0:01How do you trust your wife?
0:03Cuz I would the whole time I was reading this, I was kind of thinking that. I'm like, is Gee he just working Andy? Are they like, yo, we got a real [ __ ] case of cowboy fever [laughter] here, so you just, you know, you keep an eye on him. I've heard of that before.
0:16Uh, she may very well be working me for all I know, but I think the way I the way I trust her is I feel like I don't have an option.
0:23She's smarter than me and more successful than me, so I'm not going to outsmart her or dupe her or trick her. So, if anything makes for a very easy way to be very honest and transparent with my wife, which has been all the difference in our relationship, too. Whenever I have an insecurity or a doubt, whenever I see a hot chick on the street, it's just so much easier to tell her the truth >> [laughter] >> because whatever comes next is going to be easier than if I lied to her.
0:53>> [laughter] >> Gee, you see the rack on that chick?
0:58>> [laughter] >> I need you guys to like put a put a GoPro on and just like walk around town.
1:04I need to see this like in action.
1:07>> What it looks like? Yeah. Yeah. And you you just see Andy's head turn [laughter] all the time with the GoPro.
1:15Turns back to Gee he.
1:18Come on. So, it's worth noting, I mean, I and we talk about this in the book as well. My wife has an anxiety disorder.
1:23She has she suffers from depression. She has mental health issues that made her almost ideally suited to work at CIA.
1:34As long as I don't violate her own mental health challenges, it's actually more comforting to her.
1:40What drives an anxious person crazy is when they wonder if you saw the girl with the nice rack. Right. As soon as you say, I saw the girl with a nice rack, it's like talking to Rain Man. Oh, yeah, it was a nice rack. It was It was a good rack. [laughter] It was a good definitely a good rack.
1:57>> [laughter] >> And that goes way better than Did you see the rack? Are you lying to me? You're lying to me. I can see that you're lying to me.
2:03>> [laughter] >> Sorry, that's so good. Well, [laughter] I'm happy for you. That's a great relationship. There's a lot of guys out there right now going, "I need that." Do you have anxiety?
2:16>> more anxiety in my life.
2:17>> [laughter] >> All right, so back to the cell though.
2:21You you are the go-between, like we said.
2:25So, you're going to be the guy who's now as SOO even you've had a lot of experience like on the ground doing things there. So, you have that skill set as well as managing the cell with Jihi, but you're going to go into Falcon, as you said, always through a second country under an assumed identity, which you've talked about out of context on a lot of podcasts with me before where you're like, "Yeah, I work for a business." Or and something like that. So, I think in the book you said you worked for Acme and like, what was it? Procurement or something like that? Okay. So, you would go in there and what was your
3:01You're doing some different things every time, but high-level like what was your main job when you would go into Falcon?
3:08Whenever you enter into a a hostile country, and by every country to a certain extent is hostile, but the definition that we're talking about when we talk about uh um denied areas or we talk about these areas that are are the most uh aggressive adversaries to the United States.
3:28When you go into those countries, you can't do more than one operational act at a time. Mhm. So, if you were to go into a more permissive environment, then you would be able to go in and you may be able to do two or three things in a day because nobody's really watching.
3:41That's what we're like here in the United States. Foreign adversaries can come here and do whatever they want to do because we don't have cameras on every intersection. We don't fund our police enough to make them anything uh significant to a foreign intelligence threat. We have We treat everybody who comes into the United States essentially as a US citizen first. So, they all have They have privacy, and they have They have the benefit of innocence until proven guilty. Like, they have rights and and privileges that are essentially granted to them because we give them to our own citizens.
4:11Other parts of the world are not like that. So, what that meant is that inside Falcon our case officers couldn't go to Falcon to execute an operation and also on that operation procure their operational support requirements. If they needed bulk cash deposits, if they needed special watches, if they needed certain SIM cards or batteries that were specific to Falcon, they couldn't do that on their own. They couldn't show up and then procure those things and carry out the operational act. It would create a trail Right.
4:41>> that would identify that what they're doing as is espionage. So, I would go in ahead of them. I would do the actual procurement part of espionage. I would buy a cell phone. I would buy a SIM card. I would make a mass depositor withdrawal of cash. And then, I would essentially cache those things or dead drop those things somewhere where a case officer could pick it up when they arrive. So, did you really You really had a cover working for in this case Acme? Yeah, I really had an identity that allowed me to transit Falcon without coming onto suspicion. There's a lot of roles that are immediately
5:18suspicious. And not always suspicious for espionage reasons. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you're wealthy. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you have access to IP. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you have familial connections or celebrity connections.
5:34So, it's actually quite hard sometimes to build a cover persona that doesn't catch anyone's interest.
5:42So, in this case, Acme Corporation was one corporation that does something mundane. They They do something that has to do with with everyday needs. Think like uh the soles on shoes or printer cartridges in printers or the person or like the nail clippers, right? Something stupid that nobody anywhere is concerned with the IP of nail clippers and nobody anywhere is concerned with the celebrity connections of a company that makes the soles for shoes and like it's all mundane and silly, but it's big business. Right.
6:15>> enough business that you want to have the natural resources that either provide the beginning or you want to have the trade route that carries them or you want to have the manufacturing that builds them. So, there's every reason in the world for a real world business person to do that job and there's also every reason in the world for local businesses to want to meet with you.
6:36But basically police, law enforcement, and intelligence don't care about you.
6:40But you really had to have that covered cuz you had to represent this whoever the actual real company was.
6:46>> really have to learn about it and you really have to know the lingo, right?
6:50So, it's >> literally reported to a guy working for that company in another country or was it you were disconnected and just said you worked for them and would approach it that way?
7:02So, this is getting into the sensitive side of how these operations are built. So, what I will say is that I was not alone.
7:11There were people that I had to speak to and people who had to speak to me.
7:15That's part of what makes it a backstopped cover, what we call a backstopped cover. So, I could send emails, emails would come, I can make phone calls and phone inbound phone calls would come in. So, everything is legit.
7:26Actually a registered business, actually registers a profit, and actually has regular revenue and P&L. Like it's all a very real thing.
7:33Um but where that person was located and how much that person was dedicated to my cover versus, you know, multiple businesses or whatever else, that that gets into the classified area. Okay. All right, so I won't I won't pull on that.
7:46But essentially, how I don't know if this is classified, too, but like how often are you going there to do this kind of stuff? So, I would go maybe once every 40-ish days or so. I would go frequently because I'm supporting four case officers.
8:03And not only am I supporting those four case officers, I have a very active targeter who wants more information.
8:09More restaurant locations, more intersections, more street names, more maps, more uh you know, IMEIs and ISMIs from different cell phone manufacturers. Like Like there's just tons of information.
8:21There's tons of collection that needs to happen on the logistics side of a CIA operation. So, there's always a reason to go. And the more you go, the less suspicious you are. Right.
8:34>> Cuz the more regular your passage is, the more you look like a regular business person. You always stay for two or three days. You always stay in the same hotel. You always do the same like things in the same city. You go to the same restaurants. You you know, borrow rent the same car from the same rental car agency. All that stuff's very common. And now all of a sudden it it puts you almost above suspicion. What about for someone like Beverly though, who I believe met You said it's converse, not converse. Is that how you say it? I think converse is better.
9:00>> I always thought converse is better, too. This was literally a conversation I had with my wife. I was like, why don't we call this person converse? And she was like >> Yeah, just call it converse. It's better. So, you see like the black shoe and the star and everything.
9:13>> Julian Dorry podcast, we're going to call converse.
9:14>> [laughter] >> So, you meet you meet converse in or or Beverly meets converse, I believe, in Wolf, not in Falcon. So, is she straddling between Wolf and Falcon? How does she manage that and not, you know, cuz it's a different role than you?
9:29Right. So, every case officer has their own justification for going into [clears throat] and out of Falcon.
9:36So, their frequency is something that we schedule, we plan to make sure that there's never two of them in the country at the same time.
9:43Their routes, their third country cleansing routes are all different. We have a specific plan for everyone to make sure that the operations don't overlap or collide. And we're also carefully controlling what geographic regions they're going to to make sure that they're not in the same city, possibly staying in a hotel that's on the same block. We want to isolate as much as possible so that if Falcon intelligence does spot one of us, it doesn't lead to the others. Okay.
10:09Right? So, while Converse is happening inside of Wolf, the information that Gigi's collecting that she gives to she gives to Beverly, some of those cases are happening inside Falcon. Some of those cases are happening in third country locations where the Falcon target comes out of Falcon for a day or two, but we're trying to build an excuse for Beverly to meet the person in Falcon later.
10:31>> Oh, okay. But, you're going every 40 days is like the CIA's own Bin Laden courier, effectively. And you're as you said, you're doing things from procurement that can't be traced back to literal dead drops. It was kind of cool, like the spycraft you were talking about and and, you know, why you would pick this type of park over that type of park, you know, versus how many people are going to be here versus there.
10:55It is wild, but every time you would go in Falcon, in this country that everyone out there should be able to figure out, they had like every person that's coming in from the outside, it sounds like, they send starting with like low-level minders onto them. Meaning like literally dudes they pay five bucks, you know, to go buy a coffee if they go through this person's, you know, drawers in the hotel or something like that. So, you knew that going in and [clears throat] when you're first going in under code name Alex Hernandez, you know, on that fake passport and everything, you were encountering always
11:32these of low-level minders. So, that meant and correct me if I'm wrong here, you didn't think they were suspicious of you. It was just that's just what you should expect as a foreigner going into this place staying at any decent hotel.
11:45Correct. If you and every business owner, every mid-level to high-level executive who has traveled through a country that is not on good terms with the United States. And there's many, many countries beyond just like the big two or three that you would think [clears throat] of.
11:59When you travel into a foreign country that's not in great terms with the US, they watch you.
12:04And they watch you with what I what what I call bumbling surveillance. And that's what you're talking about, the low-level minder.
12:11Like this is a dude or a gal who they run like a food cart 14 hours a day. And they don't make enough money to keep their family alive on a food cart. So, then they work a few extra hours every night by watching foreigners.
12:26Sometimes they're assigned a foreigner.
12:28Sometimes they voluntarily watch a foreigner and then go to the local police station after they watch him and try to sell their information. Right?
12:35Sometimes they If they can't sell their information to a local police officer, they'll sell their information to like a local gangster and be like, "Hey, you got a guy staying at the local Radisson who wears a Rolex." But they're always trying to peddle what information they can to make a buck just to make ends meet. These individuals are really easy to spot. These bumbling surveillance are really easy to spot. And when you see them, it's a comfort.
12:57Because that's all that's all that's covering you. It's when you don't see them that you have to ask harder questions.
13:05Why am I not being watched now?
13:08Am I more interesting than I think I am?
13:11Did no minder show up today because they're hungover? Because they drank too many beers last night? What's the explanation?
13:17Yeah. So, you would describe back the first time we ever talked in episode 97 the three types of surveillance. There's like discreet to lose where what what's Is that for the other two?
13:26>> Yeah, there's there's discreet to lose surveillance, there's close surveillance, and discreet not to lose surveillance.
13:33Okay. Can you just redefine all those real quick for everyone so we have that?
13:37>> So absolutely. From the the the simplest, least sophisticated form of surveillance is called close surveillance. It's when the person who's following you essentially wants you to know you're being followed. They stay right on your shoulder. If they're driving, they stay right on your bumper.
13:54When you park, they try to park you in.
13:56Like they're they're trying to intimidate you, and they are also following and watching you. So these are more the bumbling guys.
14:03Um close.
14:04>> Close. What these are is these Yeah, I mean, when it comes to training, these are your bumbling guys. Yeah. But we're talking specifically about trained surveillance. When a surveillance team is trained for close surveillance, that might be more like a police surveillance team. They they know a drug dealer's coming in. They don't want that drug dealer to do any drops. So they're going to follow that drug dealer. They can't arrest him. He hasn't committed a crime.
14:26There's no proof, but they're going to stay on his ass everywhere he goes.
14:29They're going to neutralize his ability to do anything. Okay.
14:32>> That's a close surveillance team. The next step down in terms of or the next step up from in terms of sophistication is something called discreet not to lose. Discreet not to lose means you don't want your target to see you, but you also can't lose them. So if they make a left turn when they shouldn't make a left turn, when they make a U-turn and they shouldn't make a U-turn, when they run across the street and there's no crosswalk, you have to go with them. Because you cannot lose them.
15:01So you might stay farther back, but if they do something stupid, you're going to do something stupid, too, cuz you can't let them disappear. So you're watching them because you're confident that they're going to execute some kind of operational act, and when they commit that act, you have to be there to catch them, apprehend them, or collect evidence.
15:19That's discreet not to lose. The third most sophisticated form of surveillance is called discreet to lose. Discreet to lose means you don't ever want your target to know you're there.
15:32You want them you want to be completely invisible to them because you're being so discreet that if you lose them, you're going to escalate the case to another resource that will pick them up.
15:42So, I'm following you down the streets in Hoboken. You turn left, you turn right, I lose you into a coffee shop. I don't know where you went. I can make a phone call and all of a sudden I've got a helicopter above head looking for you or I've got a series of drones that are triangulating you or I can find someone who's going to ping your cell phone from a local tower and we'll find you and I'll get right back on you two blocks from now.
16:00Right? Discreet to lose is the most sophisticated form of surveillance because it's the most dangerous.
16:05>> Scariest one. It means that you're so interesting they're willing to spend the money of almost infinite resources to see what you're doing. So, you had been going and doing these trips for a long time.
16:19How long I guess you're not allowed to say.
16:21But a while. You've been going in roughly every 40 days. You're doing all these different things to manage for your people on the ground depending on which two are in the country at the time.
16:31And then you have this 3-day trip plan where you you know, the cover is you're going to be going and meeting with these different procurement companies for your job. But you're going to be doing some of your regular things.
16:43And you notice I guess day one when you come downstairs into the hotel lobby something's off.
16:51What why why was something off to you? I don't know. I don't know why things were different that day. But for whatever reason I couldn't find a minder. I couldn't find a bumbling surveillance.
17:03And it was winter, it was cold.
17:06Um it was nasty outside, but that had never stopped that had never stopped minders from being there before.
17:13So, in that moment it felt it felt comfortable. It felt like victorious. I felt like I am [ __ ] so good at this. Here we go.
17:29This is what I've been This is why I'm coming here every 40 days. So that nobody thinks that I'm suspicious, so that I can be free to do whatever I want to do. So that Like this is what it's all about. I used to joke with James back in the building when we were back at Wolf together. We used to joke about the day that we would become invisible inside Falcon. The day that we were so commonplace, so boring, so dull, so predictable that they wouldn't even follow us.
17:53It wasn't even worth the wasn't worth paying the homeless guy $5 to watch us.
17:57Right? And I was like, today is that day. I mean, that I finally I'm here. And I'm going to tell James I can't wait to get back and tell James that I beat him to the punch, right? Like that's That was what was going through my head. Um and it didn't last long before the second thought came to my head that that if they're not following me with a bumbling surveillance, they might be following me with something better.
18:23Because it doesn't take a lot to follow somebody without a person. You can follow them by following a cell phone signal. You can follow them by following a a driver. You can follow them by following, you know, a series of static surveillance that that stand along their route. And remember, we do the same thing on most every trip, so it wouldn't be hard to set up a series of static surveillance. They just watch you go from point A to point B to point C and you never see them at all. Did that thought come into your head where you're like, could this be Major Bond oil over again?
18:54It didn't come into my head in that moment. It just struck me that I could be wrong, which was not something that the younger version of me would have ever thought. The younger version of me would have been like, I am so [ __ ] good.
19:09But instead, I had a few years under my belt and a little bit more like humble stew and I was like this could be something else, too. Just just having the ability to recognize that there could be an alternate explanation than what you think is a lot harder than most people realize. Most people are so sure that their opinion is right. Most people are so sure that their perspective is right that they don't even entertain, seriously entertain, a second point of view.
19:36Right? You can count your your religious extremist activities on the backs of people who do this. You can see how many people have lost their fortunes because this is what they did. You can see how many people have lost relationships because they truly believe that they were so right there could be no other alternative.
19:53All that I had learned in my life and up to that moment at least gave me the sense to say "What if I'm not that good? What if this is just something else?" But here's the other thing, too. There's There's two other variables here. Number one, speed of processing.
20:10Cuz something could go wrong at any instant. And, you know, worst-case scenario.
20:15But also like you take this for granted.
20:17If I'm sitting out there with Joe trying to like cook something up when we're not recording and come up with a title or whatever.
20:24And then or, you know, some type of idea. I might be like, "Wait a minute.
20:30I I know I don't know about that. Let's back it." You see what I mean? Like you almost have like a physical reaction to it in tone and shift. It's not like you're talking to someone necessarily in the hotel lobby. But but you can't be like you know, or show any sign that you're even thinking. But in your head you're running these like algorithmic calculations of like, "Okay, well those 13 people over there weren't doing this.
20:53The two guys over there aren't looking at me right now. That's not the nor You know what I mean?" Like you have to put all this together and you have to stand there like this. Yeah, it's true. It's true and that's part of the reason why you don't have anything else you have to do.
21:06Right? The The reason you schedule your day on this day in particular, I had scheduled the day so that I had two business meetings in the day.
21:15And I knew that there would be someone else driving me from business meeting to business meeting, and I knew that the drivers had already known what time to pick me up and drop me off because that would It was all predetermined in email correspondence to the backstopped cover organization, right?
21:28So, my 100% job from point A to point B was just to determine my surveillance status. And that's what a surveillance detection route is supposed to do.
21:39Nothing else except determine your surveillance status. You know what the route's going to be, you know what the turns are going to be, you know how long you're going to be on a certain side of the street, you know everything. And there's always room for street lights to go long or for some traffic accidents to slow you down or whatever else. So, you you leave space for variables.
21:56But you're giving 90% of your resources to one task. So, you are correct.
22:02You have to process quickly, but you don't have to prioritize between processes. You're doing one thing and one thing only.
22:08So, you can have those processes without biting your nails or looking around the room or, you know, awkwardly scratching your belt line.
22:17So, how did you catch the initial surveillance in this case?
22:21So, the There's a process for surveillance detection, and we get to go through it almost step by step in the book. I'm really excited about that.
22:26That's one of the things that CIA didn't like about this book. There were several that they didn't like, and we can talk about this some other time, but but uh one of the things they didn't like is that I expressed how we detected or how I detected surveillance on this route.
22:40As I went from point A to point B, as I went from the hotel to the first business meeting, someone else was driving. My entire focus was just on finding surveillance, which means that I could observe the environment around me.
22:52And when you are looking for surveillance, what you're really looking for is a change in the environment that doesn't make sense.
23:00When you move, let's just say you move from Hoboken to New Jer- or Hoboken to uh Manhattan.
23:04>> Mhm.
23:05Whether you're driving or training or ferrying, you if you do it enough times, you know what to expect. You know what normal looks like.
23:14Surveillance happens when normal doesn't look normal. When you see one face too many times or when you see one card too many times or when you uh you make a mistake and you take a U-turn and somebody follows you through the U-turn. And then that same person that follows you through the U-turn just happens to be the person who walks into the deli on 37th that you walk into.
23:33You're looking for strange patterns that don't fit the chaos of normalcy.
23:38And that's from point A to point B.
23:41I also had a second meeting scheduled that day and in between those two meetings I was going to take kind of a lunch break.
23:47So, again, I get out I leave from point B to go to my lunch break and I'm looking for the things that don't look normal from point B to point C, but I'm also looking for anything that repeats what happened in the first leg. We call them legs. You have multiple legs to a surveillance detection route. Sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes seven.
24:07What you're looking for is how often do you see the same outlier from leg to leg? That's how you truly determine if you're under surveillance and that's what we detail in the story. That's how I found out. Not just that I was under surveillance, but who specifically was following me.
24:23>> You were seeing some of the same people and you were seeing that there were multiple different people, multiple different cars, which now says it's been in your head escalated. Correct.
24:33At what point did you start [ __ ] yourself?
24:36Shh.
24:37Second leg.
24:39Second leg, picking up the same vehicle from the first leg.
24:43Identifying uh identifying people who when I moved from driving to walking and seeing the same people again both in cars and on foot, that shit's scary.
24:55That shit's scary because now you realize there's a team the team has resources. Like it's easy for one person. We we when you learn surveillance detection, you learn that all the advantages do not go to the surveillance team.
25:12The surveillance team has all the disadvantages because they have to react.
25:16>> Yes. So they're always one step behind.
25:17They don't know where you're going next.
25:18They don't know when you're going there.
25:20If they lose you, they have to find you again. So you might think that the surveillance team has all the advantages. The only advantage a surveillance team has is technology and resources.
25:30It's actually the field operator that has all of the advantages in a surveillance detection route.
25:34>> You're the wide receiver. They're the cornerback. Yes. You choose everything, right?
25:39So you you become acutely aware of these advantages and disadvantages because if you [ __ ] up and you make them suspicious of you they can plus up with more resources.
25:52They can fall off and come back on you the next day. They can escalate you even higher and all of a sudden you have a SWAT team or a takedown team rather than a surveillance team following you. So it becomes this really difficult dance where you have to act in such a way that's so calculated that they don't realize it's calculated, that's so predictable without seeming predictable that they just watch you and don't care.
26:17They don't escalate. They don't chase.
26:18They don't worry. And this is one place you said the movies get wrong all the time.
26:22>> All the time. Cuz in the movies, what does somebody do when they're under surveillance? They [ __ ] run. They try to do crazy [ __ ] jump on buildings.
26:29You're basically saying I love the visual you gave where you're like it's like when you see a bear. You don't run because it says that's dangerous, so it's going to come after you. You have to like very cautiously look at it and back away. So you're like, "Hey amigo, I ain't here to do anything to you."
26:48>> here I'm not I'm not worth your time.
26:51That's the whole goal. We call it lulling surveillance. You're trying to lull your surveillance to sleep. You're trying to lull them into making an error. You're trying to lull them into into giving up on you, right? [snorts] It's a job for them, too.
27:06It's a job for them, too. They woke up at some time, got their kids off to school, ate their breakfast, took their coffee. They're going to have to take their morning [ __ ] at some point, too.
27:16So, the whole goal is to make their life so simple and predictable that when 4:00 comes around, they're like, "Nothing here, folks." And they go home.
27:25That's what you want to do. You don't want to be interesting enough that at 4:00 they call in and they get overtime and they're like, "Hey, we're going to stay on this guy for another 3 hours."
27:32What made you want to go to an arcade?
27:34What what once you knew that this stuff was going down, it was it's really cool.
27:38People are going to have to like read to get all the details of different places you were picking and what you would have to think about going into them, like plan out why would be there and why it would make sense to be in this place, like down to the microscopic type [ __ ] But, what made you say, "You know what?
27:52I'm going to stop and, you know, shoot badly >> [laughter] >> in an arcade so they know I'm not a good shot."
27:59So, um surveillance teams are made up of people, and every one of the people on a team is creating a surveillance persona for the day. So, if uh if you were to come to my surveillance training course, one of the things Every Day Spy teaches is it certifies people in discrete to lose surveillance. If you were to come, I would teach you about how to make a profile and how to change your profile to fit into different environments for different purposes.
28:23Professional surveillance teams know how to change their profile for different circumstances because at at the first hour that you're following somebody, you might need to look a certain way, but by the fourth hour that you're following somebody, you need to change your profile.
28:38I was at a point in the surveillance detection route where I knew that the next person who should follow me is the younger male on their team. You You can literally see the pattern in how a professional surveillance works. So, to lull them to sleep, you try to make it as easy as possible for them. So, I didn't want to go into the quilting store, cuz if I went into the quilting store and some [ __ ] 22-year-old kid followed me, he would feel awkward. Mhm. But, maybe the 60-year-old woman or the 55-year-old woman wouldn't feel so awkward. But, she wasn't the next one up on the on the rotation. Oh, yeah. That calculated.
29:12>> Yeah. I knew the next person up on the rotation was the young kid. Well, where's he going to fit in?
29:17The arcade. And one of the other things you always want to do on a surveillance route is you want to be able to control your time.
29:24So, if you walk into a coffee shop, for example, logically, you think, "Oh, coffee shop's going to be quick." You don't have any [ __ ] idea.
29:31The barista could be lazy, they could be slow, there could be a long line, there's all sorts of reasons why you might walk into a coffee shop and you think you're going to be there for 2 minutes, but you're there for 15 minutes instead. That's That's a showstopper for a surveillance detection route, because you've lost control of time.
29:47You walk into an arcade, you control every element of your time.
29:51Do you play one game? Do you play four games? Do you die quickly in the game?
29:55Do you just walk around? Do you go buy a coffee or a or a Coke if the line is short? Do you Do you just use the restroom? You can control every element of your time. So, I knew I wanted a place for a 22-year-old guy to follow me, about 22-year-old to follow me. I wanted it to be a place that only he would fit in on the whole team, so it makes it very easy for him, and a place where I could loiter, so that as soon as I saw him with me, I could play three, four, five games, give the whole team a 15- or 20-minute break, so that they can smoke a cigarette, they can restructure who's in what cars. Like, I want them to
30:27have a really easy life, so that they don't think that there's anything suspicious about me.
30:32>> [snorts] >> And that 22-year-old guy can follow me anywhere in this arcade he wants to, cuz he doesn't even have to be close to me. He can be on the second floor and watch me on the first floor.
30:40He can be on the first floor and watch me on the second floor. It's easy.
30:43That's why I picked the arcade. But you don't want you or him to make each other. Maybe you never want to make eye contact with these people. And that's what That's what happened here. I'll I'll read this little passage. You were You were in the in the arcade and you said, "I squinted down the barrel of the plastic rifle.
31:03You were playing some [ __ ] dinosaur game, shoot the dinosaur. The T-Rex was looking right at me, clawing at the dirt with its hind leg. I had a good clean shot at it. My finger hovered over the trigger. At that moment, a figure appeared around the right-hand side of the arcade cabinet, little more than two arms breaths away from me. It was someone I recognized from earlier in the day, but it wasn't Puma. It was Bomberman, the guy from outside the knockoff shop hours ago and miles across town. In the confusion of that moment, there was no time to calibrate my reactions. We locked eyes, each of us
31:33visibly recognizing the other. My heart stopped. I had been made. Now they knew for sure that I had intelligence training. Bomberman's mouth hung open.
31:41On impulse, I squeezed the blue plastic trigger. My shot went wide. The T-Rex roared and charged me. Its jaws clamped shut and blood red text filled the screen. Game over. There's no way the timing was that perfect.
31:51>> [laughter] >> I This was one part I didn't buy. Like you definitely shot and that was I don't know, 5 minutes later. But you locked eyes with this guy, you know.
32:00I mean that's horrible. Yeah. It's horrible. I mean, it's uh the thing that's so nasty about it is how fast it all went wrong. Yeah. I mean, I'm in the arcade. I'm playing the [ __ ] game.
32:13First of all, if anybody's played like these I think this was like a Jurassic Park game. Nobody ever beats the [ __ ] Tyrannosaurus in the actual game. It costs like costs like $5. But regardless, regardless, um I thought I was doing everything right. I was like, "Oh yeah, they got the team out there.
32:28They're going to send the young guy in.
32:30Uh you know, the next person up on the list is the is Earmuffs. I'm going to be good to go. I've got 4 more hours to kill and then they're going to be off shift. I thought I had it all on lockdown.
32:39And uh and then my peripheral eyes caught somebody familiar that was not the right person. Had I Had my periphery caught Puma, the guy wearing the Puma suit, I would have been perfect. I would have been like, "Got it." Like that's exactly what I expected. But instead, it's like when you see something that's just out of place and you do a double take, [ __ ] the wrong person was there. And I looked at him and I was like, "What?"
33:03And then clearly he was also surprised to see me because there he was looking at me.
33:10If you've ever been to an arcade, this is what kills me. Every time I go to an arcade now.
33:15>> [laughter] >> He's got arcade PTSD. It's In a way, it's it's ridiculous. But the next time you're in an arcade, the next time you go to, you know, whatever the the adult arcade is or anything else, you'll notice nobody makes eye contact.
33:27>> Yeah. Nobody looks at anybody. You're there with your friends, you're looking at the bar, you're checking out asses and tits, you're doing whatever you're doing, but you're not making eye contact with strangers.
33:36And it felt so horrible in that moment cuz I was like, "We're looking at each other in this [ __ ] place where nobody's looking at each other."
33:44>> How long was it? Like 2 seconds, 5 seconds? I think in reality, it was probably a second to a second and a half.
33:50>> But it felt longer.
33:51>> But it felt so long.
33:52>> Was it kind of like that scene in The Town where they like get out of the car after they they did the big getaway and the cop's staring right at him and they're like, they just look at him like this and then the cop goes, >> [laughter] >> "You didn't see anything." And he just walks away cuz he's like, "That wasn't supposed to happen." I don't remember The Town, but probably. Ah, you got to watch that movie.
34:11Yeah.
34:12But it doesn't feel good. And uh and it feels so naked and dirty. And uh and you're And then however long it it was is irrelevant because what it feels like is I just I just stepped on a hornet's nest. Like this whole thing is going to explode. I thought for sure that this dude he saw me, I saw him, he's going to step away and he's going to call in on the radio and he's going to be like, I got made. And as soon as he says he got made, the commander of the unit is going to be like this person's intelligence trained because you can't in the game of espionage, you can't be on the surveillance team and claim that
34:52you got burnt or claim that you got made and have it be because of your own error.
34:58They all cover each other's backs that way. So, it can't be your mistake that made you get caught.
35:02If you got caught, it's because they were trained and they saw you. Mhm.
35:06That's how you always escalate cases.
35:08That's how you make sure that nobody ever questions the surveillance report, right? So, I was like, oh, this is standard procedure. This person's going to get out, he's going to say I got made. Commander's going to call in to command and say, "Hey, we've got an intelligence trained operative." At that point, either they're going to send in the capture squad because they've been waiting for me to give them a cue that I'm intelligence trained or they're going to escalate the case and I'm going to have a new team on me in the next 2 hours or I'm going to have a team that just picks me up in the morning and like
35:36it's going to get worse.
35:38There's no way it goes from this to better. It only goes from this to worse and I don't even know what worse is going to look like, which is just incredibly disheartening.
35:49You were saying that you were doing some things during this time that I guess you were trained on like at the farm or at CIA to reduce stress.
35:59>> Yeah, and prepare your body for what's coming next. Like is this strictly like breathing type things or are there also thought exercises?
36:06>> They're both. Yeah, it's a great point.
36:07There's there's breathing exercises. I mean, things that you can learn in in anybody who's been through adult therapy has probably learned breathing exercises that we learn at CIA from box breathing to deep breathing to to um resistance breathing where you where you take a deep breath and then you resist as you ex as you exhale it. There's all sorts of ways that you can artificially slow your heart rate, which reduces your blood pressure, which allows for clearer thought. So, of course, I'm doing that as best I can without looking like I'm doing that as I'm in like a crash bang wreck up car game trying to burn more
36:39time.
36:41But then you're also going through thought exercises where where you're creating multiple hypotheses about what may have happened and what may happen next, and you're trying to identify what's the most probable, what's the least probable, and what can you do next because you want to create the most important thing when you feel overwhelmed with emotion, the most important thing is to create time. Mhm.
37:00Because your [clears throat] logical brain works much slower than your emotional brain.
37:06So, when you feel emotional, you feel the pressure to make fast decisions.
37:12When in fact, what you need to do is you need to to give your emotions time to do whatever they're going to do.
37:17But but don't make a decision until you give your logical brain a chance to catch up. Cuz your logical brain will catch up. I I think I've given you this example possibly, but uh at some point I'm sure when you were a kid, you were walking through a dark room and you saw something in the corner that spooked you.
37:34Mhm. Oh, it's a rat. Oh, it's a snake.
37:36Oh, it's a monster.
37:38And then a split second after that, you realize it's just a crumpled up t-shirt or it's just a a book that fell off the bookshelf laying open, right?
37:47And then after you have that, you feel a sense of relief. That's exactly how the brain works even as an adult. Something triggers you and you jump or you startle because you're your emotional brain works so fast. It takes a half a tick or two before the logical brain is like, "Oh, wait a second. That's not a monster. That's a book. That's not a rat. That's a t-shirt, right?" The same thing happens when you're making decisions in business, when you're making decisions in the field. It's never as bad as you think it is first.
38:14You just have to give yourself time to work through it. So, that's what I was trying to do is give my logical brain a chance to catch up so that instead of just thinking a SWAT team's going to show up and I'm dead, I think, well, maybe not. Maybe something else will happen first.
38:30When did you start to process that maybe you had dodged a bullet? Like how long after that?
38:35I didn't I didn't think that I was safe.
38:38Yeah, you never thought you were safe, but when did you think like, "Oh, they're not literally sending in like the SWAT team to take me to the torture chamber this instant." [laughter] Oh, this instant?
38:47>> Yeah. Um I would say it the last stop that I made before I called it a night was at a men's clothing store.
38:56And when I walked into that men's clothing store, and I still had surveillance behind me, and it was still the same team with the same people in the same vehicles, that's when I started to think like, I it's not game over yet.
39:07Something else is happening.
39:10There's still there's still room somewhere. There's still room for flexibility. You were trying on belts, you were saying? Belts, jackets. You trying them around the neck or what?
39:19>> [laughter] >> No, just uh there's uh if you've ever traveled, it's just shocking how predictable men's stores are. They all have the same thousand options for belts and jackets and hats.
39:33All right, so you get back to the hotel, and you're still thinking like, "Ooh, maybe they're going to take me at the hotel." And it was cool. You were calculating like the most logical times they might like burst through the door to take you based on what the attention would be from the people on hand. And you thought it was going to be between 10:00 or 11:00 at night. What Why did you think that?
39:53>> Because it's the right time of day to make the biggest scene with the least reaction. Here's here's what was so fascinating to me in hindsight as I was going through writing the memoir.
40:05You know, everybody makes a big deal, especially in the United States. We all promote training. Like, "Oh, get training, and we've got the best training." And you know, we we go out of we spend money out of pocket to go go you know, survival training and SEAL training and all this other kind of training to try and make ourselves tough.
40:20What nobody ever talks about is how that [ __ ] training can work against you.
40:25And what happened for me as I was reviewing, as I was going through my memoir, as I was writing the memoir, I was like, holy [ __ ] man. I My training in a lot of ways created a whole hell of a lot more stress and effort than if I would have never been trained. Don't get me wrong, the training saved my life, but nobody talks about the fact that when you actually need to use that training, all the other [ __ ] that's going through your head is just burning and burning.
40:52It's burning resources, it's burning cycles, it's burning speed, it's burning all sorts of stuff. So, I thought like I I'm exercising my surveillance detection route because I think I know how to do it because I was trained a certain way, and then they actually reacted in a way different from my training.
41:09And now I'm going through this exercise in the hotel room where I'm like, well, if they're going to burst into my room, here's how I would do it. So, then I'm building up this reaction to something that's going to happen in my mind at a certain time because that's how I would do it.
41:23It doesn't happen that way. They did it differently.
41:27And it's like there's these instances throughout this the memoir where I'm like, I was trained to do it this way, they did it a different way. I was trained what I would call best in class, they were clearly not operating best in class. So, then that makes it really difficult to predict how someone's going to operate.
41:44Cuz what what's their training school?
41:46Yeah.
41:47Now, did were you already thinking to yourself cuz you're like sitting on your bed in the hotel room and kind of sweating this out, but it's a long time you're sitting there sweating this out.
41:58Had you already like accepted in your head that this was the last time you ever going to be coming to this place?
42:03Yeah, I think I I mean even before that, I knew that this would be my last trip into Falcon, probably for the rest of my life. Yeah. Which I'm not super sad about. Falcon's a cool place, but it's definitely not that cool a place.
42:17Um but yeah, it was a it was a little bit of a bitter sweet moment cuz the last There are still places I would have loved to have gone. Like there's my favorite restaurants, my favorite coffee shops, my favorite tourist stops, my favorite museums that I that I came to love while I was there and now they're gone to me forever. Like I could have had one more chance. I was at the MoMA here in Manhattan yesterday.
42:43And I had no idea that Starry Night by Van Gogh is on the wall in MoMA. I had never seen [clears throat] it before in my life.
42:49And I've seen hundreds of pictures of it just like everybody else has, but nothing compared to standing 6 in away from the from Starry Night by Van Gogh and seeing the paint and seeing the and like seeing it.
43:04And I know I can always go back and see it again.
43:08The stuff that I saw there, I'll never get to see it again.
43:12Yeah, I mean you do kind of know though going into the job there's a D-Day at some point.
43:18Yeah. You know, even if it you don't want it to be as dramatic as yours ended up being, but there's a point where something gets revealed afterwards or you know, you have a successful mission and now they're on to it and you're not going to be able to do that. So in some ways, I mean mentally you had to be prepared for that. Yeah.
43:34Yeah, I mean I would say yes, but that's another kind of sign of my age and ignorance. I didn't expect it to happen so soon. I didn't expect it to happen second tour. I didn't expect it to happen when I was still like, you know, in my early 30s. I thought that's the kind of thing that happens to you when you're mid-career, 15 years in the job, right?
43:53Right.
43:54So you were still nervous cuz it was supposed to be a three-day trip, but during this whole day where you're doing SDRs and trying to evade these guys, you were also getting your flight changed to the morning to basically get out of there and you had in your head a cover story that you know, you accomplished what you needed to at your meeting, so you're going back home to the third country that you always go home to.
44:17And it was an early flight, you get out of there and you go to the airport, but you're thinking to yourself the most logical way for them to take me, even before you were going there, is to have them pull me out to get a second security check at the airport cuz you go into a room no one sees Season and they never have to see you again. So, did you It seemed like you thought that was probably going to happen. Yeah, so you know, it's let's this is a great opportunity to talk about how different the movies are from real life.
44:46Hopefully, even just the people listening to the conversation who haven't had a chance to read the book yet or maybe will never read the book, read the [ __ ] book.
44:54But, >> [laughter] >> even description. Even the people who don't, I hope that by now they've come to realize professional intelligence is a game of disappearing, of not acting suspicious, uh-huh, but having nefarious intent nonetheless.
45:12So, when it comes time to self-evacuate or self-exfil out of a country, you really only have two or three options. You can [ __ ] run for the hills and do whatever you need to do to escape through a jungle on a boat, over a mountain, and get out. Problem is you're being followed. And as soon as you make a break, everybody knows what you're doing.
45:34That's it. Yeah. That's it. And then they just call in a [ __ ] wilderness team instead of a downtown urban surveillance team and they wrap you up in the wilderness.
45:41Or you try to go some route where you have somebody else facilitate your escape. You try to rent a private boat charter, you try to rent a private plane, uh you try to hide yourself in somebody's trunk.
45:53Problem is you have a [ __ ] signal in your pocket in your cell phone.
45:57Everybody that's helping you has a signal that's coming out of their device.
46:00Once again, they see you make a break for it. They watch you fall off the cellular map and they're like, "We got a runner."
46:06And then shoo, all teams come in. The strangely the way that you get out easiest, the way that you get out with the highest chance of success is to actually use all the formal borders that are in your place.
46:19So, for me, I did the calculation in my head. I was like, "You know what?
46:23Uh I got made in the arcade. They haven't wrapped me up yet.
46:28I still have the same surveillance team on me outside that I did for the rest of the day.
46:32Either they're not communicating or they're communicating poorly or uh or there's something else going on here. Maybe it's budgetary, maybe it's logistics, who knows. But I don't have any reason to try to run.
46:46So, let's just try to cross the border.
46:48Let's see if the best chance is actually just to cross the border because I know if they suspect me they'll wrap me up at the airport anyways. And at least if they wrap me up at the airport, it's in front of everybody. It's a formal government thing. Like, now all of a sudden it's going to be an international issue because they took me at a legal border.
47:06It's public. Yeah.
47:08Also, that's why I chose We We made as big of a splash as we could. I sent emails and made phone calls to try I sent out lots of signals that said, "Hey, I'm leaving early. Leaving tomorrow 6:00 a.m.
47:19Leaving from, you know, this airport.
47:21You guys I'm not trying to hide it."
47:23And uh and that was the best I could do until I got to the airport and got pulled aside in the secondary.
47:30What happened when when you got pulled aside? Obviously, you're like, "Oh, fuck." But what what went down in there?
47:35>> Yeah, all [ __ ] [ __ ] me is right. And then on top of that I'm glad I was right about this. At least I knew that this could happen. So, here are the chips that they have, here's the chips that I have. And then it got really strange and and I and I love this part of the story and I really there's no other reason to read this.
47:54It's a must to read this for the story that happens at secondary, because >> [snorts] >> I was just telling you how training works against us sometimes.
48:02This is one of those instances where the training that I had received in handling an interrogation, countering an interrogation, resisting an interrogation, all of those things were very useful.
48:13But what was the most useful to me was understanding how the interrogation I was being exposed to was so different than what I was trained. Mhm. It was so much less professional. It was so much less uh uh specific. It was so much less intentional. It was almost chaotic. And if anything, what that did is it gave me confidence through the interrogation. I was like, "Holy [ __ ] What I went through at the farm was worse than anything I'm going through now.
48:41Right? What I went through after I [ __ ] up with Major Bondoy, however many years ago, 4 years ago, is worse than what I have now. And I could actually walk away from that, and I can't walk away from this." It was just so wildly interesting to see the training really come full circle. I was like, "This is why we do what we do."
48:57Now, if only I can tell somebody this, and I have to not [ __ ] this up right now.
49:02But they you felt like they the guys who were questioning you were either like out of the loop or under-trained. And when they were doing it, like you're saying, it wasn't up to par. So how quickly after you sat down did you realize like, "Ooh, I might be getting out of here"? I mean, it was fast. So here's what's Well, I didn't know how fast I'd be getting out of there. But here's what I will say. I sat down, and it was just within a few minutes of sitting down that the interrogation started. That's a no-no.
49:31That's a no-no. In real interrogations, you let them sweat.
49:34>> got a flight to catch. They don't care about my flight.
49:37>> Yeah. I mean, think about what you went through when we interrogated you.
49:41Right? We We at least let you We were literally on a on a filming schedule, but we still let you sweat it out for 5 or 7 minutes.
49:49There was no sweatshop at all here, right? You're supposed to force a person to sweat and let the time do the work for you. You're supposed to sit them in a room that's uncomfortable. I sat in a room that was perfectly comfortable.
49:59You're supposed to sit them in a room that intimidates them. I got sat in a clean, bright, white room.
50:05Nothing uncomfortable here, folks, right? Like it just wasn't up to snuff for what we do in the West. Now, either we're monsters or these guys were not prepared to be interrogating a potential suspected intelligence officer.
50:23One way or the other.
50:24>> How long was it? Overall, it took about 90 minutes, right? For the entire for the entire interrogation to happen, which was plenty of time for me in an air Well, not plenty of time, but it was it was enough time for me to still get to my airplane, but it was just another example of that's not how it would have worked for me, right? I would have let the dude sit there for 90 minutes with no food, no water, and I would have turned the [ __ ] heat up or down. And then just check in and be like, "Oh, we haven't forgotten about you. Are you doing okay? Is there anything I can get you?" Dump a little water on him.
50:52>> [laughter] >> Zip tie him to the chair. It's the little things.
50:55>> Yeah. The little things. Let them know you care.
50:57>> You know, I got you.
50:59So, they you get through this. They're obviously like somewhat out of the loop, but they had been told at least to flag you.
51:07And then they let you go, and you were like You got to act normal. Going to the even though you're trying to catch this flight, you got to just walk to it, and you get there, you get on the plane, then you got to think about how long it takes to get out of the airspace in Falcon. Yes. It was a whole It was the worst flight I've ever been on because it's never far enough. Every time the [ __ ] plane turns, every time it's like it's just doing what a plane does, but in your mind you're like Are they going back?
51:33>> [laughter] >> How >> with us." What is going on?
51:38Um and then, you know, you finally It wasn't until I entered my third-party my third-country location I was actually on the ground cuz I'm on a country carrier, a country controlled aircraft for Falcon. So, it's not until I'm off that [ __ ] airplane that I feel like I'm actually not still on the ground in the country.
51:58>> that [ __ ] ground when you get down there.
51:59>> Dude, I don't even care if it had someone homeless guys piss on it.
52:02>> with it.
52:03>> [laughter] >> I've never been so happy to be in this [ __ ] hole in my life.
52:09Yeah.
52:11And then you celebrate and then you realize that you're hungry and then you have a [ __ ] giant diarrhea [ __ ] and uh and then you're you're all [ __ ] up cuz you realize all the cortisol dump and you're just like I'm not a Superman at all. I'm just a frail weak little man.
52:25>> insane rush. You got to be like I got those [ __ ] Yeah, I mean there's a little bit of that. That's only a little bit though. The most of it is like holy [ __ ] holy [ __ ] holy [ __ ] And then then you start the whole explanation to CIA. And guess how many of them believed me?
52:41Zero. I mean James James and the the rest of the cell had my back. But once I started telling people like this is what happened to me, everybody was like you [ __ ] up and you need to report how you [ __ ] up cuz we don't know cuz we weren't there.
52:55So, and then that turned into a whole after action report and the whole cell had to start we had to scrub everybody's records, everybody's files, everybody's cases to see where the [ __ ] up it happened cuz we had to assume that the reason I was under surveillance was because somewhere we had made a mistake.
53:10Did you ever find it? We never found a mistake on our side.
53:14So, that left the only other explanation The mole.
53:19So, even though you guys were a cell set up so that the mole wouldn't have access to that.
53:26Something happened to where they at least knew who you were. The mole. The mole knew.
53:32>> And we had set up the cell so that I was exposed. That was something >> I'm the courier. So, that's how we had set it up and we set it up that way intentionally and then and setting it up that way was beneficial to the CIA mole hunt on their side.
53:45So, even after we had done our scrub and Langley had done their scrub, everybody came back and was like, "There was no error in operations. This was This was the mole found you and the mole reported you and the good news happy story at the end, they found the mole and they were able to operate on the mole in large part because we got the right person to make the right mistake at the right time."
54:09That was what was confusing me and I found the mole on one Google search. So, everyone [laughter] out there can I don't know, like are we allowed to do that if the camera's on me and I say search something and then it pulls up?
54:19>> Try it. And you don't confirm >> going to confirm or deny.
54:22>> All right, so I'm going to you let's let's get the camera on me. Joe, Google this cuz I'm going to use the words in the book.
54:30CIA informant arrested O'Hare Airport cash Which one do you want to go, chief?
54:52>> That first one.
54:56Camera's still on me, right? Still on me, Andy?
54:59>> [laughter] >> Still on you. Can I read the headline, Andy?
55:02>> man.
55:02>> All right. How a $230,000 debt and a LinkedIn message led an ex-CIA officer to spy for China. Kevin Mallory went years without a steady job making him a right target for recruitment, court documents say. Now, you're not going to confirm or deny, but the person that you write about in the book is named Scimitar and what was confusing to me is that the guy had a CIA background according to what you write, but had been outside of that for a long time.
55:31So, I think you wrote at some point he tried to get back in too, but didn't necessarily get in. So, how did he get access to like clearly some of the highest people in Falcon House to be able to get information, you know?
55:46So, one of the things that we we find with moles, we find with what we call internal penetrations, is that they they have a abilities to tap into networks of persons, people that they know, and then they also have the ability to tap into physical control networks that they have access to.
56:07So, whether or not Kevin is the right scimitar or whether it's somebody else, what we found is that the person who was able to report on Falcon House had both access to the systems at some point to some level and access to the people at some point and at some level.
56:26And that was you said this in the book, he he wasn't discovered till after you guys had left CIA. And if you think about it, let's just I mean, let's talk about the the meta, right? The meta strategy behind the book.
56:41We created a book that was transparent because that's what we wanted to give.
56:46CIA read our transparent book and said, "The American people will never see this." So, then we asked them, "How do we make this story? How do we make the details of this, the important parts of the transparency that we want to share?
56:57How do we make this available?" At first, they said, "No no ball." Later on, as we got into more legal back and forth and we started exploring the option of suing CIA, then they started to play ball a little bit more.
57:10So, what is in this book is still what CIA would have considered to be classified from 3 years ago, but it also allows for the areas where they have reviewed it and they have said, "You're allowed to say this." So, whether the O'Hare airport was something that we intentionally intended to say at the beginning or whether that's something CIA came in with at the end is up to the reader to determine.
57:35But either way it was allowed in there.
57:36Correct.
57:37>> That we can pull on that kind of threat.
57:40Did you like while you guys were still there though? First of all, when once you get made and get out of there and have this daring escape and then report it back and it gets handled and whatever, what happens to the cell after that cuz now they don't have a courier?
57:54They find a new courier. When we built the architecture for the cell model, we made it in such a way that couriers, the nodes as we called them, could always be replaced and that the scale, the model could be scaled in other places. So, Wolf found a new a new courier. And when when G and I both left Wolf to go on to our next operation, they found a new targeter, too. Mhm. And then we helped start to train other units of CIA around the world how to build their own cell model.
58:26Some people picked it up, some people hated it, but everybody that picked up the cell model had their targeter, had their case officer pool, had their courier. Courier wasn't always a Sue, sometimes the courier was a junior case officer or a tech person or a a logs person, a logistics person.
58:44But we all had the same kind of model with the same idea in mind.
58:48So you this mission was clearly a success because you invented something new by using something that previously like an enemy had used against you.
58:58And eventually part of the work leads to them actually uncovering the mole.
59:04And also along the way you're getting a lot of intel on Falcon that you wouldn't be able have been able to access if >> [snorts] >> the people that need to get that information had, you know, some sort of direct connection to the mole. Right.
59:20It's actually funny cuz from CIA's point of view, the success was for the exact opposite of the order that you're laid out. What do you mean? The first reason we were successful was because we got information on Falcon that we didn't previously have.
59:31>> Right. Okay. And then And then we also got them all. We also got them all.
59:33Great. Okay. So, you see that uh later there's people from CIA who are publicly talking about not necessarily the detail you did, but the model of like having compartmentalization, which is kind of what for case officers, which is kind of what you invented here. So, clearly in the modern day some version of this has been adopted at a high level across the agency around the world for different missions. Right. So, what's fascinating is that in the immediate aftermath, the the last few years of my career, I trained other people how to do this.
60:09My wife was also called in to train other people how to do this. We very quickly rose through leadership ranks from middle managers to senior managers based on the success of operations and our success exporting this model. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below.
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