friendship with for years?
Not necessarily years, sometimes only weeks or months, but in one case it was 11 years.
Right.
Wow.
Because for the first 11 years, I didn't see any apparent vulnerabilities or stresses.
He and I became extremely close.
So the friendship was real.
Oh, well, absolutely.
The friendship was real.
Yeah.
I won't say that the friendship was real in all of my recruitments, but in this one, it was absolutely real.
In fact, we still refer to each other as brother.
And he moved away from his first posting to a second foreign posting.
And in the meantime, while he was abroad, while he was serving abroad for his country, the government changed.
And not only did the government change, but the ethnic group which controlled the government and dominated the majority, it was a minority dominating a majority, it flip flopped.
And so suddenly he was upset that he could no longer be promoted.
In spite of whatever he did, he said, There's a glass ceiling.
I could work my rear end off forever, and I'm not going to be promoted.
And he wrote to me and he said, Jim, how can I give loyalty to a government that treats its citizens like that?
Well, that's like a big sign saying, Recruit me.
This was 11 years later.
Oh, he'd also gone through a divorce.
In fact, headquarters nicknamed me Dr. Divorce there for a while because divorce is such a tumultuous period psychologically and financially.
Our son went through a divorce.
I mean, he was devastated.
And you're very vulnerable during that time.
Well, his wife had a baby.
She moved back to her home country.
And so when it was coming up on their child's third birthday, I knew he was going to be back in her home country.
And I said, You know, I think I have an idea of something that might appeal to you work wise.
Why don't I meet you there?
I have to have a trip to Europe, anyways.
I'll meet you in this country.
He said, Fine.
So, this is 11 years after I've met him.
We've got an extremely close relationship.
So, I, what we call breaking cover, I told him who I really worked for, told him how much I appreciated the fact that he'd protected me, even if he'd suspected that.
That took 30 seconds.
And he said to me, he said, now I have something to believe in.
And so he joined my team.
He didn't feel like he was betraying anything, he felt like his government had betrayed him.
And so he was on my team now.
Worked for us for a number of years, and today he's a successful businessman in his country.
And a few years ago, he said, Jim, I'm half tempted to put a picture of you up in our business with the caption that says, Our founder.
Oh my gosh.
But he's really, no, he's a great guy.
I love the guy like a brother.
Working with MI6 and Mossad00:08:25
I mean, I'm not making that up.
He's like a brother.
What are the biggest misconceptions of the CIA?
That we go around killing people willy nilly?
No.
Or that we're constantly armed.
I mean, in war zones and high threat situations, yes, we're armed.
What else?
Actually, you know, frankly, I tell a lot of my CIA and FBI students, I say, you know, you probably do yourself a disservice if you go around puncturing the myth of the CIA.
Because if people think you're everywhere and you know everything, that can actually be in your favor.
And in fact, we do a lot of wonderful things, amazing things, but a lot of it could be myth.
To me, I just had a guy on here who is a former FBI interrogator, and I asked him what are the biggest differences between the FBI and the CIA?
Because to me, it seems like the CIA just has this element of mystery around it that the FBI doesn't.
Mystique, yes.
Very mystique.
And I was explaining to another friend of mine to me, it seems like FBI agents are dogs, CIA agents are like cats.
Yeah, I think I've heard that analogy before.
Yeah.
And we each serve our own purpose.
I mean, they are.
Primarily in law enforcement.
They try to get into intelligence.
Sometimes when they get into intelligence, they need to look at it more from the way we look at it.
You know, we're not law enforcement.
I don't carry a badge.
I don't have the power of arrest.
In fact, if I were to participate in a joint CIA FBI operation, they would have to temporarily give me some kind of authority that I don't have otherwise.
But we're going after different goals and things like that.
I've trained a lot of FBI special agents on human recruitment techniques and intelligence operations.
And I think they've appreciated it.
It's just a different way of looking at things, that it's not to make a court case.
You're trying to recruit somebody to give you intelligence.
And it's a different goal, absolutely different goal.
It's more long term for us.
They're trying to get a conviction a lot of times.
And that's their law enforcement.
They're the best law enforcement organization in the world.
And sometimes they're seniors, that's really what they're focused on is doing that.
And they have a tremendous public relations appeal.
Whereas we try and minimize that.
Don't do public relations.
Right.
They do.
They do.
To their credit, they do.
To you, what are the biggest differences and who is the number one?
Like, how would you rank the world's top spy agencies from the CIA to the Mossad, MI6, the Chinese clandestine service, all of them?
Add in the Russians.
And obviously the Russians.
Well, those would be probably the top five.
Certainly, but now ranking them.
But there's a lot of them.
Those are the top five.
So if you could rank them or compare them, and also secondary to that, how many of these different spy agencies have you been in contact with personally?
Probably all of them.
Yeah, I mean, I have been in touch with all of them in one way or another.
Never underestimate your adversaries.
Now, of course, the British, MI6, they're our allies.
They're extremely good.
They're.
They're smaller than us, and so they have to have more bang for the buck, just like Mossad.
Mossad is much smaller.
In Mossad's case, it's an existential issue for the survival of the state of Israel.
And so they are incredibly focused.
My hat is off to them on some of the operations they've pulled off.
On a person per person basis, they're one of the best in the world.
I'd rank them in the top one or two.
British as well, MI6.
I worked with MI6 a fair amount, doing some things.
They are incredibly dedicated.
The Russians have traditionally been good.
Don't ever underestimate the Russians, and they're willing to throw a lot of people, a lot of resources at issues.
The Chinese, just by overwhelming numbers.
I pity my poor FBI colleagues having to deal with Chinese espionage in the United States because it's almost like human wave attacks during the Korean War, where you'd have hundreds of thousands of Chinese coming at you.
This is, they are.
Willing to spend a lot of money, a lot of manpower, a lot of time on issues.
And, you know, the Russians are very sophisticated.
Let's put it this way During our Manhattan Project, where we were developing our atomic weapon, the Russians penetrated.
At that time, it was the predecessor organization of the KGB.
It was called the NKVD, which today is either the SVR or the FSB.
These are the two the domestic and the foreign and the domestic intelligence services.
And then there's the GRU, which is the military intelligence.
But the NKVD recruited people within every part of the Manhattan Project.
They basically stole all the plans for the nuclear weapon.
And when they detonated their own nuclear weapon in 1949, they absolutely copied ours, even though they had their own domestic design.
In fact, the scientists, the Russian scientists, were really hurt that they weren't going to detonate a Russian designed weapon.
But the intelligence chief at the time, a man named Beria, he said, Look, if this doesn't work, it's going to be my neck and your neck.
So we know the American weapon works.
We're going to.
Do that.
So the first atomic bomb the Russians detonated in 1949 was an American design that they had stolen from the Manhattan Project.
And my hat is off to them in that they had every level of the Manhattan Project penetrated, every level.
They had redundancy.
It was incredible what they did.
So you have to respect your enemy.
When it comes to cybersecurity and cyber intelligence from like spying on phones and different kinds of software that are being used, from what I understand, Mossad is.
Is number one when it comes to.
Well, I've read the same thing.
I mean, some of these spy tools are coming out of not so much Mossad itself, but out of very brilliant Israeli designers, you know, cyber designers.
They have some of the best software and hacking tools in the world.
I mean, world class.
Some of the best.
In fact, there was some controversy about who they're selling them to, you know, not just allies, but to some countries that probably shouldn't have these type things.
But you're right.
I would say.
That they have some of the best designers, and we have a good one, good ones too.
But they have some of the best.
And when you travel to different countries and go to these different embassies, um, and other countries, you have to the agency or the government has to declare you.
No, okay, depends on the government or you know, if it's a friendly government or if it's a friendly government, they would typically declare you.
Declare meaning that even though my title is first or second or third secretary, and it looks like I work for the state department.
But I actually worked for the CIA.
So there were certain governments where, not all, but certain governments that were allies, where we'd say, well, Mr. Lawler's really a CIA officer.
And I may have liaison responsibilities, meaning I work with their service, with their intelligence service, and I may not.
But yeah, but then we would have a certain number of people, especially in some countries that are totally undeclared.
They're working there under deep cover, or they may be working under commercial cover.
Out of all the agencies, which agency do you think has the most widespread tentacles covert in the United States or other countries?
Infiltrating Chinese Gangs00:08:24
Probably the Chinese, but the Russians would be a close second.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
The Chinese simply by numbers, and their idea of intelligence collection doesn't exactly track with ours.
They may be stealing, you know.
Intellectual property.
It's not classified.
But if you're Monsanto and you've developed a certain very disease resistant plant and you've put millions and millions of dollars into developing, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, developing a particular seed variety, and then some Chinese spy steals it to take it back to China, simply, okay, it's not a military secret, but it's a food.
It's food and it's worth a lot of money.
So they have penetrated industry, government, a lot.
And I think they have.
You know, incredible resources to do that.
Russians do too.
I would think the Russians probably are more interested, though, in traditional military subjects and aerospace and defense things to steal.
Yeah, I'm sure you're familiar with the story about Huawei installing their equipment on cell towers.
What did you make of that story?
Well, and let's, for people listening who aren't familiar with it, could you sort of explain what the overview of that is?
Well, they're a dominant designer of routers and things like that, but you can put a back door in this thing that will allow.
The host or the country that you came from, China, to get access into people's computers or people, things like that.
I mean, being at the really at the base of the thing at the router, you can more easily penetrate a cyber target.
And they're an extremely successful company.
And I think now there's a ban against, in the US at least, of anything Huawei related that's near military installations.
And the Defense Department, fortunately, no longer buys anything from.
From them.
Right.
Yeah.
It was wild to learn that they have installed their equipment on cell towers that were in the proximity of ICBM sites.
Right.
Coincidental?
I don't think so.
Wow.
Yeah.
Could you imagine it being the other way around?
Could you imagine China using our equipment?
No.
No, I can't.
It seems like, I mean, and pardon my general ignorance to international politics, but it seems like China.
If you look at the world as the biggest countries competing, it seems like China's winning.
It's gaining ground.
Whether it's winning, I don't know.
You know, it's interesting.
We've had Nobel Prize winning scientists.
A number of them have been ethnic Chinese.
None of them have ever been somebody from China.
I mean, as a Chinese citizen.
Interesting.
Their education system does not encourage free thinking and creativity.
That's why we have so many Chinese students who come to the United States and stay.
Because our system actually nurtures that and encourages that.
It's a totally different perspective.
And yes, they're, I'm not saying they don't develop some indigenous, very ingenious things.
They do.
But I think most scientists appreciate the openness and the freedom here to pursue certain scientific avenues, you know, rather than having the government tell them to do this or take an American design and copy it.
I mean, how much, how creative is that?
Right.
Now they take it and they, They take it, they maybe perfect it, add some features to it, and produce it a heck of a lot cheaper than we can produce it.
Are you familiar with the social media app TikTok?
Yeah, I mean, that's controlled by the Chinese.
Right.
And so TikTok in China has the regulations on it for people under a certain age group where they turn it off after a certain time at night.
It's only educational content.
Well, those rules don't apply to those of us abroad.
So they, you know, Lord knows what they're sucking up.
What do you make of all that?
Well, again, they're using their economic might and everything to gain influence.
I've had my colleagues who served in third world posts, maybe in Africa or Latin America.
So the Chinese are everywhere trying to gain influence.
Oh, yeah, all over Africa.
All over.
All over.
You know, they're coming in doing big infrastructure projects just to gain bridges and roads, just to gain more influence.
And it's not that the Africans really like these people.
Right.
But they don't have a choice sometimes.
If they come in, the Chinese come in with the money and they're willing to build an airport or bridges, highways, then it happens.
But they're buying influence in a major way.
How does that affect the global chess game?
What do you think their perspective is on doing that?
Are they just trying to diversify their investments or do they have other goals?
I mean, obviously they have other goals, but.
I think to project influence, yes.
Now, do I think that we're going to have a Chinese dominated world?
No, I don't think that.
But they have come from a position of weakness, not 30 or 40 years ago.
To where now they are a world player and they never want to be treated as the sick man in Asia, where the British and the Americans, especially the British, they dominated the Chinese, taking Hong Kong, taking Macau, things like that.
The Chinese considered that a major insult.
And then, of course, the Japanese invaded, killed hundreds and millions of Chinese.
The Chinese are not going to put up with that.
And they're not going to, you know, so they never want to be in a position of weakness like that again.
I can understand where they're coming from on that.
But I don't think they're thinking that 50 years from now, everything's going to be dominated by China.
I mean, maybe they are, but I don't think so.
I think this is just them feeling their oats, getting influence.
They still have an Air Force and a Navy that is nowhere close to ours.
Yeah, it's just if you think about the evolution of warfare.
During the Cold War, it was nukes.
Before that, World War II, it was boots on the ground and bullets and tanks and whatever, maybe.
It seems like with what China's doing with things like TikTok or with what's going on in Mexico with shipping fentanyl into Mexico and training the cartels to distribute fentanyl, put fentanyl in heroin and distribute that only to the United States, which is having a dramatic effect on.
On young people in the U.S., it seems like they are taking another route to try to dismantle what's going on in our country.
I don't know if the Chinese government is deliberately doing that.
You know, the Chinese have their own numerous criminal gangs.
You know, whether there are elements of the Chinese government that are aware of what's going on with these Chinese gangs, they probably work more closely.
I mean, we don't work with the mafia, but.
It wouldn't surprise me if at least parts of the Ministry for State Security or the People's Liberation Army have at least contacts inside some of these Chinese gangs.
I don't think that this is coming down from the Politburo in Beijing, though, to infiltrate fentanyl into Mexico.
I think it's purely a financial thing.
They're wanting to get people hooked on stuff, but that's a criminal thing.
Again, there may be some government awareness or maybe some rogue government agents are aware of it.
I think the Chinese government itself has bigger things to do than something like that.
Yeah, it's fascinating how long China has been around, an ancient civilization.
They have mills there, fabric mills that are older than our country.
Right.
Fentanyl Trafficking in Mexico00:04:10
I want to get into a little bit of what you were doing in counterproliferation overseas.
For people who aren't familiar with what that means, can you give us a definition?
Well, right.
There are two terms.
Non proliferation means you do not want weapons of mass destruction spreading.
And then there's another term called counter proliferation, meaning that you want to actually set a WMD program back.
And by WMD, weapon of mass destruction, I mean either a nuclear weapon or a biological weapon, to a lesser extent, a chemical weapon, because they don't have the same far ranging effects that nukes and bio does.
And then also you're concerned about the delivery systems, either the drones, the cruise missiles, or the strategic missiles, the ballistic missiles.
And I got into that in the latter two thirds of my career and found it tremendously satisfying.
I tell my fellow case officers it's psychologically righteous when you can shut down a nuclear weapons network that is trafficking in a weapon that could kill 140,000 people.
This is important.
This is not a minor issue that we need to be paying attention to, it's a significant issue.
And so I really found that very energizing and satisfying to work against WMD networks.
Are you able to tell what specific part of the world you were working in?
Well, initially I started out in Europe, but then when I came back to the United States in the mid 90s, I was heavily involved in counterproliferation efforts worldwide.
And I think this is a good part to interject.
Your book, Living Lies, was absolutely fascinating.
You claim it to be fiction.
Should I show them a copy of it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Fascinating, fascinating story.
Well, is the reason you call it fiction because you have to keep certain secrets secret?
It was easier to get it cleared, I guess.
You know, everything I write that has anything to do with.
Yeah, sorry, hold it up by your face.
Sorry, here.
There you go.
Perfect.
You can get this on Amazon or Barnes Noble or Book Baby, which is my publisher.
Perfect.
And I'll link it below in the description as well.
It was a.
I didn't want to do memoirs.
I have a lot of friends, agency friends, who've done memoirs.
A lot of things I did were so classified I'd never get them cleared.
And we have to submit everything we write.
You make a lifetime commitment once you're a CIA officer that you'll submit anything, any manuscript that has to do with CIA or intelligence to what we call the Publication Review Board.
And they can tell you, no, you're not going to say this.
And they will literally black it out.
And then you have to delete it from your manuscript or just leave the blacked in portion out where it looks like what's gone wrong with this page.
It's got black marks all over it.
You can do it either way.
But you can't mention certain things.
So I submitted Living Lies to the Publication Review Board, and it took them a year to clear it, even though it's fiction.
It's out of my imagination.
Fiction.
Maybe thinly disguised fiction, but fiction.
I mean, there are some episodes in there of things that I closely modeled after some things I did, but it is fiction.
And they had a request for five really minor redactions to take out a word here, a few words there, a phrase here.
None of these were, by the way, in my opinion, classified, which is supposed to be the criteria.
I mean, you can say all the negative or positive things you want about CIA in the book, and they don't care as long as you don't mention classified.
These, I didn't think were classified, but then I asked myself, because they don't affect the storyline, do I want to fight another year on this?
So I just said, fine.
So I took those offending phrases or words out.
And then when I submitted my second espionage novel, in the twinkling of an eye, they only took a month to clear it.
And no redactions, and an actual request for a copy for the CIA library.
Nuclear Weapons and Ukraine00:15:02
So, maybe because I was not a total jerk in the first one.
And what is the premise of In the Twinkle of an Eye?
It's about a Russian and North Korean conspiracy to develop a very devastating biological weapon for assassination and for genocide.
And so the North Koreans and the Russians conspire on this, and a very talented FBI agent, with some help from the CIA, recruits a penetration of this program.
Sounds terrifying.
It's supposed to be, because it is.
It is, too.
Actually, biological weapons in many aspects are more terrifying than nuclear weapons because with nuclear weapons, you have what we call choke points the fissile material, which is the guts of a nuclear weapon.
If you don't have that, you don't have a weapon.
And you have to have some fairly sophisticated technical skills, too.
Biological weapons, though, the knowledge of how to do a biological weapon is so ubiquitous, so common.
There are thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people probably in the world that could, if they wanted, put together a biological weapon.
It might be crude, but some folks could do a fairly sophisticated one.
You may, those of you who are around in the year 2001, may recall the anthrax attacks.
And it turned out that was a disgruntled and nutsy scientist at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
And he killed, ended up killing about 13 people with that.
Could have killed many more.
And we had to spend billions and billions of dollars to go in and remediate the areas that were contaminated with the anthracis spores.
So it's out there.
I'm kind of stunned that more biological attacks haven't happened.
How much of those books that you wrote are fiction and how much of those are true?
Is that truth?
Well, there's nothing in there that's a total stretch.
Although, okay, I conceive in living lies, I come up with this physics principle.
Neutron phasing.
I just made that up.
It's supposedly a dramatic way to increase the yield of a nuclear weapon.
That was totally author's license, just fictional license.
But the actual things that go on in the book and the other one, there's a lot of truth.
I'd say a good 95%.
And the second one, in the twinkling of an eye, I've got that one as well.
Yeah, I chose that one.
Is all about this weapon, and you can see the biohazard symbol in her eye.
And the Russian scientist has his father was at Chernobyl as one of the fire chiefs and lost his life when the Chernobyl explosion occurred in 1986.
And he's treated well, he's sent to the best institutes, but he finds out that his father and the others didn't have to die, that it was all a huge mess up, screw up, what happened to the Russians.
And then he tumbles into the fact that they're using his very advanced skills.
As a geneticist, to develop this horrible weapon.
And so that's when he is ripe for recruitment, both ideologically.
I mean, I don't believe in this, you know.
And yes, I want to get back at these people because my dad would still be alive.
And so they develop a way to communicate with him using a lot of artificial intelligence and a small doll.
And I'm not going to give away the plot.
And it's actually based on some people I know.
In fact, I base characters in my books on real people.
And I get their permission.
If they're a good guy, I tell them I'd like you to use you as a model for a character.
If they're the bad guys, that's top secret and I don't tell you who they are.
So, what is going on with Iran and the nuclear?
Up until 2016, we had this joint comprehensive JCPOA.
It was a prohibition against the Iranians developing advanced ways to enrich uranium, which they could then use in a nuclear weapon.
They're allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67%, which is light enriched uranium.
That's what they commonly use in nuclear power plants.
For peaceful purposes.
But not to exceed that, because when you get up into the 80s or 90% enriched, then you're talking about a weapon.
And the only other use for it would be a nuclear submarine, which they don't have.
So.
Oh, I didn't know they use the highly enriched uranium for submarines.
For nuclear subs.
Okay.
They can.
Yeah.
I'm not sure if they use all nuclear subs, but they can use it.
Okay.
But really, the only other practical use of highly enriched uranium is in a nuclear weapon, because there's only two.
Sources of the nuclear weapon.
There's either highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
And the HEU is enriched from the natural 0.7% up to 80 or 90% in that range to get a weapon.
Or you just take it up to 3.67% for power plant, for fuel for a nuclear power plant.
And we were very concerned that they've actually enriched a substantial quantity of their uranium hexafluoride up to about 60% enriched.
And they didn't need to do that.
And to go from 60% up to weapons grade wouldn't take too many more passes through their high ultra centrifuges.
And so that's a troubling thing.
Other troubling facts are that there's a sunset clause on this thing, it's only going to exist for eight or nine years.
In the meantime, we will have taken off all the financial sanctions against Iran.
That will free up billions of dollars for them.
And Lord knows what they're going to do with that as far as terrorism and things.
But at the end of that eight or nine years, they can do whatever they damn well please.
And they're no longer within the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA.
It's actually damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If we have the agreement and the Iranians cheat, which is basically the premise of my first book we have an agreement, we reach the agreement, but they decide they want to have an ace in the hole and have a covert nuclear weapons program, well, then we're screwed on that case.
But if we don't do the agreement, then we could inadvertently push them into a nuclear weapon where they say, well, what do we have to lose?
And they do that.
Now, a lot of people naturally are concerned if Iran has a nuclear weapon.
I'm concerned as well.
But my bigger concern is not that Iran per se would have the nuclear weapon, but suddenly all of their neighbors, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, everybody in the region will feel like, well, I've got to have one too.
They have different religions.
The Iranians are predominantly Shia Muslim, whereas they're surrounded by Sunni Muslim.
And a lot of those countries might say, well, we're not going to let Iran unilaterally have a weapon.
So it's a very, and the point I'm trying to make, Danny, is the more countries that have weapons, that just logarithmically almost multiplies the chances that someone is going to use one of those weapons either intentionally or accidentally.
And that would be a horrible thing.
It would be not just for that, but then somebody might launch a counter strike, and it's going to make a very unstable region that's already unstable completely unstable.
When we have more nukes than anybody in the world, it's like saying we're the United States.
We're the only ones who get to have the nukes.
Us and unfortunately Russia, but no one else can have them.
I know.
I know.
That sounds hypocritical, but I think I'd rather us have them.
And, you know, some of my friends, good friends, would like us, the whole world, to totally eliminate nuclear weapons.
That's not going to happen.
I think that's a laudable goal, but it's naive.
How could you ever prove that Russia didn't keep some in reserve or the Chinese didn't keep some in reserve?
And, you know, I guarantee you they would.
Is it true that Putin can't by himself make the decision to launch a nuke?
No, I don't know that.
I don't know that.
I don't know if President Biden completely by himself can.
I think he could give the order, but if some general said, What is this all about?
In fact, I think there was at least, in fact, I know there was a case in the former Soviet Union where they actually ordered a strike, and there was one commander that said they thought they saw incoming U.S. ICBMs coming in.
Turned out it was.
Something else.
It was total error.
And this one very sane, pragmatic Russian commander said, No, no, no, we're not going to launch.
And they didn't.
Otherwise, it could have been the end of the world.
So, yeah, I was under the impression that the U.S. president had the power to hit the nuclear button.
That may be true.
And then in Russia, it's different because people say that Putin looks like he has cancer.
He might be going crazy.
He's a Rabbit, a mad dog backed into a corner right now because of the United States.
And he could press the button because he's going crazy.
But apparently, he has a bunch of commanders or generals who have the ultimate decision to make that call.
That may be true.
I really don't know about that.
I don't know.
Interesting.
I hope it's true.
I hope that there are some people that would counterman that.
What is your view on what's happening in Ukraine with Russia and with us?
I think we just wrote them like a $13 billion check.
Well, I'm a strong supporter of defending Ukraine and against what I consider to be absolute Russian aggression.
And I actually think that sentiment transcends political parties.
We have a lot to divide us, but I think that both of our political parties are fairly united on supplying the Ukrainians with what they need.
You know, they got invaded, and it was this type of a, you know, if we had just.
Turned our head, it would be like the appeasement that happened in the late 30s, where Hitler took over Austria, Anschluss, and then he took over the Sudetenland and then he basically all of Czechoslovakia.
And we kept turning our eyes and appeasing him.
You don't appease dictators.
And so finally, he invaded Poland in September of 1939.
And that's when the Western alliance, at least the British and the French, drew the line.
What would you say to people who claim that what we're doing right now with the Ukraine is the same thing that we did with the Mujahideen?
To fight the Russians?
Well, to a certain extent.
And guess what?
It got the Soviets out.
When we gave them stingers, they had to leave.
Now, that morphed into Al Qaeda and some other cancers.
Yes, I know.
But I think the difference is, and I don't have very many Afghan friends, a few, but by and large, I mean, the folks in Afghanistan were terribly divided.
They had the Northern Alliance, they had the Taliban, and they had.
Elements in the South, they've never been a united country, frankly.
They've cobbled together and they have vast differences in religion and political outlooks and things like that.
Whereas the Ukrainians are basically westernized.
They think like us.
I guess I can identify with them more than I can with a different alien mindset in Afghanistan.
I don't fault the administration for getting out of Afghanistan, but I do fault them for the way they did it, just abruptly.
Left a lot of our friends in the lurch.
I mean, I just, I guess maybe it's because my son lost one of his best friends.
My son was a Marine.
He lost one of his best friends there with a suicide bomber.
And you wonder, after all the money and blood that we've spent 21 years later, what have we got?
We've got nothing in Afghanistan.
I think, though, that our values with the Ukrainians are more common values that we share.
And these people have been invaded.
It's not Ukrainian against Ukrainian.
Well, sometimes it is because the Russian speaking Ukrainians or ethnic Russians, it could be.
But it was literally naked aggression of the Russians invading and trying to force, you know, we're just going to take this land.
If you look at it from Russia's perspective, that we're using the Ukraine as sort of this, to taunt Russia, and we're using them as this, it's like this tug of war.
They're just this pawn in this.
Big tug of war between the US and Russia.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe from I recently saw Oliver Stone's Putin interviews where he did the I don't know if you saw that, but it was a long form interview.
It was like a couple hours long of interviews with one on ones with Putin.
But in a lot of the NATO countries, the US has been installing intercontinental launch sites or they call them defensive.
They're defensive.
Missile sites, but Putin's claim was that within a couple hours they could be transitioned into offensive launch sites.
Well, a lot of those countries have joined NATO because they were dominated by the Soviet Union after World War II and forced into being part of the Eastern Bloc and the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.
So they naturally, I mean, even now, even the Swedes and the Finns who have traditionally been neutral since World War II.
Are they wanting to join NATO?
And this was not up until Putin invaded Ukraine.
I mean, he's accomplished exactly 180 degrees what he hoped to accomplish.
He's now driven most of the rational speaking, you know, rational countries in that part of the world and is thinking, yeah, well, I want to be part of NATO now.
I don't want to be invaded like Ukraine.
Yeah, I can see what you're saying that there can be an argument made for the Russian sense of encirclement by NATO, but they bring it on themselves by acting like the bully in the neighborhood and then getting all upset because you want to have a cop.
Protecting you from the bully.
Tactical Nukes and Sanctions00:15:04
The financial element, the financial chokehold that we've put on them with the sanctions, from what I understand, is Russia actually has the ability to pay off their debts.
However, they've been cut off from the ability to access that money.
That's right.
Because, for one thing, oil is typically denominated in dollars, and guess who controls that?
So we've been fortunate in that respect.
I think the sanctions are starting to hurt.
What's hurting them, I think, probably more is the fact that thousands of young Russian boys have been killed in Ukraine, many thousands.
Eventually, that filters back to people that 15,000, 20,000 were estimated dead Russians.
I mean, we lost, what was it, 60,000 in the Vietnam War, but that went on for 20 years.
This has only been seven months, and they've lost maybe 15,000 to 20,000 dead and gosh knows how many wounded, injured.
That's got to eventually.
In fact, if he has to resort to conscription, meaning a draft, that's going to be a tremendous morale blow in Russia.
I think what is the city in the south that's on the Black Sea and Russia?
Odessa.
Not Odessa.
I'm sorry.
Odessa.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about.
And Ukraine.
That's, I think, one of their goals, right?
Is taking Odessa.
Oh, they love that because it controls a lot of the sea lanes in the Black Sea.
Right.
Well, they took Crimea.
They just annexed it.
They annexed it.
That was about five, six years ago.
And they were wanting to, in essence, if not politically, at least de facto annex parts of the Western or the Eastern parts of Ukraine.
Now, again, their argument would be there's Russian speakers there.
These people are, you know, lean towards us, not towards you.
But the way they were doing it was just absolutely outrageous going and killing people.
See, my whole perspective on the thing is obviously, this is like a general overview of it.
But what would have happened?
Would there be all this blood and war and death if we hadn't dropped billions of dollars of armor or weapons into Ukraine, onto the border?
If we hadn't, today we would have stayed out.
Okay, if we just stayed out today, you'd have a Russian dominated Ukraine.
Zelensky would have been shot.
A lot more Ukrainians would have died.
I don't begrudge.
The Ukrainians a single dollar.
I wish we'd given them twice as much.
Really?
Absolutely.
In fact, I would say even more advanced weapons and maybe establish a no fly zone, meaning that we would, NATO would actually, now that would be close to an act of war, but to actually shoot down Russian aircraft.
In addition to that, there were reports of U.S. veterans going to Ukraine and fighting.
And what if one of those United States veterans that went over there on their own whim to fight got killed?
Well, actually, I think that's happened already.
Because we can't control people that go over and volunteer.
I mean, the Russians might think we can control them.
We can't.
This is not the CIA or the Department of Defense infiltrating veterans into Ukraine surreptitiously.
These people are doing it on their own, and we can't.
I don't know that we can legally prohibit them.
Maybe we can, but they can go and do that.
And I think actually one or two have already been killed or captured.
Really?
Yeah, I think so.
A handful, two or three.
It's tragic.
But yeah, I think that's happened.
Do you think Putin would drop a nuke, or what, if so, what do you think would actually push him to do that?
Like, what do you think his mindset is when it comes to even dropping like a small tactical nuke?
I think there is minimal chance of that, but it's not a 0% chance, maybe less than 5% chance.
Why is that?
Well, because he knows that that would absolutely set NATO off, and he would have to fear what the repercussions of that would be.
We might establish a no fly zone, we might do some other things that.
Would ultimately, you know, right now the Chinese and some others are trying or staying on the sidelines.
But if he used a tactical nuke, I think even they would say, no, that's too much.
That's too much.
What is Russia's relationship with China?
I'd say it's quote unquote correct.
They're not allies, but China is probably sitting gleefully on the sidelines watching this because they don't want a real strong Russia, and they certainly don't want a real strong United States.
But they, yeah, they'll trade with the Russians and things like that.
And I'm sure they depend upon Russian oil and gas.
Unfortunately, China does not have a lot of oil and gas at all, which is horrible because they've got so many people, but I don't think they've ever found the oil and gas reserves that would serve their population.
So they depend upon Russian oil and gas, Iranian oil and gas, some of our adversaries to supply them.
But as far as the Chinese try to get along, but they aren't coming out rah, rah, Russia.
It's just, in fact, there may be some pretty.
Vigorous conversations privately.
Well, what do you think happens if we flew Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan?
What do you think happens if we start to intervene in Taiwan the same way we're doing in Ukraine?
Well, I don't think we have to.
Taiwan's pretty heavily armed.
And it's not as easy as invading Ukraine, where the Russians were right on the border.
They could just come across.
The Chinese have to cross 60 or 70 miles of water or more.
And not that they couldn't do it, they could.
But It's not quite the same.
It would be pretty costly.
In fact, I'm sure that Xi in China, Xi Jinping, is watching this Russian thing and thinking, God, I hope that doesn't happen to us.
I mean, watching the Russians be set back.
Right.
When it comes to nukes, if that unfortunately were to happen, what are your feelings on mutually assured destruction?
Is that still a thing?
Or is that.
Okay, so during the Cold War, we had this concept called mutually assured destruction, meaning that if the Russians launched strategic weapons at us, we would counter strike.
And pretty soon, not only Russia and the United States, but most of the world would be a desolate wasteland.
So it was called MAD, which it was, mutually assured destruction.
You know, a tactical nuke means we're talking on the order of maybe hundreds of tons, not thousands of tons of TNT or the bomb that destroyed little boy that destroyed Hiroshima.
Was a 14 kiloton weapon.
That's 14,000 tons of TNT yield.
That killed 140,000 people.
Now, the amount of explosive power that brought down the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1996 and killed 165 people was only a ton and a half.
So if you multiply a ton and a half by a thousand, you kind of start to get a bare idea of what a small nuclear weapon could do.
Now, a tactical nuke usually would be not.
Probably not even a kiloton.
It'd be several hundreds of tons or whatever.
But it would still be the type of thing where you're just opening Pandora's box.
What's next then?
I think there may be a greater chance he might use chemical weapons, but even that would be horrible.
Didn't they find multiple chemical weapons facilities in the Ukraine?
I remember that lady Victoria Newland was being questioned.
I don't think so.
They were questioning her about that.
No.
That was a lot of this is Russian propaganda.
In fact, we have gone in, we, the United States, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, has made it a goal to go into states or former states of the Soviet Union and help them turn their biological weapons labs into producing, you know, pharmaceuticals and things like that.
We actually pay their scientists to convert to peaceful uses for medicines and pharmaceuticals and things like that.
But the Russians have accused us of going in and equipping the Ukrainians with biological weapons programs, and that's nonsense.
So.
Maybe you can find a video on this on YouTube.
I'm pretty sure I saw a video of Victoria Nuland being questioned about biological weapons facilities, multiple in the Ukraine.
And they were former biological weapons when it was part of the Soviet Union.
Oh, okay.
And we have spent a lot of money, a lot of your taxpayers' money, to go in and make sure they don't produce biological weapons, but they produce things for vaccines and things like that that are needed.
Right.
Because the difference between a Plant that manufactures vaccines or manufactures some kind of devastating virus or bacteria is very slight.
You can use a lot of the same equipment for either good purposes or bad purposes.
I can assure you 100% what we were doing was to help the Ukrainians.
They have vast crops there.
They're one of the biggest wheat producers in the world.
Consequently, they need the right fertilizers, the right wheat seeds, the right everything.
They need to put Battle, wheat blight, and things like that.
So, they're biological labs there.
They're designed at pesticides and things like that.
So, and we were converting, helping them convert to peaceful, and there's no offensive biological weapon facility in Ukraine.
What do you think would happen if the United States, our continent, actually got hit by a nuke or a bomb?
What would happen if Russia actually dropped a bomb somewhere in the United States?
Well, I think we would retaliate.
Do you think we would do the same?
Oh, absolutely.
Or do you think it's possible that we wouldn't retaliate?
Instead, we would go in, take out the regime, and claim Russia for our own?
Well, I don't think we would do that.
But I think we would probably do a counterstrike.
In fact, I'm sure they have standing orders that if, say, somebody were to take out New York or Washington, that we would strike back.
Now, what scares the Russians is that.
Our non nuclear military forces are so much more advanced than theirs.
And, you know, that we, if we took all, if all the nukes in the world disappeared, the military advantage would be heavily to our favor, not Russia.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Our weapons are much better.
Our people are much better.
The military, our military is set to devolve as much power downwards as possible to where a local field commander has a lot of authority.
The opposite is true in Russia.
They're top down.
If you take out a Russian colonel or a general, which they've done, then the rest of them are like running around like chickens with their heads cut off because they don't know what to do.
But strategically, wouldn't the United States rather just claim Russia rather than just put a crater and kill and just respond by killing more people?
Well, I guess, yeah.
Because wouldn't I don't think we have any plans to make Russia the 51st state?
But if hypothetically there was a crater in Washington from Russia, Would any other country blame us for going in and just taking Russia for our own?
And if the only other option is murdering hundreds of thousands of people with another name?
I would assume, Danny, that our counterstrike would be against certain military facilities.
And yeah, there would be civilian casualties.
But I think we would be hurriedly striking Russian military facilities.
And we know where they are.
So we wouldn't be just dropping a nuclear weapon blindly on Moscow.
Now, that doesn't mean that back in the days of the Cold War, Yeah.
We each had everybody's cities were targeted, all of them.
Really?
Oh, all over the United States.
We had, and all over Russia, you know, not only missiles in silos, but you have the nuclear weapons that are on submarines.
You have the ones in Russia that were on railway cars.
They kept moving so that you'd never know where they are.
And that's, of course, the big secret of the submarines you don't know exactly where they are.
And so they could launch missiles with, you know, a 100 kiloton weapon or bigger megaton weapon off of a.
Submarine that you don't know where it is.
Yeah.
What is the, there's a famous story of the submarine commander, the Russian submarine commander who was given the order to fire in, like, I think it was right off the coast of Florida.
Right.
I think that was one I was referring to earlier where they thought, and he said, no, we're not doing this.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
On the scale of threats, obviously Russia being a huge one, where does North Korea fall?
Well, okay.
That's a difficult one because they have proven nuclear weapons and they have.
Proven missile capacity, including missiles that can reach the United States.
This is unlike Iran, which has neither, at least that we know of.
But North Korea has been assiduously developing a nuclear weapons inventory for a good 30 or 40 years.
And I'm sure they have a stockpile of weapons now and missiles that can deliver them.
It's a very, very difficult, what we call a difficult human target.
Not impossible, but they've got such a police state there that it's difficult to get access to their people.
But we know that there are some people that are very unhappy with Kim Jong un and the ruling party, and we just have to devise ways to appeal to those people.
Are there any CIA spies in North Korea?
I hope so.
That would be, I would imagine, one of the hardest jobs to be a spy in a place like North Korea.
I can imagine, yeah.
Yeah.
That's a place where it's, I could, just from the stories I've heard of people that have visited that place, it's virtually impossible.
As a Westerner to fit in there.
Right, right.
No, if we had a spy there, what would be a North Korean who's working for us and who somehow fits in?
And I hope we have a lot of them, but I don't know.
Again, it's a hard target.
Not that they're hard to recruit, it's hard to get access to them.
The AQ Khan Network00:07:16
Can you explain who AQCON is and what your involvement was in dismantling that program?
Sure.
AQ Khan, Dr. Abdul Qadir Khan, was a Pakistani metallurgist.
He had his PhD in metallurgy from the University of Delft in the Netherlands.
And after college, after he got his PhD, he went to work for a company called Urenco.
And Urenco is an acronym for the Uranium Enrichment Corporation.
And it's a consortium of the Dutch, the British, and the Germans.
And they got together to develop very sophisticated.
Ultra centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium for nuclear power plants.
And so, those Urenco has plants in the Netherlands and Great Britain and Germany with these very sophisticated designs.
Well, he had seen India, Pakistan's mortal enemy, detonate a weapon either in 1970 or early 70s.
And of course, he was very concerned as a Pakistani that now Pakistan's mortal enemy had nuclear weapons and they didn't.
So he offered to steal the designs from Urenco for these centrifuges and bring them back to Pakistan.
And the Pakistani government encouraged him to do it, and so he did that.
And by the early 1980s, they had a full fledged uranium enrichment plant at a place in Pakistan called Kahuta, and they named it after him Khan Research Lab, or KRL.
And then they were able to get designs for nuclear weapons from abroad.
And he wasn't the designer himself, but He was basically supplying the fuel for the nuclear weapons.
That was all for Pakistani domestic use.
But what we didn't know at the time is that he also had reached out to Libya and offered to basically make a turnkey enrichment facility for them and to supply them with nuclear weapons designs.
And if you remember, Libya in the 80s and 90s, and even in the 2000s, was a state sponsor of terrorism.
And a mortal enemy of the United States.
And so the program that I led was able to uncover this conspiracy, penetrate it, and ultimately bring it down.
How many years were you involved in this?
Almost 10.
Almost 10 years.
Right.
Wow.
And it was the same yield as the one that destroyed Hiroshima, the designs they had.
So, you know, if you can say that your team helped stop the deaths of 140,000 people, I think that's worthwhile.
Was any of the technology that they were using to create this enriched uranium and develop this program, how much of that was taken from the United States?
Absolutely very little.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah, none.
It was all from this European design, at least for the enrichment facility.
And the nuclear weapons design was from another nuclear weapons state, not the United States.
So there was very little American, if any American content to it.
I mean, Khan basically knew not to go to the United States for things.
So he, his network, he's a very charismatic individual, very popular.
I used to jokingly say that AQ Khan is kind of a combination of, you know, our Dr. Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer.
He's a mix, miss, Mashup of Robert Oppenheimer, George Washington, and Elvis.
What?
Oh my God.
He's so popular in Pakistan.
He was the father of the Islamic bomb.
Right.
You know, they tested five nuclear weapons in 1998.
And so they were trafficking, Khan was personally trafficking in a nuclear weapon that would work.
They didn't have to test it anymore.
It would work.
And that was what they were selling to the Libyans.
Or what he was selling.
I. Divorce it from the Pakistani government.
They knew nothing about it or very little.
I can't even begin to imagine.
I mean, that just goes to show some of the disciplines it takes to do a job like you did when you say it took 10 years to accomplish one mission or to achieve one objective.
Well, it was close to 10 years.
We started it sometime in 96, and I retired in 05.
And so, yeah, it was about 10 years, nine or 10 years.
Did you ever come in contact personally with him?
No, but we had people that did.
Wow.
So you, okay.
So you were recruiting people around him.
That were involved with him directly, and they were able to gather the intelligence.
That's it, yeah.
What have been the implications of taking out that network and dismantling that WMD program?
Well, President Musharraf of Pakistan put Khan under five years of house arrest, and he just passed away, Khan passed away, I think, a year ago.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
We also assisted the governments because the network was not just a single network, it was a worldwide network.
We provided, we, the U.S. government, provided expertise to go and prosecute the other elements of the network to shut them down so that this could not be reconstituted.
But when our director, George Tenet, he was the one that confronted Musharraf, and Musharraf knew nothing about what Khan was doing.
In fact, they hated each other, Khan and Musharraf did, because Khan, he saw Khan as a potential rival for power in Pakistan.
And Musharraf's Gut reaction was to just kill Khan.
And Director Tennant said, No, that's not what we want.
You know, we don't want asking you to kill the guy.
Right.
So he put him under house arrest for five years.
And then they clamped down.
And then we went to all the governments that the other parts of the network were in and helped basically throw those folks in jail.
What do you think this nuclear threat evolves into?
Or do you think the threat of actual nuclear bombs explosions evolves?
Is going to last forever?
Or do you think that we're going to evolve into some sort of super advanced weapons?
Well, we've gone for almost or more than 70 years without another one being detonated in anger.
I mean, the last one was in 1945.
So that's 77 years since we've, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And we've avoided war until now.
Private Contractors and Spies00:15:16
But as I said earlier, the more countries that have this, and especially if they're not stable governments, Right.
If the Russians and the Chinese and our allies, the French and the British, have it, and the Israelis, I'm sure, have it, but these are governments that are led by rational people.
We may not like them, but they're led by rational people and they know the consequences if they were to use a nuclear weapon.
But the more countries you have, the more chances for some rogue leader or irrational leader to decide to use one.
And so that scares me.
But I don't think.
I don't foresee a war, a strategic nuclear war between any of the major nuclear weapons powers.
We're all, I think, conscious of how devastating that would be.
Yeah.
Which leads me to another subject I wanted to discuss, which I think these two are very much related.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but there are, actually, you probably are aware, there are a number of officers who are in charge of nuclear sites in the US and abroad.
Who have claimed to have seen UFOs hovering above nuclear silos?
And I mean, there's a whole book written about it, documenting all these different cases in Europe, here.
What do you make of the UFO phenomena?
What do you believe, and what do you not believe?
I think that there is a possibility that these UFOs, or now they're called UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, I'm not sure why we changed the name, maybe because UFOs were ridiculed so much.
So now we have to have a new acronym.
But, you know, we commissioned a government report on these.
The DNI issued a, that's the Director of National Intelligence issued a report about, I think it was earlier this year or a few months ago, saying that we can account for some of these, but there's some of these we can't account for why or how, what these are.
We don't have any proof, you know, what these things are.
I think it was pretty obvious that it was not an advanced design from China or Russia.
Because they would do things that simply nobody could conceive would be physically possible.
Right.
For nothing that we have under current designs can suddenly make a 90 degree turn without banking into a turn.
They just go like that.
You don't know.
Or they do things, just radical maneuvers, that defy what we understand as aerodynamic principles, meaning that there's somethingness to them.
So, what are the possibilities?
Okay.
The possibilities are.
That the observers were mistaken, and yet we've had a lot of reports of trained Navy pilots and other folks who are not nuts, who are seeing these things.
Okay.
Then the next possibility is that they were from another planet somewhere, I mean, extraterrestrial.
The thing that causes me to want to doubt about that is that the distances, unless some civilization somewhere has mastered a faster-than-light drive, we are really on the edge of.
Town on the edge of the galaxy, and it would have taken so many years for some extraterrestrial intelligence to have reached us, unless they've developed, like on Star Trek, a warp drive, something that could go faster than the speed of light.
Maybe, although people tend to doubt that we can do that, unless you can bend space.
And then the other possibility is time travel.
I know that sounds crazy, but if they could develop a time travel, and this is from many years in the future, that it could be actually.
People who look like us, but just from a different thing, or a parallel universe, which is another variation on that.
And I know a number of scientists have talked about the multiverse.
And I'm not a physicist.
I don't know.
What I would say is, I wouldn't dismiss this out of hand.
I don't think we can just laugh at it and say, well, these people are nuts that are seeing these things.
And I'm happy that the DNI was taking it seriously.
And I know parts of the Pentagon are taking it seriously because it could be.
A threat to our national security.
As you pointed out, if they're hovering near missile bases or near defense installations, we need to be sure what these things are.
Yeah, that to me seems like there's an amazing documentary that came out called The Phenomenon in 2000.
And he correlates, they show, there's a brilliant animation done of the world.
There's a world map, and it shows every single nuclear bomb detonation in the history since the first one ever.
And It shows what date they happen.
So, it's a timeline showing all of them happening and how they correlate with UFO sightings.
Right.
And the uptick in UFO sightings correlates exactly with the uptick in nuclear bomb tests and the development of these nukes.
So, the fact that, you know, one of the ideas is that these crafts, these beings or the civilization, whatever it be, could just be making sure that these crazy territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons aren't going to blow each other up and destroy the planet.
Or worse.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know.
I find it fascinating.
I've got friends.
I mentioned at least one name to you of a senior CIA officer who is an expert on these things, or at least is passionate about it.
I don't think you can dismiss these folks as lunatics and crazy anymore.
There's too much of it that rational, credible people are saying.
I don't think I'd lose sleep over it, but I find it interesting.
Do you think?
Or do I think that maybe in the next 50 or 100 years we'll find out?
Well, maybe, maybe not.
Do you think that we already know?
Is there people in other people in the CIA who already know this?
I don't think that.
You don't think that?
I don't think that.
Now, my friend whose name I mentioned to you, he may think that, but uh, I no, I don't think you don't think the government would keep secrets from us, just from you, Danny.
We have this thing don't tell Danny Jones anything, exactly, right?
Um.
Yeah, no, I mean, the fact that the Pentagon would come out and talk about this publicly says something.
That's what my point is.
That finally we're acknowledging a subject that was been up until now ridiculed, that this was the lunatic fringe.
And now it's becoming, well, maybe it's not as crazy as they think.
Do you think it's possible that there are organizations funded by the government in the United States, private organizations?
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, who have technology, advanced technology that common academia around the world scientists don't know about, that they discovered that could explain some of these things that they have been working on.
Possible, yes.
But I mean, and also I would say parenthetically, I hope so.
I mean, I hope we would have something like that, but I kind of doubt it.
I think most of the people that I know that are skilled in aerodynamics say this far exceeds what we.
Concurrent, what we or the Chinese or the Russians or the British or the French can do.
I mean, you're asking, is it possible that we could design craft like that and they're so super secret that we're not telling them?
Or back engineer, find them and back engineer them, be working on the back engineer to learn it.
That would be great.
Maybe that'll be my next novel.
Yeah.
It's fascinating, just the idea that we could have discovered that technology and trying to back engineer it.
Specifically, because we're worried about weapons.
We want to think, we don't want this to get in the hands of the Chinese or the Russians.
We want to figure it out first.
The problem, and maybe we could back engineer some of it, but some of it I think is so sophisticated, we'd be like an ape studying a laptop.
Yeah, it'd be like the guy, Bob Lazar, the way he described it was it would be like dropping a nuclear reactor in the middle of the street in the time in antiquity where they're riding around in horse and bun.
Well, you don't even have to go that far back.
Go back to the 1880s or 1890s.
If you suddenly.
We're in the 1880s or 1890s, and you saw a jet aircraft go by, you'd think it was magic.
Exactly.
And yet, not 20 years later, the Wright brothers flew a plane, maybe not a jet plane, but they flew a plane and it just blew people's minds.
So I don't know.
Again, if we had agencies who secretly had this knowledge of either A, super advanced technology and crafts that aren't explainable by modern physics, B, another civilization that exists here, that there's no.
Evidence of in the public, and we knew about it.
Hypothetically, what would be the implications of disclosure to the public of something like that?
Would there be national security implications?
I see what you're saying.
Could it create panic or something like that?
Let me tell you, as much as I'd like to believe that something like that could happen, you know, what was it?
Franklin said, you know, you can, two people can keep a secret if one of them's dead.
And I think I don't know that the US government or the Russian government or the Chinese government are capable of keeping something like that under wraps.
Really?
I don't think so.
That would be so explosive that someone would leak it, someone would go public, someone somewhere.
I just don't think we're capable of keeping that a secret.
Well, there is the story of Bob Lazar who came out.
I think I talked to you about it on the phone.
He was a guy who worked for Los Alamos Labs and he got hired, he got brought in on the Janet flights to Area 51 and he worked at a site called S4, a secret site.
He agreed to have his phone tapped because he understood it was a national security issue.
And he essentially talked about this publicly.
He went public on it and basically doxed himself to protect himself.
The consequences were many people around him, friends and family, got audited by the IRS.
There was an attempt to completely wipe out his history working at Los Alamos Labs and going to MIT, to which he was able to prove.
He literally walked into Los Alamos Labs with a report.
Reporter and said, Hey, what's up?
He knew everybody there, knew the layout of the building.
And there was another publication that was published in a newspaper years before that that proved he essentially worked there.
So there's hard evidence of the government trying to cover up the fact that he worked at Los Alamos and went to MIT.
And he talks about this.
So there's people like him.
Obviously, the government has gone to an extreme measure to try to just discredit him and prove that this wasn't the case.
He's One of the only ones I know of.
I don't know if there's any more, but his story is awfully compelling.
Yeah, I'm not really that familiar with it.
And there's a difference between maybe preventing him from talking and what he really found out.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know the man.
You know, maybe he's got to screw loose.
I'm not sure.
It's very possible.
Okay.
He was able to keep his story straight for since the 80s, which is compelling.
Going back to these, I mentioned some private intelligence or some private aerospace contractor companies that have government contracts.
How much of how much intelligence is through private contractors?
And how much does the CIA or the government rely on private contractors?
Actually, quite a bit, especially since 9 11.
We, you know, we were.
Under the gun, the American people were absolutely panicked that another 3,300 Americans were going to die.
And so there was a big trend to hiring cleared contractors.
You know, I mean, I was a cleared contractor.
I had retired from the CIA in 2005, and they needed my skill sets doing certain things.
And I had the experience.
You know, intelligence work is like any other profession.
The more you do it, hopefully, the better you get at it.
And so you can't just replicate that with a new trainee.
So contractors became quite prevalent in a number of areas.
And today, You know, the number of people who hold clearances wouldn't surprise me if the contractors far outnumber the actual federal employees.
Over the entire intelligence community and Department of Defense, it's common that you have people who have expertise, they have a clearance, they keep up their clearances, then you want to use those and not just have their knowledge walk out the door.
So I'd say that, you know, it's pretty big.
What is the threat?
Of having some of these companies, these either whether it be defense contractors or intelligence contractors, what is the threat of one of these companies being infiltrated or having?
I think the more you have them, the more you become an actuarial.
It's an actuarial certainty that if you have 100,000 people with a clearance, if only 1% of them are bad, either malicious insiders or what we would call an unwitting collaborator being manipulated somehow and.
Well, you know, that's if you had a hundred thousand and one percent, then that means there's a thousand of them.
I don't think there's a thousand penetrations of the U.S. government, but what I'm saying is, you know, the more number, the bigger the number of people you have that have clearances, the greater the number of spies, threats inside you've got.
I just wonder if it makes us more vulnerable when we use these.
A great example is a company like Palantir.
When we use companies like this, the private organizations that have lots of employees could be good at their jobs, or they could even hire former CIA officials.
Assassination Rules and Committees00:15:16
They do that.
Right.
They do that often, right?
Right.
I just wonder how that changes the dynamic.
And, you know, obviously there's more manipulation involved.
Well, it makes it a much broader target.
But you have to remember companies like Palantir have unique, highly sophisticated.
Services that they provide the CIA and to DIA and to other things.
And so we actually need them.
We can't just say, well, you've got 100 or 1,000 employees now.
We don't want you.
I mean, if they've got certain things that enhance our national security, we have to look at this rationally.
Hmm.
The CIA does use Palantir, correct?
I think we're one of their primary customers.
One of the primary customers.
I think so.
When you have people like Peter Thiel being that involved in pushing, Presidential campaigns and being involved so much in government, him also being having one of the biggest CIA contracted companies.
Well, Danny, it's a free country.
It is a free country.
You know, we are not Russia or China.
Yeah.
So, Mr. Thiel and other people can do what they want, you know.
It's just when you have oligarchs like him that are so tied into government and that have so much influence.
Well, he's a very bright guy.
He is a very bright guy.
Yeah.
I mean, you look at Elon Musk.
Bright, erratic, but bright.
You know, if Elon Musk had been born in the United States, he might have made a presidential run, but you know, he's South African originally, so he can't run.
But I mean, you got to respect what he's done.
I may not like everything he's done, and he is erratic, but kind of a polymath, meaning he's good at a lot of things.
A lot of things.
How do you think, from the conception of the CIA through history, how do you think the outside world, outside of the United States, looks at America when you consider the 1953 coup in Iran, the Bay of Pigs, the Iraq War?
And our long history of facilitated regime change to support our strategic and business interests?
It's a complicated history.
I won't say that I think that all of our projects and operations ultimately were in the national interest.
I think at the time, I can say this all of the ones you just named, none of them were simply creatures of the CIA, it was the White House.
That asked, and I don't mean just a Republican, but our Democratic or Republican president.
It was out of the White House that those operations sprang and at their direction.
So we were the tool that was used, but we were not the ones running the show.
They, the White House, absolutely wanted those operations to happen.
We can't go off and just willy nilly overthrow a government.
We have to have a finding.
And that's true.
That was true even in the 50s and 60s.
We didn't just do this on our own, it was at White House direction.
Isn't it true that Alan Dulles and John Kennedy had, they butted heads a lot and he had different goals and aspirations than the president?
I mean, you know, his brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State.
So they had kind of a lock on the foreign policy and the intelligence collection things.
I'm not sure.
I mean, I know Dulles was fired basically after the Bay of Pigs.
But.
Whether they butted heads.
If they were butting heads, it was probably over that.
Because as you know, the invasion of Cuba, our invasion, possibly could have been successful had we had more U.S. air cover.
And Kennedy refused to do that.
So I could see that Dulles and some other CIA officers at the time would rightly blame Kennedy for getting weak knees and not following through.
Whether the invasion was justified or not, I'm just saying that I could see the mentality that there were naval ships, there were U.S. fighter jets and stuff that could have intervened.
And some of the CIA officers felt like Kennedy had betrayed them.
There was a famous quote from Kennedy with, I believe it was the French prime minister or ambassador.
Yeah, the French ambassador, where he says, I don't think I'm in charge.
I don't have control of what's going on.
I think he was referring to Alan Dulles and his aspirations.
Well, this may have been what led Kennedy to fire Dulles.
Right.
Maybe he lost confidence in him.
And, you know, this also is entrenched in the conversation of conspiracy theories.
The JFK assassination is one of the biggest conspiracy theories in America.
And I don't even think many people even consider it.
Like, I hate the term conspiracy.
The term conspiracy theory is a negative term in general.
And I don't even think that I know that JFK assassination isn't even a conspiracy theory anymore.
There's been so much evidence released, and so many people have dedicated books and documentaries and studies to this that no one even refutes some of the evidence.
How none of it links together, whether it be the magic bullet or the Warren Commission reports, the witnesses that have been interviewed after.
It's sort of like the JFK assassination now is like, okay, you guys did your homework.
We don't want to talk about it.
And when it comes specifically to the CIA, the CIA is synonymous for some of the biggest conspiracy theories, like MKUltra.
Well, that wasn't a conspiracy theory.
That was where the agency was actually testing drugs on people and things like that.
That was in the 60s and 70s, yeah.
What were the motives behind MKUltra?
I don't really recall.
I think we were maybe testing psychedelics on people to see if they could be used as a truth serum.
Mm hmm.
Something like that.
Do you know?
Do you think this would have been something that we may become interested in because we saw other nations doing the same thing and we wanted to compete with them, sort of like a space race?
Yeah.
I mean, you've probably heard of this.
You know, we would employ psychics to see if they could, you know, envision, read people's minds.
Well, the Russians were doing that too remote viewing.
Remote viewing.
Yeah.
I forgot the term for it remote viewing.
We were doing it.
The Russians were doing it.
Who knows who else was doing it?
It's just, it seems like some of the most wacky stories that so many people write off as conspiracy theories, you know, because.
Well, no, they actually were going on some of this stuff.
Right, they were.
It wasn't a conspiracy, it actually was going on.
We admitted it, right.
Yeah, well, in the church committee, you know, a lot of this stuff came out.
The fact that we were actually had been asked to do assassination attempts against Castro, you know, that led to Executive Order 12 triple three, which prohibits us from doing things like that unless the White House directs this.
What was that?
Unless the White House.
No, no, what was the executive order?
Order 12333, 12333.
When did that come out?
In the mid 70s, as a result of the church committee.
So there were certain things that the CIA could not, we couldn't just go off and assassinate people.
Now, a lot of folks would say that our using predators and Reaper drones is a just remote assassination, which it is, but that's been authorized by the White House.
The church committee, was that.
Before or after Operation Northwoods?
I'm not sure what Operation Northwoods is.
Oh, okay.
Operation Northwoods was a declassified plan, I believe, that was developed under Alan Dulles to fly an empty passenger jetliner over the Caribbean and have it shot down, basically, to stage an excuse to invade Cuba.
To say that Cubans shot down an empty air, shot down an American airliner.
Right, as a provocation.
Right.
I'd never heard of that.
But again, Dulles was removed about 1963 or 64, 63.
And the church committee didn't happen until the mid 70s.
Okay.
And so a number of things were a result of the church committee.
Also, it led to the creation of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the HIPC, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
So you have.
Congressional oversight of significant CIA operations, and we would have to report periodically to these two congressional bodies.
I've testified and gone down there and talked to these folks before, and they're bipartisan, both Republicans and Democrats.
And if it's my experience with them, is if it's judged to be in the national interest, they're usually pretty much in favor of it.
Today, when you were actively in the CIA compared to today, how do you think it's changed, particularly when it comes to?
The media.
How much influence do you think the CIA has in what we see on national news networks?
Close to zero.
We're prohibited from mounting propaganda campaigns in the United States.
We can do it abroad, but even then, we have to make sure that it doesn't leak back into the United States.
So, a result of the church committee is we couldn't influence the American public.
For instance, if I were to try and recruit you, an American citizen, to do something operational.
I would have to tell you, Danny, you're working for American intelligence.
I wouldn't have to say CIA necessarily, but I have to say you're working for U.S. intelligence so that you are absolutely witting to the fact that what you're doing could put yourself in danger and that you are going to accept that risk consciously and that I wouldn't just manipulate you into doing something.
And that also extends to, I mean, we can't do newspaper articles and propaganda pieces and things like that in the United States.
Right.
But the CIA, in particular, I know the FBI has influence over today's social media platforms, correct?
Well, I can't speak for the FBI.
They've always had a much more robust public relations effort than we have.
We're in the shadows, they're not, but we don't influence the American people.
We can conduct influence campaigns against foreign groups, terrorist groups.
We do that a lot.
Construct a media platform or a social platform or something to try and penetrate a foreign group.
It's possible that we do that.
I don't know.
We like to, you know, we want to be, we have some cutting edge cyber operations, but they're not aimed at the United States.
Okay.
So when it comes to influencing the American people, we can't do it.
The CIA can't do it.
The FBI can.
We can't do it covertly.
We could come out and, okay, I'll give you an example.
One of my best friends, Gary Schroen, a national hero, he was the author of First In, describing how he took our U.S. forces into Afghanistan 15 days after 9 11.
The man's incredibly courageous.
He just passed away about three, four weeks ago.
More decorations than anybody in history as far as a CIA officer.
He's got our equivalent the Medal of Honor, the Silver Star, all of this.
The CIA actually asked him to write that book because it was a good news story about how he led our people.
The CIA team into Afghanistan two weeks, 15 days after 9 11 happened.
And so they asked him to write that with their support.
Okay, but they're not making up stuff.
This actually was his memoir, basically, and they encouraged him to do it.
They didn't pay for it or anything like that, but they encouraged him to do it.
So as long as the CIA involvement is not hidden, and as long as it's the truth, They can put out stuff.
I mean, I don't know if you've got in your library the World Factbook, which the CIA produces.
It's a fact book on every country in the world.
It's an open CIA publication, but it's all true, and you can buy it.
Really?
Yep.
Go on and buy it.
It's actually a very good reference tool.
Look at any country, and they'll tell you the population.
It's like having Wikipedia, but in depth about certain countries.
Interesting.
Yeah.
The World Factbook.
It's a CIA publication.
It's true.
Is it on Amazon?
I'm sure it is.
Really?
If not, go to the CIA.gov and get you a copy.
It comes out every day.
I got to get one for the bookshelf.
Right.
That's fascinating, man.
It's a standard reference tool.
Well, everything that you've been through throughout your career, all the countries you've been to, all the people you've met, all the situations you've been in, what are some of, if you could boil it down to two or three of the biggest lessons you've taken from this life that you've had?
What would those be?
Well, that no doesn't always mean no.
I told you about that one recruitment where the guy said no, and then just less than a week later, he says yes.
That espionage has a multitude of motivations, and I've never known a single person that did it only for money.
There's some kind of it's typically an ego thing or, you know, ego, I'm hurt because you've stolen credit for something I did.
Or you have mistreated me in some way, and so it's a way of getting back.
It could be ideological.
I had people that I recruited that believe strongly in the democracy that we enjoy, and they detested their own government.
We've had people that did it because they were thrill seekers.
You know, a guy that said, Well, I think this is going to be fun.
You know, he had this kind of Walter Mitty type secret image of him being a spy, and all of that.
Writing About What You Know00:02:45
But I think one of the things I've learned is at times it's good.
Maybe more times than not, to just shut up and listen to people.
Because you don't recruit people when you're in transmit mode.
You recruit people when you're listening to them and when you see how they are hurting.
If I want to recruit Danny Jones, I've got to get inside his head and figure out what are his stresses.
How can I relieve his stress?
And everybody's under stress or you're dead.
Everybody's under stress.
And some of it may be invented in stress, your own stress.
And not being able to deal with stress.
But, you know, I was able to recognize stress in people and help them.
And fortunately, you know, I've had a wonderful career.
I really enjoyed the people I work with.
I love my fellow CIA officers.
We're like family, we stand up for one another.
And that's a good feeling.
That's a real good feeling.
Well, that's incredible, man.
What you've done is the stuff that you've been through, the experiences that you've lived through are incredible, even though we will never.
Be able to fully understand what you did.
But thank you so much for coming here and sharing your stories and your wisdom with us.
Where can people listening andor watching find your books?
Again, you can get them on Amazon or Barnes Noble or Book Baby.
And maybe I can't talk about a lot of what I did, but I can write fiction.
I can write spy stories.
They say, write about what you know.
And so I've written these two espionage novels and thinly disguised.
Some of the characters, and not so thinly.
A couple of my friends, I patterned characters in the book after them.
It's a lot easier to pattern it after somebody you know.
It's like a portrait artist.
They don't just stand there and do a portrait.
They look at you and they study you and they paint.
Well, I've found out it was a lot easier rather than inventing a character out of sheer cloth.
If I based a character on somebody I knew, and if they were a good guy, I would get their permission.
Sometimes I'd even let them pick out the name they want and I would describe them.
Interesting.
It's almost like you took real life people and you painted a disguise on them for your book.
Exactly.
I did acknowledge them.
And the acknowledgments, if they were one of the good guys, I said, now here's who it's based on.
And they were tickled to be a fictional character in a book.
Do you find it hard to sort of find the thrill in normal everyday life now that you're not on these clandestine operations?
Running to Relieve Stress00:01:23
Absolutely.
That's why I'm writing fiction.
I can live vicariously through my characters in my novels.
But yeah, I did.
I mean, I still wake up dreaming sometimes that I'm.
Output transcript Out trying to recruit some foreign official.
Interesting, man.
And it's amazing.
We talked about it briefly too, but you're a runner, right?
That's correct.
You're an incredible physical fitness for your age.
It's commendable.
I look up to that.
It's rare to find in people these days.
Well, I started before I was married in 1975, and I've been fortunate I was able to continue that and the marriage for 47 years.
So it was a stress reliever and a way to think about things, usually early in the morning when I go running.
Unfortunately, about two weeks ago, I had a case of tendonitis, and so I've been just walking rather than running, but I will get back there running soon enough.
I had another accident about a year and a half ago where I ruptured the quadricep in my left leg.
That led to about five or six months of recovery.
So it seems like I don't bounce back the way I used to, but I've got a hard head.
And you've got some strong legs, especially after living through that dog attack on your calf.