Annie Jacobsen reveals the Pentagon's terrifying "launch on warning" policy, mandating immediate retaliation within 74 minutes even without confirmation of an attack. She details how DARPA calculated strike times and pursued biohybrid research, while her book Nuclear War exposes the "use it or lose it" doctrine that could trigger nuclear winter, dropping global temperatures by 40 degrees and killing billions. Connecting historical atrocities from Operation Paperclip to modern covert operations, Jacobsen argues that compartmentalized secrecy and flawed deterrence theories leave civilization fragile, suggesting that future conflicts might ultimately be fought with sticks and stones as advanced technology fails. [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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Launch on Warning Explained00:15:23
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Do you just start writing about something that's interesting and does it like evolve into this idea of a book or do you sort of pick what you want to write a book about?
And then go backwards, like reverse engineer it from there.
Like, for example, with Area 51, like, what was the first thing that drew you into that story?
A job.
Like, I wanted a job.
I wanted to write a book so badly.
That was my first book in the world of journalism.
We call it long form, right?
And every, I mean, who isn't dying to write a book?
Look, it's the most amazing profession.
I mean, not only do I write, which is just part of it because I'm a nonfiction author and a reporter, I write about people that I interview.
And so that part of it is extraordinary, you know, just being able to get the stories out of these fascinating people.
And the way Area 51 came to me was the journalist lucky break.
You know, I was reporting, you know, short form, right, where you're kind of like doing the 500-word articles.
And I'd been writing on terrorism because that's what was going on in the early 2000s.
And there was a, let me get this straight.
Okay, so I'm at, I'm at.
Like a Christmas Eve dinner, and my husband's uncle's wife's sister's husband, who's an 87 year old retired Lockheed skunk work, Lockheed guy.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
And I just think he's just this old man who designs, you know, airplane windows because that's kind of the role he always played.
And he leans over to me at this Christmas dinner.
We'd probably had five or six of them at that point and says, Boy, do I have a story for you.
And you know, you think, okay, everybody thinks they have a story.
And he said, the CIA just declassified my life's work.
And he was the physicist who created stealth technology for the CIA, starting when Eisenhower was president.
So he worked on the U 2 and then on the A 12 Oxcart.
And I'm like sitting there at this Christmas dinner, like, what?
Really?
You know, literally they had just declassified all this.
And then he started talking a little bit, and I said, and he was telling me about where they did all the testing of these.
Of these aircraft and I said, you know, he was talking about how it was this facility out in the desert called Groom Lake, and I was like that's not Area 51, by any chance, is it?
And he was like, oh yeah, they call it Area 51.
And then that you know, that was my lucky break.
That was really, and that was before Obama declassified it.
Yeah yeah, that was in 2009 and um, and you know that's how you build a story.
To answer that question, like you, as a reporter, I worked with Lovick and learned all about his story and then said, You know, when he would be talking about Ray Gowdy, the first test pilot on the U-2.
Wait, is Ray around?
Yeah, he's like 93, but, you know, he's still and then you interview Ray Gowdy and you find out what it was like to be the very first human being in a U-2, right?
And then Ray says, oh, you got to talk to Wayne Pendleton or, oh, you got to talk to, you know, Bob Murphy.
And so I put together 74 people who worked in and out of Area 51.
And we're all part of either Lockheed or the Air Force or the CIA.
And that the reason why the book was so secret, going back to the vault thing, was because no one had ever before had all those individuals go on the record, right?
So, and when they were all talking to me, by the way, they would say Groom Lake or the ranch, you know.
But all these declassified documents, you could tell where the word Area 51 was redacted.
You know, they just, excuse me, they declassified everything and then, you know, Crossed out Area 51 with black.
And out of, I don't know, probably several thousand pages of documents I reviewed, in one place they forgot to redact Area 51.
And I put it up on my website.
You know, it was like brilliant.
Wow.
Yeah.
And did you just self fund yourself?
Did you fund yourself through all this?
How long did it take you to write this?
Oh my God, I wrote Area 51, I mean, probably in, you know, a year and a half.
Yeah.
And then I was also writing it for the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
And I had sold a story about.
You know, Burbank, how Lockheed was so integral to the development of Burbank in the 50s.
And, you know, that's a suburb of LA.
And so they loved that story and they did a two part series.
And that led to the, you know, it was coincided to come out right around the book.
And so that allowed me to kind of balance, you know, being a journalist.
That was the transition from being a reporter who wrote magazine pieces and being an author.
And since then, I just, I write.
I write book after book after book.
I love writing.
That's incredible.
Now, the part about the part in the book, like the last, was it like the last 14 pages of the book that talk about the Stalin aircraft with the beings?
That was the reason that they kept it in a vault.
And then how did they, what made him come to the decision to release this to the public?
Well, you know, it's so interesting when you work with sources because, I mean, you and I spoke about this on the phone, right?
Like, how do you trust someone?
How do you work with people that you and develop a relationship with them where they're telling you their role in history, right?
So that's the Ed Lovick, you know, the guy at the dinner party that was the physicist for Lockheed Skunk Works.
The trust part of it comes from knowing someone is a real individual with a real job, you know, that this is, they have a long standing relationship and there's multiple people that can vouch for them in that manner.
And,.
So that's what reporting is always about.
And that's why a lot of people come to you from, you know, friends of friends.
And the one individual that you're asking about in Area 51 that caused such a commotion, you know, they all know him.
All the people in the book know him.
They're all part of the same group of people who, I mean, most of them are dead now.
But, you know, this is how you put together a story.
And it's always interesting, too, public's reaction to that, you know, how the public deals with.
People's legitimacy.
And that's why, as nonfiction authors, or at least in my position, all of my books are seriously footnoted.
Like there'll be 400 pages of text and 100 pages of notes.
But all of the books, as we spoke earlier before we started, I write about the CIA, I write about the Pentagon.
All these projects, all these programs, all these hundreds of individuals, CIA operators, paramilitary operators, engineers, spies, servicemen, all of them, almost all of them at some point in the reporting history tell me, Annie, I did what I did so we would prevent nuclear World War III.
And that's why this new book I wrote, Nuclear War, a Scenario, Is so significant for me in like a timeline of my work as an author because there's this like, once I knew I was going to write that book, it was like the most obvious moment of all.
It was like, but of course, all of these other books have led up to this narrative, which frightens the hell out of me.
Even reading it, you know, for the hundredth time, right?
I mean, what was your experience reading it?
I was terrified.
I was terrified reading it.
I had to put it down and, and, Go for multiple walks during the process of reading that book.
And I, like I told you, I was listening to Christopher Nolan's movie soundtrack while I was reading the book, and it was like watching a movie in real life.
I mean, you talk about nukes in all of your books.
And what I love about the new book is it's a fictional scenario, but it's also a real scenario.
And it's, I have so many questions because it's like, it's not like, You just go from place to place talking about events that happened.
You're talking about a potential event that could happen.
You're playing it out a fictional scenario that could possibly happen, which makes that book so unique and so captivating to read.
And it's.
And a small correction is that I don't know, I wouldn't call the book fictional.
I would call it a fact based scenario, right?
Because everything that is reported in the book, I take you through.
What will happen from nuclear launch to nuclear winter?
Yes.
And the shocking part, as you now know, having read it, is that this happens in seconds and minutes and hours.
Yes.
Not months and years.
I mean, nuclear winter itself, the part five of the book is a longer part, but the war itself is 74 minutes, right?
Because 72, because what I learned from the different sources that I worked with and let me just say, you know, two Secretary of Defenses, the head, a former STRATCOM commander,
former nuclear sub-force commander, the former director of FEMA, the person in charge of what to do with the public after nuclear war, which you learn is not much because as he told me, everyone will be dead, right?
So I take the reader and this was the shocking part because when I approached it, One wondered, how will I do this, right?
How does one keep it on point of fact and not go into, you know, making things up?
And the only things that are made up in the book are in italics.
And that's the dialogue that, like, for example, the Secret Service director or the special agent in charge of the president's detail for the Secret Service will say to the CAT team element.
And that also comes from my interviews with those individuals when I would say, well, like, what would you say?
And in some places, I'm able to quote a Secretary of Defense because he says, No, Annie, this is what I would say, this, and will give me a verbatim line.
That's when you see it's in quotes.
Right.
But otherwise, he says, Well, this would be total chaos.
And, you know, this is called jamming the president when the STRATCOM commander is saying this and the SECDEF is saying this and the Joint Chiefs of Staff is saying that, right?
Right.
The chairman.
That's what I love about it because it's not told in like a third person.
It's told as in like first person, you're there, it's happening now.
That's what makes, like, that's what really makes the book so.
gripping like it just it had me by the throat the whole time i was reading it it was hard to put it down and also reporting that finding out these individual places that exist where thousands of people are rehearsing new what what to do in nuclear war day in day out and have been doing this since 1945.
this is the shocking part of it you know learning about the aerospace data facility in colorado that by the way was classified its look its existence was classified until 2008.
That's where the data comes in from the satellite that sees the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM as it launches in less than a second.
So in a fraction of a second from the time that there would be a rogue launch, in my book I use the North Korean scenario, right?
A fraction of a second, the entire command and control, nuclear command and control system knows, holy shit.
nuclear launch, right?
And then it's just tick, counting down what happens.
And that should scare the hell out of everyone because you don't really think of that anymore.
No, you don't.
We think, oh my God, the Cold War is over.
People aren't, you know, and then, and yet you, in Ukraine, you have situations where you have, you know, the president of Russia talking about or alluding to maybe using a tactical nuke.
These are terrible.
You have, you know, situations where people actually even contemplate this.
Hopefully, when they read the book, they realize this is sheer madness.
The idea of even using one nuclear weapon.
All the war game scenarios in the Pentagon have showed us that once one is launched, it's the end game.
Once one is launched.
Yes.
That was probably the scariest revelation for me because I don't think anybody knows that.
I don't think anybody is, by and large, is aware that we have a rule that as soon as missiles launch heading towards us, we have to empty our arsenal.
It's use it or lose it, at least for our ICBMs.
Use them or lose them.
I mean, you can't even believe that when you hear that, but yet that is an actual nomenclature that is tossed around.
Washington.
The same as how about the bolt out of the blue attack?
Right.
Right.
When you learn these different strategies, launch on warning.
I mean, for all the reporting I had done previously, six books prior, you hear sort of in passing, launch on warning, but you don't really know what that means until you drill down on it.
And then you realize that we don't actually, the way in which the policy is set up, and again, this is explained to me.
Point by point, from former Secretary of Defense William Perry, right?
Reckless Nuclear Strategies00:03:08
Point by point, we do not wait to absorb a nuclear weapon.
So once the satellite systems tell us, whoop, a nuke is on the way, launch on warning is the policy.
And then I didn't know this, but they launched them over the North Pole to go hit, if it is from North Korea, it has to go over, fly over Russia to hit North Korea.
And what are the chances that we can get Putin on the line in less than six minutes to tell them, hey, we got MIRV nukes coming over your continent of Siberia and Russia that are going to go for North Korea?
They're not coming for you, they're going for North Korea.
That is terrifying.
I mean, it's so terrifying, and it really is almost unbelievable.
Like, okay, I mean, most people do not realize that.
And even if you, when I had initially, there's a brilliant scientist called Hans Christensen who keeps track of all of the nuclear weapons and reports them with his colleagues in the Bulletin of Atomic Science.
You know, it's called the Nuclear Notebook.
And so he keeps track of all these things.
And I did the interview with Christensen, and he's the one who said to me, Absolutely, the nukes go over the North Pole if we're going to strike back at North Korea, let's say if they attacked us.
And they have to overfly Russia.
And so you think to yourself, wait, is that really plausible?
And when I did my interview with former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who was also a former director of the CIA and was also a former White House chief of staff.
Okay.
So he has been around in all these different positions.
And he said to me, I'm paraphrasing, yes, the hole over the North Pole is a problem.
You know, you just go, oh my God, right?
Like, how can this kind of existential, like mayhem, potential apocalyptic mayhem exist every second of every day of every year?
And it does.
And we just are kind of living with this sword of Damascus over our heads.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, okay, well, and I really, I mean, the book is terrifying, but I hope that it brings to the table a discussion about all of this.
Like, you know, it's not something that is wise.
And it's certainly not something, you know, when you look at the former president, you know, the whole fire and fury with North Korea, it's like that just seems so reckless once you know how fundamentally perilous all of this is.
Yeah, you said it great in the Pentagon's Brain Book.
You said every man, woman, and child has the sword of Damocles dangling over their head by the thinnest of strings.
Nazi Scientists Under Interrogation00:09:38
And it could be cut at any moment by accident or by a miscommunication.
And that was Kennedy's quote.
Oh, that was Kennedy's quote.
That was Kennedy's quote.
He's such an interesting president.
I've looked at all the presidents.
You know, I always stay out of politics.
No one has any idea how I vote.
And I have just as many readers on both sides of the aisle.
It's so.
I'm so in favor of that because the.
Well, nothing you write about is an opinion.
It's all real documentary.
It's all like it's.
Nothing you're writing is your opinion.
And people then form their own opinions.
Right.
Okay.
So I'm going to tell you an anecdote about that because.
When I wrote Operation Paperclip about the Nazi scientists who came to America after the war, my editor really taught me.
I had a position that I, that was the closest I was coming to an opinion, right?
My editor, wise that he is, suggested that I thread in some more of the concept of, you know, that many people believed if these Nazis didn't come to America, we'd all be speaking Russian, okay?
So that that was necessary to win the Cold War.
And I did that.
And when the book came out, I mean, that was what, 2013.
So you could actually, a journalist could still appear on CNN and Fox News back to back nights.
I mean, that would never happen now, which is tragic, you know, in my opinion.
But you could.
You could be on both because I was just telling, you know, I just had an interesting story that lots of people were really interested in.
And when I would be in the more conservative environments, they would, people would say, Oh my God, Annie Jacobson, thank God you wrote this book, Operation Paperclap.
You showed us that.
If we didn't hire these guys, we'd all be speaking Russian.
And then I would go over to the more liberal organizations, the news organizations, and they would say, oh my God, Annie Jacobson, you wrote this book, Operation Paperclip, and man, did you show us that hiring those Nazis was the worst, most odious, undemocratic thing we ever did.
I mean, thank you so much for writing this book.
They're both wrong.
What do you think?
I don't know.
I think, well, they're both right and they're both wrong, right?
I think I think that we had it was either get those scientists or let the Russians get the scientists.
Like it's, it's, it's the game theory thing, right?
It's the, it's the, um, the prisoner's dilemma.
The same thing with nuclear war.
Like, let's just say, let's prosecute them all, send them off to prison, execute them, and let's hope that the Russians do the same exact thing.
Or do we take all their science?
I mean, it's what's fascinating.
Like, one of the things that blew my mind about Operation Paperclip was that these people like Warner von Braun, You said Von Braun?
You call him Von Braun.
I mean, there's so many different pronunciations.
I just try to stick to one pronunciation, but I'm of the.
I remember we had a president who said Pakistan, and we had a secretary of state who said Pakistan.
So, right?
You can say whatever.
It's just transliteration.
So, after Hitler enacted that scorched earth policy where he.
What happened?
They destroyed all the infrastructure.
In Germany, all the dams, all the bridges, everything kind of like what they did in Rome.
Um, von Braun and some other high ranking Nazi scientists were basically like sitting in a mansion eating caviar because they knew that they the Russians or the Americans needed them badly and they had a future with the U.S. Army or with the Russians.
Absolutely, and what was so interesting reporting that book was looking at documents in the national archives, right?
Looking at their files, so they're.
Once they became part of the American national security apparatus, they had files on them.
But then they, and they, their past, like sort of what they were doing in World War II, was all done from interviews, right?
So you have to take into consideration that these were Nazis saying what they did, you know, under interrogation as opposed to seen through a different lens.
I went to Germany and looked at the Bundesarchives, and they had.
a lot of different kind of records that were fascinating.
I mean, I had a German translator with me.
And so I was able to report, I think, more of the story than had existed on the record, although I, you know, there are some incredible journalists that came before me that were working in different veins of the individual scientists and things, and I definitely stand on their shoulders, but definitely was able to get some original reporting on the record, including a lot of this sort of The capture moment, right?
And right before the war ended, that you're talking about, where these Nazis knew that the war was going to end not in their favor.
And they wanted to work for the Americans.
They knew they were valuable.
And they did not want to go work for the Russians because they hated one another, the Russians and the Germans hated one another.
And in fact, we know from the declassified documents that the Germans, the Nazi scientists who did wind up in Russia were treated like garbage.
Oh, really?
They had a program.
There's a whole CIA file on this I found at the National Archives where the CIA was like, what are they, you know, what do they have?
Who do they have?
And what are they doing?
And so we were constantly trying to get intel.
And this is, of course, all pre-U2, so it all kind of threads together.
We didn't know anything.
We didn't know what was going on in the aftermath of the war.
in Russia in those first few years.
And so the CIA was hunting for information and the best information they could get was a couple years after the war ended, the Russians kind of got all they could or all they thought they could from the German rocket scientists and then just sent them home.
And we called the program, the CIA called the program Operation Dragon Return.
That's what it was called.
And we had CIA officers, you know, interviewing these, the Germans as they were being brought back.
to try to say, what did you tell the Russians?
And it was interesting because the Russian rocket program was actually superior to the American program in the early 50s.
And of course, they got Sputnik.
Absolutely.
Launching Sputnik required essentially a ballistic missile.
And so there's a really complex argument that, wait a minute, maybe those Nazi scientists weren't so great because the Russians, who were working from almost nothing, given what their country was destroyed.
And yet they were able to build up their rocket program.
So there's an argument that if American rocket scientists had been moved to the fore, you know, they would have been just as excellent as the Von Browns.
But still, you know, having interviewed two of the men on the moon, two astronauts, Apollo astronauts, as I have, Ed Mitchell and Buzz Aldrin, both who, in our discussions and our interviews, Are so enamored with the German scientists, they can simply not think of them as former Nazis.
Really?
I mean, so, you know, this is.
What does it mean to be a Nazi?
That's a good question.
That was in your book.
Well, what do you think it means to be a Nazi?
I don't know.
I'm not qualified to answer.
I think, you know, I found it interesting the story of, I think her name is Hannah Arendt, where she talks about she had a lover.
She was Jewish and she fell in love with a Nazi.
And she had a.
Basically, what she talked about, she breaking down good and evil.
Like, it's not, she was saying that there's so much nuance.
Like the guy that she was in love with was the guy who was in charge of the transportation with the trains or whatever.
And she was like, This guy has never had a coherent thought go through his mind.
He's not a thinker, right?
You say that how do evil people sleep at night?
Well, they sleep great because they don't have a conscience.
And this guy was just sort of following rules, right?
You just sort of have people who aren't thinkers that just follow the rules and get through the day.
And that was what she was saying about the guy she fell in love with.
Like, this guy is not inherently evil.
Like, he's not a killer.
He's not a Hitler.
But he was born in a certain, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And he was following the rules.
That was her argument.
Well, obviously, I didn't interview any Nazis.
So I only interviewed the children of Nazis.
Keto Brains for Sharp Minds00:03:01
Right.
And so my perspective comes from like the reverse engineering of the crime, right?
The massive genocide.
And so.
When one looks at history like that, your lens is, you know, is focused on evil, right?
So I don't, I can't think of it any other way.
And also, I am someone who does believe in forgiveness, right?
So that's a whole other complex situation.
And I have interviewed many people who have had a very guilty conscience and I have, I have borne witness to that, right?
And it's a very, it's a very, Human situation.
You know, it's just, it's profound.
Okay.
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Confirmed Prisoner Experiments00:08:59
What I found shocking was reading and studying all these Nazis through their files, through their interrogations, and then also looking at those who kind of became heroes in America, right?
And sort of had buildings named after them and became part of the American way of life.
Never once did any single one of them ever, ever, anywhere, ever, in any document, be it their private files or their public interviews, did they ever express remorse.
Ever.
And that says something to me.
What do you think that is?
Denial denial denial right, you know.
And to be able to, you know, look your new employer in the eye and say, I was not a Nazi.
The only people in my establishment who are Nazis were the was the janitor, you know when it's just simply not true.
You yourself were a Nazi, everyone you were hired was a Nazi, you know.
The book was so, that book was so meaningful to me.
And, you know, it's, it's, when you write and you write about really dark things, there is, at least my style is like, how much do you show your reader?
Okay.
Right.
So, in other words, in the nuclear war book, it's meant to terrify you.
And yet it's all mechanical.
Right.
I do describe what happens to people.
When they are incinerated, because I learned that information from declassified Atomic Energy Commission documents.
Okay, and it is horrific right, people turning into combusting carbon right, but it's scientific and so it's.
It's like, it's like fruit, it's like frigidly cold horror as you're reading it right, you with your soundtrack um, in your mind.
But very different from that at the other end of the spectrum is the horror of the Holocaust, the horror of World War II.
And so, but I knew when I was writing paperclip that if I, if I just, if I was too descriptive, it, people might have to put the book down because people can only handle so much.
But I needed to know it.
And so I went to Dachau and I met with the lead archivist.
What is Dachau for people listening that might not know?
Dachau is the concentration camp, one of the first, and it was in Germany, unlike Auschwitz, which was in Poland.
And it's where a lot of medical experiments took place, you know, gruesome, gruesome medical experiments, the freezing experiments, that the aircraft, the people who were involved in aircraft engineering and the doctors that were working, that then ended up coming to America, this is where they all sort of, you know, that was their laboratory, right?
They experimented on prisoners, okay?
They killed them.
And you could distance yourself by having it be that guy, your student doing the work.
But I hold them all accountable.
These are those who came to America and became our heroes.
But in any event, at Dachau, I asked the archivist to show me the actual photographs.
And they have them there.
And I saw them.
And I will never forget.
I mean, what I remember, I can remember the look in the, you know, a series of photographs of someone living and then dying.
You know, being frozen to death.
And I, or in an altitude chamber, a decompression chamber, you know.
Oh, God.
I mean, just horrific.
But I had to see that so that I could forcefully write that narrative.
And it taught.
How were they freezing them?
The freezing experiments, they had a big, and there are some famous photographs of them, some that are also available online now, but they had a big, like, you know, almost like a blow-up pool, right?
And they had ice water in it.
And the idea, the Nazi experiments, they were not just doing them to be cruel per se, right?
The idea was they wanted, they needed pilots to fly higher, faster, and further, okay?
So, and then when you would get shot down in the North Sea, you would freeze to death.
And so they needed to know how, the Reich this is, needed to know how long can a pilot survive in freezing water before we can rescue him.
And they wanted to know that, like, oh, do we send our resources out to get this guy?
It's been XYZ amount of time.
And so they tested how long someone could live before they froze to death on concentration camp prisoners and like young men who are the same age as pilots, you know?
You know, I know this is a terrible comparison, but I was watching this video online this morning of these.
They call them nuclear veterans.
The atomic soldiers.
The atomic soldiers.
These kids were like 18, 19 years old.
They put them on ships and they put them out where they drop bombs, where they drop nukes.
They told them, turn around, just don't look at the flash, cover your face like this, face the other way.
And these people said they could see the x rays of their hands through their closed eyes when the flash came through.
And they had to deal with their children were born with like crazy diseases that they were like dying early and stuff.
Like it was, that's on par with some of this shit.
Yes.
I mean, it's so complex because, again, you know, we had the Nuremberg trials, we had the doctor's trial, you know, to set the gold standard of what can never be done to a human.
And then we turned around and did many of those same things.
The Atomic Energy Commission absolutely did.
I mean, this is on the record now.
In the name of, you know, we must prevent nuclear World War III.
There you go.
So, and, but if it does happen, we have to know how it's going to affect people.
I mean, the atomic soldiers there were those on ships and there were also those in the desert in Nevada when we were setting off bombs because they wanted to see how they, being the Defense Department, wanted to see how soldiers would perform in nuclear battle.
They wanted to see how they would perform physically and also psychologically, right?
They said that some of the people were there on the boat, like crying for their mothers after that flash went off.
But, you know, the flip side of that, too, is then there's Billy Waugh, right?
So we segue to Billy Waugh, who actually, you know.
Billy.
We are all over the place in this podcast.
We are not staying.
Sorry, this is going to be an interwoven discussion of all of the books at once.
This is not going to be a segmented chapter of one book after the other.
That's okay.
But Billy Wong was part of a green light team who jumped a handheld nuke into Area 51, or actually, it wasn't Area 51, but it was near Area 51, into the Nevada test site.
And multiple people.
You know, Billy told me this amazing story.
It's in the book Surprise, Kill, Vanish that I wrote about the CIA's paramilitary.
And, you know, many people are like, how do you, you know, you're, because that's what we call a single source story, right?
It's just Billy who told me that, right?
And I, when I report a story that is a single source, I make it clear that it's, you know, what is being said is in quotes, right?
But when I was researching nuclear war, the new book, I worked with, Los Alamos was very, very helpful to me.
Wow.
And very transparent and really interesting.
And I think a lot of it had to do with the Oppenheimer film, right?
They realized that public awareness of things is significant, right?
Information is king.
But they confirmed the Billy Waugh.
One of the librarians, historians, confirmed the Billy Waugh story.
The briefcase nuke.
Yes, which was just like, amen, you know?
Wow.
Yeah, that was a crazy story.
Um back to Paperclip though.
So can you explain this Otto Ambrose character, I mean, and didn't you interview his family?
The Otto Ambrose Story00:12:35
I did, I did.
Um Ambrose to me was pure evil, right?
I mean, he worked for IG Farben, who is the chemical company who you know made Xyclumbi and other all kinds of other um you know, chemicals, and Ambrose was part of the chemical weapons scientists that were of great interest to the United States.
But more than anything that was shocking to me was that I found in the National Archives the receipt, and this had never been reported before, of a one million Reichsmarks bonus that Adolf Hitler gave to Otto Ambrose.
to thank him for his work.
One million Reichsmarks.
That's how important he was to Adolf Hitler himself.
And Ambrose was tried and convicted at Nuremberg of mass murder and slavery because he was in charge of the chemical element of the chemical factory.
There was a rubber plant at Auschwitz called Buna.
And most people don't even know about this.
I didn't know about this before I reported Paperclip.
But Buna was where the young men, the young Jewish concentration camp prisoners who, okay, you'd get off the trains, go that way to be gassed.
Oh, you're a young man that's 18 years old and you look healthy.
Let's work you to death over at Buna, building rubber for the Reich because they needed tanks and, you know, The tanks needed treads.
Didn't they develop synthetic rubber?
Yeah, the first ones.
That was Ambrose.
That was Ambrose.
That's why they got the million in his team, yes.
And he was in charge of the plant there.
And then on the flip side of that, I interviewed Gerhard Merschowski, who was an actual Buna survivor, right?
So he was 18 years old and he was picked coming off the train.
And, you know, it's like when, I mean, he was in his 90s when I interviewed him and he described to me.
How, when he was leaving quickly, like, oh, you know, of course, people didn't know they were getting on a train to go to Auschwitz.
Auschwitz, they just knew they had to leave quickly from where they're home.
And he put on his best boots, like his sturdiest boots.
And those boots saved his life because he could work and walk through the frozen, you know, soil to this Buna factory that was just so, you know, it was a death camp.
It was a work to death camp as opposed to gas you to death camp.
And auto, the records that I found in Germany that describe.
Ambrose, you know, a few days before the Russians liberated Auschwitz, knowing the Russians were near, and Otto Ambrose like rapidly gathering up all his papers so that he wouldn't be, you know, caught for the criminal, the war criminal that he was, and then leaving on a fancy train.
And, you know, the fact that we were interested in him and hired him is just, it just, It's horrifying in every level.
And I mean, remember, he was convicted at Nuremberg and he was in Landsberg prison and then a kind of deal was made to let the prisoners out because, you know, there was a new war.
This is now we're in the late 50s or the mid 50s and it's time to get, you know, get over what happened in Germany.
And that's one of the conditions for the Germans to be our partners.
the West Germans was to release all the prisoners from Landsberg.
And that's why Ambrose, Otto Ambrose, was released.
And then he, you know, it's very mysterious in what capacity he worked for us.
But he did work for us because he has a paperclip file.
But, and there are, you know, there's entry and exit visas and nothing else, right?
It's just all been obfuscated.
Wow.
The story is waiting to be told.
More of it.
I told what I could in paperclip.
You know, um, I mean, they even gave him his villa back.
They gave him his Swiss villa.
Is that where his family lives now?
Yes, and it's complicated because I reached the son and, um, who got all the money, you know, and like it was living in a house that was paid for by Hitler.
I mean, it was a very contentious conversation, and it was like, do not call me anymore.
And I, you know, I even pursued that and I remember being told by one of my attorneys, like Annie, they have different laws in Germany for stalking like you can, you know, because a reporter can kind of really, you know, you can become a bit like a pit bull with a bone, especially in a situation like that.
You know, you really wanted to talk to him.
I really wanted to know, did you consider just showing up at his house?
That's what I was going to do, and I was just advised against it.
It's here, like not not advised, like told, like don't do that, bad idea, Good Lord.
Who else did you talk to there when you went there?
Well, Dr. Blum.
So if you Google Kurt Blum, you can find a photo of him and Kennedy and Johnson.
You should find that, Steve.
No, no, no.
That's Debuss.
Oh, that's Debuss.
That's Kurt Debuss.
That's right.
He was, I mean, you know, Blum was the Reichsgesundheitführer.
That was his German title.
And that means the Deputy Surgeon General. of the Third Reich, okay?
And he was in such close proximity to Hitler, he wore the golden party badge.
This little pin that meant he had favor with the Fuhrer, right?
And he planned, oh God, the documents I found in the Bundesarchive, they were just murderous, you know.
Dr. Kurt Blum is his name.
There he is up there on the left, right?
Top left.
Yeah.
And he has that dueling scar.
Yeah, they all had those dueling scars.
But he, I found these documents where he talks about giving Sonderbehandlung, that's the German term, to, you know, like I think it was 10,000 or maybe it was 18,000 tubercular Poles, like Polish people with tuberculosis.
And Sonderbehandlung means special treatment.
And that's the way a reporter unwinds, like, oh, that's a euphemism for death.
Because he's writing these documents I found, he's writing back and forth to Himmler, you know, we should just give them Sonderbehandlung, special treatment.
And Himmler saying, yes, but the parents might want, or the family members might wonder, you know, so you can, they're deciding to kill masses of people.
And when I went to speak with Kurt Blum's son, who had never done an interview until we did an interview, who was just a remarkable human being, like amazing, you know, just what was he like?
Oh, my God.
I mean, he had been a doctor, and he looked, he's like for as evil as his father looks, he looks kind and gentle and is, right?
And he writes books and he'd given up his medical, his traditional medical career to treat people with Bach flowers.
What's a Bach flower?
Like Bach is like, it's like a Bach flower.
It's like, it's like almost like aromatherapy.
Oh, okay.
Right?
So it's like holistic medicine.
And it's this incredible human irony that the father, because, Kurt Blum's primary job and why he was interesting to the Defense Department, the War Department, was that he was working on a bubonic plague bomb for Hitler.
Okay?
Literally.
I mean, the documents are all there.
He was developing a plague bomb for Adolf Hitler.
Jesus Christ.
He was in charge of the biological warfare program.
And that he was trying to kill people, you know, that way.
And his son is trying to cure people for.
With flowers is this remarkable irony and it's just endlessly interesting and the you know, America being a country where, like everyone seems to have like father issues right.
And then you go and you I mean just to have met the young Dr. Blum, and you kind of put yourself in his moccasins and you imagine, I mean, he had no contact with his father, never met him.
No no, he met him in all of that, but like after the war, I mean Oh, he just abandoned him after the war.
Yeah, they just went that, you know, Kurt Blum's wife, Bettina Blum, was Germany's, let me get this right, she was Germany's most famous novelist.
Like, I think it was even romance novels, like in the 30s, right?
They were this dashing couple, you know, and it was interesting because he was kind of like an epic figure in German medicine before, you know, The Reich took over.
And he transformed.
He became a nationalist.
He became a fascist.
He wrote books sort of at the cusp of National Socialism in 1933.
And it's just, I could just go on forever about.
What do you write books about?
About being a doctor.
Okay.
About being a doctor, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that's an interesting thing about these scientists like him and von Braun and Otto Ambrose is their career or their profession takes precedent.
And any sort of evil that will.
Help propel them, no matter good or evil, no matter what it is, they're willing to go with it as long as it propels what they're interested in.
And that's the great conundrum because, you know, of like, how far do you go with pushing science?
And where are the lines of morality, you know?
And what is a human capable of when they.
swallow the Kool-Aid about a certain ideology.
You know, that is the fundamental question at the heart of every book I have ever written because that question gets raised by many members of elite military forces that I have interviewed.
You know, how does, how does, how do you walk that line?
How do you, you know, how, at what point is there a no?
And usually there isn't.
And usually, like, I found one of the most interesting things at Area 51 is how I, when I reported Area 51 is when I learned what need to know actually is, right?
And it's a very, you know, sort of innocuous situation at Area 51 in terms of developing planes.
Like, somebody in one room is working on the engine, and in another room, they're working on the windshield wipers, okay?
And you don't know for what.
It's like that myth of four people feeling an elephant.
Walking the Ethical Line00:05:26
And one of them thinks it's a tree trunk, and one of them thinks it's a rope.
That's the compartmentalization.
Yes.
And so that is also a system of systems works, right?
And that's the same with the nuclear war industry.
You're just working on a piece of the action, you know.
Going back to real quick to when you were in Germany and you were interviewing his son, didn't he give you a bunch of stuff to take home?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I went there and it was like, it was such a, it was like a moment.
I mean, he opened the door and said, you know, I've been waiting for you to come.
Like it was like a, like as a metaphor, like finally, right?
Because there was a kind of catharsis about him, at least I felt, speak, you know, Well, what was interesting is he said, I will tell you everything I know about my father, but you have to tell me everything you know.
And I had just come from the archive with my German PhD, brilliant historian translator who was working with me and reading these Dr. Kurt Blom Reichesgesundheitführer documents about the Sunderby handling, about the special treatment, about killing tubercular poles.
And the younger Dr. Blom asked me to explain that.
To him, what I knew of his father, and I did, you know, with the reporter's hat on.
But you also have this feeling of like, oh, God, you know, it's like it's the person's father, right?
Right, right.
And so then he told me everything that, you know, he shared with me, what he knew of his father, and that's in the book, in Operation Paperclip.
And then when I was leaving, he said, I have these books.
He had like this incredible collection of books, you know, incredible.
And like I said, he had written, I think he's written six or eight books.
And none of which deal with, you know, political issues or anything just about being a human and about being a doctor and about, you know, homeopathic medicine.
But he said, I have something for you.
You know, I want you to read these.
And he pulled these books down and he gave them to me and I realized, looking at them, and they had wrappers on them and they actually had exhibit number such and such from the Nuremberg trials, and I was like oh my god, I can't, you know.
I thought he wanted me to take them back to my hotel room and read them and I said I And he said, no, I don't.
I want you to have them.
I want you to have them.
I don't want them.
And you should have them.
And I do have them.
And I have them.
And I, you know, I think about them and I look at them sometimes, you know.
Because, you know, what Blum did at the Nuremberg trial is extraordinary in its mental sort of screws with your head, right?
Blum was so smart and crafty.
He was at the doctor's trial before he worked for, you know, before he became part of Paper Club.
And he got it.
He and his wife, Bettina, were still together.
And she kind of worked with his attorney.
And they found documents to demonstrate that American doctors were experimenting on prisoners during the war.
The prosecution completely off guard during the Nuremberg trial.
Like, if you read these manuscripts of the, I mean, the doctor's trial is this shocking trial and many shocking things happen, but that is like the prosecution was stunned.
It was like, you know, they didn't know what to say.
Like, did we really do this?
And we did.
And that blew the argument against Blum and he was acquitted.
Wow.
What were we doing to prisoners and where?
I mean, you know, and then this gets you all, I mean, then it just kept going through MKUltra.
Area 51 stuff?
Yes.
We were experimenting on prisoners and we were, you know, it has to do with testing, again, testing, you know, penicillin, testing degrees of sickness.
And it was part of the war effort.
And so it became, you know, and that he became so cynical, like in his post-trial interrogations and discussions with his handlers, all of which I read and I write about in Operation Paperclip.
You know, he's so cynical and he it's really creepy because he has a point, you know, which doesn't excuse any of his murderous behavior, but he does have a point about hypocrisy and it's just frightening and spooky in its complete factual reality.
Have you ever seen the show based on PK Dick's book?
It's called Man in the High Castle.
I haven't seen it yet.
Cynicism in Post-Trial Interrogations00:10:29
I keep it's on the list.
Yeah, it's incredible.
It really, like, I mean, you can read history.
I mean, you can go to the links that you did, watch the videos.
But, like, the way they did that show and how they show, like, what would happen if the Nazis would have taken over America and, like, all the symbolism everywhere, the beautiful, like, all the emblems, flags in the yard, the branding, the branding was, like, ungodly.
One of the top guys wasn't American.
This is a little part, I'll just ruin this.
One of the top guys who wasn't American ends up, you know, joining the Nazis.
And, uh, Down the road, he was one of the top guys, one of the most evil guys, right?
He becomes just pure evil.
Then his son goes in for a physical, and they find out his son has some sort of neurodegenerative disease, and his son has to be euthanized.
And that's the sort of spiral you watch him go down, the father.
Yeah.
And it is just, it's gut wrenching.
It is just so gut wrenching.
And then to read your book and hear about all the euthanization they were doing on people with disease or people with mental problems or whatever it may be, it was just, yeah, it's just makes you want to throw up.
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It's linked below, and then back to the show.
Then you fast.
Okay, so the outcome of Blum, he's acquitted at Nuremberg, and then we hire him.
And we know that he's such a hot potato, right?
And his name is so public, right?
I mean, one of the most shocking things is all these Nazis came to America under their own names.
They did not have pseudonyms.
But Blum.
And you see this in his intelligence, in his file, the handlers were like, ah, we can't really bring you to America yet.
We kind of have to, you know, cool it.
So we'll put you at one of our facilities in Germany because we occupied Germany.
And they put him, Blum, at this place called Camp King where he was the doctor.
And I write this at length and I'm still shocked that this hasn't gotten more attention because Camp King was the original.
Black Site.
And it was run by the military and the CIA.
And Camp King, as I report in the book, was where the program that became known as MKUltra began, right?
Originally, it was called Bluebird and then Artichoke.
And this is where we were testing drugs on prisoners.
Wow.
What year?
It began immediately.
I went there.
I went to.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Haus Waldorf.
They.
Okay, first interrogation center for the German Air Force.
And so there was a horrible, evil Nazi named Reinhard Galen, and he had been in charge of, for Hitler, he'd been in charge of, you know, Eastern Front intelligence.
So he collected intelligence on the Soviets.
So of course we wanted him after the war.
So he was set up at his own facility down the road from Camp King.
And Galen would grab individuals who he said were Soviet spies.
Okay.
I mean, my God, he was just settling scores half the time.
We know that now, right?
And say, oh, this guy's a Soviet spy.
Essentially torture him with these radical new drugs you're working on.
And let's see what we can learn.
And so, you know, all of the early programs to see how much morphine you could give someone before their head exploded, how much, you know, this was all going on at Camp King.
And Dr. Blum was the doctor.
Dr. Blum was the doctor there.
I mean, and that is original reporting for me from Paperclip, followed by his arch nemesis, who to me is the most important, one of the most interesting people in Operation Paperclip, Dr. Walter Schreiber, who was the Surgeon General of the Reich, not the deputy, but the Surgeon General.
And he was one of the most odious human beings imaginable.
And, you know, it's just like, I don't want to spoil his story of what he did and how his outcome was, because you've got to read Paperclip, but like that he winds up.
in Texas, you know, eating cheeseburgers and living the American dream is just mind boggling.
And how he winds up, I mean, it's just, it's worth a read, right?
And then, and that, and also he's one of the only paperclip scientists who gets exposed and expelled.
He had to leave.
Oh, really?
Yeah, he had to leave.
How did he get exposed?
He got exposed by Leo Alexander, who was, had been in charge of finding out You know, he was an American Jew who was a psychiatrist who was sent to the ruins of the Reich to find out who to hang, right?
Find doctors to prosecute.
And so, on the one hand, you had him pursuing who to hang, and he's up against the guys who are secretly figuring out who to hire, right?
Wow.
It was this wild conundrum.
And Leo Alexander didn't know.
You know, he didn't know.
He was the chief investigator for the doctor's trial.
And he didn't realize that there was this other program until much later, until the 50s, when he found out Schreiber was living in America.
Wow.
And then.
Wasn't there.
Which one of them was like the top guy at Kennedy Space Center at one point?
That was Debuss.
That was Debuss.
Okay, that was Debuss.
That was Debuss.
Who wore, I found in his file, you know, these little tidbits that a reporter kind of gets to put on the record for the first time become a little bit of a badge.
Of honor and I don't think it had been ever reported before that Kurt Davis wore his Nazi Reich uniform to work at Pina Mundi, where he worked like that was not required you could go.
And where?
At Pina Mundi, which is in Germany, where they were building the rockets okay okay, but he wore like out of pride.
I thought you were saying he wore it to Kennedy Space Center.
I was like what?
No no no, out of out of pride.
He wore his Nazi suit to work back during the war right, and he also turned in a fellow scientist who wouldn't give him the Hitler salute.
Wow.
Right.
And that guy went to the Gestapo picked him up and that guy was, you know, taken off, right?
So Kurt Debuss was a hardcore Nazi, right?
Like an avowed Nazi.
And, you know, you look at pictures of him with that dueling scar, which was the mark of the elite, you know?
But.
That was such a weird, unique thing that the Nazis did.
Like, it was almost like they didn't even need to have the sword fight.
They could just cut each other's cheeks open and you would get the job done because it seemed like they just all wanted that scar.
And of course, it began earlier, you know, and then it was outlawed for a while, and then the Nazis.
You know, when they were younger, they brought it back.
It meant you were at one of these elite universities.
And they would sometimes, and it was interesting because, of course, they.
Can you find some examples, some photos of them?
Many of them would become, you know, doctors themselves, but they would, when you'd have a slice in this duel, then they would pack the wound with horsehair to make it more pronounced because that was a sign of, you know, sort of prowess.
Who was that?
Is that Von Brown on the top left?
No.
No, that's Scorzini.
He was kind of like an operator for.
Yeah.
Like right there.
It's intense.
Yeah, they all have them.
And they're all in almost the same exact spot, too.
The cheek.
You know, it's so interesting to look back through the lens of history and think, like, when you see those photographs now of the president, you know, standing there with these hardcore Nazis.
Oh, God.
Look at that guy's bleeding all over the place.
Mm hmm.
Sorry.
Scarred German fencer.
Yeah, man.
That's so.
Yeah, what were you saying about looking through the lens of history?
You know, I mean, it's just paperclip is infinitely interesting also because that is where the buildup of, you know, again, tying it back to nuclear war.
Like the V2 was the precursor to the ICBM, which now carries. nuclear warheads from anywhere in the world, one side of the world to the other, in, you know, 26 minutes, 30 minutes, 33 minutes, right?
That's where it all began.
Mysterious Flying Wing Pilots00:14:06
And the incredible fast-paced march of science in this tiny period of time from 1943, 4, 5, you know, till now is just remarkable.
And it seems to me, because I write about war and weapons, that all of this military technology comes down to this very interesting concept of dual use, right?
You have that which can harm and that which can not necessarily heal, but can advance, right?
You know, all of the internet, right?
That we have the internet, that we have computers.
I mean, it's just remarkable to think that this has all happened in our world since World War II.
You know, you have to wonder too what kind of technology did the Nazis have that we might not know about?
Like, what was it?
Was there anything that was not declassified?
You know, there's, there's, you talk about, there's a scientist named Rydell, I think his name was, who was obsessed with flying.
He was obsessed with UFOs, yeah.
Oh, he was also obsessed with UFOs.
Oh, my God.
He was a real sore in the, in the, a thorn in the side of the government because he came here and he joined a UFO club.
Oh, really?
And he would, and then he and his friends were doing UFO hoaxes.
I write about this in Area 51 because it was really interesting.
Most of them kind of stayed in line and were really interested in towing the, you know, American, the line of democracy and then, you know, advancing their careers.
That really was the Nazis were nothing if, the former Nazis were nothing if they weren't ambitious.
But a few of them ran into, you know, trouble.
And Rydell was one of them because the government did not like that he was really interested in UFOs.
I mean, we could talk for days about the UFO conundrum.
We could.
Didn't the Horton brothers come from Germany?
They designed the flying wing, right?
So as I write in Area 51, there was this search for all the different top Nazis that were developing weapons and weapon systems for the Reich.
And the Horton brothers were among them.
And they disappeared.
They went to South America.
They designed the flying wing.
And if you look at pictures side by side of the flying wing and the B-2 bomber, I mean, they it's very similar, right?
They just, you're like, oh, intellectual property theft.
Oh, wow.
That bad.
Yeah.
Stephen, or Steve, pull up the yeah, there you go.
Right.
Horton.
Type in Horton flying wing.
Yeah, Horton flying wing.
And then there was some sort of story.
There was a story in Area 51 where somebody went to interview the Horton brothers.
And they were like, any questions about CIA?
We will not say a word about CIA.
Why do you think that was?
I mean, my theory on a lot of this is that time reveals all things.
There's a quote that I start the Area 51 book with that I'm forgetting right now, but by the old Greek philosopher Horace.
And it's exactly that, that that which is hidden inevitably gets revealed.
And I think that what's so interesting, being a reporter non writing about nonfiction, as I do, and others like Tom O'neill, who's been on your show, who's a friend of mine right, you know, you just start to on, you're peeling back layers of this enigmatic system of secrets and why, and?
And it's like a ball of yarn it just gets bigger and bigger, and bigger and bigger.
And that's certainly the case with UFOS and it you could almost say the Horton Brothers are the um Origin story, I believe, of Ufology, you know, flying saucers, right?
They actually created an aircraft that looks exactly like a flying saucer.
I have a picture of it in the Area 51 book.
It's a circular, you know.
I listened to audio, I didn't get photos.
So this is like, you know, and then what comes first, the chicken or the egg, right?
You know?
Yeah.
What did you can we find a picture of it?
I would love to see it.
Horton Brothers Flying Saucer Area 51.
We can find it online.
You think, yeah, there it is right there.
The national they took the yeah, is that it?
That's from my book.
Yes, oh wow, that I got at the National Archives.
Well, that doesn't really look like a flying saucer.
I think I guess from one angle it does.
No, the one right here, the one wing, the one wing.
Oh, that down below, right here.
No, no, no, where are we pointing at?
Yeah, see.
It says arrow stories.
Two brothers, one wing.
It is so futuristic looking.
It's crazy.
I mean, that was 1941 or two, right?
Right.
Oh, it burned.
Burned.
I mean I.
The thing that I think is interesting is like that you can, that the human mind can write the narrative that it needs to right.
So if you believe, if you want to believe, then you write that.
And when I say write, I mean that you know figuratively, not necessarily literally.
You just that's your reverse engineering from this idea of you know Aliens exist or UFOs exist, right?
And then everything leans toward that and fills that narrative in.
And if you're on the other side of it and you are suspicious of that, you know, everything.
I mean, look, I learned when I was on my first book, Area 51, I learned about this concept from officers of the CIA about, and there are two forms of strategic deception.
Yes.
There is cover, right?
And that's to try, you know, to essentially have a cover story.
Like Billy Waugh jogging through Khartoum.
That's right.
That's one kind of strategic deception.
But the other kind is misinformation, right?
And so it's, and the example I use in the Area 51 book was a bunch of the Lockheed engineers were heading out to Area 51 to work on the U-2 spy plane.
This is in the middle of the 50s.
And of course, it was the most classified project or one of them that existed at the time, right?
I mean, The Soviets could not know we were building a spy plane that could fly 70,000 feet in the air above where their surface to air missiles could shoot them down for the purposes of spying on the Soviet Union to find out what was going on below, right?
That's what the U 2 was.
It was just absolutely this ingenious idea of like aerial espionage.
That is the origin story, the birth of it, right?
Right.
So it's so top secret.
And they all get on the plane, and the plane crashes into Mount Charleston.
And everyone's dead.
Oh, yeah.
There was one guy who missed the flight, right?
Yeah, that I interviewed, Bob Murphy.
Yeah.
He got drunk and missed the flight.
God.
Right.
Can you imagine the guilt?
Right.
And so he.
So they're all dead.
And then the CIA is like, oh, shit.
Our program's going to be exposed.
It's this like.
Oh, right.
You know, all the reporters are taking off up to get up the road and they cut off the road so you can't get up there, but still it's going to leak out.
And then the press reports a story that they were all scientists working on a secret atomic bomb out at Nevada test site.
And, you know, the CIA's like, no comment, right?
In this sort of mysterious way.
And they're like, see, it is.
And then, so that's there you have disinformation, right?
It's just like, and a lot of times, What the agency does, in my experience, my understanding from people explaining this to me and from reporting stories and looking at history, is they use the public's perception, or what you could say the public's gullibility in some cases, and they use that to their advantage.
You know, sometimes it spirals out of control and they can't control it, but often strategic deception is part of the.
is how the public reacts to something, right?
And one of.
The most eye opening stories to me is how these I think they were CIA pilots that were testing like the first jet airplane, the first fighter jet over Nevada.
They would bring gorilla masks in the cockpit with them.
So, if another pilot came within the visual distance, they put on their gorilla mask.
That way, when this guy goes to dinner with some buddies or goes to the bar, no one's going to believe he saw a gorilla flying a jet plane.
That is bizarre.
And that's so similar.
I mean, it makes perfect sense in Bob Lazar's story.
If he's going to work on some shit and they put a little alien dummy in the window to make it seem like, okay, no one's going to believe Bob Lazar if he says he saw an alien, but that kind of.
That kind of backfires.
A lot of people do believe that.
And again, it depends what camp you're in that you revert.
That story will work for your story, right?
Which makes it all very interesting.
It's why I will never like sort of I mean, I know my position.
I really believe that the whole hoo-ha about all of this is part of a major strategic deception campaign.
What's going on right now?
Yes.
And it has been going on.
since 1947, since the CIA was created.
I mean, you can read in Area 51 the original concern of then CIA director Walter Beadle Smith, right?
His concern with like this UFO crisis.
I mean, I quote the documents from the archives, right?
That it's like going to cause a problem and we need to use this.
You know, I'm paraphrasing again, but this, so this was happening in 1947 and you can just chart, at least I can, how this is a repeating story.
Now, many people, you know, take me to task over that.
And I've interviewed for my book Phenomenon many of the individuals who are at the fore of this thrust to say that the U.S. government is hiding alien technology.
Now, for what do you think sorry, go ahead.
Well, to me, it's like and I've interviewed all of them and, you know, I've written about what they have told me and their opinions about things.
And so do you do do they change their mind?
Are they part of you know are they part of the strategic deception campaign?
Are some of them?
I mean Excuse me.
I sit back and look from afar That's maybe my Tom O'Neill chaos book.
That's the 20 year You know Side reporting because it just keeps building and people continue to contact me about this and that and it just gets more and more interesting and also as the science and technology grows right Now you have threaded into all of this these new issues about DNA, about things that didn't exist.
Or they certainly existed, but that didn't exist within the narrative 60, 70 years ago.
What about DNA?
This idea that people that have experiences are different and they have different DNA.
I get into that in the end of Phenomena.
That's the one I haven't read yet.
I mean, I'm a storyteller.
I'm a reporter and I'm a storyteller and I'm really interested in stories and I'm really interested in how people, you know, we all, how you live your life.
And, you know, Joan Didion said, we tell ourselves stories to live.
Right.
And also many of the people I know that are involved in that world, Have had what are called near death experiences, right?
And the phenomena.
Yeah.
And if you've had a near-death experience, to my eye, you are in a different category of human being, right?
Because you've had an experience that others simply can't relate to, right?
And I'm talking about like, you know, like particularly in war, most of the people I know that have shared with me, they're really intense, like I should have died story, right?
That's really intense.
Yes.
That's an experience that, whew, right?
It's going to change your thinking, right?
I have a lot I want to ask you about that, but I want to stand on the UFOs for a second.
I thought we were going back to paperclip.
First, we got to do Surprise Kill Vanish, then we got to go back to.
If you were to decide to start writing a book about the whole UFO phenomenon in America right now, and you were to start interviewing all your sources, do you think you would get the real story?
I wouldn't write that book because that's opinion.
And I don't want to write opinion.
Ballistic Missions and Chills00:03:01
I want to write, I do write.
Here's this document.
Here's that.
There's no documents.
That's the thing.
There's no hard evidence.
And I think that's the long quest for me, you know, ultimately.
And I also build trust with people who sit in that world, right?
And in my experience also, as people get older and they come closer to meeting the maker, they their perspective shifts on what is important and what they want to share and tell.
And I think that's really interesting, you know, in a completely legitimate way, right?
I mean, even the nuclear war book, like these, getting someone like Leon Panetta to go on the record with me, getting some of the elder statesmen that I did.
Why?
Because they have grandchildren.
Because they are, they, they, as one of them said to me, we thought we had this covered, you know?
Like, oh, we'd get through the Cold War with all these nukes.
At one point, we had 30,000 nukes.
30,000 nuclear warheads.
And China had how many?
They had like pretty close to that, right?
No, Russia.
Russia.
Russia.
They had in the 20s?
Russia had the same.
Russia has always essentially, once we became equals in the early 50s, then it's been the same.
So they had 30,000 too.
Today, we have 5,000.
They have 5,000.
That's 1,700 of which are on ready for launch status.
Meaning so out of 5,1700 are ready for launch ready for launch.
They could go in a matter of seconds.
They can go.
I mean a cop some of them are you know have to come out of the side out of the hangars for the bombers, but the 400 ICBMs in missile silos are Take 60 seconds.
That's why they call them minute men.
Right.
The submarine launched ballistic missiles That just gives me chills the handmaidens of the apocalypse.
Right.
Right.
And so as people get older that have had access to super classified material, I think coupled with the fact of how rapidly the world is actually just changing culturally, scientific, right?
People feel the need to share stories, to share information, not to like spill the beans on national security, but just more of a more of the people that I find interesting, it's like more they want to tell their narrative.
They want to tell why I'm telling you this.
Right.
Right.
And then it becomes a cautionary tale, or perhaps it becomes a way for maybe leave the world a better place.
Collagen for Body Production00:02:35
Yeah.
Or to reframe how we think about things.
Right.
You know, I mean, the most clear, the clearest sort of most obvious immediacy of that is these 80 year old elder statesmen who've worked in nuclear command and control all their lives saying, people cannot think that using a tactical nuclear weapon is anything short of madness, you know, because you do, you hear.
Yeah, they talk about it.
They talk about it with Ukraine.
And it is, you gotta hand it to humanity that for all of the atrocities we've committed, we haven't dropped one since the late 40s.
Like, it's amazing that we have not.
Having studied this area, I now believe it's because the people in control, in command and control, they have seen the nuclear war games.
They know this can never be done.
Just everybody or just the U.S.?
In the US, in the US, right?
But with the weird exception being the president, I think that was one of the most shocking things I learned in this book a number of people explaining to me how, okay, because we have what is called sole authority.
So the president of the United States can launch.
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UFO Community Secrets Revealed00:15:57
It's linked below.
Now, back to the show.
On his own.
He doesn't need to ask the Secretary of Defense.
He doesn't need to ask the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He sure doesn't need to ask Congress.
He makes a decision to launch.
Okay.
And that freaks everybody in the chain of command out because, according to multiple sources, as I report in the book, the president is kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't need to know about nukes.
That's pretty much the standard understanding because.
There's lots of other things the president does have to deal with.
And nuclear war has existed in this sort of mindset that, oh, it will never happen.
It's unthinkable.
And again, I wrote the book so that you can realize you have to think this through.
Because what happens when all of these elder statesmen are gone and nuclear weapons are just a sort of theoretical complex?
They're still there in their silos, able to launch in 60 seconds.
The subs can launch in 14 minutes from being given the command.
It is terrifying.
The submarine stuff really got me going.
The submarine stuff is crazy.
And now I heard the development.
New submarines now.
They had the Ohio class.
Now they're working on the Columbia class nuclear submarines.
There's always a reason to have more nuclear weapons unless you believe.
If you believe a billion each, it's an insane amount of money, right?
And so you wonder why people want to talk about UFOs instead.
Yes.
Yeah.
It is the UFO thing, really, you know, because this show, I have so many people that come on the show.
UFOs is just like in the media or on YouTube.
It just the stuff gets so much attention, right?
And there's these warring factions inside the UFO community that just like it, they're just fighting against each other over what's real, what's not real, what's a you know, what's deception, what's purposeful deception, what's not.
And you know, that Paul Benowitz documentary was really great, and and it, I love it because it tied right into your book, Area 51.
Because you know, the guy, people who don't know, he was a UFO.
Uh, he was part of the UFO community, he was an enthusiast, and he was seeing these objects come over this mountain across the street from his house in Nevada.
Right?
And he thought they were UFOs, he was filming them, sharing them with the UFO community.
And the Air Force got wind of it, I guess.
And they sent that guy, Richard Doty, out to his house to see what he knew, see if he knew anything classified, see his footage, make sure this guy wasn't, you know, gonna get any of this stuff to the Soviets.
Because I guess the UFO community at that time was infested with Soviet, uh, You know, Soviet moles, right?
Or not moles, but spies, like infiltrating the UFO community to see, you know, what was going on.
And he wanted to use Benowitz as a conduit to basically poison the well of the UFO community with some, like, oh, maybe this is UFOs, maybe it's aliens.
When Richard Doty knew for a fact it was not aliens, it was some sort of, you know, futuristic.
They were testing what?
The B 2 bomber back then?
So they didn't want the Soviets to know about that.
So, Let's let them know.
And this is strategic deception.
Like you're going to lean into people's gullibility or people's desire to know.
And this is threaded throughout the whole weapons community always because there's something that the government is working to keep concealed.
And what a great cover for it.
But again, half the people will tell you, no.
I mean, you can follow any.
Any you can follow either narrative, the idea that's that that that is not going on now is appalling, like it has to be going on now times 10.
When I, I mean, when I started seeing the New York Times report about UFOs and seeing all these people in Congress start to fight about it and to become this dog and pony show in the media, that's when my mind is like, okay, this is not what it seems to be, it can't be.
And then, well, there's also the always the idea of to get you to look over there or not.
Right.
Right.
And then there's hangout.
Yes.
And then there's the unfortunate idea, too, that I mean, I don't write for a newspaper anymore, and it's increasingly difficult to do that because you either have to have a political opinion or you have to be willing to write about what people want to read.
Right.
And the easier, you know, shiny subject is certainly easier to read for most people, more desirable to read than like some, you know, really serious, heady stuff that, you know, consumes, also consumes the world and certainly consumes the national security apparatus.
Well, what's fascinating to your point is that nobody ever, I had never heard of what you report in your book with the EGG engineer talking about those human experiments to turn.
Kids with Down syndrome into aliens.
I have never heard about that anywhere.
Well, that's not reported anywhere because that's the source.
That's your source.
So you broke it, but no one talked about it after you published.
How long ago did you publish the book?
2011?
Yes.
So no one, I've never heard anyone discuss that story before I read your book, which is wild that no one's kind of followed up on that or told stories about it.
It's, if I ever report.
The UFO story, it would be that story filled in.
It's a very, very interesting story.
But the reason no one talks about it is because there's not right now, there's nothing else to say about it because it's extremely limited in terms of the individuals who know that information.
Now, this specific story, to qualify it, this was I might be getting this wrong, but was it only one source who gave you this?
Just this one engineer?
Okay.
You know, the UFO, the idea of technology well, I think a little bit closer to you.
The idea of technology has always bedeviled the idea of national security for the government, right?
So immediately after the war, there was no missiles to launch, right?
It was just bombers.
So the big threat was we had an air defense system that would notify the newly created defense department, if there was a Russian attack.
Okay.
And as I report in Area 51, this defense system was in jeopardy of being overrun if there was a War of the Worlds type hoax.
That is what there are many supporting documents to suggest that.
And there are also supporting documents to suggest that Stalin knew this and was also obsessed with this War of the World hoax.
And so I see this.
idea of telling a story and freaking people out so much that they behave in a certain way as a fundamental to strategic deception.
Okay.
And so the real question is, is, is that what all of this is about repeated ad infinitum as we move through all these different technologies?
And that's a question.
Right.
And the other part.
Just to sow chaos in civilization?
Well, initially it was to over, like if everyone was calling each other up, like, oh my God, you know, the War of the Worlds is happening.
That's what happened, right?
These are actual CIA agents.
So the CIA agents.
Yeah.
And so the air defense system, the system couldn't hold, right?
And so this idea that you can create chaos and.
and lose functionality has always existed in our post-World War II world.
And so I look at the lens of all, like, you know, I was fascinated when the pandemic happened.
It's like all of these features that were not expected by anyone that I can tell from having read, you know, many government documents, sort of lack of control, right?
Or the whole movement against vaccines, for and against vaccines, or six feet, you know, and again, not to get in the weeds about the details of it, but just what I'm talking about is like that society moves like a herd and the government is always trying.
That is the biggest nemesis of a government of like society moving in a manner that is uncontrollable, right?
And so like, for example, my most recent, before the nuclear war book, I wrote a book called First Platoon, which is about this platoon of young soldiers who goes to Afghanistan.
Ends in, you know, terrible situation.
But what they were doing and what they didn't know they were doing, is they were essentially gathering biometrics on Afghans, right?
So they were taking iris scans fingerprints, Dna on all of Afghanistan.
This was the Defense Department's plan.
Do you know about this?
I haven't read first platoon yet.
This sounds like Darpa.
Well yes, this is sort of like they're mapping.
They were doing, yes exactly, they all thread.
That's the human terrain, right?
So think about the very concept of human terrain.
It's so uncontrollable.
Like you can control aircraft.
You can even control nuclear bombs as long as they don't go out of their silos, right?
Government is about control and people are uncontrollable.
And the more uncontrollable the people get, the less security there is, the less national security.
And so if you read any of my books, you start, you know, or all of them, I mean, one of the many people that read, I read one book and now I'm reading the other one.
Oh my God, they all thread.
Well, they do all thread because I'm just reporting history that exists that has unfolded, and again, modern warfare, right?
Weapons.
So, entwined with weapons and war are these secrets and these psychological operations and these ideas about how do we control people so that we can manage society, right?
Right.
And this is kind of what we're talking about tangentially, but it all does.
you know, thread back to this.
And it becomes very interesting.
And one of the reasons that I write is not to try to convince you or share my opinion, but more demonstrate, like sort of, I love unearthing facts that were previously unknown.
And sometimes everything can be said in an anecdote, right?
That's the great joy.
And you're just looking through documents forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and you come across something that Like Ambrose's $1 million Reichs bonus.
I mean, that tells you right there.
Was he a Nazi?
What do you think?
Right?
It's amazing to me that you've never been like intimidated by the CIA or the government or anything, or they've never tried to just like move in next door, maybe put something in your mailbox.
I mean, it was interesting when I went, going back to the, we started talking about the story in the beginning.
When I report, this is an interesting anecdote.
I'll tell you about, just because people are obsessed with the CIA, right?
I mean, they are.
And I remember.
You know, they're called the agency, Annie, right?
Like that's what it, you know.
No, well, people I've told you're not supposed to say the CIA.
C-I-A, you're only supposed to say C-I-A.
Yes, and you have to say agency, an agency guy.
But when I was- But when I was reporting Area 51, I had all the guys sign an NDA with me, okay?
Meaning it was a non-disclosure so that, because I was so amazed that I had, it was such a coup d'etat having all these engineers, I mean, I interviewed most of the A-12 pilots who were still alive, right?
The CIA pilots who flew on these incredible missions in this Mach 3 aircraft.
And people who worked on those programs and the nuclear weapons engineers, I mean, it was intense.
And they all signed an NDA with me because I couldn't risk them suddenly going like doing an interview with National Geographic or, you know, somewhere else.
Right.
Because you're putting in so much work traveling and meeting all them.
Yes.
And my publisher had to do that.
So it was very smart, right?
Not my idea, but it was very smart.
I was terrified.
But, you know, it's also great is I have all their signatures.
It's just such a, like, I have all these NDAs.
Like, talk about an artifact.
Right.
But so, anyways, then.
Time rolls around, and the CIA, the director of national intelligence at the time, General Clapper, wants to give these guys medals.
Okay.
So they're going to go to the CIA to get the medals.
And the CIA decides to have an event at the Smithsonian Museum where they all speak, okay, about the A 12 program because it had just been declassified or part, you know, the major thrust of it.
And they're like, Oh, we want, you know, I became friendly with them.
These are like, you know, they're like my grandfather, right?
Like times 10.
And it's like, we got to bring Annie along, right?
And I was like, great, right?
And then I also said, well, remember, and the CIA wanted them to do press.
And then they said, well, we can't because we have an NDA with Annie.
And the CIA was furious, right?
Because they were like, no way, she cannot come.
This is the CIA.
Are you kidding me?
Exactly.
And at the time, Area 51 was still classified.
The actual name, they did not admit it existed.
It wasn't until Obama was president and he made a joke of it at the Lincoln Center giving some awards.
And then it became declassified.
Okay.
The name Area 51, you could not say it before.
So I get invited along and it's a total quid pro quo, right?
Which is hilarious to have a quid pro quo with the CIA, right?
Meaning they're like, okay, Annie, because I really wanted to go to the agency.
And you can't.
Like, I mean, a few reporters get to go for whatever reasons we don't know, but for the most part, you can't go to the agency as a reporter, and especially not writing about Area 51.
They all knew I was writing about Area 51, and so it was a quid pro quo.
They said, Okay, we'll let you come, but um, you I've never told the story before.
I'm kind of sitting here going, Should I be telling this story?
You're shocked, okay.
Um, so Okay, Annie, you can come, but you have to let our guys speak at the Smithsonian and do press.
And I said, Okay, that sounds fair.
And it was like a handshake quid pro quo, right?
Unfair Agency Recruitment Tactics00:02:50
So we go there and it was quite fun.
I mean, like Ken Collins came.
I mean, you know, it was really cool.
We stayed at the Joint Base Anacosta in, you know, military housing.
We would go around in this van to these different places.
We went to DIA headquarters and spoke, you know.
And I'm just kind of like tagging along and I'm so excited for that.
The last day is when we're going to the CIA to get the medal for the guys to get the medals.
And they do the Udvar Hazy, the Smithsonian Museum discussion, and everything's great.
And, you know, I'm like, oh my God, I can't wait.
And guess what happens, you know, five minutes before we're supposed to go to the CIA in the parking lot?
What?
Oh, we're sorry.
We're so sorry, Annie.
No.
We're so sorry, Annie, but something's come up and you can't come to the CIA.
Well, that's par for the course for them then, I guess.
And I was so upset and mad, right?
Mad.
And I. Had no choice but to appeal to the guy's humanity.
It was like that or yell.
So I put our minder, our handler, who will remain nameless, who is the equivalent of a three star general.
He's the one who tells me this.
And all the guys, you know, in my book are like sitting in the van and they see this happening and they're like, oh no, poor Atty.
And I put my hand on his shoulder and I was like, that's not playing bear.
And he's like, we're the CIA.
Or worse, yeah, you know, and I was like, We don't play fair, it's still not fair, and I am going to trust that you will work this out.
And I kept my hand on her shoulder, and I came back to the van, and the guys were all like, The guys, they were like 85 year old, you know, pilots and stuff.
They were like, You put it, you're not supposed to put your hand on the shoulder of the general, right?
And I was like, Well, screw that, he just ruined my trip, you know, it's not fair.
And then and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Annie Jacobson got recruited to the CIA.
Definitely didn't get recruited, but I did get the invitation back.
So I went.
You got to go.
Yeah.
Wow.
I got to go.
And I have to say, that's like the that's like the you know, they weren't playing fair.
And I really liked and respected that that individual heard that, or at least that's my perception of it.
Call me naive or call me optimistic.
But that was my perception.
It was like it wasn't fair.
And so they let me go.
The Photoshop Photo Incident00:09:29
And they wouldn't.
It was funny because they wouldn't let me take my picture there, right?
Like, as if I cared.
I didn't care about my picture there.
But everyone that goes there, you stand there in the CIA and they have a big seal.
And it's like, apparently, you know, you get your picture taken and you hang it on your bathroom wall or something.
And all the guys had this, had their picture taken and stuff.
And we saw the wall and it was right.
But, you know, I didn't.
They were like, you can't have your picture taken.
Like, that was like my hand slap or something.
Okay.
But then the funniest thing was.
About a week later, after the trip, the guys sent me a photoshopped photo of me.
That's almost better.
And it's so brilliant because I'm like, oh, wow.
The general sent you that?
No, the guys from my book.
Oh, from a great career book, yeah.
They all got together and had somebody's grandson who knew how to use Photoshop in 2011 photoshopped me into the thing.
And it's really funny because, and I've never posted the picture because it's talk about disinformation.
It's like, I wasn't.
I mean, it's not a real photo.
It's a Photoshop photo, except for I was really there.
You know, that is actually really what I was wearing that day, right?
It was the whole.
Oh, wow.
Anyways, it was just a fascinating anecdote.
And it makes.
What a great story.
Yeah.
Was one of those guys the EGG guy?
Can't say, won't say.
Well, let's at least tell the EGG guy's story before we move on to the next book.
So this guy was an EGG scientist.
Maybe he was there, maybe he was not.
And he was the one who told you that.
This crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 was sent by Stalin and had humans in it that were, they weren't flying it.
This was apparently being driven like a drone and it was crashed and they weren't aliens.
And we found out that they were trying to medically alter humans to look like aliens.
And then he said that.
The Americans, him specifically, was working on a project or a program in the US doing the same exact thing.
Did I sum it up pretty well?
You summed it up.
And, you know, the thing is, at Area 51, like right outside of Area 51, this was going on.
And the most interesting part of all of that to me is the human factor of it, right?
That this person told me this story.
I tell you in the book, you know, the kind of confession.
And again, he was colleagues with all of them.
So completely legitimate person.
And he wanted the story known because of the human experiment element of it, right?
And this kind of indirectly led me to the paper clip reporting, right?
To looking at the Nuremberg doctor's trial, right?
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I mean, his position was, you know, it's one thing to be manipulating people's perception about whether or not Something is a UFO from outer space or advanced aircraft, right?
It's one thing to do that.
It's one thing to manipulate, you know, the storyline, but it's another thing to involve humans in experiments.
And that's what he said.
That was the element that he said kept him from being able to sleep at night, right?
And that, and that, and remember that he implicated himself in this dark program.
Yes.
So you have to say to yourself, what kind of a madman would make something like that up in implicating themselves?
He wasn't finger pointing.
He was saying, this is on my conscience.
I was part of it.
We were a small group of people.
It was super classified.
And it was horrible and dark, and it should never have been done.
And his belief was by telling me, then more would be revealed, right?
More information would come out.
But the most interesting part of that, the coda, which also have never spoken of and telling you now, which is why maybe I will write about it over 20 years, right?
Is that his family was deeply upset because his family did not know this dark secret he carried, okay?
And as I write in the book, I said, why are you telling me this?
Why aren't you confessing this to a priest?
You know, and it was that he felt that he would be judged by a priest, right?
And that me as a reporter was not judging.
I was just simply recording information.
Which was my position, you know, and so when I went when I went to his house When I asked him what why don't you why aren't you telling a priest this?
Why are you telling me?
And his feeling was that I wouldn't judge him, right?
So this was meaningful to me because I Understood that this was a deeply human conundrum that he was in and for whatever reason call it fate and circumstance.
I was the reporter that showed up in his life I was the one that was learning other things about this area Area 51 and the people involved in it And he felt compelled to tell me and have it on the record, right?
It made an extraordinary, you know, bada boom, right?
People were, you know, outraged.
I mean, it's made up.
It's not made up.
How could, you know, a million different reactions, right?
But to me, what was important was what his family thought because they did not know this dark secret before it appeared in my book.
And so he asked me to come out to where he lived in the Las Vegas area.
And I showed up, and in the room was his wife and his children.
And we had this kind of come to Jesus roundtable where they were like, Tell us that is not true.
And he was like, It is true.
So, all of those people.
How old was he?
He was in his late 80s.
So, you know, so.
Scoot that thing just a little closer to me.
All the arrows that have been thrown at me.
Over that reporting, or that were in days past right eh, you know, not so hurtful, because the real courage was that man, you know, jeopardizing his entire family's perception of him.
Right, that is extraordinary, that's just extraordinary to me.
Did you ask him why he wanted to let that out?
I mean, I have so many, you know, we communicated for a very long time.
We communicated for a very long time.
I have so many emails from him and, you know, just, you know, it's a big story and one day maybe I'll report it.
But it's not, it's very, it's so profound, it's so profoundly human and yet at the same time it's so tied in with war and weapons and national security and secrets.
So it really is the like American, the freaky American, Strategic deception story, you know, and it will have its place, if it has its place, it will be written.
I mean, not to sound cryptic or enigmatic, but do you know what I mean?
It's more of, it's not about sensationalism.
Right.
You know, I did not know that would be, I mean, that Area 51 was a massive bestseller.
It was on the bestseller list for 14 or 15 weeks, and half the people read only the last 12 pages.
Right.
It's people, UFO people, right?
That's what I was, yeah.
And it was, you know, and since then, I told my friend on the phone the other day, I'm like, she's not into UFOs.
He's like, what?
She wrote a book called Area 51.
How is she not into UFOs?
I mean, listen, I was at LAX this morning flying here, right?
And I stopped in the bookstore, the Book Soup Bookstore Terminal 7, LAX.
What do they have front and center?
Area 51.
I signed it.
I took a picture.
It was amazing.
You know, and the guy was like, oh my God, you wrote that book, you know?
I mean, people read that.
And what's great about that is it, okay, so 12 years ago, people read the last 12 pages, but now they read the whole book.
And that's extraordinary, you know?
And that's very relevant to what's going on right now.
Very, very relevant.
And it and it and it launched my career.
So I have a very, I mean, really and truly, you know, um, and and I had no idea that it would be that explosive.
I thought that me reporting some, you know, firsthand details about aerospace, you know, crafts and things would be like really the thing that would get everyone.
And then that I was kind of surprised because I'm not a ufologist and I, but it's it's an it.
It is a real, it's a real, you know, I'll tell you one person I took to meet him.
I was working at the time.
DARPA Anecdotal Projects00:15:55
Can you take me to meet him, please?
Well, I've said this before, but at the time, Area 51 had been, was like under development for a television show by AMC, which was a big, big TV channel then.
And Chris Carter was writing it, who is the creator.
You're so young.
He was the creator of The X-Files.
Oh, yeah, of course.
So Chris and I took Chris out to meet him.
And that was pretty awesome.
It was really, you know, they're just like the, and again, that might be part of the narrative if the book ever gets written, but it was really.
Did they discuss?
That whole thing, he did not watch the X Files.
Oh my god, of course, right?
Why would you need to watch the X Files when you lived it?
Yeah, but Chris is a really you know, he's like a I admire his writing, he's a brilliant storyteller in the fictional world.
And yeah, yeah, all right, let's take a quick break, right?
We'll come back and finish.
Uh, gotta talk about Pentagon's brain phenomena, and then we'll wrap it up with nuclear war.
Amazing.
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Now back to the show.
I want to get into the DARPA, Pentagon's Brain Stuff.
That was actually the first book I ever read of yours.
Okay.
Which was amazing.
And before you knew I was coming in, you asked me to come in, or did you just read it randomly, or was it like a prep thing?
No, I read DARPA.
I read The Pentagon's Brain before I ever talked to you.
And then everything else came out.
I think after that, I read Paperclip.
And then it was, what was the order?
It was Pentagon's Brain, Paperclip, Area 51, Surprise, Kill, Vanish was the last one.
I just finished yesterday, Surprise, Kill, Vanish.
Nice.
Well, the way that the DARPA book came to be, I mean, most of my books come from the previous book, The Idea, right?
So my editor said to me, like, wait, whatever happened to Von Brown, you know, after such and such a time?
And it was like, Oh, he was asked by the Pentagon to be the lead scientist for this new agency they were creating in 19, you know, around 1956, 57, and it was called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA.
Right.
And Von Braun was going to be the lead scientist.
He told the Joint Chiefs of Staff, well, I'm only doing that if 12 of my colleagues come, colleagues, euphemism, Nazi colleagues.
So they said no.
That was kind of the line in the sand.
We're not having 12 of them at the Pentagon.
So instead, the director became a guy called Herb York.
And I went, then you always wonder, you know, oh, do I have a book here?
And I found Herb York's papers, his like personal papers that he donated to the Giesel Library in San Diego.
This massive trove of papers with really interesting things in them.
Sometimes you can find documents that like, aren't really, they're kind of quasi, not declassified, but maybe, you know, they're there.
And that's actually where I found that first detail that I report in the Pentagon's brain that becomes the seed of my new book, Nuclear War, which is that Herb York wanted to know precisely how many minutes and seconds it took for an ICBM to get off a launch pad in Soviet Russia and strike Washington, D.C.
So he hired the world's smartest scientists.
The Jason scientists who became this integral part of DARPA and whom have been entwined with an extraordinary number of conspiracies.
I've interviewed the Jason scientists.
All the best conspiracy theories come from DARPA.
Come from DARPA and also the Jason scientists, right?
And in the book, I interviewed Murph Goldberger, who was the founder of Jason.
But in any event, they whittled that number down for him and they told Herb York it was 26 minutes and 40 seconds.
That was precisely how long it took for that launch.
And then, of course, at the time, it was only.
For the ICBM to get here?
From Russia to Washington, D.C.
Now, and from North Korea, I had an engineer at MIT, a physicist named Ted Postle, do the math for the nuclear war book, and it's 33 minutes from a launch pad in Pyongyang, North Korea, to hit Washington, D.C. What's the craziest shit DARPA has done?
Like the absolutely most mind bending thing that they've created.
I think the biohybrids, because when I say that thing they have done, right?
So let's, for anyone who isn't familiar with DARPA, right?
It's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a mouthful.
They added the D for defense.
They added the D for defense, but it is the most powerful, most secretive, most productive military agency in the world.
And I kind of believe that before I wrote the book, most people had not heard of DARPA.
I mean, I think, you know, or at least when I was doing press for it, it was like shocking.
I think you're right about that.
So that's fascinating.
And part of that has to do with DARPA likes the public perception of, you know, that they like do all these things for the good of humanity.
And actually, we know from the declassified documents again, or actually, this was not declassified.
This was the statement by the first SecDef at the time, the SecDef at the time that DARPA was created.
Neil McElroy, an advertising executive who became a Secretary of Defense, he said, he went to Congress to get the funding and he said, this agency is going to create the vast weapon systems of the future.
That is what DARPA does.
They are always 20 years ahead of anything that you or I know.
So any technology that is like, what the hell was that that I just saw and you're not supposed to have seen, that's DARPA.
They were doing Neuralink in the 90s, right?
They were doing, they are always doing things 20 years before you know about them because they do what is called blue sky technology.
Blue sky research and technology, yes.
And they have to be ahead of the curve.
They have to be, right?
Is that, is DARPA the only, I mean, when it comes to this kind of stuff, like innovating weapons for defense and national security, that's probably the only thing, the only apparatus that exists that's doing unlimited blue sky sort of research and development, right?
Because they have unlimited money.
That we know of, but like, I mean, nothing surprises me anymore.
And so when you find out there's like some agency you've never heard of, it's like, oh, of course, right?
Like, look at NRO, the National Reconnaissance Organization, right?
National Reconnaissance Office, okay?
NRO was created in 1961.
No one knew it existed until 1993 when it was declassified.
So they were involved in the first technology, the first satellite technology.
So when I interviewed Dr. Bud Whelan, who was the first director of science and technology at CIA, he identified himself as the mayor of Area 51 because he worked out there.
And he built the first satellite called Corona.
This is like back in the old days when it literally took wet film images, dropped the wet film, and the Lockheed pilots would retrieve the film as it floated.
The canister of film floated down from space with a parachute attached to it.
I'm not kidding.
Right?
So this is NRO.
They're in charge of everything above, right?
And it was so classified, no one knew it existed for more than 30 years.
Is it true that NRO officers or people in the NRO have to be cleared through CIA, NASA, and.
Something else?
That I don't know, but I do know they have their own classification.
Air Force, that's what it was.
Yeah, I mean, they all kind of work with one another for one another, you know.
I mean, one of the guys I interview in Nuclear War, Richard Garwin, who designed the thermonuclear bomb, drew the plans for Edward Teller, right?
When Edward Teller couldn't figure out how to actually make the bomb explode, Richard Garwin drew the design that allowed it to, right?
He's 93.
He's been a major source for me.
Nuclear war in my book, right?
He was one of the founders of NRO.
So they all work part and parcel.
But the point of this, when you say, you know, is DARPA doing the most advanced technology?
Maybe.
But maybe there's another organization like NRO.
I mean, people forget there are 17, at least 17 intelligence agencies.
It's not just CIA.
17?
17.
I mean, Google them, look them up, right?
That's why there's now a director of national intelligence.
So there are, you know, There are, and I think that to stay ahead of the enemy, you know, air quotes or not air quotes, to stay ahead, the federal government is always playing not just chess, but like, you know, move the magic balls, right?
And what's under what hat.
And so things need to be hidden so that secrets can be kept.
When the F-117 was retired, I went to the ceremony with Ed Lovick, the grandfather of stealth technology, right?
And it was amazing.
It was up there at Lockheed at Skunk Works, okay?
And they made this announcement that was, I just remember this one line, and I am paraphrasing, but they said, like, we created the F-117.
It was like a 20-year project, you know, DARPA.
And for 20 years, I think there were 10,000 people cleared on the program.
This is what the guy was saying that was giving this speech.
And he said, and no one leaked it.
And then he said, oh, correction.
It was actually 10,000 people cleared plus Tom Clancy.
What?
Revealing that Tom Clancy had the inn with the Lockheed guys, and that's where he got a lot of his secrets.
Interesting.
One of the most interesting things I thought about the DARPA book also was that they were inviting science fiction writers to meet with them.
Like I think one of them was the writer for Terminator.
No, no, no.
That was me going to the Pentagon on a boarding trip, right?
Oh, okay.
But they did.
But yes, yes, to your point, they did after 9-11.
The government, remember that statement, you're too young, but after 9-11, there was a statement that was kind of, an echo throughout, you know, it was in the zeitgeist that 9-11 was a failure of imagination, right?
That no one could foresee that terrorists could hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings, except for Tom Clancy.
And so that led DARPA to create, to hire science fiction writers.
This is like an anecdotal project for DARPA.
I mean, it's like a nothing burger.
But it was really interesting to me because they hired science fiction writers, a couple of whom I interviewed.
To kind of sit around a round table and come up with the craziest ideas they could, you know, of terrorist attacks and of surprise attacks to then try to game out how they could defend against them, which is not a bad idea.
On that reporting trip, when I went to the Pentagon, I brought with me Chris Carter, as I was saying, we were working on Area 51 as a television show at the time, and also Gail Ann Hurd, who co wrote The Terminator with her then husband, James Cameron, but who was also the producer on The Walking Dead, right?
And when we went into the Pentagon, it was wild because, and again, this goes back to that idea that people are just humans with, you know, I mean, of course they're humans, but what I mean is we're all just like people with like, you know, spouses at home and animals and pets and kids and things because bringing those two to the Pentagon was like bringing Brad Pitt to a Girl Scout party, right?
I mean, you know, it was no longer Annie, put your pen away, which it usually is.
Like, no one lets me take notes at the Pentagon.
because then they can't go beyond the record, right?
It's just background.
And it was, and, you know, we had our cell phones out.
We were taking camera, you know, pictures.
The generals were like, come in here, hide the classified stuff.
I write about this in the book because it was so astonishing.
They, and Chris Carter had created the character of the smoking man for the X-Files, which is the quintessential boogeyman, you know, the government boogeyman, right?
Who's always smoking and is up to no good, right?
He's sort of like the embodiment of conspiracy.
And the generals loved that.
And then Gail having co-written the Terminator with Skynet, the generals loved that.
And I found that both comforting and terrifying.
And so did Chris and Gail.
Right.
But the interesting part about, you know, we're all just sort of people at the end of the day was like at a couple points during this traveling around, you know, going through the Pentagon and whatnot, even though when you went into the bathroom, your minder had to follow you in there, right?
That's how it works there, in the E-ring, which is where the Joint Chiefs are.
But at one point, someone was like, wait a minute, Chris Carter, just a second.
And he's like, you know, dials his wife, honey, you're not going to believe this.
Chris Carter's here.
You can ask that question about episode eight, season 12, you know, and literally put him on the phone with the wife to answer the question.
And it was like really interesting that everybody at the end of the day has real people problems and real people curiosity and real people.
questions, most of them, right?
Maybe that's a good thing.
Maybe that's what keeps us all from, you know, launching nuclear war.
Not us launching nuclear war, but them launching nuclear war.
Right.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be one of those guys, either in the Pentagon or in DARPA, who knows all these secrets, but you still have a regular life.
Gaddafi's Craziest Stories Told00:03:57
You still have a cat at home and still have a husband and kids or whatever it might be.
And I don't know.
There's just so many moral questions around it.
Like, if you're working on something that it could, Destroy humanity or destroy an entire country, or developing some sort of system that has the potential to spy and capture all the information of millions of people in a country.
And, like, how do you deal with that?
How do you compartmentalize it and leave it at work?
Maybe that's how they find those people to work on that.
Maybe that's one of the parts of the screening process to be able to work on these programs is like, do you have, like, Kariyaku talks about people with the CIA, you have to have.
You can't be a sociopath, but you have to have sociopathic tendencies.
So, like, how does a normal person balance that?
Well, I mean, I think people are very different.
It's interesting that you brought up John Kiriakou, and I loved hearing, I loved the podcast that he did with you, both of them.
And I think agency people are very different than weapons people, right?
At least in my experience, like generals at the Pentagon.
And I say that almost like a metaphor, right?
Because it is an archetype of a person that is very different.
than a CIA person.
I mean, Billy Waugh, to jump over to Surprise Kill Vanish, CIA paramilitary, if I may, right?
Like, Billy was such an extraordinary person.
You know, he started out as a source and he became a friend.
And he only shared with me what he could, right?
I mean, but it was clear that there was so much more going on.
One of the last phone calls I had, conversations I had with him, I was being asked to speak out in Palm Springs.
I live in LA.
And so there was a car service that drove me out.
And I was like, in the car, I was like, I'm calling Billy.
Right.
And that was in December.
That was in November.
And he died in April.
Right.
So it was very close to his end.
Right.
And he told me the craziest story.
I told him I was writing the book on nuclear war.
And he told me the craziest story.
He's like, and he told me about this mission that he was in in Alaska for one of the nuclear tests that went off there.
And I was like, Billy, what?
Like, you never told me about this.
I don't know about this.
And, you know, he would chuckle.
And it was like you know one, one millionth of what I did.
Right, he was an operator for the CIA, starting when Eisenhower was an officer White Star.
You know, that was the program before the Vietnam War in Laos.
Right, that was a long, long time ago and he worked for the agency almost straight through to the end.
Right, we know he went to Gaddafi.
He went to Libya right, right before Gaddafi was killed.
What was that?
In 2011?
I mean, it was in his 80s.
You know, um, I mean, and who knows, he may have still been operating when we were working together.
When we, you know, he and I traveled to Hanoi, we traveled to Havana.
Um, I always got the sense of that he was working, you know, there was always something going on because he was an incredible asset for the agency.
I mean, he could, he could just feel untouchable traveling with him into these most dangerous parts of the world.
I mean, okay, I'll tell you an interesting story.
So right before we left, he came to my house.
I live in Los Angeles.
And actually, my husband's Norwegian and my husband had a friend, Norwegian's my husband's mother tongue, and he had a friend, Per Ostein, visiting from Norway on a business trip.
So we were all sitting in the garden, right, for this.
Billy Waugh in the Garden00:15:17
And Billy was telling stories.
We were about to go to Hanoi.
And he also insisted on having $10,000 in cash in his back pocket, okay?
And I say, I mean, it sounds so apocryphal.
It's actually true.
And there are two witnesses, right?
So he has this, I mean, it's, He's got $100 bills folded up and he's 87 and a half years old.
And we're about to go to Hanoi.
And we're sitting there in my garden, you know, eating dinner.
And Billy's got this wad of cash.
And I say to him, you know, Billy, that might not be a great idea to have that in a third world country, like $10,000 hanging out of your pocket like that.
Right.
And like, I mean, it was like, what a dumb thing to say.
Okay.
Like, really and truly, like, this is Billy Wadd.
You know what I mean?
Like, he's operated around the whole world.
He's got, like, you know, bullet frags in his.
I mean, he was taking jogs running from bin Laden's dogs.
I mean, everyone's tried to kill him.
He was invincible.
And here I am telling him not to have this money.
But on the other hand, like, it's kind of true.
Like, why would he be 87, you know?
And he, before I could finish the sentence, he has picked up a fork and thrust it into the wooden.
Coffee at the wooden picnic table and said anyone tries to, you know?
And then he says like 10 swears, you know with me that's what's going to happen to them.
And this fork, and we're all just looking at it and this fork is just like, didn't you know in the table right, did he pay to get your table fixed?
No, it didn't matter, it's just, it's just a wooden picnic table, right.
But the point is like Billy, and like why did he?
I still think about that.
Did that scare you?
No.
Billy, he comes off in your book as like this just old school kind of guy who's like this protective, like a knight in shining armor who you could go anywhere and you would just be like, you would feel invincible with him.
You know, he's the knuckle dragger assassin.
But were there any moments where like that, like that fork in the table that like gave you pause, be like, oh my God, this guy is.
He is who I think he is.
He's not just this, you know.
The fork in the table was the only time that Billy broke the veneer of just being so, so calm.
And, you know, like that was an attack, right?
And that was because I kind of insulted him, or at least that was his perception of that, right?
But I liked your definition.
I liked hearing John Kiriakou talk about Billy.
It was amazing.
And I loved also that he said that Billy swore all the time because the truth of the matter is this is the one quid pro quo I had with Billy, right?
Billy swore.
I mean, it was so fun to be around him because, like, everybody has the little kid in them that, like, you know, your mother tells you you're not supposed to swear constantly.
And Billy, just every other word that came out of his mouth was a swear.
But he wanted, he, we made an agreement that in the book, I wouldn't use the F word every other word because it was disruptive.
You know what I mean?
And so, I mean, there is, but I thought that was very interesting because it, you know, the knight in shining armor part of it was diffused by the fact that Billy had this vocabulary that was just, you know, I have videos of him during the pandemic.
We did a lot of Zooms to kind of stay in touch.
Yeah.
And maybe I'll put them up one day because they're just apps.
I mean, Billy would sit in his office and shoot.
the shit with me, you know?
And he would just tell old stories again and again and again.
And they were just, you know, it was really awesome.
It was like great getting that stuff down on the record out of his mouth, right?
Because he was really a one of a kind.
You know, he was, when he, I was at his funeral here in Tampa.
Yeah.
I was talking to Rick.
He told me you were coming down, like, I got to get her on the podcast.
I got to get her down here.
Rick's like, you want me to kidnap her?
I'm like, I don't know.
Those guys are funny.
I mean, I want, speaking of kidnapping, I once had a friend.
Who got stuck in Morocco during the pandemic, right?
Like, remember when the March 15th or whatever that was, when Trump closed the borders and like you could barely get back into the United States?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And I had a friend my age who was stuck in Morocco and she was seriously worried.
And I called up Rick and like some other guys and they were like, oh, yeah, we'll go get her.
You know, it's going to be expensive and she's going to have to come out by boat.
But it was like they gave me a whole plan about how they could go get her.
And it was like, wow, right?
They were not kidding around.
Wow.
A lot of Billy's operations.
Were like it sounded like, especially during the first few operations.
I think his first one was to Libya.
Is that right?
Well, that was after the Vietnam War.
Yeah, obviously, after the Vietnam War, he started to go and work for the post office.
And then it's like when he got hired on these covert operations, it seemed like there wasn't much communication, like he wasn't sure who he was working for.
Always, I mean.
He was a singleton right, so that meant he operated alone for the most part, and that is a remarkable job, right and when.
When I interviewed Kofor Black, who is a very top CIA person during the whole war on terror and was Billy's boss, you know, and like I'm paraphrasing here, but he said something like, again, you know, these guys always saying like, oh, Annie, like you really think you know anything, right?
And he basically said like, huh, you know, you think you got all this stuff from Billy, but the truth of the matter is most of his career was spent getting verbal messages from guys like me with.
nothing written down.
And that is just stunning to think about, that there's an element of the national security apparatus that functions like that, right?
So what it really is, is president to Kopher Black to Billy Waugh.
And Billy Waugh, right?
And does that still go on?
I don't know.
Right.
But what I do know is being able to get Billy Waugh's story on the record was like a real privilege for somebody like me because it's okay.
So if it's one one thousandth of the story, it's still an incredible through line of seeing one man operate through all these wars.
Right.
And of course, it culminates in the end of the book.
That book leads me to nuclear war, which is, you know.
Do you remember the scene I recreate when we're in Jop's garden in Hanoi?
Yes, I do.
So to set the stage for that, Billy was assigned to kill the leader of the North Vietnamese army, General Jop.
And General Jop, in many ways, was like more, I don't want to say more powerful than Ho Chi Minh, but was like, you know, just as important, right?
He led the army and everybody followed him.
And the American government wanted him dead like nobody's business.
There was a perception that the Vietnam War. would end if Jop was dead, right?
And so Billy was assigned to kill him on this mission called Oscar Eight, which I write about in Surprise Kill Vanish, and which Billy wrote about in his book, and is just a remarkable, shocking mission, okay?
And so when we go back to Hanoi, Billy and I travel there, and we are set to meet with General Jop's son.
Jop had died just a few years before, like the age of over 100, and his son, Dien Bien, named after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, The house, this gorgeous house, is not far from like the mausoleum where Ho Chi Minh lies and rests.
And it's this magnificent house with a huge garden.
And like basically, it's a museum of Jop, right?
There's medals, and I mean, it just, and also in Jop's ashes are there.
And like kind of, there's like a Buddhist little temple that we went into.
I mean, it was just wild, right?
But we're sitting in the garden, and Dian Bien brought to the picnic, no pun intended.
The man assigned to kill Billy Waugh, right?
General Zhang, right?
So it was just like two arch enemies meeting in their 90s.
Billy wasn't quite yet in his 90s, but the colonel was.
And it was just wild to be discussing the war, to listen.
I mean, they were discussing the war.
I was listening.
And then this subject comes up because as I write in the book, Billy was part of the green light.
And we talked about this earlier the Area 51 bomb dropping when they jumped the nuclear weapon.
That was a test to see if such a team like that, a green light team, would ever use that weapon in war, would ever use a tactical nuke, that thing that you and I have been saying must never happen, right?
So in the 60s, this was a real thought.
And the Defense Department looked long and hard about, wait a minute, because the Ho Chi Minh Trail was this engineering masterpiece, this pathway through the jungle through which all these weapons were being run up and down and was fueling the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army.
And so the government had tried every which way to.
Shut this trail down and they couldn't.
And the kind of one idea that got run by the Jason scientists, I write about this in the Pentagon's brain and then again in Surprise Kill Vanish from a different point of view.
The idea was, well, we could drop it or place a tactical nuclear weapon on the trail, blow it up, and then it'll cut off.
You know, it's like cutting the artery.
And so in this, you know, there we are in Hanoi in 20, what was it, 2016, Billy Waugh and the Arch Enemy.
Colonel Zhang talking to each other about what it was like to try and kill each other, and all their friends are dead and they're alive.
And the subject comes up of this tactical nuclear weapon.
And Billy says, We should have used it.
And Zhang and Diane Bien are like, Excuse me?
I mean, I write this out in the book.
They're like, What?
The Americans would never have done that.
That's a ridiculous concept.
And Billy explains to them that it was actually thought through and it was decided against.
And Billy took the position.
That we should have used the tactical nuke.
And I was shocked.
They were shocked.
So he still thought, he thought, like going back, I would have used it if it was my choice?
Or was he kind of.
Here's what he said, and I'm paraphrasing, it's actually sourced in the book of what he really said from the tape recorder, but he said something to the effect of 58,000 of my friends and countrymen died, and a million of your friends and countrymen died.
One tactical nuclear weapon would have ended the war.
And that was just like.
It was this mind boggling concept.
I mean, I completely disagree with it.
Obviously, you see for reasons why in a nuclear war scenario, but that was Billy's position.
And so, you know, for as much like everything about Billy Waugh to me is just he was a man, he was one of a kind, you know.
As I said at his memorial service, he rode for the brand, right?
But I fundamentally disagreed with him on the tactical nuclear weapon.
And, you know, we had.
Many arousing conversations about that because, you know, I mean, and I think that that from the, and again, the, you know, that she who has never been in war, right?
My perspective on that would be like, wow, there are, the government needs to have different kinds of people.
You don't want Billy Waugh in charge of your nuclear arsenal, right?
And we laugh, but it's not funny.
You know, the big question in the books in Surprise, Kill, Vanish is, are, Full frontal wars better than assassinations and sending in people like Billy Waugh to surgically take out terrorist leaders or to take out, you know, evil people.
And I think the Billy Waugh is the better answer to that because I mean, there's, I think there's multiple cases to be made, but I think one of the things that has been shown to us over the last few decades with the wars in the Middle East is that.
These big wars are they cause spectacles and they become recruiting mechanisms for more terrorists.
Like the terrorists, they're like the Hydra, like you cut off one head and another head grows.
But if you at least have somebody like Billy Waugh or some sort of covert assassin to go in and take out these bad guys, similar to what happened with I mean Osama, that was made into a big spectacle too.
But when you do it covert and you don't make a big scene, you're not.
Helping the terrorists recruit more people.
Like, if you look at Afghanistan or even what's going on right now in Gaza, and there's children seeing their family members be slaughtered, they're going to grow up hating Americans.
This is the conundrum of, you know, guerrilla warfare, right?
So it all comes back to what we've been talking about this whole evening, which is like, Science and technology moves forward and makes these weapon systems that are bigger and faster and more complex and more precise.
And then you have the human factor, you know, the operators.
And then you have big wars with armies.
And then you have the operators, the individuals, the singletons like Billy Waugh or the small teams.
I don't have the answer.
I really am always amazed that just when I think, oh, this explains something.
It opens up a whole new Pandora's box, and you're stuck within a whole new question, right?
Covert Action and POW Guilt00:09:46
Like, you know, because you could say, because.
Well, there's no collateral damage with a knife to the throat.
This is the big question.
And then, you know, then history unfolds in a certain way.
And later people say, you know, like, okay, I'll give you an example, right?
Billy sat in my office when we were on the way to Hanoi and took me through a PowerPoint that never happened.
Okay.
So this way, preface this.
And he said, you know, God, Billy, thousands swears that he had presented to his CIA boss a plan to kill Hugo Chavez.
Okay.
And it was this remarkable plan.
They were going to Halo jump in and kill Hugo Chavez.
Okay.
Right.
And I mean, I, you know, if you, I, you know, I wrote Jack, the Jack Ryan series for a couple of seasons.
Right.
And if you, if you see, if season two, we kind of mimic this, right?
At the end of season two, we won't give it away, but it comes, it's pulled from the history pages.
Right.
So because Billy had this long plan, it was very interesting.
But the, but the point, he said they, the agency rejected it and they always said to him things like, Don't ever show us any crap like that again, you know, and then they would come back to him and say, do you have any ideas about this and that?
But the point that he was making and the reason he showed me that is he said, that's one of those situations where can you imagine if, because he was pointing to what that country looks like now, right?
And such devastation and starving people and a terrible government and just a horrible mess of a country.
And he was saying, can you imagine if we had killed the leader?
We would be blamed for all of this.
Right?
So.
But nobody would know we killed the leader.
But they always find out, don't they?
Yeah, I guess they do.
I think that things reveal themselves, right?
And that is the conundrum for the idea of covert warfare versus infantry warfare.
But what I do know, having written First Platoon and having.
Interviewed a group of young soldiers who were literally straight out of high school.
I mean, what they went through in Afghanistan is everybody's worst nightmare.
And that made me really ask that same question of myself that you just asked, which is, you know, wow, is covert action a much better solution?
I mean, of course, the big solution is why are we having all these wars?
Right.
But that's also.
If you interview enough people in the national security sphere, it's like that's a naive question.
You can't even ever ask that.
There's no answer.
Just don't ask.
Don't ask that.
Well, it's more like I think it really is saying, you know, humans are wired for war, humans are wired for conflict, right?
People want their neighbors X, Y, or Z.
So, well, it's different for us too because we're separated by 6,000 miles of ocean on both sides and we don't see anything up close.
All those countries over there in Europe and South America and Mexico, they witness it every day.
It's ubiquitous.
And it's hard for people like me to even have an opinion on it when they've never seen it.
You know, all I can do is read books and talk to people like you who have actually been there and report on, talk to all these people.
You feel kind of guilty even trying to form any sort of opinion on it, to be honest.
Well, that's an interesting.
I think that's really interesting what you just said.
You feel a sense of guilt because there's a culpability with all of us, right?
Like that's what I felt interviewing the soldiers from 1st Platoon, right?
I mean, the Billy Walls of the world, everyone in that Surprise, Kill, Vanish book, every tier one operator I interviewed, you know, their hand is raised and they are like, send me.
It's a cliche, except for it is not a cliche.
Right.
Right.
That is what they want to do.
As much as I want to be a writer and a reporter, as much as you want to be a podcaster, they want to be out doing covert action, right?
Yes.
And so the guilt part of it for me, no book hurt my heart as much as writing First Platoon because the soldiers that were so young and they were like the age of one of my sons at the time that they went to war, you know, to send an 18-year-old kid into battle.
It just, it's shocking.
It feels shockingly terrible, especially because a lot of these guys told me how much they were influenced by the way in which war is presented in media, right?
Which I am also a part of, working with one, you know, finger in Hollywood, right?
James Twist, who ended up committing suicide from 1st Platoon after coming home and just not being able to deal with the pain of what was in his head.
He told me, I write about this in First Platoon, how, you know, he watched war movies and just thought, this is going to be great.
And then he found himself in Afghanistan, in the worst place in the world, a medieval type environment.
And, you know, the historical part of that is a tragedy.
Yeah.
And that's the guilt, I think.
I think sending young soldiers who don't know better to war is.
You can say it's their decision, you know, but also a lot of those individuals told me they, you know, they went for the, to see the world, you know, they went to get out of the small coal mining town.
They went to maybe go to college one day.
And yes, some of the stories have a happy ending, but a lot of them don't.
And that's the part, you know, that.
They haven't found a purpose in life yet.
This is just a convenient opportunity, completely opposite of Billy Waugh.
Completely.
He was like, he was.
Didn't you think he was camping outside of Kopher's office on a lawn chair?
Yeah.
Send me out there.
Yeah.
Although, you know, Billy Waugh, I mean, then you could say, I mean, I could hear Billy saying, daddy, that's a bunch of hogwash, you know, because Billy was what, 14, 15 years old in Texas and World War II was happening and he ran away from home to join the military.
Didn't he hitchhike to the Pentagon?
No, no, he hitchhiked to California because he heard that they weren't checking papers as, you know, severely as they were in Texas.
And so you could get away, you could kind of pretend you were older than you were.
And he was just so pissed he missed World War II that he signed up the minute he graduated from high school.
Right.
So you can't really, I mean, and again, that's like the armchair judgment.
Yeah.
You know, but it is, it is, it's, you know, people sometimes ask me, what's a, why do you write about war?
And it's because there's nothing more dramatic.
Right?
And it's not just war.
It's the national security apparatus.
It's the civilian sector that requires war, right?
It's the secrets around the war.
It's the covert action that comes as a result of it.
It's the deception campaigns.
It's all of this.
It's the human lives.
It's the human dramas.
It's the near death experiences.
These are incredible subjects.
And I feel very lucky to have been able to interview some of these people that, looking back on history, are like, Wow, you know, I interviewed Hervey Stockman, the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2.
I mean, he fought in three wars and then he was shot down in Vietnam.
Or rather, he was shot at, crashed, and became a POW in the Hanoi Hilton.
Did he ever get out?
He got out.
Oh, obviously you interviewed him.
He got out.
He got out.
No, and he, you know, the detail on Hervey that I just never can get out of my mind is that he, whenever he was invited, To a Pentagon function after the war.
And mind you, he left Princeton to go fight Nazis in a Mustang, right?
An old, in like aircraft before jet engines, okay?
And then he flew through atomic clouds as an Air Force pilot.
And then he flew over the Soviet Union taking photographs.
And then he flew in Vietnam and then he became a POW, right?
He was a hero among heroes.
And when he came home, the Pentagon would invite him to events.
He insisted on wearing his Hanoi Hilton pajamas, the POW pajamas, the striped ones.
Nuclear Triad and EMP Threats00:14:50
Really?
He wore them home.
He refused to take them.
Like everybody, he just wanted it to be known, right?
And he said something to me that has, and again, I'm paraphrasing, but he said, the invitations from the Pentagon stopped coming because they wanted heroes, not former prisoners.
Yeah, we don't like to talk about our failures.
Right.
All right.
We're coming up to the end.
We're on the final stretch.
We have to dig into this book right here, Nuclear War.
Can you explain what's going on on the cover of your new book, Nuclear War?
That is the Ivy Mike thermonuclear bomb, right?
So atomic bombs, people think Hiroshima, Nagasaki, those were tiny.
A thermonuclear bomb is a two-stage weapon.
It uses, it is an atomic bomb inside a nuclear bomb.
The atomic bomb is the fuse.
It's so incredibly powerful.
That bomb is essentially the same.
It's like if you set off 1,000 Hiroshima's at the same time in the same place.
1,000.
Wasn't it supposed to be smaller than it actually was?
Well, the Ivy Mike bomb was the.
Proof of was the test that was the first thermonuclear test.
This is the one that was designed by Richard Garwin, whom I interviewed for the book, right?
And then, and the idea at the time was how do we make these massive nuclear bombs smaller so we can fit them in the top of a ballistic missile to strike an enemy across the world, right?
So the weight of the bomb had to actually be smaller.
If you go back in time to Hiroshima, it was in an aircraft.
It got like dropped out of the aircraft.
It weighed 9,000 pounds.
That's the size of a small elephant.
Okay.
And then they needed to, and then you had to create bombs with far more capacity to destroy the megaton.
Hiroshima was 15 kilotons.
This weapon on the cover of my book is 10.4 megatons.
It's so massive.
And this is something like four and a half miles of fireball, right?
So in, In the scenario that I tell in nuclear war, the first bomb that strikes is a.
The bomb that strikes Washington, D.C., is a one megaton thermonuclear weapon.
And I describe the effects factually based on all the details that all the scientists were measuring while we were exploding bombs like this.
Because we wanted, we meaning the Defense Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, wanted to know. the effects that these bombs would have on people so they could plan war, plan nuclear war.
And this fireball was, you know, five, four and a half miles wide, the fireball.
And the one, a one megaton fireball is about 1.1 miles wide.
So just of pure fire, pure fire.
Hurricane of fire.
Everything in that fireball is incinerated.
Nothing survives.
Nothing.
No insects, no cellular life, nothing.
The distance from the Pentagon to the White House is two miles.
What happens in the second mile radius?
Oh my goodness.
Well, I describe that thanks to the scientists that were measuring all of the nuclear weapons which were exploded from the end of the war until 1962 when the treaty prohibited atmospheric testing.
All of those weapons tests that You just, you know, that you described earlier.
They were performed to under for scientists, American scientists and engineers to understand how these effects would affect, you know, people, places, and things essentially.
And they're all compiled in these books.
And you can see in my source material, that's where I pull all the information from.
So, for example, like I can tell you precisely based on these documents at what temperature, you know.
The upholstery in a car, a 1958 style Buick, catches on fire.
And at what distance, right?
Or at what distance pine needles catch on fire?
Because this is the minutiae that the government was recording and understanding.
Because the idea was that one day we would have a nuclear war, which is just so mind-boggling when you read the scenario and you realize what a nuclear war will look like.
It's a reading it.
It's almost like the idea of having a plan in place for a nuclear war is irrelevant once it happens.
It seems like there's no hope for anything after a nuclear bomb hits.
I mean, you describe that the streets turn to molten rock.
Yes.
And that's from the effects book, by the way.
I mean, that's just not my imagination.
Right.
No, the level of details that you put in there of exactly what happens to the roads, the cars, the human beings, the rivers, the lakes, like it's astonishing the amount of detail that they are aware of.
And then you begin and it builds out from there and you realize, oh my God, nuclear command and control is a massive system of systems.
There's the nuclear triad, which is.
America's nuclear arsenal.
It's made up of the ICBMs and the silos that we spoke of.
We have 14 nuclear armed, nuclear powered Ohio class submarines that they call the handmaidens of the apocalypse because they are completely undetectable under the ocean and they can fire between 80 and 90 nuclear warheads in 90 seconds.
And I, you did a great job of explaining the MIRVed missiles.
How do those work?
So there's, there's a, there's, there's like 20 something missiles on each sub, and each of those missiles have like three warheads in each one that can hit multiple targets that are predetermined.
MIRV stands for multiple independently targetable, you know, vehicles, right?
And so it's this idea that in the nose cone of one missile on a sub, right?
And I misspoke.
There's, you know, The numbers are dizzying.
I write this in the book, right?
Because in the subs, there is a missile that is called a trident.
And inside the nose cone of the trident sits a MIRVed missile, right?
Which means there are these multiple warheads.
So you can fire one trident out of a sub.
It comes out of the vessel, breaches the surface of the ocean, moves into boost phase.
And then goes ballistic through its mid course phase, at which point the warhead releases the multiple warheads and they can independently target places that are up to several hundred miles away.
And this system, the Handmaiden of the Apocalypse, can sneak up to a coast and essentially be 14 minutes away.
From a coast, and so this idea that we have the nuclear triad is so bizarrely redundant.
Right, we have the icbms in the ground, we have the this, the missiles and the subs, and then we also have our bomber force.
Right, and so this is all set up to fundamentally lock down this idea that this is called deterrence.
Right, so like we have so many nuclear armed weapon systems in our triad that if you dare try and attack us, we will annihilate you to our smoldering fireplace, right?
And then the other side, the enemy, which used to just be Russia, the superpower, but now there are nine nuclear-armed states, the idea is like, okay, then they have their nuclear arsenal that is on par with ours, at least Russia is.
And so they're saying essentially, you know, Don't you dare attack us because we have the same amount of firepower and if you do, we will turn you into a fireplace.
And that is the fundamental premise of deterrence.
And so the whole idea of nuclear war is predicate of like not having a nuclear war is predicated on this idea of deterrence, which as I write in the book is just a theoretical phenomenon.
It's like saying, okay, so if that works, great, we won't have a nuclear war.
But what if it doesn't work?
What if one rogue missile gets launched?
And that is the terrifying scenario that everyone in the national security system will really tell you, well, deterrence will hold.
Because if it doesn't, this is what's going to happen.
Well, because we have super sophisticated defense rockets, right?
NORAD, that can shoot down missiles out of the sky.
Which is pure fantasy.
Pure fantasy.
Pure fantasy.
Because as we discussed earlier, the U.S. arsenal is about 1,700.
Ready for launch more or less.
Okay.
And Russia has the same.
China has 500 now.
North Korea has maybe 50.
Okay.
And so people think, well, we have, they imagine like Israel's Iron Dome.
Well, our system is called the Interceptor System.
And it's run by the Missile Defense Agency.
And they have a grand total of 44 interceptor missiles.
And the success rate.
Of those interceptor missiles is between 40 and 55 percent.
So if and you don't start a nuclear war with a couple missiles, you send the mother load.
So if you send 1,700 missiles or even a thousand missiles at the United States and we have 44 interceptor missiles, you see the point.
So say if Russia does Russia have MIRVs too?
Russia has MIRVs.
So a thousand missiles really is like 3,000.
Those are actually warheads.
And when I say the numbers are dizzying, the numbers are dizzying, right?
They are.
And thank you to Hans Christensen and his colleagues at the Nuclear Notebook, Matt Corda, and others who keep track of this because they do the best they can to, you know, based on who reports what, to keep track of what MIRV missiles are where.
And there are all these treaties that say you can't have this and you have to have that.
And these numbers really are dizzying.
I try in the book to just delineate the basic facts of what they are and how they exist.
But, you know, so if you have a MIRVed warhead, that counts as, you know, if the MIRV has four warheads in its nose cone, that counts as four nuclear weapons of the 1700.
But still, it only takes one of those that's on the cover of my book to take out a city.
And also, as I write in the book, the anarchy and the mayhem that is almost guaranteed to follow.
And this comes straight out of the mouth of former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry telling me that there's just absolutely no way that civil society can hold, even with one nuclear missile.
And you have Craig Fugate, former director of FEMA, saying to me, he was taking me through, FEMA is the one that's in charge of these super secret, top secret classified plans of what will happen after a nuclear war.
And he's very honest.
He's like, You know, we're an agency who plans for asteroids, okay?
But he said, after a nuclear war, there's, it's just a matter of self-survive.
That's an actual quote from him, you know?
Hope that you have pediolite stocked.
So, the idea that nuclear war is unthinkable, I believe, is a dangerous concept.
I think people need to think about nuclear war to understand this is madness.
How does it make you feel when you see reports of people like Mark Zuckerberg and all these billionaires creating these nuclear bunkers?
I mean, it just seems silly to me because, first of all, it's incredibly naive because.
You know, that's just.
You know.
Read the book and find out what happens when the EMP comes right, the nuclear emp yeah, excuse me, that just takes out all electricity.
I mean, you don't need an extra weapon for an emp, the nukes, the nukes handle that absolutely.
You just explode a nuclear weapon 300 miles above, you know Oklahoma, and goodbye the power grid, right?
So whoever's in their bunker, their bunker is working on a backup generator and that backup generator has only so much fuel And if you can't pump fuel ever again, you know, you suffocate in your nuclear bunker.
Sorry, Danny, but, you know, this is the.
Who survives?
Doomsday Plane and Winter00:09:14
No.
Well, you know, listen, nuclear winter was this concept that first emerged in 1983 when Carl Sagan and colleagues wrote the first theory of nuclear winter.
This idea that after a nuclear exchange, never mind the.
The incinerating destruction from all the weapons, right?
That the soot that would be lofted into the air would block out the sun.
And so you would have nuclear winter.
Maybe ice age.
Yes.
And at the time, okay, so one of those scientists, Brian Toon, was Carl Sagan's young student at the time, and he's still alive.
And I interview him for the book.
And he's been working on this issue ever since that first paper.
He's a remarkable academic, and the papers that they have written are astonishing.
And what he said to me was interesting, which was that he said that when the nuclear winter theory first came out, the Defense Department, you know, sort of really tried to shoot it down, no pun intended.
That, you know, it was Russian propaganda and it wasn't really going to happen and all of this.
And, you know, there were two schools of thought.
There were those who were like, oh my God, this is just a disaster and it is nuclear winter is real.
And there were others who said, didn't we, that theory, you know, Well, the scientists discussed the fact that their climate modelings were limited to pencil and paper.
I mean, yes, computers, but there was nothing near like there is now for climate modeling.
Their most recent paper, which used state-of-the-art computer technology to model, and they wrote a paper, I think it was like 18 scientists on five countries.
I cite it in the book, and I interview some of them.
And they say actually the models from nuclear winter are like minor compared to what will really happen with what it shows us with this new technology.
And that in essence, five billion people will die after a nuclear exchange.
The people that die in the minutes and hours of the fireballs, the fallout, and then the nuclear winter.
Like, here's one detail that Professor Toon shared with me that I just can't get out of my mind.
He showed me a picture, too, like a drawing that his team had done.
He said, Because the temperature of the earth will drop by 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
There will be 330 billion.
I'm losing the metric.
I think pounds, 330 billion pounds of soot lofted into the air, right?
Places, this is Toon talking.
He said, places like Iowa and Ukraine will be sub zero for seven years, every day of the year.
And so then, That's the death of agriculture.
So, this is a very grim topic to end our podcast on.
Well, who survives that?
How do you survive?
Do they know?
Do they speculate who could possibly survive?
I mean, so when a nuclear exchange happens, one of the most fascinating things to me is how you have the facility that's inside the Cheyenne Mountain complex buried in.
A granite mountain.
One of the guys there is in charge of launching nukes, or what's it, Central Command or Stratcom?
Stratcom.
Strategic Command.
U.S. Strategic Command.
So one of those guys, including the president, has to be sent up into this nuclear airplane, this airplane that can survive any sort of nuclear bomb.
It's called the Doomsday Plane.
The Doomsday Plane.
Until it runs out of fuel, yes.
And it has like days worth of fuel, so they can basically drive around in circles until.
Chaos sort of dies down?
I don't know that it has days worth of fuels.
It's kind of impossible.
I think it has about 24 hours.
And the idea was that it would be refueled in air.
But that's not going to, I mean, that's, you got to consider what would be going on.
So, yes, if it can get refueled, it could fly around in the air.
And those planes were designed, that's why they call them the Doomsday Fleet, to be able to give launch orders from the air while things are blowing up on the ground.
And so, you know, but to answer your question about who survives, what, I looked at this book called The Cold in the Dark that was written by Carl Sagan and some colleagues after this nuclear winter theory.
And Sagan, this is now 40 some odd years ago, says, Who would want to survive?
You'd have this small group of people who would essentially become hunter gatherers again because you'd have to be Billy Waugh, right?
Or even you'd have to be an advanced prepper with military training.
To be able to survive in a world without agriculture, right?
And so that's the idea of like, you know, who would want to survive?
You think like most people that are used to today's technology that need electricity to survive, all those people would be dead.
But I wonder what would happen to like uncontacted tribes in the Amazon.
Would they survive?
Would they be the ones that, you know, probably birth a new civilization 20,000 years down the.
down the road?
I mean, you know, according to Professor Toons, like Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South America, you know, would not have these same climate effects that the rest of the world.
And so, yes, people, and that's an interesting, you know, I end the book by telling a story of the archaeologist who discovered Gobekli Tepe.
In southern Turkey.
Yeah.
Which was kind of the birth of, you know, it's got all these other things.
We just did a full podcast on that like a couple days ago.
I'm sure about other things, not like post nuclear war.
Right, right.
But what, you know, Klaus Schmidt was the archaeologist who found the place in the 90s.
And with him was a young graduate student named Michael Morsch, who's still alive and who I interview.
And he tells me about finding this incredible, like this buried secret, right?
So, you know, it's 12,000-ish years old.
And it changed the timeline about how, you know, scientists and archaeologists get to think about, you know, humanity's kind of emergence.
from hunter-gatherer to civilization, right?
To being civilized man, right?
You know, and that's the idea of like, I end it with this kind of thought of like, what's it going to be like 24,000 years?
I take you through minute, you know, the seconds ticking time clock, right?
From launch to nuclear winter and then jump 24,000 years to a thought experiment, which is like, will anyone ever know we were here?
Like, what will they find, right?
We will be like the Gobekli Teb.
Right?
Like, who were these people?
What happened to them?
Right?
I mean, when Einstein was asked about what weapons he thought World War III would be fought with, his famous answer, and I'm paraphrasing, is, I don't know, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
You know, and this idea that civilized man has created, we have created all this technology, this, Accelerated rate, particularly accelerated since the end of World War II.
Just astonishing acceleration, right?
That's the Pentagon's brain, just how fast it's all happened.
And yet it took us, you know, approximately 12,000 years to get here from like the guys running around with spears to doing this podcast, right?
But it could all be gone in seconds and minutes.
Yes.
An amazing book.
I can't recommend it enough.
And this podcast, if it's out in the public, which by the time this thing hits YouTube, your book will be out.
People will be able to find it.
Nuclear War, a Scenario, everywhere.
Books can be found.
I'm assuming Amazon audio will be out by then.
Anything else we should tell people?
Listen to the Danny Jones podcast.
That's right.
I enjoy listening to Danny Jones podcast.
Thank you.
That means a lot, Annie.
I really appreciate that.
It's been a true honor to have you in here and to talk to you today.