Fri Episode #2246: The Most Damaging Spy in History and the Most Dangerous Stat You've Never Heard
David Knight and Adam Rasmussen analyze the collapse of America's biblical worldview, noting a drop from 11% in 1995 to just 4% today as syncretism fuels societal decay. The discussion shifts to geopolitical tensions, including potential World War III involving China and Iran, while Wayne Barnes details his hunt for Robert Hansen, an FBI double agent who spied for the Soviets. Barnes reveals how the Personnel Security Interview exploits personal crises to catch traitors, arguing that rejecting divine principles leads to mental health struggles and loss of liberty. Ultimately, the episode warns that both spiritual apathy and unchecked espionage threaten national stability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Telling the Truth is Revolutionary00:10:28
Deceit.
Telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
It's the David Knight Show.
As the clock strikes 13, it's Friday, the 17th of April, year of our Lord 2026.
Well, you know, as we had Pete quoting a fake Bible verse, one person said, it's a good thing he was talking to American Christians because they don't know that it's fake.
We got the Trump administration constantly throwing Jesus into their politics.
We're going to have Adam Rasmussen, who is going to be looking at the state of Christianity in the USA.
He's going to tell us what their study has found.
We also have, make sure you stick around because we've got a great interview, a fascinating story about tracking down perhaps the most damaging mole that has ever been in U.S. intelligence.
And this is a book by the FBI agent who did it.
His name is Wayne Barnes.
The book is Traitor in the FBI.
Fascinating story, a fascinating man.
Make sure you stick around for this interview.
And we're going to begin by talking a little bit about the war, but mostly about artificial intelligence because something very, very dangerous has been introduced at the state level in a Democrat state.
We've seen Trump moving aside all obstacles for artificial intelligence, but this is a bipartisan issue, folks, and it is really dangerous.
We'll be right back.
Well, here we are at week seven.
We were told three to four weeks.
They didn't, I guess what they meant was three plus four weeks, except it's not about to end.
Trump is sending another 10,000, I think it's 10,200 troops more now.
I guess they're going to be putting boots on the ground.
He's got 50,000 troops there now.
We were told it wasn't going to be a quagmire.
Remember how Ben Shapiro, that genius propagandist, he is a genius propagandist, I guess, if he can get people to still listen to him.
But just one.
Lie after the other.
We're winning.
It's not going to be a quagmire.
It's not going to take forever.
Well, that's the way it's shaping up, just like all these other wars.
And it's kind of interesting.
Is this going to go into World War III?
We just had a Chinese tanker that was under sanctions that got through the Strait of Hormuz, got through the blockades from the U.S. government, did not stop them.
China had said, you better not stop any of our ships.
You're not going to economically blockade us.
So, you know, we're getting to the point where if Trump wants to keep going down this path, we're probably going to.
Take us into World War III, one way or the other.
David Icke had an interesting take on this.
We look at Iran, and this is how many wars they have instigated or fought since the Second World War.
Totally blank.
And on the right-hand side, you have the U.S., and it's filled with one place after the other we've attacked.
Actually, that's how many they've instigated for about 200 bloody years.
This is how many the USA has fought with Britain in tag most of the bloody time since the Second World War.
These are American bases around Iran.
Who's threatening who, one wonders?
Iranians are just the same as you and me.
People just want to get on with their lives and their families and all the rest of it.
But let's demonize them.
Let's demonize them.
Let's bomb them.
Why?
We have no heart.
We love death.
These bloody pillocks doing all this stuff.
Violent extremists.
Yeah, look in the bloody mirror.
Look at them.
Talk about inversion.
The bloody terrorists fighting terrorism.
I love it.
War is peace.
Slavery is freedom.
Ignorance is strength.
What is that?
Archontic inversion.
It's all a bloody movie that we're coming through, and it's all leading up to World War III.
That's right.
And these chickens are going to come home to roost.
One day.
Maybe it'll be terrorist bombing, but it'll be people in some of these countries who blame us for the policies of the politicians in our country and say, well, you should have taken them out, right?
That's what we're saying about the people in Iran.
They should have gotten rid of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Well, we should have gotten rid of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, all of these guys, but especially Donald Trump.
I had this meme sent to me by a listener, Michael Barnett, and I thought it was perfect.
I mean, here it is Trump as an elephant, you know, the GOP here, and he's on the floor.
It says, Help, I can't get out.
Yeah, he's stuck.
It should be, I guess, some quicksand quagmire there.
But when I saw that, it kind of rang a bell.
I thought, you know, that's perfect.
The perfect symbol for the GOP.
And our neocons, they've got this long nose that they just can't keep out of other people's business, don't they?
That's really the sum of it.
So, they have on the way, you have 10,000 troops.
The Saudis are pushing Trump to call off the Hormuz blockade, but of course, he wants to double down because he wants to quote unquote save face, right?
He's got to show everybody how strong he is.
The Saudis are very concerned because they're worried that there's going to be an escalation.
That it's going to cause a blockade of the Red Sea as well.
With their pipeline, they've been able to claw back and start and get back to the pre war level in terms of exports from at least the Saudi government.
But they have to take what they pump down in the pipeline, they have to take that through the Red Sea.
And the Houthis can blockade that.
The Iranians said, well, we've got levers that we have not used yet.
And so they believe that that's what the veiled threat was really about in terms of retaliation.
For Trump escalating this constantly.
It's just a, like I said, it's not even geopolitics, folks.
It is egopolitics.
It's boneheaded, stupid, obstinate, hubris, prohibiting any maritime traffic from approaching or departing from Iranian ports, regardless of how the ships are flagged.
So, yeah, we're going to go to war.
We're going to fight with Russia, with China, with any other country that wants to get oil from Iran.
We want to pick a fight with them.
Again, when you look at Donald Trump, As people have said, is he as crazy as King George III, The Madness of King George?
Great film if you never saw it.
But here's a guy who lost the colonies because of his obstinance and his madness.
And Trump could lose a lot more than that.
Ron does not want to shut down the area if they don't want to do it, or if they do want to do it, I should say.
The Houthis are the obvious partner to do it, and they have the capacity to do it.
Saudi Arabia recently has been able to get its oil exports back up to their pre war level.
Of, I think, 7 million barrels a day.
That's one of the few things that are actually producing out of the Gulf area, and that could easily be shut down.
The Houthis have shown their ability to disrupt traffic at the choke point with a combination of anti ship missiles, airborne and seagoing drones, even commandos boarding parties.
A major U.S. operation to suppress those attacks on Israel linked shipping in 2025 proved to be very costly, with America reportedly losing.
Two FA 18 Super Hornet fighters, and several MQ 9 Reaper drones.
These things seem to be very vulnerable lately.
I think it was more than a dozen of them were shot down by the Iranians in the first couple of weeks.
It was reported to have cost more than a billion dollars for the U.S. before an Oman brokered ceasefire ended America's, quote, Operation Rough Rider.
Yeah, should have been an expensive writer.
Underwriter.
The taxpayers underwrite all of these expenses.
It's just an astronomical amount of money that the federal government and the military industrial complex, the Machiavellian industrial complex, is blowing on all this stuff.
They are making us all poor as we look at this.
What are we getting out of this?
They're impoverishing us and they are putting us at danger of retaliation.
Houthis had promised that they wouldn't attack Saudi Arabia or the Saudi ships.
They emphasized such commitments could evaporate, however, under pressure from Iran.
The U.S. is reportedly demanding that Iran suspend nuclear enrichment for 20 years, while Iran has offered to suspend it for a period of less than 10 years.
And yet, for 35 years, B.B. Netanyahu has told us that they're just a couple of weeks away.
And it's not upright.
And how is it that Israel is okay to have a nuclear weapon, but nobody else can have one?
They don't even play by the same rules that Iran did.
Iran signed on to the non proliferation treaty about nuclear weapons.
They allowed inspectors.
Israel won't allow any inspectors.
They've got nuclear weapons, but they won't tell people what they've got, and they have said all that stuff.
And who are the criminals?
Who are the terrorists there?
Of course, you and I know.
And then we take a look at what is happening with the airlines.
This has been, you know, I've said before that if you look at.
Airplane development, right?
The history of flight.
I had a friend of mine who was an engineer and he went to, I guess it was the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
And when he came back, he said, kind of dawned on me that the history of flight was really more than anything a history of engine development.
And as engines developed, we had more and more flight.
But that was the 20th century.
That was when we were working on just the ability to travel, the ability to fly.
Engine History Drives Flight Growth00:07:29
We wanted to have that.
And the government decided that after a while that they were going to not allow that to happen.
You know, since 9 11 and the government's false flag, we have had nothing but government mandates and government law enforcement and security theater to shut down all flying.
And it's getting worse all the time.
Now they're going after the fuel issue, as one of the airlines said.
There's nothing that causes major radical change in air.
The airline industry more than the price of fuel.
And you're at a situation now where there's, I think it's six weeks that Europe has left of jet fuel.
If Trump is going to continue this madness and if he's going to continue to escalate this, how do we get rid of this guy?
It's just insane that we sit here and we watch this idiot who is destroying the economy worldwide, who's putting us into World War II.
And when he's confronted with it, he doesn't even fess up to it.
He was confronted today by a reporter.
And said, How much longer is this going to go on?
And what's going to happen?
The gas prices aren't coming down.
He goes, Oh, yeah, they are.
They're really getting.
She said, $4 a gallon.
He said, Well, that's what NBC says.
And, but that's what everybody knows.
You can see that when you go to the pump.
And he says, everything else is great.
The stock market, the Dow is doing great, right?
This is the same Pam Bondi thing.
Who cares about Jeffrey Epstein?
The Dow is at 50,000.
Well, the Dow's not at 50,000 anymore, it's not doing great.
He just looks at you and lies.
And here's the other thing it's not simply about the economics.
You're killing people.
What's the matter with you?
I mean, this is unbelievably criminal.
He doesn't care at all about bombing civilians or anything else that he's done.
They just kill people and then they say, well, we can handle the economics of this.
You know, I had all these people saying it was going to be much worse than it is right now.
Well, it's not that bad.
It's like everything else, it takes a while to develop.
It's just like his tariffs.
We're starting to see the economic effects of his tariffs just as this stuff kicked in.
Well, the airline passengers are being hit by all kinds of jet fuel crunch.
They're adding.
Special fees, adding more charges for bags and all the rest of the stuff.
Karen just left today and is traveling down to see her mother in Florida and bring her back for a short period of time.
Her mother's 93.
And so she's going down to fly her back.
And it's unbelievable how the price of flying has skyrocketed, how they've added fees for bags and all the rest of the stuff.
But the airlines are really struggling.
I've got.
We got a listener who used to write me frequently during the Trump lockdown and all the mask madness that was happening on the airlines and talking about what was happening as a flight attendant.
And so he was telling me about that and the little power trips that the other fellow flight attendants were getting on.
But he wrote me to talk about how difficult things were for the airlines even before this fuel thing kicked in.
And he said the other part of it is that.
They're not planning on a lot of people flying.
They're going upscale.
They're going to start having fewer seats and they're going to charge a lot more for them.
And they have a little bit more room.
Like I said, they're going to go upscale.
So you won't be packed like sardines quite as badly, but you'll pay quite a bit more.
All of this, folks, really tracks into their long term plans that they've been coming up with for the longest time.
Of course, with the climate MacGuffin, they were doing that.
But remember when they had their C 40, right?
The 40 cities that.
We're telling you, well, you can only have so much meat and all the rest, even telling you how many you can have three articles of clothing that are new per year.
But one of the things that they said was you can have one flight every three years for 900 miles or less.
That's where this is all headed, quite frankly.
And this is the one way to get there.
Trump is a one man fourth turning.
It's getting so bad that a lot of the marginal airlines are locking up and shutting down and selling off their assets.
And you've got some of the bigger guys are talking about merging.
They're talking about a merger between United and American.
And I see when they're talking about this, I see the same things being said that were said back when.
You had the first major bank mergers that happened.
There was state banking before Bill Clinton got in, and he changed that, as Gerald Slenty points out many times, allow them to cross state lines.
So you had a California bank that was Bank of America, you had a North Carolina bank that was called Nations Bank.
They put together a merger to make a giant bank, and everybody was saying at the time, they're not going to allow that.
That is so anti competitive.
That'll be shut down by the federal government.
Well, it wasn't.
And one of the reasons it wasn't was because Carter had, as his chief of staff, he had a guy named Erskine Bowles from North Carolina.
He had come up through the banking industry.
And so he was working to get this thing through.
And people said, well, if that happens, it's going to set off a chain of reactions.
You're going to wind up with just a few really large banks.
And voila, that's exactly what happened.
Within a decade, we had the major catastrophe of the real estate issues and everything.
And they were all then too big to fail.
So they bailed out those really big banks.
And then let smaller banks die by the hundreds every year.
So, that is the direction that they want to go with the airlines as well.
They want this to be just a couple of carriers, and they will have very expensive tickets.
That's one way they can get this to work.
Outside of having direct prohibition, they've got ways they can do this economically.
And when people asked the transportation secretary about it and the Justice Department, are they going to object to this?
Well, The Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, said, Well, Donald Trump loves big deals.
He loves to see them happen.
And he would have to review any of these things.
So, you know, he can insert himself in the process.
And I'm sure he can make a nice little tidy profit, he and his family, for facilitating this.
It's just corruption, corruption and consolidation.
Airlines are cutting their capacity plans in order to save on costs, which could further drive up airfare.
They're going to have fewer flights because if they merge together, There are some routes that they're in competition with each other, so they just get rid of about 300 routes.
Over my career, I've seen many periods of disruption in this industry, says Delta's CEO.
And time and again, high fuel prices have been the most powerful catalyst for change, separating the winners and forcing weaker players to rationalize, consolidate, or be eliminated.
Global Oil Market Faces Decline00:03:12
And so that is what's happening.
But don't worry, because everything is just fine, according to Donald Trump.
He said, hey, the gas prices could have been higher, could have been a lot worse.
Not a problem.
You know, not a problem for him.
It's a free ride on the beast.
The larger corporations can afford to accept these losses, whereas the smaller ones are going to go under.
Where have I seen this before?
It seems kind of familiar from Trump's last term.
It's the same movie we see all the time.
As a matter of fact, we talked about this yesterday, but we didn't play the clip.
This is the Chevron executive, Andy Walls, who suggested Americans should just drive less.
You know, hey, if the gas prices get expensive, don't drive, don't fly.
Don't have a house, on and on and on.
More now on what the war means for your gas prices from someone at Chevron who helps determine those prices.
CBS News national correspondent Lilia Luciano traveled to Chevron's largest oil refinery on the Mississippi coast and spoke to Andy Walls, a president of the company, about what you at home can do to avoid high prices at the gas pump.
Here's what he said People should try to drive less, they should try to conserve energy.
Is there any way to prioritize American consumers?
Is there any way of lowering their prices, of helping?
American consumers before supplying global markets.
I don't think there's a silver bullet.
We have crude here that's closer to us that we're all processing and using that's helping Americans buffer their price.
If this goes on for an extended period of time, it's probably going to get tougher.
America has relied on reliable oil for a long time.
How is that at risk right now?
There's countries in Asia and other parts of the world that rely heavily on Middle East crude.
They can't make the products people need and they're starting to run out and that is a real problem.
You can see more of that interview tomorrow on CBS Morning.
Yeah, well, the other thing he said, it's a global market for crude, he went on to say later in the interview.
Yeah, that's right.
That's why our prices are going up as well.
They can talk about the fact that we're a net exporter and we've got so much oil here.
And isn't that great?
You know, we're going to dominate the oil industry.
Well, it's not us, it's going to be the politicians, it's going to be the big corporations.
You and I are going to see our costs go up just like people in other parts of the world.
It is a global market for crude.
And what is happening is oil demand growth is being completely wiped out.
By the Gulf energy shock.
And so it would be much worse if it wasn't demand destruction.
The demand destruction is happening because the economy is going down.
And so people are using less of it.
They said world oil demand now is expected to decline by 80,000 barrels per day.
They had planned before for it to expand by 730,000 barrels per day.
So it's going to decline by about one tenth of what the incline is going to be 730,000 increase.
And now it's an 80,000 decrease.
So again, and when you look at the price of oil, it was around $70 a barrel before the war.
AI Liability Under Pressure Now00:11:15
Now it's around 100.
Brent crude is more than 100.
West Texas Intermediate is a little bit under 100.
But the bottom line is, you know, it's a little bit, the average is a little bit more than 100.
So it's gone up about 50%.
But it's not a problem for Donald Trump.
He really doesn't care.
He said, we have to do this in order to stop the nuclear weapons.
Well, you're not stopping the nuclear weapons from Israel, you're just killing a lot of people, quite frankly.
So we're going to take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk about what's going on with artificial intelligence.
Like I said, it is a very, very troubling bill.
That we need to pay attention to.
This is coming at the state level, and we have seen all kinds of push from the federal government to run this thing through because they need it for their warfighting, they need it for their surveillance state.
That's something that should really concern all of us.
I mean, there's a lot of different issues here.
What is it doing to people mentally, spiritually?
What is it doing to our jobs, our economy?
What is it going to do in the near future?
But then how is it going to be weaponized by these people?
Who are concentrating all power and all wealth in the hands of just a few people?
That's, I think, the most dangerous aspect of it.
But there is an element of hope.
We're going to talk about that when we come back.
We'll be right back.
The David
Knight Show.
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Well, it seems like every day we get some new attack on our freedom and our economy.
And this is the latest one.
I mean, you know, just the last couple of days we've had Donald Trump come out and give a full endorsement.
To warrantless spying through FISA.
And he says, Hey, it's worth it for you to lose your rights because of national security.
He says the quiet part out loud.
Most people won't couch it in those kinds of direct, crude terms.
But he does, and he doesn't have a problem with it.
So, what is happening with artificial intelligence?
Well, we have a bill that is coming up in Illinois.
It's being backed by OpenAI.
It seeks to limit when AI companies can be held responsible for catastrophic harm.
Now, we're talking about things, we're talking about mass death, things that result from the use of weapons of mass destruction, as well as criminal behavior by these large language models or robots or whatever.
So, they want to give themselves legal immunity, just like the pharmaceutical companies have been able to secure.
It seems like we've got a repeating pattern of that as well, not just the concentration of wealth, but the idea that these large companies should never be liable for any harm that their products do.
Trump just gave to something that has been proven to be harmful, glyphosate.
He's just given them a pass on the lawsuits that are out there.
I mean, they've had billions of dollars from people who have been harmed, lawsuits that have gone through and have successfully gotten compensation for some people.
So they're shutting that down.
And now they're going to do the same thing for OpenAI or for just AI in general.
But it's even worse than that.
Yes, go ahead.
Probably going to be saying what you're just saying that this is including autonomous criminal behavior from the models themselves.
Yeah.
It's pretty amazing that they could make something that's going to break the law and, oh, well, throw your hands up.
Isn't that amazing?
Yeah, I've always said that.
You know, we look at this and going back to what Hugo Daguerre said about the Ardelect wars, the wars over artificial intelligence, his idea, and of course, he was a pioneer in artificial intelligence, and he said, when people realize how these things are going to be used, There's going to be a revolution, but these people are going to use it to fight the people.
They will then use the artificial intelligence, the robots, and things like that.
And he said, You'll wind up having what I'd call gigadeath, right?
Billions of people who'll be killed.
And of course, some of this could happen, and they could say, Well, you know, it was just a software error.
Sorry about that.
The autonomous killer robots came in and wiped out a city.
But, you know, software errors happen.
It's just the price we have to pay because artificial intelligence is so indispensable.
That's just going to be one of the downsides we have to live with.
We've got to look at the risks and the benefits, just like we did with the Trump genetic code injection.
Well, the bill is already viewed by some observers, says the New American, as a possible model for future legislation in other states.
And if a consumer product causes harm, liability follows.
That standard is now under pressure as AI moves into higher risk domains.
That should always be the case.
And yet, you know, it began with the vaccine industry.
Now we've got it for glyphosate.
We've got it for other industries are getting their immunity.
And so now they're going to do it for artificial intelligence.
The proposal is known as the Artificial Intelligence Safety Act.
Following a tradition, I would say, Of always naming the inverting these things.
Remember, you had the Patriot Act, which is anything other than patriotic, and this is about anything other than safety.
It's not about safety at all.
So, this has become something of a tradition the way they name these things.
Anyway, it offers it's safety for the AIs and their manufacturers.
That's the AI manufacturer safety.
It's going to keep them safe and protected.
That's right.
It offers major AI developers a path to avoid liability.
Even in cases of extraordinary harm.
The bill defines a quote, frontier model.
This is what they're going to give liability protection to.
They say a one trained, that's going to be an AI model that is trained using more than 10 to the 26th computational operations or at a compute cost that exceeds $100 million.
In other words, this is not aimed at protecting small developers or at niche tools.
It is written for the largest, most Powerful players in the field.
They're the only ones who get the protection.
If you're a small developer, you don't get any protection.
But if you're a giant corporation like OpenAI, spend $100 million developing your LLM, now you get immunity for whatever it does.
And it's not as though the amount of money that you're spending on it is going to affect its alignment, whether it's going to be more or less likely to do something harmful.
In fact, it's the exact opposite.
It's these super highly funded.
Frontier models that are pushing the boundaries that are the most likely to be, you know, set to some unaligned thing and go off the rails.
That's right.
Except that, you know, if you got $100 million to spend on your AI, you've got some politicians that you bought.
And that's where this is really coming from.
This only protects people that have spent more than $100 million on politicians.
It says a developer shall not be held liable for critical harms if the developer did not intentionally or recklessly cause the critical harms.
Only their machine that did it, right?
So, the definition of critical harm is not trivial, points out the New American.
It means that the quote, death or serious injury of 100 or more people.
Oh, there you go.
There's our pharmaceutical model.
And yes.
And we don't have to wait for killer robots for this to be a potential problem with the way these things are already finding zero day hacks in major infrastructure.
You could have something like that happen any day now.
That's right.
That's right.
At least a billion dollars worth of damages to rights and property, right?
So this is another thing.
It's got to be your model has to be $100 million, and the damages have to be really high for you to get.
Complete immunity.
So if it's really high, you get complete immunity.
If you only did, you know, a couple hundred million dollars worth of damage to people or less, you don't get any coverage.
You got to do more than a billion dollars of damage.
So, you know, go all the way in.
If you're going to have something go wrong, go big or go home, right?
Yeah, it really sucked to kill only 99 people when if you got 100, you'd get immunity.
That's right.
Such harm may occur through the creation or the use of.
Chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.
In other words, this is NBC, right?
Nuclear, biological, chemical.
It also includes conduct by a model that is acting with no meaningful human intervention.
And if committed by a human, this would constitute a criminal offense.
But if it's done by artificial intelligence, of course, well, then not going to be prosecuted.
So involving intent, recklessness, or negligence.
So, if it kills a bunch of people, if it destroys a bunch of property, it's just fine as long as it's coming from a really big corporation.
They are the ones who get the legal immunity.
And there's also a flip side of this to stop the models that are under $100 million in that this shields liability from people using it as a tool to commit crimes for the big manufacturers.
But if someone is just using it as a tool to commit crimes of their own, you are not.
Explicitly protected if you spent less than that.
So, anyone that's creating these things for a small computer to run, something that's not going to be 10 to the 26 computational whatever, something that's a local model that isn't in competition with these major manufacturers, you are potentially liable for the way people use this.
It's like what we're seeing with the bill in Virginia that was just signed in to make gun manufacturers liable for.
The crimes committed with their guns.
That's right.
Emergency Meeting on Reserve Computers00:03:27
Yeah.
And it is a long tradition of large companies going to government to demand that they come up with regulations that will be targeted toward their smaller competitors.
I've talked about that over and over again.
Looking at it as sawing off the lower rungs of the ladder of success, they've been doing that whether it comes to food or drugs or other things.
Even local restaurants, they will beg the politicians to put in all kinds of Regulations because I said, well, you know, if somebody does some little operator comes out here and does a really shoddy job, then people are going to be afraid to go out to eat at restaurants.
So we need to have all these regulations that we can afford, but they can't.
So, yeah, this is, you know, we've looked at this type of thing in the past.
I think it was the Genesis Act, because it was a Genius Act, I think it was the crypto, and the Genesis was the AI stuff that came out of Washington, came out of the Trump administration and Marsha Blackburn.
That was there to limit state regulation.
But evidently, you know, you can put in state legislation if you want to go even more laissez faire for the big guys.
You can do that at the state level.
OpenAI is publicly supporting this bill big time.
And I just got to say, you know, Sam Altman, of all these big tech people, you know, when you look at people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, anything, these are some really megalomaniacal, you know, Peter Thiel, who was obsessed with the Antichrist.
And of course, his definition of the Antichrist is he says that's going to manifest itself in people shutting down artificial intelligence.
So if you are anti artificial intelligence, then according to Peter Thiel, You are anti Christ, right?
You're anti Messiah.
So I guess he thinks that artificial intelligence is Jesus, not Trump.
But of course, Trump will do in a pinch for him.
He threw a lot of support behind him.
But understand that when we get to the national security aspect, as the New American points out, it gets a lot darker.
The Golden Dome that Trump wants to put through, as they point out, is not just a missile defense system, it is also a practical network of sensors, satellites, and interceptors.
All of it coordinated by AI systems.
People need to go back and look at the, what was it, 1980 something movie War Game with Matthew Broderick, where the computer's been given launch control.
And what happens with all this stuff?
Even as we look at Mythos, the code writing software that everybody's talking about with Anthropic, the fact that this can identify exploits and hack into systems, It is freaking out the Treasury Department.
They're having an emergency meeting about this.
How do we protect the Federal Reserve's computers?
We've got all the money here and all the ledgers are on the computer.
What if this thing hacks into us?
Well, it's just a matter of time.
And I think, in a sense, the seeds of its own destruction are in this thing.
You know, when we look at the large language models, as we talked about in the past, as they start, as the content on the internet becomes more and more synthetic.
What happens is a kind of mad cow disease where they start to lose their ability.
User Liability for AI Crimes00:03:28
And you also have these types of things that are a possibility when you get to what is happening with the large corporations who are working to get people to replace people.
As a matter of fact, we got a picture of the sea.
What is the solution that they're looking for?
They're trying to save a trillion dollars.
How are they going to do it?
What trillion dollar problem is AI trying to solve?
Wages.
They're trying to use it to solve having to pay you wages.
And yet, when they put these things in, what they're finding is that we've already had a lot of companies have already started using this to fire a lot of people.
The people who remain, they said, wind up spending most of their time cleaning up the AI slop.
So it looks really good at first, but when you look at it closely, you find out there's all these subtle errors that have been inserted into it.
And they said it's just really morale crushing to have to work with that.
And the more you use AI to help you in a cognitive sense, the more you lose your ability to think.
It's the same type of thing that we saw with the London taxi drivers who would, there's a certain part of the brain that they could actually look at with the London taxi drivers.
They were learning the route of the city, which had grown up over.
Centuries, and you've got all these short little roads that have different names.
And to build a map of that, these guys would ride around on a bicycle and they called it doing the knowledge.
Then they would have a test, and somebody would ask them to, you know, they'd have to take somebody to a couple of different addresses and they'd have to work that out in their mind.
And so that actually exercised their mind, and they could actually see that the brain got larger.
Then, when they started using GPS, their brains started shrinking because they weren't using that.
And they said that happens very quickly with people who are working in tandem with intellectual stuff, with artificial intelligence.
And so it is uninspiring work.
And it is something that is actually counterproductive in the long term.
So there's something that's fundamentally wrong with all of these things.
And I think the limiting factors are already built in as to what's going to happen with this.
Well, and one more thing about this bill is it's just.
Horribly impractical.
They couldn't enforce it really because these things don't run 100% autonomously.
It might hallucinate and commit a crime that the user never intended for it to commit, but the user still had to set it up and let it go.
So at some point, people can still commit crimes by setting these things up to commit a crime, but not explicitly telling it to do so.
How much of the liability is on the user versus on the machine?
I didn't do that.
My Autonomous computer did.
I got kind of close to it.
I enabled a few things here.
But I think, really, Lance, the key thing when you're talking about nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks, and you're talking about massive casualties and billions of dollars worth of damage, I think this is linked to its deployment for government because that's really where it's going to have the leverage and it's going to have the autonomous killer machines.
We're going to be having the robotic cops that are out there.
What's going to happen when they go crazy on people?
Measuring Nuclear Attack Risks00:15:11
Well, We're going to take a break and we're going to begin with the interviews here.
I think you're really going to enjoy these interviews.
The FBI detective, of course, he explained to me he's got.
At first, I saw him, I thought, well, he really doesn't look like an FBI agent.
Of course, he's been retired for a couple of decades and he's now helping people, helping as a detective, helping people find art issues and forgeries and things like that.
But he told me after the interview, he said, the reason my hair is so long, he's got hair that comes down over his shoulders.
He said he's going that out for children who have cancer and are getting chemotherapy and have lost all their hair.
But I just saw him and I thought, wow, he doesn't look like an FBI agent.
He looks like a ponytailed libertarian.
Some of the guys that I met in the Libertarian Party.
But we're going to take a quick break here and we'll be right back with our interviews.
First, we have coming up Adam Rasmussen, who is going to talk about the state of Christianity here.
And we all know that it's in a pretty sad shape.
Based on what we've seen this last week and the excuses that have been made.
As a matter of fact, before we go, I've got one clip here that I wanted to play, and that is this is a GOP representative.
Listen to what he says about Donald Trump and the context of what's been happening this last week.
This is a GOP representative from Congressman from Texas.
I believe that Donald Trump is better than sliced bread.
I think he's almost the second coming, in my humble opinion.
I think he's done a fantastic job.
He's got a very difficult job.
Pope's got a tough job.
Job, you know, got issues in the church, but Donald Trump has a very, very difficult job to do, the toughest job in the world.
Yeah, yeah, he is it's nearly the second coming of Christ, he said.
Yeah, nearly, huh?
Well, they get right up to the line, except these people have crossed over the line so far.
Uh, it's not even funny.
We're going to take a quick break, we'll be right back with Adam Rasmussen to talk a little bit about the state of Christianity here in America.
We'll be right back.
Good show.
Elvis.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles.
And the sweet sounds of Motown.
Find them on the Oldies Channel at APSRadio.com.
Joining us now is Adam Rasmussen.
He is with the Cultural Research Center out of Arizona.
And I've talked to George Barnum in the past.
He also works with that organization.
It comes out of Arizona Christian University.
And you can find their website at culturalresearchcenter.com.
We're going to talk to him about the spiritual.
State of America.
And of course, it's always a difficult thing to measure.
So, we're going to talk to them about the metrics that they use, how they determine this, and what looks like some very bad news about the good news.
And that is a lot of people are not getting the good news or ordering their lives based on that.
Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Rasmussen.
Let me ask you, first of all, since we're talking a lot about polls here and measuring public opinion, you're not connected with Scott Rasmussen and the polling organization, are you?
Is it just a coincidence?
It's a great last name, probably just a coincidence.
Okay.
All right.
Let's talk a little bit about what's going on because we've had a lot of buzz about how the assassination of Charlie Kirk has caused a revival in terms of a lot of people reassessing their lives, as we always see when there's a sudden death of somebody who is very well known, especially Charlie Kirk being very outspoken about his faith.
What did you see when you looked at this?
Arizona Christian University is in Glendale, which is right next door to where Charlie Kirk went to church.
So, a lot of our students and faculty knew him.
And if people were watching on TV, they saw the memorial service and wow, what a powerful life Charlie lived and what he stood for, and the people that are with Turning Point USA and just incredible.
And those anecdotal stories that we've heard about people.
Signing up to have Turning Point USA on their campus, like over 54,000 turned around for that.
And we've heard about Bible sales being up from the American Bible Society and those kind of things.
But the long term results just really aren't showing much of a change as it comes to biblical worldview.
And that's really what we study at the Cultural Research Center.
We want to understand people's beliefs and behaviors that flow from those beliefs.
And it's pretty much the same since September.
Uh, 2025, and we just measured that again, it's still at four percent for biblical worldview incidents.
And there's been a significant, yeah.
Let me just interject here.
I'm sorry, there was a significant decline from 2020.
Uh, in the report that you just put out, you looked at 2020, 2023, and 2026, and there's a significant decline from 2020.
Was 2020 higher than usual, or is this a long term decline that's going on?
Because I I can imagine a lot of people are challenged with the things that were happening in their lives during 2020, and that might have caused an uptick.
Was that the case, or is this just a long term downward slope?
That's a great question, brother.
We look at this trending since all the way back to 1994.
So, the construct that George Barna and the Cultural Research Center work with is what we call biblical worldview.
So, how does it square with the Bible?
Not Christian, not Protestant, not Catholic.
We're just looking at what does God say in his word?
And in 95, it was at 11%, and it has declined down to where we are today at 4%.
I don't think it's ever gone up.
So, the number you're looking at in 2020 was at 6%.
So, across the U.S., among adults, 6% of them had a biblical worldview in 2020.
COVID happened.
We had these mandates where we couldn't meet together.
Within 18 months, it reduced in 33%.
So, it went from 6% down to 4%, which is kind of where we're at right now.
Well, and I guess a part of that is, you know, if you're going to a church and the church just shuts down, it's like, well, what we're doing is not important, I guess.
That is, people are seeing a real conflict.
And I guess that's really kind of how you look at this.
What do people say they believe?
And do we see evidence of that in their life?
And so, if there's an inconsistency in what's happening in the leadership of the church, I imagine that helps a lot of people to turn the other way and say, well, we don't really think that they really believe this necessarily.
It's a difficult thing to measure somebody's practice.
So, how do you do that?
I mean, this is something.
That is very personal between an individual and God.
It's difficult to measure, but you've got certain ways that you look at this to see how the culture is going.
And of course, as I've said many times, culture as well as politics are all downstream from what you think about God, right?
Absolutely.
I think it was Tozer that said, what you think about God is the most important part of who you are.
And you're right, individually and then corporately as a culture, what we believe about God and morality affects everything.
And the way we measure it is a scientific study, a representative sample of 2000 adults in the US.
And it has a 95% confidence interval, plus or minus one or 2%.
So, this is kind of the gold standard of social science.
And really, we're just measuring tendencies of central tendency, okay, like right in the middle of averages.
And there are about 50 questions.
Some of them are demographic, depending on what we're focused on.
But mostly, it takes about 20 minutes to fill out.
And yeah, that's how we do it.
And you've got different categories that you put people into.
Talk a little bit about the terms that you've got here.
First of all, what do you mean by worldview?
Explain that to the audience.
Great question.
So, everyone has a worldview.
It is the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual filter through which an individual experiences, interprets, and interacts with the world.
So, we all have a worldview, and it is the basis of every one of our decisions.
So, the biblical worldview is only one among many.
And biblical theism, we are defining as coming from scripture.
And there are some basic beliefs there about God and Jesus and sin and humanity.
It's not like you have to have a Bible degree.
We even have assessments for fourth, eighth, and 12th grade students.
But everyone has a worldview.
So the biblical worldview is one of them.
There's also, you can name it, like Islam or Marxism or a variety of different things.
Most Americans are actually syncretists.
So what they do is they pull and take from A variety of different sources.
So they say, I believe in Jesus when he talks about forgiveness, but I reject him when he talks about marriage or about judgment.
Oh, I'll take a little bit of karma and I'll take a little bit.
And so it's just this mix that's very subjective and often very contradictory.
So it's a la carte, right?
Yeah.
The smorgasbord.
Pick and choose what you want as you go through the cafeteria line.
That's a good Scandinavian word right there.
Yeah, that's a good one.
So you look at this and you say, well, okay, so the Bible says, uh, don't kill them.
They say, well, I'm a Christian, but I think killing is okay.
But then it comes down to some of these issues like, well, is that killing or is that killing?
What about euthanasia?
What about abortion?
What about war and all these different other things that are out there?
So then that's the point at which it becomes dicey, isn't it?
That's, is that difficult to sort that out when you're doing the poll?
Yes, in our latest research that we just put out, it's showing that the very issue you've identified there is the one that's the most difficult for Americans.
So, marriage, life, family, it's very difficult for people to kind of figure that out.
And the Bible's really clear.
So, for whatever reason, and there could be many of them, that's the one area that's the toughest.
And of course, in a sense, when we look at this, the numbers are amazingly low.
And yet, I guess really that shouldn't be a surprise when we look at the fruit of what is happening in America.
You know, we look at our families falling apart.
It's not a surprise that we don't agree with God's definition of marriage, you know, and on and on.
We could extend that to a lot of different things.
Yeah, I agree.
It does come back to worldview, doesn't it?
And so, as you said, there's really no surprise.
I think the idea of marriage, sex, and babies as part of God's plan.
And when we reject God, we reject all the good things that children are a blessing from the Lord, and so is family.
And we're not honoring the marriage bed, as it says in Hebrews.
There's a lot that we're missing on the greatest things in life because we reject God.
And you cannot get there from a purely secular or naturalistic worldview.
You can't get there just by looking under a microscope or looking at some kind of Ethnographic study to say what is absolute that has to be revealed from our creator, and when it is revealed, it is corroborated by the world because he created the world.
So, you know, it's not against all of these things, it actually squares with reality and human flourishing.
But you can't get there by rejecting the Lord, you just can't.
That's right.
Yeah, I spent some time talking this week about John Cleese and Richard Dawkins as they're looking at the Islamification of London.
They're bemoaning the fact that they're losing Christian culture and Western civilization and things that have been the bedrock of a lot of individual liberties that they've enjoyed and things like that.
And yet, the two of them have been pretty instrumental in rejecting the root of that.
And so now they cry because they don't have the fruit.
And yet, it's been a cut flower society for a very long time.
I mean, they cut themselves off from the root, off from Christ.
And yet, the flowers in the vase were still very pretty for quite a while, but now they're all dropping off.
Dead, aren't they?
That is such a good point.
Prosperity Turns People from God00:15:39
And I agree 100% because when you look at these neo Darwinists, when you look at atheism or this Marxism that is anti church, anti family, anti God, and when you look at that, I would say a godless atheism will take on the flavor of its culture.
So when you have guys like Dawkins say, oh, be loving and things like that, I say, why?
Jesus is the one that said that, not Darwin.
Okay, so for me, um, when I look at atheism, it's like tofu.
Okay, it takes on, it has no flavor, it takes on the flavor of its culture.
So, all of a sudden, you get rid of Christianity in Great Britain, and what you're going to have is whatever's in the culture.
So, it the atheism itself looks very different when it's paired with, um, let's say Islam or when it's paired with Marxism.
Soviet Russia, or whatever, we've seen it over and over again.
There is no real flavor.
It only takes what's there.
And so, for people to be very optimistic about Darwinism or Neo Darwinism in a Christian culture is one thing.
But once you cut, like you said, it's a cut flower proposition here.
Once you cut off Christianity, you do not have love.
You do not have individual liberty or any of these things that we've talked about.
That's right.
That's right.
Now, you've got, in terms of breaking this down, you've got several different categories of worldview.
You talk about integrated disciples, emergent followers, and world citizens.
What do you mean by those terms?
That's a great question.
So, when we talk about biblical worldview incidents, we're measuring what we would call integrated disciples.
So, Jesus said, Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them.
So, an integrated disciple is someone who understands the Bible, Genesis to Revelation, and they're living in accordance with those commands and principles in the Bible.
Now, They're not perfect.
That's even part of the biblical worldview, right?
We're sinners.
But an integrated disciple is someone who really knows the word and they are drawing upon it in prayer and they're living that out.
It's about one in 25 adults are an integrated disciple, or 4%.
There's another 10%.
We call those emerging followers.
And they're definitely not as biblical in their thinking and behaviors.
However, they do have faith.
They have some gaps in their understanding of the Bible and in the application of some of its principles.
But there's a huge potential here because they believe they're probably saved and going to heaven and all of those good things.
It's just they need to be discipled up, they need to have their thoughts and behaviors fall more in line with Scripture.
And so we're looking at one in 10 here.
25 million Americans in this category.
And then the rest we would call emerge, I'm sorry, we would call those world citizens, 85%.
So, 85% of Americans, we would say, aren't really operating from a biblical worldview.
They may use biblical language.
They may be like my friend a few years ago.
He called himself a priester because he went to church on Christmas and Easter.
Okay.
So, but, you know, they're more nominative in their way of looking at faith, they're more syncretistic.
And we would say they're, More operating on what's out there in the air, you know, in the worldview.
So, what does it look like between an emergent follower and somebody who is a holiday Christian or like you were describing there?
What do you see that's different with the emerging followers?
So, emerging followers would be able to articulate how a person is saved, and they would believe it.
So, that we're saved by faith in Jesus Christ and by grace alone, not by works.
They would say that God is the loving creator of the universe and He's in charge and He's given us moral rules.
Things will start to get a little dicey, though, as they start to work some of those finer points out, like you and I were talking earlier about.
Sanctity of life and the definition of marriage and things getting a little more fuzzy.
So, in terms of application in their life, that's where the fuzziness is, right?
Right.
And across the board, most Americans understand the importance of having meaning and purpose in their life.
And it's a good thing.
Many of them are very close to what the Bible says.
And so, the emerging followers would be in that same category.
So, they've got a lot of good things going, but can you imagine what would happen if people, you know, one on one and in small groups would reach out to their neighbors and family members who had questions about the Lord and really could disciple them in relationship?
Boy, we would see huge changes with all these numbers that you and I have been talking about.
Because the physical symptoms of children being born out of wedlock or the divorce rate or people defaulting on loans or any of these things, these societal ills, They're just physical symptoms of a spiritual problem.
So, if we can help people come back to their creator who loves them and follow what he says in his word, could you imagine 25 million Americans, if they started following those things and being loving people, loving God first, and loving their spouses and children?
Can you imagine what an exciting place this would be?
Oh, yeah.
And as I've pointed out many times, when you look at something like the war on drugs, which is going to turn 55 this year, this summer, I've pointed out many times, I've had several guests on the program who've talked about how they were involved in gangs or they're involved in drug addiction or whatever.
The thing that turned it around in their life was becoming a Christian and that completely changed everything.
And so, when we look at the scourge of drugs, we look at the scourge of the government's reaction to drugs, you know, bringing out a big hammer and hitting people with it or creating a police surveillance state, all the many other things that have happened, the damage to our constitution, to our court systems, and all the rest of this stuff.
When you look at it, yeah, it is.
Really, the consequences of this make all the difference in the world.
And the sad thing is, as I'm looking at these numbers going from 2020, 2023, 2026, so three years apart, I see a constant decline in the emergent followers.
I mean, it isn't that people are getting into this situation where they are beginning a relationship with Christ, but they just really haven't applied it in their life.
That has taken a huge crop.
It's dropped from 19% in 2020 to 10% in 2026.
It's been cut in half in just that short period of time.
You're right.
It is sad.
And we have to remember that God's call is for everyone, every single person in the United States.
And all of us are to yield our lives to Jesus as our Savior and Lord.
And as you were mentioning, people like Chuck Colson, we could go on and on when they give their life to Jesus and they allow Him to be the leader of their lives.
Charlie Kirk, we mentioned him before.
I just can't think of a better leader or moral structure for individual flourishing or the flourishing of a nation.
And it's just, it's absolutely, I don't know if it's hilarious, it's sad, it's depressing, whatever.
It's just shocking that Jesus and the church are so under attack.
And it's always been that way.
But I thought here in the United States, we said that we trust in God.
And in the Constitution, it's not the number one.
Right in the Bill of Rights, the number one is to have freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
And then in the Declaration of Independence, four times God is mentioned as the one that gives us these rights.
He's our creator, and we've been given these rights by Him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Not the government.
The government should just say, okay, hands off, that is for all humans.
And here in America, it doesn't seem like we want to give that credit back to God and to understand we have to live under.
His principles, and I just can't find it anywhere else like the Bible and in Jesus.
Well, you know, that's why when we look at this, I think it's because we've had it so easy.
That is, I've heard people call it affluenza.
You know, it's like that's a pandemic that's been going around America.
You know, when things get too easy for you and you get too focused on circumstances, especially getting too focused on money because you see that as your path to comfort.
As the Bible said, you know, the love of money is the root of all evil.
And that's what we're really seeing here in America.
It's amazing that as people become prosperous, and we see this, I think, on an individual basis as well as on a collective basis, they turn away from God.
You know, we don't need God anymore.
So you go through this cycle in societies, and I'm afraid we're about to go to a period of time where we're going to be crying out to God for help because I think we're about to turn the corner into really bad economic times.
But perhaps that'll be a revival.
Who knows?
Oh, yes, I hope so.
I mean, you and I can't make the Holy Spirit move, but God can.
And we pray that He does that, that there's a revival.
And I agree with you that affluenza is a great way to say it.
The late Dr. Francis Schaefer said that a lot of times people will do anything to protect their personal peace and affluence.
Yeah.
Just as long as it doesn't bother me, leave it out of my life.
But the problem is, we're called to be stewards.
Of our own lives.
And then here in a free country, we have a responsibility to continue to help our neighbors and to love them.
And that's the call of a Christian, not just to pursue a life of pleasure, but a life of fulfillment.
And I think there's a huge difference between those two.
We did a study in September of 2024 that made a moderate to strong correlation.
It's an inverse correlation.
So one goes up, the other goes down, between anxiety, depression, fear, suicidal thoughts.
And the biblical worldview.
So, what I mean to say is the more biblical worldview you have, the less incidence of anxiety, depression, and fear and suicidal thoughts you have.
It's kind of like when you study more, okay, you'll get less answers wrong on the quiz, okay?
So, it's an inverse correlation.
That's right.
And sadly, what we see that goes right along with that is the older you are, the more likely it is that you have a biblical worldview.
So, boomers, Xers, okay, and then millennials and Z, what we found is they have the least amount of biblical worldview.
So if a child is being raised right now in a home and they're under 17, there's a one in 100 chance that or less that they'll have a biblical worldview.
The problem is without a biblical worldview, without knowing that God loves them, they're being raised in a family that believes that and things like that.
There's a real pressure to find these definitions of who I am, why I am here, what's important in life.
And that's just too much for children to come up with all on their own.
So, without the biblical worldview, they have extreme anxiety, depression, fear, all of these things.
So, the antidote again is to help these young families, moms and dads that are trying to get through this tough life, and to come around the young families and build them up and help them raise their children.
Children, according to the Bible.
And of course, the society offers answers to all those things, they're just the wrong answers.
They go to school, they watch entertainment, the world that's there, they've got answers for all those issues, and they're the wrong ones.
They even can't help them to figure out whether they're a boy or a girl.
I mean, that's the reality of how bad things have gotten, isn't it?
I agree 100%.
Yeah, you just can't YouTube or TikTok your way to a flourishing life.
That's right.
And you can't just put a device in front of a child and think that that's going to help them to become a full human being, to know how to interact with others, to have proper etiquette, to really aim for the stars.
There's just not enough there.
Let me ask you if.
It goes back to real relationships.
That's right.
Let me ask you along that line.
When you talk about integrated disciples, is there a part of that that has to do with parenting and people's attitude toward that and what they want to do in terms of taking control of what their children are taught?
Is that something that you ask about?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I'm trying to see if I have it on, I might have it back in my other office.
We have a wonderful resource from the Cultural Research Center called Raising Spiritual Champions.
And it has to do with those of us that are under the age of 12.
And one of the things parents have to do is they have to actually screen what their children watch because more than parents, teachers, coaches, friends, pastors, youth workers combine is the influence of media.
So we need to understand that these things here are actually meant to be discipleship tools and that everything that we're doing with our children.
Children is forming and shaping their souls.
And a lot of parents, they're just trying to get through the day.
Nobody's taught them how to do that.
So, our whole attitude about worldview is this worldview for why?
Why do we even care about worldview?
Jesus Christ did not die for worldview.
He was not raised for worldview.
He died and was raised again for his disciples.
So, we're using worldview to build.
Discipleship.
Discipleship Tools Shape Children's Souls00:05:00
So we're just saying, hey, look, here's some areas to grow.
Here are some areas where you're strong, but we want to help the church and we want to help families.
And so, yes, if we want to see the next generation flourish, we have to help parents and parents have to help their children.
And I'm not sure that's the metric people are actually looking at.
And I think that's where the discipleship goes wrong in the first place because it is with the parent child relationship.
And I think that's why we've seen a continual downgrade.
In terms of what is happening in America, because we have given up the responsibility of raising our kids.
We've delegated it out to other people.
Or as you point out, we're just so busy, we don't have time to do it ourselves.
And so that's really, I think, what is happening with us.
Now, you also talk about born again Christians.
How does that fall into your categories?
So, there are two kinds of born again Christians according to our research.
One is people that would say, Oh, yeah, born again Christian, that's what I am.
And then the other would be theologically identified born again Christians.
And those would be people that could answer this question.
If Jesus, you know, it's the old evangelism explosion question.
If Jesus should say to you, Why should I let you into my heaven? or God would say that, you would say something like, I've confessed my sins and I believe that Jesus Christ died and rose again to save me and bring me to heaven.
That is a theologically identified born again Christian.
We've got labels for everything.
I got you.
Let me ask you this is kind of off the mark here a little bit, but because it's speculation, it's not data that you've actually recorded.
But I've also talked about this upcoming UFO disclosure thing.
I call it a UF hoax.
And we've got a lot of politicians now that are working and a lot of influencers are working to get everybody excited about this.
This is something that I've seen in the culture.
I've seen coming out of Hollywood.
And of course, it's part of the worldview and paradigm that people like Carl Sagan have pushed for a very long time.
And that is that there are aliens from outer space who are coming here.
I see this as not a biblical worldview, I see this as an evolutionary worldview.
And yet you have people like Tim Burchett say, well, no, I think that's Christian.
You know, it's a.
Whatever it is out there, you know, we'll say that God created it, but I, I see this as really reinforcing the evolutionary worldview.
Um, what do you think is going to be the response since you watch people closely with this stuff?
How do you think that's going to affect these numbers when something like that comes out and they start?
Uh, there's been a lot of push with this to, to convince people that, uh, this is really real and that it is not, uh, angels or demons, but it's extraterrestrial beings from another universe or whatever.
What do you think that's going to do to it?
Is that going to be another major hit when we see that coming?
It's a distraction and a fascinating one.
And I've heard it all before, my brother.
Yeah.
So, like, people have told me Genesis 6, the Nephilim were from somewhere else.
Carl Sagan said the universe is all that ever was, is, or ever will be.
I mean, he's quoting Revelation there, ascribing eternality, which belongs to the uncreated creator, but he's giving it to the universe.
So, Carl Sagan believed in a closed universe.
Universe, Charles Darwin, I mean, Dawkins said, if there is life out there, it had to have been evolved.
So it is, like you said, a matrix of these things.
We see it in all kinds of movies out there, and it's something people believe in.
And as such, because they reject Jesus, it's a distraction.
So, as you know, me personally, if we found that there was alien life out there, it doesn't necessarily bother me.
Because the scripture talks about seraphim and cherubim and all of these interesting angelic beings and things like that.
But I know of only one that was made in his image, and that is man.
And I only know of one name by which we must be saved, and that's Jesus.
So that's what I can focus on.
It's almost like the problem of evil.
Does evil exist?
Yes.
Did God create it?
No.
How does this work?
You know, you can speculate, but let's just deal with the problem.
I mean, we've got a problem here and we have solutions, and there's some fuzzy edges.
Focusing Hearts on Jesus Alone00:07:10
So when people start working on that as proof for their worldview, I think it's just a distraction.
Yeah, I think when I look at it, we look at the evolution creation issue.
It's something that actually built my faith quite a bit when you look at it.
I mean, there isn't any.
You're not going to get something from nothing and you have to have an intelligence to organize this stuff.
And so that's what the Bible posits, you know, and, and really that's the only thing that makes any logical sense to me is that there would be a creator God that put everything together and created it out of nothing.
And so you have to have an eternal intelligence, I think, but I think there's a massive deception that is underway.
As you point out, it'd be a distraction.
I think that's an underlying cause for it.
They want to have a political distraction for a variety of reasons, but I think it's going to be something that, um, I don't know.
It's been around for quite some time.
So perhaps the people are going to buy into it or already bought into it.
I'm not really sure what's going to happen with it, but it'll be interesting to see how that affects the numbers.
So moving forward here, what do you think?
Again, you've got some resources there at your university that can help people, I think, to get a handle on this.
And I think really it begins at home, doesn't it?
In terms of discipling children.
If we lose this generation, and this is something.
That every tyrant has understood, said, you know, give me the kids in the first few years and they're mine for life.
God said the same thing.
And he told parents, he said, you know, when you're with your kids in the way, teach them about this, teach them about that.
That is our responsibility as parents.
If we don't do it, somebody else is going to take them over and disciple them into their worldview, isn't it?
100% Ephesians 6, Deuteronomy 6, very clear.
And in Deuteronomy 6, it's interesting.
It says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one.
And the word Shema there.
So, but before he says, Talk about it, me on the way, and when you rise up, and when you, you know, do all these things, when you live, basically, he is saying these words need to be on your heart.
So, I think as parents, grandparents, any of us that have teachers' impact on the next generation, we have to ask the question Is God's word on my heart?
Yes.
Am I?
Because we can't really impact the next generation.
We can impact our own hearts.
Lord, please use me.
And then the Lord can bless these young people.
So I think it's not about them, it's about us.
And this is the way God changes the culture.
It goes this way God changes the church, and the church changes the culture.
And all through Scripture, we see that.
If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my faith.
And judgment begins with the household of God, and so on and so forth.
So you and I can only say, Oh, Lord, here am I. I'm here, Lord.
Come work in my life.
And then with those that I influence, and so on and so forth.
And we really need to get back to that.
And God needs to be our number one love.
It's not a burdensome command to love God and love others.
It's not.
I absolutely agree.
So, like you and I were saying, deception happens this way distraction, deception.
And it's like we're not in an information world anymore.
We're in an attention world.
So it's not even information.
It's just like the cat that follows the laser on the wall.
And we just get distracted.
But Jesus Christ, Him, yeah, squirrel.
Okay.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ, Him exalted.
There is nothing greater.
And we have to set our hearts to that true north.
And when we do that, maybe the Lord's using this message today in somebody's life.
When we do that and we say, Lord, I'm available, don't put any limits on what God can do with one person, with many.
And that's our message.
I agree.
I think back to always the instructions like on a plane, right?
The planes lost pressure and the little things dropped down from the ceiling, the mask.
They always tell everybody if you're with a young child, put it on yourself first.
Uh, because otherwise, if you're gone, there's nobody's going to help the kids.
So that really is what we need to do.
We need to look at that.
I think it can be a, um, uh, God can move in our hearts to drive us towards Him in the sense that we constantly see that, uh, God turns the hearts of the fathers towards their children.
That is always something that we see happening during revivals of a culture, of a society that, that is, uh, but that's God working in your heart, uh, to do that.
But you really do need to focus On your own relationship, make sure that's there.
Make sure you've got your lifeline going, and then you can try to help others, whether it's your children or somebody else that you know.
I absolutely agree with that.
That's really where it starts.
Again, we're talking to Dr. Adam Rasmussen, Arizona Christian University, and the website is culturalresearchcenter.com.
Thank you so much for talking to us.
It's fascinating, even though it is, I guess we should say, a little bit disturbing.
It's the bad news about the good news that's there.
And the good news is always going to be there.
There's nothing that's going to change that.
That is the good news for each and every one of us individually.
We look at what is happening in our society.
We don't like where it's going.
We don't like the politics.
We don't like the society.
And yet that is the fruit of what is happening.
But nobody can come between us and God.
That is the key thing.
We don't have to have a consensus that is there.
Even if it's just 1% or less, we can still have a relationship with God.
No one can get in the way of that except you yourself.
And so that is what we need to focus on.
And that really is our hope, I think.
Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Rasmussen.
My pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Compartmentalization Leads to Arrest00:15:07
David Knight Show.
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Well, I'm going to put this in as a prelude to the interview.
We already cut the interview.
I pre recorded this on Wednesday with Wayne Barnes.
Who wrote the book, A Trader in the FBI?
A fascinating individual.
You're going to hear this.
And one thing that I want to let you know that we were talking after the interview.
And so I wanted to put this in because we didn't have this recorded.
We started talking about how he got into writing.
And it's very interesting.
He said he started learning how to actually write in an interesting way using adjectives and adverbs and things like that to get the people to read the reports that he was sending.
And he said a lot of times would have like a four page report.
And if it was really dry, they wouldn't get all the way through it.
So they wouldn't get to the key information at the end.
So I tried to make it interesting.
And he said, I first realized that I was being successful, he said, when I was crossing the street in Washington.
And there was a supervisor that was there that was reading his reports and met him halfway and stopped him on the median.
And he said, Yeah, he said, I read your stuff.
It was great.
He said, I got to page four and I wanted to see some more pages there in this report.
So he did not hire a ghostwriter.
He wrote this true story on his own.
It's a real page turner.
And I can't recommend it enough.
It's a traitor in the FBI.
So.
We'll cut to the introduction now that I gave with the original interview, but this is a very fascinating individual as well as a fascinating story.
Making sense.
Common again.
You're listening to The David Knight Show.
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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 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.
Wow.
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.
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 Czechs, 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 the 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 walks, 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 that were 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.
John Douglas and Personality Crisis00:15:58
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 Pog Kettle 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, the 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 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 pictures of everybody who's watching because the guy set 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.
So, see, that's very good of you.
That's the 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 serial 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 personality.
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 that 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 B2 bomber wing?
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 was 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's out the window.
So, what 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 they meet 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.
The American says, I need 10.
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 anybody we'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, 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.
Mm hmm.
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 it 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 makes 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 is John Q. Public instead of a movie producer, a director, a writer.
But so the case was set.
That was my part of the case.
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 agent who's like 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 and But so, no one on the squad, I felt so bad.
My supervisor on the healthcare 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 them.
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 turned him?
No, again, it's like I say, it's this whole book.
It was 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, 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, when 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.
High Risk Agent Needs Long Leash00:04:28
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 show 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 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 an 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.
Yeah.
So, 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 a decent, neat person.
He said, He's a low risk agent and 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 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.
So I was happy that half of the career I did was most extraordinary.
And I'm happy that I was able to write this book.
And get it through pre publication, like I say, after seven years.
Investigative Philosophy in Art Forgery00:05:05
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 take it to a FedEx.
I FedEx 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, my case 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 Lloyds 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 a 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 Get rid of all the art, 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, 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?
Motive Behind Backdoor Defects00:15:14
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 kind 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.
You have the developers who usually have a back door, usually the owner of the company's 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 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, 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, And Mercedes Benz.
He was in a mechanical engineer.
That was it.
That would be his goal.
What makes him laugh, right?
And things would make you cry.
That's 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 want to have many relatives, which is leverage to keep you.
But that means in his mind, he already thought about leaving.
Yeah.
You don't think you ever think 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?
So it works two ways.
One of the issues is covered in part of a 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 out how you get them out, how they get them 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.
So, 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, when I have to, 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 96.
I passed the California bar.
Ask some lawyers if they like to take the California bar after they've been out of law school 25 years and see what they say.
So I was back and I was a lawyer.
So I told a lawyer joke Hindu, a Jew, and a lawyer driving down the road, car breaks down.
I mean, like, so are lawyers walking into 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.
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.
I said, he's got 11 patents.
He 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 to be 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 that 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 even 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?
That's what we always 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, things happen, you're trying to get the job done, isn't like someone like I need to, 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 to have the book have some success would be really good.
But enough people have read it and they always say, like, 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 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 fits that.
They said, that's it.
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, with his age, he had to be in the bracket.
We had to have the mindset.
And we had an expression, IDTSFAO, which is I do this shit for a living.
I mean, if 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 you were running out of time.
The last objection that the pre publication people had again, not knocking them, they had a job to do.
Catching Spies with IDTSFAO Mindset00:04:09
I understand that.
But they had parameters that they couldn't fix or move back.
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.
Bulldog magic.
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 external 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.
I know you.
No one else is on video, but you can 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 Traitor 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 pattern that people use out there.
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.
Exposing What They Want to Hide00:01:07
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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