Analysts vs. Operations in The Middle East (with David McCloskey)

Published Jun 22, 2025, 7:05 AM

CIA analyst turned best-selling spy novelist David McCloskey visits with old friends John & Jerry where they look at the CIA and their experiences in The Middle East before, during and after The Arab Spring. With a survey of what's happening in The Middle East currently.

I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.

And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.

Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.

Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?

This is mission implausible. Today's guest is David McCluskey. He's actually a friend and a former colleague, and he is now best known for his best selling spy novels Damasca, Station, Moscow X and The Seventh Floor, all worth reading. We'll probably talk about him in the podcast, but he's probably even better known nowadays, especially in England, for his well regarded podcast The Rest Is Classified with British security journalist Gordon Carrera.

It's good.

David previously worked at the CIA on issues related to the Middle East and worked in embassies abroad, but he was in the sort of snotty, whimpy side of the agency. Jully and I who were busy saving the world so that it could be destroyed later. So sorry about that.

So I can't be friends, you know, Manars and Venus can d O and d I people. We'll explore that. I'm sorry over here, you go.

I was I was trying to translate all the garbage you were writing up in the field so the people making the decisions in DC would know what the hell you were talking about.

I have lots of questions, but here's where I'd like to start off with. What is it like now to be making a living off of our exploits?

I like I like to I like to say John that you know, I was certainly not a I was certainly not a case officer like you out there saving the world regularly day by day. But but you know every day. Yeah, what better person to actually be able to write down on paper those exploits than an analyst, right? I mean, this is this It's just a continuation of my sort of prior career right now. Now I get to write more fantastical stories and UH and occasionally you know, poke fun at you guys, and UH and some of my analysts friends as well. So it's not too bad. It's not too bad.

Yeah, I have to say as we start that when I entered the agency the first couple of tours, I was like the agency version of hermaphrodite, sort of a I was because I was between I was between the d I, the intelligence guys, the analysts, guys, intelligence folk, the analysts, and the operations officer, tough guys like John and both of you, the DI analyst and the do O operators. Both of you gave me noggies and swirlies right and looked good.

Point, this is a real besmirching of our reports, officer friends, isn't it. It is. It's terrible.

I all of us deserve a besmirching, So that's not that's true. I was trying to go on offense til that my besmirching is a little further down the pike.

That's true. That's true. Yeah, No, I mean, uh, I mean analysts, though I don't think they were analysts, weren't the type to be given out like noggi's and swirlies. Jerry, and I feel like it was very much a heads down, eating lunch at your desk crowd for the most part, right, That's what I remember.

Mostly I got like eye rolls and like oh yeah, you got oh And then I get use a big word and I have to go look it up and realize I've been besmirched.

But this is an influencing thing. We were talking, We were talking about this before we even hit record, that what Jerry just did is a classic case officer influencing tactic for analysts, which is, when you're sitting down in a briefing, they tell you, they the case officers, tell you how smart you are and how they don't know anything, and how they're just desperate for your knowledge, and then use the analyst. You know, even if you kind of know what's happening, you feel good when the briefing starts right and it's just a classic I swear that they taught you that somewhere along the line, because I got every case officer I sat down with ever period.

I have to get this out, so they get this out early. We had a a an analyst, a very senior analyst woman. She came to Manila and we were talking and you know, around the table, and we were giving a briefing. And at the time, one of the terrorist groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, was something we were concerned with. And so the reports officer says, well, well, there's no way around this, you know. He says that it's called the MILF, And everybody smiles around the table except for the analyst, and she's like yeah, and he's like the mill and uh, she's like and she's like smart enough to pick up that's supposed to mean something. He says, well, maybe you should look it up later, but don't use a government computer.

Well it was abbreviated milf in' that's the name.

Yeah, yeah, the MILF. Yeah. Yeah, we're going down. We're already sort of launching down a path, and conspiracy theories come out of like the CIA, And David, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe some of the tribes inside of CIA really briefly, and then discuss what the DII the analysts do, and then we can sort of talk about conspiracy theories and conspiracies both within the agency and who gets blamed for conspiracy theories and so forth. So why don't you why don't I kick it over to you?

I'm sure you're well, yeah, I mean, and the most important tribe is the analyst, because they're the ones writing and stuff that goes goes to the policymakers, right, that's what the CIA is there to do. For the most part. Occasionally we'll spin up some covered action stuff which usually doesn't go that well. But you know, the analysts are sort of we're holding the flame. I mean, so the analysts is certainly one tribe, right, your your case officer brethren are another.

Relations officers.

Yeah, that's right.

There's there's a whole host of like teers and ness in tiers. Yeah, yeah, the support guys. But like even within like the d O, right, there's a bunch of different sort of you know, there's like a sort of hierarchy.

Right, And how do you see the hierarchy? That's that's all. How do I see it in the operations side?

Yeah?

Well I was thinking that, Yeah, there's there's reports officers, there's cmos, there's there's sues, right, and I always forgot what that stood for, essentially, like essentially like an analyst.

In the d O.

Is that right? Okay? There were targeting officers, which I guess could be in either the d I or the d O, as I recall, you know, interestingly enough, the last time I went into Langley up in the newly renovated museum. There is a wall that has a list of every or what seems like every possible job title you could have at the CIA, and it is an entire wall. Have you seen this. It's well, let us in.

There anymore to be clear.

And you still have pictures in me on a horse in Afghanistan. Those are all going we didn't go real well yeah, yeah, I mean.

My perception was always the case. Officers believed themselves to be the reason the entire place existed, and thus the most important people there thatived believed, yes, believed themselves to be the most important Who I mean, who else there was? You know, a variety of techie type roles. There were those guys in the green jackets who monitored the uh, the contractors who came in who I always like to include them in any kind of book, if I could just randomly throw a reference at them.

I don't know.

You've done a good job with your books. You've thrown in that you had the hot dog machine, and the hot.

Dog machine in there, sadly was it was ripped out at some point in the past decade, probably for like code violations. I tried to get a reference to the you know, the gift shop in there as much as I can, and I used I think John, I actually took this line from you with permission, of course, because at one point in some conversation you said that we stopped being a real spy service as soon as the gift shop went in. You know, we put that. Put that in the mouth of.

The CIA on it the end.

Yeah.

But David, so there's there's the analysts and the operator, so the two core tribes. But there's another split, another schism inside of the agency. And I want to know which side you fall on. Were you dunkin Donuts or were you Starbucks? There's two places to get coffee.

That's right, That's right. You know what I I migrated over the course of my career. I began as a dunkin Donuts.

Man, made more money, went to Starbucks.

Yeah, exactly. And then once I made gs ten I started, I went to Starbucks. It was Duncan to start, and then it became Starbucks. Although I heard a rumor, I wasn't there. A director at some point wanted to like rip out the coffee stands, right, I don't know which one.

Our friends Rob Danberg wanted to do that.

He oh, Okay, yeah, yeah, get rid of them. But yeah, no, I'm I became a Starbucks man as it went on, and there were plenty of my analyst friends who probably spent good portions of their days kind of like just milling around the Starbucks writer having various like ostensible work chats in the cafeteria or at the Starbucks that were that were not.

That's why he wanted to rip them out, because.

Yeah, exactly exactly the strength.

Let's talk about you for a second. I mean, really, you have become quite popular both for your books, which are high praise, but also this podcast, which is newer. So which do you like better nowadays? The writing or the podcasting.

Oh that's hard. I mean I enjoy both of them. I think the writing is the central thing that that I don't know, I will never I will never stop writing, and I hope the podcast never stops. But kind of the central piece of all of it's the books. But Gordon and I having a ton of fun on the podcast, and I see it as very like symbiotic with the writing because it's an opportunity to go into spy stories that I know some thing about and then actually go deep and do the research to come up with kind of, you know, the arc for a tour or four six part series and and learn a whole bunch of stuff that I don't I didn't otherwise know, and then frankly, you know, try to find ways to work some of that material into books if I can. And so kind of going into real stuff and finding interesting characters or situations is really fruitful. So I think the two things really work well.

Again, fiction and John's war stories are pretty much the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, there I was. It does be an igor. Let's take a break. We'll be right back.

So I want to I'm gonna endeavor to say something good about.

Analysts, okay, And I know it's gonna be hard for you.

And it's and I'm going I want to get down this rabbit hole. And this gets into conspiracies and conspiracy theories. So one of the bigger ones is IRAQ w WEMD and it's something that I have an indirect insight into, and I imagine also you indirect through hearsay and so forth. But my sense was it is billed as and on permission to swear, because this is a big one. This is like a huge agency fuck up. And I think I'm not going to shy away from that, but I think the real for me, in any case, the real conspiracy here is that the Bush administration basically had decided to go to war, and they built their own with Doug Fife, they built their own intelligence service in the Pentagon for a little while for two years to basically prove that case and to throw out any evidence that didn't support it. And then of course they went down the road of Saddam and al Qaeda were very close, which was completely untrue. And then they said that, you know, they hooked into a whole host of scammers that claimed that Saddam had this you know, curveball and all the rest of this. And my understanding is that the analysts who wouldn't go along with this were systematically weeded out, you know, sort of pushed off to the side or demoted or asked to move off, and that the analyst at the end said, the evidence that we have indicates that they likely do. There was sort of probability, I don't know as high, medium, low, and the White I said that's not good enough. And George Tennant, who I think highly uncaved is my understanding, and he said, look, it's it's yes or no. There's no maybe's here. We're going to war. Say yes or no, and you'd better be friggin yes, right, And so they did they said yes. And so the agency, through a conspiracy, has been stuck with this has been pinned to us as a one of our great failures. And I think it's you know, the analysts are sort of at the center of this, the pressures on them. So I'm wondering from where you sat, from what you heard, you weren't involved in this. It's your sense of pressure on analysts. And this goes today with this administration to all sorts of things like you know, where COVID came from and so forth. So I wonder wonder if you could go into that.

Yeah, that's my understanding as well. The rock WMD story is that it's a it is in some sense a story about analytic failure, because at the time there wasn't I actually don't think that there were embedded across the DII. There weren't sort of the the confidence statements and all these kind of other and frankly, a lot of the clarity around how good or bad or fragmentary or otherwise the sourcing was like those were not as consistently embedded in the assessments, and so it was easier in some ways, I think, to sort of handwave maybe or for consumers of the intel to take away different stories from what they were reading. And a lot of the changes made, like just as I was joining, were to try to like systematize the way that we communicated INTEL assessments and to be very clear about what we knew and what we didn't know and things like that.

You know.

The art of the story you told on Rock WMD, I think is a that's a particularly egregious example of the politics kind of dipping in and dictating or really influencing what the CIA puts down on paper. I think the politicization of analysis, though it's rarely that easy. I think to sort of go back and say that's exactly what happened, I think a Rock WMD, because I mean my understanding is that sometimes like there were NSC or Pentagon or White House officials who would literally I mean it came out to Langley on multiple occasions to like basically sit with the analysts right and right and like so I mean that's a lot of pressure right, and to your point, like, if the decision has already been made to do this, to go to war, I guess becomes more of a political question for you know, the director for the seventh floor to figure out how do you not lose the trust of the White House, right if they've already made the decision. But but yeah, I mean the politicization pressure and sort of I guess the risk is real and it is really I think hard to it's not It shouldn't be hard for the line analysts to navigate because they're the ones that are looking at the stuff, and ideally they're being backed up the chain by people who have an interest in like maybe corny, but like, yeah, speaking the truth regardless of what the politics are. But there's really many different ways that the analysis can get politicized at different parts of the chain. A lot of different people are touching it, and frankly, stuff can get politicized by what's not written or what's not reported into the White House or what doesn't get read in the PDB. So brief yeah, yeah, so you know, it's a really and it's really subtle, I think, because frankly, the politicization could start with you know, someone who's editing one of those pdbs just kind of softening some stuff a little bit, or saying, is this really a moderate confidence judgment? This seems more like a low confidence judgment to me based on this definition, And that's more art than science. And if something's a low confidence judgment, then maybe it's you know, maybe it's not worth actually briefing to the president period. And so it never makes, you know, it never makes it into any kind of higher level conversation down in the oval. So there's lots of different ways. I mean, frankly, i'd be curious for your guys thoughts on this, And you know, on the collection side, I'd imagine there's plenty of ways that someone on the seventh floor in the DdO shop could say on these three or four topics, I want to see the stuff before it gets descemnded. And you could decide, for any reason, you kind of cook up maybe we don't descend this kind of thing, and because it's gonna set off fireworks downtown, and maybe I make up some stuff about how the sourcing's bogus or whatever in order to justify it. So there's a lot of different ways you could play around with it. I think throughout the chain, right, I.

Think it's important to discuss what descend means, right. People that may not realize this. So people like John and I, we would collect the information from a source what it just putatively get a human source. He gives us the information. We don't like hand it to the president. We actually hand it to a reports office or a CMO and they take the information, decide how it's written up. Then it goes to headquarters where they look at it again, and then they descem it to whomever needs it, whoever is in need to know, so to the analysts. And there's always a danger that if that raw disseminated report goes directly to the White House and it's wrong, or if it's lanted, then you've got other problems. But so that's the way it should go. But there's lots of places to slip TwixT the it fixed the spoon in the lip, right I mean, and not always to influence it.

But yeah, if you go to go back to the WMD a rock WND problem, A lot of people have gone back after the analysts for making a bad call there, but frankly there was no good collection then either. So it was a real intelligence failure. We had no good sources. Really, we had a White House that decided they needed to go to war, and we had no Americans living in the country. We had no good sources, and the analysts were being pressured to come up with an analytic judgment, and I think they tried to use what would be logical. Well, he had WMD before and he tried to hide it, so we must be doing so again. And so it was a real problem. And I think we've seen even more recently. You talked about it in one of your podcasts recently about the twenty twenty two invasion of Ukraine.

It seems in that.

Case we actually had good collection. We had some sort of source or sources. They were telling us that Putin was about to invade. But some of the analysis clearly was wrong because we had information Putin was going to invade. But then were the decision was what's going to happen next? And essentially our analysts in some fashion must have told the White House, well, Ukraine's gonna lose quickly, and so you better get Lenski out of there, and that's not what happened.

Someone had to.

Make a decision on how were the Ukrainians willing to fight, and we obviously did not have good intelligence on that either.

And David, so you were involved a lot with Syria that's reflected in your book. You were there for Prog Prog Spring, Christ dates me for the Arab Spring. Spring springs and people tend to think, in conspiratorial thinking that the agency is omnipotent when things surprise us. So like the Arab Spring, people tend to think that the agency is involved in prophesying that we've got You guys have a crystal ball. So I was wondering if you could give us your senses an analyst of what we could know about the Arab Spring. Right, a fruit seller gets slapped in the world falls apart and then whether and then more recent is like when a sad fell, like everybody was like holy shit, I mean nobody predicted it. So I just wondering if you could give folks a sense of like how you guys are just as much at sea as the rest of us, right, and it's not a conspiracy to hide or that we've got all this information. Yea, this information, we have all this power that people assume we have.

I think that The way I would maybe frame it is, I think making a call on the eruption of mass sort of popular uprising in the Middle East is a mystery. It is a sort of mass psychological phenomenon that is inherently unpredictable and actually nobody is capable of predicting it. Whereas does Saddam possess chemical, biological weapons whatever is a secret, We in theory could have collected information that would have, you know, sort of proved or disproved whether or not that's true, Which is why I think I would say to your point, John, I'd never thought about WMD. Actually is a doo failure, a collection failure that's also a piece of it. The whole kind of chain failed because the analysts we didn't have good information, and then the analysts sort of through pressure and otherwise, you know, messed up the call. But I think an intelligence failure involves like are there secrets to collect that should have been collected or analysis that should have been conducted given the available information that wasn't right, Whereas I think predicting Syria it's not possible, and so we certainly did not have a crystal ball, and most of what the country analysts were doing in those late twenty ten early twenty eleven months were either writing pieces that explained sort of what are the hurdles to a protest movement or to an insurgency or a civil war, like what has to be overcome to get there? So said differently, like what would you have to believe for this to happen? Or writing scenarios that lay out, you know, three or four worlds or paths you could travel down should the sort of security apparatus and general kind of pillars of stability in a given country start to crumble, And none of us had any eye. I mean I had friends who were working on other you know, milliased accounts at that point in time, who were literally writing essentially writing pieces that had them in draft form that were like, this is why it's not going to happen here, and then the protest movement would start to May would be like delete these, you know, So like no one saw that stuff coming, right, I mean no more than like nobody saw the sort of collapse of communism across Eastern Europe happening so quickly in eighty nine either, right, So it's just it's not predictable. Those kind of mass events.

Well, I don't know. I don't know about that. I mean I went to West Berlin in the in April of eighty nine, and you know, five months later it all fell apart, the wall came down. Coincidence.

Well, I'm in analysis right there.

In my mind.

No, and more of this enlightening banter after a quick break.

Just because I was sort of involved in this. It was also a process issue. So there was this source called Curveball. Now Curveball, he was the main source. Singles never do things on single source. He was the main source that told us with great confidence and specificity about the state of the WND programs. And Curveball was living in Munich at the time, and German Station and I got a pretty good view into this talked to the Germans about him because he refus to meet the CIA, but he did talk to the German intelligence and he said, I won't meet the CIA, but you know, you can give their information to HIT to them, to US intelligence. I think the station took a look at his stuff and said, we can't verify any of this and maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but it's like we can't verify it. So it's really not any good. And then what happened is the military came in and they said, well, we'll do it, right, but they didn't tell the station. So all that reporting that went out went out through the US military, and we in the station and our analysts were getting it, but we didn't know where it was coming from, right, I mean, we didn't have a need to know that it was coming out of Munich. And it only sort of at the very end did we solve that. Yeah, it was like.

A big circular references.

This is that same guy.

There's the same guy. And I think it's been in the press that the station chief actually wrote and said, I hope this isn't the case, and Tyler Drumhill are famously, again according to the media, went and said, I hope you're not basing it and on this guy in Munich on curveball, And by then it was sort of too late. But the process, the military and you know, they they talked to each other, but they didn't talk about sourcing to each other, right, So it gets I don't want to get too much into the weeds, but yeah, it was also a process issue for sure.

And the way I remember this kind of rolling Downhill. To me as an analyst when I joined a few years after, this was being really really explicit. When you're writing a finished intelligence product. You know, you're not giving obviously the name of the source, you're not describing where they work, but you don't cure like like extensive descriptions of how much confidence we have in the source and whether they actually have good access and all of that, like have they been vetted? So there's there was a lot more information that got included post like three oh four oh five than if you go back and read stuff that was written in one or two, like oftentimes the sourcing statements were very thin.

Trust me, dude, you know that it's a sourcing statement.

Yeah, yeah, I mean kind of yeah, that's the way it read.

Yeah.

To go back to Syria, I think Syria is a big deal. Like there was environmental concerns and things that led to you know, lots of people leaving Syria, which led to problems in Europe and political problems that related to immigration and things that put pressure on political leaders. What do you think is happening now? Do you think this is a policy question not an intelligence question? Do you think we are handling it well, we have a new leader in Syria, and it sounds to me like, you know, the administration wants to sort of blow him off, and I worry that more problems in Syria are a potential problem for outside of Syria as well.

Yeah, I'm weirdly as an analyst. I'm a natural pessimist, and I think Syria for like fifteen years, has given me plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about pretty much everything, a lot of reasons to continue to be pessimistic, although strangely enough, at this point I'm sort of cautiously hopeful or optimistic about the future. I mean, and it is. It's not to say that I think it's possible that we get like a flowering Jeffersonian democracy in Syria. That seems unlikely, but I think it's also very possible, if not even likely, that we get a better outcome than Assad by a wide margin in terms of it is a low bar, but I think it's it's possible that we end up with a Syria that is at least not sort of actively creating, you know, massive problems for all of its neighbors, and maybe hopefully in the future politically more stable and also more open, right than the regime Osad Ran and frankly managing you know, it's repressive apparatus on a much less sort of industrial horrific scale. We will cross that bar for sure, right is that this is going to be a far less repressive regime than the one oside Ran. That's said, I mean, you know where to start with the problems. And frankly, you know, even though we still have true groups in the northeast, I think maybe about nine hundred or so that are there supporting our comrades in the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces. You know, I don't think this administration has any Do they have a Syria policy or an interest in developing one? I mean, and if so, what would it even be. You know, I think this is kind of one of those pockets of the world that's just probably not going to be getting a lot of interest from Trump two point zero.

But it will be getting a lot of interest from Israel and Turkey.

And we will be getting a lot of interest from Israel and Turkey, and I think they're the two major geopolitical winners here. I read that the Israeli Air Force in the days after Osad fled flew more air sorties over Syria than they had in any day in any conflict since nineteen sixty seven. They essentially destroyed most of Syria's military capacity in like about seventy two hours. And the Turks, you know, have are probably the group with the most influence both in the North and then with the new new crew in Damascus, so big winners. Iran US not so much. So we'll see.

We just need an independent Curtis stan that'll fix it exactly.

I've got an idea for the Middle East. I do feel I mean, I do feel bad for that. It's like the Kurds is just the constant every time, like every time at one of these conflicts ends, it's the Kurds end up getting screwed. So it's really tragic.

We're gonna stop here for today and continue next week with more of our conversation with David McCloskey here on Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Ceipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart podcasts,

Mission Implausible

As former high-level CIA operatives, John Sipher and Jerry O'Shea would create fake conspiracies aro 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 83 clip(s)