101: Christopher Turner | 25 Years A Spy – Lessons In Espionage From A CIA Veteran.

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The following is a conversation with Christopher Turner, a 25-year veteran of America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

During these 25 years, Turner completed sensitive assignments in the Far East, South Asia, and Europe and those locations are intentionally vague for reasons you will discover during the conversation. Notably, Turner is a recipient of the Intelligence Star, which is a rare commendation for valour under fire, but more on that in the conversation. 

Christopher also has a very interesting pre-CIA career as well, he served as an anthropologist in a largely untouched, hidden away civilisation tribe in the Philippines. 

Since retiring from the CIA, Turner has penned several books, including, the non-fiction historical, CASSIA Spy Ring and the upcoming fictional spy novel, The Locksmith Of Salzburg.

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Time Stamps With Christopher Turner

• 00:00 – Introduction.
• 02:16 – How Did Living With A Filipino Tribe Inform Your Future Work As A Spy?
• 16:50 – Horrific Imelda Marcos Story.
• 25:24 – Serendipity In Turner’s Life.
• 34:39 – CIA Recruitment & Predicting The Future.
• 45:53 – Christopher Turner On Putin.
• 49:46 – The Value Of Discernment.
• 52:56 – Training For Espionage.
• 1:04:21 – Where Did Turner Serve His 25 Years?
• 1:12:06 – What Is Cover (My Favourite Part)
• 1:40:06 – The Art Of Persuasion (My Second Favourite Part)
• 2:08:41 – Communication Is The Most Important Transferable Skill.
• 2:12:46 – Exotic & High Stakes (Intelligence Star).
• 2:28:51 – Ethics Of CIA, Conspiracy & Religious Fundamentalism.
• 2:46:24 – America Is The Best Country In The World.
• 2:53:16 – Country You Are Bullish On & Conversation Between Any Two People Of History.
• 2:56:23 – Afterthoughts & Ambition For The Podcast.

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Links To Christopher Turner

• Turner's Books

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The following is a conversation with Christopher Turner, a twenty-five year veteran of America's Central Intelligence Agency. During these twenty-five years, Turner completed sensitive assignments in the Far East, South Asia, and Europe. And these locations are intentionally vague for reasons that uh you will discover during the conversation. Notably, Turner is a recipient of the Intelligence Star, which is a rare commendation for valor under fire. Christopher also has a very interesting pre- and post-CIA career as well. Pre-CIA, he served as an anthropologist in a largely untouched, hidden away from civilization tribe in the Philippines, and post-CIA career, he has penned several books, including the non-fiction historical C-A-S-S-I-A Cassia Spy Ring, and then the upcoming fictional spy novel, The Locksmith of Salzburg. Finally, for me, this conversation is a podcast highlight, because so rarely do you get to hear insights from someone who legitimately spent years operating undercover in multiple locations across the world as a spy. My favorite movies are Indiana Jones, Jason Bourne, James Bond, Mission Impossible, etc. So I likely project far too much onto the romantic idea of high-stakes espionage. And therefore, I think with these ideas informing our public consciousness about what a spy is, along with all of the conspiracy stuff that's usually roped in with the CIA, it's actually very rare that you get to hear a down-to-earth take on what spycraft is in the real world context. And this conversation is precisely that spycraft in a real world context delivered by a 25-year veteran in the CIA. Highlights in this podcast include the art of persuasion, explaining cover, the value of discernment, how one trains in espionage, how Turner was awarded the intelligent star, and then, of course, much, much more as well. So do please hang around to the end of the podcast for me to explain my afterthoughts, and then as well for me to deliver what my ambition is for this podcast. But with no further ado, here is Christopher Turner. What did you learn about human behavior from working as an anthropologist at a Filipino tribe? And this is long before your time at the CIA. So how did it inform your future career?

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Of course, I didn't know it at the time because I had no aspirations to join the intelligence world at that time. I thought I would become an anthropology professor or an archaeology professor. But I went and lived with a technologically Stone Age tribe in the mountains of the northern Philippines. And there I did learn what I think are many sort of universal truths about humanity, that we are much more alike than we are different. A lot of the differences are really window dressing. They're very minor differences in preferences and uh rituals. Of course, history is different and everything else, but the humanity of us all still burns through all of that stuff that we call culture. And uh it's it's persistent and it's very, very apparent. Uh when you first arrive in a very disorienting new culture, particularly one that's technologically different from yours, linguistically very different from yours, all of its rituals are different, it's possibly its climate is different, diet, everything. All you look at at first are the differences, and you go, oh my gosh, this is so exotic and different. But after you sit around the fire night after night, drinking whatever it is they drink with the people, you start to realize that really the same things that interest me, that concern me, are the same things that interest and current concern these people. They're really no different. The humanity is so much more alike than it is different. And one lesson that came echoed in my mind as I was making this little self-discovery was something that a professor had told me when I was taking a physical anthropology class. And that's when you study skeletal remains and things like that. Physical anthropology looks at what is left of the human record after you've gone, after you've died. And this professor said, Listen, when we take away known geography, provenance from bones, we can't tell the difference between this group and that group. And it in other words, what he was saying was if if we're digging through a prehistoric settlement in Africa, of course we know roughly what those people looked like and everything else. But he said, you take those bones out of their in- situation, you can't tell who they were or what they were, what they are. It's the great leveling. Death is the great leveling, right? It it exposes our base humanity. You can't tell all of those little nuances and things that that make us notice differences in one another and develop bigot bigotry and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

You said uh they were technology technologically in the Stone Age. Uh what does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 5:40

So that means that obviously in the modern world, they had things of the modern world, but those things were not produced anywhere in their tribal region. They were all things that came to them very, very indirectly through um sort of down-the-stream style trading. And it was their primary economy was based on barter, right? So they had there was no cash economy at the time when I lived there. And if they had excess coffee or excess rice or excess um, you know, surplus mongo beans or something like that, they could trade somebody something that in turn would be traded, and maybe eventually they would end up with um a nice modern dress for their daughter or uh a piece of of steel from an old um World War II Jeep that they could use blacksmithing techniques to pound into a spearhead or into the ubiquitous machete, what they call a bolo, in the Philippines. And that's that's sort of their pocket knife. Everybody has a a machete with them. That's how you survive. You harvest things with it, you cut firewood with it, you open coconuts with it. And so obviously they had modern metallurgy, but that was unrelated to their technological development.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

You said uh, for example, they would have the same interests and same concerns in this tribe, which for context is the 80s, right? Yes, it's the it's uh 1987. 1987. So these people who are still bartering, they don't have cash between each other, you know, they're existing on X, Y, and Z. What are the same interests and concerns that they have which can connect them to maybe someone like me or the audience listening, who has only ever existed with cash, hasn't smelted iron, and hasn't, you know, plowed a field? Well what do we have in common with them?

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Right. So uh when again, when I first arrived, I noticed all of those things. They're working with their hands in the field or with a water buffalo to you know mulch the the rice patty before they plant, everything's different, nothing's mechanized. Uh the all of the processes are by hand, whether they're threshing or winnowing or whatever. Um the diet, of course, is completely different from anything that either you or I would be familiar with. Yet when all of that dazzling, all those dazzling differences fade, and you're able to connect with people first as on a small group basis and then on a one-on-one basis, what you realize is that that person has hopes and dreams and loves and distastes and uh concerns that are different in uh in sort of uh style, but the substance of them is exactly the same as as ours. That man or woman still loves their child exactly the same way that someone in the West loves their child and has hopes for their betterment and uh their concerns about uh putting food on the table may be very different from our concerns because in the West you go to a job and you earn cash and that cash, that currency, that note, is used to buy things you need to put a roof over your head and possibly your family's head and food on the table. But for them, it's they went into the field to harvest, and their concerns were the same. They they still had to work, they they had taken out the middleman and the and the banknotes, but their concerns were the same. And if they had a plot of land that was particularly suited to certain supplementary supplementary vegetables, for example, they could grow forest ferns on a piece of their land, whereas someone else had a piece of land that had better sunlight and better drainage, and they could grow beans and onions, then there was a trading element that happened there. Of course, there was no exchange of cash, but everybody knew the valuation of everything that was happening. It was just like cash, right? So all of those things turned out, I realized were quite superficial, those do those differences. And when you drilled down on what they really cared about, were interested in, um, again, sort of, you know, their their ideas of what was romantic, what was honorable, what was what fill in the blank, it was very similar. You could connect very, very easily with them.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

That's really interesting. So gossip and popularity, uh, you know, there was one guy who cared a little bit too much about money and right the these same themes that clearly play a role in 21st century modernity were at play in this ancient tribe.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Absolutely. There were people who had reputations, just like people had reputations uh back home, right? I immediately identified certain people. In fact, sometimes I would I would liken them to people I grew up with. I'd say, oh, that's like that's like Bill's dad. He's he's a big gossip. He goes to the in the morning, he doesn't go to have fellowship with the guys, he goes to get the latest scoop on what's happening, particularly the bad news or salacious stuff. And then he becomes the the Twitter for the village, right? He disseminates it in short, easy to digest um packages. And and yeah, so so and then there was the stingy person, and then there was the generous person. And so, and probably it was a small village I lived in of uh uh only a couple hundred people, but uh the valley itself had uh a few thousand, but proportionally all of those personality types were there. Um it was it was it was the same, essentially.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Yeah. And you're there 87. When was Fernando Marcos? Was it 70s or 80s?

SPEAKER_01 12:20

So so yeah, so the revolution, he was in office for a couple of a few decades, right? So he got booted during the People's Revolution of 1986. So about a year before I showed up, he was out, and uh the Philippines at that time was in a state of chaos, and I arrived on the last plane before the August military coup. And I arrived, I was a shiny faced uh 22-year-old uh graduate student, and I arrived at the international airport in Manila, and all the lights were off and the baggage carousels were not working, and people were running around with um automatic weapons in uniforms, uh, and um I asked what was happening, and it they said, well, this is yet the latest, the latest coup, and there's been an attack on one of the military forts, and they're trying to wrest power from the civilian government, etc. So that's that's what I arrived to see when I showed up in 1987.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

And did the CIA have anything to do with Marcos' downfall? Because I don't know if this is completely true, but blood bankers Jim Henry, we've spoken about it off-air a bit. He suggests that the CIA played quite a strong hand in the financial dealings of Fernando Marcos that allowed him to just simply wire transfer foreign aid offshore. I mean, are you getting a sense now, like, okay, wow, what does this say? Is forming an opinion in your mind, an organization that you would go on to, you know, serve a career with.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

No, I I really didn't I really didn't even think of any of those intrigues at the time. And um I and I don't, I mean, it's well beyond my pay grade and locked behind many layers of steel, probably. Uh whether or not that there was a role that the CIA played in his um absconding from the Philippines. I I I think that uh whether or not the f the CIA played a role, obviously the U.S. government facilitated his departure from uh the Philippines and set him up in comparative luxury, not quite the luxury he knew in the Philippines, but it was Hawaii. He was in Honolulu. Well, actually, he was on the opposite side of Honolulu on that, but he was on Oahu on the island. And he and he was I mean, that's top grade real estate, right? And he was in a very, very beautiful home and wanted for nothing. And even after he died, he was sarcophagus was there. Oh, what's that? A guy who had a lot to answer for. Yeah, a guy who had uh so I have met people over the years who were victims of his regime, uh, who had been tortured and who had been um uh lost their their jobs and their livelihood. Um so yeah, he was he was a strange fellow who had a very, very checkered past and a mostly imagined his uh heroic past during during the World War II. He claimed to have been a major resistance figure and he wasn't. Um but he was uh sort of we've seen this kind of populism arise in other places, obviously, since Ferdinand Marcos, and but he uh marshalled those same sentiments in his population. This this to this day, many well, obviously his son, Bongbong Marcos, was just elected president. Just elected president, right? And so, and he's never admitted any culpability on the part of his family or anything else. And but long before he was elected, the son was elected, the there were a lot of apologists in the Philippines who said, hey, things were better when Marcos was in charge, because yeah, maybe he maybe he skimmed a little bit, but that's that's okay. We accept that. A little bit. Yeah, right. Yeah the streets, the streets were safe and and people had jobs, and there's this uh this rose-colored glasses uh look at what he did, supposedly, for the Philippines, and then his his sins and misdeeds are minimized. And we've seen that again with other populist uh leaders in more recent times.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Yeah. I'm not sure if this anecdote is familiar to you offhand, but in Blood Bankers Jim Henry, he documents it directly. Emildamarcos, you know, Ferdinand's wife, who was famously evil, to be frank. Um, she wanted to uh create a competitor to the Cannes Film Festival in Manila, and she constructed at enormous financial cost, but also human cost, a Parthenon equivalent, which she would then host the um you know the the Manila Film Festival in. And during the construction, there was a there was a collapse, and as much as ten bodies had perished in this collapse, and everyone is you know shocked and sad, and okay, we gotta do these people right, we gotta take them out of this of this of this uh cement which is now formed and bury them, and she said, No, no, no, no, we're on a tight schedule here, continue building. And they just laid concrete after concrete on top of these dead bodies, and then when the night came of the film festival, and I remember the famous names, I don't remember the famous names there. One of them was Jeremy Irons, who obviously is everyone knows him, but there were some other very famous names. On the night of this debut film festival, because cement is porous, it was so hot that the flies would congregate en masse because they could smell that there was rotting flesh in the area, and it turned out to be a catastrophic affair. But I mean, just as an ex one one of the many anecdotes of this enormously corrupt, horrible family who um documented the Philippines. But that's got nothing to do with what we're talking about, but just an interesting tangent.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

I'm very familiar with that with that site and that story, and I bent to that. It's on an area of reclaimed land on Manila Bay, and she envisioned and built this. Uh to me, it looked a little bit like um Hitler's plan for Linz, Austria. He was going to reimagine it as a uh sort of Greco-Roman center of culture, and he had his favorite architect draw up all the plans, and that's what it looked like to me. It looked like this very uh, you know, a lot of monumental architecture and things, and there was this story about hey, listen, we we've got a tight timeline, those people knew what the risks were, we've got a press on.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

Yeah. Oh, crazy, crazy. Okay, so you've come into the Philippines just after that point. I just was interested, I mean, how is there still a Stone Age tribe there during this point? Because the Philippines, I mean, they had a a very uh what would you say, just modernized agricultural export, sugar cane, etc. But there was still enough of the Philippines to have this tucked away tribe? Sure.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

There were there were two or three places in the Philippines where these are almost exclusively, if not exclusively, very, very austere, nearly inaccessible mountainous areas, interior mountainous areas. Um and as a result of that they're the people oftentimes have developed culturally um to be distinct from the lowland Filipinos and those the the economy and things like that. So that while they were connected to the lowlands, obviously, and becoming ever more connected as the years went on, now there's extensive connection between the lowlands and and the highlands and the Philippines. But when I was there, there was they were still in this sort of late-stage transition where um there were remnants of the old culture where they saw themselves as culturally distinct from the lowlands and very protective of their culture, and it is very culturally distinct. There's there's not a lot of similarity uh between lowland culture and uh the highland culture of this Kalinga tribe that I lived with. And so this distinction of Stone Age, it's not what you think of like this undiscovered Stone Age tribe hidden in the mountains. That's what we normally think of. Maybe a kind of a Papua New Guinea sort of a scenario where you penetrate the interior and on a plateau there's this previously unknown or little known tribe of people. These people had interactions with the lowland and did have things of the modern world, but in terms of an anthropological definition, they were still in what's called the Neolithic, the late Stone Age, in terms of their ability to create things, right? They still made their own pots by hand, their cooking pots by hand. They still uh engaged in subsistence-only agriculture. Only small surpluses were used for this barter trade to get a few items on the side. Um and so uh that it's really that's a technical description of what they were. It wasn't uh I didn't show up and people were not, uh I wasn't thrown back into some movie set where. I had come upon an isolated valley in uh Shangri-La where people lived a completely different life in isolation from the rest of the world. It was just a technolog uh a technical distinction.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

And we'll get to the sort of serendipity that might have led you there, and then of course the CIA as well. But I I would just be interested to hear, you know, what was your interest in pursuing this in the first place? Now that might be extremely obvious to some people, but a complete mystery to others.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Well, I I grew up in a rural area in the middle of the United States, and I had a rich imagination that was fostered by my parents, and I always had stacks and stacks of books available to me. That was the one thing I never wanted for. And we also had this extensive collection of National Geographic magazines going back to the early 1950s. And I, and also a set of what's called the World Book, which was an encyclopedia from the from probably the middle 60s. Uh and I poured through particularly the National Geographic and the World Book encyclopedias because I was so interested in what was beyond the far horizon. I was very, very I looked around me and saw a certain degree of I don't know, not maybe blandness or predictability or something. I I was unimpressed with what was around me and interested in what was just beyond this place. So I quickly developed this interest in faraway places and different people and different languages, and so I devoured everything my parents gave me. And so it was not a circuitous path from that early beginning when I was learning how to read at you know the age of four to where I ended up in the Philippines. My parents would say that it was a fairly straight path. Uh we weren't surprised at all that he read National Geographics when he was five years old and ended up essentially becoming a National Geographic article when he was twenty two.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Okay, so it's just this sort of wonderlust is the wrong word. We've spoken about it before Fernver, but it's this it was just something that was fostered in you. You wanted to do the most Indiana Jones type style investigation you could find.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

I did even before Indiana Jones, although I'm sure those movies influenced me to a degree, they were probably more an affirmation than an actual influence. I didn't go to see Indiana Jones and hey, that's exactly what I want to do. I went to see Indiana Jones and said, like, I think this might be possible. Um this seems like something that is is in line with my interests. Um yeah, so I think I think that was. And you mentioned Fairnvee, and um I had obviously when I was living in the middle of nowhere in middle America, uh, I had no Fairnvee yet because I had never been anywhere, but I had anticipatory Fairvey. I had nostalgia and sentimentality and yearnings for places I had not yet been, sure, except in the confines of my cranium.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

All right, so talk to me a little bit before we get into the career of the CIA, which is obviously the meat of the chat, but talk to me a little about uh talk to me a little sorry a little bit about the role of serendipity that has played in your life. Because you becoming a you getting the opportunity to study this Filipino tribe is in itself serendipity, but then as well, becoming a CIA agent is as well extremely serendipitous. So if you could just reflect on that, um I would love to hear what you think.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

We've talked a little bit about this offline as well. Uh I reflecting back over my life to date is um I I've found pivotal choices that I made. Uh and sometimes I made these choices without much forethought or analysis or even critical thinking of any kind. And um and they set me on a path that was uh, you know, that decision led to this event, led to a series of other events that I could not have anticipated. So zerendipity was uh uh, you know, such a strange thing. It's like I took this class, I I went uh on an exchange program to the University of Hawaii for a year, and and I took a class from a guy uh that led to another class from the same professor who himself was on a one-year sabbatical to the University of Hawaii. I could have missed him if I had gone one year later or one year earlier. And in the second class, not the first class, I wrote a paper that sparked a discussion between us that led to a relationship that persisted beyond the confines of this course in Hawaii. And when he returned to the United States and I returned to another place in the United States and began working on an archaeological project thousands of miles from where he was a professor, nonetheless, this connection resurfaced, and then he offered me an opportunity. It was just a very, very strange series of events that one decision, if I had looked at my calendar at the University of Hawaii and said, and I did this many times, I look at my calendar and say, hey, listen, I need these courses. These are the courses I absolutely can't get anywhere else on planet Earth, and I had to make choices, and they were choices between equals often. They were not choices between clear advantages and disadvantages. I didn't say, oh, this is the course I need to take because obviously, and then this led me to this guy because I knew all about him. No, no, no. There was none of that. That was the series of very uh, I mean, there was thought behind these choices, but uh I mean, nothing that you could map out, and it would have been equally as valid to decide against those choices that led in that direction, which makes you wonder where else I could have gone and what else I could have done if I had made only that one pivotal decision in a different direction. So it's impossible to say. And um I'm but I mean that's a that's a feckless task, isn't it, to look back over your decisions and to second guess yourself and say what if um especially if you're going to what if for a better outcome.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 28:51

Like that'll hurt you. Absolutely. Even even when uh I was in the CIA, I I made decisions that I sometimes regretted about maybe assignments and working with certain people and things like that. I think only it's obviously a natural reaction to say only if I had chosen that other path than the one I did for um, but that's a that should be a fleeting question at best.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Yep. But say more a little bit about the serendipitous moment that maybe brought you into the CIA. So you kind of briefly mentioned what brought you to the Philippines there, right? This one professor who gave you an opportunity, but tell that story.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

So so it the actual path to the CIA started in the Philippines up in the mountains, not as you might anticipate it, it happened with me sitting around and saying, oh, I see a one-for-one swap with some of the skills I'm I'm learning up here. Not at all. I didn't think in those ways. I didn't know enough about the CIA to know that there was any transfer transferability between the skills. But what happened was I became somewhat disillusioned with the idea of becoming a professor, which was sort of my only option. Once you get a PhD in anthropology with an emphasis in archaeology, there's there aren't many options for you to go and work on Wall Street or to uh or anything else. Uh you you become associated with an institution of higher learning and you become a professor and you write and try to get grants and do more research. And so that decision I made at the end of my time in the Philippines was I want to regroup. I'm going to drop out of graduate school. I'm going to try to find a job in archaeology because that's my field, but I'm going to look for something else. What I what I've enjoyed this past year living in the Philippines is hanging out with different people from a different culture, learning new a new language or two. And uh, you know, it's the sitting around the campfire talking about things that that interests me, hearing people's, and it's not just hearing about people's lives, it's also hearing about their mythologies and things like that. It's their stories. And I enjoyed that. And I said, I have to find a way to keep visiting other places and keep meeting new people and learning new languages. And I need to find a way for somebody to pay me a salary while I'm doing that. I don't have a trust fund. So you can't just be a vagabond. Right. I I I need to become a vagabond, and I need I need enough income to support my habit. And so I came back and got uh I used my connections in Hawaii to get a job as a staff archaeologist for the state of Hawaii, and I started working as a as a salvage archaeologist before there was construction or if there was a uh uh an eruption on the big island to go in and salvage some of the archaeological uh artifacts and treasures. Oh, it was fun. And I was yeah, I was outside, I I was doing, I was mapping something I like to do. I like maps, I like to make maps, I like to read maps, I like to look for old maps, so I was mapping. I was I was uh uh living in Hawaii and and be getting paid to walk around in in isolated valleys and look for uh scraps of ancient culture, but I was also using my spare time to look for this dream job. And I didn't know what the dream job would be, and I spotted in the Sunday um Honolulu Bulletin newspaper, I spotted a little one inch by one inch advertisement in the classified for this Central Intelligence Agency, and it essentially laid out my dream job. Do you like to learn languages? Are you interested in uh traveling and living in foreign countries? It uh do you do you like you know to take calculated risks, all these things, right? And at that time in my life, it was I heard the bell ringing as I read each one of those bullet points. It was a ding, ding, ding, ding. And I said, Well, I'm not sure if this is my dream job or not, but it sure looks awfully interesting. So I sent off an application and uh through a process of of communication, through uh a couple of phone calls and through some long, exhaustive written applications, uh the CIA finally sent me an airline ticket in the mail and said, we'd like you to come and chat with us in Washington, D.C. And I did that. And it was a very strange experience. Uh, my luggage got lost along the way, so I had to do all of my uh interviews in a pair of jeans that I wore on the airplane, and I had to explain as my preamble to every interview with these Brooks Brothers dressed uh senior CIA officers why I was appearing before them in jeans and a t-shirt. And uh only my last couple of interviews, I actually had a suit. But anyway, I left with absolutely no guarantees of anything. They just said, we'll get back in touch with you if we're interested in you. And I went back to Hawaii and started working again. And unbeknownst to me, they were churning away on their background investigation and stacking me and ranking me relative to other applications applicants and so forth. And then finally I did get the notification that I had been offered a job.

SPEAKER_00 34:36

Uh John Perkins uh talks a little bit about how crucial to the CIA recruiting was this notion of not having a family, being able to take enormous risks to your sort of personal self and not to be compromisable, you know, to not have someone to have leverage against you because you're just yourself. There's no one else responsible. I mean, did you get that sense during your interview process and could that have been a contributing factor to them ultimately hiring you?

SPEAKER_01 35:04

Uh possibly. I think uh no one ever said anything about my family situation. Actually, I got I received very little positive feedback or any any sort of clues at all during the interview process. It was very, it was distinctly one-way. Umratorical on my part, not on theirs. They offered, you know, short, concise questions, and I offered answers until they blinked and said that was enough. Um so I did get the impression based just on the types of questions that were being asked of me, that they were looking for people who were comfortable living overseas, but not just living overseas, working overseas, being functional overseas. A lot of people can travel and be a tourist or uh go on an academic exchange program and have things sort of sorted out for them in advance and be able to survive. But that's not really what they were looking for. They were looking for somebody who could be dropped into a brand new operational environment abroad and not only adapt to the circumstances, whatever they were on the ground, oftentimes rapidly changing uh circumstances, but able to find their feet quickly and to be able to operate, to make good dis good sound decisions, to uh stay out of trouble, to stay alive, to stay out of trouble, to stay out of the hospital, uh, to stay healthy. And so I did realize that when they were inquiring about my past in the Philippines and about how I operated very independently, I understood what they were after. Uh, but the whole family bit, like uh, we don't want you to have a family, they never really talked about that at all. It seemed to me that they wanted you to appear to be very normal and indistinguishable from all others on the outside, but to have something a little different on the inside that was not readily apparent.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

Yeah, yeah. Could you speculate as to what that bit is on the inside that's not readily apparent?

SPEAKER_01 37:11

I I I think if I had to boil it down to a couple of words, and I hope that the words themselves are self-explanatory, resiliency is definitely something they were interested in. And not just intellectual resiliency, but physical resiliency. They were looking for people who weren't going to crumble. Yeah, they were looking for people who were tough, but not these were not, they were not looking for former special forces operators with had to walk sideways through doorways because their their their shoulders are so broad and who have giant square jaws with a with a prominent dimple on the on the end. Um obviate that person from their choices, but they weren't necessarily looking for that kind of person. They were looking for something a bit deeper. They were looking for somebody who had uh intellectual and physical resiliency, somebody who was just a normal looking person for the most part, or regardless of the way they looked, perhaps that's a better way of putting it, they could survive in arduous conditions, high stress. I mean, they you could be sent to Europe and you think like, oh, well, Europe, you know, Western Europe, that's a very comfortable place to live physically. But for a CIA officer, the stresses and strains on having a clandestine life at night are require a lot of resiliency. Uh it may be different from the same, it may be a corollary to, but different from the same resiliency you might need in a war zone, say on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border or something like that. But nonetheless, those that same set of attributes is is present in both those theaters. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

It actually sounds like you're describing a type of discipline. So is that what they're looking for? Someone extremely disciplined can follow through on their word, and if they say no, I shan't do X, Y, and Z, they almost know that they're not going to do X, Y, and Z. There's no risk that they're gonna not follow through on that.

SPEAKER_01 39:28

Possibly discipline of a d usually when people say discipline, they they do again think of some examples maybe from the military, sort of this unquestioning discipline and hospital corners on the bunk every morning and the gear all polished. But the they were looking for this very unusual combination of sort of free thinking, of creativity, this uh looking for opportunities and looking for innovative ways to pursue opportunities, because innovation means that you're less predictable, and if you're less predictable, you're less noticeable by your adversaries. So coming up with new and innovative ways to accomplish the job. So they're looking for people who are creative, and there's discipline in that, and there's also discipline of a kind that you you mentioned that is apart from the soldierly discipline that I would say is a discipline of sort of honesty, because it was very clear to me from the beginning that many times you will be operating on your own, and only your word when you come back and and and make your report will stand as the record for what happened. And so you're on your own. You could come back and try to paint yourself in a favorable light, and uh you could say that, yeah, you know, I'm pretty much, you know, you've seen the James Bond films. Well, that's kind of me, you know. Um I I did a lot of stuff. Uh, you know, I I did an acapulco cliff dive, and then I and and I did some pretty fascinating things, but that will eventually come back to bite you, of course. Uh so they were looking for uh an intellectual honesty, but also a sort of a core honesty that we're going to send you off into murky and tortuous paths, on on murky and tortuous paths, and it's going to be disorienting for even the best of us. You're gonna have to to to uh uh grope your way through that situation, figure out what's happening, find your way back and tell us what happened without any embellishments.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

Before we uh move on to the spycraft, a 25-year career in the CIA, I'd love to just ask you on the topic of serendipity. Do you think it's possible to predict the future?

SPEAKER_01 41:56

I no, I don't think you can really predict the future. I mean, you can you can garner as much information about your kind of present circumstances and you can look at people's patterns of behavior. If we're looking at the way that humans interact, and you're trying to figure out how that human might interact again in the future, and how that might have an effect on bigger events beyond the person, maybe we're talking about Putin here or something else. Really, all you can do is seek ground truth on where people are now, and then look at where they've been and to try to discern patterns. Actually, discernment is a key skill. That's one of the things they were very interested in, uh critical thinking and discernment. And being able to discern these patterns, um, people, humans are creatures of habit, intellectual habit, and physical habit. And patterns always emerge from people's behavior. And if you can figure those patterns out, you might come up with a better way to prognosticate what might happen, but I don't think that's really predicting anything. But it's always just a percentage guess. You can have a sense of system. It's a guess, right. We saw this in the buildup to the Ukraine invasion, right? People were making their best possible guesses about what might happen based on the information available to them now and based on what they knew from the past, Crimea and Syria and other things. And then they were looking at what was happening, real-time intelligence as it developed, and then they were prognosticating. They were saying, like, listen, we think that, and then they would try to assign values to that. It looks like, based on the current buildup, that they would be ready to cross over into Ukraine in two weeks, you know.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

So that's about the best you can do. In that case, specifically. Wasn't the US sort of famously uh accurate with their predictions, saying, guys, gear up because Russia is going to invade.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

Yeah, I think I think most analysts at that time were singing a fairly coherent chorus on what was happening. Uh different people had different ideas of maybe the timeline, but many people didn't see a face-saving way out of where Putin was going and his mindset and what he had done in the past and had not answered for, how he might be interpreting those things. If he invaded Crimea and took it over, he occupied it and and um uh gobbled it up into part of of Russia and didn't suffer any significant repercussions. What does that tell him? Um it was it was so reminiscent of the buildup to World War II, it was eerie. As Hitler was saying on the one side, no, no, no, we have peaceful intentions toward all of our neighbors, but at the same time, he was eyeing the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, and he was uh looking over at Poland and cutting secret backroom deals with the Soviet Union, whom he would later betray. Um he and it was it was very, very reminiscent of that, and I don't want to draw too many direct lines between Putin and Hitler, of course, but it was very similar. It was a very uh trying to mollify the Western world about their intentions that that was very similar, but then having these secret plans to actually do the opposite.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

I mean, since we're well, since I brought up Ukraine, and given your extensive experience in intelligence, I would love to hear what your analysis is of Putin. Because you hear two arguments either he's a crazy madman or he is a perfectly rational man who made a miscalculation. What is your analysis of Vladimir?

SPEAKER_01 46:17

Yeah, I think the reason you see these sort of two countervailing opinions of him is that he may be a little of both. He may be a slightly irrational, mostly mostly rational madman. Um I think the truth is probably somewhere in between. I think he does have these grandiose ideas of returning Russia to uh a place in his personal, sort of a mythological place. Uh it's and again, it's almost a Hitler-esque type of a reminiscing about Germany's greatness before the Treaty of Versailles crippled our economy and our people and our military. It's the same thing. Before the erosion of pure Russia, we were this great country to be reckoned with. So I think there's a very rational piece to that, but part of it is also based on irrationality, right? I think he's living this sort of mythological experience, but he's very, very methodical. He's still he still is the KGB guy deep down inside, and you may see old pictures of him standing next to uh the authors of perestroika and things like that. You and you might think, well, this guy was in on the grand opening of the of Russia to the West, the economic and cultural reopening of the formerly hermit-like Soviet Union. But I don't think he was a party to that. I think he was still the KGB guy. I think he was undercover. I think he saw the path of least resistance, he saw where public opinion was going and where political will was going and where the world was going. And he decided I need to play along with this, with this, I need, I need to dive into the water and be floated down this river until I can get to a place where I'm in charge. And then after I'm in a place where I'm in charge, then I'm going to buttress my power. And at some point, there is well, I'll reach a tipping point where I'll be confident enough to realize my sorry, hit the table again, realize my ambitions. Um I think probably the truth is somewhere between. I think there's definitely some nuttiness to him. So and he's you know, and when he's belligerent, of course, it's easy to say he's a crazy guy because he's belligerent and he's and he's defending his positions and he's angry and seems his points seem irrational and untethered to any fact. But I don't think all of that is some sort of irrationality. I think some of a lot of that might be part of his his plan. I think he's playing a role. I think he's he's a KGB guy. I think he's still undercover. I think he's got this one, we don't know what really is beneath that. We've seen indications of what he really thinks, uh-huh, but he still has this other layer that he's playing.

SPEAKER_00 49:39

Um you said something interesting just a little bit earlier, and forgive me if I'm you know belaboring a point, um, but just before we get into the spy craft, you mentioned discernment, which I think, just from my own understanding of what that word means, is like a necessary skill in any field. Because that's almost a social skill, you know, an ability to maybe cut through BS could be another way to describe it. But I mean, talk to me about discernment, how natural it might have been, how you learnt it, and you know how important it might be.

SPEAKER_01 50:17

I I I'm not sure how much of it is learned and how much someone brings sort of naturally to the game. Uh you may bring, you may have an aptitude for it. I think I had an aptitude for it that I discovered actually in the mountains of the Philippines. I was able to discern quickly that there were commonalities beneath all the rigmarole and the and the distractions, the really interesting stuff, the stuff that you see on documentaries about about tribes where people are dancing around and and uh you know eating strange animals and doing all that. So you may be wowed by that, but beneath that, I was able to quickly discern that there was a lot more going on and that those things that were going on were uh very recognizable to me and very familiar to me. And so I I think that what I had to do was I had to practice it. I had to hone that skill. I think I brought something to the to the game, some aptitude for discernment to the game, and then I had to I had to put it through different tests, different situations, uh, and through those tests, I think I I honed that skill. And it's it's part also of this other term that's bandied about a lot, but isn't explained clearly, well, at least not often enough explained clearly, and that is critical thinking. There are critical thinking skills that play a key role in discernment. You have to think about things beyond your confirmation bias and beyond your uh your your tendencies and your habits. You know, that we were talking about patterns before. Some people skip steps in their decision-making process because they're in a pattern. They recognize the entry point of the pattern. So they said, like, I don't need to waste my intellectual energy on the middle parts of this because I've already been through this three or four times before. So I'm gonna skip ahead to the end point. And if you can identify those patterns where people are missing pieces in between, that that's that shows that someone who lacks critical thinking rigor, they're they're they're ready to just put their brain in park and to move forward to an expected outcome. But discernment, if you're really a discerning person, you don't do that, at least you don't do that regularly.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

So this brings us to the career, 25 years in the CIA. I'd love to ask you where you served, but but before that, if you could say how you train for spycraft, what did you have to, you know, basically what were the courses you might have gone through and the lessons you learned before you're deployed in field? You know, how does one sharpen up?

SPEAKER_01 53:18

Yeah. Well, it was it many of the things that you're taught to do in training with the CIA as an ops operations officer, someone who's going to go abroad and run operations, um, they're not necessarily skills that you you bring to the CIA. They're things that are developed because they're unusual. Tradecraft, clandestine tradecraft is an unusual pursuit. And there really aren't any corollaries to the outside world. Uh, with the exception maybe of people who are successful, you know, drug dealers or something like that. We can move money around and not get caught. We can move product around and not get caught.

SPEAKER_00 53:58

Are you making an equivalent between say offices and a drug dealer?

SPEAKER_01 54:03

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think there's some definite crossover there because there's tradecraft is tradecraft. And if it's been purposed for national security goals, it it plays out one way. But if it's been repurposed so that that law, so we're all trying to avoid detection by security services. Interesting, right? I'm overseas and somebody's trying to catch me at what I'm what I'm doing. Well, that's a little different from a very, very good drug dealer trying not to get caught. Um he's trying not to leave a money trail. He's trying to meet people and make deals clandestinely without getting caught. So that's been, you know, so that streetcraft is streetcraft. And uh for my purposes, I had to, I was not a criminal, and they can't hire criminals because again, we talked about we want you to be an honest criminal. Uh so we want you to have all of this, all of this uh, we want you to have a bifurcated personality where you have all of these skills of honesty and integrity so we can trust you when we send you out on an assignment, but we want you to do everything clandestinely and to circumvent certain, you know, laws of the host country. Um, so it is a very, people have described it as stealing secrets, right? Stealing is stealing, right? You're stealing secrets. You're uh the product is information. Um and so I had to learn how to do this craft. And I was not a I was not a natural, none of us were. We all had to learn from scratch, and we had to have senior people telling us how to hold clandestine meetings. But before you have a clandestine meeting, you can't drag a tale to that meeting. You can't drag your opponents or even curious bystanders to your clandestine meeting. It therefore it's not clandestine if people are watching you have it. Um so the value of the information is in maintaining its secrecy. For people not to know that you have it, that you took it, that's the value of it. Um so I had to learn all of these things, and there was a there were long, arduous courses where we were put into strange scenarios and asked to do unusual things and not get caught. And I I can't get into the nuts and bolts of it, but it was uh hair raising at times, even though it was training, obviously training, right? You knew that it wasn't real, but it was still nonetheless they they turned up the pressure so that you knew there was a lot on the line with this exercise. You know, you could flunk out if you if you didn't complete this exercise properly. And um, some of it was was very, very sort of on the very, very uh tangible skills, like uh uh designing um a non-alerting route as posing as a pedestrian or a driver, but finding out if you're alone or if you have a surveillance team on you, or perhaps you have again interested bystanders because maybe you look different from the native population, or perhaps uh criminal elements could take an interest in you. So you have to make sure you're alone. Uh, in sometimes a city of 20 million, you have to see make sure that you're completely alone. So all of these skills you're tested in a time and time again, and it and with each iteration of the training, the pressure is dialed up and the stakes are higher. So that you under you understand what you're getting yourself into, that uh the training pressure is telegraphing to you what's waiting for you in this career. Oh, and then there's then there's language training and things like that. There are also other types of training and some firearms training and you know, security-related stuff.

SPEAKER_00 58:20

But it sounds like, just based off what we've spoken about before, a lot of your work, you know, in the art of persuasion sort of came rather naturally or at least self-taught. You know, it wasn't someone dictating you from the top, this is how you gather intelligence from a person. It was you having a very sort of vague brief and then you just sort of delivering on it.

SPEAKER_01 58:47

I yeah, I I think based on what I know of the training now, perhaps when I went through it was even vaguer than it is now. It's still fairly vague, but you're chosen, uh, unbeknownst to us who had gone through the application process, you're chosen because you have some of these skills, you're exhibiting some of these skills already. Whether or not you have them to the degree and of the quality required for the job will determine whether or not you pass the training, right? But everybody brought to the training a certain degree of aptitude in the art of persuasion. And then as you as you said, you're given these, you're you're given some background. This is what we expect of you, these are the kinds of skills. Here are a few techniques that you can use, but these techniques only work if you've already got the the DNA for it, right? You've got to have this the stuff for it already. Um, otherwise, it's just a mechanical process. And if you don't have any aptitude, you'll be trying to use these techniques and they will come off as false and and won't work. So we would be given these, and then we would be given an assignment. Here, here are here are the bare bones of what we expect for you. This is what has to happen. Here are the objectives, and here so it's very clear what you have to accomplish. And then you do have to marshal these these skills you have, maybe, maybe using some of the advice that you were given in uh an instruction session, and then you apply it, and you either you're either successful or you're not. There's very little ambiguity in the outcome.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:29

So um, you've mentioned the word clandestine a number of times. I actually don't know what that word means. I can kind of figure it out by the context, but could you could you say what that means?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:40

I it's just uh it's a synonym in this word in this way for secret. It's it's uh it's just secret. Yeah, it's clandestine tradecraft is is jargon that the CIA uses for the tradecraft of maintaining secrecy. Okay, the things, the methodologies that you have to use to maintain secrecy, the integrity of an operation. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:05

And in your training, you you know certainly, well, I say certainly, I have no idea, but you you probably uh had scenarios where you got a tail, for example, or someone confronted you, or you got into some level of danger. In your 25-year career, how many times did you explicitly feel danger?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:30

Um I I don't know how many times, but it w um the times were few because what was that?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:39

But it's more than you can count.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:43

Probably more than I can count, or at least than I can remember accurately, because uh there there's this this um as you become more used to the work, the things that you thought were major risks in the beginning slowly become work-a-day. They seem little different from something that anyone else in any other profession might might do. And part of the problem with that is that the people you're working with and the people to whom you can speak are all doing the same job. So I can't talk about, I can't, I can't find a lodestar outside of my circle and come clean with them about what I did for the day because it's all classified, it's all very, very secret. So I can't uh that person can't tell me, like, oh wow, that's very risky. That's a strange, unusual, risky thing that you did. So soon you become sort of inured to risk. And then only very, very dangerous situations tend to remain in your memory when somebody says, Did you do something risky? If I if I think about it in a more objective way, I did risky stuff almost every day. I could have been caught and thrown into jail for a while and then declared persona non grata and kicked out of the country, never to go back again ever. Um I could have been used for some sort of political leverage. The people, more importantly than that, than my own safety, my safety and my security had an impact on the people I was meeting clandestinely, secretly. Um, and they were, they did not have the diplomatic protections or official government backing or anything else that would um allow them to be traded out of a situation or sent home. They had a big a steeper price to pay, right? So those there was risk involved in everything. And I so sometimes I can only remember really the more dangerous things when you know people were shooting and bombs were going off and things like that. But there was risk every day.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:18

So let's talk a little bit about where you served. Now I know you have to be vague about it, but very vague. In 25 years, it sounds like there was at least five or more countries that you had specific missions in. So I'd love to you say a little bit about it. Now we can probably narrow it down to Asia and Europe, but if you could say more specifically, that'd be great.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:44

Well, I I spent a lot of time because of my pre-CIA experience, I spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia. That was uh particularly early in my career, I spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia. And in more than one country in Southeast Asia. And also uh the sort of middle part of my career in Northeast Asia. I spent a lot of time in Northeast Asia, in all the big places that you might imagine intelligence collection was important. Um I was in Northeast Asia. And then I spent uh some time also, uh war zone time, we called it, in South Asia, Central Asia. It depends on how you define that.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:32

But it was what does South Asia mean? You know, I always think that's the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:35

Yeah, let's call it the let's call it the greater the greater Afghanistan theater of action.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:43

You see, South Asia for me is such a politically correct term because Afghanistan or India or Pakistan for me is subcontinent from the Australian view. It is. Why why did that become South Asia?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:58

I I think it So what I think a lot of it is cultural definitions and also linguistic definitions, right? So if you look at Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, you're talking about a common group, uh common linguistic group. Urdu, Hindi, so so there's a certain shared um ethno-linguistic grouping there, right? Yeah. And the and there are there are no implications of days of former empire or anything else. So there's no suggestion of anything else. It's just South Asia, right? So and that's to distinguish it from Afghanistan, which is this linguistically different from Pakistan. It's right across the border, which used to be the Durand line in the days of the empire, that there's a significant cultural and linguistic shift. The um the languages of Afghanistan are much more closely aligned with uh Farsi, with Persian language. Um so I think those are I think they're really kind of and then if you look at a map, you can say like, well, yeah, Afghanistan's more central than Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. They're down, you know, a little to the south. Um so that I think they're just sort of I don't think they're link I don't think they're necessarily politically correct, but I think, yeah, I think it's just a linguistic thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:27

So I understand you don't want to directly name countries that you might have served in, but perhaps you could mention the languages you speak just to and of course there's no, you know, there's no correlation.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:38

Now I don't yeah, I don't speak all of these well, but I do speak some. Uh and I have had some erosion in my fluency in several of them. So I speak a couple Philippine dialects, obviously. Uh obviously. Tagalog and a and a tribal language. I I speak some Bahasa, which is the language of shared language of Malaysia and Indonesia. Um I also speak a little bit of Korean. That's mostly self-taught, but uh and then I have some formal training in Japanese, and I have a little bit of fluency in the languages along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Um not not extensive. I was not formally trained, but I I I I I know a little bit. And then I do speak, I do speak some European uh languages too, not well. I I I served in Europe very late in my career. In fact, I retired when I was in Europe. I retired undercover, as they say, when I was in Europe, um, because I was a tandem couple with my wife. She was my Mrs. Smith to my mister. And we traveled all over the place together. We're coming up on our 25th anniversary soon. Uh, so I had a little bit of time uh in the agency before I met her and married her. But uh we traveled mostly we traveled together all over the world and served together. Um and so I speak some German. I'm not I'm pretty self-taught in German. I uh I did a lot of archival research in in uh in German language. Uh I speak a little Italian and a little French, but not a lot. Um uh used to be okay in Italian, pretty conversational, but it's eroded over the decades.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:43

Okay, so obviously I'm gonna make no correlation between where you served, but that sounds there sometimes there isn't a correlation, actually. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:53

Well, we'll let the audience on which is the correlation which is I should say I I I did, I don't speak a word of Spanish, but I spent a little bit of time in Central and South America.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:05

Okay. Okay, so we'll add that to the list. But basically, I was just jotting down the countries there. We've got Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Germany, Italy, France. Well, let's just use that as a general idea of the. I served in a few a few of those, not all of them. So I am very interested to know because clearly, and we'll get to it in the chat, but your your work became very Islamic extremism, terrorism, Afghanistan, Pakistan focused post-9-11. But pre-9-11, you're in various countries in Southeast Asia. What is the CIA's objective pre-9-11 in these countries?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:47

Well, it's all it the the CIA in a non-war tactical environment is the collection of strategic intelligence. It's not even necessarily collection of the intelligence of the host country. It may be, but sometimes host countries are venues where CIA officers can more readily approach other countries of high strategic value. So you can just imagine that everywhere around the world there are not only US and Australian and Swedish embassies, but there are embassies of China, Russia, um, all sorts of different countries. And so sometimes sometimes you're not just focused solely on pursuing, you know, indigenous targets. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:51

Okay, interesting. Very vague, but nonetheless, I completely understand there is a there there is a necessity to keep it vague, which definitely informs my next question, which for me, speaking off air, is by far the most fascinating. But that is the question of cover. What is cover? And if you could just explain to the most granular detail how one actually lives out cover.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:20

So obviously, if you are a CIA officer, if you travel to and live in another country and try to work there, you cannot be an overt CIA employee. There are dangers that come with that and biases that come with that, people who will who will avoid you precisely because you are the CIA officer in that country. Um, but also for your own personal protection. You can't just be wandering around carrying a card, a business card that says, you know, I'm the local CIA guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um so there are there are practical considerations for cover, and then there are other more, there are other avocational reasons for it and personal security reasons for it. Um But cover cover is interesting, it's it's a very sensitive topic, and I can't talk about it in a lot of detail, but I can talk about it in with I can give you an historical example, a real historical example. And some people are going to say, like, oh wow, that's too long ago and far away, but this actual example is it is relevant to the situation today. So it's World War II. This is from this nonfiction book that I wrote. So it's World War II, and sort of the uh the swirling uh humming center of all espionage activity in Europe is Istanbul. It's outside, it's in Turkey. Istanbul is outside of the Reich and all of the uh secret police uh draconian issues of being inside the Reich, and it's outside of uh occupied areas as well, like France and things. So there's freedom of movement. So all the players are there. It's like it's like Casablanca, right? It all the players are there. Everybody's trying to steal secrets from everybody else, and also there are charlatans there and con men and all sorts of different kinds of people, but everybody's trying to gain an advantage on everybody else. And in that stew of espionage, there is a U.S. Embassy, and in that U.S. Embassy, there are the equivalent of CIA officers. They're Office of Strategic Services officers, OSS officers. And the guy who is in charge of stealing secrets, getting clandestine intelligence from sources is a guy named Lanning McFarland. And Lanning McFarland is a guy from Chicago who traveled all over the world doing all sorts of business deals, and he was recruited by Wild Bill Donovan, the head of the OSS, to uh into the OSS, trained and dispatched to Istanbul in the early 1940s to steal as many secrets from inside the Reich as he could. And he was sent to the embassy as the chief of the Lend Lease section inside the U.S. Embassy. Lend lease, some people might not know, was this program that the United States had for transferring massive amounts of military hardware to allied countries, the Soviet Union, Britain, Australia, everything else. So if you're in Australia and you see uh Australian uh Royal Air Force pilots flying uh P-47 Thunderbolt aircraft or air cobras or something, all those were sent, those American airplanes were sent under the Lend Lease. It's an important job. So Landing McFarland had this job that he actually did. He actually was the Lend Lease guy. He was making deals. He was closing deals, making deals. He was doing that all day long. But in the evening, his real job started. He was he was an intelligence officer. And he went out to meet prospective sources and established sources, and from them he got intelligence that he went back into the embassy and reported through a separate secure channel to OSS headquarters, who then put the most important reports in front of people like uh Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, to help inform his decisions. So that's what cover is, and he had to live that cover during the and this is a snake pit. Uh it's not just this roiling deal-making environment in Istanbul. It's a snake pit. People are also gunning for one another. It's a dangerous place. So if he walked around and said, hey, I'm the OSS guy, I'm looking for people who have information, and I've got a big stack of cash to give them for whatever deep whatever great details they have, he wouldn't have lasted long. He probably would have ended up face down in a canal somewhere. So he had to use his cover to stay alive. He had to also use his cover to he did was doing a job, but then his real job started at five o'clock at night. So that's that's cover, and that's how you use it. And his cover is typical in that it did two things. It was cover for status, CFS, cover for status, and that meant it explained why he was in Istanbul.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:42

And also meeting with important people and hosting stuff, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:46

Absolutely, and also meeting important people and making deals through the land lease program overtly in front of everybody, also potentially revealed avenues of interest for him on the clandestine side. He might spot somebody during his peregrinations during the day as the land lease guy that he said, now that's a guy I want to meet in the bar after work and see if he'd be willing to go to dinner with me and to speak off the record. I know what he wants, what he's willing to say on the record, but I'd he's got access that I'm interested in. And I want to explore his uh his willingness to speak off the record with me. And then that, and that might be the beginning of a relationship that is developed. We call it development that is developed into a clandestine relationship where that person becomes a paid source of the OSS. So that's cover for status, but there's also some action in there too. But then there's also cover for action. So cover for action means that you can use your cover to spot likely sources and to begin developing or cultivating a relationship with them that then diverges from the lend lease duties.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:04

So for example, right now I'm a CIA agent in the fi in Indonesia, and perhaps I my task is to div is to gather intelligence on Chinese business in Indonesia, for example. So I am posing as like some geothermal financier. Would that be my cover? By day, I actually legitimately finance geothermal products, and then by night, I'm saying, look, you know, we had four French bids, and we had this interesting Chinese bid come in. Now I'm gonna take this guy out, I'm gonna wine him, I'm gonna dine him, and I'm gonna I'm gonna determine where his money comes from, who he is, what his actual interests are, how in bed with the state he is. Is this like is this too hyperbolic of an example of what a modern-day CIA agent might be uh doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:55

No, it's I mean, that's within the realm of possibility because that falls the the lend-lease thing in obviously there's no lend-lease program anymore, but that sort of like uh uh trade person, a person who's interested in developing international trade, right? That kind of a person is uh exactly the kind of cover that you could use today. Um and or or you could have a you could have a political uh it depends on what kind of targets you're interested in, too. Are you just interested in, so if your day job gives you access only, gives you natural access only to people who have economic interests, and the stated collection directives of the US government, the thirst for in for clandestine information, is not in the economic economic realm at all. It's only in the political or military realm, then that economic cover will only get you so far, right? You could be innovative and you could say, like, well, I have this very economically, financially oriented cover, but it's not really getting me what we what I need. But, you know, everything has to, uh this, all this political and military stuff, all of these programs, you know, this tit for tat trade and deal making that goes on in the political and military realms, all has to be funded. And uh, you know, local and foreign players who are seeking to acquire military goods still have to come up with financing. So maybe I could figure out a way to get in that angle. But see, that that again requires somebody who's very, very innovative, who can think on their feet and say, you know, I was after this five years of preparation, I was sent out with this economic or financial portfolio, and now people only want political and military information, then you have to figure out how to use your cover for status to get at your action. Um, so your example is is relevant, but I can't go into any specific detail on actual covers because that's very, as you might imagine, that's really super sensitive.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:14

I would be so interested to hear what your specific covers were. Just to discover a lot. You were a restaurant owner at one stage or something. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:25

I I had so I had a lot of I had different, I had several different covers over over the years, but also I I had more expedient covers, right? Sometimes I was just a tourist. My cover was just tourists being a tourist. And you you might say, well, that doesn't give you access to anything if you're just a tourist. Well, I already perhaps had an ongoing operation, but I needed to take it, what we call off-island. I needed to take it out of the city where I'm living because it's easier for me to move around in in a neighboring country or maybe a country really far away. But I have no reason to go there. If I'm in if I'm in Southeast Asia, uh I have no real reason to go to uh Mongolia. Why why can't I go to Ulaan Batar? I don't know. I mean, I uh there's no there's no connection, right? Sure, sure. But I can go to Ulaan Batar as a tourist, and then I can pick up whatever it is that I'm doing there because then it's cover for status. My my tourist cover is cover for status, but while I'm in Ulaan Batar or Greater Mongolia, I have to act. I'm still I'm still acting my cover. I'm still pretending to be a tourist. I'm going to all the sites and doing all the things that a tourist does. And then my other work starts on the margins of my touristic activities.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:50

Something that really stood out to me when we spoke uh last time was that it's beyond a full-time job. This cover isn't just a superficial way to signal to the world this is your job. You legitimately carried out that job, and then in addition would go home and start informing the government, which which which genuinely means it's a 18-hour job, 18 hours a day, seven days a week. And that really shocked me because what kind of a toll does that take on one person? And and and very few people would be capable of doing that. You genuinely, it sounds like at least, you genuinely did not have downtime.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:39

I had very very little downtime, and luckily my wife and I both were doing the same work and we could talk to each other about our work, so it was good that we saw each other every day and and saw and at night I could I could tell her where I was going and what I was well, she already knew where I was going and what I was doing because she was read into everything. Um that would have been different if my spouse had been a non-agency officer, right? If they had if they'd been a regular civilian person, it would have been a potential point of great uh anxiety and stress. Um, but I didn't have that. I I I have seen that in other couples, but I didn't experience it. But it was a very, very demanding job. It took a lot of time, it was uh oftentimes very stressful, sometimes physically demanding, uh, not only as you'd think in terms of uh just uh endurance, physical endurance, but sometimes because you were in places where it was very a very unhealthful environment. I mean, there were you know all sorts of tropical diseases and and things, and you were out in it, you were mixing it up, you were eating off the street, you know, from street, you know, corner restaurants and everything else. And so um, you know, you spend in certain countries, you spend two or three years oftentimes sick. You know, you're you're you're not you just don't feel very well, you know, and um, and on top of that, you just don't have any downtime, you don't have any time to rest. And so it is, it's very demanding. It's uh it's two jobs in one, just like this Lend Lease example that I gave you from you know 80 years ago. That guy landing McFarland, his clock, his real clock, what he was evaluated for, his job that he was evaluated for was not how great he was when he did the land lease stuff. Although he had to perform that in an exemplary way to justify his position in the embassy, he was only evaluated after five o'clock in the evening. The work he did until midnight was what his uh what he was evaluated on and whether or not he was considered successful. And it was also what he was paid for. He wasn't paid two salaries, he was paid one, and it was a government salary, so he wasn't making a lot of money, and I know that firsthand. You don't you have to do that?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:57

But you're not doing it for financial. Oh, you're not doing it for the money.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:00

Yeah, no, it's a government job, and um it's it's uh uh akin to the military in that way, right? You're not being paid a lot of money to be uh um a major or a captain leading troops into extremely perilous situations.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:19

Yeah, and if you're capable of in your downtime exceeding at a corporate job, it does suggest a level of exceptionalism, which I suppose would inform a post-career. You know, you can go on and really fulfill the role of somebody else who wasn't a undercover clandestine agent who can, you know, perform at a very high level.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:48

I I think, yeah, I think based on anecdotal evidence from people I know only, uh, a lot of people have gone on to second successful second careers. After the agency. Then there are people like me who want to be retired and then to pursue things that aren't necessarily great centers of profit, like writing writing books World War II.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:14

Why don't you just go sit on the board of a couple of mining companies?

SPEAKER_01 1:28:17

Come on, then that's just not my thing. And you know, I understand that some people, you know, they they're switched to corporate America, they they get jazzed just as much, perhaps, by a different kind of stimulation in the private sector. But I'm j that's that's not me. I'm I have not an ounce of merchant blood in my body. So it just does not sound interesting to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:44

Um, something that also really stood out to me when I last heard you speak about cover was the notion of the toll of pretending to be someone else. I just couldn't imagine you're fulfilling your role in the day job and not even being able to say to the person, you know what, this isn't even actually me. I don't give that much of a fuck about this. This is just to fulfill the role so I can actually pursue my secondary job. I could just only imagine what the toll that might be on a person emotionally, but then physically we kind of touched on. But what about the emotional toll of pretending to be someone else?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:28

Yeah, I think it it it may have some it had may have somewhat of a toll. I think I think this resiliency issue that we spoke of before has a lot to do with this. Rolling with the punches and being resilient is part of just part of the job. You can either do it or you can't, and it will sort out very quickly. Even if you get through the through the arduous training, if you do one or two tours, let's say uh four to six years in uh after you've been in the field, you'll know whether or not you can you're in it for the long game or not. And uh the people so the people who stay in are the ones who can who can roll with the punches, who who don't invest too much emotion in the fact that their day job, the job that's written on their business card, isn't what they do for real. Um they they they realize that that's they reconcile that that is just a tool that gets them the other piece. Um they don't uh philosophize too much about about that. And it it there are obviously elements of stress involved in playing that role um and not being able to tell everyone that with whom you're in contact that actually that's not what I really am. I'm this other thing. Um but I think that's the resiliency issue again. I think it all kind of comes back to that.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:04

Yeah. So this is a question that only just occurred to me, but I'd love to on the on the topic of cover, right? And trying to help me and the audience understand it in right now, the modern day you know, the middle of the year 2022. Say I am a grocer, a Woolworths in Sydney, a financial advisor in London, a tech guy in Silicon Valley, or just a regular person in Stockholm. How often would I actually encounter someone who is in cover in your experience? And just to add context to this, you said last time that the CIA really do have more resources internationally than anyone else compared to MI6, compared to ASIO in Australia, compared to any other intelligence, CIA really just they just have more people, right? So I would say with that as the context, CIA specific, how often would a regular person who's perhaps operating at the higher end of, you know, some corporate structure, how often would they interact with a CIA agent?

SPEAKER_01 1:32:18

I I think that's almost impossible to answer because I think there are just so many fickle elements to how you might intersect with someone depending on what your what your job is and what you're doing, and again, at what level you're doing, and whether it's of any interest beyond your industry and it has a national security implication or something. There's a possibility, but I would say pretty close to zero, and I'll tell you why. Okay. Because the CIA is might be bigger than say MI6 or uh ACES or something like that, and might have more resources, but I can't and I can't say how big it is. I'm talking about my career category, not the giant administrative element that has to support all of this. I'm just talking about my sort of pointy end of the spear category, the collection end. It's pro you would probably be you would your jaw would drop if you saw how small it was, the number. It's a fairly elite small group. And um so much so that in your in your age batch, your co among your coevils, you probably know everyone. You might not know everyone in the clandestine service, the entire, you know, the all of the other operations officers, but you probably know a lot of them, and you probably know almost everyone, if not everyone, in your who are your co-evils, who are your in your age batch. So it's much smaller than you would think. So as a result of just that statistic alone, I think the pop the probability of your coming in contact with them, unless you are a podcaster in Sweden who's who's trying to find interesting stories from retired CIA people, I think it would be very very unlikely that you just run into them. They're not like everywhere. Like you know, when you go and buy your bread in the morning from the baker and he gives you a strange wink and you think like but I'm not suggesting the baker.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:37

I mean, I'm typically mentioning I was being facetious. Yeah, but for example, you know, if I speak to a guy who perhaps is a prominent venture capitalist in Stockholm, now that seems like a pretty big day to be a cover, but perhaps one of his companies, the head of operations, might be a cover, for example. I don't know. I'd say z I'd say zero. Okay. So maybe maybe this is because what I'm trying to do with that question is is is understand how prevalent m intelligence gathering might be right now in capital cities. So for example, yeah, you don't know this answer. Perhaps you don't want to say it explicitly, but for example, in Stockholm, how many CIA agents do you think might be present? I have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:24

So I the one thing I know about numbers is is that they constantly fluctuate. So if Russia, for example, because of Ukraine, suddenly is the top collection priority for the United States government. And if in Scandinavian countries it's assessed that I'm speaking in passive voice essentially, if it's assessed, if some people assess that um there are targets to be had who can fulfill those collection objectives, then there might be a redistribution. But again, I'm telling you it's a fairly small number. So these things these things fluctuate. And then you might say, like, well, obviously Scandinavia is a very important player in the current Ukraine crisis because of all of this talk of NATO membership. But maybe in terms of CIA clandestine collection, that's not an epicenter. Right. It may be somewhere else. Because this is the work of exhaustive analysis, right? Where are the targets? Yeah. Um, so and also I would say that the you know, the US embassies and other entities in in the world collect a ton of information. Journalists are everywhere, collect a ton of information. So overt information, what we call open source information, is ubiquitous. So the stuff that a CIA person would go after, take risks to get, and pay be willing to pay for, that that operation would be surgical and small and very, very limited in scope. Um, so that little piece, we're not talking about uh CIA doesn't collect on a giant amount of information that's duplicative of what's readily available elsewhere. It's that tiny little piece at the top, that little thin rind at the top that they want to get at. And so it's very, very difficult. And so and it might be in the most unlikely place. You might say that, oh, well, it's obviously Ukraine and it's Russia. So what why why is the I I heard tell that the CIA is active in in Madagascar? What's going on? What's up with that? Why are they in Madagascar? Well, this something something happening there. And then a surge of personnel might be, well, there used to be one and now there are three. Those are the numbers we're talking about. You know, we're not talking about, you know, a thousand people are put against this, uh, you know, this one little thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:05

So Yeah, you you told the anecdote to me off air of the agent who was reposted to say Libya, and then he arrives in Libya, and then he's and he's organized all of his stuff to come, apartment cover, everything, and he gets a call on the terminal and says, by the way, we're rediverting you to Rome. Get on the next plane.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:25

Yeah. So that's a real story, and it's not a one-off. It's happened not always, but it's happened. So when world priorities shift, we all see that happening, right? Things happen on the turn of a dime. It just suddenly shifts. And those shifts, one of the reasons the CIA is good at what it does is because it's non-doctrinaire, right? It's not like a military, it's not following a long set of doctrine. And it can pivot very, very quickly. It's small and nimble. So when that guy arrives with his cat, his dog, his three kids who are already enrolled in the local American school, um, his his spouse has uh is a nurse and she's got a job at a local clinic, and they get off the airplane, they say, sorry, it's it's Rome now. Then they get they spend the night in the terminal and get on the next airplane tomorrow morning. And the and they'll be this in this case, it they were told, when your stuff gets here, we'll send it on.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:24

Okay, so we're talking about it can turn on the dime. Clearly, it's very well explicitly aligned with American interests. Could you hypothesize as to how many CIA agents might be active in China or Taiwan, for example? Can't that would be for example. I mean, maybe if you could tell me off air, but I just obviously right now, gathering intelligence, Taiwan, gathering intelligence Shanghai, Beijing is likely top of the American interests. I don't know. But anyway, yeah, that would be fascinating to know. Let's look, we're almost two hours in. Um, I hope you have flexibility with time because we haven't even gotten into okay, great. So let's talk about the art of persuasion because this is ultimately, you know, the role of an intelligence officer. They are trying to gather information which otherwise wouldn't be available to their interests, which is in this case the American state and protection of, you know, the uh the homeland. So I'd love to hear you speak a little bit about the art of persuasion and very interestingly enough, how it might not be as transactional or or dirty or slimy as you might as you might think.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:41

Right. So even among young CIA officers who are beginning their training, there's um a misunderstanding of what persuasion is about. Persuasion is often uh confused with manipulation, which is um trying to convince someone to do something, but it's based on um it's based on falsehoods. You're overselling, exaggerating, or otherwise misleading someone to manipulate them into compliance or to buy something or something. We've all heard about the smarmy, slimy used car salesman who sells the car to someone and it's a it's a it's a lemon, right? We've all heard that. So that doesn't work in the world of intelligence because the world of intelligence is based on enduring relationships, lasting relationships that are based on trust. So they have to, the the agents, the sources of information whom you recruit to provide you secret information, they have to trust that you have their interests at heart, that you're going to protect them, and that you're gonna do the right thing by them. You're going to maintain the confidentiality of the relationship and you're gonna handle their information in the proper way and avoid exposure. So trust is at the basis of the whole thing. That's why persuasion is different. Persuasion is about marshalling some skills that you may be able to develop with some natural attributes that you should have to still convince someone, but to convince someone based on truth, not based on falsehoods. So while you might use cover, which is obviously a deception, but that deception is required because you are protecting your sources and methods. It's not you're not using that cover to continue to manipulate someone. You're you're going to use that cover to do what you have to do and to maintain the clandestinity of it. So that persuasion has to be predicated on honesty because a long-term relationship is no different from a friendship or even a relationship, like a romantic relationship. Um if there's not trust there, it won't last very long. Um so I think that's the biggest misnomer, is there's this idea that CIA people are going out and manipulating people to do things that they don't want to do. Instead of convincing people that it's either possibly in their personal interest or in their avocational, in their vocational interest, or in the greater interest of a bigger cause for them to cooperate in this way. And either they agree to do it or they don't agree to do it. There's no manipulation, they're not tricked into saying yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:38

But give us an example. Say you're a ex This is very basic, but you know, uh export-import guy in Japan. Okay, you know, and you're an American and you've identified several targets. I would be so fascinated to figure out how you actually bring that person from total stranger to their willing to give up secrets that they probably wouldn't even tell their wife or their best friend at such a huge risk for seemingly not a very big reward, perhaps cash reward, but possibly, you know, so psychological. So this is really the persuasion part of it. How does one turn someone who it's their deepest, darkest secret, you know?

SPEAKER_01 1:44:33

So maybe one of the biggest parts that's missing from the equation is the issue of suitability. And suitability involves finding the right person to persuade. You're not trying to persuade any person, you're trying to persuade the right person. And that right person has to have all they have to be suitable. In other words, they have to have all the right pieces inherent. They have to bring that. So you might have to meet 100 people to find one that's suitable. And once you find the one that's suitable, that has that unlikely combination of all this suitable suitability in terms of personality, risk taking, discretion, you might have somebody who has all of the wonderful secrets in their head, but who's not discreet at all. And they would, in fact, love to brag about the fact that they have a secret relationship with a CIA person. So you have to find someone who's discreet. You have to find someone who's who is properly motivated in terms of why they're potentially interested in doing something like this. For example, you said it's high risk, potentially very low yield for them personally. Why would they do that? Yeah. Well, they probably do it for the same reasons I'm doing it, that I'm uh that I'm I'm ideologically and personally predisposed to do these kinds of things for not that much money, right? So finding somebody who's same-same is not as difficult as you would think. Uh, and finding someone who is looking to serve a cause greater than themselves is not that difficult to find. But then you have to have all of these other stars in alignment as well. And so there's an assessment process that happens with that 100 people I told you about. Some people you make the decision after a five-minute conversation in a crowded bar or at a party. And other people you meet two or three times and then you make the decision, this is not going anywhere, this person is unsuitable. But finally you winnow it down to the one. Like I said, these are surgical operations going after the thin rind of secrets. So we're not looking at everybody. And then, or you may find somebody who's perfectly suitable and who is uh on a psychological basis, they're motivated properly, but they don't have any access. So that person is a no, also, as wonderful as it would be, and they're charming. You like to meet with them, you like them as a as a human being, and they have all the proper motivations, they're trying to do something to change. Maybe their country is rife with corruption and they want to do something to change that, and they see this as their op their one and only opportunity. But if they don't have access to effect that change and to give you the secrets that can help informed policymakers back in the United States to effect that change, then it's not going to happen. So then finally you winnow it down to the one or the one in 200 or whatever the proportion is.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:40

On the topic of finding suitability, and also we alluded to that a lot of your work was in Southeast Asia, uh, cultures that famously in corporate or professional settings is a lot of booze. Decisions are not made sober. Where did the role of intoxication and therefore a very crude and and uh and uh um crude and malicious type of manipulation can take place in an alcohol-induced setting? Where did the role of that come into it? How do you think about it?

SPEAKER_01 1:48:20

So, again, this would be part of your assessment of suitability, and you may find someone who has all of the necessary attributes for which you're looking. And alcohol, for example, may be part of that equation because maybe culturally it's required to be hammered to make a deal. To to be hammered to make a deal, to break bread to make a deal. Some people will not even meet with you if you're not willing to meet with them, right? And if you're not willing to eat that at least, which I like, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:55

I think that I think the the the Asian cultures have that right. Maybe not the boost, but the like the necessity to know a person over a meal personally. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:06

Yeah. No, and that's that that and we're talking about universal universalisms. Uh that's one of them. Very, very few people are willing to enter into a deep trust-based relationship without first breaking bread together. And like I said, I likened it to uh this process to friendships and romantic relationships. And uh when was the last time you had a deep personal relationship with someone you'd never shared a meal with? Um it's this it's the same thing. Or or a romantic uh interest. You listen, I I I'm going to marry this woman, but you know, I've never actually had a meal with her. Um that's very unlikely scenario. And it's a very unlikely scenario around the world for this job. And you have to learn how to balance things like alcohol, intoxicants. You have to you have to uh you have to participate if it's culturally relevant and ex and expected of you. But getting blind drunk is not in your benefit. You've got to having a high tolerance will help you get deeper and deeper into a relationship without losing your way. But you have to have control over yourself at all stages of the process. You can't surrender yourself to drinking as if you're out with your university buddies and you're just getting commoded, hugging, drunk, right? You can't do that because you're working with a goal and in mind. So you do have to drink oftentimes, and you do have to break bread almost always. And so you follow certain cultural norms, but again, as I said from the Philippines, a lot of times I these cultural norms are very thin, they're very superficial. It's what's beneath, it's what it allows you to access beneath it that's important. Once you've passed the litmus test, like this person is willing to break bread with me, they're willing to share drinks with me, they're willing to share a taxi ride home with me afterwards when we're both tipsy. Okay, now let's go to the next stage of conversations. So if somebody's only interested in getting um blind drunk and with with a CIA officer, then that comes that becomes readily apparent. And that's a suitability issue. Go like, oh, that person just wants to party. But they don't want to.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:29

They don't know you're a CIA officer, right? They think you're the export import manager of some bank. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:36

But they don't, those people, if they're entering into the trajectory of a trust-based relationship as opposed to the trajectory of a good time relationship only, it's always different. They don't know who you are, but if you're moving towards substantial discussions, that trajectory eventually looks different from the entry point. There's a different there's a divergence. Like the night would end at a different place. Right. You know, absolutely. And if they go like he's just a good time Charlie, that's all this person is, then that relationship goes this way. And that's not where we want to go. It just goes to a strip club and nothing tangible. Yeah. Okay. Suitability issue. That that is that relationship is is going to go, you know, into the uh out basket.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:25

Mate, honestly, I cannot tell you how fascinating I find this subject. Because I don't know what it is. Maybe you can, I mean, you should say. Is it is it so fascinating because it goes right to the core of like human interpersonal relatability? What does it mean to have a good friend? What does it mean to really trust a person versus just relate to a person because they're similar to you? They have a similar job, they have similar issues with their wife. So sure, drink as much as you like and be a dirtbag, versus how do you truly become a friend with a person? May i I don't know, that's off topic, but is that why this is so interesting to me? Uh you know?

SPEAKER_01 1:53:10

Well, I think I think in this uh fascination with this kind of these these pieces of of espionage, I think the reason it's so fascinating is because it's the same reason why people buy spy literature. Because espionage, that whole process is oftentimes an extreme representation of many things that are familiar to us all. People are put in to situations that we recognize, but they're extreme. And and the we've all been in risky situations, but then we you crank up the risk in espionage. And I think it's because we're we're drawn to these stark examples, and it it's stark because it tends to be on the on the extreme side. The stakes are really high. So having a friendship might involve high stakes, but it might not. It might never involve a very a risky situation where somebody is put in facing a giant life or death conundrum and your loyalty or disloyalty decides, you know, uh everything. But I think possibly that's why. It's a it's such an extreme representation of things that are familiar, but it's it's maybe off to one side and very, very stark.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:40

So if a good relationship is based on trust, familiarity, how do you feel about the ethics or or at least the personal toll of building these relationships based on trust, which ultimately are transactional because your interest in him is that he has information you want to pass on to someone else. How does that take a toll on you? And how do you think about the ethics of that? The guilt almost.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:12

Yeah, I I think all of these relationships uh from the beginning, when this when you when you again I talk I'll talk about trajectory, when you start on the trajectory toward this trust-based relationship as opposed to the good time-only relationship, immediately you're building toward something substantial that transcends the personal part of the relationship. And in that process, which starts from the beginning, the suitability of the relationship is exposed, right? So you can stop the relationship at any point when you think that this is just going to become a a friendship. There's never going to be anything more to it than a friendship. So you're always building toward if the person has access and they're suitable from the beginning, you're building toward the institutionalization, not necessarily the transactional part of it, but the institutionalization of the of the relationship. There's always building toward something that's bigger than the personal relationship itself. So at any point, if the person says, This, I'm not comfortable with the direction this is going, I see where this is going, I'm not comfortable with it, then that is a suitability issue and the relationship can end. But it's as long as you're moving it toward, in other words, everybody's eyes are wide open going into this process. No, nobody's surprised at any point during this process. Um, it's it's like if you're uh building a friendship with a woman and you secretly have a desire to have a romant romantic relationship with her or him, depending on your preference, your persuasion, then you don't want to spring your your undying devotion and unrequited love at the at the end of the relationship. You want to let that person know that this is the trajectory of the relationship. There shouldn't be surprises, and there's no there's no underhandedness in letting somebody know where this is going. Actually, that's greater honesty, I would contend. Letting somebody know this is where I see the relationship going and building toward that so that they're a part of it. And so when you get to the point where the rubber meets the road where they're going to give you something, probably they've already voluntarily given you something because we're on this path. Yeah. You're becoming messy. They've already voluntarily given to you. You didn't ask for it. They've already said, like, you know, kind of where this relationship is going. What I need to tell you is this. Okay. So there are no surprises along this way.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:02

Are you still friends with anyone who has informed for you? No. And is that a professional reason, or is it because unfortunately the reality of the job is that it was just transactional? No, that's that's the job, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:58:18

There are people I really liked a lot, but again, it the purpose of the relationship ended in this institutionalization of the relationship. And then the person's relationship with the with the CIA trumped any real personal relationship that we had. So that that's the relationship. It developed into that relationship. It didn't develop into a deep and enduring and lasting friendship, it developed into a deep and enduring, lasting relationship with this, with the agency. After I leave, the next person comes in and fills my shoes, and they are the face of the of the entity to which they have formed the relationship.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:12

Yeah, yeah. So as someone who professionally befriended people, what can you say to me in the audience are persuasion skills or at least persuasion habits that someone could adopt should they want to say, for example, leave a better impression on women, leave a better impression on their boss, their colleagues, etc. Um, in the least slimy transactional way possible. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:59:48

Right. So what immediately sweeps away sliminess is is integrity and honesty. You have to be, you have to have honesty, and you have to, and and with honesty comes consistency because relationships are don't last very long if if they're not consistent. If if somebody can't trust you to be consistent, that's a very, very basic thing. And that honesty can't be an on-again, off again thing. Like I was I've been mostly honest with you, but I'm not really very honest with you. You have to be un unwaveringly honest, right? But then you also have to bring some personal things to the game as well. You have to be, you have to have some element of likability. You have to have some. I've heard uh in the Commonwealth world, I've heard the word matey. Like that's a very matey person. I think that tends to be a little on the smarmy side. Oftentimes when I've heard it, it it's been written, it's I can see it in my mind written in italics. Um, but I think what it amiable, a person who's amiable is is a likable person, right? And a person who you don't have to have a giant larger than life, magnetic personality. You don't have to be the king or queen of charisma. In fact, somebody who is charismatic oftentimes is very aware of their charisma and is um uh a lot of times vanity goes along with charisma and they're they're larger than life and they're not very discreet, and they're using their charisma constantly. Where I'm talking about something at a lower level, like ability. And and there has to be genuineness there, there has to be some humor there, there has in other words, all the things that are required to have a relationship with another human being that has to be there. It can't be predicated first on this bigger thing that we're talking about. It has to be predicated first on building trust. The bigger thing has to come later. And in that, I would say, probably the most important skill that somebody can bring that. So they bring maybe natural likability to the table, but one of the things they can develop if they don't have it already, uh, is the skill of listening intently to another person. Oftentimes people think persuading is about talking. Like I can talk, I'm silver-tongued and I can talk anybody into doing anything. Again, that's off that's probably manipulation. It's a little different. That's car salesy. Yeah, that's very car salesy. Yeah, let me, you know, oh, you look good in that car. You know, that oh, yeah. Um this one's just for you.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:24

You know, I sold it to a guy last week. He actually lives in your block, and I tell you, he's he he's giving me the best, the best reviews I've ever had on this car. You know, his wife hasn't given him as much attention in years.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:37

That's it. So you're talking your way into convincing someone of something as opposed to listening your way in. Because people want to be heard. And if you want to build a relationship with someone, you have to have some interest in that other person. And you cannot derive interest in that other person by talking to them. You have to listen to them. And yet it's true, you do have to share some of yourself too, of course you do, but you cannot dominate the conversation. You cannot, you have to listen and you have to listen with intention. You have to understand what's important to that person. You want to listen to the words they use, because people, when they talk to one another, they use the words they like to hear. So if I say things to you, if I let's say I use the word discernment and I say discernment, and that means something very, very deep to me, and to you it doesn't mean really anything, then I'm not talking to you in a language that creates intimacy between us. I'm just I'm telling you something. I'm not, you're not telling me what discernment means to you. I'm telling you what discernment means to me, and then I'm just continuing to drive it home, and I don't really care what you think about discernment. I I want it, but if I'm interested in what you have to say, then I might share what I think discernment is, but then I need to hear what you think discernment is, and I need to hear the the language you use to describe it. And if you say discernment means um seeing things clearly, I have to think about seeing things clearly might be different from the the vocabulary I would use for discernment. You begin to understand a person a little bit differently. Absolutely. And and so that's universal too. That's not just between people of similar cultures. People will tell you how they think of things in the language they prefer. And, you know, language, words are very, very powerful things. They're they're they're they're oftentimes sometimes words are are bandied about and aren't worth a whole lot. But when somebody wants to make a point, they're gonna let you know exactly how they feel about something in the way that they want to hear it that makes sense to them.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:00

The words they like to hear, that is something I the words I hear that resonates with me quite a lot because you know, as a you know, podcaster, right, interviewer, whatever I think generally a good interviewer or podcaster does a lot more listening than they do talking themselves, and you know, it's an extremely asymmetrical relationship. You know, one person is here to learn about the other person, it does not go the other way. Um trying to understand me, I spent a lot of time trying to listen to the good interviewers, how do they do it? Yeah, really getting a sense for their own language, the words they like to hear. What does one word mean to them, which might not mean the same thing to you, because you have your own baggage attached to certain words. Uh that's a that's a really cool insight. And I imagine one which is difficult because you're hearing words in languages that aren't your native tongue, therefore you clearly have extremely different understandings of these words. They don't they don't have all the cultural baggage and so forth.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:11

Very true. Uh you know, the sometimes very, very key words like honor are discussed. And honor might mean something different to that person, and if you're just assuming that the flashcard you use to learn their language, honor means this, and you're looking at it and you learn that that word one for one, you you won't understand what honor means to them. You have to drill down on what honor means to them. What does honor mean to that person? And you have to have them use it in context. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:43

These days, when you're developing relationships, do you ever feel like the old spy craft somehow taints the authenticity and depth that you could otherwise have because you fall into the old methods of being the extremely likable, friendly, open person who I can share my secrets with that might not be at the very core the Christopher Turner who wants to present himself.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:13

I think so. I've been I've been out now for a few years. So I've been able to find my feet. I've been I I retired seven years ago. And uh maybe when I first left, there I had to I don't think reinvent myself, but I think I had to sort of learn how to navigate in the world as just a regular person instead of looking for opportunities um everywhere in in relationships that I had. But it wasn't as difficult as I I I'm maybe making it sound more difficult than it was. It was a fairly easy transition. I just once I was able to shed all of that, because with that comes extra pressure and stress, right? So it's not hard to shed pressure and stress. And maybe that's one reason that maybe sometimes a used car salesman, for example, type of a of a salesman, person, a marketer, might have harder, more difficulty transitioning once they're out of their job because they're still sort of selling all the time. I never really sold, you know, I just I developed relationships, and now I just don't have any institutional goals. So it was pretty easy for me to throttle back and just to seek out people who with whom I have things in common and uh shared interests.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:36

Something we spoke about off-air was um I proposed to you that communication was the most important transferable skill, and that is irrespective of your industry, your age, your profession, whatever, the ability to be able to say what you feel without jarring the other person. So this seemed to resonate with you quite deeply, I think for obvious reasons, given what we've just spoken about. Um, but I'd love to hear how you think about communication as a skill someone owns and also how just important it is, irrespective of who you are.

SPEAKER_01 2:09:12

Yeah, I think I think communication is is key to everything, right? It it reveals who you are. It it um yeah, I mean it's it's at the basis of every single relationship you have, whether it is a relationship with the person behind a counter or that you're dealing with in a in a very simple way, uh, a brief way, or if it's somebody with whom you have some more substantial and perhaps long-term interests with. Um I do really think that it's the basis of everything and learning how to communicate. And again, I'll go back to sort of the key skill of communication is exactly the same key skill as persuasion, and that is listening. Um, we we tend to speak more than we listen, I think, oftentimes. Uh, some people are just very naturally good listeners, but I think in general, we tend to speak. We want to let people know how we feel, what we're thinking. Um how smart we are. Yeah, how smart. Yeah, you want to impress someone, you want to uh be the smartest person in the room, or whatever it is that is driving you. But oftentimes being quiet is the most powerful communication tool.

SPEAKER_00 2:10:31

Let's then relate that to some experience you've had, which really does separate you from you know the normal distribution of humanity. Because you've operated so intimately with so many different cultures. It's not on a superficial level, it's truly intimate. You spoke at the beginning of the podcast about the similarities between a Stone Age Filipino tribe and the rest of us. Can you comment once more across the universality differences and similarities that you've experienced?

SPEAKER_01 2:11:09

I so I would only say that I have found many, many more similarities than differences. The differences are often very, very superficial. And perhaps this all goes back to a comment I made near, very near the end of my uh academic anthropology pursuits. When I told a fellow graduate student in anthropology, I said, well, you know, at its core, culture doesn't really matter. And that didn't that didn't go over too well with the other anthropologists because anthropologists study culture, right? But my point was that culture is important, of course. It it's important to people to preserve, it's important for people's identities and all these things. But in that definition, you can see how superficial it is as well. It's important for my identity to be part of this cultural group, to be part of this modern day tribe, because we're all basically tribal, right? We wear the uniforms of one football team over another, and we make we we argue based on my political tribe over your political tribe and everything else. These are very, very important things to us as to you know, discriminating between us is very important to humans, it seems. That goes back probably back millennia to times when there were warring tribes, you know, stalking the landscape. So I don't know. I I I think I don't have any really wonderful insights other than that.

SPEAKER_00 2:12:45

No, I love that. That's great. So when I first uh discovered you, it was in this interview that you gave to Project Brazen in their um uh one of their newsletters, and you wrote about having in a career that well, at least they described it as exotic and high stakes. And so I'd love to ask you about that generally, but also specifically about how you won an intelligence star, because I think this will give to the audience a lot of context for the you know, the the the the legitimacy and high stakes of what you were doing, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:13:24

Okay, so perhaps I should define what the intelligence star is first. It's a CIA um uh medal award commendation for valor in the field, and it's the second highest uh CIA award specifically for valor. There are other higher ones, but therefore more administrative or leadership related things. And I was awarded this based on a Warzone assignment that I had, where it was a high-stakes um assignment where I was embedded with an indigenous team of sp of special operators, and we were our primary means of survival as obvious outsiders in this indigenous element beyond growing long beards and dressing as they did, was to just keep an extremely low profile. But events in that war zone involved things bigger than my little unit, and eventually we were targeted because of uh for retribution. There was a there was a large-scale strike by Western Allied uh military forces, and we were the expedient ready element that could be retaliated against. And during that, uh it was very high stakes because it was a life or death thing. My little team and I were able to continue to operate successfully, to uh we continue to collect tactical battlefield intelligence. We were able to continue operating, and it's because of that team effort that I was sort of singled out as the leader, I was the chief of this unit uh to receive this award. Uh, but I think I it was I was just symbolic of what my little team did. Uh I wasn't the guy who charged into the um deafening guns or anything. We just we continued, I can't go into a lot of detail about what we did, but we were under extreme duress, a lot of incoming fire. Uh it was machine gun fire, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars. We were being hit from every angle, and we continued to we put ourselves into a very exposed position to understand what was transpiring on the battlefield and to convey that to the larger military um outside of us. And we had no other means of protection than this indigenous force and our own uh side arms, small arms. Uh, we had rifles and pistols. So it was a risky high-stakes thing. It could have easily gone another way. We could have been overrun and um there would have been little um left of us if that had happened, but it it it ended well for us. And as a result of our performance during this time of great duress, this eventually wound its way through the bureaucracy. And uh I was surpr I was surprised. I didn't know I was going to receive any um acknowledgement or anything for what we did, and then I was advised that I had received this medal. So And it was in Afghanistan, right? It was uh I I I think I can say that it was on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, right on the border area. Yeah. We were it's it's a very, very uh nebulous uh situation uh along the border.

SPEAKER_00 2:17:16

So it's it sounds like friendly fire. Was it Western forces? No, okay, so it was the Taliban.

SPEAKER_01 2:17:24

It was precipitated by a large Western strike that was a was a, I don't know if it was a mass casualty event, but the the opposing forces, the Taliban associated extremist forces, this was a counter-terror terrorism operation, uh, suffered as a result of this strike. But it was a, how can we say this? It was a it was a long-distance strike. There was no one else anywhere around. There were no you there were no US or ESOF, the uh Western forces positioned anywhere near where this happened. We were the only available ready targets for retribution.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:02

Okay, okay, that makes sense. So basically, in response to, say, a drone attack that killed a lot of enemies, then you can't get a chance.

SPEAKER_01 2:18:09

Yeah, or artillery or other missiles or or or yeah, or you know, conventional aerial bombardment kind of stuff. They were yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:19

And it was unusual for you to experience I mean f shooting at and being shot at in your job, because typically it was more as we've spoken about this heavy undercover spy work. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:18:37

Yes, so in certain areas where it's dangerous to operate, uh either for you know civ civil disintegration or um insurgencies or whatever, whatever's happening in a host country, you might, as a CIA officer, carry a gun. You might. Uh I have, and I I I had previously in different in different jobs, but that's only for self-defense. That's uh we used to have a joke, we said like the only reason we have a gun is if you ever, if it ever comes out of the holster, if even if you survive the encounter, you're you're gone. Your your tour is finished. Because that means that means everything went bad. It was a it was a self-defense scenario. But this was very unlike that. This was a war zone. We openly carried our weapons. So yes, it was very different from my previous experiences. Yeah. And it was shortly after that that you retired, right? It was uh not shortly, it was several years after that. Oh, okay. So you continued to go on and yeah, I continued to go on for several years, more than more than five years, uh, six, six, seven years, I can't remember how many years after that.

SPEAKER_00 2:19:53

If this is too personal of a question, just let me know and I'll cut it out. But you know, have you experienced PTSD and and these longer-term mental health implications of going through such uh a stressful event?

SPEAKER_01 2:20:10

I I definitely had so a after that event, I was involved in another event. Uh I was involved in a uh suicide truck bombing on on the place where I was staying. And uh that was a mass casualty event. A lot of people died. I was able to get out without uh suffering too much. Uh, but everything I had with me at the time, I was trying to get out of the war zone at this time. I was finished. Everything that I had with me, to include my passport, everything, uh, burned up in this attack. And uh I did end up losing some hearing in in my uh one of my ears, and um uh and that coming right on the heels of this other this other attack when we were very, very far forward in the action. I I I had PTSD symptoms when I came back. I was hyper-vigilant. I uh for may months, if not uh more than a year, uh I had issues with loud noises, I slept poorly, etc. Yeah, I had your sort of classic symptoms, and I still have some like hypervigilance issues and some issues with loud noises, but um much, much less than I did for that first year or so after I came back.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:28

That is an amazing story. The uh suicide bomber who destroyed all of your personal belongings, if you wouldn't mind telling it, because it's one of unbelievable coincidence and this thing we kind of started with life can be understood backwards, but it can't be understood forwards. Can you predict the future? What role does serendipity and randomness and chance play in your life? I think that story you told is unbelievable. So if you wouldn't mind sharing it with the audience.

SPEAKER_01 2:21:59

Okay, so I had just gone through this very high-stakes war zone experience where we were embedded with an indigenous unit. I I was finished, I had done a full year plus in this very austere environment, very far forward in the war zone. Some would say about 20 kilometers behind the lines, if there were lines in Afghanistan. So I was finally able to take a deep breath and to start to decompress. And I came out of the war zone on a helicopter with all of my belongings, which weren't many. I had like, you know, two bags, like a backpack and a bag. But I had pictures and I had my passport and my tickets. This was in the day of paper tickets in that part of the world. And uh to help me decompress, the uh office put me into a nice hotel in this city. And uh I was there. I think it was that in Afghanistan. Uh no, I was actually on the Pakistan side at this point. So they took me, got me to the nearest um operating international airport. So I was uh that I was going to leave on a commercial flight out. Okay, okay. So they put me up in this uh hotel and I loved it. Uh I had a nice dinner, and the very next night I arranged to have some of my old friends who just coincidentally happened to be serving uh in a war zone assignment in that in that capital and um to come over to my hotel and to have a nice dinner with me. And we made arranged for a time and everything else, and I was standing out in front of the hotel waiting for them to come. They both came in uh I think one of them came in a car, the other guy came in a taxi. We loitered in front of the hotel for 10, 15 minutes telling uh war stories and catching up, and then we wandered in through the through the lobby and sat down at the hotel and ordered appetizers and drinks. And the uh waiter brought us our beer, and that's the last thing any of us remember. And the whole hotel, you know, started to come apart, and we the overpressure from this giant explosion of uh, I don't know, 1400 kilograms of high explosive material had this giant crater uh that it created. It the overpressure from that explosion came through and just wiped out the ground floor of the hotel. I mean, just absolutely destroyed everything. So we found ourselves, we kind of regained consciousness and we were on the floor, having had all of our uh having had our lungs decompressed. And uh so then we picked our way out of the hotel. Um and uh the the hotel was on fire at this point, and the the it was going up in flames, so we we kind of gathered ourselves and and uh gave first aid to a few people and gathered up everybody else in the restaurant and got out of the hotel. And we went to the back where the swimming pool was because uh the hotel swimming pool, because we thought if this thing's going up in flames, we want to be near water. So we went out in the back and we also used some of the pool water and some napkins from the restaurant, uh, some cloth napkins from the restaurant to bind some wounds on some people. I didn't have a scratch on me. I I couldn't hear anything, and my insides felt like jelly from the overpressure, but um I was okay. And eventually we realized that the hotel was burning and we didn't have a way out through the back. And so I went back into the hotel again and found an egress point, an exit through this uh kitchen area, which was just a helter-skelter mess. And then I came back and got everybody, and we went through this kitchen and came out the front. And as we were, unbeknownst to me, as we were exiting the front of the hotel, there was a CNN camera there, and they showed this these bedraggled people coming out single file from the ruins. They were going, like, where do these people come from? We thought nobody could possibly come out of that mess. And so we just did a beeline over to the guy's car, the guy who drove, not the guy who took a taxi. And we went, we went into the embassy and and said we were part of this event. And uh so, but my mother, meanwhile, receives a telephone call, and uh she's in the Williamsburg area on the east coast of the United States, and she receives a telephone call from our neighbor and said, I just saw your son on television, on CNN, and he was coming out of a bombed-out hotel. And so my mom immediately watches the the reel that comes back on every 10 minutes, and there there I was. And so she at least she knew I was alive. So then she called my wife and said, you know, Christopher's on CNN. Have you heard from him? And I had I had no, I mean, I didn't have a phone, everything had gone. So your wife also didn't know. She didn't know until I was able to, so I didn't have any ID, so it was I had to I had to be verified to get into the embassy. So I was being vouched for by these other people who said everything he got, you know. So eventually I got in, and once I was in, I was okay because I was able to make a secure call back to my wife and say, hey, listen, this happened.

SPEAKER_02 2:27:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:22

It's it's the reason why I mean, obviously the drama of the story, but also the fact that you happen to meet friends who happen to be in this town, which is so fucking random in the first place. It was very random. They were military personnel, right? They were there on a biking trip or something, yeah. And so they happen to be there to drag you out of a blast that almost certainly might have killed you.

SPEAKER_01 2:27:46

If we had been still standing out chewing the fat on the sidewalk in front of the hotel when it happened, we would have been there would have been nothing left of us. It was a very it was a very large explosion. So just minutes away, we went, we decided, oh, let's go get something to eat, and we wandered inside, and it happened.

SPEAKER_00 2:28:04

So and it's just for me the role of serendipity in one's life, you know, how meeting those people who otherwise wouldn't be there in a in a hundred million alternative universes brings you out to to survive you, to then do what you're gonna do now, and who knows what your books are gonna do, and who knows what future work you're gonna do is gonna do. And um that that for me is just so unbelievably fascinating, and kind of like if you want to get philosophical about it, kind of like the the the energy of life, you know, how a random encounter can completely redirect you or continue you in your case, that's for example. Yeah. Um okay, so something as well that I really would like to hear more from you about is some of the ethics of foreign intervention. So we spoke a bit about the ethics of persuasion and um but you know what right does America or any other country have to intervene in other countries' business purely for their own self-interest? Now, for anyone with a political ideology, myself included, the answer is kind of obvious, but I would just love to hear how you justified and how you think about it.

SPEAKER_01 2:29:28

Well, I this is gonna sound like a cop-out a bit. Well, maybe it's not a bit, maybe it's gonna sound like a cop out. But I really didn't bother myself too much with should America be intervening in this or not in this. Um my job was solely to collect actionable or useful, maybe I should say useful intelligence that would inform US policymakers, up to and including the president, of course, but other senior policymakers as well. So it was a very clear-cut mission for me. There were these were these were so a a politician uh or an advisor or something may make a decision contrary to the intelligence that you collect, right? But the point is that they didn't make it in a vacuum. And that was my mission, is to make sure that if they decided against the information that I gave them, they were deciding against something instead of just deciding based on their ridiculous biases or it meah, just in a vacuum. So in as for the deeper question of what gives America the right to intervene in other countries, these see, these are very, very senior, uh, these are very, very high-level strategic questions, right? So these questions we're hearing on a regular basis now because of the Ukraine. What right does America have to send treasurer, you know, taxpayer money, billions of dollars worth of war material?

SPEAKER_00 2:31:14

Up to 50 billion, I heard today.

SPEAKER_01 2:31:16

Yeah, to buttress this uh uh defense of a country that heretofore has been rife with corruption and all sorts of insider training and trading and oligarchs, you know, crazy oligarchs and everything else. What's our right there? So, you know, this is all sort of real politics stuff. Uh, you know, it it involves political expediency and it involves questions of morality and things like that. So uh these are rabbit holes that I typically tried to avoid going down because I, of course, had my own opinions about everything. And I was not a robot, I was not uh a military person who was dispatched to fight a questionable war in Iraq. I was a civilian person who made choices based on my own morality and my own ethical reasoning, right? So I didn't serve in Iraq. I chose not to serve in Iraq. Did I hamper my career progression, my hallowed career progression, by deciding not to serve in Guantanamo Bay or to serve in Iraq or to serve here or to serve there? Possibly I did. I I chose not to go to certain places and do certain things. Was I somehow justifying myself while still being part of a flawed policy and a flawed organization and a flawed mission? Uh I guess anybody could could could say that what you should have done is you should have slammed your fist down on the table and say, I quit and stormed out of the room and said, you know, I'll I'll vote with my feet. This is outrageous. Um but I realized that none of these, you know, you know, the world of international affairs is all gray. It's not, it's neither black nor white. And I know that sounds like an excuse, but it is. It's a murky gray fog. And you do the best you can with the information that you have. And if you are tasked with, if your mission is to provide more information to sweep away some of that fog so that maybe somebody who's in a position of power can do something better, I decided that I would help somebody do something better. If they decided not to do it better, then that was on them. But I was doing everything I could to try to improve uh the right to help facilitate the right decisions. So why did you decide against Iraq? Uh so I just didn't uh uh see The legitimacy of the intervention. I did see, of course, I saw the legitimacy of the intervention in Afghanistan. Of course, that that mission, of course, morphed into something completely different, right? But in the beginning, the intervention, I think, was the right move. I lost my best friend in the 9-11 attacks. So I had a personal stake as well as an ideological stake in seeing the Taliban and their foreign fighters who had found refuge inside Afghanistan dealt with decisively. No, so uh so it was not the that mission for me was not sufficiently justified. I did not fault people who went to uh take part in that mission. But I personally did not. Um and there were other there were other assignments and other missions that I also elected not to go into. And if I had been told you must participate, this is a direct order, or you can just quit, then I probably would have had to resign at that point, but I never was put into that position.

SPEAKER_00 2:35:17

You spent so many years informing against Islamic extremists and in a sense fighting the war against Islamic terror. How do you now think about Islamic extremism specifically, but then also religious fundamentalism? How has it influenced your worldview spending so much time combating this force and being involved in 9-11, being involved in Pakistan, Afghanistan, seeing the worst of it, but then I'm sure as well seeing some of the good in it? Um, how do you think about this complex issue?

SPEAKER_01 2:35:53

Yeah. It's that that's a very complicated question. I mean, there's obviously some good thing, there are good things that came out of our focus on international terrorism, where we were able to thwart uh attack planning or in uh planned attacks or attack planning, those are two separate things. Or we were able to disrupt cells that had long-term ambitions for doing you know global mayhem and things like that. Those are all very there's a strategic element to that, but that those are mostly tactical things that I was involved in. Um the greater idea of how do we as how does the the world, the the aligned world focus on stamping out uh Islamic related, Islamist extremism is a trickier question because it's not a it's not one thing. It's not it's not Hitler's Germany or um Rwanda's genocide or this or that. It's not a single definable, containable thing, tangible thing. It's this diverse uh always transforming thing that is oftentimes uh an implicit part of something legitimate. So that's a that's a bigger question, and and I we used to joke when I was uh staff officer deployed to the field, we used to joke that you know some of what we do is the game whack-a-mole. You it's it's this big board and it's has a bunch of holes in it, and then every once in a while this little furry head pops up. It's a carnival game, and you take an oversized padded hammer, and you are supposed to anticipate where it's coming up and hit it on the head, and you get points for that, and if you get enough points, you win a prize. And we were we were joking that this is like playing whack-a-mole. You we never know, you know, we hit this this this mole, and another one pops up over there, we hit this one, and another one pops up over there. So um I think that I mean it's just it's it's something, these kinds of things, whether it's ideological extremism or religious extremism. I once had a conversation with a woman who said, who told me that, well, you know, with as we're all living through right now with Islamic extremism, religion has killed more people in history than any other any other single thing. And I said, well, that's an argument that can be made, but so too can an argument be made that that uh post-war China was a non-religious purging Stalinist Russia was a non-religious purging of humanity, Pol Pot's purging of humanity was uh so I said, I'm not so sure that religion as defined by you is alone in its atrocity rate. That it's obviously so it depends on what you worship, doesn't it? Exactly, exactly. You can worship money and you can worship ideology and you can worship power, and all of these things, when worshipped, uh to an extreme degree, not too I'm not you know, no one can possibly say that the uh Greek Orthodox monks that live out on the end of a rocky peninsula are religious extremists who are going to take over the world and start killing people, but so too with other ideologies. It's only in their extreme that they become volatile and dangerous. That's the thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:39:46

It's it's the question of extremism, which was very I was very conscious to say Islamic extremism, religious fundamentalism. Yes, you know, like uh I saw recently this documentary on Netflix talking about this uh Latter-day Saints extremist cult that has extremely polygamous. That's religious fundamentalism, uh, the Orthodox Jewish community, religious fundamentalism, Islamic Orthodox, religious fundamentalism, so forth and so forth. If you marry an ideology to the point where you stop asking any questions about the rest of the world, that's when you start getting people that, as I'm sure you've experienced firsthand, are willing to die for a cause that is largely, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:40:30

And and any barbarity can be justified in extremist situations. Right. Alright.

SPEAKER_00 2:40:36

Um, did you ever provide intelligence that directly informed on a terrorist attack that you stopped? I think I probably did, yes. That's an amazing thing. Do you know what it was?

SPEAKER_01 2:40:52

I there are a couple, yeah. You cannot say. So I don't think any I don't think any CIA officer can say that they and they alone thwarted their information alone, thwarted an attack, because single source stuff isn't the stuff of of any kind of thwarting, right? You have to have it's like journalism. You can't have one single source that says something. You have to have be able to check it out.

SPEAKER_02 2:41:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:41:22

Uh you have to have some cor uh some corroboration of sources. So I was I think yes, I was part of that.

SPEAKER_00 2:41:27

Okay. Cool. Look, I'm I'm looking at the time now. We're coming on three hours, so we've already you've already given way more time than you allotted. And I'm afraid that if I just keep asking questions, it will be it might get a bit uh I don't know. It might just dry up. But so instead, let me ask you a big, very generalized question to round off the CIA, and then I'll finish with a few personal questions that I'd like to ask every guest. And that is just you addressing the overall role that CIA conspiracy has in the formation of geopolitics, you know, the relationship with Henry Kissinger, the slimy stuff that people think of when CIA is mentioned. How do you reflect on that as someone who's served 25 years with this organization?

SPEAKER_01 2:42:15

So a lot of the conspiracy stuff, um obviously some of it is just pure nonsense. It's just made up to satisfy someone's perverse view of the world. Some of it is based in reality, and all I would contend that those reality-based conspiracies such as interventions in uh South and Central American political affairs and things like that, th those are all based in historical on historical facts, and they predated me by decades. Um and that was part of an you know of a CIA, it was the same organization, but with very little oversight, and with uh broad executive powers, the president or his his um lieutenants could could tell the CIA to go do something highly questionable and they would go do it, right? For an executive order. Assassination. Oh, yeah, like you know, the exploding cigars to to Castro or some uh supporting uh a coup d'etat in some uh South American country or something like that. You know, um these were all very, very uh questionable activities by anyone's moral compass and couldn't be couldn't be done again today simply because we have so much oversight, uh congressional oversight and the and also the executive level interventions are are more limited and regulated. Um so I I would just say that I I mean I really don't have any there were no conspiracies generated during my ex with the exception of some of the 9-11 ridiculousness that I won't even comment on that the CIA somehow was involved in in the bombing of the Twin Towers and that I mean just ridiculous stuff that is so far off the record reservation. Yeah, all that stuff is just so you know, uh my worldview is this. Let me try to twist history to fit my worldview kind of uh reckoning.

unknown 2:44:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:44:29

Give us an example, apart from 9-11 JFK, the non-reality CIA conspiracy, which you just have to dismiss uh without question.

SPEAKER_01 2:44:39

Well, the um I had a family member. I'll give you a personal example. I had a family member who persisted in her accusations of me being involved in assassination operations. Like when things go bad, I know what you guys do. You just you just kill the troublemakers, you know, and so I know. And so that's insulting. Yeah, it's insulting, right? And it's ridiculous, right? That I'm uh being accused of being a murderer, you know. And so I said that I essentially said that's ridiculous, you're accusing me of being murdered. And what was the response, of course, was the crazy response. Well, of course you'd deny it. So it's the circular argument, you know, it's the snake eating its tail. I can't possibly stop it from eating its tail. Someone captured by ideology. That's right. So my the way I ended the argument was that it wasn't convincing that other person to stop being crazy, but the way I ended the argument was that my job requires living people. And dead men tell no tales. So why would I go around killing my sources? So I said, dead men tell no tales. That's all I'm gonna say. I don't go around killing people who refuse to collaborate with me or who try to stab me in the back or whatever. Um so that was my only that was my end response, but that was that was something that kind of haunted me for several years after I joined the agency, having being accused of that kind of ridiculousness.

SPEAKER_00 2:46:17

This is now definitely the last question, but it just occurred to me. Okay. Um how do you think about this statement? That America is the best country in the world. So we're talking about ideology, we're talking about America's right to intervene. Clearly, you are the policeman of the planet that ensure all of this global order, that ensure trade routes, that ensure some sort of globalization. How do you think about that statement that it is the best country in the world?

SPEAKER_01 2:46:49

It I something between a bristle and a shudder, uh, it makes me uncomfortable. Um it suggests that there's some sort of superiority about the American way of life over all other possible ways of life in the world, that other solutions that other people have found are somehow less than the solutions we found in the United States, despite evidence to the contrary, right? When you're living abroad and you're looking back at America, you see her for all she is, you see her for her strengths and you see her for her warts. And let me tell you, she's got a lot of warts. And that that is something that we uh if you're a citizen of a nation, you have to accept the whole package. That doesn't mean you have to endorse it or justify it or uh chant that it's the best or anything else. I hear that a lot. I've heard it a lot more since I came home, and I'm tuning more into national media that you know America's the best, and if you don't like it, you can just go back to where you came from and things like that, which is ridiculous because we're all from somewhere else. Yeah, to include the Native Americans that came across the Bering Land Straits. I'm an anthropologist, remember? I know how they got here. We're all African. Everybody's from some this was a vast empty continent. Yeah, it's a vast empty continent 35,000 years ago. There weren't even unless you're a mastodon or a mammoth, you don't have any claim to being born, you know, uh uh a native. Um so that's a ridiculous thing. And and it's also such a dismissive thing of every other place in the world. And having lived in many other countries, I've seen wonderful solutions to many of the biggest problems of the human condition on planet Earth. And to say somehow that those are less than the creaky, insufficient things that have been done in the United States is um ludicrous at best. It it's it's the it it's it smacks of like this jingoistic sort of uh hyper patriotic ridiculousness, right? Where you're altering reality to fit you know this this these feelings you have. Uh so I just think that that's ridiculous. I've I've lived in a lot of countries where I would be happy to spend the all of my remaining days there.

SPEAKER_00 2:49:15

That question really makes me think of the opening to Guns, Jones, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Uh I'm I just want to see if you recall what it is. No, I don't know. If not, I'll say. Okay, so you know, he is a great anthropologist. I don't know if you as an anthropologist want to question that, but I think you would certainly be considered a great anthropologist. He he asked the question of his friend in Papua New Guinea, because he was there for 11 years studying birds. Um, and his Papua New Guinea friend says to him, you know, uh, why, you know, why are you guys so smart? You know, how did you do all this stuff? And then Jared reflects on that question and asks the and asks, why was it that the English boarded the shores of Australia rather than the Aboriginals boarding the shores of Dover, you know, the United Kingdom? And then he goes on to explain throughout the book why that was in fact the case and ultimately ends with the conclusion that it's not a question of who's smarter or who's better, you know, or or or who could organize themselves more. It's like a difference in value and it's a difference in organizational capacity, it's a difference in your geographical uh, you know, birth. And maybe I'm kind of not doing the argument enough justice, but to answer the question of why is one country better than another through that prism, it does make you think of it differently because in a globalized capitalist world, clearly America is the best because they have by far the least invadable shores, the largest internal river system, the most land for agriculture, uh land of immigrants who all worked extraordinarily hard to build all this value versus Europe that has indefensible borders, that has a much longer history of warfare, least cooperation, less languages, or the nomadic Australian aboriginals. And it it's just this overall worldview, which sort of explains why one country is different than another, but that question of better is absolutely not true. Because right now at this day, 2022, Papua New Guinea is one of the least developed places on the planet. Yet, Jared Diamond says with confidence that some of the smartest people he ever met were Papua New Guineans because they could walk through the bush and tell you exactly what noise that bird was, where he feeds, how he gets his food, how then that means for him, how he can develop his own food, and so forth. And anyway.

SPEAKER_01 2:51:46

Some of the most intelligent people I met were with the tribe I lived in with in the Philippines. They were incredibly intelligent. Um, their natural native intelligence was far above anyone I had ever met. Yeah. Um, so this whole idea that if your formal education equals your intelligence is a is is a very um lazy way to think. Um and also the whole idea better. Better is completely subjective and contextual, right? So better, um, well, I I there are a lot of countries in the world where you don't personally go bankrupt just because you have cancer.

SPEAKER_00 2:52:32

Precisely. What metric are you gonna measure better from?

SPEAKER_01 2:52:34

Yeah, yeah. Medical bankruptcy?

SPEAKER_00 2:52:37

Well, we're yeah, that's number one in the United States. If you're gonna measure it on an ability to accumulate wealth, then I suppose America might be the best place in the world. But are you gonna measure it on the bond between a mother and a daughter? I mean, that's like almost an impossibly to measure thing, but anyway. Anyway.

SPEAKER_01 2:52:54

Some of these facts, you know, were teased out during the pandemic when everybody was busy labeling people essential or non-essential, and we found out that some of the lowest paid, least stable jobs in the world were the most essential.

SPEAKER_00 2:53:09

Precisely two final ones for you, Mr. Turner. The first being, what is a country looking forward that you are particularly bullish on?

SPEAKER_01 2:53:20

Well, I'll just follow on the preamble about medical care. I did live in Scandinavia for a couple of years. And I I'm not saying this to uh appease you sitting in Stockholm. Well, you're actually not sitting in Stockholm. Are you sitting in Stockholm? Um Helsingland. Oh, okay. There we go. So Sweden, we'll just say. Uh but I think Scandinavia, I I I realize not everyone will agree with me because there are good things and bad things in every country, but overall the life in Scandinavia fit my internal rhythms and my sort of personal ideology for the way people should live their lives and treat one another, and what is of value and what is not of what is of lesser value.

SPEAKER_00 2:54:16

Do you want to call that one country in particular rather than Scandinavia as a whole?

SPEAKER_01 2:54:22

Um I I I I think in terms of practicality, Denmark and Sweden would be up up my list. Nor Norway is great, but but Norway's a much more expensive, more difficult outside of the U.S. Yeah. So I I would I would go with Denmark and and Sweden.

SPEAKER_00 2:54:46

Lovely. Finally, if you could witness a conversation between any two people of history, dead or alive, no language barriers, so tune into a podcast. Who would you listen to?

SPEAKER_01 2:54:59

So uh this is a non-standard reply. So I as an I'm an I'm an archaeologist still deep in my soul, and I've thought about different people who never had a voice, who are long lost to history, right? So you people can imagine in their mind's eye uh cavemen or whatever. But I was thinking more specifically how interested I would be having been to the Viking Ship Museum in uh Roskilde, Denmark, how wonderful it would be to sit in on a conversation with a couple Viking warriors who are resting at their oars. Um uh not necessarily a king like Harold Bluetooth or something like that, but somebody, you know, sort of your work a day swordsman uh who have to pull an oar when the sun when the wind dies. Uh, I'd like to know what their life is like. I'd like to know what's been lost. to humanity um since they passed and turned to dust and left nothing behind.

SPEAKER_00 2:56:07

Amazing. Amazing. Chris, I I think this was a special episode. So thank you so much for allowing the extra time and also being generous with the responses.

SPEAKER_01 2:56:20

Oh you're very welcome. I enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 2:56:23

Cheers. So thank you again, Chris and mate. Yeah we could have gone on for a lot longer. We tried to keep it to about an hour, an hour and a half. And I think in those three hours um there was still room for more. But a real highlight for me for sure so far in this podcasting journey. So thank you very much. Finally to you my dear listener, what is my ambition for this podcast? To me, for me to realize that I really do need the help of you, the listener, because my hope is to corner the podcast market for eclectic curiosities in whatever country it is you're listening in from. But unfortunately, as I'm sure you've noticed there is no genre there is no category for eclectic curiosities. There is a general interest but I don't think this quite fits into it because although the curiosities differ they also do overlap. And so the one thing that can help me realize this ambition is more energy put into the algorithm and basically that comes through the form of reviews both written and starred. So if you could please uh do me the favor of leaving a review wherever you're listening to this whether that's Spotify five stars apples five stars and a re and and a comment or anywhere else where it where it is. Because the podcast algorithms do they have about one node that they look at and that is the amount of reviews a show gets so it really is um so it really has an outsized impact if you could please leave a nice review. So thank you again Christopher thank you again to you my dear listener for listening for over three hours. I look forward to delivering next week's episode with Dick Smith, one of Australia's greatest ever entrepreneurs and finally again Christopher Turner. Cheers.