00:00:00
Speaker 1: I think some of what we did waterboarding, for example, was questionable, but preventing a second wave, I think follow on generations will not fully understand what that took and how surprising it was that didn't happen. All it takes is three people to take over some public transportation and it didn't happen. It's incredible, especially since you know, if you look at the three of us, this is the crew you have to work with.
00:00:28
Speaker 2: I'm John Ceipher and I'm Jerry o'she I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the.
00:00:36
Speaker 3: World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
00:00:42
Speaker 2: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
00:00:46
Speaker 3: In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
00:00:49
Speaker 2: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
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Speaker 3: We'll break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
00:00:59
Speaker 2: Welcome to me Mission implausible.
00:01:04
Speaker 4: Hey guys, I've been thinking what my career might have been like if I'd met you when you were active agents, and I was an active international correspondent, and you could have told me lots of secret things. I know, I know you wouldn't have. But I think journalists have this fantasy. Usually in a media organization, there's these conspiracies that the CIA controls us, which we're going to get into in today's show. But the reality is often there is one or two journalists who are known to have good CIA sources. I don't even know what that means because I've never been one of those people. But I think that means like people in the office building, not actual field agents, like high level you know.
00:01:45
Speaker 3: I think it means they're talking to retired people, or they're trading on information, like you're talking to the Office of Public Affairs, where they say, if you don't publish that story that you somehow got through congressional age of something will If you don't publish it, we'll give you something else for a while. So I think there may be some trading back and forth. From what I've seen, most of the leaks, they seem to come from elected officials, because we take polygraphs every five years, so if we talk to journalists like it'll come out.
00:02:14
Speaker 2: Well, First of all, Adam, welcome back after boguarding us for several weeks and not joining us and forcing Jerry and I to pull something deep in our soul.
00:02:22
Speaker 1: To speak about.
00:02:23
Speaker 2: But sorry to Jerry's point, I never, never, ever, once spoke to a journalist when I worked inside, and I don't think people in our part of the business. I'm sure there's two occasions as possible, you know, or in the old days, people would sit in the bar and be rooted in the fifties or whatever and talk with journalists. But you know, for us, it's best to stay away from journalists. We're not allowed by regulation or law to use them as sources, and so we stayed away from them.
00:02:48
Speaker 5: And so I think when you.
00:02:49
Speaker 2: See these people with good CIA sources, it's probably people in the administration who are telling them tidbits that they pick up on, or retired people like I do talk to journals us now. I don't tell them secrets because I don't have secrets.
00:03:02
Speaker 3: Although I will say from time to time I think I've got a couple of secrets left, really big, juicy secrets I'm not telling anybody. And then I open up The New York Times of the Washington post and I'm like, there's the story, and in fact I read it, I'm like, whoa, I was read into this and I didn't know those details right, So I mean.
00:03:22
Speaker 2: You know somebody's talking.
00:03:23
Speaker 5: Yeah, somebody's talking. But it's usually like five or six years later the assets are gone. But it's like wha, Like how did that one get out?
00:03:31
Speaker 3: And then we'll like call somebody up who was involved in that, and like, man, it's like they got it like eighty percent right, because you never get it quite right well.
00:03:39
Speaker 2: And the thing is to understand is there's no one in the CIA, for example, who knows all the things that are happening. We're compartmented, like if I was working on Russia stuff, I didn't know what was happening in China, or I might. And it's a large organization with lots of people working on lots of sensitive stuff. Even the director doesn't know the details of lots of operations and things that he needs to be briefed. And he's briefed in general unless he's a deeper dive. So if anyone is trying to say no, no, it's this way, it's that way. Yeah, they might know that in their little cylinder we called cylinders of excellence. You really do as a joke.
00:04:11
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:04:12
Speaker 2: So in our interview, Jerry and I interview an old friend and colleague, Phil Mudd, who was a very senior officer in the CIA but then went over in a senior position in the FBI. He was an analyst but worked on counter terrorism issues. And during our interview, one of the things we talk about is this view out there that the CIA controls things and specifically controls the media. And we talked about in our interview our FKA junior who believes that the CIA was involved potentially in killing his father and he believes the CIA controls the media. I know what's interesting and new since we talked to him is Robert F. Kennedy joined the Trump campaign and there's even talk about his interest in becoming the CIA director in a Trump administration. And so it makes our interview I think more timely.
00:04:55
Speaker 5: Today. We're fortunate to have Phil Mud on the show.
00:04:59
Speaker 3: Phil is a long time senior CIA officer and CNN commentator. Phil, you started at CIA as a South Asia, Mid East analyst, and you worked your way up to be a senior analyst for CIA's counter terrorism efforts after nine to eleven where I got to know you and you were even a prime liaison between CIA and the world of intelligence and the FBI and the world of law enforcement, which is pretty special. And then you were with CNN for like almost ten years, right.
00:05:29
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, Alex Righter. It was a lot of fun. Yeah.
00:05:31
Speaker 3: Inside the agency, you were known for your insightful, fact based analytical skills. You brief presidents and senators and Congress and foreign liaison. So, Phil, it's really.
00:05:43
Speaker 5: Great to have you here.
00:05:44
Speaker 1: Thanks, thanks for having me, Phil.
00:05:45
Speaker 2: So the first question I want to do was sort of a crossover between your experience at the agency and the FBI and the media. On the campaign trail, Robert F. Kennedy Junior has repeatedly stated that the CIA has taken over the American press, the US media, all that's our run by undercover CIA operatives as part of some secret government plot to manipulate American minds. At a recent campaign event, he even said that the new head of npr A is a CIA agent. Got that wrong and that was just the latest selveo. And as you know, the CIA is taking over the American press. He stated on Twitter. The Other Day that the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and even the Daily Beast are under the control of Intelligence agency operatives.
00:06:23
Speaker 5: Rolling Stone too.
00:06:24
Speaker 2: And journals like Smithsonian National Geographic appear to be compromised by the CIA. So, Phil, you worked for quite a long time in media after you left the agency. So what is your experience about the intelligence community shaping the news.
00:06:37
Speaker 1: It's interesting. I have a professional perspective from my years as an analyst and a personal perspective. You can laugh about this stuff, and it is a little it's a little disturbing yourself, so laughable. But I always default initially to my old life as an analyst and wish that people would actually, even if you don't know anything about intelligence, breakdown how this would work if it were true. So you'd have to have a broad conspiracy in the CI, which would involve hundreds of people, none of whom I guess I ever spoken that conspiracy would extend to the leadership of many media organizations. So those media people, who many of who might not be terribly sympathetic to the CI, have agreed to this. Okay, do your multiplication hundreds of people of CI, hundreds of people in leadership positions in media. A lot of those are public companies, so they have to persuade not only their staffs to say, John or Jerry or Phillip is coming in to take over a position that he's a CIA guy and he's secretly subverting the organization. But you'd also have to tell the corporate enterprise, the stakeholders, because these are public companies, you'd have to sell out the stakeholders. Now you're dealing with thousands of people, none of whom has ever spoken. If you do took stats class, one of the best things I ever did in college as an English major was to take a semester of statistics. That's not feasible. But on the personal side, I guess, as a ten year CNN commentator, one of the most interesting jobs I ever had. You're not going to lead this. Let me give you a guess about the number of times CIA Public Affairs in ten years I was on thousands of times, thousands every show on Don Lemon, the morning shows, the afternoon shows, all of them. The number of times in ten years of thousands of appearances that CIA Public Affairs or any CI official call me. I'll give you a guess it's a round figure. I guess it's zero zero. I actually was surprised. I thought they would actually call it once in a while and say, there are some facts you might want to consider in my answer to be well, I don't do facts, but I left government. I was actually a little surprised about it. I think people don't believe that, but I don't know what to say. I think the CIA was afraid I'd get out and say, you know that the CI is trying to influence me or some mean but I was one of the national security commentators for CNN, So anybody who believes is conspiracy my personal experiences. They never called. Never It's like trying to get a Dateton Heights. I never got a call back.
00:09:02
Speaker 5: Phil Let me contradict you here.
00:09:04
Speaker 1: Did you call me.
00:09:07
Speaker 5: Because I think you're wrong.
00:09:09
Speaker 3: I can think of certainly one one thing where the government did get involved in trying to shape it, and this was when it's all in the press, where the Trump campaign actually worked with the National inquired David Pecker, right, he's admitted this on the stand under. When you're calling that journalism, I'm just saying this is a journalistic at enterprise where they agreed to make up stories about Ted Cruz.
00:09:30
Speaker 5: They also agreed.
00:09:31
Speaker 3: To make up stories. So this wasn't CIA doing it. No, No was the CIA's boss. So there is actually an example of this, but it's not the mainstream media.
00:09:41
Speaker 1: The National Choir had a reputation back in the day. I think they've declined a bit for breaking some of the best Hollywood stories there were. I mean, they were quite rigorous about what they did. But what I'm talking about is before I joined CNN, which was I don't remember in twenty twelve or two thirteen. I did Fox, I did Al Jazeera, I did all of them in CNN offer a paycheck, So I, being a bright analyst, said I'll do that. But I'm not saying it doesn't happen anywhere. I'm saying I had a ten year run of doing a lot of media, and not only did it not happen to me, I never witnessed it. I never heard about it. I sat in the green room at CNN with everybody from CI directors to senators. I was in there a lot with Lindsey Graham back in the day, a lot with the former CI director Michael Hayden. It just never and again, I know people don't believe this. It didn't happen. They CEI didn't call people, didn't try to influence this, and I never heard about this in backroom conversations over cocktails, and believe me, I will drink a cocktail that didn't happen.
00:10:39
Speaker 2: You hear people say often once an intelligence official, always an intelligence official, or something like that. Essentially, once you retire, the ant wants nothing to do with you. They want nothing to do For several years, I would try to write in if I met somebody interesting or I got something, and I've written a lot of pieces and I've gone TV two.
00:10:54
Speaker 5: They don't care.
00:10:55
Speaker 2: There's almost no back and forth.
00:10:58
Speaker 1: I was assigned as Deputy Director National Security Brands at the FBI in two thousand and five. So I was deputy director of counter Terrorism at CIA, and then when the FBI was under a lot of pressure to do better on domestic intelligence, that is, make sure the next attack doesn't happen. When I moved over to the FBI, almost instantaneously people at the CI head coders were like, you don't work here. I tried to do some joint training between the FBI agents and the CIA. The response I won't name the officer whom you both know, but was basically not only no, but FU were not doing this in that case. I was talking about doing interrogation training, which I learned a lot at the FED. The FBI is very good at interrogations, not the things that were done at our black sites, but they are very good. So I thought, why don't we do some of this jointly? And the answer I got again was FU. So to support your point, people think that there's a closed society and that when you leave there's a secret circle. It was almost the reverse. Get the hell out of here, don't call us, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. If I could just a great story about that. I quit when I was forty eight. I did not resign, which cost me a life lot of retirement money and not maybe not the smartest move I ever made. But I went to hand in my badge at CI, and I had told Director Moller, the FBI director whom I worked for in the CIA, I'm not doing any events. I want out. I'm out, So I wanted to you got to hand in your badge and you sign a bunch of documents saying I agree. I'll never speak to podcasts about the secret things I learned about. But I double parked going in because at that point there was a lot of hiring and the CI parking lot was so full. So I'm like, it's going to take twenty minutes. I go out. There's a SPO, a security protective officer, a CI cop at my car. He's like, you're double parked. I gotta give a ticket. Where's your badge? On my twenty four years it's the only day on the headquarters compound. I thought he was going to put me in a handcuffs. I don't have a badge. I just I didn't resign turn it in. I resigned. So he said, thank you, get out of here and don't go back here.
00:12:54
Speaker 2: Let's take a break.
00:12:55
Speaker 5: We'll be right back.
00:13:04
Speaker 3: And Rebecca phil I'm going to return to this thing because the question really is about what I think to be respectable mainstream media people, journalists who don't come at things with quite so much of a of a bias, and you know, New York Times, Washington Post.
00:13:21
Speaker 5: Maybe some small bias, but they are real journalists.
00:13:24
Speaker 1: I also would say there's a difference between a conspiracy theory and what I witnessed the media. The media wants to make a story. So it's your responsibility, as a reader, a listener, a watcher to say, I'm going to look at I mean to every day I look at the Wall Street Journal, I look at BBC, I look at the New York Times, I look at whatever else shows up on my feed to try to get a constellation of perspectives. Because even if you trust a journalist, and I have done a million New York Times interviews in my life, like all of us, a journalist is going to have a perspective. Sure they like President Trump, they don't like President Trump. All of us have biases. That's different than going in saying actually the World Trade Center was an inside hit job, which would require an epic belief that tens of thousands of people knew that and none of them ever went to CNN or NBC or Fox and spilled it. I mean, I had biases when I was on CNN, I knew him. I Mike, you're paying me to comment, But again, you shouldn't watch me alone. You should, you probably should, but maybe you should watch some Fox people. Make sure you read the Wall Street Journal. It's very well written. Read the New York Times. BBC is great because they give you a European perspective. Al Jazeera is interesting. Read it and sort through yourself.
00:14:34
Speaker 2: So, Phil, you're one of the few people who worked in senior positions at both CIA and FBI. What perceptions and misperceptions did you find those organizations have about each other? And then you know then the same questions of the media, like what are the perceptions miss perceptions amongst those various organizations.
00:14:48
Speaker 1: I was at the senior levels like Director Moller, Robert Mueller, who was obviously known for the rest of investigation, but was the director when I was at the FBI. I was his intelligence advisor. I saw him as often as four times a day at that level. Relationship with the CI is excellent. He and George Tennant were great friends. They used to go out to dinner all the time. At that point. It's called Mahogany row at the FBI. When you're on your Mahogany row, your job is to make things work the further you move down into junior ranks, and I suspect this is the same in corporate America. I do a lot of consulting. You can get me on Philip mud at gmail dot com. But the further you go down, the more prejudice you see. FBI. That guy I'm talking to the CI, he's using a fake name. I can't trust him. He's a liar, he's a cheat. His job is to flip people. CI. That guy's basically a reform copy. Doesn't know anything about the world. He doesn't know anything about anything sophisticated beyond putting handcuffs on people. I was actually quite disappointed with the CIA when I left at some of what I saw. But they both had great strengths and great weaknesses. The CIA is very agile, They move fast. They are huge risk takers. Partly remember they're dealing in an environment where they don't have to go in front of a court of law. So you can break laws, you can steal a laptop, you can lie to somebody which is I'm a CI officer. That's fine in terms of agilly, fast moving, and you'll look at how quickly they were into Afghanistan after nine to eleven. Great talent. There are some smart fing people there. The FBI is slower moving, but far more consistent about guidelines. They have to go in front of a quart of Wall much more management oriented in a good way. How do you put a process into place to make sure you do this properly? We did not do process at the CIA. Much better training, I thought at the FBI. I thought in terms of talent, they also had quite good talent at the senior levels, but stultified CI agility meant that it was difficult to manage. People would tell the director, knowing that sometimes they shouldn't have. The FBI was the reverse. I would joke around with Director Malo, which, let me tell you, was not the easiest thing to do. People treated him like he was made of marble. That wouldn't happen at the CIA. You do not walk into the CI director and say yes, or you say no, we're not doing that. That's wrong. You don't do that. The FBI said both had great strikes and great weaknesses. I'd close by saying I wish they could have learned more from each other, because they certainly could have.
00:17:01
Speaker 3: Considering per Robert F. Kennedy Junior, we control the media. I have to say, in my thirty three years at the agency, I never not once talked to a journalist.
00:17:13
Speaker 1: John.
00:17:13
Speaker 3: I don't think you have either, Phil did you ever have. Did you have any media experience, any exposure to the media when you.
00:17:20
Speaker 2: Were an anrest For Pete's sake, Dre, they're out there on that time.
00:17:23
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: Actually, George Tennant was a big personality, the former CI director. He had his head of public Affairs, Bill Harlotte, wanted the agency CI to have a voice. After nine to eleven, the story of the CIA became the story of des Moines. What the CIA did wasn't just secret stuff. It affected whether what happened with getting on an airplane in Iowa, it happened with alerts in California. So I think there was a sense, and maybe I'm being too apologetic, that we had a responsibility to speak to more people across America about what we did, because countering al Qaiedo was America. So Bill Harlowe said, you got to talk to the New York Times, Washington Post, and then my first on camera interview it was Tom Brokaw, and I was so scared. He was so nice, but I was petrified. But yeah, CEI wanted to put itself out and then when I got to the FBI, they did the same. We want to show that we're entering the intelligence world. So we're going to make you go talk to BBC and everybody else. Funny story. I did this through public affairs and a really aggressive producer. This really pissed me off from I forget NBCCBSAB one of them, a really aggressive producer, came in with public affairs to do an interview that they had requested through public affairs. So we're going out from my office again on Mahogany Road, the seventh floor, the Director's floor at the FBI, and this lady I could if I were signed, we'd have an issue today. I never talked to her again after this said I forgot my purse in your office. I said, okay, I'll take you back there, you pick up, we get back there. I didn't forget my purse. This going through public affairs is ridiculous. You need to talk to me directly, and I'm like, you cannot be serious. So you just lied to me in an effort to make me do something that not only violates the ethics of the FBI and the CI, but also could get me fired. I don't want to pretend like I'm holier than now, but she really pissed me off because we're taught in those environments. You don't do that right, So long answer, But yeah, I did a lot of media, which is how I got into CNN after I left, But it was all through public affairs, and believe me, that was enough.
00:19:28
Speaker 2: To turn it back to RFK stuff Again. He talked about the CIA controlling the media, but he's also talked a lot about a thing he calls Operation mocking Bird. And I know if you're familiar with that or not, it's a conspiracy theory. And he says for years, through Operation mocking Bird, the CIA secretly recruited journalists to help brainwash Americans. And he said Operation Mockingbird is alive and well today and their job is to propagandize the American people.
00:19:55
Speaker 5: So, Phil, we want to know what you were recruited into Operation.
00:19:59
Speaker 1: I was twenty four. CNN recruited me. Yes, you know again going back to I always go back to my analysts hat and ask people to do your mathematics. If that's true, that means that there are thousands of people who are aware of this over the years. Those thousands of people, not a single one of whom has ever told their story. I can see how people who are having a beer say yeah, see I recruit. It's also illegal, which means the Inspector General is to see and as we all know around this table, the Inspector General is to brutal, brutal, they will kick your ass and then say how about now I take a bat to your head. So they never inspected that. The Congress never looked at that after they found and that Congress is perfectly happy also to kick your ass. And the thousands of people in the media, none of them has ever come out with data about this, which would be a terrific story.
00:20:55
Speaker 3: And it would be people's their financial wellbeing and their reputation. Is No, I'm going to turn down this pulletzer and this huge promotion I can get by saying yes to this CIA guy who's offered me three hundred bucks a month, right, manipulating.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: How do you come up with all these people who might have declined those approaches. None of them ever spoke. They're scared, really, after how many times the CI's been crushing the media, they're scared.
00:21:19
Speaker 2: Jarry and I were texting before the show and he put it really well. He says, you know we have the aides there always be accused of running so many confluent and contradictory conspiracies that I don't know when we'd have time to go to the ground floor Starbucks, the ten staff meetings, do performance review or gasp, even conduct espionage related activity against iss North Korea.
00:21:37
Speaker 1: To the comment, especially back early after nine to eleven, people would talk about their phones being listened to. I'm like, okay, yeah, there is three hundred and thirty million Americans who's talking about cheating on their wife going to McDonald's, who's listening. And I'm sorry to make your life seem less and significant, but if you're banging your secretary, nobody cares. Your wife cares. But that's about it.
00:22:03
Speaker 3: So, Phil, I'm going to ask you to cast your mind back and see if I'm the only one that remembers this. So this is twenty ten, twenty eleven, and there was a guy by the name of Michael.
00:22:13
Speaker 5: Furlong and he was not an agency guy.
00:22:15
Speaker 1: He was Doddia.
00:22:18
Speaker 3: He came to the agency and I was in this meeting and I think you were in CTC at the time, and he says, I got this great idea. We're running with this former CIA guy, Dewey Clarice, who's an agent's infamous agency guy, and he says, to get garner intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are going out and we are basically recruiting journalists and stringers and people who helped journalists, and we've hired all these guys and so like when a New York Times journalist comes out, he's got to get a fixer and a guy who, like you can translate for him. And we're hiring those guys. And he said, Peter Bergen can co talk to been lied and next time he does that, we're going to kill him. And I remember sitting in this meeting going we're not allowed to.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: Do this with illegal This isn't illegal.
00:23:08
Speaker 3: And yeah, and so this went up the this went up the chain and reported this meeting, and Furulong went up. Not only was he fired for this idea but DD but he went up on charges.
00:23:18
Speaker 5: I don't know if he was ever found guilty.
00:23:20
Speaker 3: People don't realize the incredible like partition between the world of journalism and the world of intelligence that we maintained.
00:23:29
Speaker 5: But that really underlined for me just how serious.
00:23:32
Speaker 2: Philly you served really in the middle of the counter terrorism fight. Both at CIA and FBI, Like, looking back at it, how do you think we, the US government or we either the CI FBI did in retrospect.
00:23:46
Speaker 5: Over those years.
00:23:47
Speaker 1: Look, there's a lot of noise. Did we treat prisoners appropriately? Were there questions about American values? I've got those. I wrote a few books when I've gone on tour their appropriate questions. These are questions about American values. If you had gone out on September eleventh in two thousand and one and said, after the attacks, there will not be another one of these events, you're going to get fewer than ten percent of Americans who would say that. The Fact is that nobody believed in an open society a second attack could be stopped, and as we know from the intelligence collection, it was planning for a second attack, what we call the second wave, and it didn't happen. There's a lot of kids who have parents and a lot of parents who have kids today because of aggressive and maybe sometimes I would agree with this hyper aggressive counter terrorism operations, but the second wave never happened. I think some of what we did waterboarding, for example, was questionable, but preventing a second wave, I think follow on generations will not fully understand what that took and how surprising it was that didn't happen. All it takes is three people to take over some public transportation and it didn't happen. It's incredible, especially since you know, if you look at the three of us, this is the crew you have to work with.
00:25:06
Speaker 5: That's a miracle.
00:25:07
Speaker 3: Then, oh my god, when you go into town and you're at the piggled Wiggledy. How do you see people thinking of mainstream media as like a singular organism, as opposed to can of worms compeding worms.
00:25:21
Speaker 5: What's your sense of it.
00:25:23
Speaker 1: That's a good question. I'm going to We've been joking a lot, but I'm going to give you a serious answer. I'm a little surprised in the age of fragmented media and people's ability to find whatever they want on the Internet about how much leadership matters. If you tell people you can't trust media, if you tell them you can't trust the church, if you tell them you can't trust the police, if you say it a thousand times, they will believe it from people that they believe in. I don't talk about what I did here with CNN because partly because it's boring, but also I think a lot of people would not like it. Where I live now, the conversations that I have, and I've been out here almost a quarter century, avoid that. We talk about the other, about how your tomatoes are doing, about how the cows are doing. There's a lot of conversation out here about prices, about cost of living, and I think most of them know what my background is. I've had a few people just drive up randomly and park and ask me about life, but we avoid it and try to stick with every day all American stuff. It's not fake though, It's not like purposely, It's more like, what's important here is we haven't had rain in a while. That's a problem where I live. What's important here is what are you doing for the town fair? The town fair is coming up in a few weeks. People are interested in that. I think the problem is really basic, and that is Ronald Reagan taught people to say there's a shining city on a hill, and part of my interpretation to that is a politicians' responsibility is to say we can do better. That's a vote leader. I'm going to lead people to a better place. We have vote followers who will say if the followers want a conspiracy theory and that gets me elected. I will go lower. Look at the terms of office for congressmen and senators over the last two hundred years. We used to have citizen politicians. We now have politicians citizens politicians who have never had a job and they can't afford to lose an election. So I think there's a lot of vote followers and not a lot of vote leaders. Ron Rayrio, I thought was a vote leader. I used to like Lindsay Graham. He's a vote follower. He's a smart guy, he's actually, behind the scenes, a nice guy. He's a vote follower.
00:27:27
Speaker 2: There's a public perception there's a lot of a text at the FBI out there now that the FBI is up to no good and they're deeply involved in politics. How do you process that?
00:27:35
Speaker 1: I find it interesting, going back to as an analysis, just I do facts. As you look at most of what the FBI does, especially things like white collar crime, gang violence, human trafficking. They do some drug work, a lot of counter terrorism work, obviously counterintelligence work. The sliver that America sees with a political hat on is like minuscule. When I was at the Bureau, we'd get in at like six thirty in the morning. The first briefing was with the director Malreate. I think it was seven fifteen, so that was counter terrors and briefing. Then you go down and talk to the attorney general. I was there with three attorneys general, one Republican and two Democrats. And then you go up to the staff meeting. So there's like a two and a half hours where I'm watching the inner workings of the FBI. As a CIA guy, the political stuff, like political investigations were just minuscule. So I go back to people and say, when you're thinking about white collar crime like Enron back in the day, or people cheating on stock dealing in Manhattan today, or you're thinking about drug trafficking, human trafficking, if you're thinking about political corruption in the sense of somebody at a city council getting paid off for a contract, do you not want that to happen? And what percentage of what the FBI does do you think is hitting your inbox? That's one tenth of one percent. The FBI people I dealt with like, we wear blue suits and white shirts and blue ties, and we want to make sure America is better because we got two kids, and we live in Peoria. They were great. I just it's again, leadership has allowed people to believe that your institutions are corrupt. It's just not what I saw.
00:29:02
Speaker 3: Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for a minute.
00:29:05
Speaker 1: Or two, and we're back.
00:29:14
Speaker 3: Phil touching on that and looking into the future maybe just a bit. We have seen a lot in the press about now people on one side of the aisle saying, either civilly or criminally, we are coming after civil servants or particular people. You've got Jim Jordan, You've got Steve Bannon. They're naming names, and they're not saying they've done anything wrong. They're simply saying, we're coming for you, and without a predicate right, without a reason, we are gonna do this. And of course, with the Supreme Court recently saying that the Executive can now talk to the DOJ and it's protected right, which whereas before if the White House said I want you to go prosecute that guy, certainly, at least since the KNDy administration, you couldn't do that. What's your sense of the institution of the FBI and DOJ. How would that look if we went down that road.
00:30:05
Speaker 1: My first question is who's the leader of that agency. Is that agency more beholden to the White House or to the workforce. This will be a time when presidential nominations of Secretary of Defense, secretary or State ci director, FBI director are really important because if there's pressure, those people have to absorb the pressure. I can say this may be too personal, but years ago President Trump got on his Twitter feed and suggested that he would remove my security clearance.
00:30:31
Speaker 5: That's right.
00:30:32
Speaker 1: Let me tell you whether it's a Democrat or Republican. If you have somebody of that authority attacking at that point a private citizen, that citizen has to pay attention to his security. I had to think about my father was agent, whether to move him out of my house because of the hate mail is getting At a personal level, I don't think American citizens recognize when the government comes after people what it does. I'm not saying this is Republicans are bad or Democrats. I'm saying there is a one to one percent fringe that will take that and say you need to fucking die. I did. I don't know if I've ever said this publicly. Pursue One case of a death threat and he's pled guilty. The guy said he wanted to kill me, and my answer was off, I'm going to court. And his lawyer was pissed off because I said I'm not doing it anymore. I got a lot of hate mail. But my point is, I don't think people recognize that there's a fringe of America that doesn't react like them, that says I'm taking that personally. And when the government comes after Jim or John or Joe or Mary, that person says I'm going after him too. That the hate in this country what I witnessed when I was at CNN was incredible. People will say anything on email. Hope you die of cancer, I hope your family dies of cancer.
00:31:49
Speaker 2: When you talk about the leadership protecting the people under them, and there's a lot of talk now after the Supreme Court immunity decision that, for example, if you give the military illegal orders, people will refuse that illegal order. I worry that we can't count on honorable people refusing illegal orders. We've seen for Judge Bork in the Saturday Night masker under Nixon, or Justin Clark in the twenty twenty election. If you Phil mutter an honorable guy, and you refuse an order, they'll just go to the next guy and he'll refuse the order. If someone is going to do the illegal.
00:32:21
Speaker 1: Ad I think that's right. I thought that Supreme Court allowed a tremendous amount of latitude. I went back to the nineteen sixties and campus unrest. If you order police to shoot on campus protesters who are nonviolent. As a non lawyer, it's not clear to me that someone would say that's a presidential order, go shoot on protesters as they did in the nineteen sixties, Go shoot on protesters at Kent State and that's covered, is it really? Or would you say that's actually an illegitimate order so therefore it's don't I don't know.
00:32:52
Speaker 3: People probably wouldn't give a direct order, although apparently Trump tried to like to go shoot protesters, just shoot him in the leg right, I think it would be much more likely and in our world have rid me of this troublesome priest right right now, you know, So I do want it to just touch on. I think the press will be if we go Downnate Avenue, which I'm really hopeful that we don't. The press, the media that we're talking about is going to be one of the really important things. Right, If people start getting prosecuted without a real predicate, we're really going to need the press. And I want to come back where we started off real briefly to RFK. So, Phil, you said that conspiracy theories often contain a kernel of truth, and that's that's almost always the best one. Yeah, right, And so RFK his Operation mocking Bird, and I invite the audience to take a look. There really was an Operation mocking Bird in the US, and it involved illegal orders. This is in nineteen sixty two, right, So this is sixty friggin years ago, President Kennedy. So, RFK Junior's uncle ordered CIA, and I think illegally and shameful, to monitor two US journalists who were publishing classified information that they were getting from leakers, and his own father, RFK approved this order, and for less than a year, CIA bugged to journalists and it went into the Crown Jewels, right. It was the Crown Jewels being like the great mistakes that the CIA have made that come out in the seventies at the Church Commission, and it became one of the great shameful things that the CIA has done, and Apparently Operation Mockingberg was very successful because Kennedy was able to find out who was feeding these two journalists. It was like mostly politicians. It was senators and congressmen.
00:34:42
Speaker 2: I think there's an assumption on some of these things that leaking is coming from the intelligence community. That's my guess is ninety percent of leaks are coming from inside the administration or the Congress. People who are interested in a specific policy outcome leak things.
00:34:55
Speaker 1: You leak things because you have an interest in a policy. There's also a lot of personal I don't like that guy.
00:35:01
Speaker 5: Scor Settlee. People may not realize it.
00:35:03
Speaker 3: I think we need to put out there as agency officers in the Intelligence Committee, every five years we take a polygraph and that's one of the things they ask us, like, we get fired with do that unlike congressmen and others.
00:35:14
Speaker 1: Yes, I did. Thankfully I'm out of that business because I think the President Trump, if he comes back, I can't take away my security clearance because I don't think I do.
00:35:22
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think he's threatened to talk to Yeah. Yeah.
00:35:25
Speaker 2: A guy who couldn't get a security clearance on his own is claiming to take away ours.
00:35:29
Speaker 3: So Phil, why do you think a lot of people are inclined to believe that an organization like the CIA controls the liberal media or the mainstream media. I mean, what is it about CIA or the liberal media that makes this of interest to them? And why do you think they believe it?
00:35:45
Speaker 1: I think there's a couple basic things. Number one, black box, I don't know what the CIA is, and so there's an interesting conspiracy theory out there the CI is involved, those people are not real Americans. There's spies in Istanbul, or Tehran or or Mosque. Also, yeah, I can conceive of them doing that because the only thing I've ever seen is James Bond. So I think a lot of people, in other words, are saying the media must be parroting this, not because they believe it. Who the hell would believe that, but because somebody told them or sold them to believe that. But the black Box piece. People like conspiracies, People like stories that are more interesting than real life. People like aliens. You know, Area of fifty seven, fifty eight, fifty fifty one, whatever it is. I've never been there. I'm sure there are aliens there.
00:36:31
Speaker 2: But for the people who believe this conspiracy, what do you think they believe the CIA is agenda is why CIA power.
00:36:39
Speaker 1: If you look at what motivates people, it's power, money, and sex. I think anybody looking to c I would say, of course, they want to control Washington. So if you want to control Washington, you have to control the media. I think there's also a sense that the CIA tries to control governments overseas. That's what they do. They try to influence. Of course, they would try to influence events in Washington, that's what they do overseas. I think the fundamental piece of what I learned about the CIA is first, their brand is great, like they don't need to improve. You want to go recruit to college campus, say you're recruiting for CI, some people might protest. And I did a little recruiting there. There's a lot of twenty three year olds. You'll be like, that is too fricking cool. So if you think they want power to increase the brand, not so much. The other thing I'd say is when I was there, we were driven by I want to be the smartest guy in the room. You want to know what's happening in Iran. You want to know what's happening in Russia. You want to know what's happening in North Korea. You talk to US. I once had I won't drop a name, but the National Security Advisor of the United States look at me and say, why do you work there? You guys do information, you don't do decisions. And I realized I like to know how stuff works, and I like to I was actually I was raised by my mother as a writer. I like to write, and I later learned I like to speak, which I did on CNN. But the CIA is actually interested in and explained to people how the world works. And that's that was really motivating. Really like it's interesting to go into the White House and say this is what's going on with al Qaieda. I did that with President Bush and he asked me once whether or not to cancel. I've never said this. July fourth celebrations me in Washington.
00:38:28
Speaker 3: Really interesting up until you let did it matter to you at all? Whether you served a Republican or a Democratic administration?
00:38:37
Speaker 1: It mattered about the people because some of them were tremendous pain in the ass. Bill Clinton had some people on the National Streety staff who asked a billion. They were a pain in the ass. I'd go back to President Bush, Don Rumsfeld's staff, Doug Fight's pain in the ass. So it wasn't really political. It was like it was harder with the Bush people on a rock because they really wanted a story, and they if you gave them an answer they didn't like, they'd ask the question a different way, then a different way, than a different way, and so we were believe it or not. Eventually told when you're getting a similar question, you are not allowed to recraft the answer because if you use the wrong words, they'll twist the words and say, why did you change that word? It was ridiculous and that was some of the Clinton staff and some of the Bush staff, and my recollection. It was people who were just trying to take our information and abuse it.
00:39:27
Speaker 2: So, Phil, I do you mentioned that you resigned instead of retiring, And it's a big deal in government. If you spend twenty years in or whatever it is, you can retire with some version of a pension or so why did you leave when you did?
00:39:43
Speaker 1: Let me be clear about how significant this was for me. I was forty eight years old when I made the decision. You can retire in my world at fifty five, so that's seven years out. If you quit at forty eight, you take a seven year penalty. So that means, and I just turned sixty two this year, that means you take you go from fifty f five to sixty two, you don't get any money till you're sixty two. So when I'm forty eight, I'm saying, if I leave, I don't see a dime for fourteen years, and I don't know how to make a living. So that's a different story. Ani made a living, But I was nominated by President Obama to be the head of intelligence at Homeland Security and as when you enter as a GS nine twenty two thousand dollars a year analyst, to be nominated for a Senate confirmed position by the president is big fucking deal. I didn't know President Obama. I think I knew who teed me up, but that requires Senate confirmation, which is an open hearing. At that point, going into the hearing process, I was the only CIA official who was going to go into an open hearing for a job. The Democrat said, we're going to crush him for torture. The Republican said, we're going to have him explain why the CIA was great in terms of dealing with al Qaeda in black sites. We're going to use this as a It had nothing to do with the job I was assigned to. That was fine. I'm perfectly happy as you guys known to take on a fight. You want to brawl, I will brawl. Two other things happened. Members of the committee I think I know who they are, started calling media saying you should show up to this because it's going to be a blood bath. And then the worst part is when the White House was doing nose counting for the confirmation, that sense was Democrats might not support denomination, which unless you don't pay your maid because she's Guatemala, and that doesn't happen, you do not get turned down by the So I realized that this was going to be a clown show and a clown. I was happy with the clown show, but that more than likely after the clown show, I would be turned down. And I knew I did not have a future at the age of forty eight. The CIA thought you'd been gone for four and a half years of the FBI. We don't give a shit. I didn't have a future at the FBI. So I remember literally looking in the mirror one day, saying if you had any courage, you'd leave. And I remember realizing, if you do that, you can't pay the mortgage. And so I chose not paying the mortgage over being told by the Senate that you're a fool.
00:42:02
Speaker 2: You could have I would have taken you could have hidden an overseas station for a couple of years.
00:42:06
Speaker 5: Today you got to Paris. I said, I said you to lose Soka.
00:42:13
Speaker 1: Man, yeah, no, So I it worked out fine. I thank god. I was really scared because I was having a trouble at that point literally paying my mortgage. I was behind a few times with the bank, and man was I scared.
00:42:30
Speaker 5: But so much for power, sex and money.
00:42:33
Speaker 1: A little bit of California cabernet that'll get you through it?
00:42:36
Speaker 5: Is that what you're drinking?
00:42:37
Speaker 1: Now?
00:42:37
Speaker 5: What are you drinking now?
00:42:38
Speaker 1: One of the local Virginia grapes is Petit Verdau in the local vineyard Starn Valley does a terrific petite for dough. It's a velvety, smooth. The owners are friends of mine, so I tried to patronize Virginia wines and this is a really good star in the valley. Petit for dou really good.
00:42:55
Speaker 5: Well, come to Hawaii and I'll make you my tie. How's that?
00:42:58
Speaker 1: It's good to see you, guys. I don't do this much anymore. I just grow tomatoes and play with the dog.
00:43:04
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for bearing with us. We'll be back again next week with another episode of Mission Implausible.
00:43:14
Speaker 6: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and Jonathan Sterner.
00:43:21
Speaker 5: The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
00:43:24
Speaker 6: Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1: I think some of what we did waterboarding, for example, was questionable, but preventing a second wave, I think follow on generations will not fully understand what that took and how surprising it was that didn't happen. All it takes is three people to take over some public transportation and it didn't happen. It's incredible, especially since you know, if you look at the three of us, this is the crew you have to work with.
00:00:28
Speaker 2: I'm John Ceipher and I'm Jerry o'she I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the.
00:00:36
Speaker 3: World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
00:00:42
Speaker 2: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
00:00:46
Speaker 3: In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
00:00:49
Speaker 2: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
00:00:54
Speaker 3: We'll break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
00:00:59
Speaker 2: Welcome to me Mission implausible.
00:01:04
Speaker 4: Hey guys, I've been thinking what my career might have been like if I'd met you when you were active agents, and I was an active international correspondent, and you could have told me lots of secret things. I know, I know you wouldn't have. But I think journalists have this fantasy. Usually in a media organization, there's these conspiracies that the CIA controls us, which we're going to get into in today's show. But the reality is often there is one or two journalists who are known to have good CIA sources. I don't even know what that means because I've never been one of those people. But I think that means like people in the office building, not actual field agents, like high level you know.
00:01:45
Speaker 3: I think it means they're talking to retired people, or they're trading on information, like you're talking to the Office of Public Affairs, where they say, if you don't publish that story that you somehow got through congressional age of something will If you don't publish it, we'll give you something else for a while. So I think there may be some trading back and forth. From what I've seen, most of the leaks, they seem to come from elected officials, because we take polygraphs every five years, so if we talk to journalists like it'll come out.
00:02:14
Speaker 2: Well, First of all, Adam, welcome back after boguarding us for several weeks and not joining us and forcing Jerry and I to pull something deep in our soul.
00:02:22
Speaker 1: To speak about.
00:02:23
Speaker 2: But sorry to Jerry's point, I never, never, ever, once spoke to a journalist when I worked inside, and I don't think people in our part of the business. I'm sure there's two occasions as possible, you know, or in the old days, people would sit in the bar and be rooted in the fifties or whatever and talk with journalists. But you know, for us, it's best to stay away from journalists. We're not allowed by regulation or law to use them as sources, and so we stayed away from them.
00:02:48
Speaker 5: And so I think when you.
00:02:49
Speaker 2: See these people with good CIA sources, it's probably people in the administration who are telling them tidbits that they pick up on, or retired people like I do talk to journals us now. I don't tell them secrets because I don't have secrets.
00:03:02
Speaker 3: Although I will say from time to time I think I've got a couple of secrets left, really big, juicy secrets I'm not telling anybody. And then I open up The New York Times of the Washington post and I'm like, there's the story, and in fact I read it, I'm like, whoa, I was read into this and I didn't know those details right, So I mean.
00:03:22
Speaker 2: You know somebody's talking.
00:03:23
Speaker 5: Yeah, somebody's talking. But it's usually like five or six years later the assets are gone. But it's like wha, Like how did that one get out?
00:03:31
Speaker 3: And then we'll like call somebody up who was involved in that, and like, man, it's like they got it like eighty percent right, because you never get it quite right well.
00:03:39
Speaker 2: And the thing is to understand is there's no one in the CIA, for example, who knows all the things that are happening. We're compartmented, like if I was working on Russia stuff, I didn't know what was happening in China, or I might. And it's a large organization with lots of people working on lots of sensitive stuff. Even the director doesn't know the details of lots of operations and things that he needs to be briefed. And he's briefed in general unless he's a deeper dive. So if anyone is trying to say no, no, it's this way, it's that way. Yeah, they might know that in their little cylinder we called cylinders of excellence. You really do as a joke.
00:04:11
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:04:12
Speaker 2: So in our interview, Jerry and I interview an old friend and colleague, Phil Mudd, who was a very senior officer in the CIA but then went over in a senior position in the FBI. He was an analyst but worked on counter terrorism issues. And during our interview, one of the things we talk about is this view out there that the CIA controls things and specifically controls the media. And we talked about in our interview our FKA junior who believes that the CIA was involved potentially in killing his father and he believes the CIA controls the media. I know what's interesting and new since we talked to him is Robert F. Kennedy joined the Trump campaign and there's even talk about his interest in becoming the CIA director in a Trump administration. And so it makes our interview I think more timely.
00:04:55
Speaker 5: Today. We're fortunate to have Phil Mud on the show.
00:04:59
Speaker 3: Phil is a long time senior CIA officer and CNN commentator. Phil, you started at CIA as a South Asia, Mid East analyst, and you worked your way up to be a senior analyst for CIA's counter terrorism efforts after nine to eleven where I got to know you and you were even a prime liaison between CIA and the world of intelligence and the FBI and the world of law enforcement, which is pretty special. And then you were with CNN for like almost ten years, right.
00:05:29
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, Alex Righter. It was a lot of fun. Yeah.
00:05:31
Speaker 3: Inside the agency, you were known for your insightful, fact based analytical skills. You brief presidents and senators and Congress and foreign liaison. So, Phil, it's really.
00:05:43
Speaker 5: Great to have you here.
00:05:44
Speaker 1: Thanks, thanks for having me, Phil.
00:05:45
Speaker 2: So the first question I want to do was sort of a crossover between your experience at the agency and the FBI and the media. On the campaign trail, Robert F. Kennedy Junior has repeatedly stated that the CIA has taken over the American press, the US media, all that's our run by undercover CIA operatives as part of some secret government plot to manipulate American minds. At a recent campaign event, he even said that the new head of npr A is a CIA agent. Got that wrong and that was just the latest selveo. And as you know, the CIA is taking over the American press. He stated on Twitter. The Other Day that the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and even the Daily Beast are under the control of Intelligence agency operatives.
00:06:23
Speaker 5: Rolling Stone too.
00:06:24
Speaker 2: And journals like Smithsonian National Geographic appear to be compromised by the CIA. So, Phil, you worked for quite a long time in media after you left the agency. So what is your experience about the intelligence community shaping the news.
00:06:37
Speaker 1: It's interesting. I have a professional perspective from my years as an analyst and a personal perspective. You can laugh about this stuff, and it is a little it's a little disturbing yourself, so laughable. But I always default initially to my old life as an analyst and wish that people would actually, even if you don't know anything about intelligence, breakdown how this would work if it were true. So you'd have to have a broad conspiracy in the CI, which would involve hundreds of people, none of whom I guess I ever spoken that conspiracy would extend to the leadership of many media organizations. So those media people, who many of who might not be terribly sympathetic to the CI, have agreed to this. Okay, do your multiplication hundreds of people of CI, hundreds of people in leadership positions in media. A lot of those are public companies, so they have to persuade not only their staffs to say, John or Jerry or Phillip is coming in to take over a position that he's a CIA guy and he's secretly subverting the organization. But you'd also have to tell the corporate enterprise, the stakeholders, because these are public companies, you'd have to sell out the stakeholders. Now you're dealing with thousands of people, none of whom has ever spoken. If you do took stats class, one of the best things I ever did in college as an English major was to take a semester of statistics. That's not feasible. But on the personal side, I guess, as a ten year CNN commentator, one of the most interesting jobs I ever had. You're not going to lead this. Let me give you a guess about the number of times CIA Public Affairs in ten years I was on thousands of times, thousands every show on Don Lemon, the morning shows, the afternoon shows, all of them. The number of times in ten years of thousands of appearances that CIA Public Affairs or any CI official call me. I'll give you a guess it's a round figure. I guess it's zero zero. I actually was surprised. I thought they would actually call it once in a while and say, there are some facts you might want to consider in my answer to be well, I don't do facts, but I left government. I was actually a little surprised about it. I think people don't believe that, but I don't know what to say. I think the CIA was afraid I'd get out and say, you know that the CI is trying to influence me or some mean but I was one of the national security commentators for CNN, So anybody who believes is conspiracy my personal experiences. They never called. Never It's like trying to get a Dateton Heights. I never got a call back.
00:09:02
Speaker 5: Phil Let me contradict you here.
00:09:04
Speaker 1: Did you call me.
00:09:07
Speaker 5: Because I think you're wrong.
00:09:09
Speaker 3: I can think of certainly one one thing where the government did get involved in trying to shape it, and this was when it's all in the press, where the Trump campaign actually worked with the National inquired David Pecker, right, he's admitted this on the stand under. When you're calling that journalism, I'm just saying this is a journalistic at enterprise where they agreed to make up stories about Ted Cruz.
00:09:30
Speaker 5: They also agreed.
00:09:31
Speaker 3: To make up stories. So this wasn't CIA doing it. No, No was the CIA's boss. So there is actually an example of this, but it's not the mainstream media.
00:09:41
Speaker 1: The National Choir had a reputation back in the day. I think they've declined a bit for breaking some of the best Hollywood stories there were. I mean, they were quite rigorous about what they did. But what I'm talking about is before I joined CNN, which was I don't remember in twenty twelve or two thirteen. I did Fox, I did Al Jazeera, I did all of them in CNN offer a paycheck, So I, being a bright analyst, said I'll do that. But I'm not saying it doesn't happen anywhere. I'm saying I had a ten year run of doing a lot of media, and not only did it not happen to me, I never witnessed it. I never heard about it. I sat in the green room at CNN with everybody from CI directors to senators. I was in there a lot with Lindsey Graham back in the day, a lot with the former CI director Michael Hayden. It just never and again, I know people don't believe this. It didn't happen. They CEI didn't call people, didn't try to influence this, and I never heard about this in backroom conversations over cocktails, and believe me, I will drink a cocktail that didn't happen.
00:10:39
Speaker 2: You hear people say often once an intelligence official, always an intelligence official, or something like that. Essentially, once you retire, the ant wants nothing to do with you. They want nothing to do For several years, I would try to write in if I met somebody interesting or I got something, and I've written a lot of pieces and I've gone TV two.
00:10:54
Speaker 5: They don't care.
00:10:55
Speaker 2: There's almost no back and forth.
00:10:58
Speaker 1: I was assigned as Deputy Director National Security Brands at the FBI in two thousand and five. So I was deputy director of counter Terrorism at CIA, and then when the FBI was under a lot of pressure to do better on domestic intelligence, that is, make sure the next attack doesn't happen. When I moved over to the FBI, almost instantaneously people at the CI head coders were like, you don't work here. I tried to do some joint training between the FBI agents and the CIA. The response I won't name the officer whom you both know, but was basically not only no, but FU were not doing this in that case. I was talking about doing interrogation training, which I learned a lot at the FED. The FBI is very good at interrogations, not the things that were done at our black sites, but they are very good. So I thought, why don't we do some of this jointly? And the answer I got again was FU. So to support your point, people think that there's a closed society and that when you leave there's a secret circle. It was almost the reverse. Get the hell out of here, don't call us, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. If I could just a great story about that. I quit when I was forty eight. I did not resign, which cost me a life lot of retirement money and not maybe not the smartest move I ever made. But I went to hand in my badge at CI, and I had told Director Moller, the FBI director whom I worked for in the CIA, I'm not doing any events. I want out. I'm out, So I wanted to you got to hand in your badge and you sign a bunch of documents saying I agree. I'll never speak to podcasts about the secret things I learned about. But I double parked going in because at that point there was a lot of hiring and the CI parking lot was so full. So I'm like, it's going to take twenty minutes. I go out. There's a SPO, a security protective officer, a CI cop at my car. He's like, you're double parked. I gotta give a ticket. Where's your badge? On my twenty four years it's the only day on the headquarters compound. I thought he was going to put me in a handcuffs. I don't have a badge. I just I didn't resign turn it in. I resigned. So he said, thank you, get out of here and don't go back here.
00:12:54
Speaker 2: Let's take a break.
00:12:55
Speaker 5: We'll be right back.
00:13:04
Speaker 3: And Rebecca phil I'm going to return to this thing because the question really is about what I think to be respectable mainstream media people, journalists who don't come at things with quite so much of a of a bias, and you know, New York Times, Washington Post.
00:13:21
Speaker 5: Maybe some small bias, but they are real journalists.
00:13:24
Speaker 1: I also would say there's a difference between a conspiracy theory and what I witnessed the media. The media wants to make a story. So it's your responsibility, as a reader, a listener, a watcher to say, I'm going to look at I mean to every day I look at the Wall Street Journal, I look at BBC, I look at the New York Times, I look at whatever else shows up on my feed to try to get a constellation of perspectives. Because even if you trust a journalist, and I have done a million New York Times interviews in my life, like all of us, a journalist is going to have a perspective. Sure they like President Trump, they don't like President Trump. All of us have biases. That's different than going in saying actually the World Trade Center was an inside hit job, which would require an epic belief that tens of thousands of people knew that and none of them ever went to CNN or NBC or Fox and spilled it. I mean, I had biases when I was on CNN, I knew him. I Mike, you're paying me to comment, But again, you shouldn't watch me alone. You should, you probably should, but maybe you should watch some Fox people. Make sure you read the Wall Street Journal. It's very well written. Read the New York Times. BBC is great because they give you a European perspective. Al Jazeera is interesting. Read it and sort through yourself.
00:14:34
Speaker 2: So, Phil, you're one of the few people who worked in senior positions at both CIA and FBI. What perceptions and misperceptions did you find those organizations have about each other? And then you know then the same questions of the media, like what are the perceptions miss perceptions amongst those various organizations.
00:14:48
Speaker 1: I was at the senior levels like Director Moller, Robert Mueller, who was obviously known for the rest of investigation, but was the director when I was at the FBI. I was his intelligence advisor. I saw him as often as four times a day at that level. Relationship with the CI is excellent. He and George Tennant were great friends. They used to go out to dinner all the time. At that point. It's called Mahogany row at the FBI. When you're on your Mahogany row, your job is to make things work the further you move down into junior ranks, and I suspect this is the same in corporate America. I do a lot of consulting. You can get me on Philip mud at gmail dot com. But the further you go down, the more prejudice you see. FBI. That guy I'm talking to the CI, he's using a fake name. I can't trust him. He's a liar, he's a cheat. His job is to flip people. CI. That guy's basically a reform copy. Doesn't know anything about the world. He doesn't know anything about anything sophisticated beyond putting handcuffs on people. I was actually quite disappointed with the CIA when I left at some of what I saw. But they both had great strengths and great weaknesses. The CIA is very agile, They move fast. They are huge risk takers. Partly remember they're dealing in an environment where they don't have to go in front of a court of law. So you can break laws, you can steal a laptop, you can lie to somebody which is I'm a CI officer. That's fine in terms of agilly, fast moving, and you'll look at how quickly they were into Afghanistan after nine to eleven. Great talent. There are some smart fing people there. The FBI is slower moving, but far more consistent about guidelines. They have to go in front of a quart of Wall much more management oriented in a good way. How do you put a process into place to make sure you do this properly? We did not do process at the CIA. Much better training, I thought at the FBI. I thought in terms of talent, they also had quite good talent at the senior levels, but stultified CI agility meant that it was difficult to manage. People would tell the director, knowing that sometimes they shouldn't have. The FBI was the reverse. I would joke around with Director Malo, which, let me tell you, was not the easiest thing to do. People treated him like he was made of marble. That wouldn't happen at the CIA. You do not walk into the CI director and say yes, or you say no, we're not doing that. That's wrong. You don't do that. The FBI said both had great strikes and great weaknesses. I'd close by saying I wish they could have learned more from each other, because they certainly could have.
00:17:01
Speaker 3: Considering per Robert F. Kennedy Junior, we control the media. I have to say, in my thirty three years at the agency, I never not once talked to a journalist.
00:17:13
Speaker 1: John.
00:17:13
Speaker 3: I don't think you have either, Phil did you ever have. Did you have any media experience, any exposure to the media when you.
00:17:20
Speaker 2: Were an anrest For Pete's sake, Dre, they're out there on that time.
00:17:23
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: Actually, George Tennant was a big personality, the former CI director. He had his head of public Affairs, Bill Harlotte, wanted the agency CI to have a voice. After nine to eleven, the story of the CIA became the story of des Moines. What the CIA did wasn't just secret stuff. It affected whether what happened with getting on an airplane in Iowa, it happened with alerts in California. So I think there was a sense, and maybe I'm being too apologetic, that we had a responsibility to speak to more people across America about what we did, because countering al Qaiedo was America. So Bill Harlowe said, you got to talk to the New York Times, Washington Post, and then my first on camera interview it was Tom Brokaw, and I was so scared. He was so nice, but I was petrified. But yeah, CEI wanted to put itself out and then when I got to the FBI, they did the same. We want to show that we're entering the intelligence world. So we're going to make you go talk to BBC and everybody else. Funny story. I did this through public affairs and a really aggressive producer. This really pissed me off from I forget NBCCBSAB one of them, a really aggressive producer, came in with public affairs to do an interview that they had requested through public affairs. So we're going out from my office again on Mahogany Road, the seventh floor, the Director's floor at the FBI, and this lady I could if I were signed, we'd have an issue today. I never talked to her again after this said I forgot my purse in your office. I said, okay, I'll take you back there, you pick up, we get back there. I didn't forget my purse. This going through public affairs is ridiculous. You need to talk to me directly, and I'm like, you cannot be serious. So you just lied to me in an effort to make me do something that not only violates the ethics of the FBI and the CI, but also could get me fired. I don't want to pretend like I'm holier than now, but she really pissed me off because we're taught in those environments. You don't do that right, So long answer, But yeah, I did a lot of media, which is how I got into CNN after I left, But it was all through public affairs, and believe me, that was enough.
00:19:28
Speaker 2: To turn it back to RFK stuff Again. He talked about the CIA controlling the media, but he's also talked a lot about a thing he calls Operation mocking Bird. And I know if you're familiar with that or not, it's a conspiracy theory. And he says for years, through Operation mocking Bird, the CIA secretly recruited journalists to help brainwash Americans. And he said Operation Mockingbird is alive and well today and their job is to propagandize the American people.
00:19:55
Speaker 5: So, Phil, we want to know what you were recruited into Operation.
00:19:59
Speaker 1: I was twenty four. CNN recruited me. Yes, you know again going back to I always go back to my analysts hat and ask people to do your mathematics. If that's true, that means that there are thousands of people who are aware of this over the years. Those thousands of people, not a single one of whom has ever told their story. I can see how people who are having a beer say yeah, see I recruit. It's also illegal, which means the Inspector General is to see and as we all know around this table, the Inspector General is to brutal, brutal, they will kick your ass and then say how about now I take a bat to your head. So they never inspected that. The Congress never looked at that after they found and that Congress is perfectly happy also to kick your ass. And the thousands of people in the media, none of them has ever come out with data about this, which would be a terrific story.
00:20:55
Speaker 3: And it would be people's their financial wellbeing and their reputation. Is No, I'm going to turn down this pulletzer and this huge promotion I can get by saying yes to this CIA guy who's offered me three hundred bucks a month, right, manipulating.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: How do you come up with all these people who might have declined those approaches. None of them ever spoke. They're scared, really, after how many times the CI's been crushing the media, they're scared.
00:21:19
Speaker 2: Jarry and I were texting before the show and he put it really well. He says, you know we have the aides there always be accused of running so many confluent and contradictory conspiracies that I don't know when we'd have time to go to the ground floor Starbucks, the ten staff meetings, do performance review or gasp, even conduct espionage related activity against iss North Korea.
00:21:37
Speaker 1: To the comment, especially back early after nine to eleven, people would talk about their phones being listened to. I'm like, okay, yeah, there is three hundred and thirty million Americans who's talking about cheating on their wife going to McDonald's, who's listening. And I'm sorry to make your life seem less and significant, but if you're banging your secretary, nobody cares. Your wife cares. But that's about it.
00:22:03
Speaker 3: So, Phil, I'm going to ask you to cast your mind back and see if I'm the only one that remembers this. So this is twenty ten, twenty eleven, and there was a guy by the name of Michael.
00:22:13
Speaker 5: Furlong and he was not an agency guy.
00:22:15
Speaker 1: He was Doddia.
00:22:18
Speaker 3: He came to the agency and I was in this meeting and I think you were in CTC at the time, and he says, I got this great idea. We're running with this former CIA guy, Dewey Clarice, who's an agent's infamous agency guy, and he says, to get garner intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are going out and we are basically recruiting journalists and stringers and people who helped journalists, and we've hired all these guys and so like when a New York Times journalist comes out, he's got to get a fixer and a guy who, like you can translate for him. And we're hiring those guys. And he said, Peter Bergen can co talk to been lied and next time he does that, we're going to kill him. And I remember sitting in this meeting going we're not allowed to.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: Do this with illegal This isn't illegal.
00:23:08
Speaker 3: And yeah, and so this went up the this went up the chain and reported this meeting, and Furulong went up. Not only was he fired for this idea but DD but he went up on charges.
00:23:18
Speaker 5: I don't know if he was ever found guilty.
00:23:20
Speaker 3: People don't realize the incredible like partition between the world of journalism and the world of intelligence that we maintained.
00:23:29
Speaker 5: But that really underlined for me just how serious.
00:23:32
Speaker 2: Philly you served really in the middle of the counter terrorism fight. Both at CIA and FBI, Like, looking back at it, how do you think we, the US government or we either the CI FBI did in retrospect.
00:23:46
Speaker 5: Over those years.
00:23:47
Speaker 1: Look, there's a lot of noise. Did we treat prisoners appropriately? Were there questions about American values? I've got those. I wrote a few books when I've gone on tour their appropriate questions. These are questions about American values. If you had gone out on September eleventh in two thousand and one and said, after the attacks, there will not be another one of these events, you're going to get fewer than ten percent of Americans who would say that. The Fact is that nobody believed in an open society a second attack could be stopped, and as we know from the intelligence collection, it was planning for a second attack, what we call the second wave, and it didn't happen. There's a lot of kids who have parents and a lot of parents who have kids today because of aggressive and maybe sometimes I would agree with this hyper aggressive counter terrorism operations, but the second wave never happened. I think some of what we did waterboarding, for example, was questionable, but preventing a second wave, I think follow on generations will not fully understand what that took and how surprising it was that didn't happen. All it takes is three people to take over some public transportation and it didn't happen. It's incredible, especially since you know, if you look at the three of us, this is the crew you have to work with.
00:25:06
Speaker 5: That's a miracle.
00:25:07
Speaker 3: Then, oh my god, when you go into town and you're at the piggled Wiggledy. How do you see people thinking of mainstream media as like a singular organism, as opposed to can of worms compeding worms.
00:25:21
Speaker 5: What's your sense of it.
00:25:23
Speaker 1: That's a good question. I'm going to We've been joking a lot, but I'm going to give you a serious answer. I'm a little surprised in the age of fragmented media and people's ability to find whatever they want on the Internet about how much leadership matters. If you tell people you can't trust media, if you tell them you can't trust the church, if you tell them you can't trust the police, if you say it a thousand times, they will believe it from people that they believe in. I don't talk about what I did here with CNN because partly because it's boring, but also I think a lot of people would not like it. Where I live now, the conversations that I have, and I've been out here almost a quarter century, avoid that. We talk about the other, about how your tomatoes are doing, about how the cows are doing. There's a lot of conversation out here about prices, about cost of living, and I think most of them know what my background is. I've had a few people just drive up randomly and park and ask me about life, but we avoid it and try to stick with every day all American stuff. It's not fake though, It's not like purposely, It's more like, what's important here is we haven't had rain in a while. That's a problem where I live. What's important here is what are you doing for the town fair? The town fair is coming up in a few weeks. People are interested in that. I think the problem is really basic, and that is Ronald Reagan taught people to say there's a shining city on a hill, and part of my interpretation to that is a politicians' responsibility is to say we can do better. That's a vote leader. I'm going to lead people to a better place. We have vote followers who will say if the followers want a conspiracy theory and that gets me elected. I will go lower. Look at the terms of office for congressmen and senators over the last two hundred years. We used to have citizen politicians. We now have politicians citizens politicians who have never had a job and they can't afford to lose an election. So I think there's a lot of vote followers and not a lot of vote leaders. Ron Rayrio, I thought was a vote leader. I used to like Lindsay Graham. He's a vote follower. He's a smart guy, he's actually, behind the scenes, a nice guy. He's a vote follower.
00:27:27
Speaker 2: There's a public perception there's a lot of a text at the FBI out there now that the FBI is up to no good and they're deeply involved in politics. How do you process that?
00:27:35
Speaker 1: I find it interesting, going back to as an analysis, just I do facts. As you look at most of what the FBI does, especially things like white collar crime, gang violence, human trafficking. They do some drug work, a lot of counter terrorism work, obviously counterintelligence work. The sliver that America sees with a political hat on is like minuscule. When I was at the Bureau, we'd get in at like six thirty in the morning. The first briefing was with the director Malreate. I think it was seven fifteen, so that was counter terrors and briefing. Then you go down and talk to the attorney general. I was there with three attorneys general, one Republican and two Democrats. And then you go up to the staff meeting. So there's like a two and a half hours where I'm watching the inner workings of the FBI. As a CIA guy, the political stuff, like political investigations were just minuscule. So I go back to people and say, when you're thinking about white collar crime like Enron back in the day, or people cheating on stock dealing in Manhattan today, or you're thinking about drug trafficking, human trafficking, if you're thinking about political corruption in the sense of somebody at a city council getting paid off for a contract, do you not want that to happen? And what percentage of what the FBI does do you think is hitting your inbox? That's one tenth of one percent. The FBI people I dealt with like, we wear blue suits and white shirts and blue ties, and we want to make sure America is better because we got two kids, and we live in Peoria. They were great. I just it's again, leadership has allowed people to believe that your institutions are corrupt. It's just not what I saw.
00:29:02
Speaker 3: Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for a minute.
00:29:05
Speaker 1: Or two, and we're back.
00:29:14
Speaker 3: Phil touching on that and looking into the future maybe just a bit. We have seen a lot in the press about now people on one side of the aisle saying, either civilly or criminally, we are coming after civil servants or particular people. You've got Jim Jordan, You've got Steve Bannon. They're naming names, and they're not saying they've done anything wrong. They're simply saying, we're coming for you, and without a predicate right, without a reason, we are gonna do this. And of course, with the Supreme Court recently saying that the Executive can now talk to the DOJ and it's protected right, which whereas before if the White House said I want you to go prosecute that guy, certainly, at least since the KNDy administration, you couldn't do that. What's your sense of the institution of the FBI and DOJ. How would that look if we went down that road.
00:30:05
Speaker 1: My first question is who's the leader of that agency. Is that agency more beholden to the White House or to the workforce. This will be a time when presidential nominations of Secretary of Defense, secretary or State ci director, FBI director are really important because if there's pressure, those people have to absorb the pressure. I can say this may be too personal, but years ago President Trump got on his Twitter feed and suggested that he would remove my security clearance.
00:30:31
Speaker 5: That's right.
00:30:32
Speaker 1: Let me tell you whether it's a Democrat or Republican. If you have somebody of that authority attacking at that point a private citizen, that citizen has to pay attention to his security. I had to think about my father was agent, whether to move him out of my house because of the hate mail is getting At a personal level, I don't think American citizens recognize when the government comes after people what it does. I'm not saying this is Republicans are bad or Democrats. I'm saying there is a one to one percent fringe that will take that and say you need to fucking die. I did. I don't know if I've ever said this publicly. Pursue One case of a death threat and he's pled guilty. The guy said he wanted to kill me, and my answer was off, I'm going to court. And his lawyer was pissed off because I said I'm not doing it anymore. I got a lot of hate mail. But my point is, I don't think people recognize that there's a fringe of America that doesn't react like them, that says I'm taking that personally. And when the government comes after Jim or John or Joe or Mary, that person says I'm going after him too. That the hate in this country what I witnessed when I was at CNN was incredible. People will say anything on email. Hope you die of cancer, I hope your family dies of cancer.
00:31:49
Speaker 2: When you talk about the leadership protecting the people under them, and there's a lot of talk now after the Supreme Court immunity decision that, for example, if you give the military illegal orders, people will refuse that illegal order. I worry that we can't count on honorable people refusing illegal orders. We've seen for Judge Bork in the Saturday Night masker under Nixon, or Justin Clark in the twenty twenty election. If you Phil mutter an honorable guy, and you refuse an order, they'll just go to the next guy and he'll refuse the order. If someone is going to do the illegal.
00:32:21
Speaker 1: Ad I think that's right. I thought that Supreme Court allowed a tremendous amount of latitude. I went back to the nineteen sixties and campus unrest. If you order police to shoot on campus protesters who are nonviolent. As a non lawyer, it's not clear to me that someone would say that's a presidential order, go shoot on protesters as they did in the nineteen sixties, Go shoot on protesters at Kent State and that's covered, is it really? Or would you say that's actually an illegitimate order so therefore it's don't I don't know.
00:32:52
Speaker 3: People probably wouldn't give a direct order, although apparently Trump tried to like to go shoot protesters, just shoot him in the leg right, I think it would be much more likely and in our world have rid me of this troublesome priest right right now, you know, So I do want it to just touch on. I think the press will be if we go Downnate Avenue, which I'm really hopeful that we don't. The press, the media that we're talking about is going to be one of the really important things. Right, If people start getting prosecuted without a real predicate, we're really going to need the press. And I want to come back where we started off real briefly to RFK. So, Phil, you said that conspiracy theories often contain a kernel of truth, and that's that's almost always the best one. Yeah, right, And so RFK his Operation mocking Bird, and I invite the audience to take a look. There really was an Operation mocking Bird in the US, and it involved illegal orders. This is in nineteen sixty two, right, So this is sixty friggin years ago, President Kennedy. So, RFK Junior's uncle ordered CIA, and I think illegally and shameful, to monitor two US journalists who were publishing classified information that they were getting from leakers, and his own father, RFK approved this order, and for less than a year, CIA bugged to journalists and it went into the Crown Jewels, right. It was the Crown Jewels being like the great mistakes that the CIA have made that come out in the seventies at the Church Commission, and it became one of the great shameful things that the CIA has done, and Apparently Operation Mockingberg was very successful because Kennedy was able to find out who was feeding these two journalists. It was like mostly politicians. It was senators and congressmen.
00:34:42
Speaker 2: I think there's an assumption on some of these things that leaking is coming from the intelligence community. That's my guess is ninety percent of leaks are coming from inside the administration or the Congress. People who are interested in a specific policy outcome leak things.
00:34:55
Speaker 1: You leak things because you have an interest in a policy. There's also a lot of personal I don't like that guy.
00:35:01
Speaker 5: Scor Settlee. People may not realize it.
00:35:03
Speaker 3: I think we need to put out there as agency officers in the Intelligence Committee, every five years we take a polygraph and that's one of the things they ask us, like, we get fired with do that unlike congressmen and others.
00:35:14
Speaker 1: Yes, I did. Thankfully I'm out of that business because I think the President Trump, if he comes back, I can't take away my security clearance because I don't think I do.
00:35:22
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think he's threatened to talk to Yeah. Yeah.
00:35:25
Speaker 2: A guy who couldn't get a security clearance on his own is claiming to take away ours.
00:35:29
Speaker 3: So Phil, why do you think a lot of people are inclined to believe that an organization like the CIA controls the liberal media or the mainstream media. I mean, what is it about CIA or the liberal media that makes this of interest to them? And why do you think they believe it?
00:35:45
Speaker 1: I think there's a couple basic things. Number one, black box, I don't know what the CIA is, and so there's an interesting conspiracy theory out there the CI is involved, those people are not real Americans. There's spies in Istanbul, or Tehran or or Mosque. Also, yeah, I can conceive of them doing that because the only thing I've ever seen is James Bond. So I think a lot of people, in other words, are saying the media must be parroting this, not because they believe it. Who the hell would believe that, but because somebody told them or sold them to believe that. But the black Box piece. People like conspiracies, People like stories that are more interesting than real life. People like aliens. You know, Area of fifty seven, fifty eight, fifty fifty one, whatever it is. I've never been there. I'm sure there are aliens there.
00:36:31
Speaker 2: But for the people who believe this conspiracy, what do you think they believe the CIA is agenda is why CIA power.
00:36:39
Speaker 1: If you look at what motivates people, it's power, money, and sex. I think anybody looking to c I would say, of course, they want to control Washington. So if you want to control Washington, you have to control the media. I think there's also a sense that the CIA tries to control governments overseas. That's what they do. They try to influence. Of course, they would try to influence events in Washington, that's what they do overseas. I think the fundamental piece of what I learned about the CIA is first, their brand is great, like they don't need to improve. You want to go recruit to college campus, say you're recruiting for CI, some people might protest. And I did a little recruiting there. There's a lot of twenty three year olds. You'll be like, that is too fricking cool. So if you think they want power to increase the brand, not so much. The other thing I'd say is when I was there, we were driven by I want to be the smartest guy in the room. You want to know what's happening in Iran. You want to know what's happening in Russia. You want to know what's happening in North Korea. You talk to US. I once had I won't drop a name, but the National Security Advisor of the United States look at me and say, why do you work there? You guys do information, you don't do decisions. And I realized I like to know how stuff works, and I like to I was actually I was raised by my mother as a writer. I like to write, and I later learned I like to speak, which I did on CNN. But the CIA is actually interested in and explained to people how the world works. And that's that was really motivating. Really like it's interesting to go into the White House and say this is what's going on with al Qaieda. I did that with President Bush and he asked me once whether or not to cancel. I've never said this. July fourth celebrations me in Washington.
00:38:28
Speaker 3: Really interesting up until you let did it matter to you at all? Whether you served a Republican or a Democratic administration?
00:38:37
Speaker 1: It mattered about the people because some of them were tremendous pain in the ass. Bill Clinton had some people on the National Streety staff who asked a billion. They were a pain in the ass. I'd go back to President Bush, Don Rumsfeld's staff, Doug Fight's pain in the ass. So it wasn't really political. It was like it was harder with the Bush people on a rock because they really wanted a story, and they if you gave them an answer they didn't like, they'd ask the question a different way, then a different way, than a different way, and so we were believe it or not. Eventually told when you're getting a similar question, you are not allowed to recraft the answer because if you use the wrong words, they'll twist the words and say, why did you change that word? It was ridiculous and that was some of the Clinton staff and some of the Bush staff, and my recollection. It was people who were just trying to take our information and abuse it.
00:39:27
Speaker 2: So, Phil, I do you mentioned that you resigned instead of retiring, And it's a big deal in government. If you spend twenty years in or whatever it is, you can retire with some version of a pension or so why did you leave when you did?
00:39:43
Speaker 1: Let me be clear about how significant this was for me. I was forty eight years old when I made the decision. You can retire in my world at fifty five, so that's seven years out. If you quit at forty eight, you take a seven year penalty. So that means, and I just turned sixty two this year, that means you take you go from fifty f five to sixty two, you don't get any money till you're sixty two. So when I'm forty eight, I'm saying, if I leave, I don't see a dime for fourteen years, and I don't know how to make a living. So that's a different story. Ani made a living, But I was nominated by President Obama to be the head of intelligence at Homeland Security and as when you enter as a GS nine twenty two thousand dollars a year analyst, to be nominated for a Senate confirmed position by the president is big fucking deal. I didn't know President Obama. I think I knew who teed me up, but that requires Senate confirmation, which is an open hearing. At that point, going into the hearing process, I was the only CIA official who was going to go into an open hearing for a job. The Democrat said, we're going to crush him for torture. The Republican said, we're going to have him explain why the CIA was great in terms of dealing with al Qaeda in black sites. We're going to use this as a It had nothing to do with the job I was assigned to. That was fine. I'm perfectly happy as you guys known to take on a fight. You want to brawl, I will brawl. Two other things happened. Members of the committee I think I know who they are, started calling media saying you should show up to this because it's going to be a blood bath. And then the worst part is when the White House was doing nose counting for the confirmation, that sense was Democrats might not support denomination, which unless you don't pay your maid because she's Guatemala, and that doesn't happen, you do not get turned down by the So I realized that this was going to be a clown show and a clown. I was happy with the clown show, but that more than likely after the clown show, I would be turned down. And I knew I did not have a future at the age of forty eight. The CIA thought you'd been gone for four and a half years of the FBI. We don't give a shit. I didn't have a future at the FBI. So I remember literally looking in the mirror one day, saying if you had any courage, you'd leave. And I remember realizing, if you do that, you can't pay the mortgage. And so I chose not paying the mortgage over being told by the Senate that you're a fool.
00:42:02
Speaker 2: You could have I would have taken you could have hidden an overseas station for a couple of years.
00:42:06
Speaker 5: Today you got to Paris. I said, I said you to lose Soka.
00:42:13
Speaker 1: Man, yeah, no, So I it worked out fine. I thank god. I was really scared because I was having a trouble at that point literally paying my mortgage. I was behind a few times with the bank, and man was I scared.
00:42:30
Speaker 5: But so much for power, sex and money.
00:42:33
Speaker 1: A little bit of California cabernet that'll get you through it?
00:42:36
Speaker 5: Is that what you're drinking?
00:42:37
Speaker 1: Now?
00:42:37
Speaker 5: What are you drinking now?
00:42:38
Speaker 1: One of the local Virginia grapes is Petit Verdau in the local vineyard Starn Valley does a terrific petite for dough. It's a velvety, smooth. The owners are friends of mine, so I tried to patronize Virginia wines and this is a really good star in the valley. Petit for dou really good.
00:42:55
Speaker 5: Well, come to Hawaii and I'll make you my tie. How's that?
00:42:58
Speaker 1: It's good to see you, guys. I don't do this much anymore. I just grow tomatoes and play with the dog.
00:43:04
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for bearing with us. We'll be back again next week with another episode of Mission Implausible.
00:43:14
Speaker 6: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and Jonathan Sterner.
00:43:21
Speaker 5: The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
00:43:24
Speaker 6: Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
