Mossad will do anything.

Mossad has no qualms doing what it takes

to ensure the survival of every Israeli citizen

around the world.

Most other countries will stop at some point,

but Mossad doesn't do that.

The following is a conversation with Andrew Bustamante,

former CIA covert intelligence officer

and US Air Force combat veteran,

including the job of operational targeting

encrypted communications and launch operations

for 200 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Andrew's over seven years as a CIA spy

have given him a skill set and a perspective on the world

that is fascinating to explore.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors

in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Bustamante.

The Central Intelligence Agency was formed

almost 75 years ago.

What is the mission of the CIA?

How does it work?

The mission of the CIA is to collect intelligence

from around the world that supports

a national security mission

and be the central repository

for all other intelligence agencies

so that it's one collective source

where all intelligence can be synthesized

and then passed forward to the decision makers.

That doesn't include domestic intelligence.

It's primarily looking outward outside the United States.

Correct.

CIA is the foreign intelligence collection.

King spoke, if you will.

FBI does domestic

and then Department of Homeland Security does domestic.

Law enforcement essentially handles all things domestic.

Intelligence is not law enforcement.

So we technically cannot work inside the United States.

Is there clear lines to be drawn between,

like you just said, the FBI,

CIA, FBI, and the other US intelligence agencies

like the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency,

Department of Homeland Security,

NSA, National Security Agency, and there's a list.

There's a list of about 33 different

intelligence organizations.

Yeah, here it is.

The Army, the Navy has all the different organizations

have their own intelligence groups.

So is there clear lines here to be drawn

or is the CIA the giant integrator of all of these?

It's a little bit of both, to be honest.

So yes, there are absolutely lines

and more so than the lines.

There are lines that divide what our primary mission is.

Everything's got to be prioritized.

That's one of the benefits

and the superpowers of the United States

is we prioritize everything.

So different intelligence organizations are prioritized

to collect certain types of intelligence.

And then within the confines of how they collect,

they're also given unique authorities,

authorities are a term that's directed

by the executive branch.

Different agencies have different authorities

to execute missions in different ways.

FBI can't execute the same way CIA executes

and CIA can't execute the same way NGA executes.

But then at the end, excuse me, when it's all collected,

then yes, CIA still acts as a final synthesizing repository

to create what's known as the president's daily brief,

the PDB, the only way CIA can create the PDB

is by being the single source of all source intelligence

from around the IC, the intelligence community,

which are those 30 some odd and always changing organizations

that are sponsored for intelligence operations.

What does the PDB, the president's daily brief look like?

How long is it?

What does it contain?

So first of all, it looks like

the most expensive book report you can ever imagine.

It's got its own binder.

It's all very high end.

It feels important.

It looks important.

It's not like a cheap trapper keeper.

It's somewhere between,

I would give it probably between 50 and 125 pages a day.

It's produced every day around two o clock in the morning

by a dedicated group of analysts.

And each page is essentially a short paragraph

to a few paragraphs about a priority happening

that affects national security from around the world.

The president rarely gets to the entire briefing in a day.

He relies on a briefer instead to prioritize

what inside the briefing needs to be shared

with the president.

Cause some days the PDB will get briefed in 10 minutes

and some days it'll be briefed over the course of two hours.

It depends on the president's schedule.

How much competition is there for the first page?

And so how much jockeying there is for attention.

I imagine for all the different intelligence agencies

and within the CIA, there's probably different groups

that are modular and they're all care about different

nations or different cases.

And is there, do you understand

how much competition there is for the attention,

for the limited attention of the president?

You're 100% correct in how the agency

and how officers and managers at the agency handle the PDB.

There's a ton of competition.

Everybody wants to be the first on the radar.

Everybody wants to be on the first page.

The thing that we're not baking into the equation

is the president's interests.

The president dictates what's on the first page of his PDB

and he will tell them usually the day before,

I want to see this on the first page tomorrow.

Bring this to me in the beginning.

I don't want to hear about what's happening in Mozambique.

I don't really care about what's happening in Saudi Arabia.

I want to see one, two, three.

And regardless of whether or not those are the three

biggest things in the world,

the president's the executive, he's the one,

he's the ultimate customer.

So we do what the customer says.

That has backfired in the past.

If you haven't already started seeing

how that could go wrong, that has backfired in the past,

but that is essentially what happens

when you serve in the executive branch.

You serve the executive.

So what's the role of the director of the CIA

versus the president?

What's that dance like?

So the president really leads the focus of the CIA?

The president is the commander in chief for the military,

but the executive, the president is also

the executive for the entirety of the intelligence community.

So he's the ultimate customer.

If you look at it like a business, the customer,

the person spending the money is the president

and the director is the CEO.

So if the director doesn't create what the president wants,

there's gonna be a new director.

That's why the director of CIA

is a presidential appointed position.

Sometimes they're extremely qualified

intelligence professionals.

Sometimes they're just professional politicians

or soldiers that could put into that seat

because the president trusts them

to do what he wants them to do.

Another gaping area that causes problems,

but that's still the way it is.

So you think this is a problematic configuration

of the whole system?

Massive flaw in the system.

It is a massive flaw in the system

because if you're essentially appointing a director

to do what you want them to do,

then you're assigning a crony.

And that's what we define corruption as

within the United States.

And inside the United States,

we say if you pick somebody outside of merit

for any other reason other than merit,

then it's cronyism or it's nepotism.

Here, that's exactly what our structure is built on.

All presidential appointees are appointed

on something other than merit.

So for an intelligence agency to be effective,

it has to discover the truth and communicate that truth.

And maybe if you're appointing the director of that agency,

you're not, they're less likely to communicate

the truth to you unless the truth aligns perfectly

with your desired worldview.

Well, not necessarily perfectly

because there are other steps, right?

They have to be, they have to go in front of Congress

and they have to have the support

of multiple legislatures or legislators,

but the challenges that the short list of people

who even get the opportunity aren't a meritorious list.

It's a short list based off of who the president is picking

or who the would be president is picking.

Now, I think we've proven that an intelligence organization

can be, an intelligence organization

can be extremely effective even within the flawed system.

The challenge is how much more effective could we be

if we improved?

And that's, I think that's the challenge

that faces a lot of the US government.

I think that's a challenge that has resulted

in what we see today when it comes to the decline

of American power and American influence,

the rise of foreign influence, authoritarian powers

and a shrinking US economy, a growing Chinese economy.

And it's just, we have questions,

hard questions we need to ask ourselves

about how we're gonna handle the future.

What aspect of that communication between the president

and the CIA could be fixed to help fix the problems

that you're referring to

in terms of the decline of American power?

So when you talk about the president wanting

to prioritize what the president cares about,

that immediately shows a break

between what actually matters

to the longterm success of the United States

versus what benefits the short term success

of the current president.

Because any president is just a human being

and has a very narrow focus

and narrow focus is not a longterm calculation.

Exactly, what's the maximum amount of years

a president can be president?

Eight.

He has to be ocean.

In the United States.

In the United States, according to our current constitution.

Yeah.

But they're very limited

in terms of what they have to prioritize.

And then if you look at a four year cycle,

two years of that is essentially preparing

for the next election cycle.

So what's only two years of really quality attention

you get from the president?

Who is the chief executive

of all the intelligence community?

So the most important thing to them

is not always the most important thing

to the longterm survival of the United States.

What do you make of the hostile relationship

that immediately stands out of the presidents

between Donald Trump and the CIA?

Was that a very kind of personal bickering?

I mean, is there something interesting to you

about the dynamics between that particular president

and that particular instantiation

of the intelligence agency?

Man, there were lots of things fascinating to me

about that relationship.

So first.

What's the good and the bad, Sergeant Trump?

So let me start with the good first.

Cause there's a lot of people

who don't think there was any good.

So the good thing is we saw that the president

who's the chief customer, the executive to the CIA,

when the president doesn't want to hear

what CIA has to say, he's not gonna listen.

I think that's an important lesson

for everyone to take home.

If the president doesn't care what you have to say,

he's gonna take funding away

or she will take funding away.

They're gonna take attention away.

They're going to shut down your operations, your missions.

They're gonna kill the careers of the people working there.

Think about that.

For the four years that President Trump was the president,

basically everybody at CIA, their career was put on pause.

Some people's careers were ended.

Some people voluntarily left their career there

because they found themselves working

for a single customer that didn't want

what they had to produce.

So for people who don't know,

Donald Trump did not display significant deep interest

in the output.

He did not trust it, yeah.

He was a disinterested customer.

Exactly right.

The information.

And then what do disinterested customers do?

They go find someone else to create their product.

And that's exactly what Donald Trump did.

And he did it through the private intelligence world,

funding private intelligence companies

to run their own operations

that brought him the information he cared about

when CIA wouldn't.

It also didn't help that CIA stepped

outside of their confines, right?

CIA is supposed to collect foreign intelligence

and not comment on domestic matters.

They went way outside of that

when they started challenging the president,

when they started questioning the results,

when they started publicly claiming Russian influence.

That's all something the FBI could have handled by itself.

The Justice Department could have handled by itself.

CIA had no place to contribute to that conversation.

And when they did, all they did was undermine

the relationship they had with their primary customer.

Let me sort of focus in on this relationship

between the president or the leader

and the intelligence agency

and look outside the United States.

It seems like authoritarian regimes

or regimes throughout history,

if you look at Stalin and Hitler,

if you look at today with Vladimir Putin,

the negative effects of power

corrupting the mind of a leader manifest itself

is that they start to get bad information

from the intelligence agencies.

So this kind of thing that you're talking about,

over time, they start hearing information

that they want to hear.

The agency starts producing

only the kind of information they want to hear

and the leader's worldview starts becoming distorted

to where the propaganda they generate

is also the thing that the intelligence agencies

provide to them.

And so they start getting this,

they start believing in their own propaganda

and they start getting distorted view of the world.

Sorry for the sort of walking through in a weird way,

but I guess I want to ask,

do you think, let's look at Vladimir Putin specifically,

do you think he's getting accurate information

about the world?

Do you think he knows the truth of the world,

whether that's the war on Ukraine,

whether that's the behavior of the other nations

in NATO, the United States in general?

What do you think?

It's rare that I'll talk about just thinking.

I prefer to share my assessment,

why I assess things a certain way,

rather than just what's my random opinion.

In my assessment, Vladimir Putin is winning.

Russia is winning.

They're winning in Ukraine,

but they're also winning the battle of influence

against the West.

They're winning in the face of economic sanctions.

They're winning.

Empirically, when you look at the math, they're winning.

So when you ask me whether or not Putin is getting

good information from his intelligence services,

when I look at my overall assessment

of multiple data points,

he must be getting good information.

Do I know how or why?

I do not.

I don't know how or why it works there.

I don't know how such deep cronyism,

such deep corruption can possibly yield true real results.

And yet somehow there are real results happening.

So it's either excessive waste and an accidental win,

or there really is a system and a process there

that's functioning.

So this winning idea is very interesting.

In what way, short term and long term, is Russia winning?

Some people say there was a miscalculation

of the way the invasion happened.

There was an assumption that you would be able

to successfully take you,

you'd be able to successfully capture the East, the South

and the North of Ukraine.

And with what now appears to be significantly insufficient

troops spread way too thin across way too large of a front.

So that seems to be like an intelligence failure.

And that doesn't seem to be like winning.

In another way, it doesn't seem like winning

if we put aside the human cost of war.

It doesn't seem like winning because the hearts and minds

of the West were completely on the side of Ukraine.

This particular leader and Volodymyr Zelensky

captured the attention of the world

and the hearts and minds of Europe, the West

and many other nations throughout the world,

both financially in terms of military equipment

and in terms of sort of social and cultural

and emotional support for the independence fight

of this nation.

That seems to be like a miscalculation.

So against that pushback,

why do you think there's still kernels of winning

in this on the Russian side?

What you're laying out isn't incorrect

and the miscalculations are not unexpected.

Anybody who's been to a military college

and including the Army War College in Pennsylvania

where so many of our military leaders are brought up,

when you look at the conflict in Ukraine,

it fits the exact mold of what an effective,

long term military conflict,

protracted military conflict would and should look like

for military dominance.

Now, did Zelensky and the Ukrainians

shock the world? Absolutely.

But in that, they also shocked American intelligence,

which, like you said, miscalculated.

The whole world miscalculated how the Ukrainians would respond.

Putin did not move in there accidentally.

He had an assessment.

He had high likelihood of a certain outcome

and that outcome did not happen.

Why did he have that calculation?

Because in 2014, it worked.

He invaded, he took Crimea in 14 days.

He basically created an infiltration campaign

that turned key leaders over

in the first few days of the conflict.

So essentially, there was no conflict.

It worked in 2008 when he took Georgia.

Nobody talks about that.

He invaded Georgia the exact same way and it worked.

So in 2008, it worked.

In 2014, it worked.

There was no reason to believe it wasn't going to work again.

So he just carried out the same campaign.

But this time, something was different.

That was a miscalculation for sure on the part of Putin

and the reason that there was no support from the West,

because let's not forget, there is no support.

There is nothing other than the Lend Lease Act,

which is putting Ukraine in massive debt right now to the West.

That's the only form of support they're getting from NATO

or the United States.

So if somebody believed Ukraine would win,

if somebody believed Ukraine had a chance,

they would have gotten more material support than just debt.

And we can jump into that anytime you want to.

But the whole world miscalculated.

Everybody thought Russia was going to win in 14 days.

I said that they would win in 14 days,

because that was the predominant calculation.

Once the first invasion didn't work,

then the military does what professional militaries do, man.

They reevaluate, they reorganize leaders,

and then they take a new approach.

You saw three approaches.

The first two did not work.

The first two campaigns against Ukraine did not work

the way they were supposed to work.

The third has worked exactly like it's supposed to work.

You don't need Kiev to win Ukraine.

You don't need hearts and minds to win Ukraine.

What's the third?

Yeah, what you need is control of natural resources,

which they're taking in the east,

and you need access to the heartbeat,

the blood flow of food and money into the country,

which they're taking in the south.

The fact that Ukraine had to go to the negotiation table

with Russia and Turkey in order to get exports

out of the Black Sea approved again,

demonstrates just how much Ukraine is losing.

The aggressor had a seat at the negotiation table

to allow Ukraine the ability to even export

one of its top exports.

If Russia would have said no, then they would not have had that.

Russia has that's like someone holding your throat.

It's like somebody holding your jugular vein

and saying, if you don't do what I tell you to do,

then I'm not going to let you breathe.

I'm not going to let blood flow to your brain.

So do you think it's possible that Russia takes the south of Ukraine?

It takes...

So starting from Mariupol, the Hursan region.

All the way to Odessa.

All the way to Odessa.

And into Moldova.

I believe all of that will happen before the fall.

Fall of this year?

Fall of this year.

Before winter hits Europe,

NATO wants Germany needs to be able to have sanctions lifted

so they can tap into Russian power.

There's no way they can have those sanctions lifted

unless Russia wins.

And Russia also knows that all of Europe,

all of NATO is the true people feeling the pain of the war

outside of Ukraine are the NATO countries

because they're so heavily reliant on Russia.

And as they have supported American sanctions against Russia,

their people feel the pain.

Economically, their people feel the pain.

What are they going to do in the winter?

Because without Russian gas,

their people are going to freeze to death.

Ukrainian people?

People all over NATO.

Ukraine, everybody knows Ukraine's at risk.

Everybody knows Ukrainians are dying.

The game of war isn't played.

It isn't played majoritively by the people who are fighting.

The game of war is played by everyone else.

It's an economic game. It's not a military game.

The flow of resources and energy and food.

Attention, exactly right.

I was on the front in the Herzog region,

the very area that you're referring to,

and I spoke to a lot of people,

and the morale is incredibly high.

And I don't think the people in that region,

soldiers, volunteer soldiers, civilians,

are going to give up that land without dying.

I agree with you.

I mean, in order to take Odessa,

it would require a huge amount of artillery

and slaughter of civilians, essentially.

They're not going to use artillery in Odessa

because Odessa is too important to Russian culture.

It's going to be even uglier than that.

It's going to be clearing up streets, clearing up buildings,

person by person, troop by troop.

It'll be a lot like what it was in Markov.

Just shooting at civilians.

Because they can't afford to just do bombing raids

because they're going to destroy cultural,

significant architecture that's just too important

to the Russian culture,

and that's going to demoralize their own Russian people.

I have to do a lot of thinking

to try to understand what I even feel.

I don't know, but in terms of information,

the thing that the Russian soldiers are saying,

the thing the Russian soldiers really believe

is that they're freeing,

they're liberating the Ukrainian people from Nazis.

And they believe this because I visited Ukraine

and I spoke to over 100,

probably a couple hundred Ukrainian people

from different walks of life.

It feels like the Russian soldiers,

at least under a cloud of propaganda,

they're not operating on a clear view of the whole world.

And given all that,

I just don't see Russia taking the south

without committing war crimes.

And if Vladimir Putin is aware of what's happening

in terms of the treatment of civilians,

I don't see him pushing forward all the way to take the south

because that's not going to be an effective strategy

for him to win the hearts and minds of his people.

Autocracies don't need to win hearts and minds.

That's a staunchly democratic point of view.

Hearts and minds mean very little to people

who understand core basic needs and true power.

You don't see Xi Jinping worrying about hearts and minds in China.

You don't see it in North Korea.

You don't see it in Congo.

You don't see it in most of the world.

Hearts and minds are a luxury.

In reality, what people need is food, water, power.

They need income to be able to secure a lifestyle.

It is absolutely sad.

I am not in any way, shape or form saying that my assessment on this

is enriching or enlightening or hopeful.

It's just fact.

It's just calculatable empirical evidence.

If Putin loses in Ukraine, the losses, the influential losses,

the economic losses, the lives lost, the power lost is too great.

It is better for him to push and push and push through war crimes

through everything else.

War crimes are something defined by the international court system.

The international court system has Russia as part of its board.

The international court system is largely powerless

when it comes to enforcing its own outcomes.

The real risk gain scenario here for Russia is significantly

in favor of gain over risk.

The other thing that I think is important to talk about is we,

everybody is trapped in the middle of a gigantic information war.

Yes, there's battlefield bullets and cannons and tanks,

but there's also a massive informational war.

The same narrative that you see these Russian ground troops

in Ukraine believing they're clearing the land of Nazis,

that information is being fed to them from their own home country.

I don't know why people seem to think that the information

that they're reading in English is any more or less true.

Every piece of news coming out of the West,

every piece of information coming out in the English language

is also a giant narrative being shared intentionally

to try to undermine the morale and the faithfulness

of English speaking Russians,

which somebody somewhere knows exactly how many of those there are.

So we have to recognize that we're not getting true information

from other side because there is a strategic value

in making sure that there is just the right amount

of mis or disinformation out there.

Not because someone's trying to lie to Americans,

but because someone is trying to influence

the way English speaking Russians think.

In that world, that's exactly why you see so many news articles

cited to anonymous sources,

government officials who do not want to be named.

There's nothing that links back responsibility there.

There's nothing that can go to court there,

but the information still gets released.

That's enough to make Ukrainians believe

that the United States is going to help them

or that the West is going to help them.

To make Russians think that they're going to lose,

and maybe they should just give up now

and leave from the battlefield now.

We have to understand we are in the middle

of a giant information war.

Maybe you can correct me,

but it feels like in the English speaking world,

it's harder to control.

It's harder to fight the information war

because of, you know, some people say

there's not really a freedom of speech in this country,

but I think if you compare,

there's a lot more freedom of speech,

and it's just harder to control narratives

when there's a bunch of guerrilla journalists

that are able to just publish anything they want

on Twitter or anything.

It's just harder to control narratives.

So people don't understand where freedom of speech is.

That's the first major problem,

and it's shameful how many people in the United States

do not understand what freedom of speech actually protects.

So that aside, you're absolutely right.

Fighting the information war in the West

is extremely difficult

because anyone with a blog,

anyone with a Twitter account, anyone...

I mean, anyone can call themselves a journalist, essentially.

We live in a world, we live in a country

where people read the headline

and they completely bypass the author line,

and they go straight into the content,

and then they decide whether the content's real or not

based on how they feel,

instead of based on empirical, measurable evidence.

So you mentioned the Lonely Sect

and the support of the United States,

support of Ukraine by the United States.

Are you skeptical to the level of support

that the United States is providing

and is going to provide over time?

The strategy that the United States has taken

to support Ukraine is similar to the strategy

we took to support Great Britain during World War II.

The enactment of the Lenly Sect is a perfect example of that.

The Lenly Sect means that we are lending

or leasing equipment to the Ukrainian government

in exchange for future payment.

So every time a rocket is launched,

every time a drone crashes into a tank,

that's a bill that Ukraine is just racking up.

It's like when you go to a restaurant

and you start drinking shots.

Sometime the bill will come due.

This is exactly what we did when Europe

and when Great Britain was in the face of Nazi invasion.

We signed the same thing into motion.

Do you know that the UK did not pay off the debt

from World War II until 2020?

They've been paying that debt since the end of World War II.

So what we're doing is we're indebting Ukraine

against the promise that perhaps they will secure their freedom,

which nobody seems to want to talk about

what freedom is actually going to look like for Ukrainians.

What are the true handful of outcomes,

the realistic outcomes that could come of this

and which of those outcomes really looks like freedom to them,

especially in the face of the fact

that they're going to be trillions of dollars in debt

to the West for supplying them with the training

and the weapons and the food and the med kits

and everything else that we're giving them,

because none of it's free.

It's all coming due.

We're a democracy, but we're also a capitalist country.

We can't afford to just give things away for free,

but we can give things away at a discount.

We can give things away, lay away,

but the bill will come due.

Unfortunately, that is not part of the conversation

being had with the American people.

Debt is a way to establish some level of control.

Power is power.

That said, having a very close relationship

between Ukraine and the United States

does not seem to be a negative possibility

when Ukrainians think about their future

in terms of freedom.

That's one thing.

There's some aspect of this war that I've just noticed

and one of the people I talked to said

that all great nations have an independence war,

have to have a war for their independence.

In order, there's something, it's dark,

but there's something about war

just being a catalyst for finding your own identity as a nation.

You can have leaders, you can have signed documents,

you can have all this kind of stuff,

but there's something about war

that really brings the country together

and actually tried to figure out what is at the core

of the spirit of the people that defines this country.

They see this war as that,

as the independence war to define the heart

of what the country is.

There's been, before the war, before this invasion,

there was a lot of factions in the country.

There was a lot of influence from oligarchs

and corruption and so on.

The factions were brought together under one umbrella

effectively to become one nation because of this invasion.

They see that as a positive direction

for the defining of what a free democratic country looks like

after the war, in their perspective, after the war is won.

It's a difficult situation

because I'm trying to make sure that you and everybody listening

understands that what's happening in Ukraine,

among Ukrainians, is noble and brave and courageous

and beyond the expectations of anyone.

The fact is there is no material support coming from the outside.

The American Revolution was won because of French involvement,

French ships, French troops, French generals,

French military might.

The independence of communist China was won

through Russian support, Russian generals,

Russian troops on the ground fighting with the communists.

That's how revolutions are won.

That's how independent countries are born.

Ukraine doesn't get any of that.

No one is stepping into that

because we live in a world right now

where there simply is no economic benefits

to the parties in power to support Ukraine to that level.

War is a game of economics.

The economic benefit of Ukraine is crystal clear

in favor of Russia, which is why Putin cannot lose.

He will not let himself lose.

Short of something completely unexpected.

I'm talking 60%, 70% probability Ukraine loses,

but there's still 20%, 30% probability

of the unimaginable happening.

Who knows what that might be? An oligarch assassinates Putin

or a nuclear bomb goes off somewhere.

Or who knows what, right?

There's still a chance that something unexpected will happen

and change the tide of the war.

But when it comes down to the core calculus here,

Ukraine is the agricultural bed to support a future Russia.

Russian knows they know they have to have Ukraine.

They know that they have to have it to protect themselves

against military pressure from the West.

They have to have it for agricultural reasons.

They have major oil on natural gas pipelines

that flow through eastern Ukraine.

They cannot let Ukraine fall outside of their sphere of influence.

They cannot.

The United States doesn't really have any

economic vested interests in Ukraine.

Ideological points of view and promises aside,

there's no economic benefit.

And the same thing goes for NATO.

NATO has no economic investments in Ukraine.

Ukrainian output, Ukrainian food,

goes to the Middle East and Africa.

It doesn't go to Europe.

So the whole, the West siding with Ukraine

is exclusively ideological

and it's putting them in a place

where they fight a war with Russia

so the whole world can see Russia's capabilities.

Ukraine is as sad as it is to say, man,

Ukraine is a pawn on a table for superpowers

to calculate each other's capacities.

Right now, we've only talked about Russia in the United States.

We haven't even talked about Iran.

We haven't even talked about China, right?

It is a pawn on a table.

This is a chicken fight so that people get to watch

and see what the other trainers are doing.

Well, a lot of people might have said the same thing

about the United States back in the independence fight.

So there is possibilities, as you've said,

we're not saying zero percent chance

and it could be a reasonably high percent chance

that this becomes one of the great democratic nations

that the 21st century is remembered by.

Absolutely.

And so you said American support,

so ideologically, first of all,

you don't assign much long term power to that,

that U.S. could support Ukraine purely on ideological grounds.

Just look in the last four years, the last three years.

Do you remember what happened in Hong Kong right before COVID?

China swooped into Hong Kong violently,

beating protesters, killing them in the street

and prisoning people without just cause.

And Hong Kong was a democracy

and the whole world stood by and let it happen.

And then what happened in Afghanistan just a year ago?

And the whole world stood by and let the Taliban take power again

after 20 years of loss.

This, we are showing a repeatable point of view.

We will talk American politicians, American administrations.

We will say a lot of things.

We will promise a lot of ideological, pro democracy,

rah rah statements.

We will say it.

But when it comes down to putting our own people,

our own economy, our own GDP at risk,

we step away from that fight.

America is currently supplying military equipment to Ukraine.

Absolutely.

And a lot of that military equipment has actually been

the thing that turned the tides of war a couple of times already.

Currently, that's the high march systems.

So you mentioned sort of that Putin can't afford to lose,

but winning can look in different ways.

So you've kind of defined so on.

At this moment, the prediction is that winning

looks like capturing not just the east,

but the south of Ukraine.

But you can have narratives of winning that return back

to the, what was at the beginning of this year

before the invasion.

Correct.

That Crimea is still with Russia.

There's some kind of negotiated thing about Donbas,

where it still stays with Ukraine, but there are some.

Public government.

Yeah.

Just like that's what they have in Georgia right now.

And that could still be defined through mechanisms.

As Russia winning.

As Russia winning for Russia.

And then for Ukraine as Ukraine winning.

And for the west as democracy winning.

And you kind of negotiate.

I mean, that seems to be how geopolitics works.

Everybody can walk away with a win, win story.

And then the world progresses with the lessons learned.

That's the high likely.

That's the most probable outcome.

The most probable outcome is that Ukraine remains

in air quotes, a sovereign nation.

It's not going to be truly sovereign because it will become,

it will have to have new government put in place.

Zelensky will, it's extremely unlikely he will be president

because he has gone too far to demonstrate

his power over the people and his ability

to separate the Ukrainian people

from the autocratic power of Russia.

So he would have to be unseated, whether he goes into exile

or whether he is peacefully left alone

is all going to be part of the negotiations.

But the thing to keep in mind also is that a negotiated peace

really just means a negotiated ceasefire.

We've seen this happen all over the world.

North Korea and South Korea are technically still

just a negotiated cease power.

What you end up having is Russia will allow Ukraine

to call itself Ukraine to operate independently

to have their own debt to the United States.

Russia doesn't want to take on that debt.

And then in exchange for that, they will have firmer guidelines

as to how NATO can engage with Ukraine.

And then that becomes an example

for all the other former Soviet satellite states,

which are all required economically by Russia,

not required economically by the West.

And then you end up seeing how it just,

you can see how the whole thing plays out

once you realize that the keystone is Ukraine.

There is something about Ukraine,

the deep support by the Ukrainian people of America

that is in contrast with, for example, Afghanistan,

that it seems like, ideologically,

Ukraine could be a beacon of freedom

used in narratives by the United States

to fight geopolitical wars in that part of the world,

that they would be a good partner

for this idea of democracy, of freedom,

of all the values that America stands for.

They're a good partner.

And so it's valuable if you sort of have

a cynical, pragmatic view,

sort of like Henry Kissinger type of view,

it's valuable to have them as a partner,

so valuable that it makes sense to support them

in achieving a negotiated ceasefire

that's on the side of Ukraine.

But because of this particular leader,

this particular culture,

this particular dynamics of how the war enrolled

and things like Twitter

and the way digital communication currently works,

it just seems like this is a powerful symbol of freedom

that's useful for the United States

if we're sort of to take the pragmatic view.

Don't you think it's possible

that United States supports Ukraine

financially, militarily enough

for it to get an advantage in this war?

I think they've already gotten an advantage in the war.

The fact that the war is still going on

demonstrates the asymmetrical advantage.

The fact that Russia has stepped up

to the negotiating table with them several times

without just turning to Chechen,

I mean, you remember what happened in Chechnya,

without turning to Chechnya levels,

just mass blind destruction,

which was another Putin war.

To see that those things have happened

demonstrates the asymmetric advantage that the West has given.

I think the true way to look at the benefit of Ukraine

as a shining example of freedom in Europe for the West

isn't to understand whether or not they could,

they absolutely could.

It's the question of how valuable is that in Europe?

How valuable is Ukraine?

Before February, nobody even thought about Ukraine,

and the people who did know about Ukraine

knew that it was an extremely corrupt former Soviet state

with 20% of its national population

self identifying as Russian.

There's a reason Putin went into Ukraine.

There's a reason he's been promising

he would go into Ukraine for the better part of a decade,

because the circumstances were aligned.

It was a corrupt country that self identified

as Russian in many ways.

It was supposed to be an easier of multiple marks

in terms of the former Soviet satellite states to go after.

That's all part of the miscalculation

that the rest of the world saw too

when we thought it would fall quickly.

So the think that it could be a shining example of freedom

is accurate, but is it as shining a star as Germany?

Is it as shining a star as the UK?

Is it as shining a star as Romania?

Is it as shining a star as France?

It's got a lot of democratic freedom based countries in Europe

to compete against to be the shining stellar example.

In exchange, on counterpoint to that,

it has an extreme amount of strategic value to Russia,

which has no interest in making it a shining star

of the example of democracy and freedom.

Outside of research in terms of the shininess of the star,

I would argue yes.

If you look at how much it captivated the attention of the world.

The attention of the world has made no material difference, man.

That's what I'm saying.

That's your estimation, but are you sure we can convert that

into political influence, into money?

Don't you think attention is money?

Attention is money in democracies and capitalist countries.

Yes.

Which serves as a counterweight to authoritarian regimes.

For Putin, resources matter.

For the United States, also resources matter,

but the attention and the belief that people also matter

because that's how you attain and maintain political power.

Going to that exact example,

then I would highlight that our current administration

has the lowest approval ratings of any president in history.

If people were very fond of the war going on in Ukraine,

wouldn't that counterbalance some of our upset,

some of the dissent coming from the economy

and some of the dissent coming from the great recession

or the great resignation and whatever is happening

with the drawout, with the down stock market.

You would think that people would feel like they're sacrificing for something.

If they really believed that Ukraine mattered,

that they would stand next to the president

who is so staunchly driving and leading the West against this conflict.

Well, I think the opposition to this particular president,

I personally believe has less to do with the policies

and more to do with a lot of the other human factors.

But again, empirically,

I look at things through a very empirical lens,

a very cold fact based lens.

And there are multiple data points that suggest

that the American people ideologically sympathize with Ukraine,

but they really just want their gas prices to go down.

They really just want to be able to pay less money

at the grocery store for their food.

And they most definitely don't want their sons and daughters

to die in exchange for Ukrainian freedom.

It does hurt me to see the politicization of this war as well.

I think that maybe has to do with the kind of calculation

you're referring to, but it seems like it doesn't.

It seems like there's a cynical,

whatever takes attention of the media for the moment,

the red team chooses one side and the blue team chooses another.

And then I think, correct me if I'm wrong,

but I believe the Democrats went into full support of Ukraine

on the ideological side.

And then I guess Republicans are saying,

why are we wasting money?

The gas prices are growing up.

That's a very crude kind of analysis,

but they basically picked whatever argument on whatever side

and now more and more and more this particular war in Ukraine

is becoming a kind of pawn in the game of politics

that's first the midterm elections,

then building up towards the presidential elections

and stops being about the philosophical, the social,

the geopolitical aspects, parameters of this war,

and more about just like whatever the heck captivates Twitter

and we're going to use that for politics.

You're right in the sense of the fact that it's...

I wouldn't say that the red team and the blue team

picked opposite sides on this.

What I would say is that media discovered

that talking about Ukraine wasn't as profitable

as talking about something else.

People simply, the American people who read media

or who watch media, they simply became bored

reading about news that didn't seem to be changing much.

And we turned back into wanting to read about our own economy

and we wanted to hear more about cryptocurrency

and we wanted to hear more about the Kardashians

and that's what we care about, so that's what media writes about.

That's how a capitalist market driven world works

and that's how the United States works.

That's why in both red papers and blue papers,

red sources and blue sources,

you don't see Ukraine being mentioned very much.

If anything, I would say that your Republicans

are probably more in support of what's happening in Ukraine

right now because we're creating new weapons systems.

Our military is getting stronger.

We're sending these...

We get to test military systems in combat in Ukraine.

That's priceless in the world of the military industrial complex.

Being able to field test, combat test a weapon

without having to sacrifice your own people is incredibly valuable.

You get all the data, you get all the performance metrics

but you don't have to put yourself at risk.

That is one of the major benefits of what we're seeing

from supporting Ukraine with weapons and with troops.

The long term benefit to what will come of this

for the United States, practically speaking,

in the lens of national security, through military readiness,

through future economic benefits, those are super strong.

The geopolitical fight is essentially moot

because Ukraine is not a geopolitical player.

It was not for 70 years and after this conflict is over,

it will not again.

Just think about what you were just saying

with the American people's attention span to Twitter

and whatever is currently going on.

If the Ukraine conflict resolved itself today in either...

In any direction, how many weeks do you think

before no one talked about Ukraine anymore?

Do you think we would make it two weeks?

Or do you think we'd make it maybe seven days?

It would be headline news for one or two days

and then we'd be onto something else.

It's just an unfortunate reality of how the world works

in a capitalist democracy.

Yeah, it just breaks my heart how much...

I know that there's Yemen and Syria

that nobody talks about anymore.

Still raging conflicts going on.

It just breaks my heart how much generational hatred is born.

I happen to be from...

My family is from Ukraine and from Russia

and so for me, just personally, it's a part of the world

I care about in terms of its history.

Because I speak the language,

I can appreciate the beauty of the literature,

the music, the art, the cultural history of the 20th century,

through all the dark times, through all the hell

of the dark sides of authoritarian regimes,

the destruction of war.

There's still just the beauty that I'm able to appreciate,

that I can't appreciate about China, Brazil, other countries

because I don't speak their language.

This one I can appreciate and so in that way,

this is personally really painful to me to see

so much of that history, the beauty in that history

suffocated by the hatred that is born

in a kind of geopolitical game

fought mostly by the politicians, the leaders.

People are beautiful and that's what you're talking about.

People are just beautiful creatures,

culture and art and science.

These are beautiful, beautiful things

that come about because of human beings

and the thing that gives me hope is that

no matter what conflict the world has seen,

and we've seen some devastating, horrible crimes

against humanity already.

We saw nuclear bombs go off in Japan.

We saw genocide happen in Rwanda.

We've seen horrible things happen,

but people persevere.

Language, culture, arts, science, they all persevere.

They all shine through.

Some of the most people don't even realize

how gorgeous the architecture and the culture is inside Iran.

People have no idea.

Chinese people in the rural parts of China

are some of the kindest, most amazing people you'll ever meet.

Korean art and Korean dance, Korean drumming.

Nobody has ever even heard of Korean drumming.

Korean drumming is this magical, beautiful thing.

In North Korea, does it better than anybody in the world?

Taekwondo in North Korea is just exceptional to watch.

In North Korea?

Nobody knows these things.

How do you know about Taekwondo in North Korea?

I have questions.

That's fascinating.

People don't think about that, but the culture,

the beauty of the people still flourishes

even in the toughest of places.

Absolutely, and we always will.

We always will because that is what people do.

That is just the truth of it.

It breaks my heart to see travesties

that people commit against people.

Whether you're looking at a micro level,

like what happens with shootings here in the United States,

or whether you look at a macro level,

like geopolitical power exchanges

and intra and interstate conflicts,

like what you see in Syria and what you see in Ukraine,

those are disgusting, terrible things.

War is a terrible thing.

That is a famous quote.

But people will persevere.

People will come through.

I hope so.

And I hope we don't do something

that I'll probably also ask you about later on

is things that destroy the possibility of perseverance,

which is things like nuclear war,

things that can do such tremendous damage

that we will never recover.

But yeah, I amidst your pragmatic pessimism,

I think both you and I have a kind of maybe small flame

of optimism in there about the perseverance

of the human species in general.

Let me ask you about intelligence agencies

outside of the CIA.

Can you illuminate what is the most powerful

intelligence agency in the world?

The CIA, the FSB, formerly the KGB, the MI6,

Mossad, I've gotten a chance to interact with a lot of Israelis

while in Ukraine, just incredible people.

In terms of both training and skill,

American soldiers too, just American military is incredible.

The competence and skill of the military,

the United States, Israeli I got to interact,

and Ukrainian as well.

It's striking.

It's striking, it's beautiful.

I just love people.

I love carpenters or people that are just extremely good

at their job and that take pride in their craftsmanship.

It's as beautiful to see.

And I imagine the same kind of thing happens

inside of intelligence agencies as well

that we don't get to appreciate because of the secrecy.

Same thing with like Lockheed Martin.

I interviewed the CTO of Lockheed Martin.

It breaks my heart as a person who loves engineering

because of the cover of secrecy.

We'll never get to know some of the incredible engineering

that happens inside of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Boeing, Raytheon.

Yeah.

There's kind of this idea that these are people

who have conspiracy theories and kind of assign evil

to these companies in some part.

But I think there's beautiful people inside those companies,

brilliant people and some incredible science

and engineering is happening there.

Anyway, that said, the CIA, the FSB, the MI6,

Mossad, China, I know very little about the...

MSS, Ministry of State Security.

I don't know how much you know.

Or just other intelligence agencies.

In India, Pakistan, I've also heard...

Yeah.

Ra is powerful and so is ISSI.

And then, of course, European nations in Germany and France.

France.

Yeah.

So what can you say about the power,

the influence of the different intelligence agencies

within their nation and outside?

Yeah.

So to answer your question, your original question,

which is the most powerful, I'm going to have to give you

a few different answers.

So the most powerful intelligence organization in the world

in terms of reach is the Chinese MSS,

the Ministry of State Security.

Because they have created a single,

solitary intelligence service that has global reach

and is integrated with Chinese culture.

So that essentially every Chinese person anywhere in the world

is an informant to the MSS.

Because that's their way of serving the Middle Kingdom,

Zhongguo, the central kingdom, the Chinese word for China.

So they're the strongest, they're the most powerful intelligence

service in terms of reach.

Most assets, most informants, most intelligence.

So it's as deeply integrated with the citizenry.

Correct with their culture.

You know what a Chinese person who lives in Syria

thinks of themselves as?

A Chinese person.

Do you know what a Chinese person, a Chinese national

living in the United States thinks of themselves as?

A Chinese person, right?

Americans living abroad often think of ourselves as

expats, expatriates, living on the local economy,

embracing the local culture.

That is not how Chinese people view traveling around the world.

And by the way, if I may mention, I believe the way

Massad operates is a similar kind of thing

because people from Israel, living abroad,

still think of themselves as Jewish and Israeli.

First.

First.

So that allows you to integrate the culture.

And yep, the faith based aspects.

Exactly right.

But the number of people in Israel is much, much smaller.

Exactly right.

The number of people in China.

So when it comes to reach, China wins that game.

Yeah.

When it comes to professional capability, it's the CIA

by far.

Because budget wise, capability wise,

weapon system wise, modern technology wise,

CIA is the leader around the world.

Which is why every other intelligence organization out there

wants to partner with CIA.

They want to learn from CIA.

They want to train with CIA.

They want to, they want to partner on counter narcotics

and counter drug and counter terrorism and counter Uighur.

You name it.

People want to partner with CIA.

So CIA is the most powerful in terms of capability and wealth.

And then you've got the idea.

You've got tech.

So tech alone, meaning corporate espionage, economic espionage,

nothing beats, nothing beats DGSE in France.

They're the top.

They've got a massive budget that almost goes exclusively to

stealing foreign secrets.

They're the biggest threat to the United States,

even above Russia and above China.

DGSE in France is a massively powerful intelligence organization.

But they're so exclusively focused on a handful of types

of intelligence collection that nobody even really thinks

that they exist.

And then in terms of just terrifying violence,

you have Mossad.

Mossad will do anything.

Mossad has no qualms doing what it takes to ensure the survival

of every Israeli citizen around the world.

Most other countries will stop at some point,

but Mossad doesn't do that.

So it's the lines you're willing to cross.

And the reasons that you're willing to cross them.

CIA will let an American stay in jail in Russia unlawfully

and seek a diplomatic solution.

The United States has let people, there are two gentlemen

from the 1950s who were imprisoned in China for 20 years

waiting for diplomatic solutions to their release.

So we do not kill to save a citizen, but Mossad will.

And then they'll not just kill.

They'll do large scale infiltration.

They do amazing things.

They spare no expense because it's a demonstration

to their own people.

Again, going back to the whole idea of influence.

Every intelligence operation that sees the light of day

has two purposes.

The first purpose is the intelligence operation.

But if it was just the intelligence operation,

it would stay secret forever.

The second purpose of every successful intelligence operation

when they become public is to send a signal to the world.

If you work against us, we will do this to you.

If you work for us, we will take care of you in this way.

It's a massive information campaign.

Do you think in that way CIA is not doing a good job?

Because there's the FSB, perhaps much less so JRU,

but the KGB did this well, which is to send a signal,

basically communicate that this is a terrifying organization

with a lot of power.

So Mossad is doing a good job of that.

Correct.

The psychological information warfare.

And it seems like the CIA also has a lot of myths about it,

conspiracy theories about it,

but much less so than the other agencies.

CIA does a good job of playing to the mythos.

So when General Petraeus used to be the director of CIA,

2000.

And your workout partner.

And my workout partner.

I write about this.

So I loved and hated those workouts with Petraeus

because he is a physical beast.

He's a strong fit at the time, 60 something year old man.

Let me take a tangent on that because he's coming on this podcast.

Oh, excellent man.

So can you say what you've learned from the man in terms of,

or like what you think is interesting and powerful

and inspiring about the way he sees the world

or maybe what you learned in terms of how to get strong in the gym

or anything about life.

Two things right away.

And one of them I was going to share with you anyway.

She asked the question.

So the first is that on our runs and man,

he runs fast and we would go for six mile runs through Bangkok.

And he talked openly about, I asked him,

how do you keep this mystery, this epic mythology

about your fitness and your strength?

How do you keep all of this alive with the troops?

And he had this amazing answer and he was like,

I don't talk about it.

Myths are born not from somebody orchestrating the myth,

but from the source of the myth simply being secretive.

So he's like, I don't talk about it.

I've never talked about it.

I've never exacerbated it.

I just do what I do and I let the troops talk.

And he's like, when it's in favor,

when it goes in favor of discipline and loyalty and commitment,

I let it run.

If it starts getting destructive or damaging,

then I have my leadership team step in to fix it.

But when it comes to the mythos,

the myth of him being superpowered soldier,

that's what he wants every soldier to be.

So he lets it run.

And it was so enlightening when he told me,

when there's a myth that benefits you, you just let it go.

You let it happen because it gets you further

without you doing any work.

It costs no investment for you.

So the catalyst of the virality of the myth

is just being mysterious.

And that's what CIA does well to go back to your first question.

What does CIA do?

They don't answer any questions.

They don't say anything.

And wherever the myth goes, the myth goes,

whether it's that they sold drugs or used child prostitutes

or whatever else, wherever the myth goes, they let it go.

Because at the end of the day, everybody sits back and says,

wow, I really just don't know.

Now, the second thing that I learned from Petraeus,

and I really am a big fan of Petraeus,

I know he made personal mistakes.

You don't get to be that powerful without making personal mistakes.

But when I worked out with him, the one thing that my,

the one thing that my commanding officer told me not to ask about,

he was like, never ask the general about his family.

I'm a family guy.

So as soon as I met General Petraeus,

one of the first things I asked him was,

hey, what was it like raising a family

and being the commander of forces in the Middle East?

Like you weren't with your family very much.

And the thing I love about the guy,

he didn't bite off my head.

He didn't snap at me.

He didn't do anything.

He openly admitted that he regretted

some of the decisions that he made

because he had to sacrifice his family to get there.

Relationships with his children, absentee father,

missing birthdays, missing, we all say,

we all say how sad it is to miss birthdays

and miss anniversaries, yada, yada, yada.

Everybody knows what that feels like.

Even business people know what that feels like.

The actual pain that we're talking about

is when you're not there to handle your 13 year old's questions

when a boy breaks up with her.

Or when you're not there to handle the bloody lip

that your nine year old comes back with

from their first encounter with a bully.

Those are the truly heartbreaking moments

that a parent lives and dies by.

He missed almost all of those

because he was fighting a war that we forgot

and we gave up on 20 years later, right?

He's so honest about that.

And it was really inspiring to me

to be told not to ask that question.

And when I broke that guidance, he didn't reprimand me.

He just, he was authentic.

And it was absolutely one of the big decisions

that helped me leave CIA on my own in 2014.

And he was honest on the sacrifice you make.

The same man, the same man who just taught me a lesson

about letting a myth live.

That same guy was willing to be so authentic

about this personal mistake.

I like complicated people like that.

So what did you, what do you make of that calculation?

A family versus job.

You've given a lot of your life and passion

to the CIA, to that work.

You spoke positively about that world.

The good it does.

And yet you're also a family man and you value that.

What's that calculation like?

What's that trade off like?

The calculation is very clear.

It's family.

I left CIA because I chose my family.

And when my son was born, my wife and I found out

that we were pregnant while we were still on mission.

We were a tandem couple.

My wife is also a former CIA officer,

undercover like me.

We were operating together overseas.

We got the positive pregnancy tests,

like so many people do.

And she cried.

My wife was a badass.

I was just, I was like the accidental spy,

but my wife was really good at what she does.

And she cried and she was like, what do we do now?

It's what we've always wanted, a child,

but we're in this thing right now.

There's no space for a child.

So long story short, we had our baby.

CIA brought us back to have the baby.

And when we started having the conversations about,

okay, what do we do next?

Because we're not the type of people to want to just sit around

and be domestic.

What do we do next?

But keep in mind, we have a child now.

So here's some of our suggestions.

We could do this and we can do that.

Let us get our child to a place where we can put him

into an international school or we can get him

into some sort of program where we have,

we can both operate together again during the day.

But CIA just had no,

no patience for that conversation.

There was no family is not their priority.

So the fact that we were a tandem couple,

two officers, two operators trying to have a baby

was irrelevant to them.

So when they didn't play with us,

when they did nothing to help us prioritize parenthood

as part of our overall experience,

that's when we knew that they never would.

And what good is it to commit yourself to a career

if the career is always going to challenge the thing

that you value most?

And that was the calculation that we made to leave CIA.

Not everybody makes that calculation.

And a big part of why I am so vocal about my time at CIA

is because I am immensely appreciative of the men

and women who to this day have failed marriages

and poor relationships with their children

because they chose national security.

They chose protecting America over their own family.

And they've done it even though it's made them,

you know, abuse alcohol and abuse substances

and they've gotten themselves,

they've got permanent diseases and issues

from living and working abroad.

It's just insane the sacrifice that officers make

to keep America free.

And I'm just not one of those people I chose family.

You said that your wife misses it. Do you miss it?

We both miss it. We miss it for different reasons.

We miss it for similar reasons, I guess,

but we miss it in different ways.

The people at CIA are just amazing.

They're people that, they're everyday people

like the guy in the gown next door,

but so smart and so dedicated and so courageous

about what they do and how they do it.

I mean, the sacrifices they make are massive.

More massive than the sacrifices I made.

So I was always inspired and impressed

by the people around me.

So both my wife and I absolutely miss the people.

My wife misses the work because you know everything.

When you're inside, it's all, I mean, we had,

we had top secret, we had TSSCI clearances at the time.

I had a cat six, cat 12, which makes me nuclear cleared.

My wife had other privy clearances that allowed her

to look into, you know, areas that were specialized.

But there was not, there wasn't a headline that went out

that we couldn't fact check with a click of a few buttons.

And she misses that cause she loved that kind of film.

And now you're just one of us living in the, you know,

the cloud of mystery.

Exactly.

Not really knowing anything about what's going on.

Exactly.

But for me, I've always been the person that likes operating

and you know what you still get to do when you leave CIA?

You still get to operate.

Operating is just working with people.

It's understanding how people think, predicting their actions,

driving their, their direction of their thoughts, persuading them,

winning negotiations.

It's, you still get to do that.

You do that every day.

And you can apply that in all kinds of domains.

Well, let me ask you on that, you were a covert CIA intelligence

officer for several years.

Maybe can you tell me the story of how it all began?

How, where you recruited and what did the job entail to the

degree you can speak about it?

Feel free to direct me if I'm getting too boring or if the, if the

Every aspect of this is super expensive.

So, so I was leaving the United States Air Force in 2007.

I was a, I was a lieutenant getting ready to pin on captain.

My five years was up and I was a very bad fit for the U.S. Air Force.

I was an Air Force Academy graduate, not by choice,

but by lack of opportunity, lack of, lack of options otherwise.

So I forced myself through the Academy, barely graduated with a

2.4 GPA.

And then went on the Air Force taught me how to fly.

And then the Air Force taught me about nuclear weapons.

And I ended up as a, as a nuclear missile commander in Montana.

And I chose to leave the Air Force because I didn't like shaving

my face.

I didn't like having short hair and I most definitely didn't like

shining my shoes.

And I did not want to be one of the people in charge of nuclear

weapons.

So when I found myself as a person in charge of 200 nuclear weapons,

I knew that I was going down the wrong road.

I have questions about this.

And more importantly, I have questions about your hair.

So you have short hair at the time?

I have, yeah, you have to military regulations.

You can't have hair longer than one inch.

Okay.

And this, the, the beautiful hair you have now,

that came to be in the CIA or after this.

So I discovered I had messy hair in CIA because I used to,

I used to go moose.

We called it moose.

I used to go Mujahideen style big burly beard and crazy wacky hair.

Yeah.

Because an ambiguously brown guy with a big beard and long hair can go

anywhere in the world without anyone even noticing him.

They either think that he's a janitor or they think that he's like some

forgotten part of history, but nobody ever thinks that that guy is a

spy.

So it was the perfect for me.

It was one of my favorite disguises.

It's what's known as a level two disguise.

One of my favorite disguises to Don was just dilapidated brown guy.

Can you actually, would you take a million tangents?

What, what's a level two disguise?

What, what's a, what are the different levels of disguise?

What are the disguises?

Yeah.

There's three levels of disguise by and large.

Level one is what we also know, what we also call light disguise.

So that's essentially, you put on sunglasses and a ball cap and,

and that's a disguise.

You look different than you normally look.

So it's just different enough that someone who's never seen you before,

someone who literally has to see you just from a picture on the internet,

they may not recognize you.

It's why you see celebrities walk around with ball caps and oversized

jackets and baseball hats, cause they just need to not look like they look

in the tabloid or not look like they look in TV.

That's level one.

Let me jump from level one to level three.

Level three is all of your prosthetics, all the stuff you see in Mission

Impossible.

Your fake ears, your fake faces, your fat suits, your stilts inside your leg,