Wayne Barnes details the true story of Robert Hansen, a Soviet double agent who spent 22 years in Colorado's Supermax prison before dying in June 2023. Barnes explains how a KGB defector provided memos enabling his team to use a Venn diagram to identify Hansen, noting that personal crises often drive betrayal. He recounts the seven-year FBI review process for his book, where they redacted nearly every line except one joke about lawyers, arguing their psychological questions were proprietary. Ultimately, Barnes insists on publishing the unredacted truth despite warnings from Gene McClellan that it could aid Russian intelligence, highlighting how human vulnerabilities remain the primary vector for cyberattacks and espionage. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Spy Versus Spy00:11:20
All right, joining us now, this is going to be a very interesting interview.
It's a spy versus spy type of thing.
It's called A Traitor in the FBI.
The true story of finding Robert Hansen.
As many people have said, perhaps the most damaging spy or double agent.
I mean, this is, we can talk about what it was that he did and what it took to find him and how there was a cover up in the FBI.
As a matter of fact, our guest today is Wayne Barnes, and it took him seven years to get the FBI to approve The release of this manuscript.
So, this is something we're starting to see a lot of problems within the bureaucracy, aren't we?
Joining us now again is Wayne Barnes.
Thank you so much for joining us, sir.
My pleasure to be here.
Thank you very much.
This is an amazing story.
And again, when we look at this, a lot of people are familiar with Jonathan Pollard.
How does Robert Hansen figure into this?
Except, I mean, Jonathan Pollard was sending information to another country, which then used that to send it to Israel, which then used it.
To get the release of prisoners from the Soviet Union.
But this is a guy who was working for the FBI and he sought out the Soviet Union so he could make money selling secrets.
And he went on for quite a long time, didn't he?
He did.
He was arrested in 2001 and spent the rest of his life in prison.
But the irony is that he spent 22 years in prison, which is almost the identical number of years he spent working as a spy against the FBI.
Wow.
It's irony and sad.
But he died in June of.
2023, which in Supermax prison in Colorado.
Wow.
Wow.
How much time?
So he spent 22 years in prison?
Right.
He was in for life.
But so he died in.
If you're in solitary confinement, 23 hours a day, never have physical contact with anybody.
When he was being debriefed after he was arrested, well, the moment he was arrested, the first thing he said is, What took you guys so long?
Which tells you his attitude.
That was to the SWAT team, which does this for a living.
My book is The Hunt.
Uh, in most cases, you have the hunt, the kill, and the feast, right?
People celebrate things.
My brain gets to the kill, and a SWAT team does that.
I go back, I'm on the next hunt.
I'm an investigator, I do the hunt for a living.
The rest of it is up to the other bureaucrats.
That's amazing.
But of course, I guess he would have that kind of an attitude because he sought out the Soviet Union.
So he figures, I'm so much smarter than these guys, they'll never catch me.
That's the attitude of a lot of criminals, isn't it?
And so he was the one who sought them out.
And this went on for quite some time.
You were part.
Of a joint investigation of the CIA and the FBI.
They weren't sure, I guess, whether this was a guy who was in the CIA or the FBI, right?
Initially, that was the case.
One of the questions is how we knew that there was a penetration of U.S. intelligence.
And most defectors, whether they're from Romania or Czech intelligence, during the Cold War, the first thing they'd say is, you know, we have you penetrated.
And then finally in 1978, General Pachepa from Romania, he was the director of the Foreign Service, he defected to the West.
And that was bad for Nikolai Ceausescu, the president.
He was like the number two man.
But we asked him about that.
And he said, no, we tell them that in training.
Nobody has you penetrated.
Not the checks, not the Gary.
We just say that to scare them so they won't work with you.
But in this situation, we had some cases that were collapsing for no apparent reason in the 80s.
And I was part of some of them, but no one really suspected any one person was doing this.
It almost seemed unheard of, which may have been us naive to a certain extent.
But we have tests to get in and sincerity things and patriotism, a lot of things going on.
But as it turns out, Hansen was.
He had a different kind of personality.
David Charney was one of the psychiatrists, psychologists who was able to interview him for weeks after he was arrested.
And his bottom line came out to be a certain level of compartmentation.
Hansen would go to mass every morning at 6 a.m.
He went into the bureau to go to his desk and did things.
But behind his eyeballs, in his brain, he was not just controversial, he was a traitor, flat out.
And as he sat down in the hallway, he had disregard and disrespect for almost everybody, but you can't present it that way.
But the way a lot of bureaucrats have to operate within bureaucracy, you do what it takes to get the job done or you just deal with everybody as you can.
But even in the hallways of FBI headquarters, they called him the undertaker because he had that black suit and just was a straight-faced guy, no fun whatsoever.
He was compartmentalizing things in his mind, which is a problem.
Even when he sat in his jail cell for like 22 years or so, he always thought he was the smartest person in the room, even when he was in solitary confinement.
That's me.
It tells you a lot.
I guess that is true.
If you're in solitary confinement, you are the smartest and the dumbest.
See, now you're logical.
You're a sensible person.
His brain, it was like, no matter who's here, I'm still, if someone won't, anyway, that was his mindset.
And one of the interesting things when he was being debriefed after his arrest for weeks at a time, he said that all the other espionage people he was familiar with, no one had done the great damage that he had done.
There were other things for shorter lengths of time and whatever.
But he saw this as more of a white collar offense.
So he felt that if he did get arrested, he would just go to one of those jails, which is for like the Wall Street guys who are doing Ponzi things or whatever, where it would be like a country club.
That's what he expected.
Or Ghulain Maxwell, right?
Yeah, right.
He got the worst of the worst, right?
Which was appropriate.
But he missed that part entirely.
And you're talking about white collar crimes.
Now, you mentioned in your book that there was somebody that was an agent, a double agent, I guess is the right term.
Somebody that was working for the Soviets, and he was actually.
Informing to the FBI, somebody that you were familiar with that was executed based on what he had done.
So this is not simply a white collar crime.
Oh, no, no, not at all.
Because I can't tell you what went through Hansen's mind.
But there are just as a slight parenthesis, there were some Russians who, after the Berlin Wall came down, sort of when the Cold War was essentially over, who wrote books who had been assigned to the Soviet embassy in Washington.
And they, like on the book cover, one fellow wrote, you know, I was the one who recruited Aldrich James and Robert Hansen.
Nobody recruited Robert Hansen.
He did this on his own.
He made his own personal contact.
They didn't even know who he was.
They didn't have a name.
They had no way to reach him except for how he decided to.
So that's a problem with, now mine is written as nonfiction.
It was the first nonfiction counterintelligence book ever submitted to the FBI pre-publication review.
Maybe it's a kind of a ballsy thing to do, but no one would even dream of it.
And it, everything, you just wouldn't do it.
That's not something the Bureau agents do.
You can write about one big drug case you have in Des Moines or Detroit or one kidnapping case in Tampa, have at it.
But you want to write about something which used to be classified, it takes a long, long time to get through.
It wasn't much that they didn't want me to write it, but they weren't sure I don't think how to, not giving any.
Credence for the bureaucracy who lead such things, they didn't have to deal with it.
It was like a whole different thing for them.
And what wasn't wasn't classified.
So that's a we could get into that.
But it wasn't as much they didn't want it published, but they never had it placed.
It was a case of first impression, as lawyers might say.
No one had had this happen to them before, and they were stuck with it.
So they have 30 to 45 days to review a book.
And you write about poetry, fly fishing in West Virginia, or you want to write about those criminal cases.
They want to see them all, but have at it.
But this one, from the start to finish, it was locked in as what had been classified secret, very secret.
The most sensitive we had because it was a penetration of U.S. intelligence.
So, anyway, the point was we had some cases that were falling apart, but that really wasn't sufficient to lead us to go on a witch hunt, but just an investigation to try to figure out what, because there was no lead.
My supervisors have described me, and I've always said that if there's no lead, you just take whatever you're doing and Splash up the stream, turning over rocks until you find something which is a lead to try to make any case work, even if all the leads seem gone.
The book was almost called Splashing Upstream to Catch a Spy, but too many people didn't understand the term, so I just left it as it was.
Well, explain that to us a little bit.
So at first, you're not really even sure that this is an individual, one person that's doing it, or it's just a couple of things that happen.
So, how did you get involved in this, and how did you begin?
What were the rocks that you first started turning over?
Well, so let's just go back a step.
In the 1990s, there was a defector from Russia.
Again, they became Russia again after the wall came down.
But I wouldn't want to try to do the lines in history with what they were and what they weren't at times when the Soviet republics are pulling away and which one stayed close and the Warsaw Pact, what happened to them.
But what happened was someone defected who had been in the KGB.
And where we always heard that they said, whether it was the Russians or the Romanians or the Hungarians, That were penetrated, meaning U.S. intelligence, and some would say the FBI.
There was just no information to go on to show that was so.
But this fellow came out, he had been in the KGB, and he not only came out, but he had brought documents with him.
And some of the documents were internal FBI memos.
So you may be in the FBI, you may be able to get State Department documents if you're a liaison from there, or something from a sensitive committee on Capitol Hill, which go spread far and wide to many places.
And even in the CIA, there are certain documents which get spread around.
But internal FBI memos, Nah, there's only one way you can get that.
So let's assume there were like five or seven memos which came out.
So the defector comes out, he says, You're penetrated, and here is information to show who you are.
So then you have to take it not just seriously, you have to put together a force.
And they called the case Gray Suit.
And all the other tangents from the Gray Suit were connected to that main case of we're penetrated.
So if you take each memo and you figure who saw that in the FBI, if it came in through the New York office or the Washington office, who saw it at headquarters?
And if you go back to the Venn diagram concept, draw a circle around that memo and everybody who saw it in the chain of command, figure those names.
And then you go to the next memo, which is a completely different topic and whatever, and draw a circle around there with everybody who saw it.
And then the next one.
And finally, when you put it all together, it should be one ellipse in the middle, which has got one person's name on it.
That's the theory.
But it didn't work that way.
For instance, you're reading the memo on your desk and you go get some coffee.
And the guy in the desk next to you, he looks over and sees what's on your desk.
He takes it, photocopies it quickly, puts it back.
And his name's not on the list.
So you don't know that he saw it.
I'm not painting it harder than it was, but you can tell from that this is a tough one.
The Venn Diagram Memo00:15:58
Yeah.
How long did you work on this case?
Well, I had been assigned to the Washington field office for, uh, uh, 18 years.
Uh, I had been to, uh, oh, I had Spanish in high school, French in college.
The Bureau gives you a language aptitude test.
Uh, because I had Romance languages in my head, I scored well in that test.
And I was in New York in 1973 and they said, you have the next highest score in the language aptitude test.
Go to Monterey, California for nine months and learn Romanian.
So I went out there nine months.
I learned it, which meant I was destined to work in the Washington office, which is the home of catching spies in America, not New York, not anyplace else.
New York.
So Washington was the place to be.
I was on the block squad, which handled Romanians, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and the Bulgarians.
There were 39 agents in the squad, which was the largest squad in the FBI.
And that began my career.
We have great mentors.
But the interesting thing is the fellows working down the hallway catching bank robbers, they knew nothing about what we were doing on the counterintelligence squads.
They knew as little as Mon Poghettle walking down the street on Pennsylvania Avenue coming from Kansas knew.
I mean, it didn't go anyplace outside of our doors.
So, if you had a success, you celebrated within the group, and that was a small group.
Anyway, so that was so my involvement became we were very successful at compromising Eastern European intelligence services.
We had recruited intelligence officers in Romania, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, I think a Bulgarian or two, which was extraordinary work by a very special set of people.
I mean, it's psychology, it's chutzpah, it's you turning over all the rocks.
And then at one point, I was.
Uh, transferred to work Soviet cases on the KGB squad that deals with political line, those are the ones who would work on Capitol Hill, meet legislative assistance.
So that was when I first started working Russians, which was, I guess, 1981.
So that was, uh, but you're applying the same tactics you had done against the Romanians, it just was against the Russians, but it was the same thing.
And the reason is because everybody has foibles in their life.
I had done some work with John Douglas.
You would know John Douglas as the Mind Hunter.
The show Criminal Minds was based on him, and he was in the Netflix series.
I think there's two seasons out of Mind Hunter.
He was the first one who went to prisons to interview serial murderers.
What was going through their mind when they did this?
How did they pick these people?
What was your gratis and all that gratification, et cetera?
So he put together how you can solve cases inductively.
Deductive is when you have.
Fingerprints and epithelials at the crime scene, you follow certain things.
Someone saw a license plate, but his was inductively what is the kind of person who would do this kind of offense?
And then he went backwards to have the two try to meet.
And a good example was arsonists.
Mr. Hoover always wanted to have the FBI not just be appreciated by law enforcement, but to help law enforcement any way we could.
When you see TV shows like a Law and Order sort of a show, they want conflict, but they don't want conflict among the squad.
So they're bringing in the FBI to national security, steal the case.
And so that's the conflict.
But actually, the local law enforcement likes the FBI a lot.
We usually bring the money.
We have money for Title IIIs, wiretaps, and just more sophistication with the.
Like in Phoenix, where they should have brought the FBI in on the Guthrie kidnapping much, much sooner.
They just had better ability to do such things.
So, anyway, so our case was with arson, for the example.
There are certain personalities in arson.
Usually, the person who sets the fire, this isn't one to burn down a building for insurance, but just the person who's arsonist.
They'll set the fire and then they'll run out and then they'll go inside and rescue somebody now that they're the hero.
Many times, there's even a firefighter who does that.
But there's other ones who do strange things.
Almost always, when you get to a fire scene, you try taking a picture of everybody who's watching because the guy said the fire is watching the fire.
He's almost always in a picture of everybody who's watching the fire.
You just have to find it.
So, those were the kind of things that's inductive, right?
That's interesting.
Let me just interject here.
We used to help people that did the puppy raising program for Guiding Eyes for the Blind.
And if the puppy would fail for the blind, they would give them to the bomb squad or the arson squad or something like that.
And that's what they told us.
They said we would always take the dogs back and let them sniff the crowd.
Because usually there was some kind of accelerator or something on their shoes because they had set the fire.
And that's, I would find a lot of them that way.
See, that's very good of you.
That's a behind the scenes view of understanding these things.
It's not that the public isn't smart, they're just not cognizant of the pieces of the puzzle that have to go together, which is, you know, I don't be too graphic, but many times when you're looking for the Sierra arsonist and you're pretty sure this MO is the same person, whoever it is, they'll find him with the crowd is here and the bush over here, and he's standing behind the bush masturbating while he's watching the fire.
And you can catch them doing that because you understand the person.
Anyway, John Douglas did those kind of things.
So then we came down to working in counterintelligence.
How can we apply this?
And while he has many books out and he's very, very skilled at this, he does a criminal field.
And I was doing counterintelligence.
And it started with two concepts.
One is who in the embassy, let's call it the Soviet embassy at the time, what is their personality, which would enable us to try to recruit someone?
They'd work for us.
Now, bear in mind, there were two superpowers, and it was the Soviet Union and the US of A, and they thought they belonged to the best superpower.
So why would they want to talk to me?
That was a problem.
And the other one was who would be an American who has clearances working for, say, a defense contractor, maybe Boeing and doing the design for the new B-2 bomber wing, okay?
What would make him all of a sudden decide to be a traitor and start selling secrets?
And the answer was simple.
Many problems, once they're solved, the simple answers were a crisis in their life.
And we had one of the intelligence officers, he had a child born.
Women have to go home with eight months of pregnancy, but if you have a premature baby, the clock calendar is out the window.
So the child was born premature and was in the hospital and needed heart surgery.
And the intelligence officer knew that if I go home, that kid's going to die.
They can't do this over there.
So we knew this.
So we found the best doctor in the world for this particular thing.
And he was the one who did the surgery.
And the diplomat knew what we had done.
And that helped us to recruit him because he saw that this wouldn't happen in his homeland.
But it did happen here.
Even though we had a greater view of not exactly leverage, but that's the kind of people we are.
We did that.
And then that's the kind of thing that makes them begin to help you.
At the same time, the fellow who works for the defense contractor would have a crisis in his life.
Like he has a child who needs surgery, not a baby, but just someone.
He goes to his employer, tries to get.
Money out of his retirement fund or insurance companies, and everybody rejects it.
So he realized I have the keys to the kingdom in my head.
So one day he goes to the Soviet embassy, follows a Russian home, and he puts a letter underneath the fellow's windshield wiper.
And it says, I have secrets to sell you.
Meet me on this park bench on Saturday at six o'clock.
And the Russians always have to show up, even though it could be a scam, but they have to show up and he'll start telling secrets.
But the problem for that man is he said, I need $10,000.
So the man on the park bench, and he says, I need the money.
And they say, Listen, I just, Pick up these things.
I'm the tradecraft guy.
We got a guy in the embassy who has to read them to see if they're real, right?
Which is appropriate, but the American doesn't have any idea that's coming.
So they agreed to meet in another week or two.
And the Russian comes back and he says, I have $5,000 for you.
And the American says, I need 10.
And he says, Well, what you gave me wasn't worth 10.
It's worth five.
Go get some more and bring it back.
And he's on the hook.
Yeah.
But he had a crisis in his life.
So either side with a crisis will have things like that happen.
We never would have done it on your own, but circumstances, you know.
So I worked counterintelligence for 18 years in Washington.
And I was a security officer for the field office, which is a, Fairly big position.
There was an interview program where we'd interview people coming in as language specialists.
And we do backgrounds on people.
If you're out of college, out of law school, you have a neighborhood, you have friends who recommend you, social acquaintances, you do neighborhood background investigations, you name it.
But when a fella comes in, say, from Afghanistan, and he speaks to either Pashto or Urdu, and he did, as a linguist, translate things, there is no background.
There's no place to go.
So I started the interview process, which they later called the Personnel Security Interview, PSI.
And It was a way to conduct interviews.
So it's almost like a verbal polygraph.
You start with various categories in their life, their education, their family, the jobs they've had, places they've traveled, whatever, and follow it along with members of their family, et cetera.
And you could have someone, an American who had maybe traveled abroad for a few months and comes back, they will now get this PSI personnel security interview.
This was 1986, and they're using that same interview process today, almost 40 years later.
So it's all over the Bureau.
There's people in the Bureau who hate me because they hate to do these interviews.
Take two to three hours, and you have to get inside someone's brain.
But nevertheless, this is a good product.
I have a website, WayneBarnesReading.com, and in there, in the press section, there's a 13 minute talk I gave on the origins of the personal security interview.
Someone wants to know about how to interview people, how the FBI does it.
That's the nature.
Anyway, getting back to this, 1989, I had a daughter who was born with spina bifida.
She would need lower leg braces in a wheelchair, and that was in Washington.
And all the surgeons we talked to said the best orthopedic surgeons in the world are in San Diego.
Go there.
So I was able to secure a transfer, which was another piece of magic.
Can't do that very often.
And so I have, well, now I have five children.
But so we moved to San Diego, and the doctors work their magic on Natalia.
Every other summer, she had more surgeries, and she walks.
I walked her down the aisle.
They said she wouldn't live and wouldn't walk, and I walked her down the aisle last year.
It's all right.
That's great.
So that was tremendous.
But it put me in San Diego in 1990.
So the bad guy, whoever the unknown subject we call Munsub was, he was still active in the early 1990s.
Mm hmm.
So, if you have a person who you think can identify who the unknown subject is, and you have to pick an FBI agent to approach him, you don't want to pick the guy who is the spy to approach the man.
That's a bad thing.
And all the agents in Washington, how could you vet them without polygraphing everybody and giving away what you knew?
So, I had left in 1990, so I wasn't the bad guy.
So, one Sunday morning in February 1998, I got a call from a dear friend, Gene McClellan.
I worked for the years in Washington.
And he said, Mike and Dave and I are coming out on Tuesday.
Don't tell anybody we're coming.
And no one in the counterintelligence squad.
I was working healthcare at the time.
Not much counterintelligence work in San Diego compared to other things.
And he said, don't tell anyone you're coming.
Not your wife, not your friends, not your supervisor, nobody.
That's what we call it undercover of darkness.
So three senior agents from this area flew out to San Diego.
We met and they got right down to business.
They said, there's a spy in the FBI.
And we know that there's a man coming to a film festival in Santa Monica in two months.
And we know he's one of the Russians who was assigned to the US in 85 or so.
And he knows the identity.
He knows what the face of this man looks like.
So, we want you to go to the film festival, get some kind of backstopping cover that would be appropriate to be at a film festival, go to the festival, find him, meet him, befriend him, recruit him, and then show him a dozen pictures of senior FBI agents, all of whom we suspect might be the traitor in the FBI, and then have him point out a photo.
And that was my mission impossible.
And that's what the book is about.
That's the very beginning of the book.
You have to understand that, again, superpowers and who would do what, but.
Goes back to John Douglas and getting personality.
John invented profiling, so he was good, but it helped all of us with what we were doing.
But what would make the man tick?
Would he be a traitor to his country?
The Berlin Wall came down.
It's now Russia, not the Soviet Union.
What kind of allegiances are in your mind?
That kind of thing.
And then how to go to a film festival as John Q. Public instead of a movie producer, a director, a writer.
But so the case was set.
That was my part of it.
It was how did I get involved?
I had a daughter born with a disability.
I had a transfer to Sandy.
I thought I left my counterintelligence life completely behind.
Like that was gone.
I was working health care fraud because I was one of the prime people to begin working health care fraud because of not just my five children, where they understand health insurance, but with her disabilities, I really understood health insurance.
So, if you take a new age and you say 26 years old, never been married, has no kids, compared to what I knew about in health insurance, I was right to be the guy to do that.
So, we had some great cases.
But so, no one on the squad, I felt so bad.
My supervisor on the health care squad, they had what we call paper, the verb to paper, that is, If I flew to someplace else in the country, if I flew to Europe, if I went to Los Angeles for a week or two, what did I go on?
It couldn't be a healthcare case.
We couldn't write down a counterintelligence case because the bad guy at headquarters, at this point, computers had become in season.
He could search the FBI's computer system to see if there was a case mounted against him.
That's right.
Wow, that's interesting.
So, how long did it take you to start to narrow this down?
Did that break it when you found this guy at the film festival?
And turn him.
No, again, it's like I say, it's more than a memo.
There were other leads being covered with other people.
There were other Russians who they believed knew the identity of the man, whether it was a picture or a voice or whatever it was.
So there are things happening all around the country, all around the world, actually, Europe and other places.
So if someone went to London, for instance, a Russian who we believe was on our list of people who would know the identity, so maybe work counterintelligence in the embassy, maybe have had access to doing a dead drop with somebody, maybe seeing them.
If there was a dead drop, is where you're dropping a rock in the woods and it's got secrets inside of it.
Instructions for the next meet, that kind of thing.
It could be in a park under a bridge, you know, the classic Russian looking thing, you know, the bridge of spies, all that stuff.
So I wasn't the only lead, but I was a very good lead because we knew this guy knew what we knew he knew.
So other things were happening massively.
And when you say other things were happening, you had the CIA involved in this as well, right?
Wasn't this a joint thing between the CIA and the FBI?
Well, it started that way.
But when, not to be redundant, when documents showed up, which were FBI documents, we, The Bureau, I say we.
I've been out for 26 years, but my brain still says we.
I apologize for that.
It's like I have a son who roots for the University of Miami and he keeps saying we, which is good, but he's not on the field.
That shows what kind of spirit he has.
So the Bureau produces what's called a letterhead memorandum.
It's got a letterhead, and then it's just a narrative, whatever the debriefing was from whoever it may have been.
That's a story.
We disseminate that on a counterintelligence basis to other agencies, NSA and CIA and state, whatever.
In the criminal world, there's a prosecutorial report, which is go to an AOSA, an assistant U.S. attorney to prosecute.
Other than that, we don't give stuff away.
So if somebody has an internal memo from the FBI, you didn't see it in somebody's desk at Langley.
I was just wondering if the CIA, you're talking about other countries and that type of thing, is that something that would be investigated then by the FBI, or is it the CIA that would start trying to make contact with these other people in other countries?
If it happens in the US, the FBI has got primary jurisdiction.
Psychological Lie Detector00:04:25
If it happens abroad, if you want to approach a Russian, for instance, who's going to London, you can't do that without coordination with the CIA.
They own the world outside of the US on an intelligence basis.
It's the same way if I need to cover a lead in Oklahoma City and I'm in San Diego, you have to tell the special agent in charge and the appropriate squad there what's coming.
Like, I have to interview this guy in person.
I've interviewed these 15 people and I can't ask you to do those interviews or read them and get it.
Well, I've got to come personally and do that.
You have to notify the territory you're going.
Whereas in the international basis, if you go to London, CIA isn't just there, they're running the show.
So that's important.
Now, once you found this guy and you start narrowing it down, I think you said that the CIA had their own suspect that they wanted to follow.
And you ran into some problems with the upper levels of the FBI, didn't you, for a while?
I don't want to make this personal.
And I appreciate you having me on your show.
I was, when I.
I was first working counterintelligence in the Bureau on a working Romanian intelligence, but on the squad, we all had Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, the other.
We all worked all of it.
Big Shell closely worked it.
If there was an embassy reception at the Czech embassy, this was, say, 1977 or 8, the Bureau radios were not yet encrypted.
So on top of the Soviet embassy, there was one antenna with the three prongs coming down, and that was the one that listened to the FBI radio channel.
That was the one which specifically listened to what in Washington was called KGB 770.
We gave the call letters.
You have call letters for your stations.
We have call letters, and our call letters for the Washington field.
Some humorous genius decided we should be KGB.
So we're KGB 770.
And in Russia, they don't even like to say the letters.
And the guys listening to the FBI channel keep hearing KGB and they cringe because that's a bad thing for them.
So we would do surveillance.
So if there was a Czech embassy reception, you want to know where license base, where they're coming from.
It's not against Americans.
It's trying to find who the contacts are and follow those leads to see what the nature of the business, whether they're buying grain or selling something, whatever it might be.
So, if we had an embassy like the Czech embassy where there was a reception, some kind of gathering, a gala occasion, one who was there, you didn't want to go in the air as Americans speaking English and you didn't want to have the guys who were Czechs.
So, they would solicit four or five Asians who spoke Romanian and we would do the surveillance that night and calling out numbers, whatever, in Romanian.
So, the Russians listening to it think something's going on with Romanians are actually doing surveillance from the Czech embassy.
Now, when I looked up Robert Hansen, one of the things I said was he.
He exposed to the Russians the fact that the FBI had put an eavesdropping tunnel under the Russian embassy.
Yeah, that was a case called Monopoly, which was very, very sensitive.
I didn't know anything about it at the time.
And that was devastating.
But so, you know, it's spy versus spy.
I mean, the idea was, I was going to call this book The Last Spy.
Theory is he was the last spy from, quote, the Cold War.
But they're always spies.
It's that simple.
Oh, yeah.
So you don't have to have a Cold War or even a hot war.
It's just, they always, you see a weakness someplace or someone that might be able to help you, someone who's getting need surgery.
I don't want to sound too.
You know, harsh about it, but you use the tools you're given to your best ability.
So, my original supervisor in Washington was a guy named Don Grunzel, and he was famous.
But he had 39 agents on the squad.
Your span of controls managers 15 humans, and he was the only one who could have possibly run this show.
And there were six or seven agents who spoke languages of Eastern Europe Czech, Romanians, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians.
All of us spoke a language of Eastern Europe.
Well, we learned in honorary language school where you were immigrants, your parents learned it through there.
And it was like a mini UN, except we all got along, unlike the UN.
Uh, so uh, the gruntle he stood beside me one day and he said, You see that agent over there?
He's doing work at his desk, he's you know, decent, neat person.
He said, He's a low risk agent and he has a you know, he does well with a short leash.
And he looked at me and he said, You're what I call a high risk agent and you need a long leash.
And he said, I've got to keep that leash tight because you keep running it long, okay?
Supervisor said that to me, and that's pretty much my career.
Um, so I was happy to have the career I did, it was most extraordinary, and I'm happy that I was able to write this book.
The Chagall Forgery00:05:07
And get it through pre publication, like I say, after seven years.
But it really deserves to be seen.
It's part of U.S. intelligence history, FBI intelligence.
Yeah.
And of course, what you're doing, there's a lot of human intelligence in that, a lot of psychological profiling.
As a matter of fact, you know, you're saying that the system that you came up with was kind of like a psychological lie detector test.
I thought it's probably a lot more successful than a lie detector test is because they've got their issues as well.
But it's very different now, isn't it?
Talk about the fact that the FBI's wiretap network has just been hacked.
So now things have moved a lot more towards computer hacking and things like that, haven't they?
Or have they?
Well, I left before there was a significant effort with cyberspace.
In the nineties, I was using it at the film festival, for instance, in the evening.
I'm answering a question, but to have this set up for it.
Sure.
After I would meet with the Russian, Ivan, I would go back to my house.
This is in Los Angeles now in Santa Monica.
I would go back to my computer on my laptop, Toshiba, and I would type a memo.
I would print it out in the holiday and business center and then make sure there was nothing left in the barrel.
No other information and I could print out.
And then I'd take it to a FedEx.
I FedExed it to my colleague, Gene McClellan in Alexandria, Virginia.
He'd get it overnight and take it into the office to work in their SCIF, which is a secured facility room where they were working, because we couldn't put any paper in the system.
So everything came hard copy from me.
So that's another example of the uniqueness of this particular case.
And that remained in the SCIF, and they couldn't even scan it in.
I mean, they could have sent it from Los Angeles Division or San Diego, but it would be in the systems.
Even back there, they couldn't.
Mm hmm.
So, this one of my cases went on for nine months until we came to a certain kind of conclusion, which I'm happy to have people read about because it is an extraordinary circumstance.
But so, when the case was over, I think those memos all still sat on the table in the corner and they never got scanned.
And so, I did a Freedom of Information Act request for this case.
I have a pretty good memory and I remember it awful lot, but I wanted to have a memo to look at.
And I sent the Information Act request in, and six months later came back and said, We got nothing like that.
We don't have it.
So it never got scanned in, as far as I know.
Because again, you can't have the bad guy search the records for him.
Sure, yeah.
Well, you know, that brings up the issue of the FBI documents of the Epstein case, as everybody's wondering about this.
And, you know, what is your take on that?
You think those things will ever be found, or have they been destroyed a long time ago if they ever had custody?
Well, I retired in 2000, so I've been out for 26 years.
Sure, yeah.
Think of what you were doing 26 years ago and what you're doing now.
That's a far cry.
I don't know what happened, but I know that I now, as an investigator, I'm a private investigator licensed in Florida.
I live in Fort Lauderdale.
And I've done a lot of art theft recovery, stolen impressionist paintings.
And when an insurance company, AIG, and Loys of London, they'll work on something for two or three or four years.
And finally, someone will say, hey, how about that FBI guy?
He got some paintings for us.
I've traveled abroad with Bob Whitman, he was head of the art theft.
In Philadelphia in the 90s, and he wrote a book called Priceless about recovering art and stolen Rodin sculptures and that kind of thing.
It was the bestseller in 2010.
Priceless.
We were at places like Romania looking for stolen Chagall paintings.
But the idea is how well you investigate and you see things others don't necessarily see.
For one particular case, there was a Chagall aboard a man from New Jersey, a big yacht like a steamboat.
It was being refurbished.
And the gentleman died.
His son took over and said, I don't want any paintings like that.
Get rid of all the art.
I'm not an art guy.
And so they sent a transparency, which would be like a slide, to the Chagall committee in Paris, where two or three of his granddaughters were Chagall's granddaughters.
They would authenticate paintings.
And it went on six months.
They got no response.
And they called the committee and said, What happened?
They said, Well, we don't know what you have.
But two weeks ago, the guy who had the original painting came in.
We authenticated the painting.
So whatever you got is a forgery.
Right?
That's a bad thing.
Anyway, it went on for years.
Interviewing all the security people, the fiction people.
Turned out someone took a photo of them over the master bed.
And then they.
Uh, had it someone forge it and then they put it in a box to look like a sink replacement and bring it in and switch the paintings out and take the box out with the original.
And you don't know it's a forgery until the Chagall committee tells you that went on for seven or eight years.
So, around 2008 or nine, somebody called me and I had done some previous recoveries.
And uh, I went through 10 banker boxes of information, all the investigations in you know French and Italian and whatever.
And uh, so I called the Chagall committee on a almost on a lark and I said, When someone authenticates a painting, do you like does you charge for that?
They said, Yeah, 500 euros.
So I said, well, the guy had the painting authenticated.
Did you charge him?
And they said, yes.
I said, how did he pay you?
Assuming he gave them euros on the barrel head.
He said, oh, we gave us a check.
I said, do you have copies front and back?
Backdoor Information Leaks00:11:31
I said, yeah, we do.
So they gave us a check, and there was a guy's name and his account number in Romanian.
Fortunately, I speak Romanian, so that was handy.
But so that's turning over the rocks in the stream.
There was no lead.
That wasn't a lead.
Wow.
It was a dead case for seven or eight years.
So, Bob Whitman and I, we went to Romania to find the guy who stole the Chicago.
We had a driver's license photo.
He had gone to one art store gallery in, I think, Marseille to try to sell it.
But it was asking to sell it for like one third of the value if they thought it was suspicious.
So, somebody had seen him and his driver's license photo matched that guy.
So, there were other assistance with other agencies like the police.
But so that's walking upstream, turning over all the rocks.
And when there are no rocks, you keep turning over the rocks.
So, that's.
That's an investigative philosophy.
Well, truly, it's fascinating.
This FBI wiretap network that was hacked, tell us a little bit about that.
Is that like all of the records in a central location about everything that they're investigating at some point in time?
That's one of the things when I look at what is happening, we see everybody getting hacked.
I mean, the CIA gets hacked.
They get their Vault 7 software that is their software they use to hack other people and to pretend that they're a different.
Um, you know, they're speaking a different language or whatever.
Uh, their tools got hacked.
It's not just them getting hacked, but their tools, their hacking tools got hacked.
And so we see this everywhere.
It seems like everybody's putting everything now on these centralized databases.
Is that what the FBI wiretap network is really about?
Um, well.
I'm not in the cyber world.
I mean, I do what I need to do for my work and for the investigations.
But all that started after I retired in 2000.
In my bureau, there was no politics.
I knew the guy.
When I was a brand new agent in 71, I met the guys who were involved in Ma Barker and Babyface Nelson.
That was the old timers then.
And then when I retired, now I'm the cold warrior.
I'm the old timer.
So the new cyber people are doing it today.
My sons are involved with technical things and computer matters in a very, very big way.
Mechanical engineers and.
People work involved in the security systems.
I know some people who are among the best in America doing certain things.
Like if you want to get into the cell phone, which they wanted to get in for the case, and I think Riverside, California, where either Apple or whoever it was wouldn't help them break into the phone because they don't make it look like they're helping.
But it's law enforcement.
You're trying to get your murderer, excuse me.
This is a normal case.
But anyway, so how you get into these things is difficult.
I understand they may have gone to the Israelis who helped with that.
But it's a shame when the U.S. intelligence, which actually has not just good intentions, the only intentions, keep our survival going well.
You need to get certain information.
Someone's giving away secrets.
You need to find out who they are and whoever it might take.
But you just have to have your best and brightest be better than their best and brightest.
And the hackers, I wish, you know, the people who are doing this for a living, the hacking, whether they're calling you and getting your mother's, oh, like the movie The Beekeeper with Jason, what's his name?
Shrethel State.
Where the older lady has a fund that she's holding $2 million as a part of a church, something, and it gets hacked and stolen.
She kills herself.
So Jason goes off as a, you know, retribution.
Mm hmm.
People would do much better if they did positive things instead of stealing money from people.
They could do other things with their computer knowledge.
It's the same way with this current circumstance.
You like to have, you know, like take a baseball bat to some of the people who are doing this because they could be doing other things.
Sure.
But it's an easy way of life.
I think they're raised with no principles.
I think they were raised the wrong way.
I was raised in inner city Philadelphia, and boy, I could have taken left turns, right turns off the beaten path all the time.
I'm happy my parents raised me the way they did, so it's turned out as it has.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I just look at this and it's like we want to put all of our eggs in one basket and then that creates this target for the bad guys to go after.
And I've talked to a friend of mine that does cybersecurity stuff and everything.
And there's always, from his perspective, you know, he's like a white hat hacker.
People hire him to find vulnerabilities in their system and then let them know about it.
Frequently, he got fed up with it because he said, I'd go to all this trouble.
I'd find the vulnerability and I'd tell them about it.
They'd do nothing at all about it.
And so, from his perspective, the more he looks at it from a technical standpoint, The more he sees the human aspect of it, you know, and that's, that's the issue, I think, uh, because it's always going to go back to a human, good or bad, that's going to be pulling this kind of stuff.
So he looks at it and the first thing he starts to do and is to look at who's got a motive, you know, it does the same type of stuff that you would do, right?
Who's got a motive to do this?
Yeah.
Is this an inside job or something like that?
And I guess that's the question.
I mean, when you look at a situation like a, a hack of the FBI or the CIA or something like that, is that, um, Of course, you're not on the inside now and you don't know that, but I mean, would that be the way that you'd look at this?
Is like, let's rule out an inside job, you know, that's putting that in there.
They can't preclude it.
They can no longer preclude it.
And my understanding with what happened with the FBI recently, it wasn't the FBI.
It was a third party that had access to the FBI computer that went in through there.
The original movie where Rami Malik was in, which was on a Netflix type series, he was a hacker who did such things.
And their situation was that they knew a guy in the company they wanted to hack into.
He was a certain kind of music fan.
So they created a disc.
Which would be new songs, the kind he liked.
And they gave it to him on the street, just the performers.
And he stuck it in his computer.
In there was the bug, the Trojan horse, which was going to infect everything and get what they needed, their back door in.
It happens all the time.
It's just really a shame.
Oh, yeah.
In the last two weeks, I've had two situations where people I personally know have called me and said, You know, I should have called you sooner, but I think I've lost a lot of money.
Well, how much do you think you've lost?
Well, probably a million dollars.
Whoa.
And someone calling and saying, I'm in the FBI, we have a case, we're working, and we need your help.
That's not how the FBI works.
So you see it all the time, and it's just so sad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If I lost a million dollars, I'd be on the phone to you right away if I knew you.
Oh, yeah.
And I'm happy to help.
I mean, that's what I do for a living.
Yeah.
Well, you know, like you're talking about this contractor that's there.
One of the things that my friend said is that he said, there's so many back doors to everything.
The developers have usually got a back door, the owner of the company has got a back door, the government frequently insists on a back door.
There's all these different back doors.
He said, that's usually, you know, somebody who's got some, you know, standard motive, like you're talking about.
They need money.
They want revenge or whatever it is.
And, uh, they've got a back door access to it.
So he says, that's where he always starts.
Who's got the back doors to this instead of, uh, who's got some kind of exploit that's going to, you know, come at it from a software standpoint.
So sometimes usually it's the simplest, most direct route is just somebody with a motive and a back door.
Right.
That's a tangent.
It's almost like the inductive investigation.
Find some individual.
I mean, I was involved in recruiting several, I'm very proud and happy to say, several intelligence officers from different countries.
And each time, it's what makes them tick.
So, just as a last example regarding what you mentioned about the delay from pre publication review, in 1977 or 8 in the Washington office, we had some undercover cases.
We had voluminous information about our targets who were in contact with.
But once you get a lot, which is a goal, getting a personality, what do you do with it?
I mean, how does that help you?
So I said, we didn't know three things about these people.
What makes them laugh?
What makes them cry?
And does he love his wife?
And if you talk to someone, I was with a Russian who was driving a car, it's a plain old embassy car, was in his passenger seat.
And I asked him, I said, like, what would really make you happy?
I mean, just happy.
He had a son, he had a family, and he stared straight ahead, not seeing the road.
And he grabbed the steering wheel and he says, a Mercedes Benz.
He was a mechanical engineer.
He wanted, that was it.
That would be his goal.
What makes him laugh, right?
And things will make you cry.
That's, you know, sadness in your life.
But the interesting thing with, and do you love your wife?
You'll find a person who you may meet at a bar every Tuesday night after work, and he thinks you're a lobbyist or he thinks you're a political actor, something else.
And they'll have a friendly conversation in a cover position.
And he'll say, for instance, you know, my wife's uncle died.
And oh, that's a shame, you know, back in Moscow.
And he'll say, so that's one last person I have to worry about.
You don't do this for a living, but picture this for a second.
Why would you think that?
Yeah.
Because someday you might plan to defect.
Who will be harmed if you defect?
Well, people who are left behind.
That's why they won't have many relatives, which is leverage to keep you.
But that means in his mind, he already thought about leaving.
Yeah.
He doesn't say he ever thinks of defecting.
If you say that's one less I have to worry about, that's a big deal.
Is that where they do you love your wife?
Is that where that comes in?
Because are they going to be willing to leave their wife when they defect?
Right.
So it works two ways.
One of the, it's this coverage.
In part of the chapter in the book where you're reflecting on females involved with Russians, and one of the issues is if you love your wife and you can't defect without her, your two kids, and oh, her parents my parents are dead, but her parents that's fine.
If you love your wife, then you have to figure how you get them out, how they get to visit Norway or something, okay.
However, there are people who have defected where the defection was their de facto divorce and they hated the woman.
They had to get rid of her.
How you work the case, that's an entirely different thing.
Yeah.
Does he love his wife?
So those two questions were important.
Just to add this, and if you don't see the humor in this, I'd be surprised.
But when I was, after three years of the pre publication review, having had the book to review, again, they get 45 days.
After three years, he finally sent it back to me, and every line, a felt tip went through every line.
Not like a computer program that zapped through them.
And it was one half of one page they didn't declare classified.
But the entire rest of the book, and it was a joke.
So I was at lunch with a Russian.
He told a Russian joke about Russians in a negative way, humorously.
So I told a lawyer joke.
I was supposed to be a lawyer.
I went to Villanova Law.
I passed the New Jersey bar.
I was in California and San Diego.
25 years later, in 1996, I passed the California bar.
Ask some lawyers if they'd like to take the California bar after they've been out of law school 25 years.
And see what they said.
So I was back and I was a lawyer.
So I told a lawyer joke you know, Hindu, a Jew, and a lawyer driving down the road, car breaks down.
I mean, like, so are lawyers walking to a bar, one of those.
It was a funny joke, but the Bureau decided it wasn't classified.
It was funny.
That's the only thing they let fly in the whole book.
How did you get past that then to get the book published?
I flew up there three times in the next four years.
I argued with them.
And one lady, a nice, nice, blind lady headquarters, she was in charge of a dozen people sitting around a conference room table, which was like, 12 against Wayne, which wasn't good.
And she said, like, these questions, like, you can't put those questions, those three questions.
In 1977, I made up those questions, how to assess people with how much information we had when you had it.
Battling Headquarters Permission00:03:48
And she said, like, you can't say those questions.
So, like, why is that?
She said, because the Bureau owns those questions.
Like, psychologically, that's how we assess people.
So I said, like, I have a son who worked for Lockheed Martin and on the exoskeleton project.
He's got 11 patents.
She said, patents are in his name, but Lockheed Martin owns those patents because he's, you know, the guy there.
It's not the same thing.
Like you can hire a guy to teach you how to pick up girls in a bar, and that's Psychology 101.
That's what I was doing.
You can't have three questions be classified.
I said, I can learn this, you know, you can't do that.
So finally, they didn't like it, but they had to agree.
But it was like they had a patent on those questions.
Wow.
Wow.
So that's the reason.
It just took a long time, but they had never had this.
I'll give them some leeway because no one had ever had the audacity to send it, and you can send a fiction.
FBI counterintelligence tale.
But if you send in something which's fiction, like, hey, that didn't happen.
But you can write something which is real and change the names and make it fiction.
But here, because this is part of FBI history, this particular case was so extraordinary.
I had to write it.
And I guess one of the last things they said is we need permission of everybody who's still alive.
A lot of people died, right?
Who are alive in the book.
We needed to get permission to use their names.
That's not a thing.
So I found them all.
And some of them were really off the grid.
And the interesting thing was all the people who had doing surveillance on the aspect in Los Angeles.
When I wasn't around watching Ivan to see who he had contact with and what else happened, it's the whole coverage.
That was, you know, it was an unheard of thing to happen because they didn't know that we're watching this Russian because he knew the identity of a spy in the FBI.
They knew it was just another Russian we're surveilling.
They'd done that during the Cold War.
They're doing it there.
Nobody knew that the ultimate motive was for this case, except a very small group of people.
Yeah.
That was tough.
Well, you know, it's kind of interesting.
This is a fascinating book.
And if this gets picked up and turned into a movie, they'll fictionalize all this stuff, right?
You see, with a true story, it's like this is based on a true story, but all the names are fictionalized or whatever.
So they'll go back and do their version of a redaction, I guess.
I don't have a big ego.
I'm proud of what I've done.
And the book, you know, I had a dear friend, he said he really liked the book and he said, and you even came off as humble.
I thought that was a nice thing to say.
Well, if things happen, you're trying to get the job done.
It's like someone, like I say, I do the hunt, I don't do the kill, and I never do the feast ever.
The feast is for the egomaniacs, right?
I don't do that.
I go back and do more hunt, which is a deal.
So, um, To have the book have some success would be really good.
But enough people have read it and they always say, like, who will, the first question, who will play you in the movie?
That's a lot of steps beyond you have a book.
It's like, it has to be successful.
It has to be interested in by somebody in Hollywood.
They have to get far.
And I said, well, you tell me, like, I'm from Philadelphia.
I'm 6'1.
I was 50 years old at the time.
And how many people fit that?
Well, Bradley Cooper is the only one offhand that fits that.
And they said, that's it.
So, but it wasn't a younger person.
And the Russian couldn't have dealt with someone who was an Asian who was 35 or, 28.
I mean, he in with his age had to be in the bracket.
We had to be have the mindset, and I we had an expression IDTSFAL, which is I do this for a living.
I mean, this is what you do.
If you really do it, people wouldn't understand it.
It's a small set of people who comprehend all of what's going on here.
And hopefully, this book is a window to other people to see.
And the last objection I knew running out of time the last objection that the pre publication people had again, not knocking them, they had a job to do.
I understand that, but they were had parameters that they couldn't fix or move back.
Catching Spies Like Wayne00:03:33
Um.
What did they say?
They wanted me to get permission from everybody to give it.
And well.
Well, yeah, I got to say that for it to go for seven years, for you to get it back at about the halfway mark at three and some, it's three years plus, and everything is redacted except one joke.
I don't think somebody that doesn't have the kind of tenacity that you have as an investigator would ever be able to get this thing published in the first place.
So that's kind of.
My girlfriend calls this dogmatic persistence.
Yeah, that's right.
Absolutely.
One of the last things they said.
Again, I have to say that with humility.
Gene McClellan was my main contact.
I worked with him for years in Washington on the counterintelligence squads, and he still had clearances in Washington after this thing was all over.
So they went to him and they said, We don't want Wayne giving the KGB or the FSB, the SDR, whatever they're being called today, internal and extra Russian intelligence.
We don't want Wayne giving a manual to the KGB about how the FBI catches spies.
Mm hmm.
That was the thing.
So I will forever be indebted to Gene.
He said, This isn't how the FBI catches spies.
This is how Wayne catches spies.
That's good.
But it was a very special case that needed things way outside the parameters.
I felt so bad for my supervisor.
I mean, he was a nice guy, but I did all the stuff with the healthcare squad.
I had great cases in case went to court.
Doctors went to jail.
And the 800 pound gorilla is over here, invisible in the corner that no one else knows is there.
So that was special.
That's a fascinating story.
Interesting.
I think everybody would be interested to read this.
Is this something that you sell directly or people pick this up at Amazon?
Oh, it goes well.
It's A Trader in the FBI, The Hunt for a Russian Mole.
No one else is on video, but you didn't see it, right?
A Trader in the FBI, The Hunt for a Russian Mole.
And it came out April 7th.
There have been pre-order, pre-publication orders were available before then, but it's available on Amazon, Barnes Noble, Target, Simon Schuster, the ultimate publishers, Republic.
Book publishers is my publishing house, and uh, Alfred Regnery is the president.
I had happened to meet him, and that helped along to get the book published.
Uh, so right now, uh, it's on the afternoon it first opened, which is last Tuesday that's one week ago.
Uh, it um, it shot the number one in the new releases, I bet, in a book, which was a big deal.
And then they sold out by three o'clock at Amazon.
Wow, Amazon doesn't sell out.
Oh, yeah, yeah, it's a fascinating book, and of course, uh, I always ask in case somebody is selling something directly, but you can find this book wherever books are sold.
A Trader in the FBI by Wayne Barnes.
It is a fascinating story.
I'm sure everybody's going to enjoy reading this.
And I bet anything you're going to have a movie out of this, Wayne.
I would love to.
Yeah.
I'll tell you, Hollywood could use a good story.
They seem to be hitting a dry well for a long period of time now.
They could certainly use a good plot.
Yeah, I have a daughter who works in the movie industry as an editor editing films.
And she says, yeah, everything comes through with either.
Part number seven.
Yeah, that's right.
A variation of something else, you know, which is, it's a shame.
But this is, this is, and it's always the true stories are the most interesting ones because they don't follow this pat pattern that people use out there.
Exposing Hidden Truths00:01:37
You know, they like to, it doesn't fall into this rut.
And so it's a true story.
It's a fascinating story.
I'm sure people love to read this book and we'll all wait to see what they do with it in terms of movie.
Hopefully they don't mess it up too much when they do that.
Thank you so much for joining us, Wayne.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
I'm happy to be here.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
It's fascinating.
Thank you.
Common man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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