Most Replayed Moment: Ex-CIA Reveals What Spies Know About Human Nature

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/15993ee6b212ab8b

Uh
John, how did you come to be a CIA spy?
When I was nine years old.
I told my parents that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up.
It came time to
Apply for college.
And I only applied at one university, George Washington University in Washington, because
It was two blocks from the White House, and it was one of only three schools in America that offered a Middle Eastern studies program.
I was one of only four people in that brand new
Middle Eastern Studies program.
I stayed for a master's degree in legislative affairs with a focus on foreign policy analysis.
I was taking a class in that program called The Psychology of Leadership.
It was taught by an eminent psychiatrist named doctor Gerald Post.
And
He gave us an assignment.
one uh one day where we had to shadow our bosses. We had to just follow our bosses for a week. Your bosses. Yeah, I worked
at a labor union called the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. And so we were just supposed to follow our boss around for a week and then write a psychological profile.
I used
dozens of, you know, footnotes from psychological, you know, psychology texts and I ended up saying that he was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies and you know, I had these citations.
I pass the paper in.
Doctor Post gives it back to me a week later, gave me an A, and then he wrote, Please see me after class.
So I went up to him after the class, and I said, Doctor Post, you wanted to see me.
He says come to my office.
So we went down there.
He closed the door and he says, Listen.
I'm not really a professor here.
I'm a CIA officer.
Undercover.
as a professor here.
And I'm looking for people who would fit into the CIA's culture.
I think you
would fit into the CI's culture.
Would you like to be a spy?
And I said,
Yes.
I would
He picked up the phone.
And
Call the number.
And he said, Bob
This is Jerry.
I've got a good one for ya.
Do you have some time?
And he said sure.

Be at this address in twenty minutes.
It was only one subway stop away.
So I jumped on the metro.
I went to Roslyn, Virginia, just across the river.
I had to buzz to be let in and a woman opens the door, she says, Are you here for Bob?
And I said yes.
She says, Come on in.
I'm sitting there for a moment and then this like six foot six
Three hundred and fifty pound giant
And he says,
John
Bob
How the hell are ya?
I want you to be at the George Washington University Medical School Saturday morning at eight o'clock. We've got some tests for you.
I said, Okay.
And then we shook hands and I left.
So
Saturday morning I went to the GW Medical School Auditorium.
There were like
I don't know, two hundred people there?
And they
Hand us a a test.
My wife picked me up, she said, How did you do? I said, I have no idea.
Does your wife at this point know that you are applying for the CIA?
Yes, and that was going to be pretty much the extent.
of what she ended up knowing. Cause once I got in
But you were allowed to tell her.
I was not allowed to tell her.
No.
So you told her anyway.
Yeah.
When I first applied they said listen, don't tell anybody because you may go under cover, you may go under deep cover.
And we can't have people out there who know that you're a CIA officer.
Presumably the CIA are smart enough.
To be able to check if you've told her.
Yeah.
And they ask you on the polygraph.
Did you tell her? Really. And I said, Yeah, I told her.
She's my wife. What am I gonna do?
You know, but it got to the point where I'd get home from a day where, you know, I broke into some guy's house and
and planted a camera on a bug and
I'd get home and she'd say, How's your day? I'd say, Great.
What'd you do?
Not a darn thing.
And then my phone would ring at you know, midnight and a guy would say
The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.
And I'd say uh Mersey Dotes and Dozie Doats and Little Lambsy Divy.
And that means
Meet me at the yacht club parking lot in three hours.
And then I'd leave. She's be she would say, Where where are you going? It's midnight.
I gotta work.
So I'd leave.
I'd do my meeting, I'd come home, six o'clock in the morning, just in time to shower, and shave and get dress to go to work, and she would say,
What was her name?
And I I remember this one terrible time. That's what she said to me. What was her name? The truth is, I had been sitting in a garbage dumpster.
Waiting for a guy to drive by down the alley and throw a bag of documents in.
And I stunk.
Of garbage.
I said to her,
Do I seriously smelt you?
Like I've been with a woman.

Seriously.
So
We ended up getting a divorce.
Yeah.
So you do the assessment.
Presumably you get in.
Yeah, well he he called me like two weeks later.
Bob did.
And he said, You blew
I said, Oh, great. Okay. So a month later,
They summoned me to headquarters.
And uh I was interviewed by
The office of
Near Eastern operations
The Office of Near Eastern Analysis
And the Office of Leadership Analysis I was offered the
Analysis job.
On the Iraq desk.
And what is the sum total of the training?
you were given in the variety of different roles.
that you had. Like how do they train this body? That's a good question. And the answer is vastly different depending on
Where you start your career.
So because I started mine in analysis, the immediate
Training.
was in mastering the CIA's writing style. So the most important
product that the CIA
rights every day is the PDB, the president's daily brief.
And it tells the president what
What you think he needs to know.
Okay.
When the Iraqis began moving to the
to the Kuwaiti border.
We had this big debat.
Are they gonna are they gonna cross the border?
Yes or no?
So I said.
Listen, why don't I call
The American defense attache in Baghdad.
And I'll just ask him to drive down there and look.
And tell us what he sees.
He drives down there.
Drives back, he calls me and he says
Лірили в entire Iraqi militari.
Is on its way to the Kuwaiti border.
So we wrote a thing for the president saying Iraq is gonna invade Kuwait and it's probably gonna happen in the next forty eight hours.
And when when did the president see that particular briefing? At seven AM the next morning.
Okay. And is there ever situations where the president would get it in the middle of the night?
Yes.
Yeah.
And be told in the middle of the night that's not.
There there are these levels of immediacy.
There's routine, which is like
Who cares?
And then there is um
Priority.
Which means yeah.
I'll get to it sometime today. Then there's immediate, which means
You should probably read it.
First.
But then there's
Flash?
Which means
Oh my god, something terrible just happened.
You should probably wake the president.
And then there's critic.
Which means they're coming over the embassy walls.
We're at war.
Wake up the president, scramble the jets. Nine eleven. Nine eleven.
Mm-hmm. That's a critic.
Yeah.
So going back to this question of
Your training.
Yeah.
What is it that the

CIA teach you about human nature.
And how to use human nature to your advantage.
That could be transferable to
other disciplines in life like business or
Well this is gonna sound
Not very nice.
But it's it's
real life. It's everyday life. Especially in
In business.
The CIA
actively seeks to hire people who have what they call sociopathic tendencies.
Not sociopaths.
Sociopaths have no conscience.
They'll just blow right through a polygraph exam.
But they're impossible.
To
corral. They're impossible to to
Yeah.
Keep.
Under rain.
Uh, and it's because they're not able their brains won't allow them to feel regret or remorse.
Now in business
Most CEOs are sociopaths.
Most, not all, but most
Especially in big companies because they claw their way to the top, usually on the backs of the people around them.
They don't feel bad, screw in the next guy.
To get that next promotion.
The CIA wants people like that.
Because
Those are the people
who are gonna break into a foreign embassy. A normal person
would not advocate breaking into a foreign embassy that's sovereign territory of a foreign country. I would.
I'd be glad to do it.
Why?
Because we're the good guys.
So do you have sociopathic tendencies? Absolutely.
And what are your sociopathic tendencies?
My sociopathic tendency
Was
To operate in
Legal, moral, and ethical grey areas.
Specifically.
That's what it was.
I I'm really curious about what we can learn about human nature from someone whose job was to meet strangers and to get them to basically sometimes
To turn against their own country.
I I'm really interested in and I think I think it's informative because so many of us
you know, when we think about what l good leadership is or what good sales
M man or woman ship is.
Um it seems like there's transferables.
I guess for some people it's family, I guess for some people it's something else.
That hook.
That you're talking about that thing that gets them. And the word that they use at the CIA for the hook.
Is a vulnerability.
And it's not really a vulnerability in every case. Now
Mm.
Ninety-five percent studies have been done about this internally at the CIA. Ninety five percent of the people who agree to become spies for us.
Do it for the money.
Right. It's it's a simple
Cash transaction.
You give me money.
I'll give you secrets.
Ninety five percent. So you telling me that you think human motivation is ninety five percent driven by money? Yes. Really? Yes.
The rest was
Love and family.
Um
Ideology.
Revenge.
And excitement.
You're gonna get a handful of people
who are hooked on James Bond movies and they will do it. I mean you're gonna pay them anyway, but they will do it just for the adrenaline rush.
It's interesting'cause when I look at this list of things and I compare it to
Business.
Mm-hmm.
I would say it's slightly different from my experience of hiring people. Specifically of hiring people. I tend to think that

themselves like why would someone leave a company right now like
I don't know, open AI.
And go work at a startup.
They're gonna get paid way more at OpenAI. You've got these e this equity and these grants and but people are
On mass doing that. And even when I think about the early days of Google, people left the big conglomerates that would pay them more.
And they went and worked for Larry and Sergei.
Um getting paid way less. Right. But to be involved in something small, scrappy exciting.
And and so I and this is what when I think about when I sit you know, probably I've had thousands of people in my life now.
Across my businesses.
And money is a factor, but it doesn't tend to be the biggest
Factor.
It tends to be, in my experience.
There's a particular
hero's journey in their mind that they want to be
seen through. They want to complete.
Uh-huh.
You know, there's a particular w way that they see themselves
And they want to fulfill that.
Oh, I could get that.
I I work with a
With a very, very tiny startup right now called Ivy Cyber.
And uh it it focuses on privacy software, you know.
Things like you know, scrambling your data so it can't be intercepted. That that sort of thing.
And
I've participated in a couple of pitches to uh
to
Angel investors.
And they'll say exactly the same thing that you did. And this is why I was confused when I heard that money was ninety five percent.
Because I I just think
Especially in the work that you I don't know, especially in the work uh that you do, I would assume. But look at it this way. I think this would explain the discrepancy.
Um you're comparing people who are making a life
Mm-hmm. Versus people who are betraying their country.
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
And what's interesting as well is in those s examples that you've given
Money is actually a proxy.
To be able to take care of my family.
Mm-hmm.
And to be able to, you know.
Fulfill my ideology.
And maybe to get excitement and revenge. Do you know what I'm saying? So even that guy that wanted the plane ticket so he could fly home. Yeah, he could he could have the money could have got him home if you've just given him
Sho the reason why he wanted to go home was because his family. His family.
That was it.
What's the extent of the things that the CIA can get?
As a
incentive for someone to
Turn against the nation to give secrets.
Quite literally anything you can imagine.
Even if it's
Against the law. Well like they're not gonna get like drugs or
you know, child prostitutes or no. Not stuff like that. I want you to
Um
Get me a s uh a green card.
Oh, yeah, sure. What if they say if the information is good enough.
Not a problem.
What if they said I want you to
I've got this.
Tax bill. I want you to make the tax bill go away.
Okay.
Gim give me the plants that Russian tank will make it happen.
What if it's an America would they speak to the IRS here and just get rid of it?
Oh, if it was an American citizen, you mean? Yeah.
Uh no.
But the why?
No.
We normally don't r recruit American citizens. By law the CIA can't operate domestically, although they have offices all over the country. Those offices are
generally to
to debrief
Business leaders
C suite officers.
Who travel to denied areas.
If you take a trip to North Korea.
Let's say
I'm gonna call you and I'm gonna say, you don't know me.
But I'm from the CIA and I understand you just went to North Korea and I was wondering if I could come over to your office for an hour and just ask you about your trip.
Ninety nine point nine nine percent are gonna say yes because they're patriots.
So I go to your office, I give you my business card
And we just chat about
You know.
Your impressions of the place and
That kind of thing.
Just to close off on this point, are there any skills that the CIA taught you or trained you in?
That you think are transferable for business that we haven't talked about?
They they trained us also in lying and lie detection.
That was actually quite important.
You know, you at the CIA you're you're a trained liar.
And this is why the divorce rate's so high. It's the highest divorce rate of any uh entity in in the US government. It's it's upwards of eighty percent.
Trained to lie. How do they train you to lie?
Hi, my name is Dave Phillips.
Um I work for an import export company.
But do they teach you the art of lying? Oh yeah. And what is the art?
You know, it's it's hard to like
It's hard to pin down. You just sort of have to have it. You have to have that ability. But the hard part is you have to keep the lies straight.
I'll give you another example.
I've never told this story before.
I was asked by headquarters, I was
Overseas in the Middle East.
And I was asked by headquarters.
to target one specific officer.
Of this foreign.
Country.
Target.
Yeah.
Hi, how are you? Oh, we've never met. I'm John. So nice to meet you.
Let me take you to lunch.
He had access to
To information that we really needed.
Uh so
They told me to
accidentally bump into him.
So I surveilled him for a week.
And he was single.
And on Saturday morning he went to
A coffee shop.
So I go into the coffee shop and I'm looking at him and he's looking at me and I said
I know you.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs? He said yes. Do I know you? I said, I am John from the American Embassy. Oh, nice to nice to see you. I said, Hey, good to see you too. You live in the area? Yes, I do. I said, Oh, so do I. I didn't. I lived like across town. Oh, fancy meeting you here at this coffee shop. I come here all the time. Do you? Yeah, he says, I come here all the time. Why don't you have a seat? he says.
So I sit down.
At the end of the conversation, I go back to the embassy and I write a cable and I said, He's gay.
I'm a hundred percent sure he's gay.
So then we started this conversation.
Headquarters and I.
How can we use that to our benefit?
Did he have a wife?
No.
Which was unusual.
At his age.
How did you know he was gay?
Oh I
I just it was a vibe.
So
Headquarters says.
We want you to pretend that you're gay.
I said, Oh, come on, you guys.
No, we really need the information. You gotta pretend that you're gay.
I said, Okay.
I'll do it.
I'll do it for Uncle Sam.
So
I call him and I said, Hey, I have two tickets to this show and
I was hoping maybe you'd be free.
Maybe we'll grab some sushi afterwards.

He said, Yeah, I'd love to.
So we go to the show. He thoroughly enjoyed it.
And we go for sushi afterwards.
And
Then we go out again and he says, Why don't you come over to my place some night and I'll I'll make dinner? I said, Great.
So I go over to his place he made a lovely dinner.
And then I thought, Well, I have to invite him to my place. So I told my wife, You're gonna have to like get out.
So she left.
I made dinner.
I removed all the pictures of us together. And we had just gotten married. So we had like our wedding picture up and everything.
At the dinner.
He leaned in to kiss me.
And I instinctively backed off.
And he said, Oh my God, I'm sorry.
I thought you're gay. And I said, Oh no, I
I am gay.
I'm
Yeah, I'm I'm not into hairy guys.
And he's like oh
Okay. I said I'm sorry.
I think you're great.
But I'm I'm not feeling it.
You didn't kiss him. No.

So
We remained friends.
And in the end he gave me the information.
Because we were friends. And then he he opened up. He's like, I can't tell anybody I'm gay. They suspect I am. And they pass me over for promotion. And my boss asked me, Is there something in your personal life that you're not telling me he knows I'm gay?
I said, listen, your culture's backwards.
Don't tell them you're gay.
Just say that you've just never met the right woman and inshallah the right woman is coming, you know, in your life at some point and
I actually Googled him a couple of years ago and he did become an ambassador finally.
And he's still working in that country now. Mm-hmm.
Does that kind of stuff happen a lot in the CIA where y you have to take one for the team? Yes.
Have you ever taken one for the team? No.
You I'm not sure you're telling the truth.
When did it c come close?
I was a brand new operations officer.

And
There was
A woman
in this foreign intelligence service.
who was
The ugliest woman I've ever seen in my life.
Like you want to avert your eyes. Like she came off the side of Notre Dame.
She was a you know, a stone gargoyle with a giant mole right here with a giant hair coming out of it. That kinda ugly.
So
So I took her to lunch.
And she was very nice.
And then I thought I did something kinda gutsy by C CIA standards.
'Cause it was early on in our relationship. I invited her
Now as a rule.

The people in this country were not allowed to socialize with us.
Privately.
It had to be like their whole office.
you know, or several of them together.
So I asked her.
Just to meet me.
Privately.
For lunch on Saturday, don't tell anybody. So she was someone from the Middle East? Yes.
And she agreed. And I was like Oh my God.
She said yes, and I ran back to the office. I was like, she said yes to a lunch on Saturday alone.
And my boss says, Okay.
Here's what I want you to do.
I want you to fuck her.
And I said, What?
I said, have you ever seen her?
And he said, I know.
But we're the good guys.
And you're gonna have to take one for the team.
And I go, Oh my God I said.
I go.
Okay.
I'll do it.
And he says, No, you're not gonna fucker. We don't do that.
I said, Well I don't know. I just started this. I've never been on an operations guy before. How am I supposed to know? He said, Come on. He said, just develop her like a normal person. You don't have to fuck her. I said, Oh my God, you almost gave me a heart attack.
But they they
Might not be mad if you did.
So long as I reported it and I got the recruitment out of it. It wasn't illegal to
Uh you know.
Sleep with assets.
Yeah, you're not supposed to sleep with assets. It has happened to a couple people I know.
And um they end up being pulled back to the United States. You have to sit in the penalty box if you do that. You're not supposed to do that.
But yeah, it happens. So sex distortion isn't a real thing.
It can be. We don't
Yeah.
When I first got hired, one of the old timers told me the story.
of about an Ayatollah that they were trying to recruit, and they set this Ayatollah up with a prostitute. And it was he had sex with his prostitute in a room where they had cameras everywhere.
And so they bumped him afterwards. They bumped into him and said, Hey
We have all these pictures. And they laid out the pictures of him, you know, butt naked with this prostitute.
And he said, Yeah.
Gimme that one an eight by ten. Give me two five by sevens of that one. How about some wallet size for this? He's like
Get out of here.
And
He said you know after that.
We just stop doing that. It doesn't work.
When you recruit somebody, you really do need the relationship to be based on mutual trust.
Not coercional pressure threatening somebody, it's it's not gonna result in a productive relationship. The Russians do it.
The Israelis do it.
But most
Intelligence services around the world don't.
Because you've been in this world.
What is it that you know about the nature of the reality that we all live in?
That the average person
Really has no idea about.
Do you know what I mean? Yeah.
Because you know, going back to what I said earlier.
Three years ago before I started doing all this podcast stuff and started interviewing people that that had been involved in spy work and CIA and all this.
I was kind of like naive to the way that the world shows I thought
I thought if I have a password on my device, my device is secure.
And I thought that.
You know? Right.
All these kind of just simple things, but
What is it that you know about the nature of reality that most people don't?
Well
I I guess it's a couple of things.
You know, John Kennedy called
The CIA the best and the brightest.
And we're not.
We're just average people.
And we're not as smart as we think we are.
We're not as worldly as we think we are.
We've pretty much missed every major global development since nineteen forty seven from the
You know, the rise of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the fall of the Soviet Union, to the Suez Crisis and the Iran hostage crisis and nine eleven and everything else. We missed it.
We're really good at day to day.
You know, updates.
For the president.
We're really good at recruiting
minor hangers on.
around terrorist groups, but the the big picture items.
We're just not good at it.
Number one.
Number two.
Until nine eleven it was against the law, like in stone.
To spy on Americans.
And now
billions of dollars are spent.
spying on Americans, whether it's NSA or CIA or
FBI or
Intelligence community contractors
Nothing.
Is secret.
Nothing. And to make matters worse.
Let's say maybe you did do something.
that law enforcement might be interested in.
They don't need a warrant anymore.
They don't need to go to a judge and say, Well, we have reason to believe, you know, blah blah blah.
All they have to do is just
Buy your metadata'cause it's for sale.
Just go to the go to the carrier.
Just buy it.
They don't need a judge's order to do that.
It's all out there.
We've made all we've made ourselves vulnerable. All of our lives are out there.
Whether it's on Facebook or X or Insta or whatever.
If they really want to get you.
They're gonna get you, which reminds me.
Of a book.
Written by doctor Harve Silverglate.
He's a professor of law at Harvard, and it's called Three Felonies a Day.
And he argues in this book that we are so overcriminalized, so overregulated in this country that the average American
on the average day going about his or her normal business commits three felonies.
Every day.
You may not mean to.
But you do.
Every day.
So
If they decide they want you.
They don't like your politics.
They can get your metadata.
They can go through that metadata.
Find crimes that they can charge you with.
And ruin your life.
And there's nothing you can do to protect yourself.
To some extent they did that to you.
Yeah.
They did.
They did that to me.
Because you spoke out about a torture programme.
That was happening in the CIA. Yeah, John Brennan wrote a letter to Eric Holder.
And said
Charge him with espionage.
And Holder wrote back.
Eric Holder was the attorney general.
Holder wrote back and said, My people don't think he committed espionage.
And John Brennan wrote back to Holder and said, Charge him anyway and make him defend himself.
So they arrested me.
Charge me with five felonies.
Including three counts of espionage. Espionage can be a death penalty case.
Charge me with espionage.
They waited until
I went bankrupt.
Ten months later.
With
two million dollars in legal fees.
And then they drop the espionage charges.
And they said, We can re add the espionage charges.
Or you can take a plea to this lesser charge.
What are you gonna do?
Roll the dice.
Knowing that the government wins ninety eight point two percent of its cases, according to Propublica?
Or do you just take the deal and make it go away?
And that's what I did.
And you got roughly two years in jail. Yeah. I uh ended up doing twenty three months.
Mm-hmm.
And for anyone that doesn't know
This was because
At some point in your career.
You spoke out about torture programs that were happening.
In Guantanamo Bay and and elsewhere. Yeah, and at secret prisons that the CIA had set up around the world.
Right.
And going back up to the top of my question here.
I I I'm really trying to speak to Jane.
Dave, who's listening to this right now. Sure. They have a normal life. Yep.
They're not really aware that spies exist and the extent of the work they do. They kind of assume that everything they see and people they interact with are normal and they think their devices and everything else is secure. What message do you have for them, a a word of warning or caution about the reality?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Elliot Spitzer, the former
Um
Governor of New York.
When he was Attorney General of New York, he
He said
Don't nod.
When you can motion.
Don't speak.
When you can nod.
And don't
Ever.

In a text message.
At the CIA on our very first day, they told us not to ever say
Or do.
Anything.
that we would be ashamed to see on the front page of the Washington Post.
I took that seriously.
The truth of the matter is, because of technology.
The way it is today.
Our whole lives are out there potentially.
For someone to see.
For someone to use against us.
So be careful what you say, be careful what you write.
Even in jest.
Because it can be taken out of context.
to target you.
And what about digital security?
You talked about the fact that
it's possible for these these forces and not just the US but other countries to be able to
hack and crack your devices and see anything on your devices. I think we will go around assuming that our devices are secure.
They're not secure.
At all.
It's not just
You know, NSA, CIA, FBI that you have to worry about.
It's
The British, the French, the Germans, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders.
The Russians, the Chinese, the Ізrays, the Iranians.
I mean everybody has these capabilities.
Everybody.
So you've got to be very, very careful.
Capabilities to do what?
To intercept communications.
I've heard you say that they can hack
Car systems.
So they could theoretically hack into my car. Yes, we know that from uh WikiLeaks. There was something in twenty seventeen called the Vault Seven Revelations. There was a
CIA software engineer who was disgruntled.
And instead of
Going to the Russians or the Chinese
He went to WikiLeaks.
And he downloaded thousands, tens of thousands of pages of
Documents classified above top secret.
And
they became what WikiLeaks called the Vault Seven documents. So they included things like
The CIA, for example
will hack into
Let's say the Iranian
ministry of interior computer system.
But they'll leave little electronic
Clues.
All written in Cyrillic.
The Cyrillic is the is the alphabet, the Russian alphabet. Okay. Yep.

Uh or
They can
Take control of your smart TV remotely.
And they can make the speaker turn into a a microphone.
So even though the T V is off.
It can still
Hear everything that's being said in the room and broadcast back to the CIA.
Can they do that with devices? Do you think that's the thing? Oh, th they could do that. When I first got hired, they were able to do that.
So you could be doing that right now with no Oh totally. Absolutely, yes.
That's old technology. And then the thing about the car.
This was revelatory.
They can take control again remotely.
Of a car's computer system.
In order to
Well
I mean
In order to
To kill you.
Crash the car. Crash the car.
Take it off a bridge, take it into a tree.
Sure.
What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.

Mm.