Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowForget pretty much everything you've heard about James Bond. While loosely based on espionage tactics of yesteryear, actual human-based tradecraft is far less glamorous -- around the globe, intelligence organizations make long-term investments in games that run for decades, carefully cultivating assets with such secrecy that, true story, some folks genuinely don't know who they're working for. In recent years, an extraordinary amount of these individuals have been arrested, tortured, murdered, or simply... disappeared. So what's going on? Why are so many spies getting busted? Tonight, Ben, Matt and Noel aim to find out.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben. We were joined with our guest super producer JJ. The main way, pause way. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Fellow conspiracy realists, Tonight's episode has been I would say a few years in the making, decades arguably for sure.
No question, Oh man, spies, a bridge of spies, a bridge too far of spies?
Perhaps what is the collective group name for spies in English? And how there's a pride of lines, of flock of geese, a murder of us and unkindness of ravens. Maybe it's a conspiracy of spies.
Yeah, that's good, that's good. Or maybe uh holdan no, no, Matt, I think you got on.
An anonymous you go an anonymity of smitties.
I like all of these answers. Here's the thing that happened in twenty nineteen. The news hit the US public in a way it doesn't usually with a prominence it doesn't often attain. And the argument from the press was, not only did it appear multiple spies were getting their cover blown, but something untoward had been happening to these assets or these operators or these agents for years. One by what, people were arrested, some were murdered, others, according to official sources, simply disappeared. And as we record this evening, observers, including former government officials, will tell you this compromise, whatever it is, continues today. We've talked about this off air. Opinions differ on how this is occurring, why this is occurring, what role government US government institutions play, and what this strange conflict between competing conspiracies means for the future. So before we go on and ask what's happening, do you guys remember these stories like they popped in the news and then they sort of popped out of the zeitgeist.
Yeah, it's rather strange because it's kind of just how that world works. Spies go missing, because when an asset disappears or is killed, nobody is really supposed to acknowledge that that occurs. Really, Yeah, unless it's being you know, disclosed for a purpose. Right. You don't say, oh, yes, our asset was taken out, like, you don't say that publicly unless you're doing it for a reason.
That's true, unless it's some sort of political maneuver. But I guess is it fair to say that we've been seeing more stories in the press where we kind of do get some of that information like weirdly, like in terms of you know, spies being discovered and their covers being blown.
Yeah, it is true. That's why it's not normal. At least, the disclosure is abnormal. And the purported rate of attrition there's always a rate of attrition baked in. The reported or purported rate of attrition is much higher than would have been permitted ostensibly during the days of the Cold War, which our Russian friends don't believe ever ended. That's the question. What is happening here? Is it a bunch of sound and fury signify nothing or is there something more through the story?
Well, we'll get right into it after a tiny, tiny word from our sponsor.
Here are the facts. This is so dumb, but just real quick, can we play a number station just for fun, just to set the movie.
Yeah, yeah, we still have those left over, the ones we didn't get to in our live show at the National Sawdust in Brooklyn. Here we go.
Ah, Yes, the old school trade. As we explored in a previous series on the history and Future of espionage, a lot of the intelligence or trade work you see in film and read and fiction, it's based on older collection methods, you know, dead drops, handlers, aliases.
Yeah, whatever. The spy who is, you know, oftentimes depicted a little bit stereotypically as a dashing hero, some sort of brilliant, you know, quick on their feet, punchy character who is fighting against some sort of shadowy super villain, you know, or the spy themselves is the super villain. As we've seen in you know again, pretty cliche depictions of say, like Russian spies, like like Boris and Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Sure, or like Carla in the excellent I think was John Lecuerr novels adapted into The most famous one would be Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy. Yeah right.
But you know, as we've learned over the years in our explorations of human or you know, human intelligence, human derived intelligence, we found that the most effective spy is not someone who's secretive and you could look at in a crowd and go, that guy seems like a spy.
Fella.
Yeah, it's just it's somebody that just looks like nobody the exists in a crowd.
Like the gray Man in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Right, you want someone who is not, you know, too short, not too tall, not too outside of like one specific genre. You don't want them too attractive.
Well, but I'm sure you don't remember the name of this character. It is totally escaping me. But the guy that Gary Oldman plays in Slow Horses the schlubby, alcoholic, but like part of that, you know, unkempt. The look of his and the way he carries himself in the most low key way imaginable is what makes him really good at what he does. What's that guy's name, Ben Jackson Lamb Jackson Lamb, what a character? Love that show? And I need to read the books.
They're pretty great, honestly, but it might ruin the next seasons for you. You know. Again, obviously, if you were the head of an intelligence agency, you would want to have read the books so that you could see what was coming up next.
Well, Ben to that point, I'm wondering if a lot of this news that we're talking about maybe has created a resurgence and fascination with spies. There's a lot of big spy shows right now that are very successful.
Black Bag is upcoming.
Black Doves is another one, really good one.
Yeah, there's a proliferation, right, and that goes into the question of how much art and reality inform each other and what the chicken in the egg situation is there. We do have to tell you, folks, we cannot recommend our earlier series enough, but check it out if you can. Simply put, you can learn all about the history of espionage in our previous series. But right now these evenings, there aren't a lot of James Bond types, by which we mean there aren't a ton of specific individuals going country to country, region to region, mission with secret identities, doing acts of intrigue and bravado and daring do people doing right? Yeah, these people do exist, They do exist, but there are far fewer now because they're less effective. You know, think of all the technology that occurred since he and Fleming was inspired to write Bond.
Yeah, and if you want to find out about a real life spy type individual, dashing, daring, do kind of guy. Check out the Ridiculous History episode on Roll Dahl, who weirdly was very much that thing and may well have been the inspiration for James Bond.
And what's that guy? I always bring him up with these who did the Oh he played sorrowmon Christopher Christopher Lee Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, also had some also had some dirt on his jacket. As they say. The thing is, you know, if you're looking at the world now, you're at widespread facial recognition, right, and you're looking at biometrics, you're looking at big data algorithms, the bread crumbing of activity in ways that ordinary like previous governments couldn't couldn't have done. And you're looking at government hacks, intelligence sharing like five Eyes long term wasn't super great for some operations. And so each of these factors makes our sort of old school roll doll h James Bond approach a little less tenable but human. As you mentioned there, Matt is far from a relic of the past. The game doesn't end. The game shifts, you know, like when you're in like when you beat a boss at the first act of a final fight and then all of a sudden there's a crazy animation and they recharge face too damnable.
Elden ring bosses. Who's that one at the end, Matt with the with the striking red hair and the knife arms, Millennia.
Something like that.
You know I'm talking about Matt. You probably beat her in one pass, you monster.
No one beats her one past.
No, No, you got.
To learn the pattern. What was her name though it was Melina, meant some with it.
Characters confused, But that game, uh famously, at the very end you fight a pretty tough boss and then a very tough boss after that. It's like the second phase the.
Eld and Beast right right, the game doesn't end, the game changes. So while our idea in fiction of a living action figure is it's pretty great, you know, if you're if you're making a script, a real human asset is going to be a careful, long term investment, not to too extraordinary. You want the infamous Deeper Agents of Russia check out our upcoming episode on Operation ghost Stories. Or you want someone like the Cambridge five asterisk because we don't know how many there were.
Or you want socialites the Cambridge plus or minus five.
We'll get We'll get to them at just a second, because they're a great example. There are socialites that can also get pulled, people who already exist in the upper echelons of some kind of political economics structure, people who have that access.
I like your Glain Maxwell's sure.
Yeah, that's a great example, your gallains. Maybe as the Os put it back in the day, your glorious amateurs. It's it's pretty nuts, and it is all positioned toward the idea of getting an edge of mitigating information asymmetry on your side while propagating information asymmetry on the side of the enemy. And these folks who are who are real human, they're often they're not going to be doing like a single mission or a paramilitary thing would be very rare for this genre of person. We're talking years and decades, quiet small moves, you know, getting that.
Promotion, laying on the groundwork, getting other assets in place, you know, informats, things like that, establishing networks, contacts, all of that kind of stuff. That's that's again pretty well depicted in Slow Horses. I think a lot of that stuff is relatively on the mark.
Yeah, and the weird thing is if we exercise empathy for these people deep in hostile territory, they're making small moves and they themselves have very limited information and somewhat ironic. Right, they know a handler, they might know another couple people like since we referenced a wheel of time, it's like how the Black Asia is organized into what they call hearts. I'm not going to go too deep into it. It's sorry, that's already a spoiler. But the big things like having someone in place to foil ironian nuclear activities, you know, or Jimmy up there centrifuges.
Uh, it's a great expression that I gotta say, Jimmy up a centrifuge. It's got to be the the whole back.
Well, we serve at the pleasure of Dylan Fagan, who is our handler. So that kind of stuff is there is the culmination of many other things that take a lot longer. And if you are you know, if you're like Noel Matton and JJ and Ben and you're you're evaluating how to how to exercise intelligence or counterintelligence in an enemy regime, the first question that occurs to you when you're talking human is not how do I put one of my my own outsiders on the inside. It's like, why don't I find someone who's already on the inside, you know, and just get them over to my cause you save so much money, you save so much time.
Right oh yeah, yeah, But to do that you have to either be extremely likable or extremely good at quietly blackmailing someone.
Right. Yeah, This, this idea of turning someone to an informant can happen through all sorts of means blackmail. Like you said, financial compensation, appeal to ideology, or appeal to romance. I would say romance is itself an ideology, you know, but each avenue has their own sets of pros and cons and strengths and weaknesses.
Yep. And every intelligence agency that you've ever heard of works very, very, very astigiously, to to borrow word from Ben's lovely vocabulary, towards acquiring high value informants. And once you have one of those, to your point been that rate of attrition can be high here because these are investments, these are human capital. These are long term, long game assets that are very expensive to maintain and also very costly to lose.
Oh yeah, they're loath to let them go. Imagine you have a car. Like imagine you bought a beat up car, right, and you restored it yourself, and now you want to drive it forever, right, you want to maybe the car can take you to places you couldn't reach earlier. Sure, that's a very bad comparison, but somewhat Well.
The car also requires maintenance. The car also requires you know, checking in on from time to time to make sure everything's running as it's supposed to, that all that work you did isn't being damaged by something that you can't see.
Well, you also have to spy on and all of your spies, right, that's the like, one of the biggest jobs you have as an intelligence agency is to keep tabs on absolutely everything each individual human does. It is just sounds like a horrifying existence.
I don't think the quality of life is super great if I'm being honest that I mean, yeah, the handlers have handlers, right, the assets have handlers, The handlers have handlers. The people at the top are fucking Orwellian.
Everybody in there is like you're an enemy. You're an enemy. You're an enemy. You're an enemy, You're an enemy. I mean, you're just like Jesus just just go have some ice cream. Lay down.
Yes, the issue is sometimes they're right, but whole cloth.
They're right about they're right about their own fears.
Well that's the problem. I mean, all this stuff is very very much at play, and you know, to your point about keeping tabs on all the spies, it's so important too, because when one of your assets flips, especially one that you've invested all that time and energy and information intelligence into, how much they know can directly impact you if they are turned, you know, to the enemy or an enemy.
Yeah, it was an interesting comment just a second ago that reminded me of that line from Incubus, don't let fear take the wheel and steer.
Wow, that's that's a good okay from the band to use Incubus in conspiracy sense. No, it's true. That is the seminal two thousands Classic Drive from the album Make Yourself by Incubus.
References are so.
Fresh because fear is what drives all this stuff, right, Fear that somebody else's ideologies are going to overtake my ideology, and then that world is going to change, and then all the you know, all this stuff is going to change because I'm so afraid that's ultimately what it is.
I don't know if I could agree with that, Like I hear you in some in some aspects, but would we not also say there's ambition in there as well. I don't.
Like it can be wrapped up in fear though. That's a really good point, Ben, and that distinction I think is important. But to me too, part of ambition is fear that someone's gonna be better than you.
Yeah, I guess it, just don't I personally am not comfortable putting a broad brush on on this, but I do hear you fair enough.
I'm cool with it.
But well, let's go to uh, let's go to Cambridge. Let's start to get a sense of scale here with the story of the Cambridge Spies. Cambridge is one of the world's most prestigious universities, and the Cambridge five asterisk or a group of spies that were turned by the Soviet Union and pulled purposely from the upper crust of British society.
Sounds like bad news exactly. The Cambridge plus or minus five they they you know, took time for this to take place, this turn to the Soviets. They were active from about the nineteen thirties until at least the early fifties. This process took decades. The general public knew nothing about the conspiracy until nineteen fifty one, and we still don't really know entirely how many people were turned. Hence the asterisk the plus or minus. Originally the group was the Cambridge four, which sounds kind of like a do wop group, and then they found a fifth person. Then they called it the Cambridge five, and at some point just the count kind of ended, right.
That's an editorial thought. Yeah, it feels like at some point they just stopped adding to the name. In a couple of cases, these guys attained very high positions in government. As we record today, there's still standing allegations against other possible members of the group, pretty much all of whom are dead at this point, which is often, you know, one of the most shore fire ways for an operative like this to escape. Funny story because partially because of their socioeconomic position, none of the confirmed members were ever prosecuted. This is a multi decade operation, and if we exercise empathy then we can see that this had two very different meanings to people on the other side of the board from the UK Allied perspective, there's fear, right they are damaged. From the Soviet perspective, there's ambition. It's a huge win over multiple decades, like it changed the course of the Cold War in some ways.
But I guess, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how did it change anything if they had these high level people, you know in the nineteen fifties, But then the Cold War ends and the Soviet Union is like collapses, So like, what did they actually win?
What did they accomplish? Yeah, by turning these folks, that is a good point. They didn't win, and they didn't make.
The big win, right. They didn't win the war, they would say, but they won battles, right, And we are coming to you with the benefit of retrospect, so we have the spoilers. We know how things worked out well.
And one could argue that the Soviet Union in Russia have been playing a much longer game than just this period of time and not doing too bad at it by today's measure.
Right, going back to the earlier point, did the Cold War ever end? A lot of us in the US will say, yeah, immediately there's no more Soviet Union, But then we have to realize a lot of people putin among them don't believe the Cold War ended. And I think we did an episode about that a few years back. That's right, okay, Well, without getting into the weeds of it, we could argue the story of the Cambridge five asterisk teaches us a crucial lesson matter how long it takes to build something, to place an asset, to leverage an informant. Even the oldest operations are kind of a house of cards. Hashtag no Kevin Spacey. You know, the wind can come from any direction, and when things go wrong, they can go south quickly.
And we'll see just how quickly that southern path can be traversed, you know, going south quickly. I'll here worthmore sponsor and be right back to it.
Here's where it gets crazy, all right, we teased at the top right. Twenty nineteen, different US media outlets reveal stunning news. They say, it turns out that a few years back, US intelligence officials were so worried the White House might accidentally expose a covert assets identity that they secretly extracted this person from Russia and say this happened, And in twenty seventeen, this is during the first Trump administration. Other news outlets do pick up the story Washington Post, New York Times, et cetera. But they start spending entirely different reasons for this extraction, like what motivated someone to pull such a precious asset. It's a wild story, but I think it's a good example.
And from what we know and from what was reported. Again, we're looking back at this from twenty twenty five. It wasn't as though they were worried that any specific person within the Trump administration or the current State Department would be exposing any assets like purposefully, right, just doxing somebody. They were worried about the state of overall security as it was being handled by that new administration and everybody coming in.
Yeah, they were concerned things had grown so lax for one or another that it was not only possible, but plausible for operations even this level to get compromised. This will give you more background on this Russian asset in a second, but just so you know, during the previous Obama administration, fellow conspiracy realist, these activities were secret enough that intelligence heads were not putting it in the President's daily brief. Instead, they were sending secret sealed envelopes just in case the daily brief was somehow compromised. But we do know a little bit about the background of this, and it kind of follows the story of the Cambridge five and other similar you know, hangout session for sure.
Decades ago, the CIA recruited a particularly ambitious Russian official who was guided to an ascension through the ranks of government functioning just as any you know, young upstart might. He wasn't breaking any laws. You know, he wasn't doing any you know, saboteur type behavior, sabotaging nukes, any of that kind of stuff. However, the CIA was waiting for him to get in the right position. They're playing some serious forty chess here.
Yeah, and helping him suddenly become better at his job than he was by you know, one way or another. And he might not have even known the methods deployed. But eventually, to your point, now, the four D chess or whatever what I call it, it pays off. They hit a milestone achievement. This guy gets promoted to a position that doesn't put him in the inner circle of the Kremlin, but it gives him high level access to several sensitive things. This would be akin to Israel's Mosad controlling a guy who reads, who doesn't get in meetings with the Supreme leader, but reads all the notes from those meetings.
Nice.
And then there's people on the CIA side, just a handful of them, who go into their own dark rooms and then read the notes that were brought from the guy that got to see the notes, and they're just like, oh, look I can see their stuff. Yeah, that's getting off in the dark as art.
Yeah. Fast forward. You know twenty sixteen, there's an election in the US, right, we all remember that one, and the Western intelligence community, not just the US, is increasingly concerned that Russian operatives are attempting to compromise the election. If that is true, then this, you know, young up and coming level Russian bureaucrat has now become our golden goose. Right if he can, as he said, Matt, go off in the dark and read some notes, then he might be and send some notes. Then he might be giving the US, which often sees itself as the world entire, a heck of an edge in a game.
But again, if done correctly, this is something that we let alone. The American people should know nothing about.
Yeah, the problem is the streets are watching so like, for instance, if this guy got promoted too fast, if he was too good when he was on the way to the Kremlin, he probably would have gotten caught. If something seems too good to be true, or if the pattern seems to not have a certain amount of guesswork and mistake, then you have to wonder why someone is right all the time, you know what I mean. Where that's where we see this narrative unfolding. Something about Uncle Sam's new confidence in their claims of election interference, coupled with the timelines of their announcements, the specificity of some of these claims, it triggers suspicion. What does suspicion always lead to investigation, at least in this sphere.
So here again shouldn't be the case, but yet there it was making the rounds in the news that the US had somehow put an operative a person inside of the Kremlin.
Yeah.
I remember back to just how confident like major news outlets in the US were saying, yes, there was definitely some election stuff going on, and I do recall just feeling okay, well, they must have some evidence, like they definitely have evidence if they can come forward and say that, even if they're anonymous officials or whatever, they're close to the investigation and from the State Department or whatever. You just you know that somebody somewhere has evidence or you can't make a claim like that against another country, at least publicly like that unless you've got something exact. So it does make sense. You know that there would be rumors at least swirling around that somebody somewhere very close to this thing has eyes.
On a source familiar with the events, right, something like that. Yeah, and this is this guess work two of the motivation behind a public statement is key to the conversation and conspiracy. Here, the CIA, whatever the narrative may be, felt they had no choice. In twenty sixteen, they came to this guy and they said, look, the s is going to hit the f We can get you out. If we don't get you out, you're going to be screwed over. And at first this guy said, nah, thank you, pass thank you, but I'm all right, And then I think as the wind picked up, he did agree to be extracted. This extraction occurs in twenty seventeen. Uncle Sam is reluctant to pull this guy out because it's awesome. It's awesome to have that inside. Look. This person had sent secrets of some sort to DC for decades. They were able to read papers from Vladimir Putin that were not you know, public to the Russian people or even outside of that inner circle. So this is a huge l for the United States. But there is a happy ending. The exfiltration is successful and as of twenty late twenty nineteen, this individual is living safely in the metro area of Washington, d C. May he live life well, hopefully in a one story ranch style house.
Do we know? Do we know the style of his house?
Well? Because you know, third stories winds got Russia?
Ah, okay, good call, good call, Ben.
Just put really bouncy bushes down.
Below a bouncy castle. Perhaps just keep it there year round, you know.
Long enough for it to be normalized.
So that would be really Yeah, that would be really funny. I X Russian assets x CIA assets functioning in Russia. Then got third story mansions. But there's there's like a trampoline mote all around it.
Love it?
Yeah yeah.
Also, yeah, if we're teaching people to fish, maybe that's a great cover. A guy retires from the private import export business. And now he just sells bouncies and inflatables, and he's on the road. So sometimes he shows up in Arizona, right in Tempe or something, and he just installs some bouncies.
I want to see a bouncy house shaped like Vladimir Putin, all right, Like you did, you bounce within his giant outstretched arms in his lap.
Oh okay, I like that propaganda. So he's holding you, catch like he's catching you. Okay, nice, all right. I can't wait till this gets translated to Russian. Maybe it'll be a good idea. It's a good idea, and I hope they keep it now. Like the Cambridge five, we could say this one example again from just a few years ago, is it's yet World War footnote about how quickly things can go wrong? Or as you said, Noel traverse the southern direction. But the story adds a few more factors of conspiracy worth considering. First off, they are two competing claims for the ex filtration. The first is that journalist got too close to the truth. The second is that one way or another, the US spilled the beans on itself. So why are there competing claims.
What just spill your beans.
Well, it's an interesting idea of the United States telling on itself. When it kind of goes back to some stuff we're going to talk about at the end of the episode, it makes you wonder what the motivation. Oh gosh, this is hard to talk about without spoil it. There are questions about perhaps the loyalties of some of the new administration that came in in twenty sixteen, and how some of that election engineering went, and why they wanted a specific person in the White House who ended up there, right.
Que bono? Who benefits and to what ends? Yeah, And the second condition that is revealed to us in this story is kind of day one stuff. Not everybody will agree, but in this milieu of action, you never assume an event exists in isolation. It's okay if an event is a one off. It's totally fine if it exists as a one time thing. But you can never make that assumption. So if something goes south, we have to look at everything related to it, however seemingly tangential, however ostensibly irrelevant. We're not looking for just the next compromise spy. We're looking for a pattern of how compromises occur. We're looking for any sort of timeline that would square with this, even if it's something this sounds dumb, but even even if you looked back and you said, hey, every time a World's Cup event happens, these terrible things seem to occur in coincidence. We talked about reading tea Leaves earlier. Reading tea Leaves gets, you know, kind of into what intelligence folks do. And sometimes you could say they're being paranoid, but it's not the nine times they ask crazy stuff. It's the tenth time when they're right.
Exactly, and that seems to be precisely what is happening right now. Little by little, by hook, or by crook, one by one, intelligence operatives around the world are getting blown their covers, getting forced away, or to the point you guys were talking out at the top of the show, just simply either being disappeared, disappearing, falling off the map, being taken out. You know, who's to say, we're going to talk more about all of these possibilities, and who is to say After a quick word from our sponsor.
We've returned fast forward with us to twenty twenty one, four years ago. Now, some of the top counter intelligence guys. Counterintelligence, it makes sense as a word, but it's still like when you hear it, it sounds silly. Right, we talked about this before. Oh your intelligence, counter intelligence. It sounds like that. Good, I'm going to fight you with the powers of dumb.
Yep, I'm not that intelligent at all. So top counter intel crews put out a call into the CIA into their various stations and bases around the world, noting that a disturbing number of informants were being captured and or killed.
Yeah, this was again to references something we mentioned earlier. This has attributed The existence of this secret cable is attributed to sources familiar with the situation. There were a couple of journalists who said they have viewed the cable. But the fact that there's not a specific person assigned to the creation of the cable and the fact that there are specifics missing is a whole other bag at Badgers, right. It makes us question the motivation of allowing this thing to go public, And for an informat just got to say it, that's rant. It is a wide group term here. It could describe our high level Kremlin insider. Sure, it could also be someone who just happens to be a grad student at the right university working with the right professor. It could be the house chef for a fancy family that not every year, but every few years has some cool politicians over for like a dinner party, you know what I mean. It could be almost anyone with very little in common.
And just to really quickly bring it back to pop culture for five seconds, there's a show, a Taylor Sheridan show called Lioness that I really really enjoyed the first season of, and I think it was the second season. Actually one of these assets was a housekeeper, like in a super super super high level targets home.
M Well, it could be a food delivery person that often ends up at the American embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, right, Like just somebody who every once in a while gets eyes on an individual that's being spied upon.
Sure, it could be someone providing nonprofit medical resources they the right country. Yeah, it could be any of those things. That the issue is that if you are on the outside and looking in, these people have extremely little in common. They have not met each other, you know what I mean. They don't kick it. They don't have a bowling night or something. The only way you could plausibly know what they have in common is the single thread. They all secretly engage knowingly or unknowingly with US intelligence And in some cases, you know, there's Matroshka doll stuff going on. Right our food delivery guy talks to someone. He hasn't no that someone talks to someone, and so they are maybe getting the short end of the stick because now they're being held responsible even though they had no idea what was going on. That is quite possible. So the only way to know that secret thread is to be on the inside, to know the inner workings of an intelligence apparatus. The coal is coming from inside the house. That's the accusation. Dun dun zah dun dun duh dun du what yeah? I mean. Also, it looks like they noticed that rival nations were becoming much better at hunting down sources, like on an unprecedented level. The rivals in Iran, in Russia and China and Pakistan in particular, we're getting way better at finding people. And the CIA at the same time was having a way tougher experience recruiting new people, especially people that were worth it, to be.
Honest, Yeah, it is crazy. It feels like ideological illusions are being kind of wiped out right now across the board when it comes to, you know, especially what people believe in with nations, with religions, with all this kind of stuff, just the shine is gone. So it's harder to get people to convince somebody, hey, do this for your country or do this for God, or do you know whatever.
It is.
Sure, it's just kind of kind of going away, and you got to convince them in a different manner or where there has to be a different motivation.
Now, yeah, there's also an existential aspect to this, a matter of survival. People are not stupid. They can sense something in the wind, especially if they're in a relatively small group. Like let's say, and this is completely hypothetical, Let's say you're a physics professor and you work on something specific. And let's say a person you have never met, but you also know of because you've read their papers, because you're one of the few people who can understand and respond to them. Let's say something bad happened to that person. Let's say there are questions about it, and then someone comes to you and says, hey, you know it's me, your buddy from earlier. I know there are only fifteen of you guys, excuse me, fourteen of you? Now, would you like to you know, would you like to hang out with us? Your answers, You're going to have a higher likelihood of saying no unless they force you to say us, because you don't want to be identified. You know, there's something in the wind, and that's that's the thing, right. Everybody looks for patterns. That's why what is it? Paradelia is real where humans see patterns even when none exists.
Like seeing faces on the back of like a semi truck. Are the little hooks in the bathroom that look like a fighting octopus?
Yeah?
Or sometimes, as we've discussed on the show, all the other Iranian nuclear scientists are dying and you're still one of them.
Yep, yep? Do you want? I mean, do you want to answer that blind cold call? Are what are you going to say to the pretty lady at the hotel bar? I hope you say something diplomatic, careful and at arm's length. So this is the logical conclusion if we're looking for patterns, if a rival agency or any agency playing the home game, playing defense, playing goalie, the rival agencies, anybody involved in this, they must logically conclude that any source that didn't get caught past a certain threshold may have been turned. And that's because they all acknowledge the dirty secret. If you are sophisticated enough, you genuinely try to not kill enemy sources when you find them, especially if they're local informants. Oh yeah, someone's already put it. Yeah, someone's already rebuilt the car. Now you can just do a carjacking, little grand theft auto and make them drive where you want them to go.
Nice.
Yeah, I guess you just you you throw the ones that messed up bad enough out of window. But then the tools, yeah, you get in your toolbox somehow. I just don't understand some of it. I guess there's enough example making. Is that what it is? When you throw somebody out a window, you make a quick example for everybody else to see as an intimidation tactic.
In that case, Yeah, it's similar to polonium poisoning or something that is sending a message. That's an example for the class, right.
But but you aren't going to send a message when it comes to you discover a foreign asset in your nest and you yeah.
Yeah, that's a great question. Depends upon the circumstances of discovery and the information. Sometimes they might historically, or only speaking historically, sometimes a person would be tortured or executed to send the message to a domestic population, especially in an authoritarian government. Other times, if you perhaps discover a group of people, you don't go public, but the whole group you find one, you make it an example for the class and kill them, maybe in a way that looks like a helicopter accident, for example, And then that raises the likelihood that the survivors, who know they've already been blown, are going to do whatever they can to keep themselves and their families safe. Sweet dehumanizing, not treating people like people, that's for sure.
No, but that's the name of the game on both sides, you know.
Yeah, Well, the CIA does also in this cable, according to reports, take it self to task and they say, look, part of this is that the work the craft has become sloppy. We've got people who are kind of overestimating their abilities. There's too much trust in new sources, and there's an underlying with that sort of arrogance. There's an underestimation of foreign intelligence capabilities because these guys are reading a lot of the same books, you know what I mean. Everybody is playing a very similar game. So don't think the person on the other side of a board doesn't know how a rook works, you know what I mean. That's how you lose a chess Oh.
No, never underestimate your opponent.
Rooks can go really far, but only in one direction.
Right, Brooks can move forward and vertically and horizontally.
I'm thinking of bishops. We're talking about castles.
Right, Bishops are the compliment the castles, sorry, and really highly skilled chess player, and knights are on bath salts.
Clearly, what the hell's up with that weird wonky movement that they do a little only move in an L shape, strange.
Just to shake it up, you know. And that's what they've ben talking about, things like the Wazir or the other non canonical chess pieces. All right, So part of what the CIA is maybe suffering from per its own cable is a thing we could call a commission issue. We all have known someone working in sales maybe with a commission structure. Have you guys did you guys ever work on commission in our previous lives gracefully No?
Yeah, well I was a salesperson in a music store, but they didn't pay me any commission. For sure, I should have gotten some, but I did not. They were not willing to pass on the profits.
Yes, I've worked for a weird, roundabout way of commission before.
And the commission structure we're all familiar with is the idea that you can earn a significant portion of your livelihood through a one time piece percentage or reward from a transaction. And the problem with commission in some industries, in some places is that it can encourage an individual actor to put their own perspective of personal gain over the larger goals of their customers, their company, or their mission. So the CIA might have a similar issue because look, if you score a new informant, it's historically a fast pass to increasing your odds for promotion. So if that's true, if you are incentivized what you want a new informant to work out, would you maybe feel that you needed that pull to work?
Oh, I think that's entirely possible. I mean it's sort of the same way that when we see certain benchmarks, very high pressure benchmarks placed on testing scores, you know in the US for example, and then that kind of leads to some sticky situations when it comes to maybe teaching for the test and or cheating on the test, because these things are so crucial to meet m Yeah.
No, obviously, we have just referred to many, many things to scope it back into talking about the CIA and the agency in particular. The pickle of the CIA is this, if you do things right, you can save innocent lives, not just in the US but across the world. You can prevent disasters, and if you do it correctly, nobody is going to know the full extent of your efforts and or heroism. There are some actual heroes, you know, there are historical issues, but there are wins that go unacknowledged. And we're going somewhere with this. The key takeaway is somehow there's some gap in the armor. A piece of US intelligence has been inarguably compromised. Is it technology? Has just technology made the old game irrelevant? What do you guys think?
Oh, that's a good point. I mean, it does seem like a lot of this stuff we're hearing about her, that's like you know, making the news has to do with you know, data breaches and hacks, and you know, while we have the names of organizations and hacker groups and things, we sometimes don't get individual names. But maybe that's a good point, or I think we set off Mike for a moment, been our spies just like getting worse, like is there are there more leaks? Like is the is the boat leaky? Just in general, I don't know.
There are still maybe not fully but close to the real wall facers that exist in these worlds of think tank and where that over you know, where that crosses over with intelligence agencies, and where that crosses over with this with various state departments, and I don't know, advisors people at the top levels of governments across the world, who are the ones who don't say a lot of stuff electronically right when we're thinking about the technology, and could you just use that to spy on everybody at all times? I think there are probably people who keep stuff under wraps enough where you need a human being to at least attempt to get as close as possible to some of those high level targets. If your goal is to if your goal is to just find out what everybody's doing and make sure everybody's going to do what you want them to do, or else their enemies.
Yeah. I would agree with the first half of that. I think, yeah, yeah, because there are some people who do have that lockdown opsec right, And like in the case of China hacking the US Treasury, they were mainly looking for signals, right, they were looking to again mitigate information asymmetry. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about with the technology. You know, speaking of China, we see that a lot of a lot of what we would call us spies or assets in China got busted, maybe just because the technology is better. There was a firewall. The official narrative is a firewall that worked very well for Middle East North African operations was deployed in China by the CIA, and it turns out China is a lot better at dousing the fire on those walls. So they compromised it. They got the folks. It took a little time to figure it out, but eventually one of the boffins on the US side said, hang on adding this right. Too often, they're no longer guessing. So it could just be tech or is this gap in the armor more of a Darien gap references references? Is it something meaning? Is it something fundamentally unfixable, irreparable, something inherent to the structure as it currently stands. Perhaps it could be as small as personal motivations within the structure. Perhaps it could be legacy organization. Perhaps it could be you know, incorrect assumptions about the people on the other side, saying all these folks are motivated by this one single thing, you know, the capital e enemy. That can also be a stumbling block. That's the trillion dollar question, you know. It leads us to the most the biggest question which we've seen a lot of people asking, did the US compromise itself? As you said, Noel, is it an own goal?
Yeah, it seems like it's certainly possible and or plausible unfortunately.
Yeah, but a self compromise, it's like informant. It can meet a bunch of different things.
It's consent.
Yeah, a self compromise is consent.
I like that.
That's pretty clever. Well, it could be accidental disclosure, you know, negligence rather than malice, a firewall that doesn't work in one place. It could be sharing classified information without realizing that could help someone else do something you don't want them to do, like we're not going to do. I don't think we need to serve an analogy here. We can just say this. The Trump administration did give classified info to Russian forces during a White House visit. This has been confirmed. This was This was information given to the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, an ambassador named serge A Kislak Kislyak. It is possible. We don't know what was it it, We don't know the specifics, but it's possible maybe that you accidentally give somebody information that they can incorporate or synthesize with other information they have, and maybe they can reach a conclusion you weren't thinking about, you know what I mean, I do. So that's just messing up, right. But then the other thing is maybe people have conflicting or contradicting priorities in their own organizations.
Yeah, it's possible. That's the whole thing where there are splinters within one group. We've talked about that before on this show, about whenever anyone comes forward and says something like, oh, well, the CIA slash the FBI allowed nine to eleven to happen, or something like that, there's always that concept that, oh, there was perhaps a splinter group within one of those organizations or those organizations that wanted something to occur, when the vast majority of the organization entire didn't want something to happen, or was attempting to stop something. It gets very convoluted in the world of spies.
Yeah, and this can happen with any large organization, right, But the problem is this kind of loggerhead of conflicting goals or poor communication. It could explain at best a few incidents, not the overall.
Pattern one hundred percent. So the third and most terrifying option is something that I think many folks have been thinking about lately, is the potential for a wilful collusion of some kind. I'm not trying to be vague about it. I think you mentioned Ben with the you know, the the administration sharing assets, you know, openly with Russia, and there is a sense that there's some moves being made that could well be in cahoots with who many Americans might see as a not an ally the idea of willful compromise.
Yeah, yeah, and you're you're referring to, I think, no specifically, the accusations and allegations regarding the current president of the United States.
Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be like super tiptoeing around it, but I just think there's a certain point where you just can't ignore some of this stuff, some of the smoke. And I don't even think it even is super conspiratorial or conspiracy theory esque to speculate about some of this stuff. There's just some moves that are taking place that just don't make sense otherwise.
Right, Right, that's we have to we have to acknowledge that there have been long standing allegations about conflicts of interest, whether those be allegations of extortion, blackmail, financial shenanigans, you know, shout out Krassnov. That's the mimetic version of this making the rounds the other ass the other concept is just a double agent. Someone got turned maybe inside the CIA, maybe inside Langley, and they're just doing their job, right Varius as little whispers and so on, little birds, Yeah, which is why the people who are I was talking about this and then that show the agency the people who are spied on the most are often spies, at least back in the day. So as as you had mentioned earlier, Matt, I believe so something about this is frightening to people. Of course, it is frightening, and it's very politically charged now such that people are people are hesitant sometimes to talk about that possibility. But that goes back to what was set up earlier, the idea of erosion of faith in not just religion, but in various institutions, government institutions in specific. Matt, I think we had talked a little bit off air, or we talked extensively off air about US AID. Do you think that's familiar to most Americans? Pretty current news cycle.
Yeah, it's everywhere. There's been a massive effort to shut down, or at least temporarily stop most of the functionality of the United States Agency for International Development, And it coincides with a lot of learning we've done on this show about NGOs, about foreign aid, about state departments from various countries, and how they move in and offer big loans and then those loans get paid back, and then they've got soft or hard power over the people who control, you know, countries, whether it's private or public. And then this agency, this specific agency is one that appears to have had a lot of power in other countries, right, and it's being systematically shut down.
It just it.
I don't know, Ben, as you said in the outline, it's something to think about because you're this organization, This United States Department, it provided forty two percent of all humanitarian aid that the United Nations tracked last year in twenty twenty four has a staff of ten thousand people for now functions with the State Department all around the world. Right, And we know what the State Department is, what it does, especially when it comes to tradecraft and those things. We know, we know how those mechanisms work. And if you don't go back and listen to episodes of our show, and specifically, Usaidea has been accused back in twenty fourteen of doing this weird thing in Cuba where they like set up a whole social media social media sites zunzunio I think zu n zu n eo. It was being accused of basically trying to undermine the Cuban government. And Mexico also has accused them just a couple of years ago of trying to undermine their government by supporting specific groups that are anti Mexican government. So you know, I'm only bringing this up because it feels like a weird thing to attack from within, because that's what's happening, right, This is being shut down by the current administration. Right, Yeah, it seems like a helpful thing for spycraft.
It seems like a helpful thing for people who don't agree with the existence of the United States, yep, as it currently stands, right.
And well, yeah, taking it down seems like that, right, Having it and having it be as robust as possible seems like a good thing for intelligence agencies.
Right, Ethics aside, you know what I mean, Just if we're looking at it, if we're looking at the the choreography, right, if we're looking at the dance itself, and we're not looking at whether or not the dance involves murdering people, then this is you know, you would want the dance to continue. This is also right, Sorry, there's a difference between destabilization and murdering people. Sure, Matrix dodge of that one. So we've got I mean, there are other organizations to What I love about The point you're bringing up here, Matt, is that there are other similar things you don't hear about. And is it is it illegal to to pop online? Right and make body accounts. No, it's it's actually it's fine. Now in the in the example you brought up of Zunzunio, they are that was a secret platform of its own right and the funding like it wasn't clearly USAID at first. Uh.
Yeah, these are accusations. USA ideas or USAID is has been historically very often accused by other countries of acting, you know, as an in some type of destabilizing way within their country, right, and it's often just because of the amount of dollars. And yeah, I mean you are talking about billions of dollars fourteen point four billion dollars from USAID to Ukraine in twenty twenty three, Yemen, Afghanistan receiving hundreds of millions of dollars.
I don't know all the all the good ones. Yeah, this is also one funny note we have to add on the side forgive our accents. We're not native Spanish speakers. But you know, zuon zunio is a pun, right, It's it's Cuban slang for the sound of hummingbird.
Makes every time it's like it kind of like Twitter. It's so funny, but every time you say it reminds me of that zoom Phil Collins song Zusue studio, There go zoon zunzuo. Maybe it's related, who knows?
Who knows? This goes all the way to the top, by which we mean Phil Collins, Oh yeah, this is I mean, this is an example. There is a reason people are across the world distrustful of these various institutions, and we're not We're not denigrating the people working for these institutions. If you meet someone who it's like dnng O's and the US have a really tough relationship abroad because of previous shenanigans. So if you should meet someone working for green Peace, they're probably just working for green peace, you know what I mean. They're not out to like steal your organs or overthrow your government. That happened just a few times, just a few times.
Won't let them live it down.
Isn't it pretty frustrating guys that there's that Just thinking about how much money gets moved around for stuff like this, and then it does seem like there's a whole bunch of time wasted, resources wasted because everybody is looking at everybody else as an enemy and not just helping the human beings and fixing the problems. I don't know. I know that's idealistic and blah.
No, I mean, yeah, but it's really sometimes I think it's you have to have a little shread of that remaining. We can't be completely stripped of our humanity, you know, living in this world. I think that's something we all strive to hold on to. I would hope so.
No, it's also an ideal that we're pretty unanimous about and consistent about on this show. You know, a lot of these problems can be solved. The decision not to solve those problems is very much a decision, and you can always make a different decision without sounding too preachy about it. While we're at it, we got to take a moment and ask all our fellow conspiracy realists to avoid vilifying individual members of the US Intelligence apparatus. Vilify politicians all you want, that's what they signed up for. But the intelligence apparatus, none of these agencies anywhere in the world, have a perfect track record. But the people working there, the actual facts shout out more and Vogelbaum human people in these positions. They're professionals. They're motivated by this goal of yes, doing a good job at their career, but also of keeping the US and the world overall a safer place. That's like the aim. They're not conspiring again, just by the nature of them existing.
They're they're keeping the US safe for the US sake, right, Well, it's pursuing the national security and interest of the US.
Sure. Yeah, so let's add an asterisk there. This is sometimes imperfect goal. I do think it is still important to defend the humanity of people involved. You know, It's like we said years back, there's not one group that runs the world. There are instead multiple groups who feel like the world would be a better place if they were in charge, and the most dangerous of those groups already have a lot of power. Is that something we could agree on? I think so, well, there's there is one other thing we can agree on, and simple, and it's kind of horrified. Around the world. Assets that were once safe are getting blown left and right. And the thing about paranoia is we may never know how many people or how because they are people, how many assets lives were ruined or ended, Because the US's own agencies don't disclose that information. It's a rabbit hole of smoke and mirrors at every turn your face forward with the stuff they don't want you to know.
Matt, did you just chuckle at assets getting blown?
We've said it so many times in this episode so far, people getting blown left and right.
This is everywhere, all the way down. And with this we pass the torch to you. Be it yours to hold it high. If you break faith with those who die shout out to the poem Flanders Fields. I want to say, let us know your thoughts here, folks, let us know what to make of all this strange, conflicting conspiracy and allegations thereof. You can find us on the emails. You can find us on the telephones. You can find us on the lines, not secret cables though, public cables only.
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